Yves here. At least some of whom are in the left are not accepting the premise that they must ignore the Democratic Party’s sorry record and back Kamala Harris.
And keep this point of view in mind:
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 23, 2024
By Robert Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
“If we lose, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” US General Curtis Lemay speaking of the US firebombing of Tokyo (and here) in WWII.
In addition to the war against Russia that the US launched with its coup in Ukraine of 2014, the next president of the US will have the US role in the genocide in Palestine to contend with. With respect to US relations abroad, it would be one thing if these conflicts had been forced on the US. But they weren’t. They were chosen by the Biden-Harris administration as part of its too-little, too-late, recognition that US-based capital, Wall Street acting in league with subsidized industries like Big Tech, has destroyed the US economy for most workers, meaning citizens.
Over the years, the position of Joe Biden with respect to China has been paradoxical. Or less charitably, incoherent. Biden joined with the (Bill) Clinton administration in 2000 to ‘normalize’ US trade relations with China so as to facilitate its entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization) in 2001. This followed Biden’s support for NAFTA (1994), which established the institutional circumstances by which the American manufacturing base was handed over to China. It was decided that American workers would either be bond traders or fentanyl addicts. What they wouldn’t be is industrial workers. Too many unions.
Graphic: NATO was formed as a residual of American power in Europe following WWII. For the uninitiated, the US lost 400,000 people in WWII while the Russians, then Soviets, lost 27,000,000. In the present, as cover for, or denial of, US imperialism abroad, NATO has successfully changed the subject from domestic economic looting to ‘Great Power politics.’ Post-War ideological competition washed the ethos of Western imperialism, euphemisms and all, through the cleansing agent of theories that need never come into contact with their facts. Sources: US Embassy, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
The outcome of five decades of neoliberal (capitalist) predation looks remarkably like Marxist analyses of the first half of the twentieth century had it. The GFC (global financial crisis) and the Great Recession that followed it led to a full recovery of the predatory economy, the one where raw political and economic power are used not simply to loot, but through lawfare, surveillance, and factionalized labor markets. to pin Americans under the repressive boot of unfettered capital. This is the world that the Biden-Harris administration was appointed to perpetuate.
The political analog, possibly easier to see because it is fresh in the minds of Americans, is the gathering of oligarch donors to select Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ candidate for president. The fake emergency regarding Joe Biden’s age— the man was widely understood to be unable to distinguish fact from fantasy (and here) forty years ago, was used to render visible the class dynamic that has a tiny cabal of corporate welfare queens and trust-fund opportunists openly and explicitly determining Federal policy.
Maps: the Russian complaint that NATO surrounded its western border after the US, Germany, and France individually and jointly promised not to, is an abstraction to Americans. In fact, the US has an answer to the question of what would happen if the Russians took actions similar to the US. It was called the Cuban Missile Crisis. Impressively, the story that Americans have been told about it is total bullshit. Not only had the Americans secretly placed nuclear weapons aimed at Moscow in Italy before the Russians sent weapons to Cuba, but word had it (link above) that JFK only had a fraction of the information that he needed regarding the US actions that precipitated the crisis. Source: cnbc.com.
While the capitalist press loves to tout the self-made nature of ‘wealth’ in the US, the richest of the Forbes 400 all saw their fortunes multiplied by the Federal Reserve’s relentless drive to raise the prices of financial assets since 2008. For example. Microsoft has a business that produces computer hardware and software. But it also has shares in the company that trade in financial markets. To the extent that Microsoft’s shares trade above the value of Microsoft as a going concern, wealth ‘creation’ is illusory. What is achieved in financial markets is redistribution upwards, not wealth creation.
This was / is part of the problem created by the Wall Street bailouts of 2008. Shares are owned by the rich. If memory serves, 90% of stocks are owned by the richest 10% of the population. Of this 10%, the very rich own a large preponderance of these shares. The American myth that people get rich by creating social (economic) value misses that in a financialized economy, the Federal Reserve plays a major role in economic distribution. Since 2008, the Fed has labored nonstop to make the very rich much, much, richer.
Graph: Democrats have a choice of crediting the phenomenal rise in the wealth of the very rich during the Biden-Harris administration to either the business acumen of the billionaire class or to the actions of the Federal Reserve. The graph clearly illustrates an ‘exogenous’ driver of the rise in wealth— the Federal Reserve. Otherwise, the results would be mixed. Capitalist economists credit the entire rise in the wealth of the rich to business acumen. Here is the Forbes 400 list. Please read Forbes’ explanation of this argument to understand why this is a problem for the rest of us. Source: inequality.org.
This all ties back to the subject at hand, electoral politics in the US, through the role that wealthy donors just played in the elevation of Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ candidate for president. Again, if great wealth indicated a greater social contribution, that would have one meaning. But what it indicates in this case is that an agency of the Federal government made it its mission to make already rich people much, much, richer. This is part of the argument for why Barack Obama was a disaster as president. He rebuilt this rigged system whereby all social wealth is institutionally organized to flow upwards. And that is why oligarchs are supporting the Democrats.
It is US foreign policy that ties this post-bailout economic dysfunction to the empire-in-decline-that-is-acting-out-abroad that the US now represents. Readers are welcomed to agree or disagree with the characterizations of US foreign policy presented here. But what you can’t disagree with are the facts. A team of professional liars, prevaricators, and bullshit artists were apparently assigned to countering the fact that the Russians were repeatedly told by US and European officials that NATO would be kept away from Russia’s border. As the second graph up illustrates, between 1990 and 2023, NATO has surrounded Russia’s western border with the exceptions of Ukraine and Georgia.
Irrespective of whether or not you agree with the Russian position on the matter, the Russians have a legitimate grievance under any reasonable reading of this history. But what was it that elevated a thirty-year-old (dis)agreement to geopolitical relevance in 2022? That would be the 2014 US-led coup in Ukraine (link above) in which the US assumed control of the Ukrainian political system. Here is the infamous phone call in which Americans Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt selected the post-coup Ukrainian government. The people that Nuland said that she would put in office were put in office.
Following the US-led coup in Ukraine and the selection of the post-coup government by American neocons, the CIA built permanent facilities on the Ukrainian border with Russia with which to surveil and attack the Russians. Further, as (Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs) Victoria Nuland put it in 2022, eight years after the US-led coup in Ukraine took place, Ukraine was (is) loaded to the gills with bioweapons labs. Whatever their genesis (Soviet, US), the US had controlled Ukraine for nearly a decade before Nuland admitted their existence.
Graphic: it is telling to see how openly and crudely racist Israelis are toward Palestinians in their social media posts. While seeing the Israelis channeling their inner Nazis has a depressing, Freudian, quality to it, seeing Americans like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump doing everything in their power to perpetuate a racist genocide is even sadder, if not quite as Freudian. Presumably, Biden – Harris wouldn’t be engaged in such an act unless they thought it to be in the strategic interest of the US. But if this were the case, why is every word they say about it be a lie? Sources: al Jazeera English, Wikipedia.
