tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45792436097679944462024-02-07T20:49:03.335-05:00cobblehillbillyjsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.comBlogger599125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-76861816745285282192023-05-11T10:45:00.019-04:002023-05-22T09:12:42.446-04:00Cognitive Dissonance Links<p><a href=" https://www.propublica.org/article/find-out-why-health-insurance-claim-denied">Claim Denied ;Maya Miller; ProPublica</a></p><p><a href="https://heisenbergreport.com/2023/05/10/pondering-armageddon-what-happens-if-the-us-defaults/">Suicide Watch: Heisenberg Report</a></p><p><a href="https://harpers.org/2023/05/news-from-mexico/">Borderline Case; John R. MacArthur; Harpers</a></p><p><a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2023/05/08/ukraines-big-mistake/">NeoLiberal Utopia; Natylie Baldwin & Renfrey Clarke</a></p><p><a href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1632982952111116290.html">Neo-Euginicists; Satoshi Akima; ThreadReader</a></p><p><a href="https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/11/07/COVID-Reinfections-And-Immunity/">Killing Us Slowly: Andrew Nikiforuk; The Tyee</a></p><p><a href="https://archive.ph/aJnFW">And Lying About It; Ed Young; The Atlantic</a></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/greg_travis/status/1658816826267058176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1658816826267058176%7Ctwgr%5Ef7a840eeafa451722706b497e802d4f1e17e543e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2023%2F05%2F200pm-water-cooler-5-17-2023.html">To Kill Our Children; Gregory Travis; Twitter</a></p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CKOIPDCzFKUeLgSk-imp1m0sy9Ia0GcV/view">Public Service Message</a></p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ">AI Chaos; Tristran Harris & Raza Askin</a></p><p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary-idUSKBN1GV2TY">Ukraine'a Nazi Problem; Josh Cohen; Reuters</a></p><p><a href="https://archive.ph/nKRr3#selection-429.0-443.19">NYT's Nazi Heros; V. Hopkins, S. Kerr & A. Tiefenthaler; NYT</a></p><p><a href="https://www.readthemaple.com/media-once-called-azov-neo-nazis-now-they-hide-that-fact/">No See of Azov; Alex Cosh & Davide Mastracci; The Maple</a></p><p><a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/texas-guns-and-stats">Everything's Average in Texas; Katelyn Jetelina; Substack</a></p><p><a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/">Goop At Sea; Lauren Oyler; Harpers</a></p><p><a href="https://fortune.com/2023/04/05/end-of-capitalism-inflation-greedflation-societe-generale-corporate-profits/">Greedflation; Will Daniel; Fortune</a></p><p><a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/11/the-espionage-act-the-4th-year-of-assanges-arrest/">Criminalizing Dissent; Joe Lauria; Consortium News</a></p><p><a href="https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php">Criminalizing Politics; Jeff Gerth; Columbia Journalism Review</a> </p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1654887898481844225?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1654887898481844225%7Ctwgr%5Ec7dbc25e48dbc1234460924b487c0d0c9e7b554d%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2023%2F05%2Flinks-5-11-2023.html">The State and Capitalism: Michael Pettis; Twitter</a></p><p><a href="https://herecomeschina.substack.com/p/america-cant-get-there-from-here?nthPub=461">US Can't Get There From Here; Godfree Roberts; Substack</a></p><p><a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-ira-is-an-invitation-to-organizers">A Sane Alternative Dismissed; Kate Arnoff; Dissent</a> </p><p><a href="https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2023/0514_pd/public-opinion-and-imperialism">Experiencing Imperialism; Prabhait Patnaik; Peoples Democracy</a> </p><p><a href="https://archive.ph/vp5BL">Why We're Fighting; Benjamin Swartz & Christopher Layne; Harpers</a></p><p><a href="https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/">Math Made You Rich: Alvin Chang: Pudding.Cool</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html">Those Familiar Winners; Talmon Smith; New York Times</a></p><p><a href="https://doctorow.medium.com/googles-ai-hype-circle-6158804d1299">Cause For Hope; Cory Doctorow; Medium</a></p><p><a href="https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/taught-for-america">Cause For Despair;l Wesley Yang; Substack</a></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-53263284264491294452022-10-03T11:13:00.003-04:002022-10-10T11:32:20.006-04:00Interregnum Links<p> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/02/patrick-lawrence-the-west-technocrats-incompetents-ideologues/">Western Incompetence: Patrick Lawrence: Sheerpost</a></p><p><a href="https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-war-has-just-begun">The Winter of Yuri: Big Serge: Substack</a></p><p><a href="https://www.thepostil.com/kharkov-and-mobilization/">& Mobilization: Jacques Baud: The Postil</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/10/the-inevitable-financial-crisis.html">Financial