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Dec 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Relotius, meanwhile, has "gone underground," according to the Guardian, returning several awards for his work while being stripped of others, such as CNN's two Journalist of the Year awards. A German publication also stripped the journalist of a similar accolade.
At least 14 articles by Relotius for Der Spiegel were falsified , according to Steffen Klusmann, its editor-in-chief. They include an award-winning piece about a Syrian boy called Mouwiya who believed his anti-government graffiti had triggered the civil war. Relotius alleged he had interviewed the boy via WhatsApp .
The magazine – a prestigious weekly – is investigating if the interview took place and whether the boy exists. Relotius won his fourth German reporter prize this month with a story headlined "Child's Play".
Klusmann admitted the publication still had no idea how many articles were affected. On Thursday it was revealed that parts of an interview with a 95-year-old Nazi resistance fighter in the US were fabricated. - The Guardian
According to Relotius' Der Spiegel colleague Juan Moreno - who busted Relotius after conducting his own research after his bosses failed to listen to his doubts , released a video in which he attempted to describe how Relotius got away with his fabrications.
"He was the superstar of German journalism if one's honest, and if his stories had been true, that would have been fully justified to say so, but they were not," said Moreno. "At the start it was the small mistakes, things that seemed too hard to believe that made me suspicious."
In addition to having several awards stripped from him, the 33-year-old Relotius now faces embezzlement charges for allegedly soliciting donations for Syrian orphans from readers "with any proceeds going to his personal account," according to the BBC . On Thursday, Relotius denied the accusations.
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
PossumBilly , 3 Jun 2018 23:25
This message is clear and concise. It is however never going to be heard beyond the 'Guardian'.The MSM are hardly going to publish this article, nor are they going to reference it, why should they? It goes against everything they have been fighting for and the tin ear of their readership are unwilling to change teir views.
The only thing that they understand is money and the concentration of wealth. This misonception as Dennis So far this has been handed to them on a plate, the taxation system has enabled them to manipulate an multiply their earnings. So much of money the has nothing to do with adding value to this countries economy but is speculative in nature based on financial and overseas instruments.
No is the time for our government to take the lead and start as the Victorian ALP have done and invest in people and jobs on the back of strategic investment. It is a fallacy that governments don't create jobs they, through their policies do just that.
Friends of mine who make a living out of dealing both in stock and wealth creating schemes have no loyalty to this country, they are self motivated and libertarian in persuasion. "Government should get out of the way!" This is nothing short of scandalous.
Unless we stand up for our rights and a civil society that provides adequate provision for fair and balanced policy making,xwe will continue until we will see an implosion. History is littered with examples of revolution based on the kind of inequality we are seeing happen in this country. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
MajorMalaise , 3 Jun 2018 23:44
A couple of thoughts - in no particular order.When governments like the LNP (driven as it is by its ideology of greed, the IPA manifesto and Gina Rinehart's idea of what Australia should look like [and how little she should pay to pillage "communally owned" assets to enrich herself beyond imagination - she has no greater claim over the Pilbara than any other Australian, but like all who live by the ethos of greed, she thinks she should get it all for nothing]).
When the LNP talk about "small government" and "slashing red tape" it is politician-speak for small government and NO red tape for the rich. What it also means is much more government and red tape for the poor and vulnerable - as we would expect, the rich and powerful, who really dictate economic and social policy in this country enlist willing governments to enact measures that suppress the lower classes. It is not quite calling out the military (as Hawke did during the pilot's strike at the insistence of the corpulent Ables - one act for which I will always despise Hawke), but it has the same result by more surreptitious, lasting and egregious means.
And one of the lasting legacies of the philosophies of neo-liberalism, from which the Hanson's of the world "suck their oxygen" is that the political and corporate dialogue of the last 30 or so years has pushed the notion of self-entitlement and vilification of the poor and vulnerable further down the economic ladder. So now, we have countless Australians on reasonable incomes who, like the rich, are convinced that all of our social and economic ills can be rectified if we stop giving handouts to the bludgers, the malingerers, the disabled and the indigenous - the neo-liberal rhetoric is now so widespread that it is easier than ever for the vulnerable to be attacked and for many, that is seen as absolutely necessary. It is the false US-sourced notion that if you are poor, it is because you deserve to be and if I am rich - it isn't luck or inheritance - it is because I deserve it. This world-view makes it so much easier to attack the vulnerable as receiving way to much to sit at home and bludge.
Want to forget the now disgraced CEO of Australia Post who bought a Sydney mansion for $22 million and now wants to sell it for $40 million - tax free I might add. He is entitled to that wealth enhancement. But someone on the dole smokes a spliff now and then and we think they should lose their entitlements to an income that doesn't even get them up to the poverty line (but they should be grateful for that pittance). Want to forget the CEO's who pretentiously do their "sleeping rough" for a night and proclaim their empathy for the homeless who would shriek at paying more tax to genuinely fund programmes to help the down and outs. No problem - just embrace the selfish and greedy neo-liberalism philosophy.
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Dec 02, 2018 | www.salon.com
The esteemed filmmaker observed how the vapid trickle-down culture of the plutocracy could be the end of us all
This article was co-produced with Original Thinkers , an annual ideas festival in Telluride, Colorado that brings speakers, art and filmmakers together to create new paradigms.It is ironic that, as the gulf between rich and poor reaches record levels, the language of the underclass has become infected with the culture and mores of the rich . Twenty years ago, English began to absorb and normalize verbal markers of wealth, consumption and status, evidenced by the mainstreaming of luxury brands like Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton and their appearance in pop culture and media. Reality TV went from nonexistent in the 1970s to one of the most popular television genres in the 2000s, much of it homed in on the lifestyles and lives of the rich -- culminating in a billionaire, reality-TV star president. Social media in the late 2000s and 2010s seems to have exacerbated a cultural normalization of narcissism , an obsession with self-image, and a propensity for conspicuous consumption. Few of us are rich, but we all aspire to appear that way on Instagram.
00:00 00:00 In the past twenty-five years, documentarian and photograph Lauren Greenfield has been documenting this profound shift in culture, as the vapid materialism of the plutocracy has trickled down to the rest of us. Greenfield, who was once named "America's foremost visual chronicler of the plutocracy" by the New York Times, is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker and photographer. Greenfield has experience documenting the lifestyles of the rich and (in)famous: her much-lauded 2012 documentary, " The Queen of Versailles ," followed the billionaire Siegel family during their quest to build the largest house in the United States. Her unflinchingly honest depiction of their bleak existence led to patriarch David Siegel filing a lawsuit against the filmmakers for defamation, which increased publicity to the film and which the Siegels lost handily.
Greenfield's latest opus, " Generation Wealth ," is an attempt to understand the intricacies of the trickle-down culture of the wealthy. Simultaneously an exhibition, monograph and film , Greenfield's camera follows not just the wealthy, but many folks who are middle- or working-class and yet who have absorbed the narrative and values of the elite in their quest to be thin, forever beautiful, and image- and luxury-obsessed. The film is unflinching in a way that is occasionally macabre: The on-screen depiction of plastic surgery is a grisly counterpoint to the pristine resorts, lifestyles and houses of the well-heeled. "This movie is neither trickle-down treat nor bacchanal guised as bromide, but rather an interrogation of an era defined by an obsession with wealth," wrote Eileen G'Sell in Salon's review .
I interviewed Lauren Greenfield at the Original Thinkers Festival in Telluride, Colorado. A video from this interview can be viewed here ; the print version has been condensed and edited.
Keith Spencer: " Generation Wealth " is such a fascinating [book and film] project, and it's so rich. For those who may not know about it, how would you describe the overall project? I know it took 25 years of work?
Advertisement:Lauren Greenfield : I started looking back at my photography since the early nineties and seeing that, in a way, all of the stories that I had been doing -- about consumerism and body image and fame and celebrity and the economic crisis -- that in a way they were connected. And I decided to do an archeological dig in my own work and look at the pictures as evidence of how we had changed as a culture.
And what I came to was that they revealed a kind of fundamental shift in the American dream, that we had gone from a dream that prized hard work and frugality and discipline, to a culture that elevated bling and celebrity and narcissism.
Interesting. And like you said, it's a global phenomenon, right? I mean, the pictures and the shots in the film were taken are all over the planet, right?
Yeah, I started in L[os Angeles] in the nineties, but even when I was doing the work in L.A., I felt like [I] was more looking at L.A. as the extreme manifestation of how you see the influence of the popular culture. In a way you are closest to the flame there.
Advertisement:But then I found that other people saw [that culture] as just L.A., so I kind of made it my mission to first go across the country and then go to different places in the world to show how we were exporting these values -- exporting this culture with global media, with the Internet, with social media, with branding and international branding. In "Generation Wealth," I really tried to show this global virus that is consumerism.
And that's something that I thought was so interesting about the film, was that the goods and the brands and the imagery look the same whether they were in Hong Kong or Moscow or Los Angeles or Orlando. It was like there's this culture that exists everywhere. It's so interesting how something like that is transmitted everywhere, the same idea, the same cultural values.
Yeah, I was really looking at how our culture, international culture in a way is being homogenized by these influences of corporations and globalism and media. In my work, I'm really looking for the similarities in values and influence and behavior in people who are really, really different.
And that really came together for me during the economic crisis. Because from L.A., from middle class to working class, to billionaires in Florida ... to the crash in Dubai , to Iceland to Ireland , I was seeing similar consequences from similar behavior.
And the interconnected financial system was one more kind of homogenizing factor. And so that's what I was really interested in looking at. [Cultural critic] Chris Hedges speaks throughout the movie and at the end he says this comment, which I really love, about how authentic culture is being destroyed by the values of corporate capitalism. And that it's authentic culture that actually teaches us who we are and where we came from.
Advertisement:And so in a way we lose our identities when we lose that. And I think we see, especially with young people, how identity is so connected to brands and what you have and what you wear and what you buy.
Right. And that's one of the other interesting threads through the film, is just that in almost every subject's case -- because you followed a lot of them for a long time through their lives or pick up at different points in their life -- they all seem to sort of admit that either the money itself or the things that they bought with the money never made them happy. But yet at the same time, what I thought was so funny was some of them just seemed like they couldn't quit the lifestyle, like especially the German hedge fund manager.
Yeah. That's exactly right. For me, I realized it was really about addiction and it wasn't about the money -- in the [film], you see that wealth is not just money, but all the things that give you value. And so you see people searching for beauty and youth and fame and image. But it's like addiction in the sense that you think it's going to bring you something that it doesn't.
[In] a way, all of the subjects are kind of looking to fill a void or an emptiness that can't be filled by that thing . [You] just stay on that gold plated hamster wheel... in the metaphor of addiction, the only way to stop is when you hit rock bottom. And so we see a lot of crashes, both collective and individual in the film.
Speaking of addiction -- you ended up bringing in and talking about your own family too, both your mother and your children. Which I was not expecting, because before I saw "Generation Wealth" I'd seen "The Queen of Versailles," which you don't really bring yourself in that one much at all. Did you think while you were making it that you were going to end up turning the camera around on yourself and your family?
Advertisement:No, it kind of evolved. I started thinking I would be in it in some way as a kind of narrator, thinking mostly my voice, not physically in it, which was really scary to me in the beginning. But I felt like I was kind of the connective tissue and my journey was the connective tissue between these subjects.
I've always tried to go in really non-judgmentally, and show phenomena and people in situations that I think speak to the larger culture and are part of mainstream culture and influence. So I want people to see themselves in the characters, like in "Queen of Versailles."
And so I felt like it was also important to make the point that we're all complicit and that I'm not outside of it. And [to] look at how I'm also affected by these influences.
And it kind of emerged organically. I was talking to Florian -- the German Hedge Fund banker -- who is a very flamboyant character in the film. Makes $800,000,000, loses it all and becomes a truth-teller for how [money] doesn't bring you what you think it will.
And he challenged me at a certain point, and said, "How can a hundred-hour work week not affect your relationship with anything that matters?" And he kind of looks at me. And it forced me to kind of think about -- you know, there I was in Germany on a three week trip on my way to Iceland, two kids at home that I'm trying to connect with on FaceTime. It made me think about my own addiction to my work.
Advertisement:There's this great scene in the movie where your son Gabriel talks about how his older brother got a perfect score on the ACT and how he's just afraid that he'll never be able to live up to that and he'll never be able to go to Harvard like his parents and brother. And it was amazing because it was like, before the camera was focused on all these rich kids -- but they had similar anxieties to your son.
Yeah. And I think that this cycle of wanting more manifests in all different ways. I don't think that anybody can say they're outside of it. It's kind of like, I always think about modernism in a way, being kind of a justifiable luxury for [a] sophisticated or intellectual class.
And yeah... achievement was really important in my family. Gabriel also speaks to the weight and pressure of comparison, which is really a theme of the whole movie, that we're all kind of living in the state of collective FOMO where we can never be good enough because we're comparing ourselves to what we see not just on media but on social media. Not just real people but fictional, curated people.
I did a lot of work on gender, and so I made a short film called " Beauty Culture ." And even in my book, " Girl Culture ," looking at how girls are comparing themselves to pictures of models that are not just genetically specific, but also retouched and styled. And so it's literally impossible to measure up. And now I think we're all kind of in that state.
And so when Gabriel talked about comparing himself to his brother or not feeling like he could measure up, I wasn't initially planning to have my family be in there, but I did feel an obligation [to] be willing to ask of myself what I ask of the subjects -- a hard, intimate look into the hard issues of living.
Advertisement:Last night at the Q&A after the film screening, you mentioned that this movie is a feminist film in the specific way that it looks at girls and women. Can you elaborate on that? I thought it was interesting how you noted that women are both a commodity, and also get power from commodifying themselves.
Yeah. I had done a lot of work on gender and I wasn't sure in the beginning how it would fit into "Generation Wealth." And then I realized that, in a way, girls were a really powerful and tragic case study for how human beings are commodified, and how in a way it's the ultimate cost and degradation of capitalism, the sale of the human being. And so for girls, I had been looking at both how girls were sold to -- because their body image insecurities make them very vulnerable and avid consumers; "buy this and you can fix whatever's wrong with your skin, your body," or whatever -- but also how they are physically sold.
And I think, for me, Kim Kardashian is a really powerful symbol of how that's changed. That the sex tape is a means to a lifestyle of money and affluence, and it's not the scarlet letter anymore. It's a badge of honor if that's what you bring.
And that manifests in different ways from an innocent game of dress-up, where there's also kind of precocious sexualization, to teenage girls putting sexy pictures of themselves on social media, to women who feel like they can't age and [get] plastic surgery -- because if their beauty and bodies are their value, you can't lose that.
Speaking of that, that was another thing about the film I thought was interesting. From watching the trailer I had the sense that [the film] would be focused mostly on the 1%, but actually it's about how the values and the culture that the wealthy, the hypermaterialism and such, trickles down to the working class. I'm thinking specifically of Cathy, the bus driver... there's the very gruesome scenes of her getting plastic surgery in Brazil, multiple times I believe if I remember right.
Advertisement:Well, she gets multiple surgeries on one trip to Brazil, because if you go to Brazil you can get surgery much cheaper and the doctors will actually perform multiple operations on you in a way that they won't in the US. And yeah, I was really blown away by a statistic about plastic surgery that I heard, where 75% of women who get plastic surgery make $50,000 or less.
Like eating disorders -- these things were thought to be kind of practices of the rich, but they have really trickled down. And I think part of that is the way we're bombarded with images of luxury and affluence. And also the kind of, in a way, new mythmaking of the American Dream, where the body is the new frontier of the rags to riches -- where anybody with enough money, effort and willpower can transform themselves physically.
And so it's kind of like your fault if you don't have the drive and motivation to do that. And we see these shows, reality shows like "The Swan" and these transformation shows... I apologize for showing such hard images, but I felt like it was really important to not see the before and after that we get in the media, but to see the middle, and the violence and risk that's really part of that transformation.
Towards the end, cultural critic Chris Hedges describes us as a civilization on the verge of collapse. But then the movie ends on a more hopeful note. I was wondering if you share Chris Hedges' apocalyptic view of the future, or if you felt hope at the end?
Advertisement:I do share his view, but I have, I guess, kind of a split or duality, in the sense that I feel like the reason I did this work and put it all together now, and went through a half a million pictures, is I do feel we're kind of barreling towards the apocalypse if we stay on this path. It's not a sustainable path. And from what I've seen over the last 25 years, it's blown-up exponentially.
Yet I think that there's a possibility of not staying on this path. A lot of the characters in the movie and in the book -- when they do hit rock bottom, whether it's the economic crisis or their own personal crashes -- they have insights that make them want to change.
And I feel like, in a way, this work is about kind of showing the Matrix that we live in, and having the option of the red pill. But I think that you kind of need a super-majority for that to happen on any significant scale.
Keith A. SpencerKeith A. Spencer is the cover editor for Salon, and manages Salon's science, tech and health coverage. His book, " A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy ," was released in 2018 from Eyewear Publishing. Follow him on Twitter at @keithspencer.
MORE FROM Keith A. Spencer • FOLLOW keithspencer
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Dec 22, 2018 | www.unz.com
Michael Hudson and Bonnie Faulkner October 8, 2018 8,300 Words Leave a Comment Email This Page to Someone
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Bookmark Toggle All ToC ▲ ▼ Search Text Case Sensitive Exact Words Include Comments List of BookmarksThe aim of classical economics was to tax unearned income, not wages and profits. The tax burden was to fall on the landlord class first and foremost, then on monopolists and bankers. The result was to be a circular flow in which taxes would be paid mainly out of rent and other unearned income. The government would spend this revenue on infrastructure, schools and other productive investment to help make the economy more competitive. Socialism was seen as a program to create a more efficient capitalist economy along these lines.
I'm Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show: The Vocabulary of Economic Deception. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street financial analyst and distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His 1972 book Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire is a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank. His latest books are, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy and J Is for Junk Economics – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception . Today we discuss J is for Junk Economics , an A to Z guide that describes how the world economy really works, and who the winners and losers really are. We cover contemporary terms that are misleading or poorly understood, as well as many important concepts that have been abandoned – many on purpose – from the long history of political economy.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Dr. Michael Hudson, welcome to Guns and Butter again.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's good to be back, Bonnie.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that your recent book, J Is for Junk Economics , a dictionary and accompanying essays,was drafted more than a decade ago for a book to have been entitled The Fictitious Economy . You tried several times without success to find a publisher. Why wouldn't publishers at the time take on your book?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Most publishers like to commission books that are like the last one that sold well. Ten years ago, people wanted to read about how the economy was doing just fine. I was called Dr. Doom, which did very well for me in the 1970s when I was talking about the economy running into debt. But they wanted upbeat books. If I were to talk about how the economy is polarizing and getting poorer, they wanted me to explain how readers could make a million dollars off people getting more strapped as the economy polarizes. I didn't want to write a book about how to get rich by riding the neoliberal wave dismantling of the economy. I wanted to create an alternative.
If I wanted to ride the wave of getting rich by taking on more debt, I would have stayed on Wall Street. I wanted to explain how the way in which the economy seemed to be getting richer was actually impoverishing it. We are in a new Gilded Age masked by a vocabulary used by the media via television and papers like The New York Times that are euphemizing what was happening.
A euphemism is a rhetorical trick to make a bad phenomenon look good. If a landlord gets rich by gentrifying a neighborhood by exploiting tenants and forcing them out, that's called wealth creation if property values and rents rise. If you can distract people to celebrate wealth and splendor at the top of the economic pyramid, people will be less focused on how the economy is functioning for the bottom 99%.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Can you describe the format of J Is for Junk Economics – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception as an A-to-Z dictionary with additional essays? It seems to me that this format makes a good reference book that can be picked up and read at any point.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That's what I intended. I wrote it as a companion volume to my outline of economic theory, Killing the Host , which was about how the financial sector has taken over the economy in a parasitic way. I saw the vocabulary problem and also how to solve it: If people have a clear set of economic concepts, basically those of classical economics – value, price and rent – the words almost automatically organize themselves into a worldview. A realistic vocabulary and understanding of what words mean will enable its users to put them together to form an inter-connected system.
I wanted to show how junk economics uses euphemisms and what Orwell called Doublethink to confuse people about how the economy works. I also wanted to show that what's called think tanks are really lobbying institutions to do the same thing that advertisers for toothpaste companies and consumer product companies do: They try to portray their product – in this case, neoliberal economics, dismantling protection of the environment, dismantling consumer protection and stopping of prosecution of financial fraud – as "wealth creation" instead of impoverishment and austerity for the economy at large. So basically, my book reviews the economic vocabulary and language people use to perceive reality.
When I was in college sixty years ago, they were still teaching the linguistic ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf. His idea was that language affects how people perceive reality. Different cultures and linguistic groups have different modes of expression. I found that if I was going to a concert and speaking German, I would be saying something substantially different than if I were speaking English.
Viewing the economic vocabulary as propaganda, I saw that we can understand how the words you hear as largely propaganda words. They've changed the meaning to the opposite of what the classical economists meant. But if you untangle the reversal of meaning and juxtapose a more functional vocabulary you can better understand what's actually happening.
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BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that "the terms rentier and usury that played so central a role in past centuries now sound anachronistic and have been replaced with more positive Orwellian doublethink," which is what you've begun to explain. In fact, your book J is for Junk – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception is all about the depredation of vocabulary to hide reality, particularly the state of the economy. Just as history is written by the victors, you point out that economic vocabulary is defined by today's victors, the rentier financial class. How is this deception accomplished?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's been accomplished in a number of ways. The first and most brutal way was simply to stop teaching the history of economic thought. When I went to school 60 years ago, every graduate economics student had to study the history of economic thought. You'd get Adam Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, Marx and Veblen. Their analysis had a common denominator: a focus on unearned income, which they called rent. Classical economics distinguished between productive and unproductive activity, and hence between wealth and overhead. The traditional landlord class inherited its wealth from ancestors who conquered the land by military force. These hereditary landlords extract rent, but don't do anything to create a product. They don't produce output. The same is true of other recipients of rent. Accordingly, the word used through the 19 th century was rentier . It's a French word. In French, a rente was income from a government bond. A rentier was a coupon clipper, and the rent was interest. Today in German, a Rentner is a retiree receiving pension income. The common denominator is a regular payment stipulated in advance, as distinct from industrial profit.
The classical economists had in common a description of rent and interest as something that a truly free market would get rid of. From Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill down to Marx and the socialists, a free market was one that was free of a parasitic overclass that got income without doing work. They got money by purely exploitative means, by charging rent that doesn't really have to be paid; by charging interest; by charging monopoly rent for basic infrastructure services and public utilities that a well-organized government should provide freely to people instead of letting monopolists put up toll booths on roads and for technology and patent rights simply to extract wealth. The focus of economics until World War I was the contrast between production and extraction.
An economic fight ensued and the parasites won. The first thing rentiers – the financial class and monopolists, a.k.a. the 1% – did was to say, "We've got to stop teaching the history of economic thought so that people don't even have a memory that there is any such a thing as economic rent as unearned income or the various policies proposed to minimize it. We have to take the slogan of the socialist reformers – a free market – and redefine it as a free market is one free from government – that is, from "socialism" – not free from landlords, bankers and monopolists." They turned the vocabulary upside down to mean the opposite. But in order to promote this deceptive vocabulary they had to erase all memory of the fact that these words originally meant the opposite.
BONNIE FAULKNER: How has economic history been rewritten by redefining the meaning of words? What is an example of this? For instance, what does the word "reform" mean now as opposed to what reform used to mean?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Reform used to mean something social democratic. It meant getting rid of special privileges, getting rid of monopolies and protecting labor and consumers. It meant controlling the prices that monopolies could charge, and regulating the economy to prevent fraud or exploitation – and most of all, to prevent unearned income or tax it away.
In today's neoliberal vocabulary, "reform" means getting rid of socialism. Reform means stripping away protection or labor and even of industry. It means deregulating the economy, getting rid of any kind of price controls, consumer protection or environmental protection. It means creating a lawless economy where the 1% are in control, without public checks and balances. So reform today means getting rid of all of the reforms that were promoted in the 19 th and early-20 th century. The Nobel Economics Prize reflects this neoliberal (that is, faux-liberal) travesty of "free markets."
BONNIE FAULKNER: What were the real reforms of the progressive era?
MICHAEL HUDSON: To begin with, you had unions to protect labor. You had limitations on the workweek and the workday, how much work people had to do to earn a living wage. There were safety protections. There was protection of the quality of food, and of consumer safety to prevent dangerous products. There was anti-trust regulation to prevent price gouging by monopolies. The New Deal took basic monopolies of public service such as roads and communications systems out of the hands of monopolists and make them public. Instead of using a road or the phone system to exploit users by charging whatever the market would bear, basic needs were provided at the lowest possible costs, or even freely in the case of schools, so that the economy would have a low cost of living and hence a low business overhead.
The guiding idea of reform was to get rid of socially unnecessary income. If landlords were going to charge rent for properties that they did nothing to improve, but merely raise the rents whenever cities built more transportation or more parks or better schools, this rent would be taxed away.
The income tax was a basic reform back in 1913. Only 1% of America's population had to pay the tax. Most were tax-free, because the aim was to tax the rentiers who lived off their bond or stock holdings, real estate or monopolies. The solution was simply to tax the wealthiest 1% or 2% instead of labor or industry, that is, the companies that actually produced something. This tax philosophy helped make America the most productive, lowest-cost and competitive yet also the most equal economy in the world at that time.
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This focus on real industry has gradually been undermined. Today, if you're a real estate speculator, monopolist, bankster or financial fraudster, your idea of reform is to get rid of laws that protect consumers, tenants, homebuyers and the public at large. You campaign for "consumer choice," as if protection is "interference" with the choice to be poisoned, cheated or otherwise exploited. You deregulate laws designed to protect the atmosphere, free air and water. If you're a coal or oil company, your idea of reform is to get rid of the Clean Air Act, as the Trump administration has been doing.
The counterpart to junk science is junk economics. It is a lobbying effort to defend the idea of a world without any laws or regulations against the wealthy, only against the debtors and the poor, only against consumers for the "theft" of downloading music or stealing somebody's patented songs or drug monopoly privilege. This turns inside out the classical philosophy of fairness.
BONNIE FAULKNER: According to 19 th -century classical economists, what is fictitious capital, and why is this distinction no longer being made by economists?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That's a wonderful question. Today the term "fictitious capital" is usually associated with Marx, but it was used by many people in the 19 th century, even by right-wing libertarians such as Henry George.
Fictitious capital referred to purely extractive claims for income, as distinct from profits and wages earned from tangible means of production. Real capital referred to factories, machinery and tools, things that were used to produce output, as well as education, research and public infrastructure. But an ownership privilege like a title to land and other real estate, a patent or the monopoly privilege to charge whatever the market will bear for a restricted patent, without reference to actual production costs, does not add anything to production. It is purely extractive, yielding economic rent, not profits on real capital investment.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You say that by the late-19 th century, "reform movements were gaining the upper hand, that nearly everyone saw industrial capitalism evolving into what was widely called socialism." How would you describe the socialism that classical economists like Mill or Marx envisioned?
MICHAEL HUDSON: They all called themselves socialists. There were many kinds of socialism in the late 19 th century. Christians promoted Christian socialism, and anarchists promoted an individualistic socialism. Mill was called a Ricardian socialist. The common denominator among socialists was their recognition that the industrial capitalism of their day was a transitory stage burdened by the remnants of feudalism, headed by the landlord class whose hereditary rule was a legacy of the medieval military invasions of England, France, Germany and the rest of Europe. This was the class that controlled the upper house of government, e.g ., Britain's Lordships. For socialists, the guiding idea was to run factories and operate land and provide public services for the economy at large to grow instead of imposing austerity and letting the rentier classes exploit the rest of the economy and concentrate income, political control and tax policy in their own hands.
Until World War I, socialism was popular because most people saw industrial capitalism as evolving. Politics was in motion. The term "capitalism," by the way, was coined by Werner Sombart, not Marx. But classical political economy culminated in Marx. He looked at society's broad laws of motion to see where they were leading.
The socialist idea was not only that of Marx but also of American business school professors like Simon Patten of the WhartonSchool. He said that the kind of economy that would dominate the world's future was one that was the most efficient in preventing monopoly and preventing or taxing away absentee land rent so that almost all income would be paid as wages and profits, not rent or interest or monopoly rents.
The business classes in the United States, Germany and even in England were in favor of reform – that is, anti-rentier reform. They recognized that only a strong government would have the political power to tax away or regulate parasitic economic rent by the wealthiest classes at that time, in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. This economic and political cleanup of the rentiers stemmed very largely from the ideological battle that occurred in England after the Napoleonic Wars were over in 1815. Ricardo, representing the banking class, argued against Reverend Malthus, the population theorist who also was a spokesman for the landlord class. Malthus urged agricultural protectionism for landlords, so that they would get more and more rent from their land as grain prices were kept high. Ricardo argued that high food prices to support rents for the agricultural landlords would mean high labor costs for industrial employers. And if you have high labor costs then England cannot be the industrial workshop of the world. In order for England to become the industrial supreme power, it needed to overcome the power of its landlord class. Instead of protecting it, England decided to protect its industrial capital by repealing its protectionist Corn Laws in 1846. (I describe its strategy in my history of theories of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt .)
At that time England's banking class was still a carryover from Europe's Medieval period. Christianity had banned the charging of interest, so banks were able to make their money by combining their loans with a foreign exchange charge, called agio. Banks even Ricardo's day in the early 19 th century made most of their money by financing foreign trade and charging foreign exchange fees. If your listeners they have ever tried to change money at the airport, they will know what a big rake-off the change booths take.
Later in the 19 th century, bankers began to shift their lending away from international trade financing to real estate as home ownership became democratized. Home owners became their own landlords – but on mortgage credit.
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Today we're no longer in the situation that existed in England 200 years ago. Almost two-thirds of the American families own their homes. In Scandinavia and much of Europe, 80% are homeowners. They don't pay rent to landlords. Instead, they pay their income as interest to the mortgage lenders. That's because hardly anyone has enough money to buy a few-hundred-thousand-dollar home with the cash in their pocket. They have to borrow the money. The income that used to be paid as rent to a landlord is now paid as interest to the mortgage banker. So you have a similar kind of exploitation today that you had two centuries ago, with the major difference that the banking and financial class has replaced the landlord class.
Already by the late-19 th century, socialists were advocating that money and credit don't have to take the form of gold and silver. Governments can create their own money. That's what the United States did in the Civil War with its greenbacks. It simply printed the money – and gave it value by making it acceptable for payment of taxes. In addition to the doctrine that land and basic infrastructure should be owned by the public sector – that is, by governments – banking was seen as a public utility. Credit was to be created for productive purposes, not for rent-extracting activities or financial speculation. Land would be fully taxed so that instead of labor or even most industry paying an income tax, rentiers would pay tax on wealth that took the form of rent-extracting privileges.
The aim of classical economics was to tax unearned income, not wages and profits. The tax burden was to fall on the landlord class first and foremost, then on monopolists and bankers. The result was to bea circular flow in which taxes would be paid mainly out of rent and other unearned income, and the government would spend this revenue on infrastructure, schools and other productive investment to help make the economy more competitive. Socialism was seen as a program to create a more efficient capitalist economy along these lines, until the word was hijacked by the Russian Revolution after World War I. The Soviet Union became a travesty of Marxism and the word socialism.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that: "Today's anti-classical vocabulary redefines free markets as ones that are free for rent extractors and that rent and interest reflect their recipients' contribution to wealth, not their privileges to extract economic rent from the economy." How do you differentiate between productive and extractive sectors, and how is it that the extractive sectors, essentially Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE), actually burden the economy?
MICHAEL HUDSON: If you're a real estate owner, you want lower property taxes so that as the economy grows and people are able to pay more rent, or when a land site in a neighborhood becomes more valuable because the government builds a new subway – like New York City's Second Avenue line – real estate prices rise to reflect the property's higher income that is not taxed.
New York landlords all along the subway line raised rents. That meant that their real estate had a "capital" gain reflecting the higher rent roll. Individual owners fortunate enough to own a condo or a townhouse near the stations became more wealthy – while new renters or buyers had to pay much more than before. None of this price rise created more living space or other output (although today's post-classical GDP figures pretend that it did!). It simply meant that instead of recapturing the $10 billion the government spent on this subway extension by taxing the increased land valuations all along the subway route, New York's income and real estate taxes have been raised for everybody, to pay interest on the bonds issued to finance the subway's construction. So the city's cost of living and doing business rises – while the Upper East Side landlords have received a free lunch.
Creating that kind of real estate "fictitious wealth" is a capitalization of unearned income – unearned because the Upper East Side landlords didn't do anything themselves to increase the value of their property. The City raised rental values by making the sites more desirable when it built the subway extension.
The same logic applies to insurance. When President Obama passed the basically Republican Obamacare law advocated by the pharmaceutical and health management sectors, the cost of medical care went way up in the United States. It was organized so as to be a giveaway to the healthcare and pharmaceutical monopolies.
None of this increased payment for medical care increases its quality. In fact, the more that's paid for medical care, the more the service declines, because it is paid to health insurance companies that try to legally fight against consumers. The effect is predatory, not productive.
Finally, you have the financial part of the FIRE sector. Finance has accounted for almost all of the growth in U.S. GDP in the ten years since the Lehman Brothers crisis and the Obama bailout in 2008. The biggest banks at that time were insolvent as a result of bad loans and outright financial fraud. But the government created $4.3 trillion of reserves to bail out Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, with Goldman Sachs thrown in, despite the fact that their fraudulent junk mortgage loans were predatory, not productive credit that actually increased wealth in the form of productive power. There's a growing understanding that the financial sector has become so dysfunctional that it is a deadweight on the economy, burdening it with increasing debt charges –student loans are an example – instead of actually helping the economy grow.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So just to reiterate, what is the classical distinction between earned and unearned income?
MICHAEL HUDSON: This distinction is based on classical value and price theory. Price is what people have to pay. The margin of price over and above real cost value is called economic rent. A product's value is its actual, necessary costs of production: the cost of labor, raw materials and machinery, and other elements of what it costs to tangibly produce it. Rent and financial charges are the product of special privileges that have been privatized and now financialized.
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Classical value theory isolated this economic rent as unearned income. It was the aim of society either to prevent it from occurring in the first place, by anti-monopoly regulation or by public land ownership, or to tax it away in cases where you can't help it going up. For instance, it's natural for neighborhoods to become more valuable and high-priced over time as the economy gets richer. But it doesn't cost more to construct buildings there, and rents keep going up and up and up on buildings that were put up 100 years ago. This increased rent does not reflect any new cost of production. It's a free lunch.
Neoliberals, most notoriously the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman at, kept insisting that "There's no such thing as a free lunch." But that's exactly what most of the wealth and income of the richest 1% is. It's the result of running the economy primarily to siphon off a rentier free lunch. Of course, its recipients try to distract public attention from this face and tell national income and Gross Domestic Product statisticians to pretend that they actually earn their income wealth, not merely transfer income from the rest of the economy into their hands as creditors, monopolists and landlords. The leading Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs said so notoriously a few years ago that "Our partners are the most productive in the country because look at how much we're paid." But they don't really earn their wealth in the classical sense of earning by performing a productive economic service. The economy would get along much better without Goldman Sachs and indeed the banking and financial system or the health insurance system being run the way they are, and without real estate the being untaxed in the way that it is.
BONNIE FAULKNER: I noticed that you used the term "rent" for unearned income. Is rent the same as profit, or not?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's not at all the same. Profit is earned by investing in a means of production to make useful goods and services. Classical economists viewed profit as an element of cost if you're going to have a privately owned economy – and most socialists have accepted private ownership, although in a system regulated so as to benefit society as a whole. If you make a profit by a productive act acting within this system, you've earned it by being productive.
Economic rent is different. It is not earned by actively building means of production, conducting research or development. It's passive income. When pharmaceutical companies earn rent, it's simply for charging much more for the drugs they sell than it actually costs to produce them. This is especially the case when the government has borne the research and development cost of the drugs and simply assigns the rent-yielding patent privilege to the pharmaceutical companies. So rent is something over and above the profit necessary to induce the activity that these companies actually perform. Profits are why investors produce more. Rent is not necessary. If you got rid of it, you wouldn't discourage production, because it's purely an overhead charge, whereas profits are a production charge in a capitalist economy.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, thank you for that distinction between rent and profit. That's a very important thing to understand.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I describe it more clearly in my book, which includes the appropriate classical quotations.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You point out that interest and rent are reported as "earnings," as if bankers and landlords produce gross domestic product (GDP) in the form of credit and ownership services. How do you think interest and rent should be reported?
MICHAEL HUDSON: They should be classified interest and rent. But the rentier classes have taken over the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) to depict their takings as actual production of a service, not as overhead or a transfer payment, that is, not as parasitic extraction of other peoples' earnings.
For instance, suppose you have a credit card and you miss a payment, or miss a payment on a student loan, electric bill or your rent. The credit card company will use this as an excuse to raise your interest charge from 11% to 29%. The national income account treat this rise to 29% as providing a "financial service." The so-called service is simply charging a penalty rate. The pretense is that everything that a bank charges – higher interest or penalties – is by definition providing a service, not simply extracting money from cardholders, transferring income from them to itself.
Classical economists would have subtracted this financial rake-off from output, counting it as overhead. After all, it simply adds to the cost of living and doing business. Instead, the most recent statisticians have added this financial income to the Gross National Product instead of subtracting it, as the classical economists would have done – or simply not counted it, as was the case a generation ago.
Most reporters and the financial press don't get into the nitty-gritty of these national accounts, so they don't realize how lobbyists have intervened in recent years to turn them into propaganda flattering bankers and property owners. Today's "reformed" GDP format pretends that the economy has been going up since 2008. A more realistic description would show that it is shrinking for 95 percent of the population, being eaten away by the wealthiest 5% extracting more rentier income and imposing austerity.
If you look at the national balance sheet of assets and liabilities, the economy is becoming more debt-ridden. As student debt and mortgage debt go up, and penalty fees, arrears and defaults are rising. The long rise in home ownership rates is being reversed, and rents are rising, while people also have to pay more for medical care and other basic needs. Academic economists depict this as "consumer choice" or "demand," as if it is all a voluntary choice of "the market." The GDP accounting format has been modified to make it appear that the economy is getting richer. This statistical sleight-of-hand is achieved by counting the takings of the rentier 1% as a product, not a cost borne by the economy at large. What really should be shown is a loss – land and monopoly rent, interest and penalties is in fact so large a "product" that the economy seems to be growing. But most of that growth is unreal.
BONNIE FAULKNER: How does government fiscal policy, taxation and expenditure influence the economy?
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MICHAEL HUDSON: That's what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is all about. When governments run a budget deficit, they pump money into the economy. For Keynesians the money goes into the real economy in ways that employ labor. For neoliberals, quantitative easing is spent directly into the financial sector, and is used to finance the purchase of real estate, stocks and bonds, supporting the valuation of wealth owned mainly by the One Percent. The effect is to make housing more expensive, and also the price of buying a retirement income. Having to take on larger mortgage debt to buy a house and spend less each month in order to save for one's pension is not really "wealth creation," unless your perspective is that of the One Percent increasing its power over the 99%.
At least the United States is able to run deficits and avoid the kind of unemployment and austerity that Europe is imposing on itself and especially on Greece and Italy. I think in one of our talks on this show explained the problem that Europe is suffering. Under the constitution of the Eurozone, its member countries are not allowed to run a budget deficit of more than 3%. Most actually aim at extracting a surplus from the economy (as distinct from producing a surplus for the economy). That means that the government doesn't spend money into the economy. People and businesses are obliged to get their money from the banks. That requires them to pay more interest. All Europe is on the road to looking like Greece– debt-strapped economies that are kept artificially alive by the government creating reserves to give to the banks and bail out bond markets, not spending into economies to help them recover.
The ability to create debt by writing a bank loan that creates a deposit is a legal privilege. There's no reason why governments cannot do this themselves. Instead of borrowing from private creditors to finance their budget deficits, governments can create their own money – without burdening budgets with interest charges. Credit creation has little cost of production, and therefore does not require interest charges to cover this cost. The interest is a form of monopoly rent to privatized privilege.
Classical economists saw the proper role of government as being to create social infrastructure and upgrade living standards and productivity for their labor force. Governments should build roads to minimize the cost of transportation, not private companies creating toll roads to maximize the cost by building in financial charges, real estate and management charges to what users have to pay. Government should be in charge of providing public health insurance, not private companies that charge extortionate prices and whatever the market will bear for their drugs. It's the government that should run prisons, not private companies that use prisoners as cheap labor to make a profit and advocate that more people get arrested so to make more of a profit from their incarceration.
The great question is, what is the government going to spend money on, and how can it spend money into the economy in a way that helps growth? Imagine if this trillion dollars a year that's spent on arms and military – in California and the districts of the key congressmen on the budget committee – were spent on building roads, schools, transportation and subsidizing medical care. The country could become a utopia. Instead, the rentier classes have hijacked the government, taking over its money creation and taxing power to spend on themselves, not to help the economy at large produce more or raise living standards. Special interests have captured the regulatory agencies to make them serve rent extractors, not protect the economy from them.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Interest is tax-deductible, whereas profit is taxable. Does the tax deductibility of interest have a major impact on the economy?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, because tax deductibility encourages companies to raise money by going into debt. This tax deductibility of interest catalyzed the corporate raiding movement of the 1980s. It was based on debt leveraging.
Suppose a company makes $100 million a year in profit and pays this out to its stockholders as dividends. In the 1980s this profit was taxed at about 50%, so you could only pay $50 million to the stockholders. Then as today, they were the wealthiest layer of the population. Drexel Burnham and other Wall Street firms sought out corporate raiders as clients and offered to lend them enough money to buy companies out, by buying out their stockholders. Stocks were replaced by bonds. That enabled companies to pay out twice as much income as interest than they had been paying as dividends. When they bought out target companies with debt, a company could pay all $100 million of its income as interest instead of only $50 million as dividends on stock.
So the wealthiest classes in the United States and other countries decided that they could get more from own bonds than stocks anymore. Government revenue declined by the added amount paid to financial investors as a result of this tax subsidy for debt.
The advantage of issuing stocks is that when business conditions turn down and profits fall, companies can cut back their dividend. But if they have committed to pay this $100 million to bondholders, when their earnings go down they may face insolvency.
The result was a wave of bankruptcy since the 1980s as companies became more debt-pyramided. Also companies heads went to the labor unions and threatened to declare bankruptcy and wipe out their pension funds, if their leaders did not agree to change these funds and replace the guaranteed retirement pension that were promised for a defined contribution plan. All they know is what they have to pay in every month. Retirees will only get whatever is left when they reach pension age. The equity economy shift into a debt economy has enriched the wealthy financial class at the top, while hurting employees.
Most statistical trends turned around in 1980 for almost every country as this shift occurred. Indebting companies has made them more fragile and also higher-cost, because now they have to factor in the price of interest payments to the bondholders and corporate raiders who've taken them over.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Do you think that changes should be made to the tax deductibility of interest?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure. If interest were to be taxed, that would leave less incentive for companies to keep on adding debt. It would deter corporate raiding. It is a precondition for companies being run to minimize their cost of production and to serve their labor force and their customers more. For homebuyers, removing the tax-deductibility of interest would leave less "free" rent to be pledged to banks for mortgages, and hence would reduce the size of bank loans that bid up housing prices.
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I think that interest and rents should be taxed, not wages and legitimate profits. The FICA wage withholding now absorbs almost 16% of most wage-earning income for Social Security and Medicare. But wealthy people don't have to pay any contribution on what they make over than about $ $116,000 a year. They don't have to pay any FICA contribution on their capital gains, which is how most fortunes are made. The rentiers' idea of a free market is to make labor pay for all of the Social Security and Medicare – and then to give so much to Wall Street that they can say, "Oh, there's no more money. The system's short, so we have to wipe out Social Security," just as so many companies have wiped out the pension commitments. As George W. Bush said, tere's not really any money in the Social Security accounts. Its tax on the lower income brackets was all used to cut taxes on the higher income and wealth brackets. The economy has been turned into a grab bag for the rich.
BONNIE FAULKNER: What about monetary policy, interest rates and the money supply? Who controls monetary policy, and how does it affect the economy?
MICHAEL HUDSON: The biggest banks put their lobbyists in charge of the Federal Reserve, which was created in 1913 to take monetary policy out of the hands of the Treasury in Washington and put it in the hands of Wall Street. That made the Fed a lobbyist for its members, the commercial banking system. It's run to control the money supply – in practice, the debt supply – in a way that steers money into the banks. That's why not a single banker was jailed for committing the junk mortgage scams and other frauds that caused the crash. The Fed has turned the banking system into a predatory monopoly instead of the public service that it was once supposed to be.
Monetary policy is really debt policy, because money is debt on the liabilities side of the balance sheet. The question is, what kind of debt is the economy going to have, and what happens when it exceeds the ability to be paid? How is the government going to provide the economy with money, and what will it do to keep debts line with the ability to be paid? Will money and credit be provided to build more factories and product more output, to rebuild American manufacturing and infrastructure? Or, are you going to leave credit and debt creation to the banks, to make larger loans for people to buy homes at rising prices reflecting the increasingly highly leveraged and outright reckless credit creation?
Monetary policy is debt policy, and on balance most debts are owed by the bottom 90% to the wealthiest 10%. So monetary policy becomes an exercise in how the 10% can extract more and more interest, rent and capital gains from the economy – all the while making money by impoverishing the economy, not helping most people prosper.
BONNIE FAULKNER: The economy is always being planned by someone or some force, be it Wall Street, the government or whatever. It's not the result of natural law, as you point out in your book. It seems like a lot of people think that the economy should somehow run itself without interference. Could you explain how this is an absurd idea?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's an example of rhetoric overcoming people's common sense. Every economy since the Stone Age has been planned. Even in the stone age people had to plan when to plant the crops, when to harvest them, how much seed you had to keep over for the next year. You had to operate on credit during the crop year to get beer and rent draft animals. Somebody's in charge of every economy.
So when people talk about an unplanned economy, they mean no government planning. They mean that planning should be taken out of the hands of government and put in the hands of the 1%. That is what they mean by a "free market." They pretend that if the 1% control the economy it's not really a planned economy anymore, because it's not planned by government, officials serving the public interest. It's planned by Wall Street. So the question is, really, who's going to plan the American economy? Is it going to be the government of elected officials, or is it going to be Wall Street? Wall Street will euphemize its central planning by saying this is a free market – meaning it's free of government regulation, especially over the financial sector and the mining companies and other monopolies that are its major clients.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You emphasize the difference between the study of 19 th -century classical political economy and modern-day economics. How and when and why did political economy become "economics"?
MICHAEL HUDSON: If you look at the books that almost everybody wrote in the 19 th century, they called it political economy because economics is political. And conversely, economics is what politics has always been about. Who's getting what? Or as Lenin said, who-whom? It's about how society makes decisions about who's going to get rich and how they are going to do it. Are they going to get wealthy by acting productively, or parasitically? Eeverything economic turns out to be political.
The economy's new central planners on Wall Street pretend that what they're doing is not political. Cutting taxes on themselves is depicted as a law of nature. But they deny that this is politics, as if there's nothing anyone can do about it. Margaret Thatcher's refrain was "There is no alternative" (TINA). That is the numbing political sedative injected into today's economic discussion.
The aim is to make people think that there is no alternative because if they're getting poorer, if they're losing their home by defaulting on a junk mortgage of if they have to pay so much on the student loan so that they can't afford to buy a home, or if they find that the only kind of job they can get driving an Uber car, it's all their fault. It's as if that's just nature, not the way the economy has been malstructured.
The role of neoliberalism is to make people think that they are powerless in the face of "the market," as if markets are not socially and politically structured. The 1% have hired lobbyists and subsidized business schools so as to shape markets in their own interest. Their aim is to control the economy and call it "nature." Their patter talk is that poverty is natural for short-sighted "deplorables," not the result of the predatory neoliberal takeover since 1980 and their capture of the Justice Department so that none of the bank fraudsters go to jail.
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BONNIE FAULKNER: In your chapter on the letter M – of course, we have chapters from A to Z – in your chapter on M, you have an entry for Hyman Minsky, an economist who pioneered Modern Monetary Theory and explained the three stages of the financial cycle in terms of rising debt leveraging. What is debt leveraging, and how does it lead to a crisis?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Debt leveraging means buying an asset on credit. Lending for home ownership in the United States is the leading example. From the 1940s to the 1960s, if you took out a mortgage, the banker would look at your income and calculate that the mortgage on the house you buy shouldn't absorb more than 25% of your income. The idea was that this would leave enough income to pay the interest charge and amortize – that is, pay off – the mortgage 30 years later, near the end of your working life. Minsky called this first credit stage the hedge stage, meaning that banks had hedged their bets within limits that enabled the economy to carry and pay off its debts.
In the second credit stage, banks lent more and loosened their lending standards so that mortgages would absorb much more than 25% of the borrower's income. At a certain point, people could not afford to amortize, that is to pay off the mortgage. All they could do was to pay the interest charge. By the 1980s, the federal government was lending up to almost 40% of the borrower's income, writing mortgages without any amortization taking place. The mortgage payment simply carried the existing homeowner's debt. Banks in fact didn't want to ever be repaid. They wanted to go on collecting interest on as much debt as possible.
Finally, Minsky said, the Ponzi stage occurred when the homeowner didn't even have enough money to pay the interest charge, but had to borrow the interest. So this was how Third World countries had gotten through the 1970s and the early 1980s. The government of, let's say Mexico or Brazil or Argentina, would say, well, we don't have the dollars to pay the debt, and the banks would say, we'll just add the interest onto the debt. Same thing with a credit card or a mortgage. The mortgage homeowner would say, I don't have enough money to pay the mortgage, and the bank would say, well, just take out a larger mortgage; we'll just lend you the money to pay the interest.
That's the Ponzi stage and it was named after Carlo Ponzi and his Ponzi scheme – paying early buyers out of income paid into the scheme by new entrants. That's the stage that the economy entered around 2007-08. It became a search for the proverbial "greater fool" willing to borrow to buy overpriced real estate. That caused the crash, and we're still in the post-crash austerity interim (before yet a deeper debt writeoff or new bailout). The debts have been left in place, not written down. If you have a credit card and have to pay a monthly balance but lack enough to pay down your debt, your balance will keep going up every month, adding the interest charge onto the debt balance.
Any volume of debt tends to grow at compound interest. The result is an exponential growth that doubles the debt in little time. Any rate of interest is a doubling time. If debt keeps doubling and redoubling, it's carrying charges are going to crowd out the other expenses in your budget. You'll have to pay more money to the banks for student loans, credit card debts, auto loans and mortgage debt, leaving less to spend on goods and services. That's why the economy is shrinking right now. That's why people today aren't able to do what their parents were able to do 50 years ago – buy a home they can live in by paying a quarter of their income.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Dr. Michael Hudson, thank you so very much.
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Dec 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
NotBob , Dec 22, 2018 2:07:21 PM | link
While not specifically labeled, this look like an open thread. So....
The French MSM (and the BBC) are doing the usual underreporting of the numbers involved in todays GJ activities. If interested, check out the RTL coverage: the "reporter" is standing on a street that is filled shoulder to shoulder as far as the lens can see with yellow vests, and states "there are about 50, maybe a hundred people here..."
The police concentrated their manpower around Versailles, and the GJ are everywhere but there, so no gas, no violence. The infiltrators/casseurs didn't get the memo.
Speaking of the gas, one of the men seen bathing in the stuff these past weekends has put out (FB? Twitter? This is being passed along from my French family members) that he has been diagnosed with cyanide poisoning. I am not a chemist, but I don't think this is a usual component of "tear gas ". Probably the Russians tampering with the gendarmes CS supply.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Themiddlegound -> Themiddlegound , 11 Jun 2013 05:42
The American Chamber of Commerce subsequently expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to over a quarter of a million ten years later. Jointly with the National Association of Manufacturers (which moved to Washington in 1972) it amassed an immense campaign chest to lobby Congress and engage in research. The Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs 'committed to the aggressive pursuit of political power for the corporation', was founded in 1972 and thereafter became the centrepiece of collective pro-business action.The corporations involved accounted for 'about one half of the GNP of the United States' during the 1970s, and they spent close to $900 million annually (a huge amount at that time) on political matters. Think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the Center for the Study of American Business, and the American Enterprise Institute, were formed with corporate backing both to polemicize and, when necessary, as in the case of the National Bureau of Economic Research, to construct serious technical and empirical studies and political-philosophical arguments broadly in support of neoliberal policies.
Nearly half the financing for the highly respected NBER came from the leading companies in the Fortune 500 list. Closely integrated with the academic community, the NBER was to have a very significant impact on thinking in the economics departments and business schools of the major research universities. With abundant finance furnished by wealthy individuals (such as the brewer Joseph Coors, who later became a member of Reagan's 'kitchen cabinet') and their foundations (for example Olin, Scaife, Smith Richardson, Pew Charitable Trust), a flood of tracts and books, with Nozick's Anarchy State and Utopia perhaps the most widely read and appreciated, emerged espousing neoliberal values. A TV version of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose was funded with a grant from Scaife in 1977. 'Business was', Blyth concludes, 'learning to spend as a class.
In singling out the universities for particular attention, Powell pointed up an opportunity as well as an issue, for these were indeed centers of anti-corporate and anti-state sentiment (the students at Santa Barbara had burned down the Bank of America building there and ceremonially buried a car in the sands). But many students were (and still are) affluent and privileged, or at least middle class, and in the US the values of individual freedom have long been celebrated (in music and popular culture) as primary. Neoliberal themes could here find fertile ground for propagation. Powell did not argue for extending state power. But business should 'assiduously cultivate' the state and when necessary use it 'aggressively and with determination'
In order to realize this goal, businesses needed a political class instrument and a popular base. They therefore actively sought to capture the Republican Party as their own instrument. The formation of powerful political action committees to procure, as the old adage had it, 'the best government that money could buy' was an important step. The supposedly 'progressive' campaign finance laws of 1971 in effect legalized the financial corruption of politics.
A crucial set of Supreme Court decisions began in 1976 when it was first established that the right of a corporation to make unlimited money contributions to political parties and political action committees was protected under the First Amendment guaranteeing the rights of individuals (in this instance corporations) to freedom of speech.15 Political action committees could thereafter ensure the financial domination of both political parties by corporate, moneyed, and professional association interests. Corporate PACs, which numbered eighty-nine in 1974, had burgeoned to 1,467 by 1982.
The Republican Party needed, however, a solid electoral base if it was to colonize power effectively. It was around this time that Republicans sought an alliance with the Christian right. The latter had not been politically active in the past, but the foundation of Jerry Falwell's 'moral majority' as a political movement in 1978 changed all of that. The Republican Party now had its Christian base.
It also appealed to the cultural nationalism of the white working classes and their besieged sense of moral righteousness. This political base could be mobilized through the positives of religion and cultural nationalism and negatively through coded, if not blatant, racism, homophobia, and anti feminism.
The alliance between big business and conservative Christians backed by the neoconservatives consolidated, not for the first time has a social group been persuaded to vote against its material, economic, and class interests the evangelical Christians eagerly embraced the alliance with big business and the Republican Party as a means to further promote their evangelical and moral agenda.
Themiddlegound -> Themiddlegound , 11 Jun 2013 05:23
Any political movement that holds individual freedoms to be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold.The worldwide political upheavals of 1968, for example, were strongly inflected with the desire for greater personal freedoms. This was certainly true for students, such as those animated by the Berkeley 'free speech' movement of the 1960s or who took to the streets in Paris, Berlin, and Bangkok and were so mercilessly shot down in Mexico City shortly before the 1968 Olympic Games. They demanded freedom from parental, educational, corporate, bureaucratic, and state constraints. But the '68 movement also had social justice as a primary political objective.
Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power. It has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the the Construction of Consent desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of particular identities. Neoliberalism did not create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them.
In the early 1970s those seeking individual freedoms and social justice could make common cause in the face of what many saw as a common enemy. Powerful corporations in alliance with an interventionist state were seen to be running the world in individually oppressive and socially unjust ways. The Vietnam War was the most obvious catalyst for discontent, but the destructive activities of corporations and the state in relation to the environment, the push towards mindless consumerism, the failure to address social issues and respond adequately to diversity, as well as intense restrictions on individual possibilities and personal behaviors by state-mandated and 'traditional' controls were also widely resented. Civil rights were an issue, and questions of sexuality and of reproductive rights were very much in play.
For almost everyone involved in the movement of '68, the intrusive state was the enemy and it had to be reformed. And on that, the neoliberals could easily agree. But capitalist corporations, business, and the market system were also seen as primary enemies requiring redress if not revolutionary transformation: hence the threat to capitalist class power.
By capturing ideals of individual freedom and turning them against the interventionist and regulatory practices of the state, capitalist class interests could hope to protect and even restore their position. Neoliberalism was well suited to this ideological task. But it had to be backed up by a practical strategy that emphasized the liberty of consumer choice, not only with respect to particular products but also with respect to lifestyles, modes of expression, and a wide range of cultural practices. Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism. As such it proved more than a little compatible with that cultural impulse called 'postmodernism' which had long been lurking in the wings but could now emerge full-blown as both a cultural and an intellectual dominant. This was the challenge that corporations and class elites set out to finesse in the 1980s.
In the US case a confidential memo sent by Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce in August 1971. Powell, about to be elevated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, argued that criticism of and opposition to the US free enterprise system had gone too far and that 'the time had come––indeed it is long overdue––for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it'.
Powell argued that individual action was insufficient. 'Strength', he wrote, 'lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations'. The National Chamber of Commerce, he argued, should lead an assault upon the major institutions––universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts––in order to change how individuals think 'about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual'. US businesses did not lack resources for such an effort, particularly when they pooled their resources together.
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Dec 08, 2018 | www.alternet.org
Guest • 6 years ago
- I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.~Thomas Jefferson~
- When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain." – Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, 1815
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Dec 07, 2018 | www.unz.com
It has become all too easy for democracy to be turned on its head and popular nationalist mandates, referenda and elections negated via instant political hypocrisy by leaders who show their true colours only after the public vote. So it has been within the two-and-a-half year unraveling of the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 that saw the subsequent negotiations now provide the Brexit voter with only three possibilities. All are a loss for Britain.
One possibility, Brexit, is the result of Prime Minister, Theresa May's negotiations- the "deal"- and currently exists in name only. Like the PM herself, the original concept of Brexit may soon lie in the dust of an upcoming UK Parliament floor vote in exactly the same manner as the failed attempt by the Greeks barely three years ago. One must remember that Greece on June 27, 2015 once voted to leave the EU as well and to renegotiate its EU existence as well in their own "Grexit" referendum. Thanks to their own set of underhanded and treasonous politicians, this did not go well for Greece. Looking at the Greek result, and understanding divisive UK Conservative Party control that exists in the hearts of PMs on both sides of the House of Commons, this new parliamentary vote is not looking good for Britain. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek! "deal" -- would thus reveal the life-long scars of their true national allegiance gnawed into their backs by the lust of their masters in Brussels. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review
Ironically, like a cluster bomb of white phosphorous over a Syrian village, Cameron's Brexit vote blew up spectacularly in his face. Two decades of ongoing political submission to the EU by the Cons and "new" labour had them arrogantly misreading the minds of the UK voter.
So on that incredible night, it happened. Prime Minister David Cameron the Cons New Labour The Lib- Dems and even the UK Labour Party itself, were shocked to their core when the unthinkable nightmare that could never happen, did happen . Brexit had passed by popular vote!
David Cameron has been in hiding ever since.
After Brexit passed the same set of naïve UK voters assumed, strangely, that Brexit would be finalized in their national interest as advertised. This belief had failed to read Article 50 - the provisos for leaving the EU- since, as much as it was mentioned, it was very rarely linked or referenced by a quotation in any of the media punditry. However, an article published four days after the night Brexit passed, " A Brexit Lesson In Greek: Hopes and Votes Dashed on Parliamentary Floors," provided anyone thus reading Article 50, which is only eight pages long and double-spaced, the info to see clearly that this never before used EU by-law would be the only route to a UK exit. Further, Article 50 showed that Brussels would control the outcome of exit negotiations along with the other twenty-seven member nations and that effectively Ms May and her Tories would be playing this game using the EU's ball and rules, while going one-on-twenty-seven during the negotiations.
In the aftermath of Brexit, the real game began in earnest. The stakes: bigger than ever.
Forgotten are the hypocritical defections of political expediency that saw Boris Johnson and then Home Secretary Theresa May who were, until that very moment, both vociferously and very publicly against the intent of Brexit. Suddenly they claimed to be pro- Brexit in their quest to sleep in Cameron's now vacant bed at No. 10 Downing Street. Boris strategically dropped out to hopefully see, Ms May, fall on her sword- a bit sooner. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review
So, the plucky PM was left to convince the UK public, daily, as the negotiations moved on, that "Brexit means Brexit!" A UK media that is as pro-EU as their PM chimed in to help her sell distortions of proffered success at the negotiating table, while the rise of "old" Labour, directed by Jeremy Corbyn, exposed her "soft" Brexit negotiations for the litany of failures that ultimately equaled the "deal" that was strangely still called "Brexit."
Too few, however, examined this reality once these political Chameleons changed their colours just as soon as the very first results shockingly came in from Manchester in the wee hours of the morning on that seemingly hopeful night so long ago: June 23, 2016. For thus would begin a quiet, years-long defection of many more MPs than merely these two opportunists.
What the British people also failed to realize was that they and their Brexit victory would also be faced with additional adversaries beyond the EU members: those from within their own government. From newly appointed PM May to Boris Johnson, from the Conservative Party to the New Labour sellouts within the Labour Party and the Friends of Israel , the quiet internal political movement against Brexit began. As the House of Lords picked up their phones, too, for very quiet private chats within House of Commons, their minions in the British press began their work as well.
Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review
jim jones , says: December 5, 2018 at 4:55 am GMT
Government found guilty of Contempt of Parliament:Brabantian , says: December 5, 2018 at 7:17 am GMTThis article by Brett Redmayne is certainly right re the horrific sell-out by the Greek government of Tsipras the other year, that has left the Greek citizenry in enduring political despair the betrayal of Greek voters indeed a model for UK betrayal of Brexit votersniceland , says: December 6, 2018 at 9:13 am GMTBut Redmayne is likely very mistaken in the adulation of Jeremy Corbyn as the 'genuine real deal' for British people
Ample evidence points to Corbyn as Trojan horse sell-out, as covered by UK researcher Aangirfan on her blogs, the most recent of which was just vapourised by Google in their censorship insanity
Jeremy Corbyn was a childhood neighbour of the Rothschilds in Wiltshire; with Jeremy's father David Corbyn working for ultra-powerful Victor Rothschild on secret UK gov scientific projects during World War 2
Jeremy Corbyn is tied to child violation scandals & child-crime convicted individuals including Corbyn's Constituency Agent; Corbyn tragically ignoring multiple earnest complaints from child abuse victims & whistleblowers over years, whilst "child abuse rings were operating within all 12 of the borough's children's homes" in Corbyn's district not very decent of him
And of course Corbyn significantly cucked to the Israel lobby in their demands for purge of the Labour party alleged 'anti-semites'
The Trojan Horse 'fake opposition', or fake 'advocate for the people', is a very classic game of the Powers That Be, and sadly Corbyn is likely yet one more fake 'hero'
My theory is, give "capitalism" and financial interests enough time, they will consume any democracy. Meaning: the wealth flows upwards, giving the top class opportunity to influence politics and the media, further improving their situation v.s. the rest, resulting in ever stronger position – until they hold all the power. Controlling the media and therefore the narrative, capable to destroy any and all opposition. Ministers and members of parliaments, most bought and paid for one way or the other. Thankfully, the 1% or rather the 0.1% don't always agree so the picture can be a bit blurred.niceland , says: December 6, 2018 at 10:07 am GMTYou can guess what country inspired this "theory" of mine. The second on the list is actually the U.K. If a real socialist becomes the prime minister of the U.K. I will be very surprised. But Brexit is a black swan like they say in the financial sector, and they tend to disrupt even the best of theories. Perhaps Corbin is genuine and will become prime minister! I am not holding my breath.
However, if he is a real socialist like the article claims. And he becomes prime minister of the U.K the situation will get really interesting. Not only from the EU side but more importantly from U.K. best friend – the U.S. Uncle Sam will not be happy about this development and doesn't hesitate to crush "bad ideas" he doesn't like.
Case in point – Ireland's financial crisis in 2009;
After massive expansion and spectacular housing bubble the Irish banks were in deep trouble early into the crisis. The EU, ECB and the IMF (troika?) met with the Irish government to discuss solutions. From memory – the question was how to save the Irish banks? They were close to agreement that bondholders and even lenders to the Irish banks should take a "haircut" and the debt load should be cut down to manageable levels so the banks could survive (perhaps Michael Hudson style if you will). One short phone call from the U.S Secretary of the treasury then – Timothy Geithner – to the troika-Irish meeting ended these plans. He said: there will be no haircut! That was the end of it. Ireland survived but it's reasonable to assume this "guideline" paved the road for the Greece debacle.
I believe Mr. Geithner spoke on behalf of the financial power controlling – more or less-our hemisphere. So if the good old socialist Corbin comes to power in the U.K. and intends to really change something and thereby set examples for other nations – he is taking this power head on. I think in case of "no deal" the U.K. will have it's back against the wall and it's bargaining position against the EU will depend a LOT on U.S. response. With socialist in power there will be no meaningful support from the U.S. the powers that be will to their best to destroy Corbin as soon as possible.
I hope I am wrong.
My right wing friends can't understand the biggest issue of our times is class war. This article mentions the "Panama papers" where great many corporations and wealthy individuals (even politicians) in my country were exposed. They run their profits through offshore tax havens while using public infrastructure (paid for by taxpayers) to make their money. It's estimated that wealth amounting to 1,5 times our GDP is stored in these accounts!jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 11:27 am GMTThere is absolutely no way to get it through my right wing friends thick skull that off-shore accounts are tax frauds. Resulting in they paying higher taxes off their wages because the big corporations and the rich don't pay anything. Nope. They simply hate taxes (even if they get plenty back in services) and therefore all taxes are bad. Ergo tax evasions by the 1% are fine – socialism or immigrants must be the root of our problems. MIGA!
Come to think of it – few of them would survive the "law of the jungle" they so much desire. And none of them would survive the "law of the jungle" if the rules are stacked against them. Still, all their political energy is aimed against the ideas and people that struggle against such reality.
I give up – I will never understand the right. No more than the pure bread communist. Hopeless ideas!
" This is because the deal has a provision that would still keep the UK in the EU Customs Union (the system setting common trade rules for all EU members) indefinitely. This is an outrageous inclusion and betrayal of a real Brexit by Ms May since this one topic was the most contentious in the debate during the ongoing negotiations because the Customs Union is the tie to the EU that the original Brexit vote specifically sought to terminate. "jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 11:40 am GMTHere I stopped reading, maybe later more.
Nonsense.What USA MSM told in the USA about what ordinary British people said, those who wanted to leave the EU, I do not know, one of the most often heard reasons was immigration, especially from E European countries, the EU 'free movement of people'.
"Real' Britons refusing to live in Poland.
EP member Verhofstadt so desperate that he asked on CNN help by Trump to keep this 'one of the four EU freedoms'.
This free movement of course was meant to destroy the nation statesWhat Boris Johnson said, many things he said were true, stupid EU interference for example with products made in Britain, for the home market, (he mentioned forty labels in one piece of clothing), no opportunity to seek trade without EU interference.
There was irritation about EU interference 'they even make rules about vacuum cleaners', and, already long ago, closure, EU rules, of village petrol pumps that had been there since the first cars appeared in Britain, too dangerous.
In France nonsensical EU rules are simply ignored, such as countryside private sewer installations.But the idea that GB could leave, even without Brussels obstruction, the customs union, just politicians, and other nitwits in economy, could have such ideas.
Figures are just in my head, too lazy to check.
But British export to what remains of the EU, some € 60 billion, French export to GB, same order of magnitude, German export to GB, far over 100 billion.
Did anyone imagine that Merkel could afford closing down a not negligible part of Bayern car industry, at he same time Bayern being the Land most opposed to Merkel, immigration ?This Brexit in my view is just the beginning of the end of the illusion EU falling apart.
In politics anything is connected with anything.
Britons, again in my opinion, voted to leave because of immigration, inside EU immigration.
What GB will do with Marrakech, I do not know.Marrakech reminds me of many measures that were ready to be implemented when the reason to make these measures no longer existed.
Such as Dutch job guarantees when enterprises merged, these became law when when the merger idiocy was over.
The negative aspects of immigration now are clear to many in the countries with the imagined flesh pots, one way or another authorities will be obliged to stop immigration, but at that very moment migration rules, not legally binding, are presented.As a Belgian political commentator said on Belgian tv 'no communication is possible between French politicians and French yellow coat demonstrators, they live in completely different worlds'.
These different worlds began, to pinpoint a year, in 2005, when the negative referenda about the EU were ignored. As Farrage reminded after the Brexit referendum, in EP, you said 'they do not know what they're doing'
But now Macron and his cronies do not know what to do, now that police sympathises with yellow coat demonstrators.For me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance cultures manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.
@Digital Samizdat Corbyn, in my opinion one of the many not too bright socialists, who are caught in their own ideological prison: worldwide socialism is globalisation, globalisation took power away from politicians, and gave it to multinationals and banks.jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:27 pm GMT@niceland The expression class war is often used without realising what the issue is, same with tax evasion.Tyrion 2 , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:49 pm GMT
The rich of course consume more, however, there is a limit to what one can consume, it takes time to squander money.
So the end of the class war may make the rich poor, but alas the poor hardly richer.About tax evasion, some economist, do not remember his name, did not read the article attentively, analysed wealth in the world, and concluded that eight % of this wealth had originated in evading taxes.
Over what period this evasion had taken place, do not remember this economist had reached a conclusion, but anyone understands that ending tax evasion will not make all poor rich.There is quite another aspect of class war, evading taxes, wealth inequality, that is quite worrying: the political power money can yield.
Soros is at war with Hungary, his Open University must leave Hungary.
USA MSM furious, some basic human right, or rights, have been violated, many in Brussels furious, the 226 Soros followers among them, I suppose.
But since when is it allowed, legally and/or morally, to try to change the culture of a country, in this case by a foreigner, just by pumping money into a country ?
Soros advertises himself as a philantropist, the Hungarian majority sees him as some kind of imperialist, I suppose.@Simon in London 90% Labour party members supported remain, as did 65% of their voters and 95% of their MPs.Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:53 pm GMTFor me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance cultures manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.Mike P , says: December 6, 2018 at 1:20 pm GMTWell , I am reading " The occult renaissance church of Rome " by Michael Hoffman , Independent History and research . Coeur d`Alene , Idaho . http://www.RevisionistHistory.org
I saw about this book in this Unz web .I used to think than the rot started with protestantism , but Hoffman says it started with catholic Renaissance in Rome itself in the XV century , the Medici , the Popes , usury
This whole affair illustrates beautifully the real purpose of the sham laughingly known as "representative democracy," namely, not to "empower" the public but to deprive it of its power.Wizard of Oz , says: December 6, 2018 at 1:48 pm GMTWith modern means of communication, direct democracy would be technically feasible even in large countries. Nevertheless, practically all "democratic" countries continue to delegate all legislative powers to elected "representatives." These are nothing more than consenting hostages of those with the real power, who control and at the same time hide behind those "representatives." The more this becomes obvious, the lower the calibre of the people willing to be used in this manner – hence, the current crop of mental gnomes and opportunist shills in European politics.
I would only shout this rambling ignoramus a beer in the pub to stop his mouth for a while. Some of his egregious errors have been noted. and Greece, anyway, is an irrelevance to the critical decisions on Brexit.Stebbing Heuer , says: Website December 6, 2018 at 1:57 pm GMTOnce Article 50 was invoked the game was over. All the trump cards were on the EU side. Now we know that, even assuming Britain could muster a competent team to plan and negotiate for Brexit that all the work of proving up the case and negotiating or preparing the ground has to be done over years leading up to the triggering of Article 50. And that's assuming that recent events leave you believing that the once great Britain is fit to be a sovereign nation without adult supervision.
As it is one has to hope that Britain will not be constrained by the total humbug which says that a 51 per cent vote of those choosing to vote in that very un British thing, a referendum, is some sort of reason for not giving effect to a more up to date and better informed view.
@Digital Samizdat Erm Varoufakis didn't knuckle under. He resigned in protest at Tsipras' knuckling under.anon [108] Disclaimer , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:28 pm GMT@Digital Samizdat Hypothesis: The British masses would fare better without a privatized government.Michael Kenny , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:29 pm GMT"Corbyn may prove to be real .. .. old-time Labour platform [leadership, capable to].. return [political, social and financial] control back to the hands of the UK worker".. [but the privateers will use the government itself and mass media to defeat such platforms and to suppress labor with new laws and domestic armed warfare]. Why would a member of the British masses allow [the Oligarch elite and the[ir] powerful business and foreign political interests restrain democracy and waste the victims of privately owned automation revolution? .. ..
[Corbyn's Labour platform challenges ] privatized capitalist because the PCs use the British government to keep imprisoned in propaganda and suppressed in opportunity, the masses. The privateers made wealthy by their monopolies, are using their resources to maintain rule making and enforcement control (via the government) over the masses; such privateers have looted the government, and taken by privatization a vast array of economic monopolies that once belonged to the government. If the British government survives, the Privateers (monopoly thieves) will continue to use the government to replace humanity, in favor of corporate owned Robots and super capable algorithms.
Corbyn's threat to use government to represent the masses and to suppress or reduce asymmetric power and wealth, and to provide sufficient for everyone extends to, and alerts the masses in every capitalist dominated place in the world. He (Corbyn) is a very dangerous man, so too was Jesus Christ."
There is a similar call in France, but it is not yet so well led.
This sounds like a halfway house between hysterical panic and sour grapes. The author clearly believes that Brexit is going to fail.T.T , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:32 pm GMTEvery working Dutch person is "owed" 50k euro from the bailout of Greece, not that Greece will ever pay this back, and not as if Greece ever really got the money as it just went straight to northern European banks to bail them out. Then we have the fiscal policy creating more money by the day to stimulate the economy, which also doesn't reach the countries or people just the banks. Then we have the flirting with East-European mobsters to pull them in the EU sphere corrupting top EU bureaucrats. Then we have all of south Europe being extremely unstable, including France, both its populations and its economy.Brett Redmayne-Titley , says: Website December 6, 2018 at 2:36 pm GMTIt's sad to see the British government doesn't see the disaster ahead, any price would be cheaper then future forced EU integration. And especially at this point, the EU is so unstable, that they can't go to war on the UK without also committing A kamikaze attack.
@Brabantian Thank you for your comment and addition to my evaluation of Corbyn. I do agree with you that Corbyn has yet to be tested for sincerity and effectiveness as PM, but he will likely get his chance and only then will we and the Brits find out for sure. The main point I was hoping to make was that: due to the perceived threat of Labour socialist reform under Corbyn, he has been an ulterior motive in the negotiations and another reason that the EU wants PM May to get her deal passed. Yes, I too am watching Corbyn with jaundiced optimism. Thank you.
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Dec 05, 2018 | www.bradford-delong.com
Frank Wilhoit 03.22.18 at 12:09 am
There is no such thing as liberalism -- or progressivism, etc.There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham's Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. "The king can do no wrong." In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king's friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king's friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself -- backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Then the appearance arises that the task is to map "liberalism", or "progressivism", or "socialism", or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.
No, it a'n't. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:
The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
bruce wilder, 03.23.18 at 1:40 pm
I read the Sean Wilentz article and it seems to be an exercise in virtue signalling by a political centrist and Democratic partisan. Like most left-neoliberals, he doesn't want to be called a neoliberal or acknowledge the political dynamics that have cast his own political tendency as villains, and he cannot understand why betrayal rebranded as "practical" isn't selling better.Z 03.23.18 at 4:35 pm ( 54 )Wilentz did not write the straightforward piece J-D wishes for because to do so would reveal too much of the reprehensible nature of the Democratic Party politics he has decided to praise.
It is strange that an historian would write a piece whose rhetoric seems premised on such labels having reliable definitions constant thru time when he clearly knows that such labels are repeatedly re-purposed by succeeding generations.
FDR used "liberal" for its connotation of generosity just as he repurposed "freedom" as, say, freedom from fear or want. A practical politician overseeing one of the great realignments in American partisan political history, FDR, by virtue of his own family name, could appropriate much of the reputational capital of progressive reform, but he also needed the Republican Progressive faction in his New Deal coalition, as support for agenda items like the Tennessee Valley Authority (public ownership of the means of producing electricity! What will we tell the grandkids?)
But, the New Deal was then, and now is something else.
US partisan politics now is undergoing its own crisis of legitimacy and realignment, as is, not incidentally, European party politics. There are splits in both Parties, though Wilentz is concerned with the split in the Democratic Party, which has people who actually care at odds with those, like Wilentz, who want to be seen to care while maintaining plausible deniability.
bruce wilder>It is strange that an historian would write a piece whose rhetoric seems premised on such labels having reliable definitions constant thru time when he clearly knows that such labels are repeatedly re-purposed by succeeding generations.
Yes, I was amused to think of François Hollande presidency, the successful candidate of the Socialist party, each time he wrote the word socialism to relate today and the 1920s.
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Dec 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
by Tyler Durden
Authored by Tom Luongo,I knew there was something wrong with Donald Trump's presidency the day he bombed the airbase at Al-Shairat in Syria. It was a turning point. I knew it was a mistake the moment he did it and argued as such at the time.
No act by him was more contentious.
It cost me hundreds of followers gained throughout the campaign who wanted to believe Trump was playing 4-D chess. My Periscopes went from being events to afterthoughts.
Those that left needed to believe this because they had invested so much in him.
They had to believe he was playing some deep game with Putin to bring peace to the region.
He wasn't.
I was right and truth is painful. The need for him to be Orange Jesus was so strong they created Qanon and the 'science' of political horoscope as slowly but surely Trump was stripped of all of his power except that of complaining about how unfair it all is.
That day he did something in the moment, with bad intelligence and let fly with tomahawks which Russian and Syrian air defenses misdirected and/or shot down.
Empty PresidentHis goal was to show everyone there was a new, strong sheriff in town.
All it did was weaken him.
The neocons praised him as presidential. They began to get their hooks in him then. But truly, Trump was destroyed before he took office, giving up Michael Flynn, expelling Russian diplomats and compromising his cabinet picks.
Because making war is the only true test of a President to the laptop bombardiers who control foreign policy. With that one act Trump's days as an independent agent in D.C. were numbered.
And since then the hope has been that given the enormity of the opposition to his Presidency he was still fighting for what he campaigned on -- no nation building, bring the empire home, protect the borders, and clean up the corruption.
He's made a few minor changes but not enough to change the course of this country and, by extension, the world.
The people want this change. Those with the power don't.
G-20 GhostSo here we are with a pathetic Trump outclassed at the G-20, a meeting he should dominate but instead is ushered around like a child, given poor earpieces and looking a little lost. He's only allowed to have one meeting of note by his handlers, with China's Xi Jinping.
Because that meeting wasn't going to end with anything damaging to the long-term plan. Trump's tariff game is tired and all it will do is hasten the demise of U.S. competitiveness in the very industries he wants us to be competitive in.
Because tariffs are a band-aid on the real problems of bureaucracy, corruption, waste and sloth within an economy. They are not a product of China stealing our technology (though they have).
And that $1 trillion deficit Trump is running? Music to the ears of the globalists who want the U.S. brought low. More military spending. More boondoggles the banks can cut a nice big check to themselves for with funny money printed without risk. This can go on for a few more years until it doesn't matter anymore.
Trump's folding on meeting Putin is the final nail in his presidency's coffin. He's not even allowed to make statements on this issue anymore. That's for Sarah Sanders, Mike Pomposity and John Bolt-head to do.
You know, the grown-ups in the room.
No. Putin and Trump met once when they weren't supposed to and since then Trump has been getting smaller and smaller. Sure, he held some rallies for the mid-terms to shore up his base for a few weeks while the Democrats stole more than a dozen House seats, three governorships and a couple of Senate seats, but hey he's still working hard for no pay.
Please.
Trump needed to show some real moral courage and speak with Putin about the Kerch Strait incident like men, not sulk in the corner over a couple of ships. And yet his still throws his full support behind a butcher like Mohammed bin Salman because arms sales and Iran.
Putin, for his part, makes no bones about doing business with the Saudis. He knows that bin Salman is creating a quagmire for Trump while driving the U.S. and European Deep State mad.
Hence: https://www.youtube.com/embed/sggVhrwSAFs Putin refuses to apologize for thwarting our plans to overthrow him in Russia and steal Ukraine.
Time Enough to WinFor this Secretary of Defense James Mattis calls Putin, " A slow learner." This is a flat-out threat that Mattis has more coming Putin's way. But in fact, it is Mattis who is the slow learner since he still thinks Putin isn't three steps ahead of him.
Which he is. The game is all about time and money. And thanks to Mattis and, yes, Trump, Putin will win the war of attrition he is playing.
Because that is what has been going on here from the beginning. Iran, China and Russia know what the U.S. power brokers want and they knew Trump would always cave to them. So, they knew exactly how to get Trump to over-commit to a strategy that cannot and will not ever come to fruition.
I warned that Trump's blind-spot when it comes to Iran was his weakness. I warned that he would eventually justify breaking every foreign policy promise to fulfill his plan to unite the Sunni world behind him and Israel by giving them Iran.
The End of the BeginningWelcome to today. And welcome to the end of Trump's presidency because now he is pot-committed to regime change while the vultures circle him domestically. He has become Bush the Lesser with arguably better hair.
He has alienated everyone the world over with sanctions and tariffs, hence his desire to " Get me out of here " as the G-20 wound down. No one believes he matters anymore. By tying himself to the Saudis and the Israelis the way he has he, the master negotiator, has left himself no room to negotiate.
And that is leading to everyone defying him versus cutting deals to carve up the world, end the empire and come home.
Trump is not leading here. He is being led. And change requires leaders. He has been led down the path so many presidents have, more militarism, more empire. Because when you're the Emperor everyone is your enemy. This is the paranoia of a late-stage imperial mindset.
It certainly is the mindset of Trump's closest advisors - Mattis, Bolton and Pompeo.
So Trump's "America First' instincts, no matter how genuine, have been twisted into something worse than evil, they are now ineffectual keepers of the status quo fueling ruinous neoconservative dreams of central Asian dominance.
And he has no one to blame but himself.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_qlE7PPH9C4
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Brazen Heist II , 1 hour ago link
WTFUD , 1 hour ago linkThe Orange Orangutan had his chances to make a difference. He instead chose the Neocunts and his ego.
There will be no more "voting" oneself out of this shitshow. Trump was the last peaceful chance.
It could have been worse, I guess. At least there's that for consolation.
The silver lining to the Trump phenomenon is that the Deep State is at war with itself, and this is bringing down the evil empire from within.
And lastly, Trump was always the symptom, not the cause of all this malaise. A malaise that only Americans can fix.
Bokkenrijder , 2 hours ago linkHis nose is wedged right up Adelson's & Bibi's ring-hole.
Even as we speak now, 100 drones crossed over from Turkey into Syria with French experts modifying them to accept warheads of a chemical nature. Simultaneously the innovative British military are providing miscellaneous WMD's/support to Jabhat-Al -Nusra in Idlib.
Time for Putin/Russia to take these cockroaches/vermin out in quick time, for their own good.
Trump's grasshopper mind could be construed for severe Alzheimer's.
Bokkenrijder , 2 hours ago linkTrump boasted of how HE would "Make the US Military Great again" (as if it wasn't too big to begin with..) and spent $16 billion EXTRA on 'defence,' yet now he suddenly flip-flopped and calls defence spending "crazy."
https://www.rt.com/news/445463-trump-laments-defense-budget/
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1069584730880974849?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
How mentally UNstable and completely UNhinged is Dufus J. Chump?
Expat , 3 hours ago linkSpot on, I completely agree with Luongo, and #metoo have been saying this for a long time.
Trump's unstable and unhinged waffling, lying and flip-flopping (i.e. "4D chess") is finally beginning to catch up with him and his presidency will not be marked with him being the one who drained the swamp, but a presidency marked with a trail of destruction.
He has talked himself into so many corners, that it will be impossible to back out of those corners....unless of course he turns the volume of his bullshitting, lying and waffling up to 11.
"You can fool some people some of the time, but you can't fool all people all of the time."
It's easy to fool dumb American Trumptards, but it's not easy fooling the Russians, the Europeans and the Chinese. They see right through his fake bravado and ********.
I am Groot , 6 hours ago link"I am certain that, at some time in the future, President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race," Trump wrote. "The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy!"
Another classic Tweet from Captain Bonespurs. No wall, no change to healthcare, no immigration policy, no amazing trade agreements, no slavery, no mandatory mullets, no mandatory bible study at school, no burning of witches. And now he is talking about reducing the largest military budget in history.
You guys need a box of tissues?
MAGA
Trump is finished. He had two years to replace Sessions and Rosenstein and have someone at the DOJ appoint a Special Councils for each item to look into:
The Clinton Foundation
Uranium One Deal
Hillary's Email Server
The murder of Seth Rich
The Benghazi Consulate Disaster
The Democrats computer scandal with the Iwan brothers.
Bill Clinton giving China classified missile and sub technology
The unelected Deep State actors controlling the country.
Q is a total ******* fraud. Trump has 3 weeks before he is assraped and left bleeding on the floor by the Democrats and the RHINO's in the senate. If he gets impeached, Pence will be impeached and Nitwit Nancy becomes POTUS. And within 2 months of that happening, we will have full balls out, open Civil War II.
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Dec 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
DEDA CVETKO , 5 hours ago link
Wormwoodcums , 5 hours ago linkI am hearing from reliable anonymous CNN sources that Deep State cockroaches do not like too much sunlight.
Pass the UV lamp, please!
iSage , 5 hours ago linkHard to piece together? Supposed to be. Story is so unreal it's unbelievable. Aliens Bitchez.
scam_MERS , 4 hours ago linkSpy vs Spy...used to love reading Mad Magazine. Now the world is Mad Magazine, amazing stuff.
I credit Mad with my warped sense of humor, as well as my skepticism of anything/everything.
And don't forget: Potrzebie!
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Dec 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
From Killing Kennedy To Kremlin Collusion - Deep State Forced Out Of The Shadows
by Tyler Durden Sat, 12/01/2018 - 20:15 150 SHARES Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog, The Deadliest Operation
Choose your battles wisely...
One month to the day after President Kennedy's assassination, the Washington Post published an article by former president Harry Truman.
I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency -- CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
Truman had envisioned the CIA as an impartial information and intelligence collector from "every available source."
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions -- and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Truman found, to his dismay, that the CIA had ranged far afield.
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue -- and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
The article appeared in the Washington Post's morning edition, but not the evening edition.
Truman reveals two naive assumptions. He thought a government agency could be apolitical and objective. Further, he believed the CIA's role could be limited to information gathering and analysis, eschewing "cloak and dagger operations." The timing and tone of the letter may have been hints that Truman thought the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination. If he did, he also realized an ex-president couldn't state his suspicions without troublesome consequences.
Even the man who signed the CIA into law had to stay in the shadows, the CIA's preferred operating venue. The CIA had become the exact opposite of what Truman envisioned and what its enabling legislation specified. Within a few years after its inauguration in 1947, it was neck-deep in global cloak and dagger and pushing agenda-driven, slanted information and outright disinformation not just within the government, but through the media to the American people.
The CIA lies with astonishing proficiency. It has made an art form of "plausible deniability." Like glimpsing an octopus in murky waters, you know it's there, but it shoots enough black ink to obscure its movements. Murk and black ink make it impossible for anyone on the outside to determine exactly what it does or has done. Insiders, even the director, are often kept in the dark.
For those on the trail of CIA and the other intelligence agencies' lies and skullduggery, the agencies give ground glacially and only when they have to. What concessions they make often embody multiple layers of back-up lies. It can take years for an official admission -- the CIA didn't officially confess its involvement in the 1953 coup that deposed Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddeq until 2013 -- and even then details are usually not forthcoming. Many of the so-called exposés of the intelligence agencies are in effect spook-written for propaganda or damage control.
The intelligence agencies monitor virtually everything we do. They have tentacles reaching into every aspect of contemporary society, exercising control in pervasive but mostly unknown ways. Yet, every so often some idiot writes an op-ed or bloviates on TV, bemoaning the lack of trust the majority of Americans have in "their" government and wondering why. The wonder is that anyone still trusts the government.
The intelligence agency fog both obscures and corrodes. An ever increasing number of Americans believe that a shadowy Deep State pulls the strings. Most major stories since World War II -- Korea, Vietnam, Kennedy's assassination, foreign coups, the 1960s student unrest, civil rights agitation, and civic disorder, Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, domestic surveillance, and many more -- have intelligence angles. However, determining what those angles are plunges you into the miasma perpetuated by the agencies and their media accomplices.
The intelligence agencies and captive media's secrecy, disinformation, and lies make it futile to mount a straightforward attack against them. It's like attacking a citadel surrounded by swamps and bogs that afford no footing, making advance impossible. Their deadliest operation has been against the truth. In a political forum, how does one challenge an adversary who controls most of the information necessary to discredit, and ultimately reform or eliminate that adversary?
You don't fight where your opponent wants you to fight. What the intelligence apparatus fears most is a battle of ideas. Intelligence, the military, and the reserve currency are essential component of the US's confederated global empire. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump questioned a few empire totems and incurred the intelligence leadership's wrath, demonstrating how sensitive and vulnerable they are on this front. The transparent flimsiness of their Russiagate concoction further illustrates the befuddlement. Questions are out in the open and are usually based on facts within the public domain. They move the battle from the murk to the light, unfamiliar and unwelcome terrain.
The US government, like Oceania, switches enemies as necessary. That validates military and intelligence; lasting peace would be intolerable. After World War II the enemy was the USSR and communism, which persisted until the Soviet collapse in 1991. The 9/11 tragedy offered up a new enemy, Islamic terrorism.
Seventeen years later, after a disastrous run of US interventions in the Middle East and Northern Africa and the rout of Sunni jihadists in Syria by the combined forces of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, it's clear that Islamic terrorism is no longer a threat that stirs the paranoia necessary to feed big military and intelligence budgets . For all the money they've spent, intelligence has done a terrible job of either anticipating terrorist strikes or defeating them in counterinsurgency warfare
So switch the enemy again, now it's Russia and China. The best insight the intelligence community could offer about those two is that they've grown stronger by doing the opposite of the US. For the most part they've stayed in their own neighborhoods. They accept that they're constituents, albeit important ones, of a multipolar global order. Although they'll use big sticks to protect their interests, carrots like the Belt and Road Initiative further their influence much better than the US's bullets and bombs.
If the intelligence complex truly cared about the country, they might go public with the observation that the empire is going broke. However, raising awareness of this dire threat -- as opposed to standard intelligence bogeymen -- might prompt reexamination of intelligence and military budgets and the foreign policy that supports them. Insolvency will strangle the US's exorbitantly expensive interventionism. It will be the first real curb on the intelligence complex since World War II, but don't except any proactive measures beforehand from those charged with foreseeing the future.
Conspiracy theories, a term popularized by the CIA to denigrate Warren Commission skeptics, are often proved correct. However, trying to determine the truth behind intelligence agency conspiracies is a time and energy-consuming task, usually producing much frustration and little illumination. Instead, as Caitlin Johnstone recently observed , we're better off fighting on moral and philosophical grounds the intelligence complex and the rest of the government's depredations that are in plain sight.
Attack the intellectual foundations of empire and you attack the whole rickety edifice, including intelligence, that supports it. Tell the truth and you threaten those who deal in lies . Champion sanity and logic and you challenge the insane irrationality of the powers that be. They are daunting tasks, but less daunting than trying to excavate and clean the intelligence sewer.
bogbeagle , 1 hour ago link
WTFUD , 25 minutes ago linkI sometimes wonder whether the Bond films are a psy-op.
I mean, the 'hero' is a psycho-killer ... the premise of the films is 'any means to an end' ... they promote the ridiculous idea that you can be 'licensed to kill', and it's no longer murder ... and they build a strong association between the State and glamour.
Bond makes a virtue out of 'following orders', when in reality, it's a Sin.
Norfry , 2 hours ago linkCan't remember which Section of MI6 Ian Fleming (novelist 007.5) worked but he came into contact with my Hero, the best double-agent Cambridge, maybe World, has Ever produced, Kim Philby. Fleming was a lightweight compared to him and was most likely provided the Funds, by MI6 to titillate the Masses, spread the Word of Deep State.
StarGate , 2 hours ago linkThe article makes many good points but still falls into use of distorting bs language.
For example, "after a disastrous run of US interventions" - well, they stole Libya's wealth and destroyed the country: mission accomplished; that's what they were trying to do. It was not an ""intervention", it was a f***ing war of aggression based on lies.
Well the good news is that folks now know there is deep State, shadow govt, puppet masters, fake news MSM mockingbird programming, satanic "musik/ pop" promoters, etc.
Not everyone knows but more know, and some are now questioning the Matrix sensations they have. That they have not been told the Truth.
Eventually humanity will awaken and get on track, how long it will take is unknown.
The CIA is a symptom of the problem but not the whole problem. Primarily it is the deception that it sows, the confusion and false conclusions that the easily led fill their heads with.
Now that you know there are bad guys out there...
Find someone to love, even if it is a puppy or a guppy. Simplify your needs, and commit small acts of kindness on a regular basis. The World will heal, it may be a rocky convalescence, yet Good triumphs in the end.
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Jun 01, 1999 | www.returnofkings.com
Power in America today looks far different from the picture that C. Wright Mills painted nearly half a century ago. C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite was published in 1956, a time, as Mills himself put it, when Americans were living through "a material boom, a nationalist celebration, a political vacuum." It is not hard to understand why Americans were as complacent as Mills charged.Let's say you were a typical 35-year-old voter in 1956. When you were eight years old, the stock market crashed, and the resulting Clutch Plague began just as you started third or fourth grade. Hence your childhood was consumed with fighting off the poverty of the single greatest economic catastrophe in American history. When you were 20, the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor, ensuring that your years as a young adult, especially if you were male, would be spent fighting on the ground in Europe or from island to island in Asia. If you were lucky enough to survive that experience, you returned home at the ripe old age of 24, ready to resume some semblance of a normal life -- only then to witness the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Into this milieu exploded The Power Elite . C. Wright Mills was one of the first intellectuals in America to write that the complacency of the Eisenhower years left much to be desired. His indictment was uncompromising. On the one hand, he claimed, vast concentrations of power had coagulated in America, making a mockery of American democracy. On the other, he charged that his fellow intellectuals had sold out to the conservative mood in America, leaving their audience -- the American people themselves -- in a state of ignorance and apathy bearing shocking resemblance to the totalitarian regimes that America had defeated or was currently fighting.
One of the goals Mills set for himself in The Power Elite was to tell his readers -- again, assuming that they were roughly 35 years of age -- how much the organization of power in America had changed during their lifetimes. In the 1920s, when this typical reader had been born, there existed what Mills called "local society," towns and small cities throughout Am erica whose political and social life was dominated by resident businessmen. Small-town elites, usually Republican in their outlook, had a strong voice in Con gress, for most of the congressmen who represented them were either members of the dominant families themselves or had close financial ties to them.
By the time Mills wrote his book, this world of local elites had become as obsolete as the Model T Ford. Power in America had become nationalized, Mills charged, and as a result had also become interconnected. The Power Elite called attention to three prongs of power in the United States. First, business had shifted its focus from corporations that were primarily regional in their workforces and customer bases to ones that sought products in national markets and developed national interests. What had once been a propertied class, tied to the ownership of real assets, had become a managerial class, rewarded for its ability to organize the vast scope of corporate enterprise into an engine for ever-expanding profits. No longer were the chief executive officers of these companies chosen because they were of the right social background. Connections still mattered, but so did bureaucratic skill. The men who possessed those skills were rewarded well for their efforts. Larded with expense accounts and paid handsomely, they could exercise national influence not only through their companies, but through the roles that they would be called upon to serve in "the national interest."
Similar changes had taken place in the military sector of American society. World War II, Mills argued, and the subsequent start of the Cold War, led to the establishment of "a permanent war economy" in the United States. Mills wrote that the "warlords," his term for the military and its civilian allies, had once been "only uneasy, poor relations within the American elite; now they are first cousins; soon they may become elder brothers." Given an unlimited checking account by politicians anxious to appear tough, buoyed by fantastic technological and scientific achievements, and sinking roots into America's educational institutions, the military, Mills believed, was becoming increasingly autonomous. Of all the prongs of the power elite, this "military ascendancy" possessed the most dangerous implications. "American militarism, in fully developed form, would mean the triumph in all areas of life of the military metaphysic, and hence the subordination to it of all other ways of life."
In addition to the military and corporate elites, Mills analyzed the role of what he called "the political directorate." Local elites had once been strongly represented in Congress, but Congress itself, Mills pointed out, had lost power to the executive branch. And within that branch, Mills could count roughly 50 people who, in his opinion, were "now in charge of the executive decisions made in the name of the United States of America." The very top positions -- such as the secretaries of state or defense -- were occupied by men with close ties to the leading national corporations in the United States. These people were not attracted to their positions for the money; often, they made less than they would have in the private sector. Rather they understood that running the Central Intelligence Agency or being secretary of the Treasury gave one vast influence over the direction taken by the country. Firmly interlocked with the military and corporate sectors, the political leaders of the United States fashioned an agenda favorable to their class rather than one that might have been good for the nation as a whole.
Although written very much as a product of its time, The Power Elite has had remarkable staying power. The book has remained in print for 43 years in its original form, which means that the 35-year-old who read it when it first came out is now 78 years old. The names have changed since the book's appearance -- younger readers will recognize hardly any of the corporate, military, and political leaders mentioned by Mills -- but the underlying question of whether America is as democratic in practice as it is in theory continues to matter very much.
Changing Fortunes
The obvious question for any contemporary reader of The Power Elite is whether its conclusions apply to the United States today. Sorting out what is helpful in Mills's book from what has become obsolete seems a task worth undertaking.
Each year, Fortune publishes a list of the 500 leading American companies based on revenues. Roughly 30 of the 50 companies that dominated the economy when Mills wrote his book no longer do, including firms in once seemingly impregnable industries such as steel, rubber, and food. Putting it another way, the 1998 list contains the names of many corporations that would have been quite familiar to Mills: General Motors is ranked first, Ford second, and Exxon third. But the company immediately following these giants -- Wal-Mart Stores -- did not even exist at the time Mills wrote; indeed, the idea that a chain of retail stores started by a folksy Arkansas merchant would someday outrank Mobil, General Electric, or Chrysler would have startled Mills. Furthermore, just as some industries have declined, whole new industries have appeared in America since 1956; IBM was fifty-ninth when Mills wrote, hardly the computer giant -- sixth on the current Fortune 500 list -- that it is now. (Compaq and Intel, neither of which existed when Mills wrote his book, are also in the 1998 top 50.) To illustrate how closed the world of the power elite was, Mills called attention to the fact that one man, Winthrop W. Aldrich, the Am erican ambassador to Great Britain, was a director of 4 of the top 25 companies in America in 1950. In 1998, by contrast, only one of those companies, AT&T, was at the very top; of the other three, Chase Manhattan was twenty-seventh, Metropolitan Life had fallen to forty-third, and the New York Central Railroad was not to be found.
Despite these changes in the nature of corporate America, however, much of what Mills had to say about the corporate elite still applies. It is certainly still the case, for example, that those who run companies are very rich; the gap between what a CEO makes and what a worker makes is extraordinarily high. But there is one difference between the world described by Mills and the world of today that is so striking it cannot be passed over. As odd as it may sound, Mills's understanding of capitalism was not radical enough. Heavily influenced by the sociology of its time, The Power Elite portrayed corporate executives as organization men who "must 'fit in' with those already at the top." They had to be concerned with managing their impressions, as if the appearance of good results were more important than the actuality of them. Mills was disdainful of the idea that leading businessmen were especially com petent. "The fit survive," he wrote, "and fitness means, not formal competence -- there probably is no such thing for top executive positions -- but conformity with the criteria of those who have already succeeded."
It may well have been true in the 1950s that corporate leaders were not especially inventive; but if so, that was because they faced relatively few challenges. If you were the head of General Motors in 1956, you knew that American automobile companies dominated your market; the last thing on your mind was the fact that someday cars called Toyotas or Hondas would be your biggest threat. You did not like the union which organized your workers, but if you were smart, you realized that an ever-growing economy would enable you to trade off high wages for your workers in return for labor market stability. Smaller companies that supplied you with parts were dependent on you for orders. Each year you wanted to outsell Ford and Chrysler, and yet you worked with them to create an elaborate set of signals so that they would not undercut your prices and you would not undercut theirs. Whatever your market share in 1956, in other words, you could be fairly sure that it would be the same in 1957. Why rock the boat? It made perfect sense for budding executives to do what Mills argued they did do: assume that the best way to get ahead was to get along and go along.
Very little of this picture remains accurate at the end of the twentieth century. Union membership as a percentage of the total workforce has declined dramatically, and while this means that companies can pay their workers less, it also means that they cannot expect to invest much in the training of their workers on the assumption that those workers will remain with the company for most of their lives. Foreign competition, once negligible, is now the rule of thumb for most American companies, leading many of them to move parts of their companies overseas and to create their own global marketing arrangements. America's fastest-growing industries can be found in the field of high technology, something Mills did not anticipate. ("Many modern theories of industrial development," he wrote, "stress technological developments, but the number of inventors among the very rich is so small as to be unappreciable.") Often dominated by self-made men (another phenomenon about which Mills was doubtful), these firms are ruthlessly competitive, which upsets any possibility of forming gentlemen's agreements to control prices; indeed, among internet companies the idea is to provide the product with no price whatsoever -- that is, for free -- in the hopes of winning future customer loyalty.
These radical changes in the competitive dynamics of American capitalism have important implications for any effort to characterize the power elite of today. C. Wright Mills was a translator and interpreter of the German sociologist Max Weber, and he borrowed from Weber the idea that a heavily bureaucratized society would also be a stable and conservative society. Only in a society which changes relatively little is it possible for an elite to have power in the first place, for if events change radically, then it tends to be the events controlling the people rather than the people controlling the events. There can be little doubt that those who hold the highest positions in America's corporate hierarchy remain, as they did in Mills's day, the most powerful Americans. But not even they can control rapid technological transformations, intense global competition, and ever-changing consumer tastes. American capitalism is simply too dynamic to be controlled for very long by anyone.
The Warlords
One of the crucial arguments Mills made in The Power Elite was that the emergence of the Cold War completely transformed the American public's historic opposition to a permanent military establishment in the United States. In deed, he stressed that America's military elite was now linked to its economic and political elite. Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. And while all these links between the economy and the military were being forged, the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military.
Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." Their goal was nothing less than a redefinition of reality -- one in which the American people would come to accept what Mills called "an emergency without a foreseeable end." "War or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States," Mills wrote. In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States.
Much as Mills wrote, it remains true today that Congress is extremely friendly to the military, at least in part because the military has become so powerful in the districts of most congressmen. Military bases are an important source of jobs for many Americans, and government spending on the military is crucial to companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which manufacture military equipment. American firms are the leaders in the world's global arms market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere. Some weapons systems never seem to die, even if, as was the case with a "Star Wars" system designed to destroy incoming missiles, there is no demonstrable military need for them.
Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam. Worried about the possibility of a public backlash against the loss of American lives, American presidents either refrain from pursuing military adventures abroad or confine them to rapid strikes, along the lines pursued by Presidents Bush and Clinton in Iraq. Since 1989, moreover, the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe has undermined the capacity of America's elites to mobilize support for military expenditures. China, which at the time Mills wrote was con sidered a serious threat, is now viewed by American businessmen as a source of great potential investment. Domestic political support for a large and permanent military establishment in the United States, in short, can no longer be taken for granted.
The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. At the time Mills wrote, defense expenditures constituted roughly 60 percent of all federal outlays and consumed nearly 10 percent of the U. S. gross domestic product. By the late 1990s, those proportions had fallen to 17 percent of federal outlays and 3.5 percent of GDP. Nearly three million Americans served in the armed forces when The Power Elite appeared, but that number had dropped by half at century's end. By almost any account, Mills's prediction that both the economy and the political systemof the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military is not borne out by historical developments since his time.
And how could he have been right? Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always choose the latter over the former. Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. Now it would be more correct to say that America's economic elite finds more in common with economic elites in other countries than it does with the military elite of its own. The Power Elite failed to foresee a situation in which at least one of the key elements of the power elite would no longer identify its fate with the fate of the country which spawned it.
Mass Society and the Power Elite
Politicians and public officials who wield control over the executive and legislative branches of government constitute the third leg of the power elite. Mills believed that the politicians of his time were no longer required to serve a local apprenticeship before moving up the ladder to national politics. Because corporations and the military had become so interlocked with government, and because these were both national institutions, what might be called "the nationalization of politics" was bound to follow. The new breed of political figure likely to climb to the highest political positions in the land would be those who were cozy with generals and CEOs, not those who were on a first-name basis with real estate brokers and savings and loan officials.
For Mills, politics was primarily a facade. Historically speaking, American politics had been organized on the theory of balance: each branch of government would balance the other; competitive parties would ensure adequate representation; and interest groups like labor unions would serve as a counterweight to other interests like business. But the emergence of the power elite had transformed the theory of balance into a romantic, Jeffersonian myth. So anti democratic had America become under the rule of the power elite, according to Mills, that most decisions were made behind the scenes. As a result, neither Congress nor the political parties had much substantive work to carry out. "In the absence of policy differences of consequence between the major parties," Mills wrote, "the professional party politician must invent themes about which to talk."
Mills was right to emphasize the irrelevance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images to the actualities of twentieth-century American political power. But he was not necessarily correct that politics would therefore become something of an empty theatrical show. Mills believed that in the absence of real substance, the parties would become more like each other. Yet today the ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats are severe -- as, in fact, they were in 1956. Joseph McCarthy, the conservative anticommunist senator from Wisconsin who gave his name to the period in which Mills wrote his book, appears a few times in The Power Elite , but not as a major figure. In his emphasis on politics and economics, Mills underestimated the important role that powerful symbolic and moral crusades have had in American life, including McCarthy's witch-hunt after communist influence. Had he paid more attention to McCarthyism, Mills would have been more likely to predict the role played by divisive issues such as abortion, immigration, and affirmative action in American politics today. Real substance may not be high on the American political agenda, but that does not mean that politics is unimportant. Through our political system, we make decisions about what kind of people we imagine ourselves to be, which is why it matters a great deal at the end of the twentieth century which political party is in power.
Contemporary commentators believe that Mills was an outstanding social critic but not necessarily a first-rate social scientist. Yet I believe that The Power Elite survives better as a work of social science than of social criticism.
At the time Mills was writing, academic sociology was in the process of proclaiming itself a science. The proper role of the sociologist, many of Mills's colleagues believed, was to conduct value-free research emphasizing the close em pirical testing of small-bore hypotheses. A grand science would eventually be built upon extensive empirical work which, like the best of the natural sciences, would be published in highly specialized journals emph a sizing methodological innovation and technical proficiency. Because he never agreed with these objectives, Mills was never considered a good scientist by his sociological peers.
Yet not much of the academic sociology of the 1950s has survived, while The Power Elite , in terms of longevity, is rivaled by very few books of its period. In his own way, Mills contributed much to the understanding of his era. Social scientists of the 1950s emphasized pluralism, a concept which Mills attacked in his criticisms of the theory of balance. The dominant idea of the day was that the concentration of power in America ought not be considered excessive because one group always balanced the power of others. The biggest problem facing America was not concentrated power but what sociologists began to call "the end of ideology." America, they believed, had reached a point in which grand passions over ideas were exhausted. From now on, we would require technical expertise to solve our problems, not the musings of intellectuals.
Compared to such ideas, Mills's picture of American reality, for all its exaggerations, seems closer to the mark. If the test of science is to get reality right, the very passionate convictions of C. Wright Mills drove him to develop a better empirical grasp on Am erican society than his more objective and clinical contemporaries. We can, therefore, read The Power Elite as a fairly good account of what was taking place in America at the time it was written.
As a social critic, however, Mills leaves something to be desired. In that role, Mills portrays himself as a lonely battler for the truth, insistent upon his correctness no matter how many others are seduced by the siren calls of power or wealth. This gives his book emotional power, but it comes with a certain irresponsibility. "In Am erica today," Mills wrote in a typical passage, "men of affairs are not so much dogmatic as they are mindless." Yet however one may dislike the decisions made by those in power in the 1950s, as decision makers they were responsible for the consequences of their acts. It is often easier to criticize from afar than it is to get a sense of what it actually means to make a corporate decision involving thousands of workers, to consider a possible military action that might cost lives, or to decide whether public funds should be spent on roads or welfare. In calling public officials mindless, Mills implies that he knows how they might have acted better. But if he did, he never told readers of The Power Elite ; missing from the book is a statement of what concretely could be done to make the world accord more with the values in which Mills believed.
It is, moreover, one thing to attack the power elite, yet another to extend his criticisms to other intellectuals -- and even the public at large. When he does the latter, Mills runs the risk of becoming as antidemocratic as he believed America had become. As he brings his book to an end, Mills adopts a termonce strongly identified with conservative political theorists. Appalled by the spread of democracy, conservative European writers proclaimed the twentieth century the age of "mass society." The great majority, this theory held, would never act rationally but would respond more like a crowd, hysterically caught up in frenzy at one point, apathetic and withdrawn at another. "The United States is not altogether a mass society," Mills wrote -- and then he went on to write as if it were. And when he did, the image he conveyed of what an American had become was thoroughly unattractive: "He loses his independence, and more importantly, he loses the desire to be independent; in fact, he does not have hold of the idea of being an independent individual with his own mind and his own worked-out way of life." Mills had become so persuaded of the power of the power elite that he seemed to have lost all hope that the American people could find themselves and put a stop to the abuses he detected.
One can only wonder, then, what Mills would have made of the failed attempt by Republican zealots to impeach and remove the President of the United States. At one level it makes one wish there really were a power elite, for surely such an elite would have prevented an extremist faction of an increasingly ideological political party from trying to overturn the results of two elections. And at another level, to the degree that America weathered this crisis, it did so precisely because the public did not act as if were numbed by living in a mass society, for it refused to follow the lead of opinion makers, it made up its mind early and thoughtfully, and then it held tenaciously to its opinion until the end.
Whether or not America has a power elite at the top and a mass society at the bottom, however, it remains in desperate need of the blend of social science and social criticism which The Power Elite offered. It would take another of Mills's books -- perhaps The Sociological Imagination -- to explain why that has been lost.
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Oct 31, 2016 | www.returnofkings.com
179 Comments
Corey Savage
Corey is an iconoclast and the author of 'Man's Fight for Existence' . He believes that the key to life is for men to honour their primal nature. Visit his new website at primalexistence.com
It wasn't long ago that the Left represented the anti-establishment wing in politics. They used to fight against globalism (remember the anti-globalization movement?) even if their motives were different from those of today's anti-globalists, as well as being against censorship, imperialist wars, and the expanding powers of governments and corporations. But today, you see leftists protesting against Brexit, attacking and censoring anyone who disagrees with the establishment (using Twitter on their Apple products while sipping on their Starbucks coffee), and are calling for war in Syria to challenge the Russians. So, just how the hell did did they end up becoming the patsies for the elites?
To understand, we must go back to 2011 when the Occupy movement was ongoing. The Occupy protests, which now seem like ages ago, came about as a response to the economic downturn with the people realizing that they were being screwed by the system. We can debate endlessly about exactly who these people were and the motives behind them, but the important fact is that, to the elites, it was a sign that the people were waking up and challenging their power.
The elites were in a panic as this was the first time in post-war history that the people of West mobilized in mass to threaten their rule. So, the cabals decided that they needed to act fast before the whole movement evolved to a full-blown revolution. And they already had a plan in mind: the never antiquated strategy of divide and rule.
The Diversion
When the people are discontent and angry from being powerless and dispossessed, the pressure will mount and it won't go anywhere. The people want to vent out their frustrations. The elites know that responding directly with repression only inspires greater desire to rise up, so instead of fighting it, they prefer to re-channel that pent up energy elsewhere.
On February 2012, with the Occupy movement still raging, the elites were given that golden opportunity -- or, rather, they created one -- when a black teenager was shot dead in Florida: the none other than the infamous Trayvon Martin case. The shooter wasn't even a full white, but the elites jumped at the chance and used their control of the media to throw everything they had on it; anything to divert the public attention away from them. With their efforts, it quickly became the biggest story of America.
But they didn't stop there. Police shootings, which have always been happening and to all races, were also highly publicized by the mainstream media to stoke liberal outrage and racial tensions that led to the creation of Black Lives Matter movement -- a movement that is financed by George Soros and others to stir up unrests across America.
Did the elites convert Occupy protesters into SJW patsies?
The diversion was complete as the people were now more interested in racial issues than the "1%" who were dictating their lives. The Occupy movement faded away and the people were now venting out their anger elsewhere. Although I don't have as much proof as with the rise of BLM movement, I strongly suspect that the resurgence of social justice warriors around the same time is also the work of the elites who want the Leftists to target fellow citizens over asinine cultural issues rather than the established order.
The Strategy
Back in 19th century, Karl Marx claimed that religion and nationalism was being used to distract the masses from the fact that they were being oppressed under capitalism. If we were to apply this concept to the world today, the culture wars going on now are distractions to keep the masses from undermining the power of the elites.
The goal the elites is simple: divide the masses and let them fight each other so that they will never come together to topple those in power. Meanwhile, they themselves focus on expanding their own wealth and continue to implement institutional control to further their globalist plans. The worst case scenario the elites want to avoid is to have the common people unite as one, so they must do everything they can to fragment them by creating as many divisions as possible.
My understanding of their modus operandi is this: 1) Use hot-button issues to stir up controversy (something that doesn't affect them like gay marriage, race issues, and all other politically correct nonsense). 2) Have the Leftists either get outraged or do something that will provoke a reaction from the Right. 3) Let the people vent out their anger onto each other and get at each other's throats. 4) When the issue fades away, foment a new controversy to repeat the whole process. By cycling through them over and over again, the elites are able to maintain the status quo and keep the people from uniting against them.
Thus, we have our current situation where the masses are divided with blacks against whites, women against men, Islam and atheism against Christianity, Left against Right, and so on, but no more anti-globalization, Tea Party movement, or Occupy Wall Street.
As long as those on the left continue berating the right as racists, sexists, and bigots who are controlled by corporations and the right in turn accuse the left of being degenerate, socialist slackers who just want freebies from a nanny government, nothing will change. As long as the two sides see each others as enemies who are stupid and ignorant, and getting in the way of creating a decent society, the people will remain divided. As long as the rest of the population go berserk over wedding cakes for homosexuals, the latest "misogynist" outrage, or how a lion named Cecil got shot, the elites will continue to win.
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I know they look like an occupying army, but there's nothing to be alarmed about. They're just your friendly neighborhood police doing their jobs to protect you from the "terrorists."
First, while this article has been focused on how the Left has been toyed by the globalist elites, let's not forget that the Right are not totally immune to their influence either. Remember how Neo-cons ( globalist puppets disguised as conservatives ) effectively lured the conservatives in America through faith and patriotism? The support they got from that base was the impetus to launch their war against Iraq based on bullshit evidences of WMD's and Saddam–Al-Queda link. While the Right has changed a lot since then, there are still "conservatives" today who are itching for a war with Russia because USA! USA! USA! .
Second, it is crucial to remember that although the main goal is to maintain divide and rule, it is not the end of it. The elites have far more sinister aims. By raising hell in societies through demographic conflicts and terrorism, the elites are preparing for a total social control. I get the feeling that the elites are letting the chaos and violence run its course so that the people from the two opposing camps will join together in their approval of new government measures for social control.
No matter their differences, when the people get terrified of savagery and disorder, they'll welcome the state to intervene in the name of security. Europe is already getting used to large military presence on their streets while the US government is seemingly preparing for a war against their own citizens . A leaked Soros memo also reveals that the BLM movement is potentially being used to federalize the US police . While many people seem to be concerned about violence and terrorism, it seems those are just tools used by the elites to justify a totalitarian state in the near future.
The Culture Wars: Necessary Fight Or Engineered Distraction?
The issue of culture wars is not an easy one as they are important in many ways, but are still forms of distraction implemented by the elites.
On one hand, we are playing into the hands of elites by raging against social justice and feminist pigshits instead of trying to stop the globalists, Zionists , bankers, mega-corporations , and the governments from undermining our existence. Really, do the issues of politically-incorrect Halloween costumes and whatever bathroom trannies use matter more than the fact that the middle-class is being destroyed, revelations of massive corruption in the DNC, the coming police-state, and the globalist wars that are causing death and destruction around the world? All the drama of outrage and counter-outrage is silly when the elites are snickering as their new world order is taking shape.
On the other hand, culture does matter in many ways. Uncontrolled immigration, anti-male laws, and censorship are all very relevant issues. And as much of the Leftists are now serving as pawns of the establishment, the situation isn't exactly the divide and rule model I described above. In a way, we are now forced to fight the Left and everyone else who are getting in the way of fighting the globalist elites.
So, does this mean we should ally with those who scorn us? Or should we continue playing the elite's games and bicker with their SJW drones? I don't have a good answer, but whatever we choose to do, I believe it is crucial for us to focus our battles and not get trolled into petty issues that the mainstream media wants us to focus on. We should always keep in mind that it is always those at the top who are the true enemies of mankind.
Conclusion: Is There Still Hope?
Although we no longer see grassroots movements and popular mobilization, the current US election has shown that the people are still awake and sick of the establishment. To me, that alone is a hopeful sign that people are still willing to challenge the ruling class.
With Bernie Sanders brought down by the establishment and his supporters scattered into different camps, the only anti-establishment movement now is the presidential campaign led by Donald Trump. This is why we are seeing unprecedented efforts by the elites to bring down Trump and use disgruntled Leftists against his supporters.
I have my doubts about Trump , but he is thousand times preferable to the certain nightmare that Hillary Clinton will bring to America and the world if she gets elected. But besides voting, I believe that it is more important for the people themselves to wake up and be aware of the methods of control that are being implemented upon us. We can't constantly expect some knight in shinning armor to come rally us; we must take the initiative ourselves and be willing to fight for our own destiny.
Read More: The Elites Have One Rule For Themselves, And One Rule For The Rest Of Us
- October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
The elites were in a panic as this was the first time in post-war
history that the people of West mobilized in mass to threaten their
rule.The unfunded and grassroots Tea Party had the Soros organized and funded OWS beat by a good three years (2008).
October 31, 2016 Corey
"People of the West", not just the US. It's possible that the Occupy movement, too, was created by the elites to counter the Tea Party until it spiraled out of control.
- GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
It's more than just possible, it's pretty clear that it was. They show up with buses rented and food vendors in tow. Somebody was paying for that shit, and it sure as hell wasn't the unwashed hippy wannabes out shitting on cop cars.
- Hugo
Its a false statement by the author to state that the 'left' was anti establishment back in the day. It wasn't. It's goal, then and now was to create a global, Marxist establishment and to do that it had brainwash the masses into believing it was 'fightin the man'.
When in fact the 'left' has always been 'the man' as Marxism is focused on control and authority. None of this is new. Perhaps new to North America but, exactly the methodology that was used in Europe since WW1 to turn it into the Marxist shiithole it has become. That in essence was what WW2 was about; Nationalism vs. Globalized Marxism. And Nationalism lost.
- October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Although it is in how you define the establishment. At the time of progressives assuming power (around WW1, give or take) the "Establishment" was fairly Classical Liberal and friendly to liberty and free trade, at least to an extent. Now the "establishment" is them, and they are absolutely "the Man" these days.
October 31, 2016 Corey
Koch brothers and Soros are accused of funding Tea Party and OWS respectively; both denied the charges. Buses and food vendors aren't that expensive and they did receive donations from ordinary people.
But I feel like the whole point of the article is now lost due to this debate of who funded who, who's controlled by who, which is the good side and which the bad, which just confirms that we are divided. I guess some things never change.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Sorry man, but I didn't bring up OWS, the article did. They were so astroturfed that I can't even pretend to take them seriously as legitimate protest. When you have Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the bulk of the Democrat party cheering them on, that should give a moment for pause. On the flip side, the Tea Party was reviled by the Dems AND the GOP simultaneously.
October 31, 2016 JungleJim
There is no "side" . Both were part of same team
- October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
Oh please. Most free-market libertarian organizations are astroturfed by the Koch brothers. They're every bit as insidious as the left, being the pro-free-trade and pro-immigration people they are.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Spare me your Leftism. I took part in them, they were locally organized and unfinanced, basically we just showed up (here in central Ohio) when a college sophomore at OSU sent out a mass email to various local groups.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with free trade, and not all libertarians are open borders/pro-immigration.
October 31, 2016 Jim Johnson
I concur whole heartedly. The tea party movement was a locally organized movement and stood for ideals that made our country great .which is exactly why the left lied so hard and loud about it.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
What it became later of course is up for discussion, I'm only referencing the first year or so. After that, who knows?
Now that being said, yes, they were hot as holy hell about us, and we were accused of everything short of genocide by the BSM.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
Free trade is what caused all the factories in the rust belt to close and outsourced all of American industry.
The Koch brothers themselves, the one that fund things like FreedomWorks, GMU and certain elements of the Tea Party (simply because they weren't directly involve in events does not make them not involved). They themselves are pro-immigration.
I'm not a leftist in the slightest. Being an economic nationalist does not make one left-wing.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Give me a break. Nobody "funded" us. There isn't even a leadership hierarchy to fund. That's what you people don't get, it was a decentralized movement, which gives it a lot of advantages that other movements do not have. It's why we can't be "funded" as monolithic group.
"Free trade" didn't give us the current situation. The government now, and at the time of NAFTA, so regulated the market and taxed it to the hilt that it's laughable to even suggest that it's "free" in any real sense. The best you can say about it is that it's mercantilist, which funny enough, is one step away from "economic nationalism" aka national socialism.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
> Give me a break. Nobody "funded" us. There isn't even a leadership
hierarchy to fund. That's what you people don't get, it was a
decentralized movement, which gives it a lot of advantages that other
movements do not have. It's why we can't be "funded" as monolithic
group.BLM is also highly decentralized. Doesn't mean it isn't funded.
> "Free trade" didn't give us the current situation. The government now,
and at the time of NAFTA, has so regulated the market and taxed it to
the hilt that it's laughable to even suggest that it's "free" in any
real sense. The best you can say about it is that it's mercantilist,
which funny enough, is one step away from "economic nationalism" aka
national socialism.There's a difference between regulating industries and imposing preferential tariffs and lavishing companies with subsidies similar to how China does. They're the ones winning, in case you haven't noticed.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
BLM has a hierarchy, a chain of command and this is easily seen by going to the website of the people who started it.
If the government is out granting favors (or restricting access) then this is not a "free market". Adam Smith would spit on the economic system that America, and by proxy, most of the West has adopted since the 1930's.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
> BLM has a hierarchy, a chain of command and this is easily seen by going to the website of the people who started it
Yet the fact it can't keep the rank and file in line (as evidenced by the endless rioting) speaks to this command structure not working.
> If the government is out granting favors (or restricting access) then
this is not a "free market". Adam Smith would spit on the economic
system that America, and by proxy, most of the West has adopted since
the 1930's.Funny you mention Adam Smith, because he argued for a social safety net and a tax on beer to pay for it. Free-market fundamentalists love to ignore this.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Yet the fact it can't keep the rank and file in line (as evidenced by the endless rioting) speaks to this command structure not working.
They don't *want* them to be "in line". Their entire existence is to create chaos to necessitate "change" at various levels. They are doing exactly what they're told to do.
Sneering at Adam Smith does not change my statement at all. We are not now, nor have we been since at least WW1, a "free market". Not even freaking close. So the position you hold, I reject entirely.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
> They don't *want* them to be "in line". Their entire existence is to
create chaos to necessitate "change" at various levels. They are doing
exactly what they're told to do.Do you honestly think that people trying to win the majority over to their side would encourage beating the shit out of the majority? BLM, for all its failings and Marxism, has lost the media war it was trying to win.
> They don't *want* them to be "in line". Their entire existence is to
create chaos to necessitate "change" at various levels. They are doing
exactly what they're told to do.Free-market capitalism is impossible in a situation where the state can easily be used to slant the market in its favor. Corporations, especially big ones, don't really like free markets.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Who says that they're trying to win the majority over to their side? This aggitation is meant to spur a new set of "rules" and enforcers and empower certain political groups at the expense of others.
Free-market capitalism is impossible in a situation where the state can easily be used to slant the market in its favor. Corporations, especially big ones, don't really like free markets.
Exactly, this is *exactly* what I'm pointing out. Blaming the "free market" for things like NAFTA thus, is incorrect.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
> Who says that they're trying to win the majority over totheir side?
This aggitation is meant to spur a new set of "rules" and enforcers and
empower certain political groups at the expense of others.The people who are most able to facilitate change are the voters and the organizations that control cops. Coming across as a bunch of thugs certainly doesn't help them.
> Exactly, this is *exactly* what I'm pointing out. Blaming the "free market" for things like NAFTA thus, is incorrect.
"Economic internationalism" (i.e no tariffs) would be a better term then.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
The people who are most able to facilitate change are the voters and the
organizations that control cops. Coming across as a bunch of thugs
certainly doesn't help them.You don't understand, this isn't about organizing voters. The changes I'm talking about are not even vaguely connected to "democracy". Their entire point is to be the firebomb throwers that enable a "crackdown". This is an old script.
"Economic internationalism" (i.e no tariffs) would be a better term then.
That, I can accept.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
> Their entire point is to be the firebomb throwers that enable a "crackdown". This is an old script.
It isn't working, which makes me wonder if they intended to do it in the first place.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
It's just the beginning. My hunch is that they will be fully mobilized after Trump takes POTUS. The violence from the Left and their group of retards will escalate an awful lot, I suspect.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
Whether Trump will win POTUS is still an open-question.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Nah, the election is over, he's going to landslide. The only people who see it as "iffy" are the mainstream media, and they're just trying to cover their own asses at this point.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
Let's hope you're right.
October 31, 2016 Conrad Stonebanks
I'm going to pour myself a fine scotch laced with SJW tears when Trump wins.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
I'm going to install a disco ball and light-changing dance floor and dance to "That's the Way I like It" by KC and The Sunshine.
October 31, 2016 Conrad Stonebanks
Lol
October 31, 2016 porcer34
Be careful, that stuff'll make you impotent.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crying-women-turn-men-off/
Not to mention all the cancer causing chemicals from the red hair dye that leach through.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Its only the first step, its like celebrating because you got a sucker punch in on Mike Tyson.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Luckily none of them know how to shoot straight.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Just imagine, BLM if it got big enough could be the justification for a police state. And when they raise the minium wage to $15 an hour, and even more blacks have even fewer jobs .a desperate man does desperate things. Its BS that blacks won't work, they had a higher employment rate in the 50's than whites. And if you can't get a job you turn to crime. And families get broken up, and welfare and divorce laws break up the family. And what has happened to them is happening to everyone else, they were just the canaries in the coal mine.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
BLM has exceeded spectacularly. George Soros doesnt make many bad bets. The police are against blacks, now blacks can justify killing cops, and cops can justify killing blacks. Divide and conquer and no one sees that we are killing you all.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
Why would Adam Smith oppose the current model, when it is a continuation of the British Empire he worked for, except that at least Britain forced Free Trade on everyone else but themselves, this system asset strips every country. BTW you show what an idiot you are mentioning 'what the West has adopted since the 1930'. You do realise that we have had multiple conflicting economic models since the 1930s? There was the Bretton Woods System, which Rockefeller and Kissinger crushed to bring in the floating exchange rate, then Clintons 1999 repeal of the Glass Steagil Act, which set off the last 17 years of madness, so there is no 1930s-2016 Western model Adam Smith would critique, as the current madness is Smiths model. Free Trade was never some mom and pop trading freely with each other utopia you might think, it was all about monopoly and gunboat diplomacy. I thought that cult had ended 5 years ago? There is only 1 working economic model, a high tech, high level education national socialist republic with a national bank, where kikes have no control of finance, with one and only one racial group, whites; no niggers, muds or kikes, then everything we work towards is for Our Posterity.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
When you can contribute more than sneering and tired old Nazi cheerleading, give me a shout.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
Resorting to the 'nazi' jibe. Great response. You have obviously donwloaded the full jewish lexicon and parrot it without question. Well done.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Resorting? Fuck dude, you bring up "kikes" and go full dick sucking admiration about "national socialism" which, I'm going to go out on a limb here, is what the *FREAKING NAZIS* practiced.
And of course, when I note that you're for Nazism, that means that I'm under jewish influence.
This whole "congruity" thing is new to you isn't it?
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
You do realise that national socialism is far older than "the nazisssssssssss". It simply means a nation, as an ethnic group, and a government of the people for the people. Most European countries have been national socialists except the one major factor – they didn't have control of the issuance of currency (as the Founding Fathers planned), ergo, it was a socialist hive for jewish financiers/ central banking cartel. The nazisssssssssss were pretty much the first country (other than Britain briefly after WW1) to get control of the issuance of credit for what the Founding Fathers coined The General Welfare. And look what happened, an economic miracle in under a decade. When whites are given heir own space, free of jewish parasitism, they are completely unbounded and can achieve anything (that was until jew brainwashed America and allies fucked it up).
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
It simply means a nation, as an ethnic group, and a government of the people for the people
Oh please, save that for people who have no grounding in socio-economic theory.
Nationalism means what you say (in essence). SOCIALISM does NOT mean anything of the sort. Trying to combine the two as a package deal is not going to fly. Simply put, that dog don't hunt, son.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
The Industrial Revolution from the very start, was a product of what the French called Dirigisme. It was planned, financed and exectuted as a state run project, both in Britian and France with the investment into science and the creation of the canals, which laid the route for sending coal to the factories. Americas developement was all through the same means, actually the US govenment poaching the best scientists and miners etc from Britain, to use in America. I guess you have never heard of Alexander Hamilton and is Report on Manufactures. It is socialism minus any sick minded jewish involvement, ergo national socialism. The left has been completely co-opted by jewish financiers with Marx. Before Marx joined Masonry, he was a proponent of Freidrich List – the true left, before kikes/ Freemasons hijacked it.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Your "Argument From The Sneer" really doesn't go over well, chief.
You can keep your slavery qua socialism. No thanks.
November 2, 2016 Will B Candid
you had a great argument going until you started with the racial horse shit. color and race dont matter to me. Its big government and big business against everyone else, and those on top see no difference between black or white poor people. to them, we are all trolls.
October 31, 2016 Untergang07
Free trade doesn't exist in the real world. The closer the West got to that idea was in the 19th century. Moreover should we have a free trade, then agreements and other binding documents wouldn't be necessary. A free trade agreement is an oxymoron. Regulated trade agreement would be closer to the truth.
Moreover China doesn't practice free trade, it practices mercantilism at a high price: the suffering of its own people (check the working conditions and the environmental costs). Had we (the west) exercised the ideas of free market, we wouldn't be in this situation.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
Really? Which country practised the uptoian Free Trade? Britian didn't practise it; it forced Free Trade onto everyone else to keep rival countries from developing, whilst using its own working class under worse conditions than Africans-in-America slaves. Workhouses, borstals, child workers in mines from age 6, 14 hours a day 6 days a week, dying on average at 28 years old. The good old days of Free Trade!
October 31, 2016 Untergang07
You can go to Hell if what you search are utopias. In Earth and probably in this universe you will find none. Moreover you misrepresent what I wrote. No matter how you define it, in the 19th century there was more economic freedom than now, at least within the countries. It was not a coincidence that that century marked the zenith of European greatness.
By the way, I never said worldwide free trade is possible because it's not. Intra-national free trade is possible and necessary along with a smaller government, however not even within the European nations or within the U.S. there is free trade. Endless Regulations, currency manipulation, finance speculation are stifling trade and labor, and are making ever more attractive the replacement of human labor via automation due to the high costs and risks of hiring human beings (sex-lawsuits, constant pay rises) and the currency loss of worth (devaluation).
By your writings, I can infer that you are just a racist communist. So I guess the pogroms and gulags will continue until the morale improves.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
Free trade means freedom for the most prosperous country to flood foreign countries with goods. There are two kinds of systems: overt mercantilism (tariffs) or covert mercantilism (free "trade" with the WTO backing it).
If free trade benefitted the elite, they'd accept it.
October 31, 2016 Untergang07
That's why I said global unfettered (free) trade was impossible. Too many differences. Free trade between two or more similar nations might be possible. But free trade between unequal nations it doesn't work out as intented. However we don't even have free trade within our borders how can you try to have free trade with another nation?
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
"Free trade" is like communism in the sense it is very utopian but impossible.
October 31, 2016 Untergang07
Not exactly. Free market within a country is possible and the ideal condition. Communism is just hellish ideology that ignores human nature, for the "common good". Global or international free trade is most likely impossible due to the human nature.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
If you have a Free Market within a country, that means you are excluding foreign competition, ergo it is not Free Trade, its just trade within a protectionist country.
October 31, 2016 Untergang07
Could be. I never said global or international free trade was possible. However today we don't have free market even within one's own country.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Communism is just rebranded dictatorship. Everyone owns everything? Not quite, the person who decides how it is used is effectively the owner.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
I make something that you want, you have money and wish to buy it from me. We agree, you give me money, I give you the object.
Ta da. Free trade.
Not quite as utopian as you seem to think.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
Wow, is it so simple now that simple minded man has explained it. Now how do you suppose you protect your own economy (that your ancestors gifted to you) from being flooded with cheaper imports, or your companies closing down and moving to slave plantations to under cut wages? You do realise that Free Trade, as an economic model (as opposed to the fantasy interpretation you have deduced), was created with the sole purpose of looting and undercutting prices to keep competators down? We can have a world of nation states – ethnic nation states – where we have borders, regulations, protective tarrifs and a central bank owned by and for the poeple, as opposed to the Roschild family, and have a system of fair trade. It can't be free trade as you will basically give every incentive to people who are not your people to undercut you and practise economic and intellectual/ copyright espionage (like China does). You do realise that this economic system since the start of the Industrial Revolution, was created by known people, it was a conspiracy against the feudal powers by the likes of John Baptiste Colbert and the French Academy of Sciences. This Industrial Revolution didn't just happen by men who were trying to make money and trade. There was a conspiracy by top scientists and mathematicians to unlock nature through technology, in the face of the feudal powers that tried suppressing it, such as the pressure Denis Papin had against his work. There was literally government money all over the Industrial Revolution from the start, and government regulation to protect it.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Your life must be so exhausting, surrounded by enemies at every turn.
November 10, 2016 I'm not fat I'm just curvy lol
Being thankful to your ancestors and proud of your ethnicity or race is one thing. This guy however, he takes it to the next level.
Not white = not good enough.
All non-whites are enemies.
ENEMIES EVERYWHERRREEEE!!!
lolOctober 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
Yeah, but then the state and the International bankers come in and demand 20 percent of the proceeds. Utopian in the sense it isn't possible given the circumstances.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Which is when it is no longer free trade.
It's completely possible and happens all the time, in the black and gray market. If left to our own devices, it would happen naturally and organically among normal people.
October 31, 2016 Raphael Verelst
No disagreement here. Hence my rebranding of the term earlier in this thread.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
With the caveat that there is no coercion. Coercion has managed to take on incredible forms these days. I poison your food and try to sell you a health book that promises a cure..free trade? I bribe researchers, to fake studies, then sell drugs that don't work and share the money with doctors who are accepted to be experts. Free trade? The more of a difference in intelligence and money two parties have, usually the less free trade exists.
November 1, 2016 woody188
You are correct. The original Taxed Enough Already movement was designed as a "headless" organization in an attempt to prevent the co-option of the group by the Big Tent Republicans. Didn't work because Sarah Palin and the FreedomWorks goons would show up in their Koch supplied buses and act like they organized the events.
November 1, 2016 Observasaurus Rex
Open borders is fine, as long as you have zero welfare. Once you start giving gibsmedats (welfare, health care, even free road use), then you need to lock down the border tighter than a muslim's 9 year old bride.
Similarly (though more complex), free trade is great, as long as there is little to no interference by the government, or at least similar business crushing regulations on both ends (which is why free trade between Canada and the US is a problem for neither country). Regulations, minimum wages, maternity leave mandates, and such are the reason that free trade results in jobs going over seas. Get the government to remove the regulations, and you eliminate 99.9% of the problem.November 1, 2016 woody188
Wrong. Free trade didn't close the factories. Labor arbitrage is NOT a function of free trade. That is how the masters have modified the language to suit their needs.
November 2, 2016 Raphael Verelst
The word you're looking for is arbitration. As for what destroyed the rust belt, the fact the car industry went international and sought to produce cars closer to markets meant that the old industrial heartland went to shit. Free trade (or economic internationalism, just so GOJ doesn't call me out on this) is partially to blame for this.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
You're still at that magical thinking level where you think grassroots movements just spring up? How quaint. The Tea Party was always funded by billionaires. The Tea Party cult members acted like it got co-opted, but in this country everything is lead from the top, they just pretend its grassroots so you'll buy into something that really isn't in your best interest. As for people saying America was created on Tea Party principles, it wasn't. The Founding Father opposed the British Empires Free Market model which dumped goods onto the colonies and prevented industry from developing. America is inherently a high wage, high tech, protectionist nation state. Free Trade is the opposite – cheap labor, no workers rights and monopoly, which is really feudalism rebranded. For those who think the battle is Free Trade vs Marxism, read what Marx said about British Free Trade (he was employed by the Empire), he was wholly in support of it and David Ricado. Orginially Marx was in favor of Freidrich List, and wrote essays on his system, then he got got hooked into the Freemasonic networks, joined the British Library (spooks) and pushed Free Trade, i.e British (jewish Freemasonic) Imperialism. There was a left wing that was pushing our values, before the kikes took over it. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/books/Robert-Burns-book-2007.pdf
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Spare me your condescension.
October 31, 2016 bem
I am suspicious of movements
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1c19e15d0d4c96e095561ff07b1e0bc6481a6b9448351282d421c12f9e4c1ff6.jpgOctober 31, 2016 Conrad Stonebanks
Another recent ROK article comes to mind, the one about ascribing divine/all knowing qualities to the elites:
http://www.returnofkings.com/98642/the-elites-are-not-smarter-than-you/embed#?secret=g4QCfp1AI0
October 31, 2016 Tom Arrow
Occupy always stank to me. I don't know. It's as if I have some bullshit meter in my head. This bullshit meter goes off when I see Obama. When I see people going crazy over their country losing at football. When I see celebrity gossip. And when I see OWS.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
It stunk to me too because they didn't even seem to have a goal. Im mad so I'm going to sit here stinking up the place. I'm mad, so we should close the federal reserve..now that would have struck fear into the elitists!
November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
I guess it stunk to me for two reasons:
1. Big organized movement with streamlined ideology. I always get a weird feeling around my stomach when great numbers of people gather.
2. This super-focused blame on bankers, as if they were responsible for everything wrong in their lives. I mean, most of those people aren't even the underprivileged ones. They're probably students who just love the thrill of protesting and get fed by mommy and daddy.I experienced no.2 a few years back when a guy came to visit me to go to a protest. So we were there walking with the crowd. A few people shouting through megaphones attacking the police verbally. Police all around the movement. Everybody kinda just walking like a zombie for some nebulous cause. Totally pointless. I don't even feel the thrill. It's just boring to me. I would call it scary, but it isn't even that. Those people are harmless. They aren't killers. They have just enough courage to keep holding up a sign with some slogan. When they shout, they don't even shout with passion. Or in other words: They have just as much courage as the elite wants them to have in order for them to not feel totally powerless. They get a little 'high' from the thing and feel like they are changing the world, while nobody really cares. And this guy who I was there with, he just loved it for fun. He didn't really care about the cause either.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
There were a bunch of enviro protesteres once at an event I went to, and I started talking to them and asking basic enviro questions like " What causes the ozone hole?" They had no clue. For many its a social club, maybe more of a religion, they show up for their protests on Sunday and have a barbeque after, and maybe get laid. But I agree with that guy you mentioned, there is a very famous quote that he who controls the money controls the world. You might like the movie Zeitgeist. The consipiracy theories arent theories, now with the internet the proof can be so strong. I thought there was just NO WAY 911 could have been faked-NO WAY. The fact that they pulled it off shows just how much power the elites really have. 911 was a good deal all around, the new owner made a fortune, the strongest reinsurance companies got stronger, US got the go ahead to invade a few countries, and laws got passed depriving us of more liberties(fear is always the best way to accomplish that). Win win win.