With respect to the US – Israeli genocide currently underway in Palestine, Kamala Harris recently repeated the materially false Biden administration – Israeli state narrative around the Hamas attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023. As a recent analysis by Haaretz revealed, a material proportion— up to half, of the Israelis killed on October 7 were killed by the IDF (Israel Defense Force) under the Hannibal Directive issued by the Israeli political leadership. Further, the claims that Hamas used sexual violence— the ‘mass rape’ narrative, has been debunked by reporters at The Grayzone (see here, here, here).
The social dynamic that this factionalized ‘truth’ creates is of political cults that believe every word handed them by people they trust, as they discount every word uttered by those in competing political cults. Instead of wielding political power, the members of these cults exist to trade group-affirming talking points on social media, exhibiting little awareness that the leaders of both cults work for the same corporate chieftains and oligarchs. Or if not the exact same corporate chieftains and oligarchs, those who hold similar political – economic roles in different cults.
That Kamala Harris knew, or should have known, that what she was telling her constituents about the US conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine is untrue has political importance. Because she is an allegedly functioning adult who is vying for an official position of power in a major nation, she should know the facts of these conflicts. That there was no distance between her recitation of fake facts and that of the Pentecostal wing of the Republican party illustrates the conundrum. A necessary first step to solving problems is to understand their causes.
The model on which the US and Israeli responses to October 7 appear to be based is 9/11. Readers will recall that the George W. Bush administration was never made to give sworn testimony to the 9/11 commission regarding its knowledge of events, and 2) was allowed to redact the pages of the Report issued by the commission that implicated the Saudis in the attacks. Both decisions were superficially defensible. There is a separation of powers issue with compelling sworn testimony from a sitting president. And the Saudis were (in theory) US allies, in addition to being business partners with the Bush family.
Little need be said with respect to the fact that fewer than half of Americans believe the official explanation of 9/11, or that about half of Americans (link above) believe that the Federal government of the US was behind the attacks. While this may be interesting, it isn’t the point. The Bush administration entered office in 2001 intent on launching a war against Iraq. In addition to redirecting attention away from the Saudis, Bush attributed knowingly false motives for the 9/11 attacks to the Iraqis. Here is (Saudi national) Osama bin Laden explaining why al Qaeda attacked the US on 9/11.
Along with Wall Street’s implosion of the economy in 2008, public disillusion over the US war in Iraq represents a lynchpin in the imperial decline that the US is now decades into. George W. Bush lied the people who historically have fought American wars into going to Iraq based on false claims about why they were doing so. Bush’s ‘pre-emptive war’ relied on a credible threat having been posed by Iraq that simply did not exist. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11captures the psychological panic that the Bush administration successfully conjured to coerce Americans into fighting its war.
But actions have consequences. Having been lied into losing lives, limbs, and / or killing Iraqi civilians to put another dollar or two on Halliburton’s stock price, much of the soldier class was subsequently foreclosed on and / or rendered unemployed by Wall Street. These are the people that American liberals and ‘the Left’ were calling ‘fascists’ 2016 – present because they wouldn’t vote for the people who lied them into the war in Iraq and then took their houses as their jobs were systematically disappeared in the Great Recession.
Each of these acts undertaken against the interests of the American people features one or more groups or actors that purposely undertook them to enrich themselves and / or to accrue power. Neither the US war in Iraq, the GFC, nor the Great Recession, were facts of nature. They were each caused by the acts of some humans seeking to benefit from taking from other humans. In class terms, these were the actions of the rich preying on the rest of us. Each act had systemic drivers requiring institutional mediation. The rich have organized the US to vacuum up social wealth for their own benefit.
The ready-made genocide, genocide-in-a-box if you will, that the US and Israel have engaged in in Palestine since October 7, 2023 never looked like a response to the attack by Hamas. It has looked like an effort to exterminate the people of Gaza since it began. Supporting this interpretation have been Israeli Zionists who have said straightforwardly(and here, here, here, here) and repeatedly that ‘clearing’ Palestine of Palestinians is the goal. Here is Israeli Zionist Chanamel Dorfman, aide to Israeli Defense Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, complaining that the Nazis killed the wrong people. Is this really an argument worth making?
Graphic: Some, possibly many, readers will be offended by conflation of Kamala Harris’s likely policies with those of the Biden administration. After all, she’s her own person, runs the logic. However, ensuring that Harris isn’t her own person was the entire point of the oligarchs (donors) interviewing her before elevating her as their candidate. They wouldn’t have elevated her if they hadn’t liked what they heard in the interviews. More than anything else, it is this idea of personality-driven politics that unites American liberals with their fascist forebears. As long as hippie-earth-mother is willing to slaughter a million Palestinians for Israeli fascists, hire her! That doing so means that she never was hippie-earth-mother won’t be understood until after the money has been deposited in the bank.
So, when Kamala Harris repeats largely or fully debunked charges of Palestinian crimes on October 7 as if they really happened while ignoring evidence that the Israelis are knowingly and intentionally acting to exterminate the Palestinian people in Palestine, possible explanations include that she is misinformed, knowingly lying, or that she is incapable of separating truth from fiction. Alternatively, if the truth supports her position on the war, why is she lying? The reasonable inference to draw is that Harris knows that the truth doesn’t support her position. 
Chart: the great mystery of US foreign policy has finally been solved. Quickly, what is it that unites Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Libya in the minds of US foreign policy officials? Well, the officials— most of whom are currently engaged in a racist genocide in Palestine, would say that these nations are all ‘authoritarian.’ With billionaire donors and the CIA currently ‘overseeing’ American elections, the contrast that gave the fear of fascism its punch is looking more like a merging of interests. Source: worldometers.info.
Readers will recall that the George W. Bush administration wove the alleged facts of 9/11 into its policy decision to launch a war against Iraq. The purpose was to frame the war as defensive when it was an offensive war. It wasn’t until no weapons of mass destruction had been found and the war was coming unwound (2005) that a single true fact regarding 9/11 or the war could be uttered in the US. Further, with ‘loyalty oaths’ (to their administration) required for citizens to gain admittance to public rallies featuring government officials, the Bush administration understood the fascist roots of its political program.
What Harris’s statement (link above) regarding events in Palestine and Ukraine indicates is that she has fully internalized the lies emanating from US and Israeli officials regarding US foreign policy, and that she will act as if they are true if she is elected president. As with the KKK using emotive terms like ‘international Jewry’ to signify group allegiance, the Democrats have a fully developed internal discourse around US foreign policy that is unquestioned and unquestionable. It was hardly ironic then that Joe Biden was George W. Bush’s point man in selling the false story of Iraq’s WMDs to Democrats.
