Female sociopath are excel in false accusations, including rape accusations. They are born actresses and have no empathy, so
framing their victim is just an easy game for them
In a fiery speech announcing her decision, Collins ripped unsupported claims by Avenatti's
client, Julie Swetnick, that Kavanaugh facilitated a Cosby-esque "gang rape" operation while in
high school.
Some of the allegations levied against Judge Kavanaugh illustrate why the presumption of
innocence is so important . I am thinking in particular not of the allegations raised by
Professor Ford, but of the allegation that, when he was a teenager, Judge Kavanaugh drugged
multiple girls and used their weakened state to facilitate gang rape .
This outlandish allegation was put forth without any credible supporting evidence and
simply parroted public statements of others . That such an allegation can find its way into
the Supreme Court confirmation process is a stark reminder about why the presumption of
innocence is so ingrained in our American consciousness. -Sen. Susan Collins
I didn't really care much about the stuff alleged to have been done by Kavanaugh
thirty-five years ago. Arguing with a close family friend I stated that there was nothing
I found more tiresome than the old lawyers tactic of springing something on you at the last
possible minute, leaving a steaming pile of turds in the middle of your desk, and then
expecting to be taken seriously. Decorum? Rules of debate? How about the laws of
discovery, sharing info amongst colleagues?
Just because this was not a criminal trial is no reason to throw out the rules for policy
making, the nomination process, which both sides have adhered to in the past. People were
comparing this to the Anita Hill fiasco during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.
Delay, interrupt, stall, maximum media exposure. Never any evidence or criminal charges to
point to.
In criminal trials there is the process of discovery by which the admission of
evidence at the last minute is strongly ill advised, and can result in it being tossed out.
Sen. Feinstein would be aware of all the rules and procedures, but she feels above it
all.
Hey Avenatti! If you and your client had any idea of what the truth is no one would every
have heard of her or of you. Don't give us this ******** that you were just representing your
client. If you had a brain you would have known she was FOS from the get go, and if you were
honest you never would have represented her. So what is it? Are you just stupid or are you
dishonest, or both?
People who make salacious claims unconfirmed or outright denied by their own named
"witnesses" tend to get sued for defamation. And the lawyers they rode in on.
Michael Avenatti is not a nice man at all. He was a factor in making the accusations seem
like a circus. No one takes him seriously as he slinks around the gutters.
Avenatti is the scapegoat. The Ford story was already fast breaking down, and the secret
polygraph and the secret therapist notes and her ex-boyfriend should have made more noise in
the Senate.
They embraced this puke and revelled in his garbage accusations. Now they need a
scapegoat, and he's it. God forbid Feinstein get raked over the coals for screwing this thing
up. The was a political hit, and everyone knew it. But the GOP are so spineless that a
high-school-drunken-grope-fest brought them to their knees. Fortunately, the Dems stayed true
to form and blew themselves up.
What I do not understand is how could they be so stupid as to endorse the Avenatti slime
factory in the first place? TONE DEAF.
Avenatti needs to be disbarred. To file a complaint for his breach of professional
responsibility, suborning perjury, and engaging in acts of moral turpitude:
If enough complaints are filed with the CA state bar, he may get disbarred.
Attorneys ALREADY have a really bad rep. Part of professional responsibility is to uphold
the integrity of the legal profession. The ONLY thing Avenatti did was to make every attorney
look like a complete shyster sleazeball, which given I just took the bar exam and will
probably become an attorney soon, I find immensely offensive.
The Demonrats used false sexual allegations against Roy Moore coupled with ballot box
cheating (their typical mode) to win a senate seat in conservative Alabama. So, since their
main national platform of open borders is so repugnant to any normal taxpaying voter, this is
their only strategy. They simply got caught. All the allegations against both Kavanaugh and
Moore were fabricated and the proof is the Soros' paid lawyers who represented them all. And
Feinstein and Schumer conspired in this farce. And independent voters know it!
They're just pissed they got caught in their fraud and this energized the R. base which
will lead to a red wave in a few weeks. And just think of the political commercial
possibilities for any Demonrat senator hoping to prevail if they vote against Kavanaugh. I
expect the final confirmation vote won't as close as the vote for cloture for this
reason.
Be careful, Roy Moore was a different story. There was evidence including him saying he
liked to date high school age girls as a 30 year old along with multiple other people who
remembered what was alleged. Not just Democrat operatives. Morals were not that different
then than now. Was he guilty of a crime no, could reasonable people still dislike his morals
sure. I grew up close to that era and thought the college age kids hanging around HS girls
was nasty. Moore verified as a 30 year old he liked them young.
Ford 0 corroborating evidence. By lumping in Moore with Kavanaugh you are giving credence
to believe the victim because all you are following the "patriarchy" of believing the accused
regardless of evidence.
The Democrats have a long history of making last minute sexual misconduct allegations
against their political opponents, always without any evidence or corroboration. And sexual
misconduct allegations that pale in comparison to what a lot of Democrats have been alleged
to do (rape allegations against Clinton, Kennedy having an affair that left a woman dead,
John Conyers for settling sexual harassment allegations with taxpayer money, Hillary for
trashing victims, or consider Weinstein and other famous/rich Democrat donors or newsmen).
I'd bet most of these allegations against Republicans were simply made up for political
purposes because they were plausible, couldn't be disproven, and couldn't be proven. Ford's
allegations fit the pattern.
The charges are always last minute, to deny the accused an opportunity to defend
themselves. Kavanaugh provided an excellent defense that would be good court room drama in a
movie, when no one in the GOP was willing to defend him, and too afraid of being accused of
not believing a victim and attacking them.
What's really going on are the Democrats in charge, are looking to deflect the attention
from what they did, to Avanetti because Avanetti did the same, except the charges of his
client, weren't believable, even though they couln't be proven or disproven. They don't want
to take the blame, for what voters might do in the midterms.
One thing's for sure, you don't see Democrats calling for indicting and prosecuting false
accusers. They're teaching people to bear false witness for their personal purposes.
avenatti gave the diversion, the clutter, the political sideshow so that all charges could
be swept away and completely fake and uncorroborated. there was no provable basis for the
ford charges, but the crazy swetnick stories simplified brooming the whole thing.
we can only hope that avenatti will be back in 2020, to run for president, and to come
marching with his parade of **** stars and "wronged" women who spend all their time
performing in strip clubs.
"... The core beliefs of these people was in a world where money, labor and products could flow across borders without any limit. Their vision was to remove these subjects (tariffs, immigration and controls on the movement of money) from the control of the democracy-based nation-state and instead vesting them in international organizations. International organizations which were by their nature undemocratic and beyond the influence of democracy. That rather than rejecting government power, what they rejected was national government power. They wanted weak national governments but at the same time strong undemocratic international organizations which would gain the powers taken from the state. ..."
"... The other thing that characterized many of these people was a rather general rejection of economics. While some of them are (at least in theory) economists, they rejected the basic ideas of economic analysis and economic policy. The economy, to them, was a mystical thing beyond any human understanding or ability to influence in a positive way. Their only real belief was in "bigness". The larger the market for labor and goods, the more economically prosperous everyone would become. A unregulated "global" market with specialization across borders and free migration of labor being the ultimate system. ..."
"... The author makes the point, though in a weak way, that the "fathers" of neoliberalism saw themselves as "restoring" a lost golden age. That golden age being (roughly) the age of the original industrial revolution (the second half of the 1800s). And to the extent that they have been successful they have done that. But at the same time, they have brought back all the political and economic questions of that era as well. ..."
"... He also makes a good point about the EEC and the organizations that came before the EU. Those organizations were as much about protecting trade between Europe and former European colonial possessions as they were anything to do with trade within Europe. ..."
"... But he has NOTHING to say about BIll Clinton or Tony Blair or EU expansion or Obama or even the 2008 economic crisis for that matter. Inexplicably for a book written in 2018, the content of the book seems to end in the year 2000. ..."
"... I'm giving it three stars for the first 150 pages which was decent work. The second half rates zero stars. ..."
"... It would have been better yet if the author had the courage to talk about the transformation of the parties of the left and their complicity in the rise of neoliberalism. The author also tends to waste lots of pages repeating himself or worse telling you what he is going to say next. One would have expected a better standard of editing by the Harvard Press. ..."
"... However, most importantly it follows the thinking and the thoughts behind the building of a global empire of capitalism with free trade, capital and rights. All the way to the new "human right" to trade. It narrows down what neoliberal thought really consist of and indirectly make a differentiation to the neoclassical economic tradition. ..."
"... Slobodan does a really masterful exposition of the roots of neoliberalism and neoliberals like Von Mises and Hayek by going all the way back to the 'Geneva School'. It is amazing to see the dedication and devotion of these water carriers for the owners of capital spend their entire life times devising subtle and sleight of hand schemes and methods to basically subvert society to serve the owners of capital. Fantastic work Slobodan. I await your next work. ..."
Chosen by Pankaj Mishra as one of the Best Books of the Summer
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal
globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to
the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink
government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.
Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism,
socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist
system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But
they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich
Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke
and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and
global institutions―the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade
Organization, and international investment law―to insulate the markets against sovereign
states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social
justice.
Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand
project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that
changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless
change, and social injustice that accompanied it. >
This is a rather interesting look at the political and economic ideas of a circle of
important economists, including Hayek and von Mises, over the course of the last century. He
shows rather convincingly that conventional narratives concerning their idea are wrong. That
they didn't believe in a weak state, didn't believe in the laissez-faire capitalism or
believe in the power of the market. That they saw mass democracy as a threat to vested
economic interests.
The core beliefs of these people was in a world where money, labor and products could flow
across borders without any limit. Their vision was to remove these subjects (tariffs,
immigration and controls on the movement of money) from the control of the democracy-based
nation-state and instead vesting them in international organizations. International
organizations which were by their nature undemocratic and beyond the influence of democracy.
That rather than rejecting government power, what they rejected was national government
power. They wanted weak national governments but at the same time strong undemocratic
international organizations which would gain the powers taken from the state.
The other thing that characterized many of these people was a rather general rejection of
economics. While some of them are (at least in theory) economists, they rejected the basic
ideas of economic analysis and economic policy. The economy, to them, was a mystical thing
beyond any human understanding or ability to influence in a positive way. Their only real
belief was in "bigness". The larger the market for labor and goods, the more economically
prosperous everyone would become. A unregulated "global" market with specialization across
borders and free migration of labor being the ultimate system.
The author shows how, over a period extending from the 1920s to the 1990s, these ideas
evolved from marginal academic ideas to being dominant ideas internationally. Ideas that are
reflected today in the structure of the European Union, the WTO (World Trade Organization)
and the policies of most national governments. These ideas, which the author calls
"neoliberalism", have today become almost assumptions beyond challenge. And even more
strangely, the dominating ideas of the political left in most of the west.
The author makes the point, though in a weak way, that the "fathers" of neoliberalism saw
themselves as "restoring" a lost golden age. That golden age being (roughly) the age of the
original industrial revolution (the second half of the 1800s). And to the extent that they
have been successful they have done that. But at the same time, they have brought back all
the political and economic questions of that era as well.
In reading it, I started to wonder about the differences between modern neoliberalism and
the liberal political movement during the industrial revolution. I really began to wonder
about the actual motives of "reform" liberals in that era. Were they genuinely interested in
reforms during that era or were all the reforms just cynical politics designed to enhance
business power at the expense of other vested interests. Was, in particular, the liberal
interest in political reform and franchise expansion a genuine move toward political
democracy or simply a temporary ploy to increase their political power. If one assumes that
the true principles of classic liberalism were always free trade, free migration of labor and
removing the power to governments to impact business, perhaps its collapse around the time of
the first world war is easier to understand.
He also makes a good point about the EEC and the organizations that came before the EU.
Those organizations were as much about protecting trade between Europe and former European
colonial possessions as they were anything to do with trade within Europe.
To me at least, the analysis of the author was rather original. In particular, he did an
excellent job of showing how the ideas of Hayek and von Mises have been distorted and
misunderstood in the mainstream. He was able to show what their ideas were and how they
relate to contemporary problems of government and democracy.
But there are some strong negatives in the book. The author offers up a complete virtue
signaling chapter to prove how the neoliberals are racists. He brings up things, like the
John Birch Society, that have nothing to do with the book. He unleashes a whole lot of venom
directed at American conservatives and republicans mostly set against a 1960s backdrop.
He
does all this in a bad purpose: to claim that the Kennedy Administration was somehow a
continuation of the new deal rather than a step toward neoliberalism.
His blindness and
modern political partisanship extended backward into history does substantial damage to his
argument in the book. He also spends an inordinate amount of time on the political issues of
South Africa which also adds nothing to the argument of the book. His whole chapter on racism
is an elaborate strawman all held together by Ropke. He also spends a large amount of time
grinding some sort of Ax with regard to the National Review and William F. Buckley.
He keeps resorting to the simple formula of finding something racist said or written by
Ropke....and then inferring that anyone who quoted or had anything to do with Ropke shared
his ideas and was also a racist. The whole point of the exercise seems to be to avoid any
analysis of how the democratic party (and the political left) drifted over the decades from
the politics of the New Deal to neoliberal Clintonism.
Then after that, he diverts further off the path by spending many pages on the greatness
of the "global south", the G77 and the New International Economic Order (NIEO) promoted by
the UN in the 1970s.
And whatever many faults of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian ends up
standing for a worse set of ideas: International Price controls, economic "reparations",
nationalization, international trade subsidies and a five-year plan for the world (socialist
style economic planning at a global level). In attaching himself to these particular ideas,
he kills his own book. The premise of the book and his argument was very strong at first. But
by around p. 220, its become a throwback political tract in favor of the garbage economic and
political ideas of the so-called third world circa 1974 complete with 70's style extensive
quotations from "Senegalese jurists"
Once the political agenda comes out, he just can't help himself. He opens the conclusion
to the book taking another cheap shot for no clear reason at William F. Buckley. He spends
alot of time on the Seattle anti-WTO protests from the 1990s. But he has NOTHING to say about BIll Clinton or Tony Blair or EU expansion or Obama or even the 2008 economic crisis for that
matter. Inexplicably for a book written in 2018, the content of the book seems to end in the
year 2000.
I'm giving it three stars for the first 150 pages which was decent work. The second half
rates zero stars. Though it could have been far better if he had written his history of
neoliberalism in the context of the counter-narrative of Keynesian economics and its decline.
It would have been better yet if the author had the courage to talk about the transformation
of the parties of the left and their complicity in the rise of neoliberalism. The author also
tends to waste lots of pages repeating himself or worse telling you what he is going to say
next. One would have expected a better standard of editing by the Harvard Press.
Anybody interested in global trade, business, human rights or democracy today should read
this book.
The book follow the Austrians from the beginning in the Habsburgischer empire to the
beginning rebellion against the WTO. However, most importantly it follows the thinking and
the thoughts behind the building of a global empire of capitalism with free trade, capital
and rights. All the way to the new "human right" to trade. It narrows down what neoliberal
thought really consist of and indirectly make a differentiation to the neoclassical economic
tradition.
What I found most interesting is the turn from economics to law - and the conceptual
distinctions between the genes, tradition, reason, which are translated into a quest for a
rational and reason based protection of dominium (the rule of property) against the overreach
of imperium (the rule of states/people). This distinction speaks directly to the issues that
EU is currently facing.
The author explicates how with Hayek and von Mises the economics of the central Europe has
had a development, such that we can consider it a true entry in the modernity.
The structures
which the neo-liberalism introduced were truly important for allowing the social progress. So
some politicians have had the way for following particular models, which also today are
considered with interest by many experts. The result is that the globalization has given to
the several countries the same possibility . This competence has a strong value, because the
author has a clear style and an efficient vision of the reality.
This is a fantastic God send for those who are interested in the neoliberal disease that
has caught this globe in the last 3 decades. It is different from other books like 'A Brief
History of Neoliberalism' by David Harvey.
The difference is that Slobodan does a really
masterful exposition of the roots of neoliberalism and neoliberals like Von Mises and Hayek
by going all the way back to the 'Geneva School'. It is amazing to see the dedication and
devotion of these water carriers for the owners of capital spend their entire life times
devising subtle and sleight of hand schemes and methods to basically subvert society to serve
the owners of capital. Fantastic work Slobodan. I await your next work.
The hard reality remains that the financial markets are, in the long term, forward-looking.
But in the short-term, they are dominated by high-speed electronic trading.
Anyone who felt
Monday's (December's, Q4's) meltdown, or watched Tuesday night's reopening of equity index
futures, watched in entertained astonishment, if not anguish.
Clearly, sentient, reasoned
thought has now been sacrificed at the altar of short-term profit. The task is to come up with
a thesis moving forward, and the challenge is to stick to that conclusion at times when the
evils of algorithmic, high-frequency and passive trading styles turn against those core
beliefs. Risk Management. Before one might profit with sustained regularity, one must learn to
effectively preserve one's capital.
just so 5 hours ago
You can
have whatever opinion you want about Yahoo's reporting of the daily ups and downs of the
markets, and keep in mind, the exchanges are betting parlors. That said, these types of wild
swings over the last 6 weeks or so, are very similar to what took place before housing bubble
burst in the late mid-ots, keep an eye on the amount of private uncollateralized debt that
mid-cap companies are carrying, if they start defaulting and these private equity houses
start running for cover, it create the same type of liquidity situation that Lehman's
caused.
"... You know we can't touch the corporations - they are sacrosanct because they are the supposed "job creators" - this one title gives them carte blanche to act however they like, to make spurious claims about economies faltering, businesses going offshore and unemployment. They also donate heavily to the political parties. ..."
Shhhh... whatever you do, don't ever let them hear you criticizing the "job creators" or
there will be trouble.
You know we can't touch the corporations - they are sacrosanct because they are the
supposed "job creators" - this one title gives them carte blanche to act however they like,
to make spurious claims about economies faltering, businesses going offshore and
unemployment. They also donate heavily to the political parties.
Repeat after me:
"Blessed are the job creators"
"Blessed are the job creators"
"Blessed are the job creators"
"For THEY shall inherit the wealth"
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs , by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; Zen Cash ; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom ; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott ; and LibertyStickers.com . ..."
"... To me, it is not so much the lies that major media organizations may broadcast, but the enormous amount of news of major importance that the networks censor that is doing the greatest harm. ..."
Journalist Justin Elliott comes on the show to talk about casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has become one of President Trump's
biggest donors. Although Trump derided him early in his campaign, the two have formed a close partnership with Adelson providing
tens of millions in funding so long as Trump continues the correct policies with respect to Israel, Palestine, and Iran. Elliott
and others have also speculated that Trump is trying to get Adelson approval to open a casino in Japan, helping him to expand his
gambling empire in Asia.
"Adelson expresses support for ZOA efforts to depose McMaster" (
Times of
Israel )
Justin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica . He
has produced stories for The New York Times and National Public Radio, and his reporting with NPR on the Red Cross' troubled post-earthquake
reconstruction efforts in Haiti won a 2015 Investigative Reporters and Editors award. Follow him on Twitter
@JustinElliott .
Whether Adelson or some other plutocrat, American politics is awash in money, and it this money is crippling our democracy. I
don't think that I have heard this topic discussed on any news program, and I don't expect to. To me, it is not so much the
lies that major media organizations may broadcast, but the enormous amount of news of major importance that the networks censor
that is doing the greatest harm.
Americans never get to see what they need to know. Keeping the peasants ignorant is the current mass media program, and they
are doing a great job of it.
Junk author, junk book of the butcher of Yugoslavia who would be hanged with Bill clinton by
Nuremberg Tribunal for crimes against peace. Albright is not bright at all. she a female bully
and that shows.
Mostly projection. And this arrogant warmonger like to exercise in Russophobia (which was the
main part of the USSR which saved the world fro fascism, sacrificing around 20 million people)
This book is book of denial of genocide against Iraqis and Serbian population where bombing with
uranium enriched bombs doubled cancer cases.If you can pass over those facts that this book is
for you.
Like Robert Kagan and other neocons Albright is waiving authoritarism dead chicken again and
again. that's silly and disingenuous. authoritarism is a method of Governance used in military.
It is not an ideology. Fascism is an ideology, a flavor of far right nationalism. Kind of
"enhanced" by some socialist ideas far right nationalism.
The view of fascism without economic circumstances that create fascism, and first of
immiseration of middle and working class and high level of unemployment is a primitive
ahistorical view. Fascism is the ultimate capitalist statism acting simultaneously as the civil
religion for the population also enforced by the power of the state. It has a lot of common with
neoliberalism, that's why neoliberalism is sometimes called "inverted totalitarism".
In reality fascism while remaining the dictatorship of capitalists for capitalist and the
national part of financial oligarchy, it like neoliberalism directed against working class
fascism comes to power on the populist slogans of righting wrong by previous regime and kicking
foreign capitalists and national compradors (which in Germany turned to be mostly Jewish)
out.
It comes to power under the slogans of stopping the distribution of wealth up and elimination
of the class of reinters -- all citizens should earn income, not get it from bond and other
investments (often in reality doing completely the opposite).
While intrinsically connected and financed by a sizable part of national elite which often
consist of far right military leadership, a part of financial oligarchy and large part of lower
middle class (small properties) is is a protest movement which want to revenge for the
humiliation and prefer military style organization of the society to democracy as more potent
weapon to achieve this goal.
Like any far right movement the rise of fascism and neo-fascism is a sign of internal problem
within a given society, often a threat to the state or social order.
Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic
or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards
to which they are entitled. "It's not so much what people have." she said, "but what they think
they should have -- and what they fear." Fear is why Fascism's emotional reach can extend to
all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism
is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -- on
those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.
This insight made us think that Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political
ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power. For example, Italy in the 1920s
included self-described Fascists of the left (who advocated a dictatorship of the
dispossessed), of the right (who argued for an authoritarian corporatist state), and of the
center (who sought a return to absolute monarchy). The German National Socialist Party (the
Nazis) originally came together ar ound a list of demands that ca- tered to anti-Semites,
anti-immigrants, and anti-capitalists but also advocated for higher old-age pensions, more
educational op- portunities for the poor, an end to child labor, and improved ma- ternal health
care. The Nazis were racists and, in their own minds, reformers at the same time.
If Fascism concerns itself less with specific policies than with finding a pathway to power,
what about the tactics of lead- ership? My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remem-
ber best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to
the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the
sur- face. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democ- racy. Unlike a monarchy
or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above. Fascism draws energy from men and
women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of hu- miliation, or a sense
that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier
it is for a Fascist leader to gam followers by dangling the prospect of re- newal or by vowing
to take back what has been stolen.
Like the mobilizers of more benign movements, these secular evangelists exploit the
near-universal human desire to be part of a meaningful quest. The more gifted among them have
an apti- tude for spectacle -- for orchestrating mass gatherings complete with martial music,
incendiary rhetoric, loud cheers, and arm-
lifting salutes. To loyalists, they offer the prize of membership in a club from which
others, often the objects of ridicule, are kept out. To build fervor, Fascists tend to be
aggressive, militaristic, and -- when circumstances allow -- expansionist. To secure the
future, they turn schools into seminaries for true believers, striv- ing to produce "new men"
and "new women" who will obey without question or pause. And, as one of my students observed,
"a Fascist who launches his career by being voted into office will have a claim to legitimacy
that others do not."
After climbing into a position of power, what comes next: How does a Fascist consolidate
authority? Here several students piped up: "By controlling information." Added another, "And
that's one reason we have so much cause to worry today." Most of us have thought of the
technological revolution primarily as a means for people from different walks of life to
connect with one another, trade ideas, and develop a keener understanding of why men and women
act as they do -- in other words, to sharpen our perceptions of truth. That's still the case,
but now we are not so sure. There is a troubling "Big Brother" angle because of the mountain of
personal data being uploaded into social media. If an advertiser can use that information to
home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what's to stop a Fascist
government from doing the same? "Suppose I go to a demonstra- tion like the Women's March,"
said a student, "and post a photo
on social media. My name gets added to a list and that list can end up anywhere. How do we
protect ourselves against that?"
Even more disturbing is the ability shown by rogue regimes and their agents to spread lies
on phony websites and Facebook. Further, technology has made it possible for extremist
organiza- tions to construct echo chambers of support for conspiracy theo- ries, false
narratives, and ignorant views on religion and race. This is the first rule of deception:
repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The
Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is
neither.
Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by assert- ing: "Fascism was the major
political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." Over the
years, he and other scholars have developed lists of the many moving parts that Fascism
entails. Toward the end of our discussion, my class sought to articulate a comparable list.
Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are
required to do exactly what lead- ers say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The
doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside
down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for the protection of their
rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism,
the mission of citizens is to serve; the government's job is to rule.
When one talks about this subject, confusion often arises about the difference between
Fascism and such related concepts as totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, tyranny,
autocracy, and so on. As an academic, I might be tempted to wander into that thicket, but as a
former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is
someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is
unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary --
including violence -- to achieve his or her goals. In that conception, a Fascist will likely be
a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a Fascist.
Often the difference can be seen in who is trusted with the guns. In seventeenth-century
Europe, when Catholic aristocrats did battle with Protestant aristocrats, they fought over
scripture but agreed not to distribute weapons to their peasants, thinking it safer to wage war
with mercenary armies. Modern dictators also tend to be wary of their citizens, which is why
they create royal guards and other elite security units to ensure their personal safe- ty. A
Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down,
Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and
the firepower to strike first.
Hypocrisy at its worst from a lady who advocated hawkish foreign policy which included the
most sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam, when, in 1998, Clinton began almost daily
attacks on Iraq in the so-called no-fly zones, and made so-called regime change in Iraq
official U.S. policy.
In May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Madeleine Albright, who at the time was
Clinton's U.N. ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl said to Albright, in connection with
the Clinton administration presiding over the most devastating regime of sanctions in history
that the U.N. estimated took the lives of as many as a million Iraqis, the vast majority of
them children. , "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more
children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think
the price is worth it.
While I found much of the story-telling in "Fascism" engaging, I come away expecting much
more of one of our nation's pre-eminent senior diplomats . In a nutshell, she has devoted a
whole volume to describing the ascent of intolerant fascism and its many faces, but punted on
the question "How should we thwart fascism going forward?"
Even that question leaves me a bit unsatisfied, since it is couched in double-negative
syntax. The thing there is an appetite for, among the readers of this book who are looking
for more than hand-wringing about neofascism, is a unifying title or phrase which captures in
single-positive syntax that which Albright prefers over fascism. What would that be? And, how
do we pursue it, nurture it, spread it and secure it going forward? What is it?
I think Albright would perhaps be willing to rally around "Good Government" as the theme
her book skirts tangentially from the dark periphery of fascistic government. "Virtuous
Government"? "Effective Government"? "Responsive Government"?
People concerned about neofascism want to know what we should be doing right now to avoid
getting sidetracked into a dark alley of future history comparable to the Nazi brown shirt or
Mussolini black shirt epochs. Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of
fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it? Or, is this just another hand-wringing exercise,
a la "you'll know it when you see it", with a proactive superficiality stuck at the level of
pejorative labelling of current styles of government and national leaders? If all you can say
is what you don't want, then the challenge of threading the political future of the US is
left unruddered. To make an analogy to driving a car, if you don't know your destination, and
only can get navigational prompts such as "don't turn here" or "don't go down that street",
then what are the chances of arriving at a purposive destination?
The other part of this book I find off-putting is that Albright, though having served as
Secretary of State, never talks about the heavy burden of responsibility that falls on a head
of state. She doesn't seem to empathize at all with the challenge of top leadership. Her
perspective is that of the detached critic. For instance, in discussing President Duterte of
the Philippines, she fails to paint the dire situation under which he rose to national
leadership responsibility: Islamic separatists having violently taken over the entire city of
Marawi, nor the ubiquitous spread of drug cartel power to the level where control over law
enforcement was already ceded to the gangs in many places...entire islands and city
neighborhoods run by mafia organizations. It's easy to sit back and criticize Duterte's
unleashing of vigilante justice -- What was Mrs. Albright's better alternative to regain
ground from vicious, well-armed criminal organizations? The distancing from leadership
responsibility makes Albright's treatment of the Philippines twin crises of gang-rule and
Islamist revolutionaries seem like so much academic navel-gazing....OK for an undergrad
course at Georgetown maybe, but unworthy of someone who served in a position of high
responsibility. Duterte is liked in the Philippines. What he did snapped back the power of
the cartels, and returned a deserved sense of security to average Philippinos (at least those
not involved with narcotics). Is that not good government, given the horrendous circumstances
Duterte came up to deal with? What lack of responsibility in former Philippine leadership
allowed things to get so out of control? Is it possible that Democrats and liberals are
afraid to be tough, when toughness is what is needed? I'd much rather read an account from an
average Philippino about the positive impacts of the vigilante campaign, than listen of
Madame Secretary sermonizing out of context about Duterte. OK, he's not your idea of a nice
guy. Would you rather sit back, prattle on about the rule of law and due process while
Islamic terrorists wrest control over where you live? Would you prefer the leadership of a
drug cartel boss to Duterte?
My critique is offered in a constructive manner. I would certainly encourage Albright (or
anyone!) to write a book in a positive voice about what it's going to take to have good
national government in the US going forward, and to help spread such abundance globally. I
would define "good" as the capability to make consistently good policy decisions, ones that
continue to look good in hindsight, 10, 20 or 30 years later. What does that take?
I would submit that the essential "preserving democracy" process component is having a
population that is adequately prepared for collaborative problem-solving. Some understanding
of history is helpful, but it's simply not enough. Much more essential is for every young
person to experience team problem-solving, in both its cooperative and competitive aspects.
Every young person needs to experience a team leadership role, and to appreciate what it
takes from leaders to forge constructive design from competing ideas and champions. Only
after serving as a referee will a young person understand the limits to "passion" that
individual contributors should bring to the party. Only after moderating and herding cats
will a young person know how to interact productively with leaders and other contributors.
Much of the skill is counter-instinctual. It's knowing how to express ideas...how to field
criticism....how to nudge people along in the desired direction...and how to avoid ad-hominem
attacks, exaggerations, accusations and speculative grievances. It's learning how to manage
conflict productively toward excellence. Way too few of our young people are learning these
skills, and way too few of our journalists know how to play a constructive role in managing
communications toward successful complex problem-solving. Albright's claim that a
journalist's job is primarily to "hold leaders accountable" really betrays an absolving of
responsibility for the media as a partner in good government -- it doesn't say whether the
media are active players on the problem-solving team (which they have to be for success), or
mere spectators with no responsibility for the outcome. If the latter, then journalism
becomes an irritant, picking at the scabs over and over, but without any forward progress.
When the media takes up a stance as an "opponent" of leadership, you end up with poor
problem-solving results....the system is fighting itself instead of making forward
progress.
"Fascism" doesn't do nearly enough to promote the teaching of practical civics 101 skills,
not just to the kids going into public administration, but to everyone. For, it is in the
norms of civility, their ability to be practiced, and their defense against excesses, that
fascism (e.g., Antifa) is kept at bay.
Everyone in a democracy has to know the basics:
• when entering a disagreement, don't personalize it
• never demonize an opponent
• keep a focus on the goal of agreement and moving forward
• never tell another person what they think, but ask (non-rhetorically) what they think
then be prepared to listen and absorb
• do not speak untruths or exaggerate to make an argument
• do not speculate grievance
• understand truth gathering as a process; detect when certainty is being bluffed;
question sources
• recognize impasse and unproductive argumentation and STOP IT
• know how to introduce a referee or moderator to regain productive collaboration
• avoid ad hominem attacks
• don't take things personally that wrankle you;
• give the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation
• don't jump to conclusions
• don't reward theatrical manipulation
These basics of collaborative problem-solving are the guts of a "liberal democracy" that
can face down the most complex challenges and dilemmas.
I gave the book 3 stars for the great story-telling, and Albright has been part of a great
story of late 20th century history. If she would have told us how to prevent fascism going
forward, and how to roll it back in "hard case" countries like North Korea and Sudan, I would
have given her a 5. I'm not that interested in picking apart the failure cases of
history...they teach mostly negative exemplars. Much rather I would like to read about
positive exemplars of great national government -- "great" defined by popular acclaim, by the
actual ones governed. Where are we seeing that today? Canada? Australia? Interestingly, both
of these positive exemplars have strict immigration policies.
Is it possible that Albright is just unable, by virtue of her narrow escape from Communist
Czechoslovakia and acceptance in NYC as a transplant, to see that an optimum immigration
policy in the US, something like Canada's or Australia's, is not the looming face of fascism,
but rather a move to keep it safely in its corner in coming decades? At least, she admits to
her being biased by her life story.
That suggests her views on refugees and illegal immigrants as deserving of unlimited
rights to migrate into the US might be the kind of cloaked extremism that she is warning us
about.
Albright's book is a comprehensive look at recent history regarding the rise and fall of
fascist leaders; as well as detailing leaders in nations that are starting to mimic fascist
ideals. Instead of a neat definition, she uses examples to bolster her thesis of what are
essential aspects of fascism. Albright dedicates each section of the book to a leader or
regime that enforces fascist values and conveys this to the reader through historical events
and exposition while also peppering in details of her time as Secretary of State. The climax
(and 'warning'), comes at the end, where Albright applies what she has been discussing to the
current state of affairs in the US and abroad.
Overall, I would characterize this as an enjoyable and relatively easy read. I think the
biggest strength of this book is how Albright uses history, previous examples of leaders and
regimes, to demonstrate what fascism looks like and contributing factors on a national and
individual level. I appreciated that she lets these examples speak for themselves of the
dangers and subtleties of a fascist society, which made the book more fascinating and less of
a textbook. Her brief descriptions of her time as Secretary of State were intriguing and made
me more interested in her first book, 'Madame Secretary'. The book does seem a bit slow as it
is not until the end that Albright blatantly reveals the relevance of all of the history
relayed in the first couple hundred pages. The last few chapters are dedicated to the reveal:
the Trump administration and how it has affected global politics. Although, she never
outright calls Trump a fascist, instead letting the reader decide based on his decisions and
what you have read in the book leading up to this point, her stance is quite clear by the
end. I was surprised at what I shared politically with Albright, mainly in immigration and a
belief of empathy and understanding for others. However, I got a slight sense of
anti-secularism in the form of a disdain for those who do not subscribe to an Abrahamic
religion and she seemed to hint at this being partly an opening to fascism.
I also could have done without the both-sides-ism she would occasionally push, which seems
to be a tactic used to encourage people to 'unite against Trump'. These are small annoyances
I had with the book, my main critique is the view Albright takes on democracy. If anything,
the book should have been called "Democracy: the Answer" because that is the most consistent
stance Albright takes throughout. She seems to overlook many of the atrocities the US and
other nations have committed in the name of democracy and the negative consequences of
capitalism, instead, justifying negative actions with the excuse of 'it is for democracy and
everyone wants that' and criticizing those who criticize capitalism.
She does not do a good job of conveying the difference between a communist country like
Russia and a socialist country like those found in Scandinavia and seems okay with the idea
of the reader lumping them all together in a poor light. That being said, I would still
recommend this book for anyone's TBR as the message is essential for today, that the current
world of political affairs is, at least somewhat, teetering on a precipice and we are in need
of as many strong leaders as possible who are willing to uphold democratic ideals on the
world stage and mindful constituents who will vote them in.
The book is very well written, easy to read, and follows a pretty standard formula making
it accessible to the average reader. However, it suffers immensely from, what I suspect are,
deeply ingrained political biases from the author.
Whilst I don't dispute the criteria the author applies in defining fascism, or the targets
she cites as examples, the first bias creeps in here when one realises the examples chosen
are traditional easy targets for the US (with the exception of Turkey). The same criteria
would define a country like Singapore perfectly as fascist, yet the country (or Malaysia)
does not receive a mention in the book.
Further, it grossly glosses over what Ms. Albright terms facist traits from the US
governments of the past. If the author is to be believed, the CIA is holier than thou, never
intervened anywhere or did anything that wasn't with the best interests of democracy at
heart, and American foreign policy has always existed to build friendships and help out their
buddies. To someone ingrained in this rhetoric for years I am sure this is an easy pill to
swallow, but to the rest of the world it makes a number of assertions in the book come across
as incredibly naive. out of 5 stars
Trite and opaque
We went with my husband to the presentation of this book at UPenn with Albright before it
came out and Madeleine's spunk, wit and just glorious brightness almost blinded me. This is a
2.5 star book, because 81 year old author does not really tell you all there is to tell when
she opens up on a subject in any particular chapter, especially if it concerns current US
interest.
Lets start from the beginning of the book. What really stood out, the missing 3rd Germany
ally, Japan and its emperor. Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his
death in 1989. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon
turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. During World War II (1939-45), Japan attacked
nearly all of its Asian neighbors, allied itself with Nazi Germany and launched a surprise
assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, forcing US to enter the war in 1941. Hirohito
was never indicted as a war criminal! does he deserve at least a chapter in her book?
Oh and by the way, did author mention anything about sanctions against Germany for
invading Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland? Up until the Pearl Harbor USA and
Germany still traded, although in March 1939, FDR slapped a 25% tariff on all German goods.
Like Trump is doing right now to some of US trading partners.
Next monster that deserves a chapter on Genocide in cosmic proportions post WW2 is
communist leader of China Mao Zedung. Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural
history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic
torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants compares to the Second World
War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in
China over these four years; the total worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55
million.
We learn that Argentina has given sanctuary to Nazi war criminals, but she forgets to
mention that 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States in 1945 and were promptly put to
work. For example, Wernher von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, but had
intimate knowledge of what was going on in the concentration camps. Von Braun himself
hand-picked people from horrific places, including Buchenwald concentration camp. Tsk-Tsk
Madeline.
What else? Oh, lets just say that like Madelaine Albright my husband is Jewish and lost
extensive family to Holocoust. Ukrainian nationalists executed his great grandfather on
gistapo orders, his great grandmother disappeared in concentration camp, grandfather was
conscripted in june 1940 and decommissioned september 1945 and went through war as
infantryman through 3 fronts earning several medals. his grandmother, an ukrainian born jew
was a doctor in a military hospital in Saint Petersburg survived famine and saved several
children during blockade. So unlike Maideline who was raised as a Roman Catholic, my husband
grew up in a quiet jewish family in that territory that Stalin grabbed from Poland in 1939,
in a polish turn ukrainian city called Lvov(Lemberg). His family also had to ask for an
asylum, only they had to escape their home in Ukraine in 1991. He was told then "You are a
nice little Zid (Jew), we will kill you last" If you think things in ukraine changed, think
again, few weeks ago in Kiev Roma gypsies were killed and injured during pogroms, and nobody
despite witnesses went to jail. Also during demonstrations openly on the streets C14 unit is
waving swastikas and Heils. Why is is not mentioned anywhere in the book? is is because
Hunter Biden sits on the board of one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies called
Burisma since May 14, 2014, and Ukraine has an estimated 127.9 trillion cubic feet of
unproved technically recoverable shale gas resources? ( according to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration (EIA).1 The most promising shale reserves appear to be in the
Carpathian Foreland Basin (also called the Lviv-Volyn Basin), which extends across Western
Ukraine from Poland into Romania, and the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the East (which borders
Russia).
Wow, i bet you did not know that. how ugly are politics, even this book that could have been
so much greater if the author told the whole ugly story. And how scary that there are
countries where you can go and openly be fascist.
To me, Fascism fails for the single reason that no two fascist leaders are alike. Learning
about one or a few, in a highly cursory fashion like in this book or in great detail, is
unlikely to provide one with any answers on how to prevent the rise of another or fend
against some such. And, as much as we are witnessing the rise of numerous democratic or
quasi-democratic "strongmen" around the world in global politics, it is difficult to brand
any of them as fascist in the orthodox sense.
As the author writes at the outset, it is difficult to separate a fascist from a tyrant or
a dictator. A fascist is a majoritarian who rouses a large group under some national, racial
or similar flag with rallying cries demanding suppression or exculcation of those excluded
from this group. A typical fascist leader loves her yes-men and hates those who disagree: she
does not mind using violence to suppress dissidents. A fascist has no qualms using propaganda
to popularize the agreeable "facts" and theories while debunking the inconvenient as lies.
What is not discussed explicitly in the book are perhaps some positive traits that separate
fascists from other types of tyrants: fascists are rarely lazy, stupid or prone to doing
things for only personal gains. They differ from the benevolent dictators for their record of
using heavy oppression against their dissidents. Fascists, like all dictators, change rules
to suit themselves, take control of state organizations to exercise total control and use
"our class is the greatest" and "kick others" to fuel their programs.
Despite such a detailed list, each fascist is different from each other. There is little
that even Ms Albright's fascists - from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin to the Kims to Chavez
or Erdogan - have in common. In fact, most of the opponents of some of these
dictators/leaders would calll them by many other choice words but not fascists. The
circumstances that gave rise to these leaders were highly different and so were their rules,
methods and achievements.
The point, once again, is that none of the strongmen leaders around the world could be
easily categorized as fascists. Or even if they do, assigning them with such a tag and
learning about some other such leaders is unlikely to help. The history discussed in the book
is interesting but disjointed, perfunctory and simplistic. Ms Albright's selection is also
debatable.
Strong leaders who suppress those they deem as opponents have wreaked immense harms and
are a threat to all civil societies. They come in more shades and colours than terms we have
in our vocabulary (dictators, tyrants, fascists, despots, autocrats etc). A study of such
tyrant is needed for anyone with an interest in history, politics, or societal well-being.
Despite Ms Albright's phenomenal knowledge, experience, credentials, personal history and
intentions, this book is perhaps not the best place to objectively learn much about the risks
from the type of things some current leaders are doing or deeming as right.
Each time I get concerned about Trump's rhetoric or past actions I read idiotic opinions,
like those of our second worst ever Secretary of State, and come to appreciate him more.
Pejorative terms like fascism or populism have no place in a rational policy discussion. Both
are blatant attempts to apply a pejorative to any disagreeing opinion. More than half of the
book is fluffed with background of Albright, Hitler and Mussolini. Wikipedia is more
informative. The rest has snippets of more modern dictators, many of whom are either
socialists or attained power through a reaction to failed socialism, as did Hitler. She
squirms mightily to liken Trump to Hitler. It's much easier to see that Sanders is like
Maduro. The USA is following a path more like Venezuela than Germany.
Her history misses that Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist, and Nazism in
Germany was a reaction to Wiemar socialism. The danger of fascism in the US is far greater
from the left than from the right. America is far left of where the USSR ever was. Remember
than Marx observed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution. The USA with ready
made capitalism for reform fits Marx's pattern much better. Progressives deny that Sanders
and Warren are socialists. If not they are what Lenin called "useful idiots."
Albright says that she is proud of the speech where she called the USA the 'Indispensable
Nation.' She should be ashamed. Obama followed in his inaugural address, saying that we are
"the indispensable nation, responsible for world security." That turned into a policy of
human rights interventions leading to open ended wars (Syria, Yemen), nations in chaos
(Libya), and distrust of the USA (Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, NK). Trump now has
to make nice with dictators to allay their fears that we are out to replace them.
She admires the good intentions of human rights intervention, ignoring the results. She says
Obama had some success without citing a single instance. He has apologized for Libya, but
needs many more apologies. She says Obama foreign policy has had some success, with no
mention of a single instance. Like many progressives, she confuses good intentions with
performance. Democracy spreading by well intentioned humanitarian intervention has resulted
in a succession of open ended war or anarchy.
The shorter histories of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Venezuela are much more
informative, although more a warning against socialism than right wing fascism. Viktor Orban
in Hungary is another reaction to socialism.
Albright ends the book with a forlorn hope that we need a Lincoln or Mandela, exactly what
our two party dictatorship will not generate as it yields ever worse and worse candidates for
our democracy to vote upon, even as our great society utopia generates ever more power for
weak presidents to spend our money and continue wrong headed foreign policy.
The greatest danger to the USA is not fascism, but of excessively poor leadership
continuing our slow slide to the bottom.
Money quote: " neoliberalism is the fight of finance to subdue society at large, and to
make the bankers and creditors today in the position that the landlords were under
feudalism."
Notable quotes:
"... ... if you take the Bible literally, it's the fight in almost all of the early books of the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, all about the fight over indebtedness and debt cancellation. ..."
"... neoliberalism is the fight of finance to subdue society at large,and to make the bankers and creditors today in the position that the landlords were under feudalism. ..."
"... They call themselves free marketers, but they realize that you cannot have neoliberalism unless you're willing to murder and assassinate everyone who promotes an alternative ..."
"... Just so long as you remember that most of the strongest and most moving condemnations of greed and money in the ancient and (today) western world are also Jewish--i.e. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, the Gospels, Letter of James, etc. ..."
"... The history of Jewish banking after the fall or Rome is inextricable from cultural anti-judaism of Christian west and east and de facto marginalization/ghettoization of Jews from most aspects of social life. The Jewish lending of money on interest to gentiles was both necessary for early mercantilist trade and yet usury was prohibited by the church. So Jewish money lenders were essential to and yet ostracized within European economies for centuries. ..."
"... Now Christianity has itself long given up on the tradition teaching against usury of course. ..."
"... In John, for instance most of the references to what in English is translated as "the Jews" are in Greek clearly references to "the Judaeans"--and especially to the ruling elite among the southern tribe in bed with the Romans. ..."
Just finished reading the fascinating
Michael Hudson interview I linked to on previous thread; but since we're discussing Jews
and their religion in a tangential manner, I think it appropriate to post here since the
history Hudson explains is 100% key to the ongoing pain us humans feel and inflict. My
apologies in advance, but it will take this long excerpt to explain what I mean:
"Tribes: When does the concept of a general debt cancellation disappear historically?
"Michael: I guess in about the second or third century AD it was downplayed in the Bible.
After Jesus died, you had, first of all, St Paul taking over, and basically Christianity was
created by one of the most evil men in history, the anti-Semite Cyril of Alexandria. He
gained power by murdering his rivals, the Nestorians, by convening a congress of bishops and
killing his enemies. Cyril was really the Stalin figure of Christianity, killing everybody
who was an enemy, organizing pogroms against the Jews in Alexandria where he ruled.
"It was Cyril that really introduced into Christianity the idea of the Trinity. That's
what the whole fight was about in the third and fourth centuries AD. Was Jesus a human, was
he a god? And essentially you had the Isis-Osiris figure from Egypt, put into Christianity.
The Christians were still trying to drive the Jews out of Christianity. And Cyril knew the
one thing the Jewish population was not going to accept would be the Isis figure and the
Mariolatry that the church became. And as soon as the Christian church became the
establishment rulership church, the last thing it wanted in the West was debt
cancellation.
"You had a continuation of the original Christianity in the Greek Orthodox Church, or the
Orthodox Church, all the way through Byzantium. And in my book And Forgive Them Their Debts,
the last two chapters are on the Byzantine echo of the original debt cancellations, where one
ruler after another would cancel the debts. And they gave very explicit reason for it: if we
don't cancel the debts, we're not going to be able to field an army, we're not going to be
able to collect taxes, because the oligarchy is going to take over. They were very explicit,
with references to the Bible, references to the jubilee year. So you had Christianity survive
in the Byzantine Empire. But in the West it ended in Margaret Thatcher. And Father
Coughlin.
"Tribes: He was the '30s figure here in the States.
"Michael: Yes: anti-Semite, right-wing, pro-war, anti-labor. So the irony is that you have
the people who call themselves fundamentalist Christians being against everything that Jesus
was fighting for, and everything that original Christianity was all about."
Hudson says debt forgiveness was one of the central tenets of Judaism: " ... if
you take the Bible literally, it's the fight in almost all of the early books of the Old
Testament, the Jewish Bible, all about the fight over indebtedness and debt
cancellation. "
Looks like I'll be purchasing Hudson's book as he's essentially unveiling a whole new,
potentially revolutionary, historical interpretation.
@ karlof1 with the Michale Hudson link....thanks!!
Here is the quote that I really like from that interview
"
Michael: No. You asked what is the fight about? The fight is whether the state will be taken
over, essentially to be an extension of Wall Street if you do not have government planning.
Every economy is planned. Ever since the Neolithic (era), you've had to have (a form of)
planning. If you don't have a public authority doing the planning, then the financial
authority becomes the planners. So globalism is in the financial interest –Wall Street
and the City of London, doing the planning, not governments. They will do the planning in
their own interest. So neoliberalism is the fight of finance to subdue society at
large,and to make the bankers and creditors today in the position that the landlords were
under feudalism.
"
karlof1, please email me as I would like to read the book as well and maybe we can share a
copy.
And yes, it is relevant to Netanyahoo and his ongoing passel of lies because humanity has
been told and been living these lives for centuries...it is time to stop this shit and grow
up/evolve
@13 / 78 karlof1... thanks very much for the links to michael hudson, alastair crooke and the
bruno maraces articles...
they were all good for different reasons, but although hudson is being criticized for
glossing over some of his talking points, i think the main thrust of his article is very
worthwhile for others to read! the quote to end his article is quite good "The question is,
who do you want to run the economy? The 1% and the financial sector, or the 99% through
politics? The fight has to be in the political sphere, because there's no other sphere that
the financial interests cannot crush you on."
it seems to me that the usa has worked hard to bad mouth or get rid of government and the
concept of government being involved in anything.. of course everything has to be run by a
'private corp' - ie corporations must run everything.. they call them oligarchs when talking
about russia, lol - but they are corporations when they are in the usa.. slight rant..
another quote i especially liked from hudson.. " They call themselves free marketers,
but they realize that you cannot have neoliberalism unless you're willing to murder and
assassinate everyone who promotes an alternative ." that sounds about right...
@ 84 juliania.. aside from your comments on hudsons characterization of st paul "the
anti-Semite Cyril of Alexandria" further down hudson basically does the same with father
coughlin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin..
he gets the anti-semite tag as well.. i don't know much about either characters, so it's
mostly greek to me, but i do find some of hudsons views especially appealing - debt
forgiveness being central to the whole article as i read it...
it is interesting my own view on how money is so central to the world and how often times
I am incapable of avoiding the observation of the disproportionate number of Jewish people in
banking.. I guess that makes me anti-semite too, but i don't think of myself that way.. I
think the obsession with money is killing the planet.. I don't care who is responsible for
keeping it going, it is killing us...
Just so long as you remember that most of the strongest and most moving condemnations
of greed and money in the ancient and (today) western world are also Jewish--i.e. Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Micah, the Gospels, Letter of James, etc.
The history of Jewish banking after the fall or Rome is inextricable from cultural
anti-judaism of Christian west and east and de facto marginalization/ghettoization of Jews from
most aspects of social life. The Jewish lending of money on interest to gentiles was both
necessary for early mercantilist trade and yet usury was prohibited by the church. So Jewish
money lenders were essential to and yet ostracized within European economies for
centuries.
Now Christianity has itself long given up on the tradition teaching against usury of
course.
I too greatly admire the work of Hudson but he consistently errs and oversimplifies
whenever discussing the beliefs of and the development of beliefs among preNicene followers
of the way (as Acts puts is) or Christians (as they came to be known in Antioch within
roughly eight or nine decades after Jesus' death.) Palestinian Judaism in the time of Jesus
was much more variegated than scholars even twenty years ago had recognized. The gradual
reception and interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in tandem with renewed research into
Phili of Alexandria, the Essenes, the so-called Sons of Zadok, contemporary Galilean zealot
movements styles after the earlier Maccabean resistance, the apocalyptism of post exilic
texts like Daniel and (presumably) parts of Enoch--all paint a picture of a highly diverse
group of alternatives to the state-Church once known as Second Temple Judaism that has been
mistaken as undisputed Jewish "orthodoxy" since the advent of historical criticism.
The
Gospel of John, for example, which dates from betweeen 80-120 and is the record of a much
earlier oral tradition, is already explicitly binitarian, and possibly already trinitarian
depending on how one understands the relationship between the Spirit or Advocate and the Son.
(Most ante-Nicene Christians understood the Spirit to be *Christ's* own spirit in distributed
form, and they did so by appeal to a well-developed but still largely under recognized strand
in Jewish angelology.)
The "theological" development of Christianity occurred much sooner
that it has been thought because it emerged from an already highly theologized strand or
strands of Jewish teaching that, like Christianity itself, privileged the Abrahamic covenant
over the Mosaic Law, the testament of grace over that of works, and the universal scope of
revelation and salvation as opposed to any political or ethnic reading of the "Kingdom."
None
of these groups were part of the ruling class of Judaean priests and levites and their
hangers on the Pharisees.
In John, for instance most of the references to what in English is
translated as "the Jews" are in Greek clearly references to "the Judaeans"--and especially to
the ruling elite among the southern tribe in bed with the Romans.
So the anti-Judaism/Semiti
of John's Gispel largely rests on a mistranslation. In any event, everything is much more
complex than Hudson makes it out to be. Christian economic radicalism is alive and well in
the thought of Gregory of Nysa and Basil the Great, who also happened to be Cappadocian
fathers highly influential in the development of "orthodox" Trinitarianism in the fourth
century.
I still think that Hudson's big picture critique of the direction later Christianity
took is helpful and necessary, but this doesn't change the fact that he simplifies the
origins, development, and arguably devolution of this movement whenever he tries to get
specific. It is a worthwhile danger given the quality of his work in historical economics,
but still one has to be aware of.
Lambert here: There's no way I'm opening up comments for a post about gold, and be very
careful not to go crazy over in Links, either. Plus I don't care about shiny substances.
However, Wolf's thinking on asset correlation in the "Everything Bubble" is interesting, which
is why I'm cross-posting this.
Since October 1, the S&P 500 index has plunged 19.6%, to 2,351 as of Monday's fiasco.
Over the same period, the price of gold has risen 7.3% to $1,271/oz. Over this short period,
gold was an effective diversification.
For the year so far, the S&P 500 index is down 12.1%, gold is down 1.6%. For the past
two years, the S&P 500, despite the huge volatility, is up 4.2%, and gold, also with some
volatility, is up 9.7%. Moving in the same direction over these time frames, gold has been
somewhat less effective as diversification, than it has been over the past three months. But as
the chart below shows, its moves were not in lockstep with the S&P 500, and thus gold has
helped counter-balance the erratic gyrations of the S&P 500 with its own erratic but
different gyrations. Diversification can be messy:
There are many reasons to trade or own gold. But here I focus on gold as diversification to
the Everything Bubble and particularly to stocks – and how that panned out over the
longer term.
Nearly all asset classes have risen in parallel for nine years since the onset of global QE,
zero-interest-rate policy, and negative-interest-rate policy: Stocks, bonds, leveraged loans,
commercial real estate, residential real estate, art, classic cars, emerging market bonds,
emerging market stocks . We call it the Everything Bubble. And now they're headed down
together.
Diversification is not possible among asset classes that move together. If for nine years
all asset classes in your holdings rose together, no matter how good this feels, you're not
diversified.
Effective diversification means that some assets rise as others fall. But in the Everything
Bubble, most asset classes rose together. And "well-diversified" investors were diversified
only in their imagination, as they're now finding out as nearly all asset classes have been
falling in parallel.
Effective diversification comes with some costs, and it's not risk free, but it provides
some stability and lowers the overall risk of your holdings.
Cash always provides diversification in the sense of stability in addition to providing
liquidity. But from 2009 through 2016, the return on cash – such as short-term Treasury
bills, FDIC-insured CDs, or FDIC-insured high-yield savings accounts – has been near zero
even as inflation ate away at its purchasing power.
But since interest rates started rising, cash generates better returns. This year, the yield
on short-term Treasury bills, FDIC-insured CDs, or FDIC-insured high-yield savings accounts has
beaten most other assets classes (to find those CDs and savings accounts, you need to shop
around). They now yield between 2% and 3%. And when these instruments are held to maturity,
there is no risk to the principal since they're redeemed at face value.
Gold doesn't offer a yield. And its price changes constantly. So the only return obtained
from gold would be derived from an increase in price. And as long as that price moves in the
opposite direction over the longer term from stock-market indices, gold provides effective
diversification to stocks – even if it hurts, such as when stocks surge and gold plunges,
which is what happened from late 2011 through 2016.
Over the long term, gold and the S&P 500 have moved in lockstep some of the time, and
diverged much of the time. This chart goes back to 1995 (both gold in $/oz and the S&P 500
index on the same axis; click to enlarge):
And when asset classes have risen together like this, it becomes very difficult to achieve
diversification going forward – because now they're at risk of all going down
together.
My thoughts at the time were somewhat speculative since the S&P 500 was still surging.
The chart I provided at the time was the long-term chart above, but it lacked the near-20%
plunge of the S&P 500 since October 1 that the current chart shows. So in this instance,
over those three months since then, gold has turned out to be a very effective diversification
to stocks.
But the risk with gold remains: there is no guarantee that gold can't also plunge, right
along with the S&P 500. This is a real risk, and diversification might sound good, but when
push comes to shove in a sell-off, it might not work. Nevertheless, given the difficulties of
finding effective diversification in the Everything Bubble, other than cash, gold has shown it
could do the job over the past three months – which largely mirrors its performance as
diversification during the 2000-2002 crash and most of the 2008-2009 crash.
By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and
author, with extensive international work experience.
Originally published at Wolf Street .
By abetting the ad industry, universities are leading us into temptation, when they
should be enlightening us
... ... ...
I ask because, while considering the frenzy
of consumerism that rises beyond its usual planet-trashing levels at this time of year, I
recently stumbled across a paper that astonished
me . It was written by academics at public universities in the Netherlands and the US.
Their purpose seemed to me starkly at odds with the public interest. They sought to identify
"the different ways in which consumers resist advertising, and the tactics that can be used to
counter or avoid such resistance".
Among the "neutralising" techniques it highlighted were "disguising the persuasive intent of
the message"; distracting our attention by using confusing phrases that make it harder to focus
on the advertiser's intentions; and "using cognitive depletion as a tactic for reducing
consumers' ability to contest messages". This means hitting us with enough advertisements to
exhaust our mental resources, breaking down our capacity to think.
Intrigued, I started looking for other academic papers on the same theme, and found an
entire literature. There were articles on every imaginable aspect of resistance, and helpful
tips on overcoming it. For example, I came across a paper that counsels advertisers on how to
rebuild public trust when the celebrity they work with gets into trouble. Rather than dumping
this lucrative asset, the researchers advised that the best means to enhance "the authentic
persuasive appeal of a celebrity endorser" whose standing has slipped is to get them to display
"a Duchenne smile", otherwise known as "a genuine smile". It precisely anatomised such smiles,
showed how to spot them, and discussed the "construction" of sincerity and "genuineness": a
magnificent exercise in inauthentic authenticity.
Another paper considered how
to persuade sceptical people to accept a company's corporate social responsibility claims,
especially when these claims conflict with the company's overall objectives. (An obvious
example is ExxonMobil's attempts to convince people that it is environmentally responsible,
because it is researching algal fuels that could one day reduce CO2 – even as it
continues to
pump millions of barrels of fossil oil a day ). I hoped the paper would recommend that the
best means of persuading people is for a company to change its practices. Instead, the authors'
research showed how images and statements could be cleverly combined to "minimise stakeholder
scepticism".
A further
paper discussed advertisements that work by stimulating
Fomo – fear of missing out . It noted that such ads work through "controlled
motivation", which is "anathema to wellbeing". Fomo ads, the paper explained, tend to cause
significant discomfort to those who notice them. It then went on to show how an improved
understanding of people's responses "provides the opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of
Fomo as a purchase trigger". One tactic it proposed is to keep stimulating the fear of missing
out, during and after the decision to buy. This, it suggested, will make people more
susceptible to further ads on the same lines.
Yes, I know: I work in an industry that receives most of its income from advertising, so I
am complicit in this too. But so are we all. Advertising – with its destructive
impacts on the living planet, our peace of mind and our free will – sits at the heart of
our growth-based economy. This gives us all the more reason to challenge it. Among the places
in which the challenge should begin are universities, and the academic societies that are
supposed to set and uphold ethical standards. If they cannot swim against the currents of
constructed desire and constructed thought, who can?
Which suckers will invest in companies with no profits? This is really repetition of Dotcom
era in tech.
Notable quotes:
"... By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street ..."
"... Nasdaq down 24% already. Renaissance IPO ETF down 31%. But Uber and other unicorns are planning record IPOs in 2019, à la dotcom-crash-debut in 2000. ..."
By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and
author, with extensive international work experience.
Originally published at Wolf Street
Nasdaq down 24% already. Renaissance IPO ETF down 31%. But Uber and other unicorns are
planning record IPOs in 2019, à la dotcom-crash-debut in 2000.
The IPO hype machine has produced some very successful companies and a lot of spectacular
wealth transfers from the hapless public to early investors selling their shares. Here are two
of the standouts that I covered:
Snap [SNAP] , purveyor of the
Snapchat app and must-have sunglasses with a built-in camera: Shares peaked at $29 on the
second day after its IPO, given it a market capitalization of $32 billion. Shares closed on
Friday at $4.96 and this morning trade at $5.24, down 82% from day two of trading.
Blue Apron [APRN] , the
cream of the crop of about 150 VC-funded meal-kit startups founded over the past five years,
was valued at $2 billion during its last round of funding in June 2015 when it was one of the
most hyped unicorns that would change the world. Then enthusiasm began to sag. By the time the
IPO approached, the IPO price was cut from a range of $15-$17 a share to $10 a share. Shares
closed on Friday at $0.68 and are trading this morning at $0.71, down 93% from its IPO
price.
But not all IPOs are "tech" companies – though there's nothing "tech" about a meal-kit
maker other than the least important part, the app. The Renaissance IPO ETF
[IPO] holds the shares of companies across the board that went public over the past two years.
After two years, the companies are removed from the ETF. Its top five holdings are in real
estate, insurance products, music streaming, and cable TV, so not exactly pushing the
boundaries of tech invention.
These five IPOs haven't done all that badly, compared to the wholesale destruction of Blue
Apron, though they all have dropped sharply from their recent peaks (prices as of this
morning):
Vici Properties [VICI], a casino property company, at $18.02, is down 22% from its
peak in January 2018 shortly after the IPO. Athene Holding [ATH] – a "retirement services
company that issues, reinsures and acquires retirement savings products" – at $38.36, has
dropped 29% since September, 2018. Invitation Homes [INVH], Blackstone's buy-to-rent creature
that acquired over 48,000 single-family homes out of foreclosure at the end of the housing
bust, at $19.40, is down 18% from its peak in September. Spotify [SPOT], the music streaming
service, at $107.46, has plunged 46% from its peak on July 26. It went public in April. Altice
USA [ATUS], a cable TV operator, at $15.37, is down 39% from the peak on the day after its IPO
in July 2017.
Overall, the Renaissance IPO ETF has plunged 31% from its peak in June 2018 (data via
Investing.com):
The Nasdaq itself has dropped 24% from its all-time peak at the end of August.
It is in this new reality that some of the biggest startups and some of the biggest
money-losers in the startup circus are trying to unload the shares to the public in 2019 before
the "window" closes. The enormous hype about these IPOs has already started, with bankers
funneling this hype to the Wall Street
Journal , which breathlessly reported on the big numbers to be transferred from the public
to the selling insiders and the companies. The hyped numbers are truly huge.
The biggest candidates that are that are now being hyped for an IPO in 2019 are:
Uber , with a current "valuation" of $76-billion, could go for an IPO in early 2019 that
would value it at "as much as $120 billion," the WSJ reported, based on the hype the bankers
are now spreading to maximize their bonuses. Not all shares would be sold in the IPO, so the
proceeds in this scenario could reach "as much as $25 billion."
Palantir (data mining), with a current valuation of $20 billion, could see an IPO valuation
of $41 billion, according to the WSJ's "people familiar with its plans," who also cautioned
that these plans remained in flux, and that, according to the WSJ, "investment bankers often
exaggerate projected IPO values to win business."
Lyft , with a current valuation of $15 billion, is also looking for an IPO in early 2019, at
"more than $15 billion."
Then there is a gaggle of other big startups that could also head for the IPO window in
2019, according to the WSJ's "people familiar with the matter," but apparently haven't decided
on the timing yet. They include:
The all-time high that "tech" IPOs combined raised in a single year was $44.5 billion. If
these tech IPOs come to pass in 2019, and if these valuations can be pulled off, with Uber
alone hoping to raise $25 billion, the 2000-record would be broken by a large amount.
That would make sense: The year 2000 was when the dotcom bubble began to collapse
catastrophically, and everyone tried to get their heroes out the IPO window before it would
close for years to come. The Nasdaq, where these IPOs were concentrated, would eventually crash
78% from its peak in March 2000, with catastrophic consequences for those who'd bought the
hype.
The WSJ muses about this new generation of record-setting IPOs and Wall Street bankers' hype
machine:
For average investors, it could mean they finally will be able to bet on companies like
Uber that have become part of their everyday lives but have been out of reach, even as their
estimated values ballooned.
When all IPOs are included, and not just "tech" IPOs, 2018 was a banner year, with $54
billion raised. This includes 47 tech companies that raised only about $18 billion – a
far cry from the $44.5 billion that tech IPOs raised in 2000. But 2019 is going to fix this
shortcoming, assuming that the hype works and that the public is buying.
The WSJ, citing Dealogic, pointed out that tech IPOs this year on average soared 28% on the
first day of trading. No word about what happened afterwards. But the Renaissance IPO ETF is
down 31% so far this year. Reality starts after the first few days of trading.
Tech companies that had already gone public raised an additional $21 billion in 2018 by
selling more shares to the public in follow-on offerings, the most for follow-on offerings
since 2000.
Then, the WSJ tucked this reality-infested warning into its last paragraph:
In another sign of exuberance, investors are overlooking lofty valuations and measly -- or
zero -- profits to have a shot at outsized returns. In the first three quarters of the year,
four-fifths of all U.S.-listed IPOs were of companies that lost money in the 12 prior months
. That is the highest proportion on record.
So the last three months of 2018 plus 2019 and perhaps years to come are shaping up to be,
by the looks of it, a similarly glorious period for tech stocks, IPOs, and the Nasdaq as the
period from March 2000 till late 2002.
So, the bastard waited until his last day on the job to do a little fake media
pay-per-view kiss-and-tell. He couldn't be mensch enough to give his boss a professional
courtesy of telling him to take this job and shove it, he just succumbed to the siren's call
of money and spilled the beans to the fake media first before anyone in the Administration
had a chance to tell him how dangerous and detrimental to the interests of American people
his words would become (anyone taking bets that the kiss-and-tell New York Times bestseller
memoir is in the works?). Such is the psycho-profile of an average Pentagon brass. No
vertebratae there -- just mollusks, tapeworms, snails and amoebas. Throw the money at them,
and watch them grovel. Everything is for sale: service record, decorations, rank, faux
military and political expertise, integrity, character, valor, heroism, cavalier and valiant
battlefield engagement, self-sacrifice, loyalty to the nation...their family...their
kids...their asses...everything@!. If it has a rank, it is casually sold on an open market.
The winning bidder takes all.
Yes, General, Donald Trump is a deeply flawed human being. To his credit, though. we have
been duly forwarned. He never - ever - claimed that he was a saint and cautioned us against
turning him into a Mao Zedong-like personality cu;t. We knew all along that we were electing
a profoundly imperfect person, and the reason why we elected him nonetheless is that the
honesty of his admission was so refreshing that it outweighed all other considerations and
was too brilliantly confessional to ignore. When was the last time you heard Hillary Clinton
focus on her shortcomings, ethical lapses, judgment failures and mental syncopes instead a
litany of her glorious accomplishments/?
Now, I have a question for you, General: what kind of ball-less, dickless and brainless
asswipe devoid of any moral scurples and personal values serves his "unfit-for-the-job "
(sic) and dangerous-to-the-country Supreme Commander for two consecutive years without
uttering a word of criticism and dissent and then, after being fired, unleashes a torrent of
hysterical fury and not even minimally credible accusations? In my mother tongue there is a
phrase for characters like you: worthless piece of ****. And you can quote me on it, Sir.
PresidentTrump , 24 minutes ago
good riddance kelly
veritas semper vinces , 37 minutes ago
"What difference does it make, at this point?" who is the president? To paraphrase a Soros
supported ex candidate, who is still not in jail.
As Ms. No a stutely observed a few days ago : there was a petition to investigate Soros ,
signed by more than the necessary number for the White House to respond, and this 1 year
ago.
And the Donald ignored it, braking the law this way.
Does this count as more or less evidence he is fighting the swamp, trumptards?
Together with the fact Sheldon Adelson , the zionist financed his campaign and Wilbur
Ross, Rothschild's man bailed him out of his bankruptcies.
Wilbur Ross , who is now his Commerce Secretary.
Can trumptards put 2+2 together ?
Conscious Reviver , 40 minutes ago
Kelly is just more senior management in the crime syndicate known by the acronym USG. What
about the oath he swore to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic?
If he was a true soldier and patriot, he would have arrested the criminals, hiding in broad
daylight, who did 9/11.
As it is, he's just another toady. Good riddance to bad trash.
youshallnotkill , 2 hours ago
These kind of threads always make me wonder how many of the commenters here are paid to
**** on our US military.
Hans-Zandvliet , 1 hour ago
No need to pay people for shitting on the US military. Even marine corps general Smedly
Butler (most decorated marine in US history) wrote it himself ("War is a Racket" [1935]),
saying: "[while serving as a marine] I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle-man for
Big Bussiness, for Wall St and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for
capitalism."
Nothing much has changed since then in the US army, or has it?
11b40 , 46 minutes ago
Only gotten worse since eliminating the draft and getting a mercenary army.
Baron von Bud , 2 hours ago
These military generals portray themselves as selfless victims of Trump. These are the
same clueless idiots that couldn't or wouldn't grow a spine and tell Obama or Bush they were
destroying America with senseless wars. Trump may be a loose cannon but he has great
instincts. These generals make me want to puke. Starched uniforms and a high tipped hat but
no brain for good policy underneath and behind all those little medals. Good riddance. Trump
needs to dump these guys and John Bolton.
terrific , 2 hours ago
The title to this story is a lie. Just because the NYT reported that Kelly told two
anonymous sources that Trump is not up to the role of President, doesn't mean that Kelly
actually said it. I'm actually surprised that a news site like ZH would use that title for a
story, when the story was never even sourced, much less corroborated.
Celotex , 2 hours ago
He'll go to Boeing and will be pulling down eight figures annually.
Moribundus , 2 hours ago
„Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in
the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are
not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." -- Dwight D.
Eisenhower
" Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not
clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine,
fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single
fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new
homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life
to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any
true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Is there no other way the world may live?"
GoldRulesPaperDrools , 2 hours ago
That's because this county hasn't fought a REAL war in decades, and by a REAL war I mean
one where you can honestly expect if you go and you're in combat you're got no more than an
even chance to come back. Military service has become another gubmint job where you wear a
uniform and play with expensive hardware paid for by the taxpayer while doing some neocon's
bidding overseas.
Moribundus , 2 hours ago
The best amerikan soldier was Smedley Butler.
The best amerikan war is Vietnam war.
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent
most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the
bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and
especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a
decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping
of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify
Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought
light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make
Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to
it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al
Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I
operated on three continents.
Our proposals are based on the creation of a Budget for democratization which would be
debated and voted by a sovereign European Assembly. This will at last enable Europe to equip
itself with a public institution which is both capable of dealing with crises in Europe
immediately and of producing a set of fundamental public and social goods and services in the
framework of a lasting and solidarity-based economy. In this way, the promise made as far back
as the Treaty of Rome of 'improving living and working conditions' will finally become
meaningful.
This Budget, if the European Assembly so desires, will be financed by four major European
taxes, the tangible markers of this European solidarity. These will apply to the profits of
major firms, the top incomes (over 200,000 Euros per annum), the highest wealth owners (over 1
million Euros) and the carbon emissions (with a minimum price of 30 Euros per tonne). If it is
fixed at 4% of GDP, as we propose, this budget could finance research, training and the
European universities, an ambitious investment programme to transform our model of economic
growth, the financing of the reception and integration of migrants and the support of those
involved in operating the transformation. It could also give some budgetary leeway to member
States to reduce the regressive taxation which weighs on salaries or consumption.
The issue here is not one of creating a 'Transfer payments Europe' which would endeavour to
take money from the 'virtuous' countries to give it to those who are less so. The project for a
Treaty of Democratization ( www.tdem.eu )
states this explicitly by limiting the gap between expenditure deducted and income paid by a
country to a threshold of 0.1% of its GDP. This threshold can be raised in case there is a
consensus to do so, but the real issue is elsewhere: it is primarily a question of reducing the
inequality within the different countries and of investing in the future of
all Europeans, beginning of course with the youngest amongst them, with no
single country having preference. This computation does exclude spending that benefit
equally to all countries, such as policies to curb global warming. Because it will finance
European public goods benefiting all countries, the Budget for democratization will de facto
also foster convergence between countries.
Because we must act quickly but we must also get Europe out of the present technocratic
impasse, we propose the creation of a European Assembly. This will enable these new European
taxes to be debated and voted as also the budget for democratization. This European Assembly
can be created without changing the existing European treaties.
This European Assembly would of course have to communicate with the present decision-making
institutions (in particular the Eurogroup in which the Ministers for Finance in the Euro zone
meet informally every month). But, in cases of disagreement, the Assembly would have the
final word. If not, its capacity to be a locus for a new transnational, political
space where parties, social movements and NGOs would finally be able to express
themselves, would be compromised. Equally its actual effectiveness, since the issue is one of
finally extricating Europe from the eternal inertia of inter-governmental negotiations, would
be at stake. We should bear in mind that the rule of fiscal unanimity in force in the European
Union has for years blocked the adoption of any European tax and sustains the eternal evasion
into fiscal dumping by the rich and most mobile, a practice which continues to this day despite
all the speeches. This will go on if other decision-making rules are not set up.
Looks like Guardian start turning away from neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... What price is paid when a promise is broken? Because for much of my life, and probably yours, the political class has made this pledge: that the best way to run an economy is to hack back the public realm as far as possible and let the private sector run free. That way, services operate better, businesses get the resources they need, and our national finances are healthier. ..."
"... I don't wish to write about the everyday failings of neoliberalism – that piece would be filed before you could say "east coast mainline". Instead, I want to address the most stubborn belief of all: that running a small state is the soundest financial arrangement for governments and voters alike. Because 40 years on from the Thatcher revolution, more and more evidence is coming in to the contrary. ..."
"... The other big reason for the UK's financial precarity is its privatisation programme, described by the IMF as no less than a "fiscal illusion". British governments have flogged nearly everything in the cupboard, from airports to the Royal Mail – often at giveaway prices – to friends in the City. Such privatisations, judge the fund, "increase revenues and lower deficits but also reduce the government's asset holdings". ..."
"... IMF research shows is that the Westminster classes have been asset-stripping Britain for decades – and storing up financial trouble for future generations ..."
The fund reports that Britain's finances are weaker than all other nations except Portugal,
and says privatisation is to blame
Columnists usually proffer answers, but today I want to ask a question, a big one. What price
is paid when a promise is broken? Because for much of my life, and probably yours, the
political class has made this pledge: that the best way to run an economy is to hack back the
public realm as far as possible and let the private sector run free. That way, services operate
better, businesses get the resources they need, and our national finances are healthier.
It's why your tax credits keep
dropping , and your mum has to wait half a year to see a hospital consultant –
because David Cameron slashed public spending, to stop it "crowding out" private money. It's
why water bills are so high and train services can never be counted on – because both
industries have been privatised.
From the debacle of universal credit to the forced conversion of state schools into
corporate-run academies, the ideology of the small state – defined by no less a body than
the International Monetary Fund as neoliberalism – is all pervasive. It decides how much
money you have left at the end of the week and what kind of future your children will enjoy,
and it explains why your elderly relatives can't get a decent carer.
I don't wish to write about the everyday failings of neoliberalism – that piece would
be filed before you could say "east coast mainline". Instead, I want to address the most
stubborn belief of all: that running a small state is the soundest financial arrangement for
governments and voters alike. Because 40 years on from the Thatcher revolution, more and more
evidence is coming in to the contrary.
Let's start with the IMF itself. Last week it published
a report that barely got a mention from the BBC or in Westminster, yet helps reframe the
entire debate over austerity. The fund totted up both the public debt and the publicly owned
assets of 31 countries, from the US to Australia, Finland to France, and found that
the UK had among the weakest public finances of the lot. With less than £3 trillion
of assets against £5tn in pensions and other liabilities, the UK is more than £2tn
in the red . Of all the other countries examined by researchers, including the Gambia and
Kenya, only Portugal's finances look worse over the long run. So much for fixing the
roof.
'British governments have flogged nearly everything in the cupboard from airports to
the Royal Mail – often at giveaway prices – to friends in the City.' Photograph:
Amer Ghazzal/Rex/Shutterstock
Almost as startling are the IMF's reasons for why Britain is in such a state: one way or
another they all come back to neoliberalism. Thatcher loosed finance from its shackles and used
our North Sea oil money to pay for swingeing tax cuts. The result is an overfinancialised
economy and a government that is £1tn worse off since the banking crash. Norway has
similar
North Sea wealth and a far smaller population, but also a sovereign wealth fund. Its net
worth has soared over the past decade.
The other big reason for the UK's financial precarity is its privatisation programme,
described by the IMF as no less than a "fiscal illusion". British governments have flogged
nearly everything in the cupboard, from airports to the Royal Mail – often at giveaway
prices – to friends in the City. Such privatisations, judge the fund, "increase revenues
and lower deficits but also reduce the government's asset holdings".
Throughout the austerity decade, ministers and economists have pushed for spending cuts by
pointing to the size of the government's annual overdraft, or budget deficit. Yet there are two
sides to a balance sheet, as all accountants know and this IMF work recognises. The same goes
for our public realm: if Labour's John McDonnell gets into No 11 and renationalises the
railways, that would cost tens of billions – but it would also leave the country with
assets worth tens of billions that provided a regular income.
Instead, what this IMF research shows is that the Westminster classes have been
asset-stripping Britain for decades – and storing up financial trouble for future
generations.
Privatisation and austerity have not only weakened the country's financial position –
they have also handed unearned wealth to a select few. Just look at
a new report from the University of Greenwich finding that water companies could have
funded all their day-to-day running and their long-term investments out of the bills paid by
customers. Instead of which, managers have lumbered the firms with £51bn of debt to pay
for shareholders' dividends. Those borrowed billions, and the millions in interest, will be
paid by you and me in our water bills. We might as well stuff the cash directly into the
pockets of shareholders.
Instead of competitively run utilities, record investment by the private sector and sounder
public finances, we have natural monopolies handed over to the wealthy, banks that can dump
their liabilities on the public when things get tough, and an outsourcing industry that feasts
upon the carcass of the public sector. As if all this weren't enough, neoliberal voices
complain that we need to cut taxes and red tape, and further starve our public services.
This is a genuine scandal, but it requires us to recognise what neoliberalism promised and
what it has failed to deliver. Some of the loudest critics of the ideology have completely
misidentified it. Academics will daub the term "neoliberal" on any passing phenomenon. Fitbits
are apparently neoliberal, as is Ben & Jerry's ice-cream and Kanye West. Pundits will say
that neoliberalism is about markets and choice – tell that to any commuter wedged on a
Southern rail train. And centrist politicians claim that the great failing of neoliberalism is
its carelessness about identity and place, which is akin to complaining that the boy on a moped
who snatched your smartphone is going too fast.
Let us get it straight. Neoliberalism has ripped you off and robbed you blind. The evidence
of that is mounting up – in your bills, in your services and in the finances of your
country.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist and senior economics commentator
"... This post first appeared on November 29, 2011 ..."
"... By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience. ..."
"... Simulposted at The Distributist Review ..."
"... Recently journalist Philip Pilkington has interviewed authors with unconventional perspectives on economic issues, including Satyajit Das and David Graeber. I thought it would be fun to interview someone too – but the man I interviewed uses a pseudonym. This is a six-part series. ..."
"... Now that Code Name Cain has indicated the promise of a libertarian society, in the next part of the interview he will give a step-by-step plan for how we can make this society a reality. ..."
Yves here. In some summers past, we've rerun NC classics during slow news periods. We
haven't had slow news period in a while, and one side effect is that we haven't yet reprised
this series on libertarianism, which will run this week and into next week. Enjoy!
By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is
currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary
school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular
audience.
Recently journalist Philip Pilkington has interviewed authors with unconventional
perspectives on economic issues, including Satyajit Das and David Graeber. I thought it would
be fun to interview someone too – but the man I interviewed uses a pseudonym. This is a
six-part series.
ANDREW : Some people say that you represent a fringe view, and so interviewing you is a
waste of time.
CODE NAME CAIN : If people obsessed with inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom
underestimate libertarians, so much the better.
ANDREW : Can you give any evidence that your ideas are taken seriously?
CNC : Well, people used to think that the financial crisis was caused by antisocial behavior
in the finance sector. In September 2007, Tom DiLorenzo pointed out on the Lew Rockwell
website that the crisis was actually the result of the government forcing banks to make
risky loans to low-income borrowers. Although initially ignored, DiLorenzo's thesis is now
widely accepted among careful observers.
ANDREW : Is that your only convincing example?
CNC : Hardly. Did you notice how over the last year or so, everyone started to talk about
how the threat of new taxes and regulations was making producers uncertain? And when producers
are uncertain, the economy fails to improve? Well, the fact that worries about taxes and
regulations cause uncertainty and so damage the economy is a key insight of Austrian economics
that we have proclaimed for decades.
ANDREW : Wait, I thought people said that Obama was causing the uncertainty.
CNC : Obama is causing the uncertainty now. Before Obama, George W. Bush was causing the
uncertainty. In general, democratic government causes uncertainty. Hans-Hermann Hoppe made all
of this clear in his 2001 book "Democracy: The God That Failed."
ANDREW : Are there things you have learned from the work of Dr. Hoppe that you had not found
in the writings of other libertarians?
CNC : "Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard were great men, but they lived in a time when
supporters of freedom needed to be careful about what they said. As a result, libertarians
often fail to describe their ideal future society in clear detail. But, as the Cato
Institute's Patri Friedman has recognized , Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an exception to this
reticence. He is willing to speak the truth, no matter how much it makes "politically correct"
people squirm, and he is so logical and eloquent that I routinely quote from his classic book
on the failure of democracy. Please color such quotes in red – I would never try to pass
off my own ideas as if they were on his level.
ANDREW : Tell us now about the libertarian society you are working to make possible.
CNC : It will be a free society – no government, no coercion. People will have their
rights respected. Everyone will be free to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't
interfere with anyone else's rights why are you looking at me like that?
ANDREW : I was kind of hoping for less speeches and more details.
CNC : What do you mean?
ANDREW : In our society, the government is the only organization allowed to kill people. In
the libertarian society, which organizations will kill people?
CNC : There will be no government that is allowed to use force against people and kill
them.
ANDREW : Some people will be very rich, right?
CNC : Of course. Some people will always be stronger and more brilliant than others.
ANDREW : Will the wealthy people still be worried about people stealing from them?
CNC : Obviously – all property is necessarily valuable; hence, every property owner
becomes a possible target of other men's aggressive desires . [255]
ANDREW : So who will protect property owners?
CNC : Insurance companies in a competitive marketplace.
ANDREW : So in your society, insurance companies will be sort of like governments. Can we
call them security GLOs (Government-Like Organizations)?
CNC : Sure, as long as we stress that the insurance companies, as security GLOs, will be
very different from the statist, coercive governments we have today.
ANDREW : Will security GLOs be different from governments because they will be small family
firms?
CNC : No. One reason that insurance companies will be well-suited for the role of security
GLOs is that they are "big" and in command of the resources necessary to accomplish the task of
dealing with the dangers of the real world. Indeed, insurers operate on a national or even
international scale, and they own substantial property holdings dispersed over wide territories
[281]
ANDREW : Will security GLOs be different from governments because they don't use physical
force against criminals?
CNC : You gotta be kidding, right? in cooperation with one another, insurers [will] want to
expel known criminals not just from their immediate neighborhoods, but from civilization
altogether, into the wilderness or open frontier of the Amazon jungle, the Sahara, or the polar
regions. [262]
ANDREW : So the security GLOs will be allowed to kill people, if they are known
criminals?
CNC : The security GLOs will not kill people, they will just expel them to the Sahara or
polar regions. What happens then is up to the criminals.
ANDREW : Can we say that the security GLOs will effectively kill them?
CNC : I really don't like that choice of wording. You make it sound like the security GLOs
will be committing aggression against the criminals. That's backwards – the criminal
commits aggression, and security GLOs will just defend people. They won't violate anyone's
rights.
ANDREW : Maybe you would prefer that we say: the security GLOs will effectively kill people
in a rights-respecting manner.
CNC: Yeah, that's better.
ANDREW : Will everybody be able to get insurance from the security GLOs?
CNC : Of course – in a market economy, shortages are impossible. Anyone can get
anything by paying the market price.
ANDREW : What if the market price of insurance for some people is more money than they can
pay?
CNC : Don't worry, competition among insurers for paying clients will bring about a tendency
toward a continuous fall in the price of protection [281-282] .
ANDREW : In the future everyone will pay less for security than they currently pay in
taxes?
CNC: Well, certain government-induced distortions would be eliminated. Government taxes more
in low crime and high property value areas than in high crime and low property value areas.
[259] Security GLOs would do the exact opposite.
ANDREW : So in rough neighborhoods, most people might not be able to afford security
insurance.
CNC : Possibly.
ANDREW : Suppose there are people who aren't covered by any security GLO – would it
effectively be legal to kill them?
CNC : They would definitely be rendered economically isolated, weak, and vulnerable
outcast[s] [287] .
ANDREW : Then people are effectively forced to join a security GLO?
CNC : Maybe you haven't realized it yet, but this will be a free society. The relationship
between the insurer and the insured is consensual. Both are free to cooperate and not to
cooperate. [281] No one will force people to buy protection, and no one will force insurers to
offer protection at a price they think is too low.
ANDREW : What are some other ways that you think this would be a good system?
CNC : Well, every property can be shaped and transformed by its owner so as to increase its
safety and reduce the likelihood of aggression. I may acquire a gun or safe-deposit box, for
instance, or I may be able to shoot down an attacking plane from my backyard or own a laser gun
that can kill an aggressor thousands of miles away. [256] In a free society, security GLOs
would encourage the ownership of weapons among their insured by means of selective price cuts
[264] because the better the private protection of their clients, the lower the insurer's
protection and indemnification costs will be [285].
ANDREW : Let's see if I understand. In poor neighborhoods, most people will not be insured,
and it will be legal to kill them. The people that are insured will be encouraged by the
security GLO to carry weapons that are as technologically advanced as possible. It sounds to me
like this would be bad for the poor neighborhoods.
CNC : On the contrary – in "bad" neighborhoods the interests of the insurer and
insured would coincide. Insurers would not want to suppress the expulsionist inclinations among
the insured toward known criminals. They would rationalize such tendencies by offering
selective price cuts (contingent on specific clean-up operations). [262]
ANDREW : Suppose that security GLOs, or private groups that they sponsor, are looking for
criminals. When the enforcers catch the criminals, will they always transport them to an
uninhabited area, or will they sometimes put them in prison?
CNC : Prisons like the ones we have? With basketball courts and televisions for the
criminals? How would that be fair?
ANDREW : Maybe other kinds of prisons?
CNC : Look, it's not about putting people in prisons. It's about people getting what they
deserve. And in the libertarian society of the future, people will get what they deserve.
Security GLOs can be counted upon to apprehend the offender, and bring him to justice, because
in so doing the insurer can reduce his costs and force the criminal to pay for the damages and
cost of indemnification. [282]
ANDREW : So they'll have to do forced labor for the security GLO?
CNC : How can you possibly think this could be worse than our current system? Where instead
of compensating the victims of crimes it did not prevent, the government forces victims to pay
again as taxpayers for the cost of the apprehension, imprisonment, rehabilitation and/or
entertainment of their aggressors [259] ?
ANDREW : Still, as a libertarian, aren't you against coercion?
CNC : Coercion? Obviously you don't understand what you're talking about. Coercion is only
when someone interferes with rights someone else actually holds. Criminals can forfeit their
rights through their own choices. When that happens, requiring them to make restitution for
their actions doesn't violate their rights.
ANDREW : Will there be any other people in the free society who will be slaves?
CNC : Slaves?! Don't you know that the first condition of a libertarian society is that
everyone owns themselves?
ANDREW : Sorry, I meant to say: effectively slaves in a rights-respecting manner.
CNC: Oh. Hmmm. Let me think about that.
ANDREW: For example, suppose someone signs a business contract and then, later, can't
fulfill the terms of the contract. What would happen?
CNC : In a libertarian society, sanctity of contract is absolutely fundamental.
ANDREW : Let me be a little more specific. Suppose some guy can't pay his debts. Would he be
allowed to declare bankruptcy and move on, or would he become, in a rights-respecting manner,
the effective slave of whoever had loaned him the money?
CNC : That would depend upon the debt contract that the lender and borrower had together
voluntarily signed. If they had chosen to include a bankruptcy proviso, then the borrower could
declare bankruptcy.
ANDREW : Suppose that in the libertarian society, lenders would rather encourage borrowers
to focus on repayment – and so they decide not to give borrowers an easy way out. Suppose
that no lenders offer loans with a bankruptcy proviso. Would that be okay?
CNC : Economic theory tells us that loans without a bankruptcy proviso will be made at lower
interest rates than loans allowing borrowers to go bankrupt. So if no loans contain a
bankruptcy proviso, it will just mean that borrowers prefer low-interest no-bankruptcy
loans.
ANDREW : I see some problems here.
CNC : Look, it sounds from your question like you think that the lenders should be coerced
into allowing borrowers to be irresponsible and go bankrupt! That would effectively make them
loan their hard-earned money in ways that they don't want. How is that any different than
forcing them to work at hard labor?
ANDREW : Obviously it would be better to have defaulting borrowers be effectively enslaved
in a way that fully respects their natural rights.
CNC : Obviously. Now that we've cleared that up, can you turn off the tape recorder? I want
to get started on my steak.
Now that Code Name Cain has indicated the promise of a libertarian society, in the next
part of the interview he will give a step-by-step plan for how we can make this society a
reality.
"... What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic. ..."
"... The movement toward the neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market is made possible by the politics of financial deregulation. And it is achieved through the transformative and, it must be said, destructive action of all of the political measures (of which the most recent is the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), designed to protect foreign corporations and their investments from national states) that aim to call into question any and all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure market: the nation, whose space to manoeuvre continually decreases; work groups, for example through the individualisation of salaries and of careers as a function of individual competences, with the consequent atomisation of workers; collectives for the defence of the rights of workers, unions, associations, cooperatives; even the family, which loses part of its control over consumption through the constitution of markets by age groups. ..."
"... The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and economic power of those whose interests it expresses: stockholders, financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic politicians who have been converted to the reassuring layoffs of laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies advocating their own extinction because, unlike the managers of firms, they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences. Neoliberalism tends on the whole to favour severing the economy from social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory, that is a sort of logical machine that presents itself as a chain of constraints regulating economic agents. ..."
"... This structural violence also weighs on what is called the labour contract (wisely rationalised and rendered unreal by the "theory of contracts"). Organisational discourse has never talked as much of trust, co-operation, loyalty, and organisational culture as in an era when adherence to the organisation is obtained at each moment by eliminating all temporal guarantees of employment (three-quarters of hires are for fixed duration, the proportion of temporary employees keeps rising, employment "at will" and the right to fire an individual tend to be freed from any restriction). ..."
"... How could we not make a special place among these collectives, associations, unions, and parties for the state: the nation-state, or better yet the supranational state - a European state on the way toward a world state - capable of effectively controlling and taxing the profits earned in the financial markets and, above of all, of counteracting the destructive impact that the latter have on the labour market. This could be done with the aid of labour unions by organising the elaboration and defence of the public interest . Like it or not, the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost of a few mathematical errors, from the vision of accountants (in an earlier period one would have said of "shopkeepers") that the new belief system presents as the supreme form of human accomplishment. ..."
What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.
As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its
predictable consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions that it inflicts, either automatically or -- more
unusually -- through the intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing public expenditures and making work
more flexible. Is the dominant discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order were no more than the implementation of
a utopia - the utopia of neoliberalism - thus converted into a political problem ? One that, with the aid of the economic
theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as the scientific description of reality?
This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the
name of a narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality, it brackets the economic and social conditions of
rational orientations and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their application.
To give the measure of this omission, it is enough to think just of the educational system. Education is never taken account of
as such at a time when it plays a determining role in the production of goods and services as in the production of the producers
themselves. From this sort of original sin, inscribed in the Walrasian myth (
1 ) of "pure theory", flow all of the deficiencies and
faults of the discipline of economics and the fatal obstinacy with which it attaches itself to the arbitrary opposition which it
induces, through its mere existence, between a properly economic logic, based on competition and efficiency, and social logic, which
is subject to the rule of fairness.
That said, this "theory" that is desocialised and dehistoricised at its roots has, today more than ever, the means of making
itself true and empirically verifiable. In effect, neoliberal discourse is not just one discourse among many. Rather, it is a
"strong discourse" - the way psychiatric discourse is in an asylum, in Erving Goffman's analysis (
2 ) . It is so strong and so hard to combat only because
it has on its side all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a world that it contributes to making what it is. It does
this most notably by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships. It thus adds its own symbolic force
to these relations of forces. In the name of this scientific programme, converted into a plan of political action, an immense
political project is underway, although its status as such is denied because it appears to be purely negative. This project aims
to create the conditions under which the "theory" can be realised and can function: a programme of the methodical destruction
of collectives .
The movement toward the neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market is made possible by the politics of financial deregulation.
And it is achieved through the transformative and, it must be said, destructive action of all of the political measures (of
which the most recent is the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), designed to protect foreign corporations and their investments
from national states) that aim to call into question any and all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to
the logic of the pure market: the nation, whose space to manoeuvre continually decreases; work groups, for example through the individualisation
of salaries and of careers as a function of individual competences, with the consequent atomisation of workers; collectives for the
defence of the rights of workers, unions, associations, cooperatives; even the family, which loses part of its control over consumption
through the constitution of markets by age groups.
The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and economic power of those whose interests it expresses:
stockholders, financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic politicians who have been converted to the reassuring
layoffs of laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies advocating their own extinction because, unlike
the managers of firms, they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences. Neoliberalism tends on the whole to favour
severing the economy from social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic system conforming to its description
in pure theory, that is a sort of logical machine that presents itself as a chain of constraints regulating economic agents.
The globalisation of financial markets, when joined with the progress of information technology, ensures an unprecedented mobility
of capital. It gives investors concerned with the short-term profitability of their investments the possibility of permanently comparing
the profitability of the largest corporations and, in consequence, penalising these firms' relative setbacks. Subjected to this permanent
threat, the corporations themselves have to adjust more and more rapidly to the exigencies of the markets, under penalty of "losing
the market's confidence", as they say, as well as the support of their stockholders. The latter, anxious to obtain short-term profits,
are more and more able to impose their will on managers, using financial directorates to establish the rules under which managers
operate and to shape their policies regarding hiring, employment, and wages.
Thus the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with employees being hiring on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary basis
and repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm itself, competition among autonomous divisions as well as among teams
forced to perform multiple functions. Finally, this competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualisation
of the wage relationship: establishment of individual performance objectives, individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation,
individual salary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and of individual merit; individualised career paths;
strategies of "delegating responsibility" tending to ensure the self-exploitation of staff who, simple wage labourers in relations
of strong hierarchical dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales, their products, their branch, their store,
etc. as though they were independent contractors. This pressure toward "self-control" extends workers' "involvement" according to
the techniques of "participative management" considerably beyond management level. All of these are techniques of rational domination
that impose over-involvement in work (and not only among management) and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they
converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities (
3 ) .
In this way, a Darwinian world emerges - it is the struggle of all against all at all levels of the hierarchy, which finds support
through everyone clinging to their job and organisation under conditions of insecurity, suffering, and stress. Without a doubt, the
practical establishment of this world of struggle would not succeed so completely without the complicity of all of the precarious
arrangements that produce insecurity and of the existence of a reserve army of employees rendered docile by these social processes
that make their situations precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This reserve army exists at all levels
of the hierarchy, even at the higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this entire economic order placed
under the sign of freedom is in effect the structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and the menace
of layoff that it implies. The condition of the "harmonious" functioning of the individualist micro-economic model is a mass phenomenon,
the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed.
This structural violence also weighs on what is called the labour contract (wisely rationalised and rendered unreal by the
"theory of contracts"). Organisational discourse has never talked as much of trust, co-operation, loyalty, and organisational culture
as in an era when adherence to the organisation is obtained at each moment by eliminating all temporal guarantees of employment (three-quarters
of hires are for fixed duration, the proportion of temporary employees keeps rising, employment "at will" and the right to fire an
individual tend to be freed from any restriction).
Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes
itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia
evokes powerful belief - the free trade faith - not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers
of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification
for existing from it. For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of
administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation
of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks. And they preach the
subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any
regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation
of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses.
Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests of the true believers and may have a variety of individual
psychic states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they
have enough specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute decisively to the production and reproduction of belief
in the neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and social world by their existence and above all by their
intellectual formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse
the things of logic with the logic of things.
These economists trust models that they almost never have occasion to submit to the test of experimental verification and are
led to look down upon the results of the other historical sciences, in which they do not recognise the purity and crystalline transparency
of their mathematical games, whose true necessity and profound complexity they are often incapable of understanding. They participate
and collaborate in a formidable economic and social change. Even if some of its consequences horrify them (they can join the socialist
party and give learned counsel to its representatives in the power structure), it cannot displease them because, at the risk of a
few failures, imputable to what they sometimes call "speculative bubbles", it tends to give reality to the ultra-logical utopia (ultra-logical
like certain forms of insanity) to which they consecrate their lives.
And yet the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the implementation of the great neoliberal utopia: not only
the poverty of an increasingly large segment of the most economically advanced societies, the extraordinary growth in income differences,
the progressive disappearance of autonomous universes of cultural production, such as film, publishing, etc. through the intrusive
imposition of commercial values, but also and above all two major trends. First is the destruction of all the collective institutions
capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine, primarily those of the state, repository of all of the universal values
associated with the idea of the public realm . Second is the imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and
the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher
mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behaviour.
Can it be expected that the extraordinary mass of suffering produced by this sort of political-economic regime will one day serve
as the starting point of a movement capable of stopping the race to the abyss? Indeed, we are faced here with an extraordinary paradox.
The obstacles encountered on the way to realising the new order of the lone, but free individual are held today to be imputable to
rigidities and vestiges. All direct and conscious intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is discredited
in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a site
where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing
volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of those very institutions and representatives of the old order
that is in the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the categories of social workers, as well as all the forms
of social solidarity, familial or otherwise.
The transition to "liberalism" takes place in an imperceptible manner, like continental drift, thus hiding its effects from view.
Its most terrible consequences are those of the long term. These effects themselves are concealed, paradoxically, by the resistance
to which this transition is currently giving rise among those who defend the old order by drawing on the resources it contained,
on old solidarities, on reserves of social capital that protect an entire portion of the present social order from falling into anomie.
This social capital is fated to wither away - although not in the short run - if it is not renewed and reproduced.
But these same forces of "conservation", which it is too easy to treat as conservative, are also, from another point of view,
forces of resistance to the establishment of the new order and can become subversive forces. If there is still cause for some
hope, it is that forces still exist, both in state institutions and in the orientations of social actors (notably individuals and
groups most attached to these institutions, those with a tradition of civil and public service) that, under the appearance of simply
defending an order that has disappeared and its corresponding "privileges" (which is what they will immediately be accused of), will
be able to resist the challenge only by working to invent and construct a new social order. One that will not have as its only law
the pursuit of egoistic interests and the individual passion for profit and that will make room for collectives oriented toward the
rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified .
How could we not make a special place among these collectives, associations, unions, and parties for the state: the nation-state,
or better yet the supranational state - a European state on the way toward a world state - capable of effectively controlling and
taxing the profits earned in the financial markets and, above of all, of counteracting the destructive impact that the latter have
on the labour market. This could be done with the aid of labour unions by organising the elaboration and defence of the public
interest . Like it or not, the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost of a few mathematical errors, from the vision
of accountants (in an earlier period one would have said of "shopkeepers") that the new belief system presents as the supreme form
of human accomplishment.
Pierre Bourdieu. Professor at the Collčge de France Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro
( 1 ) Auguste Walras (1800-66), French economist,
author of De la nature de la richesse et de l'origine de la valeur ("On the Nature of Wealth and on the Origin of Value")(1848).
He was one of the first to attempt to apply mathematics to economic inquiry.
( 2 ) Erving Goffman. 1961. Asylums: Essays on
the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates . New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
( 3 ) See the two journal issues devoted to "Nouvelles
formes de domination dans le travail" ("New forms of domination in work"), Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales , nos.
114, September 1996, and 115, December 1996, especially the introduction by Gabrielle Balazs and Michel Pialoux, "Crise du travail
et crise du politique" & Work crisis and political crisis, no. 114: p.3-4.
You can find original interview at using the lisnk above, or if it disappeared, in Humor
section of this site
Notable quotes:
"... I will say that, just as Marxism provides an essential way of examining capitalism, libertarianism provides a filter for examining and criticizing stateist impulses. But a society organized around libertarian principles, just silly. ..."
"... The one thing libertarians want desperately to ignore is that imposing their vision of an utopian society is that while no one is "coerced" and will have equal rights, the inequalities that exist today will be cemented into society. ..."
What puzzles me about the Libertarian Dream is their ability to ignore the Dark Ages in
Western Europe.
It fulfills all their requirements, and by what accounts survive, was remarkably
unsuccessful. Life was poor, nasty, brutish and short.
I've has the discussion of rule of law with libertarians, and it went like this:
Lb: We could have a farming society without rule of law.
Me: How are disputes resolved?
Lb: We all get together and resolve the dispute.
Me: How is the dispute resolution enforced?
Lb: Everybody agrees to the resolution.
Me: What happens if some do not agree? What happens if someone cheats?
Lb: ..
Me: We've used this mechanism before, Hatfields vs McCoy' in the US, and Campbells Vs
McDonalds in Scotland.
Lb: ..
Those who don't know their History, are condemned to repeat it.
Winston Churchill in his "History of the English Speaking Peoples" refers to the desire
of the People in England to have "The King's Peace," otherwise known as "The Rule of Law"
with all it's apparatus, Police, Courts, etc.
The Libertarians appear to want "Rule by the Rich and Powerful" and do not understand
that that includes few, if any, of the current libertarians, except perhaps for the Koch
Brothers.
In the 90's when encountering a want-to-be business tycoon spouting Libertarian
nonsense, I would encourage them to seek their fortune in Somalia, where no government
existed.
I will say that, just as Marxism provides an essential way of examining capitalism,
libertarianism provides a filter for examining and criticizing stateist impulses. But a
society organized around libertarian principles, just silly.
Tom DiLorenzo pointed out on the Lew Rockwell website that the crisis was actually the
result of the government forcing banks to make risky loans to low-income borrowers.
Oh the poor banks, forced to loan money for houses aka: The Brer Rabbit Loan Origination
philosophy.
"Forced "the banks were not. They juiced the bankruptcy laws, and bundle up the loans
and sold then to a willing set of buyers, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, "Government
Corporations", who were re-nationalized when they fell into trouble.
The Bank's happily took the loan origination fees, and survived when they were then
"forced" to accept Government bail outs.
Why some senior bank executives even took a cut in Bonuses – the misery of it all!
/s
That was the first thing that leaped out at me too.
Are you kidding? the banks were "forced" by the government where to start with that
one?
The only thing that fits was said here not to long ago.
" arguing with an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon. They just knock over the
pieces, shit on the board, and strut around like they won anyway."
The one thing libertarians want desperately to ignore is that imposing their vision of
an utopian society is that while no one is "coerced" and will have equal rights, the
inequalities that exist today will be cemented into society. Until someone can explain to
me what my recourse is when my right to breathe clean air and drink clean water or to speak
my mind freely is destroyed by a polluter or someone who doesn't like what I have to say, I
will view libertarianism as the worst of all possible worlds.
when i was still on faceborg, years ago, I would often be confronted by wandering
libertarians.
one way to send them into conniptions was to say, "fine. let's run your experiment of
lawlessness and "freedom" but first, in order to adhere to good experimental methodology,
shouldn't we first redistribute the wealth?"
a race hardly proves anything if it's between a fighter jet and a rickshaw.
the resulting frothing fits were entertaining. They believe that they are paragons of
logical thinking as opposed to us silly lefties.
and , like the neoreactionaries that threaten to take their place in corporate philosophy,
they seem to believe that they will naturally be the Lords of the Manor.
Libertarians hate to hear about Rawls' Veil of Ignorance.
Cain's libertarian views have the depth and breadth of a bunch of mutually contradictory
bumper stickers. The views lack a grasp of system interactions and impacts, and display a
narrow rigid simplicity that neglects scads of important social, economic and environmental
factors. The views are so inept it makes me wonder, was this interview satire?
The interview is based on the works of Hans-Hermann Hoppe; the parts in red either links
or when they have numbers, direct quotes with page references.
In my experience (from Usenet days, mostly) libertarians vary quite a bit in their
views. Mr. Hoppe's seem to be of the anarcho-capitalist flavor, similar to David
Friedman's, but many libertarians would disagree with them and some would say they are
crazy. Libertarianism seems to be a tendency, an attitude, a sensibility, rather than an
explicit set of principles cast in the form of propositions and rules. It is more aesthetic
than logical, in spite of the way they regard themselves; see Thus Spake
Zarathustra, on 'the coldest of all cold monsters' for a taste.
In regard to libertarianism on the ground: as with other marginal ideologies, there have
been some experiments; for example, there was a project of getting libertarians to move to
some county in New Hampshire where their numbers would enable them to have some influence
on the social order and its government. None that I know about have been very
successful.
> The views are so inept it makes me wonder, was this interview satire?
The interview is satire, but as you can imagine, libertarianism is extremely hard to
satirize; the author faced technical challenges in making the self-ownage even more obvious
than it already is.
More perhaps a caper, frolic, or prank -- of which are extended in time with no single
punchline (except for the running gag of "in a rights-respecting manner"). It's
satirical.
I have to admit that nowadays when someone says they are a libertarian, my 1st
assumption is that they are an idiot, who doesn't realize they are just a tool for the
republican/neoliberal overlords/industrialists who just want to go back to pre-regulatory
and pre-taxation years as were 120 years ago.Back when snake oil salesmen were free to
peddle their wares, any how they saw fit.
Thirty years ago, being a libertarian at least had some logic behind it. they were anti-
drug war and anti- police state and things that actually make sense. They realized there
had to be SOME laws, and Some civic responsibility.
anyone who has crazy ideas like this today are actual and factual "conspiracy theorists".
Talk about crazy. There isn't any substance here to refute . this is all total BS.
Again, we find the "information age" taken up by peoples opinions of "fact" that are pure
propaganda.
I've had close contact with libertarians. One is a medical doctor. A primary goal is to
eliminate democracy entirely. The people would have no input in determining the conditions
under which they live. A market unpreturbed by taxes and regulations would yield the most
optimum rusults which benefit the society. People who are lazy and who lack ambition, which
is proven by their low economic status, would be isolated and cast aside into favelas
because they are undeserving of anything better. The greatest threat is not global warming,
or the threat of nuclear war but tyranny. He and his son are armed and expect to be able to
defeat the government when the time comes. Based on a discussion where I used the term
social justice, the good doctored recoiled and said social justice is communism. He was
also against helping ( I suppose via the givernment) victims of natural catastrophies such
as floods, hurricanes, fires, earth quakes etc. When asked what kind of society would
result from these beliefs, they don't have a clue except to say that when one persues a
just and moral cause the outcome is of no consequence. When asked about global warming they
emphasized their right to have all the plastic straws they want. A tyrannical government
imposing rules is the greatest threat.
All very logical. Yes? Another doctor, my primary care physician welcomes global warming
because he thinks we can deal with it very easily and feels that it is most fortunate that
we don't have global cooling.
Another retired doctor I talk to expressed the view that all Muslim mosques in the US
should be blown up and all Muslims should leave the country or be killed.
hell no!
But they have a different "schtik" .. like cinton/obama doing the same thing but they use
different words . appealing to different people.
for clarity, i suppose I should have used some better punctuation.
"republican/neoliberal" meaning "the deregulation crowd"
""overlords/industrialist" meaning the powers that be who make money in manufacturing and
other related industries who have liabilities in relation to their waste/pollution
disposal, working conditions,safety standards/practices/costs,etc . who are the funders of
this type of propaganda.
I have no illusions that the deregulation gang didn't gain ascension to our gov't as of
late; with carter, and has been in EVERY administration since.
The absence of a thriving libertarian polity across all human history and geography
implies a fundamental incompatibility with human nature.
My guess is that any human group which tries it is simply destroyed and/or absorbed by
neighbouring human groups which employ more effective arrangements (whatever defects those
particular arrangements may have).
Libertarians aren't much for empiricism, I suppose .
Most of the last 10k years are feudal and libertarianism is just feudalism. Even the
Roman states were mostly run on a private law basis – aka libertarianism. Mass
slavery, citizenship limited to an elite who personally acted as enforcers, courts and
legislators.
Libertarianism is the perennial philosophy, horribly compatible with human nature.
It's interesting that this post is generating separate comment threads 7 years apart. I
started reading the 2011 comments thinking they were current and was immediately struck by
the thoroughness and passion of the debate, occurring around the time of the Obamacare
rollout and closer to the 2008 crash. Possibly more people had a stake in libertarianism
back then and found this interview threatening? In any event, one thing common to both
threads is the tendency not to recognize the interview as satire. Compliments to Mr.
Dittmer for his enduring dry wit (even though the internet makes irony hard to
recognize).
so what happens when the GLOs from different customers are pulled into a battle between
them? and how does this work when some one who hired them to protect them dies from a
business ?
At the inception of this entire RussiaGate spectacle I suggested that it was a political
distraction to take the attention away from the rejection by the people of neoliberalism which
has been embraced by the establishments of both political parties.
And that the result of the investigation would be indictments for perjury in the covering up
of illicit business deals and money laundering. But that 'collusion to sway the election' was
without substance, if not a joke.
Everything that has been revealed to date tends to support that.
One thing that Aaron overlooks is the evidence compiled by William Binney and associates
that strongly suggests the DNC hack was no hack at all, but a leak by an insider who was
appalled by the lies and double dealing at the DNC.
In general, RussiaGate is a farcical distraction from other issues as they say in the video.
And this highlights the utterly Machiavellian streak in the corporate Democrats and the Liberal
establishment under the Clintons and their ilk who care more about money and power than the
basic principles that historically sustained their party. I have lost all respect for them.
But unfortunately this does open the door for those who use this to approve of the
Republican establishment, which is 'at least honest' about being substantially corrupt servants
to Big Money who care nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or the public. The best of
them are leaving or have already left, and their party is ruined beyond repair.
This all underscores the paucity of the Red v. Blue, monopoly of two parties, 'lesser of two
evils' model of political thought which has come to dominate the discussion in the US.
We are heavily propagandized by the owners of the corporate media and influencers of the
narrative, and a professional class that has sold its soul for economic advantage and access to
money and power.
"... an old-school Christian democracy, rooted in European traditions ..."
"... Beggar-thy-neighbor migration policies, such as building border fences, will not only further fragment the union; they also seriously damage European economies and subvert global human rights standards. ..."
"... at least 300,000 refugees each year ..."
"... surge funding, ..."
"... raising a substantial amount of debt backed by the EU's relatively small budget. ..."
"... To finance it, new European taxes will have to be levied sooner or later, ..."
It is no secret that neoliberalism relentlessly pursues a globalized, borderless world where labor, products, and services obey
the hidden hand of the free market. What is less often mentioned, however, is that this system is far more concerned with
promoting the well-being of corporations and cowboy capitalists than assisting the average person on the street. Indeed, many of
the world's most powerful companies today have
mutated
into
"
stateless superpowers
," while consumers are forced to endure crippling austerity
measures amid
plummeting
standards
of living. The year 2018 could be seen as the tipping point when the grass-roots movement against these dire conditions took off.
Since 2015, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants into Germany and the EU,
a groundswell of animosity has been steadily building against the European Union, perhaps best exemplified by the Brexit
movement. Quite simply, many people are growing weary of the globalist
argument
that
Europe needs migrants and austerity measures to keep the wheels of the economy spinning. At the very least, luring migrants with
cash
incentives
to move to Germany and
elsewhere
in
the EU appears incredibly shortsighted.
Indeed, if the globalist George Soros wants to lend his
Midas
touch
to ameliorating the migrant's plight, why does he think that relocating them to European countries is the solution? As
is becoming increasingly apparent in places like
Sweden
and
France, efforts to assimilate people from vastly different cultures, religions and backgrounds is an extremely tricky venture,
the success of which is far from guaranteed.
One worrying consequence of Europe's season of open borders has been the rise of far-right political movements. In fact, some of
the harshest criticism of the 'Merkel plan' originated in
Hungary
,
where its gutsy president, Viktor Orban, hopes to build "
an old-school Christian democracy,
rooted in European traditions
." Orban is simply responding to the democratic will of his people, who are fiercely
conservative, yet the EU parliament voted to
punish
him
regardless. The move shows that Brussels, aside from being adverse to democratic principles, has very few tools for addressing
the rise of far-right sentiment that its own misguided policies created.
Here it is necessary to mention once again that bugbear of the political right, Mr. Soros, who has received no political mandate
from European voters, yet who campaigns relentlessly on behalf of globalist initiatives through his Open Society Foundations (OSF)
(That campaign just got some serious clout after Soros
injected
$18bn
dollars of his own money into OSF, making it one of the most influential NGOs in the world).
With no small amount of impudence, Soros has condemned EU countries – namely his native Hungary – for attempting to protect their
territories by constructing border barriers and fences, which he believes violate the human rights of migrants (rarely if ever
does the philanthropist speak about the "human rights" of the native population). In the
words
of
the maestro of mayhem himself: "
Beggar-thy-neighbor migration policies, such as building
border fences, will not only further fragment the union; they also seriously damage European economies and subvert global human
rights standards.
"
Through a leaked
network
of
compromised EU parliamentarians who do his bidding, Soros says the EU should spend $30 billion euros ($33bln) to accommodate "
at
least 300,000 refugees each year
." How will the EU pay for the resettling of migrants from the Middle East? Soros has an
answer for that as well. He calls it "
surge funding,
" which entails "
raising
a substantial amount of debt backed by the EU's relatively small budget.
"
Any guesses who will be forced to pay down the debt on this high-risk venture? If you guessed George Soros, guess again. The
already heavily taxed people of Europe will be forced to shoulder that heavy burden. "
To
finance it, new European taxes will have to be levied sooner or later,
" Soros admits. That comment is very interesting in
light of the recent French protests, which were
triggered
by
Emmanuel Macron's plan to impose a new fuel tax. Was the French leader, a former investment banker, attempting to get back some
of the funds being used to support the influx of new arrivals into his country? The question seems like a valid one, and goes far
at explaining the ongoing unrest.
At this point, it is worth remembering what triggered the exodus of migrants into Europe in the first place. A large part of the
answer comes down to unlawful NATO operations on the ground of sovereign states. Since 2003, the 29-member military bloc, under
the direct command of Washington, has
conducted
illicit
military operations in various places around the globe, including in Iraq, Libya and Syria. These actions, which could be best
described as globalism on steroids, have opened a Pandora's Box of global scourges, including famine, terrorism and grinding
poverty. Is this what the Western states mean by 'humanitarian activism'? If the major EU countries really want to flout their
humanitarian credentials, they could have started by demanding the cessation of regime-change operations throughout the Middle
East and North Africa, which created such inhumane conditions for millions of innocent people.
This failure on the part of Western capitals to speak out against belligerent US foreign policy helps to explain why a number of
other European governments are experiencing major shakeups. Sebastian Kurz, 32,
won
over
the hearts of Austrian voters by promising to tackle unchecked immigration. In super-tolerant Sweden, which has
accepted
more
migrants per capita than any other EU state, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party
garnered
17.6
percent of the vote in September elections – up from 12.9 percent in the previous election. And even Angela Merkel, who is seen
by many people as the de facto leader of the European Union, is watching her political star crash and burn mostly due to her
bungling of the migrant crisis. In October, after her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered a stinging setback in Bavaria
elections, which saw CDU voters abandon ship for the anti-immigrant AfD and the Greens, Merkel
announced
she
would resign in 2021 after her current term expires.
Meanwhile, back in the US, the government of President Donald Trump has been shut down as the Democrats refuse to grant the
American leader the funds to build a wall on the Mexican border – despite the fact that he essentially made it to the White House
on precisely that promise. Personally, I find it very hard to believe that any political party that does not support a strong and
viable border can continue to be taken seriously at the polls for very long. Yet that is the very strategy that the Democrats
have chosen. But I digress.
I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on
desperately needed Border Security. At some point the Democrats not wanting to make a deal will cost our
Country more money than the Border Wall we are all talking about. Crazy!
The lesson that Western governments should have learned over the last year from these developments is that there exists a
definite red line that the globalists cross at risk not only to the social order, but to their own political fortunes. Eventually
the people will demand solutions to their problems – many of which were caused by reckless neoliberal programs and austerity
measures. This collective sense of desperation may open the door to any number of right-wing politicians only too happy to meet
the demand.
Better to provide fair working conditions for the people while maintaining strong borders than have to face the wrath of the
street or some political charlatan later. Whether or not Western leaders will change their neoliberal ways as a populist storm
front approaches remains to be seen, but I for one am not betting on it.
Neoliberalism is a most troubled term, one that denotes a variety of
ideologies, beliefs, policies and practices. This article outlines some of the changes concerning corporate governance, managerial
control, and employee relations and points at the interrelations between the scholarly debates and theoretical contributions,
macroeconomic conditions, and political agenda all being part of the century-long history of neoliberalism.
The roots of neoliberalism runs deep in Western thinking
and the history of the term is more complex than is generally recognized, especially among those who associate the term with
laissez-faire policies and what at times has been rejected as "market fundamentalism." Liberalism as a political and economic term
is of British origin, but the neoliberal tradition of thinking derives from the continent, and from Austria and Germany in
particular.
1
The Austrian School of Economics, represented by
Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter and the so-called Ordo-liberals at Freiburg University in Germany represent two distinct
branches of economic liberalism. While Hayek early on warned against an expanded role of the state as the central planner of
economic activities, the German group of liberal economists was more ready to recognize the role of the state as the legitimate
regulator of the economy.
Hayek was a peripheral figure in the economic profession
in the interwar period, but the anti-Keynesian sentiments at London School of Economics, best represented by the economist Lionel
Robbins, served to advance Hayek as an alternative to the widely endorsed Keynesian economic theory and its application in policy.
In 1950, Hayek was offered a position at LSE on the basis of a private donation. A few years earlier, in 1947, Hayek had founded the
Mont Pčlerin Society (MPS), a community of intellectuals including economists such as Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and Lionel
Robbins and the philosopher Karl Popper. This group was committed to advancing a liberal economic agenda and to counteracting
collectivist solutions to economic problems. For more than two decades, MPS was operating out of the limelight as Keynesianism
effectively enabled economic growth and handled the issue of the distribution of economic resources through the use of progressive
taxation in the emerging welfare states. In both economics departments and in policy-making quarters, Keynesianism became highly
influential, at times hegemonic. However, by the mid-1960s, the profit rates started to decline in American industry and during the
first oil crisis in the 1970s, caused by political conflicts, industry's profit rates sharply declined as energy costs soared.
Liberalism as a political and economic term is of
British origin, but the neoliberal tradition of thinking derives from the continent, and from Austria and Germany in particular
The remainder of the 1970s were characterized by the new
phenomenon of
stagflation
, high inflation in combination with rising
unemployment, and the new monetarist economic theory advocated by Milton Freidman proposed a high interest-rate policy to curb
inflation and to promote economic growth. Paul Volcker, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve named by President Carter, announced
a high interest rate policy that would last well into the 1980s. By the mid-1970s, the predominant Keynesianist economic policy came
under attack and neoliberal intellectuals could advance their positions.
The triumph of neoliberalism in the 1980s was caused by
both macroeconomic and political changes in American society. First, the combination of high overseas savings, primarily in Japan
reporting significant trade surplus, an overrated dollar, and the high-interests policy of the Fed led to an inflow of capital into
the American economy, creating an oversupply of capital in the 1980s.
2
In
addition, Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 on the basis of a pro-business agenda, and the Reagan Administration recruited
economic advisors and co-workers from neoliberal and neoconservative think tanks that were either formed. or significantly increased
their budgets, in the 1970s, as private capital owners donated money to advance free market policies. The new administration wanted
to promote economic growth by implementing new regulatory policies based on the idea of the virtues of "small governments" as
prescribed by Hayek's work published during the war years and thereafter. One of the key targets in this neoliberal framework were
the trade unions, which were widely regarded as representing a collectivist solution that poorly fitted with the free-market policy
advocated by neoliberal intellectuals. In addition, substantial tax reforms in the 1980s were justified on the basis of what was
branded "trickle-down economics" by its critics, the idea that reduced taxes would create their own economic momentum as the supply
of capital would "trickle down" the economic system and generate economic growth through increased demand.
By the mid-1980s, a wave of hostile takeovers strongly contributed to
the decline in managerial capitalism, the economic regime characterized by large, public corporations run by professional
managers representing various functional domains of expertise, and promoted a shift to "investor capitalism.
The tax-reforms reduced the federal income but the inflow
of foreign capital into the American economy enabled the Reagan Administration to eat the cake and have it too: while Reagan was
fond of speaking of "rolling back the state," he had larger budget deficits than any other post-World War II president, and
government bonds served to finance the sharp increase in military spending in the 1980s. In fact, the issuing of government bonds
closely followed the budget deficits in the Reagan era.
3
Investor capitalism
The new economic advisors, equipped with the new finance
theory, advocated a liberalization of regulatory frameworks enabling new financial operations. By the mid-1980s, a wave of so-called
hostile takeovers strongly contributed to the decline in managerial capitalism, the economic regime characterized by large, public
corporations run by professional managers representing various functional domains of expertise, and promoted a shift to "investor
capitalism," an economic regime closely bound up with the emergence of an increasingly dominant finance industry. As the American
economy overflowed with capital, there were opportunities for a new class of professional finance professionals to raise capital, to
buy large conglomerate firms being underrated after 1970s bear markets, and to divest them. Permissive regulators endorsed economic
theories that regarded hostile takeovers as a legitimate mechanism serving to eliminate poorly managed firms with low-growth
opportunities and therefore playing a key role in renewing and invigorating the economy. Such theoretically logical arguments were,
however, not supported by empirical evidence as it was primarily sound and well-functioning companies that were subject to hostile
takeover bids.
4
Regardless of the legitimacy of the new forms of
financial engineering, strongly dependent on the ability to issue junk bonds popular among the new generation of finance industry
actors such as Michael Milken, the new threat to corporate survival made CEOs and directors aware of the need to pay close attention
to the market valuation of the stock. The popularity of agency theory and its insistence on the creation of shareholder value as the
sole legitimate objective of the corporation further underlined the firm's orientation towards the finance market. In the new
political and regulatory environment of the 1980s, the focus shifted from long-term survival and economic stability, i.e., virtues
of managerial capitalism, to short-term capital accumulation and the ability to live with the turmoil of the ups and downs of the
economy. Managers had traditionally been paid to secure long-term and stable growth and to cater to a variety of constituencies,
while in the new economic regime, that of investor capitalism, high returns on investment and the one-sided focus of shareholder
enrichment were rewarded. Managers started to "think like shareholders."
The popularity of agency theory and its insistence on the creation of
shareholder value as the sole legitimate objective of the corporation further underlined the firm's orientation towards the
finance market.
The inflow of capital into the U.S. economy had also
created a new form of finance industry actor, the fund manager. While fund managers controlled 20% of shares of a stock-listed
company in 1970, in 2005, the comparable figure was 60%.
5
In the
ideal case of market-based transactions, an investor being unsatisfied with the financial performance of the firm acts through
exit
rather
than
voice
(in Albert Hirschman's terms), i.e., he or she sells the
stock. In the case where one single actor holds large shares of the stock, the selling of the shares would affect the market price,
and therefore fund managers started to influence how CEOs and directors were recruited to the firms in which they held stocks, that
is, they increasingly turned to
voice
rather than
exit
.
As a consequence, CEOs and the directors with a background in finance that shared a belief in finance market efficiency and the
virtue of shareholder value creation were increasingly recruited. As both fund managers and CEOs were now compensated on the basis
of their ability to report a growth in the value of the stock, the interests of CEOs, directors, and owners converged as they were
now all serving the same finance market. In an agency theory view, this led to a reduction of the so-called agency costs.
Unfortunately, there was evidence of new forms of behavior that were not anticipated by free-market protagonists.
If markets were efficient, why would firms invest their so-called
"free cash flow" to manipulate the price of their stock rather than investing the money in productive capital, or transfer the
capital to the owners as dividends?
For instance, in the period of 1987-2007, the amount of
annual repurchases of stocks by individual firms increased eighteen-fold.
6
Agency
theory makes the assumption that finance markets are effectively pricing assets, that is, all publically available information is
reflected in a financial asset's market price. Yet, the de-regulation of the finance markets from the 1980s to promote market
efficiency coincides with a strong preference of firms to repurchase their own stock. If markets were efficient, why would then
firms invest their so-called "free cash flow" to manipulate the price of their stock rather than investing the money in productive
capital, or transfer the capital to the owners as dividends? The literature on stock repurchases offers a number of explanations but
fails to provide a unified and comprehensive view.
7
Under all
conditions, stock repurchases remain a puzzling phenomenon for free-marketeers.
In the new regime of investor capitalism, dominated by
neoclassic economic theory favouring market transactions and skeptical of the role of organizations altogether (as they to some
extent represent a market failure in terms of offering lower transaction costs vis-ŕ-vis comparable market transactions), managerial
authority has been moved to the outside of the corporation. First of all, to repeat, the shareholder value creation policy locates
the shareholders who know better than executives inside the firm where to invest the free-cash flow; if there are promising
potentials within the focal firm, capital owners will buy more shares, but if there are higher expected returns elsewhere, the
capital will be invested accordingly. Second, as a consequence of the suspicion that executives are at risk to act
opportunistically, various forms of auditing, accreditations, and credit ratings are widely used in an attempt to move the corporate
control outside of the firm. The extensive literature on auditing and the issuing of accreditations and credit ratings unfortunately
reveal that it is complicated to maintain the arm's-length distance needed between the auditor and the auditee,
8
and
in the case of credit-rating, the so-called "issuer pays" policy leads to a series of governance problems.
9
Third, the orientation towards finance markets and its
emphasis on high returns over long–term stability -- there is ample evidence of a sharp growth of recurrent financial crises after 1980
10
-- has
led to new human resources and employment practices, wherein a larger proportion of the workforce is hired on short-term contracts
and receive lower pay and fewer benefits. In addition, in the U.S., and the U.K., the two epicentra of neoliberal reforms, the level
of unionization has been in decline, further reducing the collective bargaining power of workers.
11
The
perhaps largest explanatory factor regarding the decline in long-term stability in employment is the loss in manufacturing jobs in
the U.S., and the succession of service-industry jobs offering both lower pay and lower demands for technical expertise. In
addition, in the attempt to boost shareholder value, downsizing and off-shoring have been popular among finance market-oriented
executives. By and large, the shift from the managerial capitalism of the Keynesian, post-World War II period to the neoliberal
investor capitalism brought a new theory of the firm, novel corporate governance practices, an accentuated short-term perspective on
economic value creation, and not least, a new vocabulary of how to address and speak about managerial practices and firm
performance.
The triumph of free-market thinking and neoliberal policy is perhaps
not so much to be treated as the ultimate evidence of the superior rationality of the market, as it is indicative of the decline
of the U.S. and U.K. economies and the West more broadly speaking on the global scale.
Concluding Remarks
In hindsight, after five decades of consolidation and
organization, free-market protagonists managed to move from the periphery of economic policy-making and into its very centres by the
end of the 1970s. Those who were initially regarded as outsiders and eccentrics started to claim the Nobel Memorial Prizes in
Economic Sciences by the mid-1970s, but this is, skeptics may say, not so much about "being right" (in terms of making adequate
predictions or providing policies that regulate the economy effectively) as much as it is indicative of the ability to capitalize on
strong political and economic interests being mobilized when, for example, trade unions' influence and demands for economic equality
were regarded to be too far advanced by certain groups. In addition to the ability to align capital owners and intellectuals in
financing academic departments and think tanks in the post-World War II period and in the crisis-ridden 1970s in particular,
12
macroeconomic
conditions were beneficial for the free-market cause. At the same time, it is complicated to predict the outcome from policy-making,
and there are significant influences from unforeseen events and unanticipated consequences of purposeful action in the history of
neoliberalism and free market reforms. Therefore, the triumph of free-market thinking and neoliberal policy is perhaps not so much
to be treated as the ultimate evidence of the superior rationality of the market as economists like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton
Friedman would assume, as it is indicative of the decline of the U.S. and U.K. economies and the West more broadly speaking on the
global scale as suggested by economic statistics.
13
While finance theory professors are fond of
speaking of finance markets as being "the brain of capitalist system," the events of 2008 rendered such statements subject to
doubt, to say the least.
The enormous growth of financial markets and the finance
industry is also a topic subject to much scholarly and media attention, and while finance theory professors are fond of speaking of
finance markets as being "the brain of capitalist system," the events of 2008 rendered such statements subject to doubt, to say the
least. In addition, the free-market capitalism being dreamed about by neoliberal intellectuals since the 1930s does by no means
imply a diminished state but rather the government and state agencies becoming an ally of capital owners, serving to rearticulate
the welfare state into a "neoliberal ownership society state." Whether that is a sustainable role of the state, or if it rewards
certain groups at an intolerable level is subject to ongoing discussions.
This article draw on A. Styhre
(2014)
Management and Neoliberalism: Connecting Policies and Practices
(New
York & London: Routledge)
Alexander Styhre
, Ph.D (Lund University) is Chair of
Organization Theory and Management, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Styhre has published
widely in the field of organization studies and is the author of several research monographs and textbooks. Alexander is the
Editor-in-Chief of
Scandinavian Journal of Management.
Jerri-Lynn here. This is
the latest installment in Justin Mikulka's excellent series on the fracking beat,
Finances
of Fracking: Shale Industry Drills More Debt Than Profit
. The industry lacks even the excuse of profit to justify
the environmental costs it inflicts – yet the mainstream media continue to swallow industry waffle. I've crossposted other
articles in the series, and I encourage interested readers to look at them – the entire series is well worth your time.
By Justin Mikulka, a freelance writer, audio and video producer living in Trumansburg, NY.
Originally published at
DeSmog
Blog
2018 was the year the oil
and gas industry promised that its darling, the shale fracking revolution, would stop focusing on endless production and
instead turn a profit for its investors. But as the year winds to a close, it's clear that hasn't happened.
Instead, the fracking
industry has helped set new
records
for
U.S. oil production while continuing to lose huge amounts of money -- and that was before the recent crash in oil prices.
But plenty of people in
the industry and media make it sound like a much different, and more profitable, story.
Broken Promises and Record Production
Going into this year, the
fracking industry needed to prove it was a good investment (and not just for its CEOs, who are garnering
massive
paychecks
).
In January,
The
Wall Street Journal touted the prospect
of frackers finally making "real money for the first time" this year. "Shale
drillers are heeding growing calls from investors who have chastened the companies for pumping ever more oil and gas even as
they incur losses doing so," oil and energy reporter Bradley Olson wrote.
Olson's story quoted an
energy asset manager making the (always) ill-fated prediction about the oil and gas industry that
this time will
be different.
Is this time going to be
different? I think yes, a little bit," said energy asset manager Will Riley. "Companies will look to increase growth a little,
but at a more moderate pace."
Despite this early
optimism,
Bloomberg noted in
February
that even the Permian Basin -- "America's hottest oilfield" -- faced "hidden pitfalls" that could "hamstring"
the industry.
They were right.
Those pitfalls turned out to be the ugly reality of the fracking industry's finances.
And this time was
not different.
On the edge of the Permian
in New Mexico,
The
Albuquerque Journal
reported the industry is "on pace this year to leap past last year's record oil production," according
to Ryan Flynn, executive director of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association. And yet that oil has at times been discounted as
much as
$20
a barrel
compared to world oil prices because New Mexico doesn't have the infrastructure to move all of it.
Who would be foolish
enough to produce more oil than the existing infrastructure could handle in a year when the industry promised restraint and a
focus on profits? New Mexico, for one. And North Dakota. And Texas.
Texas is experiencing a
similar story. Oilprice.com cites a
Goldman
Sachs
prediction of discounts "around $19-$22 per [barrel]" for the fourth quarter of 2018 and through the first three
quarters of next year.
Oil producers in fracking
fields across the country seem to have resisted the urge to reign in production and instead produced record volumes of oil in
2018. In the process -- much like the
tar
sands industry in Canada
-- they have created a situation where the market devalues their oil. Unsurprisingly, this is not a
recipe for profits.
Shale Oil Industry 'More Profitable Than Ever'
--
Or
Is It?
However,
Reuters
recently
analyzed 32 fracking companies and declared that "U.S. shale firms are more profitable than ever after a strong third
quarter." How is this possible?
Reading a bit
further reveals what Reuters considers "profits."
"The group's cash flow
deficit has narrowed to $945 million as U.S.benchmark crude hit $70 a barrel and production soared," reported Reuters.
So, "more profitable than
ever" means that those 32 companies are running a deficit of nearly $1 billion. That does not meet the accepted
definition
of profit.
A
separate
analysis
released earlier this month by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and The Sightline
Institute also reviewed 32 companies in the fracking industry and reached the same conclusion: "The 32 mid-size
U.S.exploration companies included in this review reported nearly $1 billion in negative cash flows through September."
The numbers don't lie.
Despite the highest oil prices in years and record amounts of oil production, the fracking industry continued to spend more
than it made in 2018. And somehow, smaller industry losses can still be interpreted as being "more profitable than ever."
The Fracking Industry's Fuzzy Math
One practice the fracking
industry uses to obfuscate its long money-losing streak is to change the goal posts for what it means to be profitable.
The
Wall Street Journal recently highlighted
this practice, writing: "Claims of low 'break-even' prices for shale drilling
hardly square with frackers' bottom lines."
The industry likes to talk
about
low
"break-even"
numbers and how individual wells are profitable -- but somehow the companies themselves keep losing money.
This can lead to statements like this one from Chris Duncan, an energy analyst at Brandes Investment Partners:
"You always scratch
your head as to how they can have these well economics that can have double-digit returns on investment, but it never flows
through to the total company return."
Head-scratching, indeed.
The explanation is pretty
simple: Shale companies are not counting many of their operating expenses in the "break-even" calculations. Convenient for
them, but highly misleading about the economics of fracking because factoring in the costs of running one of these companies
often leads those so-called profits from the black and into the red.
The Wall Street Journal
explains the flaw in the fracking industry's questionable break-even claims: "break-evens generally exclude such key costs as
land, overhead and even at times transportation."
Other tricks, The Wall
Street Journal notes, include companies only claiming the break-even prices of their most profitable land (known in the
industry as "sweet spots") or using artificially low costs for drilling contractors and oil service companies.
While the mystery of
fracking industry finances appears to be solved, the mystery of why oil companies are allowed to make such misleading
claims remains.
Why does the fracking
industry continue to receive more investments from Wall Street despite breaking its "promises" this year?
Because that is how
Wall
Street makes money
. Whether fracking companies are profitable or not doesn't really matter to Wall Street executives who
are getting rich making the loans that the fracking industry struggles to repay.
An excellent example of
this is the risk that
rising
interest rates pose
to the fracking industry. Even shale companies that have made profits occasionally have done so while
also
amassing
large debts
. As interest rates rise, those companies will have to borrow at higher rates, which increases operating costs
and decreases the likelihood that shale companies losing cash will ever pay back that debt.
Continental Resources, one
of the largest fracking companies, is often touted as an excellent investment. Investor's Business Daily
recently
noted t
hat "[w]ithin the Oil& Gas-U.S.Exploration & Production industry, Continental is the fourth-ranked stock with a
strong 98 out of a highest-possible 99 [Investor's Business Daily] Composite Rating."
And yet when
Simply
Wall St.
analyzed the company's ability to pay back its over $6 billion in debt, the stockmarket news site concluded that
Continental isn't well positioned to repay that debt. However, it noted "[t]he sheer size of Continental Resources means it is
unlikely to default or announce bankruptcy anytime soon." For frackers, being at the top of the industry apparently means
being too big to fail.
As interest rates rise,
common sense might suggest that Wall Street would rein in its lending to shale companies. But when has common sense applied to
Wall Street?
The Chronicle notes the
epic money-losing streak for the industry and how fracking bankruptcies have already ended up "stiffing lenders and investors
on more than $70 billion in outstanding loans."
So, is the party over?
Not according to Katherine
Spector,
a
research scholar
at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. She explains how Wall Street will reconcile
investing in these fracking firms during a period of higher interest rates: "Banks are going to make more money [through
higher interest rates], so they're going to want to get more money out the door."
1. The
Sightline Institute methodology had 33 cos. Not 32. I would bet the Reuters reporter took out one company out from the
analysis. Bear in mind XOP has 72 or so companies so there is a lot of scope for cherry picking there too.
2. What
bank wants to run an oil company? The banks lent to a sector which conned them. I guess rates were too low for too long. Those
loans/bonds are only recoverable if oil prices are high. The oil men know they are long a massive call option, and you can't
take it off them. They can't get new money so they won't give back the old.
3.
Diamondback and maybe 8 others make money. Infrastructure in the right place and good geologies.
4. The
numbers are unfair to Andarko cos the cut off misses a bunch of cash coming back in q3
Remember Enron? We're clearly not smart enough to understand the genius of how this is profitable. I guess we should
just step aside and watch the smart guys spin straw into gold. I'm sure they will share the wealth with the land
owners right?
These oil men are not stupid. They like to get their DUCs in a row – wells drilled but uncompleted. If oil goes up
enough they can open the DUCs in less than 2 months. Its the weakly capitalized ones who will pump oil out of a
reservoir with low oil prices to service debt. Also by drilling they often validate a lease which would void if
they didnt drill. However by not pumping they dont have to pay any royalties – just rents.
Below $50 on WTI a lot of the sector doesn't generate enough cashflow to meet investment plans.
I think a lot of the funding is with junk bonds. So most of those bonds are sold to investors, including ETFs, mutual
funds, and pension funds. Many of the banks are just middlemen and will probably not be left holding too much of the bag if
they haven't kept them on their own books or written lots of stupid derivatives on them.
This
should be a much smaller sector than the housing sector so a sub-prime mortgage bond-like crash shouldn't have the impact
of 2008. But who knows, the main thing aI marvel about with the financial sector is their unerring ability to take
something that should be relatively safe, weaponize it, and threaten global financial stability with it.
I've watched in horror from a distance in regards to fracking, and then a few days ago, this planning area map for open
hydraulic fracking leases has me surrounded in a sea of red
We're on
a fractured rock aquifer in the foothills here that's separate from the one on the valley floor, and because it gets scant use
in Ag, and not many people live here (we're 2.5x as big as Paradise,Ca. in size, with 1/10th of the population and at a
similar altitude) nobody's hard rock wells had any issues with going dry during the lengthy drought and having to drill
hundreds if not a thousand feet deeper in search of H20, as was occurring to the farmers et al on the fruited plain.
I sure
don't like the idea of a fractured rock aquifer and fracking
One thing
going against us, is land is cheap here, it's nature acres, nice to look at. but no development potential, as the trees are
all in the way, and what sorry sap is going to cut down oaks a couple hundred old and level the hills to put in tiny boxes?
That
villain doesn't exist, luckily.
But if
you were to dangle large amounts of money at the owners of such low value acres, in oil leases?
And the
idea it was all a circle jerk by Wall*Street & Big Oil, to get the money!
.
Makes it even harder to swallow
Its not just the environmental damage. Banks lending to frackers will be precedent creditors. They'll keep loaning until
whatever value in the company that can be extracted in extremis has been used up. One can easily imagine the sort of
accounting Wall Street uses.
So when these companies finally go bust, faced with the diminishment of oil production, will US taxpayers be forced to bail
out the industry because of the economic/national security implications of the prospects of eviscerated US oil production
volumes? If so, Wall Street wins yet again.
A gigantic hidden cost is the liabilities associated with the resulting abandoned wells. This is why this fall there was a
Supreme Court challenge in Canada to a ruling on who gets paid first in such cases. In Canada the reclamation costs fall to
the remaining producers who share costs of the Orphan Well Association. In the US, it is completely off the books, and
therefore falls to the government to clean up abandoned plays when companies go bust.
So,
taxpayers could be on the hook both if there is a government bailout on bad loans, a al 2008/2009, AND will have to pay to
clean this up (it's expensive, by the way, there are thousands and thousands of these sites that need to be remediated). I
suspect the reason all this is happening is a strategic effort to use tax payer backstopped risk to punish Russia to daring
to exist.
This is similar to mines and old waste dumps. If the owners were limited partnerships or companies that went bankrupt
with no remaining solvent pieces, then there is no money in the kitty to clean them up. The remaining game in town then
is Superfund and state programs for inactive hazardous waste sites and orphan wells.
The
RCRA Subtitle C and D regulations in the 1980s and early 90s required landfill operators to set aside funds in
lock-boxes so that if they went bankrupt, the state could access those funds to close the landfills. The landfills
typically charge a fee per ton just to fund these financial assurance accounts and they need to keep them on file with
the states. Unfortunately, the resource extraction industry has generally been able to successfully fight against these
types of requirements as "job-killers".
One economic problem with fracked gas wells is they only produce large quantities of gas for a short time. It's usually 2 to 3
years. After that production tanks. I suspect a similar thing happens with fracked oil wells. I I've in NY close to the PA
boarder. For about 4 years, fracking was really booming. Now it has almost stopped. You see big lots filled with fracking
equipment gathering rust. It didn't take most people long to realize that only a few made money while the rest pay the bill
for all of the damage done. I'm glad in NY state they banned fracking. I own 50 acres and refused to buy into a leasing deal
before fracking was banned. My biggest concern was my well water becoming contaminated as well as losing control over how my
land is used. A big problem is that a company is allowed to drill under your land even if you don't have a lease agreement
with them. They have to pay you but they can also pollute your well. If that happens your property becomes of no value and
useless.
We'd become curious about folks moving to the NE tip of PA, as it looked like NJT might actually reopen rail service to all
those $80-$140K houses, right before Williams/ Transco's Constitution Pipeline finally caused hundreds of new fracked
wells? We'd guessed the only effect of the '16 election was who'd be prodding retirees into GasLand Poconos. Seems like a
great location for a remake of Green Acres meets Deliverance?
https://www.njherald.com/20180410/lackawanna-cutoff-project-may-finally-be-back-on-track
Looks like there's a mess of unwatchable YouTube videos. I wonder if refugees have any idea of what could happen up there?
Yes, when liquidity has a much smaller time constant then actual production, the rules of liquidity will decouple from the
production and actually dominate the process.
This is
well-known from physics, and why many economic theories are obviously and fundamentally wrong.
As long
as the economy is financialized with almost infinite velocity, nothing in the real world (including profits) will actually
drive the system. This is trivially obvious.
This kind of thing makes me chuckle. So the CEOs and other suits at the fracking companies are scamming their investors to
enrich themselves. Hard to feel bad about it (even though a fair number of the investors are probably "institutional") if it
wasn't for the needless environmental destruction that goes along with these two groups of elites ripping each other off.
Very broadly speaking, wouldn't this be a good real-world example of MMT? There is a natural resource we want to extract, we
have the manpower and machinery to do it, so we just do it? The money to fund it is limitless bound only by the constraints of
the resource itself. Wall street is just a rent-extracting intermediary
It's ironic that, having lived thru the 80's when the financial "geniuses" took over and it was all about ROI – Westinghouse
somehow came to the conclusion that you could make 6% on golf courses (they didn't even know, I don't think) instead of 2% on
industrials (that was probably correct) so they basically sold the store. Except for the nukes, sigh.
The
comments above, apes's for instance, point to the whole slosh of money. And there is some truth to that. But in this case, I'm
afraid much of the answer is that people in the oil bidness make oil wells because that's what they know how to do. ROI, Scmoi
O I.
Of all
the industries that are gone because they weren't allowed to "do what they know" because it was "cheaper to offshore" – read a
greater ROI to Wall Street – how come the worst is the only one that keeps its nose to the grindstone and does the actual work
it knows how to do?
No, what I meant was those other ones just "diversified" or whatever the word of the moment was, just did whatever made
the people at the top money.
But
oil/gas is different. They just "have to go get it". It's like termites and wood. I respect that, even if it's the wrong
thing to do. If I must refer to The Terminator again, "it's what they do. It's ALL they do".
PS:
there is oil/gas everywhere. I worked in the "bidness,"btw.
So frackers can take out billions of unpayable debt and discharge it in bankruptcy, but I get to carry a millstone of student
debt around my neck for the rest of my life? Great system we got here. Pretty flipping great.
You should have issued a junk bond on yourself instead of taking a student loan. You could then just default on the junk
bond (after having written some derivatives to short it to profit from your financial demise).
I have a different take on all this fracking.
I believe it was decided at the highest levels of our government to support it; including financially if necessary. The basis
for this support and secrecy would be national security. Easy enough to see how this could have transpired.
All that
said, if my theory is correct, the frackers will be bailed in some form or fashion. Probably the next QE will pick up the tab
or perhaps the DOD is funding it indirectly already.
Your take parallels Pym of Nantucket's. Ever since the end of WWII, the United States has been allowed to just 'print
money', first to pay for its contest with the former Soviet Union for global hegemony and then to 'pay for' its energy and
the products its industries could no longer profitably produce – at least as profitably as they could by off-shoring those
industries. This is all really just an extension of 'petrodollar warfare' – gigantic bluff the US can continue to go it
alone if necessary – having salted the central banks of 'developing countries' with all the 'reserve currencies' they
realistically need, at least if the depredations of the likes of George Soros are held in check.
In
summary, fracked oil is propping up not just Big Oil but the US military industrial complex and ultimately Wall Street and
its banks. As long as the US can control the world's access to energy (and possibly retard its transition to renewable
sources?), US politicians and bankers can continue to 'print money' (i.e. export debt) and sustain the whole rotten edifice
of US and Western 'political economy'.
As
usual Michael Hudson has it right:
"Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling
hosts." It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized
infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary
wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means?
The time will come, as a result of this, that the US
will
have to go it alone. They are turning your money to
shit. Unless our corporate masters sell out the rest of the country to foreigners, like they already have much of our
nation's productive capital.We won't be alone, but like Greece, we will no longer be independent or free.
This kind of crap increasingly pervades our economy. Military. Finance. Healthcare. Like money with Gresham's Law, bad
investment drives out good. Every cost is also someone's profit opportunity, so costs are magnifying and spinning out of
control. More and more the welfare of society depends on 'borrowed' money.
It's like the modern day pyramids. Nicely dressed piles of rocks in the desert. Total waste and destruction of
resources. It also destroyed the social capital of Ancient Egypt, and turned them into slaves of Pharoah. It was the
people of Egypt who paid for the pyramids, with their labor and their liberties.
So
that's what else is going on. Your freedoms are going down those wells. And up the towers of finance. The Egyptians, at
least, got something to look at. They already had the barren wastelands.
At least these depressed oil prices from over fracking in the US will make Saudi Arabia poorer. Possibly poorer to the point
that widespread social unrest ensues there, leading to the dethroning of the House Of Saud, which, in turn, will cause the
dethroning of their chief covert friend and ally Israel.
Then in
order to stave off social unrest here in the US, we'll have to cut off ties with these two roguish troublemakers in the
region. Much needed balance of power will then be restored to the region with Iran and Syria restored to their former glory,
sparking peace and prosperity from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Egypt, Somalia and Yemen.
I don't
know if the pieces on the chessboard will ever realign this way, but it's rather amusing to speculate that this realignment
could possibly be triggered by the stupidity and shortsightedness of the US to over frack!
You got it backwards. KSA and Russia need lower oil prices to force US producers off the field and get their supply chains
back. Your thinking like a 1970's person. Think 2010's.
This is a non-climate change reason why developing electric vehicles in North America, Europe, and China would be good.
It would strip away much of the demand for oil which is a major funding source for Russia and KSA.
Jesus Herbert Walker Christ. Is anyone else getting sick of this stupid series? If you keep writing the same article every
year, and Wall Street keeps engaging in the same apparently irrational behavior, you might want to rethink your smug pose and
ask yourself whether there might be some additional digging to do to understand what the hell is going on.
The
contrast between this series and Hubert Horan's Uber work is striking. Horan not only points out the fact that Uber is
unprofitable, but also clearly shows who has an interest in extending the hype, and how and why the bandwagon keeps rolling.
This series is the complete opposite.
Fracking
"investors" aren't getting ripped off, and they're not stupid. You've just completely missed half the point of the Master
LImited Partnership structure. For the limited partners, the losses are a feature, not a bug. Until MLP shares are cashed in,
they generate tax losses for the LPs. Those losses are valuable generally, but 501c3s, especially love them because they allow
non-profits to offset Unrelated Business Income.
Go to
Guidestar or Nonprofit Explorer and pull down the 990T of any nonprofit with a few billion dollars worth of invested assets.
Line 5 (usually blank but filled in as a long attachment at the end) is almost invariably a who's who of the fracking
industry, with thousands of dollars in losses from each company. In any given year, LPs only liquidate positions in a small
number of the companies their holding each year, allowing them to avoid taxes with the annual losses, then cash in (at least
sometimes) when the value of the company is high.
The
industry's a scam, but just as much of the taxpayers as of the investors.
Do you make a habit of putting your foot in your mouth and chewing? Because you did it here, by copping a 'tude while being
100% wrong.
Passive tax exempt investors have no use for losses. Zero. Zip. Nada.
An
investor in a limited partnership is a passive investor. Income from a passive investment NEVER generates Unrelated
Business Income. If the idiocy you presented was correct, no endowment or public pension fund could ever show a net profit
from their investments in private equity and hedge funds without it being taxed as UBI. There would literally be no private
equity industry as we know it because most of its money comes from tax exempt investors, namely public pension funds,
endowments, foundations, private pension funds.
UBI
results from activity conducted by the not for profit. The classic example is an art museum's gift shop. See IRS
Publication 598 (emphasis ours):
Unrelated business income is the income from a trade or business
regularly
conducted by an exempt organization
and not substantially related to the performance by the organization
of its exempt purpose or function, except that the organization uses the profits derived from this activity.
Limited partners are required to be passive and have nada to do with the operation of the partnership. They typically make
double sure that their investment income won't be characterized as business income. As one tax expert confirmed by e-mail:
Endowments/exempts/pension funds can wind up having UBTI when they don't structure their investments through
corporations. They rarely fail to do this structuring. They wouldn't put themselves in the position of deliberately
incur UBTI and then go hunting for losses to offset it.
So it
is possible that you heard of a not-very-competent endowment that wound up seeking tax losses, but that would be highly
unusual, when you incorrectly said the opposite.
There
are other tells that you don't even remotely understand the how limited partnerships work, such as your comment "In any
given year, LPs only liquidate positions in a small number of the companies their holding each year, allowing them to avoid
taxes with the annual losses."
Limited partnerships are pass-through entities. LPs receive their pro-rata share of income and loss annually. They do not
need to sell to recognize gains or losses resulting from their participation in operations.
The
mainstream journalist who first wrote about the pervasiveness of losses in fracking after oil prices started trading in the
new normal of $70 a barrel and below, John Dizard of the Financial Times, explained why frackers would keep drilling at
losses as long as they could get their hands on funding, so this is entirely consistent with his forecast. And Dizard's
column is for wealthy individuals and he is conversant with tax issues, unlike you.
Politically Obama was a "despicable coward", or worse, a marionette.
Notable quotes:
"... A 50 state strategy, or no 50 state strategy, it really doesn't matter. Democrats were going to take losses. The key is, making sure the party is unified enough to run public policy courses. ..."
"... Your points make little sense in the face of what people wanted in 2016 that Obama could have delivered without interference from the Republicans. Things like anti-trust enforcement, SEC enforcement aka jailing the banksters, not going into Syria, not supporting the war in Yemen (remember he did both of those on his own without Congress), not making the Bush tax cuts permanent, not staying silent on union issues and actually wearing those oft mentioned comfortable shoes while walking a picket line, the list of what could have been done and that people supported goes on and on. None of which required approval from Congress. ..."
"... And speaking of the ACA, we know that Obama and others did whatever they could to kill single payer and replace it with Romneycare 1.5. The language in the bill and the controversy surrounding it show that no one thought this would give them a short term political advantage. If anything, the run up to the vote finally made enough citizens realize that they didn't hate government insurance, they just hated insurance. And here were the Democrats and Obama, forcing people to buy expensive insurance. ..."
"... He had a mandate for change. He had a majorities in both houses. He had the perfect bully pulpit. He chose not to use any of it. He and others killed the support for local parties. The Democrats needed the JFA with Hillary because Obama had pretty much bankrupted the party in 2012. A commitment to all 50 states would have been huge and would have helped Hillary get on the ground where she needed to shore up support by a few thousand votes. ..."
"... Obama and the Democrats took losses from 2008 on because they promised to do what their constituents voted them in to do and then decided not to do it. ..."
"... People don't have Republican fatigue. They don't have Democrat fatigue. They simply don't see the point in voting for people who won't do what they're voted in to do. ..."
"... The citizens of this country want change. They want higher wages and lower prices. They want less war. They want less government interference. They want their kids to grow up with more opportunities than they did. ..."
"Democratic left playing a long game to get 'Medicare for All'" [Bloomberg Law]. "'We don't have the support that we need,'
said Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, who will co-chair the Progressive Caucus. She said that she'd favor modest expansions
of Medicare or Medicaid eligibility as a step toward Medicare for All. 'I am a big bold thinker; I'm also a good practical
strategist,' Jayapal said.
'It's why the Medicare for All Caucus was started, because we want to get information to our members so people feel
comfortable talking about the attacks we know are going to come.'" • So many Democrat McClellans; so few Democrat Grants.
"Progressives set to push their agenda in Congress and on the campaign trail. The GOP can't wait." [NBC]. "While the party
has moved left on health care, many Democrats seem more comfortable offering an option to buy into Medicare or a similar public
plan rather than creating one single-payer plan that replaces private insurance and covers everyone. Progressives, led by Rep.
Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and her Medicare For All PAC, plan to whip up support for the maximalist version and advance
legislation in 2019." • The "maximalist version" is exactly what Jayapal herself, quoted by Bloomberg, says she will not seek.
Not sure whether this is Democrat cynicism, sloppy Democrat messaging, or poor reporting. Or all three!
The problem is unlike 1933 large sections of the electorate just wanted more Republican
economics to "deal" with the aftermath. That is the difference between a moderate
recession(historically) and a collapse like the early 1930's had when the British Empire and
the de Rothschild dynasty finally collapsed.
40% didn't want anything the Obama Administration came up with succeed. 40% wanted more
than they could possible politically come up with and that left 20% to actually get something
done. You see why the Democrats had to take losses.
Even if Health Care, which was controversial in the party was nixed for more "stimulus",
Democrats look weak. Politically, Stimulus wasn't that popular and "fiscal deficit" whiners were going to whine
and there are a lot of them.
Naked Capitalism ignores this reality instead, looking for esoteric fantasy. I would argue
Democrats in 2009-10 looked for short term political gain by going with Health Care reform
instead of slowly explaining the advantage of building public assets via stimulus, because
the party was to split on Health Care to create a package that would satisfy enough
people.
Similar the Republican party, since Reagan had done the opposite, took short term
political gain in 2016, which was a mistake, due to their Clinton hatred.
Which is now backfiring and the business cycle is not in a kind spot going forward, which
we knew was likely in 2016.
So not only does "Republican fatigue" hurt in 2018, your on the political defensive for
the next cycle. Short-termism in politics is death.
A 50 state strategy, or no 50 state strategy, it really doesn't matter. Democrats were
going to take losses. The key is, making sure the party is unified enough to run public
policy courses.
I truly don't understand your point of view. I also don't understand your claim that NC
deals in fantasy.
Your points make little sense in the face of what people wanted in 2016 that Obama could
have delivered without interference from the Republicans. Things like anti-trust enforcement,
SEC enforcement aka jailing the banksters, not going into Syria, not supporting the war in
Yemen (remember he did both of those on his own without Congress), not making the Bush tax
cuts permanent, not staying silent on union issues and actually wearing those oft mentioned
comfortable shoes while walking a picket line, the list of what could have been done and that
people supported goes on and on. None of which required approval from Congress.
There's even the bland procedural tactic of delaying the release of the Obamacare exchange
premium price increases until after the election in 2016. He could have delayed that notice
several months and saved Hillary a world of hurt at the polls. But he chose not to use the
administrative tools at his disposal in that case. He also could have seen the writing on the
wall with the multiple shut down threats and gotten ahead of it by asking Congress that if
you are deemed an essential employee you will continue to be paid regardless of whether your
department is funded during a shutdown. With 80% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck
that would have been a huge deal.
And speaking of the ACA, we know that Obama and others did whatever they could to kill
single payer and replace it with Romneycare 1.5. The language in the bill and the controversy
surrounding it show that no one thought this would give them a short term political
advantage. If anything, the run up to the vote finally made enough citizens realize that they
didn't hate government insurance, they just hated insurance. And here were the Democrats and
Obama, forcing people to buy expensive insurance.
Obama took a huge organization that could have helped him barnstorm the country (OFA) just
like what Bernie is doing now and killed it early in his first term. He had a mandate for
change. He had a majorities in both houses. He had the perfect bully pulpit. He chose not to
use any of it. He and others killed the support for local parties. The Democrats needed the JFA with Hillary because Obama had pretty much bankrupted the party in 2012. A commitment to
all 50 states would have been huge and would have helped Hillary get on the ground where she
needed to shore up support by a few thousand votes.
Obama and the Democrats took losses from 2008 on because they promised to do what their
constituents voted them in to do and then decided not to do it. By the time 2016 rolled
around, there were estimates which placed 90% of the counties in the US as not having
recovered from the disaster in 2007. Hillary ran on radical incrementalism aka the status
quo. Who in their right mind could have supported the status quo in 2016?
The Democrats lost seats at all levels of government because of their own incompetence,
because of their cowardice, because of their lazy assumptions that people had nowhere else to
go. So when record numbers of people didn't vote they lost by slim margins in states long
considered True Blue. There is nothing cyclical about any of that.
People don't have Republican fatigue. They don't have Democrat fatigue. They simply don't
see the point in voting for people who won't do what they're voted in to do.
The citizens of
this country want change. They want higher wages and lower prices. They want less war. They
want less government interference. They want their kids to grow up with more opportunities
than they did.
Obama and Hillary and all the rest of the Democrats stalking MSM cameras could
have delivered on some of that but chose not to. And here we are. With President Trump. And
even his broken clock gets something right twice a day, whereas Team Blue has a 50/50 chance
of making the right decision and chooses wrong everytime.
Please provide better examples of your points if you truly want to defend your
argument.
And, that often mentioned reason for voting for Democrats, the Supreme Court. Neither
Obama nor the Democrats fought for their opportunity to put their person on the Supreme
Court. Because of norms I guess. Which actually makes some sense because it broke norms.
Because they simply don't care
I truly don't understand why you think any of that. Most mystifying is your claim that
anyone thought ACA would provide short term political benefit?
You know how Obamacare could have given Hillary a short term political gain? If Obama had
directed HHS to delay releasing any premium increase notices until after the election.
Otherwise, you'd have to support your argument a lot better. NC has the least fantastical
commentary base of any website I've seen.
This is complete and utter nonsense. Your calling depicting NC as "fantasy" is a textbook
example of projection on your part.
The country was terrified and demoralized when Obama took office. Go read the press in
December 2008 and January 2009, since your memory is poor. He not only had window of
opportunity to do an updated 100 days, the country would have welcomed. But he ignored it and
the moment passed.
Obama pushed heath care because that was what he had campaigned on and had a personal
interest in it. He had no interest in banking and finance and was happy to let Geither run
that show.
As for stimulus, bullshit. Trump increased deficit spending with his tax cuts and no one
cares much if at all. The concern re deficit spending was due to the fact that the Obama
economic team was the Clinton (as in Bob Rubin) economics team, which fetishized balanced
budgets or even worse, surpluses. We have explained long form that that stance was directly
responsible for the rapid increase in unproductive household debt, most of all mortgage debt,
which produced the crisis.
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.
Here's a comment I wrote, lifted from the thread at the original post. It's in response to
a previous comment that references the postwar reconstruction era.
"I have thought the WWII period is enormously undervalued as a moment of social thought
and system-building. The global capitalist class suffered a tremendous loss of power during
the 1930s everywhere, even where it was "saved", but there was no immediate plan for how to
restructure on the basis of the new dispensation. I think a lot of that planning took place
as the war was waged during the early-mid 40s, so that a system could congeal the elements of
experimentation already on the books. This took different forms in different countries, but
it was progressive overall in a way that would have been impossible a generation earlier --
and was to become impossible two generations later when the class configuration had shifted
once more.
"The argument beneath the argument in this post is that the cultural shifts we've gone
through, like the rise of neoliberal ideology (or family of ideologies) is incomprehensible
without recognition that the power and organizational dynamics of the global system evolved
to be incompatible with the previous social democratic regime. I'm fairly sure of that. What
I'm less sure of is exactly how that evolution took place and what its main constituents are.
Exploring that, it seems to me, is what political economy should be about.
"What I'm not happy with is a political environment in which ideas are regarded as prime
movers in and of themselves, where "capitalism" becomes a particular bundle of values and
predilections and neoliberalism just a more extreme version of the same. It puts the terrain
of politics in struggles over consciousness (and therefore the microregulation of individual
thought and behavior) rather than over the power to change the rules we live by. Not that
consciousness doesn't matter, of course, but if the most powerful determinant of it is how we
live and what constraints we have to adapt to, evangelizing people is not the best way to
alter that either."
I certainly do not think it was one thing, but if there was one thing above all that
mattered, it was the decision of the rich to pay executives, especially ceo's, a whole lot
more, and to pay for the ideological rationalization of that policy as a theory of economics
and finance. Reducing marginal income tax rates made it practical.
The professional manager, the balancer of many stakeholders, had been at odds with the
capitalist, to the end of the 1960's. Soaring CEO compensation, tied to financialization, set
in motion the change that changed everything.
There is no need to talk about capitalism or neoliberalism it is Wealth that matters,
wealth as a being with its own trajectory around which names of nations and oligarchs are
appended as accidents. Wealth is a mysterious being, it has the will to remain to continue
existing and changes agents for its survival continuously. The poor and the rich are the
material visible aspect of that invisible being that is Wealth. But being invisible does not
mean it does not exist. Wealth manipulates all of us in order to exist and the very rich are
as much contingent accidents in the life of Wealth as the very poor. All are necessary for
its existence.
From David Harvey's
A Brief History of Neoliberalism Part 11 – The Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal legacy: a bizarre form of a sinister
political doctrine from which it would be difficult one to escape
But Thatcher had to fight the battle on other fronts. A noble rearguard action against
neoliberal policies was mounted in many a municipality –– Sheffield, the Greater
London Council (which Thatcher had to abolish in order to achieve her broader goals in the
1980s), and Liverpool (where half the local councillors had to be gaoled) formed active centres
of resistance in which the ideals of a new municipal socialism (incorporating many of the new
social movements in the London case) were both pursued and acted upon until they were finally
crushed in the mid-1980s.
She began by savagely cutting back central government funding to the municipalities, but
several of them responded simply by raising property taxes, forcing her to legislate against
their right to do so. Denigrating the progressive labour councils as 'loony lefties' (a phrase
the Conservative-dominated press picked up with relish), she then sought to impose neoliberal
principles through a reform of municipal finance. She proposed a 'poll tax' –– a
regressive head tax rather than a property tax –– which would rein in municipal
expenditures by making every resident pay. This provoked a huge political fight that played a
role in Thatcher's political demise .
Thatcher also set out to privatize all those sectors of the economy that were in public
ownership. The sales would boost the public treasury and rid the government of burdensome
future obligations towards losing enterprises. These state-run enterprises had to be adequately
prepared for privatization, and this meant paring down their debt and improving their
efficiency and cost structures, often through shedding labour.
Their valuation was also structured to offer considerable incentives to private capital
–– a process that was likened by opponents to 'giving away the family silver'. In
several cases subsidies were hidden in the mode of valuation –– water companies,
railways, and even state-run enterprises in the automobile and steel industries held high-value
land in prime locations that was excluded from the valuation of the enterprise as an ongoing
concern.
Privatization and speculative gains on the property released went hand in hand. But the aim
here was also to change the political culture by extending the field of personal and corporate
responsibility and encouraging greater efficiency, individual/corporate initiative, and
innovation. British Aerospace, British Telecom, British Airways, steel, electricity and gas,
oil, coal, water, bus services, railways, and a host of smaller state enterprises were sold off
in a massive wave of privatizations.
Britain pioneered the way in showing how to do this in a reasonably orderly and, for capital,
profitable way. Thatcher was convinced that once these changes had been made they would become
irreversible: hence the haste. The legitimacy of this whole movement was successfully
underpinned, however, by the extensive selling off of public housing to tenants. This vastly
increased the number of homeowners within a decade. It satisfied traditional ideals of
individual property ownership as a working-class dream and introduced a new, and often
speculative, dynamism into the housing market that was much appreciated by the middle classes,
who saw their asset values rise –– at least until the property crash of the early
1990s .
Dismantling the welfare state was, however, quite another thing. Taking on areas such as
education, health care, social services, the universities, the state bureaucracy, and the
judiciary proved difficult. Here she had to do battle with the entrenched and sometimes
traditional upper-middle-class attitudes of her core supporters .
Thatcher desperately sought to extend the ideal of personal responsibility (for example through
the privatization of health care) across the board and cut back on state obligations. She
failed to make rapid headway. There were, in the view of the British public, limits to the
neoliberalization of everything. Not until 2003, for example, did a Labour government,
against widespread opposition, succeed in introducing a fee-paying structure into British
higher education .
In all these areas it proved difficult to forge an alliance of consent for radical change. On
this her Cabinet (and her supporters) were notoriously divided (between 'wets' and 'drys') and
it took several years of bruising confrontations within her own party and in the media to win
modest neoliberal reforms. The best she could do was to try to force a culture of
entrepreneurialism and impose strict rules of surveillance, financial accountability, and
productivity on to institutions, such as universities, that were ill suited to them. Thatcher forged consent through the cultivation of a middle class that relished the joys of
home ownership, private property, individualism, and the liberation of entrepreneurial
opportunities. With working-class solidarities waning under pressure and job structures
radically changing through deindustrialization, middle-class values spread more widely to
encompass many of those who had once had a firm working-class identity .
The opening of Britain to freer trade allowed a consumer culture to flourish, and the
proliferation of financial institutions brought more and more of a debt culture into the centre
of a formerly staid British life. Neoliberalism entailed the transformation of the older
British class structure, at both ends of the spectrum.
Moreover, by keeping the City of London as a central player in global finance it increasingly
turned the heartland of Britain's economy, London and the south-east, into a dynamic centre of
ever-increasing wealth and power. Class power had not so much been restored to any traditional
sector but rather had gathered expansively around one of the key global centres of financial
operations. Recruits from Oxbridge flooded into London as bond and currency traders, rapidly
amassing wealth and power and turning London into one of the most expensive cities in the
world.
While the Thatcher revolution was prepared by the organization of consent within the
traditional middle classes who bore her to three electoral victories, the whole programme,
particularly in her first administration, was far more ideologically driven (thanks largely to
Keith Joseph) by neoliberal theory than was ever the case in the US. While from a solid
middle-class background herself, she plainly relished the traditionally close contacts between
the prime minister's office and the 'captains' of industry and finance. She frequently turned
to them for advice and in some instances clearly delivered them favours by undervaluing state
assets set for privatization . The project to restore class power –– as opposed
to dismantling working-class power –– probably played a more subconscious role in
her political evolution.
The success of Reagan and Thatcher can be measured in various ways. But I think it most useful
to stress the way in which they took what had hitherto been minority political, ideological,
and intellectual positions and made them mainstream. The alliance of forces they helped
consolidate and the majorities they led became a legacy that a subsequent generation of
political leaders found hard to dislodge.
Perhaps the greatest testimony to their success lies in the fact that both Clinton and Blair
found themselves in a situation where their room for manoeuvre was so limited that they could
not help but sustain the process of restoration of class power even against their own better
instincts. And once neoliberalism became that deeply entrenched in the English-speaking world
it was hard to gainsay its considerable relevance to how capitalism in general was working
internationally.
This is not to say, as we shall see, that neoliberalism was merely imposed elsewhere by
Anglo-American influence and power. For as these two case studies amply demonstrate, the
internal circumstances and subsequent nature of the neoliberal turn were quite different in
Britain and the US, and by extension we should expect that internal forces as well as external
influences and impositions have played a distinctive role elsewhere. Reagan and Thatcher seized on the clues they had (from Chile and New York City) and placed
themselves at the head of a class movement that was determined to restore its power. Their
genius was to create a legacy and a tradition that tangled subsequent politicians in a web of
constraints from which they could not easily escape . Those who followed, like Clinton and
Blair, could do little more than continue the good work of neoliberalization, whether they
liked it or not.
Overinvestment in stocks of retires is very common under neoliberalism.
There are several factors here: one is greed cultivated by neoliberal MSM, the second is
insufficient retirement funds (gambling with retirement savings) and the last and not least is
lack of mathematical skills an inability to use Excel for viewing their portfolio and making
informed decisions.
Notable quotes:
"... At the end of 2016, 69 percent of investors in their 60s had at least 40 percent of their 401(k) portfolio invested in stocks, up from 65 percent in 2007, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington. ..."
"... 19 percent had more than 80 percent of their 401(k) invested in stocks in 2016 ..."
"... "We had lousy forecasts in 2008. The housing market was in a tailspin," said 76-year-old John Bauer, who worked for McDonnell Douglas and Boeing Co for 36 years in St. Louis. "Today, employment is way up. The housing market is steady and corporations are flush." ..."
BOSTON (Reuters) - Nancy Farrington, a retiree who turns 75 next month, admits to being in a
constant state of anxiety over the biggest December stock market rout since Herbert Hoover was
president.
"I have not looked at my numbers. I'm afraid to do it," said Farrington, who recently moved
to Charleston, South Carolina, from Boston. "We've been conditioned to stand pat and not panic.
I sure hope my advisers are doing the same."
Retirees are worrying about their nest eggs as this month's sell-off rounds out the worst
year for stocks in a decade, and some fear they are headed for a day of reckoning like the 2008
market meltdown or dot-com crash of the early 2000s.
Retirees have less time to recover from bad investment moves than younger workers. If they
or their advisers panic and sell during a brief downturn, they may lock in a more meager
retirement. But their portfolio could be even more at risk if they hold on too long in a
prolonged decline.
"I have no way of riding it out if that happens," said Farrington. "I can feel the anxiety
in my stomach all the time."
While many industrialized countries still have generous safety nets for retirees, pensions
for U.S. private-sector workers largely have been supplanted by 401(k) accounts and other
private saving plans. That means millions of older Americans are effectively their own pension
managers.
Workers in countries like Belgium, Canada, Germany, France and Italy receive, on average,
about 65 percent of their income replaced by mandatory pensions. In the Netherlands the ratio
of benefits to lifetime average earnings is abut 97 percent, according to a 2017 Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development report.
The OECD says the comparable U.S. replacement rate from Social Security benefits is about 50
percent.
U.S. retirees had watched their private accounts mushroom during a bull stock market that
began in early 2009. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates near zero for years,
enticing retirees deeper into stocks than previous generations as investments like certificates
of deposit, government bonds and money-market funds generated paltry income.
At the end of 2016, 69 percent of investors in their 60s had at least 40 percent of their
401(k) portfolio invested in stocks, up from 65 percent in 2007, according to the Employee
Benefit Research Institute in Washington.
Still, fewer have gone all in on stocks in recent years. Just 19 percent had more than 80
percent of their 401(k) invested in stocks in 2016, down from 30 percent at year-end 2007,
according to nonprofit research group EBRI.
"Nothing has gone wrong, but it seems the market is trying to figure out what could go
wrong," said Brooke McMurray, a 69-year-old New York retiree who says she became a financial
news junkie after the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
"Unlike before, I now know what I own and I constantly read up on my companies," she
said.
The three major U.S. stock indexes have tumbled about 10 percent this month, weighed by
investor worries including U.S.-China trade tensions, a cooling economy and rising interest
rates, and are on track for their worst December since 1931.
The S&P 500 is headed for its worst annual performance since 2008, when Wall Street
buckled during the subprime mortgage crisis. But some are not quite ready to draw
comparisons.
"We had lousy forecasts in 2008. The housing market was in a tailspin," said 76-year-old
John Bauer, who worked for McDonnell Douglas and Boeing Co for 36 years in St. Louis. "Today,
employment is way up. The housing market is steady and corporations are flush."
Still, Bauer said he is uneasy about White House leadership. He and several other retirees
referenced U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin's recent calls to top bankers, which did more
to rattle than assure markets. U.S. stocks tumbled more than 2 percent the day before the
Christmas holiday.
Nevertheless, Bauer is prepared to ride out any market turmoil without making dramatic moves
to his retirement portfolio. "When it's up, I watch it. When it's down, I don't," he said. And there are some factors helping take the sting out of the market rout, said Larry Glazer,
managing partner of Boston-based Mayflower Advisors LLC.
When we reported last week that Imran Awan and his wife had been indicted by a grand jury on
4 counts, including bank fraud and making false statements related to some home equity loans,
we also noted that those charges could simply be placeholders for further developments yet to
come. Now, according to a new report from the
Daily Caller , the more interesting component of the FBI's investigation could be tied to
precisely why New York Democrat Representative Yvette Clarke quietly agreed in early 2016 to
simply write-off $120,000 in missing electronics tied to the Awans.
A chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke quietly agreed in early 2016 to sign
away a $120,000 missing electronics problem on behalf of two former IT aides now suspected of
stealing equipment from Congress, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. Clarke's
chief of staff at the time effectively dismissed the loss and prevented it from coming up in
future audits by signing a form removing the missing equipment from a House-wide tracking
system after one of the Awan brothers alerted the office the equipment was gone. The
Pakistani-born brothers are now at the center of an FBI investigation over their IT work with
dozens of Congressional offices.
The $120,000 figure amounts to about a tenth of the office's annual budget, or enough to
hire four legislative assistants to handle the concerns of constituents in her New York
district. Yet when one of the brothers alerted the office to the massive loss, the chief of
staff signed a form that quietly reconciled the missing equipment in the office budget, the
official told TheDCNF. Abid Awan remained employed by the office for months after the loss of
the equipment was flagged.
If true, of course this new information would seem to support previously reported rumors
that the Awans orchestrated a long-running fraud scheme in which their office would purchase
equipment in a way that avoided tracking by central House-wide administrators and then sell
that equipment for a personal gain while simultaneously defrauding taxpayers of $1,000's of
dollars.
Meanwhile, according to the Daily Caller, CDW Government could have been in on the
scheme.
They're suspected of working with an employee of CDW Government Inc. -- one of the Hill's
largest technology providers -- to alter invoices in order to avoid tracking. The result
would be that no one outside the office would notice if the equipment disappeared, and
investigators think the goal of the scheme was to remove and sell the equipment outside of
Congress.
CDW spokeswoman Kelly Caraher told TheDCNF the company is cooperating with investigators,
and has assurance from prosecutors its employees are not targets of the investigation. "CDW
and its employees have cooperated fully with investigators and will continue to do so,"
Caraher said. "The prosecutors directing this investigation have informed CDW and its
coworkers that they are not subjects or targets of the investigation."
Not surprisingly, Clarke's office apparently felt no need whatsoever to report the $120,000
worth of missing IT equipment to the authorities... it's just taxpayer money afterall...
According to the official who talked to TheDCNF, Clarke's chief of staff did not alert
authorities to the huge sum of missing money when it was brought to the attention of the
office around February of 2016. A request to sign away that much lost equipment would have
been "way outside any realm of normalcy," the official said, but the office did not bring it
to the attention of authorities until months later when House administrators told the office
they were reviewing finances connected to the Awans.
The administrators informed the office that September they were independently looking into
discrepancies surrounding the Awans, including a review of finances connected to the brothers
in all the congressional offices that employed them. The House administrators asked Clarke's
then-chief of staff, Wendy Anderson, whether she had noticed any anomalies, and at that time
she alerted them to the $120,000 write-off, the official told TheDCNF.
Of course, the missing $120,000 covers only Clarke's office. As we've noted before, Imran
and his relatives worked for more than 40 current House members when they were banned from the
House network in February, and have together worked for dozens more in past years so who know
just how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.
Also makes you wonder what else Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Awans might be hiding.
Certainly the decision by Wasserman-Shultz to keep Awan on her taxpayer funded payroll, right
up until he was arrested by the FBI while trying to flee the country, is looking increasingly
fishy with each passing day.
The 911 protection swamp is deep, and profiteers and drug, human traffic, NGO, Body part,
war mongers runs deep.
Please stop calling it building 7 It was the Solomon building.. While you are at it look
at the 1991 Solomon bond scandal which gave the Citi Clinton Mafia all power.... Oh yea
Bush/Clinton cabal did get Saudis to buy Citi stocks and GE plastics. Swampy enough?
120k write off ! You are kidding me?
south40_dreams , 1 year ago
Blackmail was where the real money was at
pissantra , 1 year ago
The real problem here is being completely ignored -- and that is this: the Awan bros were
likely spies (with Wasserman either forced to allow them to spy or the spymaster selling
intel to Pakistan). This would mean that 21+ congress-critters have been completely
compromised. THIS is important NOW, after Trumps Afghan speech -- if he plans to lean on
Pakistan with an "either you stop helping the Taliban or we will destroy you (economically
and/or physically) along with them...."--- these compromised congress-critters will defund
Trumps war.
Freddie , 3 weeks ago
No. Pakistan is the smokescreen. Wasserscum, like Scott Israel, are dual shitizens. This
is, as is Broward County, a MO$$$$ad op. Broward County for vote theft, fraud, attorney
killings, false flags, etc. I would guess a lot more in Congress are owned.
Just watched Congress during Bibi and even ko$$her Porschenko addressing Congrez-zio. They
jump up like circus trained animals to give standing ovations for every word.
Awans and Wasserscum will get passes. George Webb on youtube appears to be doing good work
but it is probably another smoke screen because George has said he is a zioni$$t.
Ban KKiller , 1 year ago
Gee Michelle....you used the Pakistanis for your IT work? What, you like filthy muslims?
Guess so.... When will you confess that you have NO IDEA where your confidential information is? Michelle Lynn Lujan Grisham is an American lawyer and politician who is the U.S.
Representative for New Mexico's 1st congressional district, serving since 2013.
mtanimal , 1 year ago
I didn't know espionage and extortion were tax deductible. Who's her accountant?
Cardinal Fang , 1 year ago
I regret that we may never know the extent of the duplicity of our government with this
ISI stooge.
pc_babe , 1 year ago
with Jeff Session at the helm, you can rest assured you never will
Loanman26 , 1 year ago
My spidy senses are flaring. It was the Russians who stole the equipment. It was comrade Sergei Awan
Blazing in BC , 1 year ago
To whoever is "in charge"....THE STENCH IS UNBEARABLE
runnymede , 1 year ago
Institutionalized unaccountability is what makes the systemic corruption function. As long
as Wasserman's brother is in charge of D.C. prosecutions, nothing will happen. He is the
gatekeeper, which is why DWS, the DNC and the Clinton Crime Machine have not only acted with
impunity, but with extreme contempt. They know they are untouchable. Honest prosecution would
expose D.C. itself as the professional criminal operation that it is, including most Repubs.
There will never be allowed a real look into the rabbit hole, George Webb's outstanding
efforts notwithstanding.
One of We , 1 year ago
President Not Hillary needs to lock some bitches up and expose the Clinton Crime Family
Foundation. Definitely lowering the bar from my lofty hopes but I'd be happy with a partial
roto rootering of the swamp if that's all he has to show for his term.
SRV , 1 year ago
The Awans were working for DWS and The Crook... this fruad is the tip of the
iceberg...
How about doping Blackberry's for 80 House Dems to sync with servers around the Capital
(remember DWS threatening the Capital Police Chief with "consequences" if he didn't give her
back her laptop found in a Capitol Hill building. The Awans were selling the access to most
of the secrets in congress since 2004... this was a spy ring (he has serious ties to
Pakistani ISI).
JiminyCrickets , 1 year ago
As long as Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Brother Steven Wasserman is running the Seth Rich
murder investigation this wont go any where.
gregga777 , 1 year ago
Unfortunately, the Anglo-Zionist FAKE NEWS Media won't cover this story, especially the
links to Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It's anti-Semitic to discuss her criminality or to
criticize her in any other way.
JiminyCrickets , 1 year ago
George Webb's detailed 300+ day investigation indicates the Awans were shipping stolen
high end cars to foreign diplomats and depleted uranium weapons using DNC Diplomatic
Containers.
no surprise that demonRat politicians throughout all legislatures have been guilty of
defrauding the tax payer for decades - in much the same way that demonRat politicians
directly legislate for welfare benefits, free insurance and tax cuts for their family and
friends - at the expense of tax payers - and who also extract tax payer funds via the gravy
train of internships, federal grants etc for their family and friends.
this is how libtard demonRat politicians infect the swamp and then infest it with their
filth and cronyism.
aided and abetted by the MSM.
if only iy was just the demonRats, there might be a chance - however, corrupt republicRats
have been just as guilty.
one day, all this will be out in the open and perhaps demonRat and republicRat voters will
see how they have been voting for corruption all these years.
are we there yet , 1 year ago
Because you are one of the little people.
NoPension , 1 year ago
We are below " little people". We are irrelevant. Just keep paying, slave. Someone correct
me if I'm wrong..... This country was founded on the principle that the individual had
sovereign rights, imbued from God...and was the vessel of ultimate power. Today...these
illegally elected ( it's almost ALL proven a fraud) cocksuckers go in broke and come out the
other end multimillionaires with legal immunity from anything, up to and including murder.
It's high time to water the ******* tree.
"
Nation
states must today be prepared to give up their sovereignty
",
according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
who told an audience in Berlin that sovereign nation states must not listen to the will of their citizens when it comes
to questions of immigration, borders, or even sovereignty.
No this wasn't something Adolf Hitler said many decades ago, this is what German Chancellor Angela Merkel
told
attendants
at an event by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin. Merkel has announced she won't seek re-election
in 2021 and it is clear she is attempting to push the globalist agenda to its disturbing conclusion before she stands
down.
"
In
an orderly fashion of course,
" Merkel joked, attempting to lighten the mood. But Merkel has always had a tin ear
for comedy and she soon launched into a dark speech condemning those in her own party who think Germany should have
listened to the will of its citizens and refused to sign the controversial UN migration pact:
"
There
were [politicians] who believed that they could decide when these agreements are no longer valid because they are
representing The People
".
"
[But]
the people are individuals who are living in a country, they are not a group who define themselves as the [German]
people
," she stressed.
Merkel has previously accused critics of the UN Global Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration of not being patriotic,
saying "
That
is not patriotism, because patriotism is when you include others in German interests and accept win-win situations
".
Her words echo recent comments by the deeply unpopular French President Emmanuel Macron who stated in a Remembrance Day
speech that "
patriotism
is the exact opposite of nationalism [because] nationalism is treason
."
The French president's words were deeply unpopular with the French population and his approval rating nosedived even
further after the comments.
Macron, whose lack of leadership is proving unable to deal with growing protests in France, told the Bundestag that
France and Germany should be at the center of the emerging New World Order.
"
The
Franco-German couple [has]the obligation not to let the world slip into chaos and to guide it on the road to peace"
.
"
Europe
must be stronger and win more sovereignty
," he went on to demand, just like Merkel, that
EU
member states surrender national sovereignty to Brussels
over "
foreign
affairs, migration, and development
" as well as giving "
an
increasing part of our budgets and even fiscal resources".
Obamacare is like at least the fifth time in over a century to introduce affordable
healthcare. Looks like we're going to need at least a sixth attempt to actually do it right.
What was Winston Churchill's saying that Americans will always do the right thing but only
after doing everything else?
Notable quotes:
"... Nixon is not just to the left of today's reps, he's to the left of the so called centrist dems I would call them right wing corporate lackays that never saw a war they didn't like. ..."
Nixon is not just to the left of today's reps, he's to the left of the so called
centrist dems I would call them right wing corporate lackays that never saw a war they didn't
like.
They are several varieties of the Mueller candle. The vendor below said they sold out the
original supply of candles but more will arrive in the future. Pray to St. Mueller!! /s
That should be a St. Mueller vigil candle cover. Something appropriate for a saint
dedicated to blocking the cleansing power of light.
From "The Legend of Saint Mueller":
"And then the Priest of the Temple named Mueller didst procure screens with which to block
out from the sight of the People those necessary sins taken upon themselves by the Priests to
protect that same People from the Forces of Evil."
In later days, that Priest named Mueller
was elected to the ranks of the anointed as the patron of all who cast shade and do other
evils in the service of a Good Cause. His Saint Day is February 29. The prayer to Saint
Mueller begins: "Redactio ad absurdum." His sigil is 'A Candle Under a Basket.'
'Trickle down effect' - the favourite buzzword of neoliberal supporters. I'd like to see
trickle down effect tried at the local pub on the taps by the local mp. Imagine what would
happen. Definitely doesn't pass the pub test.
Spending cuts reduce demand in the economy, for every dollar spend by the govt at the lowest
levels (welfare and essential services) around five to seven dollars of extra economic
activity is generated.
This sustains demand in the economy, and despite what Scott Morrison thinks, demand is
actually the thing that drives investment. Investment will not be made by businesses if there
is no demand, no matter how low the tax on profits is.
If you continually cut govt spending you will dampen down economic activity and
demand.
If you give tax breaks on profit to those who with a low propensity to spend locally (ie
foreign investors and super wealthy) and then impose Austerity to "balance the books" then
you will do a few things:
Profits in the short term will increase as there is a greater intensive to declare profits
as the tax is lower;
The increased profit will be more than likely achieved by reducing investment and and not
giving wage rises. Both are costs deducted before profit is calculated;
Investment in productive businesses will stall as demand falls as austerity measures kick
in;
Investments in speculative / safe haven investments will increase (shares, Property,
artworks etc); This will drive up speculative house prices and price out many ordinary
people.
Wages will stagnate and start to fall in real terms; Demand will stagnate and fall.
Businesses will cut back on investment and wages.
Inequality will worsen; and
Social discontent rise.
The cut taxes and impose austerity mantra is the fatuous economic and social thinking we
have come to expect from from the neo-cons.
IT MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER
It never was going to work long terms. Only the massive con job by the media and
politicians made it seem even plausible.
If you want evidence of a con job by politicians you need look no further than the
assumption made that "all government spending is worthless" made by scot Morrison and co.
Even with this ridiculous assumption he was only able to get even one of five scenarios to
give a 0.5% boost to GDP in ten years time.
If he actually subtracted any negative effect of cutting govt spending, even without any
multiplier effect, then there was no scenario where the tax cuts made any sort of economic
sense.
And of course the MSM which is owned by the super wealth elite, will only continue to put
out pro neo-cons propaganda and ruthlessly degenerate any opposition viewpoint.
This is actually ironic as capitalism actually works best for all, including by the way
the super wealthy, when governments continually redistribute wealth downwards.
Economic well-being is something that thrives very well with social well-being.
Capitalism will fail catastrophically if governments continue to redistribute wealth
upwards.
Social dislocation is the probable outcome of the current ideological trajectory.
After the US government elicited outrage from the Chinese due to its attempts to convince
its allies to bar the use of equipment made by telecoms supplier Huawei, President Trump is
apparently weighing whether to take another dramatic antagonistic step that could further
complicate trade negotiations less than two weeks before a US delegation is slated to head to
Beijing.
According to
Reuters , the White House is reportedly considering an executive order that would ban US
companies from using equipment made by Huawei and ZTE, claiming that both companies work "at
the behest of the US government" and that their equipment could be used to spy on US citizens.
The order would invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to order the Department
of Commerce to prohibit the purchase of equipment from telecoms manufacturers that could
threaten national security. Though it wouldn't explicitly name Huawei or ZTE, the ban would
arise from Commerce's interpretation. The IEEA allows the president the authority to regulate
commerce in the face of a national emergency. Back in August, Congress passed and Trump signed
a bill banning the use of ZTE and Huawei equipment by the US government and government
contractors. The executive order has reportedly been under consideration for eight months,
since around the time that the US nearly blocked US companies from selling parts to ZTE, which
sparked a mini-diplomatic crisis, which
ended with a deal allowing ZTE to survive, but pay a large fine.
The feud between the US and Huawei has obviously been escalating in recent months as the US
has embarked on an
"extraordinary influence campaign" to convince its allies to ban equipment made by both
companies, and the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada has also blossomed into a
diplomatic crisis of sorts.
But the real reason issuing a ban on both companies' equipment is seen as a priority is
because Huawei's lead in the race to build 5G technology is making its products more appealing
to global telecoms providers. Rural telecoms providers in the US - those with fewer than
100,000 subscribers - are particularly reliant on equipment made by both companies. They've
expressed concerns that a ban would require them to rip out and scrap their equipment at an
immense cost.
Rural operators in the United States are among the biggest customers of Huawei and ZTE,
and fear the executive order would also require them to rip out existing Chinese-made
equipment without compensation. Industry officials are divided on whether the administration
could legally compel operators to do that.
While the big U.S. wireless companies have cut ties with Huawei in particular, small rural
carriers have relied on Huawei and ZTE switches and other equipment because they tend to be
less expensive.
The company is so central to small carriers that William Levy, vice president for sales of
Huawei Tech USA, is on the board of directors of the Rural Wireless Association.
The RWA represents carriers with fewer than 100,000 subscribers. It estimates that 25
percent of its members had Huawei or ZTE equipment in their networks, it said in a filing to
the Federal Communications Commission earlier this month.
As Sputnik
pointed out, the news of the possible ban followed questions from Defense Secretary Gavin
Williamson, who expressed serious concerns over the involvement of Huawei in Britain's 5G
network, suggesting that Beijing sometimes acted "in a malign way." But even if it loses access
to the US market, Huawei's global expansion and its leadership in the 5G space are expected to
continue to bolster profits and growth. Currently, Huawei sells equipment in 170 countries.
According to a statement from the company's rotating chairman, the company's full-year sales
are expected to increase 21% to $108.5 billion this year. The company has signed 26 contracts
globally to supply 5G equipment for commercial use, leaving it well ahead of its US rivals.
'Trickle down effect' - the favourite buzzword of neoliberal supporters. I'd like to see
trickle down effect tried at the local pub on the taps by the local mp. Imagine what would
happen. Definitely doesn't pass the pub test.
Compare with "That's set to worsen in the new year, experts told CNBC on Monday, pointing to
risks including the Federal Reserve likely raising interest rates further and mounting concerns
about a global economic slowdown." The problem iether expecting rally or expecting further
downturn is that stock prices are so detached from reality that everything is possible.
Wall Street will see a "relief rally" in stocks that would offer a better selling
opportunity for investors, technical analyst Katie Stockton says.
The rally would last for several weeks and would be up to 8 percent higher than where
the markets closed on Friday, she says.
Obamacare is like at least the fifth time in over a century to introduce affordable
healthcare. Looks like we're going to need at least a sixth attempt to actually do it right.
What was Winston Churchill's saying that Americans will always do the right thing but only
after doing everything else?
Notable quotes:
"... Nixon is not just to the left of today's reps, he's to the left of the so called centrist dems I would call them right wing corporate lackays that never saw a war they didn't like. ..."
Nixon is not just to the left of today's reps, he's to the left of the so called
centrist dems I would call them right wing corporate lackays that never saw a war they didn't
like.
I still had some things I didn't talk about in Sunday's Trump Derangement
International , about how the European press have found out that they, like the US MSM, can
get lots of viewers and readers simply by publishing negative stories about Donald Trump. The
US president is an attention magnet, as long as you only write things about him designed to
make him look bad.
The Guardian is only too happy to comply. They ran a whole series of articles on Sunday to
do juts that: try to make Trump look bad. Note that the Guardian editorial team that okayed the
articles is the same as the one that allowed
the fake Assange/Manafort one , so their credibility is already shot to pieces. It's the
magic triangle of today's media profits: spout non-stop allegations against Russia, Trump and
Julian Assange, and link them when and where you can. It doesn't matter if what you say is true
or not.
Anyway, all the following is from the Guardian, all on December 23. First off, Adam Gabbatt
in New York, who has painstakingly researched how Trump's businesses, like Trump Tower and the
Trump store, don't appear to have sufficiently (as per him) switched from Happy Holidays to
Merry Christmas. Sherlock Holmes would have been proud. A smash hit there Adam, bring out the
handcuffs.
During Donald Trump's presidential campaign he talked often about his determination to win
one particular war. A war that had been raging for years, he said. Specifically: the war on
Christmas. But despite Trump's repeated claims that "people are saying Merry Christmas again"
instead of the more inclusive "happy holidays", there are several places where the Christmas
greeting is absent: Trump's own businesses.
The Trump Store, for example. Instead of a Christmas gift guide – which surely would
be more in keeping with the president's stated desire for the phrase to be used – the
store offers a holiday gift guide. "Shop our Holiday Gift Guide and find the perfect present
for the enthusiast on your list," the online store urges. "Carefully curated to celebrate the
most wonderful time of year with truly unique gifts found only at Trump Store. Add a bow on
top with our custom gift wrapping. Happy Holiday's!"
The use of the phrase "Happy Holiday's" [sic] in Trump marketing would seem particularly
egregious. The long-standing "War-on-Christmas" complaint from the political right is that
stores use the phrase "Happy Holidays", rather than specifically mentioning the Christian
celebration. It is offered as both an example of political correctness gone mad, and as an
effort to erase Christianity from the US.
It's just, I think that if Trump had personally interfered to make sure there were Merry
Christmas messages all around, you would have remarked that as president, he's not allowed to
be personally involved in his businesses. But yeah, you know, just to keep the negativity
going, it works, no matter how fluffy and hollow.
Second, still on December 23, is Tom McCarthy for the Guardian in New York, who talks about
Robert Mueller's phenomenal successes. Mueller charged 34 people so far. In a case that
involves "this complexity which has international implications, aspects relying on the
intelligence community, complicated cyber components". It really says that.
And yes, that's how many people view this. What do they care that Mueller's original mandate
was to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and 'Russians', and that he has not proven
any collusion at all so far, not even with 34 people charged? What do they care? It looks like
Trump is guilty of something, anything, after all, and that's all the circus wants.
One measure of special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutorial success in 2018 is the list
of former top Donald Trump aides brought to justice: Michael Cohen pleaded guilty, a jury
convicted Paul Manafort, a judge berated Michael Flynn. Another measure is the tally of new
defendants that Mueller's team charged (34), the number of new guilty pleas he netted (five)
and the amount of money he clawed back through tax fraud cases ($48m).
Yet another measure might judge Mueller's pace compared with previous independent
prosecutors. "I would refer to it as a lightning pace," said Barb McQuade, a University of
Michigan law professor and former US attorney. "In a case of this complexity which has
international implications, aspects relying on the intelligence community, complicated cyber
components – to indict that many people that quickly is really impressive work."
But there's perhaps a more powerful way to measure Mueller's progress in his investigation
into Russian interference in the 2016 US election and links between Moscow and the Trump
campaign; that's by noticing how the targets of his investigation have changed their postures
over the course of 2018, from defiance to docility – or in the case of Trump himself,
from defiance to extreme, hyperventilating defiance.
In reality, you would be at least as correct if you would claim that Robert Mueller's
investigation has been an abject failure. Not one iota of collusion has been proven after 20
months and $20 million in funds have been used. And any serious investigation of Washington's
culture of fixers and lobbyists would land at least 34 people who have committed acts that
border on or over illegality. And in a matter of weeks, for a few hundred bucks.
Third, still on December 23, is Julian Borger in Washington, who's been elected to convey
the image of chaos. Trump Unleashed, says our modern day Shakespeare. With Jim Mad Dog Mattis
characterized as ".. the last independently minded, globally respected, major figure left in
the administration".. . Again, it really says that.
Because woe the man who tries to bring US troops home, or even promises to do so a few days
before Christmas. For pulling out America's finest, Donald Trump is being portrayed as
something eerily close to the antichrist. That truly is the world on its head. Bringing troops
home to their families equals chaos.
Look, guys, if Trump has been guilty of criminal behavior, the US justice system should be
able to find that out and convict him for it. But that's not what this is about anymore. A
million articles have been written, like these ones in the Guardian, with the sole intention,
evidence being scarce to non-existent, of smearing him to the extent that people see every
subsequent article in the light of a man having previously been smeared.
The US stumbled into the holiday season with a sense of unravelling, as a large chunk of
the federal government ground to a halt, the stock market crashed and the last independently
minded, globally respected, major figure left in the administration announced he could no
longer work with the president. The defense secretary, James Mattis, handed in his
resignation on Thursday, over Donald Trump's abrupt decision to pull US troops out of
Syria.
On Saturday another senior official joined the White House exodus. Brett McGurk, the
special envoy for the global coalition to defeat Isis and the US official closest to
America's Kurdish allies in the region, was reported to have handed in his resignation on
Friday. That night, senators flew back to Washington from as far away as Hawaii for emergency
talks aimed at finding a compromise on Trump's demand for nearly $6bn for a wall on the
southern border, a campaign promise which has become an obsession.
Now look at the next headline, December 23, Graeme Wearden, Guardian, and ask yourself if
it's really Trump saying he doesn't agree with the rate hikes that fuels the fears, or whether
it's the hikes themselves. And also ask yourself: when Trump and Mnuchin both deny reports of
Trump firing Powell, why do journalists keep saying the opposite? Because they want to fuel
some fears?
From where I'm sitting, it looks perfectly logical that Trump says he doesn't think Powell's
decisions are good for the US economy. And it doesn't matter which one of the two turns out to
be right: Trump isn't the only person who disagrees with the Fed hikes.
The main suspect for 2019 market turmoil is the inevitable fallout from the Fed's QE under
Bernanke and Yellen. And there is something to be said for Powell trying to normalize rates,
but there's no doubt that may hasten, if not cause, turmoil. Blaming it on Trump not agreeing
with Jay Powell is pretty much as left field as it gets.
Over the weekend, a flurry of reports claimed Donald Trump had discussed the possibility
of firing the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell. Such an unprecedented move would
trigger further instability in the markets, which have already had their worst year since the
2008 crisis. US officials scrambled to deny Trump had suggested ousting Powell, who was
appointed by the president barely a year ago.
The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, tweeted that he had spoken to the president, who
insisted he "never suggested firing" Powell, and did not believe he had the right to do this
. However, Trump also declared – via Mnuchin – that he "totally disagrees" with
the Fed's "absolutely terrible" policy of raising interest rates and unwinding its
bond-buying stimulus programme, piling further pressure on the US's independent central
bank.
And now, in the only article in the Guardian series that's December 24, not 23, by Victoria
Bekiempis and agencies, the plunging numbers in the stock markets are Trump's fault, too.
Top Democrats have accused Donald Trump of "plunging the country into chaos" as top
officials met to discuss a growing rout in stock markets caused in part by the president's
persistent attacks on the Federal Reserve and a government shutdown. "It's Christmas Eve and
President Trump is plunging the country into chaos," the two top Democrats in Congress, House
speaker nominee Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, wrote in a joint
statement on Monday. "The stock market is tanking and the president is waging a personal war
on the Federal Reserve – after he just fired the Secretary of Defense."
Trump criticized the Federal Reserve on Monday, describing it as the "only problem" for
the US economy, even as top officials convened the "plunge protection team" forged after the
1987 crash to discuss the growing rout in stock markets. The crisis call on Monday between US
financial regulators and the US treasury department failed to assure markets, and stocks fell
again amid concern about slowing economic growth, the continuing government shutdown, and
reports that Trump had discussed firing Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.
The last one is from one Jonathan Jones, again December 23, again for the Guardian. And it
takes the top award in the narrative building contest.
Again, the Guardian editorial team that okayed this article is still the same as the one
that allowed the fake Assange/Manafort one, an editorial team that sees no problem in making
things up in order to smear people. To portray Trump, Assange and anyone who's had the
misfortune of being born in Russia as suspicious if not outright criminal.
But look at what Jones has to say, and what Guardian editor-in-chief Kathy Viner and her ilk
allowed and pressured him to say. He wants to have a say in how Trump should dress (seasonal
knitwear), he evokes the image of Nazi architect Albert Speer for no reason at all, and then
it's a matter of mere inches until you arrive at Trump as a king, an emperor, an inner
tyrant.
"He's in a tuxedo!", Like that's a bad thing for Christmas. "She's in white!". Oh dear, call
the pope. If both Trumps would have put on Christmas sweaters in front of a fire, the writer
would have found something negative in that.
The absence of intimacy in the Trumps' official Christmas portrait freezes the heart. Can
it be that hard to create a cosy image of the presidential couple, perhaps in front of a
roaring hearth, maybe in seasonal knitwear? Or is this quasi-dictatorial image exactly what
the president wants to project? Look on my Christmas trees, ye mighty, and despair! If so, it
fuels suspicions that it is only the checks and balances of a 230-year-old constitution that
are keeping America from the darkest of political fates. You couldn't create a creepier
Yuletide scene if you tried. Multiple Christmas trees are currently a status symbol for the
wealthy, but this picture shows the risks.
Instead of a homely symbol of midwinter cheer, these disciplined arboreal ranks with their
uniform decorations are arrayed like massed soldiers or colossal columns designed by Albert
Speer. The setting is the Cross Hall in the White House and, while the incumbent president
cannot be held responsible for its architecture, why heighten its severity with such rigid,
heartless seasonal trappings? Everything here communicates cold, empty magnificence. Tree
lights that are as frigid as icicles are mirrored in a cold polished floor. Equally frosty
illuminations are projected on the ceiling. Instead of twinkling fairy magic, this lifeless
lighting creates a sterile, inhuman atmosphere.
You can't imagine kids playing among these trees or any conceivable fun being had by
anyone. It suggests the micromanaged, corporate Christmas of a Citizen Kane who has long
since lost touch with the ordinary, warm pleasures of real life. In the centre of this
disturbing piece of conceptual art stand Donald and Melania Trump. He's in a tuxedo, she's
wearing white – and not a woolly hat in sight. Their formal smartness adds to the
emotional numbness of the scene. Trump's shark-like grin has nothing generous or friendly
about it. He seems to want to show off his beautiful wife and his fantastic home rather than
any of the cuddly holiday spirit a conventional politician might strive to share at this
time.
It begs a question: how can a man who so glaringly lacks anything like a common touch be
such a successful "populist"? What can a midwestern voter find in this image to connect with?
Perhaps that's the point. After more than two centuries of democracy, Trump is offering the
US people a king, or emperor. In this picture, he gives full vent to his inner tyrant. If
this portrait contains any truth about the state of America and the world, may Santa help us
all.
I realize that you may be tired of the whole story. I realize you may have been caught in
the anti-Trump narrative. And I am by no means a Trump fan. But I will keep on dragging you
back to this. Because the discussion should not be based on a handful of media moguls not
liking Trump. It should not be based on innuendo and smear. If Trump is to be convicted, it
must be on evidence.
And there is no such evidence. Robert Mueller has charged 34 people, but none with what his
mandate was based on, none with Russia collusion. This means that the American political
system, and democracy itself, is under severe threat by the very media that are supposed to be
its gate keepers.
None of this is about Trump, or about whether you like him or not, or even if he's a shady
character or not. Instead, it's about the influence the media have on how our opinions and
ideas about people and events are being shaped on a daily basis.
And once you acknowledge that your opinions of Trump, Putin et al, even without any proof of
a connection between them, are actively being molded by the press you expect to inform you
about the truth behind what goes on, you will have to acknowledge, too, that you are a captive
of forces that use your gullibility to make a profit off you.
If our media need to make up things all the time about who's guilty of what, because our
justice systems are incapable of that, then we have a problem so enormous we may not be able to
overcome it in our present settings.
Alternatively, if we trust our justice systems to deliver true justice, we don't need a
hundred articles a day to tell us how Trump or Putin are such terrible threats to our world.
Our judges will tell us, not our journalists or media who are only in it for a profit.
I can say: "let's start off 2019 trying to leave prejudice behind", and as much as that is
needed and you may agree with me, it's no use if you don't realize to what extent your views of
the world have been shaped by prejudice.
I see people reacting to the star writer at Der Spiegel who wrote a lot about Trump, being
exposed as a fraud. I also see people trying to defend Julian Assange from the Guardian article
about his alleged meetings with Paul Manafort, that was an obvious big fat lie (the truth is
Manafort talked to Ecuador to help them 'sell' Assange to the US).
But reacting to the very obvious stuff is not enough . The echo chamber distorts the truth
about Trump every single day, and at least six times on Sunda y, as this essay of mine shows.
It's just that after two years of this going on 24/7, it is perceived as the normal.
Everyone makes money dumping on the Donald, it's a proven success formula, so why would the
Guardian and Der Spiegel stay behind? They'd only hurt their own bottom line.
It has nothing to do with journalism, though, or news. It's smear and dirt, the business
model of the National Enquirer. That's how far our once truthful media have fallen.
All these journalists are influenced and manipulated by 'Australian-American Leadership
Dialogue', 'Atlantikbrücke', Open Society Foundation money etc. Wars boost the NYSE
because many weapons manufacturers are listed there.
If the journalists weren't manipulated all 2018 compilations would not have omitted the
World Cup in Russia.
"... 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. ..."
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.
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.
This article is excellent and well overdue. All we need to do now is to wrench control of our
mainstream media out of the hands of Corporate (foreign) control. We are being told to vote
against ourselves in order for the few corporate elite to accrue massive wealth and
power over us.
MEDIA laws need to be very strict with very, very severe financial penalties for bias and
propaganda. Certainly remove this concept of self regulation whereby they sit on their own
disciplinary boards. Raise the standards of our media and allow us to retrieve some semblance
of our democracy.
Without media control, how would corporations be able to manipulate and propagandise the
populace with their own vested interests.
That is why governments are doing corporate bidding and getting fascist style surveillance
of its people, in order to counteract the ability of the people to gain knowledge through the
internet and vote against corporate control of our democracy.... nothing to do with terrorism
which was caused mostly by corporate foreign extraction of wealth through weapon sales;
resource acquisition, etc.
It is back to control of our mainstream media by the very (foreign) corporations that are
sucking out our wealth and putting nothing back.
Corporate media ia all powerful. They insidiously permeate the populace with corporate
views of Australia's financial and economy; infrastructure and every aspect of social
life from birth to euthanasia with racism and religion thrown in for good measure.
Should a politician have the audacity to act against their corporate interests, they do
not last long, without exclusions - PMs Whitlam and Rudd being prime examples.
This current mob of gutless underachieving dinosaur neo con nutters in govt, are
completely turning over Australia to these Corporate (foreign) parasites and our prospect is
not looking good.
Within no time we will be a Corporatocracy (as is the USA) and along with that comes 1%
owning 99% of the wealth; third world poverty; crime through the roof; drugs out of control;
public health and education a joke; public services non existent; legal system in disarray
and entrenched with bias and inequity.
"... Her targets range from pharmaceutical companies, which uphold a heartless version of market rationality, to internet companies with monopoly power such as Google and Facebook. Her most compelling example, however, is the workings of the financial sector, and its Friedman-style obsession with "shareholder value maximization," which has infected the corporate sector as a whole. ..."
"... Reading Mazzucato's book, it is hard not to wonder just how "neoliberal" ideas and values, which uphold the rationality of the market and exclude notions of the common good, came to shape the conduct of individuals and institutions. ..."
"... In these narratives, neoliberalism appears indistinguishable from laissez-faire. In " Globalists : The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism," Quinn Slobodian briskly overturns this commonplace view. Neoliberals, he argues, are people who believe that "the market does not and cannot take care of itself," and indeed neoliberalism is a form of regulation -- one that insulates the markets from vagaries of mass democracy and economic nationalism. ..."
Ideas once dismissed as the ravings of the loony left are breaking into the mainstream of economic and intellectual debate. We live
in an age of political earthquakes: That much, at least, seemed clear from newspaper headlines nearly every day of 2018. But intellectual
tectonic plates were also shifting throughout the year, with ideas once dismissed as the ravings of the loony left breaking into
the mainstream.
A Western consensus quickly formed after the collapse of communist regimes in 1989. It was widely believed by newspaper editorialists
as well as politicians and businessmen that there was no alternative to free markets, which alone could create prosperity.
The government's traditional attempts to regulate corporations and banks and redistribute wealth through taxes were deemed a problem.
As the economist Milton Friedman
put it , "The
world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests."
Neither individuals nor companies needed to worry much about inequality or social justice. In Friedman's influential view, "There
is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits."
Political fiascos in the West, following its largest financial crisis -- events accompanied by the emergence of China, a Communist-run
nation-state, as a major economic power, as well as an unfolding environmental calamity -- have utterly devastated these post-1989
assumptions about free markets and the role of governments.
Confessions to this effect come routinely from disenchanted believers. Take, for instance, Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist
of the International Monetary Fund, who recently posed the once-blasphemous question: "What comes after capitalism?"
Blanchard was commenting on the recent demonstrations in France against President Emmanuel Macron. He
rightly described a global impasse: "Given
the political constraints on redistribution and the constraints from capital mobility, we may just not be able to alleviate inequality
and insecurity enough to prevent populism and revolutions."
Nor, for that matter, can we work towards a greener economy. In any case, Blanchard's admission confirms that we inhabit, intellectually
and culturally, a radical new reality -- one in which "neoliberalism," a word previously confined to academic seminars, has entered
rap lyrics , and stalwarts of the establishment
sound like activists of Occupy Wall Street.
Thus, Martin Wolf, respected columnist for the Financial Times, recently
concluded , if "reluctantly," that
"capitalism is substantially broken." This year, many books with titles such as "The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death
of Competition" and "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" blamed an unjust economic system and its beneficiaries
for the rise of demagogues.
It is becoming clear that the perennial conflict between democracy, which promises equality, and capitalism, which generates inequality,
has been aggravated by a systemic neglect of some fundamental issues.
In " The Value of
Everything : Making and Taking in the Global Economy," Mariana Mazzucato bracingly focuses our attention on them. Mazzucato
has previously written about the innovative role of governments in the modern economy. In her new book, she asks us to distinguish
between people who create value and those who merely extract it, often destroying it in the process.
Her targets range from pharmaceutical companies, which uphold a heartless version of market rationality, to internet companies
with monopoly power such as Google and Facebook. Her most compelling example, however, is the workings of the financial sector, and
its Friedman-style obsession with "shareholder value maximization," which has infected the corporate sector as a whole.
Reading Mazzucato's book, it is hard not to wonder just how "neoliberal" ideas and values, which uphold the rationality of the
market and exclude notions of the common good, came to shape the conduct of individuals and institutions.
In the conventional account of neoliberalism, Friedman looms large, along with his disciple Ronald Reagan, and Britain's Margaret
Thatcher. Much has been written about how the IMF's structural adjustment programs in Asia and Africa, and "shock-therapy" for post-Communist
states, entrenched orthodoxies about deregulation and privatization.
In these narratives, neoliberalism appears indistinguishable from laissez-faire. In "
Globalists : The
End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism," Quinn Slobodian briskly overturns this commonplace view. Neoliberals, he argues, are
people who believe that "the market does not and cannot take care of itself," and indeed neoliberalism is a form of regulation --
one that insulates the markets from vagaries of mass democracy and economic nationalism.
Beginning with the breakup of the Hapsburg Empire, Slobodian's lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group
of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules.
Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well in our own time. We stand in the ruins of their project, confronting political,
economic and environmental crises of unprecedented scale and size.
It is imperative to chart our way out of them, steering clear of the diversions offered by political demagogues. One can only
hope that the new year will bring more intellectual heresies of the kind Mazzucato's and Slobodian's books embody. We need them urgently
to figure out what comes after neoliberalism.
"... The political strategy behind these contradictions is simple: it is difficult to criticise government spending on health and education, or popular regulations like consumer protection and limits on executive pay. So why not just criticise all government spending and all ..."
After the mining boom and decades of economic growth, how can Australia be broke?
Gina Rinehart was becoming the world's richest woman those on the minimum wage were falling further and
further behind
Australia just experienced one of the biggest mining booms in
world history. But even at the peak of that boom, there was no talk of the wonderful opportunity we finally had to invest in world-class
mental health or domestic violence crisis services.
Nor was there much talk from either major party about how the wealth of the
mining boom gave us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in remote Indigenous communities. Nope, the peak of the mining boom
was not the time to help those who had missed out in decades past, but the Howard government thought it was a great time to introduce
permanent tax cuts for high-income earners. These, of course, are the tax cuts that caused the budget deficits we have today.
Millions of tonnes of explosives were used during the mining boom to build more than 100 new mines, but it wasn't just prime farmland
that was blasted away in the boom, it was access to the middle class. At the same time that Gina Rinehart was becoming the world's
richest woman on the back of rising iron ore prices, those on the minimum wage were falling further and further behind their fellow
Australians.
Like Joe Hockey, Rinehart saw the problem of inequality as having more to do with the character of the poor than
with the rules of the game: "If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain. Do something
to make more money yourself – spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."
Privatisation is deeply unpopular with voters. Here's how to end it | John Quiggin
Australia isn't poor; it is rich beyond the imagining of anyone living in the 1970s or 80s. But so much of that
new wealth has been vacuumed up by a few, and so little of that new wealth has been paid in tax, that the public has
been convinced that ours is a country struggling to pay its bills.
Convincing Australians that our nation is poor and that our governments "can't afford" to provide the level of services they provided
in the past has not just helped to lower our expectations of our public services and infrastructure, it has helped to lower our expectations
of democracy itself. A public school in Sydney has had to ban kids from running in the playground because it was so overcrowded.
Trains have become so crowded at peak hours that many people, especially the frail and the disabled, are reluctant to use them. And
those who have lost their jobs now wait for hours on the phone when they reach out to Centrelink for help.
Although people with low expectations are easier to con, fomenting cynicism about democracy comes at a long-term cost. Indeed,
as the current crop of politicians is beginning to discover, people with low expectations feel they have nothing to lose.
As more and more people live with the poverty and job insecurity that flow directly from neoliberal welfare and industrial relations
policies, the scare campaigns run so successfully by the likes of the Business Council of Australia have lost their sting. Scary
stories about the economy become like car alarms: once they attracted attention, but now they simply annoy those forced to listen.
'If governments can't make a difference and all politicians are corrupt, why not vote for outsiders?
After decades of hearing conservative politicians say that government is the problem, a growing number of conservative
voters no longer care which major party forms government. If governments can't make a difference and all politicians
are corrupt, why not vote for outsiders like Jacqui Lambie or Clive Palmer? There is perhaps no clearer evidence of
the short-termism of the Liberal and National parties today than their willingness to fan the flames of anti-politician
rhetoric without considering that it is their own voters who are most likely to heed the message.
Back when he was leading the campaign against Australia becoming a republic, Tony Abbott famously argued that you couldn't trust
politicians to choose our head of state. And more recently, in campaigning against marriage equality, Minister Matt Canavan was featured
in a television advertisement laughing at the thought that we could trust politicians.
Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world
Convincing Australians that the country was broke also helped convince us that we have no choice but to sell the
family silver. But of course we have a choice. Just as there is no right answer as to whether it's better to rent
a home or buy one, there is no right answer to whether it's better for governments to own the electricity supply,
the postal service or the water supply, or none of these things.
Different governments in different countries make different decisions at different points in time. 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 marketeers in Australia can see alternatives.
Consider stadiums, for example. The NSW Liberal government has a long track record of being pro-privatisation. It has sold off
billions of dollars' worth of electricity, water and health infrastructure. But when it comes to football stadiums, it has no ideological
problem with public ownership, nor any fiscal inhibition about spending billions of taxpayers' dollars.
In 2016 the NSW Liberal government spent $220m buying back ANZ Stadium, built in the 1990s with taxpayer funds at a cost of $690m
and subsequently sold to Stadium Australia Group. Having bought back the stadium, the NSW government plans to spend hundreds of millions
of dollars refurbishing it. That same money could build a lot of school science labs, domestic violence crisis centres or skate parks
for the bored kids the shopping malls don't want scratching up their marble stairs. For the past 30 years, Australians have been
told that we can't afford high-quality public services, that public ownership of assets is inefficient, and that the pursuit of free
markets through deregulation would create wealth and prosperity for all. But none of this is true.
While the policy agenda
of neoliberalism has never been broadly applied in Australia, for 30 years the language
of neoliberalism has been applied to everything from environmental protection to care of the disabled. The result of the partial
application of policy and the broad application of language is not just a yawning gap between those with the greatest wealth and
those with the greatest need, but a country that is now riven by demographic, geographic and racial divides.
Cutting the budget deficit is very important – except when it isn't
Australian politics
isn't about ideology, it's about interests. The clearest proof of that claim is that neoliberal ideas such
as deregulation were never aimed at powerful interest groups like the pharmacists or the gambling industry. And savage spending cuts
were never aimed at subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry or private health insurers.
Tony Abbott, who claimed to have a philosophical problem with carbon taxing, once proposed a 20% increase in the tobacco excise
Just 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. Here are some examples:
John Howard said he was obsessed with deregulating the labour market, but introduced 762 pages of labour-market regulation,
which he entitled WorkChoices. He didn't deregulate the labour market; he re-regulated it in his preferred form. He knew that
government decisions matter. Similarly, the Abbott government declared it was waging a war on red tape, yet the Turnbull government
is determined to pass new laws restricting unions and NGOs.
If there is one thing that neoliberals really seem to believe, it is that reducing the budget deficit is very, very important.
Except when it isn't. The political and business leaders who said we needed to slash welfare spending because we had a "budget
emergency" are currently advocating a $65bn tax cut for business – even though the deficit is bigger now than it was at the
time of the alleged emergency.
The Productivity Commission and state treasuries spent years advocating the deregulation and privatisation of the electricity
industry – and succeeded in creating a "free market" system governed by 5,000 pages of electricity market rules. Electricity
is too dangerous and too important to be deregulated, and those pushing for deregulation always knew that. They didn't want
a free market; they simply wanted a market, one in which the government played a smaller role and the private sector made large
profits selling an essential service for much higher prices than the government ever charged.
The NSW government requires NGOs and disability service providers to compete with each other but, when it sold Port Botany
and the Port of Newcastle, it structured the sales to ensure that Newcastle could not compete with Port Botany for the landing
of the millions of containers that arrive by ship each year. While "competition policy" is applied to the vulnerable, those
buying billion-dollar assets are protected from those same forces of competition.
To be clear, there has been no obsession among the political elite with the neoliberal goals of reducing government spending,
regulation or tax collection in Australia over the past three decades. None. They didn't mean a word of it. While there may have
been economists, commentators and even business leaders who sincerely believed in those goals, it is clear from their actions, as
distinct from their words, that John Howard, Tony Abbott and even the former head of the Business Council of Australia Tony Shepherd,
the man tasked with running Abbott's National Commission of Audit, had no principled objection to spending large amounts of public
money on things they liked spending large amounts of public money on. Indeed, in his speakers' agency profile, Tony Shepherd brags
about his ability to get public money for private ventures:
It is no mean feat to convince governments to support private sector proposals, but as former prime minister, the honourable
Paul Keating, said, "Tony managed to get more money out of my government than any other person I can recall."
Hundreds of new pages of regulation now govern the conduct of charities. Billions of taxpayers' dollars have been spent by "small
government" politicians on everything from television ads for innovation to subsidies for marriage counselling. And Tony Abbott,
who claimed to have a philosophical problem with carbon taxing, once proposed a 20% increase in the tobacco excise.
The political strategy behind these contradictions is simple: it is difficult to criticise government spending on health and education,
or popular regulations like consumer protection and limits on executive pay. So why not just criticise all government spending and
all
red tape in general? Once you have convinced the public that all government spending is inefficient, you can set about
cutting spending on your enemies and retaining it for your friends. And once you convince people that all regulation is bad, you
can set about removing consumer protections while retaining the laws that protect the TV industry, the gambling industry, the pharmaceutical
industry and all your other friends.
Cover of Dead Right by Richard Denniss, Quarterly Essay.
When powerful groups want subsidies, we are told they will create jobs. When powerless groups want better funding
for domestic violence shelters or after-school reading groups, they are told of the need to reduce the budget deficit.
When powerful groups demand new regulations, we are told it will provide business with certainty, but when powerless
groups demand new regulations, they are told it will create sovereign risk.
Ideology has a bad name these days, but it simply means a "system of ideas and ideals." By that definition, it is possible to
think of neoliberalism as an ideology focused on the idea that market forces are superior to government decision-making. But while
large segments of Australian politics and business have draped themselves, and their policy preferences, in the cloak of neoliberal
ideas and ideals, in reality to call them "ideologues" is to flatter them. They lack the consistency and strength of principle to
warrant the title.