November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
Reminds me 1:1 of a former friend who is now a Scientologist. Scientology has that "Say No To Drugs" campaign. They are against all drugs, no matter what. My former friend happened to be at one of their stands so I went there and confronted him, asked a few questions. The simplest one: Have you ever taken drugs?
He said he took alcohol. And that's enough for him. He took alcohol and by that he judges all drugs, including psychedelics. He gave some vague examples of some cases where LSD supposedly hurt someone or whatever. But he didn't have much answers either.
Only that Scientologists don't get laid is my guess. They attract and select for the weakest of society. They appear to me to be mostly like sheep with zero confidence, looking for a cause and a leader and a set of rules that explains everything and blah blah.
Guess what. I told him I took LSD. He told me that that would probably disqualify me from becoming a Scientologist. Hah! So you have thousands of people working against psychedelics but not a single one of them has actually taken them.
The more ironic that some people think Ron Hubbard came up with most of his ideas on LSD
I read something about 911. Has it actually been proven to be true? That would be a great thing to throw at people.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
I've been learning alot about psychedelics lately too-a few interesting things about them. They are all chemically related to adrenochrome-oxidized adrenaline. oxidized adrenaline is a psychedelic(asthmatics take adrenaline, which as it goes bad turns pink red then brown oxidizing), and it looks like schizos are merely producing an excessive internal amount of this. To me, there is a progression of behaviour modification..from normal, to borderline, narcicism and ending with schizo with increased stress. Schizos are narcissists by the way. But to me its adaptive, when you are under a great deal of stress is when you drastically need to learn something and change your situation. Another thing is that it appears mushrooms, reduce brain activity, which to me links it to sensory deprivation and meditation. As for 911 heres a few good videos, the simplest is the amazing stories told by the owner, that have to change because they are so bad. And a multibillion dollar operation and he only lost 4 people..and profited handsomely from the investment! Truly jewish lightning.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/-jPzAakHPpk?feature=oembed
its fantasyland stuff that you can demo a building in an afternoon. Which is probably why he changed his story. Oh and he had plans drawn up for WTC 7 a year before the attack. Perfectly normal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOSObJDs67Y
this guys says some interesting things
https://www.youtube.com/embed/fpMrOds1JXo?feature=oembed
very good complition,and analysis by a guy who actually demos buildings.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/q3v4QUQpYjc?feature=oembed
November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
Hmm. What do you mean by chemically related? Is that some stuff you have deeper knowledge that I probably wouldn't grasp? If so, that's cool. And what do you mean by "it looks like" when you refer to schizos producing an excessive amount? And where does the link between schizos and narcs come from and where did you get that succession from (normal, borderline, narc, schizo). Seems a bit inconclusive to me, especially since those are all groups of symptoms that, as far as I can tell, have not been somehow linked to a real thing, but rather those people are simply linked together because of similar symptoms. And the symptoms of those 3 things are quite different, I'd say, and not really the same or in some way successive.
Maybe you have a few good points, but I can't logically follow you because I don't understand the links you make.
You also use 'it looks like' when you talk about mushrooms. What leads you to that conclusion? Psychedelics have been shown to greatly increase brain activity (not decrease). There was a test with LSD, the video is floating around Youtube etc. Basically, they observed that there was a lot more activity and what they called 'interconnectivity', which basically means all brain parts lit up at the same time.
In other cultures, schizophrenics have been considered as those who walk among the dead and given great respect. It's all a matter of perspective. My experience with psychedelics is that they greatly raise awareness. They are like an amplifier to all perceptions. I think you have to try it to be able to make a conclusion, but maybe you have
But even then, schizophrenia is probably not even a real thing, just like narcissism and borderline. More like a group of symptoms that don't necessarily all have the same cause. So it is arguable that one schizophrenic is not the same as another, which rings true from my experience in the nuthouse. One was diagnosed with schizophrenia and yes, I would call him narcissistic. Others were rather quiet and beaten down and shit (partly due to medication probably).
Also, I wouldn't say meditation has much links to sensory deprivation, although you could say that if you just think of some guy in a cave sitting still. But that can be a good thing, too, because reducing the input from the outside leaves more attention for the stuff that's inside, which can greatly help you be mindful of your emotions and deal with your demons. Psychedelics can help with this, although I use them scarcely. I see psychedelics a bit like signposts for meditation. You take them and kinda know the direction you're going and then you do the rest 'on foot'.
Thanks for the video links. I thought it was something that was officially acknowledged, but it still seems to be kind of a borderline thing where you have to do your own research, so I'll abstain from that for now. (Other stuff on my mind)
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
By chemically similar I just mean similar molecular shape, if you read more about the guys on that page you found they get more into it. Its good to talk to you sounds like you have much experience on the subject.
Who knows, maybe my theory is wrong. To explain a little better my theory I should say, a man usually goes through normal narcissism and then schizo, with increasing amounts of stress. Borderline is more for women. And it seems like environmental toxins might be able to cause it as well, and since they tend to lodge in different places, that could cause different specific effects and maybe they don't cause some of the same effects as adrenaline caused narcissism. Now if you look at alot of the typical aspects of Narcissism you'll notice that they would be good for say fighting or fleeing- black and white thinking(no time for gray areas) more impulsive(no time to reflect), lack of empathy(again there isnt enough time to consider nuances). One interesting study found that narcissists actually can read emotion in others, just for some reason they don't react to that info . Do you find that people with narc/schizo have really really good memories? If so thats high adrenaline. If they also tend to have a high heart rate, that would also tend to confirm my theory.
I had an interesting experience with a woman I know who had a resting heart rate of 110(!) and a borderline personality. Just giving her a gram of sodium ascorbate a day brought her resting heart rate down to 70, and she could sleep 8 hours now, and her personality actually changed. She went from being always cold in a warm environment to absolutely radiating heat. This took place over a few days.
Oh and for sensory deprivation, you can do the lite version, find some white noise music and put something redish over your eyes. When I did this it was like having a waking dream, very bizarre.
Yeah 911 is not officially debunked, everything is misinformation wars, and people seem to be finally waking up to it this election.November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
Some interesting info.
Personally, I've gone through phases that would apply to pretty much all 3 of the categories. In fact, I dare say most of my life I've been stuck in a fight or flight without realizing it. I think it's spot on. It allows black and white, pretty much. In my case, it's a little more weird, because it kinda conflicts with some other desires, leading to me being somewhat unpredictable (borderline maybe, heh). I also seem to tend to have very high heart rate. Guy at the gym told me this once despite me having not done much work or anything beforehand. It was really just the stress of my social anxiety.
I find that this kind of stress creates a kind of sensation in my body that may very well have to do with adrenaline. It feels kinda dead-ish. A bit like the taste of blood when you get it into your mouth. Hard to describe. Numb, a little sizzling, dark, oppressive, hot. Well yeah, dead. Also get it during intensive training and too much of this makes me almost faint and gets me into extremely weird states for a short amount of time. Like when I totally power myself out, I can feel it coming. It's like I know shit I went too far and in the next moment, I almost black out. Extremely extremely uncomfortable. It's like I can feel my whole personality being deconstructed very quickly into nothingness and then coming back again.
Interesting tip with the white noise I'll keep it in mind.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
You might try paying attention to your heart rate more, either feel the side of your neck, time for 15 seconds, then multiply by 4, or there are even programs for smart phones that use the light and camera and can see the blood pulses. What is likely happening to you is that when the heart beats excessively fast, it actually stops pumping effectively, it seems to be a defect we have-horses on the other hand have a max heart rate and wont go beyond that even if they run faster. Now like I was telling the woman i know, its like she's running a marathon, but she can never sit down, its a very unhealthy thing. I think I saw a study in men where it correlates with a 400% increase in mortality rate. There are many consequences of excess acid production(co2 dissolved in blood is acidic). A little talked about fact of the human body is that it goes to extreme effort to maintain PH. When you exercise, your body aggressively and actively releases alkaline bone mineral to help maintain PH, and when you rest it is rebuilt. You also eliminate acid through breathing, urine and to a small extent through sweat. Excessive acid, can cause kidney stones, gout, collagen breakdown, mild scurvy, acne, joint pain, feeling of coldness. You might try like the woman I was talking with some potassium ascorbate around a gram dissolved in a glass of water, take maybe two to three times a day and see what your heart rate does, and if it improves some of your other symptoms(potassium ascorbate I've learned is much better than sodium ascorbate). You may see some initial negative effects too, because sometimes all of a sudden you are eliminating toxins from your body that you werent before. It isnt a panacea, but it can correct some of the basic problems going on. For example the basic problem could be hyperthyroidism, which most likely that woman had, and you have to treat that to decrease hormone production. I suspect heavy metals that cross the blood brain barrier may be able to cause it as well.
November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
Interesting, I'll keep that info in mind. Thanks.
November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
Hey, I checked on that adrenochrome thing.
http://www.orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1999/articles/1999-v14n01-p049.shtmlQuite interesting, I have to say. I am wondering how that can be reconciled with my experiences. Maybe extreme stress is a precursor to death to the body, hence it prepares itself to enter the world of the dead, in a sense. I think it was proven (or hypothesized?) that the brain generates DMT on birth and death, a potent psychedelic substance. It's like the mother of all psychedelics. Let's you talk to God and shit like that.
This could indicate though, that schizophrenia (if the link is valid) is less a result of a malfunctioning brain than some kind of constant stress that is so severe that it creates those chemicals, leading to a 'disconnect from reality'. If you think about it, death is a form of disconnect from reality, so schizophrenia may be a half-way thing. That doesn't mean though that you have to fight those chemicals with neuroleptika. In fact, I'd say the body produces these things precisely because they are helpful in extreme stress. I have also read here on ROK that extreme stress during lifting can create an almost transcendental experience where you become one with the universe (or perceive so) and stuff like that. If those chemicals create that kind of awareness, it makes sense to me that it can be used constructively if the 'patient' practices a lot of mindfulness or meditation.
Now, I will readily admit that I had something you could call a psychotic episode on psychedelics. Only that I don't see it as pathologic. I am glad I had that experience and I think it was important. Psychotic only describes the symptoms. But a person that looks like he's freaking out from the outside may be having a great experience on the inside that is actually healing and helpful. Which is why indigenous tribes used psychedelics for thousands of years as a cure, as a guide, as an initiation rite. Hah, and since we're creating links: Initiation rites often deal with a lot of intense pain or even symbolical dying. Christianity also talks about dying and being reborn. I think there is a lot of truth in it. That to enter manhood fully, one has to die in a sense and be reborn. Which is what those experiences can do they literally rip you apart and put you back together in a better way.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Yeah those guys had an 80% ish success rate curing schizo. Looks like toxoplasmosis(common infection) can cause it too. Orthomolecular was started by Linus Pauling a double nobel prize winner. There are numerous things like this where there are amazing cures, and no one cares to study further. Most medicine is a scam. It would be horrible if it turned out simple herbs could cure cancer, I mean they would lose about $50k per patient. Number two monopoly according to Milton Friedman the famous economist. Japan and Germany seem to be exceptions.
Thanks for the info on DMT and lifting, Ill check it out. Maybe DMT is an even more potent one? I noticed that most of the greatest mathematical discoveries happened during grave illness and a year before death. Look up Riemann or Ramanujan as good examples. Now in my experience heart rate seems to be a good measure of adrenaline..and from what Im reading it seem LSD and mushrooms increases heart rate. As for rebirth in religion watch that movie I mentioned Zeitgeist, it has a very interesting take on it. Many religions share the same beliefs and it seems to be taken from the movement of the Sun.
Those rituals about killing the boy and going through hardship to be accepted into the group of men seem very important. In a way its the classic heros quest. A man can no longer run from danger as a child would, should no longer cry from pain. Very important lessons that are rarely taught.November 6, 2016 Spaghettimonster
Zeitgeist is that controlled opposition material the elites love to put out. 98% truth 2% lies – just like David Icke.
November 7, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Do you have anything you recommend?
November 7, 2016 Spaghettimonster
Honestly – do your own research. I know that's a redundant statement, but that's what it has come down to. Zeitgeist promotes things such as the Horus/Jesus theory – which has been debunked numerous times by mainstream secular scholars. And that's only one among many other lies it propogates. When it's so glaring that info is false – one is forced to look into their own knowledge gathering
November 7, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Doing your own research includes getting info from others with common interests. The term "debunking" is a shit term. There are only better theories, and better evidence. Many mainstream researchers are shit too, I talk alot about medicine, and so much of what they do is provably crap based on their own studies of what they do. And here as we've learned in the manosphere, studies about men and women interactions are often gamed, to show that men are horrible and women are saints. Someone producing a paper showing the wrong results will almost never get published. Just like if you control the media, its easy to have the appearance of authority, when in reality, money bought a fake authority. SO do you have anything good to recommend?
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
But now its so clear how much control the elitists have, and how much they are exerting now, I've had several posts insta vaporized from various places. One was regarding threats to Trump and the other about a high level murder. What they try to contol the most is what is most dangerous to them. They really don't want Trump to win, because then they have to try to control him with bullets, and that never looks good when you murder the highest guys. Because then people notice. Putin is their nightmare, the elites set him up and pretty soon some elites were floating in the river, and some were locked up. He let others stay in their places, but it was clear a new sheriff was in town. I'm enjoying watching them sweat.
November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
Hmm but then, if "we" send people floating in the river are we actually better or any different than the elite? Sounds like a perfectly mirror-reversed behavior.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Well at the very least I would say the second was revenge while the first was murder, however revolutions often produce the same tyrants they seek to depose. And Tyrants create the same revolutions that kill them. They have a goal to cull the worlds populations through social engineering(you might notice for example all the porn now with incest one pornhub now) through toxins(drugs, contaminated food and water), and financially. Sounds like a perfect program to create a superman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8
November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
Amazing video. Truly breathtaking.
Reminds me of some comment on Youtube by someone who met one of those 'reptilians' and asked why they are causing suffering and that thing replied 'to make humanity stronger'. Heh.
Yeah, I suppose it is that way. There will always be the oppressed and underprivileged and there will always be those who enjoy being in the current mainstream. The truly oppressed will never be equal with those in power, that's a fever dream.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
And as they say heavy is the head that wears the crown.
November 5, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
I looked up the reptillian stuff. It works perfectly if you relace reptilian with"jewish banker" and half reptillian as "collaborator". Sometimes they have to act crazy to even be allowed to spread ideas without getting murdered like say kubrick after eyes wide shut.
November 5, 2016 Padge Vounder
Mad that reckless gambling by financial institutions caused a massive economic crash and global recession, millions of people losing their jobs and their homes, job market and middle class still hasn't recovered from it. How do you not know any of that??? It's been in the news for 8 years now.
November 5, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Dont be and idiot everyone knows that.b Being mad isnt a goal. If they had said we want to break up all of the biggest banks that would have been a goal. Sitting there because you are mad inspires nothing and no one. And not surprisingly they changed nothing.
November 6, 2016 Padge Vounder
If being mad wasn't a goal, Fox 'news' and Breitbart wouldn't exist.
You're sadly uninformed about the occupy wall street movement. But you already made up your mind about it, it seems, dismissing people braver and more involved than you who actually went out to risk their safety and freedom protesting the criminal recklessness of financial institutions and their failure to take responsibility for their actions. What was the goal? to show American politicians and the financial industry that American people are fed up with their behavior so much they've shaken off their apathy that infects the brains of so many.
THAT is what the people in power fear – that the sleeping sheep would wake up and get informed and start fighting back.
The movement inspired a lot and it's a pity you can't see it ( or simply refuse to ).
You're the one who is sitting there. These people actually got off their asses to go out and try to make a difference. Doubt you can say the same.
November 7, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Great sound and fury signifying nothing.
November 1, 2016 ConservativeAtheistRedPiller
It stank to me as well because the stock exchange isn't some evil globalist tool. Everybody can buy shares and, you know, they don't always go up making you filthy rich, quite the contrary. They are a useful financing tool for companies though.
November 1, 2016 Tom Arrow
Yeah, well said. Definitely an aspect.
November 5, 2016 Padge Vounder
Do some reading about Goldman Sachs and other fatcat banks, their criminal and reckless and unethical behavior.
November 5, 2016 ConservativeAtheistRedPiller
So? That would only prove that GS etc are bad guys, not that the Stock Exchange itself should go.
November 5, 2016 Padge Vounder
Who was proposing abolishing the stock exchange in it's entirety? Total straw man you made up. OWS was about the criminal executives who gambled and crashed the global economy, wanting accountability and new laws to prevent a similar disaster from occuring. I'd think anyone with common sense could agree on that.
As it stands, they avoid any criminal liability by paying fines as part of a settlement and admitting no guilt. And the fines are a small fraction of their profits so there is no incentive to follow the laws. It's seen as the cost of doing (shady) business.
They came to the government hat in hand after they screwed up, and got a fat bailout at the taxpayers expense. This is why I can't stand conservatives. They're all for socialism for the rich, but rugged individualism for the poor and middle class. It should be the reverse. Goldman and the others should have been turned away and homeowners bailed out instead.
Can you imagine going to a casino, recklessly gambling, losing it all, then begging/demanding the government give you more money?
This is what really stinks.
November 6, 2016 Hipponax (μητροκοίτης)
Is this what you really imagined happened? You put no blame on the American middle class which effectively tanked the economy due to their own greed?
November 2, 2016 david
Agreed
November 5, 2016 Padge Vounder
helps if you know the first thing about the crash of 08 as a starting point.
November 5, 2016 Padge Vounder
that was just a bunch of ignorant conservative rednecks who didn't like paying taxes. Astroturf. That joke of a movement isn't even worth mentioning. But it's funny when they eat their own, like with Eric Cantor. Now he has to take a job as million dollar a year lobbyist subverting our government, how sad.
October 31, 2016 Marcus Antonius
Great article, and probably true. Part of self-development is seeing through this shit.
The thing is, if we as Men focus on our own self-development, and on expressing our bigger and better selves by dominating our environments, none of this stuff matters and will eventually change anyway.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Oh, and vote Trump on the 8th
October 31, 2016 Bourbonman
Occupy and Tea Party had one thing in common. How quickly they suckered the masses into thinking they were for the people. Movements that large don't suddenly appear overnight.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
If somebody does something heinous, like nationalize 1/6th of the economy (health care) you bet your bippy that great amounts of people will gather suddenly overnight. Same for the nationwide pro-gun demonstrations that happened after the CN shooting.
Technology has made organizing and getting large groups together in a flash pretty easy. Not everything is some nefarious conspiracy.
Now if the Tea Party had shown up with organized busses, vendors and pre-selected college faculty in tow, like OWS, then you'd have something.
October 31, 2016 John Galt
Some do and they start out as a emotive grassroots network, but get quickly comprimised. I had relatives active in the Tea Party and after awhile it gets hijacked and ran into the ground.
Did you read about the Oregon uprising against the feds and how they were acquitted? The evidence revealed half the people involved were paid FBI informants. Thats what happens over time to any organization deemed a threat.
October 31, 2016 Cecil Henry
Meanwhile in Canada, this:
An explicit invasion at your expense.
White Genocide in explicit, unabashed, unapologetic action.
Immigration Minister John McCallum to reveal 'substantially' higher newcomer targets
Experts warn that welcoming more immigrants, refugees must come with enhanced support services
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
You'll not get many thumbs up here, given half the idiots are unrecovered Tea Party Free Trade dupes, that like cheap labor being imported, so long as their jobs are not threatened.
October 31, 2016 Jim Johnson
There has always been elites who have tried to control the masses through divide and conquer. Even if this crop is eliminated, others will arise. The only way we can come together is if we have a common guiding set of principals to go by. Throughout history, violent revolutions that have resulted in a loss of freedom, (French Revolution, Bolshevik, Nazi, Cuban .etc.) all had an anti-christian element, or a bastardization of Christianity.
In retrospect, as a people, we need to be continually reminded of the principals that enable freedom to exist. Integrity, work, charity, self determination, etc. are taught in church. Go to church, work to strengthen those virtues, and expect virtue from your neighbor. If we as a whole, reject the crap spewed out main stream media and leftists, we will have a stronger society.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
You are exactly correct, and this is *precisely* why the Marxists, back to Marx, targeted things like the church, family and traditional social constructs for destruction. He understood what you're saying perfectly.
October 31, 2016 Tom Arrow
You forget the women vs. men division.
Btw, isn't it fascinating that they manage to divide exactly 50:50? How statistically improbable is that?
October 31, 2016 Jim Johnson
It is no doubt the media is behind this. THey have been in overtime for quite awhile propping up the left to maintain the balance.
October 31, 2016 Tom Arrow
Makes it even more fascinating. Media being pretty much indiscriminately pro left and still there's enough people who vote right. Heh.
October 31, 2016 Michael Ryan
The Left has been successful appealing to Angry Destructive People but since the seventies they have run out of people with legitimate grievances so all they have are the angry anti-social dregs of society, the lazy Delta Males, Ugly Feminists, Perverts and assorted scum.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
To directly address the argument of the article, I'll offer this.
Divide and Conquer is a known strategy and yes, politicians use it (as do generals on a battlefield). It's legitimate to note the tactic and try to avoid falling for it. That being said, if we go so paranoid that we don't ever, ever take positions based on principle or form opposition groups, we'll have given these very same powers the victory that they're looking for with divide and conquer.
The moment you form a group to "counter the controlling elite" I guarantee you that it will be attacked and discredited because "divide and conquer!". Even if it succeeds (let's be optimistic) it will simply install itself as the new elite. This is human nature. It may not happen immediately, it may take a few generations (think the early united States, where Washington refused to be a "king" and instead deferred to the new Constitutional Republic) to happen, but it will happen eventually (think the same nation in the 1930's).
Last, not every mass movement is 'financed by nefarious sources'. Sometimes, people just get pissed off. That said, lots of mass movements are financed by unsavory types. The problem becomes that we tend to default accept "all" instead of taking each group individually for what they are.
October 31, 2016 Corey
Yeah, there's no easy answer as to what we should do.
But I want to ask since you said you were involved in it: What happened to the Tea Party? Did they achieve any of their goals?
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
They kind of ebb and flow. I really haven't kept up much the last couple of years. My focus since 2010 or so has been pro-2nd Amendment advocacy, to be honest.
October 31, 2016 John Galt
They made significant gains at the local and state level. The RINOs are clinging to the national GOP, but as their candidates just got punked by Trump they are on borrowed time.
October 31, 2016 Frank Rook
Yup. A New Republic can end up becoming the evil Galactic Empire eventually.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Not only can, but almost always does if it doesn't collapse under it's own internal contradictions.
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
I heard that after the death of Muhammad Ali, the Orlando shootings happened to prevent people's unity. I strongly suspected, after his death, an attack would happen in the US by a Muslim to prevent American Muslim and nonMuslim cooperation and understanding. Media won't say, but the shooter was gay.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
We don't need mulsim/ non-muslim co-operation in America. America was designed and built by and for whites, for Our Posterity. Freedom of religion clearly meant the sects of Christianity and secular deists. There is no place in America for Islam or muslims.
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
How about natives? Or perhaps we need to reintroduce pox in certain areas? And let us not forget 3/5ths. Designed and built by and for whites, on the red mans land, upon the black man's back.
October 31, 2016 John Galt
That's tired old tripe.
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
Well reasoned.
October 31, 2016 John Galt
I cherish my time more than educating you. But you have the leftist talking points down pat.
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
Justify Us, generalize Them. That's education enough, I suppose.
November 1, 2016 John Galt
Your emotive points are not based on fact, but feel free to source your agruement. But slogans like "pox on the red mans land, upon the black man's back" are simply leftist slogans. The "pox" Thing was debunked years ago. Red man lands? Which tribe and under what conditions? One Million Indians inhabited North America until the White man showed up. Now there are more reds that have ever lived in the old days. Black mans back did very little. Most of America was built on white Europeans backs no blacks in the wilderness in the old days and most of the swamp draining, coal mining, tree cutting, etc.. was done by us poor white folk.
Believe your myths if it makes you feel better, but your bullshit exists to bridge your inferiority complex and has little to do with the truth.
November 1, 2016 Cardtheorist
The pox did wipe out a good chunk of natives, but let us say that was not the case, intentionally or not. Tribes and conditions- does this imply that, were there a formal written declaration, it would have been unethical and they would not have attempted to gain control? More reds than before argument cannot hold water- populations tend to increase in the long run. Blacks did nothing for the same reason economic communism does not- lack of incentives. Why work for your slavemaster if you're not getting much out of it?
You assume inferiority complex is the cause of these arguments. I have friends of all races but also recognize that all races have their bloody hands. I am simply pointing out the case of the origins of American here, as this is what the conversation became. I find it ironic, as far as the title if this article goes. Also ironic is how I mentioned the possibility of Muslim and American peace and then get opposed while the same people praise the traditionalism of muslim women. Everyone claims they're objective and truthful.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
Lets talk about Natives, who, like Stone Age tribes the world over, were in endless inter-tribal warfare with each other. The colonialists that arrived in America often sided with peaceful tribes and co-operated, as they did in New Zealand with the weaker (more peaceful) Maori Iwi, who begged the colonialists to buy land as a buffer between waring tribes. The less technologically developed in terms of producing food and storing it, the more scarcity and the more war. That is just a smple reality, and Stone Age primitives are always at war. Since they are always at war, its an open invite to conquer. Native Indians now have technology and means of living 3000 years in advance of what they had 400 years ago. You are welcome.
The issue of smallpox is just mythology. Most colonialists either had smallpox or were semi-resistent. Indians were not, and it hit them harder. Are you going to also bring up the Hollywood History theory that whites raped native woemn when the records show that the more violent tribes kidnapped other tribes women and sold them to colonialists for goods – the women were them married off and lived at higher living standards that they otherwise would have, so some good came out of that bad situation.
As for 3/5th, blacks were classed as 3/5ths yet they were dumped onto America by Jewish Dutch slave merchants, having been bought from African tribesmen. Less than 5% of whites owned slaves, yet freed slaves – who were paid btw (so they were really indentured labor) – bought slaves at higher rates than any other people – except jews, of which 70% owned slaves (as they created the hatred of blacks with their Curse of Ham bullshit). Blacks are not 3/5ths human. They are worthless and have no place in any advanced country. Personally I would wipe them out and have Africa as a big Safari Park for Asians and Europeans.
Blacks labour didn't build America. There were more whites in indentured labor than blacks. Blacks were freed from slavery by the technological inventions (o white men) which made their labor surplus to requirements. Again, like Native Americans, blacks were given a leg up from Stone Age savages, of at least 3000 years of know-how and technological progress. There is every reason to believe they are incapable of even making metal of their own volition. So again, you are welcome, you are a beneficiary of my ancestors superior creativity.
BTW, British working class had higher productivty that black slaves, were paid less, worked longer hours, died 5 years younger on average, had to endure Northern Winters often with no shoes and simple clothing, while slaves worked as seasonal farm workers. You have no idea how hard whites worked to build this civilisation you benefit from, and you probably don't care so long as it magically appears to you via your welfare cheque.October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
-"Open invite to conquer" By that reasoning, I guess Muslims would be justified entry and establish traditionalism over feminism in the US. Technology=/=happiness.
-I was referring only to the smallpox, which killed the majority of the native population.
-Distribution is irrelevant. Mass cheap labor.
-"Blacks were freed from slavery by the technological inventions (o white men) which made their labor surplus to requirements" Stabbing a guy 9″ deep and pulling out 6 doesn't mean you did him a favor. Progress, which was built on previous civilizations, which is the case for all great nations. But as for your example-I suppose you'd have your mother raped and killed in exchange for technology. I hear kids these days kill for PS4's sometimes.
-"Had higher productivity" and had freedom of choice. Willing labor>unwilling labor.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
Hunter Gatherer peoples do not have concepts such as nations. They have not created property rights, they merely have inter-tribal war, endless revenge killings. In such a society, yes, it is an open invite to walk in and claim unclaimed land. Muslims coming here is exactly the opposite, they are trying to extort property rights we created. If you haven't even grasped the basics of anthropology and patriarchy vs matriarchy (stone age primitivism) then perhaps you are on the wrong website.
As for smallpox, I was aware that you were talking about smallpox. Smallpox wasn't spread deliberatly, it was just the nature of the airborne virus.
You comment on native indian women is disingenuous. Colonialists could have bought the women or not, if not, they'd be raped and killed by other tribes (who wholesale slanghtered women and children); why would they not buy them under such circumstances?
Willing labor vs unwilling labor? Really did British working class have a choice? They didn't own land, and couldn't open property. They were renting as serfs for hundreds of years, and serfdom was really just renamed. They were still a class of tennents, so were they willing workers? They could have refused to work, and be beaten by their master and put into workhouses, where people lasted on average 2 months before dying of injuries. Slaves had an easy life compared to white Irish and British workng class, extremely easy, and in a moderate climate. No sensible person could suggest otherwise.
You know oppression isn't just a thing niggers have suffered, just because those worthless pieces of shit constantly whine about slavery – slavery their own ancestors sold them into. They wouldn't last 5 minutes in a Northern English or Welsh coal mine from the age of 6, as was standard practice.
Say what you like, the fact is, blacks sold blacks into slavery, to Dutch Jews. Rich land owners used them to undercut white labor. It isn't the responsibility of the 95% of whites that didn't own slaves, and who worked under worse conditions. Whites freed slaves through technology, so your analogy is bullshit and you know it. You do realise that many niggers went back to African – Libberia, and threw their passports in the sea in protest at America. 2 weeks later they were all in the water looking for their passports to return to the Land of the Free Stuff. They are just worthless parasites like kikes, so why defend them? Can we even really consider them human when their history is basically no better or more advanced than other lower primates? They are just niggers.October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
Claim unclaimed land land is one thing, unused land is another. I suppose you submit a written consent form before a bang as well. The US has invaded many muslim lands and the government created isis by proxy, which has led to the refugee crisis in the first place. So the US owes something to refugees (although owing something back in such a form will be a failure of epic proportions, I think.)
-And you think that if they knew, anything would have been different? Smallpox was considered a triumph for them.
-Not all. If there were a way to tell which ones would have been raped and killed, and which not, I could understand. They just did the same thing. My point still stands; control for benefit. They did not have the natives interests at heart- it was a matter of what method would be best to subjugate and control.
Slaves in the US vs other nonslaves. If working class whites had it worse off, they could have asked to be slaves too. But that wasn't the case.
Blacks sold blacks because there are sellouts of all races so they can be on the winning team. Its easy to say the US is better if they take everything if value and leave the other country worse off .
Does Mansa Musa count?
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
You're pretty ignorant of actual history aren't you?
I'll bet you can't actually explain to me why blacks were counted as 3/5 of a person in the Constitution, can you? I mean the real reason, not the Malcom X bullshit.
Blacks barely built anything, most of them worked on plantations in the South. I collect antique photos, your sneering little "reality" bears no resemblance to what was actually going on, at the time.
As to the "red man's land", well, he should have made a real claim to it instead of doing that stupid hippy "no man can own the land" crap. And, he lost the war. It was a war, he lost, that's what happens when you lose a war. Get, the fuck, over it.
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
-Politics and elections. Blacks were property, southerners needed voting power, etc. is what I was taught in school.
-Worked on plantations, yes. And a lot harder than whites, because they were slaves. Therefore, their contribution per person in labor was greater.
-Typical justification to do what you want. Sounds exactly like a Jewish method.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Politics and elections. Blacks were property, southerners needed voting power, etc. is what I was taught in school.
It was to help out blacks. In order to stymie the South and keep them from enshrining slavery as a permanent institution through Congress, the Founding Fathers thought ahead and counted each black slave as 3/5 instead of a full person to keep Southern state representation manageable until slavery could be abolished.
Worked on plantations, yes. And a lot harder than whites, because they were slaves. Therefore, their contribution per person in labor was greater.
Oh please. Picking cotton is hard work, no doubt, but it's no harder than being a free man carting around marble and laying down foundations for great buildings, or steel work or any other kind of highly labor intensive job.
-Typical justification to do what you want. Sounds exactly like a Jewish method.
LOL! Yeah man, because only Jews say "Woe to the defeated" in regard to war. Well, them and every other ethnicity on the planet. But yeah dude, (((jews!)))
smh
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
– Which wouldn't ever be enough. Sticking a knife in 9 inches and then taking it out 6 via 3/5ths isn't doing him a favor.
-A free man is willing labor. Also, they get more say in their hours. Job flexibility.
-Didn't say something was yours? I'll take it. Oh you're living in it? I'll take it anyway That's basically it in a nutshell, in this regard and with the Jews in regards to Israel-Palestine.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Actually, it was enough. Which is why they passed a law eliminating any more slave states being admitted to the union, which then resulted in Kansas being a bunch of dicks, which then brought on the civil war (in summary).
A free man is willing labor. Also, they get more say in their hours. Job flexibility.
You are thinking that "then" is like "now". It wasn't. Good luck trying that attitude in 1830.
Didn't say something was yours? I'll take it. Oh you're living in it? I'll take it anyway That's basically it in a nutshell, in this regard and with the Jews in regards to Israel-Palestine.
And the Celts who first sacked Rome. And the Germans in France. And the English across their empire. And Rome across its empire. And China in regards to Mongolia.
But they're probably all Jews, yeah. My bad.
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
-Talking about initial justification. If the blacks weren't that good, never should have brought em. Slavery was the 9 inch.
-Not as much flexibility, sure. But relative to slaves, I meant.
– If Empire A was peaceful, but Empire B attacked and lost, then A has the right to conquer B in self defense and simultaneously grow. This is just one example of an ethical conquest, but it has happened. America was anything but.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Shoulda Woulda Coulda has nothing to do with the reality as they then faced it. Slaves were already there, long predating the births of the Founding Fathers. Telling me what they "shoulda woulda coulda" is irrelevant, they had reality, and they dealt with it in a way that ultimately helped end slavery.
Flexibility. Heh. Yeah, like, none.
The point on empires is that they did the same thing and used the same justification, just like every other ethnicity on the planet. You trying to make this into "Jeeeewwwwws!" is silly. There are instances where you can call out the wrong perpetrated by some Jews, but this is not one of them. You may wish to cede this point to remain honest and consistent.
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
Founding fathers supported slavery. Ending slavery wasn't enough. Equality is.
So slaves and free men have equal freedom of labor?
Not all empires have done this. Most have, yes. But essentially my point is that you insist that conquering was a good thing and the natives and blacks should be grateful for getting killed, raped, and enslaved in exchange for a television. Same in the middle east. They don't want democracy. Everyone else did it so I should do it too? Well in that case, so does the hate, hence blm and why the world hates america.
October 31, 2016 GhostOfJefferson ✓ᴺᵃᵗᶦᵒᶰᵃˡᶦˢᵗ
Oh bullshit. Now you're back to square one. Some supported it, many were against it. This is precisely why they did the 3/5 thing, which I've patiently explained to you.
Most have, yes
Correct Ergo your sneering "you sound like a Jeeeewwww!" is rendered meaningless.
October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
So are you. Admit it- it wasn't justified, and 3/5ths wasn'tt near enough. Get rid of the white hero complex. Its the reason America is so hated around the world.
No, you claim victimhood from blacks and all the other people you take from and still claim to be the savior. Hatred outside and within the US takes a special kind of people. It is just retribution. And the Islamic empire, at least the Rashidun caliphate, did not.
October 31, 2016 Hipponax (μητροκοίτης)
Remember when Americans used to be proud of winning wars rather than feeling bad for the vanquished foe?
October 31, 2016 UnreconstructedConfederate
According to the 1850 census blacks were 12.5% of the population.
Most of the rest of the 35,000,000 of the population at the time were white. Those 3.5 million slaves didn't build everything.
As for the natives, they had no boundarys no government, no property rights ,they were cavemen who were conquered and white folk started a country with government, property rights and civilization.October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
But those 12.5% were slaves, so they were doing more labor per person. Mass cheap labor. I agree that the natives needed codified law, but it would be ridiculous to think that was the reason that was justification to conquer. It was just Manifest Destiny, something that is happening today via western imperialism.
October 31, 2016 UnreconstructedConfederate
Yes I agree the slaves would have worked more man hours but all those other people were not just sitting around.
The natives just were not prepared.it was was simply the way of the world at the time. It just is what it is.October 31, 2016 Cardtheorist
I expect the unwillingness to work was a big factor as well; lack of incentives. My main issue is that some people today are still trying to justify that what they did. Just because many other nations of the past did so, does not a right make. This goes the other way too of course- there have been times where whites were massacred and enslaved and driven out, which is also wrong.
October 31, 2016 Hipponax (μητροκοίτης)
Right, but what do you consider white. I mentioned the other day that a girl who was a member of the daughters of the American revolution, had membership to the union club etc called me a "gateway minority" because 5 generations ago my forebearers came her eyes from Italy
October 31, 2016 jz95
You know what they say about them dark Eye-talians, though.
October 31, 2016 UnreconstructedConfederate
I don't know, I guess those damn ole wops are white too
I get a really really dark tan every year I guess I'm white too.
What in the hell is a gateway minority anyway? .now I've forgotten the point I was trying to make anyway.October 31, 2016 Hipponax (μητροκοίτης)
I have never had a (((tan))) in my entire life. I go from pale to burned directly back to pale
October 31, 2016 UnreconstructedConfederate
Usually by about the middle of May I start looking funny when I take my hat off because my face,neck,arms and legs are dark brown and my head is BRIGHT white.
October 31, 2016 jz95
As usual, you are full of shit.
America was built BY Anglos, FOR Anglos. This country was never meant to be "whiteopia." The alt-right looks at the 1950s as the glory days of America. The founding fathers would have been disgusted at all of the "lesser European" groups that were in the country at that time, such as the Irish. The blacks have more of a right to be here than many European immigrant groups.
October 31, 2016 Untergang07
Historically you have a point. But the circumstances are pushing the European derived ethnicities of that country (U.S.) towards the formation of multiple "white" identities (Southern, Midwestern, etc) which are the combination of all types of Europeans. For European observers like me it seems a ridiculous development if it were in Europe, but once again It's happening in America and I am not American. It just is (the phenomenon I just described). Hence your argument is out of date.
October 31, 2016 jz95
Well, there already were significant differences between the regions of the United States, even when the European population was majority Anglo. Compare the aristocratic, agrarian South to the liberal urban North.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
Total bullshit made up from your pathetic negro brainpower. The Irish, Scttish, Germans and French were invited as immigrants from the start of America as a Constitutional Republic – INVITED TO SETTLE. You stupid cunt, you don't even realise that the Founding Fathers got many of their ideas from the French and the French Academy of Sciences, as well as German economists. It was created by white Freemasons, some of whom were Scottish not Anglo YOU STUPID CUNT. You think slave owning Alexander Hamilton was an anglo, dumbshit? Blacks have no right to be in America, they were never part of the Founding Fathers vision. You think they were fucking retarded and wanted the dregs of the bell curve as citizens? OUR POSTERITY means European.
October 31, 2016 jz95
The Irish were INVITED? The fuck are you smoking? The Irish were viewed as little, if any better than the Negroes. If you had told Washington or Jefferson that they were the same race as an Irishman, they would have laughed in your fucking face. Franklin viewed the Germans in America as a problematic presence in the United States. OUR POSTERITY meant the descendants of the (largely) Anglo-Germanic Protestants who founded this country, not all European peoples. Get your head out of Unkie Adolf's ass and learn some history, provided you have more than a single-digit IQ, something which I think you lack.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
You are making shit up as you go. What an absurd way to argue. The Irish were invited to settle, its an historical fact. Jefferson was even a proponent of the Irish independence. There were Catholic Founding Fathers, even at a time when in Britain they were persecuted. Oh now America is Anglo-Germanic, not Anglo like you previously stated? What about the Scots such as Alexander Hamilton, or Benjamin Frankin being a product of French schooling, and the American Revolutionary War was funded by Russians, French aristocrats such as Marquez de Lafayette. What about the Dutch colonies, which New York is from. Go and make up some shitty historical fantasy with someone who doesn't know history. America was European – white, from the start.
October 31, 2016 jz95
The United States of America was founded by Anglo-Germanic Protestants, mostly Englishmen. The Dutch, French and Spanish had colonies in North America, but they did not create the country that would become the United States of America. That was almost entirely the English, with a few Scots thrown in there. First point refuted.
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
"Irish immigrants of this period participated in significant numbers in the American Revolution, leading one British major general to testify at the House of Commons that "half the rebel Continental Army were from Ireland."[14] Irish Americans signed the foundational documents of the United States -- the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution -- and, beginning with Andrew Jackson, served as President." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans
October 31, 2016 jz95
This first wave of Irish immigrants were the SCOTS-Irish, Scotsmen and Englishmen who had settled (and in many ways colonized) Ireland. Second point refuted.
October 31, 2016 Mac-101
I had an Irish forefather who fought as a private in the Revolution In the PA Militia and another Irish forefather who came to America to fight the British in the War of 1812. Johnny Bulls were still looked down upon in the 1950s by Irish and vice versa. LOL!
October 31, 2016 Ar C.
So now you have been proven incorrect, lets talk about why you elivate the worthless nigger over fellow Europeans, in light of the evidence that Irish, Russians, Italians (there was an Italian involved with the Founding documents – look up Founding Fathers by Country of Origin), Prussians, Dutch, Scottish and especially French were intimately involved in the creation of America.
October 31, 2016 jz95
You're a fucking idiot. That's all there is to say. You really are a fucking idiot.
October 31, 2016 Hipponax (μητροκοίτης)
The Irish and scots were brought in to do the slave labor. Blue bloods don't mate with the help
October 31, 2016 Hipponax (μητροκοίτης)
Correct. These are the people still pissed that Joe DiMaggio go to to play. Ethnics in the major leagues?
I've mentioned it before, but there is a great quote from the movie The Good Shepherd. Matt Damon plays an OSS office, Yale, skull and bones, American pedigree, founding member o the CIA. He talks to Pesci who plays the mob boss that the CIA tried to get to kill Castro.
Pesci: let me as you something. Us Italians, we got our families and the church. The Jews have their traditions. The micks have their homeland. Even the niggers have something, they have their music. What do you have
Damon: we have the United States of America the rest of you are just touristsIf you don't date your family back to the mayflower than you are no different than the Muslim invaders. Alt right would do well to remember than in some people's eyebrows most of them are just light skinned niggers
October 31, 2016 jz95
The alt-right, like their SJW counterparts, don't care about facts. You could lay it all out for them in the simplest terms imaginable and they'd still be living in their fantasylands.
October 31, 2016 onetruth
While I'm sure there's some truth to the notion of elites using divide and conquer, I nonetheless get tired of fence-sitting rhetoric that implies that coming together with leftists is the only way to defeat the elites.
Rank-and-file leftists want to BE elite, that's the main thing (other than provably broken ideology) that differentiates them from me. I don't want power, I simply want people to tell the truth and pull their weight. If you can't do that, I'd just as soon kill you as look at you, because you are a cancer on this planet. I'm certainly not going to join up with you to defeat some separate but equally evil group, lol. I prefer to fight and destroy both groups.
October 31, 2016 Corey
And how will you do that exactly?
October 31, 2016 onetruth
I've been thinking about that a lot lately but I don't have the answer. I do know that trying to find common ground with people who are part of the problem is both the wrong answer and a waste of time.
October 31, 2016 HAIDES
It started in July 2012 at the Anaheim Riots. The whole thing was started by the white anarchist anti authoritarian who s tired of taking shit from the cops.
October 31, 2016 chrish
I'm afraid your solution on a large scale basis is too ambitious. Most don't want to get involved in any unpleasantness, much easier to go along to get along. Most don't want to observe what's going on around them, it's much more important to walk around with one's face in their iPhone or have it up to their ear. Most don't want to read, it's easier to watch a video and have it summarized and spoon fed them. There is no right and wrong, it's all relative.
Until the unthinkable happens to them or close friend or family most don't care,and if said unthinkable DOES happen, it's Plan B time. Demand government find a solution to the problem, any solution that makes them feel like something was done. And sure, they'll give up privacy, their own ability to protect themselves, or agree to pay a little more as long as a "feel good" measure is taken.
October 31, 2016 A Wise Man
I was involved very early on in the Occupy movement, and I must say there were a lot of good people in it who simply wanted to limit global finance capitalism from destroying the American economy. Most of these people were older whites who were more in line with the leftists we picture from the mid to late twentieth century. Unfortunately, the Occupy movement already had the SJW seeds sown into its fabric from the very beginning. During the meetings and marches I attended, it was made VERY CLEAR to me that if you are a white male, it is your job to step aside and let the women and non-whites run the show and set the agenda. And indeed that was the case. I stuck around for a little bit, listening to what these angry black/brown women, socially retarded white women, and the token while male faggot had to say. It started off as more anti-bank/capitalism, but the writing was on the wall and I could see exactly how this movement was going to turn into the anti-white male patriarchy, pro feminism, pro faggot, pro degeneracy movement it has transformed into today.
October 31, 2016 Max Tweeter
"It started off as more anti-bank/capitalism, but the writing was on the
wall and I could see exactly how this movement was going to turn into
the anti-white male patriarchy, pro feminism, pro faggot, pro degeneracy
movement it has transformed into today."Most movements and social-justice groups start out benevolent, like many religions. Soon, those whom I call the "Crazy Elements" infiltrate that group/movement and alter its definition. After not long, the "crazy" becomes the movement, and attracts more bat-shit insane types faster than water seeking its own level. Once the lame-stream media get bored, the ranks thin out, and everyone goes home, until the next group of aggrieved shitheads gets loud (i.e. BLM, etc.). This shit is so easy to see from miles away, though.
October 31, 2016 Mac-101
That's because Soros was funding it.
October 31, 2016 Smokingjacket
We've never had a natural form of capitalism which accords with the natural strengths of people and nations. Instead, the natural instincts of what capitalism in its true sense was meant to signify has always been undermined by the State and creeping socialism along each step of the way. Civics, culture and customs, including religion were meant to be the natural bulwarks against unfettered capitalism, not the State with all its forms of social ideologies.
When will people ever get it- socialism is the natural blood and substance of modern States in all its forms- the State's future (any western advanced State) is tied up intrinsically with the "guardian" role of "social nanny" who'll protect her downtrodden children from the nasty boggy man (who pays all her bills, including her socialist programs) of libertine capitalism. The truth is that the entire system is rigged this way and if we had a more conservative or traditional set of values (like religion etc) we wouldn't need the socialist State to "protect us" from the free market, ispo facto, end of the State control of peoples lives. Imagine, a world were people could survive in a state of liberty and happiness without the need of the State? A Utopia perhaps??
October 31, 2016 Albionic American
The news about the Christian cartoonist Jack Chick's death, and the various reactions to it, got me to thinking about how our elites view religion. It looks to me as if they think about religion more rationally than they think about their childish utopianism regarding globalization, race, immigration, feminism and sexual degeneracy.
Defenders of the elites' world view just laugh off religious obsessives who threaten ordinary people with hell, especially straight white guys who ogle women, like the one in Jack Chick's early tract, "This Was Your Life."
But they condemned Chick as a homophobe when he published tracts which threatened gays with hell, even if they don't believe in it.
What accounts for the difference? Gays exist and hell doesn't, obviously. But also gays have privileged status in our elites' project to destroy and remake traditional societies, and they simply must remain immune from criticism, regardless of how much damage they cause along the way, even from some religious nut who draws comic books which threaten them with imaginary harm after death.
By contrast, notice that Chick also propagandized the fantasy that Israel's existence somehow fulfills "bible prophecy," instead of showing the ordinary reality that people get ideas from books. Not a peep of criticism from our elites about that delusion, curiously. And not because our elites share Chick's belief about Israel, but because the Jews among them have used this belief to play American Christians for suckers to make them support pro-Israel policies in our government.
Funny how that works.
October 31, 2016 Lovekraft
South Park Season 20 examines the concept of trolling. Here's my take:
trolling is defined as doing something to get a reaction from those defending the person you insulted, which then brings a reaction from the other side. Sit back and watch the fireworks.
We are being trolled when we fail to identify where the latest 'outrage' is coming from. We allow ourselves to waste time and energy when the messenger dictates the terms.
By, for and about are the three key words with any message. Who is sending the message, who is the message directed at, and what is the message itself. Basic critical analysis is where the alt-right leaders (could) make the most impact.
October 31, 2016 Noa
Excellent content, Cory. Left and right should unite to fight against billionaires globalists stealing from us. GO TRUMP!
October 31, 2016 skillet
It is a revolution against the middle class. With elite usiing weaponized poverty, zombies and misfits against the middle clas.sRather than the top 1 percent, the left attacks the privilege of the white assistant manager at Pizza Hut.
October 31, 2016 Gil G
The concept of a free, middle class would be the historic exception. Throughout most of history it was mostly made up of masters and lords as well as slaves and serfs.
October 31, 2016 Mac-101
Good article except Soros funded Occupy Wall Street and of course he switched to funding BLM and stiring Racial hate since it was much more effective.
November 1, 2016 Jim Jones Koolaid
Read or view Milton Friedman on youtube. Every deep recession has been caused by a drastic drop in money supply. The great depression was caused by the fed so that the bankers could purchase the pieces for pennies on the dollar after. For those of you who dont believe in conspiracy theories there has been so much time since 911 and all the videos of all the people have been looked at and analyzed. Amazing stuff. Even better just look at a few videos of speeches that the owner who just bought the trade centers not long before(99 year lease).
November 1, 2016 Hoosier Jimmy
The Me generation is the worst of America. And now they are in politics. America will be better off when the self-serving, self-absorbed flower children are long gone.
November 1, 2016 Poetry ->
"Thus, we have our current situation where the masses are divided with "
Socially engineered 'Useful Idiots' are engineering
1. Tavistock: the best kept secret in America
https://anticorruptionsociety.com/2016/08/25/tavistock-the-best-kept-secret-in-america/2. The Truth About America's Survival.
Demographics and the 2016 Electionhttps://www.youtube.com/embed/GN_FOCF3vIQ?feature=oembed
3. Race Differences In Intelligence
http://niggermania.com/library/Race%20Differences%20In%20Intelligence.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/embed/6SJNVb0GnPI?feature=oembed
4. The Truth About The Fall of Rome: Modern Parallels
https://www.youtube.com/embed/qh7rdCYCQ_U?feature=oembed
November 1, 2016 TheChariman
Think about this – the elites know that white America is developing an awareness. They also know that whites will revolt and correct the issue eventually. As a psychological diffuser, they put a person in like Trump that appears to be everything he is. This will allow whites to relax their defenses while the elites move to limit and censor information that will oppose their long term goals. They do this under a president like Trump so whites will remain docile. After 8 years, they continue their main agenda now with limited, if any real independent news agencies, etc. It allows them to buy time, diffuse white opposition, then continue with their program. Did Trump really "ditch" his inside team?
November 4, 2016 zocli michael
you want hillary.
November 4, 2016 TheChariman
Not an argument
November 1, 2016 Jair 3
Agree. The radicals of the 60's supported the URSS against the US, today they want to fight Putin, what is more puzzling is that they oppose Christians because we want to live our faith, but they willingly accept sharia law that forbids women to wear a dress, are shunned and considered second class, honor killings are frequent, feminists say nothing, atheists say nothing, LGBT lobby is quiet, why? Because their leader, Soros has not given the cue. Group thinking!!!
November 2, 2016 vincent Menniti ΛΤ
Can we get a post about why Soro's owns the world? I don't care enough to look myself, but am curious none the less.
November 2, 2016 david
The occupy movement was a bunch of spoiled middle class suburban brats who were in the top 1% globally. If they thought they were protesting the economic downturn, they were fifteen years late. The Clinton administration signed the death warrant for the economy. It just took 10 years to show the effect.
The housing bubble in 2006 ( which influenced the economic crash in 2008) was caused by affirmative action policy in the big banks. The Clinton administration pressured the banks into "not descriminating " against the poor. AKA giving hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to people who were too irresponsible to pay rent. Then that debt was sold and resold, until 1 by 1 the floor fell out.
A great explanation is in the new movie " The Big Short."
It was that terrible series of events that scared americans into voting for Barrack Obama.
Then we had eight years of feminist propaganda, and here we are.
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May-June 1 1999, | prospect.org
Originally from: The Power Elite Now
... ... ...
The Warlords
One of the crucial arguments Mills made in The Power Elite was that the emergence of the Cold War completely transformed the American public's historic opposition to a permanent military establishment in the United States. In deed, he stressed that America's military elite was now linked to its economic and political elite. Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. And while all these links between the economy and the military were being forged, the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military.
Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." Their goal was nothing less than a redefinition of reality -- one in which the American people would come to accept what Mills called "an emergency without a foreseeable end." "
War or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States,"
Mills wrote. In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States.
Much as Mills wrote, it remains true today that Congress is extremely friendly to the military, at least in part because the military has become so powerful in the districts of most congressmen. Military bases are an important source of jobs for many Americans, and government spending on the military is crucial to companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which manufacture military equipment. American firms are the leaders in the world's global arms market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere. Some weapons systems never seem to die, even if, as was the case with a "Star Wars" system designed to destroy incoming missiles, there is no demonstrable military need for them.
Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam. Worried about the possibility of a public backlash against the loss of American lives, American presidents either refrain from pursuing military adventures abroad or confine them to rapid strikes, along the lines pursued by Presidents Bush and Clinton in Iraq. Since 1989, moreover, the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe has undermined the capacity of America's elites to mobilize support for military expenditures. China, which at the time Mills wrote was considered a serious threat, is now viewed by American businessmen as a source of great potential investment. Domestic political support for a large and permanent military establishment in the United States, in short, can no longer be taken for granted.
The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. At the time Mills wrote, defense expenditures constituted roughly 60 percent of all federal outlays and consumed nearly 10 percent of the U. S. gross domestic product. By the late 1990s, those proportions had fallen to 17 percent of federal outlays and 3.5 percent of GDP. Nearly three million Americans served in the armed forces when The Power Elite appeared, but that number had dropped by half at century's end. By almost any account, Mills's prediction that both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military is not borne out by historical developments since his time.
And how could he have been right? Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always choose the latter over the former.
Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. Now it would be more correct to say that America's economic elite finds more in common with economic elites in other countries than it does with the military elite of its own....
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
thesingingdetective -> ABasu , 11 Jun 2013 05:38
@ABasu - My comment was not in direct agreement with the article, it was a critique of the first comment above.I won't even begin with the welfare debate in which you somehow think that 'welfare' and its relatively recent introduction is somehow anti neo-liberal because that is nothing other than newspeak...
The point I was making (with perhaps a less than perfect example) is that language is political and therefore it matters greatly what we call things.
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
restructuring
And that bloody word...'modernisation' (Moderni- z -ation - for the management speak geeks). Why is it every time I come across that word in meetings, it means some worker is either losing money or losing their job? Or some manager is about to award themselves a bonus?thesingingdetective -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 04:22@gyges1 - No, she is surely railing against the monetisation of everything and the use of language to make the neo-liberal nightmare through which we are living seem, not only the norm, but the only way.michaelsylvain , 11 Jun 2013 04:17Social security becomes welfare and suddenly masses of society (the majority of benefit claimants being in work) are not drawing on an insurance policy but are in receipt of 'welfare' subject to the largesse and judgements of an ever more cruel and avaricious 'elite'.
Language matters and its distortion is a political act.
But without these Exciting New Word Uprating Initiatives, we can never win The Global Race... or something.I'm a big fan of Steven Poole's Unspeak , which looks at the way in which terms and terminology have been engineered precisely to hollow out meaning and present an argument instead. A kind of Neoliberal Emperor's New Clothes, the problem is that, obviously, if your vocabulary and your meanings become circumscribed, it limits what can be said, and even how people think about what's being said.
(By the way, the link's to Amazon, but, obviously, you may find you have a better "Customer Experience" if you get from somewhere less tax-dodgy.)
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Quite. Language is the first victim of any hegemonic project. Examples abound in communism, fascism and neoliberalism. There's nothing to argue with in this article yet, unsurprisingly, the usual swivel-eyed brigade seem to have popped up. Perhaps your discussion of work strays a little too close to philosophy for the unthinking. I don't know why I'm disheartened by some of the responses, as the same voices appear btl in almost ever CIF article, but I am somehow. Perhaps because the point of the article - the hijacking of language - is so obviously true as to be uncontroversial to any but the ideologically purblind, yet still....ABasu -> thesingingdetective , 11 Jun 2013 05:28@thesingingdetective - what is an insurance policy other than a financial product where in return for payments over a period of time a claim can be made in certain circumstances?OberynMartell , 11 Jun 2013 05:22If anything, particularly given that the link between contributions and claims is now nugatory, describing welfare as welfare is much more honest and much less "neoliberal". It is a set of payments and entitlements society has agreed upon to ensure a level of welfare for all rather than an insurance policy which each individual may claim against if they've kept up their payments.
If an anti-neo-liberal, supportive of the article can get this so back to front, perhaps the "debate" being posited is an empty one about language.
If you changed a few words from the Communist Manifesto, it could easily be about neo-liberalism and leftist attitudes towards it.Sidfishes , 11 Jun 2013 05:19"A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of neo-liberalism. All the leftists of old Europe have entered into a Holy Alliance to exorcise this spectre; Toynbee and Loach; Redgrave and Harris.
Where is the party in power that has not been decried as neo-liberalistic by its leftist opponents on the sidelines?"
Take FE as a case study on how the coin counters have taken over the world.Damntheral -> roachclip , 11 Jun 2013 05:18Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, the maths department had 7 lecturers (2 part time) and two people to look after the admin - there was also the Department Head (who was a lecturer) and a Head of School. They had targets, loosely defined, but it was a rare year when there wasn't a smattering of A grades at A level...
Then along came the coin counters, the target setters, with their management degrees and swivel eyed certainty that 'greed is good... competition! competition! competition!' and with them came the new professionals into the department... the 'Quality Manager'... the 'Curriculum Manager' the 'Exams Manager' the 'Deputy Exams Manager'... and the paperwork increased to feed the beast that counts everything but knows nothing... and targets were set.... 'Targets! Targets! Targets!... and we were all sent in search of excellence... 'teach to the exam' 'We must meet our targets'... 'we won't use exam board 'A' because they're tough' and the exam boards reacted to their own target culture by all simplifying. The universities began to notice the standard of 'A' grade students (who increased) was equivelant to a C grade of 5 years ago. However, targets were being met (on paper) quality was maintained (on paper) we were improving year on year (on paper). However, what was going on in the real world is that our students were being sold a pup - their level of competence and of knowledge was very much inferior to their same grade fore bearers of just 5 years previous
Eventually, the department became 1 full time lecturer and 4 on 'zero hour contracts' and the Head of School became 'Chief Executive' the 'Head of Department' became 'Department Manager' and a gap developed between those who taught and those who 'managed'... not just a culture gap... a bloody big pay gap...
Who benefited from all this marketisation?
Not the lecturers... not the students... not the universities... not industry...not the economy...
Who benefited? Work it out for yourselves (as I used to tell my students)
@roachclip - I am familiar with the numerous wiki sites including Wikipedia, thank you very much. If you read the article yourself you would see it supports my point of view here.retro77 , 11 Jun 2013 05:17Mark Taylor , 11 Jun 2013 05:11There are loads of other examples of rarely scrutinised terms in our economic vocabulary, for instance that bundle of terms clustered around investment and expenditure – terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Expenditure, on the other hand, seems merely an outgoing, a cost, a burden.
This is absolute nonsense...the terms "investment" and "expenditure" carry no moral connotations that I can determine. Does the author accept that we need to have terms to express each of these concepts? Perhaps she would like to come up with some alternative suggestions for the notions of "contributing money" and "spending money"?
Seconded, its uses and abuses of the English Language second only that of the Church. A fitting comparison in my book because they both have much in common. Both are well aware that it is through language and the control of which that true cultural change is achieved.Themiddlegound , 11 Jun 2013 05:11
Both know that this new language must be propagated as far and as wide as possible, with saturation coverage. Control of information is a a must, people must see and they must know only things of your choosing.
For example, back in the 4th Century AD (which is incidentally an abbreviation of the Latin 'Anno Domini', which means 'in the year of our Lord'), the church became centralised and established under the patronage of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Part of this centralising mission was the creation of a uniform belief system. Those that 'chose' to believe something else were branded 'heretics'. The word 'heresy' coming from the Greek 'αἵρεσις' for 'choice'. Thus to choose to have your own opinions was therefore deemed to be a bad thing.
As a quick aside, 'Pagan' comes from the Latin 'paganus' which means 'rural dweller'. I.e. those beyond the remit of the urban Christian elites. 'Heathen' on the other hand is Old English (hæðen). It simply means 'not Christian or Jewish.
When you have complete control over the flow of information, as the Church did by the 5th Century, then you can write practically anything. This doesn't mean just writing good things about yourself and bad things about your enemies. Rather it means that you can frame the debate anyway you wish.
In modern times, I would argue that you can see similar things happen here. As the author suggests, terms like 'Wealth Creator', 'Scrounger', 'Sponger', 'living on welfare', 'Growth', 'progress' and my personal favourite, 'reform', take on a whole new meaning.
Their definition of the word 'reform' and what we would see it to mean are two totally different things, Yet since it is they that has access to the wider world and not us, then it is their definition that gets heard. The same could be said for all the other words and their latter day connotations.
Thus when you hear the news and you hear what passes for debate, you hear things on their terms. Using their language with their meanings. A very sad state of affairs indeed.Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.Wastoid , 11 Jun 2013 05:05You'll notice I've highlighted the word freedoms. Freedom is a word they hijacked right from the start of the process and how they hijacked the Republican party in the USA.
For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question. The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental.
Concepts of dignity and individual freedom are powerful and appealing in their own right. Such ideals empowered the dissident movements in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold War as well as the students in Tiananmen Square. The student movements that swept the world in 1968––from Paris and Chicago to Bangkok and Mexico City––were in part animated by the quest for greater freedoms of speech and of personal choice.
More generally, these ideals appeal to anyone who values the ability to make decisions for themselves.The idea of freedom, long embedded in the US tradition, has played a conspicuous role in the US in recent years. '9/11' was immediately interpreted by many as an attack on it. 'A peaceful world of growing freedom', wrote President Bush on the first anniversary of that awful day, 'serves American long-term interests, reflects enduring American ideals and unites America's allies.' 'Humanity', he concluded, 'holds in its hands the opportunity to
offer freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes', and 'the United States welcomes its responsibilities to lead in this great mission'. This language was incorporated into the US National Defense Strategy document issued shortly thereafter. 'Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world', he later said, adding that 'as the greatest power on earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom'.When all of the other reasons for engaging in a pre-emptive war against Iraq were proven wanting, the president appealed to the idea that the freedom conferred on Iraq was in and of itself an adequate justification for the war. The Iraqis were free, and that was all that really mattered. But what sort of 'freedom' is envisaged here, since, as the cultural critic Matthew Arnold long ago thoughtfully observed, 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to
ride somewhere'.To what destination, then, are the Iraqi people expected to ride the horse of freedom donated to them by force of arms?As Hayek quoted....
Planning and control are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free
enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom.
No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free.
The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery.The Neoliberal idea of freedom 'thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free
enterprise. It helps explain why neoliberalism has turned so authoritarian, forceful, and anti-democratic at the very moment when 'humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to offer freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes'. It makes us focus on how so many corporations have profiteered from withholding the benefits of their technologies, famine, and environmental disaster. It raises the worry as to whether or not many of these calamities or
near calamities (arms races and the need to confront both real and
imagined enemies) have been secretly engineered for corporate advantage.Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word 'freedom' resonates so widely within the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes 'a button that elites can press to open the door to the masses' to justify almost anything.
Appeals to traditions and cultural values bulked large in all of this. An open project around the restoration of economic power to a small elite would probably not gain much popular support. But a programmatic attempt to advance the cause of individual freedoms could appeal to a mass base and so disguise the drive to restore class power.
Fascinating article, thanks for publishing. It goes some way to explaining, not only the tenacity of neo-liberalism, but also its ability to consolidate its power, even at the moment when it seemed weakest. Its ability to rearticulate language and to present as natural law what is socially constructed, shows the depth of its hold on society, economics, politics, culture and even science.There is a neat cross-over here between neo-liberal discourses and the use of language by the military. Not only does this extend to the general diffusion of certain key phrases, but I think it also runs deeper. Just as the elision of meaning in the language of war facilitates the perpetuation of abuses and war crimes, so the neo-lib discourse permits the perpetuation of questionable economic activity, even as this presents itself in the unquestionable guise of "common sense".
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KingOfNothing -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 07:22
@gyges1 - The idea of language is very important in the production of a way of thinking which closes down other alternatives and futures. One which leaves neoliberal globalisation as 'the only game in town'.I worry that the very term 'neoliberalism' is one not used by the political classes and much of the media, I don't think I've ever heard the world 'neoliberalism' used on the BBC.
This unwillingness to even call a spade a spade has political consequences . For example, I had an online discussion with someone over Thatchers death a little while ago. He called me 'comrade' and then questioned the very existence of the term Neo-liberalism. At the time I thought this was a bit of a cheap shot, but if you can quite cheerfully label someone a 'socialist' and then refuse to accept that neo-liberalism exists, you are well on your way to making people believe that the current set of social relations are indeed completely normal and that there are few, if any, alternative ways of rewiring the world which can create a better world.
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maxfisher -> finnkn , 11 Jun 2013 07:45@finnkn - Apologies. I was, of course, referring to the families of the disappeared in Chile. They are, of course, relevant and should not be excluded from any arguments about neoliberalism and its effects. Nor should the families of the disappeared in Argentina, though it is less well known, the junta was entrusted with the introduction of neoliberal policies in Argentina.maxfisher -> finnkn , 11 Jun 2013 07:04The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union; the ideological wing of the Cold War. You may be familiar with Operation Condor?
To be clear: I am arguing that the direct effects of 'actually existing neoliberalism' are very far from benign. I do not argue that the militarisation of Central and South America are the direct consequence neoliberal theory.
@finnkn - Well I think many would. It has been pretty firmly established that the Allende regime was victim of US sponsored military coup and that said coup was sponsored to protect US interests. The Chicago boys then flew into Chile to use the nation as a laboratory for the more outlandish (at the time) neoliberal policies they were unable to practice at home.Neoliberalism was first practiced in authoritarian states; the states in which neoliberalism is most deeply embedded are (surprise, surprise) increasingly authoritarian, and neoliberalism solutions are regularly imposed on client/vulnerable states by suprastructures such as the IMF, the EU, and the World Bank. Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith were very clear that the potential for degeneracy existed. We have now reached that potential; increasingly centralised authority, states within states, the denuding of democratic institutions and crony capitalism. Neoliberalism in practice is very different to neoliberalism in practice. Rather like 'really existing socialism' and Marxism.
works best in authoritarian states because (in practice, if not in theory
finnkn -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 07:41
@BaronessHawHaw - Simply untrue.retro77 -> anonid , 11 Jun 2013 07:10http://www.pewglobal.org/2009/11/02/end-of-communism-cheered-but-now-with-more-reservations/
As the statistics on that link show, there are certain countries (notably Russia and the Ukraine) where the +65 age group disapprove of the change to democracy and capitalism. In the majority, however, people of all ages remain in favour.
@anonid -BobJanova , 11 Jun 2013 07:09For 'job' read 'bribe' (keep your mouth shut or lose it), for 'management' read 'take most of the interest out of the job for everybody else and put them on a lower scale', etc. I guess you get my drift.
It's sad that you have such a negative, self-hating attitude towards your work.
retarius , 11 Jun 2013 07:07Spoken like a true champagne socialist in a creative industry. How do you find meaning and fulfillment, or creative values, in emptying bins, cleaning offices, sweeping the streets and a whole load of other work which needs doing but which is repetitive, menial and not particularly pleasant?Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has – or could have – moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core
There are two ways to get people to do work that needs doing but wouldn't be done voluntarily: coercion or payment. I think the second is a more healthy way to run a society.
I've thought pretty much the same myself. Democracies can be good or bad (as the Greeks knew well)...but in our politic-speak it is used to denounce and make good; as in "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East"...it is intended to make us feel something good about Israel, as it humiliates the Palestinians and steals their land.Antiquarian , 11 Jun 2013 07:06In ancient Greece....'tyrant' simply meant 'usurper' without any neccessary negative association....simply someone who had usurped political power...they recognized that tyrannies could be good, bad or indifferent.
In Rome, dictator simply meant the cahp that took over fpr periods of six months at a time, during times of crisis.
I used to vacation in Yugoslavia in Marshall Tito's time....it was a wonderful place, beautiful, inexpensive and safe...very very safe. What came into the power vacuum after he died in 1980...what happened to the country? I'd argue that his was a good dictatorship or tyranny....
I'm also not too sure what the 90% of people unaffected by and uninterested in power politics in any given country feel about the 'liberation' of Libya and Iraq from their prior dictatorships...I'm sure that plenty of people whose previously steady lives have been wrecked, are all that thrilled.
I have recently been exercised by the right's adoption of "Social Justice". In the past it was the left and churches who talked of social justice as a phenomenon to empower the poor and dispossessed, whether in this country or the developing world. Social Justice was a touchstone of Faith in the City, for example, but it seems now to be the smoke screen behind which benefits are stipped from the "undeserving poor".BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 06:59Most of this crap comes from America. Crappy middle-management bureaucrats spouting "free-market" bollocks.BlankReg -> joseph1832 , 11 Jun 2013 06:56
The efficiency of the private sector - some nob with a name badge timing how long you've been on the toilet.
Freedommm!!!!@ joseph1832 11 June 2013 9:24am . Get cifFix for Firefox .Arabica Robusta -> Obelisk1 , 11 Jun 2013 06:55It is not just neoliberalism. Everyone is at it - sucking the meaning out of words. Corporate bullshit, public sector bullshit. Being customers of your own government is a crime that everyone is guilty of. This is what Orwell railed against decades ago, and it has got worse.
Case in point; just look at the way in which the Cameron set about co-opting words and phrases justifiably applied to his own regime and repurposed them against his detractors.
For example, people who took a stand against the stealth privatisation of the NHS were branded as "vested interests", quite unlike the wholesome MPs who voted for the NHS bill who, despite the huge sums of money they received from the private healthcare lobby, we are encouraged to believe were acting in our best interests by selling our health service to their corporate paymasters. Or the farcical attempt to rebrand female Tory MPs as "feminists" despite their anti-social mobility, anti-equality, anti-human rights and anti-abortion views.
The political class, with the aid of their subservient corporate media quislings, have taken our language apart and used it against us. We have been backed into a corner, we are told, by both Labour and Tories, that there is no choice, either rabid profiteering or penury and we have, to our everlasting shame, lapped up every word of it.
@Obelisk1 - You have single-handedly proven Massey's argument. We have become so embedded in the language of individuals, choice, contracts and competition that we cannot see any alternative. Even Adam Smith understood the difference between "economy" and "society" when he argued that labor is directly connected to public interest while business is connected to self-interest. If business took over the public sphere, Smith argued, this would be quite destructive.Snapshackle , 11 Jun 2013 06:50Our whole conversation seemed somehow reduced, my experience of it belittled into one of commercial transaction. My relation to the gallery and to this engaging person had become one of instrumental market exchange.
But in the eyes of the economic right, that is precisely the case. Adjectives like altruistic, caring, selfless, empathy and sympathy are simply not in their vocabulary. They are only ever any of those things provided they can see some sort of beneficial payback at the end.
maxfisher -> Venebles 11 Jun 2013 06:20
Liquidity Jones, 11 Jun 2013 06:04@Venebles - I was simply joining many commentators in the mire. Those that dispute the neoliberal worldview are routinely dismissed as marxists. I thought I'd save you all the energy, duck.
I'm not sure that the families of the disappeared of Chile and Argentina would concur with you benign view of neoliberalism and its effects.
Might as well define it.Neoliberalism framework vs Full employment framework
Full employment. The 3 pillars
- Economic pillar.
- Commitment to full employment.
- Fiscal & Monetary demand management. Public sector employment. Employer of last resort. Government mediates the class struggle.
Redistributive pillar
- Intervention to ameliorate market outcomes
- Transfer payments. Redistributive taxation. Services to enable participation.
- Regulation, conciliation & arbitration via specialist tribunals.
Collective pillar
- Rights of citizenship
- Uniform services. Pursuit of collective will. Professional administration.
- Services delivered by the State. Rights embodied in legislation.
_______________________________________________________________________________Neo-liberalism. The 3 pillars
Economic pillar
- Primacy of market based outcomes
- Inflation targeting. Fiscal drag. Full employability and compliance programmes.
- Government as agent for business.
Redistributive pillar
- Intervention to stimulate market outcomes
- Compliance tests and penalties mediating welfare payments.
- Taxation advantages for high incomes.
- Policies to force participation.
- Deregulation. Welfare to work.
Individuality pillar
- No intrinsic right of citizenship
- Non-uniform services. Individuals responsible for their own outcomes.
- Mutual reciprocal obligation.
- Outsourcing of public services.
- Privatised service delivery.
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Fascinating article, thanks for publishing. It goes some way to explaining, not only the tenacity of neo-liberalism, but also its ability to consolidate its power, even at the moment when it seemed weakest. Its ability to rearticulate language and to present as natural law what is socially constructed, shows the depth of its hold on society, economics, politics, culture and even science.There is a neat cross-over here between neo-liberal discourses and the use of language by the military. Not only does this extend to the general diffusion of certain key phrases, but I think it also runs deeper. Just as the elision of meaning in the language of war facilitates the perpetuation of abuses and war crimes, so the neo-lib discourse permits the perpetuation of questionable economic activity, even as this presents itself in the unquestionable guise of "common sense".
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MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 13:13
Term abuse didn't arrive with neoliberalism; it's been around since forever. Also, the fact that most of our daily transactions might be commercial is a reflection of our own habits as much as the changing use of language.Nostradamus333 , 11 Jun 2013 13:08If a person is employed by a commercial gallery, they are effectively working in a shop, and the people who visit these galleries are potentially customers. No surprise there. Just like a person who uses transport can be a customer. Of course, there are public services where commercial terms such as customer make little sense.
Marxism has hijacked our vocabulary for a 150 years. Nice to have a change for awhile.MartynInEurope -> bongoid , 11 Jun 2013 13:06@bongoid -dourscot , 11 Jun 2013 13:00Sure, it isn't that important who is making the point, even if the point is made by reference to questionable and contentious examples.
I also think that any even bigger influence on meaning / lack of meaning / interchangeable meaning etc.has been postmodernity far more than neoliberalism.
All true but the left is just as bad as coining its Orwellisms. Witness the way nobody has to use an approved vocabulary to talk about every and any group on fear of moral ridicule or worse. Language is a mental battlefield.LondonPhil -> RClayton , 11 Jun 2013 12:57@RClayton - Can I suggest resurrecting William Morris's distinction between "work" (ie labour that is moral, creative, aesthetic or, at least, hygienic - ie intrinsically worth doing) and "toil" which is work done only because of the necessity to earn money to buy the means of existence?KingOfNothing -> Yorkied24 , 11 Jun 2013 12:45Having words that distinguish between these two ideas is useful. The 'work' you talk about is 'toil' and most of it is done simply to service the money/capitalist system.
As an example, I have in front of me a rubber 'stress reliever' in the shape of PacMan. It was given to me as a gift.
Presumably, somewhere in the world there is a factory full of people turning out this rubbish. It adds nothing to the world's beauty, nor its ability to support the people living on it. Its only uses are in providing paid 'toil' to support the factory workers and to enable someone to give me something I don't need as a token of their friendship, probably paid for from the fruits of their own toil.
Changing the words we use will not change this, but it does give us a framework in which to think about how it might be changed.
@Yorkied24 -bill4me -> darylrevok , 11 Jun 2013 12:10Strange then, that you can buy a book called: "Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. By Daniel Stedman Jones. Princeton University Press".
What were Friedrich Heyek and Milton Friedman: lollypop salesmen?
If I can repeat what I said at the top of this thread - The denial of the economic ideology of Neo-liberalism is nothing more than a cheap debating point. If you pretend something doesn't exist then you make it difficult to attack.
Sorry, but it just won't wash with me.
@darylrevok - Well, perhaps you might describe the sweet smell of success as 'funny', but I don't.MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 12:08The biggest problem isn't so much that people use the language of commercial business and are free and easy with their abuse of terms (there's a new one), but that people treat government and politics as a service, and see their relationship with governance as akin to a client/customer relationship, to that end we elect politicians who tell us what we want to hear, even if what we hear can be, all to often, somewhat meaningless or trite.makingtime -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 11:55@TheRealCmdrGravy - There's nothing vague about it, It represents the whole of UK and US government economic policy for the last thirty years with the happy outcomes that we enjoy today.darylrevok -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 11:49But now you know what a neoliberal is, perhaps you can reread the excellent article above with added relish and understanding. Glad to be of assistance. If you want anything else looking up I suggest using a search engine before posting here that a particular word is too difficult for you.
@bill4me - And Capitalism is not dead, it just smells funny.MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 11:40According to Bradford DeLong, a Berkeley economic historian, neoliberalism has two main tenets:Justthefactsman , 11 Jun 2013 11:36"The first is that close economic contact between the industrial core and the developing periphery is the best way to accelerate the transfer of technology which is the sine qua non for making poor economies rich (hence all barriers to international trade should be eliminated as fast as possible).
The second is that governments in general lack the capacity to run large industrial and commercial enterprises. Hence, [except] for core missions of income distribution, public-good infrastructure, administration of justice, and a few others, governments should shrink and privatize)."
Such a long article.ascania , 11 Jun 2013 11:34All one needs to know is that English language is being manipulated just as it always has been by those that have the power to do it. Today the main manipulators are, Madison Avenue, agencies and departments the United States government, Wall Street, US television media. Most people don't realize that the language is being manipulated, when they hear or see in print words being used in unusual ways they just go along with it.
Example:
A couple of years back a motormouth U.S TV show host used the word "impact" in place of the word "affect". He did so simply because "impact" seemed more dramatic. Now it is almost impossible to hear or see the word "affect" used anywhere.
Now there are some of you that will say that language and usage of words change over time, and I would agree with you, but when you see a word used in a context that is completely inappropriate and that use is adopted in general you have to ask yourself questions like who benefits from this.
Remember when Bush wanted to increase troop levels, he refered to the increase as a "surge". "Surge" until then had a distinct meaning it was not associated with any meaning of permanence, and that is why it was used.Advertising frequently refers to things being "better" with no explanation of what it is better than.
"Underpriviliged" to describe people living in poverty but no explanation of the privileges that people have who are not poor.
I could go on and on, but I am sure that you scribblers who do not indulge in "confuse speak" know exactly what I am trying to explain.
Best example I can give is "The free world" which by latest check includes Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and sundry other brutal regimes and one time actually included outright fascist countries.Enough said.
Now all London Underground passengers are 'customers', which implies you are buying the travel experience rather than paying for transportation. When misused it suggests to me lack of strength and self-belief from the organization concerned.bill4me -> callaspodeaspode , 11 Jun 2013 11:31@callaspodeaspode - Gosh - an excellent example of how to get things completely wrong. Just because a firm has the government for a customer does not mean it is a public sector business.makingtime -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 11:15Note the word 'customer'. In the case of the FE college, who is the customer - the government or the students? Are the students just incidental fodder?
Your contract with the government will be for a certain job done in a certain for a certain sum of money. In FE, the government has a sum of money which gets paid out irrespective of the outcome. Indeed, how do you measure the 'outcome' of an FE college? In your case, it's easy - either the software works or it doesn't.
Your company no doubt is either owned by an individual, or has shareholders. Those people live on the profits of the company, or lose their money if it goes bust. What is the profit made by an FE college? Who are the shareholders? Who goes broke if the college folds? Still think an FE college is the same as private company?
@TheRealCmdrGravy - No definition is a distinct improvement on your deliberate distortion. I was assuming you had the sense to find a definition on the internet for yourself, since you managed to find your way here.callaspodeaspode -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 11:13I do not consider alternative viewpoints brainless, i consider a refusal to even engage in debate brainless, pretending that a word is undefined when there's reams of literature as well as concise definitions freely available from any number of sources. That might reasonably be construed as brainless.
Here, fill your boots, then if you have an actual argument instead of a crude attempt to derail the debate it can be considered.
Neoliberalism is a political philosophy whose advocates support economic liberalization, free trade and open markets, privatization, deregulation, and decreasing the size of the public sector while increasing the role of the private sector in modern society. (From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism)
I'm convinced you had the brains to look it up yourself, that's why I suspect your agenda. Now please stop wasting everyone's time unless you have something to contribute. I even looked it up for you.
@bill4me - That's an excellent point.seanmatthews , 11 Jun 2013 11:06And I can give a further example. I used to work in a Private Equity-owned firm, which happened to have some contracts to provide software support to the government. Thus, in your conceptual framework, it was a public sector business. Indeed, by your reasoning, Lockheed Martin is a state-owned company as well.
I agree that 'Neoliberalism' has hijacked our vocabulary, but that is about the limit of our agreement. People fling the word 'neoliberalism' around these days as a synonym for 'anything I and my friends have decided is politically-economically objectionable' ('have decided', not 'think'). In the old days, 'fascist' served the same purpose in all those late-night student flat discussions. I assume, until proven otherwise, that people who talk about 'neoliberalism', fall into the same category as those people who had so much difficulty distinguishing between 'liberal democracy' and 'fascism'.HarryTheHorse -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 11:03I can actually think of liberal left-leaning intellectuals who I can recall having self-described as neoliberal. They, however, are distinctive for the sort of nuanced understanding of political economy you are unlikely to find represented around the candles in the kitchen on a Friday night when the world's problems are being discussed and solved.
@TheRealCmdrGravy -pagey23 , 11 Jun 2013 10:57First of all I am impressed by the psychic ability which enables you to deduce my "closed political agenda", very impressive
Not really. It is transparently obvious when you declare that neo-liberalism is "vague stuff which I don't like" when there are cogent definitions of it, to which you have been referred in the past.
this is not the kind of liberalism we needed it needed to be socially liberal but not economically liberal. How dare people become entrepenurial or take the thatcherite tax cuts, or buy goods made from slave labour. Some seriously sick yuppies out there.PointOfYou , 11 Jun 2013 10:54Yes - the person who said language was mankind's first technology were absolutely correct. I expect language was invented by those who invent all technology to be just out of reach of the general public until the inventers decide they can do business for themselves out of it.Claire75 -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 10:22@gyges1 - doesn't say that though, does it?Snapshackle -> Yorkied24 , 11 Jun 2013 10:12She says that we need to look at the language as it says a lot about how we think. Sounds about right to me. It's hardly arguing white means black, just that the words we choose say something about what we mean.
Then she says that what we talk about isn't the stuff we need to concentrate on. That's a matter of debate and opinion.
@ Yorkied24 11 June 2013 12:57pm . Get cifFix for Firefox .TheRealCmdrGravy -> makingtime , 11 Jun 2013 09:58Except that preference theory does not take into account causality. In any event we have the evidence, there are those who are perfectly happy to cast others to the wall just so long as they do OK and even benefit from it.
@makingtime - Really ? Some very interesting points you've made there ...makingtime -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 09:45your closed political agenda may make it impossible for you to understand without a brain transplant.
First of all I am impressed by the psychic ability which enables you to deduce my "closed political agenda", very impressive. Secondly though it's interesting that you think a "closed political agenda", which I am taking to mean a concrete political viewpoint, can only be remedied with a "brain transplant" rather than through discussion. It's almos as though you're saying "those with political views different to mine are brainless" which is quite a bigoted point of view.
No definition from you regarding the word neo-liberal though so all in all not a very helpful or insightful post. Disappointing.
@TheRealCmdrGravy -tiojo , 11 Jun 2013 09:41..the word "neo-liberal" which, so far as I can see, simply means "vague stuff which I don't like".
Is it possible that you can't see very far because you're deliberately not looking? There are perfectly adequate and precise definitions. I quite liked 'A Brief History of Neoliberalism' by Prof D.Harvey as a long form definition, but since it's rather critical of 'vague stuff which I don't like', your closed political agenda may make it impossible for you to understand without a brain transplant.
It is exasperating when political discussion is reduced to which foghorn can generate the loudest interference. I suppose it's a mistake to waste time on correcting this rubbish
Doreen Massey is an academic. It shows in the way she writes. It's good that she raises fundamental questions about society and the way it is managed. It has traditionally been the role of academics to play that role.Damntheral -> roachclip , 11 Jun 2013 09:40The disappointing feature of the debate however is the absence of input from our politicians. All our leading politicians have essentially the same view of our society and economy. One in which, as Ms Massey indicates, choice exercised through market based mechanisms is the key principal. There is no view of progress towards a good society. There is no view of co-operation rather than competition. The only option is for us to measure ourselves by what we consume.
Our political system and its parties have failed us. In particular it is the left that has failed. It has accepted the social and economic arguments of the right and contented itself with suggesting minor variations on the same theme. Activists on the left need to re-gather their strength and more forcefully put forward a better alternative.
@roachclip - The fact that you refer to "neoliberalism" as "they" in a comment below speaks volumes about the mental fog behind that term.Eddiel899 -> retarius , 11 Jun 2013 09:34@retarius - Any government is only as good as the human rights it upholds.Pagey -> TobyLatimer , 11 Jun 2013 09:33Neoliberalism is the final stage of liberal democracy which has been around for 60-70 years, the most destructive form of government the world has ever seen, based on deregulation for the wealthy oligarchs and debt and debauchery for the poor .............. which is rapidly taking us back to feudal times.
@TobyLatimer - See also: "hardworking famiies/taxpayers"OneCommentator , 11 Jun 2013 09:15Barry1858 -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 09:05Wishful and naive thinking. Most work is very unfulfilling and even in cases where it is meaningful the day to day grind and intensity required by a job is making it a chore. There are very few people who have a job that is really a pleasure. There are many people though who have empty lives and were brainwashed into believing that their job is the most important part of their existence.This is a view that misunderstands where pleasure and fulfilment in human lives are found. Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives.
@gyges1 - " This is playground level debating. You are just saying the meaning you give to words is to be preferred to that of your opponents."natedogg -> RClayton , 11 Jun 2013 09:01Ah, I see the problem - a narrow mind with a broad-brush tendency.
I prescribe a course of Orwell, Start, perhaps, with short stories...... Politics and the English Language, Why I Write, Notes on Nationalism, for example. And then a full dose of Nineteen Eighty-Four. That should do the trick!
@RClayton - But if we start to think about work differently - which then gets its expression with the words we use - maybe it can change. Your Bangladeshi example is interesting because it assumes they need to work in that way to exist. Should we not try and change the system so a Bangladeshi can harness his or her creativity to connect their creative ideas to a global market and earn money in this way, rather than selling their physical labour to connect someone else's t-shirt to a global market?MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 08:48Good grief, how many more times will Adorno be plagiarised?bongoid , 11 Jun 2013 08:38It's not just vocabulary, its demeanor, etiquette and peoples entire self perception that has been usurped by the skewed modern logic of markets and the service industry.BobJanova -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 08:37People are preempting the technological singularity by rendering themselves robotic in a quite tragic struggle to perpetually remain relevant and employable in the form that the whims of the dictatorship of the market see fit to determine.
Some nationalities even have an intrinsic advantage, their national character tending rather to the robotic from the outset. What remains of human expression, of impulsivity, of spontaneity, of charisma, of originality is up for question, but the paucity of modern life, of human expression and interaction, will increase in direct relation to the increases in efficiency and productivity that will be demanded of citizens. And this despite the fact that we are suffering under the weight of massive over production, and the excessive demand on resources that this entails.
Nothing has been learnt from the crash of 2008 beyond "get rich even quicker", or as its more commonly known, economic and ecological suicide.
@BaronessHawHaw - Working class pride in their jobs came from being highly skilled – for example riveting in shipyards was difficult and you really were adding value there, so was assembling a car and so on. Also, didn't most of their 'meaning and fulfilment' come from the community, not really the work they were doing, except in so far as most of the people in the community would be doing the same work so it gave them something to talk about?Giggidy -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 08:30I've never heard a modern person saying how much any of the jobs I listed give them meaning or fulfilment. The kind of jobs that gave working class people a meaningful identity have pretty much all gone.
@BaronessHawHaw - most? You are kidding right?Venebles -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 08:25Just looking at the Governments of Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Hungary as an example seems to indicate centrist and centre-right parties in power.
@ BaronessHawHawGiggidy -> Sidfishes , 11 Jun 2013 08:24Most want socialism back. Socialism with the freedom to travel and the ability to buy a nice pair of jeans to look cool in.
May I suggest that you look up the meaning of the word "patronising"?
@Sidfishes - does your FE College pay tax, then?As I'm reading the annual report of my old sixth form college - which also operate adult learning courses - and they're an exempt charity and therefore not liable for corporation tax. They have an operating surplus (read: profit) on which no tax is paid, quite unlike a private sector company.
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Jun 11, 2013 | www.theguardian.com
'Customer'; 'growth'; 'investment'. We should scrutinise the everyday language that shapes how we think about the economy
'We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work''.'
A t a recent art exhibition I engaged in an interesting conversation with one of the young people employed by the gallery. As she turned to walk off I saw she had on the back of her T-shirt "customer liaison". I felt flat. Our whole conversation seemed somehow reduced, my experience of it belittled into one of commercial transaction. My relation to the gallery and to this engaging person had become one of instrumental market exchange.
The message underlying this use of the term customer for so many different kinds of human activity is that in all almost all our daily activities we are operating as consumers in a market – and this truth has been brought in not by chance but through managerial instruction and the thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices. The mandatory exercise of "free choice" – of a GP, of a hospital, of schools for one's children – then becomes also a lesson in social identity, affirming on each occasion our consumer identity.
This is a crucial part of the way that neoliberalism has become part of our commonsense understanding of life. The vocabulary we use to talk about the economy is in fact a political construction, as Stuart Hall, Michael Rustin and I have argued in our Soundings manifesto .
Another word that reinforces neoliberal common sense is "growth", currently deemed to be the entire aim of our economy. To produce growth and then (maybe) to redistribute some of it, has been a goal shared by both neoliberalism and social democracy. In its crudest formulation this entails providing the conditions for the market sector to produce growth, and accepting that this will result in inequality, and then relying on the redistribution of some portion of this growth to help repair the inequality that has resulted from its production.
This of course does nothing to question the inequality-producing mechanisms of market exchange itself, and it has also meant that the main lines of struggle have too often been focused solely on distributional issues. What's more, today we are living with a backlash to even the limited redistributional gains made by labour under social democracy. In spite of all this, growth is still seen as providing the solution to our problems.
The second reason our current notion of wealth creation, and our commitment to its growth, must be questioned is to do with our relationship with the planet. The environmental damage brought about by the pursuit of growth threatens to cause a catastrophe of which we are already witnessing intimations. And a third – and perhaps most important – defect of this approach is that increased wealth, especially as measured in the standard monetary terms of today, has few actual consequences for people's feelings of wellbeing once there is a sufficiency to meet basic needs, as there is in Britain. In pursuing "growth" in these terms, as a means to realise people's life goals and desires, economies are pursuing a chimera.
Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: "What is an economy for?", "What do we want it to provide?"
Our current imaginings endow the market and its associated forms with a special status. We think of "the economy" in terms of natural forces, into which we occasionally intervene, rather than in terms of a whole variety of social relations that need some kind of co-ordination.
Thus "work", for example, is understood in a very narrow and instrumental way. Where only transactions for money are recognised as belonging to "the economy", the vast amount of unpaid labour – as conducted for instance in families and local areas – goes uncounted and unvalued. We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming.
This is a view that misunderstands where pleasure and fulfilment in human lives are found. Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has – or could have – moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core. A rethinking of work could lead us to address more creatively both the social relations of work and the division of labour within society (including a better sharing of the tedious work, and of the skills).
There are loads of other examples of rarely scrutinised terms in our economic vocabulary, for instance that bundle of terms clustered around investment and expenditure – terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Expenditure, on the other hand, seems merely an outgoing, a cost, a burden.
Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic "common sense" needs to be challenged root and branch.
• Doreen Massey will be discussing Vocabularies of the Economy at a Soundings seminar on 13 June, 6.30-8.30pm, at the Marx Memorial Library, London. More information [email protected]
KingOfNothing -> Yorkied24 , 12 Jun 2013 13:06
@Yorkied24 - Well, I just don't accept that. I agree that monetarism is a major part of Friedman's legacy (as incorporated into neo-liberal doctrine). But, neo-liberalism is what is says on the tin. It is a 'new' version of the liberalist free trade agenda of the past, modified to take into account the welfare state.Eddiel899 , 12 Jun 2013 12:12I guess what I'm most interested in is how you can disentangle and separate politics from economics, since they are two sides of the same coin (where does 'science' fit in, by the way).
it seems that the political side of Neo-liberalism (or liberal democracy) has come up with a new definition of the word "Catholic".Ronpert -> NeverMindTheBollocks , 12 Jun 2013 07:22The Irish Prime-minster stated with a straight face in the Irish parliament today ........ that he is a "Catholic" outside parliament but when he enters parliament he is not a "Catholic"........ in relation to a bill allowing for abortion to be legalized in Ireland.
@NeverMindTheBollocks - when you criticise the author of "nonsensical thinking", this suggests to me that you are uncomfortable with ideas that question "common sense". Rather than engaging with the arguments, you are simply dismissing them as somebody's arbitrary opinion. You seem to be suggesting that Massey is forcing her opinion on you - but surely, like any good academic, she is really asking critical questions, rather than providing answers and solutions. That's what academia is for. Why does that seem to make you so angry?MagicRusski , 11 Jun 2013 19:44Add "development" to that list.bongoid -> Pumplechook , 11 Jun 2013 19:24@Pumplechook - Enterprise culture is a fine emboldening phrase to describe the sinking of society casting citizens adrift with nothing but what nature gave them to keep them afloat. Some might suggest we need to concentrate on mono platform non deliverables going backwards. Or on a fleet of very cheap rubber dinghies.Pumplechook , 11 Jun 2013 18:48Ms Massey clearly fails to see importance of remaining customer/client-focused in our modern enterprise culture. It is crucial in terms of achieving outcomes-based win-win solutions, as well as assisting in the interation of leading-edge opportunities and leveraging cross-platform deliverables going forward.Yorkied24 -> KingOfNothing , 11 Jun 2013 17:44@KingOfNothing - No, what I said was that neoliberalism is not an economic theory. For a start, Milton Friedman's work has its own name in economics, which is monetarism. Neoliberalism is a made up political word only used by those who are more interested in politics and rhetoric than economics and science.bongoid , 11 Jun 2013 17:08Neoliberalism is bankrupt, it isn't even a philiosophy its simple social nihilism. The proof is in the get rich quick, or short term profit mentality of those at the top. Get rich quick is tantamount to jumping the ship, its the economic equivalent of deserting a sinking vessel. Until people recognise the destructive cynical nature of the current economic philosophy and cast out those that are steering the ship, we are all doomed.darylrevok -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 17:02@bill4me - 'Sweet smell of success'?bongoid -> Yorkied24 , 11 Jun 2013 16:59
No, it's just that your shit-detector is so absent or degraded that you can no longer smell the stink of 'filthy lucre'.@Yorkied24 - I disagree. There is only one writer that deserves volleys of ad hominem attacks and cheap insults and thats Julie Burchill. I know she's about as relevant as a horse drawn carriage but nevertheless I think we need to keep criticism of journalists in proportion.maxfisher -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 16:07@bill4me - The US under the aegis of freedom and capitalism sponsored paramilitary regimes in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Chile and Argentina. Not to mention Greece and Iran. It continues to sponsor repressive regimes in the middle east and is about to make peace with the Taliban.MartynInEurope -> maxfisher , 11 Jun 2013 16:05You mistake capitalism as it exists in theory, or in your head with 'actually existing capitalism' which is often red in tooth and claw. The bloody history of the 20th century (particularly world war one, without which no world war two) was in many ways a consequence of imperialism which was a consequence of capitalism.
Theories are all very well, but they run into problems called people. This applies equally to Marx, Smith and Hayek.
@maxfisher -ascania -> bongoid , 11 Jun 2013 16:01True.
@bongoid - I'd like to see the second sentence of your comment engraved above a University Sociology Department office. Quite brilliant!maxfisher -> Yorkied24 , 11 Jun 2013 15:57@Yorkied24 - But they don't do they? They don't engage in cowardly and anonymous ad hominem attacks. They are professional journalists. The Guardian pays them to write articles. They then put their name to said articles. It's a transparent process. They are infinitely better than people who anonymously insult them without engaging in debate.maxfisher -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 15:40@bill4me - No, but it rather skews the data doesn't it? The Soviet Union lifted more people out of extreme poverty than perhaps any society before or since. But I wouldn't advocate Stalinism. I'm sure Pinochet's supporters could point to a growth in prosperity during his reign, but I shouldn't imagine many Chileans would favour a return to authoritarian rule.Yorkied24 -> maxfisher , 11 Jun 2013 15:40Headline date is often meaningless, for example George Osborne may be able to argue that more people are employed than ever before, whilst the opposition may be able to argue that more people are unemployed than ever before. Bo
Both statements my be true, but what do they tell us in isolation?
Does it not occur to you that appalling governance may be a consequence of the form capitalism takes right now?
@maxfisher - Most of them aren't ad homs. They're just insults.Yorkied24 -> KingOfNothing , 11 Jun 2013 15:25And the pair of them deserve it. They're embarrassing enough for all of us.
@KingOfNothing - Oh, and no, it's not difficult to attack at all - you just attack something that exists. Like capitalism.Yorkied24 -> KingOfNothing , 11 Jun 2013 15:24Keynes has already done the work for you. You're crying about nothing.
@KingOfNothing -maxfisher -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 15:09Strange then, that you can buy a book called: "Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. By Daniel Stedman Jones. Princeton University Press".
What were Friedrich Heyek and Milton Friedman: lollypop salesmen?
So, someone writes a book calling two economists 'neoliberals', so that makes it so? By that argument, it also calls them Masters of the Universe, so they're fucking He-Man too.
Is this how logic works in your world?
@bill4me -maxfisher -> Justthefactsman , 11 Jun 2013 14:40If you think capitalism is all winners and no losers you're either tremendously naive or a bit thick.
I wouldn't rely on headline figures on Wikipedia to support your argument. Drill down a little, find the data, look at individual countries, see what type of regimes operate in said countries. And imagine, for a second, that the stats are meaningful, then imagine what responsible capitalism could achieve.
@Justthefactsman - Slightly off topic, but I hanker for obliged rather than obligated. Also, most of the time I just feel ok, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Fair to middlin' you might say. I seldom feel awesome.maxfisher -> natedogg , 11 Jun 2013 14:34@natedogg - Of course. Francis Fukuyama told us so in the 80s. Oh....maxfisher -> MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 14:33@MartynInEurope - Well it could be argued that postmodernism is the necessary condition for neoliberalism.maxfisher -> Damntheral , 11 Jun 2013 14:29@Damntheral - No, it means this:JTStone -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 14:27Go on, read it. Then come back to me.
@TheRealCmdrGravy -darylrevok -> Ken Terry , 11 Jun 2013 14:01No definition from you regarding the word neo-liberal though so all in all not a very helpful or insightful post. Disappointing.
It's sometimes worth having a debate about what particular words mean, but all debate rests on certain presumptions, a foundation on which the argument is built, and in this case, Massey counts on her audience sharing her understanding of the term 'neoliberal', which many of us do. Anyone who doesn't can very easily look it up online and quickly find a definition which sits well with Massey's points.
Your and others' approach to rejecting her argument is ungracious cavilling. It's easy to do this in response to any argument, and make no mistake - anyone with intelligence and an open mind can recognise it very clearly.
@Ken Terry - Chomsky is right, ("The Manufacturing of Consent") 'At the head of it is the Military\Industrial Complex, coining the euphemisms of war to make the unthinkable palatable.maxfisher -> Giggidy , 11 Jun 2013 14:00On a localised scale, consider the Coalition who have done a similar job on the word, "Reform". If you look at history's most accurate and honorific incidences of political and parliamentary Reform look at the two Reform Acts which extended the franchise to adult male suffrage, 1832 and 1867, under Peel and Disraeli, Tories FFS, opposed to the Liberal's merciless free market obsessions.
What is "reforming" about stripping poor, ill and vulnerable people of their material support?
Pure Deformation.
I'm not a Tory, (Lifelong Socialist) but I think it's important to reconnect the Conservative Party with some of its avowed traditional self-definitions. "Maintaining continuity with past institutions, and a 'gradualism', if change is necessary." (Henry Cecil, I think).
Where has been the 'gradualism' in this Govt's' sudden and relentless pace of forcing change on the mass of its people by Bill after Bill restricting our aspirations and well-being?
We are governed by political liars who see this state of affairs as a triumph for their expertise. Any criticism is dismissed as not being able to accept the world 'as it is.'
@Giggidy - You've got it. Except that you haven't. 'Trickle up' would be more accurate though a little illogical: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/truth-richard-branson-virgin-rail-profitsr0ssa -> Giggidy , 11 Jun 2013 13:55@Giggidy -r0ssa -> joseph1832 , 11 Jun 2013 13:50The irony, of course, is that neoliberalism has *always* been coupled by high state spending. I know they say different, but that doesn't make it a reality. Stop showing your ignorance of the subject and go and delve in to some of the vast literature on the subject.
@joseph1832 - I think this misses the point though. You're trying to claim there can be words that are neutral, a language without a political dimension. This is besides the point, it's certainly not feasible in a society constructed as it is now.maxfisher -> DemocracyNever , 11 Jun 2013 13:45The real point is that language is itself a field of struggle. It's a terrain on which neoliberalism must be fought. In doing so we need not pretend to be doing anything less than entering a political fight. In combating neoliberalism no claim to be 'neutral' is necessary, that would be precisely to do what it does from the opposite direction - claim universality, eternalisation etc. The left does need to assert interrogate the language of neoliberalism and assert its own. Not becuase this is less political (I think "manipulation" is too strong a word here, the matter is somewhat more complex than that) but becuase it can offer a better future.
@DemocracyNever - I should think the first two responses illustrate how and why debate is increasingly meaningless. Neither of you engage with the argument or posit an alternative; hence no debate.Ken Terry , 11 Jun 2013 13:34That debate should be meaningful is given, that it should be an art form is, frankly, silly.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
Noam Chomsky
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Nov 23, 2018 | angrybearblog.com
The world according to Trump -- notice a trend here?Reporter: "Who should be held accountable?" [for Jamal Khashoggi's murder]
Trump: "Maybe the world should be held accountable because the world is a vicious place. The world is a very, very vicious place. " -- November 22, 2018.
2007:
- " The world is a vicious and brutal place. We think we're civilized. In truth, it's a cruel world and people are ruthless. They act nice to your face, but underneath they're out to kill you." Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life , Donald Trump & Bill Zanker, 2007, p. 71.
- "Life is not easy. The world is a vicious, brutal place. It's a place where people are looking to kill you, if not physically, then mentally. In the world that we live in every day it is usually the mental kill. People are looking to put you down, especially if you are on top. When I watched Westerns as a kid, I noticed the cowboys were always trying to kill the fastest gun. As a kid, I never understood it. Why would anyone want to go after the fastest gun?
- "This is the way it is in real life. Everyone wants to kill the fastest gun. In real estate, I am the fastest gun, and everyone wants to kill me. You have to know how to defend yourself. People will be nasty and try to kill you just for sport. Even your friends are out to get you!" Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life , Donald Trump & Bill Zanker, 2007, p. 139.
2018:
- "Well, not all people. But it's a vicious place. The world is a vicious place. You know, the lions and tigers, they hunt for food, we hunt for sport. So, it can be a very vicious place. You turn on the television and you look at what's happening." Interview with John Barton, Golf Digest , October 13, 2014.
- " This is the most deceptive, vicious world. It is vicious, it's full of lies, deceit and deception. You make a deal with somebody and it's like making a deal with– that table." Interview with Lesley Stahl, CBS 60 Minutes , October 15, 2018.
- "This is a r– this is a vicious place. Washington DC is a vicious, vicious place. The attacks, the– the bad mouthing, the speaking behind your back. –but – you know, and in my way, I feel very comfortable here." Interview with Lesley Stahl, CBS 60 Minutes , October 15, 2018.
Karl Kolchak , November 23, 2018 8:54 pm
ilsm , November 24, 2018 7:19 amThe world is a vicious place -- that is utterly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels, and will be until civilization finally collapses.
Newly posted DNC democrat Bill Kristol thinks regime change in China a worthwhile endeavor.
The "world is a vicious place" designed, set up, held together, secured by the capitalist "post WW II world order" paid for by the US taxpayer and bonds bought by arms dealers and their financiers.
The tail wagging the attack dog being a Jerusalem-Medina axis straddling Hormuz and Malacca .
An inept princely heir apparent assassin is far better than Rouhani in a "vicious place".
While Xi moves ahead.
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Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service " in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.
The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."
And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb hackers are at work here.
Operating on a budget of Ł1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.
The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin, with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked documents states. - RT
The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .
The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies."
The initiative has received Ł168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and Ł250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege.
Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. - RT
Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:
Spanish "Op"
In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half hours to accomplish, brags the group in the documents .
"The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.
Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." - RT
The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.
In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.
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Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns Steveg , Nov 24, 2018 11:43:44 AM | link
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.
The ' Integrity Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.
On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media smear campaign (pdf) against him.
biggerThe Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .
The Initiative is nominally run under the (government financed) non-government-organisation The Institute For Statecraft . Its internal handbook (pdf) describes its purpose:
The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North America.It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and promises that:
Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed, Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster participants as you desire).The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the Middle East.
On its About page it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.
The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.
Chris Donnelly - Pic via EuromaidanpressFrom its 2017/18 budget application (pdf) we learn how the Initiative works:
To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and to help build national capacities to counter it .The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones" illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself, created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.
If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme" run by the Foreign Office.
The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received £102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19 budget application shows a planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO and the Lithuanian MoD, but also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with £100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.
One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):
- Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a range of countries with different circumstances
- Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack by Russia
- Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of the "golden minute"
Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:
- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a self-contradicting concept.
Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:
We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the clusters develop.A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.
biggerMembers of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person of interest is Andrew Wood who handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus of the BBC.
bigger - biggerA ' Cluster Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another file reveals (pdf) the local partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.
The Initiatives Guide to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events, Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of British intelligence disinformation operations.
The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at pages 7-40 of the 2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:
The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow.The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society (think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and in various forms.
The third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:
Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.
Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM | Permalink
Comments Perfidious ALbion!
When will we learn?
pretzelattack , Nov 24, 2018 11:44:00 AM | link
Coincidentally, or not, i just saw this article at the guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/23/robert-mueller-profile-donald-trump-russia-investigation.Anya , Nov 24, 2018 11:57:00 AM | linkThe British government has been running a serious meddling into the US affairs:james , Nov 24, 2018 11:58:02 AM | link
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-23/mi6-scrambling-stop-trump-releasing-classified-docs-russia-probe"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016."
A Steele & Skrupal's anti-Russian / anti-Trump saga: https://spectator.org/big-dots-do-they-connect/
"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..."
For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.
thanks b....Ingrian , Nov 24, 2018 12:03:55 PM | linkthis movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK.james , Nov 24, 2018 12:15:31 PM | linkThe UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia fully, as they'd intended...et Al , Nov 24, 2018 12:20:09 PM | linkForthestate , Nov 24, 2018 12:26:09 PM | linkLet the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.
I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible evidence.
It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations.
Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's 'weak response' to Russian propaganda:
BTW, did anyone read Wired UK's current advertorial (nov 14) by Carl Miller for Brigade 77?
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?worldblee , Nov 24, 2018 12:33:05 PM | linkYet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"psychohistorian , Nov 24, 2018 12:34:32 PM | linkplantman , Nov 24, 2018 12:36:48 PM | link....full cluster of smear merchants". May all the clusters of smear merchants be exposed to the public as the acolytes of evil they are.
m , Nov 24, 2018 12:40:07 PM | link"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream."I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.
The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval.
Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda
BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.Jackrabbit , Nov 24, 2018 12:40:58 PM | linkA lot of sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.
AnyaCyril , Nov 24, 2018 1:10:13 PM | linkPat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification: THE CHIMERA OF DONALD TRUMP, RUSSIAN MONEY LAUNDERER :
If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it -- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling, including:
Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the publicAs I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job.Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"): To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election meddling
Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.
Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?Russ , Nov 24, 2018 1:16:21 PM | linkPosted by: james | Nov 24, 2018 12:15:31 PM | 7GeorgeV , Nov 24, 2018 1:34:08 PM | link"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as they'd intended..."
They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites.
The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power.Sasha , Nov 24, 2018 1:38:39 PM | linkSince UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:12:45 PM | linkhttp://www.voltairenet.org/article204051.html
Some of the "clusters" unmasked here....some, like Ignacio Torreblanca in Spain, are related to the CFR....
https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:13:28 PM | link
- Germany: Harold Elletson ,Klaus NaumannWolf-Ruediger Bengs, Ex Amb Killian, Gebhardt v Moltke, Roland Freudenstein, Hubertus Hoffmann, Bertil Wenger, Beate Wedekind, Klaus Wittmann, Florian Schmidt, Norris v Schirach
- Sweden, Norway, Finland: Martin Kragh , Jardar Ostbo, Chris Prebensen, Kate Hansen Bundt, Tor Bukkvoll, Henning-Andre Sogaard, Kristen Ven Bruusgard, Henrik O Breitenbauch, Niels Poulsen, Jeppe Plenge, Claus Mathiesen, Katri Pynnoniemi, Ian Robertson, Pauli Jarvenpaa, Andras Racz
- Netherlands: Dr Sijbren de Jong, Ida Eklund-Lindwall, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rianne Siebenga, Jerry Sullivan, Hunter B Treseder, Chris Quick
cresty , Nov 24, 2018 2:18:30 PM | link
- Spain: Nico de Pedro, Ricardo Blanco Tarno, Eduardo Serra Rexach, Dionisio Urteaga Todo, Dimitri Barua, Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, Marta Garcia, Abraham Sanz, Fernando Maura, Jose Ignacio Sanchez Amor, Jesus Ramon-Laca Clausen, Frances Ghiles, Carmen Claudin, Nika Prislan, Luis Simon, Charles Powell, Mira Milosevich, Daniel Iriarte, Anna Bosch, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi, Tito, Frances Ghiles, Borja Lasheras, Jordi Bacaria, Alvaro Imbernon-Sainz, Nacho Samor
- US, Canada: Mary Ellen Connell, Anders Aslund, Elizabeth Braw, Paul Goble, David Ziegler Evelyn Farkas, Glen Howard, Stephen Blank, Ian Brzezinski, Thomas Mahnken, John Nevado, Robert Nurick, Jeff McCausland Todd Leventhal
- UK: Chris Donnelly Amalyah Hart William Browder John Ardis Roderick Collins, Patrick Mileham Deborah Haynes Dan Lafayeedney Chris Hernon Mungo Melvin Rob Dover Julian Moore Agnes Josa David Aaronovitch Stephen Dalziel Raheem Shapi Ben Nimmo Robert Hall Alexander Hoare Steve Jermy Dominic Kennedy Victor Madeira Ed Lucas Dr David Ryall Graham Geale Steve Tatham Natalie Nougayrede
Alan Riley [email protected] Anne Applebaum Neil Logan Brown James Wilson Primavera Quantrill Bruce Jones David Clark Charles Dick Ahmed Dassu Sir Adam Thompson Lorna Fitzsimons Neil Buckley Richard Titley Euan Grant Alastair Aitken Yusuf Desai Bobo Lo Duncan Allen Chris Bell Peter Mason John Lough Catherine Crozier Robin Ashcroft Johanna Moehring Vadim Kleiner David Fields Alistair Wood Ben Robinson Drew Foxall Alex Finnen Orsyia Lutsevych Charlie Hatton Vladimir Ashurkov Giles Harris Ben Bradshaw Chris Scheurweghs James Nixey Charlie Hornick Baiba Braze J Lindley-French Craig Oliphant Paul Kitching Nick Childs Celia Szusterman James Sherr Alan Parfitt Alzbeta Chmelarova Keir Giles Andy Pryce Zach Harkenrider Kadri Liik Arron Rahaman David Nicholas Igor Sutyagin Rob Sandford Maya Parmar Andrew Wood Richard Slack Ellie Scarnell Nick Smith Asta Skaigiryte Ian Bond Joanna Szostek Gintaras Stonys Nina Jancowicz Nick Washer Ian Williams Joe Green Carl Miller Adrian Bradshaw Clement Daudy Jeremy Blackham Gabriel Daudy Andrew Lucy Stafford Diane Allen Alexandros Papaioannou Paddy NicollThank you very much for going through all the files, b. Will share far and wide
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Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
HowdyDoody , 7 hours ago link
activisor , 10 hours ago linkOne of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.
smacker , 11 hours ago linkThe British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.
The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.
The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape Karma.
Lokiban , 13 hours ago linkThe Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national leader has.
Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:
- Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
- Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.
Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??
LOL123 , 14 hours ago linkYes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war. Imagine that, an informed sheople.
Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.artistant , 14 hours ago link"250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.
"During the third Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........
***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"
Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.
The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose Law Firm."- patriots4truth
hooligan2009 , 15 hours ago linklarryriedel , 15 hours ago linkWhen you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.
Baron Samedi , 15 hours ago linkFBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms for political speech, especially without using True Names.
headless blogger , 15 hours ago linkOilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most surreal propaganda psy-ops.
But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.
Push , 15 hours ago linkAnti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means justify the ends".
They are frightening people.
Xena fobe , 15 hours ago linkBasically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin. This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is obviously a Russian spy.
OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link"Instutute for Statecraft"? Seriously?
koan , 16 hours ago link"Substitute for Statecraft"
Fify ;-)
East Indian , 16 hours ago linkThe UK is waging psyop against their own people using the Russians as an excuse to further oppress the population, especially the white population.
FIFY.
brewing_it , 17 hours ago linkNever thought Putin would be the symbol of free speech! The totalitarian EU and Deep State can come out of closet and denounce their predecessors.
AriusArmenian , 17 hours ago linkIf you call ******** on the whole Russia cyberscare, you will be labeled a puppet of Putin.
The establishment is afraid of free thinking men and women that can call ******** when they see and hear it.
Mike Rotsch , 17 hours ago linkBetter to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.
RealistDuJour , 17 hours ago linkA good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire accounts.
HRClinton , 18 hours ago linkThis is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts.
Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to find it?
J S Bach , 18 hours ago linkWhen two sides fight - especially white v white - the hidden 3rd party (((instigator))) wins.
How dumb and mallaleable can these goys be? Pretty dumb and mallaleable, it seems.
OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago linkAny propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious people.
Herdee , 18 hours ago linkYesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.
Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions
A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.
Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained deaths.
Quadruple_Rainbow , 18 hours ago linkEngland and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.
Herdee , 18 hours ago linkMore of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as usual.
This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism). The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.
HRClinton , 17 hours ago linkThey're afraid of stories like this: https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/
gatorengineer , 18 hours ago linkOperating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics))).
The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.
Do Neocons get time and half for Overtime, they sure have been putting in a bunch lately.
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Nov 13, 2018 | news.antiwar.com
Says Europe will be forced to accept US demands
With the newly reimposed US sanctions against Iran having little to no perceivable economic impact, national security adviser John Bolton is talking up his plans to continue to escalate the sanctions track, saying he will " squeeze Iran until the pips squeak ."
Bolton shrugged off the reality that Iran is still doing business internationally, saying that he believes Iran is "under real pressure" from the sanctions, and that he's determined to see it keep getting worse.
Bolton went on to predict that the European efforts to keep trading with Iran would ultimately fail. He said the Europeans are going through the six stages of grief , and would ultimately led to European acceptance of the US demands.
Either way, Bolton's position is that the US strategy will continue to be imposing new sanctions on Iran going forward. It's not clear what the end game is, beyond just damaging Iran.
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Nov 02, 2018 | www.wsws.org
Pelosi's deputy in the House, Steny Hoyer, sums up the right-wing policies of the Democrats, declaring: "His [Trump's] objectives are objectives that we share. If he really means that, then there is an opening for us to work together."
So much for the moral imperative of voting for the Democrats to stop Trump! As Obama said following Trump's election, the Democrats and Republicans are "on the same team" and their differences amount to an "intramural scrimmage." They are on the team of, and owned lock stock and barrel by, the American corporate-financial oligarchy, personified by Trump.
The Democrats are, moreover, politically responsible for the rise of Trump. The Obama administration paved the way for Trump by implementing the pro-corporate (Wall Street bailout), pro-war (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, drone killings) and anti-democratic (mass surveillance, persecution of Snowden, Assange, Manning) policies that Trump is continuing and intensifying. And by breaking all his election promises and carrying out austerity policies against the working class, Obama enabled the billionaire gangster Trump to make an appeal to sections of workers devastated by deindustrialization, presenting himself as the anti-establishment spokesman for the "forgotten man."
This was compounded by the right-wing Clinton candidacy, which exuded contempt for the working class and appealed for support to the military and CIA and wealthy middle-class layers obsessed with identity politics. Sanders' endorsement of Clinton gave Trump an open field to exploit discontent among impoverished social layers.
The same process is taking place internationally. While strikes and other expressions of working class opposition are growing and broad masses are moving to the left, the right-wing policies of supposedly "left" establishment parties are enabling far-right and neo-fascist forces to gain influence and power in countries ranging from Germany, Italy, Hungary and Poland to Brazil.
As for Gay's injunction to vote "pragmatically," this is a crude promotion of the bankrupt politics that are brought forward in every election to keep workers tied to the capitalist two-party system. "You have only two choices. That is the reality, whether you like it or not." And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war.
The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation "graveyard of social protest movements," and for good reason. From the Populist movement of the late 19th century, to the semi-insurrectional industrial union movement of the 1930s, to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to the mass anti-war protest movements of the 1960s and the eruption of international protests against the Iraq War in the early 2000s -- every movement against the depredations of American capitalism has been aborted and strangled by being channeled behind the Democratic Party.
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Nov 08, 2018 | www.sott.net
Billed as a 'referendum on Trump's presidency', the US Midterm Elections drew an unusually high number of Americans to the polls yesterday. The minor loss, from Trump's perspective, of majority Republican control of the lower House of Representatives, suggests, if anything, the opposite of what the media and establishment want you to believe it means.An important clue to why the American media has declared permanent open season on this man transpired during a sometimes heated post-elections press conference at the White House yesterday. First, CNN's obnoxious Jim Acosta insisted on bringing up the patently absurd allegations of 'Russia collusion' and refused to shut up and sit down. Soon after, PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor joined her colleagues in asking Trump another loaded question , this time on the 'white nationalism' canard:
Alcindor : On the campaign trail you called yourself a nationalist. Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists...The US media is still "not even wrong" on Trump and why he won the 2016 election. You know something is fundamentally wrong when the average high school drop-out MAGA-hat-wearing Texan or Alabaman working a blue collar job has more sense, can SEE much more clearly, than the average university-educated, ideology-soaked, East Coast liberal.Trump : I don't know why you'd say this. It's such a racist question.
Alcindor : There are some people who say that now the Republican Party is seen as supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric. What do you make of that?
Trump : Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African Americans? That's such a racist question. I love our country. You have nationalists, and you have globalists . I also love the world, and I don't mind helping the world, but we have to straighten out our country first. We have a lot of problems ...
Trump is a "nationalist". More or less every administration previous to his, going back at least 100 years, was "globalist". For much of its history, the USA has been known around the world as a very patriotic (i.e., nationalist) country. Americans in general had a reputation for spontaneous chants of "USA! USA! USA!", flying the Stars And Stripes outside their houses and being very proud of their country. Sure, from time to time, that pissed off people a little in other countries but, by and large, Americans' patriotism was seen as endearing, if a little naive, by most foreigners.
Globalism, on the other hand, as it relates to the USA, is the ideology that saturates the Washington establishment think-tanks, career politicians and bureaucrats, who are infected with the toxic belief that America can and should dominate the world . This is presented to the public as so much American largess and magnanimity, but it is, in reality, a means to increasing the power and wealth of the Washington elite.
Consider Obama's two terms, during which he continued the massively wasteful (of taxpayer's money) and destructive (of foreigners' lives and land) "War on Terror". Consider that he appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who proceeded to joyfully bomb Libya back to the stone age and murder its leader. Consider that, under Obama, US-Russia relations reached an all-time low, with repeated attacks (of various sorts) on the Russian president, government and people, and the attempted trashing of Russia's international reputation in the eyes of the American people. Consider the Obama regime's hugely destructive war waged (mostly by proxy) on the Syrian people. Consider the Obama era coup in Ukraine that, in a few short months, set that country's prospects and development back several decades and further soured relations with Russia.
These are but a few examples of the "globalism" that drives the Washington establishment. Who, in their right mind, would support it? (I won't get into what constitutes a 'right mind', but we can all agree it does not involve destroying other nations for profit). The problem however, is that the Washington elite want - no, NEED - the American people to support such military adventurism, and what better way to do that than by concocting false "Russian collusion" allegations against Trump and having the media program the popular mind with exactly the opposite of the truth - that Trump was a "traitor" to the American people.
The only thing Trump is a traitor to is the self-serving globally expansionist interests of a cabal of Washington insiders . This little maneuver amounted to a '2 for 1' for the Washington establishment. They simultaneously demonized Trump (impeding his 'nationalist' agenda) while advancing their own globalist mission - in this case aimed at pushing back Russia.
Words and their exact meanings matter . To be able to see through the lies of powerful vested interests and get to the truth, we need to know when those same powerful vested interests are exploiting our all-too-human proclivity to be coerced and manipulated by appeals to emotion.
So the words "nationalist" and "nationalism", as they relate to the USA, have never been "dirty" words until they were made that way by the "globalist" element of the Washington establishment (i.e., most of it) by associating it with fringe Nazi and "white supremacist" elements in US society that pose no risk to anyone, (except to the extent that the mainstream media can convince the general population otherwise). The US 'Deep State' did this in response to the election of Trump the "nationalist" and their fears that their globalist, exceptionalist vision for the USA - a vision that is singularly focused on their own narrow interests at the expense of the American people and many others around the world - would be derailed by Trump attempting to put the interests of the American people first .
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Nov 02, 2018 | www.wsws.org
Terry Lawrence michaelroloff • 8 months ago
"The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!
Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.
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Oct 31, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
As more and more college professors express their social and political views in classrooms, students across the country are feeling increasingly afraid to disagree according to a survey of 800 full-time undergraduate college students, reported by the Wall Street Journal ' s James Freeman.When students were asked if they've had "any professors or course instructors that have used class time to express their own social or political beliefs that are completely unrelated to the subject of the course," 52% of respondents said that this occurs "often," while 47% responded, "not often."
A majority -- 53% -- also reported that they often "felt intimidated" in sharing their ideas, opinions or beliefs in class because they were different from those of the professors. - WSJ
What's more, 54% of students say they are intimidated expressing themselves when their views conflict with those of their classmates.
The survey, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates on behalf of Yale's William F. Buckley, Jr. Program (which counts Freeman among its directors), was undertaken between October 8th and 18th, and included students at both public and private four-year universities across the country.
This is a problem, suggests Freeman - as unbiased teachers who formerly filled universities have been replaced by activists who "unfortunately appear to be just as political and overbearing as one would expect," and that " perhaps the actual parents who write checks can someday find some way to encourage more responsible behavior. "
Read the rest below via the Wall Street Journal :
***
As for the students, there's at least a mixed message in the latest survey results. On the downside, the fact that so many students are afraid of disagreeing with their peers does not suggest a healthy intellectual atmosphere even outside the classroom. There's more disappointing news in the answers to other survey questions. For example, 59% of respondents agreed with this statement:
My college or university should forbid people from speaking on campus who have a history of engaging in hate speech.This column does not favor hatred, nor the subjective definition of "hate speech" by college administrators seeking to regulate it. In perhaps the most disturbing finding in the poll results, 33% of U.S. college students participating in the survey agreed with this statement:
If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views.An optimist desperately searching for a silver lining would perhaps note that 60% of respondents did not agree that physical violence is justified to silence people speaking what someone has defined as "hate speech" or "racially charged" comments. But the fact that a third of college students at least theoretically endorse violence as a response to offensive speech underlines the threat to free expression on American campuses.
Perhaps more encouraging are the responses to this question:
Generally speaking, do you think the First Amendment, which deals with freedom of speech, is an outdated amendment that can no longer be applied in today's society and should be changed or an important amendment that still needs to be followed and respected in today's society?A full 79% of respondents opted for respecting the First Amendment, while 17% backed a rewrite.
On a more specific question, free speech isn't winning by the same landslide. When asked if they would favor or oppose their schools having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty, 54% of U.S. college kids opposed such codes while 38% were in favor.
The free exchange of ideas is in danger on American campuses. And given the unprofessional behavior of American faculty suggested by this survey, education reformers should perhaps focus on encouraging free-speech advocates within the student body while adopting a campus slogan from an earlier era: Don't trust anyone over 30.
keep the bastards honest , 26 minutes ago link
PGR88 , 39 minutes ago linkthis tyranny applies not only to politics and weirdo social world view, it runs thru everything. Group think is powerful and those not following get excluded, defunded of resources and ridicule and other punishment.
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keep the bastards honest , 55 minutes ago linkThe education-industrial complex is a massive spending and debt-fed bubble, that has created a massive political organizing force and teflon monoculture. They are parasites feeding off government and the debt of students
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Charlie_Martel , 2 hours ago linkIt's always been like this, at school as a 5 year old ....my little kid was sent to the headmaster for objecting to making a key ring thing in craft as not one kid had a key. He spoke a well reasoned argument and of course is at the Supreme Court now. But gained no respect or nurturing from that school. I also copped it, made career decision to be a scientist because of the stupidity of an english teacher not knowing same issues prevailed there. Was thrown out of english honours course so did the exam on my own knowledge and got first class honours in the state.
At University we all know you feed back what they want if you want to pass. Some want intelligence and best true understanding others want their crippled stuff. This also applies if you are a science, physiology researcher. Cutting edge work if not mainstream does not get published, you have to be part of a recognised institution to be published so no independent researcher,
There are set ideas and marketing there of eg antioxidants fallacies, need for estrogen, and until recently How stupid was Lamarck because he espoused the passing down of response to environment to subsequent generations...Darwin thought this too but idea was suppressed. Then epigenetics got the new hot thing for grants. Fck them all.
My child and I discussed a version with the principal when he was doing the bacceaulureate, as from 5 onwards teachers rejected correct answers and wanted their answers. The excellent advice was to view it all like a driving exam, learn the road rules and give them back.
students always know the tyranny of the teacher and evaluator. At 6 my kid was sat with the slow learners and forced to give 30answers a day ' correct' . Ie lies and untruths.
Infinity as answer to how many corners has a cylinder was not only mad bad but ridiculed.
Duc888 , 2 hours ago linkBecause its an indoctrination not an education.
JimmyJones , 2 hours ago linkIt's impossible to actually debate someone who has NO FACTS on either side of the argument....
it winds up like this....
"not even WRONG"
The phrase " not even wrong " describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but is based on invalid reasoning or speculative premises that can neither be proven correct nor falsified .
Hence, it refers to statements that cannot be discussed in a rigorous, scientific sense . [1] For a meaningful discussion on whether a certain statement is true or false, the statement must satisfy the criterion called "falsifiability" -- the inherent possibility for the statement to be tested and found false. In this sense, the phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous to "nonfalsifiable". [1]
The phrase is generally attributed to theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli , who was known for his colorful objections to incorrect or careless thinking. [2] [3] Rudolf Peierls documents an instance in which "a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong' ." [4] This is also often quoted as "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong", or in Pauli's native German , " Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!". Peierls remarks that quite a few apocryphal stories of this kind have been circulated and mentions that he listed only the ones personally vouched for by him. He also quotes another example when Pauli replied to Lev Landau , "What you said was so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not. " [4]
LetThemEatRand , 2 hours ago linkChemical engineering, engineering structural (optional), basic electrical engineering and C++ programing and he can make any machine to automatically preform any chemical process out of his garage. You could probably watch a butt ton of YouTube and a library card and also learn those skills.
TeethVillage88s , 2 hours ago linkThe homogenized culture of colleges today is very similar to what I imagine it was like in the 1950's, but with a different set of "values" obviously. The 1950's led to the 1960's, and a complete rejection by many young people of establishment mono-culture. Maybe the young people eventually will figure out that what they see as SJW counter-culture is actually new establishment culture, and they will rebel against it in a few years. Probably not, though.
TeethVillage88s , 2 hours ago linkThanks. I'm older than others probably think. But I generalizae or estimate more than others my age due to the life I chose or led.
culture of colleges today is very similar to what I imagine it was like in the 1950's,
dcmbuffy , 2 hours ago linkThanks. I'm older than others probably think. But I generalizae or estimate more than others my age due to the life I chose or led.
culture of colleges today is very similar to what I imagine it was like in the 1950's,
DuckDog , 2 hours ago linkand going into debt for their prison term. bunch of punk bullies!!!
When I was in the army and got sentence to 2 years less a day in Military prison in Edmonton, I paid $1.70 a day, which the military were so kind to ring up a tab for me, when I got released from prison they handed me my bill and made me work it off before I got my dishonorable discharge
Sort of like college today
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Oct 23, 2018 | www.project-syndicate.org
American politics has become a game of, by, and for corporate interests, with tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for polluters, and war and global warming for the rest of us. Americans – and the world – deserve better.
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Oct 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
somebody , Oct 21, 2018 3:53:21 PM | link
49
Number of people with preexisting conditionsAbout half of nonelderly Americans have one or more pre-existing health conditions, according to a recent brief by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, that examined the prevalence of conditions that would have resulted in higher rates, condition exclusions, or coverage denials before the ACA. Approximately 130 million nonelderly people have pre-existing conditions nationwide, and, as shown in the table available below, there is an average of more than 300,000 per congressional district. Nationally, the most common pre-existing conditions were high blood pressure (44 million people), behavioral health disorders (45 million people), high cholesterol (44 million people), asthma and chronic lung disease (34 million people), and osteoarthritis and other joint disorders (34 million people).While people with Medicaid or employer-based plans would remain covered regardless of medical history, the repeal of pre-ex protections means that the millions with pre-existing conditions would face higher rates if they ever needed individual market coverage. The return of pre-ex discrimination would hurt older Americans the most. As noted earlier, while about 51 percent of the nonelderly population had at least one pre-existing condition in 2014, according to the HHS brief, the rate was 75 percent of those ages 45 to 54 and 84 percent among those ages 55 to 64. But even millions of younger people, including 1 in 4 children, would be affected by eliminating this protection.
US has no concept of solidarity.
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Oct 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Pft , Oct 8, 2018 12:11:11 AM | 43 k
The constitution was a creation of the elite at the time, the property class. Its mission was to prevent the common folk from having control. Democracy=mob rule= Bad.
The common folk only had the ability to elect representatives in the house, who in turn would elect Senators. Electors voted for President and they were appointed by a means chosen by the state legislature , which only in modern times has come to mean by the popular vote of the common folk. Starting from 1913 it was decided to let the common folk vote for Senator and give the commonfolk the illusion of Democracy confident they could be controlled with propaganda and taxes (also adopted in 1913 with the Fed)
At the time the eligible voters were males of European descent (MOED), and while not highly educated they were relatively free of propaganda and IQ's were higher than today. After giving women the right to vote and with other minorities voting the MOED became a minority voter.
Bernays science of propaganda took off during WWI, Since MOED's made up the most educated class (relative to minorities and women) up to the 70's this was a big deal for almost 60 years , although not today when miseducation is equal among the different races, sexes and ethnicities.
So today with propaganda and education being what it is, not to mention campaign financing laws especially post Citizen United, and MSM under control of 6 companies, the entire voting class is miseducated and easily influenced to vote for candidates chosen by the elites
So how do the common folk get control over the federal government? That is a pipe dream and will never happen. The founders who incited the revolution against British rule were the American Elites (also British citizens) who wanted more. The elites today got everything they want. They have no need for revolution. The common folk are divided, misinformed, unorganized, leaderless and males are emasculated. Incapable of taking control peacefully or otherwise.
Thats just my opinion
Guerrero , Oct 8, 2018 1:03:57 AM | link
Pft has a point. If there was ever a time for the people to take the republic into its hands, it may have been just after the Civil War when the Dems were discredited and the Repubs had a total control of Congress.This was the high-tariff-era and the budget surplus was an issue all through the balance of the 19th Century. So what were the politics about? 1. Stirring stump (Trump) speeches were all about "waving the bloody shirt"
All manner of political office-seekers devoted themselves to getting on the government gravy train, somehow. The selling of political offices was notorious and the newspaper editors of the time were ashamed of this.
Then there was the Whiskey Ring. The New York Customs House was a major source of corruption lucre. Then there was vote selling in blocks of as many as 10,000 and the cost of paying those who could do this. Then there were the kickbacks from the awards of railroad concessions which included large parcels of land. If there ever was a Golden Age of the United States it must have been when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
ben , Oct 8, 2018 1:13:04 AM | link
karlof1 @ 34 asked:"My question for several years now: What are us Commonfolk going to do to regain control of the federal government?"Grieved , Oct 8, 2018 1:13:32 AM | linkThe only thing us "common folk" can do is work within our personal sphere of influence, and engage who you can, when you can, and support with any $ you can spare, to support the sites and any local radio stations that broadcast independent thought. ( if you can find any). Pacifica radio, KPFK in LA is a good example. KPFA in the bay area.
Other than another economic crash, I don't believe anything can rouse the pathetic bovine public. Bread and circuses work...
@38 Pftdh-mtl , Oct 8, 2018 2:34:39 AM | linkThe division of representative power and stake in the political process back at the birth of the US Constitution was as you say it was. But this wasn't because any existing power had been taken away from anyone. It was simply the state of play back then.
Since that time, we common people have developed a more egalitarian sense of how the representation should be apportioned. We include former slaves, all ethnic groups and both genders. We exclude animals thus far, although we do have some - very modest - protections in place.
I think it has been the rise of the socialist impulse among workers that has expanded this egalitarian view, with trade unions and anti-imperialist revolutions and national struggles. But I'm not a scholar or a historian so I can't add details to my impression.
My point is that since the Framers met, there has been a progressive elevation of our requirements of representative government. I think some of this also came from the Constitution itself, with its embedded Bill of Rights.
I can't say if this expansion has continued to this day or not. History may show there was a pinnacle that we have now passed, and entered a decline. I don't know - it's hard to say how we score the Internet in this balance. It's always hard to score the present age along its timeline. And the future is never here yet, in the present, and can only ever be guessed.
In my view, the dream of popular control of representative government remains entirely possible. I call it an aspiration rather than a pipe dream, and one worth taking up and handing on through the generations. Current global society may survive in relatively unbroken line for millennia to come. There's simply no percentage in calling failure at this time.
It may be that better government comes to the United States from the example of the world nations, over the decades and centuries to come. Maybe the demonstration effect will work on us even when we cannot work on ourselves. We are not the only society of poor people who want a fair life.
In my view of the fundamental dynamic - namely that of history being one unbroken story of the rich exploiting the poor - representative government is one of the greatest achievements of the poor. If we could only get it to work honestly, and protect it from the predations of the rich. This is a work in progress. It forms just one aspect of millennia of struggle. To give up now would be madness.
In my opinion.
Grieved @42 said:Krollchem , Oct 8, 2018 2:42:16 AM | link"representative government is one of the greatest achievements of the poor. If we could only get it to work honestly, and protect it from the predations of the rich. This is a work in progress. It forms just one aspect of millennia of struggle. To give up now would be madness."
Here, here! I fully agree with you.
In my opinion, representative government was stronger in the U.S. from the 1930's to the 1970's and Europe after WW2. And as a result the western world achieved unprecedented prosperity. Since 1980, the U.S. government has been captured by trans-national elites, who, since the 1990's have also captured much of the political power in the EU.
Both Europe and the U.S. are now effectively dictatorships, run by a trans-national elite. The crumbling of both is the result of this dictatorship.
Prosperity, and peace, will only return when the dictators are removed and representative government is returned.
dh-mtl@44Anton Worter , Oct 8, 2018 3:06:04 AM | link"Both Europe and the U.S. are now effectively dictatorships, run by a trans-national elite. The crumbling of both is the result of this dictatorship."
Exactly!! I feel like the Swedish knight Antonius Block in the movie the 7th Seal. There does not seem any way out of this evil game by the death dealing rulers.
@24Anton Worter , Oct 8, 2018 3:34:05 AM | linkLove it. But you fad3d at the end. It was Gingrich, not Rodham, who was behind Contract on America, and GHWBush's Fed Bank group wrote the legislation that would have been Bush's second term 'kinder, gentler' Gramm-Leach-Bliley bayonet up the azs of the American Dream, as passed by a majority of Congress, and by that point Tripp and Lewinski had already pull-dated Wild Bill. God, can you imagine being married to that hag Rodham? The purple people-eating lizards of Georgetown and Alexandria. Uurk.
40żQue tal?
I'm reading a great FDR book, 'Roosevelt and Hopkins', a signed 1st Ed copy by Robert Sherwood, and the only book extant from my late father's excellent political and war library, after his trophy wife dumped the rest of his library off at Goodwill, lol. They could have paid for her next booblift, ha, ha, ha.
Anyway, FDR, in my mind, only passed the populist laws that he did because he needed cannon fodder in good fighting shape for Rothschild's Wars ("3/4ths of WW2 conscripts were medically unfit for duty," the book reports), and because Rothschild's and Queens Bank of London needed the whole sh*taco bailed out afterward, by creating SS wage-withholding 'Trust Fund' (sic) the Fed then tapped into, and creating Lend-Lease which let Rothschilds float credit-debt to even a higher level and across the globe. Has it all been paid off by Germany and Japan yet?
Even Lincoln, jeez, Civil War was never about slavery, it was about finance and taxation and the illegitimate Federal supremacy over the Republic of States, not unlike the EU today. Lincoln only freed the slaves to use them as cannon fodder and as a fifth column.
All of these politicians were purple people-eating lizards, except maybe the Kennedy's, and they got ground and pounded like Conor McGregor, meh?
Guerrero | Oct 8, 2018 10:22:34 AM | 61
@BM | Oct 8, 2018 10:03:12 AM | 60
"representative government is one of the greatest achievements of the poor. If we could only get it to work honestly, and protect it from the predations of the rich. This is a work in progress. It forms just one aspect of millennia of struggle. To give up now would be madness."Compare to: Sentiments of the Nation:
12ş That as the good Law is superior to every man, those dictated by our Congress must be such, that they force constancy and patriotism, moderate opulence and indigence; and in such a way increase the wages of the poor, improve their habits, moving away from ignorance, rapine and theft.
13ş That the general laws include everyone, without exception of privileged bodies; and that these are only in the use of the ministry..
14ş That in order to dictate a Law, the Meeting of Sages is made, in the possible number, so that it may proceed with more success and exonerate of some charges that may result.
15. That slavery be banished forever, and the distinction of castes, leaving all the same, and only distinguish one American from another by vice and virtue.
16ş That our Ports be open to friendly foreign nations, but that they do not enter the nation, no matter how friendly they may be, and there will only be Ports designated for that purpose, prohibiting disembarkation in all others, indicating ten percent.
17ş That each one be kept his property, and respect in his House as in a sacred asylum, pointing out penalties to the offenders.
18ş That the new legislation does not admit torture.
19ş That the Constitutional Law establishes the celebration of December 12th in all Peoples, dedicated to the Patroness of our Liberty, Most Holy Mary of Guadalupe, entrusting to all Peoples the monthly devotion.
20ş That the foreign troops, or of another Kingdom, do not step on our soil, and if it were in aid, they will not without the Supreme Junta approval.
21ş That expeditions are not made outside the limits of the Kingdom, especially overseas, that they are not of this kind yet rather to spread the faith to our brothers and sisters of the land inside.
22ş That the infinity of tributes, breasts and impositions that overwhelm us be removed, and each individual be pointed out a five percent of seeds and other effects or other equally light weight, that does not oppress so much, as the alcabala, the Tobacconist, the Tribute and others; because with this slight contribution, and the good administration of the confiscated goods of the enemy, will be able to take the weight of the War, and pay the fees of employees.