With all that is, and isn’t, being said by leading Democrats about the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, it is the facts on the ground that future US political leaders will be forced to reckon with. Russia’s western border is zero miles from Ukraine, whereas Washington DC is 5,000 miles from Kiev. US weapons and materiel are fussy and ludicrously expensive. Russian weapons and materiel are robust and designed to maximize lethality, versus the US goal of maximizing profits for the MIC. In other words, it was capitalism that rendered the American MIC considerably worse than useless.
US participation in the genocide in Palestine recalls the arguments of philosophers and scholars following WWII that what it was that differentiated the Holocaust from ordinary history was the effort by the Nazis to exterminate a people— the Jews. However, reading the quote from US General Curtis LeMay above regarding the firebombing of Tokyo, which he led, doesn’t impart a sense of a self-evident moral difference between Allied actions in WWII and those of the Axis Powers. Lemay didn’t see one, at any rate.
Within the frame of ‘military valor’ (that is not endorsed here), LeMay was an actual hero in WWII. The firebombing of Tokyo that he led burned 100,000 Japanese civilians alive on its first night. All told, the firebombing of civilian populations in Japan ended up killing between 330,000 and 900,000 people. Additionally, the allies bombed civilian populations in Germany relentlessly, with the bombing of Dresden being one of the better-known cases.
From the perspective of the present, civilian deaths from American wars are plausibly viewed as ‘collateral damage.’ But they aren’t collateral— meaning unintended even if predictable, because the civilians were intentionally targeted. Here, Osama bin Laden explains why he believed that American civilians were legitimate targets in the 9/11 attacks. For Americans who imagine that the illusion of democracy, fake democracy if you will, protects them from political reprisals for US actions taken abroad, the bin Laden letter is essential reading.
During the Cold War, General LeMay advocated pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the USSR (now Russia) and China (link above) while the US still had a strategic advantage by way of its larger nuclear arsenal. This didn’t mean ‘strategically’ or ‘surgically’ striking Command Centers— it meant slaughtering half-a-billion civilians—while they were wholly or partially defenseless. How then were Americans in 1965 morally horrified by the Holocaust when in ordinary conversations they advocated forcefully for the murder of half-a-billion innocents?
The lesson that the so-called intelligence agencies learned through the psychological manipulation of the American public during the Cold War was that once the groundwork— the instilling of unreasoned fears, had been laid, Americans would agree to pretty much anything. Even after no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq and the war had turned into the predictable catastrophe that it was, most Americans still found inane drivel about ‘freedom’ attached to the war to be compelling. To money-shot from the epoch: ‘freedom ain’t free.’
An aspect shared between Zionism and Nazism is the conceptual shift from the general claim of peoples with rights as such to the claim that particular peoples are special, and therefore deserve special rights. Following WWII, the argument was put forward that it was the Nazi effort to exterminate an entire people— the Jews, that separated the Holocaust from ordinary history. The Zionist shift from the defense of the rights of ‘peoples’ to the special rights of Jews recreated a variation on the racial case claimed by the Nazis.
The Nazis held retrograde racial views (borrowed from American eugenicists) that they claimed distinguished them from the rest of humanity. The Zionist claim is that Jews are God’s chosen people, and that this distinguishes them from the rest of humanity. The Nazi’s ‘Thousand-year Reich’ lasted about fifteen years. This is evidence against the claim that the Nazis possessed superior racial qualities. Likewise, if the Jews are God’s chosen people, why not leave the public assertions of this fact to their God? In fact, like American Pentecostals, they don’t trust their own God to follow scripture as they have interpreted it.
The practical problem with both theories is that there are about eight billion humans on the planet, most of whom are on the wrong side of Nazi / Zionist supremacy. That Democrats can’t see American racial history in the Zionist’s treatment of Palestinians might be bizarre if it weren’t so politically convenient. In 2024, American Democrats, led by the senior leadership of their party, are consciously and knowingly supporting a genocide against a racial, religious, and ethnic minority in Palestine. This makes them racists engaged in a racist genocide.
The social destruction being caused by both American conflicts ties to this latter point. WWI begat WWII. Further, it was the Biden administration’s decision to place these conflicts within the broader frame of economic competition between nations. Anyone who has followed the environmental back-and-forth of recent years knows that renewed imperial competition has been underway for decades now. A race is on by the US to secure the resources needed to fulfill the Democrats’ EV fantasies. As usual, the effort is bounded by too-convenient assertions that they can’t cross ‘their’ donors because Trump!
Graph: the Biden administration’s claim that it engineered a major recovery in manufacturing employment in the US isn’t a reason to uncork the champagne just yet. The facts are that ‘the Biden miracle’ was a reflexive recovery following the catastrophe of the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden’s real contribution to manufacturing employment came through his support for NAFTA. Additionally, Biden supported the normalization of trade relations with China that facilitated China’s admission to the WTO in 2001. Together, these caused the precipitous decline from 19.5 million manufacturing workers in 1980 to 13 million today. Source: Federal Reserve of St. Louis.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald has done a respectable job of identifying and commenting on the delusion, ignorance, and hypocrisy of the young Democrats now rushing to support Harris. As was the case with young Democrats in 2020, the response is Pavlovian. Good dog. What a good dog. Now, rollover and play dead. While the officials of various Federal agencies must be beaming with pride at their ability to manipulate electoral politics with such finesse, they have created the political equivalent of highly processed foods.
As the current American political leadership effectively demonstrates, capitalists favor having compliant, not-bright, people holding public office to do their bidding. This isn’t to suggest that a cabal of evil geniuses is running things. Having met and had long conversations with many very rich people, the only class dumber than the US political class are the oligarchs. What part of the nuclear annihilation that Biden-Harris are working so hard to bring about in Ukraine don’t Harris’s oligarch benefactors understand?
Tying this back to economics for a moment, the Democrat’s focus on child ‘influencers’ in Chicago was more than just political marketing. Following from 1990s Republican neoliberal Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, influencers, Uber drivers, cashiers, fentanyl dealers, financial advisors, crypto speculators, disinformation specialists, personal shoppers, bud-tenders, and dog-walkers represent the culmination of the Democrats’ industrial policy. So no, your ‘career’ picking up dog crap in the street (‘piece work’) isn’t how your grandparents raised a family.
The lever for Greenwald’s critique (above) is incongruity— the fact that reconciliation by the young with the party of Genocide Joe appears to have been so quick and easy. The ‘Hitler Youth’ quality of the conversion was / is impressive. However, what is the alternative? Toll-booth Zionist Trump! has already committed to the pay-as-you-go slaughter of Palestinians funded by Miriam Adelson. The only antiwar candidate in the upcoming is Jill Stein, whom the Democrats have successfully marginalized. But if you’re going to vote, Stein is the best (only) hope for the US.
In fact, the purpose of the American one-party system, the uniparty, is to ensure that nothing changes. Or rather, the faces change, but the policies stay the same. The hope held by Democrats that Harris’s policies will be less genocidal than Biden’s misses that the only people who interviewed her before she was elevated to be their candidate for president were donors. In fact, the donors are the glue that holds the uniparty together. How else could, marketing chatter aside, Biden and Trump have nearly identical policies?
