A slightly skeptical view on the US political establishment and foreign policy
If Ronald Reagan was America's neo-Julius Caesar, his adopted son was the first George Bush
(just as J.C. adopted Augustus). And look what THAT progeny wrought. I fully expect that over the next
century, no fewer than seven Bushes will have run or become president (mimicking the Roman Caesarian
line). Goodbye, American Republic.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly,
speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun
to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized
mob.
polyarchy:A system where the participation of masses of people is limited to voting
among one or another representatives of the elite in periodic elections. Between elections
the masses are now expected to keep quiet, to go back to life as usual while the elite make decisions
and run the world until they can choose between one or another elite another four years later.
So polyarchy is a system of elite rule, and a system of elite rule that is little bit more soft-core
than the elite rule that we would see under a military dictatorship. But what we see is that under
a polyarchy the basic socio-economic system does not change, it does not become democratized.
This site is very skeptical as for the viability of Neoliberalism
as a social system and had distinct pro "New Deal" capitalism bias. You are warned.
And yes, my friends, like Molière's play
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme character,
who he was surprised and delighted to learn that he has been speaking
prose all his life without knowing it.,
you are living under neoliberal regime without knowing it. And this regime is not the same as
democracy. See Two Party System as Polyarchy
What is really interesting is that the term "neoliberalism" has the status of a semi-taboo
in the USA, and seldom can be found in articles published by the USA MSM, due to some kind of "silence"
pact ;-).
Due to the size an introduction was converted to a separate page
Who Rules America
any form of military escalation would be fraught with grave risks
You know there is a saying falsely attributed to Churchill: "Those who choose shame between war
and shame they end up by getting both". Russia chose shame in 2014, but will inevitable get war.
Or hasn't it already? The "hybrid war", you know.
Or another saying: "Better a terrible end than an endless terror".
Your views on the Syrian intervention are convincing to me, Russia should definitely avoid
deeper involvement.
You pose a false ridiculous dilemma. How can a normal honest Russian equate some ragheads with
Russians and hesitate whom to help and where to intervene?
Imagine East Germany has not united with the West Germany, but instead become a fascist country
with a hostile anti-WG identity. Some people there want to WG anyway and they raise a rebellion,
so the Berlin regime starts to oppress and even bomb and kill them. At the same time WG has got an
opportunity to fight ISIS on the ground. So how do you think what an honest German from WG should
choose having the limited military resources? To help your German brothers nearby and intervene (or
occupy EG outright altogether) or to fight some damned ragheads somewhere far away in the damned
desert?
Exactly if Putin has chosen an intervention in Syria over an intervention in Ukraine he is just
saying to everybody that Russians do not matter but that Muslims do. When Putin was saying he's a
nationalist "of some sort" we now know of what sort of nationalists he is. Muslim and Ukrainian ones!
Or more generally any nationalists who are against Russians.
@Western Solidarity
I will be brief here. Right now we are entering uncharted waters in Russo-American relations.
What the investigations of Trump's ties to the Kremlin or at least to the Russian Mafia will reveal
remains to be seen. Meanwhile the U.S. Senate is rushing to put more sanctions on Russia for alleged
meddling in America's elections last year. This is simply insane. Russia and America have the
two largest nuclear arsenals on earth. Russia sits at the crossroads of Asia, Europe and the Middle
East and is Europe's first line of defense from invasion from the Orient or Moslem Middle East.
Russia's help is need to settle the Syrian civil war, end the Ukrainian crisis, keep Iran nuclear
free, de=fang North Korea and curb China's growing appetite and ambition for worldwide resources,
markets and "adventures". The U.S. should be working with Russia to manage these issues and make
Western solidarity not just a slogan but a reality. Instead the Congress is going all out to alienate
and aggravate the Russian Bear. I fear that one day President Putin will tire of the persecution
of Russia and her proud people and the demonization of his regime and give orders to send long
range nuclear missiles and atomic warheads to both North Korea and Iran.
Russia shares borders with both and could easily ship these weapons in piecemeal by train,
truck, ship and plane to the tyrants in power in those countries and send technicians to assemble
them and train the North Koreans and Iranians on how to use them.
This is I know a nightmare scenario, but it could easily occur. At that point two of America's
closest dependents, Israel and Japan, would be directly threatened by virulent dictators. How
would America react?
What could or would the U.S. President do to "retaliate"? This is very, very serious and Congress
needs to stop playing games and realize it is vital to America's peace and security to be friends
or at least neutral with Russia and work with them on areas of common agreement and need such
as stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, settling ongoing wars, stopping the migrant
invasion of Europe, etc., etc. Otherwise it could literally come to World War II and the end of
the planet. No joking matter my friends.
Russia's help is need to settle the Syrian civil war, end the Ukrainian crisis, keep Iran
nuclear free, de=fang North Korea and curb China's growing appetite and ambition for worldwide
resources, markets and "adventures".
Except that the US doesn't really want to settle the Syrian war. Without permanent Jihad, how
could Washington ever justify a permanent 'War on Terror'? Ditto Ukraine: they need a constant
crisis there to isolate the Europe from Russia. They did not appreciate Putin's attempts at improving
relations with Europe–Germany, especially–since coming to power in 1999. The Norks' nukes don't
threaten Russia in the slightest–Russia has more than enough of a deterrent to handle such a small,
isolated country. And Iran and Russia now have quite goods relations, and Iran still doesn't have
a bomb. As far as China's resource appetites are concerned, well, that actually benefits Russia,
as China is now one of their largest customers, both for natural resources as well as defense/aerospace
technology.
This is a warning to several prominent commenters of this blog: it is quite possible that Faustian
bargain of alliance with the deep state to depose Trump might backfire and produce completely
opposite result -- strong and durable alliance of Trump and the deep state on the basis of the
same model that existed from 2003 -- inverted totalitarism introduced by Bush II. In this case
you can kiss hopes not only for impeachment, but also for 2020 reversal goodbye.
Many "never-Trumpers" see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as their best hope
to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided.
After all, the deep state's bureaucratic leadership has worked arduously for decades to
subvert constitutional order.
As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a
June 2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized
factions within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump
initiatives, such as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans,
and mass surveillance."
Inverted totalitarism is completely compatible with Trumpism ("bastard neoliberlaism"):
Princeton University political theorist Sheldon Wolin described the US political system
in place by 2003 as "inverted totalitarianism." He reaffirmed that in 2009 after seeing a year
of the Obama administration. Correctly identifying the threat against constitutional governance
is the first step to restore it, and as Wolin understood, substantive constitutional government
ended long before Donald Trump campaigned. He's just taking unconstitutional governance to
the next level in following the same path as his recent predecessors.
However, even as some elements of the "deep state" seek to remove Trump, the President now
has many "deep state" instruments in his own hands to be used at his unreviewable discretion.
Obama basically decided against marketing his healthcare plan. In February, 2009 the Obama campaign
contacted campaign workers and asked them to convene neighborhood groups to make suggestions for
the plan. My wife and eye convened such a group. We believed it was to be part of a national grass
roots push to overwhelm the naysayers.
We sent in the neighborhood's suggestions. We were told they would get back to us. They never
did. Grassroots organizing was eliminated. There was no grassroots push. Obama hardly marketed
his plan, letting Republicans define it for him.
Much of it still applies today, but Democrats are clueless...they fear their big donors would
revolt if they actually stated what the American people want and need.
Steve Beshear who was the Democratic Kentucky Governor who did a great job of implementing Obamacare
for his state was asked about the stances of his state's two Senators. He really laid in McConnell
which was no surprise. His comment re Rand Paul? Senator Paul wants to take our nation back to
the 18th century.
Please...
Susan Collins is just as bad as the rest of them.
Her carefully crafted public image is all show.
GOP moderates always cave because they are not moderates, they just play to the tastes of their
purple states
The GOP will throw a few crumbs, make a big show about the "moderates" improving the bill and
then they will be free to vote for it.
Trump, ever the con artist will sell it as Trump steak
Oh, BS. That the party is corrupt was made evident to anyone who watched Bubba sign away Glass-Steagall,
just in time for Hillary to announce her run for Senator from New York/Wall Street. Of course,
Bubba insists that there was no quid quo pro. Those who believe him would be good customers for
buying the Brooklyn Bridge...
DEMOCRATS & REPUBLICANS: ONE BIRD, 2 WINGS . SAME SHIT
UKRAINE meddled in US 2016 election. In conspiracy to blackmail Trump, Ukraine provided DNC
with false accusations against Manafort, hoping to derail Trump and install Deep State figurehead
Hillary Clinton.
See the timeline, and smoking-gun email from Alexandra Chalupa. To steal election, DNC fabricated
Trump-Russian collusion stories which have poisoned US-Russia relations in this administration
and stoked impeachment fever. Anti-Russian hysteria serves Israel by killing Syria & Iran diplomacy.
Great journalism by Lee Stranahan.
The fabricated collusion stories strike me as efforts to force Trump to put
the US on an aggressive war footing against Russia in Syria and elsewhere.
As such the constitute war crimes efforts and are not only criminal, but
stupid in light of the unnecessary risk they put us to.
"... US imperial policy in the Middle East focuses on encircling, destroying and dismantling Iran's allies (Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iraq (Shi'a Militia), Qatar and Yemen with the intent of overthrowing the government and installing a client regime in Teheran ..."
"... And yet the US destroyed Iran's most useful enemy, Saddam's Iraq. Sometimes I wonder whether US foreign policy has any guiding intelligence at all. Maybe it consists only of stupid, reckless flailing. ..."
US policy in the Middle East and South Asia is shaped by several basic considerations:
US Imperialism is the force of global domination
US imperial policy in the Middle East focuses on encircling, destroying and dismantling Iran's
allies (Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iraq (Shi'a Militia), Qatar and Yemen with the intent of overthrowing
the government and installing a client regime in Teheran.
The return of Iran to the status of puppet regime will advance Washington's ultimate goal
of encircling and isolating Russia and China.
The US overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran will facilitate Israel's final seizure of
Palestine, including Jerusalem, and establish Tel Aviv as the dominant regional power in the Middle
East.
Washington's 'Two Track' Policy for Domination
US strategic planners rely on a two-track policy , combining and blending military and ideological
weapons.
Its military strategy relies on slicing up the Middle East - 'salami tactics' – invading
and conquering of each and every country and government, which shares the Islamic Republic of Iran's
policy of national sovereignty and independence. US military success or failure depends on its alliances
in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The US, Saudi Arabia and Israel all sponsor terrorist
groups which have attacked Iran's scientists, its elected representatives and military leaders, as
well as its sacred sites – inside Iran as well as abroad.
The political and ideological strategy involves the penetration and organization of domestic forces
to destabilize and weaken Iran's internal security, defense capability and overseas alliances.
Ideological warfare involves: (1) exploiting regional, ethnic, class and religious differences
to undermine stability and fragment the country; and (2) converting legitimate social critics and
political opposition parties into imperial collaborators.
Ideological attacks are designed to attract Iranian writers, academics, intellectuals and artists
who choose to ignore the history of US imperialism in fomenting bloody coups (Mossadegh 1954), launching
proxy wars via Saddam Hussain's invasion (1980- 88) and the terrorist attacks by Israel and Saudi
Arabia, as well as the terrorists backed by Iraq's former dictator.
US propaganda intervention in Iran's electoral process has been designed to promote a so-called
"color revolution" regime change favored by neo-liberal, pro-West parties and candidates
who seek US sponsorship in their ascent to power. The imperial collaborators and various Western
'human rights' NGOs hide the sordid history of Washington's overt and proxy wars/coups and occupations
in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Palestine.
In order to intimidate and weaken overseas and domestic allies; and the (4) financing and arming
of terrorists from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa to attack the Islamic Republic.
Linguistic and Conceptual Perversions
Imperial warfare depends on perverting political language and concepts. The US refers to invasion,
which have killed and maimed millions of Muslims and Christians in Iraq (2003-2017) and Syria (2011-2017)
as 'humanitarian interventions'. In reality its policy described an ongoing 'holocaust' – the massive
genocidal violation of the human rights of scores of millions of people to sovereignty, peace and
security of home, life, limb, culture and faith.
The millions of victims of the West's current holocaust in the Middle East reject and scorn Washington's
imperialist claim of defending 'democratic values' and its so called 'responsibility to protect
(R2P) ' as pronounced by a series of US Administrations through their mouthpieces in the United
Nations.
In contrast, US support for the Saudi monarch's brutal bombing and blockade of Yemen has led to
an entire population facing starvation and a massive, cholera epidemic, which now threatens over
26 million Yeminis. The campaign against Yemen by the brutal Saudis and their US-EU allies is the
very definition of crimes against humanity and international law.
Sanctions: A Tool of Conquest
US sanctions against Iraq, Syria, Iran and Yemen have been designed to starve working people into
submission while capturing the support of some middle class consumers. US policy of invading Libya
and brutally murdering President Gadhafi and his family members was designed to systematically destroy
a prosperous, independent republic and turn it into a backward, impoverished fiefdom of tribal warlords,
exploited by Western oil companies. Saudi Arabia joined the European Union in financing terrorists,
many trained in the destroyed remnants of Libya, who later killed innocent civilians in Paris, Nice,
London, Manchester and other parts of Europe.
The strategic goal of the US invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen has been to violently divide these
independent republics and turn them into ethnically cleansed, impoverished, mini-states – in the
imperial tradition of 'divide and conquer'. Such tribal fiefdoms are easily dominated by imperial
powers.
Regional and Global Strategy
Washington's imperial strategists have arrived at the conclusion that they cannot conquer independent
states, like Iran, in a single attack, given its size, defense capability, internal cohesion and
regional alliances.
Their strategy is to surround Iran by destroying its allies, one nation at a time.
The first phase of the US invasion, occupation and systematic destruction of Iraq and its entire
governmental infrastructure was designed to overthrow the Baathist state, then neutralize the Shi'a
militia and impose a servile client regime in Baghdad. The second step was to encourage Sunni tribal
warlords to seize control of central Iraq. The third step was to arm the Kurds to form a mini-state
in northern Iraq (so-called "Kurdistan"). This would entail large-scale ethnic cleansing, the total
destruction of Iraq's ancient Christian community, the extermination of its multiethnic modern educated,
scientific, cultural and technocratic work force. In other words, the US strategy was to obliterate
any remnant of the Iraqi Republic in its war to 'remake the Middle East'.
After Iraq and Libya, the next target for US-EU aggression has been the government of the Syrian
Arab Republic, Iran's ally. The EU, USA, Saudi Arabia and Turkey sponsored an invasion by mercenary
Salafi forces under a network of Daesh-ISIS-al Queda terrorists. Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and
the Emirates have provided military, logistical and financial support to the terrorists.
After Syria, the fourth target of Anglo-American-Saudi-Israeli military strategy would be to undermine
the national sovereignty of Lebanon and destroy the armed political Hezbollah Party, the powerful
Lebanese resistance organization (allied with Iran). It was consistent with this strategy for the
West to support Israel's brutal air and ground attacks against the civilian population and infrastructure
of Beirut, Lebanese port cities and villages. Tens of thousands of Lebanese Christians were not spared
the Israeli terror bombing campaign.
If a Lebanese campaign were successful and Hezbollah was destroyed, the 'final'
Israeli
conquest of Palestine, the fifth objective, could commence: US and world Zionism would unconditionally
celebrate Israel's massive ethnic purge of Palestine's native peoples and finish off the total confiscation
of the homes, mosques, churches, land and resources of millions of Muslim and Christian Palestinians
and other peoples. This would create history's first 'pure Jewish' state.
The sixth imperial objective would be to disarm Iran's military and security structure and weaken
its economy in order to isolate the Islamic Republic and undermine its Middle Eastern alliances.
This strategic objective explains why Washington promotes its one-sided nuclear arms agreement with
Iran, while the nuclear-armed Israel is excluded! Despite Iran's abiding by the terms of the agreement,
there have been no reciprocal lifting of economic sanctions or the normalization of trade and diplomatic
relations.
Iran Counters the US Global Military Threat
Iran responded by developing economic, technical and military agreements with Russia and China
in order to counter the US-Israeli-Saudi threats and sanctions. Russia provides advanced defensive
weapons systems. China signs large-scale, long-term trade agreements while including Iran in its
huge Central Asian infrastructure projects. Most importantly, Iran has succeeded in defending the
legitimate government of Syria, while aiding Iraq and Yemen.
Iran undermined official US sanctions by signing multi-billion dollar agreements with the giant
Boeing Corporation for the purchase of passenger airplanes as well as developing further agreements
with US banks and agro-business exporters and oil companies. These profitable agreements with the
US agro-business export sector can weaken the Pentagon-Zionist sanctions.
Iran has the diplomatic support of the Non-Aligned Movement opposing Israeli-US Zionist military
threats.
Iran's principled opposition to Saudi Arabia's massive arms purchases, as well as the Kingdom's
vicious alliance with Israel and its genocidal assault against the Yemeni people, has gained the
support of world public opinion – especially the masses of independent Muslims throughout the world.
Iran's educational, scientific, military and political-electoral advances provide the basis for
national security, economic growth, cultural enrichment, international alliances and the deepening
of social democracy for its people. It provides an alternative independent vision for many millions
of Muslims living under harsh monarchies, military dictators and imperial oppression.
Conclusion
Since the US and its allies launched their 'hot war' by surrounding, threatening and destabilizing
Iran, Washington's strategy has suffered serious military defeats and political retreats.
Iraq is no longer encircled by the US. Shia-based militias have regional control, especially south
of Baghdad and beyond. Syria, Iran's ally, has fought hard to finally liberate many towns, cities
and territory taken by the terrorist mercenaries despite the EU-US-Saudi-Israel's initial advances.
Rival rebel forces and mercenary gangsters besiege the US puppet governments in Libya, Somalia
and South Sudan. The classic CIA term, 'blowback', means these terrorists are now turning their guns
on the West.
Washington has lost control of Afghanistan. Over a third of the Afghan military and police recruits
defect to the resistance fighters. The central 'government' in Kabul influences less than a quarter
of the country
Despite spending trillions of dollars on wars and propaganda over the past two decades, US military
strategy to encircle and conquer Iran has been a military, diplomatic and economic failure. The American
people have suffered thousands of casualties and its domestic economy is in permanent crisis with
massive unemployment, poverty, recession and stagnation.
Despite US congressional, Presidential and Pentagon support for Israel's Jewish colonization of
Palestine, more countries, trade unions and social movements, around the world, support the boycott,
divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel than ever before. Manu are speaking up despite
government threats to outlaw 'criticism of Israel' as a 'hate crime'.
The turmoil and deep political divisions in the United States between the oligarchs allied to
President Trump and the opposition oligarchs have created a profound institutional crisis, which
has undermined domestic governance and disrupted US global alliances, US-EU relations and US-Asian
trade links.
Despite the bizarre and often theatrical presentation by the US mass media, the American Congress
and President Trump are fighting over fundamental issues, including control of the national security
agencies (CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, etc.), foreign and military policy, the economy and environmental
agenda, the federal budget, judiciary and the Presidency.
The political crisis has paralyzed the capacity of the US to start new wars and negotiate international
agreements. President Trump is facing a serious coup d'état involving the political-intelligence
elite, with the military looking warily on the chaos. The masses are increasingly polarized or disgusted.
In an attempt to deflect from his domestic problems, President Trump deepened the US alliance
with Saudi Arabia and reiterated threats against Iran. Nevertheless he declined pressure to move
the US embassy to Israel. The inconsistent and ad hoc nature of current US policy alienates friends
and foes – with no redeeming features.
The domestic opposition demands an end of President Trump's diplomatic overtures to Russia. It
uses the fake pretext of Russian interference in the US presidential election to move toward the
president's impeachment.
The US faces a CLANDESTINE CIVIL WAR among its elite!
A financial bubble accompanies the American domestic political crisis. The economic elite, the
banks and stock market have benefited through speculation, despite or because of, the paralysis among
rival political oligarchs!
The emergence of Trump's so-called 'national-capitalist ideology' means a decline in
US multi-lateral agreements, such as NATO, the EU, NAFTA and the Trans-
Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP). This explains Trump's effort to renegotiate bilateral agreements,
which have failed
Trump's stated policy objectives have fallen between two chairs: the multi-lateral agreements
have not been replaced by lucrative bilateral deals. Trump relies on big business offerings and 'nationalist'
ideology to minimize his diplomatic failures and ideological isolation. Trump wants to win contracts
for greater US exports and investment. This has been weakened by the previous administration's pursuit
of economic sanctions and expanding wars, as well as his feckless propaganda.
The Trump regime is full of contradictions: It threatens to end the nuclear agreement with Iran
but allows Boeing to sell billions of dollars of civilian aircraft to Teheran. It signs a $300 billion
dollar arms sales agreement with Saudi Arabia (business for the for military industries) while losing
political influence in the US, where the Saudis are widely despised.
At least, Trump does not blather on about humanitarian wars; he would prefer signing business
deals. He mentions the need for 'regime change' in Syria and sending more troops to Afghanistan but
does little to implement these goals.
President Trump is fighting for his own political (and personal) survival and to prevent his impeachment
(via a Congressional coup). His strongest defense would be to strengthen the domestic economy and
show some overseas economic successes.
Essentially, Trump's economic agenda depends on his avoiding politically and militarily costly
wars. That was one of his campaign promises that resonated with the nation's core electorate.
Trump would like to balkanize Syria, while avoiding new troop commitments to Afghanistan. He would
prefer profitable trade relations with Russia and China and perhaps, Iran, over war.
The impediments to any Trump policy success are massive: Trump's Administration includes zealous
neo-conservative Russophobes and Zionist-Iranophobes. These are militarists who would provoke eventual
armed conflict with Moscow and Teheran. Their current focus is on expanding the war in Syria, sending
more US troops to Afghanistan and forging deeper ties with Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The current internal political contradictions between the Trump regime and the 'Deep'
State apparatus, and between the Trump-allied business elite and the Zionist-neoconservative warmongers,
preclude the development of a consequential Trump foreign policy.
In the meantime, domestic political warfare and the deepening divisions between the US and EU
will create opportunities for Russia, China and Iran to join together in historic economic political
and alliances, which might help re-balance a world on the brink of 'world war', economic collapse
and environmental disaster.
The divisions among NATO countries undermine the establishment of a united front for greater imperial
wars. The fragmentation of the European Union (Brexit, the collapse of Greece, the EU-sponsored putsch
in Ukraine) lessens its global economic influence. The division between the US Presidential regime
and the Opposition Security State apparatus paralyzes the US push for new imperial wars.
Divisions and conflicts within the imperial camp presents favorable opportunities for anti-imperialist
countries in the Middle East, like Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The strategic Russo-Chinese economic alliance may create a new global economy based on peaceful
co-existence and greater economic co-operation.
This essay is dedicated to the memory of the innocent martyrs of the recent brutal terrorist attacks
against the Iranian Parliament and the holy shrine and to honor the brave survivors and family members
of the victims.
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New
York. He is the author of 63 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional
journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research,
Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles
in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science
Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Partisan Review, Temps Moderne, Le Monde Diplomatique,
and his commentary is widely carried on the internet. His publishers have included Random House,
John Wiley, Westview, Routledge, Macmillan, Verso, Zed Books and Pluto Books. He is winner of the
Life Time Career Award, Marxist Section, of the American Sociology Association, the Robert Kenny
Award for Best Book, 2002, and the Best Dissertation, Western Political Science Association in 1968.
Some recent titles include Unmasking Globalization: Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century (2001);
co-author The Dynamics of Social Change in Latin America (2000), Unmasking Globalisation (2001),
System in Crisis (2003), co-author Social Movements and State Power (2003), co-author Empire With
Imperialism (2005), co-author) Multinationals on Trial (2006). His most recent title, The Power of
Israel in the United States (Clarity Press, Inc. 2006), has been acquired for Japanese, German, Italian,
Indonesian and Arabic editions.He received his MA and Ph.D. from the University of California at
Berkeley. Among his books:
A perfect article beyond any possible comments. Mr. Petras hits a perfect score as he often
does. A dispassionate, lucid and thorough analysis of the greater geopolitical world that could
teach the half brained and crooked congressional representatives a great many lessons.
Mr. Petras, my hats off to you. This is the most to-the-point, honest assessment of what's
going on I've read in a long time.
My only complaint is the use of the term "Middle East". We should all drop this British colonial
era term and just call it what it is: Southwest Asia. Please don't take that as being nit-picky
and looking for fault (not my intention at all) your article is brilliant. But we have to start
somewhere.
@Joe Levantine Is it possible that many representatives know quite well what's going on, but
have reasons, their own political survival, to pretend they do not know ?
Senator Hollings just dared to speak the truth shortly before he resigned, in 2004.
With respect to Israel's supposedly assigned role, I beg to differ. The US, like Russia and
Iran, is an assimilative empire, established on the basis of welcoming and incorporating any group
or individual willing to adopt the imperial culture and language. In other words, these are non-exclusive
states. Israel, on the other hand, is built on rigid and comprehensive racial and religious exclusiveness.
Only jews can join. Israel is the quintessential nation state, built on an antiquated, romantic
19th-century idea. The self-defeating and ultimately untenable model of the nation state was demonstrated
unequivocally in 1945, but ignoring historical proof, Israel resuscitated it in 1948. Therefore,
it would seem to me Israel can never become the dominant force in the Middle East. Even if it
somehow succeeds in attaining this position, it will definitely be of a very short duration. It
is a bit like what Guizot once remarked: you can do anything with a bayonet, except sit on it.
1. Could have used a bit of information on the Rothschilds and other dominant Jewish
Banking Family Oligarchs, including their role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy (the
last Constitutional President of the United States ), on November 22, 1963, in the Coup
D'etat in Dallas, (the first successful Modern Arab Spring ).
2. Could have benefitted by references to the horrors of Vietnam and Indonesia (1965), 9/11,
and the attack on the Liberty, among other dark pages of recent history, which would have taken
a sentence.
3. Could have used a bit of a VISION advocacy of how to Cure this Zionist imperialist
plague so nicely described by Petras. The Restoration of the Republic, destroyed on November
22, 1963, is the Revolutionary Cure so ignored by the earnest and not so earnest critics of the
Zionist New World Order.
As USA internal rot accelerates she is becoming increasingly erratic and desperate in her international
policy. It increasingly looks like biten by white shark seal trashing desperately in the water
while life along with blood leaving it's body. Others should keep their cool and patiently wait.
"2) US imperial policy in the Middle East focuses on encircling, destroying and dismantling
Iran's allies (Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iraq (Shi'a Militia), Qatar and Yemen with the intent
of overthrowing the government and installing a client regime in Teheran."
And yet the US destroyed Iran's most useful enemy, Saddam's Iraq. Sometimes I wonder whether
US foreign policy has any guiding intelligence at all. Maybe it consists only of stupid, reckless
flailing.
How many Americans and Europeans realize that all Islamic terrorism in the West is Sunni and
none of it is Shia, and that all the demonization of Iran and Hezbollah is solely for the benefit
of Israel?
If I were to offer any suggestion, I'd just prefer that the author amend the abbreviation of
the US to the Z US (Zionist occupied US), as all of the things he mentions that the US
is doing, are all in direct contravention of the principles and interests and people of the actual
US, and are, rather, all being done to benefit the most sinister and intractable enemy of the
of the US (and so many others including Iran); the Z US.
The American people have suffered thousands of casualties and its domestic economy is in
permanent crisis with massive unemployment, poverty, recession and stagnation.
Trump's economic agenda depends on his avoiding politically and militarily costly wars.
That was one of his campaign promises that resonated with the nation's core electorate.
I spell out my case for calling it the ZUS here:
(which I invite the moderators to including under a blue 'more' link so as not to clutter up
the comment section)
saying US, by which I do not mean ordinary US people then the rotten elite running the
show.
I sort of know that, but I hope you (and others) can understand why that distinction is
so important to us genuine Americans who're horrified at the conduct of the US government on
the world's stage.
The interests of the US government vs. the people of the US, could not be more diametrically
opposed. They're looting our Treasury and our future to fund eternal wars for Israel- that
do nothing but destroy any kind of long-term hope for this country. They're creating hatred
for the American people that will reverberate over generations. They're systematically dismantling
our sacred codified rights (earned in blood) going all the way back to the Magna Carta. They
assassinate our citizens if they prove inconvenient to the regime, when they aren't burning
them alive at places like Waco or the World Trade Center. There seems to be nothing too demonic
that this government will do to us American citizens if they suspect that by doing so it will
somehow augment their power to dominate us even more.
Today in America is much like the Russians during the Bolshevik / Soviet regime. Our government
is our most intractable and dangerous enemy on the planet. We Americans have nothing to fear
from Russia or Iran. That's laughable. But we have everything to fear from Washington DC. The
drooling fiend that inhabits those think tanks and J-Street and K-Street and CFR and PNAC and
CIA and all the other acronyms of Satan are our worst enemy on this planet, just as they threaten
and menace the rest of the people of the planet, intending to use our children as cannon fodder
even as they commit endless atrocities and war crimes in our name.
So I guess my point is just that the interests of the US [zio-government], vs. the interests
of the US people are so wildly at odds, that it would be nice if others could see this as glaringly
as those of us American citizens, watching with horror- as our government perpetrates monstrous
crimes all over the globe, and here at home.
The banking cartels are not run by patriotic American citizens, they're run by our enemies.
The Pentagon is not run by patriotic American citizens, it's run by our enemies.
the FBI and CIA and DEA and NSA are all operated by the enemies of the American people.
the media are the most sinister and committed enemy we have. No one hates our guts more.
the universities are nothing but kosher Marxist indoctrination centers, telling our young
people (among other things) that the "US" liberated the people of Kosovo. (is that what happened?).
They tell our students that our participation in the world wars was honorable and noble. They
tell them that what we are doing in the Middle East today is honorable and noble. They even
are attempting to make any criticism of Israel a crime on the universities and campuses. Outlawing
any expression of support for the BDS movement. Does that sound like our universities are run
by and for Americans?!
there are two entities here in the good ol' US of A. There is the ZUSA, that is an enemy
to all of mankind, including the people of the US. And then there are the people of the US;
represented by those who still cling to quaint notions like the Rule of Law, and our traditions
like freedom of speech and fair play. People like Michael Hastings. People like Seth Rich.
People like Pat Tillman or Ron Paul or all of his supporters. People like the ones that voted
for Obama to end the wars, and who voted for Trump to end the wars. People like Ken O'keefe,
who are Americans to the core, and still represent the spirit of what being an American was
all about, until our nation was hijacked in 1913 for the greater glory of $atan.
the US goal in former Yugoslavia was primarily a rejuvenation of NATO which has lost
its meaning with the demise of SU. Also, the Demoncrats have a natural propensity to package
their imperialism into "humanitarian" interventions, the Republicans are much less sleazy
– the Republicans just say you are with us or against us, no matter whether what we do is
legal or illegal. Therefore, it was a perfect little war for the Clintons:
1) breath a new life into NATO,
2) clean up the Southern Europe of any residual Russia and/or socialist influence and
3) do a dress rehearsal for attacking Russia (using NATO).
sounds like a perfectly excellent analysis to me.