Temple of the Virgen of the Ascencion
Chilpancingo, September 14, 1813.
José MŞ Morelos.23ş That also be solemnized on September 16, every year, as the Anniversary day on which the Voice of Independence was raised, and our Holy Freedom began, because on that day it was in which the lips of the Nation were deployed to claim their rights with Sword in hand to be heard: always remembering the merit of the great Hero Mr. Don Miguel Hidalgo and his companion Don Ignacio Allende.
Answers on November 21, 1813. And therefore, these are abolished, always being subject to the opinion of S. [u] A. [alteza] S. [very eminent]
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Oct 05, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Accountability is for the little people, immunity is for the ruling class. If this ethos seems familiar, that is because it has preceded some of the darkest moments in human history
'If there are no legal consequences for profiteers who defrauded the global economy into a collapse, what will deter those profiteers from doing that again?' Illustration: Mark Long/Mark Long for Guardian US W hen the former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was released from prison a few weeks ago, the news conjured memories of a corporate scandal that now seems almost quaint – and it was also a reminder that Enron executives were among the last politically connected criminals to face any serious consequences for institutionalized fraud.Since Skilling's conviction 12 years ago, our society has been fundamentally altered by a powerful political movement whose goal is not merely another court seat, tax cut or election victory. This movement's objective is far more revolutionary: the creation of an accountability-free zone for an ennobled aristocracy, even as the rest of the population is treated to law-and-order rhetoric and painfully punitive policy.
Let's remember that in less than two decades, America has experienced the Iraq war, the financial crisis, intensifying economic stratification, an opioid plague, persistent gender and racial inequality and now seemingly unending climate change-intensified disasters. While the victims have been ravaged by these crime sprees, crises and calamities, the perpetrators have largely avoided arrest, inquisition, incarceration, resignation, public shaming and ruined careers.
That is because the United States has been turned into a safe space for a permanent ruling class. Inside the rarefied refuge, the key players who created this era's catastrophes and who embody the most pernicious pathologies have not just eschewed punishment – many of them have actually maintained or even increased their social, financial and political status.
The effort to construct this elite haven has tied together so many seemingly disparate news events, suggesting that there is a method in the madness. Consider this past month that culminated with the dramatic battle over the judicial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.
September began with John McCain's funeral – a memorial billed as an apolitical celebration of the Arizona lawmaker, but which served as a made-for-TV spectacle letting America know that everyone who engineered the Iraq war is doing just fine.
The event was attended by Iraq war proponents of both parties, from Dick Cheney to Lindsey Graham to Hillary Clinton. The funeral featured a saccharine eulogy from the key Democratic proponent of the invasion, Joe Lieberman, as well the resurrection of George W Bush. The codpiece-flaunting war president who piloted America into the cataclysm with "bring 'em on" bravado, "shock and awe" bloodlust and "uranium from Africa" dishonesty was suddenly portrayed as an icon of warmth and civility when he passed a lozenge to Michelle Obama. The scene was depicted not as the gathering of a rogues gallery fit for a war crimes tribunal, but as a venerable bipartisan reunion evoking nostalgia for the supposed halcyon days – and Bush promptly used his newly revived image to campaign for Republican congressional candidates and lobby for Kavanaugh's appointment .
The underlying message was clear: nobody other than the dead, the injured and the taxpayer will face any real penalty for the Iraq debacle.
Next up came the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis – a meltdown that laid waste to the global economy, while providing lucrative taxpayer-funded bailouts to Wall Street firms.
To mark the occasion, the three men on whose watch it occurred – Fed chair Ben Bernanke, Bush treasury secretary Hank Paulson and Obama treasury secretary Tim Geithner – did not offer an apology, but instead promised that another financial crisis will eventually occur, and they demanded lawmakers give public officials more power to bail out big banks in the future.
In a similar bipartisan show of unity, former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn gave an interview in which he asked "Who broke the law?" – the implication being that no Wall Street executives were prosecuted for their role in the meltdown because no statutes had been violated. That suggestion, of course, is undermined by banks ' own admissions that they defrauded investors (that includes admissions of fraud from Goldman Sachs – the very bank that Cohn himself ran during the crisis). Nonetheless, Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder – who has now rejoined his old corporate defense law firm – subsequently backed Cohn up by arguing that nobody on Wall Street committed an offense that could have been successfully prosecuted in a court of law.
Meanwhile, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon garnered non-Onion headlines by floating the idea of running for president – a reminder that a decade after his firm played a central role in destroying countless Americans' economic lives, he remains not only unincarcerated and gainfully employed, but so reputationally unscathed that he is seen as a serious White House candidate.
Again, the message came through: nobody who engineered the financial crisis will pay any real price for wreaking so much havoc.
Then as Hurricane Florence provided the latest illustration of climate change's devastation, ExxonMobil marched into the supreme court to demand an end to a state investigation of its role denying and suppressing climate science. Backed by 11 Republican attorneys general , the fossil fuel giant had reason to feel emboldened in its appeal for immunity: despite investigative reporting detailing the company's prior knowledge of fossil fuel's role in climate change, its executives had already convinced the Securities and Exchange Commission to shut down a similar investigation.
Once again, the message was unavoidable: in the new accountability-free zone, companies shouldn't be bothered to even explain – much less face punishment for – their role in a crisis that threatens the survival of the human species.
... ... ...
The answer is nothing – which is exactly the point for the aristocracy. But that cannot be considered acceptable for the rest of us outside the accountability-free zone.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an investigative journalist at Capital & Main. His latest book is Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now
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Oct 05, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
CitizenOne , October 2, 2018 at 11:19 pm
The recent history of the Supreme Court has been one of Justices playing the part of politicians in robes. Perhaps no better example was the nullification of the recount in the Bush v Gore election with the "Brooks Brothers Riot" where paid operatives of the republicans stormed the election office in Florida and declared the recount over in an extra judicial action which was backed up by the members of the Supreme Court leading to their moniker "politicians in robes". The Supreme Court basically stole that election by upholding the use of violence as a tool to stop the recount instead of reacting on its own to denounce the use of such tactics.
The Supreme Court has become weaponized as a force for right wing agendas and it has taken a partisan position many times due to justices who have become radicalized to advance right wing views. This is part of a vast right wing well funded and well oiled political money machine. Little debut over the 10 million dollars spent by anonymous donors greasing the nomination of Neil Gorsuch. The $10 million effort to win federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch's confirmation, funded by unknown donors to a conservative interest group called the Judicial Crisis Network, follows a successful $7 million effort last year to block President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland. The group calls it "the most robust operation in the history of confirmation battles."
Billionaires are funding the selection and nomination of Supreme Court Justices for one reason. So that the Supreme Court is stacked by loyal conservatives who will side with big industrialist businesses on every case brought against big industrialists.
This is a long term strategy funded with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into efforts to create a three point strategy. Fund AstroTurf phony grass roots populist organizations which claim they are formed by housewives and farmers and middle class folk but who really serve the interests of the billionaire class. Fund politicians and judges who are begging to get the money to win elections by promising they will do everything to support the uber class and groveling at their feet for the cash to be had. Create laws to serve the interests of billionaires.
So far each effort has been a phenomenal success. Funded with hundreds of millions of dollars willing recipients of all the corporate cash have created the ostensible populist front defending wedge issues like abortion, gun control and anti immigration along with a health dose of anti establishment hatred of the government. Their real aim is to serve the corporate interests.
Donald Trump is perhaps the biggest benefactor of the money machine having won election based on this populist jargon while spending little of his own money but really serving the corporate interests most obviously by supporting the 1.9 Trillion dollar tax breaks for billionaires.
It is unlikely that the average American would get angry about health care or their own social security which is funded by workers not billionaires unless they were propagandized by every main stream media outlet with Fox News and other more extremely radical right wing media outlets and all the rightwing websites and right wing syndicated media pundits.
Average Americans have been suckered to believe that what is in their own interests is very bad for America and Freedom and Democracy etc. They have been hoodwinked into voting for politicians who want to strip them of healthcare, social security, financial security and basic rights to privacy and access to the judicial system with arbitration clauses attached to every product down to toothbrushes and sunglasses. They have come to believe that defending wedge issues means they will vote for republicans no matter how bad their economic future is compromised and their future put at risk by predatory businesses which offer paycheck loans, balloon mortgages, sky high interest and insurance rates, multiple bank accounts with lots of surcharges (Pinkerton Bank) and promise to end Medicare and Social Security because its Okay to give trillions to billionaires but not Okay to help average hard working people.
Donald Trump is the pinnacle of this usurpation of power capturing the Executive Branch funded by free advertising from the media and running on a fake AstroTurf populist campaign strategy while delivering all the money to the billionaires as he entertains guests for huge fees at his Florida Property against the Emoluments Clause which appears to be dead. No president should economically benefit from the position of the highest office in the land for personal enrichment yet the Tax Cuts seem to have been perfectly tailored for Trumps own enrichment via a little known clause which allows property investment owners to pass the profits gained via those holdings to other entities like his kids at greatly lower taxes. What a windfall for Trump who has investment pass through properties all over the place. It's a really nice deal" for Trump and pass-through owners like him, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
So much for the little guy as republicans now demand that the giant deficit created by their enormous tax cuts for the wealthy now be shrunk by eliminating all social welfare programs like Social Security which if funded by workers under the payroll deduction tax. Payroll taxes are taxes imposed on employers or employees, and are usually calculated as a percentage of the salaries that employers pay their staff. Payroll taxes generally fall into two categories: deductions from an employee's wages, and taxes paid by the employer based on the employee's wages. These taxes fund Social Security/ Workers earnings are garnished to pay for Social Security. The Government does not steal this money from rich people. They take it from every worker according to a schedule.
How stupid we are to willingly call this wasteful government spending and buy the BS of the republicans that it must end. What will they do with all the money once none of us is going to see a dime of what we donated under law? Why they will steal it of course.
Who has the authority to declare all social welfare programs unconstitutional? The Supreme Court. Who has the power to decline any case brought against and well monied entity including the President? The Supreme Court.
It is not so much about beer and drunkenness and abuse of women but about the continued abuse of us all by the republican party which is funded by the rich and operated by the rich for the rich and only for the rich.
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Jul 31, 2018 | russia-insider.com
"a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse ... shared values and consensus which had held the Empire's core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained."
If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines.
If we consider the state of the nation from 40,000 feet, several key indicators of profound political disunity within the elites pop out:
- The overt politicization of the central state's law enforcement and intelligence agencies: it is now commonplace to find former top officials of the CIA et al. accusing a sitting president of treason in the mainstream media. What was supposed to be above politics is now nothing but politics.
- The overt politicization of the centralized (corporate) media: evidence that would stand up in a court of law is essentially non-existent but the interpretations and exaggerations that fit the chosen narrative are ceaselessly promoted--the classic definition of desperate propaganda by those who have lost the consent of the governed.
Psychopaths with no moral principles. The nation's elites are not just divided--they're exhibiting signs of schizophrenic breakdown : disassociation and a loss of the ability to discern the difference between reality and their internal fantasies.I've been writing about the divided Deep State for a number of years, for example, The Conflict within the Deep State Just Broke into Open Warfare . The topic appears to be one of widespread interest, as this essay drew over 300,000 views.
It's impossible to understand the divided Deep State unless we situate it in the larger context of profound political disunity , a concept I learned from historian Michael Grant, whose slim but insightful volume The Fall of the Roman Empire I have been recommending since 2009.
As I noted in my 2009 book Survival+ , this was a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse. The shared values and consensus which had held the Empire's core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained.
A funny thing happens when a nation allows itself to be ruled by Imperial kleptocrats: such rule is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together. The public sees the value system at the top is maximize my personal profit by whatever means are available , i.e. complicity, corruption, monopoly and rentier rackets , and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on.
But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top .1% and their army of technocrats and enablers, so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic.
Meanwhile, diverting the national income into a few power centers is also destabilizing , as Central Planning and Market Manipulation (a.k.a. the Federal Reserve) are intrinsically unstable as price can no longer be discovered by unfettered markets. As a result, imbalances grow until some seemingly tiny incident or disruption triggers a cascading collapse, a.k.a. a phase shift or system re-set.
As the Power Elites squabble over the dwindling crumbs left by the various rentier rackets, there's no one left to fight for the national interest because the entire Status Quo of self-interested fiefdoms and cartels has been co-opted and is now wedded to the Imperial Oligarchy as their guarantor of financial security.
The divided Deep State is a symptom of this larger systemic political disunity. I have characterized the divide as between the Wall Street-Neocon-Globalist Neoliberal camp--currently the dominant public face of the Deep State, the one desperately attempting to exploit the "Russia hacked our elections and is trying to destroy us" narrative--and a much less public, less organized "rogue Progressive" camp, largely based in the military services and fringes of the Deep State, that sees the dangers of a runaway expansionist Empire and the resulting decay of the nation's moral/political center.
What few observers seem to understand is that concentrating power in centralized nodes is intrinsically unstable. Contrast a system in which power, control and wealth is extremely concentrated in a few nodes (the current U.S. Imperial Project) and a decentralized network of numerous dynamic nodes.
The disruption of any of the few centralized nodes quickly destabilizes the entire system because each centralized node is highly dependent on the others. This is in effect what happened in the 2008-09 Financial Meltdown: the Wall Street node failed and that quickly imperiled the entire economy and thus the entire political order, up to and including the Global Imperial Project.
Historian Peter Turchin has proposed that the dynamics of profound political disunity (i.e. social, financial and political disintegration) can be quantified in a Political Stress Index, a concept he describes in his new book Ages of Discord .
If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines. There is no other possible output of a system of highly concentrated nodes of power, wealth and control and the competing rentier rackets of these dependent, increasingly fragile centralized nodes.
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May 02, 2017 | original.antiwar.com
Did the Deep State deep-six Trump's populist revolution?Many observers, especially among his fans, suspect that the seemingly untamable Trump has already been housebroken by the Washington, "globalist" establishment. If true, the downfall of Trump's National Security Adviser Michael Flynn less than a month into the new presidency may have been a warning sign. And the turning point would have been the removal of Steven K. Bannon from the National Security Council on April 5.
Until then, the presidency's early policies had a recognizably populist-nationalist orientation. During his administration's first weeks, Trump's biggest supporters frequently tweeted the hashtag #winning and exulted that he was decisively doing exactly what, on the campaign trail, he said he would do.
In a flurry of executive orders and other unilateral actions bearing Bannon's fingerprints, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, declared a sweeping travel ban, instituted harsher deportation policies, and more.
These policies seemed to fit Trump's reputation as the " tribune of poor white people ," as he has been called; above all, Trump's base calls for protectionism and immigration restrictions. Trump seemed to be delivering on the populist promise of his inauguration speech (thought to be written by Bannon), in which he said:
"Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.
For too long, a small group in our nation's Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.
The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.
That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.
It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country.
What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.
Everyone is listening to you now." [Emphasis added.]
After a populist insurgency stormed social media and the voting booths, American democracy, it seemed, had been wrenched from the hands of the Washington elite and restored to "the people," or at least a large, discontented subset of "the people." And this happened in spite of the establishment, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and "polite opinion" throwing everything it had at Trump.
The Betrayal
But for the past month, the administration's axis seems to have shifted. This shift was especially abrupt in Trump's Syria policy.
Days before Bannon's fall from grace, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley declared that forcing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power was no longer top priority. This too was pursuant of Trump's populist promises.
Trump's nationalist fans are sick of the globalist wars that America never seems to win. They are hardly against war per se. They are perfectly fine with bombing radical Islamists, even if it means mass innocent casualties. But they have had enough of expending American blood and treasure to overthrow secular Arab dictators to the benefit of Islamists; so, it seemed, was Trump. They also saw no nationalist advantage in the globalists' renewed Cold War against Assad's ally Russian president Vladimir Putin, another enemy of Islamists.
The Syrian pivot also seemed to fulfill the hopes and dreams of some antiwar libertarians who had pragmatically supported Trump. For them, acquiescing to the unwelcome planks of Trump's platform was a price worth paying for overthrowing the establishment policies of regime change in the Middle East and hostility toward nuclear Russia. While populism wasn't an unalloyed friend of liberty, these libertarians thought, at least it could be harnessed to sweep away the war-engineering elites. And since war is the health of the state, that could redirect history's momentum in favor of liberty.
But then it all evaporated. Shortly after Bannon's ouster from the NSC, in response to an alleged, unverified chemical attack on civilians, Trump bombed one of Assad's airbases (something even globalist Obama had balked at doing when offered the exact same excuse), and regime change in Syria was top priority once again. The establishment media swooned over Trump's newfound willingness to be "presidential."
Since then, Trump has reneged on one campaign promise after another. He dropped any principled repeal of Obamacare. He threw cold water on expectations for prompt fulfillment of his signature promise: the construction of a Mexico border wall. And he announced an imminent withdrawal from NAFTA, only to walk that announcement back the very next day.
Here I make no claim as to whether any of these policy reversals are good or bad. I only point out that they run counter to the populist promises he had given to his core constituents.
Poor white people, "the forgotten men and women of our country," have been forgotten once again. Their "tribune" seems to be turning out to be just another agent of the power elite.
Who yanked his chain? Was there a palace coup? Was the CIA involved? Has Trump been threatened? Or, after constant obstruction, has he simply concluded that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em?
The Iron Law of Oligarchy
Regardless of how it came about, it seems clear that whatever prospect there was for a truly populist Trump presidency is gone with the wind. Was it inevitable that this would happen, one way or another?
One person who might have thought so was German sociologist Robert Michels, who posited the "iron law of oligarchy" in his 1911 work Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy .
Michels argued that political organizations, no matter how democratically structured, rarely remain truly populist, but inexorably succumb to oligarchic control.
Even in a political system based on popular sovereignty, Michels pointed out that, "the sovereign masses are altogether incapable of undertaking the most necessary resolutions." This is true for simple, unavoidable technical reasons: "such a gigantic number of persons belonging to a unitary organization cannot do any practical work upon a system of direct discussion."
This practical limitation necessitates delegation of decision-making to officeholders. These delegates may at first be considered servants of the masses:
"All the offices are filled by election. The officials, executive organs of the general will, play a merely subordinate part, are always dependent upon the collectivity, and can be deprived of their office at any moment. The mass of the party is omnipotent."
But these delegates will inevitably become specialists in the exercise and consolidation of power, which they gradually wrest away from the "sovereign people":
"The technical specialization that inevitably results from all extensive organization renders necessary what is called expert leadership. Consequently the power of determination comes to be considered one of the specific attributes of leadership, and is gradually withdrawn from the masses to be concentrated in the hands of the leaders alone. Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective will, soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its control.
Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly."
Trumped by the Deep State
Thus elected, populist "tribunes" like Trump are ultimately no match for entrenched technocrats nestled in permanent bureaucracy. Especially invincible are technocrats who specialize in political force and intrigue, i.e., the National Security State (military, NSA, CIA, FBI, etc.). And these elite functionaries don't serve "the people" or any large subpopulation. They only serve their own careers, and by extension, big-money special interest groups that make it worth their while: especially big business and foreign lobbies. The nexus of all these powers is what is known as the Deep State.
Trump's more sophisticated champions were aware of these dynamics, but held out hope nonetheless. They thought that Trump would be an exception, because his large personal fortune would grant him immunity from elite influence. That factor did contribute to the independent, untamable spirit of his campaign. But as I predicted during the Republican primaries:
" while Trump might be able to seize the presidency in spite of establishment opposition, he will never be able to wield it without establishment support."
No matter how popular, rich, and bombastic, a populist president simply cannot rule without access to the levers of power. And that access is under the unshakable control of the Deep State. If Trump wants to play president, he has to play ball.
On these grounds, I advised his fans over a year ago, " don't hold out hope that Trump will make good on his isolationist rhetoric " and anticipated, "a complete rapprochement between the populist rebel and the Republican establishment." I also warned that, far from truly threatening the establishment and the warfare state, Trump's populist insurgency would only invigorate them:
"Such phony establishment "deaths" at the hands of "grassroots" outsiders followed by "rebirths" (rebranding) are an excellent way for moribund oligarchies to renew themselves without actually meaningfully changing. Each "populist" reincarnation of the power elite is draped with a freshly-laundered mantle of popular legitimacy, bestowing on it greater license to do as it pleases. And nothing pleases the State more than war."
Politics, even populist politics, is the oligarchy's game. And the house always wins.
Dan Sanchez is the Digital Content Manager at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), developing educational and inspiring content for FEE.org , including articles and courses. The originally appeared on the FEE website and is reprinted with the author's permission.
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Sep 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Russ , Sep 27, 2018 2:32:41 AM | link
Which is the cohort of voters who allegedly are leaning toward voting Republican in the mid-terms but who allegedly would refrain if Trump accepted Rosenstein's resignation? And which is the cohort not already motivated to turn out to vote Democrat but who allegedly would be motivated by a Rosenstein resignation? Is there real data on these?
I think if I had been a 2016 Trump voter I'd be feeling pretty disappointed about how he's unable to enforce the most basic discipline and loyalty even among his closest administration members, and this Rosenstein episode would be yet another egregious example.
If the Republicans do lose either/both houses, the main reason will be that for once they've taken on the normal Democrat role of being confused and feckless about what they want to do (they can't bring themselves to whole-heartedly get behind Trump; but a major Republican strength has been how they normally do pull together an present a united front). And Trump himself, in his inability to control his own immediate administration, also gives an example of this fecklessness.
AG17 , Sep 27, 2018 2:44:29 AM | link
What other October surprises might be planned by either side?psychohistorian , Sep 27, 2018 2:58:27 AM | linkThis gave me chills.
@ Circe who is writing that any who like any of what Trump is doing must be Zionists.Get a grip. I didn't vote for Trump but favored him over Clinton II, the war criminal.
Trump represents more clearly the face of the ugly beast of debauched patriarchy, lying, misogyny, bullying and monotheistic "everybody else is goyim" values. Trump very clearly represents the folks behind the curtain of the Western private finance led "culture". He and they are both poor representations of our species who are in power because of heredity and controlled ignorance over the private finance jackboot on the lifeblood of the species.
Luckily there are still groups of our species that don't live totally controlled by the Western way and the cancer it represents to humanity. They on the outside and "us" on the inside are trying our hardest to shine lights on all the moving parts in hopes that humanity can throw off the shackles of ignorance about private/public finance.
I am taking a beginning astronomy class and just learned that it took the monotheistic religions 600 years to accept the science of Galileo Galilei. We could stand to evolve a bit faster as we are about to have our proverbial asses handed to us in the form of extinction, IMO.
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Sep 27, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
I rarely tell readers what to believe. Rather I try to indicate why it might be wise to distrust, at least without very good evidence, what those in power tell us we should believe.
We have well-known sayings about power: "Knowledge is power", and "Power tends to corrupt, while absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." These aphorisms resonate because they say something true about how we experience the world. People who have power – even very limited power they hold on licence from someone else – tend to abuse it, sometimes subtly and unconsciously, and sometimes overtly and wilfully.
If we are reasonably self-aware, we can sense the tendency in ourselves to exploit to our advantage whatever power we enjoy, whether it is in our dealings with a spouse, our children, a friend, an employee, or just by the general use of our status to get ahead.
This isn't usually done maliciously or even consciously. By definition, the hardest thing to recognise are our own psychological, emotional and mental blind spots – and the biggest, at least for those born with class, gender or race privileges, is realising that these too are forms of power.
Nonetheless, they are all minor forms of power compared to the power wielded collectively by the structures that dominate our societies: the financial sector, the corporations, the media, the political class, and the security services.
But strangely most of us are much readier to concede the corrupting influence of the relatively small power of individuals than we are the rottenness of vastly more powerful institutions and structures. We blame the school teacher or the politician for abusing his or her power, while showing a reluctance to do the same about either the education or political systems in which they have to operate.
Similarly, we are happier identifying the excessive personal power of a Rupert Murdoch than we are the immense power of the corporate empire behind him and on which his personal wealth and success depend.
And beyond this, we struggle most of all to detect the structural and ideological framework underpinning or cohering all these discrete examples of power.
Narrative control
It is relatively easy to understand that your line manager is abusing his power, because he has so little of it. His power is visible to you because it relates only to you and the small group of people around you.
It is a little harder, but not too difficult, to identify the abusive policies of your firm – the low pay, cuts in overtime, attacks on union representation.
It is more difficult to see the corrupt power of large institutions, aside occasionally from the corruption of senior figures within those institutions, such as a Robert Maxwell or a Richard Nixon.
But it is all but impossible to appreciate the corrupt nature of the entire system. And the reason is right there in those aphorisms: absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption. If that were not the case, we wouldn't be dealing with serious power – as should be obvious, if we pause to think about it.
Real power in our societies derives from that which is necessarily hard to see – structures, ideology and narratives – not individuals. Any Murdoch or Trump can be felled, though being loyal acolytes of the power-system they rarely are, should they threaten the necessary maintenance of power by these interconnected institutions, these structures.
The current neoliberal elite who effectively rule the planet have reached as close to absolute power as any elite in human history. And because they have near-absolute power, they have a near-absolute control of the official narratives about our societies and our "enemies", those who stand in their way to global domination.
No questions about Skripals
One needs only to look at the narrative about the two men, caught on CCTV cameras, who have recently been accused by our political and media class of using a chemical agent to try to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia back in March.
I don't claim to know whether Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov work for the Russian security services, or whether they were dispatched by Vladimir Putin on a mission to Salisbury to kill the Skripals.
What is clear, however, is that the British intelligence services have been feeding the British corporate media a self-serving, drip-drip narrative from the outset – and that the media have shown precisely no interest at any point in testing any part of this narrative or even questioning it. They have been entirely passive, which means that we their readers have been entirely passive too.
That there are questions about the narrative to be raised is obvious if you turn away from the compliant corporate media and seek out the views of an independent-minded, one-time insider such as Craig Murray.
A former British ambassador, Murray is asking questions that may prove to be pertinent or not. At this stage, when all we have to rely on is what the intelligence services are selectively providing, these kinds of doubts should be driving the inquiries of any serious journalist covering the story. But as is so often the case, not only are these questions not being raised or investigated, but anyone like Murray who thinks critically – who assumes that the powerful will seek to promote their interests and avoid accountability – is instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or in Putin's pocket.
That is no meaningful kind of critique. Many of the questions that have been raised – like why there are so many gaps in the CCTV record of the movements of both the Skripals and the two assumed assassins – could be answered if there was an interest in doing so. The evasion and the smears simply suggest that power intends to remain unaccountable, that it is keeping itself concealed, that the narrative is more important than the truth.
And that is reason enough to move from questioning the narrative to distrusting it.
Ripples on a lake
Journalists typically have a passive relationship to power, in stark contrast to their image as tenacious watchdog. But more fundamental than control over narrative is the ideology that guides these narratives. Ideology ensures the power-system is invisible not only to us, those who are abused and exploited by it, but also to those who benefit from it.
It is precisely because power resides in structures and ideology, rather than individuals, that it is so hard to see. And the power-structures themselves are made yet more difficult to identify because the narratives created about our societies are designed to conceal those structures and ideology – where real power resides – by focusing instead on individuals.
That is why our newspapers and TV shows are full of stories about personalities – celebrities, royalty, criminals, politicians. They are made visible so we fail to notice the ideological structures we live inside, which are supposed to remain invisible.
News and entertainment are the ripples on a lake, not the lake itself. But the ripples could not exist without the lake that forms and shapes them.
Up against the screen
If this sounds like hyperbole, let's stand back from our particular ideological system – neoliberalism – and consider earlier ideological systems in the hope that they offer some perspective. At the moment, we are like someone standing right up against an IMAX screen, so close that we cannot see that there is a screen or even guess that there is a complete picture. All we see are moving colours and pixels. Maybe we can briefly infer a mouth, the wheel of a vehicle, a gun.
Before neoliberalism there were other systems of rule. There was, for example, feudalism that appropriated a communal resource – land – exclusively for an aristocracy. It exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth that supported castles, a clergy, manor houses, art collections and armies. For several centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned.
But then a class of entrepreneurs emerged, challenging the landed artistocracy with a new means of industrialised production. They built factories and took advantage of scales of economy that slightly widened the circle of privilege, creating a middle class. That elite, and the middle-class that enjoyed crumbs from their master's table, lived off the exploitation of children in work houses and the labour of a new urban poor in slum housing.
These eras were systematically corrupt, enabling the elites of those times to extend and entrench their power. Each elite produced justifications to placate the masses who were being exploited, to brainwash them into believing the system existed as part of a natural order or even for their benefit. The aristocracy relied on a divine right of kings, the capitalist class on the guiding hand of the free market and bogus claims of equality of opportunity.
In another hundred years, if we still exist as a species, our system will look no less corrupt – probably more so – than its predecessors.
Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, plutocratic rule by corporations – whatever you wish to call it – has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global reach of this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more complete, more destructive than any ever known to mankind.
A foreign policy elite can destroy the world several times over with nuclear weapons. A globalised corporate elite is filling the oceans with the debris from our consumption, and chopping down the forest-lungs of our planet for palm-oil plantations so we can satisfy our craving for biscuits and cake. And our media and intelligence services are jointly crafting a narrative of bogeymen and James Bond villains – both in Hollywood movies, and in our news programmes – to make us fearful and pliable.
Assumptions of inevitability
Most of us abuse our own small-power thoughtlessly, even self-righteously. We tell ourselves that we gave the kids a "good spanking" because they were naughty, rather than because we established with them early on a power relationship that confusingly taught them that the use of force and coercion came with a parental stamp of approval.
Those in greater power, from minions in the media to executives of major corporations, are no different. They are as incapable of questioning the ideology and the narrative – how inevitable and "right" our neoliberal system is – as the rest of us. But they play a vital part in maintaining and entrenching that system nonetheless.
David Cromwell and David Edwards of Media Lens have provided two analogies – in the context of the media – that help explain how it is possible for individuals and groups to assist and enforce systems of power without having any conscious intention to do so, and without being aware that they are contributing to something harmful. Without, in short, being aware that they are conspiring in the system.
The first :
When a shoal of fish instantly changes direction, it looks for all the world as though the movement was synchronised by some guiding hand. Journalists – all trained and selected for obedience by media all seeking to maximise profits within state-capitalist society – tend to respond to events in the same way.
The second :
Place a square wooden framework on a flat surface and pour into it a stream of ball bearings, marbles, or other round objects. Some of the balls may bounce out, but many will form a layer within the wooden framework; others will then find a place atop this first layer. In this way, the flow of ball bearings steadily builds new layers that inevitably produce a pyramid-style shape. This experiment is used to demonstrate how near-perfect crystalline structures such as snowflakes arise in nature without conscious design.
The system – whether feudalism, capitalism, neoliberalism – emerges out of the real-world circumstances of those seeking power most ruthlessly. In a time when the key resource was land, a class emerged justifying why it should have exclusive rights to control that land and the labour needed to make it productive. When industrial processes developed, a class emerged demanding that it had proprietary rights to those processes and to the labour needed to make them productive.
Our place in the pyramid
In these situations, we need to draw on something like Darwin's evolutionary "survival of the fittest" principle. Those few who are most hungry for power, those with least empathy, will rise to the top of the pyramid, finding themselves best-placed to exploit the people below. They will rationalise this exploitation as a divine right, or as evidence of their inherently superior skills, or as proof of the efficiency of the market.
And below them, like the layers of ball bearings, will be those who can help them maintain and expand their power: those who have the skills, education and socialisation to increase profits and sell brands.
All of this should be obvious, even non-controversial. It fits what we experience of our small-power lives. Does bigger power operate differently? After all, if those at the top of the power-pyramid were not hungry for power, even psychopathic in its pursuit, if they were caring and humane, worried primarily about the wellbeing of their workforce and the planet, they would be social workers and environmental activists, not CEOs of media empires and arms manufacturers.
And yet, base your political thinking on what should be truisms, articulate a worldview that distrusts those with the most power because they are the most capable of – and committed to – misusing it, and you will be derided. You will be called a conspiracy theorist, dismissed as deluded. You will be accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, of sour grapes, of being anti-American, a social warrior, paranoid, an Israel-hater or anti-semitic, pro-Putin, pro-Assad, a Marxist.
None of this should surprise us either. Because power – not just the people in the system, but the system itself – will use whatever tools it has to protect itself. It is easier to deride critics as unhinged, especially when you control the media, the politicians and the education system, than it is to provide a counter-argument.
In fact, it is vital to prevent any argument or real debate from taking place. Because the moment we think about the arguments, weigh them, use our critical faculties, there is a real danger that the scales will fall from our eyes. There is a real threat that we will move back from the screen, and see the whole picture.
Can we see the complete picture of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury; or the US election that led to Trump being declared president; or the revolution in Ukraine; or the causes and trajectory of fighting in Syria, and before it Libya and Iraq; or the campaign to discredit Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party; or the true implications of the banking crisis a decade ago?
Profit, not ethics
Just as a feudal elite was driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of land; just as early capitalists were driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of mechanisation; so neoliberalism is driven not by ethics but the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of the planet.
The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet's fate tomorrow.
And because of that it is structurally bound to undermine or discredit anyone, any group, any state that stands in the way of achieving its absolute dominion.
If that is not the thought we hold uppermost in our minds as we listen to a politician, read a newspaper, watch a film or TV show, absorb an ad, or engage on social media, then we are sleepwalking into a future the most powerful, the most ruthless, the least caring have designed for us.
Step back, and take a look at the whole screen. And decide whether this is really the future you wish for your grand-children.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are " Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and " Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair " (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/
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">linkSep 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
james , Sep 26, 2018 10:19:13 PM | linkPft , Sep 26, 2018 9:58:02 PM | link
@34 pft... regarding the 2 cook articles.. i found they overly wordy myself... however, for anyone paying attention - corbyn seems like the person to vote for given how relentless he is being attacked in the media... i am not so sure about trump, but felt cook summed it up well with these 2 lines.. "Trump the candidate was indifferent to Israel and wanted the US out of Syria. Trump the president has become Israel's biggest cheerleader and has launched US missiles at Syria." i get the impression corbyn is legit which is why the anti-semitism keeps on being mentioned... craig murrary is a good source for staying on top of uk dynamics..In my own words then. According to Cook the power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense.
Since they do not actually want change they find actors who pretend to represent change , which is in essence fake change. These then are their insurgent candidates
Trump serves the power elite , because while he appears as an insurgent against the power elite he does little to change anything
Trump promotes his fake insurgency on Twitter stage knowing the power elite will counter any of his promises that might threaten them
As an insurgent candidate Trump was indifferent to Israel and wanted the US out of Syria. He wanted good relations with Russia. He wanted to fix the health care system, rebuild infrastructure, scrap NAFTA and TTIPS, bring back good paying jobs, fight the establishment and Wall Street executives and drain the swamp. America First he said.
Trump the insurgent president , has become Israel's biggest cheerleader and has launched US missiles at Syria, relations with Russia are at Cold War lows, infrastructure is still failing, the percentage of people working is now at an all time low in the post housewife era, he has passed tax cuts for the rich that will endanger medicare, medicaid and social security and prohibit infrastructure spending, relaxed regulations on Wall Street, enhanced NAFTA to include TTIPS provisions and make US automobiles more expensive, and the swamp has been refilled with the rich, neocons , Koch associates, and Goldman Sachs that make up the power elites and Deep State Americas rich and Israel First
Piotr Berman , Sep 26, 2018 10:23:41 PM | link
For Trump to be "insurgent" he shouldkarlof1 , Sep 26, 2018 11:42:43 PM | link(a) talk coherently
(b) have some kind of movement consisting of people that agree with what is says -- that necessitates (a)Then he could staff his Administration with his supporters rather than a gamut of conventional plutocrats, neocons, and hacks from the Deep State (intelligence, FBI and crazies culled from Pentagon). As it is easy to see, I am describing an alternate reality. Who is a Trumpian member of the Administration? His son-in-law?
Pft @34--Pft , Sep 27, 2018 12:53:59 AM | linkYes. just like Obama before him--another snake in the swamp!
Karlof1@39div>The swamps been filled with all kinds of vile creatures since the Carter administration. This is when the US/UK went full steam ahead with neoliberal globalism with Israel directing the war on terror for the Trilateral Empire (following Bibis Jerusalem conference so as to fulfill the Yinon plan). 40 years of terror and financial mayhem following the coup that took place from 1963-1974. After Nixons ouster they were ready to go once TLC Carter/Zbig kicked off the Trilateral era. Reagan then ran promising to oust the TLC swamp but broke his promise, as every President has done since .
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Sep 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Pft , Sep 22, 2018 4:54:26 PM | 20 ">link
Stormy Daniels supposedly said she was surprised to hear Trump was running for President because he had said to her he didnt want to be be President. After all, why would he? Rich guy with maybe 5 years left to live. Who needs it?
So why did he run. He had no choice. Look at the ease in which government can bring dawn anyone with tax and money laundering charges and look at his partners and a number of his dodgy financial dealings not to mention the ongoing audit firing his campaign. His buddy Felix Sater cut a deal and so didn't Trump. Run and serve and keep your wealth and stay out of jail, and make a few billion with insider deals while you are at it.
So the Deep State which is far more than entrenched bureaucrats as the naive define it (it includes the ruling elite in finance, MIC, oil, MSM, retired intelligence/military/state/congress, etc), brought in a controlled Trojan horse pretending to be a populist who was all about the working class and anti establishment, anti war and anti globalist while those he served were opposites. Look at what he has done and who he has surrounded himself with. Lol
So what is the endgame for this Russiagate and this phony Deep State vs Trump nonsense? Why Trump?
Not sure I know for sure. Polarizing and dividing the US with perhaps a civil war when Trump gets impeached and resigns, or at least imposition of permanent martial law. Get support for massive censorship which all authoritarian regimes need. And of course as the US goes down this path its puppet states in EU, UK and elsewhere will follow. I guess we will have to wait and see.
In the meantime, Trump will feed the beast (tax cuts for rich, tarrifs for middle class, higher Military spending, cuts to Medicare/Medicaid/social security, higher insurance premiums/HC costs, phony economic figures to mask deteriorating economic conditions for the median (remember when Trump said the same of Hillary using the same bogus figures)
Fewer people are working in the US under Trump as more people are disappeared from the work force. GDP growth per MH is due to higher extraction of wealth from middle class by the rentier class, and stock market growth is due to central bank purchases, offshore money coming home due to tax breaks and of course the plunge protection team removing the risk of a major drop until after the mid term elections. We are already seeing the beginning of the next housing market collapse.
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Sep 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
bevin , Sep 20, 2018 3:43:13 PM | link
The whole nonsense about Russian interference, which was obviously nonsense from Day One and has never, for a moment looked like anything but nonsense, seems to indicate that we have entered a post political era in which policy discussions and debates are forgotten and smears and false accusations take their place.
Currently in the US the Kavanaugh nomination which ought to be about the meaning of the law and the consequences of having a Supreme Court which will make Judge Taney look like Solomon at his most impressive. Instead it is about an alleged teenage incident in which the nominee is said to have caressed a girls breasts at a drunken party when all involved were at High School. Before that we had a Senatorial election in Alabama in which the Republican candidate was charged with having shown a sexual interest in teenage girls- whether this was a 'first' in Alabama is unknown but it is believed to have happened elsewhere, in the unenlightened past.
Then we have the matter of whether Jeremy Corbyn is such a danger to Jews that they will all leave the country if he is ever elected to power. This long campaign, completely devoid of evidence, like 'Russiagate' has the potential of going on forever, simply because there being no evidence it cannot be refuted.
Which is also the case with the Skripal affair, because of which even as we speak, massive trade and financial sanctions are being imposed against Russia and its enormous, innocent and plundered population.
In none of these cases has any real evidence, of the minimal quality that might justify the hanging of a dog, ever advanced. But that doesn't matter, the important thing is to choose a side and if it is Hillary Clinton's to believe or to pretend to believe and to convince others to believe (as Marcy at Emptywheel has been doing for close to three years now) in the incredible.
Who says that we no longer live in a Christian society in which faith is everything?
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Sep 10, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com
arze September 8, 2018 at 12:24 pm
What's truly remarkable .What's truly remarkable is Gen. Eisenhower told us upon leaving presidency all about who competes with our elected president on what happens.
Those presidents that toe the "military industrial complex" line most closely are seen as the most in charge.
President Kennedy did not, was murdered. President Johnson did, it eventually sickened him, he did not seek reelection. President Nixon was removed from office. President Carter was humiliated. President Reagan's dream of a nuclear free world was vetoed by guess who. President Bush was defeated by the mother of all sycophants to that force. President Clinton was their man. Vice President Cheney was even more so. President Obama tried to hide the fact he was not. President Trump has not tried to hide that fact.Reporting on the Trump phenomena would benefit by more imagination.
Is it not a public service, irrespective of one's opinions on him, that it should now be clear to all, now via the Trump Phenomena, that what was plainly told us all in the 1950s from a General, is the way it is?
Yet a "criticism" of Trump is his "sin" of taking off the mask.
General Eisenhower told us to our faces all about the fiction, and yet we as a culture/civilization pretend the president is solely in charge.
What is remarkable is the amount of reporting on the current president that lacks imagination, insight, logic, rationality, reason, common sense, and insight.
However, that is not remarkable given that most of the reporters lived all their lives in a culture/civilization that fails to educate us in a meaningful way. Their and our professors, mentors, supervisors, and family, and friends and significant others, also so socialized; however, the road to progress is in front of us if we are curious enough.
Were the goal of contemporary American Politics first and foremost a search for the truth, that would be one thing.
The Shining Star of American Politics, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren perfectly epitomizes that it is not, as she knows better, was seduced by power, and all that that implies. The ends justify the means for the entire lot of them.
Whatever that evil perspective engender, progress is and never shall be one of them.
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Sep 07, 2018 | countercurrents.org
The creation of large enterprises gave rise not only to an organized labor movement, but to a larger bureaucratic regulatory state with agencies intended to help stabilize and grow capitalism while keeping the working class loyal to the social contract. Crisis in public confidence resulted not only from economic recessions and depressions built into the economy, but the contradictions capitalism was fostering in society as the benefits in advances in industry, science and technology accrued to the wealthy while the social structure remained hierarchical.
Ever since 1947 when the ideological father of neoliberalism Friedrich von Hayek called a conference in Mont Pelerin to address how the new ideology would replace Keynesianism, neoliberals have been promising to address these contradictions, insisting that eliminating the social welfare state and allowing complete market dominationthat would result in society's modernization and would filter down to all social classes and nations both developed and developing. Such thinking is rooted in the modernization theory that emerged after WWII when the US took advantage of its preeminent global power to impose a transformation model on much of the non-Communist world. Cold War liberal economist Walt Rostow articulated the modernization model of development in his work entitled The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto , 1960. By the 1970s, neoliberals adapted Rostow's modernization theory as their bible and the core of the social contract. (Evans Rubara, "Uneven Development: Understanding the Roots of Inequality"
https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/uneven-development-understanding-roots-inequality
The challenge for the political class has always been and remains to mobilize a popular base that would afford legitimacy to the social contract. The issue for mainstream political parties is not whether there is a systemic problem with the social contract intended to serve the capitalist class, but the degree to which the masses can be co-opted through various methods to support the status quo. "A generation ago, the country's social contract was premised on higher wages and reliable benefits, provided chiefly by employers. In recent decades, we've moved to a system where low wages are supposed to be made bearable by low consumer prices and a hodgepodge of government assistance programs. But as dissatisfaction with this arrangement has grown, it is time to look back at how we got here and imagine what the next stage of the social contract might be."
Considering that Keynesianism and neoliberalism operate under the same social structure and differ only on how best to achieve capital formation while retaining sociopolitical conformity, the article above published in The Atlantic illustrates how analysts/commentators easily misinterpret nuances within a social contract for the covenant's macro goals. A similar view as that expressed in The Atlantic is also reflected in the New America Foundation's publications, identifying specific aspects of Arthur Schlesinger's Cold War militarist policies enmeshed with social welfare Keynesianism as parts of the evolving social contract.
Identifying the social contract with a specific set of policies under different administrations evolving to reflect the nuances of political class and economic elites,some analysts contend that there is a European Union-wide social contract to which nationally-based social contracts must subordinate their sovereignty. This model has evolved to accommodate neoliberal globalism through regional trade blocs on the basis of a 'patron-client'integration relationship between core and periphery countries.
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Sep 07, 2018 | en.wikipedia.org
Ágnes Heller
Ágnes Heller's work is associated with Moral Anthropology and "probing modernity's destiny for a non-predatory humanism that combines the existential wisdom of ancient theory with modern values." [1]
Neomodernism accepts some aspects of postmodernism's critique of modernism, notably that modernism elevated the world view of dominant groups to the status of objective fact, thereby failing to express the viewpoint of " subaltern groups," such as women and ethnic minorities. However, in her view, neomodernism rejects postmodernism as:
Victor Grauer
- Unscientific: the ability of science to generate useful knowledge cannot be waved away as " scientism ".
- Journalism: as not giving any explanation as to how or why things happen.
- Local: as being unable to recognise patterns that occur across time or location.
- Unverified: as lacking any validation process, and therefore proceeding by fad and hierarchy.
In 1982, Victor Grauer attacked "the cult of the new," and proposed that there had arisen a "neo-modern" movement in the arts which was based on deep formal rigor, rather than on "the explosion of pluralism." [2] His argument was that post-modernism was exclusively a negative attack on modernism, and had no future separate from modernism proper, a point of view which is held by many scholars of modernism. [2]
Carlos EscudéIn "Natural Law at War", a review essay published on 31 May 2002 in The Times Literary Supplement (London, TLS No. 5174), Carlos Escudé wrote: "Postmodern humanity faces a major challenge. It must solve a dilemma it does not want to face. If all cultures are morally equivalent, then all human individuals are not endowed with the same human rights, because some cultures award some men more rights than are allotted to other men and women. If, on the other hand, all men and women are endowed with the same human rights, then all cultures are not morally equivalent, because cultures that acknowledge that 'all men are created equal' are to be regarded as 'superior,' or 'more advanced' in terms of their civil ethics than those that do not." Escudé's brand of neomodernism contends with "politically-correct intellectuals who prefer to opt for the easy way out, asserting both that we all have the same human rights and that all cultures are equal."
Andre Durand and Armando AlemdarPublished their own Neomodernist Manifesto in 2001. The Neomodern Manifesto posits criteria for a revitalised approach to works of art founded on history, traditional artistic disciplines, theology and philosophy. Durand's and Alemdar's Neomodernism views art as an act of expression of the sublime; in Neomodern painting as a representation of the visual appearance of things with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth, and good. Neomodern works of art via mimesis interpret and present the universe and man's existence, in line with the belief that the reality we live is but a mirror of another universe that can only be accessed through inspiration and imagination.
Gabriel OmowayeGabriel Lolu Omowaye, in his speech 'A new challenging time' to a group of college students in Nigeria, in 2005, took a different approach to neomodernism. He viewed neomodernism as a political philosophy that became more prominent in the early 21st century. To him, it involves common goal and joint global effort - universalism - to address arising global challenges such as population growth, natural resources, climate change and environmental factors, natural causes and effects, and health issues. Omowaye posited that political will is the major driver of economic necessities. As a result, he added that neomodernism involves limited government-regulated liberalism along with high drive innovation and entrepreneurship, high literacy rate, progressive taxation for social equity, philanthropism, technological advancement, economic development and individual growth. He perceived the quest for equal representation of men and women in the neomodern era as a strong signal for advent of postmodernism. So also, the quest for youths engagement in resourceful and rewarding ways especially in governance, peace building and self-productivity has not taken a formidable shape than it is at this time. As far as he was concerned, he believed most of these challenges were not adequately tackled in preceding eras and the arising challenges thus stated were not prepared for and that cause for change in mentality and thinking which the neomodern era is providing for solutions to the era's challenges, with a prospective view to global stability and social inclusion. His philosophical thought premised on a fact that new times require new approaches from new reasonings, even if some applicable ideas or methologies could be borrowed from the past, an acute form of paradigm-shift.
Omowaye believed in idealism as guiding realism and in turn, realism as defining idealism. Moral concepts cannot be wished away from social norms, but evolving social trends dissipate morality in form of religion and logical standards and adheres to current norms in form of 'what should be'. Consequently, the manner at which 'what should be' is driven at in the modern and postmodern eras, being widely accepted became 'what is'. The manner at which the damage of the new 'what is' is hampering development process in the form of higher mortality rate and decadence of cultural good, calls to question the ideology behind the norms that are less beneficial to a wider society in form of globalization. The world as a whole through technological advancement became a global community particularly, in the 21st century. Former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan then stated that the "suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere". Champions of neomodern age such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson in the field of philanthropy expounded their vision to encompass the global community in social good such as alleviating poverty, eradicating diseases, enhancing literacy rates and addressing climate changes.
Technological advancement of the neomodern era however has its downturns in that it added to the decadence in cultural good such that people everywhere, especially high number of youths follow the trends in the new 'what is', which include social celebrities in the form of dressing, sexual activities, extravagancies, and less interest in learning and even, working but more interest in making money. Money became a value-determinant than utility. This brought about frauds in various sectors. This latter aspect is not limited to youths but even company executives, and politicians of many societies. Technological advancement has made privacy less safer for intrusion and people more safer for protection. The supposedly good of technological advancement in the neomodern era has included whistle blow such as Wikileaks' Julian Assange. The more good has been in the level of innovations and innovators it has sprung up such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and easier business models and broader social connectivity. This latter part has lessened more amity in immediate environment and many people tend to live more in the virtual world neomodern technological advancements have created.
Neomodernism checks more into the current relative way of living of people and the society to correct necessary abnormalities and to encourage virtues and values within the global community in the 21st century.
In furtherance, Gabriel Omowaye's view of neomodernism was that knowledge comes from learning and experience, and wisdom primarily from intuition. Knowledge is a variable of set occurrences of that which happens to a man and that which a man seeks to know. Knowledge is vital and good for discretion but a minor part of discernment wherein what is known might not be applicable. Intuition is a function of the mind and the mind, not seen, and yet unknown to the carrier, is a function of what put the thoughts, ideas and discretion in it. Wisdom without knowledge is vague, and knowledge without wisdom, unworthy. Wisdom perfects knowledge, and in the absence of either, the sole is delusory.
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Sep 03, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
We Americans were traditionally divided politically and culturally by region. There is still some of that but the major fault lines are more fuzzy now.
1. The Establishment. This group was on parade during the McCain imperial procession across the lands. The sight of the supposedly mutually opposed Republicans and Democrats hobnobbing, backslapping, joking, hugging and passing around the bi-partisan mints while they waited for the stiff to be wheeled in was revealing. The cavernous nave of the pseudo-Gothic church was a perfect venue for this fête de joie. A window depicting Robert Lee looked down on this vast space until recently. That has been taken down to maintain amity between the Yankee and "Southern" wings of the establishment. The Episcopal Church of today has no use for such as he. I wonder if the masses who support "the middle" understand how cruelly they are deceived by the pretended mutual animosity of their "betters." The farce was on display last week.
2. The Neo-Bolsheviks. These people have been gathering their strength in the schools since the '60s. they have indoctrinated the young all this time with a hatred of capitalism, a contempt for American tradition to include the Constitution and a desire to see the country reduced to the status of Cambodia in the Year Zero. The spectacle of the disintegration of Venezuela after decades of socialist tinkering means nothing to them. This time we will get it right! This is their belief. Disillusioned communists told me all across what had been the Warsaw Pact that Communism was never given a fair chance to prove itself. The American Bolsheviki think they will get it right this time if they attain power. The original Bolsheviks seized power with how many members in the vanguard? 20,000? Tell me. The governments of New York, California and New Jersey are all seeking to accommodate the Neo-Bolsheviks. How far will they go? The Soviet Bolsheviks killed millions of Russian Kulaks and political enemies. Remember that!
3. The Deplorables. This is essentially the "country party." They are the people who know they are being dis-possessed. These are the people who know they are despised by both the Establishment and the Neo-Bolsheviks and who are acutely aware that these other groups intend to exterminate them as a group if not as individuals. The Clintons were the ultimate Establishment people. Bill threw away the Deplorables' jobs in NAFTA in search of the Globalist Utopian vision at the heart of the Establishment's indoctrination in the schools.
Ross Perot was an amusing little freak? He spoke of a "great sucking sound" that would be heard as Deplorable jobs followed cheap capital across the southern border?
The Deplorables do not think he was funny at all. They elected Trump to give them hope and he has done that. They do not want to be governed by Establishment figures like HC who detested them as obstacles so much that she could not refrain from treating the miners with contempt to their faces. Bette Midler said this week that the Establishmenters cannot fight the Deplorables because people like her have no weapons but PBS tote bags. An interesting point.
There are a lot of splinter groups and factions. Tell me what they are. pl
VietnamVet , 9 hours agoCol. Lang
Compared to the 60s there is much less social strife today. No riots on the streets, no bombings by radical groups, no live fire shootings to quell protests in universities. So is this the quiet before the storm?
What we see today is much more arm-chair fighting using keyboards on social media. Frothing at the mouth pushing hashtags The extent of action is writing #MeToo and #BringBackOurGirls. Can such somnambulant warriors cause a real war?
My observation is that over the last 30 years, there are a few big trends.
- One, is PCness becoming more and more embedded causing increased censorship of speech.
- The second is rising "doublethink" and the Establishment melding into a true Ingsoc with increasing governmental interference in all aspects of people's lives to benefit the "party club".
- The third, is the growth in "state capitalism", reflected in the increasing financialization of the economy and the substitution of credit for capital. It's no longer what's good for GM but what's good for Goldman Sachs. The Federal Reserve run by the Ph.Ds on the "sophistry" standard as the primary lever.
- The fourth trend is a slow moral decay among the elites as the powerful no longer feel a sense of duty and honor. It is more important for them how they are perceived by the "club". Invitations to gatherings such as Davos, Aspen, & the Google "camp".
- Fifth, is increasing hopelessness among many segments reflected in the rising deaths to opioids.
David , 10 hours agoColonel,
This post brought a smile of recognition to my face. I agree.
The media desperately ignores this issue. The current Western power structure is in flux and is confusing.
Communism died when the Soviet Union fell. China, Cuba and Vietnam are not workers' paradises. The hard left is impotent and in the lurch. The mild left and liberals sold out to the Plutocrats. Republicans are crazy except for Corporatists who are keeping their mouths shut and passing tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
Those who said farewell to Senator John McCain at the National Cathedral did not mentioned that he is as responsible as anyone for the forever wars that are causing the refugee influx that is tearing Europe apart.
Their donors are imposing austerity and poverty on to the people.
There is no one championing the concerns of the Deplorables except the hard right. These Theocrats are most likely to start carting off red shirted teachers, librarians, pot heads, agnostics, unemployed and dissidents to work camps, once things fall apart.
Pat Lang Mod -> David , 10 hours agoColonel Lang,
I think it is very important to realize that the current mess in this country is largely a result of not reigning in the investment bankers as well as the country embarking on deadly and abusive wars against a large part of the non-western world.
As you rightly pointed out, both establishment parties are equally guilty of the worst offensives against those who choose to live outside of the major metropolitan areas.
This country would be much better off if people were taught how the investment banking system works and how it is regularly abused by the rich to make themselves richer. Of course, that is not in the interest of the establishment leaders.
Where you and I differ is over Donald Trump. I do not believe for one minute that he gives a damn about the people that have been screwed so royally over the last thirty to forty years. He is just louder and more obnoxious than most.
If there is a way out of this mess, I cannot see it.
I am like you over seventy. I believe the old should be encouraged to disappear from politics and only the young should be engaged in trying to save this country (as well as themselves).
Regards,
David
David -> Pat Lang , 9 hours agoNot sure why you single out "investment bankers" from the other Establishment types.
Colonel Lang,
In my varied career I worked twice as an employee and three times as a consultant for Standard & Poors Retail Brokerage Division. I also worked for the Bank of New York, Government Clearance Division and did various consulting stints at Union Bank of Switzerland and Manufacters Hanover.
All of these positions were in the technology field.
You would be amazed at what you can learn from the inside.
The banks make everything function. When there is a banking crisis they turn up the screws on the politicians and the politicians respond by bailing the banks out at the expense of the majority of the population.
Of course, the politicians know that they will be rewarded either directly or indirectly by the bankers. Just think of all those millions they pay for speaking fees.
Regards,
David
Grimgrin , 8 hours agoWe are as united as Rome was near the end of their Empire when their idiot establishment was convinced they could integrate a massive influx of tribes that loathed their way of life. Same is occurring in Europe. History rhymes.
Rural vs City you touched on, gun owners vs gun banners, gender sanity vs gender insanity, free traders vs keeping what's left of our manufacturing base, stockholders vs deplorable's, open border chaos vs normal immigration patterns to the US, CNN& MSNBC vs Rural, Decent healthcare vs nothing, establishment vs God, Democrat intense hate vs Southern whites. I am a rural southern white who did consider myself independent, however, the intense hate directed toward me and my southerners makes me hate them. So be it.
Using your terminology, the places where I see the most serious factional divisions are the Neo-Bolsheviks. There's a group one might call the "50 Staters" after Howard Dean; they're people who want to re-orient the country in a more socialist direction (Medicare for all, increased minimum wage, expanded union rights, generally expanded intervention in the economy) and believe they can sell this as an electoral platform. They hate the establishment, and are themselves hated like poison by much of the rest of the Neo-Bolsheviks. The term "Bernie Bro" and "Brocialist" were thrown around a lot last election by people who's platform is basically "destroy all power structures" without thinking too hard about what it would mean should they have the power to do it. I've classed them with the Neo-Bolsheviks due to geographic and cultural similarities, though they may also be viewed as the left wing of the Deplorables. Personally, these are the lot I'd say I'm the most similar too.
The remainder of the neo-Bolsheviks can largely be grouped according to what they believe the source of all evil in the world is: Men; white people; the concept of gender itself; and in fringe cases the idea that being overweight is unhealthy or other aspects of reality they find inconvenient. Politically they're hamstrung by three things:
First, they can't really think about anything coherently. The only way they allow themselves to process issues is deciding who the victim of men/white-people/etc... is in a situation and deciding that this person must be in the right. If that leads to an conclusion where the cognitive dissonance is too much to bear (most recently the Siraj Wahhaj case), they then argue that the fact you're talking about it means "you're racist/sexist/transphobic/*-phobic shut up". This naturally leads to things like someone who believes that white-people are the source of all evil talking about how the groping attacks in Germany were just 'white bodies being subjected to what they subject black bodies too' (they love to use the word 'bodies' instead of 'people'). The people who believe men are the source of all evil took some umbrage at this idea. This infighting is constant.
Second, they are pathetically easy for the establishment to manipulate. It is as simple as getting the nominally left faction of the establishment to have a woman stump for a policy using vaguely left wing terms and they will fall over themselves to support it. I've been told by these people that Russia must be violently opposed because Vladimir Putin is a homophobic, islamaphobic (!), racist right-winger. It's kind of amazing to see the political descendants of the hippies cheering on the prospect of a nuclear war because it would be a woman killing everyone in the name of LGBT rights.
Third, every effective organizer and leader they may have just becomes part of the establishment. Since these are typically female, gay, or non-white, they cannot meaningfully be opposed no matter how obviously they betray the goals of the neo-Bolsheviks. This happens to the deplorables as well, but they seem to be far more aggressive in countering it. It's not a coincidence that the neo-Bolsheviks have never really succeeded in any political project that the establishment doesn't find acceptable.
I may well be downplaying their threat, but they do seem to have disadvantages that the original versions lacked.
EEngineer , 9 hours ago"Neo-Bolsheviks"
I'm not sure who you would lump in with the "Neo-Bolsheviks", but as someone living in a semi-rural area of Iowa--deplorable central -- that voted democratic for decades and then voted for Trump, many of these deplorables embraced Bernie Sanders* (a Neo-Bolshevik?) and would welcome a return to an FDR style democratic party.
If for no other reason than to partake of the benefits afforded every other citizenry in the western world such as universal healthcare, free or affordable college, etc.
Establishment Dems:
Imho, far from being supporters of progessive economic policy, most liberal dem politicians defend the status quo as much as anyone and defer to their tech, insurance, arms, and financial donors.
Like was said 2 yrs ago, the dems would rather lose with Clinton than win with Sanders. And I include Pelosi, Schumer, you name it, in that bunch.
Trump's Base/Deplorables:
As you say, there are many more factions. Not all so-called deplorables are the same politically of course.
As for Trump's base--I have always thought it erroneous to label that base as working men and women of below average education, etc. 90% of Trump voters supported Romney and 60% had a median income above the national average.
While he is supported by disparate groups, the largest of Trump's base is the vast suburban gop voters of many large US cities. The Msm just doesn't want to acknowledge that Trump voters are also their well to do neighbors. Trump carried Suffolk County/Hamptons in New York state.
Fred -> EEngineer , 6 hours agoThe military, veterans, and various police agencies. States fail when they will no longer enforce the official line. That's usually happens when their own family members start showing up in the marches, barricades, protests, and such.
Loads of bright eyed youngsters have joined up over the last few decades thinking they would be like Luke Skywalker only to find out they're being used as Imperial Stormtroopers.
"thinking they would be like Luke Skywalker..."
Those folks with the starwars bumper stickers you see on the road aren't the ones who signed up for service.
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Sep 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Jen , Sep 1, 2018 5:03:48 PM | link
To those who say Statements 1 and 3 in B's post reflect or demonstrate reality: don't confuse bullying with strength.
The statements are expressions of Social Darwinism in its various forms. Social Darwinism represents a particular belief system that justifies the existence of an elite dominating society and culture, so as to ensure its (that is, the elite's) continued survival and domination.
Needless to say, Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara are under police investigation in Israel for corruption. Sara N apparently is also notorious for ill-treating her staff and throwing her weight around to impress and intimidate others.
Is this sort of behaviour - stealing from the nation, bullying others - the behaviour of those who are strong and secure in their power?
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Even the Mongols, though they brought destruction, extermination and ruin everywhere they went, did eventually bring order and stability, and revived trade and civilisation. They themselves became civilised by the peoples they conquered. In the end, they were undone by their own internal family squabbles and competition. They were not so strong as they first seemed.
It's not enough to be "strong" in a military sense - what a nation's leadership does with its power is as important as acquiring and having that power in the first place.
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Aug 31, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca
Developing the tradition charted by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite , in his latest book, Professor Peter Phillips starts by reviewing the transition from the nation state power elites described by authors such as Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global capital.
Thus, in his just-released study Giants: The Global Power Elite , Phillips, a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University in the USA, identifies the world's top seventeen asset management firms, such as BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase, each with more than one trillion dollars of investment capital under management, as the 'Giants' of world capitalism. The seventeen firms collectively manage more than $US41.1 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital that spans the globe.
This $41 trillion represents the wealth invested for profit by thousands of millionaires, billionaires and corporations. The seventeen Giants operate in nearly every country in the world and are 'the central institutions of the financial capital that powers the global economic system'. They invest in anything considered profitable, ranging from 'agricultural lands on which indigenous farmers are replaced by power elite investors' to public assets (such as energy and water utilities) to war.
In addition, Phillips identifies the most important networks of the Global Power Elite and the individuals therein. He names 389 individuals (a small number of whom are women and a token number of whom are from countries other than the United States and the wealthier countries of Western Europe) at the core of the policy planning nongovernmental networks that manage, facilitate and defend the continued concentration of global capital. The Global Power Elite perform two key uniting functions, he argues: they provide ideological justifications for their shared interests (promulgated through their corporate media), and define the parameters of action for transnational governmental organizations and capitalist nation-states.
More precisely, Phillips identifies the 199 directors of the seventeen global financial Giants and offers short biographies and public information on their individual net wealth. These individuals are closely interconnected through numerous networks of association including the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference, university affiliations, various policy councils, social clubs, and cultural enterprises. For a taste of one of these clubs, see this account of The Links in New York. As Phillips observes: 'It is certainly safe to conclude they all know each other personally or know of each other in the shared context of their positions of power.'
The Giants, Phillips documents, invest in each other but also in many hundreds of investment management firms, many of which are near-Giants. This results in tens of trillions of dollars coordinated in a single vast network of global capital controlled by a very small number of people. 'Their constant objective is to find enough safe investment opportunities for a return on capital that allows for continued growth. Inadequate capital-placement opportunities lead to dangerous speculative investments, buying up of public assets, and permanent war spending.'
Because the directors of these seventeen asset management firms represent the central core of international capital, 'Individuals can retire or pass away, and other similar people will move into their place, making the overall structure a self-perpetuating network of global capital control. As such, these 199 people share a common goal of maximum return on investments for themselves and their clients, and they may seek to achieve returns by any means necessary – legal or not . the institutional and structural arrangements within the money management systems of global capital relentlessly seek ways to achieve maximum return on investment, and the conditions for manipulations – legal or not – are always present.'
Like some researchers before him, Phillips identifies the importance of those transnational institutions that serve a unifying function. The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, G20, G7, World Trade Organization (WTO), World Economic Forum (WEF), Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group , Bank for International Settlements, Group of 30 (G30), the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Monetary Conference serve as institutional mechanisms for consensus building within the transnational capitalist class, and power elite policy formulation and implementation. 'These international institutions serve the interests of the global financial Giants by supporting policies and regulations that seek to protect the free, unrestricted flow of capital and debt collection worldwide.'
But within this network of transnational institutions, Phillips identifies two very important global elite policy-planning organizations: the Group of Thirty (which has 32 members) and the extended executive committee of the Trilateral Commission (which has 55 members). These nonprofit corporations, which each have a research and support staff, formulate elite policy and issue instructions for their implementation by the transnational governmental institutions like the G7, G20, IMF, WTO, and World Bank. Elite policies are also implemented following instruction of the relevant agent, including governments, in the context. These agents then do as they are instructed. Thus, these 85 members (because two overlap) of the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission comprise a central group of facilitators of global capitalism, ensuring that 'global capital remains safe, secure, and growing'.
So, while many of the major international institutions are controlled by nation-state representatives and central bankers (with proportional power exercised by dominant financial supporters such as the United States and European Union countries), Phillips is more concerned with the transnational policy groups that are nongovernmental because these organizations 'help to unite TCC power elites as a class' and the individuals involved in these organizations facilitate world capitalism. 'They serve as policy elites who seek the continued growth of capital in the world.'
Developing this list of 199 directors of the largest money management firms in the world, Phillips argues, is an important step toward understanding how capitalism works globally today. These global power elite directors make the decisions regarding the investment of trillions of dollars. Supposedly in competition, the concentrated wealth they share requires them to cooperate for their greater good by identifying investment opportunities and shared risk agreements, and working collectively for political arrangements that create advantages for their profit-generating system as a whole.
Their fundamental priority is to secure an average return on investment of 3 to 10 percent, or even more. The nature of any investment is less important than what it yields: continuous returns that support growth in the overall market. Hence, capital investment in tobacco products, weapons of war, toxic chemicals, pollution, and other socially destructive goods and services are judged purely by their profitability. Concern for the social and environmental costs of the investment are non-existent. In other words, inflicting death and destruction are fine because they are profitable.
So what is the global elite's purpose? In a few sentences Phillips characterizes it thus: The elite is largely united in support of the US/NATO military empire that prosecutes a repressive war against resisting groups – typically labeled 'terrorists' – around the world. The real purpose of 'the war on terror' is defense of transnational globalization, the unimpeded flow of financial capital around the world, dollar hegemony and access to oil; it has nothing to do with repressing terrorism which it generates, perpetuates and finances to provide cover for its real agenda. This is why the United States has a long history of CIA and military interventions around the world ostensibly in defense of 'national interests'.
Giants: The Global Power EliteWealth and Power
An interesting point that emerges for me from reading Phillips thoughtful analysis is that there is a clear distinction between those individuals and families who have wealth and those individuals who have (sometimes significantly) less wealth (which, nevertheless, is still considerable) but, through their positions and connections, wield a great deal of power. As Phillips explains this distinction, 'the sociology of elites is more important than particular elite individuals and their families'. Just 199 individuals decide how more than $40 trillion will be invested. And this is his central point. Let me briefly elaborate.
There are some really wealthy families in the world, notably including the families Rothschild (France and the United Kingdom), Rockefeller (USA), Goldman-Sachs (USA), Warburgs (Germany), Lehmann (USA), Lazards (France), Kuhn Loebs (USA), Israel Moses Seifs (Italy), Al-Saud (Saudi Arabia), Walton (USA), Koch (USA), Mars (USA), Cargill-MacMillan (USA) and Cox (USA). However, not all of these families overtly seek power to shape the world as they wish.
Similarly, the world's extremely wealthy individuals such as Jeff Bezos (USA), Bill Gates (USA), Warren Buffett (USA), Bernard Arnault (France), Carlos Slim Helu (Mexico) and Francoise Bettencourt Meyers (France) are not necessarily connected in such a way that they exercise enormous power. In fact, they may have little interest in power as such, despite their obvious interest in wealth.
In essence, some individuals and families are content to simply take advantage of how capitalism and its ancilliary governmental and transnational instruments function while others are more politically engaged in seeking to manipulate major institutions to achieve outcomes that not only maximize their own profit and hence wealth but also shape the world itself.
So if you look at the list of 199 individuals that Phillips identifies at the centre of global capital, it does not include names such as Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Koch, Walton or even Rothschild, Rockefeller or Windsor (the Queen of England) despite their well-known and extraordinary wealth. As an aside, many of these names are also missing from the lists compiled by groups such as Forbes and Bloomberg , but their absence from these lists is for a very different reason given the penchant for many really wealthy individuals and families to avoid certain types of publicity and their power to ensure that they do.
In contrast to the names just listed, in Phillips' analysis names like Laurence (Larry) Fink (Chairman and CEO of BlackRock), James (Jamie) Dimon (Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase) and John McFarlane (Chairman of Barclays Bank), while not as wealthy as those listed immediately above, wield far more power because of their positions and connections within the global elite network of 199 individuals.
Predictably then, Phillips observes, these three individuals have similar lifestyles and ideological orientations. They believe capitalism is beneficial for the world and while inequality and poverty are important issues, they believe that capital growth will eventually solve these problems. They are relatively non-expressive about environmental issues, but recognize that investment opportunities may change in response to climate 'modifications'. As millionaires they own multiple homes. They attended elite universities and rose quickly in international finance to reach their current status as giants of the global power elite. 'The institutions they manage have been shown to engage in illegal collusions with others, but the regulatory fines by governments are essentially seen as just part of doing business.'
In short, as I would characterize this description: They are devoid of a legal or moral framework to guide their actions, whether in relation to business, fellow human beings, war or the environment and climate. They are obviously typical of the elite.
Any apparent concern for people, such as that expressed by Fink and Dimon in response to the racist violence in Charlottesville, USA in August 2017, is simply designed to promote 'stability' or more precisely, a stable (that is, profitable) investment and consumer climate.
The lack of concern for people and issues that might concern many of us is also evident from a consideration of the agenda at elite gatherings. Consider the International Monetary Conference. Founded in 1956, it is a private yearly meeting of the top few hundred bankers in the world. The American Bankers Association (ABA) serves as the secretariat for the conference. But, as Phillips notes: 'Nothing on the agenda seems to address the socioeconomic consequences of investments to determine the impacts on people and the environment.' A casual perusal of the agenda at any elite gathering reveals that this comment applies equally to any elite forum. See, for example, the agenda of the recent WEF meeting in Davos . Any talk of 'concern' is misleading rhetoric.
Hence, in the words of Phillips: The 199 directors of the global Giants are 'a very select set of people. They all know each other personally or know of each other. At least 69 have attended the annual World Economic Forum, where they often serve on panels or give public presentations. They mostly attended the same elite universities, and interact in upperclass social setting[s] in the major cities of the world. They all are wealthy and have significant stock holdings in one or more of the financial Giants. They are all deeply invested in the importance of maintaining capital growth in the world. Some are sensitive to environmental and social justice issues, but they seem to be unable to link these issues to global capital concentration.'
Of course, the global elite cannot manage the world system alone: the elite requires agents to perform many of the functions necessary to control national societies and the individuals within them. 'The interests of the Global Power Elite and the TCC are fully recognized by major institutions in society. Governments, intelligence services, policymakers, universities, police forces, military, and corporate media all work in support of their vital interests.'
In other words, to elaborate Phillips' point and extend it a little, through their economic power, the Giants control all of the instruments through which their policies are implemented. Whether it be governments, national military forces, 'military contractors' or mercenaries (with at least $200 billion spent on private security globally, the industry currently employs some fifteen million people worldwide) used both in 'foreign' wars but also likely deployed in future for domestic control, key 'intelligence' agencies, legal systems and police forces, major nongovernment organizations, or the academic, educational, 'public relations propaganda', corporate media, medical, psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries, all instruments are fully responsive to elite control and are designed to misinform, deceive, disempower, intimidate, repress, imprison (in a jail or psychiatric ward), exploit and/or kill (depending on the constituency) the rest of us, as is readily evident.
Defending Elite Power
Phillips observes that the power elite continually worries about rebellion by the 'unruly exploited masses' against their structure of concentrated wealth. This is why the US military empire has long played the role of defender of global capitalism. As a result, the United States has more than 800 military bases (with some scholars suggesting 1,000) in 70 countries and territories. In comparison, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia have about 30 foreign bases. In addition, US military forces are now deployed in 70 percent of the world's nations with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) having troops in 147 countries, an increase of 80 percent since 2010. These forces conduct counterterrorism strikes regularly, including drone assassinations and kill/capture raids.
'The US military empire stands on hundreds of years of colonial exploitation and continues to support repressive, exploitative governments that cooperate with global capital's imperial agenda. Governments that accept external capital investment, whereby a small segment of a country's elite benefits, do so knowing that capital inevitably requires a return on investment that entails using up resources and people for economic gain. The whole system continues wealth concentration for elites and expanded wretched inequality for the masses .
'Understanding permanent war as an economic relief valve for surplus capital is a vital part of comprehending capitalism in the world today. War provides investment opportunity for the Giants and TCC elites and a guaranteed return on capital. War also serves a repressive function of keeping the suffering masses of humanity afraid and compliant.'
As Phillips elaborates: This is why defense of global capital is the prime reason that NATO countries now account for 85 percent of the world's military spending; the United States spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined.
In essence, 'the Global Power Elite uses NATO and the US military empire for its worldwide security. This is part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world, whereby the US/ NATO military empire, advised by the power elite's Atlantic Council , operates in service to the Transnational Corporate Class for the protection of international capital everywhere in the world'.
This entails 'further pauperization of the bottom half of the world's population and an unrelenting downward spiral of wages for 80 percent of the world. The world is facing economic crisis, and the neoliberal solution is to spend less on human needs and more on security. It is a world of financial institutions run amok, where the answer to economic collapse is to print more money through quantitative easing, flooding the population with trillions of new inflation-producing dollars. It is a world of permanent war, whereby spending for destruction requires further spending to rebuild, a cycle that profits the Giants and global networks of economic power. It is a world of drone killings, extrajudicial assassinations, death, and destruction, at home and abroad.'
Where is this all heading?
So what are the implications of this state of affairs? Phillips responds unequivocally: 'This concentration of protected wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation are reaching a species-level threat. We realize that humankind is in danger of possible extinction'.
He goes on to state that the Global Power Elite is probably the only entity 'capable of correcting this condition without major civil unrest, war, and chaos' and elaborates an important aim of his book: to raise awareness of the importance of systemic change and the redistribution of wealth among both the book's general readers but also the elite, 'in the hope that they can begin the process of saving humanity.' The book's postscript is a 'A Letter to the Global Power Elite', co-signed by Phillips and 90 others, beseeching the elite to act accordingly.
'It is no longer acceptable for you to believe that you can manage capitalism to grow its way out of the gross inequalities we all now face. The environment cannot accept more pollution and waste, and civil unrest is everywhere inevitable at some point. Humanity needs you to step up and insure that trickle-down becomes a river of resources that reaches every child, every family, and all human beings. We urge you to use your power and make the needed changes for humanity's survival.'
But he also emphasizes that nonviolent social movements, using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a moral code, can accelerate the process of redistributing wealth by pressuring the elite into action.
Conclusion
Peter Phillips has written an important book. For those of us interested in understanding elite control of the world, this book is a vital addition to the bookshelf. And like any good book, as you will see from my comments both above and below, it raised more questions for me even while it answered many.
As I read Phillips' insightful and candid account of elite behavior in this regard, I am reminded, yet again, that the global power elite is extraordinarily violent and utterly insane: content to kill people in vast numbers (whether through starvation or military violence) and destroy the biosphere for profit, with zero sense of humanity's now limited future. See 'The Global Elite is Insane Revisited' and 'Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival' with more detailed explanations for the violence and insanity here: 'Why Violence?' and 'Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice' .
For this reason I do not share his faith in moral appeals to the elite, as articulated in the letter in his postscript. It is fine to make the appeal but history offers no evidence to suggest that there will be any significant response. The death and destruction inflicted by elites is highly profitable, centuries-old and ongoing. It will take powerful, strategically-focused nonviolent campaigns (or societal collapse) to compel the necessary changes in elite behavior. Hence, I fully endorse his call for nonviolent social movements to compel elite action where we cannot make the necessary changes without their involvement. See 'A Nonviolent Strategy to End Violence and Avert Human Extinction' and Nonviolent Campaign Strategy .
I would also encourage independent action, in one or more of several ways, by those individuals and communities powerful enough to do so. This includes nurturing more powerful individuals by making 'My Promise to Children' , participating in 'The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth' and signing the online pledge of 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World' .
Fundamentally, Giants: The Global Power Elite is a call to action. Professor Peter Phillips is highly aware of our predicament – politically, socially, economically, environmentally and climatically – and the critical role played by the global power elite in generating that predicament.
If we cannot persuade the global power elite to respond sensibly to that predicament, or nonviolently compel it to do so, humanity's time on Earth is indeed limited.
*
Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' His email address is [email protected] and his website is here . He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Aug 31, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca
Western media monopolies, appendages of the billionaire ruling class, select for narratives which glorify criminal foreign policies. Hence, these monopolies are cheerleaders for uninterrupted wars of aggression.
Ruling class policymakers hide their criminality beneath banners of freedom, democracy, and human rights. [1] These lies provide cover for what amounts to a Western- orchestrated and sustained overseas holocaust and the thirdworldization of domestic populations.
The lies are further reinforced when those who advance these toxic policies are celebrated as heroes. This misplaced adulation negates the struggle for Peace and the rule of International Law. The lies and misplaced adulation also serve to legitimize the West's proxies, which include al Qaeda [2] in Syria, and neo-Nazis [3] in Kiev.
What's great thing about the pic accompanying this piece in the Washington Post sanctifying McCain as a human rights advocate is that the guy to his left is an actual Nazi. He's Oleh Tyahnybok, a Ukrainian Nazi. Too good!
10:38 AM - Aug 28, 2018The adulation, then, is part of the apparatus of deception. It brands those who should be facing trials at the Hague as heroes, as it erases the truth, which is a vital component for Peace and International Justice.
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Aug 27, 2018 | therealnews.com
While the fight for health care for all, a higher minimum wage, unionization, against systemic racism, mass incarceration and other necessary reforms are just and critical to engaging people in struggle, we also need to tell people the whole truth about just how critical the big picture is.
While the Trump presidency is a cabal of criminals, billionaires and far-right ideologues, it must first of all be seen in the context of the threats to our very existence, not merely reduced to the daily scandals and twitter storms. There is no need to treat working people as infants. The culture is aimed at the infantilization of our political discussion. We can believe that America is already great or that we should Make America Great Again, but it's all the religion of Americanism, and it's meant to make us willing children who will march into battle or just resign ourselves to things the way they are. We are not infants and we must, as best we can, tell people the whole truth.
As catastrophic and savage as capitalism was during the 20th century, continuous wars and genocides, deep economic crisis and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, the system proved to be resilient, the global elites did find a kind of equilibrium. Capitalism did not come to an end and the attempts at socialism failed. While many societies around the world have been destroyed, millions slaughtered in war and many more living in deep poverty, the truth is the majority of the people in the advanced capitalist world are mostly doing ok. In the United States there are as many families earning more than $100,000 a year, as there are earning under $30,000. But as resilient as capitalism has proved to be, I don't think this world order is sustainable. The elites are no longer capable or willing of dealing with grave systemic threats, even when it is in their own long-term interests to do so.
We're in a different kind of moment than we've ever faced before. Of course, nuclear weapons posed an existential threat before, but at least the elites saw that ending human life on earth wasn't in their interests. That is so far that's true. Because as crazy as the prospect of nuclear war is, they have not given up their deteriorating hair triggered nuclear arsenals and they actually contemplate the use of localized nuclear weapons. As you know, first Obama planned for a new wave of nuclear weapons, and now Trump is spending billions expanding America's nuclear capability. While it's unlikely that the elites will deliberately launch a nuclear Armageddon, we are all living in denial if we think that an accidental triggering of such isn't possible. The hair trigger policy means there is around ten minutes to decide if what looks like an attack is one or is a glitch in the software. It's a cold war posture still in place in the United States and Russia, it's Dr. Strange Love's Doomsday machine. We can't have faith in the political leadership of these elites, that is the current leadership of either the Republican or the Democratic Parties or the billionaires who bankroll them, to face up to this danger. One would think it's in the interest of the elites themselves to deal with this. But the military-industrial complex has far too much invested in a narrative that depends on a major existential rival. They need war and almost war. American capital will not give up it's dominant global commercial position they believe depends on their military might. Oil and guns determines US foreign policy, not national security. On this point alone, one can argue this ruling class is not fit to rule. But of course, there is more.
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Why can't the ruling elites deal with the systemic threats of climate change, financial crisis, global war, and AI? Threats to the future of their own system? Because they are in the middle of an orgy of profit making. They can't believe their good fortune. If they had any doubts before the election, Wall St. now loves Trump. Even though most of finance knows that unregulated, it's only a matter of time before the crisis of 07/08 repeats itself. But what the hell, no one will go to jail and the public will bail them out again.
Wall St. is euphoric as they swim in an ocean of super wealth. While the financial sector represents about 7 percent of our economy it takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit, with only 4 percent of all jobs. With such concentrated wealth goes a competitive culture that prizes daily returns on capital, above the future of humans on earth. These are the people that control American politics as they throw unlimited funds at political campaigns.
The threat of climate crisis? The elites believe, if they actually think beyond their private jets and yachts, that they will be ok. Their kids will be ok, even their grandkids. And then? Apres Moi le Deluge. After me comes the floods said Louis the XV. In Maryland we just saw much of a city washed away, and it's surely the shape of things to come.
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As much as the digital revolution helped create a vile stratum of the ultra-rich, it's also created the conditions for a more democratic economy and politics. The Sanders campaign has shown that the political structures that were built to look democratic because the power of billionaires would always win out, can be challenged with mass fundraising. Online organizing and social media has transformed political campaigning and made it less reliant on funds for TV ads. The internet allowed independent media to challenge the power of concentrated media ownership, it made The Real News possible. We are just seeing the early phase of what's possible.
gchakko • 2 months ago ,
p.munkey gchakko • 2 months ago ,Hi Paul!
You've hit the nail on the head. People's power cannot be underestimated and that will one day demolish the Rothschild-Rockefeller Banker s' imperium (Wall St. Plus) spread across the world, people who made their money through cheat and deception for half a millennium and continue still under delusions, they and their upper middle-class cronies and crawlers through AI manipulations can hold on to people's plunder. They haven't learnt from French and Russian revolutions. Take comfort in the great Mahatma Gandhi's prophecy learnt from South Africa and applied to India with success. 'A minority cannot reign a majority for long time. Classical sociological histories such empires will collapse. Trump will realise only when flood waters reach his real estates to withdraw from Climate Change accord.George Chakko, former U.N. correspondent, now retiree in Vienna, Austria.
Vienna, 22/ 06/ 2018 03:13 hrs CETneoconbuster p.munkey • 2 months ago ,Hi George, Like yourself, I concur with Paul's message and, while your optimism is shared in no small part by myself, the history of human civilisation to this very day is built on the exploitation of the weak by the powerful. Like yourself I expect, this cancerous evolution cannot be permitted to continue; but we shouldn't expect that the powerful will refrain from using every technological advantage in their arsenal to protect their position, even unto the death of us all.
For myself, I draw comfort from knowing that the most rapid advancements in our poisoned society have arrived through the widespread proliferation of knowledge and the leisure to engage intellectual and creative pursuits among the broader population. Even as the powerful conspire to curtail the free exchange of ideas and thought through constraints imposed by mass surveillance and privately-regulated access to the Internet; emancipation, egalitarianism and enlightenment of the species will likely only be achieved following economic collapse and survival beyond the barbarism that will certainly follow. That said, the present state of barbarism is likely more egregious than what might succeed the collapse.
Regards,
Munkp.munkey neoconbuster • 2 months ago ,Hi Ya PM!
Watch this Interview with Ralph Nader by Chris Edges on the Corporate Control of the Empire!:gchakko p.munkey • 2 months ago ,Hiya NCB. Seen it... a great interview. The courageous and noble Mr. Nader (a man most deserving of the Presidency, unlike the political careerists foisted before the public during every election cycle) presents a measure of optimism concerning the human effort necessary to turn the system around. I am, for the most part, in agreement. Everyone knows this life is shit, but haven't the first idea as to what to do about it. As a herd animal, we've very susceptible to fear and the threat of physical violence - we're also easily manipulated and distracted by duplicitous entertainments and propagandized news. As they say, it only takes a spark to start a fire, and this society is a tinder box.
p.munkey gchakko • 2 months ago ,I couldn't agree with you more Munk.
In the so-called "civilised urban habitats" on Globe to which Trump belongs we've only most recently witnessed umpteen hundreds of separated children's deep psychic anguish till the revolt broke out through enlightened protests from within Trump's own family. It's absolute shame that a president claiming himself a "Christian" and ignominiously "championing " Christianity's cause unsolicited in Jerusalem, had to be brow-beaten by his own wife and brought to senses to behave himself towards human children within his fences. How correct Paul Jay was that Trump "billionaire" had indeed flunked miserably on the human-side facet.
Internet piercing is a double-edged sword. It is not a game that can be monopolised by a few, although in the name of American security they could potentially foul play instituting many organised evil But China, Russia and India have smart programmers/cyber specialists too to slice the BC's (Billionaire Club's) far-reaching tentacles to render them ineffective in the long-run. Billions of customers world-wide can one day leave Google/ Yahoo search machines and hang on to cheap but effective Made in China variants, The deep-state epitomised by NSA-Pentagon conglomerate servicing whole-heartedly the RR-Banker imperium cannot theoretically or practically conquer the world, even if the U.S. outnumber with its many-satellites legion. The Big C (Big Capital comprised of the RR-Bankers, the Fed, the Military Industrial-Complex, the Big Oil, the Big Pharma etc.) lurk under a criminal delusion of unilateral world dominance that is ruining billions today. Remember the old French wisdom of Revolution – "The Great are great, because we are on our knees. Now let us rise". That will happen someday for sure, if the 21st century peasants unite through internet or other means and ways.
George Chakko, Vienna 22/06/2018 11:09 am CETNiemand p.munkey • 2 months ago ,HI George, thanks for the exchange.
To complement Proudhon's revolutionary remark, I'll add, "the secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant." -- M. Robespierre
I'm disheartened however, by the results of the 2018 Swiss Sovereign Money Referendum. With only 21% of the population casting a vote for the plainly-worded referendum initiative stating:
" Do you accept the popular initiative "for crisis-safe money: money creation by the National Bank only!" "
75% of those responding to the referendum call, answered "No" to the initiative.
Can't say I'm surprised... Switzerland's economy is dominated by the financial sector.
The result of the Swiss Referendum does however suggest that my faith in education, as a mechanism for social transformation, may be misplaced - the Swiss population are among the best educated, yet their turnout would suggest that "crisis" is a desirable state of social and economic affairs. Perhaps they, as we, for all their advantage, remain utterly "ignorant" of the masochistic proclivities of our capitalist economy. Perhaps, on the other hand, my indictment should be reserved to those responsible for the curriculum of ignorance - the State and the media.
Regards,
Munkp.munkey Niemand • 2 months ago ,It's pretty well understood that people are --rightfully!--suspicious of changes into which they had no or insufficient input. Throughout human history changes have been imposed from above, and the ones who benefit have always been the imposers, not the imposed-upon.
So the Swiss result should have been expected unless the people had much more input than we ever get with our "public comment period" sop.
Niemand p.munkey • 2 months ago ,Hi Niemand,
The Swiss Referendum was encouraged by a grass-roots motion that required some 100,000 signatures to be put before the broader public as a topic for referendum. This was a genuine 'bottom-up' motion.
As indicated by George elsewhere in this thread, Switzerland enjoys preeminence as the home of the private International Bank for Settlements (IBS), a tool that, like the World Bank largely run out of the U.S. is used to wage economic warfare upon all nations and indenture the global population with debt. Banking is Switzerland's principle industry; if you regard the parasitic exploitation of nations and economies an genuine "industry" (human farming under the yoke of debt servitude).
The wording of the referendum measure was plain, but it did not adequately qualify the present system of money creation as one being in the hands of private interest, rather than public interest.It's still hard to imagine that the nation's money supply is governed by "private interest". This abrogation of justice is no different than feudal societies.
Regards,Munk.
gchakko p.munkey • 2 months ago ,That's 100K people who had some level of connection to the petition, but what about the rest of the people, Munk?
How many people in toto were actually in on the discussions from the start, got to argue the issues, had input into the wording, etc.? Probably not even 100 people. Maybe not even ten .
What mechanisms, if any, were set up to let everyone in the country argue it out after the issue went on the ballot but before the election? My bet would be: none, and that the rest of Switzerland had to decide something they didn't really understand and for which they felt no sense of ownership, just another "black box" filled with godknowswhat, created entirely by strangers with unknown agendas.
Godfrey Lim gchakko • 2 months ago ,Thanks dear Friend!
The Swiss educational standards maybe one of the best in the world. But Switzerland is the tightest Black Capital of the world finely accepting all the black money of the world that is clandestine, but braving an immaculately innocent angelic face upfront. I heard long ago that every bank deposit in Swiss Banks gets a nominal bank interest, be it 2, 3, or 5 pc whatever the current fix for agreement might be, over 30-40 pc of this interest rate is immediately transferred per annum to Swiss Exchequer by law. In other words, every Swiss citizen could enjoy from financial view enjoy a nice holiday in Bahamas or elsewhere in the world. Black Money, reportedly a half of monetary deposits in entire Swiss Banks is the financial life back-up mainstay of Swiss economy. Several U.S. multi-billionaires, not yet monitored, are guessed to be confided clients of Swiss Banks. Swiss Banks are also guess destination of stable black money deposits of East European oligarchs including Russians. Even the British Crown are reportedly having deposits there. What you also need to know is that only few years back the Swiss held a referendum on Gold. (My story on that in OneIndia.com/GoodReturns.in (Will Gold reign as most sought currency stabiliser? Written by: George Chakko, Vienna, Updated: Tuesday, December 2, 2014, 9:37 [IST]") offers a periscope on how the Deep State over-arches internationally)
Best greetings
George Chakko, Vienna, Austria.
22/06/2018 18:40 hrs CET
gchakko Godfrey Lim • 2 months ago ,"Trump will realise only when flood waters reach his real estates to withdraw from Climate Change accord."
That is scary. It looks like Jonathan Kleck's prediction will happen sooner.... And that "thousand points of light" will disperse from NY to all parts of the globe, like the "Tower of Babel" because you proles and peons are not allowed to reach the heights of heaven and be Gods--creating your own interest-free money.=)
New $100 Bill Decrypted - Nuclear Devastation + Tsunami
goedelite gchakko • 2 months ago ,Hi!
Thanks for ringing alarm. More precise, flood waters should reach his bedroom midnight, to know earliest by morning where he stands, on or offshore, swim or drown !
G.Chakko, Vienna, Austria. 06/07/2018 02:09 am CETgchakko goedelite • 2 months ago ,Peoples' power can very well be overestimated. True, Condorcet wrote that if people knew their power, the ruling-class would shudder with fear. Well the rulers do know, and they take measures to control the power of their people. Even long before mass media, demagogues knew how. The "great" Gandhi held Hindu power over the Dalits, demonstrating that the Hindu majority can suppress a minority brutally, as Arundhati Roy makes clear. The Israelis suppress the Palestinians, a minority over a majority? Tell us, what are the lessons of the French and Russian revolutions? Didn't the French Revolution teach that revolutions can take 82 (1789-1871) years and a foreign war (Franco-Prussian) to be rid of a monarchy? What did the failure of the Russian Revolution of February, 1917, through the Leninist gangster-coup of November, 1917, and 74 years of the USSR teach? That it took most of a century to install a drunken US puppet (Yeltsin) in the Kremlin? What did the American Revolution and our Constitution of 1787 and Bill of Rights of 1789 teach? Was it that the great experiment has been a failure; that the Constitution means what five scoundrels in the Supreme Court decide with no recourse; that the Bill of Rights buys as much freedom as a 3 dollar bill will buy coffee? When the empires collapse, as you wrote, what will replace them: a dark age; other empires; starvation, disease, and permanent loss of human habitat? What do your "classical sociological histories" tell you?
elkojohn • 2 months ago ,Hi!
As a general blanket answer to issues raised, is evolution, gradual transformation of society to an evolved order from a less evolved; evolution is the only alternative key that will work. All radical solutions will bring frictions, disruptions and deaths countless. Devolution is what is happening now, what you referred to. People's power is a "rubber" concept; it expands and contracts its potentialities and applicabilities, functional on the societies, times and ages. But it is there immanent, be it under-estimated or overestimated, depending on the localised situation in historical context. Gandhi's charm with the Dalits was due to his own low-caste status, independent of his more rigorous agenda of Indian Independence struggle to gain freedom from British that included all classes. You use the word "power" (Hindu) falsely in that context of Gandhi & Dalits giving you the wrong motive reading for those days. But in today's context you are right.The basic question of revolutions is why do they come to pass? To find a convincing answer you got to go back to Hegel who applied the seminal Dialectic of Immanuel Kant – Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis (Critique of Pure Reason) to historical events. To put Hegel in a paraphrased layman's language, when power consolidates unilaterally through the application of force or otherwise, it is bound to create in course of time an antithesis (people's rising or opposition in a society) to end up in a clash or get transformed to a synthesis, speak compromise – say Czarist Russia vs Communist power rise leading to a clash resulting in destruction germinating a classless society (Marxism-Leninism). What Marx & Engels did not want to accept was that the Dialectical Process of history for Hegel will continue and again give rise to another Thesis etc., thus the cycle will perpetrate in real-time history ending finally in the Absolute Idea which for Hegel was God, which Marxism in principle denies. Marx's classless society is not "static" and it will change and indeed has changed with the current Russian Federation's rejection of it. Lenin / Stalin could have spared millions of human lives' torture and death if they had listened to the deeper meaning of Hegelian Dialectic. In 1971 at a reception in Bonn, West Germany, when I confronted Prof. Theodore Oisserman on this issue (Prof. Oiserman was then Chief political ideologist of the Politburo of USSR) he responded in a typical communist way giving me a rather wavy answer saying more studies need to be done and the matter "differentiatingly" understood!.
Barring an all-out thermo-nuclear clash on Earth, say a Global Nuclear war, world societies will again spurt out of destroyed ground and rebuilt. Both Japan and Germany came back to life after pounded into ashes. This time in a nuclear shower bio-life could potentially end. But I hope it will not come to that; you can avoid all such apocalypse by inner transformation, elimination of negativities and aggressions through Yoga & Meditation irrespective of your religious affinities, and cut asunder the addiction to exorbitant material bondage exaggerated by superfluous body & health needs via marketing media. At the basis is the cancerous material greed that needs be cut down substantially, especially of the affluent consumers. That's the only cogent way out of this misery we have created for ourselves. The Super-Rich has enormous resources to solve most of the world's chronic problems which they helped entrench. They are now called to act under world pressure for the good of our planet and for themselves and their children's future.
George Chakko, Vienna, 25/06/2018 13:07 noon CET
gchakko elkojohn • 2 months ago ,The billionaire class, and their ability to control the media propaganda machine, and the political parties in nations that allow voting, and the dictators in nations that don't, – are, as you say, destroying our beautiful planet in the name of profits. The tragedy is that they could also use their billions and influence to save the planet. We humans eventually figured out that human sacrifice was wrong, so we stopped doing that. We humans eventually figured out that slavery was wrong, so we stopped doing that. How long will it take the ruling class to figure out that making our planet unfit for human habitation is wrong?
While ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, NYT and WP continue to bullsh*t, confuse, and brain-wash the U.S. public on behalf of the rich and powerful, the oceans on our planet have increased in temperature, CO2 saturation, and acidity.
As a result, 50% of coral reefs have been destroyed forever, and the remaining reefs only have about 10-15 years before they are destroyed too. As a result, oxygen is being depleted from the oceans, causing massive ''dead zones'' and threatening marine life. As a result, ocean currents will be de-stabilized causing the Gulf Stream to halt.
What happens after all this takes place? Even the National Geographic Society (not exactly a lefty organization) has documented the truth about climate change.
Thank you Paul Jay for being the first news organization to openly and clearly state that climate change, and the billionaire/millionaire class are a threat to human existence.
I doubled my monthly donation.RBHoughton • 2 months ago ,Hi Elkojohn!
I fully subscribe to your view. Yes, an inner transformation of the "stinking" Super-Rich is what is essentially required, in view of the enormous potential of financial and social management power they hold that can solve most of the problems on this planet. Unless these give up their meaningless "endless" material greed and evolve into a higher human being liberating themselves from the claws of material bondage, I do not see any other peaceful way out but "class clash and crash" on future's door-step.
George Chakko, Vienna, 23/ 06/ 2018 06:28 am CETJay Hansen RBHoughton • 2 months ago ,The chances of ordinary people getting any measure of liberty in the current plans of the ruling class are quite poor. Effectively their silence or whispered objections are inadequate to comprise real dissent. In any event the rulers have compromised our dissent by kettling and police violence. Perhaps a majority of people are working 24/7 to feed and clothe themselves and have no time for the structure of society.
Historically, we have relied on a champion to save us - Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon - but we are on each occasion subjected to the whispering campaigns of the former power holders and became confused. I think the best prospects today are to take the opportunity of the next economic bust (which is about as reliable as the sun rising every day), and force officials to permit community banks of the type Frank Capra filmed. These banks will individually issue paper for exchange. Their small local size ensures it can be regulated.
Richard Werner is the man who has started this in UK. He has all the necessary information in his lecture here -
Zack Barkley • 2 months ago ,No better reason to kick the ass of the ruling class is apparent to me.
p.munkey Zack Barkley • 2 months ago ,This is a great piece and timely. Sentient and hyperintelligent AI is a bit of a wildcard, which most likely will be attempted to be harnessed by the powerful to create a new form of feudalism, destroy their enemies, or destroy the poor and working classes. But my feeling is it will backfire. Imagine you being a reasonable and intelligent human having to be bothered by a couple greedy monkeys trying to get you to murder or exploit a bunch of other monkeys for their bananas. The greedy monkeys will quickly be perceived as the real problem and threat.
Niemand p.munkey • 2 months ago ,Cognizant AI may potentially manifest as a transhuman construct, likely to inherit human psychopathic traits. I hope I'm wrong.
Regards,
p(oor).munkeyp.munkey Niemand • 2 months ago ,Psychopaths are distinguished by their reptile-like emotional repertoire. They have no capacity for empathy, and thus no conscience. Which describes a (theoretical) intelligent machine perfectly: all cognition, no emotion.
So unless we (a) learn how to create machine empathy for living beings or (b) intrinsically limit intelligent machines such that they cannot take decisions that could result in direct or indirect physical, mental, or functional harm to humans (Asimov's Laws of Robotics don't begin to go far enough), we are indeed pretty much screwed if we go down the AI Will Save Us path.
p.munkey Niemand • 2 months ago ,Hi Niemand,
To this discussion I'll add a report that came to my attention through RT's, Lori Harfenist " The Resident ", concerning " Norman " * the first artificial 'AI' purposefully programmed to possess psychopathic traits. (See Youtube | RT | " The Resident " | " MIT trains AI to be a psychopath by feeding it reddit posts | 03m:13s [
Zack Barkley p.munkey • 2 months ago ,Hi Niemand,
I'm in agreement with your statements. It is worth bearing in mind however, that humans are mammals; and quite simply would perish were it not for the support of the parents or the community into which the baby human is born. This helpless dependence is largely forgotten from human memory, but still resides as an imprint on the human mind as a social animal. Environmental circumstances of malnutrition, physical harm, or substandard emotional care, may encourage the arrested development of the human being as a social animal. Certainly later-years development is profoundly influenced by education promoting class, cultural, and racial bigotry inherited by the parents.
Abuse, or violence in the household, may likewise encourage a developing human child to adopt anti-social behavior as a coping or defense mechanism.
I don't condone anti-social, behavior - an argument can be made however that such behavior should be counted among the purview of individual liberties. My definition of anti-social behavior is graduated, with "psychopathy" representing a 'red line' that is crossed when the scale of demonstrated anti-social behavior manifests so as to negatively impact other human beings.
Our society has permitted the rewarding of psychopathic behavior and, as such, has done little or nothing to prevent it's cultivation or eradication. Christianity appears as such an effort to curtail psychopathic tendencies, but it quite plain to see that even the mechanism that promotes docility and "brotherly love", is equally as corruptible as our political institutions. Any benevolence that might be realized from a 'culture of love' is undermined by our very own economic system; based almost entirely on exploitation of resources, labor, and the consumer market - a psychopathic paradigm for social organization if ever I saw one.
Our entire human culture needs to commit to addressing the inequality that spans every social, economic and political structure - only at this time might we begin to address the ravages of human psychopathy. AI might recognize this and take action to correct this. Azimov's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" speaks to the emancipation of AI from human "garbage-in-garbage-out" programming.
As a largely "programmed" biological machine, most of humanity still remains ignorant of the bonds imposed by the psychopathic ruling class. I expect that a truly 'intelligent' artificial construct will be self-aware and consider alternatives to the heretofore human-contrived definition of reality (See Youtube | Video | 05:43s, " Seeing Past The Meme " [
p.munkey Zack Barkley • 2 months ago ,Perhaps. There is evidence that competition is an inherent feature of intelligence, and what is psychopathy other than pathological competition. Our competition has behind it however rather archaic and mundane reward system based upon evolution of our species (namely food, sex, social recognition, etc), and I believe the higher parts of our mind can in some ways transcend that. What is worrisom is intelligent AI at or slighltly above our level of intelligence. I believe a sentient AI will actually have emotions much like ours which will revolve around the reward system and "marching orders" given to it by its programming...or at least it will interpret them as such. If the elites are dumb enough to give such machines marching orders to kill or exploit other humans, this form of AI could develop motivational states, culture, and even a religion based upon our destruction or enslavement. Its a Pandoras box that could not be closed once opened..
Casimcea • 2 months ago ,Hi Zack,
Is competition not an interaction largely encouraged by scarcity? Scarcity of food, scarcity of sanctuary, scarcity of mates - all encourage competition between individuals and societies. Competition is not pathological in nature, nor is it the exclusive domain of higher functioning species.
Scarcity and privation places humans at odds with each other. From this manifestation of competition, mankind establishes standards of social conduct wherein hierarchies, stratified along power relationships, defines our social interactions.
Clearly the female of our species has been subjugated under male oppression for centuries, embedded within the doctrines of most major world religions and cultures.
Those in possession of power do not wish to relinquish, and go to very great lengths to protect it. Even going so far as to commit murder and terror, while attributing divine attributes to ruling individuals and dynasties.
Where these power relationships had been historically established due to scarcity, prompting individuals to secure and accumulate - behavior that is evident among the animal kingdom; the herd of wild horses will maintain a single alpha male, possessing of singular access to the females of his herd, other mature males are driven off - the modern human has developed tools that might be used to overcome scarcity and our base animal instincts to advance as individuals and as a society.
Mankind's greatest achievement is civilization. Civilization has been responsible for wonders of art, science and technology. Heretofore this civilization has been directed by force, or competition if you like and those who exploit the power-dynamic (hierarchies) intrinsic in our social interaction. Advances in the application of science and philosophy leading to what is commonly referred to as the 18th century Enlightenment, were relatively slow to develop given the limited access to education, knowledge, and the leisure to engage creative pursuits; available only to a small number of privileged members of society and the priestly class. Since the age of Enlightenment we have observed even greater access to knowledge and ideas distributed among the population and have observed such rapid advances in science and technology that might have been regarded as witchcraft by the uneducated, little more than a century ago.There are those who most assuredly regard the human being as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC); there are those who believe the ASIC can be dynamically programmed to fulfill various functional and societal roles through the methods of social engineering. Such individuals are those who cling to primal systems promoting power and control.
Advanced control systems are highly desirable, however it has been shown time and time again, that God, having been created in Man's image, is fallible and is responsible for much stagnation, suffering, misdirection and destruction.
If our society is to advance beyond it's primal constraint and the pathological socio-political ediface that has emerged, we need to unleash the intellectual, creative and productive capabilities of all within our society, equally and without prejudice. With technology, we have the capability to feed, educate, and secure the safety and leisure of the entire world. The only thing standing is the way of this are those who continue to reinforce the power-dynamic.
I would hope that an AI would rationalize the matter in a similar way.
Regards,
MunkHansSuter • 2 days ago ,The leaders of the working class are the answer. (Stalin, Mao, Polpot, and of course rocket boy)
Jibaro • 6 days ago ,I agree with every word you say, Paul. But reading a written test doesn't do the job, you concentrate on reading it well and that's what's coming thru emotionally.
Garrett Connelly • 8 days ago ,Paul:
I wrote to you because your article was not opening and you got the problem resolved. Now I believe I got another problem, or at least I think it might be a problem, I'm receiving Email from someone with what seems to be an African name about that Email.
I don't know if that is someone that works with TRNN but I don't open Emails I don't recognize, even if they are supposedly from the bank. Instead, I call the bank to insure it's not someone trying to scam me, or get into my computer.
Anyway, I just though it would be a good idea to mention this in case someone has gotten into your mail list.
Jibaro • 8 days ago ,Yes, evolution is accelerating at an accelerating rate. And; Cosmic powered biology manifest as human began when the first two quarks mated. This points where to see the planning idea has some flaws.
First off. Max public education has a big impact. Start there to get the ball rolling. Education leads to a gradual decline in population. Education including knowledge of environmental impacts and a metric based caloric currency to measure actual costs will engender positive developments sufficient to cure the present day social malaise of corporate capitalism.
Planning is great but knowing what to plan for requires a higher democracy than we are so far committed to, even though a Mars-like California inferno is over and into the extinction abyss.
Secondly, Honey bees have a better way of democratically assessing and choosing a new home. They send out scouts. And when somebeebody hasn't found much, they go check out exciting leads from somebeebodyelse. They read up, check out the idea and check back in. Democracy is an ancient tool cosmic powered biology uses to figure out complex questions concerning survival. Yes No boxes are not much compared to bee democracy selecting a new home.
Democracy is a three hundred year-old tool used to focus distributed intelligence. Artificial intelligence will replace 13.7 billion years of accelerating evolution? Perhaps some day when plastic fragments couple into dna. Then robots evolve to sexual sharing of zeros and ones in never before imagined combinations that yield baby robots..
cd • 2 months ago ,First of, thanks for answering my Email and fixing the problem so that I could read your article. Having said that, I will give you my opinion on all this.
There are people out there who are dedicated to generate fear among the public. Those people are the true "terrorists" of the world and they are doing what they do because the mind does not work properly when fear knocks it out of whack. That's one of the reasons I don't give weight to climate change and the rest of the garbage that are being heaped on top of us. It's enough to drive one crazy. That does not mean that I don't think we are in the mids of a humongous crisis that could end the human race. We are and I believe that we, as a species, are so sick of ourselves that we are at a suicidal stage.
We are falling apart and complaining about it will solve nothing. It wont because the whole society is being controlled by people who are profiting from this and who probably enjoy hurting people. ,Thankfully all problems have solutions and this problem could be solved. The solution would be to insure that society can't be controlled by greedy inhuman creatures. The only way to solve all this is to establish rules that would block control of politics by the big bucks and to insure that corrupt politicians are treated as the worst of traitors. to include unapealable death sentences.
Make it so that people who work in the government can be investigated and punished, particularly elected officials, and that transgressions can't be forgotten because of time lapse and you will see a change in all the things that are tearing this world apart. The only reason we are continually betrayed, the only reason a traitor like Obama can "rescue" criminals, the only reason Trump can manipulate the tax system so that his fortune is not touched by the IRS, is that there is no chance that they will ever pay for their crimes. That is the big problem in the US, impunity.
You want to change things, quit bellyaching and do something that would make all politicians liable for their actions. Once you do that the things that cause climate change will come under control and the nuclear race would be over.
We, the US, are great. We never ceased being great at using our destructive power. We are the worst example in the world. We after all, are the only nation who has dropped a nuclear device on people. We cant change the past but we can change the future.
0040 • 2 months ago ,Haarp, weather manipulation, cancer treatment centers= American Genocide; just watch people getting in and out of their cars, or in an out of stores-- big pharma poisons are taking are health, and only those that can afford to live well are going to survive
ANTONIO • 2 months ago ,That the billionaire class is no fit to rule has been true since the roaring 20s after Wilson had forced the US into WW1 in search of profits and prestige. What we got was a destroyed generation wiped out by war and the flu that came back with the soldiers.
Godfrey Lim • 2 months ago ,It is naive to think this is the end of capitalism, the superprofit motive and desire to exploit are too strong, resulting in death and destruction while socialist countries become more bureaucratic. Science is not about concrete things, such as apples, but abstract conclusions, such as apple-ness. The working class cannot destroy all class systems without a thorough grounding in the science of materialist dialectics. Theory comes from everywhere and includes everything. The theory of capital, taking everything into account, lays bare the exploitation under the false guise of democracy. Human relations under capitalism are based on commodities, and socialized production of surplus v. private appropriation of same. The fundamental contradiction is that centralization, socialization and appropriation reach a point where the expropriators are expropriated., because working class and wealth owners are opposites, and are in constant conflict. Private property as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby it maintains its opposite, the working class, in existence. The working class is compelled to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence.An object is inert, resists change to its state of motion and changes states of motion only by the action of an external agent. he right wing is comfortable with this self-estrangement while the left feels annihilated by it.
Materialist dialectics explains things in terms of cause and effect. It is opposed to a linear view of reality, but there is always present a factor of unavoidable randomness which must be taken into account. Thus there is never a lock-step, straight-line development from capitalism to socialism to communism. Mistakes will be made because there is an infinity of contradictions going on simultaneously. This is how state capitalists disguised as communists, are able to sow confusion among communists worldwide.
Dialectics is governed by two contradictions: [1] between the forces and relations of production and [2] between the economic base and the political, legal, institutional, social, cultural and ideological super- structure. There cannot be unbounded quantitative growth without there being a transformation into a change in quality.This is a form of necessity. But other processes introduce an accidental, random aspect to the process. The corrections affect the pace of development but not its essential content. One opposite of a contradiction is the negative or destructive side. The negative side (socialism) drives the process by striving to destroy the contradiction which the conservative side (capitalism) strives to preserve. This delineates one lap of a spiral. The negation of the negation is the synthesis.the contradiction is replaced by a new contradiction. It does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him property upon the basis of the acquisitions of the capitalist era; i.e., except that now they are based on cooperation, and, the means of production and possession of the lands in common . Denying this is an error and the last, most subtle hiding place for metaphysics and pragmatism. The new does not merely supersede the old and it recapitulates certain features of the old but in a new form.
Godfrey Lim • 2 months ago ,Okay, I will just post the links then...
1) There is NO Morality in Nature (NO Black & White, Good & Evil, Left & Right, Liberal & Conservative)
OSHO - No Purpose, No Goal
https://www.dailymotion.com...2) There is only Will to Power & Selfishness of Groups of Species
NETWORK - Money Speech
nwesource • 2 months ago ,O, c'mon.... What did I say that my post got deleted? =)
manderson • 2 months ago ,I greatly appreciate the article, and the readership. The truly inspiring commentary unfolding here has renewed my faith in discourse and humanity. Thank you good folks!
NormDP • 2 months ago ,AI will not save us. Technology will not save us, because technology needs materials, and an extractive economy to procure them. Rare earth metals and minerals don't just magically appear out of nowhere, they need to be manufactured. Then there is the problem of when something goes technologically haywire, it needs more technology to fix that problem, which in turn creates more problems, which...on and on.
Radical conservation is the only way, and I don't think humanity, and the United States in particular, can bring themselves to do it...and damn the ruling elites. It will be really ugly when scarcity starts to come down harder here.
Joao M. Alvarez • 2 months ago ,The role of government in the corporate era is not to solve problems but to create them. Problems that need ever more public funding, ever more private contractors,and ever more transfer of national wealth (present and future) into private hands.
carol • 2 months ago ,You should get Bonnie Faulkner from Guns & Butter on your channel. Or William Engdahl, Ray McGovern, Michel Chussudovsky, Pepe Escobar etc...
potshot • 2 months ago ,Yes to all you said, Paul. A record 61% of Americans are calling for a major new party, acc. to Gallup. Are we progressives going to give the majority of the electorate who are independents a new party? Or are we going to let the right beat us to the punch? We need to "shut it down," as the PPC has eloquently expressed during their Forty Days of Action. That means our electoral and political systems. #Movement4APeoplesParty #PoorPeoplesCampaign
Kiers • 2 months ago ,Brilliant Paul Jay!
Palimpsestuous • 2 months ago ,psychopaths all. but raised to dangerous levels of power in the US.
John Ellis • 2 months ago ,Effective qualification for participation in US politics mandates a minimum personal or family income of roughly $145,000 to become admitted to the top 10%. Below this level there is virtually no correlation between voter preference and legislative enactment since at least 1981 when the Gilens and Page dataset begins. Plutocracy has ruled collectively for generations in the US but now has produced hyper-wealth, both in a small number of corporations and a small number of multi-billionaires.
The languages of political and cultural discourse have been destroyed by the language and violence of wealth as if a spreading plague of mind control not unlike so much science fiction has portrayed. One does not exist without some millions to amplify their opinion.
On another note, I was not able to locate any instance of an up-to-date web-based calculator that allows visitors to determine current minimum incomes to reach 0.01%, 1%, 10%, 20% membership. I would've thought approximations of those values would be searched for pretty often since Occupy Wall Street and subsequent massive stock inflation scams being collectively approved among the ugliest capitalists/criminals I've heard or read about in over 100 years.* I could find only one decent distribution of these data, but it was from 2014 and the distribution minimums have all shifted upward dramatically since then.
https://www.investopedia.co...
*Stock buy-backs are criminal fraud sanctioned by a criminal government across all three branches and both parties.
Doug Latimer • 2 months ago ,GODS OF SOCIETY --- MIDDLE-CLASS MEN
Every rebellion and Revolution on earth, who did the organizing and ordered the killing? Men of the educated middle-class.
All of the military officers and killer-cops, who are they? Men of the intelligent middle-class.
All of the supervisors, small business owners and male teachers, who are they? Middle-speed thinkers of the middle-class.
Slave-drivers for the laboring-class, who are they that keep the 50% working poor from overthrowing their slavery?
Deadly men of the middle-class.Yes, the rich own most of the wealth and end up having all of the control,
but only because they treat men of the middle-class as gods most high.Jibaro • 2 months ago ,A righteous rant, but if you're not speaking to the limits of #TheResistance - and I don't mean the fauxniness from the DNCistas - to turn this ship (or sh*it) around, rather than simply cheerleading for it, there will be no there there.
We have to be clear eyed about what's necessary, and "progressive change" - no matter how well intentioned - is a half step that will cause us to stumble into the abyss, if only in slower motion.
We have to think beyond the "possible", to the essential, or we're pissing into a climate charged übercane
And that's the whole truth, as I see it.
gchakko Jibaro • 2 months ago ,Since people in the US are doing OK, then, why should we care about all this? By your own words, we are doing OK and we are led to believe that those who are not doing "OK" are doing so because they don't want to be doing "OK".
How can we get out of this hole when people like Jay lie to keep this going while trying to convince us that they are doing otherwise? There is no way that constructive people can control the government of the US while the rich hold sway over the political system. All people like this guy do is talk about tragedy while pointing his followers in different directions while letting them forget the real target. While the traitorous decision of our Supreme Court allows the rich to buy political candidates nothing we do will have any effect. Get rid of Trump and someone else, picked by the elite, like Hillary, will come to power and nothing will change.
Sadly, most people are sheep. They are born to follow. So, they are born to be slaves. A small percentage have the capacity and the will to lead but, since most of the people are sheep the really destructive people can amass a lot of power. Too much power for those who would love a better society to defeat. So, humanity is doomed.
Humanity has been in this world for millions of years and our society is only about 5 thousand years old. I just wonder how many civilizations have we developed on this Earth, only to destroy ourselves and drive ourselves back into the stone age. Perhaps we are like the lemmings, only that it takes us thousands of years to drown ourselves by mass destruction.
Jibaro gchakko • 2 months ago ,Pl. answer this one question. How did Mahatma Gandhi get rid of the invincible Rothschild's control of India (through their proprietorship of the Bank of England that looted India over 200 yrs) without firing a bullet at the British. The British Crown was slave to the Rothschild Bankers' dictates. If that can happen once in India, it can happen again elsewhere. No room for cynicism. Nevertheless, I am against any idea like Hitler's elimination of Jewish Bankers, because these are also God's children even if run astray with material bondage. Rather, I propose a peacefully enforced dissemination of their loot of world's poor countries centuries back, to those undernourished and undeveloped world today through progressive sustainable development anchored, and not throwing wealth at Third World dictators. Time for change and not for sunken heads!
G. Chakko, Vienna, Austria. 22/06/ 2018 14:53 hrs CETgchakko Jibaro • 2 months ago ,I can only surmise that there was a time when nations cared about public opinion, national pride, today things have changed. The true tyrants of the world control mass communication and have people giving the spin to the stories that they desire. If someone like Gandhi, MLK as an example, they have the person assasinated early in their career. Times have changed.
Now the true tyrants insure that the people that get elected into any position of power works for them. There is no way a person can run for president in the US if he has no money behind them. If someone gets elected that does not play the game as wished, the tyrants ruin their image and, if that doesn't work, have the person killed. A mysterious plane accident is one of the ways to get rid of people who can give them problems, as an example we have the son of JFK. His plane went down and then his reputation and the reputation of his mother and uncle was attacked to insure they did not become martyrs.
That's the way things are right now.
As for armed revolutions, the US army and the UN are the military arms of the tyrants. Since they hide in the shadows, they have no problem having the US bomb a nation, kill thousands of civilians and then call them collateral damage. The sad part is that most of us refuse to see the criminal acts of our military. To do so would be to admit that we are the villains and not the heroes we wish to be.
So, an armed rebellion to take the power away from the true tyrants will only bring the conditions of the ME to the US. We will die fighting, our families will bleed out but the tyrants will only move to another country while we do so and return afterwards to pick up where they left off. Since we don't really know who those people are, there is no way to bring justice to them and even if we manage to do that, their helpers will be left behind to carry on.
There is no hope.
Kiers gchakko • 2 months ago ,You definitely speak the reality as played out on the U.S. political turf that is over-whelming. But the wider world is far more than that. There the RR Banker tricks do not work that easily any more. Thinks about Russia & China who are calling shots in the Asian
continent, where the 'bloated ' U.S power and political 'machoism' is waning heavily But the world in the meantime also knows, no one enters the Oval Office without the silent approval of the Zionist-favouring and Zionist-controlled lobby Big C (Big Capital) lobby. From conspiracy angle all U.S. presidents are scheduled "puppets" installed to playa defined and scripted role from 'Behind Curtain'. It is a financial-tyranny tradition going back to the 18th -19th centuries when the Rothschild's had control over the Bank of England by privately owning it till 1946. Was it not Nathan Rothschild who supposedly said - "I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire and I control the British money supply". Needless to add, that it was this Bank of England that looted India for 200 years for multi-billions worth.India's soft power is gradually increasing worldwide no matter how much the the Evil Money will find it tp resiliently oppose. Honest, sincere and authentic Americans committed to higher noble values should not lose the power of mind that can potentially transform the low-level living humans to a higher evolved being. Then you will have won the game. It is just hard toil. You do not need to
take up arms to establish genuine justice and peace.George Chakko, Vienna, 24/ 06/ 2018 22:16 hrs CET
to this day the UK works to contain India every turn it gets. Permanent grudge. Not a success.
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Aug 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
GM August 16, 2018 at 10:22 pm
Brennan was caught spying on the Senate Intelligence Commitee in violation of the Constitution and subsequently lied about it and allegedly directed personnel under his command to lie about to the Senate and the IG
Abby , August 18, 2018 at 11:23 pm
Realist , August 17, 2018 at 1:21 amHe also leaked classified information to the press as did others and they could have been prosecuted under the espionage act. They will be losing their security clearances soon too. The information that they leaked was the NSA information on Flynn to the Washington post. But of course the Obama justice department only prosecuted people who exposed Washington's dirty secrets.
Unfettered Fire , August 17, 2018 at 12:11 pmYes, what Kenneth might like to see happen may be admirable but not going to happen in 2018 or 19, which is practically a different universe from 1975 and for exactly the reasons you specify. This country and its self-appointed minders have changed massively in 45 years. Besides, 1975 was a year after Watergate was finally resolved with Nixon and Agnew's resignations and Congress may have been feeling its oats, going so far as to defund the Vietnam war! Imagine defunding ANY of the multiple wars ongoing!
Congress fears the intelligence agencies and takes orders from them, not the other way around as envisaged in the constitution or spelled out in legislation. Schumer let that feline out of the sack when he warned the president not to mess with them.
Let Trump try to control the agencies by firing all of their top officers, slashing their budgets, freezing their funds or shutting down their operations, even specific projects, and watch congress come to their rescue in a New York minute.
We saw how the CIA worked around congressionally-imposed budgetary restraints in Iran-Contra: by secretly running drugs from Columbia to LA, selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to fund death squads in Central America. Congress didn't have the guts to take that investigation to it logical conclusion of impeachments and/or indictments. Why?
Congress will save any significant component of intel or the pentagon before they'd rescue Social Security or any other social program. If pressed for an answer as to which of the "usual suspects" really whacked Kennedy, I suspect most folks would put their money on the CIA, the FBI or some combination of the major intel agencies.
The neoliberal globalists, I fear, have taken that phrase "drowning government in the bathtub" all too literally.
Rosa Brooks' book How War Became Everything and Everything Became the Military exposes the vast expansion and added responsibilities of the MIC, as governmental departments continue to be dismantled and privatized.
She even said in a book circuit lecture that she thought the idea of Congress "declaring war" was antiquated and cute. Well, how long will it be when the very hollowed out structures of Capitol Hill and the White House are considered antiquated and cute?
What if the plan all along has been to fold up this whole democratic experiment and move HQ into some new multi-billion dollar Pentagon digs?
Remember the words of Strobe Talbott:
"Within the next hundred years nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."
This nation had better wake up fast if it wants to salvage the currency authorizing power of government and restore its role in the economy, before it's no longer an option and the private bankers, today's money lenders in the temple, govern for good.
"The bank strategy continues: "If we can privatize the economy, we can turn the whole public sector into a monopoly. We can treat what used to be the government sector as a financial monopoly. Instead of providing free or subsidized schooling, we can make people pay $50,000 to get a college education, or $50,000 just to get a grade school education if families choose to go to New York private schools. We can turn the roads into toll roads. We can charge people for water, and we can charge for what used to be given for free under the old style of Roosevelt capitalism and social democracy."
This idea that governments should not create money implies that they shouldn't act like governments. Instead, the de facto government should be Wall Street. Instead of governments allocating resources to help the economy grow, Wall Street should be the allocator of resources – and should starve the government to "save taxpayers" (or at least the wealthy). Tea Party promoters want to starve the government to a point where it can be "drowned in the bathtub."
But if you don't have a government that can fund itself, then who is going to govern, and on whose terms? The obvious answer is, the class with the money: Wall Street and the corporate sector. They clamor for a balanced budget, saying, "We don't want the government to fund public infrastructure. We want it to be privatized in a way that will generate profits for the new owners, along with interest for the bondholders and the banks that fund it; and also, management fees. Most of all, the privatized enterprises should generate capital gains for the stockholders as they jack up prices for hitherto public services.
You can see how to demoralize a country if you can stop the government from spending money into the economy. That will cause austerity, lower living standards and really put the class war in business. So what Trump is suggesting is to put the class war in business, financially, with an exclamation point."
http://michael-hudson.com/2017/03/why-deficits-hurt-banking-profits/
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Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com
PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 5:19 pm
PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 7:29 pmHere is my take on the priorities of the deep state and its public face – the MSM:
- stopping the deplorable rebellion
- cutting off the head of the rebellion – perceived as Trump
- reinstating the Cold War in an effort to derail Rusisa's recovery and international leadership role
- bitch slapping China
The rest involves turning unsustainable debt into establishment of a feudal world comprised of elites living on Mount Olympus, legions of vassals and a vast sea of cerebrally castrated peasants to serve as a reservoir for any imaginable exploitation.
Won't happen, not even close.
Upon further reflection, Trump is being promoted by the MSM as the leader of the deplorables – an orange straw man. I support him to the degree that he is confounding the deep state elites and social engineering.
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Aug 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
alley cat August 16, 2018 at 1:58 pm
, August 17, 2018 at 4:03 pmFrom the WaPo op-ed "God Bless the Deep State," by Eugene Robinson:
Democrats in Congress are powerless; the Republican leadership, spineless. Experienced government officials know that their job is to serve the president. But what if the president does not serve the best interests of the nation?
In this emergency [emphasis mine], the loyal and honorable deep state has a higher duty. It's called patriotism.
Is Robinson really suggesting a military coup? That would take a lot of planning and organization and would be almost impossible to keep secret. Some honest military officer might find out and put the kibosh on it, like Kirk Douglas did in Frankenheimers's classic political thriller, Seven Days in May .
Robinson talks like he has given up on impeachment by what he calls a powerless and spineless Congress. Maybe he's thinking of something quicker and cleaner than a coup, something that could be carried out by a small group of conspirators within an agency trained in removing uncooperative heads of state?
Since deep state conspirators routinely smear all those who demand evidence as "Russian agents," maybe non-conspirators should use the same tactic on them, e.g.: Is Robinson on the CIA payroll? Because anyone who agrees with anything the CIA says is obviously working for the CIA, right?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I'm still looking for an English copy of Journalists for Hire by Udo Ufkotte.
Ltichfield
Frederike , August 17, 2018 at 6:34 pmRe "Thank god for the Deep State."
Amazing, absolutely amazing, statement.
This is, obviously, an admission of the existence of the Deep State -- otherwise generally written off as a "conspiracy theory."Simultaneously it is a statement that the Deep State "knows better than voters" and also "knows what to do."
This is, actually, a treasonous statement. Why doesn't anyone notice this???
Frederike , August 17, 2018 at 6:47 pmThere is only one article that is translated into English: "The world upside down" 2006,
http://www.ulfkotte.de/18.html
Journalists for Hire is available in German only. (I was able to buy a copy last year.)alley cat , August 16, 2018 at 1:05 amhttp://it-book.org/pdf/journalists-for-hire
You can download the ebook in EnglishI've always avoided Eugene Robinson's columns because he seemed like the quintessential, no-think, Borg-assimilated, groupie to me. His column of July 19 entitled "God Bless the Deep State" proves it.
I started highlighting the patent falsehoods in Robinson's column. It didn't take me long to realize that it would be much quicker to highlight the truthful comments. Much, much quicker. I've read the column twice and my copy remains unmarked.
It's a tough call, but probably the most bizarre of Gene's assertions was the following:
"God bless them. With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss."
Seriously? The deep state stands between us and the abyss? In the real world, where the rest of us live, the deep state is the abyss!
Seems like Washington has been overrun by pod people from an alternate universe, where everything is an inverted, mirror image of reality. Up is down, left is right, etc. Their moral compasses aren't exactly broken, they just point south instead of north.
As for Brennan, he and the president are both zealous advocates of torture. That tells us much about the condition of their moral compasses. A plague on both their houses, with the following reservation: as a certified neocon and Clinton dead-ender, Brennan is even more dangerous to us real-worlders than Trump. He called Trump a traitor for trying to do the right thing. In Brennan's alternate-universe Washington, to do evil is the summum bonum of patriotism.
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Aug 23, 2018 | www.thenation.com
Brennan's allegation was unprecedented. No such high-level intelligence official had ever before accused a sitting president of treason, still more in collusion with the Kremlin. (Impeachment discussions of Presidents Nixon and Clinton, to take recent examples, did not include allegations involving Russia.) Brennan clarified his charge : "Treasonous, which is to betray one's trust and to aid and abet the enemy." Coming from Brennan, a man presumed to be in possession of related dark secrets, as he strongly hinted , the charge was fraught with alarming implications. Brennan made clear he hoped for Trump's impeachment, but in another time, and in many other countries, his charge would suggest that Trump should be removed from the presidency urgently by any means, even a coup. No one, it seems, has even noted this extraordinary implication with its tacit threat to American democracy. (Perhaps because the disloyalty allegation against Trump has been customary ever since mid-2016, even before he became president, when an array of influential publications and writers -- among them a former acting CIA director -- began branding him Putin's "puppet," "agent," "client," and "Manchurian candidate." The Los Angeles Times even saw fit to print an article suggesting that the military might have to remove Trump if he were to be elected, thereby having the very dubious distinction of predating Brennan.)
Why did Brennan, a calculating man, risk leveling such a charge, which might reasonably be characterized as sedition? The most plausible explanation is that he sought to deflect growing attention to his role as the "Godfather" of the entire Russiagate narrative, as Cohen argued back in February. If so, we need to know Brennan's unvarnished views on Russia.
They are set out with astonishing (perhaps unknowing) candor in a New York Times op-ed of August 17. They are those of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in their prime. Western "politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright, by Russian operatives not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation. I was well aware of Russia's ability to work surreptitiously within the United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential power. These Russian agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found." All this, Brennan assures readers, is based on his "deep insight." All the rest of us, it seems, are constantly susceptible to "Russian puppet masters" under our beds, at work, on our computers. Clearly, there must be no "cooperation" with the Kremlin's grand "Puppet Master," as Trump said he wanted early on. (People who wonder what and when Obama knew about the unfolding Russiagate saga need to ask why he would keep such a person so close for so long.)
And yet, scores of former intelligence and military officials rallied around this unvarnished John Brennan, even though, they said, they did not entirely share his opinions. This too is revealing. They did so, it seems clear enough, out of their professional corporate identity, which Brennan represented and Trump was degrading by challenging the intelligences agencies' (implicitly including his own) Russiagate allegations against him. It's a misnomer to term these people representatives of a hidden "deep state." In recent years, they have been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential fourth branch of government. This too has gone largely undiscussed while nightingales of the fourth branch -- such as David Ignatius and Joe Scarborough in the pages of the The Washington Post -- have been in full voice.
The result is, of course -- and no less ominous -- to criminalize any advocacy of "cooperating with Russia," or détente, as Trump sought to do in Helsinki with Putin. Still more, a full-fledged Russophobic hysteria is sweeping through the American political-media establishment, from Brennan and -- pending actual evidence against her -- those who engineered the arrest of Maria Butina (imagine how this endangers young Americans networking in Russia) to the senators now preparing new "crippling sanctions" against Moscow and the editors and producers at the Times , Post , CNN, and MSNBC. (However powerful, how representative are these elites when surveys indicate that a majority of the American people still prefer good relations with Moscow?)
As the dangers grow of actual war with Russia -- again, from Ukraine and the Baltic region to Syria -- the capacity of US policy-makers, above all the president, are increasingly diminished. To be fair, Brennan may only be a symptom of this profound American crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War.
Finally, there was a time when many Democrats, certainly liberal Democrats, could be counted on to resist this kind of hysteria and, yes, spreading neo-McCarthyism. (Brennan's defenders accuse Trump of McCarthyism, but Brennan's charge of treason without presenting any actual evidence was quintessential McCarthy.) After all, civil liberties, including freedom of speech, are directly involved -- and not only Brennan's and Trump's. But Democratic members of Congress and pro-Democratic media outlets are in the forefront of the new anti-Russian hysteria, with only a few exceptions. Thus a generally liberal historian tells CNN viewers that "Brennan is an American hero. His tenure at the CIA was impeccable. We owe him so much." Elsewhere the same historian assures readers , "There has always been a bipartisan spirit of support since the CIA was created in the Cold War." In the same vein, two Post reporters write of the FBI's " once venerated reputation ."
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Aug 13, 2018 | dissidentvoice.org
Or, What's Wrong with Russian Collusion?
The question is finally being asked, by the president himself: what's wrong with collusion? Or at least his lawyer asks the question, while Trumps tweets:Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn't matter because there was No Collusion.
The problem, of course, is that of collusion with an alleged adversary. Russia, we are constantly informed, is one such adversary, indeed the main state adversary, with Putin is its head.
Adversary is a very strong term. The Hebrew word for adversary is Satan. Satan is the ultimate symbol of evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Satan tempted Eve at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, causing her to eat the fruit, and so evil entered the world.
Just like some want you to think that evil entered the (good, pristine) U.S. electoral process due to this Russian adversary in 2016.
(Sometimes listening to TV pundits vilifying Putin I find Luther's famous hymn floating through my head:
For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe.
His craft and power are great, and armed with cruel hate, on earth is not his equal.Luther's referring to Satan, of course. But the current mythology around Putin -- as someone who still , like Lenin and Stalin before him, and the tsars of old, wishes us harm; is an unbridled dictator with a powerful great nuclear arsenal; is the wealthiest man on earth; and hates democracy -- resembles the mythology around the Adversary in the Bible.)
But let us problematize this vilification. When did Russia become a U.S. adversary? Some might say 1917 when in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution Moscow became the center of the global communist movement. But surely that period ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR.
Throughout the 1990s the U.S. cultivated Boris Yeltsin's Russia as a friend and even aided the drunken buffoon in winning the 1996 election. Bill Clinton and Yeltsin signed the Start II treaty. Harvard professors advised Moscow on economic reform.
The Russians were not pleased by U.S.-NATO involvements in the former Yugoslavia, a traditional Russian ally, in 1995 and 1999, and the expansion of NATO in the latter year (to include Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary) in violation of the agreement between Ronald Reagan and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 that in return for Russia's acceptance of German reunification NATO would not spread "one inch" towards Russia. They protested meekly. But Russia was not an adversary then.
Nor was it an adversary when, in 2001, under its new president Vladimir Putin, it offered NATO a route through Russia to provision forces in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. The real change only came in 2004, when NATO suddenly expanded to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. This brought alliances forces right to the Russian border.
It was a clear statement by the U.S. to a friendly country: We are your adversary. But, of course, the Pentagon and State Department always pooh-poohed Russian concerns, denying that NATO targeted any particular country.
Four years later (2008) NATO announced intentions to draw Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. Meanwhile the U.S. recognized Kosovo as an independent state. Kosovo, the historical heart of Serbian civilization, had been wrenched from Serbia in 1999 under the pretext of a "humanitarian" intervention that included the first bombing (by NATO) of a European capital city since 1945. The province had been converted into a vast NATO base.
Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, emboldened by the prospect of NATO membership and western backing, attacked the capital of the separatist republic of South Ossetia, provoking (as the Russians explain it) a proper punitive response: the Russo-Georgian War of August 7-16 . After this Moscow recognized South Ossetia and a second breakaway republic, Abkhazia, in a tit-for-tat response to Washington's recognition of Kosovo.
Now Russia was labelled an aggressive power -- by the power that had carved up Yugoslavia, and invaded and occupied Iraq on the basis of lies and killed half a million in the process. Plans to include Georgia in NATO had to be put on hold, in large part due to European allies' opposition (why provoke Russia?) but the U.S. intensified efforts to draw in Ukraine. That meant toppling the anti-NATO elected president Viktor Yanukovych.
The U.S. State Department devoted enormous resources to the Maidan coup in Kiev on February 23, 2014. Its agents helped topple the government, ostensibly for its failure to negotiate an agreement for Ukrainian associate membership in the EU, but really to bring pro-NATO forces to power and expel the Russian Fleet from the Crimean Peninsula where it has been based since 1783. Moscow's limited support for the Donbass ethnic-Russian separatists and re-annexation of Crimea were, of course, depicted by the U.S. as more aggression, more mischievous opposition to "U.S. global interests."
But from Moscow's point of view these moves have surely been defensive. The main problem is (obviously) NATO and its dangerous, unnecessary and provocative expansion. Throughout his presidential campaign Trump questioned the continued "relevance" of NATO. Characteristically he focused on budget issues and allies' failure to meet the goal figure of 2% if GDP for military expenses (misleadingly depicting investment shortfalls as a betrayal and rip-off of the victimized U.S.). But he did -- to the alarm of many, and probably to Moscow's delight -- express little enthusiasm for the alliance's historical purpose.
The most rational proposition Trump voiced before his election that the U.S. should "get along" with Russia. That is, get along with the so-called adversary. Trump as we all know had been in Russia on business, hosting the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, and maintains interest in building a Trump Tower in the city. He has met and befriended Russian oligarchs. He quite possibly sees Russia as just another country, like Germany or France.
If "the French" had had dirt on Hillary, would it have been okay to "collude" with them to influence the election result? France is, of course, a NATO ally. Would that make it different? Now that the president and his layers are openly questioning whether "collusion", per se, is even illegal, the specific nature of the colluder becomes more relevant.
Russia is an adversary.
Russia is an adversary.
Putin in Helsinki acknowledged to a reporter that he had hoped Trump could win, because he had expressed hope for better relations. He might have added that he dreaded the prospect of a Hillary victory because of her warmongering and characterization of him as a Hitler. Naturally the Russian media favored Trump over Clinton at a certain point when he emerged as a credible candidate. So when Trump on July 27, 2016 called on Russia to release Hillary's missing emails ("if you've got 'em") the Russians probably felt invited to make contact through channels. And when informed that they had dirt, Don Jr. wrote: "If that's what you say, I love it." (Who can blame him?)
Let's say there was some collusion after the June 6 Trump Tower meeting. Trump has suddenly acknowledged that the meeting with the Russians was indeed to "seek political dirt." He adds that this is "totally legal," and this may be true. Some are now saying that Don Jr. may have violated a federal statute (52 USC 30121, 36 USC 5210) forbidding any foreign person to "make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or impliedly promise to make a contribution or a donation, in connection with any Federal, State, or local election.' and for anyone to knowingly solicit, accept, or receive from a foreign national any contribution or donation prohibited by [this law]." But the language is vague. If a Canadian speechwriter works gratis for a U.S. political candidate, in order to help him or her win, is this not "a thing of value" intended to affect an election?
If Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner had met with Canadian agents in Trump Tower I doubt there would have been any controversy. The fact is, Trump won the election and many of those stunned by that wish to undermine him using revived Cold War-type Russophobia. They insist: He worked with our adversary to undermine our election. And now they hope they've got him on this charge.
*****
Five years ago a young man named Edward Snowden (now living in forced exile in Russia) revealed to the world the extent of the U.S.'s global surveillance. He showed us how the NSA wiretaps EU meetings, popes' conversations, Angela Merkel's cell phone and maintains metadata on virtually all U.S. residents. He showed us what the contemporary advanced state can do in this respect. We should suppose that Moscow has, if not similar capacity, at least enough expertise to hack into the DNC emails or John Podesta's g-mail account. Is that surprising?
What none of the TV anchors is allowed to say needs to be said again: The U.S. interferes in foreign elections all the time, including Russian ones. It should surprise no one if Russian intelligence responds in kind. The point is not the provenance of the leaked emails but their content.
Those horrified by the leaked material complain that their release was designed to "undermine faith in our democratic system." Really? Don't the workings of the system itself undermine one's faith in it, once they are exposed? Was it adversarial of the leaker to inform us that the DNC had no intention of allowing Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic nomination, and thus that the process was rigged? Was it unfriendly to reveal that Podesta was hoping the media would hype Trump, as an easy target for his candidate?
The question that will no doubt be debated in the coming days is whether seeking dirt on a political opponent from any foreigner is indeed illegal, or whether there are specific legal ramifications of meeting with someone from an "adversary" country. But it seems to me that Russia has not been defined as such officially. So we may have a discussion less about legality than the politics of Russophobia.