Finally, not a word of this essay is anti-American. Opposing US foreign policy— the product of an antique and decrepit MIC filtered through the corrupt and dysfunctional American system of political graft, is to argue that the policies of officialdom run counter to the larger interests of the US and the world. Anti-Americanism is precisely what the George W. Bush administration engaged in when it lied the US into war with Iraq.
Further, the Germans are still apologizing for the Nazis seven decades after they were defeated in WWII. The Biden administration’s choice to emulate the Nazis by engaging in racist genocide likewise will have one meaning in the short term, and quite another in the longer term. As I wrote in multiple essays before the 2020 election, Joe Biden, like George W. Bush before him, is the embodiment of imperial decline. Kamala Harris represents an effort to put a fresh face on the same old imperialist foreign policy. You can understand this now or three years from now. The choice is yours.
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“…part of the argument for why Barack Obama was a disaster as president… He rebuilt this rigged system whereby all social wealth is institutionally organized to flow upwards.”
This is as fine a description of St. O’s legacy as has been written. Kudos to Mr. Urie, and thank you for reposting this article– I enjoyed the read.
Of course Obama’s first opponent, McCain, had his own history of kowtowing to banks. If the game is rigged it’s a bipartisan rigging. To be sure there were a few Repubs who opposed the 2008 Pelosi/Obama bailout but the mighty Wurlitzer drowned them out.
At any rate thanks for the above which is good if a bit all over the map. I too believe that a Kamala regime will be further bad news for the country–Obama 2–which must be why TPTB are pushing so hard.
yep,
“This is part of the argument for why Barack Obama was a disaster as president. He rebuilt this rigged system whereby all social wealth is institutionally organized to flow upwards. And that is why oligarchs are supporting the Democrats.”
but the question is who rigged it?
in 1991 bush sr. had wised up and signed a series of spending bills that got the economy going again, he figured out trickle down was a scam. to late though to save his presidency.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-12-19-mn-1025-story.html
…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_Surface_Transportation_Efficiency_Act
…
………..
i seem to remember a series of bills that may have totaled between 200-220 billion dollars in 1991.
in todays dollars half a trillion or more. in a country with about 2/3rds the population today.
that is a massive injection of money for production, most likely large unionized companies would be the producers.
so that is how bill clintons real economy was hidden till the money ran out at the end of the 1990’s, and it exposed the empty rotted out hollow shell that bill clinton created, with the help of someone like biden.
carter was a wrecking ball. someone who had worked on government projects, and should have known better.
but the twit had alfred kahn and paul volker. complete idiots.
reagan was a fool, but at least he backed off a little at the end.
so in realty, the last real money that went into industrial america, was 1991. can’t count obamas flimsy pathetic attempt because most unions and factories were long gone by then thanks to bill clinton.
so obamas job was to make sure no new deal. bill clintoin had wiped that away.
bill clintons policies were so bad, that by 2008, the jig was up.
actually it would have been up earlier, except bush jr. dropped helicopter money, and said shop till you drop.
if he had not done that, most likely by the end of 2001, we would have really faced what happened in 2008 then.
it did not matter who became president after clinton. the die was cast, clinton had softened up iraq, and prepared america for the invasion of iraq, and even passed legislation to make sure.
i have said for years, gore would have gone in also.
love this,
“Tying this back to economics for a moment, the Democrat’s focus on child ‘influencers’ in Chicago was more than just political marketing. Following from 1990s Republican neoliberal Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, influencers, Uber drivers, cashiers, fentanyl dealers, financial advisors, crypto speculators, disinformation specialists, personal shoppers, bud-tenders, and dog-walkers represent the culmination of the Democrats’ industrial policy. So no, your ‘career’ picking up dog crap in the street (‘piece work’) isn’t how your grandparents raised a family.”
harris is perfect, she thinks this is normal and just, just like biden.
Great article, agreed, but St. O hardly deserves credit (or blame) for it. At best he’s a place holder for the fully rigged system that was already decades old when he took office in 2009. The rigging goes back to the 1980’s under Reagan when Reps and Dems alike colluded to completely reverse the historic, top-down distribution, from rich to poor, of revenues refunded under the terms of America’s originally progressive IRS tax code. Lest we forget.
Former NYT IRS correspondent David Cay Johnston irrefutably documented this transformation in his 2003 book, Perfectly Legal. Jaw dropper of a book for anyone who wants to know how Reps and Dems teamed up to rewrite the IRS code to benefit not just the top 10% but especially the top 1% of all wealthholders. Yes, Rob Urie.
As I recall, Johnston’s source for his data on the top 1% of US wealthholders was French economists of whom he learned via the Libertarian CATO Institute. I’m thinking now that they were probably Thomas Picketty and his team of Capital and Ideology in the 21st Century fame.
This is a long, comprehensive, excellent article. I wish there were a way for more Americans to learn what it teaches. Unfortunately the narrative is much stronger than the reality. And my Democrat friends deny the existence of a narrative, which makes it difficult to discuss. I have experimented for years with various approaches to penetrating the mental armor of my PMC colleagues but they are protected by vast self virtue and enormous stock portfolios from ever entertaining something so uncomfortable. Nothing will change until it becomes sufficiently uncomfortable for enough people. Crisis is inevitable when reality is denied.
Well said.
Our PMC colleagues wouldn’t make it through 3 paragraphs of this article before turning their nose up at such nonsense. They would much rather go with Tweets that say Orange Man Bad. Much shorter and less thought provoking.
As far a uncomfortable, looking at the stock price of Dollar General today, I’m guessing it’s getting pretty uncomfortable for some out there.
In fact, the purpose of the American one-party system, the uniparty, is to ensure that nothing changes. Or rather, the faces change, but the policies stay the same. The hope held by Democrats that Harris’s policies will be less genocidal than Biden’s misses that the only people who interviewed her before she was elevated to be their candidate for president were donors
Spot on, but my hard-core Democrat friends and family will retort with, “yeah, but what about Trump?” The hold of this binary set-up that the oligarchs have ingeniously created using Trump is not to be underestimated.
Trump is always their trump card. Weird huh?
Exactly: They need the DT to “scare” the D party faithful into supporting them – a kind of “good cop, bad cop” routine. The MassMedia and the compatible left outlets like Common Dreams, DNow! LOVE the DT. He is the only excuse they have left. They have given the dude far more coverage than any other political figure in recent memory.
Instead of being against the “deep state” it seems that the DT is being directed from Langley. If not, he might as well be, he polarizes, whips up emotional hysteria, and is the ultimate distraction from the hardcore issues. He’s a perfect divide and rule character
Plus, the DT is much closer to the true face of the US stereotype: loud, obnoxious, elitist, authoritarian, egomaniac, abrasive, ignorant, narcissistic, serially mendacious, conman, snake-oil salesman.