Fallout: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><a href="https://unherd.com/2022/09/the-eu-is-sleepwalking-into-anarchy/">Social Fallout: Thomas Fazi: Unherd</a></p><p><a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/12/diana-johnstone-the-specter-of-germany-is-rising/">Political Fallout: Diana Johnstone: Consortium News</a></p><p><a href="https://michael-hudson.com/2022/09/a-short-history-of-inflation-in-modern-times/">Economic Fallout: Michael Hudson</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/25/the-city-that-survived-covid-better-than-the-rest-of-us-00050564">COVID Isn't That Hard: Victoria Colliver: Politico</a></p><p><a href="https://qz.com/china-life-expectancy-exceeds-us-1849483265">If You Care About The Living: Mary Hui: Quartz</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/10/death-is-anything-but-a-dying-business-as-private-equity-cashes-in.html">Profiting From Death: John McGreggor: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/TRyanGregory/status/1567498937979879426?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1567498937979879426%7Ctwgr%5E25c116e228ae95a4052597694b3e1c051d30244a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2022%2F09%2Flinks-9-8-2022.html">Has Consequences: T Ryan Gregory: Twitter</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/InstantBerlin/status/1561744742181998594?s=20&t=N6tnjsrzkTWHY_LSj5uw-Q&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email">As The World Burns: Martin Zeigler: Twitter</a></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-56484554397848513222022-08-26T11:03:00.005-04:002022-08-26T13:46:41.499-04:00Institutional Delusional Links<p><a href=" https://www.ianwelsh.net/most-zero-sum-games-are-negative-sum-so-are-most-positive-sum-games/">Negative Sum Capitalism: Ian Welsh</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32412-y">False Consciousness: Sparkman, Geiger & Weber: Nature</a></p><p><a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/87664?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email">False Finance: Michael Pettis: Carnegie Endowment</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/08/china-as-a-developmental-state-indigenous-innovation-and-global-competition.html">Indigenous Innovation: Lazonick and Li: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><a href="https://www.indianpunchline.com/world-order-looks-different-from-moscow-beijing/">Lookin West: M. K. Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline</a></p><p><a href="https://www.thepostil.com/ukraine-weapons-or-peace-a-conversation-with-jacques-baud/">From The Alps: Jaques Baud: The Postil</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/08/turkey-positions-itself-as-the-middleman-in-east-west-conflict.html">From Anatolia: Connor Gallagher: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><a href="https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/who-was-behind-july-15-2016-military-uprising-turkey">With Your Eyes Squinted: Mahmut Cengiz: Small Wars</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/08/a-marines-assessment-of-russias-military-operation-in-ukraine-a-profound-appreciation-of-all-three-realms-in-which-wars-are-waged.html">From Quantico: Lambert Strether: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/11/patrick-lawrence-so-far-as-i-can-make-out/">As Far As I Can See: Patrick Lawrence: ScheerPost</a></p><a href="https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2022/08/on-wunderwaffe-thinking-again-and-some.html">Wunderwaffe: Andrei Martyanov: Smoothiex12</a><br /><p><a href="https://sonar21.com/combined-arms-a-look-at-russian-air-ops-in-the-donbas/">Combined Arms: Larry Johnson: Sonar21</a></p><p><a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/08/ukraine-wrong-assumptions-wrong-conclusions-and-a-lot-of-dead-soldiers.html#more">Bad Assumptions: b: Moon Of Alabama</a></p><p><a href="https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/08/05/has-the-ukraine-conflict-driven-american-government-officials-crazy/">Mar-a-Lago Blues: Jeremy Kuzmarov: CovertAction</a></p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/08/latin-america-is-once-again-on-great-gameboard-as-new-cold-war-threatens-to-go-global.html">Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Nick Corbishley: Naked Capitalism</a><br /><p><a href="https://www.indianpunchline.com/where-jcpoa-oil-conjoin-stands-opec/">Great Bitter Lake After Taste: M. K. Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/08/iran-and-russia-move-to-create-a-global-natural-gas-cartel.html">Gas Goes East: Simon Watkins: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/polio-virus-hundreds-of-infections-possible-new-york-health-department/">Polio: Sophie Reardon: CBS</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/08/cdc-rigs-its-own-monkeypox-case-reports-by-not-including-questions-on-airborne-transmission.html">CDC Pox: Lambert Strether: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><a href="https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/inflation-in-a-time-of-corona-and-war">It Ain't Labor: Servaas Storm: Inet</a></p><p><a href="https://pandem-ic.com/with-or-without-you-how-population-outliers-affect-pandemic-severity/">Bringing Down The Average: Philip Schellekens: PandemIC</a></p><p><a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid-is-keeping-as-many-as-4-million-people-out-of-work/">The Long March: Katie Bach: Brookings </a></p><p><a href="https://upnight.com/2022/08/11/the-normalization-of-covid-another-example-of-how-america-is-perversely-pro-risk/">Risk Society: Mitchell Aboulafia: Up@night</a></p><p><a href="https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/07/08/Forever-Pandemic-Nikiforuk-Replies-Critics/">Forever: Andrew Nikiforuk: TheTyee</a></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.profgalloway.com/welfare-queens/">Welfare Queens: Scott Galloway: ProfGalloway</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><br /><br /><p></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-15307788271483716092022-04-01T11:23:00.002-04:002022-04-01T12:19:38.546-04:00Fog Of War Links<p> <a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/biden-means-what-he-says">Why Biden Picked A War</a>: Margaret Kimberly: Black Agenda Report</p><p><a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/george-kennan-nato-covert-guerrilla?s=r">His Muse</a>: Yasha Levine: Substack</p><p><a href="https://turcopolier.com/everybody-has-a-plan-until-they-get-punched-in-the-mouth-ttg/">His Plan</a>: TTG: Turcopolier</p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/AsaWinstanley/status/1509101458981019649?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1509101458981019649%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2022%2F03%2Flinks-3-31-2022.html">His Troops</a>: Asa Winstanly: Twitter</p><p><a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/29/realist-case-ukraine-peace-deal/">Alternate Reality</a>: Stephen M. Walt: Foreign Policy</p><p><a href="file:///C:/Users/john.newman/Downloads/U.S.%20Cold%20War%20Policy%20Was%20Designed%20by%20a%20Bigot%20George%20Kennan_s%20diaries%20reveal%20just%20how%20much%20he%20hated%20America.pdf">Bigots All The Way Down</a>: David Greenberg: TNR</p><p><a href="https://patrickarmstrong.ca/">Losing Perspectives</a>: Patrick Armstrong: Russia Observer</p><p><a href="https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4">And Security</a>: Corey Doctorow: OneZero</p><p><a href="https://www.drorpoleg.com/abrogation-theory/">Joining The Herd</a>: Dror Poleg</p><p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26164879">In The Risk Society</a>: Ulrech Beck: Justor</p><p><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/airborne-toxic-events-ehrenreich">Of Airborne Toxic Events</a>: Ben Ehrenreich: Baffler</p><p><a href="https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/">And Few Bodies</a>: Notes From Disgraceland</p><p><a href="https://www.dw.com/en/the-true-cost-of-fracked-us-freedom-gas/a-61283540">Casus Belli:</a> Sarah Steffen: DW</p><p><a href="https://theanalysis.news/ukraine-a-pawn-in-a-larger-struggle-vijay-prashad-pt-1/">Bigger Picture</a>: Paul Jay & Vijay Prashad: The Analysis</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://declassifieduk.org/how-uk-military-and-spy-agencies-are-weaponising-social-justice/">Weaponized Justice</a>: Freya India: Declassified UK</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/27/insurers-could-have-been-climate-heroes-instead-they-have-risked-a-crisis-to-dwarf-2008">Climate Zeros</a>: Eugene Linden: The Guardian</p><p><br /></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-2076066165131696872022-01-25T11:03:00.016-05:002022-01-26T12:41:07.844-05:00The Global COVID Divide<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjxx21_DrEcOt7K2U_gV6Zsp4N1vvTuQNVCKnqiQZmjl8sJ67kQYyBfnT-KwnVLl-X2reCVulZVTgJsJKQDc4ixGT3cpz2Yn4YF5_8e9xMFlH3blVsLDDessU_cfrUhbSOD7aJsEP-FvkY/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1519" data-original-width="2784" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjxx21_DrEcOt7K2U_gV6Zsp4N1vvTuQNVCKnqiQZmjl8sJ67kQYyBfnT-KwnVLl-X2reCVulZVTgJsJKQDc4ixGT3cpz2Yn4YF5_8e9xMFlH3blVsLDDessU_cfrUhbSOD7aJsEP-FvkY/w375-h205/image.png" width="375" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><br />The Pandemic isn't over, it is at the end of its beginning. <p></p><p>Incessant messaging that Omicron is "<a href="https://dglassman.medium.com/omicron-was-never-mild-2b130568d7fa">milder</a>", that COVID <i>is </i>endemic, that there is some "<a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-has-been-lost-covid-19/">normal</a>" <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-im-done-with-covid-is-easier-said-than-done/">to return to</a> are all <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/574984-covid-19-long-haulers-plead-for-government-action">wishful thinking</a> at best, <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/they-really-are-trying-to-kill-us-all.html">cynical propaganda</a> at <a href="https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1485977546978168832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1485977546978168832%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2022%2F01%2F200pm-water-cooler-1-25-2022.html">worst</a>. In