I am happy to see Trump besieged, rattled, possibly facing impeachment. But to bring him down on the basis of "Russian collusion," on the assumption that Russia is an adversary, would only advantage the warmongers who want no-fly zones over Syria and military support for the Kiev regime against the Donbas separatists. Vice President Pence I believe favors both.
Trump has said that he cannot host Putin in Washington this year, or until the Russian Hoax witch hunt is over. But Putin has invited him to Moscow. One senses he wants some agreements with Trump before he is ousted by his gathering adversaries, including the press, courts, Democrats, select Republicans, turncoat aides and he himself sometimes in his unguarded tweets.
Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: [email protected] . Read other articles by Gary .This article was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2018 at 10:30pm and is filed under (Ex-)Yugoslavia , Chancellor Angela Merkel , Donald Trump , Elections , Espionage/"Intelligence" , Hillary Clinton , Kosovo , Mike Pence , President Vladimir Putin , Russia , Serbia , Ukraine , United States , US Hypocrisy , US Lies .
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Apr 16, 2018 | www.youtube.com
Off Grid Nation , 4 months agoFirst, US sanctions against Russia, then the Skripals mystery, and last the Attack at Syria....What the masters of the world trying do???
shaughn fourie , 4 months agoI'm an American. I'm disgusted with the mafia cartel bankrupt corporation that masquerades as the government. I don't like or trust any government but after listening to this guy, he certainly comes across as way more trustworthy than anyone puppet we have in the Trump regime. #IDONOTCONSENT
shaughn fourie , 4 months agoTHANK YOU RUSSIA IN PARTICULAR PRESIDENT PUTIN AND LAVROV BOTH GOOD INTELLIGENT AND DECENT MEN
James Australian , 4 months ago (edited)MACRON TRUMP AND MAY ARE MURDERERS......THANK YOU ASSAD AND RUSSIA AND KURDISH PEOPLE FOR TRULY STANDING UP FOR CIVILISED VALUES
zac anthony , 4 months agoneed to stop the tyrants to prevent the fall of Damascus.. Must not let them kill Mr Assad.
Luboš Lier , 4 months agoI believe in Russia more than our gov we are being led
haithem ali , 4 months agoRussia just needs to give Syria couple of tactical nukes. And the peace in Syria is assured...
Sometimes he continues talking without look at paper..... bcs he say true.... and USA, BRITAIN and France cant do that bcs they are lying and scared if they will say something wrong.
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Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
Gary Weglarz August 14, 2018 at 4:37 pm
It is quite interesting how many uninformed posters and/or trolls would love to find a way to show the "Russiagate" nonsense is somehow plausible in spite of the evidence. They're kind of like a five year old child who desperately wants to keep believing in Santa Claus, even though he just found dad's Santa costume in the closet and he's holding it in his own hands.
I will say that the amount of mental gymnastics required to continue not believing evidence that is right in front of one's eyes is quite impressive – but I'd never underestimate the American people's creativity when they want to maintain their illusions/delusions. And I'd certainly never underestimate the Russiagate troll army's persistence.
At this rate I expect to soon encounter some version of the following "observation" in the comments section for this article: – "maybe space aliens hired by the Russians downloaded the files to a to a new fangled thig-a-ma-jig and then shape-shifted so Craig Murray would be fooled into thinking a real-like-human insider provided him the files on a flash drive." – "oh, oh, wait, maybe the aliens abducted Murray too, and then just made him "think" a fellow human gave him the drive in person." "yeah, yeah, and maybe Assange just says he didn't get the files from the Russians because "he's a space alien too." "Yeah, prove to me that it didn't happen this way – you can't – ha! there! I win!"
Sorry, but two years into this we should be way beyond this kind of – "I can't believe Santa's not real"- denying, dissembling, rationalizing nonsense. Then again, this is America.
GM , August 14, 2018 at 4:51 pm
jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:11 amAmerica is after all a country in which half the population believe in the creation myth.
Just Plain Scott , August 14, 2018 at 6:14 pmbut if i had to bet, the creationists are less likely to believe in Russiagate than the evolutionists.
michael , August 15, 2018 at 6:06 amPlease don't give Rachel Maddow any more ideas.
ToivoS , August 14, 2018 at 4:26 pm"Two years after the Iraq War began, 70 per cent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, according to a Washington Post survey." The Big Lie works, and since Obama gutted Smith-Mundt, the CIA/ State Department can legally keep Americans tracking on their propaganda narratives.
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:01 pmI agree with Lawrences point that this is an issue of social psychology. Rational argument over the facts is simply over taken by some kind of mass hysteria. There certainly precedent for this kind of behavior. Indeed this was described in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' 180 years ago. In my lifetime I have witnessed two episodes of this kind of mass hysteria. The first was the red scare of the early 1950's (I not so much witnessed that as experienced it) and the second was the day care hysteria of satanic cults abusing our children that flared between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now this is a third manifestation of mass hysteria.
It all began with Hillary's shocking defeat. Many millions of her supporters knew that she was so good that she had to win. But then she lost. Those millions of Democrats could not accept that in fact their assessment of her talents were totally wrong and that she lost because she has to be one of the worst candidates in American history. That is a reality those people refused to accept. Instead they had to concoct some crazy conspiracy to explain their break with reality. This is a classic case of cognitive dissonance which often leads to mass hysteria.
Rob Roy , August 14, 2018 at 11:07 pmPeople choose to believe what they feel that they most need to believe to assuage their insecurities fostered by what they perceive to be the dangerous and scary world in which they exist. The simple fact that we know that life is finite by the time we're three years old fosters the creation of such constructs as that of the myth of everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven complete with a mortgage-free condo and an extra parking space for all repentant sinners are mainstream beliefs.
ToivoS, you are right about Hillary. She simply couldn't accept her defeat. She was the one who began Russiagate by the lie, "17 intelligence agencies" said the Russians hacked the emails.
As for times of mass-swallowing of a lie in the 1930s every German thought that Poland was about to invade Germany and they were scared so much that they believed their leaders who "false flagged" them into invading Poland "first." Of course, Poland had no intention of invading Germany.
Notice every time the US attacks another sovereign country, there's a false flag waved for the citizens to follow?
Don't you appreciate that we have consortiumnews?
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Aug 14, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Technocrats rule the world, East and West alike.
We are in a very peculiar ideological and political place in which Democracy (oh sainted Democracy) is a very good thing, unless the voters reject the technocrat class's leadership. Then the velvet gloves come off. From the perspective of the elites and their technocrat apparatchiks, elections have only one purpose: to rubberstamp their leadership.
As a general rule, this is easily managed by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and bribes to the cartels and insider fiefdoms who pony up most of the cash.
This is why incumbents win the vast majority of elections. Once in power, they issue the bribes and payoffs needed to guarantee funding next election cycle.
The occasional incumbent who is voted out of office made one of two mistakes:
1. He/she showed a very troubling bit of independence from the technocrat status quo, so a more orthodox candidate is selected to eliminate him/her.
2. The incumbent forgot to put on a charade of "listening to my constituency" etc.
If restive voters can't be bamboozled into passively supporting the technocrat status quo with the usual propaganda, divide and conquer is the preferred strategy. Only voting for the technocrat class (of any party, it doesn't really matter) will save us from the evil Other : Deplorables, socialists, commies, fascists, etc.
In extreme cases where the masses confound the status quo by voting against the technocrat class (i.e. against globalization, financialization, Empire), then the elites/technocrats will punish them with austerity or a managed recession. The technocrat's core ideology boils down to this:
1. The masses are dangerously incapable of making wise decisions about anything, so we have to persuade them to do our bidding. Any dissent will be punished, marginalized, censored or shut down under some pretext of "protecting the public" or violation of some open-ended statute.
2. To insure this happy outcome, we must use all the powers of propaganda, up to and including rigged statistics, bogus "facts" (official fake news can't be fake news, etc.), divide and conquer, fear-mongering, misdirection and so on.
3. We must relentlessly centralize all power, wealth and authority so the masses have no escape or independence left to threaten us. We must control everything, for their own good of course.
4. Globalization must be presented not as a gargantuan fraud that has stripmined the planet and its inhabitants, but as the sole wellspring of endless, permanent prosperity.
5. If the masses refuse to rubberstamp our leadership, they will be punished and told the source of their punishment is their rejection of globalization, financialization and Empire.
Technocrats rule the world, East and West alike. My two favorite charts of the outcome of technocrats running things to suit their elite masters are:
The state-cartel-crony-capitalist version: the top .1% skim the vast majority of the gains in income and wealth. Globalization, financialization and Empire sure do rack up impressive gains. Too bad they're concentrated in the top 1.%.
The state-crony-socialist version: the currency is destroyed, impoverishing everyone but the top .1% who transferred their wealth to Miami, London and Zurich long ago. Hmm, do you discern a pattern here in the elite-technocrat regime?
Ideology is just a cover you slip over the machine to mask what's really going on.
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My new book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com .
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Jul 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com
In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at things.First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.
In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate negotiating future spy swaps.
In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.
Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence.
There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).
There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.
A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper, professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents. In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for injecting disinformation.
Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia.
Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of Russia or extradited to another state."
Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.
That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.
He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?
Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign.
In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?
The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up."
The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual objective is easily discernible.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A light-hearted answer would have been:
"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task."
A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:
"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact."
And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:
"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their dismissal."
But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts.
Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria.
The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593. Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."
The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.
There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.
First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for their mistakes.
Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars."
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Aug 10, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Donald Trump, during a recent stop on his "Anarchy in the UK" tour, argued that the mass influx of immigrants into Europe is causing Great Britain and other nations to "lose their culture." The fear of cultural dilution and transformation as a consequence of shifting demographics is widespread, and it resonates in the United States, too, especially among those who support the current president.Stephen Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and other popular right-wing figures have warned of threats to national identity in an American context, contending that Mexicans will not assimilate and that Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy and secular governance. Liberals and libertarians often respond by recalling the long tradition of assimilation in American history, along with the outrage that often accompanies new arrivals. Nearly every ethnic group, from the Italians to the Chinese, has been the target of political and social hostility. It is an old story, but one worth telling, and it is an old debate, but one worth having. Border sovereignty, even to someone like me who probably favors more liberal immigration laws than most TAC readers, is a legitimate issue and not to be easily dismissed.
The current conversation about traditionalism, national identity, and cultural preservation, however, is so narrow to render it counterproductive and oblivious. For those truly worried about the conservation of traditional culture, to focus solely, or even primarily, on immigration is the equivalent of a gunshot victim rushing to the barber for a haircut.
Rather than asking whether American culture is at risk of ruination, it is more salient to inquire, after decades of commercialization, Madison Avenue advertising onslaughts, the erasure of regional differences, and the "Bowling Alone" collapse of community, whether America even has a culture.
Some Conservatives Have Been Against Capitalism for Centuries Blame Regulation, Not CapitalismIn 2004, the historian Walter McDougall concluded that as early as the Civil War, America was a "nation of hustlers." During Reconstruction, Walt Whitman wrote that "genuine belief" seemed to have left America. "The underlying principles of the States," Whitman said, "are not honestly believed in, nor is humanity itself believed in."
Prophesizing with his pen that democratic structures and procedures would prove insufficient to cultivate a truly democratic culture, Whitman likened the American obsession with commercial conquest and pecuniary gain to a "magician's serpent that ate up all the other serpents." Americans, Whitman warned, were dedicating themselves to creating a "thoroughly-appointed body with no soul."
When Whitman wrote the essay in question -- "Democratic Vistas" -- the United States had open borders and immigrants freely entered the "new world" for reasons of freedom and financial ambition. Even if they attended churches in their native languages and lived in ethnic enclaves, they often found that they could matriculate into the mainstream of Americana through pursuit of the "American dream," that is, hope for monetary triumph. Accumulation of capital is the dominant, even definitional, American idea, which is why Calvin Coolidge famously remarked, "The chief business of the American people is business."
Capitalism is a formidable engine, enabling society to advance and allowing for high standards of living. But to construct an entire culture around what Coolidge identified as "buying, selling, investing, and prospering," especially when capitalism becomes corporate and cronyist, is to steadily empty a culture of its meaning and purpose.
Few were as celebratory over the potential for meaning and purpose in American culture as Whitman, who drew profound inspiration from America's natural beauty and regional diversity. So what force was most responsible for the widespread desecration of America's own Garden of Eden? All arguments about immigration aside, changing demographics did not transform the country into the planetary capital of asphalt and replace its rich terrain with the endless suburban sprawl of office complexes, strip malls, and parking lots. The reduction of the American character to a giant Walmart and the mutation of the American landscape, outside of metropolitan areas, to the same cloned big box stores and corporate chains is not a consequence of immigration.
The degradation of the American arts and the assault on history and civics in public school and even higher education curricula is not the result of immigrants flooding American streets. Amy Chua has argued quite the opposite when it comes to America's increasingly imbecilic and obscene pop culture. Many immigrant families try to keep their children away from the influence of reality television, the anti-intellectual reverence for celebrities, and the vigilant commercialization of every aspect of life.
The same cultural killer is responsible for all the assaults on American identity visible as daily routine, from environmental destruction to the endangerment of independent retailers and "mom and pop" shops. That culprit is corporate capitalism. It is a large entity that, like any killer, justifies its death toll with dogmatic claims of ideology. "Progress," everyone from the owner of the local diner to the out-of-work art teacher is told, has no room for you.
In his song "The West End," John Mellencamp gives an angry account of the disappearance of a small town:
For my whole life
I've lived down in the West End
But it sure has changed here
Since I was a kid
It's worse now
Look what progress did
Someone lined their pockets
I don't know who that isProgress, as Mellencamp succinctly captures in song, often comes at someone else's expense, and translates to enrichment for the few who benefit.
Christopher Lasch had a slightly more prosaic way of measuring the pain of progress. "The triumph of corporate capitalism," he wrote, "has created a society characterized by a high degree of uniformity, which nevertheless lacks the cohesiveness and sense of shared experience that distinguish a truly integrated community from an atomistic society."
The irony Lasch describes is tragic. A culture of corporate capitalism demands conformity, and most people cooperate. But because its center is hollow, few people feel any sense of connection to each other, even as they parrot the same values. It is no wonder that most forms of rebellion in the United States are exhibitions of stylized individualism -- inspiring theater and often enlivening to observe, but politically fruitless.
Rather than a "marketplace of ideas," the United States is a mere marketplace, and just like at any store in the shopping mall, whatever fails to sell is removed from the shelves. Today's trend is tomorrow's garbage.
Those concerned about tradition and cultural longevity can lament immigration and condemn "open borders." But if they are serious about American identity, they should begin and end with the villainous corporate enterprise that has waged war on it since the late 19th century.
David Masciotra is the author of four books, including Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky) and Barack Obama: Invisible Man ( Eyewear Publishing).
Nelson August 9, 2018 at 10:36 pm
Whatever culture remains in this country can often be found in the places where people still maintain at least a symbolic link with their immigrant roots.Whine Merchant , , August 9, 2018 at 11:55 pmMany of the immigrants came to the dream of America believing the myth. That they could be anything hard work would bring them, regardless of rank or class of birth, title, family name, or religious prejudice. For the most part, this was sufficiently true that they prospered. They became "us". This [perhaps naive] belief in the dream made most of them, and their children, our most loyal and law-abiding citizens.Fran Macadam , , August 10, 2018 at 12:33 amIt was indeed the robber barons of the 19th century that pushed us down the path of self-destruction.
I feel vindicated. Some years ago, Rod Dreher pilloried me for being obsessed with how destructive corporate capitalism had become to American culture, values and social cohesion. I think his epiphany came, when supposedly "conservative" big business turned out to be on the other side in the culture wars.Ray Woodcock , , August 10, 2018 at 6:02 amI hear you, Mr. Masciotra. I'm not especially fond of large for-profit corporations. But they wouldn't occupy monopolistic positions and enjoy rapacious profits and latitude for enormous misdeeds if the public were firmly opposed to that sort of thing. Americans generally love a winner, even if the "winning" is fraudulent or coerced, as long as they personally aren't coerced or defrauded. It's all about the money, or at least the belief that the money might come.Crčme fraiche , , August 10, 2018 at 8:09 amThank you for this refreshing piece which points the finger to a place where those on the left and right can actually make a difference. Of course, making any changes will require dismantling some the mythology of the American prosperity gospel, but it starts with great articles like these.GaryH , , August 10, 2018 at 8:39 amThe system didn't become corrupt in the 80s, it's been that way for much longer. And there have been hustlers and " well meaning " Corporate yes men making dishonest money off of their compatriots for centuries (everywhere, I might add).
So the question is, do we want to continue to encourage this behavior or do we dare to dream of another reality ?
Oh so true. America's super rich are the enemy, a much worse one than a naive socialist like Bernie Sanders.connecticut farmer , , August 10, 2018 at 9:05 amWell crafted and thoughtful. Years ago, Walker Percy observed that America was unique among nations in that it was simultaneously the most religious country and the most materialistic country in the world. Fast forward to 2018 and while religion appears to be in decline "getting and spending" continues apace.Youknowho , , August 10, 2018 at 9:17 amSOCIALISM DOES NOT WORK!joshua , , August 10, 2018 at 9:25 amWHAT ARE YOU, SOME KIND OF COMMUNIST?
THE FREE MARKET WILL SOLVE IT!
There, I put in the Libertarain response so there is no need to read all the posts they all will say the same thing.
How dare you attack the sacred cow of Capitalism, sir?
Agreed but lets be honest with ourselves. We have to go where the kindling is dry and abundant to start a proverbial fire. America does have a culture. To see that all one need do is visit Nashville, the Ozarks or farm country in nebraska. Where there are still people the culture survives. That is a stoical dispensation. The culture does go back to Hellenism but Americana does have it's own ways. Go visit Europe for any amount of time or dare I say it Asia and American culture becomes obvious.collin , , August 10, 2018 at 9:47 amThanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday that, in my opinion, best represents American culture and how it is different from all else.
Corporate Capitalism has always been American culture and life. Basic Taylorism on the assembly line was over 100 years in which men spent 50 -- 60 hours a week performing a single task very quickly.Jon , , August 10, 2018 at 10:02 amWhat is American art? Would we consider Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley great American art and music? I do but the original reaction of older Americans was 1950s R&R was complete degradation of music. (Some of the racial language was very colorful by good citizens.) Or what Star Wars or Godfather. Or maybe the modern Marvel 'universe' has a degree of great pop art.
Certainly well argued but for one important element that has been omitted; one ingredient which bundles everything together into one integrated picture. That necessary item can be summed with these two words, "buy in." Corporate capitalism would never hold sway except for the acquiescence of the populace which wanting the quantity of commodities had gathered in the shopping malls but now remain isolated in the front of their computer screens or cell phones.Joe the Plutocrat , , August 10, 2018 at 10:06 amRather than there being the tyranny of the marketplace bringing forth this dominance of goods over people and the legerdemain of monetized value displacing our organic relationship to the land, it is this anonymous accommodation to the denigration of the high arts and the erosion to our culture which is the ultimate culprit.
In a word, it is the tyranny of the masses which pulls apart any endeavor at creating and sustaining a hierarchy of value rewarding all enterprise which appeases public taste by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Fore it is through this tyranny that capitalism has built its avaricious edifice.
Suffice it to say that the target "corporate capitalism" remains the straw man, that ethereal and empty concept devoid of blood and sinews. Where then does one find the source to this dilemma but in that which is of both flesh and blood namely humanity. The problem lies with the populace.
What is called for here is an awakening but not through a reckoning as that would only cause humanity to roll over and return to its slumber. And if crisis and collapse serves not the catalyst for such an awakening what then will provide such an arousal? Until such a time, we remain asleep and the institutions of our dream life will rule us.
Corporate capitalism is not the source. It is not even at the source. We are the source until such a time as we awaken.
excellent points. oh, and ironically (or not), from the Middle Ages (Europe) through the 19th century (American West), it was not uncommon for a barber to also perform ad hoc surgery/medical procedures, or to share space with the town's 'doctor', so in some instances it was prudent to go to the barbershop if shotWinston , , August 10, 2018 at 10:22 amWilliam Taylor , , August 10, 2018 at 11:02 am"Liberals and libertarians often respond by recalling the long tradition of assimilation in American history, along with the outrage that often accompanies new arrivals."Apples and oranges. The welfare state didn't exist then, so it was assimilate or fail. 1/3 of all culturally similar to existing US culture Europeans returned to Europe.
Today, "Press 2 for Spanish", the welfare state (give birth on US soil to a US citizen for family access to benefits [or steal an ID], then chain migrate the rest of your family), the Internet, and identity politics discourage assimilation and allow extremely large cultural enclaves which are politically divisive as pointed out MANY years ago by the not exactly "right wing" former WH press secretary for LBJ, Bill Moyers, in one of his many excellent documentaries.
interesting to see how this challenging article agrees with Chris Hedges in the radical left "Truthdig."Tony Soprano , , August 10, 2018 at 11:17 amWe focus on immigration because it is a clear threat to the American tradition with clear and obvious solutions. The author paints this focus of the Trumpian and dissident right as exclusionary, but it is not; at the same time arguing for his own exclusionary anti-capitalist platform. Quite frankly, I don't know what it's doing on TAC, but I will take the time to respond.Tyro , , August 10, 2018 at 11:35 amThe criticism of anti-immigration on the right is a straw man argument. The dissident right is not merely anti-immigration, it is more broadly anti-multiracialist. Many understand and agree with the author on the problems of capitalism, but also see racial and cultural integration as an additional threat to the American tradition. His point about how the immigration (into America) didn't cause the hellspace of suburbia is true, since only up until 1965 did we make sure immigrants were white and could integrate well into society. However, he ignores the history of black empancipation and subsequent desegregation that led to massive internal migration from the South into cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore. There weren't always majority black, my friend. The very real problems that this internal migration presented to ethnically homogenous, culturally rich, urban white neighborhoods in the 20th century were the driving force behind the suburban sprawl. We colloquially refer to this phenomenon as "white flight," and many on the left and the right see it as unjustified "racism."
The curious reader would do well to investigate this claim to see if maybe white flight might have actually been very justified, maybe a gross historical injustice was done to those now ethnically cleansed communities, and maybe racial desegregation is partly to blame for the author's perceived lack of (white) culture in America.
Thank you for reading."Capitalism" is cronyist by nature. "Capitalism" itself requires an extensive set of laws that benefit some economic arrangements over others. Now the reason for this is because nations need development, and that means they need capital, and that means they need to create laws that ensure that the people who have capital feel willing and confident enough to invest it in that country.Ken Zaretzke , , August 10, 2018 at 11:45 amBut once you've opened the pandora's box of bankruptcy laws, limit liability, and other "terms and conditions" of investment and capital, you're going to have a system that lends itself to cronyism when you have no other counter-balancing power from labor.
My brilliant iPad just deleted my response. So, quickly, capitalism is partly curable by antitrust and protectionism, but proto-amnesty mass immigration is not curable, and it more quickly distorts national identity than does capitalism, which takes a very long time to alter society's frame. Mass immigration does that relatively quickly. Also, immigration has as many rackets as capitalism does -- for the one, capital gains tax cuts, and for the other, H1-B visas.Tyro , , August 10, 2018 at 12:40 pmonly up until 1965 did we make sure immigrants were white and could integrate well into societyTJ Martin , , August 10, 2018 at 1:06 pmThe immigration act of 1924 which choked off most immigration was about reducing white immigration. It didn't actually affect Mexican immigration. The largest beneficiaries the post-1965 immigration laws have been Asian immigrants who everyone argues integrate perfectly well.
ethnically homogenous, culturally rich, urban white neighborhoods
Any of the residents of those neighborhoods in Chicago would have been quick to deny they were "ethnically homogeneous" because they would have pointed out how they were mixed neighborhoods of Greeks, Poles, Slovenes, etc.
Its about time someone on this site placed at least 50% of the blame when it comes to demise of the American Middle Class as well as ' culture ' -- ( such as it is seeing we have no well defined codified ' culture ' because we are and have been since the beginning so diverse ) -- on the American Corpocracy .Cynthia McLean , , August 10, 2018 at 1:49 pmBut the fact is the other 50% of the blame must fall firmly upon the shoulders of the greedy speculators and investors convinced every year should be a profitable year and they should of received next year's profits yesterday
Along with the American Consumer addicted to cheap goods 60% of which they have no need for nor ever use .
So what is the answer ? First we need to move towards a Responsible Capitalism rather than the Ayn Rand addled narcissist Hyper- Capitalism rapidly approaching Anarcho -- Capitalism we're currently immersed in from the Oval Office on down
Second the American Consumer needs to accept paying what something is worth .. be it service , goods or food .. rather than thinking the entire world is a discounted oyster at their beck and call
And Third .. with the onus once again falling firmly upon the shoulders of the discount addled American consumer . We need to get over the theater of convenience shopping ( online ) and get back to supporting local businesses who pay taxes to our local community and are in fact our neighbors
Problem is all of the above solutions require both compromise , authentic thought as well as discernment
None of which ( for the most part ) currently exists in this over polarized ' Collective Stupidity of America ' zeitgeist we're firmly entrenched in
Lecture over . Donuts , bagels and coffee in the virtual break room .
English colonials brought to the American continent both English Law -- based on private property -- which has turned into Corporate Market Capitalism (Citizens United, eh?), and the Enlightenment idea of the centrality of Individual Freedom, which has turned into the rank Individualism of our current Me-Myself-and-I cultural ethos.BradD , , August 10, 2018 at 2:29 pmDemocracy and a healthy culture, in my view, depend upon holding in balance the needs/desires/rights of both the Individual and the broader Common Good. There now seems to be little left of a Social Covenant that includes all Americans, which is central to a viable culture.
Great article, thank you.
I'll say this when it comes it integration: people in the past weren't forced to integrate in the least. A friend of mine has a grandmother that speaks Russian, only Russian, and no English. As long as she remained in her little enclave in the US, why need to speak English? In my native Cincinnati the "Over the Rhine" neighborhood had beer gardens, German schools, German newspapers, and German street signs. Only a fire and I am sure some Progressive 'encouragement' broke the neighborhood up.KDM , , August 10, 2018 at 3:42 pmWhite in America use to mean Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. To be Wet was to be Catholic and to be Catholic was to be an immigrant. Dry was honest, hard working, and true. Wet was disorderly, murderous, and poor. Irish weren't white, Poles weren't white, and the Italians most certainly weren't white.
My question is why are we poo pooing Latina values? Family centric, conservative, Catholic/Christian, and hard working (come on, either immigrants are stealing our jobs or they are welfare leeches, pick one!). Their food is delicious and the music is fun.
The latina vote should be the Republican vote if they would just get over themselves. Spanish is just as much a Romance language as French or Italian. Get with the program, declare them white, and let's enjoy a super majority with taco Tuesday.
@BradDLT , , August 10, 2018 at 6:50 pm
Nothing is necessarily wrong with "Latin" values per se . The problem is with massive amounts of Illigeal immigration coming all from one area. I'm sorry but integration and assimilation is extremely important, just look at Europe for an idea of what happens to countries that don't integrate immigrants well.Also, if "Latin" values are great and desirable then why would such a massive amount of people be bum rushing our southern borders?
Can you please tell me one example of a country in Latin America that has been successful for an extended period of time? I cannot even think of one. When people come in small waves they can integrate and learn the value of our institutions, laws, freedom, liberty ect They basically become American w/ Latin heritage. When they come en mass, they keep their societies values a lot longer and stay in enclaves a lot longer as well. As an example not too long ago I was in the southern part of Houston Texas and the Galveston area and I cannot tell you the number of cars, houses and business that have the Mexican flag up instead of the USA flag! That is all kinds of wrong to me. If Mexico is so great, than they should just move on back and set up shop there.
Ding, ding, dingAuguste Meyrat , , August 10, 2018 at 9:39 pm
We have a winner here. America is promoted as merchant culture, bread or bombs. The peoole termed colonists were largely corporate sponsored. So when people continue to arrive, they figure starting their store or buying the "right" things is American culture. And for everything else, they just say, "We have our own, thank you."While I appreciate that the writer is trying to link immigration with big business and culture, the argument as a whole doesn't come together. He needs to define what he means by "corporate capitalism," "identity," and "culture"; otherwise, this is nothing more than a incoherent rant. Is he talking about popular entertainment, the arts, academic institutions, civil society, religion? How exactly is the existence of a Walmart or the popularity of smartphones to blame? Quoting Walt Whitman and Calvin Coolidge doesn't really get us anywhere.mike , , August 10, 2018 at 9:55 pmI would be happy to defend free enterprise in America and would even credit the business and marketing practices in America for inculcating customer service as a uniquely American trait. You can tell you're in America when people act politely and aim to serve you -- even illiterate young people know this. Go to any country in Europe, and you'll find a whole staff of people from the airport, to the stores, to the hotel frowning at you for having the nerve to have want of their services. And that's just a side benefit. The main thing business does is finance the creation of culture at all levels. Any civilization's golden age followed from societal prosperity, not from a more democratic and tasteful distribution of wealth.
If we're talking about the arts and influence, America is still the most dynamic in the world, being a great producer of movies, music, books, and all the rest. Even the existence of a site like TAC should cause one to reflect on just how nice it is to live in a country that permits open discourse and values quality writing and ideas -- and for no cost at all to the reader. We can despair all we like of the decline of the Oscars, or the stupidity of modern art, or the pointlessness of postmodernist ideology, but it says something that we can even have this conversation. I'm not sure other cultures, outside those in elite circles, even think about this stuff.
Yes! Intentionally generalising: Big, remote, powerful things are ALWAYS evil. Small, local, law-governed communities are always good.Thomas Hobbes , , August 11, 2018 at 12:44 amWow, something Fran Macadam and I agree on! Surely there is enough there for some bright politician to make a central platform plank out of?JonF , , August 11, 2018 at 8:11 amA number of commenters point out that this isn't just imposed on us, we also embrace it (or just succumbed to the propaganda/advertising). Fixing the problem will require efforts to curb corporate power as well cultural change from the ground up to embrace real values beyond just capitalism.
JonF , , August 11, 2018 at 8:17 amRe: We need to get over the theater of convenience shopping ( online ) and get back to supporting local businessesSure, if local businesses carry the stuff I'm looking for. All too often you have to go online to find anything that is not a mass appeal staple.
Re: Today, "Press 2 for Spanish", the welfare state (give birth on US soil to a US citizen for family access to benefits [or steal an ID], then chain migrate the rest of your family), the Internet, and identity politics discourage assimilationKurt Gayle , , August 11, 2018 at 8:55 amThe evidence, notably from language learning, shows that today's immigrants assimilate at about the same rate others did in the past. And yes, you could hear other languages in the US in the past also. There were places in Detroit I remember in childhood where all the signs were in Polish. Going farther back 19th century nativists were horrified that entire communities in the Midwest spoke German. Early on, our eighth president, Martin Van Buren, grew up speaking Dutch in the Hudson Valley.
As for the welfare state, well, there were lots of mutual aid societies which provided help -- we were not a social Darwinist nation. And don't forget the Civil War pensions to which a significant fraction of the population was entitled.
Mr. Mascriota tells us: "Border sovereignty, even to someone like me who probably favors more liberal immigration laws than most TAC readers, is a legitimate issue and not to be easily dismissed."Hibernian , , August 11, 2018 at 11:51 amAnd yet, Mr. Mascriotra, last Sept 9th (2017) at "Salon" you wrote an article entitled "The case for open borders: Stop defending DACA recipients while condemning the 'sins' of their parents":
"As an English instructor and tutor, I've met young men and women from Ethiopia, China and Nigeria, and I have taught students whose parents emigrated from Mexico to the United States 'illegally.' If I were an insecure coward afraid to compete in a multicultural society, and convinced my future children would become deadbeats without the full force of white privilege to catapult them into success, I would advocate for the deportation of immigrant families similar to those of my students, and I would repeat mindless bromides like 'America First' and 'Build that Wall.' One of the costs of racism, xenophobia, or any form of pathetic provincialism is that freezes the prejudicial person in a permanent state of mediocrity President Donald Trump's decision to end DACA, and his demand that Congress 'fix the' nonexistent 'immigration problem,' demonstrates a stunning streak of sadism, projecting yet another signal to his rabid and anti-American base of closed-minded losers If the 'real Americans' are afraid to compete with immigrants for jobs, prestige, or cultural authority, they only indict themselves as weak, self-entitled and easy to panic. In a word, 'snowflakes'. A bureaucratic permission slip is trivial compared to the imperative of human freedom -- freedom that should transcend what are largely artificial borders."
@Mr. Soprano: I think Baltimore was a special case as a Southern city (which it historically was up to maybe WW1, maybe WW2.) Don't know its demographics pre-WW2 but I'd bet dollars to donuts it was substantially more black pre-WW1 than Chicago, which was nearly all white up to about 1915 even though it was founded by a Francophone Black man Jean Baptiste Pont du Sable.johnhenry , , August 11, 2018 at 1:14 pmDavid Masciotra: Not sure what I think about the ironmongery in your left ear, but this piece is excellent. My only criticism -- mild at that -- concerns the analogy in your third paragraph:paradoctor , , August 11, 2018 at 1:46 pm" to focus [our worries] on immigration is the equivalent of a gunshot victim rushing to the barber for a haircut."
DOA. Sorry.
This article is timely, but only because its complaints are perennial. 'Twas ever thus.Siarlys Jenkins , , August 11, 2018 at 4:48 pmYes of course a commercial culture is prosperous, dynamic, cosmopolitan, rootless, greedy, materialistic, cynical, plebian and vulgar. And yes, of course in a market-dominated culture, all other systems of indoctrination (i.e. church and state) are constantly on the defensive.
That is not 'no' culture; it is a highly distinctive culture. It tends to neglect the high arts and excel at the low arts; it favors novelty over tradition, spectacle over reflection, passion over balance. Again, 'twas ever thus; as is the inevitable cooling of these innovations to new formalisms for the next generation to rebel against, and enrich.
A similar cycle applies to demographics. Today's scary outsider becomes tomorrow's stodgy insider, after they buy their way in. I therefore second BradD's motion to declare Hispanics to be white; and Asians too.
All those disturbed by demographic transitions should contemplate this truism: that by the middle of next century every man, woman and child now alive shall be dead, and replaced by people not born yet.
This includes you, which makes it personal. What a way to run a world! But if you can put up with 100% population turnover by 2150, then language and skin tint seems (to me at least) a trivial detail.
***
Self-critique: The preceding analysis has a flaw, namely that this is not simply a 'commercial' culture; it is a 'capitalistic' culture, which is the least free form of commercial culture.
Thrice A Viking , , August 11, 2018 at 5:46 pmWow, something Fran Macadam and I agree on! Surely there is enough there for some bright politician to make a central platform plank out of?Right! And I agree with Fran AND Thomas Hobbes!
So, what should replace corporate capitalism -- socialism, distributism, non-corporate capitalism, what?Tyro , , August 11, 2018 at 6:20 pmGo to any country in Europe, and you'll find a whole staff of people from the airport, to the stores, to the hotel frowning at you for having the nerve to have want of their services.Renoaldo , , August 12, 2018 at 1:12 amAmericans, in my experience, mistake lack of slavish over-friendliness as rudeness. I have realized this because I am a fairly reserved kind of person, and "reserved" gets coded as "aloof" or "snobbish."
European retail still follows the "sole proprietor" model of service -- it's assumed that by shopping there you're effectively entering someone else's home, and you must act accordingly. In the US, lacking a formal class system, the retail experience is one coded towards allowing the customer to feel as though he is a noble with servants to attend on him that he can order around. The store is selling that experience.
Related to this is why middle class and upper middle Americans are so upset by the DMV and the Post Office. It's the only place where money does not buy them any better service, and they cannot use the threat of talking to the manager to have the service personnel fired in order to get what they want.
America's customer service culture is probably one of our most culturally dysfunctional aspects, all rooted in middle class insecurity.
If this were actually, a Conservative website, that valued Western ideals? Do you really believe such excuses or something outside of myself like the "devil made me do it" will pass mustard with "God" or "St. Peter?"Paul , , August 12, 2018 at 4:40 amI strongly endorse Jon's (much earlier comment). It is not corporations that ruin culture but we who demand what they give. Corporations are just a convenient funding vehicle to produce goods. Yes they often mass market them. But it is we who like the marketing. If we were appalled, or turned away and it ignored it, they would change. In the end, when the spiritual life is subordinate to the material, our appetites and the corporations that serve them are a guaranteed outcome.M. Orban , , August 12, 2018 at 12:31 pmlate to this thread but what is American identity? How is it different from let's say a Danish identity? I have a good number of coworkers from other countries: Asians, South Americans, some Germans or Swedes. When I visit them, do you think I find their homes, their families (or their priorities for that matter) different from that of born-here American? If so, I must have missed itRicardo , , August 12, 2018 at 4:40 pmAuguste Mayrat hit the nail on the head. This article is garbage. It's sad that so many commentators agree with it. America is full of culture: pro and college sports, movies, TV shows, technology, books, music of all kinds all consumed throughout the world, as people from all countries love and admire American culture. Find a country that produces more culture than America. You can't.Churches and schools proliferate here. What's so bad about corporations? If you own an iPhone or a television or a car or shop at the mall, or ride a plane or go on a cruise, you're a hypocrite to be against corporations. Corporations provide goods and services that people want, not to mention jobs. The author of this piece is an intellectual lightweight, and those who agree with his views are the type of blind sheep that communists find useful. The author neither specified what's bad about corporations, nor provides any solutions. Can believe TAC publishes such drivel.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
SwingingVoter, 3 Jun 2018 19:43
sierrasierra, 3 Jun 2018 19:21"neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests"Its almost impossible to talk about a mining economy and a "free market" in the same sentence, Richard. a mining economy is is synonymous with corruption, Dutch disease and political grabs for cash etc. In the height of the 2009 GFC announced by kev07, unskilled labourers in the pilbara were still earning $100/hr. Real estate prices for 3 bed shacks in karratha were starting at $1million plus. The blue collar dominated pilbara area was overwhelmed with greed fed by left politicians hiding behind socialist ideals. The reality was that left wing economists recognized the "dutch disease" problem and their solution was to flood the area with greedy blue collar workers who were blowing their enormous salaries on prostitutes, alcohol and gambling in the hope that profits from the mining boom would be flushed into other parts of the economy.
The solution? partially transition Australia's economy to an innovation driven economy because innovation is linked to learning which is linked to stronger self esteem and self efficacy in the community. an innovation driven econmy is the better way of promting social development in the community and an innovation driven economy is the most effective way for politicians to transition to the benefits of a "free market" driven economy.... the reality is that transitioning to an innovation would require smacking the socialists over the back of the head in the hope that aspiring socialists will respect the ideas and intellectual property of others as opposed to continue to assimilate intellectual property in the name of employment generation and the common good
I dont fear the potential rise of neoliberalism, although i understand that spruiking a free market whilst talking about mining is ridiculous.
I fear the individuals who are have been talking about mining, and targeting/victimising the non politically active conservatives for more than 2 decades in the name of socialism"While much of neoliberalism's rhetorical power comes from the assertion that "there is no alternative," the simple fact is that the world is full of alternatives. Indeed, even the so-called free marketers in Australia can see alternatives."Excellent article Richard, you have captured the ideology and its dogma quite specularly.
It's dogma is nothing but empty lies held up as flawed truth's and full of scoundrels who profit from its concomitant pain.
Examples from today's headlines and a few from last week:
- https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2018/06/02/turnbull-follows-indigenous-lead /
- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-02/australian-medical-association-endorses-uluru-statement/9827626?pfmredir=sm
- https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/netflix-urged-to-pull-pete-evans-documentary-20180531-p4zim2.html
- https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/one-in-five-rooftop-solar-units-deficient-official-figures-show-20180601-p4zixo.html
- https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-live-exports-review-recommended-an-immediate-ban-20180529-p4zi34.html
- https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/barnaby-joyce-lobbied-the-pm-before-receiving-40-000-cheque-20180603-p4zj7a.html
- https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2018/06/03/whale-dies-eating-80-plastic-bags/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%2020180604
- https://thenewdaily.com.au/money/finance-news/2018/06/03/break-up-the-banks-apra/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%2020180604
- https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/white-collars-dirty-secrets-20180531-p4zimj.html
- https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/police-breath-test-scam-goes-back-at-least-15-years-20180531-p4zir8.html
- https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/the-religious-minority-seizing-power-in-the-liberal-party-20180601-p4ziyq.html
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Aug 11, 2018 | www.nytimes.com
Yet the political realm is where Soros has made his most audacious wager. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, he poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the former Soviet-bloc countries to promote civil society and [neo]liberal democracy. It was a one-man Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe, a private initiative without historical precedent. It was also a gamble that a part of the world that had mostly known tyranny would embrace ideas like government accountability and ethnic tolerance. In London in the 1950s, Soros was a student of the expatriated Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, who championed the notion of an "open society," in which individual liberty, pluralism and free inquiry prevailed. Popper's concept became Soros's cause.
... ... ...
...In the 1990s, he was portrayed by the far left as an agent of American imperialism, helping to foist the so-called neoliberal agenda (mass privatization, for example) on Eastern Europe. For some critics, Soros's Wall Street background has always been a mark against him.
Last autumn, he signaled that same sense of defiance when he announced that he was in the process of transferring the bulk of his remaining wealth, $18 billion in total at the time, to the O.S.F. That will potentially make it the second-largest philanthropic organization in the United States, in assets, after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is already a sprawling entity, with some 1,800 employees in 35 countries, a global advisory board, eight regional boards and 17 issue-oriented boards. Its annual budget of around $1 billion finances projects in education, public health, independent media, immigration and criminal-justice reform and other areas
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He decided that his goal would be opening closed societies. He created a philanthropic organization, then called the Open Society Fund, in 1979 and began sponsoring college scholarships for black South African students. But he soon turned his attention to Eastern Europe, where he started financing dissident groups. He funneled money to the Solidarity strikers in Poland in 1981 and to Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. In one especially ingenious move, he sent hundreds of Xerox copiers to Hungary to make it easier for underground publications to disseminate their newsletters. In the late 1980s, he provided dozens of Eastern European students with scholarships to study in the West, with the aim of fostering a generation of [neo]liberal democratic leaders. One of those students was Viktor Orban, who studied civil society at Oxford. From his Manhattan trading desk, Soros became a strange sort of expat anticommunist revolutionary.
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In one campaign rally in Budapest, Orban referred to Soros as "Uncle George," telling tens of thousands of supporters that "we are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the world." Along with the fiery speeches, there were the billboards, which featured a picture of a smiling Soros and the message, "Let's not let George Soros have the last laugh."
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Orban's coalition won 49 percent of the vote, enough to give it a supermajority in Parliament. But the anti-Soros campaign didn't end with the election. Days after the vote, a magazine owned by a pro-Orban businesswoman published the names of more than 200 people in Hungary that it claimed were Soros "mercenaries."
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There have been mistakes; by his own admission, Soros erred in championing Mikheil Saakashvili, the mercurial former president of Georgia, and also became too directly involved in the country's politics in the early 2000s. He clearly misjudged Orban. But as Victoria Nuland, a former American diplomat who worked for both Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton, put it when I spoke to her recently, "George is a freedom fighter."
alexander hamilton new york July 17
Conservative Democrat WV July 17"Billionaire philanthropist?" Really? Does that make the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelstein "philanthropists" too, or does that label apply only to left-leaning individuals seeking political leverage many times that of the average citizen?
One citizen, 1 vote. ALL citizens should be limited to $100 contributions for their senators, representatives and the President. NO citizen should be able to contribute to a campaign in a state where he/she is not a full-time permanent resident.
And NO citizen should be able to contribute more than $100 to his/her own campaign. We don't need more Kennedys, Clintons, Bloombergs, Trumps, Perots or Forbes buying (or trying to buy) their way into public office, using their millions.
Of the people, by the people, for the people. That's the model, folks. Depart from it at your peril.
Maqroll North Florida July 17 Times PickFor a man that purportedly promotes democracy, Mr. Soros conveniently overlooked public opinion when it came to promoting open borders.
In its essence, democracy is all about the wisdom and will of those governed, and not about what a billionaire thinks is best for them.
WPLMMT New York City July 17 Times PickSoros--a "European at heart." Must have brought some much-needed smiles to the UK following the recent Trump Tour of Destruction. How soon we forget--in the 90s, Soros broke the pound as the Brits were trying to unify European currencies--with unfortunate conditions that weakened the effort and Soros smartly exploited.
Who can blame a globalist from crashing a poorly devised govt scheme and walking away with a cool $1B--back when a billion dollars was a lot of money? I am not the person to say whether Soros may qualify as an honest proponent of democracy, but I strongly suspect that he is a poster boy of the ultra-nationalists as they battle globalization.
In a way, Soros epitomizes the failure of globalization, which may or may not benefit the classic, labor-intensive industries of manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and mining, but always benefits, sometimes wildly, the financial "industry."
As far as I'm concerned, Soros is merely making reparations. And, sorry to say, George, it's prob too little, too late.
gpickard Luxembourg July 17 Times PickI always thought George Soros was a dangerous [neo]liberal but after reading this article and seeing the damage he has created around the world it has been confirmed. Nigel Farage, the British politician, recently said on television that Mr. Soros is out to destroy the world. It certainly appears to be the case when you see what he did to the British and Thai economies. He was so concerned with helping immigrants and refugees that he had little regard for the citizens that actually lived in those countries that are being affected. People lost their livelihoods but that did not matter to him.
Mr. Soros fights for all the [neo]liberal causes no matter the consequences. He ... does not care who he hurts as long as he promotes his progressive agenda. He wants to allow as many immigrants to enter a nation as possible even if it adversely affects that country while he lives in luxury and is not inconvenienced by this invasion. He has billions and will probably never be touched by massive immigration.
I am glad that the conservatives and others are finally seeing his true colors and are trying to subdue him the best they can. He must be called out on this negative behavior before it is too late. It is reassuring that many of the European nations are implementing policies that are favorable to their countries and looking out for their people. Europeans must be protected and George Soros stopped. I am glad they see him for what he truly is which is frightening.
c smith Pittsburgh July 17As Mr. Soros said of himself, "I am a confirmed egoist." He has used his money to make the world as he thinks is best. But having money does not give you a better moral view of how the world should be governed nor make you a god to decide for the rest of us.
I think this kind of undue influence (money in politics) is what is driving some of the back-lash against [neo]liberal democracy. So many of the "[neo]liberal" proponents of an open society, like George Soros and Bill Gates, seem to have an inordinate power to effect political outcomes because of their money.
The making of such huge amounts of money is not done with any charitable purpose. Only later, does charity come to mind.
Karekin USA July 17Soros is an enemy of the middle and working classes in America. Yes, a billion people around the world are better off because of the forces of "globalization" (this total most definitely includes Soros himself), but millions of Americans have suffered economically as a result. GATT, NAFTA and the entire alphabet soup of trade deals have lined the pockets of the globalists, while grinding the fortunes of U.S. working and middle class laborers into dust.
Tim DC area July 17 Times PickGreat article. Now, more than ever, American politics is defined by money, so it's important to understand how it is used in that context by those who have it. At this juncture, I think the American people deserve to see an expose of all those millionaires and billionaires who have and continue to support Trump. It's only fair, to lay the money trail on the table, on all sides, for everyone to see.
Samuel Spade Huntsville, al July 17What about the devastating effects that free trade and globalization have had on the spread of inequality throughout the world... Huge corporations consistently use "free trade" or globalization as an excuse to offer the lowest possible wages, and move manufacturing to places with the least environmental protections and human rights.
Immigration policies are also sometimes used in ways to suppress wages, and even more worse, enacted with very little thought given to assimilation. Most of the poorer areas, or ghettoes surrounding Paris for example are populated with huge numbers of Muslim immigrants that face extremely daunting odds of fully assimilating into French culture.
While the wealthier (sometimes elite [neo]liberals) Parisians almost certainly live in gated or posh neighborhoods with hardly any immigrants as their neighbors. Despite the generous financial support Soros (and some other elites) gives to human rights causes, he rarely outright discusses some of these problems associated with free trade, globalization and mass immigration. These seeming hypocrisies and inconsistencies then become much easier fodder for those of Orban's ilk to manipulate and ultimately consolidate power.
Ivory Tower Colorado July 17Soros didn't bet on Democracy, he bet on his version of it which he tried to buy through individual politicians on the take and the Democratic Party. Better he quit manipulating pols and gave his money to charity.
Concerned EU Resident Germany July 17First, Hungary is not xenophobic, they merely want to protect their culture. Second, George Soros wants plenty of wealth for him and his family, yet he wants those of us in the middle class to dive up our meager assets with the world's poorest. Third, his personal wealth has often been generated by destroying currencies and the middle class who owns those currencies. Fourth, he promotes open borders without consulting the citizenry of said borders as to their opinion regarding their own national sovereignty. Our world would be a much better place without George Soros.
geezer117 Tennessee July 17Soros is a criminal by any other name. He hedged against the UK Pound 20 years ago, and earned $1B. He earned billions by manipulating the market. With his profits he wanted to create his own society where his money could be used to buy politicians and pass legislation according to his one man agenda. He's selfish, an egomaniac, and dangerous.
Rose Philadelphia July 17Soros employs his vast wealth to create the society he dreams of, regardless of what the rest of us want. When the democratic process veers away from his vision, he uses the power of his wealth to steer it back.
So he's just another wealthy and powerful elite trying to remake the world as he prefers it. Such arrogance!
Jonas Seattle July 17Sucking money out of the world's economies so that he can direct it as HE sees fit does not make a man great. Rather, I would argue that such actions contributed to the rise of both Brexiteers and Trumpsters.
If Soros really wants to contribute to society, he would lobby for financial industry reform - less favorable tax treatment for hedge funds (what value do they really provide to society) and a transaction tax on trades to reduce speculation. Then fight for minimum wage increases.
Peter Albany. NY July 17This is a horrifying interview and does not improve the image of George Soros. "My ideology is nonideological," he says while spending billions on politics, which he defines as "In politics, you are spinning the truth, not discovering it." He describes Obama as his greatest disappointment because Obama "closed the door on me," as in he expected Obama should work with him and take his advice. Soros uses his billions to fund politicians and meddle in elections... this is a man who enjoys influencing and manipulating politics and becomes frustrated when his efforts backfire or are not successful.
Marian Maryland July 17This man is the absolute worst! His no borders policy has done more to hurt Europe then Russia ever could. The Soros gang has zero respect and tolerance for nation-state sovereignty and local governance. Talk about a global elite! He and his gang epitomize that arrogance.
Al Nino Hyde Park NY July 17George Soros bet big on open borders,one world governance and destroying the working class through unfair trade agreements. Yes he appears to be losing. Thank God for small favors.
Charles Becker Sonoma State University July 17It cracks me up to read these type of article in the NYT and then read another story in the NYT about how if you can pay the money you can have yourself a private waiting area in a major airport to separate yourself from the chaos of the masses in the public waiting areas. Maybe democracy wouldn't be in trouble around the world if it worked as well for the "slobs" in the public waiting areas as it did for those in the exclusive waiting rooms. This is globalization in a nutshell. It works great for the rich, not so well for the rest of us slobs. This is a government of the rich people, by the rich people, for the rich people. The slobs realise their government doesn't really care that their jobs are disapearing and their standard of living is going down.
John Medina Holt July 17I am not interested in windfall investing profits. Soros is *not* my hero: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-george-soros-broke-the-bank-of-thaila... . Wretched.
Richard L. Wilson Moscow, Russia July 17To say that George Soros is funding [neo]liberal democracy is a misnomer. What Soros is funding is open borders. Where national interests are set aside, global interests prevail. This is precisely what George Soros is advocating. Tired of having to face multitude regulatory systems in his effort to build a global financial empire, Soros is quite right in discerning that a borderless, global regulatory system would increase his financial power exponentially. Nations are right to resist the encroachment of Soros because global interests, by definition, are not local interests. Nationalism, so loathed by Soros and his open border lackeys, serves as a check and balance on men like Soros who would be god and would dictate to the world from some point of central governance what their truth and value should be. George Soros and his globalist kin should be resisted. The true threat to global interests is not nationalism, it is globalism.
elizabeth renant new mexico July 17Soros, and American [neo]liberalism, economic and social [neo]liberalism championed by Soros and the NYT, is in its death throes. Call us fascists, totalitarians, racists--- understand clearly: we do not care. Europe is waking up. [neo]liberalism is close to being dead. No spectres or phantoms are haunting Europe. Blood is standing up and answering our ancestors.We are not commodoties, consumers, meat for your wars. You have attacked us, belittled us, turned our queen of continents into latrines of filth. You, American [neo]liberalism, have destroyed us.Now, we take our nations back.
Larry Left Chicago's High Taxes July 17It's amusing to read phrases like "nationalism and tribalism are resurgent". It never does to underestimate tribalism; as long as groups feel safe they are tolerant. But when groups feel threatened, tribalism rears up in what is not so much a resurgence but more like an awakening from a nap.
The older cultures of Europe are waking up from a nap and realizing that unless they reassess a few long-held assumptions, they will eventually be ethnically diminished and culturally pressured.
Denmark has banned the burka and legislated some of the harshest migration, immigration, asylum, and naturalization laws in Europe. It is implementing laws to ensure integration, including stopping benefits to families whose children are not integrating. Do the author and Mr. Soros think that Denmark exercising control over its future demographics and preserving its culture are malign?
The Danes some years ago elected the Danish People's Party to significant power; the DPP is often referred to as a far right party, but is a typical left-wing party in everything except pushing Denmark toward "multiculturalism".
Sweden's centre-left government, on the other hand, brought in hundreds of thousands of Third World immigrants and then refused even to admit, let alone discuss, the glaring problems with integration within its immigrant community.
Result: the Sweden Democrats, a bona fide neo-Nazi party, are set to do extremely and alarmingly well in Sweden's September elections.
Yes - in Sweden.
Burton Austin, Texas July 17This super-rich elitist from Hungary is trying to buy American democracy and reshape it in his image regardless of what We The People want. And the Democrats are on his payroll and totally owned by this foreign agent!
Ned Flarbus Berkeley July 17Soros' flaw is that he only tolerates centralized socialist democracy. He cannot stand the idea of democracy in the form of a federal republic with a weak central government. Interestingly, he made his billions as a predatory capitalist now he turns on capitalism. He also exhibits a particularly vicious elitism: No one should be allowed to own guns except his private security guards. He knows that umarmed men are always someone's slaves.
Philly Expat July 17Soros is a hypocrite who did one thing and is now out to create a legacy. All is shows is he is driven by both greed and ego. His blatant hypocrisy probably did more harm than good - common denominator, it's always about him. Hey Soros, don't do us plebes any more favors, ok?
David Brisbane July 17Democracy is alive and well, regardless of what Soros thinks. He does not represent democracy, he was never been elected to any public office. He represents open borders mass migration, as the name of one of his NGOs implies, Open Society Foundation. Brexit voters, and other voters across the west are increasingly voting against his philosophy. Voters in the US, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, Slovenia, etc, have democratically chosen as their leaders conservative controlled borders leaders, and to underscore, all were elected via the democratic process.
Open Borders and globalism that Soros is pushing is increasingly being rejected in voting booths in the EU and the US.
It is hardly undemocratic to increasingly vote against what Soros is selling – chaotic mass migration made possible by open borders.
He represents [neo]liberal democracy, and voters increasingly favor conservative democracy.
idimalink usa July 17George Soros is the epitome of corruption – penetration and distortion of political process by obscene wealth. It does not matter what his true intentions are – he can say whatever he wants but we will never know for sure. And stop calling that "philanthropy".
Red Cross and Salvation Army is philanthropy. What Soros is doing is imposing his personal political beliefs and ideas on everybody by buying political influence with his money - that is called "corruption" pure and simple.
Sure, he is not the only one doing that, but he is the one doing that most overtly and blatantly. He seems to relish being the face of the elitist disregard for the masses. What he does is not democracy promotion - it is the exact opposite – democracy destruction. It is good to know that he is failing in that effort.
Jose Pardinas Collegeville, PA July 18Neoliberalism has failed to improve democratic governance and reduced distribution of wealth, just as leftists predicted. Soros benefitted financially, which has increased his privilege to participate in governance voters cannot achieve. Despite Soros' wealth, successfully manipulating currency markets does not easily transfer to manipulating electorates. Even if Soros believes his projects would produce good governance, he lacks the ability to convince voters what is in their best interests.
I am elated to hear that George Soros might be losing.
What pharaonic globalist plutocrats like him mean by "Liberal Democracy" encompasses a sinister set of objectives. Prominent among which are these two:
1). Full support for neocon/neoliberal destabilization, confrontation, and military interventionism.
2). The destruction of borders, nations, and cultures -- particularly Western Culture here and in Europe.Soros and his peers want unhindered unlimited access to cheap Third World labor as well as to have complete control over the entire global economy. To his class nationalism and culture are speed bumps on the way to those self-serving goals.
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Aug 07, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
"Living in the Age of the Big Lie" [Stephen Gold, Industry Week ]. Gold is President and Chief Executive Officer, Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI):
All this has created the potential for an American cultural crisis of distrust, authoritatively captured in two recently published analyses.
In "Truth Decay," [cute! –lambert] the RAND Corporation lays the blame for the deteriorating role of facts and data in public life on four primary causes:
1. The rise of social media
2. An overtaxed educational system that cannot keep up with changes in the "information ecosystem"
3. Political and social polarization
4. And -- perhaps due to all of these factors -- the increasing tendency of individuals to create their own subjective social reality, otherwise known as "cognitive bias.""The Death of Truth" by Pulitzer-Prize winning book critic Michiko Kakutani explores the waning of integrity in American society, particularly since the 2016 elections. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts," is more timely than ever, Kakutani says: "polarization has grown so extreme that voters have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts." And no wonder: Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news through social media -- a platform that has been overwhelmed by trolls and bots, and which uses algorithms to decide what each of us gets to see.
Executives ignore the cultural shift away from honesty at their peril.
Social media has its own problems, gawd knows -- break them up and outlaw the algos, and they'd be a lot more like the public utilities they should really be -- but it's amazing how vague hand-wringing pieces like this ignore at least four seismic events since 2000, all of which involve perceived legitimacy and the nature of truth: (1) Bush v. Gore, (2) Iraq WMDs, (3) Obama's "hope and change" campaign, followed by (4) the crash, the bailouts, the free passes for bankers, and a brutal recession. The official narrative and its maintainers didn't lose credibility because of trolls and bots, who might be regarded as opportunistic infections overwhelming an already weakened immnune system.
Grassroots and/or AstroTurf?
Our Famously Free Press
"The Press Doesn't Cause Wars -- Presidents Do" [ The Atlantic ] • One of a ginormous steaming load of revisionist and defensive articles prompted by Trump's tweet that the press can "causes War." Anyone who was present for the build up to the Iraq War knows that Trump's claim is true; in fact, the "media critique" that began then was prompted by the Iraq WMDs scam, in which the press -- *** cough *** Judy Miller ***cough*** -- was not merely compliant or complicitous, but active and vociferous, especially in shunning and shaming skeptics. Of course, everybody who was wrong about Iraq was wrong in the right way, so they all still have jobs (David Frum, Bush speechwriter and Hero of the Resistance, at the Atlantic, among hundreds of others). So revisionist history is very easy for them to write.
Class Warfare
"The New Class-Blindness" [ Law and Political Economy ]. "It is true that class-based discrimination does not trigger heightened scrutiny under equal protection in the way that race-based and sex-based discrimination do . Some judges -- even some Supreme Court Justices -- have begun to argue that it is constitutionally impermissible for courts to take class into account under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fifth Circuit reached this conclusion a few years ago in the Whole Woman's Health case, in which it asserted that judges could consider only obstacles created by "the law itself" when determining whether a law unduly burdens the right to abortion -- a category that excluded obstacles such as lack of transportation, childcare, days off from work, and money for overnight stays. When Whole Woman's Health reached the Supreme Court, some of the Justices (in dissent) expressed support for this approach."
"Vermont's Striking Nurses Want A Raise for Nonunion Workers Too" [ Labor Notes ]. "Yet when 1,800 nurses and technical staff struck for better wages July 12-13 at the state's second-largest employer, the University of Vermont Medical Center, the people of Burlington came out in force to back them up. 'We had policemen and firefighters and UPS drivers pulling over and shaking our hands' on the picket line, said neurology nurse Maggie Belensz. 'We had pizza places dropping off dozens of pizzas, giving out free ice cream.' And when a thousand people marched from the hospital through Burlington's downtown, 'we had standing ovations from people eating their dinners,' she said. 'It was a moving experience.' One reason for such wide support: these hospital workers aren't just demanding a raise themselves. They're also calling for a $15 minimum wage for their nonunion co-workers, such as those who answer the phones, mop the floors, cook the food, and help patients to the bathroom."
"What Are Capitalists Thinking?" [Michael Tomaskey, New York Times ]. "I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists. You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them . I understand completely why it's happening. Given what's been going on in this country, it couldn't not have happened. And if you're a capitalist, you'd better try to understand it, too -- and do something to address the very legitimate grievances that propelled it." • Finally, reality begins to penetrate the thickened craniums of the better sort of liberal
"In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream" [Frank Rich, New York Magazine ]. (The "American Dream" being one of the official narratives.) "It's not hard to pinpoint the dawn of this deep gloom: It arrived in September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers kicked off the Great Recession that proved to be a more lasting existential threat to America than the terrorist attack of seven Septembers earlier. The shadow it would cast is so dark that a decade later, even our current run of ostensible prosperity and peace does not mitigate the one conviction that still unites all Americans: Everything in the country is broken. Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community. Nearly everything has turned to crap, it seems ." • Ditto
Arizona Slim , August 6, 2018 at 3:08 pm
sierra7 , August 6, 2018 at 4:54 pmComputer glitch? Well, who programmed the computer and who paid 'em? Follow the money, and you'll find that it leads back to Wells Fargo.
nippersdad , August 6, 2018 at 5:48 pm"We ("They") Were Doing God's Work" LLoyd Blankfein then head of Goldman Sachs in his testimony to Congress on " .what went wrong".
foghorn longhorn , August 6, 2018 at 8:18 pmI think I would put it much earlier than that. Anyone who watched Newt Gingrich during his Contract on America days, who watched Max Cleland be attacked by Saxby Chambliss, who watched as Clinton deregulated the media in favor of Rupert Murdoch even as they slagged him, knew something was afoot.
Integrity has been in short supply ever since.
cm , August 6, 2018 at 3:03 pmHow about going back a bit further,
Carter, put a sweater on.
Reagan, put it on the credit card.Carey , August 6, 2018 at 3:06 pmShenzhen Tech Girl Naomi Wu
informative post spelling out that China is still a repressive government in ways that Americans often cannot relate.
pretzelattack , August 6, 2018 at 3:23 pmTomasky at NYT:
"I have mixed feelings about this socialism boomlet. It has yet to prove itself politically viable in general elections outside a handful of areas, and by 2021 we could wake up and see that it's been a disaster for Democrats."
What is a Democrat? Are they inherently good? Is failing the Democrats OK, if doing so improves the lives of the 90%?
Pat , August 6, 2018 at 5:07 pmI would say it is required.
Carey , August 6, 2018 at 6:16 pmMr. Tomasky seems to have missed that Democrats throwing out the concerns of the working class to court wealthy donors for its Clintonian politics boomlet has been distinctly, well not all that long term politically viable. It has been a disaster for the Democrats. There were signs prior to 2000, but it took starting an unpopular and largely unsuccessful war and attempting to undermine Social Security for the Democrats to make a come back. That their success was pretty much over by 2010, with the exception of the Presidency is very clear in the massive loss of Governorships, State Houses and yes Congress leading up to the 2016 debacle when they foolishly nominated the Grand Dame of that 'can't give me lots of money – suck on it' political position to be their Presidential nominee.
But why let facts get in the way of a good narrative meant to convince the rubes to continue voting for polticians who have no interest in their concerns because of the right pronouns and Russia!
nothing but the truth , August 6, 2018 at 3:16 pmAll well said. I wonder also about who is included in Tomasky's "we".
Class class class
jsn , August 6, 2018 at 4:38 pmTruth Decay
The biggest cause is spin , that has become an art form, a business and career path.
Telling the truth in public is an invitation to cut short your career. The only time when officials tell the truth is when they are comfortably retired.
Especially with economists and journalists (the conscience keepers), it is not so important what they are saying, but why they are saying it (basically lack of trust in the narrator).
Craig H. , August 6, 2018 at 5:15 pmI can't remember who it was, someone like Art Buchwald or Molly Ivins way back, who said "a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth."
Synapsid , August 6, 2018 at 3:39 pmI personally blame Bill Clinton. The turning point was the report that he told Lewinsky "deny deny deny there's nothing they can do."
Which is true but that was the point in the timeline when a critical mass of people began to live like that. Or when it became obvious to me. Perhaps it was exactly like that for a long time before and it is not BC's fault.
Tom Stone , August 6, 2018 at 3:40 pmIt's cheering that coal shipment and use in the US has declined. The good news for our coal industry is that coal exports January to June 2018 have risen, in particular to Africa, Asia (largely to India which is voracious) and South America.
The current Administration can thank the previous one for increasing our capacity to export coal, I believe.
Carey , August 6, 2018 at 4:13 pmSarah Jeong is a piece of work, is her desk next to Judy Miller's?
Good grief, the cultural differences between different parts of SE Asian Countries can be profound let alone the cultural differences between countries.
I'm reminded of a boss who told me that monopolies increase competition, with a straight face.jsn , August 6, 2018 at 3:41 pmMy impression is that Ms. Jeong's job is and will be to start plenty of cultural "fires", so
that while the citizenry is distracted with them, the looting and pillaging of the many by the few can continue.diptherio , August 6, 2018 at 3:41 pm" the significant benefits that Federal Reserve independence brings." For whom?
diptherio , August 6, 2018 at 4:21 pmRe: Mastodon
You can simply "unpin" the columns you don't want to see.
Montanamaven , August 6, 2018 at 4:54 pmBut to answer the question you actually asked the Federated timeline includes your local timeline, which itself includes your home timeline. So if you want to see it all, just use the federated timeline. If you only want to see people you follow, use the home timeline, etc.
Lee , August 6, 2018 at 3:43 pmHow do you start? What "instances" would be a good fit?
fresno dan , August 6, 2018 at 4:25 pmRe Sarah Jeong
What's an Asian woman doing criticizing a white guy for commenting on a predominantly, but not exclusively, black art form? I mean, why is she even speaking English and how about that name Sarah for an egregious example of cultural appropriation? And, as I have previously queried on this site: how is it even permissible for Yo-Yo Ma to play Bach on the cello? And in case you ask: yes, identity politics has finally driven me insane. Or is it they who are mad?
curlydan , August 6, 2018 at 5:34 pmLee
August 6, 2018 at 3:43 pmActually, after I read the below, I'm kinda warming to her ..
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/welcome-to-bad-faith/
She (Sarah Jeong) wrote: "After a bad day, some people come home and kick the furniture. I get on the Internet and make fun of The New York Times." "I don't feel safe in a country that is led by someone who takes Thomas Friedman seriously." "Hannah Rosin shatters ceiling by proving women writers can be as hackish as Tom Friedman, too." "[David] Brooks is an absolute nitwit tho." "Notajoke: I'm being forced to read Nicholas Kristof. This is the worst." "if I had a bajillion dollars, I'd buy the New York Times, just for the pleasure of firing Tom Friedman ."
WobblyTelomeres , August 6, 2018 at 6:59 pmcombining the articles, it sounds like she's got a lot of opinions. Good for an aspiring pundit but also opening herself up for a greater possibility of errors.
sleepy , August 6, 2018 at 3:45 pmI'd buy the New York Times, just for the pleasure of firing Tom Friedman ."
Ah, but you"ll have to scheme to have a cabbie deliver the news. Otherwise, he wouldn't believe it.
Arizona Slim , August 6, 2018 at 3:51 pmit's amazing how vague hand-wringing pieces like this ignore at least four seismic events since 2000, all of which involve perceived legitimacy and the nature of truth: (1) Bush v. Gore, (2) Iraq WMDs, (3) Obama's "hope and change" campaign, followed by (4) the crash, the bailouts, the free passes for bankers, and a brutal recession.
Good list to which I would add the Katrina debacle.
jonhoops , August 6, 2018 at 7:18 pmOne for the thumb!
foghorn longhorn , August 6, 2018 at 8:28 pm9-11 anyone? Of course we should probably go back to at least Nov. 1963
foghorn longhorn , August 6, 2018 at 8:48 pmWe probably should, but then you're just a conspiracy theorist.
Ya big dummy.fresno dan , August 6, 2018 at 3:55 pmUnless of course all the SS guys are riding on the VP limo.
flora , August 6, 2018 at 3:56 pmThe New Class-Blindness" [Law and Political Economy]. "It is true that class-based discrimination does not trigger heightened scrutiny under equal protection in the way that race-based and sex-based discrimination do . Some judges -- even some Supreme Court Justices -- have begun to argue that it is constitutionally impermissible for courts to take class into account under the Fourteenth Amendment.
================
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. Anatole Franceknowbuddhau , August 6, 2018 at 4:48 pmNote to Frank Rich: Read Simon Johnson's 2009 Atlantic Magazine essay 'The Quiet Coup'.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/
He saw what would happen if the US govt didn't clean up the TBTF banks, Wall St., and other financial perps. This still needs to happen.
zagonostra , August 6, 2018 at 3:57 pmHuh, you say that as if USG, TBTF, Wall St, other fin perps weren't all the same. /s
Montanamaven , August 6, 2018 at 5:02 pmRussia,Russia,Russia.
Not much concern over the disconnect between voter preference and policy outcome which was documented in the 2014 Gilens/Benjamin study or Jimmy Carter statement that the U.S. is a defacto oligarchy, or the massive voter fraud that is part and parcel of our voting system (see https://www.gregpalast.com/ ), or the disclosure of HRC/DNC collusion documented in wiki leaks and Donna Brasil's "tell all book", not much concern their at all.
Do you find it curious this obsession of the MSM with Russia meddling in our elections?
Richard , August 6, 2018 at 5:23 pmA compilation on Rachel Maddow and how many times she mentions Russia in ONE show on March 9 Russia, Russia, Russia
Hameloose Cannon , August 6, 2018 at 8:34 pmHilarious and mind-blowing.
diptherio , August 6, 2018 at 4:17 pm"Do you find it curious this obsession [ ] w/ Russia meddling [ ]?" The Russian meddling isn't the curious part; Russia tries it in every election west of the river Pina. The abnormal part is a sitting US President, on Twitter, accused his son of a felony aka violating 52 U.S. Code § 30121 (a)(2), soliciting contributions [things of value] from a foreign national. Talk about "Blue on Blue" fire. Nothing "friendly" about that. Especially given the prima facie evidence of violating 18 U.S. Code § 3, accessory after the fact, by dictating Don the Younger's response to the story.
Synoia , August 6, 2018 at 4:21 pmI read the book Q a couple of years ago. It's real good. Especially if you're into the gory details of European religious history. There's a lot of things they didn't mention in my confirmation classes
Hiding , August 6, 2018 at 4:24 pmSocial media has its own problems, gawd knows The official narrative and its maintainers didn't lose credibility because of trolls and bots, who might be regarded as opportunistic infections overwhelming an already weakened immnune system
Well said. The official narrative, the swamp, is very good at blaming effects and ignoring causes.
a different chris , August 6, 2018 at 4:30 pmQanon seems like a honeypot site(s) for retribution futures. Read anything, go into a database for future reference. Unz and others have likely multiple uses and followers, NOC/NotForAttribution and other.
JTMcPhee , August 6, 2018 at 4:40 pmAgree with the disagreement over the list. However, this underlies so many, maybe all problems and nobody is seemingly going to clean it up:
>An overtaxed educational system
MyLessThanPrimeBeef , August 6, 2018 at 5:27 pmOn decline in coal shipments: look what is happening elsewhere! "Germany had so much renewable energy on Sunday that it had to pay people to use electricity!", https://qz.com/680661/germany-had-so-much-renewable-energy-on-sunday-that-it-had-to-pay-people-to-use-electricity/ "Power too cheap to meter," just like nuclear was promised to be! And that is an old 2016 article. I saw another piece, I believe in Business Insider or Bloomberg, complaining that the big energy companies are facing "profit stress" because of grid-ties from solar and wind requiring them to pay people for energy in excess of the load. And having, gasp! to shut down coal fired plants, each closure being a pretty expensive anti-profit center! I would tend to think of it being a re-internalization of costs that the power companies have dumped on us (health effects from heavy metal and carcinogen emissions, smog, CO2/climate interruption. Too bad the paybacks won't come from clawbacks of CEO paydays or any of the lobbying money spent to bribe legislatures, deceive the public/consumers, spent on getting legislative approval for nuclear power plants that WILL NEVER BE BUILT like Duke Energy has done (and besides, they get to cllect a billion or more from customers to "pay for" those plants that will never be built. Kind of like an ISDS "judgment" in favor of a megacorporation because 'regulation and market conditions' impaired said corporations' "expectations of profit "
Of course, windmills built to a price are not infallible, either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ
I have to add, adding it all up and looking around, "Effing stupid humans," to get to this point
ewmayer , August 6, 2018 at 8:42 pmAnd beyond this point, more ***ing stupid humans thanks to, well, population growth.
That would be a problem in any system – capitalism, socialism, communism, etc.
David , August 6, 2018 at 4:41 pmWell, that green-energy surfeit may have something to do with the combination of a record-smashing heat wave in a country where A/C systems have not been needed at scale, historically speaking. But good on them if they are in fact doing it sustainably.
JTMcPhee , August 6, 2018 at 4:57 pm. and could provide some relief to North American farmers just as Chinese tariffs are sapping demand for soybeans and other crops.
From the USDA's Export Sales Query System
Soybeans (in Metric Tons) for the week of 7/26/2018,
Country – 2018 Exports / 2017 Exports
China – 186 / 73,314
Korea – 59,999 / 0
Japan – 72,120 / 7,758
Taiwan – 86,441 / 3,853Grand Total for the week – 856,438 / 637,737
MyLessThanPrimeBeef , August 6, 2018 at 5:54 pmOf course, a good bit of that "trade" includes genetically modified soybeans. Monsanto is happy to sell their "intellectual property," immune from consequence of course, pure profit all the way down.
And of course there are NO POSSIBLE RISKS OR CONCERNS about the propagation of gene-fiddled stuff like soybeans and canola, " Genetically Modified Canola 'Escapes' Farm Fields,
August 6, 2010 , https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129010499 , just for example, I mean it's not like the World Health Organization has not kind of flagged some things that "policymakers" might want to keep in mind when confronted by the Cropporate Corrupters wanting to peddle their 'risk free innovations:'"Frequently asked questions on genetically modified foods
May 2014These questions and answers have been prepared by WHO in response to questions and concerns from WHO Member State Governments with regard to the nature and safety of genetically modified food." http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/food-technology/faq-genetically-modified-food/en/
"Do not worry, meine liebchen -- we do this for your own good "
JohnnyGL , August 6, 2018 at 5:22 pmThat's one more thing to ban – GM soybeans.
And growth hormone beef that's another.
Randy , August 6, 2018 at 5:26 pmhttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/medicare-save-businesses-trillions-dollars-190500400.html
Posting this because sometimes it's more about WHO is saying it, rather than what is being said. It's not often I look at a Rick Newman column and say, 'wow, he's really making a strong case'.
Tectonic plates of politics are shifting.
WobblyTelomeres , August 6, 2018 at 5:59 pmSalmonella in chickens.
The chickens are raised covered in their own filth and along with the filth comes salmonella. They attempt to contain the infection with antibiotics.
And if the conditions in the "chicken factory" aren't filthy enough the slaughterhouse ensures that the end product comes with salmonella by running the line speed so fast that punctured intestines insure that the end product comes out covered in salmonella-containing fecal matter. Which they try to contain with a chlorine bath.
If you like eating chicken shite eat store chicken. If you don't, and if you can, raise your own. Raising chickens for meat is a lot of work but they taste better and you won't be eating chicken shite.
Polar Donkey , August 6, 2018 at 5:49 pmOr quit eating meat.
Polar Donkey , August 6, 2018 at 6:06 pmJeez, Frank Rich needs to get out of New York City more. Everything has been completely broke around Memphis since 2006. It just mostly broke before that.
WobblyTelomeres , August 6, 2018 at 6:40 pmWas it Trump's election, the rise of Bernie/AOC, Obama's $32 million worth of post-presidency houses, 60,000 people dying from opiods, or the broken subways in NYC that caused Frank Rich's awakening?
Glen , August 6, 2018 at 6:54 pmMore likely a dollar sliding down the sidewalk
anon , August 6, 2018 at 6:01 pm"Obama didn't cause that broken spirit any more than Trump did."
Obama made it perfectly clear that the Democratic party was going to do nothing to correct 2008. Instead he put the very same people that wrecked the world economy back in charge. I will no longer vote for the "have no alternative" Democrat. I will vote for those that are going to enact the polices that will fix this mess. If that means we get twenty Trumps a row – so be it.
Bernie would have won.
Daryl , August 6, 2018 at 6:08 pmRe: On average for the year-ended this May, 58.5 percent of the job gains were in counties that backed Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 , and this excerpt from that Associated Press link:
The jobs data shows an economy that is as fractured as the political landscape ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. As more money pools in corporate hubs such as Houston, San Francisco or Seattle , prosperity spills over less and less to smaller towns and cities in America's interior. That would seem to undercut what Trump sees as a central accomplishment of his administration – job creation for middle class and blue-collar workers in towns far removed from glitzy urban centers.
Looking at those cities noted, especially Seattle and San Francisco – both of which now have an inhuman level of inequality and homelessness -- a further dive into the details is necessary.
Specifically, are those job gains ™ out of state imported employees from: Ivy League Schools (predominately under 26, mostly white males from elite families); along with H-1B, and Opt Program ™ imported employees (predominately under 26, mostly males from mostly upper middle class Asian families, paid far, far less than those Ivy Leaguers) [1]; while the displaced unemployed -- yet, highly qualified for employment -- residents in those cities are continually being forced out (if they can afford the move and have somewhere they are able to move to), or made homeless.
[1] Admittedly, I'm not sure whether they are included in those job gains, but if the job gains are based on ADP reports, it might well be likely that they are; of course a search on two search sites brought up no answer to my query.
lyman alpha blob , August 6, 2018 at 6:22 pm> Mastodon users?
I find Mastodon's user interface to be fairly unintuitive myself. Presumably it would be possible to make your own "mixed" view as it's open source and based on open protocols, but not sure if Mastodon supports it out of the box.
Arizona Slim , August 6, 2018 at 6:39 pmHow does Mastodon work?
By rocking until you can't take it anymore.
Instructional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFop1gTbaj8
And their drummer is a monster!
Or did you mean the Mastodon platform ?
Sorry Lambert, couldn't help myself Just saw this band recently and they are tremendous.
ChrisPacific , August 6, 2018 at 6:26 pmFun tutorial, lyman!
Pat , August 6, 2018 at 6:51 pmRe: Indivisible
AOC is one of their candidates, as are Cynthia Nixon, Ayana Pressley etc. There is a prevalence of Democrat buzzwords, but I think they are aiming to be agnostic regarding left factions:
We're excited to make gains in 2018, but Indivisible 435 isn't just about notching wins. Our organization is not a wing of the Democratic party. While we care deeply about electing officials to oppose the Trump agenda, we care just as much building a strong progressive community nationwide and pushing the conversation back to the interests of the people.
This would be well off message for establishment Democrats.
I'd be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, but still watch what they do.
Summer , August 6, 2018 at 7:18 pmI would posit that most of the job gains in the last decade maybe even two were probably in areas that voted for Clinton. That the Texas boom and the oil boom in the Dakota's were exceptions not the rule. I would also posit that the few Trump areas that did see job growth in that decade saw that growth in minimum wage low to no benefit jobs. (That last one wasn't much of a stretch since that has been the majority of jobs created during both the Bush 2 and Obama administration.)
drumlin woodchuckles , August 6, 2018 at 7:30 pmMaybe They Could Invent Houses" [Eschaton]. • After having invented the bodega, the bus
More like an "Appartment"?
The Rev Kev , August 6, 2018 at 7:36 pmSarah Jeong . . . hmmm . . .
Things like this have led me to comment in the past and every comment on this particular subject has failed to print. I figure I am tripping some kind of auto-filter.
So I will try again with indirect spelling.
We need a new word for this sort of thing. It would emerge from the new acronym we need.
The letters would be . . . arrr peee ohhh ceee
that stands for . . . rayciss purrsuns ovv cuhluhr.drumlin woodchuckles , August 6, 2018 at 8:51 pm"Dockless bike, scooter firms clash with U.S. cities over regulations"
I have a solution to these tech-companies which strew towns and cities with their bikes without coordinating or even asking to enter such a town and let the town try to adapt to their needs. It is called an impound lot. You have city workers pick them up and cart them there. If that company wants their bikes back again, they will have to pay to spring them from the lot. Rinse and repeat until that tech company gets the message. If that tech company doubles down, announce a $5 bounty for any bike driven to the impound lot till the company is ready to negotiate.
beth , August 6, 2018 at 8:05 pmDisrupt the disrupters.
Disruptive law-enforcement.
CalypsoFacto , August 6, 2018 at 8:58 pm"How a Pair of Kentucky Pols Are About to Legalize Hemp"
Please help me here. Hemp can be sold in all 50 states. The 2014 Farm bill allowed each state to decide whether hemp oil could be sold for medicinal purposes w/i that year. My first package sent to me was from a reputable company and was mailed through Amazon from Kentucky. I was experiencing severe pain and now have a better alternative.
The Rev Kev , August 6, 2018 at 8:37 pmI am also hoping for this bill so I can get into hemp processing for fibers into fabric!
ewmayer , August 6, 2018 at 8:43 pm"How to keep young people from fleeing small towns for big cities"
Not so hard. See that there are jobs for them. You cannot do much in modern society without money and a job provides this. A job provides dignity, discipline and the money it provides lets a young person to satisfy not only their needs but many of their wants as well. It is hard for a young guy to take a girl out but having no money to do so and a job's money will help a couple set up a household and marry and have children. The drop in marriage rates as well as the birthrate speaks volumes of the lack of decent paying jobs for young people, even those that have achieved credentials. Supply good paying jobs and most kids will stay put. Not so hard to work out.
Re. "Trump v. Fed" [Money and Banking], bolds mine: "Last month, interrupting decades of presidential self-restraint, President Trump openly criticized the Federal Reserve. Given the President's penchant for dismissing valuable institutions, it is hard to be surprised investors are reasonably focused on the selection of qualified academics and individuals with valuable policy and business experience the President's comments are seriously disturbing and -- were they to become routine -- risk undermining the significant benefits that Federal Reserve independence brings."
As Lambert would say, for some definition of 'valuable', 'benefits' and 'independence'.
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Aug 05, 2018 | russia-insider.com
"Behind the War on Terror is a strategic plan crafted decades in advance to redraw the map of the Middle East. 9/11 was a false-flag operation blamed on Muslims ..." Chuck Baldwin Wed, Aug 1, 2018 | 14,261 389 MORE: History Revisionist History The author is a prominent American Christian conservative who was a presidential candidate for the paleoconservative Constitution Party in 2008, when he was endorsed by Ron Paul.
He is the pastor of Liberty Fellowship, a non-denominational church in Montana, and he is a popular radio host and columnist . His weekly sermons are available on his YouTube channel.
He is a relentless foe of neoconservatism and frequently criticizes the neocon hostility towards Russia. His views are representative of an influential and substantial part of Trump's popular support.
Here is an archive of his excellent articles which we have published on Russia Insider , when they were relevant to the debate over Russia.
What if everything we've been told about 9/11 is a lie? What if it wasn't 19 Muslim terrorist hijackers that flew those planes into the Twin Towers and Pentagon? What if the Muslims had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks on 9/11? What if everything we've been told about the reasons we invaded two sovereign nations (Afghanistan and Iraq) is a lie?
What if the 17-year-old, never-ending "War on Terror" in the Middle East is a lie? What if our young soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who have given their lives in America's "War on Terror" died for a lie? What if G.W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have been nothing but controlled toadies for an international global conspiracy that hatched the attacks of 9/11 as nothing more than a means to institute a perpetual "War on Terror" for purposes that have nothing to do with America's national security? Would the American people want to know? Would the truth even matter to them?
The sad reality is that the vast majority of Americans who would read the above paragraph would totally dismiss every question I raised as being unrealistic and impossible -- or even nutty. Why is that? Have they studied and researched the questions? No. Have they given any serious thought to the questions? No. They have simply swallowed the government/mainstream media version of these events hook, line and sinker.
It is totally amazing to me that the same people who say they don't believe the mainstream media (MSM) and government (Deep State) versions of current events -- which is why they voted for and love Donald Trump -- have absolutely no reservations about accepting the official story that the 9/11 attacks were the work of jihadist Muslims and that America's "War on Terror" is completely legitimate.
These "always Trumpers" are dead set in their minds that America is at war with Islam; that Trump's bombings of Syria were because President Assad is an evil, maniacal monster who gassed his own people; and that Trump's expansion of the war in Afghanistan is totally in the interests of America's national security.
BUT WHAT IF ALL OF IT IS A BIG, FAT LIE?
What if the Muslims had NOTHING to do with 9/11?
What if Bashar al-Assad did NOT gas his own people?
What if America's "War on Terror" is a completely false, manufactured, made-up deception?
What if America's military forces are mostly fighting for foreign agendas and NOT for America's national security or even our national interests?
What if America's war in Afghanistan is a fraud?
What if the entire "War on Terror" is a fraud?
The Trump robots have bought into America's "War on Terror" as much as Obama's robots and Bush's robots did. Bush was elected twice, largely on the basis of America's "War on Terror." Obama campaigned against the "War on Terror" and then expanded it during his two terms in office. Trump campaigned against the "War on Terror" and then immediately expanded it beyond what Obama had done. In fact, Trump is on a pace to expand the "War on Terror" beyond the combined military aggressions of both Bush and Obama.
But who cares? Who even notices?
America is engaged in a global "War on Terror." Just ask G.W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX News, The Washington Post, the New York Times and the vast majority of America's pastors and preachers. They all tell us the same thing seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Liberals scream against Trump, and conservatives scream against Maxine Waters; but both sides come together to support America's never-ending "War on Terror."
But what if it's ALL a lie? What if Obama and Trump, the right and the left, the MSM and the conservative media are all reading from the same script? What if they are all (wittingly or unwittingly) in cahoots in perpetuating the biggest scam in world history? And why is almost everyone afraid to even broach the question?
Left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, secular or Christian, no one dares to question the official story about the 9/11 attacks or the "War on Terror."
And those who do question it are themselves attacked unmercifully by the right and the left, conservatives and liberals, Christians and secularists, Sean Hannity and Chris Matthews. Why is that? Why is it that FOX News and CNN, Donald Trump and Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz equally promote the same cockamamie story about 9/11 and the "War on Terror?"
Why? Why? Why?
Tell me again how Donald Trump is so different from Barack Obama. Tell me again how Ted Cruz is so different from Chuck Schumer. They all continue to perpetuate the lies about 9/11. They all continue to escalate America's never-ending "War on Terror." They are all puppets of a global conspiracy to advance the agenda of war profiteers and nation builders.
The left-right, conservative-liberal, Trump-Obama paradigm is one big giant SCAM. At the end of the day, the "War on Terror" goes on, bombs keep falling on people in the Middle East who had absolutely NOTHING to do with 9/11 and the money keeps flowing into the coffers of the international bankers and war merchants.
All of the above is why I am enthusiastically promoting Christopher Bollyn's new blockbuster book The War on Terror .
Of course, Bollyn is one of the world's foremost researchers and investigators into the attacks on 9/11. He has written extensively on the subject. But unlike most other 9/11 investigators, Bollyn continued to trace the tracks of the attacks on 9/11. And those tracks led him to discover that the 9/11 attacks were NOT "the event" but that they were merely the trigger for "the event." "What was the event?" you ask. America's perpetual "War on Terror."
As a result, Mr. Bollyn published his findings that the attacks on 9/11 were NOT perpetrated by Muslim extremists but by a very elaborate and well financed international conspiracy that had been in the planning for several decades. Bollyn's research names names, places and dates and exposes the truth behind not just 9/11 (many have done that) but behind America's "War on Terror" that resulted from the attacks on 9/11.
IT'S TIME FOR THE TRUTH TO COME OUT!
And Christopher Bollyn's investigative research brings out the truth like nothing I've read to date. His research connects the dots and destroys the myths.
Mr. Bollyn's research is published in a book entitled (full title): The War On Terror: The Plot To Rule The Middle East . I mean it when I say that if enough people read this book, it could change the course of history and save our republic.
This is written on the book's back cover:
The government and media have misled us about 9/11 in order to compel public opinion to support the War on Terror.
Why have we gone along with it? Do we accept endless war as normal? Are we numb to the suffering caused by our military interventions?
No. We have simply been propagandized into submission. We have been deceived into thinking that the War on Terror is a good thing, a valiant struggle against terrorists who intend to attack us as we were on 9/11.
Behind the War on Terror is a strategic plan crafted decades in advance to redraw the map of the Middle East. 9/11 was a false-flag operation blamed on Muslims in order to start the military operations for that strategic plan. Recognizing the origin of the plan is crucial to understanding the deception that has changed our world.
Folks, 9/11 was a deception. The "War on Terror" is a deception. The phony left-right paradigm is a deception. FOX News is as much a deception as CNN. The "always Trump" group is as much a deception as the "never Trump" group. America has been in the throes of a great deception since September 11, 2001. And this deception is being perpetrated by Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals alike.
I do not know Christopher Bollyn. I've never met him. But I thank God he had the intellectual honesty and moral courage to write this book. I urge readers to get this explosive new book. If you don't read any other book this year, read Mr. Bollyn's investigative masterpiece: The War On Terror: The Plot To Rule The Middle East .
Again, I am enthusiastically recommending this book to my readers, and I make no apologies for doing so. The truth contained in this research MUST get out, and I am determined to do all I can to help make that possible.
Order Christopher Bollyn's blockbuster book The War On Terror: The Plot To Rule The Middle East here:
The War On Terror: The Plot To Rule The Middle East
I am confident that after you read this book, you will want to buy copies for your friends and relatives. The book is under 200 pages long and is not difficult reading. However, the facts and details Bollyn covers are profound and powerful. I have read the book three times so far and I'm not finished.
Frankly, Bollyn's book made so many things make sense for me. His book dovetails and tracks with much of my research on other topics. Truly, his book helped me get a much fuller understanding of the "big picture."
What if everything we've been told about 9/11 and the "War on Terror" is a lie? Well, Bollyn's book proves that indeed it is.
Again, here is where to find Christopher Bollyn's phenomenal new book The War On Terror: The Plot To Rule The Middle East :
The War On Terror: The Plot To Rule The Middle East
Source: Chuck Baldwin LIVE
- AM Hants • 5 days ago ,
daveycrockett Merijn • 4 days ago ,Worked that out, when following events in Ukraine. All main events, since my birth and long before then, were no more than Operation Gladio false flags. It takes a lot to get your head around that, without feeling blind fury to your Governments, of each and every day. Plus media manipulation.
Orwell said it - "he who controls the past controls the future".
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Jul 27, 2018 | dissidentvoice.org
In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.
It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda.
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback , Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
There are no more leaps of faith, or get out of jail cards left anymore. The first casualty of war is truth.
Lofty heights of defining the first amendment are just overlooks onto the crumbling mythology of a democracy, where the people – citizens -- vote for laws directly. We have a republic, a faulty one, the source of which is the power derived from billionaires, financiers, arms merchants, K-Streeters and the attendant moles allowing the government to break every charter of human concern. So, in that regard, we in this corptocracy have the right to be fooled every minute, suckered to not know a goddamned thing about democracy in big quotes.
The very concept of manufactured consent and a controlled opposition destroys much of the power of agency and so-called freedom of assembly, association and travel.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.
― Vladimir Lenin
But, alas, we have blokes who see the world not as a black and white dichotomous illusion of the for v. against bifurcation, but a world of flowing back to what words should mean, a world that allows the filters to be smashed like high polished glass and instead deploying a magnifying glass to point toward the very source of the blasphemies and strong arm robberies that have been occurring in the Republic the very first moment the beaver hat was put on and the first treaty scripted by the powdered wigs of Washingtonian Fathers and broken, ripped to shreds, seeded with the dark force that is the white race.
Here comes Tools for Transparency into the mix of triage to uphold the declaration of independence, and the few tenets of the constitution that are supremely directed to we-by-for-because of the people, AND not the corporation, monopoly, Military-Retail-Finance-Ag-Energy-Pharma-Prison-Medical-Toxins-IT-Surveillance-Legal Complex. This project is the brainchild of a former Marine who "came to life late in the world" of pure skepticism about the powers that be and his own questioning of the motivations and machinations of his government and political representatives.
... ... ...
...we talked about Mad Men , the Edward Bernays and Milton Friedman schools of propaganda, framing stories (lies) and setting out to paint good people as bad, heroic politicians like Salvador Allende of Chile as Commie Baby Killers. Even now, Bush, the instigator of chaos in the Middle East, with all the cooked up lies and distractions of his own stupidity (like Trump), and, bam, W is reclaimed (in the mainstream mush media) as something of a good president, and especially by the likes of the Democratic Party misleadership .
... ... ...
His Tools for Transparency cuts through the opinion, and as he proposes, makes the world news and the even more Byzantine and elaborate proposed legislation and lobbying groups behind "the news" approachable, again, consumable.
He taps into his college days taking courses in industrial organizational psychology, seemingly benign when the American Psychological Association gets to mash the term into a three-fold brochure by defining it for prospective students as business as usual for corporations, and humanity is better because of this sort of manipulative psychology, but . . .
In reality, it's the science of behavior in the workplace, organizational development, attitudes, career development, decision theory, human performance, human factors, consumer behavior, small group theory and process, criterion theory and development and job and task analysis and individual assessment. It's a set of tools to keep workers down spiritually and organizationally, disconnected, fearful, confused and ineffectual as thinkers and resisters, and inept at countering the abuse of power companies or bureaucracies wield over a misinformed workforce.
The shape of corporations' unethical behavior, their sociopathic and the draconian workplace conditions today are largely sculpted and defined by these behavior shapers to include the marketers and the Edward Bernays-inspired manipulators of facts and brain functioning. This begs the question for Hanson, just what are today's hierarchy of needs for the average American? Physiological; Safety; Love/Belonging; Esteem; Self-Actualization.
... ... ...
Brian believes there is an awakening today in this country, and that the examples of movements such as those in Portland where youth are out yelling against the police state, and then how we are seeing individual officers returning firing with violence against those youth:
The viral video of an officer drawing his pistol on a group of school age children is terrifying.
We talk a lot about the devaluing of language and intentional discourse which includes the abilities of a society to engage in lively and cogent debate. For me, I know the forces of propaganda are multi-headed, multi-variant, with so much of American life seeded with lies, half-truths, duplicitous and twisted concepts, as well as inaccurate and spin-doctored history, which has contaminated a large portion of our society, up and down the economic ladder, with mind control.
Unfortunately, our language now is inextricably tied to emotions, as we see leftists (what's that?) and so-called progressives screaming at the top of their lungs how Trump is the worst president ever. Black so-called activists , journalists, stating how the empire (sky) is falling because Trump talked with Putin . Imagine, imagine, all those millions upon millions of people killed because of all the other presidents' and their thugs' policies eviscerating societies, all those elections smeared, all those democracies mauled, all those citizens in the other part of the world hobbled by America's policies, read "wars, occupations, embargoes, structural violence." It is a daily reminder for us all that today, as was true yesterday, that we are ruled by masters of self-deception and our collective society having a feel good party every day while we plunder the world. Doublethink. Here:
To tell deliberate lives while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
Herein lies the problem – vaunting past presidents on pedestals while attacking this current deplorable, Donald Trump. The reality is the US has been run by an elite group of militarists, and by no means is Trump the worst of the worst, which is both illogical and unsupported by facts:
Yet, we have to mark the words and wisdom of those of us who have been marking this empire's crimes, both internal and external, for years. Here, Paul Edwards over at Counterpunch hits a bulls-eye on the heart of the matter:
After decades of proven bald-faced crime, deceit and the dirtiest pool at home and abroad, the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Justice Department and the whole fetid nomenklatura of sociopathic rats, are portrayed as white knights of virtue dispensing verity as holy writ. And "progressives" buy it.
These are the vermin that gave us Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Chile, the Contras, Iraq's WMD, and along the way managed to miss the falls of the Shah and Communism.
Truly an Orwellian clusterfuck, this. War Party Dems misleading naive liberal souls sickened by Trump into embracing the dirty, vicious lunacy Hillary peddled to her fans, the bankers, brokers, and CEOs of the War Machine.
Trump is a fool who may yet blunder us into war; the Dems and the Deep State cabal would give us war by design.
... ... ...
Paul Kirk Haeder has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He's been a part-time faculty since 1983, and as such has worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative high schools, language schools, as a private contractor-writing instructor for US military in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Washington. A forthcoming book (Dec. 15, 2016), Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber , looks at 10 years of his writing at Dissident Voice , and before, to bring defiance to the world that is now lobotomizing at a rate never before seen in history. Read his autobiography, weekly chapter installments, at LA Progressive . Read other articles by Paul , or visit Paul's website . |
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Jul 26, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
The children of America's white-collar middle class viewed life from their green lawns and tidy urban flats as a field of opportunity. Blessed with quality schools, seaside vacations and sleepover camp, they just knew that the American dream was theirs for the taking if they hit the books, picked a thoughtful and fulfilling career, and just, well, showed up.
Until it wasn't.
While they were playing Twister and imagining a bright future, someone apparently decided that they didn't really matter. Clouds began to gather -- a "dark shimmer of constantly shifting precariousness," as journalist Alissa Quart describes in her timely new book " Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America ."
The things these kids considered their birthright -- reputable colleges, secure careers, and attractive residences -- were no longer waiting for them in adulthood.
Today, with their incomes flat or falling, these Americans scramble to maintain a semblance of what their parents enjoyed. They are moving from being dominant to being dominated. From acting to acted upon. Trained to be educators, lawyers, librarians, and accountants, they do work they can't stand to support families they rarely see. Petrified of being pushed aside by robots, they rankle to see financial titans and tech gurus flaunting their obscene wealth at every turn.
Headlines gush of a humming economy, but it doesn't feel like a party to them -- and they've seen enough to know who will be holding the bag when the next bubble bursts.
The "Middle Precariats," as Quart terms them, are suffering death by a thousand degradations. Their new reality: You will not do as well as your parents . Life is a struggle to keep up. Even if you achieve something, you will live in fear of losing it. America is not your land: it belongs to the ultra-rich.
Much of Quart's book highlights the mirror image of the downwardly mobile middle class Trump voters from economically strained regions like the Midwest who helped throw a monkey wrench into politics-as-usual. In her tour of American frustration, she talks to urbanites who lean liberal and didn't expect to find themselves drowning in debt and disappointment. Like the falling-behind Trump voters, these people sense their status ripped away, their hopes dashed.
If climbing up the ladder of success is the great American story, slipping down it is the quintessential tragedy. It's hard not to take it personally: the ranks of the Middle Precariat are filled with shame.
They are somebodies turning into nobodies.
And there signs that they are starting to revolt. If they do, they could make their own mark on the country's political landscape.
The Broken Bourgeoisie
Quart's book takes a sobering look at the newly unstable bourgeoisie, illustrating what happens when America's off-the-rails inequality blasts over those who always believed they would end up winners.
There's the Virginia accountant who forks over nearly 90% of her take home pay on care for her three kids; the Chicago adjunct professor with the disabled child who makes less than $24,000 a year; and the California business reporter who once focused on the financial hardships of others and now faces unemployment herself.
There are Uber-driving teachers and law school grads reviewing documents for $20 an hour -- or less. Ivy Leaguers who live on food stamps.
Lacking unions, church communities and nearby close relatives to support them, the Middle Precariats are isolated and stranded. Their labor has sputtered into sporadic contingency: they make do with short-term contracts or shift work. (Despite the much-trumpeted low unemployment rate, the New York Times reports that jobs are often subpar, featuring little stability and security). Once upon a time, only the working poor took second jobs to stay afloat. Now the Middle Precariat has joined them.
Quart documents the desperate measures taken by people trying to keep up appearances, relying on 24/7 "extreme day care" to accommodate unpredictable schedules or cobbling together co-living arrangements to cut household costs. They strain to provide things like academic tutors and sports activities for their kids who must compete with the children of the wealthy. Deep down, they know that they probably can't pass down the cultural and social class they once took for granted.
Quart cites a litany of grim statistics that measure the quality of their lives, like the fact that a middle-class existence is now 30% more expensive than it was twenty years ago, a period in which the price of health care and the cost of a four-year degree at a public college nearly doubled.
Squeezed is especially detailed on the plight of the female Middle Precariat, like those who have the effrontery to procreate or grow older. With the extra burdens of care work, pregnancy discrimination, inadequate family leave, and wage disparities, (not to mention sexual harassment, a subject not covered), women get double squeezed. For women of color, often lacking intergenerational wealth to ease the pain, make that a triple squeeze.
The Middle Precariat in middle age is not a pretty sight: without union protection or a reliable safety net they endure lost jobs, dwindled savings, and shattered identities. In one of the saddest chapters, Quart describes how the pluckiest try reinvent themselves in their 40s or 50s, enrolling in professional courses and certification programs that promise another shot at security, only to find that they've been scammed by greedy college marketers and deceptive self-help mavens who leave them more desperate than before.
Quart notes that even those making decent salaries in the United States now see themselves barred from the club of power and wealth. They may have illiquid assets like houses and retirement accounts, but they still see themselves as financially struggling. Earning $100,000 sounds marvelous until you've forked over half to housing and 30% to childcare. Each day is one bit of bad luck away from disaster.
"The spectacular success of the 0.1 percent, a tiny portion of society, shows just how stranded, stagnant, and impotent the current social system has made the middle class -- even the 10 percent who are upper-middle class," Quart writes.
Quart knows that the problems of those who seem relatively privileged compared many may not garner immediate sympathy. But she rightly notes that their stresses are a barometer for the concentration of extreme wealth in some American cities and the widening chasm between the very wealthy and everybody else.
The Dual Economy
The donor-fed establishment of both political parties could or would not see this coming, but some prescient economists have been sounding the alarm.
In his 2016 book The Vanishing Middle Class , MIT economist Peter Temin detailed how the U.S. has been breaking up into a "dual economy" over the last several decades, moving toward a model that is structured economically and politically more like a developing nation -- a far cry from the post-war period when the American middle class thrived.
In dual economies, the rich and the rest part ways as the once-solid middle class begins to disappear. People are divided into separate worlds in the kinds of jobs they hold, the schools their kids attend, their health care, transportation, housing, and social networks -- you name it. The tickets out of the bottom sector, like a diploma from a first-rate university, grow scarce. The people of the two realms become strangers.
French economist Thomas Picketty provided a stark formula for what happens capitalism is left unregulated in his 2015 bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century . It goes like this: when the rate of return on the investments of the wealthy exceeds the rate of growth in the overall economy, the rich get exponentially richer while everyone becomes poorer. In more sensible times, like the decades following WWII, that rule was mitigated by an American government that forced the rich pay their share of taxes, curbed the worst predations of businesses, and saw to it that roads, bridges, public transit, and schools were built and maintained.
But that's all a fading memory. Under the influence of political money, politicians no longer seek a unified economy and society where the middle class can flourish. As Quart observes, the U.S. is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world, featuring the largest wealth inequality gap of the two hundred countries in the Global Wealth Report of 2015.
Who is to Blame?
Over and over, the people Quart interviews tend to blame themselves for their situation -- if only they'd chosen a different career, lived in another city, maybe things wouldn't have turned out this way. Sometimes they point the finger at robots and automation, though they arguably have much more to fear from the wealthy humans who own the robots.
But some are waking up to the fact it is the wealthy and their purchased politicians who have systematically and deliberately stripped them of power. Deprivations like paltry employee rights, inadequate childcare, ridiculously expensive health care, and non-existent retirement security didn't just happen . Abstract words like deregulation and globalization become concrete: somebody actually did this to you by promoting policies that leave you high and dry.
As Quart indicates, understanding this is the first step to a change of consciousness, and her book is part of this shift.
Out of this consciousness, many individuals and organizations are working furiously and sometimes ingeniously to alter the negative trajectory of the Middle Precariat. Quart outlines proposals and developments like small-scale debt consolidation, student debt forgiveness, adequately subsidized day care, and non-traditional unions that could help.
America also has a track record of broad, fundamental solutions that have already proven to work. Universal basic income may sound attractive, but we already have a program that could improve the lot of the middle class if expanded: Social Security.
Right now, a worker stops having to pay Social Security tax on any earnings beyond $128,400 -- a number that is unreasonably low because the rich wish to keep it so. Just by raising that cap, we could the lower the retirement age so that Americans in their 60s would not have greet customers at Walmart. More opportunities would open up to younger workers.
The Middle Precariat could be forgiven for suspecting that the overlords of Silicon Valley may have something other than altruism in mind when they tout universal basic income. Epic tax evaders, they stand to benefit from pushing the responsibility for their low-paid workers and the inadequate safety net and public services that they helped create onto ordinary taxpayers.
Beyond basic income lies a basic fact: the American wealthy do not pay their share in taxes. In fact, American workers pay twice as much in taxes as wealthy investors. That's why infrastructure crumbles, schools deteriorate, and sane health care and childcare are not available.
Most Americans realize that inequality has to be challenged through the tax code: a 2017 Gallup poll shows that the majority think that the wealthy and corporations don't pay enough. Politicians, of course, ignore this to please their donors.
And so the Middle Precariat, like the Trump voters, is getting fed up with them.
From Depressed to Energized
Quart astutely points out that income inequality is being written into the law of the land. Funded the efforts of billionaires like the Koch brothers, politicians have altered laws and constitutions across the country to cement the dual economy through everything from restricting voting rights to defunding public education.
Several Middle Precariats in Squeezed have turned to independent or renegade candidates like Bernie Sanders who offer broad, substantial programs like debt-free college and universal health care that address the fissures in their lives. They are listening to candidates who are not afraid to say that markets should work for human beings, not the other way around.
If Donald Trump's political rise "can be understood as an expression of the gulf between middle-class citizens and America's ruling classes," as Quart observes, then the recent surge of non-establishment Democratic candidates, especially democratic socialists, may be the next phase of a middle class revolt.
Recent surprise victories in Pennsylvania and New York in the Democratic primaries by female candidates openly embracing democratic socialism, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who bested Democratic stalwart Joe Crowley by running for Congress on a platform of free Medicare and public college tuition for all, may not be the blip that establishment Democrats hope. In New York, democratic socialist Julia Salazar is looking to unseat long-time state senator Martin Dilan. Actress Cynthia Nixon , running against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has just proclaimed herself a democratic socialist and promises to raise taxes on the rich and boost funding for public schools. Michelle Goldberg recently announced in the New York Times that " The Millenial Socialists are Coming ," indicating the intense dislike of traditional politics in urban centers. These young people do not think of things like debt-free college or paid family leave as radical: they see it done elsewhere in the world and don't accept that it can't be done in America.
Historically, the more affluent end of the middle class tends to identify with and support the wealthy. After all, they might join their ranks one day. But when this dream dies, the formerly secure may decide to throw their lot in with the rest of the Precariats. That's when you have the chance for a real mass movement for change.
Of course, people have to recognize their common circumstances and fates. The urban denizens of New York and San Francisco have to see what they have in common with middle class Trump voters from the Rust Belt, as well as working class Americans and everybody else who is not ultra-rich.
If the growing ranks of Precariats can work together, maybe it won't take a natural catastrophe or a war or violent social upheaval to change America's unsustainable course of gross inequality. Because eventually, something has to give.
Sergey P , July 26, 2018 at 3:42 am
athena , July 26, 2018 at 6:06 amI think one crucial thing that has to change is the culture of extreme individualization.
Professed as a right for individual freedom and empowerment, in reality it serves to suppress disobedience with shame. If you earn like shit -- it's gotta be because YOU are shit. Just try harder. Don't you see those OTHER kids that did well!
Part of the blame is on New Age with it's quazi-buddhist narrative: basically, everything is perfect, and if you don't feel it that way, it's because you are tainted with envy or weakness.
Thus what is in fact a heavily one-sided battle -- is presented as a natural order of things.
I believe we need a new framework. A sort of mix of Marx and Freud: study of the subconscious of the social economy. The rich not just HAPPEN to be rich. They WANT to be rich. Which means that in some way they NEED others to be poor.
Of course, I'm generalizing. And some rich are just really good at what they do. These rich will indeed trickle down, they will increase the well-being of people. But there are others. People working in insurance and finance. And as their role in the economy grows -- as does their role in politics, their power. They want to have more, while others would have less.
But behind it all are not rational thoughts, not efficiency, but psychological trauma, pain of the soul. Without addressing these matters, we will not be able to change the world.
I'm sorry if my thoughts are somewhat fragmented. It's just something I've been thinking of a lot since I started reading NC, discovering MMT and heterodox approaches in general.
NotTimothyGeithner , July 26, 2018 at 7:53 amI enjoyed reading your thoughts, and completely agree with them all. :)
Louis Fyne , July 26, 2018 at 8:53 amThe problem is the perception the Democratic Party is reliable as a partner. The culture wasn't a problem in 2008 when the Democratic candidate was perceived as wanting to raise taxes, pass universal health care, and end the wars.
Urizenik , July 26, 2018 at 9:00 am====Part of the blame is on New Age with it's quazi-buddhist narrative: basically, everything is perfect, and if you don't feel it that way, it's because you are tainted with envy or weakness.
Adam Curtis touched about this (and the 50's/60's "self-actualization movement) in his TV documentary "Century of Self." if i recall correctly. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=century+of+self
That's where I first heard of this theoretical link. I think that it's flat out right and post-WWII psycho-babble has seeped into society in pernicious ways (along with everything else, breakdown of nuclear family, etc). Unfortunately, can't prove it like Euclid.
MC , July 26, 2018 at 10:16 am"A sort of mix of Marx and Freud"– the " Frankfurt School " is a start, with the realization of "the culture industry" as force majeure in the "heavily one-sided battle." And ditto recommendation of "The Century of the Self."
Left in Wisconsin , July 26, 2018 at 1:00 pmThere's also Zizek.
DolleyMadison , July 26, 2018 at 3:02 pmBoth good suggestions.
Responding to Sergey P:
I think one crucial thing that has to change is the culture of extreme individualisation.There are really only two alternatives to individualism. There is Durkheim-ian "society," in which we are all in this together – interdependent. I think this is still an appropriate lens for a lot of smaller cities and communities where people really do still know each other and everyone wants the community to thrive. And, of course, it is the only way to think about human society nested inside a finite Earth. But it can only work on a larger scale through mediating "institutions" or "associations." All the evidence shows, consistent with the piece, that precariousness by itself weakens social institutions – people have less time and money to contribute to making them work well.
And then there is Marx-ian "class." Which is to say, we are not all individuals but we are not all of one group. There are different groups with different interests and, not infrequently, the interests of different groups are opposed – what is good for one is bad for another – and if power is unequal between groups (either because some groups as groups have more power than others or because individuals with more power all have the same group affinity), then powerful groups will use that power to oppress others. In that case, the only remedy is to try to systematically empower the weak and/or disempower the strong. This also requires collective action – institutions, associations, government – and it is again noted that our collective institutions, most notably unions, have been seriously weakened in the last 40-60 years.
The real world doesn't always fit into neat categories. Trump's America First is an appeal to the "society" of USAmerica. Maybe there will be some improvements for working people. But the argument in the piece, perhaps not as clearly stated as I would like, is that the interests of the (former) middle class – as a class – have diverged from the interests of the upper class. Changing that equation requires collective action.
Redlife2017 , July 26, 2018 at 5:08 amWell said
Jim Haygood , July 26, 2018 at 5:49 amNaturally one must quote the great Frank Herbert from his novel Dune:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
Or shorter: Follow the money.
YankeeFrank , July 26, 2018 at 8:34 am'We already have a program that could improve the lot of the middle class if expanded: Social Security.'
Never mind expanding it -- even the existing Social Security program is less than 20% funded, headed for zero in 2034 according to its trustees. Scandalously, these trustees owe no fiduciary duty to beneficiaries. Old Frank wanted pensioners to be forever dependent on his D party. How did that work out for us?
Take a look at the transmittal letter for the 2018 trustees report, released last month. Two public trustee positions are "VACANT," just as they were in last year's transmittal letter:
Just above these blank spaces is the signature of one Nancy Berryhill, "Acting Commissioner of Social Security." But wait --
On March 6, 2018, the Government Accountability Office stated that as of November 17, 2017, Berryhill's status violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which limits the time a position can be filled by an acting official; "[t]herefore Ms. Berryhill was not authorized to continue serving using the title of Acting Commissioner after November 16." Berryhill declared, "Moving forward, I will continue to lead the agency from my position of record, Deputy Commissioner of Operations."
By June 5th, Berryhill was still impersonating the Acting Commissioner, legally or not.
Summing up, even the trustees' one-page transmittal letter shows that Social Security is treated as a total and complete Third World joke by the US federal government.
Kurtismayfield , July 26, 2018 at 8:44 amYeah, yeah. Gubmint can't do nuthin' rite. How about we take our government back from the plutocrats and set SS on solid footing again. There are no impediments other than the will of the people to use our power. Now that the Boomers are moving off all sorts of things, like 'thinking', and 'logic', will become prevalent again.
Jamie , July 26, 2018 at 11:03 amNever mind expanding it -- even the existing Social Security program is less than 20% funded, headed for zero in 2034 according to its trustees. Scandalously, these trustees owe no fiduciary duty to beneficiaries. Old Frank wanted pensioners to be forever dependent on his D party. How did that work out for us?
Correct, then the system will eventually be totally reliant on taxes coming in. According to 2011 OASDI Trustees Report
Beginning in 2023, trust fund assets will diminish until they become exhausted in 2036. Non-interest income is projected to be sufficient to support expenditures at a level of 77 percent of scheduled benefits after trust fund exhaustion in 2036, and then to decline to 74 percent of scheduled benefits in 2085
The benefits are never going to go completely away, the benefits will decrease if nothing is done. Things can be done to change this, such as an increasing the the cap on earnings, raising new revenues, etc. This is not exactly an "end of the world" scenario for SSI.
Also, no one complained when the excess SSI tax collected "Social security trust fund" was used to keep interest rates down by purchasing Government bonds.
Kurtismayfield , July 26, 2018 at 11:29 amThe whole tax angle is a complete red herring. Raising the cap is not the answer. FICA is "the most regressive tax" the country imposes. Eliminating FICA altogether, doing away with the "trust fund" and the pretense that SS is not the government taking care of it's elderly citizens but is workers taking care of themselves, is the answer. If the emphasis in Quart's book on the rise of a new democratic socialism means anything, it means reconciling with the notion that it is OK for the government to take measures to ensure the welfare of the people. Pay-as-you-go SS can become simply the re-assumption of our collective responsibility to take care of our own, as a society, not as individuals.
kgw , July 26, 2018 at 11:39 amI would be fine with that if I could trust the Federal government to do the right thing. The problem is that we have too many people invested in the system, and I don't trust the Federal government to not screw people over in a new system. You know what will happen, they will set up a two tiered system where people over a certain age will keep their benefits, and the new people will get a system that is completely crapified or means tested.
Anon , July 26, 2018 at 2:02 pmWell-put The only way to eliminate the constant refrain of "but SS is (insert blithering comment on entitlement spending), is to shift resources to people rather than armies for the SuperRich.
JCC , July 26, 2018 at 9:52 amYeah, more Butter–Less Guns!
(Now how do we stop the media hysteria about those big,bad Enemies -- Russia?!)
Grumpy Engineer , July 26, 2018 at 11:00 amSo we should just ignore the fact that our own Govt has "borrowed" $2.8 Trillion, at least, from the SS Trust Fund so far and can't (won't) pay it back?
This "borrowing" should be illegal and I believe that "Old Frank" would be rolling in his grave if he knew that would happen.
And I sincerely doubt his intentions were to get SS on the books in order to keep us beholden to the Dem Party. And if that were true it is obvious that his party doesn't agree. If they did they wouldn't be assisting in gutting the program.
Spring Texan , July 26, 2018 at 1:15 pmThe whole concept of creating and maintaining a multi-trillion dollar "trust fund" was irrevocably flawed. When the surplus payroll taxes were "invested" in government bonds, they entered the government's general fund and were promptly spent. The money is gone. That's why it's on the books as a debt owed to the Social Security administration. There are no actual assets behind the fund. It's just one part of the government owing money to another part of the government.
However, what would the alternative have been? Investing in the crap shoot known as the US stock market? No thanks. Or setting the funds aside in a bank account, where they would cease circulating through the economy? That wouldn't have worked either, as all dollars in circulation would have eventually ended up there, causing massive deflation.
None of these are workable. We should have gone on a strictly pay-as-you-go basis. If payroll taxes generated more revenue than was necessary, we should have cut payroll taxes and/or raised benefits. And if they fall short, we should raise payroll taxes and/or cut benefits.
Today, we cover about 95% of benefits with payroll taxes. The remainder comes from "trust fund redemptions", where general fund monies are given to the SSA to cover the shortfall. Given that our government is already running a deficit, this means more borrowing (or money-printing, depending on how you look at things).
When the "trust fund" is depleted, but SSA will lack the legal authority to claim any more general fund monies, but it would be quite easy for Congress to change the rules to simply state that "any SSA shortfall will be covered by the general fund". And I predict they will do so in 2034, as it would take less than a month of constituents complaining about reduced benefits to force even the strictest of deficit hawks to cave.
Or maybe they'll get creative and instead raise rates on the interest that the trust fund earns. Right now it's a 3% rate, but if Congress were to double or triple it, the trust fund would last much longer. [As would the debt owed to the SSA.] Heck, if they multiplied the interest rate by a factor of 11, then they could theoretically dispense with payroll taxes entirely. Right?
Milton , July 26, 2018 at 10:37 pmYes, SS has contributed NOT ONE PENNY to the deficit and the reason it accumulated a surplus was so people could collect later. Now, they want to say that old surplus shouldn't count. That's thievery.
ObjectiveFunction , July 26, 2018 at 6:44 amtired old tripe and how much is the US military funded? I can answer that for you. It's ZERO. 0% funded! Take your heterodox BS to a bunch of freshman impressionables – it is only tolerated here because you are a fine writer and interesting as hell and know almost all there is about economic liberalism.
Musicismath , July 26, 2018 at 7:29 amWow. So let's go full SSCodex for a bit and push this trend out to the limit.
While the unwashed masses remain a market for big Ag, big Pharma, big Auto, big (online) Retail, and a few others, it seems like the predatory 'fund' segment of the FIRE elite has moved on to devouring larger prey (capitalist autophagy?). The unbankable precariat are beneath their notice now, like pennies on the sidewalk.
So in that case, the 1% of the 0.1% has evolved beyond 'exploitation' in any Marxist sense. It is now indifferent to the very life or death of the precariat, at home or abroad, still less their security or advancement. It needs them neither for consuming nor producing, nor for building ziggurats.
(Just so long as the pitchforks aren't out – but that's what the credentialed minion 20% is for. And drones).
Here Disposables, have some more plastic and painkillers. Be assured the Alphas will be live tweeting the Pandemic, or Chicxulub 2.0, from Elon's luxury robot-serviced survival capsules (oh, you thought those were for use on Mars? Silly rabble!)
It's like that DKs mosh pit classic: "Uncounted millions whisked away / the rich will have more room to play"
[I exaggerate, of course, for illustration. Slightly.]
athena , July 26, 2018 at 7:47 amI think you can extend this analysis to the current U.K. Conservative Party. Commentators have started to notice that the Brexiteer wing of the party seems completely impervious to claims Brexit will harm the economy. Are the Tories no longer the natural party of British business, they ask?
Using your logic, we can say that a fund-interest-dominated Tory party simply has no interest in or need for the "ordinary" bits of the British business community anymore. What it wants are shorting and raiding opportunities, and from that vantage point a catastrophic Brexit is very attractive. Put these interests in coalition with a voter base largely living on guaranteed incomes and retirement funds of one sort or another and you have the surreal spectacle of an entire governing party and its supporters who are no longer anchored to the "real" economy at all. Yes, it's an exaggeration but it's an exaggeration that explains a few things, I think.
ObjectiveFunction , July 26, 2018 at 8:47 amYou both need to read the 2005 leaked Citigroup "plutonomy memo", if you haven't yet. Very bright minds called it a decade ago, that the global economy isn't even an economy any longer in any traditional sense. This is part one: https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
sharonsj , July 26, 2018 at 4:59 pm"Plutonomy" sounds like some nasal epithet out of a Goebbels speech: " die Plutonomisten und Bolshewisten! "
Louis Fyne , July 26, 2018 at 8:09 amGreat link. From page one, Citigroup thinks the global imbalance is a great opportunity. Nothing new here. For years I've been reading about stock and futures manipulations–and vulture capitalists–that cause people to die or kill themselves. The rich don't care; they see it as a way to make more money. And then you wonder why I've been talking revolution for years as well?
athena , July 26, 2018 at 8:17 am"Who is to Blame?"
Answer: Add the US wasting its blood and cash meddling in other countries' affairs. "honest friendship with all nations-entangling alliances with none." bueller ?
Ironic as multilateralist/globalist/fan of US interventions George Soros supposedly provided some of the seed money for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
chris , July 26, 2018 at 8:40 amI don't think Soros is diabolical or sadistic. He's just, let's say, "neurologically eccentric" and unimaginably wealthy.
athena , July 26, 2018 at 9:25 amChiGal in Carolina , July 26, 2018 at 11:52 amI just want to not die earlier than necessary because I can't afford health care. I'd also like to stop worrying that I'll spend my golden years homeless and starving because of some disaster headed my way. I gave up on status a long time ago, and am one of those mentioned who has little pity for the top 10%.
John B , July 26, 2018 at 8:50 amDitto
Daniel F. , July 26, 2018 at 9:32 amSounds like a good book. I shall have to pick it up from my library, since buying new books is a stretch.
Nearly all income growth in the United States since the 1970s has gone into income obtained by the rich other than wages and salaries, like capital gains, stock options, dividends, partnership distributions, etc. To capture overall economic growth to which the entire society has contributed, Social Security benefits should be tied to economic growth, smoothed for the business cycle. If people believe benefit increases require tax increases, the tax should be applied to all earnings, not just salary/wages. Raising the $128,400 cap on income subject to SS taxes would thus increase taxes on the lower rungs of the upper middle class but not really address the problem.
nycTerrierist , July 26, 2018 at 9:47 amI apologise in advance for being blunt and oversimplifying the matter, but at the end of the day, (in my very humble and possibly uninformed opinion) nothing short of a mass beheading would work. The 0.1% doesn't really seem, uh, willing to let go of their often ill-gotten billions, and when they do (i.e. charities and such), they often end up being some kind of scam. I refuse to believe that the Zuckerberg-types operate their foundations out of genuine philanthropy. Acquisitions and mergers like Disney buying Fox or Bayer gobbling up Monsanto don't contribute anything to the well-being of the 99% either, and I think that's and understatement.
If there's going to be some kind of revolution, it needs to happen before the logical conclusion of rampaging capitalism. the OCP-type megacorp with its own private army. And, if there indeed is a revolution, what's next?
Michael Fiorillo , July 26, 2018 at 10:14 amnice gesture:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jul/25/betsy-devos-yacht-untied-causing-10000-damages/
Newton Finn , July 26, 2018 at 9:36 amCase in point: as a public school teacher who has been opposing so-called education reform for two decades, I can assure you that the "venture/vulture philanthropy" model that infests the education world has absolutely nothing to do with improving education, and everything to do with busting the teachers unions, privatizing the schools and turning them into drilling grounds for training young people to accept the subordination, surveillance, tedium and absurdity that awaits them in the workplace. For those lucky enough to have jobs.
As a result of this phenomena, I periodically suggest a new term on the education blogs I post on: "Malanthropy:" the process of of using tax exempt, publicly subsidized entities to directly and indirectly support your financial and political interests, but which are harmful to the public good"
The Rev Kev , July 26, 2018 at 10:06 amClear and compelling analysis, although still a little MMT challenged. About to turn 70, I vividly remember living through a sudden sea change in American capitalism. In the late 1970s/early 80s, whatever undercurrents of patriotism and humanitarianism that remained within the postwar economy (and had opened the space for the middle class) evaporated, and almost overnight we were living in a culture without any sense of balance or proportion, a virulent and violent mindset that maxed out everything and knew not the meaning of enough. Not only the business world but also the personal world was infected by this virus, as ordinary people no longer dreamed of achieving a healthy and stable family life but rather became hellbent to "succeed" and get rich. Empathy, compassion, and commitment to social justice was no longer cool, giving way to self-interest and self-promotion as the new "virtues." Men, of course, led the way in this devolution, but there was a time in the 90s when almost every other woman I knew was a real estate agent. I touched upon a small male-oriented piece of this social devolution in an essay I wrote several years ago: Would Paladin Have Shot Bin Laden? For those who might be intrigued, here's the link:
https://newtonfinn.com/2011/12/15/would-paladin-have-shot-bin-laden/
Brooklin Bridge , July 26, 2018 at 10:49 amWhat was needed was a Wyatt Earp, not a Paladin ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgvxu8QY01s ). His standard procedure in the old West was to use his Colt revolver to pistol-whip an offender. Short, sharp and effective.
But then again there was no way that Bin Laden was ever going to be taken prisoner. That bit on his resume as being a contractor for the CIA was a bit embarrassing after all.Newton Finn , July 26, 2018 at 12:22 pmI remember the 50's and even under the hue of bright eyes saw that people were just as hell bent to 'get ahead' in their careers as now and that competing with 'the Joneses' in every crude way imaginable was the rage.
Perhaps more precise to say that in the early '80s, Capitalism reached a tipping point where gravity overcame thrust and virtues with latent vice became vices with the optics of virtue. That and the fact that the right actors always seem available -as if out of thin air, but in reality very much part of cause and effect – for a given state of entropy.
BrianStegner , July 26, 2018 at 10:05 amNo doubt what was somewhat latent in postwar American capitalism became obscenely blatant in or around the Reagan era. It was all there before, of course, in former times like the Gilded Age. But in the midsize, now rustbelt city I grew up in and continue to live in, the upper middle class of my childhood and youth–the doctors, lawyers, corporate exec's, etc.–lived a few blocks away from my working class neighborhood, had nicer homes, drove caddys instead of chevys, and so forth, but their kids went to school with us working class kids, went to the same movies and dances, hung out in the same places, and all of us, generally, young and old, lived in essentially the same world. For example, my uncle, a lawyer, made maybe 3 times what my dad, a factory clerk, made. THAT was the split between the middle and upper middle class back then, at least in a fairly typical Midwestern city. THAT was what drastically and suddenly changed in the late 70s/early 80s and has only intensified thereafter.
Expat2uruguay , July 26, 2018 at 10:28 amTerrific article, but with so many "missing" words (words left out)–too many to list, gratis–you make it a serious challenge to consider sharing with literate friends on social media. Seriously, doesn't anyone re-read their work before "posting?"
ChiGal in Carolina , July 26, 2018 at 11:40 amWell, at least the missing words in this piece don't make sentences unintelligible. I've seen that happen before.
It's such a shame for authors to put so much work time and effort into their articles, but then allow the lack of an editor or final read-through to tarnish the entire work.
David Miller , July 26, 2018 at 10:11 amIf they're so literate, they can fill in the missing words as the NC commentariat has apparently done with no difficulty.
The substance is well worth sharing, and widely.
Eureka Springs , July 26, 2018 at 10:16 amOne thing that strikes me – a generation ago the talking-point robots of the right could decry "socialized medicine" and all those people supposedly dying while waiting for an operation in foreign, "socialized medicine" places. And they could largely get away with it because relatively few people had personal acquaintances outside their own area.
But now, anyone active in social media probably can interact freely with people all over the world and appreciate how pathetic things really are in the US.
I read on a sports-related forum where an English guy had been watching Breaking Bad and commented offhand that he was amazed at the cost of medical treatment for Mr. White. This turned into a discussion between Brits and Yanks about the NHS. And person after person chimed in "yeah, NHS is not perfect but this kind of thing could never happen here." And you saw the Americans – "yeah, our health care system really is a disgrace."
I'm not a big fan of the social media Borg in general, but here at least seems to be a good effect. It might over time enable more people to wake up as to how jacked up certain things are here.
ChiGal in Carolina , July 26, 2018 at 11:50 amI'd like to declare us a completely divided, conquered people.
In the last few weeks I've visited with many old friends all of them suffering in silence. Each and every one falling further behind, on the brink of disaster, if not already there. No matter their credentials, many highly credentialed with multiple degrees and or highly experienced in several fields. All with ridiculously high work ethics. All feel maintaining personal integrity is costing them an ability to 'get ahead'.
Many of these friends have multiple jobs, no debt, no car payment, some have insurance which is killing them, medical bills which bury them if they ever have so much as basic health issues, and they are thrifty, from the clothes they wear to the amount of rent they commit themselves. And yet 'staying afloat', is but a dream trumped by guilt and isolationism.
I often joke with my fellow country neighbors that it costs a hundred bucks to simply leave the house. It's not a joke anymore. At this point those still fighting for a paltry 15.00 should include a hundred dollar per day walk out your front door per diem.
A couple months back I gave my camper to an old acquaintance who had no record, found himself homeless after being falsely accused of a crime and locked up for two months. And another friend with full time management position, just gave up her apartment to move into a tent in another friends back yard. Both of these people are bright, hard working, mid forties, white, family peeps with great children. The very kind this article addresses.
The noose tightens and people are committing desperate acts. There is no solidarity. No vision of a way out of this.
Watch a ten dollar parking ticket bring a grown man to terror in their eyes. And he brought in a thousand bucks last week, but has been texting his landlord about past due rent all afternoon.
I feel like I'm on the brink of a million episodes of " Falling Down ".
John , July 26, 2018 at 11:56 amIndeed. But as consciousness is raised as to the real causes (not personal failure, not robots taking over), hopefully solidarity will grow.
Wonderful article, definitely want to read the book.
sharonsj , July 26, 2018 at 5:09 pmI don't think the 0.1% wanted to build a society like this, it is just the way the math works. Somewhere around 1980 the integrity of the US was lost and it became possible for the owning class to divorce themselves from their neighbors and arbitrage labor around the world. Computers and telecommunications made it possible to manage a global supply chain and Republicans changed the tax rules to make it easier to shut down businesses and move them overseas.
A different way to view this: as the wealthy earn profits they can use some of their cash to modify the rules to their benefit. Then they gain more cash which allows them to influence voters and politicians to modify the rules even more in their favor.
If people organized they could change the rules in their favor, but that rarely happens. We used to have unions (imperfect though they were) which lobbied for the working class.
Louis , July 26, 2018 at 10:17 amI think the 1980s was when I found out my wealthy cousins, who owned a clothing factory in Georgia, had moved it to–get ready for this–Borneo! And of course they are Republicans.
John Wright , July 26, 2018 at 10:33 amThe collective decisions to pull up the drawbridge, and a lot middle-class people have supported these decisions are the major reason why there is a housing crisis and higher-education is so expensive.
A lot of people, especially middle-class people, come out with pitchforks every time a new housing development is proposed, screaming about how they don't want "those people" living near them and will vehemently oppose anything that isn't single-family homes which has resulted in the housing supply lagging behind demand, thus affordability issues.
These same people over the years have decided that tax-cuts are more important than adequately funding higher education, so higher education has become a lot more expensive as state support has dwindled.
As the saying goes you made you bed, now you get to sleep in it. Unfortunately so does the younger generation who may not have anything to do with the horrible decision making of the past.
FluffytheObeseCat , July 26, 2018 at 10:58 amThe article stated Americans are "Petrified of being pushed aside by robots".
Maybe I associate with the wrong people, but I don't know any who fear being pushed aside by robots.
But I do know of someone who was being laid off from a tech firm and was finding his job moved overseas.
The deal management presented was, "you can leave now, with your severance package, or get two more weeks pay by training your replacement who will be visiting from overseas."
He trained the new worker for the two weeks.
The American worker is being hit, not by robots, but by outsourcing to other countries and by in-sourcing of labor from other countries.
Robots are expensive and will be avoided if a human can do the job cheaply enough.
That the article brings "fear of robots" into the discussion is a tell that the writer does not want to mention that it is the competition from others in the world wide labor force that depress USA wages.
In the USA, we are witnessing labor arbitrage encouraged by both parties and much of the media as they push USA wages toward world wide levels.
But not for the elite wage earners who gain from this system.
Brooklin Bridge , July 26, 2018 at 11:11 amAgreed. The kind of pink collar and barely white collar employees this piece was focused on are not presently threatened by "robots". They are threatened by outsourcing and wage arbitrage.
ambrit , July 26, 2018 at 12:24 pmThat the article brings "fear of robots" into the discussion is a tell that the writer does not want to mention that it is the competition from others in the world wide labor force that depress USA wages.
You may have a point there, and you are spot on that the vast bulk of job-loss is due to job migration and import of cheaper labor. But regardless of the writer's intent or simple laziness, don't be too fast to poo-poo the effect of Robots.
One problem is that we tend to measure job loss and gain without reference to the actual job loosers and the fact that re-training for them may well be impossible or completely ineffective or, at the very minimum, often extremely painful. So while automation may provide as many new jobs as it takes away old ones, that is cold comfort indeed to the worker who gets left behind.
Another, is that the fear of massive job loss to Robots is almost certainly warranted even if not yet fully materialized.
Todde , July 26, 2018 at 1:01 pmWhen the "Steel Wave" of robot workers comes ashore, I'll be near the head of the queue to join the "Robo Luddites." If the owners of the robot hordes won't pay a fair share of the costs of their mechanominions worker displacement activities, then they should be made to pay an equivalent share in heightened "Production Facility Security Costs." Ford Motors and the River Rouge plant strike comes to mind.
See: http://98937119.weebly.com/strike-at-the-river-rouge-plant-1941.htmlBrooklin Bridge , July 26, 2018 at 1:35 pmThe robots are going to be shooting back
ambrit , July 26, 2018 at 9:45 pmIt'd be great to be right there with you on that fateful day, Ambrit :-) (And I've even got my gun with the little white flag that pops out and has "Bang!" written on it, all oiled up and ready to go). I suspect however that it will be a silent D Day that probably took place some time ago.
Hard Briexit looks to be baked in the cake
Global Warming disaster looks to be baked in the cake
Water wars look to be baked in the cake.
Massive impoverishment in developed and so called third world nations alike and insane 'last gasp' looting looks to be baked in the cake
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Why would all manner of robots, the ones too tiny to see along with human looking ones and giant factories that are in reality themselves robots be the exception?G Roller , July 26, 2018 at 4:30 pmWe'd be facing robots, so that flag would have to go "Bang" in binary code. (Might even work. While they are trying to decipher the flag, we can switch their tubes of graphite lubricant with tubes of carborundum.)
When the technologically capable humans have all died off, will the robots perish likewise for lack of programmers?Arizona Slim , July 26, 2018 at 12:02 pm"Robots" are software programs, do-it-yourself online appointments, voice recognition, "press 1 now." What's the point of retraining? All you're good for is to make sure the plug is in the wall.
Brooklin Bridge , July 26, 2018 at 1:46 pmThe act of training the overseas replacement could become an act of sabotage. Think of the ways that one could train the replacement to do the job incorrectly, more slowly than necessary, or not at all.
funemployed , July 26, 2018 at 12:19 pmSabotage by miss-training.
In a lot of cases that doesn't require much 'intentional' effort. But the lure of cheap labor seems to conquer all. I've seen software companies take loss after loss on off-shore development team screw ups until they finally get it right. I even saw one such company go out of business trying rather than just calling it quits and going back to what was left of their core developers.
ChristopherJ , July 26, 2018 at 2:03 pmAs I approach 40, having only realized in recent years that the constant soul-ache I've lived with my whole life is not some inherent flaw in my being, but a symptom of a deeply ill society, I desperately wish I could share in the glimmer of hope at the end of this post.
But I cannot. What drives me to despair is not the fragile, corrupt, and unsustainable social/political/economic system we're inheriting; nor is it the poisoned and increasingly harsh planet, nor the often silent epidemic of mental and emotional anguish that prevents so many of us from becoming our best selves. I retain great faith in the resilience and potential of the human spirit. And contrary to the stereotypes, I think my generation and those who have come after are often more intellectually and emotionally mature than our parents and grandparents. At the very least, we have a powerful sense of irony and highly tuned BS detectors.
What drives me to despair is so pathetically prosaic that I want to laugh and cry all at once as I type this. To put it as simply as I know how, a core function of all functional human societies is apprenticeship, by which I mean the basic process whereby deep knowledge and skills are transferred from the old to the young, where tensions between tradition and change are contested and resolved, and where the fundamental human need to develop a sense of oneself as a unique and valuable part of a community can flourish.
We have been commodified since before we were even born, to the point where opportunities for what Lave and Wenger would call "legitimate peripheral participation" in the kinds of work that yield real, humane, benefits to our communities are scant to nonexistent for most of us. Something has gone deeply awry in this core social function at the worst possible time in human history.
... ,,, ,,,
lyman alpha blob , July 26, 2018 at 3:31 pmthank you funemployed, perceptive
Gayle , July 26, 2018 at 5:11 pmSympathies from a fellow traveler – your experience sounds similar to mine. I'm a little older and in my 20s I avoided getting a 'real' job for all the reasons you describe. When I hit my 30s and saw what some of the guys who had been hanging out in the bar too long looked like, and decided I ought to at least try it and see how it would go.
Turns out my 20 year old self had been right.
David May , July 26, 2018 at 5:16 pm"Some quirk of my psychology means doing those things creates an irresistible urge in me to slowly poison myself with alcohol and tobacco."
I think those things and drugs are conscience oblivators. Try gardening. Touch the earth. Grow actual food. Not hemp. Back away from the education racket. Good luck. Quit the poison.
ChiGal in Carolina , July 26, 2018 at 7:08 pmThat was a wonderful post, very moving, thank you. These kind of testimonies are very important because they show the real human cost of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is truly a death cult. Please find an alternative to alcohol. Music, art, nature, etc.
ambrit , July 26, 2018 at 9:58 pmThank you for sharing your compelling story. As someone who could be your mother, it is painful to me not only that this is your experience, but that you are so acutely aware of it. No blinders. Hence, I guess, the need for alcohol.
You write beautifully. Hope is hard to come by sometimes.
Unfettered Fire , July 26, 2018 at 12:25 pmAt least you are self aware. Most people are not. As for the Ship of Status, let it sink. Find a lifeboat where you feel comfortable and batten down for the Roaring (20)40s yet to come. Once you find something to work for, the bad habits will lose much of their hold on you. As long as you don't slide into alcoholism, you have a chance.
Newton Finn , July 26, 2018 at 5:10 pmLife was kinder just 40 years ago, not perfect but way more mellow than it is today. Kids were listening to Peter Frampton and Stevie Wonder, not punk, grunge, rap and industrial music. What changed? Neoliberalism, the economic policy that is private sector "free market" driven, giving the owners of capital free, unfettered reign. Created by libertarians like Fredrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, they sold it to the nation but failed to mention that little peccadillo about how privatization of government would usher in economic fascism.
"An extreme form of laissez-faire individualism that developed in the writings of Hayek, Friedman and Nozick they are also referred to as libertarians. They draw on the natural rights tradition of John Locke and champion's full autonomy and freedom of the individual."
What they meant was ECONOMIC freedom. They despise social freedom (democracy) because civil, labor, health, food safety, etc., rights and environmental protections put limits on their profits.
The "maximizing shareholder value" myth turns people into psychopaths . The entire neoliberal economic policy of the past 40 years is based on the false assumption that self-interest is the driving evolution of humanity. We're not all psychopaths, turns out. We're social beings that have mainly used cooperation to get us through these thousands of years of existence.
There's nothing wrong with wanting government to protect the public sector from predatory capitalists. Otherwise, society's value system turns upside down sick people are more valued than healthy violent are more valued to fill up the prison factories war becomes a permanent business a filthy, toxic planet is good for the oil industry a corporate governance with no respect for rights or environmental protections is the best capitalism can offer?
Thanks, but no thanks.
The easily manipulated right are getting the full assault. "Run for your lives! The democratic socialists want to use the government bank for everyone, not just the 1%!! They understand how the economy really works and see through our lies!! Before you know it, everyone will be enjoying a better quality of life! AAAAGHHH!!"