My response to ‘what about Trump” is to calmly but forcefully insist that they are deflecting to Trump and drag them back to the failure of the Democrats. The usual response I get is something I like to call “cognitive dissonance” face. I am not a popular person these days.
Discussions like this are, in the long run, maybe more important than a vote in the election for advancing oligarchy-critical politics.
There are a lot of people of good will voting for war and oligarchy, and they can be reached.
“I criticize the Democrats more than the Republicans because they require more criticism. That Republicans are evil is obvious at a glance to anyone with a conscience; that Democrats are evil is much less obvious, and usually requires quite a bit more consciousness and commentary to understand.” ********* It’s obvious Catlin Johnstone is watching FOX News and getting her information from there. I have lots of former FB friends who will back me up on this.
How so? It’s not so obvious to me.
I have familiarity with all MSM outlets and I can totally understand where she is coming from.
This was a common response from PMC team blue types to any criticism of Obama. Granted I’m being dated.
I know PMC types who still maintain that “Obama wanted to do the right things, but the Republicans stopped him”.
Obama was very, very, good in his performance, and his pre to post presidency increase in net worth indicates that important groups appreciated the performance.
The thing that baffles me about that argument is that Obama began his admin with gigantic Dem majorities in both Houses of Congress! If ypu can’t do anything other than watered down Romneycare, then one has to wonder about stuff…
There’s an old post on NC that summarizes the evidence against this view (‘The Empire Continues to Strike Back’ or some such). It lists a bunch of things that he could have done under existing laws and structures that would have (a) done a lot more to hold bad actors accountable for the financial crisis; (b) led to better outcomes for borrowers and the economy as a whole, and (c) almost certainly been much more popular with voters than what he actually did.
He didn’t do them because they would have involved turning on his biggest donors.
Here, with Yves’ signature, arrow-in-the-bulleye writing.
Young Democrats are “pro-Palestine” in the same way they were “pro-Black” in 2020. Their support is just political theater with the aim of returning to the status quo. These young puppets only exists so that the Democrats appear to have a heart, and what truly drives their “protests” (which are nothing more than police controlled circuses) is the fear of Muslims and Minorities standing up against the Empire domestically and in unison with arms.
This is simply offensive. You insultingly act as if young people have no agency and are not genuinely outraged by the Gaza genocide and are seeking to increase costs to Israel by publicizing and supporting BDS measures. Billionaire funders have blacklisted protest participants (who they can generally identify well via facial IDs from videos and still images) from many many job opportunities. So they are paying, or at risk of paying, lifetime career costs and you have the nerve to sneer? And that’s before getting to arrests and roughing up.
I would say “imperial decline” began with Ronald Reagan becoming president in 1980….after the fall of vietnam, and the accession of Carter, who wanted to cut the defense budget, who wanted all troops pulled out of Korea…there were a few years of a glimmer of hope…Senators were flying to Cuba to meet Castro…journalists uncovered watergate and brought down Nixon…Lockheed was broke and facing bankruptcy, but was saved by the taxpayer….the public and Congress itself was much more suspicious of the government, hence the Church hearings…anyway, all this was dashed when the soviets invaded Afghanistan forcing Carter to buckle under to the hawks and then of course the taking of the US embassy in Tehran….Reagan wins, all domestic issues relegated to foreign policy, and along with it, a massive military buildup….
If we want an accurate understanding of where we are today we need an accurate understanding of the history leading up to it. To begin with, despite our whitewashed liberal history of Watergate, some of Nixon’s most powerful enemies were right-wingers who were incensed at detente with Russia and China. The Republican neocons, led by Rumsfeld and Cheney, were able to take over during the Ford administration. Carter was a creation of the Rockefeller wing of the Republican party. He was the our first neoliberal President. And while he did have (in my opinion) some authentic concerns about human rights, half of his foreign policy officials were neocons, most importantly Brzezinski (who headed the Rockefeller funded Trilateral Commission that trained Carter and staffed his administration). The Russian “invasion” did not force Carter to buckle under; rather, the hawks were already supporting the most radical jihadists along with some of the most vicious drug lord/war lords against the Soviet-backed (and Western-oriented) government in Afghanistan. As Brzezinski delightedly bragged about later, we lured Russia in to give them their own Vietnam – that was our goal. That our buddies became the basis for Al Quaeda later was just a side benefit.
I do agree that there was a brief window of opportunity for something different in the 1970s, but it was very quickly closed tight. The first neolib/neocon administration was Carter’s. He laid the groundwork for Reagan just as Clinton did for Bush II.
Likewise, trucking and airline deregulation began under Carter…
Also Natgas if I recall correctly?
I am not sure that any one event or point in history can be said to be “THE” beginning of our decline, imperial or otherwise, but I would certainly agree that the elevation of St. Reagan to the Oval Office was a significant milestone on our path to hell.
I have conversations with a friend who is a history professor on this and related subjects fairly frequently. He can frequently digress into events that took place in the 1800s, but when he does this I try to steer him back to our living history, to the times where we have/had agency (in theory) and could have shaped things differently– fun conversations, as just watching a game on the telly interests neither of us greatly. A “blue-no-matter-democrat,” I think that democrat participation in genocide has finally cracked that armor.
Here’s what appears to be another milestone, and I know that Lambert has linked to this before, but here it is again:
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
A Chinese acquaintance of mine believes that 9/11/2001 was the catalyst that accelerated the demise of the USA as a world power, and I don’t disagree with that either.
We all agree there is a problem, and we can agree upon many of the symptoms. Agreement in these two things are good because together we can start to address some of the effects to limit or even prevent further harm while we still determine where the root of the problem lies. Or so I hope.
I consider the States Declaration of Independence to be the height of The Enlightenment (as did Ho Chi Minh, but that’s another story).
By the time The Constitution was hammered out The Union was already in decline.
I consider the fall of Saigon in 1975 ( when the wounded Empire turned its sights inward) and the bankruptcy/bankers’ coup of NYC later that year as the overture for what was to come…
The 1973 and 1979 oil boycotts were what started the imperial decline. Americans had gorged on cheap gasoline for decades, and the shock of seeing those low prices (30 cents a gallon for gas, e.g.) vanish caused a psychological shock wave that left voters watching numbly while the New Deal was dismantled by Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama. And the original impetus for the oil boycott was US one-sided support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. It always comes back to our “ally” Israel, seemingly. I’m hard put to think of a single thing Israel has ever done for us, other than take taxpayer largesse from Americans and cycle some of it back into bribes for Congress through a multitude of lobbying groups. (I realize the second oil boycott was about Carter letting the deposed Shah of Iran into the US for medical treatment, but that proceeded based on the success OPEC had destabilizing the US economy the first time.)