I remember how we scrambled at the time to make sense of it. WTF were they up to?!
why were they bombing a nation that had been 'our' ally during WWII, and seemingly so that
some KLA terrorists could lay claim to their ancient and sacred lands? Hard won from the same
Muslim hoards that had drenched Kosovo in Christian, Serbian blood for centuries.
Some of us figured it was kind of a payback for Palestine. 'Yes, we zio-scum are ravaging
your people in Palestine, but as payback, we'll give you Kosovo!
We even wondered if there wasn't some secret, high-level negotiations going on between the
representatives of Islam and the Zionists. 'OK, what do you want for Palestine?' / 'We'll take
Kosovo'.
Then there was general Clarks quote regarding the necessity of bombing Serbia:
"Let's not forget what the origin of the problem is. There is no place in modern Europe
for ethnically pure states. That's a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into
the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states."
- General Wesley Clark
so it's been a conundrum, but your analysis sounds like the best so far.
travelling NGO EcoSystem
:-)
Yes we see it all over the place. But also please keep in mind that the original NGO that
$ubverted and corrupted is the one that took control of the US.
The actions of the 'US' (ZUSA) today are no more a representation of the people of the US,
than those in Kyiv or Kabul represent the typical Ukrainian or Afghan.
Washington DC no more represents the 300+ million people here than did the actions of Mubarak
represented the Egyptian people, or Yeltsin represented the Russian people, or Tony Blair represented
the people of England.
We have all of us been NGO'd by the Fiend, and none more so than us here in the US, where
they declare from their pulpits that there is 'zero daylight between Israel and the ZUSA!'
So it stings to read about how this or that benefits the US, when all the benefits are going
to the very same Beast that is drooling its putrid saliva all over US too.
"... Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided. ..."
"... As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June 2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance." ..."
Douglas Valentine has once again added to the store of knowledge necessary for American citizens
to understand how the U.S. government actually works today, in his most recent book entitled
The CIA As Organized Crime . (Valentine previously wrote The Phoenix Program ,
which should be read with the current book.)
The US "deep state" – of which the CIA is an integral part – is an open secret now and the Phoenix
Program (assassinations, death squads, torture, mass detentions, exploitation of information) has
been its means of controlling populations. Consequently, knowing the deep state's methods is the
only hope of building a democratic opposition to the deep state and to restore as much as possible
the Constitutional system we had in previous centuries, as imperfect as it was.
Princeton University political theorist Sheldon Wolin described the US political system in place
by 2003 as "inverted totalitarianism." He reaffirmed that in 2009 after seeing a year of the Obama
administration. Correctly identifying the threat against constitutional governance is the first step
to restore it, and as Wolin understood, substantive constitutional government ended long before Donald
Trump campaigned. He's just taking unconstitutional governance to the next level in following the
same path as his recent predecessors. However, even as some elements of the "deep state" seek to
remove Trump, the President now has many "deep state" instruments in his own hands to be used at
his unreviewable discretion.
Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as
their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided.
After all, the deep state's bureaucratic leadership has worked arduously for decades to subvert
constitutional order.
As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June
2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions
within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such
as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance."
Glennon noted that the propensity of "security managers" to back policies which ratchet up levels
of security "will play into Trump's hands, so that if and when he finally does declare victory, a
revamped security directorate could emerge more menacing than ever, with him its devoted new ally."
Before that happens, it is incumbent for Americans to understand what Valentine explains in his book
of CIA methods of "population control" as first fully developed in the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program.
Bad enough that the Republican Senate bill would repeal much of the Affordable Care Act.
Even worse, it unravels the Medicaid Act of 1965 – which, even before Obamacare, provided health
insurance to millions of poor households and elderly.
It's done with a sleight-of-hand intended to elude not only the public but also the Congressional
Budget Office.
Here's how the Senate Republican bill does it. The bill sets a per-person cap on Medicaid spending
in each state. That cap looks innocent enough because it rises every year with inflation.
But there's a catch. Starting 8 years from now, in 2025, the Senate bill switches its measure
of inflation – from how rapidly medical costs are rising, to how rapidly overall costs in the
economy are rising.
Yet medical costs are rising faster than overall costs. They'll almost surely continue to do
so – as America's elderly population grows, and as new medical devices, technologies, and drugs
prolong life.
Which means that after 2025, Medicaid will cover less and less of the costs of health care
for the poor and elderly.
Over time, that gap becomes huge. The nonpartisan Urban Institute estimates that just between
2025 and 2035, about $467 billion less will be spent on Medicaid than would be spent than if Medicaid
funding were to keep up with the expected rise in medical costs.
So millions of Americans will lose the Medicaid coverage they would have received under the
1965 Medicaid act. Over the long term, Medicaid will unravel.
Will anyone in future years know Medicaid's unraveling began with this Senate Republican bill
ostensibly designed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? Probably not. The unraveling
will occur gradually.
Will future voters hold Republicans responsible? Again, unlikely. The effects of the unraveling
won't become noticeable until most current Republican senators are long past reelection.
Does anyone now know this time bomb is buried in this bill?
It doesn't seem so. McConnell won't even hold hearings on it.
Next week the Congressional Budget Office will publish its analysis of the bill. CBO reports
on major bills like this are widely disseminated in the media. The CBO's belated conclusion that
the House's bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would cause 23 million Americans
to lose their health care prompted even Donald Trump to call it "mean, mean, mean."
But because the CBO's estimates of the consequences of bills are typically limited to 10 years
(in this case, 2018 to 2028), the CBO's analysis of the Senate Republican bill will dramatically
underestimate how many people will be knocked off Medicaid over the long term.
Which is exactly what Mitch McConnell has planned. This way, the public won't be tipped off
to the Medicaid unraveling hidden inside the bill.
For years, Republicans have been looking for ways to undermine America's three core social
insurance programs – Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The three constitute the major legacies
of the Democrats, of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. All continue to be immensely popular.
Now, McConnell and his Senate Republican colleagues think they've found a way to unravel Medicaid
without anyone noticing.
"... For example, let's take Japan, Germany or South Korea. On the face of it, you could argue that they have been extremely successful societies in terms of industrial development, standard of living, etc. But, all three of them are actually dying as communities, if we consider their population decline. ..."
The greatest mistake of all is thinking western model (in your particular case, the american
model) will make russians better, or even being adopted by russians... While Russia can have
a good work ethic, it's laughable to wish them to adopt Protestant-Work-Ethic (that by itself
also has too much of a strong individual feeling that leads into complete atomized individuals
as follows from the Great Generation to the Baby Boomers and the latter's legacy to the decline,
lack of self-dependency and selfishness of later generations if it's not controlled).
I didn't say Russia should become like the US. I said Russians need to assess the reasons as
to why they've comparatively failed in relation to other nations. Russians need to learn lessons
from US, Germany, Japan, France, and etc., but of course, Russians must find their own way
to fix the problems.
Still, the Big Questions must be asked as to WHY.
Japan asked this question when confronted with the Western threat in the 19th century. It wondered
why the West made so many advances whereas Asia failed to. So, it went about reforms.
Of course, Russia has also raised this question, but it is such an underachiever given all
the potentials.
Russia needed a Putin because things got so out of hand. Now, they must look to themselves
to deal with the big challenges.
" I said Russians need to assess the reasons as to why they've comparatively failed in relation
to other nations. etc"
This theme of alleged "failure" of Russian state relative to the West is very common. But then
what is considered a "successful" society?
For example, let's take Japan, Germany or South Korea. On the face of it, you could argue
that they have been extremely successful societies in terms of industrial development, standard of
living, etc. But, all three of them are actually dying as communities, if we consider their population
decline. Therefore, based on this criteria, let's call it a "sustainable existence" criteria,
they might prove a failures in the end.
If we apply this same criteria to say, Roma people (gypsies), then they appear the big winners.
This previously secret order involved having US intelligence design and implant a series of cyberweapons
into Russia's infrastructure systems, with officials saying they are meant to be activated remotely
to hit the most important networks in Russia and are designed to "
cause them pain and discomfort ."
The US has, of course, repeatedly threatened "retaliatory" cyberattacks against Russia, and promised
to knock out broad parts of their economy in doing so. These appear to be the first specific plans
to have actually infiltrate Russian networks and plant such weapons to do so.
Despite the long-standing nature of the threats, by the end of Obama's last term in office this
was all still in the "planning" phases. It's not totally clear where this effort has gone from there,
but officials say that the intelligence community, once given Obama's permission, did not need further
approval from Trump to continue on with it, and he'd have actually had to issue a countermanding
order, something they say he hasn't.
The details are actually pretty scant on how far along the effort is, but the goal is said to
be for the US to have the ability to retaliate at a moment's notice the next time they have a cyberattack
they intend to blame on Russia.
Unspoken in this lengthy report, which quotes unnamed former Obama Administration officials substantially,
advocating the effort, is that in having reported that such a program exists, they've tipped off
Russia about the threat.
This is, however, reflective of the priority of the former administration, which is to continuing
hyping allegations that Russia got President Trump elected, a priority that's high enough to sacrifice
what was supposed to be a highly secretive cyberattack operation.
When a Briton or American speaks about a "four-letter word", he means a vulgar sexual term, a
word not to be mentioned in polite society. In Israel we also have such a word, a word of four letters.
A word not to mention. This word is "Shalom", peace. (In Hebrew, "sh" is one letter, and the "a"
is not written.)
For years now this word has disappeared from intercourse (except as a greeting). Every politician
knows that it is deadly. Every citizen knows that it is unmentionable. There are many words to replace
it. "Political agreement". "Separation". "We are here and they are there". "Regional arrangement".
To name a few.
And here comes Donald Trump and brings the word up again. Trump, a complete ignoramus, does not
know that in this country it is taboo.
He wants to make peace here. SH-A-L-O-M. So he says. True, there is not the slightest chance that
he really will make peace. But he has brought the word back into the language. Now people speak again
about peace. Shalom.
Peace? What is peace?
There are all kind of peaces. Starting from a little peace, a baby-peace, to a large, even mighty
peace.
Therefore, before opening a serious debate about peace, we must define what we mean. An intermission
between two wars? Non-belligerence? Existence on different sides of walls and fences? A prolonged
armistice? A Hudna (in Arabic culture, an armistice with a fixed expiry date)?
Something like the peace between India and Pakistan? The peace between Germany and France – and
if so, the peace before World War I or the peace prevailing now? The Cold War between the Soviet
Union and the United States, or the Hot Peace between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump?
There are all kinds of peace situations. What kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace are we talking
about? The peace between a horse and its rider? The peace between a people of masters and a people
of slaves? Something like the peace between the South African Apartheid regime and the Bantustans
it had created for the Blacks? Or a quite different kind of peace, a peace between equals?
It's about this peace I would like to speak. Not "real" peace. Not "perfect" peace. Not "complete"
peace.
About peace. Peace pure and simple. Without qualifications, please.
When did it all start? The conflict that now dominates the lives of the two peoples, when did
it begin?
Hard to say.
It is easy to say: it started when the first Jewish immigrant reached these shores.
Sounds simple. But it is not altogether true.
It seems that the pre-Zionist Bilu immigrants, who came here in the early 1800s, did not arouse
hostility.
I have a theory about that: some time before the Bilu (short for "House of Jacob, Go!") came here,
a religious German sect, the Templers, settled in this country. They had no political aims, just
a religious vision. They set up model villages and townships, and the locals were grateful. When
the first Jews arrived, the locals assumed that this was more of the same.
Then came the Zionist movement, which definitely had political aims. They spoke only about a "national
home", but the founder, Theodor Herzl, had previously written a book called "The Jewish State" (or,
more accurately, "The Jewstate"). The aim was hidden for a time, because the country belonged to
the Ottoman Empire.
Only very few of the local population realized right from the beginning that this was a mortal
danger for them. A large majority of the Muslims saw the Jews only as an inferior religious community,
which the Prophet had commanded them to protect.
So when did the conflict start? There are various theories about that. I adhere to the theory
of the almost-forgotten historian Aharon Cohen, who pointed to a particular event. In 1908, the revolution
of the "Young Turks" broke out. The Islamic Ottoman Empire turned into a nationalist state. As a
reaction, there arose in Palestine and the neighboring countries an Arab national movement, which
called for the "decentralization" of the empire, giving autonomy to its many peoples.
A local Arab leader approached the Zionist representative in Jerusalem with a tempting offer:
if the Jews support the Arab movement, the Arabs will support Zionist immigration.
In great excitement, the Zionist representative rushed to the then leader of the Zionist world
movement, Max Nordau, a German Jew, and urged him to accept the offer. But Nordau treated the offer
with contempt. After all, it was the Turks who were in possession of the country. What did the Arabs
have to offer?
It is difficult to know how history would have evolved if such a Zionist-Arab cooperation had
come into being. But a European Jew could not even imagine such a turn of events. Therefore the Zionists
cooperated with the Turkish – and later with the British – colonial regime against the local Arab
population.
Since then, the conflict between the two peoples has intensified from generation to generation.
Now peace is further away than ever.
But what is peace?
The past cannot be obliterated. Anyone who suggests that the past should be ignored and that we
"start again from the beginning" is dreaming.
Each of the two peoples lives in a past of its own. The past shapes their character and their
behavior every day and every hour. But the past of one side is totally different from the past of
the other.
This is not just a war between two peoples. It is also a war between two histories. Two histories
which contradict each other in almost every particular, though they concern the very same events.
For example: Every Zionist knows that until the 1948 war, the Jews acquired land with good money,
money contributed by Jews around the world. Every Arab knows that the Zionists bought the land from
absentee landlords who lived in Haifa, Beirut or Monte Carlo, and then demanded that the Turkish
(and later the British) police evict the fellahin who had tilled the land for many generations. (All
the land had originally belonged to the Sultan, but when the empire was bankrupt the Sultan sold
it to Arab speculators.)
Another example: Every Jew is proud of the Kibbutzim, a unique achievement of human progress and
social justice, which were frequently attacked by their Arab neighbors. For the Arabs, the Kibbutzim
were just sectarian instruments of displacement and deportation.
Another example: Every Jew knows that the Arabs started the 1948 war in order to exterminate the
Jewish community. Every Arab knows that in that war, the Jews evicted half the Palestinian people
from their homeland.
And so forth: nowadays the Israelis believe that the Palestinian Authority, which pays a monthly
salary to the families of "murderers", supports terrorism. The Palestinians believe that the Authority
is duty-bound to support the families whose sons and daughters have sacrificed their lives for their
people.
And so forth, without end.
(By the way, I am very proud of having invented the only scientifically sound definition of "terrorist",
which both sides can accept: "Freedom fighters are on my side, terrorists are on the other side.")
There will never be peace if the two peoples do not know the historical narrative of the other
side. There is no need to accept the narrative of the opponent. One can deny it totally. But one
has to know it, in order to understand the other people and respect it.
Peace does not have to be based on mutual love. But it must be based on mutual respect. Mutual
respect can arise only when each people knows the historical narrative of the other side. When it
understands that, it will also understand why the other people acts the way it does, and what is
needed for peaceful co-existence.
That would be much easier if every Israeli Jew learned Arabic, and every Palestinian Arab learned
Hebrew. That would not solve the problem, of course, but it would bring the solution much closer.
When each of the two peoples understands that the other side is not a bloodthirsty monster, but
acts from natural motives, it will discover many positive points in the culture of the other side.
Personal contacts will be established, perhaps even friendships.
This is already happening in Israel, though on a small scale. In the academic world, for example.
And in the hospitals. Jewish patients are often surprised to discover that their nice and competent
doctor is an Arab and that Arab male nurses are frequently more gentle than the Jewish ones.
That cannot replace dealing with the real problems. Our two peoples are divided by real, weighty
controversies. There is a problem about land, about borders, about refugees. There are problems of
security and innumerable other issues. A war of more than a hundred years will not end without painful
compromises.
When there is a basis for negotiations between equals, a basis of mutual respect, insoluble problems
will suddenly become soluble problems.
But the precondition for this process is the return of the four-letter-word to the language.
It is impossible to do something big, something historic, if there is no belief that it is possible.
A person will not plug an electric cord into a wall if they do not believe that they will be connected
to electricity. They must believe that the lights will go on.
Nobody will start peace negotiations if they believe that peace is impossible.
The belief in peace will not make peace certain. But at least it will make peace possible.
Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, writer, and former member of the Israeli Knesset.
Read other articles
by Uri , or visit Uri's
website .
"... Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as
their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided.
..."
"... As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June
2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions within
the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such as stepped-up
drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance." ..."
"... Corraborative evidence of Valentine's thesis is, perhaps surprisingly, provided by the CIA's
own website where a number of redacted historical documents have been published. Presumably, they are
documents first revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. A few however are copies of news articles
once available to the public but now archived by the CIA which has blacked-out portions of the articles.
..."
"... This led to an investigation by New Times in a day when there were still "investigative reporters,"
and not the government sycophants of today. Based on firsthand accounts, their investigation concluded
that Operation Phoenix was the "only systematized kidnapping, torture and assassination program ever
sponsored by the United States government. . . . Its victims were noncombatants." At least 40,000 were
murdered, with "only" about 8,000 supposed Viet Cong political cadres targeted for execution, with the
rest civilians (including women and children) killed and "later conveniently labeled VCI. Hundreds of
thousands were jailed without trial, often after sadistic abuse." The article notes that Phoenix was
conceived, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency ..."
"... But the article noted that one of the most persistent criticisms of Phoenix was that it resulted
"in the arrest and imprisonment of many innocent civilians." These were called "Class C Communist offenders,"
some of whom may actually have been forced to commit such "belligerent acts" as digging trenches or
carrying rice. It was those alleged as the "hard core, full-time cadre" who were deemed to make up the
"shadow government" designated as Class A and B Viet Cong. ..."
"... Ironically, by the Bush administration's broad definition of "unlawful combatants," CIA officers
and their support structure also would fit the category. But the American public is generally forgiving
of its own war criminals though most self-righteous and hypocritical in judging foreign war criminals.
But perhaps given sufficient evidence, the American public could begin to see both the immorality of
this behavior and its counterproductive consequences. ..."
"... Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Reportedly,
that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer, which stated, in the original language:
Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English: "Nobody has been
corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything." That sums up the CIA leadership entirely.
..."
Douglas Valentine has once again added to the store of knowledge necessary for American citizens
to understand how the U.S. government actually works today, in his most recent book entitled
The CIA As Organized Crime . (Valentine previously wrote The Phoenix Program ,
which should be read with the current book.)
The US "deep state" – of which the CIA is an integral part – is an open secret now and the Phoenix
Program (assassinations, death squads, torture, mass detentions, exploitation of information) has
been its means of controlling populations. Consequently, knowing the deep state's methods is the
only hope of building a democratic opposition to the deep state and to restore as much as possible
the Constitutional system we had in previous centuries, as imperfect as it was.
Princeton University political theorist Sheldon Wolin described the US political system in place
by 2003 as "inverted totalitarianism." He reaffirmed that in 2009 after seeing a year of the Obama
administration. Correctly identifying the threat against constitutional governance is the first step
to restore it, and as Wolin understood, substantive constitutional government ended long before Donald
Trump campaigned. He's just taking unconstitutional governance to the next level in following the
same path as his recent predecessors. However, even as some elements of the "deep state" seek to
remove Trump, the President now has many "deep state" instruments in his own hands to be used at
his unreviewable discretion.
Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as
their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided.
After all, the deep state's bureaucratic leadership has worked arduously for decades to subvert
constitutional order.
As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June
2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions
within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such
as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance."
Glennon noted that the propensity of "security managers" to back policies which ratchet up levels
of security "will play into Trump's hands, so that if and when he finally does declare victory, a
revamped security directorate could emerge more menacing than ever, with him its devoted new ally."
Before that happens, it is incumbent for Americans to understand what Valentine explains in his book
of CIA methods of "population control" as first fully developed in the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program.
Hating the US
There also must be the realization that our "national security" apparatchiks - principally but
not solely the CIA - have served to exponentially increase the numbers of those people who hate the
US.
Some of these people turn to terrorism as an expression of that hostility. Anyone who is at all
familiar with the CIA and Al Qaeda knows that the CIA has been Al Qaeda's most important "combat
multiplier" since 9/11, and the CIA can be said to have birthed ISIS as well with the mistreatment
of incarcerated Iraqi men in US prisons in Iraq.
Indeed, by following the model of the Phoenix Program, the CIA must be seen in the Twenty-first
Century as a combination of the ultimate "Murder, Inc.," when judged by the CIA's methods such as
drone warfare and its victims; and the Keystone Kops, when the multiple failures of CIA policies
are considered. This is not to make light of what the CIA does, but the CIA's misguided policies
and practices have served to generate wrath, hatred and violence against Americans, which we see
manifested in cities such as San Bernardino, Orlando, New York and Boston.
Pointing out the harm to Americans is not to dismiss the havoc that Americans under the influence
of the CIA have perpetrated on foreign populations. But "morality" seems a lost virtue today in the
US, which is under the influence of so much militaristic war propaganda that morality no longer enters
into the equation in determining foreign policy.
In addition to the harm the CIA has caused to people around the world, the CIA works tirelessly
at subverting its own government at home, as was most visible in the spying on and subversion of
the torture investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The subversion of democracy
also includes the role the CIA plays in developing and disseminating war propaganda as "information
warfare," upon the American people. This is what the Rand Corporation under the editorship of Zalmay
Khalilzad has described as "conditioning the battlefield," which begins with the minds of the American
population.
Douglas Valentine discusses and documents the role of the CIA in disseminating pro-war propaganda
and disinformation as complementary to the violent tactics of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Valentine
explains that "before Phoenix was adopted as the model for policing the American empire, many US
military commanders in Vietnam resisted the Phoenix strategy of targeting civilians with Einsatzgruppen-style
'special forces' and Gestapo-style secret police."
Military Commanders considered that type of program a flagrant violation of the Law of War. "Their
main job is to zap the in-betweeners – you know, the people who aren't all the way with the government
and aren't all the way with the Viet Cong either. They figure if you zap enough in-betweeners, people
will begin to get the idea," according to one quote from The Phoenix Program referring to
the unit tasked with much of the Phoenix operations.
Nazi Influences
Comparing the Phoenix Program and its operatives to "Einsatzgruppen-style 'special forces' and
Gestapo-style secret police" is not a distortion of the strategic understanding of each. Both programs
were extreme forms of repression operating under martial law principles where the slightest form
of dissent was deemed to represent the work of the "enemy." Hitler's Bandit Hunters: The SS and the
Nazi Occupation of Europe by Philip W. Blood describes German "Security Warfare" as practiced in
World War II, which can be seen as identical in form to the Phoenix Program as to how the enemy is
defined as anyone who is "potentially" a threat, deemed either "partizans" or terrorists.
That the Germans included entire racial categories in that does not change the underlying logic,
which was, anyone deemed an internal enemy in a territory in which their military operated had to
be "neutralized" by any means necessary. The US military and the South Vietnamese military governments
operated under the same principles but not based on race, rather the perception that certain areas
and villages were loyal to the Viet Cong.
This repressive doctrine was also not unique to the Nazis in Europe and the US military in Vietnam.
Similar though less sophisticated strategies were used against the American Indians and by the imperial
powers of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, including by the US in its newly acquired
territories of the Philippines and in the Caribbean. This "imperial policing," i.e., counterinsurgency,
simply moved to more manipulative and, in ways, more violent levels.
That the US drew upon German counterinsurgency doctrine, as brutal as it was, is well documented.
This is shown explicitly in a 2011 article published in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
entitled German Counterinsurgency Revisited by Charles D. Melson. He wrote that in 1942, Nazi commander
Heinrich Himmler named a deputy for "anti-bandit warfare," (Bevollmachtigter fur die Bandenkampfung
im Osten), SS-General von dem Bach, whose responsibilities expanded in 1943 to head all SS and police
anti-bandit units and operations. He was one of the architects of the Einsatzguppen "concept of anti-partisan
warfare," a German predecessor to the "Phoenix Program."
'Anti-Partisan' Lessons
It wasn't a coincidence that this "anti-partisan" warfare concept should be adopted by US forces
in Vietnam and retained to the present day. Melson pointed out that a "post-war German special forces
officer described hunter or ranger units as 'men who knew every possible ruse and tactic of guerrilla
warfare. They had gone through the hell of combat against the crafty partisans in the endless swamps
and forests of Russia.'"
Consequently, "The German special forces and reconnaissance school was a sought after posting
for North Atlantic Treaty Organization special operations personnel," who presumably included members
of the newly created US Army Special Forces soldiers, which was in part headquartered at Bad Tolz
in Germany, as well as CIA paramilitary officers.
Just as with the later Phoenix Program to the present-day US global counterinsurgency, Melson
wrote that the "attitude of the [local] population and the amount of assistance it was willing to
give guerilla units was of great concern to the Germans. Different treatment was supposed to be accorded
to affected populations, bandit supporters, and bandits, while so-called population and resource
control measures for each were noted (but were in practice, treated apparently one and the same).
'Action against enemy agitation' was the psychological or information operations of the
Nazi
period. The Nazis believed that, 'Because of the close relationship of guerilla warfare
and politics, actions against enemy agitation are a task that is just as important as interdiction
and combat actions. All means must be used to ward off enemy influence and waken and maintain a clear
political will.'"
This is typical of any totalitarian system – a movement or a government – whether the process
is characterized as counterinsurgency or internal security. The idea of any civilian collaboration
with the "enemy" is the basis for what the US government charges as "conspiracy" in the Guantanamo
Military Commissions.
Valentine explains the Phoenix program as having been developed by the CIA in 1967 to combine
"existing counterinsurgency programs in a concerted effort to 'neutralize' the Vietcong infrastructure
(VCI)." He explained further that "neutralize" meant "to kill, capture, or make to defect." "Infrastructure"
meant civilians suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers. Central to the Phoenix
program was that its targets were civilians, making the operation a violation of the Geneva Conventions
which guaranteed protection to civilians in time of war.
"The Vietnam's War's Silver Lining: A Bureaucratic Model for Population Control Emerges" is the
title of Chapter 3. Valentine writes that the "CIA's Phoenix program changed how America fights its
wars and how the public views this new type of political and psychological warfare, in which civilian
casualties are an explicit objective." The intent of the Phoenix program evolved from "neutralizing"
enemy leaders into "a program of systematic repression for the political control of the South Vietnamese
people. It sought to accomplish this through a highly bureaucratized system of disposing of people
who could not be ideologically assimilated." The CIA claimed a legal basis for the program in "emergency
decrees" and orders for "administrative detention."
Lauding Petraeus
Valentine refers to a paper by David Kilcullen entitled Countering Global Insurgency. Kilcullen
is one of the so-called "counterinsurgency experts" whom General David Petraeus gathered together
in a cell to promote and refine "counterinsurgency," or COIN, for the modern era. Fred Kaplan, who
is considered a "liberal author and journalist" at Slate, wrote a panegyric to these cultists entitled,
The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War. The purpose of this
cell was to change the practices of the US military into that of "imperial policing," or COIN, as
they preferred to call it.
But Kilcullen argued in his paper that "The 'War on Terrorism'" is actually a campaign to counter
a global insurgency. Therefore, Kilcullen argued, "we need a new paradigm, capable of addressing
globalised insurgency." His "disaggregation strategy" called for "actions to target the insurgent
infrastructure that would resemble the unfairly maligned (but highly effective) Vietnam-era Phoenix
program."
He went on, "Contrary to popular mythology, this was largely a civilian aid and development program,
supported by targeted military pacification operations and intelligence activity to disrupt the Viet
Cong Infrastructure. A global Phoenix program (including the other key elements that formed part
of the successful Vietnam CORDS system) would provide a useful start point to consider how Disaggregation
would develop in practice."
It is readily apparent that, in fact, a Phoenix-type program is now US global policy and - just
like in Vietnam - it is applying "death squad" strategies that eliminate not only active combatants
but also civilians who simply find themselves in the same vicinity, thus creating antagonisms that
expand the number of fighters.
Corraborative evidence of Valentine's thesis is, perhaps surprisingly, provided by the CIA's
own website where a number of redacted historical documents have been published. Presumably, they
are documents first revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. A few however are copies of news
articles once available to the public but now archived by the CIA which has blacked-out portions
of the articles.
The Bloody Reality
One "sanitized" article - approved for release in 2011 - is a partially redacted New Times article
of Aug. 22, 1975, by Michael Drosnin. The article recounts a story of a US Army counterintelligence
officer "who directed a small part of a secret war aimed not at the enemy's soldiers but at its civilian
leaders." He describes how a CIA-directed Phoenix operative dumped a bag of "eleven bloody ears"
as proof of six people killed.
The officer, who recalled this incident in 1971, said, "It made me sick. I couldn't go on with
what I was doing in Vietnam. . . . It was an assassination campaign . . . my job was to identify
and eliminate VCI, the Viet Cong 'infrastructure' – the communist's shadow government. I worked directly
with two Vietnamese units, very tough guys who didn't wear uniforms . . . In the beginning they brought
back about 10 percent alive. By the end they had stopped taking prisoners.
"How many VC they got I don't know. I saw a hell of a lot of dead bodies. We'd put a tag on saying
VCI, but no one really knew – it was just some native in black pajamas with 16 bullet holes."
This led to an investigation by New Times in a day when there were still "investigative reporters,"
and not the government sycophants of today. Based on firsthand accounts, their investigation concluded
that Operation Phoenix was the "only systematized kidnapping, torture and assassination program ever
sponsored by the United States government. . . . Its victims were noncombatants." At least 40,000
were murdered, with "only" about 8,000 supposed Viet Cong political cadres targeted for execution,
with the rest civilians (including women and children) killed and "later conveniently labeled VCI.
Hundreds of thousands were jailed without trial, often after sadistic abuse." The article notes that
Phoenix was conceived, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, as Mr. Valentine
writes.
A second article archived by the CIA was by the Christian Science Monitor, dated Jan. 5, 1971,
describing how the Saigon government was "taking steps that could help eliminate one of the most
glaring abuses of its controversial Phoenix program, which is aimed against the Viet Cong political
and administrative apparatus." Note how the Monitor shifted blame away from the CIA and onto the
South Vietnamese government.
But the article noted that one of the most persistent criticisms of Phoenix was that it resulted
"in the arrest and imprisonment of many innocent civilians." These were called "Class C Communist
offenders," some of whom may actually have been forced to commit such "belligerent acts" as digging
trenches or carrying rice. It was those alleged as the "hard core, full-time cadre" who were deemed
to make up the "shadow government" designated as Class A and B Viet Cong.
