cobblehillbilly

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Over Dynamic Situation Links

Drowining In A Bathtub: Alex Pareene: New Republic
A Fragile Giant: Matt Stoller: The Nation
Can Be Saved: James Galbraith: The Nation
With Tools At Hand: Martin Wolf: Financial Times
Used Wisely: Matt Stoller: MattStoller
And Carefully Monitored: Michael Grabel & Paul Kiel: ProPublica
Unless The Looters Win: Matt Stoller: MattStoller
Change Is Baked In: CAPA

History Rolls On: Max Blumenthal: Historical Substack
Sacred Ignorance: Kourosh Zaibari: Asia Times
And Viscious Politics: E J Magnier
Not Saying Retreat: Robert Fisk: The Independent

Commienomics: Ricardo Bellofiore: Monthly Review

Thursday, March 12, 2020

"The West" is in the process of demonstrating that it no longer exists. We are living through an astonishing period in which infrastructure after infrastructure is being shown to have been privatized and then monetized, which is to say the Public Good component has been liquidated, converted to private financial wealth and thus no longer operational. A great portion of the world's population now finds itself at the mercy of mercenary, amoral Western Oligarchs and Plutocrats who have dimantled the State to empower themselves with sociopathic disregard for those things they cannot themselves provide. A coordinated response to a Public Health crisis, or airliners that don’t spontaneously nosedive for instance.

COVID-19 has exposed the core value of Neoliberalism: money is all that matters, life without it is worthless. No exceptions, if you're a new born, a superannuated war hero or the inventor of a vaccine that has saved billions of lives, if you don't have money you don't deserve to live. Our Oligarch in Chief went on television to announce that trade and travel with Europe would be blocked for a month due to the coronavirus and that testing and treatment charges would be waived for Americans who fear they may be infected. Homeland security latter clarified that, in fact, trade would not be blocked and if you want to get to Europe you can fly through the not so United Kingdom. The main US medical insurance trade group clarified that while testing would be covered at no expense to patients, any treatment would be subject to copays and no doubt surprise billing. The US has proven incapable of making test kits available in anthing but desultory quantities. For the Neoliberals in charge, if you can't afford medical care they'd like for you to know what's making you sick once you are sick so that you can go die quietly somewhere without infecting them, but preventive testing would be a crime against the market: sickness is the demand that drives it! Public Health wasn't worth a moment's thought until your disease put them at risk. Of course if you want treatment you will need to pawn you future.

The response from Congressional Democrats is nearly as vile, they have passed a bill that will temporarily fund payed sick leave and unemployment insurance for everyone who doesn't have them (and doesn’t work for a company with more than 50 employees, Walmart & McDonald's staff are still on their own) just through the pandemic. This rather than permanently legislating them as a human right and Public Good like any first world country: everyone knows that Medicare for All cannot be made law. Apparently the Democrats are concerned about the untreated adding to the already huge homeless populations in all the major Democratic strong hold cities, Team Blue is not offering any relief on copays, insurance premiums or surprise billing but does think in a pandemic thier servants should stay home rather than coming anywhere near. This concern will pass with the crisis: Public Health is immaterial to Neoliberalism, private profits must be maintained particularly when a global pandemic affords opportunity for “surge pricing". So, from both Parties, it's "your money or your life."

Public health? Privatized.

A particularly awkward time for the Democrats to have to address this issue as they have just rigged every caucus and primary to ensure that Sanders, who has been pushing for medical care as a human right for years, doesn't become their nominee. In litigation following an assortment of frauds in the 2016 Democratic Primaries, Party officials stated the Party is a private club that can do whatever it wants whenever it wants with rules and procedures, a fact in evidence with the last minute introduction of the APP in Iowa that made votes uncountable, confusing the outcome and stealing late votes and momentum from Sanders. Then, Bloomberg entered the race and the requirement for "campaign contributions" above a certain threshold to participate in the debates suddenly vanished. That all candidates with "delegates" qualified for the next debate suddenly no longer applied when Tulsi Gabbard unexpectedly got some.