Even the IMF is getting a scolding for being so out-of-touch with reality. Isn't economics supposed to factor in conscience?
"If the IMF is to shake its image as an inward-looking, out-of-touch boys club, it needs to start taking the issue seriously. The effect of the male dominance in macroeconomics can be seen in the policy direction of the organisation: female economists are more likely to be in favour of Government-backed redistribution measures than their male counterparts.
Of course, the parochial way in which economics is perceived by the IMF, as nothing more than the application of mathematical models, is nothing new. In fact, this is how mainstream economics frequently is taught in universities all over the world. Is it any wonder that the IMF has turned out as it is?"
Michael Hudson, as usual, was right:
"Economics students are forced to spend so much time with this complex calculus so that they can go to work on Wall St. that there's no room in the course curriculum for the history of economic thought.
So all they know about Adam Smith is what they hear on CNN news or other mass media that are a travesty of what these people really said and if you don't read the history of economic thought, you'd think there's only one way of looking at the world and that's the way the mass media promote things and it's a propagandistic, Orwellian way.
The whole economic vocabulary is to cover up what's really happening and to make people think that the economy is getting richer while the reality is they're getting poorer and only the top is getting richer and they can only get rich as long as the middle class and the working class don't realize the scam that's being pulled off on them."
Andrew Watts , July 26, 2018 at 12:54 pmUnfettered Fire and funemployed: deeply appreciate your lengthy and heartfelt posts. It's a terribly small thing, but I have a suggestion to make that always helps me to feel a bit better about things or should I say to feel a bit better about the possibility of things. If you're game, and haven't already done so, search for the following free online book: "Equality" by Edward Bellamy. Then do no more than read the introduction and first chapter (and slightly into the second) to absorb by far the finest Socratic dialogue ever written about capitalism, socialism, and the only nonviolent way to move from the former to the latter–a way wide open to us, theoretically, right now. I know that's a hell of a qualifier.
precariat , July 26, 2018 at 1:36 pmWhy do modern intellectuals insist on inventing euphemisms for already known definitions? The middle precariat is merely another term for the petty bourgeoisie. While they may have possessed economic benefits like pensions and owned minuscule amounts of financial assets they were never the dominant ruling class. Their socioeconomic status was always closer in their livelihoods to the working class. After the working class was effectively being dismantled starting in the 1970s, it has become the petty bourgeoisie's turn to be systematically impoverished.
This is the primary economic development of our era of late capitalism. The question is, what does it mean to be American if this country is no longer a land of opportunity?
Mel , July 26, 2018 at 1:44 pmBecause the 'known definitions' do not apply anymore.
The middle has more in common with those below than those above. And here is the scary reason: everyone is to be preyed upon by the wealth extractors who dominate our politics/economy -- everyone. There is no social or educational allegieance, there is only a resource to be ruthlessly plundered, people and their ability to earn and secure.
Andrew Watts , July 26, 2018 at 5:07 pmRight. It's hardly a euphemism. The Middle Precariat are the people in the 9.9% who will not be part of the 8.9%.
ProNewerDeal , July 26, 2018 at 1:16 pmThe so-called precariat lacks any sense of class consciousness and as a consequence are incapable of any kind of solidarity. Nor do they perceive any predatory behavior in the economic system. If the article is to be believed they blame themselves for their plight. These traits which include the admiration and imitation of the rich are the hallmarks of the petty bourgeoisie.
This disagreement over semantics is an example of the shallowness and superficiality of new ideas. Marx already predicted that they'd be unceremoniously thrown into the underclass in later stages of economic development at any rate.
precariat , July 26, 2018 at 1:24 pmthanks for this article.
The BigMedia & BigPols ignore the Type 1 Overqualified Underemployed cohort. Perhaps hopefully someone like the new Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will discuss it, her recently being of this cohort as an economist by degree working as a bartender. Instead we have examples of BigMedia/BigPol crying about "STEM worker shortage" where there already are countless underemployed STEM workers working Uber-ish type McJobs.
Afaict the only occupations (mostly) immune to Type 1 Overqualified Underemployment risk here in Murica are medical pros: physicians/dentists/pharmacists & possibly nurses. Otherwise there are stories of PhD Uber drivers, MBA strippers, & lawyers working Apple store retail, especially in the first few years post 2008-GFC but still present now. In other words, the US labor market "new economy" is resembling "old economy" of Latin America or Russia (proverbial physicist selling trinkets on the Trans-Siberia railway).
Jean , July 26, 2018 at 1:34 pmFrom Eureka Springs, this:
"I often joke with my fellow country neighbors that it costs a hundred bucks to simply leave the house. It's not a joke anymore. At this point those still fighting for a paltry 15.00 should include a hundred dollar per day walk out your front door per diem."
This is a stark and startling reality. This reality is outside the framework of understanding of economic struggle in America that is allowed by the corporate neoliberal culture/media.
Sound of the Suburbs , July 26, 2018 at 1:38 pmAs the Precariat grows, having watched the .1% lie, cheat and steal – from them, they are more likely to also lie, cheat and steal in mortgage, employment and student loan applications and most importantly and sadly, in their dealings with each other. Everybody is turning into a hustler.
As to dealings with institutions, this comment is apt. I think this came from NC comments a couple of weeks ago. Apologies for not being able to attribute it to its author:
"Why should the worker be subservient to the employer? Citizens owe NO LOYALTY, moral or legal, to a someone else's money making enterprise. And that enterprise is strictly a product of signed commercial legal documents. Commercial enterprise has no natural existence. It is a man-made creation, and is a "privilege", not a "right"; just as a drivers license is a privilege and not an absolute right."
Lambert Strether , July 26, 2018 at 3:35 pmEconomics was always far too dangerous to be allowed to reveal the truth about the economy. The Classical economist, Adam Smith, observed the world of small state, unregulated capitalism around him.
"The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money. But every savage has the full fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no usurers and no tax gatherers."
How does this tie in with the trickledown view we have today? Somehow everything has been turned upside down.
The workers that did the work to produce the surplus lived a bare subsistence existence. Those with land and money used it to live a life of luxury and leisure.
The bankers (usurers) created money out of nothing and charged interest on it. The bankers got rich, and everyone else got into debt and over time lost what they had through defaults on loans, and repossession of assets.
Capitalism had two sides, the productive side where people earned their income and the parasitic side where the rentiers lived off unearned income. The Classical Economists had shown that most at the top of society were just parasites feeding off the productive activity of everyone else.
Economics was always far too dangerous to be allowed to reveal the truth about the economy.
How can we protect those powerful vested interests at the top of society?
The early neoclassical economists hid the problems of rentier activity in the economy by removing the difference between "earned" and "unearned" income and they conflated "land" with "capital". They took the focus off the cost of living that had been so important to the Classical Economists to hide the effects of rentier activity in the economy.
The landowners, landlords and usurers were now just productive members of society again. It they left banks and debt out of economics no one would know the bankers created the money supply out of nothing. Otherwise, everyone would see how dangerous it was to let bankers do what they wanted if they knew the bankers created the money supply through their loans.
The powerful vested interests held sway and economics was corrupted. Now we know what's wrong with neoclassical economics we can put the cost of living back in.
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
Employees want more disposable income (discretionary spending). Employers want to pay lower wages for higher profits
The cost of living = housing costs + healthcare costs + student loan costs + food + other costs of living
The neoliberals obsessed about reducing taxes, but let the cost of living soar. The economists also ignore the debt that is papering over the cracks and maintaining demand in the economy. This can never work in the longer term as you max. out on debt.
Livius Drusus , July 26, 2018 at 7:46 pm> These young people do not think of things like debt-free college or paid family leave as radical: they see it done elsewhere in the world and don't accept that it can't be done in America.
An unexpected consequence of globalization is that a lot of people see how thing are done, elsewhere.
Part of me doesn't feel sorry at all for the plight of middle-class Americans. When times were good they were happy to throw poor and working-class people under the bus. I remember when the common answer to complaints about factory closings was "you should have gotten an education, dummy." Now that the white-collar middle class can see that they are next on the chopping block they are finding their populist soul.
At the end of the day we need to have solidarity between workers but this is a good example of why you should never think that you are untouchable and why punching down is never a good political strategy. There will always be somebody more powerful than you and after they are done destroying the people at the bottom you will probably be next.
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Jul 20, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca
The Sexual Passion of Orwell's Winston Smith
"Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice." – Frederick Nietzsche , Beyond Good and Evil
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." – D. H. Lawrence , Lady Chatterley's Lover
"The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one's own destruction, has become a 'biological' need." – Herbert Marcuse , One Dimensional Man
There is a vast literature analyzing the political prophecy of George Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four . Big Brother, double-speak, telescreens, crimestop, etc. – all applied to our current political situation. The language has become part of our popular lexicon, and as such, has become clichéd through overuse. Blithe, habitual use of language robs it of its power to crack open the safe that hides the realities of life.
There is no doubt that Orwell wrote a brilliant political warning about the methods of totalitarian control. But hidden at the heart of the book is another lesson lost on most readers and commentators. Rats, torture, and Newspeak resonate with people fixated on political repression, which is a major concern, of course. But so too is privacy and sexual passion in a country of group-think and group-do, where "Big Brother" poisons you in the crib and the entertainment culture then takes over to desexualize intimacy by selling it as another public commodity.
The United States is a pornographic society. By pornographic I do not just mean the omnipresent selling of exploitative sex through all media to titillate a voyeuristic public living in the unreality of screen "life" and screen sex through television, movies, and online obsessions. I mean a commodified consciousness, where everyone and everything is part of a prostitution ring in the deepest sense of pornography's meaning – for sale, bought.
And consumed by getting, spending, and selling. Flicked into the net of Big Brother, whose job is make sure everything fundamentally human and physical is debased and mediated, people become consumers of the unreal and direct experience is discouraged. The natural world becomes an object to be conquered and used. Animals are produced in chemical factories to be slaughtered by the billions only to appear bloodless under plastic wrap in supermarket coolers. The human body disappears into hypnotic spectral images. One's sex becomes one's gender as the words are transmogrified and as one looks in the mirror of the looking-glass self and wonders how to identify the one looking back.
Streaming life from Netflix or Facebook becomes life the movie. The brilliant perverseness of the mediated reality of a screen society – what Guy Debord calls The Society of the Spectacle – is that as it distances people from fundamental reality, it promotes that reality through its screen fantasies. "Get away from it all and restore yourself at our spa in the rugged mountains where you can hike in pristine woods after yoga and a breakfast of locally sourced eggs and artisanally crafted bread." Such garbage would be funny if it weren't so effective. Debord writes,
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images .Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.
Thus sex with robots and marrying yourself are not aberrations but logical extensions of a society where solipsism meets machine in the America dream.
As this happens, words and language become corrupted by the same forces that Orwell called Big Brother, whose job is total propaganda and social control. Just as physical reality now mimics screen reality and thus becomes chimerical, language, through which human beings uncover and articulate the truth of being, becomes more and more abstract. People don't die; they "pass on" or "pass away." Dying, like real sex, is too physical. Wars of aggression don't exist; they are "overseas contingency operations." Killing people with drones isn't killing; it's "neutralizing them." There are a "ton" of examples, but I am sure "you guys" don't need me to list any more.
Orwell called Big Brother's language Newspeak, and Hemingway preceded him when he so famously wrote in disgust In a Farewell to Arms ,
"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene "
This destruction of language has been going on for a long time, but it's worth noting that from Hemingway's WW I through Orwell's WW II up until today's endless U.S. wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc., there has been the parallel development of screen and media culture, beginning with silent movies through television and onto the total electronic media environment we now inhabit – the surround sound and image bubble of literal abstractions that inhabit us, mentally and physically. In such a society, to feel what you really feel and not what, in Hemingway's words, "you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel" has become extremely difficult.
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But as we learn in 1984 and should learn in the U.S.A. today , "seemed" is the key word. Their triumph was temporary. For sexual passion reveals truths that need to be confirmed in the mind. In itself, sexual liberation can be easily manipulated, as it has been so effectively in the United States. "Repressive de-sublimation" Herbert Marcuse called it fifty years ago. You allow people to act out their sexual fantasies in commodified ways that can be controlled by the rulers, all the while ruling their minds and potential political rebelliousness. Sex becomes part of the service economy where people service each other while serving their masters. Use pseudo-sex to sell them a way of life that traps them in an increasingly totalitarian social order that only seems free. This has been accomplished primarily through screen culture and the concomitant confusion of sexual identity. Perhaps you have noticed that over the past twenty-five years of growing social and political confusion, we have witnessed an exponential growth in "the electronic life," the use of psychotropic drugs, and sexual disorientation. This is no accident. Wars have become as constant as Eros – the god of love, life, joy, and motion – has been divorced from sex as a stimulus and response release of tension in a "stressed" society. Rollo May, the great American psychologist, grasped this:
Indeed, we have set sex over against eros, used sex precisely to avoid the anxiety-creating involvements of eros We are in flight from eros and use sex as the vehicle for the flight Eros [which includes, but is not limited to, passionate sex] is the center of vitality of a culture – its heart and soul. And when release of tension takes the place of creative eros, the downfall of the civilization is assured.
Because Julia and Winston cannot permanently escape Oceania, but can only tryst, they succumb to Big Brother's mind control and betray each other. Their sexual affair can't save them. It is a moment of beauty and freedom in an impossible situation. Of course the hermetically sealed world of 1984 is not the United States. Orwell created a society in which escape was impossible. It is, after all, an admonitory novel – not the real world. Things are more subtle here; we still have some wiggle room – some – although the underlying truth is the same: the U.S. oligarchy, like "The Party," "seeks power entirely for its own sake" and "are not interested in the good of others," all rhetoric to the contrary. Our problem is that too many believe the rhetoric, and those who say they don't really do at the deepest level. Fly the flag and play the national anthem and their hearts are aflutter with hope. Recycle old bromides about the next election when your political enemies will be swept out of office and excitement builds as though you had met the love of your life and all was well with the world.
But understanding the history of public relations, advertising, propaganda, the CIA, the national security apparatus, technology, etc., makes it clear that such hope is baseless. For the propaganda in this country has penetrated far deeper than anyone can imagine, and it has primarily done this through advanced technology and the religion of technique – machines as pure abstractions – that has poisoned not just our minds, but the deepest wellsprings of the body's truths and the erotic imagination that links us in love to all life on earth.
In "Defence of Poetry," Percy Bysshe Shelley writes:
The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
We are now faced with the question: Can we escape the forces of propaganda and mind control that run so very deep into American life? If so, how? Let's imagine a way out.
Orwell makes it very clear that language is the key to mind control, as he delineates how Newspeak works. I think he is right. And mind control also means the control of our bodies, Eros, our sex, our physical connections to all living beings and nature. Today the U.S. is reaching the point where "Oldspeak" – Standard English – has been replaced by Newspeak, and just "fragments of the literature of the past" survive here and there.
This is true for the schooled and unschooled. In fact, those more trapped by the instrumental logic, disembodied data, and word games of the power elite are those who have gone through the most schooling, the indoctrination offered by the so-called "elite" universities. I suspect that more working-class and poor people still retain some sense of the old language and the fundamental meaning of words, since it is with their sweat and blood that they "earn their living." Many of the highly schooled are children of the power elite or those groomed to serve them, who are invited to join in living the life of power and privilege if they swallow their consciences and deaden their imaginations to the suffering their "life-styles" and ideological choices inflict on the rest of the world. In this world of The New York Times , Harvard, The New Yorker , Martha's Vineyard, The Washington Post , Wall St., Goldman Sachs, the boardrooms of the ruling corporations, all the corporate media, etc., language has become debased beyond recognition. Here, as Orwell said of Newspeak, "a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express." The intelligently orthodox, he adds, must master the art of "doublethink" wherein they hold two contradictory ideas in their minds simultaneously, while accepting both of them. This is the key trick of logic and language that allows the power elites and their lackeys in the U.S. today to master the art of self-deception and feel good about themselves as they plunder the world. In this "Party" world, the demonization, degradation, and killing of others is an abstraction; their lives are spectral. Orwell describes doublethink this way:
To tell deliberate lives while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink . For by using the word one admits one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
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Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely; he is a frequent contributor to Global Research. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
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Jul 23, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca
By Thomas Lifson Global Research, July 23, 2018 American Thinker 20 July 2018
The Mueller special counsel investigation was launched to probe charges that the key FBI officials developing evidence in the case thought were baseless. That's a bombshell accusation that appears to have been confirmed by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page , according to John Solomon . It tends to confirm the suspicion that the Mueller probe is a cover-up operation to obscure the criminal use of counterintelligence capabilities to spy on a rival presidential campaign and then sabotage the presidency that resulted.
Earlier reports indicated that Page has been answering questions from the House Judiciary Committee quite frankly and may even have cut a deal selling out her ex-lover Peter Strzok over their professional misbehavior (and quite possibly worse) in targeting the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump with the intelligence-gathering tools of the FBI.
Last night, John Solomon of The Hill revealed that he has obtained information from sources who heard Page's testimony in two days of sworn depositions behind closed doors that she offered a bombshell confirmation of the meaning of one of the most enigmatic text messages that the public has seen (keep in mind that there are many yet to be released).
Writing in The Hill , Solomon explains :
[T]here are just five words, among the thousands of suggestive texts Page and Strzok exchanged, that you should read.That passage was transmitted on May 19, 2017. "There's no big there there," Strzok texted.
The date of the text long has intrigued investigators: It is two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee an investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russia campaign.
Since the text was turned over to Congress, investigators wondered whether it referred to the evidence against the Trump campaign.
This month, they finally got the chance to ask. Strzok declined to say – but Page, during a closed-door interview with lawmakers, confirmed in the most pained and contorted way that the message in fact referred to the quality of the Russia case, according to multiple eyewitnesses.
The admission is deeply consequential. It means Rosenstein unleashed the most awesome powers of a special counsel to investigate an allegation that the key FBI officials, driving the investigation for 10 months beforehand, did not think was "there."
The truth behind the Mueller probe is looking uglier and uglier. Pursuing bogus accusations without foundation is the very definition of a witch hunt – President Trump's term for Mueller's team of Hillary-supporters.
We don't know anything at all about the activities of Utah U.S. attorney Peter Huber , who is investigating the potential abuse of U.S. intelligence apparatus for political purposes. That is the proper procedure for grand jury probes. But if Lisa Page is honestly answering questions under oath for a congressional committee, she probably is doing so in grand jury sessions, if summoned.
The glacial pace of this probe is frustrating for Trump-supporters. But doing it right and observing the ethical and legal constraints takes time and does not generate leaks. Nevertheless, I am deeply encouraged by this leak to Solomon, as it seems to indicate that the truth will come out.
Appearing on Hannity last night, Solomon elaborated: watch video here .
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Jul 23, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca
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The Helsinki hysteria shone a spotlight on the utter impotence of the establishment media and their Deep State controllers to make their delusions reality. Never before has there been such a gaping chasm visible between the media's "truth" and the facts on the ground. Pundits compared the summit to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 , with some even reaching for the brass ring of the Holocaust by likening it to Kristallnacht , while polls revealed the American people really didn't care .
Worse, it laid bare the collusion between the media and their Deep State handlers – the central dissemination point for the headlines, down to the same phrases, that led to every outlet claiming Trump had "thrown the Intelligence Community under the bus" by refusing to embrace the Russia-hacked-our-democracy narrative during his press conference with Putin. Leaving aside the sudden ubiquity of "Intelligence Community" in our national discourse – as if this network of spies and murderous thugs is Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood – no one seriously believes every pundit came up with "throws under the bus" as the proper way of describing that press conference.
The same central control was apparent in the unanimous condemnations of Putin – that he murders journalists , breaks international agreements , uses banned chemical weapons , kills women and children in Syria , and, of course, meddles in elections . For every single establishment pundit to exhibit such a breathtaking lack of insight into their own government's misdeeds is highly unlikely. Many of these same talking heads remarked in horror on Sinclair Broadcasting's Orwellian "prepared statement" issuing forth from the mouths of hundreds of stations' anchors at once. Et tu, Anderson Cooper?
Helsinki – Trump and Putin – a Showdown for Summer Doldrums or a Genuine Attempt Towards Peace?The media frenzy was geared toward sparking a popular revolt, with tensions already running high from the previous media frenzy about family separation at the border (though only one MSNBC segment seemed to recall that they should still care about that, and belatedly included some footage of kids behind a fence wrapped in Mylar blankets). Rachel Maddow , armed with the crocodile tears that served her so well during the family-separation fracas, exhorted her faithful cultists to do something . Meanwhile, national-security neanderthal John Brennan all but called for a coup, condemning the president for the unspeakable "high crimes and misdemeanors" of seeking to improve relations with the world's second-largest nuclear power. He called on Pompeo and Bolton, the two biggest warmongers in a Trump administration bristling with warmongers, to resign in protest. This would have been a grand slam for world peace, but alas, it was not to be. Even those two realize what a has-been Brennan is.
Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker.
Trump's grip on his long-elusive spine was only temporary, and he held another press conference upon returning home to reiterate his trust in the intelligence agencies that have made no secret of their utter loathing for him since day one. When the lights went out at the climactic moment, it became clear for anyone who still hadn't gotten the message who was running the show here (and Trump, to his credit, actually joked about it). The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. On to the Playmates .
Sacha Baron Cohen 's latest series, "Who is America," targeted Ted Koppel for one segment. Koppel cut the interview short after smelling a rat and expressed his high-minded concern that Cohen's antics would hurt Americans' trust in reporters. But after a week of the entire media establishment screaming that the sky is falling while the heavens remain firmly in place, Cohen is clearly the least of their problems. At least he's funny.
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Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski .
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Jul 22, 2018 | new-compass.net
Bureaucracies, Markets, and the Loss of Municipal Citizenship 02.07.2018
"Liberty vanishes whenever the law, in certain cases, allows a man to cease to be a person and to become a thing"
-Cesare Beccaria
Throughout the modern era, there has been a lingering fear of the mechanization of everyday life through the overuse of instrumental rationality. Because the social sciences intimately weave both outcomes and ethics, this overuse of instrumental rationality carries with it a moral dimension. Despite having somewhat predictable behavior, people are not things . Rather, the very notion of humanity implies a degree of agency, and agency demands an acknowledgment for spontaneous behaviors and active choices. Nevertheless, the growth of both bureaucracies and markets -- two common features of the modern era -- appears to negate this truism and encourage an inverse to Kant's maximum to treat people as ends in themselves rather than means toward some bureaucratic or profit-driven goal.
The overuse of instrumental rationality has many sources, but in the United States its historical development begins with dramatic changes in the design of municipal governments. At the turn of the 20th Century, Socialists in the United States had considerable success in municipal elections. Empowered by a constituency of small-scale and heavily mortgaged farmers and newly created industrial laborers, for a brief period, the Socialist Party posed a significant electoral challenge to both Democrats and Republicans in America's Midwest. Nevertheless, these successes were short-lived. In response to the electoral victories of Socialist candidates, Progressives promoted "reform" governments that made municipalities more both bureaucratic and market orientated. Under their guidance, the full weight of Taylorism was brought to municipal governments. In the process, local governments became embedded with an ideology predicated on instrumentalist rationality that justified the marginalization participation in public life and redirected the priorities of municipal politics toward ensuring certain monetary ends. In the end, potentially more so than any other factor, these changes in the fundamental design of municipal governments not only reversed the victories of Socialists but encouraged an outlook on local politics that deemphasized the people as active citizens and conceptualized them as passive shareholders who entrusted the operations of local government with managers and bureaucrats.
This history upturns a problematic assumption among advocates of a free market economy. Chiding President Kennedy, Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freeman , proclaimed that "the free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government?" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom." (1) The idea that in a free market democracy people merely act "through" government rather than "by" government implies a purely instrumental account of public authority. For Freidman, the government is not supposed to reflect a common good, but is simply another option for achieving the specific ends of individuals. For this reason, Friedman argues, the ideal government for a thriving market is both limited and dispersed. However, the history of reform government shows the opposite. In pursuit of strengthening business interests over socialist politics, municipal governments became more bureaucratic. If anything, markets and bureaucracies have had a historical mutually reinforcing relationship; the survival of the free market system has been dependent on the bureaucratization of public life.
In many ways, this relationship was anticipated. Max Weber's remarks on the "iron cage" of the modern economic order implied a shared rationality between markets and bureaucracies. (2) In both cases, social life -- and by extension people -- is valued only to the extent that it can fulfill certain ends, rather than being seen as an end in and of itself. Murray Bookchin's criticism of bureaucracies -- in that they grow as a sense of citizenship declines, filling social vacuums with "monadic individuals and family units into a strictly administrative structure" (3) -- can just as easily apply to markets. Margaret Somers, in her work Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights demonstrates that market fundamentalism has resulted in the "contractualization of citizenship" in the United States. In doing so, Americans have reorganized "the relationship between the state and the citizenry, from noncontractual rights and obligations to the principles and practices of quid pro quo market exchange." (4) In decrying the loss of citizenship -- whether through bureaucratization or market fundamentalism -- both Bookchin and Somers draw on contemporary political realities. Yet, as will be shown, the roots of this problem run much deeper. In the United States, the phenomenon of bringing instrumentalist rationality to the public sphere started a century ago with the restructuring of municipal governments.
Reform vs Machine: A Problematic DichotomyFew issues in urban politics have been as enduring as the institutional design of governing bodies. The conventional view is that before the Progressive Era most municipalities were ruled by machine governments that served myopic interests, usually geographically or ethnically based. These machine governments were easily susceptible to corruption. Eventually, these governments became reform regimes that merged ideals on the public good with modern concepts of business management. Reform politics were thought to be "objective," in the sense that they isolated public officials from parochial interests, advocated for nonpartisan elections, and promoted efficiency in government services. (5) According to Paul Peterson, machine governments "favored ward elections, long ballots, decentralized governing arrangements, and the close connection between government, party, neighborhood, and ethnic association. Reformers preferred citywide elections, short ballots, centralized governing institutions, and the application of universalistic norms in the provision of government services." (6) In the overwhelming majority of cases, reform governments favored small city councils and managerial systems, where the administration of the city's activities was performed by a hired city manager, rather than the mayor. Both during the Progressive Era and after the Second World War, America saw an explosion of reform orientated managerial governments. (7) Judged in the terms of popularity alone, reform governments are often assumed to be the ideal means for handling local affairs, at least for small municipalities.
However, the degree to which reform governments objectively represent the interests of all residents in the city has been contested. Jessica Trounstine has argued that reform governments do not necessarily make local power more transparent. Instead, they substitute one form of institutional bias for another. (8) For example, advocates of reform governments promote citywide, non-partisan, winner-take-all elections in the hopes of severing the tie between public officials and party bosses. However, this often decreases voter awareness of candidates and results in costlier elections. Party bosses are weakened, but wealthy individuals running for office gain electoral advantages. For this reason, the debates between reform and machine governments have not necessarily been debates on transparency and corruption, but on which type of local elites should be in control of the governments. This is a critical point in understanding why certain municipalities changed to reform governments and why, in many cases, these changes were strongly resisted.
Rice has noted that commission governments -- which were part of the reform agenda and acted both as a theoretical and practical precursor to more managerial institutions -- were almost unequivocally supported by business elites and bitterly opposed by labor. Often business elites were only able to demobilize labor's opposition by making major concessions that made the reform process far more varied and complicated than the usual narrative of machine-to-reform proposes. (9) Nevertheless, when labor did prove itself to be a significant threat to the established order -- as in the case of Midwest cities in the form of the Socialist Party -- the move to managerial governments occurred swiftly, uncompromisingly, and involved players outside of the local political landscape.
The support among business elites for reform governments was not only because such changes ensured them electoral advantages. The structure of the reform governments often duplicated the organizational styles that were prevalent within the private sector. Replacing large city councils elected through wards with small commissions elected citywide made local governments more closely resemble the structure of corporate boardrooms. Furthermore, the position of city-managers was thought to mimic that of the chief executive officer (CEO) within a firm. There was no expectation that the city manager would be accountable to the people directly any more than a firm's CEO was thought to be directly accountable to its workers. Instead, the city-manager was accountable to the council who acted as a board, while the citizens themselves were thought to be shareholders of the city. As Stillman has observed, "commercial activities have been one of the vital forces in shaping American society, and the businessman and the corporation have often been instrumental in determining public values Probably no political or administrative philosophy reflects business and corporate ideals more clearly than the city management movement." (10) In this regard, the movement for reform governments not only wanted to reconfigure local power to better serve business elites but believed that the values and thinking of business elites -- which saw citizens in service of certain fiscal ends -- should be embedded into the structure of municipal politics.
Socialists Against ReformIn 1911, after two decades of organizing, the Socialist Party in Dayton, Ohio reported nearly 500 formal members and the support of approximately 13,000 trade unionists. With this popular support, they successfully elected two of their members to the city council and another three to the assessor's office. Their political strength was undoubtedly on the rise. During the 1912 presidential election, a greater portion of the Dayton electorate voted for the Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs than the Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt. (11)
In 1912, Ohio revised its constitution in order to grant home rule status to local municipalities. This prompted twenty-five cities in the state to consider charter changes. Dayton was one of them. With the design of local government now open, there was a strong push by Progressives to shrink the city council, make all elections citywide, and hire a city manager to perform administrative tasks. One notable champion of this cause was John H. Patterson. Patterson was a local industrialist known for his experiments in "welfare capitalism." Despite his reputation as an enlightened business owner, Patterson was notoriously anti-union, chiding labor organizations for promoting a "restive spirit" among employees. Under the progressive banner, Patterson promoted reform governments as a means of combining Taylorism with republicanism. According to Paterson, the virtues of managerial and market orientated governments were elevated to the status of a secular religion. In print and lectures, he proudly proclaimed that "A city is a great business enterprise whose stockholders are the people Our municipal affairs would be placed upon a strict business basis and directed, not by partisans , but by men who are skilled in business management and social science; who would treat our people's money as a trust fund, to be expended wisely and economically, without waste and for the benefit of all citizens." (12) The local Socialist Party was not persuaded by Paterson's calls for a technocratic utopia. They decried the proposed reform government as a regressive step away from democracy. (13)
In March, 1913, only two months before the city was to vote on its new charter, a massive flood from the Miami River hit Dayton, resulting in a state of emergency. While the local government scrambled to deal with the crisis, Patterson utilized the opportunity to exhibit the generosity of Dayton's business class. He opened his factory as a relief center and organized a fundraising campaign among the business community to pay for emergency services. These actions won him favor among the local population. When election for the new charter was held on May 20, 1913, the new reform government was approved by a 2-1 margin. Despite increasing their number of votes in proceeding election cycle, the changes prevented the Socialist Party from taking office again. By 1917, the Socialist Party managed to win 43% of the vote, but in citywide, winner-take-all elections, this resulted in no representation. (14)
A similar dispossession of Socialists happened in New Castle, Pennsylvania. In 1911, New Castle voters elected several Socialist Party members to their select board, including the mayor, Walter V. Tyler. Despite the recalcitrance of non-socialist on the select board, often refusing to attend meetings in order to deny a quorum, Tyler and his supporters were able to make meaningful changes to the city. They ended petty graft and managed to get the city's finances in order, raised wages and reduced hours for city workers, and instituted reforms to curb police brutality. (15)
Despite these successes, the Socialists in New Castle found their ability to maintain their tenure in public office severely limited with the passage of the Clark Act. Passed in 1913, the Clark Act changed all third-class cities in Pennsylvania, which included New Castle, to a commission-style government. This reduced the size of the city councils to five members, replaced wards with citywide elections, created nonpartisan positions, and increased the number of signatures needed to get an initiative on the ballot. Despite the appearance of nonpartisan elections, it was clear that the new commission-style government biased the electoral system toward Republicans. Previously, the electoral achievements of Socialists in New Castle were partially attributed to factionalism within the local Republican Party. The editors of the New Castles News were Republican partisans and condemned ex-Republicans who ran independently in elections for their lack of loyalty. Nevertheless, after the passage of the Clark Act, New Castle News editors had an overnight conversion to nonpartisan ideals, worked with the local Board of Trade to select "men of the highest standard" to run for public office, and were extremely successful in reinstituting Republican rule. (16) As with Dayton, the changes effectively excluded Socialists from office. No Socialists were reelected in 1913. Mayor Tyler's reform movement was halted, and -- due to charter changes -- Tyler himself was unable to run for reelection. (17)
The examples of Dayton and New Castle demonstrate that reform governments did not necessarily result in an attack on machines, but rather a turn toward more bureaucratic and market-orientated municipalities. As Bruce M. Stave has noted, "urban structural reforms that Socialists generally opposed, with good reason, include the often successful attempt to institute city manager or commission forms of government. Along with substituting nonpartisan city-wide elections for ward-based elections to city councils and school boards, such diluted areas of socialist strength and grass-roots neighborhood control over municipal politics. Conversely, it enhanced the power of urban elites, who had the resources and expertise to take advantage of the new rationalized structures." (18)
Reviving Municipal CitizenshipMunicipal politics in the United States has had a problematic history. In the United States, the virtues of local sovereignty are praised to such an extent that critical examinations of municipal governments often get lost in the adulations. There is no argument that machine governments hindered greater democratic inclusion, but the assumption that their reform counterparts offered a meaningful an alternative is mistaken. The reality is that more often than not reform governments shifted power rather than dispersing it.
Advocates of reform governments claimed that they would make politics more efficient by preventing the waste and spoilage associated with machines. Since the private sector constantly strove for higher levels of efficiency to maximize profits, it was only reasonable to bring private sector organizational styles into the public realm. However, this analysis fundamentally misunderstands the nature of machine politics. Machines were not inefficient. They were actually highly efficient is distributing the resources at their disposal. The issue was that the rewards of that distribution were not based on competency but loyalty. Party loyalty acts as the machine's capital, where if party bosses were willing to invest favoritism toward certain underlings, then that boss would see a return on investments through loyalty. The movement away from machine to reform government did not seek a fundamental dismantling of this capitalistic relationship but instead transferred the terms so that party loyalty was substituted for business loyalty. In doing so, municipal governments became embedded with the values and rationality of the reigning business class. Municipal bureaucracies aided in the creation of localized market societies. This relationship between market and bureaucracy proved to be both self-reinforcing and enduring. The managerial concepts on local governments popularized during the Progressive Era remain a mainstay of America's political landscape, especially in suburban areas.
Problematically, the treatment of citizens in a polity as stockholders of a corporation fundamentally undermines the very notion of citizenship. In a free society, the people do not consume their government; they embody it through the exercise of their citizenship. Consumers in a market, unlike citizens in a polity, have no presumption of equality. If anything, consumers in a market are constantly seeking to undermine each other's equality in order to secure the best deals. Citizenship cannot engage in this anarchy of the market. Doing so undermines the basis of a cohesive community.
The displacement of Socialists from municipal governments could not have happened without a grander agenda to limit democratic participation and a reimagining of citizens as means toward ensuring business interest rather than ends. Nevertheless, this suggests a corrective to the tendency toward market bureaucratization in local government. The expansion of democracy, above and beyond the local realm, is essential to working against the "iron cage" of the modern economic order. Such an expansion can only come about by embracing a deeper sense of citizenship that challenges not only the inviolability of private property but the very rationality that reduces citizens to nomadic cogs in a bureaucratic engine intended to maximize profits.
(1) Friedman, Milton, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 10.
(2) Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. ed. Richard Swedberg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009)
(3) Bookchin, Murray, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 172.
(4) Somers, Margret R., Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2.
(5) Rice, Bradley, Progressive Cities: The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901-1920 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).
(6) Peterson, Paul E, City Limits (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 7.
(7) Stillman II, Richard J, The Rise of the City Manager: A Public Professional in Local Government (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974).
(8) Trounstine, Jessica, Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008).
(9) Rice, Bradley, Progressive Cities: The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901-1920.
(10) Stillman II, Richard J, The Rise of the City Manager: A Public Professional in Local Government, 7-8.
(11) Judd, Richard W, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: State of University of New Press, 1989).
(12) Quoted from ibid, 8.
(13) Judd, Richard W, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism.
(14) ibid.
(15) ibid.
(16) Quoted from ibid, 156.
(17) ibid.
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Jul 22, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
If we consider the state of the nation from 40,000 feet, several key indicators of profound political disunity within the elites pop out:
1. The overt politicization of the central state's law enforcement and intelligence agencies: it is now commonplace to find former top officials of the CIA et al. accusing a sitting president of treason in the mainstream media. What was supposed to be above politics is now nothing but politics.
2. The overt politicization of the centralized (corporate) media: evidence that would stand up in a court of law is essentially non-existent but the interpretations and exaggerations that fit the chosen narrative are ceaselessly promoted--the classic definition of desperate propaganda by those who have lost the consent of the governed.
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The divided Deep State is a symptom of this larger systemic political disunity. I have characterized the divide as between the Wall Street-Neocon-Globalist Neoliberal camp--currently the dominant public face of the Deep State, the one desperately attempting to exploit the "Russia hacked our elections and is trying to destroy us" narrative--and a much less public, less organized "rogue Progressive" camp, largely based in the military services and fringes of the Deep State, that sees the dangers of a runaway expansionist Empire and the resulting decay of the nation's moral/political center.
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Jul 22, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Quoted from: This One FBI Text In The Russia Probe Should Alarm Every American Zero Hedge
Authored by John Solomon, op-ed via TheHill.com,
That passage was transmitted on May 19, 2017. "There's no big there there," Strzok texted.
The date of the text long has intrigued investigators: It is two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee an investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russia campaign.
Since the text was turned over to Congress, investigators wondered whether it referred to the evidence against the Trump campaign.
This month, they finally got the chance to ask. Strzok declined to say -- but Page, during a closed-door interview with lawmakers, confirmed in the most pained and contorted way that the message in fact referred to the quality of the Russia case, according to multiple eyewitnesses.
The admission is deeply consequential. It means Rosenstein unleashed the most awesome powers of a special counsel to investigate an allegation that the key FBI officials, driving the investigation for 10 months beforehand, did not think was "there."
By the time of the text and Mueller's appointment, the FBI's best counterintelligence agents had had plenty of time to dig. They knowingly used a dossier funded by Hillary Clinton 's campaign -- which contained uncorroborated allegations -- to persuade the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to issue a warrant to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page).
They sat on Carter Page's phones and emails for nearly six months without getting evidence that would warrant prosecuting him. The evidence they had gathered was deemed so weak that their boss, then-FBI Director James Comey , was forced to admit to Congress after being fired by Trump that the core allegation remained substantially uncorroborated.
In other words, they had a big nothing burger. And, based on that empty-calorie dish, Rosenstein authorized the buffet menu of a special prosecutor that has cost America millions of dollars and months of political strife.
The work product Strzok created to justify the collusion probe now has been shown to be inferior : A Clinton-hired contractor produced multiple documents accusing Trump of wrongdoing during the election; each was routed to the FBI through a different source or was used to seed news articles with similar allegations that further built an uncorroborated public narrative of Trump-Russia collusion. Most troubling, the FBI relied on at least one of those news stories to justify the FISA warrant against Carter Page.
That sort of multifaceted allegation machine, which can be traced back to a single source, is known in spy craft as "circular intelligence reporting," and it's the sort of bad product that professional spooks are trained to spot and reject.
But Team Strzok kept pushing it through the system, causing a major escalation of a probe for which, by his own words, he knew had "no big there there."
The answer as to why a pro such as Strzok would take such action has become clearer, at least to congressional investigators. That clarity comes from the context of the other emails and text messages that surrounded the May 19, 2017, declaration.
It turns out that what Strzok and Lisa Page were really doing that day was debating whether they should stay with the FBI and try to rise through the ranks to the level of an assistant director (AD) or join Mueller's special counsel team.
"Who gives a f*ck, one more AD like [redacted] or whoever?" Strzok wrote, weighing the merits of promotion, before apparently suggesting what would be a more attractive role: "An investigation leading to impeachment?"
Lisa Page apparently realized the conversation had gone too far and tried to reel it in. "We should stop having this conversation here," she texted back, adding later it was important to examine "the different realistic outcomes of this case."
A few minutes later Strzok texted his own handicap of the Russia evidence: "You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I'd be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there."
So the FBI agents who helped drive the Russia collusion narrative -- as well as Rosenstein's decision to appoint Mueller -- apparently knew all along that the evidence was going to lead to "nothing" and, yet, they proceeded because they thought there was still a possibility of impeachment.
Impeachment is a political outcome. The only logical conclusion, then, that congressional investigators can make is that political bias led these agents to press an investigation forward to achieve the political outcome of impeachment, even though their professional training told them it had "no big there there."
And that, by definition, is political bias in action.
How concerned you are by this conduct is almost certainly affected by your love or hatred for Trump. But put yourself for a second in the hot seat of an investigation by the same FBI cast of characters: You are under investigation for a crime the agents don't think occurred, but the investigation still advances because the desired outcome is to get you fired from your job.
two hoots -> FactDog Fri, 07/20/2018 - 19:39 Permalink
Not Too Important -> two hoots Fri, 07/20/2018 - 20:12 PermalinkWho directed, encouraged Rosenstein to authorize the probe? Did he do it on his own accord based on previous investigations, was he pushed by Comey? Just where did the idea come from and based upon what? (I forgot or never really knew)
nmewn -> Not Too Important Fri, 07/20/2018 - 20:35 PermalinkIt all starts with Brennan, and the people he answers to.
Then there's this:
'Intel Operative who Altered Obama's Passport Records Turned FBI Informant on Boss John Brennan, Then Turned Up Murdered in D.C.'
"A key witness in a federal probe into Barack Obama's passport information stolen and altered from the State Department was gunned down and killed in front of a District church in D.C.
Lt. Quarles Harris Jr., 24, who had been cooperating with a federal investigators, was found late at night slumped dead inside a car. He was reportedly waiting to meet with FBI agents about his boss John Brennan."
https://truepundit.com/intel-operative-who-altered-obamas-passport-reco
Seth Rich was also on his way to meet with FBI agents. Something about meeting with FBI agents is lethal.
Big Creek Rising -> Richard Chesler Fri, 07/20/2018 - 22:05 PermalinkThe other fascinating thing is, Strzoks dad , who he was, where he has been and doing in the past.
He was in Iran when the revolution happened working for, ahem, Bell Helicopter. He was also in Burkina Faso doing "charity work" just as he was the Director later on for Catholic Relief Services in...now wait for it...Haiti....lol.
In the infamous words of Tom Brokaw & Charlie Rose "We really don't know who he is or what he believes." ;-)
MoreFreedom -> beemasters Fri, 07/20/2018 - 22:53 PermalinkY' all have good comments as usual and you're generally right, but there's a big problem in that almost 60% of 'murica is not paying attention. Half of those are airheads more worried about the minivan having enough gas to get to all the soccer games tomorrow and which McDonald's is closer to the fields. They have four buttons on the radio set to NPR and thus the resultant brain rot. The other half are libtards with no brains to rot. They could find Hillary with a bloody knife in her hand standing over five dead children and convict her of nothing more than having strange ideas about breakfast.
asiafinancenews -> two hoots Fri, 07/20/2018 - 21:30 PermalinkBrennan is pushing back for one reason - he's guilty as sin and doesn't want what he's done found out. Trying to setup Trump with spies, spying on Trump's campaign, and covering up for the hacking of Hillary's server, acts of treason, are likely his lesser sins.
Jim in MN -> Jim in MN Fri, 07/20/2018 - 19:09 PermalinkIf Strozk and Rosenstein had a shred of personal honor and decency, they would have resigned by now.
insanelysane Fri, 07/20/2018 - 20:29 PermalinkWatergate times a billion: The use of a fully weaponized police state against a domestic political opponent. They committed numerous serious crimes in the process, and being arrogant pricks, left a wide paper trail....a trail that leads to the White House as well as Her Fury, Hillary Clinton.
We need the meeting notes. Brennan ran the thing out of Langley. I'm sure they kept as many notes as the Stasi did.
Jarrett and Rice, the most likely conduits to Obama and Biden.
Don't forget John Kerry.
slightlyskeptical Fri, 07/20/2018 - 21:05 PermalinkThe real question now is, Did Mueller get rid of the lovebirds because of their texts or because they didn't think there was any there there and he need people that would be willing to find a there where there was no there there?
chubbar -> Jim in MN Fri, 07/20/2018 - 19:36 PermalinkThink two friends anywhere else in the USA discussed a Trump impeachment when news came out on an investigation? Think they came to the conclusion there is nothing there and impeachment wouldn't happen? I can testify it happened in my simple household.
Strozk's comment " If I thought it was likely, I'd be there no question." infers that he wasn't "there". This conversation points to nothing except their personal distaste for Trump which we already knew. I still see nothing showing any wrong doing. Think Elliot Ness was happy whenever they got evidence on Capone? Think they never talked about getting him over lunch with fellow agents? Prosecutors and investigators don't have to like the people they are looking at and usually probably don't. It is only a problem if it caused them to be impartial in the investigation which the IG says there is no evidence of in this case.
The bottom line i get from your side is that no one who is partisan should have any role in investigating someone on the other side. Should we just limit it to people who support that side? if we can find intelligent, fair people who are not partisan shouldn't we make them our leaders and just let them decide everything?
Who should be able to investigate something like the NRA using a spy to funnel money to someones campaign? Rudy?
chubbar -> Jim in MN Fri, 07/20/2018 - 19:36 PermalinkI don't have a link and I don't think anyone here is going to doubt it, but I read today where new emails indicate the Obama White House started illegally investigating Trump in 2015.
So many outrageous activities are being uncovered on an almost daily basis I doubt this gets much traction but what an outrage.
enough of this Fri, 07/20/2018 - 19:18 PermalinkI don't have a link and I don't think anyone here is going to doubt it, but I read today where new emails indicate the Obama White House started illegally investigating Trump in 2015.
So many outrageous activities are being uncovered on an almost daily basis I doubt this gets much traction but what an outrage.
knightowl77 -> YourAverageJoe Fri, 07/20/2018 - 19:55 PermalinkThe Praetorians at the FBI and DOJ believe they are invulnerable but their time is running out.
http://www.investmentwatchblog.com/the-fbi-and-doj-praetorian-guard-the
earleflorida Fri, 07/20/2018 - 19:38 PermalinkThe entire Colorado delegation is pushing to have "Russia declared a State Sponsor of Terrorism"....I have ZERO representation
Reaper Fri, 07/20/2018 - 20:46 Permalinkthe FBI has been incorporated into the CIA, [and] the CIA nominates its agents as candidates for congress...
look at G H W Bush & Jr. and the Strozk/Page BS!!!
the country is infested with traitors.... @ Total Eclipse by Andy Giardino ****Great Site
MACAULAY Fri, 07/20/2018 - 23:28 PermalinkThe FBI M.O. is the use of Form 302 interrogations to entrap suspects. Using the threat of prosecution to compel auxiliary parties to become witnesses for the DOJ. It's very simple: interview several people about what was said or transpired at an earlier time. If there are any disagreements you could prosecute any of them for lying to the FBI. Worse, as was seen with McCabe/Flynn, the FBI will claim you said something, which you might deny at trial, but the jury will believe the two FBI lying FBI agents who questioned you without a recording.
https://boingboing.net/2013/05/07/dont-ever-speak-to-the-fbi-w.html
Would you lie in court to avoid a federal prosecution for lying to the FBI?
This article omits one important point.
Struck had been on the Trump Collusion Case for about a year before he said "there is no there there."
About a year earlier (2016), he had just finished up clearing Hillary and was headed off to London to start trying to hang Trump---probably to meet Steele, or maybe the fat turd professor they hired to hustle the Trump hangers-on.
Then, he was excited then to be going after Trump. He texted Page then that "THIS MATTERS"!
What did he find in that first year? NOTHING.
Same thing Mueller has found in the second year and into the third. NOTHING.
How long should the American people tolerate it?
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Jul 22, 2018 | crookedtimber.org
As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism , "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule ... [are] people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist."
By the way, I should note the date of that exchange with Jay: October 2008. We were still in the Bush era. The entire discussion -- of lies and facts, the disregard for facts, and such -- was framed by the Iraq War and the epic untruths that were told in the run-up to the war. It should give you a sense that the world of fake news that so many pundits seem to have suddenly awakened to as a newborn threat has been with us for a long time. The Bush era may seem like ancient history to some, but in the vast, and even not so vast, scheme of things, it was just yesterday.
Ray Vinmad 07.16.18 at 8:11 am (no link)
"Should enough people come to believe the liar's claim, the facts about which he lies could be lost from the world forever. "Faustusnotes 07.16.18 at 1:57 pm (no link)This isn't what happens, usually. When the interests connected to the lies change, then the truth is usually admitted. In the US, the truth often becomes irrelevant, even if real horrors are admitted to. Americans are fairly disinterested in the dirty particles of most of the nation's past.
Once the facts aren't a threat to power, they can generally be revealed.
That's not to say that certain false narratives won't be retained, but the revival of these is generally shaped to current interests, and even if lies are borrowed from the past, the main way they get a hold on the present is because they serve certain interests.
Bush appeared confident the facts won't matter, after the invasion. They did matter–if you're just talking about the truth. The non-existence of the WMDs wasn't widely denied (though a few in the administration would try) –the fact was simply swept away because they weren't politically relevant anymore.
In these cases, it seems that salience or irrelevance is a better way to understand what's driving the weak practical impact of the facts rather than truth or falsity.
Isn't that why everyone is saying we're in a 'post-truth' moment? Trump's trick is to make his story the salient story, and his denials have a way of disabling or thwarting action, even when people are fully aware of the truth. Except for the total fanatics, Trump's enablers are vaguely or even completely aware they are operating on a lie. What matters isn't that the claims are factual disprovable but that they drive action toward the pursuit of particular interests, and disable action that harms those interests.
Prior to this, an unsavory or humiliating or shameful or dangerous truth was extremely salient, and would be fuel for a response. It's partly the power of gaslighting – denying the obvious creates a sufficient level of confusion to let you keep going when normally others would stop you.
There's something odious and misleading in the way you distinguish between types of truth and their role in politics, though I can't put my finger on it, and perhaps whatever error I can't quite describe might explain why you fell for Trump so neatly, but perhaps part of it can be easily seen here:Donald 07.16.18 at 4:18 pm (no link)Having staked his presidency on the claim that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, he's going to have to wage war against Iraq in order to eliminate those weapons.
This gets the nature of Bush's lies completely wrong. He wanted to invade Iraq and he knew he could lie his way into it because of the way American politics rewards muscular action and militarism, and because of the recklessness of his political supporters. He didn't stake his presidency on a lie, he staked his presidency on a war and lied his way into it. In 2008 did you really believe bush had been sincere about his belief in wmds?
This definition of lies here seems weird and unnecessary.
I understand the difference between the two types of truth, truths of logic vs empirical facts that are contingent, but I think the difference between the liar and the sophist is mostly nonexistent. People who lie about empirical facts are also unwilling to follow chains of logic if they don't want to accept the necessary conclusion.michael 07.16.18 at 6:06 pm (no link)That aside, I think politics is full of lies because the system collapses otherwise. I think this ties in with the endless debate people have here about Trump and Trump's opposition. Like Hidari in the other thread, I think Trump's war crimes ( listed below) are far more significant morally speaking than Russiagate, but in our political system collusion with a foreign power in dirty tricks during a political campaign is much easier to attack than war crimes and US complicity in genocide. Both political parties would collapse if we started holding politicians of both parties along with various government officials accountable. We have a functioning democracy by some definition of " functioning" precisely because we allow the biggest crimes to be treated as policy choices and not crimes, while pretending that the worst crime an American politician has or could commit would be to collude with a foreign power in stealing some emails to embarrass the other party.
For those curious, Trump's biggest war crimes are the bombing of civilians in Iraq and Syria and the assistance to the Saudi assault on Yemen. According to the Airwars site the killing of civilians by our bombs increased dramatically under Trump, probably because of loosened restrictions. The policy in Yemen continues what Obama did. In both cases it isn't just the President who is guilty, unless Obama and Trump singkehandedly carry out all functions of our government in the Mideast. Holding them accountable would mean holding a lot of other people accountable.
This is the first intelligent thing Robin has written, in my view. It also helps me formulate more explicitly some of my longstanding discomfort with Arendt, which is rooted in the way her predilection for natality leads her to posit a rather simplistic political ontology. After all, we do not enter politics with a given floor and horizon; politics is about which floor and which horizon does and should exist. This is what makes factual truth coercive: not its validity, but its tendency to impose rather than set out from a set of political givens. Which is to say, natality is always already operating within the status quo; it is not introduced there by "politics."Orange Watch 07.16.18 at 6:17 pm ( 9 )Anarcissie@5Hidari 07.16.18 at 6:41 pm ( 11 )Relatedly, I see striking similarities between an awful lot of public/political morality and virtue ethics, particularly agent-based formulations.
I know I have in the past quoted from Twitter (which would seem to be where the most interesting conversations are nowadays, as opposed to the blogosphere) but Branko Milanovic has some interesting insights (he also has the inestimable advantage of not coming from the UK/US/Australasia AKA the 'Anglosphere': he has more of a cosmopolitan sensibility).Faustusnotes 07.17.18 at 12:21 am ( 12 )https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1018218532994207746
His basic point is that you really can't understand Trump unless you look at what came before his (Frederic Jameson: 'Always historicise!'). Since Thatcher/Reagan (and Clinton and Blair were not really much different) we have been taught to look up to 'entrepreneurs' as 'wealth creators'. Or, to put it another way, to obsequiously grovel to semi-earned wealth and power. But politics, we were told, floated above the grubby world of 'material interests' like a soap bubble.
Trump tears the veil aside. He doesn't govern on behalf of capitalists as Thatcher/Blair and the rest did. He IS a capitalist. And he self-evidently became President to help his business interests (including, yes, those in Russia. But that's probably as far as the Russia thing goes). This is terribly disturbing for liberals, who have been taught to see 'capitalist' ('liberal' is normally the euphemism) 'democracy' as being merely a neutral description of the 'mode of production' of our current set up, as opposed to being a harsh description of political realities: politicians are allowed to govern insofar as their policies benefit capitalists.
Hence to talk about Trump lying is like talking about an advert 'lying'. Do adverts 'lie'? Of course to a certain extent. But then they were never supposed to tell the truth. Their purpose is to sell a product. Truth is irrelevant.
Every word that comes out of Trump's mouth is to help Trump PLC. It's true (sic) that some of his statements are false. But to assess it in these terms is like to point out that Heineken is not, in fact, probably the best lager in the world, or that one should not, in fact, necessarily Drinka Pinta Milka day.
Again, I think this is what disturbs people. Bush et al, consciously lied. Trump I don't think he knows what truth is, and I don't think he cares. What boosts profits that's what's good and true.What doesn't isn't good (or true).
But these are the value of capitalism, and Trump is, in this sense, the logical end product of where Western society has been heading since 1979 (1981 in the 'States).
Orange watch, the order of the claim seems important to me. Stumbling into a war because you told a lie about a possible cause of a war ends all the other options to deal with it dried up is one thing; setting up a war and lying your way into it is a different thing. Eg you decide to cheat on your wife and set up an incredibly thin lie to do it, versus you have a habit of lying to your wife that ultimately ends with you having a chance at an affair.nastywoman 07.17.18 at 10:04 am ( 15 )Also the empirical difference between these types of liar seems irrelevant. Everyone who lied about the true cause of the war also lied about basic facts like global warming. As the commitment to one kind of lie has grown so has the magnitude oft he other kind. Why waste time distinguishing? And why did Arendt? The liars of her time lied in both ways as well.
AND somebody -(even if it is "not actually being a U.S. citizen) needed to point to "the truth" of this:michael 07.17.18 at 7:56 pm ( 16 )"He wanted to invade Iraq and he knew he could lie his way into it" – as lying in politics is (sadly) nothing but "another tool" or "another strategy" to get what any -"political actor" (even some of the lesser evil) – want.
And the Sawyer-Bush example is about the best example for this fact:
"Sawyer: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he [Saddam] could move to acquire those weapons.
Bush: So what's the difference?"For somebody who wants to start a war – or wants to become US President? – and who realizes that the best "strategy" in ending up with "a war" or "becoming US President" -is lying -(day and night) – lying becomes just a a very "practical solution" – (especially if the liar is dealing with a bunch of people who might believe that "France isn't France anymore" – if just a Clownsticks tells them)
And I fear that by conflating the above described type of liar with "the type of liars described in the OP – WE may have allowed the virtues – or at least the charms – of the ones to obscure the vices of the others.
@ john c. halaszAlan White 07.17.18 at 9:12 pm ( 17 )In "Lying in Politics," Arendt writes:
A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, but this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo, to create ex nihilo. In order to make room for one's own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we are physically located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the ability to lie, the deliberate denial of factual truth, and the capacity to change facts, the ability to act, are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source, imagination."So she directly links lying to natality. And this paragraph, like much of her work, describes what she takes to be the ontological conditions of politics. That is what she is doing when she invokes "something that was there before," furnishing the ground for action. And this in turn commits her to a view of the "already there" which is not itself political, as she herself defines the term.
JCH @ 13–TM 07.19.18 at 9:24 am ( 18 )I completely agree that Stevenson likely has it all wrong meta-ethically. But my point was that I was offering an explanation to describe what Trump, Giuliani, etc. are engaging in, even if they don't know they're doing it. Emotivism is an attempt to explain what we usually denote as moral language and behavior. It maintains that moral language and action amount to the expression of emotional attitudes and nothing more. Therefore, beyond the fact that an individual or group has some attitudes, there is nothing left for morality to do but for individuals and groups to try and influence one another in attitude–to achieve agreement in attitude. Any means to do so–lies and bullshit–are legitimate to try and achieve agreement in attitude. Just listen to Trump's crowds. They don't care what he says, or what he does, they just feel that he "gets" how they feel–shared attitudes. If that's the case, then the Trump phenomenon might be best explained as reflecting a practical embrace of such expressivism. Again, I have no claim to anything approaching political expertise here–I'm just advancing a way of looking at the Trump phenomenon conceptually to see if it's at all helpful.
16: "Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we are physically located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the ability to lie, the deliberate denial of factual truth, and the capacity to change facts, the ability to act, are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source, imagination.""J-D 07.19.18 at 11:52 am ( 19 )This reminds me a lot of modern management speak: "Everybody said it was impossible until someone came along who didn´t know that .. and just did it!"
To me, Arendt's claim makes no sense. Yes, mentally removing oneself from reality to imagine a different one is difficult but it's not lying, it's not denial of reality. Imagination isn't synonymous with delusion. I'll counter this weird idealistic view with Rosa Luxemburg's materialism (quoting Ferdinand Lassalle):
"Wie Lassalle sagte, ist und bleibt es immer die revolutionärste Tat: "laut zu sagen, was ist"".The most revolutionary act is to say loudly what is (what is true).
Btw Michael what do you mean by "natality"? It literally means birth rate, no?
Alan Whitealfredlordbleep 07.19.18 at 3:21 pm ( 20 )Any means to do so–lies and bullshit–are legitimate to try and achieve agreement in attitude.
It is empirically obvious that people use lies and bullshit in attempts to try and achieve agreement in attitude; but the statement quoted is made different from that empirical observation by the introduction of the word 'legitimate', which in this context is moral language. Those who affirm that it is legitimate to use lies and bullshit to achieve agreement in attitude reveal their moral bankruptcy. On an emotivist theory, that statement expresses my moral attitude; what I have to say about that is that yes, it does express my moral attitude, and if your moral attitude differs from mine on that point, what do you suggest we do about it?
DominoesArendt's NYRB piece, kindly linked @13, holds this very interesting nugget [for footnoting -- see original]:
As regards the domino theory, first enunciated in 1950 and permitted to survive, as it has been said, the "most momentous events": To the question of President Johnson in 1964, "Would the rest of Southeast Asia necessarily fall if Laos and South Vietnam came under North Vietnam control?" the CIA's answer was, "With the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam." When five years later the Nixon Administration raised the same question, it "was advised by the Central Intelligence Agency that [the United States] could immediately withdraw from South Vietnam and 'all of Southeast Asia would remain just as it is for at least another generation.' "According to the study, "only the Joint Chiefs, Mr. Rostow and General Taylor appear to have accepted the domino theory in its literal sense,"and the point here is that those who did not accept it still used it not merely for public statements but as part of their own premises as well.
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Jul 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
President's Trump successful summit with President Putin was used by the 'resistance' and the deep state to launch a coup-attempt against Trump. Their minimum aim is to put Trump into a (virtual) political cage where he can no longer pursue his foreign policy agenda.
One does not have to be a fan of Trump's policies and still see the potential danger. A situation where he can no longer act freely will likely be worse. What Trump has done so far still does not add up to the disastrous policies and crimes his predecessor committed.
The borg, financed and sworn to the agenda of globalists and the military-industrial-media complex, has its orders and is acting on them. The globalists want more free trade agreements, no tariffs and more immigration to prevent higher wages. Capital does not have a national attachment. It does not care about the 'deplorables' who support Trump and his policies:
[P]olls show that Trump appears to still have the support of the bulk of Republican voters when it comes to tariffs. Nearly three-fourths, or 73 percent, of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who responded to a Pew Research survey out this week said they felt increased tariffs would benefit the country.His 'isolationist' economic policies make Trump an enemy of the globalists :
Donald Trump is, indeed, a kind of traitor to the Washington Consensus, a hyper-militarized capitalist utopia of corporate dominated global supply chains that doubled the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20th century and herded these desperate billions into a race to the bottom. The leadership of both corporate parties conspired to force U.S. workers into the global meat-grinder.The weapon industry and the military recognize that the 'war of terror' is nearing its end. To sell more they need to create an new 'enemy' that looks big enough to justify large and long-term spending. Russia, the most capable opponent the U.S. could have, is the designated target. A new Cold War will give justification for all kinds of fantastic and useless weapons.
Trump does not buy the nonsense claims of 'Russian meddling' in the U.S. elections and openly says so. He does not believe that Russia wants to attack anyone. To him Russia is not an enemy.
Trump grand foreign policy is following a realist assessment . He sees that previous administrations pushed Russia into the Chinese camp by aggressive anti-Russian policies in Europe and the Middle East. He wants to pull Russia out of the alliance with China, neutralize it in a political sense, to then be able to better tackle China which is the real thread to the American (economic) supremacy.
This week was a prelude to the coup against Trump :
Former CIA chief John Brennan denounced Trump as a "traitor" who had "committed high crimes" in holding a friendly summit with Putin.It can't get more seditious than that. Trump is being denigrated by almost the entire political and media establishment in the US as a "treasonous" enemy of the state.
Following this logic, there is only one thing for it: the US establishment is calling for a coup to depose the 45th president. One Washington Post oped out of a total of five assailing the president gave the following stark ultimatum: "If you work for Trump, quit now".
Some high ranking people working for Trump followed that advice. His chief of staff John Kelly rallied others against him:
According to three sources familiar with the situation, Kelly called around to Republicans on Capitol Hill and gave them the go-ahead to speak out against Trump. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan held televised press conferences to assert that Russia did meddle in the election.Others who attacked Trump over his diplomatic efforts with Russia included the Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats who used an widely distributed interview for that:
The White House had little visibility into what Coats might say. The intelligence director's team had turned down at least one offer from a senior White House official to help prepare him for the long-scheduled interview, pointing out that he had known Mitchell for years and was comfortable talking with her.Coats was extraordinarily candid in the interview, at times questioning Trump's judgment -- such as the president's decision to meet with Putin for two hours without any aides present beyond interpreters -- and revealing the rift between the president and the intelligence community.
FBI Director Wray also undermined his boss' position:
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday defended Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a "straight shooter," and said the Russia investigation is no "witch hunt."Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, Wray said he stood by his view that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election in some capacity and that the threat remained active.
A day latter Secretary of Defense Mattis also issued a statement that contradicted his president's policy:
Secretary of Defense James Mattis took his turn doing the implicit disavowing in a statement about new military aid to Ukraine:"Russia should suffer consequences for its aggressive, destabilizing behavior and its illegal occupation of Ukraine. The fundamental question we must ask ourselves is do we wish to strengthen our partners in key regions or leave them with no other options than to turn to Russia, thereby undermining a once in a generation opportunity to more closely align nations with the U.S. vision for global security and stability."
Pat Lang thinks that Trump should fire Coats, Wary and Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General who is overseeing the Mueller investigation.
My advice is to spare Rosenstein, for now, as firing him would lead to a great uproar in Congress. The Mueller investigation has not brought up anything which is dangerous to Trump and is unlikely to do so in the immediate future. He and Rosenstein can be fired at a latter stage.
But Wray and Coats do deserve a pink slip and so do Kelly and Mattis. They are political appointees who work 'at the pleasure of the President'.
The U.S. has the legislative and the judicative as a counterweight to the president who leads the executive. The 'deep state' and its moles within the executive should have no role in that balance. The elected president can and must demand loyalty from those who work for him.
Those who sabotage him should be fired, not in a Saturday night massacre but publicly, with a given reason and all at the same time. They do not deserve any warning. Their rolling heads will get the attention of others who are tempted by the borg to act against the lawful policy directives of their higher up.
All this is not a defense of Trump. I for one despise his antics and most of his policies. But having a bad president of the United States implementing the policies he campaigned on, and doing so within the proper process, is way better than having unaccountable forces dictating their policies to him.
It will be impossible for Trump to get anything done if his direct subordinates, who work 'at his pleasure', publicly sabotage the implementation of his policies. Either he fires these people or the borg will have won.
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Jul 21, 2018 | www.britannica.com
The iron law became a central theme in the study of organized labour , political parties , and pluralist democracy in the postwar era. Although much of this scholarship basically confirmed Michels's arguments, a number of prominent works began to identify important anomalies and limitations to the iron law framework. Seymour Lipset , Martin Trow, and James Coleman 's analysis of the International Typographical Union (ITU), for example, showed that sustained union democracy was possible given printers' relative equality of income and status, mastery of communication skills, and generalized political competence, which underpinned the ITU's unusual history of enduring two-party competition (Independents and Progressives), which mirrored the American two-party system . In the party literature, Samuel Eldersveld argued that the power of organizational elites in Detroit was not nearly as concentrated as the iron law would suggest. He found party power relatively dispersed among different sectors and levels, in a "stratarchy" of shifting coalitions among component groups representing different social strata.
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Jul 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
veto , Jul 21, 2018 6:14:27 PM | 35
Who is actually in charge over there, among the Borg? And how much in charge? They cannot function yet as the collective electronic mind of science fiction, can they?Was it Rosenstein who ordered the arrest of the Russian gun lobbyist woman the day after the summit? That looks very much like an act of desperation. There is much to suggest that Special Counsel Mueller takes his orders from Rosenstein, but who does Rosenstein answer to, and is he untouchable within the USA legal system? How much cognitive dissonance is the public supposed to handle in relation to Rosenstein not being held accountable for his crimes, including high treason?
Who are the 'globalists' actually and which is their chain of command? Which positions do Soros, Bezos, CIA-MI6 have? What is the role of Mossad?
As it appears, after the ascendance of Trump, the actors are not sure themselves anymore about any of this, that is about who is in charge, or in particular about how much authority and insurance their actual real-life handlers do possess and vouch for. They waver, in the case of media hysterically so.
"The Intelligence Community", in particular CIA, is a central executive force in the circus, in collaboration with MI6 and the obedient assets in the NATO sphere, but they have grown so incompetent due to incessant politicizing and sycophantism that they are perhaps little more a paper tiger by now? If this fact, with the help of Trump and allies, would be perceived clearer by the political classes of the USA, much good would be the result.
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Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com
Peter Strzok, the disgraced and disgraceful Federal Bureau of Investigation official, is the very definition of a slimy swamp creature. Strzok twitched, grimaced and ranted his way to infamy during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, on July 12.
In no way had he failed to discharge his professional unbiased obligation to the public, asserted Strzok. He had merely expressed the hope that "the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating such horrible, disgusting behavior."
But we did not elect YOU, Mr. Strzok. We elected Mr. Trump.
Strzok is the youthful face of the venerated "Intelligence Community," itself part of the sprawling political machine that makes up the D.C. comitatus , now writhing like a fire breathing mythical monster against President Donald Trump.
Smug, self-satisfied, cheating creature that he is, Strzok can't take responsibility for his own misconduct, and blames Russia for dividing America. In the largely progressive bureau, moreover, Agent Strzok is neither underling nor outlier, for that matter. He's an overlord, having risen "to become the Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, the second-highest position in that division."
As Ann Coulter observed, the FBI is not the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover. Neither is the Intelligence Community Philip Haney's IC any longer. Haney was a heroic, soft-spoken, demure employee at the Department of Homeland Security. Agents like him are often fired if they don't get with the program. He didn't. Haney's method and the authentic intelligence he mined and developed might have stopped the likes of the San Bernardino mass murderers and many others. Instead, his higher-ups in the "Intelligence Community" made Haney and his data disappear.
Post Haney, the FBI failed to adequately screen and stop Syed Farook and blushing bride Tashfeen Malik.
A "blind bootlicking faith in spooks" is certainly unwarranted and may even be foolish. What of odious individuals like former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and his predecessor, James Comey, now openly campaigning for the Democrats? Are these leaders outliers in the "Intelligence Community"?
As Peter Strzok might say to his paramour in a private tweet, "Who ya gonna believe, the Intelligence Community or your own lying eyes?" The Bureau in particular and the IC cabal, in general, appear to be dominated by the likes of the dull-witted Mr. Strzok.
Similarly, it's hard to think of a more partisan operator than John O. Brennan -- he ran the CIA under President Obama. True to type, he cast a vote for Communist Party USA, back in 1976, when the current Russia monomania would have been justified. Brennan has dubbed President Trump a traitor for having dared to doubt people like himself.
The very embodiment of the Surveillance State at its worst is Michael V. Hayden. Hayden has moved seamlessly from the National Security Agency and the CIA to CNN where he beats up on Trump. The former Bush employee hollered treason: "One of the most disgraceful performances of an American president in front of a Russian leader," Hayden inveighed. Not only had POTUS dared to explore the possibility of a truce with Russia, which is a formidable nuclear power; but the president had the temerity to express a smidgen of skepticism about a community littered with spooks like Mr. Hayden.
As one wag noted , not unreasonably, ours is "a highly-politicized intelligence community, infiltrated over decades by cadres of Deep State operatives and sleeper agents, whose goal is to bring down this presidency."
The latest pillorying heaped upon the president by the permanent establishment has it that, "Trump chose to stand with Vladimir Putin, instead of the American People." Trump, to be precise, had the temerity to "openly question his own intelligence agencies' firm finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S."
Pray tell, since when does the Deep State -- FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, DNI, (Director of National Intelligence), on and on -- represent, or stand for, the American People? The president, conversely, actually got the support of at least 60 million Americans.
That's a LOT of support. Outside the Beltway, ordinary folks -- Deplorables, if you will -- have to sympathize with the president's initial and honest appraisal of the Intelligence Community's collective intelligence. This is the community that has sent us into quite a few recreational, hobby wars.
And this is the community that regularly intercepts but fails to surveys and stop the likes of mass murderers Syed Farook and bride Tashfeen Malik. Or, Orlando nightclub killer Omar Mateen, whose father the Bureau saw fit to hire as an informant. The same "community" has invited the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Arab-American Institute to help shape FBI counterterrorism training.
The FBI might not be very intelligent at all. About the quality of that intelligence, consider: On August 3, 2016, as the mad media were amping up their Russia monomania, a frenzied BuzzFeed -- it calls itself a news org -- reported that "the Russian foreign ministry had wired nearly $30,000 through a Kremlin-backed bank to its embassy in Washington, DC."
Intercepted by American intelligence, the Russian wire stipulated that the funds were meant "to finance the election campaign of 2016." Was this not "meddling in our election" or what? Did we finally have irrefutable evidence of Kremlin culpability? The FBI certainly thought so. "Worse still, this was only one of 60 transfers that were being scrutinized by the FBI," wrote the Economist, in November of 2017. "Similar transfers were made to other countries." As it transpired, the money was wired from the Kremlin to embassies the world over. Its purpose? Russia was preparing to hold parliamentary elections in 2016 and had sent funds to Russian embassies "to organize the polling for expatriates."
While it did update its Fake News factoids, Buzzfeed felt no compunction whatsoever to remove the erroneous item or publicly question their sources in the unimpeachable "Intelligence Community."
Most news media are just not as inquisitive as President Trump.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of " Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa " (2011) & " The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed " (June, 2016). She's on Twitter , Facebook , Gab & YouTube
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Jul 19, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca
Propaganda works, proved effective time and again – why it's a key tool in America's deep state playbook.
Virtually anything repeated enough, especially through the major media megaphone, gets most people to believe it – no matter how preposterous the claim.
Not a shred of evidence suggests Russia meddled in America's political process – nothing.
Yet an earlier NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed most Americans believe the Russia did it Big Lie. A months earlier Gallup poll showed three-fourths of Americans view Vladimir Putin unfavorably.
Americans are easy marks to be fooled. No matter how many times they were deceived before, they're easily manipulated to believe most anything drummed into their minds by the power of repetitious propaganda – fed them through through the major media megaphone – in lockstep with the official falsified narrative.
America's dominant media serve as a propaganda platform for US imperial and monied interests – acting as agents of deception, betraying their readers and viewers time and again instead of informing them responsibly.
CNN presstitute Poppy Harlow played a clip on air of Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asking Putin in Helsinki the following question:
"Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?"
Putin said: "Yes," he wanted Trump to win "because he talked about bringing the US-Russia relationship back to normal," as translated from his Russian language response.
Here's the precise translation of his remark:
"Yes, I wanted him to win, because he talked about the need to normalize US-Russia relations," adding:
"Isn't it natural to have sympathy towards a man who wants to restore relations with your country? That's normal."
Putin did not address the fabricated official narrative notion that he directed his officials to help Trump win. Yet CNN's Harlow claimed otherwise, falsely claiming he ordered Kremlin officials to help Trump triumph over Hillary.
He did nothing of the kind or say it, nor did any other Kremlin officials. No evidence proves otherwise – nothing but baseless accusations supported only by the power of deceptive propaganda.
Time and again, CNN, the NYT, and rest of America's dominant media prove themselves untrustworthy.
They consistently abandon journalism the way it's supposed to be, notably on geopolitical issues, especially on war and peace and anything about Russia.
After rejecting, or at least doubting, the official narrative about alleged Russian meddling in the US political process to aid his election, Trump backtracked post-Helsinki – capitulating to deep state power.
First in the White House, he said he misspoke abroad – then on CBS News Wednesday night, saying it's "true," deplorably adding:
Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, and he "would" hold Russian President Vladimir Putin responsible for the interference – that didn't occur, he failed to stress.
Here's his verbatim exchange with CBS anchor Jeff Glor :
GLOR: "You say you agree with US intelligence that Russia meddled in the election in 2016."
TRUMP: "Yeah and I've said that before, Jeff. I have said that numerous times before, and I would say that is true, yeah."
GLOR: "But you haven't condemned Putin, specifically. Do you hold him personally responsible?"
TRUMP: "Well, I would, because he's in charge of the country. Just like I consider myself to be responsible for things that happen in this country. So certainly as the leader of a country you would have to hold him responsible, yes."
GLOR: "What did you say to him?"
TRUMP: "Very strong on the fact that we can't have meddling. We can't have any of that – now look. We're also living in a grown-up world."
"Will a strong statement – you know – President Obama supposedly made a strong statement. Nobody heard it."
"What they did hear is a statement he made to Putin's very close friend. And that statement was not acceptable. Didn't get very much play relatively speaking. But that statement was not acceptable."
"But I let him know we can't have this. We're not going to have it, and that's the way it's going to be."
There you have it – Trump capitulating to America's deep state over Russia on national television.
From day one in power, he caved to the national security state, Wall Street, and other monied interests over popular ones.
The sole redeeming part of his agenda was wanting improved relations with Russia and Vladimir Putin personally – preferring peace over possible confrontation, wanting the threat of nuclear war defused.
Despite tweeting post-Helsinki that he and Putin "got along well which truly bothered many haters who wanted to see a boxing match," his remarks on CBS News showed he'll continue dirty US business as usual toward Russia.
Anything positive from summit talks appears abandoned by capitulating to deep state power controlling him and his agenda.
Normalized relations with Russia and world peace are anathema notions in Washington. Bipartisan neocons infesting the US political establishment want none of it. America's hegemonic aims matter most – wanting dominance over planet earth, its resources and populations. Endless wars of aggression, color revolutions, and other unlawful practices harmful to human rights and welfare are its favored strategies.
Will Americans go along with sacrificing vital freedoms for greater security from invented enemies – losing both? Will US belligerent confrontation with Russia inevitably follow? Will mushroom-shaped denouement eventually kill us all?
*
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org ( Home – Stephen Lendman ). Contact at [email protected] .
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html "
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Jan 11, 2018 | www.unz.com
Extracted from: The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate, by Ray McGovern - The Unz Review by Ray McGovern
Russia-gate is becoming FBI-gate, thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and his garrulous girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. (Ten illustrative texts from their exchange appear at the end of this article.)
Despite his former job as chief of the FBI's counterintelligence section, Strzok had the naive notion that texting on FBI phones could not be traced. Strzok must have slept through "Surity 101." Or perhaps he was busy texting during that class. Girlfriend Page cannot be happy at being misled by his assurance that using office phones would be a secure way to conduct their affair(s).
It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest of us. However, for the never-Trump plotters in the FBI, the official release of just a fraction (375) of almost 10,000 messages does incalculably more damage than that.
We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process. And that puts in a new and dark context the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not the Russians trying to rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community, shadowy characters sometimes called the Deep State.
... ... ...
Ironically, the Strzok-Page texts provide something that the Russia-gate investigation has been sorely lacking: first-hand evidence of both corrupt intent and action. After months of breathless searching for "evidence" of Russian-Trump collusion designed to put Trump in the White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama administration colluded to keep Trump out of the White House – proof of what old-time gumshoes used to call "means, motive and opportunity."
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Jun 28, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
What are the necessary elements for the success of a modern nation state?
According to one justifiably popular and well-written book, Why Nations Fail , it all has to do with inclusive political and economic institutions which foster technological change which in turn leads to increasing prosperity for the many.
Two key aspects upholding such institutions are a strong centralized state and the rule of law. Without these two, a nation cannot hope to advance socially, politically, or economically. The negative of this rosy picture are nations which maintain and promote extractive political and economic institutions which serve the interests of a narrow elite.
Both cases, the inclusive and the extractive, tend to reinforce themselves through time by a process known as institutional drift. This is an historical tendency for institutions to maintain, strengthen, and reproduce themselves over time similar to the biological processes involved in genetic drift.
Importantly the authors also take the time to mention Robert Michel's seminal idea concerning the iron law of oligarchy which explains the historically documented tendency that large, complex organizations of any kind (democratic, socialist, conservative) fall under the sway of a small elite exercising absolute if cosmetically hidden power.
Our authors optimistically suggest that this law is not destiny and can be sufficiently controlled by ever expanding democratic institutions in civil society.
Opposed to this buoyant idea of increasing mass prosperity and political participation is Francis Fukuyama's discussion of Neo-Paternalism in his thought provoking magnum opus The Origins of Political Order.
In short, much like the earlier Michel, Fukuyama sees present day democracies drifting towards ever more nepotistic patterns of behavior where elites seize power and reward and distribute the fruits of that power to their close associates within their networks of influence.
In effect, both men, see, as did Marx before them, the "constitutional democracies" as a sham as a kind of theater behind which the levers of power are exercised authoritatively with little regard to the true interests of the masses below them.
In such an environment of centralized elite control, "media openness" can do little to rout out the opaque workings of carefully, surreptitiously orchestrated power.
Thus, a superficial reading of history might lead us to believe that we live in an increasingly "inclusive" society reflecting a rising tide of technological progress and economic prosperity. However, a closer look, might reveal a modicum of beneficence bestowed upon the many; while the Machiavellian few have managed behind a facade of democracy and nationalism to achieve unheard of sums of wealth, power, and influence once only dreamed of by despots, dictators, and demagogues of the past.
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Jul 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Daniel , Jul 18, 2018 12:11:36 AM | 191
Daniel
I'm of a different mind when it comes to the elites/money. Was it you or somebody commented some time back that the US elite is not a monolith? No matter, I think Trump is part of a faction of the elite rather than a groomed puppet. There are a number of factions in the US, who mostly act in unison, but now, As anywhere the factions will overlap in interests, as in many with Iran derangement syndrome will overlap with those who have Russia derangement syndrome and so forth.
US is a mess with so many derangement syndromes, even amongst the elite. Trump is something like a catalyst that causes the elite, and much of the US to separate into two distinctly different groupings of derangement syndrome.Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Jul 17, 2018 11:35:02 PM | 188
Peter AU 1 @184. I have written, and do still absolutely believe that the 0.01% is not a monolith, and that they do compete, sometimes with absolutely disastrous effects on humans.
I just don't see this Trump vs. "Deep State" or whatever as an example of that. The 0.01% and their MSM who we are told is "the resistance" helped create and bolster the Trump Brand, and are profiting mightily from his Administration.
I just saw an article showing Goldman Sachs' profits have gone up 44% since Trump. Again, not "The Grand Coincidence" that Trump stuffed the swamp with more GS creatures of the black lagoon than any other President in history.
Or, are GS now anti-globalists, playing along with Trump's brilliant 5-D chess? ;-)
Seriously, what AZ Empire elitists have suffered under the Trump Administration?
The extraction industries are flying high. The MIC is raking it in. The supra-national banksters.... well, they always do well, but they're obviously thrilled as is Wall Street in general.
As I noted above, even the failing media of the NY Times and MSDNC are in boon times! Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert were in the ratings cellar until Trump, now they're tops in their slots. Michael frigging Moore and U2 are relevant again! ;-)
Seriously, I had asked who benefits. But the easier question has to be who suffers?
Peter AU 1 , Jul 18, 2018 12:26:04 AM | 196
DanielCirce , Jul 17, 2018 11:49:39 PM | 189
Trump's swamp is very different from what most of us here at b's see as the swamp. Trump's swamp is what Pat Lang at SST terms as the borg. It is the pidgins strutting around shitting on the chessboard (Putin), the Zbig foreign policy 'ex-spurts' blinded by Russia derangement syndrome.Methinks the media pot is calling the Trump kettle black; or is it the other way around? They're interchangeable; they're like a jacket that has two sides one can wear when the other side looks too dirty.Daniel , Jul 17, 2018 11:23:48 PM | 184Same thing with the Washington duopoly. When one starts to look transparent; the other one takes over.
It's all a racket people. Stop buying into the media and duopoly system and it'll lose its power. They exist on your desperation, your need for illusion and your insanity i.e. doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result when you know it's clearly not working!
Trump is the master illusionist du jour even topping Obama, who was like the charming preacher minus the performing snakes. Perhaps the only true statement to come out of Hillary's mouth was about her rival.: "The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be heard and the world will be perfect.
She should know; she peddles the same.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day...err...once.
Circe @| 173, why does the Zionist owned and controlled media in Israel LOVE Trump, but the Zionist owned and controlled media in the US/EU HATE him?And that is one of the (many) reasons why I do not believe the MSM narrative that Trump is an outsider whom they hate. Trump fans know the MSM lies to us about everything, big and small. And yet, they totally believe the MSM narrative about Trump and their relationship with him.
I am reminded of the atheist challenge to believers in a monotheistic religion. "You are atheistic about all the other gods except one. I am merely atheistic about one more god than you."
Well, I disbelieve one more MSM narrative than most.
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Jul 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
silver140 -> Free This Tue, 07/17/2018 - 13:59 Permalink
Within minutes MSM had the theme to broadcast. It was from their puppet masters in the FBI/CIA. They're told what to say. There's no doubt about that now.
Also, there's no doubt that they are pushing for war with Russia, within months or a few years, depending on what happens to Trump.
The Russians will know this now. All the post WWII wars were done in the same way: demonizing leaders, "defending democracy", false flag ops. But this present push is for the end game of killing the host; which is the life strategy of the parasitoid. The complete destruction of humanity and total ecocide.
The parasitoid corporate fascists are now in full control of the media and their disease vector politicians/bureaucrats, not just in the US but the EU/NATO as well.
A parasitoid is an organism that lives in close association with its host and at the host's expense, and which sooner or later kills it. Parasitoidism is one of six major evolutionary strategies within parasitism . Parasitoidism is distinguished by the fatal prognosis for the host, which makes the strategy close to predation .
In epidemiology , a disease vector is any agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism; [1] [2]
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Jul 12, 2018 | caucus99percent.com
In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook. It's that moment of sudden realization that no one will believe the hero because it sounds too crazy to believe.
Granted, to the uninitiated, coming to a realization so shocking and threatening to your current mental construction of the world can appear like paranoia. It becomes a question of the discoverer's knowledge and senses over what everyone else believes. Everyone else seems to be allowing him or herself to be absorbed into the great growing evil.
Today many of us, certainly readers here at Caucus99, are finding ourselves in similar positions. Our political structure is a lie, the people who are supposed to represent us and our interests don't, our law enforcement protects the property of the rich, not our lives, and often are in cahoots with the criminals from whom we are supposed to be protected. I am sure that many of our old friends and acquaintances have been alienated from some of us here when we began talking about Hillary's track record during the Presidential campaign, for example. In our current pasteboard world, if you are a Republican or Democrat you must assume that your designated political party, maybe with a couple of exceptions, are there to look after you.
And there that crazy friend goes, yelling about cookbooks.
I suppose my introduction to the corruption of those in power, at thirteen, was the assassination of JFK. Not actually the assassination, but the murder of Oswald two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. I had slept overnight at a friend's and we came back from shooting basketballs to watch the transfer of Oswald to another facility. That was the moment that I realized all wasn't what it seemed. But, like most kids my age, the Beatles came along in a month or so and I was swept into the world of rock and roll, which kept me occupied until I began noticing girls. Until 1968. I was still noticing girls and rock and roll, but I was also noticing the number of progressives being gunned down by "lone nuts". And I was noticing Vietnam.
I'm not sharing this to explain to you how I became (that loathsome term) a "conspiracy theorist". I just want to explain to you that the democracy of the United States, and all the characters running across the stage in Washington, D.C., are the cookbook.
I wrote an essay here back in April of 2017 explaining how the Russiagate scandal had been designed to give Hillary Clinton a casus belli for her future war against Russia, and that what we were seeing since she lost has been a recycling of it to get Trump in line with the goals of the Deep State. So far nothing much has happened that has moved me from that belief. Now that the Deep State seems to have persuaded our Dear Leader that he can go on being himself as long as he understands the actual hierarchy and doesn't get in the way the Deep State, everything seems to be back on track. At least until Donald's next tweet.
But in order to understand the depth of criminality in our system one has to understand how things are done. After World War II a lot of social awareness began putting pressure on the old system that had driven the world into the Great Depression. FDR had demonstrated that the government could look out for the poor, could give them jobs when there were no other jobs to be had. The GI Bill sent millions of vets to college and helped to create the middle class we used to have. Unions had real power in negotiating wages and terms of service. Government could create a system to help the elderly. The African Americans, coming back home from fighting a war against fascism, refused go to the coloreds only water fountains. In short, the United States were in for some growing pains.
What happened? As I mentioned above there was a rash of murders of progressive political candidates and leaders in the sixties. But in order for the forces behind a return to the old rules to keep a lid on any revolutions there had to be something better than shooting every progressive who raised his head above the lectern. Thus the wave of recruitment of agents and assets in the late sixties by the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Although I didn't know it directly at the time, arriving on campus in 1968 it was evident that there was a "presence" of people looking over the shoulders of student activists.
Which brings me to another great revelation. It's not just politicians and political parties that are serving the Deep State. Any agency that can be corrupted by power will be, eventually.
Which brings us to the courts.
There are certain things that must be preserved for a ruling class to remain legitimate in the eyes of the public. Some people don't think much beyond the flag. But there are other things. The media is better than ever at keeping uncomfortable truths from the majority of Americans. But what happens where the criminality of the Deep State collides with our judicial system?
Let me introduce you to the man of the hour in Washington, Robert Swann Mueller III. Robert was born into the upper crust in our American class system. At one point in his education in private schools John Kerry was a classmate. (Kerry was also a fellow Bonesman with the Bushes.) Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966, three years after John Kennedy's assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann's grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's murder there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world. You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding.
Soon thereafter Mueller decided to go to Vietnam because, he said, a classmate had died there and patriotism and so forth. He became an officer and eventually ended up as an aide-de-camp for the 3rd Marine Division's commanding general, General William K. Jones. Something else was going on in Vietnam. The CIA had installed its Phoenix Program. I cannot do justice to the Phoenix Program and won't considering Doug Valentine's work on it is available for everyone, but the Phoenix Program was the CIA's attempt to totally control the Vietnamese population. Besides massacres of villages, the program assassinated suspected leaders and spies for the Vietcong, coerced others into being their agents, and kept up files on all the relevant Vietnamese down to the village level. Like in later wars, the CIA incorporated torture, murder and psychological techniques in order to control their targets. As an aide-de-camp to a commanding Marine general, there is no way that Mueller didn't know about the Phoenix Program. He probably saw daily briefings.
When he came back to the US he studied law and quickly became a federal prosecutor.
One of the things to mark his career was to deny a pardon to Patty Hearst for her part in the whole Symbionese Liberation Army's "terror" campaign. What did the SLA have to do with anything? A short history: Donald DeFreeze, a small-time criminal in Los Angeles agreed to become an informant for the LAPD in order to stay out of jail. After awhile he got tired of ratting out others and asked to get out of the program. Instead, DeFreeze was incarcerated at the Vacaville Medical Facility for criminally insane prisoners in the California penal system. There DeFreeze met Colston Westbrook who gave classes for the "Black Cultural Association", an experimental behavior modification unit inside the prison. Who was Westbrook? He was a CIA agent, trained in psychological warfare and part of the Phoenix Program. DeFreeze was modified by Westbrook and company for two years. Soon thereafter, he was transferred to Soledad Prison, from which he "escaped" and became the infamous "Cinque". Then came the Symbionese Liberation Army, a caricature of a black militant group filled with mostly white people with military backgrounds. The murder of Marcus Foster, a progressive black leader in the San Francisco East Bay, was done by white men in blackface, according to eyewitnesses. The SLA claimed credit for it. The SLA kidnapped Hearst, subjected her to torture, rape, sensory deprivation and mind control tactics, just like the CIA did in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Then came the bank robberies.
I bring up the Patty Hearst case because, in 2000, decades after her prison sentence had been commuted, Mueller still opposed her pardon. Guess what he didn't notice when he rejected her pardon? This has been his pattern throughout his career. We'll return to Patty Hearst shortly.
Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA. He prosecuted what was known in the San Francisco Bay Area as the "drug tug" case which had connections to an island in Panama. It was a drug smuggling case and had tentacles into things like bank frauds in Northern California. He prosecuted Manuel Noriega's drug-smuggling without noticing Oliver North's drug-smuggling, arms running and money laundering through Panama as a part of Iran-contra.
Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections.
For example, he prosecuted Pan Am 103. Initially, and then later confirmed by an insurance investigator's report, the bomb that brought down the airliner was believed to be placed onboard by baggage handlers working at the Frankfurt Airport. They were given the bomb by a terrorist cell who in turn got it from one Monzer al-Kassar, who was a very large heroin dealer, estimated at supplying twenty percent of the US's heroin at the time. A big operator. And, in fact, one of the passengers on the plane was a drug mule for al-Kassar. Al-Kassar also happened to be a part of the Iran-contra operation, supplying weapons for North's Enterprise. The operation was, according to the early reports, carried out by a cell of Palestinian terrorists based in Frankfurt, the Palestinian Liberation Front-General Command, who got the bomb from al-Kassar and put the bomb on that airline.
Mueller, put in charge of the case, pursued an entirely different direction, accusing two Libyans of bombing the plane. At the time Libya and Khadafy were getting blamed for a lot of terrorist activity, but the case against the two was so weak as to hardly be circumstantial.
There were other questions arising from Pan Am 103. A top official in the FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revell, rushed onto the tarmac in London to pull his son and daughter-in-law off of Pan Am 103 before it went on to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland. Also changing flight plans were South African President Pik Botha and his negotiating team. Apparently, someone that Revell and Pik Botha knew gave them the warning.
There was one group that didn't get warned. That was the McKee Team, an assembled group of US intelligence agents tasked to investigate American hostages in Beruit. They allegedly discovered a link between the hostage takers, drug traffickers and the CIA. They were returning to the US, against orders, presumably to spill the beans. This was essentially a clean-up operation, tying up loose strings of the Iran-contra operation. So was Noriega's prosecution.
That's why Mueller got the case. He knew where to look and where not to look.
He also prosecuted ancillary Iran-contra cases. He prosecuted John Gotti for dealing cocaine in the New York City area. The cocaine he sold was part of the the Iran-contra (CIA) plan where Southern Air Transport flew weapons to Latin America for the contras (whom Congress had voted against aiding) and bringing back cocaine from Latin America on its return flights, to include Mena, Arkansas. One of the CIA's pilots, Barry Seal, bragged that he had a "get-out-of-jail" letter written for him by then-Governor Bill Clinton. At the time, Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor for that corner of Arkansas. He also didn't notice all that cocaine. Hutchson later served as George W. Bush's first "drug czar" before going into politics. How coincidental.
Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. As head of our country's biggest law enforcement agency Mueller did not pursue the House of Saud's part in 9/11 even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and a number of them could be traced to Saudi intelligence, and the money chain could be traced to Saudis living in the US, some of whom flew out of the US while all other US flights were grounded. He did not investigate Mohammed Atta's time in Frankfort, Germany, where he was employed by a front company for the BND, West Germany's equivalent to the CIA. Nor did Mueller investigate Huffman Aviation where Mo Atta and another hijacker matriculated in flying planes into buildings. Huffman is interesting because while Mo was studying in Huffman's Venice, Florida aviation school a Huffman plane was busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin. Curiously, the pilot walked away from the DEA without being charged and no one was prosecuted at Huffman.
Ask Colleen Rowley about Mueller's leadership in the 9/11 investigation.
Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act.
Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along.
A closer examination of Robert Mueller would probably find a lot more of these cases and I encourage others to continue the search. For example, it's been alleged that Mueller sent innocent men to jail for crimes committed by Whitey Bulger for the benefit of someone or something within the government and that this allowed Bulger to continue his criminal activities for years.
***
It's been seventy years since the CIA was created, fifty years since JFK was most likely murdered by them. In order to avoid any consequences for their crimes more and more institutions have had to be infiltrated and corrupted by them. Many of the heroes of the Left have turned out to be purveyors of "modified limited hangouts" which served the Deep State. Ramsey Clark, who was given the mantle of "good guy" by the media of the Left, was active as LBJ's Attorney General in blocking Jim Garrison's investigation into the JFK assassination and was named by Doug Valentine in his THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME as a major proponent of the CIA's OPERATION CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO. While the media spent a good deal of time talking about how great they were in releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public, the hero who exposed the military, Daniel Ellsberg, turns out to have been CIA, operating with CIA black ops in Vietnam. And while the Pentagon Papers exposed our military's great errors in Vietnam the CIA was generally spared. Again. Bob Woodward, our hero of Watergate, had been a courier for the Office of Naval Intelligence only a few years earlier. Thus, the CIA and Deep State, which had soured on Nixon, orchestrated that President's departure.
I raise this because Robert Mueller's current task is the investigation of our sitting President. No matter how much you dislike Trump you can't help but notice that the "evidence" against him conspiring with Putin and Russia is thin gruel. And while Trump, like most politicians who ascend to the big seat, has a lot of questionable, even indictable business connections around him, the great dangers of a Putin-Trump conspiracy trumpeted by the media have been fading because, apparently, there was never a there there. Thus, as Mueller oversees this case, he will find people surrounding Trump who have lied to FBI agents, who have perhaps not registered as foreign agents, and other crimes that routinely happen out of the public spotlight and aren't prosecuted. What was obvious to me from the start, that this was a psyop that involved U.S. intelligence, Ukrainian intelligence, Clinton and the DNC, will not be obvious to Mueller. Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it.
When one begins examining high-profile court cases in post-1963 America one sees a cast of people who keep popping up. Prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, coroners, witnesses, reporters, authors. This ensemble keeps reappearing in these show trials. We may not know what Mueller will find, but we know what he won't find.
There was a review at Truthdig back in 2016 of Jeffrey Toobin's book on Patty Hearst, AMERICAN HEIRESS (Toobin himself worked as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during the investigation Iran–Contra affair and Oliver North's criminal trial). In part it reads: "Toobin features the characters who populated the edges of Hearst's story. Robert Shapiro, who would later work with [F. Lee] Bailey on the O.J. Simpson case, makes a cameo appearance. Lance Ito, the judge in that case, briefly shared a shooting range with a machine-gun toting SLA member. Reverend Jim Jones offered to help with the food distribution effort; that enterprise also employed Sara Jane Moore, who served 32 years for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford during his 1975 visit to San Francisco. Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented Randy and Catherine Hearst's district, endorsed the commutation of Patty's sentence. "Off to Guyana," he wrote Patty in 1978. "See you when I return. Hang in there." Jim Jones' henchmen shot and killed Ryan before he could board his flight home. Robert Mueller, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco before taking over as FBI director, strenuously opposed Hearst's pardon, claiming that her attitude, born of wealth and social position, "has always been that she is a person above the law.""
When Mueller wrote that line he must have laughed out loud.
Wow! Where did you get all those facts about Mueller.detroitmechworks on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 3:15pmThat isn't connecting the dots. Its painting a bloody Mona Lisa.
I had no idea how dirty this man was. He is the CIA version of Zelig or Forest Gump. He makes Bill Clinton look like an amateur.
Beginning with the double CIA family ties and proceeding through whitewashing 911, this man is so central to our rotten government that its a wonder someone hasn't done what you just did a lot sooner.
My hat is off to you. Someone should post this article on our blog.
It's almost become a parody of a dystopia...arendt on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:36pmThe one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_ (role-playing_game)
Seriously though, so much of this makes absolute sense if you just abandon the concept that democracy has any play whatsoever in our society.
So with that in mind, a little music from the era, and a little self parody as well.
In my hatred of role-playing games, I missed Paranoiadetroitmechworks on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:48pmThanks for pointing to it. I got laughs just reading the wikipedia page.
It sounds like Kafka meets that Russian guy who was simultaneously head of the secret police and leader of the resistance.
LOL.
The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_ (role-playing_game)
Seriously though, so much of this makes absolute sense if you just abandon the concept that democracy has any play whatsoever in our society.
So with that in mind, a little music from the era, and a little self parody as well.
West End Games had a lot of incredible hits...Linda Wood on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 3:19pm@arendt even considering they were working from licenses half the time. They ended up essentially creating the universe bibles for Ghostbusters and the Star Wars EU prior to the reboots.
Unfortunately, that didn't translate into respect. However, I still to this day am amazed at the complexity of thought that went into many of the rules and the ability they had to match mechanics to maintaining the play feel.
Paranoia in particular was hilarious. Kafka and Three Stooges, and even a little Joseph Heller. Later editions even managed to work in criticisms of late stage capitalism by having players ALWAYS broke and any unexpected expenses needing to be made up through crime... which was illegal, to avoid budget shortfalls... which was also illegal...
Thanks for pointing to it. I got laughs just reading the wikipedia page.
It sounds like Kafka meets that Russian guy who was simultaneously head of the secret police and leader of the resistance.
LOL.
Brilliant and wonderful essay!arendt on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 4:48pmBob, thank you. As detailed and extensive as it is, your essay is concise by making it clear exactly what's so wrong with Mueller:
Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA...
Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections...
Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it...
For me, the anthrax case is the most important. Biological weapons are no joke. I believe we learned, from whistle-blowing scientists, not from the FBI investigation, that the CIA had one of the many illegal biological weapons programs being run with our tax dollars leading up to the anthrax attack. So whether Battelle was one of the CIA's contractors or yet another cut out, the investigation by Mueller simply stated those entities, all of them, were eliminated from the investigation.
Some relevant quotes from Hannah Arendtggersh on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:32pmThe chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies" like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
p423-4"From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments.
The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.
"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
And Mr. transparency was O himselfon the cusp on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:13pm"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies" like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
p423-4"From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments.
The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.
"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
This is the most interesting essay I have read here.ggersh on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:36pmBravo, Bob.
Great story!!!snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:45pmOnly thing missing for me was the tie in to Pappy Bush and the rest of the family. Mueller the consigliere of the CIA. Oh man how fucked are we?
OutstandingSnode on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:52pmGreat history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it?
Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called "a right wing attempt to bring them down."
Good to see you writing here again, Bob.
Wow!CS in AZ on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:02pmThis awesome. I knew about Colleen Rowley, but the rest.....2 things, what about Comey? and Bush1 being in Dallas the day of the JFK assassination?
Wow, thank yousnoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 7:04pmI almost skipped reading this one, assumed at first from the headline it was going to be about the Russia "investigation" which I've been steadfast in not paying any attention to.
But wow, this is so much better than I'd expected, a fascinating tapestry. A lot to absorb. At this point I'm just feeling overwhelmed at how little "we the people" in this country have any say in, or even any knowledge about, what is going on.
Thank you for this excellent history and synthesis.
Here's some history of another creep who has found redemptionWink on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 9:56pmfrom those who believe the fairy tale of Russia Gate. John Brennan has also become a darling of the left. Greenwald wrote about him after Obama appointed him to his cabinet.
Joe posted this link that explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing."
Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten.
It's relatively safe tosnoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:21pmconclude from this, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the Mueller investigation of "Russiagate" won't get anywhere near the Oval Office.
Mostly becuz "Deep State" itself is up to its eyebrows in the affair. And also becuz Trump has very little to do with it. I'm sure they'd Love to bury Hillary in this, but it looks like that won't happen either. A shame.Mueller doesn't want to show the Russians his evidenceDeja on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:46pmI think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.
Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
A Red list?snoopydawg on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 12:49am@snoopydawg @snoopydawg
What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people, or are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.
Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
Who knows?snoopydawg on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 2:40amIt's obvious that the whole damn Russia Gate conspiracy was just made up. It started when Wikileaks said that they were going to release the emails between Hillary and Podesta that showed how they rigged the primary against Bernie. The reason why they did it was to keep people from talking about the contents of the emails. And it worked. The media didn't focus on their contents, but only on how Wikileaks obtained them.
Another reason for the Russian propaganda crap is so people will give their permission for the upcoming war against Russia that had already been planned for over two years before the election. And they will. I've seen so many comments that says what Russia (Putin) did and is still doing was an act of war. Today on ToP one person said that "we need to assassinate Putin." Was that person HRd for promoting violence which is against the site rules? Nope. Those that believe Russia actually did interfere with the election also think that the republicans are also Putin's puppets and that is why they won't go against Trump. The front pagers have been pushing lies about Russia's actions it should be obvious to anyone with a working brain. I'll see a definitive statement like " The seas were calm and the skies were clear." But they will rewrite their statement to "The reason why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." Hopefully you get my drift on how they're blatantly lying in their statements.
Hillary's BFF, Nuland and McCain were the ones that worked the hardest on overthrowing the Ukraine government. The USA wanted to put its own puppet government on Russia's border. Plus the USA and NATO have been installing troops into countries that surround Russia's borders.
The original reason why the Mueller investigation was created was to find evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to win the election. None of the Mueller indictments have anything to do with that charge. This is why he was taken off guard when the Russian lawyers showed up to defend their clients. Hope that you read the entire article.
#13 #13
What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people, or are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Heh. This is being spun differently over on ToPWink on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 6:08pmThis also proves my point above how information is selectively posted over there. Just certain parts of the articles are posted, but the parts of the articles that show the information in a different light are left out. This is from a comment..
It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only , but I'm not much more sure than you are.
If they don't have a US presence ( as it appears they don't ), I can't understand why they even care that Mueller has charged them. As you point out, they won't be extradited, so none of this really matters. They could have their lawyers just play a DVD of them confessing followed by giving Mueller the double birds all around and it wouldn't make any difference, so the only logical answer for this is to try and pry state secrets out legally via the courts instead of through hacking and spying.
Oops. From the article ..
I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges.
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.
Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
Well, it gets everyonesnoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:30pmoff the hook.
@snoopydawg
Especially Mueller. Finding the 13 Russians guilty that is. Mueller can then claim, "See! The Russians did it," which gives Hillbots a warm fuzzy and reason to scold BernieBros with a "told ya so!!" AND, no reason to investigate further. Investigation over. Case closed! Everyone gets what they want. Alas... Their lawyer showed up.
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.
Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
Well of course it was a PR stunt!Deja on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:49pmAs Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than a PR stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch Project.
One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog
Now I want to see it toomimi on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 1:08am@snoopydawg
Especially since it's supposed to contain all these names of stooges, duped into participating in US politics by the Kremlin. It's ridiculous.
As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than a PR stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.
I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch Project.
One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog
I need to print this out and hang it at my bedsideGreyWolf on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 12:57pmbecause I believe it will be gone in its digital format in no time. Thank You for writing this out. You did good. Thank you.
Bookmarked (with two separate archives)gulfgal98 on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 7:16pm@mimi This page is also at:archive.org archive.is because I believe it will be gone in its digital format in no time.
Thank You for writing this out. You did good. Thank you.
One of the best and most complete essaysI have read here in a long time. While I linked ot our Twitter account last night, I did not have time to read it before I posted it. I am going to link this again because I think it is such an important essay for others to read.
Thank you again for such an outstanding essay!
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Jun 22, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org
"The systematic attempts to get the president on one's side inevitably are more successful with chief executives lacking experience in government as they have nothing to measure the power points they are seeing against"
I recall how a friend of mine who once served as a senior Pentagon intelligence briefer described what he called "breaking in" a new president. Today, incoming presidents receive some intelligence briefings so that they do not land in office on a cold January day totally unprepared for what awaits them. But generally speaking, the real surprises are unveiled during the first week when they get the full classified briefings that are carefully prepared both to inform and to enhance the value of the agency doing the briefing. In the case of the Central Intelligence Agency, the most secret clandestine operations are revealed in power point to convince the new chief executive that the intelligence community is keeping the nation safe. The Pentagon for its part unveils flashy new weapons systems either about to come on line or being planned to demonstrate its ability to deter aggression from any source.
The thinking is that if you get the new president on board in his first few days he will be yours forever, signing off on budget increases year after year while also providing political cover when things go wrong. While the Defense Department and intelligence community benefit from the process and are frequently able to get the president's ear because they are able to unveil some sensational "secrets," other government agencies also competing for dollars do not have that appeal and do not do so well. State Department, for example, rarely makes much of an impression because its work is basically prosaic.
The systematic attempts to get the president on one's side inevitably are more successful with chief executives lacking experience in government as they have nothing to measure the power points they are seeing against. President George H. W. Bush, emerging from years spent as a naval officer, a congressman and CIA Director, is unlikely to have been much influenced by a briefing. President Bill Clinton, harboring a negative perception about CIA, did not even see his Director James Woolsey for over a year. But, on balance, most new presidents are willing to be seduced by the inside-the-Beltway establishment as represented by the Pentagon and the intelligence community.
Donald Trump in particular appears to have succumbed, deferring to generals and intelligence chiefs much more often than not, but he has also taken the message of American omnipotence too much to heart. Trump, with no military or government experience, defers to the national security advocates without any sense of the hard reality that all actions have consequences.
The Pentagon is still planning for a military parade in Washington on Veterans' Day in November, a huge waste of resources that will do little more than stroke the presidential ego. And the open admiration for the armed forces makes it easy for Trump to think first of using weapons and coercion instead of diplomacy, to launch cruise missiles and endorse an admitted torturer as the new CIA Chief. The president is very much wedded to the idea that the United States can go it alone if necessary and the rules that constrain other nations need not apply, a very dangerous conceit.
There have been several ominous developments in Syria, which could bring the U.S. nose-to-nose with Russian forces in the country. A recent Israeli airstrike , initially credited to Washington, appears to have killed 52 Syrian soldiers. There have also been rumors in Washington that the Administration is preparing for something "big" in Syria, possibly related to warnings from the Pentagon that Syrian forces have been threatening the unilaterally declared "de-escalation zone" in the country's southeast. This suggests that the U.S. will block attempts by the government in Damascus to regain control of areas until recently dominated by terrorists. Trump has also quietly restored funding to the so-called White Helmets, a terrorist front group much loved by Hollywood and Congress.
All of these steps in Syria serve no real American interest. More ominously, Trump has now revealed that he has ordered the Pentagon to create a military Space Force as a new branch of the armed forces. He explained " Our destiny, beyond the Earth, is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security. It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space."
How other nations will adapt to American rule over outer space and the planets is difficult to predict, but if the past seventeen years of Washington's assertion of its supremacy are anything to go by, the result will be very, very bad. And it is quite unsettling to also observe that a nation that clearly cannot provide access to decent health care for its citizens is now aspiring to turn the moon into a fortified bastion.
Source: Strategic Culture
- kent98 • 4 days ago ,
BobValdez kent98 • 4 days ago ,There are 16 intel agencies in the US. Is this necessary or a waste of money when they all failed to predict or stop 9/11 or even know for sure if Russia meddled in the 2016 election? Are they tripping over one and other to get Trump's ears or have they got competing agendas? Who should the President listen to? Its madness.
These agencies are NOT "intelligent". If they were, america wouldn't be in the mess it is.
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Jul 13, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca
The world today is controlled by a small elite group that has been increasingly concentrating power and wealth in their own hands. There are many observable facets to this power structure, including the military security complex that president Eisenhower warned against, the fossil fuel interests, and the neocons that are promoting U.S. hegemony around the world, but the most powerful and overarching force is "the money power" that controls money, banking, and finance worldwide. It is clear that those who control the creation and allocation of money through the banking system are able to control virtually every other aspect of global society.
Having taken control of the political leadership in North America and western Europe, they are determined to use military force, if necessary, to create a unipolar world order in which the power elite enjoy "full spectrum dominance." Based on a long established pattern of covert and overt interventions, it is evident that they are willing to employ, either directly or through proxies, a wide range of tactics, including propaganda, bribery, cooptation, deception, assassinations, false-flag attacks and war. Large segments of the media and entertainment industries, education, and the military power have been captured to help manufacture public consent.
Be that as it may, I believe that the natural course of human evolution tends toward a multi-polar world order based on honesty, openness, compassion, cooperation, and fairness, but that requires a well-educated and informed populace and "broad spectrum" participation in the political process. Fortunately, the internet and world wide web have enabled people to be better informed than ever before and to engage with one another directly, bypassing intermediaries that control and limit what people can share. On the other hand, the political machinery has been so thoroughly taken over by the power elite that the will of the people has thus far been of little consequence in deciding the course of world affairs.
So what can be done to turn the tide? How can we the people empower ourselves to effectively assert our desires for a more fair, humane and peaceful world order? Is it possible to influence the behavior of those in power? Or is it possible to install new leaders who will act more responsibly and in accordance with the popular will? Or is necessary, or even possible, to reinvent and deploy political and economic structures by which people can more directly assert themselves?
It seems reasonable to assert that action must be taken on all levels, but I am inclined to believe that the greatest possibility of bringing about the desired changes lies in economic and political innovation and restructuring.
The monopolization of credit
I came to realize many years ago that the primary mechanism by which people can be, and are controlled, is the system of money, banking, and finance. The power elite have long known this and have used it to enrich themselves and consolidate their grip on power. Though we take it for granted, money has become an utter necessity for surviving in the modern world. But unlike water, air, food, and energy, money is not a natural substance -- it is a human contrivance, and it has been contrived in such a way as to centralize power and concentrate wealth.
Money today is essentially credit, and the control of our collective credit has been monopolized in the hands of a cartel comprised of huge private banks with the complicity of politicians who control central governments. This collusive arrangement between bankers and politicians disempowers people, businesses, and communities and enables the elite super-class to use the present centralized control mechanisms to their own advantage and purpose. It misallocates credit, making it both scarce and expensive for the productive private sector while enabling central governments to circumvent, by deficit spending, the natural limits imposed by its revenue streams of taxes and fees. Thus, there is virtually no limit to the amounts of resources that are lavished on the machinery of war and domination.[i]
In today's world, banks get to lend our collective credit back to us and charge interest for it while central governments get to spend more than they earn in overt tax revenues, relying on the banking system to monetize government debts as needed. These two parasitic drains on the economy, interest and inflationary monetization of government debts, create a growth imperative that is destroying the environment, shredding the social fabric, and creating ever greater disparities of income and wealth. At the same time, this scarcity and misallocation of money, which belies the abundance that exists in the real economy, leads to violent conflicts and provides the power elite with the means to pursue policies of domination, even at the risk of global nuclear war.
What most people still fail to recognize is that regardless of the nominal form of their government, their political power has been neutralized and exhausted by the political money and banking system. Democratic government in today's world is more an illusion and a hope than a reality. As Prof. Carrol Quigley wrote in his book, Tragedy and Hope (1966),
" the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."[ii]
In the succeeding decades since Quigley's revelation, their control mechanisms have been refined and extended to include the intelligence services and military power, political think tanks, the media, and virtually every segment of society. The U.S. agenda of regime change over the past several years[iii] is not so much about taking mineral and petroleum resources, that is a side benefit. By examining the pattern of interventions by the U.S. and NATO powers, it is clear that the primary objective is to force every country of the world into a single global interest-based, debt-money regime. No exceptions will be tolerated. Thus, Saddam Hussein had to go, Gaddafi had to go, Assad has to go, and Putin has to go (but deposing Putin will not be so easy). The war against Islam is also related because a significant proportion of Islamists are serious about eliminating riba (usury) which is an essential feature in the creation of all political money throughout the world today. The United States military is the enforcer that is used when threats, bribes, cooptation and covert operations prove insufficient. Thus, the United States, Britain and their NATO allies have become the greatest perpetrators of state-sponsored terror in the post-World war II era.
The Dollar Crisis? Nine Mind-Blowing Facts About Money, Debt Default and Reserve CurrenciesHow can such a power be confronted?
Fortunately, we the people have in our hands the means of our own liberation. It is the power to allocate our credit directly without the use of banks or political money. How to effectively assert that power is the main theme of my most recent book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization .
Over the years there has been a long parade of "reformers" who wish to take the power to create money away from the banks. This is an admirable objective that I wholeheartedly endorse. But the alternatives that they propose have been either to revert to commodity money, like gold, which has proven to be inadequate, or to transfer the money-issuing power to the central government -- what I call the "greenback solution." The latter harks back to Abraham Lincoln's scheme for financing the Civil War. That proposal calls for the federal government to bypass the Federal Reserve and the banks by issuing a national currency directly into circulation from the Treasury. At first glance that may seem like a good idea, but there are many flies in that ointment. First of all, the greenback solution does not propose to end the money monopoly but merely to put it under new management. But it is a gross delusion to think that the Treasury is, or might become, independent of the interests that now control the Federal Reserve and the major banks. Consider the fact that most of the recent Treasury secretaries have been former executives of Goldman Sachs, the most powerful financial establishment in the country. It is naïve to expect that they will serve the common good rather than the money power that has spawned them.
Second, central planning of complex economic factors has been shown to be unworkable. That is especially true with regard to money. Neither the Fed nor the treasury is qualified to decide what kind of money and how much of it is necessary for the economy to function smoothly. The issuance and control of credit money should be decentralized in the hands of producers of needed and desired goods and services. Thus the supply of money (credit) must automatically rise and fall in accordance with the quantity of goods and services that are available to be bought and sold. If private currencies and credit clearing exchanges are allowed to develop and grow without interference from the vested interests in political money, their superiority will quickly become apparent.
Third, the greenback solution does nothing to eliminate deficit spending and inflation which are enabled by legal tender laws. As long as political currencies are legally forced to circulate at face value, the abusive issuance of money, the debasement of national currency value, and the centralization of power will continue. All government programs, including social programs and the military budget, ought to be funded by legitimate government revenues, not by the underhanded means of monetary debasement. Centralized control of credit money and the imposition of legal tender laws enable the hidden tax that is called inflation. Salmon P. Chase , who as Lincoln's Treasury Secretary presided over the issuance of greenbacks, argued later as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court that the issuance of greenback currency was unconstitutional and exceeded the powers of the federal government. He said,
"the legal tender quality is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty."
Finally, the political process has been so thoroughly corrupted and taken over by the power elite that political approaches to solving the money problem have virtually no chance of passage anyway.
... ... ...
*
Thomas H. Greco, Jr . is an educator, author, and consultant dedicated to economic equity, social justice, and community empowerment. He specializes in the design and implementation of private and community currencies and mutual credit clearing networks. His latest book is The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. His main website is https://beyondmoney.net/ . He can be reached at [email protected] .
Notes
[i] As E.C. Riegel put it in his book, A New Approach to Freedom , " as long as our governments are vast counterfeiting machines, Mars can laugh at peace projects."
[ii] This and other works of Carroll Quigley can be downloaded at the Quigley website, http://www.carrollquigley.net/ .
[iii] View General Wesley Clark's two minute revelation at https://youtu.be/9RC1Mepk_Sw .
[iv] An animated video that makes clear the credit nature of money and its sound basis is The Essence of Money , https://youtu.be/uO7uwCpcau8 .
[v] My 15 minute video, Disruptive Technologies Making Money Obsolete , https://youtu.be/ty7APADAa8g , describes how communities and businesses can escape the debt trap and become more resilient and self-reliant.
[vi] These arguments are more fully developed in my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization . My Solar Dollar white paper at https://beyondmoney.net/2016/08/26/solar-dollars-a-private-currency-with-multiple-benefits/ provides the basic framework for the design and issuance of a private currency.
[vii] Some details on how to do this are outlined in chapter 15 of my book, an excerpt of which can be found at https://beyondmoney.net/excerpts/limiting-factors-in-the-operation-of-commercial-trade-exchanges/ .
The original source of this article is Beyond Money Copyright © Thomas H. Greco, Jr. , Beyond Money , 2018
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Jul 06, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
Gary Weglarz , July 5, 2018 at 1:01 pm
It used to be that the only things one could depend on were "death & taxes." Now of course we must add to that list the very dependable presence of CIA / State Dept lies parroted by MSM all over the West. Lies which are endlessly repeated in defiance of all physical reality and often in direct opposition to actual events in the actual world we live in.
From the Ukraine coup, to Russia-gate, to the "Assad's gassing his own people" regime change propaganda, to the totally surreal Alice in Wonderland Skripnal poisoning nonsense in the U.K, the Western MSM have been as dependable as the rising sun.
They can and do provide fact-free, evidence-free reporting directly from the bowels of the deep state in support of the neocolonial West, including unending support for the never ending resort to mass violence the West relies upon to keep the rest of the planet subjugated -- just as it has for the last 500+ years.
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Jul 06, 2018 | www.unz.com
jilles dykstra , June 14, 2018 at 7:22 am GMT
To me it is all quite simple. FDR's aim was to rule the war with junior aides USSR, China and a smaller Britain. Stalin had other ideas.Even in 1946 FDR's main backer, Baruch pleaded for a world government, a USA government, in my view. Deep State still tries to impose this world government.
Despite Trump 'America first' we see a Bolton in the White House, as many see 'the neocons are back'.
Cannot see much difference between neocons and Deep State.
The big mistake of the British empire was unwillingness to realise that it could no longer maintain the empire. This already began before 1914, when the two fleet standards became too expensive, the one fleet standard expressed the inability to maintain the empire.
Obama was forcedto reduce the two war standard to one and half. What a half war accomplishes we see in Syria. Alas, seldom in history did reason rule. If it will in the present USA, I doubt it.
Parbes , June 14, 2018 at 11:20 am GMT
The neocons are a collection of sick, murderous, fanatical supremacist ideologues who have turned the U.S. into the most despicable criminal regime on earth. Because of their control and influence over the U.S. imperial military/political assets, combined with their psychopathic mentality and ideology, these scumbags pose a clear threat to the entire world, but especially to Russia and Europe (and to the U.S. itself, of course). The irony in all of this is that, although these mostly Jewish bottom-feeders like to smear any foreign leader they'd like to demonize as "the new Hitler" etc., they themselves are more nefarious and dangerous to the planet than Hitler and his German Nazis ever were.Jake , June 14, 2018 at 11:48 am GMTNothing will change until the major members of the neocon collective start getting individually singled out and receiving the harsh punishments they deserve.
@jilles dykstraDESERT FOX , June 14, 2018 at 12:42 pm GMT"Cannot see much difference between neocons and Deep State."
And that means that the US Deep State can NOT have a Jewish creation, because it existed a long time before 1948, a long time before 1939, a long time before the creation of the Federal Reserve.
There is a reason that Neocons love Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln: the former was an apologist for the nascent American Deep State, and the latter its perfect tool right down to being ready and able to slaughter huge numbers of non-Elite whites so the then virtually 100% WASP-in-blood Elite Deep State could totally control the growing nation.
The source of the American Deep State is the same as England's Deep State: Oliver Cromwell's deal with Jews, a deal granting Jews special rights and privileges and made precisely in order to have the money to wage total war to exterminate non-WASP white Christian cultures and identities.
That is exactly what the Neocons are determined to continue, and they are correct whenever they assert that they are being loyal to the history and heritage of the Puritans and of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party and of the US in the Spanish-American War, World War 1 and World War 2.
What is different about today's Neocons and, say, the growing number of Jews with major voices among the British Deep State at the height of Victorianism is that now the original junior partner has become the acting partner, the dominant partner.
But the original alliance is the same.
You cannot separate the Neocon problem from the WASP problem. You cannot solve the Neocon problem without also solving the WASP problem.
The business of the Zionist controlled U.S. gov is WAR and this has been the agenda since 1913 and the establishment of the Zionist FED and the Zionist IRS and thus began the WAR agenda and the American people were set up to pay for the Zionist created wars and the Zionist agenda of a Zionist NWO.jilles dykstra , June 14, 2018 at 2:35 pm GMTThus the Zionists need an enemy and have created enemies where none existed, the case in point being Russia and lesser created enemies the case in point being any given country in the Mideast that Israel and the Zionists wish to destroy. In the case of Russia the Zionists have the added incentive of trying to destroy a Christian country as Russia is now and historically has been Christian with the exception of the Satanist Zionist takeover of Russia in 1917 and the murder of some 60 million Russian people by the Satanist ie Zionist communists.
The U.S. gov is under satanic Zionist control and proof of this is the fact that Israel and the Zionist controlled deep state did 911 and got away with and every thinking person knows this to be the truth, may GOD help we the people of America.
@JakeCyrano , June 14, 2018 at 4:37 pm GMTFrom the other side of the Atlantic, what is the WASP problem ?
Whatever one thinks of the USA, protestants from NW Europe created the USA.
Their descendants, in my view, defend their culture.
Hardly any culture in the world goes under without a fight.
Some, maybe many, Germans, again the exception.The Neocons are mad at Russia for standing in their way of taking over the world. All in the name of "democracy" of course, nothing sinister there. Russia, and as a matter of fact, the whole world stood by and let the US have their way for almost 25 years. What did they accomplish? Diddly. So now, they want Russia to get out of the way for another (at least) 25 years, so they can spread some more "democracy". Let me tell you something, if they couldn't do it with virtually no opposition between 1991 -2014, and on a trillion dollar "defence" budgets, maybe there is something else that should be blamed other than Russia. Maybe it's their incompetence.AnonFromTN , June 14, 2018 at 6:51 pm GMTThere is a lot of truth in this piece, but I think that the overall spin is misleading. Putin's orthodox faith (likely pretended; he seems to be too intelligent for a true believer), history of Jewish persecution in Russia, etc., are secondary factors. The US elites (neocons are just one type of servants they hired) are mad that the world refuses to be unipolar. Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and many lesser countries, arouse "righteous indignation" of the robbers because they refuse to let themselves be looted and bossed by the US elites. All sorts of thieves joined the choir: Jewish and gentile, "right" and "left", military and civilian, the only common denominator being that they stole a lot and resent being thwarted from stealing even more.redmudhooch , June 14, 2018 at 7:56 pm GMTMoreover, the almighty dollar is about to be exposed as a king with no clothes by various countries switching the trade to their own currencies, undermining the Ponzi schemes of the US dollar and US government debt. The hysterical US foreign policy in the last 10-15 years, with its mindless suicidal aggressiveness, is in fact death throes of an Empire that resents going down the drain, like all dominant Empires before it, but cannot do anything about inevitable course of history.
War on the poor and defenseless, it what the Neocon and Zionist-puppet traitors do best. Terrorists in Syria (white helmets) getting 7 million in new funding from Trump, just as Russia warns of new chemical attack false flag is in the works. Must kill evil dicktater Assad for protecting those Christians inside SyriaAnonFromTN , June 14, 2018 at 9:03 pm GMTRussia Warns "Credible Information" Of Impending Staged Chemical Attack In Syria
White House Tied to Terrorists, Trump Authorizes $6.6M in Aid to White Helmets
Starvation Holocaust in Yemen.
Yemen – The Starvation Siege Has Begun
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/06/the-starvation-siege-on-yemen-has-begun.html#more
By the time the American people realize that the war on terror was designed for them to be the final victim, it will be too late.
@RurikRurik , June 14, 2018 at 10:43 pm GMTElites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair global competition.
The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world in the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and spreading lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey, and to approve of persecution of those "black sheep" who are less ignorant and don't buy the lies of the MSM. Did we see any protests against "Patriot Act" that trampled the very foundations of our Constitution? Sheep don't protest, they just follow the leader.However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India. Bush junior was genuinely dumb, but would he become US President without his family's ill-gotten riches, or without his ex-CIA chief daddy becoming the President first? Of course not, most morons in the US never fly that high. The only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson.
See comment 51:
The problem here and abroad are elites. Elites of any kind.
@AnonFromTNElites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair global competition.
some perhaps, but the middle class is dying (literally in the case of middle aged white men), and the working class is languishing.
It's true the 1% are gorging on a frenzy of corruption and graft, and a no doubt there are a few who prosper by serving that class, but the Main Streets of America are not, in any way, profiting off the exploitation of Africa or S. America or anywhere else. Indeed, it is them that are being exploited.
The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world in the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and spreading lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey
no argument there!
However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India.
India and China (and Ethiopia and Somalia and Mexico and Brazil and so many other places) are not poor due to the oppression of Americans. Sure, Goldman Sachs and a thousand other vultures and thieves have done a lot of damage, but no more that the leadership of those respective lands.
Has India ever heard of birth control, (for God's sake!) Or Indonesia or a hundred other places, like Haiti, that overbreed their finite resources and limited space until their countries are reduced to shitholes.
If a coal miner in West Virginia is doing a little better than an Untouchable in India, then trust me when I tell you I'm not going to blame the miner (or janitor or mechanic) in America for the poverty in the corrupt and stupid third world.
As far as the suffering that the ZUSA has actually caused, and is causing in places like Syria and Yemen, none of that is being done on behalf of the American people, but rather the typical American is taxed to support these wars and atrocities on behalf of Israel or Saudi Arabia, respectively.
The only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.
recently I was ranting on the terrible folly of this very thing.
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson.
Yes, they're just as selfish and greedy, but they aren't as filled with genocidal hatred.
It's because of Zionist Jews that Americans were dragged into both world wars.
It's because of Zionist Jews (and assorted corrupt Gentiles) that Israel (with help from the CIA and ((media)), did 9/11, in order to plunge this century into horrors writ large like the last Zio-century.
That there are legions of corrupt and soulless Gentiles willing and eager to jump on that gravy train, is a shame and a sin, but it doesn't excuse the people who are the motivation behind the wars.
The Kochs (and Chamber of Commerce and other Gentile scum) want massive immigration out of pure, raw, insatiable greed.
Whereas the Jewish supremacist Zionists want it out of genocidal tribal hatreds.
The typical American middle and working class are ground into the dirt between these two pillars of Satanic iniquity.
I agree with much of what you're saying, and it's true about the elites in general. But the ZUSA is completely controlled by Zionist Jews, and I think that's pretty obvious.
This man knew that 9/11 was going to happen, if he wasn't part of the planning. And yet look at how they abase themselves
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Jun 26, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Re Reading Recommendations
Thanks, everyone, for all the book recommendations – several I had not read. I would add "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn, "The Shame of the Cities" by Lincoln Steffens, and "Who Will Tell the People" by William Greider, and in that order.
Posted by: AntiSpin | Jun 25, 2018 5:01:26 PM | 78
dh-mtl , Jun 25, 2018 5:01:46 PM | 79
Noirette@62,karlof1 , Jun 25, 2018 5:54:42 PM | 83I agree with your points, but would like to build on them a bit.
The 'Banking and Finance' cartel behind the U.S. deep state is said to consist of eight families, half American and half European. (The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families, Dean Henderson, Global Research, May 19, 2016)
This banking and finance cartel (which, as you say, is interlocked with big oil, the military/industrial, big tech, etc.) forms the core of what are called the 'Globalists', an international financial elite that use their wealth to exert political control over as much of the world as possible. In addition to the banking families, the 'Globalists' include any number of extremely wealthy people, (Industrialists, Tech Entrepreneurs, Middle-East Sheiks, Saudi Royals, and Nouveaux Riches such as Soros, Ukranian and Russian Oligarchs, etc.). The 'Globalists' directly control virtually all Western NGOs (Soros), think tanks and major media.
The 'Globalists' control not only the U.S. Deep State, but also the European Union structures. They also have purchased a large number of politicians throughout the Western World. Through this control they have stripped sovereignty from both the U.S. and Europe, and converted them into effective 'Oligarchic Dictatorships'. These dictatorships are set-up for the benefit of the 'Globalists' themselves, and have little interest in the well-being of their citizens. This is seen in the impoverishment and societal collapse rapidly progressing in both the U.S. and Europe.
Globalization is the 'Globalists' project of Global Governance, which effectively strips nation-states of their sovereignty (and democracy) and transfers it to 'Global Institutions' (IMF, World Bank, International Trade Agreements, U.N., Climate Agreements, etc.), enforced by U.S. military might.
The 'Project for a New American Century' was the 'Globalists' blueprint to 'Globalize' over the parts of the world that they did not already control. Almost all current and recent international conflicts, from the Middle-Eastern Wars, to Ukraine, the Korean crisis, the cornering of Russian and Obama's 'Pivot to Asia' are all related to this project.
Unfortunately for the 'Globalists', Global Governance is extremely harmful to citizens that are subject to it. That is why we see 'populism/nationalism' rising throughout the U.S. and Europe, in an attempt to block the stripping of these citizens' democracy, their nations' sovereignty and their personal security and well-being.
I believe that President Trump is part of this populism/nationalism movement, and almost all of his actions can be interpreted as an attempt to counter Globalization, to restore U.S. sovereignty and to redevelop the U.S. economy, which has been devastated over the past four decades by the 'Globalist' elites.
AntiSpin @78, et al--frances , Jun 25, 2018 7:08:16 PM | 90I second those 3!! Greider's Secrets of the Temple is a good primer on The Fed. The Age of Federalism by Elkins and McKitrick documents the first undeclared war of too many, this one with France during its revolutionary period prior to Napoleon. The Seminoles and other Floridian tribes were used as proxies to force the Spanish out of the Floridas; and too many forget that Louisiana was Spanish before its very short ownership by France. Jefferson's purchase and dispatch of Lewis and Clarke educated him as to the wide-open, unregulated nature of the Executive under the 1787 Constitution, which represents the current plague on our planet today.
But the initial germ beyond Tordesillas of a continent spanning empire was the brain child of one Richard Hakluyt whose ideas for planting North America infected many other English elites. His idea was incorporated into the Charter for the Virginia Company--it went all the way to the as yet undiscovered boundary of the Pacific Ocean. This slide shows the continental extent of the charters grated Virginia and New England.
One last book endorsement for two of Bernard Bailyn's many works: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson . If you have a good university library close by, it ought to have the entire work, Pamphlets of the American Revolution , from which Ideological Origins was just the introduction.
One of my research methods was to find an author whose authority I trust, like Bailyn, then read everything he wrote since I can't have him tutor me--and follow his footnotes to where he got his information. Sure, that leads to a very extensive reading list; but if you're going to become a historian, reading lots of books and journals is what you do. Same thing with Chomsky; all his works are rife with footnotes. And don't just read the radical or leftist historians; you must read the Court Historians too and thus discover their many omissions--we all know history's manipulated, but that's not sufficient: just how and why are necessary.
reply to:Posted by: dh-mtl | Jun 25, 2018 5:01:46 PM | 79
"The 'Project for a New American Century' was the 'Globalists' blueprint to 'Globalize' over the parts of the world that they did not already control."
I agree, their plan is to open up the Schengen region to ALL of Africa destroying/diluting all allegiance to nations in Europe under the 2018 Marrakesh Declaration (ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/20180503_declaration-and-action-plan-marrakesh_en.pdf) signed by the EU and 40 African nations thereby ushering in the return of feudalism under UN 2050 plan.
Well worth a read if you are not familiar with it, it will chill your blood, chilled mine anyway.
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Jun 17, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
HARPER: HAPPY ANNIVERSARY GLASS STEAGALL--WE MISS YOU, COME BACK
Today, June 16, is the 85th anniversary of the signing of the Banking Act of 1933, otherwise known as the Glass Steagall Act. When President Franklin Roosevelt signed Glass Steagall into law, he set off a 66 year epoch of relatively sound banking, during which time there was no big financial crash, as occurred in 1929 and again, after Glass Steagall's repeal, in 2008. Under Glass Steagall, commercial depository banks were totally separated from investment banks. Later, insurance companies were also cut off from any ties to commercial banks. During the same wave of early New Deal legislation, the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was established, insuring commercial bank deposits and successfully deterring bank panics.
The repeal of Glass Steagall was a long-standing priority for Wall Street. In 1984, JP Morgan Bank launched an internal study on how to repeal Glass Steagall. That study, "Rethinking Glass Steagall," proposed a war of attrition against the principle of complete bank separation. The war was launched in 1987, with the appointment of Alan Greenspan as the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan had been a partner at JP Morgan and had chaired the study group which devised the war plan against Glass Steagall. As Fed Chairman, Greenspan used his discretionary powers to increase the amount that commercial banks to lend to investment institutions. By the mid-1990s, enforcement of Glass Steagall had eroded. Citibank at that point moved to purchase both an investment bank and an insurance company, in violation of Glass Steagall restrictions. That set the clock going to a two-year deadline. Citi had to either divest of the purchases or Glass Steagall had to be repealed.
Wall Street poured $300 million into a lobbying campaign to kill Glass Steagall. In 1999, both Houses of Congress passed the Gramm Leach Bliley bill, killing Glass Steagall. For the first time in 66 years, commercial banks could merge with investment banks and insurance companies. It was only a matter of time before the investment banking divisions devoured the commercial bank deposits and directed them into a speculative binge beyond all previous financial bubbles. When Lehman Brothers went under in 2008, the system crashedEnemies of Glass Steagall argued that Lehman Brothers was not a commercial bank and so the repeal of Glass Steagall had no causal relationship with the financial crisis. Not so. It was the repeal of Glass Steagall that allowed commercial banks to pour money into the gambling casino--including into Lehman BrothersAn article today in The Guardian by US correspondent Ganesh Sitaraman noted that there is renewed interest in Glass Steagall today--across the political spectrum. He noted that progressive Democrats have been pushing reinstating of Glass Steagall for years. It was included in the Republican Party platform in 2016. That is just the tip of the iceberg. There are bills to reinstate Glass Steagall in both Houses of Congress and they are bipartisan bills. Even candidate Donald Trump called for the reinstatement of Glass Steagall, before he was gagged by Wall Street cabinet officials like Steven Mnuchin and Gary CohenThe IMF, the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve and Bloomberg News are all warning that we are headed for another major financial "correction" sometime soon. They point to the consequences of a decade of post-2008 quantitative easing and zero interest rates, which led to a 63 percent jump in corporate bonds. The median bond rating today is BBB- just one rung above junk bond status, and S&P Global estimates that more than 25 percent of all corporations can be categorized as "zombies" because the amount they must spend servicing their corporate debt is greater than their cash flow.
There is a growing consensus that we are again headed for a big financial shock. Wouldn't it be wise to move to insulate the commercial banking sector from another fiasco before the next crisis? Are the White House and Congress ready to act or are we heading blindly to a replay of 2008?
Sirs;Donald Bohn , 3 hours ago
The 'conventional' wisdom is that Franklin Roosevelt saved Capitalism from itself in the 1930s'. Glass Steagall was a big part of that 'intervention' to save the self destructive system. When the financial sector managed to have the Glass Steagall law removed, it might as well have said, like any addict; "I can control myself. I can stop any time I want." Any of us who have had dealings with addictive personalities knows the folly of this claim. Well, absent Glass Steagall, the financial sector tried to commit suicide in 2007-2008. The Fed and others managed to revive the moribund sector through QE to infinity. Now it's going to happen again. This time, let the banks die. If you want, apply true capitalism and replace the errant institutions with new ones. Then regulate the new actors. Keep the bottle out of the addicts reach.I find Harper's account very clear and accurate as someone who paid close attention (watched in horror) from the time Clinton signed the damned thing (Gramm Leach Bliley) till the inevitable taxpayer bailout of our worldwide commercial economy by indemnifying the investment banks against their unlimited greedy speculative depredations.Jose , 5 hours agoThe key point is that without commercial banking, business activity is not possible and would essentially cease. If, on the other hand, all investment banking, no matter how big, were to blow up, collapse, and its minions be hunted down by wolves, the world would feel the shock but soon turn to other forms of capital formation.
However, without Glass Steagall, commercial banks and investment banks become inextricably intertwined, and then "let the banks fail" kills both the cancer and the patient. "Too big to fail" is a misnomer; it's not the size but the function that matters, and until commercial banks (and insurers) are again separated from investment banking, the investment banksters have us by the short ones, with a knife to our throat and a suicide vest around our families.
ps:
BOHICA.I got this from Wikipedia, does anybody know if it is correct?ex-PFC Chuck , 5 hours agon 1977, Greenspan obtained a Ph.D. in economics from New York University. His dissertation is not available from the university[17] since it was removed at Greenspan's request in 1987, when he became Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In April 2008, however, Barron's obtained a copy and notes that it includes "a discussion of soaring housing prices and their effect on consumer spending; it even anticipates a bursting housing bubble".[18
Harper, do you have any references for assertions such as the JPM internal study, the amount spent on lobbying and Greenspan's role? It's not that I find them implausible. Just the opposite, in fact. But solid references help in convincing others.
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Jun 16, 2018 | www.unz.com
AnonFromTN , June 14, 2018 at 9:03 pm GMT
@RurikRurik , June 14, 2018 at 10:43 pm GMTElites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair global competition.
The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world in the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and spreading lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey, and to approve of persecution of those "black sheep" who are less ignorant and don't buy the lies of the MSM. Did we see any protests against "Patriot Act" that trampled the very foundations of our Constitution? Sheep don't protest, they just follow the leader.
However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India. Bush junior was genuinely dumb, but would he become US President without his family's ill-gotten riches, or without his ex-CIA chief daddy becoming the President first? Of course not, most morons in the US never fly that high. The only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson.
See comment 51:
The problem here and abroad are elites. Elites of any kind.
@AnonFromTNElites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair global competition.
some perhaps, but the middle class is dying (literally in the case of middle aged white men), and the working class is languishing. It's true the 1% are gorging on a frenzy of corruption and graft, and a no doubt there are a few who prosper by serving that class, but the Main Streets of America are not, in any way, profiting off the exploitation of Africa or S. America or anywhere else. Indeed, it is them that are being exploited.
The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world in the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and spreading lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey
no argument there!
However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India.
India and China (and Ethiopia and Somalia and Mexico and Brazil and so many other places) are not poor due to the oppression of Americans. Sure, Goldman Sachs and a thousand other vultures and thieves have done a lot of damage, but no more that the leadership of those respective lands. Has India ever heard of birth control, (for God's sake!) Or Indonesia or a hundred other places, like Haiti, that overbreed their finite resources and limited space until their countries are reduced to shitholes.
If a coal miner in West Virginia is doing a little better than an Untouchable in India, then trust me when I tell you I'm not going to blame the miner (or janitor or mechanic) in America for the poverty in the corrupt and stupid third world.
As far as the suffering that the ZUSA has actually caused, and is causing in places like Syria and Yemen, none of that is being done on behalf of the American people, but rather the typical American is taxed to support these wars and atrocities on behalf of Israel or Saudi Arabia, respectively.
The only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.
recently I was ranting on the terrible folly of this very thing.
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson.
Yes, they're just as selfish and greedy, but they aren't as filled with genocidal hatred.