Yet "security committees" throughout South Vietnam, under the direction of the CIA, sentenced
at least 10,000 "Class C civilians" to prison each year, far more than Class A and B combined. The
article stated, "Thousands of these prisoners are never brought to court trial, and thousands of
other have never been sentenced." The latter statement would mean they were just held in "indefinite
detention," like the prisoners held at Guantanamo and other US detention centers with high levels
of CIA involvement.
Not surprisingly to someone not affiliated with the CIA, the article found as well that "Individual
case histories indicate that many who have gone to prison as active supporters of neither the government
nor the Viet Cong come out as active backers of the Viet Cong and with an implacable hatred of the
government." In other words, the CIA and the COIN enthusiasts are achieving the same results today
with the prisons they set up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
CIA Crimes
Valentine broadly covers the illegalities of the CIA over the years, including its well-documented
role in facilitating the drug trade over the years. But, in this reviewer's opinion, his most valuable
contribution is his description of the CIA's participation going back at least to the Vietnam War
in the treatment of what the US government today calls "unlawful combatants."
"Unlawful combatants" is a descriptive term made up by the Bush administration to remove people
whom US officials alleged were "terrorists" from the legal protections of the Geneva Conventions
and Human Rights Law and thus to justify their capture or killing in the so-called "Global War on
Terror." Since the US government deems them "unlawful" – because they do not belong to an organized
military structure and do not wear insignia – they are denied the "privilege" of belligerency that
applies to traditional soldiers. But – unless they take a "direct part in hostilities" – they would
still maintain their civilian status under the law of war and thus not lose the legal protection
due to civilians even if they exhibit sympathy or support to one side in a conflict.
Ironically, by the Bush administration's broad definition of "unlawful combatants," CIA officers
and their support structure also would fit the category. But the American public is generally forgiving
of its own war criminals though most self-righteous and hypocritical in judging foreign war criminals.
But perhaps given sufficient evidence, the American public could begin to see both the immorality
of this behavior and its counterproductive consequences.
This is not to condemn all CIA officers, some of whom acted in good faith that they were actually
defending the United States by acquiring information on a professed enemy in the tradition of Nathan
Hale. But it is to harshly condemn those CIA officials and officers who betrayed the United States
by subverting its Constitution, including waging secret wars against foreign countries without a
declaration of war by Congress. And it decidedly condemns the CIA war criminals who acted as a law
unto themselves in the torture and murder of foreign nationals, as Valentine's book describes.
Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Reportedly,
that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer, which stated, in the original language:
Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English: "Nobody has
been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything." That sums up the CIA leadership
entirely.
Douglas Valentine's book is a thorough documentation of that fact and it is essential reading
for all Americans if we are to have any hope for salvaging a remnant of representative government.
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the US Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November
2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office
of Military Commissions. This originally appeared at
ConsortiumNews.com .
"... "In my view this is a deep power struggle between Qatar and Saudi Arabia that has little to do with stated reasons regarding Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. The action to isolate Qatar was clearly instigated during US President Trump's recent visit in Riyadh where he pushed the unfortunate idea of a Saudi-led "Arab NATO" to oppose Iranian influence in the region. ..."
"... Moreover, Qatar was acting increasingly independent of the heavy Wahhabite hand of Saudi Arabia and threatening Saudi domination over the Gulf States. Kuwait, Oman, as well as non-Gulf Turkey were coming closer to Qatar and even Pakistan now may think twice about joining a Saudi-led "Arab NATO". Bin Salman has proven a disaster as a defense strategist, as proven in the Yemen debacle. ..."
"... KSA could not have taken this course of action all by itself. Someone somewhere must be egging them on. But who? The US seems to have no interest in a Saudi-Qatari conflict. Israel might, but only if said conflict is resolved in Saudi favor. ..."
"... I am therefore coming to the conclusion that there is no longer clear leadership of US policy and there are different factions within the US government. The white house and CIA are supporting the Saudis while the Pentagon supports Qatar. This is just a hunch, but it seems like it could make sense. Perhaps this is what happens when a government is in a state of decompensation. ..."
"... I quite like the WWI parallel. Trump as Kaiser Wilhelm? There certainly are some striking similarities in character. ..."
"... "...gifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern,-technology, industry, science -- but at the same time superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success, -- as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday-romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off, a juvenile cadet, who never took the tone of the officers' mess out of his voice, and brashly wanted to play the part of the supreme warlord, full of panicky fear of a monotonous life without any diversions, and yet aimless, pathological in his hatred against his English mother." ..."
"... It also stands to reason if you simply consider Saudi's importance regionally: A lot is made of Iran's threat to Saudi influence, but Turkey - thanks in part to considerable investment by Qatar currently while investment from elsewhere has reduced massively -- is also very threatening to Saudi's influence, especially on the religious front. ..."
"... Iran representing Shia interests in the region and Turkey representing Sunni interests is not a difficult future to imagine. It would of course grate with Saudi Arabia given that it had poured vast amounts of money into the Turkish economy and the diyanet. ..."
"... Hassan Nasrallah has given his annual International Al-Quds Day speech with plenty of fire aimed at the usual suspects. The Daily Star reports: 'Nasrallah accused Saudi Arabia of "paving way for Israel" in the region. '"It's unfortunate that Saudi Arabia is the head of terrorism and today it's holding its neighbors accountable for supporting terrorism," Nasrallah said, hinting to the recent economic sanctions against Qatar.' https://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2017/Jun-23/410688-nasrallah-says-regional-conflicts-seek-to-serve-israel-interest.ashx Al-Manar provides this report, http://english.almanar.com.lb/292250 Unfortunately, I cannot locate an English language transcript, although one might become available eventually as is usually the case. Piotr Berman | Jun 23, 2017 6:42:14 PM | 36 Piotr Berman Aljazeera evil? Are you joking? .... @Anon | Jun 23, 2017 3:47:56 PM | 24 You did not address the argument I made, namely, that Aljazeera editors apparently belong to "Muslims, who immediately set out to support it [Darwinian theory of evolution] unaware of the blasphemy and error in it." These guys pretend to be nice Wahhabis, dressing in dishdashas, their womenfolks in abayas, but in fact they spread heretical and blasphemous doctrines. However, I am more of a Khazar than a Wahhabi and I do not treat this argument seriously. It is the fact that compared to other government supported TV/online venues, say RT or PressTV, Aljazeera is well written and edited, has plenty of valuable material, etc. It is a worthwhile place to check when you want to get a composite picture on some issues. And it irritates KSA potentates in a myriad of ways, precisely because it targets "politically engaged Muslim". It is a good example that pluralism has inherent positive aspects, devils that quarrel are better than "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them." ==== Actually, I hope for many more benefits will show up from this quarrel than improved profits for Iranian produce growers. It is worthwhile to observe that Dubai, a component emirate of UAE, has gigantic economic links with Iran, which must be tolerated by overlords from Abu Dhabi: they had to bail out their cousins after real estate collapse, so they have big money stake in Dubai being prosperous. Potentially, Dubai and especially the hapless vegetable and dairy producers in KSA can lose a bundle (the latter had to invest a lot in farms for Qatari market, it is not like letting cows graze on abundant grasslands plus planting cucumbers and waiting for the rain to water them). Aljazeera and Muslim Brotherhood are more irritating to KSA and UAE than an occasional polite missive to Iran. ..."
"... The only hope for Saudi Arabia is to re-denominate oil sales in multiple currencies such as the WTO drawing rights, of course based on another formula, perhaps based on the countries that purchase the most oil. This would be the only way for the royalty to gain longevity as rulers of the country. Any other scenario spells disaster. ..."
William Engdahls views. "In my view this is a deep power struggle between Qatar and Saudi
Arabia that has little to do with stated reasons regarding Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. The action
to isolate Qatar was clearly instigated during US President Trump's recent visit in Riyadh where
he pushed the unfortunate idea of a Saudi-led "Arab NATO" to oppose Iranian influence in the region.
The Saudi move, clearly instigated by Prince Bin Salman, Minister of Defense, was not about
going against terrorism. If it were about terrorism, bin Salman would have to arrest himself and
most of his Saudi cabinet as one of the largest financiers of terrorism in the world, and shut
all Saudi-financed madrasses around the world, from Pakistan to Bosnia-Herzgovina to Kosovo. Another
factor according to informed sources in Holland is that Washington wanted to punish Qatar for
seeking natural gas sales with China priced not in US dollars but in Renminbi. That apparently
alarmed Washington, as Qatar is the world's largest LNG exporter and most to Asia.
Moreover, Qatar was acting increasingly independent of the heavy Wahhabite hand of Saudi
Arabia and threatening Saudi domination over the Gulf States. Kuwait, Oman, as well as non-Gulf
Turkey were coming closer to Qatar and even Pakistan now may think twice about joining a Saudi-led
"Arab NATO". Bin Salman has proven a disaster as a defense strategist, as proven in the Yemen
debacle.
As to the future, it appears that Qatar is not about to rollover and surrender in face of Saudi
actions. Already Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani is moving to establish closer ties with Iran,
with Turkey that might include Turkish military support, and most recently with Russia.
Kuwait and Oman are urgently trying to get Saudi to backdown on this, but that is unlikely
as behind Saudi Arabia stands the US and promises of tens of billions of dollars in US arms. This
foolish US move to use their proxy, in this case Riyadh, to discipline those not "behaving" according
to Washington wishes, could well be the turning point, the point of collapse of US remaining influence
in the entire Middle East in the next several years."
KSA could not have taken this course of action all by itself. Someone somewhere must be egging
them on. But who? The US seems to have no interest in a Saudi-Qatari conflict. Israel might, but
only if said conflict is resolved in Saudi favor.
I am therefore coming to the conclusion that there is no longer clear leadership of US
policy and there are different factions within the US government. The white house and CIA are
supporting the Saudis while the Pentagon supports Qatar. This is just a hunch, but it seems like
it could make sense. Perhaps this is what happens when a government is in a state of decompensation.
It is mind boggling that a fundamental reshaping of the Middle East was most likely put in motion
by Trump completely oblivious of what he was doing shooting from the hip on his Saudi trip. Outside
of an outright invasion of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, it is hard to see this as a once in a life time
geopolitical gift to Russia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iran.
Now when July 3 comes and goes, Saudi Arabia will look completely impotent in the eyes of the
countries in the region. I wonder if there is some sort of interest between Russia, Turkey, Qatar,
and Iran on a coup in Saudi Arabia. I can't imagine it would be that difficult. I know it is not
Putin's policy to play these types of games like the US Regime, but one has to assume that people
are just fucking done with the clowns running Saudi Arabia.
Gaddafi's speech to the Arab League in Syria 2008 was so prescient..
"We [the Arabs] are the enemies of one another I'm sad to say, we deceive one another, we
gloat at the misfortune of one another, and we conspire against one another, and an Arab's
enemy is another Arab's friend.
Along comes a foreign power, occupies an Arab country [Iraq] and hangs its President,and
we all sit on the sidelines laughing. Any one of you might be next, yes.
Peter AU "Is Qatar, like Turkey, already heading for a multi-polar world? For 25 years, the US
was the only game in town, but with Russia's move into Syria there are now options."
Hard to see the world heading in that direction:
Russia and China will no longer allow the US Regime to use the same tactics to start wars
against Iraq and Libya anymore.
China is methodically closing off the South China Sea to the US Regime
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is starting to increase their shared defense
Europe is openly talking about creating its own independent defense force
I wonder if Qatar is already in talks with China about joining the Silk Road Initiative now
that it is openly moving into the Russia and Iran sphere.
@17 The best is yet to come. There's a chance Netanyahu will fly into Riyadh to tell everybody
what to do. I'm sure he wants what's best for the region.
I quite like the WWI parallel. Trump as Kaiser Wilhelm? There certainly are some striking
similarities in character.
Quote from Thomas Nipperdey:
"...gifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern,-technology,
industry, science -- but at the same time superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without
any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through
to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality
and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate
for applause and success, -- as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to
be his birthday-romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably
exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off, a juvenile cadet, who never took the tone
of the officers' mess out of his voice, and brashly wanted to play the part of the supreme
warlord, full of panicky fear of a monotonous life without any diversions, and yet aimless,
pathological in his hatred against his English mother."
Last month at the China-Arab Cooperation Forum in Doha, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi postulated
that Qatar should take part in the realization of China's Silk Road Initiatives.
Yeah, you're right. I hadn't looked into the question sufficiently. Of course the Chinese are
looking for more external finance for the project. They don't want to be the only ones who pay.
Fat chance, though. The Qataris have been in austerity since the decline in the oil price. Someone
I know who works in the Qatar Museum has seen all her colleagues let go. And now the crisis with
Saudi.
The Qataris may even have signed contracts with China. But if you know anything about the Gulf,
there's a wide gap between signing a contract, and actually getting paid. It depends upon how
the prince concerned feels about the project when the question of payment comes up. A company
I worked for in the 80s took two years to get payment, even though they were experts in Gulfi
relations.
The issue of the threat regarding the Turkish base didn't surprise me much, though. I think
it's clear that if MB is the target, then of course Turkey has to become a target, and Qatar -
Turkey ties have to be broken. It stands to reason.
It also stands to reason if you simply consider Saudi's importance regionally: A lot is
made of Iran's threat to Saudi influence, but Turkey - thanks in part to considerable investment
by Qatar currently while investment from elsewhere has reduced massively -- is also very threatening
to Saudi's influence, especially on the religious front.
Iran representing Shia interests in the region and Turkey representing Sunni interests
is not a difficult future to imagine. It would of course grate with Saudi Arabia given that it
had poured vast amounts of money into the Turkish economy and the diyanet.
On a slightly different note there's a scandal going on in western Turkey, in Duzce, at the
moment because the local authority has unveiled a statue of Rabia - the four fingered Muslim Brotherhood
salute! :-)
Hassan Nasrallah has given his annual International Al-Quds Day speech with plenty of fire
aimed at the usual suspects. The Daily Star reports: 'Nasrallah accused Saudi Arabia
of "paving way for Israel" in the region.
You did not address the argument I made, namely, that Aljazeera editors apparently belong
to "Muslims, who immediately set out to support it [Darwinian theory of evolution] unaware
of the blasphemy and error in it." These guys pretend to be nice Wahhabis, dressing in dishdashas,
their womenfolks in abayas, but in fact they spread heretical and blasphemous doctrines. However,
I am more of a Khazar than a Wahhabi and I do not treat this argument seriously.
It is the fact that compared to other government supported TV/online venues, say RT or PressTV,
Aljazeera is well written and edited, has plenty of valuable material, etc. It is a worthwhile
place to check when you want to get a composite picture on some issues. And it irritates KSA
potentates in a myriad of ways, precisely because it targets "politically engaged Muslim".
It is a good example that pluralism has inherent positive aspects, devils that quarrel are
better than "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all,
and in the darkness bind them."
====
Actually, I hope for many more benefits will show up from this quarrel than improved profits
for Iranian produce growers. It is worthwhile to observe that Dubai, a component emirate of UAE,
has gigantic economic links with Iran, which must be tolerated by overlords from Abu Dhabi: they
had to bail out their cousins after real estate collapse, so they have big money stake in Dubai
being prosperous. Potentially, Dubai and especially the hapless vegetable and dairy producers
in KSA can lose a bundle (the latter had to invest a lot in farms for Qatari market, it is not
like letting cows graze on abundant grasslands plus planting cucumbers and waiting for the rain
to water them). Aljazeera and Muslim Brotherhood are more irritating to KSA and UAE than an occasional
polite missive to Iran.
One pattern in Syrian civil war were persistent and bloody feuds between jihadists that
formed roughly four groups:
"salafi", presumably funded by KSA,
"brothers", presumably funded by Qatar and Turkey,
al-Qaeda/al-Nusra/something new that was forcing the first two groups to surrender some
weapons (and money?),
and ISIS that had more complex sources (or more hidden).
Medium term strategy of Syrian government and allies for the near future is to "de-escalate"
in the western part of the country and finish off ISIS, partitioning hitherto ISIS territories
in some satisfactory way, while maintaining some type of truce with the Kurds. Then finish off
the jihadists, except those most directly protected by Turkey. Finally, take care of the Kurds.
Some sufficiently safe federalism can be part of the solution, but nothing that would lead to
enclaves with their own military forces and their own foreign policy, like Iraqi Kurdistan.
That requires the opposing parties to exhibit somewhat suicidal behavior. A big time official
feud between "brothers" and "salafi + Kurds" (a pair that shares some funding but with scant mutual
affection" can help a lot. Most of all, a big time feud between Turkey and KSA can stabilize the
situation in which jihadists from Idlib and northern Hama observe a truce/de-escalation, while
their colleagues from south Syria get clobbered, and definitely will induce them to refrain from
attacking Syrian government while it is busy against ISIS. After Erdogan was prevented from marching
onto Raqqa, he has two options: "Sunnistan" in eastern Syria under domination of YPG or a much
smaller YPG dominated territory that can be subsequently digested. Option one is a true nightmare
for Erdogan, more than a mere paranoia. However, Erdogan is also "pan-Sunni" Islamist, so he could
be tempted to backstab infidels from Damascus, as he was doing before. An open feud with Sunnistan
sponsors should help him to choose.
Qatar opened the Middle East's first centre for clearing transactions in the Chinese yuan on
Tuesday, saying it would boost trade and investment between China and Gulf Arab economies.
"The launch of the region's first renminbi clearing center in Doha creates the necessary
platform to realise the full potential of Qatar and the region's trade relationship with China,"
Qatar's central bank governor Sheikh Abdullah bin Saud al-Thani said at a ceremony.
"It will facilitate greater cross-border renminbi investment and financing business, and
promote greater trade and economic links between China and the region, paving the way for better
financial cooperation and enhancing the pre-eminence of Qatar as a financial hub in MENA (Middle
East and North Africa)."
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's (ICBC) Doha branch is the clearing bank for the centre,
which intends to serve companies from around the Middle East.
A clearing bank can handle all parts of a currency transaction from when a commitment is
made until it is settled, reducing costs and time taken for trading.
The centre "will improve the ease of transactions between companies in the region and China
by allowing them to settle their trade directly in renminbi, drawing increased trade through
Qatar and boosting bilateral and economic collaboration between Qatar and China," said ICBC
chairman Jiang Jianqing.
At present, Qatar and the Gulf's other wealthy oil and gas exporters use the U.S. dollar
much more than the yuan. Most of their currencies are pegged to the dollar, and most of their
huge foreign currency reserves are denominated in dollars.
Laguerre @27
Date of article April 24, 2017
In April 2015, Qatar opened Qatar Renminbi Centre (QRC), the region's first clearing centre
for the Chinese currency. This allows for trades priced in RMB to be cleared locally in Qatar
rather than in other centres such as Shanghai or Hong Kong.ICBC has since become the designated
clearance bank servicing the QRC, which has handled more than 350bn yuan ($52.6bn) since its inception.
http://emerge85.io/blog/the-middle-kingdoms-big-four-and-the-gulf
~ ~ ~ ~
Trending and not very far to seeing what is now held under the table. Oil will also be priced
in RMB because KSA, to maintain their share of exports to China, will need to get on board. For
now, it's been reaffirmed, SA does the whipping and USA protects the Royals.
About Sunni-Shia split. My impression is that this is mostly KSA + UAE obsession. For example,
there is a substantial Shia minority in Pakistan, but the dominant thinking among the Sunnis seems
to be "Muslim solidarity". There is a minority that is virulently anti-Shia, but they are politically
isolated and despised exactly on the account of breaking that solidarity. After all, Pakistan
forms the boundary of the Umma with non-Muslim India. I base that opinion on comments in online
Pakistani newspapers, and what I have heard from an acquaintance who was a religiously conservative
Sunni Pakistani. To him, the attack on Yemen by KSA was wrong "because they are Muslim". So even
if Pakistan is to a certain extend in Saudi pocket, and its deep state has an extremist Sunni
component, overt siding against "fellow Muslim" is out of the question.
Egypt is another case. One can find rather isolated anti-Shia outbursts, like writings of some
fossils in Al-Azhar (who are responsible for the state religion), but the government steers away
from that, and in spite of hefty subsidies, it joined Yemen war only symbolically and for a very
short time (unlike Sudan that really needs the cash for its mercenaries). As you move further
away from the Persian Gulf, the indifference to the "split" increases. As far as Qatar and Aljazeera
are concerned, probably no one detests them more than Egyptian elite, as they were valiantly fighting
Muslim Brotherhood for the sake of progress with some occasional large massacres (killing several
hundreds of protesters, issuing hundreds of death penalties to participants in a single protest,
in absentia! incredible idiocy+cruelty). That explains why al-Sisi joined KSA against Qatar.
However, the civil war in Libya that embroils Egypt is a classic case of unexpected alliances.
Egypt with a help from Russia, KSA and UAE supports the "eastern government" that bases legitimacy
on democratic parliament re-assembled in Tobruq on Egyptian border, and dominated by military
strongman Haftar. The latter has the best chance of all people to become a military strongman
of all Libya, but apparently has meager popularity and thus, too few troops. He patched that problem
by an alliance with a Salafi group that had a numerous militia, currently partitioned into smaller
units and incorporated into Haftar's brigades. Even with that, his progress on the ground is very,
very gradual. Against him is the government in Tripolis, legitimized by a more fresh parliament
and UN/EU, plus a military force that includes several militias. Part of the parliamentary support
stems from Muslim Brotherhood, and some part of military support comes from Salafi militias. There
are also aspects of a "war of all against all", seems that Saharan tribes collected a lot of fresh
blood feuds.
Thus Qatari+Turkish support for Tripoli government is aligned with EU, and Egyptian support
for Tobruq government is aligned with Russia and KSA.
I thought I might just throw this out there and see what sticks. US policy is based on power and
control. Saudi Arabia has been a good ally but it does not serve use policy or strategic goals
any longer. Not really. I think the grand prize for destabilizing the middle east is Saudi Arabia.
It would be the only way to truly control the development of other nations or more specifically,
to control their rivalries and save the the US from complete economic breakdown. The Saudi's are
being plumbed by the best of them, telling them they are you friends, we have your back and so
long as Saudi Arabia loses more money and keeps lossing money in needless wars etc.
The only hope for Saudi Arabia is to re-denominate oil sales in multiple currencies such
as the WTO drawing rights, of course based on another formula, perhaps based on the countries
that purchase the most oil. This would be the only way for the royalty to gain longevity as rulers
of the country. Any other scenario spells disaster. Of course, it would be a rough go for
them for a while, but in the end, a slight change in outlook and the unfair advantage given to
the US would go a long way, economically to stabilizing large blocks of countries. They also could
of course change their outlook on the world, but that is certainly a difficult challenge. If the
Muslim world came together based on their similarities, they could be a very powerful block.
The US no longer has the financial velocity it once maintained and this is much more due to
insane ideas about being a hegemon. I never thought revolution would be possible in the US, but
it is coming and it won't take much. The country does not appear to have intelligence peddle back
a number of policies, drunk on its own poison, it makes capitalism look disgusting. A new business
model is needed, one that developes mutual trade based on respect from within the exchange itself.
Saudi Arabia needs to cultivate multi-channel support for its biggest resource so that when the
returns are no longer there, they will have also developed multiple avenues to prosperity. Just
a thought.
Ukraine is now debt slave. Debt slave is not an independent country. No way. It is a
neo-colony.
Notable quotes:
"... The scale of de-industrialization and of de-modernization Ukraine achieved in short 26 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union is nothing short of mind-boggling and unprecedented. ..."
Why Ukrainians of course, it's their country after all.
" it's their country after all."
Their country?
Ukraine had ceased to exist as an independent country in 2014, with arrival
of Nuland (ziocon) and Brennan (the CIA). Hence the spectacular appointments of
Misha Saakishvilli (wanted in his native Georgia), Natali Yaresko (an American
felon), Pravyj sector (local neo-nazi), and finally, Groysman, a Jewish
entrepreneur and current prime minister of Ukraine. Jews make 0.4% of Ukrainian
population:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-population-of-the-world
"While Putin was basking in the glory of the 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi,
the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington - the CIA, the National Endowment
for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs
- was on the ground in Kiev assisting the putsch that overthrew Ukraine's
constitutionally elected President and Russian ally.
From there, the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea inexorably
followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia and its leader.
So as it turned out, the War Party could not have planned a better outcome -
especially after Russia moved to protect its legitimate interests in its own
backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil war in Ukraine. That
included protecting its 200-year old naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea."
Moreover, the Ukrainian territory is the result of Soviet annexations of
Rumanian, Polish, and Hungarian territories; without the generous provisions by
the USSR, Ukraine would be a puny patch of land:
http://ukrmap.su/en-uh10/273.html
Get it, boys and girls? Everyone owes it to Ukraine to "put her on her feet".
Russia owes her gas transit, buying everything Ukraine (less and less)
produces. And, of course, Ukraine's main idea about Europe, as even her former
President still thinks so, is to get to EU, get a truck load of free money (aka
investments) and start living as European upper middle class. I am not
exaggerating. Of course, the fact that Ukraine became what it became by 1990
was largely thanks to the Soviet economic system somehow got lost on such
people as Kuchma, not to speak of very many average Ukrainians.
The scale of de-industrialization and of de-modernization Ukraine
achieved in short 26 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union is nothing
short of mind-boggling and unprecedented.
"... Put another way, historical perspectives conceived in what Becker termed "the specious present" have a sell-by date. Beyond their time, they become stale and outmoded, and so should be revised or discarded. This process of rejecting truths previously treated as authoritative is inexorable and essential. ..."
"... Memories, whether directly or vicariously acquired, are "necessary to orient us in our little world of endeavor." Yet the specious present that we inhabit is inherently unstable and constantly in flux, which means that history itself must be pliable. Crafting history necessarily becomes an exercise in "imaginative creation" in which all participate. However unconsciously, Everyman adapts the past to serve his most pressing needs, thereby functioning as "his own historian." ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... This idée fixe ..."
"... my sense is that many Americans have an inkling that history of late has played them for suckers. This is notably true with respect to the post-Cold War era, in which the glories of openness, diversity, and neoliberal economics, of advanced technology and unparalleled U.S. military power all promised in combination to produce something like a new utopia in which Americans would indisputably enjoy a privileged status globally. ..."
"... "Of course money-lovers will want the United States Government, because it's the one government that exists simply and solely to protect money. " ..."
"... Nah, they'll put a few more bricks in the wall, reinforce the gates, and hire more guards so they can rest well at night while bathed in the glow that they continue to advance the best interests of human-kind over the objections of the unwashed masses on the other side of the wall. ..."
"For all practical purposes history is,
for us and for the time being, what we know it to be." So
remarked
Carl Becker in 1931 at the annual meeting of the American
Historical Association. Professor Becker, a towering figure among historians
of his day, was president of the AHA that year. His message to his
colleagues amounted to a warning of sorts: Don't think you're so smart. The
study of the past may reveal truths, he allowed, but those truths are
contingent, incomplete, and valid only "for the time being."
Put another way, historical perspectives
conceived in what Becker termed "the specious present" have a sell-by date.
Beyond their time, they become stale and outmoded, and so should be revised
or discarded. This process of rejecting truths previously treated as
authoritative is inexorable and essential. Yet it also tends to be fiercely
contentious. The present may be specious, but it confers real privileges,
which a particular reading of the past can sustain or undermine. Becker
believed it inevitable that "our now valid versions" of history "will in due
course be relegated to the category of discarded myths." It was no less
inevitable that beneficiaries of the prevailing version of truth should
fight to preserve it.
Who exercises the authority to relegate?
Who gets to decide when a historical truth no longer qualifies as true?
Here, Becker insisted that "Mr. Everyman" plays a crucial role. For Becker,
Mr. Everyman was Joe Doakes, John Q. Public, or the man in the street. He
was "every normal person," a phrase broad enough to include all manner of
people. Yet nothing in Becker's presentation suggested that he had the
slightest interest in race, sexuality, or gender. His Mr. Everyman belonged
to the tribe of WHAM.
Memories, whether directly or vicariously
acquired, are "necessary to orient us in our little world of endeavor." Yet
the specious present that we inhabit is inherently unstable and constantly
in flux, which means that history itself must be pliable. Crafting history
necessarily becomes an exercise in "imaginative creation" in which all
participate. However unconsciously, Everyman adapts the past to serve his
most pressing needs, thereby functioning as "his own historian."
Yet he does so in collaboration with
others. Since time immemorial, purveyors of the past - the "ancient and
honorable company of wise men of the tribe, of bards and story-tellers and
minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been
entrusted the keeping of the useful myths" - have enabled him to "hold in
memory those things only which can be related with some reasonable degree
of relevance" to his own experience and aspirations. In Becker's lifetime it
had become incumbent upon members of the professoriate, successors to the
bards and minstrels of yesteryear, "to enlarge and enrich the specious
present common to us all to the end that 'society' (the tribe, the nation,
or all mankind) may judge of what it is doing in the light of what it has
done and what it hopes to do."
Yet Becker took pains to emphasize that
professional historians disdained Mr. Everyman at their peril:
"Berate him as we will for not reading our
books, Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must
adapt our knowledge to his necessities. Otherwise he will leave us to our
own devices The history that does work in the world, the history that
influences the course of history, is living history It is for this reason
that the history of history is a record of the 'new history' that in every
age rises to confound and supplant the old."
Becker stressed that the process of
formulating new history to supplant the old is organic rather than
contrived; it comes from the bottom up, not the top down. "We, historians by
profession, share in this necessary effort," he concluded. "But we do not
impose our version of the human story on Mr. Everyman; in the end it is
rather Mr. Everyman who imposes his version on us."
Donald Trump as Everyman's
Champion?
Becker offered his reflections on
"Everyman His Own Historian" in the midst of the Great Depression. Perhaps
because that economic crisis found so many Americans burdened with
deprivation and uncertainty, he implicitly attributed to his everyman a
unitary perspective, as if shared distress imbued members of the public with
a common outlook. That was not, in fact, the case in 1931 and is, if
anything, even less so in our own day.
Still, Becker's construct retains
considerable utility. Today finds more than a few White Heterosexual
American males (WHAM), our own equivalent of Mr. Everyman, in a state of high
dudgeon. From their perspective, the specious present has not panned out as
it was supposed to. As a consequence, they are pissed. In November 2016, to
make clear just how pissed they were, they elected Donald Trump as president
of the United States.
This was, to put it mildly, not supposed
to happen. For months prior to the election, the custodians of the past in
its "now valid version" had judged the prospect all but inconceivable. Yet
WHAMs (with shocking support from other tribes) intervened to decide
otherwise. Rarely has a single event so thoroughly confounded history's
self-assigned proctors. One can imagine the shade of Professor Becker
whispering, "I warned you, didn't I?"