The Democratic Party has become a toy of the Intelligence Community, the twin MICs (Medical and Military), and the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) who all desperately want a reliable subordinate in the White House to handle PR. The self-funding Sanders campaign is the biggest threat these constituencies see as his vast number of small donors have wildly different interests from the corporate and Permanent State functionaries who control the Party. The Republican Party is the unselfconscious Party of the Oligarchs after Trump’s hostile take over four years ago and the Democrats are now demonstrating themselves to be the Party of Permanent War, Universal Surveillance and profits before Public Health. The PMC's desperation for a more respectable face in the White House is not because they want to change how things are run, after all, they are running things, its' that incumbent incompetence has revealed that the PMC itself has set up "Health Care" as a system to encourage the poor to become sick so that the Medical Industrial Complex can profit from their illness. Congress represents corporations who see citizens as cash cows.

Political representation? Privatized.

Sovereign once in its borders and its people, now, when the Oligarch in Chief accuses China of infecting the world with the pandemic embarrassing his government, he is insulting the people from which we acquire most of our essential medical products, from face masks and gloves to antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. This is the sad result of the CEOs and MBAs, the leadership cadre of the PMC who form the core constituency of the Democratic Party, having realized that resilience, a Public Good, could be monetized by maximizing industry concentration and the “global division of labor”, the latter a euphemism for the race to the bottom. This race is in pursuit of the most exploitable labor, land, ecology, whatever to maximize the money returns to capital while dislocating to remote locations and unseen people the starvation, misery, ecological destruction, atmospheric pollution etc. from which profits derive. This monetization of unseen devastation has driven Western “Globalization” and it is arriving at it’s endgame.

Sovereignty? Privatized.

China, today, offered medical assistance to Italy while the US treated Italy as a threat and the EU ignored her request to activate the EU Mechanism for Civil Protection. Russia has told OPEC to grow up, collapsing the price of oil. This will in a matter of weeks plunge the US Southwest and particularly Texas into recession as the fracking industry collapses. In turn, that means the US will have to ramp up imports of oil and gas, putting downward pressure on the dollar at the same moment the financial markets are plunging as a result of the cash flow displacements emanating from various COVID related quarantines, lock downs travel bans etc. These cash flow displacements promise to blow up the teetering inverted pyramids of debt QE has imposed on the financial sector across the West for the last decade. All the fraud propped up by a decade of global Central Bank financial transfers to the rich stand to unwind.

We have become a menagerie of squabbling Oligarchs, enabled by a begging coterie meretricious meritocrats haggling over privileges, trampling a dance floor built of the bodies of American workers, living, dying and dead. A nation that sees it’s people as an extractive resource until they become an unnecessary cost will not stay a nation for long. An empire built on pure economic exploitation, the Neoliberal retooling of what we once called “The West”, will rot from it’s deadest organs first, in this case its head. The scale of catastrophe will be determined by how long it takes for someone with some holistic understanding of Political Economy to step in and restructure what remains salvageable.

It’s a disgrace to be hoping for an American Putin to step in stop to the free fall, but this is likely the best “The West” can hope for.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Fluid Now Links

Fury Over Fear: Xu Xhangrun: ChinaFile
Power Illusion: Yuen Yuen Ang: Project Syndicate
Power Delusion: Pat Donahue & Matt Miller: Bloomberg
Wishing Making It So: Robin Emmott & Josh Irish: Reuters
Winter Is Coming: Michael Klare: Consortium News
Before The Heat: Robert Brulle: Springer Science + Business
Meet The Money: Colin Schultz: Smithsonian
And The Appetite: Melissa Chan & Heriberto Araujo: The Atlantic

Hating Positive Change: Carl Beijer
And The Health It Brings: A P Galvani, A S Parpia, E M Foster-Burton & M C Fitzpatrick: The Lancet
Money Is An Iron: A S Hamrah: The Baffler
From River To Sea: R H Gilson: TOHV
Frozen Conflict: Diana Johnstone: Consortium News
Saving Journalism: Nicholas Lemann: NYRB
Libertarian State: B Landau-Taylor & O Dixon-Luinenberg: Palladium

Saturday, December 7, 2019

Kayfabe: Has Trump Done Any Real Good?

“Kayfabe” from WWF “professional wrestling”, from Wikipedia: “In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ (also called work or worked) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature of any kind. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.”

This is a good way to think about the theatrical antagonism between our two political parties. If you’re getting information from FOX, CNN, NBC or NPR, or if you are reading the major newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, or one of the corporate owned local or regional papers, you’re being systematically lied to for the benefit of what has become an Oligarchy, pure and simple. It's politics is mostly corporate interests pursued through lobbyists greasing politicians, but it's visible face is CEOs and “Founders” like Bloomberg, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Diamond, Blankfein, Tillerson and for that matter Trump. While there are real differences between these interests, they are politically meaningful, mostly for the corporations and the oligarchs themselves, occasionally their minions: they are personally meaningful to the public facing participants, the people in the spotlight or on the witness stand, some of whom will suffer real consequences, but most of these are neither the real powers nor necessarily aware of the agendas of the real powers manipulating them.