Tue 16 Oct 2018
13.00 EDT
Last modified on Tue 16 Oct 2018
19.11 EDT
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Australian economic growth has been a 'standout' says Bernie Fraser, but too many have missed the benefits.
Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/EPA
Neoliberalism has caused "misery and social polarisation" yet remains in vogue with the Coalition government,
according to the economist Bernie Fraser.
The former Treasury secretary and Reserve Bank governor has made the
comments in a presentation circulated to participants of the Australia Institute's revenue summit to be held in
Canberra on Wednesday.
Michael Keating, a former secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, will also use the summit
to raise doubts about the Morrison government's budget forecasts.
Australia's housing boom is not heading for a soft landing. How did we get
here? | Greg Jericho
Read more
In the background notes for Fraser's speech, seen by Guardian Australia, he says that Australia's 27 consecutive
years of economic growth is a "standout", "Winx-like" performance.
But the record deserves only "qualified applause" because "too many Australians remain unemployed, under-employed,
underskilled, underpaid and lack job security".
Fraser warns that society has become "less fair, less compassionate and more divided" and "more devoid of trust in
almost every field of human activity" in the past 20 years.
"As a disinterested player in climate change negotiations and a miserable foreign aid donor, we have slipped well
down the list of good global citizens."
Political ideologies appear to have contributed to inequality and disadvantage in Australia in that time, he
argues.
Fraser in large part blames "neoliberalism" and its influence on policymaking for the "disconnect between
Australia's impressive economic growth story and its failure on so many markers to show progress towards a better,
fairer society".
"Favouring the market system ahead of the state system, and individual interests ahead of community interests, can
lead to profoundly unfair social outcomes.
More than three million Australians living in poverty, Acoss report reveals
Read more
"Those unable to afford access to decent standards of housing, healthcare, and other essential services have to
settle for inferior arrangements, or go without."
Fraser says charitable organisations see the effects of "real poverty" that result in "misery, anxiety and loss of
self-esteem of mothers unable to put food on the table for their kids, of old and young homeless people, and the
victims of domestic violence and drug overdoses".
Fraser summarises the key thrusts of neoliberalism as "the pursuit of the lowest possible rates of income and most
other taxes and the maximum restraint on government interventions and spending programs".
Evidence in Australia and overseas shows the influence of neoliberalism on fiscal policy "and the misery and
social polarisation that has come with it", he says.
The global financial crisis "should have" marked a tipping point, when the "idealised view of financial markets
being self-regulating" was shattered. While Australia "avoided the worst traumas of the GFC" with prompt fiscal and
monetary policy responses, in Europe "taxes were increased and spending programs slashed", resulting in a further
five or six years of severe recession.
Fraser says that all political ideologies – taken to extremes – can be divisive and cause damage, including an
ideology "based on a state system".
But the former Reserve Bank governor focuses on neoliberalism because it "remains in vogue". The Morrison
government "continues to reaffirm its over-riding commitment to lower taxation, and to assert that this is the best
way to increase investment, jobs and economic growth" -
despite the lack of evidence to support the theory
.
Although Fraser recognises that politics never can or should be taken out of policymaking, he suggests the best
course is to "hammer away" at flaws of particular approaches.
In a separate presentation Keating – who headed PM&C from 1991 to 1996 – warns the government's promise to cap
expenditure while simultaneously cutting taxes and returning the budget to surplus is based on overly optimistic
assumptions of growth in GDP, wages and productivity.
Why are stock markets falling and how far will they go?
Read more
According to Keating, the government must stop assuming there have been no structural changes in the relationship
between unemployment and the rate of wage increases.
He notes that predictions of a tightening labour market leading to higher wages are predicated on assumptions of
growth averaging 3% or as much as 3.5%.
He will also say a sustained return to past rates of economic growth will be impossible unless we can ensure a
reasonably equitable distribution of income, involving a faster rate of wage increases, especially for the low-paid.
Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck, has a forthcoming book, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and
the Future of White Majorities . He argues that what I would call "bad nationalism" –
the global surge in rightwing populism – is driven by large-scale immigration, and the
threat it poses to the cultural identity of the ethnic majority. Some people fear change; they
prefer the monocultural landscape in which they grew up, and visible changes to it threaten
their sense of belonging and security. Certain attitudes are, if not hereditary, baked in to
the point where they may as well be.
He supports this view with plentiful survey data, a favourite nugget being that the way you
answer the question, "Would you prefer your children to be well-mannered, or to be
considerate?" is a major predictor of whether you'd vote for or against Trump and Brexit .
The question is a proxy for what the cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the strict
father (well-mannered) versus the nurturant family (considerate) model. These frames are the
timeless and elemental organising principles for our political divisions –
authoritarian versus pluralist, right versus left – all the way back to Christ the
Warrior versus Christ the Saviour.
I believe people respond to authoritarian and pluralist arguments according to who's
making them, how trenchantly they are made, and the economic, media and political environment
around them. Austerity soil has always been notoriously fertile for authoritarian ideas. Yet
Kaufmann dismisses any economic factor, saying that had there been one, 2008 would have seen
an upturn in rightwing nationalism, not 2017. My view is that depressions take years, not
months, to grind people down.
To me the key questions are how are the key decisions made and by whom are they made?
Globalism (not globalization, mind you) is a process whereby decisionmaking gets shifted
farther and farther from the people and democratic accountability is continually weakened -
ironically often with the rationale that we need this to "compete with China".
As a result, national borders (and therefore cultures) become less and less important
and institutions like central banks, the EU, the WTO, etc. become ever more powerful. What
you call neoliberalism is an effect - not the cause - of this phenomenon, in my
opinion.
By the way, I agree with you that there is hope - in fact I am more optimistic today
than I have been for many years - although probably for very different reasons than
you.
I am quite sure that for the time being the nation state is an essential form of political
and economic organisation. So I accept the necessity of nations. I reject nationalist
ideologies which at best are confused, like ZW's argument, and at worst are very nasty
things indeed.
I was stunned by the modernity of Renan's speech when I read it. Glad to see that it is
available online. Hope you read it.
Globalisation is the ability to move goods/finance/ideas/culture around the global at
speeds unheard of - there is no way to alter this, so your definition is inexact by quite a
margin.
What is happening is neoliberalism - the economic sytem which has hijacked Globalisation
- is playing havoc across the world.
These are not one and the same thing. Nationalism is a reaction to neoliberailsm, and
the way it is concentrating wealth in the hands of the few.
Take a look at places like Finland, Norway and other parts of Europe, where they have
restrained neoliberalism and do not have the same levels of inequality as in the USA or the
UK. Japan is the most equal developed nation in the world. We need to marry strong
democratic structures (at national and global level) with globalisation at the expense of
neo-liberalism, not in support of it.
In short, your view is depressing and misguided. There is hope.
Globalism is a system where a cosmopolitan class of technocratic elites makes all the
decisions after talking among themselves in well-appointed conference rooms to which common
people are not given access (think of what goes on in Brussels or in the ECB tower every
day).
Democracy is something else.
In my opinion the two are mutually incompatible.
Yes, I'm talking about both British and non-British Muslims. Here's the clarification
you're looking for: ICM Research for Channel 4 found that more than 100,000 British Muslims
sympathize with suicide bombers and people who commit other terrorist acts. Moreover, only
one in three British Muslims (34%) would contact the police if they believed that somebody
close to them had become involved with jihadists.
In addition, 23% of British Muslims said Islamic Sharia law should replace British law
in areas with large Muslim populations.
On social issues, 52% of the Muslims surveyed said they believe homosexuality should be
illegal, compared to 22% of non-Muslim Britons.
39% of Muslims surveyed believe women should always obey their husbands, compared to 5%
for non-Muslims. One in three British Muslims refuse completely to condemn the stoning of
women accused of adultery.
Admittedly, this ICM survey is from 2016 so the picture may have improved, but I think
you'll agree, these attitudes are quite a long way from the enlightenment values
mentioned.
Open borders and nationalism are really different issues. One can recognise the need for
borders and border controls without convincing oneself that the people within a given
border line are therefore endowed with some common essence about which they can feel pride
or shame.
The pity about this is that liberal writers like ZW nearly always start from zero on
this issue as if there wasn't a whole mass of discussion of a very detailed kind that has
already taken place. Thus I would say that Ernest Renan's speech to the Surbonne in the
1880s published as What is a Nation? (reprinted in Shloma Sand's book On the
Nation and the 'Jewish People' ) is well in advance of ZW's musings.
I am with Einstein on this. He was once asked if he regarded himself as a German or a Jew.
He replied: "I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the
measles of mankind".
I found ZW's suggestion that "you do not need to be proud of Oliver Cromwell in order to be
proud of Jessica Ennis-Hill" both revealing and ridiculous. If one is going to pick a
figure from English history not to be proud of why on earth would one choose Cromwell? And
on what grounds exactly does ZW feel proud of JE-H?
The Cromwell reference leads to a further point. Can the English, on ZW's argument, take
pride in the actions of Scots prior to the Act of Union? And can they take pride in the
actions of the Irish from Northern but not Southern Ireland?
I would nuance what you say just a little. Our actions contribute to producing not only
things but also people. A parent can feel justified pride in the actions of his/her
children as can a teacher in the actions of his/her pupils. There can also be a justified
sense of collective pride for people who have contributed to that collective. ZW is right
about that. She gets into a muddle when she tries to project this collective pride
backwards in time to things we could have had no part in.
People can be proud of their country , there is nothing wrong with it ,but when a country
consists of many ethnic groups and religions, identifying the country only with majority
ethno linguistic or religious group can lead to discrimination , alienation and resentment
. This has led to civil wars in many regions. Canada and Switzerland are some of the
exceptions where federal system and equalities of ethno linguistic groups have strengthened
their countries .I would call this good nationalism.
On the other hand, many countries in Asia and Africa are suffering from the conflicts due
to persecution or discrimination inflicted upon minorities from the majoritarian
governments.
Modi in India is using the nationalistic card, trying to give an impression that the
country only belongs to Hindus and Hindi speakers. In reality, India is not even a country
, it is a collection of nation states with many ethnic groups , languages and religions
which were united during the British rule. It is more diverse than the whole of Europe
.However Modi is keen to perpetuate the myth India is homogenous , this natinalistic
ideology might risk formenting divisions and conflicts in the future.I would call it 'bad
nationalism '
Aren't we looking for the word patriotism as opposed to nationalism here Mz. Williams? I've
always cleaved to Orwell's definitions of patriotism and nationalism. Predictably,
nationalism gets short shrift.....largely because nationalism is dim, divisive and utterly
undigestible for the vast majority of a nation at ease with itself. This is why Moggo,
Bojo, Foxy and Gove prefer nationalism.
I'm not the one who has a problem with neo-liberalism, it's provided for me more than
adequately. Having spent a lot of time living overseas, it's provided ALL Australians with a
far better deal than a few billion others.
If you are too naive to see this, then maybe you need to try an alternative for a while.
It's quite ok, i'll be waiting for when the alternative fails (they always do) and I can come
back and pick off the assets from the carcus of that little experiment for less than a cent
in the dollar.
The dog eat dog economy simply represents our nature, it's who we are, we thrive under
libertarianism.
Po-faced, Libertarian BOLLOCKS.
Privatisation is sucker-farming.
Milking the punters, like ants milk aphids.
Farming them, like bellbirds do with leaf-bugs.
And even THAT is only part of the equation.
The fondest goal, the one which gives the management class hard-ons ?
Privatisation de-unionises their workforces.
It is quite strange that the biggest supporters of neo-liberal economics with its belief that
giving money to the rich will solve all our problems call themselves 'Christians'.
I can't remember when Jesus preached trickle down. I don't remember the bit where Jesus
said to treat those seeking asylum and fleeing violence like they are the scum of the earth.
I don't remember when Jesus said the poor needed a good kick in the guts while they are down
to motivate them to work harder. I don't remember when Jesus said we should cut funds from
the sick to balance the budget. I don't remember Jesus saying that if you bear false witness
often enough then you will fool enough of the people enough to keep power so you can look
after your corporate buddy buddies.
In fact, almost all of the politicians in the Coalition who proclaim to be 'Christian'
must have their own secret bible because nothing I have heard from the New Testament
justifies their actions.
Me, I'm an atheist and I have more care, consideration, ethics and compassion than the
entire collection of right wing bible bashers sitting in parliament today.
Thanks for this. We need more of these articles pointing out the bullshit behind this story
that the Coalition has been feeding the gullible peasantry with for over 30 years, sneering,
smirking and sniggering as truckloads of public money goes to private corporations. The money
received from selling off public assets has been shoved into private businesses who then feel
very free to charge like bulls.
It's a shame so many folk still fall for this bullshit meaning that their own families, work
colleagues and community get shafted through diminishing public services.
They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was always there right on the job
They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell
Full of that yankee doodle de dum
Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell
And I was the kid with the drum
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al
It was Al all the time
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal
Buddy, can you spare a dime?
'This is more or less the definition of increased productivity and it is what ultimately
leads to improved living standards for everyone'
Lazy, neoliberal, supply-side economic guff. Neoliberals undermine government and
democracy and then scavenge on the wreckage. When does 'ultimately' begin for 'everyone'?
Never.
'Private companies provide the same service with much less labour'
Firing people is the answer? What a hardened realist you are. Must be great to be so
certain in your neoliberal convictions. Are you really telling us that every privatisation
has been a success?
These pieces of infrastructure have been built through generations of work and wise
investment - they are not any one government's to sell. It's just easier for a corrupt,
rudderless, feckless neoliberal shill to sell it than it is for them to to run it.
Can't even begin to address the characteristic Libertarian slyness in all that.
But I'll try.
"What you call neoliberalism was a set of responses to the failure of socialism or as Tony
Blair said 'what matters is what works'."
Incorrect.
What I--what the world--calls "Neoliberalism', is the corpse of Classical economics,
resurrected post-WW2 by Friedman and Hayek's 'Mont Pelerin Society. '
Why was it buried ?
Because during the Great Depression, its dogmatic insistence on continued austerity and wage
cuts only made things worse.
After all, in an economic slump, whats the worst thing you can do ?
Deprive people of whatever little purchasing power they have.
So, goodbye Classical economics.
After which, govts SPENT their societies out of slump, putting people to work.
(O, the horror ! O, the heresy !)
The public works of that era include Germany's autobahns and the US New Deal projects,
including the Tennessee Valley system and similar in Western States.
( O the horror ! O the heresy !)
Friedman, Hayek and the gang looked at those and post-WW2 programs of public benefit, such as
the UK's NHS and shat themselves. Typical fear-driven conservatives, they were convinced such
programs represented the thin end of the wedge which MUST end in imposition of Soviet-style
conditions.
What utter paranoid crap.
Their resurrected corpse of Classical economics ?.
THAT is what is 'Neoliberalism'.
Whether or not I call it so is immaterial.
Then, this lofty bit of finger-wagging assertion;
"This process of economic evolution is necessarily imperfect and incomplete...."
Your Lordship's overview is appreciated...
"....but currently leaves you free to own a computer, read news on-line, communicate using
the internet (maybe using NBN?) and express your views freely. "
Sez who ?
You ?
Besides, the only one talking about that old bogey, "socialism" is you.
Because its a conveniently perjorative label, eh ?
Pretty infantile, though.
"Anybody who doesn't agree with EVERYTHING I say, must be a 'socialist.' And they can't
play with my toys."
PS 'Adam', why do LIbertarians always project a Superiority Complex ?
Why are the buggers always so PLEASED WITH THEMSELVES ?
Neoliberalism = Socialism for the Rich - Capitalism for the Poor.
Politics needs reform, plain & simple. Fed ICAC and Integrity Commission is a good
start but it's not enough. The rules have to change too. Major decisions like privatising
services or tax handouts to the rich, shouldn't by law be allowed to get through parliament
or the senate unless the claims being made to justify them are quantifiable &
demonstrated to be in the National Interest. Currently politicians have no obligation to do
either.
e.g. claiming that jobs will be created if Penalty rates are cut = there's no way to
quantify such a BS claim and Doug Cameron got them to admit that in Senate Estimates. Even so
they were allowed to lie through their teeth and impose it anyway with no requirement to
prove their BS claims. This corporate tax handout = once again they claim it will lead to
more wealth to average Australians and more jobs but it can't be quantified or guaranteed via
regulation so it's all bullshit. The rich will hoard the wealth & kick Australians in the
guts as usual. That's what they've always done and always will do. Privatisation of
electricity..what a crock of shit. They claimed it would create competition and drive down
prices. What's happened? The complete opposite but politicians KNOW they're not accountable
and therein 'lies' the problem. The shortsheeting of the original NBN, = yet another lie.
They've totally crippled Australia's ability to compete in a digital age and completely
screwed regional 2nd tier cities and towns in terms of growth. As far as the National
interest is concerned the shortsheeting of the NBN is the complete opposite. Even so they
were allowed to bastardise that too without any accountability whatsoever. Australians need
to start demanding political reform so these bastards are accountable to the people.
Neoliberalism is just the academic name for the political ideology of greed, corruption, self
interest, self entitlement, corporate welfare, inequality, user pays, and poverty is your
fault.
Do you see any contradiction between privatised electricity and socialised stadiums?
Neoliberalism explains it all. Corruption in politics means that only profitable assets
are privatised. Stadiums lose money, so are kept in private hands as corporate welfare for
the various billionaire team owners and TV networks.
I love Richard Denniss! What a brilliantly concise and yet well supported argument. Now we
just need someone who can say it in terms that will persuade unwilling voters to think
carefully about their vote. If they do think carefully they simply cannot return this
government to power, now that they're all revealed as nothing but crony capitalists.
I must admit that like many people I also thought neoliberalism was an ideology, but then
I couldn't understand why they were so inconsistent in their spending of 'tax-payers'
funds'.
From now on I'll be pointing out those inconsistencies with more confidence - armed with
Richard's incontrovertible points, and also by a closer reading of Canadian Kean Birch's
article:
[The term neoliberalism ] is used to refer to an economic system in which the
"free" market is extended to every part of our public and personal worlds.
And here's wikipedia's definition of crony capitalism:
Crony capitalism is an economy in which businesses thrive not as a result of
risks they take, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business
class and the political class.
NB But there's a more explicit definition here, which I like much better:
Crony capitalism is a term describing an economy in which success in business
depends on close relationships between business people and government officials. It may be
exhibited by favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, government grants, special
tax breaks, or other forms of state interventionism.
Yes, we have a spot of bother, and I think that their name - Institute of Public Affairs - is
quite a misnomer.
The way these people operate is more akin to Opus Dei and many other 'secret societies'
that have another public face altogether.
Given that IPA's agenda is a private members wish list which has a huge impact on matters
of a broad public nature, it's rather akin to incest, and we know where the confusion between
Church and State takes us regarding separation of powers, exactly where we are right now .two
Royal Commissions that are joined at the hip, Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
(2013 – 2017) and our current horror show Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation,
and Financial Services Industry which could for all intents and purposes be as long as
aforementioned.
Stay with me, as these are issues that relate to other 'energy' systems, namely money, sex
and power, and if we have any doubts as to how far this cancer has spread, a quick purview of
the following members ought to resolve it for you:
For the 70th Birthday big bash, we know that guests to the party were:
• Gina Rinehart
• Rupert Murdoch
• Tony Abbott
• George Pell - Australian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church
• Michael Kroger - President of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party of Australia
and former director of the IPA
• Mitch Fifield - Communications Minister
Think horizontal and vertical industries/associations and you begin to get the picture,
and that's before thinking about BCA and VECCI.
First, elect the other mob next time around. They're in the pockets of the multinationals and
the US alliance as well, but they're not quite as bad, yet. The next thing is a full-on
assault on mainstream media. The frontline of the revolution, if there is to be one, is the
media. No more guns or territorial claims, it's a battle for the mind. Education is the key.
The "Neolibs" attack education at every opportunity - teachers, curriculum, funding etc. etc.
but there's nothing wrong with education - the real problem is that the mainstream media
relentlessly, all day every day works to an agenda of dis-education, deliberately undermining
and destroying the work of our schools. They preach doubt and mistrust - of learning, facts,
truth, intelligence, pure science, art, music, culture, thoughtfulness, forbearance, empathy
and altruism. They teach us to monetise and gamble on everything. Their aim is to dumb
everyone down to the point where not only can't they read an analog clock or drive their own
car but become entirely dependent on the word of authority (of which they are the mouthpiece)
for a continued existence. Today, with our vast social platforms we can target their lies and
threats, one by one. Pick each one, attack it, viciously, loudly, risibly, with facts,
comedy, derision and invitations to dance. Spread it wide. Call them out at every
opportunity. Sneer them into oblivion. Mainstream media is the primary problem. That's what
must be destroyed.
No, regrettably they have not.
The neoliberalist 'mistake' has been going on for around 40 yrs now - it has proved a
relentless descent into inequality and austerity.
Chris Bowen
at the National Press Club : "...Labor will go to the next election:
Achieving budget balance in the same year as the government;
Delivering bigger cumulative budget surpluses over forward estimates as well as substantially
bigger surpluses over the ten year medium term; and
That the majority of savings raised from our revenue measures over the medium term will go
towards budget repair and paying down debt...."
Pure neoliberal economic poison that will create further hardship for our citizens, worsen
inequality and recess the economy yet further.
People have got to come to understand that the bigger surpluses Bowen speaks of are
federal tax collection surpluses; i.e. he intends to withdraw further spending capacity from
the private sector, all while the current account deficit already draws 3.5% GDP (~$30bn) a
yr from that same heavily indebted private sector.
This Bowen statement report
from the SMH : "The whiff of a surplus, not reaching at least 1 per cent of GDP until 2026-27, does not
adequately protect Australia against the potential roiling seas of international
uncertainty," he will say.
"Australia needs bigger surpluses, sooner than the government is scheduling.
"We can't afford to let the next four years go to waste in the efforts for a healthier, safer
budget surplus."
Absolute macroeconomic stupidity, arrogant, vandalous ideological madness.
When will the people come to their senses and stop supporting such socially destructive
errant neoliberal economic alchemy?
Just look at the Citizens Assembly overseeing the law change in the recent Irish referendum.
Worked a treat, cause those involved wanted to find the bvest alternative, rather than
feather their own nest.
It is indeed important to make the distinction between the ideology of neoliberalism - the
ideology of private enterprise is good, and public spending is bad - and the operational
system of crony capitalism - the game of mates played by government and the special
interests.
And it is certainly equally important to call out the monumental hypocrisy involved in the
government's application of the ideology's set of rules to the powerless and public and the
government's application of corrupt practice rules to the special interests.
The system is destroying the egalitarian character of Australia and fanning the flames of
nativist authoritarianism here.
But what's even more dangerous is the fundamental dishonesty that the system necessitates,
and the alienating influence it has - on top of the growing economic inequality.
The system has destroyed the economic and environmental viability and sustainability of
the planet on which human civilization depends.
What is becoming increasingly clear to more and more of the public is that - simple put-
the system cannot be allowed to go on as it has been proceeding because it threatens the
future of civilization on earth.
Change is imperative now. However, how that will unfold is unclear, as well as, the toll
the destruc5turing system will take.
What is clear is that a great restructuring must happen - and soon.
That'd be like astronomers saying that although Hellenic astrology is pseudoscientific nonsense they can probably do business
with Ptolemaic or Hindu astrology. Other scientists would laugh and call astronomy the dismal physics. Isn't it about time economists
like yourself just told the knuckle dragging ideologues - of whatever colour and salinity - to fuck off?
That'd be like astronomers saying that although Hellenic astrology is pseudoscientific nonsense they can probably do business
with Ptolemaic or Hindu astrology. Other scientists would laugh and call astronomy the dismal physics. Isn't it about time economists
like yourself just told the knuckle dragging ideologues - of whatever colour and salinity - to fuck off?
One interesting argument against bond rates rising further is that will be tremendous hit for
the USA budget as they need to pay interest of their debt. So it might be that there is just one
hike on the road from now.
Hasenstab described his market outlook during an interview with
the Financial Times .
"October was not a fluke," Hasenstab said. "There is a lot of entrenched interest rate
risk in all financial markets right now."
But even if raising interest rates leads to some discomfort in the short term, the Fed
should keep hiking, because "it's the right thing to do."
"I don't know what they will do, but I know what they should do, and that is to keep
raising rates," he said. "It is better to have these periodic downturns than procrastinating
and have to move even more aggressively later on."
Hasenstab's $35 billion Templeton Global Bond Fund is up 1.6% on the year, compared with a
2.2% loss for the global bond market , thanks to aggressive bets against the euro and US
equities. Judging by Hasenstab's outlook, if his view proves correct, those trades should
continue to generate profits during the new year.
A bond manager predicting rates will rise .... that´s a rarity in this business.
Looks like he is trying to tell the truth. But I don't trust politicians and neocons and Wall
Street guys. They will do everything to keep rates down. They will even start a war or sell
their mother, if that keeps rates down.
"...Templeton Global Bond Fund is up 1.6% on the year, compared with a 2.2% loss for
the global bond market, thanks to aggressive bets against the euro and US equities."
I was under the impression a bond fund invested in bonds? Stupid me! So I guess its not
really a bond fund - its just a fund.
Oh man, open up the holdings of any actively managed bond funds- MBS, CLOs, Loans, junk,
paper without ANY ratings. Very difficult to find a pure non-leveraged avtively managed bond
fund to hedge equities. You're better off building a ladder out of Treasuries and AAA
corporates yourself - and then holding till maturity.
A great many investors are about to be hit with huge margin calls and flushed out of this
market.
Imagine the shock this morning of a fictitious couple named Joe and Jill Average that are
nearing retirement with a net worth last month of around 250 thousand dollars as they check
to see how they are doing after hearing "murmurs" the market has slipped. With three-quarters
of it in the market, they will be horrified to find that the mere pullback of stocks in
recent weeks has ripped away over 50 thousand dollars or 20% of their wealth.
Few people watch their investments daily but rather chose to peek at them every now and
then. This is the main reason a lot more Americans are not waking up today sick to their
stomach and in near panic from the devastation markets have wrecked upon their savings as
trillions of dollars have vanished into a big black hole. The article below argues this does
not make for a Merry Christmas!
Neoclassical economics makes you thing the markets are something they are not.
The 1920's sucker that believed in free markets – "Everything is getting better
and better look at the stock market"
The 1920's neoclassical economist that believed in free markets - "Stocks have reached
what looks like a permanently high plateau." Irving Fisher 1929. It was obviously a
stable equilibrium.
What had gone wrong?
Henry Simons and Irving Fisher supported the Chicago Plan to take away the bankers ability
to create money, so that free market valuations could have some meaning.
The real world and free market, neoclassical economics would then tie up.
Henry Simons was actually at the University of Chicago (free market headquarters), but
they had forgotten about his work in a few decades.
What is real wealth?
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised
inflating asset prices doesn't create real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track
real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth
and therefore does not add to GDP.
The real wealth in the economy is measured by GDP.
Inflated asset prices aren't real wealth, and this can disappear almost over-night, as it
did in 1929 and 2008.
Free and modestly regulated markets are good, no arguments there. The time for free
markets in interest rates, was before Nixon signed the Venganza contract. Now, it'd be
counterproductive, not with $22 Trillion in direct liabilities, and multiples in indirect
ones. If you're championing interest rates free markets under this condition, you're
suspicious.
How do you repay $22 Trillion under a free market determined 32% rate of interest, how? If
you default, the destabilization would be unimaginable. The governments can simply not be
allowed to keep piling on unproductive debt, not at all. If folks are bawling like newborns
at 2.7% rates, then what'd happen at conservative market rates of 6% and above, what
exactly?
Find out again, why the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States was founded, it'd open
your eyes to human depravity...
S&P still comfortably above anything 'real', and yet all this talk about the Fed's
unwavering resolve. And housing crisis 2.0 hasn't even rounded 2nd base.
The hypothesis is that due to emergence of mutual funds and other financial instruments the capitalist class became more
homogeneous in its interests and more united with financial oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... In such a situation there were significant divisions within the capitalist class that attenuated its overall political clout. Industries divided according to policy preferences, and political parties, which were essentially interest group coalitions, attracted different segments of this class. (In the US the Republicans were just as much an interest group coalition as the Democrats, just different interests like small retail business, domestic mining, nonunion manufacturing, etc.) Public policy in this dispensation, whatever its ostensible justification, reflected sectoral influence. ..."
"... Since the early 1970s capital ownership has become substantially more fungible in every respect. Equity funds of various sorts established themselves as institutional players, allowing individual capitalists to diversify via investment in these funds. Regulatory restrictions on capital movements were dismantled or bypassed. New information technology dramatically reduced (but not eliminated!) the fog of all financial markets. ..."
"... The other side of the coin was political influence over ideas. Intellectuals who advanced the positions we now call neoliberal were rewarded with research funding, jobs and influence over government policy. ..."
"... Lending conditionality reproduced in developing countries the same incentives that had shifted the intellectual environment in the core capitalist world. ..."
"... This hypothesis -- and it's important to be clear that's what it is -- also gives us an explanation for why the 2008 crisis, while it did provoke a lot of reconsideration by intellectuals -- did not result in meaningful institutional or policy change: the underlying political economic factors were unaltered . And it implies that further intellectual work, necessary as it is, will not be enough to extricate us from the shackles of neoliberal political constraints. For that we need to contest the power that undergirds them. ..."
"... The alliance (in the US, the focus of my comments) of the monied interests, providing the financial resources and seeking the repeal of the social and fiscal policies of the New Deal, and the heavily Southern-based evangelical/religious right, providing the voting bloc and seeking to turn back the progress of minorities and women in achieving more equal social and political rights -- created the powerful political base from which the revisionist onslaught was mounted. Reagan then provided the smiling face to sell the proposition that "government isn't the solution to your problems; government IS the problem" that effectively neutered the one institution capable of regulating the monied interests. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is a dialectic between them more than it has been a fixed doctrine. The remarkable power and resistance to outside critique is attributable to the insular nature of that dialectic. ..."
"... Where we are -- neoliberalism triumphant albeit spent ..."
A standard narrative is that the Keynesian postwar order cracked up over the crisis of inflation during the mid-1970s. A conservative
alternative that trusted markets more and government less was vindicated by events and established its intellectual dominance. After
a lag of a few years, policy followed along. One can critique this on matters of detail: economic growth remained stronger during
the 70s than it would be thereafter, anti-Keynesians did not have a superior understanding of economic developments, and no intellectual
revolution was complete within the space of just a few years. But the deeper problem, it seems to me, is that this attributes vastly
exaggerated agency to coteries of intellectuals. Do we really think that the elections of Reagan and Thatcher, for instance, were
attributable to a shift in grad school syllabi in economics and related fields?
I propose an alternative hypothesis. From the end of WWII to the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, a large portion
of capital was illiquid, its value tied to its existing use. The rich sought to diversify their portfolios, of course, but there
were limits. Stock market transactions were beclouded by large information costs, and share ownership tended to be more stable and
concentrated. Fortunes were rooted in specific firms and industries. In such a situation there were significant divisions within
the capitalist class that attenuated its overall political clout. Industries divided according to policy preferences, and political
parties, which were essentially interest group coalitions, attracted different segments of this class. (In the US the Republicans
were just as much an interest group coalition as the Democrats, just different interests like small retail business, domestic mining,
nonunion manufacturing, etc.) Public policy in this dispensation, whatever its ostensible justification, reflected sectoral influence.
Since the early 1970s capital ownership has become substantially more fungible in every respect. Equity funds of various sorts
established themselves as institutional players, allowing individual capitalists to diversify via investment in these funds. Regulatory
restrictions on capital movements were dismantled or bypassed. New information technology dramatically reduced (but not eliminated!)
the fog of all financial markets. And firms themselves became separable bundles of assets as new technology and business methods
allowed for more integrated production across ownership lines. The combined result is a capitalist class with more uniform interests
-- an interest in a higher profit share of income and greater freedom for capital in every respect.
The crisis in real returns to
capital during the 1970s, the true economic instigator, galvanized this reorganization of the political economy. (In the US the S&P
peaked in 1972 and then lost almost half its inflation-adjusted value by the end of the decade. This is not an artifact of business
cycle timing.)
Of course, all understanding of the world is mediated by the way we think about it. The wealthy didn't say to themselves, "Gee,
my assets are taking a hit, so the government needs to change course." They turned to dissident, conservative thinkers who explained
the "failures" of the 70s as the result of too little concern for the engine of growth, which (of course) was understood to be private
investment. Market-friendly policy would, it was said, reinvigorate investment and spur economic growth. Keynesianism was seen as
having failed because it took investors for granted, taxing and regulating them and competing with them for finance; politicians
needed to show respect. It's understandable why capitalists would interpret their problems in this way.
The other side of the coin was political influence over ideas. Intellectuals who advanced the positions we now call neoliberal
were rewarded with research funding, jobs and influence over government policy. When the World Bank and the IMF were remade in the
wake of the 1982 debt crisis, this influence was extended internationally. Lending conditionality reproduced in developing countries
the same incentives that had shifted the intellectual environment in the core capitalist world.
This hypothesis -- and it's important to be clear that's what it is -- also gives us an explanation for why the 2008 crisis,
while it did provoke a lot of reconsideration by intellectuals -- did not result in meaningful institutional or policy change:
the underlying political economic
factors were unaltered . And it implies that further intellectual work, necessary as it is, will not be enough to extricate us
from the shackles of neoliberal political constraints. For that we need to contest the power that undergirds them.
The alliance (in the US, the focus of my comments) of the monied interests, providing the financial resources and seeking
the repeal of the social and fiscal policies of the New Deal, and the heavily Southern-based evangelical/religious right, providing
the voting bloc and seeking to turn back the progress of minorities and women in achieving more equal social and political rights
-- created the powerful political base from which the revisionist onslaught was mounted. Reagan then provided the smiling face
to sell the proposition that "government isn't the solution to your problems; government IS the problem" that effectively neutered
the one institution capable of regulating the monied interests.
An interesting discussion of the roots, differences and similarities between neoliberalism and ordoliberalism. And believe it
or not, the many comments raise some interesting points. Only one real gaslighting comment.
One thing Barkley said should be repeated: neoliberalism has opposing poles quite a distance apart. Neoliberalism is a dialectic
between them more than it has been a fixed doctrine. The remarkable power and resistance to outside critique is attributable to
the insular nature of that dialectic. The neoliberal right has chosen its interlocutors, the centrist "left" very well, which
is an important reason that the non-neoliberal real Left is emerging now from the sojurn in the politics of cultural critique
where it went in the 1960's with no knowledge or interest in economics.
It does not take a genius to see that human civilization and the natural ecology can only survive if people somehow manage
to produce a rational architecture for political economy deliberately and on an unprecedented scale and level of sophistication.
Where we are -- neoliberalism triumphant albeit spent and a Left at peak consciousness -- is exactly the wrong place to be in
the political cycle.
The Guardian is the best newspaper with 4,049,000 daily readers, they are owned by
non-profit foundation and they are free to write whatever they are pleased but their contents
is verified 100% so you are free not to like it but you have to accept it as a facts.
The Guardian is the best newspaper with 4,049,000 daily readers, they are owned by
non-profit foundation and they are free to write whatever they are pleased but their contents
is verified 100% so you are free not to like it but you have to accept it as a facts.
Michael Greenwood , Geoff Naylor and David Murray on the failures of economic policy
While agreeing with the thrust of Paul Mason's article (
A new politics of emotion is needed to beat the far right , Journal, 26 November), it is
surely necessary to employ economics if we are to defeat neoliberalism. We have lived under
this regime, with increasing severity, for 25 years or so. The result has been the stagnation
of real incomes for the large majority, with the benefits of GDP growth accruing to those at
the top of income and wealth distributions. This has suppressed growth, as those with less
money tend to spend it and those with more hide it and avoid tax. Lower UK growth is clearly
shown in comparative data.
So if neoliberalism is a school of economics, it is a failure if the aim of economic policy
is to encourage growth and the reinvestment of the benefits. Of course, neoliberalism is not
economics, it is political dogma, supported by its beneficiaries. We need economics
undergraduates to demand to be taught real economics and not the propaganda of power that is
neoliberalism.
Michael Greenwood Manchester
• In his search for a political narrative of economic hope to counteract the rise of
rightwing populism, Paul Mason overlooks the sense of belonging that exists in faith
communities. Here, a selfless collaboration for the inclusive good of one another has never
required disruption of the free-market economy. It is just that this ethos has not been
introduced at the national economic and political levels.
Geoff Naylor Winchester, Hampshire
• All suffered the same 2007-08 financial crash, but the "UK has weakest wage growth of
wealthy nations" ( Report
, 27 November). Anything to do with Tory-led government economic policy?
David Murray Wallington, Surrey
For 40 years, the ideology popularly known as "neoliberalism" has dominated political decision-making in the English-speaking
west.
People hate
it . Neoliberalism's sale of state assets, offshored jobs, stripped services, poorly-invested infrastructure and armies of the
forcibly unemployed have delivered, not promised "efficiency" and "flexibility" to communities, but discomfort and misery. The wealth
of a few has now swelled to a level of conspicuousness that must politely be considered
vulgar
yet the philosophy's entrenched itself so deeply in how governments make decisions and allocate resources that one of its megaphones
once declared its triumph "the end of history".
... ... ...
Paul Keating's rejection
It was a year ago that a third sign first appeared, when the dark horse of Australian prime ministers, Paul Keating, made public
an on-balance rejection of neoliberal economics. Although Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser instigated Australia's first neoliberal policies,
it was Keating's architecture of privatisation and deregulation as a Labor treasurer and prime minister that's most well remembered.
Now, "we have a comatose world economy held together by debt and central bank money," Keating has said, "Liberal economics has run
into a dead end and has had no answer to the contemporary malaise." What does the disavowal mean? In terms of his Labor heir Bill Shorten's growing appetite for redistributive taxation and close relationship to the union movement, it means "if Bill Shorten becomes
PM, the rule of engagement between labour and capital will be rewritten," according to The Australian this week. Can't wait!
Tony
Abbott becomes a fan of nationalising assets
Or maybe's Sukkar's right about the socialists termiting his beloved Liberal party. How else to explain the earthquake-like paradigm
shift represented by the sixth sign? Since when do neoliberal conservatives argue for the renationalisation of infrastructure, as
is the push of Tony Abbott's gang to nationalise the coal-fired Liddell power station? It may be a cynical stunt to take an unscientific
stand against climate action, but seizing the means of production remains seizing the means of production, um, comrade. "You know,
nationalising assets is what the Liberal party was founded to stop governments doing," said Turnbull, even as he hid in the dens
and in the rocks of the mountains to weather – strange coincidence –
yet another Newspoll
loss.
"new introduction to a re-released Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto.
Collective, democratic political action is our only chance for freedom and enjoyment."
Might be true. But frightening that people should naively still think that democracy is to be found in the 'Dictatorship of
the Proletariat' [ ie those who know what's good for you even if you don't like it ] of the Communist Manifesto after the revelations
of what that leads to in the Gulag Archipelago , Mao's China , Pol Pot , Kim John - un .
How quickly the world forgets. - you
might just as well advocate Mein Kampf it's the same thing in the end !
That's what you claim and it might be so but I'm not interested in keeping a score on the matter. The point you failed to get
is that the people you mentioned where totalitarian thugs. They used the banner of communism to achieve their ends. They would
have used what ever ideology that was in fashion to achieve the same results.
Does present day neo-liberalism actually qualify as a political movement?
Vested interests and the dollar seem to have all the power. Lies and deception are so common the truth is seen as the enemy.
The voting public are merely fools for manipulation. Nah, neo-liberalism is not government, it is something far nastier, and clearly
not what the public vote for, presuming a vote actually counts for anything anymore.
The S&P crashed below its bear market level of 2352.7 - the lowest since April 2017 -
ending the longest bull market in history. This is the worst December for the S&P 500 since
The Great Depression
Volatility on Wall Street has led shares worldwide on a wild ride in recent months,
resulting in a number of stock markets dipping into bear territory -- typically defined as
20 percent or more off a recent peak.
That's set to worsen in the new year, experts told CNBC on Monday, pointing to risks
including the Federal Reserve likely raising interest rates further and mounting concerns
about a global economic slowdown.
"I think the worst is yet to come next year, we're still in the first half of a global
equity bear market with more to come next year," said Mark Jolley, global strategist at CCB
International Securities. Volatility on Wall Street has led shares worldwide on a wild ride
in recent months, resulting in a number of stock markets dipping into bear territory --
typically defined as 20 percent or more off a recent peak.
That's set to worsen in the new year, experts told CNBC on Monday, pointing to risks
including the Federal Reserve likely raising interest rates further and mounting concerns
about a global economic slowdown.
"I think the worst is yet to come next year, we're still in the first half of a global
equity bear market with more to come next year," said Mark Jolley, global strategist at CCB
International Securities.
A decade after the subprime bubble burst, a new one seems to be taking its place – a
phenomenon aptly characterized by Ricardo Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier
Gourinchas as "
Financial 'Whac-a-Mole .'" A world economy geared toward increasing the supply of
financial assets has hooked us into a global game of waiting for the next bubble to
emerge somewhere.
Like the synchronous boom in residential housing prior to 2007 across several advanced
markets, CLOs have also gained in popularity in Europe. Higher investor appetite for European
CLOs has predictably led to a
surge in issuance (up almost 40% in 2018). Japanese banks, desperately seeking higher
yields, have swelled the ranks of buyers. The networks for financial contagion, should things
turn ugly, are already in place.
The artificial bull market is officially over, with the SPX officially entering bear market
today. BTFD is dead. Worst single day drop ahead of Christmas since 1918! As the first bear
market in years hits the most artificial stock market in history...
... ... ...
Trump is right, the Fed is the problem, but not for raising rates. Trump and
the MSM media are saying the Fed is making a policy mistake by raising rates as the economy
slows, and more importantly because the stock market is selling off. The current FF rate is
sitting between 2.25 and 2.5%, which historically is still low and accomodative. But Trump
should have stuck to his campaign version of the Fed, when he called out the Fed for the bubble
in stocks, and for keeping rates to low which led to what he called a "big fat ugly bubble."
After his election, he embraced the stock market, and now he owns it.
The Fed is the problem because they cut rates to Zero and held it there for 7 years. The Fed
is the problem for helping orchestrate the bailouts. The Fed is the problem because they did
multiple rounds of QE which did NOTHING for the middle class and the average Americans, instead
it made the rich richer and created the largest wealth inequality. The Fed is the problem
because they waited too long to begin raising rates, which helped create the largest asset
bubbles the world had ever seen.
And on CNBC, as the market has been selling off nonstop, they have the audacity to ask 'why
the relentless selling'?! As the market rallied 342% over the last 10 years, not once did they
ever ask why the relentless buying. Not once were they or anyone else worried about the
repercussions. They were cheerleading the entire time. Not once did anyone mention that the
Fed's reckless policies led to a dangerous rally in stocks and across multiple asset classes.
People thought the party would and could never end.
So as the market is only down -20%, today former Hollywood movie director turned Treasury
Secretary sent the markets into deeper selling as he made headlines for calling Bank CEO's and
consulting with the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) about the market conditions and liquidity. We
haven't even seen panic in the markets yet, and we are consulting bank ceo's and the PPT??? But
once again, the old conspiracy theory of the existence of the PPT became a fact.
Mnuchin confirmed their existence. Now all of a sudden we are seeing "recession fears"
headlines all over the place, but a few months ago when stocks were at records you never heard
the "r" word. Yet they love to say the stock market is not the economy. The longest artificial
bull market is officially over. Now we will see just how bad it will get. We are only down
-20%, and it is a long way down if this is only the start.
They herded folks into gambling ventures, while piling them high with alcohol (debt), just
like in Vegas. We're tempted to just give up, and let the chips fall wherever. Some folks
think recalibration comes without unpleasantness. Making America Great Again, requires
sacrifice, work, and determination but if folks would rather sacrifice their children to the
Moloch of a levitated market, perhaps we're interacting with the wrong people and ought just
quit.
It's depressing that folks claim they wanna go to heaven, but keep looking longingly at
hell...
I stayed out of this abomination of a market once I made the money back I lost in 2008.
Never again, I said to myself. The Fed herds people into stocks, houses, whatever they think
they can pump and dump. Why doesn't Trump shut them down?
If the goal of the OPEC+ cuts was to boost oil prices, then the deal is clearly failing.
OPEC+ is scrambling to figure out a way to rescue oil prices from another deep downturn. WTI is
now down into the mid-$40s and Brent into the mid-$50s, both a 15-month low. U.S. shale
continues to soar, even if shale producers themselves are now
facing financial trouble with prices so low. Oil traders are clearly skeptical that OPEC+
is either willing or capable of balancing the oil market.
OPEC+ thought they secured a strong deal in Vienna in early December, but more needs to be
done, it seems. OPEC's Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo wrote a letter to the cartel's
members, arguing that they need to increase the cuts. Initially, the OPEC+ coalition suggested
that producers should lower output by 2.5 percent, but Barkindo said that the cuts need to be
more like 3 percent in order to reach the overall 1.2 million-barrel-per-day reduction.
More importantly, the group needs to detail how much each country should be producing. "In
the interests of openness and transparency, and to support market sentiment and confidence, it
is vital to make these production adjustments publicly available," Barkindo told members in the
letter, according to
Reuters . By specifying exactly how much each country will reduce, the thinking seems to
be, it will go a long way to assuaging market anxiety about the group's seriousness.
Still, the plunge in oil prices this month is evidence that traders are not convinced.
The view is "that the U.S. will continue to grow like gangbusters regardless of price and
overwhelm any OPEC action," Helima Croft, the chief commodities strategist at Canadian broker
RBC, told
the Wall Street Journal .
"Unless there is a real geopolitical blowup, it could take time for these cuts to really
shift sentiment."
While cuts from producers like Saudi Arabia will help take supply off of the market, OPEC
might help erase the surplus in another unintended way. Bloomberg
raises the possibility that low oil prices could increase turmoil in some OPEC member
states . The price meltdown between 2014 and 2016 led to, or at least exacerbated, outages in
Libya, Venezuela and Nigeria. The same could happen again.
Just about all OPEC members need much higher oil prices in order to balance their books.
Saudi Arabia
needs roughly $88 per barrel for its budget to breakeven. Libya needs $114. Nigeria needs
$127. Venezuela needs a whopping $216. Only Kuwait -- at $48 per barrel -- can balance its
books at prevailing prices. Brent is trading in the mid-$50s right now.
How unlikely did it seem (pre-Khashoggi) that the Syrian situation would take the turns
we're now starting to witness?
Totally under the radar during the holiday newscycle.....major news story!
▪Saudi Arabia Agrees to Finance Rebuilding of Syria - Trump▪
US President Donald Trump said in a statement on Monday that Saudi Arabia has agreed to
pay for the reconstruction of Syria rather than the United States financing the
reconstruction of that country.
>>> "Saudi Arabia has now agreed to spend the necessary money needed to help
rebuild Syria, instead of the United States. See? Isn't it nice when immensely wealthy
countries help rebuild their neighbors rather than a Great Country, the U.S., that is 5000
miles away. Thanks to Saudi A! " Trump said via Twitter.<<<
Trump has welcomed Riyadh's decision, adding that it is "nice when immensely wealthy
countries help rebuild their neighbors rather than a Great Country, the US, that is 5000
miles away."
The US president's comment comes after, on Wednesday, he announced that the United States
would withdraw its roughly 2,000 troops from Syria since the Daesh* terror group had been
defeated. However, the White House later clarified the decision does not mean the US-led
international coalition's fight against the Daesh has ended.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the US Congress who have supported US military
engagement and intervention throughout the world have criticized Trump's decision, saying
that a US troop withdrawal from Syria will lead to the reemergence of the Daesh and aid
Russia, Turkey and Iran fulfilling their interests in the region.
Right now neo-fascism is the most probably scenario of the social system after the decline of
neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... But, in Europe, there has always been a deep distrust of the Anglo-American celebration of "possessive individualism" and its repudiation of community and society. Remember Margaret Thatcher's contempt for the idea of "society"? So, it is unsurprising that neoliberalism's advocates dismiss recent European analyses of local, regional and global economies as the nostalgia of "old Europe", even as neoliberalism's failures stack up unrelentingly. ..."
"... The consequences of these failures are largely unseen or avoided by policymakers in the US and their camp followers in the UK and Australia. They are in denial of the fact that not only has neoliberalism failed to meet its claimed goals, but it has worked devastatingly to undermine the very foundations of late-modern capitalism. The result is that the whole shambolic structure is tottering on the edge of an economic abyss. ..."
"... If Streeck is correct, then we need to anticipate what a post-capitalist world may look like. He thinks it will be terrible. He fears the emergence of a neocorporatist state and close crony-like collaboration between big capital, union leaders, government and the military as the consequence of the next major global financial crisis ..."
"... Jobs will disappear, Streeck believes. Capital will be intensely concentrated in very few hands. The privileged rich will retreat into security enclaves dripping with every luxury imaginable ..."
"... Meanwhile, the masses will be cast adrift in a polluted and miserable world where life – as Hobbes put it – will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. ..."
"... As Piketty and Streeck are pointing out to us, the post-neoliberal era has started to self-destruct. Either a post-capitalist, grimly neo-fascist world awaits us, or one shaped by a new and highly creative version of communitarian democracy. It's time for some great imagining. ..."
It is unfashionable, or just embarrassing, to suggest the
taken-for-granted late-modern economic order – neoliberal capitalism – may be in a
terminal decline. At least that's the case in what former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott
likes to call the "Anglosphere" .
What was once known as the Chicago school of economics
– the neoclassical celebration of the "free market" and "small government" – still
closes the minds of economic policymakers in the US and its satellite economies (although
perhaps less so in contemporary Canada).
But, in Europe, there has always been a deep distrust of the Anglo-American celebration
of "possessive individualism" and its repudiation of community and society. Remember Margaret
Thatcher's
contempt for the idea of "society"? So, it is unsurprising that neoliberalism's advocates
dismiss recent European analyses of local, regional and global economies as the nostalgia of
"old Europe", even as neoliberalism's failures stack up unrelentingly.
The consequences of these failures are largely unseen or avoided by policymakers in the
US and their camp followers in the UK and Australia. They are in denial of the fact that not
only has neoliberalism failed to meet its claimed goals, but it has worked devastatingly to
undermine the very foundations of late-modern capitalism. The result is that the whole
shambolic structure is tottering on the edge of an economic abyss.
What the
consequences might be
Two outstanding European scholars who are well aware of the consequences of the neoliberal
catastrophe are French economist Thomas Piketty and German economist Wolfgang Streeck.
Piketty's 2013 book, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century , charts the dangers of socioeconomic inequality in capitalism's
history. He demonstrates how this inequality can be – and has been over time –
fundamentally destructive of sustained economic growth.
Most compellingly, Piketty documented in meticulous detail how contemporary neoliberal
policies have constructed the worst forms of socioeconomic inequalities in history. His
analysis has been underlined by the recent Oxfam report that showed a mere eight
multi-billionaires own the equivalent amount of capital of half of the global population.
Despite Piketty's scrupulous scholarship, Western neoliberal economies continue merrily down
the road to nowhere. The foundations of that road were laid by the egregiously ideological
policies of Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – and slavishly followed by Australian politicians
on all sides ever since.
Streeck's equally detailed scholarship has demonstrated how destructive of capitalism itself
neoliberal policymaking has been. His latest book, How Will Capitalism
End? , demonstrates how this neoliberal capitalism triumphed over its opponents (especially
communism) by devouring its critics and opponents, obviating all possible alternatives to its
predatory ways.
If Streeck is correct, then we need to anticipate what a post-capitalist world may look
like. He thinks it will be terrible. He fears the emergence of a neocorporatist state and close
crony-like collaboration between big capital, union leaders, government and the military as the
consequence of the next major global financial crisis .
Jobs will disappear, Streeck believes. Capital will be intensely concentrated in very
few hands. The privileged rich will retreat into security enclaves dripping with every luxury
imaginable .
Meanwhile, the masses will be cast adrift in a polluted and miserable world where life
– as Hobbes put it – will be solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short.
What comes next is up to us
The extraordinary thing is how little is known or understood of the work of thinkers like
Piketty and Streeck in Australia today.
There have been very fine local scholars, precursors of the Europeans, who have warned about
the hollow promises of "economic rationalism" in Australia.
But, like the Europeans, their wisdom has been sidelined, even as inequality has been
deepening exponentially and its populist consequences have begun to poison our politics,
tearing down the last shreds of our ramshackle democracy.
The time is ripe for some creative imagining of a new post-neoliberal world that will repair
neoliberalism's vast and catastrophic failures while laying the groundwork for an Australia
that can play a leading role in the making of a cosmopolitan and co-operative world.
Three immediate steps can be taken to start on this great journey.
First, we need to see the revival of what American scholar Richard Falk called "globalisation
from below" . This is the enlivening of international civil society to balance the power of
the self-serving elites (multinational managers and their political and military puppets) now
in power.
Second, we need to come up with new forms of democratic governance that reject the fiction
that the current politics of representative government constitute the highest form of
democracy. There is nothing about representative government that is democratic. All it amounts
to is what Vilfredo Pareto described as
"the circulation of elites" who have become remote from – and haughtily contemptuous
of – the people they rule.
Third, we need to see states intervening comprehensively in the so-called "free market".
Apart from re-regulating economic activity, this means positioning public enterprises in
strategic parts of the economy, to compete with the private sector, not on their terms but
exclusively in the interests of all citizens.
As Piketty and Streeck are pointing out to us, the post-neoliberal era has started to
self-destruct. Either a post-capitalist, grimly neo-fascist world awaits us, or one shaped by a
new and highly creative version of communitarian democracy. It's time for some great
imagining.
This article is based on an earlier piece published in John Menadue's blog Pearls
and Irritations.
The longest and most ridiculous bull market. I once saw an epitaph on a tombstone that
read "I told you I was sick". I want mine to say "I told you to sell at Dow 26,000".
This wasn't a bull market, it was a levitated market.
In other news, we heard the Saudis have committed to help in rebuilding Syria and if true,
then we say to the Saudis, find redemption within your reach. And while we're at that, what
plans are in place for Yemen, the Kashoggi family, and the Saudi next generations, beyond
financial subsidies.
Concisely, what's the human development plan, devoid of white elephants, that cogently
integrates Saudi Arabia into the 21st century. A plan that can be coherently backed by the
globe, shorn of repression and terror cultivation?
Repentance, Restitution, and Recalibration, the three R's of a new leaf...
The Saudis wont do ****, they will send a few dozen Indians and maybe 100 Pakis (someone
has to manage the pakis you know). They will Spackle over the noticeable bullet holes, duct
take the plumbing back together and if they are lucky they may even free up a few Filipino
maids from slavery to clean the bathrooms that ISIS fucked up due to squatting on the seats
of the toilets and shooting the *** washer water all over the place.
Other than that, Saudis dont do **** all for themselves.
The market and RSI where overheated. Just correcting and cooling of RSI. Reading ZH would
make you believe the end of the world was here. Smart money been in cash since august.
They'll be buying these heavenly discounted companies soon. Especially oil equipment and
services who are now below 2008 lows.
You could be right? But I remember doing some DOW studies going back to DOW inception, and
it was always a very ominous signal when markets crashed in late December.
President Donald Trump has put a number of burning issues back on the agenda.
These include the widening income gap in the United States, the unintended and unexpected
consequences of outsourcing, and the disequilibrium created by signing trade agreements with
countries with different labor laws and environmental, health and safety standards.
In foreign policy, Trump has managed to pass on an important message: don't take
American heavy lifting for granted!
More importantly, Trump has persuaded millions of
Americans excluded or self-excluded from the political arena to end their isolation and demand a
meaningful place in collective decision-making.
Thus, for the time being at least, air-brushing Trump out of the picture is a
forlorn task.
(Image source: Ryan Johnson/City of North Charleston/Wikimedia Commons)
As the American political elite head for Christmas holidays,
the buzz in Washington
circles is that 2019 will start with fresh attempts at curtailing the Trump presidency or, failing
that, preventing Donald Trump's re-election in 2020.
Amateurs of the conspiracy theory may
suggest that the whole thing may be a trap set by the Trump camp to keep the president's opponents
chained to a strategy doomed to failure.
By devoting almost all of their energies to attacking Trump personally and praying that the
Mueller probe may open the way for impeachment,
the president's opponents, starting with
the Democrat Party leadership, have shut down debate about key issues of economic, social and
foreign policy -- issues that matter to the broader public.
Reducing all politics to a
simple "Get Trump!' slogan makes them a one-trick pony that may amuse people for a while but is
unlikely to go very far.
Despite sensational daily headlines furnished by the Mueller soap opera,
there is little
chance of the impeachment strategy to get anywhere close to success.
And even if the
pro-impeachment lobby succeeds in triggering the process, it is unlikely that this would lead to
Trump's removal from office. In fact, out of the 45 men who have served as President of the United
States only two, Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton, faced formal impeachment procedures, but neither
was driven out of office.
Two others, Richard Nixon and John Tyler, came close to being impeached but managed not to face
the music in the end.
Nixon resigned and Tyler dodged by not seeking re-electi
on.
With impeachment unlikely, Trump's opponents may be looking for other ways of terminating his
tenure at the White House. One way is to exert so much psychological pressure that he decides to
regain his tranquility by resigning. However, apart from Nixon's special case, the resignation has
never been a feature of the American presidential history.
In any case, Trump looks like the last man on earth to opt for the humiliation of entering
history as a quitter.
A third way to get rid of Trump is to persuade the Republican Party
not to nominate him for a second term
. At first glance that may look like a credible
option if only because the main body of the Republican Party has never warmed up to Trump.
In fact, calling Trump a Republican president may be more of a verbal conceit than an accurate
depiction of reality. In the mid-term elections in November, some Republican senators and
congressmen insisted that Trump should stay away from their campaigns. Some who did lose their
seats may have regretted their decision, as Trump proved to be in command of his own support base
beyond the Republican Party.
The anti-Trump section of the US media is desperate to find at least one Republican
figure capable of challenging the incumbent president in the coming nomination contest. So far,
however, none
of the putative knights-in-shining-armor fielded by the anti-Trump media has
succeeded in making an impression.
In any event,
there are only five cases in which an incumbent president failed to win
re-nomination by his party
. Of these, four were men who had inherited the presidency after
the death of the president.
One was the already mentioned -- John Tyler, who became president in 1841 after the death of
President William Henry Harrison. Another was Millard Fillmore, who entered the White House after
the death of President Zachary Taylor.
The third on the list was the already mentioned Andrew Jackson, who not only failed to secure
re-nomination but also narrowly escaped impeachment. The fourth was Chester Arthur, who took over
after the assassination of President James Garfield. He was ditched when he launched an anti-graft
campaign that alienated many within his own party.
Only one sitting president who had won the first term failed to secure re-nomination by his
party. He was Franklin Pierce, whose demise came in exceptional circumstances created by the
division over the issue of slavery as the nation moved towards the War of Secession. Today, none of
those conditions obtains in the United States and the Republican Party, and the possibility of a
palace revolt against the incumbent seems remote.
Some of Trump's opponents publicly pray
that he might forswear a second term because of poor health. Although he has entered his
eight-decade, however, Trump shows no signs of physical fatigue let alone serious illness leading
to possible incapacitation.
During the mid-term elections, this septuagenarian was capable
of flying from one end of the continent to the other in a single day to address half a dozen public
meetings.
That political power may act as an aphrodisiac and doping agent has been known at least since
the time of the great Xerxes, whose only regret was that, in 100 years, none in his million-man
army would be alive. There is no doubt that Trump thrives on power and, despite the extra kilos he
has gained in the past two years, still sees himself as a long-distance runner.
The mistake
that Trump's opponents made from the start, and some still continue to make, is to underestimate
him and dismiss his appeal to wide segments of society as an aberration.
Trump has, however, managed to question the political agenda by
questioning the
so-called Washington Consensus that led to globalization with all its benefits and drawbacks.
In his unorthodox manner, Trump has put a number of burning issues back on the agenda.
These include the widening income gap in the United States, the unintended and unexpected
consequences of outsourcing, and the disequilibrium created by signing trade agreements with
countries with different labor laws and environmental, health and safety standards. In foreign
policy, Trump has managed to pass on an important message: don't take American heavy lifting for
granted!
More importantly, Trump has persuaded millions of Americans excluded or
self-excluded from the political arena to end their isolation and demand a meaningful place in
collective decision-making.
Thus, for the time being at least, air-brushing Trump out of
the picture is a forlorn task.
Tags
Politics
Since
I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump's planned
military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn't gotten better, it's gotten worse. I'm
having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the
political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of
the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few
thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying .
Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that
even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of
the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria
and the operations they've been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those
troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so
normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he's bringing the troops home, and
now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is
suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an
unaccountable US military occupation he didn't like, is now suddenly cheerleading for
congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out.
"I would urge my colleagues in the Senate and the House, call people from the
administration and explain this policy," Graham recently told
reporters on Capitol Hill. "This is the role of the Congress, to make administrations
explain their policy, not in a tweet, but before Congress answering questions."
"It is imperative Congress hold hearings on withdrawal decision in Syria --
and potentially Afghanistan -- to understand implications to our
national security," Graham tweeted today .
In an even marginally sane world, the fact that a nation's armed forces are engaged in daily
military violence would be cause for shock and alarm, and pulling those forces out of that
situation would be viewed as a return to normalcy. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite. In
an even marginally sane world, congressional oversight would be required to send the US
military to invade countries and commit acts of war, because that act, not withdrawing them, is
what's abnormal. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite.
A hypothetical space alien observing our civilization for the first time would conclude that
we are insane, and that hypothetical space alien would be absolutely correct. Have some Reese's
Pieces, hypothetical space alien.
It is absolutely bat shit crazy that we feel normal about the most powerful military force
in the history of civilization running around the world invading and occupying and bombing and
killing, yet are made to feel weird about the possibility of any part of that ending . It is
absolutely bat shit crazy that endless war is normalized while the possibility of peace and
respecting national sovereignty to any extent is aggressively abnormalized. In a sane world the
exact opposite would be true, but in our world this self-evident fact has been obscured. In a
sane world anyone who tried to convince you that war is normal would be rejected and shunned,
but in our world those people make six million dollars a year reading from a teleprompter on
MSNBC.
How did this happen to us? How did we get so crazy and confused?
I sometimes hear the analogy of sleepwalking used; people are sleepwalking through life, so
they believe the things the TV tells them to believe, and this turns them into a bunch of
mindless zombies marching to the beat of CIA/CNN narratives and consenting to unlimited
military bloodbaths around the world. I don't think this is necessarily a useful way of
thinking about our situation and our fellow citizens. I think a much more useful way of looking
at our plight is to retrace our steps and think about how everyone got to where they're at as
individuals.
We come into this world screaming and clueless, and it doesn't generally get much better
from there. We look around and we see a bunch of grownups moving confidently around us, and
they sure look like they know what's going on. So we listen real attentively to what they're
telling us about our world and how it works, not realizing that they're just repeating the same
things grownups told them when they were little, and not realizing that if any of those
grownups were really honest with themselves they're just moving learned concepts around inside
a headspace that's just as clueless about life's big questions as the day it was born.
And that's just early childhood. Once you move out of that and start learning about
politics, philosophy, religion etc as you get bigger, you run into a whole bunch of clever
faces who've figured out how to use your cluelessness about life to their advantage. You
stumble toward adulthood without knowing what's going on, and then confident-sounding people
show up and say "Oh hey I know what's going on. Follow me." And before you know it you're
donating ten percent of your income to some church, addicted to drugs, in an abusive
relationship, building your life around ideas from old books which were promoted by dead kings
to the advantage of the powerful, or getting your information about the world from Fox
News.
For most people life is like stumbling around in a dark room you have no idea how you got
into, without even knowing what you're looking for. Then as you're reaching around in the
darkness your hand is grasped by someone else's hand, and it says in a confident-sounding
voice, "I know where to go. Come with me." The owner of the other hand doesn't know any more
about the room than you do really, they just know how to feign confidence. And it just so
happens that most of those hands in the darkness are actually leading you in the service of the
powerful.
That's all mainstream narratives are: hands reaching out in the darkness of a confusing
world, speaking in confident-sounding voices and guiding you in a direction which benefits the
powerful. The largest voices belong to the rich and the powerful, which means those are the
hands you're most likely to encounter when stumbling around in the darkness. You go to school
which is designed to indoctrinate you into mainstream narratives, you consume media which is
designed to do the same, and most people find themselves led from hand to hand in this way all
the way to the grave.
That's really all everyone's doing here, reaching out in the darkness of a confusing world
and trying to find our way to the truth. It's messy as hell and there are so many
confident-sounding voices calling out to us giving us false directions about where to go, and
lots of people get lost to the grabbing hands of power-serving narratives. But the more of us
who learn to see through the dominant narratives and discover the underlying truths, the more
hands there are to guide others away from the interests of the powerful and toward a sane
society. A society in which people abhor war and embrace peace, in which people collaborate
with each other and their environment, in which people overcome the challenges facing our
species and create a beautiful world together.
People aren't sleepwalking, they are being duped . Duped into insanity in a confusing,
abrasive world where it's hard enough just to get your legs underneath you and figure out which
way's up, let alone come to a conscious truth-based understanding of what's really going on in
the world. But the people doing the duping are having a hard time holding onto everyone's hand,
and
their grip is slipping . We'll find our way out of this dark room yet.
Has anyone noticed that Rachel Maddow with her sooo patronizing, sooo objectionally smug
manner, implying that anyone who likes Trump is laughably pathetic, well – she keeps on
doing this and oddly (and effectively) generates a lot of support for Trump and what he's
doing. Her absolutely foul manner is perfectly crafted to turn folks against her and what she
espouses. You go girl!
It seems to me that, objectively, there are about three basic reasons for Endless War in
the Middle East.
One, to insure the security of the Israeli state. Two, to insure the free flow of cheap ME
petroleum to our 'trading partners' around the world who burn it to make cheap **** and ship
it across sealanes kept open by the U.S. Navy to Walmart and Amazon for resale (on credit!)
to the sheeple. Three, to finance the multi-billion dollar arms-building American MIC.
Purposes One, Two and Three mutually reinforce each other. You don't have to agree with all
Purposes as long as you agree with one of them. Proponents of Purpose One find allies among
the proponents of Purposes Two and Three. And vice versa. And, in a 'virtuous' (or is it
vicious?) circle, all at the top get very rich. The ultra-wealthy supporters of Israel, the
globalists, the corporatists, the militarists and their financiers and media mouthpieces.
Essentially all the new money in the Billionaire Class.
And who is opposed to this little arrangement? A few libertarians, and realists, and some
historians? A few folks on 'conservative' (but not neocon) websites? A few deplorables who
are actually thinking about their own best interests? A few people morally offended by the
notion of living in an 'exceptional' country which sponsors deadly perpetual war? A few
people who think its crazy to go half way around the world to kill people engaged in a
conflict which is critical to their daily lives but theoretical to us? A few men and women
who have seen combat and know the bloody truth? A few people who would prefer to re-invest in
the United States and repair the damage done to this country over the last forty years?
When you think about it the deck is definitely stacked in favor of Endless War. And what
Trump did on Thursday is again rather extraordinary.
The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge." Lord
Acton
George Herbert Walker Bush died on Saturday. He was 94 years old. Thanks to decisions he made
throughout his career, thousands – perhaps millions – of people never got near 94. He
invaded Iraq in 1991, instituted sanctions that destroyed the country. He pardoned those involved
in the Iran-Contra affair and was head of the CIA when Operation Condor launched the military coup
in Argentina in 1976 .
Instead, Simon Tisdall – a mindless servant to the status quo, always happy to weave
invective about our designated enemies – treats us to paragraph after paragraph of inane
anecdotes.
Good old Georgie once gave him a lift in Air Force One.
Barbara gave him useful advice about raising Springer Spaniels.
The following words and phrases are not found anywhere in this article: CIA, Iraq,
Iran-Contra, Argentinian coup, Iran Air Flight 655, NAZI, Panama.
Rather, Tisdall refers Bush's term as "before the era of fake news". Which makes him either a
complete a liar or profoundly under-qualified to write on the subject – as the Bush-era
spawned the original fake news: The Nayirah testimony . A pack of lies told
before the Senate, and used to justify a war in the middle-east.
Bush started two wars as President. Planned and enabled countless crimes as director of the
CIA. pardoned all those implicated in the Iran-Contra affair. Refused to apologise when the US
Navy "accidentally" shot down an Iranian airliner, killing over 200 civilians, including 60
children.
He was the original neocon – his administration brought us Cheney and Powell and
Rumsfeld. Gave birth to the ideology that stage-managed 9/11, launched the "War on Terror", and
cut a blood-stained swath across North Africa and the Middle East.
We don't hear about that.
What we DO hear about is Bush's "deep sense of public duty and service" and that
"Bush was a patriot who did not need cheap slogans to express his belief in enduring American
greatness". No space is given over to analysis, to examine the fact that "belief in enduring
American greatness" is quasi-fascism, and responsible for more violent deaths this century than
any other cause you can name.
In hundreds of words, a notionally left-wing paper has nothing but praise for a highly
unpopular right-wing president. No space is given over even to the gentlest of rebukes.
The whole article is an exercise in talking without saying anything. Pleasantries replacing
truth. Platitudes where facts should be. A nothing burger, with a void on the side and an extra
order of beige.
It's an obituary of Harold Shipman that eschews murder talk and rhapsodises about his love of
gardening.
A eulogy to Pinochet that praises his economic reforms but neglects all the soccer stadiums
full of corpses.
An epitaph to Hitler that focuses, not on his "controversial political career", but on his
painting and his vegetarianism.
Did you know Genghis Khan once lent me a pencil? He was a swell guy. The world will miss
him.
We're no longer supposed to examine the lives, characters or morals of our leaders. Only
"honour their memory" and be "grateful for their service". History is presented to us, not as a
series of choices made by people in power, but as a collection of inevitabilities. Consequences
are tragic but unavoidable. Like long-dead family squabbles – To dwell on them is unseemly,
and to assign blame unfair.
Just as with John McCain, apologism and revisionism are sold to us as manners and good taste.
Attempts to redress the balance and tell the truth are met with stern glares and declarations
that it is "too soon".
It's never "too soon" to tell the truth.
John McCain was a dangerous war-mongering lunatic. George Bush Sr was a sociopath from a
family of corrupt sociopaths. The world would be a far better, and much safer place if just one
major newspaper was willing to say that.
Really, there are two obituaries to write here:
First – George HW Bush, corrupt patriarch of an old and malign family, passing out of
this world to face whatever eternal punishment (hopefully) awaits those who sell their immortal
soul in exchange for a brief taste of power.
Second – The Guardian, perhaps a decent newspaper once-upon-a-time, now a dried out
husk. A zombified slave to the state, mindless and brainless and lifeless. No questions, no
reservations, no hesitation. Obediently licking up the mess their masters leave behind.
It's sickening.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting.
Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he's forced to out of a near-permanent sense of
outrage.
My mother believed it was only Bush Senior's longevity that prevented some of the neo-cons from
bumping off Bush Junior. He was President in name only and has long since fulfilled his
usefulness in committing the US to endless war. He is prone to verbal gaffes and that must make
him a liability, and when powerful evil people get nervous they often turn deadly.
Cut&Pasted from Lavrov interview in today's Saker Vineyard:
Question: When the death of President George H.W. Bush was announced, President Putin
expressed his condolences in a very emotional message. George Bush Sr. believed that one of the
worst mistakes of his presidency was failure to prevent the Soviet Union's dissolution. Did you
meet with him? What are your impressions of him?
Sergey Lavrov: I believe that George Bush Sr greatly contributed to the development of the
United States and ensured that his country responsibly played its role in the world,
considering its weight in international affairs.
I remember very well how President George H.W. Bush visited Moscow, and then he went to
Ukraine where he encouraged the Soviet republics' political forces to do their duty by
preserving the country rather than create huge, tragic problems for millions of people who
became citizens of different states the morning after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Mr Bush was a great politician. I believe that every word that will be said about his
achievements reflect the people's true attitude to this man. However, one comment about the
link between President Bush and the demise of the Soviet Union. I heard a commentator say that
George Bush Sr made history by helping Mikhail Gorbachev soft-land the Soviet Union. In fact,
George Bush Sr never did that; he simply wanted to protect millions of people from political
games. This is what we can say confidently about him.
It was German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte actually spilled the beans regarding the western media
in his best seller, Journalisten Gekaufte, (Bought Journalists). Ulfkotte described the degree
to which the CIA has penetrated the western media and corrupted, or bribed ( including himself)
the system which has become a PR organization for the intelligence services, and MIC. On
publication it immediately sold 120,000.00 copies and then strangely became unavailable in
English. He was described as a 'conspiracy theorist' (but of course) and died at the relatively
young age of a heart attack at 56. There are some salient issues surrounding his death raised
by Jonas Schneider in his book 'The Mysterious Death of Udo Ulfkotte: Evidence for a Murder.
He has announced his order to withdraw US troops from Syria.
His Defense Secretary James Mattis has resigned. There are rumors National Security
Adviser John Bolton may go too. (Please take
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with you!)
He announced a start to withdrawing from Afghanistan.
He now says he will veto a government funding bill unless he gets $5 billion for his
Wall, and as of 12:01 AM Washington time December 22 the federal government is officially
under partial shutdown.
All of this should be taken with a big grain of salt. While this week's assertiveness
perhaps provides further proof that Trump's impulses are right, it doesn't mean he can
implement them.
Senator Lindsey Graham is demanding
hearings on how to block the Syria pullout . Congress hardly ever quibbles with a
president's putting troops into a country, where the Legislative Branch has legitimate
Constitutional power. But if a president under his absolute command authority wants to pull
them out – even someplace where they're deployed illegally, as in Syria – well hold
on just a minute!
This will be a critical time for the Trump presidency. (And if God is really on his side, he
soon might get
another Supreme Court pick .) If he can get the machinery of the Executive Branch to
implement his decision to withdraw from Syria, and if he can pick a replacement to General
Mattis who actually agrees with Trump's views, we might start getting the America First policy
Trump ran on in 2016.
Mattis himself said in his resignation letter, "Because you have the right to have a
Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these [i.e., support for
so-called "allies"] and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my
position."
Right on, Mad Dog! In fact Trump should have had someone "better aligned" with him in that
capacity from the get-go. It is now imperative that he picks someone who agrees with his core
positions, starting with withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan, and reducing confrontation with
Russia.
Former Defense Secretary
Chuck Hagel complains that "our government is not a one-man show." Well, the "government"
isn't, but the Executive Branch is. Article II,
Section 1 : "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of
America." Him. The President. Nobody else. Period.
Already the drumbeat to saddle Trump with another Swamp critter at the Pentagon is starting:
"Several possible replacements for Mattis this week trashed the president's decision to pull
out of Syria. Retired Gen. Jack Keane called the move a "strategic mistake" on Twitter.
Republican Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) signed a letter demanding
Trump reconsider the decision and warning that the withdrawal bolsters Iran and Russia." If
Trump even considers any of the above as Mattis's replacement, he'll be in worse shape than he
has been for the past two years.
On the other hand, if Trump does pick someone who agrees with him about Syria and
Afghanistan, never mind
getting along with Russia , can he get that person confirmed by the Senate? One possibility
would be to nominate someone like Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney specifically
to run the Pentagon bureaucracy and get control of costs, while explicitly deferring
operational decisions to the Commander in Chief in consultation with the Service Chiefs.
Right now on Syria Trump is facing pushback from virtually the whole Deep State
establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as the media from Fox News , to NPR ,
to MSNBC . Terror has again gripped the establishment that the Trump who was elected president
in 2016 might actually start implementing what he promised. It is imperative that he pick
someone for the Pentagon (and frankly, clear out the rest of his national security team) and
appoint people he can trust and whose views comport with his own. Just lopping off a few heads
won't suffice – he needs a full housecleaning.
In the meantime in Syria, watch for another "Assad poison gas attack against his own
people." The last time Trump said we'd be
leaving Syria "very soon " was on March 29 of this year. Barely a week later, on April 7,
came a supposed chemical incident in Douma, immediately hyped as a government attack on
civilians
but soon apparent as likely staged . Trump, though, dutifully took the bait, tweeting that
Assad was an "animal." Putin, Russia, and Iran were "responsible" for "many dead, including
women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack" – "Big price to pay." He then for the
second time launched cruise missiles against Syrian targets. A
confrontation loomed in the eastern Med that could to have led to war with Russia. Now, in
light of Trump's restated determination to get out,
is MI6 already ginning up their White Helmet assets for a repeat ?
Trump's claim that the US has completed its only mission, to defeat ISIS, is being compared
to George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner following defeat of Iraq's army and the
beginning of the occupation (and, as it turned out, the beginning of the real war). But if it
helps get us out, who cares if Trump wants to take credit? Whatever his
terrible, horrible, no good, very bad national security team told him, the US presence in
Syria was never about ISIS. We are there as Uncle Sam's Rent-an-Army for the Israelis and
Saudis to block Iranian influence and especially an overland route between Syria and Iran (the
so-called
"Shiite land bridge" to the Mediterranean ).
For US forces the war against ISIS was always a sideshow, mainly carried on by the Syrians
and Russians and proportioned about like the war against the Wehrmacht: about 20% "us," about
80% "them." The remaining pocket ISIS has
on the Syria-Iraq border has been deliberate ly left alone, to keep handy as a lever to
force Assad out in a settlement (which is not going to happen). Thus the claim an American
pullout will
lead to an ISIS "resurgence " is absurd. With US forces ceasing to play dog in the manger,
the Syrians, Russians, Iranians, and Iraqis will kill them. All of them.
If Trump is able to follow through with the pullout, will the Syrian war wind down? It needs
to be kept in mind that the whole conflict has been because we (the US, plus Israel, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, the United Kingdom, etc) are the aggressors. We sought to use
al-Qaeda and other jihadis to effect regime change via the tried and true method. It
failed.
Regarding Trump's critics' claim that he is turning over Syria to the Russians and Iranians,
Assad is nobody's puppet. He can be allied with a Shiite theocracy but not controlled by it;
Iran, likewise, can also have mutually beneficial ties with an ideologically dissimilar
country, like it does with Christian Armenia. The Russians will stay and expand their presence
but unlike our presence in many countries – which seemingly never ends, for example in
Germany, Japan, and Korea, not to mention Kosovo – they'll be there only as long and to
the extent the Syrians want them. (Compare our eternal occupations with the Soviets' politely
leaving Egypt when Anwar Sadat asked them, or leaving Somalia when Siad Barre wanted them out.
Instead of leaving, why didn't Moscow just do a " Diem " on them?) It
seems that American policymakers have gotten so far down the wormhole of their paranoid
fantasies about the rest of the world – and it can't be overemphasized, concerning areas
where the US has no actual national interests – that we no longer recognize classic
statecraft when practiced by other powers defending genuine national interests (which of course
are legitimate only to the extent we say so).
Anyway, if this week's developments are the result of someone putting something into
Donald's morning Egg
McMuffin , America and the world owe him (or her) a vote of thanks. Let's see more of
the wrecking ball we Deplorables voted for !
Trump thought that by bringing the swamp into his fold he might be able to defang it. He
bent the knee, played nice and kissed the ring but still they kept at him. I think Trump has
had enough of giving a mile for getting an inch. I like Trump when he presents himself as a
human wrecking ball to all the evil plans of the Washington establishment and if he continues
like this I honestly believe he will be reelected in 2020, and one day will be acknowleged as
a true chapion for every day Americans but if he shrinks back into his shadow and gives the
likes of Bolton and Pompeo free reign to **** all over the globe with their insane scheming
he will be a one term failure.
Don't get too excited about the possibility that there may be more kinds of viagra to try
out, Jattras. If Trump recently seems to be more like the candidate we voted for, the real
reason for his reversion back is because the midterm elections are over and Trump kept the
Senate.
Check with me before you start making a lot of crack-pot statements
You know already what I will respond to this. And I know already what you will say in return.
So, instead of getting into a back and forth about it, I will simply leave you with something
to consider.
The fact that each successive report that comes out that refutes the claims of the truther
movement is automatically dismissed by people like you shows how conspiracy theory thinking
works. The final 9/11 report comes out in 2004 and, of course, the truthers dismiss it
because it was written by a branch of the federal government who you believe perpetrated 9/11
in the first place. Then Popular Mechanics publishes a 5,500 word report in 2005 extensively
answering and debunking the movement claims.
Here, you people can't claim that it was a government cover-up -- at least not directly --
because Popular Mechanics is a privately owned publication. Therefore, new sub-conspiracy
theories are invented to "prove" how Popular Mechanics is part of the cover-up. To give just
one example Christopher Bollyn "claimed to have discovered why the 100-year-old engineering
magazine would take part in a government cover-up of the crime of the century: A young
researcher on the magazine's staff named Benjamin Chertoff was a cousin of then-Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and the magazine was seeking to whitewash the criminal
conspiracy with its coverage." (Slate 2011) Here we are seeing the kind of incredible mental
contortion that truthers are willing to engage in to continue believing their theories.
Then in 2008 the National Institute of Standards and Technology released the final
installment of its study into the causes behind the collapse of the buildings -- $16 million
was invested into the investigation. And, as I well know, you and other truthers will have a
smart Alec come-back as to why the NIST report is wrong, its authors are part of the vast
conspiracy and so on. On and on it goes no matter how many reports are published by however
many experts.
Again, I am not interested in getting dragged into a back-and-forth about the merits and
demerits of these reports. Rather, I wish to point out the flawed reasoning inherent to 9/11
trutherism: that it has its own internal mechanisms for discounting any evidence that
contradicts its central tenets. It therefore constitutes a closed system of thought because
there is nothing that would ever count as a refutation. In other words, for all contradictory
evidence another explanation is made to retroactively fit the latest gap in the theory that
is exposed.
Now, I know full well that this is probably not going to change your mind either. And I'm
sure that there will be plenty of responses to this comment and thumbs down from Off-Guardian
readers. But I hope that you at least consider whether you are wrong about this subject. For
my part, I worry that 9/11 trutherism obscures what are indeed important subjects -- US
imperialism, US govt. corruption, the nefarious influence of the CIA, the legitimate
grievance that people in the Middle East have against the US, Israel, the Saudi dictatorship
and so on. Above all, I worry that 9/11 trutherism makes it open season for the real enemies
-- the US foreign policy establishment, et cetera -- to portray the resistance to them and
their agenda as a bunch of tin foil hat wearing fruitcakes. I feel strongly that the left
needs to jettison this in-group, conspiracy theory-type stuff really become a major force and
overturn the status quo.
People like you must count as a great success for the obedience training that keeps
capitalist society running smoothly, with the few dissidents casually dismissed as "a bunch
of tin foil hat wearing fruitcakes".
Even NIST eventually admitted that WTC-7 free-fell for 2.5 seconds. That can only happen
if all the support columns fail at exactly the same time; otherwise it would topple over
sideways. Only controlled explosives can make that happen.
Your touching faith in the word of ruling-class "experts", over the evidence of your own
eyes, and basic physics, is a credit to the Middle Ages. It would warm the hearts of the
Catholic theologians who refused to look through Galileo's telescope because they knew, as a
matter of revealed truth, that what he said couldn't possibly be true.
What do the claims of a bunch of tinfoil-hat-wearing fruitcakes count for, against not
just ruling class dogma, but the entire weight of respectable middle-class opinion? The
social status and careers of millions of right-thinking professionals, like you, depend on
believing, or at least pretending to believe, not just the 9/11 Official Story, but all the
other Official Stories as well. How could all those comfy middle-class people, with their
comfy middle-class careers and high-status friends, be wrong? That would throw the entire
plan for next weekend's dinner party into question.
Do you believe the Offical Skripal Story? The Official ISIS story? The Official Syrian
Chemical Weapons Story? The Official JFK Assassination Story? The Official USS Liberty Story?
The Official Tonkin Gulf Story? How do you decide which Official Stories to believe, except
on the basis of careerism and status-seeking?
Again, I am not interested in getting drawn into a back-and-forth about the various claims of
9/11 truthers like yourself. I would just like to make one comment and then leave two things
for yourself and other truthers on here to consider.
First, I would like to comment upon the fact that I have been subjected to some rather
nasty personalized abuse on this thread simply for challenging the claims of trutherism. I'm
not pointing this out to feel aggrieved or to search for sympathy or to make myself out as
some kind of victim. Rather I do so to illustrate how it is indicative of the negative and
mind-closing effects of the group-think and the conspiracy theorist mind-set. It goes
something like this: "everyone who questions the tenets of the great truther theory is the
enemy, not just a skeptic but rather a collaborator in the evil system that suppresses the
"truth"."
The people it discusses were truthers and many of them reexamined their beliefs after
being confronted by actual specialists on the subjects basing their truther beliefs on. If
you are open-minded as you claim to be, then have the decency to at least read the article
and consider its points, rather than just reflexively rejecting the source as part of the
great cover-up.
Finally, I would like to leave you with a quote from Noam Chomsky. Now, I am well aware
that you think Chomsky is a sell-out for not getting on board with trutherism and that you
have all kinds of fancy come-backs as to why he is wrong. But he raises a very important
issue of priorities for people on the anti-imperialist left to consider. Is this obsession
with this issue really helping us to fight against imperialism and all of the other
iniquities of the world? I think not:
"One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement has been to draw enormous amounts of
energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state, and their
institutional background, crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be,
if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is
treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and
activist work." Noam Chomsky
Ah "truther", that neologism which serves the same purpose as the recasting of the term
"conspiracy" to designate foolishness, gullibilty etc.
And as for Chomsky, well here's what he had to say about the 9/11 "inside job" theory:
"And even if it were true, which is extremely unlikely, who cares? It doesn't have any
significance. It's a little bit like the huge energy that's put out on trying to figure out
who killed John Kennedy. Who knows? Who cares? Plenty of people get killed all the time, why
does it matter that one of them happened to be John F. Kennedy?"
Let's just consider that for a moment. Chomsky is considering the possibilty -- however
remote in his view -- that 9/11 may indeed have been an inside job. And he's saying it
doesn't have any significance that the US goverment carried out an attack on its own
population! It doesn't have any significance that the "war on terror" was launched on the
basis of a lie!
This is the moment when Chomsky truly stood revealed. He was like the kid with his hand in
the cookie jar who instantly concocts any number of excuses all of which contradict each
other. And yet even when caught out like this, he has his supporters who say he "dispels 9/11
theories with sheer logic"!
That's the one. I mean – who knows and who cares? It's not as if a terrorist attack on
mainland America that altered the face of New York and launched a war across the world is
actually important.
Well, I think the fact that Noam Chomsky has said this demonstrates how few people accept
these 9/11 truther ideas -- even amongst people who generally agree with your (and my) kind
of politics. George Galloway, who like Chomsky is about as far politically from the neocons
as you can get, has also spoken very eloquently against trutherism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A5ToK6g0m8
Ironically, the only remotely public figure who does that I've heard mentioned on this
thread is some Reaganite crank that I had never heard of until now. That really does not bode
well for you, does it?
And having now listened to Mr Galloway and once again having to put up with his portentous
stretching out ..of the ..sentence to -- quite frankly pad the time out, I see that his
"points" come down to the following:
Two planes flew into the twin towers. Yes -- there's no disputing that one.
GW Bush could not possibly have planned the thing himself. Yes again -- no dispute. At
this point I must express my gratitude to Reagan for finally proving that the guy in front is
just a puppet.
If the US did it themselves and it "got out" it would be the end of America's credibility.
Yes indeed. Which is why, all across the mainstream press, it will only ever be presented as
a "nutty conspiracy theory"
Galloway: "I saw, myself, the airplanes hitting the twin towers."
-- which is supposed to constitute proof of the official
Evil-Terrorists-In-A-Cave-In-Afghanistan story.
attention, "flaxgirl": your grand unified theory of 9/11 now needs to incorporate George
Galloway as a fake witness for the US government, which seems strange, given his decades of
opposition, both before and after, to the imperial warfare for which 9/11 served as a
pretext.
The political function of the No-Planes-At-WTC claims could not be more clear; it's so
that people who dispute other aspects of the Official Story can all be dismissed as deranged
idiots.
But Peter you need to look at the evidence for yourself and not take others' word for it. And
be guided by those who know how buildings collapse -- Chomsky certainly doesn't.
This is a wonderful tutorial by Richard Gage, founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11
Truth.
The story of 9/11 is utterly preposterous. The only reason people believe it is to do with
psychology of how we relate to power nothing to do with the actuality of the story -- because
it's utterly ludicrous.
Wut? " less violent ones like England, the US or France " From here on it just gets worse
until Chomsky has no credible position left to argue from.
Heightened sense of cognitive dissonance by old Noam.
' even if it were true, which is extremely unlikely, then who cares? It doesn't have any
significance."
Wow, for someone with such intellect this is some low-level thinking. I almost feel sorry
for Chomsky for holding such an immoral position. Would he feel the same way if his wife was
murdered? "Ah, there's other things to worry about, anything else is a diversion of energy."
Very sad.
Where basic physics is concerned we should not speak of theory. The only possible explanation
for the collapse of the buildings is controlled demolition. There is no doubt whatsoever that
9/11 was an inside conspiracy. There is also no doubt that death and injury were staged
– at least, there is zero evidence of its reality in the visual record and one would
think that for the 3,000 dead and 6,000 injured claimed there would be at least one piece of
evidence for their reality, rather than every piece (anomalously small in number) in the
visual record perfectly fitting "staged". Not to mention other anomalies unrelated to the
visual record and that actual killing and injuring of people by the perpetrators would take a
highly-problematic form in the shape of a great number of loved ones (as opposed to the tiny
number presented) and the injured themselves when controlled demolition was so obvious.
When you say that there is no doubt whatsoever that 9/11 was an inside conspiracy, I feel you
are being overconfident unless what you are saying is that there is some evidence that some
figures at the World Trade Centres seemed to have foreknowledge.
Frankly, although we all have our theories as to who was responsible, I remain in full
agreement with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth who state simply that the official
account conflicts with physics. All else is suspicion and supposition. It may well be well
grounded supposition, but until we discover who planned and executed the event and who
definitely had foreknowledge, what we are dealing with is speculation.
The problem with that is that the great many people who refuse to believe anything other
than the official account of 9/11 dismiss our views as those of cranks
The buildings came down by controlled demolition. The evidence for that is
incontrovertible and the rationale presented by NIST for fire being the cause is demonstrably
not based on a skerrick of evidence and is obviously fraudulent and false. There is not a
single reason to suspect that the cause of collapse of all the buildings wasn't controlled
demolition. If you believe there is a single reason to suspect another cause can you please
provide it.
Since waking up to 9/11, I find that people either decide something is something with too
little evidence or refrain from deciding on what something is when the evidence is so
overwhelming you're practically drowning in it. Being conservative in judgement in the face
of overwhelming evidence is no virtue in my opinion.
I have engaged in conversation with Mick West who runs the metabunk.org website that
allegedly debunks all the conspiracy theories. We have gone back and forth a number of times
over the cause of WTC-7's collapse and I have invited him to respond to an Occam's Razor
challenge to provide 10 points that favour "fire" over "controlled demolition". He did not
respond to the challenge, nor could he provide a single point that favours fire over
controlled demolition. Not a single point -- didn't change his mind though. https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/5000-challenge.html
Nor has anyone responded to my other Occam's Razor challenges. I judge when I see that
there is a reasonable amount of evidence and that evidence points all one way and there is no
evidence pointing any other way. If you disagree with this method fair enough.
And just to add, that, of course, it must be an inside job in the case of controlled
demolition. As Graeme MacQueen says, there is no room in the official story for controlled
demolition.
The big secret is though that death and injury were staged. That's the real secret.
It was a totally excellent piece. No reservations.
"Theory"? Are you serious? If you believe that 9/11 was the work of 19 barely-trained
terrorists (one of whom cried when asked to do steep turns and stalls according to his
alleged flying instructor but was tasked with the most impossibly-expert manoeuvre of doing a
330 degree turn into the Pentagon), armed with boxcutters who managed to hijack 4 planes,
navigate them into 3 iconic buildings without being molested by a single fighter interceptor
through the most defended airspace on earth, which subsequently caused the 10-second
collapses (displaying all the characteristics of controlled demolition and none of
fire-caused collapses) of three high-rise steel frame buildings, here's a $5,000 challenge
for you. All you have to do is provide 10 points that support the "fire" hypothesis over the
"controlled demolition" hypothesis for the collapse of WTC-7 and you can choose your own
structural engineer to validate your points. There's so very much material on the collapse it
shouldn't be very difficult. In fact, all you have to do is come up with one point to support
WTC-7's collapse by fire and I'll give you $5,000. One point -- validated by a structural
engineer of your choice. https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/5000-challenge.html
9/11 is probably the biggest hoax in history and includes the very clever subhoax of 3,000
dead and 6,000 injured. Not only was it a hoax but they did not aim for realism in any shape
or form and gave us extra clues in addition to their preposterous
against-physical-and-administrative-reality story.
This is what Paul Craig Roberts, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy, who has
had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service, and business, has to say
about 9/11. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/about-paul-craig-roberts/
According to the official story, on September 11, 2001, the vaunted National Security
State of the World's Only Superpower was defeated by a few young Saudi Arabians armed only
with box cutters. The American National Security State proved to be totally helpless and was
dealt the greatest humiliation ever inflicted on any country claiming to be a power.
That day no aspect of the National Security State worked. Everything failed.
The US Air Force for the first time in its history could not get intercepter jet fighters
into the air.
The National Security Council failed.
All sixteen US intelligence agencies failed as did those of America's NATO and Israeli
allies.
Air Traffic Control failed.
Airport Security failed four times at the same moment on the same day. The probability of
such a failure is zero.
If such a thing had actually happened, there would have been demands from the White House,
from Congress, and from the media for an investigation. Officials would have been held
accountable for their failures. Heads would have rolled.
Instead, the White House resisted for one year the 9/11 families' demands for an
investigation. Finally, a collection of politicians was assembled to listen to the
government's account and to write it down. The chairman, vice chairman, and legal counsel of
the 9/11 Commission have said that information was withheld from the commission, lies were
told to the commission, and that the commission "was set up to fail." The worst security
failure in history resulted in not a single firing. No one was held responsible.
Washington concluded that 9/11 was possible because America lacked a police state.
The PATRIOT Act, which was awaiting the event was quickly passed by the congressional idiots.
The Act established executive branch independence of law and the Constitution. The Act and
follow-up measures have institutionalized a police state in "the land of the free."
Osama bin Laden, a CIA asset dying of renal failure, was blamed despite his explicit
denial. For the next ten years Osama bin Laden was the bogyman that provided the excuse for
Washington to kill countless numbers of Muslims. Then suddenly on May 2, 2011, Obama claimed
that US Navy SEALs had killed bin Laden in Pakistan. Eyewitnesses on the scene contradicted
the White House's story. Osama bin Laden became the only human in history to survive renal
failure for ten years. There was no dialysis machine in what was said to be bin Laden's
hideaway. The numerous obituaries of bin Laden's death in December 2001 went down the memory
hole. And the SEAL team died a few weeks later in a mysterious helicopter crash in
Afghanistan. The thousands of sailors on the aircraft carrier from which bin Laden was said
to have been dumped into the Indian Ocean wrote home that no such burial took place.
The fairy tale story of bin Laden's murder by Seal Team Six served to end the challenge by
disappointed Democrats to Obama's nomination for a second term. It also freed the "war on
terror" from the bin Laden constraint. Washington wanted to attack Libya, Syria, and Iran,
countries in which bin Laden was known not to have organizations, and the succession of faked
bin Laden videos, in which bin Laden grew progressively younger as the fake bin Laden claimed
credit for each successive attack, had lost credibility among experts.
Watching the twin towers and WTC 7 come down, it was obvious to me that the buildings were
not falling down as a result of structural damage. When it became clear that the White House
had blocked an independent investigation of the only three steel skyscrapers in world history
to collapse as a result of low temperature office fires, it was apparent that there was a
coverup.
After 13 years people at home and abroad find the government's story less believable.
The case made by independent experts is now so compelling that mainstream media has opened to
it. Here is Richard Gage of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth on C-SPAN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zbv2SvBEec#t=23
At the same time, however, it seems fair to point out that Trump and López Obrador both represent what
the Times described as "a global repudiation of the establishment." Indeed, this fact could actually help to distinguish
between the two leaders (along with other populist leaders) and their competing worldviews. While they stand on opposite sides
of the political spectrum, both Trump and López Obrador are part of the global revolt against what critics call neoliberalism,
and this is important for understanding our current era.
The past 30-plus years has been defined by the
political
project
of neoliberalism, spearheaded by the U.S. government and international financial institutions like the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with the utopian aim of creating a global capitalist economy perfectly guided
by the invisible hand of the market (for neoliberals and free-market fundamentalists, the invisible hand is an almost divine
concept, worshipped in economics departments around the country). The neoliberal era peaked in the 1990s, and in America it
was Democratic President Bill Clinton who accomplished neoliberal "reforms" that right-wingers had long dreamed of, including
financial deregulation, NAFTA and "ending welfare as we knew it" (he would probably have
privatized
Social Security too
had it not been for Monica Lewinsky).
Though the 1990s is often remembered as the beginning of our hyper-partisan age (demonstrated by the Clinton impeachment
scandal), the irony is that Democrats and Republicans became closer than ever before on economic issues during this decade.
The "Washington consensus" dominated this period, and it took a Democrat to pass a Republican trade deal and other
conservative economic policies. (Not surprisingly, the Democratic Party's shift to the right simply resulted in the GOP
shifting even further to the right.)
Neoliberalism was a global project advanced by economic elites. Not surprisingly, then, the neoliberal policies of the past
few decades have benefited those who pushed for them, creating enormous wealth for the richest individuals while leaving the
world grossly unequal. According to Oxfam, 82 percent of the wealth created in 2017
went
to the top one percent
, while the poorest half got nothing. In America alone, inequality is at historic levels and more
than 40 million people live in poverty; a
UN report
from
last month notes that the U.S. "now has one of the lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility of any of the rich
countries," and zip codes "are tragically reliable predictors of a child's future employment and income prospects."
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In Europe, Latin America, Asia and the United States, the status quo is no longer acceptable to a populace that has been
betrayed time and again throughout the neoliberal era. Leaders who represent this status quo are being thrown out of office
left and right. Those who have challenged the "establishment" have been labeled "populists" by the press, of course, and
thus are categorized more for what they stand
against
than what they stand
for
(this would be like
identifying the Soviet Union and the U.S. for their anti-fascism, rather than their communism or capitalism).
Some dispute the characterization of right-wing populists as anti-neoliberal, and correctly point out that most of the
Trump administration's economic policies have actually been neoliberalism on steroids (e.g., the GOP tax bill, deregulation,
etc.). Right-wing populism is purely about racism and xenophobia, these critics insist, and to make it about economics is to
ignore these ugly realities. But as Thomas Frank
pointed
out
in The Guardian back in 2016, "trade may be [Trump's] single biggest concern -- not white supremacy."
"It seems to obsess him," wrote Frank, who watched several hours of Trump's speeches. "The destructive free-trade deals our
leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make
to those companies' CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US."
Say what you will about Trump's tendency to lie and spew falsehoods, but on the issue of trade he has actually been pretty
consistent since entering the White House, and free trade is one of the staples of the neoliberal project. On the left, free
trade deals like NAFTA and TPP have also been major talking points, as we saw with Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign in
2016. There are other economic issues where some agreement exists, and right-wing populist parties in Europe are even more
likely to be anti-neoliberal on economic issues. Marine Le Pen's National Front, for example,
opposed
austerity cuts and promised to increase welfare for the working class
(at least for French citizens), while lowering the
retirement age and increasing tariffs to benefit French companies (and, the claim goes, workers too).
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Still, the left- and right-wing alternatives to neoliberalism are poles apart, and the differences between left-populists
like López Obrador and Sanders and right-populists like Trump and Le Pen are hard to overstate. To appreciate just how
different their worldviews are, it is worth considering how the left and right have historically understood themselves in
relation to the Enlightenment and modernity.
Throughout the modern era progressives and reactionaries have more or less rejected the status quo, with thinkers from both
sides offering critiques of the modern world. The fundamental difference was that the left considered itself a part of the
Enlightenment tradition, while the right was part of the "counter-Enlightenment" (this goes back to the French Revolution,
when revolutionaries sat on the left side of the Estates General and royalists sat on the right).
The left criticized modernity not because it rejected the modern world, but because it saw the Enlightenment project as
incomplete. Karl Marx praised the bourgeoisie and called capitalism a "great civilizing influence," considering it to be a
positive development in history. He also wrote the most influential critique of capitalism to date, and while he acknowledged
that capitalism was progress over feudalism, he also believed that it must eventually be replaced with socialism to
realize the goals of the Enlightenment. Put simply, Marx and other leftists believed in the idea of progress, long associated
with the Enlightenment.
On the right, criticisms of modernity came from a very different perspective. Reactionaries did not see the modern world as
progress over the pre-modern world; rather, they saw it as a decline. Driven by nostalgia and resentment, reactionaries
romanticized the past and believed that the ills of modernity could be cured by simply turning back the clock and restoring
the status quo ante.
In his classic book "
Escape from Freedom
," the psychiatrist and
social philosopher Erich Fromm attempted to make sense of the rise of fascism in the early 20th century, and in doing so
offered a penetrating analysis of modernity. While the modern world had liberated men and women from social conventions of the
past and various restrictions on the individual (i.e., "freedom from"), it had also severed what Fromm called "primary bonds,"
which gave security to the individual and provided meaning. Forced from their communities into urban and industrial
environments, modern men and women were left alienated and rootless, feeling powerless and purposeless in the new world.
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There were two ways that people could respond to this situation, Fromm argued; either they could reject freedom
altogether and embrace counter-Enlightenment movements like fascism, or they could progress to a "positive freedom," where one
can relate oneself "spontaneously to the world in love and work."
"If the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a
basis for the realization of individuality," wrote Fromm, "while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them
security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden." Freedom, he continued, "becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of
life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some
kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his
freedom."
The reactionary impulse would be to "escape from freedom" and restore the conventions and "primary bonds" of the past,
while the progressive impulse would be to progress to a more complete and dynamic kind of freedom.
The reader may be wondering where all of this fits in with the current revolt against neoliberalism. Put simply, the
neoliberal age has left many people with the same kind of doubts and anxieties that Fromm discussed in his book almost 80
years ago. Numerous articles have been written in recent years about how the policies of neoliberalism have
worsened stress and loneliness
, exacerbated
mental
health problems
,
driven
rising rates of suicide
and the opioid crisis, and left people feeling desperate and hopeless in general. Globalization,
deindustrialization, consumerism and "financialization"; all these economic trends are contributing to the breakdown of our
democratic society, leading some to embrace authoritarian alternatives, as many did in Fromm's day.
From this point of view, the global rise of populism that continued with López Obrador isn't much of a surprise. The
popular rejection of neoliberalism around the world is undeniable at this point, but it is still unclear whether this
rejection of the status quo will lead to reactionary or progressive change in the long run. López Obrador represents
progressive change, as does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's surprise primary victory in New York's 14th congressional district.
Trump and other far-right populists like Le Pen represent something very different.
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It will ultimately come down to which side can offer the more appealing alternative, and the left should recognize that the
more realistic and "pragmatic" approach isn't always the most politically persuasive. One of the most common criticisms of
populists has been that they are selling a pipe dream, which to an extent is true -- especially for right-wing populists who
base their entire worldview on falsehoods. If the left wants to stop reactionary populism, however, it will have to adopt an
unapologetically populist approach of its own, and reject the dogma of neoliberalism once and for all.
Captain
Nonobvious
Leader
21 Jul
Neoliberalism is nothing more than a set of excuses and fables for giving more wealth, power
and income to the rich and well off than they have at any given moment, and for distributing
the assets of ownership and governance across borders, out of reach and jurisdiction of the
people.
Which brings us to today.
But what next? Neoliberalism is ending because enough of society now is owned and run by the top end --completely in Russia,
and mostly, here in the US-- that the people no longer have enough to work with to compete
against oligarchy.
In the US there's no more need for the pretense, so we get the blatant language and behavior of a Trump, and public display
of the aggression against the people and the nation that neoliberalism has been practicing
out of view all along. (It's not actually been so much hidden as willfully ignored by
moderates and commentators since the Administration of the previous lying, delusional
national media star.)
What's next is rapid consolidation of oligarchy. The Supreme Court will be held by oligarchy
fanatics for the coming 40 years, and will be ruling every imaginable practice of liberal or
progressive governance to be unconstitutional. Even an economic collapse like the Great
Depression can't unseat a Court, and no voting majorities can legislate against their
Constitution.
Basho
Leader
21 Jul
No matter how much you pretty up neoliberalism with racial diversity, women' empowerment, and
homosexual rights, it still stinks. Neoliberalism has turned the Democratic Party into a
political-correct Republican Party. All the great accomplishments that came from the1930s to
the mid-70s are gone. Democrats have become the party of the oligarchs and the professional
elites who serve them. They have - as Thomas Frank has suggested - ceased to be the party of
the people. The whole point of neoliberalism is to please big money donors by dismantling all
that Democrats did to help and ordinary working Americans before the1980s. This had been what
Noam Chomsky called Amerca's Golden Age. America had become the finest country to live in in
the entire history of the world. That's gone. Today Democrats join with Republicans in
supporting a corporate oligarchy. If the Democratic Party is to have a future (and if I am to
be a part of it) they must turn to new voices like Tulsi Gabbard and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
They need to make Bernie Sanders the Chair of the Democratic Party. And they need to quit
warmongering. The Democratic Party must model itself after Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Andrés
Manuel López Obrador in Mexico. Neoliberalism is a plague. It is anti-democratic. It must
end. The Democratic Party must once again be a moral force for economic justice.
Mike Calcagno
Leader
Basho
23 Jul
Edited
nYes, things were great in American cities in the 60s and 70s. Those riots - how
wonderful? Almost 1000 murders a year in Chicago in the early 70s, more than 2000 a year
in New York. Major American cities looked like Dresden after WWII in many neighborhoods.
LBJ was a warmonger who got 57000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians
killed, and Kennedy won by running to the right of Nixon. You continue to peddle this
nonsense that there was this golden age of liberalism. There was a brief period where the
White working class did well as a result of unions, and because wealthier white men who
served with them during the war felt an obligation to their fellow servicemen. As usual,
you ignore the plight of non-White Americans. I'm not calling you a racist; I'm
challenging you on your myopia. n
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Basho
Leader
Mike Calcagno
23 Jul
Edited
Today we have police armed with military equipment harassing and killing people of color
in American cities. Driving while Black has become a crime. Our Golden Age (which ended in
the 1970s) saw the least economic inequality of any industrialized nation. FDR created an
excellent economic safety net. He essentially created our middle class. Today we have
greatest wealth inequality of any industrialized nation. In the Golden Age we had the
nonviolent Civil Rights Movement (in which I participated.) There was a major peace
movement in the Democratic Party (in which I participated.) We had the War on Poverty.
Unions were strong. Working people had a decent standard of living. The Democratic Party
was actually liberal (The word liberal today has been drained of all meaning.) Kennedy
ran, not to the right of NIxon but as a hawk like Nixon, but at the time of his death he
was working to get out of Vietnam. And he started pushing the Democratic Party towards
civil rights.Kennedy got rid of the evil Alan Dulles as head of the CIA. Today's Dulles's
techniques are a clear part of the Democratic Party's foreign policy. Our CIA is Murder
Incorporated. The Democratic Party that I once loved has gone to hell.
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FreeQuark
Leader
22 Jul
The social agenda of the left is entirely compatible with neoliberalism, and in fact certain
aspects of that social agenda - unrestricted immigration, for example - are fundamental
components of neoliberal economic ideology. Neoliberal politicians who are members of
center/left political parties thus run on a far left social platform and thereby win election
after election over economic progressives. The left has consequently neutered itself on
economics through its overemphasis on social issues. Most people on the left are totally
unwilling to acknowledge that reality, and that is why neoliberals will continue to dominate
center/left politics around the world. Even though "progressives" may manage to win an
election here or there, neoliberals will always be able to maintain overall control of
center/left parties by associating left-wing economics with opposition to immigration and
other alleged "right-wing" causes. For people on the left primarily concerned about
economics, alternative right politicians on the order of Trump or Le Pen are likely to remain
the only viable political options in most elections for a long time to come.
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Darren
Tomlyn
Leader
21 Jul
Edited
Humanity now stands at a crossroads, for there's a difference between reacting against the
corruption of civilization, and reacting against civilization itself... The latter is
unfortunately what Trump (and Brexit) truly represents. If the latter is what people vote
for, then they vote for DEATH... Unfortunately, as has been proven throughout the past few
thousand years, this usually ultimately results in their very own death at the same time.
Although neoliberalism has been about the corruption of capitalism - using economic power to
get one part of humanity to essentially wage war on the rest to further their own goals -
this particular underlying economic conflict (the rich and powerful vs everyone else) is
inherent to civilization, and is what government exists to manage. So again, the main problem
stems from people not learning from history and repeating many of the same mistakes, even it
the context and outcomes merely rhyme...
Todd
Dunning
Leader
22 Jul
Can someone here help me out to properly define "Neoliberalism"?
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FreeQuark
Leader
Todd Dunning
22 Jul
Neoliberalism is the idea that the removal of protectionist trade policies, government
regulations, immigration quotas, and other barriers to international commerce is the key
to economic growth and prosperity. It's safe to say I think that the adoption of the
neoliberal policy agenda by many governments around the world has not produced the outcome
that economists and globalist think tanks claimed it would produce. The problem now is
that mainstream political parties in Western countries have bought, hook, line, and sinker
into neoliberalism and are refusing to let it go regardless of its failings. The reason
they won't let it go of course is that most of those parties are controlled by wealthy
people who haven't been harmed by neoliberal policies. I'm guessing Justin Trudeau,
Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and the Clintons have never lost a night's sleep worrying
that the factory they work in may move overseas or that they will lose a job to some
upwardly-mobile immigrant.
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RobertSF
Leader
Todd Dunning
22 Jul
Is there no wiki in your internet? Or are you looking for an argument?
jak123
Leader
21 Jul
Excellent article. Trump and AMLO are similar in that both are insurgents. The question for
both is whether they can make real progress within their respective political systems. The
Russia issue is a test of that. On one side is Trump, who represents a break from the
neoliberal policies of the past (even if many of his policies are neoliberal, as Lynch says),
such as hostility toward Russia, and on the other hand are elements of his government, such
as the intelligence agencies, that backed Clinton and are part of the effort to undermine
Trump because they want to topple Putin to allow the US to plunder Russia. The hysterical
overreaction to the summit. Strzok's shocking testimony to Congress and Mueller's pretend
indictments of Russians who will never stand trial represent an escalation by the elements of
Trump's government who oppose him.
It was over two years ago that Wells Fargo's fake accounts scandal burst into the headlines, and since then, there has been an
unrelenting torrent of bad news. In late October, the American Banker
reported
that two executives were placed on leave after they received notifications of pending sanctions from the Office of the Comptroller
of the Currency. In November, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell sent a
letter
to Senator Elizabeth Warren saying the Fed will not lift a cap on Wells's growth until the bank addresses deficiencies in oversight
and risk management. "The underlying problem at the firm was a strategy that prioritized growth without ensuring that risks were
managed, and as a result the firm harmed many of its customers," Powell wrote.
In early November, Jay Welker, who was the head of the private bank, which sits within the bank's wealth management business,
retired . Under Welker,
the private bank
pushed wealth advisors to vigorously sell
high-fee products . There may be more bad news about this aspect of the embattled bank. The Justice Department, the SEC, the
Labor Department, and Wells Fargo's own board are conducting ongoing investigations into its wealth management business that have
yet to be resolved.
There's still one aspect of how the wealth management business pushed for growth that former Wells Fargo employees say hasn't
gotten the scrutiny it should. For four years, starting in 2012 and through the end of 2015, Wells incentivized some of its advisors
in that business through something called the "Growth Award." Some former employees say these awards led to behavior that was not
in the best interest of clients, including steering them towards higher-fee products. The Growth Award was much discussed internally,
says a former investment strategist at Wells, although not everyone was privy to the details of how it worked.
Last summer, the Wall Street Journal
reported
the existence of the growth award, but not the details of how the money worked. Essentially, the growth award was a way of motivating
advisors to grow their businesses. In and of itself, that isn't unusual. The industry has for years offered successful brokers incentives,
often in the form of elaborate trips to exotic locales.The SEC is
weighing new rules that may curtail the use of such rewards under the theory that they could make brokers "predominantly motivated"
by "self enrichment." Firms have also long used rich packages to lure successful brokers to move their business.
But firms are cutting back on the use of such packages, according to industry insiders. When told about the details of the growth
award, three financial advisors at other firms with whom Yahoo Finance spoke expressed shock at both the sheer size and the way it
incentivized advisors for short-term growth, rather than long-term business building. (Another advisor thought that in the context
of the packages that were used to incentivize brokers to switch, it wasn't so surprising.) Or as former Wells Fargo executive, who
was in the retail brokerage industry for decades, says, "If a free golf outing is bad business, then the Growth Award is bad business
on steroids."
In a statement to Yahoo Finance, spokesperson Shea Leordeanu said, "At Wells Fargo Wealth and Investment Management, we are committed
to taking care of our clients' financial needs every day and take seriously our responsibility to help them preserve and invest their
hard-earned savings. Our primary goal is to be a trusted advisor to our clients and to act in their best interests. And we have supervisory
processes and controls in place so that, if a team member acts in a manner not in line with our values and our policies, we take
appropriate action."
An enormous, compounding bonus for bringing revenue to Wells Fargo
The Growth Award wasn't available to the entire army of some 14,000 advisors, who make up the broad group of Wells Fargo Advisors.
(Many others, most prominently those who came with the 2008 Wachovia merger, had different compensation plans with lock-ups that
are just now expiring, leading to something of an
exodus , according to press reports.) This Growth Award, on the other hand, was meant for the 3,000 or so advisors who were part
of something known as Wealth Brokerage Services, or WBS. These advisors are located in the bank branches, or in hubs -- Wells Fargo
buildings in cities -- that housed wealth management personnel among others like business bankers. (Wells Fargo subsequently
announced a reorganization
that is expected to combine what were separate groups of advisors.) To be eligible, you couldn't be a newbie -- you needed a two
year minimum at the bank -- and you had to be doing more than $350,000 in annual revenue. The former executive and another advisor
estimate that narrowed the group down to about 2,000 people.
The amounts people stood to make were extraordinary. Here's how the math worked. The goal was for an individual financial advisor
to increase his or her revenue by at least 15% for each of the four years that the Growth Award was in place. The award multiplied
each year the goal was achieved. So if you achieved 15% growth in the first year, you received a 15% bonus. If you achieved 15% growth
again in the second year, you received a 30% bonus. If you achieved 15% growth in the third year, you received a 45% bonus. Finally,
if you achieved 15% growth again in the 4th year, you received a whopping 60% bonus.
If you didn't achieve the goal, you were not penalized, but you didn't receive the bonus.
To get specific about just what these percentages could mean, say you generated $1 million in revenue in 2011, and you achieved
precisely 15% growth each year for the next 4 years. In year one, your revenue would be $1,150,000, and your bonus, at 15% of that,
would be $172,500. The new 2013 goal would be $1,322,500 (a 15% increase from the $1,150,000.). If you hit that goal, your Growth
Award bonus for 2013 would be $396,393. And so on. If you hit the goals for 2014 and 2015, you stood to make a bonus of $684,393
and $1,049,403, respectively. That means you stood to make $2.3 million in total Growth Award bonuses. In other words, the financial
incentives to hit the numbers were enormous.
Perhaps for the very reason the incentives were so enormous, more advisors hit the numbers than Wells had expected. (Of course,
there was also a strong bull market during that period.) The Journal reported that Wells had allotted $250 million for the Growth
Award bonuses. Instead, Wells had to pay $750 million between 2012 and 2015. "It's widely known inside Wells that they were so way
over budget," says another former advisor. "I personally know brokers who were awarded bonuses of over $2 million, which is a stunning
amount of money," says a former investment advisor.
Roughly two-thirds of the 2,000 or so eligible advisors earned an award.
"When you throw that kind of money out, it incentivizes."
Now consider the Growth Award from the perspective of a client, who might wander into a bank branch, maybe having gotten an unexpected
inheritance. "You have to connect the dots," the former executive says. "This is where the sales pressure in the bank branches meets
the wealth and investment management business."
The staff of the branch was incentivized to steer clients to a Wells financial advisor, because investment management referrals
helped them meet their sales goals, and that advisor, in turn had incentives -- really big incentives -- to steer the clients toward
products that generate upfront revenue. "If you don't have a high moral background, it'll put you in a position to do things for
clients that aren't in their best interest," says a former advisor. "I'm always looking at what's best for the client but it's also
what's best for my paycheck." "You are absolutely incentivizing advisors to sell the products with the highest upfront fees," says
the former executive.
"Yeah, when you throw that kind of money out, it incentivizes," says another former advisor. "Jesus would probably be okay. But
the disciples probably would have had some morals put to the test on that one."
Multiple sources say the Growth Award helps explain why annuity sales at Wells Fargo were so high, especially after the bank tried
to tamp down on the amount the Award was going to cost them. In 2014, Wells Fargo decided to stop "fee fronting," which allowed advisors
to count fees that would be paid in subsequent years toward their annual tally. So advisors began to search for products with high
initial fees, one former advisor said.
Annuities come with high upfront revenues for the broker, making them an obvious choice for someone who is trying to hit a revenue
target -- but maybe not the optimal choice for the client. "You think Wells Fargo's Bankers Are Bad? Take a Look at its Brokers,"
was the headline of an October 2016 piece in thestreet.com. The piece
noted that Wells had argued to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it should not be subject to rules to put its investors
first in cases where its advisors were making referrals for products including annuities, and that in 2015, Wells was number one
in the country for annuity sales.
"It's pretty stunning that a firm that has just half the assets of its larger competitors sells more annuities," says a former
advisor. "I think that just speaks to the emphasis on making sales numbers and a need to sell more of the highest payout products."
Indeed, the Journal reported and several former advisors corroborate that internally, 2015 was dubbed "The Year of the Annuity."
It wasn't just annuities. One former advisor also noted that advisors trying to chase the growth award also favored mutual funds
with high upfront fees. "You'd think if revenue was going up by 15% a year, your AUM would at least go up at least 12% or 13%," a
former advisor said. "That was not the case. The award was only revenue based -- there was nothing in there for AUM, longevity, or
anything like that. Strictly show us the money and we'll show you the money."
All the fees were disclosed to Wells Fargo's clients. But what clients didn't know was the incentive structure that was in place
for their advisor. So yes, clients understood the fees -- but they were in the dark as to at least part of the reason one product
might have been recommended over another. "Imagine that it's November," says the former executive. "You have to do $250,000 in revenue,
or you going to leave a million dollars on the table. What are you doing to do?" He continues, "Every client of WBS has to go back
and look at every trade, every single decision, from 2012 to 2015 and scrutinize whether it was impacted by the Growth Award." "I
think if clients and the public knew that Wells Fargo Advisors had given such substantial and amazing well-timed retention bonuses
to lock up their advisors, they would begin to wonder whether their advisors were giving the best advice to their clients," says
another former investment strategist.
There could be another problem, too. "If you achieved the goal early, you would stop doing business so you didn't have the higher
base to start from in the next year," says the former executive. "You'd sand bag -- and that might not be in the client's best interest
either."
A golden handcuff at a very good time for Wells Fargo
The Growth Award may also help explain why Wells has been able to retain as many advisors as it has, despite the ongoing scandals.
Six months before the end of the Growth Award program, midway through 2015, Wells Fargo asked those advisors who had qualified for
the award how they would like to receive their pay. There were two options. The first option essentially allowed the advisor to unlock
all the money at the end of February 2021. If the advisor left before that, the money was forfeited. A third of the advisors who
earned awards chose this option.
The other option paid out a tenth of the bonus each year for 10 years. If the advisor so chose, they could get that money up front
as a forgivable loan. Every year the advisor remained at Wells Fargo, he or she would simply pay the interest on their bonus, and
a tenth of the principle would be forgiven. But if the advisor left, he or she had to pay back the unforgiven principle. (Or if the
advisor hadn't taken the forgivable loan, the annual checks would stop.) Two-thirds of advisors opted for this route.
The Growth Award also had the potential to create another problem for advisors. The nice thing about building a fee-based business
is that it's an annuity for the advisor. Every year, there's a fee. If, on the other hand, the advisors put clients' money into things
that generate a one-time pop of revenue, the advisor doesn't get the same type of ongoing fees. So, the former executive says, some
advisors are in a hole, where they owe taxes on the Growth Award, while their income has shrunk dramatically. "I know guys who got
it who built or bought a huge house and are now stuck," he says.
The golden handcuff of the Growth Award has been good for the bank in the face of all of the scandals. One advisor told Yahoo
Finance that the growth in the number of clients also shrank dramatically amid the unrelenting negative news.
"I went from around 30 referrals to two in six months after the scandal hit," this person said. What had been a solid stream of
clients slowed to a trickle. But the only out for advisors would have been to have another firm hire them away and pay off their
loan.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Growth Award is how deliberate it was. "It was not a computer glitch or an oversight,"
as the former executive says. "It was not perpetrated by a few rogue employees. The Growth Award was conceived by the Compensation
Committee. The Compensation Committee is the most senior of senior management. The goal was to drive growth and drive growth it did."
But perhaps at a price for clients -- making the Growth Award, in its way, the most telling evidence yet of the cultural issues within
Wells Fargo.
"... The Pity of It All : A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 ..."
"... Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results. ..."
"... Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire. ..."
"... Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. ..."
"... Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. ..."
"... Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis. ..."
"... Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. ..."
"... The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality. ..."
"... Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on. ..."
"... "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper" ..."
"... "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. " ..."
"... Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention. ..."
"... " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that." ..."
"... But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld? ..."
"... Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS. ..."
"... But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny. ..."
At the Huffington Post, Jim Sleeper addresses
"A Foreign-Policy Problem
No One Speaks About," and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives.
Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, even if he's not a warmongering neocon
himself. The Yale lecturer's jumping-off point are recent statements by Leon Wieseltier and
David Brooks lamenting the decline of
American power.
In addition to Wieseltier and Brooks, the "blame the feckless liberals" chorus has included Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, David
Frum, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and many other American neoconservatives. Some of them have
been chastened, or at least been made more cautious, by their grand-strategic blunders of a few years ago ..
I'm saying that they've been fatuous as warmongers again and again and that there's something pathetic in their attempts to
emulate Winston Churchill, who warned darkly of Hitler's intentions in the 1930s. Their blind spot is their willful ignorance
of their own complicity in American deterioration and their over-compensatory, almost pre-adolescent faith in the benevolence
of a statist and militarist power they still hope to mobilize against the seductions and terrors rising all around them.
At bottom, the chorus members' recurrent nightmares of 1938 doom them to reenact other nightmares, prompted by very similar
writers in 1914, on the eve of World War I. Those writers are depicted chillingly, unforgettably, in Chapter 9, "War Fever," of
Amos Elon's
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. Elon's account of Germany's stampede into World
War I chronicles painfully the warmongering hysterics of some Jewish would-be patriots of the Kaiserreich who exerted themselves
blindly, romantically, to maneuver their state into the Armageddon that would produce Hitler himself.
This is the place to emphasize that few of Wilhelmine German's warmongers were Jews and that few Jews were or are warmongers.
(Me, for example, although my extended-family history isn't much different from Brooks' or Wieseltier's.) My point is simply that,
driven by what I recognize as understandable if almost preternatural insecurities and cravings for full liberal-nationalist belonging
that was denied to Jews for centuries in Europe, some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves
into the Iraq War, and they have continued, again and again, to employ modes of public discourse and politics that echo with eerie
fidelity that of the people described in Elon's book. The Americans lionized George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and
many others as their predecessors lionized Kaiser Wilhelm, von Bethmann-Hollweg, and far-right nationalist associates who hated
the neo-cons of that time but let them play their roles .
Instead of acknowledging their deepest feelings openly, or even to themselves, the writers I've mentioned who've brought so
much folly and destruction upon their republic, are doubling down, more nervous and desperate than ever, looking for someone else
to blame. Hence their whirling columns and rhythmic incantations. After Germany lost World War I, many Germans unfairly blamed
their national folly on Jews, many of whom had served in it loyally but only a few of whom had been provocateurs and cheerleaders
like the signatories of [Project for New American Century's] letter to Bush. Now neo-cons, from Wieseltier and Brooks to [Charles]
Hill, are blaming Obama and all other feckless liberals. Some of them really need to take a look in Amos Elon's mirror.
Interesting. Though I think Sleeper diminishes Jewish agency here (Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are no one's proxy) and can't
touch the Israel angle. The motivation is not simply romantic identification with power, it's an ideology of religious nationalism
in the Middle East, attachment to the needs of a militarist Sparta in the Arab world. That's another foreign policy problem no one
speaks about.
Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:11 pm
"Democracy in in the Middle East" was always just a weasel-word saying of "let's try to improve Israel's strategic position
by changing their neighbours".
The neocons basically took a hardline position on foreign interventionism based out of dual loyalty. This is the honest truth.
For anti-Semites, a handful of neocons will always represent "The Jews" as a collective. For many Jews, the refusal to come to
grips with the rise of the neocons and how the Jewish community (and really by "community" I mean the establishment) failed to
prevent them in their own midst, is also a blemish.
Of course, Jim Sleeper is doing these things now. He should have done them 15-20 years ago or so. But better late than never,
I guess.
Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:16 pm
P.S. While we talk a lot about neocons as a Jewish issue, it's also important to put them in perspective. The only war that
I can truly think of that they influenced was the Iraq war, which was a disaster, but it also couldn't have happened without 9/11,
which was a very rare event in the history of America. You have to go back to Pearl Harbor to find something similar, and that
wasn't technically a terrorist attack but rather a military attack by Japan.
Leading up to the early 2000s, they were mostly ignored during the 1990s. They did take over the GOP media in the early 90s,
using the same tactics used against Hagel, use social norms as a cover but in actuality the real reason is Israel.
Before the 90s, in the 70s and 80s, the cold war took up all the oxygen.
So yeah, the neocons need to be talked about. But comparing what they are trying to do with a World War is a bit of a stretch.
Finally, talking about Israel – which Sleeper ignored – and the hardline positions that the political class in America have
adopted, if you want to look who have ensured the greatest slavishness to Israel, liberal/centrist groups like ADL, AJC and AIPAC(yes,
they are mostly democrats!) have played a far greater role than the neocons.
But I guess, Sleeper wasn't dealing with that, because it would ruin his view of the neocons as the bogeymen.
Just like "liberal" Zionists want to blame Likud for everything, overlooking the fact that Labor/Mapai has had a far greater
role in settling/colonizing the Palestinian land than the right has, and not to speak about the ethnic cleansing campaigns of
'48 and '67 which was only done by the "left", so too the neocons often pose as a convenient catch-all target for the collective
Jewish failure leading up to Iraq.
And I'm using the words "collective Jewish failure" because I actually don't believe, unlike Mearsheimer/Walt, that the war
would not have gone ahead unless there was massive support by the Israel/Jewish lobby. If Jews had decided no, it would still
have gone ahead. This is also contrary to Tom Friedman's famous saying of "50 people in DC are responsible for this war".
I also think that's an oversimplification.
But I focus more on the Jewish side because that's my side. And I want my community to do better, and just blaming the neocons
is something I'm tired of hearing in Jewish circles. The inability to look at liberal Jewish journalists and their role in promoting
the war to either gentile or Jewish audiences.
Kathleen, May 6, 2014, 6:53 pm
There was talk about this last night (Monday/5th) on Chris Matthew's Hardball segment on Condi "mushroom cloud" Rice pulling
out of the graduation ceremonies at Rutger's. David Corn did not say much but Eugene Robinson and Chris Matthews were basically
talking about Israel and the neocons desires to rearrange the middle east "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" conversation.
Bumblebye, May 6, 2014, 2:33 pm
"some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War"
Have to take issue with that – the neo-cons hurled young American (and foreign) servicemen and women into that war, many to
their deaths, along with throwing as much taxpayer money as possible. They stayed ultra safe and grew richer for their efforts.
Citizen, May 7, 2014, 9:03 am
@ Bumblebye
Good point. During WW1, as I read the history, the Jewish Germans provided their fair share of combat troops. If memory serves,
despite Weimar Germany's later "stab in the back" theory, e.g., Hitler himself was given a combat medal thanks to his Jewish senior
officer. In comparison to the build-up to Shrub Jr's war on Iraq, the Jewish neocons provided very few Jewish American combat
troops.
It's hard to get reliable stats on Jewish American participation in the US combat arms during the Iraq war. For all I've been
able to ascertain, more have joined the IDF over the years. At any rate, it's common knowledge that Shrub's war on Iraq was instigated
and supported by chicken hawks (Jew or Gentile) at a time bereft of conscription. They built their sale by ignoring key facts,
and embellishing misleading and fake facts, as illustrated by the Downing Street memo.
Keith, May 6, 2014, 7:47 pm
PHIL- Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little
difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which
are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine.
The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's
emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results.
Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal
emphasis on an American dominated global empire.
So yes, the nationalistic emphasis is an anachronism, however, the decline of the US in conjunction with the extension of a
system of globalized domination should hardly be of concern to elite power-seekers who will benefit. In fact, the new system of
corporate/financial control will be beyond the political control of any nation, even the US. If they can pull it off. An interesting
topic no doubt, but one which I doubt is suitable for extended discussion on Mondoweiss. As for power-seeking as a consequence
of a uniquely Jewish experience, perhaps the less said the better.
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that
10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with
them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the
same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack
Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.
Right now, their interests have diverged over the
Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself
is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political
movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty antisemite whose followers killed many thousands
of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished
during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify
with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.
In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy
for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with
the Bandera brigades.
(I know I'm always grabbing OT threads of discussion, but when it comes down to it, I know much less about Zionism and Israel/Palestine
than many, if not most of the regular commenters here.)
I also am going to drift further off-topic by saying there is strong evidence that the slaughter in Odessa last Friday was
highly orchestrated and not solely the result of spontaneous mob violence. Very graphic and disturbing images in all of these
links:
" and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives.
Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, ..>>
Stop it Sleeper. Do not continue to use the victim card ' to explain' the trauma, the insecurities, the nightmares, the angst,
the feelings, the sensitivities, blah blah, blah of Zionist or Israel.
That is not what they are about. These are power mad psychos like most neocons, period.
And even if it were, and even if all the Jews in the world felt the same way, the bottom line would still be they do not have
the right to make others pay in treasure and blood for their nightmares and mental sickness.
As near as I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), the Ukrainians themselves are about half and half pro Russia and Pro NATO.
Your glance at the history of the region as to why this is so, and your text on historical Ukranian suffering and POTV on MW commentary
on this –did not help your analysis and its conclusion.
There's a difference between isolationism and defensive intervention, and even more so, re isolationism v. pro-active interventionism
"in the name of pursuing the democratic ideal". See Ron Paul v. PNAC-style neocons and liberal Zionists.
Also, if you were Putin, how would you see the push of NATO & US force posts ever creeping towards Russia and its local environment?
Look at the US military postings nearing Russia per se & those surrounding Iran. Compare Russia's.
And note the intent to wean EU from Russian oil, and as well, the draconian sanctions on Iran, and Obama's latest partnering
sanctions on Russia.
Imagine yourself in Putin's shoes, and Iran's.
Don't abuse your imagination only by imagining yourself in Netanyahu's shoes, which is the preoccupation of AIPAC and its whores
in the US Congress.
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes
that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition
with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on
the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack
Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.
Right now, their interests have diverged over
the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel
itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support
the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty anti-Semite whose followers killed
many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those
left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-Zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any
of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.
In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy
for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with
the Bandera brigades.
Yonah writes The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal. If the US is not able to back up our attempt to help them gain their
freedom it is not something to celebrate, but something to lament.
What are you saying? Ukraine has been an independent nation for 22 years. What freedom is this? What we have witnessed is that
one half of Ukraine has gotten tired that the other half keeps on electing candidates that represent those Ukrainians that identify
with Russian culture. They (the western half) successfully staged a coup and purged the other (eastern half) from the government.
You call that "freedom". Doesn't it embarrass you, Yonah, that the armed militias that conducted that coup are descendants of
the Bandera organization.
Does that ring a bell? These are the Ukrainians that were involved in the holocaust. Does Babi Yar stir any memories Yohan?
It was a massacre of 40,000 Jews just outside of Kiev in 1942. It was the single largest massacre of Jews during WWII. The massacre
was led by the Germans ( Einsatzgruppe C officers) but was carried out with the aid of 400 Ukrainian Auxillary Police. These were
later incorporated into the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician" made up mostly Ukrainians. The division flags are to this day
displayed at Right Sector rallies in western Ukraine.
Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were
almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed.
Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis.
Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this
is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia.
Or you can count their billions. In any case, the neutral posture is sensible for Israel here. Which is highly uncharacteristic
for that government.
Toivo S- The history of Jew hatred by certain anti Russian elements in the Ukraine is not encouraging and nothing that I celebrate.
Maybe I have been swayed by headlines and a superficial reading of the situation.
If indeed I am wrong regarding the will of the Ukrainian people, I can only be glad that my opinion is just that, my opinion
and not US or Israel or anyone's policy but my own. I assume that a majority of Ukrainians want to maintain independence of Russia
and that the expressions of rebellion are in that vein.
My people were murdered by the einsatzgruppen in that part of the world and so maybe I have overcompensated by trying not to
allow my personal history to interfere with what I think would be the will of the majority of the Ukraine.
But Toivo S. please skip the "doesn't it embarrass you" line of thought. Just put a sock in it and skip it.
Well thanks for that Yonah. My wife's family descended from Jewish communities in Odessa and Galicia. They emigrated to the US
between 1900 and 1940. After WWII none of their relatives left behind were ever heard from again. Perhaps you have family that
experienced similar stories. What caused me to react to your post above is that you are describing the current situation in Ukraine
as a "freedom" movement by the Ukrainians when the political forces there descended from the same people that killed my inlaws
family (and apparently yours to). Why do you support them?
ToivoS- I support them because I trust/don't trust Putin. I trust him to impose his brand of leadership on Ukraine, I don't trust
him to care a whit about freedom. It is natural that the nationalist elements of Ukraine would descend from the elements that
expressed themselves the last time they had freedom from the Soviet Union, that is those forces that were willing to join with
the Nazis to express their hatred for the communist Soviet Union's rule over their freedom. That's how history works. The nationalists
today descend from the nationalists of yesterday.
But it's been 70 years since WWII and the Ukrainians ought to be able to have freedom even if the parties that advocate for
freedom are descended from those that supported the Nazis. (I know once i include the Nazi part of history any analogies are toxic,
but if I am willing to grant Hamas its rights as an expression of the Palestinian desire for freedom, why would I deny the Ukrainian
foul nationalist parties their rights to express their people's desire for freedom.)
Political parties are not made in a sterile laboratory, they evolve over history and most specifically they emerge from the
past. I accept that Ukrainian nationalism has not evolved much, but nonetheless not having read any polls I assume that the nationalists
are the representatives of the people's desire for freedom. And because Putin strikes me as something primitive, I accept the
Ukrainian desire for freedom.
What are you supporting? Let me refresh your historic memory: Black's Transfer Agreement. Now apply analogy, responding
to ToivoS. Might help us all to understand, explore more skillfully, Israel's current stance on the Putin-Ukranian matter .?
(I think Nuland's intervention caught on tape, combined with who she is married to, already explores with great clarification
what the US is doing.
"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play
the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. Most people here would probably disagree with Sleeper, because he does
not deny that the world needs a cop, nor that the US would play a positive role, if it only had the means and the desire to
do so. People here (overwhelmingly) see the US role as a negative one (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let
the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world,"
The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that
embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop,
confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have
us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock
it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality.
Contrast that with the realist or realism approach recommended by George Kennan, and followed by this country successfully
through the end of the Cold War. That approach is conservative and contends we should stay out of wars unless the vital national
security interests of the US are at stake, like protecting WESTERN Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere. This
meant we could sympathize with the plight of all the eastern Europeans oppressed by the Soviets, but would not defend militarily
the Hungarians (1956) or the Czechs (1968). It also meant we wouldn't send US troops into North Vietnam because we didn't want
to go to war with the Chinese over a country that was at best tangential to US interests. When we varied from that policy (Vietnam
and Iraq wars, Somalia) we paid a very heavy price while doing nothing to advance or protect our vital national security interests.
The sooner this country can return to our traditional realism-based foreign policy the better. Part of that policy would be
to disassociate the US from its entangling alliance with Likud Israel and its US Jewish supporters that espouse the Likud Greater
Israel line.
Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily
involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country.
They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to
get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend
and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on.
Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed
at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews. It is also directed
at Neoconservative foreign policy advocates, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, and overlap between the two groups. Please also note
my use of the term "major role", and that I am not saying the Neocons and their supporters (Jewish or non) were solely responsible
for our involvement in the Iraq war. I am offering these caveats in the hope that the usual changes of antisemitism can be avoided
in your or anyone else's response to my arguments.
The influence of Neocons on US foreign policy has been very harmful to this country and poses a grave danger to its future.
It would be wise for you to reflect on that harm and those dangers and decide whether you belong in the realist camp or want to
continue running with the Neocons.
Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed
at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews.
What about the role of *liberal Zionists*, like Hillary Clinton, in supporting and promoting the Iraq War? Clinton still hasn't
offered an apology for helping to drive the United States in a multi-trillion dollar foreign policy disaster - and she has threatened
to "totally obliterate" Iran.
What about Harry Reid's lavish praise of Sheldon Adelson?
"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has for some time billed the Koch brothers as public enemy No.1 .
But billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson? He's just fine, Reid says.
"I know Sheldon Adelson. He's not in this for money," the Nevada Democrat said of Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate who
reportedly spent close to $150 million to support Republicans in the 2012 presidential election."
@ yonah fredman "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper"
Strange
"state into the Armageddon .. "
"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to
play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. "
Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention.
" (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they
want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act
like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper
does not say that."
You do tho, without quoting anyone "here".
BTW Pajero, strawmen no matter how lengthy and seemingly erudite, rarely walk anywhere
I'm going to put this down as Jewish navel gazing.
Jews are disproportionately liberal. Jews make up a huge chunk of the peace movement. Jews are relative to their numbers on
the left of most foreign policy positions.
Iraq was unusual in that Jews were not overwhelming opposed to the invasion, but it is worth noting the invasion at the time
was overwhelming popular. Frankly given the fact that Jews are now considered white people and the fact that Jews are almost all
middle class they should be biased conservative. There certainly is no reason they should be more liberal than Catholics. Yet
they are. It is the degree of Jewish liberalism not the degree of Jewish conservatism that is striking.
But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct
from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul
Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld?
Strongly antiwar incumbent Rep. Walter Jones (R – NC) has won a hotly contested primary tonight, defeating a challenge from
hawkish challenger and former Treasury Dept. official Taylor Griffin 51% to 45%.
Voter turn out was light .. tea party types did a lot of lobbying for Griffin here .but Jones prevailed. Considering the
onslaught of organized activity against him by ECI and the tea partiers for the past month he did well.
@ lysias
Let's refresh our look at what Ron Paul had to say about foreign policy and foreign aid. Then, let's compare what his son has
said, and take a look of his latest bill in congress to cut off aid to Palestine. Yes, you read that right; it's not a bill to
cut off any aid to Israel.
Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will
not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS.
The heavy artillery included the detestable Karl Rove, former Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barber and the War Party's highly
paid chief PR flack, Ari Fleischer.
But it was Neocon central that hauled out the big guns. Bill Kristol was so desperate to thwart the slowly rising anti-interventionist
tide within the GOP that he even trotted out Sarah Palin to endorse Jones's opponent"
But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it
here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence
of the manifest destiny.
"... It is also a nice illustration of how "Westminster Style" democracy works. Any chance that the electorate might elect a left wing government and you get a Zinoviev letter or a Bologna railway station bombing. ..."
"... In other words "Elect whom you like". ("Provided we like them too!") It's really a bit like herding sheep. ..."
The documents reveal him as Alexis Bellegarde, one of four White Russian aristocrats believed
to have been behind an infamous forgery 15 years before the war began. The revelations of Bellegarde's
importance to MI6 will increase suspicions that British agents had a hand in the production of the
"Zinoviev letter"; its leak to the Daily Mail many believe cost Labour the 1924 general election.
foolisholdman -> Brian Milne 11 Oct 2015 05:55
Brian Milne
It is also a nice illustration of how "Westminster Style" democracy works. Any chance that
the electorate might elect a left wing government and you get a Zinoviev letter or a Bologna railway
station bombing.
In other words "Elect whom you like". ("Provided we like them too!") It's really a bit
like herding sheep.
AlbertTatlock53 -> LordUpminster 11 Oct 2015 08:35
Despite the blandness of the OH volumes on Ultra, some facts did leak out, like having a month's
notice of the Italian declaration of war and useful tactical and operational details like the
positions of wolf packs. It also reminded me of a couple of anecdotes about Ultra information
by unwitting sources in memoirs. I wouldn't deprecate Ultra or the British war effort that far.
The British army that went to Normandy was the most mechanised and armoured army in history and
pulled rather more than its own weight in the coalition. The principal offensive weapon of the
British empire was Bomber Command, which in the spring-summer of 1943 began to devastate the German
war economy.
The Soviet and then the US contributions to the war dwarfed the British empire but only relatively,
it was still a superpower in 1945, though by the Suez crime it had become a wholly-owned subsidiary
of Murder Inc.
LordUpminster ID7678903 11 Oct 2015 04:04
And no doubt the establishment will continue to play such dirty tricks to undermine our
so called democracy
Not the slightest: according to our friend jamesforysthe below that's essentially what they're
for.
Re. the Zinoviev letter, I did see one theory many years ago that the man behind it was the
then-Polish Army Minister Władysław Sikorski, the one who later headed the Polish exile government
in London and was killed in an air crash. Certainly in October 1924 he was bragging to people
in governmental circles in Warsaw that it was his agents who had arranged it - though why exactly
is not easy to see, given that Poland had no particular political interest in Britain at the time.
I suspect that it was empty boasting, and that it was Russian emigrés who were responsible.
Coming up soon: conclusive proof that Jeremy Corbyn was once an agent of the Tsarist Okhrana.
Brian Milne 11 Oct 2015 04:00
Had Labour won, thus Baldwin, MacDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain probably not have been the course
of politics, would the UK necessarily have moved further left? The question remains to be seen,
but unless somebody more genuinely socialist had replaced MacDonald probably not. However, the
outcome may well have been a far more amicable relationship with the Soviet Union, the Versailles
Treaty and League of Nations possibly better conformed to and the rise of Hitler less likely.
The Zinoviev letter may well have been as much a contributory denominator in that than is implied.
Of course, we hall never know really, only historians expounding their own theories and interpretations
of history.
samuel glover -> jamesforsythe 11 Oct 2015 01:43
"Some brilliant espionage across the Middle-east and Israel is precisely what's needed
to bring these politically infantile areas into western like democratic administrations, this
century, not next. And with fewer wars. "
First, you think western intelligence agencies **haven't** been prominent in the history of
that region?!?!?
Second, you think these same agencies are capable of just whipping up entire social and political
structures and cultures on demand? Do you read newspapers?
Remember that these agencies -- in America, in Britain, in every NATO country -- spent decades
and billions of dollars and billions of man-hours staring obsessively at the USSR. EVERY ONE of
them was completely blindsided when the Soviet Union folded up.
error418 -> jamesforsythe 10 Oct 2015 23:21
"Our" best interests or that intelligence service´s best interests? ISI in Pakistan is a good
example of such a service gone rogue. Experts in election rigging.
Frisco27 10 Oct 2015 19:06
"Sexing up" documents? What a scumbag... That would never happen these days.
"... Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market. ..."
"... The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension fund go? ..."
"... Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership. ..."
"... family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300 to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery. ..."
"... Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo. ..."
"... Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs. ..."
"... So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context. ..."
"... Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this. I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via the capitalist countries. ..."
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality. They still struggle
for access to the basics
... ... ...
The disparities in wealth that we term "income inequality" are no accident, and they can't be fixed by fiddling at the edges of
our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom.
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access
to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.
... ... ...
Too often, the answer by those who have hoarded everything is they will choose to "give back" in a manner of their choosing –
just look at Mark Zuckerberg and his much-derided plan to "give away" 99% of his Facebook stock. He is unlikely to help change inequality
or poverty any more than "giving away" of $100m helped children in Newark schools.
Allowing any of the 100 richest Americans to choose how they fix "income inequality" will not make the country more equal or even
guarantee more access to life. You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools, even when you're the master; but more
to the point, who would tear down his own house to distribute the bricks among so very many others?
mkenney63 5 Dec 2015 20:37
Excellent article. The problems we face are structural and can only be solved by making fundamental changes. We must bring
an end to "Citizens United", modern day "Jim Crow" and the military industrial complex in order to restore our democracy. Then
maybe, just maybe, we can have an economic system that will treat all with fairness and respect. Crony capitalism has had its
day, it has mutated into criminality.
Kencathedrus -> Marcedward 5 Dec 2015 20:23
In the pre-capitalist system people learnt crafts to keep themselves afloat. The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now
we have the church of Education promising a better life if we get into debt to buy (sorry, earn) degrees.
The whole system is messed up and now we have millions of people on this planet who can't function even those with degrees.
Barbarians are howling at the gates of Europe. The USA is rotting from within. As Marx predicted the Capitalists are merely paying
their own grave diggers.
mkenney63 -> Bobishere 5 Dec 2015 20:17
I would suggest you read the economic and political history of the past 30 years. To help you in your study let me recommend
a couple of recent books: "Winner Take all Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and "The Age of Acquiescence" by Steve Fraser.
It always amazes me that one can be so blind the facts of recent American history; it's not just "a statistical inequality", it's
been a well thought-out strategy over time to rig the system, a strategy engaged in by politicians and capitalists. Shine some
light on this issue by acquainting yourself with the facts.
Maharaja Brovinda -> Singh Jill Harrison 5 Dec 2015 19:42
We play out the prisoner's dilemma in life, in general, over and over in different circumstances, every day. And we always
choose the dominant - rational - solution. But the best solution is not based on rationality, but rather on trust and faith in
each other - rather ironically for our current, evidence based society!
Steven Palmer 5 Dec 2015 19:19
Like crack addicts the philanthropricks only seek to extend their individual glory, social image their primary goal, and yet
given the context they will burn in history. Philanthroptits should at least offset the immeasurable damage they have done through
their medieval wealth accumulation. Collaborative philanthropy for basic income is a good idea, but ye, masters tools.
BlairM -> Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 19:10
Well, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst possible economic system, except for all those other economic
systems that have been tried from time to time.
I'd rather just have the freedom to earn money as I please, and if that means inequality, it's a small price to pay for not
having some feudal lord or some party bureaucrat stomping on my humanity.
brusuz 5 Dec 2015 18:52
As long as wealth can be created by shuffling money from one place to another in the giant crap shoot we call our economy,
nothing will change. Until something takes place to make it advantageous for the investor capitalists to put that money to work
doing something that actually produces some benefit to the society as a whole, they will continue their extractive machinations.
I see nothing on the horizon that is going to change any of that, and to cast this as some sort of a racial issue is quite superficial.
We have all gotten the shaft, since there is no upward mobility available to anyone. Since the Bush crowd of neocons took power,
we have all been shackled with "individual solutions to societal created problems."
Jimi Del Duca 5 Dec 2015 18:31
Friends, Capitalism is structural exploitation of ALL WORKERS. Thinking about it as solely a race issue is divisive. What we
need is CLASS SOLIDARITY and ORGANIZATION. See iww.org We are the fighting union with no use for capitalists!
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 18:04
You'd be better off reading Marx if you want to understand capitalism. I think you are ascribing the word to what you think
it should be rather than what it is.
It is essentially a class structure rather than any defined economic system. Neoliberal is essentially laissez faire capitalism.
It is designed to suborn nation states to corporate benefit.
AmyInNH -> tommydog
They make $40 a month. Working 7 days a week. At least 12 hour days. Who's fed you that "we're doing them a favor" BS?
And I've news for you regarding "Those whose skills are less adaptable to doing so are seeing their earnings decline." We have
many people who have 3 masters degrees making less than minimum wage. We have top notch STEM students shunned so corporations
can hire captive/cheaper foreign labor, called H1-Bs, who then wait 10 years working for them waiting for their employment based
green card. Or "visiting" students here on J1 visas, so the employers can get out of paying: social security, federal unemployment
insurance, etc.
Wake up and smell the coffee tommydog. They've more than a thumb on the scale.
I am a socialist. I decided to read this piece to see if Mr. Thrasher could write about market savagery without propounding the
fiction that whites are somehow exempt from the effects of it.
No, he could not. I clicked on the link accompanying his assertion
that whites who are high school dropouts earn more than blacks with college degrees, and I read the linked piece in full. The
linked piece does not in fact compare income (i.e., yearly earnings) of white high school dropouts with those of black college
graduates, but it does compare family wealth across racial cohorts (though not educational ones), and the gap there is indeed
stark, with average white family wealth in the six figures (full disclosure, I am white, and my personal wealth is below zero,
as I owe more in student loans than I own, so perhaps I am not really white, or I do not fully partake of "whiteness," or whatever),
and average black family wealth in the four figures.
The reason for this likely has a lot to do with home ownership disparities, which in turn are linked in significant part to
racist redlining practices. So white dropouts often live in homes their parents or grandparents bought, while many black college
graduates whose parents were locked out of home ownership by institutional racism and, possibly, the withering of manufacturing
jobs just as the northward migration was beginning to bear some economic fruit for black families, are still struggling to become
homeowners. Thus, the higher average wealth for the dropout who lives in a family owned home.
But this is not what Mr. Thrasher wrote. He specifically used the words "earn more," creating the impression that some white
ignoramus is simply going to stumble his way into a higher salary than a cultivated, college educated black person. That is simply
not the case, and the difference does matter.
Why does it matter? Because I regularly see middle aged whites who are broken and homeless on the streets of the town where
I live, and I know they are simply the tip of a growing mountain of privation. Yeah, go ahead, call it white tears if you want,
but if you cannot see that millions (including, of course, not simply folks who are out and out homeless, but folks who are struggling
to get enough to eat and routinely go without needed medication and medical care) of people who have "white privilege" are indeed
oppressed by global capitalism then I would say that you are, at the end of the day, NO BETTER THAN THE WHITES YOU DISDAIN.
If you have read this far, then you realize that I am in no way denying the reality of structural racism. But an account of
economic savagery that entirely subsumes it into non-economic categories (race, gender, age), that refuses to acknowledge that
blacks can be exploiters and whites can be exploited, is simply conservatism by other means. One gets the sense that if we have
enough black millionaires and enough whites dying of things like a lack of medical care, then this might bring just a little bit
of warmth to the hearts of people like Mr. Thrasher.
Call it what you want, but don't call it progressive. Maybe it is historical karma. Which is understandable, as there is no
reason why globally privileged blacks in places like the U.S. or Great Britain should bear the burden of being any more selfless
or humane than globally privileged whites are or have been. The Steven Thrashers of humanity are certainly no worse than many
of the whites they cannot seem to recognize as fully human are.
But nor are they any better.
JohnLG 5 Dec 2015 17:23
I agree that the term "income inequality" is so vague that falls between useless and diversionary, but so too is most use of
the word "capitalism", or so it seems to me. Typically missing is a penetrating analysis of where the problem lies, a comprehensibly
supported remedy, or large-scale examples of anything except what's not working. "Income inequality" is pretty abstract until
we look specifically at the consequences for individuals and society, and take a comprehensive look at all that is unequal. What
does "capitalism" mean? Is capitalism the root of all this? Is capitalism any activity undertaken for profit, or substantial monopolization
of markets and power?
Power tends to corrupt. Money is a form of power, but there are others. The use of power to essentially cheat, oppress or kill
others is corrupt, whether that power is in the form of a weapon, wealth, the powers of the state, or all of the above. Power
is seductive and addictive. Even those with good intensions can be corrupted by an excess of power and insufficient accountability,
while predators are drawn to power like sharks to blood. Democracy involves dispersion of power, ideally throughout a whole society.
A constitutional democracy may offer protection even to minorities against a "tyranny of the majority" so long as a love of justice
prevails. Selective "liberty and justice" is not liberty and justice at all, but rather a tyranny of the many against the few,
as in racism, or of the few against the many, as by despots. Both forms reinforce each other in the same society, both are corrupt,
and any "ism" can be corrupted by narcissism. To what degree is any society a shining example of government of, for, and by the
people, and to what degree can one discover empirical evidence of corruption? What do we do about it?
AmyInNH -> CaptainGrey 5 Dec 2015 17:15
You're too funny. It's not "lifting billions out of poverty". It's moving malicious manufacturing practices to the other side
of the planet. To the lands of no labor laws. To hide it from consumers. To hide profits.
And it is dying. Legislatively they choke off their natural competition, which is an essential element of capitalism. Monopoly
isn't capitalism. And when they bribe legislators, we don't have democracy any more either.
Jeremiah2000 -> Teresa Trujillo 5 Dec 2015 16:53
Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out
your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market.
The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension
fund go?
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:45
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government
also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled.
Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency
of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The words "OWN" and "ASSETS" are the key descriptors of the definition of wealth. But these words are not well understood by
the vast majority of Americans or for that matter, global citizens. They are limited to the vocabulary used by the wealthy ownership
class and financial publications, which are not widely read, and not even taught in our colleges and universities.
The wealthy ownership class did not become wealthy because they are "three times as smart." Still there is a valid argument
that the vast majority of Americans do not pay particular attention to the financial world and educate themselves on wealth building
within the current system's limited past-savings paradigm. Significantly, the wealthy OWNERSHIP class use their political power
(power always follows property OWNERSHIP) to write the system rules to benefit and enhance their wealth. As such they have benefited
from forging trade policy agreements which further concentrate OWNERSHIP on a global scale, military-industrial complex subsidies
and government contracts, tax code provisions and loopholes and collective-bargaining rules – policy changes they've used their
wealth to champion.
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:44
Unfortunately, when it comes to recommendations for solutions to economic inequality, virtually every commentator, politician
and economist is stuck in viewing the world in one factor terms – human labor, in spite of their implied understanding that the
rich are rich because they OWN the non-human means of production – physical capital. The proposed variety of wealth-building programs,
like "universal savings accounts that might be subsidized for low-income savers," are not practical solutions because they rely
on savings (a denial of consumption which lessens demand in the economy), which the vast majority of Americans do not have, and
for those who can save their savings are modest and insignificant. Though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through
the "stock market exchanges," purchased with their earnings as labor workers (savings), their stock holdings are relatively minuscule,
as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners. Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans
own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent
of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don't affect the incomes of most retirees.
As for taxpayer-supported saving subsidies or other wage-boosting measures, those who have only their labor power and its precarious
value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital workers (their productive
assets applied in the economy) as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs
and wants and sufficiently provide for themselves and their families. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will
continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive
capital.
As such, the vast majority of American consumers will continue to be strapped to mounting consumer debt bills, stagnant wages
and inflationary price pressures. As their ONLY source of income is through wage employment, economic insecurity for the 99 percent
majority of people means they cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. Thus, the production side of the economy
is under-nourished and hobbled as a result, because there are fewer and fewer "customers with money." We thus need to free economic
growth from the slavery of past savings.
I mentioned that political power follows property OWNERSHIP because with concentrated capital asset OWNERSHIP our elected representatives
are far too often bought with the expectation that they protect and enhance the interests of the wealthiest Americans, the OWNERSHIP
class they too overwhelmingly belong to.
Many, including the author of this article, have concluded that with such a concentrated OWNERSHIP stronghold the wealthy have
on our politics, "it's hard to see where this cycle ends." The ONLY way to reverse this cycle and broaden capital asset OWNERSHIP
universally is a political revolution. (Bernie Sanders, are you listening?)
The political revolution must address the problem of lack of demand. To create demand, the FUTURE economy must be financed
in ways that create new capital OWNERS, who will benefit from the full earnings of the FUTURE productive capability of the American
economy, and without taking from those who already OWN. This means significantly slowing the further concentration of capital
asset wealth among those who are already wealthy and ensuring that the system is reformed to promote inclusive prosperity, inclusive
opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
yamialwaysright 5 Dec 2015 16:13
I was interested and in agreement until I read about structured racism. Many black kidsin the US grow up without a father in
the house. They turn to anti-social behaviour and crime. Once you are poor it is hard to get out of being poor but Journalists
are not doing justice to a critique of US Society if they ignore the fact that some people behave in a self-destructive way. I
would imagine that if some black men in the US and the UK stuck with one woman and played a positive role in the life of their
kids, those kids would have a better chance at life. People of different racial and ethnic origin do this also but there does
seem to be a disproportionate problem with some black US men and some black UK men. Poverty is one problem but growing up in poverty
and without a father figure adds to the problem.
What the author writes applies to other countries not just the US in relation to the super wealthy being a small proportion
of the population yet having the same wealth as a high percentage of the population. This in not a black or latino issue but a
wealth distribution issue that affects everyone irrespective of race or ethnic origin. The top 1%, 5% or 10% having most of the
wealth is well-known in many countries.
nuthermerican4u 5 Dec 2015 15:59
Capitalism, especially the current vulture capitalism, is dog eat dog. Always was, always will be. My advice is that if you
are a capitalist that values your heirs, invest in getting off this soon-to-be slag heap and find other planets to pillage and
rape. Either go all out for capitalism or reign in this beast before it kills all of us.
soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:32
Our antiquated class structure demonstrates the trickle up of Capitalism and the need to counterbalance it with progressive
taxation.
In the 1960s/1970s we used high taxes on the wealthy to counter balance the trickle up of Capitalism and achieved much greater
equality.
Today we have low taxes on the wealthy and Capitalism's trickle up is widening the inequality gap.
We are cutting benefits for the disabled, poor and elderly so inequality can get wider and the idle rich can remain idle.
They have issued enough propaganda to make people think it's those at the bottom that don't work.
Every society since the dawn of civilization has had a Leisure Class at the top, in the UK we call them the Aristocracy and
they have been doing nothing for centuries.
The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone
else doing all the work.
Feudalism - exploit the masses through land ownership
Capitalism - exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)
Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:
a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.
The system itself provides for the idle rich and always has done from the first civilisations right up to the 21st Century.
The rich taking from the poor is always built into the system, taxes and benefits are the counterbalance that needs to be applied
externally.
Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 15:31
I often chuckle when I read some of the right wing comments on articles such as this. Firstly, I question if readers actually
read the article references I've highlighted, before rushing to comment.
Secondly, the comments are generated by cifers who probably haven't set the world alight, haven't made a difference in their
local community, they'll have never created thousands of jobs in order to reward themselves with huge dividends having and as
a consequence enjoy spectacular asset/investment growth, at best they'll be chugging along, just about keeping their shit together
and yet they support a system that's broken, other than for the one percent, of the one percent.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans
and found that "the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the
United States". That means that 100 families – most of whom are white – have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks walking
around the country (and the million or so locked up) combined.
Similarly, the report also stated that "the wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino
population" of the nation. Here again, the breakdown in actual humans is broke down: 186 overwhelmingly white folks have more
money than that an astounding 55,000,000 Latino people.
family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300
to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans
to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery.
soundofthesuburbs -> soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:26
It is the 21st Century and most of the land in the UK is still owned by the descendants of feudal warlords that killed people
and stole their land and wealth.
When there is no land to build houses for generation rent, land ownership becomes an issue.
David Cameron is married into the aristocracy and George Osborne is a member of the aristocracy, they must both be well acquainted
with the Leisure Class.
I can't find any hard work going on looking at the Wikipedia page for David Cameron's father-in-law. His family have been on
their estate since the sixteenth century and judging by today's thinking, expect to be on it until the end of time.
George Osborne's aristocratic pedigree goes back to the Tudor era:
"he is an aristocrat with a pedigree stretching back to early in the Tudor era. His father, Sir Peter Osborne, is the
17th holder of a hereditary baronetcy that has been passed from father to son for 10 generations, and of which George is next
in line."
If we have people at the bottom who are not working the whole of civilisation will be turned on its head.
"The modern industrial society developed from the barbarian tribal society, which featured a leisure class supported
by subordinated working classes employed in economically productive occupations. The leisure class is composed of people exempted
from manual work and from practicing economically productive occupations, because they belong to the leisure class."
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by Thorstein Veblen. It was written a long time ago but
much of it is as true today as it was then. The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight.
DBChas 5 Dec 2015 15:13
"income inequality" is best viewed as structural capitalism. It's not as if, did black and brown people and female people somehow
(miraculously) attain the economic status of the lower-paid, white, male person, the problem would be solved--simply by adjusting
pay scales. The problem is inherent to capitalism, which doesn't mean certain "types" of people aren't more disadvantaged for
their "type." No one is saying that. For capitalists, it's easier to rationalize the obscene unfairness (only rich people say,
"life's not fair") when their "type" is regarded as superior to a different "type," whether that be with respect to color or gender
or both.
Over time--a long time--the dominant party (white males since the Dark Ages, also the life-span of capitalism coincidentally
enough) came to dominance by various means, too many to try to list, or even know of. Why white males? BTW, just because most
in power and in money are white males does not mean ALL white males are in positions of power and wealth. Most are not, and these
facts help to fog the issue.
Indeed, "income inequality," is not an accident, nor can it be fixed, as the author notes, by tweaking (presumably he means
capitalism). And he's quite right too in saying, "You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools..." I take that
ALSO to mean, the problem can't be fixed by way of what Hedges has called a collapsing liberal establishment with its various
institutions, officially speaking. That is, it's not institutional racism that's collapsing, but that institution is not officially
recognized as such.
HOWEVER, it IS possible, even when burdened with an economics that is capitalism, to redistribute wealth, and I don't just
mean Mark Zuckerberg's. I mean all wealth in whatever form can be redistributed if/when government decides it can. And THIS TIME,
unlike the 1950s-60s, not only would taxes on the wealthy be the same as then but the wealth redistributed would be redistributed
to ALL, not just to white families, and perhaps in particular to red families, the oft forgotten ones.
This is a matter of political will. But, of course, if that means whites as the largest voting block insist on electing to
office those without the political will, nothing will change. In that case, other means have to be considered, and just a reminder:
If the government fails to serve the people, the Constitution gives to the people the right to depose that government. But again,
if whites as the largest voting block AND as the largest sub-group in the nation (and women are the largest part of that block,
often voting as their men vote--just the facts, please, however unpleasant) have little interest in seeing to making necessary
changes at least in voting booths, then...what? Bolshevism or what? No one seems to know and it's practically taboo even to talk
about possibilities. Americans did it once, but not inclusively and not even paid in many instances. When it happens again, it
has to happen with and for the participation of ALL. And it's worth noting that it will have to happen again, because capitalism
by its very nature cannot survive itself. That is, as Marx rightly noted, capitalism will eventually collapse by dint of its internal
contradictions.
mbidding Jeremiah2000 5 Dec 2015 15:08
Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might
find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo.
Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere
in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that
you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have
a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt
to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs.
Consider as well that you don't have transportation to get a job that would improve your circumstances. You earn too much to
qualify for meaningful levels of food support programs and fall into the insurance gap for subsidies because you live in a state
that for ideological reasons refuses to expand Medicaid coverage. Your local schools are a disgrace but you can't take advantage
of so-called school choice programs (vouchers, charters, and the like) as you don't have transportation or the time (given your
employer's refusal to set fixed working hours for minimum wage part time work) to get your kids to that fine choice school.
You may have a fridge and a stove, but you have no food to cook. You may have access to running water and electricity, but
you can't afford to pay the bills for such on account of having to choose between putting food in that fridge or flushing that
toilet. You can't be there reliably for your kids to help with school, etc, because you work constantly shifting hours for crap
pay.
Get back to me after six months to a year after living in such circumstances and then tell me again how Americans don't really
live in poverty simply because they have access to appliances.
Earl Shelton 5 Dec 2015 15:08
The Earned Income Tax Credit seems to me a good starting point for reform. It has been around since the 70s -- conceived by
Nixon/Moynihan -- and signed by socialist (kidding) Gerald Ford -- it already *redistributes* income (don't choke on the term,
O'Reilly) directly from tax revenue (which is still largely progressive) to the working poor, with kids.
That program should be massively expanded to tax the 1% -- and especially the top 1/10 of 1% (including a wealth tax) -- and
distribute the money to the bottom half of society, mostly in the form of work training, child care and other things that help
put them in and keep them in the middle class. It is a mechanism already in existence to correct the worst ravages of Capitalism.
Use it to build shared prosperity.
oKWJNRo 5 Dec 2015 14:40
So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those
who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap
if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context.
We can probably all agree that Capitalism has brought about widespread improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions,
for example, compared to the feudal system that preceded it... But it also disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of Capitalist
societies and is wholly unequal by design.
Capitalism depends upon the existence of a large underclass that can be exploited. This is part of the process of how surplus
value is created and wealth is extracted from labour. This much is indisputable. It is therefore obvious that capitalism isn't
an ideal system for most of us living on this planet.
As for the improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions etc that Capitalism has fostered... Most of these were
won through long struggles against the Capitalist hegemony by the masses. We would have certainly chosen to make these improvements
to our landscape sooner if Capitalism hadn't made every effort to stop us. The problem today is that Capitalism and its powerful
beneficiaries have successfully convinced us that there is no possible alternative. It won't give us the chance to try or even
permit us to believe there could be another, better way.
Martin Joseph -> realdoge 5 Dec 2015 14:33
Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to
the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic
systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this.
I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via
the capitalist countries.
VWFeature 5 Dec 2015 14:29
Markets, economies and tax systems are created by people, and based on rules they agree on. Those rules can favor general prosperity
or concentration of wealth. Destruction and predation are easier than creation and cooperation, so our rules have to favor cooperation
if we want to avoid predation and destructive conflicts.
In the 1930's the US changed many of those rules to favor general prosperity. Since then they've been gradually changed to
favor wealth concentration and predation. They can be changed back.
The trick is creating a system that encourages innovation while putting a safety net under the population so failure doesn't
end in starvation.
A large part of our current problems is the natural tendency for large companies to get larger and larger until their failure
would adversely affect too many others, so they're not allowed to fail. Tax law, not antitrust law, has to work against this.
If a company can reduce its tax rate by breaking into 20 smaller (still huge) companies, then competition is preserved and no
one company can dominate and control markets.
Robert Goldschmidt -> Jake321 5 Dec 2015 14:27
Bernie Sanders has it right on -- we can only heal our system by first having millions rise up and demand an end to the corruption
of the corporations controlling our elected representatives. Corporations are not people and money is not speech.
moonwrap02 5 Dec 2015 14:26
The effects of wealth distribution has far reaching consequences. It is not just about money, but creating a fair society -
one that is co-operative and cohesive. The present system has allowed an ever divide between the rich and poor, creating a two
tier society where neither the twain shall meet. The rich and poor are almost different species on the planet and no longer belong
to the same community. Commonality of interest is lost and so it's difficult to form community and to have good, friendly relationships
across class differences that are that large.
"If capitalism is to be seen to be fair, the same rules are to apply to the big guy as to the little guy,"
Sorry. I get it now. You actually think that because the Washington elite has repealed Glass-Steagel that we live in a unregulated
capitalistic system.
This is so far from the truth that I wasn't comprehending that anyone could think that. You can see the graph of pages published
in the Federal Register here. Unregulated capitalism? Wow.
Dodd Frank was passed in 2010 (without a single Republican vote). Originally it was 2,300 pages. It is STILL being written
by nameless bureaucrats and is over 20,000 pages. Unregulated capitalism? Really?
But the reality is that Goliath is conspiring with the government to regulate what size sling David can use and how many stones
and how many ounces.
So we need more government regulations? They will disallow David from anything but spitwads and only two of those.
neuronmaker -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:16
Do you understand the concept of corporations which are products of capitalism?
The legal institutions within each capitalist corporations and nations are just that, they are capitalist and all about making
profits.
The law is made by the rich capitalists and for the rich capitalists. Each Legislation is a link in the chain of economic slavery
by capitalists.
Capitalism and the concept of money is a construction of the human mind, as it does not exist in the natural world. This construction
is all about using other human beings like blood suckers to sustain a cruel and evil life style - with blood and brutality as
the core ideology.
Marcedward -> MarjaE 5 Dec 2015 14:12
I would agree that our system of help for the less-well-off could be more accessible and more generous, but that doesn't negate
that point that there is a lot of help out there - the most important help being that totally free educational system. Think about
it, a free education, and to get the most out of it a student merely has to show up, obey the rules, do the homework and study
for tests. It's all laid out there for the kids like a helicopter mom laying out her kids clothes. How much easier can we make
it? If people can't be bothered to show up and put in effort, how is their failure based on racism
tommydog -> martinusher 5 Dec 2015 14:12
As you are referring to Carlos Slim, interestingly while he is Mexican by birth his parents were both Lebanese.
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:12
Why isn't that capitalism? It's raw capitalism on steroids.
Zara Von Fritz -> Toughspike 5 Dec 2015 14:12
It's an equal opportunity plantation now.
Robert Goldschmidt 5 Dec 2015 14:11
The key to repairing the system is to identify the causes of our problems.
Here is my list:
The information technology revolution which continues to destroy wages by enabling automation and outsourcing.
The reformation of monopolies which price gouge and block innovation.
Hitting ecological limits such as climate change, water shortages, unsustainable farming.
Then we can make meaningful changes such as regulation of the portion of corporate profit that are pay, enforcement of national
and regional antitrust laws and an escalating carbon tax.
Zara Von Fritz -> PostCorbyn 5 Dec 2015 14:11
If you can believe these quality of life or happiness indexes they put out so often, the winners tend to be places that have
nice environments and a higher socialist mix in their economy. Of course there are examples of poor countries that practice the
same but its not clear that their choice is causal rather than reactive.
We created this mess and we can fix it.
Zara Von Fritz -> dig4victory 5 Dec 2015 14:03
Yes Basic Income is possibly the mythical third way. It socialises wealth to a point but at the same time frees markets from
their obligation to perpetually grow and create jobs for the sake of jobs and also hereford reduces the subsequent need for governments
to attempt to control them beyond maintaining their health.
Zara Von Fritz 5 Dec 2015 13:48
As I understand it, you don't just fiddle with capitalism, you counteract it, or counterweight it. A level of capitalism, or
credit accumulation, and a level of socialism has always existed, including democracy which is a manifestation of socialism (1
vote each). So the project of capital accumulation seems to be out of control because larger accumulations become more powerful
and meanwhile the power of labour in the marketplace has become less so due to forces driving unemployment. The danger is that
capital's power to control the democratic system reaches a point of no return.
Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 13:42
"I do not have the economic freedom to grow my own food because i do not have access to enough land to grow it and i do not
have the economic clout to buy a piece of land."
Economic freedom does NOT mean you get money for free. It means that means that if you grow food for personal use, the federal
government doesn't trash the Constitution by using the insterstate commerce clause to say that it can regulate how much you grow
on your own personal land.
Economic freedom means that if you have a widget, you can choose to set the price for $10 or $100 and that a buyer is free
to buy it from you or not buy it from you. It does NOT mean that you are entitled to "free" widgets.
"If capitalism has not managed to eradicate poverty in rich first world countries then just what chance if there of capitalism
eradicating poverty on a global scale?"
The average person in poverty in the U.S. doesn't live in poverty:
In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority-58.2 percent-have computers.
Fully 96.1 percent of American households in "poverty" have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording
device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record
it for watching later.
Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in
the homes of Americans in "poverty."
More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.
Interestingly, the appliances surveyed by the Census Bureau that households in poverty are least likely to own are dish washers
(44.9 percent) and food freezers (26.2 percent).
However, most Americans in "poverty" do not need to go to a laundromat. According to the Census Bureau, 68.7 percent of households
in poverty have a clothes washer and 65.3 percent have a clothes dryer.
"... By far the biggest act of wage slavery rebellion, don't buy shit. The less you buy, the less you need to earn. Holidays by far the minority of your life should not be a desperate escape from the majority of your life. Spend less, work less and actually really enjoy living more. ..."
"... How about don't shop at Walmart (they helped boost the Chinese economy while committing hari kari on the American Dream) and actually engaging in proper labour action? Calling in sick is just plain childish. ..."
"... I'm all for sticking it to "the man," but when you call into work for a stupid reason (and a hangover is a very stupid reason), it is selfish, and does more damage to the cause of worker's rights, not less. I don't know about where you work, but if I call in sick to my job, other people have to pick up my slack. I work for a public library, and we don't have a lot of funds, so we have the bear minimum of employees we can have and still work efficiently. As such, if anybody calls in, everyone else, up to and including the library director, have to take on more work. ..."
"Phoning in sick is a revolutionary act." I loved that slogan. It came to me, as so many good things did, from Housmans, the radical
bookshop in King's Cross. There you could rummage through all sorts of anarchist pamphlets and there I discovered, in the early 80s,
the wondrous little magazine Processed World. It told you basically how to screw up your workplace. It was smart and full of small
acts of random subversion. In many ways it was ahead of its time as it was coming out of San Francisco and prefiguring Silicon Valley.
It saw the machines coming. Jobs were increasingly boring and innately meaningless. Workers were "data slaves" working for IBM ("Intensely
Boring Machines").
What Processed World was doing was trying to disrupt the identification so many office workers were meant to feel with their management,
not through old-style union organising, but through small acts of subversion. The modern office, it stressed, has nothing to do with
human need. Its rebellion was about working as little as possible, disinformation and sabotage. It was making alienation fun. In
1981, it could not have known that a self-service till cannot ever phone in sick.
I was thinking of this today, as I wanted to do just that. I have made myself ill with a hangover. A hangover, I always feel,
is nature's way of telling you to have a day off. One can be macho about it and eat your way back to sentience via the medium of
bacon sandwiches and Maltesers. At work, one is dehydrated, irritable and only semi-present. Better, surely, though to let the day
fall through you and dream away.
Having worked in America, though, I can say for sure that they brook no excuses whatsoever. When I was late for work and said
things like, "My alarm clock did not go off", they would say that this was not a suitable explanation, which flummoxed me. I had
to make up others. This was just to work in a shop.
This model of working – long hours, very few holidays, few breaks, two incomes needed to raise kids, crazed loyalty demanded by
huge corporations, the American way – is where we're heading. Except now the model is even more punishing. It is China. We are expected
to compete with an economy whose workers are often closer to indentured slaves than anything else.
This is what striving is, then: dangerous, demoralising, often dirty work. Buckle down. It's the only way forward, apparently,
which is why our glorious leaders are sucking up to China, which is immoral, never mind ridiculously short-term thinking.
So again I must really speak up for the skivers. What we have to understand about austerity is its psychic effects. People must
have less. So they must have less leisure, too. The fact is life is about more than work and work is rapidly changing. Skiving in
China may get you killed but here it may be a small act of resistance, or it may just be that skivers remind us that there is meaning
outside wage-slavery.
Work is too often discussed by middle-class people in ways that are simply unrecognisable to anyone who has done crappy jobs.
Much work is not interesting and never has been. Now that we have a political and media elite who go from Oxbridge to working for
a newspaper or a politician, a lot of nonsense is spouted. These people have not cleaned urinals on a nightshift. They don't sit
lonely in petrol stations manning the till. They don't have to ask permission for a toilet break in a call centre. Instead, their
work provides their own special identity. It is very important.
Low-status jobs, like caring, are for others. The bottom-wipers of this world do it for the glory, I suppose. But when we talk
of the coming automation that will reduce employment, bottom-wiping will not be mechanised. Nor will it be romanticised, as old male
manual labour is. The mad idea of reopening the coal mines was part of the left's strange notion of the nobility of labour. Have
these people ever been down a coal mine? Would they want that life for their children?
Instead we need to talk about the dehumanising nature of work. Bertrand Russell and Keynes thought our goal should be less work,
that technology would mean fewer hours.
Far from work giving meaning to life, in some surveys 40% of us say that our jobs are meaningless. Nonetheless, the art of skiving
is verboten as we cram our children with ever longer hours of school and homework. All this striving is for what exactly? A soul-destroying
job?
Just as education is decided by those who loved school, discussions about work are had by those to whom it is about more than
income.
The parts of our lives that are not work – the places we dream or play or care, the space we may find creative – all these are
deemed outside the economy. All this time is unproductive. But who decides that?
Skiving work is bad only to those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
So go on: phone in sick. You know you want to.
friedad 23 Oct 2015 18:27
We now exist in a society in which the Fear Cloud is wrapped around each citizen. Our proud history of Union and Labor, fighting
for decent wages and living conditions for all citizens, and mostly achieving these aims, a history, which should be taught to
every child educated in every school in this country, now gradually but surely eroded by ruthless speculators in government, is
the future generations are inheriting. The workforce in fear of taking a sick day, the young looking for work in fear of speaking
out at diminishing rewards, definitely this 21st Century is the Century of Fear. And how is this fear denied, with mind blowing
drugs, regardless if it is is alcohol, description drugs, illicit drugs, a society in denial. We do not require a heavenly object
to destroy us, a few soulless monsters in our mist are masters of manipulators, getting closer and closer to accomplish their
aim of having zombies doing their beckoning. Need a kidney, no worries, zombie dishwasher, is handy for one. Oh wait that time
is already here.
Hemulen6 23 Oct 2015 15:06
Oh join the real world, Suzanne! Many companies now have a limit to how often you can be sick. In the case of the charity I
work for it's 9 days a year. I overstepped it, I was genuinely sick, and was hauled up in front of Occupational Health. That will
now go on my record and count against me. I work for a cancer care charity. Irony? Surely not.
AlexLeo -> rebel7 23 Oct 2015 13:34
Which is exactly my point. You compete on relevant job skills and quality of your product, not what school you have attended.
Yes, there are thousands, tens of thousands of folks here around San Jose who barely speak English, but are smart and hard
working as hell and it takes them a few years to get to 150-200K per year, Many of them get to 300-400K, if they come from strong
schools in their countries of origin, compared to the 10k or so where they came from, but probably more than the whining readership
here.
This is really difficult to swallow for the Brits back in Britain, isn't it. Those who have moved over have experiences the
type of social mobility unthinkable in Britain, but they have had to work hard and get to 300K-700K per year, much better than
the 50-100K their parents used to make back in GB. These are averages based on personal interactions with say 50 Brits in the
last 15 + years, all employed in the Silicon Valley in very different jobs and roles.
Todd Owens -> Scott W 23 Oct 2015 11:00
I get what you're saying and I agree with a lot of what you said. My only gripe is most employees do not see an operation from
a business owner or managerial / financial perspective. They don't understand the costs associated with their performance or lack
thereof. I've worked on a lot of projects that we're operating at a loss for a future payoff. When someone decides they don't
want to do the work they're contracted to perform that can have a cascading effect on the entire company.
All in all what's being described is for the most part misguided because most people are not in the position or even care to
evaluate the particulars. So saying you should do this to accomplish that is bullshit because it's rarely such a simple equation.
If anything this type of tactic will leaf to MORE loss and less money for payroll.
weematt -> Barry1858 23 Oct 2015 09:04
Sorry you just can't have a 'nicer' capitalism.
War ( business by other means) and unemployment ( you can't buck the market), are inevitable concomitants of capitalist competition
over markets, trade routes and spheres of interests. (Remember the war science of Nagasaki and Hiroshima from the 'good guys'
?)
"..capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt". (Marx)
You can't have full employment, or even the 'Right to Work'.
There is always ,even in boom times a reserve army of unemployed, to drive down wages. (If necessary they will inject inflation
into the economy)
Unemployment is currently 5.5 percent or 1,860,000 people. If their "equilibrium rate" of unemployment is 4% rather than 5% this
would still mean 1,352,000 "need be unemployed". The government don't want these people to find jobs as it would strengthen workers'
bargaining position over wages, but that doesn't stop them harassing them with useless and petty form-filling, reporting to the
so-called "job centre" just for the sake of it, calling them scroungers and now saying they are mentally defective.
Government is 'over' you not 'for' you.
Governments do not exist to ensure 'fair do's' but to manage social expectations with the minimum of dissent, commensurate
with the needs of capitalism in the interests of profit.
Worker participation amounts to self managing workers self exploitation for the maximum of profit for the capitalist class.
Exploitation takes place at the point of production.
" Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the
revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wages system!'"
Karl Marx [Value, Price and Profit]
John Kellar 23 Oct 2015 07:19
Fortunately; as a retired veteran I don't have to worry about phoning in sick.However; during my Air Force days if you were
sick, you had to get yourself to the Base Medical Section and prove to a medical officer that you were sick. If you convinced
the medical officer of your sickness then you may have been luck to receive on or two days sick leave. For those who were very
sick or incapable of getting themselves to Base Medical an ambulance would be sent - promptly.
Rchrd Hrrcks -> wumpysmum 23 Oct 2015 04:17
The function of civil disobedience is to cause problems for the government. Let's imagine that we could get 100,000 people
to agree to phone in sick on a particular date in protest at austerity etc. Leaving aside the direct problems to the economy that
this would cause. It would also demonstrate a willingness to take action. It would demonstrate a capability to organise mass direct
action. It would demonstrate an ability to bring people together to fight injustice. In and of itself it might not have much impact,
but as a precedent set it could be the beginning of something massive, including further acts of civil disobedience.
wumpysmum Rchrd Hrrcks 23 Oct 2015 03:51
There's already a form of civil disobedience called industrial action, which the govt are currently attacking by attempting
to change statute. Random sickies as per my post above are certainly not the answer in the public sector at least, they make no
coherent political point just cause problems for colleagues. Sadly too in many sectors and with the advent of zero hours contracts
sickies put workers at risk of sanctions and lose them earnings.
Alyeska 22 Oct 2015 22:18
I'm American. I currently have two jobs and work about 70 hours a week, and I get no paid sick days. In fact, the last time
I had a job with a paid sick day was 2001. If I could afford a day off, you think I'd be working 70 hours a week?
I barely make rent most months, and yes... I have two college degrees. When I try to organize my coworkers to unionize for
decent pay and benefits, they all tell me not to bother.... they are too scared of getting on management's "bad side" and "getting
in trouble" (yes, even though the law says management can't retaliate.)
Unions are different in the USA than in the UK. The workforce has to take a vote to unionize the company workers; you can't
"just join" a union here. That's why our pay and working conditions have gotten worse, year after year.
rtb1961 22 Oct 2015 21:58
By far the biggest act of wage slavery rebellion, don't buy shit. The less you buy, the less you need to earn. Holidays
by far the minority of your life should not be a desperate escape from the majority of your life. Spend less, work less and actually
really enjoy living more.
Pay less attention to advertising and more attention to the enjoyable simplicity of life, of real direct human relationships,
all of them, the ones in passing where you wish a stranger well, chats with service staff to make their life better as well as
your own, exchange thoughts and ideas with others, be a human being and share humanity with other human beings.
Mkjaks 22 Oct 2015 20:35
How about don't shop at Walmart (they helped boost the Chinese economy while committing hari kari on the American Dream)
and actually engaging in proper labour action? Calling in sick is just plain childish.
toffee1 22 Oct 2015 19:13
It is only considered productive if it feeds the beast, that is, contribute to the accumulation of capital so that the beast
can have more power over us. The issue here is the wage labor. The 93 percent of the U.S. working population perform wage labor
(see BLS site). It is the highest proportion in any society ever came into history. Under the wage labor (employment) contract,
the worker gives up his/her decision making autonomy. The worker accepts the full command of his/her employer during the labor
process. The employer directs and commands the labor process to achieve the goals set by himself. Compare this, for example, self-employed
providing a service (for example, a plumber). In this case, the customer describes the problem to the service provider but the
service provider makes all the decisions on how to organize and apply his labor to solve the problem. Or compare it to a democratically
organized coop, where workers make all the decisions collectively, where, how and what to produce. Under the present economic
system, a great majority of us are condemned to work in large corporations performing wage labor. The system of wage labor stripping
us from autonomy on our own labor, creates all the misery in our present world through alienation. Men and women lose their humanity
alienated from their own labor. Outside the world of wage labor, labor can be a source self-realization and true freedom. Labor
can be the real fulfillment and love. Labor together our capacity to love make us human. Bourgeoisie dehumanized us steeling our
humanity. Bourgeoisie, who sold her soul to the beast, attempting to turn us into ever consuming machines for the accumulation
of capital.
patimac54 -> Zach Baker 22 Oct 2015 17:39
Well said. Most retail employers have cut staff to the minimum possible to keep the stores open so if anyone is off sick, it's
the devil's own job trying to just get customers served. Making your colleagues work even harder than they normally do because
you can't be bothered to act responsibly and show up is just plain selfish.
And sorry, Suzanne, skiving work is nothing more than an act of complete disrespect for those you work with. If you don't understand
that, try getting a proper job for a few months and learn how to exercise some self control.
TettyBlaBla -> FranzWilde 22 Oct 2015 17:25
It's quite the opposite in government jobs where I am in the US. As the fiscal year comes to a close, managers look at their
budgets and go on huge spending sprees, particularly for temp (zero hours in some countries) help and consultants. They fear if
they don't spend everything or even a bit more, their spending will be cut in the next budget. This results in people coming in
to do work on projects that have no point or usefulness, that will never be completed or even presented up the food chain of management,
and ends up costing taxpayers a small fortune.
I did this one year at an Air Quality Agency's IT department while the paid employees sat at their desks watching portable
televisions all day. It was truly demeaning.
oommph -> Michael John Jackson 22 Oct 2015 16:59
Thing is though, children - dependents to pay for - are the easiest way to keep yourself chained to work.
The homemaker model works as long as your spouse's employer retains them (and your spouse retains you in an era of 40% divorce).
You are just as dependent on an employer and "work" but far less in control of it now.
Zach Baker 22 Oct 2015 16:41
I'm all for sticking it to "the man," but when you call into work for a stupid reason (and a hangover is a very stupid
reason), it is selfish, and does more damage to the cause of worker's rights, not less. I don't know about where you work, but
if I call in sick to my job, other people have to pick up my slack. I work for a public library, and we don't have a lot of funds,
so we have the bear minimum of employees we can have and still work efficiently. As such, if anybody calls in, everyone else,
up to and including the library director, have to take on more work. If I found out one of my co-workers called in because
of a hangover, I'd be pissed. You made the choice to get drunk, knowing that you had to work the following morning. Putting it
into the same category of someone who is sick and may not have the luxury of taking off because of a bad employer is insulting.
No one knows how the Midas myth ends, but he dies of starvation because everything turns to gold. The the culture equates wealth
and self-worth, this is repetition of Midas myth on a new level. Like Russian oligarchs (Prokhorov is one example), or Getty in the
USA enjoying a harem of "girlfriends"
For those that haven't seen the first few episodes of British TV series about Getty, you should. There are many parables that
come to mind that include Getty Sr, his children, his kidnapped grandson, and him harem, or how I would call them Getty's female
posse.
Notable quotes:
"... The esteemed filmmaker observed how the vapid trickle-down culture of the plutocracy could be the end of us all ..."
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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
"... Nearly 50% of the top executives and managers surveyed admit that they mobilize their workers politically. ..."
"... The most important factor in determining whether a firm engages in partisan mobilization of its workers-and thinks that that mobilization is effective-is the degree of control it has over its workers. ..."
"... But the problem isn't corruption. It's capitalism. Workers are dependent on employers for their well-being. That makes them vulnerable to their bosses' demands, about a great many matters, including politics. The ballot and the buck are fused. Not because of campaign donations but because of the unequal relationship between capital and labor. Not just in the corridors of Congress but also in the halls of the workplace. Unless you confront the latter, you'll never redress the former. Without economic democracy, there's no political democracy. ..."
"... I'd argue though that in terms of the overall discourse, "the bosses" have won without even resorting to anything so crude. ..."
"... people soak up attitudes about economics and trade policy from work. ..."
"... They aren't being threatened, it's simply a matter of culture – of lionising the "private sector" and bashing the "public sector" and those out of work. The identity comes out of water cooler moments and the lunch break. It takes a strong outside-work identity not to want the halo of "private sector wealth creator" and thus disdain a union, or a strike or a dole recipient ..."
"... But hey, it's not him getting black lung or dying in a mine collapse. It's his workers. The ones he's been fined repeated times for ignoring safety regulations to save a buck here and there. ..."
"... Much conservative rhetoric, especially in the US, is caught up in an anachronistic big-government/small-government debate. But real government is not where the nominal authority lies, but who has the real power! ..."
"... conservatives are leading a revolution, in which national governments are being usurped by the big government of the international corporate oligopoly. ..."
"... . . . the problem isn't corruption. It's capitalism. ..."
"... 15% report that employer messages affected their vote choice. ..."
"... Some workers are terribly underpaid, forcing them to work extra hours/job; some are subject to capricious scheduling, and irregular hours; others in prestige jobs intentionally overworked, makes for easier conditioning. All around the 40hr/week standard persists despite massive productivity gains. At least the French get August off to take a proper trip to the beach. ..."
In
my Salon column today, I look at new research examining how corporations influence politics.
Money talks. But how?
From "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to
Citizens United, the story goes like this: The
wealthy corrupt and control democracy by purchasing politicians, scripting speech and writing laws. Corporations and rich people
make donations to candidates, pay for campaign ads and create PACs. They, or their lobbyists, take members of Congress out to
dinner, organize junkets for senators and tell the government what to do. They insinuate money where it doesn't belong. They don't
build democracy; they buy it.
But that, says Alex Hertel-Fernandez, a PhD student in Harvard's
government department, may not be the only or even the best way to think about the power of money. That power extends far beyond
the dollars deposited in a politician's pocket. It reaches for the votes and voices of workers who the wealthy employ. Money talks
loudest where money gets made: in the workplace.
Among Hertel-Fernandez's findings:
1. Nearly 50% of the top executives and managers surveyed admit that they mobilize their workers politically.
2. Firms
believe that mobilizing their workers is more effective than donating money to a candidate, buying campaign ads, or investing
in large corporate lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce.
3. The most important factor in determining whether a firm engages in partisan mobilization of its workers-and thinks that
that mobilization is effective-is the degree of control it has over its workers. Firms that always engage in surveillance
of their employees' online activities are 50 percent more likely to mobilize their workers than firms that never do.
4. Of the workers who say they have been mobilized by their employers, 20% say that they received threats if they didn't.
My conclusion:
When we think of corruption, we think of something getting debased, becoming impure, by the introduction of a foreign material.
Money worms its way into the body politic, which rots from within. The antidote to corruption, then, is to keep unlike things
apart. Take the big money out of politics or limit its role. That's what
our campaign finance reformers tell us.
But the problem isn't corruption. It's capitalism. Workers are dependent on
employers for their well-being. That makes them vulnerable to their bosses' demands, about a great many matters, including
politics. The ballot and the buck are fused. Not because of campaign donations but because of the unequal relationship between
capital and labor. Not just in the corridors of Congress but also in the halls of the workplace. Unless you confront the
latter, you'll never redress the former. Without economic democracy, there's no political democracy.
That's a disgusting state of affairs, and one which I hope is confined to the US. I've never seen anything remotely like that
– never had a hint that my boss wanted to influence my vote – at any of the places I've worked, including the ones with no pension
scheme and no union recognition.
.2
Metatone 06.07.15 at 3:44 pm
I think in terms of campaigning (letter writing) etc. these abuses have clear effects.
I'd argue though that in terms of the overall discourse, "the bosses" have won without even resorting to anything so crude.
At least here in the UK it's palpable that people soak up attitudes about economics and trade policy from work. And
those policy preferences aren't designed around their prosperity
They aren't being threatened, it's simply a matter of culture – of lionising the "private sector" and bashing the "public
sector" and those out of work. The identity comes out of water cooler moments and the lunch break. It takes a strong outside-work
identity not to want the halo of "private sector wealth creator" and thus disdain a union, or a strike or a dole recipient
Josh Jasper 06.07.15 at 4:38 pm
cassander : Seems to me that coal miners and coal mine owners have a lot of interests in common.
You might want to mention that to someone who's worked for Massey energy at the Upper Big Branch Mine. Suggest to him that
he really ought to be giving his wages to the PACs if Massey tells them to.
I suggest having your dentist on speed dial.
For that matter, it's evident that the lot of interests Murray and his labor force have in common exclude worker safety as
well
But hey, it's not him getting black lung or dying in a mine collapse. It's his workers. The ones he's been fined repeated
times for ignoring safety regulations to save a buck here and there.
Does mobilization to vote Republican affect coal workers? Yes. It makes it very likely that the industry will get away with
ignoring safety regulations to save money, because destroying mining safety regulations for major donors is a Republican party
practice.
Sasha Clarkson 06.07.15 at 6:45 pm
Much conservative rhetoric, especially in the US, is caught up in an anachronistic big-government/small-government debate.
But real government is not where the nominal authority lies, but who has the real power!
Like it or not, conservatives are leading a revolution, in which national governments are being usurped by the big government
of the international corporate oligopoly. This of course is barely accountable for its actions, nor subject to democratic
oversight, and hence can ride roughshod over the broad mass of humanity. Of course, like the Star Wars Trade Federation, the oligopoly
also subverts/coerces the loyalties of employees from the wider community to itself.
I suspect that the trend is that national governments will be important only in that they will provide the armies to enforce
the will of the corporate elite. Eventually even this may become unimportant as other means are found to suppress us!
. . . the problem isn't corruption. It's capitalism.
So simple, then. So obvious.
More than a century of organizing work in hierarchy was all just a big mistake, but no worries, we'll just exchange it for
"economic democracy" at the service desk at Best Buy.
Ronan(rf) 06.07.15 at 8:11 pm
Not to display a put on world weary cynicism , but I'm surprised people are surprised by this. It isn't "capitalism" , it's politics.
People have always been pressured into how they vote, whether by domineering individuals in their family, notable families in
their community , factions in their village, political machines in their towns and cities , so on and so forth. In workplaces
of all sizes, from small shops to local factories, individuals have been coerced, whether implicitly (through peer pressure) or
explicitly (threats of dismissal) into supporting political positions a dominant faction wants them to. (Is this not part of what
trade unions do, or have done?)
It is a fallacy of WEIRD thinking to imagine away such pressures historically. Obviously this situation in the OP isn't ideal,
but it is politics , as it has existed since time immemorial. (Or at least a date I can't place)
Alex Hertel-Fernandez 06.07.15 at 8:24 pm
Cassander: I've looked at workers' self-reports of whether employer messages changed their behaviors. About half of all workers
who have been contacted by their bosses report a change in at least one of their political behaviors or attitudes, and 15%
report that employer messages affected their vote choice. Is this a lot or a little? I think the answer depends on whether
you think it is an appropriate role for managers to play in the political lives of their employees.
You're definitely right that the economic interests of workers and managers are often aligned on things like trade and regulation.
But many times they are not - as in the cases of working conditions (e.g. minimum wage) or redistributive policies. And independent
of the content of employers' political messages, we might be worried about the power that managers have over their workers. For
instance, I find that about 28% of contacted workers reported that their employers' messages either made them uncomfortable or
included threats of economic retaliation. I think whether you are troubled by these statistics or not depends on whether you are
concerned about power differentials between employers and their employees.
Barry Freed: Many of these employer tactics used to be illegal, for the most part, before Citizens United. And some states
have taken action to curb the most coercive practices (NJ and OR). But most states haven't.
hix 06.07.15 at 8:40 pm
Well, I associate such behaviour with defect democracy – which is how id think of most historical democracies. So for me it is
shocking to see this kind of mechanism in a modern long established rich democracy (ok not that shocking, considering all the
other fingerpointers towards that direction with regards to the US).
gianni 06.07.15 at 8:46 pm
Not to mention the ways in which American corporations especially have worked to diminish the employee's time for political activity.
Some workers are terribly underpaid, forcing them to work extra hours/job; some are subject to capricious scheduling, and
irregular hours; others in prestige jobs intentionally overworked, makes for easier conditioning. All around the 40hr/week standard
persists despite massive productivity gains. At least the French get August off to take a proper trip to the beach.
Added to this our antiquated infrastructure and sprawling residential geography make the simple fact of getting to work a huge
time investment. While in your car you are more likely to be fed the political opinions of well-funded media figures than to those
of your peers. Don't forget that this is in the country that invented the internet – how many of those people could just be telecommuting
anyway?
Ronan(rf) 06.07.15 at 8:55 pm
@13 – I don't know if I'd see the US as an institutionally mature democracy akin to what exists in Northern Europe, more as a
hybrid of areas that are economically and politically developed, and others that are more comparable to weak states or emerging
democracies (at best the European 'periphery', Spain, Greece, Italy, Ireland- perhaps in the 80s more than now) You can see this
in the weak state capacity, corrupt militia like police forces and late agrarian style of politics.
Also, perhaps I'm wrong.
Bruce Wilder 06.07.15 at 9:44 pm
Rich Puchalsky @ 11:
I appreciate that when you're going against an established story, you have to emphasize that what's really
going on is a whole different story.
That's what I'd take "the problem isn't corruption. It's capitalism." to be.
A very good article from is considered to be a neocon publication
Notable quotes:
"... Additionally, hard-line conservatives had been hazed out of power since 1932, but had been carefully organizing and building their strength ever since. The Volcker Recession allowed them to seize the moment, finally electing one of their own to the presidency: Ronald Reagan. The three succeeding Republican terms finally cemented the idea among the Democratic elite that the party would simply have to submit to neoliberalism to be able to compete ..."
"... Effectively, both parties conspired to break the New Deal ..."
"... The spectacular late-'90s boom was, in retrospect, the first and last time the U.S. saw full employment under neoliberalism. It was followed immediately by a financial crisis and a prolonged "jobless recovery," where growth returned reasonably quickly but employment and wages lagged far behind. (Only in 2017 did the median household income finally surpass the 1999 peak -- despite the economy being 18 percent larger.) ..."
Meanwhile, New Dealers ran into political difficulties. In 1972, George McGovern
ran on a strongly left-wing platform, and got flattened by Nixon, seemingly demonstrating that
the New Deal was no longer a vote winner. Neoliberal economists were reaching the height of
academic respectability, they had a convincing story to explain the problems, and they gained
the ears of top Democratic politicians like Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. On the advice of
Alfred Kahn, Kennedy
shepherded through airline deregulation , while Carter appointed neoliberal Paul Volcker to
chair of the Federal Reserve, where Volcker proceeded to create a terrible recession to crush
inflation. "
The standard of living of the average American has to decline ," he said.
This produced growing inequality, which turned out to be a keystone element of neoliberal
political economy. Deregulation, union-busting, abandoning anti-trust, and so forth shunted
money to the top of the income ladder -- thus providing more resources for lobbying, political
pressure groups, think tanks, and economics departments to produce yet more neoliberal
policy.
All this enabled neoliberal political operatives, who were organizing within the Democratic
Party to
push out the old New Dealers . The Democratic "
Watergate Babies " elected after Nixon's downfall were largely neoliberals, and proved
quickly to be amenable to deregulation and abandoning anti-trust.
Additionally, hard-line conservatives had been hazed out of power since 1932, but had
been carefully organizing and building their strength ever since. The Volcker Recession allowed
them to seize the moment, finally electing one of their own to the presidency: Ronald Reagan.
The three succeeding Republican terms finally cemented the idea among the Democratic elite that
the party would simply have to submit to neoliberalism to be able to compete .
Effectively, both parties conspired to break the New Deal .
For a time, it seemed that the neoliberals were right. America enjoyed reasonably good
growth under Reagan, and did even better in the late '90s under Bill Clinton, when a boom in
high-tech companies led to the first sustained period of full employment since the '70s --
without so much as a whisper of inflation. The Democratic elite's adoption of neoliberalism
seemed to be paying off -- partly, no doubt, why Clinton followed Reagan's lead on anti-trust
and passed two large packages of financial deregulation.
However, there were problems below the surface. In the New Deal days, wages had grown along
with productivity. But in the mid-'70s, the link was broken, and median wages began to
stagnate. As a result, income inequality began to increase, as economic growth flowed into
corporate profits, executive pay, and capital gains instead of to the working class.
The spectacular late-'90s boom was, in retrospect, the first and last time the
U.S. saw full employment under neoliberalism. It was followed immediately by a financial crisis
and a prolonged "jobless recovery," where growth returned reasonably quickly but employment and
wages lagged far behind. (Only in 2017 did the median household income finally surpass the 1999 peak --
despite the economy being 18 percent larger.)
Financial deregulation also dramatically increased financial sector size and instability.
Contrary to prophets of the self-regulating market, an unchained Wall Street quickly created an
escalating series of financial crises, requiring expensive government bailouts. Not even a
single decade after Clinton's last package of deregulation, the worst financial panic since
1929 struck, leading to the worst recession since the 1930s.
The Democrats swept to power in a wave election in 2008, as the economy entered free fall.
They had every opportunity to abandon neoliberalism and return to the kind of New Deal policy
that the Great Recession called for -- and they blew it.
Early on, there was a brief window where the Democrats' old thinking snuck through, leading
to the passage of the Recovery Act stimulus under President Obama. But this was only about half
the necessary size, and instead of continuing to work on unemployment, the party became
obsessed with deficits, turning to austerity by February 2010 .
With unemployment still at 10 percent during that year's midterms, the Democrats were flattened
at the polls, leading to Republican control of the House and dozens of state legislatures.
Incredibly, the Democrats responded by doubling down on neoliberalism. Over and over again
during the Obama years, the party elite proved itself overly sympathetic to the concerns of the
market.
Instead of attacking the concentrated wealth and power of big finance, Democrats took the
neoliberal route and passed a blizzard of complicated rules in the Dodd-Frank financial reform
package that attempted to reduce specific financial sector risk. Many of those provisions were
quite worthy, to be sure, but after the crisis the biggest banks are even
larger than they were before the crisis and financial sector profits quickly bounced back
to their previous levels.
The Obama administration also proved itself largely incapable of enforcing laws against
white-collar crime. Department of Justice careerists like Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer were terrified
that anything more than gentle wrist-slap fines would undermine
the stability of the financial sector . As a result, despite
massive fraud carried out
during the housing bubble and the ensuing crash , no major
bank and none of their top executives were convicted of anything.
Most damning of all, neoliberalism under Obama turned in the worst economic performance
since the 1930s . Despite the fact that the 2008 crash left obvious excess capacity, there
was no catch-up growth -- on the contrary, growth was about two-thirds the 1945-2007 average,
with no sign of speeding up on the horizon. Even 10 years after the start of the recession,
there is every sign that the economy is still depressed.
So despite the confident predictions of the Chicago School, the political economy created by
neoliberalism turned out to be identical to 1920s laissez-faire economics in every important
respect. The United States is once again a country which functions mostly on behalf of a tiny
capitalist elite. It has the same extreme inequality, the same bloated, crisis-prone financial
sector, the same corruption, and the same political backlash to the status quo and rising
extremist factions.
Now, it must be admitted that Obama is a magnificent political talent, the finest national
politician in terms of raw ability since FDR. As long as he was at the top of the party, his
sheer charisma and moderately good policy record allowed him to get re-elected -- especially
against a tone-deaf aristocrat like Mitt Romney, who had advocated that Detroit be allowed to
go bankrupt.
But Hillary Clinton,
by her own admission , is not very good at retail politics. She has neither the cool,
effortless charisma of Obama, nor the warm human touch of her husband. Worse, she is accurately
perceived as being firmly ensconced in the political and economic elite -- made worse still by
a ( partly
unfairly ) awful relationship with the press, and a lingering miasma of scandal and
corruption. But fundamentally, Clinton -- virtually handpicked by the party elite, and
promising to continue and build on the accomplishments of Obama -- was the candidate of
Democratic Party neoliberalism, for better and worse. And she lost to Donald Trump.
All this has profoundly discredited neoliberalism within the Democratic Party. The last
generation of centrist policymaking has been a giant failure. There was some partial
recognition of the problems under President Obama, and much worthy policy, but nowhere near the
fundamental economic restructuring that is clearly needed to stop the economic elite from
hoarding the fruits of growth.
"... 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 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. ..."
"... Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ..."
"... Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy ..."
"... J Is for Junk Economics – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception ..."
"... J is for Junk Economics ..."
"... Guns and Butter ..."
"... J Is for Junk Economics ..."
"... The Fictitious Economy ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... J Is for Junk Economics – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception ..."
"... Killing the Host ..."
"... J is for Junk – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception ..."
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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 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.
ORDER IT NOW
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.
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier."
Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false
flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat.
With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head
Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will
have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal
globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears
in scores of British history books – right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King – as a British officer who
chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise
the defences. In researching
Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that
Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first
historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was
publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly
Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.
Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how
highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane
just happened to be on holiday in the
United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to
rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So
he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just
sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged
field organiser."
It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane
is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely
unbalanced panel of British
military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.
Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been
forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft
has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against
Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of
influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus
exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and
others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.
The mainstream media have
tracked down
the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel
Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic
Daniel Edney).
By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location
of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of
the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building.
It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.
Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing
for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.
Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically
check it out. Kit did so and was
aggressively
ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing
hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that
launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.
I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation
war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I
am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.
I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the
Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter
for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.
But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the
British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that
we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity
Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media,
it would be the biggest story of the day.
As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.
You can
bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".
As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as
real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with
increasing frequency and audacity
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.
Chinese refineries that used to purchase U.S. oil regularly said they had not resumed buying
due to uncertainty over the outlook for trade relations between Washington and Beijing, as well
as rising freight costs and poor profit-margins for refining in the region.
Costs for shipping U.S. crude to Asia on a supertanker are triple those for Middle eastern
oil, data on Refinitiv Eikon showed.
A senior official with a state oil refinery said his plant had stopped buying U.S. oil from
October and had not booked any cargoes for delivery in the first quarter.
"Because of the great policy uncertainty earlier on, plants have actually readjusted back to
using alternatives to U.S. oil ... they just widened our supply options," he said.
He added that his plant had shifted to replacements such as North Sea Forties crude,
Australian condensate and oil from Russia.
"Maybe teapots will take some cargoes, but the volume will be very limited," said a second
Chinese oil executive, referring to independent refiners. The sources declined to be named
because of company policy.
A sharp souring in Asian benchmark refining margins has also curbed overall demand for crude
in recent months, sources said.
Despite the impasse on U.S. crude purchases, China's crude imports could top a record 45
million tonnes (10.6 million barrels per day) in December from all regions, said Refinitiv
senior oil analyst Mark Tay.
Russia is set to remain the biggest supplier at 7 million tonnes in December, with Saudi
Arabia second at 5.7-6.7 million tonnes, he said.
19 hours ago This is an
economic/political tight rope for both countries. China is the largest auto market in the
world with numerous manufacturers located inside its borders. Apple sales will disappoint
inside China after Meng's arrest over Iran sanctions (Huawei is a world heavy weight in terms
of sales), and this has already begun inside China due to national pride. Canada has already
seen one trade agreement postponed over her detention. US firm on the main have already
issued orders to not have key employees travel to their Chinese plants unless absolutely
necessary for fear of retaliation. Brussels is actively working on a plan to bypass US
Iranian sanctions, which are deeply unpopular in Europe.
The key to this solution might be in automotive. Oil is possibly on the endangered bargaining
list. Russia is a key trading partner (for years) with China and, along with Saudi Arabia and
Iran (or even without Iran) will be able to supply their needs. Our agricultural sector,
particularly in soybeans, has been hit hard, forcing the US govt. into farm subsidies. Brazil
just recorded a record harvest in soybeans. The US could counter with lifting Meng from
arrest in return for an agricultural break, but those negotiations won't make the mainstream
news. Personally, I think her arrest was a very ill-thought move on the part of law
enforcement, as the benefits don't even begin to outweigh the massive retaliation to US firms
operating inside their borders. It is almost akin to arresting Tim Cook of Apple or Apple's
CFO. You don't kill a bug with a sledge hammer.
"... According to the narrative fabricated by the intelligence agencies and promoted by the Democratic Party and the corporate media over the past year and a half, Putin and his minions hacked the Democrats and stirred up social divisions and popular grievances to secure the election for Donald Trump, and they have been working ever since to destroy "our institutions." ..."
A central theme of the hysteria over alleged "Russian meddling" in US politics is the
sinister effort supposedly being mounted by Vladimir Putin "to undermine and manipulate our
democracy" (in the words of Democratic Senator Mark Warner).
According to the narrative fabricated by the intelligence agencies and promoted by the
Democratic Party and the corporate media over the past year and a half, Putin and his minions
hacked the Democrats and stirred up social divisions and popular grievances to secure the
election for Donald Trump, and they have been working ever since to destroy "our
institutions."
Their chosen field of battle is the internet, with Russian trolls and bots infecting the
body politic by taking advantage of lax policing of social media by the giant tech companies
such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.
To defend democracy, the argument goes, these companies, working with the state, must
silence oppositional viewpoints -- above all left-wing, anti-war and socialist viewpoints --
which are labeled "fake news," and banish them from the internet. Nothing is said of the fact
that this supposed defense of democracy is a violation of the basic canons of genuine
democracy, guaranteed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution: freedom of speech and
freedom of the press.
But what is this much vaunted "American democracy?" Let's take a closer look.
The
two-party monopoly
In a vast and complex country with a population of 328 million people, consisting of many
different nationalities, native tongues, religions and other demographics, spanning six time
zones and thousands of miles, two political parties totally dominate the political
system.
The ruling corporate-financial oligarchy controls both parties and maintains its rule by
alternating control of the political institutions -- the White House, Congress, state houses,
etc. -- between them. The general population, consisting overwhelmingly of working people, is
given the opportunity every two or four years to go to the polls and vote for one or the
other of these capitalist parties. This is what is called "democracy."
The monopoly of the two big business parties is further entrenched by the absence of
proportional representation, which it makes it impossible for third parties or independent
candidates to obtain significant representation in Congress.
The role of corporate
money
The entire political process -- the selection of candidates, elections, the formulation of
domestic and foreign policies -- is dominated by corporate money. No one can seriously bid
for high office unless he or she has the backing of sponsors from the ranks of the richest 1
percent -- or 0.01 percent -- of the population. The buying of elections and politicians is
brazen and shameless.
Last month's midterm elections set a record for campaign spending in a non-presidential
year -- $5.2 billion -- a 35 percent increase over 2014 and triple the amount spent 20 years
ago, in 1998. The bulk of this flood of cash came from corporations and multi-millionaire
donors.
In the vast majority of contests, the winner was determined by the size of his or her
campaign war chest. Eighty-nine percent of House races and 84 percent of Senate races were
won by the biggest spender.
Democratic candidates had a huge spending advantage over their Republican opponents,
exposing the fraud of their attempt to posture as a party of the people. The securities and
investment industry -- Wall Street -- favored Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 52
percent to 46 percent.
Elections are anything but a forum to openly and honestly discuss and debate the great
issues facing the voters. The real issues -- the preparation for new wars, deeper austerity
and further attacks on democratic rights -- are concealed behind a miasma of attack ads and
mudslinging. The research firm PQ Media estimates that total political ad spending will reach
$6.75 billion this year. In last month's elections, the number of congressional and
gubernatorial ads rose 59 percent over the previous, 2014, midterm.
The setting of policy and passage of legislation is helped along by corporate bribes,
euphemistically termed lobbying. In 2017 alone, corporations spent $3 billion to lobby the
government.
Ballot access restrictions
A welter of arcane, arbitrary and anti-democratic requirements for gaining ballot status,
which vary from state to state, block third parties from challenging the domination of the
Democrats and Republicans. These include filing fees and nominating petition signature
requirements in the tens of thousands in many states. Democratic officials routinely
challenge the petitions of socialist and left-wing candidates who are likely to find support
among young people and workers.
Media blackout of third party candidates
The corporate media systematically blacks out the campaigns of third party and independent
candidates, especially left-wing and socialist candidates. The exception is candidates who
are either themselves rich or who have the backing of wealthy patrons.
Third party candidates are generally excluded from nationally televised candidates'
debates.
In last month's election, the Socialist Equality Party candidate for Congress in
Michigan's 12th Congressional District, Niles Niemuth, won broad support among workers, young
people and students for his socialist program, but received virtually no press
coverage.
Voting restrictions
Since the stolen election of 2000, when the Supreme Court shut down the counting of votes
in Florida in order to hand the White House to the loser of the popular vote, George W. Bush,
with virtually no opposition from the Democrats or the media, attacks on the right of workers
and poor people to vote have mounted.
Thirty-three states have implemented voter identification laws, which, studies show, bar
up to 6 percent of the population from voting. States have cut back early voting and absentee
voting and shut down voting precincts in working class neighborhoods. A number of states
impose a lifetime ban on voting by felons, even after they have done their time. In 2013, the
Supreme Court gutted the enforcement mechanism of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, with no real
opposition from the Democrats. The United States is one of the few countries that hold
elections on a work day, making it more difficult for workers to cast a
ballot.
Government of, by and for the rich
The two corporate parties have overseen a social counterrevolution, resulting in a
staggering growth of social inequality. In tandem with this process, the oligarchic structure
of society has increasingly found open expression in the political forms of rule. Alongside
the erection of the infrastructure of a police state -- mass surveillance, indefinite
detention, the militarization of the police, Gestapo raids on workplaces and attacks on
immigrants, the ascendancy of the military in political affairs, internet censorship -- the
personnel of government have increasingly been recruited from the rich and the
super-rich.
More than half of the members of Congress are millionaires, as compared to just 1 percent
of the American population. All the presidents for the past three decades -- George H. W,
Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama -- have either been multi-millionaires going
in or have cashed in on their presidencies to become multi-millionaires afterward. In the
person of the multi-billionaire real estate speculator and con man Donald Trump, the
financial oligarchy has directly taken occupancy of the White House.
In The State and Revolution , Vladimir Lenin wrote: "Bourgeois democracy,
although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under
capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for
the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor."
PATRICK COCKBURN: The Turks benefit from this. It also shows, you know, that Turkey
is really powerful in the region. You know, they've moved a lot of troops up to the border.
They'd been threatening to come in anyway. I think, you know, portraying this as Russia being
the big winner, this is pretty naive, or even childish, in many ways. It's in Russia's
interests that the U.S. should stay in Syria in alliance with the Kurds, which means that the
U.S. is probably confronting Turkey, whose main policy objective is to eliminate this Kurdish
enclave. So if anything, you know, this is something which makes it easier for the
administration to revive the old U.S. alliance with Turkey. And so it doesn't necessarily work
in Russia's favor.
This is a very simpleminded view, that this benefits Russia. Turkey benefits because
suddenly this whole area in northeast Syria becomes vulnerable to them. They've threatened to
move in. They've talked about burying the Kurdish militants in ditches. And we know what
happened earlier in the year in Afrin, another Kurdish enclave. You know, there was extreme
ethnic cleansing. Almost half the Kurdish population was driven out, and hasn't come back.
They've been taken over by extreme Arab jihadis. So yeah, it's very much in Turkey's interests
what's happened. But it is not necessarily in Russia's interests at all. BEN NORTON:
Yeah, Donald Trump himself, in fact, repeatedly tweeted this on December 20 in response to the
news. You know, many media reports portrayed this as a gift to Russia and Iran. Trump pointed
out that now Russia and Iran will be fighting ISIS on their own in Syria, and there are still
elements of ISIS that are in the country. Thousands of fighters, although ISIS doesn't control
a territorial capital, as it had in the past. And what's also interesting about this is that on
the same day Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops on December 19, the U.S. State
Department also cleared a $3.5 billion sale of air defense systems to Turkey. And in addition
to that, a few journalists, mostly Kurdish and Turkish journalists, pointed out that Trump's
decision to withdraw came just two days, or a few days, after he had a phone call with the
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And just two days before that decision, Erdogan had, in
fact, claimed that in the phone call Trump had agreed, had greenlighted, to a Turkish assault
on northeast Syria. Turkey has been trying to get the U.S. to get approval to send Turkish
troops and embedded jihadist rebels east of the Euphrates River. So do you think that this is
essentially a kind of green light from Trump, saying to Erdogan go ahead and invade?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, it kind of–it opens the door to that. Green light
creates a picture of somebody saying, you know, go for it. Which is doubtful. But you withdraw
the troops, Turkey has been threatening to intervene. Yeah, I think, you know, it may well
amount to that.
I think that, you know, it's easy to pillory what Trump said and did. You know, saying that
the Islamic State will come back, ISIS will come back. But you know, this was a movement that
once controlled territory really from Baghdad to almost to the Mediterranean. And you know, it
just lost its last small town on the east of the Euphrates in eastern Syria. So you know, will
it come back? Well, yeah, there will be more guerrilla warfare. But again, you know, what
strikes me about a lot of the coverage is it's kind of hysterical. It kind of–it is based
on a sort of conspiratorial view of what Trump is up to, what his relations with the Russians
are. You know, this stuff is so far from the reality of what's actually happening on the ground
in Syria, or in Iraq, for that matter. It's very difficult to to discuss it or contradict it.
But it's just sort of off the wall.
BEN NORTON: And the question now up in the air is what will happen to the Kurdish
forces in northeast Syria, specifically the YPG, the People's Protection Units, which control
this area in the northeast. For months now the YPG has, in fact, had kind of on and off
relations with Damascus, the central government of Syria. They had brief negotiations and peace
talks, and they made some–a few agreements. But it seems that the agreements didn't go
very far. It seems to me that this decision will encourage the YPG to seek further
rapprochement and a kind of alliance with Damascus. So what do you think-
PATRICK COCKBURN: They'll be desperate to do that right now, because they may not
like Damascus very much, but they'd much prefer the Syrian government to the Turks. They're
really terrified of the Turks coming in. They're threatened. They are terrified of ethnic
cleansing. So they'll go to Damascus.
Now, previously, because of the U.S. presence that inhibited them, stopped them doing that.
And also the Russians didn't want them to do that. So they'll do that. But it's it's–you
know, the Turkish army is pretty big, pretty strong. Even supposing the Syrian army came into
this enclave it wouldn't necessarily be able to stop the Turks. I mean, what's happened is
that, you know, if you go to that area, one, it's not a great place for the Turks to fight
against heavy armor and aircraft. It's very flat, most of the east of the Euphrates. Not many
mountains, or no mountains, and few hills. And also mostly about 2 million Kurds there. But a
lot of them are in towns or cities along the Syrian-Turkish border. Often cities, when the
frontier was drawn up between Syria and Turkey, it ran along the old railway line between
Aleppo and Mosul. And so cities were cut in half. Kurdish cities were cut in half. So a lot of
these the Kurds live within artillery range of the Turkish army/.
It's important to talk about this, because if the Turks do come across, we could have a
great wave of 2 million Kurds taking to the roads, desperate to get out, going to northern
Iraq, going elsewhere. And there seems very little concern about this, and it's kind of
depressing to hear these sort of conspiracy theories about Russia when what is happening is
that, you know, is in many ways pretty–you know, pretty simple, but pretty bad.
BEN NORTON: And then finally, Patrick, let's just take a big look at what's going on
here. What do you think this will mean for the future of the war in Syria? The war has been
going on since early 2011, and it looks like the conflict is really finally in its final
stages. It might come to an end pretty soon. We've also seen, interestingly, negotiations
between Iran, Russia, and Syria, and Turkey. And specifically, Iran, Turkey, and Russia have
had these kinds of peace negotiations. They've had some developments, some breakthroughs, and
then some obstacles. But the three of them, it seems like they have had many agreements,
although there are some agreements that seem pretty intractable. And I think the question of
Idlib, and now the question of the Northeast, seem to be two major obstacles that Russia, Iran,
and Turkey have really different views on. So with this potentially the U.S. withdrawal, would
this potentially accelerate a peace negotiation for the end of the war? Or could it potentially
usher in a new phase of the war?
PATRICK COCKBURN: It could go either way. It's very difficult to tell which way the
ball will roll after this. Will the Turks come in directly, or will the Russians try to stop
them? Will the Syrian government sort of take over the, do a deal with the Kurds and take over?
You know, if the Turks do come in, what will happen to the Kurds in this area? You know, it's
about 50-50 Kurds and Arabs. And they–you know, the relations are very hostile. You know,
there could be a lot of revenge killings in this area.
So you know, it's difficult to say that. But I think a lot of this has to do with Trump
wanting to get on better terms with Turkey. And if he does want to do anything against Iran,
having better relations with Turkey is essential. But the actual having a U.S.–a Kurdish
enclave supported by the U.S. in Turkey never really, you know, didn't do any damage to the
Russians, and didn't do any damage to Iran. So I think the idea that this is, you know, Happy
Christmas for Putin and slogans like that is really completely unrealistic.
BEN NORTON: We'll have to end our conversation there. We were speaking with the
award-winning journalist Patrick Cockburn, who has for decades been a foreign correspondent for
the British newspaper the Independent, and he's also the author of several books. Thanks so
much for joining us, Patrick.
PATRICK COCKBURN: Thank you.
BEN NORTON: For The Real News Network, I'm Ben Norton.
The Grauniad just quoted a tweet from a predictably OUTRAGED @HillaryClinton:
Actions have consequences, and whether we're in Syria or not, the people who want to
harm us are there & at war. Isolationism is weakness. Empowering ISIS is dangerous.