Those deeply invested in drawing a
straight line from the specious present into the indefinite future blame
Trump himself for having knocked history off its prescribed course. Remove
Trump from the scene, they appear to believe, and all will once again be
well. The urgent imperative of doing just that - immediately, now, no later
than this afternoon - has produced what
New York Times
columnist
Charles Blow aptly
calls
a "throbbing anxiety" among those who (like Blow himself) find
"the relentless onslaught of awfulness erupting from this White House"
intolerable. They will not rest until Trump is gone.
This
idée fixe
, reinforced on a
daily basis by ever more preposterous presidential antics, finds the nation
trapped in a sort of bizarre do-loop. The media's obsession with Trump
reinforces his obsession with the media and between them they simply crowd
out all possibility of thoughtful reflection. Their fetish is his and his
theirs. The result is a cycle of mutual contempt that only deepens the
longer it persists.
Both sides agree on one point only: that
history began anew last November 8th, when (take your pick) America either
took leave of its senses or chose greatness. How the United States got to
November 8th qualifies, at best, as an afterthought or curiosity. It's
almost as if the years and decades that had preceded Trump's election had
all disappeared into some vast sinkhole.
... ... ...
...my sense is that
many Americans have an inkling that history of late has played them for
suckers. This is notably true with respect to the post-Cold War era, in
which the glories of openness, diversity, and neoliberal economics, of
advanced technology and unparalleled U.S. military power all promised in
combination to produce something like a new utopia in which Americans would
indisputably enjoy a privileged status globally.
In almost every respect, those
expectations remain painfully unfulfilled. The history that "served for the
time being" and was endlessly reiterated during the presidencies of Bush 41,
Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama no longer serves. It has yielded a mess of
pottage: grotesque inequality, worrisome insecurity, moral confusion, an
epidemic of self-destructive behavior, endless wars, and basic institutions
that work poorly if at all. Nor is it just WHAMs who have suffered the
consequences. The history with which Americans are familiar cannot explain
this outcome.
The Mandate of Heaven, which members of my tribe once took as theirs
by right, has been cruelly withdrawn. History itself has betrayed us.
How did we manage to sleepwalk for two plus centuries with dreams of "the
city on a hill", our "exceptional nation" etc etc and quite freely disparage
others for their war making proclivities without getting wise to it all?
This line from D.H.Lawrence in his graphic novel "Quetzalcoatl" charges
Mexico and other governments with encouraging our nefarious actions.
"Of
course money-lovers will want the United States Government, because it's the
one government that exists simply and solely to protect money. "
Trump only exists because the two political parties have become so corrupt
and arrogant they don't give a damn about working people. In theory, the
Democratic party represents workers, but as profane lefty Jimmy Dore
recently explained, the Dems are worse than Trump:
When that happens, when promises of American greatness restored prove
empty, there will be hell to pay. Joe Doakes, John Q. Public, and the man
in the street will be even more pissed. Should that moment arrive,
historians would do well to listen seriously to what Everyman has to say.
Some thoughts on this would be that American greatness needed 1) a high
level of national unity 2) a lot of discipline and hard work.
There's a tendency to look back to the 1950′s when talking about
"American Greatness", but in reality this was a very unusual time. America
lacked industrial competitors. After WW2, Germany and Japan were in ruins.
China was still an economic basket case and Europe was recovering with the
help of US multi-nationals and US investment.
Rather than start partying, the US needed an awareness of the coming
challenges and needed from the 1950′s to develop a modern industrial base in
new technologies with top class technological skills among its workforce as
a national project. The aim should have been to build a world class
education system at least to match the STEM results of the best Europeans
and N/E Asians.
In the event, the US disappeared into counter cultural Hippiedom and sent
all its industries to Asian for cheaper and more efficient production. A government stuffed with commercial special interests is obviously going
to do what is best for their bottom lines i.e. produce in Asia and sell in
the US – they're not in business to look after the US public. The public are
Consumers and they are Vendors.
Nah, they'll put a few more bricks in the wall, reinforce the gates, and
hire more guards so they can rest well at night while bathed in the glow
that they continue to advance the best interests of human-kind over the
objections of the unwashed masses on the other side of the wall.
"Are we any better off than we were 50 years ago? Absolutely . . . White
dominance is on the decline as the demographic white majority heads for
oblivion over the course of the next 30 years."
Mark Potok in an August 2013 column for the white-hating SPLC.
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Mark_Potok#Quotes
Us WHAMs are in the bulls eye of many a group who would like to see us
join the dinosaurs.
There is very strong trans-species-trans phylum evidence
for what is going to happen in response to betrayal-deception .and it ain't
pretty as they say. Harvard biologist Robert Trivers I believe Comrade Unz
mentioned that he was a research assistant for Robert Trivers at
Harvard wrote a book about the biology of betrayal and revenge using a
massive amount of trans-species and trans-phylum evidence-data
So I recommend that you read Robert Triver's book I also recommend that
you read the conversation betwern Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers ..where
Trivers discusses the overwhelming ethnological evidence for this which you
can very easily google for
Larger point being made by Noam Chomsky these days: White Males are dying
at an historically unprecedented rate .worse than if there was a
plague-epidemic at higher rate than WW2
Donald Trump's MAGA!!! Jobs Program for Working Class Native Born White Teenage Males from
economically distressed Native Born White Working Class Families from the American Heartland=a Tour
of Duty on patrol with a US Army issued M-16 in Afghanistan .Iraq Syria .coming back to their
Mother's as limbless freaks .human sausages .canon fodder for Donald Trump's precious Jew
only Israel .
"War is a Racket" ..as USMC General and two time Congressional Medal
winner .Smedley Butler wrote over 75 years ago
I'm a big fan of the late Dick Winters and 101 Airborne Easy Company Band of
Brothers WW2. But I just found out recently that Easy Company members Ronald
Spiers and Robert "Burr" Smith were at a high level actively involved in the
destruction of Laos which was bombed back to the Stone Age by the USAF
Interestingly Robert "Burr" Smith trained the US Army Delta Force Team that
died in the Iranianian desert in 1980 .Smith avoided dying in that desert
crash when the CIA yanked him out of this doomed mission at the last minute
out of fear that if Smith a CIA Operative .was captured .risk of spilling
the beans to the Iranians about what the CIA was up to Robert "Burr" Smith was the embodiment of "Invade the World-Invite the
World with his role in the destruction of Laotian Society and his adopted
Laotian teenage "son" .
"We only want to be life as easy as it was under Eisenhower (to be fair,
from Truman to LBJ)."
Nostalgia has a funny way of warping our sense of
reality. Life for some people was "easy" in the 1950′s, but for a number of
people, it was cold, hard, and dark.
Another of the usual enemies of free
speech & Israeli citizen, Potok, supports strict Israeli immigration laws
which specify JEWS ONLY, while he demands massive 3rd world immigration into
the US & Europe.
Interesting post, I've read it through twice, but it has complicated issues.
WHAMs
Wherever corporate CEOs,] . etc.etc.etc.--, [politicians, and generals
congregate to pat each other on the back, you can count on WHAMs
-reciting bromides about the importance of diversity!
Important detail:
some of my brethren - let's call them one percenters -
YEah, SOME "brethren"! THat tiny fraction of a %point, that lives large!
Some Brethren to the name WHAMs! they are.
Sociopaths
who some kind of way masquerade as W H A M. And
what
they do is done in the name of the W H A M
, which is my sticking point.
That small fraction of a %point does all the
bad
, and shifts the
blame ( from the World!!) on to the real WHAMs, what's left of 'em, ( what's
left of the White Hetero part
of 'em, ) who aren't polluted from the social scientist/ ongoing war to turn
WHAMs into WIAMPs! (White Inverted American Male/Tranny Punks.)!! That the
world will hate, and eventually probably be encouraged to completely get rid
of, while the fraction of the %point rides off into the sunset! Then you can
see the real perverts in action!
What happens if you get rid of
Trump? The people who voted for him will most likely replace him with
someone very similar in almost every way, but more competent. Probably a
professional politician version of him. Is that what you want?
Yes, in ancient Greek history Trump is analogous to the Tyrants of Athens,
who were a transition from aristocratic to truly democratic rule. Of course
once democracy was installed the common people of Athens demanded and got
wars against a variety of enemies. Trump rise is an alarming portent. A few
decades from now George W. Bush will be regarded as the last of the cautious
Skull and Bones aristocrats. It is a bit silly to talk of WHAMS, as if the
displacement of white gentiles is less important that open acceptance of
homosexuality. It is WASPs, gay or straight, who have lost.
As was said above, so many words, so little content.
Bacevich has gone off the deep end. Truly.
The idea that white males were sitting around lording it up with their
privilege is absolutely preposterous. No white male ever has done that, and
Bacevich certainly know that. Andrew? Exactly how many times in your long
lifetime have you been slapping backs with other white men laughing about
how great you have it because of your gender and your race?
I'll help you out. It's zero, Andrew. You know it. I know it. We know it.
So this writing is horseshit. Col. Bacevich, you do really great military
anlysis and opinion.
Stop with the virtual signalling fairy tales.
As a white male nothing was ever easy. Yeah, perhaps I did not get my
head beat a few times and avoided some jail. Maybe.
And that makes how much difference in anyone's life?
You really need to get back to the military analysis, bud. You are
sounding like a lunatic with this stuff. But more than that. Dishonest.
I tuned out when he started saying WHAMS misguidedly didn't consider
non-WHAMS in their history, which was completely rational considering before
very recent times there was no reason to.
Interesting but nowhere near your better pieces, too meandering. Although I
only hit the H in the WHAM formulation you have. WHAM doesn't work on two
counts.
i. The pop band, Wham, still well-known due to pop music being in
stasis, and they had one great single and a few others that tasteless people
like.
ii. H also stands for homosexual. It is funny how that word is not
goodspeak in English of now, and heterosexual almost has a pejorative
quality but is widely used. The sickness of western culture. The equivalent
in Japanese of homosexual is used to refer to people who are, well,
homosexual. The equivalent of heterosexual is just about never heard. That
is not discrimination, simply that it is naturally, as it should be, seen as
the norm.
@restless94110
The traditional role of the white male is to support a family by bringing
home the bacon; be courageous when things get rough and defend your family
and friends with your blood; fix everything that's broken; build everything
you need with your hands, or build the machines necessary to build
everything; run everything with competence and man up and take the blame if
you screw up; teach your children how to deal with life; teach people right
from wrong and set the example for them to follow; create high-level
science, medicine, art, physics, math, engineering, etc.
It's a very tall
order, and anyone who thinks it's easy, is a fool.
What about the likes of my aunt who was the
second wife of a childless mega millionaire who died when she was 38 leaving
her to enjoy 50 healthy years as a rich woman until she suddenly died in her
sleep?
The first paragraph was enough social justice warrior crap to make it
unnecessary reading the rest. Yet, I did try for another five paragraphs and
it's just more of the same tripe.
Yeah, all of us stand in line and get free hand-outs. White people at the
front of the line. Nobody works for what they have. Everyone has the same
IQ, the same work ethic, the same adherence to law. I'm upset because the
color of my skin is supposed to dictate my place in the line for free
hand-outs and I am no longer at the front of the line. God what arrogant,
malicious crap.
We just went through IQ scores by country in homeschool today. My kids
are muti-racial, SE Asians, who occupy the top five spots worldwide. They
have the highest average income in this country, the highest academic
performance, and the lowest crime rates.
Of course, we sat around talking about their "privilege" as SE Asians and
how everything is handed to them for free. How they just go up to any line
and cut in front. Right? No.
What I just did was show them your article as a perfect example of why we
don't go to government school.
We are not your "peeps" for the white blood in us and you are not some
hero of ours for having the arrogance to speak for our non-white blood
either.
You are disgusting and worthy of nothing but contempt. I'm majority
white, not pure blood (Seneca Indian) but don't buy into the cult of
victimology where I am supposed to get job preferences, school preferences,
etc. because I am quantum blood Indian. That doesn't make me an "Indian". I
am an American. Our kids are Americans.
The idea that we should knock off "whitey" because we're mixed blood,
like it's "our" turn now – how nonsensical and revolting.
@Backwoods Bob
You are obviously a slow reader but apparently handicapped in dealing with
numbers too. If you had actually read "another five paragraphs" you would
have read the author's "All of which is nonsense of course" at the beginning
of his sixth par.
Fortunately I didn't waste time on many of your paragraphs.
@Anon
The traditional role of ANY male is to support a family by bringing home the
bacon, etc.
It's just what males do, anon.
Bacevich's idiotic virtue signaling nonsense that posits that all white
males knew this and knew that. and that we all had secret meetings in the
basement of the church is ridiculous.
I've known whites who had racist views on black people. I've also known
blacks who have racist views on white people.
But even racists never had any thought that they were suddenly privileged
because of their skin color and/or they were smirking about it in secret or
whatever it is that this guy is claiming in his long, long, long, overly
long piece.
In other words, men did those things, anon, white ones, black one, etc.
This white privilege stuff is just bullshit. It has to go. Andrew B., let
it die it's own irrelevant death.
@Stogumber
Yes if you want life as it was in the 1950′s, then you need to recognize
that we got out of the Great Depression because we started to pay farmers
their fair share. Today they only get 35% of the Parity Dollar, the dollar
that provided for the prosperity across the nation, because it was not
stolen from the producer of that which keeps us alive, literally, and
literally kept the economy afloat, because it was based upon real wealth
properly monetized, meaning not stolen as is the system today .but we lost
that when we stopped Parity, which created earned income at sufficient
levels to not have to borrow as we are now addicted .. as the "interests
whose interest is interest" intend.
Here is a letter to Trump with an
important chart.
Konrad Lorenz
and
Desmond Morris
, or anthropologists such as
Lionel Tiger
. They linked studies of animal behaviour to the idea of Darwinian
evolutionary principles to tell readers just how very like the beasts we were in
our sex lives, our workplaces and our recreational behaviours. We were advised to
look at chimps and other primates and derive understanding of ourselves from their
apparently culture-free activities and traits. Underneath all our fancy culture
and language, we were simply naked apes enacting primitive territorial
imperatives.
The reading public lapped it up as both a neat, satisfying
narrative, and as an excuse for all manner of not-so-civilised behaviours for
which we no longer had to take personal and moral blame. We go to war – well, so
do baboons; it's in our genes, we can try to overcome it, but in the end as in the
beginning we're all just animals. By 1976 we didn't even have to blame the animal
in ourselves: Richard Dawkins gave us the selfish gene, whose sole reason for
existence was to reproduce itself. And we, that is the body and brain of you and
me, were nothing but vehicles for these genes which compelled us to optimise their
chances of replicating. Talk to the gene, the conscience isn't listening.
Much of this was based on algebraic theories of altruism developed by
WD Hamilton
, who shifted the mechanism of evolution from making groups fitter
to survive to a new insistence on individual inclusive fitness. This was via kin
selection, which drills down deeper than the inter-relatedness of individual
organisms, to the separate alleles (of which genes are made) in every organism:
these preferentially promote only those vehicles which contain alleles most
closely related to themselves. Genes were responsible, somehow, for you fighting
the whirlwind to save your sister, but probably not your less related cousin, and
certainly not the stranger from down the road.
Some people were not crazy about this view of the human race. Genes doing
algebra didn't suit a more macrocosmic idea of a fallible but responsible
humanity.
Robert Trivers
was the man who produced the unifying theory of kin selection
and altruism. Now, decades on, he has arrived at a big, new universal theory, also
essentially based on the arithmetic of gene selection. Deceit is useful where
telling the (unpleasant) truth would hamper your progress. Progress towards what?
Trivers would say your fitness, which is defined as raising the chances of
replicating your genes into the next generation.
Your genes, apparently, would agree with him; but they would, wouldn't they?
That is if they were capable of agreeing. I want to hang on to the fact that the
building blocks of ourselves do not want or intend anything. Chemicals aren't
conscious, although by amazing chance they can combine to make a conscious
organism.
Once self-conscious humans begin to do science, and with the benefit of
language, start to describe the nature of the chemicals that make them what they
are, but having to use regular language if they want a large audience (maths is a
much better language, but fewer people can read it), they cannot help but slide
into the notion of intention. Dawkins's selfish gene gained an absurd life of its
own because most people don't speak arithmetic.
The biological mechanism by which we conceal inconvenient truths from ourselves
and others is shown, says Trivers, in functional MRI scans of blood flow
associated with neural activity in the brain: "It is estimated that fully ten
seconds before consciousness of intent, the neural signals begin that will later
give rise to the consciousness and then the behaviour itself." Freud, who always
believed that neurology would discover a physical basis for the unconscious, would
be delighted, though according to Trivers, psychoanalysis is nothing more than a
money-grabbing hoax. Yet there remains a void between brain chemicals doing what
they do and the emergence of the sense we all have of possessing a mind.
Trivers's theories of deceit and self-deceit are based on multiple gleanings
from experimental psychology. A trial with rats shows this, another with students
suggests that. The actual experiments are referenced, rather minimally, in
page-related endnotes, but Trivers's writing is full of halting phraseology as he
slips from findings in the lab or questionnaire to the generality of human social
behaviour.
He suggests from relatedness theory that fathers should show a "slight genetic
bias towards their daughters", but "no one knows if this is true". General
assertions about human behaviour are peppered with such phrases as "One is tempted
to imagine ", "in mice at least ", "work still in its infancy ", "first
speculations ", "Whether any of my speculations are true I have no idea ". And,
really, if he doesn't, I certainly don't.
Once he has laid out his evidence, our biologically determined deceit behaviour
is ready to account for just about everything Trivers doesn't like about the
world, such as the false justifications for the invasion of Iraq, the
self-deceiving use, by the US and UK, of 9/11 to declare war on oil-rich countries
and on to torture, religion and stock-market trading. It so happens that Trivers
and I dislike much the same things but, though I daresay knowledge is generally
better than lack of it, I'm not convinced of the benefits of offering us the
excuse of having been manipulated by our genes for our repeatedly scurrilous
behaviour.
While the first part of the book explains the theory, and the second part
discusses how deceit was responsible for all the political and social injustices
both he and I perceive in the world, there is a third element woven through both.
An actual individual life, that of Trivers himself, emerges, like a gene in the
organism, offered perhaps as a consciously self-deprecating example of what
evolutionary pressure to deceive can do to a person. Somehow, though, it comes
across as back-handed boasting.
The man whom Trivers calls "I" is a compulsive thief who can't go into a room
without coming away with a trophy. He talks of his "'inadvertent' touching of
women", which occurs exclusively with his left (unconscious) hand. Apropos chimps
turning their backs to hide an erection from a dominant male, he explains that he
finds it very hard "in the presence of a woman with whom I am close, to receive a
phone call from another woman with whom I may have, or only wish to have, a
relationship, without turning my back to pursue the conversation".
He understands the male/female gender split by recollecting "trying to poison
the minds of my three daughters against their mother". He nearly killed his
girlfriend and nephew by driving the nephew's "cool car" too fast on a precipitous
road, when he noticed her interest in the younger man. And after pages and pages
on biological selection, evolutionary pressure and the dangerous deception that is
religion, it not only turns out that he prays regularly, but he gives a short
lecture on the proper way to say the "Lord's Prayer" (emphasise "thy"). I wasn't
surprised to discover that he is on prescription antidepressants, as well as using
ganja and cocaine.
There will be Iron Johns who read this book and cheer, and although he explains
that each sex (abhorring the word "gender", which he calls a euphemism) contains
both male and female genes, my male genes are just too wimpy to find any charm in
Trivers's display of self-disclosure – machismo and pet peeves – dressed up as an
important new evolutionary understanding of humanity.
Jenny Diski's
What I Don't Know About Animals
is published by Virago.
Oh dear- could you then...disentangle your own behaviour from
your 'human nature".
In general- Yes. Human behaviour changes rapidly and depends on
culture and individual choices. Human nature changes very very slowly,
in 'evolutionary time'. Too slowly for it to be observed.
On the level of the individual -- No. I can't disentangle my personal
choices from my inherited tendencies. To what extent does my behaviour
(or my character)reflect my genes or upbringing, to what extent is it
my own free will? Nature, Nurture, or Nietzsche?, as Stephen Fry would
say. I can't say- except that I believe that we all have free will and
are therefore in most cases responsible for our actions.
As for 'my' human nature, that is a meaningless phrase. Human
nature I would define as the (evolved) psychological traits humans
have
in common
.
In his article Pinker gives (I think) quite a convincing
explanation of how human behaviour can be changing for the better,
while human nature (perforce) remains the same.
Oh dear- could you then-with the help of Pinker's
pseudo-scientific, deterministic, eurocentric tosh and/or Dawkins
overly simplistic, to the point of idiocy take on genes and evolution-
disentangle your own behaviour from your 'human nature.' I am really
curious.
"... the use of debt as a primary weapon in class warfare ..."
"... They were in hock to the man, and eventually became slaves to him. This structure, of sharecropping and usury, held together by political violence, continued into the 1960s in some areas of the South. As late as the 1960s, Kennedy would see rural poverty in Arkansas and pronounce it 'shocking'. These were the fruits of usury, a society built on unsustainable debt peonage. ..."
"... Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society ..."
"... Today, the debts do not involve liens against crops. People in modern America carry student loans, credit card debt, and mortgages. All of these are hard to pay back, often bringing with them impenetrable contracts and illegal fees. Credit card debt is difficult to discharge in bankruptcy and a default on a home loan can leave you homeless. A student loan debt is literally a claim against a life - you cannot discharge it in bankruptcy, and if you die, your parents are obligated to pay it. If the banks have their way, mortgages and deficiency judgments will follow you around forever, as they do in Spain. ..."
"... By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is J is for Junk Economics ..."
"... Students usually don't think of themselves as a class. They seem "pre-class," because they have not yet entered the labor force. They can only hope to become part of the middle class after they graduate. And that means becoming a wage earner – what impolitely is called the working class. ..."
"... But as soon as they take out a student debt, they become part of the economy. They are in this sense a debtor class. But to be a debtor, one needs a means to pay – and the student's means to pay is out of the wages and salaries they may earn after they graduate. And after all, the reason most students get an education is so that they can qualify for a middle-class job. ..."
"... Shedding crocodile tears for the slow growth of U.S. employment in the post-2008 doldrums (the "permanent Obama economy" in which only the banks were bailed out, not the economy), the financial class views the role industry and the economy at large as being to pay its employees enough so that they can take on an exponentially rising volume of debt. Interest and fees (late fees and penalties now yield credit card companies more than they receive in interest charges) are soaring, leaving the economy of goods and services languishing. ..."
"... Students are the new NINJAs: No Income, No Jobs, No Assets. But their parents have assets, and these are now being grabbed, even from retirees. Most of all, the government has assets – the power to tax (mainly labor these days), and something even better: the power to simply print money (mainly Quantitative Easing to try and re-inflate housing, stock and bond prices these days). Most students hope to become independent of their parents. But burdened by debt and facing a tough job market, they are left even more dependent. That's why so many have to keep living at home. ..."
"... A must-read primer on debt peonage and how universities are basically real estate hoarders and debtor magnets for the banks. ..."
"... Not to mention the incredible amount of cheating that goes on at universities. I guess cheating at college is training for joining the Kleptocracy. ..."
"... The question to ask, I think, is about the sustainability of this inversion of the dream of education as the path to upward mobility. People do not need to fully, or even partially, intellectually grasp the causes of their misery and sense of failure and futility to overthrow the status quo. This is the ideal -typically coming from the left- where informed citizens will recognize class conflict in its current form, neoliberal policies enriching the 1% and impoverishing most of the rest, and take over the government by voting out corrupt and captured politicians. ..."
"... Once the difference between education and indoctrination is learned, thee student and debtors in general can be "woke." How many students even think they should put themselves through a process of de-institutionalization, especially if they've followed the course of 1st grade to college graduation without a break? ..."
"... Today, the debts do not involve liens against crops. People in modern America carry student loans, credit card debt, and mortgages ..."
"... Perhaps Michael Hudson is – somewhat sloppily – referring to the IIRC typical case where getting the loan requires someone to sign on as guarantor, normally the student's parents. ..."
Yves here. Matt Stoller anticipated the situation Michael Hudson describes, the use of
debt as a primary weapon in class warfare.
From a 2010 post :
A lot of people forget that having debt you can't pay back really sucks. Debt is not just a
credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control.
It's actually baked into our culture. The phrase 'the man', as in 'fight the man', referred
originally to creditors. 'The man' in the 19th century stood for 'furnishing man', the merchant
that sold 19th century sharecroppers and Southern farmers their supplies for the year, usually
on credit. Farmers, often illiterate and certainly unable to understand the arrangements into
which they were entering, were charged interest rates of 80-100 percent a year, with a lien places
on their crops. When approaching a furnishing agent, who could grant them credit for seeds, equipment,
even food itself, a farmer would meekly look down nervously as his debts were marked down in a
notebook. At the end of a year, due to deflation and usury, farmers usually owed more than they
started the year owing. Their land was often forfeit, and eventually most of them became tenant
farmers.
They were in hock to the man, and eventually became slaves to him. This structure, of sharecropping
and usury, held together by political violence, continued into the 1960s in some areas of the
South. As late as the 1960s, Kennedy would see rural poverty in Arkansas and pronounce it 'shocking'.
These were the fruits of usury, a society built on unsustainable debt peonage.
Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society
Today, the debts do not involve liens against crops. People in modern America carry student
loans, credit card debt, and mortgages. All of these are hard to pay back, often bringing with
them impenetrable contracts and illegal fees. Credit card debt is difficult to discharge in bankruptcy
and a default on a home loan can leave you homeless. A student loan debt is literally a claim
against a life - you cannot discharge it in bankruptcy, and if you die, your parents are obligated
to pay it. If the banks have their way, mortgages and deficiency judgments will follow you around
forever, as they do in Spain.
Young people and what only cynics might call 'homeowners' have no choice but to jump on the
treadmill of debt, as debtcroppers. The goal is not to have them pay off their debts, but to owe
forever. Whatever a debtcropper owes, a wealthy creditor owns.
And as a bonus, the heavier the
debt burden of American citizenry, the less able we are able to organize and claim our democratic
rights as citizens. Debtcroppers don't start companies and innovate, they don't take chances,
and they don't claim their political rights. Think about this when you hear the calls from ex-Morgan
Stanley banker and current World Bank President Robert Zoellick and his nebulous mutterings pining
for the gold standard. Or when you hear Warren Buffett partner Charlie Munger talk about how the
bailouts of the wealthy were patriotic, but we mustn't bail out homeowners for fear of 'moral
hazard'.
Or when you hear Pete Peterson Foundation President and former Comptroller General David
Walker yearn nostalgically for debtor's prisons.
Focusing on students, Hudson shows how much "progress" has been made in a mere seven years.
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City,
and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is
J is for Junk Economics
Students usually don't think of themselves as a class. They seem "pre-class," because they have
not yet entered the labor force. They can only hope to become part of the middle class after they
graduate. And that means becoming a wage earner – what impolitely is called the working class.
But as soon as they take out a student debt, they become part of the economy. They are in this
sense a debtor class. But to be a debtor, one needs a means to pay – and the student's means to pay
is out of the wages and salaries they may earn after they graduate. And after all, the reason most
students get an education is so that they can qualify for a middle-class job.
The middle class in America consists of the widening sector of the working class that qualifies
for bank loans – not merely usurious short-term payday loans, but a lifetime of debt. So the middle
class today is a debtor class.
Shedding crocodile tears for the slow growth of U.S. employment in the post-2008 doldrums (the
"permanent Obama economy" in which only the banks were bailed out, not the economy), the financial
class views the role industry and the economy at large as being to pay its employees enough so that
they can take on an exponentially rising volume of debt. Interest and fees (late fees and penalties
now yield credit card companies more than they receive in interest charges) are soaring, leaving
the economy of goods and services languishing.
Although money and banking textbooks say that all interest (and fees) are a compensation for risk,
any banker who actually takes a risk is quickly fired. Banks don't take risks. That's what the governments
are for. (Socializing the risk, privatizing the profits.) Anticipating that the U.S. economy may
be unable to recover under the weight of the junk mortgages and other bad debts that the Obama administration
left on the books in 2008, banks insisted that the government guarantee all student debt. They also
insisted that the government guarantees the financial gold-mine buried in such indebtedness: the
late fees that accumulate. So whether students actually succeed in becoming wage-earners or not,
the banks will receive payments in today's emerging fictitious "as if" economy. The government will
pay the banks "as if" there is actually a recovery.
And if there were to be a recovery, then it would mean that the banks were taking
a risk – a big enough risk to justify the high interest rates charge on student loans.
This is simply a replay of what banks have negotiated for real estate mortgage lending. Students
who do succeed in getting a job hope to start a family, or at least joining the middle class. The
most typical criterion of middle-class life in today's world (apart from having a college education)
is to own a home. But almost nobody can buy a home without getting a mortgage. And the price of such
a mortgage is to pay up to 43 percent of one's income for thirty years, that is, one's prospective
working life (in today's as-if world that assumes full employment, not just a gig economy).
Banks know how unlikely it is that workers actually will be able to earn enough to carry the costs
of their education and real estate debt. The costs of housing are so high, the price of education
is so high, the amount of debt that workers must pay off the top of every paycheck is so high that
American labor is priced out of world markets (except for military hardware sold to the Saudis and
other U.S. protectorates). So the banks insist that the government pretends that housing as well
as education loans not involve any risk for bankers.
The Federal Housing Authority guarantees mortgages that absorb up to the afore-mentioned 43 percent
of the applicant's income. Income is not growing these days, but job-loss is. Formerly middle-class
labor is being downsized to minimum-wage labor (MacDonald's and other fast foods) or "gig" labor
(Uber). Here too, the fees mount up rapidly when there are defaults – all covered by the government,
as if it is this compensates the banks for risks that the government itself bears.
From Debt Peons to Wage Slaves
In view of the fact that a college education is a precondition for joining the working class (except
for billionaire dropouts), the middle class is a debtor class – so deep in debt that once they manage
to get a job, they have no leeway to go on strike, much less to protest against bad working conditions.
This is what Alan Greenspan described as the "traumatized worker effect" of debt.
Do students think about their future in these terms? How do they think of their place in the world?
Students are the new NINJAs: No Income, No Jobs, No Assets. But their parents have assets, and
these are now being grabbed, even from retirees. Most of all, the government has assets – the power
to tax (mainly labor these days), and something even better: the power to simply print money (mainly
Quantitative Easing to try and re-inflate housing, stock and bond prices these days). Most students
hope to become independent of their parents. But burdened by debt and facing a tough job market,
they are left even more dependent. That's why so many have to keep living at home.
The problem is that as they do get a job and become independent, they remain dependent on the
banks. And to pay the banks, they must be even more abjectly dependent on their employers.
It may be enlightening to view matters from the vantage point of bankers. After all, they have
$1.3 trillion in student loan claims. In fact, despite the fact that college tuitions are soaring
throughout the United States even more than health care (financialized health care, not socialized
health care), the banks often end up with more education expense than the colleges. That is because
any interest rate is a doubling time, and student loan rates of, say, 7 percent mean that the interest
payments double the original loan value in just 10 years. (The Rule of 72 provides an easy way to
calculate doubling times of interest-bearing debt. Just divide 72 by the interest rate, and you get
the doubling time.)