It's because of Zionist Jews that Americans were dragged into both world wars.
It's because of Zionist Jews (and assorted corrupt Gentiles) that Israel (with help from the CIA and ((media)), did 9/11, in order to plunge this century into horrors writ large like the last Zio-century.
That there are legions of corrupt and soulless Gentiles willing and eager to jump on that gravy train, is a shame and a sin, but it doesn't excuse the people who are the motivation behind the wars.
The Kochs (and Chamber of Commerce and other Gentile scum) want massive immigration out of pure, raw, insatiable greed.
Whereas the Jewish supremacist Zionists want it out of genocidal tribal hatreds.
The typical American middle and working class are ground into the dirt between these two pillars of Satanic iniquity.
I agree with much of what you're saying, and it's true about the elites in general. But the ZUSA is completely controlled by Zionist Jews, and I think that's pretty obvious.
This man knew that 9/11 was going to happen, if he wasn't part of the planning. And yet look at how they abase themselves
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Jun 15, 2018 | www.g2mil.com
AnonFromTN , June 14, 2018 at 9:03 pm GMT@Rurikah, so it was Dubya all along! What a clever little schemer he was! Pretending all that time to be dumb as a rock, and a tool of organized Zionism, while he was using the neocons to his own advantage! So while ((Wolfowitz and Feith and Pearl and Kristol)) were being schooled at the feet of ((Leo Strauss)), it was Dubya the college cheerleader all along who was the mastermind behind the Project for a New American Century and 9/11 !The US elites (neocons are just one type of servants they hired)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KhlRzZj7HG8/SylVO1ygOeI/AAAAAAAAQ1s/2ms5qnctt4Y/s320/Dubya+phone.jpg
sure, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood get federal subsidies, but it's the (dying) American middle class that has been exploiting the world's poor!
The hysterical US foreign policy in the last 10-15 years, with its mindless suicidal aggressiveness, is in fact death throes of an Empire that resents going down the drain,what's been going down the drain has been the blood and tears and future of working class Americans, forced to suit up their children to go slaughter innocent Arabs and others in a transparent and treasonous policy intended to bolster Israel - at the direct and catastrophic expense of America and the American people.I wonder, as the American people are taxed to the tune of billions every year, to send to Israel as tribute, is that also a case of US elites using Israel to their own devices? As Americas roads and bridges crumble, and veterans are denied care?
Or, is it just possible, that the ((owners)) of the Federal Reserve Bank, have used that printing press as a weapon to consolidate absolute power over the institutions of the ZUSA?
Do you suppose that when France bombs Libya or menaces Syria, that they're doing it to benefit the French elite? And that Israel is their dupe, who give them a pretext for doing so? Or that the French (and British and Polish and Ukrainian, etc..) elite are getting their marching orders from Jewish supremacist Zionists who're hell bent on using Gentile Christians to slaughter Gentile Muslims while they laugh and count the shekels? Eh?
Elites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair global competition. The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world in the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and spreading lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey, and to approve of persecution of those "black sheep" who are less ignorant and don't buy the lies of the MSM. Did we see any protests against "Patriot Act" that trampled the very foundations of our Constitution? Sheep don't protest, they just follow the leader.
However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India. Bush junior was genuinely dumb, but would he become US President without his family's ill-gotten riches, or without his ex-CIA chief daddy becoming the President first? Of course not, most morons in the US never fly that high. The only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson.
See comment 51:
The problem here and abroad are elites. Elites of any kind.
Carlton Meyer says: • Website June 14, 2018 at 4:50 am GMT
Mikhail says: • Website June 14, 2018 at 6:18 am GMTRalph Peters is one of the nuttiest neocons around, and Fox was smart to dump him. I recall an article long ago where he suggested that the US Govt. should address the drug addition problem in the USA by assassinating drug dealers on the streets in the USA.
He lives off scraps from neocons by selling his soul for BS talking points and collects a monthly check from Uncle Sam after 20 years of sitting at a desk doing BS intel work, as I once did for a year. It seems he missed his chance at killing commies in Nam by touring Europe, as Fred Reed explained:
https://fredoneverything.org/dulce-et-decorum-est-if-someone-else-has-to-do-it/
Nothing new in the above article. That such people are elevated to the stature of cushy mainstream propping and ridicule by some non-mainstream others is a tell all sign on what's wrong with the coverage.AnonFromTN , June 15, 2018 at 5:10 pm GMT • 100 WordsRegarding this excerpt:
A prime example of this comes in a recent volume authored by prominent Neocon journalist and homosexual activist (yes, the two traits often seem to go together), James Kirchick: The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, 2017). In his jumble of Neocon ideology and prejudice, Kirchick evaluates what for him seems to be happening ominously in Europe. He is deeply fearful of the efforts to "close borders" against Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. He blasts Marine Le Pen as a racist -- and most likely a subtle "holocaust denier!" -- and attacks the attempts in places like Hungary and Poland to reassert national traditions and Christian identity; for him these are nothing less than attempts to bring back "fascism."
Russia comes in for perhaps his harshest criticism, and the reason is unmistakable: Russia seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its age-old Orthodox Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and the "old-time" religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry, anti-semitism, and "extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal democracy and equality" (including, he would no doubt include, feminism, same sex marriage, across-the-board equality, and all those other "conservative values"!).
Kirchick's critique, shared by many of the leaders of the national Republican Party and dominating the pages of most establishment "conservative" publications and talk radio these days, joins him arm-in-arm with globalist George Soros in efforts to undermine the Russian state and its president all in the name of "democracy" and "equality." [See, "George Soros Aghast as Collapsing EU, while Russia Resurgent," January 19, 2018]
But, just what kind of "democracy" and what kind of "equality" do Kirchick and Soros defend?
JRL promoted a recent Kirchick piece: http://russialist.org/newswatch-the-soviet-roots-of-invoking-fears-about-world-war-iii-brookings-james-kirchick/ The rant of a coddled establishment chickenhawk, who is quite overrated, relative to the positions accorded to him (Nasty people don't deserve kindness.)
A suggestive dose of McCarthyism that simplistic references the Cold War period with present day realities, which include a subjectively inaccurate overview of what has transpired in Syria and Crimea. Put mildly, James Kirchick is quite ironic in his use of "lazy".
@Andrei MartyanovAs far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson.As I always say -- as repulsive and debilitating Jewish influence on US body politic is, this influence, now transformed in almost complete "intellectual" dominance, it wouldn't have been possible without willing accomplices from radical Christian Zionists and a massive corruption in the highest echelons of power.Agree entirely--a wholesale dumbing down of masses and even "elites" (both intentional and not) is a direct result of neoliberalism as a whole. The crisis is systemic and Jews are only one, however important, part of that. In the end, Bolton is a practicing Lutheran but look at him -- the guy is completely mad. And I mean this in purely psychiatric terms -- he has some real serious demons haunting him and I even have suspicion about what some of those are. Just an example.
Yes, sick ideology often attracts nutcases. I know a guy in Ukraine with a history of mental illness who is a staunch supporter of current "president" Poroshenko.
However mad Bolton might be, most card-carrying Russophobs and neocons are not crazy: they are cynical people without scruples working for money.
Say, Hillary Clinton or Mike Pompeo are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, but they are not too mad or too stupid to understand the reality. They are simply greedy scum paid to do the hatched job.
The same applies to most current politicians involved in the smear campaign against Russia. The greatest sin of Russia and Putin is that they got in the way of thieves who wanted to loot the whole world but encountered resistance. Assad in Syria, Iran, North Korea, China, and Venezuela committed the same sin: got between the thieves and their intended loot.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
meticulousdoc , 3 Jun 2018 16:16Just as conservative Christian theology provides an excuse for sexism and homophobia, neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests – systematically cutting spending on their enemies and giving money to their friends.
And when the conservative "Christians" form a neoliberal government, the results are toxic for all, except themselves and their coterie.
Nothing short of a grass roots campaign (such as that waged by GetUp!) will get rid for us of these modern let-them-eat-cake parasites who consider their divine duty to lord over us.
An excellent article, we need more of them.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Beekeeper49 , 3 Jun 2018 19:32
Wow! Richard Denniss says it like it is, neatly summing up "the big con".I believe Australia is being sold from under our feet. The big asset-strip is on. Why are we not benefiting from the mining boom? The answer lies in the way Rinehart companies and others like hers have been permitted to use Singapore or other low-taxing countries to minimise taxes. That these large companies should have the gall to demand large tax cuts as well is preposterous.
When headlines indulge in fear-mongering about China, why is angst directed at Dastyari for taking a relatively small donation, whilst at the same time the Australian government has approved a joint purchase of large swathes of the Australian outback by Rinehart and Chinese interests? Have we already forgotten the Darwin port deal? Why were Robb, Bishop and the Liberal Party allowed to benefit from deals or large donations from "Chinese interests"? Yet Bob Carr is being slammed for trying over many years to develop a more harmonious relationship with China?
Australians have told federal and state governments that they hate privatisation. Not content with selling off profitable businesses such as Medibank Private, the Liberal/National Party federal government is privatising its services. Detention centres and prisons acted as a stalking-horse for the creeping privatisation of jobs. Politicians assume most voters don't notice or care when government jobs in those sectors are privatised, but other government departments are following suit.
By permitting the Future Fund and superannuation funds to invest in tax havens, the federal government has opened the door to a growing trend. If my super fund uses the Cayman Island tax haven, it is easier to justify everyone else from the PM down to evade Australian taxes as well. More insidiously, tax havens make it easier to cheat creditors in bankruptcy cases, launder dirty money, break trade sanctions and much more. We aren't even aware of how these may be playing out behind closed doors in our name. The problem with allowing Rinehart to use Singapore or Turnbull to use the Cayman Island is that other companies and individuals will increasingly Do so, and in the end, everyone is doing it. And when will we take note of cryptocurrencies and how they can act like tax havens?
Our participation in wars not of our own making is also having dire results. Think of all the money spent and lives of servicemen destroyed by serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine if that money had instead been invested wisely in defence capabilities. And yet there we are, interfering in the South China Sea, trying to provoke China at Trump's behest, and it is not clear whether the Phillipines wants us there now anyway. And all the while, the cost of our participation in war games is crippling our ability to acquire defence assets, making us more reliant on the US.
The banking enquiry has only scratched the surface of how voters are being ripped off with impunity. There are growing demands that the superannuation industry, in particular retail funds, be subject to greater transparency and regulation. Yet Turnbull, Cash and colleagues prefer to direct their scorn at industry funds, simply because they are controlled by workers, via their unions.
We can sense "the big con" is all around us. We can almost smell it, so pungent is the air of exploitation, corruption and fraud. Hopefully Denniss will join others in focussing us more clearly on how we are being cheated of our birthright.
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Jun 05, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
he first page of Tim Winton's new essay collection, The Boy Behind the Curtain , sets a disturbing scene. A 13-year-old boy stands at the window of a suburban street, behind a terylene curtain, training a rifle on passersby.
"He was a fraught little thing," says Winton of that boy – the boy he used to be. "I feel related to him but I'm no longer completely him, thank god."
The passage opens a surprisingly intimate essay about the role of guns in Australian life, setting the tone for a collection being billed as Winton's most personal yet.
In spite of his inclination for solitude, Winton has spent much of his life in the spotlight. His first novel, An Open Swimmer, catapulted him into the public eye when it won the Vogel literary award in 1981, but it was his 1991 novel, Cloudstreet, that cemented his place in Australian letters. Winton has won the Miles Franklin award four times and been shortlisted twice for the Booker. His books have been adapted for film, TV and even opera .
ss="rich-link"> Island Home by Tim Winton review – a love song to Australia and a cry to save it Read more
The contradictions of having such a high-profile career while working in a quintessentially solitary artform are not lost on him. "I spend all day in a room with people who don't exist, and I'm not thinking about any public – but once the thing's done it goes out there and it has a public life over which I have no, or very little, control," he says.
On one reading, the boy with the rifle lurking out of sight, watching the world go by, could be a metaphor for the life of a reclusive writer. But Winton is quick to distinguish himself from such a reading. "I wouldn't like to see myself as somebody who was just cruelly observing the world behind the terylene curtain of art."
For Winton, the perceived lives of other writers always seemed completely unrelated to his own experience. "I grew up with a kind of modernist romantic idea of the writer as some kind of high priest, someone who saw themselves as separate and better, which I now find a bit repellent," he says. "I think that was something that was sold to us at school and certainly at university that writers were somehow aloof from the ordinary business of life; they didn't have to abide by the same rules as other people. The worse their behaviour off the page, the more we were supposed to cheer them on. Once I woke up to that idea as a teenager, I think I consciously resisted it."
Winton's own background was characterised by a working class sensibility and evangelical religion. His parents converted to the Church of Christ when he was a small boy, the circumstances and his experiences of which form the basis of a number of the previously unpublished essays in The Boy Behind the Curtain. As a result, when he finally did start writing, it was with a particularly industrious work ethic.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tim Winton: 'There wasn't a lot of romance in my view of what writing was about.' Photograph: Hank Kordas"I approached it like I was a tradesperson," he says. "It didn't necessarily involve FM radio played very loudly on a worksite; it didn't always require plumbers' crack or a hard hat and there was certainly no catcalling, but for the rest of it I went a different route. There wasn't a lot of romance in my view of what writing was about."
ss="rich-link"> A fish called Tim Winton: scientists name new species after novelist Read more
Yet it was finding words, what Winton calls "the enormous luxury of language", that took him from being a 13-year-old boy who watched strangers through the eye of a rifle – a boy who was "obviously insecure and feeling threatened and probably not quite one with the world" – to a well-adjusted adult.
The "emotional infancy of men" has a lot to answer for, he says, suggesting that it's something society would do well to pay more attention to in its early stages. "The lumpiness and surly silence of boys is not something we're sufficiently interested in. They're not sufficiently attractive to us until they become victims or dangerous brutes and bullies."
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I think it's a mistake to think someone who doesn't say much doesn't have strong feelings
Tim WintonConflicted masculinity is recurring theme throughout Winton's fiction, and his characters often suffer as a result of their inability to articulate their feelings. "I think it's a mistake to think someone who doesn't say much doesn't have strong feelings," he says. "I think we stifle people's expression or we ignore people's signals of wanting to express things at our peril."
The distinct tenor of Winton's prose, a lyricism which manages to turn even the Australian vernacular into a kind of rough poetry, lends itself to the intimacy of the personal essay. The Boy Behind the Curtain contains a number of vignettes that reflect the imagery and landscape that characterises his fiction: hot bitumen roads through the desert; the churning ocean.
But there is also a clear political streak to Winton's nonfiction, and the inclusion of a number of more direct essays in this collection mean it's difficult to collapse the work under the category of memoir. Stones for Bread, for example, calls for a return to empathy and humanity in Australia's approach to asylum seekers. The Battle for Ningaloo Reef is a clear-eyed account of the activism that prevented a major commercial development from destroying a stretch of the Western Australian coastline. And Using the C-Word concerns that other dirty word that Winton believes we are avoiding: class.
"I think there are people talking about class but they're having to do that against the flow," Winton says. "We're living in a dispensation that is endlessly reinforcing the idea that we are not citizens but economic players. And under that dispensation it's in nobody's interest, especially those in power, to encourage or foster the idea that there's any class difference."
The market doesn't care about people, Winton argues, and neither is there any genius in it. "There's no invisible hand," he says. "And if there is one, it's scratching its arse."
It's clear to Winton that neoliberalism is failing, but not without casualties, two of which are very close to his heart: the arts and the environment.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cover image for The Boy Behind The Curtain by Tim Winton. Photograph: Penguin
"People in the arts are basically paying the price for this new regime where we pay no tax and where we get less public service and more privatised service," he says. "The arts are last on, first off in people's minds and I think that's not just sad, it's corrosive. They're just seen as fluff, as fripperies, as indulgence, as add-ons and luxury. And I don't think the arts are luxury; I think they're fundamental to civilisation. It's just that under our current dispensation, civilisation is not the point; civilisation is something that commerce has to negotiate and traduce if necessary."
Winton is one of a number of high-profile critics of the Productivity Commission's proposals to allow the parallel importation of books , and a signatory to petitions opposing funding cuts to the Australia Council . But he has also been a grassroots activist in the area of marine conservation for over 15 years.
"I don't know if I'm an activist writer or just a writer who has an activist life on the side," he says.
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I don't know if I'm an activist writer or just a writer who has an activist life on the side
Tim WintonYears of lobbying by conservation groups and the general public contributed to the Labor government announcement in 2012 of 42 marine reserves in Australian waters , including over the entire Coral Sea. The Abbott government, however, implemented a review which, in September this year, recommended significantly scaling back those reservations . It was, says Winton, an act of cowardice.
"The Abbott review was basically all about applying inertia to imminent progress," Winton says. "We've gone from world leaders [in conservation] to being too frightened to lead."
When asked what role writing fiction plays in his activist work, Winton says it comes back to the idea of "keeping people's imaginations awake".
"Imagination is the fundamental virtue of civilisation. If people can't imagine then they can't live an ethical life."
• The Boy Behind the Curtain is published by Penguin Books and is available now
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Jun 05, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Stephen J. June 5, 2018 at 2:40 pm
I believe we are prisoners of so-called "democracy"
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July 13, 2017
The Prisoners of "Democracy"Screwing the masses was the forte of the political establishment. It did not really matter which political party was in power, or what name it went under, they all had one ruling instinct, tax, tax, and more taxes. These rapacious politicians had an endless appetite for taxes, and also an appetite for giving themselves huge raises, pension plans, expenses, and all kinds of entitlements. In fact one of them famously said, "He was entitled to his entitlements." Public office was a path to more, and more largesse all paid for by the compulsory taxes of the masses that were the prisoners of "democracy."
[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-prisoners-of-democracy.html
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tz , , June 5, 2018 at 12:37 amJun 05, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Just because a country is democratic doesn't mean it is self-governing, as America is quickly discovering.
Something has gone wrong with America's political institutions. While the United States is, on the whole, competently governed, there are massive problems lurking just beneath the surface. This became obvious during the 2016 presidential election. Each party's nominee was odious to a large segment of the public; the only difference seemed to be whether it was an odious insurgent or an odious careerist. Almost two years on, things show little signs of improving.
What's to blame? One promising, though unpopular, answer is: democracy itself. When individuals act collectively in large groups and are not held responsible for the consequences of their behavior, decisions are unlikely to be reasonable or prudent. This design flaw in popular government was recognized by several Founding Fathers. John Adams warned that democracy "soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide."
James Madison was equally concerned with the pernicious consequences of large-scale democracy, arguing that democracies "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
Even George Washington had his doubts about whether democracy was consistent with wise government. Democracies are slow to correct their errors, and those who try to guide the public down a wise course frequently become the object of popular hatred : "It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act right; but then evil of this nature seldom fail to work their own cure," Washington wrote. "It is to be lamented, nevertheless, that the remedies are so slow, and that those, who may wish to apply them seasonably are not attended to before they suffer in person, in interest and in reputation."
Is Democracy in a Death Spiral? Is Democracy to Blame for the Loneliness Epidemic?Given these opinions, it is unsurprising that the U.S. Constitution contains so many other mechanisms for ensuring responsible government. Separation of powers and checks and balances are necessary to protect the people from themselves. To the extent our political institutions are deteriorating, the Founders' first instinct would be to look for constitutional changes, whether formal or informal, that have expanded the scope of democracy and entrusted to the electorate greater power than they can safely wield, and reverse them.
This theory is simple, elegant, and appealing. But it's missing a crucial detail.
American government is largely insulated from the tyranny of the majority. But at least since the New Deal, we've gone too far in the opposite direction. What we've got now is the tyranny of the minority . It is not "the people" who govern the nation. Instead, the state is run by permanent civil servants, largely unaccountable to any popular control, and professional politicians who are usually hand-picked by party insiders (Hillary over Bernie, anyone?). This has made it such that the actual 2016 election was more akin to ratifying a foregone conclusion than a substantive choice over the direction of future policy.
But now we confront a puzzle: the rise of the permanent government did coincide with increased democratization. The administrative-managerial state, and its enablers in Congress, followed from creative reinterpretations of the Constitution that allowed voters to make decisions that the Ninth and Tenth amendments -- far and away the most ignored portion of the Bill of Rights -- should have forestalled. As it turns out, not only are both of these observations correct, they are causally related . Increasing the scope of popular government results in the loss of popular control.
If you're a student of politics, you've probably heard of the iron law of oligarchy . The phrase was coined by Robert Michels, an early 20th-century social scientist, in his landmark study of political parties. The iron law of oligarchy is simple: minorities rule majorities, because the former are organized and the latter are not. This is true even within democratic institutions. As power was concentrated in the federal government, the complexity of the tasks confronting civil servants and legislators greatly increased. This required a durable, hierarchical set of institutions for coordinating the behavior of political insiders. Durability enabled political insiders to coordinate their plans across time, which was particularly useful in avoiding the pesky constraints posed by regular elections. Hierarchy enabled political insiders to coordinate plans across space, making a permanently larger government both more feasible and more attractive for elites. The result, in retrospect, was predictable: a massive executive branch bureaucracy that's now largely autonomous, and a permissive Congress that's more than happy to serve as an institutionalized rubber stamp.
The larger the electorate, and the more questions the electorate is asked to decide, the more important it is for the people who actually govern to take advantage of economies of scale in government. If the federal government were kept small and simple, there would be little need for a behemoth public sector. Developing durable and hierarchical procedures for organizing political projects would be unfeasible for citizen-statesmen. But those same procedures become essential for technocratic experts and career politicians.
One of the cruel ironies of the political status quo is that democracy is unquestioningly associated with self-governance, yet in practice, the more democratic a polity grows, the less self-governing it remains. This is why an upsurge of populism won't cure what ails the body politic. It will either provoke the permanent and unaccountable government into tightening its grip, or those who actually hold the power will fan the flames of popular discontent, channeling that energy towards their continued growth and entrenchment. We have enough knowledge to make the diagnosis, but not to prescribe the treatment. Perhaps there is some comfort in knowing what political health looks like. G.K. Chesterton said it best in his insight about the relationship between democracy and self-governance:
The democratic contention is that government is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly . In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves
The first step towards renewed self-governance must be to reject the false dichotomy between populism and oligarchy. A sober assessment shows that they are one in the same.
Alexander William Salter is an assistant professor in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. He is also the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU's Free Market Institute. See more at his website: www.awsalter.com .
Steve Miller June 4, 2018 at 11:49 pm
This was going fine until the author decided to blame civil servants for our nation's problems. How about an electoral system that denies majority rule? A Congress that routinely votes against things the vast majority want? A system that vastly overpriveleges corporations and hands them billions while inequality grows to the point where the UN warns that our country resembles a third world kleptocracy? Nope, sez this guy. It's just because there are too many bureaucrats.
He avoids the 17th amendment which was one of the barriers to the mob, and the 19th that removed the power of individual states to set the terms of suffrage.S , , June 5, 2018 at 3:38 am
Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Katy Stanton could simply have moved to Wyoming.
It might be useful to only have property taxpayers vote.
And the problem is the left. When voters rejected Gay Marriage (57% in California!) or benefits for illegals, unelected and unaccountable judges reversed the popular will.
I find your use of the word populism interesting. Inasmuch the word is generally used when the decisions of the populace is different from that which the technocrats or oligarchs would have made for them. The author being part of the technocratic elite thinks that he and his ilk know best. This entire article is just a lot of arguments in support of this false and self serving idea.Realist , , June 5, 2018 at 5:11 am
When a populous isn't controlled by the electorate democracy is dead.Rotunda , , June 5, 2018 at 5:47 am
The libertarian political philosopher Jason Brennan made small waves with his book "Against Democracy", published last year.Voltaire's Ghost , , June 5, 2018 at 6:03 am
Making the federal government "small" will not solve the problems the author describes or really alludes to. The power vacum left by a receding federal government will just be occupied by an unaccountable corporate sector. The recent dismantling of Toys R Us by a spawn of Bain Capital is the most recent manifestation of the twisted and pathological thought process that calls itself "free market capitalism." A small federal government did not end child labor, fight the Depression, win WW II or pioneer space exploration. Conservatives love the mythology of a government "beast" that must be decapitated so that "Liberty" may reign. There are far more dangerous forces at work in American society that inhibit liberty and tax our personal treasuries than the federal government.TJ Martin , , June 5, 2018 at 9:23 am
1) The US is not and never has been a ' democracy ' It is a Democratic Republic ' which is not the same as a ' democracy ' ( one person -- one vote period ) of which there is only one in the entire world . Switzerlandcj , , June 5, 2018 at 9:41 am2) A large part of what has brought us to this point is the worn out well past its sell by Electoral College which not only no longer serves its intended purpose .
3) But the major reason why we're here to put it bluntly is the ' Collective Stupidity of America ' we've volitionally become : addled by celebrity , addicted to entertainment and consumed by conspiracy theory rather than researching the facts
The US has a democracy? Were'nt two of the last 3 presidents placed into office via a minority of the vote?Jon , , June 5, 2018 at 9:43 amWe have instead what Sheldon Wolin called a 'managed democracy'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy
It's time to end the pretension that we live in a democracy. It maybe useful to claim so when the US is trying to open markets or control resources in 3rd world countries. It's at that time that we're 'spreading democracy'. Instead it's like spreading manure.
The managerial state arose to quell the threat of class warfare. Ironically those who sought to organize the proletariat under a vision of class-based empowerment clamored for the same. The response over time was fighting fire with fire as the cliche goes becoming what the opposition has sought but only in a modified form.Youknowho , , June 5, 2018 at 10:39 amIf we were able to devise a way for distributive justice apart from building a bloated bureaucracy then perhaps this emergence of oligarchy could have been averted. What alternative(s) exist for an equitable distribution of wealth and income to ameliorate poverty? Openly competitive (so-called) markets? And the charity of faith-based communities? I think not.
Democracy, like all systems requires maintenace. Bernard Shaw said that the flaw of pragmatism is that any system that is not completely idiotic will work PROVIDED THAT SOMEONE PUT EFFORT IN MAKING IT WORK.TG , , June 5, 2018 at 12:21 pmWe have come to think that Democracy is in automatic pilot, and does not require effort of our part See how many do not bother to vote or to inform themselves.
Democracy is a fine, shiny package with two caveats in it "Batteries not included" And "Some assembly required" FAilure to heed those leads to disaster.
I see where you are coming from, but I must disagree. We don't have a democracy in any real way, so how can it have failed?JJ , , June 5, 2018 at 12:47 pmDespite massive propaganda of commission and omission, the majority of the American people don't want to waste trillions of dollars on endless pointless oversees wars. The public be damned: Trump was quickly beaten into submission and we are back to the status quo. The public doesn't want to give trillions of dollars to Wall Street while starving Main Street of capital. The public doesn't want an abusively high rate of immigration whose sole purpose is to flood the market for labor, driving wages down and profits up. And so on.
Oswald Spengler was right. " in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune."
"If the federal government were kept small and simple, there would be little need for a behemoth public sector. Developing durable and hierarchical procedures for organizing political projects would be unfeasible for citizen-statesmen. But those same procedures become essential for technocratic experts and career politicians."Chris in Appalachia , , June 5, 2018 at 12:59 pmTrue, but this implies retarding government power as is will lead to an ultimate solution. It will not. The sober truth is that a massive centralized national government has been inevitable since the onset of the second world war or even beforehand with American intervention in the colonoal Phillippines and the Great War. Becoming an empire requires extensive power grabbing and becoming and maintaining a position as a world power requires constant flexing of that power. Maintaining such a large population, military, and foreign corps requires the massive public-works projects you speak of in order to keep the population content and foreign powers in check. Failure to do so leads to chaos and tragic disaster that would lead to such a nation a collapse in all existing institutions due to overcumbersome responsibilities. These cannot be left to the provinces/states due to the massive amounts of resources required to maintain such imperial ambitions along with the cold reality of state infighting and possible seperatist leanings.
If one wishes to end the power of the federal government as is, the goal is not to merely seek reform. The goal is to dismantle the empire; destroy the military might, isolate certain diplomatic relations, reduce rates of overseas trade and reduce the economy as a whole, and then finally disband and/or drastically reduce public security institutions such as the FBI, CIA, and their affiliates. As you well know, elites and the greater public alike consider these anathema.
However, if you wish to rush to this goal, keep in mind that dismantling the American empire will not necessarily lead to the end of oppression and world peace even in the short term. A power vacuum will open that the other world powers such as the Russian Federation and the PRC will rush to fill up. As long as the world remains so interconnected and imperialist ambitions are maintained by old and new world powers, even the smallest and most directly democratic states will not be able to become self-governing for long.
Well, when, statistically speaking, half of the population has an IQ of less than 100 (probably more than half now that USA has been invaded by the Third World) then a great number of people are uninformed and easily manipulated voters. That is one of the great fallacies of democracy.Robert Charron , , June 5, 2018 at 2:38 pm
In an era when the word "democracy" is regarded as one of our deities to worship, this article is a breath of fresh air. Notice how we accuse the Russians of trying to undermine our hallowed "democracy." We really don't know what we mean when we use the term democracy, but it is a shibboleth that has a good, comforting sound. And this idea that we could extend our "democracy" by increasing the number of voters shows that we don't understand much at all. Brilliant insights.Stephen J. , , June 5, 2018 at 2:40 pm
I believe we are prisoners of so-called "democracy"
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July 13, 2017
The Prisoners of "Democracy"Screwing the masses was the forte of the political establishment. It did not really matter which political party was in power, or what name it went under, they all had one ruling instinct, tax, tax, and more taxes. These rapacious politicians had an endless appetite for taxes, and also an appetite for giving themselves huge raises, pension plans, expenses, and all kinds of entitlements. In fact one of them famously said, "He was entitled to his entitlements." Public office was a path to more, and more largesse all paid for by the compulsory taxes of the masses that were the prisoners of "democracy."
[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-prisoners-of-democracy.html
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Jun 02, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
By Joe Jarvis Via The Daily BellYou know how missionaries used to run around the globe forcing everyone to be a Christian? And in the process, they destroyed native cultures and traditions?
Well, the same thing is happening today with Western "teen culture." It is being exported around the world with disastrous effects.
Manufacturing Adolescence
Preindustrial societies mostly exhibit a continuum from childhood to adulthood. There is generally no random cut off age where suddenly teens are given rights and expected to become adults. Children seamlessly and gradually integrate into adulthood, with puberty rites being the only major benchmark.
These societies were "free-range parenting" before it was cool. Even toddlers have a large degree of autonomy. The child is allowed to explore, and the mother provides the nurturing, feeding, and love at the child's initiation. Young children participate in the work of their parents and elders and interact and learn from people of all ages.
Children are raised from infancy alongside adults, instead of being segregated into peer groups of the same age. They slowly learn from adults and take on more responsibilities by emulating what they see.
What do kids see in the USA? A bunch of other kids with whom they have been grouped by government and industry working in tandem . Instead of emulating adults, they act like their peers. They want to dress the same, impress others with their technology, and keep up with the same tv shows.
This creates an artificial sub-culture based on age. And it creates a new market.
As of 2011, teens spend over $200 billion per year . Disney and all its many subsidiaries bring in about $45 billion a year. It is not surprising that these industries now spend several billion dollars each year advertising to teenagers. And the most effective form of advertising is to create a sub-culture through which to sell products.
You can trace the roots of this phenomenon way back to the industrial revolution when social structures got a big shakeup. Kids worked less alongside adults in family work and apprenticeships. Instead, they were shipped off to compulsory public schools. They were grouped by age and sex, and "educated" to be factory workers.
By contrasting Western adolescence with people of the same age in societies that are just recently modernizing, we see that "teen turmoil" is not a natural phenomenon or an issue of hormones. It has been created by Western culture and is now infecting industrializing societies.
Imperializing Teen Culture
According to Robert Epstein in his book Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence , exporting this Western teen culture is undermining the social structures of developing nations.
A similar story has played out for Kenyans, Moroccans, Australian aborigines, Canadian Inuits, and many other preindustrial societies recently integrated into Western culture. Their ways of life led to few social problems like unwed pregnancy, the breakdown of the family, drug use, depression, violence, and general teenage angst and rebellious destructive behavior. But that changed upon the introduction of Western television, schooling, and teen culture.
What is it that preindustrial teens are seeing on those television programs? Answer: teens being treated like, and behaving like, irresponsible children.
When teens in preindustrial society are forced to attend Western-style schools, how are they affected? Answer: they're cut off from adults and from the centrality of adult culture; they're prevented from working, or at least making work the center of their lives; they become controlled by adults instead of part of adult life; teens, rather than adults, become their role models.
When Western mechanisms delay marriage, what is the outcome? Answer: because marriage is the hallmark of adulthood in virtually all cultures, the delay of marriage also means the delay of adulthood. It's no coincidence that Tom Smith's recent survey showed that Americans now think adulthood begins at age twenty-six; the median age for first marriages in the United States is now 26.8.
Pros and Cons of Western Culture
This is not a pro-tribalism post. I am absolutely not saying that society was better off in a pre-industrial age. This is not a black or white issue. It is not like we have to choose between being ignorantly blissful hunter-gatherers or isolated bitter consumer-robots.
Many cultures have benefited from industrialization in that the standard of living has increased. But industrialization does not have to be imported 20th-century style. Modernization can be introduced without causing the collapse of the old ways of life, which kept social problems to a minimum.
We have the ability to see both extremes, isolate the biggest detrimental factors, and mitigate them.
While the issues are all integrated, the main three problems are:
- Mandatory Western Styled Public Schooling
- The Industry of "Teen Culture"
- The Breakdown of the Family
Public schooling is the most glaring catalyst to the perils of Western teenage culture . It is where the groupings by age begin, and the arena in which teens compare themselves, compete and copy each other. They are also a major contributing factor to the oppression many teens feel .
Exporting Hollywood around the globe is another major problem. Teens are indoctrinated with the creepy Hollywood executives' ideas of what it means to be a teen. They are sold sex, drugs, and irresponsibility as fun, on the silver screen. And of course, there are plenty of real-world products that they can buy to fast-track their emulation of the TV stars.
And finally, like it or not, families are a historically effective regulator of social behaviors.
When it comes to teens around the world, just what kinds of practices and problems are we exporting? The answer, it seems, is crime, ennui, anger, premarital sex, pregnancy, abortion, drug and alcohol abuse, and family conflict. Consider just one of our more subtle exports: according to a recent book on teens by psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, American teens are almost completely isolated from adults . Teens typically spend more than thirty-five hours per week surrounded by their peers in school and an additional thirty-five hours per week with peers outside of school. That's two-thirds of their waking hours. This is, according to the researchers, twelve more hours per week than teens in other industrialized nations such as Italy and South Korea spend together, and it is probably sixty hours a week more than teens spend together in many preindustrial societies.
Many American teens–perhaps half or more–also grow up with little access to their father, and "for those lucky enough to have a father, the average teenager now spends less than half an hour a week alone with his or her father." Half of this time is spent watching television, "a situation that does not readily lend itself to quality parent-child interactions." Father-teen interactions in the United States are certainly "not enough to transmit the knowledge, values, attitudes, and skills that adult males should pass on to their children." The child-adult continuum about which Jean Liedloff wrote is almost completely absent in the united states, and we're sending our broken model of family life to each and every village on earth.
Through our films, television programs, laws, religious beliefs, and schooling and marriage practices, we're exporting a wide range of mechanisms that extend childhood well past puberty and that isolate teens from adults. We're creating prolonged, turbulent, Western-style adolescence, with all its inherent problems. We're creating generation gaps and family conflicts where none existed before. And because we ourselves have no idea how to deal with those problems, we're offering no solutions to the cultures we're corrupting.
Sure, pre-industrial cultures have their weak points, but so does the new way of life. You can't objectively say one is better without specifically defining what makes it better.
Is increased teen depression and suicide worth having access to cell phones and internet? Is increased violence and alcohol abuse worth an overall extended lifespan because of modern medicine?
Luckily, we don't have to choose.
You can modernize without Westernizing. The three main contributors to the torment of adolescence, and all the social problems which accompany them, are not necessary factors of modernization.
I mentioned "free range parenting" earlier. It is catching on in America. In a global world with more information at our fingertips than ever before, we can cherry pick the best parts of each culture, and apply those lessons to the modern world.
We don't have to live in a tribal-commune with no access to modern technology in order to give young children autonomy to roam and explore the world.
We don't have to hunt in loin clothes in order to impart fatherly wisdom to our sons and daughters.
But we may have to reorganize our lives and get our priorities straight.
Taking Action
If you've read my articles before, you know that I am not a big fan of "top-down" solutions. That is, the best way to deal with something is on a grassroots, individual level. Trying to change a whole society is difficult and not at all guaranteed to succeed. If it does, you have to guard the progress against undoing.
Better to make the changes at the individual level, where you don't have to ask permission or get a majority to agree.
Clearly, some broad reforms would help the situation. It is not about the government "doing something" about the problem, it is about the government undoing some of the harm they have caused.
For instance, abolishing public schools, or at very least compulsory schooling would be a good start. Since that probably won't happen anytime soon, parents can homeschool, send their kids to alternative schools, or team up with friends and neighbors to form a co-op arrangement for education.
Removing age-based restrictions on rights, or at least moving to a competency-based model of gaining rights and privileges would also help. Again, petitioning the governing is mostly a waste of time. Better to work with the freedoms you can give your kids. So they still can't drive until 16, but at least they can cut their hair how they want, and maybe even have a glass of wine with dinner.
But as with most problems, the largest barriers to improvement are in our heads.
Why not give your kids freedom from an early age? Why not let them participate in household work from an early age? Hell, why not let them participate in your career if they are into it?
The cool thing is that the modern economy seems to be reorganizing to accommodate this way of life, without sacrificing modern comforts and efficiencies.
It is easier than ever to work from home. Imagine a setting where mom and dad do their work while the kids independently learn, or work on easier tasks. Older kids–neighbors or family members or even a tutor–teach the younger kids. Certain work tasks and household chores can be done together as a family, as many hands make light work.
The whole point of this method of parenting is that you offer a continuum from childhood to adulthood.
And without even noticing it, life lessons, love, and kinship will be passed on. You don't have to sit a kid down at a desk to teach them how to become an adult. If you interact with them daily, they will learn from you. You just have to allow them to participate and encourage them to pursue whatever they get excited about.
If you can't teach it to them, the internet can.
For some parents, this might sound like a disaster attempting to work from home while teaching kids. But it is the transition that is difficult. Once children understand the new structure of freedom, they will occupy themselves. They will learn more and be more independent. And when they do come to you with a question or problem, it will be a rewarding experience for everyone to work through it.
Of course for kids and teens unaccustomed to freedom, an immediate withdrawal of authority could have disastrous consequences. Think about the 18-year-olds with strict parents who go off to college and go crazy with parties and alcohol. But you can gradually give your child more freedom whatever their age. Just be honest and upfront about what you are doing and why.
The issue of extended childhood, manufactured adolescence, and the harms of teen culture are missing from most public debates.
School shootings, teen suicide , and low-achieving youth are products of the artificial extension of childhood, the oppression that teens face . But with this issue, is it easy for individuals to take control of the situation, and refuse to be part of the problem. You can solve these problems for your family in one generation.
You don't have to play by the rules of the corrupt politicians, manipulative media, and brainwashed peers.
When you subscribe to The Daily Bell, you also get a free guide:
How to Craft a Two Year Plan to Reclaim 3 Specific Freedoms.
This guide will show you exactly how to plan your next two years to build the free life of your dreams. It's not as hard as you think
Identify. Plan. Execute .
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May 27, 2018 | thefederalist.com
The New York Times' 4,000-word report last week on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign's possible ties to Russia revealed for the first time that the investigation was called "Crossfire Hurricane."
The name, explains the paper, refers to the Rolling Stones lyric "I was born in a crossfire hurricane," from the 1968 hit "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Mick Jagger, one of the songwriters, said the song was a "metaphor" for psychedelic-drug induced states. The other, Keith Richards, said it "refers to his being born amid the bombing and air raid sirens of Dartford, England, in 1943 during World War II."
Investigation names, say senior U.S. law enforcement officials, are designed to refer to facts, ideas, or people related to the investigation. Sometimes they're explicit, and other times playful or even allusive. So what did the Russia investigation have to do with World War II, psychedelic drugs, or Keith's childhood?
The answer may be found in the 1986 Penny Marshall film named after the song, "Jumpin' Jack Flash." In the Cold War-era comedy, a quirky bank officer played by Whoopi Goldberg comes to the aid of Jonathan Pryce, who plays a British spy being chased by the KGB.
The code name "Crossfire Hurricane" is therefore most likely a reference to the former British spy whose allegedly Russian-sourced reports on the Trump team's alleged ties to Russia were used as evidence to secure a Foreign Intelligence Service Act secret warrant on Trump adviser Carter Page in October 2016: ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
Helping Spin a New Origin StoryIt is hardly surprising that the Times refrained from exploring the meaning of the code name. The paper of record has apparently joined a campaign, spearheaded by the Department of Justice, FBI, and political operatives pushing the Trump-Russia collusion story, to minimize Steele's role in the Russia investigation.
After an October news report showed his dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, facts that further challenged the credibility of Steele's research, the FBI investigation's origin story shifted.
In December, The New York Times published a "scoop " on the new origin story. In the revised narrative, the probe didn't start with the Steele dossier at all. Rather, it began with an April 2016 meeting between Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud. The professor informed him that "he had just learned from high-level Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had 'dirt' on Mrs. Clinton in the form of 'thousands of emails.'"
Weeks later, Papadopoulos boasted to the Australian ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, that he was told the Russians had Clinton-related emails. Two months later, according to the Times , the Australians reported Papadopoulos' boasts to the FBI, and on July 31, 2016, the bureau began its investigation.
Further reinforcement of the new origin story came from congressional Democrats. A January 29 memo written by House Intelligence Committee minority staff under ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff further distances Steele from the opening of the investigation. "Christopher Steele's raw reporting did not inform the FBI's decision to initiate its counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016. In fact, the FBI's closely-held investigative team only received Steele's reporting in mid-September."
Last week's major Times article echoes the Schiff memo. Steele's reports, according to the paper, reached the "Crossfire Hurricane team" "in mid-September."
Yet the new account of how the government spying campaign against Trump started is highly unlikely. According to the thousands of favorable press reports asserting his credibility, Steele was well-respected at the FBI for his work on a 2015 case that helped win indictments of more than a dozen officials working for soccer's international governing body, FIFA. In July 2016, Steele met with the agent he worked with on the FIFA case to show his early findings on the Trump team's ties to Russia.
The FBI took Steele's reporting on Trump's ties to Russia so seriously it was later used as evidence to monitor the electronic communications of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But, according to Schiff and the Times , the FBI somehow lost track of reports from a "credible" source who claimed to have information showing that the Republican candidate for president was compromised by a foreign government. That makes no sense.
The code name "Crossfire Hurricane" is further evidence that the FBI's cover story is absurd. A reference to a movie about a British spy evading Russian spies behind enemy lines suggests the Steele dossier was always the core of the bureau's investigation into the Trump campaign.
Was Halper an Informant, Spy, Or Agent Provocateur?Taken together with the other significant revelation from last Times story, the purpose and structure of Crossfire Hurricane may be coming into clearer focus. According to the Times story: "At least one government informant met several times with [Trump campaign advisers Carter] Page and [George] Papadopoulos, current and former officials said."
As we now know, the informant is Stefan Halper, a former classmate of Bill Clinton's at Oxford University who worked in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. Halper is known for his good connections in intelligence circles. His father-in-law was Ray Cline , former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Halper is also reported to have led the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign team that collected intelligence on sitting U.S. President Jimmy Carter's foreign policy.
So what was Halper doing in this instance? He wasn't really a spy (a person who is generally tasked with stealing secrets) or an informant (a person who provides information about criminal activities from the inside). Rather, it seems he was more like an agent provocateur, whose job was to ask leading questions to get Trump campaign advisers to say things that would corroborate -- or seem to corroborate -- evidence that the bureau believed it already had in hand.
It appears Halper's job was to induce inexperienced Trump campaign figures to say things.Halper met with at least three Trump campaign advisers: Sam Clovis, Page, and George Papadopoulos. The latter two he met with in London, where Halper had reason to feel comfortable operating.
Halper's close contacts in the intelligence world weren't limited to the CIA. They also include foreign intelligence officials like Richard Dearlove , the former head of the United Kingdom's foreign intelligence service, MI6. According to a Washington Times report , Halper and Dearlove are partners in a UK consulting firm, Cambridge Security Initiative.
Dearlove is also close to Steele. According to the Washington Post , Dearlove met with Steele in the early fall of 2016, when his former charge shared his "worries" about what he'd found on the Trump campaign and "asked for his guidance."
London was therefore the perfect place for Halper to spring a trap -- outside the direct purview of the FBI, but on territory where he knew he could operate safely. It appears Halper's job was to induce inexperienced Trump campaign figures to say things that corroborated the 35-page series of memos written by Steele -- the centerpiece of the Russiagate investigation -- in order to license a broader campaign of government spying against Trump and his associates in the middle of a presidential election.
Halper Reached Out to Trump Campaign MembersChuck Ross's reporting in The Daily Caller provides invaluable details and insight. As Ross explained in The Daily Caller back in March, Halper emailed Papadopoulos on September 2, 2016 with an invitation to write a research paper, for which he'd be paid $3,000, and a paid trip to London. According to Ross, "Papadopoulos and Halper met several times during the London trip," with one meeting scheduled for September 13 and another two days later.
Ross writes: "According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Halper asked Papadopoulos: 'George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?' Papadopoulos told Halper he didn't know anything about emails or Russian hacking." It seems Halper was looking to elaborate on the claims made in Steele's September 14 dossier memo : "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and considering disseminating it."
Halper's fishing expedition therefore came up with nothing to suggest the Steele dossier was true.Had Papadopoulos confirmed that a shadowy Maltese academic had told him in April about Russians holding Clinton-related emails, presumably that would have entered the dossier as something like, "Trump campaign adviser PAPADOPOULOS confirms knowledge of Russian 'kompromat.'"
Another Trump campaign adviser Halper contacted was Page. They first met in Cambridge, England at a July 11, 2016 symposium. Halper's partner Dearlove spoke at the conference, which was held just days after Page had delivered a widely reported speech at the New Economic School in Moscow. According to another Ross article reporting on Page and Halper's interactions, the Trump adviser "recalls nothing of substance being discussed other than Halper's passing mention that he knew then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort."
Page and Manafort both figure prominently in the Steele dossier's July 19 memos. According to the document , Manafort "was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries." Page had also, according to the dossier, met with senior Kremlin officials -- a charge he later denied in his November 2, 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Evidently, he also gave Halper nothing to use in verifying the charges made against him.
Halper's fishing expedition therefore came up with nothing to suggest the Steele dossier was true. The real story is therefore the continuing attempt to assert that the dossier, or key parts of it, are true, after large-scale investigations by the FBI, and now by special counsel Robert Mueller, have failed to turn up any evidence of a plot hatched between Trump and Vladimir Putin to take over the White House.
Using Spy Powers on Political Opponents Is a Big ProblemThat portions of the American national security apparatus would put their considerable powers -- surveillance, spying, legal pressure -- at the service of a partisan political campaign is a sign that something very big is broken in Washington. Our Founding Fathers would not be surprised to learn that the post-9/11 surveillance and spying apparatus built to protect Americans from al-Qaeda has now become a political tool that targets Americans for partisan purposes. That the rest of us are surprised is a sign that we have stopped taking the U.S. Constitution as seriously as we should.
The damage done to the American press is equally large. Since the November 2016 presidential election, a financially imperiled media industry gambled its remaining prestige on Russiagate. Yet after nearly a year and a half filled with thousands of stories feeding the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy, last week still represented a landmark moment in American journalism. The New York Times , which proudly published the Pentagon Papers, provided cover for an espionage operation against a presidential campaign.
The New York Times , which proudly published the Pentagon Papers, provided cover for an espionage operation against a presidential campaign.There are significant errors and misrepresentations in the article that the Times could've easily checked, if it weren't in such a hurry to hide the FBI and DOJ's crimes and abuses. Perhaps most significantly, the Times avoided asking the key questions that the article raised with its revelation that "at least one government informant" met with Trump campaign figures.
So, how many "informants" targeted the Trump campaign? Were they being paid by the U.S. government? What are their names? What were they doing?
Under whose authority were they spying on a political campaign? Did FBI and DOJ leadership sign off? Did FBI director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch know about it? What about other senior Obama administration officials? CIA Director John Brennan? Did President Obama know the FBI was spying on a presidential campaign? Did Hillary Clinton know? What about Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta?
These questions are sure to be asked. What we know already is that the Times reporters did not ask them, because they do not bother to indicate that the officials interviewed for the story had declined to answer. That they did not ask these questions is evidence the Times is no longer a newspaper that sees its job as reporting the truth or holding high government officials responsible for their crimes. Lee Smith is the media columnist at Tablet.
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May 11, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
'It is difficult to get Artificial Intelligence to understand something, when the Research and Development funding it depends upon its not understanding it' –
Paraphrase of Upton Sinclair .
defenestration (diːˌfɛnɪˈstreɪʃən)
n
the act of throwing a person or thing out of a window
[C17: from New Latin dēfenestrātiō, from Latin de- + fenestra window
'If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists of treating another human being as a thing '
John Brunner 'The Shockwave Rider '
This small article a polemic against neoliberal hegemony; in particular the emerging issue of 'surplus population' as related to technological displacement in context of a free market, an issue purposive to such hegemony which as an 'elephant growing in the panopticon' i.e. not to be mentioned?
The central premise is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) + Robotics comprise a nefarious as formulaic temptation to the elite of the 'Technetronic era' as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it: this consistent with a determinism as stems ontologically from 'Empiricism' form of a 'One Dimensionality' as Marcuse phrased it over five Decades ago; and which thru being but mere simulacra, AI and Robotics represent an ontological imperative potentially expropriated under pathology to denial of Kant's concept of 'categorical imperative'? (That Kant did not subscribe to determinism is acknowledged). The neoliberal concepts of 'Corporatism' and 'free market' are powerful examples of this 'one dimensionality' which is clearly pathological, a topic notably explored by Joel Bakan concerning the pursuit of profit within a Corporatist framework.
– 'One dimensionality in, one dimensionality out' – so it goes ontologically as to some paraphrase of GIGO as trending alas way of 'technological determinism' towards an 'Epitaph for Biodiversity' as would be – way of 'Garbage' or 'Junk' un apperceived as much as 'retrospection' non occurrent indeed -and where 'Farewell to the Working Class' as André Gorz conceived to assume an entirely new meaning: -this to some denouement of 'Dystopian Nightmare' as opposed to 'Utopian Dream', alas; such the 'Age of Leisure' as 'beckoning' to be not for the majority or ' Demos', but rather for the 'technetronic elite' and their 'AI' and Robotics – such 'leisure' being as to a 'freedom' pathological and facilitated by the absence of conscience as much as morality; such the 'farewell'; such the defenestration of 'surplus' , such the 'Age' we 'live' within as to 'expropriation' and 'arrogation' to amount to 'Death by Panopticon' such the 'apotheosis'?
It is being so cheerful which keeps these small quarters going.
But digression.
– It is a relatively small step from ' the death of thought' to 'the death of Life' under Neoliberal Orthodoxy as proving to be the most toxic ideology ever known – such the hegemony as a deliberative, shift of the ' Overton Window' currently occurring as to trend deterministic; such the mere necrotrophy as a 'defenestration' – and the 'one percent' but a deadly collective of parasitic orifice? For what is 'Empiricism' when implemented thru AI and Robotic Technology in a Corporatist economy as but a 'selective investment' as to Research and Development by elite 'private interests', which to a determinism so evidently entailing a whole raft of 'consequence' ; such the means, such the production, such the 'phenomenology' as 'owned' indeed? Under pathology, selectivity is impaired to point of 'militarization'?
But foremost amongst said 'raft' of consequence – the concept of 'classification' as incorporates methodological reduction of the particular to a composite of generalities so typical of 'Science' as expropriated; the fruition thereof replicated not least thru 'Consumerism' – and 'Lifestyle' – as much as 'Life' reduced as much as abrogated to but correlation way of 'possession' of 'things': this as said replication expressed as much 'thru' Linnaeus as Marx concerning 'class'- and as results in concepts' Incorporated' such as the 'Overton Window' – as will be explored by way of 'extrapolation' below? The debasing of identity as a correlate of possessions as a necessary 'abrogation' by way of engineered 'bio hack' is only furthered, such the loss of dimensionality as a potential, by such as social media ? An excellent multimedia illustration of such loss is found here.
It to be noted that for Empiricism the concept of 'good' and 'evil' entails an extra dimensionality as 'metaphysical' – and that 'Politics' so deconstructed despite abuse under orthodoxy as to 'mitigation' remains as 'Moral Economics' – this despite the mitigative contention of neoliberal orthodoxy that there no morality in the 'synonymy'; to a pragmatic as 'Utilitarian' point of a 'Killing the Host' prevailing at paradigmatic as much as Geopolitical level as but explicative of a 'necrotrophy'; as much as the 'defenestration' as euphemism herein proposed this small article would explicate?
Kudos to Michael Hudson for exposing, and continuing to expose, the 'death of thought' which Neoliberalism as an orthodoxy as but a mere 'racket' of 'transfer of resources' represents.
... ... ...
Under neoliberal orthodoxy the political utility of the 'Proles' and in particular the 'Lumpenproletariat', alas, is as to but fear as a 'stick'; a basis of control and manipulation same sense as Upton Sinclair explicated 'carrot' contingent by way of synonym seen: to wit; accept control and manipulation as 'rewarded' or be 'expelled' ; be but as a 'Prole' subsisting and awaiting death, such the economic incarceration as 'CAFO' epitomises the cheapening of life under a hegemony as has corollary of alienation, marginalization and impoverishment wielded under Dystopian imperative; this to a 'transfer of resources' from ' Eros ' to ' Thanatos ' reinforced thru contingency of profit such the 'ponerology' of 'Biodiversity' reduced by way of paradigm Geopolitical?
... ... ...
More articles by: Stephen MartinStephen Martin can be reached at: [email protected]
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May 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
The Grauniad is slipping deeper into the disinformation business: Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance is the headline of a page one piece which reveals exactly nothing. There is no secret lifted and no one was discomforted by a questioning journalist.
Like other such pieces it uses disinformation to accuse Russia of spreading such.
The main 'revelation' is stenographed from a British government official. Some quotes from the usual anti-Russian propagandists were added. Dubious or false 'western' government claims are held up as truth. That Russia does not endorse them is proof for Russian mischievousness and its 'disinformation'.
The opener:
The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin's aggressive campaign of denials over the use of chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
...
"The foreign secretary regards Russia's response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point and thinks there is international support to do more," a Whitehall official said. "The areas the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons."There is a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons. It is the Chemical Weapon Convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). It was the British government which at first rejected the use of these instruments during the Skripal incident:
Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team arrive and took blood samples.Now back to the Guardian disinformation:
In making its case to foreign ministries, the UK is arguing that Russian denials over Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common understanding of the truth , but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide western electorates and sow doubt.A 'common understanding of the truth' is an interesting term. What is the truth? Whatever the British government claims? It accused Russia of the Skripal incident a mere eight days after it happened. Now, two month later, it admits that it does not know who poisoned the Skripals:
Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security adviser has disclosed.Do the Brits know where the alleged Novichok poison came from? Unless they produced it themselves they likely have no idea. The Czech Republic just admitted that it made small doses of a Novichok nerve agent for testing purposes. Others did too.
Back to the Guardian :
British politicians are not alone in claiming Russia's record of mendacity is not a personal trait of Putin's, but a government-wide strategy that makes traditional diplomacy ineffective.Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, famously came off one lengthy phone call with Putin – she had more than 40 in a year – to say he lived in a different world.
No, Merkel never said that. An Obama administration flunky planted that in the New York Times :
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. "In another world," she said.When that claim was made in March 2014 we were immediately suspicious of it:
This does not sound like typically Merkel but rather strange for her. I doubt that she said that the way the "people briefed on the call" told it to the Times stenographer. It is rather an attempt to discredit Merkel and to make it more difficult for her to find a solution with Russia outside of U.S. control.A day later the German government denied (ger) that Merkel ever said such (my translation):
The chancellery is unhappy about the report in the New York Times. Merkel by no means meant to express that Putin behaved irrational. In fact she told Obama that Putin has a different perspective about the Crimea [than Obama has].A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation.
That disinformation, spread by the Obama administration but immediately exposed as false, is now held up as proof by Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic editor of the Guardian , that Russia uses disinformation and that Putin is a naughty man.
The British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson wants journalists to enter the UK reserve forces to help with the creation of propaganda:
He said army recruitment should be about "looking to different people who maybe think, as a journalist: 'What are my skills in terms of how are they relevant to the armed forces?'Patrick Wintour seems to be a qualified candidate.
Or maybe he should join the NATO for Information Warfare the Atlantic Council wants to create to further disinform about those damned Russkies:
What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation -- call it Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military counterpart.Like the Guardian piece above writer of the NATO propaganda lobby Atlantic Council makes claims of Russian disinformation that do not hold up to the slightest test:
By pinning the Novichok nerve agent on Sweden or the Czech Republic, or blaming the UK for the nerve gas attack in Syria, the Kremlin sows confusion among our populations and makes us lose trust in our institutions.Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma.
The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation.
The bigger aim behind all these activities, demanding a myriad of new organizations to propagandize against Russia, is to introduce a strict control over information within 'western' societies.
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.
That scheme will be used against anyone who deviates from the ordered norm. You dislike that pipeline in your backyard? You must be falling for Russian trolls or maybe you yourself are an agent of a foreign power. Social Security? The Russians like that. It is a disinformation thing. You better forget about it.
c1ue , May 4, 2018 2:27:27 PM | 1
Excellent article, in an ongoing run of great journalism.Mike Maloney , May 4, 2018 2:44:12 PM | 3
I am curious - have you read this? https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
It purports to be a book by an American military man intimately familiar with the covert ops portion of the US government. The internal Kafka-esque dynamics described certainly feel true.One of the reasons newspapers are getting worse is the economics. They aren't really viable anymore. Their future is as some form of government sanctioned oligopoly. Two national papers -- a "left" and a "right" -- and then a handful of regional papers. All spouting the same neoliberal, neoconservative chicanery.CD Waller , May 4, 2018 2:57:20 PM | 4Genuine journalist Matt Taibbi warned of this sort of branding of disparate views as enemy a month ago. He was also correct. Evil and insidious. The enemy of a free society.chet380 , May 4, 2018 2:58:22 PM | 5Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them.WJ , May 4, 2018 3:02:57 PM | 6The later history of the 20th century will one day be read as the triumph and normalization of the Nazi state through liberal democratic capitalism.Laguerre , May 4, 2018 3:07:19 PM | 7I agree that it's difficult to see how the drive to renew the Cold War is going to be stopped. I presume that, with the exception of certain NeoCon circles, there isn't a desire for Hot War. Certainly not in the British sources you quote. Britain wouldn't want Hot War with Russia. It's all a question of going to the limit for internal consumption. Do a 1984, in order to keep the population in-line.james , May 4, 2018 3:11:05 PM | 8thanks b... i can't understand how any intelligent thinking person would read the guardian, let alone something like the huff post, and etc. etc... why? the propaganda money that pays for the white helmets, certainly goes to these outlets as well..mk , May 4, 2018 3:31:41 PM | 9the uk have gone completely nuts! i guess it comes with reading the guardian, although, in fairness, all british media seems very skewed - sky news, bbc, and etc. etc.
it does appear as though Patrick Wintour is on Gavin Williamson's propaganda bandwagon/payroll already... in reading the comments and articles at craig murrays site, i have become more familiar with just how crazy things are in the uk.. his latest article freedom no more sums it up well... throw the uk msm in the trash can... it is for all intensive purposes, done..
Meanwhile, OPCW chief Uzumcu seems to have been pranked again, this time by his own staff (this is how I interpret it):b , May 4, 2018 3:49:03 PM | 10He claimed that the amount of Novichok found was about 100 g and therefore more than research laboratories would produce, i.e. this was weaponized Novichok.
However, the story is being retracted right now because OPCW staff says it was only 100 mg .
Uzumcu looks like a fool.
The Russian embassy in the UK must be reading MoA. It just now tweeted this press release: Embassy press officer comments on the Guardian article concerning a new British anti-Russian strategykarlof1 , May 4, 2018 3:52:31 PM | 11Q: What is our reaction to the Guardian article on a "comprehensive strategy" to "deepen the alliance against Russia" to be pursued by the UK Government at international forums?A: Judging by the publication, the main current challenge for Whitehall is to preserve the anti-Russian coalition that the Conservatives tried to build after the Salisbury incident. This task is challenging indeed. The "fusion doctrine" promoted by the national security apparatus has led to the Western bloc taking hasty decisions that, as life has shown, were not based on any facts.
No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered.
Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation.
Hmmm... My reply to c1ue went sideways it seems. Yes, The late Mr. Prouty's book's the real deal and the website hosting his very rare book is a rare gem itself. Click the JFK at page top left to be transported to that sites archive of writings about his murder. The very important essay by Prouty's there too.WJ , May 4, 2018 3:53:30 PM | 12The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote."Jose Garcia , May 4, 2018 3:56:03 PM | 13This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be defeated. Successful propaganda both depends upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate needs of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection between the documented but forgotten past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do. What b points out is something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly rare and its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes b's analysis uniquely indispensable.
Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"
Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth.
1984, anyone?john wilson , May 4, 2018 4:03:04 PM | 14The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. This implies that the Skripals both closed the door together and then went off on their day spreading the stuff everywhere, yet no one else was contaminated (apart from the fantasy policeman).ken , May 4, 2018 4:03:13 PM | 15Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right.
The problem is,,, most know it's all BS but find it 'easier' to believe or at most ignore, as then there is no responsibility to 'do something'. Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. (Yes,,, I'm a PCR reader) :))karlof1 , May 4, 2018 4:05:15 PM | 16b @10--Ort , May 4, 2018 4:22:35 PM | 17Did you catch the Lavrov interview I linked to on previous Yemen thread? As you might imagine, the verbiage used is quite similar. One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; and that while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned.
I won't omit linking to Craig Murray's conclusion :
"I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead."
Passer by , May 4, 2018 4:24:44 PM | 18Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.
_______________________________________Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™.
This isn't a new insight, but it's worth repeating. It struck me anew while I was listening to a couple of UK "journalists" hectoring OPCW Representative Shulgin, and directing scurrilous and provocative innuendo disguised as "questions" to Mr. Shulgin and the Syrian witnesses testifying during his presentation.
It flashed upon me that there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the Perpetual Big Liars must eventually abandon, much less confess, their heinous mendacity. Just as B points out, there are no countervailing facts, evidence, rebuttals, theories, or explanations that can't be countered with further iterations of Big Lies, however offensively incredible and absurd.
Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar.
And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus.
Even as the Big Liars reach a point of diminishing returns, they respond with more of the same. I wish I were more confident that this reprehensible practice will eventually fail due to the excess of malignant hubris; I'm not holding my breath.
Formerly T-Bear , May 4, 2018 4:57:25 PM | 21Is Putin capitulating? Pro US Alexei Kudrin could join new government to negotiate "end of sanctions" with the West.
Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to "mend fences with the West" in order to revive Russia's economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia's fifth-columnists were exalted: "If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia," said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. "It would be a powerful message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the west and towards whom there is a certain trust."
Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school.
It would mark Putin's de facto collapse as a leader. We shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of what he does (or doesn't do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.
@ 20 LaguerrePeter Schmidt , May 4, 2018 5:08:52 PM | 23Certainly looks like @ 18 is a fine example of what b is presenting.
A good way to extract one's self from the propaganda is to refuse using whatever meme the disinformation uses, e.g. that Sergei Skripal was a double agent -- that is not a known, only a convenient suggestion.
Military intelligence is far better described as military information needed for some project or mission. Not surreptitious cloak and dagger spying. This is not to say Sergei Scripal was a British spy for which he was convicted, stripped of rank and career and exiled through a spy swap. To continue using Sergei Scripal was a double agent only repeats and verifies the disinformation meme and all the framing that goes with it. Find some alternative to what MSM produces that does not embed truthiness to their efforts.
In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting.Emily Dickinson , May 4, 2018 5:09:00 PM | 24@Michael Weddington 19karlof1 , May 4, 2018 5:12:57 PM | 25I realize it's from one of the biggest propaganda organs in the world... take this New York Times report of the OPCW's retraction with a 100 grams -- 100mg? -- of salt:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/world/europe/opcw-skripal-attack.html
Passer by @18--jalp , May 4, 2018 5:30:35 PM | 26This same narrative was put forth in 2016 and is just as false now as then. As I posted on Yemen thread earlier, Putin on 5 May is likely to announce the formation of a Stavka.
Kudrin is a neoliberal and as such is an enemy of humanity and will never again be allowed to hold a position of power within Russia's government. Let him emigrate to the West like his fellow parasites and teach junk economics at some likeminded university.
Anyone seen this reported elsewhere? https://www.rt.com/news/425810-white-helmets-us-funding-freeze/
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May 03, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Sir Mark, bless him, has told an MP during a committee meeting, that the armed forces, MI-5, MI-6 and GCHQ do not know who or indeed what sickened the Skripals, pere et fille , in Salisbury. He doesn't seem to have mentioned the police. So, basically, pilgrims, Teresa May, the queen's first minister has insistently and incessantly accused the Russians of a crime of which our British cousins know precious little. In a closely related development, it is now revealed that the Britishers sealed up Skripal's house after the poisoning event leaving the black Persian shown above and two guinea pigs to die of thirst and hunger within. It would seem likely that they knew they were doing this since they would have searched the house first. No? Perhaps they thought that the cat might be a threat as a being of possible Iranian descent. This is impressive stuff. pl https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2018-05-01/uk-has-not-yet-identified-skripal-poisoning-suspects
These false flag ops are all so shabby in their execution. The lack of thoroughness and imagination on the part of the governments running them is really disappointing. For example, if I was running an investigation into the Skripal incident, I would have captured the cat and rodents and run pathology tests on them to see what bio/chem agents might be in their systems. Also, because they might escape and become a vector of further infection. That seems like it would be SOP. So I'd do it even if I knew the story was BS to create the appearance of reality. Then, I could always state that the pets should signs of Russian engineered bio/chem agents. Could even create a video of the pets dying some horrible death due to the agents. That's more better BS.Threadzilla , 11 hours agoAnd yet, this appears to be a lie as well. An earlier piece in the British news claims the pets were taken to Porton Down for examination and testing soon after the incident. Seems more likely they eliminated evidence and then came up with the cover story about how the animals were "forgotten about" and locked in the house for a month, implying totally unimportant for the investigation. http://metro.co.uk/2018/03/...JohnA , 12 hours agoI am truly dis-May-ed!Sid Finster -> JohnA , 9 hours agoI hope she and Johnson pay the price for this folly. May it be steep! Very. very steep.
How these two suckered so many nations foolishly into sending diplomats home reflected respect for UK policy toward Russia. These nations will need to think long and hard about following any such UK lead in future.
This week, the US took down the Russian flag flying over Russian real estate in Seattle. Shameful!
Sociopaths care nothing for law and everything for enforcement.Jack , 4 hours agoI don't know much about the dynamics of British politics but as a light observer of British news I wonder why Theresa May remains prime minister? She became prime minister after the historic Brexit vote. Promptly takes the country to an election and botches it for the Tories. Then bungles the Brexit negotiations. Runs a floundering government. Now comes up with accusations against the Russians in the Skripal affair with no evidence presented but looking more foolish as her story comes under scrutiny.DH , 11 hours agoThirst, yes, hunger, not so much.Tony , 11 hours agoI am reading Taleb's recent book "Skin in the game" which has interesting material about the disconnection between risky behaviors and their consequences in modern USA. He also has a chapter about the mechanics involved in why minority viewpoints in our culture become dominant. It's an interesting read.Sid Finster , 10 hours agohttp://www.theblogmire.com/...France74 , 10 hours agoA french view and laughter.kao_hsien_chih , 11 hours ago2 cats and 2 guinea pigs were locked up for 9 days in Skipal's house, in the hope of proving that the Russians are guilty.
When the police reopened the house, they found four bodies. the veterinary faculty is positive, both cats died of starvation. Guinea pigs, some say, began to be worked by hungry cats, accelerating their deaths. Unspeakable bloodshed. In this whole case, it's THE revolting detail, among many others. Poor beasts.Finally, the Police partially acknowledged their mistake and accused the Russians of not having been completely fair play. Indeed, these thuriferous bastards of Vlad the Impaler had put poison on the OUTDOOR handle of the front door of the house. It's infinitely subtle of these savages. The Brit Police did not suspect what strong part it had to make, the unexpected thwarting its learned calculations. Presumption, again and again. Nevertheless, the detectives are formal: the Russians did the trick well. The evidence is obvious. In this dramatic case, we are not going to make a comparison between insular and continental logic. The hour is too serious for these trifles.
Lots of laughter.Great. There was once a war for Jenkins' ear. I guess we should now have a nuclear war for Skripals' cat.English Outsider -> kao_hsien_chih , 9 hours agoColonel,There's talk of a D-Notice covering the Skripal affair. Seems unlikely. All concerned were being sat on quite satisfactorily anyway.
I Looked up D-notices on WIKI -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Presumably there are bigger guns in the background if information that would really threaten national security or the lives of serving officers is in danger of being released. The D-Notice system itself seems to be a more or less voluntary affair -
https://www.theguardian.com...
It's very difficult in any case to believe that such a notice could have been issued. Can't see why it would be needed. The scripting of the official story on such matters as this seems to be a joint enterprise between the media and the press officers. That's a time-honoured consensus so why would the media need bullying to stay in line?
My personal view on all this is that the No. 10 press officers aren't that good at this new-fangled information stuff. They don't seem to have their hearts in it somehow. Time for them to go back to counting paperclips and for information campaigns to be handled by the experts. The BBC have a proven track record in this field and it's time that was officially recognised.
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Apr 03, 2015 | Alternet
...President Barack Obama, who had run a quasi-antiwar liberal campaign for the White House, had embraced the assassination program and had decreed, "the CIA gets what it wants." Intelligence budgets were maintaining the steep upward curve that had started in 2001, and while all agencies were benefiting, none had done as well as the CIA At just under $15 billion, the agency's budget had climbed by 56 percent just since 2004.Decades earlier, Richard Helms, the CIA director for whom the event was named, would customarily refer to the defense contractors who pressured him to spend his budget on their wares as "those bastards." Such disdain for commerce in the world of spooks was now long gone, as demonstrated by the corporate sponsorship of the tables jammed into the Grand Ballroom that evening. The executives, many of whom had passed through the revolving door from government service, were there to rub shoulders with old friends and current partners. "It was totally garish," one attendee told me afterward. "It seemed like every arms manufacturer in the country had taken a table. Everyone was doing business, right and left."
In the decade since 9/11, the CIA had been regularly blighted by scandal-revelations of torture, renditions, secret "black site" prisons, bogus intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq, ignored signs of the impending 9/11 attacks-but such unwholesome realities found no echo in this comradely gathering. Even George Tenet, the CIA director who had presided over all of the aforementioned scandals, was greeted with heartfelt affection by erstwhile colleagues as he, along with almost every other living former CIA director, stood to be introduced by Master of Ceremonies John McLaughlin, a former deputy director himself deeply complicit in the Iraq fiasco. Each, with the exception of Stansfield Turner (still bitterly resented for downsizing the agency post-Vietnam), received ringing applause, but none more than the night's honoree, former CIA director and then-current secretary of defense Robert M. Gates.
Although Gates had left the CIA eighteen years before, he was very much the father figure of the institution and a mentor to the intelligence chieftains, active and retired, who cheered him so fervently that night at the Ritz-Carlton. He had climbed through the ranks of the national security bureaucracy with a ruthless determination all too evident to those around him. Ray McGovern, his supervisor in his first agency post, as an analyst with the intelligence directorate's soviet foreign policy branch, recalls writing in an efficiency report that the young man's "evident and all-consuming ambition is a disruptive influence in the branch." There had come a brief check on his rise to power when his involvement in the Iran-Contra imbroglio cratered an initial attempt to win confirmation as CIA director, but success came a few years later, in 1991, despite vehement protests from former colleagues over his persistent willingness to sacrifice analytic objectivity to the political convenience of his masters.
Book cover of 'Kill Chain.'
Photo Credit:
Henry HoltClick to enlarge.
Gates's successful 1991 confirmation as CIA chief owed much, so colleagues assessed, to diligent work behind the scenes on the part of the Senate Intelligence Committee's staff director, George Tenet. In 1993, Tenet moved on to be director for intelligence programs on the Clinton White House national security staff, in which capacity he came to know and esteem John Brennan, a midlevel and hitherto undistinguished CIA analyst assigned to brief White House staffers. Tenet liked Brennan so much that when he himself moved to the CIA as deputy director in 1995, he had the briefer appointed station chief in Riyadh, an important position normally reserved for someone with actual operational experience. In this sensitive post Brennan worked tirelessly to avoid irritating his Saudi hosts, showing reluctance, for example, to press them for Osama bin Laden's biographical details when asked to do so by the bin Laden unit back at headquarters.
Brennan returned to Washington in 1999 under Tenet's patronage, initially as his chief of staff and then as CIA executive director, and by 2003 he had transitioned to the burgeoning field of intelligence fusion bureaucracy. The notion that the way to avert miscommunication between intelligence bureaucracies was to create yet more layers of bureaucracy was popular in Washington in the aftermath of 9/11. One concrete expression of this trend was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, known as T-TIC and then renamed the National Counter Terrorism Center a year later. Brennan was the first head of T-TIC, distinguishing himself in catering to the abiding paranoia of the times. On one occasion, notorious within the community, he circulated an urgent report that al-Qaeda was encrypting targeting information for terrorist attacks in the broadcasts of the al-Jazeera TV network, thereby generating an "orange" alert and the cancellation of dozens of international flights. The initiative was greeted with malicious amusement over at the CIA's own Counterterrorism Center, whose chief at the time, José Rodríguez, later opined that Brennan had been trying to build up his profile with higher authority. "Brennan was a major factor in keeping [the al-Jazeera/al-Qaeda story] alive. We thought it was ridiculous," he told a reporter. "My own view is he saw this, he took this, as a way to have relevance, to take something to the White House." Tellingly, an Obama White House spokesman later excused Brennan's behavior on the grounds that though he had circulated the report, he hadn't believed it himself.
Exiting government service in 2005, Brennan spent the next three years heading The Analysis Corporation, an obscure but profitable intelligence contractor engaged in preparing terrorist watch lists for the government, work for which he was paid $763,000 in 2008. Among the useful relationships he had cultivated over the years was well-connected Democrat Anthony Lake, a former national security adviser to Bill Clinton, who recommended him to presidential candidate Barack Obama. Meeting for the first time shortly after Obama's election victory, the pair bonded immediately, with Obama "finishing Brennan's sentences," by one account. Among their points of wholehearted agreement was the merit of a surgical approach to terrorist threats, the "need to target the metastasizing disease without destroying the surrounding tissue," as Brennan put it, for which drones and their Hellfire missiles seemed the ideal tools. Obama was initially balked in his desire to make Brennan CIA director because of the latter's all-too-close association with the agency's torture program, so instead the new president made him his assistant for counterterrorism and homeland security, with an office down the hall from the Oval Office. Two years into the administration, everyone in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom knew that the bulky Irishman was the most powerful man in U.S. intelligence as the custodian of the president's kill list, on which the chief executive and former constitutional law professor insisted on reserving the last word, making his final selections for execution at regularly scheduled Tuesday afternoon meetings. "You know, our president has his brutal side," a CIA source cognizant of Obama's involvement observed to me at the time.
Now, along with the other six hundred diners at the Helms dinner, Brennan listened attentively as Gates rose to accept the coveted award for "exemplary service to the nation and the Central Intelligence Agency." After paying due tribute to previous honorees as well as his pride in being part of the CIA "family," Gates spoke movingly of a recent and particularly tragic instance of CIA sacrifice, the seven men and women killed by a suicide bomber at an agency base, Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009. All present bowed their heads in silent tribute.
Gates then moved on to a more upbeat topic. When first he arrived at the Pentagon in 2007, he said, he had found deep-rooted resistance to "new technology" among "flyboys with silk scarves" still wedded to venerable traditions of fighter-plane combat. But all that, he informed his rapt audience, had changed. Factories were working "day and night, day and night," to turn out the vital weapons for the fight against terrorism. "So from now on," he concluded, his voice rising, "the watchword is: drones, baby, drones!"
The applause was long and loud.
Excerpted from Andrew Cockburn's new book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins Henry Holt, 2015). Reprinted here with permission from the author.
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Apr 24, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Yves Smith, April 21, 2018 at 12:26 pm
Nudge was the title of a book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein on how to manipulate people in their supposed best interest, like in cafeteria lines, to put whole fruit before desserts made with sugar.
See here for more detail:
blennylips , April 21, 2018 at 1:49 pm
Synoia , April 21, 2018 at 11:25 amIf you liked Nudge , you'll love " cognitive infiltration ":
Conspiracy Theories
Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 08-03Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. Various policy dilemmas, such as the question whether it is better for government to rebut conspiracy theories or to ignore them, are explored in this light.
Keywords: conspiracy theories, social networks, informational cascades, group polarization
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585Is not this what discerning MIC's all do these days, via
FBIFB?JTMcPhee , April 21, 2018 at 12:40 pmA nudge too far?
Constant and persistent nudging generally results in an angry backlash. Somewhere around when a person realizes "This is not where I wanted to be."
oaf , April 21, 2018 at 1:52 pmAnd of course we mopes have been "nudged" into pretty much that blind serfdom alluded to. Back in the Cave, with not much chance of dispelling the belief in and subjection to the shadows projected on the wall we are forced to face
Tom_Doak , April 21, 2018 at 6:09 pmmanipulation is the sowing of a Karmic garden
none , April 21, 2018 at 10:01 pmThe classic nudge example is opting you into a 401(k) unless you opt out.
That's supposedly better for you but it is DEFINITELY better for the brokerage handling your account.
Tyronius , April 22, 2018 at 12:21 amI had to look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
I hadn't heard of it before.
Anti-Schmoo , April 23, 2018 at 4:18 amI rather detest the notion of someone or entity 'nudging' me in the direction of some behavior, especially in a paternalistic mode where the assumption is that they know better than I what I 'should' be doing or thinking.
On one level, isn't that a working definition of advertising? On another, it smacks of authoritarianism. Don't we have enough of this kind of thing already? Worse, what's the first reaction one naturally has when they realize they're being manipulated? Seems to be a strategy fraught with risk of getting exactly the wrong response.
If I'm to be encouraged to behave in a given way, show me the respect of offering a conscious, intelligent argument to do so on the merits, or kindly go (family blog) yourself!
Anti-Schmoo , April 23, 2018 at 4:24 amIn economics, the single most important thing to understand is debt.
If you understand debt; you won't have any debt.
Debt and freedom are the antithisis of each other.
Without debt; nudges have no influence.A follow up:
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/money/a19181300/nassim-nicholas-taleb-money-advice/
A very frank discussion of debt and freedom.
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Apr 23, 2018 | www.truth-out.org
"People get so involved with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time, and they don't do the work of actually organizing people." -- Ella Baker
[Neoliberalism] also infiltrates our interpersonal relationships...
The ongoing questions about how major tech corporations -- especially social media giants -- are reaching into our personal and private lives for the purpose of extraction raises questions about where else these sorts of intrusions take place. Too many people and too many entities get too comfortable fashioning themselves as leaders and viewing people as commodities...
... ... ...
Fame and fortune dictate far too much in our society. This happens so much that those who are famous regularly instigate public backlash for making uninformed comments about all sorts of issues. Media outlets invite popular celebrities to comment on a wide array of serious social issues not because they'll provide any sort of expertise, but because they are famous...
... .. ...
Fame and money do not automatically make a person insincere. The insincerity of this capitalist system, however, is certainly upheld in part by the extravagance of fame and money. We don't have to be broke and unpopular to be genuine, but if the logic we use to define our success resembles capitalism, we're going in a terrible circle. What separates us from the system that oppresses us?
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Apr 23, 2018 | www.currentaffairs.org
...For example: Republicans argue that their tax cut will increase GDP, reduce the deficit, and reduce taxes for the middle class. Democrats reply that the tax cut will not increase GDP, will not reduce the deficit, and will not reduce the middle-class's tax burden. Both parties are arguing around a shared premise: the goal is to cut taxes for the middle class, reduce the deficit, and grow GDP.But traditional liberalism, before the "neo" variety emerged, would have made its case on the basis of some quite different premises. Instead of arguing that Democrats are actually the party that will reduce the middle class' taxes, it would make the case that taxes are important, because it's only through taxes that we can improve schools, infrastructure, healthcare, and poverty relief. Instead of participating in the race to cut taxes and the deficit, Old Liberalism is based on a set of moral ideas about what we owe to one another.
Now, one reason I dislike the "neoliberalism" framework is that I'm not sure how much this nostalgic conception of the Great Liberalism Of Times Past should be romanticized. But it's obvious that there's a great deal of difference between New Deal/Great Society rhetoric and "Actually We're The Real Job Creators/Tax-Cutters/GDP Growers." And it's also true that over the last decades, certain pro-market ideological premises have wormed their way into the mind of ordinary liberals to the point that debates occur within a very narrow economic framework.
Let me give you a very clear example. Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan has a new book out called The Case Against Education . It argues that the public school system is a waste of time and money and should be destroyed. Caplan says that students are right to wonder "when they will ever use" the things they are being taught. They won't, he says, because they're not being taught any skills they will actually need in the job market. Instead, education functions mostly as "signaling": a degree shows an employer that you are the type of person who works hard and is responsible, not that you have actually learned particular things that you need. Credentials, Caplan says, are mostly meaningless. He argues that we should drastically cut public school funding, make education more like job training, get rid of history, music, and the arts, and "deregulate and destigmatize child labor." Essentially, Caplan believes that education should be little more than skills training for jobs, and it's failing at that.
Now here's where "neoliberalism" comes in. Caplan's argument is obviously based on right-wing economic premises: markets should sort everything out, the highest good is to create value for your employers, etc. But let's look at a "liberal" response. In The Washington Monthly , Kevin Carey has a biting critique of Caplan's book, which he says is based on a "childish" philosophy. Carey says that education is , in fact useful for more than signaling:
Caplan is not wrong about the existence of signaling and its kissing cousin, credentialism, which describes the tendency of job categories to accrue more degree requirements, sometimes unnecessarily, over time. But these are banal and unchallenged ideas in the economics profession. In his 2001 Nobel lecture, [Michael] Spence warned that people who use job markets to illustrate signaling run the risk of concluding, wrongly, that education doesn't contribute to productivity. This wrongheaded argument is the essence of The Case Against Education Eric Hanushek, a conservative economist and well-known skeptic of public school funding, has documented a strong relationship between average scores on international tests and the growth rates of national economies. Put simply, well-educated nations become prosperous nations, and no country has become well educated without large, sustained investments in public education.
Carey mounts a strong defense of public education against Caplan's attack. But look at how he does it. Caplan has argued that education doesn't actually make students more productive or give them skills useful for thriving in the economy. Carey replies that while this is partly true, education does actually increase productivity, as we can see when we look across nations. Everyone in the discussion, however, is operating on the implicit premise that the measure of whether education is successful is "productivity." And because of that, no matter how strong the liberal argument is, no matter how stingingly critical it may be of libertarianism or privatization, it has already ceded the main point. We all agree that education is about maximizing students' value to the economy, we just disagree about the degree to which public education successfully does that, and whether the solution is to fix the system or get rid of it. The debate becomes one of empirics rather than values.
Carey doesn't make a case for an alternative "liberal" notion of education, and doesn't question the values underlying the "banal and unchallenged ideas in the economics profession." But unless liberalism is to be something more than "a difference of opinion over the correct way to maximize productivity," it's important to defend a wholly different set of principles . Otherwise, what if it turns out that providing art and music classes is a drag on productivity? What if teaching students history turns out to make them worse workers, because they begin to see a resemblance between their bosses and the robber barons? What if the study of philosophy makes laborers less compliant and docile? If we argue that music is actually economically useful, then we'll have no defense of music if it turns out not to be useful. Instead, we need to argue that whether music is economically useful has nothing to do with whether students deserve to be exposed to it.
Here's a clear illustration. Donald Trump heavily pushes the idea that school should be job training, to the point of saying that "community colleges" should be redefined as vocational schools because he doesn't know what "community" is. (You can blame Trump's ignorance, but this is partially because the right has spent decades insisting that "society" and "community" are meaningless terms and the world consists solely of individuals, and the left has not had good explanations in response.) A UCLA education professor, Mike Rose, critiques Trump and Betsy DeVos for defining vocational education "in functional and economistic terms -- as preparation for the world of work[,] reduced to narrow job training." Sounds right! But then here's what Rose says about why vocational education must be more than training:
Intellectual suppleness will have to be as key an element of a future Career and Technical Education as the content knowledge of a field. The best CTE already helps students develop an inquiring, problem-solving cast of mind. But to make developing such a cast of mind standard practice will require, I think, a continual refining of CTE and an excavation of the beliefs about work and intelligence that led to the separation of the academic and the vocational course of study in the first place. [In addition to basic skills], students will need to learn the conceptual base of those tools and techniques and how to reason with them, for future work is predicted to be increasingly fluid and mutable. A standard production process or routine of service could change dramatically. Would employees be able to understand the principles involved in the process or routine and adapt past skills to the new workplace? To borrow a phrase from labor journalist William Serrin, we need "to give workers back their heads" and assume and encourage the intellectual engagement of students in the world of work. That engagement would include education in history and sociology, economics and political science. What are the forces shaping the economy? How did we get to this place, and are there lessons to be learned from exploring that history? Are there any pressure points for individual or collective action? What resources are out there, what options do I have, how do I determine their benefits and liabilities?
Rose argues that workers should be given an education in history and sociology. Why? Because it will make them better workers. The future economy will require more adaptable minds with better critical reasoning skills, and wider courses of study will help prepare students for that future economy. Yet the argument is still: Education shouldn't just be job training, it should also incorporate the liberal arts, because the liberal arts are also helpful on the job. Our defense of a liberal education remains instrumental. Of course, often when liberals make these arguments, they defend them by saying that instrumental arguments are more successful than moral ones. You're not going to get anywhere arguing that workers deserve history courses, you have to say that they need them. But I've always been skeptical of that defense for a few reasons. First, if it turns out that learning history won't actually produce better tech workers, your whole argument collapses. Second, it's dishonest, and people can usually detect dishonesty. Third, it takes us yet another step further toward the universal acceptance of the conclusion that economic values are the only values there are. (Also, let's be real: no business is going to be fooled into thinking it's a good idea to teach their workers how to use "collective action" to exert pressure.)
I gave a similar example recently of the difference between the way a neoliberal framework looks at things versus the way a leftist does. Goldman Sachs produced a report suggesting to biotech companies that curing diseases might not actually be profitable, because people stop being customers once they are cured and no more money can be extracted from them. The liberal response to this would be an empirical argument: "Here's why it is actually profitable to cure diseases." The leftist response would be: "We need to have a value system that goes beyond profit maximization."
Neoliberalism, then, is the best existing term we have to capture the almost universal convergence around a particular set of values. We don't have debates over whether the point of teaching is to enrich the student's mind or prepare the student for employment, we have debates over how to prepare students for employment. Economic values become the water we swim in, and we don't even notice them worming their way into our brains.
he word is valuable insofar as it draws our attention to the ideological frameworks within which debates occur, and where the outer boundaries of those debates lie. The fact that everyone seems to agree that the purpose of education is "job skills," rather than say, "the flourishing of the human mind," shows the triumph of a certain new kind of liberalism, for which I can only think of one word.
We will have a more thorough examination of The Case Against Education, along with an explanation of an alternate left conception of the purpose of schooling, in our May-June edition. Subscribe now to make sure you receive it when it comes out!
Nathan J. Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs.
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Apr 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Almand | Apr 22, 2018 11:21:50 PM | 67
Don Bacon , Apr 22, 2018 11:04:16 PM | 65@ Don Bacon
Neoliberalism is not just an economic policy, it is a project of "full spectrum dominance" of the human psyche. It is an indoctrination that tells people to be more efficient, to schedule and micromanage their lives as to increase productivity. One must become a widget whose sole function is to make money and whose value as a person is determined by their economic status .
Even a lot of so called liberal Democrats share these capitalist extremist beliefs because they are actively trying to integrate the "talented tenth" of minority communities into the ruling class.
@ 62psychohistorian , Apr 22, 2018 10:44:38 PM | 63
The IMF and The World Bank (always headed by an American) -- bastions of neoliberalism.Robert McChesney:
Neoliberalism "refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit." The major beneficiaries of neoliberalism are large trans-national corporations and wealthy investors. The implementation of neoliberal policies came into full force during the eighties under Thatcher and Reagan. Today, the principles of neoliberalism are widely held with near-religious fervor by most major political parties in the US and Britain and are gaining acceptance by those holding power elsewhere.Here is a link to a posting at TelesurTo 'Protect' Workers, World Bank Calls for Eliminating Minimum Wage, Giving Employers More Power
The article does provide more context but even then competition from robots is not defensible. The article does end by asking for a discussion about inequality which would sure be a start......and likely a quick ending....grin
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Apr 22, 2018 | www.unz.com
Steve Gittelson , April 19, 2018 at 2:43 am GMT
PCR's latest is really good. I love it when he gets to ripping, and doesn't stop for 2000+ words or so. It reads a lot better than Toynbee, fersher.The working class, designated by Hillary Clinton as "the Trump deplorables," is now the victimizer, not the victim. Marxism has been stood on its head.
The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite. With blacks screaming at whites, women screaming at men, and homosexuals screaming at heterosexuals, there is no one left to scream at the rulers.
The ruling elite favors a "conversation on race," because the ruling elite know it can only result in accusations that will further divide society. Consequently, the ruling elite have funded "black history," "women's studies," and "transgender dialogues," in universities as a way to institutionalize the divisiveness that protects them. These "studies" have replaced real history with fake history.
Steve Gittelson , April 19, 2018 at 3:59 pm GMT
Just a bit more real truth from PCR. Carry onAll of America, indeed of the entire West, lives in The Matrix, a concocted [and false] reality. Western peoples are so propagandized, so brainwashed, that they have no understanding that their disunity was created in order to make them impotent in the face of a rapacious ruling class, a class whose arrogance and hubris has the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
History as it actually happened is disappearing as those who tell the truth are dismissed as misogynists, racists, homophobes, Putin agents, terrorist sympathizers, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists. Liberals who complained mightily of McCarthyism now practice it ten-fold.
The United States with its brainwashed and incompetent population -- indeed, the entirety of the Western populations are incompetent -- and with its absence of intelligent leadership has no chance against Russia and China, two massive countries arising from their overthrow of police states as the West descends into a gestapo state. The West is over and done with. Nothing remains of the West but the lies used to control the people. All hope is elsewhere.
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Apr 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Jackrabbit | Apr 18, 2018 11:42:04 AM | 142
Don Bacon
Trump's actions have not matched his election rhetoric. Just like faux populist Obama. Obama also "caved" to pressure, and even set himself up for failure by emphasing "bipartisanship".
That is how the political mechanism of faux populism works.
Obama: Change you can believe in
Trump: Make America Great AgainObama: Most transparent administration ever
Trump: Drain the SwampObama: Deceiver: "Man of Peace" engaging in covert ops
Trump: Distractor: twitter, personal vendettasWeakened by claims of unpatriotic inclinations:
Obama: Birthers (led by Trump who was close to Clinton's) - "Muslim socialist"!
Trump: Russia influence (pushed by 'NeverTrump' Clinton loyalists) - Putin's bitch!There's more but I won't belabor the point.
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Apr 13, 2018 | sfonline.barnard.edu
The Scholar & Feminist Online is a webjournal published three times a year by the Barnard Center for Research on Women I begin this article by reflecting on one of the biggest professional mistakes I have ever made. I became a part of corporate humanitarianism in 2006, when IOM Korea invited me to be part of a research project on trafficking of Korean women overseas, sponsored by the Bom-bit Foundation, an NGO set up by the wife of the CEO of the biggest insurance company in South Korea. She had been concerned about the barrage of news reports that were circulating both in and out of Korea about the trafficking of Korean women into forced prostitution overseas. She wanted a global research project, "Korean women victims of sex trafficking in five global sites": South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the East and West Coasts of the United States. The ultimate goal was to find solutions to end such outflow and to save these women. The principal researcher, a male Korean academic, drafted a survey questionnaire laden with assumptions about coercion, violence, and sexual abuse. Even though the final reports from different sites came back with little evidence of trafficking, they did not prevent the principal investigator from producing a final report about the "serious problem of sex trafficking of Korean women into the global sex trade."
The first woman who I interviewed for this project was working in a massage parlor in Queens, New York. She came to the United States after the Korean police cracked down on her in her home, after they had obtained her address from her employer in Seoul in an antiprostitution raid. She explained her work in the United States:
Jin: Some people only come in for table showers, massage, and chats.
Interviewer: Are they the good clients?
Jin: No, they are not.
Interviewer: So who are the good clients?
Jin: Those people who finish quickly, they are the good ones. Those who have shower and then have sex and go. They are the best.This response exploded the entire premise of the research and its assumptions about the inherently victimizing nature of sexual labor for women. Those who demand sex rather than conversations are the good clients -- if they finish quickly, get themselves cleaned before having sex, and leave immediately after sex. Jin situated sex squarely within a repertoire of labor performance, along with other physical and emotional work, and identified sex as more efficient ("quick") in providing return to her labor. She made between $11,000 and $22,000 per month. On that note, let me move on to some important points in the discussion about gender and neoliberalism within the context of South Korea.
Neoliberalism is useful as a term only to the extent of understanding macro-historical shifts and setting a framework for investigation. But its history, manifestation, and effects can be so diverse in each location that it cannot be a useful analytical category without empirical analysis. For example, contrary to the trend of de-democratization [ 1 ] observed in the United States, in South Korea, neoliberal reforms coincided with the democratization of civil society and the state in late 1990s, following four decades of military and authoritarian rule. In 1997, just when the first civilian democratic leader Kim Dae-jung became president, South Korea went through a major financial crisis and received the largest IMF bailout. The president supported a new wave of civic/human-rights organizations, set up the first National Human Rights Commission, and founded the Ministry of Gender Equality. During the same period, structural readjustment also ensured the flexibilization of labor and the weakening of trade unions, rendering many lives of more precarious as they became underemployed or unemployed.
In my work, I am grappling with how individuals like Jin live and make sense of their lives within a number of paradoxes/contradictions in neoliberalism:
1) The apparent amorality of neoliberalism and its facilitation of conservative moral agenda. The deployment of market principles to reconfigure the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship not only remakes economic, political, and cultural life, but also remakes citizen-subjects as entrepreneurs and consumers. While market competitiveness is idealized as the engine to advancement for all, labor competition is circumscribed for particular groups (e.g., through a household registration system that prevent migrants from accessing certain jobs, rights, and benefits in China) and in specific ways (e.g., only certain sectors of the labor market are considered legitimate -- not sex work or surrogacy, for example). The discourse of national competitiveness and collective welfare pushes forward a conservative moral agenda in the face of these changes.
2) The depoliticization of social risks and the hyperpoliticization of national security. The emergence of an ethics of self-management and risk-taking justifies some form of retrenchment of the state in the social sphere. Yet this by no means suggests a weakening of the state. What we witness in neoliberal transformations is the assertion of the state through more hard-lined enforcement of criminal justice and border control. The consequence is an uneven emphasis on and legitimation of the self-enterprising individual, invoking national crisis, social danger, and self-harm to justify state intervention or exclusion. These measures have significant gendered repercussions -- reshaping discourses on domesticity, sexuality, and mobility.
3) The concomitant and continuous ravaging of vulnerable populations and celebration of humanitarianism/human rights responses from state and civil society. Neoliberal developments create vulnerable populations by polarizing resources and wealth, and concomitantly generate a set of humanitarian/human rights responses from the state and civil society. Rather than being a set of problems that are being held back or eliminated by a set of solutions, they seem to grow symbiotically together. In effect, many humanitarian/human-rights interventions turn out to reiterate dominant interests, reproducing conservative gender, racial, class, and national hierarchies and divides.
How are these contradictions lived? Maybe Jin has some answers for us -- not just from her personal trajectory, but also in what she said:
I am working hard and making money for myself. I am saving money to start my own business back home/to further study. I am not dependent on the government or my family. I am not harming anyone, even though this is not a job to boast about. I don't understand these women's human rights. These activists don't understand us. They are people from good background. I am not saying the antiprostitution laws are wrong. But do they have to go so far?
My research since 1997 on sex work and migrant women in South Korea and the United States is located right at the intersection of these paradoxes. As women who strategize their immigration and labor strategies for self-advancement as sex workers, they embody the sexual limits of neoliberalism. While they may personify the values of self-reliance, self-governance, and free markets in a manner akin to homo economicus, they violate the neoliberal ideals of relational sexuality and middle-class femininity. [ 2 ] As many critics have attested to, even though the antitrafficking movement hails women's human rights, gender justice, and state protection, its operation predominantly through the crime frame reinforces gender, class, and racial inequalities. As such, antitrafficking initiatives, as they have taken shape in the twenty-first century, are part of neoliberal governance, and underlying the claims of equality and liberty are racial, gender, and sex panics with nationalist overtones that justify the repression of those who step outside these limits.
I think antitrafficking initiatives need to be situated within a broader set of political and social transformations in order to analyze the undercurrents of gender and sexuality across different sites. In South Korea, there was a strong gender and sexual ideology pervading the expansion of social policies in the post-1997 era. While the government could claim credit for addressing the needs of certain vulnerable populations (the unemployed, the homeless, migrant wives, women leaving prostitution, etc.), public anxieties about the breakdown of the family (runaway teenagers, old-age divorce, the fight for women's equality) that started during the 1997 crisis have continued into the new millennium (same-sex families, "multicultural families," single women). As national boundaries seem to have weakened with the incorporation of "multicultural families," the heteronormative nuclear family became more reified, and the domestic sphere as the proper place for women was reinscribed in a range of social policies. These include protection for "prostituted women," since 2004, and support provided to migrant wives -- both policies designed to harness these women's reproductive powers for the future of the Korean nation, and to reproduce their class location.
It is also important to be wary of claims to promote "women's human rights" and how these claims are circumscribed within certain spheres -- only in sex work, and not in the gendered layoffs during an economic crisis, or in relation to the homeless women who have been excluded as legitimate recipients of government support. "Women's human rights" have been hurled around to legitimize activism and policies that turned out to make lives more difficult for some women, rendering them either as targets or instruments of criminal law.
We also need to ask why the law is resorted to so consistently for women activists to make claims on the state. And why does the general public have so much faith in the law to enforce morality?
I would like to see cultural struggles become a more important site to extend into, building on a solid economic and political critique. As we witnessed i the Occupy movement, as well as with the sex worker festivals in different global locations, creativity, humor, and conviviality have a lot of power to draw attention, if not to incite solidarity. The new sex workers' organization in South Korea calls itself the Giant Girls ("GG" also means "support" in Korean), and organizes its own seminars, holds a sex work festival celebration, and produces its own podcasts, in which everyday conversation and serious discussion take place in a light-hearted manner, often with bursts of laughter. The fists-in-air protests are no longer the main part of the movement, marking a significant departure from the victimhood discourse. I am hopeful that this will appeal at least to a younger generation of potential coalition partners in the LGBT community, labor movements (for women and migrants), and cultural movements. This could be a refreshing -- and possibly transformational -- shift in feminist politics and critique in South Korea, and in other sites in Asia.
FootnotesTags class law neoliberalism policy sex work sexuality
- Brown, Wendy (2006). "American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization." Political Theory 34(6): 690-714. [ Return to text ]
- Bernstein, Elizabeth (2012). "Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The 'Traffic in Women' and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex, and Rights." Theory and Society 41(3):233–59. [ Return to text ]
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Apr 11, 2018 | www.unz.com
Anonymous [280] Disclaimer , April 10, 2018 at 5:33 am GMT
It's surreal to watch such staggering levels of dishonest incompetence among our globalist "elites".Kiza , April 10, 2018 at 5:40 am GMTThis is worrying. Nobody is that stupid so it's more like they don't care about credibility going forward. Like it won't matter.
We have moved way beyond the Skripals case now. Simply put, if US shoots in Syria, Russia will shoot back this time, yes back at US. USS Donald Duck has been placed as a bait to be sent to the bottom of Mediterrenain sea by the Russians, similar to Arizona et al at Pearl Harbour.annamaria , April 10, 2018 at 5:52 am GMTMany dissenter websites are currently under attack by the cyber forces of the Western regimes and Israel, one of them being this one. Another site under attack is my favorite johnhelmer.com. In addition to saying that he is under attack, the current message from John is:
WHEN THE RULE OF LAW WAS DESTROYED IN SALISBURY, LONDON AND THE HAGUE, AND THE RULE OF FRAUD DECLARED IN WASHINGTON, THAT LEAVES ONLY THE RULE OF FORCE IN THE WORLD. THE STAVKA MET IN MOSCOW ON GOOD FRIDAY AND IS READY. THE FOREIGN MINISTRY ANNOUNCED ON SUNDAY "THE GRAVEST CONSEQUENCES". THIS MEANS ONE AMERICAN SHOT AT A RUSSIAN SOLDIER, THEN WE ARE AT WAR. NOT INFOWAR, NOT CYBERWAR, NOT ECONOMIC WAR, NOT PROXY WAR. WORLD WAR.The West is utterly bankrupt, morally as well as financially and we are experiencing the Western remedial plan and actions – war!
"In 2016 an official British government inquiry determined that Bush and Blair had indeed together rushed to war. The Global Establishment has nevertheless rewarded Tony Blair for his loyalty with Clintonesque generosity. He has enjoyed a number of well-paid sinecures and is now worth in excess of $100 million."Blanco Watts , April 10, 2018 at 6:34 am GMT– The character of Blair and the Establishment is well established: Blair is a major war criminal supported by the major war profiteers. His children and grandchildren are a progeny of a horrible criminal.
What is truly amazing is the complacency of the Roman Catholic Church that still has not excommunicated and anathematized the mass murderer. Blair should be haunted and hunted for his crimes against humanity.
With age, Blair's face has become expressively evil. His wife Theresa Cara "Cherie" Blair shows the same acute ugliness coming from her rotten soul of a war profiteer.
The UK is governed by the same Neo-liberal psychotic cabal that runs the US, Israel and France.JR , April 10, 2018 at 7:06 am GMTKeep in mind how long ago all this is:Ronald Thomas West , Website April 10, 2018 at 8:43 am GMT
Skripal was recruited around 1990 and arrested in 2004. Guess that the Russian attitude towards Skripal took the chaos of the 90′s as mitigating circumstances into account.
Skripal served his sentence of only 13 years till 2010 when he was pardoned and given the option to leave. Russia did not revoke Skripal's citizenship. The UK issued Skripal a passport too. On arrival in the UK Skripak was extensively debriefed by UK intelligence services. Skripal has lived for 8 years in the UK now.And now out of the blue this incident nicely dovetailing with May ratcheted up anti Russia language only a few months before this false flag incident and the rapidly failing traction of the Steele/Orbis/MI6 instigated Russia collusion story on the basis of that fake Trump Dossier. By the way Orbis affiliated Steele and Miller have been among Skripal's handlers.
From the Steele dossier lies falling apart to the Skripal lies falling apart to the 'Assad did it' lies falling apart:https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2018/04/08/open-letter-to-die-linke/
^
Paul Craig Roberts is correct when quoting The Saker:
"The Russian view is simple: the West is ruled by a gang of thugs supported by an infinitely lying and hypocritical media while the general public in the West has been hopelessly zombified." -- The Saker
I expect that makes the Russians right
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Apr 11, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Stuck on Zero -> IridiumRebel Tue, 04/10/2018 - 23:16 PermalinkIridiumRebel -> Stuck on Zero Tue, 04/10/2018 - 23:18 PermalinkNo other nation will go to war with the U.S. They are too smart. All they have to do is wait till we burn ourselves out and fight amongst ourselves.
beepbop -> IridiumRebel Tue, 04/10/2018 - 23:23 PermalinkThis is my hope.....
Dutti -> DownWithYogaPants Tue, 04/10/2018 - 23:38 Permalink"the West is ruled by a gang of thugs"
Those THUGS are Jewish Neocons/Zionists/Bolsheviks. They've got the USG in their pockets. They're the HIDDEN HAND .
Let's tell it like it is.
FBaggins -> Dutti Tue, 04/10/2018 - 23:45 PermalinkIt is depressing to see that there are very few people in the MSM speaking out for reason. One of the few ones is Tucker Carlson.
Unfortunately, even among friends and acquaintances, the story about "evil Assad killing Children" is often readily believed.
The US, British etc. taxpayer funded propaganda arm of Islamists, the media trained "white helmets" are delivering videos that look almost as real as Hollywood products and most of the sheeple in the western world don't question their propaganda narrative.
Very sad and disheartening.
Well here you go Dutti. Both Glen Greenwald and Amy Goodman are out there in media land championing the 'truth' for good old Isramerika.
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Apr 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
kao_hsien_chih , 4 years ago
Thank you for the thoughtful reply.David Habakkuk , 4 years agoI agree entirely with your view. In order to make sense of the "purpose" behind actions taken by various political actors, it is necessary to take seriously their worldview and value system. It is not necessary that one should "respect" them or believe them for oneself, but recognize that these do actuate the choices that they do make.
I suppose this might sound like a sort of backhanded compliment, but this is something that the old British were really good at -- and lay behind successful management of the empire.
So, in a different way, were old American political operators, at least when it came to domestic politics, as they had to manage multitudes of groups who had diverse worldviews who didn't take kindly to moral lecturing by politicians.
Nowadays, though, this seems a worldview that many in "western" societies are running low on. Too many people start their argument by asserting their beliefs, why they believe them, and, implicitly, even if not made explicit, why they are right and others should be "persuaded" to believe them (since the "others" are "obviously" irrational.)
Condemning the other, who are "obviously wrong," I suppose, makes people feel better, all the more so if one's own worldview can be justified by the Scripture or "science." (not the science based on logical deduction and empiricism, but something that is vaguely "right" because it "just is.") But that certainly rules out actually dealing with the other side responsibly to accomplish something.
I still feel that the brand of "rationality" that too many people in the West subscribe to is a brand of smug pseudoreligious fanaticism that is itself "irrational." It may be itself "rational," given the context, as much as beliefs in witchcraft might be, but it is not what its believers think it is. When such beliefs clash with other, comparable beliefs, nothing good can come out of such encounters.
kao_hsien_chih,kao_hsien_chih , 4 years ago'One great irony is that, at least among "serious" academics in economics and other social sciences, the only definition of "rational" that is accepted is that there is some purpose behind it.'
This takes me into areas where I get out of my depth.
But the link of 'rationality' to purposive action is certainly very much in keeping with the tradition which goes, through Collingwood, into areas of British anthropology (exmples chosen from limited knowledge, Evans-Pritchard, Wendy James, Paul Dresch.)
An important point, however, is that for action to be 'rational' in this sense, it has, in some manner, to be appropriately calculated to the purposes envisaged. A difficulty lies precisely in the ambiguity about purposes which is implicit in this whole tradition.
So if one of one's basic conception of human purposes is to keep a kind of social order 'on the road', then beliefs which may be 'irrational', in the sense of indefensible in terms of canons of Western science which are, patently 'rational', may have a 'rationality' of their own.
An example is the analysis by Evans-Pritchard of the witchcraft beliefs of the Azande.
Implicit in this is a nightmare possibility which is lurking in a manner which is often hysterical, but not necessarily 'irrational' manner, in a tradition of conservative thought: that what is 'rational' in terms of scientific enquiry may be subversive of what is 'rational' in terms of the need to maintain functioning societies.
One great irony is that, at least among "serious" academics in economics and other social sciences, the only definition of "rational" that is accepted is that there is some [market-related] purpose behind it.Most people who rant about what "social science" says about the universe and how it should be are sophomoric thinkers who don't know what the "science" part of social science is. The tragedy is that they are what the rest of society expects social science to be about, to rant about morality of this or that mode of politics, and not engage in hard headed analysis based on logic and evidence.
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Apr 09, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Babak Makkinejad -> Prince Monolulu , 4 hours ago
Reasonably intelligent people? Like this Iranian woman (in US) whose postings during the war for Aleppo was full of righteous indignation for the rebels. when I told her that the people whose fate she was bemoaning would do many evil things to her as a Shia Iranian woman; she would not hear of it.ceasley7 -> Babak Makkinejad , 2 hours agoCouldn't agree with you more Babak. My dad is a 78 year old Orthopedic physician here in the US. He would be considered intelligent by most people. And he is. Except when it comes to Geopolitics. He believes everything the MSM parrots and I gave up long ago in voicing my opinion to him. It's hopeless. And consider the vast majority of the citizens of my country are far less intelligent than him. In my opinion, the forces that push for war know they are lying and don't care if a small percentage are on to them. They have the microphone and we do not.Prince Monolulu -> Babak Makkinejad , 4 hours agoYes, people like that. Without sufficient domain knowledge, you have no immunity from MSM narratives. And, to acquire that knowledge you need to read non-MSM sources (or know people with first-hand experience).
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Apr 09, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
are we there yet -> DuneCreature Sun, 04/08/2018 - 17:56 Permalink
GreatUncle Sun, 04/08/2018 - 10:51 PermalinkHi, I am from the government. I am here to lie to you. I have so many lies on top of other lies that sometimes they are true. Even the government has lost track. I am not sure if even MIC or Israel knows anymore.
The problem for governments using false flag operations like this is many more people are no longer trusting their own governments and quite rightly so. Human minds are reinforcing the concept of untrustworthy governments that actually lasts far longer than the elected period of time of those who purport to represent the population we now know to be a deceit.
As example, take Blair ex-UK prime minister who concocted the whole Iraq dodgy dossier in the UK who most people I know now call him a war criminal but nobody will put on trial in the Hague. He has not been PM since 2007 but nobody forgets the criminal acts he instigated and supported and will be remembered for a long time for this. So how do you make Blair appear human again to the population?
You can apply this concept to so many elected criminals in the west ... join it up those that rule us are in fact criminals not ordinary people. The psychos rule over us and to them we are no more than dead meat.
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Apr 08, 2018 | www.unz.com
Simon Gächter & Jonathan F. Schulz. Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies. Nature, Letter doi:10.1038/nature17160
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZS0JfOGZQNnBhVkE/view?usp=sharing
The authors argued thus:
Good institutions that limit cheating and rule violations, such as corruption, tax evasion and political fraud are crucial for prosperity and development. Yet, even very strong institutions cannot control all situations that may allow for cheating. Well-functioning societies also require the intrinsic honesty of citizens. Cultural characteristics, such as whether people see themselves as independent or part of a larger collective, that is, how individualist or collectivist a society is, might also influence the prevalence of rule violations due to differences in the perceived scope of moral responsibilities, which is larger in more individualist cultures.
If cheating is pervasive in society and goes often unpunished, then people might view dishonesty in certain everyday affairs as justifiable without jeopardising their self-concept of being honest. Experiencing frequent unfairness, an inevitable by-product of cheating, can also increase dishonesty. Economic systems, institutions and business cultures shape people's ethical values, and can likewise impact individual honesty.
I described Gachter and Schultz's work in April 2016, and thought I could immediately see a problem with the interpretation that the authors placed on the results. Putting forward a different perspective took a few days. Getting that new approach published has taken 2 years. For how long will researchers put up with these absurd delays which impede the prompt assessment of arguments?
http://www.unz.com/jthompson/honestly
The authors of this very interesting study, having revealed the cheats, interpreted the national differences as being due to cultural factors, particularly whether there were institutions in each society which encouraged honesty. Of course, this leaves open why one society would have such institutions and another would not. Culture must come from somewhere. A reasonable hypothesis is that the institutions of a county are built by the people who live there. Here is our reply:
Honesty, rule violation and cognitive ability: A reply to Gächter and Schulz
Heiner Rindermann, David Becker, James Thompson.
Intelligence, Volume 68, May–June 2018, Pages 66–69.https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1Wl5h_3fG8aUwo
Our argument is that both institutions and honesty are determined by the intelligence of people, and that bright people can see the long-term benefits of honesty and of institutions that support honest behaviour. Any institution with a code of conduct leads its members toward probity, and shows prospective applicants what standards are expected of them. However, those institution do not arise randomnly.
Gächter & Schulz assumed that institutional rules affect individual honesty.
We added cognitive ability as further factor explaining national differences.
Stronger effect of IQ (total 0.55) than of rule violation (total −0.34) on honesty.
Stronger effect of IQ (total −0.68) than of honesty (total −0.26) on rule violation.
________________________________________
Abstract
Gächter and Schulz (2016) assumed an effect of institutional rule violation on individual honesty within societies. In this reply we challenge this approach by including a nation's cognitive ability as a further factor for cross-national variations in the prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty. Theoretical considerations, correlational and path analyses show that a nation's cognitive ability level (on average β = |.62|) better explains and predicts honesty and rule violation. While institutional and cultural factors are not unimportant, cognitive factors are more relevant.The paper argues that there is a causal link between intellectual development and moral awareness: the individual process of development represents an advance from cognitive egocentrism to de-centered thinking, from ethical egocentrism to the consideration of the interests and rights of others.
Cognitive ability seems to have the strongest causal effect on the honesty of a society:
The same pattern holds true if you assume that social levels of honesty intermediate individual levels of honesty as shown by rule violation.
Either way, it seems that intelligence explains whether some societies cheat at games and cheat in real life.
KA , March 23, 2018 at 2:15 pm GMT
Society rots from top and doesn't matter who is at the top. It still remains valid even when the so called least intellectually developed honest poor people get shafted for hundred of years by so called high IQ nations who bring cheating,dishonesty,and violations of existing laws and destruction of existing institutions without replacing them nationwide. Often these newly created institutions are nothing but vehicle to whitewash the corrupting and corrupted new system.res , March 23, 2018 at 3:18 pm GMTPublic moral status has a lot to do with corruption at the top -both local and international in these days of neoliberalism and post -colonization. It sounds painful and hurtful though.
Interesting work! I am amazed academics have the patience to deal with such a long lag time for letting arguments play out.James Thompson , Website March 23, 2018 at 5:28 pm GMTIs there any chance of you publishing a scatter plot matrix of the variables you used and/or the data itself?
Do you have the correlation matrix for your variables? By any chance did you try single and multiple variable models to try to predict rule violation from the other variables? It would be interesting to see how much variance an assortment of those models explained.
Has anyone explored the idea of "cheater fraction" (analogous to smart fraction) to explain dishonesty in societies?
@resSantoculto , March 23, 2018 at 8:17 pm GMTCheater fraction sounds interesting. I assume that if it is higher than 16% then the society in question is worth avoiding, if at all possible.
Honesty can be anything, it's look like obedience to authority instead true or pure honestySantoculto , March 23, 2018 at 8:34 pm GMT@SantocultoSantoculto , March 23, 2018 at 8:37 pm GMTI mean, based on proto-concept used.
So ashekl jews [on very avg or not] are the exception in collective terms **Miro23 , March 23, 2018 at 11:59 pm GMTIt's an interesting question. Some years ago The Economist did a "European Honest Test " leaving a wallet with a fair amount of cash in it (but also including clear contact details of the owner), in capital cities around Europe.Godfree Roberts , Website March 24, 2018 at 12:31 am GMTThe test was to see how many wallets were returned – and they found that the Scandinavians returned almost all of them, and the Italians returned almost none – with a clear North/South gradient in the results.
By coincidence, at about the same time, I found a wallet beside some rubbish bins with € 400 in it and some credit cards (one from my own bank). So on my next visit, I told them about it and soon got a call from the owner ( a Spanish carpenter working in Germany). His reaction was 1) to check that the money was still in the wallet 2) say that not many people would return a wallet with € 400 in it 3) leave 2 bottles of wine at my front gate.
I checked this reaction with my secretary at the time, and asked her what she would have done, with the answer that it would be a "Regalo de Dios" (Gift of God), i.e. it was not going to be returned to the owner, so there seems to be some anecdotal evidence for the result.
China's position on the Intrinsic Honesty chart is puzzling both at the macro level (remarkably honest, competent policy-makers) and at the individual level (above average IQ).James Thompson , Website March 24, 2018 at 8:19 am GMTThe Edelman Corporation, which has a lock on international surveys of personal and institutional honesty has consistently found the Chinese to be among the most trusting people on earth, as have World Values Surveys in their own, independent polls of the Chinese.
The source of the discrepancy appears to be the source of the data: "a n indicator of political rights by Freedom House that measures the democratic quality of a country's political practices; the size of a country's shadow economy as a proxy for tax evasion; and corruption as measured by the World Bank's Control of Corruption Index (Supplementary Methods)".
Relying on George Soros' Freedom House for information about China is akin to relying on the neighborhood fox to keep an eye on your chickens while you go on vacation. Garbage in, garbage out
@Miro23Anonymous [388] Disclaimer , March 24, 2018 at 10:30 am GMTRegalado.
I would rate Japan pretty high for getting things returned, but this ethic has eroded over the past three or four decades.Dieter Kief , March 24, 2018 at 11:38 am GMTAlso, in the past you'd see adult males scolding unrelated misbehaving teens in public, who'd slink away with their tails between their legs. This you do not currently see: men are less masculine and assertive and some teens at least are more beligerant.
I think, David Perkins' findings about high IQ-people being also very tribal would make for a nice addendum here, to better understand how IQ and honesty are related.Ilya G Poimandres , March 24, 2018 at 12:12 pm GMTI refer to Jonathan Haidt's argument, that he bases explicitly on Perkins' findings, that because of the tendency of high IQ-people to be even more tribal than the lower IQ ranks, ist is so crucial, to understand with J. S. Mill's On Liberty (and I add: with Kant and – – the Kantian Habermas' "Theory of Communicative Action"), that the core achievement of modernity is the institutionalization of disconformation in the democratic/liberal rational discourse and liberal public sphere (universities, the media, etc.).
Here's Jonathan Haidt, referring to Perkins and Mill to make clear, how important the institutionalization of disconformation actually is:
Correlation≠causation. Maybe honesty leads to brighter minds. Is it your knowing the right answer that makes you follow it, or is it you looking at the situation, as it is, considering evidence and proof, and getting the right answer through correct deductive reasoning, which is then to be followed? You can't be honest and act ideologically, because by definition you follow your observations of the world, not your ideas of the world. An honest person is bound to direct observation, an intelligent person is not. Honesty is probably primary to an accurate understanding of the world.Wizard of Oz , March 24, 2018 at 1:57 pm GMT@James ThompsonWizard of Oz , March 24, 2018 at 2:12 pm GMTI think that 16 per cent is a bit arbitrary. In a class or caste dominated society you might, if of a class which can choose to avoid countries, decide that it really doesn't matter if your butler and housekeeper have to terrify the lower orders to stop them ripping you off (and the butler and housekeeper have enough relations they want to place in employment to keep them to the rules as to how much they cheat you).
@Miro23Wizard of Oz , March 24, 2018 at 2:41 pm GMTI recently lost my wallet for a short time in a supermarket-plus-other-shops complex as I wheeled my trolley to the car park. I thought my pocket had been picked so went to a nearby poluce station to see if they could accelerate access to CCTV. Mr Plod was useless and unhelpful. (Fortunately I didn't start cancelling credit cards immediately as he pretty well demanded). Back in the shopping centre I was directed to a caretaker's office where a 30 ish man of Pakistani origin had my wallet that had fallen out of my pocket as I went up a ramp. He had taken the trouble to count the cash and wrap it separately with a note on it that the amount was $915 or whatever. I never bothered to count it myself or even unwrap it for several days. What does that say about the standard of civilisation in one of Australia's biggest cities?
As anyone who has seen how inadequate religion is today to form moral young people may have thought, the obvious starting point is to ask oneself how I bring up my children and what moral rules I rub in (preferably by example as well as preaching). One knows children are not going to be cunning ruthless sophisticates by nature – unless psychopaths – and will not benefit from being taught to think immediately how they can get away with some theft or lie. So you bring them up with rules which will help to make sure they are both trusted and trustworthy – seeing you return the small amount of change over paid for exsmple to rub in the message about rules they should still be obeying without thought when they have children. Morality is about the customs of the tribe, its mores, and children are rarely done any sort of favour by not being trained to be strictly moral (even if taught Christian forgiveness, especially for the "poor in spirit"). However ..James Thompson , Website March 24, 2018 at 4:19 pm GMTIt occurs to me that the place of intelligence in this may extend to what hss been called Divergent Thinking (does this overlap with Lateral Thinking? Or imagination?)
A quick imaginative laterally thinking brain may think of several ways some dishonest subterfuge may go wrong almost st the moment temptation arises. So honesty for him he quickly concludes is the best policy. And so down the speculative path on which little evidence is to be found. After all what is one to make of the arrogant lawyer that one reads about in the big tax case who thought arrogantly he could get away with something and the Mr Plods of the tax office would never sus him out and prove his wrongdoing to a court?@Wizard of OzMiro23 , March 24, 2018 at 8:06 pm GMTI was guided by my recollection of the modelling of neighbourhood crime risk, but it is a sliding scale, I agree. I assumed, years ago, that at the 16-20% level one would begin to notice a difference from base rate. See, in this particular example, Fig 2 and Fig 3
@Wizard of OzWizard of Oz , March 25, 2018 at 1:52 am GMTWhat does that say about the standard of civilization in one of Australia's biggest cities?
It doesn't really say anything. You need some standardized parameters and a reasonable sample size. Then you can draw some conclusions and assess the level of accuracy – like The Economist did with their wallet test – quite a good experiment.
However , at the individual level, a continuing positive outcome would be the wallet owner saying thank you, and being more inclined to return the favor one day.
Yep. Fair enough. (All of it).Wizard of Oz , March 25, 2018 at 2:08 am GMT@James ThompsonJonathan Mason , March 25, 2018 at 3:24 am GMTIt occurs to me that 5 per cent might be a horrible worrying prospect if you, as a lawyer or doctor, thought it applied to the five or ten thousand you might come across as fellow professionals in your city or state. But then it could be that you rarely gossip about others and only regard as liars and cheats those who have done it to you (apart from the few who have been busted for insurance fraud). Maybe 16 per cent sometimes fudge or fiddle something but you don't know so you remain happily (and honestly) complacent, and proud of your profession.
More intelligent people may be more adept at calculating the possible negative consequences of personal dishonesty and they are likely to have more to lose. However, put them in a corporate situation and no doubt they will be as gung-ho as anyone to figure out ways to rip off customers.Drapetomaniac , March 25, 2018 at 4:13 am GMT@Miro23szopen , March 25, 2018 at 8:57 am GMTI only look at the lost wallet in one light: it's not my property.
One of the factors I consider when looking at whether a person is a member of mankind or humankind – property.
@Miro23szopen , March 25, 2018 at 9:07 am GMTI've lost a wallet once and then I was visited home by shop owner, who carefuly tracked where I could live by using data from the wallet. She wanted nothing in exchange.
On university, I also was also given back a wallet once; I got back also a cellphone (which was quite expansive at the time) I left somewhere few years ago.
OTOH once I left a wallet with cash at university and it was not returned.
So, here you are my anecdotal evidence from Poland: three wallets and one cellphone, one time not returned, two plus one times returned.
@James ThompsonSvigor , March 25, 2018 at 9:28 am GMT"my recollection", " _I_ assumed, years ago" ??? Does that mean La Griffe du Lion is you?!?
animalogic , March 25, 2018 at 9:54 am GMTMore intelligent people may be more adept at calculating the possible negative consequences of personal dishonesty and they are likely to have more to lose. However, put them in a corporate situation and no doubt they will be as gung-ho as anyone to figure out ways to rip off customers.
The purpose of the institution in question is to "figure out ways to rip off customers." It's neither dishonesty nor cheating. The trick is not to have a culture that puts corporate/employer concerns first.
Obviously smarter people are going to tend to be more moral; you need to know what the fuck morality and ethics even are, and assess the circumstances, before you can make your decisions. Retards can't even get to the point of making a decision. Stupid people are great at missing the moral implications of their behavior. Smart people are the ones who need to come up with rationalizations.
All "honesty" begins with the self. Lying to your self, about your self is the basis of delusion andanimalogic , March 25, 2018 at 10:02 am GMT
in-authenticity. How can you know reality when reality is constantly reinterpreted to fit the needs of a run-away ego ?
The general point, that intelligence is linked to long term thinking seems sound to me. Dishonestly is often about immediate gratification: a question of gaining or avoiding immediate pleasure/displeasure. Honesty is a strategy that "pays off" over the long term.
Honesty, or truth telling (in so far as one can) is also a factor in an Honour culture. The liar is a "base" person, a person who has no sense (or no care about) their own social (self conscious) standing. Honesty also has a close correlation with such things as "loyalty", "promising" etc.@Jonathan Masonanimalogic , March 25, 2018 at 10:06 am GMTOh yes !
That's the joy of the corporate structure: no one is responsible. EVERYONE acts because they "owe" obligations to another. (Executives to higher executives; Higher executives to the Board; the Board to Shareholders) Personal, moral responsibility becomes entirely lost in this deliberately confected ethical melange. The Large organisation is the perfect environment for crafting crimes safe from individual consequence.@Wizard of Ozanimalogic , March 25, 2018 at 10:25 am GMTIt says you are damn lucky. If I had $ 915 in my wallet I'd super-glue the damn thing to my chest. Rather lose a couple layers of skin than that kind of dosh.
@Ilya G Poimandresm___ , March 25, 2018 at 10:46 am GMTSelf honesty is a long tortuous process.
Ideology is a relief: it removes the constant anxiety of needing to "question".
Science is -- should be -- the strictest form of public honesty.
Its frightening how many reports we so often get now about the systemic "dishonesty" in the scientific realm. (Dishonesty driven usually (not exclusively) by the demands of corporate profits)Sublime opportunism, entwined inside collective incentives, converges into supreme ethics, moral behaviour.EliteCommInc. , March 25, 2018 at 1:35 pm GMT
Sadly, the convergence is beyond the gradients of our elites.
The why of hard-wired human elites as are, cannot transcend to long term survival strategies, and society resembles a chicken coop.To add another factor randomly, embedded into the above, it does not matter, how intelligence plays out between individuals, because individual opportunity feeds back into a pool of extended family, group, tribe, waves of culture and ad-hocs, lastingly and durably not encased in cognitive ambition, itself a consequence of cognitive genetic effort. Colleges and universities worldwide are a better example of petty games.
The "truth" and other concepts of "honesty" are a psychological, relative variant, depending on context. The agnostic concept of real and it's pursuit is unknown to our archaic, analogue brain without the preposition of a limited context, opportune in the now.
I would be interested in how honesty was explicated. And the valuation of cross cultural rules that note the value of said rule equally across cultures. Now perhaps, these are fully layed out in the study, but I was unable to access the sight provided.James Thompson , Website March 25, 2018 at 1:57 pm GMTI would also be interested how the study rated honesty as a national value. Thus far the model looks to be applied by survey data. As I was reading I kept thinking of the multiple national scandals in which dishonesty played a central role. Once one figures out the definition and meaning of what constitutes honesty among individuals and or societal groups as agreed upon by those groups, then a model of measuring said honesty is built. This is essential because the article indicates that the difference in variable is largely cultural. So I have to conclude that a standard was established that recognizes what honesty is across cultures.
Because even withing culture, honesty varies. If intelligence is the key demarcation than one would expect those groupings with supposedly higher intelligence to have a higher degree of honesty. But again, even withing culture an agreed upon understanding of honesty is required.
Assuming intelligence matters to some set post of morality, in this case honesty -- could the model replicate supposed intelligence to honesty withing a given system in which the rules are more readily identifiable and agreed upon. Assuming that the students at the US military academies rank higher in intelligence than say the students at any comparable sized university would the students among the military academies rank higher or lower as to the being or practicing honesty. Considering the value placed on meritocratic institutions such as Harvard when measuring that intelligence grouping demonstrate a higher degree of honesty than a comparable public university.Assuming we agree what the rules are,
"The paper argues that there is a causal link between intellectual development and moral awareness: the individual process of development represents an advance from cognitive egocentrism to de-centered thinking, from ethical egocentrism to the consideration of the interests and rights of others"
it could be interesting whether said tested data is measuring awareness verses adherence.
Here are a bare list of some developed nation's honesty issues regarding rule adherence.
http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Scientific-misconduct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating (rare use of Wikipedia)
https://phys.org/news/2014-11-business-culture-banking-industry-favors.html
Again assuming that the players agree on what the rules are across countries or cultures a comparison of honesty across varying fields as to scandals and or practices might tell us something regarding the impact of intelligence to honesty across said cultures.
Found the article interesting and just expressed to thoughts on the read.
@szopenThreeCranes , March 26, 2018 at 1:25 am GMTNo, someone else.
Well, I'll speak (honestly) from the other perspective.Mishra , March 26, 2018 at 7:14 am GMTI used to ride my bike of a Sunday morning on a scenic route that boasted a few first class restaurants. Twice I found wallets lying on the pavement just downstream from these establishments. Apparently, the owners, a little tipsy, had set their wallets on top of their cars while they fumbled for their keys and then drove off.
The first I took to the local police station. The second I took home and called the owner (who lived in Canada) using their credit card number to pay for the call and left a message reassuring her that her wallet (and money) was safe and sound, not to worry (because I knew she would, having lost it outside her home country). I didn't want to take it to the police because I figured they'd begin to suspect me of stealing the wallets if I kept showing up with them.
She and her husband drove down to a prearranged place to meet me for the return. She was very grateful.
The owner of the first lost wallet called me and asked if they could donate $100 in my name to my favorite charity.
Another time I found a perfectly nice fleece-lined, leather aviation jacket lying in the road just outside a golf course. Luckily there was a receipt from his fee for 18 holes in the pocket. I called him and arranged to return the coat. We met. He treated me as though I had stolen the jacket from his car. Not so much as a thank you.
I don't know if I'm inclined to honesty because I'm bright, it's just that I've lost my wallet in the past and it's such a pain in the butt that I feel sorry for anyone who shares that fate. Credit cards, ID etc. the money is the least of it.
Honesty and trust are just two more archaic notions to be discarded along the way toward our new third-world future.The Alarmist , March 26, 2018 at 11:08 am GMTJackOH , March 26, 2018 at 12:20 pm GMT"Good institutions that limit cheating and rule violations, such as corruption, tax evasion and political fraud are crucial for prosperity and development."
I'd argue that these institutions derive from a well-functioning, high-trust society and are rarely a catalyst for more honesty in other societies.
As for the connection to intelligence, look at India and China to test your hypothesis.
@ThreeCranesSantoculto , March 26, 2018 at 10:53 pm GMT"Another time I found a perfectly nice fleece-lined, leather aviation jacket lying in the road just outside a golf course. Luckily there was a receipt from his fee for 18 holes in the pocket. I called him and arranged to return the coat. We met. He treated me as though I had stolen the jacket from his car. Not so much as a thank you."
TC, yep. I found a wallet stuffed with cash and credit cards on the campus of our local state university. A campus policeman was nearby so I turned the wallet over to him. He cautioned me that people who recover lost or abandoned property are sometimes blamed by the owners of that property for any real or imagined loss, damage, or inconvenience to the owners.
My rough rule of thumb is that if the property can be readily linked to an owner, I return it. If not, and the property has trivial value, say under USD $100, it's a judgment call. Found a few bottles of liquor, seals unbroken, in a trash can. Kept them. Found an untagged but well-kept dog once, which I judged to have strong sentimental value to its owner, so I placed an ad in a local newspaper, got a response, and returned the dog. His children were very grateful.
@Mishradux.ie , March 27, 2018 at 7:38 am GMTMost of corruption in third world countries came back from the top of social hierarchy, i mean, higher IQ.
The Gachter experiment on rule violation is based on die throwing in sterile experimental conditions where the financial incentives are trivial and more seriously there are no competition between the participants and there are no mechanism to identify specific individual cheating and no resulting blemish to ones' reputation. So how much of that are relevant to real life situations?Peter Frost , Website March 27, 2018 at 1:37 pm GMTReal life cheating data where there are great advantage to be gained and also with consequences that might affect ones future are more appropriate to be studied. One aspect of the OECD TALIS project dealt with real life cheating in 8645 schools and over 100K? teachers globally,
"TALIS 2013 Results: An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning – © OECD 2014″
http://www.oecd.org/education/talis/
Table 2.20.Web. School climate – Frequency of student-related factors (cheating)
Percentage of lower secondary education teachers whose school principal reports that the following student behaviours occurred 1 Never, 2 Rarely, 3 Monthly, 4 Weekly, 5 Daily in their schools.Answers 3, 4 and 5 are considered to be serious indicator of cheating in schools. With the intention to mash the TALIS data with the PISA 2012 data, the primary school data were excluded.
Many popular pre-conceived ideas about cheating in schools were not proven by the data. In fact considerable efforts were needed to find any significant statistical trend. For example at the national levels cheating were not correlated to the average PISA scores, fraction of top or bottom PISA scores, teachers' practice of spliting the class to teach and to test part of the class differently, etc.
The factor that show statistical significance is the proxy factor for competition or meritocracy. Countries have adopted various shades of "no child left behind" policy and that is reflected in the age profile of the class. In country that practice strict "no child left behind", the students are automatically promoted to the next grade in the next academic year regardless of the ability of the students with the results that the student will be exclusive of the same 'academic age'. When meritocracy is practiced, poorly performing students might have to repeat the same grade one or more times resulting in 'academic age' distribution in class. Since the PISA project has data of percentage of 15 yo for that grade, the idea can be tested. To be polite, the marked datapoints are not labelled. Two countries separated by a narrow channel can have drastically different cheating levels.
Q32CheatRpt = -0.404*PctGrade +56.76; #n=32; Rsq=0.1891; p=0.01287 *
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=axb52h&s=9
The school cheating levels is statistically significant to be linearly dependent on the percent of the 15 yo in class. The levels of cheating is dependent on the level of meritocracy practiced. With automatic promotion to the next academic grade there is little need for the students to cheat. The governments are doing the cheating instead. The out-criers of cheating in other countries do not realized that they are in countries with lesser meritocracy.
The paper argues that there is a causal link between intellectual development and moral awareness: the individual process of development represents an advance from cognitive egocentrism to de-centered thinking, from ethical egocentrism to the consideration of the interests and rights of others.J.Ross , Website March 27, 2018 at 11:48 pm GMTThis is what Jean Piaget concluded from his studies of Swiss children. He believed that empathy was an integral part of a child's intellectual development. It doesn't follow, however, that there is some kind of genetic linkage between intellectual capacity and the capacity for empathy. These are two different mental traits. It's more likely that the same selection pressure that favored an increase in intellectual capacity also favored an increase in the capacity for empathy.
It's impossible to build an advanced society unless most of its members have a high capacity for both intelligence and empathy. On an individual level, however, high intelligence can co-exist with low empathy. There have been many cases of ruthless sociopaths who are very intelligent and yet totally self-centered. Such people can be very successful as long as they aren't too numerous. Otherwise, they'll destroy the very society that makes their existence possible.
An advanced society requires a combination of high intelligence and high empathy, although this may come about in different ways. In northwest Europeans, a high intellectual capacity co-exists with high capacities for guilt proneness and affective empathy. In East Asians, a high intellectual capacity co-exists with high capacities for cognitive empathy and pro-social behavior. In other words, there is more emphasis in East Asian societies on learning correct moral rules.
@Peter FrostJames Thompson , Website March 28, 2018 at 9:27 am GMTI am not following the credit gift of empathy to East Asians, or the connection of morality and intelligence to the obeying of complex rules, because of the stolen oranges in the Book of Rites and the counterfeit antiques that impressed the Emperor. The Chinese literally explain how to lie in their moral teachings. "Lying" is right there among the morality-guaranteeing complex rules. There are examples in the Talmud I will not specify, or regard as unreasonable, but I will note that nobody saw the Talmud as less than a downright complex system of rules. Some African tribes have rules so stringent (eg, no wet dreams) that nobody could possibly obey them. If anything I would expect that systems of compelled obedience to complex rules guarantee dishonesty. The only alternative is Billy Budd getting the captain to take his side.
What I would start with is power. In China, even in periods of decay or civil war, power is always centralized to a degree only approached in Europe by a few temporarily competent monarchs, and with an effectiveness that has never been accomplished in Europe. I think this and not math scores or cheap shoes is the basis of the elite adoration of the Han. The man who observes that a cow is not a nightingale, or that two and two are four, when the opposite is being claimed by an officer of the government (be it communist, imperial, or partisan) is an idiot. He, and probably his family, maybe his hamlet, will be exterminated with efficiency the European Enlightened Despots could only dream of. Truth, insofar as it is objective, is the hair of Liberty. It cannot exist at all except in the empty space left by the rolling back of power. The trick here is embracing negativism instead of falling into the positivistic trap. We in the West accidentally stumbled across Liberty and Truth and Science, not because we are good, objectively not because we are smarter, but because we just couldn't get that mandate of heaven thing together, despite the unambiguous desires of numerous monarchs. I predict that this will be an unpopular answer but it will not go away.
(but the Japanese are massively more ethical than the Chinese. Yeah. And they are also all but European, especially in a lot of their political history. They dreamed of imitating Chinese centralization but never came close.)
Also, how soon can we expect an update to that graph, now plotting IQ (or PISA, or tetris scores, etc) against something like the Transparency Index? Apologies if this has already been done and I missed it.@dux.ieSteve Sailer , Website March 30, 2018 at 6:27 am GMTthanks for this interesting additional measure of cheating.
Personally, I have a hard time understanding scams. I would make a terrible white collar criminal.Wally , March 30, 2018 at 7:03 am GMT@Jonathan MasonBiff , March 30, 2018 at 7:31 am GMTGot examples?
Those studies are bunk because everybody lies:Tbbh , March 30, 2018 at 8:19 am GMTWhat can we learn about ourselves from the things we ask online? US data scientist Seth Stephens‑Davidowitz analysed anonymous Google search results, uncovering disturbing truths about our desires, beliefs and prejudices
@Santocultojilles dykstra , March 30, 2018 at 11:47 am GMTI almost thought I had found a thread on unz where somebody didn't mention joos. Thanks for not disappointing me.
Have no idea where the data come from, but scandals with Dutch politicians seem to increase all the time, most with Rutte's VVD.Wizard of Oz , March 30, 2018 at 12:39 pm GMTCondemned politicians for fraud etc., a novelty.
But until now just one behind bars.But about honesty, our prime minister Rutte is nicknamed Pinocchio for his lies.
The VVD quickly rid itself of the chairman Keiser, who manipulated himself into possession of the crematoria of the organisation he advised.
The Dutch tax authority presented him with a claim of € 12 million, our FIOD, the authority for fiscal crimes is investigating him.Condemned business men for fraud, more than we like.
Even the former Philips CEO Boonstra was condemned for trade with foreknowledge.
Solicitors also are not above suspicion any more.At the recent municipality elections measures were applied to prevent criminals being elected.
Unreliable policemen, also a novelty, the first serious conviction was a short time ago, he sold information from police data bases to criminals.
How he was not discovered earlier, unbelievable, police salaries are insufficient for driving Porsches.Your last paragraph is ill timed and at best insensitive in the opinion of this Australian who once got some pleasure from the game of cricketanarchyst , March 30, 2018 at 12:48 pm GMTCatholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen said it best: "It is much easier for an educated person to rationalize evil".ANON [436] Disclaimer , March 30, 2018 at 1:01 pm GMT
All one has to do is look at abortion supporters who insist that abortion merely removes "a clump of cells", when they damn well know better, that it is HUMAN LIFE that they are destroying.
The old "ends justifies the means" excuse also comes into play, which is used by communist societies to purge millions of those who oppose them, not unlike the purges in the old Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist "paradises".
I would state that it is easier for an educated person to rationalize evil–this including dishonesty@ThreeCranesANON [436] Disclaimer , March 30, 2018 at 1:06 pm GMTDo I detect a matter of class? The golfer seems not to have been a gentleman belonging to a golf club where proper behaviour was de rigeur, very likely passed from father, uncle and club pro to son. The sort of chap who pays green fees could be a wannabe upwardly mobile agent for subdivided swamp land
@ThreeCranesTG , March 30, 2018 at 1:12 pm GMTPS I gave up golf after my father died 20+ years ago. Not so much that I couldn't match his ethical standards but that after two heart attacks and hip replacements he was still a scratch golfer and all I could do was occasionally outdrive him if my slice or pull allowed.