Playing into Russia & Iran's hands is foolish. This President is putting our national
security at grave risk.
This from the woman who almost singlehandedly (i.e. along with David Cameron and Sarkovy)
destroyed Libya and allowed -- if not encouraged -- the flow of US weapons to go into the
hands of ISIS allies in the US-Saudi-Israeli obsession with toppling Assad regardless of the
consequences. As Justin Raimondo wrote in
Antiwar.com in 2015:
The policy of the Obama administration, and particularly Hillary Clinton's State
Department, was – and still is – regime change in Syria. This overrode all
other considerations. We armed, trained, and "vetted" the Syrian rebels, even as we looked
the other way while the Saudis and the Gulf sheikdoms funded groups like al-Nusra and
al-Qaeda affiliates who wouldn't pass muster. And our "moderates" quickly passed into the
ranks of the outfront terrorists, complete with the weapons we'd provided.
This crazy policy was an extension of our regime change operation in Libya, a.k.a.
"Hillary's War," where the US – "leading from behind" – and a coalition of our
Western allies and the Gulf protectorates overthrew Muammar Qaddafi. There, too, we
empowered radical Islamists with links to al-Qaeda affiliates – and then used them to
ship weapons to their Syrian brothers, as another document uncovered by Judicial Watch
shows.
After HRC's multiple foreign policy fiascos she is the last person who should be
commenting on this matter.
We used to jokingly call the Washington Post 'Pravda on the Potomac' because of what
appeared to be occasional heavy spin – the official story – in news coverage on
foreign policy. Now, the new coverage seems to be 'all spin all the time'. It's getting
harder and harder find reporting on foreign policy issues.
What is the most valuable thing Turkey has? The ability to block pipelines to Europe. They
need to have Syria in semi chaos to complete that block, but it is already the case. And
there is no shortage of cheap options to maintain it, nor any huge objection by regional
players to maintain it.
Turkey, otoh, controls its territory well enough to make its own moves, leveraging its
strategically central location to the max. (The whole flood-the-EU-with-refugees extortion
move was just vicious. Kissinger would be proud )
Also the pipeline expansion is a big part of the Russia phobia too. Keeping hydrocarbons
flowing by sea under the protection of the navy is a cornerstone of maintaining global
security. Thus, as long as Turkey blocks Russian pipelines too, it will get away with it for
the time being.
With a likely Emerging markets bust, however, TR will be at the mercy of creditors, so
Erdogan is going to need a whole new stack of cards to play for that round, which wol be next
year very possibly.
Thanks for this post. I makes the best sense of our actions. We want to keep Turkey loyal
to NATO, keep them buying our missiles, etc. The raging hatred of Turkey for the Kurds and
their pursuit of a corner of land to call their own somewhere in the east of Turkey (close to
huge oil reserves) and the threat of relentless terrorism has been Erdogan's big nightmare.
At odds with Erdogan has been the policy of the US Military which has always used the Kurds
as trusted allies in the ME. But all the sturm und drang of Syria has now subsided and seems
to have been almost pointless thanks to the Saudis falling apart. At least it looks that way.
And this also explains Mattis' abrupt resignation, explicitly stating he does not agree with
Trump turning his back on the Kurds. Basically. Mattis has worked with the Kurds for decades
probably. The only question now is what concessions did we get from Erdogan that Turkey will
not have a total pogrom on the Kurds? It is going to be interesting to see what becomes of
the Saudis as well.
For the past year I have concluded that the market was vulnerable to a number of factors and
was likely making an important top and likely setting up for a Bear Market:
Global economic growth was becoming more ambiguous and the fragility of worldwide growth
would be shortly exposed
An avalanche of debt would serve as a governor to growth
Corporate profit expectations for 2018-20 were too elevated
The pivot to monetary restraint by the Federal Reserve (taking the punch bowl away) would
be market unfriendly
With less liquidity would come a new regime of volatility
The risks of fiscal and monetary policy mistakes were growing
The behavior of the President and hastily crafted policy (e.g. the U.S. retreat from
Syria) would make economic uncertainty and market volatility great again (#muvga)
The reduction in the corporate tax rate has failed to deliver the growth expected to
reduce the burgeoning deficit – the benefit has trickled up and not down
Market structure represented a potential market threat that was being underestimated
Investors, participating in The Bull Market of Complacency, were ignoring the risks of a
large market drawdown
I concluded that the notion of T.I.N.A ("there is no alternative) was no longer applicable
and that rising short term interest rates made the compelling case for C.I.T.A. ("cash is the
alternative"):
Chart Courtesy of Charlie Bilello of Pension Partners
Out of 15 major asset classes ranging from stocks to bonds to REITs to Gold and Commodities,
only one is higher in 2018: Cash.
After the markets responded quite vigorously to the corporate tax reduction and cash
repatriation bills in January, markets swiftly moved higher – making a top near month
end. Consolidation and a multi-month period of choppiness followed but the markets made a new
high by mid-September at about 2920.
The toxic cocktail of the above factors have contributed to a more than 400 handle drop
(-13%) in the S&P Index to 2500 currently – below my (short term) expected trading
range of 2550-2700.
Back in early July I presented this suite of projections for the S&P Index – which
proved reasonably prescient, and to the penny we have just hit my six month projection of
S&P 2500 (!):
By the Numbers
As SPYDERS moved towards $273 yesterday afternoon -- on a full day spike in the S&P
Index of over 20 handles -- I moved back to market neutral.
Should the S&P Index climb back to 2,750-2,750 (my very short term prognostication), I
will move back again to a net short exposure, as downside risk expands over upside
reward.
My gross and net exposures remain light in a background of uncertainty (e.g., current
trade battle with China) and in the new regime of volatility. Quite frankly, I am playing
things "tight" in light of these factors -- and in consideration that I have had a very good
year thus far.
Again, my expectations below should be viewed not with precision, but rather as a
guideline to overall strategy:
Very Short Term (in the next five trading days)
–Higher, but not materially so. 2,750-2,775 seems a reasonable guesstimate.
–I plan to scale into a net short position on strength, but I will give the market a
wider berth today and into the first few days of the second half (inflows expected).
Short Term (in the next two months)
–Lower, but not materially so.
–I expect a series of tests of the S&P level 2,675-2,710.
Intermediate Term (in the next six months)
–Lower, a break towards "fair market value" of about 2,500 is my expectation.
More Lessons Learned
"When we ask for advice we are looking for an accomplice." – Saul Bellow
The investment mosaic is complex and Mr. Market is often unpredictable.
There is no quick answer or special sauce to capture the holy grail of investment results
– it takes hard work, common sense and the ability to navigate the noise.
The common thread of these naked swimmers are self confidence, smugness and the failure to
memorialize their investment returns (because the typically are so inconsistent and
dreadful).
They are bad and deceptive actors who are in denial to themselves and are artful and
accountable dodgers to the investing masses.
"In my next life I want to live my life backwards." – Woody Allen
Take Woody Allen's advice (above) – be forewarned and learn from history as common
sense is not so common as:
"A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore."– Yogi Berra
I have spent a lot of time over the last few months exposing the bad actors who, we learned,
were swimming naked this year; as the market's tide went out .
I did so, not because of any hatred but because I saw this also in 2008-09 and we should
finally be learning from history so that we don't call on those same resources in the
futures.
Where Do We Go From Here?
"I'll just conclude by saying most of the issues we are dealing with today are induced by
bad political choices."– Fred Smith, CEO Of Fed Express (
conference call )
Over the last year I have consistently written that "fair market value" (based on a
multi-factor analysis) for the S&P Index was between 2400-2500 – well below the
expectations of every major Wall Street strategist. I posited that 2018 would be the first year
(in many) in which the revaluation of price earnings ratios would be headed lower. (Multiples
are down by nearly 20% this year).
The major indices have had the worst month of December since the Great Depression –
declining by about -9%. Though many pin the loss (especially yesterday's) on the Federal
Reserve's actions and communications, the recent market drawdown is a function of the reality
of the headwinds I listed at the beginning of this morning's missive (that most have
dismissed).
We are now at 2500 (down from 2920 three months ago) – which means the market is at
the upper end of being fairly valued for the first time all year. It also means that an
expanding list of stocks are now attractive if my recession expectations prove unfounded.
Expanding problems facing the White House and policy blunders (underestimated by investors
– see FedEx quote above), reduced domestic economic expectations and a continuation of
Fed tightening (and balance sheet drawdowns) have contributed to the latest market swoon. That
drawdown has occurred in a backdrop of rising fear and some extreme sentiment readings –
abetted by a changing market structure in which passive products and strategies "buy high and
sell low."
As posited this week I believe we are now going to have a playable year end rally from here
but as we move into the New Year things get more problematic.
"Though the third year of a Presidential cycle is usually bullish – it's different
this time.
Trump confusing brains with a bull market can't fathom the emerging Bear Market. At first
he blames it on Steve Mnuchin, his Secretary of Treasury (who leaves the Administration in
the middle of the year). Then he blames a lower stock market on the mid-term election which
turned the House. Then he blames the market correction on the Chinese.
The S&P Index hits a yearly low of 2200 in the first half of the year as the market
worries about slowing economic and profit growth and a burgeoning deficit/monetization. The
announcement of QE4 results in a year end rally in December, 2019. In a continued regime of
volatility (and in a market dominated by ETFs and machines/algos), daily swings of 1%-3%
become more commonplace. Investor sentiment slumps as redemptions from exchange traded funds
grow to record levels. The absence of correlation between ETFs and the underlying component
investments causes regulatory concerns throughout the year.
Congress holds hearings on the changing market structure and the weak foundation those
changes delivered during the year.
Short sellers provide the best returns in the hedge fund space as the S&P Index
records a second consecutive yearly loss (which is much deeper than in 2018).
As the Fed cuts interest rates the US dollar falls and emerging markets outperform the US
in 2019. The ten year Treasury note yield falls to 2.25%.
I, like many, are concerned about corporate credit (See Surprise #8) and though credit is
not unscathed, it is equities that bear the brunt of the Bear since they are below credit in
the company capitalization structure.
Bottom line, after a steep drop in the first six months of the year, the markets rise off
of the lows late in the year in response to this shifting political scene (the decline of
Trump) and a reversal to a more expansive Fed policy – ending the year with a -10%
loss."
Bottom Line
* For now, think like a trader and not an investor"
The illusion of positive possibilities is fading quickly in a market hampered by political
turmoil and strapped with untenable debt loads.
The key to delivering superior investment performance in 2018 was not a buy and hold
strategy. Rather, it was opportunistic and unemotional trading and for the foreseeable future
this will likely be the case.
While I believe we are likely to rally into year end, the near term upside to that rally has
been markedly reduced (though I still believe we can reach to at least 2600 or so on the
S&P Index by year end, a gain of 100 handles or more) -- the likelihood of a recession and
Bear Market in 2019 has increased.
The trouble with CIA democrats is not that they are stupid, but that that are evil.
Hillary proved to be really destructive witch during her Obama stunt as the Secretary of State. Destroyed Libya and Ukraine,
which is no small feat.
Notable quotes:
"... The policy of the Obama administration, and particularly Hillary Clinton's State Department, was – and still is – regime change in Syria. This overrode all other considerations. We armed, trained, and "vetted" the Syrian rebels, even as we looked the other way while the Saudis and the Gulf sheikdoms funded groups like al-Nusra and al-Qaeda affiliates who wouldn't pass muster. And our "moderates" quickly passed into the ranks of the outfront terrorists, complete with the weapons we'd provided. ..."
"... She is truly an idiot. Thanks again, Ivy League. ..."
The Grauniad just quoted a tweet from a predictably OUTRAGED @HillaryClinton:
Actions have consequences, and whether we're in Syria or not, the people who want to
harm us are there & at war. Isolationism is weakness. Empowering ISIS is dangerous.
Playing into Russia & Iran's hands is foolish. This President is putting our national
security at grave risk.
This from the woman who almost singlehandedly (i.e. along with David Cameron and Sarkovy)
destroyed Libya and allowed -- if not encouraged -- the flow of US weapons to go into the
hands of ISIS allies in the US-Saudi-Israeli obsession with toppling Assad regardless of the
consequences. As Justin Raimondo wrote in
Antiwar.com in 2015:
The policy of the Obama administration, and particularly Hillary Clinton's State
Department, was – and still is – regime change in Syria. This overrode all
other considerations. We armed, trained, and "vetted" the Syrian rebels, even as we looked
the other way while the Saudis and the Gulf sheikdoms funded groups like al-Nusra and
al-Qaeda affiliates who wouldn't pass muster. And our "moderates" quickly passed into the
ranks of the outfront terrorists, complete with the weapons we'd provided.
This crazy policy was an extension of our regime change operation in Libya, a.k.a.
"Hillary's War," where the US – "leading from behind" – and a coalition of our
Western allies and the Gulf protectorates overthrew Muammar Qaddafi. There, too, we
empowered radical Islamists with links to al-Qaeda affiliates – and then used them to
ship weapons to their Syrian brothers, as another document uncovered by Judicial Watch
shows.
After HRC's multiple foreign policy fiascos she is the last person who should be
commenting on this matter.
a different chris, December 21, 2018 at 11:50 am
> the people who want to harm us are there & at war
Sounds like then they are too busy to harm us? She is truly an idiot. Thanks again, Ivy League.
We used to jokingly call the Washington Post 'Pravda on the Potomac' because of what
appeared to be occasional heavy spin – the official story – in news coverage on
foreign policy. Now, the new coverage seems to be 'all spin all the time'. It's getting
harder and harder find reporting on foreign policy issues.
Many threads to tug on at the close of this tumultuous work-week before the supreme holiday
of white privilege rolls through, all silver bells and hovering angels.
It took hours of rumination and prayer to arrive at a coherent notion about the strange
doings in Gen. Mike Flynn's sentencing hearing, but here goes: Judge Emmet Sullivan sent Gen
Flynn to the doghouse for three months to reconsider his guilty plea. The judge may believe
that Gen. Flynn needs to contest the charge in open court, where all the Special Prosecutor's
janky evidence will be subject to discovery and review. Mr. Mueller tried to toss a wrecking
bar into the proceedings the day before by pressing charges against two of Gen. Flynn's
colleagues in the Turkish lobbying gambit, which was meant to terrify Gen. Flynn as a hint that
separate charges would be dumped on him if he doesn't play ball. A lot can happen in three
months, including the arrival of a new Attorney General, and we'll leave it there for the
moment.
The stopgap spending bill before congress -- to avert a government shut-down -- is based on
the comical idea that the money is actually there to spend. Everyone with half a brain knows
that it's not money but " money ," a hypothetical abstraction composed of hopes and wishes. The
USA is worse than broke. It's down to liquidating its rehypothecated hypotheticals. After all,
financialization added up to money with its value removed . The global credit markets seem to
be sensing this as the tide of borrowings retreats , exposing all the wretched, slimy creatures
wheezing in the exposed mudflats who have no idea how to service their old loans or generate
credible new ones. But, no matter. We'll continue pretending until the US$ flies up its own
cloacal aperture and vanishes.
Contingent on that exercise is "money" for Mr. Trump's promised-and-requested border wall.
The wall is really a symbol for the nation's unwillingness to set a firm policy on immigration.
Half of the political spectrum refuses to even make a basic distinction between people who came
here legally and those who snuck in and broke the law. They've super-glued themselves to that
position not on any plausible principle, but because they're desperate to corral Hispanic votes
-- and notice how eager they are to get non-citizens on the voting rolls. Their mouthpiece, The
New York Times , even ran an op-ed today,
None of Us Deserve Citizenship , (is that even grammatical?) arguing that we should let
everybody and anybody into the country because of our longstanding wickedness.
The simple resolve to firmly and politely send interlopers back across the border would go a
long way to providing border security, but we've allowed this process to be litigated into
incoherence so that it is increasingly impossible to enforce the existing rules. Mr. Trump's
wall is an acknowledgement of that failure to agree on lawful action to defend the border. It
evokes the works of past empires, like the wall built across Britain by the Roman emperor
Hadrian to keep out the warlike, filthy, blue-faced Scots, or the Great Wall of China built to
block marauding Mongols. Of course, these societies didn't have closed circuit TV, drones,
laser sensors, four-wheel-drive landcruisers, and night-vision goggles. I'm not persuaded that
the US really requires Mr. Trump's wall, but it does require a functioning consensus that
national borders mean something, and the president's argument is a lever to produce that
consensus.
In the meantime, the condition of the US economy, which Mr. Trump has boasted is roaring on
his account, wobbles badly. It has been based for two decades on a three-card-monte trade
set-up in which China sends us amazingly cheap products and we send them IOUs (dollars, i.e.
Federal Reserve promissory notes). It was not an arrangement bound to last. And it entailed a
lot of mischief around the theft of complex intellectual property. The damage there appears to
be already done. China may have enough computer mojo now to make all kinds of trouble in the
world. Of course, China will have enough political and economic trouble when its Molto-Ponzi
banking system flies apart, so I would not assume that they are capable of attaining the kind
of world domination that scenario-gamers in the US Intel-and-Military offices dream up.
To me, these disturbances and machinations suggest the unravelling of the arrangements we've
called "globalism." That's what we face most acutely in 2019, along with the fragile conditions
in banking, markets, and currencies that can put the schnitz on supply lines as everybody and
his uncle around the world fear that they will never get paid. It all makes for a suspenseful
holiday. Bake as many cookies as you can while the fixings are still there and stuff a few in
your ammunition box for the fretful days ahed.
... In the introduction to the second volume in his series, The State and the
Opposition , Rogovin noted:
A peculiarity of the counter-revolution realized by Stalin and his accomplices was that it
took place under the ideological cover of Marxist phraseology and never-ending attestations
of loyalty to the October Revolution Naturally, such a counter-revolution demanded
historically unprecedented conglomerations of lies and falsifications, the fabrication of
ever-newer myths
Similar to the Stalinists, modern anti-communists use two kinds of myths: namely,
ideological and historical. Under ideological myths we have in mind false ideas, oriented to
the future -- that is, illusory prognoses and promises. These sorts of products of false
consciousness reveal their mythological character by way of their practical realization.
Myths that appeal not to the future but to the past are another matter.
In principle, it is easier to expose these myths than anti-scientific prognoses and
reactionary projects.
Like ideological ones, historical myths are a product of immediate class interests
products of historical ignorance or deliberate falsification -- that is, the concealment of
some historical facts, the tendentious exaggeration, and the distorted interpretation of
others.
Refuting these myths is only possible by rehabilitating historical truth -- the honest
portrayal of actual facts and tendencies of the past.
In this work, Rogovin argued that the fundamental problem facing the USSR was "a
deepening of socially unjustified differentiation of incomes and the comforts of life."
"Workers regularly encounter instances of unearned enrichment through the deceit and the
ripping-off of the state and the people. [ ] Certain groups of the population have the means to
meet their needs at a scale beyond any reasonable norms and outside of their relationship to
social production. [ ] There does not exist any systematic control of sources of income and the
acquisition of valuable goods," he wrote.
In a remarkable statement, inequality, he insisted, not wage-leveling, expressed "in
essence, the social structure of [Soviet] society."
Rogovin called for the implementation of income declarations, whereby people would be
required to report the size of their total income, not just their official wages, so that the
government and researchers might actually know the real distribution of earnings. He advocated
for the establishment of a "socially-guaranteed maximum income" to combat "unjustified
inequality."
Vadim Rogovin and Nina Naumova's 1984 Social Development and Societal
Morals
Elsewhere, Rogovin further argued that inequality lay at the center of the USSR's falling
labor productivity. In a work co-authored with Nina Naumova, Social Development and
Societal Morals , he maintained that the socio-economic crisis facing the USSR stemmed
from the fact that inequality was growing in Soviet society; people worked poorly in the Soviet
Union not because their work was inadequately remunerated relative to others, but
because their commitment to social production had been eroded by intensifying social
stratification that was unrecorded in official statistics.
In 1983, the very same year that Rogovin authored his critical report on the state of
inequality in the USSR that ended up in the hands of the Moscow authorities, another
sociologist, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, would issue a report, kept secret at first but later leaked
to the Western press, advocating a transition to "economic methods of management," -- in other
words, market-based reforms. A central aspect of this was policy centered around increasing
inequality in workers' compensation in order to stimulate production. Zaslavskaya noted at the
time that such reforms would be opposed by what she described as "the more apathetic, the more
elderly, and the less qualified groups of workers."
In a few years, Zaslavskaya would become a leading advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and one of
the main architects of the pro-market, perestroika reforms. In 1986, she was appointed
the head of the Soviet Sociological Association. Her positions were widely embraced by the
discipline.
Tatiana Zaslavskaya and Mikhail Gorbachev 1989 at Congress of People's Deputies.
[Copyright RIA Novosti]
In contrast, Rogovin's views were frequently, and ever more so, the object of sharp
criticism. In 1985, a discussion occurred at the Institute of Sociology regarding a report
produced by Rogovin and his research team about Soviet lifestyles. In it, Rogovin made openly
critical comments about the anti-egalitarian impact of the shadow economy and the transfer of
wealth through inheritance. It was sharply criticized by some of the Institute's top scholars,
who both disagreed with its content and were nervous about the response it might get from the
authorities. At the discussion, one such individual remarked:
The report by the author presented here has two basic failings: 1) it is inadequately
self-critical; 2) the authors, and in particular, Rogovin himself, aren't appropriately
thinking of the addressee to whom this report is directed. The report is going to the highest
levels [of the Communist Party] and superfluous emotion is not necessary. The next criticism
[I have] is about "unjustified inequality." In principle, there can be no such thing.
[ ] in the note to the TsK KPSS [Central Committee of the Communist Party] [ ] the
recommendations [that you make] demand the utmost care in how you approach them, particularly
those that relate to the "third economy" and taxes on inheritance. [There should be] a
minimum of categoricalness and a maximum of conciliatoriness.
As the decade wore on, Rogovin began to adopt an ever more critical stance on
perestroika , whose devastating economic consequences were increasingly showing
themselves. Rather than bringing prosperity to the masses, Gorbachev's reforms created a total
crisis in the state sector of the economy, exacerbating widespread shortages in food, clothing
and other basic necessities. Economic growth declined from 1986 onwards. In 1989, inflation
reached 19 percent, eroding the gains the population had made in income over the preceding
years. As the scholar John Elliot noted, "When account is taken of additional costs, real per
capita income and real wages probably decreased, particularly for the bottom half of the
population. These costs included: deteriorating quality and unavailability of goods;
proliferation of special distribution channels; longer and more time-consuming lines; extended
rationing; higher prices and higher inflation-rates in non-state stores (e.g., collective farm
market prices were nearly three times those in state stores in 1989); virtual stagnation in the
provision of health and education; and the growth of barter, regional autarky, and local
protectionism."
Newly established private enterprises had great leeway to set prices because they faced
little to no competition from the state sector. They charged whatever the market would bear,
which led to substantial increases in income inequality and poverty, with the most vulnerable
layers of the population hardest hit. The changes were so severe that Elliot insists that
"income inequalities had actually become greater in the USSR than in the USA." In the late
1980s, fully two-thirds of the Soviet population had an income that fell below the
officially-recommended "decent level" of 100 to 150 rubles a month. At the same time, the
shadow economy alone is estimated to have produced 100,000–150,000 millionaires in the
late 1980s. By the early 1990s, one-quarter of the population or 70 million people were
destitute according to official Soviet estimates. Miners' strikes and other signs of social
discontent erupted across the country.
Sociologists were intimately aware of the growing popular discontent. The Communist Party
bureaucracy called upon them to help manage the situation. In 1989, the director of the
Institute of Sociology received a request from the highest layers of the Communist Party. He
was asked to respond to a letter from a rank-and-file party member that expressed extreme
hostility towards the country's "elites." The letter writer described the party as dominated by
an "opportunist nucleus" and called for the waging of a "class war" by the working masses
against their policies. The ideology division of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
wanted the Institute's director to respond to the letter because the sentiments expressed in it
were "widespread (representative) [sic] among the working class."
Soviet economist and
sociologist Genady Lisichkin
In the midst of these circumstances, Rogovin came under fire in one of the country's media
outlets for articles he was writing against the promotion of social inequality. Since the
mid-1980s, he had been championing the implementation of income declarations that would require
people to report their full earnings, progressive taxes, and a socially-declared maximum
income. Based on the amount of positive correspondence he was receiving from readers, it was
clear that his views resonated with the population, a fact noted by Western scholars at the
time. In a public press debate with the economist Gennady Lisichkin, the latter accused Rogovin
of wanting to strengthen the hand of the bureaucracy and implied that he was a Stalinist. He
was allegedly guilty of "Luddism," religious-like preaching, misquoting Marx to find support
for his arguments, wanting the state to have the power to move people around "like cattle,"
defending a deficit-system of distribution based on "ration cards," suffering from "left-wing"
infantilism, and being a "demagogue" and a "war communist." He attempted to link Rogovin to the
very force to which he was most hostile -- Stalinism. The head of the Soviet Sociological
Association, Tatiana Zaslavskaya, openly endorsed Lisichkin's positions.
The disagreements between Rogovin and other scholars over perestroika evolved into
a fierce dispute about Soviet history and the nature of Stalinism. Rogovin identified a
relationship between cheerleading for pro-market reforms and historical falsification. There
was an increasingly widespread effort to link egalitarianism with Stalinism, the struggle for
equality with political repression. In Was There an Alternative? , Rogovin frequently
talked about the fact that the move towards a market economy was accompanied by the propagation
of myths about Soviet history. This was one of those myths.
In 1991, Zaslavskaya co-authored a book that claimed that the Soviet Union's problems lay in
the fact that in the late 1920s it abandoned the New Economic Policy (NEP), during which the
government had loosened state control of the economy and restored market relations to an
extent, in an effort to revitalize the economy under conditions of isolation, backwardness, and
near economic collapse due to years of war. A one-sided and historically dishonest account of
the NEP, this work did not contain any discussion of the political struggle that occurred
during the NEP between Stalin and the Left Opposition over the malignant growth of inequality,
the bureaucratization of the state and economy, and the crushing of inner-party democracy. The
book skipped over this history because it would have cut across one of the central arguments
made at the time in favor of perestroika -- that market relations were inherently at
odds with the interests of the Communist Party bureaucracy. The book's account of labor policy
under Stalin was also false. It insisted that during the 1930s revolutionary enthusiasm was the
primary method used to stimulate people to work, ignoring the fact that income inequality rose
substantially at this time. As the scholar Murray Yanowitch has pointed out, under Stalin
"equality mongering" was labeled the brainchild of "Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Bukharinites and
other enemies of the people."
In the 1980s, sociologists and other scholars promoting perestroika sought to imbue
these policies with a humanitarian mission, insisting that market reforms would allow "the
human factor," which had been crushed under the weight of bureaucratic stagnation, to rise
again. The "human factor" was defined as man's desire for personal recognition through
differentiated, material reward. It was supposedly the primary driver of human activity. To the
degree that official wage policy in the USSR led to a relatively egalitarian distribution of
social resources with wages leveled-out between skilled and unskilled labor, it flew in the
face of man's desire for recognition of his own individual contribution. Rising inequality in
income -- necessitated by the demands of socio-economic development -- was part of the process
of "humanizing socialism." The argument was made that increasing social stratification would
ultimately provide real "socialist justice."
As Tatiana Zaslavskaya claimed in 1990, "Despite all its limitations, the 'classical' market
is, in fact, a democratic (and therefore anti-bureaucratic) economic institution. Within the
framework of its exchange relationships, all participants are at least formally equal; no-one
is subordinated to anyone else. Buyers and sellers act in their own interests and nobody can
make them conclude deals they do not want to conclude. The buyers are free to select sellers
who will let them have goods on the most advantageous terms, but the sellers too can chose
buyers offering the best price."
In making this argument, scholars relied upon the official Soviet definition of socialism --
"from each according to his ability, to each according to his labor" -- that was enshrined in
the country's 1936 constitution. This was also known as the Stalin constitution.
In 1988, Rogovin used the concept of the "human factor" to make a very different argument.
In a piece entitled, "The Human Factor and the Lessons of the Past," he insisted that the
defense of social inequality by the Soviet elite was one of the key reasons why the "human
factor" had degenerated in the USSR. The very best elements of "the human factor" had been
crushed by Stalin during the Terror. Corruption, disillusionment, parasitism, careerism and
individual self-promotion -- the most distinctive features of the Brezhnev era -- were the
"human factor" created by Stalinism. In promoting inequality and the market, Rogovin insisted,
perestroika did not mark a break with Stalinism or the legacy of the Brezhnev era, as
was so often claimed, but rather their further realization.
One year later he wrote, "The adherents of the new elitist conceptions want to see Soviet
society with such a level of social differentiation that existed under Stalin but having gotten
rid of Stalinist repression. It is forgotten that the debauched character of these repressions
[ ] flowed from the effort to not simply restrain, but rather physically annihilate above all
those forces in the party and in the country that, though silenced, rejected the social
foundations of Stalinism."
After years of studying these questions in near-total isolation, Rogovin was finally able to
write openly about this subject. He tested the waters by first publishing "L.D. Trotsky on Art"
in August 1989 in the journal Theater . It was followed shortly thereafter by an
article entitled "The Internal Party Struggles of the 1920s: Reasons and Lessons," also
published in a journal outside of his discipline, Political Education . Moving closer
to a forum likely to be followed by his colleagues in sociology, in early 1990 Rogovin
published "L.D. Trotsky on NEP" in Economic Sciences . And finally, a few months
later, "L.D. Trotsky on Social Relations in the USSR" came out in the flagship journal of his
discipline, Sociological Research .
Rogovin's first article on the subject within his discipline reviewed Trotsky's role in
Soviet history during the 1920s and summarized his seminal work, The Revolution
Betrayed . It made clear to whom Rogovin fundamentally owed the views he had been
advancing over the course of the previous decade.
Trotsky, however, continued to be vilified by Soviet officialdom. In 1987, on the 70th
anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Gorbachev described Trotsky as "the arch-heretic of
Soviet history, an 'excessively self-assured politician who always vacillated and cheated."
As a result of Rogovin's profound sympathies for Trotskyism and efforts to place his work in
the tradition of the Left Opposition's critique of Stalinism, he was increasingly isolated from
his colleagues, several of whom entered the Yeltsin administration and helped facilitate the
eventual implementation of shock therapy, a key component of capitalist restoration in Russia.
His discipline never forgave him for his intransigence and principles. One will find almost no
mention of Rogovin or his contributions in the numerous monographs and other publications that
have come out over the last 20 years about sociology in the USSR.
But Rogovin's isolation from Soviet sociology did not undermine his capacity to work.
Rather, it coincided with the start of the publication of Was There an Alternative? In
1992, Rogovin met the International Committee of the Fourth International, and established a
close political and intellectual relationship with the world Trotskyist movement that would
intensify over the course of the next several years. This relationship was the basis upon which
Rogovin made his immense contribution to the fight to defend Trotsky and historical truth. Two
recently republished tributes to Rogovin by David
North review this history.
Despite his death twenty years ago, through his work Rogovin continues his struggle to arm
the working class with historical consciousness.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming
Notable quotes:
"... We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published. However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2 deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016. ..."
"... Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation. ..."
"... If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his unsubstantiated claims and accusations? ..."
Editorial Note: The Forensicator recently published a report, titled " Guccifer
2 Returns To The East Coast ." Forensicator provided the following introduction to his
latest findings, reproduced here with the permission of the author.
In this post, we announce a new finding that confirms our previous work and is the basis for
an update that we recently made to Guccifer 2's Russian
Breadcrumbs . In our original publication of that report, we posited that there were
indications of a GMT+4 timezone offset (legacy Moscow DST) in a batch of files that Guccifer 2
posted on July 6, 2016. At the time, we viewed that as a "Russian breadcrumb" that Guccifer 2
intentionally planted.
Now, based on new information, we have revised that conclusion: The timezone offset was in
fact GMT-4 (US Eastern DST) . Here, we will describe how we arrived at this new, surprising
conclusion and relate it to our prior work.
A month/so after publication, Stephen McIntyre ( @ClimateAudit ) replicated our analysis. He ran a few
experiments and found an error in our
original conclusion.
We mistakenly interpreted the last modified time that LibreOffice wrote as
"2015-08-25T23:07:00Z" as a GMT time value. Typically, the trailing "Z" means " Zulu Time ", but
in this case, LibreOffice incorrectly added the "Z". McIntyre's tests confirm that LibreOffice
records the "last modified" time as local time (not GMT). The following section describes the
method that we used to determine the timezone offset in force when the document was saved.
LibreOffice Leaks the Time Zone Offset in Force when a Document was Last Written
Modern Microsoft Office documents are generally a collection of XML files and image files.
This collection of files is packaged as a Zip file. LibreOffice can save documents in a
Microsoft Office compatible format, but its file format differs in two important details: (1)
the GMT time that the file was saved is recorded in the Zip file components that make up the
final document and (2) the document internal last saved time is recorded as local time (unlike
Microsoft Word, which records it as a GMT [UTC] value).
If we open up a document saved by Microsoft Office using the modern Office file format (
.docx or .xlsx ) as a Zip file, we see something like the following.
LibreOffice , as shown below, will record the GMT time that the document components were
saved. This time will display as the same value independent of the time zone in force when the
Zip file metadata is viewed.
For documents saved by LibreOffice we can compare the local "last saved" time recorded in
the document's properties with the GMT time value recorded inside the document (when viewed as
a Zip file). We demonstrate this derivation using the file named
potus-briefing-05-18-16_as-edits.docx that Guccifer 2 changed using LibreOffice and then
uploaded to his blog site on July 6, 2016 (along with several other files).
Above, we calculate a time zone offset of GMT-4 (EDT) was in force, by subtracting the last
saved time expressed in GMT (2016-07-06 17:10:58) from the last saved time expressed as local
time (2016-07-06 13:10:57).
We've Been Here Before
The Eastern timezone setting found in Guccifer 2's documents published on July 6, 2016 is
significant, because as we showed in Guccifer 2.0
NGP/Van Metadata Analysis , Guccifer 2 was likely on the East Coast the previous day, when
he collected the DNC-related files found in the ngpvan.7z Zip file. Also, recall that Guccifer
2 was likely on the East Coast a couple of months later on September 1, 2016 when he built the
final ngpvan.7z file.
We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern
timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published.
However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it
related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2
deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious
circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016.
Further, this critic accused the Forensicator (and Adam Carter ) of using this finding to amplify the
impact of Forensicator's report in an effort to spread disinformation. He implied that
Forensicator's report was supplied by Russian operatives via a so-called "tip-off file." The
Forensicator addresses those baseless criticisms and accusations in The Campbell
Conspiracy .
Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the
ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely
different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast
finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation.
If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately
planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his
unsubstantiated claims and accusations?
Closing Thought: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming
It is curious how those running vpn's often don't bother appropriately setting their
device time zones.
Regarding the closing thought, that was my thinking regarding the Byzantine Vegetable
'ally' at /qr in a non-American time zone who repeatedly attacked me.
Perhaps I have shared some harsh words with you and William, but I do sincerely care for
your well being and my appreciation for the work you both have done remains. The Optics have
been understandably difficult to swallow for many, but I hope that in your own time, you both
will be willing to take another look at Q.
Interesting to see Fleming -- as time goes on, it is pretty clear that he was telling us a
few things about how power really works--psychopathic oligarchs with private wetworkers. Of
course now we have governments competing to hire the same mercenaries -- and the uniformed
mercenaries working oligarchs with government complicity.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming
Notable quotes:
"... We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published. However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2 deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016. ..."
"... Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation. ..."
"... If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his unsubstantiated claims and accusations? ..."
Editorial Note: The Forensicator recently published a report, titled " Guccifer
2 Returns To The East Coast ." Forensicator provided the following introduction to his
latest findings, reproduced here with the permission of the author.
In this post, we announce a new finding that confirms our previous work and is the basis for
an update that we recently made to Guccifer 2's Russian
Breadcrumbs . In our original publication of that report, we posited that there were
indications of a GMT+4 timezone offset (legacy Moscow DST) in a batch of files that Guccifer 2
posted on July 6, 2016. At the time, we viewed that as a "Russian breadcrumb" that Guccifer 2
intentionally planted.
Now, based on new information, we have revised that conclusion: The timezone offset was in
fact GMT-4 (US Eastern DST) . Here, we will describe how we arrived at this new, surprising
conclusion and relate it to our prior work.
A month/so after publication, Stephen McIntyre ( @ClimateAudit ) replicated our analysis. He ran a few
experiments and found an error in our
original conclusion.
We mistakenly interpreted the last modified time that LibreOffice wrote as
"2015-08-25T23:07:00Z" as a GMT time value. Typically, the trailing "Z" means " Zulu Time ", but
in this case, LibreOffice incorrectly added the "Z". McIntyre's tests confirm that LibreOffice
records the "last modified" time as local time (not GMT). The following section describes the
method that we used to determine the timezone offset in force when the document was saved.
LibreOffice Leaks the Time Zone Offset in Force when a Document was Last Written
Modern Microsoft Office documents are generally a collection of XML files and image files.
This collection of files is packaged as a Zip file. LibreOffice can save documents in a
Microsoft Office compatible format, but its file format differs in two important details: (1)
the GMT time that the file was saved is recorded in the Zip file components that make up the
final document and (2) the document internal last saved time is recorded as local time (unlike
Microsoft Word, which records it as a GMT [UTC] value).
If we open up a document saved by Microsoft Office using the modern Office file format (
.docx or .xlsx ) as a Zip file, we see something like the following.
LibreOffice , as shown below, will record the GMT time that the document components were
saved. This time will display as the same value independent of the time zone in force when the
Zip file metadata is viewed.
For documents saved by LibreOffice we can compare the local "last saved" time recorded in
the document's properties with the GMT time value recorded inside the document (when viewed as
a Zip file). We demonstrate this derivation using the file named
potus-briefing-05-18-16_as-edits.docx that Guccifer 2 changed using LibreOffice and then
uploaded to his blog site on July 6, 2016 (along with several other files).
Above, we calculate a time zone offset of GMT-4 (EDT) was in force, by subtracting the last
saved time expressed in GMT (2016-07-06 17:10:58) from the last saved time expressed as local
time (2016-07-06 13:10:57).
We've Been Here Before
The Eastern timezone setting found in Guccifer 2's documents published on July 6, 2016 is
significant, because as we showed in Guccifer 2.0
NGP/Van Metadata Analysis , Guccifer 2 was likely on the East Coast the previous day, when
he collected the DNC-related files found in the ngpvan.7z Zip file. Also, recall that Guccifer
2 was likely on the East Coast a couple of months later on September 1, 2016 when he built the
final ngpvan.7z file.
We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern
timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published.
However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it
related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2
deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious
circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016.
Further, this critic accused the Forensicator (and Adam Carter ) of using this finding to amplify the
impact of Forensicator's report in an effort to spread disinformation. He implied that
Forensicator's report was supplied by Russian operatives via a so-called "tip-off file." The
Forensicator addresses those baseless criticisms and accusations in The Campbell
Conspiracy .
Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the
ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely
different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast
finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation.
If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately
planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his
unsubstantiated claims and accusations?
Closing Thought: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming
It is curious how those running vpn's often don't bother appropriately setting their
device time zones.
Regarding the closing thought, that was my thinking regarding the Byzantine Vegetable
'ally' at /qr in a non-American time zone who repeatedly attacked me.
Perhaps I have shared some harsh words with you and William, but I do sincerely care for
your well being and my appreciation for the work you both have done remains. The Optics have
been understandably difficult to swallow for many, but I hope that in your own time, you both
will be willing to take another look at Q.
Interesting to see Fleming -- as time goes on, it is pretty clear that he was telling us a
few things about how power really works--psychopathic oligarchs with private wetworkers. Of
course now we have governments competing to hire the same mercenaries -- and the uniformed
mercenaries working oligarchs with government complicity.
Believe it or not, all these faces are fake. They have been synthesized by Nvidia's new AI
algorithm, a generative adversarial network capable of automagically creating humans, cats, and
even cars.
Credit: Nvidia
The technology works so well that we can expect synthetic image search engines soon - just
like Google's, but generating new fake images on the fly that look real. Yes, you know where
that is going - and sure, it can be a lot of fun, but also scary . Check out the video. It
truly defies belief:
According to Nvidia, its GAN is built around a concept called "style transfer." Rather than
trying to copy and paste elements of different faces into a frankenperson, the system analyzes
three basic styles - coarse, middle, and fine styles - and merges them transparently into
something completely new.
Coarse styles include parameters such as pose, the face's shape, or the hair style. Middle
styles include facial features, like the shape of the nose, cheeks, or mouth. Finally, fine
styles affect the color of the face's features like skin and hair.
According to the scientists, the generator is "capable of separating inconsequential
variation from high-level attributes" too, in order to eliminate noise that is irrelevant for
the new synthetic face.
For example, it can distinguish a hairdo from the actual hair, eliminating the former while
applying the latter to the final photo. It can also specify the strength of how styles are
applied to obtain more or less subtle effects.
Not only the generative adversarial network is capable of autonomously creating human faces,
but it can do the same with animals like cats. It can even create new cars and even
bedrooms.
Credit: Nvidia
Nvidia's system is not only capable of generating completely new synthetic faces, but it can
also seamlessly modify specific features of real people, like age, the hair or skin colors of
any person.
The applications for such a system are amazing. From paradigm-changing synthetic free-to-use
image search pages that may be the end of stock photo services to people accurately previewing
hair styling changes. And of course, porn.
you're one
of the millions of human beings who, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, still
believe there is such a thing as "the truth," you might not want to read this essay. Seriously,
it can be extremely upsetting when you discover that there is no "truth" or rather, that what
we're all conditioned to regard as "truth" from the time we are children is just the product of
a technology of power, and not an empirical state of being. Humans, upon first encountering
this fact, have been known to freak completely out and start jabbering about the "Word of God,"
or "the immutable laws of quantum physics," and run around burning other people at the stake or
locking them up and injecting them with Thorazine. I don't want to be responsible for anything
like that, so consider this your trigger warning.
OK, now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at how "truth" is manufactured. It's
actually not that complicated. See, the "truth" is well, it's a story, essentially. It's
whatever story we are telling ourselves at any given point in history ("we" being the majority
of people, those conforming to the rules of whatever system wields enough power to dictate the
story it wants everyone to be telling themselves). Everyone understands this intuitively, but
the majority of people pretend they don't in order to be able to get by in the system, which
punishes anyone who does not conform to its rules, or who contradicts its story. So, basically,
to manufacture the truth, all you really need is (a) a story, and (b) enough power to coerce a
majority of people in your society to pretend to believe it.
I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better
debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan
Cook ,
Craig Murray ,
Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama, and many others). [ ed. including
us ]
The short version is, The Guardian's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix
his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort,
Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on
numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans
into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian
prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual
anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The
Guardian quietly revised the piece (employing the subjunctive mood rather
liberally), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had
never published it.
The Guardian's latest attack on Julian Assange was not only a fallacious smear, it
represented a desperate attempt on behalf of the British intelligence community to conflate the
pending US charges against the journalist with Russiagate. The Guardian's article seeks to
deflect from the reality that the prosecution of Assange will
focus on Chelsea Manning-Era releases and Vault 7, not the DNC or Podesta emails.
We assert this claim based on the timing of the publication, the Guardian's history of
subservience to British intelligence agencies, animosity between The Guardian and WikiLeaks,
and the longstanding personal feud between Guardian journalist Luke Harding and Assange. This
conclusion is also supported by Harding's financial and career interest in propping up the
Russiagate narrative
"... " The information in this post alone should make everyone question why in the world the Guardian would continue to use a source like Villavicencio who is obviously tied to the U.S. government, the CIA, individuals like Thor Halvorssen and Bill Browder, and opponents of both Julian Assange and former President Rafael Correa." ..."
"... 2014 Ecuador's Foreign Ministry accused the Guardian of publishing a story based on a document it says was fabricated by Fernando Villavicencio, pictured below with the authors of the fake Manafort-Assange 'secret meeting' story, Harding and Collyns." ..."
"... "There is also evidence that the author of this falsified document is Fernando Villavicencio, a convicted slanderer and opponent of Ecuador's current government. This can be seen from the file properties of the document that the Guardian had originally posted (but which it has since taken down and replaced with a version with this evidence removed)." ..."
"... " This video from the news wire Andes alleges that Villavicencio's name appeared in the metadata of the document originally uploaded alongside The Guardian's story." ..."
"... One of my greatest journalistic experiences was working for months on Assange's research with colleagues from the British newspaper the Guardian, Luke Harding, Dan Collins and the young journalist Cristina Solórzano from @ somos_lafuente " ..."
"... The tweet suggests, but does not specifically state, that Villavicencio worked with the disastrous duo on the Assange-Manafort piece. Given the history and associations of all involved, this statement alone should cause extreme skepticism in any unsubstantiated claims, or 'anonymously sourced' claims, the Guardian makes concerning Julian Assange and Ecuador. ..."
"... The two photographs of Villavicencio with Harding and Collyns as well as the evidence showing he co-authored the piece doesn't just capture a trio of terrible journalists, it documents the involvement of multiple actors associated with intelligence agencies and fabricated stories. ..."
"... Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win." ..."
"... That Harding and Collyns worked intensively with Villavicencio for "months" on the "Assange story," the fact that Villavicencio was initially listed as a co-author on the original version of the Guardian's article, and the recent denial by Fidel Narvaez , raises the likelihood that Harding and the Guardian were not simply the victims of bad sources who duped them, as claimed by some. ..."
Regular followers of WikiLeaks-related news are at this point familiar with the multiple
serious infractions of journalistic ethics by Luke Harding and the Guardian, especially (though
not exclusively) when it comes to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. However, another individual at
the heart of this matter is far less familiar to the public. That man is Fernando
Villavicencio, a prominent Ecuadorian political activist and journalist, director of the
USAID-funded NGO Fundamedios and editor of online publication FocusEcuador .
Most readers are also aware of the Guardian's recent publication of claims that Julian
Assange met with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on three occasions. This has now
been
definitively debunked by Fidel Narvaez, the former Consul at Ecuador's London embassy
between 2010 and 2018, who says Paul Manafort has never visited the embassy during the time he
was in charge there. But this was hardly the first time the outlet published a dishonest smear
authored by Luke Harding against Assange. The paper is also no stranger to publishing stories
based on fabricated documents.
In May,
Disobedient Media reported on the Guardian's hatchet-job relating to 'Operation Hotel,' or
rather, the normal
security operations of the embassy under former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. That
hit-piece ,
co-authored by Harding and Dan Collyns, asserted among other things that (according to an
anonymous source) Assange hacked the embassy's security system. The allegation was promptly
refuted by Correa as "absurd" in an interview with The Intercept , and also by WikiLeaks as an "anonymous libel" with which the
Guardian had "gone too far this time. We're suing."
How is Villavicencio tied to The Guardian's latest smear of Assange? Intimately, it turns
out.
Who is Fernando Villavicencio?
Earlier this year, an independent journalist writing under the pseudonym Jimmyslama penned a
comprehensive report
detailing Villavicencio's relationships with pro-US actors within Ecuador and the US. She sums
up her findings, which are worth reading in full :
" The information in this post alone should make everyone question why in the world the
Guardian would continue to use a source like Villavicencio who is obviously tied to the U.S.
government, the CIA, individuals like Thor Halvorssen and Bill Browder, and opponents of both
Julian Assange and former President Rafael Correa."
As most readers recall, it was Correa who granted Assange asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy
in London. Villavicencio was so vehemently opposed to Rafael Correa's socialist government that
during the failed 2010 coup against Correa he falsely accused the President of "crimes against
humanity" by ordering police to fire on the crowds (it was actually Correa who was being shot
at). Correa sued him for libel, and won, but pardoned Villavicencio for the damages awarded by
the court.
Assange legal analyst Hanna Jonasson
recently made the link between the Ecuadorian forger Villavicencio and Luke Harding's Guardian
stories based on dubious documents explicit. She Tweeted : 2014 Ecuador's
Foreign Ministry accused the Guardian of publishing a story based on a document it says was
fabricated by Fernando Villavicencio, pictured below with the authors of the fake
Manafort-Assange 'secret meeting' story, Harding and Collyns."
Jonasson included a link to a 2014 official Ecuadorian government statement which reads in part:
"There is also evidence that
the author of this falsified document is Fernando Villavicencio, a convicted slanderer and
opponent of Ecuador's current government. This can be seen from the file properties of the
document that the Guardian had originally posted (but which it has since taken down and
replaced with a version with this evidence removed)."
The statement also notes that
Villavicencio had fled the country after his conviction for libeling Correa during the 2010
coup and was at that time living as a fugitive in the United States.
It is incredibly significant, as Jonasson argues, that the authors of the Guardian's latest
libelous article were photographed with
Villavicencio in Ecuador shortly before publication of the Guardian's claim that Assange
had conducted meetings with Manafort.
Jonasson's Twitter thread also states: " This video from the news wire
Andes alleges that Villavicencio's name appeared in the metadata of the document originally
uploaded alongside The Guardian's story." The 2014 Guardian piece, which aimed a falsified
shot at then-President Rafael Correa, would not be the last time Villavicencio's name would
appear on a controversial Guardian story before being scrubbed from existence.
Just days after the backlash against the Guardian reached fever-pitch, Villavicencio had the
gall to publish another image of himself
with Harding and Collyns, gloating : "
One of my greatest journalistic experiences was
working for months on Assange's research with colleagues from the British newspaper the
Guardian, Luke Harding, Dan Collins and the young journalist Cristina Solórzano from @somos_lafuente " [Translated from Spanish]
The tweet suggests, but does not specifically state, that Villavicencio worked with the
disastrous duo on the Assange-Manafort piece. Given the history and associations of all
involved, this statement alone should cause extreme skepticism in any unsubstantiated claims,
or 'anonymously sourced' claims, the Guardian makes concerning Julian Assange and Ecuador.
Astoundingly, and counter to Villavicencio's uncharacteristic coyness, a recent video posted
by WikiLeaks via Twitter does show that
Villavicencio was originally listed as a co-author of the Guardian's Manafort-Assange
allegations, before his name was edited out of the online article. The original version can be
viewed, however, thanks to archive services.
The two photographs of Villavicencio with Harding and Collyns as well as the evidence
showing he co-authored the piece doesn't just capture a trio of terrible journalists, it
documents the involvement of multiple actors associated with intelligence agencies and
fabricated stories.
All of this provoke the question: did Villavicencio provide more bogus documents to Harding
and Collyns – Harding said he'd seen a document, though he didn't publish one (or even
quote from it) so readers might judge its veracity for themselves – or perhaps these
three invented the accusations out of whole-cloth?
Either way, to quote WikiLeaks, the Guardian has "gone too far this time" and its
already-tattered reputation is in total shambles.
Successful Propaganda, Failed Journalism
Craig Murray calls Harding an " MI6
tool ", but to this writer, Harding seems worse than an MI6 stooge: He's a wannabe-spook,
hanging from the coat-tails of anonymous intelligence officers and publishing their drivel as
fact without so much as a skeptical blink. His lack of self-awareness and conflation of
anecdote with evidence sets him apart as either one of the most blatant, fumbling propagandists
of our era, or the most hapless hack journalist to stain the pages of printed news.
To provide important context on Harding's previous journalistic irresponsibility, we again
recall that he co-authored the infamous book containing the encryption password of the entire
Cablegate archive, leading to a leak of the unredacted State Department Cables across the
internet. Although the guilty Guardian journalists tried to blame Assange for the debacle, it
was they themselves who ended up on the receiving end of some well-deserved scorn.
In addition to continuing the Guardian's and Villavicencio's vendetta against Assange and
WikiLeaks, it is clearly in Harding's financial interests to conflate the
pending prosecution of Assange with Russiagate. As this writer
previously noted , Harding penned a book on the subject, titled: " Collusion: Secret
Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win." Tying Assange to
Russiagate is good for business, as it stokes public interest in the self-evidently faulty
narrative his book supports.
Even more concerning is the claim amongst publishing circles, fueled by recent events, that
Harding may be writing another book on Assange, with publication presumably timed for his
pending arrest and extradition and designed to cash in on the trial. If that is in fact the
case, the specter arises that Harding is working to push for Assange's arrest, not just on
behalf of US, UK or Ecuadorian intelligence interests, but also to increase his own book
sales.
That Harding and Collyns worked intensively with Villavicencio for "months" on the "Assange
story," the fact that Villavicencio was initially listed as a co-author on the original version
of the Guardian's article, and the recent denial by Fidel Narvaez
, raises the likelihood that Harding and the Guardian were not simply the victims of bad
sources who duped them, as claimed by some.
It indicates that the fake story was constructed deliberately on behalf of the very same
intelligence establishment that the Guardian is nowadays only too happy to take the knee
for.
In summary, one of the most visible establishment media outlets published a fake story on
its front page, in an attempt to manufacture a crucial cross-over between the pending
prosecution of Assange and the Russiagate saga. This represents the latest example in an
onslaught of fake news directed at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks ever since they published the
largest CIA leak in history in the form of Vault 7, an onslaught which appears to be building
in both intensity and absurdity as time goes on.
The Guardian has destroyed its reputation, and in the process, revealed the desperation of
the establishment when it comes to Assange.
Flynn "treason" is not related to Russia probe and just confirm that Nueller in engaged in witch hunt.
I believe half of Senate and House of Representative might go to jail if they were dug with the ferocity Mueller digs Flynn's past.
So while Flynn behavior as Turkey lobbyist (BTW Turkey is a NATO country and not that different int his sense from the US -- and you
can name a lot of UK lobbyists in high echelons of the US government, starting with McCabe and Strzok) is reprehensible, this is still a witch hunt
When American law enforcement and intelligence officials, who carry Top Secret clearances and authority to collect intelligence
or pursue a criminal investigation, decide to employ lies and intimidation to silence or intimidates those who worked for Donald
Trump's Presidency, we see shadow of Comrage Stalin Great Terror Trials over the USA.
Former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn passes by members of the
media as he departs after his sentencing was delayed at U.S. District Court in
Washington, U.S., December 18, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
By Jan Wolfe and Ginger Gibson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge fiercely criticized President Donald
Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Tuesday for lying to
FBI agents in a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and
delayed sentencing him until Flynn has finished helping prosecutors.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told Flynn, a retired U.S. Army
lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
that he had arguably betrayed his country. Sullivan also noted that Flynn had
operated as an undeclared lobbyist for Turkey even as he worked on Trump's
campaign team and prepared to be his White House national security adviser.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his December 2016
conversations with Sergei Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador in Washington,
about U.S. sanctions imposed on Moscow by the administration of Trump's
Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, after Trump's election victory but before
he took office.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, leading the investigation into possible
collusion between Trump's campaign team and Russia ahead of the election, had
asked the judge not to sentence Flynn to prison because he had already
provided "substantial" cooperation over the course of many interviews.
But Sullivan sternly told Flynn his actions were abhorrent, noting that
Flynn had also lied to senior White House officials, who in turn misled the
public. The judge said he had read additional facts about Flynn's behavior
that have not been made public.
At one point, Sullivan asked prosecutors if Flynn could have been charged
with treason, although the judge later said he had not been suggesting such a
charge was warranted.
"Arguably, you sold your country out," Sullivan told Flynn. "I'm not hiding
my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense."
Flynn, dressed in a suit and tie, showed little emotion throughout the
hearing, and spoke calmly when he confirmed his guilty plea and answered
questions from the judge.
Sullivan appeared ready to sentence Flynn to prison but then gave him the
option of a delay in his sentencing so he could fully cooperate with any
pending investigations and bolster his case for leniency. The judge told Flynn
he could not promise that he would not eventually sentence him to serve prison
time.
Flynn accepted that offer. Sullivan did not set a new date for sentencing
but asked Mueller's team and Flynn's attorney to give him a status report by
March 13.
Prosecutors said Flynn already had provided most of the cooperation he
could, but it was possible he might be able to help investigators further.
Flynn's attorney said his client is cooperating with federal prosecutors in a
case against Bijan Rafiekian, his former business partner who has been charged
with unregistered lobbying for Turkey.
Rafiekian pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to those charges in federal court
in Alexandria, Virginia. His trial is scheduled for Feb. 11. Flynn is
expected to testify.
Prosecutors have said Rafiekian and Flynn lobbied to
have Washington extradite a Muslim cleric who lives in the United States
and is accused by Turkey's government of backing a 2016 coup attempt. Flynn
has not been charged in that case.
'LOCK HER UP!'
Flynn was a high-profile adviser to Trump's campaign team. At the
Republican Party's national convention in 2016, Flynn led Trump's
supporters in cries of "Lock her up!" directed against Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton.
A group of protesters, including some who chanted "Lock him up,"
gathered outside the courthouse on Tuesday, along with a large inflatable
rat fashioned to look like Trump. Several Flynn supporters also were there,
cheering as he entered and exited. One held a sign that read, "Michael
Flynn is a hero."
Flynn became national security adviser when Trump took office in January
2017, but lasted only 24 days before being fired.
He told FBI investigators on Jan. 24, 2017, that he had not discussed
the U.S. sanctions with Kislyak when in fact he had, according to his plea
agreement. Trump has said he fired Flynn because he also lied to Vice
President Mike Pence about the contacts with Kislyak.
Trump has said Flynn did not break the law and has voiced support for
him, raising speculation the Republican president might pardon him.
"Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn. Will be interesting
to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him,
about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful
political campaign. There was no Collusion!" Trump wrote on Twitter on
Tuesday morning.
After the hearing, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters
the FBI had "ambushed" Flynn in the way agents questioned him, but said his
"activities" at the center of the case "don't have anything to do with the
president" and disputed that Flynn had committed treason.
"We wish General Flynn well," Sanders said.
In contrast, Trump has called his former long-time personal lawyer
Michael Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to separate charges, a "rat."
Mueller's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election and
whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe has cast a shadow
over his presidency. Several former Trump aides have pleaded guilty in
Mueller's probe, but Flynn was the first former Trump White House official
to do so. Mueller also has charged a series of Russian individuals and
entities.
Trump has called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt" and has denied
collusion with Moscow.
Russia has denied meddling in the election, contrary to the conclusion
of U.S. intelligence agencies that have said Moscow used hacking and
propaganda to try to sow discord in the United States and boost Trump's
chances against Clinton.
Lying to the FBI carries a statutory maximum sentence of five years in
prison. Flynn's plea agreement stated that he was eligible for a sentence
of between zero and six months.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Ginger
Gibson; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Kieran Murray and
Will Dunham)
Matt o'Brien and Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writers
,
Associated Press
•
December
17, 2018
<img alt="Key takeaways from new reports on Russian disinformation" src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/9VGA29inJ83dPeqC.cvqTg--~A/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAwO2lsPXBsYW5l/http://globalfinance.zenfs.com/images/US_AHTTP_AP_HEADLINES_BUSINESS/e66de17c8e1a4cecaf1da81f2bf87093_original.jpg" itemprop="url"/>
Some suspected Russian-backed fake social media accounts on Facebook.
Russians seeking to influence U.S. elections through social media had their
eyes on Instagram and the black community.
These were among the findings in two reports released Monday by the Senate
intelligence committee. Separate studies from University of Oxford researchers
and the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge reveal insights into how Russian
agents sought to influence Americans by saturating their favorite online
services and apps with hidden propaganda.
Here are the highlights:
INSTAGRAM'S "MEME WARFARE"
Both reports show that misinformation on Facebook's Instagram may have had
broader reach than the interference on Facebook itself.
The New Knowledge study says that since 2015, the Instagram posts generated
187 million engagements, such as comments or likes, compared with 77 million
on Facebook.
And the barrage of image-centric Instagram "memes" has only grown since the
2016 election. Russian agents shifted their focus to Instagram after the
public last year became aware of the widespread manipulation on Facebook and
Twitter.
NOT JUST ADS
Revelations last year that Russian agents used rubles to pay for some of their
propaganda ads drew attention to how gullible tech companies were in allowing
their services to be manipulated.
But neither ads nor automated "bots" were as effective as unpaid posts
hand-crafted by human agents pretending to be Americans. Such posts were more
likely to be shared and commented on, and they rose in volume during key dates
in U.S. politics such as during the presidential debates in 2016 or after the
Obama administration's post-election announcement that it would investigate
Russian hacking.
"These personalized messages exposed U.S. users to a wide range of
disinformation and junk news linked to on external websites, including content
designed to elicit outrage and cynicism," says the report by Oxford
researchers, who worked with social media analysis firm Graphika.
DEMOGRAPHIC TARGETING
Both reports found that Russian agents tried to polarize Americans in part by
targeting African-American communities extensively. They did so by campaigning
for black voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in
2016, according to the Oxford report.
The New Knowledge report added that agents were "developing Black audiences
and recruiting Black Americans as assets" beyond how they were targeting
either left- or right-leaning voters.
The reports also support previous findings that the influence operations
sought to polarize Americans by sowing political divisions on issues such as
immigration and cultural and religious identities. The goal, according to the
New Knowledge report, was to "create and reinforce tribalism within each
targeted community."
Such efforts extended to Google-owned YouTube, despite Google's earlier
assertion to Congress that Russian-made videos didn't target specific segments
of the population.
PINTEREST TO POKEMON
The New Knowledge report says the Russian troll operation worked in many ways
like a conventional corporate branding campaign, using a variety of different
technology services to deliver the same messages to different groups of
people.
Among the sites infiltrated with propaganda were popular image-heavy services
like Pinterest and Tumblr, chatty forums like Reddit, and a wonky geopolitics
blog promoted from Russian-run accounts on Facebook and YouTube.
Even the silly smartphone game "Pokemon Go" wasn't immune. A Tumblr post
encouraged players to name their Pokemon character after a victim of police
brutality.
WHAT NOW?
Both reports warn that some of these influence campaigns are ongoing.
The Oxford researchers note that 2016 and 2017 saw "significant efforts" to
disrupt elections around the world not just by Russia, but by domestic
political parties spreading disinformation.
They warn that online propaganda represents a threat to democracies and public
life. They urge social media companies to share data with the public far more
broadly than they have so far.
"Protecting our democracies now means setting the rules of fair play before
voting day, not after," the Oxford report says.
4 hours
ago
so where's the evidence that Russian
facebook or twitter posts changed a single vote?
"... If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ... If you can wait and not be tired by waiting ... If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim ... If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you ... Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it. ..."
The stock market has had a volatile year, and it's not over yet: The Dow Jones Industrial
Average lost more than 520 points on Monday and the S&P 500 fell 2.1 percent. Both are in
correction and on pace for their worst December performance since the Great Depression in
1931.
But for the average person, shifts in the market , even ones as dramatic as the ones we've
seen this year, shouldn't be cause for panic. During times of volatility, seasoned investor
Warren Buffett says it's best to stay calm and stick to the basics, meaning, buy-and-hold for
the long term.
So, during downturns, "heed these lines" from the classic 19th century Rudyard Kipling poem
"If -- " which help illustrate this lesson, Buffett wrote in his 2017 Berkshire Hathaway
shareholder letter :
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ...
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting ...
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim ...
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you ...
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.
Market downturns are inevitable, Buffett pointed out, using his own company as an example:
"Berkshire, itself, provides some vivid examples of how price randomness in the short term can
obscure long-term growth in value. For the last 53 years, the company has built value by
reinvesting its earnings and letting compound interest work its magic. Year by year, we have
moved forward. Yet Berkshire shares have suffered four truly major dips."
He went on to cite each of the steep share-price drops, including the most recent one from
September 2008 to March 2009, when Berkshire shares plummeted 50.7 percent.
Major declines have happened before and are going to happen again, he says: "No one can tell
you when these will happen. The light can at any time go from green to red without pausing at
yellow."
Rather than watch the market closely and panic, keep a level head. Market downturns "offer
extraordinary opportunities to those who are not handicapped by debt," he says, which brings up
another important investing lesson: Never borrow money to buy stocks .
"There is simply no telling how far stocks can fall in a short period," writes Buffett.
"Even if your borrowings are small and your positions aren't immediately threatened by the
plunging market, your mind may well become rattled by scary headlines and breathless
commentary. And an unsettled mind will not make good decisions."
Don't miss: Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio agree on what to do when the stock market
tanks
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Stock Sell-Off Defies Everything the Bulls Hoped Would Stop It
(Bloomberg) -- Valuations aren't stopping it. Jerome Powell's softer tone failed
to soothe anyone. The moratorium on tariffs is a fading memory and now the
sturdiest chart level of the year is in danger of giving way.
A stock rout that bulls thought was finished three different times since October
is in a new and ominous phase, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 1,004
points in two days. No Santa Claus rally. Instead, the S&P 500 Index is hurtling
toward the second-worst December on record.
"The stock market doesn't care what looks good now. It's wondering if
fundamentals will deteriorate in the future," said Peter Mallouk, co-chief
investment officer of Creative Planning, which has around $36 billion under
management. "You have a lot of people that are scared, and they're sitting on the
sidelines to wait it out."
Waiting it out is starting to look like the only viable strategy. On Monday, the
S&P 500 briefly pierced a level that had been a psychological foundation for 10
months, its intraday low from Feb. 9. Valuations shrink and shrink -- computer
and software stocks trade at 15 times next year's earnings estimates, cheaper
than utilities and soapmakers -- and the selling just gets worse.
With Monday's 54-point loss, the S&P has now fallen 2 percent or more six times
this quarter. The Nasdaq Composite has done it 10 times. Both are the most since
the third quarter of 2011.
Pinning a single cause on the carnage has become an exercise in absurdity, with
analysts cycling through a rotating list of reasons that include trade, Donald
Trump's legal travails, China data, sinking oil and cooling home prices. Anyone
daring to suggest economic growth may slow in 2019 is pointed to charts showing
factories, employment and profits are booming -- but those assurances are
starting to fall on deaf ears.
While S&P 500 Index futures indicated a potential respite in Asian trading
Tuesday, rising as much as 0.5 percent, traders remained cautious.
Investors "are too worried, but that's the big driver behind the declines we've
seen recently, overall worries about U.S. growth and worries about global
growth," said Kate Warne, investment strategist at Edward Jones. "Investors have
gotten very nervous about the changes they're seeing ahead and they're uncertain
about what they mean."
A troubling sign for Americans: equity pain, which all year has been worse
overseas, is landing with more force in the U.S. The Russell 2000 Index of small
caps, a proxy for domestically oriented companies, slid into a bear market
Monday, falling 21 percent since Aug. 31.
On the other hand, since hitting a 19-month low in late October, the MSCI
Emerging Markets Index has trended higher, even as the S&P 500 Index keeps making
new lows. Stocks in the EM gauge have outperformed the S&P 500 for three
consecutive weeks, the most since late January, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
To comfort themselves in the face of such depressing facts, beaten-up investors
have looked at past corrections and noticed that this one is still playing out
according a relatively benign plan. Under the pattern, major swoons that have
interrupted the bull market that began in 2009 have taken around 100 days to tire
out before dip-buyers swooped in to put things right.
At the same time, anyone betting the New Year will bring an end to the volatility
should be aware that bull markets can die slow deaths. The 88-day sell-off has
been going on roughly one-third as long as it has taken for the S&P 500 to fall
into the 11 bear markets it's suffered going back to World War II.
How many more sellers than buyers were there on Monday? The volume of stocks
trading lower on the New York Stock Exchange reached 1 billion shares, compared
with 158 million that were bought. The difference in trading volume, at 883
million shares, is on track to become the biggest weekly gap since 2016, data
compiled by Bloomberg show.
That the worst two-day sell-off since October landed on the same week Powell's
Federal Reserve is expected to announce its ninth interest rate hike was grist
for those who see central bank policy behind everything. As willingly as the Fed
chairman has walked back his most hawkish pronouncements, nobody thinks monetary
policy is likely to loosen even as growth in the economy and earnings slows from
this year's pace.
"That's what the market is struggling with right now -- do they believe in a
growth slowdown to trend or something more sinister than that?" said Phil
Camporeale, managing director of multi-asset solutions for JPMorgan Asset
Management. "I don't think people really want to take risk, but especially
trying to catch a falling knife on equity prices."
(Adds details on S&P 500 futures trading in seventh paragraph.)
j
3 hours ago
Don't borrow money to buy stocks. Got
that ? No margin accounts. Ever.
H
5
hours ago
This has been a long, ho-hum recovery
from the Great Recession. Asset prices got way ahead of the
fundamentals. Everything returns to the mean; margins, interest
rates, unemployment, etc. Count your blessings, a nine year
bull is rare.
s
3
hours ago
To make matters worse I read a
story earlier today indicating that the hedge funds in
Europe are literally being wiped out and those are their
favourite & biggest ones. Yup, Alex Jones (yeah I know
how everyone in mainstream media loves to hate the guy
and even censors him) predicted what would happen back in
2008 or 2009. He said that the recession then was just
the start of it. That the powers that be would facilitate
a come back, so that people could get into EVEN BIGGER
DEBTS (which they did with the 0% interest rates) and
then they'd engineer an even more massive crash that
would suck all the liquidity and equity out of the
markets towards the big wigs that controls everything -
read BOIS (Bank of International Settlements) which is
owned by a few very wealthy secretive people and they are
the ones that basically owns and operates the banks the
world over - and dictating all the banking laws too. They
just keep getting richer & richer at our expense. Like as
if they need all that wealth.
K
1 hour ago
40 years watching markets and people
just do not understand that forward PE's get cut in half or go
as low as 5x PE with a recession -- all the fluff on the upside
gets parsed out and once the income flows slow the gratuitous
accounting stops and suddenly there is transparency and people
wait 10 years to get even-maybe 20 this cycle- and the public
realizes they have been hoodwinked
b
2 hours
ago
Maybe POTUS can rehire Yellin after he
fires Powell (if only he could)
"... Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive of DoubleLine Capital, on Monday said the S&P 500 stock index is headed to new lows and that U.S. equities are in a long-term bear market. ..."
"... "I think it is a bear market. I think we've had the first leg down and the second leg down is usually more painful than the first leg down," said Gundlach, who oversees more than $123 billion. ..."
"... "I think this lasts a long time. It has a lot to do with the fact that, I believe, that we're in a situation that is ... highly unusual - that we're increasing the budget deficit so spectacularly so late in the cycle while the Fed is hiking interest rates." ..."
"... The intraday low for the year in the S&P was on Feb. 9, when it bottomed at 2532.69. The low close for the year was on April 2 at 2581.88. On Monday, the S&P closed 2545.94. ..."
<img alt="FILE PHOTO: Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of DoubleLine Capital, speaks during the Sohn Investment Conference in New York" src="https://s.yimg.com/it/api/res/1.2/BXVsdhZsK0OiZdcOd8_ffw--~A/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7c209MTt3PTQ1MDtoPTMwMDtpbD1wbGFuZQ--/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/Reuters/2018-12-17T182416Z_1_LYNXMPEEBG1NJ_RTROPTP_2_FUNDS-DOUBLELINE-GUNDLACH.JPG.cf.jpg" itemprop="url"/>
NEW YORK (Reuters) -
Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive of DoubleLine Capital,
on Monday said the S&P 500 stock index is headed to new lows and that U.S.
equities are in a long-term bear market.
Gundlach, speaking on CNBC TV, said passive investing has reached "mania status"
and will exacerbate market problems.
"I think it is a bear market. I think we've had the first leg down and the
second leg down is usually more painful than the first leg down," said
Gundlach, who oversees more than $123 billion.
"I think this lasts a long time. It has a lot to do with the fact that, I
believe, that we're in a situation that is ... highly unusual - that we're
increasing the budget deficit so spectacularly so late in the cycle while the
Fed is hiking interest rates."
The S&P 500 briefly erased its losses in late-morning trade on Monday but resumed
its steep decline and pierced through Gundlach's target after he made his "bear
market" comments.
The intraday low for the year in the S&P was on Feb. 9, when it bottomed at
2532.69. The low close for the year was on April 2 at 2581.88. On Monday, the S&P
closed 2545.94.
Investors are also bracing for the Federal Reserve's last rate decision of the
year on Wednesday, when they are expected to raise U.S. interest rates for a
fourth time for 2018.
Gundlach said the Fed should not raise rates this week but will. "The bond market
is basically saying, 'You know, Fed, there's no way you should be raising
interest rates'," he said.
The U.S. central bank's quantitative tightening campaign has made markets nervous
because of the ultra-low levels that have remained in place for several years,
Gundlach said.
"The problem is that the Fed shouldn't have kept them (rates) so low for so long.
The problem is, we shouldn't have had negative interest rates like we still have
in Europe. We shouldn't have had done quantitative easing, which is a circular
financing scheme," he said.
Gundlach also said the China-U.S. trade war gets worse from here. "China doesn't
like to be told what to do by President Trump," he said. For its part, "I think
they (the United States) will probably ratchet up the tariffs."
The remarks by Gundlach, who in April recommended investors short Facebook Inc,
extended losses in Facebook shares on Monday after he characterized the social
media giant as a "diabolical data-collection monster that would ultimately fall
victim to regulation." The stock closed 2.69 percent lower.
Gundlach took a shot at passive investment strategies such as index funds,
declaring the investing strategy a "mania" that is causing widespread problems in
global stock markets.
"I'm not at all a fan of passive investing. In fact, I think passive investing
... has reached mania status as we went into the peak of the global stock
market," Gundlach said. "I think, in fact, that passive investing and robo
advisers ... are going to exacerbate problems in the market because it's hurting
behavior," he said.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Traders and investors will be glad to see the back of 2018. It's been
the worst rout since 1901, by Deutsche Bank AG's reckoning, with almost every asset class
delivering losses. These charts illustrate the backdrop to what went wrong this year –
and hint at what could go better in 2019.
$14,889,930,106,680
That's how much the total value of companies listed on the world's stock markets has
declined since peaking at $87,289,962,917,450 on Jan 28. In other words, almost $15 trillion
has been wiped off the global equity market this year.
The list of potential motivations for the sell-off is long and includes rising geopolitical
risks, the prospect of trade wars erupting, the risk that a slowdown in global growth that
could degenerate into a worldwide recession, and the evergreen what-goes-up-must-come-down. But
might it just be possible that investors start to take the view stocks have fallen far and fast
enough to offer value next year?
Talkin' About a Recession
It's clear that one of the fundamental worries spooking investors is that the period of
coordinated global growth that propelled stock markets higher in recent years is coming to an
end.
The R word is increasingly cropping up in news articles. But economists put the chances of a
recession in the coming year at 15 percent in the U.S. and 18 percent in the euro zone,
according to Bloomberg surveys. Even the Brexit-battered U.K. economy is only at a 20 percent
risk, while for Japan the likelihood rises to 30 percent. Perhaps those concerns about a
recession are overdone.
Curving to Inversion
Or perhaps not. One trend was omnipresent in 2018 – the relentless flattening of the
yield curve in the U.S.
Yields at the short end of the Treasury market pushed higher with every quarterly increase
in the Fed's benchmark interest rate. Longer-dated bonds danced to a different beat,
particularly as the October equity shakeout drove a flight to quality.
An inverted yield curve – when yields on shorter-dated bonds are higher than their
longer-dated counterparts – is often seen as an indicator of impending recession. It's
finally happened: yields on five-years are below those for two-years. A key question for 2019
will be how the feedback loop develops between the Federal Reserve's policy intentions and the
shape of the curve.
Quantitative Tightening
The Fed has been reducing its economic stimulus by not replacing the bonds it bought under
its Quantitative Easing program as they mature.
But this "normalization" is already taking its toll as the sharp equity market sell off in
October showed. The Fed has a tricky choice to make in 2019 about whether it can persist both
with hiking rates and reducing quantitative easing. Is the world ready yet to stand on its own
feet without ongoing central bank support?
No Alarms and No Surprises
Economic surprise indexes – which measure actual economic data compared to forecasts
– are designed to be portents of the future. And for 2018 they largely did their job.
U.S. strength is waning and Brexit is taking a toll on the U.K. In particular the third-quarter
weakness in euro-zone growth, when both Germany and Italy turned negative, was well-flagged
from as early as the first quarter.
For 2019 there is a more neutral outlook, but it is interesting that the U.S. economic data
is much more evenly balanced in terms of expectations. Europe continues to be the worst
performer – quite something considering the predicament the U.K. is in.
Europe Stumbles
Europe has seen growth falter this year, with Italy's political crisis and Germany's diesel
vehicle emissions scandal taking their toll.
Italy's third-quarter growth was revised to -0.1 percent, beating only Germany. The
prospects for 2019 are none-too-rosy, bar the notable exception of Spain, as momentum has
evaporated. Europe remains in the sick bay of the developed world – just as the European
Central Bank prepares to remove its monetary stimulus to the economy.
Relying on China
China came to the global economy's rescue in the wake of the financial crisis, but it is
starting to pay the price for increasing its debt to create additional GDP growth. Total social
financing as a percentage of gross domestic product – a broad measure of credit creation
– is flat-lining. Adding extra debt to boost the economy is becoming a less effective
measure. It is not just the threat of a trade war with America that has pushed Chinese equities
down by 20 percent in 2018.
China faces the classic emerging-market middle-income trap where growth fueled by credit
runs out of road. This debt bubble will not be easily fixed.
Finding Reverse Again
Japanese Prime Minister's famous three economic arrows are failing to hit their mark. Debt
that stands in excess of 250 percent of GDP is hampering all efforts to resuscitate inflation
and sustainable growth in the world's third-largest economy. Third-quarter GDP contracted 2.5
percent on an annualized basis, the worst performance for four years.
Tokyo might be hosting the Olympics in 2020, but there is little benefit flowing through so
far. Japan, like the rest of the once dominant Asian export powerhouses, is just as beholden to
the outcome of the trade war with Trump as China is.
Hunting for Neutral
Until very recently, many economists were anticipating at least four more rate increases
from the Fed next year at a pace of one per quarter. While the futures market still suggests a
Dec. 19 hike is a done deal, the outlook for monetary policy in 2019 has shifted significantly
in recent weeks.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has trimmed its forecast for number of potential Fed rate increases
in 2019; billionaire fund manager Paul Tudor Jones said earlier this month that he's not
expecting any additional tightening from the U.S. central bank next year. A halt to the hikes
might prove as pleasing to financial markets as to President Donald Trump.
Credit Squeeze
Companies with dollar bonds have seen their borrowing costs soar relative to those of the
U.S. government as the Fed has driven its benchmark interest rate higher this year. Investors
have seen a corresponding slump in the value of the corporate debt they own.
Any slowdown in the ascent of U.S. borrowing costs as the Fed pauses for breath should give
succor to corporate bonds – provided it isn't accompanied by a rise in defaults.
Other People's Money
It's been a terrible year for the stocks of firms that manage other people's money for a
living.
Fund managers tend to invest in each other's shares. And you'd expect them to have
better-than-average insight into the business prospects of their peers. So watch for an
inflection point in asset management stocks – it might be a sign of a turning point for
the wider market.
Happy Birthday to the Euro
The common European currency celebrates its 20th birthday at the start of January. During
the two decades of its existence, rumors of the euro's demise have been proven to be greatly
exaggerated.
The European debt crisis at the beginning of this decade posed an existential threat to the
euro's well-being. The currency survived. At several points in the past few years, Greece
seemed on the verge of either quitting or being ousted from the project. Its membership
survived. And Italy's election of a populist government earlier this year raised the prospect
of a founding member threatening to leave if it wasn't allowed to break the bloc's budget
rules. Still, the euro survives.
In fact, as the chart above shows, investors are close to the most relaxed they've been
about the euro fracturing in more than five years based on the Sentix Euro Break-Up Index, a
monthly gauge of investor concern about the threat. So let's end by wishing the euro many happy
returns.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at [email protected]
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP
and its owners.
Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering asset management. He previously was
the London bureau chief for Bloomberg News. He is also the author of "Complicit: How Greed and
Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable."
Marcus Ashworth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European markets. He spent three
decades in the banking industry, most recently as chief markets strategist at Haitong
Securities in London.
"... christophere steele admitted before a british court today that he was hired by the clintons/obama/DNC to make up the dossier as a weapon to use against trump as a backup plan in case he won the election.. this proves the DNC lied, paid for a fake dossier, and comey admitted he knew the fake dossier was false before using it to get a FISC warrant and to spy on trump, which was used as an excuse for the mueller investigation.. yahoo news and leftwing media arent covering the story.. educate yourselves ..."
1 hour ago
When I read articles like this I look to see who wrote it, printed it etc. When I see
Bloomberg, Yahoo, HuffPo I approach it as fake news. Now I no longer watch any of Fox news
as they are fast becoming just like the rest of the propaganda outlets. This is just
inflammatory anti Trump drivel with no basis in fact.
O 1 hour
ago Was this the interview report that was written 7 months after the interview?
R 44 minutes ago
Actually this story is not accurate. Mueller released copies of the 302 memos, which are in
effect official documentation to a case file. The 302 was dated seven months after the
interview, when the FBI policy requires such reports to be filed within five days. The
judge will ask tomorrow for copies of agent's contemporaneous interview notes and any other
documents supporting what is written in the 302, as well as an explanation for the delay in
filing the memo. 1
hour ago You mean the notes the FBI, in the person of one Peter Strzok, (yes that Strozk)
made seven months after he was interviewed? with the required 302 documents that are either
to be taken extemporaneously or done within days of the interview being dated months later?
You mean those notes?!!!! Nice try Bloomberg, but no amount of yellow journalism spin will
stop this case from being thrown out! 15 minutes ago christophere steele
admitted before a british court today that he was hired by the clintons/obama/DNC to make
up the dossier as a weapon to use against trump as a backup plan in case he won the
election.. this proves the DNC lied, paid for a fake dossier, and comey admitted he knew
the fake dossier was false before using it to get a FISC warrant and to spy on trump, which
was used as an excuse for the mueller investigation.. yahoo news and leftwing media arent
covering the story.. educate yourselves 1 hour ago Not so bias garbage news .. they
entrapped him what 302 form you want to go with .. FBI doctored the original.. FBI
curuption runs rampant.. comey lied so much about knowing about fake dossier.. then what
the hell was he doing.. comey the tall guy phony
Wall Street, Banks, and Angry Citizens
The Inequality Gap on a Planet Growing More Extreme
Nomi Prins
December 13, 2018
2,400 Words
16 Comments
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As we head into 2019, leaving the chaos
of this year behind, a major question remains unanswered when it comes to the state of Main Street, not just
here but across the planet. If the global economy really is booming, as many politicians claim, why are
leaders and their parties around the world continuing to get booted out of office in such a sweeping
fashion?
One obvious answer: the post-Great
Recession economic "recovery" was largely reserved for the few who could participate in the rising financial
markets of those years, not the majority who continued to work longer hours, sometimes at multiple jobs, to
stay afloat. In other words, the good times have left out so many people, like those struggling to keep even
a
few hundred dollars
in their bank accounts to cover an emergency or the
80%
of American workers who live paycheck to paycheck.
In today's global economy, financial
security is increasingly the property of the 1%. No surprise, then, that, as a sense of economic instability
continued to grow over the past decade, angst turned to anger, a transition that -- from the U.S. to the
Philippines, Hungary to Brazil, Poland to Mexico -- has provoked a plethora of voter upheavals. In the
process, a 1930s-style brew of rising nationalism and blaming the "other" -- whether that other was an
immigrant, a religious group, a country, or the rest of the world -- emerged.
This phenomenon offered a series of
Trumpian figures, including of course The Donald himself, an opening to ride a wave of "populism" to the
heights of the political system. That the backgrounds and records of none of them -- whether you're talking
about Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, or Jair Bolsonaro (among others) -- reflected the daily
concerns of the "common people," as the
classic definition
of populism might have it, hardly mattered. Even a billionaire could, it turned out,
exploit economic insecurity effectively and use it to rise to ultimate power.
Ironically, as that American master at
evoking the fears of apprentices everywhere showed, to assume the highest office in the land was only to
begin a process of creating yet more fear and insecurity. Trump's trade wars, for instance, have typically
infused the world with increased
anxiety
and distrust toward the U.S., even as they thwarted the ability of domestic
business
leaders and ordinary
people
to plan for the future. Meanwhile, just under the surface of the reputed good times, the
damage
to that future only intensified. In other words, the groundwork has already been laid for what
could be a frightening transformation, both domestically and globally.
That Old Financial Crisis
To understand how we got here, let's take
a step back. Only a decade ago, the world experienced a genuine global financial crisis, a meltdown of the
first order. Economic growth ended; shrinking economies threatened to collapse; countless jobs were cut;
homes were foreclosed upon and lives wrecked. For regular people, access to credit suddenly disappeared. No
wonder fears rose. No wonder for so many a brighter tomorrow ceased to exist.
The details of just why the Great
Recession happened have since been glossed over by time and partisan spin. This September, when the 10th
anniversary of the collapse of the global financial services firm Lehman Brothers came around, major
business news channels considered whether the world might be at risk of another such crisis. However,
coverage of such fears, like so many other topics, was quickly tossed aside in favor of paying yet more
attention to Donald Trump's latest tweets, complaints, insults, and lies. Why? Because such a crisis was so
2008 in a year in which, it was
claimed,
we were enjoying a first class economic high and edging toward the
longest
bull-market in Wall Street history. When it came to "boom versus gloom," boom won hands down.
None of that changed one thing, though: most people still feel
left behind
both in the U.S. and
globally
. Thanks to the massive accumulation of wealth by a 1% skilled at gaming the system, the roots
of a crisis that didn't end with the end of the Great Recession have spread
across the planet
, while the dividing line between the "have-nots" and the "have-a-lots" only sharpened
and widened.
Though the media hasn't been paying
much attention to the resulting inequality, the statistics (when you see them) on that ever-widening wealth
gap are mind-boggling. According to Inequality.org, for instance, those with at least $30 million in wealth
globally had the fastest growth rate of any group between 2016 and 2017. The size of that club rose by 25.5%
during those years, to 174,800 members. Or if you really want to grasp what's been happening, consider that,
between 2009 and 2017, the number of billionaires whose combined wealth was greater than that of the world's
poorest 50% fell from
380
to just
eight
. And by the way, despite claims by the president that every other country is screwing America, the
U.S. leads the pack when it comes to the growth of inequality. As Inequality.org
notes
, it has "much greater shares of national wealth and income going to the richest 1% than any other
country."
That, in part, is due to an institution
many in the U.S. normally pay little attention to: the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve. It helped
spark that increase in wealth disparity domestically and globally by adopting a post-crisis monetary policy
in which electronically fabricated money (via a program called quantitative easing, or QE) was offered to
banks and corporations at significantly cheaper rates than to ordinary Americans.
Pumped into financial markets, that
money sent stock prices soaring, which naturally ballooned the wealth of the small percentage of the
population that actually owned stocks.
According to
economist Stephen Roach, considering the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances, "It is hardly a
stretch to conclude that QE exacerbated America's already severe income disparities."
Wall Street, Central Banks, and
Everyday People
What has since taken place around the
world seems right out of the 1930s. At that time, as the world was emerging from the Great Depression, a
sense of broad economic security was slow to return. Instead, fascism and other forms of nationalism only
gained steam as people turned on the usual cast of politicians, on other countries, and on each other. (If
that sounds faintly Trumpian to you, it should.)
In our post-2008 era, people have
witnessed
trillions
of dollars flowing into bank bailouts and other financial subsidies, not just from governments
but from the world's major central banks. Theoretically, private banks, as a result, would have more money
and pay less interest to get it. They would then lend that money to Main Street. Businesses, big and small,
would tap into those funds and, in turn, produce real economic growth through expansion, hiring sprees, and
wage increases. People would then have more dollars in their pockets and, feeling more financially secure,
would spend that money driving the economy to new heights -- and all, of course, would then be well.
That fairy tale was pitched around the
globe. In fact, cheap money also pushed debt to epic levels, while the share prices of banks rose, as did
those of all sorts of other firms, to record-shattering heights.
Even in the U.S., however, where a
magnificent recovery was supposed to have been in place for years, actual economic growth simply didn't
materialize at the levels promised. At
2% per year
, the average growth of the American gross domestic product over the past decade, for
instance, has been half the average of 4% before the 2008 crisis. Similar numbers were repeated throughout
the developed world and most emerging markets. In the meantime, total global debt hit
$247 trillion
in the first quarter of 2018. As the
Institute of International Finance
found, countries were, on average, borrowing about three dollars for
every dollar of goods or services created.
Global Consequences
What the Fed (along with central banks
from Europe to Japan) ignited, in fact, was a disproportionate rise in the stock and bond markets with the
money they created. That capital sought higher and faster returns than could be achieved in crucial
infrastructure or social strengthening projects like building roads, high-speed railways, hospitals, or
schools.
What followed was anything but fair. As
former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen
noted
four years ago, "It is no secret that the past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up
as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the
majority." And, of course, continuing to pour money into the highest levels of the private banking system
was anything but a formula for walking that back.
Instead, as more citizens fell behind, a
sense of disenfranchisement and bitterness with existing governments only grew. In the U.S., that meant
Donald Trump. In the United Kingdom, similar discontent was reflected in the June 2016 Brexit vote to leave
the European Union (EU), which those who felt economically squeezed to death clearly meant as a
slap at
both the establishment domestically and EU leaders abroad.
Since then, multiple governments in the
European Union, too, have shifted toward the populist right. In Germany, recent elections swung both
right
and
left
just six years after, in July 2012, European Central Bank (ECB) head Mario Draghi
exuded optimism
over the ability of such banks to protect the financial system, the Euro, and generally
hold things together.
Like the Fed in the U.S., the ECB went
on to manufacture money, adding another
$3 trillion
to its books that would be deployed to buy bonds from favored countries and companies. That
artificial stimulus, too, only increased inequality within and between countries in Europe. Meanwhile,
Brexit negotiations remain ruinously divisive,
threatening
to rip Great Britain apart.
Nor was such a story the captive of the
North Atlantic. In Brazil, where left-wing president Dilma Rouseff was ousted from power in 2016, her
successor Michel Temer oversaw plummeting economic growth and escalating unemployment. That, in turn, led to
the election of that country's own Donald Trump, nationalistic far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro who won a
striking
55.2%
of the vote against a backdrop of popular discontent. In true Trumpian style, he is disposed
against both the very idea of climate change and multilateral trade agreements.
In Mexico, dissatisfied voters similarly
rejected the political known, but by swinging left for the
first time
in 70 years. New president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known by his initials AMLO,
promised to put the needs of ordinary Mexicans first. However, he has the U.S. -- and the whims of Donald
Trump and his "great wall" -- to contend with, which could hamper those efforts.
As AMLO took office on
December 1st
, the G20 summit of world leaders was unfolding in Argentina. There, amid a glittering
backdrop of power and influence, the trade war between the U.S. and the world's rising superpower, China,
came even more clearly into focus. While its president, Xi Jinping, having fully consolidated power amid a
wave of Chinese nationalism, could become his country's
longest serving
leader, he faces an international landscape that would have amazed and befuddled Mao
Zedong.
Though Trump declared his meeting with
Xi a success because the two sides agreed on a
90-day tariff truce
, his prompt
appointment
of an anti-Chinese hardliner, Robert Lighthizer, to head negotiations, a tweet in which he
referred to himself in superhero fashion as a "
Tariff
Man
," and news that the U.S. had requested that Canada arrest and extradite an executive of a key
Chinese tech company, caused the Dow to take its
fourth largest plunge
in history and then
fluctuate wildly
as economic fears of a future "Great Something" rose. More uncertainty and distrust
were the true product of that meeting.
In fact, we are now in a world whose
key leaders, especially the president of the United States, remain willfully oblivious to its long-term
problems, putting policies like deregulation, fake nationalist solutions, and profits for the already
grotesquely wealthy ahead of the future lives of the mass of citizens. Consider the
yellow-vest protests
that have broken out in France, where protestors identifying with left and right
political parties are calling for the resignation of neoliberal French President Emmanuel Macron. Many of
them, from financially starved provincial towns, are angry that their purchasing power has dropped so low
they can barely
make ends meet
.
Ultimately, what transcends geography
and geopolitics is an underlying level of economic discontent sparked by twenty-first-century economics and
a resulting Grand Canyon-sized global inequality gap that is still
widening
. Whether the protests go left or right, what continues to lie at the heart of the matter is the
way failed policies and stop-gap measures put in place around the world are no longer working, not when it
comes to the non-1% anyway. People from
Washington
to
Paris
,
London
to
Beijing
, increasingly grasp that their economic circumstances are not getting better and are not likely
to in any presently imaginable future, given those now in power.
A Dangerous Recipe
The financial crisis of 2008 initially
fostered a policy of bailing out banks with cheap money that went not into Main Street economies but into
markets enriching the few. As a result, large numbers of people increasingly felt that they were being left
behind and so turned against their leaders and sometimes each other as well.
This situation was then exploited by a
set of self-appointed politicians of the people, including a billionaire TV personality who capitalized on
an increasingly widespread fear of a future at risk. Their promises of economic prosperity were wrapped in
populist platitudes, normally (but not always) of a right-wing sort. Lost in this shift away from previously
dominant political parties and the systems that went with them was a true form of populism, which would
genuinely put the needs of the majority of people over the elite few, build real things including
infrastructure, foster organic wealth distribution, and stabilize economies above financial markets.
In the meantime, what we have is, of
course, a recipe for an increasingly unstable and vicious world.
However, coverage of such fears, like so many other topics, was quickly tossed aside in favor of
paying yet more attention to Donald Trump's latest tweets, complaints, insults, and lies.
Tossed aside by whom? The corporate media of course. Fake news. Their ONLY agenda is the ongoing
demonetization of Donald Trump.
Minus the obligatory Trump bashing this is a good piece. The beating heart of Neo Feudalism (against
which we populists/nationalists/deplorables rebel) is debt money aka the FED. So what would you have us
actually do about the banking cartel? Vote BETO? Check our privilege?
I suggest stepping back further than the GFC, to the halcyon days of Thatcher and Reagan and TINA.
That's
when we stopped investing in ourselves, which is why R&D has a 50% lower share of GDP today than then.
Encouraged by the success of this non-investment, we then stopped keeping up the infrastructure we had
built–including the great corporate labs that created our recent prosperity–and now the maintenance bill is
coming due.
Needless to say, the Chinese did the opposite and the current "China!" noise is designed to distract us
from the dreadful destiny our faux democracy created for us.
But a country deserves the government it gets and we've always liked Elmer Gantry's style of
self-confident bullshit.
I miss Mike Whitney. Where did he go? He hasn't posted anything here at Unz since June. He was just as good
as Nomi on the finance/economic topics, but we didn't have to endure the constant anti-Trump
virtue-signalling. It's a bit like being served castor oil along with your beef bourguignon: it spoils the
whole effect.
Another thing I don't like about Nomi is how she fails to make the connection between
hyper-financialization and falling median incomes in the West on the one hand, and open borders and 'free'
trade on the other. Neoliberalism could succinctly be defined as the free movement of goods, capital and
people across borders. Hence, there is nothing left-wing about hating borders–not if you by 'left-wing' you
mean
pro-workingclass
.
Remember, the Tea Party was a grassroots anti-banker movement. The media successfully convinced the rest of
America that they were all racist fascist deplorables.
Post-housing collapse, maybe, the Fed should have provided loans to Main Street merchants, unleashing more
small-business energy, especially since so few Americans are starting businesses these days. But those
loans, too, always need to be allocated to people with a reasonable chance to pay them back. The Fed gave
the dough to the banks and the zombies, but in different ways, the small-business climate in the USA is
almost as bad as the zombie-business climate.
Back in 2008, any small-business stimulus would have been
complicated by the need for small fish to compete with the Goliath of big-box chains and on-every-corner
franchise mills spawned by big corporations, which, in neither case, generate many quality, rent-covering
jobs beyond a few management positions. In many cases, the owners of franchise businesses do not make
much -- they can't pay much. And the recent attempt to stimulate small businesses via the LLC tax cut might be
diluted by the undermining of small retail by volume sellers, like Amazon & Walmart -- behemoths that sell
everything under the sun at cut rates, now speedily delivering to customers' doors.
Infrastructure spending would create long-term value and some quality, if temporary, jobs mostly for
underemployed males, one of the groups unable to just work part-time or temp jobs at low wage levels, making
up the difference between living expenses and inadequate pay with spousal income, child support checks or
multiple monthly welfare streams from .gov and a refundable child tax credit up to $6,431. Rather than
working multiple jobs, that is what many single-breadwinner parents do. They stay below the income limits
for the .gov handouts, strategically, thereby keeping wages and job quality low for many women who lack
access to unearned income streams unrelated to their employment.
College-educated Americans (and others) also face the problem of the many dual-earner parents, keeping
two of the few decent-paying jobs with benefits under one roof. These are often not two rocket-scientist
jobs, but jobs that many educated people could perform. They maintain those jobs despite tons of time off to
accommodate their personal lives, letting $10-per-hour daycare workers, NannyCam-surveilled babysitters and
never-retiring grandparents do the work of raising their kids. The middle-class job pool would expand
dramatically if they were just more interested in raising the kids they produce, but they put house size and
multiple vacations first, with the liberals among them insincerely bemoaning the fact that 30 million
Americans lack health insurance, while they are double-covered in their above-firing, family-friendly jobs.
Still, if infrastructure spending is used to build The Wall, everyone will at least be safer, welfare
expenditures will go down and fewer welfare-assisted noncitizens will chase jobs, driving wages down for
underemployed US citizens. Bridges require repair -- something that affects the safety of everyone in the
country. The electrical grid and nuclear plants need to be fortified. Something needs to be done about
cybersecurity, a type of invisible infrastructure that is more and more important.
We need US citizens to get these jobs, including the record number of working-aged US citizens out of the
laborforce. Infrastructure spending should not be used to employ the citizens of other countries, like the
1.5 to 1.7 new legal immigrants admitted into the country each year, many of whom qualify for welfare and
tax credits for US-born kids and boatloads of illegal immigrants.
The Western propaganda continues unabated. In the latest episode of #FakeNews France3 TV got caught
broadcasting a fake Yellow Vests image–photoshoped by its disinformation division–to their viewers, and then
blatantly lied about afterwards:
I fear for the Jews, both universalist Tikkun Olas like Nomi and the Zio-nationalists,
when the (((Great Ponzi))) collapses.
Haxo has to be hasbara of some sort trying to discredit Prins' article. That aside, I hope for major
correction before we see a complete collapse of the U.S. and global economy which will result in complete
social collapse. For no other reason than I live in a major East Coast city and am not prepared to forage
for food.
That's when we stopped investing in ourselves, which is why R&D has a 50% lower share of GDP today
than then.
Encouraged by the success of this non-investment, we then stopped keeping up the infrastructure we had
built–including the great corporate labs that created our recent prosperity–and now the maintenance bill
is coming due.
Is this the result of Ivy League schools pumping out more degrees in finance rather than science and
engineering, or the cause?
Including Hungary and Viktor Orban in your piece demonstrates a lack of research and a definite lack of
perspective. I discount the rest of what you babble on about as a result. Try doing some on-the-spot
research. You might learn what really is going on. Start with the hundreds of YouTube tourist blogs. Then
visit. Stop blindly regurgitating the narrow, usually distorted crap you find in the press. You may have a
point but it appears to be a house of cards. To me at least. An expat enjoying my freedoms in Hungary.l
Yeah, and what 'tomdispatch regular' Prins does is increase the sense of rage and helplessness by pointing
out the degenerative process without offering any avenue to lance the boil and treat the infection. This
only contributes to the resultant social problems she describes. Not necessarily smart.
Better had she
pointed to some means of holding those responsible accountable, example given:
I'm old, mid seventies, studied economics in the sixties.
Among the many stupid things I did or thought in my life is that economics is what is expressed by
'economics is common sense made difficult'.
Maybe I had also the completely wrong idea about common sense, looking back, and looking around me now, it
hardly seems to exist.
The figures about CO2 ppm can be explained in one sentence, yet mankind seems to be embarking on the most
expensive experiment ever, the outcome of which will, my conviction, be that the only effect is back to
barbarism, civilisation depends on cheap energy.
About financial crises, around 1880 there was a crash in
Germany, Wild West around emission of shares was ended.
In 1929 USA financial regulations were way behind German, the great crash.
The USA, with GB, is the only country in the world where the central bank is not state owned.
Therefore derivatives were not regulated, the fairy tales about absolute minimum value were believed, as
were before 1880 in Germany emission fairy tales.
We have one more problem central bank, ECB, in theory owned by the euro countries, in practice Draghi can do
what he wants, as long as he stays within his statutes.
Anyone with some insight in the world economy sees that w're heading towards a gigantic crash, who is
unable to see this can read Varoufakis.
Now how did we get into this mess ?
In my opinion quite simple: globalisation, that made the political power of the nation states disappear, EU
of course also is globalisation.
Central bankers of the world monthly meet at BIS Basle, financially, economically, in my opinion, there the
world is ruled.
What these central bankers think, I've no idea.
But that Dutch central bank director Klaas Knot does not care for Dutch interests, is more than clear.
There is one important and interesting thing about economies, economy defined as the finances of a
country, the euro zone, the USA, politicians, and bankers, even central bankers, do not control economies.
A few aspects can be controlled, but not all of them at the same time.
So inconsistent decisions lead to unwanted, and/or unforeseen consequences.
The euro is a political experiment, the object was to force euro countries to become more or less
economically the same.
It failed, southern euro countries differ economically as much now from northern as when the euro was
introduced.
The only way out for France economically now I can see is the old devaluation recipe.
Alas, 'thanks' to the euro this is no longer possible.
So that, what is erronuously called elite, has maneuvred itself into a lose lose situation, do nothing, and
France will have a second 1791, or remove the euro flag from the sinking EU ship.
In both cases, as far as I can see, end of EU.
@tac
Quite simple, more and more French are running into financial difficulties.
Most of them of course do not understand why, but they're not interested in why, as the immigrants 'we want
a better life'.
Since over ten years now, I'm retired, we live many months yearly in France.
Great country, compared to the Netherlands, more and more resembling LA.
We do not pay French income taxes, just property tax.
But the steady increase over the years of the cost of living in France we noticed quite well.
For the last two or three years it is clear to us that even our French neighbours are less affluent, our
neighbouring houses all are second homes, owned by upper middle class, of course.
Complaints about the cost of the gardener, no parties with traiteurs any more.
A traiteur is someone who prepares expensive dishes for parties etc.
French complain, even in casual conversations, a restaurant owner 'Macron is right, nobody wants to work in
France any more', someone else 'France is ill, we pay to much for social security'.
Nomi doesn't even mention the impact a million and a half legal immigrants coming in each year has had on
our supposed recovery. How can we trust what she says when she leaves out such pertinent information? In
fact we could argue the only way we were able to recover after the Great Depression is because immigration
had been cut.
Mike was possibly the
only
journalist who gave Trump a modicum of good advice when he mentioned
bumping retirees pay instead of pretending corporate tax cuts will ever "trickle down" to the workers still
on the job. Bullseye! I could use a raise.
Mike said $150 more per month would go directly for stuff retirees need, especially the ones right on the
edge. Young plumbers, roofers, electricians and so on would have tons of work to do.
Cut corporate tax, on the other hand. and the buggers only send more work to China, sluice money to
anti-worker NGOs, or sit on it all like Bill Gates.
I'd go one step further: Put a cork in the billions for Israel program and pay off all American student
loans. Further still: Tax corporations that outsource work to pay every young worker $2500 monthly till
America learns how to pay "middle class wages" again. Bezos at Amazon can get a special bill for the
millions of worker-years he's stiffed and pay them US Marshall rates, backdated to their start date with
interest.
I know, I know. Fascist economics is
so
boring. But we're near the centennial of the days when
Benito Mussolini was the most respected and successful politician in Europe if not the world.
So in 2018 chickens hatched in 2008 come home to roost.
The financial meltdown of 2008 is no longer fresh in our minds. In the wake of the 2008
crisis, to save itself from bankruptcy, the US paid leading banks in excess of $16 trillion - the
biggest bailout ever! This itself had a huge impact on the overall debt burden.
Was 2017 a bond bubble that was deflated in 2018 or it was "everything bubble" and stocks are
the next in line. The lowest S&P500 went during22008 crisis was 670 I think.
Notable quotes:
"... financial crisis poses a fundamental challenge to globalization and to the finance capitalism of the Anglo-American neoliberal model of the free market. ..."
Reinhart and Rogoff (2008) suggest that 'the present U.S. financial crisis is severe by any
metric.' Many have pointed to the systemic nature of the crisis. Gokay (2009) suggests an
analysis in terms of' the explosive growth of the financial system during the last three
decades relative to manufacturing and the economy as a whole' with the huge growth of finance
capitalism and 'the proliferation of speculative and destabilizing financial institutional
arrangements and instruments of wealth accumulation.' This has meant 'the rise of new centers
and the loss of relative weight of the U.S. as a global hegemonic power' with increasing
resource depletion and ecological crisis. He goes on to argue:
The current financial crisis (and economic downturn) has not come out of blue. It is the
outcome of deep-seated contradictions within the structure of global economic system. It is
not a 'failure' of the system, but it is central to the mode of functioning of the system
itself. It is not the result of some 'mistakes' or 'deviations,' but rather it is inherent to
the logic of the system. ( http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?contexr=va&and=123
)
... ... ...
The question is the nature of the systemic crisis: does it mean the end of U.S. style
capitalism? Does it mean the end of neoliberalism? Does it mean the end of capitalism
itself?
Undoubtedly, the financial and economic crisis of 2008 is a major geopolitical setback for
the United States and Europe.
Altman (2009) argues hat governments in the U.S. and Europe will turn inward to focus on
domestic recovery especially as their citizens begin to make demands, such as the 'tea-party' )
phenomenon in the U.S.
The international fiscal deficits will discourage the U.S. and Western nations from
embarking on any international initiatives in foreign policy and Western capital markets will
take several years to recover as the banks insulate themselves by becoming risk-averse.
Perhaps, most importantly 'the economic credibility of the West has been undermined by the
crisis' (p. 10)...
... ... ...
Whatever the economic advantages of progress toward the 'knowledge economy,' the 'creative
economy' and, even the 'green economy the fact is that the cur- rent financial crisis poses
a fundamental challenge to globalization and to the finance capitalism of the Anglo-American
neoliberal model of the free market. As Harold James (2009: 168) reminds us
'The response to the Asian crisis of 1997-98 was the reinforcement of the American model
of financial capitalism, the so-called Washington consensus'
and he goes on to argue
'The response to the contagion caused by the U.S. subprime crisis of 2007-8 will be the
elaboration of the Chinese model.' ...
The key problem of the USA is that neoliberalism ideology is now discredited (since 2008) and
neoliberalism as the social system clearly entered the stage of decline. Trump and Brexit
were the first Robin (as in "One robin doesn't make a spring" )
The key problem that probably will prolong the period of neoliberalism past its Shelf LIfe
Expiration Date is that the alternative to it is still unclear. and probably will not emerge
until the end of the age of "cheap oil" which might mean another 40-50 years. But the rise of
far-right nationalism is a clear indication of people in various countries started reject
neoliberal globalization (including the USA, GB and most of Europe.) Trump's "national
neoliberalism" and Brexit are just another side of the same coin.
Economic rape of Russia and post Soviet republic in 1991-2000 as well as the communication
revolution postponed the crisis of neoliberalism for a decade or so. Otherwise, it might well
start around 2000 instead of 2008. Now G7 countries that adopted neoliberalism entered the
phase of "secular stagnation" (as Summers called it) and probably will not be able to escape
for it without some war-style mobilization or military coup d'état and introduction of
command economics.
IMHO military remains one of the few realistic hopes to play the role of countervailing
force for the financial oligarchy -- which owns that state under neoliberalism, So when we
talk about the Depp State that created anti-Trump witch hunt it is not just intelligence
agencies (although they assume active political role now and strive to be the kingmakers).
This Wall street, military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies.
It will be interesting if establishment neoliberals will try to take revenge in 2020, as
they clearly do not have any viable candidate right now (Biden is a sad joke). But they
definitely can put Trump on the ropes in 2019 and sign of their intention to do so already
emerged.
BTW the key problem of Trump survival is that Trump abandoned (or was forced to abandon)
most of his key election promises to the electorate (with the only exception of tariffs for
China, I think).
In this sense Trump behaved much like Obama did with his "Change and hope" bait and switch
trick, and Nobel Peace Price. Nobel Peace Prize for the butcher of Libya and Syria, the
godfather of ISIS, is rich.
During election campaign, his message was straightforwardly anti-globalization. He
believes that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favor of the big
corporations that have been encouraged to invest around the world and thereby deprive
American workers of their jobs. Further, he argues that large-scale immigration has
weakened the bargaining power of American workers and served to lower their wages.
He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the
US. He believes that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has had the effect of
exporting American jobs to Mexico. On similar grounds, he is opposed to the TPP and the
TTIP. And he also accuses China of stealing American jobs, threatening to impose a 45%
tariff on Chinese imports.
To globalization, Trump counterposes economic nationalism: "Put America first". His
appeal, above all, is to the white working class who, until Trump's (and Bernie Sander's)
arrival on the political scene, had been ignored and largely unrepresented since the 1980s.
Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary
how their interests have been neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have
voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich and Wall
Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the
white working class. With the arrival of Trump they finally found a representative: they
won Trump the Republican nomination.
Trump believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's
resources
The economic nationalist argument has also been vigorously pursued by Bernie Sanders , who
ran Hillary Clinton extremely close for the Democratic nomination and would probably have
won but for more than 700 so-called super-delegates, who were effectively chosen by the
Democratic machine and overwhelmingly supported Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans,
the Democrats have long supported a neoliberal, pro-globalization strategy, notwithstanding
the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and the Democrats now find
themselves deeply polarized between the pro- and anti-globalizers, an entirely new
development not witnessed since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40
years ago.
Another plank of Trump's nationalist appeal – "Make America great again" –
is his position on foreign policy. He believes that America's pursuit of great power status
has squandered the nation's resources. He argues that the country's alliance system is
unfair, with America bearing most of the cost and its allies contributing far too little.
He points to Japan and South Korea, and NATO's European members as prime examples. He seeks
to rebalance these relationships and, failing that, to exit from them.
As a country in decline, he argues that America can no longer afford to carry this kind
of financial burden. Rather than putting the world to rights, he believes the money should
be invested at home, pointing to the dilapidated state of America's infrastructure. Trump's
position represents a major critique of America as the world's hegemon. His arguments mark
a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalization ideology that has reigned since
the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These
arguments must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of
their authorship.
Roughly two-thirds of Americans agree that "we should not think so much in international
terms but concentrate more on our own national problems". And, above all else, what will
continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalizers is inequality.
" Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with
reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims. "
Two months ago, to the chagrin of a generation of traders, Morgan Stanley made a dismal
observation : Price action in 2018 has shown that 'buy the dip' is on its way out. To wit,
buying the S&P 500 after a down week was a profitable strategy from 2005 through 2017, and
buying these dips fueled most of the post-crisis S&P 500 gains (relative to buying after
the market rallied). But in 2018 'buying the dip' has been a negative return strategy for the
first time in 13 years . In other words, "buying the fucking dip" is no longer the winning
strategy it had been for years (even if buying the most shorted hedge fund names still is a
stable generator of alpha).
However, a more concerning observation is that while BTFD may no longer work, it has been
replaced with an even more troubling trend for market bulls: Selling The Fucking Rip, or as it
is also known, STFR.
This selling of rallies has been especially obvious for the past two weeks as traders have
observed ongoing intra- US session asset-allocation trades out of the S&P and into TY, with
simultaneous volume spikes / blocks trading in ESH9 (selling) and THY9 (buying) at a number of
points throughout the day, but usually after the European close, and toward the end of the
trading day.
"SELL THE RIPS" IN SPOOZ BECOMING THE NORM
So what is behind this pernicious, for bulls if quite welcome for bears, pattern?
Here, Nomura's Charlie McElligott has some thoughts and in his morning note reminds clients
that he had previously highlighted a similar potential observation YTD between the inverse
relationship of UST stripping activity (buying US fixed-income) and the SMART index (end of day
US Equities flows being sold) -- which indicates a similar trend with pension fund de-risking
throughout 2018, as their funding ratios sit at post GFC highs.
In other words, one possible culprit is pension funds who have decided that the market may
have peaked, and are taking advantage of the recent selldown in fixed income, to reallocate
back from stocks and into bonds, locking in less risky funding ratios.
And, as McElligott concludes, this equities de-risking/outflow corroborates what we touched
upon this morning, namely this week's EPFR fund flows data which showed an astounding -$27.7B
outflow for US Equities (Institutional, Retail, Active and Passive combined), the second worst
weekly redemption of the past 1Y period.
Meanwhile, the equity weakness is being coupled with surprising strong bid for US
Treasuries, further confirmation of an intraday Pension reallocation trade.
According to McElligott, the price-action in the long-end of late indicates "that we
potentially are seeing "real money" players back involved for the first-time in awhile,
"toe-dipping" again in adding / receiving as the global slowdown story picks-up steam amidst
growing 2019 / 2020 recession belief", a hypothesis which is further validated by the sharp
rebound in direct bidders in recent auctions and especially yesterday's 30Y which we have
documented extensively, as the "buyers-strike" in long duration auctions seems to have
ended.
This Treasury bid could include large overseas pensions (which are less sensitive to hedge
costs than say Lifers), Risk-Parity (as previously-stated, our QIS RP model estimated the
risk-parity universe as a large buyer of both USTs and JGBs over the past month and a half) and
potentially, resumption of long-end buying from "official" overseas sources as well (with
market speculation that there could be an implicit agreement / gesture coming out of the G20
trade truce arrangement), McElligott notes.
One tangent to note: the bid has been more evident in futures and derivatives (as they are
"off-balance sheet" expressions into a liquidity constrained YE reality), which is reflected in
the fresh record dealer holdings of USTs and which the Nomura strategist notes has made made
futures super rich to cash, creating arb opportunities in the cash/futures basis as the
calendar is about to flip.
Finally, as to who or what is the real reason behind these inexplicable bouts of "selling
the rip", whoever it is, the biggest threat to the market is that once the pattern manifests
itself enough times it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at which point it's not a question of
who started it - as everyone will be doing it - but rather at what point does the Fed step in
to stop it.
Considering that nothing was fixed in 2008, we have had zirp for a decade, there is no
doubt that capital has been misallocated....GM closing plants, Caterpillar closing plants are
economic manifestations of this ponzi scheme...They cannot normalize interest rates with the
amount of debt used to paper over the last crisis...or to satisfy an American government
spending a trillion dollars a year more than they take in....Dow 6000...
Yes they CAN normalize interest rates. Why should someone with saved capital hold the bag
so that crooks who gamed the Globalist movement remain whole? Flotsam in the middle who lose
are fodder. Sorry but even the new socialism won't save them.
Blame the Globalists, not the savers. I suspect many Globalists are morphing into the new
Socialists. Yet to come is the Globalist definition of the new Socialist. Globalists demanded
low rates, low wages, open boarders for goods, and open boarders for people. Socialists will
demand much the same, I suspect.
Selling overvalued stocks and buying Treasuries after the Fed's brief tightening cycle
with the backdrop of a slowing global economy would be a smart and coherent move. Call me
skeptical but I just can't see pension funds behind such a logical move.
Buying Treasuries today is not smart. Flight to safety, multiplied by big money pouring
into the interest rate dip as a 'taper tantrum' move to scare the Fed into not raising rates
any more, is sucker money.
Money market funds are the only safe harbor at this moment.
Wait until rate increases from the Fed end, perhaps in another 3 or 4 increases.
Between now and then, liquidity issues will create big capital gains opportunities on debt
and debt funds if you wait it out.
Both BTFD and STFR are cynical HFT strategies. The faster algos prey on the slower ones,
except for the unique cases where a human predator preys on the algos. (In England, it's a
crime for humans to prey on algos.)
BTFD has a warm appeal because it appears to forecast blue skies and better days, but is
still a predator strategy if there's no fundamental reason to expect better times ahead.
STFR is based on the fear of missing out. Any human who loses on that one makes me
sad.
No, the day they stop will be the day the EU officially starts to decompose and rot in
front of the world. The entertainment will be watching and listening as the try to explain
away the festering and leprosy. All due to 'Kick the Can', not to mention the fact they were
dumb enough to fall for the Globalist scam of low rates and open boarders. There's no
explanation for that level of stupid. A few people sold out the entire Continent using
ideology and gullibility. All it took was a great sales pitch.
ok, so with the 10-yr already falling, what exactly is the Fed going to do. If they lower
then bonds just become a better investment (short run). Guess that's why they're gonna raise.
It's like a house of mirrors.
The Fed and/or SEC will not act until there is a major decline; like circuit breakers
kicking in. Which by the way were put in after the 1987 crash and have never been used.
The 80's had program buying/selling and portfolio insurance. Now we have algos and
computers running the show. Same kind of thing just faster to act with better speeds and
computer power.
This will eventually lead to a similar market mega move and those in power will not act
until it does.
They need something to blame (not someone-think financial crisis) as it can't be their
lack of oversight and blindness [sarc]
Anything goes until the market comes unglued and then the rules get changed. The
regulators are always late to the show and need to be shown what to do after it happens even
though it was clear to many.
Swing between extremes, however, consistent in US history, economic predatory dependence on
free/ultra cheap labor with no legal rights. Current instantiation, offshored and illegal and
"temporary" immigrant labor. Note neither party in the US is proposing "immigration reform"
is green card upon hire. Ds merely propose green card for time served for those over X number
of years donated as captive/cheap.
The entitled to cheap/captive now want it in law, national laws and trade agreements.
All privilege/no responsibilities, including taxes.
Doesn't scale. 1929 says so, 2008 says so.
Liberals, the Left, Progressives -- whatever you want to call them suffer from a basic
problem. They don't work together and have no common goals. As the article stated they
complain but offer no real solutions that they can agree on. Should we emphasize gay pride or
should we emphasize good-paying jobs and benefits with good social welfare benefits? Until
they can agree at least on priorities they will never reform the current corrupt system -- it
is too entrenched. Even if the Capitalist Monstrosity we have now self-destructs as the
writer indicates -- nothing good will replace it until the Left get their act together.
"Lesser of two evils" needs to go on the burn pile.
Encumbent congress needs a turn over.
Not showing up to vote is not okay. If people can't think of someone they want to write-in,
"none of the above" is a protest vote. Not voting is silence, which equals consent.
Local elections, beat back Koch/ALEC, hiding on ballots as "Libertarian". "Privatize
everything" is their mantra, so they can further profitize via inescapeable taxes, while
gutting "regulation" - safety and market integrity, with no accountability.
Corporation 101: limited liability. While means we are left holding the bag. As in bailout -
$125 billion in 1990, up to $7.7 trillion in 2008.
Anything the Economist presents as the overriding choice is probably best relegated to
one factor among many. I respect Milanovic's work, but he's seeing things from where we are
now. Remember we've seen populist surges come and go from the witch-burnings and religious
panics of the 17th century to 1890s Bryanism and the 1930s far right, and each time they've
yielded to a more articulate vision, though the last time it cost sixty million dead - not
something we want to see repeated. This time it's hard because dissent still clings to a
"post-ideological" delusion that those on top never succumbed to. But change will come as
what I'd term "post-rational" alternatives fail to deliver. Let's hope it's sooner rather
than later.
"Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt." Thank you Martin, at least someone
writing in the Guardian has got the point!
We voted against the EU's unelected European Central Bank, its unelected European Commission,
its European Court of Justice, its Common Agricultural Policy and its Common Fisheries
Policy.
We voted against the EU's treaty-enshrined 'austerity' (= depression) policies, which have
impoverished Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
We voted against the EU/US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which would
privatise all our public services, which threatens all our rights, and which discriminates
against the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
We voted against the EU's tariffs against African farmers' cheaper produce.
We opposed the City of London Corporation, the Institute of Directors, the CBI, the IMF,
Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, which all wanted us to
stay in the EU.
We voted against the EU's undemocratic trilogue procedure and its pro-austerity Semester
programme. We voted to leave this undemocratic, privatisation-enforcing, austerity-enforcing
body.
Bailout was because that was public savings, pensions, 401ks, etc. the banks were playing
with, and lost. Bailout is billing all of us for it. Bad, letting the banks/financial
"services" not only survive but continue the exact same practices.
Bailout: $7.2 to $7.7 trillion. Current derivative holdings: $500 trillion.
Not just moral hazard but economic hazard when capitalism basic rule is broken, allow bad
businesses to die of their own accord. Subversion currently called "too big to fail", rather
than tell the public "we lost all your savings, pensions, ...".
Relocating poverty from the East into the West isn't improvement.
Creating sweatshops in the East isn't raising their standard of living.
Creating economies so economically unstable that population declines isn't improvement.
Trying to bury that fact with immigration isn't improvement.
Configuring all of the above for record profit for the benefit of a tiny percentage of the
population isn't improvement.
Gaming tax law to avoid paying into/for extensive business use of federal services and tax
base isn't improvement.
Game over. Time for a reboot.
I am glad you finally concede a point on neo-liberalism. The moral hazard argument is
extremely poor and typical in this era of runaway CEO pay, of a tendency to substitute
self-help fables (a la "The monk who sold his Ferrari) and pop psychology ( a la Moral
Hazard) for credible economic analysis.
The economic crisis is rooted in the profit motive just as capitalist economic growth is.
Lowering of Tarrif barriers, outsourcing, changes in value capture (added value), new
financial instruments, were attempts to restore the falling rate of profit. They did for a
while, but, as always happens with Capitalism, the seeds of the new crisis were in the
solution to the old.
And all the while the state continues growing in an attempt to keep capitalism afloat.
Neoliberalism failed ( or should I say "small state" ) and here is the graph to prove it: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/usgs_chartSp03t.png
Interesting, and I believe accurate, analysis of the economic and political forces afoot.
However it is ludicrous to state that Donald trump, who is a serial corpratist, out-sourcer,
tax avoider and scam artist, actually believes any of those populist principles that you
ascribe so firmly to him. The best and safest outcome of our election, in my opinion, would
be to have a Clinton administration tempered by the influences from the populist wings of
both parties.
Great article, however the elite globalists are in complete denial in the US. Our only choice
is to vote them out of power because the are owned by Wall Street. Both Bernie and Trump
supporters should unite to vote establishment out of Washington.
There were similar observations in the immediate aftermath of 2008, and doubtless before.
Many of us thought the crisis would trigger a rethink of the whole direction of the previous
three decades, but instead we got austerity and a further lurch to the right, or at best
Obama-style stimulus and modest tweaks which were better than the former but still rather
missed the point. I still find it flabbergasting and depressing, but on reflection the 1930s
should have been a warning of not just the economic hazards but also the political fallout,
at least in Europe. The difference was that this time left ideology had all but vacated the
field in the 1980s and was in no position to lead a fightback: all we can hope for is better
late than never.
Yes it is, it's an extremely bad thing destroying the fabric of society. Social science
has documented that even the better off are more happy, satisfied with life and feel safer in
societies (i.e. the Scandinavian) where there is a relatively high degree of economic
equality. Yes, economic inequality is a BAD thing in itself.
Oh, give me a break. Social science will document anything it can publish, no matter how
spurious. If Scandanavia is so great, why are they such pissheads? There has always been
inequality, including in workers' paradises like the Soviet Union and Communist China.
Inequality is what got us where we are today, through natural selection. Phenotype is largely
dependent on genotype, so why shouldn't we pass on material wealth as well as our genes?
Surely it is a parent's right to afford their offspring advantages if they can do so?
Have you got any numbers? Or references for your allegations. I say the average or median
wealth, opportunity, economic circumstance and health measures are substantially better than
a generation (lets say 30 years) ago.
Again I don't think our system is perfect. I don't deny that some in our societies
struggle and don't benefit, particularly the poorly educated, disabled, mentally ill and drug
addicted. I actually agree that we could better target our social redistribution from those
that have to those that need help. I disagree that we need higher taxes, protectionism,
socialism, more public servants, more legislation. Indeed I disagree with proposition that
other systems are better.
George Orwell said, in the 30s, that the price of social justice would include a lowering of
living standards for the working- & middle-classes, at least temporarily, so I follow
your line of thought. However, the outrageous tilt toward the upper .1% has no "adjustment"
fluff to shield it from the harsh despotism it represents. So, do put that in your
statistical pipe and smoke it.
Trump never ceases to crack me up. While his (terrible) current lawyer, declares on TV
that there was collusion but it just didn't last long, Trump calls his former lawyer/fixer at
"Rat".
This is just too funny, I mean this is the President of the United States calling his
former personal lawyer a "Rat" which of course is a common mob term for a witness testifying
against you.
Of course it never happened, just like Manafort didn't make 3 trips to London to meet
Julian Assange. These fictions were just used as a pretext for diving into the backgrounds of
Trump's political supporters and find crimes to charge them with.
The Cohen raid was particularly egregious, a likely violation of attorney-client
privilege. Not suprisingly the American Bar Association is silent.
So, Manafort never laundered money and failed to report taxes? Did Flynn never fail to
report his work as a foreign agent? Did he also not report income taxes?
Look at all these poor crooks, unfairly being prosecuted for cheating and stealing.
All that could have been prosecuted by a district attorney. They looked at all of
Manafort's dealings 10 years ago and passed because he was working with the Podesta Group at
the time and thus protected by Hillary Clinton's influence.
Add to this that Trump changed his election slogan from "make America [ "working class"]
great again" to "make Amerca [financial oligarchy] great again"
The only problem is that 'America' does not exist. America is a part description of a
continent and I think we are talking about the USA (only one country on North American
soil) Why do the yanks always have to exaggerate their own importance like the Olympics
bloke who claimed he was robbed at gunpoint lol! Do the USAians actually have an
inferiority complex?
" Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with
reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims. "
Jana Bacevic
59
2 years ago
PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology; sociology of
knowledge, social theory, political economy of knowledge production.
This is an extremely interesting and important question. In the past years, critics are
increasingly proclaiming that neoliberalism has
come to an end
, or at least become too broad or
too vague
to be used as an explanatory term.
Yet, neoliberalism has proven to be remarkably resilient. This, as
Jamie Peck
has argued, may be due to its propensity to 'fail forward', that is, perpetuate
rather than correct or reverse the mechanisms that led to its failures in the first place – the
economic/fiscal policies following the
2008 economic crisis
are a good example. Or it may have to do with what
Boltanski and Chiapello
have dubbed 'the new spirit of capitalism', meaning its capacity to
absorb political and societal challenges and subsume them under the dominant economic paradigm –
as reflected, for instance, in the way neoliberalism has managed to coopt politics of identity.
But the success of neoliberalism has arguably less to do with its performance as an economic
philosophy (at least after 2008, that is patently not the case – even IMF
has admitted
that neoliberal policies may be exacerbating inequality), and more to do with
what seems to be the consensus of political and economic elites over its application.
Neoliberalism allows for the convergence of financial, governmental, military, industrial and
technological networks of power in ways that not only make sustained resistance difficult, but
also increasingly constrain possibilities for thinking about alternatives.
This is not to say that
heterodox economic
ideas are lacking. Alternatives to mainstream (or neo-classical)
economics range from Marxist and Keynesian approaches, to post-Keynesian, participatory, or
'sharing' economies, and the philosophy of
degrowth.
Yet, in the framework of existing system of political and economic relations,
successfully implementing any of these would require a strong political initiative and at least
some level of consensus beyond the level of any single nation-state.
In this sense, the economic philosophy to succeed neoliberalism will be the one that manages
to capture the 'hearts and minds' of those in power. While the Left needs to start developing
sustainable economic alternatives, it seems that, in the short term, economic policies will be
driven either by some sort of
authoritarian populism,
(as for instance in Trump's pre-election speeches), or a new version
of neoliberalism (what
Will Davies
has called "punitive" neoliberalism). Hopefully, even from such a shrunk space,
alternatives can emerge; however, if we are to draw lessons from the
intellectual history of neoliberalism
, they will require long-term political action to
seriously challenge the prevailing economic order.
This isn very important question that i try to answer in my books. I think
regulation and taxation are key, as well as moving toward a more local circular
economy. You can download the books for free at
Exploitation is high on the priority list of any Tory government, wealth should be
distributed much more fairly than it currently is. The tories only serve the rich, they have
no time or empathy for the poor.
Empathy and compassion are vacant in the tory philosophy of the world. These two
components make up a psychopathic personality.
The median retirement account balance among all working US adults is $0 . This is true
even for the cohort closest to retirement age, those 55-64 years old.
The average (i.e., mean) near-retirement individual has less than 8% of one year's income
saved in a retirement account
77% of all American households aren't on track to have enough net worth to retire , even
under the most conservative estimates.
There a number of causal factors that have contributed to this lack of retirement
preparedness (decades of stagnant real wages, fast-rising cost of living, the Great Recession,
etc), but as we explained in our report The Great Retirement Con
, perhaps none has had more impact than the shift from dedicated-contribution pension plans to
voluntary private savings:
The Origins Of The Retirement Plan
Back during the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress promised a monthly lifetime
income to soldiers who fought and survived the conflict. This guaranteed income stream,
called a "pension", was again offered to soldiers in the Civil War and every American war
since.
Since then, similar pension promises funded from public coffers expanded to cover retirees
from other branches of government. States and cities followed suit -- extending pensions to
all sorts of municipal workers ranging from policemen to politicians, teachers to trash
collectors.
A pension is what's referred to as a defined benefit plan . The payout promised a worker
upon retirement is guaranteed up front according to a formula, typically dependent on salary
size and years of employment.
Understandably, workers appreciated the security and dependability offered by pensions.
So, as a means to attract skilled talent, the private sector started offering them, too.
The first corporate pension was offered by the American Express Company in 1875. By the
1960s, half of all employees in the private sector were covered by a pension
plan.
Off-loading Of Retirement Risk By Corporations
Once pensions had become commonplace, they were much less effective as an incentive to
lure top talent. They started to feel like burdensome cost centers to companies.
As America's corporations grew and their veteran employees started hitting retirement age,
the amount of funding required to meet current and future pension funding obligations became
huge. And it kept growing. Remember, the Baby Boomer generation, the largest ever by far in
US history, was just entering the workforce by the 1960s.
Companies were eager to get this expanding liability off of their backs. And the more
poorly-capitalized firms started defaulting on their pensions, stiffing those who had loyally
worked for them.
So, it's little surprise that the 1970s and '80s saw the introduction of personal
retirement savings plans. The Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA) was formed by the
Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) in 1974. And the first 401k plan was created
in 1980.
These savings vehicles are defined contribution plans . The future payout of the plan is
variable (i.e., unknown today), and will be largely a function of how much of their income
the worker directs into the fund over their career, as well as the market return on the
fund's investments.
Touted as a revolutionary improvement for the worker, these plans promised to give the
individual power over his/her own financial destiny. No longer would it be dictated by their
employer.
Your company doesn't offer a pension? No worries: open an IRA and create your own personal
pension fund.
Afraid your employer might mismanage your pension fund? A 401k removes that risk. You
decide how your retirement money is invested.
Want to retire sooner? Just increase the percent of your annual income contributions.
All this sounded pretty good to workers. But it sounded GREAT to their employers.
Why? Because it transferred the burden of retirement funding away from the company and
onto its employees. It allowed for the removal of a massive and fast-growing liability off of
the corporate balance sheet, and materially improved the outlook for future earnings and cash
flow.
As you would expect given this, corporate America moved swiftly over the next several
decades to cap pension participation and transition to defined contribution plans.
The table below shows how vigorously pensions (green) have disappeared since the
introduction of IRAs and 401ks (red):
So, to recap: 40 years ago, a grand experiment was embarked upon. One that promised US
workers: Using these new defined contribution vehicles, you'll be better off when you reach
retirement age.
Which raises a simple but very important question: How have things worked out?
The
Ugly AftermathAmerica The Broke
Well, things haven't worked out too well.
Four decades later, what we're realizing is that this shift from dedicated-contribution
pension plans to voluntary private savings was a grand experiment with no assurances.
Corporations definitely benefited, as they could redeploy capital to expansion or bottom line
profits. But employees? The data certainly seems to show that the experiment did not take
human nature into account enough – specifically, the fact that just because people have
the option to save money for later use doesn't mean that they actually will.
And so we end up with the dismal retirement stats bulleted above.
The Income Haves
& Have-Nots
In our recent report The Primacy Of Income , we
summarized our years-long predictions of a coming painful market correction followed by a
prolonged era of no capital gains across equities, bond and real estate.
Simply put: the 'easy' gains made over the past 8 years as the central banks did their
utmost to inflate asset prices is over. Asset appreciation is going to be a lot harder to come
by in the future.
Which makes income now the prime source of building -- or simply just maintaining -- wealth
going forward.
That being the case, it's obvious that those receiving a pension will be in far better shape
than those who aren't. They'll have a guaranteed income stream to partially or fully fund their
retirement.
Resentment Brewing
While the total number of people expecting a pension isn't tiny, it's certainly a minority
of today's workers.
31 million private-sector, state and local government workers in the US participate in a
pension plan. 3.3 million currently-employed civilian Federal workers will receive a pension;
as will some percentage of the 2 million people serving in the active military and
reserves.
Combined, that's about 25% of current US workers; roughly 13% of total US adults.
The danger here is of festering social discord. The majority, whom we already know will not
be able to retire, will highly likely start regarding pensioners with envy and resentment.
"Hey, I worked as hard as Joe during my career. How come he gets to retire and I don't?"
will be a common narrative running in the minds of those jealous of their neighbors.
This bitterness will only increase as taxes continue to rise to fund government pension
payouts, already
a huge drain on public budgets . "Why am I paying more so Joe can relax on the beach??"
Humans are wired to react angrily to perceived injustice and unfairness. This short clip
shows how it's hard-coded into our primate brains:
So it's not a stretch at all to predict the divisive tension and prejudice that will result
from the growing gap between the pension haves and have-nots.
The negative stereotypes of union workers will be tightly re-embraced. This SNL sketch
captures a good number of them:
The steady news
reports of pension fraud and abuse will anger the majority further. Any projected decreases
in Social Security (benefit payouts will only be 79 cents on the dollar by 2035 at our current
trajectory) will only exacerbate the ire, as the small governmental income the have-nots
receive becomes even more meager.
The growing potential here is for an emerging social schism, possibly accompanied with
intimidation and violence, not dissimilar to that which has occurred along racial or religious
lines during darker eras of our history.
As people become stressed, they react emotionally, and look for a culprit to blame. And as
they become more desperate, as many elderly workers with no savings often do, they'll resort to
more desperate measures.
Broken Promises
And it's not all sunshine and roses for the pensioners, either. Being promised a pension and
actually receiving one are two very different things.
Underfunded pension liabilities are a massive ticking time bomb, certain to explode over the
next few decades.
For example, many pensions offered through multi-employer plans are bad shape. The
multiemployer branch of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federally-instated
insurer behind private pensions, will be out of business by 2025 if no changes in law are made
to help. If that happens, retirees in those plans will get only 10% of what they were
promised.
Moreover, research conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows a
$1.4 trillion shortfall between state pension assets and guarantees to employees. There are
only two ways a gap that big gets addressed: massive tax hikes or massive benefit cuts. The
likeliest outcome will be a combination of both.
So, many of those today counting on a pension tomorrow may find themselves in a similar boat
to their pension-less neighbors.
No Easy Systemic Solutions, So Act For Yourself
There's no "fix" to the retirement predicament of the American workforce. There's no policy
change that can be made at this late date to reverse the decades of over-spending,
over-indebtedness, and lack of saving.
All we can do at this time is influence how we take our licks. Do we simply leave the masses
of unprepared workers to their sad fate? Or do we share the pain across the entire populace by
funding new social support programs via more taxes?
Time will tell. But what we can bet on is tougher times ahead, especially for those with
poor income prospects.
So the smart strategy for the prudent investor is to prioritize building a portfolio of
income streams in order to have sufficient dependable income for a sustainable retirement. Or
for simply remaining afloat financially.
Sadly, accustomed to the speculative approach marketed to us for so long by the financial
industry, most investors are woefully under-educated in how to build a diversified portfolio of
passive income streams (inflation-adjusting and tax-deferred whenever possible) over time.
Those looking to get up to speed can read our recent report A
Primer On Investing For Inflation-Adjusting Income , where we detail out the wide range of
prevalent (and not-so-prevalent) solutions for today's investors to consider when designing an
income-generating portfolio. From bonds, to dividends (common and preferred), to real estate,
to royalties -- we explain each vehicle, how it can be used, and what the major benefits and
risks are.
And in the interim, make sure the wealth you have accumulated doesn't disappear along with
the bursting of the Everything Bubble. If you haven't already read it yet, read our premium
report from last week What To Do Now That 'The
Big One' Is Here .
They can try and tax to fill pension buckets that are empty, but the population is more
likely than ever to react negatively to this sort of thing.
People will not move to areas where the potential for extortion to satisfy pension
promises exists. Nor will they move to any place where there's the possibility of a big tax
increase to fill public coffers.
In my own area there's already the threat of a large property tax increase to cover
'social improvements' that are not really the responsibility of the local government, but you
can't tell them that, they extend their tentacles into everything. The county is just as bad,
with property tax increases and then handing out grants that no one monitors and no one knows
about.
If govt's would go back to doing what they're supposed to do instead of the garbage
they're involved in now we'd be better off and it would cost those who actually pay the taxes
a lot less. It's one big reason people are moving to rural areas. My muni has voted several
times now to increase local option sales tax, the people keep putting it down, the voting
costs thousands to conduct, I wish they would give it up.
It's no wonder that Chicago loses 150 people every day...not a good thing.
"The list includes a married couple -- a police captain and a detective -- who joined DROP
at around the same time and collected nearly $2 million while in the program. They both filed
claims for carpal tunnel syndrome and other cumulative ailments about halfway through the
program. She spent nearly two years on disability and sick leave; he missed more than two
years ... the couple spent at least some of their paid time off recovering at their condo in
Cabo San Lucas and starting a family theater production company with their daughter..."
Pensions in many ways they are the biggest Ponzi Scheme of modern man. Pension payouts are
often predicated on the idea the money invested in these funds will yield seven to eight
percent a year and in today's low-interest rate environment, this has forced funds into ever
riskier investments.
The PBGC America's pension safety net is already under pressure and failing due to the
inability of pension funds to meet their future obligations. The math alone is troubling but
when coupled with the overwhelming possibility of a major financial dislocation looming in
the future a nightmare scenario for pensions drastically increases. More on this subject in
the article below.
84% of state and local public sector workers receive defined benefit pensions as do 100%
of federal workers with little to no contribution on their part. After 30 years Federal
workers receive 33% of their highest 3 consecutive years pay and state workers average
benefits are $43000 with a range from 15000 (MS) to 80000 (CA). Private sector employees get
to pay for this and have little if anything coming from their employers in the form of a
pension. Instead, private sector employees get to gamble their savings in the stock and bond
markets to secure a retirement. And don't thing government employees are paid less - they are
usually paid very competitively with the private sector. Bottom line is private sector
employees are slaves to federal, state, and local governments.
Not only are government workers not paid that less, they get a slew of days off, sicks
days, mental health days , every minor holiday is a day off. And because they never get laid
off, the lower salary is worth more over the long term. then the private sector worker who
gets fired every 5 years
A 401K is not a pension plan and if you don't put anything into the 401K then you get
nothing out of the 401K. Plus, pensions can fail. The people that made no other arrangements
for their retirement other than rely on SocSec will have more because they will qual for food
stamps, housing subsidies, utility credits, etc. The picture is being distorted.
There is not going to be the old American pension, it's the new America, where everything
has been hollowed out. The new American economic conditions has created a vast
underclass.
The growing underclass is because of being hollowed out. Social services for the
underclass is costing hundreds of billions. The Trumpers want a massive cut in social
funding.
The communist Democratic Socialist have a wedge issue of underclass causes which keeps the
Democratic Socialist party growing. Clinton is their enemy as we now know from Clinton's out
burst.
The only way out for Trumpers is an infrastructure build. This will draw in the masses as
labor markets tighten, thus pushing wages up.
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... The idea that examiners should not criticize any bank misconduct, predation, or 'unsafe and unsound practice' that does not constitute a felony is obviously insane. ..."
"... The trade association complaint that examiners dare to criticize non-felonious bank conduct – and the WSJ ..."
"... I have more than a passing acquaintance with banking, banking regulation, and banking's rectitude (such an old fashioned word) in the importance for Main Street's survival, and for the country's as a whole survival as a trusted pivot point in world finance , or for the survival of the whole American project. I know this sounds like an over-the-top assertion on my part, however I believe it true. ..."
"... Obama et al confusing "banking" with sound banking is too ironic, imo. ..."
"... It was actually worse than this. The very deliberate strategy was to indoctrinate employees of federal regulatory agencies to see the companies they regulated not as "partners" but as "customers" to be served. This theme is repeated again and again in Bush era agency reports. Elizabeth Warren was viciously attacked early in the Obama Administration for calling for a new "watchdog" agency to protect consumers. The idea that a federal agency would dedicate itself to protecting citizens first was portrayed as dangerously radical by industry. ..."
"... Models on Clinton and Bush. What's not to like? Why isn't msm and dem elites showing him the love when he's following their long term policies? And we might assume these would be hills policies if she had been pushed over the line. A little thought realizes that in spite of the pearl clutching they far prefer him to Bernie. ..."
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is
to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas
City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives
The Wall Street Journal published an article
on December 12, 2018 that should warn us of coming disaster: "Banks Get Kinder, Gentler
Treatment Under Trump." The last time a regulatory head lamented that regulators were not
"kinder and gentler" promptly ushered in the Enron-era fraud epidemic. President Bush made
Harvey Pitt his Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair in August 2001 and, in one of
his early major addresses, he spoke on October 22, 2001 to a group of accounting
leaders.
Pitt, as a private counsel, represented all the top tier audit firms, and they had
successfully pushed Bush to appoint him to run the SEC. The second sentence of Pitt's speech
bemoaned the fact that the SEC had not been "a kinder and gentler place for accountants." He
concluded his first paragraph with the statement that the SEC and the auditors needed to work
"in partnership." He soon reiterated that point: "We view the accounting profession as our
partner" and amped it up by calling accountants the SEC's "critical partner."
Pitt expanded on that point: "I am committed to the principle that government is and must be
a service industry." That, of course, would not be controversial if he meant a service agency
(not "industry") for the public. Pitt, however, meant that the SEC should be a "service
industry" for the auditors and corporations.
Pitt then turned to pronouncing the SEC to be the guilty party in the "partnership." He
claimed that the SEC had terrorized accountants. He then stated that he had ordered the SEC to
end this fictional terror campaign.
[A]ccountants became afraid to talk to the SEC, and the SEC appeared to be unwilling to
listen to the profession. Those days are ended.
This prompted Pitt to ratchet even higher his "partnership" language.
I speak for the entire Commission when I say that we want to have a continuing dialogue,
and partnership, with the accounting profession,
Recall that Pitt spoke on October 22, 2001. Here are the relevant excerpts from the NY
Times' Enron
timeline :
Oct. 16 – Enron announces $638 million in third-quarter losses and a $1.2 billion
reduction in shareholder equity stemming from writeoffs related to failed broadband and water
trading ventures as well as unwinding of so-called Raptors, or fragile entities backed by
falling Enron stock created to hedge inflated asset values and keep hundreds of millions of
dollars in debt off the energy company's books.
Oct. 19 – Securities and Exchange Commission launches inquiry into Enron
finances.
Oct. 22 – Enron acknowledges SEC inquiry into a possible conflict of interest
related to the company's dealings with Fastow's partnerships.
Oct. 23 – Lay professes confidence in Fastow to analysts.
Oct. 24 – Fastow ousted.
The key fact is that even as Enron was obviously spiraling toward imminent collapse (it
filed for bankruptcy on December 2) – and the SEC knew it – Pitt offered no warning
in his speech. The auditors and the corporate CEOs and CFOs were not the SEC's 'partners.'
Thousands of CEOs and CFOs were filing false financial statements – with 'clean' opinions
from the then 'Big 5' auditors. Pitt was blind to the 'accounting control fraud' epidemic that
was raging at the time he spoke to the accountants. Thousands of his putative auditor
'partners' were getting rich by blessing fraudulent financial statements and harming the
investors that the SEC is actually supposed to serve.
Tom Frank aptly characterized the Bush appointees that completed the destruction of
effective financial regulation as "The Wrecking Crew." It is important, however, to understand
that Bush largely adopted and intensified Clinton's war against effective regulation. Clinton
and Bush led the unremitting bipartisan assault on regulation for 16 years. That produced the
criminogenic environment that produced the three largest financial fraud epidemics in history
that hyper-inflated the real estate bubble and drove the Great Financial Crisis (GFC).
President Trump has renewed the Clinton/Bush war on regulation and he has appointed banking
regulatory leaders that have consciously modeled their assault on regulation on Bush and
Clinton's 'Wrecking Crews.'
Bill Clinton's euphemism for his war on effective regulation was "Reinventing Government."
Clinton appointed VP Al Gore to lead the assault. (Clinton and Gore are "New Democrat" leaders
– the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.) Gore decided he needed to choose an
anti-regulator to conduct the day-to-day leadership. We know from Bob Stone's memoir the sole
substantive advice he gave Gore in their first meeting that caused Gore to appoint him as that
leader. "Do not 'waste one second going after waste, fraud, and abuse.'" Elite insider fraud
is, historically, the leading cause of bank losses and failures, so Stone's advice was sure to
lead to devastating financial crises. It is telling that it was the fact that Stone gave
obviously idiotic advice to Gore that led him to select Stone as the field commander of Clinton
and Gore's war on effective regulation.
Stone convinced the Clinton-Gore administration to embrace the defining element of crony
capitalism as its signature mantra for its war on effective regulation. Stone and his troops
ordered us to refer to the banks, not the American people, as our "customers." Peters' foreword
to Stone's book admits the action, but is clueless about the impact.
Bob Stone's insistence on using the word "customer" was mocked by some -- but made an
enormous difference over the course of time. In general, he changed the vocabulary of public
service from 'procedure first' to 'service first.'"
That is a lie. We did not 'mock' the demand that we treat the banks rather than the American
people as our "customer" – we openly protested the outrageous order that we embrace and
encourage crony capitalism. Crony capitalism's core principle – which is unprincipled
– is that the government should treat elite CEOs as their 'customers' or 'partners.' A
number of us publicly expressed our rage at the corrupt order to treat CEOs as our customers.
The corrupt order caused me to leave the government.
Our purpose as regulators is to serve the people of the United States – not bank CEOs.
It was disgusting and dishonest for Peters to claim that our objection to crony capitalism
represented our (fictional) disdain for serving the public. Many S&L regulators risked
their careers by taking on elite S&L frauds and their powerful political fixers. Many of us
paid a heavy personal price because we acted to protect the public from these elite frauds. Our
efforts prevented the S&L debacle from causing a GFC – precisely because we
recognized the critical need to spend most of our time preventing and prosecuting the elite
frauds that Stone wanted us to ignore..
Trump's wrecking crew is devoted to recreating Clinton and Bush's disastrous crony
capitalism war on regulation that produced the GFC. In a June 8,
2018 article , the Wall Street Journal mocked Trump's appointment of Joseph Otting
as Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The illustration that introduces the article bears the
motto: "IN BANKS WE TRUST."
Otting, channeling his inner Pitt, declared his employees guilty of systematic misconduct
and embraced crony capitalism through Pitt's favorite phrase – "partnership."
I think it is more of a partnership with the banks as opposed to a dictatorial perspective
under the prior administration.
Otting, while he was in the industry, compared the OCC under President Obama to a fictional
interstellar terrorist. Obama appointed federal banking regulators that were pale imitation of
Ed Gray, Joe Selby, and Mike Patriarca – the leaders of the S&L reregulation. The
idea that Obama's banking regulators were akin to 'terrorists' is farcical.
The WSJ's December 12, 2018 article reported that Otting had also used Bob Stone's
favorite term to embrace crony capitalism.
Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting has also changed the tone from the top at his
agency, calling banks his "customers."
There are many terrible role models Trump could copy as his model of how to destroy banking
regulation and produce the next GFC, but Otting descended into unintentional self-parody when
he channeled word-for-word the most incompetent and dishonest members of Clinton and Bush's
wrecking crews.
The same article reported a trade association's statement that demonstrates the type of
outrageous reaction that crony capitalism inevitably breeds within industry.
Banks are suffering from "examiner criticisms that do not deal with any violation of law,"
said Greg Baer, CEO of the Bank Policy Institute ."
The article presented no response to this statement so I will explain why it is absurd.
First, "banks" do not "suffer" from "examiner criticism." Banks gain from examiner criticism.
Effective regulators (and whistleblowers) are the only people who routinely 'speak truth to
power.' Auditors, credit rating agencies, and attorneys routinely 'bless' the worst CEO abuses
that harm banks while enriching the CEO. The bank CEO cannot fire the examiner, so the
examiners' expert advice is the only truly "independent" advice the bank's board of directors
receives. That makes the examiners' criticisms invaluable to the bank. CEOs hate our advice
because we are the only 'control' (other than the episodic whistleblower) that is willing and
competent to criticize the CEO.
The idea that examiners should not criticize any bank misconduct, predation, or 'unsafe
and unsound practice' that does not constitute a felony is obviously insane. While
"violations of law" (felonies) are obviously of importance to us in almost all cases, our
greatest expertise is in identifying – and stopping – "unsafe and unsound
practices" because such practices, like fraud, are leading causes of bank losses and
failures.
Third, repeated "unsafe and unsound practices" are a leading indicator of likely elite
insider bank fraud and other "violations of law."
The trade association complaint that examiners dare to criticize non-felonious bank
conduct – and the WSJ reporters' failure to point out the absurdity of that
complaint – demonstrate that the banking industry's goal remains the destruction of
effective banking regulation. Trump's wrecking crew is using the Clinton and Bush playbook to
restore fully crony capitalism. He has greatly accelerated the onset of the next GFC.
Thank you for this, Bill Black. IMO the long-term de-regulatory policies under successive
administrations cited here, together with their neutering the rule of law by overturning the
Glass-Steagall Act; de-funding and failing to enforce antitrust, fraud and securities laws;
financial repression of the majority; hidden financial markets subsidies; and other policies
are just part of an organized, long-term systemic effort to enable, organize and subsidize
massive control and securities fraud; theft of and disinvestment in publicly owned resources
and services; environmental damage; and transfers of social costs that enable the organizers
to in turn gain a hugely disproportionate share of the nation's wealth and nearly absolute
political control under their "Citizens United" political framework.
Not to diminish, but among other things the current president provides nearly daily
entertainment, diversion and spectacle in our Brave New World that serves to obfuscate what
has occurred and is happening.
I'm with you Chauncey. I believe the rot really got started with creative accounting in
early 1970s. That's when accountants of every flavor lost themselves and were soon followed
by the lawyers. Sauce for the goose.
Banks and Insurers and many industrial concerns have become too big. We could avoid all
the regulatory problems by placing a maximum size on commercial endeavour.
A number of years ago I did both the primary capital program and environmental (NEPA) review
for major capital projects in a Federal Region. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at
stake. A local agency wanted us (the Feds) to approve pushing up many of their projects using
a so-called Public Private Partnership (PPP). This required the local agency to borrow many
millions from Wall Street while at the same time privatizing many of their here-to-fore
public operations. And of course there was an added benefit of instituting a non-union
shop.
To this end I was required to sit down with the local agency head (he actually wore white
shoes), his staff and several representatives of Goldman-Sachs. After the meeting ended, I
opined to the agency staff that Goldman-Sachs was "bullshit" and so were their projects.
Shortly thereafter I was removed to a less high-profile Region with projects that were not
all that griftable, and there was no danger of me having to review a PPP.
Oh, and I denied, denied, denied saying "bullshit."
Thank you, NC, for featuring these posts by Bill Black.
I have more than a passing acquaintance with banking, banking regulation, and banking's
rectitude (such an old fashioned word) in the importance for Main Street's survival, and for
the country's as a whole survival as a trusted pivot point in world finance , or for
the survival of the whole American project. I know this sounds like an over-the-top assertion
on my part, however I believe it true.
Main Street also knows the importance of sound banking. Sound banking is not a 'poker
chip' to be used for games. Sound banking is key to the American experiment in
self-determination, as it has been called.
Politicians who 'don't get this" have lost touch with the entire American enterprise,
imo. And, no, the neoliberal promise that nation-states no longer matter doesn't make this
point moot.
adding: US founding father Alexander Hambleton did understand the importance of sound
banking, and so Obama et al confusing "banking" with sound banking is too ironic, imo.
It was actually worse than this. The very deliberate strategy was to indoctrinate
employees of federal regulatory agencies to see the companies they regulated not as
"partners" but as "customers" to be served. This theme is repeated again and again in Bush
era agency reports. Elizabeth Warren was viciously attacked early in the Obama Administration
for calling for a new "watchdog" agency to protect consumers. The idea that a federal agency
would dedicate itself to protecting citizens first was portrayed as dangerously radical by
industry.
Models on Clinton and Bush.
What's not to like? Why isn't msm and dem elites showing him the love when he's following
their long term policies?
And we might assume these would be hills policies if she had been pushed over the line.
A little thought realizes that in spite of the pearl clutching they far prefer him to
Bernie.
CIA democrats are still determined to sink Tramp, and continues to beat the dead cat of
"Russian collision". What is interesting is that Jacob Schiff financed Bolsheviks revolution in
Russia.
Yahoo comments reflect the deep split in the opinions in the society, which is positioned
mainly by party lines. Few commenters understadn that the problem is with neoliberalism, not
Trump, or Hillary who represent just different factions of the same neoliberal elite.
Notable quotes:
"... Schiff said Deutsche Bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to the state of New York for laundering Russian money, and that it was the one bank willing to do business with the Trump Organization. ..."
"... In an interview with the New Yorker that was posted on line on Dec. 14, Schiff said the Intelligence Committee is "going to be looking at the issue of possible money laundering by the Trump Organization, and Deutsche Bank is one obvious place to start." ..."
"... A Senate investigation, which Warren and Van Hollen want to see followed by a report and a hearing, could put further pressure on the lender. The written request from the senators, sent Dec. 13, cites Deutsche Bank's "numerous enforcement actions" and a recent raid by police officers and tax investigators in Germany. ..."
"... Schiff, a target of Trump's on Twitter, also referred to reported comments by the president's sons some years ago that they didn't need "to deal with U.S. banks because they got all of the cash they needed from Russia or disproportionate share of their assets coming from Russia." He said Sunday he expects to learn more about that claim through financial records. ..."
The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee joined Democratic colleagues in
questioning ties between Deutsche Bank AG and President Donald Trump's real estate
business.
Representative Adam Schiff of California said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that any type
of compromise needs to be investigated. That could add his panel's scrutiny to that of
Representative Maxine Waters, who's in line to be chair of the House Financial Services
Committee and has also focused on the bank's connections to Trump.
Schiff's comments came three days after Wall Street critic Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
and fellow Senate Democrat Chris Van Hollen called for a Banking Committee investigation of
Deutsche Bank's compliance with U.S. money-laundering regulations.
Schiff said Deutsche Bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to the state
of New York for laundering Russian money, and that it was the one bank willing to do business
with the Trump Organization.
"Now, is that a coincidence?" Schiff said. "If this is a form of compromise, it needs to be
exposed."
In an interview with the New Yorker that was posted on line on Dec. 14, Schiff said the
Intelligence Committee is "going to be looking at the issue of possible money laundering by the
Trump Organization, and Deutsche Bank is one obvious place to start."
More Pressure
A Senate investigation, which Warren and Van Hollen want to see followed by a report and
a hearing, could put further pressure on the lender. The written request from the senators,
sent Dec. 13, cites Deutsche Bank's "numerous enforcement actions" and a recent raid by police
officers and tax investigators in Germany.
It also notes the lender's U.S. operations being implicated in cross-border money-laundering
accusations such as in a recent case involving Danish lender Danske Bank A/S and the movement
of $230 billion in illicit funds.
"The compliance history of this institution raises serious questions about the national
security and criminal risks posed by its U.S. operations," the senators said in their letter.
"Its correspondent banking operations in the U.S. serve as a gateway to the U.S. financial
system for Deutsche Bank entities around the world."
Troy Gravitt, a Deutsche Bank spokesman, responded that the company "takes its legal
obligations seriously and remains committed to cooperating with authorized investigations."
Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, had questioned the Federal Reserve earlier this year about
how it would keep the White House from interfering with oversight of the lender, which had been
a major lender to Trump's real estate business.
Schiff, a target of Trump's on Twitter, also referred to reported comments by the
president's sons some years ago that they didn't need "to deal with U.S. banks because they got
all of the cash they needed from Russia or disproportionate share of their assets coming from
Russia." He said Sunday he expects to learn more about that claim through financial
records.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jesse Hamilton in Washington at
[email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jesse Westbrook at
[email protected], Mark Niquette, Ros Krasny
55 seconds ago A
special Special Prosecutor must be appointed with a billion dollar budget. Where will the
money come from? Fines, penalties, and restitution by the Godfather.
U 46 seconds ago With
all these investigations, who should die hard Republicans vote for in 2020? Should it be
Donald Trump or Individual 1 or David Dennison? Gonna' be a hard choice next year.
F 1
minute ago Investigations of Trump are just getting started! hahaha
A 7 minutes ago Don
the Con is certainly getting a lot of probes of his illegal, criminal business deals. He
was a total idiot to become president and draw all this attention considering all the
crimes he has committed.
W 3 minutes ago
"Shifty" Schiff....doing everything to bring America together again!
D 17 minutes ago Lets investigate SLIMEY SHIFTLESS SCHIFF for leaking to
the News Media and running faster than a speedy bullet to a microphone and running his
loose lips !
B 3 minutes ago One of
the problem is that politicians, like schiffhead, have never had a real job and only have
scammed their donors and havent a clue how the real world works.
"... Nik Williams, the policy advisor for Scottish PEN, the Scottish centre of PEN International. We are leading the campaign opposing suspicionless surveillance and protecting the rights of writers both in Scotland and across the globe. Find out more on Twitter at @scottishpen and @nikwilliams2 . Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
"... In 2013, NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government surveillance that enables intelligence agencies to capture the data of internet users around the world. Some of the powers revealed enable agencies to access emails in transit, files held on devices, details that document our relationships and location in real-time and data that could reveal our political opinions, beliefs and routines. ..."
"... As big data and digital surveillance is interwoven into the fabric of modern society there is growing evidence that the perception of surveillance affects how different communities engage with the internet. ..."
"... In 2013, PEN America surveyed American writers to see whether the Snowden revelations impacted their willingness to explore challenging issues and continue to write. In their report, Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor , PEN America found that "one in six writers avoided writing or speaking on a topic they thought would subject them to surveillance". ..."
"... At times, surveillance appears unavoidable and this was evident in many of the writers' responses to whether they could take actions to mitigate the risks of surveillance. Without knowing how to secure themselves there are limited options: writers either resign themselves to using insecure tools or choose to avoid the internet all together, cutting them off from important sources of information and potential communities of readers and support. ..."
"... Although not explicitly laid out in the post, I'm inclined to believe any online research on PETs might single one out as a "Person of Interest" ..."
"... we know better now – EVERYTHING is recorded and archived. Privacy may not be dead yet, but now exists only in carefully curated offline pockets, away from not just the phone and the laptop, but also the smart fridge's and the face-recognising camera's gimlet eye. ..."
"... And it's not just off centre political opining that could be used in such efforts. The percentages of internet users who have accused [people of using] porn sites suggests there would be some serious overlap between the set of well known and/or 'important' people and the set of porn hounds. Remember the cack-handed attempts to smear Hans Blix? ..."
"... Most of us (real writers or just people who write) need to hold down a job and increasingly HR depts don't just 'do a Google' on all potential appointees to important roles but in large concerns at least, use algorithmic software connected to the web and the Cloud to process applications. ..."
We know what censorship looks like: writers being murdered, attacked or imprisoned; TV and
radio stations being shut down; the only newspapers parrot the state; journalists lost in the
bureaucratic labyrinth to secure a license or permit; government agencies approving which
novels, plays and poetry collections can be published; books being banned or burned or the
extreme regulation of access to printing materials or presses. All of these damage free
expression, but they leave a fingerprint, something visible that can be measured, but what
about self-censorship? This leaves no such mark.
When writers self-censor, there is no record, they just stop writing or avoid certain topics
and these decisions are lost to time. Without being able to record and document isolated cases
the way we can with explicit government censorship, the only thing we can do is identify
potential drivers to self-censorship.
In 2013, NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government surveillance
that enables intelligence agencies to capture the data of internet users around the world. Some
of the powers revealed enable agencies to access emails in transit, files held on devices,
details that document our relationships and location in real-time and data that could reveal
our political opinions, beliefs and routines. Following these revelations, the UK government
pushed through the Investigatory Powers Act ,
an audacious act that modernised, consolidated and expanded digital surveillance powers. This
expansion was opposed by civil rights organisations, (including Scottish PEN where I work),
technologists, a number of media bodies and major tech companies, but on 29th November 2016, it
received royal assent.
But what did this expansion do to our right to free expression?
As big data and digital surveillance is interwoven into the fabric of modern society there
is growing evidence that the perception of surveillance affects how different communities
engage with the internet. Following the Snowden revelations, John Penny at the Oxford
Internet Institute analysed traffic to Wikipedia pages on topics designated by the Department
of Homeland Security as sensitive and identified "a 20 percent decline in page views on
Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned 'al Qaeda,' 'car bomb'
or 'Taliban.'" This report was in line with a study by Alex Marthews and
Catherine Tucker who found a similar trend in the avoidance of sensitive topics in Google
search behaviour in 41 countries. This has significant impact on both free expression and
democracy, as
outlined by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy
matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic
debate."
But it doesn't end with sourcing information. In a study of Facebook, Elizabeth Stoycheff
discovered that when faced with holders of majority opinions and the knowledge of government
surveillance, holders of minority viewpoints are more likely to "self-censor their dissenting
opinions online". If holders of minority opinions step away from online platforms like
Facebook, these platforms will only reflect the majority opinion, homogenising discourse and
giving a false idea of consensus. Read together, these studies document a slow erosion of the
eco-system within which free expression flourishes.
In 2013, PEN America surveyed American writers to see whether the Snowden revelations
impacted their willingness to explore challenging issues and continue to write. In their
report, Chilling Effects:
NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor , PEN America found that "one in six
writers avoided writing or speaking on a topic they thought would subject them to
surveillance". But is this bigger than the US? Scottish PEN, alongside researchers at the
University of Strathclyde authored the report,
Scottish Chilling: Impact of Government and Corporate Surveillance on Writers to explore
the impact of surveillance on Scotland-based writers, asking the question: Is the perception of
surveillance a driver to self-censorship? After surveying 118 writers, including novelists,
poets, essayists, journalists, translators, editors and publishers, and interviewing a number
of participants we uncovered a disturbing trend of writers avoiding certain topics in their
work or research, modifying their work or refusing to use certain online tools. 22% of
responders have avoided writing or speaking on a particular topic due to the perception of
surveillance and 28% have curtailed or avoided activities on social media. Further to this, 82%
said that if they knew that the UK government had collected data about their Internet activity
they would feel as though their personal privacy had been violated, something made more likely
by the passage of the investigatory Powers Act.
At times, surveillance appears unavoidable and this was evident in many of the writers'
responses to whether they could take actions to mitigate the risks of surveillance. Without
knowing how to secure themselves there are limited options: writers either resign themselves to
using insecure tools or choose to avoid the internet all together, cutting them off from
important sources of information and potential communities of readers and support.
Literacy
concerning the use of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (oftentimes called PETs) is a vital part
of how we protect free expression in the digital age, but as outlined by the concerns of a
number of the participants, it is largely under-explored outside of the tech community: "I
think probably I need to get educated a wee bit more by someone because I think we probably are
a bit exposed and a wee bit vulnerable, more than we realize." Another was even more stark
about their worries about the available alternatives: "I have no idea about how to use the
Internet 'differently'".
When interviewed, a number of writers expressed concerns about how their writing process has
changed or is in danger of changing as a result of their awareness of surveillance. One
participant who had covered the conflict in Northern Ireland in 70s and 80s stated that they
would not cover the conflict in the same manner if it took place now; another stopped writing
about child abuse when they thought about what their search history may look to someone else;
when they heard of a conviction based on the ownership of the Anarchist Cookbook, a participant
who bought a copy for research shredded it. Further to this a participant stated: "I think I
would avoid direct research on issues to do with Islamic fundamentalism. I might work on
aspects of the theory, but not on interviewing people in the past, I have interviewed people
who would be called 'subversives'."
These modifications or avoidance strategies raise a stark and important question: What are
we as readers being denied if writers are avoiding sensitive topics? Put another way, what
connects the abuse of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, the treatment of asylum seekers by
the Australian government on Manus and Nauru, the hiding of billions of pounds by wealthy
individuals as revealed in the Panama and Paradise Papers, the deportation of members of the
'Windrush Generation' and the Watergate scandal? In each case, writers revealed to the world
what others wanted hidden. Shadows appear less dense if writers are able to explore challenging
issues and expose wrongdoing free from the coercive weight of pervasive surveillance. When
writers are silenced, even by their own hand, we all suffer.
Surveillance is going nowhere – it is embedded into the fabric of the internet. If we
ignore the impact it has on writers, we threaten the very foundations of democracy; a vibrant
and cacophonous exchange of ideas and beliefs, alongside what it means to be a writer. In the
words of one participant: "You can't exist as a writer if you're self-censoring."
Thanks Yves, this is an important topic. Although not explicitly laid out in the post, I'm
inclined to believe any online research on PETs might single one out as a "Person of
Interest" (after all the state wants unfettered access to our digital lives and any attempt
by individuals to curtail such access is viewed with suspicion, and maybe even a little
contempt).
I trust the takeaway message from this post will resonate with any person who holds what
might be considered "heretical" or dissenting views. I'd also argue that it's not just
writers who are willingly submitting themselves to this self-censorship straitjacket,
ordinary people are themselves sanitizing their views to avoid veering too far off the
official line/established consensus on issues, lest they fall foul of the machinery of the
security state.
Yes – not just 'writers' as in 'those who write for a living or at least partly
define themselves as writers in either a creative or an activist sense, or both' – but
all of us who do not perceive ourselves as 'writers', only as people who in the course of
their lives write a bit here and there, some of it on public platforms such as this, but much
of it in emails and texts to friends and family. It wouldn't be quite so bad if the
surveillance was only of the public stuff, but we know better now – EVERYTHING is
recorded and archived. Privacy may not be dead yet, but now exists only in carefully curated
offline pockets, away from not just the phone and the laptop, but also the smart fridge's and
the face-recognising camera's gimlet eye.
Staying with the 'not just' for a moment – the threat is not just government
security agencies and law enforcement, or indeed Surveillance Valley. It is clear that if
egghead techs in those employments are able to crack our lives open then egghead techs in
their parent's basement around the corner may be capable of the same intrusions, their
actions not subject to any of the official box-ticking govt actors with which govt actors
must (or at least should) comply.
And it is not just the danger of govt/sinister 3rd parties identifying potential security
(or indeed political or economic) threats out of big data analysis, but the danger of govt
and especially interested third parties targeting particular known individuals –
political enemies to be sure, but also love rivals, toxic bosses, hated alpha males or queen
bitches, supporters of other football clubs, members of other races not deemed fully human,..
the list is as long as that of human hatreds and jealousies. The danger lies not just in the
use of the tech to ID threats (real or imagined) but in its application to traduce threats
already perceived.
And it's not just off centre political opining that could be used in such efforts. The
percentages of internet users who have accused [people of using] porn sites suggests there would be some
serious overlap between the set of well known and/or 'important' people and the set of porn
hounds. Remember the cack-handed attempts to smear Hans Blix? Apparently no fire behind that
smoke, but what if there was? The mass US surveillance of other parties prior to UN Iraq
deliberations (from the Merkels down to their state-level support bureaucrats) was a fleeting
and hastily forgotten glimpse of the reach of TIA, its 'full spectrum dominance', from the
heights of top level US-free strategy meetings down to the level of the thoughts and hopes of
valets and ostlers to the leaders, who may be useful in turning up references to the
peccadilloes of the higher-ups 'go massive – sweep it all up, things related and
not'
And it's not just the fear of some sort of official retribution for dissenting political
activism that guides our hands away from typing that deeply held but possibly inflammatory
and potentially dangerous opinion. Most of us (real writers or just people who write) need to
hold down a job and increasingly HR depts don't just 'do a Google' on all potential
appointees to important roles but in large concerns at least, use algorithmic software
connected to the web and the Cloud to process applications.
This is done without human
intervention at the individual level but the whole process is set up in such a way that the
algorithms are able to neatly, bloodlessly, move applicants for whom certain keywords turned
up matches (union or party membership, letters to the editor or blog posts on financial
fraud, climate change vanguardism, etc) to the back of the queue, in time producing a grey
army of yes people in our bureaucracies.
The normal person's ability to keep pace with (let alone ahead of) the tech disappeared
long ago. So when a possible anonymising solution – Tor – crops up but is soon
exposed as yet another MI/SV bastard love child, the sense of disappointment is profound.
Shocked but not surprised.
"Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. – I remember a
conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right,
these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves
and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of
society]? "
We already
know insurers have been using online searches to discriminate amongst the victimae. The
married/unmarried differences in cancer treatments are a confirmation. Self-censorship is a
rational decision in seeking information in a linked world. (I gave up on affording
insurance, and I do searches for friends; the ads I get are amusing.)
It could be said that journalists have a professional duty, but as the man said, "If you
believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
As the woman said, "If your business depends on a platform, your business is already
dead."
(As for the above quote, check the provenance for the relevance.)
I confess I do concatenate your quotes on
occasion: "For a currency to function as a reserve currency is tantamount to exporting jobs."
Some of your most illuminating statements are in side comments to linked articles.
Means I spend a lot of time reading the site. But then I get to recategorize most other
current events sites as 'Entertainment.' And since they're not very, they've been
downregulated.
My choice being shackled e'n more to chains of FIRE, or living a healthy happy life,
rather than increasing my stress by fighting institutions, we're investing in ourselves. Good
sleep, good food, good exercise.
The basis of our diet is coffee, with cocoa (7% daily fiber with each tablespoon) and
organic heavy whipping cream (your fats should be organic (;)). That cream's not cheap; well,
actually it is amazingly cheap considering the energy inputs. I'll be fasting soon to murder
cancer cells, and fasting also costs, lets see, nothing.
That the best thing you can do is nothing, occasionally, is a strong offset to the
institutional framework. Janet's been a nurse 40 years, and every day (truth) we get another
instance of not wanting the probisci inserted. Even when we get M4A, we'll be cautious in our
approach.
I suppose that here we are looking at the dogs that did not bark for evidence of
self-censorship. Certainly my plans to take over the world I do not keep on my computer. I
had not considered the matter but I think that a case could be made that this may extend
further than just writers. The number of writers that cannot publish in the US but must
publish their work in obscure overseas publications is what happens to those who do not seek
to self censor. There are other forms of censorship to be true. I read once where there was
an editorial meeting for either the Washington Post or New York Times when a story came up
that would make Israel look bad. The people at the table looked around and without so much as
a nod that story was dropped from publication. Now that is self-censorship.
But I can see this self censorship at work elsewhere. To let my flight take fancy, who will
paint the modern "Guernica" in this age? Would there be any chance that a modern studio would
ever film something like "The Day After" mentioned in comments yesterday again? With so many
great stories to be told, why has Hollywood run itself into a creative ditch and is content
to film 1960s TV shows as a movie or a version of Transformers number 32? Where are the
novels being written that will come to represent this era in the way that "The Great Gatsby"
came to represent the 1920s? My point is that with a total surveillance culture, I have the
feeling that this is permeating the culture and creating a chilling effect right across the
board and just not in writing.
What we are experiencing censorship-wise is nothing new, just more insidious. It is not
even a Left/Right politics issue. We just saw Trumpist fascist conservatives KILL the
Weekly Standard (an action praised by Trump) for advocating the wrong
conservativism. The shift in the televised/streamed media from news to infotainment has
enabled neoliberal capitalism to censor any news that might alienate viewers/subscribers to
justify obscene charges for advertising. Hilariously, even fascist Laura Ingram got gored by
her own neolib ox.
Of course, a certain amount of self-censorship is prudent. Insulting, inflammatory,
inciteful, hateful speech seldom animates beneficial change – just pointless violence
(an sometimes law suits). Americans especially are so hung up on "free speech" rights that
they too often fail to realize that no speech is truly free . There are always consequences
for the purveyor, good and bad. Ask any kid on the playground with a bloody nose.
I would like to see some Google traitor write an article on the latest semantic analysis
algorithms and tools. Thanks to the government, nobody but the FEDs and Google have access to
these new tools that can mine terabytes of speech in seconds to highlight global patterns
which might indicate plotting or organizing that might be entirely legal. I have been trying
for years to get access to the newer unobtainable tools to help improve the development of
diagnostic and monitoring self-report health measures. Such tools can also quickly scan
journals to highlight and coordinate findings to accelerate new discoveries. For now, they
are used to determine if your emails indicate you are a jihadist terrorist or dope peddler,
or want to buy a Toyota or a Ford.
Rhetorical I know, but Don DeLillo is quite good. It was in his novel Libra ,
although arguably from/about a different era at this point, where it first hit home to me
that the Blob really does manipulate the media to its own ends all the time. And you can't
swing a cat without hitting a terrorist in his books.
But to your point, DeLillo is pretty old at this point and I'm hard pressed to think of
anyone picking up his mantle. And none of his novels, as brilliant as some of them might be,
rise to the level of The Great Gatsby in the popular imagination to begin with.
The surveillance people are the nicest, kindest human beings that have only your best
interest at heart.
They would never break down your door and terrorize you for searching online for a
pressure cooker and if you heard stories that they did that, the surveillancers have an
answer for you, it's fake news, and if you persisted in not believing them, there are other
methods of persuasion to get you to change your mind or at least shut up about it.
That pressure cooker story gets a lot of mileage. While there is undoubtedly a lot of
surveillance it might be interesting to see a story on just how much of it leads to actual
arrests on real or trumped up charges. Here's suggesting that the paranoia induced by books
like Surveillance Valley is over the top in the same way that TV news' focus on crime stories
causes the public to think that crime is rampant when it may actually be declining.
That said, journalists who indulge their vanity with Facebook or Twitter accounts are
obviously asking for it. And the journalistic world in general needs to become a lot more
technologically "literate" and realize that Youtube videos can be faked as well as how to
separate the internet wheat from the chaff. Plus there's that old fashioned way of learning a
story that is probably the way most stories are still reported: talking to
people–hopefully in a room that hasn't been bugged.
Just to add that while the above may apply to America that doesn't mean the web isn't a
much more sinister phenomenon in countries like China with its new social trust score. We
must make sure the US never goes there.
For your first sentence I think you are referencing:
The surveillance people are "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being[s]
I've ever known in my life." (ref. Statement by Major Marco about Raymond Shaw from 1962 and
2004 movies "The Manchurian Candidate"). ?
Maybe you need some refresher re-education.
Expression of minority opinions and surpressed information is not a safe activity, thus we
self censor. However reality asserts itself and perhaps in those moments one can more safely
express alternate points of view. As far as writing online i worry about the future –
with everything recorded and searchable, will we at some point be facing round ups of
dissidents? What kind of supression will stressed governments and corporate hierarchies do in
the future?
I think the last blog post I wrote that was linked here at NC was called "TPP is
Treason."
I was writing and was published on the Internet from 2011-2016. I continue to write, but I
no longer publish anything online, I closed my Facebook account, and I rarely comment on
articles outside of NC, especially anywhere I have to give up a digital-ton of personal info
and contacts just to say a few words one time.
Goodness knows I do not worry a bit about fundamentalist Islamic militancy. Do I have any
anxiety about jackbooted "law enforcement" mercenaries in riot gear and automatic rifles
breaking down my door at the behest, basically, of the corporate/banking/billionaire,
neoliberal/neoconservative status quo, my big mouth excoriating these elite imperialists, at
the same time asset forfeiture laws are on the books and I can have EVERYTHING taken from me
for growing a single plant of cannabis, or even having any cannabis in my house, or not, all
they have to report to a complicit media and prosecutorial State is that I was growing
cannabis when there was none.
Of course there is little danger of that if I am not publishing, and hardly anyone knows I
ever have, and no one currently is paying any attention.
The fact in America at least is, as long as the status quo is secure, TPTB don't really
care what I write, as long as they do not perceive it as a threat, and the only way they
would is if a LOT of people are listening But still, there is nothing more terrifying on
earth than America's Law/Corporate/Bank/Privatized Military/Media imperialist State, chilling
to say the least, evidenced in the extreme by a distracted, highly manipulated and neutered
citizenry.
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
"If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search
may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain."
Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz has asked SaraACarter.com to post her letter to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan
in support of her friend and colleague retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who will be
sentenced on Dec. 18. The Special Counsel's Office has requested that Flynn not serve any
jail time due to his cooperation with Robert Mueller's office. Based on new information
contained in a memorandum submitted to the court this week by Flynn's attorney, Sullivan has
ordered Mueller's office to turn over all exculpatory evidence and government documents on
Flynn's case by mid-day Friday. Sullivan is also requesting any documentation regarding the
first interviews conducted by former anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok and FBI Agent Joe Pientka
-known by the FBI as 302s- which were found to be dated more than seven months after the
interviews were conducted on Jan. 24, 2017, a violation of FBI policy, say current and former
FBI officials familiar with the process. According to information contained in Flynn's
memorandum, the interviews were dated Aug. 22, 2017.
Read Gritz's letter below... (emphasis added)
The Honorable Emmet G. Sullivan. December 5, 2018 U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia
333 Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington D.C. 20001
Re: Sentencing of Lt. General Michael T. Flynn (Ret.)
Dear Judge Sullivan:
I am submitting my letter directly since Mike Flynn's attorney has refused to submit it as
well as letters submitted by other individuals. I feel you need to hear from someone who was an
FBI Special Agent who not only worked with Mike, but also has personally witnessed and reported
unethical & sometimes illegal tactics used to coerce targets of investigations externally
and internally.
About Myself and FBI Career
For 16 years, I proudly served the American people as a Special Agent working diligently on
significant terrorism cases which earned noteworthy results and fostered substantial
interagency cooperation. Prior to serving in the FBI I was a Juvenile Probation Officer in
Camden, NJ. Currently, I am a Senior Information Security Metrics and Reporting Analyst with
Discover Financial Services in the Chicago Metro area. I have recently been named as a Senior
Fellow to the London Center for Policy Research.
While in the FBI, I served as a Special Agent, Supervisory Special Agent, Assistant
Inspector, Unit Chief, and a Senior Liaison Officer to the CIA. I served on the NSC's Hostage
and Personnel Working Group and brought numerous Americans out of captivity and was part of the
interagency team to codify policies outlining the whole of government approach to hostage
cases.
In November 2007, I was selected over 26 other candidates to become the Supervisory Special
Agent, CT Extraterritorial Squad; Washington Field Office (WFO) in Washington, DC. At WFO, I
led a squad of experts in extraterritorial evidence collection, overseas investigations,
operational security during terrorist attacks/events, and overseas criminal investigations. I
coordinated and managed numerous high profile investigations (Blackwater, Chuckie Taylor,
Robert Levinson, and other pivotal cases) comprised of teams from US and foreign intelligence,
military, and law enforcement agencies. I was commended for displaying comprehensive leadership
performance under pressure, extensive teamwork skills, while conducting critical investigative
analysis within and outside the FBI.
In December 2009, I was promoted to GS-15 Unit Chief (UC) of the Executive Strategy Unit,
Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD). While the UC, I codified the WMDD five-year
strategic plan, formulated goals and objectives throughout the division, while translating the
material into a directorate scorecard with cascading measurements reflecting functional and
operational unit areas. This was the only time in Washington, DC when I did not work with of
for McCabe.
From September to December 2010, I was selected as the FBI's top candidate to represent the
FBI, and the USG in a rigorous, intellectually stimulating; 12 week course for civilian
government officials, military officers, and government academics at the George C. Marshall
Center in Garmisch, Germany, Executive Program in Advanced Security Studies. The class was
comprised of 141 participants from 43 countries.
I have received numerous recommendations and commendations for my professionalism, liaison
and interpersonal ability and experience . Additionally, I have been rated Excellent or
Outstanding for my entire career, to include by Andrew McCabe when I was stationed at the
Washington Field Office. Further, other awards of note are: West Chester University 2005 Legacy
of Leadership recipient, Honored with House of Representatives Citation for Exemplary record of
Service, Leadership, and Achievements: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Awarded with a framed
Horn of Africa blood chit from the Department of Defense and Office of the DASD (POW/MPA/MIA)
for my work in bringing Americans Out of captivity, "Patriot, Law Enforcement Warrior, and
Friend."
Length of Association with Flynn, McCabe, and Mueller
I met Michael Flynn in 2005, while working in the Counterterrorism Division (CTD) at FBI
Headquarters (FBIHQ).
I met then Supervisory Special Agent Andrew McCabe, when he reported to CTD at FBIHQ, around
the same time. McCabe subsequently was the Assistant Section Chief over my unit, my Assistant
Special Agent in Charge at the Washington Field Office, and the Assistant Director (AD) over
CTD when I encountered the discrimination and McCabe spearheaded the retaliation personally
(according to documentation) against me.
I have known both men for 12-13 years and worked directly with both throughout my career.
They are on the opposite spectrum of each other with regard to truthfulness, temperament, and
ethics, both professionally and personally.
I regularly briefed former FBI Director and Special Prosecutor Mueller on controversial and
complex cases and attended Deputies meetings at the White house with then Deputy Director
Pistole. I got along with both and trusted both. Watching what has been done to Mike and
knowing someone on the 7th floor had to have notified Mueller of my situation (Pistole had
retired), has been significantly distressing to me.
Lt.G. Michael T. Flynn:
Mike and I were counterparts on a DOJ-termed ground-breaking initiative which served as a
model for future investigations, policies, legislation and FBI programs in the Terrorist Use of
the Internet. For this multi-faceted and leading-edge joint operation, I was commended by Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, Gen. Keith Alexander (NSA Director), and LtG. Michael Flynn as well as
others for leading the FBI's pivotal participation in this dynamic and innovative interagency
operation. I received two The National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation (NIMUC) I for my
role in this operation. The NIMUC is an award of the National Intelligence Awards Program, for
contributions to the United States Intelligence Community.
Mick Flynn has consistently and candidly been honest and straightforward with me since the
day I met him in 2005. He has been a mentor and someone I trust to give me frank advice when I
ask for his opinion. His caring nature has shown through especially when he saw me being torn
apart by the FBI and he felt compelled to write a letter in support of me. He further took the
extra step to comment on my character in an NPR article and interview exposing the wrongdoings
in my case and others who have stood up for truth and against discrimination/retaliation.
Senator Grassley also commented on my behalf. NPR characterized this action against me as a
"warning shot" to individuals who stood up to individuals such as McCabe.
The day after I resigned from the FBI, while I was crying, Mike reached out and
congratulated me on my early retirement. I really needed to hear that from someone I respected
so much. His support for the last 13 years has been unparalleled and extremely valuable in
helping me get through the trauma of betrayal, unethical behavior, illegal activity executed
against me and to rebuild my life. Additionally, his support has helped my family in dealing
with their painful emotions regarding my situation. My parents wanted me to pass on to you that
they are blessed that I have had a compassionate and supportive individual on my side
throughout this trying time.
Mike has been a respected leader by his peers and by FBI Agents and Analysts who have
interacted with him. I personally feel he is the finest leader I have ever worked with or for
in my career. Our continued friendship and subsequent friendship with his family has helped all
of us cope with the stress a situation like this puts on individuals and families.
It is so very painful to watch an American hero, and my friend, torn apart like this. His
family has had to endure what no family should have to. I know this because of the damaging
effect my case had on my parent's health, finances, and emotional well-being. Mike and I both
had to sell our houses due to legal fees, endured smear campaigns (mostly by the same
individual, McCabe). I ended up being deemed homeless by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was
on public assistance and endured extensive health and emotional damage due to the retaliation.
Mike kept in touch and kept me motivated. He has always reached out to help me with whatever he
could.
The Process is the Punishment
Thomas Fitton of Judicial Watch commented to me that the "Process is the punishment." This
is the most accurate description I have heard regarding the time Mike has gone through with
this process and the year and a half I was ostracized and idled before I resigned. This process
is one which many FBI employees, current, retired and former, feel was brought to the FBI by
Mueller and he subsequently brought this to the Special Prosecutor investigation.
It also fostered the behavior among FBI "leadership" which we find ourselves shocked at when
revealed on a daily basis. Is this the proper way to seek justice? I say no. I swore to uphold
the Constitution while protecting the civil rights of the American people. I believe many
individuals involved in Mike's case have lost their way and could care less about protection of
due process, civil and legal rights of who they are targeting. Mike has had extensive
punishment throughout this process. This process has punished him harder than anyone else
could.
Andrew McCabe
I believe I have a unique inside view of the mannerisms surrounding Andrew McCabe, other FBI
Executive Management and Former Director Mueller, as well as the unethical and coercive tactics
they use, not to seek the truth, but to coerce pleas or admissions to end the pain, as I call
it. They destroy lives for their own agendas instead of seeking the truth for the American
people. Candor is something that should be encouraged and used by leadership to have necessary
and continued improvement. Under Mueller, it was seen as a threat and viciously opposed by
those he pulled up in the chain of command.
I am explaining this because numerous Agents have expressed the need for you to know
McCabe's and Mueller's pattern of "target and destroy" has been utilized on many others,
without regard for policies and laws. I, myself, am a casualty of this reprehensible behavior
and I have spoken to well over 150 other FBI individuals who are casualties as well.
I am the individual who filed the Hatch Act complaint against McCabe and provided
significant evidentiary documents obtained via FOIA, open source, and information from current,
former, and retired Special Agents. The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) asked why my filing of
the complaint was delayed from the actual acts. I said I personally thought I was providing
additional information to what should have been an automatic referral to OSC by FBI OPR. I was
notified I was the only complainant. This illustrates not only a fatal flaw in OPR AD Candice
Will not making the appropriate and crucial referral, but also shows the fear of those within
the FBI to report individuals like McCabe for fear of retaliation.
While serving at the CIA, detailed by the FBI in January 2012, I was responsible for
overseas investigations, as opposed to Continental United States-based (CONUS) cases.
Unfortunately, during my assignment at the CIA, I encountered extensive discrimination by two
FBI Special Agents and subsequently, in 2012, I filed an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)
complaint. Instead of addressing the issues, then CTD Assistant Director Andrew McCabe chose to
authorize a retaliatory Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigation against me,
five days after my EEO contact. The OPR referral he signed was authored by the two individuals
I had filed the EEO complaint against. In his signed sworn statement, McCabe admitted he knew I
had filed or was going to file the EEO.
Numerous members of my department at the CIA requested to be spoken with by CTD executive
management, regarding my work ethic and accomplishments. However, CTD, Inspection Division, and
OPR disregarded the list of names and contact numbers I submitted. This is an example of
knowing you are being targeted and the truth is not being sought.
Although my time at this position was short, I was commended by my CIA direct supervisor
for: "having already contributed more than your predecessor in the short time you have been
here." My predecessor had been assigned to the post for 18 months; I had been there four
months.
In contrast and showing lack of candor, McCabe wrote on official documents the following
statement, contradicting the actual direct supervisor I worked with daily:
"SA Gritz had to be removed from a prior position in an interagency environment, due to
inappropriate communications and general performance issues"
This is one of many comments McCabe used to discredit my reputation and to ostracize me.
McCabe knew me as someone who told the truth, worked hard, got results, and was always willing
to be flexible when needed. He was also acutely aware of the excellent relationships I had
formed in the USG interagency due to comments made by individuals from numerous agencies. Yet,
he continued to make false statements on official documents. He has done this to numerous other
very valuable FBI employees, destroying their careers and lives. He used similar tactics of
lies against Flynn. It should be noted, McCabe was very aware of my professional association
with Mike Flynn.
In July 5, 2012, I was involuntarily pulled back to CTD from the CIA. I was told McCabe made
the decision. A year and a month later, I resigned from the job I absolutely loved and was good
at. All because of the lack of candor of numerous individuals within the FBI.
Unethical and
dishonest investigative tactics
Throughout the last year, I have kept abreast of the revelations surrounding anything
related to Mike's case. I believe, from my years at the FBI and in exposing corruption and
discrimination, the circumstances surrounding the targeting, investigation, leaking, and
coercion of him to plea are all consistent with the unethical process I and many others have
witnessed at the FBI. The charge which Mike Flynn plead to was the result of deception,
intimidation, and bias/agenda. Simply, Mike is being branded a convicted felon due to an
unethical and dishonest investigation by people who were malicious, vindictive, and corrupt.
They wished to silence Mike, like they had once silenced me.
The American people have read the Strzok/Page text messages, the conflicting testimony and
lack of candor statements of former Director Comey, the perceived overstepping of the
reasonable scope of the Special Prosecutor's investigation, the extensive unethical,
untruthful, and outright illegal behavior of Andrew McCabe, to include slanderous statements
against Flynn, and the facts found within FOIA released documents and Congressional testimony.
As a former/retired Agent, I have combed through every piece of information regarding Mike's
case, as if I was combing through evidence in the hundreds of cases I have successfully handled
while in the FBI.
The publicly reported Brady material alone, in this case, outweighs any statement given by
any FBI Agent (we now know at least one FD-302 was changed), Special Prosecutor investigator
report, and any other party still aggressively seeking that this case remain and be sentenced
as a felony. Quite simply, I cannot see justice being served by branding LtG. Michael Flynn a
convicted felon, when the truth is still being revealed while policies, ethics, and laws have
been violated by those pursuing this case.
We now know all FBI employees involved in Mike Flynn's case have either been fired, forced
to resign or forced to retire because of their excessive lack of candor, punitive biases,
leaking of information, and extensive cover-up of their deeds.
Summation
Michael Flynn has always displayed overwhelming candor and forthrightness. One of the main
individuals involved in his case is Andrew McCabe, who used similar tactics against me in my
case, of which Mike Flynn defended me by penning a letter of character reference and is a
witness. Seeing McCabe was named as a Responding Management Official in my case, he should have
recused himself with anything having to do with a character witness on my behalf against him
and DOJ.
I'm told by numerous people, but have been unable to confirm, that McCabe was asked why he
was so viciously going after Flynn; my name was mentioned. I do know, from experience with
McCabe, he is a vindictive individual and I have no doubt Mike's support of me fueled McCabe's
disdain and personally vindictive aggressive unethical activities in this case . It matches his
behavior in my case.
Reliable fact-finding is essential to procedural due process and to the accuracy and
uniformity of sentencing. I'm unsure if the fact-finding in this case is reliable, nor do I
think we currently have all the facts.
The punishment which LtG. Flynn has already endured this past year, due to the nature of the
case, legal fees and reputation damage, is punishment enough. He is a true patriot, a loving
husband and father, a devoted grandfather, a trusted friend, and has a close knit family made
up of compassionate and honest individuals. To be branded a felon, is a major hit to a hero who
protected the American people for 33 years. I do not think society would benefit from Mike
Flynn going to jail nor being branded as a convicted felon. Not knowing the sentencing
guidelines for this charge but if there is any chance that the case can be downgraded to a
misdemeanor, this would be an act of justice that numerous Americans need to see to stay
hopeful for further justice.
This lady is seriously brave. She confirms one more reason i strongly support our Second
Amendment; it's to protect us from tyrants and corrupt people like McCabe, Ohr, Comey and
Mueller. Oh yes. I almost forget Rosenstein who should be hung for treason also.
WOW...all this time I had been asking where are the whistle blowers and kept saying,
certainly not all the FBI are this corrupt -and further asked are they being threatened to
not come forward?"
Well, the later sure seems true when you consider Ms. Gristz statements, particularly "
the fear of those within the FBI to report individuals like McCabe for fear of retaliation.
"
This is the level of corruption that ought to bring this entire cabal to their knees and
place them behind bars. Hopefully Judge Sullivan's intuitions will be bolstered by Ms.
Gristz' letter.
The FBI is corrupt to the core...from top to bottom. If she joined the FBI to "uphold the
Constitution" or "serve the American People" or some other horseshit then that was her first
mistake. The FBI is a completely corrupt & unconstitutional organization that protects
only the (((globalists))) and other enemies of freedom. The Hoover Buliding should be
padlocked and all of the agents of evil put on trial for treason.
Flynn was an example to the rest of the Trump supporters. His guilt or innocense was/is
meaningless and irrlevant to the Prog Attack Dogs. The message was/is clear:
"We are the Power. Resistance is futile. Bend your knee or we will destroy you."
It is prudent for reasonable people to believe that the Progs have spent the past couple
years destroying evidence that can be used against their gods (Obama, Clinton, Soros, etc.)
and their cohorts.
There is no penalty or negative consequence for the Mueller team who engaged in
"unethical" activity. None of them will have to answer to anyone or disgorge the millions of
dollars in "fees" they have been paid by the Sheeple.
All Progs must hang.
Christopher Wray must hang next.
It is very interesting and educational to read this pre-election article two years later and see where the author is
right and where he is wrong. The death of neoliberalism was greatly exaggerated. It simply mutated in the USA into "national
neoliberalism" under Trump. As no clear alternative exists it remain the dominant ideology and universities still
brainwash students with neoclassical economics. And in way catchy slogan "Make America great again" under Trump
means "Make American working and lower middle class great again"
It is also clear that Trump betrayed or was forced to betray most of his election promises. Standrd of living of common
americans did not improve under his watch. most of hi benefits of his tax cuts went to large corporations and financial
oligarch. He continued the policy of financial deregulation, which is tantamount of playing with open fire trying to
warm up the house
What we see under Trump is tremendous growth of political role of intelligence agencies which now are real kingmakers and can
sink any candidate which does not support their agenda. And USA intelligence agencies operated in 2016 in close cooperation
with the UK intelligence agencies to the extent that it is not clear who has the lead in creating Steele dossier. They are
definitely out of control of executive branch and play their own game. We also see a rise of CIA democrats as a desperate
attempt to preserve the power of Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ('soft neoliberals" turned under Hillary into into warmongers
and neocons) . Hillary and Bill themselves clearly belong to CIA democrats too, not only to Wall Street democrats, despite the fact
that they sold Democratic Party to Wall Street in the past. New Labor in UK did the same.
But if it is more or less clear now what happened in the USa in 2016-2018, it is completely unclear what will happen next.
I think in no way neoliberalism will start to be dismantled. there is no social forces powerful enough to start this job, We
probably need another financial crisi of the scale of 2008 for this work to be reluctantly started by ruling
elite. And we better not to have this repetition of 2008 as it will be really devastating for common people.
Notable quotes:
"... the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye turned to corporate evasion. ..."
"... It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present. ..."
"... In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has stagnated for over 30 years . ..."
"... On average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014. ..."
"... As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late 70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none. As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable. ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both. ..."
"... According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population. ..."
"... The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement. ..."
"... Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely one of secular stagnation . ..."
"... those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s. ..."
In the early 1980s the author was one of the first to herald the emerging dominance of neoliberalism in the west. Here he argues
that this doctrine is now faltering. But what happens next?
The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The
crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks
were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour
was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary
policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade,
with no end in sight.
After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism
manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic
disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left
had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic
in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic.
But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.
The first inkling of the wider political consequences was evident in the turn in public opinion against the banks, bankers and
business leaders. For decades, they could do no wrong: they were feted as the role models of our age, the default troubleshooters
of choice in education, health and seemingly everything else. Now, though, their star was in steep descent, along with that of the
political class. The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It
marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis.
But the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial
crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the
late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services
and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby
creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned
as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye
turned to corporate evasion.
It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic
period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism,
when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.
But by far the most disastrous feature of the neoliberal period has been the huge growth in inequality. Until very recently, this
had been virtually ignored. With extraordinary speed, however, it has emerged as one of, if not the most important political issue
on both sides of the Atlantic, most dramatically in the US. It is, bar none, the issue that is driving the political discontent that
is now engulfing the west. Given the statistical evidence, it is puzzling, shocking even, that it has been disregarded for so long;
the explanation can only lie in the sheer extent of the hegemony of neoliberalism and its values.
But now reality has upset the doctrinal apple cart. In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced
very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income
while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than
it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has
stagnated for over 30 years .
A not so dissimilar picture is true of the UK. And the problem has grown more serious since the financial crisis. On average,
between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real
incomes between 2005 and 2014.
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot
The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against
labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded,
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the
Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being but the latest examples; the politico-legal attack on the unions;
the encouragement of large-scale immigration in both the US and Europe that helped to undermine
the bargaining power of the domestic workforce; and the failure to retrain displaced workers in any meaningful way.
As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of
countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late
70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none.
As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable.
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot, as graphically illustrated by
the support for Trump and Sanders in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK. This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat
denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent
essay
in Foreign Affairs : "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens
that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is
generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.
Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s.
Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left
behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which
they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing
elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.
The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly
remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the "working class" was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans
described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup
poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.
Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt. Hitherto, on both sides of the Atlantic, the agency of class has been in retreat
in the face of the emergence of a new range of identities and issues from gender and race to sexual orientation and the environment.
The return of class, because of its sheer reach, has the potential, like no other issue, to redefine the political landscape.
The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, is a function of politics
The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labor movement. They are not synonymous: this is obvious in the US
and increasingly the case in the UK. Indeed, over the last half-century, there has been a growing separation between the two in Britain.
The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as
an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement.
Indeed, Ukip has been as important – in the form of immigration and Europe – in shaping its current attitudes as the Labour party.
In the United States, both Trump and Sanders have given expression to the working-class revolt, the latter almost as much as the
former. The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, as the left liked to think, is a function of
politics.
The neoliberal era is being undermined from two directions. First, if its record of economic growth has never been particularly
strong, it is now dismal. Europe is barely larger than it was on the eve of the financial crisis in 2007; the United States has done
better but even its growth has been anaemic. Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely
one of secular stagnation .
Worse, because the recovery has been so weak and fragile, there is a widespread belief that another financial crisis may well
beckon. In other words, the neoliberal era has delivered the west back into the kind of crisis-ridden world that we last experienced
in the 1930s. With this background, it is hardly surprising that a majority in the west now believe their children will be worse
off than they were. Second, those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they
are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes,
just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s.
A sure sign of the declining influence of neoliberalism is the rising chorus of intellectual voices raised against it. From the
mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers. But since the western
financial crisis, the centre of gravity of the intellectual debate has shifted profoundly. This is most obvious in the United States,
with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs becoming increasingly influential. Thomas Piketty's
Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been a massive seller. His work and that of
Tony Atkinson
and Angus Deaton have pushed the question of the inequality to the top of the political agenda. In the UK,
Ha-Joon Chang , for long isolated within the economics
profession, has gained a following far greater than those who think economics is a branch of mathematics.
Meanwhile, some of those who were previously strong advocates of a neoliberal approach, such as Larry Summers and the Financial
Times 's Martin Wolf, have become extremely critical. The wind is in the sails of the critics of neoliberalism; the neoliberals
and monetarists are in retreat. In the UK, the media and political worlds are well behind the curve. Few recognize that we are at
the end of an era. Old attitudes and assumptions still predominate, whether on the BBC's Today programme, in the rightwing
press or the parliamentary Labor party.
Following Ed Miliband's resignation as Labour leader, virtually no one foresaw the triumph of
Jeremy Corbyn in the subsequent leadership election.
The assumption had been more of the same, a Blairite or a halfway house like Miliband, certainly not anyone like Corbyn. But the
zeitgeist had changed. The membership, especially the young who had joined the party on an unprecedented scale, wanted a complete
break with New Labour. One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment
is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalisation. The most extreme
forms of this phenomenon were New Labour and the Democrats, who in the late 90s and 00s became its advance guard, personified by
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, triangulation and the third way.
But as David Marquand observed in a review for the New Statesman , what is the point of a social democratic party if
it doesn't represent the less fortunate, the underprivileged and the losers? New Labour deserted those who needed them, who historically
they were supposed to represent. Is it surprising that large sections have now deserted the party who deserted them? Blair, in his
reincarnation as a money-obsessed consultant to a shady bunch of presidents and dictators, is a fitting testament to the demise of
New Labour.
The rival contenders – Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – represented continuity. They were swept away by Corbyn, who won nearly 60%
of the votes. New Labour was over, as dead as Monty Python's parrot. Few grasped the meaning of what had happened. A Guardian
leader welcomed the surge in membership and then, lo and behold, urged support for Yvette Cooper, the very antithesis of the
reason for the enthusiasm. The PLP refused to accept the result and ever since has tried with might and main to remove Corbyn.
Just as the Labour party took far too long to come to terms with the rise of Thatcherism and the birth of a new era at the end
of the 70s, now it could not grasp that the Thatcherite paradigm, which they eventually came to embrace in the form of New Labour,
had finally run its course. Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour
turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an
authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better
Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also
his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand
the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political
environment, devoid of any certainties of almost any kind, in which Labour finds itself dangerously divided and weakened.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better. David Cameron was guilty of
a huge and irresponsible miscalculation over Brexit. He was forced to resign in the most ignominious of circumstances. The party
is hopelessly divided. It has no idea in which direction to move after Brexit. The Brexiters painted an optimistic picture of turning
away from the declining European market and embracing the expanding markets of the world, albeit barely mentioning by name which
countries it had in mind. It looks as if the new prime minister may have an anachronistic hostility towards China and a willingness
to undo the good work of George Osborne. If the government turns its back on China, by far the fastest growing market in the world,
where are they going to turn?
Brexit has left the country fragmented and deeply divided, with the very real prospect that Scotland might choose independence.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem to have little understanding that the neoliberal era is in its death throes.
Dramatic as events have been in the UK, they cannot compare with those in the United States. Almost from nowhere,
Donald Trump rose to capture the Republican nomination
and confound virtually all the pundits and not least his own party. His message was straightforwardly anti-globalisation. He believes
that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favour of the big corporations that have been encouraged to invest
around the world and thereby deprive American workers of their jobs. Further, he argues that large-scale immigration has weakened
the bargaining power of American workers and served to lower their wages.
He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the US. He believes that the North American
Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has had the effect of exporting American jobs to Mexico. On similar grounds, he is opposed to the TPP
and the TTIP. And he also accuses China of stealing American jobs, threatening to impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports.
To globalisation Trump counterposes economic nationalism: "Put America first". His appeal, above all, is to the white working
class who, until Trump's (and Bernie Sander's) arrival on the political scene, had been ignored and largely unrepresented since the
1980s. Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary how their interests have been
neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich
and Wall Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the white working class. With the arrival
of Trump they finally found a representative: they won Trump the Republican nomination.
Trump believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources
The economic nationalist argument has also been vigorously pursued by
Bernie Sanders , who ran Hillary Clinton extremely
close for the Democratic nomination and would probably have won but for more than 700 so-called super-delegates, who were effectively
chosen by the Democratic machine and overwhelmingly supported Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans, the Democrats have long
supported a neoliberal, pro-globalisation strategy, notwithstanding the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and
the Democrats now find themselves deeply polarised between the pro- and anti-globalisers, an entirely new development not witnessed
since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40 years ago.
Another plank of Trump's nationalist appeal – "Make America great again" – is his position on foreign policy. He believes that
America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources. He argues that the country's alliance system is unfair,
with America bearing most of the cost and its allies contributing far too little. He points to Japan and South Korea, and NATO's
European members as prime examples. He seeks to rebalance these relationships and, failing that, to exit from them.
As a country in decline, he argues that America can no longer afford to carry this kind of financial burden. Rather than putting
the world to rights, he believes the money should be invested at home, pointing to the dilapidated state of America's infrastructure.
Trump's position
represents a major critique of America as the world's hegemon. His arguments mark a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalisation
ideology that has reigned since the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These arguments
must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of their authorship. But Trump is no man of the left.
He is a populist of the right. He has launched a racist and xenophobic attack on Muslims and on Mexicans. Trump's appeal is to a
white working class that feels it has been cheated by the big corporations, undermined by Hispanic immigration, and often resentful
towards African-Americans who for long too many have viewed as their inferior.
A Trump America would mark a descent into authoritarianism characterised by abuse, scapegoating, discrimination, racism, arbitrariness
and violence; America would become a deeply polarised and divided society. His threat to impose
45%
tariffs on China , if implemented, would certainly provoke retaliation by the Chinese and herald the beginnings of a new era
of protectionism.
Trump may well lose the presidential election just as Sanders failed in his bid for the Democrat nomination. But this does not
mean that the forces opposed to hyper-globalisation – unrestricted immigration, TPP and TTIP, the free movement of capital and much
else – will have lost the argument and are set to decline. In little more than 12 months, Trump and Sanders have transformed the
nature and terms of the argument. Far from being on the wane, the arguments of the critics of hyper-globalisation are steadily gaining
ground. Roughly two-thirds of Americans agree that "we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our
own national problems". And, above all else, what will continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalisers is inequality.
End of cheap oil is the next milestone in the development of neoliberalism. It remain to be seen if it can survive the end of
cheap oil.
Notable quotes:
"... According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population. ..."
"... American politicians, Obama in particular, constantly talk about "the middle class" when they want to refer to the bulk of the working population, as if almost everybody were doctors, lawyers, teachers and managers. ..."
"... This situation in the USA remind me of Australia where we have a choice between two right wing parties ..."
"... austerity for the working class while the rich go untouched even to pay a fair share of taxation. It's world wide the servants of the 1% who own 50% of the world's economy. ..."
"... There is no country in the world that doesn't have a mixture of both. The mix is probably a bit strained in north Korea but those countries where private capital is supreme all have intolerable conditions for workers. The Nordic countries probably have the most enlightened approach and best living standards for the majority. Remember well the old adage: With communism man exploits man. With capitalism it's the other way round. ..."
"... one can only hope neoliberalism is dead and/or dying.... ..."
"... Trump does not truly represent the labor or economically frustrated class. He is saying things that they'd like to hear. He is a rich and pompous man who belongs to the class which benefited tremendously from neoliberalistic policies. People are so fed up with inequality, their emotions can be directed in any direction and manipulated. Anger needs a target - Mexicans, Blacks, women, Muslims, immigrants and the list expands. Trump is misleading them by speaking in their voices while enjoying the comfort of luxury that he built by exploiting those very people. ..."
Quote: According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working
class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.
How strange. American politicians, Obama in particular, constantly talk about "the middle
class" when they want to refer to the bulk of the working population, as if almost everybody
were doctors, lawyers, teachers and managers. It's good therefore to know that the American
people know better than their politicians how to classify themselves.
This situation in the USA remind me of Australia where we have a choice between two right
wing parties. The LNP is extreme/ultra right wing and our Labor Party is right wing
controlled. At least in Britain you have a choice, from afar it seems that your Conservative
Party is equal to our LNP but your Labour Party seems to be a little more Left wing than our
Labor Party which is a good thing for Britain.
willpodmore your next target must be your tory government, they are doing to you what our
tory government in Australia is doing to us and if Trump gets elected the USA tory government
will do to them, austerity for the working class while the rich go untouched even to pay a
fair share of taxation. It's world wide the servants of the 1% who own 50% of the world's
economy. If you don't believe me type the 1% own 50% of Earth's economy into Dr Goggle and
see what come up.
The one thing all Left leaning people do agree on is 'fairness' and equity for all, in
economic terms it means that huge corporations pay a fair share of tax, as working people do.
Sadly Tory govts ignore the profits of corporations and fail to force them to pay a fair
share of tax. The basic problem that the neo-cons suffer from is insatiable greed where
enough is never enough, selfishness is also a trait along with lack of empathy or compassion
for their fellow mankind.
"neoliberalism" is simply unregulated capitalism as practiced by Tory governments around the
world. Labour governments usually regulate and force these huge corporations to pay a fair
share of taxation from their huge incomes. The corporations are owned by the 1% who own 50%
of the world economy and continuing to grow on a daily basis.
Yes, nothing has changed in my lifetime except the 1% now own 50% of Earth's economy. Working
people have always struggled while the rich build their mansions, both Bernie Sanders and
Jeremy Corbyn have the right idea of a fair distribution of wealth. This means these huge
corporations paying their fair share of their income in taxes to the host country so "all"
the people receive some benefit, apart from the 1%.
blaster1, the joke of the century, globalisation -- which will only increase to the benefit of
everyone eventually. You obviously have little knowledge apart from what the Tories feed you.
1% of the global population own 50% of Earth's economy and through their corporations who the
tories allow to avoid paying tax will build on that 50% how long will it eventually take the
other 99% to receive any benefit? 200,000 years?
Exploitation is high on the priority list of any Tory government, wealth should be
distributed much more fairly than it currently is. The tories only serve the rich, they have
no time or empathy for the poor. Empathy and compassion are vacant in the tory philosophy of
the world. These two components make up a psychopathic personality.
pantomimetorie yes, and England could also be if you had a government who were not merely
servants of the rich. A government interested in the fair distribution of wealth. Not a tory
government, obviously!
There's no such thing as neoliberalism, it's just capitalism and capitalism actually works,
unlike socialism.
Yes it works alright, it works for the 1% of the global population who own 50% of the global
economy, sadly it leaves in its wake an underclass of people living below the poverty line
struggling to survive. It works for the rich, but there is no mechanism in the system that
the conservative will use to force the rich to pay their fair share of taxation to the
country included in that are the multibillion pound multinational corporations who pay little
to naught in taxes also which leaves a huge swathe of the population on Struggle Street and
the sooner that democratic socialism is instituted the better off the other 99% will be.
Keep up! There is no country in the world that doesn't have a mixture of both. The mix is
probably a bit strained in north Korea but those countries where private capital is supreme
all have intolerable conditions for workers. The Nordic countries probably have the most
enlightened approach and best living standards for the majority. Remember well the old
adage:
With communism man exploits man.
With capitalism it's the other way round.
Think they call it lobbying. Companies pay professional lobby firms staffed with ex MPs or
whatever to ' meet' ministers. The PR companies make 'donations' to party funds and push for
government contracts, changes in legislation, favorable to their industry tax breaks. You
can do it of course. Write to your mp to get your local roads, parks, libraries, improved.
Don't hold your breath.
That has to be the joke of the year if not the century!!!!!!!!!!!!
The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and
the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was
double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.
It would be interesting to see those growth figures with inflation taken into account or
to average them out across the whole world and not just the West. I suspect that if the
massive growth in India, China and the rest of Asia was taken into account the growth figures
wouldn't be so bad.
Excuse me? You're the one claiming rural inhabitants "have no idea" what city life entails.
That may have been the case centuries ago, but not now. Offshoring is small potatoes in the shift of global production. It may have been big news
a decade ago. We aren't a decade ago.
"Poverty = no kids" is your myth. Human history proves otherwise. Nobody's "decimating western/westernized population for profit". Is what you're about
really more white people, fewer brown people? Just say it, this is the Guardian, we've heard
it all before.
So run your country then. But intelligently, not on the basis of twisted myth-making and
dodgy race myths that we had enough of in 1945.
The left, at least as far as I know, have not been able to build up a solid set of
ideas on which to build a political agenda nor have they sought to gain traction for their
ideas in sites of knowledge production. The neoliberals were organised and waiting when
their turn came. For me, the left have fragmented and have turned to cultural critiques and
identity politics, forgoing any kind of realistic transformative agenda.
Apologies for not answering earlier.
i) Traction in sites of knowledge production is happening certainly. Again I can point to the
article for support - Stiglitz, Ha-Joon Chang, Piketty etc did not arise to such prominence
due to an organised left-wing agenda but because events in the real world demanded an
explanation for why neoliberalism wasn't delivering its universal benison as promised, and
indeed was showing empirical signs that it might be poisonous to economic activity in certain
fundamental ways.
ii) In my view it is quite possible to support identity politics (social liberalism if you
like) and a more left wing view of economics. At present the more enthusiastic placard wavers
are seeing identity politics as more likely to produce a beneficial change, but many are
recognising that the former hegemony of neoliberalism is breaking, and the best way to really
enhance the welfare of vulnerable groups is to promote universal economic justice in some
form.
iii) You appear to want to replace one hegemonic system of thought with another. But these
are the wrong tactics for me, since we have things to do in the real world.
By all means explain some of the properties your new left hegemonic theory should have, I'd
be very interested to hear them.
But in the end the practical steps are obvious and consist of applying left wing principles
to the modern economy. An example would be privatising the natural monopoly of the
railways.
If that sounds retro, it isn't, because we've never had to deal with an economy in this
condition before. We must proceed step by step in my view. The hegemony of neoliberalism was
damaging and lasted 40 years and counting. We must be pragmatic to be successful, given what
we know about the modern economy, and proceed by finding successful strategies rather than an
abstruse new theory that ignores the messy present in favour of some pure, simple conception
of the world backed up by the PR department. As I said above, one of the critical faults of
neoliberalism is its insistence that it is the answer to everyone's prayers. That certainty
is also the seed of its destruction, because to avoid doubts it eventually has to answer
those unrealistic prayers.
Trump does not truly represent the labor or economically frustrated class. He is saying
things that they'd like to hear. He is a rich and pompous man who belongs to the class which
benefited tremendously from neoliberalistic policies. People are so fed up with inequality,
their emotions can be directed in any direction and manipulated. Anger needs a target -
Mexicans, Blacks, women, Muslims, immigrants and the list expands. Trump is misleading them
by speaking in their voices while enjoying the comfort of luxury that he built by exploiting
those very people.
Billions of Chinese and Indian have never seen a toilet in their life, so yes, they really
don't know what life in a city is. And that doesn't make them "dumb". In their domain,
farming, you don't look like a brain storm either.
Offshoring isn't a "tiny element". We are no longer self sustaining and if China slammed the
door (as they did for a brief instant on Japan), there'd be serious heartburn in the US
before transitioning.
The official western tautology is fail/fail for the public. Not enough jobs to consider
having kids? Too bad. Not enough money to raise your kids? Too bad. Due to natural events?
No, due to political gaming.
Decimating western/westernized population for profit. It's not complicated. It is you who
claim immigration is needed to leave it as it is. "Ending our ability to pay pensions by
ending immigration isn't improvement either. "
The west has no business meddling with the rest of the planet if it can't run their own
countries.
People aren't so dumb as you imagine. They really didn't know about life in the city? Every
village had its emigrant. I've no such disdain for those who made that move.
Offshoring's now a tiny element in western deindustrialisation. Your costs are too high,
you can't compete: don't blame those worse off than yourself, put your own house in order and
educate your workforce to do better than flip burgers.
"Birth control brings down reproduction rates" is a meaningless tautology. People have
been practising birth control for centuries, mainly by delaying marriage. The PRB peddles
malthusian nonsense that the past half-century has clearly discredited. I thought you were
for population growth anyway: "economies so economically unstable that population declines"?
Make your mind up.
The ridiculous boom did crash, in 2008. Maybe you missed it. I want to know how we go
forward. But people need to pay attention to what's going on outside our head too.
I correct misrepresentations of the truth such as yours.
And the problem with communism is that it suspends peoples right in favour of central
control.
Communism and socialism is a post -capitalist society, means exactly the same thing to
me as they did to Marx also.
The common ownership and democratic control by us all, of all the means and instruments
for creating and distributing wealth. 'Common' and 'social' mean the same.
Nothing to do with state ownership or corporate or private ownership.
Nothing to do with central control either . It is a post-capitalist system
which utilises the technological advances of capitalism to produce for use to satisfy human
needs, using self feeding loopback informational tools for stock measurements and control
with direct inputs at local regional and global levels to allow calculation in kind, as
opposed to the economic calculation of capitalism, only necessary to satisfy profit
taking.
The reality is that we can all choose to be rich or poor. We are free to do as we wish
(within the law).
Nonsense. If you are born poor you will most likely die poor. Poverty is both absolute
and relative.
All wealth comes from the exploited abour of the working class which creates a surplus value
above its rationed access (wages). A commonly owned society, would not have rich or poor, we
would all have free access to the commonly produced wealth, with no elite classes creaming it
off and storing it.
Other than that, mind your own damn business, if you can't deal with the arguments.
One of the biggest downsides of the rise of Corbyn and Sanders, interesting though it is, is
the oxygen it seems to be giving to several old Marxist hacks who have made a good living for
decades banging on about their discredited and blood soaked ideology, ie Jacques et al.
Recently joined by that newly hatched Marxist harpie on the block, the hipster bearded and
thoroughly poisonous Richard Seymour.
The fact is there is not and never was any such thing as "neoliberalism". What they are
really referring to is globalisation- which will only increase to the benefit of everyone
eventually. The world is shrinking ever faster and that is no bad thing. Progress, evolution,
the future, call it what you want. To try and make out that it is halting or in reverse is
plainly nonsense.
???
What I remember of Reagan,
- spent like a drunken sailor, "defense" spending, til it broke US economy
- unbounded "adjustable rate" and "balloon" mortgages, first bank bailout, bill kicked down
the road to Bush Sr., $125 billion, when it blew up
- "trickle down", wealth transfer, via having taxed public pick up the tab for not just his
defense binge spending, but also corporate welfare programs (patent office, Import/Export
bank, infrastructure, etc.)
- first soup kitchens, adults panhandling/will work for food signs that I'd ever seen
- illegal immigrant amnesty, millions
- "War On Drugs" and right after that black neighborhoods flooded with crack
Reagan and Thatcher kicking off their "gut the public of wealth" agenda.
Their story is "you're a failure". Because a) you don't work hard enough/long enough, b) hold
your household together (if you were at work all waking hours), c) don't know how to raise
decent, independent kids (whilst being at work every waking hour), d) aren't motivated to
improve your lot in life if you need to work every waking hour and e) probably need to take
stress management classes if this gets on your nerves because you personally are driving up
"our" health care costs with your irresponsible neglect of your health.
Or, as the economists tout in the papers, "Productivity is up!" Or as the oligarchical put
it, "we need immigrant work force", who'll do it for cheaper and not complain or
burden us with their need for an actual life outside of work.
Clinton is, was, and still is. despite her recent fake reversal, a staunch supporter of TPP
and other trade agreements that will further impoverish the working class. She is the
furthest thing from a populist. Case closed.
Neoliberal economic policies, with their emphasis on market-led development and individual
rationality, have been exposed as bankrupt not only by the global economic crisis but also by
increasing social opposition and resistance. Social movements and critical scholars in Latin
America, East Asia, Europe and the United States, alongside the Arab uprisings, have triggered
renewed debate on possible different futures. While for some years any discussion of
substantive alternatives has been marginalized, the global crisis since 2008 has opened up new
spaces to debate, and indeed to radically rethink, the meaning of development. Debates on
developmental change are no longer tethered to the pole of 'reform and reproduce': a new pole
of 'critique and strategy beyond' neoliberal capitalism has emerged.
Despite being forcefully challenged, neoliberalism has proven remarkably resilient. In the
first years since the crisis erupted, the bulk of the alternative literature pointed to
continued growth in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and in other big
emerging market countries to affirm the necessary role for the state in sustaining capitalist
development. New developmental economists have consequently reasserted themselves. Their
proposals converged into a broader demand for global Keynesianism (Patomaki, 2012) -- a demand
that is proving to be less and less realistic in the face of a deepening global economic
crisis.
Interpreting and Resisting Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is a historical phenomenon. In the early 1970s firms began to feel acutely the
impact of falling profitability. Many managers and owners believed the mounting power of
organized labor was responsible. Indeed, this emerging structural crisis of capitalism was
amplified by increasing labor militancy and social opposition, and by the rising challenge of
socialism and nationalism from the Global South - the greatest wave of decolonization in world
history (Arrighi, 2007: 136). The power of the United States reached its nadir with its defeat
in Vietnam (1975), with the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, and with the spread of
revolutionary struggles, notably in Latin America. It is against this backdrop that the rise of
neoliberalism becomes understandable.
Neoliberalism's set of pro-market and anti-labor policies were first implemented by the
brutal US-backed Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973). The monetarist economic principles of
the infamous 'Chicago Boys' guided the process. At this time, however, many other governments
in the South resisted initial demands by the Northern-dominated international financial
institutions (IFIs), notably the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), to implement
rapid 'shock therapy' structural adjustment programmes.
The 1979 to 1982 Volcker Shock changed matters dramatically. Paul Volcker, then head of the
US Federal Reserve, allowed US interest rates to skyrocket from around 5 per cent to over 20
per cent, ostensibly to halt persistent inflation and to shock the US economy out of
stagnation. This move sparked a global rise in interest rates and a wave of profound economic
crises in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Soviet bloc. Governments in these countries lost
the ability to service their debts because of the dramatic falls in the prices received for and
the quantity of their primary goods exported. This triggered the 1980s debt crisis, which
opened an opportunity for governments North and South to press more systematically for
neoliberal transformation.
Instead of mobilizing workers and peasants against this new form of economic imperialism,
governments in the South began to reorient their economies toward intensified export production
in order to earn the foreign currency needed to repay their loans. With the fall of the Soviet
Union, neoliberal shock therapy was also extended to Russia and other Eastern European
countries. In the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan, Western governments mobilized their
military power to facilitate the entrenchment of neoliberal policies at a terrible human
cost.