A fatal symbiosis has emerged between banking and higher education in America. Bankers sit on
the boards of the leading universities – not simply by buying their way in as donors, but because
they finance the transformation of universities into real estate companies. Columbia and New York
University are major real estate holders in New York City. Like the churches, they pay no property
or income tax, being considered to play a vital social role. But from the bankers' vantage point,
their role is to provide a market for debt whose magnitude now outstrips even that of credit card
debt!
Citibank in New York City made what has been accused of being a sweetheart deal with New York
University, which steers incoming students to it to finance their studies with loans. In today's
world a school can charge as much for an education as banks are willing to lend students – and banks
are willing to lend as much as governments will guarantee to cover, no questions asked. So the bankers
on the school boards endorse bloated costs of education, knowing that however much more universities
make, the bankers will receive just as much in interest and penalties.
It is the same thing with housing, of course. However much the owner of a home receives when he
sells it, the bank will make an even larger sum of money on the interest charges on the mortgage.
That is why all the growth in the U.S. economy is going to the FIRE sector, owned mainly by the One
Percent.
Under these terms, a "more educated society" does not mean a more employable labor force. It means
a less employable society, because more and more wage and consumer income is used not to buy goods
and services, not to eat out in restaurants or buy the products of labor, but to pay the financial
sector and its allied rentier class. A more educated society under these rules is simply
a more indebted society, an economy succumbing to debt deflation, austerity and unemployment except
at minimum-wage levels.
For half a century Americans imagined themselves getting richer and richer by going into debt
to buy their own homes and educate their children. Their riches have turned out to be riches for
the banks, bondholders and other creditors, not for the debtors. What used to be applauded as "the
middle class" turns out to be simply an indebted working class.
In today's world a school can charge as much for an education as banks are willing to lend
students – and banks are willing to lend as much as governments will guarantee to cover, no
questions asked.
Banks are (debt) slave owners, but universities are the (debt) slave merchants and overseers.
Which is probably why campuses aren't filled with groups fighting for labor rights or discussing
the abysmal economic reality they face.
Instead virtue signalling, woke IdPol is the dominant focus, which is just fine with the overseer,
and nurtured by the comfortable tenured faculty, who are often quite happy having little debt
slave house servants of their own (grad students, adjuncts).
And even worse the overseers (universities) don't put the revenue generated by slaves into
improving classes, hiring more full time faculty, or a host of other factors that improve the
quality of education.
They funnel it into aesthetics to make things look more appealing on tours, and materials,
they use to attract more slaves, all the while crapifying quality of education. Which is the moat
odious aspect of their role, they arent using the slaves to build a better educational system,
but to get more slaves. The number of useless PowerPoint lectures I sat through makes me angry
when I think about it.
Universities are the wives (or husbands) that look on and enable child abuse Almost, if not
more disgusting than the abuser (banks).
And this is coming from a lucky grad who managed to stay out of the gig economy.
Well put. Outstanding posts by Stoller and Hudson. A must-read primer on debt peonage and how universities are basically real estate hoarders and
debtor magnets for the banks.
Credit where it's due: I'm a fan of both Stoller and Hudson, but I believe Hudson has been
emphasizing debt in his writings far longer than Stoller. From Wikipedia:
Hudson [aged 78] devoted his entire scientific career to the study of debts: both domestic
(loans, mortgages, interest payments) and external. In his works he consistently advocates
the idea that loans and exponentially growing debts that outstrip profits from the economy
of the "real" sphere are disastrous for both the government and the people of the borrowing
state: they are washing money (going to payments to usurers and rentiers) from turnover, not
leaving them to buy goods and services, and thus lead to "debt deflation" of the economy "
The rentier class is just a bit out over its skis on this. First, college debt is not "out
of sight our of mind" the way rural poverty in the deep south is and was. The victims of the banks
are geographically well distributed and numerically much greater than southern sharecroppers.
I don't think the demographics of the Bernie Sanders movement is any accident. Young people in
this country are not illiterate farmers. They often are well educated. Furthermore an education
is something that cannot be confiscated by a bank in lieu of payment on a loan. Geographic distribution
of victims is very important from the point of view of networking. As much as we have become more
isolated as individuals due to some of the forces present in American society, victims of the
rentier class are in close proximity to one another and in contact. They are also present all
over the US. Like a fire fed by uncut underbrush in a forest the flames may spread quickly. When
it happens, none of the prognosticators will have seen it coming–not even those of the left.
While I agree with your post, I quibble with your first line. I don't think the rentier class
is "over its skis" with this one any more than the airline industry is "over its skis" with what
it has been doing. As long as people are willing to put up with these tactics, they will continue .and
get worse. There is no incentive for them to stop or slow down .
It's not that people put up with it I know dozens that just have no hope, faith, or sense
that change is even possible; so crippled with anxiety over their finances that they are utterly
useless, myself included. When there is no light at the end of the tunnel it is almost impossible
to muster the effort to do anything.
"Furthermore an education is something that cannot be confiscated by a bank in lieu of payment
on a loan."
..which is why the government guarantee exists – coupled with the fact that the "education"
for most is largely a myth – a degree is not an education.
As widely reported in NYC public schools last year – the graduation rate is 86%, but tests
show less than 4% comprehension for math and english as reported in the NYP last year –
same is largely true for higher education except for the price tag. The sharecroppers at least had tangibles to show from the financing exercise however meager
they might be at the end of the day – the degree is largely worthless.
The question to ask, I think, is about the sustainability of this inversion of the dream of
education as the path to upward mobility. People do not need to fully, or even partially, intellectually
grasp the causes of their misery and sense of failure and futility to overthrow the status quo.
This is the ideal -typically coming from the left- where informed citizens will recognize class
conflict in its current form, neoliberal policies enriching the 1% and impoverishing most of the
rest, and take over the government by voting out corrupt and captured politicians.
What is far
more likely is that scapegoats are offered -a la Trump or some other demagogue. (But scapegoating
leaves exploitation unresolved.) Whichever occurs, the current system of exploitation cannot go
on, especially when all the other factors associated with hitting the limits to growth are considered.
Once the difference between education and indoctrination is learned, thee student and debtors
in general can be "woke."
How many students even think they should put themselves through a process of de-institutionalization,
especially if they've followed the course of 1st grade to college graduation without a break?
Thank you Michael. I studied economics at ANU and went through the period when Australia considered
the cost of a university education, which back in the early 80s was free (I think we paid around
$150 by way of Union subs). One of the new questions for students was the issue of education being
a private or public good.
The Labor Treasurer at the time (and later Prime Minister), Paul Keating, made it quite clear
that education had more of the characteristics of a private good and the benefits (public good
aspect) of a quality education for the country were erased and have never been seen (discussed)
again.
Money changed university and that change has not been positive for the institutions or the
citizens they serve.
This article is a little misguided. I absolutely agree that excess student debt is becoming
a major problem in American society that is causing all sorts of real problems, but to blame "the
bankers" is to point a finger at the wrong culprit.
The true culprit is grotesque symbiosis between the colleges & universities and the US Department
of Education , which issues over 90% of student loans. If you want to know who the predatory lender
is here, look to Washington. The banks are just participating at the edges of our student loan
fiasco.
Part of the problem is the popular concept of "good debt" vs. "bad debt", as espoused by economists
such as Jared Bernstein. "Good debt" helps increase your earning potential, so the more good debt
the government pushes on the populace, the better. Right? It's a popular concept in DC.
And it's crap. And the government is crushing an entire generation of students with excess
debt in the process. I think Michelle Singletary summarized it well:
Yes, All Debt is Bad Debt .
So you think that the banksters are only profiting on this by accident? Who do you think is
lobbying to have student loan debt made non-dischargeable? Who do you think is lobbying the Dept.
of Ed. to guarantee all those loans?
For sure, there is more than enough blame to go around, and multiple actors have earned their
share. But to place the majority of the blame outside the financial sector that, as Hudson points
out, always profits MORE from debt than the people whose products that debt is used to buy, is
a bit on the bizarre side.
Banks make money by creating debt and getting their victims er, customers to take that debt
on. Therefore, bankers have an interest in increasing the overall level of debt in an economy.
When you see debt skyrocketing, look around for an unscrupulous banker.
Your understanding of student loans is behind the times. The federal government hasn't guaranteed
any privately-issued student loans since June of 2010. That was seven years ago.
This was Obama's great "improvement" to student lending. Cut the bankers out of the loop and
have the government issue loans directly. And somehow the total amount of debt being carried by
students managed to skyrocket anyway. It actually accelerated . And the government routinely
employs debt collection practices (like seizing Social Security checks) that were rightly outlawed
in the private sector. Those evil debt-collection companies that you regularly hear about in the
news? Hired by our government for purposes of collecting on federal student loans.
Private banks only hold $150 billion out of $1.44 trillion in total student debt. That's barely
10%. Sure, the banks make some profit here. But the bulk of the problem is the federal loans.
It's our own government that is crushing an entire generation of students with excess debt.
If I understand correctly, this change was implemented as a part of Obamacare. "We won't know
what is in it until we pass it." I wonder what else is in that bill.
Your comment does not contradict Hudson's assertion that student debt creates compliant employees,
making it difficult to change employment or stand up to employers. Likewise all the surveillance
makes people afraid to protest and demonstrate, in case they lose their jobs.
The true evil is compound interest where the interest on a loan far exceeds the original loan.
Economic activity increases linearly, interest geometrically. Does risking x dollars entitle you
to x^n compensation. It is interesting to note, that in the ancient world the majority of slaves
were not due to conquest but default on debt. The revival of slavery and serfdom is an obsession
with the .001%ers. No robot can ever match the service of a subjugated human being. This country
is ruled by murderers and thieves, sad to say.
The Department of Education has contracted out the loan servicing, a practice that has led
to even further abuse of borrowers. I found this list of about a dozen different servicers, but
it's from 2013 and is likely out of date:
Marvelous hijack of the thread here buddy. Start talking about lousy Government instead of
everything else. Brilliant move. You should apply to some Right Wing Think Tanks. I reckon they
will pay handsomely for a brain like yours.
Yeah, buster, don't be going and confusing people with interesting facts and points of view
that haven't already been expressed thousands of times! What do you think this is, an anechoic
chamber?
the US Department of Education, which issues over 90% of student loans
Usually something like this would trigger hand waving about the Fed Gov crowding out the private
sector. But in this case, crickets. I wonder why.
In a related note, presumably any loans issued by the Fed Gov do not actually increase the
monetary base. So in a way, the Fed Gov is at cross purposes with the Fed Reserve which is doing
everything in its power to create private debt inflation (increase of the monetary base). Banks
to indebted students: "wake me up when you paid off Uncle Sam and we can do bidness."
Which triggers my suspicion on why the banks are pro immigration – because I believe immigrants
would more or less be free of debt. Banks to themselves: "what's not to love? Oops, I mean give
us your down-trodden, your poor".
Today, the debts do not involve liens against crops. People in modern America carry student
loans, credit card debt, and mortgages
Hard to say just how angry this makes me. I know most of the county likes to sneer at farmers,
even more than others in flyover country. But to read this statement in a supposedly thoughtful
article makes my blood boil. Given the vast consolidation in land ownership (Zuckerberg's attempt
to strong arm Hawaiians was merely an attempt to follow the example of Ted Turner, after all),
and the way Tyson destroyed whole segments of the market, crops are a large lever. Used to be
crops and equipment, but John Deere has done its best to make farmers captives as well. But no,
they don't exist (except to pay outrageous tuition to ag and vo-tech colleges) and MODERN Americans
eat food that springs magically into existence in Trader Joe's. Bah, a plague on their houses.
/sarc
Maybe the student loan debtors should start picketing the home of that Democratic hero, Joe
Biden. Or take a look at just why post grad tuition has skyrocketed.
The objective of this game is for schools to extract as much money as possible from the government,
with the students being held responsible for paying it back. Higher loan limits are the cause
of higher tuition rates, not the effect.
Being from MT and a (one-time) ag family, I hear you on the issue of farmer indebtedness that
is a serious problem, as it always has been. I've been hearing forever about the realities of
farming - go into debt during planting and hope you get enough at harvest to pay it off and still
have a little left over to live on.
However, as you point out, land consolidation by the likes of Cargill and their ilk has greatly
reduced the number of family farms and the amount of family farm debt along with it. Total student
loan debt right now is over $1.4T, whereas total ag debt is only $395B i.e. there is 4 times as
much student loan debt as ag debt.
I'm pretty sure that Hudson wasn't trying to downplay the plight of family farmers in this
country, or the crushing amounts of debt that they, individually, often end up taking on. I think
he's just pointing out that on the macro-level, student debt has become the main contributor to
overall indebtedness (along with mortgages).
Not that all that money goes to hiring teaching staff. The majority of courses are taught by
poorly paid adjutants and grad students. There is however an ever burgeoning class of college
administrators all with six figure incomes pensions and medical care. It is jobs program for the
well connected and ethnically privileged. Try getting a job at a university, not if you don't
know somebody. The level of corruption at universities is truly astounding. I guess it is par
for the course in our mafia culture. Free tuition would certainly increase pressure on cleansing
the Stygian Stables, but until the electoral system is reformed and publicly financed there can
be no reform of our education system. Finally, I second the emotion, may Joe Biden rot in hell.
Ya load 16 tons and what do ya get Another day older and deeper in debt St. Peter don't ya call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
I came across the term leet-man the other day. That was in reference to John Locke, yes, that
John Locke . He used the term in reference to his work on the South Carolina constitution of a
few centuries ago. That was a bad idea then, and has gotten worse in the current context.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Locke's preamble stated: "that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy;" Locke's "constitution"
established the eight lords proprietors as a hereditary nobility, with absolute control over
their serfs, called "leet-men":
"XIX: Any lord of a manor may alienate, sell, or dispose to any other person and his heirs
forever, his manor, all entirely together, with all the privileges and leet-men there unto
belonging .
"XXII: In every signory, barony and manor, all the leet-men shall be under the jurisdiction
of the respective lords of the said signory, barony, or manor, without appeal from him. Nor
shall any leet-man, or leet-woman, have liberty to go off from the land of their particular
lord, and live anywhere else, without license from their said lord, under hand and seal.
"XXIII: All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all generations."
& the risk versus reward is completely skewed . The risk of default is (should be) based on
the best credit rating of the borrower or the guarantor. In this case it seems that the risk premium
is based on the worst credit rating so difference between risk and reward is completely off.
Personally I'd never ever guarantee someone elses debt – I'd rather borrow the money and lend
it myself to whoever wanted me to be guarantor as in effect the risk would be the same as being
a guarantor and the costs would be less as the middle man would be cut out.
Therefore I consider this:
banks insisted that the government guarantee all student debt
Aye. Saying "yes" to somebody who wants to borrow $120k for a masters in "motivational speaking"
from a crappy knockoff of Trump University isn't exactly doing them a favor. But the US government
will do it anyway. They pretty much say "yes" to everything when it comes to student borrowing,
regardless of how likely it is that the student will be able to repay.
Assessing a potential borrower's ability to repay (a.k.a., underwriting) and sometimes saying
"no" is an important part of lending. Keeps people from getting in over their heads. Well, it
used to be. Nobody seems to bother these days. Especially the US government.
There's another way to look at it. If the government takes on all this debt, then forgives
it, hasn't it given a tuition-free education "by the back door"? This could have been an outrageously
ingenious move by Obama to slide free education in via the MMT back door.
Coming off as an ideologue isn't a way to persuade people.
No one here likes making students borrow to pay for education. Even the Fed has found tuition
subsides will lower default rates. But you don't get what the objective is. It is ostensibly to
get more people educated, which of course allows for the continued inflation of college costs.
The Fed article pointed the issue of what the apparent real aims are:
Our results suggest that if the goal of education policy is to improve aggregate welfare,
then merit-based tuition subsidies are preferable to both need-based subsidies and higher government
borrowing limits, as merit-based subsidies promote college investment without increasing default
rates in the student loan market. However, if the goal is to deliver high college enrollment
rates, then need-based subsidies are preferable to merit-based subsidies and higher government
borrowing limits, but come at the cost of higher default rates on student loans.
And the payoff to having a degree is even higher than before given rising income inequality
(one of my buddies was just at an investment conference where this was a prominent point made).
So if you can't get a college education, you will be left out of what is left of the middle class.
But one of many problems is only something like 57% of the students complete their degrees even
in 6 years.
Any bankruptcy attorneys out there who can give me a good reason not to declare chapter 7 with
10-15k in unsecured debt, low income, and no medium term (5-10 years) prospects of needing a good
credit score? Seems like the only tool left in the toolkit for us wage slaves these days?
In the 90s, a radio promotion man from a music label was the first person to explain the the
sharecropper analogy to me during a discussion about recording artist contracts. And the internet
(or the information people give in service of it) has not changed the dynamic in music or any
other industry because it concentrated power and made creditors and credit reporting agencies
more powerful.
A student loan debt is literally a claim against a life - you cannot discharge it in bankruptcy,
and if you die, your parents are obligated to pay it.
No. The second half of that is a flat-out wrong statement. Student loans are discharged upon
the borrower's death. Every time I read Hudson, I find myself incredibly frustrated that a man of such brilliance
resorts to lazy and hyperbolic exaggerations to make a point when there is no bloody need to do
so. Reality is grotesque enough.
Perhaps Michael Hudson is – somewhat sloppily – referring to the IIRC typical case where getting
the loan requires someone to sign on as guarantor, normally the student's parents.
Q for those who know: Am I right in thinking this ?
Here in the UK today's undergraduates are graduating with a debt in the high £40ks. That is
getting on for twice the per capita national debt (around £27k if memory serves) so, given that
about half now go to university, that will in time nearly double the national debt – except it
will have been privatised so that's ok (/sarc).
Actually, it's not ok. After buying or renting (mostly renting) ridiculously expensive houses
and paying off their student loans, today's graduates will not/cannot possibly generate enough
economic surplus to pay the pensions of their parents. Somehow/sometime this is going to break.
One aspect of this needs additional consideration: one person's debt is another person's asset.
But whose asset? Blaming "rentiers" is insufficiently precise; we ought to know who lent the money.
Demand for "bonds" comes from many sources, including retiree pensions, 401Ks, and so on.
Most of the student loans are federally guaranteed, but are the principal and interest payments
actually going to Uncle Sam, or to Sallie Mae bond tranche owners? Are the boomers – at least
those with pensions and 401ks – enslaving students through their ravenous demand for income-producing
assets to fund their retirements?
Most people are blindly funding "life cycle" retirement funds, not realizing that those very
"investments" are enabling all the behavior they decry as exploitative. The huge national debt,
student loan, housing and auto loan bubbles are all funded by people who think of themselves as
"investors", but are actually ENABLERS.
I fear the abuses won't end until people wake up and realize that their 401K retirement fund
is abetting all the evils they abhor, and start demanding better investment options. But many
simply won't care, and the finance industry will fight tooth and claw to prevent reform of their
gravy train
P.S. In past years, when I searched I was not able to easily find a single bond mutual fund
or ETF of any size that doesn't fund either the national debt, the TBTF banks, the housing, student
loan or auto bubbles. One would think there would be some funds investing in bonds issued by non
financial productive corporations; are there any? I would give good coin to a 401K or IRA-compatible
fund or ETF which indexed non-financial corporate bonds, especially if it used a socially-responsible
overlay to screen out the other forms of corporate abuse (monopolies, pollution, slave-labor practices
etc.).
Are the boomers – at least those with pensions and 401ks – enslaving students through their
ravenous demand for income-producing assets to fund their retirements?
Two industries not yet outsourced are education and healthcare. Rural college towns are the
only oases of prosperity in mid-America. This article explains why. All the money being spent
there is coming from the student's future earnings. It is unsustainable. The percentage of middle
class families have fallen from 62% in 1970 to 43% in 2014. This is why government took over student
loans. To keep the scam going. Debt that can't be paid back won't be. Healthcare has likewise
been finanicizlized. Housing is well into its second bubble blown in part by Chinese flight capital.
Something will pop. The prick could be as simple as a successful soft coup by the global media
and the intelligence community that forces Donald J Trump to resign.
"... Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse ..."
"... See original post for references ..."
"... Prison Industrial Complex ..."
"... Business Behind Bars Former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese has a way to slow the exodus of jobs overseas: Put prisoners to work ..."
"... even if drugs were legalized – the same people would be in jail for something else. ..."
"... Minority Heroin dealers are given intolerable sentences, but Perdue Pharmaceuticals floods the market with opiates with an ever increasing death toll, yet Raymond and Mortimer Sackler are billionaires. Go figure. ..."
"... Police and prison guards' unions = sweet spot of the Dem base (particularly in California) ..."
"... "But terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands." Leon Trotsky, 1920 ..."
Mass
incarceration in the United States has mushroomed to the point where we look
more like the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe and the Middle East than
the democracies of Western Europe. Yet it vanished from political discussions
in campaigns in the 2016 election. In a new
INET Working Paper
, I describe in detail how the US arrived at this point.
Drawing on a new model that synthesizes recent research, I demonstrate how the
recent stability in the number of American prisoners indicates that we have
settled into a new equilibrium of mass incarceration. I explain why it will
hard to dislodge ourselves from this damaging and shameful status quo.
Mass incarceration started from Nixon's War on Drugs, in a process described
vividly by John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic-policy adviser, in 1994:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two
enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?
We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black,
but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks
with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their
meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know
we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
This was the origin of mass incarceration in the United States, which has
been directed at African Americans from Nixon's time to today, when one third
of black men go to prison (Bonczar, 2003; Baum, 2016; Alexander, 2010).
Federal laws were expanded in state laws that ranged from three-strike laws
to harsh penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. The laws also
shifted the judicial process from judges to prosecutors, from the courtroom to
offices where prosecutors pressure accused people to plea-bargain. The threat
of harsh minimum sentences gives prosecutors the option of reducing the charge
to a lesser one if the accused is reluctant to languish in jail awaiting
trial-if he or she is unable to make bail-and then face the possibility of long
years in prison. And the shift of power was eased by the pattern of financing.
Prosecutors are paid by localities, while the costs of prisons are borne by
states. The trip to the penitentiary does not cost prosecutor at all. "Instead
of juries and trial judges deciding whether this or that defendant merits
punishing, prosecutors decide who deserves a trip to the nearest penitentiary
(Stuntz, 2011, 286; Pfaff, 2017, 127)."
In a recent book, Pfaff minimized the role of drug laws in mass
incarceration on the grounds that most state prisoners were convicted of
violent crimes; only federal prisoners were predominantly convicted of drug
violations. But the importance of public prosecutors and plea bargains
contaminates this inference because the listed crimes in state prisons were
produced in plea bargains. Since drug laws contain so many minimum sentences,
plea bargains were driven toward lesser charges that did not fall under the
drug laws. The results of the plea bargains do not indicate why prisoners were
originally arrested and charged (Pfaff, 2017).
Both political parties were engaged at different times in legislation that
gave rise to mass incarceration. It would seem likely that they could get
together to try to reduce the rate of incarceration, but the prospects are not
good in our current political impasse. The reduction of incarceration always
has some risks, and political figures are very risk averse. Some people want to
reduce the cost of prisons to help fund other government programs, but they
have not produced many proposals to accomplish this goal or how to allocate the
gains.
As Todd Clear stated in his 2007 book,
Imprisoning Communities: How Mass
Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse
:
Imprisonment in America is concentrated among young, poor-dominantly
minority-men and (to a lesser extent) women who come from impoverished
communities. The way these young people cycle through our system of prisons
and jails, then back into the community, leaves considerable collateral
damage in its wake. Families are disrupted, social networks and other forms
of social support are weakened, health is endangered, labor markets are
thinned, and-more important than anything else-children are put at risk of
the depleted human and social capital that promotes delinquency. After a
certain point, the collateral effects of these high rates of incarceration
seem to contribute to more crime in these places. Crime fuels a public call
for ever-tougher responses to crime. The increasing way in which the face of
criminality is the face of person of color contributes to an unarticulated
public sense that race and crime are closely linked. The politics of race
and justice coexist malignantly, sustaining an ever-growing policy base that
guarantees new supplies of penal subjects in a self-sustaining and
self-justifying manner (Clear, 2007, 175).
We seem to be in a new equilibrium. It took forty years to get to this
point, and it may take at least that long to get back to what we can consider a
normal incarceration rate typical of advanced economies. We have not yet
started down that road.
Anyone who thinks it will take 40 years to undo a stroke of the pen, which
the war on drugs was, is pissing (in a humanitarian direction) into the wind.
Removing the prison population would give janet yelllen an enormous
migraine.
I'd add that the distinction between violent crime and drug violations
misses the mark in another way too. The massive scale of the US black market,
the cruelty of life in US prisons, the massive distrust and animosity between
law enforcement and many communities, the disruption caused to families and
communities by mass incarceration, and our high rate of violent crimes are
hardly unrelated phenomena.
I'd wager decriminalization of drugs would lead to a pretty large decrease
in supposedly unrelated violent crimes.
True enough, but I'm sure the
Prison Industrial Complex
loves the
idea of long term studies on impact followed by long term debates on
methodology and findings. IMO, it is the monopolistic profitability of
corporations like UNICOR that split their profits and governance with the very
same people who control the mass incarceration and competitive bidding laws and
policies, that far outweigh any other factor. Without substantial changes to
the monetization and conflict of interest laws at the top, all the findings in
the world are just noise to the entrenched system.
Consider this 2003
Fortune
article
Business Behind Bars
Former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese has a way to slow the exodus of jobs
overseas: Put prisoners to work
Prominent conservatives have been encouraging prisons to put inmates to
work for years. Led by Edwin Meese, the former U.S. Attorney General and
head of the Heritage Foundation, and Morgan Reynolds, one of the first
President Bush's economic advisors, they have lobbied for real prison
employment by the private sector–not just make-work projects like stamping
license plates or building courthouse furniture. The benefits are difficult
to ignore: Businesses get cheap, reliable workers; inmates receive valuable
job training and earn more than they would in traditional prison jobs; and
the government offsets the cost of incarceration and keeps jobs and tax
dollars in the U.S.
Who do you think legislators are going to take their guidance from? Former
AGs (who just happened to build and grow the prison workforce), or scholarly
studies?
Social engineering described in this post was also a continuation of
corporate / elite commercial interes. Free labor–what's not to like? Legal
slavery, more profits from multiple directions of all kinds–legit, corrupt and
criminal. Plus serving as a method to keep the downtrodden unable to respond in
a way to create change (COINTELPRO and its contemporary descendants). . .
No way out but through but what will that look like? Comes down to
individual understanding and action, no single uniform "solution". I gradually
become more conscious of what I create. It's not a process that can be urged on
others. "Be the change . . ."
. . . The politics of race and justice coexist malignantly, sustaining an
ever-growing policy base that
guarantees new supplies of penal subjects
in a self-sustaining and self-justifying manner (Clear, 2007, 175).
I am pissed at Ford. What a golden opportunity missed. Instead of moving
Ford Fusion production to China, it could move production to a few prisons and
use homegrown slaves instead of Chinese ones.
"The increasing way in which the face of criminality is the face of person
of color contributes to an unarticulated public sense that race and crime are
closely linked."
so no drug laws means no black inmates?
even if drugs were legalized – the same people would be in jail for
something else.
There are no jobs – 40%+ UE Rate for this demographic – so what do you
expect them to do?
Eric Gardner was selling cigarettes "for money" – joke crime – yet five cops
descended on him.
The reason why the people are getting arrested and jailed for drug
crimes is poverty. These people lack the economic opportunity to bring
them out of it, so they drift to illegal enterprises. Even if you made
all drug use and distribution/sales legal, this does not change the
economic realities that make people choose an illicit activity in the
first place. So they would be arrested for something else that is
illegal.
If there's the political will and power to repeal abusive drug
laws, why wouldn't it be (theoretically) possible to do the same with
laws that target the poor?
When I was growing up in the "bad old days" of '70's NYC, police
officers would have rightfully laughed in the face of of a superior or
elected official who told them to go after people selling "loosies" (a
la Eric Garner).
I'm not saying it will happen, but popular revolts could go a long
way toward loosening the vise on poor communities.
Recreational Cannabis is legal in Colorado. It is a state granted
monopoly. Already Colorado is cracking down on home grown weed
production. There is legalization, and there is state granted monopoly
legalization. The outcome for poor people is the same. Cigarettes are
legal, yet Eric Gardner was murdered for selling them. Go figure.
Minority Heroin dealers are given intolerable sentences, but Perdue
Pharmaceuticals floods the market with opiates with an ever increasing
death toll, yet Raymond and Mortimer Sackler are billionaires. Go
figure.
We live in a mafia culture. It's called ethnic privilege. Drugs are
already legalized for the ethnically privileged. Mass incarceration,
Genocide by Other Means, for the ethnically unprivileged. Go figure!
I believe that we,
the 80%
, are being classed as the
present day, Neo-Peasants and Neo-Kulaks. (Hillbillies, working class,
uneducated, not woke, Nazis, deplorables, reactionaries, homeless, right-wing,
religious bigots, addicts, petty criminals, progressives, Bernie-bros,
conspiracy nuts ..) by the Neo-Apparatchiks.
There
is
a Revolution going on! It
is being waged
against us
.
"During 1920–50, the leaders of the Communist Party considered repression
to be a tool that was to be used for securing the normal functioning of the
Soviet state system, as well as for preserving and strengthening their
positions within their social base, the (The 20%) Working Class. (The Bolshevik
Leadership
were not really
"working class", but usually,
"Intellectuals"!) (
peasants
, who were NOT considered "working
class", represented
80%!!!! of the USSR population then
).
The
GULAG system was
introduced in order to isolate and eliminate
class-alien, socially dangerous, disruptive, suspicious, and other disloyal
elements, whose deeds and thoughts were not contributing to the strengthening
of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Forced labor (was used) as a
"method of reeducation" ."
"But terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not
want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of
policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded
upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an
insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and
breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills
individuals, and intimidates thousands." Leon Trotsky, 1920
"... Being in control of the losing party is still being in control: deals can be made, hands can be shaken, backs can be rubbed. A reformed progressive party means that the current elite lose their relevance, influence and power. And they will have none of that. ..."
"... "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them." Dems have been running away from Henry Wallace (Roosevelt too) since way before my time. ..."
"... outside ..."
"... The Dems are never going to change unless challenged from outside the party. Sanders' Titanic analogy isn't particularly valid since the first class passengers in this case have their own private lifeboats. ..."
"... Pelosi, Schumer, Clinton, Hoyer. They are all old. In 5 years time, the whole Democratic party could change. There is a saying attributed to Max Planck, "Science advances one funeral at a time.", I suggest the same applies to politics. ..."