Trump, however awful, and awful he is, is our elected President: what’s at issue now with Ukraine and before that with the Mueller inquiry, is whether the elected President should set policy or if that should be left to what I’ll call the Shadow Government. The real powers are thus divided amongst themselves, some thinking the President sets policy, others thinking the elected President is just a figurehead for policies set within the Shadow Government at the behest of the Oligarchy. Were Trump successfully impeached for the issues on the table now, the Oligarchy, through the Shadow Government will have eliminated any meaningful representative government in the US: foreign policy will not be subject to popular government at all as has been the case for domestic policy for at least 20 years. These divisions drive what real conflict there is. But make no mistake, lots is being done with avid bipartisan consensus in DC behind the kayfabe: environmental and labor laws have been and continue to be gutted; Wall Street continues to be bailed out; tech monopolies go un-prosecuted for clear anti-trust violations; and ever expanding defense, border security and intelligence budgets continue to be passed; corporatist, conservative judges continue to be approved by the Senate; universal surveillance continues. These are all policies on which both parties to the Oligarchy agree completely.

While this corporate and militarist consensus goes unnoticed, theatrical conflict distracts everyone who relies on corporate media from the underlying mechanics of Oligarchy. Fossil fuels and associated industries support the GOP while the Medical Industrial Complex along with The Bar Association supports the Democrats, the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) has historically been non-partisan, bribing candidates of both parties (“campaign contribution” is a euphemism for “bribe”), but since Trump’s election the Shadow Government (CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security and a dozen other security agencies), which is the MIC’s client, has come out in full force for the Democrats, trying to frame Trump as a Russian stooge and now impeach him for doing less coercive things in Ukraine than Joe Biden bragged about there in 2016.

While I think Trump should be impeached, I think he should be impeached for the same reasons that George Bush Jr. and Barak Obama should have been impeached before him: illegal, undeclared wars, illegal universal surveillance, illegal drone strikes against innocent foreign civilian populations and an execrable border policy: Trump is just carrying on what Bush and Cheney started and Obama continued. They are all war criminals and impeachable for those high crimes, not the piddling misdemeanors Trump is being attacked for. Obama had the distinction to add to this litany the deliberate illegal murder of a US citizen by drone strike abroad.

So, to the question I'm frequently asked, “what, if anything, has Trump done that is actually good for this country?” My reply: I believe he has done one singularly good thing and it is the thing he is being impeached for: he has tried to withdraw the US from the “Forever Wars” he was bequeathed by his predecessors and de-escalate our confrontation with nuclear armed Russia. He campaigned on improving US relations with Russia and to prevent this threat to MIC rice bowls it appears that the CIA and FBI set up the whole Russiagate hysteria thinking it would kill off Trump before the election and that they would be rewarded as good soldiers by President Hillary Clinton. That didn’t really work out so well for anyone and it looks as though chickens are starting to think about coming home to roost.

Russia is a second rate country with an economy just smaller than that of California but a substantial and very effective nuclear arsenal. It has been the policy of the Shadow Government since JFK to overplay the threat from Russia in order to support ever expanding budgets for the Pentagon and the MIC. Russia, while relatively weak, does have a more modern nuclear arsenal than our own, and recently better military equipment, from planes to new types of missiles that the US cannot defend against. This is a direct result of Bush Jr unilaterally withdrawing the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, as Bill Clinton had done elsewhere before him, despite Bush Sr having expressly promised Gorbachev that the US would not do so. When Bush Jr did this the Shadow Government didn’t think Russia would be able to defend itself from a first strike missile launch at it’s borders in the instance that the US perfected missile defense (which the US hasn’t yet, although the Russians more or less have), but Russia has proven them wrong. This makes nuclear war with Russia a very real existential question for not just the US, but humanity as a whole and the Donald has made real efforts to deescalate that existential risk. When he was elected that risk was at it’s greatest in Syria and Ukraine.