Neoliberalism has entailed processes of contested socio-economic transformation. Amidst
great popular resistance and economic instability, post-war state-led strategies of development
gave way to market-oriented neoliberal ones, or the so-called 'Washington consensus'. The
economist John Williamson identified ten policies characteristic of the consensus: fiscal
discipline, reduction in public expenditure, tax reform, financial liberalization,
market-determined exchange rates, trade liberalization, an open door to foreign direct
investment, privatization of public service and state-owned enterprises, deregulation, and
secure property rights. These policies have led to higher unemployment, worsening social
inequalities, widespread impoverishment, peasant land dispossessions, unsustainable
urbanization and increased worker exploitation.
Contributors to this book describe many of the specific developmental transformations in the
Global South, and how neoliberal processes have led to an expansion of the global reserve army
of workers and accelerated international migration. At the same time, financial and trade
deregulation have enhanced the power of finance capital and multinational corporations, which
they have used to pursue the outsourcing and offshoring of many industrial and service
activities. This globalization of production has brought with it intensified processes of
ecological destruction.
Women and the poor are the most negatively impacted by the neoliberal privatization of
public services. As women increasingly enter into the workforce, the privatization of public
services magnifies their 'double burden'. Such transformations have been global, having
negative impacts on workers in the South and, increasingly, in the North.
The neoliberal policies shaping these transformative processes are derived from neoclassical
economic theory. Neoclassical theory obscures and naturalizes the exploitative foundations of
capitalism because it reduces labor to just another factor of production, not unlike other
'technical inputs' like land and capital. The social reproduction of workers is further assumed
to be a private, genderless process restricted to the household, when it is in fact vital to
overall capital accumulation processes. In not dissimilar ways, neoclassical economics tends to
treat the environment as an externality. Further embedded in this kind of approach is a
tendency towards methodological nationalism. Certain models presuppose that capital and labor
do not move internationally and that international trade represents merely exchange of
commodities between national units. It follows, in theory, that by promoting domestic
specialization according to a given country's comparative advantage, free trade would
spontaneously stabilize participating 'national' economies at an equilibrium level, maintaining
employment and growth in all of them.
With its emphasis on liberal, market-based notions of individual equality and freedom,
neoclassical economics conceals underlying social polarizations and exploitative relationships
characteristic of capitalism. In reality, neoliberal transformation favors the interests of the
strongest capitals internationally (see Shaikh, 2005). Despite the proclaimed spontaneity of
the market, moreover, neoliberalism does not lead to a retreat of the state. Rather,
neoliberalism is marked by the class-based restructuring of the state apparatus in ways that
have responded to the evolving needs of capital accumulation (for example, around new financial
imperatives). What is more, as today's capitalism is dominated by Northern powerhouses like the
United States and Western European countries, the extension of capitalist relations globally
embodies these imperialist powers' aspirations to retain supremacy in the hierarchy of
states.
Neoliberalism, in fact, has always occurred through and within states, never in the absence
of states. Actually existing neoliberal transformations are mediated by the hierarchical
position of a given state within the world market and by specific social struggles.
Consequently, neoliberal transition in the United States is not the same as neoliberalism
transition in India or Iraq, and each entails specific national, class, racial and gendered
dimensions. Yet contributors to this book recognize that neoliberalism is a class-based
political and economic project, defined by the attack of capital and neoliberal state
authorities on the collective capacity of organized labor, the peasantry and popular classes to
resist the subordination of all social, political, economic and ecological processes to
accumulation imperatives. The subsequent consolidation of neoliberalism globally has thus been
to the benefit of global capital, and has come at the expense of workers, women and the poor.
Relations of imperialist domination, environmental exploitation, racial and gender oppression
are constitutive dimensions of this class struggle.
Neoliberal consolidations nonetheless generate new social resistances. Many contributors to
this book identify continuing processes involving the decomposition of working classes and the
formation of important social movements. With the 1999 demonstrations in Seattle, these
struggles assumed an inter-American character. Various indigenous groups, trade unionists,
faith-based and women's organizations marched alongside environmentalists and farmers in a
collective bid to shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks (Burbach, Fox and Fuentes,
2013: 2). In the new millennium, the 'alter-globalisation' movement has attained a truly global
scale. Yet the movement has not been without problems. Notably, the activists and organizations
have failed to produce precise sets of collective demands or a coherent international political
programme. Pre-existing antagonisms among workers and peoples across lines of national and
social oppression were not overcome. The movement, as a result, failed to articulate collective
resistance across national, regional and international levels (Prashad, 2013: 235). After the
huge demonstrations against the war on Iraq (2003), it gradually faded away.
Still, resistances to neoliberalism grew thereafter, especially in the Global South. In some
cases these made significant advances. For example, while the United States and other Western
states were bogged down with military aggressions in the Middle East, US control over Latin
America eased. Social mobilizations there enjoyed new spaces for action, which helped give rise
to a variety of progressive governments less subservient to imperialist interests and the
competitive imperatives of neoliberal development. In this book, Abelardo Marifta-Flores
suggests that progressive income redistribution and the reinforcement of regional integration
processes are among the most significant achievements. Susan Spronk and Sarah Miraglia
highlight the progressive, albeit imperfect, gendered dimensions of the Bolivarian
transformative movement in Venezuela. Neoliberal transformations also create new socio-economic
conditions that may undermine US and Western hegemony. As several authors attest, for example,
the relocation of industrial production towards East Asia has generated new centers of
accumulation. Consequently, Western imperial powers now face a major challenge with the rise of
China and India. So too have other big emerging capitalisms, like Brazil, Russia, South Africa,
Indonesia and the Gulf States, become ever more important centers of accumulation. This has
lent support to arguments suggesting global hegemony has started to shift from the West to the
East.
To be sure, these emerging capitalisms, China in particular, offer alternative sources of
foreign direct investment, international aid, developmental loans and technological know-how to
countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Leaders of the BRICS have, for example, called for
a 'multipolar' reform of the financial system and of the IFIs, which includes the establishment
of a new multilateral Development Bank, the 'BRICS Bank'. Yet the extent to which these changes
offer an alternative at all has everything to do with the extent to which South -- South
relations and flows of know-how do not serve to extend and reproduce exploitative class
relations of domination, even be they under novel forms of sub/ Southern imperialism. This
remains to be seen, and indeed the global crisis is affecting the terms of this debate.
The Global Crisis and the Resilience of Neoliberalism
The global crisis that emerged in the United States in 2007 was rooted in the preceding
decades of neoliberal restructuring. Its immediate trigger, however, was the subprime mortgage
lending debacle. The US subprime crisis then took a global turn in late September 2008 with the
collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers. As investors scrambled to preserve their
wealth and dump any toxic assets they had bought into, otherwise liquid US credit markets
seized up, bringing the global financial system to the edge of ruin. Only massive and sustained
state intervention prevented the system's implosion. Many Western governments rolled out
financial Keynesianism. This entailed nationalizing failed private banks and industries and
adding trillions of dollars to the public debt. The governments thus staved off global economic
collapse but only by incurring massive increases in new public debts. This gave rise to the
sovereign debt crises in the 'peripheral' EU countries. A number of developing countries also
incurred new public debts as governments rolled out economic stimulus packages to help sustain
domestic investment, maintain employment and buttress internal demand.
On the one hand, the privileges and powers gained by global capital under neoliberal
transformation remain largely intact. Indeed, imperialist governments have done everything in
their power to reinforce the current system. Such is the aim of the quantitative easing and
zero interest rate policies being pursued by the US Federal Reserve, the Banks of England and
Japan, and increasingly the European Central Bank. These actions are intended to prop up the
financial markets, support the prices of financial assets and make these countries' exports
more competitive. Throughout it all neoliberal technocrats remain unwavering in their
ideological commitments to market-oriented development. For example, the World Bank's Global
Financial Development Report 2013 attempts to reframe the global crisis not as a fundamental
problem of 'market failure' and capitalism, but instead as essentially about 'state failure'
and flawed human nature. The solution? More of the same neoliberal policies implemented since
the 1980s, but now guided and sustained by a more robust state apparatus that ensures better
market discipline...
"... The teen also claims that Walmart managers attempt to cut costs by reducing full-time associates to part-time workers, something that the behemoth retailer has been accused of in the past . "I'm sick of all the b-------, bogus write-ups and my job," Racicot concluded. "F--- management, f--- this job and f---- Walmart. ..."
Some people know how to make an entrance, while others specialize in exits.
On December 6th, 17-year old Jackson Racicot posted a video titled, "How I quit my job
today," on Facebook. As of today, the video has been viewed nearly 300,000 times.
"Attention all shoppers, associates and management, I would like to say to all of you today
that nobody should work here, ever," he said over the speakers. "Our managers will make
promises and never keep them."
During his remarks, Racicot noted that he has been working for Walmart for over a year and a
half, and calls out his assistant manager for insulting him.
"[Management] will preach to us about how they care about their employees but about a month
ago, my boss, assistant manager Cora called me a 'waste of time,' and management did
nothing."
.... ... ...
The teen also claims that Walmart managers
attempt to cut costs by reducing full-time associates to part-time workers, something that the
behemoth retailer has been accused of in the
past . "I'm sick of all the b-------, bogus write-ups and my job," Racicot concluded. "F---
management, f--- this job and f---- Walmart. "
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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 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 ..."
"... Any political movement that holds individual freedoms to be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
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.
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.
"... Dan Davies on financial fraud is certainly the most entertaining book on Economics I have read this year. Highly recommend ..."
"... Chris Dillow : Review of Dan Davies: Lying for Money ..."
"... Lying For Money ..."
"... Dan has also a theory of fraud. 'The optimal level of fraud is unlikely to be zero' he says. If we were to take so many precautions to stop it, we would also strangle legitimate economic activity... ..."
"Squalid crude affairs committed mostly by inadequates. This is a message of Dan Davies' history of fraud, Lying For Money ....
Most frauds fall into a few simple types.... Setting up a fake company... pyramid schemes...
control frauds, whereby someone abuses a position of trust...
plain counterfeiters.
My favourite was Alves dos Reis, who persuaded the printers of legitimate Portuguese banknotes to
print even more of them....
All this is done with the wit and clarity of exposition for which
we have long admired Dan. His footnotes are an especial delight, reminding me of William
Donaldson.
Dan has also a theory of fraud. 'The optimal level of fraud is unlikely to be zero'
he says. If we were to take so many precautions to stop it, we would also strangle legitimate
economic activity...
"... Because once we go from "corruption is getting more and more common; something must be done" to "meh," we are crossing from a flawed democratic republic to outright tyranny and oligarchy with little way back. ..."
"... Why would anyone expect anything different from the Times, or any major U.S. Newspaper or media outlet? They are organs of the intelligence community and have been for many years. ..."
"... I think the ridiculous and pathetic explanations by NYT in this case are, in part, due to the fact that they simply don't care enough to produce better answers. In their view, these CIA connections and those with other Govt. agencies are paramount, and must be maintained at all costs. ..."
"... It is likely that the relationship is a little more formal than mere collusion ..."
"... "Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few" [George Bernard Shaw" ..."
"... Has been since Judith Miller told us there were WMD in Iraq in 2003. They don't plan anticipations of crises, but the actual crises themselves. In a moral world, the NYT is as guilty of genocide as Bush and Blair. ..."
The more important objection is that the fact that a certain behavior is common does not negate its being corrupt. Indeed,
as is true for government abuses generally, those in power rely on the willingness of citizens to be trained to view corrupt
acts as so common that they become inured, numb, to its wrongfulness. Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as
commonplace, then it is transformed in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable.
Because once we go from "corruption is getting more and more common; something must be done" to "meh," we are crossing
from a flawed democratic republic to outright tyranny and oligarchy with little way back.
Besides, they don't all do it ... there are honorable reporters out there, some few of whom work for the Times and the Post.
Another great article Glenn. The Guardian will spread your words further and wider. Salon's loss is the world's gain.
Why would anyone expect anything different from the Times, or any major U.S. Newspaper or media outlet? They are organs
of the intelligence community and have been for many years. That these email were allowed to get out under FOIA is indicative
of the fact that there are some people on the inside who would like to get the truth out. Either that, or the head of some ES-2's
Assistant Deputy for Secret Shenanigans and Heinous Drone Murders will roll.
Scott Horton quote on closely related Mazzetti reporting (in this case regarding misleading reporting on how important CIA/Bush
torture was in tracking down and getting bin Laden, the focus of this movie):
"I'm quite sure that this is precisely the way the folks who provided this info from the agency [to Mazzetti] wanted them to
be understood, but there is certainly more than a measure of ambiguity in them, planted with care by the NYT writers or their
editors. This episode shows again how easily the Times can be spun by unnamed government sources, the factual premises of whose
statements invariably escape any examination."
I think the ridiculous and pathetic explanations by NYT in this case are, in part, due to the fact that they simply don't
care enough to produce better answers. In their view, these CIA connections and those with other Govt. agencies are paramount,
and must be maintained at all costs.
If you don't like their paper-thin answers, tough. In their view (imo) this will blow over and business will resume, with the
all-important friends and connections intact. Thus leaving the machinery intact for future uncritical, biased and manipulative
"spin" of NYT by any number of unnamed govt. sources/agencies...
In what conceivable way is Mazzetti's collusion with the CIA an "intelligence matter" that prevents the NYT's managing
editor from explaining what happened here?
That one is easy, as we learned in the Valerie Plame affair. It is likely that the relationship is a little more formal
than mere collusion.
Just another step down the ladder towards despotism. "Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment
by the corrupt few" [George Bernard Shaw"
The relationship between the New York Times and the US government is, as usual, anything but adversarial. Indeed, these
emails read like the interactions between a PR representative and his client as they plan in anticipation of a possible crisis.
Has been since Judith Miller told us there were WMD in Iraq in 2003. They don't plan anticipations of crises, but the actual
crises themselves. In a moral world, the NYT is as guilty of genocide as Bush and Blair.
The humor seems to go completely out of the issue when 100,000 people are dead and their families and futures changed forever.
"We pledge subservience to the Owners of the United Corporations of America, and to the Oligarchy for which it stands, one Greed
under God, indivisible, with power and wealth for few."
Notable quotes:
"... bin laden gave terror a face. how conveeeenient for warmongers everywhere! ..."
"... CIA in collusion with mainstream newspaper NYT. And you call this news ? ..."
"... collusion between the us media and the us government goes back much, much further. Chomsky has plenty of stuff about this... ..."
"... The NYTimes has its own agenda and bends the news that's fit to print. Journalistic integrity? LOL. No one beat the war drums louder for Bush's Neocons before the Iraq war. Draining our nation's resources, getting young Americans killed (they didn't come from the 1%, you see). The cradle of civilization that's the Iraqi landscape wiped out. Worst, 655,000 Iraqis lost their lives, said British medical journal Lancet, creating 2.5mn each internal & external refugees. ..."
"... The NYT never dwelled on the numbers of Iraqis killed. Up to a few weeks ago, its emphasis on the current Syrian tragedy is to inform us on the hundreds or thousands who've lost their lives. ..."
"... World financial meltdown? When Sanford Weill of Citi pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall late 1990's, the FDR era 17-page law separating commercial from investment banks, a measure that's preserved the nation's banking integrity for over half a century, the Nyt added its megaphone to the task, urging Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to comply, editorializing In 1988: "Few economic historians now find the logic behind Glass-Steagall persuasive" . In 1990, that "banks and stocks were a dangerous mixture" "makes little sense now." ..."
"... just off the top of my head I recall the editor of one of a British major was an MI5 agent; this is in the public domain. ..."
"... We pledge subservience to the Owners of the United Corporations of America, and to the Oligarchy for which it stands, one Greed under God, indivisible, with power and wealth for few. ..."
"... The NYT has been infiltrated for decades by CIA agents. Just notice their dogged reporting on the completely debunked "lone-gunman" JFK theory---they will always report that Oswald acted alone---this is the standard CIA story, pushed and maintained by the NYT despite overwhelming evidence that there was a conspiracy (likely involving the CIA). ..."
I've often wondered what you think of the journalism of someone like Seymour Hirsch. (sic) He broke some very important
stories by cozying up to moles in the MIC.
You'e confusing apples with oranges. Hersh seeks information on issues that outrage him. These do not usually include propaganda
for the intelligence agencies, but information they would like to suppress. He's given secret information because he appears to
his informers as someone who has a long record of integrity.
It's straight outta that old joke about the husband being caught by his wife in flagrante delicto with the pretty young lady neighbour,
who then tells his wife that he and his bit on the side weren't doing anything: "And who do you believe-- me, or your lying eyes?"
The NYTimes has its own agenda and bends the news that's fit to print. Journalistic integrity? LOL. No one beat the
war drums louder for Bush's Neocons before the Iraq war. Draining our nation's resources, getting young Americans killed (they
didn't come from the 1%, you see). The cradle of civilization that's the Iraqi landscape wiped out. Worst, 655,000 Iraqis lost
their lives, said British medical journal Lancet, creating 2.5mn each internal & external refugees.
Following the pre-Iraq
embellishment, NYT covered up its deeds by sacrificing Journalist Judith Miller. As Miller answered a post-war court case, none
other than Chairman & CEO Arthur Sulzberger jr. locked arms with her as they entered the courtroom.
The NYT never dwelled on the numbers of Iraqis killed. Up to a few weeks ago, its emphasis on the current Syrian tragedy is
to inform us on the hundreds or thousands who've lost their lives.
World financial meltdown? When Sanford Weill of Citi pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall late 1990's, the FDR era 17-page
law separating commercial from investment banks, a measure that's preserved the nation's banking integrity for over half a century,
the Nyt added its megaphone to the task, urging Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to comply, editorializing In 1988: "Few economic
historians now find the logic behind Glass-Steagall persuasive" . In 1990, that "banks and stocks were a dangerous mixture" "makes
little sense now."
NYT, a liberal icon? In year 2000, when I lived in NYC, New York Daily News columnist A.M. Rosenthal used to regularly demonize
China in language surpassing even Rush Limbaugh. I told myself nah, that's not the Rosenthal-former-editor of the NYT. Only when
I read his obituary a few years later did I learn that it was indeed the same one.
We pledge subservience to the Owners of the United Corporations of America, and to the Oligarchy for which it stands, one Greed
under God, indivisible, with power and wealth for few.
NOAM CHOMSKY _MANUFACTURING CONSENT haven't read it? read it. read it? read it again.
thought totalitarianism and the ruling class died in 1945? think again. thought you wouldn't have to fight like grandpa's generation
to live in a democratic and just society? think again.
Would that we could hold these discussions without reference to personal defamations -- "darkened ignorance" and "educate yourself"
which sounds like "f___ yourself". Why can't we just say "I respectfully disagree"? Alas, when discussing political issues with
leftists, that seems impossible. Why the vitriol?
Greenwald's more lengthy posts make it clear that he believes that people who differ with him are "lying" and basing their
viewpoint upon "a single right wing blogger". He chooses this explanation over the obvious and accurate one -- legal rationales
developed by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration. The date of Greenwald's archive is February 19, 2006.
Oddly, he bases all of his contentions upon whatever he could glean up to that date. But the legal rationale for warrantless wiretaps
was based upon memos written by John Yoo at the OLC that Greenwald did not have access to in 2006. The memos were not released
until after Obama took office in 2009.
Obama released them in a highly publicized press conference staged for maximum political impact. Greenwald could not possibly
have understood the legal rationale for the program since he had not been privy to them until March 2009 if, indeed, he has bothered
to acquaint himself with them since then. Either way, nobody was "lying" except those who could have understood the full dimension
and willfully chose to hide or ignore the truth. It's not exactly like I am new to this subject as you seem to imply. I wrote
a 700 page book about Obama administration duplicity in this same vein. An entire chapter is devoted to this very topic.
Warrantless wiretaps were undertaken after a legal ruling from OLC. And after Obama took office, warrantless wiretaps were
continued. Obviously since they were based upon OLC rulings, since no prosecutions have ever been suggested and since they have
continued uninterrupted after Obama took office, the Justice Department under both administrations agrees with me and disagrees
with Greenwald. We arrive at this disagreement respectfully. Despite Obama's voluminous denunciations of the Bush anti-terror
approach on the campaign trail, he resurrected nearly every plank of it once he took office.
But this is a subsidiary point to a far larger point that some observers on this discussion to their credit were able to understand.
Despite all of these pointless considerations, the larger point of my original post was that Greenwald missed the "real" story
here, which was that the collusion between NYT and CIA was not due to institutional considerations as Greenwald seems to allege,
but due to purely partisan considerations. That, to me, is the story he missed.
I find that people who are losing debates try to shift the focus to subsidiary points hoping that, like a courtroom lawyer,
if they can refute a small and inconsequential detail raised in testimony, they will undercut the larger truth offered by the
witness. It won't work. Too much is on the record. And neither point, the ankle-biting non-issue about legality of warrantless
wiretaps or the larger, salient point about the overt partisan political dimension of NYT's collusion with a political appointee
at CIA who serves on the Obama reelection committee, has been refuted.
Joseph Toomey
Author, "Change You Can REALLY Believe In: The Obama Legacy of Broken Promises and Failed Policies"
Conspiracy theorists, have been, of course, telling you this for years (given media's motive is profit and not honesty). I suppose
the exact same conspiracy theorists other guardian authors have been too eager to denounce previously?
The NSA wiretap program revealed by Risen was not illegal as Greenwald wrongly asserts. As long as one end of the intercepted
conservation originated on foreign soil as it did, it was perfectly legal and required no FISA court authorization.
Mr. Toomey, in 2006 Greenwald
published a compendium of legal arguments defending the Bush Admin's warrantless wiretapping and the (sound) rebuttals of
them. It is exhaustive, and covers your easily dispensed with argument. By way of introduction to his many links to his
aggregated, rigorous analyses of the legal issues, he wrote this:
I didn't just wake up one day and leap to the conclusion that the Administration broke the law deliberately and that there
are no reasonable arguments to defend that law-breaking (as many Bush followers leaped to the conclusion that he did nothing
wrong and then began their hunt to find rationale or advocates to support this conclusion). I arrived at the conclusion that
Bush clearly broke the law only by spending enormous amounts of time researching these issues and reading and responding to
the defenses from the Administration's apologists.
He did spend enormous time dealing with people such as yourself, and all of his work remains available for you to educate
yourself with, at the link provided above.
Maybe you'd like to explain that to Samuel Loring Morison who was convicted and spent years in the federal system for passing
classified information to Janes Defence Weekly. I'm sure he'd be entertained. Larry Franklin would also like to hear it. He's
in prison today for violating the Espionage Act.
Courts have recognized no press privilege exists when publishing classified data. In 1971, the Supreme Court vacated a prior
restraint against NYT and The Washington Post allowing them to publish the Pentagon Papers. But the court also observed that prosecutions
after-the-fact would be permissible and not involve an abridgement of the free speech clause. It was only the prior restraint
that gave the justices heartburn. They had no issue with throwing them in the slammer after the deed was done.
Thomas Drake, a former NSA official, was indicted and convicted after revealing information to reporters in 2010. The statute
covers mere possession which even NYT recognized could cover reporters as well. There have been numerous other instances of arrests,
indictments and prosecutions for disclosure to reporters. It's only been due to political calculations and not constitutional
limitations that have kept Risen and others out of prison.
The NYT has been infiltrated for decades by CIA agents. Just notice their dogged reporting on the completely debunked "lone-gunman"
JFK theory---they will always report that Oswald acted alone---this is the standard CIA story, pushed and maintained by the NYT
despite overwhelming evidence that there was a conspiracy (likely involving the CIA).
What outrages me the most is the NYT's condescending attitude towards its readers when caught in this obvious breach of journalistic
ethics.
Both Baquet and Abramson, rather than showing some humility or contrition, are acting as if nothing bad has happened, and that
we are stupid to even talk about this.
This article misses the elephant in the room. Namely, that the NYT only plays footsies with Democrats in positions of power.
With the 'Pubs, it's open season.
Not true. There are many examples of the NYT colluding with the Bush administration, some of which Glenn has mentioned in this
article. Take, for example, the fact that the NYT concealed Bush's wire-tapping program for almost a year, at the request of the
White House, and didn't release details until after Bush's re-election.
"... The Government leaks classified material at will for propaganda advantage, but hunts Assange and tortures Private Manning for the same. ..."
"... these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as "watchdogs" over them. ..."
"... The issue under discussion here, however, is the extent to which the media is an eager partner in the message-sending, rather than an unwitiing tool. ..."
The New York Crimes. The seamless web of media, government, business: a totalitarian system.
Darkly amusing, perhaps, unless one begins to tally the damage.
USA Inc. Viva Death,
Did you hear the one about the investment banker whose very expensive hooker bite off his
crank?
I'm not sure what's scarier--that the CIA is spending taxpayer dollars spending even a split
second worrying about what a two bit hack like Maureen Dowd writes, or that the NY Times
principals are so institutionally "captured" that they parrot "CIA speak".
Or maybe that our purported public servants in the legislature are bipartisanly
and openly attempting to repeal portions of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign
Relations Authorization Act in 1987 banning domestic propaganda.
America is becoming a real sick joke. And the last to know will be about 65% of the
populace I like to call Sheeple.
Very depressing. I thought we would get a smart bunch over here. The major trend I've noticed
instead? Blind support for the empire and the apparatus that keeps it thriving. Unable to be
good little authoritarians and cheer for the now collapsing British Empire, they have to
cheer for it's natural predecessor, the American Empire. This includes attacking all those
who might question the absolute infallible of The Empire. Folks like.. Glenn. It is
fascinating to watch, if not disheartening.
So all cozying up to spooks is not always a bad thing, huh?
Just my point.
I see. I thought your point was that there was some sort of equivalence between Hersh's
development of sources to reveal truths that their agencies fervently wished to keep secret
and Mazzetti's active assistance in protecting an agency's image from sullying by fellow
journalists.
And that ended his career in government service, as it should have...or not:
From Wikipedia: John O. Brennan is chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President
Barack Obama; officially his title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security
and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President.
Unfortunately this is nothing new for Mazetti or the New York Times, nor is it the first time
Glenn Greenwald has called Mazetti out on his cozy relationship with the CIA:
The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash
The coordinated, successful effort to implant false story lines about John Brennan
illustrates the power the intelligence community wields over political debates.
Glenn Greenwald Dec. 08, 2008 |
...Just marvel at how coordinated (and patently inaccurate) their messaging is, and --
more significantly -- how easily they can implant their message into establishment media
outlets far and wide, which uncritically publish what they're told from their cherished
"intelligence sources" and without even the pretense of verifying whether any of it is true
and/or hearing any divergent views:
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, New York Times, 12/2/2008:
Last week, John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama's likeliest
choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal
critics attacked his alleged role in the agency's detention and interrogation program. Mr.
Brennan protested that he had been a "strong opponent" within the agency of harsh
interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not
worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.
Mr. Obama's search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are
complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush
administration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a
central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.
Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said
Mr. Obama's decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a
message that "if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted," and
had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency's clandestine service.
...The story, by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, noted that John O. Brennan had withdrawn
his name from consideration for CIA director after liberal critics attacked his role in the
agency's interrogation program, even though Brennan characterized himself as a "strong
opponent" within the agency of harsh interrogation techniques. Brennan's characterization was
not disputed by anyone else in the story, even though most experts on this subject agree that
Brennan acquiesced in everything that the CIA did in this area while he served there.
"these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger –
between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as
"watchdogs" over them."
Glenn - the only objection I have to your column and all your previous columns on this
matter is that I am not sure the establishment media actually claim to be watchdogs, at least
not any more, and certainly not since Sept 11. They really are more like PR reps.
The media is another tool in the [government, in this case] arsenal to help send a
message, as are speeches before think tanks and etc.
Yes. The issue under discussion here, however, is the extent to which the media is an
eager partner in the message-sending, rather than an unwitiing tool.
Did everyone forget the Judith Miller article? The usage of Twitter and other social media
during the Iranian election of 2009? The leaks about the Iranian nuclear program in the
Telegraph? ARDA?
The U.S. government, along with every other government in the world, uses the media to
influence public opinion and send geopolitical messages to others that understand the message
(normally not the masses). The media is another tool in the arsenal to help send a message,
as are speeches before think tanks and etc.
We use social media to create social unrest if it aligns with our interests. We use the
media to send political messages and influence public opinion. The vast majority of reporting
in the N.Y. Times, WSJ, Guardian, Telegraph, and etc. do not reflect this, but every now and
then "unnamed sources" help further a geopolitical message.
In this country, it has been that way since before the founding fathers and the Republic.
Remember the Federalist, Anti-Federalist, Sam Adams as Vtndex, and etc.? Newspapers used for
"propaganda" purposes.
Upthread I asked him for his comments on the reporting of Seymour Hirsh. He is someone
who cozied up to all kinds of people - and wound up busting some extremely important
stories in the process.
I think a modest amount of review of Sy Hersh's work will demonstrate that his "cozying
up" hasn't included running interference for the spooks' official PR flacks.
"... Bob Marley got it right.... the human race is becoming a rat race, and it's a disgrace. ..."
"... The biggest problem is the financialisation of the economy... what is the actual value of things? The market is so manipulated that real price discovery is not possible. ..."
"... We have an over-cooked service-sector economy unsustainably reliant on cheap debt, cheap energy, and cheap manufactured goods to fuel our 'high-end levels of consumption, and mobility or living standards, and an over-heated housing market that is unsustainably run according to the needs of investors and landlords rather than residents or tenants. ..."
"... What we need is a coordinated approach between our nations. Undercutting each other on corporate taxes, writing tax avoidance into law, and continuing to allow multinationals to influence our politicians and play our governments against each other is exactly the game we must end. ..."
"... Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further.... ..."
"... "Ransom". There is no better word to describe it. This (the ransom mentality) is exactly the reactionary, vindictive, doctrinaire psychology that must be extracted like a cancer from our institutional lives and the human species. A monolithic task. But identifying the cause is the first step to cure. ..."
"... these are the new medieval transnational barons ..."
@Crackerpot - The whole austerity crisis thing appears to have been engineered so that a few blinkered and unpatriotic, vulture
mafia privateers can make a killing, selling off vital state assets, such as infrastructure and ports, to the Chinese. This is
a very suspicious and widespread trend.
Bob Marley got it right.... the human race is becoming a rat race, and it's a disgrace.
I see it every day from the window of my flat, on a main road, in Bethnal Green. There's a 'mentally unstable' Rastafarian
who stands by the overground station, and shouts things out to people like "You're living in babylon".
The biggest problem is the financialisation of the economy... what is the actual value of things? The market is so manipulated
that real price discovery is not possible.
We have an over-cooked service-sector economy unsustainably reliant on cheap debt, cheap energy, and cheap manufactured
goods to fuel our 'high-end levels of consumption, and mobility or living standards, and an over-heated housing market that is
unsustainably run according to the needs of investors and landlords rather than residents or tenants.
The whole thing is going to blow apart. Our 'aspirations' are slowly killing us - they're destroying the social fabric.
What we need is a coordinated approach between our nations. Undercutting each other on corporate taxes, writing tax avoidance
into law, and continuing to allow multinationals to influence our politicians and play our governments against each other is exactly
the game we must end.
Deborah Orr:Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes
its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as
a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further....
I never thought I would live long enough to see this level of honesty ATL. It should have been published long ago, but at least
the discussion now begins.
"Ransom". There is no better word to describe it. This (the ransom mentality) is exactly the reactionary, vindictive, doctrinaire
psychology that must be extracted like a cancer from our institutional lives and the human species. A monolithic task. But identifying
the cause is the first step to cure.
"... Neoliberalism? This is not just a financial agenda. This a highly organized multi armed counterculture operation to force us, including Ms Orr [unless she has...connections] into what Terence McKenna [who was in on it] termed the `Archaic Revival'. That is - you and me [and Ms Orr] - our - return to the medieval dark ages, if we indeed survive that far. ..."
"... The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ..."
"... the UK government did intervene in the economy when it bailed out the banks to the tune of many billions of pounds underwritten by the taxpayer. The markets should always be regulated sufficiently (light touch is absolutely useless) to prevent the problems currently being experienced from ever happening again. ..."
"... Traditional liberalism had died decades before WWII and was replaced by finance capitalism. What happened after WW II was that capitalism had to make various concessions to avoid a socialist revolution: social and political freedoms indeed darted ahead. ..."
"... No chance mate, at least not all the time greasy spiv and shyster outfits like hedge funds are funding Puffin face and the Vermin Party. They are never going to bite the hand that feeds them ..."
"... And in case we get uppity and endeavour to challenge the economic paradigm and the rule of these neoliberal elites, there's the surveillance state panopticon to track our movements and keep us in check. ..."
"... There is not a shred of logical sense in neoliberalism. You're doing what the fundamentalists do... they talk about what neoliberalism is in theory whilst completely ignoring what it is in practice. In theory the banks should have been allowed to go bust, but the consequences where deemed too high (as they inevitable are). The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality of neoliberalism. ..."
"... She, knowingly, let neo-liberal economic philosophy come trumpeting through the door of No10 and it's been there ever since; it has guided our politicians for the past 30 odd years. Hence, it is Thatcher's fault. She did this and another bad thing: the woman who glorified household economics pissed away billions of pounds of North Sea Oil. ..."
"... Bailouts have been a constant feature of neoliberalism. In fact the role of the state is simply reduced to a merely commissioning agent to private parasitical corporations. History has shown the state playing this role since neoliberalism became embedded in policy since the 1970s - Long Term Capital Management, Savings and Loans, The Brady Plan, numerous PFI bailouts and those of the Western banking system during the 1982 South American, 1997 Asian and 2010 European debt crises. ..."
@EllisWyatt - Here's the funny thing about those who cheer the broken neoliberal model. They
promise we will get to those "sunny uplands" with exactly the same fervor as old Marxists.
Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom
Neoliberalism? This is not just a financial agenda. This a highly organized multi armed counterculture operation to
force us, including Ms Orr [unless she has...connections] into what Terence McKenna [who was in on it] termed the `Archaic
Revival'. That is - you and me [and Ms Orr] - our - return to the medieval dark ages, if we indeed survive that far.
The same names come up time and time again. One of them being, father of propaganda, Edward Bernays.
Bernays wrote what can be seen as a virtual Mission Statement for anyone wishing to bring about a "counterculture." In the
opening paragraph of his book Propaganda he wrote:
"..The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important
element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government
which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised. Vast numbers of human beings must
cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily
lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by
the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.
It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind..."[28]
Bernays' family background made him well suited to "control the public mind." He was the double nephew of psychoanalysis
pioneer Sigmund Freud. His mother was Freud's sister Anna, and his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud's wife Martha
Bernays.
@OneCommentator - the UK government did intervene in the economy when it bailed out the banks
to the tune of many billions of pounds underwritten by the taxpayer. The markets should
always be regulated sufficiently (light touch is absolutely useless) to prevent the problems
currently being experienced from ever happening again.
Those at the bottom of society and
those in the public sector are the ones paying the price for this intervention in the UK. If
you truly believe in the 'free' market then all of these failing organisations (banks, etc)
should have been allowed to fail. The problem is that the wealth created under the current
system is virtually all going to those at the top of the income scale and this needs to
change and is one of the main reasons that neo liberalism should be binned!
Traditional liberalism had died decades before WWII and was replaced by finance
capitalism. What happened after WW II was that capitalism had to make various concessions to
avoid a socialist revolution: social and political freedoms indeed darted ahead.
@brighton2 - No chance mate, at least not all the time greasy spiv and shyster outfits like hedge funds are funding Puffin
face and the Vermin Party. They are never going to bite the hand that feeds them.
And in case we get uppity and endeavour to challenge the economic paradigm and the rule of
these neoliberal elites, there's the surveillance state panopticon to track our movements and
keep us in check.
I know what you are saying it's just sooner or later as those at the bottom continue to be
squeezed the wealthy will sow their own seeds of destruction. I think we are witnessing the
end game which is reflected in the desperation of the coalition to flog everything regardless
of the efficacy of such behavior, they feel time is running out and they would be right.
Call it what you will - "neoliberalism", "neoconservatism", "socialism" or whatever it is...
This debate is not even really solely about money: this is about liberty , about
free choice, about being permitted to engage in voluntary exchange of goods and services with
others, unmolested. About the users of services becoming the ones paying for those
services.
Ultimately the real effect will be to remove power from governments and hand it back to
where it belongs - the free market.
voluntary transactions among free agents. That's called a free market and it is by far
the most efficient way to produce wealth humanity has ever known.
Could you explain how someone bound by a contract of employment, with the alternative,
destitution, is a 'free agent'?
@SpinningHugo - Nothing comes out of nothing and i well remember black Monday in the City.
That was the start of the spivs running the economy as if it were a casino. If you think its only on CiF that Thatcher gets the blame, think on this, Scotland, a
whole nation blames her too.
Unless you are completely confused by what neoliberalism is there is not a shred of
logical sense in this.
There is not a shred of logical sense in neoliberalism. You're doing what the
fundamentalists do... they talk about what neoliberalism is in theory whilst completely
ignoring what it is in practice. In theory the banks should have been allowed to go bust, but
the consequences where deemed too high (as they inevitable are). The result is socialism for
the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality of neoliberalism.
Savers in a neoliberal society are lambs to the slaughter. Thatcher "revitalised" banking, while everything else withered and died.
Neoliberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom, communism is definitely not.
Neoliberalist policies have lifted millions of people out of poverty in Asia and South
America.
Neoliberalism is based on the thought that you get as much freedom as you can
pay for, otherwise you can just pay... like everyone else. In Asia and South America it has
been the economic preference of dictators that pushes profit upwards and responsibility down,
just like it does here.
I find it ironic that it now has 5 year plans that absolutely must not be deviated from,
massive state intervention in markets (QE, housing policy, tax credits... insert where
applicable), and advocates large scale central planning even as it denies reality, and makes
the announcement from a tractor factory.
Neoliberalism is a blight... a cancer on humanity... a massive lie told by rich people and
believed only by peasants happy to be thrown a turnip. In theory it's one thing, the reality
is entirely different. Until we're rid of it, we're all it's slaves. It's an abhorrent cult
that comes up with purest bilge like expansionary fiscal contraction to keep all the money in
the hands of the rich.
@MickGJ - You are wrong about the first 2 of course.
Banksters get others to do their shit.
But unfortunately the poor sods who went down on D Day were in their way fighting for Wall
Street as much as anything else. It's just that they weren't told about it by the Allies massive propaganda machine. So partly right
The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created
and distributed around the globe
Which would be what? State planning? Communism? Totally free market capitalism? Oh wait, we already have the best of a bad bunch, a mixed capitalist economy with
democracy. That really is the crux of it, our system isn't perfect, never will be, but nobody has come
up with a better solution.
Barclays bank "only" paid out £660m in dividends to the bearers of risk capital,
while its bonus pot for a very select number of its staff was £1.5bn.
Fascinating! Now, one could infer that Barclays represent "beneficial capitalism",
rewarding its hard-working employees, but maybe we won't.
This is not the traditional capitalist style
The Traditional capitalist is not an extinct species but under threat. For the time
being the population is stagnant in some countries and even increasing in some others.
However, due to the foraging capacity of Neoliberal creature , competing in the same
economical niche, the size and life expectation of it are diminishing.
She, knowingly, let neo-liberal economic philosophy come trumpeting through the door of
No10 and it's been there ever since; it has guided our politicians for the past 30 odd years.
Hence, it is Thatcher's fault. She did this and another bad thing: the woman who
glorified household economics pissed away billions of pounds of North Sea Oil.
@MickGJ - No, you're right. Why let yesterdays experience feed into what you expect of the
future? Lets go forwards goldfish like, every minute a brand new one, with no baggage!
And by the way, who saved the hide of the very much private sector banks and financial
institutions? The hated STATE, us tax payers!
I think I agree with everything that you say here? The people at the top these days aren't
really of much use for anything, including capitalism. The only thing that they do excel at
is lining their own pockets and securing their privileged position in society.
They have become quite up front about it. There was a bit of a fuss last year when
Barclays bank "only" paid out £660m in dividends to the bearers of risk capital, while
its bonus pot for a very select number of its staff was £1.5bn. Barclays released a
statement before their AGM explaining:
"Barclays is fully committed to ensuring that a greater proportion of income and profits
flow to shareholders notwithstanding that it operates within the constraints of a
competitive market."
This is not the traditional capitalist style competition that they are talking about where
companies competed as to who can return the biggest profit for their shareholders this now
comes secondary to the real competition which is for which company can return the biggest
bonuses for a small group of employees.
Bailouts have been a constant feature of neoliberalism. In fact the role of the state is
simply reduced to a merely commissioning agent to private parasitical corporations. History
has shown the state playing this role since neoliberalism became embedded in policy since the
1970s - Long Term Capital Management, Savings and Loans, The Brady Plan, numerous PFI
bailouts and those of the Western banking system during the 1982 South American, 1997 Asian
and 2010 European debt crises.
No wonder you're so ignorant of the basics of economic policy if you won't flick through a
book - fear of accepting that you're simply wrong is a sure sign of either pig ignorance or
denial, and is as I said embarrassing so its not really much point in wasting anymore time
engaging with you.
The neoliberal idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as
well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda.
..."neoliberal", concept behind the word, has nothing to do with liberal or liberty or
freedom...it is a PR spin concept that names slavery with a a word that sounds like the
opposite...if "they" called it neoslavery it just wouldn't sell in the market for political
concepts.
..."austerity" is the financial sectors' solution to its survival after it sucked most the
value out of the economy and broke it. To mend it was a case of preservation of the elite and
the devil take the hindmost, that's most of us.
...and even Labour, the party of trade unionism, has adopted austerity to drive its
policy.
...we need a Peoples' Party to stand for the revaluation of labour so we get paid for our
effort rather than the distortion, the rich xxx poor divide, of neoslavery austerity.
Of course it has. And it will continue to "fail", while provide us with all
sorts of goodies, for the foreseeable future. Capitalism's endless "failure" is of no more
concern than human mortality. Ever tried, ever failed, try again, fail better.
"... Now we see moneyed entities with vested interests, carpet bagging and flogging off the NHS and an unelected fossil fuel mandarin, at the heart of government decision making, appointing corporate yea-sayers, to the key government departments, with environmental responsibilities. Corporations capturing the state apparatus for their own ends, is 'corporatism.' ..."
"... "Neoliberalism in practice is every bit as bad as Communism in practice, with none of the benefits." ..."
"... The bailout is simply actual neoliberalism as opposed to the theory inside tiny right wing minds. The system depends on the wealthy not being allowed to suffer the consequences of their own greed, or it would represent revolution and still not work. ..."
"... Neoliberalism in practice is every bit as bad as Communism in practice, with none of the benefits. It always amusing to see neoliberal morons shout about the red menace when they're two sides of the same coin. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is nothing if not the opposite extreme of the communist planned economy. Like the communist planned economy, neoliberalism is doomed to failure. I think we've all been sold a lie. ..."
@NotAgainAgain - this is very true, it reminds me of an engineering company I worked for in
Nottingham (since gone under). The production manger was a corrupt thief. He gradually
sub-contracted the production work out to other companies in the area, taking backhanders for
his troubles.
Once all the production was farmed out, he somehow got himself promoted to
director level, where he and a sycophant subbed all the design work out. So all the
production and design was done out of house, standards dropped and the company closed,
leaving him with a nice payoff, just prior to retirement.
Some would say he played a blinder, my interpretation is he ruined a perfectly viable
company, making a very good product, and over the course of about 5 years put over 30 people
out of work.
In a just world he would be spending his retirement in prison.
Income distribution and a happy workforce is actually very good for business as well as
society!
Of course it is, but the capitalists do not know it. In many countries, including Finland,
the "condition of the working classes", ie. working conditions, have been in rapid decline
for the last 20 years.
Permanent salaried jobs have been replaced with temps from agencies, unpaid overtime is
becoming the norm, burnouts are commonplace and so on.
If in your country things are different, no mass lay-outs and outsourcing to China, count
yourself lucky!
But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their
taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments
Noam Chomsky pointed this out aeons ago though-that the American model is to use tax money
to benefit private interests through technological infrastructure.
It was ever thus, if in slightly different forms. Still it is surprising that they have gone
so quickly from their stated position at the start of the republic of a rejection of kings
and emperors to their position now of corruption so ingrained it is impossible to make
distinctions. Proxy emperors are emperors all the same, no matter the rhetoric that promotes
them.
One senses that there is very little 'going back' possible. Besides, the great Neoliberal
scam is predicated upon the qualities of the 'governments' we have and the capacity of those
'rhetoricians' with the capacity to say anything or play any role, to lick any arse, to get
elected. Such apparent strength is weakness. In this world that now exists here, we have now
entered the same world as the USSR in the eighties, where the announcement of bumper harvests
of wheat, made everyone with a brain cell groan and think
'Oh fuck! no bread this winter-quick, run to the shops now, and buy up all the flour
there'.
But there is now no way to declare that without being seen as beyond the pale-a bug eyed
conspiracist.
Still, I am a believer in the connectedness of this world. The economic system and its
mythologies are just weird and distorted canaries in the coalmine of the wider environment.
It is indicating that there is a misalignment between the way we think and what is possible
in this world. Austerity promoters and 'Keynsian' Ballsites are one and the same thing-both
pretenders that the key to the problems is within their narrow gifts
Hubris is followed by nemesis. In a wider sense what we seen now is a complete failure of
the capacity to educate and to learn,and moderate behaviour, and find some way of caring for
our 'others', beyond the core of 'self'. nationalism is essentially an extension of 'self'.
We now shall see the failure of a retraction of thought into nationalism and
scapegoating.
I predict that the population of the world will decline over the next century-quite
markedly.
The only solace is that at the end of the process, the pain will be forgotten. It always
is.
@MickGJ - Cameron said 'We will cut the deficit, not the NHS,' and promised to be the
'greenest government ever,' saying that you could 'go green,' if you voted 'blue.'
Now we see
moneyed entities with vested interests, carpet bagging and flogging off the NHS and an
unelected fossil fuel mandarin, at the heart of government decision making, appointing
corporate yea-sayers, to the key government departments, with environmental responsibilities.
Corporations capturing the state apparatus for their own ends, is 'corporatism.'
Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many
aspects of financial services – that Britain enjoyed during the second half of the
20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce.
There was very little 'healthy economic growth' in Britain in the second half of the 20th
century.
Britain was bankrupt after WW2 with its people dependent on Marshall Aid and food
contributions from its former 'colonies'.
Whatever 'growth' occured after Marshall Aid arrived was scuppered by a class system where
company managers were more concerned with walking on the workers than with keeping their
businesses afloat while such discrimination provoked hard left trade union policies which
left british industry uncompetitive and ultimately non-existent.
If that wasn't enough, Thatcherism arrived to re-inforce class discrimination, sell off
national services and assets and replace social policy with neo-liberal consumerism.
Whether the workforce was swollen by women or anyone else is immaterial.
The anti-democratic incestuous class conflict latent in British society continues to ensure
that the UK will remain a mere vassal state of foot-soldiers and consumers for international
neo-liberal capitalism.
@DasInternaut - Completely agree. The performance has been poor to absymal. But this is a
failure of democratic governance because the collective interests of citizens as consumers
and service users are not being represented and enforced by the elected politicians since
they have been suborned by the capitalists elites and their fellow-travellers.
The people, indeed, have been sold a lie, but, unfortunately, it is only UKIP which is
making the political waves by revealing selected aspects of this lie. The three established
parties have been 'bought' to varying extents. But more and more citizens are beginning to
realise the extent to which they have been bought.
There is an upside to all of this, maybe I wont get modded so much from now on for being so
angry at the ideological criminals . Hopefully the middle classes will cotton on to the fact
that all this is not a mad hatters tinfoil hobby, we need more of them to be grumpy.
@MickGJ - We've already seen it. Not great so far. GS4, Winterbourne view, southern cross,
trains...............Welfare to work companies, delivering no better results than people left
to their own devices. Energy companies.
We'll see if the new wave of free schools, academy schools, and all the service outsourced by
the council perform any better.
Doubtful, as to make a profit, they have to employ poorer paid people, less well qualified,
and once they've got a contract, they've got very little competition, as when the second
round of bidding comes around, as the firms having got the first contract are the only one
with relevant experience, they are assured of renewal, the money machine will keep going!
Neoliberalism are policies that are
influenced by neo classical economics. If you are suggesting that the neoliberal school of
thought would advocate any kind of a bailout then you are mistaken. Where else have I
"apparently" embarrassed myself?
@TedSmithAndSon - This is just an inaccurate rant not a reply.
"The system depends on the wealthy not being allowed to suffer the consequences.."
Unless you are completely confused by what neolibralism is there is not a shred of logical
sense in this.
"The debt industry are the lenders who take advantage of a financial system..."
Which is what savers are. They come in the form of individuals businesses and governments.
This encompasses everyone.
"whilst paying the lowest possible rate. Wonga, for instance."
If you are a lender you do not pay anything, you receive.
"Thatchers revolution was to take our citizenship and give it a value, whilst making
everyone else a consumer, all for a handful of magic beans in the shape of British Gas
shares."
...not forgetting that she revitalised the economy and got everyone back to work
again.
"Neoliberalism in practice is every bit as bad as Communism in practice, with none of the
benefits."
Neoliberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom, communism is definitely not.
Neoliberalist policies have lifted millions of people out of poverty in Asia and South
America. Communism has no benefits for society open your eyes!
@ATrueFinn - After they are finished, what do Singaporeans eat?
Next year's harvest (possibly of GM food which makes better use of scarce
resources). I imagine the sun will eventually stop bombarding us with the energy that powers
photosynthesis but I'm not losing any sleep over it.
@MurchuantEacnamai - I think the point is this, Amazon make money by selling books, they
avoid paying taxes, yet expect an educated, literate population to be provided for them, on
the grounds that illiterate people don't buy books, and expect roads to move the books around
on.
@theguardianisrubbish - No! The bailout is simply actual neoliberalism as opposed to
the theory inside tiny right wing minds. The system depends on the wealthy not being
allowed to suffer the consequences of their own greed, or it would represent revolution and
still not work.
The debt industry are the lenders who take advantage of a financial system designed to
push profits upwards (neoliberalism in practice), whilst paying the lowest possible rate.
Wonga, for instance.
Thatchers revolution was to take our citizenship and give it a value, whilst making
everyone else a consumer, all for a handful of magic beans in the shape of British Gas
shares.
Neoliberalism in practice is every bit as bad as Communism in practice, with none of the
benefits. It always amusing to see neoliberal morons shout about the red menace when they're
two sides of the same coin.
.and provides them at a massively inflated cost accompanied by unforgivable waste and
inefficiency, appalling service and life-threatening incompetence.
as opposed to the private sector, who always does what it says it will do, at reasonable
cost, for the benefit of their customers, and with due regards to ethics?
Like the Banks, the financial sector, who will never sell you a product that isn't the best
for you, regardless of their interest? the private companies like Southern Cross, GS4?
The private insurance who refuse to take you on the minute you've got some illness or
disability? Get off it! The state isn't perfect, the services it provides are not perfect,
but replacing them with private provision isn't the answer!
@MurchuantEacnamai - How would you rate how well British government has done in ensuring
markets are genuinely competitive. How well has British government done in ensuring our
energy market is competitive, for example. Does the competitiveness we observe in the energy
market give customers better or worse value than they had before deregulation? How do you
rate the British government's performance in rail and public transport, with respect to
competitiveness?
Personally, and notwithstanding the notable exception of telecoms, I rate the British (and
US) government's performance in deregulating state entities, creating new markets and
ensuring competition, as poor.
Neoliberalism is nothing if not the opposite extreme of the communist planned economy.
Like the communist planned economy, neoliberalism is doomed to failure. I think we've all
been sold a lie.
"... Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom ..."
"... Neoliberal ideology acted as a smokescreen that enabled the financially powerful to rewrite the rules and place themselves beyond the law. ..."
"... So it seems that your suggestion is for a return to western capitalism post-war style - would that be right? (b.t.w. if I bring up the whole Soviet Union thing, it is partly because quite a few commentators in this debate come across as if they wish for something much more leftist than that). ..."
"... What you have missed, is that the lions share of the proceeds of that growth are not going to ordinary people but to a tiny minority of super rich. It is not working for the majority. ..."
"... The taxpayers are left to pick up the tab, nations are divided against immigrants and scroungers and then unfettered evangelists like you can spout as pompously as you like about how much big business would like to remove the state from corporate affairs. ..."
"... Without the state there wouldn't be neo-Liberalism, it took state regulated capitalism to build what unfettered purists insist on tearing apart for short term greed. ..."
"... The trouble is Neo-Liberals do not want to remove the state at all, they want to BE the state and in the process rendering democracy pretty much meaningless. And they've succeeded. ..."
"... The biggest swindle ever pulled was turning the most glaring and crushing failure of unfettered corporatism into the biggest and most crushing power grab implemented in order to suppress the will of the people ..."
"... Nobody hates a market more than a monopoly and capitalism must inevitably end in monopoly as it has. For the profiteering monopolies investment especially via taxation is insane as it can only undermine their monopoly. ..."
"... The bankers have always known that the austerity caused by having to pay off un-payable loans, that increase every year, will eventually produce countries very similar to the "Weimar Days" in pre-Hitler Germany. ..."
"... They also know that drastic conditions such as these often lead to a collapse of democracy and a resurgence of Fascism. ..."
"... Neoliberalism could not exist without massive state support. So the term is meaningless. There is nothing "liberal" about having a huge state funded military industrial complex that acts a Trojan horse for global corporations, invading other countries for resources. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is a branch of economic ideology which espouses the value of the free-market, and removing all protective legislation, so that large companies are free to do what they want, where-ever they want, with no impediments from social or environmental considerations, or a nation's democratic preferences. ..."
"... Business-friendly to who exactly: the nation or hostile overseas speculators? ..."
"... The golden age of 1945 - 1975 or so witnessed huge rises in standards of living so your point linking neo-liberalism to rising standards of living is literally meaningless. There was an explosive growth in economic activity during the three or four post war decades ..."
"... The assumption shared by many round here that the young are some untapped resource of revolutionary energy is deeply mistaken ..."
A wonderful article that names the central issue. Neoliberal ideology acted as a smokescreen
that enabled the financially powerful to rewrite the rules and place themselves beyond the
law. The resultant rise of financial capitalism, which now eclipses the productive
manufacturing-based capitalism that was the engine of world growth since the industrial
revolution, has propelled a dangerous self-serving elite to the centre of world power. It's
not just inequality that matters, but the character of the global elite.
The neo-liberal order commenced only in the late 1970s - there was a very different
order prior to this which was not "soviet socialism" as you term it.
So it seems that your suggestion is for a return to western capitalism post-war style -
would that be right? (b.t.w. if I bring up the whole Soviet Union thing, it is partly because
quite a few commentators in this debate come across as if they wish for something much more
leftist than that).
Anyway, my worry with this idea is that I am just not convinced that life in "The West
1945-80" was better on the whole than in "The West 1980-present". It's true that
unemployment is higher these days, but a lot of work in the post-war years was boring and
physically exhausting; in factories and mines where conditions were degrading and bad for
health; and where industrial relations were simply terrible. I think as well that the higher
unemployment is a localized phenomenon that many developing countries are not experiencing
(this is relevant because Deborah Orr proposes change for the whole world, not merely the
West).
There were also frequent recessions and booms - in fact, more frequent (albeit shorter)
than now. What seems to have changed in this respect is that, whereas we used to alternate
regularly between 2-3 years of boom and 1-2 years of bust, we now have 15 years of continuous
boom followed by a (maybe?) 10 year bust (this pattern began around 1980). If you asked me
which of these two patterns I preferred, then I think I'd go for the pre-1980 pattern, but
its not clear to me that the post-1980 pattern is so much worse as to underwrite a savage
indictment of the whole system.
As for Casino banking: they should reform that. Britain's Coalition Government has done
something in that respect, although its not very radical - I am hoping Labour can do more.
There is certainly a lot to be said for banks going back to a pre-"Big Bang" sense of
tradition and prudence.
Buts let's not also forget the plus sides in the ledger for post-1980 capitalism: hundreds
of millions in the former third world lifted out of poverty; unprecedented technological
innovation (e.g. the internet, which makes access to knowledge more equal even as income
inequality grows); and the accomodation (at least in the West) of progressive social change,
such as the empowerment of ethnic minorities, LGBT people and women.
Change, yes - but lets be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
OK, but both the claim and the link cited in support talk only about a problem in the US.
This can't really answer my point, which was that the rest of the world should not be
expected to support a change to the economic system of the whole world just because of
problems that are mostly localised to North America and Europe. People in developing
countries might like the fact that they are, at last, catching "the West" up, and might well
not care much about widening inequality of incomes in Western societies.
If you are going to propose changes that you want the whole world to adopt, as Deborah Orr
does, then you should be careful to avoid casually assuming that Africa, India, China, et al,
feel the same way about the world's recent history as we do. It seems to me that not enough
care has been demonstrated in this regard.
@MickGJ - Left to their own devices the most extreme neo-liberals would remove the state
almost completely from corporate life.
Except when the State has to step in to prop up an unsustainable ideology. Then it's all
meek murmurings and pleas for forgiveness and a timid "we'll be better from now" concessions
and the Government obliges the public with the farce that they actually intend to do anything
at all but make the public pay for the financial sector's state subsidized profligacy.
Once the begging bowl is re-filled of course then the pretense of "business as usual"
profligacy rises to the fore.
The taxpayers are left to pick up the tab, nations are divided against immigrants and
scroungers and then unfettered evangelists like you can spout as pompously as you like about
how much big business would like to remove the state from corporate affairs.
When you well know that is the last thing big business would like to do. More of the state
owned pie is always the most urgent of priorities. Poorer services at inflated costs equates
as 'efficiency' until the taxpayer is again left to step in and pick up the bill.
Without the state there wouldn't be neo-Liberalism, it took state regulated capitalism to
build what unfettered purists insist on tearing apart for short term greed.
The trouble is Neo-Liberals do not want to remove the state at all, they want to BE the
state and in the process rendering democracy pretty much meaningless. And they've
succeeded.
The biggest swindle ever pulled was turning the most glaring and crushing failure of
unfettered corporatism into the biggest and most crushing power grab implemented in order to
suppress the will of the people.
Just as IMF loans come with 'obligations' the principle of democracy itself was sold as
part of 'the solution'.
The unsustainable, sustained. By slavery to debt, removal of society's safety net and an
economy barely maintained by industries that serve the rich, vultures that prey on the weak
and rising living costs and the drudgery of a life compounded by a relentless bombardment of
everything in life that is unattainable.
Nobody hates a market more than a monopoly and capitalism must inevitably end in monopoly as
it has. For the profiteering monopolies investment especially via taxation is insane as it
can only undermine their monopoly. With the economy now globalised not even a world war could
sweep away the current ossified political economy and give capitalism a new lease on life.
It's socialism or monopoly capitalist barbarism. Make your choice.
Money that the governments don't actually need as they can print their own money and spend it
to use their countries own resources and then raise taxes to offset the extra spending and
thus maintaining monetary value. The reality is that a government should never, ever borrow
money.
The beginning period between the two world wars (1919-33) in Germany called the Weimar
Republic shows us exactly what severe austerity imposed by the Treaty of Versailles caused.
Because the German economy contracted severely due to reparations payments, steady inflation
and severe unemployment ensued. Of course the FED having started the Great Depression in
America had not helped matters much anywhere in the world. The bankers have always known that
the austerity caused by having to pay off un-payable loans, that increase every year, will
eventually produce countries very similar to the "Weimar Days" in pre-Hitler Germany.
They
also know that drastic conditions such as these often lead to a collapse of democracy and a
resurgence of Fascism.
What causes inflation is uncontrolled speculation of the kind we have seen fed by private
banking at various crucial points in history, such as the Weimar Republic. When speculation
is coupled with debt (owed to private banking cartels) such as we are seeing in America and
Europe now, the result is disaster. On the other hand, when a government issues its own "good
faith" commerce-related currency in carefully measured ways as we saw in Roman times or
Colonial America, it causes supply and demand to increase together, leaving prices
unaffected. Hence there is no inflation, no debt, no unemployment, and no need for income
taxes.
In reality, the Weimar financial crisis began with the impossible reparations payments
imposed at the Treaty of Versailles. It is very similar to the austerity being imposed on
European Nations and America as we speak – regardless of the fact that the IMF is
trying to pose as "the Good Cop" at the moment! The damage has been done to nations like
Greece, and others are soon to follow. The uncontrollable greed of banks and corporations is
leading to an implosion of severe magnitude! It's time to open their books and put a stop to
these private banks right now!
@MysticFish - So the US who has a greater spend on the military than communist China is
neoliberal?
Neoliberalism could not exist without massive state support. So the term is
meaningless. There is nothing "liberal" about having a huge state funded military industrial complex
that acts a Trojan horse for global corporations, invading other countries for resources.
The term neoliberal is not only meaningless but misleading as it implies a connection with
true liberalism, of which it has no meaningful connection.
Do away with deceptive terms like neoliberalism, capitalism, socialism, left wing and right
wing and things become clearer.
At root a lot of the people who get involved in all of the above have very similar
character traits - love of power, greed, deceitful, ruthlessness. Most start out with these
character traits, and others gain them as a result of power.
Anyone high up in politics or business is unhinged. You have to be. The organizational
structures in these things are so synthetic, the beliefs so artificial, rigid, dogmatic and
inhuman that only a unhinged person could prosper in this climate.
Most reasonable people admit doubt, are willing to accept compromise, are willing to make
the occasional sacrifice for the greater good. All these things are what make us human,
however all these things are seen as weaknesses in the inverted world of business and
politics.
Business and politics creates an environment where the must inhuman traits prosper.
"no but the highly placed banking and financial class are along with their venal
political mates"
For sure but are they capitalists? Although they may well own capital does their power
derive from the ownership of capital? You may, or may not be interested in this
lecture on the future of capitalism by John Kay.
@AssistantCook - Neoliberalism is a branch of economic ideology which espouses the value of
the free-market, and removing all protective legislation, so that large companies are free to
do what they want, where-ever they want, with no impediments from social or environmental
considerations, or a nation's democratic preferences. Von Hayek was a major influence and
Thatcher was a loyal disciple, as was the notorious dictator, Pinochet. It is economic
theory, designed for vulture capitalists, and unpopular industries like fossil fuel or
tobacco, and usually the 'freedom' is all one-sided.
@DavidPavett - If states are too big, then what about multinational banks and corporations? I
wonder why Neoliberal ideology does not try to limit the size of these. They are cumbersome
and destructive, predatory dinosaurs and yet our politicians seem mesmerised to the point of
allowing them special favours, tax incentives and the ability to determine our nation's
policies in matters such as energy and health. Why not 'Small is Beautiful,' when it comes to
companies? It doesn't make sense to shrink the state but then let non-transparent and
unaccountable, multinational companies become too powerful. One gets the feeling the country
is being invaded by the interests of hostile nations, using all-too-convenient Neoliberal
ideology and hidden behind a corporate mask.
Is the IMF ever stop evading its responsibility and blaming others for the worldwide
financial tragedy it has provoked? Is it ever stop hurting the working class?
"Neo-liberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom for the rich and powerful
elites is all."
No it is not that is what you want to believe. There is nothing in this statement other
than an opinion based on nothing.
"Many people across the globe were lifted out of poverty between 1945-1980 so what does
your statement about neo-liberalism prove"
Which countries during this period saw massive sustainable reductions in poverty without
some free market model in place?
"It is you who should open your eyes and stop expecting people on here to accept your
ideological beliefs and statements as facts."
I don't expect people to accept my beliefs I am just pointing out why I think their
beliefs are wrong. This is a comment section the whole idea of it is to comment on different
views and articles. How can you ever benefit or make an accurate decision or belief if you do
not try to understand what the opposite belief is? I think nearly everything I have said has
been somewhat backed up by logic or a fact, I have not said wishy washy statements like:
"Neo-liberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom for the rich and powerful
elites is all."
Unless you can expand on this and give evidence or some form of an example why you think
its true then it makes no sense. You are not the only commentor on this article to make a
similar statement and the way people have attempted to justify it is due to bailouts but as I
have said a bailout is not part of the neoliberal school of thought so if you have a problem
with bailouts you don't have a problem with neoliberalism.
@murielbelcher - I don't want to go to far into Thatcherism because it is slightly off topic.
The early 80s recession was a global recession and yes during the first few years
unemployment soared. Why was that because the trade unions were running amok the UK was
losing millions of days of work per month.
Inflation was getting out of control and the only
way to solve it was a self induced recession. You cannot seriously believe that without the
reforms that she implemented we would not have recovered as quick as we did nor can you argue
that it was possible for her or anyone else to turn around such an inefficient industry.
Don't forget the problems of the manufacturing industry go back way before Thatcher's time.
"Here's your problem. You believe that banks lend savings. They don't. Loans create
deposits create reserves."
I am not claiming to be an expert on this if you are then let me know and please do
correct me. I agree banks do not lend deposits but they do lend savings. There is a
difference putting money on deposit is different to say putting money into an ISA. I don't
agree though that deposits create reserves I believe that they come from the central bank
otherwise banks would be constrained by the amount of deposits in the system which is not
true and something you have said is not true.
Nevertheless, the majority of liquidity in the bond markets (like most other markets)
comes from institutional investors, i.e pension funds, unit trusts, insurance companies, etc.
They get their money from savings by consumers as well as sometimes companies. Ok we don't
always give our money to insurance companies when we save but via premiums is another way the
ordinary consumer contributes to this so called "debt industry". I also said that foreign and
local governments buy debt and companies invest directly into the debt market.
"In theory the banks should have been allowed to go bust, but the consequences where deemed
too high (as they inevitable are). "
Iceland would disagree.
"The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality
of neoliberalism."
Why have only the rich benefited from the bailout? You are not making any sense.
"The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality
of neoliberalism."
Why? You cannot just say a statement like that and not expand, it makes no sense.
"Thatcher "revitalised" banking, while everything else withered and died."
...but also revitalised the economy and got everyone back to work.
"Neoliberalism is based on the thought that you get as much freedom as you can pay for,
otherwise you can just pay... like everyone else."
Again you have to expand on this because it makes no sense.
"In Asia and South America it has been the economic preference of dictators that pushes
profit upwards and responsibility down, just like it does here."
Don't think that is true in most cases nor would it make sense. Why would a dictator who
wants as much power as possible operate a laissez-faire economy? You cannot have personal
freedom without having economic freedom, it is a necessary not sufficient condition. Tell me
a case where these is a large degree of political freedom but little to no economic freedom.
Moreover look at the countries in Asia and South America that have adopted a neoliberal
agenda and notice their how poverty as reduced significantly.
"I find it ironic that it now has 5 year plans that absolutely must not be deviated from,
massive state intervention in markets (QE, housing policy, tax credits... insert where
applicable), and advocates large scale central planning even as it denies reality, and makes
the announcement from a tractor factory."
Who has 5 year plans?
"In theory it's one thing, the reality is entirely different."
If the reality is different to the theory then it is not neoliberalism that is being
implemented therefore it makes no sense to dispute the theory. Look at where it has been
implemented, the best case in the world at the moment is Hong Kong look at how well that
country has performed.
"a massive lie told by rich people "
I can assure you I am not rich.
"Until we're rid of it, we're all it's slaves."
Neoliberalism is based on personal freedom. If you believe this about neoliberalism in your
opinion give me one economic school of thought where this does not apply.
"Bailouts have been a constant feature of neoliberalism."
What you are saying does not make sense. Whatever you say about that there was no where else
to turn the government had to bailout out the banks a neolibralist would disagree.
"In fact the role of the state is simply reduced to a merely commissioning agent to
private parasitical corporations. "
That's corporatism which so far you have described pretty well.
"History has shown the state playing this role since neoliberalism became embedded in
policy since the 1970s - Long Term Capital Management, Savings and Loans, The Brady Plan,
numerous PFI bailouts and those of the Western banking system during the 1982 South American,
1997 Asian and 2010 European debt crises."
What?! Bailouts have been occurring before the industrial revolution. Deregulation in the
UK occurred mainly during the 80s not 70's. Furthermore financial deregulation occurred in
the UK in 1986. In the USA the major piece of financial deregulation was the Gramm Leach
Bliley Act which was passed in 1999. So you have just undercut your own point with the
examples you gave above. You could argue Argentina and we could argue all day about the
causes of that, but I would say that any government that pursues an expansionary monetary
policy under a fixed ER is never going to end well.
"...policy if you won't flick through a book."
My point was that when people quote a source they tend to either quote the page that the
point comes from. To be honest if this book is telling you that neoliberalism and
neoclassical are significantly different (which you seemed to suggest in you earlier post)
then I would suggest put the book down.
"Google, Amazon and Apple... avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more
powerful than governments."
Yes to the first, no to the second. Corporations with revenues exceeding the GDP of a small nation have quite a lot of power:
Exxon's revenue is between the GDP of Norway and Austria. In Finland Nokia generated 3 4 % of the GDP for a decade and the government bent backwards
to accommodate its polite requests, including a specific law reducing the privacy of
employees' emails.
We percieve a problem in (most of) Europe and North America because our economies are
growing more slowly than this, and in some cases not at all. The global growth figure comes
out healthy because of strong growth in the emerging countries, like China, Brazil and
India, who are narrowing the gap between their living standards and ours. So, the world as
a whole isn't broken, even if our bit of it is going through a rough patch.
@Fachan - Except that it isn't capitalism that was being criticized here, but neoliberalism:
a distinction that's often lost on neoliberals themselves, ironically.
I'm sure that Denis Healy and any number of African economists would confirm that the IMF is
quite simply a refuge of absolutely last resort, when investor confidence in your economy is
so shattered that the only way ahead is to open the shark gates and allow big money to
plunder whatever value remains there, without the benefit of any noticeable return for your
people. Greece is but one more victim of a syndrome that encompasses all the science and
forensic analysis of ritual sacrifice.
@OneCommentator - don't confuse economic deregulation which acted as handmaiden to global
finance and multinationals as economic freedoms for population
China's govt was doing what china's govt had decided to do from 1978 BEFORE the election
of Thatcher in 1979 or Reagan in 1980 (office from Jan 1981), so very little correlation
there I think
The GATT rounds whether you agree with their aims or not were the products of the post war
decades, again before Thatcher and Reagan came to power
The golden age of 1945 - 1975 or so witnessed huge rises in standards of living so your
point linking neo-liberalism to rising standards of living is literally meaningless. There
was an explosive growth in economic activity during the three or four post war decades
@theguardianisrubbish - you can't get away with this
She DID not get everyone back to work again. There were two recessions at either end of the 1980s. She TRIPLED unemployment during the first half of the 1980s and introduced the phenomenon
of high structural unemployment and placing people on invalidity benefits to massage the
headline unemployment count. Give us the figures to back up your assertion that she "got
everyone back to work again." I suspect that you cannot and your statement stands for the
utter nonsense that it is in any kind of reality.
A few months after she was forced out Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1991 during yet
another recession declared that "unemployment was a price worth paying"!!!
Neo-liberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom for the rich and powerful
elites is all. Many people across the globe were lifted out of poverty between 1945-1980 so
what does your statement about neo-liberalism prove
It is you who should open your eyes and stop expecting people on here to accept your
ideological beliefs and statements as facts.
"The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at
governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached:
adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big
State."
That's glib and inaccurate. A better read about the IMF from an insider:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/ Digest: the biggest problem the IMF have to deal with in bailouts is always the politics
of cronyism; free-market oligarchs and government in cahoots.
"Many IMF programs "go off track" (a euphemism) precisely because the government can't
stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and the consequences are massive inflation or other
disasters. A program "goes back on track" once the government prevails or powerful oligarchs
sort out among themselves who will govern -- and thus win or lose -- under the IMF-supported
plan. The real fight in Thailand and Indonesia in 1997 was about which powerful families
would lose their banks. In Thailand, it was handled relatively smoothly. In Indonesia, it led
to the fall of President Suharto and economic chaos."
Generally whoever happens to be in opposition at the time. This made the LibDems
the ideal (sorry) choice for a long time but then they broke a long-standing if unspoken
promise that they would never actually be in government.
Last weekś Economist has some very interesting stuff from the British Social
Attitudes survey which shows the increasing drift away from collectivist ideals towards
liberalism over each succeeding generation.
The assumption shared by many round here that the young are some untapped resource of
revolutionary energy is deeply mistaken
"... The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe ..."
"... The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask. ..."
"... Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. ..."
"... Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments. ..."
"... The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised. ..."
"... Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. ..."
The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is
created and distributed around the globe
Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT First published on Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT
The IMF's limited admission of guilt over the Greek bailout is a start, but they still can't see the global financial system's
fundamental flaws, writes Deborah Orr. Photograph: Boris Roessler/DPA FILE T he International Monetary Fund has admitted that some
of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was
"bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived
happily ever after.
Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in
"the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF,
put the interests of the eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with
horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.
The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes
no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity",
have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be
coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge
is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more
quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have
been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment",
as the philosopher
John Gray has said all along.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course,
its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the
Big State. Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless,
to be efficient and responsive. I agree. The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves
– and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial
and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules,
and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments
have been obliged to limit their activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task,
supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.
But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated
the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured,
law-abiding and financially secure people – people who expect to be well paid themselves, having been brought up believing in material
aspiration, as consumers need to be.
So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"? The neoliberal
idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda.
But how can the privatisation of societal welfare possibly happen when unemployment is already high, working people are turning to
food banks to survive and the debt industry, far from being sorry that it brought the global economy to its knees, is snapping up
bargains in the form of busted high-street businesses to establish shops with nothing to sell but high-interest debt? Why, you have
to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon
and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they
avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments.
And further, those who invest in these companies, and insist that taxes should be low to encourage private profit and shareholder
value, then lend governments the money they need to create these populations of sophisticated producers and consumers, berating them
for their profligacy as they do so. It's all utterly, completely, crazy.
The other day a health minister,
Anna Soubry
, suggested that female GPs who worked part-time so that they could bring up families were putting the NHS under strain. The
compartmentalised thinking is quite breathtaking. What on earth does she imagine? That it would be better for the economy if they
all left school at 16? On the contrary, the more people who are earning good money while working part-time – thus having the leisure
to consume – the better. No doubt these female GPs are sustaining both the pharmaceutical industry and the arts and media, both sectors
that Britain does well in.
As for their prioritising of family life over career – that's just another of the myriad ways in which Conservative neoliberalism
is entirely without logic. Its prophets and its disciples will happily – ecstatically – tell you that there's nothing more important
than family, unless you're a family doctor spending some of your time caring for your own. You couldn't make these characters up.
It is certainly true that women with children find it more easy to find part-time employment in the public sector. But that's a prima
facie example of how unresponsive the private sector is to human and societal need, not – as it is so often presented – evidence
that the public sector is congenitally disabled.
Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services – that Britain
enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce. Soubry and her ilk, above all
else, forget that people have multiple roles, as consumers, as producers, as citizens and as family members. All of those things
have to be nurtured and invested in to make a market.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone
is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who
came up with that theory , did not agree
that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised.
Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal
allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. And even as the results of their
folly become ever more plain to see, they are grudging in their admittance of the slightest blame, bickering with their allies instead
of waking up, smelling the coffee and realizing that far too much of it is sold through Starbucks.
"... The era of neoliberalism has seen a massive increase in government, not a shrinkage. The biggest change is the role of governments - to protect markets rather than to protect the rights and dignities of its citizens. When viewed by outcome rather than ideological rhetoric, it becomes increasingly clear that neoliberalism has nothing to do with shrinking the state, freeing markets, or freeing the individual, and everything to do with a massive power grab by a global elite. ..."
"... What was the billions of pounds in bank bailout welfare and recession on costs all about? You tell me. All the result of the application of your extremist free market ideology? Let the banks run wild, they mess up and the taxpayer has to step in with bailout welfare and pay to clear up the recession debris ..."
"... Market participants and their venal political friends have during the past 30 years of extremist neo-liberal ideology rigged, abused, distorted and subverted their market and elite power to tilt the economic and social balance massively in their favour ..."
"... Neo liberalism = the favoured ideology of the very rich and powerful elite ..."
"... at last somebody is looking at globalisation and asking whose interests is it designed to serve? It certainly ain't for the people. ..."
"... the highly placed banking and financial class are along with their venal political mates ..."
"... We've had three decades of asset stripping in favor of the rich elites and look at the mess we're in now. ..."
"... I strongly believe that people are not being told the full story. Like the NSA surveillance revelation, the effects will not be pretty when the facts are known. No country needs the IMF. ..."
"... The mythology surrounding deficits and national debt is a religion that the world is in desperate need of debunking. Like religion, the mythology is used as a means of power and entrenchment of privilege for the Ruling Caste, not the plebs (lesser mortals). ..."
This article is a testament to our ignorance. Orr is no intellectual slouch, but somehow,
like many in the mainstream, she still fails to address some fundamental assumptions and thus
ends up with a muddled argument.
"What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never
going to return;"
Lending has not stopped - it's just moved out of one market into another. Banks are making
profits, and banks profit are made by expanding credit.
Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and
faceless, to be efficient and responsive.
Yes and no. There is a difference between what is preached and what happens in practice. The
era of neoliberalism has seen a massive increase in government, not a shrinkage. The biggest
change is the role of governments - to protect markets rather than to protect the rights and
dignities of its citizens. When viewed by outcome rather than ideological rhetoric, it
becomes increasingly clear that neoliberalism has nothing to do with shrinking the state,
freeing markets, or freeing the individual, and everything to do with a massive power grab by
a global elite.
@MurchuantEacnamai - well righty ideologues such as yourself and your venal political
acolytes have utterly failed to support the case or institute measures that: "apply effective
democratic governance to ensure market
What was the billions of pounds in bank bailout welfare and recession on costs all about?
You tell me. All the result of the application of your extremist free market ideology? Let
the banks run wild, they mess up and the taxpayer has to step in with bailout welfare and pay
to clear up the recession debris
Market participants and their venal political friends have during the past 30 years of
extremist neo-liberal ideology rigged, abused, distorted and subverted their market and elite
power to tilt the economic and social balance massively in their favour
You the taxpayer are good enough to bail us out when we mess up but then we demand that
your services are cut in return and that your employment is ever more precarious and wages
depressed (at the lower end of the scale - never ever the higher of course!! That's the
neo-liberal deal isn't it
Neo liberalism = the favoured ideology of the very rich and powerful elite and boy don't
they know how to work its levers
Very insightful commentary and at last somebody is looking at globalisation and asking whose
interests is it designed to serve? It certainly ain't for the people. Amazing it's been
approved on a UK liberal newspaper as well!
@Fachan - There was nothing in the article about envy. It was an exposition of the failure of
our present system which allows the rich to get ever richer. That would be fine if it weren't
for the fact that the increasing disparity in wealth is bringing down the economy and making
it less productive while leaving a large part of the population in, or on the verge of,
poverty.
@CaptainGrey - but we're not talking about that form of capitalism are we?
Surely you must realise that there are very very different forms of capitalism. The capitalism that reigns now would not have permitted the creation of the NHS had it not
been devised in the1940s when a very different type of capitalism reigned. Its political acolytes and its cheerleader press would have denounced the NHS as an
extremist commie idea!!
The Chicago boys swarmed into eastern Europe after 1989 to introduce a form of gangster
unbridled capitalism. The very Chicago boys led by Milton Friedman who used the dictator Pinochet's Chile as
test bed for their ideology from September 1973 after the coup that overthrew Allende
The neo-liberal order commenced only in the late 1970s - there was a very different order
prior to this which was not "Soviet Socialism" as you term it.
As such this extremist rich man's ideological experiment has had a long innings and has
failed as the events of 2008 laid bare for all to see - it has been tried out disastrously on
live human beings for 34 years and has now been thoroughly discredited with the huge bank
bailouts and financial crash and ensuing and enduring recession It was scarcely succeeding
prior to this with high entrenched rates of unemployment, frequent recessions/booms and busts
and unsustainable property bubbles and deregulated unstable speculative aka casino banking
activity
1. Neoliberalism cannot be pinned on one party alone. It was accepted by the Thatcher
government, but no Prime Minister since has seriously challenged it.
2. Neoliberalism is logically contrary to conservative values. Either there are certain
moral imperatives so important that it is worth wasting money over them, or there are not. No
wonder that Tories are torn in two, not to mention Labour politicians who also try to combine
neoliberalism and moral principle.
3. Saying "even Adam Smith" is understandable but unfair. His work was rather enlightened
in the context of mercantilism, and of course the Wealth of Nations was not his only book.
Others will know his work better than me, but I think he dwells rather strongly on problems
of persistent poverty.
4. The political and redistributive functions of nations are indeed damaged by neolib, but
I don't think there is any realistic way of getting that power back without applying capital
controls. If we apply capital controls, all hell breaks loose.
5. Ergo, we are stuck with a situation where neolib is killing democracy, distributive
justice and conservative moral values, but there is nothing we can do about it without
pulling the plug altogether and unleashing a sharp drop in wealth and 1930s nationalistic
havoc. A bit of a tragedy, indeed.
Deborah Orr: The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it
wags its finger at governments that run up debt.
I strongly believe that people are not being told the full story. Like the NSA
surveillance revelation, the effects will not be pretty when the facts are known. No country needs the IMF. Any national government with its own national currency
sovereignty can pay its own debts within its own country with its own currency. International
borrowing in foreign markets is the biggest myth since religion. But since neoliberalism and
its inherent myths have been swallowed whole for so long, we are still at the stage where the
child points and laughs at the nude emperor. The fallout from the revelation and remedy is to
follow.
The problem with the Eurozone is not that the Euro is the "national" currency. Control of
the Euro resides with the European Central Bank, not the Troika (European Commission,
European Central Bank, IMF). The European Central Bank, as sole controller of the Euro (the
"national" currency), can issue funds to constituent Eurozone states to the extent necessary.
I challenge anyone to demonstrate how any central bank does not have power over its own
currency!
The mythology surrounding deficits and national debt is a religion that the world is in
desperate need of debunking. Like religion, the mythology is used as a means of power and
entrenchment of privilege for the Ruling Caste, not the plebs (lesser mortals).
@DavidPavett - Does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean? There are
certainly no leads on this in the link given to "the philosopher" John Gray
Gray wrote this in the Guardian in 2007:
Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale
privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social
dislocation on a massive scale
This doesn't seem to support Orrś assertion that he is calling for a
structural adjustment, rather the opposite. I'ḿ not really familiar with Grayś work
but he seems to be rather against the universal imposition of any system, new or old.
@CaptainGrey - Capitalism is not an undifferentiated mass. Late-stage neoliberal
hypercapitalism as practiced in the US and increasingly in the UK is a very different beast
than the traditional European capitalist social democracy or the Nordic model, which have
been shown to work relatively well over time. In fact, neoliberal capitalism - the sort Orr
is talking about here - is marked by increasing decline both in the state and in the economy,
as inequality in wealth distribution creates a society of beggars and kings instead of
spenders and savers. The gains achieved through carefully regulated capitalism won't stick
around in the free-for-all conditions preferred by those whose ideology demands the sell-off
of the state.
@PeterWoking - For some parts of the world , yes they are more affluent now , but a huge part of the globe is still without
food and water .
I think de regulation of the financial sector has caused a huge amount of damage to the world all round and
to be honest, i expect more of the same as the Bankers are still in control.
"... The structures of the global economy present challenges to any country or political party that wants to try to break out of U.S. hegemony. Even for countries as big and with as much potential as Brazil or Egypt, countries that have experienced waves of relative independence, the inertia of these economic structures helps send them back into old patterns of extraction and debt. In this moment of right-wing resurgence it is hard to imagine political movements arising with plans to push off the weight of the economic past. But that weight cannot be ignored. ..."
"... I'm guessing the short answer is credit. The amazing genius of the US reserve currency policies have given them such massive leverage over the world, it is nearly impossible to recreate elsewhere. This is why China is trying to get loans flowing from their belt/road relationships. ..."
"... Without the ability to simply declare into existence wealth, the US would have to compete fairly for their global relationships. What is amazing about this system, is that the right to owe money to the US is something countries will beg for, because there is no alternate trust system that could be used to stimulate economic activity. ..."
"... The global economy is truly in an unusual situation and the completely financialized creation of credit is less than 50 years old as a human experiment. (before it was linked to precious metals, and I think returning to that would squash liquidity). ..."
"... The same forces that are being applied to Brazil and Venezuela have been, and will continue to be applied to American workers. America is not busy spreading democracy, it's busy extending the reach of Wall $treet's steely fingers. ..."
"... The author does mention the problems with an extraction state. I think that that is at the root of the problem. It also is a result of the general trade pattern set up by the Western Europeans, with others brought in over time. Industrialization-Colonialism I think can fairly be described as root causes. It is also a lot more plausible than claiming the relatively recent introduction of the US $ as a reserve currency as a root versus aggravating cause. ..."
Why is it so difficult even for huge countries with large, diversified economies to maintain
independence from the West?
If anyone could have done it, it was Brazil. In the 19th century it was imagined that Brazil
could be a Colossus of the South to match the U.S., the Colossus of the North. It never panned
out that way.
And 100 years later, it still hasn't happened. With a $2 trillion GDP (a respectable $9,800
per capita), nearly 200 million people, and a strong manufacturing base (the second largest in
the Americas and 28.5 percent of its GDP), Brazil is far from a tiny, weak island or peninsula
dependent on a patron state to keep it afloat.
When Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva won a historic election to become president of Brazil in
2003, it seemed like an irreversible change in the country's politics. Even though Lula's
Workers' Party was accused of being communists who wanted to redistribute all of the country's
concentrated wealth, the party's redistributive politics were in fact modest -- a program to
eradicate hunger in Brazil called Zero Hunger, a family-based welfare program called the Family
Allowance, and an infrastructure spending program to try to create jobs. But its politics of
national sovereignty were ambitious.
It was under Workers' Party rule (under Lula and his successor, president Dilma Rousseff,
who won the 2010 election to become president at the beginning of 2011) that the idea surged of
a powerful BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) alliance that could challenge the
ambitions of the U.S.-led West. Brazil took steps to strengthen its manufacturing, and held its
ground on preventing pharmaceutical patent monopolies. Lula's Brazil accused Western countries
of hypocrisy for insisting both on "free trade" with poor countries and farm subsidies for
themselves. Brazil even moved in the direction of building an independent arms industry.
Contradictions remained: The Workers' Party government sent Brazilian troops to command the
UN force that enacted the U.S.-impelled occupation of Haiti -- treating the world to the
spectacle of the biggest, wealthiest country in the region helping the U.S. destroy the
sovereignty of the poorest as part of its foreign policy. But in those years Brazil refused to
renounce its alliance with Venezuela's even more independent-minded government under Hugo
Chavez; it defended ideas of South-South cooperation, especially within Latin America, and it
made space for movements like the Landless Peasants' Movement (MST).
But after more than a decade of Workers' Party rule, what happened? President Rousseff was
overthrown in a coup in 2016. When polls showed that Lula would have won the post-coup
election, he was imprisoned to prevent him from running. And so with the Workers' Party
neutralized, Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro, a man who famously saluted the American flag and
chanted "USA" while on campaign (imagine an American leader saluting the Brazilian flag during
a presidential campaign). No doubt the coup and the imprisonment of Lula were the key to
Bolsonaro's rise, and failings like supporting the coup in Haiti played a role in weakening the
pro-independence coalition.
But what about the economy? Or Brazil's leaders now dragging the economy into the U.S. fold?
Or did the Brazilian economy drag the country back into the fold?
Brazil's economic history and geography have made independence a challenge. Colonial-era
elites were interested in using slave labor to produce sugar and export as much of it as
possible: The infrastructure of the country was built for commodity extraction. Internal
connections, including roads between Brazil's major cities, have been built only slowly and
recently. The various schemes of the left-wing governments of the last decade for South-South
economic integration were attempting to turn this huge ship around (not for the first time --
there have been previous attempts and previous U.S.-backed coups in Brazil), and to develop the
internal market and nurture domestic industries (and those of Brazil's Latin neighbors).
Yesterday's dependent economy was based on sugar export -- today's is based on mining
extraction. When Bolsonaro was elected, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation quickly posted a
story speculating on how the new government would be good for Canadian mining companies. The
new Brazilian president plans to cut down huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest. Brazil is to
return to its traditional role of providing natural resources to the U.S. and to the other rich
countries.
A smaller country with a stronger pro-independence leadership, Venezuela faced similar
structural economic problems that have imperiled and nearly derailed the independent-minded
late president Hugo Chavez's dream that Venezuelans would learn to eat arepas instead of
hamburgers and play with Simon Bolivar dolls instead of Superman ones. There, too, the
pro-independence project had a long-term goal of overcoming the country's dependence on a
single finite commodity (oil), diversifying its agricultural base and internal markets. And
there, too, the challenge of doing so proved too great for the moment, especially in the face
of an elite at least as ruthless as Brazil's and nearly two decades of vindictive, pro
regime-change U.S. policy. Today Venezuela's "Bolivarian project" is in crisis, along with its
economy and political system.
There are other sleeping giants that remain asleep, perhaps for economic reasons. In the
face of relentless insults by Trump, the Mexican electorate chose a left-wing government
(Mexicans have elected left-wing governments many times in the past few decades, but elections
have been stolen). But locked into NAFTA, dependent on the U.S. market, Mexico also would seem
to have little option but to swallow Trump's malevolence.
Egypt is the Brazil of the Middle East. With 100 million people and a GDP of $1.4 trillion,
the country that was for a few thousand years the center of civilization attempted in the 20th
century to claim what is arguably its rightful place at the center of the Arab world. But
today, this giant and former leader of the nonaligned movement is helping Israel and the U.S.
starve and besiege the Palestinians in Gaza and helping Saudi Arabia and the U.S. starve and
blockade the people of Yemen.
Egypt stopped challenging the U.S. in the 1970s after a peace deal brought it into the fold
for good. Exhaustion from two wars with Israel were cited as the main cause -- though a proxy
war with Saudi Arabia in Yemen and several domestic factors also played a role. But here, too,
is there a hidden economic story?
Egypt has oil, but its production is small -- on the order of 650,000 barrels a day compared
to Saudi Arabia's 10 million barrels, or the UAE's 2.9 million. It has a big tourist industry
that brings in important foreign exchange. But for those who might dream of an independent
Egypt, the country's biggest problem is its agricultural sector: It produces millions of tons
of wheat and corn, but less than half of what it needs. As told in the classic book
Merchants of Grain , the politics of U.S. grain companies have quietly helped feed its
power politics all over the world. Most of Egypt's imported grain comes from the U.S. As
climate change and desertification wreak havoc on the dry agricultural ecosystems of the
planet, Egypt's grain dependence is likely to get worse.
The structures of the global economy present challenges to any country or political
party that wants to try to break out of U.S. hegemony. Even for countries as big and with as
much potential as Brazil or Egypt, countries that have experienced waves of relative
independence, the inertia of these economic structures helps send them back into old patterns
of extraction and debt. In this moment of right-wing resurgence it is hard to imagine political
movements arising with plans to push off the weight of the economic past. But that weight
cannot be ignored.
Justin Podur, a
Toronto-based writer who teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
His site is podur.org . Follow him on Twitter:
@justinpodur . Produced by by
Globetrotter
, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
So Egypt has a massive and rapidly growing population, but relatively little arable land,
and so is dependent on food imports.
Duh. Perhaps the problem is not Western grain merchants. Perhaps the problem is when a country
that could comfortably feed 20 million people boosts its population to 100 million and
beyond, that more people do NOT automatically create more wealth. I mean, that is an
established fact: more Egyptians are certainly creating more demand for food, but they are
not automatically and without delay creating more fresh water, or new industries, etc.
I'd always wondered why in the aftermath of WW2, when most of the developed world was in
tatters, why South America didn't arise to become more than the continual basket case of a
place that it is? Every country there has had hyperinflation (Brazil had a decade long+ stretch of it)
episodes-post WW2, but surprisingly none before the war
I think the answer for South America is structural to its politics and society. Both were
settled by Europeans from feudal societies and incorporated all the worst aspects of a
decaying Spain and Portugal into their systems. They are not just dependent on resource
extraction, they are dominated by elites who's sole source of power is that resource
extraction. In Classical economics terms, they are dominated by rentiers, not industrial
capitalists. In modern development economics, you would say their structural issues prevent
them escaping the middle income trap. When you look at
reactionary movements in Brazil or Argentina, its usually big ranchers and mining interests
who are behind them. The urban middle classes are usually not strong enough to form a buffer
– as historically has happened in Europe and the US and most other countries that have
achieved high development status.
Some might argue that a major contributor to the problem is simple geography. South
American has a largely impenetrable interior, encouraging an urban and infrastructural system
based on connecting agricultural and mining areas to big coastal cities, who's wealth is then
dependent on trading those goods across the ocean. When you compare North American or Europe
or even China to South America, you can see the former countries have dense internal networks
of rail/road and many similar sized cities. South American has a few mega cities and very
undeveloped internal networks. Of course, there is a chicken and egg argument here –
did geography lead to a rentier dominated society, or did a rentier society result in an
undeveloped urban structure and infrastructure?
Good start but article doesn't really give explicit answer to its rhetorical question. I'm
guessing the short answer is credit. The amazing genius of the US reserve currency policies
have given them such massive leverage over the world, it is nearly impossible to recreate
elsewhere. This is why China is trying to get loans flowing from their belt/road
relationships.
Without the ability to simply declare into existence wealth, the US would have to compete
fairly for their global relationships. What is amazing about this system, is that the right
to owe money to the US is something countries will beg for, because there is no alternate
trust system that could be used to stimulate economic activity.
The global economy is truly
in an unusual situation and the completely financialized creation of credit is less than 50
years old as a human experiment. (before it was linked to precious metals, and I think
returning to that would squash liquidity).
I think in the future a different currency will be needed that is anchored to energy in a
more direct way than the petrodollar. I think we should trade in kWh.
It might be also worth focusing on those countries which have succeeded in keeping some
independence, whether small or large. Bhutan is an example of a very small country which has
to some extent succeeded in keeping western and other foreign interests at arms length. Of
course, its protected from western domination by being landlocked by two regional
superpowers. But it has resisted the temptation to play off one against the other. The price
has been relative poverty, although its proud of having a very happy (by their own measure)
populace. It has though accepted its military dependence on India, in effect ceding its
military independence to that country (as was proven in the recent Chinese incursion, the
Bhutanese depended on the Indian military to chase the Chinese off).
Plenty of countries have tried some level of autarky. Ireland tried it after independence
– both military neutrality and economic independence. The latter was a disaster, it
proved completely impractical and left the country entirely impoverished by the 1950's.
Larger states including of course Russia, India and China have had their experiments.
Russia
at the moment seems the most successful, something nobody I think would have predicted 10
years ago.
India has been largely proud to be apart for decades, but seems determined under Modi to abandon that. In South America, Uruguay is arguably the most successful example of a
country that has kept to some degree its own independence. Costa Rica has been successful
too, although you can't really say its kept US influence at bay.
In Africa, Botswana is a
country which has had some degree of success. In Asia, Laos has tried to keep all influences
out, but its pretty much being swallowed up by the Chinese now. This, of course leads us to
the other conclusion – if you are small, and you resist Western influence, you may just
end up getting swallowed up by another imperial power, be it the Saudi's (Yemen) or
Laos/Tibet/Myanmar (China), etc.
The New World Order (GHW Bush) has only a couple of rules, and one is you will do
'business' only with the western finance Borg.
And what they mostly mean by 'business' , is everything you do should be financed
by the Borg, the Borg gets a cut of everything you do, or you don't get to do it.
It's not only bad for other countries, it's bad for the American people because those same
finance institutions that screw over other countries, screw Americans over by
leading/prompting the rush to off-shore American jobs.
The same forces that are being applied to Brazil and Venezuela have been, and will
continue to be applied to American workers. America is not busy spreading democracy, it's busy extending the reach of Wall $treet's
steely fingers.
It is taken for granted here that there was a coup. But the charges of corruption against
Lulu stemming from the Operation Car Wash investigations seem pretty real and plausible. The
Clintons have their foundation, and Trump has his "all-sorts-of-stuff" . They are still
walking free. Is it a coup because somebody in a high office actually got convicted of
something?
The author does mention the problems with an extraction state. I think that that is at
the root of the problem. It also is a result of the general trade pattern set up by the
Western Europeans, with others brought in over time. Industrialization-Colonialism I think
can fairly be described as root causes. It is also a lot more plausible than claiming the
relatively recent introduction of the US $ as a reserve currency as a root versus aggravating
cause.
Since a huge number of countries seem to have had this problem (half of the issue is
referred to as the Dutch disease after all), it would be more interesting to compare
experience to countries that escaped the problem. My guess is that a close look at the
history, and current trends, would show that the problem is actually much deeper rooted and
far more problematic than just some hand-wringing over the United States replacing nice
guy/gal governments and the US$ reserve currency.
Yves: "Homer had this figured out long ago: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." But the press has done a great job of presenting
squillionaires trying to remake society along their preferred lines as disinterested philanthropy. "
Notable quotes:
"... By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst, the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website ..."
"... America's new "philanthrocapitalists" are enabling social problems rather than solving them ..."
"... British novelist Anthony Trollope once observed, "I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist." ..."
"... Legendary short seller Jim Chanos, who teaches business students to spot fraud, understands why: when he scrutinizes a company for signs of shady activity, one of the things he looks for is an uptick in philanthropy -- a strategy business ethics professor Marianne Jennings has named as one of the "seven signs of ethical collapse" in organizations. Chanos refers to the ruse as "doing good to mask doing bad." ..."
America's new "philanthrocapitalists" are enabling social problems rather than solving
them
A new breed of wealthy do-gooders armed with apps and PowerPoints claim they want to change
the world. But with their market-oriented values and often-shortsighted prescriptions, are
really they going to change it for the better?
Or change it at all?
Anand Giridharadas, who has traveled first-class in the rarefied realm of 21 st
-century "philanthrocapitalists," harbors serious doubts. In his acclaimed book, "
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World ," the business reporter and
former McKinsey consultant exposes the willful blindness of bright-eyed social entrepreneurs
and TED-talking executives who, having drunk their own late-stage capitalist Kool-Aid, are now
ready to serve us all. Compliments of the house.
Doing Good, Masking Bad
British novelist Anthony Trollope once observed, "I have sometimes thought that there is no
being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist."
Legendary short seller Jim Chanos, who teaches business students to spot fraud, understands
why: when he
scrutinizes a company for signs of shady activity, one of the things he looks for is an
uptick in philanthropy -- a strategy business ethics professor Marianne Jennings has named
as one of the "seven signs of ethical collapse" in organizations. Chanos refers to the ruse as
"doing good to mask doing bad."
Such cynical public relations gambits are familiar enough to New Yorkers using Citi Bike,
the public-private bike share system funded by Citigroup, whose misdeeds helped spark the
global financial crisis of 2007-8. Or visitors to the Sackler Gallery at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, named for the family whose members own Purdue, the pharmaceutical company that
fueled America's opioid crisis through deceptive marketing of the addictive painkiller
OxyContin.
But another sort of deep-pocketed philanthropist is harder to pin down. The harm she causes
seems less direct; her motives more lofty. This type is fond of touting "win-win" solutions to
social problems and tossing out terms like "impactful" and "scalable" and "paradigm-shifting"
-- the kind of lingo fed to business school students in lieu of critical thinking. Members of
this group nevertheless refer to themselves as "thought leaders."
These would-be benefactors of humanity tend to like former president Bill Clinton, whose
Clinton Global Initiative became the ultimate road show for eager converts to what Giridharadas
calls the faith of "win-winnerism," i.e. "I'm doing great in this racket, and so can you."
Inhabiting Silicon Valley start-ups, venture capital firms, think tanks, and consulting
companies in large metropolitan areas, philanthrocapitalists speak reverently of global
poverty, but rarely touch down in places like Appalachia or rural Mississippi.
They are people like John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, whose book
"Conscious Capitalism" is the bible for those aspiring to the win-win faith. In his
formulation, CEOs are not simply the heads of companies, but transcendent beings that find
"great joy and beauty in their work, and in the opportunity to serve, lead, and help shape a
better future." Mackey's philosophy is one in which the beneficiaries of commerce should
dedicate themselves to social improvement because they are obviously the best equipped to do
the job. The public is meant to humbly follow.
This last bit, as Giridharadas shrewdly points out, may be far more radical than the old
trickle-down philosophy of yesterday's winners, who lobbied the government to get out of their
way so that the bounteous by-products of their cutthroat activities could descend unimpeded to
the poor. The new winners want something even more audacious: to replace the role of government
as guardian of the common good.
Giridharadas presents searching conversations with well-educated, often well-meaning people
floating above and apart from the lives of ordinary Americans, wishing to ease their
consciences but failing both to clearly see the problems of society and to notice, for more
than a nagging moment, the ways in which their own lives are financed by the fruits of
injustice. They end up embracing a warm-and-fuzzy vision of changing the world that leaves
brutal underlying structures securely in place.
The author has said what few who have traveled in this world have said plainly, lest their
passport be revoked: the efforts of philanthrocapitalists are largely disruptive, rather than
beneficial, to public life.
You can see it in the kind of ideas they embrace. Lecture slots at Davos don't get doled out
for discussing the need to expand popular, time-tested programs like Social Security and
Medicare that are proven to reduce poverty and economic inequality. Such sensible fare is not
nearly "innovative" or exotic enough -- and besides, it might require the wealthy to pay
additional taxes. Better are schemes like universal basic income that tend to favor elite
interests (such as continuing to pay workers inadequate wages) or creating technological
solutions like the one offered in the book by a young win-winnerist: an app that charges
workers to manage the unpredictable cash flow caused by erratic work schedules.
And what of campaigning to outlaw the exploitative business practice that causes the problem
in the first place? Notsomuch.
Talking about victims plays well on the philanthrocapitalist circuit, but pointing out
perpetrators is largely forbidden. You can wow the crowd by peddling for-profit schemes to help
the poor, but you won't get the same applause by calling to jail criminal executives. Yet, as
Giridharadas makes clear, even the fanciest app will not erase the feeling among ordinary
people that the system has been captured by a small group of the rich and powerful -- a feeling
that drives them away in disgust from establishment politics and makes them very angry
indeed.
What the philanthrocapitalist has a hard time admitting is that meaningful structural change
involves a lot more than an app and a PowerPoint. It means taking on financialized corporations
that engage in
stock market manipulation to enrich shareholders rather than investing in workers and
products that are actually useful to human beings. It requires fixing a regressive tax system
in which the wealthy pay less on their investments than working people pay on their earned
income. It means empowering workers and taking on the coercive hierarchies of wealth and power
that are locking into place a dual economy where the affluent become so removed from the
struggles of the majority that they hardly speak the same language.
Antidemocratic and unaccountable, the new philanthropists emerge in Giridharadas's
cautionary book less as the solvers of social problems than the deluded enablers. The emperor
may stand there in his organic underpants waving a pie chart, but in the court of public
opinion, it is increasingly obvious that he's not in the least interested in dismantling his
own palace.
"... Somewhat foolishly he deepened the cleavage between himself and ordinary people by both his patrician predilections and the love of lecturing ..."
This is the question that I am often asked and will be asked in two days. So I decided to
write my answers down.
The argument why inequality should not matter is almost always couched in the following
way: if everybody is getting better-off, why should we care if somebody is becoming extremely
rich? Perhaps he deserves to be rich -- or whatever the case, even if he does not deserve, we
need not worry about his wealth. If we do that implies envy and other moral flaws. I have
dealt with the misplaced issue of envy here * (in response to points made by Martin
Feldstein) and here ** (in response to Harry Frankfurt), and do not want to repeat it. So,
let's leave envy out and focus on the reasons why we should be concerned about high
inequality.
The reasons can be formally broken down into three groups: instrumental reasons having to
do with economic growth, reasons of fairness, and reasons of politics.
The relationship between inequality and economic growth is one of the oldest relationships
studied by economists. A very strong presumption was that without high profits there will be
no growth, and high profits imply substantial inequality. We find this argument already in
Ricardo where profit is the engine of economic growth. We find it also in Keynes and
Schumpeter, and then in standard models of economic growth. We find it even in the Soviet
industrialization debates. To invest you have to have profits (that is, surplus above
subsistence); in a privately-owned economy it means that some people have to be wealthy
enough to save and invest, and in a state-directed economy, it means that the state should
take all the surplus.
But notice that throughout the argument is not one in favor of inequality as such. If it
were, we would not be concerned about the use of the surplus. The argument is about a
seemingly paradoxical behavior of the wealthy: they should be sufficiently rich but should
not use that money to live well and consume but to invest. This point is quite nicely, and
famously, made by Keynes in the opening paragraphs of his "The Economic Consequence of the
Peace". For us, it is sufficient to note that this is an argument in favor of inequality
provided wealth is not used for private pleasure.
The empirical work conducted in the past twenty years has failed to uncover a positive
relationship between inequality and growth. The data were not sufficiently good, especially
regarding inequality where the typical measure used was the Gini coefficient which is too
aggregate and inert to capture changes in the distribution; also the relationship itself may
vary in function of other variables, or the level of development. This has led economists to
a cul-de-sac and discouragement so much so that since the late 1990s and early 2000s such
empirical literature has almost ceased to be produced. It is reviewed in more detail in this
paper. ***
More recently, with much better data on income distribution, the argument that inequality
and growth are negatively correlated has gained ground. In a joint paper **** Roy van der
Weide and I show this using forty years of US micro data. With better data and somewhat more
sophisticated thinking about inequality, the argument becomes much more nuanced: inequality
may be good for future incomes of the rich (that is, they become even richer) but it may be
bad for future incomes of the poor (that is, they fall further behind). In this dynamic
framework, growth rate itself is no longer something homogeneous as indeed it is not in the
real life. When we say that the American economy is growing at 3% per year, it simply means
that the overall income increased at that rate, it tells us nothing about how much better
off, or worse off, individuals at different points of income distribution are getting.
Why would inequality have bad effect on the growth of the lower deciles of the
distribution as Roy and I find? Because it leads to low educational (and even health)
achievements among the poor who become excluded from meaningful jobs and from meaningful
contributions they could make to their own and society's improvement. Excluding a certain
group of people from good education, be it because of their insufficient income or gender or
race, can never be good for the economy, or at least it can never be preferable to their
inclusion.
High inequality which effectively debars some people from full participation translates
into an issue of fairness or justice. It does so because it affects inter-generational
mobility. People who are relatively poor (which is what high inequality means) are not able,
even if they are not poor in an absolute sense, to provide for their children a fraction of
benefits, from education and inheritance to social capital, that the rich provide to their
offspring. This implies that inequality tends to persist across generations which in turns
means that opportunities are vastly different for those at the top of the pyramid and those
on the bottom. We have the two factors joining forces here: on the one hand, the negative
effect of exclusion on growth that carries over generations (which is our instrumental reason
for not liking high inequality), and on the other, lack of equality of opportunity (which is
an issue of justice).
High inequality has also political effects. The rich have more political power and they
use that political power to promote own interests and to entrench their relative position in
the society. This means that all the negative effects due to exclusion and lack of equality
of opportunity are reinforced and made permanent (at least, until a big social earthquake
destroys them). In order to fight off the advent of such an earthquake, the rich must make
themselves safe and unassailable from "conquest". This leads to adversarial politics and
destroys social cohesion. Ironically, social instability which then results discourages
investments of the rich, that is it undermines the very action that was at the beginning
adduced as the key reason why high wealth and inequality may be socially desirable.
We therefore reach the end point where the unfolding of actions that were at the first
supposed to produce beneficent outcome destroys by its own logic the original rationale. We
have to go back to the beginning and instead of seeing high inequality as promoting
investments and growth, we begin to see it, over time, as producing exactly the opposite
effects: reducing investments and growth.
"he argument is about a seemingly paradoxical behavior of the wealthy: they should be
sufficiently rich but should not use that money to live well and consume but to invest."
I disagree on this. I do not care if they use the high income to invest or to live well,
as long as it is one or the other.
The one thing I do not want the rich to do is to become a drain of money out of active
circulation. The paradox of thrift. Excess saving by one dooms others into excess debt to
keep the economy liquid.
If you invent a new widget that everyone on earth simply must have, and is willing to give
you $1 per to get it, such that you have $7 billion a year income... good for you!
Now what do you deserve in return?
1) To consumer $7 billion worth of other peoples' production?
Or
2) To trap the rest of humanity in $7 billion a year worth of debt servitude, which will
have your income ever increase as interest is added to your income, a debt servitude from
which it will be mathematically impossible for them to escape since you hold the money that
they must get in order to repay their debts?
The choice of capitalists
to buy paper not products
Wealthy households are obscene
But not macro drags.
When they buy luxury products and personal services
When they buy existing stocks of land paintings and the like of course this is as bad as
buying paper.
But at least that portfolio shifting
Can CO exist with product purchases.
So long as each type of spending remains close to a stable ratio
In my "ideal" tax regimen, steeply progressive income taxes would be avoided by real property
spending or capital investment to get deductions.
This, of course, would lead to over-investment in land, buildings, houses, etc. WHICH is
why my regimen also includes a real property tax (in addition to state and local real estate
taxes). The income tax would not be "avoided" by real property purchases as much as
"delayed".
To avoid 90% income tax, buy diamonds, paintings, expensive autos... then only pay 5% per
year on the real property, spreading the the tax over 20 years. Buy land, buildings, houses,
etc., get hit with the 5%, plus the local real estate taxes.
It really depends on what is consumed. Consumption can lead to malinvestment. For instance,
buying 1960s ferraris does very little for the current economy. This is an exceptionally low
multiplier activity.
inequality have bad effect on the growth of the lower deciles of the distribution as Roy and
I
"
~~BM~
keep in mind that there are many directions of growth. there is growth that benefits the
workers, the rank-and-file. there is growth that benefits the excessively wealthy. but now,
finally there's a third type of growth, the kind of growth that destroys the planet, and
perhaps a 4th a new channel of growth that would help us to preserve the planet. we need to
think about some of these things.
One VERY important item is missing from that list - environmental sustainability - giving
people control over much more resources than they need is a waste of something precious.
Ted Turner owning millions of acres of land he's restoring to prairie sustained by bison,
prairie dogs, wolves, etc is bad?
I wish he had ten times as much land. Or more so a million bison were roaming the west and
supplying lots of bison steaks, hides, etc, as they did for thousands of years before about
1850.
First reflections on the French "événements de décembre"
Because I am suffering from insomnia (due to the jetlag) I decided to write down, in the
middle of the night, my two quick impressions regarding the recent events in France -- events
that watched from outside France seemed less dramatic than within.
I think they raise two important issues: one new, another "old".
It is indeed an accident that the straw that broke the camel's back was a tax on fuel that
affected especially hard rural and periurban areas, and people with relatively modest
incomes. It did so (I understand) not as much by the amount of the increase but by
reinforcing the feeling among many that after already paying the costs of globalization,
neoliberal policies, offshoring, competition with cheaper foreign labor, and deterioration of
social services, now, in addition, they are to pay also what is, in their view and perhaps
not entirely wrongly, seen as an elitist tax on climate change.
This raises a more general issue which I discussed in my polemic with Jason Hickel and
Kate Raworth. Proponents of degrowth and those who argue that we need to do something
dramatic regarding climate change are singularly coy and shy when it comes to pointing out
who is going to bear the costs of these changes. As I mentioned in this discussion with Jason
and Kate, if they were serious they should go out and tell Western audiences that their real
incomes should be cut in half and also explain them how that should be accomplished.
Degrowers obviously know that such a plan is a political suicide, so they prefer to keep
things vague and to cover up the issues under a "false communitarian" discourse that we are
all affected and that somehow the economy will thrive if we all just took full conscience of
the problem--without ever telling us what specific taxes they would like to raise or how they
plan to reduce people's incomes.
Now the French revolt brings this issue into the open. Many western middle classes,
buffeted already by the winds of globalization, seem unwilling to pay a climate change tax.
The degrowers should, I hope, now come up with concrete plans.
The second issue is "old". It is the issue of the cleavage between the political elites
and a significant part of the population. Macron rose on an essentially anti-mainstream
platform, his heterogenous party having been created barely before the elections. But his
policies have from the beginning been pro-rich, a sort of the latter-say Thatcherism. In
addition, they were very elitist, often disdainful of the public opinion. It is somewhat
bizarre that such "Jupiterian" presidency, by his own admission, would be lionized by the
liberal English-language press when his domestic policies were strongly pro-rich and thus not
dissimilar from Trump's. But because Macron's international rhetoric (mostly rhetoric) was
anti-Trumpist, he got a pass on his domestic policies.
Somewhat foolishly he deepened the cleavage between himself and ordinary people by both
his patrician predilections and the love of lecturing others which at times veered into the
absurd (as when he took several minutes to teach a 12-year old kid about the proper way to
address the President). At the time when more than ever Western "couches populaires" wanted
to have politicians that at least showed a modicum of empathy, Macron chose the very opposite
tack of berating people for their lack of success or failure to find jobs (for which they
apparently just needed to cross the road). He thus committed the same error that Hillary
Clinton commuted with her "deplorables" comment. It is no surprise that his approval ratings
have taken a dive, and, from what I understand, even they do not fully capture the extent of
the disdain into which he is held by many.
It is under such conditions that "les evenements" took place. The danger however is that
their further radicalization, and especially violence, undermines their original objectives.
One remembers that May 1968, after driving de Gaulle to run for cover to Baden-Baden, just a
few months later handed him one of the largest electoral victories -- because of
demonstrators' violence and mishandling of that great political opportunity.
"So, harvesting energy from the sun is unsustainable?"
No. I'm saying it is not scale-able.
How are you going to do it? Run diesel fuel powered tractors to dig pit mines to get
metals, to be smelted in fossil fuel powered refineries. Burn fossil fuels to heat sand into
glass. Use toxic solvents purify the glass and to electroplate toxic metals. Then incinerate
the solvents in fossil fuel powered furnaces.
That may get us to a 40% reduction in carbon, but it isn't getting us to 90%
reduction.
Even then, how are you going to get nitrogen fertilizers for farms? Currently we strip H2
from CH4 (natural gas), then mix with nitrogen in the air, apply electricity, poof, nitrogen
fertilizers, and LOTS of CO2. I have yet to see a proposal for large-scale farming that
offers a method of obtaining nitrogen fertilizers without CO2 emissions.
AND, there is still a massive problem of storing the electricity from when the wind is
blowing and sun is shining until times when it isn't.
"So, you are calling for global thermonuclears war to purge 6 billion people from the
planet?"
Nope.
"You clearly believe the solution is not paying workers to work, but to not pay them so
they must die."
I'm all about paying workers to work. I vehemently disagree with liberals when they breach
the idea of "universal basic income"... a great way to end up like the old Soviet Union,
where everyone has money, but waits in long lines to get into stores with nothing on the
shelves for sale.
"The population is too high to support hunter-gathers and subsistence farming for 7
billion people plus."
Correct.
"You have bought into Reagan's free lunch framing and argue less trash, less processing of
6trash to cut costs, so everyone must earn less so they consume less, ideally becoming
dead."
Not even close.
This is where Liberals pissed me off right after Trump won and was still talking "border
adjustment tax". The cry from the likes of Robert Reich was "oh noooo... prices will go up
and hurt the poor." Since when were progressives the "we need low prices" party? I thought we
were the ones that wanted higher prices, if those higher prices were caused by higher wages
to workers!
"I call for evveryone paying high living costs to pay more workers to eliminate the waste of
landfilling what was just mined from the land."
Not sure how that makes it magically possible to cut carbon emissions 90% though.
Besides that, Saudi Arabia requires the organization to maintain a high level of oil
production due to pressure coming from
Washington to achieve a very low cost per barrel of oil. The US energy strategy targets
Iranian and Russian revenue from oil exports, but it also aims to give the US a speedy economic
boost. Trump often talks about the price of oil falling as his personal victory. The US
imports
about 10 million barrels of oil a day, which is why Trump wrongly believes that a decrease in
the cost per barrel could favor a boost to the US economy. The economic reality shows a strong
correlation
between the price of oil and the financial growth of a country, with low prices of crude oil
often synonymous of a slowing down in the economy.
It must be remembered that to keep oil prices high, OPEC countries are required to maintain
a high rate of production, doubling the damage to themselves. Firstly, they take less income
than expected and, secondly, they deplete their oil reserves to favor the strategy imposed by
Saudi Arabia on OPEC to please the White House. It is clearly a strategy that for a country
like Qatar (and perhaps Venezuela and Iran in the near future) makes little sense, given the
diplomatic and commercial rupture with Riyadh stemming from
tensions between the Gulf countries.
In contrast, the OPEC+ organization, which also includes other countries like the Russian
Federation, Mexico and Kazakhstan, seems to now to determine oil and its cost per barrel. At
the moment, OPEC and Russia have agreed to cut production by 1.2 million barrels per day,
contradicting Trump's desire for high oil output.
With this last choice Qatar sends a clear signal to the region and to traditional allies,
moving to the side of OPEC+ and bringing its interests closer in line with those of the Russian
Federation and its all-encompassing oil and gas strategy, two sectors in which Qatar and Russia
dominate market share.
In addition, Russia and Qatar's global strategy also brings together and includes partners
like Turkey (a future
energy hub connecting east and west as well as north and south) and Venezuela. In this
sense, the meeting between
Maduro and Erdogan seems to be a prelude to further reorganization of OPEC and its members.
It's crazy to think of all of the natural gas burned off by the world's oil producers. I
think of those oil platforms that have a huge burning flame on top. This is the kind of ****
that reminds us that the people who control the world care not for the people who live here.
Can't make a buck from it? ******* burn it.
Consider though that those oil producers are only in it for the money; it's not an
avocation with them. I imagine if there was a way to salvage the natural gas, it would be
done. Mo Muny would dictate it.
This could be the beggining of a level 5 popcorn event. It started a year or two ago and
when I saw it everybody laughed. Well look at it now. Saudi wants to defect. They have had
nothing but problems with the House of Sodomy for quite some time now.
If this leads to war in the Persian Gulf Edgar Cayce called it. The empire will burn that
place down before losing it. They may fail but something is going to go down.
Are the Sauds still full heartedly pushing the Zionist mission in Yemen?
As an Iranian-American I have been waiting for something big to happen with Iran. I am
really tired of waiting. I hope that Iran will grow some balls and fight the coalition. I
know that there are 80 million lives in danger, including my mom going back to Iran for a
short term. But this has been like a long torture and unending nightmare.
There is no multipolarity yet, but a bipolar hype of the world dominance run by US and its
vassals. An awakening will be harsh, when these realize their emperor goes naked.
Update 5: Cohen has been sentenced to 36 months in prison for his crimes, far below the
guideline of 51 - 63 months laid out by New York prosecutors. The Judge noted that the
guidelines aren't binding and had the ability to issue a lesser sentence.
Cohen has also been hit with forfeiture of $500,000, restitution of $1.4 million and a fine
of $50,000. He will be allowed to voluntarily surrender on March 6 .
Update 4: Judge Pauley has responded following Cohen's statement, saying "Mr. Cohen's crimes
implicate a far more insidious crime to our democratic institutions especially in view of his
subsequent plea to making false statements to Congress," adding that Cohen's crimes warrant
"specific deterrence."
Update 3: Cohen has spoken, telling the Judge: "Recently the president tweeted a statement
calling me weak and it was correct but for a much different reason than he was implying. It was
because time and time again i felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds." Judge William
Pauley, meanwhile, noted that Cohen pleaded guilty to a " veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent
conduct ," which was motivated by "personal greed and ambition."
Update 2: Petrillo, Cohen's attorney, continues to reference Cohen's desire to cooperate
further with prosecutors to answer future questions - however Manhattan prosecutors don't
appear to care, according to Bloomberg banking reporter Shahien Nasiripour. In a memo last week
to the court, they said that Cohen's promise to cooperate further is worthless - especially
since there would be nothing requiring him to do so once he's already been sentenced.
Meanwhile, Jeannie Rhee - an attorney with Robert Mueller's office, told the court that
while Cohen lied to the special counsel's team during his first interview in July, he has been
truthful since.
Manhattan Assistant US Attorney Nicolas Roos, however, says that any reduction in sentence
"should be modest."
Roos added that Cohen "has eroded faith in the electoral process and compromised the rule of
law," and that he engaged in " a pattern of deception of brazenness and greed ."
Update: Cohen's attorney, Guy Petrillo, says Cohen thought that President Trump would shut
down the Mueller probe, and has argued that his client's cooperation warrants a lenient
sentence.
"Mr. Cohen's cooperation promotes respect for law and the courage of the individual to stand
up to power and influence," said Petrillo.
"His decision was an importantly different decision from the usual decision to cooperate,"
added Petrillo. "He came forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our
country. He did so not knowing what the result would be, not knowing how the politics would
play out and not even knowing that the special counsel's office would survive."
"The special counsel's investigation is of the utmost national significance... Not seen
since 40 plus years ago in the days of Watergate." -Guy Petrillo
Petrillo has asked the judge to "consider Cohen's "life of good works" in his decision,
adding that Cohen's cooperation stands in "profound contrast" to others who havern't cooperated
and who "have continued to double-deal while pretending to cooperate."
***
Michael Cohen, former longtime personal lawyer for President Trump, has shown up to a New
York courthouse where he will be sentenced on Wednesday for a laundry list of crimes - some of
which implicate Trump in possible wrongdoing, but most of which have nothing to do with the
president. Judge William Pauley, meanwhile, noted that Cohen pleaded guilty to a " veritable
smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct ," which was motivated by "personal greed and ambition."
Update 2: Petrillo, Cohen's attorney, continues to reference Cohen's desire to cooperate
further with prosecutors to answer future questions - however Manhattan prosecutors don't
appear to care, according to Bloomberg banking reporter Shahien Nasiripour. In a memo last week
to the court, they said that Cohen's promise to cooperate further is worthless - especially
since there would be nothing requiring him to do so once he's already been sentenced.
Meanwhile, Jeannie Rhee - an attorney with Robert Mueller's office, told the court that
while Cohen lied to the special counsel's team during his first interview in July, he has been
truthful since.
Manhattan Assistant US Attorney Nicolas Roos, however, says that any reduction in sentence
"should be modest."
Roos added that Cohen "has eroded faith in the electoral process and compromised the rule of
law," and that he engaged in " a pattern of deception of brazenness and greed ."
Update: Cohen's attorney, Guy Petrillo, says Cohen thought that President Trump would shut
down the Mueller probe, and has argued that his client's cooperation warrants a lenient
sentence.
"Mr. Cohen's cooperation promotes respect for law and the courage of the individual to stand
up to power and influence," said Petrillo.
"His decision was an importantly different decision from the usual decision to cooperate,"
added Petrillo. "He came forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our
country. He did so not knowing what the result would be, not knowing how the politics would
play out and not even knowing that the special counsel's office would survive."
"The special counsel's investigation is of the utmost national significance... Not seen
since 40 plus years ago in the days of Watergate." -Guy Petrillo
Petrillo has asked the judge to "consider Cohen's "life of good works" in his decision,
adding that Cohen's cooperation stands in "profound contrast" to others who havern't cooperated
and who "have continued to double-deal while pretending to cooperate."
***
Michael Cohen, former longtime personal lawyer for President Trump, has shown up to a
New York courthouse where he will be sentenced on Wednesday for a laundry list of crimes - some
of which implicate Trump in possible wrongdoing, but most of which have nothing to do with the
president.
Cohen, who went from claiming he would "take a bullet" for President Trump to stabbing his
former boss in the back, faces sentencing on nine federal charges , including campaign finance
violations based on a hush-money scheme to pay off two women who claimed to have had affairs
with Trump, as well as making false statements to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Prosecutors alleged that Cohen paid off two women at the "direction" of "Individual-1,"
who is widely assumed to be Trump.
Prosecutors said the payments amounted to illegal campaign contribution s because they
were made with the intent to prevent damaging information from surfacing during the 2016
presidential election, which Cohen pleaded guilty to in August.
Legal experts view the filing as an ominous sign for Trump , suggesting prosecutors have
evidence beyond Cohen's public admissions implicating the president in the payoff scheme.
While the Justice Department has said previously that a sitting president cannot be indicted,
that would not stop prosecutors from bringing charges against Trump once he leaves office. -
The Hill
New York prosecutors have recommended that Judge William Pauley impose "a substantial term
of imprisonment" on Cohen - which may be around five years. Cohen's attorneys, meanwhile, have
asked Pauley for a sentence which avoids prison time - citing his cooperation with the Mueller
probe and other investigations which began prior to his guilty plea last summer. Mueller said
that Cohen had "gone to significant lengths to assist the Special Counsel's investigation,"
having met with Mueller's team seven times where he reportedly provided information useful to
the Russia investigation. The special counsel's office has recommended that any sentence Cohen
receives for lying to Congress should run concurrently with the charges brought by the
Manhattan federal prosecutors.
Cohen, 52, pleaded guilty in August to tax evasion,
lying to banks and violating campaign finance laws - charges filed by the US Attorney's Office
for the Southern District of New York.
The campaign finance charges relate to his facilitation of two hush-money payments to porn
star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal shortly before the 2016 presidential
election. Both women say they had sex with Trump in the prior decade. The White House has
denied Trump had sex with either woman.
Prosecutors say the payments were made "in coordination with and at the direction of"
Trump, who is called "Individual-1" in a sentencing recommendation filed last week.
Cohen's crimes were intended "to influence the election from the shadows," prosecutors
wrote. -
CNBC
In November Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Organization's
ill-fated plans to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow - a project floated by Cohen and longtime
FBI asset who had been in Trump's orbit for years, Felix Sater. Cohen claims he understated
Trump's knowledge of the project. He also lied to Congress when he said that the Moscow project
talks ended in early 2016, when in fact he and the Trump Organization had continued to pursue
it as late as June 2016.
On Wednesday, Stormy Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti - who is in attendance at Cohen's
sentencing, said in a Wednesday tweet that Cohen "thought we would just go away and he/Trump
would get away with it. He thought he was smart and tough. He was neither. Today will prove
that in spades."
Trump's paying around $280,000 in " hush money " .. out of his own pocket is
dwarfed into virtual insignificance by Obama's Presidential Campaign in 2008..,.
BEING FOUND "GUILTY" OF ILLEGAL USE OF 2 MILLION IN CAMPAIGN MONEY
barely reported by the media that saw THE OBAMA DOJ decide not to prosecute Obama and
instead quietly dispose of this
"REAL CRIME" with a fine of 375 thousand dollars by the US FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISION.
Welcome to the two tier Justice System we all live under..
One for the Deeeep State Globalist Elite and .. the other...
"... Brexit can be considered as the rebuilding of the old nation state wall between England and the Continent. To an extent, this is a repudiation of the Globalist Movement, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Neo-Liberal Experiment. In it's essence, Trumps Wall is a repudiation of the NAFTA Consensus. The American 'deplorables' support it because they see it as a means of defending their livelihoods from those hordes of 'foreign' low wage workers. In both cases, it is a looking inwards. ..."
Brexit can be considered as the rebuilding of the old nation state wall between
England and the Continent. To an extent, this is a repudiation of the Globalist Movement, a
wholly owned subsidiary of the Neo-Liberal Experiment. In it's essence, Trumps Wall is a
repudiation of the NAFTA Consensus. The American 'deplorables' support it because they see it
as a means of defending their livelihoods from those hordes of 'foreign' low wage workers. In
both cases, it is a looking inwards.
Arguably, May is one of a generation of politicos in decline. Macron, (perhaps Merkel's
hope of having a posterity,) has caved. Merkel has seen the face of her political mortality
recently. May has her Pyrrhic victory.
The Clintons cannot even give tickets to their road show away. In all of these examples,
the replacements waiting in the wings are, to be charitable about it, underwhelming. Brexit
is but the opening act of a grand, worldwide crisis of governance.
How England muddles through this will be an object lesson for us all. We had better take
notes, because there will be a great testing later.
While the UK has rightly been the focus, I can't help wondering what the deeper feelings
are across Europe. It's very hard to gauge how much thought the rest of Europe is giving to
Brexit at this stage. The average punter seems very uninterested at this point, while a
growing number (from what I'm reading from other sources) just wish they'd get it over with
so the rest of Europe could be allowed to get on with its own internal concerns. I suspect
the rest of the EU economies most affected must be putting their 'crash-out' plans into
over-drive after this week's continuing escapades.
(Re: Sinn Féin. I was wondering if there was the remotest possibility that they
would cross their biggest line just to help a Tory government, and a particularly vile Tory
government from their standpoint. When speaking to veteran Belfast Republican during
negotiations on the GFA (Good Friday Agreement), their viewpoint was that nearly everything
could be negotiated but one thing was impossible: entering into a foreign London parliament.
Symbolically and practically, it was a step beyond the pale. I also noticed lately that a
couple of older Sinn Féin Republicans, who had to be persuaded into the negotiation
camp all those years ago, are again contemplating running for local government positions in
the North.)
Everything I've read indicates that the rest of Europe has simply given up on Brexit
– they are unwilling to expend any more energy or political capital on it. The leaders
have much bigger things on their plates than Brexit, and the general population have lost
interest – I'm told it rarely features much in reporting on the major media. I think
they'll grant an extension purely to facilitate another couple of months preparation for a
crash out, and thats it.
As for Sinn Fein, I get the feeling that after been caught on the hop by Brexit, they now
see a crash out as an opportunity. NI looks likely to suffer more than anywhere else if there
is a no-deal – there is hardly a business there that won't be devastated. But they are
caught between trying to show their soft face in the south and their hardliner face in the
North, and I think they are having difficulty deciding how to play it.
The British circus attracts interest and there is coverage on the motions and so on
treated as UK internal politics. May and the ultra-brexiteers get almost all the attention.
The only options mentioned are no deal and May's agreement.
" European diplomats in London watching the government's Brexit agony have conveyed a
mixture of despair, and almost ghoulish fascination, at the state of British politics, with
one saying it is as melodramatic as a telenovela, full of subplots, intrigue, tragedy and
betrayal
Although privately many diplomats would love Brexit to be reversed, and believe it could
mark a turning point against populism, there was also a wariness about the disruption of a
second referendum. One ambassador suggested the French realised that European parliamentary
election campaign of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, would be damaged by the sight of
furious British leave campaigners claiming they had been cheated of their democratic rights
by an arrogant elite who refused to listen: "What is happening in France is potentially
momentous. The social fabric is under threat, and this anger could spread across the
continent," the ambassador said, referring to the gilets jaunes protests ."
During the last decades of Soviet power, the importance of Communist ideology' was
frequently
overrated abroad. Only after the downfall of the regime did it become clear that
Marxism-Leninism
was no longer taken seriously; lip service was still paid to it, but it became the subject of
ridicule
among those at the very' top.
Is there a danger that a similar misapprehension may prevail now that political views once
found only' at the periphery' of the political system have moved to its center?
... ... ....
... In the 1980s, a strange situation had arisen: The KGB spent much of its time harassing
and persecuting the dissidents, but they believed as little in communism and the Soviet system
as their victims. They did what they did because they had been given orders from above. What is
known about their real convictions? Deep down many of them were probably cynics, willing
apparently' to serve any' system as long as it preserved their privileged positions. What of
the current situation? How important is ideology', and what is the specific weight of power and
money'?
... ... ...
In its cultural history, Russia went through a golden and a silver age, but now there are
few prospects even for a bronze age. One feels reminded of Pushkin's reaction having finished
listening to Nikolai Gogol reading to him Dead Souls: "God, what a sad country, our
Russia."
As with the USSR if promised of better life are not fulfulled, ideology is bankruppt and
nationalism is on the rise.
Notable quotes:
"... The Party of Davos is yet unwilling to make the fundamental changes that would reduce the huge advantages they have accumulated over the past 40 years. We should therefore expect an intensification of this conflict with the natural ups and downs but a general trend towards increasing angst and frustration manifesting in unpredictable ways ..."
The main fault of the EU is that the biggest party at the table always in the end, when
things get serious, gets its way. The 80 million or so people of Germany de facto rule the 500
million of the Union, or you know, the three handfuls that rule Germany. No important decision
can or will ever be taken that Berlin does not agree with. Angela Merkel has been the CEO of
Europe Inc. since November 22 2005, gathering more power as time went by . That was never going
to work unless she made everyone richer. Ask the Greeks about that one.
Merkel was the leader of both Germany and of Europe, and when things got precarious, she
chose to let German interests prevail above Italian or Greek ones. That's the fundamental flaw
and failure of the Union in a nutshell. All other things, the Greek crisis, Salvini, Macron,
Brexit, are mere consequences of that flaw. In absence of a forever economic boom, there is
nothing left to fall back on. SF
-----------
A persuasive article, the Europeans here can now explain to us all how much better and more
virtuous Europe is than the United States.
What was it that Macron was saying about a European army? The CRS and the Gendarmerie Mobile
will get this under control but Macron may well be neutered by the unrest.
FWIW, the disparate power exercised by the great and the small states under present EU
conditions is exactly what the US Framers successfully avoided by the Great Compromises in the
US Constitution. pl
The main breaking point of the EU is the Euro. The rules agreed in the Maastricht Treaty
are not suitable for the participating countries but are written by the northern european
countries such as Germany and my country The Netherlands.
The rules each Euro-country are:
* maximum of 60% debt to GDP
* maximum deficit of 3% of GDP
* maximum inflation of 1.5%
These rules made national politicians toothless. A lot of monetary policy they could use
were taken away from them and delegated to the non-democratic, non-chosen technocratic
institute of the European Central Bank.
They are not allowed to print money battle a recession which would increase inflation.
This strategy makes a country cheap. So when there is a lot of inflation in Italy, Greece,
Portugal or Greece a lot of people from northern Europe go there on holiday.
In your discussion of the Eurozone you do not mention the Target 2 balances. This is almost a
non subject in Germany and not referred to that often elsewhere. I believe they amount to an
unacknowledged form of fiscal transfer.
Even if I'm correct, I don't think it's enough.
All unified countries, from the US to Iceland, recognise the duty of the richer areas to
transfer funds to poorer areas if needed. So, in the UK, HMG sends large sums of money over
to Northern Ireland as subsidy.
The other side of the coin to this is that the central government may supervise the
expenditure of that subsidy. That entails overall control over the entire expenditure of the
recipient area.
This system of fiscal transfer is seldom adequate and seldom well supervised.
It is, however, essential in any country.
As the EU becomes more unified this question of fiscal transfer becomes more important.
There are two obstacles.
1. The richer countries are reluctant to pay the subsidy. Since the EU is not yet a
unified state there are no means of coercing the richer countries into paying the subsidy. To
be part of a superstate, and to benefit from being part of it, is one thing. To face a
reduced standard of living in order to subsidise other parts of it is quite another.
2. Even if the richer parts of the EU are willing to pay, there are no effective means of
supervising the spending of the subsidy.
This is I think the greatest problem the EU faces and it faces it because it is in
transition from a collection of countries to a unified state under unified control. As a
collection of countries there is no onus on any one country to subsidise another. As a
unified state the process would happen automatically. But the in-between stage the EU's
currently at allows for neither one nor the other.
This is why we hear so often the calls for "ever greater unity" for the EU. That is no
mere expression of an ideological or millenarian dream. It is a precondition that must be met
if the EU is to hold together. Given the other stresses to which the EU is subjected I do not
believe it will arrive quickly enough or at all at the degree of unification that will allow
that precondition to be satisfied.
"The Union appears fatally wounded, and that's even before the next financial crisis has
materialized. Speaking of which, the Fed has been hiking rates and can lower them again a
little if it wants, but much of Europe 'works' on negative rates already. That next crisis
could be a doozy."
Sir
IMO, the Southfront article has a lot of merits. The problem that much of Europe faces is
similar to what we face here. Extreme wealth inequality caused by the concentration of
political and economic power in the hands of a few. The divide between the working class and
the urban upper class. The "Deplorables" are expressing their frustration at the ballot box
now by voting for Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, AMLO, Salvini & Five Star and what would have
been considered fringe parties not too long ago. The social contract has fallen apart.
The Party of Davos is yet unwilling to make the fundamental changes that would reduce
the huge advantages they have accumulated over the past 40 years. We should therefore expect
an intensification of this conflict with the natural ups and downs but a general trend
towards increasing angst and frustration manifesting in unpredictable ways
Russian articles are about as close to the truth as we are going to get on the internet
since it serves their interests to weaken the sanctions placed on them by the West. Facts do
not serve western Media Moguls. The last thing they want published is that the news is
manipulated to make them richer and more powerful. The closest I ever got to the White House
was standing on the lawn when Jimmy Carter welcomed Pierre Trudeau. Still, there is a video
of Huma Abedin hugging Lindsey Graham with the Generals looking on at John McCain's
funeral.
The fundamental problem of the EU is that the Euro is an unfinished project. Unfinished
because it lacks the internal transfer payments required to make it fully functional. Every
single currency essentially subsidizes to some degree it's poorer regions at the expense or
the richer. This is true or the US, all European countries prior to the euro etc The reason
for this is that under normal circumstances a poorer region (or under the current EURO
scenario, a poorer country) would be able to benefit from a weaker currency, in its
relationship with a better off country enjoying a stronger currency. By agreeing to a common
currency it gives up this essential compensating mechanism, but (normally) only in exchange
for meaningful fiscal transfers as compensation.
Today euro zone fiscal transfer amount to a fraction of comparative rates in the us or
other countries. Practically, it's non existent.
And the main reason for the current situation is Merkel/Germany. It takes all the benefits
(a lower weaker currency then it would otherwise have and unfettered access for is products
across Europe) without any costs. Of course, in the long run it's undermining the golden
goose, but it's difficult to focus even Germans on the long term...
The topic can be expanded at length but I've tried to keep it simple. Nothing is more
important than this.
The article is over the top. Brussels has very limited economic power and less political
power. The EU budget is only around 1% of Gross National Income. What is the Federal Budget
in the USA in comparison? Just your defence spending is around 3% of GDP. Fx. Hungary
receives around 4 billion Euros in 2017 from the EU and paid ca 800 million Euros to the EU.
How vital is 3.2 billion Euros for Hungary in a existential question? It's ca 2.7 % of GDP.
As for the commission it is only able to administrate existing rules.
New rules required the Council of Europe (the governments) and the EU parliament to pass
them.
The Council's voting rules require a majority to pass and sometimes unanimity. Which is
why the is no agreement on the distribution of refugees/immigrants. Member countries can
refuse to take part. Germany has limited
" .. if the more national-minded parties of the EU get a majority in the EU parliament
..."
They are a most disparate group of parties and it's unlikely in any case that they'd end
up having the say in the European Parliament. If they got near to it, we would see the same
mechanism operating as can operate in the parliaments of the constituent countries - the
status quo parties would join together to keep them from power.
But that's speculation. Here we are on firmer ground -
"The article is over the top. Brussels has very limited economic power and less
political power. The EU budget is only around 1% of Gross National Income."
There are two points relevant here.
1. "Brussels" or "the EU" are very imprecise terms. It is safer to talk in terms of the
Berlin/Paris/Brussels axis, with the two first components having the ultimate say and the
third being mainly the means through which that say is expressed.
2. The size and expenditure of Brussels itself is remarkably small. Compare it to the
massive size and expenditure of the governing apparatus in Washington and it's almost
invisible. But through regulation and law it has at its disposal increasing control over the
much larger establishments and budgets of the constituent nation states.
It is important not to exaggerate the reach of EU regulation. Many regulations we think of
as "EU regulations" are made elsewhere at international level and the EU only transmits these
regulations to its member states. For this and other reasons the Berlin/Paris/Brussels axis,
or whatever term one may wish to use, cannot be directly compared with the central power in
the US. But the EU does have very much more power than is indicated in the sentence quoted
above.
Good day Colonel. We can only hope so. The EU was conceived as an idea that would prevent
another European Conflict. Its initial organisation the European Coal and Steel
Community was designed to bring the sinews of war under centralised control. This was a
practical measure which was quite separate from the founder's beliefs about the origins of
the war; this was that it was the people who by their nationalism and subordination to
demagoguery that had enabled that power to be harnessed by the forces of Fascism. They thus
determined to create a political system in parallel that would neutralise the people as a
factor in political decisions within what would eventually become the EU. This involved
rendering their choices at the ballot box ineffective puppets who can initiate no legislation
and by virtue of their large constituencies are so distant from the people that no real
representation can take place. I doubt that there is one person in twenty in the UK who could
tell you the name of their MEP. What this means in effect is that there is no demos, no
people in the original Greek political sense and since there is no demos there can be no
democracy. The European Commission, which is the executive arm of the EU is voted for by the
Parliament, there is no input from the people which is why you see strange anomalies like
Prime Minister May negotiating with Michael Barnier or President Donald Trump talking to
Jean-Claude Juncker, two men who wield enormous power and yet have never received a single
vote from a citizen of the EU.
The truly frightening thing about this state of affairs is not the present EU even with
its lack of accountability, malice and incompetence but the opportunities it offers for
future tyranny and oppression. Human beings being what they are, no system that leaves the
people out of its decision making process will endure long as a force for good in the
world.
A currency is both an instrument and a product of a nation's monetary, fiscal and budgetary
policies.
Multiple nations with separate, and often contrary policies, cannot realistically share a
currency.
on one hand the dream of the internationalist eurocrats is the United States of Europe,
that is a USA on steroids from the aspect of govt powers. They are after it with 'all
possible despatch' as the old british navy slang goes. For them nation states are a thing of
the past and they see a rainbow society stretching from Gibraltar to Tallinn, and from Faroer
islands to Rhodes, with all possible colours, and other liberal nightmares of 'families', as
well as as a refuge open to everybody, who is not christian/and or conservative. Political
and economical control is absolute in their hands, and a police state is chasing 'family
values', but not petty crime. Drugs are legalized and stuff.
That dream is falling apart. Thank God.
On the other hand everything a semi-official russian source says must be taken with a huge
spoon of salt, since those 'pesky rooshans' are always up to something. A united and strong
EU not to mention a strong european army is not in their interest, since they fear a
Barbarossa 2.0. But what they want less is the version of Mr. Trump's NATO, an enlarged and
obeying military AND political arm of the US.
Yes the current EU is weak and will be weaker when in April 2019 more eu-sceptical parties
will join the EU parliament, I would even go as far as they will the majority. The neoliberal
top down, forced 'gleichschaltung' has failed and the Yellow Vests are only one aspect. A
thorough reform is needed, and as always I promote the way the austro-hungarian empire
worked, and worked reliably. That is a common foreign and defence politics, financed commonly
BUT this budget was to be suported by BOTH parliaments. The rest is voluntary. Standards,
education, police and intelligence services obligatorily share data etc. but NOTHING ELSE is
mandatory.
As of anti US sentiments. The late G. Bush with his visit in 1989 has left a deep and very
positive mark on hungarian public opinion. Some 30 years later the new ambassador appointed
by the running Pres himself says, that although Mr. Trump and Mr. Orban see the world very,
very similarly, a gesture from the hungarian govt is needed to facilitate a personnal
meeting. It could be a defence cooperation, a step to increase energy independence, or
helping to resolve the ukrainian situation.
Let me translate.
Buy US weapons for billions of dollars, buy US LNG for 50-70% higher price, or let 150 000
hungarians be forcefully assimilated into ukrainians becuase that is in-line with US
interests.
If you would like Sir, I would be more than honoured to write you a piece on the growing
disillusionment about the „West" in the Visegrad 4 countries, and the impossibility of
US geopolitical plans with this region.
"The 80 million or so people of Germany de facto rule the 500 million of the Union, or you
know, the three handfuls that rule Germany. No important decision can or will ever be taken
that Berlin does not agree with. "
Stupid lie, in the past I was used to better quality Rusian propaganda. :-)
"A persuasive article, the Europeans here can now explain to us all how much better and
more virtuous Europe is than the United States."
Sir;
It may be a stretch, but I can see the present state of the European Union as analogous to
America under the Articles of Confederation. That experiment wasn't working out as expected,
so, America went back to the drawing board and developed the Constitution. This set in train
events that, arguably, culminated in the War Between the States. Out of that crucible came a
strong central government, with some allowances for differences between states and regions,
but a general and enforceable national system. Where is the District of Columbia for Europe?
Berlin? Hardly. German civil law does not run in France, or Spain. Brussels? Conrad was right
in describing it in the opening of his book "The Heart of Darkness" as full of whited
sepulchers. Until some true Capitol is established for Europe, apart from and distinct from
the state capitols, and given effective power, Europe will just limp along.
The real value of the European Union lies in its function as a brake on inter-european
disputes. Preventing round three of the Great War might be it's biggest achievement.
As for Merkel being CFO of Germany, well, a nation is not just it's financial and economic
systems. If she concentrated her energies only on the financial aspects of her country, then
she deserves to go. Not enough of the 'vision' thing.
"The real value of the European Union lies in its function as a brake on inter-european
disputes."
I've seen that statement so often that I might eventually have to agree with it out of
weariness. But I don't think it'll do.
The reason we've had seventy years of peace, more or less, is that the European powers,
possibly excepting Germany, are no longer Great Powers.
In such disputes as have seriously escalated the EU has not been a brake. It has if
anything been a promoter of conflict, though its contribution to conflict so far has
necessarily been less than the contribution of its constituent nation states.
The reaction of the western media to these protests in France is quite different compared to
how they reported (aka propagandized) the Arab Spring and the Color Revolutions in Eastern
Europe. There they created the mythology of the liberty loving people vs the authoritarian
state. And the hysteria to gin up support for regime change.
In this instance on the protests in France, on most days there is no reporting. And when
there is any analysis these protesters are deemed as anarchists and troublemakers. I can't
wait for the subversive Russian hand to show up in the NY Times and WaPo. I for one would be
very interested to learn more about the Yellow Vests and the sentiments among the broad
public they are mining. It seems their demands are the demands of the disenfranchised. Those
who have paid the price for the enormous wealth of the Davos globalist elites. It also seems
that 70% of the French public support the protests.
The poll ratings of Macron the favorite of the globalist elites has plummeted that makes
Trump a very popular leader relatively. Will the "regime changers" in the west demand that
Macron go as they would if these protests were taking place in Russia for example?
IMO, the biggest problem in Europe is that an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels has
essentially stripped EU countries of their sovereignty and make classic bureaucratic
decisions that make ordinary lives more challenging, like the well known example of the pages
of directive about the shape and color of bananas that can be sold in the EU, which is an
example of a bureaucracy that is so big that they have to invent knew ways to remain
relevant.
We've seen many countries in Europe starting to take independent stances and pushing back
against the Brussels bureaucracy. Hungary, Czech Republic, Italy are examples of countries in
some conflict with Brussels. Even in Germany what would have been considered fringe political
parties are gaining substantial ground in national, state and local elections. All signs that
the average person is getting more frustrated.
this article from SF is provocative, not so persuasive. The mantra that some German Kamarilla
is ruling the EU, that German "deep state" if you will, exists in order to conquer the
European continent by peaceful, economic, financial means is IMO total BS. Germany is not
sovereign country, that is no. 1; secondly - the important decisions like the Greece bailouts
were made by France (Sarkozy) and others by "pulling Merkel over the table", by ramming these
decisions through the Bundestag without proper deliberations. Thirdly, the ECB boss and the
Board are totally out of German hands. Merkel saw to it that Mario Draghi became the boss,
and not Weidmann. The issue of Greece´s debts and the role of Goldman Sachs in getting
Greece into the Euro zone is well known, and I will not spend any more time digesting it
again here. Facts are that Greece´s billions of Euro´s received from printing
presses, ended up in the pockets of oligarchs, who purchased real estate in Geneva, Lausanne,
Paris, Berlin, Munich, London, New York. The famous 2000 names on Lagarde´ list never
materialized in public.
Now, the state of infrastructure in Germany is bad, people´s savings disappeared,
poverty in old age is a big issue for average German worker. Tell me, how did Germany profit?
There is no disparate power of Germany in the EU. France does not know "wo ihr der Schwanz
steht" - and talking about european military force is of course excluding the control over
the French nuclear arsenal.
I am not linking to sources but I can provide these if so desired, the SF article did not
provide any for their claims.
Fanto - I am so glad that you distinguish between "Germany" - still one of the finest
countries in Europe - and the German ruling apparatus.
The elites tend to drag us along with them when it comes to conflict. So because the
Western power structures are at present opposed to, say, Russia, we must all line up
dutifully and uncritically behind the anti-Russian line. And many of us do just that.
I've seen this mechanism at work in my own country. Our government, Brussels, and the
Irish government are involved in a complex dispute. This is now spilling over into antagonism
on our part against "the Irish" and antagonism on their part against "the Brits" - not
unexpected in the latter case because the Irish do have a fair few reasons for hostility to
"the Brits" in any case. What a mess!
The same mechanism operated internally in the Ukraine. A generalised sense of resentment
against a corrupt and greedy elite was diverted to the quite different channel of conflict
between pro-Russian and anti-Russian sectors of the population.
They got the conflict, all right, but the corrupt and greedy elite is still there.
I believe this will happen to us in Europe if we don't look out. The crony corporatist
club we term "the EU", and the crony corporatist governments of its constituent nations, are
the common burden of the many peoples of Europe. If we allow them to become our leaders in a
fight against each other they will remain our common burden.
The Greek bailout was simply EU self preservation and not in their interests. The IMF was
more lenient that Germany in those bailouts.. Seriously. =)
Germany did not mind the wealth transfer from the southern states, nor the lower euro due
to their economic inefficiencies (see Pres. Trumps comments), Goldman or no Goldman. If the
Chinese do it they are currency manipulators but when Germany does it...
And Germany not spending on infrastructure restrained consumption, imposing their short
sighted austerity on the rest of Europe. This exacerbated the crazy trade surpluses that
Europe had with the rest of the world, basically starving the European consumers and screwing
the USA further.
hah. I would hope no one is suggesting that Merkel's 'refugees for cheap labour' imposed on
Europe was due to American pressure. It is basically an extension of the German predatory
economic polices.
The financial sovereignty of the Eurozone countries, Germany included, is constrained by the
terms of the Maastricht Treaty, by which they are restricted from running budget deficits in
excess of 3%. The north/south divide that has been unfolding since it went into effect early
in this century was uncannily predicted by the late Wynne Godley in the London Review of
Books a few months the treaty's ratification. Godley was a senior analyst in the British
Finance Ministry and his analyses were said by some to be the primary influence in the
government's decision not to forsake the pound for the common currency.
As for Germany having minimal influence on Eurozone financial policy, try telling that to
Yanis Varoufakis, who was the Finance Minister of Greece during the 2015 negotiations that
led to the draconian austerity program under which the country's economy has all but
collapsed and its infrastructure looted at bargain basement prices. There was little question
in his mind that it was Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Finance Minister at the time,
running the show.
exSpec4Chuck, I see that you are full on board of emotional German bashing tour; I can
recommend the book by H.W.Sinn, "Der Euro", Hanser Verlag, 2015. quote (p.27) "....Italiens
große Tageszeitung iL Giornale sieht in Deutschland das Bestreben am Werk, das Vierte
Reich zu errichten... Das linke englische Wochenmagazin New Statesman nannte Angela Merkel
gar das ´gefährlichste deutsche Staatsoberhaupt seit Hitler´ " (if you are
not proficient in German, you can try Google translate).
and what Varoufakis claims are concerned - he was refuted by the research of H.W. Sinn, who
calculated that only 1/3 of money which was going to Greece - benefited the French, German,
American banks, and not 90% as Varoufakis claims. The 2/3rds of it benefited Greeks, who were
buying foreign assets because they did not trust their own economy.
BTW, the introduction of the Euro was a political decision to weaken to Deutsche Mark,
against the Franc, it was promoted by Mitterrand as "better than Versaille", meaning better
than the reparations after WW1. -also called "Versaille without war". So, tell me -who is
right, give me some other points of view, please.
Related to the question ( rethorical? ) you pose, it was really very timely that these
protests in France started just a week after Macron supported the creation of an European
Army....They were organized by social networks ( not workers assemblies, as it is the usual
way amongst French working class movements... )... like the last so succesful electoral
campaign of Bolsonaro.... There is a significant extrem right component and claims for only
low taxes..... In fact it seems that people from the "Yellow Vests" who are willing to
negotiate are receiving death threats from the far-righters, who, at the same time, claim for
the rise to power of a general whom Macron dismissed in the past, once taking over....Then...
it is the presence of strange strong fitted masked people wearing sunglasses and dressed in
military fatigues with backpacks....wearing strange white brazelets.... amongst the first
line in the front of the riots...Believe me, I have seen many working class movements through
these years in Europe and this one resembles more the "Ukrainian Maidan" than any other
else...by its extrem violence, even attacking representative signs of French nation as
Marianne statue, Arc du Triumphe , or even burning of French flags...and calls
to storm L´ Elysée ...
Macron, like it or not, is the legitimate president of France elected in democratic
elections....There is an excellent opportunity to fight him in the next European elections,
since the real fish ( we all seem to agree in that ) is cut in Brussels.... Why it is that
this people can not wait till May..., or is it that the real organizers of these riots do not
expect any good result in those elections, be it because they are fringe organizations with
scarce support amongst the French people, or because they can not concur as subjects to these
elections because they are... well, foreigners...?
There are a lot of people who live far worst that the French today, including people in
the US ( only you would wish to have the still remaining French welfare state...to which the
globalist want to take a dent in...) and then, would you be happy seeing this happening in
the US?
Anyway, am I detecting some schadenfreude here by this South Front people?
Who they are, btw?
I use to read them when at first The Saker was publishing their "analyses"...It seemed to me
they were military people then....
Nobody in the US disputes Macron's legitimacy. His fantastical effort to prevent global
warming by raising the already sky high taxes on consumer energy products are a French
problem and worthy of an Enarch. The US has far fewer bases in Europe that it used to have,
especially in Germany. The remaining ones are there because of a mistaken policy of
containing Russia post USSR.
You Europeans and your governments are fully complicit in that
policy although as Trump observes you are unwilling to fund your own defense adequately under
NATO agreements. As I have said, I personally, think NATO should be dissolved and that
whatever security arrangements should exist between the US and European countries should be
on a bi-lateral basis, but it appears that your governments do not want NATO dissolved.
Pompeo is pretty simplistic guy from the "Coalition for the peace from the position of strength". A neocon hell bent on US hegemony.
And it not true that Mike Pompeo is doing his best to demolish the global neoliberal world order. It just point to US vassals its real
place in the neoliberal pecking order.
Notable quotes:
"... "Multilateralism has too often become viewed as an end unto itself," said Pompeo. "The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done." Maybe I ran in strange circles during my eight years in the State Department, but few of my colleagues were in thrall to such simplistic thinking. ..."
"... For its part, the Trump administration hasn't been shy about trespassing on other countries' sovereignty. Trump has threatened to invade Venezuela and to punish South Africa for its land-reform policies. By the end of 2017, he had also sanctioned nearly 1,000 individuals and entities. Apparently, there are limits to how much other countries can "exert their sovereignty" within their own borders if doing so goes against the interests of the U.S. ..."
"... The liberal international order actually provides a legal basis for such interventions -- if, that is, you're willing to uphold it and play by its rules. The UN Security Council has passed hundreds of Chapter VII resolutions authorizing action to "restore international peace and security." Many investigations and prosecutions by the ICC, to which all NATO members except Turkey and the U.S. belong, have advanced many U.S. policy interests. Multilateral bodies also provide a forum for resolving lesser disputes. Trump's animus toward the World Trade Organization, for instance, ignores the better than average (and better than China) U.S. winning streak in trade cases. ..."
"... Do multilateral institutions need review, reform and renewal? Well, what institution doesn't? And as the largest funder from 2014 to 2016 for 24 out of 53 leading UN and non-UN multilateral institutions (compared with nine each for Japan and the U.K.), the U.S. has a strong interest in making sure they work effectively and advance the interests of member states. ..."
If a diplomat truly is, as the old saying goes, "an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country," then Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo has earned his pay. His speech in
Brussels on "Restoring the Role of the Nation-State in the Liberal International Order" deserves a State Department Distinguished
Honor Award for Intellectual Dishonesty.
"Multilateralism has too often become viewed as an end unto itself," said Pompeo. "The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly
are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done." Maybe I ran in strange circles during my eight years in the State
Department, but few of my colleagues were in thrall to such simplistic thinking.
Pompeo then hurled rhetorical grenades at a row of multilateral bunkers: United Nations peacekeeping missions don't work; the
Organization of American States hasn't brought freedom to Cuba; the African Union doesn't advance the mutual interest of its members;
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund just make things worse; the European Union puts the interests of its bureaucrats before
those of its countries and citizens. Admittedly, each of those institutions is imperfect. But none lives down to the caricatures
Pompeo made of them.
Finally, in his own Mount Suribachi moment
, Pompeo brazenly planted the flag of American leadership on an international liberal order that this administration has worked
harder to blow up than to build. Wisely, he beat a retreat after his speech, taking no questions.
So, let's look at his points one by one. In attacking multilateralism, Pompeo claimed that the Trump administration's mission
is "to reassert our sovereignty and we want our friends to help us and exert their sovereignty as well." Trump himself played up
this same theme at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
But it's not clear that multilateral agreements and institutions have actually done much to abuse U.S. sovereignty. The UN
charter , for instance, clearly excludes intervention in
any state's domestic affairs. The U.S. veto on the Security Council gives it an unassailable backstop. America has unrivaled
voting power in the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank. Many of the supposed threats to U.S. sovereignty that the Trump administration has cited have been either
illusory -- such as a hortatory compact on migration the U.S. pulled out of last year -- or could be easily
countered
, such as a possible investigation by the International Criminal Court into U.S. actions in Afghanistan.
For its part, the Trump administration hasn't been shy about trespassing on other countries' sovereignty. Trump has threatened
to invade Venezuela and to punish South Africa for its land-reform policies. By the end of 2017, he had also sanctioned
nearly 1,000 individuals and entities. Apparently,
there are limits to how much other countries can "exert their sovereignty" within their own borders if doing so goes against the
interests of the U.S.
The liberal international order actually provides a legal basis for such interventions -- if, that is, you're willing to uphold
it and play by its rules. The UN Security Council has passed hundreds of Chapter VII resolutions authorizing action to "restore international
peace and security." Many investigations and prosecutions by the ICC, to which all NATO members except Turkey and the U.S. belong,
have advanced many U.S. policy interests. Multilateral bodies also provide a forum for resolving lesser disputes. Trump's animus
toward the World Trade Organization, for instance, ignores the
better than average (and better than China) U.S. winning streak in trade cases.
Even in those situations where international rules may constrain future U.S. behavior, they reflect trade-offs that negotiators
have weighed and accepted. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk said to Congress in 1965 about the thousands of treaties and agreements
that the U.S. had inked in the previous two decades, "We are constantly enlarging our own freedom by being able to predict what others
are going to do."
At their best, multilateral institutions allow their member states to leverage national power. Twice in the last decade, the U.S.
Government Accountability Office has compared the cost of UN peacekeeping missions to U.S. boots on the ground and found them to
be a much more cost-effective
alternative . Fittingly, two days after Pompeo blasted his hosts at the EU for shortchanging the interests of its members' citizens,
news broke of a massive, multi-nation EU-coordinated
raid on the 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate in
Italy -- the kind of bust that no country can mount on its own.
Do multilateral institutions need review, reform and renewal? Well, what institution doesn't? And as the
largest funder
from 2014 to 2016 for 24 out of 53 leading UN and non-UN multilateral institutions (compared with nine each for Japan and the
U.K.), the U.S. has a strong interest in making sure they work effectively and advance the interests of member states.
But the way to do that isn't to browbeat them, or to take your ball and go home when things don't go your way. For all the weaknesses
of the UN Human Rights Council, the U.S. withdrawal (Iceland
took its place) won't make it better, and makes it even less likely that offenders will be held to account. Moreover, China and Russia
are busy building their own multilateral bodies or suborning existing ones like
Interpol .
Pompeo claimed that the U.S. wants to create international organizations "that deliver on their stated missions, and that create
value for the liberal order and for the world." But the administration's drastic budget cuts to the State Department and international
organizations (which a more multilaterally-minded Congress
has blunted) and its preference for bilateral over multilateral deals suggest it would rather they withered on the vine. Equally
toxic has been Trump's disdain for the work of experts and seasoned public servants -- witness his recent repudiation of a searing
U.S. government
report on climate change's economic impact.
One of my wonkiest jobs as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo was to cover Japan's conduct in commodities
groups such as the International Tropical Timber Organization, the International Coffee Organization and the now-defunct International
Natural Rubber Organization. I never became an expert, though I did come to understand why Japan has such good coffee. I did, however,
develop a healthy respect for the wonks, nerds and gnomes who inhabit the multilateral garden, tending to their countries' national
interests while advancing the greater common good. They need and deserve your support, Mr. Secretary, not your contempt.
"... The unquenchable quest for high income on the part of the upper classes must be halted. ..."
"... They maintain it is a mistake to isolate it merely in the context of the financial innovation and deregulation occurring from the late 1990s. Instead, capitalism has particular historical tendencies and specific class relations. ..."
"... However, because politics and social class alliances can change, so can the profitability. The current crisis was not caused by falling rates of profits, but by financial innovation, credit overextension, and the particular social class alliances facilitating these activities. ..."
Neoliberalism is a new stage of capitalism that emerged in the wake of the
structural crisis of the 1970s. It expresses the strategy of the capitalist classes
in alliance with upper management, specifically financial managers, in-
tending to strengthen their hegemony and to expand it globally. As of 2004,
when our book Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution was
published by Harvard University Press, this strategy appeared successful,
based on its own objectives, the income and wealth of a privileged minority,
and the dominance of a country. The contemporary crisis is an outcome
of the contradictions inherent in that strategy. The crisis revealed the
strategy's unsustainable character, leading to what can be denoted as the
"crisis of neoliberalism." Neoliberal trends ultimately unsettled the foundations
of the economy of the "secure base" of the upper classes -- the capability of the United States
to grow, maintain the leadership of its financial institutions worldwide, and ensure the dominance of its currency
-- a class and imperial strategy that resulted in a stalemate.
A New Social Order-A Multipolar World
The crisis of neoliberalism is the fourth structural crisis in capitalism since
the late nineteenth century. Each of these earthquakes introduced the establishment
of a new social order and deeply altered international relations. The
contemporary crisis marks the beginning of a similar process of transition.
Not only is financial regulation involved, but a new corporate governance,
the rebuilding of the financial sector, and new policies are now required. The
basic tenets and practices of neoliberal globalization will be questioned, and
production has to be "re-territorialized" in the United States to a significant
extent. Accordingly, countries such as China, India, or Brazil will become
gradually less dependent on their relationship to the United States. It will be,
in particular, quite difficult to correct for the macro trajectory of declining
trends of accumulation and cumulative disequilibria of the U.S. economy
once the present Great Contraction is stopped.
In any event, the new world order will be more multipolar than at present. Further, if such changes are not realized successfully in
the United States, the decline of U.S. international hegemony could be sharp. None of the urgently required tasks in the coming
decades to slow down the comparative decline of the U.S. economy can be realized under the same class leadership and unchecked
globalizing trends. The unquenchable quest for high income on the part of the upper classes must be halted. Much will
depend on the pressure exerted by the popular classes and the peoples of the world, but the "national factor," that is, the national
commitment in favor of the preservation of U.S. preeminence worldwide, could play a crucial role. The necessary adjustment can be realized in the context of a new
social arrangement to the Right or to the Left, although, as of the last months
of 2009, the chances of a Left alternative appear slim.
It is important to understand that the contemporary crisis is only the
initial step in a longer process of rectification. How long this process will
last depends on the severity of the crisis, and national and international
political strife. The capability of the U.S. upper classes to perform the much
needed adjustment and the willingness of China to соllaborate will be
crucial factors. A crisis of the dollar could precipitate a sequence of events
that would alter the basic features of the process.
Two very distinct categories of phenomena are involved in the analysis of the contemporary crisis: the historical dynamics of
capitalism, on the one hand, and financial and macro mechanisms, on the other hand. The interpretation of the crisis lies at the
intersection of these two sets of processes, and the difficulty is to do justice to both and account for their reciprocal
relationships.
Neoliberalism should be understood as a new phase in the evolution of capitalism. As such, it can be described
intrinsically-its basic mechanisms and contradictions. The reference to a m ost recent phase raises, however, the issue of
previous phases. The comparison with earlier periods reveals the traits proper to the new period. The analysis of the social,
political, and economic trends that led to the establishment of neoliberalism is also telling of the nature and fate of this
social order. Symmetrically, the notion of a crisis of neoliberalism implies a possible transition to a new phase, and the
nature of the society that will prevail in the wake of the contemporary crisis is a major component of the investigation here.
... ... ...
A central thesis in Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution
is that the overall dynamics of capitalism under neoliberalism,
both nationally and internationally, were determined by new class
objectives that worked to the benefit of the highest income brackets,
capitalist owners, and the upper fractions of management. The greater
concentration of income in favor of a privileged minority was a crucial
achievement of the new social order. Income statement data make this
apparent. In this respect, a social order is also a power configuration,
and implicit in this latter notion is "class" power. National accounting
frameworks add to this observation that a large and increasing fraction
of U.S. capital income comes from outside of the United States. Not only
class relations are involved, but also imperial hierarchies, a permanent
feature of capitalism.
The new configuration of income distribution was the outcome of
various converging trends. Strong pressure was placed on the mass of
salaried workers, which helped restore profit rates from their low levels
of the 1970s or, at least, to put an end to their downward trend. The opening
of trade and capital frontiers paved the way to large investments in
the regions of the world where prevailing social conditions allowed for
high returns, thus generating income flows in favor of the U.S. upper
classes (and broader groups that benefit to some extent by capital income).
Free trade increased the pressure on workers, the effect of the
competition emanating from countries where labor costs are low. Large
capital income flows also derived from the growing indebtedness of households
and the government. Extreme degrees of sophistication and expansion
of financial mechanisms were reached after 2000, allowing for
tremendous incomes in the financial sector and in rich households. The
crisis, finally, revealed that a significant fraction of these flows of income
were based on dubious profits, due to a n increasing overvaluation of
securities.
Besides the comparative interests of social classes, the leading position
of the United States, economically, politically, and militarily, must also
be considered. The political conditions underlying the dominance of the
United States in the decades preceding the crisis are well known. Two
major factors are the fall of the Soviet Union and the weakness of Europe
as a political entity. Neoliberalism corrected for the earlier decline of
the leadership of the United States in the 1970s, at least vis-a-vis Europe
and Japan. The U.S. economy is still the largest in the world in terms of
gross domestic product (GDP), with a leadership in fields as important
as research and innovation, both in production and financial mecha-
nisms. As a consequence, the dollar is acknowledged as the international
currency.
The international neoliberal order -- known as neoliberal globalization --
was imposed throughout the world, from the main capitalist countries of
the center to the less developed countries of the periphery, often at the cost
of severe crises as in Asia and Latin America during the 1990s and after
2000. As in any stage of imperialism, the major instruments of these international
power relations, beyond straightforward economic violence, are
corruption, subversion, and war. The main political tool is always the establishment
of a local imperial-friendly government. The collaboration of the
elites of the dominated country is crucial, as well as, in contemporary capitalism,
the action of international institutions such as the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
World Bank (WB), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Economically, the purpose
of this domination is the extraction of a "surplus" through
the imposition of low prices of natural resources and investment abroad, be
it portfolio or foreign direct investment. That countries of the periphery
want to sell their natural resources and are eager to receive foreign invest-
ment does not change the nature of the relations of domination, just as
when, within a given country, workers want to sell their labor power, the
ultimate source of profit.
The same notion, hegemony, is used here to refer to both class hierarchi-
cal relationships, as in neoliberalism, and imperialism internationally. No
distinction is made between hegemony and domination as in approaches of
Gramscian inspiration. The notion emphasizes a common aspect within
class and international mechanisms. In each instance, a class or country
leads a process of domination in which various agents are involved. In
neoliberalism, the upper fractions of capitalist classes, supported by finan-
cial institutions, act as leaders within the broader group of upper classes in
the exercise of their common domination. Similarly, the United States acts
as leader within the broader group of imperialist countries.
... ... ..
..the upper classes, to the Right. A shift would occur within the compara-
tive interests of these classes.
b. It is hard to imagine that such a far-reaching transformation would
be accomplished without significant support from the popular classes. A
degree of concession to the popular classes might be necessary. Consequently,
a political orientation to the Center Right could be expected.
3. Diversification in the rest of the world. Such a new strategy of strengthening
of the U.S. domestic economy would have important consequences for countries
of the periphery profoundly engaged in the neoliberal international
division of labor. But, in the long run, such trends open opportunities
toward the establishment of national development models as was the case
after the Great Depression (as in import-substitution industrialization in
Latin America), the much needed alternative to neoliberal globalization.
Independent of the path followed by the United States, the situation will
differ significantly around the globe. An increased diversity will be observed
in the establishment of new social orders more or less to the Right
or to the Left. Europe is not committed to international hegemony as is the
United States, and the European Union is politically unable to pursue such
an ambitious strategy. Europe might-paradoxically, given its history -- become the traditional
neoliberal stronghold in the coming decades.
It is still unclear whether social democratic trends in a few countries of Latin America
will open new avenues to social progress. The crucial factor
will be the impact of the contemporary crisis on China. Either, having suecessfully
superseded the consequences of the crisis, China will experience
strengthened neoliberal trends as if nothing had happened, or the experience
of the crisis, in China itself or in the rest of the world, will work in
favor of a "third way" along the contemporary pattern of the mixed economy
that prevails in China.
Even if new social arrangements are successfully established in the
United States, it is hard to imagine that U.S. hegemony will be preserved.
There will be no clear substitute to an impaired U.S. dominance, and a
multipolar configuration, around regional leaders, will gradually prevail
in the coming decades. A bipolar world, Atlantic and Asian, is a possible
outcome. Abstracting from rising international confrontation if conflicting
interests cannot be superseded, the optimistic scenario is that new international
hierarchies will be expressed within international institutions
to which the task of global governance would be slowly transferred.
This
new environment would be favorable to the international diversification of
social orders around the globe. This would mean a sharp break with the
logic of neoliberal globalization, with a potential for developing countries
depending, as in the case of the popular classes concerning domestic social
orders, on what these countries would be able to impose.
This book can be highly recommended as a book on the Great Financial
Crisis of 2008, and a book of politics, political economy, class analysis,
sociology, and history. Very impressive accomplishment.
The strength of this book on the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 is that
Dumenil and Levy place the crisis in a larger historical perspective.
They maintain it is a mistake to isolate it merely in the context of
the financial innovation and deregulation occurring from the late 1990s.
Instead, capitalism has particular historical tendencies and specific class
relations.
This is a very impressive volume published by Harvard University Press.
It offers a play by play of the Great Financial Recession of 2008, beginning
from 2000 in chapters 12 - 17, the political response and the continued
stagnation in domestic economies and instability within the international
economic order in chapters 18 - 20, along with very interesting historical
policy observations and recommendations for this current crisis in chapters
21 - 25. Nonetheless the real power of this book occurs in its historical
analysis of capitalist development since 1970s described in great detail
in chapters 1 - 11.
According to Dumenil and Levy the historical
tendencies of capitalism are radically mediated by politics and social class
configurations (i.e. alliances). They argue capitalistic
development, since 1880s, has gone through four primary stages and corresponding
crises. They emphasize these developments are not historically necessary,
but contingent on politics and social class configurations. Moreover, their
analysis is particular to the capitalistic development in the United States
and Western Europe, they are able to generalize or internationalize their
analysis because of the U.S. global hegemony (although they certainly accept
there are modes of resisting this hegemony (e.g. Iran, Venezuela, Cuba,
China, etc.).
Dumenil and Levy have demonstrated in previous work the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall in capitalistic economies. However, because politics
and social class alliances can change, so can the profitability. The current
crisis was not caused by falling rates of profits, but by financial innovation,
credit overextension, and the particular social class alliances facilitating
these activities. There is no single cause of the crisis, but broader
social political mechanisms at work and in the process of transformation.
The basic story goes like this: following the Great Depression of 1930
a strong social political alliance emerged between
the management class and "popular classes" (this popular
class includes blue and white collar workers, including quasi-management,
clerical, and professional, which cannot be reduced to the traditional "working-class").
In the 1970s there was a severe profitability crisis, the legislative and
institutional response to this crisis caused a fracture between management
and popular classes, and a re-alliance between
management and capitalist classes (which includes ownership and financial
classes).
Once the alliance between capitalist classes and management had been
forged in late 1970s and 1980s, profitability returned and financial incentives
and financial innovation reconfigured personal incentives and corporate
motivations. Most important according to Dumenil and Levy is that these
historical transformations manifested a "divorce" between ownership/finance
and the domestic economy and its actual production process. The political
system did nothing to reconcile this disconnect, indeed expedited the divorce
via deregulation and financial innovation, what the economic literature
calls "financialization" (although, to repeat in several countries the response
was radically different and in specific opposition to U.S. hegemony and
the neo-liberalism which the U.S. Treasury, IMF, World Bank, and WTO exported
to the rest of the world).
No-deal Brexit: Disruption at Dover 'could
last six months' BBC. I have trouble understanding why six months. The UK's customs IT
system won't be ready and there's no reason to think it will be ready even then. I could
see things getting less bad due to adaptations but "less bad" is not normal
The
Great Brexit Breakdown Wall Street Journal. Some parts I quibble with, but generally
good and includes useful historical detail.
The "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom is often assumed
to be one where the once-great, sophisticated Brits are subordinate to the upstart, uncouth
Yanks.
Iconic of this assumption is the mocking of former prime minister Tony Blair as George W.
Bush's "poodle" for his riding shotgun on the ill-advised American stagecoach blundering into
Iraq in 2003. Blair was in good practice, having served as Bill Clinton's dogsbody in the no
less criminal NATO aggression against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999.
On the surface, the UK may seem just one more vassal state on par with Germany, Japan, South
Korea, and
so many other useless so-called allies . We control their intelligence services, their
military commands, their think tanks, and much of their media. We can sink their financial
systems and economies at will. Emblematic is German Chancellor Angela Merkel's impotent ire at
discovering the Obama administration had listened in on her cell phone, about which she –
did precisely nothing. Global hegemony means never having to say you're sorry.
These countries know on which end of the leash they are: the one attached to the collar
around their necks. The hand unmistakably is in Washington. These semi-sovereign countries
answer to the US with the same servility as member states of the Warsaw Pact once heeded the
USSR's Politburo. (Sometimes more. Communist Romania, though then a member of the Warsaw Pact
refused to participate in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia or even allow Soviet or other
Pact forces to cross its territory.
By contrast, during NATO's 1999 assault on Serbia, Bucharest allowed NATO military aircraft
access to its airspace, even though not yet a member of that alliance and despite most
Romanians' opposition to the campaign.)
But the widespread perception of Britain as just another satellite may be misleading.
To start with, there are some relationships where it seems the US is the vassal dancing to
the tune of the foreign capital, not the other way around. Israel is the unchallenged champion
in this weight class, with Saudi Arabia a runner up. The alliance between Prime Minister Bibi
Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) – the ultimate Washington
"power couple" – to get the Trump administration to destroy Iran for them has American
politicos listening for instructions with all the rapt attention of the terrier Nipper on the RCA
Victor logo . (Or did, until the recent disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Whether this portends a real shift in
American attitudes toward Riyadh remains questionable .
Saudi cash still speaks loudly and will continue to do so whether or not MbS stays in
charge.)
Specifics of the peculiar US-UK relationship stem from the period of flux at the end of
World War II. The United States emerged from the war in a commanding position economically and
financially, eclipsing Britannia's declining empire that simply no longer had the resources to
play the leading role. That didn't mean, however, that London trusted the Americans' ability to
manage things without their astute guidance. As Tony Judt describes in Postwar , the
British attitude of "
superiority towards the country that had displaced them at the imperial apex " was "nicely
captured" in a scribble during negotiations regarding the UK's postwar loan:
In Washington Lord Halifax
Once whispered to Lord Keynes:
"It's true they have the moneybags
But we have all the brains."
Even in its diminished condition London found it could punch well above its weight by
exerting its influence on its stronger but (it was confident) dumber cousins across the Pond.
It helped that as the Cold War unfolded following former Prime Minister Winston
Churchill's 1946 Iron Curtain speech there were very close ties between sister agencies
like MI6 (founded 1909) and the newer wartime OSS (1942), then the CIA (1947); likewise the
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, 1919) and the National Security Administration
(NSA, 1952). Comparable sister agencies – perhaps more properly termed daughters of their
UK mothers – were set up in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This became the so-called
"Five Eyes" of the tight Anglosphere spook community, infamous
for spying on each others' citizens to avoid pesky legal prohibitions on domestic
surveillance .
Despite not having two farthings to rub together,
impoverished Britain – where wartime rationing wasn't fully ended until 1954 – had
a prime seat at the table fashioning the world's postwar financial structure. The 1944 Bretton Woods
conference was largely an Anglo-American affair , of which the
aforementioned Lord John Maynard Keynes was a prominent architect along with Harry Dexter
White, Special Assistant to the US Secretary of the Treasury and Soviet agent.
American and British agendas also dovetailed in the Middle East. While the US didn't have
much of a presence in the region before the 1945 meeting between US President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and Saudi King ibn Saud, founder of the third and current ( and hopefully last ) Saudi state – and didn't
assume a dominant role until the humiliation inflicted on Britain, France, and Israel by
President Dwight Eisenhower during the 1956 Suez Crisis – London has long considered much
of the region within its sphere of influence. After World War I under the Sykes-Picot agreement with
France , the UK had expanded her holdings on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, including
taking a decisive
role in consolidating Saudi Arabia under ibn Saud. While in the 1950s the US largely
stepped into Britain's role managing the "East of Suez," the former suzerain was by no means
dealt out. The UK was a founding member with the US of the now-defunct Central Treaty
Organization (CENTO) in 1955.
CENTO – like NATO and their one-time eastern counterpart, the Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization (SEATO) – was designed as a counter to the USSR. But in the case of Britain,
the history of hostility to Russia under tsar or commissar alike has much deeper and longer
roots, going back at least to the
Crimean War in the 1850s . The reasons for the longstanding British vendetta against Russia
are not entirely clear and seem to have disparate roots: the desire to ensure that no one power
is dominant on the European mainland (directed first against France, then Russia, then Germany,
then the USSR and again Russia); maintaining supremacy on the seas by denying Russia
warm-waters ports, above all the Dardanelles; and making sure territories of a dissolving
Ottoman empire would be taken under the wing of London, not Saint Petersburg. As described by
Andrew
Lambert , professor of naval history at King's College London, the Crimean War still echoes
today :
"In the 1840s, 1850s, Britain and America are not the chief rivals; it's Britain and
Russia. Britain and Russia are rivals for world power, and Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, which
is much larger than modern Turkey -- it includes modern Romania, Bulgaria, parts of Serbia,
and also Egypt and Arabia -- is a declining empire. But it's the bulwark between Russia,
which is advancing south and west, and Britain, which is advancing east and is looking to
open its connections up through the Mediterranean into its empire in India and the Pacific.
And it's really about who is running Turkey. Is it going to be a Russian satellite, a bit
like the Eastern Bloc was in the Cold War, or is it going to be a British satellite, really
run by British capital, a market for British goods? And the Crimean War is going to be the
fulcrum for this cold war to actually go hot for a couple of years, and Sevastopol is going
to be the fulcrum for that fighting."
Control of the Middle East – and opposing the Russians – became a British
obsession, first to sustain the lifeline to India, the Jewel in the Crown of the empire, then for
control of petroleum, the life's blood of modern economies. In the context of the 19th and
early 20th century Great Game of empire, that was understandable. Much later, similar
considerations might even support Jimmy Carter's taking up much the same position, declaring in
1980 that "outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an
assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be
repelled by any means necessary, including military force." The USSR was then a superpower and
we were dependent on energy from the Gulf region.
But what's our reason for maintaining that posture almost four decades later when the Soviet
Union is gone and the US doesn't need Middle Eastern oil? There are no reasonable national
interests, only corporate interests and those of the Arab monarchies we laughably claim as
allies. Add to that the bureaucracies and habits of mind that link the US and UK
establishments, including their intelligence and financial components.
In view of all the foregoing, what then would policymakers in the United Kingdom think about
an aspirant to the American presidency who not only disparages the value of existing alliances
– without which Britain is a bit player – but
openly pledges to improve relations with Moscow ? To what lengths would they go to stop
him?
Say 'hello' to Russiagate!
One can argue whether or not the phony claim of the Trump campaign's "collusion" with Moscow
was hatched in London or whether the British just lent some "
hands across the water " to an effort concocted by the Democratic National Committee, the
Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, the Clinton Foundation, and their collaborators at
Fusion GPS and inside the Obama administration. Either way, it's clear that while evidence of
Russian connection is nonexistent that of British agencies is unmistakable, as is the UK's hand
in a sustained campaign of demonization and isolation to sink any possible
rapprochement between the US and Russia .
As for Russiagate itself, just try to find anyone involved who's actually Russian. The only
basis for the widespread assumption that any material in the Dirty Dossier that underlies the
whole operation
originated with Russia is the claim of Christopher Steele , the British "ex" spy who wrote
it, evidently in collaboration with people at the US State Department and Fusion GPS. (The
notion that Steele, who hadn't been in Russia for years, would have Kremlin personal contacts
is absurd. How chummy are the heads of the American section of Chinese or Russian intelligence
with White House staff?)
Andrew Wood , a
former British ambassador to Russia Stefan Halper , a dual US-UK citizen. Ex-MI6 Director
Richard Dearlove . Robert Hannigan , former director of GCHQ; there is
reason to think surveillance of Trump was conducted by GCHQ as well as by US agencies under
FISA warrants. Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ soon after the British government denied
the agency had engaged in such spying. Alexander Downer , Australian diplomat (well, not
British but remember the Five Eyes!). Joseph Mifsud , Maltese academic and suspected British
agent.
At present, the full role played by those listed above is not known. Release of unredacted
FISA warrant requests by the Justice Department, which President Trump ordered weeks ago, would
shed light on a number of details. Implementation of that order was derailed after a request by
– no surprise – British Prime Minister Theresa May . Was she seeking
to conceal Russian perfidy, or her own underlings'?
It would be bad enough if Russiagate were the sum of British meddling in American affairs
with the aim of torpedoing relations with Moscow. (And to be fair, it wasn't just the UK and
Australia. Also implicated are Estonia,
Israel, and Ukraine .) But there is also reason to suspect the same motive in
false accusations against Russia with respect to the supposed Novichok
poisonings in England has a connection to Russiagate via a business associate of Steele's,
one Pablo Miller , Sergei
Skripal's MI6 recruiter . (So if it turns out there is any Russian connection to the
dossier, it could be from Skripal or another dubious expat source, not from the Russian
government.) Skripal and his daughter Yulia have disappeared in British custody. Moscow
flatly accuses MI6 of poisoning them as a false flag to blame it on Russia.
A similar pattern
can be seen with claims of chemical weapons use in Syria : "We have irrefutable evidence
that the special services of a state which is in the forefront of the Russophobic campaign had
a hand in the staging" of a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018. Ambassador
Aleksandr Yakovenko pointed to the so-called White Helmets, which is closely associated with
al-Qaeda elements and considered by some their PR arm: "I am naming them because they have done
things like this before. They are famous for staging attacks in Syria and they receive UK
money." Moscow warned for weeks before the now-postponed Syrian government offensive in Idlib
that the same ruse was being prepared
again with direct British intelligence involvement, even having prepared in advance a video
showing victims of an attack that had not yet occurred.
The campaign to demonize Russia shifted into high gear recently with the UK, together with
the US and the Netherlands,
accusing Russian military intelligence of a smorgasbord of cyberattacks against the World
Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and other sports organizations, the Organization for the Prohibition
of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Dutch investigation into the downing of MH-17 over Ukraine, and
a Swiss lab involved with the Skripal case, plus assorted election interference. In case anyone
didn't get the point,
British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson declared : "This is not the actions of a great
power. This is the actions of a pariah state, and we will continue working with allies to
isolate them."
In sum, we are seeing a massive, coordinated hybrid campaign of psy-ops and political warfare
conducted not by Russia but against Russia, concocted by the UK and its Deep
State collaborators in the United States. But it's not only aimed at Russia, it's an attack
on the United States by the government of a foreign country that's supposed to be one of
our closest allies, a country with which we share many venerable traditions of language, law,
and culture.
But for far too long, largely for reasons of historical inertia and elite corruption, we've
allowed that government to exercise undue influence on our global policies in a manner not
conducive to our own national interests. Now that government, employing every foul deception
that earned it the moniker Perfidious Albion , seeks to embroil us
in a quarrel with the only country on the planet that can destroy us if things get out of
control.
This must stop. A thorough reappraisal of our "special relationship" with the United Kingdom
and exposure of its activities to the detriment of the US is imperative.
James George Jatras is an analyst, former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy adviser to
the Senate GOP leadership.
"... Non-elite members of the Party -- functionaries -- mistake their "secret" knowledge as professional courtesy rather than as perquisite and status marker. (I don't suppose it's a secret to anyone that the US CIA regularly plants stories in the NYTimes and elsewhere... unless you weren't paying attention in the strident disinfo campaign prior to the Iraq invasion.) ..."
Howard Zinn said, in a speech given shortly after the 2008 Presidential election, "If you don't know history, it's like you were
born yesterday. The government can tell you anything." (Speech was played on DemocracyNow www.democracynow.org about Jan. 4, 2009
and is archived, free on the website.)
Being older (18 on my last Leap Year birthday - 72), I recall the NYTimes and CIA have had relationship with, and was caught
having "planted CIA workers" as NYTimes writers. Within my adult lifetime, in fact.
This is what the CIA reflexively does: insists that [...] it is an "intelligence matter".
In a sense the CIA is always going to be right on this one - "Central Intelligence Agency" - but only as a matter of nomenclature,
rather than of any other dictionary definition of the word "intelligence".
Actually the collusion between the CIA and big business is far more damaging. The first US company I worked for in Brussels (it
was my first job) was constantly being targeted by the US media for having connections to corrupt South American and Third World
regimes. On what seemed like an almost monthly basis our personnel department would send round memos saying that we were strictly
forbidden to talk to journalists about the latest exposé.
It was great fun - even the telex operators knew who the spies were.
The line "'The optics aren't what they look like,' is truly an instant classic. It reminds me of one of my favorite Yogi Berra
quotes (which, unlike many attributed to him, is real, I think). Yogi once said about a restaurant in New York "Nobody goes there
anymore. It's too crowded." Perhaps Yogi should become an editor for the Times.
British readers will no doubt be shocked -- shocked! -- to learn of cozy relations between a major news organization and a national
intelligence agency.
"'I know the circumstances, and if you knew everything that's going on, you'd know it's much ado about nothing,' Baquet
said. 'I can't go into in detail. But I'm confident after talking to Mark that it's much ado about nothing.'
"'The optics aren't what they look like,' he went on. 'I've talked to Mark, I know the circumstance, and given what I know,
it's much ado about nothing.'"
How can you have a Party if you don't have Party elites?
And how can a self-respecting member of the Party claim their individual status within the Party without secret knowledge designed
to identify one another as members of the Party elite?
[Proles are] natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals ... Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance
not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals the Party was trying to achieve. ... The
ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering -- a world of of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines
and terrifying weapons -- a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts
and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting -- 300 million people all with the same
face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes... [
1984 ,pp 73-74]
It makes no difference if an imagined socialist England, a collapsing Roman city-state empire, an actual Soviet Union, or a
modern American oligarchy.
Party members thrive while those wretched proles flail in confused and hungry desperation for something authentic (like a George
Bush) or even simply reassuring (like a Barack Obama.)
Non-elite members of the Party -- functionaries -- mistake their "secret" knowledge as professional courtesy rather than
as perquisite and status marker. (I don't suppose it's a secret to anyone that the US CIA regularly plants stories in the NYTimes
and elsewhere... unless you weren't paying attention in the strident disinfo campaign prior to the Iraq invasion.)
Manzetti has "no bad intent" because he is loyal to the Party.
Like all loyal (and very well compensated) Party members, he would never do anything as subversive as reveal Party secrets.
"... The term is used as a catchall for anything that smacks of deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation or fiscal austerity. Today it is routinely reviled as a shorthand for the ideas and practices that have produced growing economic insecurity and inequality, led to the loss of our political values and ideals, and even precipitated our current populist backlash ..."
"... The use of the term "neoliberal" exploded in the 1990s, when it became closely associated with two developments, neither of which Peters's article had mentioned. One of these was financial deregulation, which would culminate in the 2008 financial crash and in the still-lingering euro debacle . The second was economic globalisation, which accelerated thanks to free flows of finance and to a new, more ambitious type of trade agreement. Financialisation and globalisation have become the most overt manifestations of neoliberalism in today's world. ..."
"... That neoliberalism is a slippery, shifting concept, with no explicit lobby of defenders, does not mean that it is irrelevant or unreal. ..."
"... homo economicus ..."
"... A version of this article first appeared in Boston Review ..."
"... Main illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare ..."
As even its harshest critics concede, neoliberalism is hard to pin down. In broad terms, it denotes a preference for markets over
government, economic incentives over cultural norms, and private entrepreneurship over collective action. It has been used to describe
a wide range of phenomena – from Augusto Pinochet to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, from the Clinton Democrats and the UK's
New Labour to the economic opening in China and the reform of the welfare state in Sweden.
The term is used as a catchall for anything that smacks of deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation or fiscal austerity.
Today it is routinely reviled as a shorthand for the ideas and practices that have produced growing economic insecurity and inequality,
led to the loss of our political values and ideals, and even precipitated our current populist backlash .
We live in the age of neoliberalism, apparently. But who are neoliberalism's adherents and disseminators – the neoliberals themselves?
Oddly, you have to go back a long time to find anyone explicitly embracing neoliberalism. In 1982, Charles Peters, the longtime editor
of the political magazine Washington Monthly, published an essay titled
A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto . It makes for interesting reading 35 years later, since the neoliberalism it describes bears little
resemblance to today's target of derision. The politicians Peters names as exemplifying the movement are not the likes of Thatcher
and Reagan, but rather liberals – in the US sense of the word – who have become disillusioned with unions and big government and
dropped their prejudices against markets and the military.
The use of the term "neoliberal" exploded in the 1990s, when it became closely associated with two developments, neither of
which Peters's article had mentioned. One of these was financial deregulation, which would culminate in the 2008
financial
crash and in the still-lingering euro debacle
. The second was economic globalisation, which accelerated thanks to free flows of finance and to a new, more ambitious type of trade
agreement. Financialisation and globalisation have become the most overt manifestations of neoliberalism in today's world.
That neoliberalism is a slippery, shifting concept, with no explicit lobby of defenders, does not mean that it is irrelevant
or unreal. Who can deny that the world has experienced a decisive shift toward markets from the 1980s on? Or that centre-left
politicians – Democrats in the US, socialists and social democrats in Europe – enthusiastically adopted some of the central creeds
of Thatcherism and Reaganism, such as deregulation, privatisation, financial liberalisation and individual enterprise? Much of our
contemporary policy discussion remains infused with principles supposedly grounded in the concept of
homo economicus
, the perfectly rational human being, found in many economic theories, who always pursues his own self-interest.
But the looseness of the term neoliberalism also means that criticism of it often misses the mark. There is nothing wrong with
markets, private entrepreneurship or incentives – when deployed appropriately. Their creative use lies behind the most significant
economic achievements of our time. As we heap scorn on neoliberalism, we risk throwing out some of neoliberalism's useful ideas.
The real trouble is that mainstream economics shades too easily into ideology, constraining the choices that we appear to have
and providing cookie-cutter solutions. A proper understanding of the economics that lie behind neoliberalism would allow us to identify
– and to reject – ideology when it masquerades as economic science. Most importantly, it would help us to develop the institutional
imagination we badly need to redesign capitalism for the 21st century.
N eoliberalism is typically understood as being based on key tenets of mainstream economic science. To see those tenets without
the ideology, consider this thought experiment. A well-known and highly regarded economist lands in a country he has never visited
and knows nothing about. He is brought to a meeting with the country's leading policymakers. "Our country is in trouble," they tell
him. "The economy is stagnant, investment is low, and there is no growth in sight." They turn to him expectantly: "Please tell us
what we should do to make our economy grow."
The economist pleads ignorance and explains that he knows too little about the country to make any recommendations. He would need
to study the history of the economy, to analyse the statistics, and to travel around the country before he could say anything.
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But his hosts are insistent. "We understand your reticence, and we wish you had the time for all that," they tell him. "But isn't
economics a science, and aren't you one of its most distinguished practitioners? Even though you do not know much about our economy,
surely there are some general theories and prescriptions you can share with us to guide our economic policies and reforms."
The economist is now in a bind. He does not want to emulate those economic gurus he has long criticised for peddling their favourite
policy advice. But he feels challenged by the question. Are there universal truths in economics? Can he say anything valid or useful?
So he begins. The efficiency with which an economy's resources are allocated is a critical determinant of the economy's performance,
he says. Efficiency, in turn, requires aligning the incentives of households and businesses with social costs and benefits. The incentives
faced by entrepreneurs, investors and producers are particularly important when it comes to economic growth. Growth needs a system
of property rights and contract enforcement that will ensure those who invest can retain the returns on their investments. And the
economy must be open to ideas and innovations from the rest of the world.
But economies can be derailed by macroeconomic instability, he goes on. Governments must therefore pursue a sound
monetary policy , which means restricting the growth of liquidity to the increase in nominal money demand at reasonable inflation.
They must ensure fiscal sustainability, so that the increase in public debt does not outpace national income. And they must carry
out prudential regulation of banks and other financial institutions to prevent the financial system from taking excessive risk.
Now he is warming to his task. Economics is not just about efficiency and growth, he adds. Economic principles also carry over
to equity and social policy. Economics has little to
say about how much redistribution a society should seek. But it does tell us that the tax base should be as broad as possible, and
that social programmes should be designed in a way that does not encourage workers to drop out of the labour market.
By the time the economist stops, it appears as if he has laid out a fully fledged neoliberal agenda. A critic in the audience
will have heard all the code words: efficiency, incentives, property rights, sound money, fiscal prudence. And yet the universal
principles that the economist describes are in fact quite open-ended. They presume a capitalist economy – one in which investment
decisions are made by private individuals and firms – but not much beyond that. They allow for – indeed, they require – a surprising
variety of institutional arrangements.
So has the economist just delivered a neoliberal screed? We would be mistaken to think so, and our mistake would consist of associating
each abstract term – incentives, property rights, sound money – with a particular institutional counterpart. And therein lies the
central conceit, and the fatal flaw, of neoliberalism: the belief that first-order economic principles map on to a unique set of
policies, approximated by a Thatcher/Reagan-style agenda.
Consider property rights. They matter insofar as they allocate returns on investments. An optimal system would distribute property
rights to those who would make the best use of an asset, and afford protection against those most likely to expropriate the returns.
Property rights are good when they protect innovators from free riders, but they are bad when they protect them from competition.
Depending on the context, a legal regime that provides the appropriate incentives can look quite different from the standard US-style
regime of private property rights.
This may seem like a semantic point with little practical import; but China's phenomenal economic success is largely due to its
orthodoxy-defying institutional tinkering. China turned to markets, but did not copy western practices in property rights. Its reforms
produced market-based incentives through a series of unusual institutional arrangements that were better adapted to the local context.
Rather than move directly from state to private ownership, for example, which would have been stymied by the weakness of the prevailing
legal structures, the country relied on mixed forms of ownership that provided more effective property rights for entrepreneurs in
practice. Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs), which spearheaded Chinese economic growth during the 1980s, were collectives owned
and controlled by local governments. Even though TVEs were publicly owned, entrepreneurs received the protection they needed against
expropriation. Local governments had a direct stake in the profits of the firms, and hence did not want to kill the goose that lays
the golden eggs.
China relied on a range of such innovations, each delivering the economist's higher-order economic principles in unfamiliar institutional
arrangements. For instance, it shielded its large state sector from global competition, establishing special economic zones where
foreign firms could operate with different rules than in the rest of the economy. In view of such departures from orthodox blueprints,
describing China's economic reforms as neoliberal – as critics are inclined to do – distorts more than it reveals. If we are to call
this neoliberalism, we must surely look more kindly on the ideas behind the most dramatic
poverty reduction in history.
One might protest that China's institutional innovations were purely transitional. Perhaps it will have to converge on western-style
institutions to sustain its economic progress. But this common line of thinking overlooks the diversity of capitalist arrangements
that still prevails among advanced economies, despite the considerable homogenisation of our policy discourse.
What, after all, are western institutions? The size of the public sector in OECD countries varies, from a third of the economy
in Korea to nearly 60% in Finland. In Iceland, 86% of workers are members of a trade union; the comparable number in Switzerland
is just 16%. In the US, firms can fire workers almost at will;
French
labour laws have historically required employers to jump through many hoops first. Stock markets have grown to a total value
of nearly one-and-a-half times GDP in the US; in Germany, they are only a third as large, equivalent to just 50% of GDP.
The idea that any one of these models of taxation, labour relations or financial organisation is inherently superior to the others
is belied by the varying economic fortunes that each of these economies have experienced over recent decades. The US has gone through
successive periods of angst in which its economic institutions were judged inferior to those in Germany, Japan, China, and now possibly
Germany again. Certainly, comparable levels of wealth and productivity can be produced under very different models of capitalism.
We might even go a step further: today's prevailing models probably come nowhere near exhausting the range of what might be possible,
and desirable, in the future.
The visiting economist in our thought experiment knows all this, and recognises that the principles he has enunciated need to
be filled in with institutional detail before they become operational. Property rights? Yes, but how? Sound money? Of course, but
how? It would perhaps be easier to criticise his list of principles for being vacuous than to denounce it as a neoliberal screed.
Still, these principles are not entirely content-free. China, and indeed all countries that managed to develop rapidly, demonstrate
the utility of those principles once they are properly adapted to local context. Conversely, too many economies have been driven
to ruin courtesy of political leaders who chose to violate them. We need look no further than
Latin American populists or eastern European communist regimes to appreciate the practical significance of sound money, fiscal
sustainability and private incentives.
O f course, economics goes beyond a list of abstract, largely common-sense principles. Much of the work of economists consists
of developing
stylised models of how economies work and then confronting those models with evidence. Economists tend to think of what they
do as progressively refining their understanding of the world: their models are supposed to get better and better as they are tested
and revised over time. But progress in economics happens differently.
Economists study a social reality that is unlike the physical universe. It is completely manmade, highly malleable and operates
according to different rules across time and space. Economics
advances not by settling on the right model or theory to answer such questions, but by improving our understanding of the diversity
of causal relationships. Neoliberalism and its customary remedies – always more markets, always less government – are in fact a perversion
of mainstream economics. Good economists know that the correct answer to any question in economics is: it depends.
Does an increase in the minimum wage depress employment? Yes, if the labour market is really competitive and employers have no
control over the wage they must pay to attract workers; but not necessarily otherwise. Does trade liberalisation increase economic
growth? Yes, if it increases the profitability of industries where the bulk of investment and innovation takes place; but not otherwise.
Does more government spending increase employment? Yes, if there is slack in the economy and wages do not rise; but not otherwise.
Does monopoly harm innovation? Yes and no, depending on a whole host of market circumstances.
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and precipitated our current populist backlash' Trump signing an order to take the US out of the TPP trade pact. Photograph: AFP/Getty
In economics, new models rarely supplant older models. The basic competitive-markets model dating back to Adam Smith has been
modified over time by the inclusion, in rough historical order, of monopoly, externalities, scale economies, incomplete and asymmetric
information, irrational behaviour and many other real-world features. But the older models remain as useful as ever. Understanding
how real markets operate necessitates using different lenses at different times.
Perhaps maps offer the best analogy. Just like economic models, maps are
highly stylised representations
of reality . They are useful precisely because they abstract from many real-world details that would get in the way. But abstraction
also implies that we need a different map depending on the nature of our journey. If we are travelling by bike, we need a map of
bike trails. If we are to go on foot, we need a map of footpaths. If a new subway is constructed, we will need a subway map – but
we wouldn't throw out the older maps.
Economists tend to be very good at making maps, but not good enough at choosing the one most suited to the task at hand. When
confronted with policy questions of the type our visiting economist faces, too many of them resort to "benchmark" models that favour
the
laissez-faire
approach. Kneejerk solutions and hubris replace the richness and humility of the discussion in the seminar room. John Maynard
Keynes once defined economics as the "science of thinking in terms of models, joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant".
Economists typically have trouble with the "art" part.
This, too, can be illustrated with a parable. A journalist calls an economics professor for his view on whether free trade is
a good idea. The professor responds enthusiastically in the affirmative. The journalist then goes undercover as a student in the
professor's advanced graduate seminar on international trade. He poses the same question: is free trade good? This time the professor
is stymied. "What do you mean by 'good'?" he responds. "And good for whom?" The professor then launches into an extensive exegesis
that will ultimately culminate in a heavily hedged statement: "So if the long list of conditions I have just described are satisfied,
and assuming we can tax the beneficiaries to compensate the losers, freer trade has the potential to increase everyone's wellbeing."
If he is in an expansive mood, the professor might add that the effect of free trade on an economy's longterm growth rate is not
clear either, and would depend on an altogether different set of requirements.
This professor is rather different from the one the journalist encountered previously. On the record, he exudes self-confidence,
not reticence, about the appropriate policy. There is one and only one model, at least as far as the public conversation is concerned,
and there is a single correct answer, regardless of context. Strangely, the professor deems the knowledge that he imparts to his
advanced students to be inappropriate (or dangerous) for the general public. Why?
The roots of such behaviour lie deep in the culture of the economics profession. But one important motive is the zeal to display
the profession's crown jewels – market efficiency, the invisible hand, comparative advantage – in untarnished form, and to shield
them from attack by self-interested barbarians, namely
the protectionists . Unfortunately, these economists typically ignore the barbarians on the other side of the issue – financiers
and multinational corporations whose motives are no purer and who are all too ready to hijack these ideas for their own benefit.
As a result, economists' contributions to public debate are often biased in one direction, in favour of more trade, more finance
and less government. That is why economists have developed a reputation as cheerleaders for neoliberalism, even if mainstream economics
is very far from a paean to laissez-faire. The economists who let their enthusiasm for free markets run wild are in fact not being
true to their own discipline.
H ow then should we think about globalisation in order to liberate it from the grip of neoliberal practices? We must begin by
understanding the positive potential of global markets. Access to world markets in goods, technologies and capital has played an
important role in virtually all of the economic miracles of our time. China is the most recent and powerful reminder of this historical
truth, but it is not the only case. Before China, similar miracles were performed by South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and a few non-Asian
countries such as
Mauritius . All of these countries embraced globalisation rather than turn their backs on it, and they benefited handsomely.
Defenders of the existing economic order will quickly point to these examples when globalisation comes into question. What they
will fail to say is that almost all of these countries joined the world economy by violating neoliberal strictures. South Korea and
Taiwan, for instance, heavily subsidised their exporters, the former through the financial system and the latter through tax incentives.
All of them eventually removed most of their import restrictions, long after economic growth had taken off.
But none, with the sole exception of Chile in the 1980s under Pinochet, followed the neoliberal recommendation of a rapid opening-up
to imports. Chile's neoliberal
experiment eventually produced the worst economic crisis in all of Latin America. While the details differ across countries,
in all cases governments played an active role in restructuring the economy and buffering it against a volatile external environment.
Industrial policies, restrictions on capital flows and currency controls – all prohibited in the neoliberal playbook – were rampant.
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Pinterest Protest against Nafta in Mexico City in 2008: since the reforms of the mid-90s, the country's economy has underperformed.
Photograph: EPA
By contrast, countries that stuck closest to the neoliberal model of globalisation were sorely disappointed. Mexico provides a
particularly sad example. Following a series of macroeconomic crises in the mid-1990s, Mexico embraced macroeconomic orthodoxy, extensively
liberalised its economy, freed up the financial system, sharply reduced import restrictions and signed the North American Free Trade
Agreement (Nafta). These policies did produce macroeconomic stability and a significant rise in foreign trade and internal investment.
But where it counts – in overall productivity and economic growth –
the experiment failed
. Since undertaking the reforms, overall productivity in Mexico has stagnated, and the economy has underperformed even by the
undemanding standards of Latin America.
These outcomes are not a surprise from the perspective of sound economics. They are yet another manifestation of the need for
economic policies to be attuned to the failures to which markets are prone, and to be tailored to the specific circumstances of each
country. No single blueprint fits all.
A s Peters's 1982 manifesto attests, the meaning of neoliberalism has changed considerably over time as the label has acquired
harder-line connotations with respect to deregulation, financialisation and globalisation. But there is one thread that connects
all versions of neoliberalism, and that is the
emphasis
on economic growth . Peters wrote in 1982 that the emphasis was warranted because growth is essential to all our social and political
ends – community, democracy, prosperity. Entrepreneurship, private investment and removing obstacles that stand in the way (such
as excessive regulation) were all instruments for achieving economic growth. If a similar neoliberal manifesto were penned today,
it would no doubt make the same point.
ss="rich-link"> Globalisation: the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world Read more
Critics often point out that this emphasis on economics debases and sacrifices other important values such as equality, social
inclusion, democratic deliberation and justice. Those political and social objectives obviously matter enormously, and in some contexts
they matter the most. They cannot always, or even often, be achieved by means of technocratic economic policies; politics must play
a central role.
Still, neoliberals are not wrong when they argue that our most cherished ideals are more likely to be attained when our economy
is vibrant, strong and growing. Where they are wrong is in believing that there is a unique and universal recipe for improving economic
performance, to which they have access. The fatal flaw of neoliberalism is that it does not even get the economics right. It must
be rejected on its own terms for the simple reason that it is bad economics.
A version of this article first appeared in
Boston Review
"... The record of deceit and deception that has surfaced in just the past two months points to yes. ..."
"... You want to get really, really pissed off? Then read " Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States " by Jessica Silver-Greenberg in the New York Times ..."
"... The big banks, however, don't make the loans. They hide behind the scenes to facilitate the transactions through automatic withdrawals from the victim's bank account to the loansharking payday companies. Without those services from the big banks, these Internet loansharks could not operate. ..."
"... Banks like JPMorgan Chase provide the banking services that allow Internet payday loansharks to exist in the first place, with the sole purpose of breaking the state laws against usury ..."
"... Then Chase vultures the victims, who are often low-wage earners struggling to make ends meet, by extracting late fees from the victims' accounts. ..."
"... Let's be clear: JPMorgan Chase, the big bank that supposedly is run oh-so-well by Obama's favorite banker, Jamie Dimon, is aiding, abetting and profiting from screwing loanshark victims. ..."
"... What possible justification could anyone at Chase have for being involved in this slimy business? The answer is simple: profit. Dimon and company can't help themselves. They see a dollar in someone else's pocket, even a poor struggling single mom, and they figure out how to put it in their own. Of course, everyone at the top will play dumb, order an investigation and then if necessary, dump some lower-level schlep. More than likely, various government agencies will ask the bank to pay a fine, which will come from the corporate kitty, not the pockets of bank executives. And the banks will promise -- cross their hearts -- never again to commit that precise scam again. ..."
The record of deceit and deception that has surfaced in just the past two months points to yes. Print 147
COMMENTS Photo Credit: Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com
Are too-big-to-fail banks organized criminal conspiracies? And if so, shouldn't we seize their assets, just like we do to drug
cartels?
Let's examine their sorry record of deceit and deception that has surfaced in just the past two months:
Loan Sharking
You want to get really, really pissed off? Then read "
Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States " by Jessica Silver-Greenberg in the New York Times (2/23/13). In sickening
detail, she describes how the largest banks in the United States are facilitating modern loansharking by working with Internet payday
loan companies to escape anti-loansharking state laws. These payday firms extract enormous interest rates that often run over 500
percent a year. (Fifteen states prohibit payday loans entirely, and all states have usury limits ranging from 8 to 24 percent.
See the list .)
The big banks, however, don't make the loans. They hide behind the scenes to facilitate the transactions through automatic withdrawals
from the victim's bank account to the loansharking payday companies. Without those services from the big banks, these Internet loansharks
could not operate.
Enabling the payday loansharks to evade the law is bad enough. But even more deplorable is why the big banks are involved in the
first place.
For the banks, it can be a lucrative partnership. At first blush, processing automatic withdrawals hardly seems like a source
of profit. But many customers are already on shaky financial footing. The withdrawals often set off a cascade of fees from problems
like overdrafts.
Roughly
27 percent of payday loan borrowers say that the loans caused them to overdraw their accounts, according to a report released
this month by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That fee income is coveted, given that
financial regulations limiting fees on debit and credit cards have cost banks billions of dollars.
Take a deep breath and consider what this means. Banks like JPMorgan Chase provide the banking services that allow Internet payday loansharks to exist in the first place, with the sole purpose of breaking the state laws against usury.
Then Chase vultures the victims,
who are often low-wage earners struggling to make ends meet, by extracting late fees from the victims' accounts. So impoverished
single moms, for example, who needed to borrow money to make the rent, get worked over twice: First they get a loan at an interest
rate that would make Tony Soprano blush. Then they get nailed with overdraft fees by their loansharking bank.
For Subrina Baptiste, 33, an educational assistant in Brooklyn, the overdraft fees levied by Chase cannibalized her child support
income. She said she applied for a $400 loan from Loanshoponline.com
and a $700 loan from Advancemetoday.com in 2011. The loans, with annual
interest rates of 730 percent and 584 percent respectively, skirt New York law.
Ms. Baptiste said she asked Chase to revoke the automatic withdrawals in October 2011, but was told that she had to ask the
lenders instead. In one month, her bank records show, the lenders tried to take money from her account at least six times. Chase
charged her $812 in fees and deducted over $600 from her child-support payments to cover them.
Let's be clear: JPMorgan Chase, the big bank that supposedly is run oh-so-well by Obama's favorite banker, Jamie Dimon, is aiding,
abetting and profiting from screwing loanshark victims.
What possible justification could anyone at Chase have for being involved in this slimy business? The answer is simple: profit.
Dimon and company can't help themselves. They see a dollar in someone else's pocket, even a poor struggling single mom, and they
figure out how to put it in their own. Of course, everyone at the top will play dumb, order an investigation and then if necessary,
dump some lower-level schlep. More than likely, various government agencies will ask the bank to pay a fine, which will come from
the corporate kitty, not the pockets of bank executives. And the banks will promise -- cross their hearts -- never again to commit
that precise scam again.
(Update: After the publication of Jessica Silver-Greenberg's devastating article, Jamie Dimon "vowed on Tuesday to change how
the bank deals with Internet-based payday lenders that automatically withdraw payments from borrowers' checking accounts,"
according to the New York Times . Dimon called the practices "terrible." In a statement, the bank said, it was "taking a thorough
look at all of our policies related to these issues and plan to make meaningful changes.")
Money Laundering for the Mexican Drug Cartels and Rogue Nations
HSBC, the giant British-based bank with a large American subsidiary, agreed on Dec. 11, 2012 to pay $1.9 billion in fines for
laundering $881 million for Mexico's Sinaloa cartel and Colombia's Norte del Valle cartel. The operation was so blatant that "Mexican
traffickers used boxes specifically designed to the dimensions of an HSBC Mexico teller's window to deposit cash on a daily basis,"
reports Reuters . They
also facilitated "hundreds of millions more in transactions with sanctioned countries,"
according to the Justice Department
.
Our banks got nailed as well. "In the United States, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wachovia Corp and Citigroup Inc have been cited for
anti-money laundering lapses or sanctions violations," continues the Reuters report. My, my, JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in
the U.S. sure does get around.
And the penalty? A fine (paid by the HSBC shareholders, of course, that amounts to 5.5 weeks of the bank's earnings) and we promise
– honest -- never to do it again.
Too Big to Indict?
Wait, it gets worse. Why weren't criminal charges filed against the bank itself? After all, the bank overtly violated money laundering
laws. This was no clerical error. The answer is simple: "
Too big to Indict," screams
the NYT editorial headline. You see federal authorities are worried that if they indict, the bank would fail, which in turn would
lead to tens of thousands of lost jobs, just like what happened to Arthur Anderson after its Enron caper, or like the financial hurricane
that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers. So if you're a small fish running $10,000 in drug money, you serve time. But if you're
a big fish moving nearing a billion dollars, you can laugh all the way to your too-big-to-jail bank.
Fleecing Distressed Homeowners
The big banks, in collusion with hedge funds and the rating agencies, puffed up the housing bubble and then burst it. Nine million
workers, due to no fault of their own, lost their jobs in a matter of months. Entire neighborhoods saw their home values crash. Tens
of millions faced foreclosure.
The big banks, which were bailed out and survived the crash, sought to foreclose on as many homes as possible, as fast as possible.
Hey, that's where the money was. In doing so they resorted to many unsavory practices including illegal robo-signing of foreclosure
documents. When nailed by the government, the big banks agreed to provide billions in aid for distressed homeowners. Were they finally
forced to do the right thing? Not a chance. (See "
Homeowners still face foreclosure despite billion in aid" NYT 2/22 .)
The big banks, despite what they say in their press statements, found a convenient loophole in the government settlement. The
banks began forgiving second mortgages, and then foreclosing on the first mortgage. That's a cute maneuver because in a foreclosure,
the bank rarely can collect on the second mortgage anyway. So they're giving away something of no value to distressed sellers and
getting government credit for it. Just another day at the office for our favorite banksters.
JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have been fined over a billion dollars for creating and selling mortgage-related securities
that were designed to fail so their hedge fund buddies could make billions. And then we've got the recent LIBOR scandal where the
biggest banks colluded to manipulate interest rates for fun and profit.
It's not about good people or bad people running these banks and hedge funds. It's the very nature of these institutions. That's
what they do. They make big money by doing what the rest of us would call cheating. As the record clearly shows, they cheat the second
they get the chance.
What kind of institution would loanshark, money launder, fix rates, game mortgage relief programs, and produce products designed
to fail? Answer: An institution that should not exist.
Nationalize Now and Create State Banks
There are about 20 too-big-to fail banks which have been designated "systematically significant." These should be immediately
nationalized. Shareholder value should be wiped out because these banks are repeatedly violating the law, including aiding and abetting
criminal enterprises. All employees should be placed on the federal civil service scale, where the top salary is approximately $130,000.
Can the government run banks? Yes, if we break up the big banks and turn them over to state governments so that each state would
have at least one public bank. (North Dakota has a strong working model.) The larger states would have several public state banks.
But never again would we allow banks to grow so large as to threaten our financial system and violate the public trust. Let FDIC
regulate the state banks. They're actually good at it.
(We'd also have to do something about the shadow banking industry -- the large hedge funds and private equity firms. Eliminating
their carried-interest tax loophole and slapping on a strong financial transaction tax would go a long way toward reining them in.)
Won't the most talented bankers leave the industry?
Hurray! It can't happen soon enough. It's time for the best and the brightest to rejoin the human race and help produce value
for their fellow citizens. Let them become doctors, research scientists, teachers or even wealthy entrepreneurs who produce tangible
goods and services that we want and need. What we don't need are more banksters.
Isn't This Socialism?
We already have socialism for rich financiers. They get to keep all of the upside of their shady machinations and we get to bail
them out when they fail. This billionaire bailout society is now so entrenched that our nascent economic recovery of the last two
years has been entirely captured by the top 1 percent. Meanwhile the rest of have received nothing. Nada. (See
"Why Is the Entire Recovery
Going to the Top One Percent? ")
I know, I know, people say, "Next time, just don't bail them out!" Meanwhile, they get to rip us off, day in and day out, until
the next crash? No thanks. Put them out of business now. If you have a better idea, let's hear it.
So what are we going to do about this? I fully agree with the assessment of this article and even the solution. State banks
would make very positive contributions to replacing these criminal enterprises. But, you have to understand that the Bank of North
Dakota was instituted in a time where the populist farmers were in a battle with the same criminal Banksters of the 1800/early
1900s. Thankfully, they succeeded in establishing their bank and it has shown us how well it works, even in a Red state like ND.
So, why is it that the dumbfuck Dems don't overwhelmingly endorse them? Two years ago, I publicly endorsed (as a citizen) state
banks as a solution to the financial problems for my state (Idaho), citing the BND as a model to follow. Who do you think gave
me the most shit about it? It wasn't the Idaho GOP, it was a Dem state senator who downplayed the state bank idea and pinned the
success that ND had on its shale oil production and proclaimed that Idaho needs to exploit its own natural resources more. Well,
they are. We are now going to start fracking for nat gas in Payette County. Dems and GOP alike here are endorsing the fracking
of our land. The sad fact is that there is not very much nat gas here to get excited about. We have nowhere near what ND has in
plays.
And, the Dems here completely miss the point of what a state bank can do for you
Try the last three centuries. They have absolute power as they control every nation's money supply and could if they wished
crash the economy next Tuesday. They can drag out a recession for years and have the ability to determine if you have job or not.
As the axiom about absolute power goes so goes the banking/financial business. Robbers and pond scum who just happen to know how
the system works but have no idea of what life is about.
"Globalism" is their mantra. Globalism is code for the Darwinian truth the elites pray to; which is their superiority giving them
the right to acquire ever increasing wealth always at any cost to other life or life support system. This IS their sum total understanding
of the meaning of existence. They laugh at our collective utter blind stupidity. If you haven't viewed "Money as Debt" on youtube
better have a boo. Then have a look at "The Money Masters" to see how the elites managed their take over of America and are now
going for the world.
"It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe
we would have a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Henry Ford
It is mandated fleecing by the likes of Bank of America in the state of Maryland- beginning January of this year, all child
support is handled by BoA via an "Epic" atm card... just one of the many ways they will skim from the people collecting support
for their kids is the 1 time per week atm rule for withdrawing cash- after that- $5 per transaction.
This is coordinated robbery with state legislature and the big banks... and it is abhorrant.
You want more examples - read Zero Day Threat by Ocheedo & Swartz (2009). That book peels back the curtain on the entire bank
card vs credit data corporation vs congressional enablers. And it's easy to read as it tracks a bunch of Canadian meth heads in
their successful efforts to steal our identities and then take our money and put it into fake bank accounts.
A reminder that the WASP society has it's roots in Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest which has been taken to new
heights lately to mean one is considered savvy if they are able to rob the meek and humble honest guy, the honest Abe's are just
too week minded, so the pain is internalized turned into self-blame "i guess i was too dumb to fall for it". I suggest the old
saying to put your hand into the tiger's mouth and take back what's yours. People are too damn dismissive and artificially programmed
to confuse nationalism with wall street thievery which they associate to the government and dare not criticize their USA government,
that would be unpatriotic and rebel rousing. I say hang the bastards all the way from Houston Texas to Los Angeles California
on every power pole from which they have stollen billion's of people's money by faking those "rolling blackouts". Authoritarianism
begets authoritarianism.
Not only are the banks a criminally organized mafia, there are more. For instance does anybody here know that there are two
mafia organizations in Italy? Let me explain to the novices here especially the knowledge challenged tea bagers cons repubics.
One mafia is in souther Italy in sicily which everyone knows including the dumbest tea bagers cons. The other one is in northern
Italy near Roma and is called the vatican where everything which goes on in southern Italy mafia also goes on here from money
laundering, power abuse from the top, human rights violation like converting all and sundry in foreign lands especially the vulnerables
and so on and on.
Yes they are criminals.....they just have laws that saya its ok to use people and steal from them unlike your average street
criminals.
The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution
so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.
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
Are these banks operating as criminals? Not really when you understand that they own lock, stock and barrel those who make
the laws. So if some pesky law was out there that prevented these capitalists from sucking every ounce of our blood they will
pay a meager fine, for appearances, and then bring the politicians and lawyers into their offices and tell them to change the
law. The government will obey as they know who the owners are.
Now let's talk about justice. When we get to that we see the whole system is so corrupt that there is no reform possible- if
you could fix it you wouldn't want to anyway.
Look, nowadays there is very little conspiratorial in any of this. They are doing it so blatantly out in the open and in our
faces it's as if they are challenging the people to stand up and fight back. So far not much resistance on the streets of the
Homeland.
I think it's also futile to attempt regulations or ask for any legal oversight. This is like the proverbial fox guarding the
hen house. The police will not police themselves. It's up to us.
Welcome to the world where businesses can 'regulate themselves'. I've said for decades that the business community is only
as socially responsible as they are legally required to be. The white collar criminal class has, like scum, risen to the top.
The first clue was the savings and loans collapse during King George the firsts rule. The creation of these entites came about
from the Reaganistas anti-regulation frenzy within the banking industry. They milked the system until it collapsed but very few
paid any price. Most actually made out like the bandits they were from THAT taxpayer bailout. So the pattern was set. Even the
Democratic party fell into lockstep because so much money could be legally stolen by these machinations. Of course, in order to
hide the fallout they had to change how inflation and unemployment was calculated.
This was all as predictable as the sunrise.
This is not a revelation - that big banks are little more than organized crime whose bosses dress in better suits, live at
better addresses and have more money than most people in organized crime ever dreamed of because these criminals are protected
by law and by the fact that even when the break what few laws there are that seriously affect them, they are simply not prosecuted.
After all who is going to launder the trillion or so dollars in drug money every year for handsome profits - as much as 20% sometimes.
Who is going to facilitate the transfer of laundered and other money in the international sale of hundreds of billions of dollars
in weapons to dictators, warlords and various other sleazebags around the world? The banks have an absolutely necessary role to
play in the Western World where Corruption is the norm in all businesses and banking operations that are bigger than one person.