"... I'm not sure how you look at the last election cycle and conclude that the 'Democrat' party is even remotely capable of reform from within. For all of Mr. Sanders laudable goals, I think he is still suffering from the delusion that enough people in the party have the courage and moral conviction to do the right thing rather than looking out for their own skin. The money suggests otherwise. ..."
"... These closet elitists espouse popular progressive policies on their face, but when push comes to shove they will happily throw a few people under the bus if it means they won't have to wait in line for their morning latte at Starbucks. ..."
"... Freud, referring to nationalism. called it "the narcissism of superficial differences." It seems to apply very well here, too. ..."
"... Fascinating stuff really, how in America Socialism=USSR=Stalin=Terrorism=Obama. Reminds me of that excellent wikileaks document talking about how they are content to have erased civics and worked to create a clueless population ..."
The quote in the title of this piece is from
Bernie Sanders
, said in a recent interview with David Sirota. Here's just a
part (emphasis and paragraphing mine):
Sirota:
The Democratic Party leadership has lost the White House,
Congress, 1,000 state legislative seats and many governorships. Why is the
party still run by the same group of people who delivered that electoral
record?
Sanders:
Because there are people who, as I often say,
would
rather have first class seats going down with the Titanic, rather than
change the course of the ship
. There are people who have spent their
entire lives in the Democratic Party, there are people who've invested a
whole lot of money into the Democratic Party,
they think the Democratic
Party belongs to them
. You know, they own a home, they may own a boat,
they may own the Democratic Party.
I mean, that's just the way people are, and I think there is reluctance
on some, not all, by the way - I mean, I ran around this country and I met
with the Democratic Party leaders in almost every state in the country. Some
of them made it very clear they did not want to open the door to working
people, they did not want to open to door to young people. They wanted to
maintain the status quo.
On the other hand, I will tell you, there are party leaders around the
country that said, "You know what, Bernie? There's a lot of young people out
there who want to get involved. We think that's a great idea, and we want
them involved."
Those who said "You know what, Bernie? There's a lot of young people out
there who want to get involved. We think that's a great idea" - they don't run
the Party when it comes to its top layers of leadership. Not by a very long
shot.
For the Message to Change, the Leadership Must Change
So what's a progressive to do? It should be obvious. The Democratic Party
has to change its policy offering, from "You can't have what all of you want"
to "If the people want a better life, we will give it to them."
Yet this is not so easily done.
For the message to change, the leadership
must also change.
Which raises the critical question: How do we depose Chuck Schumer, Nancy
Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and the rest of their kind and make people like Bernie
Sanders and Jeff Merkley the Party leaders instead?
After all, if someone like Bernie Sanders isn't Senate Majority Leader, if a
Sanders-like politician (Ted Lieu perhaps) isn't Speaker of the House, what's
the point of electing more back-bench progressives, more "supporting cast"
players?
If there's no way to do that - and soon, given the ticking clock - we're
Sisphus pushing the same heavy bolder up the same high hill, year after year,
decade after decade, till we die or the game is finally truly over. 2018 is
around the bend. 2020 is coming.
Après ça, le déluge
. Not much time to
solve this one.
Completely filling the Second Class cabins on the Titanic with
our
people (that is, populating Congress with progressives who are nevertheless
kept from leadership and control) won't change what goes on in the Captain's
cabin and on the bridge.
Put more simply,
we need to control the Party
, or when the clock
truly runs out, all this effort will truly have been pointless. I'm not
fatalistic. I assume there's a way. So here's my first shot at an answer.
Elected Progressives Must Openly Rebel Against Their "Leaders"
In order for the revolution inside the Democratic Party to work, our elected
progressive congressional representatives senators, must work to depose Pelosi
and Schumer (etc.) and take power.
More - they must do it
visibly,
effectively and now
, in order to convince the 42% of voters that
someone
inside the Party is trying to knock these people out of the Captain's chair.
We voters and activists have our own challenges. This is the challenge for
the electeds we've already put in place. If our elected progressives don't do
this - or won't do this - "tick-tick-tick" says the world-historical clock on
the wall. And we can all go down together, steerage and First Class alike.
It's time to step up, elected progressives. It's also time to be
seen to
step up
. Read the Paul Craig Roberts quote at the top again. If the
Party's failed leaders aren't deposed, the revolution will have failed.
It's a moment for real courage, and moments of courage bring moments of
great fear. I understand that this kind of open rebellion, open public
confrontation, a palace coup in front of the TV cameras, is frightening.
It's also necessary.
My ask: If you agree, write to your favorite elected progressive and say so.
No more gravy train for Democratic elites. Meat and potatoes for voters
instead.
Complete the Sanders revolution by changing House and Senate
leadership - now.
I know this puts some very good people on the spot. But maybe that's a
feature, yes?
Though I believe climate change is well past the point that it can be
mitigated, the attempt to depose the corporate democrats is a noble enough
endeavor.
Stephen Jaffe is running against Nancy Pelosi, a very thoughtful and
progressive candidate.
I'm sure these guys could use any help anyone is willing to offer. I believe
they are both against PAC money, but they can accept donations through actblue.
Yeah but so we have two
white men
running against women, and on
top of that if my google is correct Jaffe is > 70yrs old?
No disrespect to the quality of the candidates, but . seems like more
wheel spinning. Like I keep saying, I don't trust Tulsi as far as I can
throw my gas guzzler, but she has the kind of profile we need.
Yes, she does. But she's from Hawai'i, and a 50 state strategy is
needed. Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein are both Californians, and
they're a couple of phonies. Despite the difficulties, any progressive
Democrats who oppose them in the primaries deserve to be seriously
considered for support. Here are some more web sites for these
candidates:
I love the spike in 2007 from Dems to Independents. That would be about the
time Pelosi said "impeachment is off the table." They came back to vote for
Obama and have been cratering ever since. And Pelosi is still there. But the
problem is: the leadership has not been developing any new leaders. Pelosi is a
disaster but whoever might replace could easily be worse.
I shake my head in wonder at how 'middle America" seems to have been
suckered by Trump, and continues to vote against its self-interest. Yet I
see a comment with a 'conditional but(t) about Pelosi, and I think, "Well,
that is just as inane?"
We need to dump BOTH sides of the same neocon , self-interested corrupt
to the core coin, BOTH parties, and completely re-tool.
The collective 'we' must come up with a simple platform, over 300 new
candidates for congress, as many candidates as there are for the upcoming
Senate seats, in the next 18 months. Tall order, but, it really is up to
'us'. We 'the people'.
The platform that would rally the votes, or a Constitutional convention
and re-work that would satiate the broad center of America is daunting if
even possible.
I have trotted out some ideas, and they just don't resonate with closest
like-minded friends, so how am I going to gain traction with folks that are
of a deeper opposite philosophical perspective?
– Single payor, one system, NOT insurance, but care: same one for
congress, the president, the military, and lowly tax mules like me
– No-deduction, simplified flat-rate income tax with four tiers, 5% 12% 20%
top rate 40%- you tell me where we draw the gross income lines between the %
rates
-Tax return has taxpayer- directed check boxes in front of a simplified
matrix of 'government' , where individuals choose where they want their
money to go. Initial 10 year period of a declining sliding scale- 90% goes
general fund first year, 80% 2nd year, and so on so that by year 10 each
taxpayor only gives 10% to the general fund, 90% is taxpayor-directed
(direct democracy?) Allows lead time for the government to see the direction
the nation, and not the elected officials, want to see their money go
(infrastructure? Bombs and depleted uranium bullets destined for distant
shores and brown people? National Parks and monuments? Starving disabled
widows and children? Public universities and Community College/ Trade
Schools?
-Currency tied to BTU/ energy– value of BTUs based on full-life cycle costs-
including carbon or waste management externalities (Coal, oil/gas, nukes,
hydro) analyzed energy units– incentivize individuals to print their own
money with rooftop solar, wind, conservation, etc ( a new Gold standard
:This is where all the displaced accountants and insurance/ medical staff
can go after the tax code is simplified )
-Reintroduce The Draft, with mandatory service to include civilian work
corps, get parents involved in directing our elected 'reps' to ponder the
slelf licking ice cream cone of perpetual war
I'm sure I am missing many things but boy, between Trump. Pelosi,
McConnell, Schumer, Ryan, Gianforte, we are according to my values and
preferences headed in a 180 degree wrong direction!
Honestly, at this point, every single vote cast in the presidential
election could be argued as being "against one's best interests". This
hackneyed phrase needs to subsume under real qualitative analysis.
it's going to be against one's self interest in all likelihood as
the system one lives in is against most of our self-interest
(including our corrupt money drenched political system). Some votes
can at best be damage control, which I suppose is in one's self
interest to a degree, but only to a degree.
This entire discussion is based upon the false premise that there
are two political parties in the United States. Objectively there is
only one party- the War Party, Empire Party, Kleptocracy Party- call
it whatever you wish. Within it are two factions with slightly
different players and ownership, but both are totally unrepresentative
of the real interests of 99.99% of the citizens.
From the standpoint of the commoners, the two parties are similar to
football teams where fan support is based upon social conformity and
quasi-religious delusion. Loyalty is fostered by staging huge circuses
where the two contestants compete to see which one can fabricate the
most appealing set of lies which they never intend to try to
implement.
"Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact
after a revolution against them" The idea that one of these "political
parties" can be captured and transformed into something other than its
very essence is ludicrous. What exactly does the displaced ruling
class (not being) left intact mean? Nancy Pelosi finally succumbing to
old age? Pelosi, Obama, or Trump are hardly the ruling class- merely
its' hired servants who can be replaced. Having the ruling class
overthrown is more likely to mean the Buffets, Bezos', and Dimons of
the world thrown into a maximum security cell In Guantanamo or burned
at the stake than a mere shuffling of political actors.
And Gaius, what basis do you have for calling Trump the worst
presidential candidate in modern history? In order to achieve that
honor he will have to outperform Obama, he of the silver tongue who
ruled for 8 years as a "progressive" while overseeing the destruction
of the middle class, enabling the financialiization of the economy and
the greatest transfer of wealth in history, and becoming the world's
most prolific assassin using a fleet of remote controlled drones. Or
be more evil than George Bush, who sat in the back row of an
elementary classroom while Dick Cheney stage managed the false flag
attack upon New York and the Pentagon and used that to turn the
country into a Homeland Insecurity police state. Granted, Trump is
trying hard to be even more destructive than his predecessors, but he
hasn't yet succeeded.
You effectively echo my thoughts, Mr Horse. The children of the
American Revolution are afraid to revolt perhaps they fear they
will be demoted to economy class on the Titanic if they rebel?
Missing 2 big ones:
1. MONEY IS NOT SPEECH, and shall be subject to regulation by legislation
and/or administrative rules;
2. Corporations ARE NOT PEOPLE and have absolutely ZERO inherent rights.
Any rights assigned to corporations by legislation shall be subordinate
to those of living beings.
The U.S. Constitution IS ONE F'D UP DOCUMENT, that makes things so
hard to change.
But really since it seems this requires an amendment to change
these things, and that is nearly impossible to achieve (well we
haven't had a new amendment in 45 years unless you count congressional
pay – yea approaching near half a century without one), it does just
underscore what a screwed up political construct we live under.
I've always liked Gavin Bryars but just read the above is on Tom Waits' top
ten list of music favorites. So here's something he did with Bryars, also part
of the sinking of the Titanic:
[ Long laundry list horror show of Obama/Clinton bundlers lobbying to
advance Trump agenda. At the end:]
The Intercept spoke to several progressive activists who
expressed outrage that leading Democratic Party officials are now
advancing the Trump agenda, but were reluctant to comment on the
record, for fear of angering powerful Democrats. But a few activists,
like Democracy Sping's Newkirk, decided to speak on the record.
Becky Bond, an activist and former Bernie Sanders adviser who also
spoke out, said, "When Democratic insiders team up with Comcast and
the private prison industry, they make it pretty difficult to see how
the party can recruit relationships with the voters it needs to bring
back into the fold."
"Destroying the internet and maximizing the profitability of mass
incarceration," she added, "is not what I would call a winning
strategy for Democrats who want to take back power in 2018."
If the DNC wanted input from granola crunchers, they would ask for it.
Or, rather, have Blue State Digital ask for it and bill the DNC six
figures.
The doctor has correctly diagnosed the disease, but there is no cure; the
prognosis is terminal. The D party are American to the core: grifting,
hustling, murdering, stealing, tech-douchebaggery, vagina-hatted buffoonery,
egotistical, self-obsessed anti-social psychopathic angry drunks of selfish
parents. I.e, all-American.
"By my count, with the Georgia election Democrats have just blown their
fifth chance in a row to make a new first impression"
Direct and simple. Publius has it right, like Hillel:
"There was an incident involving a Gentile who came before Shammai and said
to him: 'Convert me to Judaism on condition that you will teach me the entire
Torah while I stand on one foot.' Shammai pushed the man away with the building
rod he was holding. Undeterred, the man then came before Hillel with the same
request. Hillel said to him, 'That which is hateful unto you, do not do unto
your neighbor. This is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary.'" (
Shabbat
31a)
Imagine this scenario with a fast-food worker, a coal miner, an adjunct
professor, a docks trucker. (Evidently Ossoff didn't imagine this, as reports
surface that he didn't campaign for these kind of voters.)
Do not exploit. Single-payer. Debt relief. Free tuition. It's not going to
be easy, but there's no need for fear.
As much as I would like to see a viable third party that owes nothing to the
POS legacy Dems, it does seem like the more likely scenario is a takeover of
the entire party apparatus and leadership.
Actually, the line is by Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan, from "All Along the
Watchtower." which was, importantly, preceded by the line, "There's no
reason to talk softly now."
"Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact
after a revolution against them .
I don't even detect this as a sincere goal among progressives/demos
which is yet another reason I'm not d partying.
If anyone takes over the party without changing nearly every process then
they are just seeking the same results by new faces.
Binding platform/policy established and maintained by as many
people/votes as possible. And this should be done by nearly anyone but
candidates/office holders. Officeholders should represent with instructions
much like a jurist.
True party membership.
No more caucus. Individual private votes on paper ballots for all party
processes. All off which must be counted immediately. Votes should be
scheduled far in advance, with no last minute changes to questions/issues as
we witnessed when given glimpses of inner party shenanigans.
Transparent, real time monitoring of all incoming and outgoing funds.
Down to the office pencils and after hours beers if on party or contracted
dimes.
Otherwise it's a private anti-democratic exclusionary party and you ain't
in it.
Being in control of the losing party is still being in control: deals can be
made, hands can be shaken, backs can be rubbed. A reformed progressive party
means that the current elite lose their relevance, influence and power. And
they will have none of that.
"Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a
revolution against them."
Dems have been running away from Henry Wallace (Roosevelt too) since way before
my time.
Michael Hudson said this back on this site in March:
"It seems that only a new party can achieve these aims. At the time these
essays are going to press, Sanders has committed himself to working within the
Democratic Party. But that stance is based on his assumption that somehow he
can recruit enough activists to take over the party from Its Donor Class.
I suspect he will fail. In any case, it is easier to begin afresh than to
try to re-design a party (or any institution) dominated by resistance to
change, and whose idea of economic growth is a pastiche of tax cuts and
deregulation. Both U.S. parties are committed to this neoliberal program – and
seek to blame foreign enemies for the fact that its effect is to continue
squeezing living standards and bloating the financial sector."
Further I find it hard to conclude that the Democratic party is salvagable
reading the post here. They have proven time and time again where their
interest lie.
Unless there is a mutiny on the horizon for the democrats, maybe it is
better to abandon ship!
Donor money attracts the status seekers pushing for the status quo,
guaranteeing low voter turnout. Leaders probably love it when the dissenters
just give up and become even more individualistic.
A new party needs to get started promoting:
– pension protections
– universal healthcare
– affordable post secondary education
Interesting how Macron managed to recruit enough members of parliament
to make his EM party viable – just that easily he ousted and replaced
people. I thought it was all too smooth. Here it's a cat fight all the
way. And in the end party politics gets corroded anyway. I'm thinking a
party is secondary to policy, because it is always shifting. Whereas some
bedrock policy, regardless of which "party" might be marching for it, can
survive all the ups and downs of sack-of-potato politics. What we need is
a movement that demands human rights. A constitutional convention would
just be another cat fight – we need to start demanding the basics, as you
list them and maybe a few more like a jobs guarantee program – the right
to work for a living wage.
Human rights are too nebulous: one could see walking down the
street holding a gun a god given right while the other sees being able
to walk in a gun free city
a god given right.
Job guarantees are just as nebulous. Instead of offering job
guarantees, you'd have to guarantee the creation of specific jobs:
cleaning polluted areas, universal daycare, research into X, etc.
I don't think you can compare the situ with the Dems to Macron's
feeble sweep up. He's a Globalist banker construct, a cutout. Obama v
2.0 a la Français. IMHO, of course.
Thank you. The Dems are never going to change unless challenged from
outside
the party. Sanders' Titanic analogy isn't particularly valid
since the first class passengers in this case have their own private
lifeboats. Of course you can get melodramatic and claim the fate of the
world is at stake and therefore the planet itself is the Titanic due to AGW
but that's a problem much bigger than political parties and changing one for
the other isn't likely to make much of a difference.
Since the article brings up Walmart and Amazon perhaps they could serve
as better analogies. They aren't really monopolies of course since they fear
competition including each other and that may be all they fear. I see this
in my own town as new competitors move in and Walmart cleans up its stores,
offers new services etc.
So Michael Hudson had it right. Sanders would have made far more of a
difference if he had started a third party rather than sheepdogging for the
Dems. The barriers are huge and designed to be so but the people running the
Dem party are not going to step aside for our convenience. It's the duopoly
system itself that needs to be overturned and not this perpetual
suggestion–that we've been hearing forever–that the Dems somehow reform
themselves. Their idea of reform is to bring on somebody like Obama to fix
the p.r.
>Sanders would have made far more of a difference if he had started a
third party
Not sure I agree with this. Now you can possibly convince me that he
should, but I feel strongly that the initial attack right in the belly of
the beast was necessary. Now everybody's heard of him, know who he is.
He's on the TeeVee, he brings them eyeballs.
If he started a third party he would have just been ignored in the
media, and the media is all.
He could have started a third party with the justification that the
DNC sabotaged him. We'll never know what would have been the outcome
in 2016, but since I see Bernie as a "first pancake" (don't eat it but
it's necessary to get things going) breaking with the Dem. Party would
have been important on several levels.
You are absolutely correct - as a third party candidate, Sanders
would have received even less media coverage than he did get from the
mainstream media. I think he would have done better than the Greens,
but he still would have lost badly. One of the major lessons of 2016
is that the deck is heavily stacked against third parties in the
United States; neither the Greens nor the Libertarians
in
combination
could muster 5% of the Presidential vote. To
ignore that lesson would be tragic.
In a 4-way election for President of the United States today,
06/10/16, with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders,
and Gary Johnson all candidates on the ballot, Trump defeats
Clinton 35% to 32%, with Sanders at 18% and Johnson at 4%,
according to SurveyUSA research conducted for The Guardian. Of
those who vote for Sanders if his name is on the ballot, 73% say
theirs is a vote "for" Sanders, 19% say theirs is a vote
"against" Trump, and 7% say theirs is a vote "against" Clinton.
In a 4-way election for President with Sanders' name not on
the ballot, Clinton defeats Trump 39% to 36%, with Johnson at 6%
and Jill Stein at 4%. 5% of all voters tell SurveyUSA they would
"stay home and not vote" in this ballot constellation. Of those
who vote for Sanders when Sanders' name appears on the ballot,
13% say they will stay home if Sanders name is not on the
ballot, 41% vote for Clinton, 15% vote for Johnson, 11% vote for
Stein, and 7% defect to Trump.
I can't help but think that as Sanders got to put his message
out at the debates, when most voters are just starting to tune in,
and then with comey and pussy grabbing there would be a significant
shift to the only not insane candidate with a shot. That is if the
media didn't go ape shit on him for 'handing the election to trump'
as soon as he decided to go 3rd party. That is a big IF, but now I
wonder how much of an effect that would have had with how much
everyone loves the media ..
The Dems are never going to change unless challenged from outside
the party.
Sanders' Titanic analogy isn't particularly valid since the first
class passengers in this case have their own private lifeboats.
To your point the first, it is not an either-or situation. And think
how effective it would be if the Dem Party leadership was challenged from
*both* inside and outside!
To your point the second, the *very* first class passengers feel
assured that they have lifeboats (and they could be wrong), but the
hangers on? Not really. They have not adequately prepared, they are as
few paychecks from disaster as the rest of us are, they are riding on
their employers' ticket, and that is why they are hanging on to the
"donor class" like grim death. The actual "donor class" doesn't pull the
levers of power, they have staff to do that. It is the staff that we are
after.
Pelosi, Schumer, Clinton, Hoyer. They are all old. In 5 years time, the
whole Democratic party could change. There is a saying attributed to Max
Planck, "Science advances one funeral at a time.", I suggest the same
applies to politics.
The history of third parties in the U.S. is not encouraging. Much as I
respect Michael Hudson's writings on economics I tend to adhere to the
writings of G. William Domhoff for analysis of power.
[ http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/class_domination.html ] From the
section "The Power Elite and Government":
" there can be only two main parties due to the structure of the
government and the nature of the electoral rules."
"The fact that Americans select a president instead of a parliament, and
elect legislators from "single-member" geographical areas (states for the
Senate, districts for the House) leads to a two-party system because in
these "winner-take-all" elections a vote for a third party is a vote for the
person's least desired choice. A vote for a very liberal party instead of
the Democrats, for example, actually helps the Republicans."
This last election cycle the Democratic Party too plainly exposed its
empty hull within. It appears vulnerable to take over by mutiny or pirates
from within.
Abandoning ship? - That sounds like a good way to drown. Neither of the
main alternative parties show promise and riding the currents of the present
seas will not carry us to a new island home.
The current situation is an echo of the post-Civil-War elections when the
Farmers' Alliance and Peoples' Party actually elected officials from local
to Federal. They lost, ultimately, to J.P.Morgan and his interests, but
sparked genuine change (a central bank, among other things).
I'm not sure how you look at the last election cycle and conclude that the
'Democrat' party is even remotely capable of reform from within. For all of Mr.
Sanders laudable goals, I think he is still suffering from the delusion that
enough people in the party have the courage and moral conviction to do the
right thing rather than looking out for their own skin. The money suggests
otherwise.
I think it has been proven rather conclusively that political animals are
first and foremost self-serving creatures. That being said, it's probably time
people take the bull by the horns and proceed with forming a party that
actually represents their collective interests rather than "the system".
I have been involved in a discussion group with some highly intelligent
people (mostly PhD types here), and it is fascinating how many of them will
apologize for the destruction created by the previous administration's
policies. These people aren't necessarily wealthy, but they see themselves as
the "resistance" when they are part and parcel part of the problem.
They, like many in the 'Democrat' party, still cling to the Hamiltonian
principles that have alienated so much of the country. Obama was a perfect
example of how destructive this mindset can be. These closet elitists espouse
popular progressive policies on their face, but when push comes to shove they
will happily throw a few people under the bus if it means they won't have to
wait in line for their morning latte at Starbucks. These faux progressives see
themselves as the thinkers and leaders in modern society (much like Orwell's
Animal Farm pigs), and they have no intention of letting the peons without
proper pedigrees institute change which would level the playing field for a
more just and humane social and economic structure.
These closet elitists espouse popular progressive policies on their
face, but when push comes to shove they will happily throw a few people
under the bus if it means they won't have to wait in line for their morning
latte at Starbucks.
This is a perfect definition of a dem tribalist, in all but words they
are the exact same as those suburban republicans the dem party so
desperately longs for, but will never have for the simple reason they are
tribalists as well.
Dems are enraged enough to don little pink hats and march by the
millions, not because of gross inequality, injustice or global warming, but
because their moderate Republican lost.
They say they hate racists and racism, but they steadfastly support the
policies that institutionalize racism. Mass incarceration, economic
injustice, global war, the biggest drivers are just fine with them. The
racism they don't like is the crass kind displayed by individuals that they
see or here. Not really because it's racist but because it tarnishes their
virtue bubble.
Dems are moderate suburban Republicans who don't have stiff enough
constitutions to see, and own the effects of the policies they support. They
are delusional hypocrites.
The crooked leadership in the DimRat party are only interested in fooling
people so they can collect campaign contributions which they promptly lop
off for their personal gain. They don't if they win or lose an election as
long as they can fool people and loot campaign money. They'll swindle the
honest people who stay within the DimRat party and throw them away like used
rags. The people who desire to change the party from within are deluded.
Bernie might have meant well and spoken some truths but when push came to
shove, he ran back to Momma! Let's get with the program and support a third
pary like the Greens who already have registration in ove 40 states.
I washed my hands of the Democrat Party and national politics after the
primary, with the exception of a possible Constitutional convention, which I
see as the best chance we have to dismantle the American empire peaceably. I'll
still vote, as disruptively as I can, but I'm not investing my energy in
national issues only to be left a dry husk. Rather, that energy is being
focused on my garden, my community, and my family.
Your comment is appreciated, perhaps more than you realize. One can
feel quite alone in a decision like this when the massed crowd insists on
marching off the cliff and expects me to not only go along, but to agree
that it is a good idea. Thank you.
Yep. Many, many more. We should create a secret handshake to
identify one another in public. Or maybe we identify our comrades
by the dirt under their fingernails, or the beet left dangling from
their back pocket as a sign of solidarity.
I don't think you are alone at all. I have been planning similarly
for the past 3 years and know several other people who are doing the
same. We have paid off mortgages, pinched pennies and are living a
simple, anti-materialistic life with the end goal of moving to a
rural/small town where we can be largely self-sustaining, focus on our
communities and make due with a much smaller income.
That being said-I will continue to use my voice (in any way that I
can) to express my outrage at the current state of the USA .
Yes! And you can find us at the local community food and music
festivals across North America. National politics has become a
toxic playground for futile argument.
I'm not investing my energy in national issues only to be left a dry
husk. Rather, that energy is being focused on my garden, my community,
and my family.
Simply voting in the Democratic primary doesn't take a lot of energy.
Your family and your community could benefit if you do so (I'm not sure
about your garden).
I strongly second this view! Independents and the alienated [David, by
the lake you seem "alienated"] should register to one of the two parties
- preferably Democratic. Registering for a party means you can vote in
that party's primary and it means you might be called by pollsters and
receive requests for contributions - all offering great potential for
disrupting which are not otherwise available to Independents and the
alienated.
Not that I'm happy with what he does or plans to do, but isn't Trump
already doing a pretty good job of dismantling the American empire?
Given our circumstances, and the patterns of history, isn't it a delusion
for the anti-imperialist Left to think that the empire will shrink/dissolve
into something resembling its preferred model, whatever that is? In fact,
doesn't history show cronies/grifters/looters/shitheel relatives (think
Kushner) as the ones who inherit a failing empire, and get their skim from
the excess energy/capital generated by it collapse?
I've no patience at all for the "Putin did it" memes, but according to
the Caligula/Nero model of imperial decline, he'd have been wise to do
everything in his power to get Trump elected, since Donnie is likely to do
more to undermine the empire than anyone imaginable.
In the BBC series "I Claudius" - Claudius believed favoring Nero would
help bring a return of the Republic.
My chief hope from Trump was that he might draw down our Military and
stop a few of our ruinous wars. Instead he seems to have "outsourced"
control and direction of the Military to the Military. And Trump's
domestic agenda seems oriented toward reducing most of the population to
the condition of self-supporting slaves transferring what wealth they
still hold into the hands of the very wealthy. I suppose this is one way
to dismantle the American Empire.
Trump and the GOP are doing exactly what they do. This might be
dismantling (privatizing) society, but this is what they are and have
been so for many years. They are malevolent, but relatively honest about
it.
The Dems, however, speak through their hats. They are also malevolent,
but do not broadcast it. They are masters of scapegoating and
rationalization. They have been moving right since at least the Carter
Presidency (yes, Carter) and appear to covet the GOP so much that they
have effectively become the GOP of 5 to 10 years ago on a sliding scale.
Since every election is The Most Important EVAH ™, they have kept those
attempting to move the party back to the left unhappily in the party as
"they have nowhere else to go". But the results over the last 50 years
reveal the Dems as liars, and eventually the lessor of 2 evils strategy
(not a typo – they are for lease) stops working as people slowly realize
that the benefits of voting blue no matter who are minimal. Thus the
increase in independents on the above graph.
We have hit the point, globally IMO, where people have had enough.
"Vote GOP/fascist, and those empty-promise Dems/liberals will suffer with
us- and we get to keep our guns." Or don't vote at all. Schadenfreude is
a powerful motivator.
The Dems were the party of conservatives back in the 1800s (remember
slavery?), took a little detour in the 1930s, and have reverted to what
they were. The left (not the vichy-left that is left only relative to the
GOP, but the progressive left) has
no
representation in
US politics. The future for progressives lies outside of the Dem party –
let the aristocratic Dems and GOP become one party with 2 factions
discriminated by the amount of bible thumping they do.
Progressives need to start over very publicly, and the sooner the
better. They need to clearly, loudly describe what they will do, how they
intend to do it, and how it will benefit people. Corbyn and Sanders have
demonstrated that there is a significant fraction of the population that
will support this. It also uses the existing Schadenfreude as a political
tool.
\rant)
"For the message to change, the leadership must change."
For the Democratic-Party leadership to change, we have to get the new
message [we will give you a better life] through to them. They're not listening
to that new [old-school] message, because roughly half of us will vote for them
no matter what the message is [say, the alternative is worse, ya' know] and the
other half of us don't vote at all [read: what difference does it make?].
Let's address that last part first. We should be able to convince the people
that their votes would make a difference if only they'd cast them for at least
five consecutive election cycles. That might entail electing more of the same
sort of Democrats that we have today. But if voter participation on the
Democratic side of the choice increased sufficiently and persistently, then
even the worst of the Democrats would have to remove the tampons from their
ears to hear the people demanding a better life.
Be advised, though, that when the better life arrives–as it briefly did
following the GI Bill, The Interstate Highway Act, the expansion of the
suburbs, the era of urban decay and municipal budget crises wrought by bond
down-grading–a fair number of the people will become Republicans and the great
cycle of rent-seeking expropriation will begin anew.
The foolish Democrats continue to send our house "surveys" as part of their
begging. Usually I just throw them out or write a brief, nasty message in red
marker. This time, with the two that are awaiting my action, I'm going to add a
more detailed "get rid of Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer etc." message.
Having worked in a Congressional office, I know that I'm not really
"communicating" with anyone, but perhaps if they get a few more of these
specific "suggestions," a light will go on in their lizard brains.
You are saying "socialist" like it's a bad thing. Ever gone for a drive?
To the library? You just dealt with two socialist entities, roads and
libraries. I could go on, but the hour is getting late.