Here (link below) is Noam Chomsky from 1977 working through the geopolitics of the first two oil price spikes of the era. Of interest is that OPEC, which was in part behind the price spikes (US producers holding tankers full of oil offshore to raise the price was another), was led by Venezuela and Iran at the time, neither of which, according to Chomsky, had a strong interest in the affairs of Israel.
https://chomsky.info/197703__/
!979 was the Iranian Revolution. Israel ascended as a US ally in the eyes of the State Dept. / CIA following the Revolution.
Taking your explanation for the moment, the oil shocks were ‘exogenous’ factors caused by geopolitical gamesmanship.
This begs the question of why Paul Volcker, who Jimmy Carter appointed to Chair the Federal Reserve in 1979, thought that raising domestic interest rates would solve inflation caused by exogenous factors?
But he did so nevertheless. Now, please look at the graph entitled ‘Manufacturing Employment, US).
Manufacturing employment in the US peaked the year that Volcker was appointed (1979). It has been declining in fits and starts since.
Quotes abound of Volcker stating that he was looking at wages (Phillips Curve), and not energy prices, when he raised interest rates and kept them there.
So, while I attribute the decline in manufacturing employment to NAFTA and China joining the WTO in the piece, it was Volcker that weakened the power of labor to the point where NAFTA and China joining the WTO became politically feasible.
Points: Volcker’s actions were economic, not explicitly political. But the consequences were both economic and political. They set in motion 1) the ascendance of finance and 2) the systematic destruction of organized labor in the US.
Last, a central theme of the piece is that US foreign policy has always been as murderous as it is today. That American youth turned away from the slaughter in Palestine suggests that it is the political-economic backdrop that has changed, not the degree of violence that the US uses aborad.
I dispute the supposed distinction between economic and political: the classical economists recognized their own discipline as political economy — the marginalists and the neoclassical orthodoxy which followed them bastardized the enterprise with their pretensions to “science” (talk about stolen valour) and then nailed the door shut on widespread awareness of their vandalism by banishing any study of the history of economic thought from the academy, thoroughly scrubbing undergraduate programs in particular. So, no, Volcker’s actions were just as political in reality as they were merely economic in the propaganda which accompanied them. He is reputed, for instance, to have carried around with him in his wallet a note reminding him to “crush labor.” Only economic my sweet Aunt Fanny …
From a Abba Lerner: “Economics has gained the title Queen of the Social Sciences by choosing solved political problems as its domain.”
Of course you’re correct. I wrote a book, Zen Economics, in which I explored the political logic of not just the content of Neoclassical economics, but the methods.
This makes sense as criticism because, via the Marginalists, method was elevated over content. The models, borrowed from physics, were back filled to fit the logic of the models (calculus).
In contrast to common interpretation, this critique of methods applies just as much to the so-called hard sciences as to the social sciences. The base premises of the mathematics employed are the same for both.
‘But actions have consequences. Having been lied into losing lives, limbs, and / or killing Iraqi civilians to put another dollar or two on Halliburton’s stock price, much of the soldier class was subsequently foreclosed on and / or rendered unemployed by Wall Street.’
And that is where the wheels are coming off. In the past there was an understanding that when you finished your service, that the government would look after you in a sort of social contract. Neolibs being neolibs, they have broken that contract as it benefits poorer people and who needs to do that? Worse yet, if you have served in the US military, you are automatically placed on a watch-list of possible suspects as you are seen as a “threat”. The VA is being nickeled and dimed and homeless vets living on the streets is already a recognizable problem. The result? People aren’t joining up in anywhere near the needed numbers for the global empire. Families who served and in the past would encourage their grown kids to do the same are now telling them to forget it. So yeah, actions have consequences. Who knew?
If the imperialist corporatists have their way and there’s enough intellectual capital left to succeed with it, the military will complete the transformation to AI-operated, kill-enabled mech warfare on the Terminator model. So there will be no need for the grunts of conflicts past, and a small cadre of woke flameheads with minimal tech creds will do the residual bits of maintenance of the mech/drone/“air asset” TO&E.
Most of the tech work, I understand, is already being done by contractors including employees of the forked (Lockheed, Raytheon (RTX now), Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Gen Dynamics, etc.) corps that have vertically integrated the war machine. I saw the harbingers of this in Vietnam, as a GI mechanic fixing helicopters. Lots of Bell (Textron) contractors doing lots of the “skilled work” on machinery that already was getting terribly complex and too fragile for the heat, dust and corrosion of the Vietnam “theater.” And often doing a crappy job, since they didn’t usually have to ride around in the aircraft they “maintained and repaired.”
As much as I can determine from reading, it looks like the process is accelerating. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2011/2/28/2011march-contractors-on-the-battlefield-outsourcing-of-military-services And as with all the other “deployments” of human capital under neoliberalism, other than the high-end tech guys and gals, contractors are paid relative peanuts and thrown away with relative wild abandon. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/06/1061896284/the-lasting-consequences-of-americas-shift-to-using-more-contractors-to-fight-wa Of course the “troops” we thank for their “service” are now urged to apply for food stamps and low-income housing to eke out their subsistence, and the VA is getting privatized apace to reduce the quantity and quality of “service” and “thanks” to the injured vets, in the same vein as the nation’s treatment of those selfless “front line workers” in health care, food service, delivery and supply chain work. Per the imperial business model of “more work for less pay, with ever tighter micromanagement intrusion.”
One anecdote: the commanding general of the First Cavalry Division while I was in-country (1967-68) ordered that GIs would continue the tradition of doing the cooking and cleaning, and even guard duty which one would think would be a soldier’s trade. This, while most other units used locals. (The general, and HQ staff, of course had locals to do their dirty work — including the General’s personal barber, who he found out to his surprise was a forward observer for the VC, who directed mortar and artillery fire onto the First Cav’s main base at An Khe — oopsie!) That work is almost exclusively done by contractors now, and at huge markup paid to the corporate providers. (I personally set some kind of record, drawing, out of a 1,095-day enlistment, KP duty on 76 days, and 48 nights of ‘guard duty’ marching around my post often without even any ammo for my rifle, and of course many days of being assigned to burn sh!t out of the half-drums in the latrines — these punitive tasks because I lacked “proper respect for authority”). A lot of that work has gone away “since the end of the draft.” Maybe, as the Empire runs up against the lack of enthusiasm for “military service,” the draft will come back, and some scut contractors will have to find other gigs.
Maybe we mopes can hope that incompetence amongst the elite will result in collapse of the madness before The Big One — like the corruption of cheating missile launch officers, DEI-promoted naval commanders getting booted because they have “lost command authority” over woke sailors, ICBMs that fail, replacement “modern” ICBMs that also fail, tanks too heavy to move and impossible to protect or even employ in the new battlespace.
I guess it will just be Murphy’s Law and fortuity that will determine the end state of it all. Will the incompetent credentialists fail in all or sufficient realms of “management” before the subset of incompetent credentialists giving a face to the power structure accede to the demands of the Rapturists and Zionists to just pull the YHWH-ordained Total War trigger?