Private banks need to be abolished and private bankers need to be in prison for life.
The current banking and economic system that is in place operates outside normal perception. Look at how Barclays was manipulating
interest rates to favour their investments and to charge others more. Geee I wonder if the other banks and investment houses did
the same? Toxic derivatives being sold as great investments knowing that they are going to fail. Goldman Sachs complicit in hiding
Greek debt for decades. Hyper trading where algorithms and nano second trading drive market values. These elite hyper traders
never seem to lose money.
The system is broken and those few benefiting from it do not want it to change.
We need to re-envision our world. I want a system where legislation benefits citizens, not corporations. I want legislation
that ensures the best possible results for the most people. I am not opposed to capitalist style economic system that serves a
citizenry needs. I am opposed to an economic system that has us serving it.
It seems it is only going to get worse. We have people trying to privatize education. Their goal is not better education but
a profit. The same people want a larger privatized penal system. Not to protect society and rehabilitate, but to generate profit.
We have this system in place in the health care industry. It does not get us better health care, it gets u more expensive health
care.
We seriously need to rethink how our economy functions, our society, etc....
Yes, Mo -- privatizing ed's about profit. But also about the new corporate religion.
Privatized schools play much more into the hands of admin. Teaching itself gets more niched into the specialized departments
whereby the specialists model the habits and reduced language of never looking into anything in anyone else's cubicles.
So few and so much rarer are the tenured posts in all these turfs that careerists will readily shear themselves of all ethics
in order to conform to the safe and orthodox. So will the many tens of thousands of Ph.D. contingent labor, who increasingly wither
in academe's vast corporate gulag.
Yes, you're so correct -- it's money that drives these massively amoral and immoral of high finance. But idolatry's more than
money. It's also the steroided vulgarized corporate religion. And it's rotting all ed, so the weakest rise to the top, and now
all K-12, too, becomes enablers of the standardized numbers rackets.
I would gladly award the DEATH penalty to the crooks who run Bank of America and Wells Fargo, two criminal organizations with
whom I have had dealings.
Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail Rolling Stone Magazine / by Matt Taibbi
The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep
bailing it out?
http://www.rollingstone.com...
And:
"It's Time to Break Up AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner and the Rest of the Telecoms." AlterNet / By David Rosen and Bruce
Kushnick
Today's telecoms provide overpriced and inferior service, and are systematically overcharging the hapless American consumer.
http://www.alternet.org/new...
"How the Phone Companies Are Screwing America: The $320 Billion Broadband Rip-Off" AlterNet / By David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick
Americans are stuck with an inferior and overpriced communications system, compared with the rest of the world, and we're being
ripped off in the process.
Great article. Spot on. Democrats used to be wary of the bankers, knowing that they needed to be watched and controlled. Regulated
banking is something necessary for an economy to run, with the emphasis on regulated. But, the banks have bought the regulators,
the "people's party," the democrats are sleeping with the bankers, and we are all paying the price.
Time to separate investment banking from commercial banking.
Time to enforce usury laws, including "fees" as part of the interest rate calculation
and, way past time to nationalize or simply yank the charters from the offending banks.
Clear, simple; and exactly what folks in Washington cannot understand.
The democrats? Who was it presided over this between 2000 and 2008, allowing it and creating laws to ensure the banks succeeded
in their ripoff? And who is currently standing in the way of any forward momentum? Republicans. Tea Party, Koch -funded Republicans
and their "Libertarian" network of slimeballs. Who was it pushing for the repeal of Glass-Steagall that made all of this possible?
Koch and their "Libertarian" slimeball network of free marketeers.And who was it that made the situation worse by getting more
of these aholes elected in 2010 and pretty much ensurig that nothing will get ccomplished? "Progressives" and "Libertarian" shysters
who were out in force yelling "both sidess are the same" - "don't vote."
And I see we're still at it in spite of everything we've witnessed the Tea Party do both at the federal and state levels.
But it's in alignment with the new, 21st century Neo-Fascist America.
Debtor prisons were eliminated more than a century ago because legislators had the sense (yes, they had some back then) to
understand that society is worse off, and no one benefits by putting those who can't pay their debts in prison. The burden was
thus shifted to creditors to assure their debtors could repay them before making the loan. The burden of indebtedness was thus
shifted from the debtor to the creditor as it should be.
In recent years the US has gone back to the old model of encouraging indebtedness and then punishing the debtors, initially
with non-bankruptable debt (thank you Joe Biden) and now with imprisonment.
There is absolutely nothing progressive or good for society in general or for individuals in particular in all of this. This
is all part of the reactionary movement in this country to destroy the Middle-class and return to a (neo) feudal society controlled
by a small class of "economic royalist" lording over a vast majority of disenfranchised and economically hopeless "serfs".
Six years after these criminals crashed the economy and almost took down the entire global structure we're still trying to
decide if these were crimes? The real crime is that We, the People meekly allow these crimes -and many others- to go unpunished.
After all, it really doesn't interest anybody outside of a small circle of friends.
Well put. If the mainstream media doesn't say something, the general population acts like it doesn't exist. The rich and powerful
have been very creative in hijacking public opinion and decimating our ability to think for ourselves. We are supposed to have
checks and balances between branches of government, but every single branch has been bought out and is in cahoots with each other.
I don't think anything short of a revolution will fix this corporatocracy. The White House has abandoned us, Congress has abandoned
us, and the Supreme Court has struck the final chord of war claiming that corporations are to be treated as people.
How much is your life worth? Not much if you aren't a politician or banker.
Neo Conned, look around you; look at the morons glued to their "smart" phones. Look at the idiots with their pants hanging
off their butts; listen to the people who can't put together a sentence in Standard English or who can't say two consecutive words
without at least one of them being a vulgar Anglo-Saxon term for a bodily function.
In general, Americans are probably the stupidest people in the world and we have lost our (at least at one time nominal) democratic
republic because of that: the obliviousness of the American people. (For reference please see Chris Hedges' excellent book, The
End of Reason and the Triumph of Illusion.)
Recently MI6 were implicated in Steel report, Skripals poisonings, Browder machinations, and creation of the Integrity
Initiative. Nice "non-interference" mode...
Notable quotes:
"... The UK's top spy spent some of his time blaming Russia for trying to, as he put it, "subvert the UK way of life" by supposedly poisoning the Skripals and through other mischievous but ultimately never verified actions, though moving beyond the infowar aspect of his speech and into its actual professional substance, he nevertheless touched on some interesting themes ..."
"... In other words, it's all about applying what he calls the "Fusion Doctrine" for building the right domestic and international teams across skillsets in order to best leverage new technologies for accomplishing his agency's eternal mission, which is "to understand the motivations, intentions and aspirations of people in other countries." ..."
"... "being able to take steps to change [targets'] behavior", this has actually been part and parcel of the intelligence profession since time immemorial, albeit nowadays facilitated by social media and other technological platforms that allow shadowy actors such as the UK's own "77th Brigade" to carry out psychological, influence, and informational operations. ..."
"... Considering Russia to be a country that "regards [itself] as being in a state of perpetual confrontation with [the West]", Younger believes that unacceptably high costs must be imposed upon it every time it's accused of some wrongdoing, forgetting that the exact same principle could more applicably be applied against the West by Russia for the same reasons. ..."
"... If read from a cynical standpoint by anyone who's aware of the true nature of contemporary geopolitics, Younger's speech is actually quite informative because it inadvertently reveals what the West itself is doing to Russia by means of projecting its own actions onto its opponent . ..."
"... That in and of itself is actually the very essence of Hybrid War , which is commonly understood to largely include blatantly deceptive techniques such as the one that the UK's top spy is unabashedly attempting to pull off. ..."
"... Accusing one's adversaries of the exact same thing that you yourself are doing is a classic method of deflecting attention from one's own actions by pretending that you're being victimized by the selfsame, which therefore "justifies" escalating tensions by portraying all hostile acts as "proactive defensive responses to aggression". ..."
"... Basically, the British spymaster just sloppily revealed his hand to Russia while attempting to implicate it for allegedly conducting "fourth generation espionage" against the UK. ..."
The head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Alex Younger briefed the public
about the challenges of so-called " fourth
generation espionage ".
The UK's top spy spent some of his time blaming Russia for trying to, as he put it, "subvert
the UK way of life" by supposedly poisoning the Skripals and through other mischievous but
ultimately never verified actions, though moving beyond the infowar aspect of his speech and
into its actual professional substance, he nevertheless touched on some interesting themes.
According to him, "fourth generation espionage" involves "deepening our partnerships to counter
hybrid threats, mastering covert action in the data age, attaching a cost to malign activity by
adversaries and innovating to ensure that technology works to our advantage."
In other words, it's all about applying what he calls the "Fusion Doctrine" for building the
right domestic and international teams across skillsets in order to best leverage new
technologies for accomplishing his agency's eternal mission, which is "to understand the
motivations, intentions and aspirations of people in other countries."
While he remarked that the so-called "hybrid threats" associated with "fourth generation
espionage" necessitate "being able to take steps to change [targets'] behavior", this has
actually been part and parcel of the intelligence profession since time immemorial, albeit
nowadays facilitated by social media and other technological platforms that allow shadowy
actors such as the UK's own "77th Brigade" to
carry out psychological, influence, and informational operations.
Younger warned that "bulk data combined with modern analytics" could be "a serious
challenge" if used against his country , obviously alluding to Cambridge
Analytica's purported weaponization of these cutting-edge technological processes to
supposedly "hack" elections, though neglecting to draw any attention to the fact that his
intelligence agency and its allies could conceivably do the same in advance of their own
interests, something that everyone who uses Western-based social media platforms is theoretically
at risk of having happen to them.
What Younger is most concerned about, however, are what he describes as the "eroded
boundaries" that characterize so-called "hybrid threats" lying between war and peace, which he
fears could undermine NATO's Article 5 obligation for all of the military alliance's members to
support one another during times of conflict. Considering Russia to be a country that "regards
[itself] as being in a state of perpetual confrontation with [the West]", Younger believes that
unacceptably high costs must be imposed upon it every time it's accused of some wrongdoing,
forgetting that the exact same principle could more applicably be applied against the West by
Russia for the same reasons.
He claims that it's the UK that will never respond in kind by
destabilizing Russia like Moscow's accused of doing to the UK, but in reality, it's President
Putin's so-called "judo moves" which prove that it's Russia who has mastered asymmetrical
responses instead. If read from a cynical standpoint by anyone who's aware of the true nature
of contemporary geopolitics, Younger's speech is actually quite informative because it
inadvertently reveals what the West itself is doing to Russia by means of projecting its own
actions onto its opponent .
That in and of itself is actually the very essence of HybridWar ,
which is commonly understood to largely include blatantly deceptive techniques such as the one
that the UK's top spy is unabashedly attempting to pull off.
Accusing one's adversaries of the
exact same thing that you yourself are doing is a classic method of deflecting attention from
one's own actions by pretending that you're being victimized by the selfsame, which therefore
"justifies" escalating tensions by portraying all hostile acts as "proactive defensive
responses to aggression".
Basically, the British spymaster just sloppily revealed his hand to
Russia while attempting to implicate it for allegedly conducting "fourth generation espionage"
against the UK.
"... Yes, its far better than the "first past the post" systems of the UK and the US where the number of votes split between two almost identical candidates can lead to a far different candidate winning with only a little over a third of the total vote. ..."
Proportional representation is definitely the way to go. I am sick to death of the
born-to-rule mentality of the major parties, and how they change the rules to benefit
themselves and to exclude others.
Minority government? There is no such thing - there is only 'government', and it is
supposed to involve all members of parliament in the decision-making process. 'Majority'
governments are an anathema to good governance. Every time I hear the likes of Tony Abbott
claim they have a mandate to implement ALL their policies, even though they only receive
around 35% of the primary vote, I want to throw something at the TV.
Bugger them! Make them work for a living - and make them consider ALL views, not just the
ones from their own party.
Preferences are an extremely good feature of our voting system
Yes, its far better than the "first past the post" systems of the UK and the US where the
number of votes split between two almost identical candidates can lead to a far different
candidate winning with only a little over a third of the total vote.
Preferential voting also makes it more possible for the major party duopoly being
overturned, allowing people to vote for a good independent without taking the risk of helping
a despised major party candidate from winning by default.
"The problem with representative democracy is that it represents the special interest groups
far more than it represents the citizenry." You are spot on.
What a logical and stirring argument you put forward Richard Denniss, and a large majority of
the electorate would have to agree.
However there is also a large number of people in the electorate that cannot appear to rise
from their nightly slumber without wearing their Blue, Red, Green or Orange tinted glasses
before facing the new day.
And because of this, and preferential voting, sneaking in the background is a plethora of the
wild mindless sub creatures called politicians who demand their rights to sit in the big
white building on Canberra;s Capital Hill, just waiting to spoil not only the electorate's
party but also known to prostitute the country's governance to their own advantage.
Richard, we desperately need a follow up stirring article on how to overcome this black
menace to our country, for the sake of our country.
If you think the public has an appetite for more bureaucrats, more rules and regulations to
micromanage people's lives and even more political wheeling and dealing in Canberra, you
should get out more.
That the coalition government is on the slide is of no long term consequence. We'll get a
Labor government next year and in a few years another coalition government and so on.
What is of long term significance is the loss of public trust in pretty much all of the
institutions - including goverment and the various government agencies that would be more
powerful under your scenario.
The problem with representative democracy is that it represents the special interest
groups far more than it represents the citizenry. Perhaps the solution lies in more direct
democracy.
The same sex marriage plebiscite demonstrated that we commoners can deliberate on a
sensitive issue, and in doing so behave far better than our elected representatives in
Parliament. And can make a sensible and progressive decision that our elected representatives
could not - both coalition and Labor MPs had opposed same sex marriage when it was raised in
th e Parliament.
The internet provides a platform for direct decision making by the citizenry. Perhaps we
should try that instead of what you are suggesting.
It's been clear for years that proportional representation has progressively meant death to
effective government, and that it forces major parties policy development further to the
political fringes to appeal to the fruit loops on the periphery of their respective
demographics. Time for a return to simple preferential voting (a-la-house of Reps) in the
senate, and an overhaul of what's considered a valid ballot - if you want to only rank 1, 2,
3 or all candidates it should be entirely your choice.
Hung parliaments, with diametrically opposed clumps of "independents" jointly holding the
balance of power can only ever deliver legislative stasis and constant political turmoil (as
we have experienced since 2010 and Europe and the US have suffered for the last decade).
Oh for the good old days when one or the other of the major parties held a working
majority in both houses, and policy was targeted at the 'sensible centre" of the Australian
electorate. At worst, they only had to deal with a couple of sensible Democrats, and the odd
lunatic fringe-ist like Harradine.
"... I find the Australian electoral system very mediocre. All those people who vote but really don't get represented. All those votes that just get mopped up by the major parties. I really can't understand why Australians have put up with such a poor system for so long. ..."
Having spent many years in a New Zealand under a First Past the Post system
and then Mixed Member Proportional, I am an enthusiastic supporter of proportional systems.
I
find the Australian electoral system very mediocre. All those people who vote but really
don't get represented. All those votes that just get mopped up by the major parties. I really
can't understand why Australians have put up with such a poor system for so long.
Hettie7-> melbournesam 31 Oct 2018 00:45
Proportional representation makes the most sense. Each party gets the same percentage of seats in the parliament as it
received votes in the election. That really is fair.
Nationalisation of essential services is required to put this country back on an even keel.
It was a stupid idea by governments (of all persuasions) to sell off monopoly essential
service assets. The neoliberal experiment has failed.
Beware: Just build a HUGE worker owned, democratically run (by workers) sector to compete
against privately owned concerns. If workers are (democratically) involved in running and
managing their own workplaces that will give plenty of competition for private concerns.
Workers will be involved in the 'politics' and economics of their local area as part of work.
They'll have more control over the technologies they want to use, how much profit they want
to make or not, wages, investment, working conditions and all aspects of their concern.
Workers would 'participate' more and be more involved in thinking about larger concerns. This
would make a nation/region more democratic on the 'ground'. Not just reliant on
'representative' democracy/voting. You'd still need over-arching government(s) but people
would have more direct control over their livelihoods and work conditions. Such a BIG sector
would give (I'm talking about Health, Education, manufacturing etc - not 'bread shop',
basket-weaving coops/social enterprises) private enterprise some REAL competition on prices
and services. It would deliver democracy to masses of people, some control over wealth
generation/economy and on a large enough scale CHANGE society in terms of social justice and
politics.
You don't need to go to State control or Private control of 'the economy'. Just the right
kinds of structures.
Neoliberalism is like a cancer on a health democracy. If we'd treated it in its early
magnifications (when the Librerals and far right old version of Labor), first started selling
off public assets (that are then charged back to citizens to use at increasing price rates
etc), we would have been fine.
But now the cancer is deep in democracy's lymph glads ( in many of our public services)
and so needs radical prolonged treatment and some surgery to assure the country's thriving
democracy survives.
First surgically remove the source: cease (vote out always) all right wing conservative
nutters from ever gaining power, or media mogul influence of government. Most but not all
hide in the Coalition.
Then, begin the reconstruction surgery to re-assert public assets and services. This is a
temporary but life saving cost.
Then, monitor and manage, (educate) the citizens about this scourge on democracy.
The death of neoliberalism means we can finally have a national debate about the size
and role of government, and the shape of the economy and society we want to build.
Neoliberalism is far from dead Richard - neoliberalism is deeply entrenched in mainstream
thinking its corporate enriching magic works insidiously - mostly subliminally under cover of
'sensible' free market self clearing 'orthodox' economics.
You and many others from 'progressive' TAI almost daily, unwittingly play a role in
reinforcing and entrenching neoliberal ideology in the community by framing macroeconomic
analysis/commentary in neoliberal terms.
Your oft repeated call for 'budget balance' over the business cycle is such an example. Only
fiscal deficits can build a prosperous productive nation in the absence of consistent
external surpluses - no government can ever build and expand a nation without permanently
injecting more funds into the non government sector than (through taxation etc) it
withdraws.
Both our major parties of government espouse neoliberal economic orthodoxy as if there is
no alternative - and no one calls them out - not even the quasi progressive TAI.
DSGE based 'orthodox' economics provides the lifeblood to neoliberalism - the myth of tax
collections funding expenditure provides plausible cover to constrain spending on
citizen/social services - but when it comes to war/corporate subsidy spending, such
constraints are immediately abandoned.
Hetereodox MMT exposes the lie of such DSGE myths - but faithful Ptolemaic 'progressives'
refuse to investigate or debate such Copernican macroeconomic sacrilege.
The recent TAI 'outlook' economic conference (proudly sponsored by 'The Australian'!! )
was a classic progressive 'fail'; loaded with orthodox 'experts' like Bowen and Keating
spouting austerity inducing neoliberal orthodoxy - not one heterodox economist was invited to
present the unwelcome, uncomfortable truth of sovereign nation macroeconomic reality.
Prof Bill Mitchell is Australia's most widely & internationally respected REAL
progressive heterodox academic - yet the TAI ignores him.
Neoliberalism won't die until it extracts the last breath of available wealth from
Australia's citizenry. It will die a savage death with the onset of the impending depression
'to end all depressions' when the collapsing housing bubble leaves citizens with a 'decades
long' bubble of unpayable private debt.
Only then will people realise they have been elaborately 'conned' - too late.
P.S. For all TRUE progressives:
Some brilliant short videos here
and here by Parody Project.
That's really the point, much as you might expect government like the Howard and Abbott ones
to have stuck to their claimed neo-liberal principles, neither substantially altered the
compulsory nature of the scheme, despite the fact that it ran more or less completely
contrary to Chicago School principles. Howard might have been fond of shouting "socialism" or
"nanny state" when he felt the need to criticise something, but deeds speak stronger than
words, and for all his p!ssing and moaning he was never going to do anything that stopped all
those truckloads of money finding their way to his friends in the banking industry.
Yes historically high mass immigration in Australia has been used as a trojan horse by the
adherents of neo-liberalism - to break down the pay and conditions of Australian workers and
their rights and entitlements.
By importing "ready made" skilled workers, neither the Government or the private sector have
had to go to the trouble of training their workforce nor bear any of the costs of educating
and training them.
As to the lower skilled imported workers, in the main, this is a crude device to cut out the
locals so that accepted or legislated pay and conditions can be lowered. Most of those
imported workers don't know their rights and are ripe for exploitation.
The shonks, rip off and quick buck merchants love neo-liberalism for the what it has done to
the Australian labour market.
And the Labor party has been complicit in all this - when it should have been protecting
Australians and Australian workers present and future from the ravaging impacts of
neo-liberalism.
For something that's supposedly dead, it still looks like neoliberalism is in charge to me.
The relentless commodification of every aspect of life continues apace. Money is still the
measure of everything and takes precedence over the environment, ethics, community,
creativity, discovery, and virtually everything else you care to name. When water thiefs, big
bankers, corrupt politicians, environmental despoilers, and those that start pointless wars
are IN GAOL, then I'll start to believe things are changing.
Neoliberalism is not simply an economic agenda. From the beginning it was conceived as and
then constructed to be much more than that - it was in fact as much a pedagogical cum
psychological operation to change minds across generations with regard to free-market
capitalism and thus to orient all thinking to that, than it was a matter of simple monetary
or trade policy. Of course, this had to be done with a good deal of repression and oppression
backing it up, here and there - Chile e.g. Thus electing neoliberalism is an effect of this
pedagogy over time - we are all schooled in its 'normality - and not a reflection of either
some natural desire for it or an educated choice.
I agree that we should be discussing fiscal policy but I suspect that Richard Denniss is
using a false frame for this topic. He probably adheres to the claim made by the
macroeconomic equivalent of pre-Copernican physics that a government that issues its own
currency, enforces taxes in that currency, and allows the currency to float in foreign
exchange markets can run out of its currency.
The fiscal policy of the federal government should be to employ all available labour in
socially useful and environmental sustainable productive activity, maintain price stability,
minimize inequality of income and wealth, and fund public services and infrastructure to the
maximum extent permitted by the resources that are available for sale in the government's
currency.
If you think that the government's fiscal policy should be to reduce a fiscal deficit or
deliver a fiscal surplus, you are a dill.
It makes no sense to target a particular fiscal balance because the outcome is driven
largely by the aggregated spending and saving decisions of the domestic non-government sector
and the external sector. The federal government does not control those variables.
The federal government needs to target economically, socially, and environmentally
desirable goals and allow the fiscal balance to reach whatever level is needed at any given
time to achieve those goals.
'Democracy' needs to be structural as well as a moral idea. Workers have been disempowered
and impoverished and disenfranchished by neoliberalism. An answer to structurally improve the
wealth AND democratic power of the workers is to build a HUGE co operative sector in each
economy: worker owned workplaces/businesses/concerns AND democratically run. THAT will
improve the situation for workers/punters: democracy where they live and work. Democracy
rooted not in fine ideas only about rights but bedded down in economic livelihoods. People
will take an interest in their local 'politics' and also understand more of the politics of
the nation. You don't have to get rid of 'capitalism' just give it a 'good run' for it's
money - some real COMPETITION. Cooperatively run Hospitals, owned by doctors and nurses and
other stakeholders - not for profit - that'll soon see the 'private' for profit' health
providers/rorters wind their prices and necks in. Socially owned, worker-owned,
government/taxpayer supported enterprise, work places, democratically run will boot up the
level of 'democracy' in our societies. We can still have voter style over-arching national
government of course. If you don't root democracy where people actually can participate and
which gives them a lot of control over their workplaces/livelihood, then it can all be
hijacked by the greedy and cunning (see neoliberalism). OH, a large cooperative sector in the
economy democratically run by workers won't deliver 'heaven on earth' - it'll still be run by
people!
It is also a tool of the neoliberals along with the whole neoliberal trend in macroeconomic
policy. The essential thing underlying this, is to try to reduce the power of government and
social forces that might exercise some power within the political economy -- workers and
others -- and put the power primarily in the hands of those dominating in the markets. That's
often the financial system, the banks, but also other elites. The idea of neoliberal
economists and policymakers being that you don't want the government getting too involved in
macroeconomic policy. You don't want them promoting too much employment because that might
lead to a raise in wages and, in turn, to a reduction in the profit share of the national
income.
Austerity fits into the mix very well Keeping wages low, or debt pressure high, means
workers will be less likely to complain or make demands. As workers struggle to provide their
families with all the temptations that a capitalist society offers, they become far less
likely to risk their employment, and less able to improve their situation.
At bottom, conservatives believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They
have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding
ideology which all boils down to the cheap labour they depend on to make their fortunes.
It shows a great sense of inferiority and knowing our "proper"place, that the populace
apparently accepted the colloquial term for neo-liberalism or economic rationalism, as being
"trickle down economics" and that all that the populace deserved and was going to get was a
trickle of the alleged wealth and benefits created.
Why were most people so compliant and accepting of something that as a concept, from the
outset, was clearly signalling it would economically completely discriminate against the 99%
and was intended to provide such a meager share of the wealth and economic benefits
generated?
A quick look around the world provides clear evidence that there really are a lot of
alternatives.
That's the crux: many (western, developed) countries before us have
proven over and over again that the best type of democratic government is one in which
consensus is the basis for long-term decisions to the benefit of all. Is it tedious? Yes.
Frustrating at times? You bet. Slow? Indeed, quite often so. But the point is,
consensus-based decision making works and eventually is in everyone's interest (left,
right and centre), resulting in better long-term outcomes. With the added benefit that new
"majority" Governments won't throw out the children with the bathwater all the time.
I'd add one aspect to the article though, and that is to combine a form of proportional
representation with longer terms of Government. You won't get much meaningful done in
3 years, whatever form of representation you choose. 4 years, 5 years... whatever strikes the
best balance between governments getting some runs on the board and voters feeling empowered
to change government coalitions in the ballot box when they stuff up.
But what economic system worked in the interests of majority of population. There was only
one such system -- USA in 1935-1970th and it was the result of WWII and record profits of the US
corporation after the war, when both Europe and Japan were devastated.
In no way the USSR was social system that worked for the majority of population. It worked
for the Nomenklatura -- a pretty narrow caste, similar to current top 1% under
neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism clearly works for the interests of the minority and against the interests of
the majority. Households are now worse off than they were 6 years ago and large businesses
are enjoying record profits. It feels as if the australian economy is being run for the
benefit of a small percentage of wealthy shareholders.
While a purported devotion to the principles and precepts of neo-liberalism has been claimed
by decades of right-wing politicians, businesses and bankers, drilling down deeper often reveals
that what is really happening in favoring the economic interests of the few at the expense of the
many, and very often involving compulsorily actions like switch to 401K accounts. Which was stoke
of genius for neoliberals to fleeces common people. acquired
Speaking as no fan of neo-liberalism, but there is a risk that the term gets overused. Things
that the right have embraced with open arms, like compulsory retirement savings (which have
enriched the private sector, especially banks and their shareholders), would have caused
sharp intakes of breath from the steely-eyed theorists who came up with the concept. While a
purported devotion to the principles and precepts of neo-liberalism has been claimed by
decades of right-wing politicians, businesses and bankers, drilling down deeper often reveals
that what is really happening in favouring the economic interests of the few at the expense
of the many, and very often involving compulsorily acquired public resources being
re-directed to business, with barely even the thinnest veneer of genuine theoretical
observance to the neo-liberal model. Both neo-liberalism itself, and bogus claims of its
practical use and benefits, need to be dead and buried.
I really would love the rich and powerful who basically prey on the average
person/worker/mums and dads, to be held accountable and penalised properly in relation to
their deeds. These bastards destroy families in their grab for greed, and almost every time
they are excused by their cohorts, and even go on to bigger and better opportunities to keep
feeding their voracious greedy appetites. Basically they steal, so why isn't their proceeds
of crime taken back by government; and why do they not do any jail time?
Natural monopolies like water and power, roads and public transport should be in public
hands. All call centres dealing with government issues should be done by public servants, not
outsourced to foreign corporations.
I'd start with a bank. Give people a non-greed infested alternative.
Under neo-liberalism we have gone from 1 person, 1 vote to $1, one vote. The con job that
is 'small government and little or no regulations' is bad for society and the environment.
Greed over need.
Dr. T. J. Coles is director of the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research and the author of
several books, including Voices for Peace (with Noam Chomsky and others) and the forthcoming
Fire and Fury: How the US Isolates North Korea, Encircles China and Risks Nuclear War in Asia
(both Clairview Books).
The current economic model being used by capitalist countries across the world is failing
most of the people in these countries while enriching tiny elites. Unfortunately, politicians
in these countries are often in the pockets of the elite or are themselves members of the
elite.
We need a new economic narrative which better reconciles the needs of the population with
the directives of the market.
Why not? Profits to the nation, not greedy corporates and their shareholders.
I think you will find there were no profits made that could be put "to the nation." When
the wall came down, the USSR and the entire eastern bloc were completely bankrupt.
As was Mao's China prior to the emergence of Deng and his "to get rich is glorious"
mantra, that set China on its current path. Of course his generally market-oriented approach
has since been bastardised to one of One Party State-capitalism dominated by cronyism,
corruption, and a perverted justice system.
Yes it has generated vast wealth, but it is an empire built on sand. As any analysis of
its shadow banking system will show.
And while the legions of newly minted millionaires of party benevolence celebrate, the
hundreds of millions stuck in poverty are left to fend for themselves.
Neoliberalism is a secular religion, so it doe need to be rational, to remains influential or even dominant, much like
Bolshevism or Trotskyism (actually neoliberalism should be viewed as a perverted mutation of Trotskyism -- Trotskyism for irch) .
It took 70 years for Bolshevism to became discredited and collapse (under the attack from neoliberalism).
In the absence of alternatives neoliberalism might continues to exist in zombie state for a very long time.
Notable quotes:
"... Poverty rate in the USA has been increasing since about the year 2000. ..."
"... Why do you think that all around the world voters are going hard against Neoliberalism and why do you think that Neoliberals are desperately trying to save their bankrupt philosophy by hiding behind Nationalism and Racism? ..."
"... While I would very much like to agree with the notion that neo-liberalism is dead, there's rather too much evidence that its pernicious influence lingers ghost-like and ghastly, having suffused far too many politicians of an ultra-conservative ilk ..."
"... The true believers in the neo-liberal faith, as it was never other than a creed espoused by Thatcher and Pinochet among others, are like those in the catholic church who continued to advocate an earth centric universe long after science proved them wrong. ..."
"... It will be a long wait until these myopic adherents to the gospel of Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan, are consigned to the waste bin of history where they belong. Until then, it will remain a struggle to right the many wrongs of this mis-guided and shallow populism. ..."
"... The neocons have had their day, though it'll no doubt take one hell of an effort to drag them out of their crony-capitalist, snouts-in-the-trough ways. The profit motive in the provision of essential services should be confined to covering costs, maintenance and associated investment. ..."
The death of neoliberalism means we can finally have a national debate about the size and
role of government, and the shape of the economy and society we want to build.
Unfortunately, I see lots of deaths but none of them is neoliberalism. I can see death of
a decent safety net in Australia. Death of biodiversity. Death of ecosystems. Death of
intelligent debate. Death of science.
Poverty rate in the USA has been increasing since about the year 2000. The international
poverty trend has been decreasing over time only because the definition of poverty is to earn
less than $1.25 per day..... So, if you earn $10/day you are well above the poverty line:
Good luck living on that income in any OECD country!
Standards of living are decreasing in Australia... ever heard of the housing crisis? The
household debt crisis?.... Paying for hospital and medicines, education, electricity and
other services.... should I go on?.... ACOSS found that "there are just over 3 million people
(13.2%) living below the poverty line of 50% of median income – including 739,000
children (17.3%)".
"The evil neo-liberalism" has delivered poverty, massive inequality, dissatisfaction,
unemployment/sub-employment and casualization, collapse of public services, high costs of
living.... and deterioration of the environment...
Why do you think that all around the world
voters are going hard against Neoliberalism and why do you think that Neoliberals are
desperately trying to save their bankrupt philosophy by hiding behind Nationalism and
Racism?
While I would very much like to agree with the notion that neo-liberalism is dead, there's
rather too much evidence that its pernicious influence lingers ghost-like and ghastly, having
suffused far too many politicians of an ultra-conservative ilk.
The true believers in the neo-liberal faith, as it was never other than a creed espoused
by Thatcher and Pinochet among others, are like those in the catholic church who continued to
advocate an earth centric universe long after science proved them wrong.
It will be a long wait until these myopic adherents to the gospel of Hayek, Friedman and
Buchanan, are consigned to the waste bin of history where they belong. Until then, it will
remain a struggle to right the many wrongs of this mis-guided and shallow populism.
Abso-bloody-lutely! The neocons have had their day, though it'll no doubt take one hell of an
effort to drag them out of their crony-capitalist, snouts-in-the-trough ways. The profit
motive in the provision of essential services should be confined to covering costs,
maintenance and associated investment. It's so painfully obvious that the market has not met
the needs of the average citizen without absurd cost. Bring on the revolution!
What made anyone think neo-liberalism was going to work? Why was this even tried or got past
a focus group?
Only the Murdoch press ever dreamed this could have any merit and a few totally selfish and
controlling wealthy people. 2008 and the GFC should have killed this idea instead it gained
traction as the perpetrators not only were not prosecuted but were subsidised to create more
havoc. Find the culprits and jail them ... it is not too late.
"... What about "competition", the God of Neoliberals?.... Competition can have some positive role in society only in an environment of Regulation. That's why the future is neither Neoliberal nor Socialist, but a Mixed Economy Social Democracy. ..."
"... Bring back a Commonwealth Bank! In fact bring back State run Electricity, Gas and Water utilities... ..."
"... The Coalition these days proudly subsidise their friends and regulate their enemies in order to reshape Australia in their preferred form. ..."
All essential infrastructure should be Nationalised. Water electricity supply and generation,
ports and railways, educational facilities, one major bank, one country wide telco and mail
delivery. Remove the for profit aspect, and they become assets. In at least a few of these
they also provide training opportunities across a wide spectrum of careers
Nationalise the banks and the Mining Industry .
Take back control of outrageous wages in both these sectors and return profits to the
taxpayer .
Nationalise the State Governments in other words get rid of them and appoint federal
controlled administrators same with local councils, sack the lot of them and appoint
administrators.
Just like the AFP is "nationalised", or education is also to a big extent "nationalised",
alongside a big chunk of the health system.... so we can nationalise other things, such as
the modes of production and distribution of energy, major mineral resources, etc.
What about "competition", the God of Neoliberals?.... Competition can have some positive
role in society only in an environment of Regulation. That's why the future is neither
Neoliberal nor Socialist, but a Mixed Economy Social Democracy.
Which party is for a Mixed Economy Social Democracy?.... Labor and to some extent the
Greens. A bunch of independents are also happy with the concept.... Together they are
currently a majority, only waiting for a Federal election.
"... I don't like using the term "neo-liberalism" that much because there is nothing "new" or "liberal" about it, the term itself just helps hide the fact that it's a political project more about power than profit and the end result is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector. ..."
"... Since the word "privatisation" is clearly no longer popular, the latest buzzword from this project is "outsourcing". ..."
"... As far as I can see "neo-liberalism", or what I prefer to call managerial and financialised feudalism is not dead, it's still out and about looking around for the next rent-seeking opportunity. ..."
"... In the political arena, is enabling porkies facilitate each other in every lunatic pronouncement about "Budget repair" and "on track for a surplus". And its spotty, textbook-spouting clones ("all debt is debt! Shriek, gasp, hyperventilate!") fall off the conveyor belts of tertiary education Australia-wide, then turn up on The Drum as IPA 'Research Fellows' to spout their evidence-free assertions. ..."
"... And don't forget the handmaiden of neoliberalism is their macroeconomic mythology about government "debt and borrowing" which will condemn our grandchildren to poverty - inter-generational theft! It also allows them to continue dismantling government social programs by giving tax-cuts to reduce "revenue" and then claiming there is no money to fund those programs. ..."
"... "Competition" as the cornerstone of neoliberal economics was always a lie. Corporations do their best to get rid of competitors by unfair pricing tactics or by takeovers. And even where some competitors hang in there by some means (banks, petrol companies) the competition that occurs is not for price but for profit. ..."
"... We find a shift away from democratic processes and the rise of the "all new adulation of the so-called tough leader" factor, aka Nazism/Fascism. From Trump to Turkey, Netanyahu to Putin, Brazil to China, the rise of the "right" in Europe, the South Americas, where the leader is "our great and "good" Teacher", knows best, and thus infantalises the knowledge and awareness of the rest of the population. Who needs scientists, when the "leader" knows everything? ..."
"... There are indeed alternatives to neoliberalism, most of which have been shown to lead back to neoliberalism. Appeals for fiscal and monetary relief/stimulus can only ever paper over the worst aspects of it's relentless 'progress', between wars, it seems. ..."
"... Neoliberalism seems vastly, catastrophically misunderstood. Widely perceived as the latest abomination to spring from the eternal battle 'twixt Labour and Capital, it's actual origins are somewhat more recent. Neoliberalism really, really is not just "Capitalism gone wrong". It goes much deeper, to a fundamental flaw buried( more accurately 'planted') deep in the heart of economics. ..."
"... In 1879 an obscure journalist from then-remote San Francisco, Henry George, took the world by storm with his extraordinary bestseller Progress and Poverty . Still the only published work to outsell the Bible in a single year, it did so for over twenty years, yet few social justice advocates have heard of it. ..."
"... George gravely threatened privileged global power-elites , so they erased him from academic history. A mind compared, in his time with Plato, Copernicus and Adam Smith wiped from living memory, by the modern aristocracy. ..."
"... In the process of doing so, they emasculated the discipline of economics, stripped dignity from labour, and set in motion a world-destroying doctrine. Neo-Classical Economics(aka neoliberalism) was born , to the detriment of the working-citizen and the living world on which s/he depends. ..."
I don't like using the term "neo-liberalism" that much because there is nothing "new" or
"liberal" about it, the term itself just helps hide the fact that it's a political project
more about power than profit and the end result is more like modern feudalism - an
authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and
inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long
debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the
energy sector.
Since the word "privatisation" is clearly no longer popular, the latest buzzword from this
project is "outsourcing". If you've had a look at The Canberra Times over the last couple of
weeks there have been quite a few articles about outsourcing parts of Medicare and Centrelink, using labour hire companies and so on – is this part of a current LNP plan
to "sell off" parts of the government before Labour takes the reins in May?
As far as I can see "neo-liberalism", or what I prefer to call managerial and
financialised feudalism is not dead, it's still out and about looking around for the next
rent-seeking opportunity.
Neoliberalism "dead"?
I think not.
It is riveted on the country like a straitjacket.
Which is exactly what it was always intended to be, a system gamed and rigged to ensure the
wage-earning scum obtain progressively less and less of the country's productive wealth,
however much they contributed to it.
The wage theft and exploitation Neoliberalism fosters has become the new norm.
Neoliberal idealogues thickly infest Federal and State Treasuries.
In the political arena, is enabling porkies facilitate each other in every lunatic
pronouncement about "Budget repair" and "on track for a surplus".
And its spotty, textbook-spouting clones ("all debt is debt! Shriek, gasp, hyperventilate!")
fall off the conveyor belts of tertiary education Australia-wide, then turn up on The Drum as
IPA 'Research Fellows' to spout their evidence-free assertions.
The IPA itself has moles in govt at every level--even in your local Council.
Certainly in ours.
Neoliberalism is "dead"?
Correction.
Neoliberalism is alive, thriving---and quick to ensure its glaring deficiencies and
inequities are solely attributable to its opponents. Now THERE'S a surprise.....
Agree! And don't forget the handmaiden of neoliberalism is their macroeconomic mythology
about government "debt and borrowing" which will condemn our grandchildren to poverty -
inter-generational theft! It also allows them to continue dismantling government social programs by giving tax-cuts
to reduce "revenue" and then claiming there is no money to fund those programs.
Neoliberalism will not be dead until the underpinning of neoliberalism is abandoned by ALP
and Greens. That underpinning is their mindless attachment to "budget repair" and "return to
surplus". The federal government's "budget" is nothing like a currency user's budget.
Currency users collect in order to spend whereas every dollar spent by the federal government
is a new dollar and every dollar taxed by the federal government is an ex-dollar. A currency
cannot sensibly have "debt" in the currency that it issues and no amount of surplus or
deficit now will enhance or impair its capacity to spend in future. A currency issuer does
not need an electronic piggybank, or a Future Fund, or a Drought Relief Fund. It can't max
out an imaginary credit card. It's "borrowing" is just an exchange of its termless no-coupon
liabilities (currency) for term-limited coupon-bearing liabilities (bonds). The federal
budget balance is no rational indicator of any need for austerity or for stimulus. The
rational indicators are unemployment (too small a "deficit"/too large a surplus) and
inflation (too large a "deficit"/too small a "surplus"). Federal taxation is where dollars go
to die. It doesn't "fund" a currency issuer's spending - it is there to stop the dollars it
issues from piling up and causing inflation and to make room for spending by democratically
elected federal parliament. The name of the game is to balance the economy, not the entirely
notional and fundamentally irrelevant "budget".
"Competition" as the cornerstone of neoliberal economics was always a lie. Corporations do
their best to get rid of competitors by unfair pricing tactics or by takeovers. And even
where some competitors hang in there by some means (banks, petrol companies) the competition
that occurs is not for price but for profit.
And changing the electoral system? Yes indeed. After years of observation it seems to me
that the problem with our politics is not individual politicians (although there are notable
exceptions) but political parties. Rigid control of policies and voting on party instruction
(even by the Greens) makes the proceedings of parliament a complete waste of time. If every
policy had to run the gauntlet of 150 people all voting by their conscience we would have
better policy. The executive functions could be carried out by a cabinet also elected from
those members. But not going to happen - too many vested interests in the parties and their
corporate sponsors.
With the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil (even though nearly 30% of electors refused to vote)
it may be a little presumptuous to dissect the dead corpse of neoliberalism, as Richard
Denniss' hopes that we can.
What is absolutely gob-smacking is that Brazilians voted for him; a man that Glenn Greenwald
describes as "far more dangerous than Trump" , that Bolsonaro envisages military
dictatorships as "being a far more superior form of government" advocating a civil war
in order to dispose of the left.
Furthermore, the election of this far-right neoliberal extremist also threatens the Amazon
forest and its indigenous people; with a global impact that will render combatting climate
change even more difficult.
Locally, recent Liberal Party battles over leadership have included the neolib factor, as the
lunatic right in that party - who I suspect would all love to be a Bolsonaro themselves -
aggressively activate their grumblings and dissension.
Oh, Richard how I wish you were right; but in the Victorian election campaign - currently
underway - I have seen Socialist candidates behaving in a manner that doesn't garner hope in
a different way of doing politics.
The fact that 'our' democracy is based on an adversarial, partisan system leaves me with
little hope.
Alain Badiou wrote that "ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial
conservatism using democratic phraseology" ; and until that imposition is discarded 'our'
democracy will remain whatever we are told it is, and neolibs will continue to shove their
bullshit down our throats as much as they can.
We find a shift away from democratic processes and the rise of the "all new
adulation of the so-called tough leader" factor, aka Nazism/Fascism. From Trump to
Turkey, Netanyahu to Putin, Brazil to China, the rise of the "right" in Europe, the South
Americas, where the leader is "our great and "good" Teacher", knows best, and thus
infantalises the knowledge and awareness of the rest of the population. Who needs scientists,
when the "leader" knows everything?
Have the people of the world abrogated their democratic responsibility?
Or is it the gerrymandering chicanery of US Republican backers/politicians( so long as you
control the voting machines ) that have sent the ugly message to the world, Power is yours
for the making and taking by any means that ignores the public's rights in the decision
making process. Has the "neo-liberal" world delivered a corrupted system of democracy that
has deliberately alienated the world's population from actively participating fully in the
full awareness that their vote counts and will be counted?
Do we need to take back the controls of democracy to ensure that it is the will of the
people and not a manipulation by vested interest groups/individuals? You're darn
tootin'!!!
A thoughtful piece. Thanks. There are indeed alternatives to neoliberalism, most of which
have been shown to lead back to neoliberalism. Appeals for fiscal and monetary
relief/stimulus can only ever paper over the worst aspects of it's relentless 'progress',
between wars, it seems.
Neoliberalism seems vastly, catastrophically misunderstood. Widely perceived as the
latest abomination to spring from the eternal battle 'twixt Labour and Capital, it's actual
origins are somewhat more recent. Neoliberalism really, really is not just "Capitalism gone
wrong". It goes much deeper, to a fundamental flaw buried( more accurately 'planted')
deep in the heart of economics.
Instead of trying to understand Neo-Classical Economics it is perhaps more instructive to
understand what it was built, layer by layer, to obscure. First the Land system, then the
Wealth system, and finally the Money system (hived off into a compartment - 'macroeconomics').
Importantly, three entirely different categories of "thing" .
In 1879 an obscure journalist from then-remote San Francisco, Henry George, took the world
by storm with his extraordinary bestseller Progress and Poverty . Still the only
published work to outsell the Bible in a single year, it did so for over twenty years, yet
few social justice advocates have heard of it.
George set out to discover why the worst poverty always seemed to accompany the most
progress. By chasing down the production process to its ends, and tracing where the proceeds
were going, he succeeded spectacularly. From Progress and Poverty , Chapter 17 - "The Problem Explained"
:
Three things unite in production: land, labor, and capital. Three parties divide the
output: landowner, laborer, and capitalist. If the laborer and capitalist get no more as
production increases, it is a necessary inference that the landowner takes the gain.
George
gravely threatened privileged global power-elites , so they erased him from academic
history. A mind compared, in his time with Plato, Copernicus and Adam Smith wiped from living
memory, by the modern aristocracy.
In the process of doing so, they emasculated the discipline of economics, stripped dignity
from labour, and set in motion a world-destroying doctrine. Neo-Classical
Economics(aka neoliberalism) was born , to the detriment of the working-citizen and the
living world on which s/he depends.
Einstein was a fan of George, and used his methods of thought-experiment and powerful
inductive reasoning to discover Relativity, twenty years later. Henry Georges brilliant
insights into Land (aka nature), Wealth (what you want, need), and Money
(sharing mechanism) are as relevant as ever, and until they are rediscovered, we are likely
to re-run the 1900's over and over, with fewer and fewer resources.
In Christian tradition, the
love of money is condemned as a sin primarily based on texts
such as Ecclesiastes 5.10 and
1 Timothy 6:10. The Jewish and
Christian condemnation relates to avarice
and greed rather than
money itself. Christian texts (scriptures) are full of
parables and use easy to understand subjects, such as money, to convey the actual message, there are further parallels in
Solon and
Aristotle,[1]
and Massinissa-who ascribed love of
money to Hannibal and the
Carthaginians.[2].
While certain political ideologies, such as
neoliberalism, assume and promote the view that the behavior that capitalism fosters in individuals is natural to humans,[2][3]
anthropologists like
Richard Robbins
point out that there is nothing natural about this behavior - people are not naturally dispossessed to accumulate wealth and
driven by wage-labor
Neoliberalism abstract the economic sphere from other aspects of society (politics, culture, family etc., with any political
activity constituting an
intervention into the natural process of the market, for example) and assume that people make rational exchanges in the sphere
of market transactions. In reality rational economic exchanges are actually heavily influenced by pre-existing social ties and
other factors.
Under neoliberalism both the society and culture revolve around business activity (the accumulation of capital). As such,
business activity and the "free market" exchange (despite the fact that "free market" never existed in human history) are often
viewed as being absolute or "natural" in that all other human social relations revolve around these processes (or should exist to
facilitate one's ability to perform these processes
Notable quotes:
"... Conwell equated poverty with sin and asserted that anyone could become rich through hard work. This gospel of wealth, however, was an expression of Muscular Christianity and understood success to be the result of personal effort rather than divine intervention. [5] ..."
"... They criticized many aspects of the prosperity gospel, noting particularly the tendency of believers to lack compassion for the poor, since their poverty was seen as a sign that they had not followed the rules and therefore are not loved by God ..."
According to historian Kate Bowler , the prosperity gospel was formed
from the intersection of three different ideologies: Pentecostalism , New Thought , and "an American gospel of
pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility". [4]
This "American gospel" was best exemplified by Andrew Carnegie 's Gospel of Wealth and Russell Conwell 's famous sermon
"Acres of Diamonds", in which Conwell equated poverty with sin and asserted that anyone could
become rich through hard work. This gospel of wealth, however, was an expression of Muscular Christianity
and understood success to be the result of personal effort rather than divine intervention.
[5]
... ... ...
In 2005, Matthew
Ashimolowo , the founder of the largely African
Kingsway International Christian Centre in southern England, which preaches a "health and
wealth" gospel and collects regular tithes, was ordered by the Charity Commission to repay money he had
appropriated for his personal use. In 2017, the organisation was under criminal investigation
after a leading member was found by a court in 2015 to have operated a Ponzi scheme between 2007 and 2011, losing or
spending £8 million of investors' money. [43]
36]Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic argues that
prosperity theology contributed to the housing bubble that caused the
late-2000s
financial crisis . She maintains that home ownership was heavily emphasized in prosperity
churches, based on reliance on divine financial intervention that led to unwise choices based
on actual financial ability. [36]
... ... ...
Historian Carter
Lindberg of Boston University has drawn parallels
between contemporary prosperity theology and the medieval indulgence trade .
[69] Coleman notes that several pre–20th century Christian movements in the
United States taught that a holy lifestyle was a path to prosperity and that God-ordained hard
work would bring blessing. [16]
... ... ...
In April 2015, LDS apostle
Dallin H. Oaks
stated that people who believe in "the theology of prosperity" are deceived by riches. He
continued by saying that the "possession of wealth or significant income is not a mark of
heavenly favor, and their absence is not evidence of heavenly disfavor". He also cited how
Jesus differentiated the attitudes towards money held by the young rich man in Mark
10:17–24, the good Samaritan, and Judas Iscariot in his betrayal. Oaks concluded this
portion of his sermon by highlighting that the "root of all evil is not money but the love of
money". [90]
In 2015, well known pastor and prosperity gospel advocate Creflo Dollar launched a
fundraising campaign to replace a previous private jet with a $65 million Gulfstream G650.
[91] On the August
16, 2015 episode of his HBO
weekly series Last
Week Tonight , John Oliver satirized prosperity
theology by announcing that he had established his own tax-exempt church, called Our Lady of
Perpetual Exemption . In a lengthy segment, Oliver focused on what he characterized as the
predatory conduct of televangelists who appeal for repeated gifts from people in financial
distress or personal crises, and he criticized the very loose requirements for entities to
obtain tax exempt status as churches under U.S. tax law. Oliver said that he would ultimately
donate any money collected by the church to Doctors Without Borders .
[92]
In July 2018, Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa, in the Jesuit journal La Civilità
Cattolica , examined the origins of the prosperity gospel in the United States and
described it as a reductive version of the American Dream which had offered
opportunities of success and prosperity unreachable in the Old World . The authors distinguished the
prosperity gospel from Max
Weber 's Protestant
ethic , noting that the protestant ethic related prosperity to religiously inspired
austerity while the prosperity gospel saw prosperity as the simple result of personal faith.
They criticized many aspects of the prosperity gospel, noting particularly the tendency of
believers to lack compassion for the poor, since their poverty was seen as a sign that they had
not followed the rules and therefore are not loved by God . [93][94]
Neoliberalism, the economic stablemate of big religion's Prosperity Evangelism cult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
. Dual streams of bull shit to confuse the citizens while the Country's immense wealth is
stolen.
"... Apologies, but Neoliberalism is far from 'dead'. But of course it should never have given 'life'. However, if it were 'dead' why did Labor vote with the Coalition to ratify the ultra-Neoliberal TPP??? The TPP is the penultimate wet dream of all neoliberal multinational vulture corporations. Why???? Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) Under these rules, foreign investors can legally challenge host state regulations outside that country's courts. A wide range of policies can be challenged. ..."
Apologies, but Neoliberalism is far from 'dead'. But of course it should never have given
'life'. However, if it were 'dead' why did Labor vote with the Coalition to ratify the
ultra-Neoliberal TPP??? The TPP is the penultimate wet dream of all neoliberal multinational
vulture corporations. Why???? Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) Under these rules,
foreign investors can legally challenge host state regulations outside that country's courts.
A wide range of policies can be challenged.
Yeah! Philip Morris comes to mind. "The cost to taxpayers of the Australian government's
six-year legal battle with the tobacco giant Philip Morris over plain packaging laws can
finally be revealed, despite the government's efforts to keep the cost secret.
The commonwealth government spent nearly $40m defending its world-first plain packaging
laws against Philip Morris Asia, a tobacco multinational, according to freedom of information
documents.
Documents say the total figure is $38,984,942.97."
Neo- liberalism is not dead its only just started. We are not in an era of democracy and
freedom but of Oligarchy and governmental servitude.
Less restrictions doesn't mean freedom it mean free booters, privateers , and plunderers are
given government support and handouts the only thing free is their right to take.
The pirates who plunder the most are given Hero status and those plundered are laughed at
as losers.
Looks around you governments are becoming agents of theft find ways to channel money to
those who don't need it . They say its right wing fascism but its not for all their evil the
fascists were determined to improve the lot of the people, however perversely they went about
it.
What we have today is legalised privateering.
None of the political parties today have the least intention to change a system that works
for them.
Fred, I can't remember who said it, but an observer of human systems and institutions made
the observation that unless the prevalent social, economic or political structures of the day
was not either changed or renewed, then those within the system would 'game' it; corrupting
it from within for personal benefit to the detriment of society as a whole.
This perfectly sums up neo-liberalism.
Whatever positive virtues were extolled when this ideology was adopted wholesale by so many
governments and societies (and please spare me the '-we delivered billions out of poverty!'
line, that was a positive byproduct, never the objective of neo-liberalism), it has since
become thoroughly corrupted, serving an ever shrinking percentage of society - entrenching a
super-wealthy 'ruling class' that makes a mockery of the idea of democracy.
It's time to ditch this 21st Century feudalistic construct, and replace it with something
that serves the whole of society with more justice than this current gravy train for the one
percenters.
Fully agree with the things being said here. The privatisation of essential services has been
a bloody disaster. Telecommunications, health, education energy production/distribution. Look
at what the NSW conservatives are doing the the public transport or the feds have done to our
communications, including Telstra the ABC and SBS.
But the issue is that this will just turn into an ongoing political football with each
successive conservative government trying to sell off the farm again.
These critical public services and infrastructure must be protected in law needing a
referendum to make major changes. Also their funding must be guaranteed and they must be run
at arms length from the government to reduce political interference and ensure they are
delivering the best possible service and are competitive with the huge private sector
operators.
There charter of operation and obligation to the public must be extremely robust and
clearly outline their duties of care to operate in a transparent and open fashion putting the
public interest as a priority.
The opposite of a neoliberal economic agenda isn't a progressive economic agenda, but
democratic re-engagement.
You can have democratic engagement voting for a 'neo-liberal economic agenda'. In fact
we've had it for decades.
But of course not even the Coalition believes that any more. These days they proudly
subsidise their friends and regulate their enemies in order to reshape Australia in their
preferred form.
They're politicians - they've never applied their ideological views in a pure way. This is
nothing new.
Ironically, one of the major objections to proportional representation in Australia has
been that it tends to deliver minority government, a situation that the major parties
prefer to avoid.
There's a big difference between minority government by a major party + a handful of
votes, versus a minority government by a handful of minority parties, or a major party + a
minor party. They tend to lead to the kind of instability we'd prefer to avoid.
The death of neoliberalism means
I think you've called it a bit prematurely. Both major parties here are still peddling
neo-liberalism, with policies which only differ on the margins.
Not knowing about his role is a dangerous blind spot. Please real MacLean brilliant book,
Democracy in Chains, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction.
Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America's burst of radical
right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they
will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian
guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you've taken several
classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would
suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even
many economics students have little understanding of his work.
The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that
even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the
relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans
really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is
manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a
transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.
That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book,
Democracy in Chains , a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While
Americans grapple with Donald Trump's chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to
changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes
are locked into place, there may be no going back.
The greedy right wing want it all for themselves.
Stephen
Hancock31 Oct 2018 00:04 3 4
Neo-liberalism will never die, it might mutate in to another parasitic ideology and the
Liberals might re-brand their party, but as long as there's human greed to want more power
and financial gain over others, people like Abbott and Joyce will continue to surface and
thrive.
ocratato31
Oct 2018 00:03 5 6 I think declaring neoliberalism dead is way too premature.
The rich and powerful have their greedy hands on the levers of government in many
countries. They are not going to give that up without a fight.
Basically neoliberalism will eventually go down kicking and screaming. Sadly it will
take a lot of us with it. It is going to get nasty.
Authoritarianism has always existed. But it hasn't always been clearly visible. Technology
makes authoritarianism more powerful. Centralization and urbanization have served the
purposes of the elite well.
People need information and communication. The inverted totalitarianism we live in,
doesn't like that. It wants the Internet to implement that inverted totalitarianism (see
China). They want everything (in a corporatist way) to be mandatory, except for what is
forbidden. What has been revealed, and is being revealed, is that the current
political-economic system isn't fit for purpose, human purpose.
So the real answer is like what is happening in France now...
Attempting to blame the internet for the increasingly authoritarian world we live in is
not seeing the forest through the trees. The internet is surely a tool used against
humanity,That doesn't make it "bad". I would say the reason people can be fooled by these
social media propaganda tactics, is precisely because the fourth estate is practicing such in
depth propaganda campaigns, with all propaganda, all the time coverage on every other form of
media as well. People have nowhere to turn.
Why do people think some russians posting on facebook and twitter skewed the electorate in
this country than say nothing about:fox news,npr,cnn,rush limbaugh,hannity,the new york
times, wall st journal,the weekly standard, time magazine,people magazine, etc.All of these
organizations and all the others spout disinformation. every day.
And america's trend towards the authoritarian state has been accelerating since at least the
national security act of 1947.as a national trend, whereas in the beginning of this countries
existence, there have been authoritarian control of local districts by local groups, ie.
whites over blacks, or whites over indians, or rich over poor immigrants, etc.
All the internet age and the "information age is doing, is changing the medium. the message
is still the same. and there has always been resistance. now that resistance seems more
futile, but is it?
Why do people think some russians posting on facebook and twitter skewed the electorate
in this country than say nothing about:fox news,npr,cnn,rush limbaugh,hannity,the new york
times, wall st journal,the weekly standard, time magazine,people magazine, etc.All of these
organizations and all the others spout disinformation. every day.
Exactly. Our society is mainly shaped by its elites. And other than Twitter they are
barely involved with the internet at all but rather get their news and attitudes from the NY
Times or (in Trump's case) cable TV. Therefore rather than enhancing the always existing
authoritarianism of "manufactured consent," the internet works to undermine it. This of
course provokes much fingering of worry beads among the elite who see the mob and their
pitchforks as real threats. The situation in France illustrates this phenomenon nicely and
there have been calls by some to block Facebook in France so those yellow vests can't
communicate with each other.
Diversity of opinion is a good thing, not bad, and some of us scan right leaning websites
just to get a different view. The internet is not the problem. Powerful authoritarians are
the problem.
In my own undoubtedly faulty memory of Animal Farm , Orwell characterized the
devolution as "the nature of the beast" through his characters. That is (over and above the
allegory of the Russian revolution/devolution), there are strong traits in human character
that makes this devolution inevitable. We have the pigs; the aggressors, and the followers,
and less savory characters, and the "never quite enough" wise annimal(s) and so on, working
unwittingly together against the welfare of the whole making the end result seem precast. Not
so much that we did nothing, as that we could do nothing.
1984 never really addressed that issue (or at least I don't remember it doing so), but
from the start everything seemed inevitable, there was no discussion of any "might have
been," that could have been an alternative to the dystopia of an engineered rivalry between
two super-powers that worked off each other to maintain a compliant global society in
hopeless mass psychological, never mind physical, irons.
But even assuming this inevitability was Orwell's own belief and intent in his
writings (and not simply my misunderstanding of them), I agree with your point that we had
plenty of warning, and not just Orwell, and that society as a whole too frequently took the
easier road but with a lot of help and insistent guidance (manipulation) from our
increasingly corrupt leaders and captains of industry (our own pigs).
Animal Farm was Orwell's best book IMO because it speaks to universal human tendencies
even though the book was also about Stalin and Trotsky. 1984 was far fetched speculation
based on, as it turned out, the short lived totalitarianism of figures like Hitler and
Stalin. People assume we are living 1984 when it's really Animal Farm.
"... Neoliberal doctrine leads to skyrocketing inequality, a swelling in the desperate and forgotten poor who are vulnerable to populist messaging and the idea of a strongman peddling easy answers to keep people safe as civil unrest increases. Fascism seeks power for power's sake and total control over the populace, and always cruelty to the marginalised, the 'others'. How all the right wingers hand-wringing over the idea of 'socialist communisms!!1!' can't see that, I don't know. ..."
"... All over the world, failed neoliberalism is being replaced by right-wing populist nationalism & I don't think "repairing democratic institutions" is at the top of their to-do list. ..."
"... I'm certainly in favour of greater nationalisation, especially of essential services. But around the world, neo-liberalism has morphed into neo-fascism and this is where the next fight must be. ..."
"... In social systems, natural selection favours cooperation. In addition, we are biased toward ethical behaviours, so cooperation and sharing are valued in human societies. ..."
"... The consequences of four decades of financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no means equally shared. Internal and external class relations were made evident through narrowly distributed booms followed by widely distributed busts. ..."
"... No wonder you get fascist right wing insurgence in this climate! ..."
Never forget that fascism is the natural defence mechanism of capital. After it is accrued,
it must be defended. The current trend in global politics is not an anomaly but an entirely
predictable outcome.
Neoliberal doctrine leads to skyrocketing inequality, a swelling in the
desperate and forgotten poor who are vulnerable to populist messaging and the idea of a
strongman peddling easy answers to keep people safe as civil unrest increases. Fascism seeks
power for power's sake and total control over the populace, and always cruelty to the marginalised, the 'others'. How all the right wingers hand-wringing over the idea of
'socialist communisms!!1!' can't see that, I don't know.
It's too late for the US I fear, and time is rapidly running out for the UK if they don't
pull their finger out and have another referendum before the self immolation of Brexit.
All over the world, failed neoliberalism is being replaced by right-wing populist nationalism
& I don't think "repairing democratic institutions" is at the top of their to-do list.
If
Australia does swing the pendulum to the left, it, along with NZ, will be one of the few
countries to do so. De-privatising will not be easy & will be met with a huge reactionary
backlash. They'll need to tread very carefully if they want to stay in government.
Neoliberalism may be dead but the neoliberals in the government will never admit it as they
seamlessly transition to authoritarian nationalism with populist promises - and failure to
deliver on them.
The neoliberal project was always a philosophical cover for crony capitalism that betrayed
the public interest by rewarding vested interests for their patronage, perverted democracy,
and served as a mechanism for perverting the natural function of an economy - to fairly
distribute goods, resources, and services throughout society - to favor the welfare of the
few over the many.
The self-interested culture of neoliberalism - the cult of the individual that denies the
common good - pervades every aspect of Australia's life as a nation - business, politics,
sport, education, and health - denying and crowding out public spirit, selfless service, and
societal wellbeing.
For meaningful change to occur there must be a rebirth of the conception of the public
good, and the virtue and necessity of acting to realise it.
However at this stage there is not a communal recognition of what the problem is let alone
how to go about repairing it. For that to happen there must be a widely accepted narrative
that naturally leads to the obvious actions that must be take to redress the damage done by
the neoliberal con job: decreasing economic inequality, restoring democracy, and rebuilding a
sense of common cause.
Piecemeal change will not be sufficient to enact the the sweeping transformation that has
to occur in every department of life. It is not enough to tax multinationals, to have a
federal integrity commission, to build a renewable future, or to move to proportional
representation.
Someone, some party, some coherent philosophical perspective has to explain why it must be
done.
It's certainly the case that the Liberal party, in particular, are now using ideas that fall
outside and to the right of neo-liberalism, but it's also obviously the case that
neo-liberalism and current Liberal thinking share the same underlying goal. Namely, the
transfer of wealth and power towards a narrower and narrower group of people and
corporations.
That suggests the death of neo-liberalism is coming about because – having done so
much damage already – it's no longer capable of delivering the required results, and
that we're moving into a new phase of the death spiral. I think that can also be seen in both
the US (where Trump is using the identified problems of neo-liberalism to further the same
basic agenda, but with less decorum and a larger cadre of useful idiots) and the UK (where
there's still a very strong possibility that Brexit will be used as an excuse to roll back
great swathes of social and democratic safeguards).
Perhaps even more worrying – given the latest reports on how we're destroying
habitat as well as the climate, and how much of our biodiversity is in South America,
particularly the Amazon – is that Brazil is how on a similar path.
The likelihood is that the Liberal party won't get away with what they have planned, but
they – and the forces behind them – certainly won't stop trying. And
unfortunately it's far from obvious that the Labor party will repudiate neo-liberalism
anytime soon. That they signed up for the latest iteration of TPP is hardly a good omen.
Democratic re-engagement is the better way forward from neo-liberalism, but unfortunately
I think it's unlikely to be the one that we end up taking.
All of that said, the deepest problem of all is the way in which democracy and government
have been corrupted, often via the media, but typically at the behest of corporations, and if
there is a way forward it has to be found in addressing those interactions
I'm certainly in favour of greater nationalisation, especially of essential services. But
around the world, neo-liberalism has morphed into neo-fascism and this is where the next
fight must be.
In social systems, natural selection favours cooperation. In addition, we are biased
toward ethical behaviours, so cooperation and sharing are valued in human societies.
But what happens when we are forced into an economic system that makes us compete at every
level? The logical outcome is societal decline or collapse.
Perhaps the worst aspect of neoliberalism was its infection of the Labor party. This has
left our social infrastructure alarmingly exposed.
The consequences of four decades of financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no
means equally shared. Internal and external class relations were made evident through
narrowly distributed booms followed by widely distributed busts.
Globally, debt has forced policy convergence between political parties of differing
ideologies. European center-left parties have pushed austerity even when ideology would
suggest the opposite.
No wonder you get fascist right wing insurgence in this climate!
Thank you Richard Denniss we need to highlight this more and more and start educating the
dumbed down population saturated with neoliberal snake oil!
No-deal Brexit: Disruption at Dover 'could
last six months' BBC. I have trouble understanding why six months. The UK's customs IT
system won't be ready and there's no reason to think it will be ready even then. I could
see things getting less bad due to adaptations but "less bad" is not normal
The
Great Brexit Breakdown Wall Street Journal. Some parts I quibble with, but generally
good and includes useful historical detail.
The overwhelming majority of economists, including all those in top policymaking positions, completely missed the growth of an
$8 trillion housing bubble. Furthermore, even as the collapse of the bubble began to push the economy into recession, policymakers
repeatedly downplayed its significance, minimizing any negative effects on the economy. As a result, the policy responses last year
were too late and far too small to have much effect countering the downturn.
This paper argues that policymakers are still underestimating the severity of the downturn. Specifically, it argues that the unemployment
rate by the end of 2009 is likely to be far higher than the most recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office and the
Federal Reserve Board.
In this context, it argues for additional stimulus in the neighborhood of 2-3 percent of GDP for two years ($300 billion to $450
billion annually). It suggests two specific mechanisms for getting this money into the economy quickly:
1) an employer tax credit of $3,000 for extending health insurance coverage to workers not already covered by health insurance.
The tax credit can include an additional $1,000 per worker to make coverage more generous.
2) an employer tax credit of up to $2,500 per worker for increasing the amount of paid time off per worker. This paid time off
can take the form of paid family leave, paid sick days, increased vacation, or shorter standard workweeks. This would both boost
demand and lead to more employment at every level of GDP. For example, if the average number of hours per worker per year were reduced
by just 3 percent, this would lead to 4.2 million more jobs at the same level of GDP.
The paper also argues for a housing policy that is focused on stabilizing housing prices, but only in markets where the bubble
has deflated. To advance this goal, it should have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stop buying mortgages that were used to purchase homes
at bubble inflated prices. (This can be determined by the ratio of the sale price-to-annual rent. As a national average, this ratio
should not exceed 15 to 1, although there is some regional variation.)
Because they continue to buy mortgages on homes purchased at bubble-inflated prices, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are generating
new losses for taxpayers, while providing no real benefit for homeowners. Homeowners in these markets will pay more in housing costs
by owning rather than renting and still find themselves with no equity when they sell their home. By contrast, if relief was focused
on markets where the bubble has deflated, prices could be stabilized and it is likely that taxpayers would actually profit in the
long-run.
The last section points out that the frequently-discussed notion that investors will flee the dollar is actually not to be feared
at all. It is in fact necessary, since the dollar must fall to correct the country's huge trade imbalance. The rest of the world
has more to fear from a free-falling dollar than the United States, since a very low dollar would make U.S. goods hyper-competitive
in the world economy. As a result, other countries would have no alternative but to act to prevent the dollar from falling too far.
Therefore, concerns about a loss of international confidence in the dollar are completely unfounded. This should not be a basis
for limiting the size of future stimulus packages.
Most economists now acknowledge that the collapse of the housing bubble is leading the country into the worst downturn since the
Great Depression. However, even as newly released economic data consistently come in worse than expected, policymakers still do not
appear to have grasped the seriousness of the downturn. The policies that have been put forward to date are in some cases tangential
to solving the economy's real problems and almost certainly not large enough to reverse the economy's slide.
The first part of this paper summarizes the evidence indicating that the recession is likely to be worse than is generally expected
and that the stimulus approved by Congress thus far will be inadequate to boost the economy back to full employment. The second section
outlines two tax credits that would be effective forms of short-term stimulus while also providing long-term benefits to the economy.
The third section discusses the inadequacy of the Obama administration's plans for dealing with the housing market. The fourth part
briefly explains why concerns about an investor flight from the dollar are misplaced, and why these concerns should not be a basis
for limiting the size of future stimulus packages.
Reply
Sunday, April 16, 2017 at 09:58 AM
Not that Wikipedia gets everything right but here is a snippet of what it says about the Goldman Sachs CEO:
'Blankfein testified before Congress in April 2010 at a hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He
said that Goldman Sachs had no moral or legal obligation to inform its clients it was betting against the products which they
were buying from Goldman Sachs because it was not acting in a fiduciary role. The company was sued on April 16, 2010, by the SEC
for the fraudulent selling of a synthetic CDO tied to subprime mortgages. With Blankfein at the helm, Goldman has also been criticized
"by lawmakers and pundits for issues from its pay practices to its role in helping Greece mask the size of its debts". In April
2011, a Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report accused Goldman Sachs of misleading clients about complex mortgage-related
investments in 2007, and Senator Carl Levin alleged that Blankfein misled Congress, though no perjury charges have been brought
against Blankfein. In August of the same year, Goldman confirmed that Blankfein had hired high-profile defense lawyer Reid Weingarten'
Weingarten helped in the defense of the Worldcom thieves. Why would anyone do business with a company led by such an ethically
challenged CEO?
The problem here is probably deeper then personality of Blankfein.
There is such thing as system instability of economy caused by outsized financial sector and here GS fits the bill. Promotion
of psychopathic personalities with no brakes and outsize taste for risk is just an icing on the cake.
> Why would anyone do business with a company led by such an ethically challenged CEO?
Why you are assuming the other TBTF are somehow better then GS?
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
This is about destruction of neoliberalism. Transnational financial elite under neoliberalism is above the law. the USA blatantly
breaches this convention now. And will pay the price.
This is Onion-style humor is no it : White House, Trudeau seek to distance themselves from Huawei move
Notable quotes:
"... The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the arrest could complicate efforts to reach a broader U.S.-China trade deal but would not necessarily damage the process. ..."
"... Meng's detention also raised concerns about potential retaliation from Beijing in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sought to distance himself from the arrest. ..."
Huawei Technologies Co Ltd's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, the 46-year-old daughter of the company's founder, was detained
in Canada on Dec. 1, the same day Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping dined together at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires.
A White House official told Reuters Trump did not know about a U.S. request for her extradition from Canada before he met Xi and
agreed to a 90-day truce in the brewing trade war.
Meng's arrest during a stopover in Vancouver, announced by the Canadian authorities on Wednesday, pummeled stock markets already
nervous about tensions between the world's two largest economies on fears the move could derail the planned trade talks.
The arrest was made at Washington's request as part of a U.S. investigation of an alleged scheme to use the global banking system
to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran, according to people familiar with the probe.
Another U.S. official told Reuters that while it was a Justice Department matter and not orchestrated in advance by the White
House, the case could send a message that Washington is serious about what it sees as Beijing's violations of international trade
norms.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the arrest could complicate efforts to reach a broader
U.S.-China trade deal but would not necessarily damage the process.
Meng's detention also raised concerns about potential retaliation from Beijing in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
sought to distance himself from the arrest.
"The appropriate authorities took the decisions in this case without any political involvement or interference ... we were advised
by them with a few days' notice that this was in the works," Trudeau told reporters in Montreal in televised remarks.
Originally from:
Truthdig
December 8, 2018, 4:38 AM GMT
Wall Street's corruption runs deeper than you can fathom | Alternet
Wall Street's corruption runs deeper than you can fathom
As an employee at the Federal Reserve in 2011, three years after
the dissolution of Lehman Brothers, Carmen Segarra witnessed the results of this deregulation firsthand
Of the myriad policy decisions that have brought us to our current precipice, from the signing of the
North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
to the invasion of Iraq and the
gerrymandering
of House districts across the country, few have proven as consequential as the demise of
Glass-Steagall
. Signed into law as the U.S.A.
Banking Act of 1933, the legislation had been crucial to safeguarding the financial industry in the wake of the Great Depression.
But with its repeal in 1999, the barriers separating commercial and investment banking collapsed, creating the preconditions for
an economic crisis from whose shadow we have yet to emerge.
Carmen Segarra might have predicted as much. As an employee at the Federal Reserve in 2011, three years after the dissolution
of Lehman Brothers, she witnessed the results of this deregulation firsthand. In her new book, "
Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street,
"
she chronicles the recklessness of institutions
like Goldman Sachs and the stunning lengths the United States government went to to accommodate them, even as they authored one of
the worst crashes in our nation's history.
"They didn't want to hear what I had to say," she tells Robert Scheer in the latest installment of "Scheer Intelligence." "And
so I think what we have in terms of this story is really not just a failure of the banks and the regulators, but also a failure of
our prosecutors. I mean, a lot of the statutes that could be used -- criminal statutes, even, that could be used to hold these executives
accountable are not being used, and they have not expired; we could have prosecutors holding these people accountable."
Segarra also explains why she decided to blow the whistle on the Fed, and what she ultimately hopes to accomplish by telling her
story. "I don't like to let the bad guys win," she says. "I'd rather go down swinging. So for me, I saw it as an opportunity to do
my civic duty and rebuild my life. I was very lucky to be blessed by so many people who I shared the story to, especially lawyers
who were so concerned about what I was reporting, who thought that the Federal Reserve was above this, who thought that the government
would not fail us after the financial crisis, and who were livid."
"Noncompliant" explores one of the darkest chapters in modern American history, but with a crook and unabashed narcissist occupying
the Oval Office, its lessons are proving remarkably timely. "We live in a culture where we reward bad behavior, we worship bad behavior,
and it's something that needs to stop," she cautions. "Changing the regulatory culture on [a] U.S. governmental level is something
that's going to take a decade, maybe two. And we need to start now, before things get worse."
Listen to Segarra's interview with Scheer or read a transcript of their conversation below:
Robert Scheer:
Hi, I'm Robert Scheer, and this is another edition of "Scheer Intelligence," where the intelligence comes from
my guests. Today, Carmen Segarra. She's written a book, just came out, called "Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants
of Wall Street." And boy, did she ever. Perhaps you remember this case; it was in 2011, two, three years into the Great Recession.
There was a lot of pressure from Congress that these banks be regulated in a more serious way. As a result, Carmen Segarra, someone
of considerable education, was brought in. And she was assigned to do a survey of Goldman Sachs, to go over to Goldman Sachs. And
I just want to preface this, people have to understand that not only is the Federal Reserve an incredibly -- the most important economic
institution in the United States, but the New York Federal Reserve plays a special role being in New York. And they are basically
entrusted with regulating the banks, and they are the institution that most definitely failed in that task, and helped bring about
the Great Recession. Would you agree with that assessment?
Carmen Segarra:
Yes, I would agree with that assessment. When I joined the Federal Reserve, as you pointed out, I was hired from
outside the regulatory world, but within the legal and compliance banking world, to help fix its problems. And I was well aware of
the problems that existed. And scoping the problems itself was relatively easy; I mean, within days of arriving, I had participated
in meetings where you had Goldman Sachs executives, you know, lying, doublespeaking, and misrepresenting to regulatory agencies without
fear of repercussions. And where I saw Federal Reserve regulators actively working to suppress and expunge from the record evidence
of wrongdoing that could be used by regulatory agencies, prosecutors, and even the Federal Reserve itself to hold Goldman Sachs accountable.
The question was, when I arrived, you know, are these problems fixable? And, spoiler alert: I don't think so.
RS:
Well, your book really is a compelling read on, really, what one could consider the dark culture of finance capital. Most
of us know very little about it; we think it's boring, it's detailed and so forth. And I was thinking of another woman observer of
great education and experience, who first tipped me off as a journalist when I was trying to cover the stuff about banking deregulation
and so forth, and when Clinton was president and they did the basic financial deregulation. A woman named Brooksley Born, who was
head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and she had your kind of background, you know; a leading lawyer with the banks,
and so forth. Understood this a lot better than most of the men who were powerful, including Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin; Lawrence
Summers, who took over from him and went on to be the head of Harvard; Alan Greenspan–none of them really understood these collateralized
debt obligations, credit default swaps; she did. She blew the whistle on it, and they basically destroyed her. She was forced out
of the Clinton administration, and what have you. Did you know about Brooksley Born's work when you got into this? Do you have any
sense? I mean, this was really sort of the first major whistleblower, and she was, as you have been, basically pushed aside.
CS:
Yes. I definitely knew about her. And you know, I have to say that I was, you know, just taking that historical perspective,
which I think is an important point of view through which we should approach this topic. I mean, I remember when I was in law school,
I was one of the very first graduating classes to graduate into a post-Glass-Steagall world. From a 50,000-foot level, I think people
have a better understanding of what that means, in the sense, you know, you have all of a sudden the securities and the banking products
can get together.
But from a practical standpoint, from a ground-zero level, where I was at, that essentially meant two things. From
a professional standpoint, we studied and were aware of the fact that there were a bunch of people on one side of the aisle, the
investment products side–you know, the collateralized debt obligations that you mentioned.
And then there were people who were on
the banking side; we're talking, you know, for purposes of argument, credit cards and debit cards. And that these people, they may
have known about their products, but they were highly specialized; they only knew about the one or two things that they touched,
and they certainly didn't know about them and how they interacted together. And one of the things that I remember studying were not
just the cases of whistleblowers, but also discussing amongst our classmates, you know, what the impact would be of all of a sudden
having a class or a series of classes, graduating from law school, with people who are focusing on banking and compliance, like I
was, and who are having to understand both of these products and sort of how they interact together. And what, sort of visualizing
what our work life would be like, in terms of reporting to people that had an incomplete understanding of how the banking world worked.
So, yes, I was definitely aware; I understood perfectly where she was coming from. And she was very much a cautionary tale for the
rest of us who are lawyers. In terms of, if you find yourself in these difficult situations, you sort of game out what potentially
can happen. And I certainly took it into consideration when I was gaming out whether or not to whistleblow.
RS:
Well, before you get to the whistleblowing stage, I think you're being too kind to what I personally think are people who
should be considered as, or at least charged and examined often with what is criminal behavior. Because ignorance is really not a
good defense; when they were called before congressional committees, these knowledgeable people admitted they really didn't understand
collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. And for people who are not that familiar, you mentioned Glass-Steagall.
And what Glass-Steagall was, was one of the, really maybe the most important response of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's democratic administration
to the Great Depression. And how did this terrible depression happen, how were the banks so irresponsible. And they decided the key
thing was to separate investment banks from commercial bank; investment banks could be high-rollers, private money, you know what
you're doing, you have knowledge; and commercial banks where you're basically protecting the assets of ordinary people, they're not
knowledgeable, they're trusting your expertise. And eliminating Glass-Steagall eliminated this wall between the two kinds of banking.
And the company that you went to observe, Goldman Sachs, was an investment bank. And by the working of that law, they should have
been allowed to go belly-up when it turned out they had a lot of these dubious credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
To people who don't know, a credit default swap was a phony insurance policy pretending to cover these things, but really there's
nothing backing it up. And somehow, in order to save them, they were allowed to announce they could do commercial banking. One could
argue, in some ways, the barrier was lifted to help–Citigroup was of course the other one–Citibank. And these are two banks that
the government stepped in to help and create this monster. Is it not the case?
CS:
Yeah, that's absolutely the case. But there's a couple of things that we need to keep in mind. I mean, I think that
we're all sort of educated enough to know that, you know, where there's a will, there's a way. And so if a system can be
corrupted, people that are allowed to grab hold of power will corrupt it–insofar and only for so long as we allow those people to
have the ability and the power to corrupt it. So ultimately, talking about more or less rules, or different rules, is productive
only to a point. Because ultimately what we're talking about here is the haphazard, slap on the wrist, failure to truly enforce
the rules and regulations equitably across the system. And that creates the imbalances that you see, for example, in Goldman
Sachs, and that you see in the system in general. One of the things that happened as a result of Glass-Steagall coming down was
that a lot of the investment bankers were allowed to take over the commercial banks. And those investment bankers knew nothing
about banking, and Goldman is a great example of that. I mean, when I arrived three years in after the financial crisis, what was
one of the things that was very shocking to me was going into meeting after meeting with Goldman senior management and hearing
them lie, doublespeak, and most shockingly of all, insist that they didn't have to comply with the law. And that is a problem.
Because a bank that doesn't believe, or management at a bank that doesn't believe they have to comply with the law–you bet they
are not supervising their employees correctly, and they're not incentivizing employees correctly in terms of how to do their job.
So their behavior is injecting enormous risk into the system
... ... ...
CS:
The case was assigned to a judge who was friends with the attorney, I had worked with the attorney that represented
the Fed. And then two days before dismissing the case, she revealed that she was married to someone who represented Goldman Sachs
for a living. So, yeah, there you go. [Laughs] I mean, it's almost impossible in terms of successfully blowing the whistle. But
going back to your question with respect to the recordings and having a say, I think the question that we need to be asking
ourselves is this: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the Federal Reserve in general, is tasked with supervising the
banks. They have recorders. They have the law on their side. New York is a one person consent state. Banks, private banks,
habitually record everything that goes on inside the bank, and they do it for good reason. Because they do it to stop and prevent
fraud, among employees and by anybody that walks in the door. Why is the Federal Reserve not recording these executives? Why are
they not preserving evidence? I think that is the question that we need to be asking ourselves. You know, what I did was not
special. What I did is what the Fed should have been doing.
Wall Street's corruption runs deeper than you can fathom | Alternet
RS:
Well, it was special in that [Laughs]–come on! There have been a lot of witnesses to
these crimes, really, and you're the lone voice from within that system that dared to speak up. And as I
said, had you not been able to document it with these tapes, you would have been just dismissed as some
kind of kook. The book is called
Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall
Street.
You know, what is so important is nuance and language and attitude. And the people on Wall
Street can affect the protection of manners and complexity. I remember Lawrence Summers testifying in
Congress on why you had to get rid of Glass-Steagall, and he said "this is very complicated." And he said
the same thing Alan Greenspan said: "These people know what they're doing," and so forth. It wasn't
complicated. If the Mafia did it, you'd see right through it in five minutes. Right? You were bundling a
bunch of lousy deals together with some good deals, and you didn't even know what was in there, and you
sold them, and you got a phony insurance contract to back it up. And yet none of these people have been,
gone to jail; very few, one or two have been prosecuted as kind of a scapegoat. But the book is a great
story of an American heroine–but this is what everybody should do! [Laughs] I mean, the real issue about
whistleblowers like yourself is why did it take you? Where were the other folks? How many people–yeah, go
ahead.
CS:
Yeah, agreed. I think that's exactly right. You know, there's a number of
reasons why I wrote the book. First of all, because I think it's an important contribution to the
historical record. As to what is the systemic culture of corruption that exists in these regulatory
agencies that are taking our taxpayer dollars and paying themselves handsome salaries to work against the
American taxpayers. And then the second reason I wrote it is to incentivize people to come forward with
their stories. I wasn't the only person who wanted to blow the whistle in terms of what was going on
there. My circumstances were unique, and I sort of go through it in the book, in the sense that I was
very lucky, for example, that the Fed refused to even negotiate the mandated settlement that they were
supposed to negotiate with me. But they refused, and that allowed me to sue. There's a number of people
who have gone through the process and have been silenced by, you know, getting a monetary offer and
signing a settlement agreement. And we don't hear about them because they are forced not to talk. What I
sort of thought about was, you know, this is just a unique–you know, I didn't ask to be in this
situation, but I felt it was my civic duty. Because I do think that we need more people to really think
about how in their daily lives, they can stop rewarding bad behavior. We live in a culture where we
reward bad behavior, we worship bad behavior, and it's something that needs to stop, you know. Changing
the culture, the regulatory culture on the U.S. governmental level is something that's going to take a
decade, maybe two. And we need to start now, before things get worse. We are not in the best-off of
situations as a country; you know, we have what seems like an economic boom, but it's really just a
debt-fueled economic boom that is going to be temporary. And it's very tough to fix these types of
cultural issues, system issues, when the hurricane of the next financial crisis hits. We need to fix it
now, while we still have a semblance of peace, while we still have the sun shining. And we don't know how
much longer that's going to be. I hope it's long enough to fix it. I hope that people are inspired to
come forward and to think about how to make a difference in their daily lives. You know, because we need
to start thinking of raising children and raising adults that are incentivized in their daily lives to
reward good behavior. I think that until we create a critical mass of Americans that in their daily lives
refuse to reward bad behavior, we're not going to see real systemic change.
RS:
Well, we'll see change. It might not be good change. I mean, you have Donald
Trump–and I want to put some oomph behind this, that it's bipartisan. Because one of the–you know,
everybody, a lot of people I know are very upset about Donald Trump. He's speaking to what Hillary
Clinton calls the "deplorables"; but there's a lot of people hurting out there. And if you read a study
done by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis about the consequence of this economic meltdown that was
engineered from places like Goldman Sachs, the human cost was incredible. I mean, people lost everything.
They weren't bailed out. There was no mortgage relief. They were not helped. The banks were bailed out.
And yet no one has been held accountable, and the politicians, democrats and republicans, who supported
it, have gotten off scot-free.
Wall Street's corruption runs deeper than you can fathom | Alternet
CS:
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. This is not a democratic problem, this is not
a republican problem. This is an American problem with worldwide impact. The U.S. dollar is a reserve
currency. The world depends in large part on the American banking system to work. And for it to work,
there are these rules, and these rules are there to create trust in the system and to create smooth
processes in the system, so that money can be moved and the economy can continue to grow. If the world
can no longer trust the American banking system because Americans cannot be trusted to regulate it, they
are going to move away from the American banking system. They are going to move away from the U.S. dollar
as a reserve currency. And then we are going to find ourselves in the situation that a lot of countries
that are not governed by reserve currencies find themselves occasionally, from time to time, whenever
they have a crisis. You know, we're talking about countries in Latin America; we're talking about
countries in Africa; we're talking about countries in Asia. I hope the book will inspire people to really
take a look around and realize, you know, the American consumer, the American worker, is incredibly
powerful. You know, these banks cannot survive without our money. We don't have to wait for the
government to keep failing us; we don't have to wait for the judiciary to keep failing us; we don't have
to wait for lawyers to keep failing us. We choose who we work for. We choose where we keep our money. We
can choose to protest. We can choose to call our pension funds and tell them, I want you to stop doing
business with Goldman Sachs. It's what we do on a daily basis. When we stand up and we say, I am not
going to be banking with these people–they will listen. It's like, they control all of these other checks
and balances that were put in place in terms of the government to stop them. So now it's up to us as a
people to actually do something about this.
RS:
Let me take a break. And I've been
talking to Carmen Segarra, who is actually the lone honest person from within the banking system that I
know of who really took the story of what these people were doing, and swindling the American people, and
fortunately documented it with tape recording–as they document everything; if you call the bank for
information, "your conversation will be recorded to make it more efficient"–well, she turned the table on
that, had the record. The book is called
Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of
Wall Street.
[omission for station break] I'm not going to be able, in the time that I have here, to
do justice to this book, because the devil is in the details. I want to talk about some people who did
speak up. I mentioned Brooksley Born, who was this brilliant member of the Clinton administration who got
pushed out for speaking up. But when the pressure came down after the Great Recession, and the banks had
to be questioned, they at Goldman Sachs turned to a Columbia University finance professor, David Beim.
And he did a report. He had access to everything, he did this incredible report. We only know about it
because it showed up in some footnote somewhere. And by the way, I haven't given enough credit here to
the people who have helped break this story. ProPublica, who did a really terrific job on it, and the NPR
show This American Life, which really did a great job. So there has been really good reporting. As you
pointed out, it was absolutely shameful that Congress did not really take testimony from you; you were
there as an observer–I think in a red dress, to be noticed. [Laughs]
CS:
Yes. Well, you know, red is the color of martyrs.
RS:
And so I want to ask you about that. Before you even went there, this guy David
Beim had done a study. And William Dudley, the president of the bank, didn't even respond. He said thank
you, they looked at the–and they never responded to the criticisms in that study, which were devastating.
Of how the bank was operating.
CS:
Yeah, but that's how the Federal Reserve Bank of New York operates. And that's,
curiously enough, also how Goldman Sachs operates. They say one thing and do another. If you want to know
what they're doing, just flip it, right? I mean, if they're asking for a report, that means that they
plan to do nothing about it. And you know, the book sort of walks you through the story of how they
played at this game of pretending to clean up the regulatory issues. I mean, the joke really was on us,
the new regulators that were brought in from the industry to actually clean up the problems that were
there. None of us are there at the Fed anymore. Every single one of those people that I talk about that
validated my story, they're gone. And they are gone under different circumstances, some in good standing,
some in less good standing, but the point is they're all gone. Because the purpose of bringing us in was
not really to change things, it was to ensure that they had a smoke screen and a story to feed the press,
that they would print, saying that they had indeed fixed this. And there was nothing else there to see.
Wall Street's corruption runs deeper than you can fathom | Alternet
RS:
We're going to run out of time here, but I want to nail down
one–this chain of responsibility. And I had just mentioned New York Fed president
William Dudley, who I believe ran into some difficulty; he had ownership in
something that they were trading with. But leaving that aside, he replaced
Timothy Geithner. And when Goldman Sachs, when this whole banking thing happened,
there was no more important individual in this country, in a position to observe
it, than Timothy Geithner. He had been in the Clinton administration; he had
worked for Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers in the Clinton administration when
they deregulated Wall Street. And he was rewarded for that deregulation, right,
by being named to the most important regulatory position, to be head of the New
York Fed. And Barack Obama in 2008, as the banking meltdown was happening, gave a
speech at Cooper Union, April of 2008, blasting Wall Street. And then, when
Hillary Clinton lost the primary, Barack Obama turned to Lawrence Summers and
Timothy Geithner, and these people for advice, and he named Timothy Geithner to
be his treasury secretary. The guy who at the New York Fed, where you went there
to work and to try to supervise Goldman Sachs–he knew everything about this, and
told us nothing, and he was rewarded by being made treasury secretary.
CS:
When I'm saying, you know, we have to stop rewarding bad behavior,
that's an example of what I'm talking about. It's like, we have a culture where
we reward people for their bad behavior. And in the Fed it is a systemic problem.
And it is a problem that comes from the top down. And when I was at the Fed, Ben
Bernanke was head of the Fed; Bill Dudley, as you pointed out, was the head of
the New York Fed; and Sarah Dahlgren was his head of supervision. This is a very
small world. We're not talking about a lot of people; the culture is top-down,
and everybody there just does what these people say, because if they don't
they're afraid they're going to lose their jobs. So from their perspective, they
have nothing to lose, because they have a bunch of workers that are going to do
as they say. And they will do what is in their best corporate interests. I mean,
you have Bill Dudley, who was allowed to hold on to a lot of his investments that
predated his arrival at the Fed and were held at Goldman Sachs. And you know,
when you have somebody who's not forced to really work for the government–as in
divesting themselves of their own conflicts and truly taking taxpayer money and
doing their job–then you can't expect a good result to come from that. Again, we
rewarded bad behavior. And that's why I think, you know, the key here is really
about taking a really good look at our daily lives and seeing, who are we
rewarding on a regular basis? And we need to stop rewarding that bad behavior.
Wall Street's corruption runs deeper than you can fathom | Alternet
RS:
But I want to challenge what I think is your optimism. And in
fact, you are living proof that doing the right thing can be a career-ender. I
haven't asked you, I mean, I assume you still have a good career; you're highly
talented and competent, and you were, you know, extremely well educated. But
you're not being considered to be treasury secretary or something, right? The
consequences for you were quite dire, weren't they?
CS:
They
were. And you know, my career in banking is over on a permanent basis. But I
think you sort of point out to, a little bit to my personality, and I hope it
comes through in the book; I sort of talk about that fact that I'm just a very
resilient person. And I just, I don't like to let the bad guys win. I'd rather go
down swinging. So for me, I saw it as an opportunity to do my civic duty and
rebuild my life. You know, and I was very lucky to be blessed by so many people
who I shared the story to, especially lawyers who were so concerned about what I
was reporting, who thought that the Federal Reserve was above this, who thought
that the government would not fail us after the financial crisis, and who were
livid. And I've been blessed with their support through the process of
whistleblowing, and I continue to be blessed by their support even after. I have
a husband who was, you know, a real hero of the story in my book, and I have been
able to remake my life as a lawyer in private practice. And my clients, you know,
God bless them, they trust me to help them. And I wouldn't change what I did for
anything. Because I think for me–and I talk about it in the book–I think living a
meaningful life is more important than making money. I think for me, making money
is important insofar as it pays the bills. But once my bills are paid, it's about
having a meaningful life. And I just feel very, very lucky that I have had the
life that I've had, that I got to go to a Catholic school that taught me the
morals that I believe in. I think that I am who I am, and I think that I would be
just as moral if I had grown up Jewish, or if I had grown up a Mormon, or if I
had grown up a Protestant. So I feel very blessed that I was exposed to what good
values and good behavior are. I decided since I was very little that that's just
the way I wanted to live my life, and that to live meaningfully was more
important than anything else. And that has driven all of my decisions, and I
found the experience to be rewarding. And when people talk to me about how bad
things are and how things sort of look like they're never going to turn around, I
tell them, no. They will turn around. We just need to believe in ourselves and be
our own saviors, and be our own heroes in our own daily lives.
RS:
But let me, let me challenge that. And yes, you're an
exemplary person. No question. And people should read this book,
Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street.
But I
want to focus on that word, "lone." Lone whistleblower. These people had the same
great education you had at the best schools, OK? They didn't blow the whistle.
No, they abetted the crime! They made it possible. They destroyed people like
Brooksley Born, who dared challenge it. And the fact of the matter is, you can't
expect ordinary people–even myself. You know, I did graduate work in economics,
I'm a professor, blah blah blah. But I can tell you, when I went into my bank
loans, I didn't know all the details and what they were talking about and
everything. I counted on regulation, I counted on government, I counted on
accountability, frankly, on the part of these institutions. So my view is, you
can't expect ordinary people–that's why we had a distinction between investment
banks and commercial banks. Commercial banks are supposed to deal with ordinary
people, OK? They're supposed to hold their money, give them a fair interest rate,
make loans on their houses, and help them out. And they have to be regulated,
because you know, the ordinary person can't be an expert. The failure here is of
the educated class. Of the superachievers. And you count on those people, yes, to
do the right thing. But money talks. And the fact of the matter is, the people
you went to school with, at the Ivy League schools, at the wherever–they sold us
all out.
CS:
I think you make a good point. But I also think that the
problems are systemic and run deeper. I mean, I would point out, for example,
just from a personal perspective, when I graduated both college and law school I
happened to be one of those that graduated into a recession, twice. There weren't
too many jobs. I didn't have too many options. I ended up working in where I
ended up working because it was either that or not feed myself. And I think one
of the problems that we have that is systemic is that we have allowed capitalism
to create such huge imbalances in how we reward people for their daily work. So
people are forced to do something that they may not even like, or may not even be
good at, because they have no choice. It's a shame, because we're a big enough
country, we have a lot of talent, there should be more invisible hand, central
planning. This whole system where we are now turning our attention to creating
computer programmers is more based on making sure that computer programming
becomes a cheap, minimum-wage job where the owners of the computer companies like
Apple don't have to overpay like they are doing now for those workers. So I think
that there are more systemic issues than we realize. And I agree with you, I
think that, you know, we were sold out by the intellectual class. But we still
need to figure out–and the intellectuals are the ones who are going to help us–we
need to figure out how to fix the system on a larger scale if we are going to
rebalance things. And I don't have the monopoly on the answer, on all the
answers, you know? I'm just a girl born in Indiana to two Puerto Rican parents,
you know? [Laughs] It's not like I have any terms, in any way access to the
higher echelons and how that works. But I think that we really do need to think
about, in our own ways and in our own lives, how we can sort of convince other
people to make the right choices on a daily basis. Because I think that if
everybody takes making the right choices seriously, and realizes that we're all
in the same boat–you know, we're all Americans, this is going to impact us all–I
think that we can, slowly but surely, right the boat and start heading in the
right direction.
RS:
People should read
Noncompliant
–it's an important
word; they weren't compliant–
A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall
Street.
And recognize that the problem with modern governance is that the
decisions are made by people who don't have our common interest, who are bought
off. That money talks. And one reason we have such despair now, and we go for
demagogues, and we have such divisive, ugly language and ugly politics, is the
so-called civilized, well-educated leaders of our country went for the money and
betrayed ordinary people. I'll let you take the last word, and then we'll wrap it
up.
CS:
Ah, well, thank you. And again, you know, I know that you
are sort of [Laughs] thinking about it from the perspective of a hopeless sort of
case. But I do think that there is–and I hope people will look at it as the
beginning of change. You know, yes, the book is a very sad story; the bad guys do
win, for now. But just because they win the battle doesn't mean they're going to
win the war. And I refuse to give up hope in the American people, and I refuse to
give up hope in the American consumer. I think that we can make a difference if
we try. Because I think that when we get the American people–no matter whether
they're democrats, republicans, independent–when we get them educated on the
topic of finance, when we get them accessible stories, they will have their say.
And they matter–we matter. And it's important that they come to the table,
otherwise this problem isn't going to get solved.
Big finance does behave like an organized crime. And should be treated by society as
such...
Notable quotes:
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives ..."
By
Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of
economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank
Whistleblowers United. Jointly published with New Economic
Perspectives
I cannot write many blogs during the fall semesters because I teach four classes (I co-teach
one of them). The fall term of instruction at UMKC is now over so I am writing one piece before
turning to grading. I have recently done additional research on a topic I know is of great
interest -- the prosecution of elite white-collar criminals. I have organized it in the form of
a game in which the reader guesses who authored the quoted passage.
Which President
described the elite banksters of his era as "charlatans, chiselers and cheats?" Which Vice
President criticized prosecutions, enforcement actions, and even safety rules for the elite
white-collar criminals of his era in these terms?
But the number of complex regulations is only half the problem. As President [deleted] has
repeatedly emphasized, it is also the adversarial and seemingly mindless enforcement methods
that really get under people's skins. Business owners are sick of being treated like
criminals. They see a government that just doesn't make sense, that charges them with safety
violations when no one is in harm's way.
[Note that enforcement action is supposed to be 'adversarial' and that 'business owners'
need to be 'treated [as] [not 'like'] criminals' when they are criminals. A safety violation
that does not cause injury because no worker is in the unsafe trench when it collapsed should
be charged as a safety violation because it is. A well-run company with a strong safety record
takes that approach to safety. The government must too.]
Which U.S. Attorney General offered
the excuse for refusing to create a national task force to prioritize the prosecution of the
elite banksters of his era that the fraudsters were merely "white collar street criminals"?
Which U.S. Attorney General explained in these terms why he was working with the regulators
because prosecutions of elite banksters require enormous sophistication and prioritization?
[T]hese investigations most often involve complicated paper trails leading to highly
sophisticated schemes which disguise illegality under the veneer of legitimate business and
financial transactions.
[Note that this AG understood the essential danger that makes 'control frauds' uniquely
damaging -- the fact that the CEO finds it far easier to 'disguise illegality' 'under the
veneer' of seeming 'legitima[cy].']
Which U.S. President met with the Nation's U.S.
Attorneys to emphasize in these terms the criticality of prosecuting elite banksters?
It takes a snake, a cold-blooded snake, to betray the trust and innocence of hard-working
people," [deleted] said in a speech to his administration's U.S. attorneys in announcing his
effort. "And so, if we have to look under rocks to find these white-collar criminals, then we
will leave no stone unturned.
Which U.S. President proclaimed "I did not run for office to be helping out a
bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street"? Which FBI Director characterized the level of elite
fraud in failed insured institutions as 'pervasive' and explained that the fraud problem came
from the top in these terms?
The American public relied upon banking institutions and financial institutions being
soundly managed by people who were honest. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that this
program go forward to the end no matter how long that takes.
He discounted past arguments that Texas' economy was the root cause for the state's
financial crisis. "Although it was the general economic downturn in Texas that surfaced the
problem, it
appears to the FBI as if a pervasive pattern of fraudulent lending activity began much
earlier."
Which U.S. President told the Nation's leading bankers "My administration is the
only thing between you and the pitchforks"?
[Note that the President was characterizing the American people as a mob out to murder the
banksters that caused the financial crisis -- and stressing that his administration would
safeguard them from accountability for their crimes.]
Which U.S. Attorney General explained
in these terms how he began working with the new regulator the day after he was appointed to
ensure the prioritization of the most elite banksters in the ongoing financial crisis they were
both confronting?
I met with [deleted] Director of [deleted], the day after he assumed office to map out a
joint effort between the regulatory agencies and the Department of Justice to winnow through
the mass of referrals that had already been made to ensure that we were focusing upon the
most significant cases as our first priority.
Which regulatory agency made the 'mass of [criminal] referrals' the AG was
referring to? How many criminal referrals did the agency make in response to its financial
crisis? How many felony convictions of individuals did the Department of Justice (DOJ) obtain
in 'major' cases in response to these referrals? Which senior law enforcement agency warned in
September 2004 that an 'epidemic' of mortgage fraud was developing that would, he predicted,
cause a financial 'crisis' if it were not stopped? Which administration "debated for months the
advantages and perils of a criminal indictment against HSBC" given an FBI investigation
confirming the congressional finding that the bank, between 2001 and 2010, "exposed the U.S.
financial system to money laundering [by a leading drug cartel] and terrorist financing risks"
[by Saudis]"? The U.S. Attorney General, at the urging of the Fed and the Comptroller of the
Currency, refused to indict the bank or its senior officers who committed and profited from
tens of thousands of felonies. What U.S. Attorney General testified to Congress in the
following terms that the largest banks were too big to prosecute?
I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does
become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do
prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national
economy, perhaps even the world economy.
Under which administration did Scott G. Alvarez, general counsel at the Federal
Reserve successfully intervene with the SEC to weaken fraud penalties against some of the
world's largest banks? Under which administration did Timothy Geithner, then President of the
NY Fed, successfully intervene with then NY Attorney General Cuomo to caution against vigorous
prosecution of elite banksters? Did this harm Geithner and Cuomo's careers? Which President
unconstitutionally appointed the first Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision -- after
being warned that appointing him without the Senate's 'advice and consent' would be
unconstitutional? Why did the President do so -- and why did the Senate not protest the action?
Which administration ended the career prospects of a top regulator they appointed when he had
the audacity to bring an enforcement action against the President's son? Which U.S. Attorney
General wrote: "We are presently facing the largest financial disaster in American history
grounded in the betrayal of public trust by flagrant self-dealing in 'other people's money'"?
Which U.S. Attorney General described the causes of the financial crisis he was investigating
"the biggest white-collar swindle in history"?
For bonus points, these questions relate to a non-government party.
Who wrote the
following -- and made it public?
"Our savings and loan industry has created the largest mess in the history of U.S.
financial institutions," [deleted] said in a letter to the [industry trade association -- the
'league']. "The league responds to the savings and loan mess as Exxon would have responded to
the oil spill from the Valdez if it had insisted thereafter on liberal use of whisky by
tanker captains." [Deleted] blamed the league for 'constant and successful' lobbying over
many years that prevented government regulators from cracking down on S&Ls run by 'crooks
and fools' and persuaded regulators to use 'Mickey Mouse' accounting .
"It is not unfair to liken the situation now facing Congress to cancer and to liken the
league to a significant carcinogenic agent ."
"Because the League has clearly misled its government for a long time, to the taxpayers'
great detriment, a public apology is in order, not redoubled efforts to mislead further."
Answers : (plus the President that appointed the official):
George HW Bush Gore Mukasey
(Bush II) Thornburgh (Bush I) George HW Bush Obama William Sessions (Bush II) Obama Thornburgh
(Tim Ryan was the OTS Director he worked with) OTS, during the S&L debacle, made >
30,000 criminal referrals (all federal banking agencies combined made fewer than a dozen
criminal referrals in response to the Great Financial Crisis) and DOJ obtained > 1,000
felony convictions in cases DOJ defined as 'major.' The FBI (through Chris Swecker) Obama 13.
Holder (Obama) Bush II Bush II (No, Cuomo was elected Governor of NY and Obama appointed
Geithner as Treasury Secretary) George HW Bush (the unconstitutional appointment was Danny Wall
as OTS Director) George HW Bush (Tim Ryan was the OTS Director who brought the enforcement
action v. Neil Bush) Thornburg (Bush I) Thornburgh (Bush I) Warren Buffett and Charles Munger
(May 30, 1989).
The mess is caused by deregulation, money in politics, lobbying by the rich, wealth
inequality, fraud in the banking system, corruption of corporations, the wealthy hiding taxes
off-shore, greed, failure of democratic institutions, etc. In another way, you could say It's
the Love of Money. (It is a very long list epitomized by Black's quotations from the highest
offices in the land.)
Concise and enlightening summary. Thank you, Bill Black. Should be taught in every high
school US History and Civics class in America together with financial and monetary literacy.
Interesting how pervasive this behavior has been across so called "leaders" of both legacy
political parties and whose names repeatedly appear on the summary list. The damage to the
social and political fabric of the nation is incalculable.
"... L.A City Attorney Mike Feuer announced a $185 million settlement reached with Wells Fargo, after thousands of bank employees siphoned funds from their customers to open phony checking and savings accounts raking in millions in fraudulent fees. ..."
"... So where is the FBI? Where is the Department of Justice? How about California Attorney General Kamala Harris? Too busy campaigning for the Senate to notice? How about L.A. District Attorney Jackie Larry? ..."
"... Only City Attorney Mike Feuer took action, and he only has the authority to prosecute misdemeanors ..."
"... multi-billion dollar ..."
"... If the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes were to go out with his lantern in search of an honest man today, a survey of Wall Street executives on workplace conduct suggests he might have to look elsewhere. ..."
"... A quarter of Wall Street executives see wrongdoing as a key to success, according to a survey by whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow released on Tuesday. ..."
"... In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK ..."
"... , 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful ..."
Organized crime. This phrase is now a precise synonym for big-banking in the United States.
These Big Banks commit big crimes; they commit small crimes. They cheat their own clients; they
swindle outsiders. They break virtually every financial law on the books. What do all these
crimes have in common? The Big Banks commit all these crimes
again and
again and
again – with utter impunity.
These fraud factories commit their serial mega-crimes, year after year, because the Big
Banks know that they will never, ever be punished. On rare occasions, their crimes have been so
egregious that U.S. 'justice' officials could no longer pretend to be oblivious to them. In
such cases, there was a token prosecution, there was a settlement where the law-breaking banks
didn't even have to acknowledge their own criminality, and there was a microscopic fine –
which didn't even force the felonious financial institutions to disgorge all of their profits
from these crimes.
Criminal sanctions, by definition, are supposed to deter criminal conduct.
The token prosecutions against U.S. Big Banks didn't deter Big Bank crime, they encouraged it.
But even these wrist-slaps were becoming embarrassing for this crime syndicate, so they dealt
with this problem. The Big Bank crime syndicate told
its lackeys in the U.S. 'justice' department that they were not allowed to prosecute one of its
tentacles, ever again.
The lackeys, as always, obeyed their Masters, and issued
a new proclamation . The U.S. 'Justice' Department would never prosecute a U.S. Big Bank
ever again – no matter what crimes it committed, no matter how large the crimes, no
matter how many times the same Big Banks committed the same crimes. Complete, legal immunity;
totally above the law. A literal culture of crime.
What happens when you create a culture of crime in (big) banking? Not only the banks break
laws – with impunity – their bank employees do so as well. Case in point:
Warren Buffett's favorite Big Bank – Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo employees came up with
a good idea for boosting their salaries: stealing money directly out of the accounts of
the bank's clients .
Consider how large this crime became, in just one of these tentacles of organized crime.
L.A City Attorney Mike Feuer announced a $185 million settlement reached with Wells
Fargo, after thousands of bank employees siphoned funds from their customers to open
phony checking and savings accounts raking in millions in fraudulent fees.
[emphasis mine]
Thousands of bank employees stealing millions of dollars from bank customers, in tiny,
little increments, again and again and again. But the story gets much worse. Why was a lowly
city attorney involved with the prosecution of this organized crime?
So where is the FBI? Where is the Department of Justice? How about California
Attorney General Kamala Harris? Too busy campaigning for the Senate to notice? How about L.A.
District Attorney Jackie Larry?
Only City Attorney Mike Feuer took action, and he only has the authority to prosecute
misdemeanors
There are only two ways in which the non-action of the U.S. pseudo-justice system can be
explained:
Take your pick. The U.S. pseudo-justice system is used to seeing so many
multi-billion dollar mega-crimes being committed by these fraud factories that
the systemic crime at Wells Fargo (which was 'only' in the $millions) didn't even attract their
attention. Or, the entire U.S. pseudo-justice system is completely bought-off and corrupt
– and they refuse to prosecute Big Bank organized crime .
A culture of crime.
It gets still worse. Thousands of Wells Fargo employees stole
millions of dollars, from countless clients. They were caught. But not even one
banker was sent to jail. In a real justice system, systemic crime of this nature would/could
only be prosecuted in one of three ways. Either every Wells Fargo criminal would be prosecuted
to the full extent of the law (given the egregious nature of the crime), or Wells Fargo
management would be prosecuted – because they would have/should have known about this
crime-wave. Or else both.
Bankers stealing money, directly and brazenly, right out of customer accounts, but no one
goes to jail? A culture of crime.
Understand that endemic, cultural changes of this nature don't originate at the bottom of
the corporate ladder. They originate at the top. In the case of the Wall Street crime
syndicate; we already know that their management personnel are criminals, because they have
admitted to
being criminals.
Many Wall Street executives says [sic] wrongdoing is necessary: survey
If the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes were to go out with his lantern in search
of an honest man today, a survey of Wall Street executives on workplace conduct suggests he
might have to look elsewhere.
A quarter of Wall Street executives see wrongdoing as a key to success, according to
a survey by whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow released on Tuesday.
In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK
[New York and London] , 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had
firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed
financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be
successful [emphasis mine]
One-quarter of Big Bank management admitted that they "need" to commit crimes. A culture of
crime. More needs to be said about the rampant, disgusting criminality among upper management
in the Big Banks of the U.S. (and UK).
A known whistleblower was conducting a public survey, asking known criminals how many of
them were engaging in criminal behavior. What percentage of respondents would
lie when answering such a survey? Three-quarters sounds about right.
One-quarter of Wall Street executives admitted that committing crimes was a way of life. The
other three-quarters lied about their criminal acts.
Monkey see; monkey do. The lower level foot soldiers see their Bosses breaking laws, with
impunity, on a daily basis. Their reaction, at Wells Fargo? "Me too."
Most if not all of the Wall Street fraud factories conduct detailed "personality testing" on
their bank personnel. Are they looking to weed-out those with criminal (if not psychopathic)
inclinations? Of course not. They conduct this personality testing to find which employees have
no reservations about engaging in criminal conduct – so they can be fast-tracked
for promotion .
There is no other way in which the systemic criminality of senior banking personnel can be
reconciled with the detailed personality-testing in which they participated, in order to reach
that level of management. The Wall Street fraud factories look for the most amoral criminals
which they can find. And with the exorbitant, ludicrous "compensation" they award to these
criminals for their systemic crimes, they end up with (literally) the best criminals that money
can buy.
A culture of crime.
As a final note; the U.S. system of pretend-justice already has a powerful weapon in its
arsenal to fight organized crime: the "RICO" act.
This anti-racketeering statute was created for one, precise purpose: to not merely
prosecute/punish organized crime, but to literally dismantle the crime
infrastructure which supports the organized crime.
Not only does the statute confer strong (almost limitless) powers in gathering evidence of
organized crime, it also permits mass seizures of assets – anything/everything connected
to the organized crime of the entity(ies) in question. In the case of the Big Bank crime
syndicate, where all of its operations are directly/indirectly tied into criminal operations of
one form or another, if RICO was turned loose on these fraud factories, by the time the dust
had settled there would be nothing left.
Oh yes. If the U.S. 'Justice' Department ever went "RICO" on U.S. Big Banks, lots and lots
and lots of bankers would go to prison, for a very, long time.
Now that the banks are calling in their insurance, the EU has to deliver either by 1)
screwing down Italy the same as they did Greece, or 2) getting the French and German public
(or better the whole EU) to bail out the banks.
There is a third option: the banks simply accept their losses, and the bankers make do
without their customary bonuses for a few quarters.
"... Since Mrs Thatcher and the 364 economists, the neoliberal right has had an interest in discrediting economic expertise, and replacing academic economists with City economists in positions of influence. ..."
"... The first is access. Through a dominance of the printed media, a right wing elite can get a message across despite it being misleading or simply untrue. ..."
"... The second is that the elite often plays on a simple understanding of how things work, and dismisses anything more complex, when it suits them. ..."
"... As the earlier reference to Mrs Thatcher suggests, there is a common pattern to these attacks by elites on experts: they come from the neoliberal right. ..."
"... Attacks by elites on experts tend to come from the political right and not the left, and the neoliberal right in particular because they have an ideology to sell. ..."
The Bank's analysis is of course not beyond criticism. [2] But the attacks of the Brexiter
elite are quite deliberately not economic in character but political: Rees Mogg claimed Carney
is a second rate politician (a second rate foreign politician!) and his forecast is
designed to produce a political outcome ('Project Hysteria'). The idea is to suggest that these
projections should not be taken as a warning by experts but instead as a political act. Once
again, I'm not suggesting
we should never think about what an experts own interests might be, but if you carry this line
of thought to the Rees Mogg extreme you undermine all expertise that is not ideologically
based, which is exactly what Rees Mogg wants to do.
This I think is the second reason why the view of the overwhelming majority academic economists
that Brexit will be harmful is going to be ignored by many. Since Mrs Thatcher and the 364
economists, the neoliberal right has had an interest in discrediting economic expertise, and
replacing academic economists with City economists in positions of influence. (Despite
what most journalists will tell you, the 364 were correct
that tightening fiscal policy delayed the recovery.) Right wing think tanks like the IEA are
particularly useful in this respect, partly because the media often makes no distinction
between independent academics and think tank employees. Just look at how the media began to
treat climate change as controversial.
But isn't there a paradox here? Why would members of the public, who have little trust in
politicians compared to academics, believe politicians and their backers when they attack
academics? In the case of Brexit, and I think other issues like austerity, these elites have
two advantages. The first is access. Through a dominance of the printed media, a right wing
elite can get a message across despite it being misleading or simply untrue. Remember how
Labour's fiscal profligacy caused record deficits? Half the country believe this to be a fact
despite it being an obvious lie. What will most journalists tell you about Brexit and
forecasts? My guess is that forecasters got the immediate impact of Brexit very wrong, rather
than the reality that what they expected to happen immediately happened more gradually. Why
will journalists get these things wrong? Because they read repeated messages about failed
forecasts in the right wing press, but very little about how GDP is currently around 2.5% lower
as a result of Brexit, and real wages are lower still. The second is that the elite often plays on a simple understanding of how things work, and
dismisses anything more complex, when it suits them. Immigrants 'obviously' increase
competition for scarce public resources, because people typically fail to allow for immigrants
adding to public services either directly or through their taxes. The government should
'obviously' tighten its belt when consumers are having to do the same, and so on. In the case
of the economic effects of Brexit, it is obvious that we will save money by not paying in to
the EU, whereas everything else is uncertain and who believes forecasts etc. As the earlier reference to Mrs Thatcher suggests, there is a common pattern to these
attacks by elites on experts: they come from the neoliberal right. If you want to call the
Blair/Brown years neoliberal as well, you have to make a distinction between [neoliberal] right
and left. The Blair/Brown period was a high point for the influence of academics in general and
academic economists in particular
on government. As I note here , Iraq was
the exception not the rule, for clear reasons. Attacks by elites on experts tend to come
from the political right and not the left, and the neoliberal right in particular because they
have an ideology to sell.
I think the Internet and the infotech revolution in general have been largely negative in their impact on the world. Ian Welsh
has a blog post that largely sums up my views on the issue.
Contrary to what many people say I think large organizations like governments and corporations have significantly more power
now than before and ordinary people have less power. The Internet has made it easier to get information but you have to sift through
tons of junk to get to anything decent. For every website like Naked Capitalism there are thousands pushing nonsense or trying
to sell you stuff.
And even if you are more knowledgeable, so what? If you cannot put that knowledge to use what good is it? At best it makes
you more well-rounded, interesting and harder to fool but in political terms knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you more effective.
In the past people didn't have access to nearly as much information but they were more willing and able to organize and fight
against the powerful because it was easier to avoid detection/punishment (that is where stuff like widespread surveillance tech
comes in) and because they still had a vibrant civic life and culture.
I actually think people are more atomized now than in the past and the Internet and other technologies have probably fueled
this process. Despite rising populism, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Yellow Jackets in France, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and the DSA this is all a drop in the bucket compared to just the massive social movements of the 1960s much less earlier periods.
Robert Putnam argued that television, the Internet and other technologies likely helped to produce the collapse of civic life
in the United States by "individualizing" people's leisure time and personally I think Putnam is right. Civic life today is very
weak and I think the Internet is partially to blame.
And even if you are more knowledgeable, so what? If you cannot put that knowledge to use what good is it?
Agreed. If anything these more knowledgeable people had a greater audience prior to the internet. Whether you were a journalist,
a great economist, a great author, or a great orator you need to persist and show intellect and talent to have your message heard
wide and broad.
(This is probably a little idealistic, but I think there is truth there.)
Now you need very little of this. If your most famous asset is your attractive body you can attract a greater audience than
great scholars and politicians.
I can't speak much on authoritarianism since whatever form it takes on today is wildly different from what it was in the past.
Unfortunately, it is hard to convince many people living in western societies that they are living in an authoritarian system
because their metal images are goose-stepping soldiers and Fraktur print posters.
I suppose the way I can assure myself that we are living in an authoritarian society is by analyzing the endless propaganda
spewed from countless, high-viewership media and entertainment outlets. It is quite simple, if the media and entertainment narratives
are within a very narrow intellectual window (with lots of 600 lb. gorillas sitting in corners) than the culture and politics
are being defined by powerful people with a narrow range of interests. This is not to say that forming public opinion or preferring
particular political views is a new thing in Western media and entertainment, just that its application, IMO, is far more effective
and subtle (and becoming more-so by the day) than it ever was in, say, NAZI Germany or the Soviet Union.
I'd put my money down that most educated Germans during NAZI rule were well aware that propaganda was being utilized to "manufacture
consent" but they participated and accepted this despite the content for pragmatic/selfish reasons. Much of the NAZI propaganda
played on existing German/European cultural narratives and prejudices. Leaveraging existing ideology allowed the party to necessitate
their existence by framing the German as juxtaposed against the impure and unworthy. Again, ideologies that existed independent
of the party not within it. Goebbels and company were just good at utilizing the technology of the time to amplify these monstrosities.
I question that being the case today. It is far more complicated. Technology is again the primary tool for manipulation, but
it is possible that current technology is allowing for even greater leaps in reason and analysis. The windows for reflection and
critical thought close as soon as they are opened. Seems more like the ideology is manufactured on the fly. For example, the anti-Russia
narrative has some resonance with baby boomers, but how the hell is it effective with my generation (millennial) and younger?
The offhand references to Putin and Russian operatives from my peers are completely from left field when considering our life
experience. People in my age group had little to say about Russia three years ago. It says volumes on the subtle effectiveness
of Western media machines if you can re-create the cold war within two years for an entire generation.
In addition and related to above, the West's understanding of "Freedom of Speech" is dated by about 100 years. Governments
are no longer the sole source of speech suppression (more like filtering and manipulation), and the supremacy of the free-market
coupled with the erroneously perceived black-and-white division between public and private have convinced the public (with nearly
religious conviction) that gigantic media and entertainment organizations do not have to protect the free speech of citizens because
they are not government. Public/Private is now an enormous blob. With overlapping interests mixed in with any antagonisms. It
is ultimately dictated by capital and its power within both government and business. Cracking this nut will be a nightmare.
Yes, this is an authoritarian world, if measured by the distance between the populace and its governing powers, but it is an
authoritarianism operating in ways that we have never seen before and using tools that are terribly effective.
"... Capitalism never was benign, Chrustjow worked as a miner in a commercially exploited mine, where there was little regard for
safety, he abhorred capitalism. ..."
@Bill Jones Interesting to read
how these idealists agree with Christian Gerondeau, 'Le CO2 est bon pour la planete, Climat, la grande manipulation', Paris 2017
Gerondeau explains how many deaths reducing CO2 emissions will cause in poor countries, simply as an example how electricity
for cooking will remain too expensive for them, so cooking is done on smoky fires in confined spaces.
" to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history." " To intentionally impoverish
the world. To what end, I wonder ?
Anyone who knows anything about history is that the rich were always better off than the poor, in fact the very definition
of rich and poor.
In this respect it never mattered if a society was capitalistic, communistic, or a theocracy, as Tibet was.
These idealistic idiots do not understand how they created the problem they now intend to solve with creating an even bigger
problem, their example is the EU, the EU is following this policy for more than twelve years now, since 2005, when the EU grabbed
power through the rejected EU 'consitution'.
Capitalism is no more than deciding between consumption and investment, Robinson Crusoë invested in a fishing net by temporarily
reducing consumption, he did not go fishing, but made a fishing net, expecting that his investment would make it possible to eat
more fish.
Capitalism never was benign, Chrustjow worked as a miner in a commercially exploited mine, where there was little regard
for safety, he abhorred capitalism.
Dutch 17th century capitalistic commerce to the far Indies, east and west, was not benign. Typically a ship left Amsterdam,
near the Schreierstoren, trans 'the tower for the crying', wives, mothers and girl friends, with 300 men aboard, and returned
with 100. Most of those who died were common sailors, captain and officers had a far lower mortality, mainly better food.
Our East Indies commerce also was not much fun for the people in the East, in the Banda Sea Islands massacre some 30.000 people
were killed, for a monopoly on pepper, if I remember correctly.
But, as the earth developed economically, there came room for also poor people getting lives beginning to look as worth living.
Engels in 1844, hope the year is right, described the conditions of working people in GB, this resulted in Das Kapital.
This room for a better life for also the poor was not given by the capitalistic system
In their struggle for a better world for anyone the idealists wanted globalisation, level playing field, anyone should be welcome
anywhere, slogans like this.
Globaliation, however, is the end of the nation state, the very institution in which it was possible to provide a better life.
Anyone following me until here now can see the dilemma, the end of the nation state was also the end of protection by that state
against unbridled capitalism.
As the idealists cannot give up their globalisation religion they must, as those who cannot give up the biblical creation story,
find an ideological way out of their dilemma. My conclusion now is 'in order to save our globalisation religion we try to destroy
economic growth, by making energy very expensive, in the hope of destroying capitalism'.
Alas, better, luckily, capitalism cannot be destroyed, those who invented the first furnaces for more or less mass producing
iron, they were capitalists. They saw clearly how cheap iron would bring economic growth, the plow.
In the country where the CO2 madness has struck most, my country, the Netherlands, the realisation of the poverty that drastically
reducing CO2 emissions will cause, has begun. If there really is madness, I wonder.
I indeed see madness, green leftists unable to make a simple multipiclation calculations about costs, but maybe mainly political
opportunism. Our dictator, Rutte, is now so hated that he needs a job outside the Netherlands, in order to qualify, either at
Brussels or in New York, with the UN, has to howl with the wolves.
At the same time, we have a gas production problem,, earthquakes in the NE, houses damaged, never any decision made to solve
the problem, either stop gas production, or strenghten the houses, both expensive solutions.
So, in my suspicious ideas, Rutte now tries to improve himself, at the same time solving a problem: within, say ten years,
the Netherlands functions without gas, and remains prosperous; the idea he tries to sell to us. In a few years time it will emerge
that we cannot have both, prosperous, and zero emission, but the time horizon for a politician is said to be five years.
"The game motif is useful as a metaphor for the broader rivalry between nations and
economic systems with the rise of imperialism and the pursuit of world power. This game has
gone through two major transformations since the days of Russian-British rivalry, with the
rise first of Communism and then of Islam as world forces opposing imperialism. The main
themes of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games include:
US imperial strategy as an outgrowth of British imperialism, and its transformation
following the collapse of the Soviet Union;
the significance of the creation of Israel with respect to the imperial
project;
the repositioning of Russia in world politics after the collapse of the Soviet
Union;
the emerging role of China and Iran in Eurasia;
the emerging opposition to the US and NATO.
This work brings these elements together in historical perspective with an understanding
from the Arab/ Muslim world's point of view, as it is the main focus of all the "Great
Games"."
Jay Dyer discusses the book here, its strengths and weaknesses:
Games in US intelligence agencies are one thing, but the fact that this arrest is a severe
blow, almost knockdown for neoliberalism is another.
From comments: "Spot on with your comment. As you point out, this event will cast a dark
shadow over executive travel for a long time to come, including those American executives who
will now be fearful of countermeasures."
Moreover, John Bolton is the sort who'd love to collect a high profile scalp like the arrest
of Meng, so it's credible that he would find a way to go ahead whether or not the China trade
negotiation team was on board.
Meng has her bail hearing in Vancouver today, so we will probably learn more about the
expected process and timetable.
Wondering why US dollars would ever be involved in transactions between a Chinese
supplier, a UK bank, and Iranian customers Assuming usage of correspondent banks in NYC?
Would also be a reason for where the indictment was filed.
The conspiracy theorist in me says that transactions are being routed through the US not
for any practical reason, or due to customer wishes, but only to expose them to US
jurisdiction for potential prosecution. An alternative to SWIFT is desperately needed
The FCPA is extremely expansive: a non U.S. company doing business in the U.S. must not do
business with Iran directly or indirectly if it knows or has reason to suspect the business
is related to Iran. So if they have the evidence it all looks like a slam dunk.
As to SWIFT, doesn't the U.S. have access to all SWIFT transactions, even those not
touching U.S. banks? They'd certainly have the Five Eyes SWIFT data.
Plus apparently the U.S. has (or had) access to Huawei's email traffic.
Not correspondent banks. HSBC has a New York branch, as does pretty much every foreign
bank with an international business. Dollar transactions clear though the US because no bank
is going to run intraday balances with other banks without the end of day settlement
ultimately being backstopped by the Fed. That means running over Fedwire.
Ah, thanks for the technical detail on why it would be cleared through the US. The Masters
of the Universe really are unwilling to take any risk unless it's socialized in some way.
Still curious why they would ever let it touch US jurisdiction, but I guess the details of
the case will eventually reveal that.
"The heart of the problem is that the Chinese firm uses a system of encryption that
prevents the NSA from intercepting its communications. A number of governments and secret
services in the non-Western world have begun to equip themselves exclusively with Huawei
materials, and are doing so to protect the confidentiality of their communications."
"The struggle centred around Huawei illustrates the way in which economic and military
preoccupations inter-connect. Already, many States have observed that Washington is so far
unable to decode this technology. Thus, as they did in Syria, they have entirely re-equipped
their Intelligence services with Huawei material, and forbid their civil servants to use any
others."
Taking into account this story from Syria the following dismissal, by China's Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying of a report in The New York Times, could be understood
differently than it was initially
"China on Thursday denounced a U.S. newspaper report that it is listening to Donald
Trump's phone calls as "fake news," and suggested he exchange his iPhone for a cellphone made
by Chinese manufacturer Huawei".
in AP, 2018-10-26, "China denies spying on Trump's phone, suggests he use Huawei".
So I turned on the local TV network to see how the story would be spun to find out what
the official line would be. There was no mention of the fact in the story that Meng was just
not the CFO of Huawei but also the daughter – the daughter – of the founder. More
to the point, nearly every scene showing Meng was when she was on-stage with Putin somewhere
so there is your guilt by association right there. They even used close-ups of the two
together though the stage was full of people seated there.
Something else in that story that I noticed. It featured the last day of the G-20 when the
American and Chinese delegation were facing each other over a conference table. On the right
was Trump and a bit further down was John Bolton. Now Trump has said he had no idea that this
arrest was taking place but Bolton said that he know beforehand. Does it not seem strange
that Bolton would not have pulled Trump aside beforehand and said 'Hey boss, we are going to
do something never done before and arrest a high-level Chinese citizen which could blow up
your whole agreement. You know, just so you know.'
With this is mind, it may be fairer to say that this was more a case of 'Huawei's Meng
Targeted using US Bank Sanctions'. The pity is that the US Justice Department finds no
trouble with targeting a corporation nearly 7,000 miles away but just can't seem to target
Wall Street which is only about 200 miles away from their headquarters. And I am afraid that
I am not too impressed with that internal Huawei memo as probably most international
corporations want to know where they can push the envelope. Personally I would be more
interested on a memo from the Clinton Foundation listing the amounts needed to gain access
the SecState and how much could be purchased for that amount. Both memos would amount to the
same thing.
This is new this development. The US has targeted individuals with sanctions but for the
first time they are attempting the extraterritorial rendition of a foreign citizen in
connection with sanctions violations meaning extraterritorial jurisdiction which means that
American laws apply all over the world. Could you imagine if this became standard practice?
The chill it would put on executive travel? The possibilities of tit for tat arrests? US tech
execs have already been warned on China travel. Do they really want to go there? This is
nothing less that a US declaration of war on firms competing with US business interests like
they have done with Russia.
I would be also wary of this massive 'coincidence' in the timing of her arrest. The US
Justice Department would probably know Meng's travel schedule better that she would –
Bolton with his contacts would see to that. It may be that events in her calendar were
pre-arranged for her. The Justice Department has a long history of setting up people.
Canada's involvement is simply another member of the Five Eyes group doing active
participation. It has not escaped my notice that all the countries rejecting Huawe's 5G
technology – Australia, the UK, New Zealand – are also members of the Five Eyes.
Not looking good.
This is not a rendition. Meng's extradition is all being done by the book. She is still in
Canada, and will have a bail hearing today. She will have the opportunity to contest her
extradition in Canada. Assuming she loses, she then goes to the US to face charges.
And I'm not keen about the CT. A top Chinese tech company like Huawei which knows it's on
America's shit list would have a very well protected Intranet. The US does not have access to
Chinese telcoms to locate or steal the data of Chinese citizens. Get real.
I'm not sure I embrace the notion of all this being done by the book as much as you Yves.
After all, even charades can have the appearance of procedural compliance and the following
of by the book rules, in fact, perhaps the incentive to create the appearance of following
the rules is even more pronounced in a high profile case such as this. As to whether she will
have a fair opportunity to defend herself, this is a watershed moment for Canada and she's is
in the spotlight here and no matter which way it goes, the decision to extradite or not will
have irrevocable implications on her international relations.
This is not a rendition. Canada isn't the UK. It's not going to bend its court processes,
particularly since Chinese have become big investors in Canada and Trump has been
astonishingly rude to Trudeau. And it has an independent judiciary.
I was pretty unimpressed by Trudeau's pusillanimity. He tried to give the impression that
Canada was just an innocent bystander in this whole process. Get real. If there's an
extradition treaty, the US has to make a formal request to the Canadian government. The idea
that the PM wasn't consulted on this is nonsensical. Justin engaging in his own version of
"cakeism". Wants to stay on the good side of both Beijing and Washington, which is an
impossible thing to do. Trudeau is already on Trump's sh*t list, and I'm sure Xi is taking
his measure of the man as well. Probably not terribly impressed with him either.
I have family and friends in Canada. Trust me, Canadians would be REALLY pissed if they
thought that the Canadian judiciary was rolling over for Trump and Bolton.Trump is not making
Canadian friends by running around throwing tantrums over NAFTA given that US-Canada trade is
one of the most balanced trade relationships in the world with very little net trade deficit
for either side.
I think this is very much being done by the book. Is there a viable law that is not, by
itself, a human rights violation? Is there credible evidence that this person broke this law?
Those are the basic questions that will need to be answered in a Canadian court room to have
an extradition move forward.
Canadians want the big powers to have coherent rational laws and treaties related to trade
etc. and then follow them. They also want to have rational, coherent international plans on
addressing conflicts and have historically been very strong supporters of the UN and
routinely have blue helmet troops all around the world on peace-keeping missions. Canada can
do this safely because it has balanced relationships with most countries around the world. It
will not do these types of arrests and extraditions on a whim because that would upset
Canada's role in the world.
Judging from what I've read, the US are claiming she committed fraud by alleging that a
company, Skycom that allegedly did business with Iran was not separate from Huawei. Here's
the BBC's take:
"On Friday, US prosecutors told the Supreme Court of British Columbia that Ms Meng had
used a Huawei subsidiary called Skycom to evade sanctions on Iran between 2009 and 2014 .
Spot on with your comment. As you point out, this event will cast a dark shadow over
executive travel for a long time to come, including those American executives who will now be
fearful of countermeasures.
Whose laws, one might ask? The US says ITS laws rule the world. ISDS says corporate right
to profit (by their accounting methods that discount externalities to zero) outweighs ALL
national and local laws.
And having spent some years as a lawyer, and observing several different kinds of courts
in operation, I would dare to challenge the assertion that "courts have to follow rules."
Like they have done in the foreclosure mess, maybe? Like the shenanigans displayed via
Chicago's "Operation Greylord" prosecutions? Or in traffic courts in small towns in Flyover
Country? how about the US bankruptcy courts, where shall we say "bad decisions" are endemic?
Remember Julius Hoffman? how about Kimba Woods, who sua sponte curtailed Michael Milken's
jail term for his junk bond racket? Even FISA, of course?
Good luck with that. It's almost impossible in the US never to break the law in some way.
It just takes a cop or prosecutors motivated enough. I find it hard to believe it's not the
same in China, let alone Russia or the UK, to name a few.
This law school lecture is 45mins long but really fun (it's got 2.5 million views). You
should never talk to the police – one reason being that, as Lynne says, there are SO
many possible offences, that you can never be sure you are not guilty of
something .
"Sounds like a good reason for executives not to break laws "
Yeah, I remember when all those HSBC executives were arrested, tried and thrown in jail.
Good times The U.S. government really believes in the rule of law. Remember when the Chief
Executive was sent to prison for life for committing "the supreme war crime" and shredding
the U.S. Constitution?
Rules are for little people Meng isn't big enough to be unprosecutable apparently.
So the US DOJ, according to "people familiar with the matter", has been investigating
Huawei for at least two years. My math tells me this is roughly since the signing of the deal
between Iran and the P5+1 countries in 2016, a deal subsequently incorporated into
international law by the UN. Now a bank that has run a laundry service for dirty money is
suddenly thrust into victimhood and (with Uncle Sam's boot on its neck no doubt) is
"cooperating" with the investigation? You couldn't make this more surreal if you tried.
If this isn't the final act in peeling off the rose tinted glasses from countries that
still consider the US a trusted friend and loyal ally, one wonders how much more evidence
they need to see it for what it really is, a duplicitous, hypocritical, tyrannical
imperialist. The irony of this charade being undertaken by the department of "justice" makes
this even more egregious. Expect development of an alternative system to Swift to go into
overdrive after this.
The point isn't "Is the US acting legally/by the book in enforcing the law", it's "Why is
the US legally enforcing the law in this case and not the million other cases equally
deserving of enforcement?" When the law isn't enforced evenly, then the law just becomes a
cover story for dishing out and withholding punishment by authorities.
Very interesting-actually mystifying. The powers that are- from their
pronouncements,haven't a clue about modern money, and in that framework the benefits of the
reserve currency they print. Maybe they do, but why, for what appears a minimal foreign
corporate compliance offence, would we want China, Russia, and a host of others to find
enough cause to continue their effort on a replacement reserve? Why are we so hell bent on
militarising the dollar? Save it for really big fish. Sure, its extremely difficult under the
current political framework for the world to organise and opt away from our dollar , but the
stability and leadership America has offered since the end of ww11, maybe appears
diminishing. Given Trump just made a deal with Xi, at the same time his vip citizen was being
targeted- obviously kind of humiliating-,as well as the administration turning a blind eye to
the murderous soprano fiefdom of Saudi Arabia; from any rational standpoint prioritising
human rights over crooked bank compliance issues , this looks keystone cop like! Sure we only
have a little info, but it still smells of hypocritical, imperialistic, one hand doesnt know
what the other hand is doing idiots in charge. Mike Hudson sees nefarious purposes,maybe hes
a bit hawkish, but this just seems so obtuse given the g20 hand shakes. Going to be very
interesting watching China's response. Then again maybe this lady is a criminal.
" the US Justice Department finds no trouble with targeting a corporation nearly 7,000
miles away but just can't seem to target Wall Street which is only about 200 miles away from
their headquarters "
This.
Having power over others seems to be a standard condition of our species. How one uses or
abuses power reveals the inner nature of the one(s) wielding the power. There need not be a
conspiracy of the powerful, just a consensus of how power should be used so that the sum
total exercises of the powerful reveal where their interests intersect. The rest of us just
got get out of the way.
If one wants to know what interesting times look like, well, we have front row seats. And
its in 3-D.
I must admit that President Trump is doing a better job than former President Obama in
ramping up a new theatre of economic warfare across the globe. Former President Obama was
rather crude, what with his drones. I'm thinking we have to update von Clausewitz's dictum:
"War is the continuation of politics by other means." to something along the lines of
"Economics is a continuation of war by other means."
The USA polity is certainly making it up close and personal.
Indeed. The possibilities for China to retaliate are seemingly endless though they won't
have the long arm the U.S. has.
Perhaps China should respond by trying to arrest and indicting some of the Wall Street big
wigs Obama never indicted. I'm sure China could come up with reasons why fraud Wall Street
committed violated Chinese law and damaged China.
Of course, being an exporter to the U.S. I'm sure China would much rather this go away,
than to retaliate.
Very interesting-actually mystifying. The powers that are- from their
pronouncements,haven't a clue about modern money, and in that framework the benefits of the
reserve currency they print. Maybe they do, but why, for what appears a minimal foreign
corporate compliance offence, would we want China, Russia, and a host of others to find
enough cause to continue their effort on a replacement reserve? Why are we so hell bent on
militarising the dollar? Save it for really big fish. Sure, its extremely difficult under the
current political framework for the world to organise and opt away from our dollar , but the
stability and leadership America has offered since the end of ww11, maybe appears
diminishing. Given Trump just made a deal with Xi, at the same time his vip citizen was being
targeted- obviously kind of humiliating-,as well as the administration turning a blind eye to
the murderous soprano fiefdom of Saudi Arabia; from any rational standpoint prioritising
human rights over crooked bank compliance issues , this looks keystone cop like! Sure we only
have a little info, but it still smells of hypocritical, imperialistic, one hand doesnt know
what the other hand is doing idiots in charge. Mike Hudson sees nefarious purposes,maybe hes
a bit hawkish, but this just seems so obtuse given the g20 hand shakes. Going to be very
interesting watching China's response. Then again maybe this lady is a criminal.
Why are we so hell bent? The U.S. hyper power status started in 1991. This is a generation
where they knew nothing else, coming off 45 years where allies did what they were told.
Whether its throwing around terms such as "American exceptionalism" or "indispensable
nation", there is a religious fervor around the U.S. among American foreign policy
elites.
Then there is imperial rot. The tenures in the U.S. Senate are longer than the Soviet
Politburo. At a practical level the Bushes and Clintons (not exactly great people) have been
responsible for who gets promoted in Washington and who develops marketable connections since
1986 with Reagan's alzheimers kicking in big time if not longer.
In many places in the US, if I jaywalk, I am a criminal. What corporate executive is not a
criminal, given the mass of laws that apply (until said criminals can bribe the legislatures
into de-criminalizing the bad behaviors)? Not to mention persuading the executive branch to
not prosecute, for all kinds of "political" reasons? Ask Wells Fargo and the other Banksters
how that works. Selective or non-prosecution for me, "the full weight of the law," that
fraudulent notion, for thee, I guess. And none of that is in any way new.
Speaking of Chinese criminals, I would add an anecdote. I have not been able to find the
episode, but one of the formerly investigative programs (20-20 or 60 Minutes, I believe) took
part in a sting of a Chinese corp that sells counterfeit medicines. This was maybe 8-10 years
ago. A very pretty if somewhat English-challenged young woman met with a bunch, maybe 10, men
and women who she thought were buyers for distributors and Pharma corps in the US and I
believe Canada. This meeting took place in a West Coast S city as I recall.
She offered that her company produced counterfeit meds using "latest technology" that from
the shape and color and texture and markings of the pills and package inserts, right down to
the packaging, holograms and all, could not be distinguished from the original. The products
were touted as being biologically inactive and "safe." She averred that her company could
deliver any quantity, from cartons to container loads, at very reasonable and attractive
price.
But that is a little different case from what appears at this point (barring correction as
the "case" develops) from the Huawei matter.
Not easy for another entity to take over the reserve currency.
China Germany etc want a trade surplus with us, so they must accept and store dollars. Very
similarly. Many individuals want to save dollars because they don't trust their own currency.
And some countries actually use dollars as their currency.
So the desire to accept or save dollars in exchange for their goods means the dollar is the
reserve currency. This won't change until something else becomes more attractive to savers
and mercantilists.
I agree that "done by the book" is irrelevant here. Selective enforcement is the issue.
Wall Street crooks have committed greater sins yet none of them is really punished.
Anyone could have written an "internal memo" like that. Proving its authenticity is a
different matter. After all, the biggest "smoking gun" I have ever seen in my life was the
"evidence" of Iraqi WMD.
Another interesting aspect of the case is that as I suspected, it might be difficult to
prove that Huawei sold Iran some specific American technologies that still have valid patents
in effect.
I personally know IBM and others breached the US arms control export laws by exporting
Cryptography to Apartheid South Africa, and believe that Shell Oil has broken nearly all
environmental laws in the Niger Delta for decades.
Is this what happens when a government is sliding rapidly down the slope of loss of
legitimacy?' We become acutely aware of the selective enforcement of its laws; a situation
that our poor and black and brown citizens have known for decades.
We have even become aware that the laws themselves are not always enacted for the public
good, but for the enrichment of certain small segments of the population.
This is not a good place to be. I mean this state of mind, not the NC site, which, as
always, provides the opportunity for much thoughtful and creative discussion.
Don't forget that the US ambassador to Germany threatened secondary sanctions against
Germany if they went ahead with Nordstream2. Trump then walked that back. But as for this
latest move, we know that Bolton at least was informed of the impending arrest so it's fair
to say that such a sensitive action would not have happened without some form of White House
approval–even if it wasn't Trump himself. It's probably not a CT therefore to say that
there's more going on here than a prosecutor making a routine request. The administration
hawks are firing a shot over the bow of anyone who defies them on Iran (the place "real men"
go to). Given what we know about Bolton's Iran obsession it may not even have much to do with
China.
And this bully boy approach to the rest of the world isn't only coming from Trump's
neocons since sanctions bills are a bipartisan favorite of our Congress. Apparently being
bribed on domestic matters isn't enough (unless you consider foreign policy to only be about
MIC profits). Doing the bidding overseas actors and their supporters taps a whole other
vein.
Flights that over fly US airspace are required to submit their manifests and passenger
names are bounced against the National Crime Information Center databases by CBP.
I would venture that her flight overflew Alaskan airspace and that is how they found out
she was on board.
So the USA decided to take hostages ;-) The key rule of neoliberalism is the financial
oligarchy is untouchable. This is a gangster-style move which will greatly backfire.
Now Russian financial executives would think twice about visiting UK, Canada, New Zealand or
Australia. and that's money lost. Probably forever.
Appearing in court wearing a green jumpsuit and without handcuffs, Meng reportedly looked to
be in good spirits in a Vancouver courtroom where the prosecutions' case was detailed publicly
for the first time. Specifically, the US alleges that Meng helped conceal the company's true
relationship with a firm called Skycom, a subsidiary closely tied to its parent company as it
did business with Iran.
Meng used this deception to lure banks into facilitating transactions that violated US
sanctions, exposing them to possible fines. The prosecutor didn't name the banks, but US media
on Thursday reported that a federal monitor at
HSBC flagged a suspicious transaction involving Huawei to US authorities, according to
Bloomberg. Prosecutors also argued that Meng has avoided the US since learning about its probe
into possible sanctions violations committed by Huawei, and that she should be held in custody
because she's a flight risk whose bail could not be set high enough. Before Friday's hearing, a
publication ban prevented details about the charges facing Meng from being released. However,
that ban was lifted at the beginning of her hearing.
Meng was arrested in Vancouver on Saturday while on her way to Mexico, according to reports
in the Canadian
Press.
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said Canada's ambassador in Beijing had
briefed the Chinese foreign ministry on Meng's arrest. The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa had
branded Meng's detention as a "serious violation of human rights" as senior Chinese officials
debate the
prospects for retaliation. Freeland said McCallum told the Chinese that Canada is simply
following its laws - echoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's claim that Meng's arrest was the
result of a legal process happening independent of politics.
Friday's hearing in Vancouver is just the start of a legal process that could end with Meng
being extradited to stand trial in the US. Even if prosecutors believe there is little doubt as
to Meng's guilt, the extradition process could take months or even years.
Anything involving Iran is inherently political. The US is abusing Interpol in no less
brazen fashion than Russia and China when seeking the extradition of dissidents. Canada
shouldn't accomodate this BS.
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
This 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 voters
But 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.
You 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.
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!
There 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. "
Here 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 states
What 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.
@niceland The
expression class war is often used without realising what the issue is, same with tax
evasion.
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.
For me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance cultures
manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.
Well , 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.
With 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.
Once 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 Hypothesis: The British masses would fare better without a privatized
government.
"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.
Every 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.
It'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.
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!
There 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!
@niceland
Your friends are not "right wing". The left/right paradigm is long dead. Your friends are
globalists, whether they realize it or not. Globalism is about moving capital to the benefit
of the haves. Migrants/immigrants are a form of capital. Investing in migration/immigration
lowers the long term costs and increases long term profit. The profit (money capital) is then
moved to a place where it best serves its owner.
I agree Jilles, and with many other of the commenters.
Read enough to see that the article has many errors of fact and perception. It is bad
enough to suspect *propaganda* , but Brett is clearly not at that level.
An important point that you hint at is that the Brits were violently and manipulatively
forced to accept mass immigration for many years.
Yet strangely, to say anything about it only became acceptable when some numbers of the
immigrants were fellow Europeans from within the EU, and most having some compatibility with
existing ethnicity and previous culture.
Even people living far away notice such forced false consciousness.
As for Corbyn, he is nothing like the old left of old Labour. He tries to convey that
image, it is a lie.
He may not be Blairite-Zio New Labour, and received some influence from the more heavily
Marxist old Labour figures, but he is very much a creature of the post-worst-of-1968 and
dirty hippy new left, Frankfurt School and all that crap, doubt that he has actually read
much of it, but he has internalised it through his formal and political education.
By the way, the best translation of the name of North Korea's ruling party is 'Labour
Party'. While it is a true fact, I intend nothing from it but a small laugh.
"... In bull markets, everything works. In bear markets, the only thing that really works is short-term government and municipal bonds and cash. Ample opportunity is being given to cut exposure to risk, and it's clear that few people are taking advantage of it. They never do. ..."
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As a longtime market observer, what I find most interesting about the latest correction in equities has
the feeling of inevitability that it will turn into something worse. It wasn't this way in late January, when everyone wanted to
buy that dip. It certainly wasn't this way in 2007, when the magnitude of the recession was grossly underestimated.
Even the Federal Reserve is getting into the pessimism. Chairman Jerome Powell signaled last week that a pause in interest-rate
hikes might be forthcoming. What's interesting about that is Powell surely knew that such a reference might be interpreted as
bowing to pressure from President Donald Trump and yet he did it anyway. In essence, he risked the perception of the Fed's
independence probably because he knows the economic data is worsening.
Just about everyone I talk to in the capital markets, including erstwhile bulls, acknowledges that things are slowing down. Yes,
the Institute for Supply Management's monthly manufacturing index released earlier this week was strong, but jobless claims are
ticking up and I am hearing anecdotal reports of a wide range of businesses slowing down. Even my own business is slowing.
Anecdotes aside, oil has crashed, home builder stocks have been crushed, and the largest tech stocks in the world have taken a
haircut. If we get a recession from this, it will be a very well-telegraphed recession. Everyone knows it is coming.
A
recession is nothing to fear. We have lost sight of the fact that a recession has cleansing properties, helping to right the
wrong of the billions of dollars allocated to bad businesses while getting people refocused on investing in profitable
enterprises. Stock market bears are so disliked because it seems as though they actually desire a recession and for people to
get hurt financially. In a way, they are rooting for a recession because they know that the down part of the cycle is necessary.
There are signs that capital has been incorrectly allocated. In just in the span of a year, there have been three separate
bubbles: one in bitcoin, one in cannabis and one in the FAANG group of stocks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon.com, Netflix and
Google-parent Alphabet. This is uncommon. I begged the Fed to take the punch bowl away, and it eventually did, and now yields of
around 2.5 percent on risk-free money are enough to get people rethinking their allocation to risk.
Yet, I wonder if it is possible to have a recession when so many people expect one. The worst recessions are the ones that
people don't see coming. In 2011, during the European debt crisis, most people were predicting financial markets Armageddon. It
ended up being a smallish bear market, with the S&P 500 Index down about 21 percent on an intraday basis between July and
October of that year. It actually sparked a huge bull market in the very asset class that people were worried about: European
sovereign debt. We may one day have a reprise of that crisis, but if you succumbed to the panic at the time, it was a missed
opportunity.
But just the other day, the front end of the U.S. Treasury yield curve inverted, with two- and three-year note yields rising
above five-year note yields. Everyone knows that inverted yield curves are the most reliable recession indicators. Of course,
the broader yield curve as measured by the difference between two- and 10-year yields or even the gap between the federal funds
rate and 10-year yields has yet to invert, but as I said before, there is an air of inevitability about it. Flattening yield
curves always precede economic weakness. They aren't much good at exactly timing the top of the stock market, but you can get in
the ballpark.
I suppose all recessions are a surprise to some extent. If you are a retail investor getting your news from popular websites
or TV channels, you might not be getting the whole picture. In the professional community, it is becoming harder to ignore the
very obvious warning signs that a downturn is coming. In bull markets, everything works. In bear markets, the only thing
that really works is short-term government and municipal bonds and cash. Ample opportunity is being given to cut exposure to
risk, and it's clear that few people are taking advantage of it. They never do.
S 25 minutes
ago If our country is going bankrupt, there is no better President, with greater experience
at going bankrupt, than this President.
M 24 minutes ago
Another Republican recession whoda thunk that would happen trump's "greatest economy ever".
D 9 minutes ago So
let's see the market is up over 20% since January 3 2017 which means it's above it's
historical average gain per year. Meanwhile everyone is screaming recession and bear
market. I want to know why anyone who has been invested in the market longer than the last
two years is so upset about. Do you think your entitled to a gain of more than 10% a year.
In the United States
today, and throughout "Western Brainwashed Civilization," only a handful of people exist who
are capable of differentiating the real from the created reality in which all explanations are
controlled and kept as far away from the truth as possible.
Everything that every Western government and "news" organization says is a lie to control
the explanations that we are fed in order to keep us locked in The Matrix.
The ability to control people's understandings is so extraordinary that, despite massive
evidence to the contrary, Americans believe that Oswald, acting alone, was the best shot in
human history and using magic bullets killed President John F. Kenndy; that a handful of Saudi
Arabians who demonstratively could not fly airplanes outwitted the American national security
state and brought down 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers and part of the Pentagon; that Saddam
Hussein had and was going to use on the US "weapons of mass destruction;" that Assad "used
chemical weapons" against "his own people;" that Libya's Gaddifi gave his soldiers Viagra so
they could better rape Libyan women; that Russia "invaded Ukraine;" that Trump and Putin stole
the presidential election from Hillary.
The construction of a make-believe reality guarantees the US military/security complex's
annual budget of $1,000 billion dollars of taxpayers' money even as Congress debates cutting
Social Security in order to divert more largess to the pockets of the corrupt military/security
complex.
Readers ask me what they can do about it. Nothing, except revolt and cleanse the system,
precisely as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson said.
"... Another reason for the instability of the Western system is that two of the main areas of sovereignty are not included in the state structure: control of credit/banking and corporations. These two elements are therefore free of political controls and responsibility. They have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour, entrepreneur-management skills and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. ..."
Summary of Prof. Carroll Quigley's
Last Public Lecture Given Months Before He Died:
"The 3rd. Oscar Iden Lecture 1978"
By Christopher M. Quigley B.Sc., M.M.I.I., M.A.
"This shift from customary conformity to decision making by some other power, in its
final stages, results in the dualism of almost totalitarian imperialism and an
amorphous mass culture of atomised individuals.
The fundamental, all pervasive cause of World instability today is the destruction of
communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting
neurosis and psychosis.
Another reason for the instability of the Western system is that two of the main areas
of sovereignty are not included in the state structure: control of credit/banking and
corporations. These two elements are therefore free of political controls and
responsibility.
They have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society.
They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour, entrepreneur-management
skills and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of
production.
The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they control:
capital. Thus capital intensification has destroyed food, manufacturing, farming and
communities. All these processes create frustrations on every level of modern human
experience and result in the instability and disorder we see around everyday."
Carroll Quigley
In 1978 Professor Carroll Quigley, a few months before he died, gave three lectures at
Georgetown University, Washington. The lecture series was sponsored by a grant from the
Oscar Iden endowment.
The genius of Carroll Quigley shone through his three presentations because, as always, he
forced his audience to think. His essays covered the thousand years of the growth of the
State in the Western tradition from 976 – 1976. His approach went against the grain of
most academics who only taught history in short sound bites.
Quigley believed that you could not understand anything unless you saw the whole, and the
essence of his philosophy was that history is logical, i.e. things happen for a reason.
For him the core of all that occurs throughout the ages is the underlying force of
fundamental human values.
Leaders, rulers and executives who miss this point are prone to make erroneous decisions
because their actions will be based on flawed analysis and understanding. The professor
saw that American society and Western Civilization were in serious trouble in the late
70's. In hindsight his final essay
The State of Individuals
was particularly
prophetic and events during the subsequent 32 years have exonerated his controversial
conclusions.
In summary this essay stated the following:
Society is an organization of persons and artifacts to satisfy human needs.
Currently our desires are remote from our true needs. Societies are built on needs and
they are ultimately destroyed through desires.
Power between the state and the society rests on the ability of the state to satisfy human
needs. The state is a good state if it is sovereign and responsible.
There are seven level of culture or aspects of society: military, political, economic,
social, emotional, religious and intellectual.
Military
: men cannot live outside of groups. They can satisfy their needs only by
co-operating within community. The group needs to be defended.
Political:
If men operate within groups you must have a method to settle disputes.
Economic:
The group must have organizational patterns for satisfying material
needs.
Social:
Man and women are social beings. They have a need for other people. They
have a need to love and be loved.
Emotional:
Men and women must have emotional experiences. Moment to moment with
other people and moment to moment with nature.
Religious:
Human beings have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about
things they cannot control and do not fully understand.
Intellectual:
Men and women have a need to comprehend and discuss.
Power is the ability in society to meet these eight fore-mentioned human needs.
Community is group of people with close inter-personal relationships. Without community no
infant will be sufficiently socialized. Most of our internal controls which make society
function have historically been learnt in community. Prior to 976 most controls in society
were internal. In the West after 976 due to specialization and commercial expansion
controls began to be externalized.
Sovereignty has eight aspects: defence, judicial, administrative, taxation, legislation,
executive, monetary and incorporating power.
Expansion in society brings growing commercialization with the result that all values, in
time, become monetized. As expansion continues it slows with the result that society
becomes politicized and eventually militarized. This shift from customary conformity to
decision making by some other power in its final stages results in the dualism of almost
totalitarian imperialism and an amorphous mass culture of atomised individuals.
The main theme in our society today is [ruthless] competition, and no truly stable society
can possibly be built on such a premise. In the long term society must be based on
association and co-operation.
From 1855 Western Civilization has shown signs of becoming increasingly unstable due to:
technology and the displacement of labour: increased use of propaganda to brainwash people
into thinking society was good and true; an increased emphasis on material desires; the
increased emphasis on individualism over conformity; growing focus on quantity rather than
quality; increased demand for vicarious satisfactions.
As a result more and more people began to comprehend that the state was not a society with
community values. This realisation brought increasing instability.
Another element of the trend towards instability in Western Civilization was the growth in
weapon
systems that if actually used would ensure total destruction of the planet. This in effect
meant that they were effectively redundant.
In addition the expansion of the last 150 years has in essence been based on fossil fuels.
The energy which gave us the industrial revolution, coal – oil – natural gas – represented
the combined savings of four weeks of sunlight that managed to be accumulated on earth out
of the previous three billion years of sunshine.
This resource instead of being saved has been lost. Gone forever never to return. The
fundamental all pervasive cause of World instability today is the destruction of
communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neurosis
and psychosis.
Medical science and all the population explosions have continued to produce more and more
people while the food supply and the supply of jobs are becoming increasingly precarious,
not only in the United States, but everywhere, because the whole purpose of using fossil
fuels in the corporate structure is the elimination of jobs.
Another reason for the instability of the Western system is that two of the main areas of
sovereignty are not included in the state structure: control of credit/banking and
corporations. These two elements are therefore free of political controls and
responsibility. They have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in
American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour,
entrepreneur-management skills and everything else the economists once told us were the
chief elements of production.
The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they control: capital.
Thus capital intensification has destroyed food, manufacturing, farming and communities.
All these processes create frustrations on every level of modern human experience and
result in the instability and disorder we see around everyday.
Today in America there is a developing constitutional crisis. The three branches of
government set up in 1789 do not contain the eight aspects of sovereignty. As a result
each has tried to go outside the sphere in which it should be restrained. The constitution
completely ignores, for example, the administrative power.
As a result the courts, in particular the Supreme court, is making decisions it should not
be making. In addition the President, who by the constitution should be easily impeached,
has become all powerful to such an extent that the office is now as basically Imperial.
However, to me the most obvious flaw in our constitutional set-up is the fact that the
federal government does not have control over money and credit and does not have control
over corporations. It is therefore not really sovereign and is not really responsible.
The final result is that the American people will unfortunately prefer communities. They
will cop or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and
brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into it and say it is a
great life but I think otherwise.
Do not be pessimistic. Life goes on; life is fun. And if a civilization crashed it
deserves to. When Rome fell the Christian answer was. "Create your own communities."
Source: The Oscar Iden Lecture Series Georgetown University Library: Prof. Carroll
Quigley
Please replace conservatism with neoliberalism in this post...
Notable quotes:
"... There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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?) ..."
"... 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 Par ..."
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.
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.
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.
"... Everything Flynn had to say implicated Obama, Clapper & Brennan but the corrupt cabal isn't subject to the laws of unwashed inbreds like you and I and the other 320 million Americans (including those who THINK they're part of the club because they virtue signal so well). ..."
You realize 2 years of Flynn under Mueller's microscope yielded nothing? And the fact he's
facing sentencing means he's not going to be called as a witness to anything.
Everything Flynn had to say implicated Obama, Clapper & Brennan but the corrupt cabal
isn't subject to the laws of unwashed inbreds like you and I and the other 320 million
Americans (including those who THINK they're part of the club because they virtue signal so
well).
Says Summer Sausage who was of course not in the room. You think you know stuff? You know
stuff from the koolaide you've swallowed for the past 20 years...
The American labor market is increasingly unequal, characterized by extraordinary returns to
work at the top of the market but rising precarity and instability at the bottom of the market.
Research on precarious work and its consequences has overwhelmingly focused on the economic
dimension of precarity, epitomized by low and stagnant wages.
But, the rise in precarious work has also involved a major shift in the temporal dimension
of work such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules. This
temporal instability represents a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk
shift from firms to workers and their families.
To date, a lack of suitable existing data has precluded empirical investigation of how such
precarious scheduling practices affect the health and wellbeing of workers. We use an
innovative approach to collect survey data from a large and strategically selected segment of
the US workforce: hourly workers in the service sector. These data reveal relationships between
exposure to routine instability in work schedules and psychological distress, poor sleep
quality, and unhappiness.
While low wages are also associated with these outcomes, unstable and un-predictable
schedules are much more strongly associated. Further, while precarious schedules affect worker
wellbeing in part through the mediating influence of household economic insecurity, a much
larger proportion of the association is driven by work-life conflict. The temporal dimension of
work is central to the experience of precarity and an important social determinant of worker
wellbeing.
Margaret Thatcher Against Friedrich von Hayek's Pleas for a Lykourgan Dictatorship :
"My dear Professor Hayek, Thank you for your letter of 5 February. I was very glad that you
were able to attend the dinner so thoughtfully organised by Walter Salomon. It was not only a
great pleasure for me, it was, as always, instructive and rewarding to hear your views on the
great issues of our time...
Von Hayek, to put it bluntly, loved Pincohet's shooting people in soccer stadiums:
the "Lykourgan Moment" in which unconstitutional and illiberal actions create the space for
future stable libertarian capitalism was a recurrent fantasy of his.
Friedman saw his trips to Chile to be an opportunity to preach to the gentiles -- to
primarily preach free markets and small government, but also respect for individuals, for their
liberty, and for democracy. And he had no tolerance for those who said it was evil to try to
make the Chilean people more prosperous because that might reinforce the dictatorship.
Buchanan... where was Buchanan on this spectrum, anyway? It's complicated:
"Buchanan has repeatedly argued that the 'political economist should not act as if he or
she were providing advice to a benevolent despot' (Boettke Constitutional Political
Economy, 25, 110–124, 2014: 112), but an increasingly influential body of scholarship
argues that Buchanan provided a wealth of early 1980s policy advice to Augusto Pinochet's
military dictatorship in Chile (e.g., Fischer 2009; Maclean 2017). In particular, Buchanan
reportedly provided an analytical defense of military rule to a predominantly Chilean
audience when he visited the country in late 1981...
...This paper draws upon largely ignored archival evidence from the Buchanan House
Archives and Chilean primary source material to assess whether Buchanan provided a defense of
Pinochet's "capitalist fascism" (Samuelson 1983) or whether he defended democracy when he
visited Chile in 1981.
Aside from the importance of this for assessing Buchanan's own legacy, his constitutional
political economy arguments presented in Chile also provide an interesting and distinct
perspective on the connection between democracy and growth, which remains highly relevant to
current debates. Despite a general agreement about the desirability of democracy, the view
that authoritarian regimes can spur "growth miracles", or might even be a necessary stage in
political-economic development, still has prominent supporters (e.g. Sachs 2012)...
Guardian is just a propaganda outlet. That sad fact does not exclude the possibility of publishing really good articles,
thouth. That still happens occasionally.
The fact that they follow MI6 and Foreign Office talking points in all foreign events coverage a is just a testament the GB is
a "national security state". Nothing more, nothing less.
Notable quotes:
"... I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook , Craig Murray , Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama , and many others). ..."
"... The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it. ..."
"... By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and "leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange. ..."
"... And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story. ..."
"... It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. ..."
"... Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so. ..."
"... The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. ..."
"... It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution." ..."
"... The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11 or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts. ..."
"... Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on. Here is where the trouble starts . ..."
The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke
Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency
feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with
Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to
conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking
allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well,
absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists
pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood
rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended
like they had never published it.
By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and
disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on
social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the
above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of
critical thinking), Politico posted this
ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story
was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted
by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative
fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and
"leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion
of Assange.
At this point, I imagine you're probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing
"truth." Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie a lie The Guardian got
caught telling. I wish the "truth" thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking
the ruling classes' lies). Unfortunately, it isn't. Here is why.
Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one),
there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it
is says it is. If we do not agree that that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to
appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest
difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain
whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.
Nor are there many "truths" (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one "truth" the
"official truth". The "truth" according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept
of truth. It is the reason the concept of "truth" was invented (i.e., to render any other
"truths" lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the
masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly
want there to be some "objective truth" (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened,
JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger's dead cat, the Big Bang, or
whatever). There isn't. The truth is just a story a story that is never our story.
The "truth" is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell,
unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else's story. The
powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative.
They either parrot the "truth" of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or
another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard
their "truth" as heresy. They regard their "truth" as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of
the powerless is always heresy.
For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we
know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our
knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on
Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or "fearless adversarial" outlet
bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is
merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.
Or all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a
journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on
television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But
they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because
of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful
when directly confronting The Guardian , or any other corporate media outlet, and state
that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can't
afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream
Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such
heretics.
Look, I'm not trying to argue that it isn't important to expose the fabrications of the
corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do
(albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that
"the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off
their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the
revolution." People already know the truth the official truth, which is the only truth there
is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it
is safer and more rewarding to do so.
And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly
fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be
rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally
serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be
instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this
story.
As for Julian Assange, I'm afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice
but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn't left them any other option. Much as they
are loathe to create another martyr, they can't have heretics of Assange's notoriety running
around punching holes in their "truth" and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff
unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.
#
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Good piece. I think there's another layer, though.
The truth or falsehood of individual facts about the physical world can often be
determined with near-certainty. But when it comes to history, or "news" about current events/
politics, reality is much too complex to address directly. Too many individual facts to be
comprehensible, let alone useful.
We must pick, choose, emphasize, or ignore particular elements, and arrange them into some
kind of structure, in order to form a useful narrative. Or in the case of "news," the legacy
media oligarchy largely performs this function for us -- we simply passively accept/ adopt
their narrative. Or, in many cases, "choose" between the closely-related variants of that
narrative offered by the "liberal" vs. "conservative" press.
This process of abstraction, simplification, and organization inevitably involves data
loss. So no narrative is "true" in the same sense that individual facts about the real world
are true. But some narratives incorporate large amounts of "facts" that are demonstrably
false, and some are more useful/ descriptive/ predictive than others. No one engaged in this
process is "objective." They -- or we -- are all in some way part of the story. It should be
self-evident that some narratives are more useful to the perceived interests of owners of
major media outlets than others, and that these will assume a much more prominent place in
their coverage than ones that are deleterious to those interests.
Ideally, most people would take these factors into account when evaluating the "news," and
maintain a much more skeptical attitude than they typically do. But there are several factors
that prevent this.
One is simply time/ efficiency. These individual narratives, taken together, support --
and are supported by -- our overall worldview. There aren't enough hours in the day to be
constantly skeptical about everything, especially since the major tools of distortion
involved in constructing mainstream narratives tend to be selection bias/ memory-holing, with
obvious lies about known facts (like the Guardian story referenced here) used only sparingly.
It's simply not practical to to constantly consider potentially "better" narratives, and to
reevaluate one's worldview based on these.
And which narrative we believe often has more to do with perceived social pressure/ social
acceptability than with "truth." As you put it,
Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because
it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
Mass media pushing a common narrative creates an artificial perception of social
consensus. Creating, or even finding, alternative narratives means fighting the inertia of
this perceived consensus, and potentially suffering social costs for believing in the "wrong"
one. The social role of narratives is largely independent of their "truth" -- if what you're
"supposed" to believe is highly implausible, that actually gives it higher value as a signal
of loyalty to the establishment.
It's probably best to maintain a resolutely agnostic attitude toward most "news" items,
unless one is particularly interested in that particular event. " Why are they pushing
this particular story?" "Why now ?" and " What are they trying to accomplish
here?" are often more useful questions than "Is it true?"
It's not a new issue -- only exacerbated by the advent of mass visual media:
"Propaganda" -- Edward Bernays (1928)
"The Free Press"– Hilaire Belloc (1918)
I get what Hopkins is trying to do here, but redefining terms (i.e., "truth") doesn't do what
he thinks it does.
The truth is not ' what most people think '; it's not ' what we are told to
believe '; it's not ' the official narrative '.
There is a useful cautionary tale embedded in Hopkins' piece, but he doesn't tease it out
properly.
Take this excerpt:
The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that
that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are
blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will
make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say
it is say it is.
With significant caveats, it is a reasonable description of the way the political world
works: if the political class decides that its interests are best served by declaring that a
specific narrative X is 'true', it will obtain immediate compliance from about half
the livestock, and can then rely on force (peer pressure; subsidy or taxation; state
coercion) to get an absolute majority of the herd to declare that they accept the 'truth' of
X .
If X is objectively false, too bad.
Try to run a legal argument based on the objective falsity of a thing that the political
class has deemed to be true: you'll be shit outta luck.
This is highly relevant where I am sitting: here are two examples – one really
obvious, one a bit less so (but far more important because of its radical implications).
Obvious Example: Drug Dogs
Recent research has shown that drug sniffing dogs give false positive signals between 60%
and 80% of the time – i.e., in terms of identifying people who are in actual
physical possession of drugs at any point in time, drug sniffing dogs perform worse than
a coin toss.
Note that this is before considering that the dog's handler is often pointing the dog at a
target that the handler thinks is likely to be carrying drugs. (Although in reality, drug
dogs are paraded around at concerts and in public spaces, sniffing every passer-by).
However there is an Act of Parliament (capitalise all the magic words) that asserts that a
signal from a drug sniffing dog is sufficient to qualify as what Americans call "probable
cause" – i.e., reasonable suspicion for a search.
Does anyone think that evidence should be admissible if it results from a search conducted
based on 'probable cause' derived from a method that produces worse outcomes than tossing a
coin?
Judges will tie themselves into absolute epistemological knots to get that evidence
admitted – and they will refuse to permit defence Counsel from adducing evidence about
drug dog inaccuracy because since the defendant actually did have drugs in their
possession, the dog didn't signal falsely.
In other words, the judge conflates posterior probability with prior
probability; the prior probability that the dog is correct, is 10%-40%; this should not
suffice to generate probable cause (or 'reasonable suspicion).
More Interesting Example: 'Representative' Democracy
In general, Western governments assert that their legitimacy stems from two primary
sources: some founding set of principles (usually a constitution – written or
otherwise), and 'representativeness' (including ratification of the constitution by a
representative mechanism, for those places with written foundational documents).
The Arrow Impossibility Theorem [1,2] and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem
[3,4], both show that there is no way of accurately determining group preferences using an
ordinal voting mechanism.
What this boils down to, is that representativeness is a lie – and it's a lie before
any consideration of voting outcomes ; it's a meta -problem (the problem that
ordinal voting cannot do what it is claimed to do – viz ., accurately identify
the 'will of the people'/'social preferences'/'what the people want').
Beyond the meta-problem, there is also the actual counting problem: no government has ever
been elected having obtained the votes of an outright bare majority, i.e., 50%-plus-1
of the entire eligible franchise. (It's more like 25-35% for most parliamentary systems
– for US presidential elections in the full-franchise period, the winner is voted for
by 29% of the eligible population; you would be horrified to look at US Senate
results).
So when the new unhappy lords (and their Little Eichmann bureaucrat enablers)
promulgate laws based on assertions of legitimacy because of a constitutional
Grundnorm and/or the representative nature of government both of those things are
pretty obvious furphies; they are objectively not 'truth' and no amount of heel-clicking and
wishing will make it so.
Which brings us to a key legal aphorism that has a jurisprudential history going back four
centuries: Ratio legis est anima legis, et mutata legis ratione, mutatur ex lex
– which dates from Milborn's case ( Coke 7a KB [1609]).
The reason for a law is the soul of the law, and if the reason for a law has changed,
the law is changed .
What this means – explicitly – is that " no law can survive the
[extinction of the] reasons on which it is founded ".
American courts re-expressed this as " cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex "
(the reason for a law having ceased, the law itself ceases) – e.g., in Funk v. United
States , 290 US 371 (1933) in which Justice Sutherland opined –
This means that no law can survive the reasons on which it is founded. It needs no
statute to change it; it abrogates itself . If the reasons on which a law rests are
overborne by opposing reasons, which in the progress of society gain a controlling force,
the old law, though still good as an abstract principle, and good in its application to
some circumstances, must cease to apply as a controlling principle to the new
circumstances.
(Emphasis mine)
Again: try running this argument in a court: " The asserted basis for all laws
promulgated by the government, is provably false. Under a doctrine with a 4-century
jurisprudential provenance, the law itself is void ."
See how far you get.
So Hopkins makes a good-but-obvious point – power does not respect either rights
or truth; as such it does you no good whatsoever to have the actual truth on your side.
He should have made the point better.
C J Hopkins, despite some good quotes and insights above, regrettably falls into the trap of
peddling Derrida-tier relativistic nonsense, playing a word game about 'truth', as if 'truth'
was not real merely because most people have strong incentives to avoid being devoted to it
Where you stand depends upon where you sit, etc., Karl Marx's dictums about economic and
power positions shaping consciousness, and of course the century-old classic:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not
understanding it.
from Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Hopkins more or less repeats Sinclair when he says
Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are
deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
Despite selling-out truth to the relativism devil in some passages, Hopkins nevertheless
creates some quotable, including the particularly insightful:
The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third
alternative.
The following notion of Hopkins is seen now and then in the alt-sphere, but always bears
repeating
It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their
slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake
up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution."
Iron and blood are the tools used to force people to accept what isn't true.
(Another way to tell: it was uttered by a fucking politician – a cunt who wanted to
live in palaces paid for by the sweat of other people's brows).
Truth does not need violence to propagate itself: in a completely-peaceful system of free
exchange, bad ideas (of which lies are a subset) will get driven out of the market place
because they will fail to conform to ground truth.
Falsehood requires violence (arguably it is a form of violence: fraud is 'violent'
because it causes its victims to misallocate their resources or to deform their preferences
and expectations).
In a very real sense, truth does not need friends: all it requires is an absence of
powerful enemies.
The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11
or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we
have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts.
But we CAN know the truth about our own situation, our own neighborhood, and our own
families. The current riots in France are a concrete ASSERTION of local truth against the
blatant and condescending official lies. The majority of France is getting poorer and
suffering more from migrant crime. Macron insists that starvation is necessary to serve Gaia,
and crime is necessary to serve Juncker. The people would prefer to have a leader that serves
France.
@FB Scientific truth
is limited by two factors – assumptions, and hidden variables. For example,
we might drop a brick in a vacuum and believe that it falls at 9.8 m/s squared. Here, we make
the assumption that the force of gravity is constant. And for most of history we were unaware
of the hidden variable of relativity to the speed of light.
So, assuming (LOL) that we are able to eliminate all assumptions and account for all
hidden variables, there is a scientific truth. That is ASSUMING we are not just a simulation
in someone elses computer!
Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on.
Here is where the trouble starts .
@The scalpel LOL and
then there is the 'observer effect' also especially in good old quantum mechanics in the end
scientific truth does boil down to what 'some can agree on'
@Kratoklastes Strength
is the production of force over distance. That is to say, force is a quantifiable, physical
phenomenon that, deconstruct it as much as you want, will hit you like a tsunami whether you
believe it or not.
Force only works because there is a real world that transcends philosophical bullshit and
marketing.
The subjective piece is will: victory is attained when the enemies will to resist is
crushed. Through the repeated use of physical force, eventually any enemy can be worn down
and vanquished.
The world is finite, desire is infinite, and for every desire and appetite, there is a
will. As multiple wills will that they attain their infinite desires in a finite world, there
will always be a conflict of will, which will always ultimately be resolved by force. Which
means ultimately, despite the rich imaginations and appetites of humans, and their related
striving, physical force will ultimately rule the day, and conquer, condition, and constrain
the mental life of mankind.
Of course, desire and appetite will not take no for an answer, and in their frustration,
they will imagine, fantasize, and conceptualize rationales for why this is not so. This is
the nature of our desires, and in good times of prosperity and peace, they may even bend our
reason in the direction of these appetites and fantasies, until the instincts for self
preservation and endurance rust, and are even forgotten. But like the moon revealed by a
passing cloud, the perpetual war of human existence will inevitably reassert itself, and
those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to daydream
when they should have been preparing.
After reading the article and the aggregate comments, I am strengthened in my belief that
the physics analogy of Schrödinger's cat is among the most useful (and
notwithstanding the otherwise valid criticism of it in the comments). In the same way that
the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, does not purport to define a given word,
per se , but rather gives a detailed description of how the word has in fact been used
over the years and centuries.
I refer to my version of Schrödinger's cat as counter-sense words or
oscillating-contradictions .
Oscillating contradictions and cogno-linguistic manipulation
The primary means by which corporate supremacy, for example, is achieved and maintained in
practice is via the maintenance and use of a small arsenal of about two dozen critical
counter-sense or yo-yo -like words/terms that are asserted or claimed to mean
either "X" or "Minus-X" at the option of the decision-maker.
Among the most important and sui generis (in a class of its own) is the word
person which is held to mean a living, breathing being of conscience (literally
a being of equity) with the rights, powers and privileges of such being ("X"), or else it can
mean a corporate entity which is a notional/inanimate item of property to be bought
and sold and otherwise traded for profit in the stock and financial markets ("Minus-X").
By way of example/demonstration of the ongoing cognitive manipulation process, if someone
had managed to hit the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court with a blast of truth-ray just
before they announced their decision in Citizens United, here is what we may have got
instead:
[MORE]
We here at the Supreme Court are part of what can be fairly and broadly referred to as
an arm of the entrenched-money-power.
At certain times and under certain circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over
you the masses that corporations be natural-persons-in-law with the rights, powers and
privileges of a natural person or living being of conscience.
At other times and other circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over you the
masses that corporations be items of property that can be actively bought and sold and
traded for profit in the stock and financial markets.
Your laughable naiveté is manifest in your expectation that you are going to
receive a definitive answer from this Court, or even that it is possible for us to give you
one. Among the foundational purposes of this Court is to actively prevent that question
from being answered definitively at all. The instant we give a definitive answer, the game
is over.
Whatever answer we give you must perpetuate the systematized delusion that the same
concept (corporate personhood) can mean either X (a living being of conscience), or minus-X
(an item of property), depending on the ever-changing needs of the decider.
So our current answer is that a corporation is a natural-person-in-law with the rights,
powers and privileges of a natural person, except when it isn't. We'll let you know next
time whether that situation has changed in the meantime.
Essentially all counter-sense words/terms follow that same template .
Notwithstanding that the respective concepts are logically and objectively mutually
exclusive , the judges of the Courts (and the broadly-defined
financial-world/social-control-structure) maintain that it can be either or both , and
we'll let you know if and when it becomes important.
So a corporate person has a right of free speech when giving money to
influence political parties, but not to object to itself being sold as a piece of property in
the stock and financial markets or when it is acquired in a merger or takeover financed by
its own assets. If a corporation has the legal capacity and rights of a natural person, then
how can it be owned as the legal property of another? The purpose of the Courts is to ensure
that that question is never presented in that way.
After person , the remaining most significant counter-sense or yo-yo
-like words are (surprise surprise) essentially all money-and-finance-based, and the most
important among these is the word principal and its role in facilitating illegal
front-loading or ex-temporal fraud (interest illegally and unlawfully compounded in
advance).
Is the amount of principal the actual or net amount advanced by the creditor and
received by the debtor for their own use and control?
Or is it the amount that the debtor agrees that they owe regardless of the amount
received?
Is the amount of principal a question of fact ? Or of the agreement of
parties ?
[Here is the premise / offer that is referenced immediately below:]
Lender (e.g., typical second-mortgage lender): "I will loan you $10,000 at 20%
per annum provided that you sign and give to me a marketable security that claims or
otherwise purports to evidence that I have loaned you $15,000 at 10% per annum, plus an
undisclosed and unregistered side-agreement and cheque (check) back to me for a bonus or
loan fee of $5,000 as a payment from the nominal proceeds."
In the process example used above, what is the principal amount of the loan? Is it
$10,000 because that is the factual net amount invested by the creditor and received by the
debtor for their own use? Or is it $15,000 because that is the amount that the debtor is
required to falsely agree that they have received and owe as a condition of the loan? Or is
it $20,000 because that is the total cash-equivalent/money assets ($15,000 mortgage + $5,000
cheque) that the debtor has to give to the creditor?
Is it a noun/fact ? Or is it an adjective/opinion merely pretending to be a
noun? All debt and therefore money in the world today depends on the answer to that question
that theoretically cannot exist.
Principal is a special type (and most significant form) of counter-sense
word or oscillating contradiction where dictionaries normally only give one sense,
while commercial practice defines the contrary. It would be very difficult to put the
Whatever-the-debtor-agrees-that-they-owe sense into a dictionary, because the fraud against
meaning (as well as the criminal law) is manifest in spelling it out, and ever more so in
more specialized financial dictionaries.
So virtually every legal, financial, accounting, and ordinary English dictionary and/or
regulation defines it to the effect "The actual amount invested, loaned or advanced to the
debtor/borrower net of any interest, discount, premium or fees", while virtually every
financial security in the real world at least implicitly incorporates the fraudulent
alternative/contrary meaning.
This in turn allows the academic world to function on the rational/factual
definition, while the markets maintain a wholly contradictory deemed or pretended
reality, while both remain oblivious to the contradiction.
Thus principal means the nominal creditor's actual and net investment, unless it
doesn't .
With this class of counter-sense word where there is a necessary and definitive
answer, the real job of the judges of the Courts becomes to make certain that the question is
never officially asked, and under no circumstances is it to be definitively answered.
With just one of these words you can theoretically steal the Earth . With a
financial system that is relatively saturated with them, such becomes child's play .
With these rules a group of competently-trained chimpanzees otherwise pulling
levers at random could do as well as the so-called wizards of Wall Street .
And significantly, these oscillating contradictions enable the judges to be self-righteous
in the extreme on behalf of the entrenched-money-power, while looting the little
people of the product of their labour.
As in: You have received the principal amount ($10,000) and you are going to pay
back the principal amount ($15,000) plus the ever-accumulating (and super-leveraged)
interest upon it according to your contract, while the meaning of the word oscillates
between fact and opinion – between a noun and an adjective
– according to what the judge needs it to mean (or accommodate) at any given instant in
time.
It seems impossibly obvious in this simple example, but with several of them orchestrated
simultaneously or sequentially, anything can truly be made to mean anything
.
A partial list of the most critical oscillating-contradicitions includes: loan, credit,
discount, interest, rate-of-interest, agreement, contract, security, repay, restitution,
etc., all of which mean either "X" or its conceptual opposite "Minus-X" at the option of the
entrenched-money-power whose vast financial fortunes are founded on such cogno-linguistic
arbitrage .
Here are what I believe to be four essential tools needed to triangulate
reality via congo-linguistic parallax . The first two are mine, and the last two
are from the American and English Courts, respectively.
1. Humans are highly cogno-linguistic . We perceive reality very largely as a
function of the language that we use to describe it. Most everyone inherently believes
and presumes that you have to be able to think something before you can say it.
The greater reality is that, above a certain base level of perception and communication, you
have to have the words and language by which to say something before you can think
it .
2. The world is ever-increasingly controlled and administered by people who genuinely
believe whatever is necessary for the answer they need. Administrative agents of the
entrenched-money-power have solved the criminal-law enigma of mens rea or guilty
mind by evolving or devolving (take your pick) into professional schizophrenics
who genuinely believe whatever they need to believe for the answer they need, and who
communicate among themselves subconsciously by how they name things. They suffer a
cogno-linguistically-induced diminished capacity that renders them incapable of
perceiving reality beyond labels .
3. Their core business model or modus operandi is the systematized delusion
:
"A "systematized delusion" is one based on a false premise, pursued by a logical process
of reasoning to an insane conclusion ; there being one central delusion, around which other
aberrations of the mind converge." Taylor v. McClintock, 112 S.W. 405, 412, 87 Ark. 243.
(West's Judicial Words and Phrases (1914)).
4.
One must not confuse the object of a conspiracy [to defraud] with the
means by which it is intended to be carried out. Scott v. Metropolitan Police
Commissioner [1974] 60 Cr. App. R. 124 H.L.
I have long since abandoned my search for truth, per se, since I came to realize that the
best I can ever do is to constantly strive to move closer to it. With apologies to the
physicists, Truth is the Limit of Infinite Good Faith .
@Tulip " which will
always ultimately be resolved by force."
Right there is where you lost the plot. That statement is just your opinion and it cannot
be proven true. The rest of your argument falls victim to this logical error.
" and those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to
daydream when they should have been preparing."
Also, just your opinion. For example, the "dreamer" might die still comforted by his/her
dreams, while the "prepper" might waste his life witing for the "inevitable' that never
arrives.
In what can be described as a monumental step forward in the relentless pursuit of 9/11
truth, a United States Attorney has agreed to comply with federal law requiring submission to
a Special Grand Jury of evidence that explosives were used to bring down the World Trade
Centers.
The Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry successfully submitted a petition to the federal
government demanding that the U.S. Attorney present to a Special Grand Jury extensive
evidence of yet-to-be-prosecuted federal crimes relating to the destruction of three World
Trade Center Towers on 9/11 (WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7).
After waiting months for the reply, the U.S. Attorney responded in a letter, noting that
they will comply with the law.
Some good documentary films here to watch for free:
My question/quibble relates to your objection to the use of sniffer dogs to establish
probable cause for search because it is no better than a coin toss. That seems fallacious
if, according to your figures, the dogs sniff 500 people and get excited by 10 of them of
which 3 are correctly identified and 7 are false positives.
Yeah. The concepts of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative
predictive value might be very helpful in assessing this.
Chinese version of neoliberalism and the USA version do differ.
Notable quotes:
"... I especially encourage the Russians on here to return to their home country. There is little point writing material critical of America in English on fringe media sites while in America contributing to the US economy and paying US taxes. My observation has been that the Russian personality not to mention background doesn't fare terribly well in corporate America. Why waste your energy in a country and system beyond reform that despises you for who you are that only accepts you for your labor. You'll find a better fit in your home country where you'll actually have genuine social belonging, which, unlike China, actually really needs more people. ..."
"... Xi might have stepped up too early, but maybe this wouldn't matter. When the Americans decide to confront China depends on the Americans. In case you believe that US presidents drive US policy, Trump was saying things about China 25 years ago. ..."
"... Chinese progress has been most impressive but the country is sitting on an enormous pile of private and SOE debt.. There has not been a country in recorded history that has accumulated debt at the rate China did post the 2008 crash. ..."
"... @Achmed E. Newman Dictatorships are personality dependent, as opposed to democracies that are ? dependent. Communism came up with a catchy slogan – dictatorship of the proletariat. Why couldn't US – which are, after all, a birthplace of propaganda – come up with a similarly catchy slogan, such as: Democracy – dictatorship of the elitariat? Or maybe, Democracy – dictatorship of the deep state. ..."
"... I worked for Chinese-Filipinos and this is really 100% true. The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are the most heartless capitalists on earth. ..."
"... [You have been repeatedly warned that you leave far too many rambling, vacuous comments, especially since so many of them demonstrate your total ignorance. Fewer and fewer of your comments will be published until you improve your commenting-behavior or better yet permanently depart for another website] ..."
Great, but kinda pedestrian. Lemme use this platform to point out China's flaws from a
Chinese perspective.
Chinese society and Chinese people are too arrogant, materialistic, and hypersensitive to
criticism.
This is a huge problem. One, it alienates pretty much anyone who becomes familiar with
China. Two, it leads to mistake after mistake when no criticism is offered to correct them in
time. Three, it causes society to view things overly in terms of money, falling behind in all
other aspects. Nobody cares how much rich or strong you are if you're a crass, materialistic
asshole. They'll hate you.
All societies have these issues, few are as bad as China. There are Chinese reading this
right now and getting angry and ready to call me a traitor, demonstrating my point
exactly.
A wise dictator is great for the country, but Xi is not wise. He is a stubborn old man
stuck in the past who is clearly not listening to advisers. He has overplayed his hand,
confronted the US 10~20 years too early, damaged China's image out of some paranoid fear of
Uyghurs, and absolutely failed at making friends with our East Asian neighbors, instead
driving them further into the arms of the Americans.
China does not need more repression right now, it needs to slowly liberalize to keep the
economy growing and competitive. I'm not talking about western style "open society" bullshit,
traitors like multiculturalists and feminists should always be persecuted. But the
heavy-handed censorship, monitoring of everyday citizens is completely unnecessary. If China
does not develop a culture of trust, and genuine, non-money based curiosity, it will not have
the social structure to overcome the west.
Outside of trade and money-related issues, the Chinese citizenry is woefully ignorant of
the outside world. There is no widespread understanding of foreign cultures and ideologies,
how they might threaten us, how to defend against them, or how to work around them. An
overwrought sense of nationalism emphasizes Chinese victimhood to the point of absurdity,
squandering any sympathy onlookers might have, and actually causes some to turn 180 and hate
China instead.
Angry, condescending attitudes towards our neighbors, especially Japan, severely cripple
China's ability to be a world player. Without a network of like-minded friends (actual
friends, not trade partners), China will never be able to match the western alliance. It is
not just America we have to overcome, but an entire bloc of nations. I don't care how much
people hate our neighbors, China must extend the olive branch, present a sincere face of
benevolence, and not act like the big guy with a fragile ego. Racially and culturally similar
East Asians are the best candidates for long-term friendship, it is wrong to forsake them
under the assumption that all we need is Russia or Pakistan.
Despite the trade war, I'm not worried about China's economy, infrastructure, political
system, or innate ability. These are our strengths. I have no love for liberal democracy or
western values. But China must change its attitude and the way it interacts with the outside
world soon, or face geopolitical disaster.
Don't overreact to every insult or criticism. Compete in areas that isn't just money or
materials. Really understand soft power, and what it takes to be liked around the world.
Develop our own appealing ideas and worldview. Listen to well-meaning, nationalistic critics,
and change before the world discovers China's ugly side.
I would say that yes, dictatorships tend to be more efficient than "democracy". The only
major downside to dictatorships are that usually dictators – thanks perhaps to personal
ambitions, lack of accountability, volatile personalities – tend to cause major wars.
That's a reason why someone becomes a dictator – to make it into the history books.
And the easiest way to make it into the history books is to cause a major war(s) and capture
all the glory that comes with causing the deaths of as many people as possible.
But then again, looking at the US, they don't seem to have been disadvantaged by a lack of
dictators at all, as far as starting wars goes. One has to wonder, are dictatorships even
competitive with US in the category of causing wars?
By Tiensen do you mean Tencent, famous now for its WeChat which I use for messaging and
payments. I now also use their cloud storage Weiyun (3 TB on only 10 RMB / month) as well as
their email.
By the way, Nvidia, YouTube, and Yahoo were all founded by ethnic Chinese from Taiwan. I
actually think Nvidia is more impressive than both Microsoft or Google. Its GPU technology is
much higher barrier to entry and as far as I can tell still exclusive to America.
I may well never come back to America ever again, and thus, most of what goes on in
America will no longer be directly relevant to me. I could give pretty much zero of a fuck
about the nonsense on China in the English language press, which I will only look at very
occasionally, and those who create it. It would be rather futile to try to change the views
of the majority of white Americans. Of course, there are a minority of white Americans who
are more informed, reasonable, and open-minded, the ones I tended to interact with back in
America, many of whom are unhappy with the state of American society. They are welcome to
contact me (my email is on my website), and if they use not an American email, I'll be more
willing to share certain information with them and possibly connect them to China-related
business/opportunities.
I especially encourage the Russians on here to return to their home country. There is
little point writing material critical of America in English on fringe media sites while in
America contributing to the US economy and paying US taxes. My observation has been that the
Russian personality not to mention background doesn't fare terribly well in corporate
America. Why waste your energy in a country and system beyond reform that despises you for
who you are that only accepts you for your labor. You'll find a better fit in your home
country where you'll actually have genuine social belonging, which, unlike China, actually
really needs more people.
Main difference is China is about Chinese ruling over Chinese with Chinese pride, whereas
America is about JAG(Jews-Afros-Gays) ruling over whites with 'white guilt', jungle fever,
and homomania.
Problem with China is too much corruption and petty greed.
Many tried to warn the weenies what would happen while our industries were "donated" to China
and got hosed for their trouble. Pat Buchanan's troubles actually started when he wrote
The Great Betrayal , even if they took a little extra time to pull his syndicated
column down.
Did you know about a World War II-era Kaiser steel mill once in California, that was cut
up in blocks like a model kit and shipped in its entirety to China?
It happened right out in the open, under Daddy Bush, and everyone who complained became an
unperson, Orwell-style. Nobody dared object to the glories of free trade. And the Chinese in
California said it was doing so because they had a multi-million ton Plan to fill, and it was
almost the 21st century.
China is now taking the wealth their nation is creating with stuff developed in Europe,
Britain, and the United States. The hole in the donut is they could have done all that under
license and we could have kept on with, and even improved our industrial base.
But in fact our leaders had Gender Reassignment in mind for the 21st century, not actual
productive work that truly builds nations. The Impoverishment of Nations is well known: Send
the real work out, keep the barbarians inside well-fed, sharp-clawed, and morally
depraved.
" its stunning advance in forty years from impoverished Third World to a huge economy"
Bullshit. The stunning advance occurred between 1950-1975. Starting with an industrial
base smaller than that of Belgium's in the 50s, the China that for so long was ridiculed as
"the sick man of Asia" emerged at the end of the Mao period as one of the six largest
industrial producers in the world.
National income grew five-fold over the 25-year period 1952-78, increasing from 60 billion
to over 300 billion yuan, with industry accounting for most of the growth. On a per capita
basis, the index of national income (at constant prices) increased from 100 in 1949 (and 160
in 1952) to 217 in 1957 and 440 in 1978.
Over the last two decades of the Maoist era, from 1957 to 1975, China's national income
increased by 63 percent on a per capita basis during this period of rapid population growth,
more than doubling overall and the basic foundations for modern industrialism were laid and
outpacing every other development takeoff in history.
In Germany the rate of economic growth 1880-1914 was 33 percent per decade.
In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate was 43 percent.
The Soviet Union over the period 1928-58 the rate was 54 percent.
In China over the years 1952-72 the decadal rate was 64 percent.
Bear in mind that, save for limited Soviet aid in the 1950s, repaid in full and with
interest by 1966, Mao's industrialization proceeded without benefit of foreign loans or
investments–under punitive embargoes the entire 25 years–yet Mao was unique among
developing country leaders in being able to claim an economy burdened by neither foreign debt
nor internal inflation.
Socially China has a great advantage over America in that, except for the Muslims of
Xinjiang, it is pretty much a Han monoculture. Lacking America's racial diversity, its
cities do not burn, no pressure exists to infantilize the schools for the benefit of
incompetent minorities, racial mobs do not loot stores, and there is very little street
crime.
Wait, weren't you a supporter of American racial diversity? Weren't the millions of dusty
beaners entering the US a God's gift to the country's rich, colorful, cultural tapestry?
A dictatorship can simply do things. It can plan twenty, or fifty, years down the
road.
So can the Western, globalist (((deep state))). The Chinese dictatorship is simply doing
it for themselves and their nation. Their people's lives are getting better for
decades while we have every reason to envy our grandfathers.
"China has an adult government that gets things done. America has a kaleidoscopically
shifting cast of pathologically aggressive curiosities in the White House."
Well put: I have long argued that the last adult president was Bush the Elder – what
followed was a sorry sequence of adolescents.
There was only one chance to elect a non-preposterous grown-up – Romney. It was
spurned.
But be of good cheer: the White House might currently be occupied by an absurd oaf, but it
might have been Hellary, a grown-up with vices not to my taste. Better the absurd than the
appalling?
As for China – I've never been there. At second-hand I am impressed. But it too
could take a tumble – life's like that.
@Cyrano Having a
dictator is not just a bad idea because of wars, Cyrano. The English spent many centuries
slowly chipping away at the ultimate power of Kings and Queens. I'm pretty sure that if they
hadn't done that, you and I would not be here writing to each other today.
There can be a powerful Monarchy or Dictator, say, like under Queen Victoria or Josef
Stalin. There will be much different outcomes. It would be a shame if the good King or
dictator happens to die and leave the whole nation to a bad one, and your children's lives
are much the worse for it, don't you think?
China is a perfect example, as anyone growing up under Mao had it very rough, even if he
didn't get swept up in the 1,000 lawnmowers campaign or the Cultural Revolution. If you had
been born in 1950, say, that was tough luck for much of your life. If you were born in 1985,
though, well, as one can read in the column above, it's a different story.
Since I brought up Queen Victoria, and now have this song in my head (not a bad thing), I
will move it into Reed's Reeders' heads now. Great stuff!:
@dearieme I agree
with your sentiment, Dearieme, and I completely agree with you about George H.W. Bush* being
the last President to act like one should.. However, that shouldn't matter anyway. Our system
of government is NOT supposed to be about who is president making a big difference in how
things run. It used to work like that too, before the people betrayed the US Constitution and
let the Feral Gov't get out of hand.
The fact is, that Mitt Romney or not, per Mr. Franz above,
the country has been in the process of being given away for > 2 decades now. Yes, no
manufacturing might, no country left. That brings up what is wrong with Mr. Reed's article,
which I'll get to in a minute.
* Politically, I hate the guy, but that's not what your point is.
I am not knocking the observations of how things run economically in America vs. in China. I
think the article does a good job on that. However, the whole analysis part seems kind of
STATIC. I know Fred knows better, as he grew up in what was a different country and BY FAR
the most powerful economically, precisely because it was when the US Feral Gov't still left
private (at least small) business alone for the most part.
You do realize, Mr. Reed, that the US was NOT created to be a democracy, but a
Constitutional Republic? China WAS a totalitarian society, but things only got (WAY) better
after Chairman Deng decided that the central government would start leaving people alone to
do business. The Chinese are very good at business and are very hard workers.
Yes, the Chinese government runs much better, at this point, than the US Feral Gov't after
years and years (say 5 decades) of infiltration by the ctrl-left. All of our institutions
have been infiltrated, governments , big-business , media , universities ,
lower
education all of it. China had it's physical Long March, and 3 decades of hard-core
Communism, but they got over it. America has had it's Long March on the down low, and is
reaping the whirlwind at the present. Will we get over it? Maybe, but it'll take guns. We got
'em.
The winds of change have blown through. They can change direction again. For a place like
America, it's not going to take one powerful man (look how ineffective President Trump has
been), but the people and a movement. Just as some have been unobservant of China over the
last 2 decades, many will miss the changes here too.
Germany in 1880 was much nearer the technological frontier than China was in 1950. The Japan comparison is better, but Japan at the end of the Tokugawa era was about as
developed as Britain in 1700 (and had already for instance substantially displaced China in
the exported silk market).
The Soviet Union suffered certain events in the period from 1941-1945 you may wish to look
up.
More relevant comparisons might be South Korea and Taiwan. Or even postwar Italy, Spain,
Portugal, and Greece.
I think most informed people now are aware that Soviet-style central planning is effective
for the initial industrialization phase. What we dispute is that it is uniquely
effective, as Mazuo and Sovoks insisted. Other systems have matched its performance at lower
human and geopolitical cost.
@dearieme GHW
certainly acted Presidential, but did that help America?
He was the architect of NAFTA (even if signed by Bill Clinton) and signed the Immigration
Act of 1990, which significantly increased the yearly number of immigrant visas that could be
issued and created the disastrous Temporary Protected Status visa.
A wise dictator is great for the country, but Xi is not wise. He is a stubborn old man
stuck in the past who is clearly not listening to advisers. He has overplayed his hand,
confronted the US 10~20 years too early, damaged China's image out of some paranoid fear of
Uyghurs, and absolutely failed at making friends with our East Asian neighbors, instead
driving them further into the arms of the Americans.
Xi might have stepped up too early, but maybe this wouldn't matter. When the Americans
decide to confront China depends on the Americans. In case you believe that US presidents
drive US policy, Trump was saying things about China 25 years ago.
The Uyghur thing nobody cares about. The western media would find something else to lie
about.
I agree with the things you say afterwards. although I find it difficult to see China
becoming likable to it's neighbors. I believe the big thing will be to see what the CCP does
in the next economic crisis; will they change or will they turtle into bad policy and
stagnate. The challenge after that would be the demographics.
@dearieme Mormons
are idealists, not realists, which puts them outside the grown-up pale in my book. Mormonism
might as well be called American Suburbanism at this point. That lifestyle takes a lot of
things for granted that will not be around much longer. They top out intellectually at the
level of mid-tier management.
To be fair, this applies to most Americans, convinced that inside everybody is a
conformist, suburban American just waiting to get out.
There's a case that can be made that Mormonism is actually the official American
religion.
Chinese progress has been most impressive but the country is sitting on an enormous pile of
private and SOE debt.. There has not been a country in recorded history that has accumulated
debt at the rate China did post the 2008 crash.
It would be a shame if the good King or dictator happens to die and leave the whole
nation to a bad one, and your children's lives are much the worse for it, don't you
think?
Sure, but the bad one would run the risk of being overthrown and his bloodline
slaughtered. Everyone would know that the buck ends with him and his family.
Modern "democracies" dilute this responsibility and leave room for a set of hidden kings
and dictators to run the show from the shadows. The plebs are supposed to vent their
frustration by voting out the bad guys but that's useless (a pressure relief valve, really)
if the shadow dictators control the information and the choices.
@Thorfinnsson
"GHW certainly acted Presidential, but did that help America?:
I've no idea but it's not the point anyway. The point is that he presumably arrived at his
decisions by thinking like an adult, instead of being blown around on gusts of adolescent
emotions, like Slick Willie, W, O, and Trump.
@Anonymous He may
run that risk, but with absolute authority, who will stand up to him? You've got to know the
history of Western Civilization (Europe, I mean) is filled with years and centuries of
terrible, evil Kings and Queens in countries far and wide, right?
As far as democracies go, no, it doesn't work in the long, or even medium, run, unless you
withhold the vote for landowners and only those with responsibility. I don't thing that's
been the case here except for the first 50 years or so. You give the vote to the young, the
stupid, the irresponsible, the women, etc., and it goes downhill. In America's case, it took
a long time to go downhill because we had a lot of human and real capital built up.
Now, this is all why this country, as I wrote already above, was not set up to BE a
democracy, Mr #126. It was to be a Constitutional Republic, with powers of the Feral Gov't
limited by the document. However, once the population treats it as nothing but a piece of
paper, that's all it becomes.
Chinese progress is impressive in absolute terms, but it is much more impressive in relative
terms. While the US and all its sidekicks are ruining their countries by losing
manufacturing, running up mountains of debt, and dumbing down the populace by horrible
educational system and uncontrolled immigration of wild hordes with medieval mentality, some
countries, including China, keep moving up. But the achievements of China or Russia wouldn't
look so great without the simultaneous suicide of the West.
Let me give you the example I know best. As a scientist and an Editor of several
scientific journals I see the decline of scientific production in the US: just 20 years ago
it clearly dominated, but now it went way down. There emerged lots of papers from big China.
Quality-wise, most of them are still sub-par, but they are getting into fairly decent
journals because of the void left by the decline of science in the US.
Yes, if current tendencies continue for 20 more years, Chinese science would improve and
China would become an uncontested leader in that field. However, if the US reins in its
thieving elites and shifts to a more sensible course, it still has the potential to remain
the world leader in science. It just needs to cut military spending to 20-30% of its current
crazy unsustainable levels and invest some of the saved resources into science, industry
(real one, not banking that only produces bubbles galore), and infrastructure. Is this
realistic? Maybe not, but hope springs eternal.
@Jason Liu As a
long time China watcher myself I didn't see anything you described with regards to China's
foreign policy, including its dealing with its East Asian neighbors. From what I saw China's
statecraft with respect to its neighbors is mature, friendly, measured, restraint and long
term thinking. May be I am missing something or see something and interpret it in an opposite
way than you did. For example you said
"and absolutely failed at making friends with our East Asian neighbors, instead driving
them further into the arms of the Americans"
"Angry, condescending attitudes towards our neighbors, especially Japan, severely cripple
China's ability to be a world player. "
I didn't see any of that. Any specific example to illustrate your point?
@DB Cooper Again,
Chinese and Russian foreign policy looks best when you compare it to the US. Both countries
made their fair share of blunders, but next to the rabid dog US they look decidedly sensible
and restrained.
@Jason Liu You
may very well be accurately describing the attitudes of individual Chinamen; but I see
no evidence that the Chinese government is all that guilty of alienating other countries. On
the contrary, they seem to be doing quite well. Even the hated Japs can't seem to invest
enough money into China.
There may be something to this. If you look at centuries of Chinese painting, you will
see that each generation largely made copies of earlier masters. As nearly as I, a
nonexpert, can tell, there is more variety and imagination in the Corcoran Gallery's annual
exhibition of high-school artists than in all of Chinese paining.
There was a point in time when I would have agreed with Fred on this; but seeing what's
become of Western art over the last century, I can't anymore. A few centuries ago, Western
art was surely making progress by leaps and bounds. These days though, it's in swift decline.
All it's got left to offer is pointless pretentiousness. At least traditional Chinese
painting still requires some real craftsmanship and skill.
Chinese progress has been most impressive but the country is sitting on an enormous pile
of private and SOE debt.. There has not been a country in recorded history that has
accumulated debt at the rate China did post the 2008 crash.
This is what happens to your brain on Forbes and the Wall Street Journal .
In reality, China is the world's largest creditor. In fact, it's the US which is the largest
debtor in the world.
All that Chinese debt that the Western presstitutes go on an on about is really just an
accounting gimmick: some state-owned bank in China makes a loan to some state-owned
conglomerate there, and this gets written down as a debt. But the Chinese government (which
owns both of them) is never going to allow either of the two parties to actually go bankrupt,
so the debt isn't actually real. It's no different than ordering your right-pocket to lend
your left-pocket ten dollars: your right-pocket may now record that loan as an 'asset' on a
balance sheet somewhere, while your left-pocket will now record it as a 'liability', but
you as a person aren't any richer or poorer than you were before. You still have ten
dollars–no more, no less. And so it is with China. They merely 'owe' that money to
themselves.
@Achmed E. Newman
Dictatorships are personality dependent, as opposed to democracies that are ? dependent.
Communism came up with a catchy slogan – dictatorship of the proletariat.
Why couldn't US – which are, after all, a birthplace of propaganda – come up
with a similarly catchy slogan, such as: Democracy – dictatorship of the elitariat? Or
maybe, Democracy – dictatorship of the deep state.
I personally prefer elections where there is only one candidate and one voter – the
dictator, it kind of simplifies things. I think it takes a lot of bravery to be a dictator,
you don't delegate glory, but you don't delegate blame either, you take full responsibility
and full credit for whatever is happening in the country.
@Digital Samizdat
The sheer amount of shadow debt outstanding is huge. 250 to 300% of GDP by some estimates.
You reckon the Chinese government have this covered and can rescue failing institutions. They
probably don't even know how many bad loans need to be written off and how badly it will
cause a squeeze on normal lending.
From what I saw China's statecraft with respect to its neighbors is mature, friendly,
measured, restraint and long term thinking.
Do you think that correctly describes China's handling of claims in the South China Sea,
or its attitude toward the independent country of Taiwan, or its promotion of anti-Japanese
propaganda on Chinese television?
but I see no evidence that the Chinese government is all that guilty of alienating other
countries.
Its complete disregard of other nations' entirely legitimate claims in the South China Sea
is evidence to the contrary. It's not as if other nations must completely sever all relations
with China for any alienation to be occurring.
@Jason Liu
Excellent comment, Jason. Certainly if China wishes to again become Elder Brother to East
Asia, it needs to start relating to its neighbors as Little Brothers instead of obstacles to
be rudely shoved aside.
@gmachine1729
gmachine, Glad to hear you are in a place that you like and suits you. That is what nations
are all about. I am also in favor of native peoples contributing their effort (through
commercial, intellectual and spiritual endeavors) to the benefit of their fellow
nation-citizens, as long as those contributions are not wrung out by force of the state.
And Russia will have a lot more people by and by. They will be Chinese or Uyghar (sp?)
perhaps, but that empty space will surely be put to use by someone or someones. Whether the
Russians like that much could be another matter.
@Random
Smartaleck China's handling of the claims in South China Sea has been characterized by
restraint and a lot of patience. Basically a combination of dangling a big carrot with a
small stick. This is the reason the ASEAN has signed up to the SCS code of conduct and the
relation between the Philippines and China is at a all time high since Aquino's engineered
the PCA farce several years ago.
Taiwan considered itself the legitimate government of all of China encompassing the
mainland. It's official name is the Republic of China. Mainland China considered itself the
legitimate the government of all of China encompassing the island of Taiwan. Its official
name is the People's Republic of China. The so called 92 consensus agreed by both sides is
that each side agreed there is only one China and each side is free to interpret its own
version of China. For the mainland that means PRC (Peoples Republic of China). For Taiwan
that means ROC (Republic of China). There is no such thing as the independent country of
Taiwan.
China's tv has world war II drama doesn't constitute propaganda in as much as history
channel in the US has world war II topics all the time.
If the reporting I have read (widely sourced) about infrastructure quality, durability, and
actual utility is even 1/2 correct, quite a lot of government (especially provincial
government) directed development cannot and will not prove to be wise investment. Combined
with the opaque economic reporting, also subject to differing reporting as is infrastructure
rating, there is some good reason t believe that the nation has some huge huge challenges
diretly ahead.
The male overhang in China (and in India, others as well, but much smaller) is another
potential problem that is difficult to assess. Maybe it is a nothingburger, and 50 million
men without any chance to have a single wife will just find something else worthwhile and
rewarding to do with their time. Maybe not. Combine wasted urban investment, financial
chicanery on a gross scale, a narrow authoritarian structure and tens of millions of
unsatisfied, un-familied men, the downside looks pretty ugly.
Maybe that reporting is all bullshit. I don't think so. I think that Chinese leadership is
likely very concerned, hence so many of them securing property and anchor babies in the West.
I do hope for the sake of the Chinese people, and the rest of the globe, that whatever comes
along will not be too bad.
This is why I'm not afraid of China: Chinese are greedy soulless capitalists, or pagans as
another poster calls them. Spot on. A country of 1.3 billion pagans will always stay a low
trust society. Every Chinese dreams of getting rich, so they can get the hell out of China.
As for all the worship of education, no fear there either, the end goal of every single
one of their top students is to go an American university, then once they get here, do
everything they can to stay and never go back.
This is why I fear China: they are invading us, and bringing their dog-eat-dog, pagan ways
with them, slowly but surely turning us into another low-trust, pagan society like the one
they left behind. Also once they get here they instantly start chanting "China #1!", and look
out for interest of China rather than that of the US. If we were wise we would stop this
invasion now, but Javanka can't get enough of their EB5 dollars.
@Digital Samizdat
The problem is neither debt nor bankruptcies, although they are part of what is going on. It
is the artificially elevated level of economic activity and the expectations of the people
depending on that level continuing to sustain their lifestyles. The activity can only be
sustained by expanding credit. If you believe that credit can continue to expand infinitely,
well, we will see.
I notice that the Chinese are reducing their personal consumption in response to the
cracks appearing in the economies of the world. They are wise to do so.
We have the same problem in the US, probably worse, and it exists throughout most of the
"first" world. China has a decided advantage because of the degree of social control of its
people, but China will not be immune when the bubble breaks.
@Anon Fred
probably shouldn't say anything about art, but when has ignorance got in the way of USian
cultural putdowns? Anyway, the very idea that the Chinese merely make copies is nonsense,
pure and simple.
@Digital Samizdat
Well put. The propaganda on US websites is always about the debt as there is a need to
believe that China is going to collapse as it simply can't have achieved what it has without
freedom, democracy and the American way, or more accurately by not employing the disastrous
policy mix known as the Washington Consensus. It is the countries who followed that (likely
deliberately) flawed model of open exchange rates, low value added manufacturing (to enrich
US multinationals and consumers) with western FDI that have given the support for the
otherwise flawed Reinhardt and Roghoff study that everyone (who hasn't actually read it) uses
to justify why debt to GDP is 'a bad thing' over a certain level. As those benighted emerging
economies prospered from their trade relationship they were then offered lots of nice $ loans
for consumption, buying cars and houses and lots of western consumer goods. So current
account deficit, more $ funding, inflation, higher interest rates to control inflation
triggering a flow of hot money that drivers the exchange rate temporarily higher undermining
the export model. Then crash – exchange rate has killed export model, interest rates
cripple domestic demand, financial markets plummet, hot money rushes out, exchange rate
collapses so stagflation. Wall Street comes in and privatises the best assets and the US
taxpayer bails out the banks. Rinse and repeat.
China was supposed to 'act like a normal country' and play this game, but it didn't. It
followed the mercantilist model and built a balanced economy without importing western
consumer goods and financial services. However, unlike Germany, Japan or S.Korea, China does
not have a standing US Army on its soil to ensure that everything gets done for good old
Uncle Sam. Hence the bellicosity and the propaganda. China's debts are owned by China, as are
a lot of America's debts. Raising debt to build infrastructure and assets like toll roads,
airports, electricity grids, high speed railways means that there is an income bearing asset
to offset the liability. Raising debt to maintain hundreds of imperial bases around the world
less so.
@Mark T You are
very perceptive. The reason why China's debts are 'bad' while Uncle Scam's debts are 'good'
is because (((the usual suspects))) are profiting off the latter, but not the former. They
were betting that, if they gave the Chinese our industry, China would repay the favor by
giving them their finance sector in return. But that's not what happened! And now, (((the
usual suspects))) are waking up to the rather embarrassing realization they got played by
some slick operators from the East from wayyyy back East.
The so called 92 consensus agreed by both sides is that each side agreed there is only
one China and each side is free to interpret its own version of China. For the mainland
that means PRC (Peoples Republic of China). For Taiwan that means ROC (Republic of China).
There is no such thing as the independent country of Taiwan.
The "One China Policy" is a diplomatic sham designed to avoid bruising the fragile egos of
the two Chinas, and is insisted on by the PRC to aid in their Finlandization & eventual
absorption of Taiwan. Taiwan has been an independent country in all but diplomatic
nomenclature for 70 years. The PRC's claim that Taiwan is a "renegade province" is laughable.
The island is simply territory that the CCP never conquered. It is only the CCP's mad
insistence on the "China is the CCP, the CCP is China" formulation that convinces it
otherwise.
Likewise, Taiwan's claim of jurisdiction over the mainland -- while justifiable given
history -- is simply delusional. The ROC can do absolutely nothing to enforce this claim,
and, barring something truly extraordinary, will never be the government of the mainland
again. Regardless, this claim does not negate Taiwan's de facto independence because it has
absolutely nothing to do with placing Taiwan under others' control.
China's tv has world war II drama doesn't constitute propaganda in as much as history
channel in the US has world war II topics all the time.
You know better than that. We aren't talking about sober, fair-minded documentaries here.
The Chinese productions are lurid, over-the-top demonizations of the Japanese. These combined
with the National Humiliation curriculum and various museums show that the CCP quite likes
stoking hatred against Japan among the Chinese masses perhaps they hope to exploit it in some
near-future manufactured conflict.
@Random
Smartaleck "The "One China Policy" is a diplomatic sham designed to avoid bruising the
fragile egos of the two Chinas, and is insisted on by the PRC to aid in their Finlandization
& eventual absorption of Taiwan. "
It is insisted on by both sides. The quarrel between the ROC and the PRC is which one is
the legitimate government of China. The 92′ consensus only formalized this
understanding in a documented form.
This "One China Policy" has its root deep into the historic narrative of China when
successive dynasties replaced one after another and which dynasty should be recognized as the
legitimate successor dynasty to the former dynasty. If you read any Chinese history book at
the end of the book there is usually a cronological order of successive Chinese dynasties one
followed another in a linear fashion. But of course in reality very often it is not that
clean cut. Sometimes between transition several petty dynasties coexist each vying for the
legitimacy to get the mandate of heaven to rule the whole of China. This "One China Policy"
is just a modern manifestation of this kind of cultural understanding of the Chinese people
and has nothing to do with Communism, Nationalism or whateverism.
@Random
Smartaleck "These combined with the National Humiliation curriculum and various museums
show that the CCP quite likes stoking hatred against Japan among the Chinese masses perhaps
they hope to exploit it in some near-future manufactured conflict."
These kind of museums are fairly newly built, three decades old at most, many are even
newer and is a direct response to Japan historic revisism. If the CCP want to milk this kind
of anti-Japanese sentiment for its political purpose shouldn't they built this kind of museum
earlier? From what I understand the elaborate annual reenactment of the atomic bombing in
Nagasaki and Hiroshima begin the moment the US retreated from the administration of Japan in
1972. Now this is what I called the milking a victimhood sentiment for its political
purpose.
The largest tourist group to Japan from a foreign country is from mainland. If the CCP is
really stoking hatred to the Japanese then they really suck at it. What Japan did to China in
the last century don't need any stoking. History speaks for itself.
I would not debate Fred on any of the points he makes but I have a point of my own.After they
read Fred's article select any number of Chinese men and women at random and tell them they
are welcome to migrate to the US with no strings attached and at the same time select any
number of American men and women at random and tell them they will likewise be welcomed by
the Chinese. The proof should be in the pudding.
It followed the mercantilist model and built a balanced economy without importing
western consumer goods and financial services.
Agree somewhat. China did and does import a lot of western consumer goods. China is Germany's biggest
trading partner, and Germany has trade surplus with China. And China isn't even the world's largest trade surplus country . Germany is, followed by
Japan.
..
Germany poised to set world's largest trade surplus.
Germany is on track to record the world's largest trade surplus for a third consecutive year.
The country's $299 billion surplus is poised to attract criticism, however, both at home and
internationally. Germany is expected to set a €264 billion ($299 billion) trade surplus this year, far
more than its closest export rivals Japan and the Netherlands, according to research
published Monday by Munich-based economic research institute Ifo.
GM does well in China, selling more cars in China than it does in the US. (Personally I
think GM makes crappy cars. ) It is successful in China, because GM has been doing a
fantastic job of marketing its brand and American brands still enjoy prestige in China. And
Apple certainly wouldn't have become the first trillion dollar company without China's
market.
On a personal note, one of my relatives sells American medical devices to China and makes
decent money. It isn't easy though as competition is fierce. America is not the only country
that makes good medical devices. You have to compete with products from other countries.
With regard to the financial section, China has been extremely cautious of opening it up.
Can you blame China? Given how the Wall Street operates. China just didn't have expertise,
experience or regulations to handle a lot of these stuff. China has been preparing it,
though, and it is ready to reform the market.
Beijing pushes ahead with opening up its financial sector despite trade
tensions.
In "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" , the first sentence of the book is "
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分.
It can be roughly translated as "Under the heaven the general trend is : what is long
divided, must unite; what is long united, must divide".
I believe in my lifetime China and Taiwan will unite again, and North Korea and South
Korea will become One Korea.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a 14th-century historical novel attributed to Luo
Guanzhong. It is set in the turbulent years towards the end of the Han dynasty and the
Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history
What is wrong with less 'inventiveness'? Do we really need a software update every 1 or 2
years? Just think, for example, how annoying the 'microsoft office ribbon' is for most of its
adult and serious users who would prefer good-old drop-down menus! Or do we really need to
change our clothes and phones every year and renew our furniture every decade because the
preferred style is changing? The vast majority of the world, especially those areas where
communitarian family models were the norm at some point in time, would embrace a little
stability over coping with each unnecessary 'invention'. For the Anglo-Saxon world, marked by
the 'absolute nuclear family', on the other hand, stability and predictability is a nightmare
and an assault on their precious individuality. Hence, the tension between the US-led bloc of
English-speaking nations and China-Russia-led Eurasia is no surprise, but rather the natural
outcome of the cultural fabric of each bloc. A world succumbing to the Chinese vision would
definitely be more dull, but more stable and foreseeable as well.
This has been an excellent article along with some excellent commentary. It's difficult to
get a clear picture of what's actually happening in China and every little bit helps. Two of
my kids went to Ivy League schools and when we were doing the drive to check them all out,
they were filled with Asians. The Chinese I deal with are very materialistic and appear to
base their importance on wealth and position. One poor Chinese kid I know who works as a
mechanic tells me Chinese girls won't even date him because of his status. Of course I live
in NY where most people are materialistic so it's hard to tell if that's a Chinese trait or
not. They do appear to be a very smart, hard driven people and there's a whole lot of them,
so there's a chance we start seeing them replace our present elite in the near future.