Fascinating stuff really, how in America
Socialism=USSR=Stalin=Terrorism=Obama.
Reminds me of that excellent wikileaks document talking about how they
are content to have erased civics and worked to create a clueless
population
Bernie played it masterfully, disrupting the democrat party and exposing
the fraud, while maintaining an operational voice as a senator. The
aforementioned elites would like nothing more than seeing him go away.
The entrenched power within the Democrat Party in Washington lies with
the campaign committees (DNC, DCCC, DSCC) who are under the thumb of some of
the most sleazy, corrupt people in politics - Democrat
"consultants".
There will be no kind of change without decapitating the party of those
scumbags. They, in turn, owe their jobs to the members of Congress who are
elected by their caucus to "oversee" those campaign committees. DCCC is
headed by Pelosi apparatchiks Lujan and Israel. Israel, in particular, is a
poster child for the corrupt, antideluvian Democrat Party hack. Similar
dynamics apply in the Senate, although the caucus "leaders" are not always
what they appear to be on paper. (Feinstein has long been the "leader" of
the Senate Democrats, though she has never held the title.)
The Democrats are dead to me and have been since 2006 when they "took
impeachment off the table" and acquiesced to the "surge" in Iraq. Whatever
inclination I might have had to remain with them was shattered in the 2008
primaries when any candidate voicing actual progressive thoughts was shunted
aside by the party leadership and their media sycophants in favor of the two
most conservative, war mongering (take another look at the second Obama-McCain
debate if you think only Hellary was a war monger) , corporate/MIC lackeys.
It doesn't matter how many elections Pelosi, Schumer, et. al. lose or how
hollowed out their representation in Congress and state houses become, They
will continue to be supported by the mega-rich neoliberal establishment,
celebrities, tech elites and the coastal intelligentsia. Without an outside
challenge from the left nothing will change inside the party since they are
correct in their observation that the left "have nowhere else to go", well
except to stay home (like they did in 2016). This will result in more Trumps
(who are smarter and more competent than the original model) and then the Dems
will play the "unity" and "resistance" cards.
I agree with 99% of what you say but, if they continue to lose then they
will not be supported by the mega-rich etc.
The sad thing is we now have the Imperial Presidency, and I'd still
probably bet (lightly) against Trump in 2020 so the Dems will probably get
the Presidency again without Congress and the country will continue to spin
its wheels.
They have been losing for decades now and yet they
do
continue to be supported by the mega rich. That's not going to dry up any
time soon as those types do like to hedge their bets.
The Imperial Presidency didn't start in January. And I'll remind you
that statusquObama had a Democrat majority in the House and a
supermajority in the Senate when he took office. He had no need to
compromise with the other side and could have pushed through any truly
progressive reforms that he and the Democrats wanted to and yet the
wheels continued to spin. All that came of that was a pro-corporate
health insurance scam that is now on its last legs.
Please don't continue to labor under the delusion that if only they
controlled more branches of government things would be different. If they
actually wanted to help out the working class in this country they would
have done so already. That they'd rather lose than help the 'deplorables'
has become abundantly clear.
It's ALL one party with a scrum at the margins. St. Bernie stands atop the
burning dumpster, railing about the injustice of it all, while being consumed
by its flames. This is an Empire backed by a full-blown Police State. Nobody is
going anywhere.
You are now free to go about your business enjoying the benefits of our
consumer society. Thank you.
Democratic consultants are to politics as mutual fund managers are to Wall
Street: Put on fronts of intelligence, talent, and insight well beyond their
abilities, act like their expertise is crucial for success when their actual
track record is mixed at best, act like their much more important to the
process than they really are, and it doesn't matter if they win or lose, they
get their hefty fees regardless.
Reforming the so-called Democratic Party is impossible in my opinion. It's
torn between a corporate leadership (appeal progressives) and its regressive
fringes. Let it burn to the ground and make a new party, for true progressives
(am I going in the direction of a "no true Scotsman"?), who would represent the
interests of "We, the people".
Then you have the real radicals, BLM, AntiFa, and the
n
th wave
intersectional feminists, respectively crying about "systemic oppression",
"goddamn nazis everywhere", "the Patriarchy", and collectively: "fugg da
po-pos!". Yes, the Republicans also have their corporate leadership and
fringes, but actual nazis and delusional AnCaps seem a lot less vocal or
significant (at least from Europe) compared to any riot or the madness at the
Evergreen State College. Then again, this is coming from someone living in
Europe, so my perspective isn't very good. Still, I don't feel really good
about the self-proclaimed Leader of the Free World (which it actually used to
be) devolving further.
That's why as small donors, people need to starve the beast--no
contributions to the any DC-based organization (to culturally appropriate
Ronald Reagan).
Support local individuals. Even $20 spent on a losing well-chosen local
state rep. is better spent than $10 for the DNC.
I like the description of the Ossoff race as a Pyrrhic loss – so much
invested by Dems into a candidate with so little to offer, that the loss
looms larger than it would otherwise.
I'm for trying anything that might work, inside or outside the D Party. I
am convinced the rules of the game in the US make it almost impossible for a
3rd Party to succeed. But there is no permanent reason the D Party has to be
one of the two.
The problem/difficulty with taking over the D Party is not just the
handful of leaders in DC. By my count, there are maybe 20 truly
left-progressive Dems in the House and no more than 5 in the Senate (being
truly charitable to people like Warren). So changing the nature of D
representation in DC with require primary-ing the vast majority of current
DC Dems. So the question is, does it make more sense to try to do this in D
primaries and try to take over the D Party apparatus – no doubt against
virtually the entire existing apparatus – or to run a complete slate of 3rd
party candidates in Nov elections. I used to think the former strategy has a
much higher likelihood of success. Now I am not so sure.
One concept that may help here is "party system." We are in the sixth party
system of the U S of A. And it sure looks like we are opening the door to the
seventh party system. So ruling out "third parties" isn't a great idea: Both of
the political parties (D and R) are structures that are dry-rotted. One kick
may send either or both tumbling. In some respects, Trump won the nomination
because Republican voters perceived how corrupted the Republican party is. (He
may be the stereotypical spoiled American businessperson, but to Republican
voters, he was somehow more "real" and "new" than Romney, the well-scrubbed
spoiled Republican businessperson.)
The parties aren't permanent. Is anyone nostalgic for the Whigs? Should we
argue that there was no way to get rid of the American Party (the
Know-Nothings)?
Sanders: "Because there are people who, as I often say, would rather have
first class seats going down with the Titanic, rather than change the course of
the ship."
And then there are those propaganda-gulping people who think that someday
they too will get one of those 1st class berths if they just keep going along
with what the elite wants
I can't believe some of the people I meet who think that somehow that the
neoliberal game plan is going to make their lives better someday
Many here commenting upon G. P.'s post truly hope and wish for change (heard
this one before?), both within the Democratic Party and outside. In both cases,
the answers and suggestions given are very innocent.
To cleanse the entire nation of the influence of corporate cash, corrupted
lackeys, and warmongers is absolutely necessary to accomplish both of those
goals, and we often do not see this nor do we see any method to be used. How
can anyone have the slimmest belief that the moneyed interests, their toadies,
and the hired hands at DoD, State, the Fed, and NSA, FBI, CIA, etc. will go
peacefully into the night when we challenge their puppets within the twin
parties of death? Will they not double down on preserving this system that
promises so much to them? Have they not killed those opposing them in other
countries, as well as here in the good ol' USA? What do we do when we go to
phase two (sorry- a wannabe poet)?
I'd like to see a discussion based upon that reality, with backup plans to
initiate and defend a strategy that knows a "win" in one area of division of
this system guarantees nothing until total victory over the entire ball of wax
is accomplished. In short, we have no global ideology, no encompassing
My gut feeling is that the working poor know, deep in their bones, it was
never as simple as presented by radicals of the sixties or those of us who have
not thought this through to its conclusion. That is why they "oppose" such
ideas and presentations (and, partly, due to well-earned suspicion that some
ideas are meant to rope the poor into a losing proposition, all the better to
hang them out to dry, eh?).
Plan piecemeal, if you must, but "act locally, think globally" means more
than just a surrender to local politics and school board elections. It can also
mean your whole philosophical outlook and approach to the question " after
this, what do we do?".
"around here" it's long been known that the reality is the dems can't win
a school board election. You don't need a gut feeling. Their demise is as
certain as their inability to see it coming.
The sad truth is that history's lurches and spurts are usually the result
of great violence–wars, revolutions. The Russian revolution shaped the
history of the 20th century because the western oligarchs were so afraid
that would happen to them that they had–temporarily it seems–to make
concessions to the welfare state. Their other tactic was to try to destroy
the source of the infection. Hitler and those backing him really had
eliminating the Commies as their principal concern. Lots in the west were
hoping he'd do it and this carried on into the Cold War.
At any rate while waiting for the cataclysm we can at least nibble at the
edges and try to revive the Left to a degree. Sitting around worrying about
what's going on with the hopeless Dems probably isn't all that useful.
All true. But we are a young species still, and the world has changed
so much in the last 100 years that I'm not sure how much of what happened
before sets limits on what we can achieve going forward.
OTOH I certainly agree with Mike that electoral politics is just the
tip of the iceberg. OTO we won't really know what we are up against until
we have some electoral power. But, just as one example, I am not at all
convinced that the grunts in the military would back a soft (or hard)
coup against a left populist with a real strategy and political operation
to improve the lives of most people. (I do think most cops probably
would.) And it is still the case that corporations need customers to make
money – in both the 1910's and 1930's, there were important splits in the
world of big business that provided openings for left politics. One of
our biggest problems is that a huge proportion of the remaining
manufacturing in this country feeds the MIC and it will be hard to get
working people to oppose that.
I did my part for the Sanders revolution by voting for Trump, who campaigned
far to the left of Clinton. But I'm just a het white male brocialist, so what
do I know.
Just one quibble. I don't want us to be at cross purposes. We have a global
way of doing things – for lack of a better description it is "capitalism" but
it falls way short of replacing government – even tho' it has been trying to do
just that for a century. Government is basically a distribution system – the
more equitable the better – and we still rely on Government to deliver. That is
one side of the coin. And it is, so far, all about money. The other side of the
coin is the planet, which has been polluted and exploited almost beyond
recovery by a human population that is way too big and a blind faith in
capitalism and trade. We are already living a contradiction. And we need to fix
it quickly. In order for policies to do us any good they have to repair the
planet while they keep us all alive at some level of comfort. An angry
revolution that has all sides talking past each other won't help anybody. It
will just waste precious time. And I submit that politics is the art of talking
past each other. We need to get above it.
Gov't is more than just distribution – it also structures the whole
capitalist market system – there is no capitalism without limited liability,
bankruptcy, contract law, etc. None of that should be taken as given or
unchangeable.
"If there were only one man in the world, he would have a lot of
problems, but none of them would be legal ones. Add a second inhabitant,
and we have the possibility of conflict. Both of us try to pick the same
apple from the same branch. I track the deer I wounded only to find that
y ou have killed it, butchered it, and are in the process of cooking and
eating it.
The obvious solution is violence. It is not a very good solution; if
we employ it, our little world may shrink back down to one person, or
perhaps none. A better solution, one that all known human societies have
found, is a system of legal rules explicit or implicit, some reasonably
peaceful way of determining, when desires conflict, who gets to do what
and what happens if he doesn't "
David Friedman, "Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and
Why It Matters"
", unless one wishes to scale the mountain of deliberate, structural
impediments to forming a viable, 50-state third party."
Excuses, excuses. You'd rather scale the mountain of impediments to
reforming the "Democrat" party?
After many years of mountain climbing (figurative), and many, many
discussions with apologists for repeating what didn't work before, I've
concluded the real determinant is not a rational calculation implied by Gaius'
above quote; it's personality. Some people have a much lower tolerance for
betrayal, and a lower attachment to institutions, than others. Personally, I
walked away in disgust when Slick Willy was president and I realized he was
really a Republican – only worse, because of the betrayal. So did others.
Others don't react that way; instead, they stay attached to the institution
and hope to overturn its power structure. I think Bernie's extremely impressive
campaign demonstrated the essential futility of that approach. So did thousands
of Bernie supporters who turned around and joined the Green Party as soon as he
lost. (Oregon has other more-or-less leftwing parties, so I don't think we
caught them all.) The proportion changes over time because it depends on the
severity of the provocation; deliberately choosing the weaker candidate, and
cheating to do it, even in the face of a Trump candidacy, was a very severe
provocation.
OTOH, I'm beginning to wonder what it will take to finish the job; the total
self-immolation of the Dems – or maybe of the country? Just as individuals have
breaking points, so do populations; where is it? My worst fear, and I now
consider it quite likely, is that we shoot right past overturning the party
structure to outright violent insurrection. It's easy to joke about
torches-and-pitchforks, but I'm getting too old for that sort of thing, and the
human costs are truly forbidding.
Politicians, like most people, do difficult things for only two reasons.
Either they have to do them, or they really want to do them. No one does them
because they think it would be a fine idea if someone does them someday.
This means that any strategy like the one proposed in this article needs to
explain how we're going to convince our congress people that they have to
oppose their leaders, not that it's a good idea. When progressives are willing,
in sufficient numbers, to either vote for and support someone else or keep
their votes and support in their pockets will those politicians think that what
we want them to do this. Short of that, no amount of pleading or shaking our
fists is going to matter.
If enough progressives in each Democratically-controlled district are
willing to publicly state they'll withhold their votes and support until this
happens, it has a chance of happening. Otherwise, I don't see how it's going to
be any more of a priority than all the other things we want that aren't being
done.
I think most voters are very wary of the government's ability to deliver
anything in terms of actual services what they want is money from them in some
form or another.
People will vote Democrat again and then they will vote Republican but there
isn't going to be some sea change in the actual policies either way.
"... It's pretty obvious that Trump is picking his friends in the ME based on his attitude towards Iran and a seeming desire to do Israel's bidding. For all his faults Obama chose to keep Israel at arm's length and ramrodded a nuclear deal with Iran that was intended to bring that country in from the cold and open opportunities for commerce that had been shut down by years of sanctions. ..."
"... In his zeal to undo all of Obama's initiatives Trump has placed the US in an intractable position in the ME. The scope of his long term plans will become more evident as the IS is driven out of Raqqa and Mosul. A lot of posters have postulated that he intends to grab a chunk of eastern Syria and western Iraq and engineer the geography so that Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon is minimized. They are very likely right. ..."
"... The saving grace might be Mueller and his posse of investigators. They are going to forensically break down any dealings that Trump and Kushner had with foreign entities before and during the presidential campaign. There may be reasons for transition type meetings with foreign diplomats but the meetings with bankers and businessmen that were so blithely left off the required documentation when applying for security clearances will come under full scrutiny in a very focused way. This focus on his foreign dealings is apparently what has been causing Trump to act in such an unhinged fashion. He's too frazzled by his domestic problems to concentrate on his foreign policy. That's because he's corrupt and it's going to be fully exposed. ..."
"... That was a good point that Putin raised with Kelly in her interview. It's one thing to point a finger at any Russian affects on elections when the US does it on such a massive scale. I wish he would release a white paper documenting this especially US efforts in Ukraine as well as Russia (to include NED and IRI). ..."
King Faisal, supporter of Palestine, became too demanding in 1974. He was killed in
1975. Official story - One of Faisal's nephews, after returning to SA from a trip to the
US, shot and killed his uncle king. Official Story - nephew was beheaded.
This craven batch of successors are kin and they do what is required of them by the
west.
Of course, human rights issues are a sick joke. SA is member of the UN Human Rights
Committee!
Nearly 3.3 million Yemeni people, including 2.1 million children, are currently
suffering from acute malnutrition. The Al-Saud aggression has also taken a heavy toll
on the country's facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools,
and factories.
The WHO now classifies Yemen as one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in the
world alongside Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria and Iraq.
humanitarian emergency? where's the r2p nato crowd? right 2 protect/resources 2 plunder
- either way it's got saudi arabia written all over it. so how come nato hasn't bombed
saudi arabia yet? syria, south sudan, nigeria, and iraq ... at least 3 of the four are
directly attributable to the usofa. so who's the world's leading terrorist?
Universally, every citizen of Saudi Arabia
that I've ever talked to has unreserved hatred for "their" royals. I assume that only
members of that family feel differently. Even people from the elite who have benefited
from the monarchy harbor no love. The masses of poor in the country absolutely despise
these clowns.
Let's run down a quick list of MSB's achievements:
Cakewalk war in Yemen to reinstall compliant dictator -- current clusterfuck
'Prosperity by Austerity' economic plan -- incipient clusterfuck
Cutting in the Royal Line -- probable clusterfuck
Hoes before Bros coddling up to Israel against Iran -- guaranteed clusterfuck
I'm not sure it's popcorn time just yet, but if I were a Saudi Prince, I'd be moving
all my non-earned cash to Swiss accounts
One man becomes ill for some unknown reason while imprisoned in a foreign country, is
repatriated on "compassonate grounds" and then dies, and the whole world is supposed to
be shocked and upset. What b reports above..............
I see the Sauds as trashmen: Their job is to take US trash-cash in payment for their
hydrocarbons and recycle it via weapons and T-bond purchases--which are also trash.
@8
There is also a possibility that Israel is preparing an attack against Iran. The whole
situation around Qatar and Saudi Arabia is quite suspicious. Dispute among family
members? Gulf states are infiltrated by the CIA, they have no an independent foreign
policy. So, what is going on? Maybe a big war is coming. Qatar is located near Iran so
Iran can heavily damage Qatari infrastructure if war break out. Because of that Qatar
pretends to be Saudi's enemy.
It can be a really big war. Turkish army at the same time could try to attack Aleppo.
US troops from bases in Jordan can move towards Deir Ezzor. At the end of the day Turkey
seizes Aleppo and Idlib Governorate (Ottoman Empire), Kurdistan is created (from Raqqa
through Deir Ezzor to Kirkuk and Iran), Iranian facilities and plants don't exist
anymore (regime change also possible), the Golan Height and part of Syria are under
Israeli control. The dissolution of Syria - that was the plan from the very beginning.
Today this sounds rather as a political fiction (because of Russia), nonetheless
something strange is looming on the horizon there.
If you've been following the "economic
stimulation" plan in US infrastructure, Orange One may provide the Wahabis a stake in
the privatized road and infrastructure in the US. As he flees the desert wasteland after
the oil markets crash, he will be able to own a "piece of the rock" and continue to bilk
Americans out of their livelihood in into perpetuity via tolls, and could retire in
splendor in Beverly Hills or Palm Beach. It's the "free market" at work.
A report of the Russians using an S-300 to shoot down a US Global Hawk over the eastern
Med. US and Russian military are silent. There is a report that a Global Hawk has
crashed .... in California.
Normally the US comes to the rescue of ISIS in Syria. Now it looks like ISIS is coming
to the rescue of US forces. There is a report that ISIS is trying to break the recently
created SAA/Hezbollah/Iranian buffer zone east of the US base near al Tanf. The US
forces were there supposedly to attack ISIS. The buffer zone removed that and
effectively any need for the forces to be there in the first place. ISIS trying to break
the buffer in order to allow the US forces to attack ISIS - a self-licking kebab.
Back in the days, the Syrians offered to interrogate (presumably at 'enhanced' level)
some people renditioned from Afghanistan that were sold to the US as members of
whichever Islamic group the US was supposed to be fighting at the time. The Syrians
presumably did this to try to get in the good books of the US (as did Iran when it
captured al Qaeda operatives escaping Afghanistan into Iran). The Syrians interrogated
these people and concluded they were innocent. I believe the US still has these innocent
people in their Gulag at Guantanamo.
I have a strong feeling that it's Saudi that will go bang first. Austerity on the Saudis
just doesn't work. It's only the money which is keeping the tribes loyal to the Najdis.
If Al Saud can't pay (or if the Kinsey consultants are advising him not to pay (as if
they would understand the politics of Saudi)), why should all the others stick with the
Sauds? I was very struck by the photo of what the Saudis have down to the Shi'ite town
of Awamiyyah in the Eastern Province. They've walled it off with those 4m high concrete
blocks, with only one checkpoint for going in or out. It's a complete siege. MbS must be
getting more and more paranoiac, and now he's carried out his coup to take over the
King.
the usa as torture supporter? why am i not surprised? they have been torturing the
planet literally and figuratively for quite a few years... the revelations of manning
was enough of an eye opener for anyone paying attention.. the thought that they would
change their ways is a joke...
@25 laguerre... yeah, those pics of the shite town in saudi arabia stuck in my mind
as well.. things ain't well in the saudi headchopper/torture paradise that the usa/isael
and etc have sidled up with.. this new kid as the head of the saudi money dictatorship
ain't all that inspiring either..
Their job is to take US trash-cash in payment for their hydrocarbons
and recycle it via weapons and T-bond purchases--which are also trash.
Sounds like you may appreciate a tidying up. I will be happy to take any such trash
off your hands. I will collect any such cash and Treasury notes that you may have in
your possession or about your premises. I will be in-and-out in a flash, so that you and
your family will barely know that I was there. Then neither I nor your trash will be a
nuisance in any way. I provide this service free of charge. (And even if I did charge,
what form would payment take?) How's that for trash man?
I haven't heard about cutting the Wahhabis in on road privatization in the
US but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. Donald and MBS in many ways are cut from a
similar cloth. Birds of a feather...
They need Idlip and Aleppo if they want a land connection between
Israel and the EU. Lebanon will be fragmentized and Hezbollah destroyed (Balkanization).
Yes, there is something fishy with the Qatar-Saudi spat. It may
well be that they want to remove themselves as a target as you speculate.
My first thought was that (any) conflict in the Gulf is an excuse to add military
resources. Also, Iran's support for the Qatari's could be spun as "aggression" and used
to unite Sunnis under Saudi leadership
(we see the setting up of a false choice all
the time: your with *us* or you're with the 'terrorists')
. I wrote about it here:
Saudi-Qatar: Gambit du Roi
.
That WSJ-UAE-CIA arms deal story is pretty enlightening:
Two other Denx partners - ex-CIA employees Gary Bernsten and Scott Modell - told the
AP that Solomon was involved in discussing proposed deals with Azima at the same time
he continued to cultivate the businessman as a source for his stories for the
Journal. . .
In an April 2015 email, Azima wrote to Solomon about a proposal for a $725 million
air-operations, surveillance and reconnaissance support contract with the United Arab
Emirates that would allow planes to spy on activity inside nearby Iran. Solomon was
supposed to ferry the proposal to UAE government representatives at a lunch the
following day, the email said.
"We all wish best of luck to Jay on his first defense sale," Azima wrote to
Solomon, Bernsten and Modell.
Under the proposed UAE deal, Azima's firms were to manage specially equipped
surveillance planes to monitor activity in Iran, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
UAE has long-standing ties to various covert and overt U.S.-led operations in the
region. Just another puppet client state of the empire. See 2003-2010, Wikileaks (search
for "MbZ", State Department code for UAE's clown prince)
2003 UAE POISED FOR IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION OPPORTUNITIES"
(S/NF) The UAE is one of our closest partners in the Middle East and one of our most
useful friends worldwide.
-- Al-Dhafra Air Force Base is the high altitude ISR hub for the AOR, and supports 50
percent of aerial refueling in the AOR.
-- Ports in Dubai and Fujairah are the logistics backbone for the U.S. Fifth. Jebel
Ali (Dubai) is the most frequented USN liberty port after Norfolk.
-- Minhad Air Base is a critical hub for Coalition/ISAF partners in Afghanistan,
including the Australians, Dutch, Canadians, Brits and Kiwis.
-- The UAE is a cash customer with FMS [foreign military sales] sales in excess of
$11 billion. Commercial sales have an equivalent value. An additional $12 billion of
FMS cases are in development with approximately the same volume of commercial sales
in the works.
-- The UAE recently purchased nine Patriot batteries, and expects to move forward on
the purchase of THAAD as the first non US customer.
-- The UAE currently commands CJTF-152 (Arabian Gulf) and maintains an active
exercise schedule with U.S. (Red Flag) and other multi-lateral partners.
-- The UAE recently hosted an AFCENT survey team to consider U.S. access to Liwa
(Safran) Air Base in support of contingency operations.
-- Additionally, the UAE is considering hosting the Regional Integrated Air and
Missile Defense Center of Excellence.
Not really much new about CIA instigated torture, the purpose of which as Orwell truly
determined is only to torture. The rest of western intrigue in the Middle East and
various other locales around the world is all part of the business plan. That plan "is
to inventory and control: all finances, land, water, plants, animals, minerals, energy,
means of production, construction, transportation, information, education, policing,
human habitation and all humans on this planet" - Rosa Koire
I refrained from mentioning the Wahhabbi trash cult; but yes, like Hitlerism, it too
must go into the dustbin. It appears that trash cult is interwoven into Zionist and
Outlaw US Empire philosophies since all three promote a terroristic, oligarchic elite
rule and policy toward neighbors and share their own version of Manifest Destiny
stemming from their common Abrahamic roots.
The author of the linked article easily presumes the Outlaw US Empire will continue
to use terrorists as its preferred foreign policy tool for the foreseeable future since
it shows no signs of terminating its announced goal of Full Spectrum Domination, a
policy energetically opposed by the SCO and suite of other organizations the author
lists. Just as Hitlerian Germany and Tojo's Japan were doomed to failure in WW2 due to
the overwhelming amount of resources available to United Nations forces, the Outlaw US
Empire is doomed to defeat thanks to the overwhelming resource base of the Multipolar
Alliance and its superior Win-Win philosophy of relations.
Old Saudi King and Queen oil fields are water/gas injection.
The coastal desalination plants are key to keeping these old
Fields producing.
Iran's Ballistic Missile strike on ISUS in Deir Ezzor from
100s klms away - Iran to Syria. ...proves Iran can strike
Gulf states along with ships in the Persian Gulf.
If Saudi go to war with Iran...they can kiss the desalination
and power plants goodbye.
The old oil fields would collapse,
the end of Idiot Arabia.
In a thread with the the word "Torture" in its title, shouldn't we be exploring the role
torture plays in radicalising Ter'rists? Wasn't one of History's recent Ter'rist
masterminds water-boarded umpteen dozen times to tip him over the edge? The only thing
we know for certain about torture is that it's a great way to extract false confessions.
Can it also be used to inspire false beliefs - keeping in mind that torture is conducted
in a Totally Controlled Environment in which the victim "knows" only what the torturer
wants/needs him to know?
I don't buy all the Jew-controlled MSM's horseshit about people being radicalised by
hare-brained hokum on the www, or the ravings of a local imam.
There's got to be more to it...
Yes, very valid points. Given the vast amount of torture that
allegedly occurred in Vietnam during its very long war for independence, what became of
all the potential terrorists? What of all those tortured within Afghanistan, Pakistan
and India. Then of course, we have the longstanding Gulag System begun by Tsars and
expanded by War Communism; Solzhenitsyn never mentions anyone being radicalized by their
Gulag time in his trilogy on the subject. If torture breeds terrorists, then South
America ought to be awash with them thanks to the decades of Outlaw US Empire directed
torture there.
In a very high-profile film seen by many millions, Luke Skywalker gets radicalized by
the presumed torture and subsequent immolation of his kin and becomes what the Galactic
Empire/ Outlaw US Empire would consider a terrorist. His own personal torture is knowing
his father is his enemy, yet he cannot kill him since he senses redemption within him.
More Hollywood; the Outlaw Josey Wales continues his fight against what he perceives as
terrorist Red Legs well after the Civil War ends, while the Red Legs and their
government connections consider Josey to be a terrorist--radicalized twice through
massacres.
So, is the torture something seen/witnessed, personally experienced, or both? Can a
system be terroristic, such as slavery, colonialism, debt peonage, apartheid, and thus
provide the required radicalization to resist/destroy them--such resistance being seen
by the system's controllers as terrorism? Just how fine a line is there between the
genuine Freedom Fighter and Terrorist? Within the Outlaw US Empire, the Black Panther
Movement certainly sew themselves as genuine Freedom Fighters, but Hoover, Nixon, and
such clearly saw them as terrorist threats to their system of control--Nelson Mandela
was named a terrorist for that very reason by Reagan while calling al-Ciada Freedom
Fighters.
As a former teacher, I like to fallback on a truism brought forth by Rodgers,
Hammerstein, and Logan in the Broadway musical
South Pacific tune You've Got to Be
Carefully Taught, which the Powers That Be tried to get them to drop, thus providing
further incentive to include it--lyrics here,
http://www.metrolyrics.com/youve-got-to-be-carefully-taught-lyrics-south-pacific.html
So, unless you can become enlightened like Lt. Cable in the musical or myself, you're
very likely to hate/stigmatize those you were socialized--taught, indoctrinated, through
delivery systems like church, school, propaganda, etc. Yet another question: What
differs between a Banzai Charge and a coordinated assault by several people wearing bomb
belts--are they both terrorist acts or just one?
Part of the Saudi Qatar spat seems to be a re-alignment of Saudi and GCC behind the SDF-Kurd plus ISIS with haircut - and whatever the US call their proxies in the south.
Moving from outing the Syrian government to a land grab for whatever they can, with a
land bridge to Jordan and a focus on Iran?
I am not sure that I want to do a Debs-style rant on Saudi Arabia (not to criticise
Debs, whose rants I greatly appreciate), but I increasingly think that Saudi is in
serious danger of implosion.
Passing over the 18th century Saudi empire, the point
where the Saudis made the alliance with Muhammad ibn Abd ul-Wahhab, the real Saudi state
began in 1908, when Ibn Saud, Abd al-Aziz Al Sa'ud, took the Dasmak fort in Riyadh.
After the WW1, where he was not particularly supported by the Brits, he launched a
successful war of conquest, supported by a bunch of jihadis, called muhajirun. These
jihadis were later suppressed by violence in the 1930s. In 1925 they took Mecca from the
Hussainis (Faisal and Lawrence's lot), and spread out to the borders of Yemen, including
Najran by 1935. Note that the state was, and is, called in Arabic, al-mamlaka
al-'arabiyya al-sa'udiyya, the Arab Kingdom of Al Sa'ud. There is no sense of
nationality; it is what the Saudi family has conquered. They've since tried to introduce
the notion of nationality, with doubtful success.
In the old days, that is late antiquity and medieval Islamic times, the way you got
the loyalty of the tribes was by simply paying them in gold. Which has only been
repeated in the oil-rich today.
What you have today in what is called Saudi Arabia, is a number of peoples who
haven't been integrated into a nation, but been paid to keep quiet, under the domination
of the Najdis from Riyadh. The Hijazis in the west aren't particularly wahhabi, but
accept the situation. The Najranis are Isma'ilis,and had a small revolt in 2000
according to the War Nerd. The Shi'a in the east are sitting on the only oil-fields, and
are the greatest problem for the Saudi regime, as mentioned above.