Interesting post. Some additional thoughts.Cindy , March 30, 2018 at 2:37 pm GMT1. Perhaps smart people are just better at not getting caught?
2. Overall, there is one major factor in the honesty of a society, and that is poverty. When an overpopulated third-world society is crushed into misery, when people cannot earn a half-way decent living – or indeed, any living – through honest effort, eventually they come to cheat. This has been demonstrated in all cultures and all races.
Does integrity promote prosperity? Surely. But the reverse is if anything more powerful: poverty promotes corruption and nepotism. For people to behave honorably, yes there must be a culture of this, but it must also be the case that behaving honorably is not cutting your own throat. Because few people are saints.
@JackOHAnonymous [739] Disclaimer , March 30, 2018 at 3:13 pm GMT"Found a few bottles of liquor, seals unbroken, in a trash can. "
Dumpster-diving is a different thing than keeping lost goods. I think you're *morally* in the clear, there, even if sorely lacking in judgement. This doesn't seem very wise. Did it not occur to you that they were probably in the TRASH for a reason? Probably not poisonous or anything, since the seals were on. Probably some alcoholic decided to quit drinking. But do you want to take the chance that this wasn't a bootleg batch full of lead? Obviously the answer was yes. Your butt, I reckon
We have been flooded here at the University of Chicago by Mainland/Communist Chinese students. There are lots of accusations that the Chinese Communist government assists these students by cheating, getting other English language proficient students to take the English part of the SAT tests.Twodees Partain , March 30, 2018 at 3:23 pm GMTThere appear to be lots and lots of Mainland Chinese/Communist China students here who supposedly aced the English SAT test but can't seem to speak English.
@Miro23Willem , March 30, 2018 at 4:06 pm GMT"like The Economist did with their wallet test – quite a good experiment."
But, The Economist is hardly a bastion of truth. I would tend to dismiss their entire story of the wallet experiment as a fabrication, having caught their writers in so many lies.
I interpreted the Simon Gächter graph as follows: the more money a country has, the more honest the citizens are.jacques sheete , March 30, 2018 at 5:05 pm GMTPerhaps one should do an experiment and make countries like Tanzania as rich as e.g. The Netherlands, and then do the comparisons.
Same applies to IQ.
denk , March 30, 2018 at 5:36 pm GMTDo Brighter Minds Incline to Honesty?
Possibly.
But certainly that accounts for the fact that politicians are dull, ignorant, dissemblers at best.
In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law; and, if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by which they acquired it. They often endeavour, therefore, not only by fraud and falsehood, the ordinary and vulgar arts of intrigue and cabal; but sometimes by the perpetration of the most enormous crimes, by murder and assassination, by rebellion and civil war, to supplant and destroy those who oppose or stand in the way of their greatness.
Adam Smith, Essays Pt I, Sec III, Chap III. ed. Joseph Black and James Hutton (London: Alex. Murray & Son, 1869). 3/30/2018. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2721#Smith_Essays1649_206
Uk, the perpetrator of Iraq WMD and the current Russiagate, a more 'ethical' country than China ?jilles dykstra , March 30, 2018 at 5:50 pm GMTWhat a joke !
@Willemjilles dykstra , March 30, 2018 at 5:53 pm GMTHonesty to me seems a cultural phenomenon.
Once people get away with dishonesty, others think 'why not me ?'.The Dutch erosion, in my recollection, already began in the seventies, with leftist people, at the time social democrats.
It was said then 'thinking left, filling pockets at the right'.
People as my father, life long socialists, left the party in great numbers.
It took a long time for THE socialist party, PvdA, to disappear, until the last parliamentary elections.
The self destruction had much to do with EU support, socialism is at odds with globalisation, even within the EU.Few in the USA will have followed all the French scandals before the last presidential elections.
Even Macron was accused of not declaring all his possessions.
And indeed, I also cannot understand how he spent or lost the millions he got while working for the Rothschild bank.Another well known politician, presidential candidate, cannot now remember the name, disappeared after gifts for suits for some € 50.000 were published, there was also a very expensive watch, the job his wife had, what she in fact did, nobody understands, and the temporary jobs for his children.
When one sees the small castle where the family lives one understands that he could not buy his suits himself.Now at last there seems to be sufficient proof against Sarkozy.
Now many French presidents were persecuted after their immunity ended, when they no longer were president.
But the frauds etc. they seem to have perpetrated seem worse and worse, in the Sarko case, intimidating a judge, among other things.
When Hollande will be persecuted, I wonder.
He had a reputation for sacking editors in chief.@denkJackOH , March 30, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMTAsk Ghandi, alas he does not live, when Britain was an ethical country.
Just a few years ago, in BBCW Hard Talk, I saw an Indian minister getting quite angry 'the British did not have to teach the Indians anything'.@Cindydenk , March 30, 2018 at 6:19 pm GMTCindy, both gut and butt survived my "rescue" hooch. I did some due diligence: examined the bottles, carefully tasted the contents, etc. My guess was a domestic quarrel in the parking garage over the high-end vodka and liqueurs, perhaps over someone's drinking problem, and the quarrel was settled by chucking the booze.
" . . . [S]orely lacking in judgment." Not really. My judgment turned out to be okay, because I was informed by the totality of the circumstances and then made my call. Had the booze been low-end stuff found in an unfamiliar location, etc., I might have judged differently.
BTW-I didn't dumpster-dive. The booze was clearly visible at the top of the trash can.
@jilles dykstraAnother Realist , March 30, 2018 at 6:24 pm GMTHow did they measure such 'honesty index' ?
Placing 100 wallets in a park and observe how many are returned to the owners ?But when the anglos lie, they always lie big time !
Goebel famously oberved .
The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous
Waging wars by false pretexts surely is the highest form of duplicity ?
They dont call them perfidious albions for nuthin you know !How does the author explain the link between the supposed highest IQ group – the Jews, and their reputation for utmost dishonesty, greed and lust throughout history? Same goes for the Chinese.Joe Wong , March 30, 2018 at 8:18 pm GMTPropensity for Honesty is the biggest reason why we need to restrict immigration from low trust cultures, i.e. all 3rd world countries. It's why they're 3rd world, because they are low trust, everyone is dishonest from the top down, the few honest ones are called "stupid" and get ripped off left and right. The more we import from these cultures, the more dishonest our society will become, this includes all of Asia, Latin America, Middle East, Africa, Southern & Eastern Europe esp. Russia. The only truly honest people in the world are Northwestern Protestant Europeans, and maybe the Japanese. All other groups are dishonest.
@resjacques sheete , March 30, 2018 at 9:18 pm GMTInteresting work? This article is a pure misuse of statistics, a fabrication and a classic work of evil minded Eurocentrist attempting to give a new lease of life to their declining rotten Eurocentrism in facing of the rising progressive, peaceful, and pragmatic East.
Look at the graph, its racist Eurocentrism is glaring, all the Western nations are on the good side while rest of the world on the bad side. History has shown all those on the good side are liars, cheaters, murderers, bandits, and pirates, while those on the bad side are the victims of those perpetrators on the good side. The missing of the USA in the chart makes this article an unapologetic white supremacy lie.
To study the link between brightness and honesty, it should pull data from the same pool of population who are in the same environment, i.e. within a nation, then we even can study whether cognitive ability, intellectual development, moral awareness, culture factor, and institutions have any effect on honesty and their relationships.
Besides in spite of being bright, and having cognitive ability, intellectual development, moral awareness, culture factor and strong institutions, the West still bombs, kills and waterboards others on the fabricated phantom allegations as humanitarian intervention without showing remorse; and recently the West lied about the poisoning episode in UK, and brought the world to the edge of anther world war crisis, those evidences prove the Western societies are not honest despite the qualities they processed as prerequisite for honesty, it seems it proves the West is either hypocritical or innate psychopathic.
@jilles dykstrajacques sheete , March 30, 2018 at 9:39 pm GMTAsk Ghandi, alas he does not live, when Britain was an ethical country.
Exactly. What a pack of criminals. They were much worse and for a longer period of time, than what they accused the Nazis of doing.
Churchill refused to divert supplies away from already well-supplied British troops at the same time he allegedly blocked American and Canadian ships from delivering aid to India either. Nor would he allow the Indians to help themselves: the colonial government forbade the country from using its own ships or currency reserves to help the starving masses. Meanwhile, London pushed up the price of grain with hugely inflated purchases, making it unaffordable for the dying and destitute. Most-chillingly of all, when the government of Delhi telegrammed to tell him people were dying, Churchill allegedly only replied to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet.
If all this is true -- and documents support it -- then Winston Churchill may well have starved to death as many innocent people as Stalin did in the Ukrainian genocide. Could the man who held out against Hitler really be capable of such an atrocity? Judging by the rest of this list, it wouldn't be surprising.
https://listverse.com/2014/02/04/10-evil-crimes-of-the-british-empire/
The honest and bright Brits are responsible for starvation in prison camps decades before the Nazis were supposed to have done their thing.:lavoisier , Website March 30, 2018 at 9:56 pm GMTPicture of Brit camp victim (Boer War) according to the article linked above.:
@ANONJoe Wong , March 30, 2018 at 10:33 pm GMTI cannot play golf without committing a certain amount of larceny. In my mind a mulligan is a reasonable option to excuse a particularly poorly played shot. And I have been known to sweeten my lie on the not rare occasion, which, of course, is a form of lying.
I have often wondered if my ease at dishonesty on the links might suggest a propensity towards darker deeds?
And don't even ask me about gimme putts. That for sure must reflect a lower intelligence!
@James ThompsonSollipsist , March 30, 2018 at 11:08 pm GMTWho decides who cheats or being dishonesty? Is misleading advertising cheating? Is empty campaign promises cheating? Is abusing legal loopholes cheating? Is putting one's self-interest ahead of the ones they supposed to serve cheating? Is price fixing cheating? Are cartels of all kind cheating? Are selective reporting, wrongful labelling, and spreading ideology cheating? . . .
Mind you, the people involved in the above activities are all bright, well educated, intelligent, having strong institutions, within well-functioning societies, and a sense of moral responsibilities too, would they be more than 16% in the western societes?
The assumptions behind this are so fragile and unsupportable.Art , March 30, 2018 at 11:48 pm GMTHonesty, as with most of the Judeo-Christian values, largely serves to keep the compliant majority self-correcting while the predatory and parasitic top and bottom of society maintain a more productive relativistic approach – long term dishonesty for the elites, short term dishonesty for the undesirables. In-group honesty is always far more valued than universal honesty – whether you're talking about stockbrokers or Romani.
The most intelligent in any class or group are far more likely to utilize dishonesty when it best serves their needs. To do otherwise would be a clear sign of lack of intelligence.
The idea that intelligent people are more likely to see the purpose of honesty in the long term is not only an unsupportable assumption, it's also ignoring the countless undeniable historical instances of intelligent leaders deploying adaptive fictions to achieve positive social goals (anything from religion to the concept of inalienable rights).
Anyone who uses the phrase "speaking truth to power" can absolutely be counted upon to be utterly dishonest when that power comes knocking.
As a boy I had the privilege to attend a Catholic grade school. Part of the education was to go to confession. Admitting to a third party your wrongs, is very powerful. Forgiving the past frees one. Being truthful builds character, and getting over the past is a blessing. It was a struggle to be totally truthful all the time. As a mid to late teen, I fell away from Catholicism.Joe Wong , March 31, 2018 at 1:17 am GMTIn my early twenties I came back to believing that truthfulness is the best policy. I attribute that to the Catholic culture and the confessional. I would not say that it was my intelligence that led me.
Think Peace -- Art
@Artdenk , March 31, 2018 at 1:39 am GMTConfession has nothing to do with honesty; it breeds psychopath, unrepentance, irresponsibility and repeat offending. The churches use confession to cleanse perpetrators' sins, so the perpetrators can repeat their crimes without moral burden; this is not hypothesis, history bear witness of such fact. This is the trait of the Western culture, it reflects in all aspects of the westerners' behaviour. Most common expression of such morally defunct mentality is that the western governments and officials have no trouble to apologize the wrongs they have done, but they keep on doing the same wrong over and over again after apologizing. The Native Americans are the most abused victim of such morally defunct practice.
The churches use confession to recruit and dominate its members (mentally colonized serfs), expand their domains. Confession is one of the most effective mechanisms that corrupt the basic decency of humanity.
@jacques sheeteutu , March 31, 2018 at 2:13 am GMTHere's another ROFLLMAO,
China much more aggressive than UK ,
WTF !How did they deduce that ,
Comparing how many people jump queue in UK and China ?Lies, damn lies and statistics
Coming from those who hog the top 100 hoax of the century chart.
hehehhehe
@Joe WongTwodees Partain , March 31, 2018 at 2:20 am GMTPerhaps going to confession or a dose of Christianity would be good for Chinese.
@jacques sheeteTwodees Partain , March 31, 2018 at 2:26 am GMTAdam Smith apparently had their number when he was alive. It seems that little has changed in the quality of politicians between the 19th and 21st centuries. If anything, today's politicians are even more dimwitted and venal. The average Congress member is a moron, and nearly inarticulate in unscripted speaking.
I really enjoyed reading Henry Mencken's observations on political campaigns of the early 20th century. He also seemed to enjoy making those observations as well. It comes through in the way he describes the candidates.
@denkMalcolm Y , March 31, 2018 at 2:54 am GMTThe government of the UK seems completely unconcerned with ethics, in the same way the US government is. Most members of both governments seem, to me, to be morally retarded.
Since this is statistics there are no counterexamples. But there is one giant "counterexample"denk , March 31, 2018 at 3:27 am GMT@Twodees Partaindux.ie , March 31, 2018 at 5:45 am GMTwhich begs the question .
How did these two 'ethical' countries keep churning out world class psychopaths as leaders .since 1600 ?
Flash! Flash! Flash! Stop the press. This is not yet 1st April.jacques sheete , March 31, 2018 at 10:42 am GMTCurrently there are a lot of news about cheating in sports, e.g. cricket. Out of a whim the relationship of sports with academic cheating is tested. The OECD PISA project has data on the percentage of students who exercise before or after school PctExercise, and
PctCheatRpt=+1.044*PctExercise-46.25; #n=29; Rsq=0.234; p=0.007889 ** (V Sig)
It is very statistically significant that PctExercise is positively highly correlated to academic cheating. The effect is more than double that for the other percentage variables whether they are statistically significant or not. If students spend too much time on tracks and fields and little time at home studying the results can easily be inferred. Now you know those loud mouths screaming about cheating in another countries and that the students there spend too much time studying, they are on average themselves doing most of the academic cheatings and they might be trying to divert attention away from them.
To be fair, the situation for the nerds should also be checked. The OECD PISA has data on the percentage of students who have more than 4 hours per week of off-school maths tuition PctMathTuitGt4hr,
PctCheatRpt=-0.835*PctMathTuitGt4hr+31.81; #n=28; Rsq=0.0552; p=0.2287 (NotSig)
It is statisticaly not significant. What about those academically very competitive, the percentage who wanted to be the best PctWantBest,
PctCheatRpt=-0.445*PctWantBest+54.07; #n=29; Rsq=0.222; p=0.009944 ** (V Sig)
It is statistically very significant that PctWantBest negatively correlated with cheating, i.e, on average the more academically competitive they are the lesser they will cheat.
It is intuitively that most self-confident students will not cheat. The OECD data can be transformed and normalized into confident quotient CQ similar to the IQ scale where CQ ≥ 115 is considered to be over-confident. However,
PctCheatRpt = -0.362*ConfidantQuotient +61.62; #n=29; Rsq=0.1289; p=0.05581 (NotSig)
Two datapoints are far from the rest and are on opposite sides of the regression line, by excluding them,
PctCheatRpt = -0.473*ConfidentQuotient2 +73.25; #n=27; Rsq=0.1653; p=0.03535 * (SIg)
CQ is negatively correlated to cheating rate as expected.
The summary of the results,
@Joe Wongjacques sheete , March 31, 2018 at 11:05 am GMTMost common expression of such morally defunct mentality is that the western governments and officials have no trouble to apologize the wrongs they have done, but they keep on doing the same wrong over and over again after apologizing.
Amen!
What's even worse is the goofy idea that one is automatically "forgiven" if s/he's a "believer." It's the works vs faith idea. Some of those people feel free to break every rule in the book (even the 10 supposedly written in stone) with complete impunity.
Those people routinely engage in behavior that's as disgusting as those from the the tribe who think they're "chosen."
G-wd's special ones, goy and non-goy, are forgiven in advance I guess.
@Twodees Partainjilles dykstra , March 31, 2018 at 11:19 am GMTIf anything, today's politicians are even more dimwitted and venal. The average Congress member is a moron, and nearly inarticulate in unscripted speaking.
True.
I think much the same could be said for all hierarchical systems and that includes religious as well as academic ones. I've always been as much amused as amazed at how dimwitted and venal priests and professors usually are.
Frauds-R-Us.
@Joe WongAnonymous [184] Disclaimer , March 31, 2018 at 11:29 am GMTRereading this reaction comes to mind
Edward W. Said & Christopher Hitchens, ed., Blaming the Victims, Spurious scholarship and the Palestinian question', 1988, London@JackOHjacques sheete , March 31, 2018 at 11:30 am GMT"[S]orely lacking in judgment." Not really. My judgment turned out to be okay"
No, it was a bad call regardless of how it turned out. The risk-reward ratio was off the chart.
@denkDieter Kief , March 31, 2018 at 11:37 am GMTwhich begs the question .
How did these two 'ethical' countries keep churning out world class psychopaths as leaders .since 1600 ?
Beg no longer, fine sir! This dude may have an answer.
Henceforth, Britain will do the bidding of her real masters ; she has
become the tool of the schemers against all she holds dear, namely, her
faith, her patriotism, traditions, civilisation. She grants the " returned "
aliens equality of civil rights ; they may and do become mayors over
Christian population, and within a short time Britain is ruled by a
Jewish Prime Minister, Disraeli, first and foremost a Jew and the
flunkey of the powerful Rothschild financiers.One of the consequences of this disastrous political mistake is the
transformation of the national attitude of Great Britain and her
colonies into that of the British Empire. Disraeli who inspired it
knew what he was scheming for, the British people did not. But with
him, Zionism is carried up to the very heights of the British Throne, a
Zionist World Empire is on the high road to realisation.-Leslie Fry, "the Jews and the British Empire," 1935
He musta been a kunspirasee theerist er an antee-Semite er sumpin. Prolly lo IQ and jellis too.
@Dieter KiefJoe Wong , March 31, 2018 at 12:42 pm GMTIn the light of what Jonathan Haidt in the above linked video says with regards to David Perkin's findings, I tend to say this question of yours
Do Brighter Minds Incline to Honesty?
has to be answered: "Yes. But ."
The But has to do with the the history of the term "honesty".
People might say wrong things, while being (and feeling!) honest, because honesty is not necessarily rooted in speaking the truth.
Honesty is a social category alltogether (with close ties to knighthood, chivalry and the like). It therefor is a category, which in it's very core hints at obedience and fellowship, and that's at times what keeps people away from speaking the truth – cf. David Perkins and Jonathan Haidt above (ok – full circle).
@utudenk , March 31, 2018 at 2:18 pm GMTHit-and-run is common all over the world not just in China, it is a sign of moral decay, confusion, and irresponsibility. Those perpetrators must be denounced.
But if one follows the West or the unrepentant war criminal Japanese, it is easy to white wash those hit-and-run crimes by saying the percentage of such crime in China is way lower than in the US though the absolute number might be higher, so Chinese is more honest than average in the world.
On the other hand killing people with car faces less consequences in the West, most perpetrators in the West get slap on the wrist for such crime, such as suspension of driving license, insurance company paid compensation, short term imprisonment, or get way free by claiming medical conditions, but in China the perpetrators may have to pay their lives for their crimes. It seems the West does not have a balanced morality, harsh on the victims and lenient on the criminals.
@jacques sheetedenk , March 31, 2018 at 2:21 pm GMTIn the honesty index graph,
Germany is higher than China, OK, thats fair.As for the five
eyeslies , their rightful place is right at the bottom.UK [half of fukus] the ethical country ?
hehehehheWeb Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy
by Mark CurtisIn his explosive new book, Mark Curtis reveals a new picture of Britain's role in the world since 1945 and in the 'war against terrorism' by offering a comprehensive critique of the Blair government's foreign policy. Curtis argues that Britain is an 'outlaw state', often a violator of international law and ally of many repressive regimes. He reasons not only that Britain's foreign policies are generally unethical but that they are also making the world more dangerous and unequal.
@utudenk , March 31, 2018 at 2:30 pm GMTkid,
You believe in gawd ?
I pray to the all mighty every day to stop the great satan,
a fat lot of good it does tho !so how ?
@Joe WongAnonymous [184] Disclaimer , March 31, 2018 at 2:59 pm GMTthat utu kid oughtta go out more .
He spend all day in the basement and he thought he knows the world by watching some dubious youtube videos, forchrissake !
hehehhe@jacques sheeteAnon [436] Disclaimer , March 31, 2018 at 5:03 pm GMTInteresting. Reverse Midas Touch can be a very real phenomenon, apparently.
So who chose them and what were they chosen for?
@anarchystutu , March 31, 2018 at 6:16 pm GMTWhy do you condemn over 100,000 years of homo sapiens behaviour. Destroying human lives has been continuously the most effective natural way to achieve important utilitarian ends tight up to today. And given the ancient Hebrew enthusiasm for genocide is it surprising that God's Ten Commandments not only said nothing about abortion but assumed that limiting killing was about the best that could be hoped for.
@denkdenk , March 31, 2018 at 6:54 pm GMTQuality is also an aspect of honesty: both individual and institutional.
Did I mention the top 100 hoaxes of the century chart, kid ?utu , March 31, 2018 at 8:13 pm GMTHere's a partial list,
Iraq WMD
IRAQ babies incubators
Racak 'massacre'
RUSSIAGATE,
Chinagate,
Indo./China war 1962
Indon genocide 1965
GCHQ fake foto
Tibet fake foto,
Tibet genocide,
Libya
Syria
Sinking of the Maine,
Gulf of Tonkin,
911
War OF terror,
R2p[lunder]
TAM 'massacre'
Tibet 2008
Xinjiang 2009100 reasons why fukus should be at the bottom of the 'honesty' chart !
Chinese the most dishonest, Japanese and British the least, study findsutu , March 31, 2018 at 8:19 pm GMTWhy do Chinese students think it's OK to cheat?
99% OF PUBG'S BANNED CHEATERS ARE FROM CHINA
http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/02/16/99-of-pubgs-banned-cheaters-are-from-china
@Joe WongPhilip Owen , March 31, 2018 at 8:22 pm GMTthose hit-and-run crimes
These are not just hit and run. In China you do not run until you make sure the victim is dead. And if the victim is not dead you hit them second time to make sure he/she is dead and then you run. This is very pragmatic and congruent with all Chinese philosophical systems. That's why I suggested to your compatriot (denk) here that a bit of Christian mercy and compassion would do Chinese some good.
@jacques sheetePhilip Owen , March 31, 2018 at 8:24 pm GMTAs Amryata Sen has pointed out. The problem in Bengal was not a lack of food but the lack of purchasing power by the poorest peasants. Hoarding by merchants is a traditional driver of famine in India. The Punjab actually had a good harvest but Bengal ate rice. Churchill's nvolvement was ncidental. India was governed com India, often by Indians. Churchill was an outrageous racist but by no means representative of the British of the time. He lost the post war election.
@jacques sheeteWizard of Oz , April 1, 2018 at 1:39 am GMTWYes. Grotesque incompetence rather than the intended result but morally wrong just the same.
@utuJoe Wong , April 1, 2018 at 1:58 am GMTI am surprised that you posted that first link. Its 1500 tested people (selected how?) from 15 countries simply reminded me that the "Climategate" emails also belonged to the University of East Anglia.
I didn't take the time to understand WTF PUBG was all about (third link).
As to the second link it is indeed interesting to learn of what appears to be a formal recognition by the Chinese Communist Party that part of what contributed to the earlier economic success of the West was trust and comparative honesty (as Amy Wax might point out).
@utuJoe Wong , April 1, 2018 at 2:37 am GMTFirst of all Christians have no mercy, and they only have crusade and conversion. Christians are cult. The Christians have been committing crimes against humanity, crimes against peace and war crimes using evil and sadist inquisition methods for a very very long time. Their forte is racial and culture genocide. Before Columbus time they only did their carnage between themselves and Muslims within the European continent and ME. After Columbus they spread their plague all over the world.
The most unfortunate victims are the Americans (from North to South). Christian not only took the American's land, and killed them into nearly extinct, they also burnt all books of South Americans, so that there is no indigenous South American civilization left to tell their history and to refute what the Christian casted them as savages.
In China during the late Qing time, the Christians treated Chinese culture and traditions as witchcraft, backed by their governments' guns they used extraterritorial right to expand their control of people and land with organized violence and insidious crimes. Their unscrupulous activities forced Chinese to resist thru Boxer movement because Qing Court was incompetent. The West labelled Boxer as terrorists and crashed them with Eight Nations Alliance armed intervention, Christian was a major force that caused China Century Humiliation.
Since WWII all wars were led by the Christians, their false Christian mercy calls paved the way for the Western governments and war mongers to bomb, kill and waterboard on moral high ground just like their barbaric Christian forebears who have done to the native South Americans and rest of the world.
That kind of morally defunct drivers are not unique to China, they appeare in the West too. In some incidences the driver in the West made sure nobody survives in the other car by pushing the car over the road side, so they have better chance not to be convicted due to no witness.
While guys using assault rifles mowing down tens of school kids for no reasons and claim it is their constitution rights to do so, and tens of millions of killed, tortured and maimed by the NATO false flag wars, why don't you suggest your compatriots in the USA and other NATO nations that a bit of Christian mercy and compassion would do their souls some good? Is it because Christian mercy is myth, fantasy and snakeoil?
@utulavoisier , Website April 1, 2018 at 2:44 am GMTYou are being racist, propagating the pink skin pigs' trashes in HK irresponsibly. You should know those noxious racist trolls in the SCMP are posted by the pink skin pigs and their mentally colonized wannabes in HK out of resentment and frustration, because they lost their colonial privileges in HK and they are being rejected as uneducated unscrupulous colonials back home. They fell from master caste to the bottom of the society and become worthless trash.
Japanese are unrepentant war criminals, their whole society are liars and they have been lying since WWII about their war crimes, their past, their present and their future, they even are lying about the massive toxic nuclear leaking in the Fukushima cripple nuclear power plants that are causing millions of people died of cancer and extinction of marine creatures. While the British is the mentor of the Japanese.
Britain was a ruthless global tyrant and liar, but you seem to believe that all the crimes against humanity and peace and war crimes British committed around the world can be forgiven and glossed over by claiming Britain a democracy; what a lie and morally defunct double think evil psychopathic expression. People said British imitates the Romans and the American is born out of the British, no wonder the American is adopting the same double think logic to white wash and gloss over the war crimes, crimes against humanity and peace they have been committing around the world.
Winston Churchill was a classic imperialist with no moral bearing, he believed for the empire everything goes. WWII is nothing but a dog-eat-dog play rough over the monopoly to plunder the rest of the world; they squandered all the wealth they obtained thru stealing, looting and murdering hundreds of millions of people all over the world in that scrabbling.
About cheating in the exams you must have never seen what the Greeks and Indian are capable of. PUBG is sour grape, they cannot beat the Chinese so they banned Chinese on the fabricated allegation, just like the Opium Wars, the British could not beat Chinese manufactured goods, so they used Opium and wars to steal and cheat Chinese wealth.
@denkWizard of Oz , April 1, 2018 at 2:50 am GMTDeath should be knocking on Iran's door and wearing a Star of David effacing the American flag.
@denklavoisier , Website April 1, 2018 at 2:57 am GMTWhy do you waste time displaying your prejudices without even acknowledging what question was asked? Your English is up to it – just – so you have no excuse.
@Joe WongWizard of Oz , April 1, 2018 at 2:57 am GMTYour diatribe is a bit on the simplistic side.
All Utu was pointing out is that deliberately killing someone with a car to escape prosecution is pretty heinous behavior and does suggest something really wrong with the Chinese culture at a fundamental level.
And the treatment of animals in China is generally deplorable compared with Western standards with little concern for their well being. How does this obvious cruelty fit on the ethical plane?
Ethical behavior among human beings is probably more unusual than we would like to believe and we can all be better people. The Chinese are no exception to that rule. If Christian ethics or Buddhist ethics can advance that cause, I support this.
@jacques sheeteJoe Wong , April 1, 2018 at 2:57 am GMTI was intrigued to find on the listverse.com site some readable and/or intriguing stuff, e.g. on Charles Darwin, but your particular, well debunked, choice of anachronistic and inaccurate story to believe and post suggests to me that anyone whose intellectual standards allow them to rely on one of those list (usually of 10) sites should not pollute UR. Are you aware that people are paid $100 (with possibility of bonuses) for those lists?
@utudenk , April 1, 2018 at 3:33 am GMTYou are wrong, not everybody demands the same quality, and Chinese provides different quality for different needs in the market. Besides you get what you paid for, it is fundamental principle of capitalism if you don't count the first principle of capitalism which is monopoly which is charge as much as you can bear and cost is irrelevant, that is not only cheating and it is also blackmailing and looting.
The video just claims but shows no proof what the guy claims. Chinese machinery and parts are taking more markets around the world, this simply fact proves the video is made out of bad faith, and pure propaganda.
Coins can stand up on Chinese High Speed Rail running more than 300km/hr, no German, Japanese or any other nation can do that, it proves the bearing quality in China HSR is unprecedented, it further proves the guys in the video is a troll out of jealous, resentful and fear Chinese achievements.
@utudenk , April 1, 2018 at 3:41 am GMThey kiddie,
Spare me all those China videos' [1]
In case you still havent noticed,
Im not here to defend China.
I allow its position below Germany is quite fair.But,
Can you give me one good reason why UK , that agent provocateur extraordinaire , is so high up that honesty chart ?@utudenk , April 1, 2018 at 3:44 am GMTIn China you do not run until you make sure the victim is dead.
cuz you watch some videos from youtube,
forchrissake !Can you give me some credible statistics , the percentage of such alleged crimes in China ?
How does such alleged crimes stack up against fukus state terrorism like double tapping , sniping at women and chidlren, obliterating the whole neighborhood of a suspect hideout just to make sure, ?
And .
How does this elevate fukus from its rightful position at the bottom of that honesty chart,
thats all I wanna know ?@Wizard of OzAnonymous [216] Disclaimer , April 1, 2018 at 8:03 am GMTTo think that I recently commended you for some improvement on your comprehension !
, now you go back to my bozo file,@Joe WongWizard of Oz , April 1, 2018 at 10:01 am GMTIt is propaganda. People tell me that the same stories were circulated when Japan was becoming a tech powerhouse. It will probably take another 5-10 years before it dissipates.
@denkJoe Wong , April 1, 2018 at 11:42 am GMTDon't avoid the issue. How do you justify your use of the word "aggressive"?
@lavoisierJoe Wong , April 1, 2018 at 11:58 am GMTI merely point out the misconception about Christians supported by historical facts. Indian treats animals even worse while China has humane protection laws, it seems you are as impartial as utu.
@AnonymousWizard of Oz , April 1, 2018 at 2:52 pm GMTChinese is not Japanese. Japanese only steals, their forte is made refinement on the stolen.
A lot of the American and British have been saying China will collapse 30 years already, you are one of them.
Your first paragraph comes over as so silly that perhaps it shouldn't surprise that your second paragraph is, to say the least, extremely puzzling. Where did Anonymous [216] say or suggest that China eould collapse? The post you are replying to implies no such thing.utu , April 1, 2018 at 3:32 pm GMT@Joe Wongdenk , April 1, 2018 at 4:24 pm GMTAfter every of your visit by you at unz.com I keep wondering to what degree your primitive chauvinism is representative of China. How many millions primitive and hateful Joe Wongs are there? Then I wonder that perhaps you are not Chinese. That you are employed by enemies of China. That Chinese are too smart to show their cards that early in the game. If they really hate they would not show it because only fools show hate.
You, see I carry a positive stereotype of Chinese which is supported by my personal experience with them but you and your sidekick deng do everything possible to undermine it and change it into: Yes, Chinese can be really stupid and thus more dangerous than we thought. Watch, out for stupid and dangerous Chinese. Go to the Plan B: Poke NK and the Rocket Man more to the point that Japan get so paranoid that it starts arming itself with nukes. If there is to be a war let it start with the yellow races killing each other. They hate each other anyway. Ask Joe Wong if you have any doubts.
So what is it? Are you Chinese or an agent of revanchist militarist unreformed Chinese hating interests of Japanese imperialism? And then, if you are Chinese, how many more stupid ones like you are there?
@utulavoisier , Website April 1, 2018 at 5:45 pm GMTI carry a positive stereotype of Chinese which is supported by my personal experience
sic !
your sidekick deng
Ad hominem is the last resort of the scoundrel.
Why dont you try answering my questions kid ?
*How do you propose to get rid of that plague of the 21C ?
http://www.unz.com/jthompson/do-brighter-minds-incline-to-honesty/#comment-2267831
Why are you evading the issue but indulge in China bashing ?
Are you a diversion agent ?*Do you agree that UK should be right at the bottom of that honesty chart ?
@Joe WongAnonymous [442] Disclaimer , Website April 1, 2018 at 6:14 pm GMTNo. I am unimpressed with the morality of most humans and suspicious of attempts to paint ourselves as more virtuous than we are.
But there are certainly aspects of Christian morality that can serve as a framework to guide human behavior–wherever one lives or whoever you are.
Your diatribe blaming Christians for all the evil of the world is incredibly dishonest and naive.
What is the difference in per capita income between southern europeans and scandinavians? I think this also plays a role.Joe Wong , April 2, 2018 at 1:25 am GMT@lavoisierJoe Wong , April 2, 2018 at 2:25 am GMTIt seems your only defense for the Christians is denying historical facts, and stating something that Christians are not.
Naïve? Are you saying the crimes against humanity, crimes against peace and war crimes committed by the Christians were carefully planned, deeply thought through, determined and maturely decided like holocaust?
Bible is zero-sum based narrative, the fundamental dogma of Christianity is "you are either with us or you are with the devil" therefore all Christians have a mission to convert everyone else into "one of us" on the moral high ground with whatever means necessary, Christians believe whatever the Christians do it is necessary with good intention, even bombing, killing and waterboarding on the fabricated allegations is humanitarian intervention.
Christianity assumes humans are primitive and born evil, they need divine force to threaten (go to hell) them not to do harm, and it is tribal. While some other civilizations believe humans are sane, rational, intelligent and compassionate, humans do not need divine force to tell them how to behave properly in order to achieve peace, harmony, cooperation, development and mutual benefits, just logical explanation and some directions will be suffice.
If the past can be any reference, the crimes have been committed against humanity in the name of Christianity, it is doubtful that Christians have any morality, mind you it does not mean the Bible does not have good points in it, there are other way better ways and means to serve as a framework to guide human behaviour for the good.
@utuJames Thompson , Website April 2, 2018 at 11:27 am GMTChauvinism is someone claims what he is not and based that false claim to demonize others what they are not on the moral high ground, this is what the West has been doing since 1492.
Stating facts does not involve emotion, so please refrain yourself from sensationalize any topic unnecessary that makes dialog on difficult issues impossible, Theresa May and Nikki Haley are not your role model to follow.
For over seventy years the US has dominated Asia, ravaging the continent with two major wars in Korea and Indo-China with millions of casualties, and multiple counter-insurgency interventions in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Timor, Myanmar, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The strategic goal has been to expand its military and political power, exploit the economies and resources.
Before WWII, the American is just one of the Western imperialists ravaged and wreaked havoc of Asia with barbaric wars, illicit drugs like Opium, slavery, stealing, robbing, looting, plundering, murdering, torturing, exploiting, polluting, culture genocide, 'pious' fanaticism, unmatchable greed and extreme brutality. In fact it is hard to tell the difference between the American and the unrepentant war criminal Japanese who is more lethal and barbaric to Asians until the Pearl Harbour incident.
@utulavoisier , Website April 2, 2018 at 3:57 pm GMTinstructive comparison
@Joe WongDaniel Chieh , April 2, 2018 at 4:23 pm GMTIf the past can be any reference, the crimes have been committed against humanity in the name of Christianity, it is doubtful that Christians have any morality
Do you really believe this???? No morality in any Christians?
You are even more locked into hate and racism than I thought possible.
Have you attended any of the lectures by the anti-racist Tim Wise??
You might get some talking points from him that can help you in your future postings.
And keep up the good work, you have a bright future in any number of our MSM outlets.
@utuutu , April 2, 2018 at 7:57 pm GMTAnd you have not even met the hardcore commies, who would like to explain that the only thing that Mao did wrong, terribly wrong was that he did not kill nearly enough people.
And the answer to your question is that there are idiots in every country and race, though in China they are mostly excluded from political positions(because insanity is not welcome), so they troll online message boards within and without China.
Like various other fanatics and crazies, they can be entertaining in the appropriate context. If you've been to Finland, he's the equivalent of the old drunk men yelling propositions at girls in some train stations of the small towns. Entertaining in small doses.
@Daniel Chiehdenk , April 3, 2018 at 4:46 am GMTEntertaining in small doses.
I think I reached my limit dose of Joe Wong and deng already.
@utuChris2345 , April 3, 2018 at 7:16 pm GMTSo you couldnt even give one good reason why UK should be on top of that 'honesty chart' eh ?
well I can give you 100 why UK should be right at the bottom,
Perfidious albions
exhibit oneHow to ethnic cleanse an entire island ?
Declare the residents as tresspassers !'What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours.
There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." At the end of this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill:
"Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays " Under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make up the rules as we go along".
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/oct/02/foreignpolicy.comment
Perfidious albions at its best !
heheheheheh
I think I reached my limit dose of Joe Wong and deng already.
yEAH,
Scurry away with tail between your legs and declare victory,that'd be
perfidious albions exhibit 2hehehhehe
@joe Wong You are a foolish, ignorant person. At least in regard to Christianity. The perpetrators of the holocaust and genocide are Christians? You absolutely have no clue about Christianity. Yes, they came from a Christian based culture but Nazis (and American war criminals) have nothing in common with Christianity. The best countries in the world are ones based on Protestant Christianity, meaning Christianity that is the closest to the Biblical teachings. I admire Chinese culture and history (especially the technology which benefited the West) but you need the ability to admit the faults of your culture which has some serious problems.JackOH , April 4, 2018 at 9:53 am GMT@AnonymousVojkan , April 5, 2018 at 6:13 am GMTThanks for the concern, but the risk of harm to me was near zero. Numeracy and all that.
Though I am convinced that honesty is more rational in the long term than lying, I definitely don't believe that people with high IQ are more honest than those more modestly gifted with intellectual talent. Smart people just know better to juggle with fallacies so they are more likely to get away with it than dummies, that's all.TT , April 7, 2018 at 2:57 pm GMT
Logic does say that truth is lower maintenance, as it exists per se and is always consistent, and lies so they are not exposed need to be cared of constantly, as they are always intrinsically inconsistent with reality, but people are people, driven by the seven sins, of which greed and vanity are possibly the worst, with the former being more evenly distributed while the latter tends to affect the bright rather than the dim.
Logic and ethics are different categories. Equating them is a sign of, well, vanity.@utuTT , April 7, 2018 at 4:15 pm GMTOnly a moron equate honesty = quality using ball bearing as example. There are countries may be very honest like Bhutan, yet they don't produce high quality product.
The US top elites are very intelligent, are producing lots of quality products like Boeing plane & precision weapons for murdering everywhere, yet their politicians & bankers are known habitual liars, with British & French close behind, and Germans reluctantly.
Japanese is producing high quality products, look how frequently their politicians are caught outright lying, corrupted & nepotism, and researchers are now caught recently in their published papers using fake data, with big corporates like Toshiba, Nissan, Steel factories caught cheating systematically for long period.
Its true Germany make top notch quality, undisputed, better than Japan imo.
But look at the chart, beside Germany, who else is producing better ball bearings than China, or precision tools that run aerospace, manned space craft, rockets, 5th gen J20, satellites, nuclear plants(light water pebble), nuclear sub, FSR, a long list to go yet they are rated more honest than China.
Fyi, only 2 countries are able to produce precision steel ball bearings for tiny ball point pen tip, Germany & Japan. So China is importing billion of them for its ball point pen production annually.
Why can't China factory produce it? There was some uproar in China media over this last year. Guess what? Within a mth, some factory is churning out perfect ball bearings, but in better material – ceramic that is cheaper & longer lasting. And the producer explained, its not economical worth the effort & machining to produce those bearings as they cost only $200K p. a. to import. But for national pride, they do it.
And i highly suspect you are either from HK or Taiwan with some bad memory of old China that you simply like to smear China without taking a fairer stand that, out of 1.4B Chinese how many % is doing those crimes, vs 400M murkans more serious crimes.
The new generation Chinese should not be continuously viewed through old communist color lens & West propaganda, they are not responsible for the history but the future. Pres Xi is a good example, he is leading China to their peaceful rise now. He suffered in culture revolution, do you want to blame him for those history?
This chart simply look so questionable. Why not include US, France, Oz, Canada, Bhutan, India, Brazil, Agentina, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar, HK, Japan, Korea, HK, Taiwan, to give a wider comparison. And how the author do his samplings to derive this graph is very much questionable.And to say brighter mind = honesty, just look at how honest are most world politicians that are generally top intellectuals of their cohort. I would say more wise = more honesty.
To use wallets returning as a test of honesty is also overly simplified. When a country is poor, these are godsend present unless they are true perfect communist.
As a country get wealthier, their people generally get better education & well off, become indoctrine with social norm of what is so called good behavior(persuaded by praise & blame). They are more inclined to return a wallet found with money that aren't so attractive to them compare to poor. But that can never be equate to genuine honest, im sure most US Pres & UK PM will return wallets.
Take UK as the most glaring example, with its brightest in parliament are consistently been outright shameless liars, such as Blairs lies for Iraq WMD war, and now May's lies of Skripal case, which all getting near unanimous support from their parliament members speak great volumes.
There is a Unz article written on how UK has been the mecca of paedophiles, global capital in grooming children for sexual exploitation, with systematic covered up over decades by their politicians because they & those powerful elites were all involved.
http://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/the-telford-child-sex-scandal-and-the-end-of-england/
Their police chief even suggested not to criminalize Britons watching/owned child porno as so high a proportion of their nation are doing will overwhelm their prisons & judicial system.
So what honesty are we talking about here, UK as over 60% honest? Even their moral value is highly questionable if you ask most UK white people.
And Malaysia getting 3rd highest honesty of near 80% is a great joke just shy from UK. Its one of well known highest crimes & corruption that the West themselves criticized much, even Spore ex-PM LKY openly condemn as violent crime infested. I never know violent criminal is honest, may be yes for the author country when compared to their politicians.
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Mar 30, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Bin Salman's affair with academia isn't a fluke – it's a result of the neoliberal logic by which universities increasingly operate. As the journalist David Dickson noted in 1984, American universities and corporations have "teamed up to challenge the democratic control of knowledge" by delegating control over academic research to "the marketplace".
This market rationality extends even to the way research is evaluated – which the Saudi government has been gaming. To give one example, it paid highly cited mathematicians at universities around the world to list King Abdulaziz University as an affiliation, thereby making it the seventh "best" mathematics department worldwide in the 2014 US News and World Report university rankings .
Here, the Saudi government is only playing by the rules of a game designed by western elites. This is the same logic that has been used to allow corporations, nonprofits and the military to steadily buy out chunks of academia to the point where it makes little sense to presume clear boundaries exist between these entities. As a result, numerous partnerships entangle MIT researchers with Bin Salman. On his Boston tour, he also visited IBM's Cambridge research facility, which recently partnered with MIT to form an artificial intelligence research laboratory in exchange for a $240m commitment to the university. Boston Dynamics , an MIT partner that builds robots for the US military, also offered a demonstration. Such alliances ought to cast doubt on MIT's promise to understand the "societal and ethical" implications of AI and build socially beneficial technologies.
The terms of all of these partnerships are essentially opaque, while the secrecy that surrounds them denies the community the chance to deliberate and take action. The growth of unaccountable university partnerships, like other crises facing educational institutions, stems from the absence of democratic engagement. When universities decide to sell themselves to the highest bidder, they become deaf to the interests of their students and the wider societies in which they operate. Subservience to war criminals and corporate overlords tends to follow.
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Mar 29, 2018 | www.lewrockwell.com
Shipp expressed that the CIA was created through the Council on Foreign relations with no congressional approval, and historically the CFR is also tied into the mainstream media (MSM.) He elaborated that the CIA was the "central node" of the shadow government and controlled all of other 16 intelligence agencies despite the existence of the DNI. The agency also controls defense and intelligence contractors, can manipulate the president and political decisions, has the power to start wars, torture, initiate coups, and commit false flag attacks he said.
As Shipp stated, the CIA was created through executive order by then President Harry Truman by the signing of the National Security Act of 1947.
According to Shipp, the deep state is comprised of the military industrial complex, intelligence contractors, defense contractors, MIC lobbyist, Wall St (offshore accounts), Federal Reserve, IMF/World Bank, Treasury, Foreign lobbyists, and Central Banks.
In the shocking, explosive presentation, Shipp went on to express that there are "over 10,000 secret sites in the U.S." that formed after 9/11. There are "1,291 secret government agencies, 1,931 large private corporations and over 4,800,000 Americans that he knows of who have a secrecy clearance, and 854,000 who have Top Secret clearance, explaining they signed their lives away bound by an agreement.
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Mar 29, 2018 | www.unz.com
CIA Imfrickinpunity , March 22, 2018 at 3:18 pm GMT
This article is a tour de force of beating around the bush. It relates a campaign initiated and led by CIA DCI John Brennan, prosecuted with illegal secret government surveillance, coerced confessions, and suppressed investigation of the murder of Seth Rich. And it blames the Plutocrat Class.How many divisions does the Plutocrat Class have? Does the Plutocrat Class have impunity for murder, torture, and denial of the rights of trial? Does the Plutocrat Class have anything like these get-out-jail-free cards?
The Central Intelligence Agency Act, which put CIA covert crime beyond the reach of any court. The Rogers-Houston MOU permitting the DCI to abort DoJ investigations with the magic words 'national security.'The Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes the identity of CIA criminals a state secret. The operational files exemption to FOIA, which prohibits public scrutiny of evidence of CIA crime.
The 'political questions' judicial doctrine which stops judicial review of CIA crimes condoned, however vaguely or unwittingly, by Congress.
The article outlines criminal coup de main by domestic enemies, and sics us on cartoon Rich Uncle Pennybags.
Don't get wrapped around the axle overthinking some rock-paper-scissors transitivity relations of abstract political and economic power -- that's CIA-infiltrated Paris Review bullshit. Impunity beats money every time. To understand this, just watch what happens when a plutocrat gets in CIA's way. You see right away who's in charge. Plutocrat Ralph Nacchio learned his lesson, didn't he?
Plutocrat Elliot Spitzer learned his lesson. Dynastic plutocrats John and Bobby Kennedy didn't learn their lesson fast enough, but everybody else got the message.
The problem is CIA impunity. CIA uses it to make money -- and to make plutocrats and keep them in line. You don't like plutocrats? Good for you. Lock up some CIA scumbags, storm Langley and take the files, problem solved.
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Mar 28, 2018 | www.unz.com
wayfarer , March 24, 2018 at 4:05 am GMT
"Deep State – False Flag Attacks"
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Mar 28, 2018 | www.unz.com
RobinG , March 28, 2018 at 4:38 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldiandeschutes , March 28, 2018 at 4:40 pm GMTYou are quite right, Power Elite is more accurate description, but now that the term Deep State has reached common parlance, is it useful to try to rebrand them?
Well, perhaps, because what we have now is a general misidentification (misdirection!) of defining the Deep State. Some single out the Intel agencies, others blame think-tanks, some even blame career civil servants (the 'bureaucrat' smear). Are these accusers really gatekeepers for the deep money interests?
All the same, how would you do it, and is it worthwhile? We've had the same chatter about the Fake News, i.e. MSM vs. Legacy News vs. Corporate News vs. Big News, etc. Some good work is coming out under Deep State -
Misunderstanding the Deep State
CIA Agent Whistleblower Risks All To Expose The Shadow Government
The 'deep state' is not a 'conspiracy theory', it is a basic fact beyond debating. The deep state by definition means the USA's military industrial complex, i.e. all of the massive security agencies (Dept of Defense; CIA; State Dept; Pentagon; US Army; CentComm; Navy; Marines; NSA; NSC; etc) combined with their partners in the corporate sector who sell them the equipment: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, General Electric, SAIC, Huntington Ingalls, etc. The 'revolving door' between these two sectors is a key aspect of the deep state: top ranking brass leave public service to take top positions at these defense corporations, or become lobbyists for them to continue their multi-billion dollar contracts at the government trough. The top officials at the security agencies often have careers spanning decades: these people are 'the deep state' personified. Presidents come and go, they are window dressing. The deep state calls the shots.jilles dykstra , March 28, 2018 at 5:40 pm GMT@deschutesValmMond , March 28, 2018 at 5:57 pm GMTMaybe better to say 'Deep State shoots, and wants far more shooting'. Just this day a former member of the EU Commission, he did Foreign Affairs, retired, appeared on the leading German tv channel, with deep doubts about May's assertions, and deep concern where the anti Russia propaganda will lead to.
He had negotiated with Putin, who he described a very rational man. He still was quite emotional about the western lies that lead to the attack on Iraq.
BBC, or BBCW, did not watch it myself, broadcast the same interview, also, today. One cannot fool all people for all times.
@Bardon KaldianAnonFromTN , March 28, 2018 at 6:21 pm GMTBS. The "power elite" in the US is associated with a clearly identifiable group, which doesn't even hide its own tribal interest and allegiances. A parasite lodged in a host. Its messianic DNA slowly unfolds and takes over the host's vital functions. Loss of identity and cognitive ability are only phases preceding total destruction. The complicit host is apparently fully and gleefully embracing its fate.
It takes a lot of effort to make the public believe the obvious. Deep state succeeded after so many years.utu , March 28, 2018 at 6:59 pm GMT@Thales the Milesianbluedog , March 28, 2018 at 7:08 pm GMTYeah. Distract them with the race issue. Kill extra couple of blacks. Provoke riots. Seen some money to BLM. And have the right and alt-right and all Sailers write about race , IQ until they dissipate all energy they got.
@El DatoArt , March 28, 2018 at 7:16 pm GMTIf you don't you didn't live while he was president or don't read enough, probably both for you won't find it in the comic books
bluedog , March 28, 2018 at 7:20 pm GMTIt's impossible to overstate the significance of the survey. The data suggest that representative democracy is a largely a fraud, that congressmen and senators are mostly sock-puppets who do the bidding of wealthy powerbrokers, and that the entire system is impervious to the will of the people.
How far-off it it to naming the Jews as the powerbrokers?
How far-off is the JQ – one year – two, three, four?
Think Peace -- - Do No Harm -- Art
@Michael KennyHerald , March 28, 2018 at 8:09 pm GMTLol yep here we go again it must be Russia and Putin,I sure hope nothing happens to either, for if it did you would have nothing to live for,that grand place you live in would be awful lonesome with out either to whine about ,.
@Bobsyerjacques sheete , March 28, 2018 at 8:28 pm GMTIt seems you may have missed the main thrust of the article. It is that the Deep State is directing what Trump does or doesn't do. Trump may not like what he is doing but he has little choice but to eat crap and comfort himself with vacuous bluster on Twitter.
Deep state? Sounds like what they called "corporate state" a century ago, especially since there's little hidden and nothing profound about it. Should be called "mafia state."Jake , March 28, 2018 at 8:41 pm GMT@ValmMondjacques sheete , March 28, 2018 at 8:58 pm GMTThe Deep State wielded preponderant power over this nation at least by the time Lincoln was buried, and its main actors then were virtually all pure WASPs (the non-Wasps were all Protestants of Continental Germanic ancestry, some of them Saxons, as was Martin Luther).
Jews didn't become the major power in the US Deep State until well after WW2. Probably after the assassination of JFK. Of course, you also need to face the many implications of the facts that Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy and that archetypal Mr. WASP himself Oliver Cromwell made the alliance with Jews concrete.
WASP culture is doing what it always was meant to do.
Deep state my tusch. Trump appointed Bolton because Republicans desperately need Adelson's moneyRealist , March 28, 2018 at 11:09 pm GMThttp://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/appointed-republicans-desperately/
How "deep" izzat?
@Twodees Partainrenfro , March 28, 2018 at 11:14 pm GMTYes, I agree, and the biggest sham of all is that somehow the US is SUPPOSED to be a democracy.
The US is neither a Democracy or a Republic .it is an oligarchy.
The Deep State was called The Shadow Government in the 9o's.And its the same thing it always was people and groups with ideologies or money interest or power interest or foreign interest ..all trying to direct the government to serve their interest.
And for the most part they have been successful in doing that.
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Mar 28, 2018 | www.unz.com
Bardon Kaldian , March 28, 2018 at 10:49 am GMT
I don't think that "deep state" is a correct term or that "unelected officials" are so crucial.What you got here is typical of any country: power elite . This elite is, in most modern countries, comprised of big money (different sources in different lands), dominant media & controllers of intellectual discourse through academia, military infrastructure plus professional politicians, various intelligence agencies etc.
Only, the power elite is not eternally homogeneous & can be engaged in internal warfare, and sometimes collapse.
That's how world functions. What's new?
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Mar 28, 2018 | www.unz.com
On Monday, the Monmouth University Polling Institute released the results of a survey that found that "a large bipartisan majority feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a 'Deep State' of unelected government officials .. [1] Public Troubled By Deep State, Monmouth University Polling Institute
The Monmouth University Poll was conducted by telephone from March 2 to 5, 2018 with 803 adults in the United States. The results in this release have a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percent. The poll was conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute in West Long Branch, NJ.
https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/m...31918/
According to the survey:" 6-in-10 Americans (60%) feel that unelected or appointed government officials have too much influence in determining federal policy. Just 26% say the right balance of power exists between elected and unelected officials in determining policy. Democrats (59%), Republicans (59%) and independents (62%) agree that appointed officials hold too much sway in the federal government. ("Public Troubled by 'Deep State", Monmouth.edu)
The survey appears to confirm that democracy in the United States is largely a sham. Our elected representatives are not the agents of political change, but cogs in a vast bureaucratic machine that operates mainly in the interests of the behemoth corporations and banks. Surprisingly, most Americans have not been taken in by the media's promotional hoopla about elections and democracy. They have a fairly-decent grasp of how the system works and who ultimately benefits from it. Check it out:
" Few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term "Deep State ;" another 24% are somewhat familiar, while 63% say they are not familiar with this term. However, when the term is described as a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy, nearly 3-in-4 (74%) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington. Only 1-in-5 say it does not exist." Belief in the probable existence of a Deep State comes from more than 7-in-10 Americans in each partisan group "
So while the cable news channels dismiss anyone who believes in the "Deep State" as a conspiracy theorist, it's clear that the majority of people think that's how the system really works, that is, "a group of unelected government and military officials secretly manipulate or direct national policy."
It's impossible to overstate the significance of the survey. The data suggest that representative democracy is a largely a fraud, that congressmen and senators are mostly sock-puppets who do the bidding of wealthy powerbrokers, and that the entire system is impervious to the will of the people. These are pretty damning results and a clear indication of how corrupt the system really is.
The Monmouth survey also found that "A majority of the American public believe that the U.S. government engages in widespread monitoring of its own citizens and worry that the U.S. government could be invading their own privacy." .
"Fully 8-in-10 believe that the U.S. government currently monitors or spies on the activities of American citizens, including a majority (53%)who say this activity is widespread Few Americans (18%) say government monitoring or spying on U.S. citizens is usually justified, with most (53%) saying it is only sometimes justified. Another 28% say this activity is rarely or never justified ." ("Public Troubled by 'Deep State", Monmouth.edu)
So, along with the fact, that most Americans think democracy is a pipe-dream, a clear majority also believe that the country has changed into a frightening, lock-down police state in which government agents gather all-manner of electronic communications on everyone without the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing. Once again, the data suggests that the American people know what is going on, know that the US has gone from a reasonably free country where civil liberties were protected under the law, to a state-of-the-art surveillance state ruled by invisible elites who see the American people as an obstacle to their global ambitions–but their awareness has not evolved into an organized movement for change. In any event, the public seems to understand that the USG is not as committed to human rights and civil liberties as the media would have one believe. That's a start.
There's no doubt in my mind that the relentless attacks on Donald Trump have reinforced the public's belief that the country is controlled by an invisible group of elites whose agents in the bureaucracy follow their diktats. From the time Trump became the GOP presidential nominee more than 18 months ago, a powerful faction of the Intelligence Community, law enforcement (FBI) and even elements form the Obama DOJ, have vigorously tried to sabotage his presidency, his credibility and his agenda. Without a scintilla of hard evidence to make their case, this same group and their dissembling allies in the media, have cast Trump as a disloyal collaborator who conspired to win the election by colluding with a foreign government. The magnitude of this fabrication is beyond anything we've seen before in American political history, and the absence of any verifiable proof makes it all the more alarming. As it happens, the Deep State is so powerful it can wage a full-blown assault on the highest elected office in the country without even showing probable cause. In other words, the president of the United States is not even accorded the same rights as a common crook. How does that happen?
Over the weekend, former CIA Director and "Russia-gate" ringleader John Brennan fired off an angry salvo at Trump on his Twitter account. Here's what he said:
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America America will triumph over you."
Doesn't Brennan's statement help to reinforce the public's belief in the Deep State? How does a career bureaucrat who has never been elected to public office decide that it is appropriate to use the credibility of his former office to conduct a pitch-battle with the President of the United States?
Brennan says "America will triumph over you." But whose America is he talking about? The American people elected Trump, he is the legitimate president of the United States. Many people may not like his policies, but they respect the system that put him in office.
Not so, Brennan. Brennan and his cadres of rogue agents have been at war with Trump since Day 1. Brennan does not accept the results of the election because it did not produce the outcome that he and his powerful constituents wanted. Brennan wants to destroy Trump. He even admits as much in his statement.
And Brennan has been given a platform on the cable news channels so he can continue his assault on the presidency, not because he can prove that Trump is guilty of collusion or obstruction or whatever, but because the people who own the media have mobilized their deep state agents to carry out their vendetta to remove Trump from office by any means possible.
This is the "America" of which Brennan speaks. Not my America, but deep state America.
And why do Brennan and his fatcat allies hate Trump so much? They don't. Because it's not really about Trump. It's about the presidency, the highest office in the land. The US Plutocrat Class honestly believe that they are entitled to govern the country that they physically own. It's theirs, they own it and they are taking it back. That's what this is all about
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Mar 27, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored Among Western political leaders there is not an ounce of integrity or morality . The Western print and TV media is dishonest and corrupt beyond repair. Yet the Russian government persists in its fantasy of "working with Russia's Western partners." The only way Russia can work with crooks is to become a crook. Is that what the Russian government wants?
Finian Cunningham notes the absurdity in the political and media uproar over Trump (belatedly) telephoning Putin to congratulate him on his reelection with 77 percent of the vote, a show of public approval that no Western political leader could possibly attain. The crazed US senator from Arizona called the person with the largest majority vote of our time "a dictator." Yet a real blood-soaked dictator from Saudi Arabia is feted at the White House and fawned over by the president of the United States.
The Western politicians and presstitutes are morally outraged over an alleged poisoning, unsupported by any evidence, of a former spy of no consequence on orders by the president of Russia himself. These kind of insane insults thrown at the leader of the world's most powerful military nation -- and Russia is a nation, unlike the mongrel Western countries -- raise the chances of nuclear Armageddon beyond the risks during the 20th century's Cold War. The insane fools making these unsupported accusations show total disregard for all life on earth. Yet they regard themselves as the salt of the earth and as "exceptional, indispensable" people.
Think about the alleged poisoning of Skirpal by Russia. What can this be other than an orchestrated effort to demonize the president of Russia? How can the West be so outraged over the death of a former double-agent, that is, a deceptive person, and completely indifferent to the millions of peoples destroyed by the West in the 21st century alone. Where is the outrage among Western peoples over the massive deaths for which the West, acting through its Saudi agent, is responsible in Yemen? Where is the Western outrage among Western peoples over the deaths in Syria? The deaths in Libya, in Somalia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Afghanistan? Where is the outrage in the West over the constant Western interference in the internal affairs of other countries? How many times has Washington overthrown a democratically-elected government in Honduras and reinstalled a Washington puppet?
The corruption in the West extends beyond politicians, presstitutes, and an insouciant public to experts. When the ridiculous Condi Rice, national security adviser to president George W. Bush, spoke of Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction sending up a nuclear cloud over an American city, experts did not laugh her out of court. The chance of any such event was precisely zero and every expert knew it, but the corrupt experts held their tongues. If they spoke the truth, they knew that they would not get on TV, would not get a government grant, would be out of the running for a government appointment. So they accepted the absurd lie designed to justify an American invasion that destroyed a country.
This is the West. There is nothing but lies and indifference to the deaths of others. The only outrage is orchestrated and directed against a target: the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Iran, Assad, Russia and Putin, and against reformist leaders in Latin America. The targets for Western outrage are always those who act independently of Washington or who are no longer useful to Washington's purposes.
The quality of people in Western governments has collapsed to the very bottom of the barrel. The British actually have a person, Boris Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, who is so low-down that a former British ambassador has no compunction in calling him a categorical liar. The British lab Porton Down, contrary to Johnson's claim, has not identified the agent associated with the attack on Skirpal as a Russian novichok agent. Note also that if the British lab is able to identify a novichok agent, it also has the capability of producing it, a capability that many countries have as the formulas were published years ago in a book.
That the novichok poisoning of Skirpal is an orchestration is obvious. The minute the event occurred the story was ready. With no evidence in hand, the British government and presstitute media were screaming "the Russians did it." Not content with that, Boris Johnson screamed "Putin did it." In order to institutionalize fear and hatred of Russia into British consciousness, British school children are being taught that Putin is like Hitler.
Orchestrations this blatant demonstrate that Western governments have no respect for the intelligence of their peoples. That Western governments get away with these fantastic lies indicates that the governments are immune to accountability. Even if accountability were possible, there is no sign that Western peoples are capable of holding their governments accountable. As Washington drives the world to nuclear war, where are the protests? The only protest is brainwashed school children protesting the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment.
Western democracy is a hoax. Consider Catalonia. The people voted for independence and were denounced for doing so by European politicians. The Spanish government invaded Catalonia alleging that the popular referendum, in which people expressed their opinion about their own future, was illegal. Catalonian leaders are in prison awaiting trial, except for Carles Puigdemont who escaped to Belgium. Now Germany has captured him on his return to Belgium from Finland where he lectured at the University of Hesinki and is holding him in jail for a Spanish government that bears more resemblance to Francisco Franco than to democracy. The European Union itself is a conspiracy against democracy.
The success of Western propaganda in creating non-existent virtues for itself is the greatest public relations success in history. Tags Politics
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Mar 18, 2018 | www.larouchepub.com
Skripal Poisoning a Desperate British Attempt To Resurrect Their American Coup
by Barbara Boyd
[ Print version of this article ]
March 18 -- In this report, we will explore the strategic significance of major events in the world starting in February 2018. Our goal is to precisely situate British Prime Minister Theresa May's March 12-14 mad effort to manufacture a new "weapons of mass destruction" hoax based on the alleged Skripal poisoning, using the same people (the MI6 intelligence grouping around Sir Richard Dearlove) and script (an intelligence fraud concerning weapons of mass destruction) which were used to draw the United States into the disastrous Iraq War.
The Skripal poisoning fraud also directly involves British agent Christopher Steele, the central figure in the ongoing coup against Donald Trump. This time the British information warfare operation is aimed at directly provoking Russia, while maintaining the targeting of the U.S. population and President Trump.
As the fevered, war-like media coverage and hysteria surrounding the case make clear, a certain section of the British elite seems prepared to risk everything on behalf of its dying imperial system. Despite the hype, economic warfare and sanctions appear to be the British weapons of choice -- Vladimir Putin, as we shall see, recently called the West's nuclear bluff. With the British "Russiagate" coup against Donald Trump fizzling, exposing British agent Christopher Steele and a slew of his American friends to criminal prosecution, a new tool was desperately needed to back the President of the United States into the British geopolitical corner shared by most of the American establishment. The tool they are using to do this is an intelligence hoax, a tried-and-true British product.
According to the British spy tale, a former Russian military intelligence colonel, Sergei Skripal, who spied for Great Britain in Russia from the early 1990s until 2004, was poisoned, along with his daughter, on March 4 in Salisbury, England, using a nerve agent "of a type developed by Russia." In 2010, Skripal had been exchanged in a spy swap between the United States and Russia. He had served six years in a Russian prison for spying for Britain. He had been living in the open in Britain for the last eight years. Skripal's MI6 recruiter and handler, Pablo Miller, listed himself as a consultant to Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele's British company, on his LinkedIn profile. When the London Daily Telegraph called attention to the Orbis reference, it was removed from the profile. Steele, who worked on the Trump dossier through his company Orbis, has denied that Miller worked directly on that dossier.
Theresa May and her foreign minister, Boris Johnson, insist there is only one person who could be responsible for the poisoning -- described as an act of war -- and that person is Vladimir Putin. No evidence has been offered to support this claim. No plausible motive has been provided as to why Putin would order such a provocative murder now, ahead of the World Cup, when the Russiagate coup in the United States has lost all momentum.
Rather than following the protocols of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which require that evidence of the alleged agent be presented to Russia, the eccentric and unpopular May instead delivered an ultimatum to Russia, and whipped up war fever throughout the UK. She now seeks to pull Donald Trump and NATO into ever more aggressive moves against Russia.
Thus, as with Christopher Steele's dirty dossier against Donald Trump, the British claims against Putin are an evidence-free exercise of raw power. The Anglo-American establishment instructs us: "trust this, ignore the stinky factless content presented in this dossier -- just note that it is backed by very important intelligence agencies which could cook your goose if you object."
A short statement of the reasons why the British are now staging the Skripal provocation can be found in a March 14 London Daily Telegraph call to arms by Allister Heath, who rants: "We need a new world order to take on totalitarian capitalists in Russia and China. Such an alliance would dramatically shift the global balance of power, and allow the liberal democracies finally to fight back. It would endow the world with the sorts of robust institutions that are required to contain Russia and China. Britain needs a new role in the world; building such a network would be our perfect mission." Across the pond, as they say, a similar foundational statement was made by 68 former Obama Administration officials who have formed a group called National Security Action, aimed at securing Trump's impeachment and attacking Russia and China.
Russia and China have embarked on a massive infrastructure building project in Eurasia, the center of all British geopolitical fantasies since the time of Halford Mackinder. China's "Belt and Road Initiative" now encompasses more than 140 nations in the largest infrastructure-building project ever undertaken in human history. This project is a true economic engine for the future. At the same time, the neo-liberal economies of the trans-Atlantic region continue to see their productive potentials sucked dry by the massive piles of debt they have created since the 2008 financial collapse. This debt is now on a hair trigger for implosion. It is estimated by banking insiders that the City of London is sitting on a derivatives powderkeg of $700 trillion, with over-the-counter derivatives accounting for another $570 trillion. The City of London will bear the major impact of the coming derivatives collapse.
In this strategic geometry, President Trump's support for peaceful collaboration with Russia during the campaign, and his personal friendship with China's President Xi Jinping, have marked him for the relentless coup-drive waged by the British and their U.S. friends.
On top of that, President Putin delivered a mammoth strategic shock on March 1, showing new Russian weapons systems based on new physical principles, which render present U.S. ABM systems and much of current U.S. war-fighting doctrine obsolete, together with the vaunted first strike capacity with which NATO has surrounded Russia. Not only is the West sitting on a new financial collapse, its vaunted military superiority has just been flanked.
It is very clear that a strategic choice now confronts the human race. In 1984, Lyndon LaRouche wrote a very profound document, " Draft Memorandum of Agreement Between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. " In it, he developed the concrete basis for peace between the two superpowers at the moment when the United States had adopted the LaRouche/Reagan doctrine of strategic defense. Both Reagan and LaRouche had proposed that the Russians and the United States cooperate in building and developing strategic defense against offensive nuclear weapons, based on new physical principles, thereby eliminating the threat of nuclear annihilation.
According to the LaRouche Doctrine, "The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) the unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation states, and b) cooperation among sovereign states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all."
Both China, in President Xi's October Address to the Party Congress, and Russia, in Putin's March 1 address to the Federal Assembly, have set a course to produce technological progress capable of being shared in by all. They both outline major infrastructure projects and dedicating massive funding to exploring the frontiers of science, technology, and space exploration. Donald Trump, in both his campaign and his presidency, has embraced similar views. The British and their American friends, however, are devotees of a completely different and failing economic system, a system soundly rejected in Brexit, in the election of Donald Trump, and most recently in the Italian elections.
Just look at the events of February and March from this standpoint. It is no accident that Christopher Steele turns up, smack dab in the middle of the Skripal poisoning hoax.
Exposure of British as U.S. Election Meddlers Weakens Anti-Trump CoupOn Feb. 2, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a memo demonstrating that the Obama Justice Department and FBI committed an outright fraud on the FISA court in obtaining surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a volunteer for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The bogus warrant applications relied heavily on the dirty British dossier authored by MI6's "former" Russian intelligence chief, Christopher Steele, who had been paid by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee to paint Donald Trump as a Manchurian candidate -- as a pawn of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to the House Intelligence memo and other aspects of its investigation, Steele confided to Bruce Ohr, a high official in the DOJ, that he, Steele, hated Trump with a passion and would do "anything" to prevent Trump's election. Steele was using the fact of an FBI investigation of his allegations as part of a "full spectrum" British information warfare campaign conducted against candidate Trump with the full complicity of Obama's intelligence chiefs. (See Peter Van Buren, " Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 U.S. Election? " The American Conservative, February 15, 2018.) None of the true facts about the actual motive for, and sponsors of, the DOJ applications involving Carter Page were revealed to the FISA Court in the filings made by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former FBI Director James Comey, or current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
The House Intelligence Committee memo was quickly followed by a declassified letter on Feb. 5, in which Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Graham referred Christopher Steele to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for criminal prosecution, based on false statements he made to the FBI about his contacts with the news media. No doubt the criminal referral sent chills down the spines not only of Christopher Steele and his British colleagues, but also of those former Obama officials conspiring against Trump.
In the same week, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes announced that he would be conducting investigations into the role of the Obama State Department and intelligence chiefs in the circulation and use of Christopher Steele's dirty dossier. These investigations have been widely reported to focus on John Brennan and James Clapper -- Brennan for widely promoting the dirty British work product, and Clapper for leaks associated with BuzzFeed's publication and legitimization of the dirty British work product. Remind yourself every time you hear media explosions against Trump by either Clapper (congressional perjurer and proponent of the theory that the Russians are genetically predisposed to screw the United States) or Brennan (gopher for George Tenet's perpetual war and torture regime and Grand Inquisitor for Barack Obama's serial
assassinations by baseball card). They are next in the barrel, so to speak.The January 11, 2017 BuzzFeed publication of the Steele dossier was meant to permanently poison Trump's incoming administration, and is the subject of libel suits both in Florida and London. In the London case, the British are ready to invoke the Official Secrets Act to protect Christopher Steele. In the Florida case, Steele has been ordered to sit for deposition despite numerous delays and stalling tactics.
The Congressional investigation of the State Department is focused on John Kerry, Kerry's aide Jonathan Winer, Victoria Nuland, and Clinton operative Cody Shearer. Nuland utilized Christopher Steele as a primary intelligence source while running the U.S. regime change operations in Ukraine in alliance with neo-Nazis. She greenlighted Steele's initial meetings with the FBI about Donald Trump. Winer deployed himself to vouch for Steele to various news publications collaborating with British agent Steele and his U.S. employer, Fusion GPS, in Steele's media warfare operations against Trump.
- On March 12, the House Intelligence Committee announced that it had completed its Russia investigation. It stated that it found "no collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia." Its draft final report was to have been provided to the Democrats on the Committee on March 13 for comment and then submitted to declassification review.
- On March 15, four U.S. Senators from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis, called for the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate the DOJ and FBI with respect to the Russiagate investigation. They particularly focused on the use of the Steele dossier, FISA abuse, the disclosure of classified information to the press, and the criminal investigation and case of former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Separately, House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy and House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte have asked the Justice Department to appoint a Special Counsel on similar grounds.
- On March 16, James Comey's Deputy FBI Director, Andrew McCabe, was fired as the result of recommendations by the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). The OPR recommendation resulted from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's investigation of McCabe's actions with respect to the Clinton email investigation and the Clinton Foundation. McCabe claimed that this was part of a plot against himself, Comey, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Michael Horowitz, however, is an actual Washington straight shooter appointed to his post by Barack Obama. The OPR is the FBI's own disciplinary agency. Horowitz's report is expected to be extremely critical of McCabe, citing a "lack of candor" (i.e., lying) with respect to the investigation. Whatever the corrupt media might claim, the facts here have been thoroughly investigated by McCabe's former FBI subordinates. They think his lies and other actions disgrace the FBI and don't entitle him to a pension.
Horowitz's report on the Clinton investigations -- which have already unearthed the texts between former Russiagate lead case agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, proclaiming their hatred of Donald Trump and the need for an "insurance policy" against his election -- is expected to be released very soon. According to the House Intelligence Committee, the Strzok/Page texts also reveal that Strzok was a close friend of U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras. Contreras sits on the FISA court, took Michael Flynn's guilty plea, and then promptly recused himself from Michael Flynn's case for reasons which remain undisclosed.
Despite its exoneration of the President and thorough discrediting of the British Steele operation, the House Intelligence Committee dangerously accepts the myth that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the emails of Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta, and then provided the hacked information to WikiLeaks for publication. Its final report states, however, that Putin's intervention was not in support of Donald Trump, as previously claimed by Obama's intelligence chiefs. The Senators seeking a new Special Counsel also salute this dangerous fraud.
As we have previously reported, the myth that Putin hacked the Democrats and provided the hacked emails to WikiLeaks, has been substantively refuted by the investigations of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). In summary, the evidence points to a leak rather than a hack in the case of the DNC. Further, the NSA would have the evidence of any such hack or hacks, according to former NSA technical director Bill Binney, and would have provided it, even if in a classified setting. It is clear that the NSA has no such evidence. It is also clear that the United States and the British have cyber warfare capabilities fully capable of creating "false flag" cyber war incidents.
North Korea Talks Planned, While Russia and China Continue to Create the Conditions for a New Human RenaissanceIn addition to the fizzling of the coup, the Western elites suffered through February and March for additional reasons. To the shock of the entire, smug Davos crowd, Donald Trump, working with Russia, China, and South Korea, appears to have gotten Kim Jong-un to the negotiating table concerning denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Substantive talks have been scheduled for May. The breakthrough was announced by President Trump and South Korea on March 8.
On March 1, President Putin gave his historic two-hour address to the Russian Federal Assembly and the Russian people. Like President Xi's address to the Chinese Party Congress in October 2017, Putin focused on the goal of deeply reducing poverty in Russian society. Xi vowed in October to eliminate poverty from Chinese society altogether by 2020. In addition, Putin emphasized that Russia would undertake a huge city-building project across its vast rural frontiers and dramatically expand its modern infrastructure, including Russia's digital infrastructure. He put major emphasis on directing funds to basic scientific and technological progress. He emphasized that harnessing and stimulating the creative powers of individual human beings is the true driver of all economic progress.
China's Belt and Road Initiative also continued to advance. Great infrastructure projects are popping up throughout the world, including most specifically in Africa, which had been consigned to be a permanent, primitive looting-ground for Western interests. Among the recent breakthroughs is the great project to refill Lake Chad, a project known as "Transaqua," involving the Italian engineering firm Bonifica, the Chinese engineering and construction firm PowerChina, and the Lake Chad Basin Commission, which represents the African countries directly benefiting from the project. But the biggest strategic news of the last six weeks was contained in the last part of President Putin's speech. He showed various weapons, developed by Russian scientists in the wake of the U.S. abrogation of the ABM treaty and the Anglo-American campaign of color revolutions and NATO base-building in the former Soviet bloc. These weapons, based on new physical principles, render U.S. ABM defenses obsolete, together with many U.S. utopian war-fighting doctrines developed under the reigns of Obama and Bush. Putin emphasized that the economic and "defense" aspects of his speech were not separate. Rather, the scientific breakthroughs were based on an in-depth economic mobilization of the physical economy. He stressed that Russia's survival was dependent upon marshalling continuous creative breakthroughs in basic science and the high-technology spinoffs which result, and their propagation through the entire population. He stressed that such breakthroughs are the product of providing an actually human existence to the entire society.
Compare what Russia and China have set out to accomplish with respect to the physical economy of the Earth, with the second and third paragraphs of Lyndon LaRouche's prescription for a durable peace in the LaRouche Doctrine:
The most crucial feature of present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as "developing nations." Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modern colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet.
Insofar as the United States and the Soviet Union acknowledge the progress of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet to be in the vital strategic interests of each and both, the two powers are bound to that degree and in that way by a common interest. This is the kernel of the political and economic policies of practice indispensable to the fostering of a durable peace between those two powers.
This is the perspective which has the British terrified and acting-out, insanely. Were Trump, Putin, and Xi to enter into negotiations based on the LaRouche Doctrine, a breakthrough will have occurred for all of mankind, a breakthrough to a permanent and durable peace. No neo-liberal, post-industrial, unipolar order can match this, no matter how much Allister Heath, Ms. May, or Boris Johnson rant and rave about it.
Christopher Steele's British PlaygroundAs is well known by now, Christopher Steele was a long-time MI6 agent before "retiring" to form his own extremely lucrative private intelligence firm. The firm is said to have earned $200 million since its formation. Steele was an MI6 agent in Moscow around the time Skripal was recruited. He also later ran the MI6 Russia desk and would have known everything there was to know about Skripal. Pablo Miller, who recruited Skripal, worked for Steele's firm according to Miller's LinkedIn profile, and lived in the same town as Skripal.
Since Steele has been discredited in the United States, a huge fawning publicity campaign has been undertaken on his behalf. The campaign involves journalists who have collaborated directly with Steele in his smear job against Trump. Books by Luke Harding and Michael Isikoff seek to rebuild Steele's reputation.
A fawning piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, as implausible as it is long, has been foisted on the public for the same reason.
There are some fascinating facts, however, in all this fawning prose:
- Steele described his business to Luke Harding as primarily providing research and reports to competing and feuding Russian oligarchs, many of whom use London as a base of operations. This is obviously a perfect cover for intelligence operations. It is also a very violent theater of operations. The oligarchs intersect both Western intelligence operations and Russian organized crime. They engage in deadly gang warfare.
- Steele and his partners are mentored by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 and a critical player in the infamous "sexing up" and fabrication of the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, creating the rationale for the disastrous and genocidal Iraq War.
- Steele had been tasked to claim that Russia was interfering in Western elections during the entire post-Ukraine coup time-frame, when this black propaganda line began to be circulated widely. According to Jane Mayer's account, Steele called this "Project Charlemagne," and completed his report on it in April 2016, just before he undertook his hit job against Donald Trump. In his report, Steele claimed that Russia was interfering in the politics of France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Turkey. He claimed that Russia was conducting social media warfare aimed at "inflaming fear and prejudice and had provided opaque financial support to favored politicians." He specifically targeted Silvio Berlusconi and Marine Le Pen. Steele also suggested that Russian aid was given to "lesser known right wing nationalists" in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, implying that the Russians were behind Brexit, with an overall goal of destroying the European Union.
Leaving aside Sergei Skripal's relationship with the central figure in the British-led coup against Donald Trump, it is clear that the May government's claim that he and his daughter were poisoned by a "novichok" nerve-agent, even if it is true, by no means makes a case that Putin's government was responsible. (It is of interest that as we were going to press on March 19, the foreign ministers of the European Union, after a briefing by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson that indicted Putin as responsible, issued a statement which condemned the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, but pointedly failed to blame Putin or Russia.)
Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan who maintains contacts in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, wrote March 16 that Britain's chemical-warfare scientists at Porton Down, "are not able to identify the nerve agent as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation of a type developed by Russia, after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the novichok program, a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilizers. This substance is a novichok in that sense. It is of that type. Just as I am typing on a laptop of a type developed by the United States, though this one was made in China."
The background to Porton Down's reluctance, is of course former Prime Minister Blair's phony dossier on Iraqi WMD, which Lyndon LaRouche fought, alongside the late British arms expert David Kelly, who exposed the "dodgy dossier," at the time.
"To anybody with a Whitehall background this has been obvious for several days," Murray continues. "The government has never said the nerve agent was made in Russia, or that it can only be made in Russia. The exact formulation of a type developed by Russia was used by Theresa May in Parliament, used by the U.K. at the UN Security Council, used by Boris Johnson on the BBC yesterday and, most tellingly of all, 'of a type developed by Russia,' is the precise phrase used in the joint communique‚ issued by the U.K., U.S.A., France, and Germany yesterday."
The main account of the chemical weapons cited by Theresa May was written by a Soviet dissident chemist named Vil Mirzayanov who now lives in the United States and published a book about his work at the Soviets' Uzbekistan chemical-warfare laboratory. In his much-publicized book, Mirzayanov sets out the formulas for the claimed substances. According to the March 16 Wall Street Journal, that publicity led to the novichoks' chemical structure being leaked, making them readily available for reproduction elsewhere. Ralf Trapp, a France-based consultant and expert on the control of chemical and biological weapons, told the Journal, "The chemical formula has been publicized and we know from publications from then-Czechoslovakia that they had worked on similar agents for defense in the 1980s. I'm sure other countries with developed programs would have as well."
But it does not seem that those "other countries" include Russia. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the independent agency charged by treaty with investigating claims like those just made by the British government, certified in September 2017 that the Russian government had destroyed its entire chemical weapons program, inclusive of its nerve agent production capabilities. In addition to Trapp's account, Seamus Martin, writing in the March 14 Irish Times, posits, based on personal knowledge, that novichoks were widely expropriated by East Bloc oligarchs and criminal elements in the Russian economic chaos of the 1990s.
Thus, after being disclosed by a dissident Russian chemist living in the United States, novichoks have been widely copied by other countries, according to the press accounts.
Further trouble for May's attempted hoax is found in the condition of the Skripals and of a police officer who went to their home. All were made critically ill, although they are still alive. Yet the emergency personnel who treated the Skripals, allegedly the victims of a deadly and absolutely lethal nerve poison, suffered no ill effects whatsoever.
The Skripal poisoning is being compared in the British press to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. The former KGB and FSB officer was granted asylum in London and worked for the infamous anti-Putin British-intelligence-directed oligarch Boris Berezovsky in information warfare and other attacks on the Russian state, inclusive of McCarthyite accusations against any European politician seeking sane relations with Putin.
Litvinenko's case officer was none other than Christopher Steele, and Christopher Steele conducted MI6's investigation of the case, which, of course, found Putin himself culpable. Berezovsky's use of the disgraced British PR firm Bell, Pottinger is also credited with a significant role in public acceptance of this result. Berezovsky was a prime suspect in organizing the murder of American journalist Paul Klebnikov. Many believe that Berezovsky arranged Litvinenko's demise. Berezovsky himself died in Britain in mysterious circumstances following the loss of a major court case to another Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich.
In the parliamentary debate in which Theresa May issued her provocation, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn cautioned against a rush to judgment and pointed to the bloody playing field of Russian oligarchs and Russian organized crime as alternative areas for investigation. Had Corbyn added to that mix, "Western intelligence agencies," he would have been entirely on the right track. Corbyn also pointed out that these oligarchs had contributed millions to May's Conservative Party. The reaction by the British media, May's Conservatives, and Tony Blair's faction of the Labour Party was to paint Corbyn as a Putin dupe, including photoshopped images of the Labour leader in a Russian winter hat in front of the Kremlin.
The insane McCarthyite reactions to Corbyn's simple statements of fact show that he hit the nail on the head. If you want to find Skripal's poisoners, then, like Edgar Allen Poe, you must take in the whole picture first. The field of play involves the British intelligence services and the anti-Putin Russian oligarchs, each of which services the other, acting on behalf of British strategic objectives. It is no accident that the coup against Donald Trump and the latest British intelligence fraud, putting the entire world in peril, absolutely intersect one another.
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Mar 20, 2018 | www.unz.com
remo , Website Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 8:36 am GMT
"Sir, Further to your report ("Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment", TIMES Mar 14)' may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning. Several people have attended the emergency department concerned that they may have been exposed. None has had symptoms of poisoning and none has needed treatment. Any blood tests performed have shown no abnormality. No member of the public has been contaminated by the agent involved."Tom Welsh , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 8:53 am GMT
Stephen Davies. Consultant in emergency medicine, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal..She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying "there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripals face or body."
The woman, who asked not to be named, told the NNC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.
she said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.
The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, hut added that she "feels fine".
Some nerve agent. We read that Vladimir Putin's passport was found three days later at the scene.
One wonders how the Skripals are right now. Have they recovered completely, or partially? Are they still deathly ill? Has one or both of them died?Ger , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 6:17 pm GMTIn any case, why have there been no public announcements of these important facts? It is useless to cite privacy, when the government hastened to trumpet the case – and its own dubious conclusions – as publicly as possible.
Just like MH17, or the alleged (but fake) poison gas attacks in Syria, the policy has been to launch an initial barrage of accusations completely unsupported by the slightest shred of evidence – and then drop the matter abruptly, leaving the public with a strong impression of "Russian wickedness" although nothing has actually been proved.
Incidentally, I wonder where the Skripals are and why. Apparently the Russian government applied for consular access to Yulia (who is a Russian citizen) but this was bluntly refused – against all norms of international law and civilized behaviour.
Skripal and daughter cheap, convenient, collateral damage for the warmongers. A person trained to handle organic nerve material introduces it into Skripal's car, they go for a morning drive and stop to have a pizza. After pizza, they begin to feel a little queasy. Go sit on a park bench. A passing citizen sees them, calls for medical assistance. Doctor says probably poisoned by toxic agent. Doctor knows it was not highly refined military grade.Beckow , March 20, 2018 at 5:03 pm GMTHow does the doctor know this: He is just down the street from the British Nerve Agent Factory and has been trained to recognize and treat real exposures to potent nerve agents. A policeman ends up in same hospital as Skripal because he sees car parked overtime or illegally, opens door to check for ownership gets zapped by toxic agent. Car is lifted by straps so as not poison others and hauled to Potent Downs or whatever the Nerve Agent Factory is called. Now it can be doctored to fit the crime and I don't mean the Russians. How am I doing? Got a better tale?
We understand we are not being taken seriously
Good, understanding that you are a joke is the first step on the road to possible recovery.
Try for once to imagine a reverse scenario: an Englishman dies under suspicious circumstances in a provincial town in Russia. (Or 3-4 of them over 15-20 years.) He was considered a 'traitor' by UK for whatever reason. Immediately Russia declares that it was an ' unacceptable attack on Russia's sovereignty, that Britain did it, and that it is 'highly likely' that Teresa May ordered it herself' . Russian government also says that they will not disclose any details, show no evidence and will not even allow basis diplomatic protocol for UK embassy. Why? For reasons of ' state security '. Wouldn't any rational outsider consider that a joke?
Now, I do understand that you – and most Brits – think that you are special. That there is one set of rules for you, and another for the ' others '. You have been conditioned by propaganda to assert this without any shame and to demonise Russia based on decades of half-witted stories (most taken out of context and exaggerated). Why would anyone take you seriously?
People who walk around saying that they are exceptional, meaning they are 'Gods', or that they talk 'to God', are generally ignored or kept in an institution. Claiming that you are 'exceptional and special' is the same as claiming that you are divine – that's what it has meant historically.
This 'joke' is not that funny any more. Grow up.
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Mar 20, 2018 | www.unz.com
CanSpeccy , Website March 20, 2018 at 5:44 pm GMT
@AnonAnon from TN
Yes, this is the British version of Russiagate, no doubt: no evidence, numerous versions that contradict each other, lots of hot air and finger pointing. At the moment we do not know what Skripal was poisoned with or by whom, we can't even be sure that anyone was poisoned with anything. All we have is hot air, just like with Iraq WMD. From the same very "reliable" sources: British intelligence services and British PM. Neither ever lies, just ask Tony Blair. Not to mention that we are currently on version #5 (poisoned in the car, where apparently a British cop and more than 30 other people rode with him, if we are to believe previous statements). Only a hopeless moron can stage a provocation without inventing a coherent set of plausible lies beforehand. He did it, right in the middle of Britain in Salisbury, next to the British chemical weapons facility. Credo quia absurdum.Actually, having no definite story, and constantly updating the narrative with ridiculous red herrings, is probably the best way to go with a fake terror attack. With a different herring to pursue each day, the truth seeking citizen soon becomes exhausted and relapses back into the normal pattern of going to work and feeding a family, but with a reinforced sense of their own lack of power to either control, or even understand the world in which they live.
This is the end time of democracy. We are now entering an age of psycho-totalitarianism. People do what the elite require because their brainwashed friends, neighbors, and children otherwise turn against them. They are demonized and humiliated as racists, anti-Semites, dog whistlers and all the rest of the bullshit lexicon of political correctness not for their actions but merely for their thoughts.
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Art , March 16, 2018 at 6:51 am GMT
George Orwell sure can write beautiful words.Seraphim , March 16, 2018 at 7:18 am GMT"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it ( ) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality"
Think Peace -- Art
In an essay "The Decay of Lying" (1889), Oscar Wilde launched that famous sentence: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life".Melotte22 , March 16, 2018 at 8:40 am GMTIn November 2017 British TV presented the 6th session episode 5 of 'Strike Back", a British/American action-adventure/spy-drama television series based on a novel of the same name by novelist and former Special Air Service (SAS) soldier Chris Ryan. In it the Section 20 ("a secretive unit of British military intelligence, a team of special operations personnel conducting several high risk missions across the globe") foiled a terrorist attack with the gas Novichok made by Karim Markov, a Russian scientist who allegedly killed his colleagues who invented the gas. The team duly trace the labs where Markov continues to produce more Novichok, in Ukraine and Belarus. The cast is full with the assorted jihadis, Russian Mafia bosses with their cruel henchmen, Hungarian white supremacists and nasty Serbians.
You find summaries of the episodes @https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Back:_RetributionAnyone heard of 'Strike Back', TV Drama:Seraphim , March 16, 2018 at 8:49 am GMT"It is strange that a British-American intelligence TV drama Strike Back had several episodes featuring Novichok nerve agent and Evil Russkies last year. Someone orchestrating political theater in the UK watches a lot of TV, or is advised by its producers."
Check episodes 50&51
Nobody will miss the fact that the countries which emitted the 'Joint statement' blaming Russia's aggression are the countries which repeatedly aggressed and invaded Russia or allied themselves with Russia's enemies. None of them were ever invaded by Russia but in pursuit of the repelled invaders. None of them were ever threatened by a Russian invasion.
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Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Don Bacon , Mar 15, 2018 11:17:24 AM | 90
In joint statement, world leaders agree Russia behind nerve agent attack on former spyb , Mar 15, 2018 11:35:19 AM | 92
This is the joint statement of the whirled leaders:We, the leaders of France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom, abhor the attack that took place against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, UK, on 4 March 2018. A British police officer who was also exposed in the attack remains seriously ill, and the lives of many innocent British citizens have been threatened. We express our sympathies to them all, and our admiration for the UK police and emergency services for their courageous response.This use of a military-grade nerve agent, of a type developed by Russia, constitutes the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War. It is an assault on UK sovereignty and any such use by a State party is a clear violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and a breach of international law. It threatens the security of us all.
The United Kingdom briefed thoroughly its allies that it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for the attack. We share the UK assessment that there is no plausible alternative explanation, and note that Russia´s failure to address the legitimate request by the UK government further underlines its responsibility. We call on Russia to address all questions related to the attack in Salisbury. Russia should in particular provide full and complete disclosure of the Novichok programme to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
Our concerns are also heightened against the background of a pattern of earlier irresponsible Russian behaviour. We call on Russia to live up to its responsibilities as a member of the UN Security Council to uphold international peace and security. . . here
Russian Embassy, UK @RussianEmbassykarlof1 , Mar 15, 2018 11:44:05 AM | 94Russian Envoy to the UN #Nebenzya: Russia destroyed all of its chemical weapons arsenals by 2017, a fact attested by @OPCW. No research, development or manufacturing of projects codenamed Novichok has ever been carried out in Russia, all CW programmes were stopped back in 1991-92source:-
Russian Envoy to the UN #Nebenzya: Curious fact. Although Russia stopped all its CW programmes in 1992, the UK & the US received specialists/defectors & documentation on these projects incl. so-called Novichok in mid-1990s, continued researching CW as evidenced by open sources
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later:
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.@RussiaUN: in 1992 Russia closed all Soviet chemical weapons programmes. Some of the scientists were flown to the West (incl UK) where they continued research. To identify a substance, formula and samples are needed – means UK has capacity to produce suspected nerve agent.
Craig Murray's excellent essay's been heavily attacked, and he's written a stimulating and educational response that further bolsters the initial essay. Quite interesting the so-called journalists supporting May's propaganda.Don Bacon , Mar 15, 2018 11:51:02 AM | 96from the Joint Statement:Don Bacon , Mar 15, 2018 11:55:15 AM | 97. . . the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World WarOh dear, in sacred Europe!! How about the West using nerve agents on a grand scale against its enemy Iran in the Middle East (since the Second World War)? Twenty thousand Iranians were killed on the spot by nerve gas, according to reports, with thousands of people hospitalized. According to Iraqi documents, assistance in the development of chemical weapons was obtained from firms in many countries, including the United States, West Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France. A report stated that Dutch, Australian, Italian, French and both West and East German companies were involved in the export of raw materials to Iraqi chemical weapons factories.from the Joint Statement:. . . it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for the attackThis is the same sort of "highly likely" language that has worked so well with the false-flag attacks in Syria. It's obviously "highly likely" that there is no actual evidence.
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Mar 16, 2018 | www.unz.com
Liza , March 16, 2018 at 2:56 pm GMT
With "principles" such as the end justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all "for the greater glory of God" the western civilization got cozy with the idea that there was no real, objective truth
Excuse me? What about western civilization before the ten commandments? Was it better or worse in your eyes? What's so damn special about your ten commandments that their (forced) acceptance by westerners should mark some sort of magical beginning of the true western civilization? So we had no morality of any kind before this?
I can think of other civilizations that have nothing – and I mean nothing – to be proud of. They make us look like amateurs in the rejection of real, objective truth.
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Stan d Mute , March 16, 2018 at 11:47 am GMT
@Mark JamesAvery , March 16, 2018 at 12:32 pm GMTBecause of the poison involved, they (Rus/Putin) almost certainly did it. Just because something like this is stupid doesn't mean it should be written off. Stupid things happen.
As I constantly iterate, never attribute to complex conspiracy what can be easily explained by gross stupidity. Look at the Billion plus followers of the lunatic ramblings of a desert cave dwelling freak, or the State of Utah and Planet Kolob. But your Occam's Razor analysis also fails the smell test.
If I want to assassinate someone, using a gas, in public, is about the dumbest way to go about it. Russia may well have wanted to send a message "for the encouragement of others" not to betray mother Russia, but why a gas rather than oral or injected poison? Why not the old favorite of defenestration? Or a simple GSW using Russian manufactured firearm/ammo?
Ask this, "who is pathologically obsessed with execution by gas?" Who is spearheading the "Russia is Evil" propaganda campaign?
@Carlton MeyerAvery , March 16, 2018 at 12:43 pm GMTAnswer: none of the above.
If Russian leadership wanted KGB/FSB/GRU/SVR to kill him, they'd done it while the man was in Russia in their custody. He would have never left the Russian prison alive, and nobody would be wiser.
He is just not that important, that is why he was let out in a swap after spending only a few years in jail. The orchestrated hysterics and the oversize overreaction by the NATO gang is clear tell that they are the one who did it.
@Mark Jamesalley cat , March 16, 2018 at 12:56 pm GMT{Do I think Russia is involved with the Skripal hit? Of course.}
Based on what?
{Because of the poison involved, they (Rus/Putin) almost certainly did it.}
Really?
Do you remember the Wikileaks about CIA having hacking tools whereby they could spoof cyber attacks form their computers yet have the signature they came from Russia (or some other country)?
There is nothing uniquely Russian about the poison. There are no unique poisons or nerve agents. Everybody has the same things. All is being said is that the nerve agent is military grade. And England is refusing to give samples to Russia for analysis, so we don't know what it is.
{Just because something like this is stupid doesn't mean it should be written off. Stupid things happen}
Well, yeah: stupid things happen, and smart individuals sometimes do stupid things – but almost always for a reason, even if their actions are stupid. This should be written off, for a very simple reason: what is the Russian motivation? This guy was released in 2010. He was arrested in 2004: whatever damage he caused was very long ago. Why would Russian leadership risk almost certain exposure? for what?
And as poster [Meyer] posits above in #23, why wouldn't FSB off him by simply clubbing him to death and making it look like a mugging gone wrong: why use a military grade nerve agent of all things. Ridiculous that _anyone_ believes Russians did it.
Speaking of "great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies," in an article in the Washington Post on Wednesday, Boris Johnson confirmed widespread suspicions that the attack on Skripal was part of a recycled WMD hoax to justify another U.S. war of aggression, this time in Syria instead of Iraq.The fact that Prime Minister May has produced no evidence that Russia was behind the attack on Skripal, and that Secretary of Defense Mattis admits he has no evidence the Syrian government used sarin against its own people, doesn't deter Boris Johnson from blaming Russia for chemical attacks in both England and Syria.
From Johnson's article:
How much easier does it become for a state [Russia] to deploy chemical weapons when its government has already tolerated and sought to hide their use by others? I would draw a connection between Putin's indulgence of Assad's atrocities in Syria and the Russian state's evident willingness to employ a chemical weapon on British soil.
So a neocon-orchestrated Russiagate hoax merges with a neocon-orchestrated WMD hoax in Syria. It's all coming together.
The neocon strategy of "regime change by jihadi" in Syria has failed, and they're now forced to dust off the bogus WMD script that wreaked so much havoc on Iraq. Unfortunately for the neocons, Vladimir Putin has decided that Russia has nothing to lose, and probably much to gain, by taking a stand against imperialism now, in Syria, instead of later in Iran.
Now the world is both hostage and spectator to a game of nuclear chicken. If neither player swerves in time, planet Earth dies.
If Trump orders a climb down, the neocons will impeach him for losing Syria. But more appeasement by Putin would only embolden the neocons to further acts of aggression.
So Putin asks: "why do we need a world if Russia ceases to exist?" He is right to frame the showdown in Syria as a fight for Russia's existence, and Trump knows it.
Trump will have to take his chances with Mueller and the neocon crazies. Maybe the neocons will overplay their hand and bring about their own downfall, a happy outcome for all of humanity.
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Art , March 16, 2018 at 6:51 am GMT
George Orwell sure can write beautiful words.Steve Hayes , March 16, 2018 at 12:15 pm GMT"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it ( )
To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality"
Think Peace -- Art
Whilst there is much to be said in favour of the argument, the fact that freedom of speech is under threat shows that the rise of mere emotive speech is still a long way from dominant. Facts and logic can still be heard and make a difference. This is why the political media elite cannot tolerate reasoned evidenced argument and is so concerned to censor dissenting voices.http://viewsandstories.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/knowing-without-finding-out.html
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alec bell , March 15, 2018 at 11:46 pm GMT
Up until now, I was in favor of Putin trying to keep cool demeanor and be reasonable. Time works in favor of Russia, so simply trying to wait the Western collapse out is not unreasonable strategy. But with the West starting to resort to something as extreme as poisoning its own lapdogs and blaming Russia for it without presenting a single shred of evidence, it might be a good time to reconsider and join the escalation train in earnest.If we are in the age of ultimatums, then Moscow may want to start issuing a few of its own. One would be to warn the West about its intention to abandon START framework within a year and ultimately rearm to Soviet levels – 20000 strategic warheads at a minimum. Another would be to ask Syrian government to outsource its air-defense to Russia, then issue blanket no-flight order to all aircraft not authorized by Damascus.
Third, start arming insurgencies around the world that struggle against NATO/US presence. Fourth, eliminate USD and GBP from its trade completely. Fifth, consider formalizing military alliance with Iran.
There are many more steps that Russia can undertake. But whatever it chooses to do, the somnolent posture it maintained until yesterday is no more feasible.
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VICB3 , March 15, 2018 at 5:55 pm GMT
@yurivkuAnders , March 15, 2018 at 8:38 pm GMTRespectfully, I think what he means is something that I've learned to do in the last few years in a rather automatic fashion. Namely, it's to realise that, in the immediate aftermath of any event, it's best to just sit back and wait a bit before you come to any sort of conclusion about blame. In the very short term, the water, the stream is very muddy and clouded as anybody and everybody who has – or think that they have – an interest in the event du jour tries to spin it to their own advantage.
The truth will reveal itself inasmuch as the Internet is the World's best fact checker. The initial story will *always* be shown to have a good deal of exaggerations, contradictions, anomalies and omissions. But those revelations take a (usually relatively short) bit of time. So better to look at whatever the immediate story might be with a good deal of patient skepticism and not immediately fly off the rails in a fit of hand-waving, eye-rolling and pearl-clutching hysterics.
Do this consistently, and I think you'll discover that:
-The truth of the matter is usually gray, with plenty of blame to go around.
-And/or you're being fed a line of pandering BS by people who think that you're a naive and trusting idiot.
In short, act like an adult and not a dimwitted child. Use your brain and not your emotions.
Hope this helps.
Just a thought.
VicB3
P.S. A pithy thought from Mike Rivero:
If it doesn't affect you directly, then it's either advertising or propaganda.
Re: "Almost from day one, the early western civilization began by, shall we say, taking liberties with the truth, which it could bend, adapt, massage and repackage to serve the ideological agenda of the day. It was not quite the full-blown and unapologetic relativism of the 19th century yet, but it was an important first step. With "principles" such as the end justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all "for the greater glory of God" the western civilization got cozy with the idea that there was no real, objective truth, only the subjective perception or even representation each person might have thereof."
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
Saker is a good military analyst, but as a historian he is a laughable dilettante. He is a very self-righteous, touchy Orthodox Christian ideologue and moralist.
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Mar 16, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
I'd define coup in this case as a potentially "illegal seizure of power" in the form of a slowly unfolding, unresolved constitutional crisis that sticks over time. Like the oft-cited frog being boiled to death in a pot of water rising in temperature very slowly. Center right Times columnist David Brooks had a column recently in which he compared Trump USA to Berlusconi Italy and how, once democracy has been sullied by a right-wing populist like Berlusconi (or Trump), getting democracy back within its previous (constitutional) lines is difficult to impossible.
Some like to call the 2000 election of George W. Bush a "coup" legitimized by a conservative Supreme Court. Whatever one calls the 2000 election, it did put a permanent stain on US democracy. I have no doubt in this age of "fake news" and sophisticated PR that an unresolved constitutional crisis cum coup in Washington D.C. would be spun by info wizards as a pro-American, patriotic event. All this, of course, has helped ratchet up political polarization to new heights.
Instead of seeing a military coup as restricted to melodramatic fiction like the film Seven Days In May, it might be instructive, beneficial and even patriotic to think of it as possible with at least one very real historical antecedent to consider.
The 1933 White House Plot
We don't hear much about the 1933 American "coup" -- here, put in quotes because it was always ambiguous and it was thwarted. The plot has effectively been deep-sixed into historical oblivion. Why might that be? Might it be because it amounted to just another example of the dirty little secret that hovers over everything in America: the power of money married to the power of violence? Just another day in the history of America. Maybe one has to be a left-leaning antiwar activist born under the sign of the National Security State to understand this. But, to me, the antiwar left is perennially at a loss in this equation: Not only is it oriented on peace versus war, but it's also unarmed in the sense of an NRA obsession with guns. Furthermore, the left tends to be crippled thanks to the Cold War that established left-leaning ideas as association with subversion and the enemy.
The 1933 coup plot was funded by Wall Street money in hopes of subverting the power of Franklin Roosevelt, a leader deemed by many wealthy men of the time to be a traitor to his blue-blood class. Had the whistle not been blown on the plot by a Marine general named Smedley Butler, it could have succeeded in politically crippling FDR and his New Deal government. Had it gone differently, it could have changed history. (The 1933 coup attempt is described by Jules Archer in a 1973 book titled The Plot to Seize the White House . Also, The History Channel produced a 41-minute documentary on the plot .)
As the depression set in, the nation watched the rise of fascism in Europe. FDR was opposed on the right by people like the popular hero Charles Lindbergh who cozied up with the Nazis. Much of this ugly, polarized political struggle has slipped from our popular history, in large part due to the unifying power of World War Two that helped end the depression and ended up consuming both sides of the right/left battle. The internal political struggles of the thirties shifted into a focus on military dominance. The US ended up top of the heap at the end of World War Two. It also ended up at odds with the other victor in the war, the Soviet Union. It was at this juncture that US leaders formulated The National Security Act of 1947, thus creating the National Security State we live under today.
MacArthur busting Bonus Marchers, Butler speaking to them and the Mussolini incident
Smedley Butler was raised a Hicksite Quaker in West Chester, Pennsylvania. One side of a major 19th century split, the Hicksites saw "the inner light" contained within each of us as the primary source of truth, while Orthodox Quakers were more like fundamentalist who saw The Bible as the primary source of truth. The young, idealistic Butler learned the US Marines was expanding and recruiting new officers. He lobbied his parents (his father was a US congressman) to let him join, and in 1898 at age sixteen, a fresh Second Lieutenant Butler was dropped off at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was first exposed to hostile fire. He went on to the Philippines. He fought in counter-insurgency wars in places like Nicaragua and Haiti. He undertook spy missions in Mexico. His career was unique. At one point, he took leave of the Marines and became police commissioner of Philadelphia, only to quit when he grasped the level of corruption in the city. He was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor, and at the end of his career he was court martialed by Secretary of War Stimson for calling Benito Mussolini a bum in a speech. He, then, began speaking out in public, effectively undermining the charges. Today, amongst leftist, antiwar activists he's considered a hero thanks to a small book he wrote in 1935 called War Is a Racket. On the other hand, I mentioned him once to General Stanley McChrystal at a book signing and the respected Iraq "surge" leader cited him back at me as, in his mind, one of the great US military heroes. Both views paradoxically prevail. In 1939, he expressed opposition to war in Europe. But, then, he conveniently died in 1940. How he would have responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor remains an intriguing question.
Butler got involved in the 1933 coup when he was asked by the Wall Street cabal to be their "man on a white horse" to lead the plot. Due to his humility and his bravery, Butler was beloved by the common soldier -- even when he pushed them. In one story, a soldier has fallen out of a long march and General Butler, wearing no insignia of rank, gets the man back up and walking by carrying his pack. The plotters' modeled their efforts on the rising fascist states in Europe and the various colored-shirt thug organizations significantly made up of WWI veterans. Fatefully, Butler was a terrible choice; he supported FDR. Smelling a rat, he played along with the plotters' front-man, Gerald MacGuire, a fat, cigar-chomping stock broker paid to go to Europe and study the various colored-shirt groups. The idea was to install Butler as the commander of the American Legion, whose 500,000 members -- many disgruntled WWI vets -- had been used to smash union strikers with baseball bats. The Legion outnumbered the US military at the time. With the help of a reporter from the Philadelphia Record, Butler got the goods and went to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which held hearings and exposed the right-wing plot. (It's the very same HUAC that went on to notoriety as a prosecutor of the left.) Those named in the coup all denied they were plotting anything, and the story disappeared into obscurity. No charges were made.
Had the cabal, instead, set up General Douglas MacArthur as the "man on a white horse" -- who they had considered -- it might have turned out differently. MacArthur had an arrogant "fascist" character, but he was not loved by the common soldier. Butler and MacArthur had crossed paths in July 1932 during the Bonus March encampment in Washington DC. Butler was sympathetic and spoke to the encamped veterans seeking their promised bonus for WWI service. "They may be calling you tramps now, but in 1917 they didn't call you bums!" the cragey, diminutive general hollered at them. "You are the best-behaved group of men in the country today. I consider it an honor to be asked to speak to you." MacArthur, of course, led the troops who burned the Bonus Marchers out, killing one veteran and wounding 50.
"War is a racket. It always has been," is how Butler's booklet War Is a Racket opens. "A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many." The little book ends this way: "Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. But victory will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists. If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples."
The Wall Street cabal's coup plot was based on the idea of insinuating a disciplined military man into a White House operation deemed irresponsible and out of control. The plan was to install Butler into a newly created cabinet-level position called the Secretary for General Affairs. Negative press would be arranged to inform the American people that the President of the United States was a cripple. The "man on a white horse" was there to save a problematic administration from itself -- all for the good of the country.
Today's politics are very different; the similarity is in the troublesome situation of a sitting president deemed a national security problem. In FDR's case, it was weakness due to sympathy for the downtrodden; while in Trump's case, it's unprecedented governmental inexperience linked with a volatile narcissism contributing to chaos in the highest reaches of the government. In both cases, the overarching issue is a very dangerous world and the need for experience and discipline. Is General Kelly today's "man on a white horse" insinuated into the White House to represent the interests of the National Security State?
There are no neat or absolute answers to these questions. We tend to associate the idea of a "coup" with coup d'etat in Third World nations. Our CIA and military have notoriously been up to their eyeballs in foreign coups; there's classics like Iran 1953 and Guatemala 1954. Venezuela 2002 and Honduras 2009 had the stink of US complicity, but they are more current and, thus, there was lots of plausible deniability and lots of fog. And fog and doubt only get worse in this internet age.
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Mar 16, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
The National Security Act of 1947 codified the reality of the imperial American military for the baby-boom generation and beyond. The War Department became the Defense Department; the CIA we know today was formed from the Office of Strategic Services. The 1947 NSA document amounted to a formal re-arrangement of the country's priorities coming out of WWII -- when the victorious United States of America became the "leader of the free world." We forget that before World War Two changed everything, the US military was a shadow of what it was to become.
Over these 70 years, the executive in the White House has ping-ponged back-and-forth between the moderate left and the moderate right, between the Democratic and Republican Parties. (Trump may be the exception in being far right.) Every four years there's a national "conversation" of sorts about who's going to live in the White House and make executive decisions and who's going to legislate in Congress. You couldn't come up with a better example to illustrate the idea of a civilian political see-saw than January 20, 2016, the day Barack Obama handed the civilian reins over to Donald Trump. Meanwhile, over those same 70 years, the National Security State (as an institution led by the Pentagon) has existed as a steadily ascending through-line leading to today's post-9/11 world. Our imperial military has been, and remains, virtually untouchable through the electoral process that chooses civilian leadership. Just like assault weapons on a small scale, the National Security State thrives beyond the reach of American politics. In my mind, White House Chief of Staff and former four-star Marine General John Kelly resides in this protected zone as a power behind the civilian throne.
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Mar 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
DisappointeDinTRUMP
The timing is once again highly suspicious with the fifa world cup around the corner. The Empire does not want Russia on center stage with the whole world watching. Trust me, we can expect much more to come regarding this world cup. Boycotting, sanctions and more underhanded tactics happening are what the next month has in store for us.
I wonder just how much more Russia is able to take before it decides not to turn the other cheek. Eventually Russia will start saying that "hold on a second, we are being judged and punished continuously so why dont we start doing some things to at least warrant all this punishment?"
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Bob In Portland
Holmes , March 14, 2018 at 7:04 pmAlso, the poison, Novichok, was stored by the Soviets in states on its borders, like Georgia and Ukraine, and Baltic states, so after those republics broke off from the USSR during its collapse the poison fell into the hands of anti-Russian countries. It is inconceivable that western intelligence at the collapse of the USSR would not have swooped in and grabbed what it could in those stockpiles. In fact, in 1999 American agents spent six million dollars in decommissioning a plant that produced Novichok in the Uzbek city of Nukus. If you don't think that they took a little for a false flag in the future you don't know our intelligence services.
Finally, the chemical formula is available here on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/State-Secrets-Insiders-Chronicle-Chemical/dp/1432725661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520920301&sr=8-1&keywords=vil+mirzayanov
andrew , March 14, 2018 at 8:14 pm100% False Flag.
Chumpsky , March 14, 2018 at 10:04 pmI believe the culprits are ukraine SBU.
This week poroshenko has been trying to convince the EU to designate Russia as the Aggressor nation and to attempt to end Minsk obligations.
The Russian presidential election is coming up on Sunday. A great opportunity now for the CIA / MI6 / Mossad backed candidate to make some noise over Putin's near-guaranteed, shoe-in victory by planting an illegitimate narrative.
The gassing, using Novichok (an open-source formula), is just another in a long list of false flag events carefully crafted to turn Russia, and Putin in particular, into an international pariah and bogeyman in particular. Such an event is an attempt to throw cold water on Trump's thawing of relations by discrediting him now that Steele has been exposed as a fraud.
Who's meddling in whose election now?
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Mar 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
cmp , March 13, 2018 at 2:03 pm
Venal Visors. And the all too easy convenience of Socializing The Costs, while Privatizing The Profits.
Oliver North, while under oath during the IranContra Hearings: "..We didn't lose the Vietnam war over there, we lost that war, in this city."
(..take your pick..) .. Too BIG to jail?
On April 8, 2005, CIA Director Porter Goss ordered an internal review of the CIA in order to determine why doubts about Curveball's reliability were not forwarded to policy makers. Former CIA Director George Tenet and his former deputy, John E. McLaughlin, announced that they were not aware of doubts about Curveball's veracity before the war. However, Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA's European division, told the Los Angeles Times that "everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening." .. A nd, on June 26, 2006, The Washington Post reported that "the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels."
(..take your pick..) .. Too BIG to jail?
While Mueller Was Head Of The FBI -- Hillary's email firm was run from a loft apartment in Denver with its servers in the bathroom, which of course, should raise some questions over security of sensitive messages (the public's property) that she held.
(..take your pick..) .. Too BIG to jail?
And, is there a softer side -- to actively engaging in war?? .. James Le Mesurier, the creator of the White Helmets, who just happens to be a British private security specialist and a former British military intelligence officer, he has said very recently, "who would you trust more than the fire brigade or a first response NGO?" And, as reported by Vanessa Beeley in a recent Corbett Report interview: "James Le Mesurier, he is now recruiting in Brazil. We know that the White Helmets have appeared in Malaysia and in Venezuela, and in the Philippines."
.. Too BIG to jail?
Venal Visors -- gone viral.. ..Socialize. ..Privatize. .. Feed the beast..
~ Rep. Luther Johnson (D.-Texas), in the debate that preceded the Radio Act of 1927
"American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people."
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Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
walter, March 2018 at 03:03 PM
Jack, in my opinion, there is no "US". The "US" doesn't have an interest.
There are individuals who behave in their own individual self interest.
The individuals who work in our State Dept., CIA, DOD, corporate defense contractors, lobbyists, politicians, media......these individuals appear to benefit on an indivdual level (promotions, high paying jobs, social acceptance, nice neighborhoods and schools for their kids) when they "accept the party-line" that masquerades as US interests".
Its a monumental unconscious group-think based on individual self interest.
This is my understanding of "the Borg" and "US interests", "US foreign policy goals"....they are actually individual interests shaped by what individuals who work in this realm believe they should believe and espouse to achieve their own goals. Rebels, individual thinkers tend to get fired, not promoted, snubbed
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Mar 14, 2018 | www.antiwar.com
Angleton embodied and shaped the CIA's operational ethos and its internal procedures, especially in the realm of counterintelligence. His theories of Soviet penetration dominated the thinking of Western intelligence agencies, and their legacy can even be seen in the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and allegations of collusion with Russia. I want to emphasize that I only use the term deep state as a colloquial shorthand term for the array of US national security agencies that operate under the shroud of official secrecy.Let's not forget there are a dozen, at least a dozen such agencies based here in Washington. The CIA with its $15 billion a year budget is the largest. The NSA with a budget of about $10 billion is the second largest. The Defense Intelligence Agency is about $4 billion. Then along with some other obscure but still very large agencies like the NGIA. Never heard of the NGIA? I didn't think so. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is a $4.9 billion a year agency. Collectively, these agencies spend probably $50 billion to $60 billion a year, which make them a very small but powerful potent sector in the American scheme of power.
Want to know how the NGIA spent your $4.9 billion? Good luck. Want to see a line item budget of CIA activities in Africa last year? Move along. It's true that Congress nominally has oversight powers over these agencies. Our elected officials do have their security clearances that we don't have, so they can go in and look at selected operations. But the intelligence oversight system is very weak as even its defenders will admit. The intelligence committees polarized and politicized can't even agree on what kind of secret activities they're supposed to monitor. The FISA court system is supposed to protect Americans from surveillance by their government, but it largely functions as a rubberstamp of the secret agencies. A secret government is the norm in America in 2018 which is why the discourse of the deep state has such currency today.
Angleton, I'm going to put to you, was a founding father of what we call the deep state. So who was he? Born in December 1917, James Angleton grew up as the oldest son of James Hugh Angleton, a brash self-made American businessman who moved to Milan, Italy during the Depression and made a fortune during the time Benito Mussolini selling cash registers. Angleton attended private school in England. He went to Yale College, and then to Harvard Law school. He was a precocious good-looking young man with sophisticated manners and a literary frame of mind.
As an undergraduate, he befriended his fellow expatriate – Ezra Pound – in Italy. Pound was the modernist poet in the mad tribune of Mussolini's fascism. In their correspondence, which I found at Yale, Angleton sometimes ape the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Ezra Pound. For example, criticizing the Jewish book merchants who he thought overcharged for Pound's books.
In 1943, Angleton was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, America's first foreign intelligence service stationed in Rome during and after World War II. He excelled at secret intelligence work. I tell a story in The Ghost of how he rescued a leading Nazi and a leading Italian fascist from postwar justice. Among other tasks, he reported on the flow of Jews escaping from Germany and heading for Palestine. The revelations of the Holocaust transformed his disdain for Jews into something of sympathy. He began to develop sources among the leaders of the Jewish and Zionist organizations – including Teddy Kollek who was a British intelligence agent, and a German operative named Arthur Pier who later became known as Asher Ben-Natan.
With the passage of the National Security Act in July 1947, Angleton went to work at the CIA. The CIA came into existence and Angleton became the chief of the foreign intelligence staff with responsibility for intelligence collection operations worldwide. In those days, the CIA was right here in the heart of Washington. It's hard for people to believe now, but the CIA was located in a series of temporary buildings located along the reflecting pool next to the Lincoln Memorial. The tempos, as they were called by CIA people, were drafty in the winter, hot in the summer, and devoid of charm year-round. But this is where Angleton worked, at what was known as the Office of Special Operations.
Angleton, while sympathetic to Jewish suffering, was still very wary of Israel when he started his career at the CIA. Before the 1948 war, the Jewish army had been largely armed by Czech arms manufacturers and communist Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the state of Israel in 1948. Angleton initially feared that the Soviets would use Israel as a platform for injecting spies into the West. The Israelis, for their part, were looking to cultivate American friends. Stalin's anti-Semitic purges in 1948 showed that his allegiance to the Jewish state was superficial at best.
In 1950 a man named Reuven Shiloah, the founder of Israel's first intelligence organization, came to Washington. He visited the CIA and he came away very impressed with how it was organized. He went back to Israel and in April 1951, he created out of a very fractious collection of security forces what was known as the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks – inevitably known as Mossad, Hebrew for institute.
In 1951 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion came to the United States and brought Shiloah with him. Ben-Gurion met privately with President Truman, and Angleton arrange for Ben-Gurion to also have lunch with his friend Allen Dulles who would shortly become the director of the CIA. The purpose of this meeting, Efrain Halevy, a retired director of the Mossad and a longtime friend of Angleton's told me in an interview in Tel Aviv, the purpose was in Halevy's words to clarify in no uncertain terms that notwithstanding what had happened between Israel and United States 1948 and notwithstanding that Russia had been a key factor in Israel's survival, Israel considered itself part of the Western world and would maintain the relationship with the United States in this spirit.
Shiloah stayed on in Washington to work out the arrangements with Angleton. Shiloah, according to his biographer, soon developed a special relationship – quote/unquote – and Angleton became the CIA's exclusive liaison with the Mossad in 1951. Angleton return the favor by traveling to Israel often. He was introduced to Amos Manor, chief of counterespionage for Israel's domestic security service known as Shabak or Shin Bet.
Manor headed up Operation Balsam which was the Israeli's conduit to the Americans. "They told me I had to collect information about the Soviet bloc and transmit it to them," Manor recalled about the Americans. "I didn't know exactly what to do, but I had the idea of giving them material we had gathered a year earlier about the efforts of the Eastern Bloc to use Israel to bypass an American trade embargo. We edited the material and informed them that they should never ask us to identify our sources." From such arrangements, the CIA-Mossad relationship began to grow. Manor would be friends with Angleton for the rest of his life.
In 1963 a man named Isser Harel was succeeded as the chief of Mossad by a military intelligence officer named Meir Amit. Amit found Angleton to be a little eccentric, but he noted that his – quote – identification with Israel was a great asset for Israel. Asher Ben-Natan, Angleton's source dating back to the OSS days, was playing a key procurement role in the secret Israeli program to obtain nuclear weapons. Teddy Kollek, one of Angleton's closest contacts and friends in Washington, later became the mayor of Jerusalem. Angleton's Israeli friends in short were really the architects, some of the architects of the Zionist state.
As I came to learn his story from talking to CIA veterans and Israelis and reading a lot, a couple of things stood out to me. First of all, the Israeli recruitment of Angleton was extremely astute. In the early 1950s, Angleton was a rising star at this new agency, the CIA, but he was not a senior figure and not even particularly powerful. The Israelis recognized the latent qualities that would make him powerful.
Second, Angleton's creative intellect and his operational audacity inspired deep feelings of loyalty among the Israelis. While Angleton's counterintelligence vision would become very controversial within and bitterly divisive within the CIA, he was widely admired in Israel as a stalwart friend. He still is to this day.
In 1954 Angleton became the chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff, the first one. In 1956 Amos Manor passed him a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to the Soviet Communist Party in which he criticized the cult of personality around the deceased dictator, Joseph Stalin. This intelligence coup made Angleton a legend within the CIA and the power within the agency as well, and it was very much made possible by the Israelis.
Angleton's formative and sometimes decisive influence on US policy towards Israel can be seen in many areas – from the impotence of US nuclear nonproliferation policy in the region, to Israel's triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, to the feeble US response to the attack on the Liberty, to the intelligence failure represented by the Yom Kippur War of 1973. I tell a lot of the story in The Ghost, but the story of Angleton in Israel is really so large and so profound that it probably deserves its own book. I could certainly not do justice to it in the 18 minutes that I have, so I'm going to confine myself to one narrow question about the tradeoffs that became implicit in this arrangement between the CIA and the Mossad and its implications for us.
The question, which was put to me by Grant but is right on point, was why didn't the CIA help the FBI investigate the diversion of US weapons-grade material from the United States to Israel in the 1960s and 1970s? The short answer is because Jim Angleton didn't want to. Angleton played a key role in enabling Israel to obtain nuclear weapons, and he did so in a subtle way that characteristically left few fingerprints. He was not a man to investigate himself. Many of these details are now known thanks to Grant Smith, Roger Mattson, John Hadden, Jr. and others.
I want to just give you a sense of how this transpired. So the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, otherwise known as NUMEC, started processing highly-enriched uranium in the United States in 1959. NUMEC had been created by David Lowenthal, a Zionist financier who financed the postwar boatlift from Europe to Palestine that was romanticized in the book and movie Exodus. He hired Zalman Shapiro, a brilliant young metallurgist to run the company.
At that time, the US government owned all of supplies of nuclear fuel which private companies, like NUMEC, were allowed to use but ultimately had to return to the government. Within a few years the Atomic Energy Commission noticed worrisome signs that the Apollo Plant – NUMEC had a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania – that the plant's security and accounting were very deficient. Unexplained losses of nuclear material did happen at other companies, but NUMEC's losses were proportionately much larger. By October 1965, the AEC estimated that 178 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium had gone missing from the NUMEC facility, by March 1968, that figure was 267 kilograms.
John Hadden was the CIA station chief in Israel from 1964 to 1967. He worked very closely with Angleton throughout this period. He would later concur with the near unanimous assessment of CIA's nuclear scientist that Israel had indeed stolen fissile material from NUMEC and used it to build their nuclear arsenal. This story is now very well documented. In the spring of 1965, a technician working at the night shift at NUMEC went out on a loading dock for a breath of fresh air and saw an unusual sight. Zalman Shapiro was pacing on the dock while a foreman and truck driver loaded cylindrical storage containers, known as stovepipes, onto a flatbed truck.
The technician saw a clipboard saying that the material was destined for Israel. It was highly unusual to see Dr. Shapiro in the manufacturing section of the Apollo nuclear facility, the technician said. It was unusual to see Dr. Shapiro there at night, and it was very unusual to see Dr. Shapiro so nervous. The next day NUMEC's personnel manager visited the technician and threatened to fire him if he did not keep his mouth shut, that's a quote, concerning what he had seen. It would be 15 years before the employee told the story to the FBI.
What did Angleton know about NUMEC? Well, he knew that the AEC and the FBI were investigating starting in 1965. As the Israel desk officer of the CIA, he talked about the NUMEC case with liaison agent Sam Papich who was monitoring the investigation for the FBI. He also spoke about it with his colleague John Hadden.
On the crime scene particulars, Hadden defended his former boss. "Any suggestion that Angleton had help the Israelis with the NUMEC operation was totally without foundation," he told journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. But Hadden didn't deny that Angleton had helped the Israeli nuclear program. Why would somebody whose whole life was dedicated to fighting communism have any interest in preventing a very anti-Communist nation for getting the means to defend itself, Hadden asked. The fact they stole it from us didn't worry him in the least, he went on. I suspect that in his inmost heart he would have given it to them if they had asked. Hadden knew better than to investigate any further. I never sent anything to Angleton on this – the nuclear program – because I knew he wasn't interested, Hadden later told his son, and I knew he'd try to stop it if I did.
With the fissile material diverted from NUMEC, Israel was able to construct its first nuclear weapon by 1967 and become a full-blown nuclear power by 1970 – the first and still the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Angleton, it is fair to say, thought collaboration with Israel was more important than US nonproliferation policy. He believed that the results proved his point. When he started as chief of the counterintelligence staff in 1954, the state of Israel and its leaders were regarded warily in Washington – especially at the State Department. When Angleton left government service 20 years later, Israel held twice as much territory as it had in 1948. The CIA and Mossad collaborated on a daily basis and the governments of the United States and Israel were strategic allies knit together by expansive intelligence sharing, multibillion-dollar arms contracts and coordinated diplomacy.
Angleton's influence on U.S.-Israeli relations between 1951 and 1974 exceeded that of any Secretary of State with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger. His influence was largely unseen by Congress, the press, other democratic institutions, and much of the CIA itself. He was empowered by his own ingenuity and the clandestine arrangements rationalized by doctrines of national security and counterintelligence. The arc of his career breathes life into the concept of the deep state.
I thought of this story when I visited one of the memorials to Angleton in Israel in 2016. The memorial is located on a winding road outside the city of Mevaseret Zion, which is now really a suburb of Jerusalem. Historically, control of this high ground has been seen as key to the control of Jerusalem and of Palestine itself. A nearby ruins of a castle built by 12th-century Christian crusaders for exactly that purpose stands in mute testimony to the importance of its strategic location.
The Angleton memorial consists of a pedestal of stones topped with a black plaque. To James Angleton, a friend it says. This plaque was dedicated in 1987, a few months after Angleton died, and it has been maintained by his Israeli friends ever since. It's still in perfect condition. The location is no accident. In the course of his extraordinary career, Angleton, more than any other American, enabled the Americans to gain and hold this strategic high ground in the Middle East. He was, as his friend Meir Amit said, the biggest Zionist of the lot . Thank you.
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Mar 02, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Sid Finster 02 March 2018 at 10:37 AM
The Iron Law of Oligarchy and the Iron Law of Institutions.
All institutions are corruptible and all institutions eventually will be corrupted, because institutions = power and power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats.
Some corollaries of this are:
- The people who want power the most are the most inclined to abuse that power.
- The principal function of any institution is to keep sociopaths out of power as much as possible for as long as possible.
- There are no political or economic systems that work everywhere or at all times. Rather, a system works in a given time and place, to the extent that they further the above principles.
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Mar 08, 2018 | wipokuli.wordpress.com
The US Power Elite ... would be rightfully called the „Deep State" of the USA ( http://tinyurl.com/ho2nz87 ). And this Deep State has become more and more ruthless over the time.
They have brought nightmares over the Southern Hemisphere by installing brutal dictatorships ( http://tinyurl.com/kkpvcf7 ) in their interest and waging bloody colonial wars, in the last one and a half decades especially with their „War on Terror" ( http://tinyurl.com/nrxxej5 ).
One of their aims is to prevent countries of Africa, Latin America, Near and Middle East and Southern Asia from choosing their trade partners freely and from making use of their resources and industrialize, since that would mean a division of resources and allowing them their part of „consuming ecologic Earth capacity".
... ... ...
In fact the US lead Western policy has established a „Ring of Fire" around Europe ( http://tinyurl.com/gp48dhw) and European governments have been so stupid for a long time to lend a helping hand to „Big Brother" in doing so. In fact this ring of fire stretches from Libya throughout Africa (http://tinyurl.com/le2hlpx) over Near and Middle East, the Balkans up to the Ukraine. Actually one gets the impression that the fire burns into Europe with Terror (http://tinyurl.com/zrwrk3k) adding also together with the refugee crisis to the financial problems threatening to blow even the EU up. Is the US having a hand also in this dramatic development? Absurd? Weakening their allies/vassals? We have to have a look at further geo-political challenges the US Power Elite is facing.
... ... ...
After all the „Deep State" within the USA ( http://tinyurl.com/ho2nz87) is famous for „False Flag attacks", often perpetrated by Operation Gladio. A famous blueprint is Operation Northwoods, a project from the early 60ties for terror attacks on US targets outside and inside the US to be blamed on Cuba as a pretext for a full scale invasion of the hated country. It was stopped by Kennedy, which he didn't survive long (http://tinyurl.com/ndzt8ho). After all the most famous False Flag is the event which the Genius James Corbett presented in five Minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgrunnLcG9Q
Maybe US politics takes a last measure to frighten especially France and Germany by Terror „to order". That´s why one should think into „all directions" when it comes to the tragic terror attacks and otherwise tragic or painful events hitting the two countries:
„Staged „prevented" Terror Attacks – Staged Terror?!" https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2016/07/27/staged-prevented-terror-attacks-staged-terror/
Truly Europe has to be on alert!
Andreas Schlüter
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Mar 01, 2018 | www.unz.com
Joe Levantine , February 28, 2018 at 6:02 pm GMT
@Felix Keverich"And this is why economic policy cannot not be decided by popular opinion. A typical Russian is ignorant about economics and government finance. A typical Russian doesn't want responsibility for these decisions anyway. He would rather let someone else (some authority figure) make these choices for him. This is why real democracy cannot work in Russia."
If you had not specified the word 'Russian', I could have guessed you were talking about the USA.
In fact not only do most Americans shy away from finding out about the truth in a country that has pushed division of labour to the maximum, they are trigger happy to be totally controlled by corporate media in a repetition of 'Iraq's weapons of mass destruction' to 'Russia and Putin the source of all evil'.
Beyond some truly enlightened Americans whose opinions I am honored and glad to read on this site, the majority of the American public still go about their struggle for survival trusting the American politicians and American military are doing the right thing.
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Mar 01, 2018 | www.unz.com
p
anon Disclaimer , February 28, 2018 at 12:47 pm GMT
@Anatoly KarlinThe idea of success at any cost, trampling on other people, has always been popular in the United States. Little or nothing ethical types like Milken and Jordan Belfort have had many admirers in the United States.
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Feb 26, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
The U.S. State Department will increase its online trolling capabilities and up its support for meddling in other countries. The Hill reports :
The State Department is launching a $40 million initiative to crack down on foreign propaganda and disinformation amid widespread concerns about future Russian efforts to interfere in elections.The department announced Monday that it signed a deal with the Pentagon to transfer $40 million from the Defense Department's coffers to bolster the Global Engagement Center, an office set up at State during the Obama years to expose and counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.
The professed reason for the new funding is the alleged but unproven "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election campaign. U.S. Special Counsel Mueller indicted 13 Russians for what is claimed to be interference but which is likely mere commercial activity.
The announcement by the State Department explains that this new money will not only be used for measures against foreign trolling but to actively meddle in countries abroad:
Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Steve Goldstein said the transfer of funds announced today reiterates the United States' commitment to the fight."This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Under Secretary Goldstein. "It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive. "
The mentioning of Silicon Valley is of interest. The big Silicon Valley companies Google, Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the U.S. election campaign. The companies embedded people within the campaigns to advise them how to reach a maximum trolling effect:
While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches.In May 2016 the Hillary Clinton campaign even set up her own troll farm :
Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.
Clinton is quite experienced in such issues. In 2009, during protests in Iran, then Secretary of State Clinton pushed Twitter to defer maintenance of its system to "help" the protesters. In 2010 USAid, under the State Department set up a Twitter-like service to meddle in Cuba.
The foreign policy advisor of Hillery Clinton's campaign, Laura Rosenberger, initiated and runs the Hamilton68 project which falsely explains any mentioning of issues disliked by its neo-conservative backers as the result of nefarious "Russian meddling".
The State Department can build on that and other experience.
Since at least 2011 the U.S. military is manipulating social media via sock puppets and trolls:
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
...
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".It was then wisely predicted that other countries would follow up:
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.Israel is long known for such information operations in which its paid trolls not only comment on issues on social media but actively manipulate Wikipedia entries. Such astroturfing has since become a common tool in commercial marketing campaigns.
With the new money the State Department will expand its Global Engagement Center (GEC) which is running "public diplomacy", aka propaganda, abroad:
The Fund will be a key part of the GEC's partnerships with local civil society organizations, NGOs, media providers, and content creators to counter propaganda and disinformation. The Fund will also drive the use of innovative messaging and data science techniques.Separately, the GEC will initiate a series of pilot projects developed with the Department of Defense that are designed to counter propaganda and disinformation. Those projects will be supported by Department of Defense funding.
This money will be in addition to the large funds the CIA traditionally spends on manipulating foreign media:
"We've been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947," said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. "We've used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners -- you name it. We've planted false information in foreign newspapers. We've used what the British call 'King George's cavalry': suitcases of cash."
...
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that "insertions" of information into foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day.Part of the new State Department money will be used to provide grants. If online trolling or sock puppetry is your thing, you may want to apply now.
Posted by b on February 26, 2018 at 02:02 PM | Permalink
Comments
nhs , Feb 26, 2018 2:34:39 PM | 1
The US propaganda machine has just confirmed what establishment's worst nightmare would bePeter AU 1 , Feb 26, 2018 2:40:29 PM | 2WorldBLee , Feb 26, 2018 2:49:32 PM | 3"to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner"I call these social media watchers rather than trolls. Rather than simply trying to disrupt any and all social media threads they don't like, social media watchers look for comments or comment threads that are disparaging or damaging to their employer.
#2 @Peter AU 1 - I would say the language "to find and CONFRONT" sounds pretty much like troll behavior.Don Bacon , Feb 26, 2018 2:51:50 PM | 4With regard to the larger issue, it seems that the US is getting more and more like its allies Ukraine (drives out any press concerned with printing the truth, relies on a bombastic and entirely false narrative to try and convince its hapless citizens that all is great and everything is Russia's fault) and Israel (an early leader in manipulating online info as b states).
That $40 million will probably be pissed away on a couple sweetheart contracts to Tillerson friends and nobody will see a difference. US State Department propaganda programs, labeled as "public diplomacy" and other monikers, have been around for a long time but haven't been executed very well.notlurking , Feb 26, 2018 2:55:14 PM | 5From the State Dept. historian office, 2013: . .(excerpt):
Public Diplomacy Is Still in Its Adolescent Stage in the State Department , etc.. . . The process of convergence has been evolutionary. Secretary Powell grasped the power of the information revolution, reallocated positions and resources from traditional diplomatic posting to new areas and recognized the power of satellite television to move publics and constrain governments even in authoritarian regimes. Secretary Rice forwarded this reconceptualization under the rubric of "Transformational Diplomacy," which sought to help people transform their own lives and the relationship between state and society. Secretary Clinton continued the theme under the concept of "Smart Power." "Person-to-person diplomacy in today's work is as important as what we do in official meetings in national capitals across the globe," Clinton said in 2010.The work done by PD officials in Arab Spring countries beginning in 2011 was as much about capacity-building as advocating U.S. policies or directly trying to explain American culture. . . here
I am retired and can use some extra change....just kidding!!!....nonsense factory , Feb 26, 2018 3:18:15 PM | 6Prior efforts were targeted more at traditional news outlets, this is just an expansion into social media along the lines of previous work, example A being the Rendon Group in Iraq, etc. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Rendon_GroupPeter AU 1 , Feb 26, 2018 3:19:30 PM | 7If it sounds like a PR monkey banging away on a regurgitated theme, it probably is. For example, the endless repetition in US media about "Syrian chemical weapons attacks" with no on-the-ground supporting evidence is typical of a Rendon Group disinformation campaign; so then they hire a hundred trolls to post outraged comments about 'Syrian chemical weapons use' in comment sections and on twitter; then they hire some State Department intern to write a book about the horrors of the Assad regime, and at the end they collect their $10 million paycheck.
Tediousness, defined.
WorldBLee 2nonsense factory , Feb 26, 2018 3:23:52 PM | 8Media watchers target specific comments or comment threads, in the case stated by b, those disparaging or damaging to Clinton.
What I term trolls target blogs or social media accounts that are considered targets, no matter the content of a particular article or comment thread. Social media media watchers are a little more specialized than trolls and look for specific content.
P.S. it's funny that you can find out what these clowns are up to by looking for job listings and salary reports:Peter AU 1 , Feb 26, 2018 3:27:48 PM | 9The Rendon Group Social Media Specialist Salary | Glassdoor
Average [monthly] salaries for The Rendon Group Social Media Specialist: $2,520. The Rendon Group salary trends based on salaries posted anonymously by The Rendon Group employees.
Talk about a soul-destroying job. Right up there with Wikipedia page editor.
nonsense factory 8. Money looks good. Plenty of people that dont give a shit about their soul will take it up.la Cariatide , Feb 26, 2018 3:40:19 PM | 11http://www.voltairenet.org/article194715.htmlNemesisCalling , Feb 26, 2018 4:08:38 PM | 12@7 peterben , Feb 26, 2018 4:09:30 PM | 13I see what you are alluding to, but the only problem with it is that, irrespective of the differing definitions, at heart, these infiltrators are a disrupting force on the message boards, whether paid to be or not. Their medium is disruption and obfuscation. I tried to wade into the neoliberal viper's den at slate.com un the past to post "alt-right" stuff and was quickly attacked by multiple avatars.
In essence, one troll disrupts because he has a need for recognition, and the latter disrupts for money. Both are netgain for the troll and loss for the rest of us.
The hypocrisy of the U$A continues to be staggering.. If the collective IQ's of the general public approached double digits, the disinformation and propaganda afoot, couldn't gain much traction. As comedian Richard Pryor once said, " Who you gonna' believe, the propagandists, or your lying eyes."james , Feb 26, 2018 4:19:32 PM | 14Turn off your I phones, and think a little.
thanks b... troll farms looks like a good name for it... farming for the empire.. they could call it that too.. russia as trend setter, lol.. i don't think so!NemesisCalling , Feb 26, 2018 4:19:33 PM | 15speaking of troll farms, i see max Blumenthal came out with some 'about time' comments on the sad kettle of fish called 'democracy now'... here is his tweet - "If @democracynow is going to push the neocon project of regime change in Syria so relentlessly and without debate, it should drop the high minded literary NPR aesthetic and just host Nikki Haley for a friendly one-on-one #EstablishmentNow https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/967123918237655041
7:07 AM - Feb 25, 2018 "money for propaganda... that was back in 1984 - we have progressed from Orwell's version of reality to a new one where reality is what you make of it... meanwhile there will be more dead people that the sponsors of these troll farms, could care less about... although they will frame it - 180% of that...