One poor Chinese kid I know who works as a mechanic tells me Chinese girls won't even
date him because of his status.
so it's hard to tell if that's a Chinese trait or not.
Yes that is a trait, Rich, and though somewhat prevalent in America too, the Chinese seem
to have no respect for guys that work with their hands. To me, that's shameful. They respect
the rich conniving businessman over the honest laborer.
I'd like to see one of the China-#1 commenters on here, or even Fred Reed*, argue with me
on that one. The British-descended especially, but all of white American culture has a
respect for honesty. That is absolutely NOT the case with the Chinese, whether living in
China or right here. See Peak Stupidity on DIY's in China vs.
America – Here is Part 1 .
* You're not gonna gain this kind of knowledge in a couple of weeks and without hanging
with Chinese people, though.
Socially China has a great advantage over America in that, except for the Muslims of
Xinjiang, it is pretty much a Han monoculture. Lacking America's racial diversity, its
cities do not burn, no pressure exists to infantilize the schools for the benefit of
incompetent minorities, racial mobs do not loot stores, and there is very little street
crime.
America's huge urban pockets of illiteracy do not exist. There is not the virulent
political division that has gangs of uncontrolled Antifa hoodlums stalking public
officials. China takes education seriously, as America does not. Students study, behave as
maturely as their age would suggest, and do not engage in middle-school politics.
Agreed. China is not burdened by the abomination of cultural and racial strife. The United
States has lost trillions of dollars due to racial and cultural differences.
@DB Cooper I'm
not picking on, or arguing at all with, you in particular, Mr. Cooper, but let me chime in
about this whole Mainland China vs. Taiwan thing. The first thing to remember is, excepting
the original Taiwanese people who've been invaded left and right, these people are ALL
CHINESE. They will eventually get back together, as the Germans have, and (I'm in agreement
with another guy on this thread) the Koreans will.
Even the Chinese widow of Claire Chenault, the leader of the great American AVG Flying
Tigers who supported the Nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek, had worked for years enabling business
between Taiwan and the mainland. There is so much business between the 2 that any kind of war
would seriously impede, and right now, the business of China is business (where have I heard
that before?)
Another thing I can say about it is that it's sure none of America's business, at this
point. The Cold War ended almost 3 decades ago. We are beyond broke, and it does us nothing
but harm in thinking we must "defend" an island of Chinamen against a continent of Chinamen.
Let the Republic Of China and the People's Republic Of China save faces in whatever asinine
ways they see fit to. It's not a damn bit of America's business.
After they read Fred's article select any number of Chinese men and women at random and
tell them they are welcome to migrate to the US with no strings attached and at the same
time select any number of American men and women at random and tell them they will likewise
be welcomed by the Chinese. The proof should be in the pudding.
American propaganda plays a big part here. Plus more Chinese speak English than Americans
speak Mandarin.
What I mean is, you may not have looked at it in a while, but the last bunch of times I've
seen the "History Channel", it was all about one set of guys trying to sell their old crap to
another bunch of guys, and the drama that apparently goes with that the Pawn Stars .
Where history comes in, I have no earthly idea. I'd much rather be watching the Nazi Channel
over this latest iteration of that network. Better yet, though, I don't watch TV.
* I think from the Chongching vs. Chongqing thing (you were right, of course). I hope I am
remembering correctly.
@Simply Simon I
recently did a graduate degree at MIT, where there are a ton of Chinese students. They seem
to be proud of China's progress, but as far as I can tell, almost all of them want to remain
in the U.S.
@Realist
abomination of racial and cultural strife! Incredible! why is such diversity an abomination
and not an advantage?
Because America ripped off all the people who are in strife' currently..and never
addressed what such exploitation did to them socially ..making what could be an advantage a
so-called 'abomination'
if some of the trillions had been spent on the needs of the American people by building
essential physical and social infrastructure to meet popular need, then there would be no
strife, people would have opportunity and structures to do their business..there would be no
social loss and diversity would not be the problem that it is
the American system uses up people and discards them to the wayside when immediate
exploitation needs are met. but we all know this making that comment inaccurate, nonsense
really.
and again the 'strife has been going on so long that the elites should know it inside out
and be able to address it positively. that they have not means that they do not care about
the people period. they are prepared to let the strife go on and exploit that for profit and
social control too
@MIT Handle It's
the proof of the pudding. No matter how progressive China is the students value America's
freedom of speech, movement, and religious liberty to name a few of the things we cherish.
It just needs to cut military spending to 20-30% of its current crazy unsustainable
levels and invest some of the saved resources into science,
An idealist, and way off the mark. Empire's number one goal isn't a scientific one, but
rather a financial one. The entire purpose of the U.S. military is to secure, and shore up
Wall Street(White/Jewish) capitol on a global scale. Smedley Butler wrote about this very
fact in the 1930's, and it still remains just as true. The Cold War/Vietnam war wasn't fought
to battle a weak, retarded economic system such as communism, but rather to shore up
financial dominance – for the same reason the U.S. military is fixated on oil fields,
pipelines and other resources – Money!
Financial weapons(sanctions) can kill way more people than bombs, and(loan sharking-IMF World
Bank) can conquer more territory than armies(Central, South America, Africa, Greece, etc
)
And the goal is not to just remain the the financial dominant system, but more importantly,
to destroy any potential competition – this is what is putting Russia, China,
and the Eurasian economic system in Washington's cross hairs.
The U.S. military strategists have mentioned on many occasions that they are not afraid of
a larger military, but rather they are deathly afraid of a larger economy. If scientists are
needed for stated goals then so be it, but they are not the crucial factor.
@MBlanc46 Why
would China need US investment? They get massive investment from Singapore other wealthy
Asian countries.
There is massive remissions from Chinese in Canada, UK and Australia. China has the money to invest extensively in Africa. Recently the Philippines went to China for investment instead of the United States. The rest of the world has pretty much written the US as declining irrelevant former
Superpower in economic terms. It still has military power as Fred noted but you cannot take
over foreign economies with a military.
You say all that but Fuji Chinese took over the economies of Philippines (A US ally no
less), Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam (Less so because the Vietnamese hate the
Chinese).
If the Koreans or Japanese did not hate the Chinese so much, they would probably take over
their economies as well.
The real Chinese power is not IN China. It is with Fuji Chinese merchants in Southeast
Asia.
Petty greed? And this is not rampant in Israel, US, Russia, Latin America .
@Jason Liu The
most anti-China people I've ever spent time with were the incredibly successful Chinese
diaspora in SE Asia. I found their contempt shocking. Chinese people were made the butt of
their jokes even on seemingly random topics. Your post offers an explanation.
I'm much more positive about your (?) country. I really liked it. But it does give me
pause for thought whenever familiarity breeds contempt.
My own little annoyance came recently. I had reason to download WeChat. It was the easiest
way to coordinate some business. When I later tried to delete my account, I found I could
not. After searching for an answer, I read that I had to email the company and was certainly
not guaranteed a response nor any action. That put the first line of their marketing about
"300 million" users into perspective.
Another anecdotal thing I've noticed. There used to be lots of Chinese restaurants in
London and very few Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese. There are now more of all of the
latter near me, and the Chinese restaurants are generally very low quality holdouts, probably
surviving by holding long cheap leases. People really like the other cultures, especially
Korea and Japan, not so much the Chinese – a strange fact given the history of East
Asia.
More relevant comparisons might be South Korea and Taiwan
Neither comparisons are exactly relevant. These two countries are tiny compared to
China. But more importantly, America took both of them entirely under its wings, due to
specific geopolitical conditions. Without the Korean and Vietnam wars, China-US thaw might have happened earlier, who
knows. Godfree isn't wrong when he points out that China was under complete embargo. It's not
like they had much of a choice other than central planning.
@Jason Liu
Brilliant, Jason! Now, what does he have to fear from giving the Uigurs and Tibetans the
right of self-determination instead of following the Israeli model and sending swarms of Han
in?
And why the threat of war over every square inch along the Indian border, where the people
are definitely not Han?
Why this greedy insanity, when if the idiot could learn the meaning of reconciliation
China would zoom ahead at record speed! Is he a Jew in disguise?
@Tyrion 2I
worked for Chinese-Filipinos and this is really 100% true.
The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are the most heartless capitalists on earth.
China has a government that can do things: In 2008 an 8.0 quake devastated the region
near the Tibetan border, killing, according to the Chinese government, some 100,000 people.
Buildings put up long before simply collapsed
Well what the Chinese government could not do is prevent the corruption that
allowed many of these collapsed buildings to be constructed from poor materials and without
regard for earthquake-related building codes.
That an overall mediocre country like China can be held up as a paragon of efficiency and
achievement to an American audience only speaks to the desperate rot afflicting America
itself. China has not managed to produce any internationally competitive products of any
complexity such as cars or airplanes; and to the extent it is beginning to succeed, this is
due to foreign investment and theft of IP. Meanwhile, South Korea has shown the world how
it's done properly.
In terms of economic systems, the Chinese are clearly superior. China runs a large
economic surplus
Up to now on the backs of poorly paid/overworked peasants. Shot a big hole in your article
right away. Damn and I don't get paid for this?!? (Grin)
PS. Intelectual theft of mostly Western knowledge. Snap! Second hole shot.
I need to get an agent, I'm soooo good I should be in charge of Face the Nation. (Smile) But
I would keep the lovley Margaret Brennan as the host. (Grin)
1. China's one-child policy did not come about as a sort of attempt at eugenics. It came
about because the previous six-child policy ("strength through numbers") was a colossal
failure, and the resulting poverty nearly tore the communist state apart at the seems. So
often governments insist on rapidly growing the population, and then when they get their
wish, they realize that a massive number of hungry and angry people leads not to strength but
to weakness. Just look at what happened when the Syrian government tried that
2. China peaceful? Not hardly. China is peaceful now because most people are doing OK.
Back when population was pushing at the limits – during Mao's early phase, and before
– when people were chronically malnourished and living in mud – no, the Chinese
people were not peaceful.
3. Again, numbers do not always translate into strength. India looks to surpass China in
total population, and they will be lucky just to avoid collapse.
4. Another thought: China is essentially ethnically pure Han Chinese. This might make
revolts possible, as the people find it easy to band together. Not so in India, which is a
massive pastiche of 100′s of different racial and ethnic groups – which are too
busy competing with each other to band together. There is an old saying that the worst
poverty that a people will accept before revolting, is exactly what they will end up with.
Could part of China's strength be the fear of the elites that, if the people are crushed too
much, that things could fall apart?
Regarding economic and scientific advancements with which no one at the time could
effectively compete, China sounds a bit like Germany prior to England, Russia and the United
States combining economic and military resources to destroy it.
@Realist That
isn't true. There are thousands of us now in Asia.
White males are everywhere in Asia doing every kind of business. I've been here for years.
Can some ethnic Han Chinese in the know give us the scoop on this:
Are Han Chinese merchants, bankers getting back on top in places like Vietnam,
Indonesia? There were huge anti Chinese riots in Indonesia in the 1960s and Han Chinese Merchants
were singled out for ethnic cleansing by victorious Vietnamese Communists in ~ 1975 –
the first Vietnamese boat people were Han Chinese merchants.
My take is that the Han Chinese in China and elsewhere in Asia are a lot like Japanese
nationalist in the 1930s and Jewish merchants/bankers forever.
In all of this Chinese sphere of influence ares of Asia I think 2018 USA has pretty much
nothing to offer except maybe playing balance of power to contain China and yes, have
military alliances with all the countries in Asia that are not mainland China – I'm
sure the Vietnamese want us back to militarize the Vietnam/China border – and we're
good at that sort of thing, but we absolutely can not and will not control, protect our own
Southern border.
Nov 28, 2018 Belt & Road Billionaire in Massive Bribery Scandal
The bribery trial of Dr. Patrick Ho, a pitchman for a Chinese energy company, lifts the
lid on how the Chinese regime relies on graft to cut Belt and Road deals in its global push
for economic and geopolitical dominance.
@nickels When was
the last time Western Christianity demonstrated any moral conduct toward other nations? Was
it England and the US fire-bombing German cities filled with civilians, followed by dropping
two nuclear bombs on a defeated nation?
as the US tries to garrison the world. Always favoring coercion, Washington now tries to
batter the planet into submission via tarifffs, sanctions, embargos, and so on.
"and so on" ? Why not just be honest Fredo? Without tariffs, the lot of the American working class would eventually fall to the level
of the rest of the Third World's teeming billions of near-starving wretches. As the one
percent continued to move all its manufacturing to the slave labor wage rates of China and
Mexico, et al.
By imposing tariffs on the products that the internationalist scumfucks build in China and
elsewhere, it tends to encourage the production of these things domestically, thereby
protecting the ever falling wages of the reviled American working class. Also China engages
in policies that are specifically intended to bolster China, like protectionist economics.
Whereas the ZUS does the opposite, its elite favoring policies that specifically fuck over
the despised American citizen in favor of anyone else.
So Trump's tariffs are one of the few things he's actually doing right. At least if you're
not one of those internationalist scumfucks who despise all things working class
American.
As for
"US tries to garrison the world. Always favoring coercion, Washington now tries to batter
the planet into submission sanctions, embargos,"
That is all being done on behalf of the Zionist fiend who owns our central bank. Duh.
What would be good, is for the ZUS to tell the Zionists to fuck off –
- returned to being the USA (by ending the Fed), and imposed massive tariffs on any
industry that off-shored its manufacturing. Hell, any industry that threatens the well-being
of our domestic industries. That pay domestic taxes and employ Americans.
This is the kind of thing China does, and if though some miracle our treasonous government
scoundrels were all to get hanged by lampposts on the glorious Day of the Rope, perhaps then
we'd do the same.
A wise dictator is great for the country, but Xi is not wise. He is a stubborn old man
stuck in the past who is clearly not listening to advisers. He has overplayed his hand,
confronted the US 10~20 years too early, *
When was the last time China sent gunboats or spy planes to murikka's doorstep ?
[hint] fukus have been doing that since the day of Opium war.]
Who started the trade war anyway ?
*damaged China's image out of some paranoid fear of Uyghurs,*
Tell that to the victims of CIA sponsored Uighurs head choppers
[1]
*and absolutely failed at making friends with our East Asian neighbors, instead driving
them further into the arms of the Americans.*
[sic]
I've posted many times here and MOA, a tally of all panda huggers PM/prez in EA,
SA, SEA .,who were ousted/liquidated by fukus shenanigans. [2]
True to form, fukus turned around to accuse China .of ' driving all its friends into
the arm of the murikkans'
fukus have many sins.
but their vilest depravity must surely be . Robbery crying out robbery.
There's this sanctimonious journo from BBC , who 'boldly' confront a Chinese diplomat,
' Do you realise your assertive/aggressive policies are driving all your friends away/
/ .'
what a prick !
[1]
Ron frowns on image posting,
but very often a picture is worth a thousand words.!
P.S.
YOUR critique might be very PC and earns you hundreds of up votes, but its all a load of
bull.
Trouble is, the mushroom club members have been kept in the dark and fed bullshit so long,
bull is exactly what they enjoy most. hehehheh
@Achmed E. Newman
So Mao's Cultural Revolution to elevate the status of workers and peasants didn't have any
lasting effect?
I seem to remember from Historian David Hackett Fisher how in the British American
colonies craftsmen who work with their hands such as tinsmith/silversmith Paul Revere were
highly regarded and enjoyed status due to recognition of the value of their work to society,
with honest skilled workers enjoying status as a calling equal to religious and government
leaders.
I also remember from somewhere the idea that countries with thriving middle classes were
countries that acknowledged and valued the work of blue collar and even unskilled labor,
while those that don't value the work of the "lower classes" are the ones stuck with a rich
elite, and poverty for the masses.
@Durruti Nah,
humor doesn't come across too well, or you missed my "dictator" signature – your
language, if you will recall. That's where the "or else" came from. You do need to calm down,
as we are pretty much on the same side here.
Don't mind the Commies on here – it was much worse under the previous 2 Fred Reed
posts on China.
OK, pre-emptive apologies here for any more wrong interpretations
Great comments. I can only add (1) Here in Calif the Chinese-Americans I know all seem to
love vegetables, and are lean. I wish I could be more like that. New Year's Resolution. (2)
Harvard downgrades Asian-American applicants because of the "personality" factor of being
decent. I think our culture is in trouble if we are penalizing students for being polite,
genial, decent.
Answer: To replace WW 2, which was the best thing that ever happened to the US economy,
allowing it to recover from an economic depression that would have otherwise been permanent.
The US started the Cold War like they started all other wars in which they've been engaged,
including the current war on terror.
@Random
Smartaleck As I understand it the ROC and the PRC share the view that the South China Sea
islands are Chinese even though they don't entirely agree how to define China.
So Mao's Cultural Revolution to elevate the status of workers and peasants didn't
have any lasting effect?
Noooooo it didn't. [/George Castanza mode]
Actually, wait, it didn't have ANY effect to elevate ANYONE, besides those elevated onto
the stage to get pig blood poured on them sort of a poor man's Carrie scene.
Anyway, Mark, whatever you remember from your David Hackett Fischer (sorry that I'm not
familiar) along with your last paragraph sound like pretty good explanations. Though China
has a pretty large middle class now, it's NOT your father's middle class. I don't know if it
could ever be a very trusting society, no matter how much money the median Chinafamily
has.
If you read Mein Kampf, you'll find that Adolph Hitler held similar views regarding German
citizenship, with the first requirement being that you must be of German blood, followed by
meeting various physical, civic and educational requirements prior to anyone becoming a
citizen of Germany, including those born in Germany. The idea that there could be any such
thing as a Black German struck him as preposterous.
(2) Harvard downgrades Asian-American applicants because of the "personality" factor
of being decent. I think our culture is in trouble if we are penalizing students for being
polite, genial, decent.
If you don't already, SafeNow, you should read the archives (or current writings) of Mr.
Steve Sailer, right here on this very site. He has been all over this stuff for years –
I think that the college admissions/high-school quality/graduation rates/etc by race, IQ etc.
is close to an obsession for him, but the posts are usually pretty interesting.
As to this specific point of yours, my answer is that this is the way Harvard keeps the
black/hispanic/other special people's numbers up where they want them along with Oriental
numbers down where they want them. That personality thing is just a way of putting "vibrant"
young people ahead. I don't like vibrancy a whole lot myself, unless there are kegs of beer
involved and only on the weekends. That is a problem for some of the Oriental young people,
as they can't drink as much as they would like – I'm not sure if it's allergies or
not.
BTW, I'd be remiss in not letting you know that the blog owner himself, Mr. Unz, is
involved in a lawsuit about Harvard admissions and has also written a whole lot about
this.
Oh, on your (1), agreed about the tons of vegetables, but they do not consider anything
without rice a meal. Rice can be OK, but when you eat lots of the white rice, with its very
high Glycemic Loading, you can balloon up fast. Not as many of the Oriental girls I see in
America and China are as slim as the way it used to be.
The sheer amount of shadow debt outstanding is huge. 250 to 300% of GDP by some
estimates.
The amount of shadow debt is probably exaggerated: all that extra cash would either
increase China's inflation rate or else greatly boost the import of goods. The Chinese
inflation rate is reasonable, as is the quantity of imports (nowhere near GDP).
As Digital Samizdat said, China's debt is mostly internal; the country's development was
largely due to her own efforts.
@Godfree Roberts
You continue to use bad statistics. World Bank specialists know more than you do. Ordinary
Chinese know that their living standards lagged terribly under Chairman Mao. The most
important changes came after he died.
Deng Xiaoping traveled to Southeast Asia in November 1978. Rather than telling the
Southeast Asians about China's "incredible advances," he sought to learn from Singapore's
progress and listened intently to Lee Kuan Yew, who told Deng that China must re-open
international trade, move toward privatization, and respect market forces. Farmers were given
greater choice in planting crops and, after meeting production quotas, were allowed to sell
surplus produce on the free market. Starvation deaths declined. Widespread privatization
began in the 1990s. China eventually acceded to the World Trade Organization. Economic growth
took off as economic freedom increased from less than 4 to more than 6 on a 10-point scale.
(Hong Kong and Singapore are close to 9 on this scale, and the US is about 8.) Human capital,
which China has in abundance (more so than the US) is more than important than economic
freedom, once a minimum of economic freedom (at least 6 on a 10-point scale) is attained, but
economic freedom below 4 (as in pre-1979 China or today's Venezuela or North Korea) does not
lead to much improvement in living standards.
@Simply Simon
China is still a developing country: the average per capita income is lower than Mexico's
level. (China is growing faster than Mexico, of course.) However, because China has so many people, the country as a whole can do great things.
tar all whiteys as white trash supremacists, even tho there's an army out there.
what is that? another gratuitous smear? Here's a clue: Not wanting to see your nation- whether it be Chinese or Palestinian or
German – flooded and overcome by foreigners- does not make you a Chinese or Palestinian
or German "supremacist". K? It simply means that you are sane and of sound mind and
psychological health. Only the insane would agitate to fund an army of foreign invaders to
overcome your nation and people. That, or having an ((elite)) that resents, envies and
despises your people, and desires to see them replaced and bred out and overcome.
Being an American, we're acutely aware of the loss suffered by the Amerindian tribes when
whitey overcame them.
But somehow I can't imagine anyone telling an Apache that his desire to preserve the lands
they had conquered – as distinctly Apache lands, suggested that he was a vile and
reprobate "Apache supremacist". I can only imagine the look on Geronimo's face if some SJW
type of the day, were to scold him as an 'Apache supremacist!' for not laying down and
accepting his tribe's marginalization and replacement.
But in the insane world we live in, Germans and N. Americans and others, are all expected
to want to be overcome, or it can only mean that they must be terrible "white trash
supremacists".
It's so laughably deranged that it's literally, clinically insane, but you still hear such
raving nevertheless.
@neutral It's all
relative. Our freedom of speech , movement and religious liberty has been degraded but
obviously not to the degree the MIT students would prefer to return to China.
So you have a better plan than President Xi ? That's pretty fucking funny especially as your plan sounds like the talking points coming
out of some neocon stinktank
The world is moving on your dinosaur thinking where the irrelevant west is still the
reference point doesn't exist anymore except in the fervid imaginations of American
exceptionalists
Basically everything you said is bullshit China's diplomacy is light years ahead of the
west the country is in fact presenting all kinds of benevolence to neighbors, with mutually
beneficial development pulled along by the Chinese locomotive
Even Japan, a country in denial about its massive crimes of the past, is coming around to
the inevitable conclusion that it must live in CHINA'S neighborhood India joined the SCO last
year look up the SCO btw and think about which will be more relevant 10 or 20 years from now
this org or dying bullshit like Nato and the G7
As for supposedly 'challenging' the US that's pretty funny what's to challenge US doesn't
have a pot to piss in
US doesn't even have an industrial base anymore with which to produce weapons in case of a
real war with an actual enemy that doesn't wear sandals look up the Pentagon's 'Annual
Industrial Capabilities' report even the MIC's stuff comes from China, somewhere down the
supply chain that's fucking hilarious
US is is well on its way to finding out the hard way a financialized Ponzi economy that
has figured out how to de-industrialize a previously industrial country for untold riches for
a handful of parasites and actually being a strong and healthy country with actual
capabilities to PRODUCE REAL STUFF are two mutually exclusive goals
Look at the so-called 'trade war' most Americans don't even realize that tariffs on
Chinese goods only means that they will be paying an extra tax Chinese are laughing at this
'trade war' what happens to Walmart and Amazon if China just stops exporting stuff to the US
they can do that you know it will hit some Chinese billionaires but so what 70 percent of the
economy is in government hands and there is enough of a consumer base in China that even
eliminating all US exports is not going to do much damage
In the meantime GM is shutting down factories and cutting 15,000 high paying jobs but
setting up shop in China along with Harley and others LOL
You're obviously some brainwashed Chang Kai-shek acolyte keep on living in your make
believe disneyworld while a socialist and dynamic China grows tall all around you LOL
No amount of tariff will force China to go along with Trump's "fair trade" plan until Trump
does what his brilliant senior advisor Stephen Miller wants him to do -- stop issuing student
visas, plus EB5, H1b, OPT and green cards to Chinese nationals, step up raids of Chinese
birth hotels in CA, NY, WA, and rescind all passports issued to Chinese birth tourist babies.
That will send tens of thousands of Chinese citizens out on the streets protesting as they
are all eager to get the hell out with their ill gotten gains while they still can, and Xi
will bend over backwards in no time.
@FB I think your
diatribe just proved Jason Liu's point about mainland Chinese being thin skin, arrogant and,
I will also add, extremely dishonest and ill-mannered. It's why most people in Southeast Asia, Oz and NZ, including the Chinese diaspora, despise
the mainland Chinese.
@Anon Machine
tools make up a fair percentage of what China imports from Germany. Tools to make tools and
patterns for manufacturing should be considered an investment.
@FB FB gets it.
All the bluster of the disingenuous American billionaire sellouts and their xenophobic,
gullible domestic fanbase will amount to nothing.
Apart from nuking China or bribing their leaders (a la Yeltsin) to follow the Washington
Consensus, China will continue its economic development. And unlike dissolution era Soviet
Union, China isn't broken and desperate to seek the "knowledge" of neoclassical economists.
Unlike Plaza Accord Tokyo, China isn't under American occupation, and unlike Pinochet era
Chile and countless other minnows, the US establishment cannot hope to overthrow the Chinese
government.
Then we get the Anon dude who replied to FB. Way to ignore history and empirical evidence
and bolster yet another dimbulb argument with racism.
Jason Liu is a retard. You resorting to typical racism is acceptable to a number of this
site's resident know-nothings, but resorting to racism to bolster your non-argument is pretty
much the definition of stupidity.
Democracy fails simply because it is basically mob rule, and 51% of the mob isn't anymore
intelligent than the minor 49%. When the Supreme Court passed Citizens United (a misnomer)
which misinterpreted money as speech, the coup, that began with the assassination of JFK, was
complete. The effect has been devastating for the average Joe; completing the transfer of
power from the people to the corporations and the billionaire class, i.e. the bGanksters.
There's much to be said of a dictatorship, but where do we fit in with the selection, and
would the elite ever allow a new JFK? No, they wouldn't even tolerate a new Muammar Gaddafi.
So were stuck with the revolving door wannabes.
No western country allowed itself to be destroyed by its leadership as China did. This
includes Nazi Germany (and I do not consider USSR a western country).
Watch this video and reflect on the fatal flaw in Chinese culture and character.
@anonymous The
ethnic Chinese of Southeast Asia who control the economies of those places are Fuji Chinese,
not Han.
Fuji Chinese actually immigrated to Philippines and Malaysia and Indonesia to escape Han
persecution and the Han themselves were escaping the Manchu Chinese by migrating South into
the Fuji Province.
Virtually all the ethnic Chinese of Southeast Asia are from the Fujian Province. This is especially true of the Philippines. Virtually all Chinese-Filipinos are from Amoy
very near to Taiwan on the coast of the Fujian Province.
@someone But he
didn't resort to racism. And if anyone deserves the insulting "retard" it is you and FB for
not seeming to see the lack of relevance to what he said in your purported responses to Jason
Liu.
@Carroll Price
Hitler wrote that in jail before he was taking orders from psychics and astrologers. The
syphilis had not really set in yet at that point.
Black US GI's wreaked a fair amount of havoc in Germany on and off the bases. There were
always rapes, stolen cars, assaults around US army bases.
Of course so did some white American GI's. Dahmer is suspected-though he did not admit
it-of having killed people around the base where he was stationed. Ironically the country most adhering to this policy these days is Israel.
What is it with people whose grasp of Chinese history is limited to the Cultural Revolution?
Why do they comment here, and why are they somehow ignorant of the previous.. say 130 years
of Chinese history? Maybe, just maybe, Chinese society would not have collapsed if it weren't
for Opium traders destroying both China and India under the guise of free trade, de facto
colonization, then outright genocidal invasion and occupation from the Japanese military
regime?
And way to bag on any sort of collective action against the ossified rentier class. Cause
Marx/Engels/Lenin/Mao is a scourge of present-day societies for some reason?
The Cultural Revolution sure has an analogue in the US and its vassal states. The whole
neoliberal/militarist Reagan revolution and similar class war developments have wracked the
US and its minion states for FORTY YEARS. Yet few people seem to be aware of it. And others
correctly note the decline in living standards, then proceed to ignore the oligarchy
beneficiaries of neoliberalism/militarism, and instead are led to demagogues to blame
irrelevant scapegoats.
@FB If you
believe this arrogant rant counts as a responsive reply to Jason Liu then, assuredly you are
the candidate retard. And that is true notwithstanding the presence of intemperately stated
truths in your rant.
@denk And you are
a typical non-American who is obsessed with a country you have never been to because you have
been watching US films your entire life and your perception of reality is formed by
screenwriters in Los Angeles.
You secretly would like to go to the United States but have a distorted perception based
upon second-rate Hollywood films.
Typical of the Chinese Singaporean you are not Chinese and possibly have never been to
China. Your family has been in Singapore for three or four generations.
As a result you see white Americans and are secretly enthralled by them. Their towering
height and self-confidence and loud voices in Orchard Road STARBUCKS.
@Jeff Stryker
Jeff, your history sucks, your political economy sucks.
Filipino Chinese are Fujian, not Fuji–Not written nor pronounced like the Japanese
mountain or film.
Fujianese are Han. Their dialect is distinct, but they are as Han as the other southern
subgroups like the Hakka (who also compose a part of Sino-Filipinos) and Cantonese. Places
like Thailand and Malaysia have large numbers of Teochow and Cantonese, not Fujis or Fujians
or any other of your malapropisms.
What is it with your dipsh!t obsession with (incorrect) demographics and your piss poor
knowledge of EVERYTHING ELSE?
@Carroll Price
Yes, the comparison of late 19th century Germany and China today has been made quite often
with at least some plausibility for non specialist readers. Happily Miranda Carter's
marvellous New Yorker article doesn't seem to have relevance to China's leadership today. See
"What happens when a bad tempered distractible doofus runs an empire".
@Realist I've
already said that no person not born in China can be a citizen.
The only Caucasians who are Chinese citizens are the descendants of Portuguese settlers in
Macau of which there is still a small community.
Philippines in particular would take a huge economic hit if every Western man living there
left. Other Asian countries would feel a similar affect to their economies.
Locals PREFER to work for Western men rather than the Chinese ethnics because Chinese
ethnics treat Malay employees like farm animals and pay a pittance.
I did not mention Thailand because the Chinese-Thai (I'm married to one and we have two
children) are no longer a distinct group and don't have the economy in a stranglehold like
they do in Philippines or Malaysia.
Cantonese have never been the businessmen that Fujian Chinese are in Southeast Asia and
live in piss-poor Chinatowns in Manila or Jakarta.
When we talk about ethnic Chinese economic dominance in Southeast Asia we are talking
about Fujian Chinese shopkeepers.
[You have been repeatedly warned that you leave far too many rambling, vacuous comments,
especially since so many of them demonstrate your total ignorance. Fewer and fewer of your
comments will be published until you improve your commenting-behavior or better yet
permanently depart for another website]
ATTENTION ALL CHINESE POSTERS (OR ETHNIC CHINESE WHO FANCY THEMSELVES AS SUCH)
You may be offended by my views but I have earned them. I've worked with ethnic Chinese in
Asia a long time.
I'm married to one. I have two children with one. They go to Chinese schools.
So I have a right to my cynical opinions.
Most of you see a bunch of loud American tourists in some local Starbucks and you think
you know everything about the West.
You know very little.
I at least have lived in squalor with ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia in the trenches
doing business with them.
Well what the Chinese government could not do is prevent the corruption that allowed
many of these collapsed buildings to be constructed from poor materials and without regard
for earthquake-related building codes.
That an overall mediocre country like China can be held up as a paragon of efficiency
and achievement to an American audience only speaks to the desperate rot afflicting America
itself. China has not managed to produce any internationally competitive products of any
complexity such as cars or airplanes; and to the extent it is beginning to succeed, this is
due to foreign investment and theft of IP. Meanwhile, South Korea has shown the world how
it's done properly.
Those buildings were built in a different era, when China was much poorer. When China gets
richer, the regulations will be strengthened and more effectively enforced. It's the same for
every country.
East Asian countries develop in stages. Today's China is like South Korea 20 years ago. 20
years ago, South Korea was like Japan 40 years ago. The difference is that while Japan and
South Korea can obtain Western technologies without problem, China has been under Western
military embargo since 1989.
You probably did not realize it, but China has burst onto the scene of some cutting edge
technologies such as super computer, the application of quantum physics, and space
technologies including China's own GPS system; not to mention dominating in ship-building,
the manufacturing of solar panel, LCD panel and LED light, cell phone including 5G
technology, electric vehicles and highspeed rail etc etc.
@someone Dude
you're never going to convince the koolaid gulping Unz whackadoodles with actual historical
knowledge and facts
They're Pavlovian reactions is to defend the rentier class that is driving them into the
ground talk about irrational and self-destructive they must love and worship the 0.01 percent
since they are voting for their good which in fact entails the death of the middle class and
ordinary folks by definition
What clowns they only spout what they have been spoonfed to spout marching blindly like
the proverbial lemmings off the cliff believe me, better men have tried to talk sense into
these morons, without effect see PCR
PS notice the flurry of anon retards here and they actually think I'm Chinese LOL
@Simply Simon
Most MIT graduates want to stay in the U.S. because it's a much richer country than China and
much easier to get ahead materialistically. After working 10-15 years in the U.S., you can
easily get a 4-bed room house with 2 nice cars in its garages in a decent neighborhood. What
can you get in China? You probably can only afford an apartment with a semi-decent car with
nowhere to park. It has little to do with free speech or politics.
@Anon You worship
at the altar of that incompetent demagogue Steven Miller. Not only are you a dimbulb racist,
you can't see through the thinnest veneer of an oligarch who harnesses the latent xenophobia
of the masses to ram through yet more regressive policies. His dipsh!t eugenicist immigration
policies are just a reflection of the same color/ethnicity bar which led to the deaths of his
relatives several generations ago.
You think banning individuals of a certain ethnicity are enough to make America Great
Again? That's gullible, even for this site.
Should have followed eugenics and banned your idiot fetus from ever hatching.
@someone Actually
I have to wonder if even the standard narrative about the 'terrible' cultural revolution has
anything to do with reality
I would love to see a Godfree Roberts essay on this subject, since I am far from anything
approaching a China scholar his essays on Mao were absolutely tremendous there can be no
doubt that there could have been no modern Chinese economic miracle had it not been for Mao's
Great Leap Forward
I did not mention Thailand because the Chinese-Thai are no longer a distinct group and
don't have the economy in a stranglehold like they do in Philippines or Malaysia.
According to Amy Chua in her book World on Fire , the Chinese make up 12% of
Thailand's population and they do still by and large control Thailand's economy, it's just
that it's very hard to tell them apart from native Thais because they've changed their names
to local Thai names, but those in the know can still tell because Chinese Thai last names
tend to be very long.
@FB I like
Godfree. He is a contrarian and certainly not afraid of voicing his opinions. He offers some
unique perspective on looking at China and this is very refreshing because I can say most of
the things the MSM on China is just nonsense and Godfree got some but not all of them right,
in my opinion.
As to Mao's Great Leap Forward, or Cultural Revolution for that matter, let's look at it
this way. If you pay attention to China's pundits talking about China in Chinese TV today you
get the impression that the Chinese government is very proud of what it has accomplished in
the last forty years. And it should be. Lifting hundreds of millions of people out of abject
poverty and transforming China to today's situation like what Fred described in such a short
span is no easy feat. These Chinese pundits always talk about 'Reform and Opening Up' all the
time. This is the phrase they used most often. But 'Reform and Opening Up' refers to the
policy Deng implemented when he took over. I have yet to see anybody praising the Great Leap
Forward and Cultural Revolution in Chinese TV. To the extent that it was brought up on very
rare occasion, it was brought up in passing but never elaborated. It is as if the history of
Communist China started in 1979 instead of 1949. May be it has some dirty laundry it doesn't
want to air? The CCP has officially declared Mao's legacy as 70% good and 30% bad. What's
that 30% bad about?
I am convinced that the standard narrative about the 'terrible' cultural revolution is
close to reality. utu posted a video on China's Great Leap Forward on this thread. Do you
think the video is CGI graphics?
@Anonymous Amy
Chau got a good many things about her own Chinese-Filipino people wrong, I place little stock
in what she says about Thailand. Or even about the Philippines.
She is only relevant for touting herself as Chinese when her family has been in the
Philippines for generations-that reflects how at odds Chinese-Filipinos are with the
predominant population and also why the Indonesians and Malaysians have carried out savage
pogroms from time to time.
Worse in the Philippines is Chinese-Filipino involvement in meth. They make it and
distribute it and import it from China. The drug war in Philippines is entirely the result of
Chinese. And Tiger Mom is unlikely to bring that up in her wildly self-congratulatory books
which also focus on German Jews because she is married to one.
Chinese do not control the Thai economy to anywhere near the extent that they control the
economy of the Philippines or other countries. Thailand has actively forced the Chinese to
assimilate to a degree and at any rate they are probably the most clever of the Southeast
Asians.
Chinese immigrants also fair best in countries broken up by colonialism like Philippines
by Spain or Malaysia by Brits where they can slide in during post-colonial confusion.
*And why the threat of war over every square inch along the Indian border, where the
people are definitely not Han?*
Pleeeeze,
Show me ONE instance of China threatening war on India.
*In the NEFA, China seemed tacitly to have accepted the Indian claim and the fact of
indian occupation, even though this meant the loss of a very large and valuable territory
populated by Mongoloid people and which in the past had clearly belonged to Tibet. It had
come into Indian hands only as a result of British expansionism during China's period of
historical weakness, a fact firmly suggested by the very name of the frontier Beijing had
tacitly accepted as the line of control -- the McMahon Line. *
"... The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big State. ..."
"... Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralized and faceless, to be efficient and responsive ..."
"... The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about ..."
"... Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments. ..."
"... The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised. ..."
The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth
is created and distributed around the globe
he IMF's limited admission of guilt over the Greek bailout is a start, but they still can't see the global financial system's
fundamental flaws, writes Deborah Orr.
The International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis
were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have
been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived happily ever after.
Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in
"the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF,
put the interests of the Eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with
horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.
The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes
no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity",
have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be
coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge
is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more
quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have
been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment",
as the philosopher
John Gray has said all along.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of
course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye
to the Big State.
Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralized and faceless,
to be efficient and responsive. I agree.
The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – and anyone else who will listen
– that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial and productive. Instead, it places
the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's
what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their
activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task, supposedly, is to get the free
market up and running again.
But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated
the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured,
law-abiding and financially secure people – people who expect to be well paid themselves, having been brought up believing in material
aspiration, as consumers need to be.
So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"? The neoliberal
idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda.
But how can the privatization of societal welfare possibly happen when unemployment is already high, working people are turning to
food banks to survive and the debt industry, far from being sorry that it brought the global economy to its knees, is snapping up
bargains in the form of busted high-street businesses to establish shops with nothing to sell but high-interest debt? Why, you have
to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer un-sustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon
and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they
avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments.
And further, those who invest in these companies, and insist that taxes should be low to encourage private profit and shareholder
value, then lend governments the money they need to create these populations of sophisticated producers and consumers, berating them
for their profligacy as they do so. It's all utterly, completely, crazy.
The other day a health minister,
Anna Soubry
, suggested that female GPs who worked part-time so that they could bring up families were putting the NHS under strain. The
compartmentalised thinking is quite breathtaking. What on earth does she imagine? That it would be better for the economy if they
all left school at 16? On the contrary, the more people who are earning good money while working part-time – thus having the leisure
to consume – the better. No doubt these female GPs are sustaining both the pharmaceutical industry and the arts and media, both sectors
that Britain does well in.
As for their prioritising of family life over career – that's just another of the myriad ways in which Conservative neoliberalism
is entirely without logic. Its prophets and its disciples will happily – ecstatically – tell you that there's nothing more important
than family, unless you're a family doctor spending some of your time caring for your own. You couldn't make these characters up.
It is certainly true that women with children find it more easy to find part-time employment in the public sector. But that's a prima
facie example of how unresponsive the private sector is to human and societal need, not – as it is so often presented – evidence
that the public sector is congenitally disabled.
Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services – that Britain
enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce. Soubry and her ilk, above all
else, forget that people have multiple roles, as consumers, as producers, as citizens and as family members. All of those things
have to be nurtured and invested in to make a market.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone
is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who
came up with that theory , did not agree
that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised.
Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal
allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. And even as the results of their
folly become ever more plain to see, they are grudging in their admittance of the slightest blame, bickering with their allies instead
of waking up, smelling the coffee and realising that far too much of it is sold through Starbucks.
"... power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives – supporting what we might loosely term our current "neoliberal order" – rather than in individuals. Significantly, our political and media classes, who are of course deeply embedded in this neoliberal structure, are key promoters of the very opposite idea: that individuals or like-minded groups of people hold power; that they should, at least in theory, be held accountable for the use and misuse of that power; and that meaningful change involves replacing these individuals rather than fundamentally altering the power-structure they operate within. ..."
"... The [neoliberal] focus on individuals happens for a reason. It is designed to ensure that the structure and ideological foundations of our societies remain invisible to us, the public. The neoliberal order goes unquestioned – presumed, against the evidence of history, to be permanent, fixed, unchallengeable. ..."
"... These minor narratives conceal the fact that such individuals are groomed before they ever gain access to power. Business leaders, senior politicians and agenda-setting journalists reach their positions after proving themselves over and over again – not consciously but through their unthinking compliance to the power-structure of our societies. ..."
"... They rise to the top because they are the most talented examples of those who are blind or submissive to power, those who can think most cleverly without thinking critically. Those who reliably deploy their skills where they are directed to do so. ..."
"... Were the neoliberal order laid bare – were the emperor to allow himself to be stripped of his clothes – no one apart from a small psychopathic elite would vote for neoliberalism's maintenance. ..."
"... elections become an illusory contest between more transparent and more opaque iterations of neoliberal power ..."
"... Despite its best efforts, neoliberalism is increasingly discredited in the eyes of large sections of the electorate in the US and UK. Its attempts at concealment have grown jaded, its strategy exhausted. It has reached the end-game, and that is why politics now looks so unstable. "Insurgency" candidates in different guises are prospering. ..."
"... Neoliberal power is distinctive because it seeks absolute power, and can achieve that end only through global domination. Globalisation, the world as a plaything for a tiny elite to asset-strip, is both its means and its end. Insurgents are therefore those who seek to reverse the trend towards globalisation – or at least claim to. There are insurgents on both the left and right. ..."
"... A Trump figure can usefully serve power too, because he dons the clothes of an insurgent while doing little to actually change the structure. ..."
"... Nonetheless, Trump is a potential problem for the neoliberal order for two reasons. First, unlike an Obama or a Clinton, he too clearly illuminates what is really at stake for power – wealth maximisation at any cost – and thereby risks unmasking the deception. And second, he is a retrograde step for the globalising power-structure. ..."
"... The neoliberal order prefers a Trump to a Bernie Sanders because the nativist insurgents are so much easier to tame. A Trump can be allowed to strut on his Twitter stage while the global power-structure constrains and undermines any promised moves that might threaten it. 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. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is now so entrenched, so rapacious that even a moderate socialist like Corbyn is seen as a major threat. And unlike a Blair, Obama or Trump, Corbyn is much harder to tame because he has a grassroots movement behind him and to which he is ultimately accountable ..."
"... In the US, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party prevented the left-insurgent candidate, Bernie Sanders, from contesting the presidency by rigging the system to keep him off the ballot paper ..."
"... How anti-semitism is being weaponised, not to protect Jews but to protect the neoliberal order, was made starkly clear this week when Corbyn criticised the financial elite that brought the west to the brink of economic ruin a decade ago, and will soon do so again unless stringent new regulations are introduced. Useful idiots like Stephen Pollard, editor of the rightwing Jewish Chronicle, saw a chance to revive the anti-semitism canard once again, accusing Corbyn of secretly meaning "Jews" when he actually spoke of bankers. It is a logic intended to make the neoliberal elite untouchable, cloaking them in a security blanket relying on the anti-semitism taboo. ..."
"... The weaponising of anti-semitism by the neoliberal order to protect its power risks turning Jews into collateral damage. It makes them another small or bigger drama in the increasingly desperate attempt to create a narrative that deflects attention from the real power-structure. ..."
"... And second, the effort to stitch together a narrative of Corbyn's anti-semitism out of non-existent cloth is likely to encourage more and more people to take a step back from the screen so that those unintelligible pixels can more easily be discerned as a smoking gun. The very preposterousness of the allegations, and the fact that they are taken so seriously by a political and media class selected for their submissiveness to the neoliberal order, accelerates the process by which these opinion-formers discredit themselves. Their authority wanes by the day, and as a result their usefulness to the power-structure rapidly diminishes. ..."
"... No one pays me to write these blog posts. If you appreciated it, or any of the others, please consider hitting the donate button in the right-hand margin (computer) or below (phone). ..."
In
my last
blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and
narratives – supporting what we might loosely term our current "neoliberal order" –
rather than in individuals. Significantly, our political and media classes, who are of course
deeply embedded in this neoliberal structure, are key promoters of the very opposite idea: that
individuals or like-minded groups of people hold power; that they should, at least in theory,
be held accountable for the use and misuse of that power; and that meaningful change involves
replacing these individuals rather than fundamentally altering the power-structure they operate
within.
In other words, our political and media debates reduce to who should be held to
account for problems in the economy, the health and education systems, or the conduct of a war.
What is never discussed is whether flawed policies are really the fleeting responsibility of
individuals and political parties or symptoms of the current neoliberal malaise –
manifestations of an ideology that necessarily has goals, such as the pursuit of maximised
profit and endless economic growth, that are indifferent to other considerations, such as the
damage being done to life on our planet.
The [neoliberal] focus on individuals happens for a reason. It is designed to ensure
that the structure and ideological foundations of our societies remain invisible to us, the
public. The neoliberal order goes unquestioned – presumed, against the evidence of
history, to be permanent, fixed, unchallengeable.
So deep is this misdirection that even efforts to talk about real power become treacherous.
My words above might suggest that power is rather like a person, that it has intention and
will, that maybe it likes to deceive or play tricks. But none of that is true either.
Big
and little power
My difficulty conveying precisely what I mean, my need to resort to metaphor, reveals the
limitations of language and the necessarily narrow ideological horizons it imposes on anyone
who uses it. Intelligible language is not designed adequately to describe structure or power.
It prefers to particularise, to humanise, to specify, to individualise in ways that make
thinking in bigger, more critical ways near-impossible.
Language is on the side of those, like politicians and corporate journalists, who conceal
structure, who deal in narratives of the small-power of individuals rather than of the
big-power of structure and ideology. In what passes for news, the media offer a large stage for
powerful individuals to fight elections, pass legislation, take over businesses, start wars,
and a small stage for these same individuals to get their come-uppance, caught committing
crimes, lying, having affairs, getting drunk, and more generally embarrassing themselves.
These minor narratives conceal the fact that such individuals are groomed before they
ever gain access to power. Business leaders, senior politicians and agenda-setting journalists
reach their positions after proving themselves over and over again – not consciously but
through their unthinking compliance to the power-structure of our societies. They are
selected through their performances in exams at school and university, through training
programmes and indentures. They rise to the top because they are the most talented examples
of those who are blind or submissive to power, those who can think most cleverly without
thinking critically. Those who reliably deploy their skills where they are directed to do
so.
Their large and small dramas constitute what we call public life, whether politics, world
affairs or entertainment. To suggest that there are deeper processes at work, that the largest
of these dramas is not really large enough for us to gain insight into how power operates, is
to instantly be dismissed as paranoid, a fantasist, and – most damningly of all – a
conspiracy theorist.
These terms also serve the deception. They are intended to stop all thought about real
power. They are scare words used to prevent us, in a metaphor used in my previous post, from
stepping back from the screen. They are there to force us to stand so close we see only the
pixels, not the bigger picture.
Media makeover
The story of Britain's Labour party is a case in point, and was illustrated even before
Jeremy Corbyn became leader. Back in the 1990s Tony Blair reinvented the party as New Labour,
jettisoning ideas of socialism and class war, and inventing instead a "Third Way".
The idea that gained him access to power – personified in the media narrative of the
time as his meeting
with Rupert Murdoch on the mogul's Hayman Island – was that New Labour would
triangulate, find a middle way between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. The fact that the
meeting took place with Murdoch rather than anyone else signaled something significant: that
the power-structure needed a media makeover. It needed to be dressed in new garb.
In reality, Blair made Labour useful to power by re-styling the turbo-charged neoliberalism
Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party of the rich had unleashed. He made it look compatible
with social democracy. Blair put a gentler, kinder mask on neoliberalism's aggressive pursuit
of planet-destroying power – much as Barack Obama would do in the United States a decade
later, after the horrors of the Iraq invasion. Neither Blair nor Obama changed the substance of
our economic and political systems, but they did make them look deceptively attractive by
tinkering with social policy.
Were the neoliberal order laid bare – were the emperor to allow himself to be
stripped of his clothes – no one apart from a small psychopathic elite would vote for
neoliberalism's maintenance. So power is forced to repeatedly reinvent itself. It is like
the shape-shifting Mystique of the X-Men films, constantly altering its appearance to lull us
into a false sense of security. Power's goal is to keep looking like it has become something
new, something innovative. Because the power-structure does not want change, it has to find
front-men and women who can personify a transformation that is, in truth, entirely hollow.
Power can perform this stunt, as Blair did, by repackaging the same product –
neoliberalism – in prettier ideological wrapping. Or it can, as has happened in the US of
late, try a baser approach by adding a dash of identity politics. A black presidential
candidate (Obama) can offer hope, and a woman candidate (Hillary Clinton) can cast herself as
mother-saviour.
With this model in place, elections become an illusory contest between more transparent
and more opaque iterations of neoliberal power . In failing the 99 per cent, Obama so
woefully voided this strategy that large sections of voters turned their back on his intended
successor, the new makeover candidate Hillary Clinton. They saw through the role-playing. They
preferred, even if only reluctantly, the honest vulgarity of naked power represented by Trump
over the pretensions of Clinton's fakely compassionate politics.
Unstable politics
Despite its best efforts, neoliberalism is increasingly discredited in the eyes of large
sections of the electorate in the US and UK. Its attempts at concealment have grown jaded, its
strategy exhausted. It has reached the end-game, and that is why politics now looks so
unstable. "Insurgency" candidates in different guises are prospering.
Neoliberal power is distinctive because it seeks absolute power, and can achieve that
end only through global domination. Globalisation, the world as a plaything for a tiny elite to
asset-strip, is both its means and its end. Insurgents are therefore those who seek to reverse
the trend towards globalisation – or at least claim to. There are insurgents on both the
left and right.
If neoliberalism has to choose, it typically prefers an insurgent on the right to the left.
A Trump figure can usefully serve power too, because he dons the clothes of an insurgent
while doing little to actually change the structure.
Nonetheless, Trump is a potential problem for the neoliberal order for two reasons.
First, unlike an Obama or a Clinton, he too clearly illuminates what is really at stake for
power – wealth maximisation at any cost – and thereby risks unmasking the
deception. And second, he is a retrograde step for the globalising power-structure.
Neoliberalism has dragged capitalism out its nineteenth-century dependency on nation-states
into a twenty-first ideology that demands a global reach. Trump and other nativist leaders seek
a return to a supposed golden era of state-based capitalism, one that prefers to send our
children up chimneys if it prevents children from far-off lands arriving on our shores to do
the same.
The neoliberal order prefers a Trump to a Bernie Sanders because the nativist insurgents
are so much easier to tame. A Trump can be allowed to strut on his Twitter stage while the
global power-structure constrains and undermines any promised moves that might threaten it.
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.
Faustian pacts
The current power-structure is much more frightened of a left insurgency of the kind
represented by Corbyn in the UK. He and his supporters are trying to reverse the accommodations
with power made by Blair. And that is why he finds himself relentlessly assaulted from every
direction – from his political opponents; from his supposed political allies, including
most of his own parliamentary party; and most especially from the state-corporate media,
including its bogus left-liberal elements like the Guardian and the BBC.
The past three years of attacks on Corbyn are how power manifests itself, shows its hand,
when it is losing. It is a strategy of last resort. A Blair or an Obama arrive in power having
already made so many compromises behind the scenes that their original policies are largely
toothless. They have made Faustian pacts as a condition for being granted access to power. This
is variously described as pragmatism, moderation, realism. More accurately, it should be
characterised as betrayal.
It does not stop when they reach high office. Obama made a series of early errors, thinking
he would have room to maneuver in the Middle East. He made a speech in Cairo about a "New
Beginning" for the region. A short time later he would help to snuff out the Egyptian Arab
Spring that erupted close by, in Tahrir Square. Egypt's military, long subsidized by
Washington, were allowed to take back power.
Obama won the 2009 Nobel peace prize, before he had time to do anything, for his
international diplomacy. And yet he stepped up the war on terror, oversaw the rapid expansion
of a policy of extrajudicial assassinations by drone, and presided over the extension of the
Iraq regime-change operation to Libya and Syria.
And he threatened penalties for Israel over its illegal settlements policy – a
five-decade war crime that has gone completely unpunished by the international community. But
in practice his inaction allowed Israel to entrench its settlements to the point where
annexation of parts of the West Bank is now imminent.
Tame or destroy
Neoliberalism is now so entrenched, so rapacious that even a moderate socialist like
Corbyn is seen as a major threat. And unlike a Blair, Obama or Trump, Corbyn is much harder to
tame because he has a grassroots movement behind him and to which he is ultimately
accountable .
In the US, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party prevented the left-insurgent
candidate, Bernie Sanders, from contesting the presidency by rigging the system to keep him off
the ballot paper . In the UK, Corbyn got past those structural defences by accident. He
scraped into the leadership race as the token "loony-left" candidate, indulged by the Labour
party bureaucracy as a way to demonstrate that the election was inclusive and fair. He was
never expected to win.
Once he was installed as leader, the power-structure had two choices: to tame him like
Blair, or destroy him before he stood a chance of reaching high office. For those with short
memories, it is worth recalling how those alternatives were weighed in Corbyn's first
months.
On the one hand, he was derided across the media for being shabbily dressed, for being
unpatriotic, for threatening national security, for being sexist. This was the campaign to tame
him. On the other, the Murdoch-owned Times newspaper, the house journal of the neoliberal
elite, gave a platform to an anonymous army general to warn that the British military would
never allow Corbyn to reach office. There would be an army-led
coup before he ever got near 10 Downing Street.
In a sign of how ineffectual these power-structures now are, none of this made much
difference to Corbyn's fortunes with the public. A truly insurgent candidate cannot be damaged
by attacks from the power-elite. That's why he is where he is, after all.
So those wedded to the power-structure among his own MPs tried to wage a second leadership
contest to unseat him. As a wave of new members signed up to bolster his ranks of supporters,
and thereby turned the party into the largest in Europe, Labour party bureaucrats stripped as
many as possible of their right to vote in the hope Corbyn could be made to lose. They failed
again. He won with an even bigger majority.
Redefining words
It was in this context that the neoliberal order has had to play its most high-stakes card
of all. It has accused Corbyn, a lifelong anti-racism activist, of being an anti-semite for
supporting the Palestinian cause, for preferring Palestinian rights over brutal Israeli
occupation. To make this charge plausible, words have had to be redefined: "anti-semitism" no
longer means simply a hatred of Jews, but includes criticism of Israel; "Zionist" no longer
refers to a political movement that prioritises the rights of Jews over the native Palestinian
population, but supposedly stands as sinister code for all Jews. Corbyn's own party has been
forced under relentless pressure to adopt these malicious reformulations of meaning.
How anti-semitism is being weaponised, not to protect Jews but to protect the neoliberal
order, was made starkly clear this week when Corbyn criticised the financial elite that brought
the west to the brink of economic ruin a decade ago, and will soon do so again unless stringent
new regulations are introduced. Useful idiots like Stephen Pollard, editor of the rightwing
Jewish Chronicle, saw a chance to revive the anti-semitism canard once again, accusing Corbyn of
secretly meaning "Jews" when he actually spoke of bankers. It is a logic intended to make the
neoliberal elite untouchable, cloaking them in a security blanket relying on the anti-semitism
taboo.
Almost the entire Westminister political class and the entire corporate media class,
including the most prominent journalists in the left-liberal media, have reached the same
preposterous conclusion about Corbyn. Whatever the evidence in front of their and our eyes, he
is now roundly declared an
anti-semite . Up is now down, and day is night.
High-stakes strategy
This strategy is high stakes and dangerous for two reasons.
First, it risks creating the very problem it claims to be defending against. By crying wolf
continuously about Corbyn's supposed anti-semitism without any tangible evidence for it, and by
making an unfounded charge of anti-semitism the yardstick for judging Corbyn's competence for
office rather than any of his stated policies, the real anti-semite's argument begins to sound
more plausible.
In what could become self-fulfilling prophecy, the anti-semitic right's long-standing ideas
about Jewish cabals controlling the media and pulling levers behind the scenes could start to
resonate with an increasingly disillusioned and frustrated public. The weaponising of
anti-semitism by the neoliberal order to protect its power risks turning Jews into collateral
damage. It makes them another small or bigger drama in the increasingly desperate attempt to
create a narrative that deflects attention from the real power-structure.
And second, the effort to stitch together a narrative of Corbyn's anti-semitism out of
non-existent cloth is likely to encourage more and more people to take a step back from the
screen so that those unintelligible pixels can more easily be discerned as a smoking gun. The
very preposterousness of the allegations, and the fact that they are taken so seriously by a
political and media class selected for their submissiveness to the neoliberal order,
accelerates the process by which these opinion-formers discredit themselves. Their authority
wanes by the day, and as a result their usefulness to the power-structure rapidly
diminishes.
This is where we are now: in the final stages of a busted system that is clinging on to
credibility by its fingernails. Sooner or later, its grip will be lost and it will plunge into
the abyss. We will wonder how we ever fell for any of its deceptions.
In the meantime, we must get on with the urgent task of liberating our minds, of undoing the
toxic mental and emotional training we were subjected to, of critiquing and deriding those
whose job is to enforce the corrupt orthodoxy, and of replotting a course towards a future that
saves the human species from impending extinction.
No one pays me to write these blog posts. If you appreciated it, or any of the others,
please consider hitting the donate button in the right-hand margin (computer) or below
(phone).capitalism , corporations , Jeremy Corbyn
Professor Carroll Quigley - Last Lectures, The Western
Tradition, Fall of the American Republic
These quotations excerpted below are all taken from
Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition
by Carroll Quigley.
It was the three part Oscar Iden Lecture at Georgetown University in 1978, a few months
before he died.
Quigley is perhaps most well known for being the author of
Tragedy and Hope
.
Later this week I intend to publish a very nice essay and summary of these thoughts in
this last lecture by Christopher Quigley.
Needless to say I do not necessarily agree with everything that Professor Quigley states
in his writings. But I do find them extraordinarily well informed and interesting. Given
that they were written in the 1970s his forecasting, although not perfect, was quite
prescient.
He does state that after Nixon it is unlikely that another President will be impeached,
because of the manner in which the impeachment process has become 'lawyerized.' How ironic
then that we have seen the impeachment of William J. Clinton, who himself was a student of
Quigley and who publicly thanked and acknowledged him as a mentor.
"And since what we get in history is never what any one individual or group is
struggling for, but is the resultant of diverse groups struggling, the area of
political action will be increasingly reduced to an arena where the individual,
detached from any sustaining community, is faced by gigantic and irresponsible
corporations."
Prof Carroll Quigley,
Part 1 The State of Communities
, Georgetown University
1978
"The reality of the last two hundred years of the history of the history of Western
Civilization, including the history of our own country, is not reflected in the general
brainwashing you have received, in the political mythology you have been hearing, or in
the historiography of the period as it exists today.
Persons, personalities if you wish, can be made only in communities. A community is
made up of intimate relationships among diverse types of individuals--a kinship group,
a local group, a neighbourhood, a village, a large family. Without communities, no
infant will be sufficiently socialized. He may grow up to be forty years old, he may
have made an extremely good living, he may have engendered half a dozen children, but
he is still an infant unless he has been properly socialized and that occurs in the
first four or five years of life. In our society today, we have attempted to throw the
whole burden of socializing out population upon the school system, to which the
individual arrives only at the age of four or five.
Human needs are the basis of power. The state, as I said, is a power structure on a
territorial basis, and the state will survive only if it has sufficient ability to
satisfy enough of these needs. It is not enough for it to have organized force, and
when a politician says, "Elect me President and I will establish law and order," he
means organized force or power of other kinds. I won't analyze this level; it's too
complex and we don't have time. I will simply say that the object of the political
level is to legitimise power: that is, to get people, in their minds, to recognize and
accept the actual power relationship in their society.
We no longer have intellectually satisfying arrangements in our educational system, in
our arts, humanities or anything else; instead we have slogans and ideologies. An
ideology is a religious or emotional expression; it is not an intellectual expression.
So when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries you have what I
call misplacement of satisfactions. You find your emotional satisfaction in making a
lot of money, or in being elected to the White House in 1972, or in proving to the
poor, half-naked people of Southeast Asia that you can kill them in large numbers.
And then, as the society continues and does not reform, you get increased
militarisation. You can certainly see that process in Western Civilization and in the
history of the United States. In the last forty years our society has been drastically
militarized. It isn't yet as militarized as other societies and other periods have
been; we still have a long way to go in this direction. Our civilization has a couple
of centuries to go, I would guess. Things are moving faster than they did in any
civilization I ever knew before this one, but we probably will have another century or
two.
As this process goes on, you get certain other things. I've hinted at a number of them.
One is misplacement of satisfactions. You find your satisfactions--your emotional
satisfaction, your social satisfaction-- not in moment to moment relationships with
nature or other people, but with power, or with wealth, or even with organized
force--sadism, in some cases: Go out and murder a lot of people in a war, a just war,
naturally.
The second thing that occurs as this goes on is increasing remoteness of desires from
needs. I've mentioned this. The next thing is an increasing confusion between means and
ends. The ends are the human needs, but if I asked people what these needs are, they
can hardly tell me. Instead they want the means they have been brainwashed to accept,
that they think will satisfy their needs. But it's perfectly obvious that the methods
that we have been using are not working. Never was any society
in human history as rich and as powerful as Western Civilization and the United States,
and it is not a happy society.
In its final stages, the civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial
power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals.
Freedom is freedom from restraints. We're always under restraints. The difference
between a stable society and an unstable one is that the restraints in an unstable one
are external. In a stable society, government ultimately becomes unnecessary ; the
restraints on people's actions are internal, there're self disciplined, they are the
restraints you have accepted because they make it possible for you to satisfy all your
needs to the degree that is good for you.
Communities and societies must rest upon cooperation and not on competition. Anyone who
says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximise his own
greed is talking total nonsense. All the history of human society shows that it's
nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the
American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the
basis of any society or any community.
The fundamental, all pervasive cause of world instability today is the destruction of
communities by the commercialisation of all human relationships and the resulting
neuroses and psychoses. The technological acceleration of transportation, communication
and weapons systems is now creating power areas wider than existing political
structures. We still have at least half a dozen political structures in Europe, but our
technology and the power system of Western Civilization today are such that most of
Europe should be a single power system. This creates instability.
Another cause of today's instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe
and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty
that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking and the
corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility, and they
have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society.
They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour, entrepreneurial-managerial
skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of
production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can
control:
capital.
So now everything is capital intensive, including medicine, and it hasn't worked. ['financialised'
is a more current term - J.]
Secrecy in government exists for only one reason: to prevent the American people from
knowing what's going on. It is nonsense to believe that anything our government does is
not known to the Russians at about the moment it happens.
To me, the most ominous flaw in our constitutional set-up is the fact that the federal
government does not have control over of money and credit and does not have control of
corporations. It is therefore not really sovereign. And it is not really responsible,
because it is now controlled by these two groups, corporations, and those who control
the flows of money.
The administrative system and elections are dominated today by the private power of
money flows and corporation activities.
Certain thin regulations were established in the United States regarding corporations:
restricted purpose and activities especially by banks and insurance companies;
prohibition on one corporation's holding the stock of another without specific
statutory grant; limits on the span of the life of the corporation, requiring recurrent
legislative scrutiny; limits on total assets; limits on new issues of capital, so that
the proportion of control of existing stockholders could be maintained; limits on the
votes allowed to any stockholder, regardless of the size of his holding; and so forth.
By 1890 all of these had been destroyed by judicial interpretation which extended to
corporations -- fictitious persons -- those constitutional rights guaranteed, especially by
the Fifteenth Amendment, to living persons.
Now I want to say good night. Do not be pessimistic. Life goes on; life is fun. And if
a civilization crashes, it deserves to. When Rome fell, the Christian answer was,
'Create our own communities.'"
Prof Carroll Quigley,
The State of Individuals
, Georgetown University 1978
Famous song of Vladimir Vysotsky about Soviet system. Sound now as if it was written about the current crisis of neoliberalism
I found several translation of it at Vysotsky Translations Of
course, original is better, but it is assessable only for Russian-speaking readers
Notable quotes:
"... Yes, something wrong along the road But at the end nightmare Neither church nor even pub Non of them is right way Nor my friends, oh nor my friends All are wrong, friends, I can say ..."
"... At the end of that long road Nothing but the gallows. ..."
"... Nothing's holy anymore, Neither drink nor prayer. ..."
Dreaming I see yellow lights
Hoarsely scream while dreaming
Give me time, oh give me time
Morning will be easy
But the morning was also hard
My party have been over
So I am smoking on empty gut
Or drinking in hangover
I saw the pub-a lot of fun
And many sexy women
This place is heaven for drunkard
But for me it's prison
In holy church was dusk and stunk
Priest burned incensed honey
No, even church was wrong, I think
Nothing there was holy
I saw wild field along the stream
That God forgot forever
Blue bells were only in clear field
And road that led somewhere
Dark ancient forest by this road
With evil witches orgies
And at the end of that scary road
Were guillotine and axes
So loosing breath I climbed on hill
To save myself from horror
I saw red alder on the top of hill
But at the foot-black cherry
If even ivy twined hills slope
I might be happy see it
Or, if there was only something else
But nothing pleased my spirit
So, I am dreaming on empty gut
Or drinking in hangover
Yes, something wrong along the road
But at the end nightmare
Neither church nor even pub
Non of them is right way
Nor my friends, oh nor my friends
All are wrong, friends, I can say
Hey one, another one,
And many, many, many, many ones
Another one and other ones
All are wrong, I can say.
In my dream burn yellow lights,
And I spill my sorrow:
"Do not go - please, stay the night!
Wait! Fresh for the morrow!"
But the morning seems all wrong,
No joy - more's the pity -
Ugh - the hair of the dog,
Of the dog that bit you!
In the bars, red, bloodshot eyes,
All that sparkling poison -
Clowns' and beggars' paradise
And my gilded prison.
In the church, stench, Evensong,
Even gold looks shabby...
No, the church, it feels all wrong,
Not the way it should be!
In a hurry, I climb up,
Why? I do not know.
There's an alder-tree on top,
A cherry-tree below.
Wish there was plush on the slope -
It would look less scrubby.
There is not a bloody hope,
Nothing's as it should be.
I keep searching high and low:
Oh my God, where are you?
By the roadside, bluebells grow,
And the road climbs higher.
All along the road, a wood
Full of witches, fellows.
At the end of that long road
Nothing but the gallows.
Horses dancing all along,
Smoothly dance the horses.
On the road it seems all wrong,
At the end, much worser.
Nothing's holy anymore,
Neither drink nor prayer.
It's all wrong, boys, by the Lord,
No, boys, it's not fair...
Into my dream creep yellow lights,
And I shout myself hoarse in my sleep:
"Wait a bit, wait a bit -
It'll get better in the morning."
But in the morning nothing is right,
It's no fun anymore:
You either smoke on empty stomach,
Or drink from a hangover.
In the drinking-house there is a familiar sight
Of a green shot, white napkins, -
It's a heaven for beggars and buffoons,
I feel like a caged bird in it.
The church dissolves in stench and darkness ,
The deacons are smoking the incense...
No, nothing is right in here, either,
Nothing is the way it's supposed to be!
I hurry off onto the hill,
So nothing would come before me, -
There grows an alder on the hill
And under the hill - a cherry tree.
If only the ivy twined the slope, -
It would bring me a slight consolation,
If there only was something else...
But no, nothing is the way it should be!
I go off onto the field, along the river.
Tons of light, no God.
Corn-flowers in the clear field
And a road leading far away.
Along the road - a deep forest
With evil witches.
And at the end of that road -
A guillotine and axes.
Somewhere horses are dancing to the beat,
Half-heartedly and smoothly..
Nothing is right along the road,
And it's no better at the end of it.
And not the church or the drinking-house -
Nothing is holy!
No, folks, nothing is right!
Nothing is right, folks...
"... 'Neoliberalism' is just a sanitised-sounding expression, to cover-up the fact that what we are really seeing here is re-branded, far-right, corporatist ideology. ..."
"... There is a major dividing line. There are those who recognise the abuses of the system and lobby for changes and there are those who lobby for further exploitation. ..."
"... The West became over-indebted when it embraced globalisation which necessarily impoverishes the Middle and Working Classes of the developed nations. A chap called Jimmy Goldsmith warned of this and was widely condemned for it. There is another issue Guardianistas would rather not confront : you can a welfare state or you can have open borders. But you can't have both. ..."
"... Private enterprise is inefficient because at it's heart it rules out cooperation. Being happiest if it's a monopoly, there's nothing a business would like better than wipe out all competition. ..."
"... Right now, the neoliberals think that those in the Far East are the workers and those in the West are the consumers, until the Far East becomes the market and wages so low in the West that they become the workers, unless of course some kind souls decide to invest money in Education, Health and infrastructure in Africa on a huge scale, so we then have Africa as the workers and the far East as the market, and the West, apart from those who own large numbers of shares or business outright, presumably either starve to death or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and start all over again, inventing and setting up completely new industries, providing the newly universally educated and healthy Chinese and Africans and South Americans haven't done it first. ..."
"... The economic model we have is bankrupt and in its death throes ..."
"... Except it's not. It is still very much alive and growing. ..."
"... deregulated capitalism has failed. That is the product of the last 20 years. The pure market is a fantasy just as communism is or any other ideology. In a pure capitalist economy all the banks of the western world would have bust and indeed the false value "earned" in the preceding 20 years would have been destroyed. ..."
"... "Multinationals need to recognise that paying tax is an investment. Without that tax, their markets will slowly evaporate." However, the gains for the transnational rich are immediate and enormous, while the failure of their markets is slow and, so far, almost entirely painless. ..."
"... Accountants now hold the whip hand in government and business. They know the price of everything but the value of nothing. They advocate selling off industries, outsourcing to low wage economies, zero hours contracts and deregulation (under the bogus campaign line of cutting red tape). ..."
"... Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can , because they are more powerful than governments. ..."
"... If you invent a set of rules that says a country that deficit spends above an arbitrary percentage of its GDP is horribly inefficient and far too high then it should not be a surprise that when that happens, it is described as such. ..."
"... But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured, law-abiding and financially secure people ..."
"... The economic model we have is bankrupt and in its death throes is gobbling up the last scintilla of surplus that can be extracted from the poor ( anyone not independently wealthy). ..."
'Neoliberalism' is just a sanitised-sounding expression, to cover-up the fact that what we are really seeing here is re-branded,
far-right, corporatist ideology.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini
There is a major dividing line. There are those who recognise the abuses of the system and lobby for changes and there
are those who lobby for further exploitation.
So on the one hand there are relatively rich philanthropists who are quietly supporting campaigns to redistribute wealth and
our abstaining, and on the other you have people arguing for repealing employment legislation.Worst of the lot are people who
pretend to care about the poor but then proceed to fill their own boots.
As consequence people like Warren Buffet should perhaps be among the good guys, whilst people like Tony Blair are the worst
of lot.
All very true. The failures of markets are well documented in economics: the tendency towards monopoly, the failure to value social
goods etc.
In addition, it is ironic that the arch advocates of the 'free market' came begging ( read lobbying) to their governments insisting
upon public financial bailouts for themselves or their counter parties. It was the 'free markets' failure to correctly price 'risk'
that was the route of the economic collapse.
As regards access to 'free markets' it seems patently obvious that if you extract the most money from that market (Amazon et
al), you should contribute a fair share towards the infrastructure of that market: roads, educations, health care etc.
@EllisWyatt - ... we have a real problem with corporations that have a default setting of minimize taxes through ever more
complex structures. It can't be beyond the wit of HMRC to reduce the complexity of the tax legislation and make it harder to
avoid? The prize is continued access to the UK market
We also have the problem that for half the households in the land the level of welfare and benfits rather than wages is the
major determinant of their disposable income and general prosperity.
The welfare code is now comparable in size to the tax code. The tax-benefit affairs of the working poor in the UK are now becoming
as complex as those of the companies that employ them.
The welfare rights industry, which is essentially tax-benefit-lawyering for claimants, is now as large and complex as the tax-lawyering
industry for companies.
It really is insane that we set the minimum wage so low that it attracts income tax, and then attempt to collect tax from the
employing company to fund a tax credit to top up the same low wages that the same company is paying.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is
enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market
Does it? where does it say that? An article which as usual blanket condemns "financial institutions" but actually means banks.
The West became over-indebted when it embraced globalisation which necessarily impoverishes the Middle and Working Classes of
the developed nations. A chap called Jimmy Goldsmith warned of this and was widely condemned for it. There is another issue Guardianistas
would rather not confront : you can a welfare state or you can have open borders. But you can't have both.
Though I'd say private enterprise is capable of building markets - but not of sustaining them. Take books: If few people
know how to read, someone will start a fee paying school to teach those who can pay for it. Then books will take off. And that
will generate money for some, who'll send their kids to school.
However it will always, inevitably, crash at some point: Business can build up, but will always do it in destructuve cycles
- exactly like the brush fires that destroy and regenerate the savannas. As somebright spark once said: Capitalism contains the
seeds of it's own destruction, or something along those lines.
And we don't want to live like that - so we have regulation, and the state.And the state fertilises, and safeguards, by cutting
the grass, making mulch, and spreading the rich gooey muck all over the nice, green, verdant, state controlled pampa.
The cowboys, now, they prefer no cutting of grass, and letting their cattle chomp away undistrurbed. And now my analogy is
starting to wear thin.
The bottom line: Private enterprise is inefficient because at it's heart it rules out cooperation. Being happiest if it's
a monopoly, there's nothing a business would like better than wipe out all competition.
Hence, the necessity for state spending, and state regulation, which the private sector is blind to, because it can't look
ahead.
People are members of families, and are employers and workers, who are customers or clients, and part of
their local communities and professions and trades and hobbyists/clubs who are large scale wholesale consumers who create the
markets that provides employment and income to individuals who are workers. And, and, one big circle.
Right now, the neoliberals think that those in the Far East are the workers and those in the West are the consumers, until
the Far East becomes the market and wages so low in the West that they become the workers, unless of course some kind souls decide
to invest money in Education, Health and infrastructure in Africa on a huge scale, so we then have Africa as the workers and the
far East as the market, and the West, apart from those who own large numbers of shares or business outright, presumably either
starve to death or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and start all over again, inventing and setting up completely new industries,
providing the newly universally educated and healthy Chinese and Africans and South Americans haven't done it first.
OK. I was against it for a long time, but go ahead. There's no way of avoiding it. Eat the Rich. Apart from the fact that ultra
thin is fashionable, and with all that dieting and exercising, they are the only people who actually get the time for lots of
exercise these days, and they'll taste incredibly tough and stringy.
@CaptainGrey - Ssshhh not on CiF, we all know that capitalism has failed its just that we can't point to a successful alternative
model because such a thing has never existed, its just that this time its different and the model I advocate will lead us all
to the sunny uplands of utopia.
Obviously there will be a little bit of coercion and oppression to get us to those sunny uplands, but you can't make an omlette
etc. plus don't worry that stuff will only happen to "bad people"
The economic model we have is bankrupt and in its death throes
Except it's not. It is still very much alive and growing. The "alternatives" have crashed and burned save Cuba and North
Korea. Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won and countless people have gained
as a result.
@CaptainGrey - deregulated capitalism has failed. That is the product of the last 20 years. The pure market is a fantasy just
as communism is or any other ideology. In a pure capitalist economy all the banks of the western world would have bust and indeed
the false value "earned" in the preceding 20 years would have been destroyed.
In the 19th century based on experience the public services became part of the public sector to avoid corruption and corporate
blackmail. The neoclassical revolution of the late 20th century has pushed us back to days when elites regarded the state as their
property. Democracy was a threat which won out either through the British model or violent revolution. A small elite cannot endure
if the majority feel exploited.
The Bilderberg Conference should look to the past and learn from the mistakes committed. Neoclassicism will eventually impoverish
them
@UnevenSurface - Multinationals need to recognise that paying tax is an investment. Without that tax, their markets will
slowly evaporate.
"Multinationals need to recognise that paying tax is an investment. Without that tax, their markets will slowly evaporate."
However, the gains for the transnational rich are immediate and enormous, while the failure of their markets is slow and, so far,
almost entirely painless.
@UnevenSurface - I think corporation tax is becoming obsolete given globalization and the increasing dominance of online / global
distribution.
Amazon, Starbucks (and to a lesser extent Google) need to have people on the ground in their market, for customer service,
distribution, warehouse staff, baristas etc. So they'll pay employer taxes etc.
The question is is that enough? I think we are missing a trick with the UK market due to outdated tax legislation that hasn't
really changed in 30 years.
After the US the UK is arguably the most attractive market in the world. Large, homogenous, wealthy with a low propensity to
save and a rapid rate of adoption of new technology / products. We need to think about how we can exploit this in relation to
corporate taxes because even though I am far from left wing, we have a real problem with corporations that have a default setting
of minimise taxes through ever more complex structures.
It can't be beyond the wit of HMRC to reduce the complexity of the tax legislation and make it harder to avoid? The prize is
continued access to the UK market
Accountants now hold the whip hand in government and business. They know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
They advocate selling off industries, outsourcing to low wage economies, zero hours contracts and deregulation (under the bogus
campaign line of cutting red tape).
All of these policies will ultimately end up with capitalism destroying itself. Low wage stagnation will result in penniless
consumers which results in no growth which results in cuttin wages to maintain shareholder returns which results in penniless
consumers etc etc etc. All our institutions are gradually eroded and life for the average citizen will become more and more unpleasant.
Profit share may be a way forward, it's not perfect, companies can effectively use it to freeze wages and benefit from unpaid
overtime, that creates unemployment as four people working a couple of hours extra ever day are denying someone else a job, but
used in the right way it could ensure people get a share in the wealth they help create.
At the sharp end it's tough, at the
company I worked at, all the managers were summoned to a meeting in September and told they had until Christmas to increase turnover
and profits, or they would be out of a job.
At the same company, one of my managers complained that a successful manager at another branch was a crook. The CEO replied
'Yes, but he's a crook that makes a million pounds in profit every year'. I wonder how Deborah's article would have gone down
with him?
Everything was easier when the U S and Europe ran the world's economies with Bank regulations, currency controls and only the
establishment could avoid income, capital gains and IHT taxes and grow wealthy generation after generation. Today there are simply
too many players in the global arena and the rules have been torn up. We are in a jungle where greed is rife and only the powerful
and corrupt survive, shipping and burying their loot in offshore havens.
We need a new global order with a change of mentality
and more morality among the world's politicians, banking and corporate leaders. Unless we end corruption and exploitation of natural
resources in the poor nations and a fairer distribution of the economic wealth the world faces economic and social collapse
Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't
be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can , because they are more powerful than governments.
Is it beyond the wit of government to close these (perfectly legal) loopholes? Otherwise, what you are asking for is for these
companies to make charitible donations to government - nothing wrong with that per se, but let's not hide behind the misleading
term 'tax avoidance' - companies are obliged to minimise taxes within the law, face it.
It is perfectly clear that in much of the EU public expenditure has been horribly inefficient and far too high
If you invent a set of rules that says a country that deficit spends above an arbitrary percentage of its GDP is horribly
inefficient and far too high then it should not be a surprise that when that happens, it is described as such.
Whether that has any basis in reality or, as I suspect, is only relevant within its own ridiculous framework, is surely the
question.
Deborah Orr is established writer for the Guardian and Married to a Will Self whose is almost certainly a millionaire. She
is one of the rich. The idea that envy is driving her politics is just utterly absurd, and suggests a total lack of reflection.
But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated
the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy,
cultured, law-abiding and financially secure people
Not really; Amazon is just as happy to sell us trashy films, multipacks of chocolate, obesity drugs and baseball bats to stove
our neighbour's head in. There's certainly an argument to be made that companies should have a duty to invest in the infrastructure
that enables their product to be transported, stored etc...but they shouldn't be expected to give a toss if their customers are
unhealthy ignoramuses. A market's a market.
But some countries manage to do this much more efficiently and effectively than others.
In Europe it would appear to be the Social Democratic Nordic countries and Germany which has very strong employment rights.
Korea's economic growth was based on government investment and a degree of protectionism. These are precisely the ideas that neoliberalism
opposes.
If they had adopted The Keynes Plan at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference then the IMF and the World Bank would never have been
set up. We most likely would not have had the euro crisis and the problem of trade imbalances between counties would most likely
have gone away.
Now that is what I call 'Keynesian'. Feel free to continue to make up your own definitions though.
Socialism for the 1% with the rest scraping around for the crumbs in an ever more divided world run by The Bilderbergers who play
the politicians like puppets.
@emkayoh - I am not sure its in its death throes, I think what we are seeing is capitalism attempting to transform itself again.
The success of that transformation will depend on how willing people across the western world to put up with reduced welfare,
poverty pay and almost no employment rights. If we say no and make things too hot for the ruling class we have a chance to take
control of the future direction of our world, if not then what's the point.
This is a strange rant. Everyone agrees that free markets need to be nurtured by appropriate state institutions. But some countries
manage to do this much more efficiently and effectively than others. It is perfectly clear that in much of the EU public expenditure
has been horribly inefficient and far too high.
There is no contradiction between being in favour of free markets and believing that markets and societies should be nurtured
appropriately. We think people should be free and all accept that they should be nurtured.
So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"?
Corporate taxation is best explained as the license that business pays to access the market -- which is in turn created through
the schools, hospitals, roads, etc. that the tax pays for. Unfortunately the new Corporate Social Irresponsibility being acted
out by multinationals today neatly avoids paying that license, and sooner or later will damage them. Multinationals need to recognize
that paying tax is an investment. Without that tax, their markets will slowly evaporate.
The economic model we have is bankrupt and in its death throes is gobbling up the last scintilla of surplus that can be extracted
from the poor ( anyone not independently wealthy).
"... What sticks in the neoliberalism craw is that the state provides these services instead of private businesses, and as such "rob" them of juicy profits! The state, the last easy cash cow! ..."
"... Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church. ..."
"... when Thatcher and Reagan deregulated the financial markets in the 80s, that's when the trouble began which in turn led to the immense crash in 2008. ..."
"... Neo-liberalism is just another symptom of liberal democracy which is government by oligarchs with a veneer of democracy ..."
"... The state has merged with the corporations so that what is good for the corporations is good for the state and visa versa. The larger and richer the state/corporations are, the more shyster lawyers they hire to disguise misdeeds and unethical behavior. ..."
"... If you support a big government, you are supporting big corporations as well. The government uses the taxpayer as an eternal fount of fresh money and calls it their own to spend as they please. Small businesses suffer unfairly because they cannot afford the shyster lawyers and accountants that protect the government and the corporations, but nobody cares about them. ..."
"... Deborah's point about the illogical demands of neoliberalism are indeed correct, which is somewhat ironic as neoliberalism puts objective rationality at the heart of its philosophy, but I digress... ..."
"... There would not be NHS, free education etc. without socialism; in fact they are socialism. It took the Soviet-style socialism ("statism") 70 years to collapse. The neoliberalistic capitalism has already started to collapse after 30 years. ..."
"... I'm always amused that neoliberal - indeed, capitalist - apologists cannot see the hypocrisy of their demands for market access. Communities create and sustain markets, fund and maintain infrastructure, produce and maintain new consumers. Yet the neolibs decry and destroy. Hypocrites or destructive numpties - never quite decided between Pickles and Gove ..."
"... 97% of all OUR money has been handed over to these scheming crooks. Stop bailing out the banks with QE. Take back what is ours -- state control over the creation of money. Then let the banks revert to their modest market-based function of financial intermediaries. ..."
"... The State can't be trusted to create our money? Well they could hardly do a worse job than the banks! Best solution would be to distribute state-created money as a Citizen's Income. ..."
"... To promote the indecent obsession for global growth Australia, burdened with debt of around 250 billion dollars, is to borrow and pay interest on a further 7 billion dollars to lend to the International Monetary Fund so as it can lend it to poorer nations to burden them with debt. ..."
This private good, public bad is a stupid idea, and a totally artificial divide. After all,
what are "public spends"? It is the money from private individuals, and companies,
clubbing together to get services they can't individually afford.
What sticks in the
neoliberalism craw is that the state provides these services instead of private businesses,
and as such "rob" them of juicy profits! The state, the last easy cash cow!
Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it
will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required
to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or
Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because
that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and
it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be
made a fully fledged bastard.
Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a
neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot
be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self
serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church.
It's subsumed the entire planet, and waiting for them to see sense is a hopeless cause. In
the end it'll probably take violence to rid us of the Neoliberal parasite... the turn of the
century plague.
"Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has
won and countless people have gained as a result."
I agree with you and it was this beneficial version of capitalism that brought down the
Iron Curtain. Working people in the former Communist countries were comparing themselves with
working people in the west and wanted a piece of that action. Cuba has hung on because people
there compare themselves with their nearest capitalist neighbor Haiti and they don't want a
piece of that action. North Korea well North Korea is North Korea.
Isn't it this beneficial capitalism that is being threatened now though? When the wall
came down it was assumed that Eastern European countries would become more like us. Some have
but who would have thought that British working people would now be told, by the likes of
Kwasi Kwarteng and his Britannia Unchained chums, that we have to learn to accept working
conditions that are more like those in the Eastern European countries that got left behind
and that we are now told that our version of Capitalism is inferior to the version adopted by
the Communist Party of China?
@bullwinkle - No , when Thatcher and Reagan deregulated the financial markets in the 80s,
that's when the trouble began which in turn led to the immense crash in 2008.
Neo-liberalism is just another symptom of liberal democracy which is government by oligarchs
with a veneer of democracy.
This type of government began in America about 150 years ago with the Rockefellers,
Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Ford etc who took advantage of new inventions, cheap immigrant labour
and financial deregulation in finance and social mores to amass wealth for themselves and
chaos and austerity for workers.
All this looks familiar again today with new and old oligarchs hiding behind large
corporations taking advantage of the invention of the €uro, mass immigration into
western Europe and deregulation of the financial "markets" and social mores to amass wealth
for a super-wealthy elite and chaos and austerity for workers.
So if we want to see where things went wrong we need only go back 150 years to what happened
to America. There we can also see our future?
The beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won
Free education and the NHS are state institutions. As Debbie said, Amazon never taught
anyone to read. Beneficial capitalism is an oxymoron resulting from your lack of
understanding.
especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won and
countless people have gained as a result.
At one and the same time being privatized and having their funding squeezed, a direct
result of the neoliberal dogma capitalism of austerity. Free access is being eroded by the
likes of ever larger student loans and prescription costs for a start.
they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than
governments
Let's not get carried away here. Let's consider some of the things governments can do,
subject only to a 5 yearly check and challenge:
force people upon pain of imprisonment to pay taxes to them
pay out that tax money to whomever they like
spend money they don't have by borrowing against obligations imposed on future taxpayers
without their agreement
kill people in wars, often from the comfort of a computer screen thousands of miles
away
print money and give it to whomever they like,
get rid of nation state currencies and replace them with a single, centrally controlled
currency
make laws and punish people who break them, including the ability to track them down in
most places in the world if they try and run away.
use laws to create monopolies and favour special interests
Let's now consider what power apple have...
- they can make iPhones and try to sell them for a profit by responding to the demands of
the mass consumer market. That's it. In fact, they are forced to do this by their owners who
only want them to do this, and nothing else. If they don't do this they will cease to
exist.
The state has merged with the corporations so that what is good for the corporations is good
for the state and visa versa. The larger and richer the state/corporations are, the more
shyster lawyers they hire to disguise misdeeds and unethical behavior.
If you support a big government, you are supporting big corporations as well. The
government uses the taxpayer as an eternal fount of fresh money and calls it their own to
spend as they please. Small businesses suffer unfairly because they cannot afford the shyster
lawyers and accountants that protect the government and the corporations, but nobody cares
about them. Remember, that Green Energy is big business, just like Big Pharma and Big Oil.
Most government shills have personally invested in Green Energy not because they care about
the environment, only because they know that it is a safe investment protected by government
for government. The same goes for large corporations who befriend government and visa
versa.
@NeilThompson - It's all very well for Deborah to recommend that the well paid share work.
Journalists, consultants and other assorted professionals can afford to do so. As a
self-employed tradesman, I'd be homeless within a month.
@SpinningHugo - Interesting that those who are apparently concerned with prosperity for all
and international solidarity are happy to ignore the rest of the world when it's going well,
preferring to prophesy apocalypse when faced with government spending being slightly reduced
at home.
@1nn1t - That is a point which just isn't made enough. This is the first group of politicians
for whom a global conflict seems like a distant event.
As a result we have people like Blair who see nothing wrong with invading countries at a
whim, or conservatives and UKIP who fail to understand the whole point of the European Court
of Human Rights.
They seem to act without thought of our true place in the world, without regard for the
truly terrible capacity humanity has for self destruction.
Deborah's point about the illogical demands of neoliberalism are indeed correct, which is
somewhat ironic as neoliberalism puts objective rationality at the heart of its philosophy,
but I digress...
The main problem with replacing neoliberalism with a more rational, and fairer system,
entails that people like Deborah accept that they will be less wealthy. And that my friends is the main problem. People like Deborah, while they are more than
happy to point the fingers at others, are less than happy to accept that they are also part
of the problem.
(Generalisation Caveat: I don't know in actuality if Deborah would be unhappy to be less
wealthy in exchange for a fairer system, she doesn't say)
Good critique of conservative-neoliberalism, unless you subscribe to it and subordinate any
morals or other values to it.
She mentions an internal tension and I think that's because conservatism and neoliberal
market ideology are different beasts.
There are different models of capitalism quite clearly the social democratic version in
Scandinavia or the "Bismarkian" German version have worked a lot better than the UKs.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign
that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the
problem.
How is it a sign of that? We are offered no clues.
What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never
going to return;
Try reading a history of financial crashes to dislodge this idea.
... even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more
savagely.
This may or may not be true but here it is mere assertion.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at
governments that run up debt.
At this point I start to have real doubts as to whether Deborah Orr has actually read even
the Executive Summary of the Report this article is ostensibly a response to.
All the comments that follow about the need for public infrastructure, education,
regulated markets and so on are made as if they were a criticism of the IMF and yet the IMF
says many of those same things itself. The IMF position may, of course, be contradictory -
but then that is something that would need to be demonstrated. It seems that Deborah has not
got beyond reading a couple of Guardian articles on the issues she discusses and therefore is
in no position to do this.
Efforts are being made to narrow the skills gap with other countries in the region, as
the authorities look to take full advantage of Bangladesh's favorable demographics and help
create conditions for more labor-intensive led growth. The government is also scaling up
spending on education, science and technology, and information and communication
technology.
Which seems to be the sort of thing Deborah Orr is calling for. She should spend a little
time on the IMF website before criticising the institution. It is certainly one that merits
much criticism - but it needs to be informed.
And the solution to the problems? For Deborah Orr the response
... from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth
is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher
John Gray has said all along.
Does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean? There are certainly no leads on
this in the link given to "the philosopher" John Gray. And what a strange reference that is.
John Gray, in his usual cynical mode, dismisses the idea of progress being achieved by the
EU. But then I suppose that is consistent from a man who dismisses the idea of progress
itself.
... Conservative neoliberalism is entirely without logic.
The first step in serious political analysis is to understand that the people one opposes
are not crazy and are not devoid of logic. If that is not clearly understood then all that is
left is the confrontation of assertion and contrary assertion. Of course Conservative
neoliberalism has a logic. It is one I do not agree with but it is a logic all the same.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this [the need
for public investment and a recognition of the multiple roles that individuals have].
Wrong again.
It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a
market.
And again.
This stuff can't be made up as you go along on the basis of reading a couple of newspaper
articles. You actually have to do some hard reading to get to grip with the issues. I can see
no signs of that in this piece.
@NotAgainAgain - We are going off topic and that is in no small part down to my own fault, so
apologies. Just to pick up the point, I guess my unease with the likes of Buffet, Cooper-Hohn
or even the wealthy Guardian columnists is that they are criticizing the system from a
position of power and wealth.
So its easy to advocate change if you feel that you are in the vanguard of defining that
change i.e. the reforms you advocate may leave you worse off, but at a level you feel
comfortable with (the prime example always being Polly's deeply relaxed attitude to swingeing
income tax increases when her own lifestyle will be protected through wealth).
I guess I am a little skeptical because I either see it as managed decline, a smokescreen
or at worst mean spiritedness of people prepared to accept a reasonable degree of personal
pain if it means other people whom dislike suffer much greater pain.
"There is a clear legal basis in Germany for the workplace representation of employees in
all but the very smallest companies. Under the Works Constitution Act, first passed in 1952
and subsequently amended, most recently in 2001, a works council can be set up in all private
sector workplaces with at least five employees."
The UK needs to wake up to the fact that managers are sometimes inept or corrupt and will
destroy the companies they work for, unless their are adequate mechanisms to hold poor
management to account.
Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has
won
There would not be NHS, free education etc. without socialism; in fact they are
socialism. It took the Soviet-style socialism ("statism") 70 years to collapse. The neoliberalistic
capitalism has already started to collapse after 30 years.
I'm always amused that neoliberal - indeed, capitalist - apologists cannot see the hypocrisy
of their demands for market access. Communities create and sustain markets, fund and maintain
infrastructure, produce and maintain new consumers. Yet the neolibs decry and destroy.
Hypocrites or destructive numpties - never quite decided between Pickles and Gove, y'see.
@JamesValencia - Actually on reflection you are correct and I was wrong in my attack on the
author above. Having re-read the article its a critique of institutions rather than people so
my points were wide of the mark.
I still think that well heeled Guardian writers aren't really in a position to attack the
wealthy and politically connected, but I'll save that for a thread when they explicitly do
so, rather than the catch all genie of neoliberalism.
@CaptainGrey - deregulated capitalism has failed. That is the product of the last 20
years. The pure market is a fantasy just as communism is or any other ideology. In a pure
capitalist economy all the banks of the western world would have bust and indeed the false
value "earned" in the preceding 20 years would have been destroyed.
If the pure market is a fantasy, how can deregulated capitalism have failed? Does one not
require the other? Surely it is regulated capitalism that has failed?
97% of all OUR money has been handed over to these scheming crooks. Stop bailing out the
banks with QE. Take back what is ours -- state control over the creation of money. Then let
the banks revert to their modest market-based function of financial intermediaries.
The State can't be trusted to create our money? Well they could hardly do a worse job than
the banks! Best solution would be to distribute state-created money as a Citizen's
Income.
@1nn1t - Some good points, there is a whole swathe of low earners that should not be in the
tax system at all, simply letting them keep the money in their pocket would be a start.
Second the minimum wage (especially in the SE) is too low and should be increased.
Obviously the devil is in the detail as to the precise rate, the other issue is non
compliance as there will be any number of businesses that try and get around this, through
employing people too ignorant or scared to know any better or for family businesses - do we
have the stomach to enforce this?
Thirdly there is a widespread reluctance to separate people from the largesse of the
state, even at absurd levels of income such as higher rate payers (witness child tax
credits). On the right they see themselves as having paid in and so are "entitled" to have
something back and on the left it ensures that everyone has a vested interest in a big state
dipping it hands into your pockets one day and giving you something back the next.
@Uncertainty - Which is why the people of the planet need to join hands.
The only group of people in he UK to see that need were the generation that faced WW2
together.
It's no accident that, joining up at 18 in 1939, they had almost all retired by 1984.
To promote the indecent obsession for global growth Australia, burdened with debt of around
250 billion dollars, is to borrow and pay interest on a further 7 billion dollars to lend to
the International Monetary Fund so as it can lend it to poorer nations to burden them with
debt.
It is entrapment which impoverishes nations into the surrender of sovereignty,
democracy and national pride. In no way should we contribute to such economic immorality and
the entire economic system based on perpetual growth fuelled by consumerism and debt needs
top be denounced and dismantled. The adverse social and environmental consequence of
perpetual growth defies all sensible logic and in time, in a more responsible and enlightened
era, growth will be condemned.
"... Socialism for the 1% with the rest scraping around for the crumbs ..."
"... Don't you think a global recession and massive banking collapse should be classified as 'crash and burn'? ..."
"... It's one of the major contradictions of modern conservatism that the raw, winner-takes-all version of capitalism it champions actually undermines the sort of law abiding, settled communities it sees as the societal ideal. ..."
"... Rich people have benefited from this more than most: they need workers trained by a state-funded education system and kept healthy by a state-funded healthcare system; they depend on lending from banks rescued by the taxpayer; they rely on state-funded infrastructure and research, and – like all of us – on a society that does not collapse. Whether they like it or not, they would not have made their fortunes without the state spending billions of pounds ..."
"... You have to be careful when you take on the banksters. Abe Lincoln John Kennedy and Hitler all tried or (in Kennedy's case planned) on the issuance of money via the state circumventing the banks. All came to a sticky end. No wonder politicians run scared of them. ..."
"... Now, that's a novel interpretation! The working people in "Communist" countries had free healthcare and education, guaranteed employment and heavily subsidized housing. The reason we have healtcare and free education is that working people in Capitalist countries would otherwise have revolted to have Socialism. In the absence of competition, there is no benefit for the Capitalist to be "beneficial". ..."
"... The banks could plainly see that they were stoking a bubble, but chose not to pass on the increased risk of lending to consumers by raising their interest rates and coolling the market. Why? Because they were making a handsome short-term profit. The banks put their own short-term interests above their long-term interests of financial stability. When the house of cards came tumbling down - we bailed them out. It was idiotic banks who failed to properly control their risk of lending that caused the crash, not interventionist politicians. ..."
Virtually everyone knows what went wrong, with the exception only of uncontrollable
ultra-right neoliberal buffs who try and put the blame on everyone else with various out and
out lies and deceptions, and they are thankfully petering and dying out by the day, including
deluded contributors to CiF, who seem to be positively and cruelly reveling in the suffering
their beloved thesis has and is causing.
So, now that we know the symptoms, what about the cure? The coalition want to make the poor
and vulnerable suffer even more than they have done over the last three decades or so while
still refusing to clamp down and wholly regulate the bankers, corporates and free markets, who
still hold too much power like the unions in the 70's,while Ed Miliband and 'One Nation
Labour' merely suggest in mild, diffident terms about financial regulation and a more balanced
economy, while still not wanting to upset those nice bankers too much.
It's time they were
upset though, and made to pay for their errors and recklessness; while they still award
themselves bonuses and take advantage of Gideon's recent tax cut, the poor and vulnerable who
were never responsible for the long recession now have money taken off them and struggle to
feed, pay bills and clothe themselves and their families, supported by the Daily Fail and co.
who look on them as scrounging, lazy, criminal, violent, drunken, drug addicted and promiscuous
sub-humans, who deserve their fate.
There's quite a few in the middle/professional classes
(many bankers) if they didn't know, but they don't bother with such, do they?
The economic model we have is bankrupt and in its death throes
I am not sure if this is true. We have the same economic system (broadly speaking,
capitalism) as nearly every country in the world, and the world economy is growing at a
reasonable rate, at around 3-4% for 2013-14 (see http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2013/01/pdf/c1.pdf
for more details).
We perceive a problem in (most of) Europe and North America because our economies are
growing more slowly than this, and in some cases not at all. The global growth figure comes
out healthy because of strong growth in the emerging countries, like China, Brazil and India,
who are narrowing the gap between their living standards and ours. So, the world as a whole
isn't broken, even if our bit of it is going through a rough patch.
This is pertinant to a discussion of Deborah Orr's article, because in it she calls for
global changes:
The response from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in
which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the
philosopher John Gray has said all along.
My point is: I don't think this argument will work, because I don't see why the emerging
countries would want wholesale change to what, for them, is quite a successful recipe, just
because it going down badly in Europe. Instead, European countries need to do whatever it
takes to fix their banking systems; but also learn to live within their means, and show some
more of the discipline and enterprise that made them wealthy in the first place.
@Uncertainty - I`m not defending philanthropy, i am saying in answer to some personal attacks
on Miss Orr below the line, that her status as either rich or poor is irrelevant, it is her
politics that count .
Tony Benn and Polly Toynbee both receive much abuse in this manner on Cif.
@kingcreosote - Socialism for the 1% with the rest scraping around for the crumbs
And yet the rest have more crumbs than under any other conceivable system. Look
at the difference that even limited market liberalisation has made to poverty in China. No loaf, no crumbs. You can always throw the loaf out of the window if you don't like the
inequality and then no-one can have anything.
@jazzdrum - I don't have much time for those rich who feel guilty about their greed and do
'charity' to salve their souls. Oh and get a Knighthood as a result.
The more honest giver is the person who gives of what little they have in their purse and
go without as a result. Not a tax dodge re-branded as philanthropy.
Also, such giving from the rich often has strings and may be tailored to what they think
are the 'deserving poor'. I don't like that either.
@Herbolzheim - It's one of the major contradictions of modern conservatism that the raw,
winner-takes-all version of capitalism it champions actually undermines the sort of law
abiding, settled communities it sees as the societal ideal.
More and more people are beginning to understand this as a fundamentally political problem (
ref. @XerXes1369). The 'left' prefers to concentrate on the role of a financial elite (which
is supposed to be exerting some kind of malign supernatural force on the state), to divert
attention from what mainstream 'left' poltics in this society has turned out to be.
When the state is taking over 60% of the income of even those on minimum wages we se
how, from the very top to the very bottom, that the state is the problem.
It's become a monster that will destroy us all.
I would query where you get these figures from, but where it not for the state, do you really
think that somebody on the minimum wage, keeping 100% of their wages, would be able to
afford, out of these wages, health care, schooling for their children, infrastructure
maintenance, their own police force and army, their own legal system?
This from an article in the Independent:
Rich people have benefited from this more than most: they need workers trained by a
state-funded education system and kept healthy by a state-funded healthcare system; they
depend on lending from banks rescued by the taxpayer; they rely on state-funded
infrastructure and research, and – like all of us – on a society that does not
collapse. Whether they like it or not, they would not have made their fortunes without the
state spending billions of pounds.
So the state, although not perfect benefit all of us, get over it!
You have to be careful when you take on the banksters.
Abe Lincoln John Kennedy and Hitler all tried or (in Kennedy's case planned) on the
issuance of money via the state circumventing the banks. All came to a sticky end. No wonder politicians run scared of them.
Free education and the NHS are state institutions. As Debbie said, Amazon never taught
anyone to read. Beneficial capitalism is an oxymoron resulting from your lack of
understanding.
Yes they are state institutions and the tax system should be changed to prevent
Amazon et al from avoiding paying their fair share. But beneficial capitalism is not an
oxymoron, it is alive and present in virtually every corner of the world. Rather than accuse
me of not understanding, I think you would do well to take the beam out of your eye.
I agree with you and it was this beneficial version of capitalism that brought down the
Iron Curtain. Working people in the former Communist countries were comparing themselves
with working people in the west and wanted a piece of that action.
Now, that's a novel interpretation! The working people in "Communist" countries had free
healthcare and education, guaranteed employment and heavily subsidized housing. The reason we have healtcare and free education is that working people in Capitalist
countries would otherwise have revolted to have Socialism. In the absence of competition, there is no benefit for the Capitalist to be
"beneficial".
The banks couldn't stop property hyperinflation, at 20% a year for well over a
decade.
The banks could plainly see that they were stoking a bubble, but chose not to pass on the
increased risk of lending to consumers by raising their interest rates and coolling the
market. Why? Because they were making a handsome short-term profit. The banks put their own
short-term interests above their long-term interests of financial stability. When the house
of cards came tumbling down - we bailed them out. It was idiotic banks who failed to properly
control their risk of lending that caused the crash, not interventionist politicians.
Last week there was a story where HSBC have taken on a senior ex-MI5 person to shore up
their money laundering 'problems'. They're being fined over a billion dollars by the fed
for taking blood money from murderers, drug dealers and corrupt politicians.
Not the Security Services' Director General by any chance?
-- In a filing to the Bermuda Stock Exchange ("BSX"), HSBC Holdings plc (Ticker:
HSBC.BH), announced the appointment of Sir Jonathan Evans to the Board of Directors.
The filing stated:
Sir Jonathan Evans (55) has been appointed a Director of HSBC Holdings plc with effect
from 6 August 2013. He will be an independent non-executive Director and a member of the
Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee.
Sir Jonathan's career in the Security Service spanned 33 years, the last six of which as
Director General. During his career Sir Jonathan's experience included counter-espionage,
protection of classified information and the security of critical national infrastructure.
His main focus was, however, counter-terrorism, both international and domestic including,
increasingly, initiatives against cyber threats. As Director General he was a senior
advisor to the UK government on national security policy and attended the National Security
Council.
He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2013 New Year's
Honours List and retired from the Service in April 2013.
I think there's some really good points in the article.
Last week there was a story where HSBC have taken on a senior ex-MI5 person to shore up
their money laundering 'problems'. They're being fined over a billion dollars by the fed for
taking blood money from murderers, drug dealers and corrupt politicians.
Their annual fee for this guy with 20 years experience to tackle a billion dollar fine and
the disfunction in their organisation? A lousy 100 k. Fee to UK for training him? 0.
Ridiculous! It should have been 10 times that for him and a finders fee of perhaps 10
million to the state.
Realistically, the state has NO clue about it's real value, or the real value of the UK
population. And the example above, I think, demonstrates banks' attitude to the global demand
that they clean up their act. We neef to take this lot to the cleaners before the stench gets
any worse.
But the internet has largely disabled the gigantic CIA fog-machine. Thousands of skilled
researchers quickly blow apart the propaganda line from the Deep State which is why there's
an hysterical reach these days to shut down the 'net (but still keep it open enough to sell
lots of stuff and nake money for the Predator Class).
Take the JFK assassination. One skilled researcher directs readers to the Warren
Commission, where buried deep inside one volume is a finding that Oswald's rife was
inoperable, certainly unable to function as a precise assassination weapon. Plus Oswald was a
lousy shot to begin with. Yet Military sharpshooters had to add parts just to site the weapon
and fire. This info in the WC pretty much excludes Oswald as the lone assassin. Without the
'net, how many people could find this info themselves.
9/11? Several researchers and web sites disclosed findings of a support network for the
alQ hijackers run by Saudi intelligence and the Royal family (the 28 pages inside the
Congressional 9/11 Inquiry); FBI informants providing financing, housing and other logistical
support to the hijackers; CIA knowledge that alQ had entered the US 18 months before 9/11 and
hid this knowledge etc.
Ditto for the OKC bombing (where local TV found bombs inside the Federal Building, which
blew away the FBI narrative about McVeigh)... ditto for the FBI role in handing out
explosives to the perps at the first WTC bombing etc. etc.
All this info, including news reports are up on the web even today... So with this kind of
info available for large numbers of people to find, the only tactic left for the deep state
psy-war operations to function is complete martial law in an Orwellian Police State. At that
point the game is over and the US collapses as a nation.
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.
I 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.
Can'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.
The 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.
Like bolshevism this secular regions is to a large extent is a denial of Christianity. While Bolshevism is closer to the Islam,
Neoliberalism is closer to Judaism.
The idea of " Homo economicus " -- a person who in all
his decisions is governed by self-interest and greed is bunk.
Notable quotes:
"... There is not a shred of logical sense in neoliberalism. You're doing what the fundamentalists do... they talk about what neoliberalism is in theory whilst completely ignoring what it is in practice. ..."
"... In theory the banks should have been allowed to go bust, but the consequences where deemed too high (as they inevitable are). The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is based on the thought that you get as much freedom as you can pay for, otherwise you can just pay... like everyone else. In Asia and South America it has been the economic preference of dictators that pushes profit upwards and responsibility down, just like it does here. ..."
"... We all probably know the answer to this. In order to maintain the consent necessary to create inequality in their own interests the neoliberals have to tell big lies, and keep repeating them until they appear to be the truth. They've gotten so damn good at it. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. ..."
"... It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard ..."
"... Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church. ..."
Unless you are completely confused by what neoliberalism is there is not a shred of logical sense in this.
There is not a shred of logical sense in neoliberalism. You're doing what the fundamentalists do... they talk about what neoliberalism
is in theory whilst completely ignoring what it is in practice.
In theory the banks should have been allowed to go bust, but the consequences where deemed too high (as they inevitable
are). The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality of neoliberalism.
Savers in a neoliberal society are lambs to the slaughter. Thatcher "revitalised" banking, while everything else withered and
died.
Neoliberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom, communism is definitely not. Neoliberalist policies have lifted
millions of people out of poverty in Asia and South America.
Neoliberalism is based on the thought that you get as much freedom as you can pay for, otherwise you can just pay... like
everyone else. In Asia and South America it has been the economic preference of dictators that pushes profit upwards and responsibility
down, just like it does here.
I find it ironic that it now has 5 year plans that absolutely must not be deviated from, massive state intervention in markets
(QE, housing policy, tax credits... insert where applicable), and advocates large scale central planning even as it denies reality,
and makes the announcement from a tractor factory.
Neoliberalism is a blight... a cancer on humanity... a massive lie told by rich people and believed only by peasants happy
to be thrown a turnip. In theory it's one thing, the reality is entirely different. Until we're rid of it, we're all it's slaves.
It's an abhorrent cult that comes up with purest bilge like expansionary fiscal contraction to keep all the money in the hands
of the rich.
Why, you have to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
We all probably know the answer to this. In order to maintain the consent necessary to create inequality in their own interests
the neoliberals have to tell big lies, and keep repeating them until they appear to be the truth. They've gotten so damn good
at it.
Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it
will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers.
It's acolytes are required
to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or
Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because
that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and
it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be
made a fully fledged bastard.
Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a
neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot
be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self
serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church.
It's subsumed the entire planet, and waiting for them to see sense is a hopeless cause. In
the end it'll probably take violence to rid us of the Neoliberal parasite... the turn of the
century plague.
Thatcher (aka "Milk Snatcher" ) pushed neoliberalism and globalization as the solution of
New Deal Capitalism problems. Now the UK arrived at the dead end of this "1 Neoliberal Road"
and now needs to pay the price. So much for TINA.
From a pure propaganda standpoint, Neoliberalism is just a sanitized-sounding expression, to
cover-up the fact that what we really see here is re-branded corporatist ideology.
That's why the crisis of neoliberalism created Renaissance for far-right movements in
Europe, which now threaten to destroy its "globalization" component and switch to "national
neoliberalism" (aka Trumpism) as the solution to the current crisis of neoliberalism ( aka
"secular stagnation" which started in 2008).
Ideology is as dead as Bolshevik's ideology became in early 60th. And I see Trump as a
somewhat similar figure to Khrushchev. An uneducated reformer with huge personal flaws, but
still a reformer of "classic neoliberalism." Which was rejected by voters with Hillary Clinton,
was not it ?
As financial oligarchy is pretty powerful and, as we now see, have intelligence agencies as
a part of their "toolset", the trend right now is to rely on "patriotic military" and far-right
nationalism to counter neoliberal globalization.
We will see where it would get us, but with oil over $100 Goldman employees might eventually
really find themselves under fire like in Omaha beach.
Hayek, while a second rate economist, proved to be a talented theologian, and he managed to
create what can be called "civil religion" not that different from Mormonism or
Scientology.
It was mostly based on Trotskyism rebranded for financial elite instead of the proletariat
and the network of think tanks instead of "professional revolutionaries" of the Communist Party
("Financial oligarchy of all countries unite", "All power to Goldman Sacks and Bank of
America," etc.).
Pope Francis did a pretty good theological analysis of this secular religion in his
Evangelii Gaudium, Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis, 2013. Rephrasing Oscar Wilde, we can
say that "objective analysis is the analysis of ideologies we do not like".
He pointed out that neoliberalism explicitly rejects the key idea of Christianity -- the
idea of equal and ultimate justice for all sinners as a noble social goal. The idea that a
human being should struggle to create justice ( including "economic justice") in this world
even if the ultimate solution is beyond his grasp. "Greed is good" is as far from Christianity
as Satanism.
As Reinhold Niebuhr noted a world where there is only one center of power and authority
(financial oligarchy under neoliberalism) "preponderant and unchallenged... its world rule
almost certainly violate the basic standard of justice".
Here are selected quotes from Evangelii Gaudium, Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis,
2013
... Such a [neoliberal] economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an
elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two
points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away
while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the
laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the
powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized:
without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We
have created a "disposable" culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about
exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it
means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society's
underside or its fringes or it's disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of
it. The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the "leftovers."
54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume
that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about
greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed
by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding
economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile,
the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain
enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed.
Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the
outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as
though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity
deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the
meantime, all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to
move us.
How many alternative economic systems would you say have been given a fair trial under
reasonably favorable circumstances?
A good question. Answer: admittedly, not a huge number - but not none either. Feudalism
held sway in the middle ages and mercantilism in the 18th century, before both fell out of
fashion. In the 20th century Russia stuck with communism for 74 years, and many other
countries tried it for a while. At one time (around 1949-89) there were enough countries in
the communist block for us to be able to say that they at least had a fair chance to make it
work - that is, if it didn't work, they can't really blame it on the rest of the world
ganging up on them.
Lately, serious challengers to the global economic order have been more isolated
(Venzuela, Cuba, North Korea?) - so maybe you could argue that, if they are struggling, it is
because they have been unfairly ganged up on. But then again, aren't they pursuing a
version of socialism that has close affinities to that tried in the Soviet Union?
The problem with giving any novel political idea a really extended trial is that you have
to try it out on live human beings. This means that, once a critical mass of data has built
up that indicates a political idea doesn't work out as hoped, then people inevitably lose the
will to try that idea again.
So my question is: are critics of the current world economic order able to spell out
exactly how their proposed alternative would differ from Soviet-style socialism?
I'd tend to agree with you but in that case it's not an ideology, merely
pragmatism. The convergence of the parties merely reflects the wider consensus in society.
The alternative is simple but people have become so wedded to the libertarian parts of
liberal democracy that it will be some time before they are ready to contemplate the
alternative, a return to the Judaeo/Christian version of human rights - an absolute right to
God who made us, to the truth, to life, to a natural family, and to own the means of earning
a living - to which all should be entitled and all should be held to account.
These are rights that any sensible person will tell you that we should be entitled to but
believe it or not they are anathema to liberal democracy which is based on exploiting the
selfishness of the individual to the detriment of the common good and the good of society at
large.
This post is a variant of "fake prosperity" -- yet another neoliberal myth. Also known as
"rising tidelift all boats"
The improvement of the standard of living in 90th was mainly due to economic plunder of xUSSR
and Eastern Europe as well as well as communication revolution happening simultaneously. The
period from 1990 to 2000 is known as "Triumphal March of Neoliberalism". Aftger year 200
neoliberalism went into recession and in 2008 in deep crisis. The neoliberal ideology was dead by
2008.
Indeed. That was in the time of feudalism and mercantilism.
No, it was as recently as WW2 more or less. After that it followed a confusing
period where social and political freedoms darted ahead up to the '80s when the economic
freedoms started being championed by the right: Thatcher, Reagan, etc.
That saw a liberalisation of trade and an explosive growth in international trade with
huge benefits for the whole world: developing countries like the Asian dragons have seen
their standards of living skyrocket and practically they can't get up with the developed
countries in one generation. China, and India to an extent, is following on that path with
pretty good results.
As the same time the developed countries saw a huge improvement in their standard of
living with products and services available at incredible prices. Even the countries that did
not get on this yet are benefiting and the fact that starvation in the world is less of a
problem is the proof of that for example.
The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created
and distributed around the globe
But we know already how that is done: voluntary transactions among free agents.
That's called a free market and it is by far the most efficient way to produce wealth
humanity has ever known. Sure, we tried other methods (slavery, forced labour, communal
entities, government controlled economies, tribal economies, etc.) but nothing worked as well
as free markets.
The calls for governments' intervention in the economy is misguided and counterproductive.
They already extract about 50% of all wealth created in this country. That's way too much
since most of the money taken by governments is money diverted from productive use.
Wrong. Traditional liberalism supported both social and economic freedoms. That included
support for most of the civil rights and freedoms we enjoy today AND free trade and free
investments.
Indeed. That was in the time of feudalism and mercantilism.
I take this opportunity to draw everyone's attention to a Finnish theorist and proponent
of liberal economical and political thinking, whose treatise on liberal national economy
preceded Adam Smith by 11 years: Anders Chydenius (1729-1803).
Margaret Thatcher left office 23 years ago. The de-regulation of the City occurred in
1986, 27 years ago. Since then UK GDP has more than doubled, inflation and unemployment are
far lower, and the numbers living in extreme poverty have fallen dramatically.
This is an attractive but idealistinc notion, because the person destiny often is shaped by
forces beyond his control. Like Great Depression or WWII. The proper idea is that the society as
a whole serves as a "social security" mechanism to prevent worst outcomes. At the same time
neoliberalism accept bailout for financial sector and even demand them for goverment.
@dmckm - Nobody is owed a good living in this world. That's what freedom means: one is free
to chose the best way to make a living. Are you saying that by forcing people to pay you
something they don't want to is freedom?
No market is 'Free'. Free markets do not exist. Markets are there for those with a vested
interest. i.e. the banksters. Note the growth of Hedge funds or slush funds for the rich.
Neoliberalism like Bolshevism is based on brainwashing and propaganda. In this case by
bought by financial elite and controlled by intelligence agencies MSM.
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalism? This is not just a financial agenda. This a highly organized multi armed counterculture operation to force us, including Ms Orr [unless she has...connections] into what Terence McKenna [who was in on it] termed the `Archaic Revival'. That is - you and me [and Ms Orr] - our - return to the medieval dark ages, if we indeed survive that far. ..."
"... The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ..."
"... A free market larger than a boot fair has never existed. A market can never have power, it's just a market after all. It's the people in the market that have power... or some of them... the few... have it disproportionately compared to others, and straight away the market isn't free. ..."
"... It's only even approximately free when properly regulated, but that's anathema to market fundamentalists so they end up with a market run for the benefit of vested interests that they will claim is "free" until their dying breath. ..."
"... Power belongs with democratically elected governments, not people in markets responsible only to themselves. Amazing that people still think as you do after all that's happened. ..."
@taxhaven - I love this "free markets" expression, but can we really have free markets please
then? This means that no taxpayer money is to be spent to bail out the capitalist bankers
when things so sour.
It also means that there is completely free movement of labor so I as an employer should
be able to hire anyone I like for your job and pay the wage that the replacement is willing
to take i.e. tough luck to you if the person is more qualified and is willing to work for
less but does not have the work visa because in free markets there will be no such things as
work permits.
Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom
Neoliberalism? This is not just a financial agenda. This a highly organized multi
armed counterculture operation to force us, including Ms Orr [unless she has...connections]
into what Terence McKenna [who was in on it] termed the `Archaic Revival'. That is - you and
me [and Ms Orr] - our - return to the medieval dark ages, if we indeed survive that
far.
The same names come up time and time again. One of them being, father of propaganda,
Edward Bernays.
Bernays wrote what can be seen as a virtual Mission Statement for anyone wishing to bring
about a "counterculture." In the opening paragraph of his book Propaganda he wrote:
".. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions
of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this
unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised. Vast
numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a
smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere
of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by
the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social
patterns of the masses.
It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind..."[28]
Bernays' family background made him well suited to "control the public mind." He was the
double nephew of psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. His mother was Freud's sister Anna,
and his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud's wife Martha Bernays.
about being permitted to engage in voluntary exchange of goods and services with others,
unmolested.
And if we ever had that, would it make the ideal society?
A free market larger than a boot fair has never existed. A market can never have power,
it's just a market after all. It's the people in the market that have power... or some of
them... the few... have it disproportionately compared to others, and straight away the
market isn't free.
It's only even approximately free when properly regulated, but that's
anathema to market fundamentalists so they end up with a market run for the benefit of vested
interests that they will claim is "free" until their dying breath.
Power belongs with democratically elected governments, not people in markets responsible
only to themselves. Amazing that people still think as you do after all that's happened.
The evidence of social decay in America is becoming more visible. As other countries
continue to show increases in life expectancy, the US continues its deterioration.
Life expectancy in the US fell to 78.6 years in 2017, a o.1 year fall from 2016 and a 0.3
year decline from the peak.
Overdose deaths reached a new high in 2017, topping 70,000, while the suicide rate
increased by 3.7%, the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics reports.
Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC director, called the trend tragic and troubling. "Life expectancy
gives us a snapshot of the Nation's overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup
call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are
preventable," he wrote in a statement.
While this assessment is technically correct, it is too superficial in seeing the rising
rate of what Angus Deaton and Ann Case called "deaths of despair" as a health problem, rather
than symptoms of much deeper societal ills. Americans take antidepressants at a higher rate
than any country in the world. The average job tenure is a mere 4.4 years. In my youth, if you
changed jobs in less than seven or eight years, you were seen as an opportunist or probably
poor performer. The near impossibility of getting a new job if you are over 40 and the fact
that outside hot fields, young people can also find it hard to get work commensurate with their
education and experience, means that those who do have jobs can be and are exploited by their
employers. Amazon is the most visible symbol of that, working warehouse workers at a deadly
pace, and regularly reducing even white collar males regularly to tears.
On top of that, nuclear families, weakened communities, plus the neoliberal expectation that
individuals be willing to move to find work means that many Americans have shallow personal
networks, and that means less support if one suffers career or financial setbacks.
But the big driver, which the mainstream press is unwilling to acknowledge, is that highly
unequal societies are unhealthy societies. We published this section from a Financial Times
comment by Michael Prowse in 2007, and it can't be
repeated often enough :
Those who would deny a link between health and inequality must first grapple with the
following paradox. There is a strong relationship between income and health within countries.
In any nation you will find that people on high incomes tend to live longer and have fewer
chronic illnesses than people on low incomes.
Yet, if you look for differences between countries, the relationship between income and
health largely disintegrates. Rich Americans, for instance, are healthier on average than
poor Americans, as measured by life expectancy. But, although the US is a much richer country
than, say, Greece, Americans on average have a lower life expectancy than Greeks. More
income, it seems, gives you a health advantage with respect to your fellow citizens, but not
with respect to people living in other countries .
Once a floor standard of living is attained, people tend to be healthier when three
conditions hold: they are valued and respected by others; they feel 'in control' in their
work and home lives; and they enjoy a dense network of social contacts. Economically unequal
societies tend to do poorly in all three respects: they tend to be characterised by big
status differences, by big differences in people's sense of control and by low levels of
civic participation .
Unequal societies, in other words, will remain unhealthy societies – and also
unhappy societies – no matter how wealthy they become. Their advocates – those
who see no reason whatever to curb ever-widening income differentials – have a lot of
explaining to do.
The stats first. They tell a clear story: Americans now live shorter lives than men and
women in most of the rest of the developed world. And that gap is growing.
Back in 1990, shouts
a new study published last week in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical
Association, the United States ranked just 20th on life expectancy among the world's 34
industrial nations. The United States now ranks 27th -- despite spending much more on health
care than any other nation.
Americans, notes an editorial the
journal ran to accompany the study, are losing ground globally "by every" health measure.
Why such poor performance? Media reports on last week's new
State of U.S. Health study hit all the usual suspects: poor diet, poor access to
affordable health care, poor personal health habits, and just plain poverty.
In the Wall Street Journal, for instance, a chief wellness officer in Ohio opined
that if Americans exercised more and ate and smoked less, the United States would surely
start moving up in the global health rankings.
But many epidemiologists -- scientists who study health outcomes -- have their doubts.
They point out that the United States ranked as one of the world's healthiest nations in the
1950s, a time when Americans smoked heavily, ate a diet that would horrify any 21st-century
nutritionist, and hardly ever exercised.
Poor Americans, then as now, had chronic problems accessing health care. But poverty,
epidemiologists note, can't explain why fully insured middle-income Americans today have
significantly worse health outcomes than middle-income people in other rich nations.
The University of Washington's Dr. Stephen Bezruchka
has been tracking these outcomes since the 1990s. The new research published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association, Bezruchka told Too Much last week, should worry
Americans at all income levels.
"Even if we are rich, college-educated, white-skinned, and practice all the right health
behaviors," he notes, "similar people in other rich nations will live longer."
A dozen years ago, Bezruchka
published in Newsweek the first mass-media commentary, at least in the United States, to
challenge the conventional take on poor U.S. global health rankings.
To really understand America's poor health standing globally, epidemiologists like
Bezruchka posit, we need to look at "the social determinants of health," those social and
economic realities that define our daily lives.
None of these determinants matter more, these researchers contend, than the level of a
society's economic inequality, the divide between the affluent and everyone else. Over 170
studies worldwide have so far linked income inequality to health outcomes. The more
unequal a society, the studies show, the more unhealthy most everyone in it -- and not the
poor alone.
Just how does inequality translate into unhealthy outcomes? Growing numbers of researchers
place the blame on stress. The more inequality in a society, the more stress on a daily
level. Chronic stress, over time, wears down our immune systems and leaves us more vulnerable
to disease.
Data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Thursday show life
expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years, pushed down by the sharpest annual
increase in suicides in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from powerful opioid
drugs like fentanyl. Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year's
increase.
Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure
of a nation's prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the
U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and
middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower
access to health care
Life expectancy is 84.1 years in Japan and 83.7 years in Switzerland, first and second in
the most-recent ranking by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The
U.S. ranks 29th..
White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced
increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and
suicide rates are highest among people in the nation's most rural areas. On the other hand,
deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men .
Earlier this century, the steady and robust decline in heart-disease deaths more than
offset the rising number from drugs and suicide, Dr. Anderson said. Now, "those declines
aren't there anymore," he said, and the drug and suicide deaths account for many years of
life lost because they occur mostly in young to middle-aged adults.
While progress against deaths from heart disease has stalled, cancer deaths -- the
nation's No. 2 killer -- are continuing a steady decline that began in the 1990s, Dr.
Anderson said. "That's kind of our saving grace," he said. "Without those declines, we'd see
a much bigger drop in life expectancy."
Suicides rose 3.7% in 2017, accelerating an increase in rates since 1999, the CDC said.
The gap in deaths by suicide widened starkly between cities and the most rural areas between
1999 and 2017, the data show. The rate is now far higher in rural areas. "There's a much
wider spread," Dr. Hedegaard said.
"This is extremely discouraging," Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American
Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said of the suicide-rate increase. Studies show that
traumas such as economic difficulties or natural disasters, along with access to lethal means
including guns and opioid drugs, and lack of access to care can affect suicide rates, she
said. More accurate recording of deaths may also have added to the numbers, she said.
Japan leads the pack in life expectancy and pretty much every other measure of social well
being. Yet when its financial bubbles were bigger than the ones in the US pre our crisis, and
it's on its way to having a lost three decades of growth. On top of that, Japan has one of the
worst demographic crunches in the world, in terms of the aging of its population. So how it is
that Japan is coping well with decline, while the US is getting sicker in many ways (mental
health, obesity, falling expectancy)?
It's easy to hand-wave by saying "Japanese culture," but I see the causes as more specific.
The Japanese have always given high employment top priority in their economic planning.
Entrepreneurs are revered for creating jobs, not for getting rich. Similarly, Japan was long
criticized by international economist types for having an inefficient retail sector (lots of
small local shops), when they missed the point: that was one way of increasing employment, plus
Japanese like having tight local communities.
After their crisis, Japanese companies went to considerable lengths to preserve jobs, such
as by having senior people taking pay cuts and longer term, lowering the already not that large
gap between entry and top level compensation. The adoption of second-class workers (long-term
temps called "freeters") was seen as less than ideal, since these workers would never become
true members of the company community, but it was better than further reducing employment.
Contrast that to our crisis response. We reported in 2013 that
the top 1% got 121% of the income gains after the crisis. The very top echelon did better
at the expense of everyone else. Longer term, lower-income earners have fallen behind. From a
2017 MarketWatch story, quoting a World Economic Forum report: "America has experienced 'a
complete collapse of the bottom 50 percent income share in the U.S. between 1978 to 2015.'"
There is a lot of other data that supports the same point: inequality continues to widen in
America. The areas that are taking the worst hits are states like West Virginia and Ohio that
have been hit hard by deindustrialization. But the elites are removed in their glamorous cities
and manage not to notice the conditions when they transit through the rest of America. They
should consider themselves lucky that America's downtrodden are taking out their misery more on
themselves than on their betters.
God, this is so depressing to read. The worse aspect of it is that it never had to be this
way but that these deaths were simply 'collateral damage' to the social and economic changes
in America since the 1970s – changes by choice. This seems to be a slow motion move to
replicate what Russia went through back in the 1990s which led to the unnecessary, premature
deaths of millions of its people. Dmitry Orlov has a lot to say about the subject of collapse
and there is a long page in which Orlov talks about how Russia got through these bad times
while comparing it with America as he lives there now. For those interested, it is at-
What gets me most is how these deaths are basically anonymous and are not really
remembered. When AIDS was ravishing the gay community decades ago, one way they got people to
appreciate the numbers of deaths was the AIDS Memorial Quilt which ended up weighing over 50
tons. It is a shame that there can not be an equivalent project for all these deaths of
despair.
There were pictures in the Wall Street Journal article I didn't pull over due to copyright
issues, but it did show people commemorating these deaths Captions:
People in Largo, Fla., hold candles at a vigil on Oct. 17 to remember the thousands who
succumbed to opioid abuse in their community.
More than 1,000 backpacks containing belongings of suicide victims and letters with
information about them are scattered across a lawn during a demonstration at the University
of Tennessee at Chattanooga on March 22.
But to your point, these seem isolated and are not getting press coverage at anywhere near
the level of the AIDS crisis.
It focuses too much on peak oil. As if the social collapse of the United States (and the
Soviet Union) was some kind of natural consequence of resources dryinf out instead of a
premeditated looting.
Orlov's posts on how Russians survived the collapse is a small masterpiece. I read it a
couple of years back and it affected me greatly. I just reread it, thanks, Rev Kev, and it
seems even more relevant now.
Small gems: Money becomes useless: items or services that can be swapped are paramount.
Bottles of alcohol, fresh homegrown veggies (and pot), I re-fashion your old suit and you fix
my broken window.
Social networks keep you alive. Know and be on good terms with your neighbors. Communal
gardens keep you fed.
War-hardened men (and the women who love them), who thrive on violence abound. They will
either be hired as security or rove about as free-lancers. A community is better able either
to hire them, or defend against them.
Our ancestors lived and thrived without: central heating, electric lights, hot and cold
running water, flush toilets, garbage collection, the Internet. We can too; it just takes
forethought and planning. Densely packed cities without these amenities are hell.
Cultivate an attitude of disdain for the 'normal' things that society values, especially
if you are a middle-aged male; career, large house and SUV, foreign vacations, a regular
salary. Enjoy contemplating nature. When the former disappear, you have the latter to fall
back upon. And consider a second career as a recycler of abandoned buildings, or a distiller
of potatoes. (Think of all the Medieval structures built from crumbling Roman edifices.)
Russians, in many ways, had more resilience built in to their system: housing was
State-owned, so there was less homelessness. Private automobiles were relatively rare, but
public transportation was wide-spread and remained in good-running order. Minimal universal
health care existed.
Cease from trying, futilely, to change the System. Ain't gonna happen. Instead, prepare to
survive, if only just, the coming dismantling.
> Once a floor standard of living is attained, people tend to be healthier when three
conditions hold: they are valued and respected by others; they feel 'in control' in their
work and home lives; and they enjoy a dense network of social contacts.
"Sapolsky: We belong to multiple hierarchies, and you may have the worst job in your
corporation and no autonomy and control and predictability, but you're the captain of the
company softball team that year and you'd better bet you are going to have all sorts of
psychological means to decide it's just a job, nine to five, that's not what the world is
about. What the world's about is softball. I'm the head of my team, people look up to me, and
you come out of that deciding you are on top of the hierarchy that matters to you."
iirc, there was a perspective of some economists that infinite groaf could be carried by
the creative, emergent, and infinite wants of homo sapiens. But that creates compounding
deprivations, never enough time, money, resources. With the 2:1 ratio of loss aversion, what
is compounded are bad affects.
That 'dense network of social contacts' means smaller groups with symmetric interactions. The multiple
dominance heirarchies is the healthy version of creative emergence, but supplying needs, not
creating wants.
I think that one of the most valuable tools used by government in the Great Depression was
the CCC, WPA, and TVA set of programs that provided jobs to people while they created
valuable infrastructure and art. How many of those people could go back to the dams or state
parks and tell their spouses and kids that "I helped build that." During a time of despair,
it was a way of making people believe they had value.
Today, it would be viewed as a waste of money that could be better spent on the military
or another tax cut for the wealthy.
I'd mentioned some wrongheaded policies of Sequoia NP of 90 years ago yesterday, and they
seem ridiculous in retrospect, and we no longer treat natural places as ad hoc zoos, where
everybody gets to see the dancing bears @ a given hour.
Our methodology as far as our rapport with fire was just as stupid, but we've really done
nothing to repair our relationship with trees and the forests they hang out in.
There's an abundance of physical labor needed to clear out the duff, the deadfalls and
assorted debris from huge swaths of guaranteed employment until the job is done, which could
take awhile.
There's really few graft possibilities though, we're talking chainsaws, Pulaskis, never
ending burn pile action and lots of sweat equity. If KBR wanted to be in charge of
backcountry camps housing crews, that'd be ok, they'd be doing something useful for a
change.
Yes, why do you think video games appeal so much to young males? Because of the pixels?
What these gamers are really after is the ability to excel in a niche hierarchy. It doesn't
(usually) appeal to females as much as more traditional kinds of success but it serves a
psychological need.
A traitorous ruling class that has sold out its workers in favor of foreign workers.
And it's very lucrative – the Walton's fortune was made by being an agent of
communist Chinese manufacturers. In direct competition with US manufacturers. Does this not
seem like treason to you?
The word 'communist' in relation to the Chinese government and party is void of content.
'Communist' in the current Chinese context is legacy branding, nothing more. Its use in this
comment is inflammatory, as is the too-loose bandying of 'treason'. The Waltons are loyal to
their class (however fierce their disputes may be with rival oligarch factions), and since
the state exists to serve the interests of their class, how can they be traitors to the
state?
"Communist" is what they call themselves. They're totalitarians. Which is what most people
think "communist" means – because all countries that called themselves communist used
authoritarian rule. Methinks you might be a marxist idealist. Offended by the misuse of your
ideal State word by totalitarians.
Similarly, I used "treason" in the sense of acting against the interests of the citizens,
not in the sense of a crime against the state. You clearly believe the state to be
representative of only the ruling class. And I don't disagree wrt the USA and its imperial
machine. Which would make the State treasonous, according to the sense of the word I
used.
One could always say communism is an end point developed through a process preceded by
socialism and before that capitalism which replaces feudalism. The idea being Chinese
Communists, the rich Chinese have bug out spots for a reason, believe Mao and the Soviets
moved too quickly skipping a Marxist historical epoch.
The Communist Party officially is always a vanguard for the future society not the
Communist society. Phrases such as "under communism" aren't Soviet features as much as they
are propaganda from the West.
When the Reds were the only game in town, the greedy class joined the CCP, but since 1991,
they skipped signing up, leaving believers in control. What the party congress believes is
probably important.
As far as branding goes, all Communists are branded because the are all vanguard parties,
not parties of blocs or even current populations. Star Trek is the only communist society.
The Soviet thinkers definitely wrote about what an Ideal society would look like, the nature
of work, and self and societal improvement.
Overthrowing a long established government shouldn't be done for light and transient
reasons, and Xi has seemed to be concerned with the demands of the party congress. The party
at large doesn't have a single voice to rally behind which makes it difficult to overthrow a
government.
the word is "communist". The gov't isn't anything of the sort these days. Isn't the
chinese gov't of today "fascist". just like the national socialists of the german stripe?
They are the state that may be lord over controller of private institutions, and ruler of
other state institutions, all intermixed into what is "the chinese economy". They allow the
private wealth creation in a controlled sense. that is state function serving private wealth.
and if you are a party loyal, private wealth may come to you some day too.
It is just another part of the world trend "everyone is turning into full fledged
fascists"
No wonder people in the states are dying earlier.. to get back on topic
Last night, my wife and I took our boys to meet Santa at my older son's school. Elementary
school in Mississippi. The town is an outer suburb of Memphis. A mile east of the town you
are in rural Mississippi. I noticed 2 or 3 parents with visible drug addiction issues. These
folks were still people. Want their kids to see Santa and have a better life. The country
doesn't care.
I'll guess that you're near Byhalia. Happy memories of visiting family there from late
forties through sixties. Wonder what its like now – how the economic changes have
affected it.
Byhalia is a little further down highway 78. Kids from Byhalia drive up to Olive Branch to
go to a McDonald's and other fast food. Things may be changing because they just completed an
outer interstate loop that passes close by Byhalia. Byhalia was just in news a couple months
ago because a kid died during a football game. People were up in arms about no doctor at game
and a 30 to 40 minute drive to closest hospital. There aren't any doctors offices in Byhalia.
Then toxicology report came back. Kid had cocaine in his system. Holly Springs and Byhalia
area are big drug smuggling area. Close to Memphis and it's distribution network, but across
state line in poor rural Mississippi. NBA players linked to this area and smuggling
networks.
I'm always amazed @ the suicide by gun numbers, as it strikes me as a not so fool proof
way of checking out, exacerbated by perhaps dying slowly in a painful way?
Oh, and bloody, very much so.
Fentanyl seems an easier way out, you just drift into the ether and leave a presentable
corpse for everybody you knew, who all wonder if they could have done something to stop it
from happening, posthaste.
It's cheap and fairly efficient, and the drug way out can be tricky. Silent film legend,
Lupe Valez, is the famed example of suicide by drugs gone wrong. She still died but not on
her own terms because the sleeping pills she took didn't react well with her last meal.
How many people have tried to check out and had it not work is something to consider.
The level of denial people are capable of can be daunting.
1). My dentist who I think is Republican told me when I brought up Medicare for all said
"I don't think we can afford Medicare for all." This was not an immediate response to my
raising the topic, but something he told me after several visits and having thought about
what I had said and around the time Sanders got media coverage introducing a Medicare for all
bill (I was getting a crown and required many visits). Talking to your dentist can be a one
sided conversation for obvious reasons, but I thought "don't you mean we can't afford NOT to
have Medicare for all?"
2). A co-worker of mine who is African American. When I said U.S. life expectancy is
falling, this is a sign of extreme policy failure and should affect how we rate the ACA (read
that here, of course!) replied "You're assuming health has an impact on life expectancy." I
was stunned and didn't know what to say for a second and finally said "yes, absolutely."
These are the types that are more than happy to hand the place over to the next Bolsonaro
if only to protect the status gap between themselves and those beneath them.
They also "hand the place over" when the Bolsonaro types tell everyone they have the
solution and the opposition party is tainted by austerity and corruption.
"You're assuming health has an impact on life expectancy"
I have absolutely no idea how I would respond to this either. Was this comment by this
person some kind of built in knee-jerk response to criticism of the ACA/Obama?
actually you are assuming health coverage, even if it was real coverage for what one
needed, has that much of an impact on life expectancy and from what I've read it probably
doesn't compared to things like poverty *regardless* of health coverage. Because the greatest
link to say heart attacks is with poverty (not diet etc.)
At this point though it doesn't even make sense to talk about the ACA circa now and say
it's Obama's ACA, it wasn't that great to begin with. But Trump has made it worse.
My dentist who I think is Republican told me when I brought up Medicare for all said
"I don't think we can afford Medicare for all."
When I brought up Medicare for All to my dentist, after listening to him describe some of
his ER work where he claims to routinely see people who have intentionally damaged their
teeth in order to obtain painkillers (which he is not allowed to proscribe to them
regardless), he said he would never want to have the kind of inferior health care they have
"in Europe." He seemed genuinely surprised when I reported that my wife had done most of a
pregnancy in Italy in the mid-90s and got pre-natal care that was better than anything she
ever got in this country.
My dentist is definitely a Repub. And he socializes with other medical professionals,
which I presume gives him a very distorted image of the health care system. I often hear him
railing against the idiotic dictates of insurance companies and he seems genuinely proud
that, unlike the inscrutable and BS pricing of hospitals, dentists have to have
straightforward pricing because many people do pay 100% out of pocket (so he says).
This is a part of the 10% that is going to be very hard to reach. But I tell him
socialists need dental care too and so he will always have work even after we take over.
Suicide can be a rational and sensible choice.
Bluntly, if the quality of your life is shitty and not going to improve why stick around?
That the reason so many people's lives are bad enough that they decide death is preferable to
life is societal doesn't change their circumstances.
If you are old and sick, barely surviving financially or in poor health and unable to afford
care suicide might look like your best alternative.
The "Hemlock Society" has been around for quite a while, that its membership is growing in
the short term says a great deal about America.
Suicide is never rational. It is arrogance that one could weigh the pros and cons of
suicide like they think the have all the pertinent information. The only truth is that we
have no idea what happens when we die or if there is some kind of experience that continues
in a form that might not be a personal consciousness. Also, why don't you see the decision to
die is made under duress and therefor invalid like signing a contract with a gun pointed at
your head? There were several times in my life that I determined "the quality of [my] life is
shitty and not going to improve [so] why stick around", but yet, I became better off going
through the struggle. As a result I have made others lives better with the understanding I
have gained going through the Shaman's journey.
By considering suicide you are considering trading a known (suffering) for an unknown
(Death). In what way can that be considered rational?
The sad fact is that we spend our whole lives avoiding suffering and never take the time
to understand it. Opioids, all drugs, are a route to avoid suffering, to avoid looking at our
trauma. Materialism is about avoiding our suffering. Suicide is materialistic because it
supposes there is a mind that we can stop.
But even in the Buddhist centers I visit it has turned away from the spiritual and people
go there not to understand their suffering, but rather only to escape it.
American society does not have an economic problem, it has a spiritual problem.
I respect your view that suicide is an arrogant act and that suffering is an unavoidable
part of life. I totally agree with the latter philosophy. You suffer, and you wade through it
and come out on the other side as a better person. Forged in fire, so to speak.
Plus, I am, by nature, an optimist. There is always something to look forward to, every
morning.
But, a few years ago, I suffered a cascade of bodily failures, whose symptoms were at
first ignored, then misdiagnosed, resulting in my taking medications that made me worse off.
At one point, for two months, I had constant nerve pain (comparable to having teeny barbed
wire wrapped around my torso and and being zapped by an electric charge every few seconds.)
Plus back pain. I could not eat, and when I did, I vomited. I lost 20 pounds. I could not
sleep for more than hour at a time, and that hour happened only once a day. I walked only
with the aid of two walking sticks. I was totally constipated for a month (gross, but this
condition just adds to one's misery.) There was no end in sight and my condition just kept
worsening with each round of new medication.
I did not seriously contemplate suicide. But I did give some thought to what I would do if
I had to face life without sleep, without food, without the ability to walk, and death came
up as one of the better solutions. Fortunately, I changed doctors.
I empathize with your struggles, and I have contemplated suicide myself, but contemplating
death is part of the shaman's journey. I do not think that suicide is arrogant, I think it is
a misunderstanding.
IMHO, medical doctors will disrupt this journey. They should be consulted but with the
understanding that they know very little about the balance of the body and what is needed to
heal.
Truth is, we will die. The greater the suffering the easier to find out "who" that is
suffering.
I get in fights with my therapist all the time about this. She is always advocating for ME
to change when I feel if she wants to help us all she should be helping us change the
system.
Well roles like therapist are part of what props up the system and they get paid for
precisely that.
I mean if we are just living our lives we see that things are both individual and
systematic. And some things are strongly systematic (economic problems), and others probably
have a significantly personal component (phobias etc.). And so we have to exist with both
being true, but if we are drowning in economic problems the rest doesn't matter. But
therapists have a specific role to individualize all problems. But if people are just doing
therapy to get stuff off their chest, who can blame them. Enough people are, although it's
not how therapists like to see their role.
The train goes right by Chester, Pa, and you can see decay along the tracks all along
BosWash. Except for Biden, a corrupt tool who hasn't figured out how to cash in, the elites
don't take the train.
Remember the Kingsman movie where the president was going to let all the dopers die? Think
Trump.
Not only is the WH response to the opioid problem merely cosmetic, they (and NIH) refuse
to link it to the economics of human obsolescence. How convenient. As jobs die, the workers
do too – less welfare burden. That is fascist thinking, and it is evident today.
Finally, let us recall that all public health leaders are Trump appointees – i.e.,
incompetent. CDC too refuses to link suicide to the economy. It's bad politics. They can do
this because there are no national standards for reporting deaths as suicides or even drug
overdoses. It is entirely up to the elected coroner. Thus 10s of thousands of suicides are
reported as natural or accidental either intentionally to ease the grief of family members or
because they lack the manpower to investigate suspicious deaths. Note the bump in accidental
deaths. Driving your car into a concrete abutment or over a cliff might be an accident, but
more often than not, the driver was pickled (Irish courage) and the death was
intentional.
So, until we do a better job of measuring the causes of death, the administration can
continue to blame the deaths on moral weakness rather than its cruel economic policies.
Sadly, I believe if suicide attempts were taken into account, the picture would even look
far bleaker, and likely include far more Metro areas. In those Metro areas there are likely
far less gun/rifle owners (reportedly the most successful method), far quicker ambulance
response times, and significant expenditures have been made, and actions taken, to thwart
attempts on transit lines and bridges, along with committing suicidal persons to locked down
psychiatric facilities (which then adds further financial burden, significant employment
issues, and possibly ugly, forced medication side effects); while doing absolutely nothing
whatsoever to address the causes.
What a sickening blotch on the US , with such wealth and power – sovereign in
its own currency – that it's citizens are increasingly attempting and committing
suicide because they can no longer afford to live in any manner that's considered humane.
That, while its Fourth Estate deliberately obscures the deadly problem – which
cannot be cured by forcing Pharma™, Therapy™, and Psychiatric Confinement™
at it, when a predatory crippling of economic stability is the entire cause – and
refuses to hold the Government and Elites accountable.
I would commend to all Beth Macy's riveting book "
Dopesick : Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America ."
Equal parts nicely written investigative reporting and painful personal stories. I'd
thought that the "opioid epidemic" meme was hyperbolic. I was wrong.
@MysticFish - If these are completely different things, why has the austerity-stricken
tax-payer been co-opted into paying for events like Thatcher's funeral
How is that corporatism?
Bilderberg policing,
How is that corporatism?
corporate funded think-tanks are having their non-mandated corporatist policies
prioritized over government election pledges on policy?
Neo-liberalism and fascist corporatism are completely different things.
If these are completely different things, why has the austerity-stricken tax-payer been
co-opted into paying for events like Thatcher's funeral and Bilderberg policing, and why is
it that corporate funded think-tanks are having their non-mandated corporatist policies
prioritised over government election pledges on policy?
In reality this is mostly neocolonial way of dealing with countries. Allowing local oligarchy
to steal as much loaned by foreign states money as they can and converting the country into the
debt slave. Look at Greece and Ukraine for two prominent examples.
The position of OneCommentator is a typical position of defenders and propagandists
of neoliberalism
IMF is part of "Washington Consensus" with the direct goal of converting countries into debt slaves of industrialized
West. It did not work well with Acia counties, but it is great success in some countries in Europe and most of Africa and Latin
America (with Argentina as the most recent example)
Notable quotes:
"... As central banks such as the FED and the ECB operate with insatiable greed and cannot be audited or regulated by any government body anywhere in the world, due to their charters having been set up that way, then bankers are free to meet secretly and plot depressions so as to gain full control over sovereign nations and manipulate markets so that their "chums and agents" in business can buy up assets and land in depressed economies – while possible wars could also make corporations and banks more money as well! ..."
..."neoliberal", concept behind the word, has nothing to do with liberal or liberty or
freedom..
Wrong. Traditional liberalism supported both social and economic freedoms. That
included support for most of the civil rights and freedoms we enjoy today AND free trade and
free investments. It used to be that liberals were practically unpopular with right wing
(traditional conservative for example) parties but more or less on the same side as left wing
parties, mainly because of their social positions. More recently the left wing parties became
more and more unhappy with the economic freedoms promoted by liberals while the right wing
parties embraced both the economic and social freedoms to a certain degree.
So, the leftists
found themselves in a bind practically having reversed roles which the the conservatives as
far as support for liberalism goes. So, typically, they're using propaganda to cover their
current reactionary tendencies and coins a new name for liberals: neoliberals which, they
say, are not the same as liberals (who are their friends since liberal means freedom lover
and they like to use that word a lot).
"austerity" is the financial sectors' solution to its survival after it sucked most the
value out of the economy and broke it.
Austerity is caused by incompetent governments unable to balance their budgets.
They had 60 years to do it properly after ww2 and the reconstruction that followed but many
of them never did it. So now it is very simple: governments ran out of money and nobody wants
to lend them more. That's it, they hit the wall and there is nothing left on the bottom if
the purse.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at
governments that run up debt.
It is a bit more complicated than that. Developed countries like Greece are supposed to run
more or less balanced budgets over longer periods. Sure, they need to borrow money on a
regular basis and may that is supposed to be done by issuing bonds or other forms of
government debt that investors buy on the open market. For such governments the IMF is
supposed to just fill in in a minor way not to provide the bulk of all the loans needed on a
temporary basis. Because of incompetent governments Greece is practically bankrupt hence it
is not going to be able to pay back most of the existing debts and definitely not newer
debts. So practically the IMF is not, ending money to them, it is giving them the money. So,
I would say that they have a good reason to wag its finger.
If private, stockholder-held central banks such as the FED and the FED-backed ECB were not
orchestrating this depression, and anybody who believed they were was a "wacko-nutcase
conspiracy theorist", then why do they keep repeating the same mistakes of forcing un-payable
bailout loans, collapsing banks, wiping out people's savings and then imposing austerity on
those nations year after year – when it is clearly a failed policy?
Possible Answers :
1. Bank presidents are all ex-hippies who got hooked on LSD in the 70's and have not yet
recovered fully as their brains are still fried!
2. Central bankers have been recruited from insane asylums in both Europe and America in
government-sponsored programs to see whether blithering idiots are capable of running large,
international financial institutions.
3. All catastrophic events in the banking/business world, such as the derivative and
housing crash of 2008, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and The Great Depression of 1929-40
were totally random events that just occurred out of nowhere and central banks were caught
off guard – leaving them no option but to play with their willies for years on end
until a major war suddenly happened to pull the whole world out of "bad times"!
4. As central banks such as the FED and the ECB operate with insatiable greed and cannot
be audited or regulated by any government body anywhere in the world, due to their charters
having been set up that way, then bankers are free to meet secretly and plot depressions so
as to gain full control over sovereign nations and manipulate markets so that their "chums
and agents" in business can buy up assets and land in depressed economies – while
possible wars could also make corporations and banks more money as well!
Please choose one of the possible answers from above and write a short 500 word essay on
whether it may or may not true – using well-defined logical arguments. I expect your
answers in by Friday of this week as I would like to get pissed out of my mind at the pub on
Saturday night!
The neoliberal idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as
well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda.
..."neoliberal", concept behind the word, has nothing to do with liberal or liberty or
freedom...it is a PR spin concept that names slavery with a a word that sounds like the
opposite...if "they" called it neoslavery it just wouldn't sell in the market for political
concepts.
..."austerity" is the financial sectors' solution to its survival after it sucked most the
value out of the economy and broke it. To mend it was a case of preservation of the elite and
the devil take the hindmost, that's most of us.
...and even Labour, the party of trade unionism, has adopted austerity to drive its
policy.
...we need a Peoples' Party to stand for the revaluation of labour so we get paid for our
effort rather than the distortion, the rich xxx poor divide, of neoslavery austerity.
@outragedofacton - You have to be careful when you take on the banksters.
Abe Lincoln, John Kennedy and Hitler all tried or (in Kennedy's case planned) on the
issuance of money via the state circumventing the banks.
I hadn't realised the John WIlkes Booth and Lee Harey Oswald were bankers.
But I do always enjoy the scenes in Saving Private Ryan when thousands of
heavily-armed Goldman Sachs employees land on Omaha beach.
Still it is surprising that they have gone so quickly from their stated position at the
start of the republic of a rejection of kings and emperors to their position now of
corruption so ingrained it is impossible to make distinctions.
Too right, I've spat my tea every time I hear some non-Brit brag of their
freedom from royal tyranny. They are blissfully unaware they have created/inherited such in
all but name. Fat Cat Bastard or Henry the Eighth, try to spot the difference in style or
attitude.
There is a particular transparency of motive which becomes clear, and reconciles all inquiry, when an interested observer accepts
a particular media framework:
The media outlet CNN provides for their domestic and international audience, the preferred position for all policy and
points of advocacy from Hillary Clinton's Department of State.
The media outlet The Washington Post serves a similar purpose, however their specialized role is as a conduit for Barack
"Hussein" Obama's Central Intelligence Agency.
"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"
Excuse me,but WTF??
It's the US,NATO, Israhell and Saudis that created ISIS, with the above mentioned spending BILLIONS to combat ISIS in Syria.
The war on terror is a hoax. The lame exploitation of Arabs and Islam to manufacture consent for war on Iraq, starting with
Mossad planting of low yield thermal nuke weapons that brought the Towers down..Saudis were the patsies.
All of this with blessing of Zionists banksters and US Treasury& Fed Reserve.
Nobody would dispute the fact that sanctification of truth is an essential foundation for
a free society. The full extent of perversion and depravity of psychopaths in power is held
in check to some extent by their need to pay lip service to civility and rule of law in the
public eye -- until **** hits the fan. The full extent of pathocracy is about to become
obvious in the Reset. It's going to stun the general public.
I don't know if there is a general formula for describing this, but in my experience,
organizations with psychopaths at the top tend to disintegrate on their own, but they do one
hell of a lot of damage on the way down, since the psychopaths never cede their power and
make moral decisions willingly. Things are essentially guaranteed to get worse as long as
they retain power. It's hard to imagine any remedy to this situation that doesn't involve
some kind of violence, starting of course with manipulation of different groups on the
street. The trouble with any scenario fitting the description of Civil War is that it tends
to center around proxy groups, while those ultimately responsible get away.
We have anecdotes about 'white hat' groups like the so-called White Dragons. They, like the
CIA, appear to operate in the shadows. Do they really exist, and are they really working to
make a positive difference? Will we know them by their works?
I have no faith in Trump as some kind of solo superhero, because thus far all the talk
about him appears to have been nothing but wishful thinking. The man seems like a human
pinball, utterly inconsistent and unpredictable. That's helpful in some ways, not in others.
Something else needs to happen / someone else needs to rise in the role of a statesman and
genuine, meaningful reformer.
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - China and the United States have agreed to halt new tariffs as
both nations engage in trade talks with the goal of reaching an agreement within 90 days, the
White House said on Saturday after U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi
Jinping held high-stakes talks in Argentina.
Trump agreed not to boost tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods to 25 percent on Jan. 1
as previously announced, as China agreed to buy an unspecified but "very substantial" amount
of agricultural, energy, industrial and other products, the White House said. The White House
also said China "is open to approving the previously unapproved Qualcomm Inc <QCOM.O>
NXP <NXPI.O> deal should it again be presented."
The White House said that if agreement on trade issues including technology transfer,
intellectual property, non-tariff barriers, cyber theft and agriculture have not been reached
with China in 90 days that both parties agree that the 10 percent tariffs will be raised to
25 percent.
"... I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services. ..."
Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6 Lies
The right wing Ecuadorean government of President Moreno continues to churn out its
production line of fake documents regarding Julian Assange, and channel them straight to MI6
mouthpiece
Luke Harding of the Guardian.
Amazingly, more Ecuadorean Government documents have just been discovered for the Guardian,
this time spy agency reports detailing visits of Paul Manafort and unspecified "Russians" to
the Embassy. By a wonderful coincidence of timing, this is the day after Mueller announced that
Manafort's plea deal was over.
The problem with this latest fabrication is that Moreno had already released the visitor
logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these "Russians" are in the visitor logs.
This is impossible. The visitor logs were not kept by Wikileaks, but by the very strict
Ecuadorean security. Nobody was ever admitted without being entered in the logs. The procedure
was very thorough. To go in, you had to submit your passport (no other type of document was
accepted). A copy of your passport was taken and the passport details entered into the log.
Your passport, along with your mobile phone and any other electronic equipment, was retained
until you left, along with your bag and coat. I feature in the logs every time I visited.
There were no exceptions. For an exception to be made for Manafort and the "Russians" would
have had to be a decision of the Government of Ecuador, not of Wikileaks, and that would be so
exceptional the reason for it would surely have been noted in the now leaked supposed
Ecuadorean "intelligence report" of the visits. What possible motive would the Ecuadorean
government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is
impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge of the security –
would not know the identity of these alleged "Russians".
Previously Harding and the Guardian have published documents faked by the Moreno government
regarding a diplomatic appointment to Russia for Assange of which he had no knowledge. Now they
follow this up with more documents aimed to provide fictitious evidence to bolster Mueller's
pathetically failed attempt to substantiate the story that Russia deprived Hillary of the
Presidency.
My friend William Binney, probably the world's greatest expert on electronic surveillance,
former Technical Director of the NSA, has stated that
it is impossible the DNC servers were hacked, the technical evidence shows it was a
download to a directly connected memory stick. I knew the US security services were conducting
a fake investigation the moment it became clear that the FBI did not even themselves look at
the DNC servers, instead accepting a report from the Clinton linked DNC "security consultants"
Crowdstrike.
I would love to believe that the fact Julian has never met Manafort is bound to be
established. But I fear that state control of propaganda may be such that this massive "Big
Lie" will come to enter public consciousness in the same way as the non-existent Russian hack
of the DNC servers.
Assange never met Manafort. The DNC emails were downloaded by an insider. Assange never even
considered fleeing to Russia. Those are the facts, and I am in a position to give you a
personal assurance of them.
I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York
Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security
services.
I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But to see the partisans of the defeated candidate (and a
particularly obnoxious defeated candidate) manipulate the security services and the media to
create an entirely false public perception, in order to attempt to overturn the result of the
US Presidential election, is the most astonishing thing I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Plainly the government of Ecuador is releasing lies about Assange to curry favour with the
security establishment of the USA and UK, and to damage Assange's support prior to expelling
him from the Embassy. He will then be extradited from London to the USA on charges of
espionage.
Assange is not a whistleblower or a spy – he is the greatest publisher of his age, and
has done more to bring the crimes of governments to light than the mainstream media will ever
be motivated to achieve. That supposedly great newspaper titles like the Guardian, New York
Times and Washington Post are involved in the spreading of lies to damage Assange, and are
seeking his imprisonment for publishing state secrets, is clear evidence that the idea of the
"liberal media" no longer exists in the new plutocratic age. The press are not on the side of
the people, they are an instrument of elite control.
My opinions are conflicted, but I'd rather give Assange a Nobel Peace Prize than a criminal
conviction. He definitely deserves a Nobel Prize more than Obama. I was in an eatery in
Cambridge, MA, when I heard Obama's prize announced, and even there people where aghast and
astounded.
The Guardian was bought by Soros, a few years ago.
Washpost, NYT and CNN, Deep State mouthpieces.
That the USA, as long as Deep State has not been eradicated completely from USA society, will
continue to try to get Assange, and of course also Snowdon, in it claws, is more than
obvious.
So what are we talking about ?
Assange just uses the freedom of information act, or how the the USA euphemism for telling
them nothing, is called.
How Assange survives, mentally and bodily, being locked up in a small room without a
bathroom, for several years now, is beyond my comprehension.
But of course, for 'traitors' like him human rights do not exist.
"I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times
have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services."
These outfits are largely state-run at this point. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff
Bezos, a man with deep ties to the CIA through his Amazon company (which depends upon federal
subsidies and has received security agency "support") and the Guardian is clandestinely
funded through UK government purchases, among other things. MI6 has also effectively
compromised the former integrity and objectivity of that outlet by threatening them with
prosecutions for revealing MI6 spy practices. And the NYT has always been state-run. See
their coverage of the Iraq War. The Israelis have bragged about having an asset at the Times.
The American government has several.
It's amazing to see the obvious progression of the lies as they take hold in an anti-Trump
elite who seem completely impervious to understanding his victory over Clinton. All these
people who claim to be so cosmopolitan and educated seem to think Assange or Manafort would
have any interest in meeting each other. (Let alone in the company of unspecified
'Russians'.)
At first it was that Assange was wrong to publish the DNC leaks because it hurt Clinton
and thus helped Trump.
Then it was that Assange was actively trying to help Trump.
Now it's that Assange is in collusion with Trump and the 'Russians'.
The same thing happened with the Trump-Russian nonsense which goes ever more absurd as
time goes on. Slowly boiling the frog in the public's mind. The allegations are so
nonsensical, yet there are plenty of educated, supposedly cosmopolitan people who don't
understand the backgrounds or motives of their 'liberal' heroes in the NYT or Guardian who
believe this on faith.
None of these people will ever question how if any of this is true how the security
services of the West didn't know it and if they supposedly know it, how come they aren't
acting like it's true. They are acting like they're attempting to smear politicians they
don't like, however.
Luke Harding is particularly despicable. He made his name as a journalist off privileged
access to Wilkileaks docs, and has been persistently attacking Assange ever since the Swedish
fan-girl farce.
Assange did make a mistake (of which I am sure he is all too aware now) in the choice to,
rather than leave the info. open on-line, collaborate with the filthy Guardian, the sleazy
NYT, and I forget dirty name of the third publication.
@anon Since you
are posting as Anon coward, I am not expecting a reply, but would be interested in (and would
not doubt) state funding of the 'Guardian'?
As for the NYT, they are plainly in some sense state-funded, but the state in question is
neither New York nor the U.S.A., but the state of Israel.
@Che Guava
Perhaps he is referring to the sheer volume of ads the British government places for public
sector appointments. As for the paper edition, most of it seems to be bought by the BBC!
So he screamed in the cafeteria and spilled his morning coffee. We all wondered what
happened to him and so we looked at his friend, and he told us that he must have read the
NYT, as that was his common reaction, a cry of pain and anguish and screams of "all lies, all
lies, all lies" whenever he reads the newspaper or watches the TV, esp. NYT.
Your article and the previous news about Manfort visiting Assange and the funny timing of
the same reminded me of this story.
The Western MSM is a lying scamming neoliberal propaganda machine.
"... You might like to report on the recent bill in Congress giving broadcasters "immunity" for spying. The New York Times acquires information from spying on citizens by the CIA twenty four hours a day - aa CIA Wire Service which is unconscionable for a newspaper. Such information allows the Times to keep competitors out of favored industries, scoop other news groups, and enhance revenues by pirated material. The Times isn't a newspaper at all but a clandestine operation run by intelligence units. ..."
"... Interestingly, the NYT revelation itself was illegal, a felony under the Intelligence Act of 1917. ..."
"... Which, ipso facto, makes at least that part of the Intelligence Act of 1917 unconstitutional: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" ( US. Constitution, Amendment I ). This perhaps explains why no newspaper has ever been prosecuted under the Intelligence Act of 1917. Prosecutors would rather have it available as a threat rather than having it thrown out as unconstitutional, and of course the Supreme Court can't rule on its constitutionality unless someone has standing to bring a case against it before them. ..."
"... It's also not surprising that the CIA would take an interest in how it is perceived. I would argue that the CIA was actually preventing or controlling the flow of info the WH was giving to filmmakers. ..."
"... This story only scratches the surface on the extent of corruption in US media and journalism in general over the last 10-15 years. The loss of journalistic integrity and objectivity in US media is on display as many media outlets showcase their one-sided liberal or conservative views. Sadly, the US media has become just as polarized as the government. However, the greatest corruption is not with the govt-media connection; the greatest corruption involves the lobbyists - foreign and domestic. Lobbying groups exert an enormous influence on politicians and the media and it extends to both sides of the aisle. ..."
"... It's no secret that the CIA and State Department have colluded with media since 1950. Public relations is nothing more than propaganda. And if you think the CIA doesn't have it's own PR department, with *hundreds* of employees, dedicated to misinformation, spin, half-truths, and psychological operations, well, consider this your wake-up call. ..."
"... "The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media." - William Colby - Former CIA Director ..."
"... "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director 1981 ..."
"... While you rightly characterize this case as indicating the "virtual merger" of government and media "watchdogs," I think a meta-theme running through your writings illuminates the "virtual merger" of both corporate & state power (esp. after Citizens United), ..."
"... the real issue is not personalities or trivial post deletions, the real issue is that the CIA is tightly bound to the institutions of America ... and that this is not a good thing for everyone ..."
...this is the norm not the exception. It's also representative of a very significant cross
section of the State Department/CIA/Pentagon/DC Beaurcratic Machine, made up of various
Leftists, Statists, academia, and privileged youth with political science degrees from east
coast/DC/Ivy League schools.
I am having a very difficult time wrapping my mind around this story.....we have an alleged
CIA spokesperson purportedly attempting to engage in damage control with a prominent national
newspaper regarding the flow of information between the CIA and film-makers doing a story on
the Bin Laden raid. Ostensibly, the information provided, regarding the raid, was to help
secure the President's reelection bid?
I note that the logo on the phone of the published photo of CIA spokesperson Marie Harf
looks remarkably similar, if not identical, to the Obama campaign logo. A "Twitter" account
profile for M's. Harf references that she is a "National Security Wonk at OFA...." . Could
the "OFA" she makes reference to possibly be "Obama for America"? Her recent tweet history
includes commentaries critical of Romney and his supporters, which appear to be in response
to her observations while watching Republican Convention coverage.
My understanding heretofore was that those engaged in the Intelligence Community,
particularly spokespersons, preferred to keep a low profile and at least appear apolitical.
Based upon the facts as presented, one must reexamine whether a US intelligence agency is
engaging in the most blatant form political partisanship to unduly influence a US
Presidential election.
You might like to report on the recent bill in Congress giving broadcasters "immunity" for
spying. The New York Times acquires information from spying on citizens by the CIA twenty
four hours a day - aa CIA Wire Service which is unconscionable for a newspaper. Such
information allows the Times to keep competitors out of favored industries, scoop other news
groups, and enhance revenues by pirated material. The Times isn't a newspaper at all but a
clandestine operation run by intelligence units.
I'm surprised by the pettiness of it all. And it's this pettiness that makes me think that
such data exchange is not only routine, but an accepted way to enhance a career. After all, who really cares what Dowd writes? I
believe Chomsky called her 'kinda a gossip columnist'. And, that's what she is.
That anyone
would bother passing her column to the CIA is, on the face of it, a little absurd. I don't
say she is a bad columnist, she's probably quite good, but hardly of interest to the CIA,
even when she is writing about the CIA. So basically, someone passed her column along,
because this is normal, and the more ambitious understand that this is how you 'get along'.
This kind of careerism is something I see, on some level, every day: the ambitious see the
rules of the game, and follow them, and the rationale comes later. For most of us, this
doesn't involve the security services. However, the principle that the MSM is, at the least,
heavily influenced by state power is fairly well understood by now in more critical circles:
all forms of media are subject to unusual and particular state pressures, due to their
central import in propaganda and mass-persuasion. The NYT is, in short, an obvious target for
this kind of influencing. And as such should really know much much better.
Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that most of what I read, or see on the nightly
broadcasts, is essentially bullshit. I could switch to RT, and in a way its counter-point
would be useful in stimulating my own critical thinking, but much of what RT broadcasts is
also likely to be bullshit. We have a world of competing propaganda memes where nobody knows
the truth. It's like we are all spooks now, each and every one of us. An excellent article,
again.
Interestingly, the NYT revelation itself was illegal, a felony under the Intelligence
Act of 1917.
Which, ipso facto, makes at least that part of the Intelligence Act of 1917
unconstitutional: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the
press" ( US. Constitution,
Amendment I ). This perhaps explains why no newspaper has ever been prosecuted under the
Intelligence Act of 1917. Prosecutors would rather have it available as a threat rather than
having it thrown out as unconstitutional, and of course the Supreme Court can't rule on its
constitutionality unless someone has standing to bring a case against it before them.
Excellent article, but it's not necessarily a surprise to see a reporter who has developed a
relationship with his source do that source a favor in hopes that the favor will some day be
returned with greater access.
It's also not surprising that the CIA would take an interest in
how it is perceived. I would argue that the CIA was actually preventing or controlling the
flow of info the WH was giving to filmmakers.
This story only scratches the surface on the
extent of corruption in US media and journalism in general over the last 10-15 years. The
loss of journalistic integrity and objectivity in US media is on display as many media
outlets showcase their one-sided liberal or conservative views. Sadly, the US media has
become just as polarized as the government. However, the greatest corruption is not with the govt-media connection; the greatest corruption involves the lobbyists - foreign and domestic.
Lobbying groups exert an enormous influence on politicians and the media and it extends to
both sides of the aisle.
What the commoners fail to understand is that the Public Relations (PR) industry controls 75%
of the information that you are fed from major media outlets. It's an industry that has
artfully masked everything you thought you knew. It's no secret that the CIA and State
Department have colluded with media since 1950. Public relations is nothing more than
propaganda. And if you think the CIA doesn't have it's own PR department, with *hundreds* of
employees, dedicated to misinformation, spin, half-truths, and psychological operations,
well, consider this your wake-up call.
Glenn, thanks for illuminating the insidious, dangerous cynicism pervading American media
& culture, which have become so inured to hypocrisy, corruption & desecration of
sacrosanct democratic values & institutions that has been crucial to the normalization of
formerly intolerable practices, laws & policies eating away at the foundations of our
constitutional democracy. The collective moral, principled "lines in the sand" protecting us
from authoritarian pressures are steadily being washed away, compromised, thanks to media
obsequious complicity.
While you rightly characterize this case as indicating the "virtual merger" of government
and media "watchdogs," I think a meta-theme running through your writings illuminates the
"virtual merger" of both corporate & state power (esp. after Citizens United), and all
the "checks & balances" enshrined in our constitution after 9/11 (e.g. deferential
judiciary, bi-partisan Congressional consensus on increasingly authoritarian, secretive US
executive, propagandistic media, etc.). At least that's my thinking, and I see no significant
countervailing pressure capable of slowing- let alone reversing- this authoritarian
re-ordering of our constitutional order & political culture, though a few exceptions
exist (e.g. Judge Forrest's suprising courage to suspend NDAA provision 1021), and rare
journalists like yourself.
One astounding example of this widespread cynicism facilitating this authoritarian trend,
was the media's rather restrained response to the revelation that elements in the massive
Terrorist/Military Industrial Complex (HBGary) had been plotting military-style
social-engineering operations to discredit & silence progressive journalists,
specifically naming YOU, who I see as one of the rare defenders of the
constitutional/democratic "lines in the sand" under relentless attack. Where was the
overwhelming collective shock & outrage, or media demanding criminal investigations into
US taxpayer-funded attacks on our so-called "free press?"
My question for Glenn, is whether he thinks it would be possible for him to get legal
standing to sue the private (& US??) entities, which proposed the covert
discrediting/repression operations targeting you specifically?
I'm no lawyer, but it seems the documents published by Anonymous, reveal actions
constituting criminal conspiracy. Given the proposed methods included forms of
politically-motivated military warfare & coercion, the guilty parties would likely be
aggressively investigated and charged with some terrorist crimes, if they had been busted
planning attacks on people/entities that trumpeted Obama administration policies or its
corporate backers (i.e. if they were Anonymous). The HBGary proposal to discredit/silence
Wikileaks defenders strongly indicated they had experience with- & confidence in- such
covert operations. Requiring a journalist/academic to be covertly
discredited/destroyed/silenced before they get legal standing would be as absurd as the Obama
administration's argument that Chris Hedges & Co. plaintiffs lack standing because they
hadn't yet been stripped of their rights & secretly indefinitately detained without
charges or trial.
I thought you might be in the unique position to use the US courts to pry open & shine
some light upon the clearly anti-democratic, authoritarian abuses of power, & virtual
fusion of corporate & state powers, which you so eloquently write about.
I glad that foreign journalism is available for me to read our the internet, it's the only
way i can find truthful information about what's going on in my own country (USA). I've known the liberal media bias was a problem for a long time, but articles like this
continually remind me that things are far worse than they appear.
All the actions surrounding the NY Times and the CIA on this issue are atrocious. With this
type of "journalistic independence", why am I paying for a Times account??
As a favor to all readers, following is a summation of all past, present, and future ideas as
articulated by the Fortune Cookie Thinker, John Andersson:
A certain amount of genocide is good because the world is overpopulated.
You should never question authority; after all, you are not an expert on authority.
Everyone wins when we kill terrorists; the more we kill, the more we generate, thus the
more we kill again, which makes us win more.
It is not possible to have absolute power; therefore, power does not corrupt.
Drones kill bad people. Only bad people are killed by drones. Thus, drones are good. We
should have more drones. That is all.
I secretly think he's the real "Jack Handy" from the Deep Thoughts series on SNL.
In my high school history class in 1968 I learned all about how newspapers printed propaganda
stories before WWI and Spanish American war in order to influence the public so they would
want to go to war and it was called "yellow journalism". I also had an English teacher that
taught us about "marketing" and how they use visuals and printed words and film to make us
want to buy a product. My father taught me to NOT BELEIVE everything you read. Now it is
called "critical thinking" and has been added as a general education class in college that
you have to take for a college degree. Critical thinking about what you read and see and hear
should be taught as early as 10 year olds so people can think for themselves. I do not read
main stream newspapers in America but read news sites all over the world.
THANK GOD FOR THE
INTERNET THAT YOU CAN READ WHAT OTHER NEWSPAPERS. I discovered Glenn on Democracy Now and
they are my go to place to read about what is really happening.
the real issue is not personalities or trivial post deletions, the real issue is that the CIA
is tightly bound to the institutions of America ... and that this is not a good thing for
everyone
"... We should not even talk about "conflict of interest" anymore. It is a collusion all the way. We saw it in the phone hacking scandal here, now at the New York Times. I have always wondered about these white tie dinners in Washington DC and how chummy and cozy the reporters looked mingling with the power-holders and -brokers. ..."
"... In what is turning out to be the CIA Century, the American President and major news outlets seem to operate under CIA authority and in accordance with CIA standard operating procedures. ..."
"... Or Afghanistan. Many of the cruise missile libs supported the invasion of Afghanistan but not Iraq. ..."
"... The press is managed on behalf of what I will call US powers. Those powers seem to be high level military, clandestine agencies, financial industry "leaders", and war contractors. The political parties and the faces they present to the public (with some few exceptions) act as functionaries to keep up the illusion that the US is a democracy. ..."
"... And I am not sure why I associate Washington's bureaucratic CIA with dancing midgets. ..."
If we thought the public trust in journalism is low, then this news only pushes it down further. Do people in journalism care?
Some do very much but for the most the media and the power-holders are in collusion.
We should not even talk about "conflict of interest" anymore. It is a collusion all the way. We saw it in the phone hacking
scandal here, now at the New York Times. I have always wondered about these white tie dinners in Washington DC and how chummy
and cozy the reporters looked mingling with the power-holders and -brokers.
The critical articles are nothing more than smokescreens. We are led to believe how hard-hitting the newspapers are and how
they hold the politicians and other power-brokers to fire. All hogwash. It is better we recognize that the citizens are merely
props they need to claim legitimacy.
Not till this moment did I realize that we are under siege. I thought Julian Assange was the one under siege but he was just trying
to offer us a path to freedom. With Assange neutralized and The New York Times and its brethren by all appearances thoroughly
compromised, how can any one of us stand for all of us against government malfeasance let alone tyranny?
Where would you go if you had dispositive proof of devastating government malfeasance? In what is turning out to be the
CIA Century, the American President and major news outlets seem to operate under CIA authority and in accordance with CIA standard
operating procedures.
It would actually be foolish to take evidence of horrific government behavior to the titular head of the government {who'd
likely persecute you as a whistleblower} or the major news organizations supposedly reporting to us about it {they'd bring it
right back to the government for guidance on what to do}.
Without safe and reliable ways to stand and speak for and to each other on a large scale about the foul deeds of our government,
we are damned to live very lonely vulnerable lives at the mercy of an unrestrained government.
Excerpt from script of Three Days of the Condor --
Higgins: I can't let you stay out, Turner.
Turner slowly stops, leans back against a building, shakes his head sadly.
Turner: Go home, Higgins. They have it all.
Higgins: What are you talking about?
Turner: Don't you know where we are?
Higgins looks around. The huge newspaper trucks are moving out.
Turner: It's where they ship from.
Higgins' head darts upward and he reads the legend above Turner's head. THE NEW YORK TIMES. He is stunned.
Higgins: You dumb son of a bitch.
Turner: It's been done. They have it.
Higgins: You've done more damage than you know.
Turner: I hope so.
Higgins: You want to rip us to pieces, but you damn fool you rely on us. {then} You're about to be a very lonely man,
Turner.
***
Higgins: It didn't have to turn out like this.
Turner: Of course it did.
Higgins: {calling out as they depart separate ways} Turner! How do you know they'll print it?
Turner stops. Stares at Higgins. Higgins smiles.
Higgins: You can take a walk. But how far? If they don't print it.
Several commenters have pointed out that the NYT does do "good" journalism. That is true. It is also true that they tell
absolute lies. See Judith Miller. The best way to sell a lie is to wrap it in the truth.
I know it's late in the comments thread by the time anyone bothers to read THIS minor contribution, but I think it worth mentioning
how this article from Glenn proves just how important are outlets like Democracy Now, RT, Cenk Uyger, Dylan Ratigan, et al. You
really have to turn away from the mainstream media as a source of anything. Far too compromised, by both their embeddedness with
the government, and their for-profit coroporate owners.
Note CNN's terrible ratings problems as of late, and the recent news that they are considering turning to more reality-type
shows to get the eyeballs back. If that isn't proof positive of the current value of corporate news, I don't know what is.
DemocracyNow.org. I think I'm going to donate to them today....
i'm do not understand why so many people are against authority in general, even when the legal & enforcement system is there
to protect your property, life and rights. i understand when corruption exists, it should be seriously addressed, but why throw
out a whole system that is "somewhat working"? why blindly call for revolution?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying
its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety
and Happiness."
This is a political officer acting as editor of a major newspaper. I agree this has been going on for some time. Here is my analysis
of that. The press is managed on behalf of what I will call US powers. Those powers seem to be high level military, clandestine
agencies, financial industry "leaders", and war contractors. The political parties and the faces they present to the public (with
some few exceptions) act as functionaries to keep up the illusion that the US is a democracy.
Romney and Obama are functionaries. They do as they're told. Obama is the more useful of the two as fewer people seem able
to look honestly at his policies. They will not oppose Obama for doing the same things and worse as Bush. It is why all stops
are being pulled out to get him, rather than Romney elected. The policies will be the same but the reaction of our population
to each man is vastly different.
So yes, the capture of the media has been going on for quite some time. It appears nearly consolidated at this time. Instead
of using this as a reason to ignore the situation, it is more important than ever to speak out. History is helpful in learning
how to confront injustice. It is not a reason, as I see many use it, to say; "well it's always been that way, so what?" In history,
we learn about corruption but we also learn that people opposed corruption. Is there some reason why we cannot also oppose corruption
right now?
I though Michael Wolff's recent analysis of Apple (here in the Guardian) was in many ways metaphorical for Western leadership,
his article acting in some ways to explain the behavior we see in cultural "elites."
Worth the read.
And somehow, after reading this article, all I can think of is the Wizard of Oz and a dancing midget army singing in
repetitive, high-pitched tones.
And I am not sure why I associate Washington's bureaucratic CIA with dancing midgets.
Who will be the first commenter to leave the classic devastating critique: "The author fails to present a balanced view, showing
only one side. The author's argument has no substance and is not really worth anything."
Don't forget this one: "The author just complains and complains without ever offering a solution or a better approach."
Also, can anyone 'splain me how to do a "response"?
China does not have its own technological base and is depended on the USA for many technologies. So while China
isdefinitly in assendance, Washington still have capability to stick to "total global dominance" agenda for some time.
Attempt to crush China by Tariffs might provoke the economic crisi in China and possible a "regime change", like Washington
santions to the USSR in the past. And that's probably the calculation.
Notable quotes:
"... President Trump has taken long-simmering US complaints about China to boiling point, castigating Beijing for unfair trade, currency manipulation, and theft of intellectual property rights. China rejects this pejorative American characterization of its economic practices. ..."
"... The problem is that Washington is demanding the impossible. It's like as if the US wants China to turn the clock back to some imagined former era of robust American capitalism. But it is not in China's power to do that. The global economy has shifted structurally away from US dominance. The wheels of production and growth are in China's domain of Eurasia. ..."
"... Combined with its military power, the postwar global order was defined and shaped by Washington. Sometimes misleading called Pax Americana, there was nothing peaceful about the US-led global order. It was more often an order of relative stability purchased by massive acts of violence and repressive regimes under Washington's tutelage. ..."
"... In American mythology, it does not have an empire. The US was supposed to be different from the old European colonial powers, leading the rest of the world through its "exceptional" virtues of freedom, democracy and rule of law . In truth, US global dominance relied on the application of ruthless imperial power. ..."
"... Washington likes to huff and puff about alleged Chinese expansionism "threatening" US allies in Asia-Pacific. But the reality is that Washington is living in the past of former glory. Trading blocs like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) realize their bread is buttered by China, no longer America. ..."
"... Washington's rhetoric about "standing up to China" is just that – empty rhetoric. It doesn't mean much to countries led by their interests of economic development and the benefits of Chinese investment. ..."
"... China's strategic economic plans – the One Belt One Road initiative – of integrating regional development under its leadership and finance have already created a world order analogous to what American capital achieved in the postwar decades. ..."
"... American pundits and politicians like Vice President Mike Pence may disparage China's economic policies as creating "debt traps" for other countries . But the reality is that other countries are gravitating to China's dynamic leadership ..."
The G20 summits are nominally about how the world's biggest national economies can cooperate
to boost global growth. This year's gathering – more than ever – shows, however,
that rivalry between the US and China is center stage.
Zeroing in further still, the rivalry is an expression of a washed-up American empire
desperately trying to reclaim its former power. There is much sound, fury and pretense from the
outgoing hegemon – the US – but the ineluctable reality is an empire whose halcyon
days are a bygone era.
Ahead of the summit taking place this weekend in Argentina, the Trump administration has
been issuing furious ultimatums to China to "change its behavior". Washington is threatening an
escalating trade war if Beijing does not conform to American demands over economic
policies.
President Trump has taken long-simmering US complaints about China to boiling point,
castigating Beijing for unfair trade, currency manipulation, and theft of intellectual property
rights. China rejects this pejorative American characterization of its economic practices.
Nevertheless, if Beijing does not comply with US diktats then the Trump administration says
it will slap increasing tariffs on Chinese exports.
The gravity of the situation was highlighted by the comments this week of China's
ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, who warned that the "lessons of history" show trade wars can
lead to catastrophic shooting wars. He urged the Trump administration to be reasonable and to
seek a negotiated settlement of disputes.
The problem is that Washington is demanding the impossible. It's like as if the US wants
China to turn the clock back to some imagined former era of robust American capitalism. But it
is not in China's power to do that. The global economy has shifted structurally away from US
dominance. The wheels of production and growth are in China's domain of Eurasia.
For decades, China functioned as a giant market for cheap production of basic consumer
goods. Now under President Xi Jinping, the nation is moving to a new phase of development
involving sophisticated technologies, high-quality manufacture, and investment.
It's an economic evolution that the world has seen before, in Europe, the US and now
Eurasia. In the decades after the Second World War, up to the 1970s, it was US capitalism that
was the undisputed world leader. Combined with its military power, the postwar global order was
defined and shaped by Washington. Sometimes misleading called Pax Americana, there was nothing
peaceful about the US-led global order. It was more often an order of relative stability
purchased by massive acts of violence and repressive regimes under Washington's tutelage.
In American mythology, it does not have an empire. The US was supposed to be different from
the old European colonial powers, leading the rest of the world through its "exceptional"
virtues of freedom, democracy and rule of law . In truth, US global dominance relied on the
application of ruthless imperial power.
The curious thing about capitalism is it always outgrows its national base. Markets
eventually become too small and the search for profits is insatiable. American capital soon
found more lucrative opportunities in the emerging market of China. From the 1980s on, US
corporations bailed out of America and set up shop in China, exploiting cheap labor and
exporting their goods back to increasingly underemployed America consumers. The arrangement was
propped up partly because of seemingly endless consumer debt.
That's not the whole picture of course. China has innovated and developed independently from
American capital. It is debatable whether China is an example of state-led capitalism or
socialism. The Chinese authorities would claim to subscribe to the latter. In any case, China's
economic development has transformed the entire Eurasian hemisphere. Whether you like it or
not, Beijing is the dynamo for the global economy. One indicator is how nations across
Asia-Pacific are deferring to China for their future growth.
Washington likes to huff and puff about alleged Chinese expansionism "threatening" US allies
in Asia-Pacific. But the reality is that Washington is living in the past of former glory.
Trading blocs like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) realize their bread is buttered
by China, no longer America.
Washington's rhetoric about "standing up to China" is just that
– empty rhetoric. It doesn't mean much to countries led by their interests of economic
development and the benefits of Chinese investment.
One example is Taiwan. In contrast to Washington's shibboleths about "free Taiwan", more and
more Asian countries are dialing down their bilateral links with Taiwan in deference to China's
position, which views the island as a renegade province. The US position is one of rhetoric,
whereas the relations of other countries are based on material economic exigencies. And
respecting Beijing's sensibilities is for them a prudent option.
A recent
report by the New York Times starkly illustrated the changing contours of the global
economic order. It confirmed what many others have observed, that China is on the way to
surpass the US as the world's top economy. During the 1980s, some 75 per cent of China's
population were living in "extreme poverty", according to the NY Times. Today, less than 1 per
cent of the population is in that dire category. For the US, the trajectory has been in reverse
with greater numbers of its people subject to deprivation.
China's strategic economic plans – the One Belt One Road initiative – of
integrating regional development under its leadership and finance have already created a world
order analogous to what American capital achieved in the postwar decades.
American pundits and politicians like Vice President Mike Pence may disparage China's
economic policies as creating "debt traps" for other countries . But the reality is that other
countries are gravitating to China's dynamic leadership.
Arguably, Beijing's vision for economic development is more enlightened and sustainable than
what was provided by the Americans and Europeans before. The leitmotif for China, along with
Russia, is very much one of multipolar development and mutual partnership. The global economy
is not simply moving from one hegemon – the US – to another imperial taskmaster
– China.
One thing seems inescapable. The days of American empire are over. Its capitalist vigor has
dissipated decades ago. What the upheaval and rancor in relations between Washington and
Beijing is all about is the American ruling class trying to recreate some fantasy of former
vitality. Washington wants China to sacrifice its own development in order to somehow
rejuvenate American society. It's not going to happen.
That's not to say that American society can never be rejuvenated . It could, as it could
also in Europe. But that would entail a restructuring of the economic system involving
democratic regeneration. The "good old days" of capitalism are gone. The American empire, as
with the European empires, is obsolete.
That's the unspoken Number One agenda item at the G20 summit. Bye-bye US empire.
What America needs to do is regenerate through a reinvented social economic order, one that
is driven by democratic development and not the capitalist private profit of an elite few.
If not, the futile alternative is US failing political leaders trying to coerce China, and
others, to pay for their future. That way leads to war.
An interesting distinction: "nationalism is patriotism in its irritated state, or that nationalism recruits the patriotic
sentiment to accomplish something in a fit of anger." But he might be mixing nationalism, far right nationalism, and
fascism. It is fascism that emerges out of feeling of nation/country being humiliated, oppressed, fall into economic
despair... It tries to mobilize nation on changing the situation as a united whole -- in this sense fascism
rejects individualism and "human rights".
BTW there were quite numerous far right movements in the USA history.
The current emergence of nationalist movements is a reaction on the crisis of neoliberalism as an ideology (since 2008). So nationalism
might be a defense reaction of societies when the dominant ideology (in our case neoliberalism) collapses. It is a temporary and defensive
reaction. As the author notes: "Foreign aggression and the onset of war will reliably generate nationalist moods and responses. "
The key question here is when a nation "deserves" a sovereign state, and when it would be better off by being a part of a larger
("imperial state" if we understand empire as conglomerate of multiple nations). As it involved economics, some choices can be bad,
even devastating for people's wellbeing.
Notable quotes:
"... Macron is not the first to try to make a hard, fast, and rhetorically pungent distinction between nationalism and patriotism. Orwell attempted to do the same in a famous essay . He wrote that patriotism is "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally." ..."
"... In the end, Orwell gives a rather unsatisfying account in which all the mental and moral vices of self-interest and self-regard are transmuted and supercharged by their absorption into a nationalistic "we." Nationalists in his account hold their nations supreme, thereby encouraging themselves to traduce any other people or nation. For Orwell, the patriot prefers this to that . The nationalist privileges us over them . For us, everything, to others nothing. ..."
"... In his recent book, The Virtue of Nationalism , Yoram Hazony makes a different contrast. His work is not primarily concerned with the moral status or self-deception of individuals, but with the organization of geopolitics. For him the contrast is between nationalism and imperialism. ..."
"... Orwell is tempted to believe the nationalist thinks his nation is best in all things, but much of nationalist rhetoric throughout Europe is a rhetoric of envy or arousal. Nationalists sometimes boast about their nations, but in many circumstances they express despair about their countries; they want to excite their people to achieve more, to take themselves as seriously as some rival national actor takes itself. ..."
"... Instead, nationalism is an eruptive feature of politics. It grows out of the normal sentiments of national loyalty, like a pustule or a fever. It could even be said that nationalism is patriotism in its irritated state, or that nationalism recruits the patriotic sentiment to accomplish something in a fit of anger. ..."
"... National loyalty attaches us to a place, and to the people who share in its life. Destroying national loyalty would almost certainly bring about the return of loyalties based on creed and blood. ..."
"... One of the outstanding features of nationalist political movements, the thing that almost always strikes observers about them, is their irritated or aroused character. And it is precisely this that strikes non-nationalists as signaling danger. ..."
"... nationalist movements are teeming with powerful emotions: betrayal, anger, aggression. ..."
"... Nationalist politics tends to be opportunist; it takes other political ideas, philosophies, and forms of mobilization in hand and discards them. Nationalists throughout the 20th century adopted Communism or capitalism to acquire the patronage or weapons to throw off imperial rule, or stick it to a neighbor, for example. ..."
"... The reemergence of nationalist politics in America and abroad requires us to ask those simple questions. What is bothering them? Do they have a point? What do they want to do about it? Would it be just? In broad strokes I intend to take those questions up. ..."
"... What the vast majority of people apparently fail to realize is that the United states is an empire which by definition is a group of states or countries containing diverse ethnic and cultural identities. ..."
"... The break-up of the Soviet Union can be blamed in part for failing to establish a strong national identity ..."
"... Greenfeld describes it as "civic nationalism" to differentiate it from the ethnic, anti-liberal "nationalism" later adopted by Russia and Germany. ..."
"... Identifying "the people" as a linguistic-cultural entity with or without borders set the stage for the bloody conflicts that were fought over borders for these groups, and the discrimination and ethnic cleansing for those who didn't belong to the dominant linguistic-cultural group, to say nothing of what needed to be done about members of the dominant group who lived outside its borders. ..."
"... Also, in the late 16th century during what is now called the Wars of Religions (but which they called Civil Wars) in continental Europe, people moved from Monarchists to Republicans and back, depending of whether they were Catholics or Protestants, but mostly depending of the position of strength in which they were at the time... ..."
"... "Modern Conservatives" have a vested interest in muddying the debate, so that it does not become clear that "conservatism" is not linked to specific political or economical models, and more importantly it is not true that the Founding Fathers were all absolutist libertarian free traders... ;-) ..."
"... What, exactly, are our children inheriting? Press 2 for Spanish. ..."
"... And let us not forget neocons. ..."
"... You should be out there carving an empire for yourself, showing your supremacy and spreading the seeds of your "culture" over uncharted territories and untamed tribes... ;-) ..."
"... I think the obvious irritant lending support to Nationalist sentiments is the non benign aspects of Globalism. ..."
What is nationalism? The word is suddenly and surprisingly important when talking about the times we live in. But we seem to be
working without a shared definition.
"You know what I am? I'm a nationalist," Donald Trump said in an October rally in Houston.
French president Emmanuel Macron slapped back at a commemoration ceremony for World War I in France. "Nationalism is a betrayal
of patriotism," he said. "By saying 'our interests first, who cares about the others,' we erase what a nation holds dearest, what
gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values."
Macron is not the first to try to make a hard, fast, and rhetorically pungent distinction between nationalism and patriotism.
Orwell attempted to do the same in a
famous essay . He wrote that patriotism is "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to
be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally."
On the other hand, "The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the
nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality."
In the end, Orwell gives a rather unsatisfying account in which all the mental and moral vices of self-interest and self-regard
are transmuted and supercharged by their absorption into a nationalistic "we." Nationalists in his account hold their nations supreme,
thereby encouraging themselves to traduce any other people or nation. For Orwell, the patriot prefers this to that . The nationalist
privileges us over them . For us, everything, to others nothing.
In his recent book, The Virtue of Nationalism , Yoram Hazony makes a different contrast. His work is not primarily concerned with
the moral status or self-deception of individuals, but with the organization of geopolitics. For him the contrast is between nationalism
and imperialism. For Hazony, it is the nationalist who respects spontaneous order and pluralism. Imperialists run roughshod over
these, trampling local life for the benefit of the imperial center.
A border will rein in the ambition of the nationalist, whereas the imperial character rebels against limits. A century ago, in
what he called the days of "clashing and crashing Empires," the Irish nationalist Eoin MacNeil felt similarly. For him, the development
of a nation -- any nation -- had in it "the actuality or the potentiality of some great gift to the common good of mankind."
It's difficult to find a consistent definition of nationalism from its critics, meanwhile. Sometimes nationalism is dismissed
as the love of dirt, or mysticism about language. Other times it's the love of DNA.
In the critics' defense, though, the way nationalism has expressed itself in different nations and different times can be maddeningly
diverse. Orwell is tempted to believe the nationalist thinks his nation is best in all things, but much of nationalist rhetoric throughout
Europe is a rhetoric of envy or arousal. Nationalists sometimes boast about their nations, but in many circumstances they express
despair about their countries; they want to excite their people to achieve more, to take themselves as seriously as some rival national
actor takes itself.
I'd like to propose a different way of thinking about the question. When we use the vocabulary of political philosophies, we recognize
that we are talking about things that differ along more than one axis. Take Communism, liberalism, and conservatism: The first is
a theory of history and power. The second is a political framework built upon rights. The final disclaims the word "ideology" and
has been traditionally defined as a set of dispositions toward a political and civilizational inheritance.
I would like to sidestep Hazony's championing of nationalism as a system for organizing political order globally, a theory that
my colleague Jonah Goldberg is tempted to call "nationism."
My proposal is that nationalism as a political phenomenon is not a philosophy or science, though it may take either of those in
hand. It isn't an account of history. Instead, nationalism is an eruptive feature of politics. It grows out of the normal sentiments
of national loyalty, like a pustule or a fever. It could even be said that nationalism is patriotism in its irritated state, or that
nationalism recruits the patriotic sentiment to accomplish something in a fit of anger.
In normal or propitious circumstances, national loyalty is the peaceful form of life that exists among people who share a defined
territory and endeavor to live under the laws of that territory together. National loyalty attaches us to a place, and to the people
who share in its life. Destroying national loyalty would almost certainly bring about the return of loyalties based on creed and
blood.
One of the outstanding features of nationalist political movements, the thing that almost always strikes observers about them,
is their irritated or aroused character. And it is precisely this that strikes non-nationalists as signaling danger. Republican democracies
should be characterized by deliberation. Conservatives distrust swells of passion. Liberals want an order of voluntary rights. But
nationalist movements are teeming with powerful emotions: betrayal, anger, aggression.
Therefore, I contend, like a fever, nationalism can be curative or fatal. And, like fevers, it can come and go depending on the
nation's internal health or the external circumstances a nation finds itself in. Foreign aggression and the onset of war will reliably
generate nationalist moods and responses. But cultural change can do it too. Maybe a national language falls into sharp and sudden
decline under pressure from a more powerful lingua franca. Even something as simple or common as rapid urbanization can be felt to
agitate upon a people's loyalties, and may generate a cultural response for preserving certain rural traditions and folkways. And
of course, sometimes nationalism is excited by the possibility of some new possession coming into view, the opportunity to recover
or acquire territory or humiliate a historic rival. The variety of irritants explains the variety of nationalisms.
You tend to find a lot of nationalism where there are persistent or large irritants to the normally peaceful sense of national
loyalty. Think of western Ukraine, where the local language and political prerogatives have endured the powerful irritant of Moscow's
power and influence in its region, and even in its territory. You find a great deal of nationalism in Northern Ireland, where a lineage
of religious differences signals dueling loyalties to the United Kingdom and to Ireland.
Until recently you didn't find a lot of political nationalism in the United States, because it is a prosperous nation with unparalleled
independence of action. But we are familiar with bursts of nationalism nonetheless -- for example, at times when European powers
threatened the U.S. in the early days of the Republic, during the Civil War and its aftermath, and especially during World War I,
which coincided with the tail end of a great wave of migration into the country.
If nationalist political movements are national loyalties in this aroused state, then we must judge them on a case-by-case basis.
When non-nationalists notice the irritated and irritable character of nationalism, often the very next thing they say is, "Well,
they have a point." You would judge a nationalist movement the way you would judge any man or group of men in an agitated state.
Do you have a right to be angry about this matter? What do you intend to do about it? How do you intend to do it?
We all do this almost instinctively. We understand that there are massive differences among nationalist projects. In order to
assert his young nation's place on the world stage, John Quincy Adams sought to found a national university. We may judge that one
way, whereas we judge Andrew Jackson's Indian-removal policy very differently. In Europe, we might cheer on the ambition of the Irish
Parliamentary party to establish a home-rule parliament in Dublin. That was a nationalist project, but so was the German policy of
seeking lebensraum through the racial annihilation of the Jews and the enslavement of Poland, which we judge as perhaps the most
wicked cause in human history. We might cheer the reestablishment of a Polish nation after World War I, but deplore some of the expansionist
wars it immediately embarked upon.
Nationalist politics tends to be opportunist; it takes other political ideas, philosophies, and forms of mobilization in hand
and discards them. Nationalists throughout the 20th century adopted Communism or capitalism to acquire the patronage or weapons to
throw off imperial rule, or stick it to a neighbor, for example.
The reemergence of nationalist politics in America and abroad requires us to ask those simple questions. What is bothering them?
Do they have a point? What do they want to do about it? Would it be just? In broad strokes I intend to take those questions up.
Kontraindicated 2 days ago
There is much discussion below as to the meaning of the term "nationalism" below. In the minds of many, it seems to be a relatively
benign term.
However, even recently we have seen extremely violent episodes break out that appear to be associated with some sort of flavour
of "nationalism", however it's defined.
In the former Yugoslavia, Tito tried to create a new "nation" that would have a common identity by breaking up the "nations"
that had previously existed on the same territory. This involved the forced relocation of various groups of Serbs and Croats (and,
to a lesser extent, Bosnians) who would now all live together in peace and harmony. However, when the political structures fell,
the people fell back into their old groups and immediately began fighting each other. The end result was an incredibly bloody
and vicious civil war and the ultimate re-establishment of Nations/Countries that mapped more closely to the ethnic/cultural/race
divisions that the people involved in the conflict were concerned with. Ultimately, they (as individuals) decided which team they
wanted to belong to and, as long as the "nation" agreed, they became part of that "nation".
Similar scenarios have played out across Africa and the Middle East (which was artificially set up for a century's worth of
conflict by Europeans in 1919).
All of which is mildly interesting, but it's not really related to the reason that this topic is coming up in NRO. The reason
that we are discussing this is that Macron spent a considerable amount of time during the Armistice Ceremony decrying "Nationalism"
(which, if we treat the term in the Yugoslavian context, likely did play a significant role in two World Wars) and Fox and Friends
were then able to teach Donald Trump a new word - after which he declared himself a "Nationalist".
So rather than beating ourselves up over semantics, would it not be better instead to debate two questions?:
Does "Nationalism" represent a growing force within enough countries that it represents a significant threat to the current
world order?
Does whatever Donald Trump thinks "Nationalism" means pose a threat to America's current place in the world and is it driving
the US away from its leadership role? (will "America First" lead to "America Isolated and Alone?")
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 2 days ago
Dear Kontraindicated,
First, your last question is already answered, in the WTO, the EU, China, Canada, Mexico have raised a complaint against the
falsified use of "national security" by Trump to justify tariffs. If the USA decided then to leave the WTO, because Trump's personal
honor would be stained, (without forgetting that the US Congress should have already protested that these tariffs were illegal
in the first place) this will be another occasion to show that it is indeed "America Isolated and Alone"... Trump could have allied
himself with the EU, Canada, etc. against some of the unfair practices of China, instead he got two of the biggest trading block
in the world (including its two territorial neighbors) to ally themselves against the USA.
What a way of winning Donnie! ;-)
Then, let's go back to the question of the meaning of Nationalism.
There are two aspects:
What is the real meaning of nationalism compared to patriotism, when we remove all the fake ideological recent additions
to these terms? (and I have answered at length on this in my other comments) And this meaning is not necessarily nefarious. It
becomes a problem when one claims that each Nation must have one "sovereign" State (in the sense of country), and there should
be only one such Nation per country.
What is the meaning which is actually meant by Trump? And it is clear that he means it the way that it was whispered to
him, which is "One Nation, One and only One State; One State, One and only One Nation"...
It is no longer "e pluribus unum", but "e uno unum" (one from one), which is slightly less ambitious and certainly less of
a reason to get up in the morning and do something productive (but then there is a lot of opportunity for "Executive Time" and
playing golf)... ;-)
Leroy 2 days ago
"Out of many, one." ONE. Get it through your head. ONE. If you are MANY, you ARE Yugoslavia. And that doesn't end well.
TitoPerdue 2 days ago
I try to imagine my parents being informed that they must now accustom themselves to white people being turned into a minority.
Would have been stunned, my folks, who first arrived in 1771.
My folks: "But what did we do wrong!"
Me: "You've been too successful and must now be punished."
My folks: "What's wrong with being successful!"
Me: "It's racist. Ask Jonah Goldberg. You know how much the Jews despise ethnocentrism."
Gaurus 3 days ago
This is a useful take on the subject. There is a big Tower of Babel problem with this word as it seems to mean different things
to different people, and different nations also define it differently.
This language barrier is why Macron's criticism of the President should be taken with a grain of salt. The left's myopic/robotic
attempts to unilaterally define this word on their terms is reprehensible, just like so many of their other attempts at PC authoritarianism
aka thought control which is pushed by the national media.
What the vast majority of people apparently fail to realize is that the United states is an empire which by definition
is a group of states or countries containing diverse ethnic and cultural identities.
You must at some point come to ask yourself, "what keeps these diverse groups contained in the U.S. from fracturing, dividing,
and falling apart?" The answer is nationalism/national identity. It is the keystone or glue that binds these diverse ethnic and
cultural groups together. Anyone or anything that tugs or tears at nationalism therefore is altogether a bad thing for the country
and will sow division and strife that was not previously there. Ultimately civil war could result if those seeking to divide the
country for political gain go too far and the left ignorantly seems all-in on doing this.
Applying recent trends in politics using this as a backdrop, one can see how pro-globalists wouldn't care to attack nationalism
as they are by definition against the very concept of a nation-state and want top bring back good old feudalism, but this time
on a global scale. For comparison Russia is another example of an empire that is aware It needs to fuel nationalist sentiment
to hold itself together. The EU is an emerging empire that is conflicted with what this means. The break-up of the Soviet Union
can be blamed in part for failing to establish a strong national identity.
Plymouth mtng, PA 3 days ago
Well said! This truth is exemplified by the evidentiary and documented history that the Founding Fathers and Jackson, Lincoln,
and Grant and the whole of 19th century America used the language of Liberty and Patriot to define the American Republic.
Leroy 3 days ago
I just learned something new. I thought that ethnicity was the same as race. It isn't. Ethnicity: "the fact or state
of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition." By that definition, we're all in an ethnic
group, and we can belong to smaller ethnic groups as well.
If Americans don't become nationalists, understand that we share common interests and goals, it won't matter how much we love
our country, because it will be unrecognizable.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Dear Leroy,
I happen to think that "race" does not exist, but we know that in the USA when people say "ethnic" they mean "race"... ;-)
I remember 30 years ago, at the hairdresser in London, picking up a copy of the tabloid "The Sun", and reading a sentence where
"ethnic" was used to mean "foreigner with a darker complexion"... (something like "the three men were ethnic") ;-)
Once more "ethnic" means "national", nothing more nothing less: "ethnos" is the Greek translation of "natio". These are words
which have been used for a few thousand years, and we have to understand what they really meant and what they really mean now,
and to remove from them the "ideological" additions.
The definition which you give shows such ideological addition, by adding "cultural" and "tradition". By definition a "nation",
as the same traditions and therefore the same "culture": they are just redundant in this definition.
An ethnic group is a nation. So yes, you are in an ethnic group, and you can "define" smaller and smaller ethnic groups within
the bigger one (the "tribes"). So in Gaul, there were many different "nations", who were Gauls, but had a great diversity between
them (just read a few pages of Cćsar).
But at some point when there are many ethnic groups within you country (and this is how a country like France was made by the
addition of regions with varying ethnic backgrounds and the migration/invasion of many other ethnic groups), at some point the
only unity is in the country, the "patria", this is there that you find the common interests and goals.
So you see in France the difference going from Nation to the Country, because in the early middle ages the king was called
"King of the French" Rex Francorum, (there were many other nations recognized on the French territory) and in the later part of
the Middle Ages, he was called "King of France", Rex Franciae.
But because the word "nation" is important, and people would not let it go, there has been a tendency to use it to mean "country",
as when we speak of the National Anthem, but this is by a shifting of its original sense.
When we want to oppose nationalism and patriotism, we need to go back to the original technical meaning, not invent a new one.
PS: the reason why "ethnic" and "race" are not the same thing, and we saw it with "Pocahontas" controversy (I mentioned it
then), it is because a nation can "adopt" somebody who was not genetically related to them. They shall still be fully part of
the nation... but their genetic material shall be different.
Leroy 3 days ago
I know you enjoy history, but the meaning of words can shift. I'll go with the meaning of the word Nation that the founders
meant when they founded this nation. Nations are sovereign, make laws and control territory. A group of people, who share a culture,
but who do not control territory is not a nation.
Hub312 3 days ago ( Edited )
Whoever wants a clear-headed understanding of nationalism, I suggest you read the world's foremost scholar on nationalism,
Liah Greenfeld's "Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity" and Pierre Manent's concise but rich "Democracy Without Nations?".
Nationalism is really just another word for modernity and democracy. . It arose in England at the end of the 17th and the 18th
centuries as the liberal answer to the question: if the people are sovereign, who are "the people" that we are now calling the
nation? Answer: those who live within the borders controlled by the sovereign. The nation state is our home and our protection
and we're all in it together regardless of language, culture, etc. This was the essentially liberal idea that was adopted and
adapted by the French. This was the form adopted by Americans too. Greenfeld describes it as "civic nationalism" to differentiate
it from the ethnic, anti-liberal "nationalism" later adopted by Russia and Germany.
It is the Russians, followed by the Germans and other central Europeans who followed their lead that gave nationalism a bad
name. Identifying "the people" as a linguistic-cultural entity with or without borders set the stage for the bloody conflicts
that were fought over borders for these groups, and the discrimination and ethnic cleansing for those who didn't belong to the
dominant linguistic-cultural group, to say nothing of what needed to be done about members of the dominant group who lived outside
its borders.
Empires and nations based on racial and ethnic identity have bloody borders, since it is impossible to draw any border anywhere
in the world that includes all members of the dominant group and excludes or oppresses all members of other groups.
Are they both called nationalisms? Yes. But they couldn't be farther apart.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Dear Hub312,
the word that is missing in your comment is "country". "if the people are sovereign, who are "the people" that we are
now calling the nation?... etc."
I am interested to see in which English author of the end of the 17th century you find the expression of "sovereign people"
or the "people are sovereign". Do you have some primary sources? I do not find it in Locke, but perhaps I am looking in the wrong
place.
And in the UK, in the 18th and 19th century, and still now, it is clear that English, Welsh, Irish and Scots are different
nations in the same "country"... Today, in Rugby the 6 nations championship takes place actually between four countries.
In the Middle Ages it is clear that the "supreme power" "summa potestas" comes God, and after this it is a question of open
debate whether it is invested directly in the King, or through the people who then may elect a king, or decide on a Republic.
And I find in the Renaissance of the 16th and early 17th century, many proponents of a summa potestas that belongs to the people,
which gives incidentally rise to the possibility of removing from power bad kings, but they happen to be Spanish and Catholics:
Francisco Suarez, Juan de Mariana and Roberto Bellarmino... worse, they are all Jesuits... ;-), and they claim that the supreme
power comes from the consent of the governed, and they were all dead by 1630... So that's it when it comes to the notion of people's
sovereignty "arising" in England in the late 17th century... It was up and awake already.
I cannot find "souveraineté" as a word (which is different from having a "sovereign"), before Jean Bodin (16th century) (but
you perhaps have better sources than mine), then I can direct you to many discussions about the nature and origin of "souveraineté"
in French in the 16th and 17th century.
Rousseau (mid-18th century) is famous for ascribing sovereignty to the people, but he was not English (although he was Protestant),
nor French, but he is also the inspiration for the "dictatorship of the people", and the Terror.
Rousseau is part of the Social Contract school, to which is usually adjoined his predecessors Hobbes and Locke, but there is
no doubt that Hobbes is a partisan of absolute monarchy, and again I fail to see in Locke a direct notion of people's sovereignty:
when he speaks of civil sovereigns he speaks of the "magistrates" who rule. But I am certain that you shall direct me to the proper
place in Locke, which currently escapes me.
The thing is that the "consent of the people" or even the "sovereignty of the people", or the "social contract" does not mean
that they are individually free afterwards... they may actually live under an absolute monarchy and still have "consented" to
it, or under a dictatorship of the people (socialist), or a national dictatorship, or a mixture of both... ;-)
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Of course, as I read again what I wrote, I made the most silly of blunders: Bellarmino was Italian, not Spanish... this invalidates
all that I have ever written.. ;-)
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Also, in the late 16th century during what is now called the Wars of Religions (but which they called Civil Wars) in
continental Europe, people moved from Monarchists to Republicans and back, depending of whether they were Catholics or
Protestants, but mostly depending of the position of strength in which they were at the time... There is a very interesting literature regarding the nature
and origin of the supreme power, and whether the people must have absolute obedience to the the sovereign civil power (whatever
shape it has). Of course none of this has to do with 17th century England, except that the same questions where asked and answered
their own way in the English Civil War (which was a religious war), when the Round-Heads decided to chop that of their King, whose
shape they did not like. ;-)
Bellarmino wrote against James I when he tried to sustain is absolute divine right to rule.
All of this to say that these questions were raised long before the Glorious Revolution. ;-)
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 2 days ago
Dear Hub312,
well, why would I read a secondary source book, if it does not know the primary sources which I know?
If this book describes nothing more than what you described (i.e. England, end of the 17th century, etc.), which is refuted
by the sources that I know, why would I waste time reading it? it could not edify me, if it does not add to what I know.
Hub312 4 hours ago ( Edited )
...and you would love the Manent book, written from a very European liberal perspective, which is brief and very concise.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Dear Michael Brendan Dougherty,
I have a revolutionary proposal: instead of investing words with supposed meanings in order to be able to say that we approve
of them or not (which in English is called begging the question), why don't we simply use the etymological meaning of the word?
;-)
It's easy, "national" means precisely the same thing as "ethnic": one is Latin, the other is Greek. You know what ethnicity
is a euphemism for in the US: "race". A "nation" does not need to have borders to be a nation, the "barbarian nations" of late
Antiquity early Middle Ages were roving nations. This is why also initially German nationalism i the 19th and early 20th century
was expansive: it meant to "unify" the German nation in one country. This is why Irish, Scottish or Welsh nationalism is divisive
and restrictive, it is meant to separate the English (seen as invaders) from the local version of a Celtic nation.
The "Patria" is the Land of the fathers: this is the "country", the "land".
The one is "Blood", the other is "Soil", you see that each can be assigned bad meaning or good meaning, if one wants to.
Behind this you have the age old conflicts between Cain and Abel, between the roving pastor, and the settled farmer.
Both Nation and Patria can be a limit within which to stay, or a limit to expand: so one can be an "imperialist" or not, whether
one is a patriot or a nationalist. Because even a patriot, may require more land, to ensure the safety of the one that he has,
his own version of "lebensraum".
These two notions are also linked to the "jus sanguinis" (right of blood) and the "jus soli" (right of soil/land) question
regarding citizenship.
In countries which have official separate notions of citizenship and nationality (in the former USSR for instance), citizenship
is clearly ascribed to the country, and nationality is clearly ascribed to ethnicity: so one can be a Russian national, citizen
of Kazakhstan.
It is the notion of the Nation-State (which is comparatively recent), which tends to make believe that for each identifiable
"Nation" there must be one identifiable "Country" (a sovereign state). It is the geographical difficulty if not impossibility
of this which lead to the political upheavals in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was trying to merge Nationalism and Patriotism
that created the problems.
In some cases when supposed "nations" wanted to be unified within one country, there was the notion of "Pan-somethingism",
Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, etc., and/or Nations wanted to become independent: so you had the fights for the unification of Italy,
Germany, the independence of Poland, Greece, etc., within the 19th century. And then there were all these places were the population
was too mixed to make any such separation easy: the Balkans, the remnants of the Turkish Empire (a perfect example together with
the Persian Empire (for those who read Xenophon), why "Imperialism" does not mean "centralization"), remnants of "German" populations
in "Slavic" countries, etc. You know what followed.
So both nationalism and patriotism can have a good or a bad meaning, depending of how one intends to use them.
For instance the notion of a "Europe of Nations" is what helped secure the Good Friday Agreement, because another way of saying
it is a "Europe of Regions", where Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Basques, Bretons (of little Brittany), etc., have a possibility of
recognition, without necessarily breaking up "countries".
So you are right there is much more than one axis of meaning, and it is important that one opposes the right terms, and this
is the responsibility of what used to be called the "publicists", those who speak of the Res Publica, what we now call "pundits":
but in the USA none are more adept at using the wrong formulations than the "modern conservative" pundits. Why? well, "modern
conservative" says it all... because you are partly right conservatism is about "a set of dispositions toward a political and
civilizational inheritance", and "modern conservatism" is therefore an oxymoron. ;-)
And this is why "Modern Conservatism" became such an easy prey for the Alt-Right Anarchists: because they are not grounded
in an actual "tradition", but like all the "progressives" (which they are), they have to reinvent for themselves a new beginning...
in the 1950s, they said, now that there is National Review, we shall become "real" conservatives, "modern conservatives", before
us, they were not really conservatives... ;-)
But you cannot be a real conservative if you have to identify a date for the birth of your movement.
"Modern Conservatives" have a vested interest in muddying the debate, so that it does not become clear that "conservatism"
is not linked to specific political or economical models, and more importantly it is not true that the Founding Fathers were all
absolutist libertarian free traders... ;-)
So Conservatism is not the opposite of Liberalism, it is the opposite of Progressivism. Imperialism is indeed about expansion
of power, but it is not necessarily about "centralization", as many empires not only have left the "local life" untouched, but
this "local life" disappeared when a supposedly more "liberal" power took over...
Therefore I do beg American publicists, especially those of the conservative variety writing in NRO, stop begging the question
when you falsely "define" terms, so that they align with what you deem to be good or bad; be instead a real conservative, go back
to the etymology and the actual meaning of the words, see how they were used initially, not only in the last 50 or even 100 years...
because then you are using "progressive" definitions, and you keep repeating that "progressives" always change the meaning of
the words to suit their purpose... You are right on that one. ;-)
Leroy 3 days ago
Conservatism "has been traditionally defined as a set of dispositions toward a political and civilizational inheritance"?
That can't be true. We all know that conservatism now means free trade, where American workers are replaced by Chinese slave
labor. We know that conservatism means an insatiable desire for foreign migrants, adding millions of campesino's to our economy
every year. Most of all, we know that conservatism stands for foreign imperialist wars and globalist profits.
What, exactly, are our children inheriting? Press 2 for Spanish.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Dear Leroy,
I agree with you that US Conservatives are Progressives by another name. see my main comment here. ;-)
TitoPerdue 2 days ago
Indeed. And let us not forget neocons.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 2 days ago
Dear TitoPerdue,
given that the Founding Fathers were already progressives, who for you committed the original sin of believing that "all men
are created equal", why do you still live in that den of iniquity that is the USA?
You should be out there carving an empire for yourself, showing your supremacy and spreading the seeds of your "culture" over
uncharted territories and untamed tribes... ;-)
I hear that there are still some fairly inaccessible places in Papua-New-Guinea... ;-)
Perfect place to show your supremacy, or end up in the cooking pot. For once your philosophy of life would become true: eat
or be eaten! ;-)
hawkesappraisal 3 days ago
I agree. "Nationalism" is a charged but nebulous word, but it describes something that is clearly important in spite of the
obscurity of its meaning. So the struggle to come up with coherent definitions is worthwhile. The current Nationalism is probably
best defined by, Progressives saying "America sucks!" and the Right responding, "No it doesn't! America is Awesome!"
freedom1 3 days ago ( Edited )
Thoughtful piece. I think the obvious irritant lending support to Nationalist sentiments is the non benign aspects of Globalism.
"What do you mean by claiming Hersh "cozys up" to MIC ppl? And what would be a specific
example of a story he broke after doing that?"
Our Men in Iran?
"We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the
D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada," a former senior American intelligence
official told me. ... In a separate interview, a retired four-star general, who has advised
the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues, said that he had been
privately briefed in 2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in
Nevada
His conversations with Lieutenant Calley are apparently what allowed him to break the My
Lai massacre story as well, even though members of the military had already spoken out about
it, and there had been already been charges brought. It just revealed the story to the
general public, which prompted a fuller investigation and courts martial. I'm sure there are
others.
So, obviously Hersh's "cozying up" (surely not the right term for it, though) is in the
interests of raising public awareness of nefarious deeds, and is not scared of painting these
organizations in a bad light, whereas Mazzetti's goal here seems to be to maintain his
privileged access by providing favors - totally different motivations. It's rather easy to
contrast the two, which "smartypants54" has even stated here.
Whatever the case, it's true that elements of the NYT have been mouthpieces more or less
for government and corporate power for a long time. While I agree with Glenn about the faux
cynicism perpetuating this kind of activity - "don't be naive, this is done all the time" - I
can understand that it exists.
Such cynicism on the part of the public, rather than being an acknowledgment of
acceptance and approval of such practices, can also be seen as part of a more radical
critique of the corporate media in general, and the NYT particularly, in that such
organizations - not that I totally agree with this - , by their very nature, can't be
reformed and can never be totally effective checks on power because of the way they're
structured, and who they answer to.
That's definitely not a reason to stop pointing it out, though.
"... Here's a wonderful example of the NYT's propensity for re-writing history: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/08/30/ny-times-scrubs-mention-cia-arming-syrian-rebels-177311/ Long live the memory hole. ..."
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence Victor Marchetti
"It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to
censor before its publication. The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages but they
stood firm and only 168 passages were censored. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to
publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that
were challenged but later uncensored."
There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult -- the cult of
intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence
Agency.
Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government.
Its membership, extending far beyond governmental circles, reaches into the power centers
of industry, commerce, finance, and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important
public influence -- the academic world and the communications media.
The cult of
intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy.
The purpose of
the cult is to further the foreign policies of the U.S. government by covert and usually
illegal means, while at the same time containing the spread of its avowed enemy, communism.
Traditionally, the cult's hope has been to foster a world order in which America would
reign supreme, the unchallenged international leader.
Today, however, that dream stands
tarnished by time and frequent failures. Thus, the cult's objectives are now less
grandiose, but no less disturbing. It seeks largely to advance America's self-appointed
role as the dominant arbiter of social, economic, and political change in the awakening
regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And its worldwide war against communism has to
some extent been reduced to a covert struggle to maintain a self-serving stability in the
Third World, using whatever clandestine methods are available.
Have some heart. It wouldn't be right to stop Mueller and his pals from billing their law
fees of $800/hr right before Christmas. Do you have any idea how much a yacht runs these
days?