“the military will complete the transformation to AI-operated, kill-enabled mech warfare on the Terminator model. So there will be no need for the grunts of conflicts past, and a small cadre of woke flameheads with minimal tech creds will do the residual bits of maintenance of the mech/drone/“air asset” TO&E.”
One will need an army of technicians, quite well specialized, to maintain all these terminator armies, scouring the air, land, and seas… And those techs will not perform, as your experience describes: “Lots of Bell (Textron) contractors doing lots of the “skilled work” on machinery that already was getting terribly complex and too fragile for the heat, dust and corrosion of the Vietnam “theater.” And often doing a crappy job, since they didn’t usually have to ride around in the aircraft they “maintained and repaired.””
And given that at limit the US is approaching “Idiocracy” type off society, this will not be possible.
While I can’t find the link, I’ve read (perhaps here at NC) that the post-WW2 GI Bill, and low-cost home financing measures, were part of the bargain struck for service in WW2. For once, the government held up its end of the bargain, for about 2 decades anyway.
Thanks, Yves, for posting this, another of Rob Urie’s fine, and scathing, essays afflicting the comfortable.
The Caitlin Johnstone twitter link is far too under-emphaized. That is a very powerful five minute read or listen.
Great post from Urie. USA- bereft, weighed found wanting. So much unrealized potential. Probably the same can be said for most persisting nation-states, regardless of which ‘system’ with which they purport to align.
All systems get gamed, overcoming human nature, evolving to a higher being seems to be a losing battle.
Disheartening act to look around at the resent circumstances we have wrought.
Caitlin Johnstone has become one of my favorite journalists. She blows Greenwald out of the water, IMO she is more consistent with less hypocrisy. She has US politics figured out- more than most US dwellers, and she’s Aussie. Her articles are posted on Consortium News and on her website.
hypocrisy from greenwald? I haven’t seen it, maybe you could edify?
His opinion on the Citizens United decision is a big one. Not to say that I don’t agree with many other points he makes
I agree. Consistently spot on. Another duo that puts out excellent work is Truthstream Media. Here’s their latest: Did the Space Age Begin on a Lie?
This Tucker Carlson interview with Mike Benz is a must watch: Mike Benz: The Real Reason for Pavel Durov’s Arrest, and the Deep State’s Plan to Control Our Speech
Robert Urie is consistently compelling. Reading him is like taking a deeply cleansing shower.
Isn’t it? Thanks Yves for posting, thanks Rob for composing. and thanks to the thread for composting! I love the compost. And this essay covered it all. My big question is as always, Since I can read the tea leaves and tell the direction of the wind politically, Why the hell can’t our government? Answer, There’s a reason for that. As Maigret would say. This post covered it all. It was super good.
From the start the Cold War was mostly propaganda, the economic and military estimates of the USSR largely overstated! Some, radical outliers, predicted the collapse of the USSR, but not as soon (IIRC 2030’s).
The massive shift was Clinton, covertly went neocon. W Bush was wide open militarist, Obama nearly but had a much more covert approach.
Trump was impeached for suggesting a paltry billion dollar slow down to the arming of Kiev!
Worse than the misinformation campaign was the hiding of the work from the public and denial of debate.
“Democracy” or even “representative republic” are sham when the people are subject of a massive con!
The anti-new dealers never went away,
The monopolists and rentiers never went away
The corporatists and monopolists, trusts, barrons never went away.
The Monarchists never went away
The MIC has never been cut down to size despite dire warnings.
Anti-labor advocates and company stores have never gone away
Global slavery and debt bondage have never gone away.
The new amped up gilded age and control over the reigns of government and to the detriment of we the people has not gone away….it is back and bigger than ever before.
The predator Creditor class is hands down wrapping things up for a new dark age.
War is peace, Greed is giving, Opportunity is to have a choice between begging on the street or being a debt peon.
Grifting and con is the business model.
Incidentally, the best way to put an end to all wars is not to begin any.
but
. “War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.” -George Orwell
“The great sore spot in our modern commercial life is found on the speculative side. Under present laws, which foster and encourage speculation, business life is largely a gamble, and to “get something for nothing” is too often considered the keynote to “success”. The great fortunes of today are nearly all speculative fortunes; and the ambitious young man just starting out in life thinks far less of producing or rendering service than he does of “putting it over” on the other fellow. This may seem a broad statement to some: but thirty years of business life in the heart of American commercial activity convinces me that it is absolutely true.
If, however, the speculative incentive in modern commercial life were eliminated, and no man could become rich or successful unless he gave “value received” and rendered service for service, then indeed a profound change would have been brought in our whole commercial system, and it would be a change which no honest man would regret.”- John Moody, Wall Street Publisher, and President of Moody’s Investors’ Service. Dated 1924
“The Monarchists never went away.”
Indeed.
And then Urie’s statement:
“…Osama bin Laden explains why he believed that American civilians were legitimate targets in the 9/11 attacks… ”
Well…for all of Bin Laden’s ramblings about attacking those without power in the USA..he really just reminded me:
“The Bin Laden family, also spelled Bin Ladin, is a wealthy family intimately connected with the innermost circles of the Saudi royal family. ”
And he couldn’t even change that in his own back yard.
He did what royals ultimately do…attack “peasants”.
Thank you. Your comment, and this superb post is ‘preaching to the choir’ with demonstrable proofs as opposed to more ‘porcine maquillage’. (Our humble hostess may have to adopt a new analogy out of respect to our porcine ’cousins’ given that KH wears lipstick – just saying). Urie’s ‘truth to power’ satire is priceless – “in other words, it was capitalism that rendered the American MIC considerably worse than useless“; “political equivalent of highly processed foods”; “the only class dumber than the US political class are the oligarchs.“ More of this please!
The empire wears black face.
Could we get a URL for that? (The link to ‘Glenn Greenwald’ in the sidebar goes to Substack, where he no longer posts.)
I can ask Urie but Greenwald has been doing this regularly in his System Update shows, so I doubt there is a single link.
Go to the Rumble website and look for Greenwald’s show. He has quite a few podcasts about Harris lately.
Apologies, I didn’t provide a link for the reason that Yves gave. He made his argument in a group of shows around the DNC event in Chicago.
If memory serves, this is the show where the subject is most specifically addressed:
https://rumble.com/v5bzx24-system-update-show-320.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
A few other links on the blogroll are out of date. Matt Stoller comes to mind is at https://www.thebignewsletter.com/. And Pando Daily brand has been acquired and repurposed.
“The fake emergency regarding Joe Biden’s age…”
No, no, no. REAL emergency, faux reason is his “age”.
Great article, I wholeheartedly agree and I also try to point out the lies and hypocrisy of the Ds.
(The old saying: the Rs stab you in the chest, while the Ds stab you in the back)
It really pisses me off when the most “progressive” members of Congress like AOC, Bernard Sanders et al. decry the atrocities, and injustices but then tell us all to vote for genocide, war, kleptocracy and oligarchy. They assume we are all gullible and stupid, but you can fool some of the…Might as well just slap me in the face, instead of spewing such hypocrisy and lies.