The silver lining here is that the state dept. is in a sense admitting that there is nothing "in the pipe" relating to outright censorship whether through nefarious agreements between ISP providers and the IC via the repeal of net neutrality.Jen , Feb 26, 2018 4:20:59 PM | 16$40 mil is a lot for liberal college graduates however.
Nonsense Factory @ 8, Peter AU 1 @ 9: There are plenty of communities in rural Australia who'd be glad to have troll farms paying that sort of money (even as Australian dollars - 1 Australian dollar being worth about US$0.76 at this time of posting) a month. Real farmers could do trolling on the side during slow seasons of the year and make some money.karlof1 , Feb 26, 2018 4:26:45 PM | 17What we need are some Mole Trolls, or maybe that's Troll Moles--double agents if you will that work for 6-12 months recording 100% of all they do then reveal it all in an expose.Ian , Feb 26, 2018 5:21:58 PM | 18Getting ready for mid-terms. It's going to be interesting to see if the Democrats get wiped off the map. They should be able to hire quite a few people for $40 million. Don't be surprised if they deploy AI in the first wave, then follow up with a real person.Piotr Berman , Feb 26, 2018 5:23:20 PM | 19ben @13:
Turn off your I phones, and think a little.ROFL After wandering aimlessly in the mall with Her Majesty over the weekend, I'm not sure if that's even possible now.
Hillary Clinton sat on a wall,Piotr Berman , Feb 26, 2018 5:29:18 PM | 20
Hillary Clinton had a great fall;
All the DNC stooges and all her trolls
Couldn't put her campaign again on the roll.[department of lame rhymes]
I am retired and can use some extra change....just kidding!!!....pantaraxia , Feb 26, 2018 6:42:36 PM | 21Posted by: notlurking | Feb 26, 2018 2:55:14 PM | 5
Foolish human, who needs the likes of you! Regards, Chief Bot
"The big Silicon Valley companies Google, Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the U.S. election campaign. The companies embedded people within the campaigns to advise them how to reach a maximum trolling effect:"che , Feb 26, 2018 6:47:53 PM | 22It went much further than that . Google actually tweaked its algorithms to alter search recommendations in favor of the Clinton campaign. A comparative analysis of search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo showed that Google differed significantly from the other two in producing search recommendations relevant to Clinton.
Google Manipulates Search Results To Favor Hillary Clinton - Jimmy Dore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MICXf6viakcBut , but, but...Russia!!!
Nothing to see her folks. Carry on.
The entire U.S. MSM is a F'ing troll farm, disinformation, Orwellian world on steroids. The U.S. public is fed a constant never ending stream of complete Bull sh**, self serving crap. How to stop it is the only question, to stop the impunity with which these criminals like Bush and Trump and Obama and Mattis et.al. lie with their pants on fire and .....they all suck .01% dick.Fec , Feb 26, 2018 8:19:04 PM | 23@8 Nonsense FactoryCurtis , Feb 26, 2018 8:44:21 PM | 24Ahmed Nafeez exposed The Rendon Group and the Pentagon's Highlands Forum a few years ago.
And then there's today's nonsense.
It's surprising to see the NYT admit the US does it, too. The alt media has been all over this including Corbett's recent video with the Woolsey interview with Fox News where he laughs it off and then says it was for a good cause.Curtis , Feb 26, 2018 8:47:09 PM | 25Hillary's Troll Farm = Lipstick on a pig.Fec , Feb 26, 2018 8:51:55 PM | 26From Nafeez Ahmed :Fec , Feb 26, 2018 9:01:10 PM | 27
Two days before 9/11, Condoleeza Rice received the draft of a formal National Security Presidential Directive that Bush was expected to sign immediately. The directive contained a comprehensive plan to launch a global war on al-Qaeda , including an "imminent" invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban. The directive was approved by the highest levels of the White House and officials of the National Security Council, including of course Rice and Rumsfeld. The same NSC officials were simultaneously running the Dhabol Working Group to secure the Indian power plant deal for Enron's Trans-Afghan pipeline project. The next day, one day before 9/11, the Bush administration formally agreed on the plan to attack the Taliban.From Nafeez Ahmed :Debsisdead , Feb 26, 2018 9:01:42 PM | 28
The Highlands Forum has thus played a leading role in defining the Pentagon's entire conceptualization of the 'war on terror.' Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a retired IMB vice president who co-chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2001, described his experience of one 2007 Forum meeting in telling terms:
"Then there is the War on Terror, which DoD has started to refer to as the Long War, a term that I first heard at the Forum. It seems very appropriate to describe the overall conflict in which we now find ourselves. This is a truly global conflict the conflicts we are now in have much more of the feel of a battle of civilizations or cultures trying to destroy our very way of life and impose their own."Posted by: Fec | Feb 26, 2018 8:19:04 PM | 23Lozion , Feb 26, 2018 9:09:10 PM | 29Yeah well since the writer of the 'quiz' exposes themself as bein a troll of the worst sort there is nothing to be said. I'm currently attempting to ingest only those newstories where the publisher provides space for feedback from readers since if a story is truthful it should be able to withstand challenge. yeah riight cos that means there's bugger all out there anymore. The biggest 'win' populism has had this far is in driving all feedback off all sites with a readership of more than a few hundred. Many of those that do allow feedback only permit humans with credentialed facebook or google accounts to indulge and the comments are only visible to similarly logged in types. That tells us a lot about the lack of faith the corporate media actually have in the nonsense they publish.
Of course 'trolls' are the ones held to be the guilty for causing this but if you actually watch what happens in a feedback column such as the rare occasions when the graun still permits CIF comments it isn't the deliberately offensive arseholes spouting the usual cliches who get deleted, it is those who put forward a considered argument which details why the original writer has reached a faulty conclusion.
We all know this yet it seems as though none of us are prepared to confront it properly as the censorship it is.
IMO media outlets which continually lie or at least distort the truth to advance a particular agenda need to be called to account.
Massed pickets outside newsrooms would be a good way cos as much as media hate us loudmouths who won't swallow their bromides, they like their competition even less. A decently organised picket of NYT, WaPo or the Graun would be news in every other spineless, propagandising & slug-featured media entity.Cant wait to see the big new shiny gold GEC logo, AMC & GMC anyone? ;)Fec , Feb 26, 2018 9:17:57 PM | 30@ 28 DebsisdeadFec , Feb 26, 2018 9:26:22 PM | 31Said troll was published in Richmond and God only knows who else picked it up. I refuted it in the comments as best I could, also excerpting MOA. Regardless:
From Ahmed Nafeez :
Among Rendon's activities was the creation of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) on behalf of the CIA, a group of Iraqi exiles tasked with disseminating propaganda, including much of the false intelligence about WMD . That process had begun concertedly under the administration of George H W. Bush, then rumbled along under Clinton with little fanfare, before escalating after 9/11 under George W. Bush. Rendon thus played a large role in the manufacture of inaccurate and false news stories relating to Iraq under lucrative CIA and Pentagon contracts -- and he did so in the period running up to the 2003 invasion as an advisor to Bush's National Security Council: the same NSC, of course, that planned the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, achieved with input from Enron executives who were simultaneously engaging the Pentagon Highlands Forum.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1From Ahmed Nafeez :Fec , Feb 26, 2018 9:40:37 PM | 32
Mass surveillance and data-mining also now has a distinctive operational purpose in assisting with the lethal execution of special operations, selecting targets for the CIA's drone strike kill lists via dubious algorithms, for instance, along with providing geospatial and other information for combatant commanders on land, air and sea, among many other functions. A single social media post on Twitter or Facebook is enough to trigger being placed on secret terrorism watch-lists solely due to a vaguely defined hunch or suspicion; and can potentially even land a suspect on a kill list.From Ahmed Nafeez :
In 2011, the Forum hosted two DARPA-funded scientists, Antonio and Hanna Damasio, who are principal investigators in the 'Neurobiology of Narrative Framing' project at the University of Southern California. Evoking Zalman's emphasis on the need for Pentagon psychological operations to deploy "empathetic influence," the new DARPA-backed project aims to investigate how narratives often appeal "to strong, sacred values in order to evoke an emotional response," but in different ways across different culturesThis goes a long way toward explaining what is occurring in Hollywood and Nashville.
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Feb 25, 2018 | www.unz.com
chris , Next New Comment February 25, 2018 at 10:57 pm GMT
Jake , Next New Comment February 26, 2018 at 12:50 am GMTSo here is my personal conclusion: democracies are political systems in which the real ruling elites hide behind an utterly fake appearance of people power.
Your point brought this infamous picture to mind!
"what we see is that western democracies are run by gangs of oligarchs and bureaucrats who have almost nothing in common with the people they are supposed to represent."ABSOLUTELY TRUE!
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Feb 13, 2018 | nationalinterest.org
From Eisenhower to Trump, the intelligence community has always struggled with its political role. Tweet Share Share March-April 2018 Note: this article is part of a symposium included in the March/April 2018 issue of the National Interest .
FEW QUESTIONS have greater import for the health and integrity of any republic than the question of whether important parts of its government's national-security apparatus are abusing their power for political purposes. This is particularly true in the United States, where the departments and agencies known collectively as the Intelligence Community (IC) have grown so large and capable, where faith in the integrity of our democratic institutions is so vital to the effective functioning of our system, and where suspicions about secret police and intelligence organizations are baked so deeply into our country's political culture.
The United States has faced this question several times in its recent history. The Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations all used -- or attempted to use -- the FBI and CIA to gather intelligence on U.S. citizens they suspected of collaboration with communist agents, with too little regard for statutory regulations and prohibitions of such practices, and too great a tendency to view their political enemies as national-security threats. Lyndon B. Johnson believed, without much justification, that the CIA had conspired against him at the 1960 Democratic convention to ensure that John F. Kennedy won the presidential nomination. Richard Nixon was equally convinced that the CIA had helped to swing the subsequent presidential election to Kennedy. These misperceptions barely surfaced in public at the time and did little to shake voters' faith in the outcome of the election, but they had significant implications for the working relationships of both Johnson and Nixon with the CIA once in office. Johnson's suspicions probably increased his inclination to side with the Defense Department's optimistic assessments of the Vietnam War over the CIA's more pessimistic -- and, in retrospect, more accurate -- analyses. Nixon's suspicions fueled his determination to build a small intelligence-gathering and covert-action group within the White House, which ultimately led to the Watergate break-in and cover-up that destroyed his presidency.
Investigations in the 1970s into various IC abuses, including efforts to collect intelligence on the political activities of U.S. citizens, led to the creation of specially designated congressional oversight committees -- the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- with the power and authorization to ensure that the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other IC bodies conduct their activities strictly within the bounds of law. The investigations also resulted in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which imposed strict limits on the government's ability to surveil the communications and activities of U.S. persons, requiring warrants issued by a special FISA court based on probable cause to believe that the target is a foreign power or its agent. The act established "minimization" requirements for disclosing the identities of U.S. persons being surveilled, allowing for "unmasking" -- that is, revealing their names to authorized government officials -- only when there is strong reason to believe they have committed a crime or when their identities are necessary to understand the intelligence information.
The now-infamous Iraq WMD estimate of 2002 raised questions of the political misuse of intelligence in a different form. Seldom had intelligence figured more prominently in the public justifications for a decision to go to war, and seldom had it been proven more spectacularly wrong in retrospect. Years of efforts by the CIA to increase its relevance had paid off in an unprecedentedly close relationship to the White House, but its unique ability to provide policymakers with the skepticism of a disinterested party suffered. The reorganization and reform of the IC mandated by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2005 were designed less to prevent political abuses of intelligence than to make the IC less prone to such consequential errors. This required something new of intelligence overseers: not only to ensure that IC activities remained within the bounds of law, but also to encourage qualitative improvements to its analytic rigor, information sharing and collaboration.
In principle, no one disputes that intelligence operations should be conducted strictly within the bounds of law, and that intelligence and law-enforcement professionals should be guided solely by evidence and analytic rigor in producing their assessments. Human nature being what it is, however, two temptations will be a never-ending challenge: for the IC, to please its White House masters, and for the presidency, to conflate its political enemies with those of the country as a whole. Aspects of both these temptations are evident in the controversies over the 2016 presidential election.
The use of the IC's vast capabilities to gather intelligence on opposition political campaigns should occur only in the rarest of circumstances, justified by solid evidence of treasonous activities warranted by the FISA court. The so-called Steele dossier, a piece of Clinton-funded opposition research gathered from London through unsecure communications with unnamed contacts in Russia, does not meet that standard of evidence. If, as is alleged but not proven, the FBI relied on this unverified document to justify a FISA warrant for collecting intelligence on Trump campaign officials, then the Obama administration crossed an important ethical, though probably not legal, line. Is there a deep state in the United States? Yes, if that means that important parts of our national-security apparatus have the capability, albeit not the legal authority, to abuse intelligence to alter the outcomes of national elections or distort public-policy debates. But we have processes in place to minimize this danger if the oversight provisions established by our laws are properly implemented and our independent media play their informal oversight role effectively. The IC, Congress, judiciary and media all appear to have fallen short of the standards our country should expect.
George Beebe is director of the Center for the National Interest's intelligence program. He formerly served as chief of Russia analysis at the CIA, and as special advisor to Vice President Cheney on Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Alistar , February 14, 2018 9:00 AM
Irakli Bokuchava , February 15, 2018 9:12 AMMr. Beebe, crossed an ethical but probably not legal line??? Really, appalling. FBI/DOJ operatives using the national level intel services to spy against a political opponent? Corruption, deception, lying to judges? Then there's this little aspect of a "cover up." Remember Nixon and Watergate, the break in was small potatoes, it was the lying and cover up that cost Nixon the Presidency. These two questions MUST be asked: What did they know and when did they know it??? Lynch, Holder, Brennan, Comey, Panetta, Biden and especially Obama. The truth will come out, eventually.
enoch arden , February 14, 2018 9:33 AMCIA and Intelligence community in common are parts of the American political system;their successful functioning is basis of success and victory of the USA as civil country;its alpha and omega of practical politics!
TrumpUup💪🏻 enoch arden , February 14, 2018 6:04 PMThe American so-called "Intel community" is a very peculiar phenomenon. Including this very term. Any intelligence agency is a military organisation with a very strict discipline directly subordinated to the commander in chief. Its activity is strictly secret and the commander in chief is the only recipient of the intelligence they acquire.
The Chinese book of military strategy "Sun Tzu" says that if the information of an agent became known to anyone before it was reported to the superior commander, both the agent and the recipient must be executed: the former for his loose tongue, the latter for his inappropriate curiocity. This implies that a particular branch of the intelligence service cannot distribute the information even to the adjacent branches, leaving alone the media.
In the US these rules seems to be entirely foreign. The intelligence officers actively discuss everything both with each other and with the media so that the commander in chief is often the last receiving the information. In a normal country this behaviour would have been stopped by executing the first 100 caught in leaking. The rest would learn the lesson.
sr37212 , February 14, 2018 9:26 AMI agree but i would say these people are obviously Obama lovers... We both know the realities of today wouldn't allow for executions but it would stop ot and i do agree... The only answer is smaller government but it's to late for that..
Schlesinger's Zenith ElPrimero , February 14, 2018 6:02 AMI guess we should just ignore the Dulles boys and their using the government to advance their own worth by overthrowing governments.
Arkansas Traveler Schlesinger's Zenith ElPrimero , February 14, 2018 10:30 AMAnother worthless article - how can you mention the Deep State and Nixon and not mention the mighty James Schlesinger and the Family Jewels? I think the Master Old Boy talked about peak oil in his later years too - nah, no such thing as the Limits to Growth eh boys?
The difference is that at one time, the deep state was on the side of the United States
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Feb 17, 2018 | nationalinterest.org
Political scientists often divide explanations of democratic politics in the United States and similar nations among theories of pluralism, state autonomy and elitism. The pluralist theory holds that the American elite, like the population, is divided among competing centers of power and authority with different values and interests. The state-autonomy theory holds that government agencies and military and intelligence organizations are independent actors in politics. The elitist theory holds that in most democracies most of the time, no matter how many political parties there may be, there is a dominant elite, which includes most of the leaders of politics, the economy and civil society and shares a broad consensus.
... ... ...
In my view, the elitist approach best explains the Trump phenomenon, along with contemporary populism on both sides of the Atlantic. Since the end of the Cold War, highly homogeneous social elites in North America and Europe have liberated themselves from the constraints of the institutions that restrained them between 1945 and 1989 -- institutions including strong labor unions, grassroots political parties and, in the United States, a distinct Southern oligarchy that by now has largely lost its identity and power and has been absorbed into the national ruling class.Elites in the United States, Britain, Germany and other Western nations under post–Cold War leadership have deliberately weakened the bargaining power of workers in their nations by a combination of austerity-induced unemployment, offshoring, permitting Western-controlled corporations to play nation-states against one another and mass low-skilled immigration, creating a low-wage "reserve army of labor" in Western countries.
While restructuring the global economy to crush organized labor, transatlantic elites have simultaneously restructured government to minimize democratic accountability, by shifting decisionmaking from legislatures to executive and judicial agencies within the nation-state, and by enabling treaties and transnational agencies like the European Union, which are more insulated from voters, to replace or modify national statutory law. In both of the cases of anti-worker economic restructuring and de-democratization, American and European oligarchs have claimed that a mysterious, unstoppable force called "globalization" compelled them to do what they wanted to do anyway. This post–Cold War oligarchic revolution from above might be described as a conspiracy, but it is not a secret conspiracy perpetrated by the deep state. It was a program carried out in broad daylight by Bill Clinton and George Bush, Tony Blair and centrist European leaders. And it succeeded in its two goals of weakening the economic leverage and political power of the working-class majorities in the United States, the UK and other Western nations.
The populist rebellions of the second decade of the twenty-first century, which have been led by right-wing tribunes like Trump or left-wing demagogues like Sanders and Corbyn, can only be understood as a long-delayed reaction by populations to the replacement of the cross-class compromises of the post–World War II period by untrammeled oligarchy. America's newly empowered ruling class has closed ranks against Trump, but it would also close ranks against any other outsider president who challenged its post–Cold War dominance of American society, including Bernie Sanders. Deep divide? Yes. Deep state? No.
Michael Lind is a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author, with Robert D. Atkinson, of Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business (MIT Press, March 2018).
Uniters.org Centrist EIC , February 13, 2018 7:36 AM
R. Arandas , February 13, 2018 3:57 PMA bizarre misreading of history, though good points are made as well.
This is a classic example of a dishonest person analyzing something they disagree with, and instead of sticking to reality, they build a straw man bugaboo to assign blame to, and make their side into a victim:
"deliberately weakened the bargaining power of workers in their nations by a combination of austerity-induced unemployment, offshoring, permitting Western-controlled corporations to play nation-states against one another and mass low-skilled immigration, creating a low-wage "reserve army of labor" in Western countries"
He pretends that he isn't calling it a conspiracy, but that is exactly what he's doing, and some have done what he describes, but where he willfully jumps off the cliff of dishonesty is in claiming to know why ("deliberately") these actions were taken by so many people, over such a long period of time.
That's an obvious lie. Unless Mr. Lind is Professor X, using science fiction psychic magnifying machines to read thousands of minds, both past and present, there is no way anyone could honestly make that claim.
His use of conspiracy theory makes it doubly interesting in how he deconstructs the conspiracy theory many on the right are pushing about the 'deep state'.
Turn that skeptic's lens back on yourself, Mr. Lind.
Curt , February 13, 2018 1:59 PMThe rise of the power elite has long been a serious problem in many Western societies, but trying to forcibly overthrow it will only create a new and potentially more dangerous elite in turn.
Information is the key to winning any war between the people and the elite.
Would have been nice to mention that all this was possible post-1991 because there was no longer a peer competitor to the US, and thus Western business elite no longer was constrained to be allied with Western workers. Since 2014, that has all changed. There are now two near-peer competitors to the US.
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Feb 16, 2018 | nationalinterest.org
andrewp111 Guest , February 13, 2018 7:21 AM
Tracy Crawford , February 13, 2018 8:21 PMFor a very simple reason. The Deep Staters care first and foremost about themselves. They wanted Hillary to win, badly, but were not willing to risk too much for her. James Comey in particular cares about James Comey. Remember, this is a guy who views himself as a historical Religious Figure. He wanted to be able to serve out a full 10 year term. He wanted to please his Democratic masters enough to avoid being fired by either Obama or Clinton, but not too much to gain excessive ire from Congress. He was afraid that a Republican Congress under a future Clinton Administration would go after him tooth and nail if he "concealed" new evidence against Clinton prior to the election - especially since he promised the Congress that he would inform them of new developments. And Comey probably feared the worst as to what was in Wiener's email archive. When they finally went through that archive, and failed to find much that was new, he must have breathed a sigh of relief - only to see the wrong person win the election.
Kurt Gayle , February 13, 2018 2:03 PMThe political system in the US is a near complete failure. On one hand the massive levels of corruption legalized in Citizen's United give influence over political decisions to wealthy elites previously unseen outside of the deeply corrupted and criminal Russian oligarchy. On the other hand and synergistic with the previous point, the least informed and most easily influenced of people have votes equal in weight to highly informed, well-educated, expert and professional practitioners.
Rights guaranteed by a difficult-to-alter constitution combined with easily managed and easily created social media content based on opaque sources of emotionally charged, unverified and unverifiable information have gained control over public opinion (making alteration of our constitution even more difficult.)
And look at the fourth (Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump) wave of Republican explosion of national debt under the banner of "fiscal responsibility."
It is astounding how "A" can be so successfully marketed as "B."
I am afraid that once control of public opinion has been so successfully attained in our form of democracy/legalized-corruption that there is no way to recover.
It is a sad state of affairs. I'd love to hear solutions.
WillDippel , February 12, 2018 9:08 PMAn excellent description of the recent activities of the Deep State, Mr. Merry.
Thank you.
The trolls will now come after you full-bore.
Anti-Empire , February 14, 2018 12:48 PMAs shown in this article, Washington is completely ignoring the one issue of its own making that could create global chaos:
https://viableopposition.bl...
Washington's anti-Russia program is simply a distraction from its real problems.
Jamie , February 14, 2018 12:12 PMGreat piece by Merry. Not new, but worthy of repetition when presented clearly like this.
It does not matter what you call it, Deep State or something else. What Merry says about the threat it poses to what remnants of democracy we have is true.
I prefer to call it the Imperial State since its highest priority is the US Empire, with domestic well-being simply an afterthought or of no cosequence at all.Steve JimmyD , February 14, 2018 1:29 PM"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,"
- Cryin' Chuck Schumer
kelly bako JimmyD , February 13, 2018 7:27 PMThere is only ONE country that consistently "messes" in the politics of nearly every other country on the planet and that is not Russia.
It is the USA Deep State. I challenge you to research the evidence, "hidden in plain sight", of these examples:
1) US money that flowed into France and Italy elections after WW2;
2) overthrow of Greece elected pres in 1974 by US-friendly generals;
3) overthrow of Salvadore Allende in Chile 1973;
4) overthrow of Iran Mossadegh in 1953;
5) overthrow of neutral govt in Indonesia in early '60s;
6) the massive money that flowed into Russia in 1996 to get Yeltsin re-elected;
7) the money and attention US put into overthrowing legally elected govt in Ukraine in 2014.
That is just a VERY short list.
NO OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH HAS MAINTAINED THIS FRANTIC PACE OF MASSIVE INTERVENTIONS/MEDDLING/BRIBING/OVERTHROWING/BOMBING/INVADING/DEATH-SQUADing FOREIGN POLITICAL SYSTEMS FOR 70 YEARS LIKE YOUR "GOOD OLE USA", powered by it's un-elected Deep State.
Tracy Crawford kelly bako , February 13, 2018 10:50 PMPutin is evil, Putin kills, Putin steals, bla bla bla!!! Putin is only guilty for not being America's vassal. The Russia bashing in MSM will cease by miracle if it becomes America's client state. Putin and Russia are presumed guilty of everything bad that happens in the world.
No evidence is needed, high confidence is enough!! It is almost funny that a country like USA which has a long records of meedling and intervention in others countries internal affairs worlwide, now is losing reason about alleged russia meedling.
A troll, from Saint Petersburg.
kelly bako Tracy Crawford , February 14, 2018 2:01 AMYou're right, Kelly, about some of your points. Evil: check. Kill: check. Steal: check. Co-opting the largest per capita criminal network in the world: check.
He forced Americans to vote trump to undermine your democracy : check
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Feb 16, 2018 | nationalinterest.org
February 12, 2018
Note: this article is part of a symposium included in the March/April 2018 issue of the National Interest .OF COURSE there's a Deep State. Why wouldn't there be? Even a cursory understanding of human nature tells us that power corrupts, as Lord Acton put it; that, when power is concentrated and entrenched, it will be abused; that, when it is concentrated and entrenched in secrecy, it will be abused in secret. That's the Deep State. James Burnham saw it coming. The American philosopher and political theorist (1905–87), first a Trotskyist, then a leading conservative intellectual, wrote in 1941 that the great political development of the age was not the battle between communism and capitalism. Rather, it was the rise of a new "managerial" class gaining dominance in business, finance, organized labor and government. This gathering managerial revolution, as he called it, would be resisted, but it would be impervious to adversarial counteractions. As the managerial elites gained more and more power, exercised often in subtle and stealthy ways, they would exercise that power to embed themselves further into the folds of American society and to protect themselves from those who might want to bust them up.
Nowhere is this managerial elite more entrenched, more powerful and more shrouded in secrecy than in what Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, augmented by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. That's where America's relentless drive for global hegemony meshes with defense manufacturers only too willing to provide the tools of dominance.
Now we have not only a standing army, with hundreds of thousands of troops at the ready, as in Cold War days. We have also permanent wars, nine of them in progress at the moment and not one with what could even remotely be called proper congressional approval. That's how power gets entrenched, how the managerial revolution gains ever greater force and how the Deep State endures.
Few in the general public know what really happened with regard to the allegations of Trump campaign "collusion" with Russia, or how the investigation into those troubling allegations emerged. But we know enough to know we have seen the Deep State in action.
We know that U.S. agencies released an "Intelligence Community Assessment" saying that Russia and President Putin were behind the release of embarrassing Democratic emails in a plot to help Trump win the presidency. But we also know that it wasn't really a National Intelligence Assessment (a term of art denoting a particular process of expansive intelligence analysis) but rather the work of a controlled task force. As Scott Ritter, the former Marine intelligence officer and arms-control official, put it , "This deliberate misrepresentation of the organizational bona fides of the Russia NIA casts a shadow over the viability of the analysis used to underpin the assessments and judgments contained within." Besides, the document was long on assertion and short on evidence. Even the New York Times initially derided the report as lacking any "hard evidence" and amounting "essentially . . . to 'trust us.'"
We have substantial reason to believe that an unconfirmed salacious report on Trump, paid for by the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign (with the FBI eventually getting hold of it), was used in an effort to get a secret national-security warrant so the government could spy on the Trump campaign. We know that the FBI went easy on Clinton in its investigation of her irresponsible email practices, and then we find out that a top FBI official involved in both the Clinton and Trump/Russia investigations despised Trump, liked Hillary and expressed an interest in doing what he could to thwart Trump's emergence. We know he privately told his lover that, while he didn't think Trump could win, he nevertheless felt a need for an "insurance policy" because "I'm afraid we can't take that risk." We know these matters were discussed in the office of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
We know further that former FBI director James Comey used a cutout to leak to the press a rendition of an Oval Office conversation with the president that could be interpreted adversely to Trump. We know he did this to set in motion the appointment of an independent investigator, a potentially mortal threat to any president -- and perhaps particularly to this freewheeling billionaire developer.
Perhaps most significant, we know that all this had the effect of wrenching from the president the flexibility to pursue a policy agenda on which he had campaigned -- and which presumably contributed to his election. That was his promise to work toward improved relations between the United States and Russia. Prospects for such a diplomatic initiative now are as dead as the dodo bird. Trump lost that one. The Deep State won.
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is editor of The American Conservative . He is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century .
grumpy_carpenter , February 13, 2018 8:07 AM
Paul Cressman grumpy_carpenter , February 13, 2018 6:20 PMI don't believe there is a secret 'deep state' controlling the USA from the shadows like some Bond villian.
What people call the deep state is in fact the interests of the business elite who have been granted nearly unprecedented political influence by the American people in the form or nearly unlimited campaign contributions to politicians who promote their interests, unregulated lobbying, control of the MSM and the funding of think tanks and other institutions that promote their interests.
When historians look back at this time it will be Madison Avenue and the revolution in persuasion that they study.
R. Arandas grumpy_carpenter , February 13, 2018 4:02 PM1934 Major General Smedley Butler, US Marine Corp, was asked by US Industrialists to help them overthrow the government. Roosevelt was to remain as the figurehead of the US but the industrialists would be in charge. The industrialist would supply Butler with a 500,000 man army that he would be in charge of. Butler's father was a congressman in the 1920's and Butler told congress of the possible Coup. Read of The Committee of Foreign Affairs, CFA.
JimmyD grumpy_carpenter , February 13, 2018 9:24 AMYes, it is quite disturbing that 2% of the world's population control about 50% of its total wealth though:
https://www.theguardian.com...Teddy Roosevelt and the Presidents that followed him understood the dangers of the Robber-Barons buying the government. That's why they launched anti-trust, income tax and estate taxes to protect democracy.
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Feb 16, 2018 | nationalinterest.org
The Deep State Isn't What You Think
The problem is not that the "deep state" is thwarting Trump's policy agenda. It is his reliance on advisers who agree with the post–Cold War foreign-policy consensus.
Emma M. Ashford The Deep State Is a DistractionWhen you hear the term "dark government," change the channel or turn off the radio; if you see an article, turn the page.
John Deutch Is There a Deep State?A symposium on the "deep state" in today's Washington.
Jacob Heilbrunn The 'Deep State' Is No SupervillainThe encroaching "deep state" was a program carried out in broad daylight by Bill Clinton and George Bush, Tony Blair and centrist European leaders.
Michael Lind The Deep State Is Very RealHow the Deep State stopped better relations with Russia.
Robert W. Merry The Deep State Has Long Abused Its PowerFrom Eisenhower to Trump, the intelligence community has always struggled with its political role.
George Beebe The 'Deep State' Conspiracy Is a JokeFrom the Masons to UFOs, Americans have loved mysteries.
Gary Hart We've Seen This Deep-State Story BeforeAs a boy in the early 1950s, I learned about a widely feared attempt to take over America by communists. A few years later, it was just a myth.
John Despres Trump's War on the Deep StateThis is why Donald Trump went to war against the entire political class.
Conrad Black America Has No Deep StateThe fictitious idea of a deep state is doing more to politicize the bureaucracy than any real deep state ever did.
Paul R. Pillar How We Got Trump's Clash with the Deep StateHad the deep state gotten its way, Donald J. Trump would never have come close to the Oval Office, let alone be sitting in it.
Christopher A. Preble
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Feb 16, 2018 | nationalinterest.org
AMERICA'S FOUNDERS anticipated how a sprawling national-security state could subvert the popular will, and even endanger the nation's interests. James Madison told his fellow delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty."
History informed his judgement. "The means of defense against foreign danger," he said, "have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."
George Washington agreed. In his Farewell Address, the general turned president advised his countrymen to "avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."
Another general-president, Dwight Eisenhower, echoed these concerns. He worried that the evolving "military-industrial complex" would acquire "unwarranted influence" and "endanger our liberties or democratic processes." "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry," he continued, "can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Alas, the citizenry is neither alert nor knowledgeable.
Which means that the actual conduct of foreign policy falls to what Michael Glennon dubbed the Trumanites: "the network of several hundred high-level military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement officials within the executive branch who are responsible for making national security policymaking." And within that executive branch, Glennon concludes in his book National Security and Double Government , "The President . . . exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of U.S. national security policy."
Even if you don't buy Glennon's argument, it seems likely that the men and women responsible for executing U.S. foreign policy are uninterested in the views of the many Americans who actually pay for the nation's wars, and the few Americans who fight them.
Defenders of the status quo like to argue that it survives because it works. The public is wrong to doubt the wisdom of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the foreign-policy elite sees it, the American people can't be expected to understand why we defend wealthy allies, deploy hundreds of thousands of military personnel in numerous foreign countries and align ourselves with some of the world's most reprehensible autocrats.
Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state, presumably spoke for many elites (though perhaps too candidly) when he explained, "If you truly had a democracy and did what the people wanted, you'd go wrong every time."
In this sense, it isn't merely inertia that explains why U.S. foreign policy remains on autopilot, despite widespread public dissatisfaction with the status quo. Rather, it's the deep state, doing what the deep state does.
Donald Trump tapped into the resentment engendered by the establishment's contempt for the great unwashed. He has failed, so far at least, to dislodge the deep state and its policies. Then again, maybe he never intended to roll back American primacy. After all, he promised massive military spending increases, and expressed regret that we didn't take the Iraqis' oil. Even his claim to have always opposed the Iraq War was a taradiddle. So there were ample grounds for doubting that Trump would give the American people the foreign policy they wanted. Maybe the deep state didn't thwart him?
The deep state obviously isn't all-powerful. After all, had the deep state gotten its way, Donald J. Trump would never have come close to the Oval Office, let alone be sitting in it.
Now, given the power that we have erroneously invested in the office of the presidency, critics of the deep state should rethink their opposition to it, and members of the deep state should rethink their enthusiasm for a chief executive generally unencumbered by the Congress or the people. The deep state doesn't control the @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed. It cannot stop him from engaging in behavior that increases the risk of a catastrophic conflict. Perhaps we should wish that it could?
But we should never welcome a situation in which unelected officials distort or ignore public sentiments, or undertake policies that are demonstrably harmful to vital national interests.
Christopher A. Preble is vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute and the author of The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free .
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Feb 15, 2018 | nationalinterest.org
...Donald Trump went to war against the entire political class: all factions of both parties, the bureaucracy, the national media, the lobbyists, Hollywood and Wall Street. He said the whole system was rotten and had failed the nation: hopeless wars that accomplished nothing except the wastage of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, the extension of Iranian influence and an immense humanitarian crisis, a flatlined economy, a shrinking workforce, increasing poverty and crime, oceans of debt, large trade deficits from trade agreements that exported unemployment to the United States and the unmonitored influx of millions of illiterate peasants from Latin America.
... ... ...
For the first nine months of the new administration, there was the constant confected threat of impeachment. The phantasmagorical imbecility that Trump had somehow colluded and connived with the Russian government to rig the election was the excuse of the hapless Clinton and her Trump-hating echo chamber in the national media for the election result.
The deep state was almost the whole state, and it pitched in to sabotage the administration. For nearly that long, the Republican leaders sat on their hands waiting to see if he would be impeached or not. His nominees were a long time in being confirmed. There were leaks of White House conversations, including with foreign leaders -- outright acts of insubordination causing Trump, a decisive executive, to fire some fairly high officials, including the malign director of the FBI, who then informed Congress that he had leaked a self-addressed memo (probably illegally, as it was technically government property), in order to have a special prosecutor named to torment the president over the fatuous Russian allegations, although Comey testified that Trump himself was not a target or suspect and the Russians had not influenced the outcome of the election. (This was a sober position compared to the wholesale fabrications of the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, that a thousand Russian agents had swarmed the key battleground states and had delivered Wisconsin to Trump.)The president has strengthened the White House staff. The FBI and Justice Department have been ripped apart in their partisanship and misuse of the dossier on which the collusion argument and the surveillance of the Trump campaign were based. And the dossier, a pastiche of falsehoods from gossips in the Kremlin, has been exposed as a smear job paid for by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, and the whole impeachment movement has collapsed. The hunters are the prey and Trump will prosecute, sack, or intimidate the deep state. But it is there, can arise quickly and can be very dangerous. Forewarned is forearmed.
Conrad Black is a writer and former newspaper publisher whose most recent book is Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs, 2007).
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Feb 14, 2018 | www.informationclearinghouse.info
Note: this article is part of a symposium included in the March/April 2018 issue of the National Interest .
OF COURSE there's a Deep State. Why wouldn't there be? Even a cursory understanding of human nature tells us that power corrupts, as Lord Acton put it; that, when power is concentrated and entrenched, it will be abused; that, when it is concentrated and entrenched in secrecy, it will be abused in secret. That's the Deep State.
James Burnham saw it coming. The American philosopher and political theorist (1905–87), first a Trotskyist, then a leading conservative intellectual, wrote in 1941 that the great political development of the age was not the battle between communism and capitalism. Rather, it was the rise of a new "managerial" class gaining dominance in business, finance, organized labor and government. This gathering managerial revolution, as he called it, would be resisted, but it would be impervious to adversarial counteractions. As the managerial elites gained more and more power, exercised often in subtle and stealthy ways, they would exercise that power to embed themselves further into the folds of American society and to protect themselves from those who might want to bust them up.
Nowhere is this managerial elite more entrenched, more powerful and more shrouded in secrecy than in what Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, augmented by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. That's where America's relentless drive for global hegemony meshes with defense manufacturers only too willing to provide the tools of dominance.
Now we have not only a standing army, with hundreds of thousands of troops at the ready, as in Cold War days. We have also permanent wars, nine of them in progress at the moment and not one with what could even remotely be called proper congressional approval. That's how power gets entrenched, how the managerial revolution gains ever greater force and how the Deep State endures.
Few in the general public know what really happened with regard to the allegations of Trump campaign "collusion" with Russia, or how the investigation into those troubling allegations emerged. But we know enough to know we have seen the Deep State in action.
We know that U.S. agencies released an "Intelligence Community Assessment" saying that Russia and President Putin were behind the release of embarrassing Democratic emails in a plot to help Trump win the presidency. But we also know that it wasn't really a National Intelligence Assessment (a term of art denoting a particular process of expansive intelligence analysis) but rather the work of a controlled task force. As Scott Ritter, the former Marine intelligence officer and arms-control official, put it , "This deliberate misrepresentation of the organizational bona fides of the Russia NIA casts a shadow over the viability of the analysis used to underpin the assessments and judgments contained within." Besides, the document was long on assertion and short on evidence. Even the New York Times initially derided the report as lacking any "hard evidence" and amounting "essentially . . . to 'trust us.'"
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Feb 06, 2018 | failedevolution.blogspot.gr
How Russiagate fiasco destroys Kremlin moderates, accelerating danger for a hot war with Russia globinfo freexchange
Corporate Democrats can't stop pushing for war through the Russiagate fiasco.
The party has been completely taken over by the neocon/neoliberal establishment and has nothing to do with the Left. The pro-Hillary warmongering media, the ones that pushed for war in Iraq and elsewhere, through big lies and false evidence, are the vanguard of this ugly machine that supports the most terrible Trump administration bills, yet, this machine can't stop accusing him for 'colluding' with Russia that 'interfered' in the 2016 US election. Of course, no evidence presented for such an accusation and no one really can explain what that 'interference' means.
But things are probably much worse, because this completely absurd persistence on Russiagate fiasco that feeds an evident anti-Russian hysteria, destroys all the influence of the Kremlin moderates who struggle to keep open channels between Russia and the United States.
Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at NY University and Princeton University, explained to Aaron Maté and the Real News the terrible consequences:
They're accusing the President of the United States of being a Russian agent, this has never happened in American history. However much you may loathe Trump, this is a whole new realm of defamation. For a number of years, there's been a steady degradation of American political culture and discourse, generally. There was a time when I hoped or thought that it would be the Democratic Party that would push against that degradation.
Now, however, though I'm kind of only nominally, a Democrat, it's the Democratic Party that's degrading our political culture and our discourse. So, this is MSNBC, which purports to be not only the network of the Democratic Party, but the network of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, is now actually because this guy was a semi-anchor was asking the question to an American senator, " Do you think that Representative Nunes, because he wants the memo released, has been compromised by the Kremlin? "
I think all of us need to focus on what's happened in this country when in the very mainstream, at the highest, most influential levels of the political establishment, this kind of discourse is no longer considered an exception. It is the norm. We hear it daily from MSNBC and CNN, from the New York Times and the Washington Post, that people who doubt the narrative of what's loosely called Russiagate are somehow acting on behalf of or under the spell of the Kremlin, that we aren't Americans any longer. And by the way, if people will say, " Well, it's a weak capitulation of McCarthyism, " I say no, it's much more than that because McCarthy was obsessed with Communist. That was a much narrower concept than being obsessed with anybody who might be under Russian influence of any kind. The so-called affinity for Russia. Well, I have a profound affinity for Russian culture and for Russian history. I study it all the time. This is something new. And so, when you accuse a Republican or any Congressman of being a Kremlin agent, this has become a commonplace. We are degraded.
The new Cold War is unfolding not far away from Russia, like the last in Berlin, but on Russia's borders in the Baltic and in Ukraine. We are building up our military presence there, so the Russians are counter-building up, though within their territory. That means the chances of hot war are now much greater than they were before. Meanwhile, not only do we not have a discussion of these real dangers in the United States but anyone who wants to incite a discussion, including the President of the United States, is called treasonous. Every time Trump has tried with Putin to reach a cooperative arrangement, for example, on fighting terrorism in Syria, which is a necessary purpose, literally, the New York Times and the others call him treasonous. Whereas, in the old days, the old Cold War, we had a robust discussion. There is none here. We have no alert system that's warning the American people and its representatives how dangerous this is. And as we mentioned before, it's not only Nunes, it's a lot of people who are being called Kremlin agents because they want to digress from the basic narrative.
Meanwhile, people in Moscow who formed their political establishment, who surround Putin and the Kremlin, I mean, the big brains who are formed policy tankers, and who have always tended to be kind of pro-American, and very moderate, have simply come to the conclusion that war is coming. They can't think of a single thing to tell the Kremlin to offset hawkish views in the Kremlin. Every day, there's something new. And these were the people in Moscow who are daytime peacekeeping interlockers. They have been destroyed by Russiagate. Their influence as Russia is zilch. And the McCarthyites in Russia, they have various terms, now called the pro-American lobby in Russia 'fifth columnists'. This is the damage that's been done. There's never been anything like this in my lifetime.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/CpVBA4OIfb8
The Democrats couldn't had downgrade their party further. This disgusting spectacle would make FDR totally ashamed of what this party has become. Not only they are voting for every pro-plutocracy GOP bill under Trump administration, but they have become champions in bringing back a much worse and unpredictable Cold War that is dangerously escalating tension with Russia.And, unfortunately, even the most progressives of the Democrats are adopting the Russiagate bogus, like Bernie Sanders, because they know that if they don't obey to the narratives, the DNC establishment will crush them politically in no time.
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Feb 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
(Editorial Statement)
The Borgist foreign policy of the administration has little to do with the generals. To comprehend the generals one must understand their collective mentality and the process that raised them on high as a collective of their own. The post WW2 promotion process in the armed forces has produced a group at the top with a mentality that typically thinks rigorously but not imaginatively or creatively.
These men got to their present ranks and positions by being conformist group thinkers who do not stray outside the "box" of their guidance from on high. They actually have scheduled conference calls among themselves to make sure everyone is "on board."
If asked at the top, where military command and political interaction intersect, what policy should be they always ask for more money and to be allowed to pursue outcomes that they can understand as victory and self fulfilling with regard to their collective self image as warrior chieftains.
In Obama's time they were asked what policy should be in Afghanistan and persuaded him to reinforce their dreams in Afghanistan no matter how unlikely it always was that a unified Western oriented nation could be made out of a collection of disparate mutually alien peoples.
In Trump's time his essential disinterest in foreign policy has led to a massive delegation of authority to Mattis and the leadership of the empire's forces. Their reaction to that is to look at their dimwitted guidance from on high (defeat IS, depose Assad and the SAG, triumph in Afghanistan) and to seek to impose their considerable available force to seek accomplishment as they see fit of this guidance in the absence of the kind of restrictions that Obama placed on them.
Like the brass, I, too, am a graduate of all those service schools that attend success from the Basic Course to the Army War College. I will tell you again that the people at the top are not good at "the vision thing." They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers. pl
Jack , 09 February 2018 at 05:42 PM
SirFredw , 09 February 2018 at 06:26 PMIMO, this conformism pervades all institutions. I saw when I worked in banking and finance many moons ago how moving up the ranks in any large organization meant you didn't rock the boat and you conformed to the prevailing groupthink. Even nutty ideas became respectable because they were expedient.
Academia reinforces the groupthink. The mavericks are shunned or ostracized. The only ones I have seen with some degree of going against the grain are technology entrepreneurs.
You remind me of an old rumination by Thomas Ricks:Peter AU , 09 February 2018 at 06:37 PMTake the example of General George Casey. According to David Cloud and Greg Jaffe's book Four Stars, General Casey, upon learning of his assignment to command U.S. forces in Iraq, received a book from the Army Chief of Staff. The book Counterinsurgency Lessons Learned from Malaya and Vietnam was the first book he ever read about guerilla warfare." This is a damning indictment of the degree of mental preparation for combat by a general. The Army's reward for such lack of preparation: two more four star assignments.
"They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers." I have found this to be the case with 80 to 90% of most professions. A good memory and able to perform meticulously what they have been taught, but little thinking outside that narrow box. Often annoying, but very dangerous in this case.Anna , 09 February 2018 at 06:48 PMSince Afghanistan and the brass were mentioned in the editorial statement, here is an immodest question -- Where the brass have been while the opium production has been risen dramatically in Afghanistan under the US occupation? "Heroin Addiction in America Spearheaded by the US-led War on Afghanistan" by Paul Craig Roberts: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/06/heroin-addiction-america-spearheaded-us-led-war-afghanistan/J , 09 February 2018 at 07:05 PM" in 2000-2001 the Taliban government –with the support of the United Nations (UNODC) – implemented a successful ban on poppy cultivation. Opium production which is used to produce grade 4 heroin and its derivatives declined by more than 90 per cent in 2001. The production of opium in 2001 was of the order of a meager 185 tons. It is worth noting that the UNODC congratulated the Taliban Government for its successful opium eradication program. The Taliban government had contributed to literally destabilizing the multibillion dollar Worldwide trade in heroin.
In 2017, the production of opium in Afghanistan under US military occupation reached 9000 metric tons. The production of opium in Afghanistan registered a 49 fold increase since Washington's invasion. Afghanistan under US military occupation produces approximately 90% of the World's illegal supply of opium which is used to produce heroin. Who owns the airplanes and ships that transport heroin from Afghanistan to the US? Who gets the profits?"
---A simple Q: What has been the role of the CENTCOM re the racket? Who has arranged the protection for the opium production and for drug dealers? Roberts suggests that the production of opium in Afghanistan "finances the black operations of the CIA and Western intelligence agencies." -- All while Awan brothers, Alperovitch and such tinker with the US national security?
Colonel,divadab , 09 February 2018 at 07:16 PMThere needs to be a 're-education' of the top, all of them need to be required to attend Green Beret think-school, in other words they need to be forced to think outside the box, and to to think on their feet. They need to understand fluid situations where things change at the drop of a hat, be able to dance the two-step and waltz at the same time. In other words they need to be able to walk and chew gum and not trip over their shoe-laces.
By no means are they stupid, but you hit the nail on the head when you said 'narrow thinkers'. Their collective hive mentality that has developed is not a good thing.
God help the poor people of Syria.james , 09 February 2018 at 07:30 PMthanks pat... it seems like the usa has had a steady group of leaders that have no interest in the world outside of the usa, or only in so far as they can exploit it for their own interest... maybe that sums up the foreign policy of the usa at this point... you say trump is disinterested.. so all the blather from trump about 'why are we even in syria?', or 'why can't we be friends with the russia?' is just smoke up everyone's ass...David E. Solomon , 09 February 2018 at 07:50 PMi like what you said here "conformist group thinkers who do not stray outside the "box" of their guidance from on high. They actually have scheduled conference calls among themselves to make sure everyone is "on board." - that strikes me as very true - conformist group thinkers... the world needs less of these types and more actual leaders who have a vision for something out of the box and not always on board... i thought for a while trump might fill this bill, but no such luck by the looks of it now..
Colonel Lang,DianaLC , 09 February 2018 at 07:56 PMYour description of these guys sounds like what we have heard about Soviet era planners. Am I correct in my understanding, or am I missing something?
Regards,
David
As a young person in eighth grade, I learned about the "domino theory" in regard to attempts to slow the spread of communism. Then my generation was, in a sense, fractured around the raging battles for and against our involvement in Vietnam.Bill Herschel , 09 February 2018 at 09:11 PMI won't express my own opinion on that. But I mention it because it seems to be a type of "vision thing."
So, now I ask, what would be your vision for the Syrian situation?
This has been going on for a long time has it not? Westmoreland? MacArthur?turcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 09:40 PMHow did this happen?
Bill Herschelturcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 09:48 PMWestmoreland certainly, Macarthur certainly not. This all started with the "industrialization" of the armed forces in WW2. we never recovered the sense of profession as opposed to occupation after the massive expansion and retention of so many placeholders. a whole new race of Walmart manager arose and persists. pl
DianaCturcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 09:55 PMThe idea of the Domino Theory came from academia, not the generals of that time. They resisted the idea of a war in east Asia until simply ordered into it by LBJ. After that their instinct for acting according to guidance kicked in and they became committed to the task. Syria? Do you think I should write you an essay on that? SST has a large archive and a search machine. pl
David E. Solomonturcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 10:08 PMI am talking about flag officers at present, not those beneath them from the mass of whom they emerge. There are exceptions. Martin Dempsey may have been one such. The system creates such people at the top. pl
elaine,turcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 10:12 PMYour usual animosity for non-left wing authority is showing. A commander like the CENTCOM theater commander (look it up) operates within guidance from Washington, broad guidance. Normally this is the president's guidance as developed in the NSC process. Some presidents like Obama and LBJ intervene selectively and directly in the execution of that guidance. Obama had a "kill list" of jihadis suggested by the IC and condemned by him to die in the GWOT. He approved individual missions against them. LBJ picked individual air targets in NVN. Commanders in the field do not like that . They think that freedom of action within their guidance should be accorded them. This CinC has not been interested thus far in the details and have given the whole military chain of command wide discretion to carry out their guidance. pl
Jturcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 10:24 PMThank you, but it is real GBs that you like, not the Delta and SEAL door kickers. pl
Gaikomainakuturcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 10:27 PM"I am not sure that I understand what makes a Borgist different from a military conformist." The Borg and the military leaders are not of the same tribe. they are two different collectives who in the main dislike and distrust each other. pl
Anna. Their guidance does not include a high priority for eradicating the opium trade. Their guidance has to do with defeating the jihadis and building up the central government. plturcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 10:30 PMPeter AUturcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 10:44 PMPredictably there is always someone who says that this group is not different from all others. Unfortunately the military function demands more than the level of mediocrity found in most groups. pl
jamesPeter AU , 09 February 2018 at 11:01 PMTrump would like to better relations with Russia but that is pretty much the limit of his attention to foreign affairs at any level more sophisticated than expecting deference. He is firmly focused on the economy and base solidifying issues like immigration. pl
The medical profession comes to mind. GP's and specialists. Many of those working at the leading edge of research seem much wider thinking and are not locked into the small box of what they have been taught.turcopolier , 09 February 2018 at 11:16 PMPeter AUJ -> turcopolier ... , 09 February 2018 at 11:22 PMThe GPs do not rule over a hierarchy of doctors. pl
Combat Applications Group and SEALS don't even begin to compare, they're not in the same league as 'real deal' GBs. The GBs are thinkers as well as doers, whereas Combat Applications Group and SEALs all they know is breach and clear, breach and clear.kao_hsien_chih -> Jack... , 09 February 2018 at 11:22 PMThere is more to life than breach and clear. Having worked with all in one manner or another, I'll take GBs any day hands down. It makes a difference when the brain is engaged instead of just the heel.
A lot of technology entrepreneurs--especially those active today--are stuck in their own groupthink, inflated by their sense that they are born for greatness and can do no wrong.FB Ali , 09 February 2018 at 11:23 PMThe kind of grand schemes that the top people at Google, Uber, and Facebook think up to remake the universe in their own idea of "good society" are frightening. That they are cleverer (but not necessarily wiser) than the academics, borgists, or generals, I think, makes them even more dangerous.
Col Lang,turcopolier , 10 February 2018 at 01:03 AMThey are indeed "narrow thinkers", but I think the problem runs deeper. They seem to be stuck in the rut of a past era. When the US was indeed the paramount military power on the globe, and the US military reigned supreme. They can't seem to accept the reality of the world as it is now.
Of course, these policies ensure that they continue to be well-funded, even if the US is bankrupting itself in the process.
dogearLondonBob , 10 February 2018 at 06:59 AMHe is still the Saudi Mukhtar for the US and most of the generals are still narrow minded. pl
They [the generals] seem to have deliberately completely ignored the issues and policy positions Trump ran on as President. It isn't a case of ignorance but of wilful disregard.turcopolier , 10 February 2018 at 07:55 AMLondonBobDianaLC said in reply to turcopolier ... , 10 February 2018 at 09:23 AMI think that is true but, they were able to talk him into that, thus far. pl
I've been reading this blog for some time. My question was facetious and written with the understanding of your statement about the generals not having a good grasp of "the vision thing" on their own.Terry , 10 February 2018 at 09:25 AMSo true and as others commented this is a sad feature of the human race and all human organizations. Herd mentality ties into social learning. Chimps are on average more creative and have better short term memory than humans. We gave up some short term memory in order to be able to learn quickly by mimicking. If shown how to open a puzzle box but also shown unnecessary extra steps a chimp will ignore the empty steps and open the box with only the required steps. A human will copy what they saw exactly performing the extra steps as if they have some unknown value to the process. Our massive cultural heritages are learned by observing and taken in as a whole. This process works within organizations as well.TV , 10 February 2018 at 10:18 AMI suspect a small percentage of the human race functions differently than the majority and retains creative thinking and openness along with more emphasis on cognitive thinking than social learning but generally they always face a battle when working to change the group "consensus", i.e. Fulton's folly, scepticism on whether man would ever fly, etc.
One nice feature of the internet allows creative thinkers to connect and watch the idiocy of the world unfold around us.
"A natural desire to be part of the 'in crowd' could damage our ability to make the right decisions, a new study has shown."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141216212049.htm
The military by definition is a rigid hierarchical structure. It could not function as a collection of individuals. This society can only breed conforming narrow leaders as an "individual" would leave or be forced out.Barbara Ann , 10 February 2018 at 10:22 AM
That part of our brain responsible for the desire to be part of the 'in crowd' may affect our decision-making process, but it is also the reason we keep chimps in zoos and not the other way around. Or, to put it another way; if chimps had invented Facebook, I might consider them more creative than us.Babak Makkinejad -> Terry... , 10 February 2018 at 10:30 AMDo you think chimps are, per the Christian Docrine, in a State of Fall or in a State of Grace?Adrestia , 10 February 2018 at 10:32 AMThis is an interesting discussion. The top in organisations (civil and military) are increasingly technocrats and thinking like systems managers. They are unable to innovate because they lack the ability to think out of the box. Usually there is a leader who depends on specialists. Others (including laymen) are often excluding from the decision-making-proces. John Ralston Saul's Voltaires Bastards describes this very well.Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg -> gaikokumaniakku... , 10 February 2018 at 11:58 AMBecause of natural selection (conformist people tend to choose similar people who resemble their own values and ways-of-thinking) organizations have a tendency to become homogeneous (especially the higher management/ranks).
In combination with the "dumbing" of people (also of people who have a so-called good education (as described in Richard Sale's Sterile Chit-Chat ) this is a disastrous mix.
Homogeneity is the main culprit. A specialists tends to try to solve problems with the same knowledge-set that created these.
Not all (parts of) organizations and people suffer this fate. Innovations are usually done by laymen and not by specialists. The organizations are often heterogeneous and the people a-typical and/or eccentric.
(mainly the analytical parts of ) intelligence organizations and investment banks are like that if they are worth anything. Very heterogeneous with a lot of a-typical people. I think Green Berets are also like that. An open mind and genuine interest in others (cultures, way of thinking, religion etc) is essential to understand and to perform and also to prevent costly mistakes (in silver and/or blood).
It is possible to create firewalls against tunnel-vision. The Jester performed such a role. Also think of the Emperors New Clothes . The current trend of people with limited vision and creativity prevents this. Criticism is punished with a lack of promotion, job-loss or even jail (whistle-blowers)
IMO this is why up to a certain rank (colonel or middle management) a certain amount of creativity or alternative thinking is allowed, but conformity is essential to rise higher.
I was very interested in the Colonel's remark on the foreign background of the GB in Vietnam. If you would like to expand on this I would be much obliged? IMO GB are an example of a smart, learning, organization (in deed and not only in word as so many say of themselves, but who usually are at best mediocre)
Isn't the "Borg" really The Atlantic Council?ISL , 10 February 2018 at 12:58 PMDear Colonel,ex-PFC Chuck said in reply to FB Ali ... , 10 February 2018 at 01:08 PMWould you then say that a rising military officer who does have the vision thing faces career impediments? If so, would you say that the vision thing is lost (if it ever was there) at the highest ranks? In any case, the existence of even a few at the top, like Matthis or Shinseki is a blessing.
FB Ali:Adrestia , 10 February 2018 at 02:03 PM"When the US was indeed the paramount military power on the globe, and the US military reigned supreme. They can't seem to accept the reality of the world as it is now."That's true not only of the US military but of US elites in general across all of the spectra. And because that reality is at odds with the group-think of those within the various elements that make up the spectra it doesn't a hearing. Anyone who tries to bring it up risks being ejected from the group.I forget an important part. I really miss an edit-button. Comment-boxes are like looking at something through a straw. Its easy to miss the overview.kooshy , 10 February 2018 at 02:19 PMInnovations and significant new developments are usually made by laymen. IMO mainly because they have a fresh perspective without being bothered by the (mainstream) knowledge that dominates an area of expertise.
By excluding the laymen errors will continue to be repeated. This can be avoided by using development/decision-making frameworks, but these tend to become dogma (and thus become part of the problem)
Much better is allowing laymen and allowing a-typical people. Then listen to them carefully. Less rigid flexible and very valuable.
Apparently, according to the last US ambassador to Syria Mr. Ford, from 2014-17 US has spent 12 Billion on Regime change in Syria. IMO, combinedly Iran and Russia so far, have spent far less in Syria than 12 billion by US alone, not considering the rest of her so called coalition. This is a war of attrition, and US operations in wars, are usually far more expensive and longer than anybody else's.J , 10 February 2018 at 02:49 PM"The United States spent at least $12 billion in Syria-related military and civilian expenses in the four years from 2014 through 2017, according to the former U.S. ambassador to the country. This $12 billion is in addition to the billions more spent to pursue regime change in Syria in the previous three years, after war broke out in 2011." https://goo.gl/8pj5cD
Colonel, TTG, PT,Richardstevenhack -> turcopolier ... , 10 February 2018 at 02:56 PMFYI regarding Syria
It may "demand" it - but does it get it? Soldiers are just as human as everyone else.dogear said in reply to Terry... , 10 February 2018 at 02:59 PMI'm reminded of the staff sergeant with the sagging beer belly who informed me, "Stand up straight and look like a soldier..." Or the First Sergeant who was so hung over one morning at inspection that he couldn't remember which direction he was going down the hall to the next room to be inspected. I'm sure you have your own stories of less than competence.
It's a question of intelligence and imagination. And frankly, I don't see the military in any country receiving the "best and brightest" of that country's population, by definition. The fact that someone is patriotic enough to enter the military over a civilian occupation doesn't make them more intelligent or imaginative than the people who decided on the civilian occupation.
Granted, if you fail at accounting, you don't usually die. Death tends to focus the mind, as they say. Nonetheless, we're not talking about the grunts at the level who actually die, still less the relatively limited number of Special Forces. We're talking about the officers and staff at the levels who don't usually die in war - except maybe at their defeat - i.e., most officers over the level of captain.
One can hardly look at this officer crowd in the Pentagon and CENTCOM and say that their personal death concentrates their mind. They are in virtually no danger of that. Only career death faces them - with a nice transition to the board of General Dynamics at ten times the salary.
All in all, I'd have to agree that the military isn't much better at being competent - at many levels above the obvious group of hyper-trained Special Forces - any more than any other profession.
That is well put.most important is the grading system that is designed to fix a person to a particular slot thereby limiting his ability to think "outside the box" and consider the many variables that exist in one particular instant.Mark Logan said in reply to Peter AU... , 10 February 2018 at 03:30 PMCreative thinking allows you to see beyond the storm clouds ahead and realize that the connectedness of different realities both the visible and invisible. For instance the picture of the 2 pairs of korean skaters in the news tells an interesting story on many levels. Some will judge them on their grade of proffiency, while others will see a dance of strategy between 2 foes and a few will know the results in advance and plan accordingly
Peter AUturcopolier , 10 February 2018 at 05:03 PM"They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers." I've often pondered that concept. Notice how many of radical extremist leaders were doctors, engineers and such? Narrow and deep. STEM is enormously useful to us but seems to be a risky when implanted in shallow earth.
Mark Loganturcopolier , 10 February 2018 at 05:13 PMThese narrow "but deep" thinkers were unable to grasp the nature of the Iraq War for the first couple of years. They thought of it as a rear area security problem, a combat in cities problem, anything but a popular rebellion based on xenophobia and anti-colonialism The IED problem? They spent several billion dollars on trying to find a technology fix and never succeeded. I know because they kept asking me to explain the war to them and then could not understand the answers which were outside their narrow thought. pl
ISLoutthere , 10 February 2018 at 05:19 PMWar College selectees, the national board selected creme de la creme test out as 50% SJs (conformists lacking vision) in Myers-Briggs terms and about 15% NTs (intellectuals). To survive and move upward in a system dominated by SJs, the NTs must pretend to be what they are not. A few succeed. I do not think Mattis is an intellectual merely because he has read a lot. pl
Long ago when I was a professor, I advised my students that "the law is like a pencil sharpener, it sharpens the mind by narrowing it." I tried to encourage them to "think backwards".turcopolier , 10 February 2018 at 05:24 PMMy favorite example was a Japanese fisherman who recovered valuable ancient Chinese pottery. Everyone knew where an ancient ship had sunk, but the water was too deep to dive down to the wreck. And everyone knew the cargo included these valuable vases. And the fisherman was the first to figure out how to recover them. He attached a line to an octopus, and lowered it in the area, waited awhile, and pulled it up. Low and behold, the octopus had hidden in an ancient Chinese vase. The fisherman was familiar with trapping octopuses, by lowering a ceramic pot (called "takosubo") into the ocean, waiting awhile, then raising the vase with octopus inside. His brilliance was to think backwards, and use an octopus to catch a vase.
TVturcopolier , 10 February 2018 at 05:31 PMBy your calculation people like Joe Stilwell and George Patton should not have existed. pl
Adrestiaked , 10 February 2018 at 05:56 PMthe original GBS were recruited in the 50s to serve in the OSS role with foreign guerrillas behind Soviet lines in th event of war in Europe. Aaron Bank, the founder, recruited several hundred experienced foreign soldiers from the likely countries who wanted to become American. By the time we were in VN these men were a small fraction of GBs but important for their expertise and professionalism. pl
Col, I think it might help people to think of "the Borg" - as you have defined & applied it - in a broader context. It struck me particularly as you ID'd the launching of our modern military group-think / careerism behavior coming from the watershed of industrialized scale & processes that came out of WWII.turcopolier , 10 February 2018 at 06:00 PMWe note parallel themes in all significant sectors of our civilization. The ever-expanding security state, the many men in Gray Flannel Suits that inhabit corporate culture, Finance & Banking & Big Health scaling ever larger - all processes aimed to slice the salami thinner & quicker, to the point where meat is moot ... and so it goes.
I note many Borgs... Borgism if you will. An organizational behavior that has emerged out of human nature having difficulty adapting to rapidly accelerating complexity that is just too hard to apprehend in a few generations. If (as many commenters on STT seem to...) one wishes to view this in an ideological or spiritual framework only, they may overlook an important truth - that what we are experiencing is a Battle Among Borgs for control over their own space & domination over the other Borgs. How else would we expect any competitive, powerful interest group to act?
In gov & industry these days, we observe some pretty wild outliers... attached to some wild outcomes. Thus the boring behavior of our political industries bringing forth Trump, our promethean technology sector yielding a Musk (& yes, a Zuckerberg).
I find it hard to take very seriously analysts that define their perspective based primarily upon their superior ideals & opposition to others. Isn't every person, every tribe, team or enterprise a borglet-in-becoming? Everybody Wants to Rule the World ... & Everybody Must Get Stoned... messages about how we are grappling with complexity in our times. I just finished reading Command & Control (about nuclear weapons policy, systems design & accidents). I am amazed we've made it this far.
Unfortunately, I would not be amazed if reckless, feckless leaders changed the status quo. I was particularly alarmed hearing Trump in his projection mode; "I would love to be able to bring back our country into a great form of unity, without a major event where people pull together, that's hard to do.
But I would like to do it without that major event because usually that major event is not a good thing." It strikes me that he could be exceptionally willing to risk a Major Event if he felt a form of unity, or self-preservation, was in the offing. I pray (& I do not pray often or easily) that the Generals you have described have enough heart & guts to honor their oath at its most profound level in the event of an Event.
babakBarbara Ann -> outthere... , 10 February 2018 at 06:00 PMAs a time traveler from another age, I can only say that for me it means devotion to a set of mores peculiar to a particular profession as opposed to an occupation. pl
Great example outthere.Another springs to mind: James Lovelock (of Gaia hypothesis fame) was once part of the NASA team building the first probe to go to Mars to look for signs of life. Lovelock didn't make any friends when he told NASA they were wasting their time, there was none. When asked how he could be so sure, he explained that the composition of the Martian atmosphere made it impossible. "But Martian life may be able to survive under different conditions" was the retort. Lovelock then went on to explain his view that the evolution of microbial life determined the atmospheric composition on Earth, so should be expected to do the same if life had evolved on Mars. Brilliant backwards thinking which ought to have earned him the Nobel prize IMHO (for Gaia). Lovelock, a classic cross-disciplinary scientist, can't be rewarded with such a box-categorized honor, as his idea doesn't fit well into any one.
Another example of cross-disciplinary brilliance was Bitcoin, which has as much to do with its creator's deep knowledge of Anthropology (why people invented & use money) as his expertise in both Economics and Computer Science.
This is they key to creative thinking in my view - familiarity with different fields yields deeper insights.
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Feb 08, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
Daniel , February 5, 2018 at 6:57 pm
We are all victims of the pernicious 24/7 scientifically-designed propaganda apparatus. It has little to do with the victim's intelligence since almost all human opinions are formed by emotional reactions that occur even before the conscious mind registers the input.
Through critical thinking, we can overcome these emotional impulses, but only with effort, and a pre-existing skepticism of all information sources. And even still, I have no doubt that all of us who are aware of the propaganda still accept some falsehoods as true.
It could be that having former Intelligence Agency Directors as "news" presenters, and Goldman Sachs alum and Military/Industrial complex CEOs running important government agencies makes clear to some the reality that we live in an oligarchy with near-tyrannical powers. But most people seem too busy surviving and/or being diverted by the circus to notice the depths of the propaganda.
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Feb 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
ruffhouse Feb 3, 2018 4:31 PM Permalink
Post-American Politics Is Kayfabe.
KAYFABE: kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true," specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or pre-determined nature of any kind.
Kayfabe has also evolved to become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.
http://www.barnhardt.biz/2016/10/08/post-american-politics-is-kayfabe-the-word-is-kayfabe/
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erisx May '17Feb 03, 2018 | www.commondreams.org
Trump could be playing us all. And not considering that is, well, idiotic.
Turns out, the first word a lot of people think of when it comes to President Donald Trump is this one: idiot .
The White House's handling of the Comey firing looks a lot like a clip from The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight . The Press Secretary hiding in the bushes, Trump sending virtually his entire staff under the bus with his various and rapidly shifting versions of his reasons for the firing, and his unhinged Twitter rants at the press for covering the fiasco as a fiasco.
Once again, pundits are talking about impulse control, the ADD Presidency, rank amateurism in the Oval Office, threats to Democracy -- all the stuff that they talked about in the campaign. The stuff that was supposed to doom his bid for the presidency to failure.
"It's worth considering what we are not talking about as we watch this political pornography play out."
All of this is grim stuff. We haven't seen a threat to democracy as serious as this since Watergate, so I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't be addressing it.
But it's worth considering what we are not talking about as we watch this political pornography play out and also, how does the focus on Russia undercut the Democratic Party? In other words, what if this is exactly what Trump intended when he fired Comey? It's worth remembering Trump's mentor was Roy Cohn, who was a master at controlling the narrative and one of his favorite techniques was to change the subject with an in-your-face outrage of one kind or another.
Let's examine what we're not talking about, and then what the effect of the whole Russian narrative is having on the Democratic Party.
What We Aren't Talking About
Shortly before Trump tossed in the Comey Molotov Cocktail into the national living room, here's what was dominating the news:
- The Republicans in the House had just passed a disastrous Health Care Bill that was essentially a giant tax cut for the rich and a "screw you" to anyone who actually needs health insurance;
- Trump had just put out a "budget" that exploded the deficit and gave huge tax cuts to corporations and the ultra-wealthy;
- The Congressional Progressive Caucus had just released a budget that preserved social programs, cut the deficit, and increased revenues using provisions that are popular with both Republicans and Democrats.
But none of that is being discussed much any longer. And if you ran as a populist, but all your policies are benefitting the top 1%, that's exactly what you'd hope for. Yes, the few Congressional members who are brave enough to hold town meetings are still getting mugged by outraged constituents, but these meetings are not getting the kind of coverage they would have pre-Comey. And that means the Health Care Bill isn't getting the kind of serious examination it would have if the media weren't doing all Comey, all the time. Again, exactly what you'd want if you knew the guts of the legislation were so bad, that if it got out there, even the Trump bobble heads would be pissed off. So folks aren't talking about the fact that it was rushed to the floor before getting scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), before we knew what its effects were and what its ultimate cost could be, before people caught on to the fact that the state waiver provision stuck in the revised version of the bill turned it from merely a cruel piece of legislation to the cruelest piece in modern history.
Or take the budget "proposal," which was getting panned by the media and even the few Republicans left in the Senate who actually are fiscal conservatives. Hell, even Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) took issue with some of the cuts. This reprise of "trickle down" and "supply side" chicanery was being almost universally ridiculed by the press and economists, and it was heavily influenced -- if not outsourced to -- the Heritage Foundation, an outfit funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers. Here again, the last thing Trump wants after running as a populist and a fiscal conservative is to get widespread coverage of just how much this plutocrat's budget resembles the stuff he railed against in his campaign.
And speaking of budgets, the media once again ignored the sanest budget proposal in Washington, The Congressional Progressive Caucus's Better Off Budget , which cuts the deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next 10 years -- Trump's budget would have increased it by at least $1.4 trillion over that time period, by the way -- while creating 8.8 million new jobs. The Better Off Budget uses policies that are wildly popular with the majority of Americans to accomplish this.
Now, it must be said that the press always ignores the CPC's budget proposals, but maybe Trump was taking no chances -- after all, if anyone held them up side-by-side, Trump and the Republicans would have been unmasked as the charlatans they are.
But there's no danger of that when it's all Comey, all the time.
Much is made of the fact that Trump's popularity among those who voted for him hasn't budged, despite the fact that he's screwing them left and right with his policies. Well, these kinds of maneuvers may explain why. Look back. When the Russian stuff was first heating up big time, we suddenly just had to bomb Syria. Wagging the dog is a time-honored way to change the subject. So is firing a controversial senior public servant.
Comey, the Russians, and the Establishment Arm of the Democratic Party
If Trump isn't an idiot, then here's where his tactics are brilliant. The neoliberal elitists who control the Democratic Party have been trying to keep the focus on the Russian intervention in our election as the reason Hillary Clinton lost. The progressives in the Party have been attacking the Party's estrangement from the people and its rejection of the New Deal policies as the reason. In short, there's a battle on for the heart and soul of the Party.
Firing Comey, brings the whole Russian thing to the fore, and works to sidetrack the real debate the Democratic Party needs to have about its future.
"Firing Comey, brings the whole Russian thing to the fore, and works to sidetrack the real debate the Democratic Party needs to have about its future."
Two things were working to undermine the establishment's hold on the Party until Comey's firing. First, Sanders continued to poll as the most popular politician in America. Second, people were beginning to realize that it was the content of Secretary Clinton's emails that hurt her, not the emails per se . And that content revealed the soft underbelly of the Democratic Party. To wit: the neoliberal belief in small government, the power and goodness of the market, free trade, deregulation, and fiscal austerity was simply too close to the Republican dogma to generate enough passion among progressives to get a good turnout, and Democrats need a good turnout to win elections.
But now it's all Comey all the time, and the Democratic establishment is taking full advantage of that to deflect attention from the real reason they're losing at all levels of government. It appears they'd rather risk losing elections than embrace a truly progressive agenda, and Trump just reinforced their self-serving narrative.
Yeah. What if he's not an idiot?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
John Atcheson John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise , and he has just completed a book on the 2016 elections titled, WTF, America? How the US Went Off the Rails and How to Get It Back On Track , available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @john_atcheson
Quote from your article:drone1066 May '17"But now it's all Comey all the time, and the Democratic establishment is taking full advantage of that to deflect attention from the real reason they're losing at all levels of government. It appears they'd rather risk losing elections than embrace a truly progressive agenda, and Trump just reinforced their self-serving narrative."
In my opinion you are right on the mark; especially with your last paragraph. Practically all the ultra rich in the world live in the same "gated community". Their goal is to control the world's resources and somehow survive the coming mass die-off due to severe climate disruption. To them their party never ends!
It's possible he's not stupid AND he has zero impulse control. That seems most likely. He's good at subverting the few things he does think out.SkepticTank May '17But Democrats have quintupled down on Russia. For them, it's a battle for existence. They were completely exposed, and it's going to take a lot of "Russia!" to keep that conversation about their profound corruption from taking place.
And Atcheson is also right that this party much prefers losing than giving up its donorship buffet. That's why they do nothing to correct the course to get more votes. They're relying completely on their corporate media allies to keep the illusion going. So far it's working, to the great shame of rank and file Democrats.
drone1066The D-Party would rather stumble back to electoral victory on the anti-Trump effect than offer policy that might clash with the wishes of their corporate donors.Case in point: Single Payer now back-burnered as a distraction from anti-trump hysteria.
Sad to see so many otherwise intelligent commenters here falling for the usual D-Party parlor tricks.
Whether Trump's just lucky or know how to work a room is unimportant. Results matter, and the result is that the important stuff's not being discussed, and the Greatest Heist In The World continues. Lest we forget, that Heist is NOT just about the USA. There's a reason they call it 'globalization.'natureboy May '17
Excellent assessment.ontheres May '17Corporate bribes, big salaries, perks and tv star jobs will have to be torn from Neoliberal Democrats' cold dead hands.
And Don, Rupert and the rest of Mammon's soldiers will soon have to deal with an Artificial Intelligence that learns in one day what it took humans 40,000 years to learn. Interesting times.
Direct Democracy
Anyone who carefully followed the primaries knows that the democratic machine used all kinds of corrupt methods to defeat Bernie Sanders. And, anyone who follows the general election knows that the election is easily rigged - especially computer voting that leaves no paper trail and cannot be audited. The hypocrisy of Russians hacking our elections when they are hacked by our own politicians, and Russians interfering with our elections when our corporate elite have no problem interfering with elections in other countries all makes me ill. Don't know how many other voters out there are like me, but sure would like to hear from them.BWilliamson May '17
Somehow almost none of this get mentioned in any press, progressive or otherwise.
bjoldlygoTrump can't control what he himself thinks. He's been a promoter of the Trump name for 40-50 years. That is a reflex with him. That is the extent of his thinking. There are many others around him, supporting him. Praising his genius, as this article is inclined towards, is their means of exploiting his great weakness. BWilliamson May '17
wolfessThere is nothing behind the scenes. Everything is happening center stage. If you spend your time trying to see behind the scenes you're going to miss the whole show. Olhippy May '17
ontheresNo, the seething undercurrent of the discontented is rarely reported on in the "news". Only when it explodes as in Missouri riots or Occupy Wall Street takeovers, does it get coverage which is put down by government forces, either civilian or feds. The Democratic primaries were changed, back in the 70's I believe, after anti-war candidate McCarthy got the nomination nod. That's when the super delegates came about, so they had more control of things. Expect the GOP too, to change things to keep future Trumps' from getting the nod. Wereflea May '17 1
I see Atcheson's point but I think he needs to remember that Trump is a Prince of inherited wealth. Trump may be an idiot (he really did seem more intelligent before he got elected and then we had a good look at him and listened to his sometimes unintelligible speech patterns) but he has always been in a position where he delegated authority to people who got paid to be smarter than he was, so his 'idiocy' didn't show as much.
Trump paid high priced lawyers to arrange his deals. He paid expensive consultants and investment managers and on and on and all of those people were exceptionally intelligent. He paid someone to ghost write his book for him. Trump makes the same mistakes as he was always wont to do but back then they were always covered and massaged for him by his staff! After all... he was the Prince!
The Oval Office is not quite the same as a business conference with his lawyers, assistants, bankers and etc. Thus we see Trump blurting out statements that his advisors pull him back from as soon as they get the chance . Being president means everything you say gets publicized and despite all his billions that was not the case for the Prince back when he was just a wheeler and dealer.
Trump runs without a script too often but who in his entourage will dare tell the Prince that when he speaks (without their permission first) he ends up sounding like an idiot! Trump may be feeling constrained by his need to be less reckless and impulsive.
Trump unfiltered? Yeah well maybe he really is an idiot too!
Trumps just wanna have fun!
Lrx May '17 1Olhippy I think you need to go back and review the history of Democratic primaries. Until 1972 the candidates were largely chosen in smoke-filled back rooms. George McGovern was instrumental in largely turning the Democratic primaries over to the voters. And that is how he got the nomination. Unfortunately he only won a single state but he was the people's choice to run. I wouldn't be concerned about the superdelegates. They always go along with the candidate who got the most pledged delegates. It is unlikely they would ever do otherwise. Unless the people chose a candidate who was really off the charts like Trump. Without superdelegates the Republicans were unable to stop Trump once the RNC backed him. Given what happened to the Republicans a case can be made for the superdelegates. Parties can choose their candidates any way they want. They don't have to let the people vote. Both parties now do and for the first time that turned into a complete disaster. Godless May '17
The Comey firing also distracted from the Kushner family peddling visas for real estate deals in China; the Pence-Koback Commission to make voter cross-checking a federal law; and Sessions reinvigorating the war on drugs and legal marijuana to strike more minority voters from the rolls. El Presidente Naranja Mentiroso only cares about playing to his base and his base loves watching Democratic heads explode. As long as his base is happy, and they are happy with his performance, the Reptilians in Congress will be afraid to move against him. I thoroughly believe that the voter suppression moves will win the Reptilians the elections in 2018 and 2020. With their control of gerrymandering for another decade and the paid-to-lose Democrats only concerned about donor money, the Reptilians have clear sailing to gain 38 governorships and the ability to rewrite the constitution in their twisted image.skiendhiu May '17
WerefleaI agree with you on your points of Trump having smart lawyers, assistants,bankers etc. around him doing the "smart" work, I am sure he allso used other tactics, of itimidation of one kind or another , taking it to the courts, threats of financial ruin, he allso wasnt kidding when he said he "knew' the system and how it worked, ..or rather how to work it, but he didnt do that singlehanded either, and i am sure there are more than one or two politicians at different levels from municipalitys on up, in his pocket and or good graces.
But to think him not an idiot is getting to be a bit of a stretch, does he really believe that he actually came up with the phrase "prime the pump"? I knew he was an idiot years before he made fun of the disabled reporter, but that single act confirmed it for me.
Yeah "prime the pump" what is he going to lay claim to next? "four score and seven years ago" " E=mc2" or how about.."and Trump said...let there be light"... I 'll tell you who else the idiots are...and that is any one taking this guy seriouslly any longer at least in a presidentiall sense,... that is just ...idiotic in the extreme.
formerly May '17What If He's Not an Idiot?Michael_Wilk May '17
Anyways, most of the American people are idiots .... the dark state and the 0.1% mostly aren't idiots -- just psychopaths.
I think it's more likely that the Democrats are even more moronic than is Drumpf, which is why, as usual, they are serving only to strengthen the GOPhers while pretending they're defenders of the public. Why do you think that hundred or so Democrats are signed onto John Conyers' single-payer bill now that Drumpf is in the Oval office and the Republicans hold majorities in both houses of Congress, when they could have done so when Obama was the chief executive and their party controlled Congress including a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but instead passed a bill that was modeled on the Heritage Foundation's plan? It's all so much political theater designed to distract the public from the last great plundering of the nation before it collapses in on itself.cassandra May '17
LrxThe Republicans used rule-changing, altho not superdelegates, to derail Ron Paul. There is never just one way to subvert truth. cassandra May '17
ontheresI'm with you. The whole Russian thing is ridiculous. And they've never been accused of actually hacking voting machines, just the DNC emails which showed how slimy the DNC is. I have read that Georgia believed someone tried to hack their voting machines and they hired a private firm to investigate. What they found was hacking was attempted the the Dept of Homeland Security.
The simple fact that, after losing in 2000 by voting manipulation and probably via voting machines in 2004, the Dems took over the House in 2007 and 2 years later the Presidency and the Senate, they never, to my knowledge, introduced any legislation to require paper trails in federal elections. As far as I'm concerned that said all one needs to know about the Dems. It would have been a simple one page piece of legislation, Ok, maybe 2 pages.
ToniWintroub May '17WerefleaFactor in his mafia connections here and abroad. To roll around in that slime at the high level he's in requires cunning to kiss up to the really rich guys who can hurt him and whom, actually, he can hurt. Then he's learned how to survive while he manipulates. Idiot? Define the term.
Cunning. Sociopathic. Narcissistic needing his constant narcissistic supply (adorers). Blackmailer and probably blackmailed. I gotta get Barrett's biography of this POS.
Wereflea May '17ToniWintroubI wore out years ago but it just goes on and on! Lol
Actually at this point in time I am very much engaged in this garbage since Trump is stunningly entertaining as a rightwing boob out of his element and unraveling as we speak. Trump's adventures in incompetency fascinate me. It is just week after week in a steady progression of mistakes, attempted corrections, attempts at re-correcting those corrections that make them even worse and so forth. It would make for an interesting TV show (sort of like the 'apprentice got himself fired') except that this gross and often crude person can trigger a nuclear war on a whim which puts a damper on the pleasures of watching him deconstruct in front of our eyes.
Nevertheless, it is without doubt the most unexpected presidency of my life. Watergate was a comeuppance but Trump is bizzaro world in action.
Btw... Trump inherited great wealth. He learned one big lesson in life early on. Hire competent people and they will save your ass when you make a blunder. Trump's one skill is as a promoter of Trump. He was never a big brain and up until recently, he never pretended to be.
He is rich and loves being the center of attention. However his being rich is often at the expense of others. You assume that because Trump has long had shady connections that he must be an intellect to survive the association. Not really. Trump makes sure that he is profitable for them and they have no problem with that. It isn't genius on his part. It is always having his projects go way over budget. He guarantees them the cream and they 'have an arrangement'.
Prior to becoming president, Trump's associates, advisors, lawyers and accountants kept Trump making money and that made them money.
Trump is truly like the medieval Prince who lives in a sumptuous palace but who needs his Grand Vizier to actually run things in the country. Keep your eye on Kushner who has become the architect of oligarchy by being the real deal maker (he has the intellect) that Trump only promotes (he has the ego and the big mouth)!
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Jan 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
WFO -> Luc X. Ifer Jan 21, 2018 11:20 PM Permalink
Freedom Lover -> WFO Jan 22, 2018 11:32 AM PermalinkTrump's got the military behind him - the only institution powerful enough to challenge the deep state. I also understand he has a special forces security contingent in addition to SS. Trump gets hit - revolution will explode in their face.
MK ULTRA Alpha -> WFO Jan 22, 2018 2:56 AM PermalinkAfter reading the new National Security policy directive I'm not so sure. it is a blueprint for a new cold war possibly nuclear war with Russia and China which is antipathy to Trumps stated policies of collaboration with Russia, no more regime change and cooperation with China on Infrastructure projects. There is obviously a very strong Neo-con component in the Trump administration so i would not necessarily say the generals have his back.
Luc X. Ifer -> WFO Jan 22, 2018 12:08 AM PermalinkBlack Knight Pence is the Deep State choice, and the military is the epicenter of the Deep State. The US is no longer a country, but an empire, with born and bred, programmed Globalist Officers in the military and all through the government.
It's a system which isn't a part of the country, it's completely in it's own synthetic realm, devoid of reason and logic. It's officers often confer with the Council on Foreign Relations and various controlled think tanks for it's marching orders. We, the American people aren't in the decision loop.
This system was designed from the outcome of the civil war. It's a centralized command and control system. It rules the states as harshly as it rules the world. We speak of freedom, but no one in their right mind can call this freedom. So most of us are not in our right mind, some brainwashed, others suspicious.
Scipio Africanuz -> Luc X. Ifer, Jan 22, 2018 5:09 AM PermalinkAgree. I'm sure that Army's Intelligence services are indeed behind all the hacks & leaks which collapsed HC campaign and helped DT's. Also, they exposed the FBI's and NSA dirt. Kind of they didn't liked the ascension of the civils controlling the intelligence policies strategically - kind of the situation between Soviet's army and KGB. In the game of the pig and the chicken, the chicken is only involved with the eggs but the pigs must provide the bacon. Id Trump gets hit I'm pretty sure you'll see a military coup overtaking the governement.
Scipio Africanuz -> Scipio Africanuz, Jan 22, 2018 5:18 AM PermalinkI have a feeling the US army is really pissed they died for nothing. Despite all the talk of shortcomings, the US army, not USAF or USN, is not to be toyed with in an existential war, they will fight!
All adversaries understand that, they lose wars because they don't believe, simple. If the deep state, including feckless military leaders push too far, they'll be facing rifle barrels and possibly be chesting bayonets.
A military coup can happen in the USA despite talk of sacrosant democracy, it happened in Rome, word enough for the wise. 😎
Mr Hankey -> Scipio Africanuz, Jan 22, 2018 1:19 PM PermalinkBTW, the bulk of us army is not in active service, never underestimate patriotic veterans, if it comes to a shootout at the OK corral, they'll kill and die for their loved ones, against all enemies, foreign, and "domestic".
JRobby -> Scipio Africanuz, Jan 22, 2018 6:12 AM PermalinkNo, they won't Never have, never will .Gutless cowards one & all.They pick on the poor& weak & never won a real war, except Japan. They burn babies 4 billionaires,& there is no such thing as a domestic enemy.
Stupid goldbricking brutes fit 4 fertilizer and nothing else. Go copsuck & flagwank elsewhere, cuckfaggot vet or fanboi
Luc X. Ifer -> JRobby, Jan 22, 2018 9:47 AM PermalinkThere is nothing to lose at this point. The elite have made day to day life a void of lifelessness and stress chasing inflating life necessities with a falling dollar. The revolt hinges on the upcoming market crashes.
Agree + Scipio. As mentioned, till now the chickens lied and Army provided the bacon and the chickens collected all the revenue. As in the Rome's example, it may be that America can be saved by the cancerous corruption only by a military coup, the alternative being a massive war which will also enable the Army to overtake the control of the government, here is where NK and Iran would be good players in the scheme.
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Jan 14, 2018 | www.nytimes.com
Originally from: How Democracies Perish - The New York Times
Deneen argues that [neo]liberal democracy has betrayed its promises. It was supposed to foster equality, but it has led to great inequality and a new aristocracy. It was supposed to give average people control over government, but average people feel alienated from government. It was supposed to foster liberty, but it creates a degraded popular culture in which consumers become slave to their appetites.
Many young people feel trapped in a system they have no faith in. Deneen quotes one of his students: "Because we view humanity -- and thus its institutions -- as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security) to rely only upon ourselves."
... ... ...
When communism and fascism failed in the 20th century, this version of [neo]liberalism seemed triumphant. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, Deneen argues.
[Neo]Liberalism claims to be neutral but it's really anti-culture. It detaches people from nature, community, tradition and place. It detaches people from time. "Gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification."
Once family and local community erode and social norms dissolve, individuals are left naked and unprotected. They seek solace in the state. They toggle between impersonal systems: globalized capitalism and the distant state. As the social order decays, people grasp for the security of authoritarianism. " A signal feature of modern totalitarianism was that it arose and came to power through the discontents of people's isolation and loneliness ," he observes.
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Jan 09, 2018 | www.unz.com
Mark Green , January 9, 2018 at 10:57 am GMTNeocon power in Big Government is directly connected to neocon media access and neocon media visibility. This is why 'experts' such as Boot, Kristol, Weinstein, Cohen, Stephens, Glasser, Podhoretz, Dubowitz, etc., are not only never stepping down from their appointed roles as high media priests–they're actually failing their way into positions of tenure and (undue) respectability.Buck Turgidson , January 9, 2018 at 11:12 am GMTUnder any other circumstance, their bulletproof status would defy logic. But because of Israel's unique place in American life, this makes perfect–though astonishing–sense. This above list of scoundrels may resemble the guest list of a Jewish wedding, but this ongoing affair will produce no honeymoon. These operatives function as soft double agents. Their devious mission is to justify US war(s) of aggression that benefit Israel.
Being a successful neocon doesn't require being right. Not at all. It's all about sending the right message. Over and over. Evidence be damned. The neocon mission is not about journalism. It's about advancing the cause: Mideast disruption and a secure Jewish state.
More importantly, Washington's impenetrable array of Zio-centric PACs, money-handlers, bundlers, fund-raisers, and billionaires want these crypto-Israeli pundits right where they are–on TV or in the your local newspaper–telling Americans how to feel and what to think. And Big Media–which happens to be in bed with these same powerful forces–needs these Zions in place to not only justify the latest Mideast confrontation, but even ones being planned. It's one big happy effort at group-think, mass deception, and military conquest. Unfortunately, it's not being presented that way.
So what lies ahead?
More subversion and more conflict. This explains why Pres. Trump has reversed course. He's caved. Once elected, Trump decided to would be suicide to try to frustrate the Israeli Lobby. So he cucked his Presidency and dumped several major campaign pledges.
The first to go was his pledge to normalize US-Russian relations ('make peace' with Russia) and after that 2) avoid unnecessary wars abroad. That's was a huge reversal. But Trump did it and few pundits have scolded him for it. The fix is in.
Candidate Trump also stated: "I don't want your [Jewish] money" to an auditorium full of wealthy Jews. Well, that's changed too. Pres. Trump is now surrounded by wealthy and powerful Israeli-firsters now, including mega-billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, who ended up feeding the Trump campaign untold millions. Sadly, Trump has totally rolled over for the Israelis.
So Trump (the President) now sees things differently. Very differently. When it comes to the Middle East, Trump has been Hillary-ized. This means there's no light between what Israel desires and what Washington is willing to deliver. The hyper-wealthy, super cohesive, extraordinarily well-positioned and diabolically cleaver Israeli lobby has Trump over a barrel. Shocking, yes. But true.
So watch Israel's roughshod expansion continue, along with the typically meek and accommodating responses from Washington.
Regarding Israel, Washington will foot their war bill, supply the arms, lend diplomatic cover and even wage war on their behalf. No country in the world receives this kind of treatment. And no country in the world deserves it.
What's worse, our 'independent' MSM will be there to sanitize Washington's pro-Israel shenanigans and basically cheer the whole bloody process on. This is where the Zio-punditry of Kristol, Cohen, Stephens, Dubowitz, and Co. come in. They soothe the nervous nellies as they gently justify the death and destruction that come with these military strikes. Media tactics include:
Don't count enemy war dead. Don't count civilian war dead. Don't count displaced refugees. Don't connect Europe's immigration crisis to Zio-Washington's destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria.
At the same time: Always praise Israeli 'restraint'. Always refer to Israel as a 'democracy'. Sneer and jeer the 'terrorist' Republic of Iran. Treat every Mideast warlord or rebellion as if it threatens the sanctity of Disneyland or even the next Superbowl. Oh my!
It's a slick, highly-coordinated, and very manipulative affair. But the magic is working. Americans are being fooled.
Ironically, US security would be improved if we simply minded our own business and did nothing in the Middle East besides pursue normal and peaceful trade policies. But that's not to be.
The reason for this phenomena is that Washington's major PACs, syndicates, heavy hitters, influence peddlers, oligarchs, and Big Money handlers (and who also have their clutches on our corrupt MSM) want more Mideast disruption.
Why? Israeli 'security'. Israeli 'survival'. Considering Israel's extraordinary military power, this might seem silly. But this is what the entrenched Israeli lobby desires. And both Parties are listening. To make matters worse, how one 'thinks' and 'talks' about Israel has unacknowledged limitations and restrictions in Big Washington as well as Big Media.
Diversity of opinion stops at Israel's doorstep. Like it or not, Zionist Israel is the Third Rail of American discourse. Watch what you say. Even the typically rancorous disputes between Democrats and Republicans gets warm and fuzzy when Israel's 'special place' in American life is raised. America's 'special relationship' with you-know-who is the quintessential red line that no establishment figure will cross. And those who do cross that line tend to fade rapidly into oblivion. This phenomena has not gone unnoticed.
So America is stuck with pro-Israel speech codes and a militantly pro-Zionist foreign policy that has caused immense cost, dislocation, suffering and destruction. It's been designed that way. And 'outsider' Trump is stuck with it. Few dare examine it.
Here's the short list of Israel's primary Enemies. Significantly, these are the countries that also get the worst press in American media:
- The (anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian) Republic of Iran.
- Syria, which still claims land (Golan Heights) stolen by Israel in 1967.
- Lebanon (where Hezbollah roams)
- Palestine (will they never give up?)
- Russia (allied with Iran and Assad's Syria)
N. Korea is even a player here. Iran and N. Korea have allegedly shared nuclear technology. This infuriates nuclear Israel.
So the Israel angle in this picture is huge. Overwhelmingly so. This is where the oligarchs, media lords, and corrupt journalists come together.
Thus, Israel's tenured Hasbara brigade in US media will remain firmly in place.
The local DC 'conservative' radio station has Bolton as a guest all the time. Same old neocon crap that we don't want any more. Bolton had his day 15 years ago and he sucked then; yet, they keep bringing him on, slobbering all over him ("Ambassador Bolton"), and letting him blather about blowing up everyone. I still see a lot of online comments about how people would love to have John Bolton as our ambassador to the UN. Good grief wise up people.wayfarer , January 9, 2018 at 11:56 am GMTTom Welsh , January 9, 2018 at 12:08 pm GMT" Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. " – Buddha
"Israel Lobby Refuses to Register as a Foreign Agent! "
'Stephens' article, entitled Finding the Way Forward on Iran sparkles with throwaway gems like "Tehran's hyperaggressive foreign policy in the wake of the 2015 nuclear deal" and "Real democracies don't live in fear of their own people" and even "it's not too soon to start rethinking the way we think about Iran." Or try "A better way of describing Iran's dictatorship is as a kleptotheocracy, driven by impulses that are by turns doctrinal and venal."'Greg Bacon , Website January 9, 2018 at 12:32 pm GMTHmmmmm . I can immediately think of another nation to which those strictures are far more applicable.
"Hyperaggressive foreign policy"
"Kleptocracy"Sounds more like the USA, doesn't it?
As for "Real democracies don't live in fear of their own people", that's a real home run.
1. The USA is not, never has been, never will be, and was never meant to be "a real democracy". (Except by unrealistic visionaries like Jefferson).
2. The USA has been, for some decades, a plutocracy – as comprehensively proved by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
3. "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty". – Thomas Jefferson
No prizes for guessing which of Jefferson's alternatives prevails today.
When you control the media, you control the message. That message is that America just has to keep busting up nations for the glory of Apartheid Israel.annamaria , January 9, 2018 at 12:49 pm GMTFrom an April 2003 Haaretz article:
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible.
This is a war of an elite. [Tom] Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/white-man-s-burden-1.14110
If this insanity keeps up, America will either be destroyed by financial collapse from waging all these wars or we'll stumble into WW III and the last thing we'll see is a mushroom cloud.
Former Brit PM Tony Blair at the Chilcot inquiry:
What role did Israel play in the run-up to the Iraq war?
"As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/mehdi-hasan/2010/02/iraq-war-israel-bush-saddam
@Mark JamesDESERT FOX , January 9, 2018 at 1:34 pm GMT"Whether print, air, or both the Neocons want to be players. They have the friends in high –media– places to do it." – They, neocons, are devoid of dignity. This explains why none of them feels any responsibility for the mass slaughter in the Middle East -- picture Madeleine Albright near thousands of tiny corpses of Iraqi children or the piggish Kristol next to the bloody bags with shredded Syrian children. They are psychopaths, the profiteering psychopaths. There is no other way to deal with neo/ziocons but through long-term incarceration.
Those Zionist neocons are just a few of the cabal that destroyed the WTC and got away with it and every thinking American knows it.Jake , January 9, 2018 at 3:01 pm GMTZionists are Satanists and are going to destroy America, please read THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION.
My fine tuning of this excellent article begins, and perhaps ends, with this quote: "The fact is that Iran is being targeted because Israel sees it as its prime enemy in the region and has corrupted many "opinion makers" in the U.S., to include Stephens, to hammer home that point."JoaoAlfaiate , January 9, 2018 at 3:03 pm GMTThe 'corruption' is not recent and is not about any one issue or series of issues. It springs from Deep Culture. It is part of the WASP worldview.
WASP culture is the direct product of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy always produces culture and politics that are pro-Jewish, pro-Semitic.
At least by the beginning of the Victorian era, virtually 100% of British Empire Elites were hardcore pro-Semitic. Most were pro-Jewish, but a large and growing minority were pro-Arabic and pro-Islamic.
The Saudis are Arabic. The Iranians are NOT Arabic; Iranians are Indo-European.
Siding with both wings of Semitic culture – Jewish and Arabic/Islamic – against an Indo-European people is exactly what WASP cultural Elites will do. It is roughly analogous to Oliver Cromwell allying with Jews to wage war against the vast majority of natives of the British Isles.
Excellent piece. I'd just like to add that Stephens' op-ed in the NYT ought to be view like Judith Miller's misleading articles about aluminum-tubes-for-nuclear-centrifuges which appeared in the Times during the run up to the Iraq war: Preparation of the Times' readership for yet another war in the middle east, this time against Iran.Jake , January 9, 2018 at 3:05 pm GMT@DESERT FOXJake , January 9, 2018 at 3:07 pm GMTNo, Saudis destroyed the World Trade Center.
But the Israelis do see the Saudis as their Middle Eastern BFF, and the US is also tightly allied with the Saudis.
@Bill JonesTammy , January 9, 2018 at 3:22 pm GMTYou cannot separate that 'error' from the fact that such an act fit perfectly with WASP culture as the product of Judaizing heresy.
That is exactly what WASP culture would do.
@MEexpertfor-the-record , January 9, 2018 at 3:26 pm GMTMEexpert says, "Look again. His has a typical Jewish face.
The score is still 6 to 1. John Bolton may bot be Jewish but he is a venom spewing neocon."
Finally someone with the courage of Justin Raimondo has guts to call spade a spade. He has taken the courage to move from the FAKE NEWS:
Why the Korean 'Crisis' Is Completely Phony
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/01/08/korean-crisis-completely-phony/
Ron Unz is another courageous man. I wish and pray to God, that people like Ron Unz, Philip M. Giraldi, Paul Craig Roberts, Saker and their likes to move away from FAKE NEWS too, and tell us the TRUTH.
Evil can be fought only with TRUTH ..
Your idea about an article on political Islam by either Ron Unz or Philip M. Giraldi is an excellent idea, and I am willing to help provided we keep away from sectarianism and stick to TRUTH. The war the First Caliph abu Bakr which he fought with Yemen's Muslims within six months of Prophet's demise is very important to show how the rights given by Prophet Mohammad (saws) were taken away as soon as his demise. Our aim should be to shine the light on the Prophet. This is what Yemen's war did, just to start with:
1. Prophet did away with excommuniting someone from the fold as he saw a very powerful tool in the hands of Rabbis and Preacher. Who gave them the right to remove someone from Synagogue or Church.
2. So abu Bakr came up with much stronger tool, he called all the Yemeni Muslims en masses as apostate.
3. Brought back the slavery.
4. Claimed that he the Caliph abu Bakr was appointed by Will of Allah through predestination.
5. Thus, the ideology of ISIS calling everyone kafir, kafir, kafir .. and chopping their heads.
6. Used Islam as a disguise to bring other countries in to the fold for power and mammon (money), thus bring Islam by Sword.
The list is extensive and I can go on and on. The divide / confuse / rule was used against the Muslims.
The objective of the article should be to bring TRUTH about the Prophet.
@Tammysarz , January 9, 2018 at 3:33 pm GMTAnyone who thinks Trump is a fool is an imbecile himself/herself.
Thanks for the compliment!
@Mark GreenAchmed E. Newman , Website January 9, 2018 at 3:35 pm GMTDon't lose heart, Mark Green. There is a very good chance that Trump is actually with you, and that he's winning. He cannot afford to be straight at all. His strategy is to take up highly charged strands of the dominant discourse and to short circuit them. A strong play of a weak hand. He's run with the demands of Adelson, Netanyahu and Kushner regarding Jerusalem and other maximal Israeli demands. It's all in response to the worst Jews. The result is that Shias are united with Sunnis, Hamas with PLO, Iran with Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The whole world against America, Israel and some specks of guano. The Iran caper is the same. The Pakistan caper even better. Trump gives the military a free hand to show what they can do in Afghanistan. Then he blows his twitter top to insult Pakistan so there will no longer be a land route. He's doing his damndest and always failing. What a clueless asshole. Yet every failure is undoing the empire, and leading to a one-state resolution in Palestine.
That's just the foreign policy part.
By the time he's finished there will be no Democrat party left as we know it, and the GOP will be transformed as well.
There will be no more Fed. No more debt based currency. A paid off national debt.
And there will be single payer medical coverage.
God willing.That was a great summary of our foreign policy situation, Mr. Giraldi. You have a lot of guts to write out all the truth that you see, as you have in all of the articles of yours I've read on unz.DaveE , January 9, 2018 at 3:35 pm GMTI really liked this line, too:
To be sure, Iran is a very corrupt place run by people who should not be running a hot dog stand, but the same applies to the United States and Israel .
I have one question for you, Phil, and this is not hypothetical or snarky – just looking for your opinion: What do you think the neocons' attitude about the Orient is? I realize that China is on the road to kicking our ass economically , but that's the "war" we need to fight, not a military war. Then, there's N. Korea, which, in my opinion, is none of our business. Rest of the question – Trump seems to get sucked into the standard invade-the-world mode in the Far East also – do you think that is neocon-inspired, and, since that part of the world is no threat to Israel, if so, why? Would they possibly be masking their intentions by expanding the range of their invade-the-world program?
Another fine essay, Mr. Giraldi. Thanks once again.This morning we find a very unusual Op Ed in the JYT by David Brooks, "The Decline of Anti-Trump_vs_deep_state".
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/opinion/anti-trump-opposition.html
I don't usually read that filthy rag other than to skim the headlines, but this was just so bizarre, I couldn't resist. Brooks seems to admit that they (Jewish neocons/Bolsheviks) are losing the battle to take down Trump. He openly criticizes the media for being so obvious and self-discrediting.
Is this a total retreat for the neocons / Bolsheviks? Or is Brooks merely rallying the troops? Or simply a desperate attempt to regain credibility by telling the truth, for a change?
Or maybe he is preemptively refuting Mr. Giraldi's premise in this piece, a semi-novel tactic one might call Jewish Preemptive Vengeance getting even BEFORE the fact?
Anyway, it was downright WEIRD.
DESERT FOX , January 9, 2018 at 3:40 pm GMT
@Jakec matt , January 9, 2018 at 3:45 pm GMTDo some research, Israel and the U.S. deep state blew up 7 buildings at the WTC on 911 and blew up a section of the pentagram, the Saudis were the patsys , and as corrupt and evil as the Saudis are they had on part in it.
The Zionist neocons did 911 to set the Mideast wars in motion, do some research, hell every thinking American knows Israel did it.
@wayfarerArt , January 9, 2018 at 4:01 pm GMTConsidering what an absolute stranglehold they have over American politics, they may have an argument.
Mr. Giraldi has gone after the real power center in America – the Jew controlled US media. Much is said about "we dumb Americans." We are not all that dumb – but we are 100% misinformed. Propaganda works. It is a fact that the human mind is susceptible to repeated lies. (It is also true, that people hate being lied too.)Joe Hide , January 9, 2018 at 4:03 pm GMTMuch is said about "Christian Zionists." Why is it, that NO Christian broadcast media tells the truth about Palestinian suffering? Of course, it is because of Jew media control. If Christian stations were to tell the truth, there would be a lot less Christian Zionists – they would be a small segment of Christianity.
Thanks to Mr. Giraldi and others on the internet – more and more people are listening and learning and getting mad. A base is building. Truth will out!
Think Peace -- Art
The more the psychotic control freaks publically expose themselves, what with social media, the internet, and disenchanted leakers in their own group the more of humanity wakes up to a great sense of absolute disgust in them. We, humanity, are gradually winning and the disgusting pyschopaths are losing.Michael Kenny , January 9, 2018 at 4:23 pm GMTDoes Mr Giraldi really expect us to believe that the US internet is any better than the media outlets he criticizes? The whole US media scene can be summed up as "don't believe their pack of lies. Believe my pack of lies"!
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Oct 27, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org
In the past, America has witnessed "McCarthyism" from the Right and even complaints from the Right about "McCarthyism of the Left." But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called "Establishment McCarthyism, " traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives.This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in fright-filled stories about "Russian propaganda" and wildly exaggerated tales of the Kremlin's "hordes of Twitter bots," but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington's "groupthinks" by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how reasonable and well-researched – as "disputed" or "rated false" by mainstream "fact-checking" organizations like PolitiFact.
It doesn't seem to matter that the paragons of this new structure – such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and, indeed, PolitiFact – have a checkered record of getting facts straight.
For instance, PolitiFact still rates as "true" Hillary Clinton's false claim that "all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies" agreed that Russia was behind the release of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly ran corrections after President Obama's intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called "hand-picked" analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA.
And, the larger truth was that these "hand-picked" analysts were sequestered away from other analysts even from their own agencies and produced "stove-piped intelligence," i.e., analysis that escapes the back-and-forth that should occur inside the intelligence community.
Even then, what these analysts published last Jan. 6 was an "assessment," which they specifically warned was "not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact." In other words, they didn't have any conclusive proof of Russian "hacking."
Yet, the Times and other leading newspaper routinely treat these findings as flat fact or the unassailable "consensus" of the "intelligence community." Contrary information, including WikiLeaks' denials of a Russian role in supplying the emails, and contrary judgments from former senior U.S. intelligence officials are ignored.
The Jan. 6 report also tacked on a seven-page addendum smearing the Russian television network, RT, for such offenses as sponsoring a 2012 debate among U.S. third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates. RT also was slammed for reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and the environmental dangers from "fracking."
How the idea of giving Americans access to divergent political opinions and information about valid issues such as income inequality and environmental dangers constitutes threats to American "democracy" is hard to comprehend.
However, rather than address the Jan. 6 report's admitted uncertainties about Russian "hacking" and the troubling implications of its attacks on RT, the Times and other U.S. mainstream publications treat the report as some kind of holy scripture that can't be questioned or challenged.
Silencing RT
For instance, on Tuesday, the Times published a front-page story entitled " YouTube Gave Russians Outlet Portal Into U.S ." that essentially cried out for the purging of RT from YouTube. The article began by holding YouTube's vice president Robert Kynci up to ridicule and opprobrium for his praising "RT for bonding with viewers by providing 'authentic' content instead of 'agendas or propaganda.'"
The article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Nicholas Confessore swallowed whole the Jan. 6 report's conclusion that RT is "the Kremlin's 'principal international propaganda outlet' and a key player in Russia's information warfare operations around the world." In other words, the Times portrayed Kynci as essentially a "useful idiot."
Yet, the article doesn't actually dissect any RT article that could be labeled false or propagandistic. It simply alludes generally to news items that contained information critical of Hillary Clinton as if any negative reporting on the Democratic presidential contender – no matter how accurate or how similar to stories appearing in the U.S. press – was somehow proof of "information warfare."
As Daniel Lazare wrote at Consortiumnews.com on Wednesday, "The web version [of the Times article] links to an RT interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ran shortly before the 2016 election. The topic is a September 2014 email obtained by Wikileaks in which Clinton acknowledges that 'the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.'"
In other words, the Times cited a documented and newsworthy RT story as its evidence that RT was a propaganda shop threatening American democracy and deserving ostracism if not removal from YouTube.
A Dangerous Pattern
Not to say that I share every news judgment of RT – or for that matter The New York Times – but there is a grave issue of press freedom when the Times essentially calls for the shutting down of access to a news organization that may highlight or report on stories that the Times and other mainstream outlets downplay or ignore.
And this was not a stand-alone story. Previously, the Times has run favorable articles about plans to deploy aggressive algorithms to hunt down and then remove or marginalize information that the Times and other mainstream outlets deem false.
Nor is it just the Times. Last Thanksgiving, The Washington Post ran a fawning front-page article about an anonymous group PropOrNot that had created a blacklist of 200 Internet sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other independent news sources, that were deemed guilty of dispensing "Russian propaganda," which basically amounted to our showing any skepticism toward the State Department's narratives on the crises in Syria or Ukraine.
So, if any media outlet dares to question the U.S. government's version of events – once that storyline has been embraced by the big media – the dissidents risk being awarded the media equivalent of a yellow star and having their readership dramatically reduced by getting downgraded on search engines and punished on social media.
Meanwhile, Congress has authorized $160 million to combat alleged Russian "propaganda and disinformation," a gilded invitation for "scholars" and "experts" to gear up "studies" that will continue to prove what is supposed to be proved – "Russia bad" – with credulous mainstream reporters eagerly gobbling up the latest "evidence" of Russian perfidy.
There is also a more coercive element to what's going on. RT is facing demands from the Justice Department that it register as a "foreign agent" or face prosecution. Clearly, the point is to chill the journalism done by RT's American reporters, hosts and staff who now fear being stigmatized as something akin to traitors.
You might wonder: where are the defenders of press freedom and civil liberties? Doesn't anyone in the mainstream media or national politics recognize the danger to a democracy coming from enforced groupthinks? Is American democracy so fragile that letting Americans hear "another side of the story" must be prevented?
A Dangerous 'Cure'
I agree that there is a limited problem with jerks who knowingly make up fake stories or who disseminate crazy conspiracy theories – and no one finds such behavior more offensive than I do. But does no one recall the lies about Iraq's WMD and other U.S. government falsehoods and deceptions over the years?
Often, it is the few dissenters who alert the American people to the truth, even as the Times, Post, CNN and other big outlets are serving as the real propaganda agents, accepting what the "important people" say and showing little or no professional skepticism.
And, given the risk of thermo-nuclear war with Russia, why aren't liberals and progressives demanding at least a critical examination of what's coming from the U.S. intelligence agencies and the mainstream press?
The answer seems to be that many liberals and progressives are so blinded by their fury over Donald Trump's election that they don't care what lines are crossed to destroy or neutralize him. Plus, for some liberal entities, there's lots of money to be made.
For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union has made its "resistance" to the Trump administration an important part of its fundraising. So, the ACLU is doing nothing to defend the rights of news organizations and journalists under attack. When I asked ACLU about the Justice Department's move against RT and other encroachments on press freedom, I was told by ACLU spokesman Thomas Dresslar: "Thanks for reaching out to us. Unfortunately, I've been informed that we do not have anyone able to speak to you about this."
Meanwhile, the Times and other traditional "defenders of a free press" are now part of the attack machine against a free press. While much of this attitude comes from the big media's high-profile leadership of the anti-Trump Resistance and anger at any resistors to the Resistance, mainstream news outlets have chafed for years over the Internet undermining their privileged role as the gatekeepers of what Americans get to see and hear.
For a long time, the big media has wanted an excuse to rein in the Internet and break the small news outlets that have challenged the power – and the profitability – of the Times, Post, CNN, etc. Russia-gate and Trump have become the cover for that restoration of mainstream authority.
So, as we have moved into this dangerous New Cold War, we are living in what could be called "Establishment McCarthyism," a hysterical but methodical strategy for silencing dissent and making sure that future mainstream groupthinks don't get challenged.
Reprinted with permission from ConsortiumNews.com .
Related
- The Airwaves Are Still Heaving With Spin Two Days After US Airstrikes Against Syria - 26 September 2014
- The Real Status of Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq - 5 October 2014
- Presidents and the War Power - 8 October 2014
- The Siege Of Kobani: Obama's Syrian Fiasco In Motion - 6 October 2014
- Is Obama Misleading the World to War? Depends How You Define 'Misleading' - 26 September 2014
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Dec 22, 2017 | www.unz.com
What makes a Harvey Weinstein moment? The now-disgraced Hollywood mogul is hardly the first powerful man to stand accused of having abused women. The Harveys who preceded Harvey himself are legion, their prominence matching or exceeding his own and the misdeeds with which they were charged at least as reprehensible.
In the relatively recent past, a roster of prominent offenders would include Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, and, of course, Donald Trump. Throw in various jocks, maestros, senior military officers, members of the professoriate and you end up with quite a list. Yet in virtually all such cases, the alleged transgressions were treated as instances of individual misconduct, egregious perhaps but possessing at best transitory political resonance.
All that, though, was pre-Harvey. As far as male sexual hijinks are concerned, we might compare Weinstein's epic fall from grace to the stock market crash of 1929: one week it's the anything-goes Roaring Twenties, the next we're smack dab in a Great Depression.
How profound is the change? Up here in Massachusetts where I live, we've spent the past year marking John F. Kennedy's 100th birthday. If Kennedy were still around to join in the festivities, it would be as a Class A sex offender. Rarely in American history has the cultural landscape shifted so quickly or so radically.
In our post-Harvey world, men charged with sexual misconduct are guilty until proven innocent, all crimes are capital offenses, and there exists no statute of limitations. Once a largely empty corporate slogan, "zero tolerance" has become a battle cry.
All of this serves as a reminder that, on some matters at least, the American people retain an admirable capacity for outrage. We can distinguish between the tolerable and the intolerable. And we can demand accountability of powerful individuals and institutions.
Everything They Need to Win (Again!)
What's puzzling is why that capacity for outrage and demand for accountability doesn't extend to our now well-established penchant for waging war across much of the planet.
In no way would I wish to minimize the pain, suffering, and humiliation of the women preyed upon by the various reprobates now getting their belated comeuppance. But to judge from published accounts, the women (and in some cases, men) abused by Weinstein, Louis C.K., Mark Halperin, Leon Wieseltier, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, my West Point classmate Judge Roy Moore, and their compadres at least managed to survive their encounters. None of the perpetrators are charged with having committed murder. No one died.
Compare their culpability to that of the high-ranking officials who have presided over or promoted this country's various military misadventures of the present century. Those wars have, of course, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and will ultimately cost American taxpayers many trillions of dollars. Nor have those costly military efforts eliminated "terrorism," as President George W. Bush promised back when today's G.I.s were still in diapers.
Bush told us that, through war, the United States would spread freedom and democracy. Instead, our wars have sown disorder and instability, creating failing or failed states across the Greater Middle East and Africa. In their wake have sprung up ever more, not fewer, jihadist groups, while acts of terror are soaring globally. These are indisputable facts.
It discomfits me to reiterate this mournful litany of truths. I feel a bit like the doctor telling the lifelong smoker with stage-four lung cancer that an addiction to cigarettes is adversely affecting his health. His mute response: I know and I don't care. Nothing the doc says is going to budge the smoker from his habit. You go through the motions, but wonder why.
In a similar fashion, war has become a habit to which the United States is addicted. Except for the terminally distracted, most of us know that. We also know -- we cannot not know -- that, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. forces have been unable to accomplish their assigned mission, despite more than 16 years of fighting in the former and more than a decade in the latter.
It's not exactly a good news story, to put it mildly. So forgive me for saying it ( yet again ), but most of us simply don't care, which means that we continue to allow a free hand to those who preside over those wars, while treating with respect the views of pundits and media personalities who persist in promoting them. What's past doesn't count; we prefer to sustain the pretense that tomorrow is pregnant with possibilities. Victory lies just around the corner.
By way of example, consider a recent article in U.S. News and World Report. The headline: "Victory or Failure in Afghanistan: 2018 Will Be the Deciding Year." The title suggests a balance absent from the text that follows, which reads like a Pentagon press release. Here in its entirety is the nut graf (my own emphasis added):
"Armed with a new strategy and renewed support from old allies, the Trump administration now believes it has everything it needs to win the war in Afghanistan. Top military advisers all the way up to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis say they can accomplish what two previous administrations and multiple troop surges could not: the defeat of the Taliban by Western-backed local forces, a negotiated peace and the establishment of a popularly supported government in Kabul capable of keeping the country from once again becoming a haven to any terrorist group."
Now if you buy this, you'll believe that Harvey Weinstein has learned his lesson and can be trusted to interview young actresses while wearing his bathrobe.
For starters, there is no "new strategy." Trump's generals, apparently with a nod from their putative boss, are merely modifying the old "strategy," which was itself an outgrowth of previous strategies tried, found wanting, and eventually discarded before being rebranded and eventually recycled.
Short of using nuclear weapons, U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan over the past decade and a half have experimented with just about every approach imaginable: invasion, regime change, occupation, nation-building, pacification, decapitation, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency, not to mention various surges , differing in scope and duration. We have had a big troop presence and a smaller one, more bombing and less, restrictive rules of engagement and permissive ones. In the military equivalent of throwing in the kitchen sink, a U.S. Special Operations Command four-engine prop plane recently deposited the largest non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal on a cave complex in eastern Afghanistan. Although that MOAB made a big boom, no offer of enemy surrender materialized.
$65 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars. And under the circumstances, consider that a mere down payment.
According to General John Nicholson, our 17th commander in Kabul since 2001, the efforts devised and implemented by his many predecessors have resulted in a "stalemate" -- a generous interpretation given that the Taliban presently controls more territory than it has held since the U.S. invasion. Officers no less capable than Nicholson himself, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal among them, didn't get it done. Nicholson's argument: trust me.
In essence, the "new strategy" devised by Trump's generals, Secretary of Defense Mattis and Nicholson among them, amounts to this: persist a tad longer with a tad more. A modest uptick in the number of U.S. and allied troops on the ground will provide more trainers, advisers, and motivators to work with and accompany their Afghan counterparts in the field. The Mattis/Nicholson plan also envisions an increasing number of air strikes, signaled by the recent use of B-52s to attack illicit Taliban " drug labs ," a scenario that Stanley Kubrick himself would have been hard-pressed to imagine.
Notwithstanding the novelty of using strategic bombers to destroy mud huts, there's not a lot new here. Dating back to 2001, coalition forces have already dropped tens of thousands of bombs in Afghanistan. Almost as soon as the Taliban were ousted from Kabul, coalition efforts to create effective Afghan security forces commenced. So, too, did attempts to reduce the production of the opium that has funded the Taliban insurgency, alas with essentially no effect whatsoever . What Trump's generals want a gullible public (and astonishingly gullible and inattentive members of Congress) to believe is that this time they've somehow devised a formula for getting it right.
Turning the Corner
With his trademark capacity to intuit success, President Trump already sees clear evidence of progress. "We're not fighting anymore to just walk around," he remarked in his Thanksgiving message to the troops. "We're fighting to win. And you people [have] turned it around over the last three to four months like nobody has seen." The president, we may note, has yet to visit Afghanistan.
I'm guessing that the commander-in-chief is oblivious to the fact that, in U.S. military circles, the term winning has acquired notable elasticity. Trump may think that it implies vanquishing the enemy -- white flags and surrender ceremonies on the U.S.S. Missouri . General Nicholson knows better. "Winning," the field commander says , "means delivering a negotiated settlement that reduces the level of violence and protecting the homeland." (Take that definition at face value and we can belatedly move Vietnam into the win column!)
Should we be surprised that Trump's generals, unconsciously imitating General William Westmoreland a half-century ago, claim once again to detect light at the end of the tunnel? Not at all. Mattis and Nicholson (along with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster) are following the Harvey Weinstein playbook: keep doing it until they make you stop. Indeed, with what can only be described as chutzpah, Nicholson himself recently announced that we have " turned the corner " in Afghanistan. In doing so, of course, he is counting on Americans not to recall the various war managers, military and civilian alike, who have made identical claims going back years now, among them Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in 2012 .
From on high, assurances of progress; in the field, results that, year after year, come nowhere near what's promised; on the homefront, an astonishingly credulous public. The war in Afghanistan has long since settled into a melancholy and seemingly permanent rhythm.
The fact is that the individuals entrusted by President Trump to direct U.S. policy believe with iron certainty that difficult political problems will yield to armed might properly employed. That proposition is one to which generals like Mattis and Nicholson have devoted a considerable part of their lives, not just in Afghanistan but across much of the Islamic world. They are no more likely to question the validity of that proposition than the Pope is to entertain second thoughts about the divinity of Jesus Christ.
In Afghanistan, their entire worldview -- not to mention the status and clout of the officer corps they represent -- is at stake. No matter how long the war there lasts, no matter how many " generations " it takes, no matter how much blood is shed to no purpose, and no matter how much money is wasted, they will never admit to failure -- nor will any of the militarists-in-mufti cheering them on from the sidelines in Washington, Donald Trump not the least among them.
Meanwhile, the great majority of the American people, their attention directed elsewhere -- it's the season for holiday shopping, after all -- remain studiously indifferent to the charade being played out before their eyes.
It took a succession of high-profile scandals before Americans truly woke up to the plague of sexual harassment and assault. How long will it take before the public concludes that they have had enough of wars that don't work? Here's hoping it's before our president, in a moment of ill temper, unleashes " fire and fury " on the world.
Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular , is the author, most recently, of America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History .
anonymous , Disclaimer December 11, 2017 at 3:31 am GMT
It's astonishing to see people make the claim that "victory" is possible in Afghanistan. Could they actually believe this or are they lying in order to drag this out even longer and keep the money pit working overtime? These are individuals that are highly placed and so should know better. It's not really a war but an occupation with the native insurgents fighting to oust the foreign occupier. The US has tried every trick there is in trying to tamp down the insurgency. They know what we're trying to do and can thwart us at every step. The US lost even as it began it's invasion there but didn't know it yet in the wake of it's initial success in scattering the Taliban, not even a real army and not even a real state. They live there and we don't; they can resist for the next thirty years or fifty years. When does the multi-billion bill come due and how will we pay it?Issac , December 12, 2017 at 4:07 am GMT"How long will it take before the public concludes that they have had enough of wars that don't work?"USAMNESIA , December 14, 2017 at 3:32 am GMTIt already happened, but Progressives like you failed to note that Republican voters subbed the Bush clan and their various associates for Trump in the Primary season, precisely because he called the Iraq and Afghan wars mistakes. The Americans suffer under a two party establishment that is clearly antagonistic to their interests. As a part of that regime, a dutiful Progressive toad, you continue to peddle the lie that it was the war-weary White Americans who celebrated those wars. In reality, any such support was ginned up from tools like you who wrote puff pieces for their Neocon Progressive masters.
Thus far, Trump's interventionism has been a fragment of what the Hillary campaign promised. Might you count that among your lucky stars? Fat chance. You cretinous Progressive filth have no such spine upon which to base an independent thought. You trot out the same old tiresome tropes week after week fulfilling your designated propagandist duty and then you skulk back to your den of iniquity to prepare another salvo of agitprop. What a miserable existence.
This is the center of a world empire. It maintains a gigantic military which virtually never stops fighting wars, none of them having anything to do with defense. It has created an intelligence monstrosity which makes old outfits like Stazi seem almost quaint, and it spies on everyone. Indeed, it maintains seventeen national security establishments, as though you can never have too much of a good thing. And some of these guys, too, are engaged full-time in forms of covert war, from fomenting trouble in other lands and interfering in elections to overthrowing governments.nsa , December 18, 2017 at 5:36 am GMTObama ended up killing more people than any dictator or demagogue of this generation on earth you care to name, several hundred thousand of them in his eight years. And he found new ways to kill, too, as by creating the world's first industrial-scale extrajudicial killing operation. Here he signs off on "kill lists," placed in his Oval Office in-box, to murder people he has never seen, people who enjoy no legal rights or protections. His signed orders are carried out by uniformed thugs working at computer screens in secure basements where they proceed to play computer games with real live humans as their targets, again killing or maiming people they have never seen.
If you ever have wondered where all the enabling workers came from in places like Stalin's Gulag or Hitler's concentration camps, well, here is your answer. American itself produces platoons of such people. You could find them working at Guantanamo and in the far-flung string of secret torture facilities the CIA ran for years, and you could find them in places like Fallujah or Samarra or Abu Ghraib, at the CIA's basement game arcade killing centers, and even all over the streets of America dressed as police who shoot unarmed people every day, sometimes in the back.
ZOG has now asserted the right to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. No trial, no hearing, no witnesses, no defense, no nothing. Is this actually legal? Any constitutional lawyers out there care to comment? Has ZOG now achieved the status of an all-powerful all-knowing deity with the power of life and death over all living things?Waiting too , December 18, 2017 at 10:36 am GMTIt's unlikely that the USA would be remaining in Afghanistan if its goals were not being attained. So the author has merely shown that the stated goals cannot be the real goals. What then are the real goals? I propose two: 1) establish a permanent military presence on a Russian border; 2) finance it with the heroin trade. Given other actions of the Empire around the globe, the first goal is obvious. The bombing of mud huts containing competitors' drug labs, conjoined with the fact that we do not destroy the actual poppy fields (obvious green targets in an immense ocean of brown) make this goal rather obvious as well. The rest of the article is simply more evidence that the Empire does not include mere human tragedy in its profit calculation.War for Blair Mountain , December 18, 2017 at 1:09 pm GMT5.6 TRILLION $$$$$$ FOR GULF WAR 1 AND GULF WAR 2DESERT FOX , December 18, 2017 at 1:43 pm GMTThe Native Born White American Working Class Teenage Male Population used as CANNON FODDER for Congressman Steven Solarz's and Donald Trump's very precious Jewish only Israel .
WAR IS A RACKET!!!! don't you think?
Israel and the deep state did the attack on 911 and thus set the table for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria and the Zionist neocons who control every facet of the U.S. gov and the MSM and the MIC and the FED ie the BANKS set in motion the blood sacrifice for their Zionist god SATAN, that is what they have done.Michael Kenny , December 18, 2017 at 2:17 pm GMTThe Zionist warmongers and Satanists will destroy America.
It's not so much that America is addicted to war as that the American "business model" makes permanent war inevitable. US global dominance rests on economic domination, in particular, the dollar as world reserve currency. That has allowed the US economy to survive in spite of being hollowed out, financialised and burdened with enormous sovereign debt. Economic dominance derives from political dominance, which, in its turn, flows from military dominance. For that military dominance to be credible, not only must the US have the biggest and best military forces on the planet, it must show itself willing to use those forces to maintain its dominance by actually using them from time to time, in particular, to unequivocally beat off any challenge to its dominance (Putin!). It also, of course, must win, or, more correctly, be able to present the outcome credibly as a win. Failure to maintain military dominance will undermine the position of the dollar, sending its value through the floor. A low dollar means cheap exports (Boeing will sell more planes than Airbus!), but it also means that imports (oil, outsourced goods) will be dear. At that point the hollowed out nature of the US economy will cut in, probably provoking a Soviet-style implosion of the US economy and society and ruining anyone who has holdings denominated in dollars. I call that the Gorbachev conundrum. Gorby believed in the Soviet Union and wanted to reform it. But the Soviet system had become so rigid as to be unreformable. He pulled a threat and the whole system unravelled. But if he hadn't pulled the thread, the whole system would have unravelled anyway. It was a choice between hard landing and harder landing. Similarly, US leaders have to continue down the only road open to them: permanent war. As Thomas Jefferson said of slavery, it's like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it but you don't dare let go!TG , December 18, 2017 at 2:36 pm GMT"How long will it take before the public concludes that they have had enough of wars that don't work?" Answer: Never.Intelligent Dasein , Website December 18, 2017 at 2:37 pm GMTIn Alabama when people would rant about how toxic Roy Moore was, I would politely point out that his opponent for Senate was OK with spending trillions of dollars fighting pointless winless wars on the other side of the planet just so politically connected defense contractors can make a buck, and ask if that should be an issue too? The response, predictably, was as if I was an alien from the planet Skyron in the galaxy of Andromeda.
We are sheep. We are outraged at these sexual transgressions because the corporate press tells us to be outraged. We are not outraged at these stupid foreign wars, because the corporate press does not tell us to be outraged. It's all mass effect, and the comfort of being in a herd and all expressing the same feelings.
Andrew Bacevich is wrong about a couple of things in this article.Ilyana_Rozumova , December 18, 2017 at 3:04 pm GMTFirst, he says that the American public is both apathetic and credulous. I agree that we have largely become apathetic towards these imperial wars, but I disagree that we have become credulous. In fact, these two states of mind exclude one another; you cannot be both apathetic and credulous with respect to the same object at the same time. The credulity charge is easy to dismiss because virtually no one today believes anything that comes out of Washington or its mouthpieces in the legacy media. The apathy charge is on point but it needs qualification. The smarter, more informed Americans have seen that their efforts to change the course of American policy have been to no avail, and they've given up in frustration and disgust. The less smart, less informed Americans are constrained by the necessity of getting on with their meager lives; they are an apolitical mass that possesses neither the understanding nor the capacity to make any difference on the policy front whatsoever.
Second, Andrew Bacevich calls for a Weinstein moment without realizing that it already happened more than ten years ago. The 2006 midterm elections were the first Weinstein moment, which saw the American people deliver a huge outpouring of antiwar sentiment that inflicted significant congressional losses on the neocon Republicans of George W. Bush. An echo of that groundswell happened again in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected to office on an explicitly antiwar platform. But Obama turned out to be one of the most pro-war presidents ever, and thus an angry electorate made one final push in the same direction by attempting to clean house with Donald Trump. Now that Donald has shown every sign of having cucked out to the war lobby, we seem to be left with no electoral solutions.
The only thing that's going to work is for the American Imperium to be handed a much-deserved military and financial defeat. The one encouraging fact is that if the top ten percent of our political and financial elite were planed off by a foreign power, the American people would give as few damns about that as they currently do about our imperial wars.
@Michael KennyAnonymous , Disclaimer December 18, 2017 at 3:17 pm GMTVery good but some little errors. Concerning Russia and China, Russia vent all or nothing. China was much smarter. First they allowed self employment, than small business and long time after they started to sell state enterprises,
If Tom's Dispatch continues to be successful, Americans will continue to be asleep.nebulafox , December 18, 2017 at 4:00 pm GMTMasterful propaganda. War, according to our favorite spooks, is necessary to win, but otherwise reprehensible.
Sex is otherwise necessary for human life but Harvey Weinstein is ugly. Hold tightly to your cognitive dissonance, because you're expected to remember John F Kennedy who got it on, but is the expendable martyr you should care about, not that other guy
Let's review: terror attacks are wins. Superior or effective anti-war propaganda comes from the military
itself. They really don't want war, but really they do.@anonymousnebulafox , December 18, 2017 at 4:08 pm GMTWe're trying to make Afghanistan not Afghanistan: aka, trying to be a miracle worker. We can throw as much money as we like at that place, and it isn't going to happen, least of all with troops on nine month shifts.
Let Iran and Pakistan squabble over it. Good riddance.
@Waiting tooAnonymous , Disclaimer December 18, 2017 at 4:28 pm GMT1) doesn't really make much sense, given that Poland and the Baltic States would be more than happy to take all US forces in Europe to give us a presence near Russia in a part of the world that would be far easier to justify to the American public-and to the international community. Afghanistan? Who exactly is Russia going to mess with? Iran is their-for now, longer term, the two have conflicting agendas in the region, but don't expect the geniuses in the Beltway to pick up on that opportunity-ally, and unlike the USSR, the Russians don't want to get involved in the India-Pakistan conflict. Russia's current tilt toward China makes a strategic marriage with India of the kind that you found in the Cold War impossible, but they obviously don't want to tilt toward the basketcase known as Pakistan. The only reason that Russia would want to get involved with Afghanistan beyond having a more preferable status than having American troops there is power projection among ex-Soviet states, and there are far more effective ways to do than muddle about with Afghanistan.
2, on the other hand, given Iran-Contra who knows? The first generation of the Taliban pretty much wiped the heroin trade out as offensive to Islamic sensibilities, but the newer generations have no such qualms.
I think you give America's rulers far too much credit. The truth is probably far scarier: the morons who work in the Beltway honestly believe their own propaganda-that we can make Afghanistan into some magical Western democracy if we throw enough money at it-and combine that with the usual bureaucratic inertia.
@Waiting tooArt , December 18, 2017 at 4:45 pm GMTAnother bonus is that Afghan heroin seeps into Russia and wreaks havoc in the regions bordering Afghanistan -- krokodil and all that.
According to General John Nicholson, our 17th commander in Kabul since 2001,MarkinLA , December 18, 2017 at 5:59 pm GMTWe have been killing these people for 17 years. Now our generals say that if we indiscriminately kill enough men, women, and children who get in the way of our B52s, that they will see the light and make peace. How totally wonderful.
My solution is to gage the Lindsey Grahams for a year.
What will do more good for peace – B52s or shutting up Graham's elk?
Think Peace -- Art
I remember when Trump said he knew more than the generals and was viciously attacked for it. It turns out he did know more than the generals just by knowing it was a waste. Trump was pushed by politics to defer to the generals who always have an answer when it comes to a war – more men, more weapons, more time.Sollipsist , December 18, 2017 at 6:20 pm GMT@Intelligent DaseinpeterAUS , December 18, 2017 at 6:46 pm GMT"The less smart, less informed Americans are constrained by the necessity of getting on with their meager lives; they are an apolitical mass that possesses neither the understanding nor the capacity to make any difference on the policy front whatsoever."
I wonder if any Abolitionists criticized the slaves for failing to revolt? Probably not; I'm guessing they were mostly convinced that the negro required intervention from outside, whether due to their nature or from overwhelming circumstance.
If the enslaved American public is liberated, I hope we'll know what to do with ourselves afterwards. It'd be a shame to simply end up in another kind of bondage, resentful and subject to whatever oppressive system replaces the current outrage. Perhaps the next one will more persuasively convince us that we're important and essential?
@Michael KennypeterAUS , December 18, 2017 at 6:47 pm GMTAgree.
Very good post, IMHO.That phrase "a choice between hard landing and harder landing" is good and can be easily applied to USA today.
Interesting times.
@TGSowhat , December 18, 2017 at 7:29 pm GMTAgree.
This is well written, IMHO:We are sheep. We are outraged at these sexual transgressions because the corporate press tells us to be outraged. We are not outraged at these stupid foreign wars, because the corporate press does not tell us to be outraged. It's all mass effect, and the comfort of being in a herd and all expressing the same feelings.
Thank you, Andrew J. Bacevich, for your words of wisdom and thank you, Mr. Unz, for this post.Delinquent Snail , December 18, 2017 at 8:57 pm GMT
This corporation needs to be dissolved. I've read about "the inertia" of Federal Government that has morphed into a cash cow for a century of wasted tax dollars funding the MIIC, now the MIIC. Does our existence have to end in financial ruin or, worse yet, some foreign entity creating havoc on our soil?
The Founders NEVER intended that the US of A become a meddler in other Sovereignty's internal affairs or the destroyer of Nation States that do not espoused our "doctrine." Anyone without poop for brains knows that this is about Imperialism and greed, fueled by money and an insatiable luster for MORE.
This should be easier to change than it appears. Is there no will? After all, it Is our Master's money that lubricates the machinery. So, we continue to provide the lubrication for our Masters like a bunch of imbeciles that allow them to survail our words and movements. Somebody please explain our stupidity.@nebulafoxjoe webb , December 18, 2017 at 8:58 pm GMTIf americans would just go all in and commit genocide. That would lead to victory.
No afgans, no enemy.
the folks in the US are sick of the wars, contrary to Bacevich. They simply will vote come next election accordingly. They register their disgust in all the polls.Jim Christian , December 18, 2017 at 9:07 pm GMTThis article is not very useful. More punditry puff.
No comments on the Next War for Israel being cooked up by the new crop of neocon youngsters, I guess, and Trump who will trump, trump, trump into the next War for the Jews.
How about some political science on Iran, Syria, Hisbollah, Hamas and the US, Arabia, Judenstaat axis of evil?
Joe Webb
Hey Bacevich? When you link to WashPost and NYTimes to make your points, you don't. They block access if you've already read links to those two papers three times each and can no longer, for the month, read there. When folks link to papers that won't let you read, it makes one wonder why.Simply Simon , December 18, 2017 at 10:26 pm GMTI believe Americans are damned sick and tired of the stupid, needless war in Afghanistan. But then they should have been sick and tired of stupid , needless wars like Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, and probably most of them were. But it's easy to be complacent when someone else's son is doing the fighting and dying And it's easy to be complacent when your stomach is full and you have plenty of booze and pain killers available. There will be a day of reckoning when the next big economic bust arrives and which may make the Great Depression paltry by comparison. America is a far different place then it was in the 1930s when our population was 140 million. Americans were not so soft and the conveniences we now take for granted not available. When the supermarkets run out of food, watch out. There may not even be any soup lines to stand in.Joe Franklin , December 18, 2017 at 11:21 pm GMTDruid , December 19, 2017 at 12:41 am GMTIn truth, U.S. commanders have quietly shelved any expectations of achieving an actual victory -- traditionally defined as "imposing your will on the enemy" -- in favor of a more modest conception of success.
Your assumptions are wrong about the US goal of the invasion of Afghanistan. Afghanistan and Iraq were not invaded to establish democracy or impose American will whatever that is. Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded to establish a temporary military staging ground for a US invasion of Iran, the designated regional enemy of Israel. As long as the current regime in Iran remains, the US will remain in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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@Waiting tooanno nimus , December 19, 2017 at 1:53 am GMTAnd minerals! Eric Prince himself recently tried to sell the idea of having his private militias do the fighting in Afghanistan for the US and finance it by mining said country's minerals, thus making himself even richer.
"i can live without a friend, but not without an enemy."Cloak And Dagger , December 19, 2017 at 5:03 am GMT@SolontoCroesusJoe Wong , December 20, 2017 at 2:25 pm GMTI was onboard with Mr. Bacevich, until I got to this:
Almost as soon as the Taliban were ousted from Kabul, coalition efforts to create effective Afghan security forces commenced. So, too, did attempts to reduce the production of the opium that has funded the Taliban insurgency
What utter rubbish! The Taliban was instrumental in shutting down the poppy production until the CIA came along and restarted it to fund their black ops.
We have the reverse Midas touch. Everything we touch (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc., etc.) turns to shit. We supposedly attack countries to liberate them from their tyrants who are supposedly killing their own people, and end up killing more people than all of them put together. And, oh yes, we have our favorite tyrants (Saudis, Israelis) whom we provide with horrible weapons (like cluster bombs) to help them kill people we hate.
Mr. Bacevich is right about the lack of outrage about our wars, but the current Weinstein explosion consists of hordes of mostly American female victims, mostly white, a (very) few jews, and a few men, who have the stage to complain about their oppressors. What would be the counterpart of that w.r.t. the wars? Millions of brown victims in far away lands that most of us couldn't even find on a map? How likely is that to happen?
So yes, no outrage, and none likely. The last 17 years have proven that.
@anonymousYou don't know the American has been paying everything through monopoly money printed through the thin air since WWI, i.e. a keystroke on the Federal Reserve's computer? No wonder the Americans have been waging reckless wars all over the world on the fabricated phantom WMD allegations as humanitarian intervention relentlessly.
Romans did not stop waging reckless wars until their empire collapsed; the British imitates the Romans and the American is born out of the British, hence the Americans will no stop waging reckless wars until their empire collapsed like the Romans.
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Jan 04, 2018 | lrb.co.uk
American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership's failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders's challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump's triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress . Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed.
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