In pursuit of the Israeli goal of having only weak and divided neighbors dependent on Israel’s good graces for peace and stability, led by Secretary Clinton during the Obama Administration, the Shadow Government embarked on a “regime change” effort in Syria to replace what is a despotic but multicultural, multi ethnic state with a violent, totalitarian, Islamic one, one the Israelis expected to be weak and chaotic. The US and Israel, through Turkey, armed and provided air support for ISIS, nothing but a re branded Al Qaeda (itself a metastasized Mujahideen, a CIA creation for bloodying Soviets in Afghanistan under Reagan), to “regime change” Syria. Having a base in Syria left over from the Cold War, Russia intervened to prevent the Islamist sectarian takeover and in so doing demonstrated the capabilities of the new systems it had developed since Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty. It both defied the Shadow Government and thwarted Israel who’s AIPAC has always been a cutting edge innovator in congressional bribery.

To that point, the Shadow Government really believed it’s own propaganda about Russia being fragile and subject to “regime change” itself. When several years earlier Secretary Clinton and her subordinate Victoria Nuland staged a coup in Ukraine, they were stunned when Russia simply annexed Crimea rather than turning it over to the new, US installed puppet government. Russia has controlled Crimea since 1783, having it’s only warm water naval base there since shortly thereafter and thus no inclination turn it over to the US, nor need to in light of Russia’s superior military capabilities in defense of her homeland. The Shadow Government was none the less stunned when it didn’t and has been funding a low level civil war there ever since. The purpose of all these provocations with regard to Russia were to force her into submission to the needs of multinational corporations, as policed by the US military: Russia is very rich in natural resources and relatively under populated so multinational corporations see it as an ideal “extraction zone” and keep being surprised by the stubborn resistance of Russians to being looted by multinationals. Because Russia was extensively looted by it’s own oligarchs, with US support under Yeltsin, the Shadow Government has assumed with “regime change” in Moscow it can internationalize that looting. Failing all of this, the Plan B was the status quo: continue to use Russia hysteria as a funding tool for the MIC.

This vision of cheap Russian resources and an unstable Russian government has until Trump aligned the Shadow Government and the American Oligarchy with regards to US Russia policy. Trump has been the first significant US politician to recognize that the Putin government, however autocratic, is both stable and popular, that it has first rate military hardware and that it poses a real existential threat to the US and the rest of the world if provoked. The Shadow Government refuses to recognize this new reality and has ramped up their “regime change” efforts around the world, largely unnoticed behind the smoke screen of kayfabe Russiagate and now Ukrainegate. While broadcast media has been fixated on these, the Shadow Government has overthrown the popular governments of Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia while trying to do the same with the more autocratic and thus stable Iran, Russia, Hong Kong and Venezuela. This is all on top of our ongoing wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria where we still have a presence despite the President’s oft stated intent to withdraw.

Where “regime change” has been successful in Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia, we see rampant ecological destruction to support first world corporations in low cost resource extraction: this is deforesting the Amazon basin and accelerating climate change. Venezuela, Iran and Russia all see quite clearly that this is the intended program for them as well. Trump, as best as I can tell, is fully on board with the “extractive” view of foreign lands and their peoples. Where he differs from the Shadow Government is in his vision of Russia as a real, existential, nuclear threat if provoked and in seeing our “forever war” as a losing proposition for the American people. I will credit him with that, and that only. So, yes, he has done one, important, good thing.

There are lots of great reasons to impeach Trump, as I listed above, but the current inquiry will, if successful, have the effect of giving the Shadow Government veto power over the policies of the elected government. This is what “Russiagate” was used to do before: by casting Trump as a Putin stooge, the Shadow Government forced him to follow it’s preferred policy of confrontation with Russia with the result that Russia continues to unveil ever more spectacular weapons the US cannot defend against, but which the Shadow Government refuses to come to terms with believing it can subvert all its enemies from within.

Trump is doing all he can to attract the support of corporations and their leadership even as the Democrats, who’s main constituencies now are the Medical Industrial Complex and the Shadow Government are running primarily to defeat Medicare for All, a more important goal for them than defeating Trump in my opinion. Trumps best bet for reelection and national hero status will be to expropriate Medicare for All from the Democrats when they succeed in barring Sanders from the Democratic nomination. He will certainly be re-elected if he does. So all the theater on broadcast media is a distraction from an internecine struggle within our corporate government over which corporations will dominate the political process, reap the spoils of an extractive global system and dominate their sectors of the globalized economy, the American People be damned.

A simple question and a simple answer but a very complex context.