However we now have the new young punk, Muhammad ibn Salman, who now has control of
his father (who has perhaps dementia), and has appointed himself crown prince. He has
already launched one war against Yemen, and a second quasi-war against Qatar, apart from
the Saudi activities in Syria. He's quite like Saddam, it can't end well. The weak point
is the loyalty of the Saudi people. Why stick with Riyadh if they're not paying? Mbs
wants to introduce efficiency savings, under the advice of Kinsey, without apparently
any idea of how Saudi works.
A new twist may soon allow SCO and CSTO members Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan troops into
Syria in the form of Peace Keepers. From Ria Novosti--Sputnik in Russian:
"The head of
the State Duma Defense Committee, Vladimir Shamanov, confirmed to RIA Novosti that
Russia is negotiating with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to send their military to Syria."
SCO and CSTO have a heavy anti-terrorism emphasis, and including troops from those
nations would provide excellent training for the new Daesh offensive likely to emerge
from Afghanistan. Apparently, Turkey agrees with the proposal and has provided its own
related to Idlib,
https://ria.ru/syria/20170622/1497104098.html
If you are born into a society wherein headchopping is the standard for capital
punishment, then it would seem to be a normal act to you. (Also the chopping off of
hands, noses, etc.) Now if you are also very poor (which is generally the case) then a
representative of the CIA, for example could entice you with a fat paycheck like you've
never seen ($400 per month). You might also be inclined to perform other tasks for bonus
money. Further - important inspiration is derived from religious and cultural
differences btw you and your designated foes.
The extraction of false confessions does
serve to legitimize torture, because a false confession is as good as a legitimate
confession when the goal from the start is to uphold a pre-determined false narrative.
I wonder how long it will be before we see a provocation against Iran or against
the SAA in Syria by the new King to be. I suspect even neocons would be delighted if the
Russians or Syrians shot down a UAE, Kuwaiti or Saudi plane. That makes we wonder if
Iran will not reply to the new idiot king via more support for the houthi.
Amnesty and its mouthpiece Kreasechan try to outdo HRW & Ken in their support for the
jihadis war on syrians
kristyan benedictVerified account @KreaseChan 11h11 hours ago
In an alternative
universe, Russia slams Syrian warplane's attacks on civilians as violation of
international law
The Yemen program sounds like the one run in Afghanistan sort of like a dragnet run by
corrupt allies who may be paid "per head." And it's cheaper than paid trip to Gitmo.
@40 hoarse, 'keeping in mind that torture is conducted in a Totally Controlled
Environment in which the victim "knows" only what the torturer wants/needs him to know?'
that's always struck me about the caliph of the islamic state,
abu bakr al-baghdadi
. He is acknowledged to have been held by the cia - after his
stint at abu ghraib - in a prison camp in iraq ... camp bucca, 'along with other future
leaders of ISIL' ... that's where he 'got the idea' of the islamic state itself.
I think al-Baghdadi and isis are much more closely tied to the usofa than is
generally acknowledged.
i've never taken
Korybko
- or sputnik - as anything other than a propaganda trumpet. he does remind
of 'inconvenient' facts from time to time ...
[T]he $65 billion in deals that King Salman signed in Beijing include a plan to
construct a Chinese drone factory in the Kingdom, which shows that Saudi Arabia's
August 2016 purchase of this technology from China was successful in serving as the
foundation for an expanded military partnership.
what the hell is china doing, selling drones ... building factories to build drones, and
65 billion worth of other projects ... in saudi arabia?
doing
a takeover
... via chinese 'entrepreneurs', xi's cronies ... a la greece?
China has long begun an investment plan for Greece that allows Athens to pay
salaries, maintain the infrastructures and sustain the impact of debt repayment plans
as well as interests. China has capital to invest, trade empowerments to be created
and a new Silk Road to be implemented, with Greece being one of the terminals where
to channel Beijing's global investments. In 2015, the Chinese giant Cosco bought most
of the Piraeus port for a total of 368.5 million Euros, 280 million of which were
cashed in Athens for 51% of the port area and the other 88 million will be delivered
after five years for the acquisition of a further 6%, but only for completed
compulsory infrastructure investments. On June 17, with reference to the port of
Piraeus, Cosco, the Piraeus port authority, and the port of Shanghai concluded an
agreement that provides for a great collaboration between the Chinese and the Greek
ports, effectively transforming Piraeus in a freight hub from the gigantic port of
the Far East.
China's interests in Greece are several and multi-faceted, and the crisis can only
help investments by lowering their costs. The Beijing funds are interested in
strategic sectors of the Greek economy, which – for Chinese companies – are very
attractive assets, by reason of the weak local competition due to the devastation of
the Greek state system and the impoverishment of local entrepreneurship. Beijing's
interests span from boating, tourism, road and port networks to real estate –
anywhere big Chinese companies and funds from the central state can find a place to
become sector leaders.
Dalian Wanda, one of the Chinese investment giants, is
interested in many areas of the Greek economy, and is ready to invest in less
strategic, but equally profitable sectors such as football. The same fund owns a
third of Atletico Madrid.
The U.S. "deep state" – of which the CIA is an integral part – is an open secret now
and the Phoenix Program (assassinations, death squads, torture, mass detentions,
exploitation of information) has been its means of controlling populations.
Consequently, knowing the deep state's methods is the only hope of building a
democratic opposition to the deep state and to restore as much as possible the
Constitutional system we had in previous centuries, as imperfect as it was.
douglas valentine has apparently tied the historical knot between today's
assassinations, death squads, torture, mass detentions, exploitation of information and
that of vietnam. that's important. the fact that it's been going on for so long points
to it's structural significance : it's built-in to the us system at this point, and will
remain so, unless and until it's 'built-out' by ordinary americans, ourselves.
the present structure is rotten, incapable of reform
Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten
nothing." Reportedly, that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer,
which stated, in the original language: Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni
rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English:
"Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn
anything."
I was equally pessimistic about Saudi A. for years, but have
become somewhat doubtful now.
Beijing and Riyadh have a long-running (hidden) strategic partnership, with the
Saudis buying Chinese missiles, China investing, and both (together with Russia)
engineering the fall of the oil price in 2014.
Europe and Russia don't want the kingdom to implode, as this would destabilize the
entire region, uproot millions more and probably cause jihadis everywhere to run amok.
China & other Asian states don't want oil to rise dramatically. The only major power
which wouldn't be affected by the turmoil, and would benefit from a higher oil price, is
the US.
If both China/ Russia and Europe support MbS in his attempts to reform the country,
shouldn't this be enough for him to have a chance of success? I sure hope so, though
it's hard to tell. At the very least we should see some serious efforts to modernize KSA
society and economy.
Greece seems to be increasingly swarming with Chinese tourists. The country has
basically nothing but logistics and tourism to offer, and China has seized the crisis
opportunity to get a foot in the European door. A bit vulture fund style I guess, but
Athens had little choice, and Tsipras & colleagues had this planned long before coming
to power imo.
...if Iran will not reply to the new idiot king via more support for the houthi.
What support for the Houthi? You give too much credence to the MSM and their sources
in Washington and you're expecting other cultures to be as arrogant, ignorant and stupid
as the American one.
Thanks to james, karlof1, ben, jfl et al for broadening the spectrum of a torture
discussion; and fast freddy for making sure that the $$$ factor isn't overlooked...
I threw that in because the torturers have control over the range and mix of
techniques to be used. Good Cop / Bad Cop is a successful and evergreen interrogation
style. And in a TC Environment, with psychiatrists and psychologists on the team, it's
possible that the geniuses have developed a production-line method of fast-tracking and
exploiting the onset of Stockholm Syndrome to enhance the Good Cop / Bad Cop experience.
Beijing and Riyadh have a long-running (hidden) strategic partnership, with the
Saudis ... [and chinese] ... both (together with Russia) engineering the fall of the
oil price in 2014.
have you got any proof at all, even speculation as to why, the russians engineered the
fall of the oil price in 2014? i think it was the saudis and us who engineered the fall
of the oil price in 2014, to the detriment of russia.
If both China/ Russia and Europe support MbS in his attempts to reform the country,
shouldn't this be enough for him to have a chance of success?
The country has basically nothing but ... [oil] ... to offer, and China has seized the
crisis opportunity to get a foot in the ... [middle eastern oilpatch] ... door. A bit
vulture fund style I guess, but ... [riyadh] ... had little choice, ... [mbs] &
colleagues had [not had] this planned ... before coming to power, imo.
Who are the idiots here....
The United States has told Turkey it will take back weapons supplied to the Kurdish YPG
militia in northern Syria after the defeat of Islamic State, Ankara said on Thursday,
seeking to address Turkish concerns about arming Kurds on its border.
Turkish defense
ministry sources said U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis also promised his Turkish
counterpart to provide a monthly list of weapons handed to the YPG, saying the first
inventory had already been sent to Ankara.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey-usa-idUSKBN19D10J
It beggars belief that an arrangement like this could be thought about, let alone work.
The US to the Kurds 'you fight and die for our objectives, then we throw you under the
bus' the Kurds 'OK boss'. This is what US policy in the Middle East consists of. You
could not make it up.
Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign
government since the Second World War. (* indicates successful ouster of a
government)
stile (noun) an arrangement of steps that allows people but not animals to
climb over a fence or wall
What does it have to do with substance?
More seriously, I do not see the Canadian exercise in rhetoric as brainwashing. Kids
should know that there is no connection between the validity of an argument and the
polish in its presentation. OTOH, this is information that should be withheld from the
future sheeple, so it should be restricted to special programs for the future helpers of
the ruling class.
It's pretty obvious that Trump is picking his friends in the ME based on his attitude
towards Iran and a seeming desire to do Israel's bidding. For all his faults Obama chose
to keep Israel at arm's length and ramrodded a nuclear deal with Iran that was intended
to bring that country in from the cold and open opportunities for commerce that had been
shut down by years of sanctions.
In his zeal to undo all of Obama's initiatives Trump
has placed the US in an intractable position in the ME. The scope of his long term plans
will become more evident as the IS is driven out of Raqqa and Mosul. A lot of posters
have postulated that he intends to grab a chunk of eastern Syria and western Iraq and
engineer the geography so that Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon is minimized. They
are very likely right.
Because of his problems at home Trump has delegated his ME and other foreign policy
to his generals. It's probably a good thing that there are old Pentagon hands that deal
with reality and recognize that there's only so much the US can do given the
circumstances. It's not so long ago that the "surge" in Iraq resulted in stop-loss
reenlistment and numerous deployments of state reserves that must have come as the
rudest of shocks to enlistees who thought they were joining to go play with tanks at
some base every other weekend. These Pentagon folks realize that to fully meet the
expectations of the Saudis and Israelis they would have to instigate a buildup that
would mirror those of the two Iraq Wars. With the possibility of hostilities in the far
western Pacific the options for the ME aren't very appealing. The American people don't
give a fuck about Syria and might get irate if they see the country moving towards war.
The saving grace might be Mueller and his posse of investigators. They are going to
forensically break down any dealings that Trump and Kushner had with foreign entities
before and during the presidential campaign. There may be reasons for transition type
meetings with foreign diplomats but the meetings with bankers and businessmen that were
so blithely left off the required documentation when applying for security clearances
will come under full scrutiny in a very focused way. This focus on his foreign dealings
is apparently what has been causing Trump to act in such an unhinged fashion. He's too
frazzled by his domestic problems to concentrate on his foreign policy. That's because
he's corrupt and it's going to be fully exposed.
if his dodgy business dealings abroad weren't enough the emoluments clause is waiting
to bite him in the ass. There are already several lawsuits in the works and more to
come. His brazen milking of his position will be the end of him if the Russian
connection isn't. Other presidents would at least wait till their terms were over to
cash in on on multi-million dollar book deals and 400 grand speeches. With the sole
exception of Jimmy Carter. Trump couldn't wait even months before he started leveraging
his position for personal gain.
But still the focus of this and most threads is what a despicable evil man Obama was
and how Trump's shortcomings all have their roots in the can of worms left by the
previous administrations. Well, Obama is gone now and so is Clinton and the Chief
Executive has the power to set things right. It ain't happening and it's time to put
responsibility where it belongs. Trump's made Iran the new Public Enemy #1 and speaks of
cancelling the nuclear deal. He's called climate change a hoax and and pulled out of the
Paris Accord. He's taking away healthcare for the hoi polloi because it was Obama that
provided it. He's undone the Cuba initiative. The joke in DC is that he's going to hunt
down the Thanksgiving turkeys that Obama pardoned and kill them. But still whenever the
subject of American impropriety rises the peanut gallery starts in with how it was all
Obama and Trump's not so bad. Well, guess what sport fans, Trump is a crooked son of a
bitch who wants to run a kleptocracy and can't understand why all these people are
gunning for him. He will find out though when Flynn starts to testify. Because that
motherfucker has flipped. Flynn is the key and will bring down the whole rotten
structure.
ben 57
That was a good point that Putin raised with Kelly in her interview. It's one thing
to point a finger at any Russian affects on elections when the US does it on such a
massive scale. I wish he would release a white paper documenting this especially US
efforts in Ukraine as well as Russia (to include NED and IRI).
@85
Torture and suffering is the crucial and integral part of Christianity.
Do you realize that the cross is a torture device?
And that the word 'passion' in Passion of Christ means a suffering, not a lust or a
drive?
Not to mention the Inquisition....
Regarding torture. It's been persistently reported in booklength works for more than a
decade that the purpose is not to elicit information. This makes sense. Really, can you
imagine that so many people have such valuable info? Rather, we're told that they're
tortured to see if they can be made to confess to falsity-- that is, as a way to further
the technology of breaking people down. Also, sometimes individuals can be made into
"split personalities"-- that is, they can be programmed to commit acts not of their own
volition, upon receiving a stimulus-- like Sirhan Sirhan or like the 1962 version of the
Manchurian Candidate with Laurence Harvey.
Ah, who knows what evil can lurk in the
minds of oligarchs and their lackeys? It makes me feel unclean to contemplate it.
Sean Hannity spoke about the murder of late Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth
Rich during his Thursday radio program, ending a temporary hiatus from the topic.
Hannity brought up the murder while speculating about leaks of damaging DNC emails that he
believes may have come from "dissatisfied, disgruntled" staffers within the group.
"My guess is there are a lot of angry, disgruntled, whistleblowing truth tellers within the DNC
that were there that saw the collusion, that saw that the fix was in against Bernie Sanders, that
saw that there was corruption at the highest levels," Hannity said on his nationally-syndicated
radio program.
Released emails via Wikileaks revealed an effort from top officials of the DNC to undermine the
campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during the primary campaign despite the organization
insistence it was neutral in the race.
"Now I don't know anything about Seth Rich in this sense. I don't have any information about why
he was murdered except that it was suspicious," Hannity continued. "And suspicious meaning it
wasn't a robbery as they've claimed but otherwise why would you not steal his wallet, his phone,
his necklace, his jewelry and watch and everything else."
Nuclear weapons changes the situation and that makes all those Thucydides Trap considerations pretty
shaky indeed... Displacement of the British empire by the USA is another counterexample.
What is Thucydides's Trap, and how does it inform U.S.-China relations in the 21st century?
The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War? Harold Kingsberg , Reader
Updated Oct 20, 2015 · Upvoted by
Marc Bodnick , Former Stanford
PhD student in Politics The Thucydides Trap is a term coined by Graham T. Allison, a Harvard professor
and recognized US national security and defense policy expert. The concept itself comes from, fittingly,
Thucydides, a Greek historian from about 2400 years ago who wrote a book entitled The History
of the Peloponnesian War , generally regarded as the first work of history as we'd recognize
it.[1] Thucydides argued that the cause of the Peloponnesian War was "the growth of Athenian power
and the fear which this caused in Sparta." In other words, as one power rises, an already established
power gets nervous and gears up for war, with this devolving into a vicious cycle that eventually
results in war.
Now, if we apply the Thucydides Trap to the US-China relationship, China is the counterpart of Athens,
the US is the counterpart of Sparta, and there's going to inevitably be war between the two. And
certainly, there are people in the US who feel that the rise of China is a direct threat to the dominance
of the US and we should all gear up for war because... well, mostly yellow peril.
Thirty years ago, there was another East Asian power on the rapid economic rise. It owned a massive
chunk of US debt, it was buying up US property left, right and center, it had a well-funded military
and a history of using it. Of course, as Japan is in its third Lost Decade, it's fairly clear to
see that Japan's meteoric rise came crashing to a halt, and most of the comments made about how the
Japanese would eat the US' lunch now seem dated in the extreme. Which is to say that the Thucydides
Trap requires the continued rise of the emerging power. It is not difficult to imagine China
continuing to rise; however, it is also not difficult to imagine China stalling out for a few years.
It is this latter possibility that makes the Thucydides Trap eminently avoidable.
China's economy has boomed in a frankly unparalleled way since Deng Xiaoping introduced the socialist
market economy. Much of this growth has been genuine. Some of it has been anything but. The latter
is most evidently seen in China's ghost cities, which the government keeps erecting. Ordos, in Inner
Mongolia, is probably the most famous of these, but the basic problem is that the city was erected
with the idea that people would flock to it and that didn't happen.[2] This constitutes a pretty
stunning waste of resources, and it's not a tenable strategy for long-term growth. Similarly, when
the Shanghai Stock Exchange tanked in August of 2015, the Chinese government's management of the
situation was to pour money into it – again, not a viable strategy for maintaining a robust market
economy in the long-term. It's clear that the Chinese government has done something right these past
few decades, but it's increasingly unclear if the Chinese government can continue that record of
success for very much longer.
There's also another problem China's looking at that makes the parallel to Japan even more pronounced:
an aging population. China's attempts at controlling demography have been deeply problematic and
left it with serious issues. Mao Zedong's attempts to boost the population beyond sustainable levels
was overly successful and led to problems, but the subsequent walking back of Mao's demography with
the One Child Policy has led to a gender imbalance and a smaller younger generation than the older
one. This is the exact opposite of what you want in an age pyramid, because the elderly produce less
than do young adults, and consume considerably more health care (among other things). This is a problem
that Japan has been trying to figure out for years, and they've had no success. Singapore has had
issues reversing their own highly successful demographic programs. China may figure out how to crack
the tough nut, but it's not going to have an easy time of it.
This is all very well-known to the people at the helm of American foreign policy, so it's quite unlikely
that they're going to fall into the Thucydides Trap, simply because they're going to be a little
leery of China's continued rapid growth. Yes, the IMF cites China as having a larger economy (based
on GDP PPP) than the US', but when you look at it per capita, China lags Turkmenistan. It's therefore
a country still punching well below its weight. Now, it's true that if China continues to
rise, it may yet get the US nervous – but most economists predict a slowdown in China, so we're a
ways from that happening, anyway. Most of the people worrying about China's rise would worry about
any Asian country doing well, even an ally's.
However, the slowdown in the Chinese economy does cause issues of its own. Like many other governments
facing economic worries, the Chinese government has engaged in some nationalist saber-rattling and
expansionism in recent years. Combine this with Japan's recent law allowing the JSDF to be deployed
away from Japan, and Japan being a key US ally, and you're looking at a very uncomfortable situation.
The majority of analysts don't expect a war between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diayou Islands,
but then, most didn't expect a war between the UK and Argentina over the Falklands, either.[3] So
long as it all remains just talk, this is fine, but if either side actually does something,
that could destabilize quickly, and the US isn't about to hang Japan out to dry. This is known by
all parties, and seeing as how war would be terrible for everyone's bottom line, everyone's
generally trying to avoid it while still getting a little bump in the polls all the same. This isn't
so much the Thucydides Trap so much as it is a rough analogue of what's going in with Russia and
Ukraine or what happened with Russia and Georgia back in 2008. Thus, in many ways, the continued
rise of China is a preferable outcome from the perspective of a US foreign policy analyst.[4] Now,
you can argue that this is another manifestation of Thucydides' Trap, but frankly, I don't think
that doing so is a valuable exercise. Thucydides was specifically referring to the continuing rise
of one country causing another to react with great hostility, and this paragraph does not describe
that in the slightest.
And even ignoring all of the above, Thucydides lived 2400 years ago and some of the facts on the
ground have changed. We spent forty years following the Second World War of the rising power not
getting into a big fight with the established one,[5] the US and the UK didn't go to war during
the early twentieth century and neither did the US and Japan in the back half of the twentieth century.
I'm not saying that Thucydides has stopped being accurate altogether, but it was always a massive
generalization and it seems to be holding less and less true the longer the Long Peace goes. The
bottom line is that Daniel Defoe's more applicable than Thucydides here: the only things certain
in life are death and taxes.
[1] Yes, Herodotus is called the "Father of History," but he tended to attribute events to the wills
of specific gods. Thucydides kept everything grounded in the human sphere, although precisely how
much of the History is dead accurate and how much he invented is a matter of some controversy.
His records of speeches – for example, Pericles' funeral oration and the Melian dialogue – are generally
viewed with a little bit of suspicion.
[2] Alternatively, one can take the view that the city was built to prop up the construction industry,
but I tend to doubt that. In any event, here's a link to an article about the deserted city:
Welcome to The World's Largest Ghost City: Ordos, China
[3] And remember, that was another case of a country whose growth rate had stalled but good going
up against an established power.
[4] It would also be preferable if Japan could also get its internal issues sorted for the same reason.
[5] Not counting proxy conflicts, of course. There were US-USSR dust-ups, but no direct fighting
between the two.
Thucydides's
Trap is a fake notion... This is unproven hypothesis. for example GB lost the power to the USA without
major war between them.
The Thucydides Trap is a term coined by Graham T. Allison, a Harvard professor and recognized US
national security and defense policy expert. The concept itself comes from, fittingly, Thucydides, a
Greek historian from about 2400 years ago who wrote a book entitled The History of the Peloponnesian
War, generally regarded as the first work of history as we'd recognize it.[1] Thucydides argued that
the cause of the Peloponnesian War was "the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused
in Sparta." In other words, as one power rises, an already established power gets nervous and gears
up for war, with this devolving into a vicious cycle that eventually results in war.
America's Collision Course With China
By JUDITH SHAPIRO
EVERYTHING UNDER THE HEAVENS
How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power By Howard W. French
DESTINED FOR WAR
Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
By Graham Allison
The Chinese superpower has arrived. Could America's failure to grasp this reality pull the
United States and China into war? Here are two books that warn of that serious possibility. Howard
W. French's "Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power"
does so through a deep historical and cultural study of the meaning of China's rise from the point
of view of the Chinese themselves. Graham Allison's "Destined for War: Can American and China
Escape Thucydides's Trap?" makes his arguments through historical case studies that illuminate
the pressure toward military confrontation when a rising power challenges a dominant one. Both
books urge us to be ready for a radically different world order, one in which China presides over
Asia, even as Chinese politicians tell a public story about "peaceful rise." The books argue persuasively
that adjusting to this global power shift will require great skill on both sides if conflagration
is to be avoided.
French says in his exhaustively researched and fascinating account of geopolitics, China style,
that the Chinese era is upon us. But, he asks, "How will the coming China-driven world look?"
To what extent will China support the international order that emerged when it was suffering humiliation
at the hands of foreign powers? What are the drivers and motivations for the new ways China projects
its power? How best should its neighbors and its rival North American superpower respond?
French, a former reporter for The Washington Post and The New York Times, argues that China's
historical and cultural legacy governs its conduct of international relations, a legacy that sits
uncomfortably with the Western notions of equality and noninterference among states. China's relations
with its neighbors in Japan and Southeast Asia were for millenniums governed by the concept of
tian xia, which held that everything "under the heavens" belonged to the empire. A superior civilization
demanded deference and tribute from vassal neighbors and did not hesitate to use military force.
China's testy relationship with Vietnam became fraught whenever a Vietnamese leader dared to demand
equal footing with a Chinese emperor; the Japanese claim to divine origins was unacceptable.
When China lost its regional dominance at the hands of colonial powers and invading armies,
it saw the situation as temporary. The struggle in the East China Sea over the Senkaku Islands
claimed by Japan since 1895, for example, has long been a sore point in Sino-Japanese relations.
But the reform-era strongman Deng Xiaoping advised China to "hide our capacities and bide our
time" on this and many other issues. Hostility between China and Japan simmers in disputes over
hierarchy, wartime apology and historical narrative, with the two "in a situation resembling galaxies
locked in each other's gravitational fields, destined to collide repeatedly only to sail past
each other after wreaking their damage." French shows convincingly that China's goal is now to
displace the American barbarians and correct historic humiliations imposed by those who dethroned
China from its rightful position at the center of the world.
China's recent spectacular land grab in the South China Sea is a fait accompli, given China's
superior power in the area and its assertion that the region is a core national interest. Arbitrators
for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea issued a 500-plus-page decision against
China and in favor of the Philippines in a dispute over the definitions of islands versus rock
formations; they concluded that Chinese arguments had no legal basis. But as French explains in
sobering detail, China has unilaterally determined to claim much of the sea as its own. The country
rejected the arbitration tribunal, knowing that its growing surface naval power and nuclear submarine
capability support a highly uneven contest. Oil rigs have been established in contested waters,
while artificial "islands" constructed from coral reefs are serving as military bases just miles
from the Southeast Asian coastline. Similarly, China's projection of economic might through the
new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and One Belt, One Road initiative, which intends to bind
a huge swath of Asia to China economically via new land infrastructure and consolidated control
of the seas, generates "a kind of fatalism or resignation about the futility of trying to defy
it." ...
"China's relations with its neighbors in Japan and Southeast Asia
were for millenniums governed by the concept of tian xia,
which held that everything "under the heavens" belonged to the empire."
Howard French, a former reporter for The Washington Post and The New York Times, argues that China's
historical and cultural legacy governs its conduct of international relations, a legacy that sits
uncomfortably with the Western notions of equality and noninterference among states. China's relations
with its neighbors in Japan and Southeast Asia were for millenniums governed by the concept of
tian xia, which held that everything "under the heavens" belonged to the empire....
These are dark times for free marketeers. Voters are only
lukewarm about the virtues of capitalism; the Grenfell
disaster is widely regarded as showing the case for greater
regulation; and, as Sam Bowman says, even the Tories "have
totally failed to make a broad-brush case for free markets."
I share some of their disquiet. Flawed as they are,
markets have virtues as selection and information-aggregation
mechanisms.
What, then, can be done to strengthen the case for
markets?
There's one thing that's crucial – equality of power. For
free markets to have public acceptance, the worst-off must
have bargaining power. Without this, "free" markets merely
become a device for exploitation.
Imagine, for example, that we had overfull employment
and/or high out-of-work benefits. Workers would then be able
to reject low wages and bad working conditions. Market forces
would then deliver higher wages and good, safer, conditions
simply because employers that didn't offer these wouldn't
have any workers. Equally – though it's harder to imagine –
if we had an abundance of housing, landlords who offered
shoddy or dangerous accommodation would either have to
refurbish their property to acceptable standards or suffer a
lack of tenants.
We wouldn't, therefore need "red tape." The market would
raise working and living standards.
We don't need thought experiments to see this. We have
empirical evidence too.
Philippe Aghion and colleagues have shown that there's a
negative correlation across countries between unions density
and minimum wage laws. Countries with strong unions have less
stringent minimum wage laws – because greater bargaining
power reduces the need for such laws. Remember that the UK
adopted minimum wages in the 1990s, when unions had been
emasculated. In the 60s and 70s, when unions were strong, the
market raised wages.
Also, there is a negative correlation across developed
countries between inequality (as measured, imperfectly, by
Gini coefficients) and business freedom. Egalitarian Denmark
and Sweden, for example, score better on the Heritage
Foundation's index of freedom than the unequal US. There's a
simple reason for this. Working people want what they regard
as a fair deal. If they can't get it through bargaining in
free markets, they'll seek it through politics and
regulation.
The inference here is, for me, obvious. If you are serious
about wanting free markets you must put in place the
conditions which are necessary for them – namely, greater
bargaining power for tenants, customers and workers. This
requires not just strong anti-monopoly policies but also
policies such as a high citizens income, full employment and
mass housebuilding.
In short, free markets require egalitarian policies. Free
marketeers who don't support these are not the friends of
freedom at all, but are merely shills for exploiters.
"Egalitarian Denmark and Sweden, for example, score better on
the Heritage Foundation's index of freedom than the unequal
US. There's a simple reason for this. Working people want
what they regard as a fair deal. If they can't get it through
bargaining in free markets, they'll seek it through politics
and regulation."
Hillary Clinton famously said "we're not
Denmark" to distinguish herself from the "unserious" Bernie
Sanders in the primary debates.
She was trying to appeal to meritocratic Democrats and
Republicans. As Josh Marshall wrote of yesterday's special
election:
"The district is relatively diverse for a GOP district and
educated and affluent. In other words, it's made up of just
the kind of Republicans who proved most resistant to Trump."
Hillary was trying to appeal to the affluent and
indoctrinated and educated meritocrats. The "non-deploreables."
And she lost. Corbyn running on an anti-austerity platform
and a manifesto that pointed more in the direction of Denmark
pulled off a biggest swing in votes since 1945.
Of course the center left, PGL and Krugman were silent
about Corbyn's great showing and complained about people who
wanted to discuss it. But it's okay to discuss the
disappointing outcome in yesterday's special election.
Free markets need "a comprehensive socialization of
investment":
"In some other respects the foregoing theory
is moderately conservative in its implications. For whilst it
indicates the vital importance of establishing certain
central controls in matters which are now left in the main to
individual initiative, there are wide fields of activity
which are unaffected. The State will have to exercise a
guiding influence on the propensity to consume partly through
its scheme of taxation, partly by fixing the rate of
interest, and partly, perhaps, in other ways. Furthermore, it
seems unlikely that the influence of banking policy on the
rate of interest will be sufficient by itself to determine an
optimum rate of investment. I conceive, therefore, that a
somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove
the only means of securing an approximation to full
employment; though this need not exclude all manner of
compromises and of devices by which public authority will
co-operate with private initiative. But beyond this no
obvious case is made out for a system of State Socialism
which would embrace most of the economic life of the
community. It is not the ownership of the instruments of
production which it is important for the State to assume. If
the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of
resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic
rate of reward to those who own them, it will have
accomplished all that is necessary. Moreover, the necessary
measures of socialisation can be introduced gradually and
without a break in the general traditions of society"
Caution
The path to Keynesian futures turned out to have a long back
traverse
From 1973 to 2008 and beyond
As yet we have not moved forward
but at least the power
driving the back traverse is over
We can recommence the advance toward greater socialization of
net investment
@Sam J. "...In the end, it is the American people who decide whether Israel is to be or not
to be a vital American ally and friend..."
To make informed decisions you have to have information. The American people don't have that.
So they really haven't made a decision at all. They've been tricked into doing things that are
covered up in lies. The American people are responsible even if they are being manipulated by
the MSM.
Too many Americans are woefully ignorant about the world, particularly about the extent that
Jewish interests have manipulated so many aspects of our government and our culture. If
Softpanorama