To put it bluntly: Since money is free speech, political bribery is legal, the US has no functioning democracy – it is an oligarchy by definition. We can add the other structural barriers to democratic accountability and legitimacy: privatization of Elections Inc.: MassMedia stage-manage debates, and dictate the discourse. Most of the public only know what they are told by our wonderful “free press” and we can see that US denizens are likely the most conditioned, misinformed, and ignorant populations in the so-called developed world.
Those are just a couple of points, the Winner Takes All electoral system (FPTP) is another barrier, and of course the electoral college is another. We can read Democracy Inc. (Sheldon Wolin). And the perverse concentration of wealth and power to the top .01% makes a mockery of any semblance of “democracy”
In an idealized world, US dwellers would not participate in the BigMoney PR stunt, instead they would protest with a list of demands. People must de-legitimize the charade and make specific demands instead. That won’t happen any time soon: millions will go and vote for the R brand or D brand of genocide, and oligarchy.
Thank you for mentioning Caitlin Johnstone, who is (with her other half) a wonderful voice of moral clarity and sanity – so much so I have sometimes wondered why she hasn’t been banned already. She deserves to be far better known.
One of the things I have done over the last 10.5 months is to stop reading many newspapers, with the reluctant exception of one or two (which I still distrust profoundly). I had long viewed them with scepticism, but have been so appalled and dismayed by their output overall, and their response to one issue in particular, that I have come to feel that they are generally a waste of time save only insofar as they provide insights on current trends in imperialistic thinking (I stopped watching TV decades ago). That is why the wonderful work done by this website, and people like Messrs Johnstone, Greenwald, Blumenthal, Maté, Napolitano, etc., are so useful. They fill a vast void which has opened up in the public space. Some of these personalities are in the heroic mould, but – alas! – I do wonder just how much of a real impact they are having on public opinion in such a complex and fragmented media landscape. Not nearly enough, I fear, and I suspect that they will remain voices ‘crying aloud in the wilderness’ to an empire which doesn’t want to hear.
So, when Biden stated that “nothing is going to fundamentally change” he was openly communicating he was going to back in full the desires of the donor class. This is exactly how i interpreted his words then.
“Nothing is going to fundamentally change.”
This is all one needs to understand about the American system of Inverted Totalitarianism institutionalized by Bill Clinton with an assist from Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Joe Biden.
Political policy is designed solely to increase the donor caste of billionaires — which has successfully been grown from about 60 U.S. billionaires in 1992 to between 700-800 U.S. billionaires in 2024. These billionaires have made their fortunes by dispossessing the general population of their jobs, homes, and savings while profiting from mass-killing in other countries.
In this system of Inverted Totalitarianism the politicians exist only to serve the billionaire donors to whom their policies have gifted a new Gilded Age. The politicians also enrich themselves: penniless hacks like Bill Clinton and Barak Obama have raked-in post-office personal net-worth in the quarter-billion dollar range.
American elections are pure theater in which nearly half of the voting-age population doesn’t even bother to cast a ballot. The “issue” that I predict will drive voter-turnout this November is not going to genocide, climate change, health care, or globalization. It will be gender and whether women should be re-classified as a caste of “service animals” who can be forced to bear children.
Meanwhile, our planet burns both literally and figuratively…
Patrick Lawrence on Scheerpost today:
“The Sound of Enforced Silence”
https://scheerpost.com/2024/08/29/patrick-lawrence-the-sound-of-enforced-silence/
First sentence:
“Is there some connection, — not quite official but it may as well be— between censorship and presidential politics?”
Later:
“It is now hard to tell where the Democratic Party ends and the national-security state begins.”
Last paragraph:
“My take: It will be silence on the imperium’s doings between now and Nov 5. And if Harris is elected in November, getting her through the following four years will require an escalated version of the censorship regime the national-security state and Big Tech imposed on dissenting voices during the Trump years, but with one difference: The objective then was to take down our forty-fifth president; this time it will be to sustain our stunningly unqualified forty-seventh.”
Very good article, thanks for posting!
In Tulsi Gabbard’s endorsement of Trump, as reported by the Daily Mail, she says:
Unfortunately, I am not able to place my trust in Ms. Gabbard or Mr. Trump – nor in their opponents. Who knows if it’s good or bad?
Flip a coin: it won’t make a dime’s worth of difference which freak “wins”
While I appreciate Caitlin J. very consistent position, I find indi.ca voice a more compelling one. In his last post, he really managed to encapsulate perfectly my feelings about the Palestinian genocide/ethnic cleansing, that is now being amplified:
https://indi.ca/i-feel-like-im-going-crazy-because-the-world-has-gone-mad/
Thanks, never heard of it.
A case in point on the current discussion about the Democrats´ corruption not being reported –
leftist outlet truthout with a new piece:
“Here’s How Trump’s GOP Could Be Preparing to Contest the 2024 Election
All eyes are on November 5, but will we witness another January 6 constitutional crisis that eclipses that of 2021?
By Kenny Bruno
https://truthout.org/articles/heres-how-trumps-gop-could-be-preparing-to-contest-the-2024-election/
Of course not a single word about the rigging by the DNC.
Thanks to Matt Taibbi and I assume this site too reported – I have read about plans by Democrats too to instigate some kind of uprising, which would even call for California going rogue declaring independence when war-gaming out some scenarios. That was even reported by the NYT. But didn´t fare too well with the public so the subject was dropped quickly.
And naturally there are many more plans which I don´t know about or which haven´t even been reported at all.
How can all these “left” writers look into the mirror and keep a straight face?
Of course one just has to go back to Chris Hedges being fired from the working-class oriented (!) Real News Network due to Hedges´s criticism of Biden endangering – apparently – our democracy!
And he couldn’t even change that in his own back yard.
He did what royals ultimately do…attack “peasants”.
If the residents of the World Trade Center were peasants, that would be news to me!
Thank you Rob, for this comprehensive and revealing write up. Thank you Yves, for posting it.
Behold, America’s latest brown bomber.
The lightweight champion of global politics.
Bomber Harris!
1. Do powerful countries always behave so?
2. Did Ottoman empire and British empire and also Mughals butcher with impunity?
3. Is there hope for Palestinians or will Israel succeed in their genocide where in most will be expelled to Jordan or Egypt ?
4. Will Israel collapse in 50 years with exodus of all Jews to Europe and America?
5. Will neighboring Arab countries finally enter the war ?
6. Will America continue to prod the world towards world was 3? not realising it is doing so?
Ultimately what will happen will happen- Israel runs out of ammo or most of Palestine( and West bank) is reduced to rubble and unlivable hell or Russia decides to nuke Ukraine.
Vietnam ended when American public did not wish to support the killing and see body bags come home.
Maybe palestine will be Israel’s vietnam…