A brand new expose
by Bloomberg shines light on modern day loan sharks: city officials that are armed with badges
like Vadim Barbarovich, who earned $1.7 million last year, easily giving him the most lucrative
job within the government of New York City. His official title is City Marshal, and he's one of
35 that the mayor has appointed to compete for fees from recovering debts. While traditionally
marshals evict tenants and tow cars, Barbarovich has found his place in part of a debt
collection industry that allows them to use their legal authority on behalf of predatory
lenders.
It's a practice that dates back to the 17th century. Back then, jobs across the Hudson River
for marshals yielded the highest fees. Under current law, marshals are entitled to keep 5% of
cash that they collect. The city also has a Sheriff's office that does similar work, but those
employees get a salary. Several mayors have called for an end to the marshal system over the
last few decades, but nobody has been successful in getting the state legislature to act upon
it.
While Barbarovich's jurisdiction is supposed to end at city limits, he has worked to recover
debts from places like California and Illinois, among others nationwide.
One person he "recovered" debt money from, to the tune of $56,000, Jose Soliz, asked: "How
could they pull all that money? I've never even been to New York."
When asked about Barbarovich's practices, a spokesman for the New York City Marshals
Association said that marshals simply "enforce court judgments".
The genesis of these judgments are often lenders who advance money to people at rates that
can sometimes top 400% annualized. They have found a loophole around loansharking rules by
stating that they are instead buying the money that businesses will likely make in the future
at a discounted price. Courts have been supportive of this distinction and, as such, the
"merchant cash advance" industry has grown to about $15 billion a year.
As soon as lenders see that borrowers have fallen behind they call marshals, whose job is to
force the banks to handover whatever cash is left. They do this by using a court order stamped
by a clerk that's obtained without going before a judge. Banks generally comply immediately,
without checking if the marshal has the right to actually take the funds. The borrower often
doesn't understand what's going on until the money is gone.
Prior to becoming a marshal, Barbarovich worked in property control earning about $70,000 a
year and sometimes volunteered as a Russian translator. Upon starting as a marshal in 2013, he
earned about $90,000. When cash advance companies discovered the power he had, his income
skyrocketed and his earnings increased almost 20 fold.
His financial disclosures show that his work enforcing Supreme Court property judgments
skyrocketed dramatically over the last two years, as did the amount of cash he recovered. In
some respects, the collection process is like the wild west: marshals don't draw a salary, earn
fees from customers and are encouraged to compete with one another, which can catalyze
aggressive behavior.
Avery Steinberg, a lawyer in White Plains, New York, who represents a few clients whose
accounts were seized by Barbarovich, told Bloomberg: "He goes about it in any which way he can.
He has a reputation of being a bully."
The Bloomberg article tells the story of Jose Soliz, whose company builds concrete block
walls for schools and stores in the Texas Panhandle. He had started borrowing from cash advance
companies several years ago and found himself trapped in a cycle of debt.
He eventually wound up taking out a $23,000 loan that he agreed to pay back within nine
weeks – to the tune of $44,970 : an 800% annualized interest rate.
He says that the fees were more than expected, so he stopped payment. When he went to go pay
his employees a couple days later, he noticed that his Wells Fargo account had been frozen and
his paychecks bounced.
He found out the hard way that cash advance companies like the one he used required him to
sign a document agreeing in advance that if there's a legal dispute, the borrower will
automatically lose, rendering any type of judicial review useless.
Those who are signing these agreements don't often realize the power that they are waiving.
Based on these agreements, the lender can accuse the borrower of defaulting, without proof, and
have a court judgment signed by a clerk on the same day.
This is exactly what happened to Soliz. His lender obtained such a judgment against him in
Buffalo, New York and called in Barbarovich to collect. Even though his Wells Fargo account was
opened in Texas, and the judgment was only valid in New York State, the bank turned over
$56,764 to the marshal. The rule is supposedly that marshals can go after out of state funds as
long as they serve demands at a bank location in New York City, according to the New York City
Department of Investigation.
On the other hand, it's not clear whether or not banks have to comply with these orders.
Some banks reject these demands but most have a policy of following any legal order they
receive so as to avoid the hassle of reviewing them and not to ruffle any feathers.
Wells Fargo, when contacted by Bloomberg, stated that it "carefully review[s] each legal
order to ensure it's valid and properly handled."
Barbarovich claims that he serves all legal orders by hand, though that is disputed by
Soliz's lawyer.
The Department of Investigation reportedly "continues to review" Barbarovich's work and
offered few specifics to Bloomberg.
The Department has stated that they're conducting multiple investigations into the
enforcement of judgments and focusing on whether not marshals are serving orders by hand.
Reminds me of another 'vishibalo' (shakedown artist) Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel who's parents
hailed from Odessa, Ukraine (a city which until today is still run by the Jewish mafia) and
his boyhood friend Meyer Lansky (who came from Belarus), who formed the first Jewish criminal
group in New York. Fiddler on the Roof: "If I were a rich man...... Tradition! Tradition!
"
His jurisdiction ends in NY, bank in Texas has no reason to comply, Soliz could suecthe
bank and sue the 'marshall' - he has no legal authority outside of nyc to seize funds absent
a court order in that jurisdiction.
Guy has a property interest of some sort in his funds being available. At very least due
process rights that were ignored.
My state had a loan shark running multiple easy cash joints and spending the money on all
sorts of properties and businesses. Voters capped his interest on loans and he left the
state.
"It's a practice that dates back to the 17th century."
Incorrect. This was a method used in ancient Rome to collect taxes. It's the reason
landowners and farmers abandoned their land. Excessive taxation and the capacity to acquire
wealth by collecting taxes from the state. By the way, the IRS pays 10%.
February 21, 1871 and the Forty-First Congress is in session. I refer you to the "Acts of
the Forty-First Congress," Section 34, Session III, chapters 61 and 62. On this date in the
history of our nation, Congress passed an Act titled: "An Act To Provide A Government for the
District of Columbia." This is also known as the "Act of 1871." What does this mean? Well, it
means that Congress, under no constitutional authority to do so, created a separate form of
government for the District of Columbia, which is a ten mile square parcel of land.
In essence, this Act formed the corporation known as THE UNITED STATES. Note the
capitalization, because it is important. This corporation, owned by foreign interests, moved
right in and shoved the original "organic" version of the Constitution into a dusty corner.
With the "Act of 1871," our Constitution was defaced in the sense that the title was
block-capitalized and the word "for" was changed to the word "of" in the title. The original
Constitution drafted by the Founding Fathers, was written in this manner:
"The Constitution for the united states of America".
The altered version reads: "THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA". It is the
corporate constitution. It is NOT the same document you might think it is. The corporate
constitution operates in an economic capacity and has been used to fool the People into
thinking it is the same parchment that governs the Republic. It absolutely is not.
Capitalization -- an insignificant change? Not when one is referring to the context of a
legal document, it isn't. Such minor alterations have had major impacts on each subsequent
generation born in this country. What the Congress did with the passage of the Act of 1871
was create an entirely new document, a constitution for the government of the District of
Columbia. The kind of government THEY created was a corporation. The new, altered
Constitution serves as the constitution of the corporation, and not that of America. Think
about that for a moment.
"He found out the hard way that cash advance companies like the one he used required him
to sign a document agreeing in advance that if there's a legal dispute, the borrower will
automatically lose, rendering any type of judicial review useless."
Immoral? Yep.
Unethical? Of course.
Surprising? Nope.
Bottom line is, these dumb shits signed off on a bottom line that SPELLED OUT THIS EXACT
PROCESS if they defaulted.
"... With the advent of Obama, many peace leaders and followers joined the Obama political machine .Those who were not co-opted were quickly disillusioned on all counts. Obama continued the ongoing wars and added new ones -- Libya, Honduras, Syria. The US occupation in Iraq led to new extremist militia armies which preceded to defeat US trained vassal armies up to the gates of Baghdad. In short time Obama launched a flotilla of warships and warplanes to the South China Sea and dispatched added troops to Afghanistan. ..."
"... The anti-war movement which started in opposition to the Iraq war was marginalized by the two dominant parties. The result was the multiplication of new wars. By the second year of Obama's presidency the US was engaged in seven wars. ..."
"... The international conditions are ripening. Washington has alienated countries around the world ;it is challenged by allies and faces formidable rivals. The domestic economy is polarized and the elites are divided. ..."
Over the past three decades, the US government has engaged in over a dozen wars, none of
which have evoked popular celebrations either before, during or after. Nor did the government
succeed in securing popular support in its efforts to confront the economic crises of 2008
– 2009.
This paper will begin by discussing the major wars of our time, namely the two US invasions
of Iraq . We will proceed to analyze the nature of the popular response and the political
consequences.
In the second section we will discuss the economic crises of 2008 -2009, the government
bailout and popular response. We will conclude by focusing on the potential powerful changes
inherent in mass popular movements.
The Iraq War and the US Public
In the run-up to the two US wars against Iraq, (1990 – 01 and 2003 – 2011) there
was no mass war fever, nor did the public celebrate the outcome. On the contrary both wars were
preceded by massive protests in the US and among EU allies. The first Iraqi invasion was
opposed by the vast-majority of the US public despite a major mass media and regime propaganda
campaign backed by President George H. W. Bush. Subsequently, President Clinton launched a
bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998 with virtually no public support or
approval.
March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush launched the second major war against Iraq despite
massive protests in all major US cities. The war was officially concluded by President Obama in
December 2011. President Obama's declaration of a successful conclusion failed to elicit
popular agreement.
Several questions arise:
Why mass opposition at the start of the Iraq wars and why did they fail to continue?
Why did the public refuse to celebrate President Obama's ending of the war in 2011?
Why did mass protests of the Iraq wars fail to produce durable political vehicles to
secure the peace?
The Anti-Iraq War Syndrome
The massive popular movements which actively opposed the Iraq wars had their roots in
several historical sources. The success of the movements that ended the Viet Nam war, the ideas
that mass activity could resist and win was solidly embedded in large segments of the
progressive public. Moreover, they strongly held the idea that the mass media and Congress
could not be trusted; this reinforced the idea that mass direct action was essential to reverse
Presidential and Pentagon war policies.
The second factor encouraging US mass protest was the fact that the US was internationally
isolated. Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush wars faced hostile regime and mass
opposition in Europe, the Middle East and in the UN General Assembly. US activists felt that
they were part of a global movement which could succeed.
Thirdly the advent of Democratic President Clinton did not reverse the mass anti-war
movements.The terror bombing of Iraq in December 1998 was destructive and Clinton's war against
Serbia kept the movements alive and active To the extent that Clinton avoided large scale
long-term wars, he avoided provoking mass movements from re-emerging during the latter part of
the 1990's.
The last big wave of mass anti-war protest occurred from 2003 to 2008. Mass anti-war protest
to war exploded soon after the World Trade Center bombings of 9/11. White House exploited the
events to proclaim a global 'war on terror', yet the mass popular movements interpreted the
same events as a call to oppose new wars in the Middle East.
Anti-war leaders drew activists of the entire decade, envisioning a 'build-up' which could
prevent the Bush regime from launching a series of wars without end. Moreover, the
vast-majority of the public was not convinced by officials' claims that Iraq, weakened and
encircled, was stocking 'weapons of mass destruction' to attack the US.
Large scale popular protests challenged the mass media, the so called respectable press and
ignored the Israeli lobby and other Pentagon warlords demanding an invasion of Iraq. The
vast-majority of American, did not believe they were threatened by Saddam Hussain they felt a
greater threat from the White House's resort to severe repressive legislation like the Patriot
Act. Washington's rapid military defeat of Iraqi forces and its occupation of the Iraqi state
led to a decline in the size and scope of the anti-war movement but not to its potential mass
base.
Two events led to the demise of the anti-war movements. The anti-war leaders turned from
independent direct action to electoral politics and secondly, they embraced and channeled their
followers to support Democratic presidential candidate Obama. In large part the movement
leaders and activists believed that direct action had failed to prevent or end the previous two
Iraq wars. Secondly, Obama made a direct demagogic appeal to the peace movement – he
promised to end wars and pursue social justice at home.
With the advent of Obama, many peace leaders and followers joined the Obama political
machine .Those who were not co-opted were quickly disillusioned on all counts. Obama continued
the ongoing wars and added new ones -- Libya, Honduras, Syria. The US occupation in Iraq led to
new extremist militia armies which preceded to defeat US trained vassal armies up to the gates
of Baghdad. In short time Obama launched a flotilla of warships and warplanes to the South
China Sea and dispatched added troops to Afghanistan.
The mass popular movements of the previous two decades were totally disillusioned, betrayed
and disoriented. While most opposed Obama's 'new' and 'old wars' they struggled to find new
outlets for their anti-war beliefs. Lacking alternative anti-war movements, they were
vulnerable to the war propaganda of the media and the new demagogue of the right. Donald Trump
attracted many who opposed the war monger Hilary Clinton.
The Bank Bailout: Mass Protest
Denied
In 2008, at the end of his presidency, President George W. Bush signed off on a massive
federal bailout of the biggest Wall Street banks who faced bankruptcy from their wild
speculative profiteering.
In 2009 President Obama endorsed the bailout and urged rapid Congressional approval.
Congress complied to a $700-billion- dollar handout ,which according to Forbes (July 14, 2015)
rose to $7.77 trillion. Overnight hundreds of thousands of American demanded Congress rescind
the vote. Under immense popular protest, Congress capitulated. However President Obama and the
Democratic Party leadership insisted: the bill was slightly modified and approved. The 'popular
will' was denied. The protests were neutralized and dissipated. The bailout of the banks
proceeded, while several million households watched while their homes were foreclosed ,despite
some local protests. Among the anti-bank movement, radical proposals flourished, ranging from
calls to nationalize them, to demands to let the big banks go bankrupt and provide federal
financing for co-operatives and community banks.
Clearly the vast-majority of the American people were aware and acted to resist
corporate-collusion to plunder taxpayers.
Conclusion: What is to be Done?
Mass popular mobilizations are a reality in the United States. The problem is that they have
not been sustained and the reasons are clear : they lacked political organization which would
go beyond protests and reject lesser evil policies.
The anti-war movement which started in opposition to the Iraq war was marginalized by the
two dominant parties. The result was the multiplication of new wars. By the second year of
Obama's presidency the US was engaged in seven wars.
By the second year of Trump's Presidency the US was threatening nuclear wars against Russia,
Iran and other 'enemies' of the empire. While public opinion was decidedly opposed, the
'opinion' barely rippled in the mid-term elections.
Where have the anti-war and anti-bank masses gone? I would argue they are still with us but
they cannot turn their voices into action and organization if they remain in the Democratic
Party . Before the movements can turn direct action into effective political and economic
transformations, they need to build struggles at every level from the local to the
national.
The international conditions are ripening. Washington has alienated countries around the
world ;it is challenged by allies and faces formidable rivals. The domestic economy is
polarized and the elites are divided.
Mobilizations, as in France today, are self-organized through the internet; the mass media
are discredited. The time of liberal and rightwing demagogues is passing; the bombast of Trump
arouses the same disgust as ended the Obama regime.
Optimal conditions for a new comprehensive movement that goes beyond piecemeal reforms is on
the agenda. The question is whether it is now or in future years or decades?
Mass protest, which must ignore the mass media, depends on organizers. No organizers--no
protest. Since organizers are mostly working for somebodies agenda, those agendas apparently
don't want mass protest against war. They only want to push multi-genderism and minority
resistance, these days.
" Where have the anti-war and anti-bank masses gone? I would argue they are still with us
but they cannot turn their voices into action and organization if they remain in the
Democratic Party . Before the movements can turn direct action into effective political and
economic transformations, they need to build struggles at every level from the local to the
national. "
.gov gives not one damn what the people think and they willl do what pleases their
masters. We are allowed to "vote" once in a while to maintain the illusion that they
care.
Very few Americans are anti-war. They are just fine with endless war and the killing of
millions of people with brown skin for any reason the government gives. Even the so-called
anti-war protesters of the Sixties are now pro war. Back then there was a draft, and they
were at risk of dying in the war. Turns they were only against themselves dying, not somebody
else's child. The volunteer army is staffed by the unfortunates of American society who have
very few options except the military. Uneducated rural whites and inner city black youths are
today's military. Poor white trash and ghetto blacks. Who cares if they die? That's the
attitude of the Sixties anti-war crowd. Hypocrites.
A universal draft, male and female, would stop all the wars in a day.
True, I also believe many Americans turn their heads toward these endless/unneeded wars
because the "enemies" mortar fire is not landing in our own backyard.
But White people know if they pray, buy groceries, buy clothes for kids, keep their
appearance up... then losing jobs & middle class is only an obstacle if you don't work
harder... Fascism is about responsibility, looking and acting like the winner class. White
people will enlist in military, police, fire department... will work harder... will work 2-4
jobs... will blame themselves for everything.
No warning or reason given for closures,Customers, employees and communities are outraged
after Papa Gino's Pizza abruptly closed dozens of locations across New England overnight.
Now that congress serves only as a mechanism for creating and maintaining skimming
operations and rigging all markets, it is imperative that citizens get no information. Since
organized crime also owns the major media outlets, that is an easy task. With no information
in the mainstream there is no anti war and no anti bank.
Gone, like the people who wanted a real 9/11 investigation. Yahoos out there still think
that if it was an inside job someone would have spoke out by now . Lol
They are all their, they are just silenced in corporate main stream media whilst corporate
main stream media absolutely 'SCREAMS' about identity politics, not an accident. Identity
politics is the deep state and shadow government plan to silence the masses about fiscal and
foreign policy.
For example, even though I am centre left, I was there in the beginning of the alt right,
it was not white supremacy for the first few weeks it was Libertarian vs corporate
Republican, then the deep state and shadow government stepped in and using corporate main
stream media, re-branded alt-right as white supremacy, is was really fast.
Most people don't even know alt-right started out as very much Libertarian taking on the
corporate state and that is what triggered that attack and a stream of fake right wingers
(deep state agents) screaming they were the alt-right together with corporate main stream
media, to ensure Libertarian where silenced.
Look at it now, how much do you here from Libertarians, practically nothing, every time
they try, they are targeted as alt-right which they were as in the alternate to corporate
Republicans much the same as the Corporate Democrats. From my perspective the real left and
the Libertarians had much more in common, than the corporate Republicans and the corporate
Democrats (both attacking the libertarians and the greens to silence them).
They are all there fighting, just totally silenced in corporate main stream media, you
have to go to https://www.rt.com/ to find
them.
Bankers control the CFR, the CFR controls the media and most gov positions and most of the
deepstate 3 letter agencies.. Everything said is tracked by the NSA and everywhere you go is
tracked by your phone and cars. Ever wonder how they take over a grass root movement so fast?
Think about it.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every
Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether
he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass
arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city,
people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the
downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing
left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people
with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly
have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's
thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom
enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and
simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
The United States is now too big for popular protest. How can I, living in California,
have common cause with someone living in New York? We live on opposite sides of this
continent and have wildly different climates. Our heavy hitters are in Technology while New
York has Banking and Wall St.
Our elected officials are unable to get crap done in the same manner we're unable to get a
good protest underway. We can withdraw somewhat or go off grid where possible but that's
about it.
African American lack of support for the Iraq war:
According to several polls taken right before the war, only a minority of African-Americans
supported the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. Most notably, a poll by the
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies had found that only 19 percent of
African-Americans supported it.
That is a striking statistic, especially considering that more than 70 percent of white
Americans were in favor of the military invasion, according to some polls.
Also note that 90% of white males were for that illegal war of aggression.
the left is so obsessed with getting trump, they can do nothing else. they are so *******
stoopid, that they wont even try to develop someone to beat trump. they put 100% of their
energy in hating trump. they are blinded by hatred.
the end is nigh and there's nothing to be done about it.... 10 years and thats it....
beyond that and event horizon... black hole... no one knows. ai terminator coming soon...
thats all i can see.
Most thinking people are not wanting to be part of a movement that will be co-opted for
someone else's political gain. I would rather prepare myself and family for the inevitable
collapse of the economy and perhaps more that awaits us. That's enough to keep me busy. I
can't change the whole world but I can prepare to help my family friends and neighbors.
In answer to the the question posed by the headerof this article, they have either been
exiled from 'respectable' media or are stuck yelling "Trump! Trump! Trump! Russia! Russia!
Russia" like a poorly programmed NPC caught in an infinite loop.
The hidden hand behind the puppet show has done a hell of a job massaging the masses, and
turning their minds into mush.
"Where have the anti-war and anti-bank masses gone? I would argue they are still with us
but they cannot turn their voices into action and organization if they remain in the
Democratic Party ."
Exactly! If there are any anti-war people out there they sure as hell are not with the
Democratic Party. Those leftist lunatics are the most destructive political group on this
planet. Their thinking is 'divide & conquer', incite racial tensions, spew hatred,
promoting that killing babies before they are born, or even on the day they are born is
awesome. One has to wonder if people that evil even have souls.
As for anti-bankers... is this author off his rocker? He's not fooling anyone by trying to
present the theory that if there are any consciencous objectors out there they would be
supporters of the Democratic party. That thought is outright laughable. Even worse, to try to
create this new narrative by writing this type of article is absolutely despicable.
Fortunately, not the least bit convincing. People know better.
" Where have the anti-war and anti-bank masses gone? I would argue they are still with us
but they cannot turn their voices into action and organization if they remain in the
Democratic Party "
OK, so..... it's the Democrat Party, not the Democratic Party. Not like anyone gives a
**** what words mean any more, but.... whatever. Use the right ******* words or..... *******
don't. Not like any of this **** matters any more at this level.
And not all of us are ******* Democrats. Neither party is really anti-war or anti-bank
now, so the red/blue thing has little relevance to those subjects. We all argue about much
more important issues now like transgender bathrooms and whether Kanye West is a racist for
supporting Trump or not.
Politics has become a black hole collapsing on us. Black hole don't give a ****. Look at
that black hole. It just ate a star and became bigger. It don't care.
Sorry but I do not see Trump as "threatening nuclear war".
Surely some of the Deep Staters did. But it's hard to see Trump as in control. His
presidency has been great for exposing how things really work. That's worth a lot. If only
the idiots would pay attention. But they won't. They're too busy placing great importance on
the trifling and little or none on the critically important.
Excuse me I have to run now and get the latest iPhone.
President Trump's ex-longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen worked with an FBI informant
known as "The Quarterback" to negotiate a deal for Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 US
election, according to
BuzzFeed News .
"The Quarterback," Felix Sater - a longtime FBI and CIA undercover
intelligence asset who was busted running a $40 million stock scheme, leveraged his
Russia connections to pitch the deal, while Cohen discussed it with Putin's press secretary,
Dmitry Peskov, according to BuzzFeed , citing two unnamed US law enforcement
officials.
Sater told BuzzFeed News today that he and Cohen thought giving the Trump Tower's most
luxurious apartment, a $50 million penthouse , to Putin would entice other wealthy buyers
to purchase their own. "In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the
same building as Vladimir Putin," Sater told BuzzFeed News. "My idea was to give a $50
million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units. All the
oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin." A second source confirmed
the plan. -
BuzzFeed
The Trump Tower Moscow plan is at the center of Cohen's
new plea agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller after he admitted to lying to
congressional committees investigating Trump-Russia collusion.
According to the
criminal information filed against Cohen Thursday, on Jan. 20, 2016 he spoke with a
Russian government official, referred to only as Assistant 1, about the Trump Tower Moscow
plan for 20 minutes. This person appears to be an assistant to Peskov, a top Kremlin
official that Cohen had attempted to reach by email.
Cohen "requested assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to
build the proposed tower and financing the construction," the court document states.
Cohen had previously maintained that he never got a response from the official, but in
court on Thursday he acknowledged that was a lie. -
BuzzFeed
While the deal ultimately fizzled, "and it is not clear whether Trump knew of the
intention to give away the penthouse," Cohen has said in court filings that Trump was
regularly briefed on the Moscow negotiations along with his family.
Sater and Cohen "worked furiously behind the scenes into the summer of 2016 to get the
Moscow deal finished," according to BuzzFeed - although it was claimed that the project was
canned in January 2016, before Trump won the GOP nomination.
Sater, who has worked with the Trump organization on past deals, said that he came up with
the Trump Tower Moscow idea, while Cohen - Sater recalled, said "Great idea." "I figured,
he's in the news, his name is generating a lot of good press," Sater told BuzzFeed earlier in
the year, adding "A lot of Russians weren't willing to pay a premium licensing fee to put
Donald's name on their building. Now maybe they would be."
So he turned to his old friend, Cohen, to get it off the ground . They arranged a
licensing deal, by which Trump would lend his name to the project and collect a part of the
profits. Sater lined up a Russian development company to build the project and said that
VTB, a Russian financial institution that faced US sanctions at the time, would finance it.
VTB officials
have denied taking part in any negotiations about the project. -
BuzzFeed
Two FBI agents with "direct knowledge of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations" told
BuzzFeed earlier this year that Cohen had been in frequent contact with foreigners about the
potential real estate project - and that some of these individuals "had knowledge of or
played a role in 2016 election meddling."
Meanwhile, Trump reportedly personally signed the letter of intent to move forward with
the Trump Tower Moscow plan on October 28, 2015 - the third day of the Republican primary
debate.
Cohen is scheduled to be sentenced on December 12. By cooperating with the DOJ, he is
hoping to avoid prison.
In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to his involvement in a $40 million stock fraud scheme
orchestrated by the Russian Mafia , and became an informant
for the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and federal prosecutors, assisting with organized crime investigations.
In 2017, Sater agreed to cooperate with investigators into international money laundering schemes.
Left, right and centre in contemporary USSA politics are rotten and corrupt. Bernie
Sanders proved that even he is susceptible to dodgy business decisions. Trump is no more
rotten and adverse to dodgy/boarderline legally tenuous deals than anybody in politics on
Capitol Hill. Do I care about this? No, because there are far more important issues to be
dealt with by a magnitude of 90000 times.
Both sides on this issue are imbeciles. One side is pushing guilt, when compared to what
Killary and the Clinton foundation got up to, it is a complete non-story. The other side
are completely absolving Orange Jesus of any guilt and making out he has morals beyond
reproach.
I rarely comment on the Trump/Russia angle, because most of it is overblown, the
narrative is distorted and context is deliberately misinterpreted.
President Trump's ex-longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen worked with an FBI
informant known as "The Quarterback" to negotiate a deal for Trump Tower Moscow during
the 2016 US election, according to BuzzFeed News.
There is nothing about this sentence which carries any credibility at all.
Honestly, you might not have bothered writing it, or the rest of the article. No. I
didn't read it, and am not going to waste any of my life doing so either.
Can somebody just give me the short, simple, dumbed-down version of what any of this
means? What does this amount to? Is this any kind of game-changer? Does it change
anything?
" ...an un-named source" ..... another fantastical fairytale from a failed american
media company by yet another un-named source. How very convenient. President Vladimir
living in an american themed cramped badly designed apartment building ? Please, I do not
like to laugh much but this is starting to make me smile. Our President has a State owned
mansion in the best part of our glorious capital ....like me he owns almost nothing and
works all the time ....why would anybody with sanity in their brain believe that he would
make this change, especially to be associated with ANYTHING american. Also no Russian
businessman that I know has ever bought a property in a trump complex .... the build
quality and design is rubbish. Westerners should take time to view some of our exceptional
office and residential towers along the Moskva River to see where wealthy people want to
invest, work and live here. Get real West !!
OK thought experiment, given that he "only" earns perhaps 150k, how is Putin going to
pay for the upkeep of such a White Elephant? Imagine if he had to pay for maintenance of
the complementary hot n cold running whores that inevitable come with such an apartment
.... what if something breaks and needs replaced?
It's like giving a Ferrari to an Amish. Thanks, but no, thanks. Not his style.
Because Putin wants to live in a building with a bunch of mobsters.
And small world - wouldnt you know the Russians who try to do hotel deals are also into
hacking illegal, unsecure servers?
And though this indicates nothing, true or not, about the election - here's the secret :
the judeocorporate media has got the public trained to react to 'Russia' and 'Putin' purely
emotionally - so much so the Maddows of the world will shriek that this proves 'collusion'
- when it does no such thing.
More Deep State smoke and mirrors.
If you havent watched any Dan Bongino speeches on youtube its worth a look.
Crooks and criminals took over worldwide. Now even US-citizens elected one for
President. It´s a shame. How long will it take until the killer squads of Blackstone
financed by Blackrock prowl through the streets to kill anybody who isn´t useful in
their view? They have been practicing for years in foreign countries, paid with taxpayers
money.
Why did the FBI or Muller zero in on this guy Michael Cohen?
Because they got everything on him, Trump and his family and associates, long before any
investigations were initiated.
NSA collected all the phone records, emails, text messages, internet usages, banking
records, library loan records, etc, . . . on EVERY Americans. All they need to do is type
in a name, like you type in a search phrase on Google, and everything associated with that
person would come up, on the screen.
The FBI knew everything they need to know about Michael Cohen, and General Michael
Flynn.
All they need to get them or entrap them is to ask them questions, which they already
knew the answers, and wait for them to "lie" or misrepresent themselves.
BINGO!
They are charged with lying to the FBI.
Trump was smart that he refused to be "interview" with the Muller, the Inquisitor. His
lawyers knew Muller will try to trap into "lying" to the FBI.
"... 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." ..."
"... 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." ..."
"... 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 ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... the emergence of the power elite had transformed the theory of balance into a romantic, Jeffersonian myth. ..."
"... 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." ..."
"... 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. ..."
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
Quite 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-"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.
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.
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 .
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.
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!)))
– 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.
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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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!
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.
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
tourists
If 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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!!!
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.
Michael Cohen To Plead Guilty To Lying About Trump Russian Real-Estate Deal
by Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/29/2018 - 09:19 128 SHARES
Four months after
he pleaded guilty to campaign finance law violations, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has
copped to new charges of lying to congressional committees investigating Trump-Russia
collusion, according to
ABC . His latest plea is part of a new deal reached with Special Counsel Robert Mueller,
which had been said to be winding down before its latest burst of activity, including an
investigation into Roger Stone's alleged ties to Wikileaks. Stone ally
Jerome Corsi this week said he had refused to strike a plea deal with Mueller's
investigators, who had accused him of lying.
To hold up his end of the deal, Cohen sat for 70 hours of testimony with the Mueller probe,
he said Monday during an appearance at a federal courthouse in Manhattan where he officially
pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements.
According to
the Hill, Cohen's alleged lies stem from testimony he gave in 2017, when he told the House
Intelligence Committee that a planned real-estate deal to build the Trump Moscow Hotel had been
abandoned in January 2016 after the Trump Organization decided that "the proposal was not
feasible." While Cohen's previous plea was an agreement with federal prosecutors in New York,
this marks the first time Cohen has been charged by Mueller.
As part of his plea Cohen admitted to lying in a written statement to Congress about his
role in brokering a deal for a Trump Tower Moscow - the aborted project to build a
Trump-branded hotel in the Russian capitol. As has been previously reported, Cohen infamously
contacted a press secretary for President Putin to see if Putin could help with some red tape
to help start development, though the project was eventually abandoned.
Though, according to Cohen's plea, discussions about the project continued through the first
six months of the Trump administration. Cohen had discussed the Trump Moscow project with Trump
as recently as August 2017, per a report in the
Guardian.
As a reporter for NBC News pointed out on twitter, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman
Richard Burr and ranking member Mark Warner foreshadowed today's plea back in August after
Cohen pleaded guilty to the campaign finance violations.
Also notable: The plea comes just as President Trump is leaving for a 10-hour flight to
Argentina. In recent days, Trump appeared to step up attacks on the Mueller probe, comparing it
to
McCarthyism and questioning why the DOJ didn't pursue charges against the Clintons.
Cohen will be sentenced on Dec. 12, as scheduled. By cooperating, Cohen is hoping to avoid
prison, according to his lawyer. While this was probably lost on prosecutors, Cohen's admission
smacks of the "lair's paradox."
Senate Republicans have offered President Trump a degree of relief from his Mueller-related
anxieties by blocking a bill that would have protected the Mueller probe from being disbanded
by the president, but with the special counsel continuing his pursuit of
Roger Stone and
Jerome Corsi , and Congressional Democrats sharpening their knives in anticipation of
taking back the House in January, President Trump is once again lashing out at Mueller and the
FBI, declaring that the probe is an "investigation in search of a crime" and
once again highlighting the hypocrisy in the FBI's decision to give the Clintons a pass for
their "atrocious, and perhaps subversive" crimes.
Reiterating his claims that the Mueller probe bears many similarities to Sen. Joseph
McCarthy's infamous anti-Communist witch hunt, Trump also blasted the DOJ for "shattering so
many innocent lives" and "wasting more than $40,000,000."
"Did you ever see an investigation more in search of a crime? At the same time Mueller and
the Angry Democrats aren't even looking at the atrocious, and perhaps subversive, crimes that
were committed by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. A total disgrace!"
"When will this illegal Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt, one that has shattered so many
innocent lives, ever end-or will it just go on forever? After wasting more than $40,000,000
(is that possible?), it has proven only one thing-there was NO Collusion with Russia. So
Ridiculous!"
As CBS
News' Mark Knoller notes , this is the 2nd day in a row, Pres Trump likening the Mueller
investigation to the Joe McCarthy witch hunt of the 50s , known for making reckless and
unsubstantiated accusations against officials he suspect of communist views. McCarthy was
eventually censured by the Senate in 1954.
Last night, President Trump threatened to release a trove of
"devastating" classified documents about the Mueller probe if Democrats follow through with
their threatened investigations. He also declared that a pardon for soon-to-be-sentenced former
Trump Campaign executive Paul Manafort was still "on
the table.
My suspicion is that the left, since the special counsel was never actually given a
legitimate crime to investigate, will want this left in place permanently. That's just my
guess though.
Without a crime however, it's hard to argue that the special counsel has any legitimacy,
since the law specifies that there must be a crime.
With that said, how can the results of what Mueller does be looked at as anything but
illegitimate?
Yes, and that I can agree with you on, however, the focus of the investigation has been
misplaced on Trump when it should have been on the Clintons. So again I can say that the
legitimacy of the counsel is in question because with Trump there was no crime.
If anything the criminal activity was perpetrated on Trump by the deep state.
The difference is that McCarthy was right about everything. The similarity is that the
press wanted to talk about everything but the contents of McCarthy's folders. It's like the
Podesta emails - "Russia hacked muh emails!" but no one seems to want to discuss their
contents.
My comments here may try to be humorous but this video needs watched to fully understand
the Mueller probe--and forward to friends........... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aevtHHULag
Trump is right that Mueller is trying to create a crime where there is nothing but
politics as it is played today. Listen to former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who now
characterizes the Mueller investigation as 'a clown show', explain in great detail:
The crimes have been found.....and HRC and the democrats and their fbi pals committed
them. Mueller is not "in search of crimes", he's in search of crimes by trump associated
people.
You can see many similarities between the way the Democrats handled the Kavanaugh
nomination and Muellers investigation. If the GOP is smart they will start consolidating all
the facts about the FISA abuse, FBI abuse, IRS abuse, Mueller abuse and start a campaign
about it in time for the 2020 elections. If the Democrats were smart they would drop this
ASAP since it isn't going any where and hope people forget about it. Somehow, I doubt that
the Democrats are that smart... After all there was a movie about Watergate... and seems like
a lot of these people are trying to live Watergate all over again, but it's really about an
abuse of power, by the government and the media.
**** off, the government isnt going to do a ******* thing to these enterprise
criminals.
I find it completely demoralizing and a slap in the face to a country when you have these
enterprise criminals not being indicted and a president threatening to expose them because HE
doesnt like something. This is not about you Trump, this is about THE UNITED STATES.
I mean come-on Trump stop with the BS. DO YOUR ******* JOB.
What in the hell people, I personally find this to be a constant gut punch when these
criminals just commit crimes over and over and it becomes a Hannity or Limbaugh bullet point
for 3 hours.
How ******* stupid of Americans to sit idle while all of this in your face bank robbing
going on. Put another way the bank robber walks from the door of a bank with a sack of cash
to the car and the police say oh look a bank robber, and they turn to their partner and shrug
their shoulders drinking covfeffe
It's the Anglo-zionist entente that meddled in U.S. elections and if Americans don't get
upset about that then they are cucks who deserve their servile fate.
"In his foreword to my book, Alan Dershowitz discusses his time litigating cases in the
old Soviet Union. He was always taken by the fact that they could prosecute anybody they
wanted because some of the statutes were so vague. Dershowitz points out that this was a
technique developed by Beria, the infamous sidekick of Stalin, who said, " Show me the man
and I'll find you the crime ." That really is something that has survived the Soviet
Union and has arrived in the good old USA. "Show me the man," says any federal prosecutor,
"and I can show you the crime." This is not an exaggeration. "
The only reason Mueller exists is for Trump to flog the Dems with. Thats the only reason
Trump keeps him around. The problem is losing the house means losing the power of subpoena,
so this should get interesting. The Repubs have it in for Trump too. Why else would they lose
a supermajority and the power of subpoena while still retaining the power to crush any bill
that the House pushes through? He's doomed, unless he can pull a rabbit out of his ***.
You don't actually believe that, do you? I suppose you still actually believe that they
even bother to count the votes. Trump was INSTALLED, not elected.
To create the illusion of division, which in turn keeps the population divided. It's
theater. Look at everything that's gone down; it's way too stupid to be real and I am
referring to both sides when I say that. The whole thing is custom tailored to stir the
emotions of a population with an average IQ of 100.
The fact that anybody is still clinging to hope in political solutions to anything is
sad and pathetic.
I don't think the political system will solve any of my problems, but Obama made it
abundantly clear that the political system will create plenty of problems.
Does anyone still believe that we have a political solution to our challenges.
1) More invaders than ever flooding our country.
2) Our most notorious criminals still walking our streets.
3) Fed, et al still manipulating our economy.
4) Law abiding citizens still being thrown into jail.
5) Surveillance state becoming ever more all seeing, and all invasive.
6) The push to war stronger than it has ever been in recent times.
7) Over 150 military bases strung across the planet.
8) Open criminality and rampant lies by press and politicians... I realize I already made
mention of the criminals, but thought this deserved emphasis.
9) Big news today... Supremes may limit the degree to which local government can encroach
on eighth amendment... wow... that this is even a debate.
10) The white population is being ordered into silence and obscurity... though no one has
forgotten to collect taxes... while the chimps and thugs are being encouraged to loot what is
left of the asylum...
I could go on... tell me, what is your vote going to accomplish? We are living on borrowed
time, and time has just about run out...
That's why voting is a waste of time because you're simply exchanging one sociopath for
another and I gave up on the notion long ago that we're living in the "land of the free".
That's the biggest line of BS the state has ever pushed but the rubes still believe it.
Progressive income tax, property taxes, central banking and they're all tenet's of communism,
in fact we have attained all ten planks of the communist manifesto. Read the IRS code or the
federal register and you'll see exactly how much freedom you have.
all you need to know about Mueller is his professional position on 9/11/01. From Judicial
Watch:
Under Mueller's leadership, the FBI tried to discredit the story, publicly countering
that agents found no connection between the Sarasota Saudi family and the 2001 terrorist
plot. The reality is that the FBI's own files contained several reports that said the
opposite, according to the Ft. Lauderdale-based news group's ongoing investigation . Files
obtained by reporters in the course of their lengthy probe reveal that federal agents found
"many connections" between the family and "individuals associated with the terrorist attacks
on 9/11/2001." The FBI was forced to release the once-secret reports because the news group
sued in federal court when the information wasn't provided under the Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA).
Though the recently filed court documents reveal Mueller received a briefing about the
Sarasota Saudi investigation, the FBI continued to publicly deny it existed and it appears
that the lies were approved by Mueller. Not surprisingly, he didn't respond to questions
about this new discovery emailed to his office by the news organization that uncovered it.
Though the mainstream media has neglected to report this relevant development, it's difficult
to ignore that it chips away at Mueller's credibility as special counsel to investigate if
Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election. Even before the Saudi coverup documents
were exposed by nonprofit journalists, Mueller's credentials were questionable to head any
probe. Back in May Judicial Watch reminded of Mueller's
misguided handiwork and collaboration with radical Islamist organizations as FBI
director.
"... Everyone knows it's the US presence in the Middle East which creates terrorists, both as proxies of and in resistance to the US imperial presence (and often one and then the other). So reading Orwellian language, Pompeo is saying the US wants to maximize Islamic terrorism in order to provide a pretext for creeping totalitarianism at home and abroad. ..."
"... The real reason is to maintain the petrodollar system, but there seems to be a conspiracy of silence never to mention it among both supporters and opponents of Trump. ..."
"... everyone knows why the usa is in the middle east.. to support the war industry, which is heavily tied to the financial industry.. up is down and down is up.. that is why the usa is great friends with ksa and israel and a sworn enemy of iran... what they don't say is they are a sworn enemy of humanity and the thought that the world can continue with their ongoing madness... ..."
"... The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order to feed international finance/IMF ..."
Trump also floated the idea of removing U.S. troops from the Middle East, citing the lower price of oil as a reason to withdraw.
"Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world? One reason to is Israel ," Trump said. "Oil is becoming less and less
of a reason because we're producing more oil now than we've ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point
where you don't have to stay there."
It is only Israel, it is no longer the oil, says Trump. But the nuclear armed Israel does not need U.S. troops for its protection.
And if it is no longer the oil, why is the U.S. defending the Saudis?
Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo disagrees with his boss. In a Wall Street journal op-ed today he claims that
The U.S.-Saudi Partnership
Is Vital because it includes much more then oil:
[D]egrading U.S.-Saudi ties would be a grave mistake for the national security of the U.S. and its allies.
The kingdom is a powerful force for stability in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is working to secure Iraq's fragile democracy
and keep Baghdad tethered to the West's interests, not Tehran's. Riyadh is helping manage the flood of refugees fleeing Syria's
civil war by working with host countries, cooperating closely with Egypt, and establishing stronger ties with Israel. Saudi
Arabia has also contributed millions of dollars to the U.S.-led effort to fight Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.
Saudi oil production and economic stability are keys to regional prosperity and global energy security.
Where and when please has Saudi Arabia "managed the flood of refugees fleeing Syria's civil war". Was that when it
emptied its jails of violent criminals and sent them to wage jihad against the Syrian people? That indeed 'managed' to push
millions to flee from their homes.
Saudi Arabia might be many things but "a powerful force for stability" it is not. Just ask 18 million Yemenis who, after years
of Saudi bombardment, are near to death for lack of
food .
Pompeo's work for the Saudi dictator continued today with a Senate briefing on Yemen. The Senators will soon vote on a resolution
to end the U.S. support for the war. In his prepared remarks Pompeo wrote:
The suffering in Yemen grieves me, but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot
worse.
What could be worse than a famine that threatens two third of the population?
If the U.S. and Britain would not support the Saudis and Emirates the war would end within a day or two. The Saudi and UAE
planes are maintained by U.S. and British specialists. The Saudis still
seek 102 more U.S. military personal to
take care of their planes. It would be easy for the U.S. to stop such recruiting of its veterans.
It is the U.S. that
holds up an already
watered down UN Security Council resolution that calls for a ceasefire in Yemen:
The reason for the delay continues to be a White House worry about angering Saudi Arabia, which strongly opposes the resolution,
multiple sources say. CNN reported earlier this month that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, "threw a fit" when
presented with an early draft of the document, leading to a delay and further discussions among Western allies on the matter.
There is really nothing in Trump's list on which the Saudis consistently followed through. His alliance with MbS brought him
no gain and a lot of trouble.
Trump protected MbS from the consequences of murdering Jamal Khashoggi. He hoped to gain leverage with that. But that is not
how MbS sees it. He now knows that Trump will not confront him no matter what he does. If MbS "threws a fit" over a UN Security
Council resolution, the U.S. will drop it. When he launches his next 'adventure', the U.S. will again cover his back. Is this
the way a super power is supposed to handle a client state?
If Trump's instincts really tell him that U.S. troops should be removed from the Middle East and Afghanistan, something I doubt,
he should follow them. Support for the Saudi war on Yemen will not help to achieve that. Pandering to MbS is not MAGA.
Posted by b on November 28, 2018 at 03:12 PM |
Permalink
Comments Pompeo: "Saudi Arabia has also contributed millions of dollars to the U.S.-led effort to fight Islamic State and other
terrorist organizations."
Everyone knows it's the US presence in the Middle East which creates terrorists, both as proxies of and in resistance to
the US imperial presence (and often one and then the other). So reading Orwellian language, Pompeo is saying the US wants to maximize
Islamic terrorism in order to provide a pretext for creeping totalitarianism at home and abroad.
The real reason is to maintain the petrodollar system, but there seems to be a conspiracy of silence never to mention it among
both supporters and opponents of Trump.
There is really nothing in Trump's list on which the Saudis consistently followed through. His alliance with MbS brought him
no gain and a lot of trouble.
He did get to fondle the orb - although fuck knows what weirdness was really going on there.
thanks b... pompeo is a very bad liar... in fact - everything he says is about exactly the opposite, but bottom line is he is
a bad liar as he is thoroughly unconvincing..
everyone knows why the usa is in the middle east.. to support the war industry, which is heavily tied to the financial
industry.. up is down and down is up.. that is why the usa is great friends with ksa and israel and a sworn enemy of iran... what
they don't say is they are a sworn enemy of humanity and the thought that the world can continue with their ongoing madness...
oh, but don't forget to vote, LOLOL.... no wonder so many are strung out on drugs, and the pharma industry... opening up to
the msm is opening oneself up to the world george orwell described many years ago...
Take a wafer or two of silicon and just add water. The oil obsession has been eclipsed and within 20 years will be in absolute
disarray. The warmongers will invent new excuses.
A hypothetical: No extraordinary amounts of hydrocarbons exist under Southwest Asian ground; just an essential amount for domestic
consumption; in that case, would Zionistan exist where it's currently located and would either Saudi Arabia, Iraq and/or Iran
have any significance aside from being consumers of Outlaw US Empire goods? Would the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes/Picot
Secret Treaty have been made? If the Orinoco Oil Belt didn't exist, would Venezuela's government be continually targeted for Imperial
control? If there was no Brazilian offshore oil, would the Regime Change effort have been made there? Here the hypotheticals end
and a few basic yet important questions follow.
Previous to the 20th Century, why were Hawaii and Samoa wrested from their native residents and annexed to Empire? In what
way did the lowly family farmers spread across 19th Century United States further the growth of its Empire and contribute to the
above named annexations? What was the unspoken message sent to US elites contained within Frederic Jackson Turner's 1893 Frontier
Thesis ? Why is the dominant language of North America English, not French or Spanish?
None of these are rhetorical. All second paragraph questions I asked of my history students. And all have a bearing on b's
fundamental question.
b says, "And it its no longer the oil, why is the U.S. defending the Saudis?"
The US has a vital interest in protecting the narrative of 9/11. The Saudis supplied the patsies. Mossad and dual-citizen neocons
were the architects of the event. Hence, the US must avoid a nasty divorce from the Saudis. The Saudis are in a perfect blackmailing
position.
Of course, most Americans have no idea that the U.S. Shale Oil Industry is nothing more than a Ponzi Scheme because of the
mainstream media's inability to report FACT from FICTION. However, they don't deserve all of the blame as the shale energy
industry has done an excellent job hiding the financial distress from the public and investors by the use of highly technical
jargon and BS.
S.A. is a thinly disguised US military base, hence the "strategic importance" and the relevance of the new Viceroy's previous
experience as a Four Star General. It's doubtful that any of the skilled personnel in the SA Air Force are other than former US/Nato.
A few princes might fancy themselves to be daring fighter pilots. In case of a Anglo-Zio war with Iran SA would be the most forward
US aircraft carrier. The Empire is sustained by its presumed military might and prizes nothing more than its strategically situated
bases. Saud would like to capture Yemen's oil fields, but the primary purpose of the air war is probably training. That of course
is more despicably cynical than mere conquest and genocide.
Trump is the ultimate deceiver/liar. Great actor reading from a script. The heel in the Fake wrestling otherwise known as US politics.
It almost sounds as if he is calling for an end of anymore significant price drops now that he has got Powell on board to limit
interest rate hikes. After all if you are the worlds biggest producer you dont want prices too low. These markets are all manipulated.
I cant imagine how much insider trading is going on. If you look at the oil prices, they started dropping in October with Iran
sanctions looming (before it was announced irans shipments to its 8 biggest buyers would be exempt) and at the height of the Khashoggi
event where sanctions were threatened and Saudi was making threats of their own. In a real free market prices increase amidst
supply uncertainty.
Regardless of what he says he wants and gets now, he is already planning a reversal. Thats how the big boys win, they know
whats coming and when the con the smaller fish to swim one way they are lined up with a big mouth wide open. Controlled chaos
and confusion. For every winner there must be a loser and the losers assets/money are food for the Gods of Money and War
As for pulling out of the Middle East Bibi must have had a good laugh. My money is on the US to be in Yemen to protect them
from the Saudis (humanitarian) and Iranian backed Houthis while in reality we will be there to secure the enormous oil fields
in the North. Perhaps this was what the Khashoggi trap was all about. The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to
deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order to feed international finance/IMF
@ Pft who wrote: "The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order
to feed international finance/IMF"
BINGO!!! Those that control finance control most/all of everything else.
Saudi Arabia literally owns close to 8% of the United States economy through various financial instruments. Their public investment
funds and dark pools own large chunks from various strategic firms resting at the apex of western power such as Blackstone. Trump
and Pompeo would be stupid to cut off their nose to spite their face... It's all about the petrodollar, uncle sam will ride and
die with saudi barbaria. If push comes to shove and the saudis decide to untether themselves from the Empire, their sand kingdom
will probably be partitioned.
The oil certainly still plays an important role, the u.s. cannot maintain the current frack oil output for long. For Tronald's
term in office it will suffice, but hardly longer. (The frack gas supplies are much more substantial.)
Personal interests certainly also play a role, and finally one should not make u.s. foreign policy more rational than it is.
Much is also done because of traditions and personal convictions. Often they got it completely wrong and the result was a complete
failure.
Let us watch what Trump does with this or if the resolution makes it to daylight:
Senate advances Yemen resolution in rebuke to Trump
The Senate issued a sharp rebuke Wednesday to President Trump, easily advancing a resolution that would end U.S. military support
for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen's civil war despite a White House effort to quash the bill.
The administration launched an eleventh-hour lobbying frenzy to try to head off momentum for the resolution, dispatching
Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Capitol Hill in the morning and issuing a veto threat
less than an hour before the vote started.
But lawmakers advanced the resolution, 63-37, even as the administration vowed to stand by Saudi Arabia following outcry
over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
"There's been a lot of rhetoric that's come from the White House and from the State Department on this issue," said Sen.
Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. "The rhetoric that I've heard and the broadcasts that we've
made around the world as to who we are have been way out of balance as it relates to American interests and American values."
[/] LINK
TheHill
But Mattis says there is no smoking gun to tie the Clown Thug-Prince to Kashoggi's killing.
TheHill
And Lyias @ 2 is a bingo. Always follow the fiat.
Soon, without any announcements, if they wish to maintain selling oil to China, KSA will follow Qatar. It will be priced in
Yuan...especially given the escalating U.S. trade war with China.
2019 holds interesting times. Order a truckload of popcorn.
Midwest For Truth , Nov 28, 2018 7:29:46 PM |
link
You would have to have your head buried in the sand to not see that the Saudi "Kings" are crypto-Zionistas. Carl Sagan once said,
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even
to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." And Mark Twain also
wrote "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
Gee, not one taker amongst all these intelligent folk. From last to first: 1588's Protestant Wind allowed Elizabeth and her cronies
to literally keep their heads as Nature helped Drake defeat the Spanish Armada; otherwise, there would be no British Empire root
to the USA, thus no USA and no future Outlaw US Empire, the British Isles becoming a Hapsburg Imperial Property, and a completely
different historical lineage, perhaps sans World Wars and atomic weapons.
Turner's message was with the Frontier closed the "safety valve" of continental expansion defusing political tensions based
on economic inequalities had ceased to be of benefit and future policy would need to deal with that issue thus removing the Fear
Factor from the natives to immigrants, and from wide-open spaces to the inner cities. Whipsawing business cycles driving urban
labor's unrest, populist People's Party politics, and McKinley's 1901 assassination further drove his points home.
Nationwide, family farmers demanded Federal government help to create additional markets for their produce to generate price
inflation so they could remain solvent and keep their homesteads, which translated into the need to conduct international commerce
via the seas which required coaling stations--Hawaii and Samoa, amongst others--and a Blue Water Navy that eventually led to Alfred
T. Mahan's doctrine of Imperial Control of the Oceans still in use today.
As with Gengis Khan's death in 1227 that stopped the Mongol expansion to the English Channel that changed the course of European
history, and what was seen as the Protestant Wind being Divine Intervention, global history has several similar inflection points
turning the tide from one path to another. We don't know yet if the Outlaw US Empire's reliance on Saudi is such, but we can see
it turning from being a great positive to an equally potential great negative for the Empire--humanity as a whole, IMO, will benefit
greatly from an implosion and the relationship becoming a Great Negative helping to strip what remains of the Emperor's Clothing
from his torso so that nations and their citizens can deter the oncoming financialized economic suicide caused by massive debt
and climate chaos.
Vico's circle is about to intersect with Hegel's dialectic and generate a new temporal phase in human history. Although many
will find it hard to tell, the current direction points to a difficult change to a more positive course for humanity as a whole,
but it's also possible that disaster could strike with humanity's total or near extinction being the outcome--good arguments can
be made for either outcome, which ought to unsettle everyone: Yes, the times are that tenuous. But then, I'm merely a lonely historian
aware of a great many things, including the pitfall inherent in trying to predict future events.
"The suffering in Yemen grieves me, but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot
worse." And I'll bet Pompeo said that with a straight face, too. lmfao
And as for "...keep[ing] Baghdad tethered to the West's interests and not Tehran's," I'm guessing the "secretary" would have
us all agree "yeah, fk Iraqi sovereignty anyway. Besides, it's not like they share a border with Iran, or anything. Oh,
wait..."
p.s. Many thanks for all you have contributed to collective knowledge, b; I will be contacting you about making a contribution
by snail mail (I hate PayPal, too).
"... a powerful force for stability in the Middle East."
"Instability" more like it.
Paid for military coup in Egypt. Funding anti-Syrian terrorists. Ongoing tensions with Iran. Zip-all for the Palestinians.
WTF in Yemen. Wahhabi crazy sh_t (via Mosque building) across Asia. Head and hand chopping Friday specials the norm -- especially
of their South-Asian slave classes. Ok, so females can now drive cars -- woohoo. A family run business venture manipulating the
global oil trade and supporting US-petro-$ hegemony recently out of goat herding and each new generation 'initiated' in some Houston
secret society toe-touching shower and soap ceremonies before placement in the ruling hierarchy back home. But enough; they being
Semites makes it an offence to criticize in some 'free' democratic world domains.
Instead of the "rebuke to Trump" meme circulating around, I found
this statement to be more accurate:
"'Cutting off military aid to Saudi Arabia is the right choice for Yemen, the right choice for our national security, and the
right choice for upholding the Constitution,' Paul Kawika Martin, senior director for policy and political affairs at Peace Action,
declared in a statement. ' Three years ago, the notion of Congress voting to cut off military support for Saudi Arabia would
have been politically laughable .'" [My Emphasis]
In other words, advancing Peace with Obama as POTUS wasn't going to happen, so this vote ought to be seen as an attack on Obama's
legacy as it's his policy that's being reconsidered and hopefully discontinued.
Trump, Israel and the Sawdi's. US no longer needs middle east oil for strategic supply. Trump is doing away with the petro-dollar
as that scam has run its course and maintenance is higher than returns. Saudi and other middle east oil is required for global
energy dominance.
Energy dominance, lebensraum for Israel and destroying the current Iran are all objectives that fit into one neat package.
Those plans look to be coming apart at the moment so it remains to be seen how fanatical Trump is on Israel and MAGA. MAGA
as US was at the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As for pulling out of the Middle East Bibi must have had a good laugh. Remember when he said he wanted out of Syria. My money
is on the US to be in Yemen before too long to protect them from the Saudis (humanitarian) and Iranian backed Houthis, while in
reality it will be to secure the enormous oil fields in the North. Perhaps this was what the Khashoggi trap was all about.
The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order to feed international
finance/IMF .
@16 karlof1.. thanks for a broader historical perspective which you are able to bring to moa.. i enjoy reading your comments..
i don't have answers to ALL your questions earlier.. i have answers for some of them... you want to make it easy on us uneducated
folks and give us less questions, like b did in his post here, lol.... cheers james
The US Senate has advanced a measure to withdraw American support for a Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen.
In a blow to President Donald Trump, senators voted 63-37 to take forward a motion on ending US support.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Jim Mattis had urged Senators not to back the motion, saying it would
worsen the situation in Yemen.
...
The vote in the Senate means further debate on US support for Saudi Arabia is expected next week.
However, correspondents say that even if the Senate ultimately passes the bipartisan resolution it has little chance of
being approved by the outgoing House of Representatives.
That is quite a slap for the Trump administration. It will have little consequences in the short term (or for Yemen) but it sets
a new direction in foreign polices towards the Saudis.
Pompeo is a Deep State Israel-firster with a nasty neocon agenda. It is to Trump's disgrace that he chose Pompeo and the abominable
Bolton. At least Trump admits the ME invasions are really about Israel.
Take a look at some of the - informed - comments below the vid to which you linked. Then think again about an 'all electric
civilisation within a few years'. Yes, and Father Christmas will be providing everything that everyone in the world needs for
a NAmerican/European standard of living within the same time frame. Er - not.
'Renewables' are not going to save hitech industrial 'civilisation' from The Long Descent/Catabolic Collapse (qv). Apart from
any other consideration - and there are some other equally intractable ones - there is no - repeat NO - 'renewable' energy system
which doesn't rely crucially on energy subsidies from the fossil-hydrocarbon fuels, both to build it and to maintain it. They're
not stand-alone, self-bootstrapping technologies. Nor is there any realistic prospect that they ever will be. Fully renewable-power
hitech industrial civilisation is a non-deliverable mirage which is just drawing us ever further into the desert of irreversible
peak-energy/peak-everythig-else.
@16 karlof1. I also find your historical references very interesting. We do indeed seem to be at a very low point in the material
cycle, it will reverse in due course as is its want, hopefully we will live to see a positive change in humanity.
For example we know Tesla didn't succeed in splitting the planet in half, the way techno-psychotics fantasize. As for that
silly link, how typical of techno-wingnuts to respond to prosaic physical facts with fantasies. Anything to prop up faith in the
technocratic-fundamentalist religion. Meanwhile "electrical civilization" has always meant and will always mean fracking and coal,
until the whole fossil-fueled extreme energy nightmare is over.
Given the proven fact that the extreme energy civilization has done nothing but embark upon a campaign to completely destroy
humanity and the Earth (like in your Tesla fantasy), why would a non-psychopath want to prop it up anyway?
It is still the oil, even for the US. The Persian Gulf supplies 20% of world consumption, and Western Europe gets 40% of its oil
from OPEC countries, most of that from the Gulf. Even the US still imports 10% of its total consumption.
Peter AU 1 | Nov 28, 2018 9:44:50 PM | 20
b | Nov 29, 2018 2:33:04 AM | 23
USD as a world reserve currency could be one factor between the important ones. With non US support the saud land could crash
under neighbours pressure, that caos may be not welcomed.
Humble people around where I live have mentioned that time is speeding up its velocity; there seems to be a spiritual (evolutionary)/physical
interface effect or something...
Tolstoy, in the long theory-of-history exposition at the end of War and Peace, challenges 'the great man' of History idea,
spreading in his time, at the dawning of the so-called: European Romantic period of Beethoven, Goerte and Wagner, when
the unique person was glorified in the name of art, truth, whatever (eventually this bubble burst too, in the 20th C. and IMO
because of too much fervent worship in the Cult of the Temple of the Money God. Dostoyevki's great Crime and Punishment is all
about this issue.)
Tolstoy tries to describe a scientifically-determined historical process, dissing the 'great man of History' thesis. He was
thinking of Napoleon Bonaparte of course, the run-away upstart repulican, anathema to the established order. Tolstoy describes
it in the opening scene of the novel: a fascinating parlor-room conversation between a "liberal" woman of good-birth in the elite
circles of society and a military captain at the party.
...only tenuously relevant to karlofi1's great post touching upon the Theory of History as such; thanks.
Now as to the question: żWhy is Trump supporting Saudi Arabia? Let me think about that...
Funny stuff happens when a judge tells a plaintiff she has to
pay $341,500 for the legal expenses of a lawsuit she lost. All of a sudden
Stormy Daniels is saying her CPL, Michael Avenatti, was acting against her wishes:
"... Predictably, Western media has been complaining again about "Russian aggression", a gift that keeps on giving. Or blaming Russia for its over-reaction, overlooking the fact that Ukraine's incursion was with military vessels, not fishing boats. Russian resolve was quite visible, as powerful Ka-52 "Alligator" assault helicopters were promptly on the scene. ..."
"... Still, Kiev – "encouraged" by Washington – insists on militarizing the Sea of Azov. Misinformed American hawks emerging from the US Army War College even advocate that NATO should enter the Sea of Azov – a provocative act as far as Moscow is concerned. The Atlantic Council , which is essentially a mouthpiece of the powerful US weapons industry, is also pro-militarization. ..."
"... Rostislav Ischchenko , arguably the sharpest observer of Russia-Ukraine relations, in a piece written before the Kerch incident, said: "Ukraine itself recognized the right of Russia to introduce restrictions on the passage of ships and vessels through the Kerch Strait, having obeyed these rules in the summer." ..."
"... Thus a Kerch Strait incident designed as a cheap provocation, bearing all the hallmarks of a US think-tank ploy, is automatically interpreted as "Russian aggression", regardless of the facts. Indeed, any such tactics are good when it comes to derailing the Trump-Putin meeting at the G20 in Buenos Aires this coming weekend. ..."
"... Poroshenko's approval rate barely touches 8% . His chances of being re-elected, assuming polls are credible, are virtually zero. ..."
"... But the US would lose no sleep if they had to throw Poroshenko under the (Soviet) bus ..."
"... Poroshenko, wallowing in despair, may still ratchet up provocations. But the best he can aim at is NATO attempting to modernize the collapsing Ukrainian navy – an endeavor that would last years, with no guarantee of success. ..."
"... Feel sorry for the Ukrainians being used as tools. Before Obama-Hillary-and Pedo Biden overthrew the Democratically elected leader, people were just doing their normal stuff. Now they hide in bomb shelters and search for food at night. ..."
"... But vainglorious folks are not paying attention, and this is dangerous especially for Europe, and the pretenders in the Middle East, if it goes down, they too will go down, it's that simple and why? Because of military and security imperatives. Russia will take down, and out, any US or European ally in the M.E. lest, they open themselves up to flanking maneuvers. ..."
"... Putin already intimated of the current Russian mindset thus: "If you like, let's all go explain ourselves to God!". Do the neocons feel confident of cogent explanation to God, or do they even wish to come before him? I doubt it, and very much so, seeing as their hands are stained with the blood of innocents, and their hearts,plot evil continuously. ..."
"... And this my friends, viscerally demonstrates the wisdom of the founding fathers, especially Washington, who warned of "entangling alliances", buttressed a few generations later, by John Q. Adams, who re-advised "Go not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy". Pay attention folks, pay attention to the architects of the Republic, who knew what they were building, better than the "war loving battle dodging" chickenhawks who love to sip exotic drinks, while instructing others to kill for their depraved egos. ..."
"... NATO delenda est!... ..."
"... Poroshenko & Allies have a team of experts who spend 24/7 searching for the next provocation. Reminds me of May on this Brexit fiasco. ..."
"... This US coup of the Ukraine is turning out to be more hassle than its worth, a bankrupt corrupt country, installing Neo Nazi's as the first government was a big mistake, it could have been handled with more finesse, instead it was like a bull in a China shop. ..."
"... Poroshenko decided to not let a good crisis go to waste. ..."
"... Geopolitics and realpolitik, bitches. So much happening in the gas domain in Eastern Europe. Nordstream, Turkish Stream, BP stream, US LNG facilities in Greece, Poland and Germany, Russia supplying LNG to Germany, Cyprus-Greece-Israel drilling in the East Med, Turkey drilling in Cyprus EEZ. In the meanwhile I see gas infrastructure being build allover Eastern Europe, connecting houses to the grid. Gas heating and energy production is coming to Eastern Europe in addition to supplying Western Europe. The stakes are enormous and that what this is all about and that is why we can see more of this. ..."
"... Most of the Ukraine people hate Poroshenko and he knows he can't win re-election. He threatens Trump with dirt on Manafort, and demands Trump start a war. Or what? is the left in the US going to impeach Trump with the supposed Poroshenko dirt on Manafort? ..."
"... He was installed by Soros during the "Purple Color Revolution" (agent provocateurs with tiki torches getting violent to force a coup against the prior sitting President, a tactic attempted in Charlottesville only a couple years later) ..."
"... " Poroshenko's approval rate barely touches 8% . His chances of being re-elected, assuming polls are credible, are virtually zero. Little wonder he used the Kerch to declare martial law, effective this Wednesday, lasting for 30 days and bound to be extended. Poroshenko will be able to control the media and increase his chances of rigging the election. ..."
The West is complaining about Russian 'aggression' but the incident looks more like a cheap ploy by a desperate Ukrainian president
and US conservatives keen to undermine Trump's next pow-wow with Putin...
When the Ukrainian navy sent a tugboat and two small gunboats on Sunday to force their way through the Kerch Strait into the Sea
of Azov, it knew in advance the Russian response would be swift and merciless.
After all, Kiev was entering waters claimed by Russia with military vessels without clarifying their intent.
The intent, though, was clear; to raise the stakes in the militarization of the Sea of Azov.
The Kerch Strait connects the Sea of Azov with the Black Sea. To reach Mariupol, a key city in the Sea of Azov very close to the
dangerous dividing line between Ukraine's army and the pro-Russian militias in Donbass, the Ukrainian navy needs to go through the
Kerch.
Yet since Russia retook control of Crimea via a 2014 referendum, the waters around Kerch are de facto Russian territorial waters.
Kiev announced this past summer it would build a naval base in the Sea of Azov by the end of 2018. That's an absolute red line
for Moscow. Kiev may have to trade access to Mariupol, which, incidentally, also trades closely with the People's Republic of Donetsk.
But forget about military access.
And most of all, forget about supplying a Ukrainian military fleet in the port of Berdyansk capable of sabotaging the immensely
successful, Russian-built Crimean bridge .
Predictably, Western media has been complaining again about "Russian aggression", a gift that keeps on giving. Or blaming
Russia for its over-reaction, overlooking the fact that Ukraine's incursion was with military vessels, not fishing boats. Russian
resolve was quite visible, as powerful Ka-52 "Alligator" assault helicopters were promptly on the scene.
Washington and Brussels uncritically bought Kiev's "Russian aggression" hysteria, as well as the UN Security Council, which, instead
of focusing on the facts in the Kerch Strait incident, preferring to accuse Moscow once again of annexing Crimea in 2014.
The key point, overlooked by the UNSC, is that the Kerch incident configures Kiev's flagrant violation of articles 7, 19 and 21
of the UN Convention on the
Law of the Sea .
I happened to be right in the middle of deep research in Istanbul over the geopolitics of the Black Sea when the Kerch incident
happened.
For the moment, it's crucial to stress what top Russian analysts have been pointing out in detail. My interlocutors in Istanbul
may disagree, but for all practical purposes, the Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, in military terms, are de facto
Russian lakes.
At best, the Black Sea as a whole might evolve into a Russia-Turkey condominium, assuming President Erdogan plays his cards right.
Everyone else is as relevant, militarily, as a bunch of sardines.
Russia is able to handle anything – naval or aerial – intruding in the Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea in a matter
ranging from seconds to just a few minutes. Every vessel moving in every corner of the Black Sea is tracked 24/7. Moscow knows it.
Kiev knows it. NATO knows it. And crucially, the Pentagon knows it.
Still, Kiev – "encouraged" by Washington – insists on militarizing the Sea of Azov. Misinformed
American hawks emerging
from the US Army War College even advocate that NATO should enter the Sea of Azov – a provocative act as far as Moscow is concerned.
The Atlantic
Council , which is essentially a mouthpiece of the powerful US weapons industry, is also pro-militarization.
Any attempt to alter the current, already wobbly status quo could lead Moscow to install a naval blockade in a flash and see the
annexation of Mariupol to the People's Republic of Donetsk, to which it is industrially linked anyway.
This would be regarded by the Kremlin as a move of last resort. Moscow certainly does not want it. Yet it's wise not to provoke
the Bear.
Cheap provocation
Rostislav
Ischchenko , arguably the sharpest observer of Russia-Ukraine relations, in a piece written before the Kerch incident, said:
"Ukraine itself recognized the right of Russia to introduce restrictions on the passage of ships and vessels through the Kerch Strait,
having obeyed these rules in the summer."
Yet, after the US Deep State's massive investment even before the protests on the Maidan in Kiev in 2014 that wrested Ukraine
away from Russian influence a possible entente cordiale between the Trump administration and the Kremlin, with Russia in control
of Crimea and a pro-Russian Donbass, could only be seen as a red line for the Americans.
Thus a Kerch Strait incident designed as a cheap provocation, bearing all the hallmarks of a US think-tank ploy, is automatically
interpreted as "Russian aggression", regardless of the facts. Indeed, any such tactics are good when it comes to derailing the
Trump-Putin
meeting at the G20 in Buenos Aires this coming weekend.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, chaos is the norm . President Petro Poroshenko is bleeding. The hryvnia is a hopeless currency. Kiev's
borrowing costs are at their highest level since a bond sale in 2018. This failed state has been under IMF "reform" since 2015 –
with no end in sight.
Poroshenko's approval rate barely touches 8% . His chances of being re-elected, assuming polls are credible, are virtually zero.
Little wonder he used the Kerch to declare martial law, effective this Wednesday, lasting for 30 days and bound to be extended. Poroshenko
will be able to control the media and increase his chances of rigging the election.
But the US would lose no sleep if they had to throw Poroshenko under the (Soviet) bus. Ukrainians will not die for his survival.
One of the captains at the Kerch incident surrendered his boat voluntarily to the Russians. When Russian Su-25s and Ka-52s started
to patrol the skies over the Kerch Strait, Ukrainian reinforcements instantly fled.
Poroshenko, wallowing in despair, may still ratchet up provocations. But the best he can aim at is NATO attempting to modernize
the collapsing Ukrainian navy – an endeavor that would last years, with no guarantee of success.
For the moment, forget all the rhetoric, and any suggestion of a NATO incursion into the Black Sea. Call it the calm before the
inevitable future storm
Feel sorry for the Ukrainians being used as tools. Before Obama-Hillary-and Pedo Biden overthrew the Democratically elected leader, people were just doing their normal stuff. Now they hide in bomb shelters and search for food at night.
The Bear has set the Trap, let NATO or whoever walk into it, but do so if they must, with the knowledge that it's a one way
ticket to hell. The Russians have been warning for years now, that one day, they'll have had enough and then..
But vainglorious folks are not paying attention, and this is dangerous especially for Europe, and the pretenders in the Middle
East, if it goes down, they too will go down, it's that simple and why? Because of military and security imperatives. Russia will
take down, and out, any US or European ally in the M.E. lest, they open themselves up to flanking maneuvers.
So someone, in this case, Europe, better tell, or force Poroshenko to tone it down, the Russians are not kidding around, this
is not a game, this is existential serious! Ukraine will go down, along with Poland, and the Baltics, if Russia feels, in any
way, shape, or manner, provoked beyond reason. Note the word "feels", some may play games, thinking it's just a game, Russia is
NOT playing games, not at all, not one bit.
Putin already intimated of the current Russian mindset thus: "If you like, let's all go explain ourselves to God!". Do the neocons feel confident of cogent explanation to God, or do they
even wish to come before him? I doubt it, and very much so, seeing as their hands are stained with the blood of innocents, and
their hearts,plot evil continuously.
Minsk was the best the Russians are willing to offer, from here on, the offer reduces exponentially, with every provocation
until there's no offer, just RAW discipline!
And this my friends, viscerally demonstrates the wisdom of the founding fathers, especially Washington, who warned of "entangling
alliances", buttressed a few generations later, by John Q. Adams, who re-advised "Go not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy".
Pay attention folks, pay attention to the architects of the Republic, who knew what they were building, better than the "war loving
battle dodging" chickenhawks who love to sip exotic drinks, while instructing others to kill for their depraved egos.
The biggest victims in all their failed adventures, are the US troops, folks who are deployed to fight wars which does nothing
to secure the Republic, but instead weakens the Republic, deprives the military of honor, capable recruits, and the economy, of
treasure, vigor, and vitality.
Poroshenko & Allies have a team of experts who spend 24/7 searching for the next provocation. Reminds me of May on this Brexit
fiasco.
When you're up ****-creek, Kerch, in this instance, you clutch at straws as the boat sinks.
With regard to NATO, they can't be involved as they're not imbeciles. Russia has provided the s300/Other upgraded Missile Defense
Systems to Syria, effectively nullifying Israeli's illegal incursions via Lebanon airspace, so what protections will Putin have
in place for one of his most strategic jurisdictions in his country? Rhetorical.
This US coup of the Ukraine is turning out to be more hassle than its worth, a bankrupt corrupt country, installing Neo Nazi's
as the first government was a big mistake, it could have been handled with more finesse, instead it was like a bull in a China
shop.
On the Crimea, let us all remember the following :
95% of Crimean's voted yes to joining Russia a result that western agencies, media etc have accepted as correct, This makes
it and the waters surrounding it Russian, I suspect the US would have a similar reaction if a couple of Russian gun boats cruised
unannounced into a US port and started doing donuts.
****** porkoshenko wont last until spring. ukraine is not a chocolate factory. a country too big for a chess piece. the best
move for trump is to stay out or invite willy wonka to pay a visit to us embassy and chop him off lol
Poroshenko decided to not let a good crisis go to waste.
Geopolitics and realpolitik, bitches. So much happening in the gas domain in Eastern Europe. Nordstream, Turkish Stream, BP
stream, US LNG facilities in Greece, Poland and Germany, Russia supplying LNG to Germany, Cyprus-Greece-Israel drilling in the
East Med, Turkey drilling in Cyprus EEZ. In the meanwhile I see gas infrastructure being build allover Eastern Europe, connecting
houses to the grid. Gas heating and energy production is coming to Eastern Europe in addition to supplying Western Europe. The
stakes are enormous and that what this is all about and that is why we can see more of this.
The cheap shot at Trump at the same time demanding action from Trump was Poroshenko's threat the Ukraine has dirt on Manafort.
How low can Poroshenko go?
Most of the Ukraine people hate Poroshenko and he knows he can't win re-election. He threatens Trump with dirt on Manafort,
and demands Trump start a war. Or what? is the left in the US going to impeach Trump with the supposed Poroshenko dirt on Manafort?
But asked if the Ukraine has any evidence that Manafort was getting paid directly by the Kremlin, Poroshenko said, "I am not
personally connected with the process.""
Not just undermine Trump/Putin meetings, but the big picture, Ukrainian "President" declaring martial law to suspend the election
he would no doubt lose.
He was installed by Soros during the "Purple Color Revolution" (agent provocateurs with tiki torches getting violent to force
a coup against the prior sitting President, a tactic attempted in Charlottesville only a couple years later)
" Poroshenko's approval rate barely touches 8% . His chances of being re-elected, assuming polls are credible, are virtually
zero. Little wonder he used the Kerch to declare martial law, effective this Wednesday, lasting for 30 days and bound to be extended.
Poroshenko will be able to control the media and increase his chances of rigging the election.
TTG
Divadab Newton •
6 hours ago Being a rational actor does not mean caring only about one's own skin. Soldiers
jump on grenades knowing they will die to save their comrades. Some soldiers willingly run into
a dark cellar with a hatchet and empty weapon to confront armed murderers in order to save
innocent women and children.
There is a story in Robert Ardrey's "African Genesis" describing how a baboon troop
protected itself from the predations of leopards. An alfa male baboon attacked a leopard
one-on-one. The result of these encounters was the death of the baboon along with the severe
wounding and death of the leopard. This altruistic behavior has evolutionary value. I have the
calculus equations in my old ecology textbook explaining this value. As a species we've
inherited this altruistic trait. Parents willingly sacrifice themselves for the sake of their
children. We've gone beyond kith and kin and can also be willing to sacrifice all for the sake
of complete strangers and abstract societal goals.
Now if another trait would take better hold within our species, we would be much better
off... mercy. I have no mathematical formulas to explain that trait.
"... Legally speaking I'm not quite sure, because there are a number of protocols that are at play here. On top of everything is the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the designation of territorial waters and shelfs, economic zones and so forth. ..."
"... And declaring martial law, what the heck does that have to do with naval affairs? Many suspect that he's reading his polls and knowing that he's in trouble, political trouble, and so he's trying to start something that will help his political chances. ..."
"... And since NATO and the European Union and the United States have been rather in the front of the foxhole claiming that Ukraine is right in many of these disputes, then you've got the recipe for real problem. You've got NATO's ships, U.S. ships, other ships that might challenge Russia in these waters. ..."
"... NATO, so close to Russia's borders–I mean, incorporating former Warsaw Pact members into NATO. Putin's reactions in that regard are perfectly understandable. I'm not saying that the United States and NATO shouldn't take measures to defend themselves. But why does that include taking over for alliance purposes, now? Commercial purposes, the EU, the common market, so forth and so on, that's another deal. But taking them over for alliance purposes–we forget. It's a political alliance, surely. But it's also a military alliance, and that's the way Moscow has to look at it. ..."
"... So their military exercises since about 2013 have been postulated on a NATO invasion of the near abroad, and even a NATO invasion of Russia proper. So this is the way they do their military exercises. Clearly they're not doing that because they think spending all that money on that preposterous possible situation is just that: preposterous. They think it's a probability, or at least a possibility. ..."
"... And to fight over Ukraine–you remember the old expression "Who would die for Danzig?" I keep asking myself, if Americans really were asked to fulfill Article 5 of the NATO treaty for a place like Tbilisi, or even a place like Riga, or any of those countries we've now expanded NATO into or proposed expanding NATO into, like Ukraine, what would Americans say when they were told that full conscription was in process, full mobilization was in process, war taxes are going to be levied, and we're going to war for a city you can't even pronounce and couldn't find on a map? That's what we're talking about. And oh, by the way, Russia is generally speaking cheek and jowl with that city, whereas we're ten thousand miles away. ..."
"... Yaas, let us continue with the fear-uncertainty-doubt support of the Neocon Narrative and whatever Great Game BS the CIA and US Global Network-Centric Battlespace Management have up their dirty sleeves for that part of the world. On the way to Full Spectrum Dominance, of course. Because that is the Manifest Destiny of We The People, new? ..."
"... Excuse me, but what is a US military training range doing in Ukraine? How would US like it if a Russian range were established in Sonora or Coahuila? And if a tourist notices it, don't you think Russians are painfully aware of the situation? But they should just accept it, as US/Nato creep ever closer to the Russian border. The amount of hypocrisy seems boundless ..."
"... I'm waiting for NSA Bolton or SecState Pompeo to claim that Poroshenko made a miscalculation. Isn't that approximately what former SecState Condoleezza Rice said about Saakashvili's shelling of Russian peace keeping troops in South Ossetia, Georgia? So if Poroshenko's aim was internal politics, it was one big belly-flop. ..."
"... Poroshenko got his martial law, but for only 30 days. It will not cover Ukraine entirely, but only regions subject to "Russian aggression," including Vinnytsia, Luhansk, Mykolayiv, Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kherson, Sea of Azov. Well, just about any region that voted for former President Viktor Yanukovych. ..."
"... Right, most of those regions were bases of support for the pro-Moscow Party of Regions. This is simply broadcasting an intention to commit election fraud. The declaration of martial law is a means to an end. ..."
"... On the other hand, it appears that some of the crew on the Ukrainian vessels were from Ukrainian secret service, one wonders why. ..."
"... There have been op-ed pieces in major US media advocating blowing the bridge up. Russia has to take that seriously. ..."
"... Who needs a mere op-ed when you have the Atlantic Council? http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russia-s-provocations-in-the-sea-of-azov-what-should-be-done ..."
"... If Mexico formed an alliance with Russia, how would the US respond? (Cuban missile crisis?) From the point of view of traditional great power politics, it's that simple. Monroe Doctrine and all that. Russia has been fighting the West in this area from at least 1610. We're poking around their neighborhood and no great power can tolerate such arrogance. ..."
GREG WILPERT: The Ukraine is saying that Russia has no reason to hold
its ships, and Russia is accusing the Ukraine of intentionally creating a provocation in order
to draw NATO from what we know of what happened. Who seems to be in the more solid position
here, legally speaking?
LARRY WILKERSON:Legally speaking I'm not quite sure, because there are a number of
protocols that are at play here. On top of everything is the UN Convention on the Law of the
Sea, and the designation of territorial waters and shelfs, economic zones and so forth. And the
right, even though those things might intersect, to pass through what are called International
Straits or international waters, no matter how narrow they may be. Then you've also got,
underneath that, various protocols and agreements that have been made. In this case, I think
there's one between Russia and Ukraine. There are probably other agreements that impact on the
Black Sea, which, as you know, the strait they were trying to pass through is to the north of,
or the north side of.
So there are all kinds of international agreements and bilateral agreements about passage
through this area. The legal aspects of it really, I think, would boil down to, in many
respects, who has Crimea? Ukraine still claims Crimea. Russia now claims Crimea. And if they
claim Crimea, then their territorial water, even with unclassed–with respect to
unclassed, its definition of straights and so forth–then that territorial water, that is
territorial water, even under [unclass], is Russian. If it's Ukranian, it's Ukrainian. The
Russians are claiming it's Russian and Ukrainian ships violated it. Ukrainians, I guess, are
complaining or asserting the fact that they think it's still Ukrainian, and so they didn't
violate anything.
But all of that, the legal aspects of it, really boil down–as Mao Zedong said,
international law comes out the barrel of a gun. Who has the biggest gun? And in this case,
Russia has the biggest gun. It's also complicated by the fact that Poroshenko has elections
coming up, I think, in March. And declaring martial law, what the heck does that have to do
with naval affairs? Many suspect that he's reading his polls and knowing that he's in trouble,
political trouble, and so he's trying to start something that will help his political
chances.
So you have so many different variables here that it's hard to say who's right and who's
wrong, except to say that you have to determine whether Russia is right about Ukraine, and
ultimately about Crimea, or whether Ukraine is right about Ukraine. And since NATO and the
European Union and the United States have been rather in the front of the foxhole claiming that
Ukraine is right in many of these disputes, then you've got the recipe for real problem. You've
got NATO's ships, U.S. ships, other ships that might challenge Russia in these waters. And
there again, though, power comes out of the barrel of a gun. Russia has the advantage because
it's operating on interior lines from this area, very close to its own homeland, close to its
ports in Crimea. And the United States or NATO would be operating, in the case of NATO, at
quite a distance from the United States, quite a distance from its home water.
So this is just another incident in Putin's ability to poke his fingers in the eyes of NATO,
and the United States in particular, since the United States and NATO started encroaching on
his near abroad.
GREG WILPERT: Right. Actually, that's something I was going to ask as well, is the
extent to which this might be also driven by domestic politics within Russia. Clearly
something's happening within the Ukraine in terms of the elections and the fact that, as you
mentioned, that Poroshenko is behind in the polls. But Putin's own popularity might be being
impacted right now due to a declining economic situation. So I'm just wondering, what role do
you think that those domestic factors within Russia might be at play, that this might be a way
for him to recuperate some of his own popularity?
LARRY WILKERSON: Well, no question about it. We say domestic politics drives most of
Donald Trump's decision making. And I think that's a correct interpretation. It also has an
impact on people like Poroshenko and Putin. And the plunge in oil prices, my goodness. I looked
at a sign this morning, it was $2.19. I never thought I'd see that price again here in
Williamsburg. The plunge in oil prices, the benchmarks, has probably hurt Russia pretty badly.
They are, as one person said to me recently, a gas station with a capital in Moscow. So Putin,
if he's sinking in the polls, this would be something for him to do that has worked for him in
the past. Stick your fingers in Ukraine, which by extension is sticking your fingers in the
U.S.'s eyes, and you get a bump in the polls. I wouldn't put it past him at all.
GREG WILPERT: Now, in 2014, Russia held a referendum in Crimea and ended up annexing
the peninsula after it said that 97 percent of the population voted to join Russia. Now,
looking at the Kerch Strait between Crimea and Russia, which Ukraine needs in order to access
its southeastern coast from the Black Sea, wasn't such a crisis inevitable sooner or later?
LARRY WILKERSON: Oh, it was. And we have had a number of incidents where a Russian
patrol craft, FSB or otherwise, Navy, had come out and challenged Ukrainian ships in accordance
with, they said, the agreement that they saw. And they actually, as I understand it, boarded
some of these ships and searched them, and caused them commercial damage, if you will, because
they held them up so long; didn't let them get under way for a long period of time. So this is,
this has been working up to this more dramatic confrontation that we have now, I think, for
some time. And it's the tit for tat game that Putin is playing with Kiev, and in essence that
NATO, the EU, and the United States are playing with Moscow. Ukraine is Ukraine, and it is
going to be a member of NATO and a member of the EU. And Moscow says over, over our prostrate
body will the whole country of Ukraine–and we've taken Crimea, thank you very much, and
have invested with little green men and other things in much of Eastern Ukraine. So over my
prostate body will that happen.
And Putin has, as I said, the interior lines. It's much easier for him to operate than it is
for NATO or the United States to operate. And as long as that situation exists he's going to
continue to test this. He's not the equal of us in combination, but he is in a position to test
us all the time, and he's become brilliant at it. He goes into a fissure here, a fissure there,
a crack here, a crack there. And if he's challenged resolutely, he just kind of holds what he's
got or he backs up a little bit. But if he finds more mobility he widens it, deepens it, and
exploits it; Syria being a perfect example. And Syria being almost to the point where it's
exterior lines for him.
LARRY WILKERSON: So I have to admire the guy for the brilliance with which he does
this, and then, as you said, he turns it into domestic political gain.
GREG WILPERT: But now turning, actually, to the West, the conflict between
pro-Russian separatists and pro-European government in the Ukraine has been all about an
international conflict already, with constant intervention from NATO, as well as from Russia.
Now, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued a declaration, actually, where he declared,
quote, full support for Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty. However, the Ukraine
is not yet part of NATO, and thus there's no obligation to defend the Ukraine. But
Stoltenberg's statement makes it sound like NATO would do just that, defend the Ukraine should
a conflict escalate. Now, what do you think? Is that a wise position for the West to take,
considering the potential for escalation and outright war?
LARRY WILKERSON: Well, I don't think it's been a wise position for the West,
quote-unquote, to take, the United States leading the way. But it's pushed itself and its
alliance, NATO, so close to Russia's borders–I mean, incorporating former Warsaw Pact
members into NATO. Putin's reactions in that regard are perfectly understandable. I'm not
saying that the United States and NATO shouldn't take measures to defend themselves. But why
does that include taking over for alliance purposes, now? Commercial purposes, the EU, the
common market, so forth and so on, that's another deal. But taking them over for alliance
purposes–we forget. It's a political alliance, surely. But it's also a military alliance,
and that's the way Moscow has to look at it.
So their military exercises since about 2013 have been postulated on a NATO invasion of the
near abroad, and even a NATO invasion of Russia proper. So this is the way they do their
military exercises. Clearly they're not doing that because they think spending all that money
on that preposterous possible situation is just that: preposterous. They think it's a
probability, or at least a possibility.
So we're giving them the incentive to do this. And to fight over Ukraine–you remember
the old expression "Who would die for Danzig?" I keep asking myself, if Americans really were
asked to fulfill Article 5 of the NATO treaty for a place like Tbilisi, or even a place like
Riga, or any of those countries we've now expanded NATO into or proposed expanding NATO into,
like Ukraine, what would Americans say when they were told that full conscription was in
process, full mobilization was in process, war taxes are going to be levied, and we're going to
war for a city you can't even pronounce and couldn't find on a map? That's what we're talking
about. And oh, by the way, Russia is generally speaking cheek and jowl with that city, whereas
we're ten thousand miles away.
GREG WILPERT: All right. Well, we're going to leave it there for now. I was speaking
to Larry Wilkerson, Distinguished Professor at the College of William and Mary. Thanks again,
Larry, for having joined us today.
LARRY WILKERSON: Thanks for having me on.
GREG WILPERT: And thank you for joining The Real News Network. If you like Real News
Network stories such as this one, please keep in mind that we've started our winter fundraiser
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The US has had the "Monroe Doctrine" for two centuries now. I think Russia views Ukraine
as within its own "Monroe Doctrine" zone.
While, I would not wish the Russian government on anybody I know, the same can be said for
many CIA-backed governments over the past 65 years, including many in Central America where
the current migrant caravan is coming from. The Ukrainian government is not a bed of roses
either.
This is a pretty sticky situation with a lot of pride on the Russian side that is in
play.
Well, I like Larry Wilkerson generally, but shouldn't we always be reminding ourselves of
the context of Western aggression in which the Ukrainian/Russian drama is playing out? That
would be including the broken promise to refuse NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact
countries if Russia agreed to accept German reunification, the American-sponsored regime
change coup in Kiev of Feb. 'f4, and the ethnic cleansing that followed in Eastern Ukraine at
the hands of literal Ukrainian Neo-Nazis who honor Stepan Bandera?
Bandera wasn't a nazi per se. Bandera was a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, who was happy
to ally with anyone to fight Soviet Russia (and Poles). He was even for a time in a Nazi
concentration camp with the intention to be liquidated. UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), which
emerged from Bandera-led Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist, were Ukrainian nationalistic
partisans, who fought Germans (once it was clear that they would not creat a Ukrainian state)
and Soviets alike (and Poles).
He was a convenient person for Soviet Russia to paint as a Nazi, because otherwise they
would have to acknowledge strong nationalistic feelings in Ukraine, which would imply that it
wasn't happy to be part of the Soviet Union. Which just wasn't on. It was supposed to be one
happy family.
Before commenting on Ukraine, I recommend one studies the history of it, from original
Kiev Russ via Polish-Lithuanian Duchy and subsequent partitions, to what was happening there
in 1930 (although reading on the Soviet induced famine really requries guts – but its
crucial in understanding of the ethnic composition of the current Eastern Ukraine), WW2 and
immediately post WW2.
Most people have an idea of the problems Balkans suffer as great powers rolled this and
that way, but Ukraine has not dissimilar unhappy history. Which does not excuse it –
but may stop people talking total nonsense and buying propaganda as truth.
Although Bandera and his followers would later try to paint the alliance with the Third
Reich as no more than "tactical," an attempt to pit one totalitarian state against another,
it was in fact deep-rooted and ideological. Bandera envisioned the Ukraine as a classic
one-party state with himself in the role of führer, or providnyk, and expected that a
new Ukraine would take its place under the Nazi umbrella, much as Jozef Tiso's new fascist
regime had in Slovakia or Ante Pavelić's in Croatia.
In some sense, you're right about his not being a nazi. He was, in fact, far worse than
German nazis, who put him under a house arrest. "Bandera remains a highly controversial
figure today in Ukraine, with some hailing him as a liberator who fought both the Soviets and
the Nazis, while trying to establish an independent Ukraine, while others consider him to be
a Nazi collaborator and a war criminal, who was, together with his followers, largely
responsible for the Volhynian genocide and partially for the Holocaust in Ukraine." And that
is just Wikipedia.
When your followers commit atrocities that make even German nazis blush – what exactly
are you?
Good to recommend studying history! And when one does, one learns that there was no such
thing as Ukraine(a), until Lenin and Stalin spliced it together from assorted parts of the
czarist empire: the western part (which was under Poland/Litva, Habsburgs, and taken over
Poland again); the centre (ancient Kievskaja Rus); and the eastern part (which was Russian
Novorosija). They were also, in part, concerned about balancing the ratio of workers and
peasants on this newly formed territory. U. had its own seat at the UN – a ploy by
those pesky Russkies to increase the strength of the socialist bloc.
Under the USSR, U. was perhaps the most prosperous republic, highly developed and productive.
How far it has fallen since 1991 is worse than a Greek tragedy.
Unmentioned are Nordstream, Nordstream II, Southstream (this year, 2018,Bulgaria proposed
restarting the Southstream construction project) and Turkish Stream. Southstream maps through
Ukraine. Turkish Stream maps through Turkey and the Black Sea & Azov Sea.
adding: the Southstream project is now mapped to go through Bulgaria, immediately north of
Ukraine, for obvious reasons. Both routes require crossing the Black Sea.
(tin foil hat time:
a shooting war in the Black Sea might shut gas pipeline projects down.
a shooting war in the Black Sea/Balkans will play hell with the Eurozone and it's reliance
on Russian gas for winter heating at a reasonable price and reliable delivery.
a shooting war in the Black Sea/Balkans will play hell with the Eurozone's cohesion and
with NATO's cohesion, as if there aren't already enough problems with the Eurozone's
cohesion.
NATO alliance to thwart Russian military aggression is one thing; NATO alliance to force
purchase of US products (gas, in this case) to the detriment of European NATO members is
something else.
Purely anecdotal,
Last week a Ukrainian waitress who had been just back to visit family told me that she could
not believe the amount of US military in Ukraine. She said that people felt that "something
was going to happen". Sorry I couldn't get more details.
Could be pretty subjective if her parents lived next to one of the training ranges.
I wonder if this is in the hundreds or thousands.
For example, the "Clear Sky" depicted as "huge" happened earlier this month.
"Clear Sky brought together nearly 1,000 soldiers and airmen from nine partner nations,
including Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and the United
Kingdom."
Imagine a Russian "combat training post" of brigade size in, say, Quebec, maybe teaching
the separatists there the fine points of maneuver-and-fire and hand to hand combat and how to
conduct war in an urban area and how to use the weapons the goddam Rooskies would be shipping
to them, and spreading the Gospel of Putinism amongst the population there to assist said
Separatists to achieve their goal of, you know, separation. Not the best analogy, of course,
given the Ukraine-Russia geography and the presence of "NATO" forces of all kinds on as much
of the periphery of Russia as or War Leaders and Sneaky Petes have been able to manage, but
might be worth a thought.
Yaas, let us continue with the fear-uncertainty-doubt support of the Neocon Narrative and
whatever Great Game BS the CIA and US Global Network-Centric Battlespace Management have up
their dirty sleeves for that part of the world. On the way to Full Spectrum Dominance, of
course. Because that is the Manifest Destiny of We The People, new?
Hey, business as usual, and it's killing not only retail quantities of people in many
lands, but the whole living part of the planet -- albeit at a pace that the mopes can hardly
notice, among all the other claims on their attention and lives. Because that's what the
people who make and sell and deploy and create "doctrines" for the use of and know how to run
a regime change know how to do, right?
Excuse me, but what is a US military training range doing in Ukraine? How would US like it
if a Russian range were established in Sonora or Coahuila? And if a tourist notices it, don't
you think Russians are painfully aware of the situation? But they should just accept it, as
US/Nato creep ever closer to the Russian border. The amount of hypocrisy seems boundless
Wilkerson is often correct, but all those comments about Putin poking the the eye of the US
if just plain gibberish. The Russians did not start this one.
For the past two months, Eastern European media have been reporting on large US Army troop
movements through their countries heading to Ukraine. Trains after trains full of tanks and
other equipment.
Poroshenko got his martial law, but for only 30 days. It will not cover Ukraine entirely,
but only regions subject to "Russian aggression," including Vinnytsia, Luhansk, Mykolayiv,
Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kherson, Sea of Azov. Well, just about any region that voted
for former President Viktor Yanukovych.
The Lviv region certainly isn't covered under martial law. Even though they're rabid
Russophobes, I suspect that the nationalist Svoboda Party and the white supremacist Right
Sektor would've put on their paranoid tin-foil-hats and figured that Poroshenko was going to
use martial law to go after them. If Poroshenko had gotten what he wanted then there might
have been an internal insurrection and possibly Poroshenko hanging from a lamp post (or on
the lam with his frenemy, Mikheil Saakashvili, former president of Georgia & former
governor of Odesa region).
I'm waiting for NSA Bolton or SecState Pompeo to claim that Poroshenko made a
miscalculation. Isn't that approximately what former SecState Condoleezza Rice said about
Saakashvili's shelling of Russian peace keeping troops in South Ossetia, Georgia? So if Poroshenko's aim was internal politics, it was one big belly-flop.
Poroshenko got his martial law, but for only 30 days. It will not cover Ukraine
entirely, but only regions subject to "Russian aggression," including Vinnytsia, Luhansk,
Mykolayiv, Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kherson, Sea of Azov. Well, just about any
region that voted for former President Viktor Yanukovych.
Right, most of those regions were bases of support for the pro-Moscow Party of Regions.
This is simply broadcasting an intention to commit election fraud. The declaration of martial
law is a means to an end.
It kinda seems like a dubious proposition to think that anybody in Kiev or Washington
wouldn't anticipate the Russian response when they poked the Bear. So I'm not convinced that
Poroshenko flopped.
Just purely legally, the Ukraina and Russia had 2003 treaty with Russia on unimpeded
access to Azov sea (for both parties). That was unchallenged until now – when Ukraine
tried to send naval vessels there, not just civilian. I believe they provided an upfront
note. Note that Ukraine still has a non-trivial chunk of coastline in Azov sea, and as such
has legal right to send its vessels there – especially if they give substantial
warning.
Russian bridge between Kerch and Crimea blocks largest ships from Mariupol, which is an
important export port for Ukraine.
On the other hand, it appears that some of the crew on the Ukrainian vessels were from
Ukrainian secret service, one wonders why.
No, they did not provide an up front note, that's the entire point of controversy. By
now
* FSB published captured orders to cross the straights *stealthily*
* FSB published interviews with sailors, who confirm this
* The radio conversations between Russians and Ukrainian ships are out, and Russians keep
saying "back off and file your request properly, just like you did last time"
* About a month ago two Ukrainian navy ships did file correctly, and passed with no
problems
Under current rules you have to file your request 48 hours in advance, take a pilot to
pass under the bridge, and pass at assigned time in transit queue
As for the 'attacks' the other day, the Guardian of all outlets explains: "Since the
completion of the bridge over the Kerch strait, Moscow has demanded that Ukrainian ships not
only give notice of their intention to transit the strait but request permission, a change
that Kiev has rejected. According to western diplomats, the dispatch of the three ships was
intended to assert freedom of navigation.."
Sure, you can claim that Russia has no right to ask Ukraine to ask for permission to
the Sea of Azov, but then Kiev should have protested that demand, not send three armed
vessels to ignore the demand and sail through anyway. That is called provocation.
And Ukraine provoking Russia is a bad idea. Unless you're NATO, and you want Ukraine as
a member. And unless you're the chocolate billionaire who took over the government and now
has an approval rating in the single digits with elections coming up in March. Question: how
much chocolate do Ukrainians eat?
Russia just spent several billions on a combined highway – railway bridge over the
Kerch strait. That bridge relieves the threat of siege by Ukraine (and not incidentally is
reducing the cost of living in Ukraine and increasing tourism adding to the sense of economic
vitality that makes accession to Russia popular locally). But, of course, if Ukraine can
routinely route warships and tugs thru the strait under the bridge, without so much as a
by-the-by to Russia, that is itself an important threat to Russia's hold on Crimea.
.
These are realist and economic not legal considerations. But, it is an important aspect of
the context of political context underneath the narrative of who did what to whom when.
Crimea used to be one of highest income provinces of Ukraine and then overnight it became one
of the poorest in European Russia, which is in a good position to give Crimea prosperity and
income growth. There is plenty of cause for dissatisfaction with Russia, particularly among
the Crimean Tartars whose official leader is now a Ukrainian politician. But, absent war, the
Russians are likely to hold on to Crimea with the somewhat grudging approval of the vast
majority of residents.
The Crimean Khanate, a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, succeeded the Golden Horde
and lasted from 1449 to 1783.[33] In 1571, the Crimean Tatars attacked and sacked Moscow,
burning everything but the Kremlin.[34] Until the late 18th century, Crimean Tatars
maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire, exporting about 2 million slaves
from Russia and Ukraine over the period 1500–1700.[35]
And a lot more at Wikipedia's Crimea article.
Do Crimean Tartars dream of independence for themselves?
They may dream, but ain't gonna happen. OTOH, they are getting a marvelous new, grand
mosque in Simferopol. Generally, relations between Russians and Tatars in Crimea are
cordial.
Yes, it will be hard for one reason, if not more – most of the Crimean Tartars are
in Turkey today (millions of them there, while there are only about 250,000 in Crimea, since
the inhumane and lawless removal by the USSR in 1944.)
Inhumane – may be in the eye of the beholder. The reason they were moved was because
they sided with the Gerrman nazis during WWII and actively supported them against the Russian
population. Among their oh-so-humane acts was betraying the locations of groups that
organized to fight against the nazis. They hid in the mountains, and the ever-humane Tatars
disclosed it all to the Germans.
Given that they spent centuries raiding what are today Ukrainian and Russian territories and
poaching the population to sell people into slavery, I am puzzled they tolerate them at all.
Half of Stambul is blonde and blue-eyed as a result of those raids. Better to know a bit of
history then repeat debunked factoids.
I was reading stories back in 2014 how the Turks gathered some of their Jihadist fighters
from Syria and were going to fly them into Crimea on two airliners to come down hard on
separatists with the Muslim Tatars as a base for them. If true, then this would explain why
the Russians shut down the airport in Crimea as a priority when they made their move.
Probably have to wait years more before the real story comes out about those times.
What a bunch of f*cktards, all of them (gov't critters). Normal people in Ukraine, Poland,
Russia, etc just want to get on with a normal life. But no, we have to have ideologies and
subterfuge. Gov't should just be a service provided and paid for by our taxes. Nothing else.
And they should learn the meaning of the words: cooperate, compromise, civility for the
benefit of their citizens.
Several commentators were predicting that Porky Porosh would resort to one or more
provocations in the run up to the election – mainly on account of his garnering no more
than 8-9% popularity rating. There really is not too much mystery to this whole affair.
So I was reading how Poroshenko was briefing Pompeo on progress in trying to get martial
law passed (
https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/11/mps-block-poroshenko-he-flees-from-the-rada-to-his-facebook-page-phones-pompeo/
) and then I began to wonder. The Ukrainian elections are on 29th March next year so even if
Poroshenko got his full 60 days of martial law, there was still a long gap until the
elections itself so why the odd timing.
Then the penny dropped. There is the G-20 Buenos Aires summit starting soon and Putin is
supposed to be meeting Trump while there. Trump has not fallen in line with people like Nikki
Halley but said: "We do not like what's happening, either way, we don't like what's happening
and hopefully it will get straightened out." So he is not onboard with another raft of
sanctions nor refusing not to meet Putin. Was this all then an attempt to spike that meeting
hence the early timing?
There must be a period of 3-4 months between the end of martial law and elections for
candidate registration, agitation etc. For elections to happen on time it must end in early
January 2019
Once martial law is in place, the president can prolong it indefinitely with no legal
limitations. Unhappiness of western backers might be a practical constraint, but that can be
mitigated through more provocations. So expect something happening in a month –
parliament initially only authorized 30 days, and Poroshenko needs to create a reason to
prolong
If Mexico formed an alliance with Russia, how would the US respond? (Cuban missile
crisis?) From the point of view of traditional great power politics, it's that simple. Monroe
Doctrine and all that. Russia has been fighting the West in this area from at least 1610.
We're poking around their neighborhood and no great power can tolerate such arrogance.
And recall another recent "incident," January 2016, those Mope Marines on "riverine
command boats" somehow "straying into Iranian waters' near the military base on Farsi Island.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S.–Iran_naval_incident
First, "mechanical failure," then "navigation error," then punishment of 9 of the 10 Marines
for dereliction or something. And there was, drum roll, a Command Investigation, that found
mumble mumble grunt sigh Could not have been one of those probing operations that the Great
(sic) Powers do, or the Israel -ites, to check out the capabilities and responses and
electronic and "kinetic" equipage of "the enemy," by sending sacrificial mopes Into Harm's
Way, could it? Naaahh.
Even worse, if it was just Mope Gyrenes demonstrating the actual incompetence in Warcraft
of Our World's Greatest Military, let's remember that there's 4,000 nuclear warheads on
sub-launched and land-based multiple warhead ICBMs and in the bomb bays of the "ready line"
bombers and attack aircraft of "NATO," and thousands more on the Evil Soviet
Russian side, and China with a couple hundred, and Yisrael with 200 to 600 more. All poised
for quick if not instantaneous launch, increasingly under control of Advanced Artificial
Intelligence Genius Command and Control Systems ™,
https://thebulletin.org/landing_article/the-promise-and-peril-of-military-applications-of-artificial-intelligence/
. All waiting, impatiently in many cases, especially the Revelationist Xtian Air Farce
officers and enlisted men, for action, I might add. Waiting for some little 'incident" like
the ginned-up Ukraine idiocy or that oopsie by the Jarheads in January 2016 to trigger the
cascade of interlocking events and doctrines and directives and Operational Plans that means
I can stop churning my guts over the environment my child and grandchildren would otherwise
find themselves having to try to survive in
Ignore the day-to-day moves in the markets, in the big picture, some MAJOR is happening
namely, that the Everything Bubble is bursting.
By creating a bubble in sovereign bonds, the bedrock of the current financial system,
Central Banks created a bubble in EVERYTHING. After all, if the risk-free rate of return is at
FAKE level based on Central Bank intervention ALL risk assets will eventually adjust to FAKE
levels.
This whole mess starting blowing up in February when we saw the bubble in passive investing/
shorting volatility start to blow up (some investment vehicles based on these strategies lost
85% in just three days).
The media and Wall Street swept that mess under the rug which allowed the contagion to start
spreading to other, more senior asset classes like corporate bonds.
The US Corporate bond market took 50 years to reach $3 trillion. It doubled that in the last
9 years, bringing it to its current level of $6 trillion.
This debt issuance was a DIRECT of result of the Fed's intervention in the bond markets.
With the weakest recovery on record, US corporations experienced little organic growth. As a
result, many of them resorted to financial engineering through which they issued debt and then
used the proceeds to buyback shares.
This:
Juiced their Earnings Per Share (the same earnings, spread over fewer shares= better
EPS).
Provided the stock market with a steady stream of buyers, which
Lead to higher options-based compensation for executives.
If you think this sounds a lot like a Ponzi scheme that relies on a bubble in corporate
debt, you're correct. And that Ponzi scheme is now blowing up. The question now is
how bad will it get?"
VERY bad.
The IMF estimates about 20% of U.S. corporate assets could be at risk of default if
rates rise – some are in the energy sector but it also includes companies in real
estate and utilities. Exchange-traded funds that buy junk bonds, like iShares iBoxx $
High Yield Corporate Bond Fund (HYG) and the SPDR Barclays Capital High Yield Bond ETF (JNK),
could be among the most vulnerable if credit risks rise. iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade
Corporate Bond ETF (LQD) could also suffer.
Source: Barron's
With a $6 trillion market, a 20% default rate would mean some $1.2 trillion in corporate
debt blowing up: an amount roughly equal to Spain's GDP .
This process is officially underway.
Credit Markets Are Bracing for Something Bad
Cracks in corporate debt lead market commentary.
the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Index losing more than 3.5 percent and on
track for its worst year since 2008.
Source: Bloomberg
Indeed, the chart for US corporate junk bonds is downright UGLY.
This is just the beginning. As contagion spreads we expect more and more junior debt
instruments to default culminating in full-scale sovereign debt defaults in the developed world
(Europe comes to mind).
This will coincide with a stock market crash that will make 2008 look like a picnic.
Again, the markets are going to CRASH. The time to prepare is now BEFORE this happens.
On that note we just published a 21-page investment report titled Stock Market Crash
Survival Guide .
In it, we outline precisely how the crash will unfold as well as which investments will
perform best during a stock market crash.
Today is the last day this report will be available to the public. We extended the deadline
into the weekend based on last week's action, but this is IT no more extensions.
Update 4 : A UN Security Council meeting has been called for 11am
tomorrow after Ukraine incident with Russia, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said in a
tweet.
* * *
Update 3 : according to media reports, on Monday Ukraine's president will propose imposing
military law, amid the ongoing crisis with Russia.
* * *
Update 2: This is the moment when the escalating crisis started...
* * *
Update 1: Following reports from the Ukraine navy that Russian ships had fired on Ukraine
vessels near the Kerch Strait, Ukraine accused Moscow of also illegally seizing three of its
naval ships - the "Berdyansʹk" and "Nikopolʹ" Gurza-class small armored artillery
boats and a raid tug A-947 "Jani Kapu" - off Crimea on Sunday after opening fire on them, a
charge that if confirmed could ignite a dangerous new crisis between the two countries.
As reported earlier, Russia did not immediately respond to the allegation, but Russian news
agencies cited the FSB security service as saying it had incontrovertible proof that Ukraine
had orchestrated what it called "a provocation" and would make its evidence public soon.
According to media reports, Russia said it has "impounded" three Ukrainian naval ships after
they crossed the border with Russia
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko immediately called a meeting with his top
military and security chiefs to discuss the situation.
Separately, the EU has urged both sides to rapidly de-escalate the tense situation at the
Kerch strait:
*EU URGES UKRAINE, RUSSIA TO DE-ESCALATE SITUATION AT STRAIT
*UKRAINE, RUSSIA SHOULD ACT W/ `UTMOST RESTRAINT', EU SAYS
*EU URGES RUSSIA TO RESTORE FREEDOM OF PASSAGE AT KERCH STRAIT
NATO has confirmed it is "closely monitoring" developments and is calling for "restraint and
de-escalation"...
" NATO is closely monitoring developments in the Azov Sea and the Kerch Strait, and we are
in contact with the Ukrainian authorities. We call for restraint and de-escalation.
NATO fully supports Ukraine's sovereignty and its territorial integrity, including its
navigational rights in its territorial waters. We call on Russia to ensure unhindered access
to Ukrainian ports in the Azov Sea, in accordance with international law.
At the Brussels Summit in July, NATO leaders expressed their support to Ukraine, and made
clear that Russia's ongoing militarisation of Crimea, the Black Sea, and the Azov Sea pose
further threats to Ukraine's independence and undermines the stability of the broader region.
"
Finally, Ukraine has called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting over 'Russian
aggression' while Ukraine's secretary for national security, Oleksander Turchynov, accused
Russia of engaging in an act of war: "We heard reports on incident and have concluded that it
was an act of war by Russian Federation against Ukraine"
* * *
As we detailed earlier, the Ukrainian navy has accused Russia of opening fire on some of its
ships in the Black Sea, striking one vessel, and wounding a crew member.
In a statement on its Facebook page , the Ukrainian navy said the
Russian military vessels opened fire on Ukrainian warships after they had left the 12-mile zone
near the Kerch Strait, leaving one man wounded, and one Ukrainian vessel damaged and
immobilized, adding that Russian warships "shoot to kill."
Ukraine accused a Russian coastguard vessel, named the Don, of ramming one of its tugboats
in "openly aggressive actions". The incident allegedly took place as three Ukrainian navy boats
- including two small warships - headed for the port of Mariupol in the Sea of Azov, an area of
heightened tensions between the countries.
Russia accused Ukraine of illegally entering the area and deliberately provoking a
conflict.
Sky News reports that the Ukrainian president has called an emergency session of his war
cabinet in response to the incident.
"Today's dangerous events in the Azov Sea testify that a new front of [Russian] aggression
is open," Ukrainian foreign ministry spokeswoman Mariana Betsa said.
"Ukraine [is] calling now for emergency meeting of United Nations Security Council."
It comes after a day of rising tensions off the coast of Crimea, and especially around the
Kerch Strait, which separates Crimea from mainland Russia after Ukrainian vessels allegedly
violated the Russian border. The passage was blocked by a cargo ship and fighter jets were
scrambled.
According to RT , Russia has
stopped all navigation through the waterway using the cargo ship shown above. Videos from the
scene released by the Russian media show a large bulk freighter accompanied by two Russian
military boats standing under the arch of the Crimea Bridge and blocking the only passage
through the strait.
"The [Kerch] strait is closed for security reasons," the Director-General of the Crimean sea
ports, Aleksey Volkov, told TASS, confirming earlier media reports.
Russian Air Force Su-25 strike fighters were also scrambled to provide additional security
for the strait as the situation remains tense. The move came as five Ukrainian Navy ships had
been approaching the strait from two different sides.
According to RT, two Ukrainian artillery boats and a tugboat initially approached the strait
from the Black Sea while "undertaking dangerous maneuvers" and "defying the lawful orders of
the Russian border guards." Later, they were joined by two more military vessels that departed
from a Ukrainian Azov Sea port of Berdyansk sailing to the strait from the other side.
The Russian federal security agency FSB, which is responsible for maintaining the country's
borders, denounced the actions of the Ukrainian ships as a provocation, adding that they could
create a "conflict situation" in the region. According to the Russian media reports, the
Ukrainian vessels are still sailing towards the strait, ignoring the warnings of the Russian
border guards.
According to
Reuters , a bilateral treaty gives both countries the right to use the sea, which lies
between them and is linked by the narrow Kerch Strait to the Black Sea. Moscow is able to
control access between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea after it built a bridge that straddles
the Kerch Strait between Crimea and southern Russia.
Reuters adds that tensions surfaced on Sunday after Russia tried to intercept three
Ukrainian ships -- two small armored artillery vessels and a tug boat -- in the Black Sea,
accusing them of illegally entering Russian territorial waters.
The Ukrainian navy said a Russian border guard vessel had rammed the tug boat, damaging it
in an incident it said showed Russia was behaving aggressively and illegally. It said its
vessels had every right to be where they were and that the ships had been en route from the
Black Sea port of Odessa to Mariupol, a journey that requires them to go through the Kerch
Strait.
Meanwhile, Russia's border guard service accused Ukraine of not informing it in advance of
the journey, something Kiev denied, and said the Ukrainian ships had been maneuvering
dangerously and ignoring its instructions with the aim of stirring up tensions.
It pledged to end to what it described as Ukraine's "provocative actions", while Russian
politicians lined up to denounce Kiev, saying the incident looked like a calculated attempt by
President Petro Poroshenko to increase his popularity ahead of an election next year. Ukraine's
foreign ministry said in a statement it wanted a clear response to the incident from the
international community.
"Russia's provocative actions in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov have crossed the line and
become aggressive," it said. "Russian ships have violated our freedom of maritime navigation
and unlawfully used force against Ukrainian naval ships."
Both countries have accused each other of harassing each other's shipping in Sea of Azov in
the past and the U.S. State Department in August said Russia's actions looked designed to
destabilize Ukraine, which has two major industrial ports there.
It is clear that Poroshenko wants to stay in power. And this is one of the ways to increase Poroshenko chances on forthcoming
elections. It is simultaneously increase chances for him to land in jail as Timoshenko does not looks kindly on such blatant
attempts to hijack elections.
Unwilling to simply accept Poroshenko's claims that he had heard reliable whispers about an
imminent Russian invasion, opposition figures pressed Poroshenko on his reasoning for the
emergency measures, and ultimately succeeded in forcing him to water down the proposal. But
even before Poroshenko's decree won the approval of lawmakers, the Ukrainian president had
already started deploying troops into the streets of his country.
Now in a state of martial law, Ukraine has called up its reservists and deployed all
available troops to join the mobilization. Initially expected to last for two months,
Poroshenko revised his degree to avoid accusations that he would try to interfere in the
upcoming Ukrainian election. The decree passed by the Rada will leave martial law in effect for
30 days. The country has also started restricting travel for Russian nationals. NATO Commander
Jens Stoltenberg told the Associated Press that
Poroshenko had given his word that the order wouldn't interfere with the upcoming vote. The
conflict between the Ukraine and Russia exploded into life on Sunday
when Russian ships fired on two Ukrainian artillery ships and rammed a tugboat as the ships
traveled toward the Kerch Strait, which connects the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. Russia's
mighty Black Sea fleet has taken the three ships and their crew into custody, and has so far
ignored calls to release the soldiers by the UN, European leaders and Poroshenko himself.
US officials criticized Russia for its "aggressive" defense of the Kerch Strait, which
Ukraine has a right to use according to a bilateral treaty. After Nikki Haley said during an
emergency meeting of the UN Security Council that Russia was making it "impossible" to have
normal relations with the US, Mike Pompeo said Russia's "aggressive action" was a "dangerous
escalation" and also "violates international law." He also advocated for Poroshenko and Russian
President Vladimir Putin to engage in direct talks. Russia says the ships disobeyed orders to
halt, and that Ukraine had failed to notify Russia of the ships' advance. Ukraine claims that
it did notify Russia, and that the incident is the result of "growing Russian aggression." Six
Ukrainian crewmen were injured in the Russian attack, which was the first act of violence
between the two nations since the annexation of Crimea.
Chief diplomats from both countries traded accusations of provocations and "deliberate
hostility."
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin tweeted that the dispute was not an accident and
that Russia had engaged in "deliberately planned hostilities," while Russian Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov blamed Kiev for what he described as a "provocation," adding that "Ukraine had
undoubtedly hoped to get additional benefits from the situation, expecting the U.S. and
Europe to blindly take the provocateurs' side."
Poroshenko said the martial law was necessary because Ukraine was facing nothing short of a
all-out ground invasion.
Poroshenko said it was necessary because of intelligence about "a highly serious threat of
a ground operation against Ukraine." He did not elaborate.
"Martial law doesn't mean declaring a war," he said. "It is introduced with the sole
purpose of boosting Ukraine's defense in the light of a growing aggression from Russia."
But the president's plans to impose martial law throughout the country were rebuffed as the
opposition forced a compromise where troops will only be deployed in 10 border provinces. These
provinces share borders with Russia, Belarus and the Trans-Dniester, a pro-Moscow breakaway
region of Moldova.
Still, many remained skeptical. Opposition figures, including former President Yulia
Tymoshenko pointed out that the order would give soldiers broad latitude to do pretty much
whatever they want. Furthermore, Ukraine never called for martial law during the insurgency in
the east that erupted back in 2014, eventually leading to an armed conflict that killed more
than 10,000.
The approved measures included a partial mobilization and strengthening of air defenses.
It also contained vaguely worded steps such as "strengthening" anti-terrorism measures and
"information security" that could curtail certain rights and freedoms.
But Poroshenko also pledged to respect the rights of Ukrainian citizens.
[...]
Despite Poroshenko's vow to respect individual rights, opposition lawmaker and former
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko warned before the vote that his proposal would lead to the
possible illegal searches, invasion of privacy and curtailing of free speech.
"This means they will be breaking into the houses of Ukrainians and not those of the
aggressor nation," noted Tymoshenko, who is leading in various opinion polls. "They will be
prying into personal mail, family affairs ... In fact, everything that is written here is a
destruction of the lives of Ukrainians."
Poroshenko's call also outraged far-right groups in Ukraine that have advocated severing
diplomatic ties with Russia. Hundreds of protesters from the National Corps party waved
flares in the snowy streets of Kiev outside parliament and accused the president of using
martial law to his own ends.
But Poroshenko insisted it was necessary because what happened in the Kerch Strait between
Crimea and the Russian mainland "was no accident," adding that "this was not the culmination
of it yet."
His critics reacted to his call for martial law with suspicion, wondering why Sunday's
incident merited such a response. With his approval ratings in free fall following a series of
corruption scandals, Poroshenko's enemies worry that the incident may have been stage-managed
to give the president an excuse to crack down on dissent and free movement ahead of the
vote.
And then there is Yulia Tymoshenko who is doing well in the polls. That crazy bitch said
that the separatists in the East should be nuked. Ukraine gave up on its nukes though.
Wise lesson for the West here: All politicians in Eastern Europe -whatever country and
whatever party- are sick psychopaths. Not that ours are any better. Yet, people keep voting
for them.
Perhaps but Putin has more interest to keep the situation as it is. Russian gas needs to
keep flowing into Europe. Russia needs that cash cow that the US is trying to disrupt .
One of my Russian mates sent me a link to a Russian news website and according to the
iskra-news.info last night ,Ukrainian gold reserves (40 sealed boxes) were loaded on an
unidentified transport aircraft in Kiev's Borispol airport. The plane took off
immediately.
So my guess is, that is if indeed this report is true it either means the new ruling elite
have stolen the gold bullion or perhaps their is a legitimate fear of the Russians taking
possession of this bullion, whatever the facts, it still looks very shady indeed.
Conclusion
Official narrative: gold bullion is going to USA (maybe to reassure the Germans their gold
is in safe hands, after all the despite numerous requests from the German Govt The Feds have
not given access for them to even view their Gold Bullion) . Real narrative: probably to
Switzerland where it is divided between Yulia Tymoshenko and her cronies.
Once again I simply implore one ACTUAL journalist to report on what's happening there.
Beside the mercenary sociopaths that took in millions off the first round of
"freedom".
Russia is a hurt and vulnerable nation.
The US has ginormous truth issues never to be resolved
Hence the Goths and Barbarians will agree that once more......Rome is burning
Btw, not defending Russia and as convoluted as it sounds my point is truth has been lost
even in this Instagram milli-second of info slop offering by those who are not standing in
the snow covered mud of unbiased reality
The last time Poroshenko, the US man in Ukraine (OU) as he was referred to in US
diplomatic cables from 2006 and exposed by Wkikleads, got the Ukes into a war with the
Eastern oblasts, a lot of Ukrainians got killed.
Poor buggers were crushed and they should never have been there. The US / McCain et al
used them as cannon fodder.
The Uke military had rotted after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and that was largely
because their corrupt leaders never gave any consideration to going to war against anyone,
other than political war against each other to determine who got the biggest slice from
plundering the state.
The plundering continues, only now there is scant left for the general population.
After the US putsch, income per capita dropped by approx a third, cost of living doubled
and tax collection was hampered even more than before because the average Uke had no money
left to pay taxes so they went underground. and paid off local officials just to let them
make a living doing whatever the could..
"Why would Russia want Ukraine in the first place?".
Lets see.....so they can fund an addition 50 million lazy ***** and pick up the tab for 25
million fat, diabetes ridden BROKE Ukrainian pensioners?
So Russia can sink tens of billions into Ukraine's bankrupt healthcare system?
Where is the upside for Russia?
Putin can add, he is not in the least bit interested in ruling Ukraine, he'd just as well
seal the ******* boarder and be done with it, in fact its what he is doing. Once those
alternate pipe lines are in there will be a 5,000 km fence and the Ukes can freeze in the
dark on their own.
Russia isn't interested in taking any country, the countries are warming up to Russia and
China. This is pissing off mushroom head and band of gypsies in DC. The failing empire
looking for a war.
"Please stop using incorrect US government propaganda language in your
articles."
US Intel cant remember everything remember they have an agenda to push. It might be a
truther website for the people posting but it is also a intel gathering site to keep abreast
of how some of the sheeple really feel. What better way to get the sheeple to open up?
After Democratic party was co-opted by neoliberals there is no way back. And since Obama the trend of Democratic Party is
toward strengthening the wing of CIA-democratic notthe wing of the party friendly to workers. Bought by Wall Street leadership is
uncable of intruting any change that undermine thier current neoliberal platform. that's why they criminally derailed Sanders.
Notable quotes:
"... When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism, would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism. ..."
"... To quote Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!" ..."
"... "Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad." ..."
"... "It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent upon the Democratic Party." ..."
"... "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." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting the Democrats ..."
"... It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of their class. ..."
"... First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious! ..."
"... from Greenwald: The Democratic Party's deceitful game https://www.salon.com/2010/... ..."
they literally ripped this out of the 2016 Green Party platform. Jill Stein spoke repeatedly
about the same exact kind of Green New Deal, a full-employment, transition-to-100%-renewables
program that would supposedly solve all the world's problems.
When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address
the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism,
would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non
threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism.
In 2016, when the Greens made
this their central economic policy proposal, the Democrats responded by calling that platform
irresponsible and dangerous ("even if it's a good idea, you can't actually vote for a
non-two-party candidate!"). Why would they suddenly find a green new deal appealing now
except for its true purpose: left cover for the very system destroying the planet.
To quote
Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!"
"Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to
everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions
currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad."
Their political position not only lacks seriousness, unserious is their political
position.
"It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent
upon the Democratic Party."
For subjective-idealists, what you want to believe, think and feel is just so much more
convincing than objective reality. Especially when it covers over single-minded class
interests at play.
"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." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting
the Democrats
It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically
fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient
facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of
establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with
delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of
their class.
First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the
Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back
into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious!
Only an International Socialist program led by Workers can truly lead a "green revolution" by
expropriating the billionaire oil barons of their capital and redirecting that wealth into
the socialist reconstruction of the entire economy.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" is a nice laugh. Really, it sure is funny hearing
these lies given any credence at all. This showmanship belongs in a fantasy book, not in real
life. The Democratic Party as a force for good social change Now that's a laugh!
Lies, empty promises, meaningless tautologies and morality plays, qualified and conditional
declarations to be backpedalled pending appropriate political expediencies, devoid any
practical content that is what AOC, card carrying member of DSA, and in fact young energetic
political apparatchik of calcified political body of Dems establishment, duty engulfs. And
working for socialist revolution is no one of them.
What kind of socialist would reject socialist revolution, class struggle and class
emancipation and choose, as a suppose socialist path, accommodation with oligarchic ruling
elite via political, not revolutionary process that would have necessarily overthrown ruling
elite.
What socialist would acquiesce to legalized exploitation of people for profit, legalized
greed and inequality and would negotiate away fundamental principle of egalitarianism and
working people self rule?
Only National Socialist would; and that is exactly what AOC campaign turned out to be all
about.
National Socialism with imperial flavor is her affiliation and what her praises for
Pelosi, wife of a billionaire and dead warmonger McCain proved.
Now she is peddling magical thinking about global change and plunge herself into falacy of
entrepreneurship, Market solution to the very problem that the market solutions were designed
to create and aggravate namely horrific inequality that is robbing people from their own
opportunities to mitigate devastating effects of global change.
The insidiousness of phony socialists expresses itself in the fact that they lie that any
social problem can be fixed by current of future technical means, namely via so called
technological revolution instead by socialist revolution they deem unnecessary or
detrimental.
The technical means for achieving socialism has existed since the late 19th century, with the
telegraph, the coal-powered factory, and modern fertilizer. The improvements since then have
only made socialism even more streamlined and efficient, if such technologies could only be
liberated from capital! The idea that "we need a new technological revolution just to achieve
socialism" reflects the indoctrination in capitalism by many "socialist" theorists because it
is only in capitalism where "technological growth" is essential simply to maintain the
system. It is only in capitalism (especially America, the most advanced capitalist nation,
and thus, the one where capitalism is actually closest towards total crisis) where the dogma
of a technological savior is most entrenched because America cannot offer any other kind of
palliative to the more literate and productive sections of its population. Religion will not
convince most and any attempt at a sociological or economic understanding would inevitably
prove the truth of socialism.
"... The original "New Deal," which included massive public works infrastructure projects, was introduced by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s amid the Great Depression. Its purpose was to stave off a socialist revolution in America. It was a response to a militant upsurge of strikes and violent class battles, led by socialists who were inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution ..."
"... Since the 2008 crash, first under Bush and Obama, and now Trump, the ruling elites have pursued a single-minded policy of enriching the wealthy, through free credit, corporate bailouts and tax cuts, while slashing spending on social services. ..."
"... To claim as does Ocasio-Cortez that American capitalism can provide a new "New Deal," of a green or any other variety, is to pfile:///F:/Private_html/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Neoliberalism/Historyromote an obvious political fiction." ..."
"The original "New Deal," which included massive public works infrastructure projects,
was introduced by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s amid the Great
Depression. Its purpose was to stave off a socialist revolution in America. It was a response
to a militant upsurge of strikes and violent class battles, led by socialists who were
inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution that had occurred less than two decades before.
American capitalism could afford to make such concessions because of its economic
dominance. The past forty years have been characterized by the continued decline of American
capitalism on a world stage relative to its major rivals. The ruling class has responded to
this crisis with a social counterrevolution to claw back all gains won by workers. This has
been carried out under both Democratic and Republican administrations and with the assistance
of the trade unions.
Since the 2008 crash, first under Bush and Obama, and now Trump, the ruling elites have
pursued a single-minded policy of enriching the wealthy, through free credit, corporate
bailouts and tax cuts, while slashing spending on social services.
To claim as does Ocasio-Cortez that American capitalism can provide a new "New Deal," of a
green or any other variety, is to pfile:///F:/Private_html/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Neoliberalism/Historyromote an obvious political fiction."
Christine Blasey Ford Thanks America For $650,000 Payday, Hopes Life "Will Return To
Normal"
by Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/27/2018 - 17:30 171 SHARES
Amid the sound and fury of the disgusting antics of the Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS nomination
process, one of the main defenses of Christine Balsey Ford's sudden recollection of an '80s
sexual assault was simply "...why would she lie... what's in it for her?"
Certainly, the forced publicity by Dianne Feinstein and public questioning guaranteed her 15
minutes of fame (and perhaps even more infamy if Kavanaugh's nomination had failed) but now, in
a statement thanking everyone who had supported her, Ford is "hopeful that our lives will
return to normal."
The full statement was posted to her GoFundMe page :
Words are not adequate to thank all of you who supported me since I came forward to tell
the Senate that I had been sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh. Your tremendous outpouring
of support and kind letters have made it possible for us to cope with the immeasurable
stress, particularly the disruption to our safety and privacy. Because of your support, I
feel hopeful that our lives will return to normal.
The funds you have sent through GoFundMe have been a godsend. Your donations have allowed
us to take reasonable steps to protect ourselves against frightening threats, including
physical protection and security for me and my family, and to enhance the security for our
home. We used your generous contributions to pay for a security service, which began on
September 19 and has recently begun to taper off; a home security system; housing and
security costs incurred in Washington DC, and local housing for part of the time we have been
displaced. Part of the time we have been able to stay with our security team in a residence
generously loaned to us.
With immense gratitude, I am closing this account to further contributions. All funds
unused after completion of security expenditures will be donated to organizations that
support trauma survivors. I am currently researching organizations where the funds can best
be used. We will use this space to let you know when that process is complete.
Although coming forward was terrifying, and caused disruption to our lives, I am grateful
to have had the opportunity to fulfill my civic duty. Having done so, I am in awe of the many
women and men who have written me to share similar life experiences, and now have bravely
shared their experience with friends and family, many for the first time. I send you my
heartfelt love and support.
I wish I could thank each and every one of you individually. Thank you.
Christine
Well one thing is for sure - she has almost 650 thousand reasons why life since
the accusations could be more comfortable...
Here's an interesting fact: Her immediate family (siblings and parents) wants nothing to
do with her. They refused to sign a petition of support created by "close family and
friends", they refused to make any supporting statements and they refused to show up to the
hearings.
Sorry doesn't seem like much money to me at all. Put family through all that for that
amount? Risk ones families welfare and safety for that amount and a bad name? One would have
to be a total idiot or crazy for that.
Wanders in, belches out a pack of lies, destroys an entire family's lives, tears a big
chunk out of the social fabric of the country, collects a huge payday and hits the beach for
the rest of her life, or at least the portion not dedicated to indoctrinating yound
minds.
She is at least as much of a Democrat as Obama ever was.
Disgusting female. Brett Kavanaugh and his family donated the gomfund me set up for his
family, to a charity for abused women.
Ford has a second go fund me which raised more, to,pay for legals, she has made a fortune,
has a 3 million plus home, and whatever she was given for this charade. And the abortion drug
company interest. Plus the google renting illegally events thru the second fromt door.
Kavanaugh has an ordinary car, a simple home worth 1.3 million and a debt of 860,000.
Always been an employee so never the big paycheck like Avenatti got.
volunteers for homeless. Plus the sports coaching for school, kids and lecturing...both no
more.
Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund XLE is down by 5.1% year to date. The fall could be
attributed to Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp CVX, the two largest U.S. oil companies which
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The energy sector has slumped 12% in the fourth quarter, majorly due to oil entering the
bear market. However, it has recovered a bit this month and is down nearly 0.5% (as of Nov 19).
Per Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at financial research company CFR, the sector
performs better in the rising rate and inflation scenario. Per CFRA, the energy sector has been
a better performing sector since World War 2 in comparison to consumer staples, healthcare and
utilities (read: Fed Meet Signals December Rate Hike: ETFs That Gained).
However, strengthening of the greenback could pose a threat to the sector. If the U.S.
dollar rallies, it will make buying dollar-denominated oil expensive in foreign currencies. The
greenback is likely to surge in the days ahead due to political and economic turbulence in
Europe. Euro has already shed nearly 5% against the greenback this year (read: Is the Uptrend
in Dollar ETFs Over?).
Given cheap valuations and strong earnings growth, investors could tap into the following
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XLE
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a High risk outlook.
Trump most probably will be a one time President... The American people will elect the next time another bullshit artist
but this time probably from Democratic Party..
Notable quotes:
"... I'll give the congressman all of that, especially ..."
"... When the economy is bad, nobody wants a bullsh*t artist in the White House. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "He came to our community and said, 'Don't sell your house. These jobs are coming back,' " Green said. "We've seen nothing but job losses around here." ..."
"... What you can blame Trump for is exploiting the hopes of Rust Belt people by telling them that he could bring those jobs back. ..."
Part of the retrenchment is a response to a slowdown in new-car sales that has prompted automakers to slim their operations
and shed jobs. And earlier bets on smaller cars have had to be unwound as consumers have gravitated toward pickup trucks and sport-utility
vehicles in response to low gasoline prices.
In addition, automakers have paid a price for the trade battle that Mr. Trump set in motion. In June G.M. slashed its profit
outlook for the year because tariffs were driving up production costs, raising prices even on domestic steel. Rising interest
rates are also generating headwinds.
Ms. Barra said no single factor had prompted G.M.'s cutbacks, portraying them as a prudent trimming of sails. "We are taking
these actions now while the company and the economy are strong to stay in front of a fast-changing market," she said on a conference
call with analysts.
More:
But demand for small and midsize cars has plunged. Two-thirds of all new vehicles sold last year were trucks and S.U.V.s. That
shift has hit G.M.'s Lordstown plant hard. Just a few years ago, the factory employed three shifts of workers to churn out Chevy
Cruzes. Now it is down to one. In 2017 the plant made about 180,000 cars, down from 248,000 in 2013.
More broadly, the years long boom in car and truck sales in North America appears to be ending, said John Hoffecker, vice chairman
at AlixPartners, a global consulting firm with a large automotive practice. "Sales have held up well this year, but we do see
a downturn coming," he said. AlixPartners forecast that domestic auto sales will fall to about 15 million cars and light trucks
in 2020, from about 17 million this year.
Watching cable news tonight at the gym, I heard an Ohio Democratic Congressman blast the president over this. He ripped Trump
for having made promises to industrial workers in his state in 2016, about how he would bring jobs back. He ripped Trump over the
steel tariffs that have driven up costs of production. And he ripped Trump for not taking his job seriously, for caring more about
Twitter than coming up with a strategy that might save jobs.
I'll give the congressman all of that, especially on Trump being a lazy, golfing-and-tweeting buffoon who doesn't
care about his job. Trump can get away with that when the economy is booming, but now it looks like things might be turning downward.
In Lordstown, workers planned to pray for a miraculous reversal of the company's decision, according to David Green, president
of United Auto Workers Local 1112.
"It's like someone knocks the wind out of you," he said of GM's announcement. "You lose your breath for a minute."
About 40 percent of the local's members voted for Trump, Green said. Now workers want to see the president keep his promises,
he said.
"He came to our community and said, 'Don't sell your house. These jobs are coming back,' " Green said. "We've seen nothing
but job losses around here."
Indeed, even before Monday's announcement, Lordstown had been bleeding jobs. Since Trump took office, GM has eliminated two
shifts and roughly 3,000 jobs at the plant, according to John Russo, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz
Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.
But we have to face some facts. People aren't buying what GM is making. Aside from the move away from small cars, an effect of
lower gasoline prices, sedan sales have been declining across all manufacturers. This summer, I got a good deal on a 2018 Honda Accord,
a car I really love, and that received rapturous praise from the automobile press when it came out. Honda struggled to sell the cars.
It's not because they're lousy cars. They're actually terrific cars. It's that consumers are losing interest in sedans. What good
does it do GM to manufacture cars that people will not buy?
You can't blame Trump for that.
What you can blame Trump for is exploiting the hopes of Rust Belt people by telling them that he could bring those jobs back.
The Rust Belt made the crucial difference for Trump in 2016. Unless the Democrats' 2020 nominee is someone who is more or less a
space alien, it's going to be hard to win those voters' support when you've improved your Twitter game and your golf score, but those
plants are idle.
Part 3 - The corporate-backed institutions behind the rapid and artificial ideological transformation of the American society
in favor of neoliberalism
In the US case I begin with 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 marshalled 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 pooled .
How directly influential this appeal to engage in class war was, is hard to tell. But we do know that 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 centres 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 '. But exactly how was state power
to be deployed to reshape common-sense understandings?
US allies in Europe and Asia did not expect to be treated like vassal states, at least not
openly. Succumbing to Trump's demands is an admission of being a lapdog.
US allies in Europe and Asia have no choice but to push back against Trump's bullying and
condescending stances. They are elected by their citizens to protect the countries' sovereignty
and interests, after all. Too, these leaders must save face and protect their legacies.
One of the first European leaders having the courage to defy Trump is French President
Emmanuel Macron, calling for the establishment of a European Union army independent of the US
to defend itself against Russia, China and possibly America itself. His proposal is supported
by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Asian allies, particularly India, also seem to have pushed back , buying Iranian oil whether
the US likes it or not.
Washington's attempt to revive the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue comprising itself and
soulmates Australia, India and Japan may be losing support. Instead of joining with the US to
contain China, India and Japan are seeking rapprochement with the Asian giant. Even "deputy
sheriff" Australia is apparently having second thoughts, as one of its states is
officially joining China's Belt and and Road Initiative.
In short, these three allies might finally realize that joining the US in containing China
is harmful to their national interests. Fighting that nuclear power on their own soil might not
be a good idea.
No country treats the US 'unfairly'
The fact of the matter is no country treats the US "unfairly" or is "eating its lunch." On
the contrary, it could be argued that it is the other way around.
Having emerged as the world's strongest nation during and after World War II, US foreign
policies have one goal: Shape the world to its image. That process began at the 1944 Bretton
Woods Conference, insisting on using the US dollar as the world reserve currency and writing
the trade rules. In this way, the US has accumulated a very powerful tool, printing as much
money as it wants without repercussions to itself. For example, when a country wants to cash
its US Treasury holdings, all America has to do is print more greenbacks.
To that end, the US is clearly "eating other countries' lunch." Indeed, a major reason the
US can afford to build so many weapons is that other countries are paying for them.
US
trade practices
On trade, the US in 1950 rejected the UK's proposal of forming an International Trade
Organization (ITO) modeled after the International Monetary Fund and World Bank because it
feared the ITO might have harmed American manufacturing. In its place, the US proposed and
succeeded in forming the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) framework to negotiate tariff rates on goods.
Being the world's most powerful economy and biggest trading nation at that time, the US
dominated the world trading system and wrote its rules. For example, it was the US that
invented and implemented non-tariff trade barriers such as anti-dumping duties and
national-security concerns to block imports. For example, the US imposed tariffs on Canadian,
EU, Mexican and other countries' steel and aluminum from entering its market for security
reasons.
It is laughable for the US to accuse Canada, the EU and Mexico of posing a national-security
threat. They are, in fact, America's most staunch allies.
US foreign direct investment
abroad
US companies bring with them ideas and technology (for which they charge exorbitant prices)
when investing in a foreign market such as China and elsewhere. The capital needed to build
factories is largely funded by the host country or other partners. For example, it is Taiwanese
and Japanese investors that built Foxconn factories in China to assemble American electronic
gadgets such as the iPad.
What's more, US companies charge huge prices for the products they make in China. According
to the Asian Development Bank and other research organizations, Chinese labor, for example,
receives a small percentage of the profits Apple takes in from gadgets it produces in China.
This lopsided profit distribution raises the question: Who is "eating whose
lunch?"
America has itself to blame
The US cannot blame China or any other country for its declining global influence and
dominance – America, particularly under Donald Trump, did that to itself. Chinese
President Xi Jinping, indeed, has advocated cooperation and dialogue as ways to defuse
conflicts and attain a better world.
No country has ever even hinted at attacking the US; it is after all the world's most
powerful nation, armed with enough conventional and nuclear weapons to blow up the world. The
"threats" are exaggerated or invented by US neoconservatives and vested interests to scare
Americans into supporting huge defense spending.
'Fake news' can only go so far
Using "fake news" to pressure countries into submission might work with those unable to
fight back, but could be extremely costly against powers such as China and Russia. For example,
Trump's escalating trade tensions with China are already adversely affecting the US economy, as
seen in falling GDP growth, decreasing stock prices, a huge agricultural inventory, and rising
poverty.
According to United Nations, the impoverished American population is being hit the hardest
under the Trump administration. The US Federal Reserve and others are projecting significant
economic decline in the foreseeable future if the trade war does not end.
One can only imagine what a nuclear war would bring.
Donald Trump is probably no less bullying than his predecessors (perhaps with the exception
of George W Bush), but he is more open about it. Bush's outburst, "You are either with us or
against us," earned America a bad reputation when he demanded that allies join him to invade
Iraq.
Trump has bullied or offended everyone, friends and foes alike. Unless he shifts gear, he
could alienate friends as well as foes, which could erode US geopolitical influence and
economic growth or might even bring the country down. He cannot threaten sovereign nations
without incurring huge costs to America.
@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.
"... 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? ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... Social 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'. ..."
"... 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. ..."
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?
@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.
Social 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.)
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....
@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?
If 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.
"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.
Back 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.
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.
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.
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.
You'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".
@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.
"... 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. ..."
"... The 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? ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
@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.
The 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
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.
For '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.
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
Spoken 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?
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.
In 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".
Most of this crap comes from America. Crappy middle-management bureaucrats spouting "free-market" bollocks.
The efficiency of the private sector - some nob with a name badge timing how long you've been on the toilet.
Freedommm!!!!
It 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.
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.
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
@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.
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".
In essence this is the largest casino in the world, created by casino capitalism. Previously
only wealthy individuals owned stocks. Now everybody owed them via thier 401K (which in recession
can easily become 201K ;-). In 2008 S&P500 touched the level of around 700. Does this mean
that the it was oversold? And what would happen to him if the government will not pushed
trillions to large banks, and some of those money went into S&p500.
Notable quotes:
"... There is no magic valuation level that supports high-flying stocks. They are driven by sentiment in both directions. ..."
"... That gets to the oft-quoted notion of "support." Does it really exist? Is there a level at which assets are just "too cheap" relative to their intrinsic values and therefore must be bought regardless of prevailing market trends? ..."
"... The mistake many market observers often make is to attribute all selloffs to gyrations in sentiment and to misunderstand that stock booms are driven by that exact factor -- in reverse. Sentiment will always rule market pricing in the short-term. ..."
Stocks quotes in this article: AAPL , NFLX , FB , AMZN , F , GE , IBM , T , GOOGLThere is no magic valuation level
that supports high-flying stocks. They are driven by sentiment in both directions.
It's on now. The markets are in full-blown correction mode.
I hope the truncated trading day on Friday did not escape your attention, because it
continued a negative price trend for stocks that began in late-September. The question now is:
How low can we go?
That gets to the oft-quoted notion of "support." Does it really exist? Is there a level
at which assets are just "too cheap" relative to their intrinsic values and therefore must be
bought regardless of prevailing market trends?
The mistake many market observers often make is to attribute all selloffs to gyrations
in sentiment and to misunderstand that stock booms are driven by that exact factor -- in
reverse. Sentiment will always rule market pricing in the short-term. That was just as
true with Apple ( AAPL ) at $220 per share as it is with
Apple at $172 per share, Netflix ( NFLX ) at $420 and $258 and on and on
down the list. Portfolio managers were buying Facebook ( FB ) above $200 per share and Amazon (
AMZN ) above
$2,000 because they had to, though, not based on innately unquantifiable, voodoo metrics such
as "disruption."
I am basing that statement on my regular conversations with fund managers at very large
asset managers, and of course no one can definitively take the pulse of every player in the
market. That is the great divide between individuals (my clients at Portfolio Guru LLC) and
institutions (pension funds, insurance companies, college endowments, sovereign wealth funds,
etc.)
Individuals want their portfolio values to rise. Period. Institutions want their portfolios
to outperform their carefully selected benchmarks over specific time periods on a risk-adjusted
basis.
So, that's what creates high-flying stocks to begin with. Portfolio managers need to
overweight the biggest names in the market -- owning more Apple, for instance, than its
weighting in the chosen benchmark would require, not simply owning or not owning Apple. In a
rising market that has a beneficial effect on valuations of those names.
If every portfolio manager needs to buy more Apple, Apple's share price will go up, making
it a larger component of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. As Apple's weighting increases, those
fund managers would have to -- you guessed it -- buy more Apple!
The circularity of that logic is undeniable, but I am telling you that's how the market for
big-cap stocks works. Please remember the men and women pulling those levers are responsible
for much, much larger asset bases than you are. So they will always move the markets, even if
history has proven their timing to be poor more often than it is excellent.
Bottom line: High-flying stocks are driven by sentiment in both directions, thus there is no
magic valuation level that supports them.
This is quite apparent in the charts of "fallen angel" stocks such as Ford ( F ) , General Electric (
GE ) , IBM (
IBM ) , and
AT&T ( T ) . The
market hates those stocks no more the day after Thanksgiving than it did the day after
Independence Day, but certainly no less, either. An investor could generate hours of amusement
by Googling "this is a bottom for..." and then entering in any of those names. So many pundits,
so many bad support level calls.
So, value traps are no way to ride out a market correction, but what about the stocks that
brought us into that correction? Are the FAANG names -- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Apple
and Alphabet ( GOOGL ) (parent company of Google) --
destined to end up in the "hate pile" with GE and IBM? God, I hope not. That's the difference
between a pullback and a crash and, by implication, the difference between a depression and a
recession.
My analysis shows that buying Apple at 13x next year's earnings -- which implies a price of
$172.55, slightly above Friday's close -- has been a lucrative strategy in the past three
years. That said, I am worried that the steady stream of noise about production cuts from
Apple's suppliers implies Wall Street's estimates for Apple's fiscal 2019 earnings are
inflated. So I am not buying Apple today.
And so it goes. Chicken and egg. Is the stock market telling us the global economy is
slowing or is the global economy slowing driving down prices for assets, especially oil, thus
creating an economic slowdown? Crude's decline has spooked the market to no end, but so has
Apple's decline. And Netflix's and Facebook's.
At the end of the day, all securities are assets on someone's balance sheet. Gold, oil,
stocks, bonds, really anything on your screen except crypto, which is very very difficult to
clear and hence to accurately value. Anything that can be physically transferred can be sold,
and in a downturn that can be a sobering thought. Don't forget it.
Get an email alert each
time I write an article for Real Money. Click the "+Follow" next to my byline to this article.
"... In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has collected 5.4m "adverse event" reports over the past decade, some from manufacturers reporting problems in other parts of the world. ..."
"... Interviews with patients and doctors have revealed flaws in how the medical devices industry is regulated. ..."
Patients around the world are suffering pain and many have died as a result of faulty
medical devices that have been allowed on to the market by a system dogged by poor regulation,
lax rules on testing and a lack of transparency, an investigation has found.
Pacemakers, artificial hips, contraceptives and breast implants are among the devices that
have caused injuries and resulted in patients having to undergo follow-up operations or in some
cases losing their lives.
In some cases, the implants had not been tested in patients before being allowed on to the
market.
In the UK alone, regulators received 62,000 "adverse incident" reports linked to medical
devices between 2015 and 2018. A third of the incidents had serious repercussions for the
patient, and 1,004 resulted in death.
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has collected 5.4m "adverse event"
reports over the past decade, some from manufacturers reporting problems in other parts of the
world.
These included 1.7m reports of injuries and almost 83,000 deaths. Nearly 500,000 mentioned
an explant – surgery to remove a device.
The figures come from research by 252 journalists from 59 media organisations in 36
countries, which has uncovered a litany of problems in the global $400bn (£310bn)
industry.
Examples of failure in the market include:
Replacement hips and vaginal mesh products sold to
hospitals without any clinical trials. Patients relying on faulty pacemakers when manufacturers
were aware of problems. Complications with hernia mesh that ruled one of Britain's top athletes
out of competing for years. Regulators approving spinal disc
replacements that later disintegrated and migrated in patients. Surgeons admitting they were
unable to tell patients about the risks posed by implants because of a lack of central
registers. Patients in Australia being given devices that the regulator has approved on the
basis they have been approved in Europe.
The findings raise concerns about the level of scrutiny devices undergo before and after
they go on the market, and whether regulators detect and act upon findings quickly enough.
Information about problems with devices is, in many countries, kept under wraps, making it
difficult for patients to research procedures that have been recommended to
them.
Interviews with patients and doctors have revealed flaws in how the medical
devices industry is regulated.
Prof Derek Alderson, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said there had been
enough incidents involving flawed devices to "underline the need for drastic regulatory
changes", including the introduction of mandatory national registries for all implantable
devices.
"In contrast to drugs, many surgical innovations are introduced without clinical trial data
or centrally held evidence," he said. "This is a risk to patient safety and public
confidence."
The Guardian and organisations including the BBC , Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung,
coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), have trawled
through thousands of documents, many obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests, to
unearth some of the biggest problems.
Alongside interviews with patients and doctors, these have revealed flaws in the way the
industry is regulated that are unlikely to be fixed by rules due to come into force in
Europe.
Among the concerns raised by the Implant Files project are that manufacturers are in
charge of testing their own products after faults have developed – and are allowed to
shop around for approval to market their products, without declaring any refusals.
The Guardian has also heard about doctors who have close industry ties or seem eager to be
early adopters of the latest devices to enhance their professional standing.
Plans for tougher EU rules have been watered down after industry lobbying, according to a
huge trove of documents uncovered by the project.
England may well be the only country in the world that is so snobbish about "trade" that, in
spite of having rung up record numbers of fundamental scientific breakthroughs and engineering
inventions, it has hardly earned any money at all from them.
If you really want to see a country "that treats a vacuum cleaner salesman like he's some
sort of genius physicist", take a look at the USA. Half its immense wealth was built on
pinching other people's ideas and "monetizing" them (a characteristically American word for a
quintessentially American practice).
She thought the investigation might have about six months left, although if Trump refuses a
face-to-face meeting, Mueller could seek a subpoena to put him before the grand jury. That
could be fought all the way to the supreme court.
There is a precedent, US v Nixon, when the justices ruled that the president must deliver
subpoenaed materials to a district court. Sixteen days later, Nixon resigned.
If Mueller decides not to have that fight, he could write a report saying he believed the
president obstructed justice. If he does not reach that conclusion, the Democratic-led House
could issue its own subpoenas.
"It is a chess match," said Milgram. "We'll have to see how it plays out in the next
year."
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.
Notable quotes:
"... Strange 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? ..."
"... All 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... Yes - 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. ..."
"... Neoliberalism 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. ..."
"... 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! ..."
"... Nothing has been learnt from the crash of 2008 beyond "get rich even quicker", or as its more commonly known, economic and ecological suicide. ..."
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.
If 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.
Sure, 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.
@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?
Having 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.
Strange 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.
The 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.
@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.
But 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.
According to Bradford DeLong, a Berkeley economic historian, neoliberalism has two main
tenets:
"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)."
All 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.
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.
@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.
Note 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.
I 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.
And 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'.
I 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.
First 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.
Yes - 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.
She 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.
Except 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 ...
your 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.
..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.
The 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.
@retarius - Any government is only as good as the human rights it upholds.
Neoliberalism 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.
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.
Wishful 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.
@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."
Ah, 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?
It'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.
People 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?
I'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.
Just 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.
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.
"... Neoliberalism 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. ..."
"... Strange 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? ..."
"... Well it could be argued that postmodernism is the necessary condition for neoliberalism. ..."
'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]
@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.
I 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".
The 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?
@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.
Ms 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.
@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.
Neoliberalism 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.
@bill4me - 'Sweet smell of success'?
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.
@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.
You 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.
@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.
@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.
Headline 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?
Strange 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.
If 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.
No 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.
On 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.'
The 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.
The
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.
That 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
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
The world is a vicious place -- that is utterly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels, and will be until civilization
finally collapses.
ilsm , November 24, 2018 7:19 am
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".
"... "The 10 Bcm/year into Europe is not a game-changer from a volume point of view, but it is a game-changer from a new source of product into mainland Europe perspective and it can be expanded." ..."
"... Meanwhile, however, Russia and Turkey are building another pipeline, Turkish Stream, that will supply gas to Turkey and Eastern Europe, as well as possibly Hungary. The two recently marked the completion of its subsea section. Turkish Stream will have two lines, each able to carry up to 15.75 billion cubic meters. One will supply the Turkish market and the other European countries. ..."
"... In this context, the Southern Gas Corridor seems to have more of a political rather than practical significance for the time being , giving Europe the confidence that it could at some future point import a lot more Caspian gas because the infrastructure is there. ..."
The Southern Gas Corridor on which the European Union is pinning most of its hopes for
natural gas supply diversification away from Russia is coming along nicely and will not just be
on schedule, but it will come with a price tag that is US$5-billion lower than the original
budget , BP's vice president in charge of the project
told S&P Global Platts this week.
"Often these kinds of mega-projects fall behind schedule. But the way the projects have
maintained the schedule has meant that your traditional overspend, or utilization of
contingency, has not occurred," Joseph Murphy said, adding that savings had been the top
priority for the supermajor.
The Southern Gas Corridor will carry natural gas from the Azeri Shah Deniz 2 field in the
Caspian Sea to Europe via a network of three pipelines : the Georgia South Caucasus Pipeline,
which was recently expanded and can carry 23 billion cubic meters of gas; the TANAP pipeline
via Turkey, with a peak capacity of 31 billion cubic meters annually; and the Trans-Adriatic
Pipeline, or TAP, which will link with TANAP at the Turkish-Greek border and carry 10 billion
cubic meters of gas annually to Italy.
TANAP was
commissioned in July this year and the first phase of TAP is expected to be completed in
two years, so Europe will hopefully have more non-Russian gas at the start of the new decade.
But not that much, at least initially: TANAP will operate at an initial capacity of 16 billion
cubic meters annually, of which 6 billion cubic meters will be supplied to Turkey and the
remainder will go to Europe. In the context of total natural gas demand of 564 billion cubic
meters in 2020, according to a forecast from the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies released
earlier this year, this is not a lot.
Yet at some point the TANAP will reach its full capacity and hopefully by that time, TAP
will be completed. Surprisingly, it was the branch to Italy that proved the most challenging,
and BP's Murphy acknowledged that. While Turkey built TANAP on time to the surprise of the
project operator, TAP has been struggling because of legal issues and uncertainty after the new
Italian government entered office earlier this year.
At the time, the government of Giuseppe Conte said the pipeline was pointless but, said
Murphy, since then he has accepted the benefits the infrastructure would offer, such as transit
fees. And yet local opposition in southern Italy remains strong but BP still sees first
deliveries of gas through Italy in 2020.
The BP executive admitted that at first the Southern Gas Corridor wouldn't make a
splash.
"The 10 Bcm/year into Europe is not a game-changer from a volume point of view, but it is
a game-changer from a new source of product into mainland Europe perspective and it can be
expanded."
Meanwhile, however, Russia and Turkey are building another pipeline, Turkish Stream, that
will supply gas to Turkey and Eastern Europe, as well as possibly Hungary. The two recently
marked the completion of its subsea section. Turkish Stream will have two lines, each able to
carry up to 15.75 billion cubic
meters. One will supply the Turkish market and the other European countries.
In this context, the Southern Gas Corridor seems to have more of a political rather than
practical significance for the time being , giving Europe the confidence that it could at some
future point import a lot more Caspian gas because the infrastructure is there.
If anybody had any doubts about the Washington's determination to
give Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman a pass over allegations that he was involved with
the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump put them to rest earlier this
week when he
released a statement praising Saudi Arabia, openly
questioning the CIA and stressing the importance of the US-Saudi relationship (while also
portraying Khashoggi as a suspicious and untrustworthy figure with ties to terror groups).
And while rumors about a possible intra-family coup in Riyadh have been simmering since
Khashoggi disappeared inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 (with
the latest reports surfacing earlier this week ), the notion that MbS's spurned relatives
might rise up and exact their revenge for last year's brutal
"corruption crackdown" at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton is looking increasingly improbable. In
other words, as long as the international response to the Khashoggi incident is limited to
countries that don't sell weapons to Saudi Arabia ending arms sales to the kingdom, then MbS
will almost certainly survive.
And in the latest indication that the royal family - not to mention nearly all of the
Saudis' regional allies - remains firmly behind the Crown Prince, even as the return of his
uncle from exile has set tongues wagging about MbS' impending ouster, one senior prince
recently told
Reuters that the CIA's findings are "not to be trusted."
"... The Private Contractors Using Vault 7 Tools for US Gov: Testimony Shows US Intel Needs a Ground-Up Rebuild Part 1... https://www.opednews.com/ar... ..."
"... Why Vault 7 Tools Used by Private Contractors Shows US Intel Needs a Ground-Up Rebuild- It's the News- Part 2... https://www.opednews.com/ar... ..."
"... Or is it owing to MI5/MI6 desperation, with how Trump will handle their involvement in the US Presidential Campaign. James Bond never had those types of problems, in the days when UK intelligence was not run by social media outlets. ..."
Not forgetting the US have their battalions of cyber trolls, together with the EU.
Then look into the media branches of cyber trolls. Ironic, when the UK Government is so
focused on Russia Today and the few funds they receive from the Russian Government.
Good point, with regards 'news' via social; media.
I do like the George Eliason articles, which explain intelligence agencies reliance on
social media. Including the US outsourcing 80% of it's intelligence to the social media.
Not just the US, when you look at the similarities with UK Media.
The Private Contractors Using Vault 7 Tools for US Gov: Testimony Shows US Intel
Needs a Ground-Up Rebuild Part 1...
https://www.opednews.com/ar...
Why Vault 7 Tools Used by Private Contractors Shows US Intel Needs a Ground-Up
Rebuild- It's the News- Part 2...
https://www.opednews.com/ar...
..........................
So what is with the timing? Is it to take attention away from BREXIT?
Or is it owing to MI5/MI6 desperation, with how Trump will handle their
involvement in the US Presidential Campaign. James Bond never had those types of
problems, in the days when UK intelligence was not run by social media outlets.
I have never managed fully to understand the mechanism by which the media and political
class decide when to leave a fact, a glaringly obvious and vital fact, completely excluded from
public debate. That process of exclusion is a psychological, not an organisational, phenomenon
but extremely effective.
Brexit continues to dominate mainstream political discussion, and the Northern Ireland
border issue remains at the centre of current negotiations, forced there by the London
government's reneging on the agreement it signed almost a year ago. But there is a secret here,
hidden in plain sight, the glaring fact driving the entire process, but which the media somehow
never mention.
"I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,"
Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political
figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the
Americas.
"I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by
leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must
send a very clear message – 'we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and
support ' – because if we don't deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil
the body politic."
Hillary still can't admit to herself that she lost the election because she was a horrible
candidate and people refused to vote for her.
Clinton urged forces opposed to rightwing populism in Europe and the US not to neglect the
concerns about race and i dentity issues that she says were behind her losing key votes in
2016. She accused Trump of exploiting the issue in the election contest – and in
office.
"The use of immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of
attacks on one's heritage, one's identity, one's national unity has been very much exploited
by the current administration here," she said.
"There are solutions to migration that do not require clamping down on the press, on your
political opponents and trying to suborn the judiciary, or seeking financial and political
help from Russia to support your political parties and movements."
Let's recap what Obama's coup in
Ukraine has led to shall we? Maybe installing and blatantly backing Neo Nazis in Ukraine
might have something to do with the rise of " populists on the right " that is
spreading through Europe and this country, Hillary.
America's criminal 'news' media never even reported the coup, nor that in 2011 the Obama
regime began planning
for a coup in Ukraine . And that by 1 March 2013 they started organizing it inside
the U.S. Embassy there . And that they hired members of Ukraine's two racist-fascist,
or nazi, political parties , Right Sector and Svoboda (which latter had been called the
Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine until the CIA advised them to change it to Freedom Party,
or "Svoboda" instead). And that in February 2014 they did it (and here's the 4 February 2014 phone call
instructing the U.S. Ambassador whom to place in charge of the new regime when the coup will
be completed), under the cover of authentic anti-corruption demonstrations that the Embassy
organized on the Maidan Square in Kiev, demonstrations that the criminal U.S. 'news' media
misrepresented as 'democracy demonstrations ,' though Ukraine already had democracy (but
still lots of corruption, even more than today's U.S. does, and the pontificating Obama said
he was trying to end Ukraine's corruption -- which instead actually soared after his coup
there).
"... 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 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 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.
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "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." ..."
"... "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..." ..."
"... this 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 ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... The 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 ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... 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 ..."
"... 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? ..."
"... 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 ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As 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. ..."
"... 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? ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... Since 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. ..."
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear CampaignsSteveg , 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.
The 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 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.
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.
Members 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.
A ' 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
"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."
"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.
this 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.
The 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...
Let 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:
"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?
Yet 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!"
"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.
A 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.
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 public
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.
As 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.
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?
"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.
Since 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....
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
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
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 Nicoll
"... By Nat Dyer, a freelance writer based in London. He was previously an investigator and campaigner at Global Witness, an anti-corruption group. He tweets at @natjdyer. Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
By Nat Dyer, a freelance writer based in London. He was previously an investigator and campaigner at Global
Witness, an anti-corruption group. He tweets at @natjdyer. Originally published at
openDemocracy
There was a little bit of good news this month for those worried about a tidal wave of
McMafia-style financial crime. A new UK government agency tasked with fighting it – the
National
Economic Crime Centre (NECC) – opened its doors.
I say "little" because financial crime is far more deeply rooted in our financial and
political systems than we like to acknowledge.
From the LIBOR-rigging scandal to the offshore
secrets of the Panama Papers and
'dark money' in the Brexit vote , it is everywhere. In my recent work with anti-corruption
group Global Witness , I saw
first-hand how ordinary people in some of the world's poorest countries suffer the consequences
of corruption and financial crime. We
exposed suspicious mining and oil deals in Central Africa, in which over a billion dollars
of desperately-needed public finances were lost offshore. The story is about the West as much
as Africa. The deals were routed through a dizzying web of offshore shell companies in the
British Virgin Islands, often linked to listed companies in London, Toronto and elsewhere. Even
if the NECC is given enough resources and collaborates widely, it has got its work cut out.
One reason all this financial crime is tolerated is that thinkers who shine a light on its
systemic nature have been erased from the record. Top of my list of neglected economic
superstars is Professor Susan Strange of the London School of Economics, one of the founders of
the field of international political economy. In a series of ground-breaking books –
States and Markets, The Retreat of the State and Mad Money – Strange showed how epidemic
levels of financial crime were a consequence of specific political decisions.
"This financial crime wave beginning in the 1970s and getting bigger in later years is not
accidental," Strange wrote.
It would have hardly been possible to design a system, she said, "that was better suited
than the global banking system to the needs of drug dealers and other illicit traders who want
to conceal from the police the origin of their large illegal profits."
For Strange, money laundering, tax evasion and public embezzlement were a result of the
collapse in the 1970s of the post-war financial order. Here are four ways she showed how
politics and the financial crime epidemic were intimately connected.
1) Money Is Global, Regulation Is National
There was nothing inevitable about financial globalisation, Strange said. It was born out of
a series of political decisions. It means that global money can skip freely across borders
beyond the reach of national laws and supervision. For smart operators tax, regulations, and
compliance become a choice, not an obligation. Strange argued that international organisations
lack the power to control global money, only coordination between the world's major economies
can rein it in.
2) Tax Havens Are an Open Invitation to Embezzlement
Unless you have somewhere to stash the cash, the looting of public money and state
enterprises can only go so far.
Tax havens give "open invitations", Strange said, to corrupt politicians to steal from their
people.
Banking secrecy in the havens allows money from tax evasion, drug trafficking and public
embezzlement to mix together until they become indistinguishable from legitimate business.
For Strange the "obscenely large" bonuses paid to those in financial markets leads to a kind
of "moral contamination", she wrote which has "reinforced and accelerated the growth of the
links between finance and politics". Strange recognised that corruption and bribery were a
problem in London and New York as well as Asia, Africa and Latin America. "Bribery and
corruption in politics are not new at all. It is the scale and extent of it that have risen,
along with the domination of finance over the real economy," she wrote.
4) Money Is Political Power
Globalisation has redefined politics, Strange argued. Political power is not just what
happens in governments, but money and markets also have power. As legitimate and illegitimate
private operators grow richer, they increase their power to shape the world system. States
starved of tax revenues grow weaker and retreat, in a reinforcing spiral. National politics
becomes captured by global money markets.
In the twenty years since Susan Strange's death in 1998, these trends have only bedded down.
Bankers' bonuses have continued to skyrocket and in 2018 reached
their pre-crisis peak .
Columbia University professor James S Henry
estimates tha t in 2015 a scarcely imaginable $24 trillion to $36 trillion of the world's
financial wealth was held offshore. Much of that is money from legitimate businesses but
contributes to a system where financial crime can prosper.
We cannot hope to get out of the morass of financial crime, and out-of-control financial
markets, without understanding how they relate to one another. The genie of globalised money
cannot be put back into the bottle, but Strange would argue that we should challenge banking
secrecy, and through coordinated action of the world's large economies close down tax
havens.
Finance and crime was only one strand of her work, but it contributed to her unnerving,
perhaps prophetic, conclusion that unless we rein in the financial system it could sweep away
the entire Western liberal order. One only has to glance at the combination of financial
chicanery and violent rhetoric that characterises the Trump presidency to see that her concerns
could hardly be more contemporary.
Strange would tell us that we need more than a new government agency to turn back the tide
of financial crime. We need nothing less than a new approach to political economy at national
and global level.
The key observation here is that the financial system is de-facto a criminal cartel and
financial oligarchy can and should be viewed as a Mafioso-style group. So organized crime laws
are perfectly applicable to the financial sector. Removal of New Deal regulations essentially get
tremendous impulse for flourishing financial sector criminality.
Notable quotes:
"... By Nat Dyer, a freelance writer based in London. He was previously an investigator and campaigner at Global Witness, an anti-corruption group. He tweets at @natjdyer. Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
"... "This financial crime wave beginning in the 1970s and getting bigger in later years is not accidental," Strange wrote. ..."
"... that was better suited than the global banking system to the needs of drug dealers and other illicit traders who want to conceal from the police the origin of their large illegal profits." ..."
By Nat Dyer, a freelance writer based in London. He was previously an investigator and
campaigner at Global Witness, an anti-corruption group. He tweets at @natjdyer. Originally
published at openDemocracy
There was a little bit of good news this month for those worried about a tidal wave of
McMafia-style financial crime. A new UK government agency tasked with fighting it -- the
National
Economic Crime Centre (NECC) -- opened its doors.
I say "little" because financial crime is far more deeply rooted in our financial and
political systems than we like to acknowledge.
From the LIBOR-rigging scandal to the offshore
secrets of the Panama Papers and
'dark money' in the Brexit vote , it is everywhere. In my recent work with anti-corruption
group Global Witness , I saw
first-hand how ordinary people in some of the world's poorest countries suffer the consequences
of corruption and financial crime. We
exposed suspicious mining and oil deals in Central Africa, in which over a billion dollars
of desperately-needed public finances were lost offshore. The story is about the West as much
as Africa. The deals were routed through a dizzying web of offshore shell companies in the
British Virgin Islands, often linked to listed companies in London, Toronto and elsewhere. Even
if the NECC is given enough resources and collaborates widely, it has got its work cut out.
One reason all this financial crime is tolerated is that thinkers who shine a light on its
systemic nature have been erased from the record. Top of my list of neglected economic
superstars is Professor Susan Strange of the London School of Economics, one of the founders of
the field of international political economy. In a series of ground-breaking books -- States
and Markets, The Retreat of the State and Mad Money -- Strange showed how epidemic levels of
financial crime were a consequence of specific political decisions.
"This financial crime wave beginning in the 1970s and getting bigger in later years is
not accidental," Strange wrote.
It would have hardly been possible to design a system, she said, " that was better
suited than the global banking system to the needs of drug dealers and other illicit traders
who want to conceal from the police the origin of their large illegal profits."
For Strange, money laundering, tax evasion and public embezzlement were a result of the
collapse in the 1970s of the post-war financial order. Here are four ways she showed how
politics and the financial crime epidemic were intimately connected.
1) Money Is Global, Regulation Is National
There was nothing inevitable about financial globalisation, Strange said. It was born out of
a series of political decisions. It means that global money can skip freely across borders
beyond the reach of national laws and supervision. For smart operators tax, regulations, and
compliance become a choice, not an obligation. Strange argued that international organisations
lack the power to control global money, only coordination between the world's major economies
can rein it in.
2) Tax Havens Are an Open Invitation to Embezzlement
Unless you have somewhere to stash the cash, the looting of public money and state
enterprises can only go so far.
Tax havens give "open invitations", Strange said, to corrupt politicians to steal from their
people.
Banking secrecy in the havens allows money from tax evasion, drug trafficking and public
embezzlement to mix together until they become indistinguishable from legitimate business.
For Strange the "obscenely large" bonuses paid to those in financial markets leads to a kind
of "moral contamination", she wrote which has "reinforced and accelerated the growth of the
links between finance and politics". Strange recognised that corruption and bribery were a
problem in London and New York as well as Asia, Africa and Latin America. "Bribery and
corruption in politics are not new at all. It is the scale and extent of it that have risen,
along with the domination of finance over the real economy," she wrote.
4) Money Is Political Power
Globalisation has redefined politics, Strange argued. Political power is not just what
happens in governments, but money and markets also have power. As legitimate and illegitimate
private operators grow richer, they increase their power to shape the world system. States
starved of tax revenues grow weaker and retreat, in a reinforcing spiral. National politics
becomes captured by global money markets.
In the twenty years since Susan Strange's death in 1998, these trends have only bedded down.
Bankers' bonuses have continued to skyrocket and in 2018 reached
their pre-crisis peak .
Columbia University professor James S Henry
estimates tha t in 2015 a scarcely imaginable $24 trillion to $36 trillion of the world's
financial wealth was held offshore. Much of that is money from legitimate businesses but
contributes to a system where financial crime can prosper.
We cannot hope to get out of the morass of financial crime, and out-of-control financial
markets, without understanding how they relate to one another. The genie of globalised money
cannot be put back into the bottle, but Strange would argue that we should challenge banking
secrecy, and through coordinated action of the world's large economies close down tax
havens.
Finance and crime was only one strand of her work, but it contributed to her unnerving,
perhaps prophetic, conclusion that unless we rein in the financial system it could sweep away
the entire Western liberal order. One only has to glance at the combination of financial
chicanery and violent rhetoric that characterises the Trump presidency to see that her concerns
could hardly be more contemporary.
Strange would tell us that we need more than a new government agency to turn back the tide
of financial crime. We need nothing less than a new approach to political economy at national
and global level.
Came across mention of her in a book recently and it struck me how much she seemed to be
a prophetess without honour. Her obituary on her life makes interesting reading-
Yes, it is a great shame, Rev. I read her obit, too, and I agree with you. I do
recommend Casino Capitalism and its sequel, Mad Money (Manchester U Press editions). She
was ahead of her time.
Oil continues collapsing. The 7% move today is probably magnified due to lack of liquidity
post-Thanksgiving, but nevertheless the move is huge. Oil is down 34% from recent highs.
Fundamentals and real economy do not change this quick, so expect to hear about more "hedge(ed)
funds" blowing up. After all this is a 3 sigma move .
What´s next for oil nobody knows, but 50 USD is a rather big level to watch. For
believers in Fibonacci, 50 is the 50% retracement from the 2016 lows.
Oil volatility, OIV index, is now in full explosion mode. This is pure panic and these
levels won´t be sustainable longer term, but the rise in oil volatility is simply
amazing.
As we outlined earlier, oil stress started spreading to credit several weeks ago. We have
been pointing out, no bounce in equities until we possibly see some stabilization in
credit . For the equity bulls, unfortunately credit continues imploding. European iTraxx
main continues the move violently higher.
Similar chart is to be found for the US CDX IG index.
Below chart shows the CDX IG index (white) versus oil (inverted, orange). The relationship
is rather clear. Add to this crowded positions and low liquidity and the moves continue feeding
of each other, causing enormous p/l pain and further risk reduction among funds.
European iTraxx main (inverted white) is now "aggressively" under performing the Eurostoxx
50 index (orange). The moves in credit are starting to feel rather "panicky", helping VIX and
other related volatilities higher.
Given the continuation in oil prices, we ask ourselves when will the market start to realize
Fed can´t be tightening as aggressively as (still) priced in. Maybe time for the Powell
put to revive?
Comments while mostly naive, are indicative for the part of the US society that elected Trump
and that Trump betrayed.
But the fact that gas went not to Europe, but to Turkey is pretty indicative. And even larger volume with go to China. At some
point Europe might lose part or all Russia gas supply as Russian gas reserved are not infinite. That the perspective EU leaders
are afraid of.
US shale gas is OK as long as the USA is supplied from Canada, Russia and other places as well. Some quantity can be
exported. But the USA can't be a large and stable gas supplier to Europe as shale gas is capital intensive and sweet spots
are limited.
Notable quotes:
"... Some worthy observations, especially with all the US "Think Tanks." But I would include the number of non-Jewish elites who have banded together with the Jewish elite and who have greatly aided in eating out the very heart of America. ..."
"... History also shows that ANY smaller entity (Israel) that depends on a larger entity (America) for its survival becomes a failed entity in the long run. Just saying. ..."
"... The American Empire is all cost and no benefit to the great majority of Americans. The MIC and that's it. Politicians on the right wave the flag and politicians on the left describe a politically correct future. All on our dime. ..."
While the Trump Administration still thinks it can play enough games to derail the
Nordstream 2 pipeline via sanctions and threats, the impotence of its position geopolitically
was on display the other day as the final pipe of the first train of the Turkstream pipeline
entered the waters of the Black Sea.
The pipe was sanctioned by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan who shared a public stage and held bilateral talks afterwards. I think it is
important for everyone to watch the response to Putin's speech in its entirety. Because it
highlights just how far Russian/Turkish relations have come since the November 24th, 2015
incident where Turkey shot down a Russian SU-24 over Syria.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/TkFR25SArYM
When you contrast this event with the strained and uninspired interactions between Erdogan
and President Trump you realize that the world is moving forward despite the seeming power of
the United States to derail events.
And Turkey is the key player in the region, geographically, culturally and politically.
Erdogan and Putin know this. And they also know that Turkey being the transit corridor of
energy for Eastern Europe opens those countries up to economic and political power they haven't
enjoyed in a long time.
The first train of Turkstream will serve Turkey directly. Over the next couple of years the
second train will be built which will serve as a jumping off point for bringing gas to Eastern
and Southern Europe.
Turkstream will bring 15.75 bcm annually to Turkey and the second train that same amount to
Europe. The TAP – Trans Adriatic Pipeline -- will bring just 10 bcm annually and won't do
so before 2020, a project more than six years in the making.
Political Realities
The real story behind Turkstream, however, is, despite Putin's protestations to the
contrary, political. No project of this size is purely economic, even if it makes immense
economic sense. If that were the case then the STC wouldn't exist because it makes zero
economic sense but some, if not much, political sense.
No, this pipeline along with the other major energy projects between Russia and Turkey have
massive long-term political implications for the Middle East. Erdogan wants to re-take control
of the Islamic world from the Saudis.
This is why they have the Saudis on a residual-poison-type drip
feed of information relating to the death of Jamal Khashoggi to extract maximal value from
the situation as Erdogan plays the U.S. deep state against the Trump/Mohammed bin Salman (MbS)
alliance.
The U.S. deep state wants Trump weakened and MbS removed from power. Trump needs MbS to
advance his plans for securing Israel's future and prolong the dollar's long-term health.
Erdogan is using this rift to extract concessions left and right while continuing to do
whatever he wants to do vis a vis Syria, Iran and his growing partnership with Russia.
Erdogan is in a position now to drive a very hard bargain over U.S. involvement in Syria,
which neither faction in the U.S. government (Trump and the deep state) wants to give up
on.
By controlling the oil fields in the eastern part of Syria and blocking the roads leading
from Iraq the U.S. is playing a game it can't win because ultimately the Kurds will either have
to be betrayed by the U.S. to keep Erdogan happy or cut a deal with the Syrian government for
their future alienating the U.S.
This has been the ultimate end-game of the occupation of eastern Syria for months now and
time is on both Putin's and Erdogan's side. Because the U.S. can't pressure Turkey to stop
growing closer to Russia and Iran.
Eventually the U.S. troops in Syria will be nothing more than an albatross around Trump's
neck politically and he'll have to announce a pull out, which will be popular back home helping
his re-election campaign for 2020.
The big loser in this is Israel who is now having to circle the wagons politically since
Putin put the screws to Benjamin Netanyahu for his part in the deaths of 15 Russian airmen back
in September by closing the Syrian airspace and allowing mostly free movement of materiel to
Lebanon.
Netanyahu, as I talked about last week, is now in a very precarious position after Israel
was forced to sue for peace thanks to the unprecedentedly strong response by the Palestinians
in Gaza.
Elijah Magnier commented
recently that it this was the net result of Trump's unconditional support of Israel which
united the Arab resistance rather than dividing and conquering it.
But the US establishment decided to distance itself from the Palestinian cause and
embraced unconditionally the Israeli apartheid policy towards Palestine: the US supports
Israel blindly. It has recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, suspended financial aid
to UN institutions supporting Palestinian refugees (schools, medical care, homes), and
rejected the right of return of Palestinians. All this has pushed various Palestinian groups,
including the Palestinian Authority, to acknowledge that any negotiation with Israel is
useless and that also the US can no longer be considered a reliable partner. Moreover, the
failed regime-change in Syria and the humiliating conditions place on Arab financial support
were in a way the last straws that convinced Hamas to change its position, giving up on the
Oslo agreement and joining the Axis of the Resistance.
Project Netanyahu,
as Alistair Crooke termed it , was predicated on keeping the support of the Palestinians
split with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority at odds and then grinding out the resistance in
Gaza over time.
Trump's plans also involved the formation of the so-called "Arab NATO" the summit for which
has been put off until next year thanks to Erdogan's deft handling of the Saudi hit on
Khashoggi. There are still a number of issues outstanding -- the financial blockade of Qatar,
the war in Yemen, etc. -- that need to be resolved as well before any of this is even remotely
possible.
At this point that plan has failed and the clash with Israel last week proved it is
unworkable without tacit approval of Turkey who is gunning for the Saudis as the leaders of the
Sunni world.
Show me the Money
But, more importantly, over time, a Turkey that can ween itself off the U.S. dollar over the
next decade is a Turkey that can survive politically the upheaval to the post-WWII
institutional order coming over the next few years.
Remember, all of this is happening against the backdrop of a U.S. and European political
order that is failing to maintain the confidence of the people it governs.
The road to dollar independence will be long and hard but it will be possible. Russia is the
model for this having successfully removed the dollar from a great deal of its trade and is now
reaping the benefits of that stability.
And projects like Turkstream and the soon to be completed Power of Siberia Pipeline to China
will see the gas from both trade without the dollar as the intermediary.
If you don't think this de-dollarization of the Russian economy is happening or significant,
take one look at the Russian ruble versus the price of Brent crude in recent weeks. We've had
another historic collapse in oil prices and yet the ruble versus the dollar hasn't really moved
at all.
The upward move from earlier this year in the ruble (not shown) came from disruptions in the
Aluminum market and the threat of further sanctions. But, as the U.S. puts the screws even
tighter to Russia's finances by forcing the price of oil down, the effect on the ruble has been
minimal.
With today's move Brent is off nearly $30 from its October high ( a massive 35% drop in
prices) just seven weeks ago and the Ruble hasn't budged. The Bank of Russia hasn't been in
there propping up its price. Normally this would send the ruble into a tailspin but it
hasn't.
The other so-called 'commodity currencies' like the Canadian and Australian dollars have
been hit hard but not the ruble.
Set the Way Back Machine to 2014 when oil prices cratered and you'll see a ruble in free
fall which culminated in a massive blow-off top that required a fundamental shift in both
fiscal and monetary policy for Russia.
This had to do with the massive dollar-denominated debt of its, you guessed it, oil and gas
sector. Today that is not a point of leverage.
Today lower oil prices will be a forward headwind for Russian oil companies but a boon to
the Russian economy that won't experience massive inflation thanks to the ruble being sold to
cover U.S. dollar liabilities.
Those days are over.
And so too will those days come for Turkey which is now in the process of doing what Russia
did in 2015, divest itself of future dollar obligations while diversifying the currencies it
trades in.
Stability, transparency and solvency are the things that increase the demand for a currency
as not only a medium of exchange but also as a reserve asset. Russia announced the latest
figures of bilateral trade with China bypassing the dollar and RT had a very interesting
quote from Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev.
No one currency should dominate the market, because this makes all of us dependent on the
economic situation in the country that issues this reserve currency, even when we are talking
about a strong economy such as the United States," Medvedev said.
He added that US sanctions have pushed Moscow and Beijing to think about the use of their
domestic currencies in settlements, something that "we should have done ten years ago."
" Trading for rubles is our absolute priority, which, by the way, should eventually turn
the ruble from a convertible currency into a reserve currency, " the Russian prime minister
said.
That is the first statement by a major Russian figure about seeing the ruble rise to reserve
status, but it's something that many, like myself, have speculated about for years now.
Tying together major economies like Turkey, Iran, China and eventually the EU via energy
projects which settle the trade in local currencies is the big threat to the current political
and economic program of the U.S. It is something the EU will only embrace reluctantly.
It is something the U.S. will oppose vehemently.
And it is something that no one will stop if it makes sense for the people on each side of
the transaction. This is why Turkstream and Nordstream 2 are such important projects they
change the entire dynamic of the flow of global capital.
Oil and commodity markets were used as a finishing move on the Soviet system. The book,
"The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century" by James R. Norman details the
use of oil futures as a geopolitical tool. Pipelines change the calculus quite a bit.
Soros funded 'migration' to Europe has also failed and created a massive cultural and
economic burden on Europe.
The Soros/Rothschild plan to destroy Middle Eastern countries and displace the people was
- of course - motivated by the Rothschilds 'bread and butter ' - OIL ( the worlds largest
traded commodity ) !!
...Where ever they go, they [neoliberals] get organised, identify the institutions/establishments/courts to infiltrate and then use that
influence to -
* Hijack the economy.
* Corrupt the society.
As the current trend shows, the nexus of the international economic activity is shifting
east. Turkey is not making a mistake aligning itself with the goals of Russia, Iran and
China. Although there is still a huge debt of the previous deeds that has to be paid.
"Half of the US billionaires are Jews while only being less then 3% of the population. And
it doesn't stop there. They work collectively to hijack the institutions critical for the
operations of the democracy."
Some worthy observations, especially with all the US "Think Tanks." But I would include
the number of non-Jewish elites who have banded together with the Jewish elite and who have
greatly aided in eating out the very heart of America.
I read on here previously some dimwit comment about "America prints a bill for 2 cents
while other countries have to earn a dollars worth of equity to buy it and we can do this
forever" kind of thing. Not if other countries don't supply the demand you can't :)
History also shows that ANY smaller entity (Israel) that depends on a larger entity
(America) for its survival becomes a failed entity in the long run. Just saying.
I think you could quite reasonably replace the term 'depends on a larger entity', with a
term that better describes a (smaller) ' parasite ' on a (larger) host...
From your lips to God's ear. The American Empire is all cost and no benefit to the great majority of Americans. The MIC
and that's it. Politicians on the right wave the flag and politicians on the left describe a
politically correct future. All on our dime.
Israhell is losing its status via Putins peaceful diplomacy and trade with ME countries
who are not onboard with the Yinon plan. This is why RUSSIAGATE, led by dual Israhelli democrats in Congress. There is always a
foreign policy issue attached to their demonizing of other countries. This is also why the UK just sent UK soldiers to Ukraine declaring war on Russia for
"invading Ukraine" and not telling parliament or the UK people.
UK/US blind support for Israhell will get us all killed.
We do know that UK soldiers have been sent to the Ukraine. We also know that, according to elements in the Government and the Civil Service, Russia
invaded and annexed the Ukraine, which is just another reason to not trust the
Government--any Government.
WRONG!!!!! NordStream Eins und Zwei are the Prizes, because DEU, Scandinavia, CHE, and FRA will
Benefit. TRK Wins 2nd Prize with TRKStream and SouthStream Pipelines. Losers are BGR and EU_PARAGOV, since BGR went from Prime Partner to Trickledown
Transiteer.
Ultimately, along with Nordstream and Turkstream, there will also be a Polarstream
(leading to UK and Iceland) and Southstream (which was already begun but temporarily
suspended after Obama threatened Bulgaria via Angela Merkel).
And, oh...I am sure there will also be a Ukrostream (also known as Mainstream)
unfortunately the Ukronazi government of Ukrainistan doesn't know this just yet. They will
find out in due course, I am sure.
First PolarStream is highly unlikely both because laying it would be extremely difficult
and expensive and because Iceland has no need for gas as it is sitting on thermal reserves
and the UK won't deal with Russia.
You are correct on SouthStream.
As to UkroStream (I assume you mean Ukraine) it is already in existence and has been for
50 plus years. Given the bad history between the parties the Russians will want to stop that
route asap, hence the timing of NordStream 2 and TurkStream. So in the future UkroSream is
going to end, not start.
long-term political implications for the Middle East. Erdogan wants to re-take control of
the Islamic world from the Saudis.
SA still has control of the Hajj -- religious tourism - command by the Magic Book that
even Turkish mohammadist must complete. +/- 18% of SA GDP-- and SA isn't sharing any of that
loot.
Ticip is required to go and throw rocks at the black orb -- and do the Muslim Hokey Pokey
along with all the rest.. oh, and pay the SA kings for the privilege !
The new 3D Grand Chessboard is being played very quietly out of Moscow.
The article is a wee bit deceptive. Whilst this was indeed the last bit of under sea pipe
they were celebrating, it should be pointed out the stunning speed that they achieved, about
a mile a day some to a depth of over 1000 feet, quite an achievement on land, let alone at
sea. This is quite interesting, especially the map
Also, as its landfall in Turkey is west of the Bosphorus, that is west of Istanbul, maybe
that 'for Turkish use' is a cover for its primary purpose, supplying the Balkans as well as
Turkey from January 2020.
Note the significance of the start to pump date, December 2019, the same as NordStream 2.
What else happens then? Oh yes, the gas transit contract with Ukraine ends. The combination
of these two new pipelines to a very great extent replace that agreement. Even though
politically everyone is saying Ukraine ($4B p.a. transit fees) should be protected.
Take another look at the map, note that it takes a dogleg south to Turkey. If at that
point it had gone straight ahead it would have gone to Bulgaria as SouthStream. But the US
and its EU vassal stopped that. Maybe the second pipeline the Russians are now discussing
will resurrect that route.
Oil and commodity markets were used as a finishing move on the Soviet system. The book,
"The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century" by James R. Norman details the
use of oil futures as a geopolitical tool. Pipelines change the calculus quite a bit.
"... By Axel Dreher, Professor of International and Development Politics, Heidelberg University, Valentin Lang,Post-Doctoral Researcher in Political Economy, University of Zurich, B. Peter Rosendorff, Professor of Politics, New York University and James Vreeland, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University. Originally published at VoxEU ..."
"... Countries that vote with the US when serving on the UN Security Council also receive more financial assistance. This column uses voting records in the Council to show that when these countries were US allies, they received more in US aid, but when the countries were not natural allies, they received more financial assistance from US-dominated international institutions instead. ..."
Dirty
Work: Buying Votes at the UN Security Council Posted on November
24, 2018 by Yves SmithBy Axel Dreher,
Professor of International and Development Politics, Heidelberg University, Valentin
Lang,Post-Doctoral Researcher in Political Economy, University of Zurich, B. Peter Rosendorff,
Professor of Politics, New York University and James Vreeland, Professor of Politics and
International Affairs, Princeton University. Originally published at VoxEU
Countries that vote with the US when serving on the UN Security Council also receive
more financial assistance. This column uses voting records in the Council to show that when
these countries were US allies, they received more in US aid, but when the countries were not
natural allies, they received more financial assistance from US-dominated international
institutions instead.
On 18 December 2017, the US vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that had
called for the withdrawal of US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel. The resolution was supported by all remaining 14 members of the Council. Two
days after the vote, Trump threatened to cut foreign aid to countries that voted against the US
at the UN. "These nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security
Council We're watching those votes. Let them vote against us, we'll save a lot," he said.
The Trump administration is not the first to pay attention to these votes. When Hillary
Clinton, at that time the US Secretary of State, paid a visit to Togo in 2012, the press
questioned her choice of destination. Clinton explained that, "[n]o secretary of state had ever
been to Togo before. Togo happens to be on the UN Security Council. Going there, making the
personal investment, has a real strategic purpose When you look at the voting dynamics in key
international institutions, you start to understand the value of paying attention to these
places."
Several years earlier, the first Bush administration famously pressured governments to vote
in favour of the Security Council resolution approving Operation Desert Storm. When Yemen voted
'no', James Baker, the Secretary of State, reportedly told colleagues, "[t]hat's the most
expensive vote they ever cast." The US subsequently cut $70 million in foreign aid.
These anecdotes reflect a systematic pattern. In previous research, we and others have found
that countries that serve on the UN Security Council get financial favours. They receive more
US aid and more loans from international institutions in which the US commands a powerful
voice, including the IMF, the World Bank, and UN aid agencies. Countries also receive softer
IMF conditionality during their two years of temporary membership (Kuziemko and Werker 2006,
Vreeland and Dreher 2014, Dreher et al. 2015).
Linking Voting Behaviour to Favours
In recent research (Dreher et al. 2018) we asked whether these favours are linked to voting
behaviour in the Security Council, what the rewards might be for voting with the US, and the
method by which the US could 'buy' agreement, given that it would be frowned upon if done
openly. To answer the questions, we used an original dataset that comprehensively records
Security Council voting data.
We estimate that countries that voted with the US in the Security Council also got an
increase in US aid of about 40%. Those members that voted against the US, on the other hand,
got no more aid while serving on the Council than countries outside the Council.
Figure 1 UN Security Council decisions over time
Source : Dreher et al. (2018).
This pattern of increased aid is only observable for US allies (see Figure 2). While the US
government would not be criticised for giving aid to allies, it might be politically costly to
an administration to openly reward non-allies in ways that the US Congress and public could
see.
Figure 2 UN Security Council voting and US aid allocation
Source : Dreher et al. (2018). Notes : The figure shows the marginal effect of serving on the UN Security Council
while voting all the time with the US on bilateral US aid flows for different levels of
political proximity to the US (in concert with the 90% confidence interval). The histogram
shows the distribution of political proximity to the US among aid-eligible countries, measured
as voting alignment in the UN General Assembly.
These payments may be seen as improper. Also, an increase in foreign aid following a vote at
the Security Council might damage the legitimacy of the UN, when this legitimacy a key reason
for governments to seek Security Council support in the first place. The US public might also
frown upon providing aid to a country not viewed as a friend of the US.
An historical example suggests that these risks do not entirely prevent the US from buying
support from countries of this type. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US attempted
to influence political developments in Russia with billions in bilateral aid in the early
1990s. In the mid-1990s, these aid packages came under increasing popular pressure in the US
because of concerns over the budget deficit, and an unpromising outcome (for US interests) in
Russian parliamentary elections.
This led to large reductions in US aid in the late 1990s. But when the US turned away from
using direct bilateral aid, it started using obfuscated sources of funding. In 1995, the IMF
approved a $6 billion loan program. It increased it to more than $10 billion the next year, and
to the extraordinary figure of $18 billion in 1998. It is now clear that the US put pressure on
the IMF behind the scenes. Boris Yeltsin, the Russian President at the time, said that to get
the IMF to commit to these loans "[w]e had to involve [Bill] Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Helmut
Kohl, and [John] Major" (Gordon 1996). Apparently, the US exploited its influence on the IMF to
provide multilateral financial support when it had become difficult and politically costly to
give bilateral aid.
We find systematic evidence that this pattern held when looking at UN Security Council
voting data. While allies received increased bilateral aid from the US when they voted for the
US position, governments not allied with the US did not. Instead, when these governments voted
with the US, there were increases in loans to them from the IMF. Our results suggest that these
countries received an increase in IMF loans of about 50%.
Figure 3 UN Security Council voting and IMF loan allocation
Source : Dreher et al. (2018). Notes : The figure shows the marginal effect of serving on the UN Security Council
while voting all the time with the US on IMF loan size for different levels of political
proximity to the US (in concert with the 90% confidence interval). The histogram shows the
distribution of political proximity to the US among aid-eligible countries, measured as voting
alignment in the UN General Assembly.
It may be no surprise to find that powerful countries would be willing to buy influence.
Realpolitikhowever, has required different channels for different countries. We see that the
practice of buying influence around the world, while perhaps crude, has been nuanced and
finessed by obscuring the funding sources. The US may have openly funded its allies, but it hid
similar favours to less friendly states. Ironically, the international institutions that the US
used for this obfuscation are the same institutions that the Trump administration is currently
weakening in its attempt to put American interests first.
Ironically, the international institutions that the US used for this obfuscation are the
same institutions that the Trump administration is currently weakening in its attempt to
put American interests first.
Never listen to what a politician says but instead concentrate like a laser on what he
does. Trump talks a good nationalist game but what about his actions? Is he undermining the
US-led international imperial order? Once again, this article is evidence that he is indeed
walking the walk. What's always amusing is opponents of the US Empire on the good-thinking
left are in fact quite clueless about how to dismantle it. They concentrate of the immorality
of it all. But in reality the concept of nationalism, which is for the most part verboten to
the left, is the very ideology required to fight Empire. Which is why bad-thinking right
wingers like Trump are the only ones that will ever succeed in undermining and destroying the
US Empire. There is nothing ironic about it.
So Trump's blatant call for "allies" to vote with the US or face an aid cut-off was only
tactically aimed at influencing the poor countries on the Security Counsel. It's strategic
goal was to undermine the whole moral legitimacy of the UN by making it blatant that poor
country votes are on sale for international aid gimmedats.
It is an empire. The last remaining19th century empire.
Consider its scope: The reserve currencyof the world. Control of vassel stayes, by
sanctions, reward of stayes with aid, actually bribes, and with secret police and armed might
in a majoroty of counyries.
Um, it might have helped if the authors had spoken to somebody who knew how the Security
Council worked. Most SC resolutions are uncontentious, and a lot of effort goes into agreeing
compromise texts. There is seldom a "US position" as such. Far from attempts to influence
other nations being hidden, they are usually semi-public, with delegations lobbying for their
language, or their position on a particular paragraph. The cases mentioned are extreme ones:
most resolutions are fairly well supported from the beginning, if the Secretary General and
the P3 are together. There are certainly egregious cases – the 2002 /3 Iraq saga is the
best known – but they are quite rare, and in general resolutions are agreed by
consensus. The cases you hear about (Syria, Palestine) are precisely those where the system
fails to work. Incidentally, Clinton's visit to Togo can't really be held against her: it's
standard practice for permanent members to have consultations with non-permanent ones, and
her staff would have been incompetent not to have suggested it.
"... When 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. ..."
"... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
"... This 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. ..."
One 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.
The 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.
The 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??
Yes 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.
"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
When 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.
FBI/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.
Oilygawkies 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.
Anti-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".
Basically, 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.
Better 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.
A 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.
This 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?
Any 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.
Yesterday, 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.
England 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.
More 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.
Operating 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.
In a trite refrain straight out of the standard Washington regime change playbook, the
United States has lodged a formal complaint alleging Iran is developing nerve agents "for
offensive purposes".
Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval. Rather, we
see the financial markets breaking under the strain of sustained institutionalized fraud, and
the social fabric tearing from persistent systemic political dishonesty. It adds up to a
nation that can't navigate through reality, a nation too dependent on sure things, safe
spaces, and happy outcomes. Every few decades a message comes from the Universe that faking
it is not good enough.
The main message from the financials is that the global debt barge has run aground, and
with it, the global economy. That mighty engine has been chugging along on promises-to-pay
and now the faith that sustained those promises is dissolving. China, Euroland, and the USA
can't possibly meet their tangled obligations, and are running out of tricks for rigging,
gaming, and jacking the bond markets, where all those promises are vested. It boils down to a
whole lot of people not getting paid, one way or the other -- and it's really bad for
business.
Our President has taken full credit for the bubblicious markets, of course, and will be
Hooverized as they gurgle around the drain. Given his chimerical personality, he may try to
put on an FDR mask -- perhaps even sit in a wheelchair -- and try a few grand-scale policy
tricks to escape the vortex. But the net effect will surely be to make matters worse -- for
instance, if he can hector the Federal Reserve to buy every bond that isn't nailed to some
deadly derivative booby-trap. But then he'll only succeed in crashing the dollar. Remember,
there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can have plenty of
worthless money.
" Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can
have plenty of worthless money". Both pretty much sums up America's predicament. Americans
are deep in debt, and their money is worthless.
he may try to put on an FDR mask -- perhaps even sit in a wheelchair -- and try a few
grand-scale policy tricks to escape the vortex. But the net effect will surely be to make
matters worse -- for instance, if he can hector the Federal Reserve to buy every bond that
isn't nailed to some deadly derivative booby-trap. But then he'll only succeed in crashing
the dollar. Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or
you can have plenty of worthless money.
Here's a prediction. If the next GFC is bad enough, will the Government and the Fed bypass
the Banks and send Cash direct to Consumers? Maybe everybody with a SIN Number who is over 18
gets a Housing Voucher to be used towards the purchase of Real Estate??
- Will it be the last one or can they kick the can just..a..little..further down the
road
- Where will it leak to besides Bankruptcies? Politics? War? All of the Above?
didyoujustpullthatoutofyourass , 16 minutes ago
link
I think the powers that be are going to lose control of everything. We're going to be
looking at a Bolshevik Revolution on a global scale. The bad parts of the bible. Because of
years of indoctrination and immigration we can no longer fix our situation with ballots.
Because of years of overspending we can no longer get out of debt. Because of years of
outsourcing we can no longer produce our own basic necessities. All of Western civilization
is in a predicament that is impossible to get out of. We're screwed. This was done to us on
purpose, and the people who did it, still haven't stopped, because they want us
destroyed.
[reposted from previous open thread, following economics and culture discussion re:
Michael Hudson]
It's time once again to pop in a blurb for Jane Jacobs, the American urban planner, city
explainer, practical activist and culture-exploring goddess. Her self-taught understanding of
cities, people and their needs, failures and successes are put forth in dozens of books
published in the late 20th and early 21st century. She rocks.
"Jacobs argued that modern political and economic ideologies were in effect no different
from those dominant in Western civilization's past Dark Ages, such as Middle Age Roman
Catholicism. In both cases, she claimed, the dominant ideology prevented and discouraged
people from finding rational and scientifically verifiable explanations and solutions.
... Community and Family
People are increasingly choosing consumerism over family welfare, that is: consumption over
fertility; debt over family budget discipline; fiscal advantage to oneself at the expense of
community welfare.
Higher Education
Universities are more interested in credentials than providing high quality education.
Bad Science
Elevation of economics as the main "science" to consider in making major political
decisions.
Bad Government
Governments are more interested in deep-pocket interest groups than the welfare of the
population.
Bad Culture
A culture that prevents people from understanding the deterioration of fundamental physical
resources on which the entire community depends."
Another good read is Systems Of Survival . In this book she unravels the two main
castes or cultures in human society: Guardians and Merchants. Merchants make deals, guardians
enforce laws. It's excellent for buyers and sellers to bargain and explore options, that is
where innovation comes from. On the other hand, it is bad for guardians such as police or
politicians to make deals, those would be bribes or cronyism.
The book is written as a Socratic dialog so it's a different read but the ideas are sound
and in fact fundamental to understanding how our society has been perverted by the
cross-pollination of guardian and commercial values.
There's a free PDF download of Jane Jacobs'
Systems Of Survival at AllBookServe.org.
There's a great interview with Michael Hudson from last year that I only watched
yesterday. It's on the RT show, Renegade, Inc., which produces some excellent economic
commentary.
Towards the end they were discussing Obama's actual legacy, and Hudson was very clear
about all the broken promises Obama made. He said that in 2016, Hillary told everyone that
after 8 years of Obama, they were better off than they were in 2008. Everyone knew this was
not true, and so they voted for Trump, who at least presented himself as understanding
this.
So Obama's actual true legacy, said Hudson, was Trump.
I thought that was a gem worth sharing. The brief interview is here: J is for Junk
Economics
"... Once again I'd like to point out that Ralph's idolization of "Mom and Pop" businesses is its own form of unempirical ideology. Small businesses in reality tend to pay lower wages, have less benefits, and can get away with less worker protections. For example there are all sorts of statutes that do not need to be enforced until a business has 15-20 workers. There never has been and never will be such thing as exploitation-free capitalism. ..."
Market fundamentalism's ideological tyranny is metastasizing, afflicting the young,
silencing politicians and hoodwinking the media. Too few progressives have a handle on the
powerful arguments that can be made to counter market fundamentalism. It's time to confront the
myths with compelling empirical reality that deconstructs and destroys the plutocratic hoax. A
roundtable recorded at the Carnegie Institution of Washington DC, on October 19, 2018
Market fundamentalism's ideological tyranny is metastasizing, afflicting the young,
silencing politicians and hoodwinking the media. Too few progressives have a handle on the
powerful arguments that can be made to counter market fundamentalism. It's time to confront the
myths with compelling empirical reality that deconstructs and destroys the plutocratic hoax. A
roundtable recorded at the Carnegie Institution of Washington DC, on October 19, 2018
I am so delighted to see this terminology catching on, because I see great parallels
between the extremism of Market Fundamentalism and Religious Fundamentalism. The cult of
American Economics is just as hostile to outside ideas, such as Marxist Economics as any
religious cult is. The fact is that talking about the social good was so taboo due to the red
scare from the time of the Russian revolutions, that no US University or Business school
taught a single course covering Marxist Economic Theory until at least 2010.
The business ideologs go into the schools, the exact same way the 'Officer Friendly' Pigs
go into the schools -- to sell the various lies and crimes of the exploitative capitalist
order.
What happened to the older ~8 hr video? Once again I'd like to point out that Ralph's
idolization of "Mom and Pop" businesses is its own form of unempirical ideology. Small
businesses in reality tend to pay lower wages, have less benefits, and can get away with less
worker protections. For example there are all sorts of statutes that do not need to be
enforced until a business has 15-20 workers. There never has been and never will be such
thing as exploitation-free capitalism.
"... Well, if the objective of having many women on board is to keep all the occupants occupied full-time on a one-to-one basis instead of letting them get busy at shooting at people, then I am all for that, they should adopt it for the whole of NATO, especially the US. ..."
"... Sounds like a good Scandinavian way of addressing NATO policy deficiencies. But when through your distraction you end up crashing into oil tankers, just don't blame it on the Russians or the Chinese. ..."
From the article this gem: "It is advantageous to have many women on board. It will be a
natural thing and a completely different environment, which I look at as positive,"
Lieutenant Iselin Emilie Jakobsen Ophus said. She is a navigation officer at KNM Helge
Ingstad, according to Defense Forum.
Well, if the objective of having many women on board is to keep all the occupants
occupied full-time on a one-to-one basis instead of letting them get busy at shooting at
people, then I am all for that, they should adopt it for the whole of NATO, especially the
US.
Sounds like a good Scandinavian way of addressing NATO policy deficiencies. But when
through your distraction you end up crashing into oil tankers, just don't blame it on the
Russians or the Chinese.
Also in the article a very nice picture of the frigate (not the one at the top, the one a
little further down the page) which makes for an excellent picture of a George-Soros-frigate.
It should be renamed KNM George Soros. Anyone for an HMS George Soros Aircraft carrier?
Embarrassing yellow paper journalism: attempt to connect the deal with Skripals false flag
operation by British intelligence agencies. The Daily Mail story preudo-analyst from Bellingcat
as a serious source, but provides no source at all for the alleged Russian quotes.
This actually a quite interesting article ( [written] by the 5 eyes intelligence
agencies)
Hot on the heels of proven Saudi state sanctioned murder under diplomatic immunity we have
a completely UNFOUNDED accusation that Russia has essentially committed the same crime.
Saudi bad guy.....Russia bad guy. Two negatives equals a positive (kind of thing). See
what I just did there? LMAO
The US spent $824.6 billion in 2018 compared to Russia's budget of $46 billion (18 times
the difference). Nevertheless, Congress recently declared, that in the event of a war with
Russia, the US could lose! So, if a President (Obama, Trump, whoever) really wanted to "Make
America Great Again" he would have to begin by firing 90% of the Military Industrial
Complex.
and Daily Mail knows this detail of how he emerged after the meeting because ...
more to come from BS factory ...
janus 1 day ago
Daily Mail will report that he died trying to slaughter a convention of journalists at
Putin's behest.
So ******* sick of britain's ruling class i want to wretch, if we need to break Britain to
get rid of them, so be it. They're all a bunch of decadent pedos and foppish fags
matriculated on globalism. they're disgusting, and even though we'll never get to see the
details, they actively tried to undermine our democracy (along with Tel Aviv).
And so it goes with our 'special relationships', special indeed, with friends like
these...
janus
Shemp 4 Victory 1 day ago
And Daily Mail knows this detail of how he emerged after the meeting because. Because they
read it from a script provided by a branch of MI6 known as OSF (Office of Substandard
Fiction).
In a trite refrain straight out of the standard Washington regime change playbook, the
United States has lodged a formal complaint alleging Iran is developing nerve agents "for
offensive purposes".
Comey knows where all the skeletons are buried and has nothing to fear, apart from a
stitch-up behind closed doors hanging, where nobody gets to see. We all know Comey is a Deep
State puppet. This hearing is all for show, to give the dunces the illusion of a functioning
dumbocracy.
Pretty rich that he's worried about leaks....but then again, he would know.
He is damned worried about private testimony as doing so would open him up to suspicion
from guilty parties concerned he might rat them out to save his hide.
Select leaks, even if untrue (fake news turned against them) could bring great pressure
upon his life.
Former
FBI Director James Comey announced over Twitter on Thursday that he has been subpoenaed by
House Republicans.
He has demanded a public testimony (during which legislators would be unable to ask him
questions pertaining to classified or sensitive information), saying that he doesn't trust the
committee not to leak and distort what he says.
"Happy Thanksgiving. Got a subpoena from House Republicans," he tweeted " I'm still happy to
sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a "closed door" thing because I've
seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion . Let's have a hearing and invite
everyone to see." In October Comey rejected a request by the House Judiciary Committee to
appear at a closed hearing as part of the GOP probe into allegations of political bias at the
FBI and Department of Justice, according to Politico
.
"Mr. Comey respectfully declines your request for a private interview," said Comey's
attorney, David Kelly, in a repsonse to the request.
The Judiciary Committee, chaired by Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) didn't appreciate Comey's
response.
" We have invited Mr. Comey to come in for a transcribed interview and we are prepared to
issue a subpoena to compel his appearance ," said a committee aide.
Goodlatte invited Comey to testify as part of a last-minute flurry of requests for
high-profile Obama administration FBI and Justice Department leaders, including former
Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. He threatened
to subpoena them if they didn't come in voluntarily. -
Politico
The House committee has been investigating whether overwhelming anti-Trump bias with in the
FBI and Department of Justice translated to their investigations of the President during and
after the 2016 US election.
Didn't Gowdy deal with this already? "When did the FBI conduct an interview limited to 5
minutes?" "When did the FBI ever conduct an interview in public?" And the rest. Sauce for the
goose is sauce for the gander.
(I happen to think Gowdy is compromised, but the points remain.)
The crook knows a public hearing will allow him to defer answering EVERY question because
it "involves a current investigation", "it's classified", "I don't recall" and every other
dodge under the sun. Put this creep away for good!
Comey knows he can't withstand real questioning. He will be forced to take the 5th. A lot
of desperation showing here. He won't show and time will run out on the House, so Lindsay
Graham needs to take up the cause.
House Republicans will hear testimony on December 5 from the prosecutor appointed by
Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by the Clinton
Foundation, according to Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC).
Meadows - chairman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations, told The
Hill that it's time to "circle back" to former Utah Attorney General John Huber's probe with
the Justice Department into whether the Clinton Foundation engaged in improper activities,
reports
The Hill .
"Mr. [John] Huber with the Department of Justice and the FBI has been having an
investigation – at least part of his task was to look at the Clinton Foundation and what
may or may not have happened as it relates to improper activity with that charitable foundation
, so we've set a hearing date for December the 5th.," Meadows told Hill.TV on Wednesday.
Meadows says the questions will include whether any tax-exempt proceeds were used for
personal gain and whether the Foundation adhered to IRS laws.
Sessions appointed Huber last year to work in tandem with the Justice Department to look
into conservative claims of misconduct at the FBI and review several issues surrounding the
Clintons. This includes Hillary Clinton 's ties to a Russian nuclear
agency and concerns about the Clinton Foundation.
Huber's
work has remained shrouded in mystery . The White House has released little information
about Huber's assignment other than Session's address to Congress saying his appointed should
address concerns raised by Republicans. -
The Hill
According to a report by the
Dallas Observer last November, the Clinton Foundation has been under investigation by the
IRS since July, 2016.
Meadows says that it's time for Huber to update Congress concerning his findings, and
"expects him to be one of the witnesses at the hearing," per The Hill . Additionally Meadows
said that his committee is trying to secure testimonies from whistleblowers who can provide
more information about potential wrongdoing surrounding the Clinton Foundation .
" We're just now starting to work with a couple of whistleblowers that would indicate that
there is a great probability, of significant improper activity that's happening in and around
the Clinton Foundation ," he added.
The Clinton Foundation - also under
FBI investigation out of the Arkansas field office, has denied any wrongdoing.
Launched in January, the Arkansas FBI probe, is focused on pay-for-play schemes and tax code
violations , according to The Hill at the time, citing law enforcement officials and a witness
who wishes to remain anonymous.
The officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said the probe is examining
whether the Clintons promised or performed any policy favors in return for largesse to their
charitable efforts or whether donors made commitments of donations in hopes of securing
government outcomes .
The probe may also examine whether any tax-exempt assets were converted for personal or
political use and whether the Foundation complied with applicable tax laws , the officials
said. -
The Hill
The witness who was interviewed by Little Rock FBI agents said that questions focused on
"government decisions and discussions of donations to Clinton entities during the time Hillary
Clinton led President Obama's State Department," and that the agents were "extremely
professional and unquestionably thorough."
TheRealNews
Published on 14 Nov 2018
The latest revelation about Brazil's slow motion coup, designed to ensure that the
center-left remains out of power and the far-right takes control, involves a general who
admitted that he threatened the Supreme Court so it would imprison presidential front-runner
Lula da Silva. We discuss the development with Brian Mier
History repeats -- Looks like yet another
"Excessively careless" enthusiastic email sender: "The revelation prompted demands from
congressional investigators that Kushner preserve his records, which his attorney said he
had."
Ivanka Trump used her personal email account to send "hundreds" of emails last year to White
House aides, assistants and Cabinet officials, according to the Washington Post, citing "people
familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence." Of that, however, she discussed
government policies "less than 100 times" - and none of the content was classified.
"his daughter's practices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton"
Some truth here. They are both chromosomally female, both were using email. Sure same thing
here, give her the cell next to Hillary. Fair sentencing would be something around life for
Hillary, week for Ivanka?
Honestly, after all of the grief those of us on the right gave Hillary, and rightfully so,
for Ivanka to be so obtuse and do this .... it just gives the liberals something to harp on.
Why make things harder than they need to be? The Trumps are under a microscope and have to
know that everything they do is going to be picked apart and debated in the court of public
opinion.
Now we will have to listen to people like Don Lemon and Rachel Madcow and the
Morning Joe Idiots for the next 2 months blow this waaayyyy out of proportion
@ChuckOrloski
Not surprising to anyone who understands that stealing ,especially from 'others' is a first
choice career of Jews/Israelis.
I have always suspected that the 9 billion of stolen Iraq funds were stolen by the Jews who
were embedded in the US occupation administration and sent to Israel. Israel was so broke in
2001 they asked the Us for economic aid then suddenly in 2004 by some miracle they were
rolling in surplus money again.
Investigations reveal a pattern of Israeli officials stone-walling efforts to stop the
perpetrators of massive financial swindles in various countries, from Europe to the US to the
Philippines While some Israeli reporters work to expose the scams, a new one is already
underway
By Alison Weir
[MORE]
French and Israeli media report that a group largely made up of Israelis scammed 3,000 French
citizens out of approximately $20 million. Most of the stolen money is in Israel, but Israeli
authorities are reportedly failing to cooperate with France in prosecuting the scammers and
retrieving the money.
This is the latest of numerous examples of Israeli officials stone-walling international
efforts against the perpetrators of massive financial swindles around the world, according to
Israeli investigative journalists and others. These scams have brought estimated billions
into the Israeli economy, propping up a regime widely condemned for human rights abuses and
ethnic cleansing against indigenous Palestinians. Together, the stories paint a picture of a
government that seems to be turning a blind eye to -- and even protecting -- scammers.
A Finance Magnates analysis reports that one of the swindles alone has brought in over a
billion dollars and employs 5,000 people. And a new scam, described below, may help what is
predicted to be "the next major driver of the Israeli economy."
A former IRS expert on international crime notes that "fraudulent industries are often
major economic drivers, and that can translate into political clout."
Some Israeli journalists have been working to expose the situation in Israeli newspapers,
publishing exposés like "As Israel turns blind eye to vast binary options fraud,
French investigators step in" and "Are French Jewish criminals using Israel as a
get-out-of-jail card?" (Short answer: yes.)
Victimizing French business owners & churches
The victims of the recent scam against French citizens included churches and the owners of
small businesses -- delicatessens, car repair shops, hair salons, plumbers, etc. Some lost
their life savings and describe being threatened and intimidated by the scammers.
3 hours ago At one company
I interviewed nine times. Figured if they have this difficult of a time making a decision
I'll lose my mind working there and accepted a position elsewhere.
J 3 hours ago Google
wasn't the only company with excessive reliance on the school and GPA for new hires. It was
and might still be very common for technology companies to use this on the assumption that
a high GPA in school means high performance in the real world. My former company had a 3.7
minimum GPA on a four point scale just to be considered for an interview. I would
frequently get candidates from my manager to interview and evaluate. I found many of the
high performers lacked the ability to generalize concepts and skills that could be used
across a wide breadth of technologies. Instead they tended to apply a concept to a specific
subject and learn/create skills that would only work in that one area. When it came time to
move to development of newer technologies the skills they had learned would not transfer
and they would start the learning process all over. After talking to a comp sci professor
friend it made sense why this was happening. It has a lot to do with how schools
compartmentalize their teaching. The tend to be lessons and labs teaching a single concept
and nothing is done to teach the kids how to take that as a generalization that can be
applied across many areas. Due to this I found I ended up with better coworkers with
somewhat lower performing students as they appeared to be better at applying concepts in a
broad manner and more.
F 3 hours ago An
interview is not just about a company interviewing a prospective employee, but the employee
interviewing the company. If you interview me more the 3 times, you're done. As a company
you need to get your stuff together.
p 3
hours ago If some company needs more than 3 interviews to hire someone, then they are too
indecisive, tedious and flaky to bother with.
History repeats -- Looks like yet another
"Excessively careless" enthusiastic email sender: "The revelation prompted demands from
congressional investigators that Kushner preserve his records, which his attorney said he
had."
Ivanka Trump used her personal email account to send "hundreds" of emails last year to White
House aides, assistants and Cabinet officials, according to the Washington Post, citing "people
familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence." Of that, however, she discussed
government policies "less than 100 times" - and none of the content was classified.
"his daughter's practices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton"
Some truth here. They are both chromosomally female, both were using email. Sure same thing
here, give her the cell next to Hillary. Fair sentencing would be something around life for
Hillary, week for Ivanka?
Honestly, after all of the grief those of us on the right gave Hillary, and rightfully so,
for Ivanka to be so obtuse and do this .... it just gives the liberals something to harp on.
Why make things harder than they need to be? The Trumps are under a microscope and have to
know that everything they do is going to be picked apart and debated in the court of public
opinion.
Now we will have to listen to people like Don Lemon and Rachel Madcow and the
Morning Joe Idiots for the next 2 months blow this waaayyyy out of proportion
The Israelis were extradited to the U.S., where the prosecutor described them as "a predatory group that targeted elderly people
in the U.S., conning them into believing they were lottery winners. Preying on their victims' dreams of financial comfort, [they]
bilked them out of substantial portions of their life savings." According to the
U.S. Attorney's office :
"The defendants operated multiple boiler rooms that used the names of various sham law firms purportedly located in New York,
including law firms named 'Abrahams Kline,' 'Bernstein Schwartz,' 'Steiner, Van Allen, and Colt,' 'Bloomberg and Associates,"
and 'Meyer Stevens.' The defendants further used various aliases and call forwarding telephone numbers to mask the fact that the
defendants were located in Israel. The defendants also possessed bank accounts in Israel, Cyprus, and Uganda, to which illegal
proceeds were wired."
The ringleaders, Avi Ayache and Yaron Bar, were eventually convicted, and the U.S. prosecutor announced that they would "spend a
substantial portion of their lives in prison." Ayache was sentenced in 2014 to 13 years in prison and Bar to 12. Yet,
prison records indicate the two were released the next year.
Other members
of the ring also appear to have been released after extraordinarily little time. If these men did serve only a tiny portion of their
U.S. sentences, as public records and phone calls and emails to the Bureau of Prisons indicate, this may be due to the fact that
Israelis are allowed to be imprisoned in Israel instead of in the U.S. Their sentences then are determined by Israel and, as we will
see below, are often far shorter than they would be in the U.S.
Gery Shalon – hundreds of millions of dollars
In 2015 Gery Shalon and
two other Israelis were charged with utilizing hacked data for 100 million people to spam them with "pump and dump" penny stocks,
netting hundreds of millions of dollars.
The money was then laundered through an illegal bitcoin exchange allegedly owned by Shalon (more on bitcoin below). Shalon was
considered the ringleader of what U.S. prosecutors called a "
sprawling
criminal enterprise. " He faced decades behind bars.
However, he was instead given a
plea deal
in which he escaped any prison sentence whatsoever. Worth $2 billion, Shalon was to pay a $403 million fine.
...The ringleaders, Avi Ayache and Yaron Bar, were eventually convicted, and the U.S. prosecutor announced that they would
"spend a substantial portion of their lives in prison." Ayache was sentenced in 2014 to 13 years in prison and Bar to 12. Yet,
prison records indicate the two were released the next year. Other members of the ring also appear to have been released after
extraordinarily little time.
So if the US government is secretly releasing Federal prisoners, and if that is the case then American justice is on par with
the Mexican penal system, where such occurrences are routine.
Can anyone here verify if those two are in prison in Israel or free?
"... farmers are, in any society in which interest on loans is calculated, inevitably subject to being impoverished, then stripped of their property, and finally reduced to servitude (including the sexual servitude of daughters and wives) by their creditors, creditors. The latter inevitably seek to effect the terminal polarization of society into an oligarchy of predatory creditors cannibalizing a sinking underclass mired in irreversible debt peonage ..."
"... For what is the most basic condition of civilization, Hudson asks, other than societal organization that effects lasting "balance" by keeping "everybody above the break-even level"? ..."
"... they possessed the financial sophistication to understand that, since interest on loans increases exponentially, while economic growth at best follows an S-curve. This means that debtors will, if not protected by a central authority, end up becoming permanent bondservants to their creditors. So Mesopotamian kings regularly rescued debtors who were getting crushed by their debts. ..."
"... By clearing away the buildup of personal debts, rulers saved society from the social chaos that would have resulted from personal insolvency, debt bondage, and military defection ..."
"... In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. ..."
"... For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists. ..."
"... A constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times ..."
"... And our Orwellian, our neoliberal notion of unrestricted freedom for the creditor dooms us at the very outset of any quest we undertake for a just economic order. Any and every revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail. ..."
"... But, in the eighth century B.C., along with the alphabet coming from the Near East to the Greeks, so came the concept of calculating interest on loans. This concept of exponentially-increasing interest was adopted by the Greeks -- and subsequently by the Romans -- without the balancing concept of Clean Slate amnesty. ..."
"... Hudson is able to explain that the long decline and fall of Rome begins not, as Gibbon had it, with the death of Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors, in A.D. 180, but four centuries earlier, following Hannibal's devastation of the Italian countryside during the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.). ..."
"... latifundia Italiam ..."
"... Arnold Toynbee is almost alone in emphasizing the role of debt in concentrating Roman wealth and property ownership" (p. xviii) -- and thus in explaining the decline of the Roman Empire. ..."
"... This is a typical example of Orwellian doublespeak engineered by public relations factotums for bondholders and banks. The real hazard to every economy is the tendency for debts to grow beyond the ability of debtors to pay. The first defaulters are victims of junk mortgages and student debtors, but by far the largest victims are countries borrowing from the IMF in currency "stabilization" (that is economic destabilization) programs. ..."
"... The analogy in Bronze Age Babylonia was a flight of debtors from the land. Today from Greece to Ukraine, it is a flight of skilled labor and young labor to find work abroad. ..."
"... "Sin" and "Debt" are the same word in many languages, such as German, Scandinavian etc. ..."
"... The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity ..."
"... Yes, Hudson's scholarship puts the lie to a lot of common economic beliefs today. ..."
"... Bankruptcy is essentially a form of debt jubilee that isn't society-wide on a specific date. ..."
"... Keeping inflation target extremely low should serve the creditors more than the debtors. ..."
"... The ECB, as currently constituted, is a full on neoliberal disaster. Copious evidence provided here: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/ ..."
"... Western civilization, until very recently, had very strict anti-usury laws which prevented most people from borrowing money at all, let alone falling into debt servitude. Indeed, while laws varied widely from place to place, most victims of over-borrowing were royal courts and aristocrats, not smallholders. And of course, since most moneylenders were Jewish, one solution for debtors regularly employed was to simply run the creditors out of town or indeed, the country. Isn't that a kind of jubilee? ..."
"... The parallels of debt oligarchies to tech oligarchies, this article draws for me .. "So it was inevitable that, in the last century of American history, increasing numbers of small firms became irredeemably unviable and lost their ability to compete. It likewise was inevitable that the FANGS amassed the masses of entrepreneurial talent and established themselves in parasitic oligarchies." ..."
"... For what is the most basic condition of civilization, Hudson asks, other than societal organization that effects lasting "balance" by keeping "everybody above the break-even level"? ..."
"... That's the core regulating idea Geoff Mann draws out of Keynes in his recent "In the Long Run We Are All Dead." As best as I can tell his take on Keynes is accurate, and he's able to make a case for aligning him with the likes of Hegel and -- drum roll -- Robespierre, who was fiercely insistent on the guarantee of an "honorable poverty." In a way, they were all theorists of the abyss, pragmatists who insisted on measures to make sure economies didn't kill their members. I was particularly taken by the idea that the General Theory is not systematic but rather an analysis of different modes of breakdown, e.g. the liquidity trap, that must be compensated for. ..."
"... Yes. Bankruptcy is hardly any kind of Jubilee. Any debt is much harder to discharge post 2005, including medical, which is the cause of half of bankruptcies according to filers. ..."
"... Student loans. Now there's a naked fleecing scam by the moneychangers. High interest, zero risk, no forgiveness. A great racket if you can get it, like Medical Insurance, profiteering guaranteed by Obamacare. ..."
"... Cooperation. Because we can decline the idea of debt right back to one thing. Cooperation. When Graeber says "Money is Debt" he is right but he fails to define the root of debt. Because debt is not money. ..."
"... Ordinary people in pension plans do own debt. That is where the hit would be hardest to absorb. ..."
"... At some point, supporters of debt forgiveness need to reconcile their position with the fact that the extinguishing of debt is, in effect, a sovereign action taking the property of another on a scale without much parallel in modern society. ..."
"... Let me suggest a parallel or two: the acquisition of property by means of enforced indebtedness combined with creditor fraud that occurred in the Great Foreclosure Carnage around 2008? Or the appropriation of the lion's share of economic growth since 1970 to the richest 1% or so? ..."
"... Creditors SHOULD be required to exercise judgment and restraint in extending credit. It's moral hazard in the other direction if the government lets them squeeze the life out of people. ..."
"... Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle ..."
"... "That is what creditors really wanted: Not merely the interest as such, but the collateral -- whatever economic assets debtors possessed, from their labor to their property, ending up with their lives" Creditors=Predators ..."
"... prædia/latifundia ..."
"... The purpose of doing so was as to keep society functioning by meeting demands that conflict with and at times are superior to the normal need to repay debt. Periodic debt forgiveness is equally normal, in the manner that medieval farmers let their land lie fallow so as to bear fruit another year. ..."
"... If the bank is stupid enough to make the loan, they are stupid enough to lose it. The bank must take the consequence of making a un-payable loan. ..."
"... The bank has far more resources to know if the loan is repayable than the person getting the loan. Since the bank 'knows' more, it should take on more responsibility for making the loan than the person getting the loan. And so, back to reason #1 above, stupid bank loses stupid loan. ..."
"... What could have facilitated debt jubilees in ancient societies was the fact that the new rulers which overthrew the old as a result of frequent wars, found it convenient to eliminate the former propertied classes to win over the support of the indebted and enslaved commoners. 'Wiping the slate clean' could have been just a measure to win political legitimacy. ..."
"... let me pre-purchase the book, and their system will download it and notify me when the content is available. ..."
To say that Michael Hudson's new book And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure,
and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Yea r (ISLET 2018) is profound is an
understatement on the order of saying that the Mariana Trench is deep. To grasp his central
argument is so alien to our modern way of thinking about civilization and barbarism that Hudson
quite matter-of-factly agreed with me that the book is, to the extent that it will be
understood, "earth-shattering" in both intent and effect. Over the past three decades, Hudson
gleaned (under the auspices of Harvard's Peabody Museum) and then synthesized the scholarship
of American and British and French and German and Soviet assyriologists (spelled with a
lower-case a to denote collectively all who study the various civilizations of ancien t
Mesopotamia, which include Sumer, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, Babylonia, et al., as well as
Assyria with a capital A ). Hudson demonstrates that we, twenty-first century
globalists, have been morally blinded by a dark legacy of some twenty-eight centuries of
decontextualized history. This has left us, for all practical purposes, utterly ignorant
of the corrective civilizational model that is needed to save ourselves from tottering into
bleak neo-feudal barbarism.
This corrective model actually existed and flourished in the economic functioning of
Mesopotamian societies during the third and second millennia B.C. It can be termed Clean Slate
amnesty, a term Hudson uses to embrace the essential function of what was called amargi
and níg-si-sá in Sumerian, andurārum and mīš
arum in Akkadian (the language of Babylonia), šudūtu and kirenzi
in Hurrian, para tarnumar in Hittite, and deror (
דְּרוֹר ) in Hebrew: It is the necessary and periodic
erasure of the debts of small farmers -- necessary because such farmers are, in any society in
which interest on loans is calculated, inevitably subject to being impoverished, then stripped
of their property, and finally reduced to servitude (including the sexual servitude of
daughters and wives) by their creditors, creditors. The latter inevitably seek to effect the
terminal polarization of society into an oligarchy of predatory creditors cannibalizing a
sinking underclass mired in irreversible debt peonage. Hudson writes: "That is what creditors
really wanted: Not merely the interest as such, but the collateral -- whatever economic assets
debtors possessed, from their labor to their property, ending up with their lives" (p. 50).
And such polarization is, by Hudson's definition, barbarism. For what is the most basic
condition of civilization, Hudson asks, other than societal organization that effects lasting
"balance" by keeping "everybody above the break-even level"?
"Mesopotamian societies were not interested in equality," he told me, "but they were
civilized. And they possessed the financial sophistication to understand that, since interest
on loans increases exponentially, while economic growth at best follows an S-curve. This means
that debtors will, if not protected by a central authority, end up becoming permanent
bondservants to their creditors. So Mesopotamian kings regularly rescued debtors who were
getting crushed by their debts. They knew that they needed to do this. Again and again, century
after century, they proclaimed Clean Slate Amnesties."
Hudson also writes: "By liberating distressed individuals who had fallen into debt bondage,
and returning to cultivators the lands they had forfeited for debt or sold under economic
duress, these royal acts maintained a free peasantry willing to fight for its land and work on
public building projects and canals . By clearing away the buildup of personal debts, rulers
saved society from the social chaos that would have resulted from personal insolvency, debt
bondage, and military defection" (p. 3).
Marx and Engels never made such an argument (nor did Adam Smith for that matter). Hudson
points out that they knew nothing of these ancient Mesopotamian societies. No one did back
then. Almost all of the various kinds of assyriologists completed their archaeological
excavations and philological analyses during the twentieth century. In other words, this book
could not have been written until someone digested the relevant parts of the vast body of this
recent scholarship. And this someone is Michael Hudson.
So let us reconsider Hudson's fundamental insight in more vivid terms. In ancient
Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. In
what we call Western Civilization, that is, in the plethora of societies that have followed the
flowering of the Greek poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite,
with only one major exception (Hudson describes the tenth-century A.D. Byzantine Empire of
Romanos Lecapenus), has been the case: For us freedom has been understood to sanction the
ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the
freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the
freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists.
And so
Hudson emphasizes that our Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries
now, Orwellian in the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace • Freedom is
Slavery• Ignorance is Strength . He writes: "A constant dynamic of history has been
the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy
in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing
authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in
Sumerian times" (p. 266).
And our Orwellian, our neoliberal notion of unrestricted freedom for the creditor
dooms us at the very outset of any quest we undertake for a just economic order. Any and every
revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail.
And we are so doomed, Hudson says, because we have been morally blinded by twenty-eight
centuries of deracinated, or as he says, decontextualized history. The true roots of
Western Civilization lie not in the Greek poleis that lacked royal oversight to cancel
debts, but in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian societies that understood how life, liberty and land
would be cyclically restored to debtors again and again. But, in the eighth century B.C., along
with the alphabet coming from the Near East to the Greeks, so came the concept of calculating
interest on loans. This concept of exponentially-increasing interest was adopted by the Greeks
-- and subsequently by the Romans -- without the balancing concept of Clean Slate amnesty.
So it was inevitable that, over the centuries of Greek and Roman history, increasing numbers
of small farmers became irredeemably indebted and lost their land. It likewise was inevitable
that their creditors amassed huge land holdings and established themselves in parasitic
oligarchies. This innate tendency to social polarization arising from debt unforgiveness is the
original and incurable curse on our post-eighth-century-B.C. Western Civilization, the lurid
birthmark that cannot be washed away or excised. In this context Hudson quotes the classicist
Moses Finley to great effect: " . debt was a deliberate device on the part of the creditor to
obtain more dependent labor rather than a device for enrichment through interest." Likewise he
quotes Tim Cornell: "The purpose of the 'loan,' which was secured on the person of the debtor,
was precisely to create a state of bondage"(p. 52 -- Hudson earlier made this point in two
colloquium volumes he edited as part of his Harvard project: Debt and Economic Renewal in
the Ancient Near East , and Labor in the Ancient World ).
Hudson is able to explain that the long decline and fall of Rome begins not, as Gibbon had
it, with the death of Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors, in A.D. 180, but
four centuries earlier, following Hannibal's devastation of the Italian countryside during the
Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.). After that war the small farmers of Italy never recovered
their land, which was systematically swallowed up by the pr æ dia (note the
etymological connection with predatory ), the latifundia , the great oligarchic
estates: latifundia Italiam ("the great estates destroyed Italy"), as Pliny the Elder
observed. But among modern scholars, as Hudson points out, "Arnold Toynbee is almost alone in
emphasizing the role of debt in concentrating Roman wealth and property ownership" (p. xviii)
-- and thus in explaining the decline of the Roman Empire.
"Arnold Toynbee," Hudson writes, " described Rome 's patrician idea of 'freedom' or '
liberty ' as limited to oligarchic freedom from kings or civic bodies powerful enough to check
creditor power to indebt and impoverish the citizenry at large. 'The patrician aristocracy's
monopoly of office after the eclipse of the monarchy [Hudson quotes from Toynbee' s book
Hannibal's Legacy ] had been used by the patricians as a weapon for maintaining their
hold on the lion's share of the country's economic assets; and the plebeian majority of the
Roman citizen-body had striven to gain access to public office as a means to securing more
equitable distribution of property and a restraint on the oppression of debtors by creditors.'
The latter attempt failed," Hudson observes, "and European and Western civilization is still
living with the aftermath" (p. 262).
Because Hudson brings into focus the big picture, the pulsing sweep of Western history over
millennia, he is able to describe the economic chasm between ancient Mesopotamian civilization
and the later Western societies that begins with Greece and Rome: "Early in this century [
i.e . the scholarly consensus until the 1970s] Mesopotamia's debt cancellations were
understood to be like Solon's seisachtheia of 594 B.C. freeing the Athenian citizens
from debt bondage. But Near Eastern royal proclamations were grounded in a different
social-philosophical context from Greek reforms aiming to replace landed creditor aristocracies
with democracy. The demands of the Greek and Roman populace for debt cancellation can rightly
be called revolutionary [italics mine], but Sumerian and Babylonian demands were based
on a conservative tradition grounded in rituals of renewing the calendrical cosmos and its
periodicities in good order.
The Mesopotamian idea of reform had ' no notion [Hudson is quoting
Dominique Charpin ' s book Hammurabi of Babylon here] of what we would call social
progress. Instead, the measures the king instituted under his mīš arum were
measures to bring back the original order [italics mine]. The rules of the game had not
been changed, but everyone had been dealt a new hand of cards'" (p. 133). Contrast the Greeks
and Romans: " Classical Antiquity, " Hudson writes, "replaced the cyclical idea of time and
social renewal with that of linear time. Economic polarization became irreversible, not merely
temporary" (p. xxv). In other words: "The idea of linear progress, in the form of irreversible
debt and property transfers, has replaced the Bronze Age tradition of cyclical renewal" (p.
7).
After all these centuries, we remain ignorant of the fact that deep in the roots of our
civilization is contained the corrective model of cyclical return – what Dominique
Charpin calls the "restoration of order" (p. xix). We continue to inundate ourselves with a
billion variations of the sales pitch to borrow and borrow, the exhortation to put more and
more on credit, because, you know, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades.
Nowhere, Hudson shows, is it more evident that we are blinded by a deracinated, by a
decontextualized understanding of our history than in our ignorance of the career of
Jesus. Hence the title of the book: And Forgive Them Their Debts and the cover
illustration of Jesus flogging the moneylenders -- the creditors who do not forgive debts -- in
the Temple. For centuries English-speakers have recited the Lord's Prayer with the assumption
that they were merely asking for the forgiveness of their trespasses , their theological
sins : " and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us ."
is the translation presented in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. What is lost in
translation is the fact that Jesus came "to preach the gospel to the poor to preach the
acceptable Year of the Lord": He came, that is, to proclaim a Jubilee Year, a restoration of
deror for debtors: He came to institute a Clean Slate Amnesty (which is what
Hebrew דְּרוֹר connotes in this context).
So consider the passage from the Lord's Prayer literally: καὶ
ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ
ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν: " and
send away (ἄφες) for us our debts
(ὀφειλήματα)." The Latin translation is
not only grammatically identical to the Greek, but also shows the Greek word
ὀφειλήματα revealingly translated as
debita : et dimitte nobis debita nostra : " and discharge ( dimitte ) for
us our debts ( debita )." There was consequently, on the part of the creditor class, a
most pressing and practical reason to have Jesus put to death: He was demanding that they
restore the property they had rapaciously taken from their debtors. And after His death there
was likewise a most pressing and practical reason to have His Jubilee proclamation of a Clean
Slate Amnesty made toothless, that is to say, made merely theological: So the rich could
continue to oppress the poor, forever and ever. Amen.
Just as this is a profound book, it is so densely written that it is profoundly difficult to
read. I took six days, which included six or so hours of delightful and enlightening
conversation with the author himself, to get through it. I often availed myself of David
Graeber' s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years when I struggled to follow some of Hudson's
arguments. (Graeber and Hudson have been friends, Hudson told me, for ten years, and Graeber,
when writing Debt; The First 5,000 Years , relied on Hudson's scholarship for his
account of ancient Mesopotamian economics, cf. p. xxiii).
I have written this review as
synopsis of the book in order to provide some help to other readers: I cannot emphasize too
much that this book is indeed earth-shattering , but much intellectual labor is required
to digest it.
ADDENDUM: Moral Hazard
When I sent a draft of my review to a friend last night, he emailed me back with this
question:
-- Wouldn't debt cancellations just take away any incentive for people to pay back loans
and, thus, take away the incentive to give loans? People who haven't heard the argument
before and then read your review will probably be skeptical at first.
Here is Michael Hudson's response:
-- Creditors argue that if you forgive debts for a class of debtors – say, student
loans – that there will be some "free riders," and that people will expect to have bad
loans written off. This is called a "moral hazard," as if debt writedowns are a hazard to the
economy, and hence, immoral.
This is a typical example of Orwellian doublespeak engineered by public relations factotums
for bondholders and banks. The real hazard to every economy is the tendency for debts to grow
beyond the ability of debtors to pay. The first defaulters are victims of junk mortgages and
student debtors, but by far the largest victims are countries borrowing from the IMF in
currency "stabilization" (that is economic destabilization) programs.
It is moral for creditors to have to bear the risk ("hazard") of making bad loans, defined
as those that the debtor cannot pay without losing property, status or becoming insolvent. A
bad international loan to a government is one that the government cannot pay except by imposing
austerity on the economy to a degree that output falls, labor is obliged to emigrate to find
employment, capital investment declines, and governments are forced to pay creditors by
privatizing and selling off the public domain to monopolists.
The analogy in Bronze Age Babylonia was a flight of debtors from the land. Today from Greece
to Ukraine, it is a flight of skilled labor and young labor to find work abroad.
No debtor – whether a class of debtors such as students or victims of predatory junk
mortgages, or an entire government and national economy – should be obliged to go on the
road to and economic suicide and self-destruction in order to pay creditors. The definition of
statehood – and hence, international law – should be to put one's national solvency
and self-determination above foreign financial attacks. Ceding financial control should be
viewed as a form of warfare, which countries have a legal right to resist as "odious debt"
under moral international law.
The basic moral financial principal should be that creditors should bear the hazard for
making bad loans that the debtor couldn't pay -- like the IMF loans to Argentina and Greece.
The moral hazard is their putting creditor demands over the economy' s survival.
So is Hudson making the claim that Jesus was never talking about 'original sin' at all?
That he was talking about literal, temporal-world financial debts and the need to erase
them? If so, when and where did this theological confusion arise? Saul of Tarsus and his
mysticism?
King James version: "and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
However, the temple whip episode demonstrated, by action, that he wanted separation of the
material economy from the religious, and 'render unto Caesar' that money was not his concern.
His inclusion of Matthew as a disciple had an antithesis with Simon the Zealot, sworn to kill
tax collectors, and says that material and financial values were to be set aside amongst his
followers.
If Hudson is claiming that the verse refers solely to this-world indebtedness, then he's
out over his skis. Not Jesus' problem.
Then of course there is the pharisee/sadducee conflict which ties into the Samaritan
story. The Samaritans were basically Jews with their own temple that didn't hand money over
to the Sadducees at the big shrine in Jerusalem everyone is always going on about. Of course,
Jesus does seem to share quite a bit in common with the Pharisees. Oh Lord, Jesus was
probably taking orders for tables and chairs during the Sermon on the Mount!
"Of course, Jesus does seem to share quite a bit in common with the Pharisees."
In his book The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity the late British Talmudic
scholar Hyam Maccoby
argues exactly that – that Jesus was a pharisee. He further asserts that Saul arrived
in Jerusalem seeking to study to become a Pharisee, a process that required extensive study,
but couldn't cut it. He then became an agent provocateur on behalf of the Sadducees in their
efforts to suppress phariseeism and the related sect founded by Jesus's disciples. After his
"road to Damascus moment," the now Paul cobbled together a new theology combining elements of
Judaism with elements of the pagan, nature religions of the Middle East. This "Jerusalem
Church," as Maccoby labels it, disappeared from history following the Roman sack of the city
in 70 CE. What has come down to us as the New Testament, argues the author in a footnote, is
a history of early Christianity that is analogous to a Stalinist history of the Russian
Revolution.
That's the theological equivalent to 'climate change is a natural phenomenon." That anti
semitic 'paul made it a jewish church' heresy been considered incorrect for over 1000 years.
read something else
add in the Constantinian Shift as well as the convenient lack of contemporary or original
texts and Christianity is hopelessly muddled. Theodosius muddled it even more.
In the same way as someone mentioned Judaism was split by the Babylonian Captivity(the elites
carted off, leaving the sub-elites in charge back home) upon their return, texts and ideas
were lost or burned, in the interest of temporal power.
same as it ever was.
in a former life, I endeavored to read all the source material of all this even read Eusebius
Constantine's pet bishop.
the various apocryphae throw everything we think we know about the history -- let alone the
original versions–into question. Nobody I've encountered in the world of religion wants
to go there but the idea of "Flog a Banker -- it's what Jesus would do" resonates with
ordinary Christians out here(except for the bankers, of course, and the rest of the
parasitium.
This book looks like a must-read. Any idea of a non-amazon source?
I was told, many years ago, that the Samaritans were the descendants of Jews who were not
shipped off to Babylon, while the sect that became dominant were the descendants of those who
went to Babylon. While there "in exile" they maintained their culture, but the two groups
inevitably diverged. When they returned from Babylon that group found the ones who had not
been exiled were not performing the rituals or interpreting "the Law" in exactly the same way
they did. Of course it was not possible that their own practices had changed.
Only the elite went into captivity, a common means of securing loyalty and assimilation.
My guess is the peasant religion probably wasn't terribly different from area to area when
you moved away from the coast and didn't get too close to Babylon or Egypt and likely just
assimilated new traditions various charismatic types passed through, not relying on anything
too specific as overlords also changed. Jerusalem was the last place the major powers could
fortify before they had to commit to a proper invasion of a major power. It was probably like
Christendom before the schism between East and West with powerful regional churches and
localized saints. Through the Americas, there are Christian celebrations with heavy local
influence from the Mexican Day of the Dead to the Irish throwing parades which aren't so
welcoming.
Islam strikes me more of a unifying religion of what was already there in a fashion
especially where Rome (Byzantines) wasn't really governing as well as a government
should.
The original sin was humans gaining the knowledge of duality and hence, the creation of
morality:
Genesis 2:15
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care
of it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the
garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when
you eat from it you will certainly die. "
Genesis 3:4
"You will not certainly die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when
you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and
evil."
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye,
and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her
husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and
they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for
themselves. "
There are some who will say that Good and Evil in hebrew really mean that it was not
duality, but they would know "everything". However, if it did not mean good and evil why
would Adam and Eve be ashamed because they were naked? They did not know they were naked
because the dualism of naked/clothed did not exist.
Duality already existed but God did not want them to know about it because it would mean
they would suffer.
Jesus was a teacher of non-dualism. How can one die if there is no dualism, if there is no
opposite for "birth"?
I don't know. God looked over his creation and saw it was Good. I doubt that is a moral statement. I think it has more to do with creation and destruction.
They saw they were naked, so they destroyed gods creation, 'fig leaves', and created their
own, 'covering for themselves'.
Then god says the punishment for this was 'by the sweat of your brow, you will eat your
bread'
You were a hunter-gatherer, but now you have knowledge of creation and destruction, you
will become 'civilized' and become a farmer.
If we look at Cain and Abel we see one son was loved by god, while the other was not. It
was civilized man who offering god rejected, not the hunter-gatherer.
And after the murder, god told Cain "you are your brothers keeper'.
Its civilization that makes one man rich and another poor. Hunter gatherers are much more
egalitarian than civilized societies.
Jesus, and many others, are here to remind us that we are all children of god and in this
together.
And that 'civilized' man has a duty to those who are 'uncivilized'. The losers, they
people who can't make it, the bottom class, we owe them, because we 'took' their
livelihood.
"Original Sin" isn't part of Judaism or Islam despite the obvious inclusion of Adam and
Eve. IMHO, its probably not possible to separate Christianity from the Imperial structures of
Rome. A religion replacing a structure which makes its former leaders deities needs a good
story to be successful.
Adam and Eve aren't important stories in Judaism and Islam (they are evidence of
polytheistic roots), but they matter to Christians because of Saul's rants.
The other issue is the authors of the various doctrines depended on what they were
attracted to. "I am the Alpha and the Omega." If this line is the case, then in the
narrative, Jesus needs to reflect the beginning and the end. He's that important. Its like
when Q was in the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the same setting as the
premiere, but instead of dealing with a mystery, Picard has to deal with saving humanity and
his fish once again. Its a nice bow, but when Kirk shows up in Generations after dealing with
his issues both in Star Trek II and VI, it doesn't work. One Gospel traces Jesus through the
line of Kings, one through the prophets, and one just "the word." The Son of God isn't dying
for an extra day of lamp oil.
Mohammad is out there directing battles and building an empire that was probably better
than what was there before. Jesus was born into Pax Romana. He could have been born into much
worse places.
I do not feel anything you wrote is in disagreement with my thoughts.
Eden, I feel, is a an imprint of pre-history, of the paleolithic. A time when money was
not the common story that people willingly (or unwillingly) currently believe. I think this
is largely driven by genetics. If your genes can change by our diet why would they not be
able to be changed by our culture? So I do not care if someone wants to be capitalist, just give me my space to be an
anarchist. You capitalism does not work in my brain.
I think it is extremely unfortunate that Professor Hudson chose to make claims about 'mere
theology' that don't have a basis in the texts concerning Jesus. The inference I get from
reading all the evangelists wrote on the subject of the Lord's Prayer is that debt collecting
is indeed frowned upon, or rather to be forgiven, but what sense would it make for a follower
of Jesus to ask God to forgive economic debt? And the evangelists expand that concept to
mean, as has been earlier written by them, all the many shortcomings man is capable of, not
just penury.
Certainly the entire message of the Bible, old and new testaments, deals with the
honorable matter of helping the poor, widows and orphans as well, because that is a good
thing to do in the eyes of the Lord, who loves mankind created in His image as it is. All of
that is part of the compassionate spiritual being He is and we ought to be.
I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For those of us who think the
spiritual message is important, there is no conflict between our faith and Dr. Hudson's
excellent reminder that mankind realized what was necessary to provide for a stable earthly
government very early in the historic record. But it has really always been recognized until
the recent economic period that governments must manage equity in their populations or else
come to a speedy ruin. Maybe never spelled out in economic theory, but even the pueblo
Indians would have something to say on the matter. Chaco Canyon is a case in point.
I think Dr. Hudson is commenting on what makes for a stable, just and durable
society . Like symmetry, humans are exquisitely attuned to imbalances in equity and fairness. Ask
two siblings made to share what they each most want. Governments and societies ignore that at
their peril.
I think he would say that much of economics is a form of special pleading, an argument by
the wealthy that what they do to become wealthy is of great value to all (not just the few)
– despite the overwhelming contrary evidence – and determined by the nearly
divine laws of the market.
Societies, like families, prosper, however, through enduring and repetitive
self-sacrifice.
Not to put words into Professor Hudson's mouth, I would say that he is correct on the
perceptions he has about the jubilee year as it is represented in the Old Testament and even
Jesus' reference to a jubilee year in the early part of his ministry. I give Professor Hudson
great credit for pointing out that powerful part of Jesus' early speech in the Temple that
did scandalize many of the listeners there. I had not seen that message before Dr. Hudson
pointed to it, but it is a very important one as he says. But Jesus was then and also in all
his further sayings taking that economic law promulgated in earlier texts and not only
pointing out that it wasn't being observed by unscrupulous taxation practices, but also
expanding it into a larger spiritual context wherein the poor are really blessed in spirit,
because poverty is right down there with humility, and that emptying of oneself on behalf of
another is where true compassion begins.
In my faith, Jesus is God incarnate. God incarnate in order that we see in his humility,
the humility intrinsic to God's relationship to mankind. Humility and 'humus' are related,
and so they should be. The hard shell of the seed falling to the ground preserves the soul of
the seed, even as what hardens it is the vicissitudes of its early life. We all presently
have life; we are like seeds that way. And as you say, EoH, societies, like families, prosper
through enduring and repetitive self-sacrifice. That's where faith and economics, true
economics such as Professor Hudson is proposing, meet.
The only church that, to me, holds to Jesus's teaching is the Franciscan Church. Jesus also tried to help people with their fears of "doing without". This is crucial to
me. If you are unafraid to do without the capitalists have no power.
25 Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye
shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the
food, and the body than the raiment? 26 Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not,
neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not
ye of much more value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit
unto [a]the measure of his life? 28 And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider the
lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 yet I say unto
you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if God
doth so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the
oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31 Be not therefore anxious,
saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be
clothed?
There were different factions within Judaism vying for public and ideological support. A
prophetic Judaism where "God desired mercy and not sacrifice", where those who were outcasted
by the priestly Judaism, the poor who couldn't afford the Priestly ritual, taxes that
enriched the Pharisaic elite that acted as a proxy for Rome, the alien, the sinner, etc. In
this prophetic tradition love your neighbor, forgiveness of debts, and extending your
neighbor to include this traditionally outcasted, alongside predictions of Judgement for the
temple elites, and return of Gods Kingdom. Jesus belonged in this tradition. Jesus was seen
as a political and religious messiah in this tradition.
Paul belonged to the Pharisaic tradition but had some sort of religious/mystical
conversion to move from prosecuting early Christian's to starting a Christ cult. Instead of
Jesus proclaiming God desired Mercy and not sacrifice, Paul claimed Jesus became the required
sacrifice. Instead of forgiveness of debts, mercy and acceptance being the way to God, Jesus
became the priestly ritual and Christianity became a cult. Richard Horsely has done great
research on First century Judaism and the historical Jesus. I also really like "the last
week" by Borg and crossan
This is a very similar thesis to one found in David Graebers "5000 Years of Debt",
interesting that it's the conclusion being arrived at by multiple scholars.
Graeber and Hudson have been friends, Hudson told me, for ten years, and Graeber, when
writing Debt; The First 5,000 Years, relied on Hudson's scholarship for his account of
ancient Mesopotamian economics
was just going to add the point about "Debt". I found Graeber's work to be fascinating,
especially how the relationship between "sin" and debt, and the implications on the
development and rise of Christianity, the rejection of homosexuality (not just wives and
daughters became sex slaves), and perhaps most importantly, how wrong market fundamentalist
are in their understanding of how economic systems evolve and their belief that market-based
systems are "natural", arising from a pre-market barter state.
It's an excellent alternative to the creation myths of mainstream economics. I've listened
to the audio book three times through and gotten more out of it each time. It's always a
pleasure to see 'conventional wisdom' dethroned by that most pernicious of enemies: actual
history.
looking forward to picking up a copy. loved graeber's Debt: and this seems to build on
that and adds Hudson's economic background to Graeber's anthropological one
There is no 'moral hazard'. This is a non sequitur designed to deceive like a lot of
'sponsored' economic theory. Every loan carries a risk and the risk is it won't be paid
back.
The moral hazard argument only applies if debts are paid back at once, thus debtors can
'wait' for a jubilee. In the real world debt is paid back in bits along with interest. So no
one will be waiting for jubilee in day to day economic life without facing consequences.
What a debt jubilee does is wipes the slate clean of loans that 'won't' be paid back, and
maintains systemic balance rather than concentration and exploitation.
It's also pretty telling that those who control the "moral hazard" meme rarely if ever
discuss the moral hazard of bailing out major Corps and Financial Houses or the "moral
hazard" of handing large Corps years of taxpayer contributions to various States.
Also overlooks that outside of personal debt, the world of corporate debt see "strategic
defaults" occur all the time with no moral hand wringing involved. Debts are a promise to pay
back, not an obligation.
I had an interesting argument with my brother-in-law several years ago, usually a very
level headed fellow who was going back to school for engineering in his 30s, as soon as I
brought up the possibility of dissolving student debt he grew quite heated. To
paraphrase:
"Why should I be punished for responsibly paying back my loans while someone else who was
irresponsible gets that debt annulled?"
Moral outrage for the debtors being forgiven their sin! Of course, a few years later with
his debt built up his tune had completely changed
Bankruptcy is essentially a form of debt jubilee that isn't society-wide on a specific
date. The big problem I see with student loan debt is that it can't be discharged in
bankruptcy. Individual bankruptcy is not something to enter into lightly, but there are a
number of people out there who can never pay back their student debt and they should be able
to go through bankruptcy and reduce it to a manageable level so they can live the rest of
their lives productively instead of indentured servitude. At the very least, Social Security
should not be garnished to pay student debt.
Very nice read! It has been voiced by many people that ECB should set and achieve higher inflation
targets, but it sticks to the 2% target, for 'price stability', while underachieving even on
that. Keeping inflation target extremely low should serve the creditors more than the
debtors.
Real "moral hazard" are people who enable this system.
I'll have to pick up a copy of the book, which sounds quite interesting. However, I cannot
go along with the argument made here that Western Civilization is less civilized than the
Ancient Near East because it did not include regular debt jubilees.
Western civilization, until very recently, had very strict anti-usury laws which prevented
most people from borrowing money at all, let alone falling into debt servitude. Indeed, while
laws varied widely from place to place, most victims of over-borrowing were royal courts and
aristocrats, not smallholders. And of course, since most moneylenders were Jewish, one
solution for debtors regularly employed was to simply run the creditors out of town or
indeed, the country. Isn't that a kind of jubilee?
Depends what you mean by "very recently." In theory, and according to canon law
(Deuteronomy 23:19) lending at interest was completely forbidden. But quite sophisticated
banking systems had developed by the end of the middle ages, and "usury" became increasingly
defined as just "excessive interest". There was a huge controversy over this in the 16th an
17th centuries, effectively ending with the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. Most
countries had (and still have) laws against "usury" – excessive rates of interest
– but that's a different issue. Many ordinary people until quite recently lived on
non-cash economies and so this was, as you say, largely an issue for the rich. Kings in those
days frequently went bankrupt, usually because of the need to finance wars. Interestingly,
one of the biggest borrowers was the Pope, in his role as a secular prince. He had an account
with the Medici Bank in Florence, which was usually overdrawn. Someone should write a history
of the effect of the debts of Princes on history.
Supposedly the richest man *ever* was Baron Fugger . His biography by Streider is a
great read. He kept the Pope's plate as collateral for some debt or another -- when the Pope
wanted to display it in some procession, the Baron agreed. He personally accompanied the
convoy that brought the plate to Rome and also marched with it in the procession. What a
message that must have sent!
He was a miner as well as banker. Some of those mines, like earlier Roman ones across the
Mediterranean, remain among the most polluted spots on earth.
Yes. Well, the problem with interest rates being too low is because the wealthy already
have enough money, nominally speaking, to buy the world a couple times over. There is already
too much money tucked away by the wealthy as assets, but because of interest and profits,
more money is always being taken out of circulation in the real economy, and sequestered in
the financial sector. Even as the government borrows to replace it in circulation, and so
prevent *deflation.* in the real economy. The money will (eventually) be destroyed, but since
the government(s) of the world are too weak, it won't be by collecting taxes, (a la MMT.)
The parallels of debt oligarchies to tech oligarchies, this article draws for me .. "So it was inevitable that, in the last century of American history, increasing numbers of
small firms became irredeemably unviable and lost their ability to compete. It likewise was
inevitable that the FANGS amassed the masses of entrepreneurial talent and established
themselves in parasitic oligarchies."
"by keeping "everybody above the break-even level" why? to enable – the planet to go from 7 Billion people to 14 Billion? in an age of AI and vast chasm of IQ's below 100 – what could be the purpose?
I'm going to get the book.
And I wonder if the notion of "IQ" and what we've come to believe is "intelligent" could have
been as manipulated as people's relationship with and beliefs about debt.
For what is the most basic condition of civilization, Hudson asks, other than societal
organization that effects lasting "balance" by keeping "everybody above the break-even
level"?
That's the core regulating idea Geoff Mann draws out of Keynes in his recent "In the Long
Run We Are All Dead." As best as I can tell his take on Keynes is accurate, and he's able to
make a case for aligning him with the likes of Hegel and -- drum roll -- Robespierre, who was
fiercely insistent on the guarantee of an "honorable poverty." In a way, they were all
theorists of the abyss, pragmatists who insisted on measures to make sure economies didn't
kill their members. I was particularly taken by the idea that the General Theory is not
systematic but rather an analysis of different modes of breakdown, e.g. the liquidity trap,
that must be compensated for.
It's also worth noting that, according to Mann, Keynes was a poor, indifferent reader of
Marx, and that a better appreciation would have led Keynes to see they were in significant
agreement on some crisis dynamics in capitalism.
"latifundia Italiam ("the great estates destroyed Italy"), as Pliny the Elder observed."
< the quote is lacking its verb; should read "latifundia perdidere Italiam".
Also, Hudson's quote in the addendum seems to partly lack indentation
Looking forward to reading it. I really enjoyed the History of debt by David Graeber so
would be interesting to go more in depth. Does Hudson discuss bankruptcy law? After all in most of the world most types of loans can
be discharged in a bankruptcy which is the closest we have to the Jubilees
Except, of course, for the 1.5 trillion student loan debt. "For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment
from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This
is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School
and the mainstream of American economists"
I only mentioned it because it's an example of an enormous, oppressive, non-dischargeable
debt for something that used to be considered a public good, and almost free.
The No Creditor Left Behind Bankruptcy "Reform" Act of 2005 carved a big hole in the idea
of debt forgiveness in America. Neoliberalism at its finest. Rescinding those changes would
probably be a big win for Democrats at the polls and in governance.
Yes. Bankruptcy is hardly any kind of Jubilee. Any debt is much harder to discharge post
2005, including medical, which is the cause of half of bankruptcies according to filers.
But that would mean showing contrition by the very malefactors who (hear's looking at you
– Biden, Schumer, Clinton .. along with their counterparts across the aisle)
Don't expect rescission from the likes of them !
The Plutocrats are just 'Biden their time until they own everything.
He's the main one responsible for this as a U.S. Senator servicing those "little family
businesses" headquartered in Delaware.
Wonder the same about bankruptcy. IIRC, think the moneychangers' bankruptcy "reform" under
the Bush II regime turned it into a virtual debtors' prison, excluding several kinds of debt
from discharge, including student loans.
Student loans. Now there's a naked fleecing scam by the moneychangers. High interest, zero
risk, no forgiveness. A great racket if you can get it, like Medical Insurance, profiteering
guaranteed by Obamacare.
Hudson perceives things that should be but aren't obvious -- about money, power, and
freedom. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but it's ultimately a weapon wielded
in an insatiable lust for power, absolute, utterly corrupt power, the ownership and
enslavement of others. Inequality is not a flaw of rigged-market cannibalism; it's a feature,
a feature those at the top of the food chain have no intention of "fixing". The US empire,
imo, is the nadir of this evil, a kleptocracy dependent on perpetual mass-murder. The paradox
is, they may be more enslaved to their narcotic than anyone.
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose." Janis Joplin
I wonder if Janis was an organ donor? These days, organ harvesting doesn't seem as
far-fetched. Were all those just urban legends about waking up in an ice bath with a note
attached about that impromptu kidney donation? /s
Regarding the point of moral hazard: what would Hudson's reply be to the person who says
"I paid off all my debts through hard work and abstinence; why should someone get a free pass
under the Jubilee. To yours truly, that would be ultimate slap in the face
Yes, the tab at the pub DID go away. A "pub" is "public house", in Babylonia too. The ale
wives weren't paid -- and they in turn didn't have to pay the palace or temples for the
consignment of beer.
A clean slate is a clean slate -- for consumer debts (NOT business debts).
It's necessary to read the book to get the details. i guarantee that nobody can deduce Bronze
Age finance abstractly.
Cooperation. Because we can decline the idea of debt right back to one thing. Cooperation.
When Graeber says "Money is Debt" he is right but he fails to define the root of debt.
Because debt is not money. It's just as the biologist here on NC said: If one amoeba hoarded
all the ATP it would simply kill off the rest of the amoeba because adenosinetriphosphate is
their source of energy, their "money".
The original sin is getting money mixed up by claiming
it is both a medium of exchange and a store of value. The word "store" goes off in its own
direction and becomes "hoard" and "deprive others". You get my drift? Debt must be
cooperation for the system to work.
A business loan used to help pay for workers' insurance – that would seem to be
worthy of consideration. A consumer loan used for an exotic vacation in the middle of an ocean – not so
worthy. A debt owed for child support or ex-wife (or husband) – would that be private or
public?
Found the source of my
misunderstanding: "In such cases rulers cancelled debts that were owed. (In that case, the ale women would
not owe the palace for the beer that had been advanced during the crop year.)" I had not put it together that the consumers were then forgiven by the ale women. Stands
to reason.
"i guarantee that nobody can deduce Bronze Age finance abstractly." Now that I can lift myself off the floor after the spastic convulsions of laughter that
brought on .. Kudos Sir . that was the best chortle I've had in yonks – !!!!!!! It is
probably the most hilarious synopsis of what ails about 90% of what we call economics at this
juncture. I think I'll have that put to paper in calligraphy and in a stunning frame on the wall
next to my Japanese charcoal art collection, of which sits on the wall around my comp
screen.
Let me get this straight your stance is basically, "I had to suffer through injustice and
I survived, why should anybody else get to have any justice?!"
It seems to favor mortgaged 'owners' of homes, if those loans are not considered
'business.' And disadvantages renters (who are thinking of borrowing to buy in the near future).
The answer is so that those other people will be able to sustain the consumption that is
necessary to absorb your production so that you don't get laid off -- but this requires an
understanding of macroeconomics unavailable in the current economic orthodoxy.
I've seen these arguments supporting debt forgiveness many, many times, but I have yet to
see any details on how this would be functionally accomplished today. I don't disagree with
the sentiment that debt has become a huge problem for many people, but sentiments aren't road
maps.
One person's debt is another person's credit. If you wipe out the debt on one side, you
extinguish the asset on the other (unless, of course, the sovereign government "buys" this
debt from the creditors in an eminent domain type fashion). Perhaps in ancient times
creditors were mostly well-healed oligarchs who could survive the loss. Today, much of the
debt is bundled and securitized and held by all sorts of individuals and institutions (think
mutual funds, pension plans, 401k's etc). While the one-percenters could absorb the hit, I'm
not so sure about those lower on the ladder who thought their retirement savings were secure
in a "safe" bond fund.
At some point, supporters of debt forgiveness need to reconcile their position with the
fact that the extinguishing of debt is, in effect, a sovereign action taking the property of
another on a scale without much parallel in modern society.
You could exchange equity interest for debt for business loans or loans secured by an
underlying asset. (mortgage loan). You could extend the time period or write down the interest rate enabling smaller
payments. You could have the Fed buy the debt, as you mentioned, and then forgive it. You could have the fed take over payments, or a portion of the payment, thereby proving
relief for the debtor while still keeping the creditor whole.
I think in the Ancient Middle East the government was the most important creditor (with
the debt arising from tax arrears) so yes, it was easier to forgive a debt then than now.
As I wrote a few lines before, another option (which has an advantage of having been in
use for centuries) is a bankruptcy.
Credit is an essential tool for stimulating any economy. Farmers often need funds to buy
seeds and get through the winter, auto manufacturers couldn't possibly survive if they had to
demand full payment up front for their cars, etc., etc (think up your own examples).
An intelligent state (or rather an idealized intelligent state) can and should issue
credit or print money to best utilize the society's productive potential. The problems begin
when the state allows this crucial function to be monopolized by the oligarchs, who unlike
the state are in the game only for profit, not for upgrading the overall well being (or war
readiness, if you prefer) of the society. A state that can print its own money can either
dispense with interest charges or forgive debt when it the debt/interest burden is excessive.
Since private lenders, who don't own the government, can't print money, they're in no
position to forgive debt. The advantage of maintaining a belief in the sanctity of debt, and
therefore the immiseration of the debtors, is that it allows the oligarchs to amass
staggering wealth, and build fabulous Xanadus in Malibu or on Long Island. You really
wouldn't want to live in a world where nobody could afford a thirty thousand square foot
house, would you?
At some point, supporters of debt forgiveness need to reconcile their position with
the fact that the extinguishing of debt is, in effect, a sovereign action taking the
property of another on a scale without much parallel in modern society.
Let me suggest a parallel or two: the acquisition of property by means of enforced
indebtedness combined with creditor fraud that occurred in the Great Foreclosure Carnage
around 2008? Or the appropriation of the lion's share of economic growth since 1970 to the
richest 1% or so?
You may have solved the problem right here: the sovereign government "buys" this debt." MMT is the perfect mechanism to do this. It accomplishes what the Temple could do in the
past. Then, the banking and insurance services required by society can be shifted to the
National Postal Service. Speculation, for those who need it, can be continued in the casinos,
where it belongs. And then we can have a real discussion about the "resource base" we call
Earth and look at ways that we can live within it, and even possibly beyond it, without
irreversibly damaging the ecology we need to revisit all this again, and again, and again
I would email your friend back and say, "you write like this is a bad thing!??!!?"
Creditors SHOULD be required to exercise judgment and restraint in extending credit. It's
moral hazard in the other direction if the government lets them squeeze the life out of
people.
Maybe its cause I have an M.div. How is this earth shattering? Its been the basic view of every dusty old Old Testament
churchman for years.
Sounds like Hudson skipped medieval cannon law and early modern eras to try and bolster the
"rediscovery" angle.
This is old hat:
Creditors aiming to own you- proverbs
Jubilee- Torah
Debts- they stoped saying that only in the 60s but I learned it like that.
But Hudson really shoulda resisted the urge to name drop Jesus quite so hard and make him
the economic revolutionary. Or is he trying to give reasons for his probable opponents to
write him off?
We on here are the choir. What do the folks in the pews here?
If he'd of kept the prophetic, he had then an ability to reach down into the prophets
which condemn growing estates, refusing jubilees, and even condemned sacrificing Children
(for material benefits from Idols) he would then be wielding a whole and big religion stick
Not just casting yet another 1800s historical Jesus.
I think you're overlooking the difference between prophecy and history here. Jesus was
another quite noisy prophet, saying what prophets say: "God's gonna getcha!" And of course He
got His for saying that, as they usually do.
We've been ignoring prophets while sanctifying them for a very long time. Hudson stitches
them back into the fabric of history. He takes them far more seriously and literally than
canon lawyers have. He helps me to understand their topsy-turvy justification of–to
build on your delightful auto-correct–cannon law.
What is the trigger point for debt forgiveness? When does it operate and upon what class
of debtors? Is it predictable or unpredictable? Is it frequent or infrequent?
It needs to be frequent enough yet to some extent unpredictable, or a class of predatory
debtors will be created, piling up debt immediately before the jubilee.
This is a means of redistribution of wealth. But aren't there better means, such as a
minimum basic income AKA universal SSI and other social entitlements? Of course, this assumes
that government seeks public welfare and is not merely the collective will of a predatory
oligarchy. Also not sure how it applies to the redistribution of wealth between nations.
If a student and medical debt jubilee, for example, were coupled with free tuition at
public colleges and M4A there would be no accumulation of debt going forward. I don't know if
there are comparable systemic changes for other types of debt, and most of this discussion is
over my head as far as theology or economic history. However, if it's about a religious,
social justice, or moral force for forgiving debts, it would include re-framing how we think
of society and our obligations to each other – not just debt forgiveness but changes to
structures to guard against further unsustainable debt.
WW I, the Russian Revolution, and WW II make one wonder about the definition of "Western
Civilization".
Each of these occurred after a period of very high wealth and income inequality with large
public and private debts in some cases.
the past century of history makes one wonder how smart it is for the 0.1% to focus on
increasing wealth and income inequality. It frequently does not end well for anybody.
Skeletons of wealthy and "noble" people at the bottom of mine shafts is often proof of
that.
And Piketty shows that these events interrupted and temporarily reversed the accumulation
of wealth, ushering in the abundance of the mid twentieth century.
'"Classical Antiquity," Hudson writes, "replaced the cyclical idea of time and social
renewal with that of linear time. Economic polarization became irreversible, not merely
temporary" (p. xxv). In other words: "The idea of linear progress, in the form of
irreversible debt and property transfers, has replaced the Bronze Age tradition of cyclical
renewal" '
I remember reading one of John Michael Greer's posts a few years back that pointed out the
differences in Western concept of time-as-linear and other, earlier societies', concept of
time as circular. We, in the West, think things will become increasingly better, (or worse)
right up to infinity. GDP will always grow, the stock market will always rise, freedom will
always increase.
Other societies thought of events as cyclical. The early growth of spring blossomed into
the fruitfulness of summer, then decayed in autumn and lay fallow in winter (or whatever
passed for winter where you were living). That's how Nature worked. And, it is inevitable
that societies grow, prosper, decline, die, then are renewed.
And, using the circle in deliberative sessions probably leads to different results than
the usual Western, linear one, of having the 'leaders' sitting in front, and the 'followers'
facing them in a subservient position. Witness the setups of most city council chambers.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote about it at length in Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle
(1987).
His immediate topic was the history of the discovery of deep time, the idea that processes
observable today could explain vast changes in the earth if allowed to act over long enough
spans of time. Being Gould, he considers cultural applications beyond geology and
evolution.
One application is that the "biblical" version of a jubilee year was by the time of the
writing of the bible an ancient idea that had survived several thousand years of middle
eastern history. That writing was contemporaneous with the early Greeks and predates the
impact of Alexander and Roman rule over the eastern Mediterranean.
Cycles are real (see Nature); linear progress is delusional.
Which is why our deluded system of imaginary linear growth is subject to chronic booms and
busts which bring cyclical reality back -- Every. Single. Time.
I am troubled by these statements in the post:
" to the extent that it will be understood,'earth-shattering' in both intent and effect."
"Just as this is a profound book, it is so densely written that it is profoundly difficult to
read."
I fear too much that is "earth-shattering" will be lost if it is profoundly difficult.
Readers less able or less determined will let the interpretations of others sway their
understanding. Those others may not share the author's perspective or intent in their
interpretations, and they may not be of persons of honesty and good will.
How would Hudson respond to the person who laments " I worked and deprived my self to pay
back my loan. Why should someone else get a free ride, if I did not"?
I guess he would say that there is another moral hazard, on part of the lender which has
to be balanced against it. If I as a lender know that I can collect any loan that I make up
to enslaving the debtor if he falls in arrears then I don't assume any risk and have no skin
in the game.
Times change, we learn from mistakes, and change our ways? Before we did the wrong thing,
now we're getting it right?
Why does someone else being done justice hurt you? It's not a "free ride," either; that
implies getting something for nothing. Farmers wiped out by drought were hardly getting a
free ride when they were forgiven debts for grain that didn't grow in fields that didn't
exactly plant and tend themselves. People often do immense amounts of work only for the
bottom to drop out on the way back from the well.
One day I took a fall off a 4′ ladder, helping a friend paint their house,
shattering my left wrist. The $20,000 bill sent my life into a tailspin. Finally declared
bankruptcy, but I've still got a few years of purgatory.
That was no "free ride," friend.
I paid back my student loans, and it sucked. Literally sucked the food off my table many a
month. And I would rejoice at someone else not having to go through that. Education should be
free, to begin with, so relieving people of crushing burdens they shouldn't have at all would
be doubly enjoyable.
The answer is so that those other people will be able to sustain the consumption that is
necessary to absorb your production so that you don't get laid off -- but this requires an
understanding of macroeconomics unavailable in the current economic orthodoxy.
Jesus was not just driving the debt collectors out of the temple, he was driving out all
of the capitalists :
Mark 11:15 KJV
15 And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out
them that sold and bought in the temple , and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers,
and the seats of them that sold doves ;
16 And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple .
17 And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house shall be called of all
nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves.
So he was kicking out people who were selling things in the temple, not just the money
changers, all the capitalists. A vessel carried goods and he did not even want to see them in
the temple.
It is not enough to end debt, because that still leaves us with capitalism.
The VERY NEXT verse is Mark 12, The Parable of the Tenants, literally telling the
capitalists that the people will rise up if you follow capitalism and then they will have to
kill the renters.
Oh, no, you don't. In the story it's the renters. My bad. But the renters in the story
would, I suppose, be equivalent to the rentiers we find ourselves plagued with today
"That is what creditors really wanted: Not merely the interest as such, but the collateral
-- whatever economic assets debtors possessed, from their labor to their property, ending up
with their lives"
Creditors=Predators
I would argue that it would be more appropriate to say that the
prædia/latifundia explains the ascent of the medieval feudal order rather than
explaining the decline of the Roman empire. The fall of the WRE is a multi-faceted phenomenon
with no singular cause, and besides it's a bit suspect to say that something that came about
6 centuries earlier caused it. The latifundia provided the template for social order
that would fill the void left by the collapse of the WRE, reaching its apex in high medieval
manorialism.
Late to comment on this but I always thought it would be an interesting thought to write a
history of the Western Roman Empire backwards in time starting maybe at the early middle ages
as the final presence of the Empire itself. As the end point of the Empire. As a culmination
of a process and working back tracing each step that was "caused" by the previous one
stretching back to its beginning in the 2d Cent BCE Rome-Italy and the economic problems of
debt, loss of the small farming economy, and the political social consequences. The Roman
victory in the Second Punic as the beginning of it as an Imperium with the Middle Ages as its
logical end, or so to speak, final "perfection".
Fascinating scholarship with very far reaching and profound implications, but I'm not
really satisfied with Hudson's answer to the friend of John Siman. The question posed is a
very fair one and of a very practical nature, concerning the possible deleterious effects of
systemic debt forgiveness on credit/lending. Hudson's answer, at least as it's presented
here, sidesteps the question and instead dives into a discussion of morality. I would think
loan durations, terms, interest rates, and generalized credit availability would all vary
greatly depending on whether or not debt cancellation was a regularly occurring, scheduled
event or a more fluid and unpredictable event based on political winds and the whims of
whatever autocrat happens to be in power. Regardless of the morality of a particular
debt/monetary system, requests for more information concerning the likely side effects of
debt forgiveness programs and any lessons regarding best debt forgiveness practices from the
ancient civilizations who practiced it are very much in order if Hudson is making the
argument that systematic debt cancellation is preferable to our present system of lifelong
compounding debts and generational indebtedness. I'm certainly not saying Hudson is off base
here, I like where he's going with his scholarship, but these are inevitable questions.
Anyone interested in the history Hudson has unearthed will want to know if he believes debt
forgiveness could work in a modern, interconnected, industrial society or if it only works
with pre-industrial grain farming peasants and a small class of aristocrats.
Oh my, perhaps the system that allowed the entire human world to be poisoned into
extinction would end. That would be awful, so many portfolios would be ruined.
Who is going to lend money for a loss? Credit card lenders manage risk with high interest
rates, limited credit lines, and closing accounts at will: good luck paying for college on
those terms. I'd guess the generous loan forgiveness in ancient times was made possible
through slave labor and spoils of war
What if students didn't have to pay for college? Or patients, health care? Pretty sure
I'd've done a much better job of spreading that money around than the deep pockets it went
into. Maybe, in not being unduly indebted myself, I could've helped others do likewise, at
least in my small way.
Where's the money going to come from? We have all the money we need, and then some, for
the things we deem necessary. Ask Wall St. and the Pentagon.
So I guess my question to all this is : why has Western civilization not collapsed? What's
the mechanisms that we have used that say, the Romans, didn't?
Who says we're not collapsing right now? The plow gave farmers mechanical advantage to speed things up. The steam engine, then
internal combustion, did likewise. Computers are aka information engines.
Sure, we've got immense momentum, way more than ever, but we're headed straight for
Climate Change Peak. And the morons in the cockpit? I can't even.
For your decades long, truth to power investigative and intellectual rigor. The
experience(s) from a young age, up to and including your work on modern money and now this
latest book.
Truly a view from a life long perspective the likes of which may never come along again.
A voice that is worthy of attention.
I wonder about the sources of debt in ancient times? It wasn't driven by consumerism like todays debt is, was it? Hopefully the book will speak to this.
Satisfying explanation of the failure of European and now North American society to
achieve civilization due to our reliance on Greek and Roman precedents for our public acts.
We were besotted by the birth of democracy in Athens and the abuse of force in Rome.
I shall buy this book, not because I am unaware of the basic argument but because I expect
Michael Hudson has a great many illustrations of the improved society that assyriologists
have discovered.
It is a great personal delight to know Hudson values Arnold Toynbee, one of my heroes and
a fine human being. Thanks NC for the review.
John Siman here. You seem to be one of only a few people posting comments who understands
the depth and vastness and importance of Hudson's project. You also love Toynbee. All this
makes me very happy!
I've never read Toynbee and my library only has a couple of his books. But I've read
elsewhere that he fell from scholarly favor in part because of his critical view of Zionism.
From Wikipedia:
Toynbee maintained, among other contentions, that the Jewish people have neither
historic nor legal claims to Palestine, stating that the Arab
"population's human rights to their homes and property over-ride all other rights in
cases where claims conflict." He did concede that the Jews, "being the only surviving
representatives of any of the pre-Arab inhabitants of Palestine, have a further claim to
a national home in Palestine." But that claim, he held, is valid "only in so far as it
can be implemented without injury to the rights and to the legitimate interests of the
native Arab population of Palestine."[30]
Time for a Toynbee revival? And while I'm a great fan of Hudson's writing on this blog and would humbly decline any
challenge to his scholarship, I do wonder about the notion of framing all of human history in
terms of money. Surely creditors only have power as long as they have force to back it up.
The book's thesis sounds a tad reductionist..
Pierre Bourdieu would probably say that the societal relations at issue are those of
power. Debtor-Creditor relations, using "money" as shorthand, are an expression of them.
Power and its absence define the rights and obligations of debtor and creditor – and
the manner in which they can be modified.
Hudson seems to be saying that his historical research tells him that the political
leaders in the ancient societies he has studied reserved to themselves the power periodically
to alter those relationships.
The purpose of doing so was as to keep society functioning by meeting demands that
conflict with and at times are superior to the normal need to repay debt. Periodic debt
forgiveness is equally normal, in the manner that medieval farmers let their land lie fallow
so as to bear fruit another year.
Rootless, unrestrained capital would plant the same ground every year, exhaust it, and
move on, leaving behind the detritus of its "creative destruction". For Hudson, a political
ruler with nowhere to move on to, feels compelled instead to play steward.
Under present day neoliberalism, most political leaders have out a less ambitious role for
themselves: they ask permission from capital to blow wind. Restraining it from unsustainably
harvesting every available resource – cotton, coal, fish, data, the earth – is
not within their normal purview.
I feel like I'm out of phase here after bringing up Toynbee in the early years of NC or is
it just a flash back thingy . society as a journey vs. a harbor.
I am reminded of this from the Merchant of Venice.
"Go with me to a notary, seal me there
Your single bond; and, in a merry sport,
If you repay me not on such a day,
In such a place, such sum or sums as are
Express'd in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken
In what part of your body pleaseth me".
Yes!! And do you know Horace's second epode, about Alfius the fænerator =
usurer?
Beatus ille qui procul negotiis,
ut prisca gens mortalium,
paterna rura bobus exercet suis,
solutus omni fænore .
Hudson's work totally illuminates this poem!
To answer the eternal question, often posed by concerned bankers or their supporters:
-- Wouldn't debt cancellations just take away any incentive for people to pay back loans
and, thus, take away the incentive to give loans?
While Dr. Hudson's answer is technically correct, it misses the mark. The question is
filled with incorrect assumptions and moral certainty. A better answer would be:
1st. If the bank is stupid enough to make the loan, they are stupid enough to lose it. The
bank must take the consequence of making a un-payable loan. And.
2nd. The bank has far more resources to know if the loan is repayable than the person getting
the loan. Since the bank 'knows' more, it should take on more responsibility for making the
loan than the person getting the loan. And so, back to reason #1 above, stupid bank loses
stupid loan.
Now when said banker or supporter starts to sputter about how you don't understand how the
world works, or how people must do the right thing, etc., reply back with: "Banks' don't give
loans, they sell loans." The price the borrower pays for the loan is both the face
value of the amount borrowed plus the price the bank sets on 'selling' that amount of money
(the interest rate of the loan). And that is if the borrower pays back the loan with money.
Otherwise the borrower pays back with the collateral used as a Plan B for the lender. So
banks 'give' (sell) loans if and only if:
1. they can make money loaning to that person (or business, or country). 'Make money' means
either getting the collateral for the loan or getting the purchase price (cost of the loan)
in full.
OR
2. they are 'requested' by a higher authority to make the loan. A government or even just a
higher up boss could 'request' that the loan officer approve the loan, regardless of the
borrower's ability to repay. This accounts for the fraud and bribery too often seen with the
banker's side of debt.
And while I'm at it, further reasons why debt should be retired and not paid back: The
consequence to society of a bank not getting repaid is much less than the consequence to
society of the individual being forced to pay back a loan that the individual can not
reasonably do. The society is not that much troubled by a bank losing 'its' money than its
members being forced into debt slavery via loan foreclosures and such. Second, the bank
should not get more money or services back from a defaulted loan than what the loan itself
was worth. Society is poorly served when the bank (and its officers) get rich by foreclosing
on loans.
Lastly, and deserving its own paragraph: Yes, the borrower usually has a gun to their head
-- want a good job? get a college degree or training, which needs a school loan to get; want
groceries on the table (but not earning enough wages to cover it)? get a payday loan; want to
make your small company's payroll (but did not see a downturn in the economy)? get a bridging
loan, etc., etc., etc.
The central question about debt, loans, and contracts is: Is a contract fair if it is
'your brains or your signature on the paper'? In case mafia bosses are reading this, the
answer is NO, it's not. And unfair contracts are not or should not be legally enforceable.
The sanctity of the contract rests on a foundation of is it a 'free and even' entered into
agreement.
What could have facilitated debt jubilees in ancient societies was the fact that the new
rulers which overthrew the old as a result of frequent wars, found it convenient to eliminate
the former propertied classes to win over the support of the indebted and enslaved commoners.
'Wiping the slate clean' could have been just a measure to win political legitimacy.
Finally someone dared to say it.
The debt economy is sustainable only by debt forgiveness: Personal bankruptcy as in USA (prior
to 2005) Or as corporations all around the world enjoy it. Remember how many times did
Trump's corporations went bankrupt?
There is a mass debt forgiveness that is not so obvious yet it is very effective to keep debt
economies alive and well. Moderate and higher inflation is a form of creeping debt forgivness
en mass. The fixed interest rates play a major role in having inflation forming a slow but
sure debt forgiveness.
Do you wonder why Ben Bernanke called for higher inflation in the midst of the GFC? Because
the moderate inflation is a crucial part of debt forgiveness that debt economy has to have in
order to function properly.
Jesus only shortened the Moses' orders on what to do with poverty in Deutoronomy 15.
Second part of Lord's Prayer is a shorter version of Moses' orders on Debt Jubilee. Even then
they knew the importance of Debt forgiveness and especially since rates were 20% all till
recently.
Today, with lower rates and inflation the need is lesser but personal bankruptcy is an
imediate help to debtors.
Since banks create money as issuing a loan and destroy money as loan is repaid (and only
interest stay as bank's profit) it is very usefull for a bank to have debt forgiven even when
loan is secured. Banks do not have to sell the property underpriced (as they usually do) to
get rid of liability that unperforming loan creates. There are expenses in selling property
especially under the price.
It is much better if the bankruptcy judge allows banks to erase their and debtors liabilities
without money being returned. It saves the banks and debtors.
This is all easy to learn when you know that banks create money when issuing a loan and
then destroy the money as the loan is returned. that is a Law.
Banks create money and then destroy it.
By forgiving the debts everyone benefits.
Same goes with moderate inflation 4-20%, everyone benefits.
A possible case of debt jubilee in our times comes to mind. In India opposition Congress
Party has promised that if it wins general elections in 2019 it will work to forgive the
debts of poor farmers. Here the motivation of this party might not be so much as to relieve
the distress of destitute farmers, many of whom are driven to suicides, as to get votes and
regain power.
Many a time benefits accrue to disadvantaged groups as an inadvertent collateral effect of
conflict of contending power groups and not as a deliberate benign act.
I guess the question is whether the local landsharks who hold these debts will observe the
edicts of New Delhi .
Speaking of which, it would be interesting to see whether and under what conditions the
jubilee model occurred in the Oriental civilizations, all of which were all too well
acquainted with rural usury. I know the Chinese empires had state granaries as insurance
against famines.
But I also recall an 1950s book "Slaves of the Cool Mountains". This discussed the
subcaste of non-Han families in the remote mountain valleys of Yunnan Province who had been
in multigenerational debt bondage and whose unusual economic order proved especially
challenging for the Communist authorities to reinvent. (I also think these areas suffered
horribly in the later famines)
Also, the Parsees (Farsis) of Mumbai were bankers to the Mughals for centuries, but I
suppose that would be state banking, not rural usury.
What distinguishes modern times from the ancient is that propertied classes in many
developed societies have strengthened their political stranglehold, which increases by the
day thanks to new artificial intelligence technologies, so much so that it appears
inconceivable how they could be displaced at all.
In ancient societies most rulers were frequently changing military adventurers and conquerors
and there was still some disconnect between power and wealth; but in modern there has
developed a close convergence between the two. In ancient societies political power was
arbiter of wealth but in modern, developed ones at least, wealth has become arbiter of
power.
Wealthy are the creditors who will not let debtors of the hook easily. I am afraid, we could
be moving to a dystopian future a la Aldous Huxley and George Orwell where rulers and asset
owners would form a same class, the ruled being little better than serfs and plebeians.
Look around. Do we not see the incipient signs already?
Sorry, I dont get it. Very much with the critical reviewer on this one:
"Wouldn't debt cancellations just take away any incentive for people to pay back loans and,
thus, take away the incentive to give loans?"
Hudson's response:
-- Creditors argue that if you forgive debts for a class of debtors – say, student
loans – that there will be some "free riders," and that people will expect to have bad
loans written off. This is called a "moral hazard," as if debt writedowns are a hazard to the
economy, and hence, immoral.
I bed to disagree. The argument is not a moral one. It is an economic one. If I expect my
dept to be written off, i have very little incentive to pay it back. As a creditor on the
other hand I would not care if i get my money from the state or the debtor. However if the
state if going to give money to people anyway we could arrange that by direct transfers and
spare us the trouble of calling it "debt", which we all know is not really debt, but just a
temporary pseudo-debt that will eventually be covered by the state.
I understand Hudson implies that the harm from taking away incentives to pay back debt is
lesser than the harm from dependencies arising from debt in general. I would like a
clarification for which kind of loans this actually holds true and would like to remind the
insame rise of wealth, well-being, long-livety of humanity since the rise of organised
credit/ loan systems.
You may expect there to be a window between the moment where your debt is due, and where a
debt jubilee could occur. So if you don't pay back your debt, bad things may happen: your
kids are incited to pay on your behalf, your house is sold to pay back the debt, your
paycheck is garnished whatever is in the law, and you should end up paying back after
all.
But if you have no kids, no house and no paycheck big enough to be garnished, no debt is paid
back, because no debt can be paid back, and on the day of the jubilee, you walk out clean,
but still with no money, no house and no significant paycheck.
What does change, however, is the risk factor for the creditor: debts that cannot be paid
back, will not be paid back: not by the debtor and not by the state.
So the bank should think twice before handing out a student loan for a very expensive
university where nobody finds work because they offer useless degrees.
As far as I can see, a jubilee would apply to any kind of debt.
Sorry about coming in late to this discussion. I want to comment on the earlier mention of
"Original Sin." I encourage those interested to read "Adam, Eve and the Serpent" by Elaine
Pagels. One of her theses is that Original Sin was a doctrine created by Augustine of Hippo
and that it fit very neatly with a drive to convince the Roman rulers to make Christianity
the official religion. After all, if humans are fundamentally flawed, they need a strong
ruler to tamp down the chaos. As one poster noted, Original Sin is not found in Judaism, and
if it dated from the story of Adam and Eve, you would expect it to be.
Actually, in my case, the Bronze Age angle is of particular interest. I don't mean to offer too much information, but hope that someone can perhaps pass this
info along to Dr. Hudson's publisher . it's not the shipping that plagues me if I have to
order via Amazon, it's the font sizes and the narrow kerning of printed pages 8^p
My eyes vastly prefer a screen reader to enlarge font sizes -- despite my
relative youth 8^\
Also, tablets and phones are vastly more portable.
Calls to my two favorite Seattle-area bookshops today went something like, "Wow, that book
looks interesting . We're going to have trouble ordering from that small publisher It would
be really hard for us to get you a copy -- why don't you just order it from Amazon
?"
In my case, ordering from Amazon would take about 3 weeks for delivery, which is hardly
the end of the world however, if I can't get it on a screen reader, then I would not be able
to take advantage of bumping up the font size >8^\
I hope that your publisher will be able to release the eBook version sooner, rather than
later. They might also contact iBooks to get a notification in Apple's system so that people
could at least see the book will be available there soon -- that way, iBooks can
automatically let me pre-purchase the book, and their system will download it and notify
me when the content is available.
FWIW, I have two of your books via iBooks ( The Monsters, Killing the Host ).
Very simple to carry around that way. Also, ginormous font size
Sorry to be Mr Pedant but The Monster is not by this Michael Hudson but a Dubya who's more
of a journalist if memory serves.
That being said, The Monster is a jaw-dropping work and will always pay re-reading after each
financial crash.
The new MH tome drops on my doormat on Monday all decks are being cleared as we speak for the
time that will be known to history as the Great Seclusion of 2018
Okay feeling silly , and thanks for the correction!
I busted through "The Monsters" some years back and must have mixed up authorship in my
memory archives. Yipes!
I was thinking that if mine arrived mid-Dec, it would be a grand northern latitude time of
year for an invigorating read. But it's all about font size (also, backlighting!)
Thanks again, and congrats on clearing your decks ;-)
Umm Sellers soft shoe at the door after spilling the rice .
After all the wrangling with the beard years ago_cough_ Babylonian debates, not to mention
the early refugees exodus out of the Sumerian collapse, only to experience a population boom
in near historical time, leading to the first city states in the region and all the baggage
that goes with it – evolution of everything.
Only to experience waves of external forces until it becomes de-facto state religion.
But yeah . some tell us human history is only 5000 years old or there about, never mind
the ad hoc assemblage as it drifts through history and the propensity of some to do a
Jefferson's bible treatment to forward personal biases – usual suspects IMO.
At certain points in social history, debt resistance becomes quite literally a matter of
war. Lenders will kill you if that is part of getting their money back. Debtors may have to kill the lenders to get out of debt. It is not always a heroic process. One of the most strident goals of the Nazi Party was to take over the Allied governments
that were imposing reparations.
For more perspective, see my article on "Ending the Evil of Student Loans" on this blog a
couple of months ago.
The question of the relationship between the oligarchs of ancient Rome and the kings who
forgave debts in even more ancient bronze age civilizations can be seen in high relief in the
life of Julius Caesar. The Roman Senate was a den of very rich thieves, while Caesar was a
charismatic leader popular with the common people. He was hated by the Roman elite because he
wanted to make the Roman state work by supporting the common people, while the Senate wanted
to be free to enrich themselves at the expense of both the people and the state. Caesar toyed
with the issue of becoming a king, leading the Senators to hate and fear him, and the people
to cheer him. Indeed, his comment on one occasion when the crowd would crown him king finds
echo in the gospels, for Caesar said "My name is not King, but Caesar!" During the passion
week of Christ, the chief priests cried out "We have no king but Caesar!" (John 19:15) Caesar
worked to find land for his retired soldiers so that they could raise the next generation of
citizen soldiers. Roman estates progressively decreased the supply of citizen soldiers, and
forced increasing reliance on mercenaries.
If anyone wants to follow up on the life of Caesar, take a look at "Caesar: Politician and
Statesman" by Matthias Gelzer or "Julius Caesar" by Phillip Freeman. Freeman ends his book
with a report by Thomas Jefferson that Alexander Hamilton told him "The greatest man who ever
lived was Julius Caesar."
If anyone wants to take the question of Julius Caesar one step further in considering
Hudson's new book, they might want to read "Et tu, Judas? Then Fall Jesus!" by Gary Courtney
or "Jesus Was Caesar" by Francesco Carrota. While taking somewhat different paths to their
conclusion, both find reasons to conclude that Julius Caesar was the historical Jesus, while
the gospels are allegorical retellings of Caesar's life, set in a Jewish milieu, If so,
Christianity began its career in a cauldron of political and religious strife and propaganda,
not so different from what we live with now. After all, both died around Passover, and big
things happened on the third day!
It is a truism that Christianity began in a cauldron of political and religious strife.
Jews were living in a militarily occupied Palestine, a troublesome peripheral territory in
the Roman empire, one that had been assaulted culturally for centuries by the allure of the
Hellenistic world and assaulted physically for millenia by competing empires.
It is common to draw parallels from the surviving accounts of Jesus with the cultures of
Greece and Roman (conceding that Rome had a culture other than barbarism). Greek language and
culture was the lingua franca of the time.
Crossan, for one, points out that tales of divine origins and virgin births were common
when poet historians sought to explain the earthly power of emperors. What was uncommon was
to associate them with the cultural meaning of the life of an itinerant preacher and peasant
village Jew.
Humans understand the new by comparing it with the a parallel from the known. But to
conclude that the historical Julius was the historical Jesus confuses the real and the
metaphorical.
Looking at the coming 2019, Goldman's economists have retained their cheerful outlook and
despite recent hints of an economic slowdown, they expect the Fed to tighten five times between
now and the end of next year (4 in 2019 including once in December), lifting the funds rate to
3.25%-3.5%. And since Goldman also expects 10Y Treasury yields to peak at 3.5% during 2H 2019
and decline to 3.3% in 2020, this means that it is Goldman's official forecast that "the 2s-10s
portion of the yield curve will invert in 2H next year."
Inversion will likely be problem for the economy, and certainly for financial conditions. As
the latest Fed Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) indicated,
banks said that should the yield curve invert , they would tighten lending standards, as
they would view a moderate yield curve inversion both as signaling a "less favorable or more
uncertain" economic outlook and as likely to reduce the profitability of lending.
"... I am currently reading "The Gulag Archipelago", and there are some very obvious common threads between what happened in the early Soviet days and what we see today: freedom of speech being attacked, publications shut down completely because the editor published material written by people who were out of favor with the party, people put on trial and their past associations ..."
"... Most of these "nothing to see here" commenters are [neo]liberals that approve of and support these social changes. They are just trying to gaslight the rest of us into not noticing what is right in front of our noses. ..."
"... Leaving out personally identifiable information. My current employer has the following groups: Women & Allies, Pan-Asian & Allies, African American & Allies, Hispanic & Allies, and finally LGBT & Allies. Does anyone notice a group who's missing? I'll give you a hint, it's the only other possible category of race/gender/sexual orientation not already listed. These groups are constantly pushed as THE networking opportunity within the company. Managers and executives run the groups and make it clear that if you want to be recognized in the organization you need to put yourself out there through one of these groups. ..."
"... A lot of your commenters laugh at this kind of wacky corporate signaling, while others react with fear for the future. I can only speak for myself and a few other straight white men when I say our reaction is anger. ..."
"... At the end of his presentation they opened the floor to questions, and the very first question was: "Do we have a social justice mission?" From the tone of the commenter, you could tell immediately she thought we should indeed have a "social justice mission." The CEO fumbled through a few sentences about diversity and opportunity, he was clearly caught off guard. ..."
"... Why bother with the hassle? Make your policies as strict as possible so that someone with a petty grudge has no grounds should they decide to sue. ..."
I wanted to bring this to your attention. My husband had a conversation with a young
friend of ours who is a recent college grad. He has been working at [a major retailer] for
the last year. I'm not sure what his title is, but we have encountered him at the store. He
is a great worker and has earned a number of company awards for his performance. He related
to my husband that he had had a conversation with a friend at work about the use or non-use
of transgender pronouns. He took the position that he would not feel comfortable doing
this.
He was later called into his manager's office and reprimanded. The manager told him that
someone had overheard his conversation (manager wouldn't say who), and that he had made this
person feel "unsafe". Our friend was written up for this, transferred to another store a long
distance away, and suffered other severe sanctions! He was a bit naive to have engaged in
this conversation at work, but good grief!
Yes, under communism, the slightest infraction was met with overwhelming punitive force.
People were taught that they had better be afraid at all times, because one mistaken word, said
in front of the wrong person, could mean their lives would change forever.
The reader goes on:
I am currently reading "The Gulag Archipelago", and there are some very obvious common
threads between what happened in the early Soviet days and what we see today: freedom of
speech being attacked, publications shut down completely because the editor published
material written by people who were out of favor with the party, people put on trial and
their past associations (before the revolution) and families of origins being used against
them, defense lawyers being threatened with prison for the very act of defending those whom
the state had deemed its enemies, etc, etc. The major difference that I see is that, in this
age, it is mostly the corporations (along with schools and smaller government entities) who
are acting in the place of the state to force people to toe the line in their thoughts and
speech.
Yes, I'm working on a book proposal now about this very thing. You cannot trust anybody in
these workplaces. Companies are forever wanting to do "team-building," but everything about the
woke workplace compels those with any common sense to consider everyone around them a potential
threat.
The reader went on to talk about her husband's experience in his workplace at a major
international corporation. I can't speak in any detail about that, at her request, but she
talked about how the Human Resources Department conducted a survey of all employees to find out
their viewpoints on LGBT issues and allyship -- which have nothing at all to do with the
company's business. Employees weren't compelled to respond, but if you did not respond, HR took
note. It all goes in your file. I've heard this from other readers too, about their
companies.
The reader said that her husband knows how to work around all this, and will probably be
okay, at least until retirement. It's their children that she worries about:
We talk about these issues. Every time something new a happens, I tell them to ask,
"What's next?", because something is always coming next. Even still, I believe it will take a
miracle for them to resist this relentless indoctrination. I sometimes laugh to myself (not
without sadness) when I see those commenters on your blog who still insist that there is
"nothing to see here", and things aren't as bad as you're making it out to be. I am amazed
that these people continue to say this in the midst of very fast social changes that are
affecting real people every single day in ways that would not have happened even three years
ago. We're heading for very dangerous times.
I'm going to start a new category of blog posts: "The Woke Workplace". Send me your accounts
of political correctness run amok in your office. If you want me to edit any details out for
privacy's sake, say so.
"I sometimes laugh to myself (not without sadness) when I see those commenters on your
blog who still insist that there is "nothing to see here", and things aren't as bad as you're
making it out to be. I am amazed that these people continue to say this in the midst of very
fast social changes that are affecting real people every single day in ways that would not
have happened even three years ago. "
Most of these "nothing to see here" commenters are [neo]liberals that approve of and support
these social changes. They are just trying to gaslight the rest of us into not noticing what
is right in front of our noses.
I sometimes laugh when I see those commenters on your blog who still insist that there is
"nothing to see here"
Look, many of us lived this many decades ago, so don't see anything new.
Many of us have held our tongues our entire careers. There have been taboos about many
subjects that are obviously true, but you just don't say anything. Just like an entrepreneur
keeps his political opinions to himself to not offend is customers, I can keep my mouth shut
to make a buck. I've worked totalitarian companies for decades so none of this crap even
raises my blood pressure.
In fact, I kind of enjoy watching middle-class women freak out when their ox is
finally gored. Why? They've been a large part of the political force that has led to
this situation as women entered the workforce. I'm always careful not to denigrate woman's
sports, or abortion, or gays, or incompetent female bosses. Welcome to jungle, ladies, when
you try to keep trans out of your bathrooms.
I look at the silver lining: there is so much incompetence due to this
homosexual/feminist/political crap it's actually a great opportunity for competent guys (who
live in the real world, natch) to keep the lights on for an expensive price. Good help is now
very hard to find everywhere.
The Left made a brilliant insight when it realized it could implement the dictatorship via
good old all-American institutions like Corporations, Schools, and Churches (all much
respected, at one time, by conservatives and most normal people) instead of the bad old
State. Even today, naïve conservatives think the country will get better if anti-normal
Corporations (which is about all of them now) get reduced regulations and taxes. This has got
to be one of the most brilliant political jiu-jitsus in history.
He is great worker who has earned a number of awards for his performance. Well, why on Earth
didn't he tell his manager that he would not accept the transfer and that the manager must
either rescind the order or lose him as an employee. Moreover, he should make it clear that
he does not feel "safe" in a working environment which seeks to police its employees for
their political and social opinions.
If Christians and other sane workers in America do not push back, and support one another
in doing so, when accosted by workplace stupidity and caviling groupthink they will surely be
subjected to it more and more. Stop telling America this is a battle we have lost. If there
are companies which are committed to the policies of absurdity there are still certainly
others that are not. It won't take more than a few years of such episodes of repression
making headlines for Americans to discern for what companies they will choose to work and
those they will not. Christians will find safe havens enough, and they will find politicians
enough to elect to office who will guarantee them legal protection.
This is an escalation of a trend that has been ongoing for some time. Not that it isn't a
meaningful escalation, but it's also part of a larger and longer trend towards overt
politicization of workspaces.
I am not unused to it. My policy for many years has been to offer no opinions at work on
any topic that could in any way be controversial socially, culturally or politically -- I
just don't participate in those conversations, or, if I can't manage that, I simply nod and
smile and don't really contribute to the conversation. Of course I will share my opinions
about things that aren't touching one of those areas, but inside those areas I just steer
clear and keep my opinions to myself.
The escalation here is in having to affirm things (even if it isn't technically mandatory)
in order to avoid being branded as a dissenter from social orthodoxy. That is a serious
escalation, I agree. It has not happened in my workplace yet. If it were to happen, I would
probably grit my teeth and fill the thing out the way the company would prefer, and that
would be that. Let them think they have more support than they really do.
Leaving out personally identifiable information. My current employer has the following
groups: Women & Allies, Pan-Asian & Allies, African American & Allies, Hispanic
& Allies, and finally LGBT & Allies. Does anyone notice a group who's missing? I'll
give you a hint, it's the only other possible category of race/gender/sexual orientation not
already listed. These groups are constantly pushed as THE networking opportunity within the company.
Managers and executives run the groups and make it clear that if you want to be recognized in
the organization you need to put yourself out there through one of these groups.
As a (TRIGGER WARNING) straight white man, it appears my only option is to attach myself
to one of the above groups as a groveling ally. Maybe if I did that I would be able to signal
to my peers that I am part of their "class".
However I am not part of their class; while most of my coworkers (regardless of race)
spent their childhood taking Japanese language instruction and study abroad trips to France,
I was working in restaurants and in construction so I could pay my rent while I went to a
poor kids university.
A lot of your commenters laugh at this kind of wacky corporate signaling, while others
react with fear for the future. I can only speak for myself and a few other straight white
men when I say our reaction is anger.
I work in a troubled industry (to say the least) and about a year ago there was a
company-wide conference call where the CEO was talking about our strategy going forward, how
we planned to retool and shift gears to navigate the increasing headwinds, etc.
At the end of his presentation they opened the floor to questions, and the very first
question was: "Do we have a social justice mission?" From the tone of the commenter, you could tell immediately she thought we should indeed
have a "social justice mission." The CEO fumbled through a few sentences about diversity and
opportunity, he was clearly caught off guard.
But I thought: Here this industry (media) is struggling to survive, and the very
first priority among younger employees is social justice.
If this industry's primary mission is social justice over "just the facts ma'am," then
this industry is doomed. But I definitely get the idea the younger crowd would just as soon
drive the business into the ground as work for a company that wasn't sufficiently "woke."
"I look at the silver lining: there is so much incompetence due to this
homosexual/feminist/political crap it's actually a great opportunity for competent guys (who
live in the real world, natch) to keep the lights on for an expensive price. Good help is now
very hard to find everywhere."
No, incompetence is rewarded. The woke political opinions count more than anything else in
a nation that's outsourced making things, which is no longer thought important Paper pushing
requires no particular competence at all, and the paper pushers are now ascendant.
No longer can managers tell the difference between a good job and a bad job, except the
bad job is more profitable for them.
I have to say, that if the Russians really were as malevolent as they make them out to be,
God help us.
I've worked in IT for a number of large companies in Ohio, some of whom have their
national headquarters here. They all have progressive policies in terms of hiring and all
that, but the guys who run things in practice are generally conservative white men in their
40s and 50s.
I think this is less a matter of imposed ideology by hardened ideologues than a matter of
wanting to avoid lawsuits by the actual fanatics.
It's the same reason we're forced to endure HR seminars on what is and what is not
appropriate physical contact in a work environment. A pat on the back that lasts for too long
or is placed a half inch too low will result in a lawsuit.
Why bother with the hassle? Make your policies as strict as possible so that someone
with a petty grudge has no grounds should they decide to sue.
And now for a word from Common Sense, though I can already tell from the comments above the
Panicky Horde will reject it and run around screaming "The sky is falling!". But here
goes:
Only about 5% of the population is Gay or Lesbian. a far smaller percent is Trans. I've had
"G" and "L" coworkers, but never a "T" person. I expect this be true of most people here. If
you are working at a small to mid sized employer there will be neither the personnel nor the
budget to allow for any sort of extravagance along these lines (nor for other trendy causes:
businesses exist to make money after all and in our day they are especially stingy about
lavishing funds on mere staff). You will find some of it at larger employers, but even there
the primary mission to make money for the shareholders. Can anyone dispute that? When I was
at Big Wall Street Bank, the Baltimore office, with about 1000 employees, hosted a Women's
Group, a Black Employees' Group, and yep, a GL group (again, no "T" anywhere in evidence
there). Each group held an annual fundraiser for a decidedly non-political Worthy Cause: the
women for breast cancer (they did a spaghetti luncheon for the office), the Black group for
the local animal shelter, and the GL group for a meals on wheel type of charity, with a bake
sale. The latter named of these was a "movable" event: the folks brought the goodies around
the office for purchase on carts. Most of us did buy something: sweets in the afternoon!
There was a Russian guy in our area– he bought nothing. Why not? Maybe he had no cash
on him that day, maybe he had dietary issues, maybe he disapproved of the group and never
mind the innocuous charity the money went to. Whatever: nothing came of that.
One note of caution here: I am speaking about private employment only. I am not making a
comment about circumstances in public employment, including academia as I have no experience
there.
Naked Capitalism with a review of Michael Hudson's new
book, And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze Age
Finance to the Jubilee Year. It digs into the ancient history of debt and forgiveness
which is, for obvious reasons, not taught in the neo-liberal 'west':
Nowhere, Hudson shows, is it more evident that we are blinded by a deracinated, by a
decontextualized understanding of our history than in our ignorance of the career
of Jesus. Hence the title of the book: And Forgive Them Their Debts and the cover
illustration of Jesus flogging the moneylenders -- the creditors who do not forgive debts
-- in the Temple. For centuries English-speakers have recited the Lord's Prayer with the
assumption that they were merely asking for the forgiveness of their trespasses ,
their theological sins : " and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who
trespass against us ." is the translation presented in the Revised Standard Version of the
Bible. What is lost in translation is the fact that Jesus came "to preach the gospel to the
poor to preach the acceptable Year of the Lord": He came, that is, to proclaim a Jubilee
Year, a restoration of deror for debtors: He came to institute a Clean Slate
Amnesty (which is what Hebrew דְּרוֹר
connotes in this context).
---
Back in July I wrote
that there is no Jewish race or Jewish people. There are only followers of the Jewish
religion strewn all over the world. Prof. Shlomo Sand makes a similar point and also debunks
some other religious fairytales:
Our political culture insists on seeing the Jews as the direct descendants of the
ancient Hebrews. But the Jews never existed as a 'people' – still less as a
nation
---
The UAE/Saudi alliance stopped their latest attempt to conquer Hodeidah port in Yemen.
They try to sell that as a humanitarian step. But the attack was failing when their
mercenaries ran into a wall of mines and missile attacks. They took a large number of
casualties. Videos:
1 , 2 .
I am copying my comment from the last open thread about the Hudson interview to below
@ karlof1 with the Michael Hudson book review
A quote from the review of the book
"
This innate tendency to social polarization arising from debt unforgiveness is the original
and incurable curse on our post-eighth-century-B.C. Western Civilization, the lurid birthmark
that cannot be washed away or excised.
"
I will write again that the problem I have with Michael Hudson is that he does everything BUT
question why the existence of private finance still.
Debt unforgiveness is only one symptom of the systemic cancer humanity of the West faces.
That systemic cancer is private finance/God of Mammon mentality. The incentives are all
wrong. Paradise California is the latest example. God Of Mammon greed compelled PG&E to
not maintain their infrastructure properly and they kept the equipment running when they
should have shut it down. PG&E has admitted complicity and also said that they didn't
have enough insurance to cover this tragedy and would go under. Someone representing
California government oversight of power providers have stated basically that PG&E is too
big to fail and they will be backstopped by taxpayers.
So how is debt forgiveness of any sort going to fix the underlying problem? It is not and
unless you have government managing any debt forgiveness instead of private folks, you will
have some form of genocide by the rich.
Until and unless Michael Hudson calls out private finance as the systemic problem Western
society has I will consider him an economic Sheep Dog like Bernie Sanders is a political
one
Thanks to b for the coverage of Syria on the ground.
The US has lost in Ukraine (US + 'allies' - Germany in first place), and lost in Syria ( +
Israel, KSA, Turkey crossed purposes..)
Syria. When Foreign Policy publishes The Syrian War is over and America has lost in
July 2018, it is kinda official...(don't recommend the article) and/or a warning to change
tack or up the game..
The upshot of the defeats. Internal groups, manipulated grass-roots-stuff (paid) -
so-called rebels (paid) / despots, dictators, corporations, on a rapacious bent, looking for
support and pie sharing - 'mafia' types who have their own code of profit-sharing - +
others.. in X country, will be very wary or will not enter into a partnership with the US as
it is not successful.
As the losses can't be acknowledged, the US will create as much hysterical clamor and
obfuscation as possible.
Exs. the Assad must go red-line demand has been seriously degraded now muted. The
emphasis at present seems to be on a 'new constitution' for Syria, i.e. the very lowest form
of law-warfare which will not succeed. As if a bunch of foreignors can draft the thing.. De
Mistura has quit.
The problem is that money is a voucher system and as such, the social contract enabling mass
society to function, yet we assume it to be a commodity to be mined from society. Which goes
to the western view of society as emergent from autonomous individuals, rather than
individuals as expressions of the organic network.
There was a time when government was private as well. It was called monarchy and eventually
the kings had to understand they served a function to society, not just be served by it. We
are at the "Let them eat cake." moment with the financial system. The problems and conceptual
flaws go much deeper than how money functions. If we want to cure the surface social issues,
we will need to get into those issues. If you want to turn off a stove, you don't just put
your hand on it, you turn off what powers it.
To psychohistoriian (#10) Thank you for the analysis of Michael Hudson. I have studied his
work and came to the same
conclusion. He seems to walk around the core issue, which happens a disappointing number of
times. Viz. the now
17 year old "wah on Terra" Core issue: what is the real truth about nine-eleven - and how the
hell does it relate to Iraq?
Core issue: The private server emails of Hillary Clinton and her cabal break numerous laws.
No one has EVER disputed the
veracity of the emails; the pay to play; the subverting of Saunders, etc etc. Instead they
scapegoat Julian Assange.
It's shocking - and I'm amazing that I still have the capacity to be shocked.
Pax.
""As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public
hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true
central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation.
The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by
providing a public option for credit creation""
Michael Hudson is actually a pretty strong proponent of public finance.
He is more in the 'positive money' camp than most MMTers but that mostly reflects his
disgust at the abuses of private credit creation.
@juliana - Please read the review of Hudson's book I linked.
The issue of periodic debt forgiveness has a much longer history in the middle eastern
society and Jesus words can only be understand within that historic context.
The view of Jesus as a Jewish revolutionary is not new at all. Reza Aslan wrote a whole
book about it: Zealot: The Life
and Times of Jesus of Nazareth as did many others. In the end the local aristocracy would
no longer condone that he was firing up the plebs with his commie talk against the money
changer and they told the imperial Roman overlords to off him ... or else.
The Christian religions defused the revolutionary aspect when they changed the target of
his teaching from real life issues towards a more spiritual perspective. The real meaning of
"forgive our debt" was turned from a real money thing into a the forgiveness of sins by some
heavily figure. (The Churches/priests also made billions from selling of indulgences due to
this transferred teaching.)
Thanks for highlighting Michael Hudson's work. Those who wish to understand Hudson
himself can find his autobiography at his web site -- http://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/life-thought-an-autobiography/
You will find that his primary mission in his economic life (though there are several) is
to untangle the mysterious processes by which the oligarchs maintain their power and by
which they continually strip the working class of everything they own.
I have been reading his articles for years, and once had the honor of being asked to
edit a chapter in one of his recent books, which I did.
If from time to time you have the choice of doing anything else in the world or reading
some of Hudson's works, choose Hudson every time. You will be very glad that you did.
//
A few years ago, while I was searching the interwebs for some appropriate children's
videos for the small daughter of some friends of mine, I came across the "Masha and the
Bear" videos.
I have to confess that I was utterly entranced, and ended up watching all that were
available at the time. Utterly charming! The contention that they are Putin propaganda is
possibly the single most absurd assertion that I have ever encountered.
//
Thanks for all this, and all the other work that you do in bringing us probably the
single most enlightening site on the web -- at least as far as international relations and
the outrages of the ruling classes are concerned.
There is a renegade school of thought according to which Jesus did not exist. There are
multiple variations. A common idea is that there were one or more Hellenistic cults in the
region of Judea around or even before the 1st century CE that believed that Christ, son of
God the Father, in something like a cosmic practical joke was sent down in disguise from
the 7th Heaven by God the Father into the lower realms because the demons/angels/lesser
gods running things there/here were screwing up and needed to be put in their place. This
Christ got crucified in disguise, probably in a lesser heaven rather than on Earth, and
then ascended triumphant in full glory. Later the various Christian stories -- were written
and rewritten by various factions, getting their final form to include a Jesus on Earth in
the 2nd to 4th century CE. Some Christian works are presented by this school of thought as
novel-like allegories or even at times parodies. This sort of thinking was presented at
least as early as about 1930 (Couchoud). Mainstream divinity school scholars, even the
atheists, hate it. Prominent proponents include RG Price and Richard Carrier, whose works I
haven't read. I do not know it well. I read about it for entertainment on vridar.org which
may or may not be the best place to go to to read about it.
A related concept is that Judaism may be best seen as a Hellenistic cult as well; that
it may be far more recent than commonly thought (not much older than Christianity); and
that it may not have become distinct from Christianity until several centuries CE. Again, I
just skim this stuff for entertainment and don't know so don't rely on me. (A current post
at vridar.org I haven't read I think is one of many that notes similarities of Old
Testament contents to Plato.)
Different denominations use "debts" vs "trespasses" in the US for the Lord's Prayer. I
believe translators have put a lot of work into which word to use dating back to circa
1600. I do not know whether there was a difference in the original Greek texts. I once read
about it but am not going to look it up now.
Australia totally blew its respect and relationship with south pacific nations under John
Howard. He coerced, blackmailed and then bluntly stole the oil reserves from East Timor in
the years following their liberation. EVERYBODY was watching this hideous theft of natural
resources from the smallest, poorest, and suffering nation on earth. Just like the yankee
carpetbaggers.
Nowadays Australia continues to totally screw up its relations with most Pacific Island
neighboring states. It can't even get the independence referendum underway as Papua New
Guinea just ignores it. China would no doubt be absolutely focussed on that
opportunity.
hey, we have people chopping off dissidents heads in ksa.. i have no problem imaging some
barbaric people from a few thousand years ago nailing someone to a cross... not saying i
know anything for sure, but reality as practiced in ksa is more strange then anything i
would like to have to witness directly... speaking of which - trump doesn't want to listen
to the suffering tape, yet he wants to continue his support for this headchopper cult..
interesting dude trump... or, strange what money will do to a persons brain..
Zionists wanted Trump to win the election ... betraying millions of voters on the Left
to forward the Zionist agenda
Thanks for the link. The Schumer info is important. But the contextualization of
Schumer's craven, complicit behavior is all wrong. To bemoan Schumer, Obama, or Hillary's
betrayal of the left is to accept the ruse that they actually represent the
left.
It should be clear by now that the Democratic Party's primary mission is to protect the
establishment. They drip-feed just enough small changes - like bathroom rights - to keep
their claim to be "left" alive. Just look at tax cuts: Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have
all cut taxes.
Likewise, to say that "Zionists" wanted to elect Trump is confusing and
counterproductive as most people (wrongly) see Zionism as being only about Israel and
associate "Zionism" with Jews (only). It should be clear by now that most of the American
establishment (aka the 'people that matter') is 'Zionist' and that these 'Zionists'
are not only pro-Israel but pro-MIC and pro-oligarchy too.
It was the US establishment that wanted Trump despite pretending to hate him. MAGA is
not a Trump invention but a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. Trump
was selected as the best person to lead that response.
I've been saying for some time now that the 2016 Presidential election was a complete
set-up. Most people reject that 'conspiracy theory' out of hand until they are reminded
that Hillary: ran against two old friends (Sanders and Trump); she snubbed the progressives
by bringing DWS into her campaign and selecting Tim Kaine as her running mate while also
including moderate whites with her "deplorables" comment, -AND- she didn't campaign in the
three crucial states that would decide the election. Meanwhile, new-comer Trump did
everything right: the only Republican to run as a populist, the only republican to champion
veterans, etc.
Up around #34 in discussing the "mythicist" school of thought about Jesus (ie, did not
exist--Christianity based on myth even deliberate fiction-writing later reworked back and
forth by various factions into its current form) I neglected the name of a 3d major author
whose works I have not read interested people might go to: Earl Doherty. I do not know this
stuff other than as a curious passerby, but it does seem erudite and well-argued to my
naive mind.
That Jesus was a rebel in conflict with authority is obvious to any child who can read.
Flipping the tables of merchants in church is pretty hard to misinterpret right?! It
blows my mind they weren't more creative with some of the rewrites, the 'bad guys' of the
story are priests...
Correct. But just for those who still don't get it, you should add that even though
Trump campaigned as a populist; he's really a faux populist who in fact cares squat about
Veterans; he prefers not to get his hair wet than honor them. What he likes to do is
pretend that because he invested close to a billion U.S. funds in the MIC, that constitutes
honoring Veterans when we all know what is driving that investment, bases, proxy civil wars
and invasions on behalf of regime change, especially in Iran, for now, and the Empire's
expansion.
Jesus was the Jewish Martin Luther. That goes to the underlaying dynamic of renewal. Which
was the original source of the Trinity, the Greek Year Gods. Father, Son, Holy Ghost =
Past, Present, Future.
Read Gilbert Murray's; The Five Stages of Greek Religion: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30250/30250-h/30250-h.htm
James,
We live in interesting times. The powers that be are throwing everything on the fire to
keep the status quo going. So when it does totally blow up, the system will be that much
more vulnerable. Then the question will be, what changes are possible?
The most profound would be understanding time is not a real dimension, from past to future,
but change turning future to past. More like temperature, pressure, color, etc, than space.
This dissolves the idea of history as singular and that everyone has to conform to the
dominant narrative.
The Eastern view of time is the past is in front of the observer and the future behind, as
what is in front and past are known and the future and what is behind are unknown. Which
conforms to the Eastern philosophy of the individual as part of its context, given we do
see events after they occur. The Western view is of the future in front and past behind,
because we see ourselves as autonomously moving through our context. Both are effectively
true, as we are moving in and part of our context.
Which then gets to the idea of God, as "all-knowing absolute," in the words of Pope John
Paul 2. A spiritual absolute(source of consciousness), would be an essence of sentience,
from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom, from which we fell. Analogous to the raw
awareness of the new born, rather than the wisdom of the old man. The religious deity is a
political construct; The father figure ruler. Yet in the wrong hands, it becomes treating
one's cultural assumptions as absolute and that results in extremism. Which the various
monotheisms seem quite adept at.
If those two dominos could be tipped over, than resetting money as a social contract,
rather than a commodity, would be almost be easy. We would own money like we own the
section of road we are driving on. Neither entirely public or private, as our notion of
public and private has been networked into a larger dynamic. Two sides of a larger coin.
Node and network.
So that is how I see the coming explosion; Both destruction of the old, but opening up the
possible.
The Outlaw US Empire's inability to coerce other nations to adopt its lie-filled draft
declaration for the APEC-CEO Conference caused it to accuse China of being the stuck-up
nation; so, unlike the ASEAN and Asia-Summit Conferences which didn't include the Outlaw
Empire and had no difficulty reaching consensus on their Declarations, no APEC Declaration
was agreed upon for publication. We do have an idea of what was discussed thanks to
Medvedev's attendance. Here's
his speech with his primary pitch excerpted so readers will understand what the Outlaw
US Empire opposes:
"First of all, the global economy needs clear and transparent rules of trade. Therefore,
a key goal is to combine efforts to improve the effectiveness of the World Trade
Organisation and its regulatory role.
"Like many countries, we recognise that the organisation needs to be modernised, but
without weakening its influence or undermining the fundamental principles of its work, let
alone its dismantling, which would mean a collapse of civilised trade.
"The institutional foundations of international trade formed by the WTO also need to be
preserved to condition further deepening of regional economic integration. Russia strongly
believes that transparent WTO rules incorporating the specifics of each Asia-Pacific, each
APEC economy, are essential for creating an Asia-Pacific free trade zone, making it a truly
open market, rather than a narrow-format system of collective protectionism.
"I would suggest the Eurasian Economic Union as an example of such an integration
platform, an alliance which Russia and its partners are developing in strict accordance
with the WTO principles. It is one of the largest regional associations in terms of market
capacity and a single market with uniform rules for doing business.
"We are cooperating with other integration projects and are now working on aligning it
with the well-known Chinese Belt and Road initiative. We are working in close contact as
part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. We also have strong ties with ASEAN.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin has launched an initiative to create the Greater
Eurasian Partnership, based on openness and mutual trust between states, and uniform rules
of the game.
"Asia-Pacific countries joining this format would help harmonise the multi-level
integration architecture that is being formed on the continent. We invite our colleagues
and stakeholders to collectively develop the landscape for such work.
"We believe that a similar principle could underlie the Asia-Pacific free trade zone
concept. This would promote truly comprehensive and indivisible economic growth in Eurasia
and the Asia-Pacific region."
Much more follows, and it's easy to see why the Empire's on the defensive as it's now
exposed as the Reactionary Power it's always been while hiding its true nature behind
self-laudatory rhetoric and propaganda.
About the only thing to admire about Trump is his ability to stand naked before the
world without a hint of embarrassment. The future lies in Eurasia and Asia-Pacific as does
the rediscovery of the past and its actual history, not the contrived, distorted narrative
fed to most everyone over the past 2K+ years to service the power of the money-lenders--The
Living-Breathing Satans.
Masha the Bear -- Putin propaganda, LOL. The lunatics propagating this pathetic drivel have
probably raised their children, and were probably raised themselves on pure, innocent and
surely non-propagandistic cartoons from Walt Disney!
From the wiki article on Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's How to Read Donald
Duck :
According to [Sophia A.] McClennen, the Disney comics are insidious, masquerading
themselves as innocent and light-hearted entertainment. How to Read Donald Duck
set out to reveal the ideological message of the comics, their support of capitalism and
imperialism.[9] The writers questioned why there are no parents in Disney comics, only
uncles and cousins. This means the concept of the family is destroyed within their
context. There is no potential dialectic between a father and his son, a mother and her
daughter.[9] The children of the stories never grow up to become parents in their own
right. Consequently, social authority is depicted as ever-lasting and never
challenged.[9] There is both a lack of parents and absence of any hint of sexual
reproduction within the stories. This is connected to another element missing from them,
the depiction of material production. All characters apparently work in the service
sector of the economy. There is no real workforce.[9] Characters who gain wealth, have
only managed to do so through treasure hunting and looting.[9] The only depictions of an
exchange of commodities, involve crafty imperialists who take advantage of ignorant
savages. When Donald and his family travel to foreign lands, they fool the locals into
trading precious resources for useless items.[9] There is a depiction of both wealthy and
poor nations. But the poverty of the latter is attributed to the ignorance of the
barbarians who inhabit them.[9] There is no labor, and no real leisure either. Donald
Duck is frequently depicted as bored with his life and dreaming of his next adventure.
His adventures invariably depict him using deception against other characters. Donald's
antics are depicted as innocent fun.[9]
sir charles drake talked here about schlomo sand and the inventions
talked of douglas reeds problem with zion
talked of the book the 13th tribe by ashkanazi author talked of eutace mullins.
it is nice too know that even after all the deletions and forum memory holing
history will absolve this great man.
he may be a bot program but he is a lover of the children of jesus the semites of gaza and
west bank.
charles believes ask a nazi should go home and rebuild khazaria in mongolia deserta
I wonder how much meat there be on them thar bones. I am inclined to assume F all.
Both the UK and Germany have the nasty habit of infiltrating organisations that show
any modicum of abillity to put words into action that may affect the supremacy
of the state. Same goes for the other NATO members.
So these efforts are either permitted to proceed until they are not,
or cancelled continuation of new/renewed Gladio cells.
Strategy Of Tension part infinity.
James @ 17: One way in which finance becomes public is for the banking system (or whatever
replaces it) to become public. Instead of privately owned banks lending to individuals,
families or small businesses, community-owned banks or banks controlled by local councils,
trade unions, student unions or grassroots organisations would lend money. These banks
would draw their funds from savings and day-to-day business accounts operated by the same
groups of people they lend to. They could also be funded by national governments.
You ask if all land is public, then who controls it? Answer must be that some kind of
government (national, regional, local) must control it on behalf of the people who support
that government. One presumes young couples (newly married perhaps or with documents to
support their having been together for a defined period) get first preference in applying
for (let's say) a 50-year lease on a dwelling which can be renewed once, maybe twice. If
the couple divorces or one of them dies, the lease would return to the government. Perhaps
the divorcee or the widowed survivor must show evidence that the lease should be
renewed.
Similarly all businesses must lease land from the government and be able to renew the
lease once, maybe twice.
Major infrastructure projects would only take place if governments controlling the land
where these projects take place agree to cooperate or transfer / sell the land to the
national government. The national government "pays" for the land by offering jobs in the
project to the people living or working in the areas of the projects.
Problem with Hudsons book is it cost 30 bucks (not including international shipping) for
336 pages of paperback and is already out of stock and NOT available on kindle. Not going
to be widely read I don't think unless something changes.
Anyways, Christianity was a split in Judaism designed by elites and executed by their
agents. Christians were then allowed to be fair game for the money lenders who could charge
interest and not forgive them their debts (unlike with fellow Jews). Christians forbid
charging usury to all. However, they also did not forgive debts to appease the ruling class
that allowed them to exist. An uneasy truce in the early years before Christianity was
formally adopted by Rome. This required a rewrite of the bible, which was easy to do before
the printing press as few copies were in circulation and most of the flock illiterate.
After Rome fell the non church elite (nobles and such) used Jews to collect taxes and when
in need of a loan borrowed money at interest from them. To pay the interest they had to
raise taxes. Another reason for their unpopularity.
The church (thanks to a rogue Pope) eventually succumbed to borrowing at interest, although
somewhat constrained, but the indulgences sold to pay the interest led to the Reformation
which was backed by the money lenders. This split the church and opened the flood gates for
heavenly usury and debt, and spilled much blood in wars that required debt to be fought .
This also enriched the money lenders ( Christians and Jews) who loaned to both sides of the
wars, and led them to eventually seize control of money creation, and thus control over
government.
Free of the church leaders who enforced "Gods" law , which could not be amended by men
outside the church (Reformation gave states control of the religion and allowed
reinterpretation), man was liberated and free to create his own laws. That made it possible
to legally break Gods laws (as Hitler and Stalin both said, everything they did was legal
under their laws) . Thus slavery, war, drugs, usury and debt were free to expand (we know
it as Free Trade).
Re: The Christian religions defused the revolutionary aspect when they changed the
target of his teaching from real life issues towards a more spiritual perspective.
_____________________________________________
I know someone in the religious life, a theologian who generally shares my high regard
for Hudson, and also shares my penchant for "alternative" news and analysis. I am well
aware that, despite his leftist politics, my friend is actually a conservative,
traditional-minded Roman Catholic.
Anyway, my friend was horrified some months ago, when we discussed a short video we'd
both seen of Hudson outlining the topic of this book. My friend was more sorrowful than
angry, but emphatically deplored Hudson's perspective as a tragic case of a worthy scholar
making a fool of himself by-- well, pontificating-- outside of his area of expertise.
My friend knows that I am always attracted to contrarian research and iconoclastic
theories that challenge settled narratives. When I protested that Hudson's interpretation
of the Lord's Prayer had the ring of truth, he strenuously demurred.
He could understand why a "non-believer", especially a cynic like me, would be intrigued
by the idea that the Fathers of the institutional church "tweaked" Jesus's words and
meanings to suit their theological purposes. But he insisted that of course Jesus
was speaking metaphorically about spiritual matters, and wasn't trying to be a secular
economics "revolutionary".
I'm not sure how generally well-known Hudson is, but I wonder if he'll be subjected to
vicious criticism and even harassment for daring to even suggest that Jesus might've
been, at least in part, preaching a gospel of economic or financial salvation. I
presume that devout Christian critics-- especially clergy and theologians-- will, you
should pardon the expression, crucify him.
karlof1,
Yet would that integration of the Eurasian continent have happened, without the threat and
pressure of the Empire?
The Empire has peaked and the integration of the Old World will continue, for survival, so
the question will be the future of the Americas. That is the real blank slate.
Jen,
Government is the central nervous system of the community. It is the Chief and the council
of elders, mutated to the king and lords, to presidents and legislatures. Finance, on the
other hand, is the circulation system of the economy. Banks and money are the arteries and
blood. Yet we have become parasites and mine value out of this medium, with those most
obsessive in the practice able to create feedback loops and take more and more. It would be
as if the head and heart told the hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should
work harder for what they do get.
Necessarily though, the nervous system and the circulation system are distinct and serve
different functions, even though they both serve the entire body. Politicians succeed by
how much hope they give the community and we experience money as quantified hope, so there
is a natural tendency to inflate the money supply, when other promises cannot be fulfilled.
The dawn of modern capitalism was when the Rothschild's took over control of the royal
treasury, from Charles 1 and created the Bank of England. For better or worse, it worked
magnificently. Now bankers are just running their own ponzi scheme and have no vision
beyond it.
The two poles of social control are hope and fear. Money is quantified hope and when the
system fails, the pendulum will swing to fear and the police and military will be in
control. Likely quite a few bankers will be used as pinatas, to appease the masses. How do
we really get beyond that, is the real question.
And, how many people who read the Lord's Prayer understand the historical meaning of
trespass?
I sure didn't! And nobody has ever made a point of drawing my attention to the issue.
Just made a search for the "official" Lord's Prayer at the Vatican site and found this:
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on
earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
To me it's an odd coincidence Michael Hudson is talking about the "Prayer" at the same
time the current Pope is speaking of plans to modify one of the lines. NOT the one about
"trespass", but rather the one speaking of "temptation".
If I was a betting man, I'd wager the Vatical won't be messing with the "tresspass"
language. Vague and misleading for ages, and just the way that one ought stay.
John Merryman @ 54: Thanks for your biological analogy. May I suggest though that the
analogy may not be entirely apt and one problem with it is that it would too easy for
people to think of society entirely in biological terms such as you describe, with the
result that to think of society as something other than in biological metaphors becomes a
barrier to thinking of creative solutions in dealing with particular problems?
Your metaphor seems to take for granted that government is centralised and the finance
industry is also centralised (whether in parallel centralised networks or joined
together).
I would suggest that we need to have decentralised systems of finance, each centred on
particular communities perhaps, with their own currencies and institutions, all linked in a
network. Rather like the Internet, I suppose. Yes, redundancy will be built into the
network but is that necessarily a bad thing?
Likewise we would have decentralised politics and governments, with the flatter
hierarchies and greater public participation in political decision-making that such
decentralisation might suggest.
The banking system in England was never magnificent for industrialists and mid/small
businesses which were starved of cash and generally looked down upon by bankers who got
much better returns from overseas investment. Part of the success of Germany and Japan post
WWII was due to a recognition of the importance of engineers to economic success and the
ease with which companies could obtain loans from commercial, not investment banks. A ten
or twenty year loan by a local commercial bank ties the firm's fortunes into the bank's own
interests. Capital in these countries thus thinks or thought more in the mid-to-long
term.
The key for me is the joint stock or public company which is totally at the mercy of
investment bankers. Private firms not listed on the stock market like IKEA or Mars or even
Trump's own business are not under the slightest obligation to the stock market. According
to Time magazine 84% of the stocks in the US are owned by the top 10% of the population, so
the stock exchange exists to make rich people richer and subject public (which are most of
the largest) companies to continual blackmail to produce outsize profits at the expense of
the workforce or else executives can find themselves having to land, albeit with their
golden parachutes, on the street.
Hilariously, the repeated attempts to bludgeon their readers into accepting the
government line is couched as a reprimand to some UK fact-seekers (who were actually
prepared to travel to find facts) for being stooges for Syrian propaganda!
i see some other responses to john and jens posts have happened since i wrote this!
@46 john merryman.. thanks for articulating a fascinating view on time and history in an
innovative way that i hadn't seen before! you're right that we can't see the future, so in
a sense it is behind us out of view... the past is staring us in the face, but could be
interpreted countless ways, and could have spun a number of different ways too, depending
on many factors, some of which we can know of, and others that we can't.. regardless - we
will have to wait and see, as i am prone to saying.. i really enjoy the way you articulate
your ideas..
@ 51 jen.. thanks for your response! i see i made a small typo in my post - 'but'
instead of 'not'... i think it is possible - public finance, and i know examples abound as
you show.. who would control the release of it is where i get anxious.. perhaps it is my
own paranoia... it seems if one knows someone on the inside, they have a better chance..
our dream of an egalitarian system where fairness rules, is subject to human nature with
all it's foibles.. granted, public finance, as opposed to private is worth going for, as
the system we have at present is clearly broken for 99% of the world today..
here where i live in b.c. - what land the gov't didn't hand over to corporations, they
let them use in such a way that doesn't spread the wealth to the locals... and the locals
aren't given the same opportunities to use the land either.. so, public land use is in the
hands of the gov't... i suppose in theory, the idea is good, but as it presently stands -
the corporations have the favour of gov'ts.. perhaps this also goes into the private,
verses public finance issue.. if the gov't wasn't beholden to private finance - it might
change all this..
finally - caitlin johnstones
latest on assange and usa "resistance"..
@43 john.. regarding your comments to jen- again, i am drawn to your perspective and agree
with the importance of the question you end with.. i personally don't know..
@57 jen.. i agree that decentralization is necessary.. anything that is big, is usually
out of touch with local needs - federal, verses local is how this works..
it would appear we have to wait for everything to collapse.. have we evolved beyond the
darwinian concept of the survival of the strongest to where we are interested in sharing
with others in some type of egalitarian way? would be nice... presently the financial world
is stacked in the usa's favour, but this appears to be changing... it seems conflicts with
power - who has it and who wants more of it - are a fertile ground for war.. that seems to
be where we are at present with the usa threatening china and russia more regularly
today... how much of that is power wanting to retain it's position? it seems like a lot to
me.. public finance would be very different and is worth pursuing, but it will have to be
pursued by gov'ts and leaders that are not beholden to corporations.. we have a ways to
go..
There are lots of comments to respond to so let me just expand on my public finance
concept.
I am advocating for totally public finance and no private banking.
I am also advocating, as others have commented, for a limit on the "ownership" of private
property. I like the 50 year lease proposed earlier and have read that China has 99 year
leases.
I also would advocate for limits on inheritance to inhibit future concentration of
"wealth".
And, yes, I am advocating for government to manage debt reconciliation and not the God
of Mammon owners.
It is time for humanity to grow up beyond the feudal insanity that has lived way beyond
its cultural imperative. The myth we are living is that these global historical elite are
moving the levers of power behind the curtain of Capitalism to provide most with war and
slavery. I am saying very clearly that I prefer the socialism with a Chinese face approach
over the Western private finance motivated one.
China has created and executed 13 5-year plans. Somewhere within the bowels of that huge
government is a group of people charged with managing China's finances. Given what I have
seen of the way China is handling corruption I can only expect that the folks making macro
economic/finance decisions put the pluralist goals of the country ahead of any oligarch
bribes or pressure. In the Western world, global finance is a profit center for the elite
and the rest of us be dammed.
Back to more components of a new social contract
New evolving definition of responsibility to and benefits from government (mandatory
voting and regular participation in government operation/management, free
education/balanced with social payback, ongoing evolution of mix of sharing/competition in
provision of goods and services as well as regulation to insure safety and advertised
value).
And it was deliberately destroyed by Hillary Clinton. In fact, she wanted so desperately
to make sure that she got full credit for the complete destruction of Libya (she thought it
would help her win her presidential campaign) and the slaughter of 40,000 Libyans, that she
kept riding her staff for assurances and evidences that could be put in front of the world
that, yes indeed, it had been all her doing.
If we are pointing out the mendacity of englander fishwraps, the Grauniad which has once
again albeit in a new way covered itself in the slimy patina of hypocrisy by enjoining it's
shrinking readership to 'get behind' May's abortion of a brexit strategy wins the prize of
scummiest journalism of the decade.
A bit like the obese and useless cat my neighbor claims to 'own' now he has vivisected
it to his taste, May's brexit is neither Arthur nor Martha.
May's plan gets england outta the EU but leaves it shackled to that organisation forced to
obey the rules but without the right to advocate or take part in changes as only members of
the EU can do that.
If May doesn't get her mess through parliament she will lose her gig and a
general election will inevitably follow, one which despite what the dodgy polls claim the
Tories will inevitably lose, meaning Mr Corbyn will be PM. That is a fate worse than death
for zionists, mega capitalists and the theiving banks, consequently the graun's editors are
in panic mode as they
praise their former nemesis and repeat her lies about "Getting back control of our
borders". Playing the race card straight off the top of the deck.
""As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public
hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true
central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation.
The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by
providing a public option for credit creation""
Michael Hudson is actually a pretty strong proponent of public finance.
He is more in the 'positive money' camp than most MMTers but that mostly reflects his
disgust at the abuses of private credit creation.
Ah, yes. Goldman Sachs is
famous for their "good work and integrity".
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has said about $4.5 billion was misappropriated from 1MDB,
including some money that Goldman Sachs helped raise, by high-level officials of the fund and
their associates from 2009 through 2014.
US prosecutors filed criminal charges against 2 former Goldman Sachs bankers earlier this
month. One of them, Tim Leissner, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money and
conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
I'm sure it was just a "few bad apples", like Goldman Sachs's Ex-CEO
Lloyd Blankfein , who was personally involved in the transaction.
You might remember Lloyd from his doing "God's
Work" .
According to Save the Children, upwards of 50,000 children died from hunger
and disease in 2017 alone, while the UN estimates that at least 16,000 civilians have been
killed or maimed by the Saudi air attacks.
So we called a spade a spade on the matter, only to have our Fox host retort as follows:
" ..not making a judgment on the moral right or wrong of the matter but if we crack down
hard with sanctions and such, are you telling us you don't think there is a financial market
impact?"
Of course that wasn't what we were saying. But what we were thinking was: Really?
Apparently this Foxified stock market cult-boy assumes even America's foreign policy should
be driven by the divine right of the casino to be pleasured by rising stock prices each and
every day.
Then again, it looks like Fox's greatest Fan-boy is slouching in the same direction and for
the same reason. That is, to keep what he has now embraced as the Trump Bubble levitated come
hell or high water.
As the Middle East Eye noted this morning, it would appear that Jared Kushner and/or
the Donald have seized upon a solution. Namely, that the hotheaded 33-year old MBS, who has
created the greatest murder spectacle since O.J. Simpson's wild ride in the Bronco, could
benefit from the steadying hand of, well, his 28-year old brother, Khalid bin Salman!
"In DC the talk is about Khalid becoming a deputy crown prince to show the world
that MBS is basically opening up his autocratic and self-centered leadership to include others
and create more accountability.
We don't know whether this prospective Salman Brothers duo can make the Istanbul Bonesaw
Massacre go away or not, or keep the stock market rising on its appointed ascent. But we can at
least hope the MBS contretemps will stir a modicum of thought in the Imperial City about the
larger issue involved.
Namely, that the biggest state sponsor of terror in the Middle East is Saudi Barbaria, not
the Iranians. And that the house of Saud's corrupt bargain with its own medieval Wahhabi
clerics is the true source of jihadi terrorism in the region, not the Shiite/Alawite
communities of Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The truth of the matter is that it was the Iran-led Shiite coalition – with the help
of the Russian Air Force – which essentially extinguished the barbaric Islamic State in
Syria and Iraq.
So not only has Washington long been on the wrong side of the Shiite/Sunni divide, but owing
to the Donald and Jared's bromance with MBS, the Trump administration has taken the US right
off the deep-end with its vicious attack on the Iran nuke deal and the ruling regime in
Tehran.
And that's the real evil being perpetrated by MBS. His infantile yet bloodthirsty vendetta
against Iran is the driving force behind much that roils the middle east at present.
Thus, MBS' political and economic attack on Qatar was motivated not only by the Muslim
Brotherhood friendly policies of its ruler, but more especially by Qatar's friendly relations
and diplomatic recognition of Iran, with which it shares the largest natural gas field in the
world.
Likewise, he recently kidnapped, roughly interrogated and humiliated Prime Minister Hariri
of Lebanon for being too soft on Hezbollah. Never mind that the latter controls the largest
bloc in Lebanon's parliament and is a participant in the nation's constitutionally prescribe
three-way split of power – wherein the Shiite elect the Speaker of the Parliament, the
Sunnis name the Prime Minister and the Chrisitians select the country's President.
But none of this mattered because MBS is determined to confront Tehran and its allies from
one end of the Mideast to the other. And that's the real reason for his genocidal attack on
Yemen.
The latter is among the poorest, most industrially backward redoubts in the entire world and
doesn't remotely have the capacity to threaten Riyadh. Its GDP of just $18
billion or a paltry $650 per capita is less than 3% of Saudi's stupendous
oil-fueled GDP, which funds the fourth largest military budget in the world.
And now Yemen's polity has been completely shattered, too, by civil war and the relentless
Saudi bombing campaigns.
The west and north are controlled by the Houthi government, which sized power during 2015 in
the country's capital city of Sana'a. So doing, they inherited a large cache of American
weapons left behind by the fleeing official government.
At the same time, the south and east are fragmented between former President's Hadi's Saudi
puppet government and regions controlled by al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and various tribal
potentates and small time warlords – some or all of whom are warring with each other as
well as with the Houthi.
In a sane world it would be instantly obvious that America has no dog in this fratricidal
bloodletting in one of the true armpits of the planet. But the Houthis, who have long dominated
their region of the country, practice a form of Shiite Islam. In turn, that makes them a
confessional ally of Iran and therefore a convenient target for MBS' proxy war on Tehran.
That's the sum and substance of the Yemen catastrophe: It's a genocide launched three years
ago by the then 30-year old Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia and son of its dementia-enfeebled
king for no other purpose than to kick the Iranians in the shins.
But one thing has led to another – including the aforementioned bromance of the Donald
and his son-in-law with a reckless power-hungry young tyrant who has gotten the White House to
fall hook, line and sinker for his anti-Iranian agenda. And that didn't take much doing –
since Bibi Netanyahu had already polluted their thin grasp of the region with his own
demonization of Tehran.
The irony is palpable. The boys and girls on Wall Street may get by accident that which they
desperately do not want: Namely, a material oil outage in the Persian Gulf and a temporary
surge in oil prices back to $150 per barrel.
That eventuality would make no matter in the longer run because world supply and demand
would adjust, and high-cost deep water oil and shale production would get an added incentive,
as would conservation and all the various flavors of alternative energy.
But a Persian Gulf oil interruption would instantly shatter an egregious stock market bubble
that is being held aloft on fumes and awaits only for a windshield on which to splatter.
At the end of the day, however, that may well be the silver lining.
The Donald's demented sanctions campaign to reduce Iran's oil exports to zero after November
had already threatened to upset the applecart in the global oil market; and, apparently, it had
also given the reckless Crown Prince the impression that he could operate with impunity, and
that no act of thuggery was to brazen to be eschewed.
But now the Khashoggi imbroglio threatens to get totally out of hand. Mohammed bin Salman's
recklessness in Istanbul may yet send the house of Saud into an existential crisis –
especially if the Donald's stubby little hands are forced to severely punish the Saudi's owing
to the overwhelming sentiment of the world community.
That is to say, along with the collapse of the stock market we could also see the collapse
of the monarchy, and the seizure or sabotage of its Persian Gulf oil fields. After all, they
happen to lie in the eastern region of the country which is heavily populated by Shiites, who
have been brutally prosecuted by MBS.
Needless to say, you will be worse for the wear if you hang around the casino in the face of
this potential double collapse.
But the world will be far better off on both counts.
Ah, yes. Goldman Sachs is
famous for their "good work and integrity".
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has said about $4.5 billion was misappropriated from 1MDB,
including some money that Goldman Sachs helped raise, by high-level officials of the fund and
their associates from 2009 through 2014.
US prosecutors filed criminal charges against 2 former Goldman Sachs bankers earlier this
month. One of them, Tim Leissner, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money and
conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
I'm sure it was just a "few bad apples", like Goldman Sachs's Ex-CEO
Lloyd Blankfein , who was personally involved in the transaction.
You might remember Lloyd from his doing "God's
Work" .
A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton to respond to further questions, under oath,
about her private email server.
Following a lengthy Wednesday court hearing, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan (who is also presiding
over fmr. National Security adviser Michael Flynn's case), ruled that Clinton has 30 days to
answer two additional questions about her controversial email system in response to a lawsuit
from Judicial Watch .
Hillary must answer the following questions by December 17 (via
Judicial Watch )
Describe the creation of the clintonemail.com system, including who decided to create the
system , the date it was decided to create the system, why it was created, who set it up, and
when it became operational .
During your October 22, 2015 appearance before the U.S. House of Representatives Select
Committee on Benghazi, you testified that 90 to 95 percent of your emails "were in the
State's system" and "if they wanted to see them, they would certainly have been able to do
so." Identify the basis for this statement, including all facts on which you relied in
support of the statement, how and when you became aware of these facts, and, if you were made
aware of these facts by or through another person, identify the person who made you aware of
these facts.
Sillivan rejected Clinton's assertion of attorney-client privilege on the question over
emails "in the State's system," however he did give Clinton a few victories:
The court refused Judicial
Watch's and media's requests to unseal the deposition videos of Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills
and other Clinton State Department officials . And it upheld Clinton's objections to
answering a question about why she refused to stop using her Blackberry despite warnings from
State Department security personnel . Justice Department lawyers for the State Department
defended Clinton's refusal to answer certain questions and argued for the continued secrecy
of the deposition videos. -
Judicial Watch
Wednesday's decision is the latest twist in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA)
lawsuit targeting former Clinton deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin. The case seeks records
which authorized Abedin to conduct outside employment while also employed by the Department of
State.
"A federal court ordered Hillary Clinton to answer more questions about her illicit email
system – which is good news," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "It is shameful
that Judicial Watch attorneys must continue to battle the State and Justice Departments, which
still defend Hillary Clinton, for basic answers to our questions about Clinton's email
misconduct."
Allow me to predict Hillary's answers: I really can't recall. Somebody else was in charge
of creating it. I don't recall who that was but I was left out of the loop when it was
created. I don't know anything about computers. Somebody who had knowledge did that. I don't
know who authorized it, I assume it went through standard channels.
As a reminder, all the data to date suggests that Hillary broke the following 11 US CODES.
I provided the links for your convenience. HRC needs to immediacy be Arrested &
Indicted.
CEO aka "President" TRUMP was indeed correct when he said: "FBI Director Comey was the
best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad
deeds!"
18 U.S. Code § 1905 - Disclosure of confidential information generally
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to
their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty
of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined
under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office
under the United States.
The Preponderance of Evidence suggests that she broke these Laws, Knowingly, Willfully and
Repeatedly. This pattern indicates a habitual/career Criminal, who belongs in Federal
Prison.
If Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopath Hillary Clinton would have been
elected. Many if not all of the High Crimes, Crimes & sexual perversion's we see coming
to Light never would have been known off.
The Tyrannical Lawlessness we see before our eyes never would have seen the light of
day.
This critique is pretty superficial. The truth is that Ukraine drifted to Baltic model (not without help from Western Europe
and the USA) for a long time. And the process started in 2001 not in 2014. That means that February 2014 coup d'état by far right
nationalist forces was just quantity turned into quality. With the dissolution of the USSR, it is clear that the result of WWII
and Yalta conference will be revised.
While it is true that it was the greatest geopolitical victory of Barack Obama and the USA against Russia, it made
the world more dangerous. The fact that it saws the teeth of dragon escaped those great US neocon strategists, like
Victoria Nuland. She looks pretty medictre person to me, judging from her public appearances. Far below the level of
position she occupied. Out of depth. Kind of early variation of Nikki Haley theme.
The USA established itself as a world power at the end of WWI, and the No.1 nation after WWII. So apparance of the USA on
world scene happened a century ago and the period of the USA primacy started around 1945 or 72 year ago. But after
dissolution of the USSR the US elite lost the countervailing power that kept it in check (and Sober) and now neocons which came to
power after the crash fo the USSR are destroying the USA pretty fast. They are real national cancer. So sad...
Neocons policy of fighting and challenging the rest of the world essentially guarantee that its dominant position will not last
more one century.
In
March 23rd, Gallup headlined
"South Sudan, Haiti and Ukraine Lead World in Suffering" , and the Ukrainian part of that
can unquestionably be laid at the feet of U.S. President Barack Obama, who in February 2014
imposed upon Ukraine a very bloody coup (see above), which he and his press misrepresented (and
still misrepresent) as being (and still represent as having been) a 'democratic revolution',
but was nothing of the sort, and actually was instead the start of the Ukrainian dictatorship
and the hell that has since destroyed that country, and brought the people there into such
misery, it's now by far the worst in Europe, and nearly tied with the worst in the entire
world.
America's criminal 'news' media never even reported the coup, nor that in 2011 the Obama
regime began planning
for a coup in Ukraine . And that by 1 March 2013 they started organizing it inside
the U.S. Embassy there . And that they hired members of Ukraine's two racist-fascist, or
nazi, political parties, Right Sector and Svoboda (which latter had been called the Social
Nationalist Party of Ukraine until the CIA advised them to change it to Freedom Party, or
"Svoboda" instead). And that in February 2014 they did it (and here's the 4 February 2014 phone call instructing
the U.S. Ambassador whom to place in charge of the new regime when the coup will be completed),
under the cover of authentic anti-corruption demonstrations that the Embassy organized on the
Maidan Square in Kiev, demonstrations that the criminal U.S. 'news' media misrepresented as
'democracy demonstrations,' though Ukraine already had democracy (but still lots of corruption,
even more than today's U.S. does, and the pontificating Obama said he was trying to end
Ukraine's corruption -- which instead actually soared after his coup there).
The head of the 'private CIA' firm Stratfor said it was
"the most blatant coup in history" but he couldn't say that to Americans, because he knows
that our press is just a mouthpiece for the regime (just like it was during the lead-up to
George W. Bush's equally unprovoked invasion of
Iraq -- for which America's 'news' media suffered likewise no penalties).
When subsequently accused by neocons for his having said this, his response was "I told the
business journal Kommersant that if the US were behind a coup in Kiev, it would have been the
most blatant coup in history," but he was lying to say this, because, as I
pointed out when writing about that rejoinder of his, he had, in fact, made quite clear in
his Kommersant interview, that it was, in his view "the most blatant coup in history," no
conditionals on that.
Everybody knows what Obama, and Clinton , and Sarkozy, did to Libya -- in
their zeal to eliminate yet another nation's leader who was friendly toward Russia (Muammar
Gaddafi), they turned one of the highest-living-standard nations in Africa into a failed state
and huge source of refugees (as well as of weapons that the
Clinton State Department transferred to the jihadists in Syria to bring down Bashar
al-Assad, another ally of Russia) -- but the 'news' media have continued to hide what Obama
(assisted by America's European allies, especially Poland and Netherlands, and also by
America's apartheid Middle Eastern ally, Israel) did to Ukraine.
I voted for Obama, partly because the insane McCain ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran") and the creepy
Romney ("Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe") were denounced by
the (duplicitous) Obama for saying such evil things, their aggressive international positions,
which continued old Cold-War-era hostilities into the present, even after the Cold War had
ended long ago (in 1991) (
but only on the Russian side ). I since have learned that in today's American political
system, the same aristocracy controls both of our rotten political Parties, and American
democracy no longer exists. (And the
only scientific study of whether America between the years 1981 and 2002 was democratic
found that it was not, and it already confirmed what Jimmy
Carter later said on 28 July 2015 :
Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting
the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to
governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members."
But yet our Presidents continue the line, now demonstrably become a myth, of 'American
democracy', and use it as a sledgehammer against other governments, to 'justify' invading (or,
in Ukraine's case, overthrowing via a 'democratic revolution') their lands (allies of Russia)
such as in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and maybe even soon, Iran.
Here are some of the events and important historical details along the way to Ukraine's
plunge into a worse condition than most African nations:
Please send this article to every friend who is part of the majority that, as a Quinnipiac
University poll published on March 22nd reported, "A total of 51 percent of voters say they
can trust U.S. intelligence agencies to do what is right 'almost all of the time' or 'most of
the time'" (and that level of trust was far higher than for the rotten press and for the rotten
politicians), even after the CIA's rubber-stamping Bush's lies to invade Iraq, and after the
FBI's shameless performance on Hillary Clinton's privatized State Department emails even after
her
smashing their cell-phones with hammers , etc., and all the other official cover-ups, with
no American officials even so much as being charged for their rampant crimes against the
American public. Besides: ever since the CIA's founding, it has had an "Operation Gladio" that specializes in
organizing terrorist acts so as for them to be blamed on, first, communist countries when they
existed; and, then, after the end of communism, on allies of Russia. Did the American
dictatorship begin right after FDR died in 1945? How much longer will these lies succeed?
For the people of
Iraq , and of Syria
, and of Ukraine, and many such countries, this dictatorship has destroyed their lives.
Trusting the 'intelligence' services of a dictatorship doesn't make any sense at all. They're
all working for the aristocracy, the billionaires -- not for any public, anywhere; not here,
not there, just nowhere. Should the cattle trust the feedlot-operator? Only ignorance can
produce trust, under the conditions that actually exist.
So, unless the idea is that ignorance is bliss, pass along the truth, when you find it,
because it is very rare -- and the system operates to keep it that way.
Overthrowing Ukraine was an attempt to end Russia being the major power on the Black Sea and
establish it as a NATO lake to stop Russia from using the sea to aid Syria or Iran. That was
ruined when Putin seized Crimea, keeping the Russian naval base.
In fact, the destabilization of the Ukraine occurred at the dawn of the new century in 2004.
The Presidential election of that year between Victor Yuschenko and Victor Yanukovich
resulted initially in the victory of Yanukovich. However serious allegations regarding
electoral fraud were raised. This resulted in mass demonstrations in Kiev and other cities
throughout Ukraine.
A re-run was ordered and the second time around Yushchenko took the Presidency with 52% of
the vote to Yanukovich's 44%. Suffice it to say that prior to the re-run a number of shadowy
foreign NGOs – including the National Endowment for Democracy – were active in
promoting civic disobedience in a number of Ukrainian cities in west and central Ukraine.
Independence Square in the middle of Kiev was occupied after the first election which was
declared invalid. These events became known as the 'Orange Revolution'.
It would be misleading to assume that significant numbers of the protestors did not have a
valid case against Yanukovich in terms of corruption and self-serving. However, it was
equally true that many of the demonstrators' motives were somewhat less noble. Prior to the
election Yushchenko had promised his running mate Yulia Tymoshenko the position of Prime
Minister should he win the election. Thus throughout, the disturbances were a struggle
between the eastern and western oligarchs.
On the crucial question of the nature of these events, 'Peoples power' or 'revolutionary
coup' the issue remains undecided.
This notwithstanding the British historian David Lane of Emmanuel College Cambridge argued
that
"The 'Orange Revolution' in Ukraine was widely considered to be an instance of the
'coloured revolutions' of 1989 engendered by democratic values and nascent civil societies in
the process of nation building. The extent to which the 'Orange Revolution' could be
considered a revolutionary event stimulated by civil society, or a different type of
political activity (a putsch, coup d'état), legitimated by elite-sponsored 'soft'
political power. Based on public opinion poll data and responses from focus groups, the
author contends that what began as an orchestrated protest election fraud developed into a
novel type of political activity -- a revolutionary coup d'état. It is contended that
the movement was divisive rather than integrative and did not enjoy widespread popular
support."
Which is about the nearest we will get to an authentic answer.
What followed, however, was a complete and corrupt shamble of opportunism, corruption and
self-serving misrule of Yuschenko and Tymoshenko who, after becoming involved in some dubious
energy deals was to become known as the 'Gas Princess'. These two paragons of democracy
eventually became bitter enemies and saw the return of Yanukovich after the Presidential
contest between her and Yanukovich in 2010 which Yanukovich narrowly won.
It's long been a truth that democracy in the US died a long time ago and the wealth and
power behind the POTUS, irrespective of who that might be, are mere puppets. Obama won his
presidency on outright lies and the crooked Clintons and Sarkozys of the US corrupt elite
serve no-one's interests but their own at the cost of the lives of Ukrainian Russian ethnics
and the Libyan, Iraqi and Syrian people. "Saving Syria's children" would require the removal
of the source of their suffering, which can be firmly laid at the door of murderous
Washington War Hawks, rent-a-gobs like Samantha Powers and Victoria Nuland(nee Kagan)and
corrupt MSM supporting the rogue state that is the USA.
by John Quiggin on November 11, 2018 It's 100 years since
the Armistice that brought an end to fighting on the Western Front of the Great War. Ten
million soldiers or more were dead, and even more gravely wounded, along with millions of
civilians. Most of the empires that had begun the war were destroyed, and even the victors had
suffered crippling losses. Far from being a "war to end war", the Great War was the starting
point for many more, as well as bloody and destructive revolutions. These wars continue even
today, in the Middle East, carved up in secret treaties between the victors.
For much of the century since then, it seemed that we had learned at least something from
this tragedy, and the disasters that followed it. Commemoration of the war focused on the loss
and sacrifice of those who served, and were accompanied by a desire that the peace they sought
might finally be achieved.
But now that everyone who served in that war has passed away, along with most of those who
remember its consequences, the tone has shifted to one of glorification and jingoism.
In part, this reflects the fact that, for rich countries, war no longer has any real impact
on most people. As in the 19th century, we have small professional armies fighting in faraway
countries and suffering relatively few casualties. Tens of thousands of people may die in these
conflicts, but the victims of war impinge on our consciousness only when they seek shelter as
refugees, to be turned away or locked up.
In the past, I've concluded message like this with the tag "Lest we Forget". Sadly, it seems
as if everything important has already been forgotten.
novakant 11.11.18 at 11:11 am (no link)
There's an interesting review in this week's TLS (paywall) by Richard J. Evans of
Jörn Leonhard: Pandora's Box – A History of the First World War
I think it varies per place, even within countries. In my English village this morning, about
a quarter of the population gathered in front of the war memorial, closing the only road.
They stood there, quietly. A couple of older people spent twenty minutes reading out the
names of all the poor souls who had left the village for war and never returned. Then there
was two minutes silence, the vicar called for personal peace for all those affected by war,
and then demanded that all those who could work for peace do so. A grim soberness marked the
whole thing
I had nearly not gone, expecting it to be too jingoistic, but it was nothing of the sort. I
am sure across the many communities remembering the Armistice across the world, many will be
doing the same.
This is my way of responding to Armistice Day.
Bob Dylan, Masters of War" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCnYmrADSns
"You that fasten all the trigger
For the others to fire
And you sit back and watch
While the death toll gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud"
Phil Ochs, "I Declare the War Is Over https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOs9xYUjY4I
"One-legged veterans will greet the dawn
And they're whistling marches as they mow the lawn
And the gargoyles only sit and grieve
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we'd been deceived
You only are what you believe"
Big Ed McCurdy, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc5hxqNdqKo
"Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war"
Just a personal question on jq. I left Australia 30 years ago. I can remember no jingoism on
armistice Day. On Australia Day and Anzac Day perhaps, but never on remembrance Day. Had that
really changed?
Regarding Leonhard, it is always a cause for concern when a reviewer calls a historian
"judicious."
The most important thing to remember about the Great War is that it wasn't caused by
malign ideologies, or nefarious leveling schemes, or crazed utopian economic cranks. It was
simply an inevitable breakdown of the normal operation of the capitalist world system.
Remember that when the ever growing infestation of libertarians, respected by their peers,
trot out their mythology.
Speaking of "lest we forget," how many people and how many commemorations have managed to
forget that the armistice came about as a direct consequence of the socialist uprising in
Germany, sparked in large part by a mass mutiny among German sailors in Kiel? Two days before
the formal armistice declaration, workers led by the left wing of the SPD stormed the
Reichstag, an ad hoc governing coalition led by the right wing of the SPD negotiated the
abdication of the Kaiser, and both the left and right wings of the SPD simultaneously issued
separate proclamations of a socialist German republic (by which they meant two very different
things, of course, a divergence that was notoriously written out over the following few years
in the blood of revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg).
In short, you can toss Armistice Day into the category as things like weekend, the 8 hour
work day, the 40 hour work week, social safety nets, and so on: if you celebrate it, don't
forget to thank revolutionary socialism for making it possible.
I'm with John on this one. I'll wear the poppy in recognition of the sacrifice, but will
avoid the local cenotaph ceremony. I find the current temper of Remembrance Day services
distasteful and the "our freedoms" trope abhorrent.
Reason @5 It's mostly Anzac Day, but the 100th anniversary has made Remembrance Day a bigger
deal than usual. And we just had a breathless announcement that "veterans" (I still haven't
got used to this Americanism) would be given boarding priority on Virgin airlines.
To be fair, our PM, who is generally hopeless on this and other issues, gave quite a good
speech on the day, which ran under the headline "War is always a failure of our humanity"
the loss of life and the lasting injuries that follow the fighting remain to show the
futility of allowing war to arise as an answer to our conflicting ideas. humanity has failed
as the dominant species. the fault lies in the hopes of too many to emulate the past society
of material greed as a goal. reaching our limits of destroying the clean air and poisoning
the seas with chemical and plastic waste as though the planet could absorb an endless spew
will cause humanity's end. honoring the dead is the least we may do to salute those that went
before us.
steven t johnson@6: WWI was "simply an inevitable breakdown of the normal operation of the
capitalist world system".
Remind me how many other "inevitable breakdowns of the normal operation" happened before,
or after 1914.
Remind me how far the authorities in Serbia, Russia (or indeed Austria-Hungary or Germany)
believed themselves to be operating in the interests of, or governed by, the capitalist world
system.
Come to that, for the next catastrophe in 1939, do the same for the authorities in Russia,
Poland and Germany.
And explain why there have been no such inevitable breakdowns since.
John Quiggin@10 "To be fair, our PM, who is generally hopeless on this and other issues, gave
quite a good speech on the day, which ran under the headline 'War is always a failure of our
humanity'" It seems to me to be quite unfair to blame WWI on us and our depraved human
nature. As Norman Angell notoriously demonstrated "us" do not get any benefit from war. Cui
bono? Nationalists want to go back to a world where sovereign nations struggle for their
place in the sun. Some, like Trump and Putin, want to go it alone. Others like the lords of
the EU want a consortium. What all share is a system of capitalist competition which will,
like all complex, crisis-ridden systems, eventually break down. Whining about human nature
seems to me detestable.
stephen@12 agrees with majority here, and elsewhere, of course. Nonetheless the confidence
the Spanish-American war, the Boer war, the Russian-Turkish war, the Sino-Japanese war, the
Russian-Japanese war and either of the Balkan wars would of course not, ever, possibly, have
spread like the third Balkan war, er, WWI would be touching were it not so disingenuous. Even
if one insists only conflicts between the great powers, the possibility that the Crimean war,
the war with Magenta and Solferino, the Schleswig-Holstein war, the Franco-Prussian war
(proper,) could not possibly have spread out of control is equally disingenous. Remember
54-40 or fight, the Aroostook war? The monotonously repetitive crises like Fashoda and the
first and second Moroccan crises and the brouhaha over the annexation of Bosnia clearly shows
crisis is normal operation. stephen's insistence this is all irrelevant is convenience, not
argument.
As to the absurd notion that a capitalist world system, in which states are the protectors
of the property of the nation's ruling class, somehow means the chieftains are pursuing the
general interests of world capitalism is delirious twaddle. It is the reformist who pretends
globalism means trade and peace.
I am well aware that everyone agrees with stephen on this point, but it is still
wrong.
Tens of thousands of people may die in these conflicts
Try 2 million in Korea.
One million in Vietnam.
500,000 in Iraq.
And who knows how many in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Serbia, Somalia and all our
various proxy wars in Yemen, Latin America and Africa plus all of the civilians massacred by
our client-state dictators in Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Congo, Egypt, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala and others I'm likely forgetting.
America is the biggest purveyor of death, destruction and human misery on the globe, but
it sounds like we've "forgotten" that as well.
Plenty of horrible things have happened in various American and other war zones since the
Western Front. Plenty of busted-up vets in every city. The problem can't be that we
forgot .
but isn't the capitalist system an emergent effect based on properties of human nature:
individualism, acquisitiveness, aggression. Surely a change of human nature would lead to a
change of economics at least; hopefully in a progressive direction but not necessarily
so.
A while back, a native American on Twitter commented that her people had already
experienced an apocalypse. This led to the following reflection on my part:
The history of modern Western Europe can be viewed as a series of apocalypses. War after
war after war, only at peace after nearly destroying itself. And that is the history of the
modern world.
>In short, you can toss Armistice Day into the category as things like weekend, the 8
hour work day, the 40 hour work week, social safety nets, and so on: if you celebrate it,
don't forget to thank revolutionary socialism for making it possible.
Do and the 100 million people revolutionary socialists would murder in the 80 or so years
following armistice day, what do they owe the revolutionary socialists?
@13
>What all share is a system of capitalist competition which will, like all complex,
crisis-ridden systems, eventually break down. Whining about human nature seems to me
detestable.
Ah yes, we all remember how non-violent those non-capitalist systems were, with the gulags
and mass killing and terror famines.
In an Old Holborn 'baccy tin somewhere in the house is my grandad's WW1 medal. He served in
the London Labour Battalions. Gassed.
He worked twice between his return and his too early death. Both jobs being very
temporary. His family lived in poverty in the East End; the "Panel" was used at times:
charity from the worthies. My dad was crippled with diseases of poverty. He was a communist
(until the 50s).
He signed up with his mates in '39. His best mate Jimmy Biscoe killed in a bomber operation
in the early 40s.
I got my dad's medals this year, twenty years after his death. He only told me a bit of
his experiences when he was dying. He loved my mum, music and kindness.
My dear, gruff dad-in-law lost his left leg at Monte Cassino. Every few years he'd get a
new "fitting", which was a great strain for him. He loved his family, his garden, rowing; we
talked a little about his experiences one quiet afternoon at the RSA. He too died too
early.
My Mum's favourite brother was a boy sailor. He went through the River Plate among other
actions. He spent time in psychiatric hospital after the war for his 'war trauma'. He too
died early.
The padre at my daughter's funeral had been a padre at Arnhem. A quiet, deeply
compassionate man who took his own life some three years later.
My best friend at school, dead in his twenties, doing his "duty".
Not a hero among them: ordinary, flawed, loved and loving human beings.
And the people left behind ? Lives filled with quiet, unresolved sadness and loss; getting by
with grit and quiet courage.
I used to go to Dawn Service. Then it got to be political Theatre. I get f .g angry with
all the brouhaha, preening and cavorting. None of this helps or helped any of those people
mentioned above.
Half a billion for the AWM? And cutting the funding of food banks? Moral bloody Bankruptcy
writ large.
You know I could possibly be sympathetic with all of you if it wasn't the case that
utopian ideology didn't have more victims than all the nationalisms put together. A plague on
all your houses.
Birdie@17 is telling us human nature generated capitalism a hundred thousand years ago? Or is
telling us that human nature is only free in a capitalist system? I think neither.
Raven Onthill@18 seems to think it is incumbent on the lesser peoples to surrender without
a fight, and accept the status quo as God-given. That Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empires
could be liquidated peacefully, like a common bankruptcy. That is not how it works in a
capitalist system of sovereign states defending the property of their respective ruling
classes, against other states. The rise of Germany and the US against the relative decline of
the British empire meant the balance of forces must change. The new balance could only be
found by war.
The relative decline of the US means the current balance of forces must change. That's why
the US government has explicitly declared Russia and China to be revisionist powers. The US
state will no more go quietly than the British empire, which would not reach a peaceful
accommodation with Germany then any more than it can reach a real accommodation with "Europe"
today.
ironoutofcavalry@19 spells out the shared premises of liberal democrats and fascists, the
determination that famines and wars under capitalism are acts of God, while everything that
happens under socialism is always deliberate. Even if you somehow pretend the depopulation of
the Americas and the mass deaths of the Middle Passage somehow had nothing to do with
capitalism, there were plenty of holocausts in later days. See Mike Davis' Late Victorian
Holocausts. (Davis contention that famines relatively soon after the revolution are the same
as the great Bengal famine or the Irish famine is social-democratic piety, the sort of thing
that gives it a bad name.) Idiot theorists of "totalitarianism" are invited to comment upon
the Triple War in South America.
ironoutofcavalry, the Black Book of Communism is a contemptible far-right propaganda rag
whose death tally was denounced by several of its own co-authors due to the main author's
obsession with reaching the nice round 100 million mark by any means necessary, with "victims
of communism" including such figures as hypothetical deaths due to lack of population growth
during famine periods, Soviet civilian deaths resulting from the economic dislocations of the
Nazi invasion, and even Nazi soldiers killed on the battlefields of the Eastern Front. By
standards much more rigorous and defensible than those used in the Black Book of Communism,
the basic functioning of global capitalist material inequality kills tens of millions of
people per decade -- which is before you even begin trying to tally the casualties of
capitalist conflicts like the two world wars, let alone any of the other massively
destructive imperial interventions around the world before and since, which people like
stephen seem to have trained themselves not to regard as catastrophic in the same way as
WWI/WWII as long as the victims are mostly poor brown people in the Third World. Hell, even
at this very moment the US is providing direct political and military support for a campaign
of intentional starvation by its Saudi proxy state against millions of people in northern
Yemen, a "terror famine" at least as deliberate and premeditated as anything Stalin or Mao
ever dreamed of.
If you must insist on spreading uninformed reactionary bromides, at least take it to a
less serious discussion space where it belongs, and regardless, don't forget to thank a
socialist if you enjoy not being sent to die in a muddy trench.
Stephen, here's a reasonable
summary of how the dynamics of capitalist economic development led inexorably to WWI and
WWII, and are leading to a future global conflict that may be much less distant than we'd
like to imagine. Now before you click the link, note the following passage quoted in the
linked article, by a political commentator writing in 1887 about the prospect of:
a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten
million soldiers will be at each other's throats and in the process they will strip Europe
barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years' War compressed into
three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal
lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery
irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of' trade, industry and credit, ending
in universal bankruptcy collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom
to the point where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen, and no one will be
around to pick them up; the absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and
who will emerge as victor from the battle. That is the prospect for the moment when the
development of mutual one-upmanship in armaments reaches us, climax and finally brings
forth its inevitable fruits. This is the pass, my worthy princes and statesmen, to which
you in your wisdom have brought our ancient Europe.
Now based on what you can guess of my political orientation strictly from what I've
posted here, try to guess which 19th century European political figure might have written
that passage. No, your first guess is wrong, he died in 1883, but close, now guess again.
Yes, your second guess is correct .
I've seen "X is bad" statements receive the "Oh yeah? Well Stalin was worse !" non
sequitur in response for many values of X. But this thread is the first time I've seen it
happen for X = WWI.
WLGR@7: if you think that revolutionary socialism made possible "weekend, the 8 hour work
day, the 40 hour work week, social safety nets" how do you explain that all these things
happened in states that did not have to endure the catastrophic misfortunes of revolutionary
socialism?
steven t johnson@14
This is the first time that I have ever been told that everyone [on CT? in the wider
universe?] agrees with me, but if that is so I do not see it as a reason for supposing I am
wrong. Rational arguments dissenting from my opinions are of course always welcome.
stj's argument that, because conflicts pre-1914 did not result in world wars, therefore
WWI was inevitable, has only to be made explicit to collapse.
I am particularly interested by stj's argument that the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78,
between two absolutist non-capitalist monarchies, was in some way the result of international
capitalism. If he will reconsider that opinion, he might like to recalibrate his denunciation
of other wars as capitalist. I would recommend the works of an intelligent Marxist, Perry
Anderson, who explains why pre-Revolutionary Russia and Wilhelmine Germany had many
capitalists, they were not actually capitalist states.
As for his denunciation of capitalism in which "states are the protectors of the property
of the nation's ruling class": there is of course some truth there, but in which system is
that not true? In capitalism, unlike some other systems – revolutionary socialism, to
start with – whose property has been protected?
Birdie@17: "isn't the capitalist system an emergent effect based on properties of human
nature: individualism, acquisitiveness, aggression?" Human nature indeed; try explaining to
Ashurbanipal of Assyria, Alexander, Genghiz Khan why these properties did not apply to their
very n0n-capitalist selves.
Stephen, are you under the impression that western Europe and the US never had a
revolutionary socialist tradition? If so, I don't really know what to tell you other than to
read even the most passing history of Western mass politics and labor struggles, the upshot
of which is that yes of course it was Western ruling classes' fear of working-class
revolutionary agitation that led to the implementation of every single one of those things,
up to and including the German ruling class in early November 1918 deciding to hand over
power to the moderate reformist wing of the SPD, whose first major policy decision as soon as
they'd settled into their desks was to pursue an armistice with the Entente. I can understand
maybe a few token Birchers or Randroids poking their heads out here and there, but has the
anti-intellectual right-wing fever swamp of our current era really risen high enough that
such mild observations are somehow surprising or controversial even in a forum like this one?
'I used to go to Dawn Service. Then it got to be political Theatre. I get f .g angry with
all the brouhaha, preening and cavorting. None of this helps or helped any of those people
mentioned above."
After Trump's election, I chose to abstain for a while from the drenching but never quenching
fire hose of information of the web, and for a while worked through the stacks of books I had
long left unread.
One I avoided for quite a while, not remembering its provenance was "Human Smoke", by
Nicholson Baker. It could not have been a gift; no one in the family still living is familiar
with this author.
It's an assemblage of quotes from various authors from the beginning of the twentieth
century up until the operation of the crematoria which furnishes the title, and its general
tendency is pacifism, disarmament, the efforts made both before and after the Great War to
prevent such catastrophes, and the inhumanity of the conduct of the war. From the outset, the
policy of our side was to starve the other into submission through naval blockades, and to a
considerable extent it was successful.
In the second round, our side was the first to start bombing civilians, and we got better
at it the longer the war went on, though it's far from clear that this was a useful
strategy.
Baker's book is not, could hardly be, a convincing argument for pacifism, given the
drumbeat of fascist pronouncements, threats, denunciations, bragging and swaggering. The
first world war was so pointless that it's hard to understand how it happened, why it
couldn't have been avoided, why it couldn't have been stopped sooner. The second was
different.
It is worth remembering that the First World War was called, by those who opposed it after
the fact, the "War to End War". An organisation was set up to ensure that there would be no
more wars, and an international agreement renouncing war was signed.
The organisation was being set up while the war was actually going on, if you count the
Western blockade and invasion of Russia, and the Greek invasion of Turkey, as part of the
war.
Nevertheless, within less than twenty years you had the Italian invasion of Ethiopia
(arguably an after-effect of Italy's failure to get what it wanted out of the First World
War) and soon after that, the Japanese invasion of southern China (inarguably, ditto).
It is possible for people to argue that since there has not been a similar war since 1945,
"humanity" has "learned its lesson". In reality, however, the reason why there has been no
similar war has been that the principal protagonists have nuclear weapons and no means of
defense against them. If anybody comes up with a genuinely reliable defense against ballistic
and cruise missiles, I'd give the world less than ten more years of peace.
Incidentally, I'd give the world less than ten more years of peace at the moment, but
that's because of the preponderance of doltish psychopaths in governments. It's interesting,
however, that a doltish psychopath like Macron is nevertheless capable of realising that
France is vulnerable to the intermediate-range nuclear missiles which the U.S. is currently
unleashing on the world, and therefore is trying to, er, have a conference about banning the
use of naughty weapons and about promoting world peace.
Stephen has won the gallery with the claim that repeated crises failing to result in systemic
failure of the world diplomatic system (that is, causing world war,) on a an easily
predictable schedule shows obviously it is entirely possible for us to go back to a world of
sovereign nations like before the US hegemony and have endless crises with nary a collapse.
It's like the capitalist economy that way. "We" are now so wise that we can avoid the follies
of our predecessors, who are obviously stupid, which is proven by their being dead, dead,
dead.
I am sure Stephen has also won hearts and minds with the claim Russian conquests
against Turkey meant the extension of the Russian empire rather than the creation of the
states of Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. But perhaps people think those new
countries came complete with serfdom; extensive church lands and widespread monasticism;
aristocratic estates and caste privileges; relative absence of cities, etc. That is, the new
states were non-capitalist because absolutist monarchy isn't capitalist.
(I'm not familiar with Perry Anderson because leftist and foreign means it will not be
easily available in the US outside elite libraries. But if Perry Anderson thinks absolutism
and mercantilism were not part of the transition to capitalism, I believe he is gravely
mistaken. Defining "capitalism" as the most refined bourgeois democracy in the imperial
metropole is popular, because it is so usefully apologetic, yet it is still nonsense.)
Last and least, reason@21 utters the preposterous claim "utopian ideologies" have killed
more people than anything else. (The comment seems to include ironoutof cavalry, but I'm sure
ironoutofcavalry, like Stephen and reason, are resolutely complacent about social evils,
because, anti-utopian.) Personally I think business as usual, not utopian ideology, had
everything to do with the great Bengal famine circa 1770 (not the WWII one.) Etc. etc. etc.
in a litany that would sicken the soul, were it not fortified by the conviction it is utopian
ideology that is the spirit of evil.
"Sadly, it seems as if everything important has already been forgotten".
But Von Clownstick just remembered it was "them Germans" – and sadly not one comment
here was about Macron reminding US that "everything important" is how to deal with
"Nationalism"?
– and about:
"But now that everyone who served in that war has passed away, along with most of those who
remember its consequences, the tone has shifted to one of glorification and jingoism".
Didn't the French and the Germans mention that it is now 70 years that these "Archenemies"
at peace? – and I think to this "Armistice Day" the first time even the Germans were
invited? – but how true there was a "shifted tone" by the German Baron Von Clownstick
–
(who somehow still pretends he is "American"?)
Britain tried to negotiate an end to the naval arms race with Germany at least twice
before 1914. Germany was not interested. After 1905 Russia was also keen to avoid conflict.
The proponents of this policy lost credibility due to German sabre-rattling and insouciant
reversals by Vienna.
– and for everybody who might have missed it – let me explain what was going on
at this "Armistice Day".
Baron von Clownstick was very, VERY unhappy -(not only because he was afraid to ruin his
hair) BUT also – BE-cause as he always says "we built the best Arms" – "the most
beautiful weaponry" – and when he always told them Germans and them French and all
these other Nato members to pay more for Nato he was hoping for more Sales of US Arms BUT
then this Macron dude -(and now also Merkel) suddenly were talking about "Europeans
protecting themselves" -(and NOT buying more US weapons) and that made Von Clownstick very,
VERY sad – as his funny tweets about the US not wanting to protect Europe anymore
– if Europe wasn't "pony up" came to let's call it – to "fruition" – or a
classical "protect me from what I want" – and THAT's what happened on this –
"Armistice Day" –
(besides the danger for Von Clownsticks hair)
Just wading in a bit to say that "Revolutionary Socialism" is one of those labels that
obfuscates more than it reveals. Lenin, Debs, and Luxembourg were all contemporaries who
believed in Socialism and revolution, but they didn't all believe in the same "Revolutionary
Socialism." Just look at the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks for proof that even seemingly
small distinctions in what it means to be "revolutionary" have huge implications.
People seem to have settled on using "Revolutionary" as a code word to mean "violent,
dangerous, and radical," or "serious, committed, and effective," depending on their politics,
while "Democratic" is treated as being the opposite (for good or ill), but it's a false
dichotomy. Pacifists can be radical, democrats can be thuggish, and democracy can be
revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, and "effectiveness" is subjective. Given that even
with conventional definitions, it's not always easy to see which of the two camps a
particular Socialist falls under (and many of them changed factions), it's probably best to
clarify what type of revolution you're talking about up front.
er, Peter T, Britain wanted to end the naval arms race with Germany because it was ahead and
in complete control of European seas. It was Britain which had introduced the Dreadnought
battleship and the battlecruiser. It's rather like the American calls to restrict the number
of nuclear weapons and discourage countries which don't have them from acquiring them.
I won't say that German sabre-rattling wasn't a factor in promoting European crisis.
However, it's hard not to see the Russian military buildup in Europe between 1905 and 1914 as
anything other than preparation for war (however inept it turned out to be in practice), and
of course the Russians were heavily involved (diplomatically) in the Balkan wars. It
certainly wasn't the Austrians who orchestrated the murder of their heir to the throne, and
if Britain were to grow grumpy at Syria murdering Prince Charles I would hardly call that
"insouciant".
Wars are a strategy for male reproduction. Invade. Kill the competing men. Impregnate the
women. Enslave and trade women as reproductive property. Repeat. It's what men have done for
centuries.
Eg. Iceland
. ""This supports the model, put forward by some historians, that the majority of females
in the Icelandic founding population had Gaelic ancestry, whereas the majority of males had
Scandinavian ancestry,"
Britain had roughly 70% of the world's merchant fleet, a world-wide empire tied together
by maritime communications and was critically dependent on sea-borne trade. This was not new
– it had been the situation since 1815. Germany set out to build a fleet specifically
designed to challenge Britain's control of its home waters (heavy on battleships, short
range). Britain responded by building the dreadnoughts, then by coming to an arrangement with
France so as to free up forces from the Med, all the while seeking a naval truce. One can
argue that Germany had every right to seek to diminish British naval dominance, but it was
surely both a foolish and an aggressive policy, given that it posed a threat no British
government could not respond to (the invasion of Belgium and German plans to annex the
Belgian coast were similar, in that they would place the High Seas Fleet across Britain's
major trade artery. In 1914 London was the greatest port in the world).
The Viennese insouciance I had in mind was in regard to the Bosnian annexation in 1909.
The details are in Dominic Lieven's Towards the Flame, but it was a typical bit of
Austro-Hungarian over-clever dickishness. It added a layer of distrust that was not helpful
in 1914.
What worried Germany the most was Russian railway-building, which threatened to make their
military planning more difficult. They saw 1914 as a narrow and shrinking window (much as
many of the same people saw war in 1939 as a last military opportunity). Indeed, they had
mooted war against Russia in 1906 and again in 1909.
It's overlooked that Europe had an established mechanism for resolving diplomatic crises
– either an international congress or a meeting of the affected powers (as at Vienna
1813, Berlin 1878, London 1912..). The Powers had imposed settlements in the Balkans on
several previous occasions, and could have done so this time. Britain and France proposed a
congress; Berlin refused.
While they all look similar to us, Germany really was much more militarist and much more
inclined to seek salvation from their dilemmas in war than the other powers. While all the
elites were in a febrile state, Germany's were in something close to a collective nervous
breakdown, isolated, truculent and fearful.
I am a big fan of Hobson's book "Imperialism, a study", written in 1902, that I believe
explain tendencies, that evidently were present in 1902 and before, that later exploded and
caused WW1 and WW2.
The general theory of the book is that capitalist countries face underconsumption problems
at home, due to the exceedigly low wage share (Hobson though is not a marxist so he doesn't
believes that this is the normal situation in capitalism).
This underconsumption forces capitalist countries to expand in the colonies, and ultimately
also to create an military/financial/industrial complex that becomes the valve through which
excess savings (due to underconsumption due to excessively low wages) can be reinvested.
I'll leave out a discussion if Hobson's economic theories make sense (I think they do) or
wether they are the same of marxist theories (I think they are the same expressed from
another point of view and with a more moderate approach), but I want to point out the chapter
about "the scientific defence of imperialism" (pp.162 onwards in the link), because it
clearly speaks of the "scientific racism" theories that are nowadays associated with fascism
and nazism.
Here a cite from p.163:
Admitting that the efficiency of a nation or a race requires a suspension of intestine
warfare, at any rate l' =trance, the crude struggle on the larger plane must, they urge, be
maintained. It serves, indeed, two related purposes. A constant struggle with other races
or nations is demanded for the maintenance and progress of a race or nation ; abate the
necessity of the struggle and the vigour of the race flags and perishes. Thus it is to the
real interest of a vigorous race to be " kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by
contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle
for trade routes and for the sources of raw material and of food supply." " This," adds
Professor Karl Pearson," is the natural history view of mankind, and I do not think you can
in its main features subvert it." Others, taking the wider cosmic standpoint, insist that
the progress of humanity itself requires the main-tenance of a selective and destructive
struggle between races which embody different power and capacities, different types of
civilisation.
From this I think it's obvious how Italian fascism and German nazism were mostly an
extremisation of theories that were already present before WW1 (and Japanese militarism and
probably many other militarism that we prefer to forget today).
In fact Mussolini justified the entry of Italy into WW2 with the idea of a natural struggle
between nations/races/cultures.
Now the main question is: was Hobson correct to say that these theories were just covers
for economic interests, that in turn were caused by underconsumption?
Or to say the same thing from a more marxist standpoint, is it true that WW1 was caused by
various capitalist countries were forced by the capitalist need for continuous
growth/expansion to continually expand their colonial empires, and in the end they had to
clash one with the other?
I think it is true.
This doesn't mean that all war in history were caused by capitalism, before capitalism ever
existed. Hower this gives an answer to some of your questions, and specifically:
1) Why didn't the normal conditions of capitalist production give rise to a world war
before?
Because various capitalist powers hadn't already conquered most of the world, so they didn't
have to go directly at each other's throat before WW1.
2) Why didn't the normal conditions of capitalist production give rise to a world war
after WW2?
Because
(2.a) after WW2 the capitalist system in developed countries had a much higer wage share due
to government intervention and anyway excess savings were repurposed through Keynesian
policies and inflation, thus much less underconsuption,
and
(2.b) because after WW2 for some decades there was only one main capitalist pole, that was
the USA, that was the main proponent of this kind of keynesian policies, either because it
was wiser, or because of the menace of socialism, or for whatever the reason.
WLGR@29: You ask whether I am "under the impression that western Europe and the US never had
a revolutionary socialist tradition?" Well, definitely not, and I cannot see that I have
written anything that could lead you to form an honest opinion that I am, or even might be.
Nor can I see any basis for your belief that, disagreeing with you, I must be wholly ignorant
of Western mass politics. I would advise you to have less faith in your own powers of
telepathy.
To refresh your memory: I wrote that various good thing happened in states that did not
have to endure the catastrophic misfortunes of revolutionary socialism. And I cannot see how
you can dispute either that states which were historically ruled by revolutionary socialists
suffered catastrophes; or that many European and other states, though never ruled by
revolutionary socialists and so avoiding their catastrophes, acquired these good things.
Pre-emptive disclaimer: I am not of course claiming that all catastrophes have been due to
revolutionary socialism.
stj@33: with regard to Russo/Turkish history, I think you are rather confused. You seem to
think I claimed that "Russian conquests against Turkey meant the extension of the Russian
empire rather than the creation of the states of Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria." I
didn't: I merely pointed out that the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8 was not in any intelligible
sense a conflict between two capitalist states. But if you want to widen the discussion to
cover Russian conquests against Turkey, I must point out that (1) several such conquests did
in fact involve extension of the Russian empire: take a quick look at the history of Ukraine
and Crimea (2) the creation of Montenegro was a result of Austrian and Venetian victories,
not Russian (3) Russia never conquered any part of Serbia from the Turks, though Russian
support for autonomously rebellious Serbs was significant (4) a complicating factor in the
formation of Romania was the Russian invasion of the principalities of Wallachia and
Moldavia, followed by an attempt to incorporate them into the Russian empire: many Romanians
preferred Ottoman rule (5) Bulgaria, you're right for once, that was a direct and
uncomplicated result of Russian conquest followed by creation of a new state. Which I never
said it wasn't.
I really do think it would be a good idea for you to read Perry Anderson's thoughtful and
erudite works before dismissing them; they may be more accessible than you think. I don't
know if your socialist principles would allow you to use the capitalist outfit Amazon
yourself, but if so Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist state is available at $29.95 plus
postage. I would also recommend on a rather different topic Passages from Antiquity to
Feudalism, same price: second-hand copies of either are a little cheaper.
Wasn't World War I the result of Germany pursuing conquest?
World War 1 was equally the result of Britain 'pursuing conquest', i.e. its decades-long
ambition to expand its empire into the Near and Far Easts. Josh Marshall is, I'm afraid, an
unreconstructed Anglophile who also believes silly claims that the British went back to
'peace' (whatever that may be for a militarised empire) after WWI.
MFB @ 39
Correct. From contemporary accounts, we know that those members of the public who were
paying attention at the time could see the various empires building up to war for years
beforehand.
Marxist explanations work better for some events than for others; I don't think they work
particularly well for WW 1, though they aren't completely irrelevant.
I don't keep up with the historiography (e.g., the probably endless debate btw the Fischer
school and its critics/opponents), but one can distinguish btw contingent and deeper causes.
The latter were both 'ideational' (e.g., hypernationalism; views of war in general; 'cult of
the offensive'; influence of Social Darwinist and racialist perspectives on intl relations;
relative weakness of the peace mvts and their msg; dominant styles of diplomacy; etc.) and
'material' (e.g., problems faced by the multinational empires, esp. Austria-Hungary; rigidity
of mobilization plans; economic and political pressures on ruling elites; etc.), though the
distinction between ideational and material is somewhat artificial.
I'm not sure which among all the historical works is most worth reading (J.C.G. Rohl was
mentioned by someone in a past thread on this topic, and there were a lot of books published
around 2014 on the centenary of the war's start); but istm James Joll's work, among others,
has held up pretty well. Political scientists/ IR people have also continued to publish on
this. (The last journal article I'm aware of is Keir Lieber's in Intl Security several yrs
ago [and the replies], though I'm sure there have been others since. And even though it's
old, S. Van Evera's piece from the '80s, "Why Cooperation Failed in 1914," is still worth
reading, for the copious footnotes to the then-extant historical work in English (and English
translation), among other things.)
MFB: "It was Britain which had introduced the Dreadnought battleship and the battlecruiser."
Hmm, wasn't the Dreadnought class a direct response to the Tirpitz Memorandum (1896) and
the subsequent German Navy Bill of 1898, the purpose of which was to build a battleship fleet
with which to confront the Royal Navy?
As regards the historical arguments about war guilt, there was a strong pro-war faction in
nearly every European country, and even in Australia (on this last point, and the links to
the British pro-war faction, see Douglas Newton's Hell Bent ). The pro-war faction
prevailed nearly everywhere. Arguing about which pro-war faction was most responsible for
bringing about the war they all wanted seems pointless to me.
Moreover, once the war started, no-one wanted in power anywhere to bring it to an end on
any terms other than victory, annexations and reparations.
Looking specifically at the British government, since it seems to have the most defenders,
they first refused an offer of alliance from Turkey and then (when Turkey entered on the
German side instead) made a secret deal with France to carve up the Ottoman empire. As
mentioned in the OP, we are still dealing with the consequences today. That's not to excuse
the pro-war factions that dominated the governments of Germany, France, Russia,
Austria-Hungary, Italy etc.
The brutal warlord understood how to govern shrewdly and even humanely.
Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Winston Churchill, even Barack Obama: there are many
historical figures who Americans have turned to for inspiration in this political distemper.
That's especially true with the midterm elections only a week in the books. But I've recently
found an even more surprising leader who offers a number of political lessons worth
contemplating: Genghis Khan.
I'm quite serious.
As a former history teacher, I picked up Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern
World because I realized I knew relatively little about one of the most influential men in
human history. Researchers have
estimated that 0.5 percent of men have Genghis Khan's DNA in them, which is perhaps one of
the most tangible means of determining historical impact. But that's just the tip of the
iceberg. The Mongolian warlord conquered a massive chunk of the 13th-century civilized world --
including more than one third of its population. He created one of the first international
postal systems. He decreed universal freedom of religion in all his conquered territories --
indeed, some of his senior generals were Christians.
Of course, Genghis Khan was also a brutal military leader who showed no mercy to enemies who
got in his way, leveling entire cities and using captured civilians as the equivalent of cannon
fodder. Yet even the cruelest military geniuses (e.g. Napoleon) are still geniuses, and we
would be wise to consider what made them successful, especially against great odds. In the case
of Genghis Khan, we have a leader who went from total obscurity in one of the most remote areas
of Asia to the greatest, most feared military figure of the medieval period, and perhaps the
world. This didn't happen by luck -- the Mongolian, originally named Temujin, was not only a
skilled military strategist, but a shrewd political leader.
As Genghis Khan consolidated control over the disparate tribes of the steppes of northern
Asia, he turned the traditional power structure on its head. When one tribe failed to fulfill
its promise to join him in war and raided his camp in his absence, he took an unprecedented
step. He summoned a public gathering, or khuriltai , of his followers, and conducted a public
trial of the other tribe's aristocratic leaders. When they were found guilty, Khan had them
executed as a warning to other aristocrats that they would no longer be entitled to special
treatment. He then occupied the clan's lands and distributed the remaining tribal members among
his own people. This was not for the purposes of slavery, but a means of incorporating
conquered peoples into his own nation. The Mongol leader symbolized this act by adopting an
orphan boy from the enemy tribe and raising him as his own son.
Weatherford explains:
"Whether these adoptions began for sentimental reasons or for political ones, Temujin
displayed a keen appreciation of the symbolic significance and practical benefit of such acts
in uniting his followers through his usage of fictive kinship ."
Genghis Khan employed this equalizing strategy with his military as well -- eschewing
distinctions of superiority among the tribes. For example, all members had to perform a certain
amount of public service. Weatherford adds:
"Instead of using a single ethnic or tribal name, Temujin increasingly referred to his
followers as the People of the Felt Walls, in reference to the material from which they made
their gers [tents]."
America, alternatively, seems divided along not only partisan lines, but those of race and
language as well. There is also an ever-widening difference between elite technocrats and
blue-collar folk, or "deplorables." Both parties have pursued policies that have aggravated
these differences, and often have schemed to employ them for political gain. Whatever shape
they take -- identity politics, gerrymandering -- the controversies they cause have done
irreparable harm to whatever remains of the idea of a common America. The best political
leaders are those who, however imperfectly, find a way to transcend a nation's many differences
and appeal to a common cause, calling on all people, no matter how privileged, to participate
in core activities that define citizenship.
The Great Khan also saw individuals not as autonomous, atomistic individuals untethered to
their families and local communities, but rather as inextricably linked to them. For example,
"the solitary individual had no legal existence outside the context of the family and the
larger units to which it belonged; therefore the family carried responsibility of ensuring the
correct behavior of its members to be a just Mongol, one had to live in a just community." This
meant, in effect, that the default social arrangement required individuals to be responsible
for those in their families and immediate communities. If a member of a family committed some
crime, the entire unit would come under scrutiny. Though such a paradigm obviously isn't ideal,
it reflects Genghis Khan's recognition that the stronger our bonds to our families, the
stronger the cohesion of the greater society. Politicians should likewise pursue policies that
support and strengthen the family, the
"first society," rather than undermining or redefining it.
There are other gems of wisdom to be had from Genghis Khan. He accepted a high degree of
provincialism within his empire, reflecting an ancient form of subsidiarity. Weatherford notes:
"He allowed groups to follow traditional law in their area, so long as it did not conflict with
the Great Law, which functioned as a supreme law or a common law over everyone." This reflects
another important task for national leaders, who must seek to honor, and even encourage, local
governments and economies, rather than applying one-size-fits-all solutions.
He was an environmentalist, codifying "existing ideals by forbidding the hunting of animals
between March and October during the breeding time." This ensured the preservation and
sustainability of the Mongol's native lands and way of life. He recognized the importance of
religion in the public square, offering tax exemptions to religious leaders and their property
and excusing them from all types of public service. He eventually extended this to other
essential professions like public servants, undertakers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and
scholars. Of course, in our current moment, some of these professions are already well
compensated for their work, but others, like teachers, could benefit from such a tax
exemption.
There's no doubt that Genghis Khan was a brutal man with a bloody legacy. Yet joined to that
violence was a shrewd political understanding that enabled him to create one of the greatest
empires the world has ever known. He eschewed the traditional tribal respect for the elites in
favor of the common man, he pursued policies that brought disparate peoples under a common
banner, and he often avoided a scorched earth policy in favor of mercy to his enemies. Indeed,
as long as enemy cities immediately surrendered to the Mongols, the inhabitants saw little
change in their way of life. And as Weatherford notes, he sought to extend these lessons to his
sons shortly before his death:
He tried to teach them that the first key to leadership was self-control, particularly
mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild
lion, and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned
them that "if you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead." He admonished them never to
think of themselves as the strongest or smartest. Even the highest mountain had animals that
step on it, he warned. When the animals climb to the top of the mountain, they are even
higher than it is.
Perhaps if American politicians were to embrace this side of the Great Khan, focusing on
serving a greater ideal rather than relentless point-scoring , we might achieve the same level
of national success, without the horrific bloodshed.
Changing the direction of American politics from the continued descent into degeneracy and
ahistoricity will be a dynastic task requiring us to teach our youngest generations about
civics and civility and U.S. history all the way from the intellectual and historical events
that led to the formation of the U.S. to the varied movements over the years that have either
strengthened the social cohesion of our melting pot nation or provoked rot from the inside
out.
Swallowing one's pride is the most difficult task of any political leader who tastes power
even once. At that point the politician frequently craves the citizenry to get on bended knee
and swallow the the arrogant decisions of the politician who has grown turgid from the
lustful exceses of the governmental trough.
I realize this "American Conservative" author is trying to point out strengths of someone
who he admits was also a tyrant, but there's a little too much much tyrant love for my taste.
Maybe strong leaders are exactly the problem, and maybe one of the reasons conservatives
often have their pants on fire is their claim that they love freedom as they beg for law and
order at the end of someone else's gun.
President Macron's protests against nationalism this weekend stand in stark contrast with
the words of France's WWII resistance leader and the man who would then become president:
General Charles de Gaulle.
Speaking to his men in 1913, de Gaulle reminded them:
"He who does not love his mother more than other mothers, and his fatherland more than
other fatherlands, loves neither his mother nor his fatherland."
This unquestionable invocation of nationalism reveals how far France has come in its pursuit
of globalist goals, which de Gaulle described later in that same speech as the "appetite of
vice."
While this weekend the media have been sharpening their knives on Macron's words, for use
against President Trump, very few have taken the time to understand what really created the
conditions for the wars of the 20th century. It was globalism's grandfather: imperialism, not
nationalism.
This appears to have been understood at least until the 1980s, though forgotten now. With
historical revisionism applied to nationalism and the great wars, it is much harder to
understand what President Trump means when he calls himself a "nationalist." Though the fault
is with us, not him.
" Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism
By pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others,' we erase the very thing that
a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and makes it great: its moral values,"
President Macron declared from the pulpit of the Armistice 100 commemorations.
Had this been in reverse, there would no doubt have been shrieks of disgust aimed at Mr.
Trump for "politicizing" such a somber occasion. No such shrieks for Mr. Macron, however, who
languishes below 20 percent in national approval ratings in France.
With some context applied, it is remarkably easy to see how President Macron was being
disingenuous.
Nationalism and patriotism are indeed distinct. But they are not opposites.
Nationalism is a philosophy of governance, or how human beings organize their affairs.
Patriotism isn't a governing philosophy. Sometimes viewed as subsidiary to the philosophy of
nationalism, patriotism is better described as a form of devotion.
For all the grandstanding, Mr. Macron may as well have asserted that chicken is the opposite
of hot sauce, so meaningless was the comparison.
Imperialism, we so quickly forget, was the order of the day heading into the 20th century.
Humanity has known little else but empire since 2400 B.C. The advent of globalism, replete with
its foreign power capitals and multi-national institutions is scarcely distinct.
Imperialism -- as opposed to nationalism -- seeks to impose a nation's way of life, its
currency, its traditions, its flags, its anthems, its demographics, and its rules and laws upon
others wherever they may be.
Truly, President Trump's nationalism heralds a return to the old U.S. doctrine of
non-intervention, expounded by President George Washington in his farewell address of 1796:
" It must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary
vicissitudes of [Europe's] politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her
friendships or enmities."
It should not have to be pointed out that the great wars of the 20th century could not be
considered "ordinary vicissitudes", but rather, that imperialism had begun to run amok on the
continent.
It was an imperialism rooted in nihilism, putting the totality of the state at its heart.
Often using nationalism as nothing more than a method of appeal, socialism as a doctrine of
governance, and Jews as a subject of derision and scapegoating.
Today's imperialism is known as globalism.
It is what drives nations to project outward their will, usually with force; causes armies
to cross borders in the hope of subjugating other human beings or the invaded nation's natural
resources; and defines a world, or region, or continent by its use of central authority and
foreign capital control.
Instead of armies of soldiers, imperialists seek to dominate using armies of economists and
bureaucrats. Instead of forced payments to a foreign capital, globalism figured out how to
create economic reliance: first on sterling, then on the dollar, now for many on the Euro. This
will soon be leapfrogged by China's designs.
And while imperialism has served some good purposes throughout human history, it is only
when grounded in something larger than man; whether that be natural law, God, or otherwise. But
such things are scarcely long-lived.
While benevolent imperialism can create better conditions over a period of time, humanity's
instincts will always lean towards freedom and self-governance.
It is this fundamental distinction between the United States' founding and that of the
modern Republic of France that defines the two nations.
The people of France are "granted" their freedoms by the government, and the government
creates the conditions and dictates the terms upon which those freedoms are exercised.
As Charles Kesler wrote for the Claremont
Review of Books in May, "As a result, there are fewer and fewer levers by which the governed
can make its consent count".
France is the archetypal administrative state, while the United States was founded on
natural law, a topic that scarcely gets enough attention anymore.
Nationalism - or nationism, if you will - therefore represents a break from the war-hungry
norm of human history . Its presence in the 20th century has been rewritten and
bastardized.
A nationalist has no intention of invading your country or changing your society. A
nationalist cares just as much as anyone else about the plights of others around the world but
believes putting one's own country first is the way to progress. A nationalist would never seek
to divide by race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference, or otherwise. This runs contrary to
the idea of a united, contiguous nation at ease with itself.
Certainly nationalism's could-be bastard child of chauvinism can give root to imperialistic
tendencies. But if the nation can and indeed does look after its own, and says to the world
around it, "these are our affairs, you may learn from them, you may seek advice, we may even
assist if you so desperately need it and our affairs are in order," then nationalism can be a
great gift to the 21st century and beyond.
This is definitely looks like the USSR trajectory with alcoholism. When people feel that they
are not needed they start to behave in self-destructive ways.
Drug overdoses led to more deaths in the U.S. in 2017 than any year on record and were the
leading cause of death in the country, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration
report issued Friday .
More than 72,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2017 , according to
the NIH -- about 200 per day. That number is more than four times the number who died in
1999 from drug abuse: 16,849.
The figures are up about 15 percent from 63,632 drug-related deaths in 2016.
Since 2011, more people have died from drug overdoses than by gun violence, car accidents,
suicide, or homicide, the DEA report stated.
In 2017,
40,100 people died in vehicle incidents; 15,549 were fatally shot, not
including suicide;
17,284 were homicide victims, though an unspecified portion of this number includes gunshot
victims; and nearly 45,000 committed suicide.
The DEA attributed last year's uptick in deaths to a spike in opioid-related fatalities. The
agency said 49,060 people died as a result of abusing opioids, up from 42,249 in 2016.
Of those opioid deaths, synthetic opioids were responsible for nearly 20,000. More people
died from them than heroin. The DEA report said synthetic fentanyl and comparable types of
drugs are cheaper than heroin , making them more attractive to buyers.
The DEA also found heroin-related drug overdoses had doubled from 2013 to 2016 because
manufacturers illegally producing synthetic fentanyl have laced the heroin with opioids.
President Trump
declared the opioid epidemic a "national emergency" in October 2017. Last month, he
signed a comprehensive bill that included $8.5 billion in funding for related projects to
reduce addiction and deaths.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions noted one positive trend in the study.
"Preliminary data from the CDC shows that drug overdose deaths actually began to decline
in late 2017 and opioid prescriptions fell significantly," Sessions said in a statement.
Saudi Arabia has fully complied with OPEC+ agreement in every month through May. Since then
it has cut supply, but by less than it pledged to curb. October is 1st time it has increased
output above the starting point.
WTI has now retraced 60% of the two-year uptrend...
WTI Crude is now down over 6% YTD to its lowest since Dec 2017.
The Democrats are politically responsible for the rise of Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... 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. ..."
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.
After a screening of "Vice" Thursday, I asked McKay which of our two right-wing Dementors
was worse, Cheney or Trump.
"Here's the question," he said.
"Would you rather have a professional assassin after you or a frothing maniac with a meat
cleaver? I'd rather have a maniac with a meat cleaver after me, so I think Cheney is way
worse.
And also, if you look at the body count, more than 600,000 people died in Iraq. It's
not even close, right? "
Modern technology makes many things possible, but it does not make them cheap... The camera
needs to work in pretty adverse conditions (think about the temperature inside the light on a hot
summer day, and temperature at winter) and transmit signal somewhere via WiFi (which has range
less then 100m) , or special cable that needs to be installed for this particular pole. With wifi
there should be many collection units which also cost money. So it make sense only for
streetlights adjacent to building with Internet networking. And there are already cameras of the
highway, so highways are basically covered. Which basically limits this technology to cities.
Just recoding without transmission would be much cheaper (transmission on demand). Excessive
paranoia here is not warranted.
According to new government procurement data, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have purchased an undisclosed number of secret
surveillance cameras that are being hidden in streetlights across the country.
Quartz
first reported this dystopian development of federal authorities stocking up on "covert
systems" last week. The report showed how the DEA paid a Houston, Texas company called Cowboy
Streetlight Concealments LLC. approximately $22,000 since June for "video recording and
reproducing equipment." ICE paid out about $28,000 to Cowboy Streetlight Concealments during
the same period.
"It's unclear where the DEA and ICE streetlight cameras have been installed, or where the
next deployments will take place. ICE offices in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio have
provided funding for recent acquisitions from Cowboy Streetlight Concealments; the DEA's most
recent purchases were funded by the agency's Office of Investigative Technology, which is
located in Lorton, Virginia," said Quartz.
Christie Crawford, who co-owns Cowboy Streetlight Concealments with her husband, said she
was not allowed to talk about the government contracts in detail.
"We do streetlight concealments and camera enclosures," Crawford told Quartz. "Basically,
there's businesses out there that will build concealments for the government and that's what
we do. They specify what's best for them, and we make it. And that's about all I can probably
say."
However, she added: "I can tell you this -- things are always being watched. It doesn't
matter if you're driving down the street or visiting a friend, if government or law enforcement
has a reason to set up surveillance, there's great technology out there to do it."
Quartz notes that the DEA issued a solicitation for "concealments made to house network PTZ
[Pan-Tilt-Zoom] camera, cellular modem, cellular compression device," last Monday. According to
solicitation number D-19-ST-0037, the sole source award will go to Obsidian Integration
LLC.
On November 07, the Jersey City Police Department awarded Obsidian Integration with "the
purchase and delivery of a covert pole camera." Quartz said the filing did not provide much
detail about the design.
It is not just streetlights the federal government wants to mount covert surveillance
cameras on, it seems cameras inside traffic barrels could be heading onto America's highways in
the not too distant future.
And as Quartz reported in October, the DEA operates a complex network of digital
speed-display road signs that covertly scan license plates. On top of all this,
Amazon has been aggressively rolling out its
Rekognition facial-recognition software to law enforcement agencies and ICE, according to
emails uncovered by the Project for Government Oversight.
Chad Marlow, a senior advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, told Quartz that cameras in
street lights have been proposed before by local governments, typically under a program called
"smart" LED street light system.
"It basically has the ability to turn every streetlight into a surveillance device, which
is very Orwellian to say the least," Marlow told Quartz. "In most jurisdictions, the local
police or department of public works are authorized to make these decisions unilaterally and
in secret. There's no public debate or oversight."
And so, as the US continues to be distracted, torn amid record political, social and
economic polarization, big brother has no intention of letting the current crisis go to waste,
and quietly continues on its path of transforming the US into a full-blown police and
surveillance state.
I previously worked for one of these types of federal agencies and to be fair, $50,000
doesn't buy a lot of video surveillance equipment at government procurement costs. The
contractor doesn't just drill a hole and install a camera, they provide an entirely new
streetlight head with the camera installed.
It would be nice if they put some of this technology to work for a good cause. Maybe
warning you of traffic congestion ahead. Or advising you that one of your tires will soon go
flat.
Obviously that won't happen, so in the meantime, I can't wait to read next how the hackers
will find a way to make this government effort go completely haywire. As if the government
can't do it without any help. At least when the hackers do it, it will be funny and
thorough.
Besides the creepy surveillance part, some of the street light tech is interesting .
lights that dim like the frozen food section - when no one is in front of the case --- RGB
lighting that shows the approximate location for EMS to a 911 call ( lights that EMS can
follow by color)
basic neighborhood street lights are being replaced by LED -- lights in this article.
Hey, I have street lights AND cameras on the same poles at the shop/mad scientist lab/
play house.
but- surveillance -- the wall better have these lights -- light up the border !
This is yesteryears news. Shot Spotter has microphones that can pick up whispered
conversations for 300 feet for a long time now, while triangulating any gunshot in a
city...
The flailing New York Times attempted, frantically, to reassemble
George Soros into something resembling a respectable person in its November 1st edition.
The made-up claims and artifices used by the Gray Lady in this respect would tickle Edgar Allen
Poe who chronicled such an effort in his short story, "The Man Who Was All Used Up." If you
know Poe's story, he encounters a pile of clothing and artificial limbs lying on the floor
which begins speaking to him. A man then slowly assembles himself using all artificial parts.
As is typical of this newspaper, the actual George Soros is nowhere to be found in the
article.
The Times describes Soros' fanatical drive to turn the United States into an opium den as
"drug reform." His disgusting crusade which looted Russia and subverted its intelligentsia on
behalf of the City of London is described as "service" on behalf of the United States. His
currency speculations which also destroyed whole countries are described as "intriguing"
investment decisions. The Times goes out of its way to mischaracterize Soros' confessed
adolescent role under the Nazis, working under forged identity papers in his native Hungary, to
confiscate the property of his fellow Jews. In a CBS 60 Minutes interview about this
perfidy, Soros admitted it, and stated that he had no guilt or regrets. Had he not acted in
this way somebody else would have, he said. The experience formed his character. The Times'
only reference to this well-known but inconvenient reality is to state that Soros lived under
the Nazis as a "Christian." But, what can you expect from a newspaper which openly praised
Adolph Hitler in his early incarnations?
The central purpose of the Times piece is name calling: pinning an anti-Semitic label on
those who think Soros is evil, particularly President Donald Trump. The fact that Soros is
funding British spy Christopher Steele's post-FBI existence, and the fact of Soros' continued
direction, participation, and funding of the regime change operation against the President
including many of the operations of RESIST, of course, have nothing to do with Trump's dislike
of George and are never mentioned to the reader. In this exercise, the Times also omits the
Israeli government's recent characterization of George Soros. While condemning recent
anti-Semitic incidents in Hungary, the Israeli Foreign Ministry emphasized that its statement
was not "meant to delegitimize criticism of George Soros, who continuously undermines Israel's
democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and
seek to deny it the right to defend itself." Finally, the Times asserts that all of the facts
now in circulation about George Soros are attributable to Lyndon LaRouche and unnamed Eastern
European tyrants. They link to the New York Times coverage of LaRouche's criminal
conviction. But even the footnote to that linked article makes clear that the Grey Lady can't
even do straight news coverage of a court case when it comes to their bete noire, Lyndon
LaRouche. As the corrective footnote explains, LaRouche was not convicted of substantive fraud
charges, like the Times article about that event asserted. Rather, the footnote explains,
LaRouche was convicted of a broad conspiracy. In truth, this was exactly the same type of Klein
conspiracy Robert Mueller is now using against the Russians he indicted for an alleged small
bore social media campaign in 2016. Klein conspiracies are famously abusive uses of the
conspiracy laws which allow prosecutors to cheat and convict people of made up crimes.
The Times' futile reconstruction effort of course fails, miserably. Soros is, simply, a man
who is all used up. The stuff people recount about him is provably and devastatingly true. The
only error made by his detractors is to believe he has any kind of power anymore. He only has
his money and such fame as comes from being a thoroughly British project –an aging and
overused hitman for the failing City of London.
"... Adam Schiff will shut down the probe that found FBI abuses. ..."
"... Credit for knowing anything at all goes to Intel Chairman Devin Nunes and more recently a joint investigation by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (Judiciary) and Trey Gowdy (Oversight). Over 18 months of reviewing tens of thousands of documents and interviewing every relevant witness, no Senate or House Committee has unearthed evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the presidential election. If Special Counsel Robert Mueller has found more, he hasn't made it public. ..."
"... But House investigators have uncovered details of a Democratic scheme to prod the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign. We now know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS, which hired an intelligence-gun-for-hire, Christopher Steele, to write a "dossier" on Donald Trump's supposed links to Russia. ..."
"... Mr. Steele fed that document to the FBI, even as he secretly alerted the media to the FBI probe that Team Clinton had helped to initiate. Fusion, the oppo-research firm, was also supplying its dossier info to senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion. ..."
"... This abuse of the FBI's surveillance powers took place as part of a counterintelligence investigation into a presidential campaign -- which the FBI also hid from Congress. Such an investigation is unprecedented in post-J. Edgar Hoover American politics, and it included running informants into the Trump campaign, obtaining surveillance warrants, and using national security letters, which are secret subpoenas to obtain phone records and documents. ..."
Adam Schiff will shut down the probe that found FBI abuses.
Arguably the most important power at stake in Tuesday's election was Congressional
oversight, and the most important change may be Adam Schiff at the House Intelligence
Committee. The Democrat says his top priority is re-opening the Trump-Russia collusion probe,
but more important may be his intention to stop investigating how the FBI and Justice
Department abused their power in 2016. So let's walk through what we've learned to date.
Credit for knowing anything at all goes to Intel Chairman Devin Nunes and more recently a
joint investigation by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (Judiciary) and Trey Gowdy (Oversight). Over 18
months of reviewing tens of thousands of documents and interviewing every relevant witness, no
Senate or House Committee has unearthed evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia
to win the presidential election. If Special Counsel Robert Mueller has found more, he hasn't
made it public.
But House investigators have uncovered details of a Democratic scheme to prod the FBI to
investigate the Trump campaign. We now know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the
Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS, which hired an intelligence-gun-for-hire,
Christopher Steele, to write a "dossier" on Donald Trump's supposed links to Russia.
Mr. Steele fed that document to the FBI, even as he secretly alerted the media to the FBI
probe that Team Clinton had helped to initiate. Fusion, the oppo-research firm, was also
supplying its dossier info to senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, Nellie,
worked for Fusion.
House investigators have also documented the FBI's lack of judgment in using the dossier to
obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump aide Carter
Page. The four FISA warrants against Mr. Page show that the FBI relied almost exclusively on
the unproven Clinton-financed accusations, as well as a news story that was also ginned up by
Mr. Steele.
The FBI told the FISA court that Mr. Steele was "credible," despite Mr. Steele having
admitted to Mr. Ohr that he passionately opposed a Trump Presidency. The FBI also failed to
tell the FISA court about the Clinton campaign's tie to the dossier.
This abuse of the FBI's surveillance powers took place as part of a counterintelligence
investigation into a presidential campaign -- which the FBI also hid from Congress. Such an
investigation is unprecedented in post-J. Edgar Hoover American politics, and it included
running informants into the Trump campaign, obtaining surveillance warrants, and using national
security letters, which are secret subpoenas to obtain phone records and documents.
Mr. Nunes and his colleagues also found that officials in Barack Obama's White House
"unmasked" Trump campaign officials to learn about their conversations with foreigners; that
FBI officials exhibited anti-Trump bias in text messages; and that the FBI team that
interviewed then Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn reported that they did not think
Mr. Flynn had lied about his Russian contacts. Mr. Mueller still squeezed Mr. Flynn to cop a
guilty plea.
All of this information had to be gathered despite relentless opposition from Democrats and
their media contacts. Liberal groups ginned up a phony ethics complaint against Mr. Nunes,
derailing his committee leadership for months. Much of the media became Mr. Schiff's scribes
rather than independent reporters. Meanwhile, the FBI and Justice continue to stonewall
Congress, defying subpoenas and hiding names and information behind heavy redactions.
There is still much more the public deserves to know. This includes how and when the FBI's
Trump investigation began, the extent of FBI surveillance, and the role of Obama officials and
foreigners such as Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic who in spring 2016 supposedly told Trump
campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that Russia held damaging Clinton emails. When he takes
over the committee, Mr. Schiff will stop asking these questions and bless the FBI-Justice
refusal to cooperate.
Senate Republicans could continue to dig next year, but Mr. Mueller seems uninterested.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions in March asked Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber to look into FBI
misconduct, but there has been little public reporting of what he is finding, if he is even
still looking. Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz is investigating, though that report
is likely to take many more months.
* * *
All of which puts an additional onus on Mr. Trump to declassify key FBI and Justice
documents sought by Mr. Nunes and other House investigators before Mr. Schiff buries the truth.
A few weeks ago Mr. Trump decided to release important documents, only to renege under pressure
from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and members of the intelligence community.
Mr. Sessions resigned this week and perhaps Mr. Rosenstein will as well. Meantime, Mr. Trump
should revisit his decision and help Mr. Nunes and House Republicans finish the job in the lame
duck session of revealing the truth about the misuse of U.S. intelligence and the FISA court in
a presidential election.
"... Later, it emerged that QIA and Glencore planned to sell the majority of the stake they had acquired in Rosneft to China's energy conglomerate CEFC, but the deal fell through after Beijing set its sights on CEFC and launched an investigation that saw the removal of its chief executive. The investigation was reportedly part of a wide crackdown on illicit business practices on the part of private Chinese companies favored by Beijing. ..."
Russian VTB, a state-owned bank, funded a significant portion of the Qatar Investment
Authority's acquisition of a stake in oil giant Rosneft , Reuters
reports , quoting nine unnamed sources familiar with the deal.
VTB, however, has denied to Reuters taking any part in the deal.
"VTB has not issued and is not planning to issue a loan to QIA to finance the
acquisition," the bank said in response for a request for comment.
The Reuters sources, however, claim VTB provided a US$6 billion loan to the Qatar sovereign
wealth fund that teamed up with Swiss Glencore to acquire 19.5 percent in Rosneft last year.
Reuters cites data regarding VTB's activity issued by the Russian central bank that shows VTB
lent US$6.7 billion (434 billion rubles) to unnamed foreign entities and the loan followed
another loan of US$5.20 billion (350 billion rubles) from the same central bank.
The news first made
headlines in December, taking markets by surprise, as Rosneft's partial privatization was
expected by most to be limited to Russian investors. The price tag on the stake was around
US$11.57 billion (692 billion rubles), of which Glencore agreed to contribute US$324 million.
The remainder was forked over by the Qatar Investment Authority, as well as non-recourse bank
financing.
Russia's budget received about US$10.55 billion (
710.8 billion rubles ) from the deal, including US$ 270 million (18 billion rubles) in
extra dividends. Rosneft, for its part, got an indirect stake in Glencore of 0.54 percent.
Later, it
emerged that QIA and Glencore planned to sell the majority of the stake they had acquired
in Rosneft to China's energy conglomerate CEFC, but the deal fell through after Beijing set its
sights on CEFC and launched an investigation that saw the removal of its chief executive. The
investigation was reportedly part of a wide crackdown on illicit business practices on the part
of private Chinese companies favored by Beijing.
"... With all due cynical respect... I find it highly ironic that some of the biggest money launderers and Mafiosi are Baltic banks. The hilarity never ends. ..."
"... Full scale bull ****. No single former Soviet bloc country get into economic level of pre-Berlin wall fall. They are done. ..."
With all due cynical respect... I find it highly ironic that some of the biggest money
launderers and Mafiosi are Baltic banks. The hilarity never ends.
Here is classic: GDP PPP per capita. What to pay attention.
#1, After 30 years and joining EU and NATO there is no difference in former Soviet bloc.
Just looks like Russia is greatest profiteer. Now those parasites are chained to west.
#2, countries of former Soviet bloc are in better shape than countries that were in sphere
of western imperialism. Especially look at countries where USA imperialism worked since 1823
Monroe's doctrine. Chart shows that in 200 years USA was not able to achieve much progress
despite permanent military interventions and political influence.
As much as I like the idea of taking my state to Estonia status, too many winner-take-all
politicians and weak thinkers to recognize that new borders would solve lots and lots of
problems.
Socialists are clearly smart, but in actuality just simple evil, immoral thieves. They
will be unlikely to support any secession because they know their enemies are the source of
their lucre.
Balkanization, what little there will be, will most likely come after we are drug into
WWIII and we are back to a 1700's subsistence existence.
A pessimist is never disappointed, but I will happily take an optimist's surprise if
people just stop and live and let live.
.............. try, try to "Unchain America" next July 4. What better way to celebrate
Independence Day than with a joining of hands across the land, if not to secede, then to
affirm our right to, one state at a time?
It's 2,790 miles from New York to Los Angeles, which is 14,731,200 feet. At three feet per
person, it would take around 4,910,400 people -- less than 1/66th of the US population -- to
make a human chain like the three Balkan states did.
"... With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect most Democrat leaders now realize that their attempt to take out Judge Brent Kavanaugh with false charges that he sexually assaulted someone in High School was a disaster. Their heavy handed, Bolshevik tactics backfired and galvanized a broad spectrum of Americans who were sickened by the spectacle of a verbal lynch mob being led by the decrepit Diane Feinstein. ..."
"... that he dated Dr. Ford for six years. He said that she never mentioned being the victim of sexual assault or misconduct. He also stated that Dr. Ford did not mention any fear of close quarters or flying, and that the two traveled together, including on a small propeller plane. also said that he witnessed Dr. Ford, drawing from her background in psychology, help prepare her roommate, Ms. Monica McLean, for a potential polygraph examination when Ms. McLean wasinterviewing for jobs with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office. He stated that Dr. Ford helped Ms. McLean become familiar and less nervous about the exam. ..."
"... No! Let's see her tried for perjury with full discovery I will be glad to be a pro bone consultant on that trial and i have a lot of experience. ..."
"... The Dems COULD have made Kavanaugh's support for torture a principled reason for opposing him. ..."
"... The Dems could've raised all kinds of principled objections to Kavanaugh; but tellingly, they chose not to. They chose to take the low road instead. ..."
"... They are complicit. Especially Feinstein. SHe's AOK with torture and 24-7 surveillance. WHat do you expect from an ardent cannabis prohibitionist? ..."
"... Indeed. That would have been a principle worth highlighting. And the question put forward - "Should a torture supporter serve on the Supreme Court?" But..Dianne Feinstein and Chuckie Schumer were never interested in that. All they were interested in was creating a media spectacle and that's exactly what they did by holding on to Ford's letter for 2 months and unleashing it the day before the vote. ..."
"... Christine Ford, Monica McLean and the others should testify to a grand jury. Isn't perjury what they indicted & convicted Gen. Flynn & George Papadopolous for? ..."
"... Why is it that Christine Ford can get away with blatantly and repeatedly lying to Congress about a federal judge but Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos were dragged through court (no doubt at great expense to them) for so-called minor lies to FBI interrogators? ..."
"... Launching 18 USC 1001 prosecutions like so many torpedoes might look expeditious in the short term but in the long term, it will be bad for both the working agent on the street and for justice in the bigger picture. ..."
"... Ford lied to the senate judiciary committee under oath. In your scheme of things people like Avenatti and his female tools can slander and libel at will in conformations even if they are interviewed by the FBI? OK, then the FBI should interview them under oath. ..."
"... If at least one Democrat is going to be removed from the Senate Judiciary Committee as a result of the midterm election realignment, I nominate 'Spartacus' as the guy. ..."
"... Kavanaugh's real crime was he went after Bill Clinton and now he paid the price for it. It's too bad in Yale they don't teach them how to watch their backs in Washington. ..."
"... Brian Merrick has been revealed as the boyfriend. He is a realtor in Malibu. His letter states: " Despite trying to maintain a long distance relationship, I ended the relationship once I discovered that Dr. Ford was unfaithful while living in Hawaii. After the breakup, I took her off the credit card we shared. But nearly 1 year later, I noticed Dr. Ford had been charging the card and charged about $600 worth of merchandise. When confronted, Dr. Ford said she did not use the card but later admitted the use after I threatened to involve fraud prevention." 'Revealed: The Man Accusing Blasey Ford of Lying About Polygraphs.' The Daily Caller, October 3, 2018. https://dailycaller.com/201... ..."
"... A woman who said that she attended UNC with Dr. Ford, identified a third woman, name blotted out, and stated that the three of them "used to purchase drugs" from a male whose name also has been blotted out. The three of them "regularly attended parties with members of his fraternity." The witness said "that she was present at --a blotted out name of an apartment--"one night in April 1987 when Dr. Ford and --someone again blotted out--"arrived to consume drugs." This witness "said that the Dr. Ford she knew had an active and robust social life in college." (Sept.25) ..."
With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect most Democrat leaders now realize
that their attempt to take out Judge Brent Kavanaugh with false charges that he sexually assaulted someone in High School was a disaster.
Their heavy handed, Bolshevik tactics backfired and galvanized a broad spectrum of Americans who were sickened by the spectacle of
a verbal lynch mob being led by the decrepit Diane Feinstein. The truth about the sex-fraud, Dr. Chrissie Ford, is now exposed
by the voluminous report issued by Senator Grassley's Judiciary Committee staff. Read it
here . (
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2018-11-02%20Kavanaugh%20Report.pdf
). Here are the highlights:
The Committee was informed that Dr. Ford had a fear of flying caused by Justice Kavanaugh's alleged sexual assault on her
more than 35 years before. That was a lie and the committee staffers discovered subsequently that Dr. Ford had racked up a ton
of frequent flyer miles. When asked about her fear of flying and about whether she had ever helped anyone prepare for a polygraph
examination, Dr. Ford acknowledged that she flew to the hearing and traveled by plane for work and leisure. Indeed, Dr. Ford listed
on her CV that one of her hobbies includes international surf travel.
The Judiciary staffers interviewed 17 people who had information about Dr. Ford's allegations. No one could corroborate her
claims about Judge Kavanaugh. In fact, two men testified that they had a contact with Dr. Ford as teen-agers that was in line
with the account provided by Dr. Ford except that it was consensual.
A long time boyfriend of Chrissie testified:
that he dated Dr. Ford for six years. He said that she never mentioned being the victim of sexual assault or misconduct. He also
stated that Dr. Ford did not mention any fear of close quarters or flying, and that the two traveled together, including on a small
propeller plane. also said that he witnessed Dr. Ford, drawing from her background in psychology, help prepare her roommate, Ms.
Monica McLean, for a potential polygraph examination when Ms. McLean wasinterviewing for jobs with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's
Office. He stated that Dr. Ford helped Ms. McLean become familiar and less nervous about the exam. The Judiciary Committee report
also details the allegations and findings from others who alleged sexual misconduct by the Judge. It was all a pack of lies. A contrived
hit job intended to destroy the man's reputation and try to cow him into backing away from the nomination. That bullying tactic failed
spectacularly. It ended up rallying a broad swath of the American public, especially women, who understand fairness and justice.
The injustice on display by the Democrats ended up helping the Republicans nail down a bigger majority in the Senate. Look for fewer
Democrat seats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Absolutely agree. With Nadler now openly talking about impeaching Kavanaugh, there is no alternative. The truth must be brought
out. The alternative is to leave him exposed permanently and keep this whole plan viable for use against future nominees. With
RBG approaching retirement this is critical.
Getting to the actual facts would be a great good. But we know that will not happen. The administration and the senate have already
shown their attitude toward professional quality investigation. That appears to be the last thing they want. If they actually
believed any of what they said, they would follow your advice. We will see.
On second thought that is probably an unfair standard. Opening up discovery for a trial would have negative effects even for
a very solid case.
"The administration and the senate have already shown their attitude toward professional quality investigation."
You mean the Mueller "Russia" investigation? That is beyond a joke at this point. Dr. Ford should be charged. She's got $1 million
or more from the go bribe fund me accounts. She should lawyer up. So should Ms. Mclean.
I think the lesson to be learned is that getting all the facts simply cannot be done, which is why we have a statute of limitations,
and why Dr. Ford's accusation should not ever have seen the light of day 30 years after the purported event.
Most liberals seem to think the statute of limitations has to do with the purported offender "living with guilt," but the law
does not acknowledge the "sensation of guilt." The statute is because after a period of time the offense cannot be fairly prosecuted
because witnesses die or move away, memories fade, evidence degrades or disappears, and so forth, and this shoddy exhibition is
proof of the validity of that principle.
I do not see how you can fault Grassley's efforts to get the facts. He bent over backward to accommodate the Democrats lies about
Kavanaugh and the WH authorized the the additional FBI investigation.
The Dems COULD have made Kavanaugh's support for torture a principled reason for opposing him. Then if they lost, which they were
likely going to do anyway, it would have at least been considered fair politics and it would have placed the spotlight on a very
ugly chapter in the country's recent history that needs to be addressed.
Shaming, shunning, bullying, threats of violence, and violence are all now accepted as methods by the left. They are totally consumed
in a political tribalism. Rather than raising the moral standards of the group they are using the most primitive instincts and
you can see this in many of the tweets from the left that use gross sexual imagery to demean their "enemies".
The more I read on group psychology such as Freud, Le Bon, etc. the more concerned I become whether the age of reason, principles,
and science will survive group psychosis given the powerful tools like social media enabling it. Social media is one of the most
dangerous technologies we have developed.
"In order to make a correct judgment upon the morals of groups, one must take into consideration the fact that when individuals
come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive
instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification. But under
the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion
to an ideal.
While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely
prominent.
It is possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by a group. Whereas the intellectual capacity
of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as
high above his as it may sink deep below it." - Gustave Le Bon
Indeed. That would have been a principle worth highlighting. And the question put forward - "Should a torture supporter serve
on the Supreme Court?" But..Dianne Feinstein and Chuckie Schumer were never interested in that. All they were interested in was
creating a media spectacle and that's exactly what they did by holding on to Ford's letter for 2 months and unleashing it the
day before the vote.
Christine Ford, Monica McLean and the others should testify to a grand jury. Isn't perjury what they indicted & convicted Gen.
Flynn & George Papadopolous for?
The recent accident that RBG experienced has probably caused both Democrats and Republicans some concern that there may soon be
another Supreme Court seat to fill under a Trump administration.
Why is it that Christine Ford can get away with blatantly and repeatedly lying to Congress about a federal judge but Michael Flynn
and George Papadopoulos were dragged through court (no doubt at great expense to them) for so-called minor lies to FBI interrogators?
Off topic: I'd love to read PT's take on the mid-term election with attention paid to the boxes of suddenly-discovered ballots
in AZ that have put (wouldn't you know!) Democratic Senate candidate Sinema in the lead. And in light of the FL recount, I'd also
be interested in what he has to say about the flagrant disregard for chain of custody of [the infamous] Broward Co. boxes of ballots.
Why is it that ballots discovered post-election day always seem to help Democrats? I don't recall ever reading or hearing about
newly-discovered ballots that benefited Republican candidates.
In my experience lying to the FBI, 18 USC 1001, was used very, very infrequently. It was used as an add on charge in the prosecution
of some of the Watergate subjects and they had been placed under oath. It was used to my knowledge to prosecute an individual
who had made a false accusatory statement in the Ray Donavan investigation in the early 80's, another debacle instigated by Senate
Democrats. Otherwise it was rarely used, and it shouldn't be used in my opinion unless the person has been given a
separate warning
and waiver, or placed under oath.
Once Big Government has opened the floodgates on prosecuting people for lying to the FBI, especially when it becomes obvious that
it is being used selectively, and in isolation in order to hang a charge on somebody in pursuit of manifestly political ends,
cooperation with FBI Agents trying to do their job will, and should, dry up. Who needs to take a chance on some partisan operation,
such as Bob Mueller, parsing their adverbs and adjectives for signs of deceit when the option is to take advantage of your right
to silence.
Launching 18 USC 1001 prosecutions like so many torpedoes might look expeditious in the short term but in the long term, it will
be bad for both the working agent on the street and for justice in the bigger picture.
Ford lied to the senate judiciary committee under oath. In your scheme of things people like Avenatti and his female tools can
slander and libel at will in conformations even if they are interviewed by the FBI? OK, then the FBI should interview them under
oath.
If at least one Democrat is going to be removed from the Senate Judiciary Committee as a result of the midterm election realignment,
I nominate 'Spartacus' as the guy.
Now that there's a new AG in town--one who isn't either cowed, incompetent, or possibly blackmailed--Mrs.Ford may get her just
deserts.
Kavanaugh's real crime was he went after Bill Clinton and now he paid the price for it. It's too bad in Yale they don't teach
them how to watch their backs in Washington.
"The injustice on display by the Democrats ended up helping the Republicans nail down a bigger majority in the Senate. Look
for fewer Democrat seats on the Senate Judiciary Committee."
While this may have held true for the Senate, it didn't in the House.
I agree with you in the sense that many of the Democrat candidates did not take the ultra progressive (socialist?) path. Many
seemed more centrist.
That was the result of state and country Democratic parties.
I think this because I definitely see a difference in the different county Republican parties in my state.
Unfortunately in my state (CO) what happens in Boulder and Denver usually carries. And as we say in CO, Boulder is about 40
square miles surrounded by reality. Denver is becoming a similar alternate reality.
Thus, I am ashamed to say, our current Governor is a person from a quite alternate reality from the one in which I live.
Brian Merrick has been revealed as the boyfriend. He is a realtor in Malibu. His letter states: " Despite trying to maintain a
long distance relationship, I ended the relationship once I discovered that Dr. Ford was unfaithful while living in Hawaii. After
the breakup, I took her off the credit card we shared. But nearly 1 year later, I noticed Dr. Ford had been charging the card
and charged about $600 worth of merchandise. When confronted, Dr. Ford said she did not use the card but later admitted the use
after I threatened to involve fraud prevention."
'Revealed: The Man Accusing Blasey Ford of Lying About Polygraphs.' The Daily Caller, October 3, 2018.
https://dailycaller.com/201...
A male witness "(Sept. 26): stated that when he was a 19-year-old college student, he visited D.C. over spring break and kissed
a girl he believes was Dr. Ford. He said that the kiss happened in the bedroom of a house which was about a 15-to- 20 minute walk
from the Van Ness Metro, that Dr. Ford was wearing a swimsuit under her clothing, and that the kissing ended when a friend jumped
on them as a joke. The witness said that the woman initiated the kissing and that he did not force himself on her. "
A woman who said that she attended UNC with Dr. Ford, identified a third woman, name blotted out, and stated that the three
of them "used to purchase drugs" from a male whose name also has been blotted out. The three of them "regularly attended parties
with members of his fraternity." The witness said "that she was present at --a blotted out name of an apartment--"one night in
April 1987 when Dr. Ford and --someone again blotted out--"arrived to consume drugs." This witness "said that the Dr. Ford she
knew had an active and robust social life in college." (Sept.25)
PT, thanks very much for posting this.
I cannot find any mention of this Judiciary Committee report at the Washington Post web site.
They had a ton of coverage of Ford's allegation before the vote, including a lengthy interview with her current husband.
It says a lot about them that they have, unless I have missed something, ignored this report.
Could the reason they are ignoring it be that they don't want to publicize anything which contradicts the line that "Women tell
the truth"?
A line that they have used to great political effect, in particular in the sinking of the Senate candidacy of Judge Roy Moore
of Alabama.
"... By Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and a political economist. He has been described by the Guardian newspaper as an "anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert". He is Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London and Director of Tax Research UK. He is a non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics . He is a member of the Progressive Economy Forum. Originally published at Tax Research UK ..."
"... 'a research paper by Hendrik Bessembinder published in the September edition of the Journal of Financial Economics posed the question "Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?" with some rather worrying conclusions for most equity investors. ..."
"... the view that stock markets themselves create value ..."
"... the view that stock markets themselves create value ..."
"... One aspect not touched upon is stocks are loans that never get repaid. If I pay $100 of a share and the company thrives. I get paid dividends in perpetuity. Plus, If I buy that share from someone who already had bought it (a trade) I am being paid when I actually provided none of the original loan (like a bank buying the "paper" from another bank). Someone calculated that the dividends paid by Apple have paid off the amount originally tendered by several hundred percent, which would make them the worst bank loans in all of creation. ..."
As many readers will know, I am not the greatest fan of stock markets. I consider most
activity on such markets to be exploitative because of the asymmetry of the information
available to investors. Much of it, from the pay directors take to the actions of most market
managers, I consider to be rent seeking. The idea that equities provide strong returns is
pretty much an urban myth, in my opinion, based on selective reading of data in those periods
between market crashes.
There is quite a lot of evidence to support my view in an article by long-term and highly
opinionated equity investor Terry Smith in the
FT this morning . As he notes he did this based on 'a research paper by Hendrik
Bessembinder published in the September edition of the Journal of Financial Economics posed the
question "Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?" with some rather worrying conclusions for most
equity investors. ' I should make clear that the research is US based. I have no reason to
think that performance in the UK is any different.
The main conclusions is that the majority of shares do not perform nearly as well as
government bonds. It is an exceptional few that make it look as though shares outperform
gilts.
Since 1977 the median new shares issued on the stock exchange has delivered a negative rate
of return, even with dividends reinvested.
On average, a quoted security has a life expectancy of just 7.5 years over the 90 year
period studied. No wonder short-termism is rife.
And as he notes:
Just five companies out of the universe of 25,967 in the study account for 10 per cent of
the total wealth creation over the 90 years, and just over 4 per cent of the companies
account for all of the wealth created.
So, what is to be learned?
First, the stock exchange is not a business funding mechanism: it is a business exit
strategy for most companies.
Second, most people are fools to take part in this game.
Third, if you insist on taking part only invest in the best stocks.
Fourth, since you have no way of knowing which ones they are, invest in a market
tracker.
Or fifth, buy gilts.
But whatever you don't believe the story that the market deliver higher rates of return than
government bonds: 96% of it does not.
When 43 pushed the privatization of Social Security through more 401k and similar
approaches my immediate thought was that he was rationalizing the transfer of wealth and
increased fees to Wall Street. Someday there will be a post-mortem about Neo-Liberalism and
that episode merits at least a footnote. To escape the memory hole.
Don't forget that Clinton had reached a deal with Gingerich to privatize up to half of the
Social Security Trust Fund in the stock market, which was only derailed by the Lewinski
scandal. Clinton was scheduled to unveil this at the State of the Union address the week
after the Lewinski story started to break, and pulled back because he was advised that if he
were impeached he'd need the Democrats in the Senate to avoid conviction. Google "Robert
Kuttner" "Clinton" and "Social Security" to get the details. There's also a book called "The
Pact" by Steven Gillon that documents the back channel negotiations, which were conducted by
Erskine Bowles, Clinton's last Chief of Staff.
It would have been the ultimate Neo-Liberal betrayal of the party of FDR, but we were
saved by a blue dress. Amazing story, not nearly as well known as it should be. We might have
been spared the Hillary Clinton phenomenon.
I don't want my Social Security benefits to be any kind of loan that has to be repaid.
That just gives the government another way to cut my benefits at some point.
I don't want Wall Street to get one penny of the contributions I have made to Social
Security for the past 50 years. They don't deserve it!
Your proposal is no more than a neoliberal justification for subjecting the Social
Security system to the depredations of the "Market", allowing the rentiers to get their cut
off the top.
Remember that taxes don't really pay for government expenses in a fiat system; don't
forget MMT.
Accounts are not real wealth any more than the map is the territory (CF Korzibsky and
general semantics). The stock market, as well as the bond market, are accounting gizmos, and
accounting is not actual wealth creation, and neither does owning stocks or binds produce
anything real.
Anyone investing in bonds in the low interest rate environment that has prevailed these
past ten years would disagree, I think.
I call rubbish on this article. Not my experience. My investing strategy is to follow the
oligarchs. Invest in stocks that make money by destroying the planet. Take profits when
things look toppy. Reinvest dividends.
Buy bonds at your own peril. Maybe when rates are in the 6% plus range but we're a long
way from that.
The main conclusions is that the majority of shares do not perform nearly as well as
government bonds. It is an exceptional few that make it look as though shares outperform
gilts.
Since 1977 the median new shares issued on the stock exchange has delivered a negative
rate of return, even with dividends reinvested.
On average, a quoted security has a life expectancy of just 7.5 years over the 90 year
period studied. No wonder short-termism is rife.
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A Couple More Points To Consider 