the face of an indifferent Nature that would just as soon see human extinction on the spikes of the COVID virus as it did that of the Buffalo in the trajectory of our rifles, we contend with the <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/us-excess-deaths-kent-willard/?trackingId=RS1DDXJmzm%2F9jvY2CkJ70Q%3D%3D">existential threat</a> COVID represents with our all too human foibles. COVID has revealed a stark division in the worlds civilizations obscured by an apparent capitalist homogeneity as evidenced in the chart above. </p><p>The state of play is thus: the virus continues to mutate in the Neoliberal West, nations in the Far East experienced with SARS <a href="https://www.ianwelsh.net/western-australia-proves-basic-pandemic-control-methods-would-have-stopped-covid/">have contained</a> and <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30800-8/fulltext">eliminated it</a>, some <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-30/china-contains-delta-outbreak-ahead-of-key-holiday-for-economy">repeatedly</a>. There is no reason to believe it will mutate into something benign, the belief viruses <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-virulent/story?id=82052581">evolve towards endemicity</a> and that <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00155-x">that's okay</a> is <a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/01/22/the-kids-are-not-alright-data-suggests-10-of-children-with-19-become-long-haulers/">self delusion</a>. The "<a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/24829/net-income-profit-pharma-companies/">Shock Doctrine</a>" approach of <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html">maximizing profit</a> from disease deployed across the West with varying degrees of ideological intensity has ensured mutations will continue by maintaining <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302268-how-did-the-omicron-coronavirus-variant-evolve-to-be-so-dangerous/">immunocompromised</a> populations at scale, such as that of South Africans with AIDS, where Omicron was bred. Those Far Eastern nations are at the point of recognizing themselves as peers of a particular sort: <a href="https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9122.html">societies with functional States</a>, the anathema of Neoliberalism. It is only a matter of time before they begin acting on it.</p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-48763030831447195372021-11-08T18:25:00.005-05:002021-11-08T18:48:09.004-05:00Freefall<p><a href="https://www.the74million.org/article/naep-long-term-unprecedented-performance-drop-american-13-year-olds/">Lost Futures: Keith Mahnken: The 74</a></p><p><a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a37775751/wsj-federal-judges-violated-law-cases-ethics/">Lost Justice: Charles Pierce: Esquire</a> </p><p><a href="https://www.cjr.org/special_report/ok-seriously-teen-vogue-mccammond-wintour.php">Privatized Politics: Clio Chang: CJR</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://luke.substack.com/p/the-american-healthcare-system-damages">The Health Con: Luke O'Neil: Welcome To Hell World</a> </p><p><a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/28/life-s28.html">The Marks: Patrick Martin: WSWS</a> </p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/15/1037195/engineering-epidemiology-pandemic-problem-solving/">Humility, Reality: Siobhan Roberts: Technology Review</a> </p><p><a href="https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/10/15/colour-revolutions-fade-away/">Fading Colors; Patrick Armstrong: Strategic Culture</a> </p><p><a href="https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/the-pandemic-and-capitalism/">Fading Prospects: James Galbraith: Democracy Journal</a> </p><p><a href="https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/">Unreal Estate: Bowman, Myers, Southwood: Works In Progress</a> </p><p><a href="https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/america-is-highly-vulnerable-to-a-missile-attack/">Indefensible: Stephen Bryen: Asia Times</a> </p><p><a href="https://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-taiwan-the-thucydides-trapper-who-cried-woof/">Wolf Trappers: Gary Brecher: Exiled</a> </p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/united-in-rage-ray">Opioid Odysseys: Tarence Ray: Baffler</a> </p><p><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/">Aerosol Heads: Megan Molteni: Wired</a></p><p><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vaccination-campaign-endangers-us-all/">Ill Faith: Scientific American</a></p><p><a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/yes-virginia-there-is-a-deep-state?justPublished=true">Eroded Trust: Matt Taibbi: Substack</a> </p><p><a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/16/what-baraitser-thought-about-the-plot-to-kill-or-abduct-assange/">Persecuted Heroes: Joe Lauria: Consortium News</a> </p><p><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-trouble-with-uplift-reed">Uplift, Off: Adolph Reed: The Baffler</a></p><p><a href="https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/girard-series-part-2-fascism-and-the-antifestival/">Antifestivities: Charles Eisenstein: Substack</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://asiatimes.com/2021/10/milestones-show-path-of-xis-transformation-drive/">Xi's Milestones: Jeff Pao: Asia Times</a></p><p><a href="https://scholars-stage.org/xi-jinpings-war-on-spontaneous-order/">Xi's Millstones: Tanner Greer: Scholars Stage</a> </p><p><a href="https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-jinping-just-isnt-that">Xi's Stones: Noah Smith: Noahpinion</a> </p><p><a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2021-10-19/myth-russian-decline">Putin It Out There: Kofman, Kendall-Taylor: Foreign Affairs </a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://i.redd.it/ihkhc17wwft71.jpg">Know Your Staff: Reddit.IT</a></p><p><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/22/2059729/-The-states-where-most-people-are-quitting-their-jobs-all-seem-to-have-two-things-in-common">Right To Work, Right To Quit: Dartagnan: Daily Kos</a> </p><p><a href="https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/the-sacrificial-king">Striking At Kings: Charles Eisenstein: Substack</a></p><p><a href="https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-age-of-exterminations-iv-how-to.html">And Those Around Them: Ugo Bardi: The Senecca Effect</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/china/what-is-behind-chinas-power-crunch-2021-09-27/">Chilling China: Shivani Singh: Reuters</a></p><p><a href="https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/">Burning West: Drought Monitor</a></p><p><a href="https://fsapps.nwcg.gov/#">Mostly Embers (At The Moment): NWEG</a></p><p><a href="https://science.thewire.in/environment/rain-september-monsoon-pattern-climate-change/">Monsoon Lingers: Amrit B L S: The Wire </a></p><p><a href="https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-crisis-food-shortage-security-fertilizer-prices-yara-ceo-madagascar-cop26">Famine Futures: Katherine Dunn: Forbes</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://mronline.org/2021/11/01/radical-heterodoxies-parallel-institutions-w-mat-forstater/">What Is Economical? Mat Forstater: MR Online</a></p><p><a href="https://evonomics.com/a-new-capitalism-the-case-for-universal-property/">What Is Property? Peter Barnes: Evonomics</a></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-33301382858815923932021-07-14T12:31:00.005-04:002021-07-15T11:25:55.374-04:00Accelerating Disintegration Links<p><a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/the-brazilianization-of-the-world/ ">Neoliberalisms Next Logical Step: Alex Hochuli: Americna Affairs Journal</a></p><p><a href="https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/07/12/the-increase-in-wealth-inequality-during-covid-is-not-an-accident-it-is-a-design-fault-that-needs-to-be-corrected/">Systemic Redistribution: Richard Murphy: TaxResearch.org</a></p><p><a href="https://www.eclogiselle.com/p/policies-that-make-poor-less-poor.html">Alternatives: eclogiselle</a></p><p><a href="https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/robert-pollin-gerald-epstein-neoliberalism%E2%80%99s-bailout-problem">Corporate Communism: Robert Pollin & Gerald Epstiem: Boston Review</a></p><p><a href="https://www.ianwelsh.net/understanding-your-control-over-climate-change/">What You Can Do: Ian Welsh</a></p><p><a href="https://davidhealy.org/can-doctors-save-their-jobs-and-the-world/?">Treating The Future: David Heal: Davidheal.org</a></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/FiskJeremy/status/1414869488516861952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1414869488516861952%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2021%2F07%2Flinks-7-13-2021.html">Killing Poor: Fisk Jeremy: Twitter</a></p><p><a href="https://www.axios.com/covid-vaccines-low-income-poor-workers-58698275-0451-4158-a967-37189dbf673c.html">Duh: Bob Herman: Axios</a></p><p><a href="https://voxeu.org/article/populism-and-covid-19">Popular Populism: Antonio Spilimbergo: VoxEU</a></p><p><a href="https://www.ianwelsh.net/preparing-for-bad-times-thread/">Take Care: Ian Welsh</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9781839/American-arrested-Haitian-presidents-killing-U-S-law-enforcement-ties-source.html">Getting Sloppy: Rachel Sharp & Lauren Lewis: Daily Mail</a></p><p><a href="https://www.brasilwire.com/white-house-admits-cia-involvement-in-latin-americas-war-on-corruption/">Catches Up With You: Brazil Wire</a></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/BlackSocialists/status/1399759406045278209">Comes Home To Bite On The Left: BlackSocialists: Twitter</a></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1413169089560813568">Comes Home To Bite On The Right: MartyrMade: Twitter</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/james-meek/who-holds-the-welding-rod">Lucrative Delusions: James Meek: LRB</a></p><p><a href="https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-newsletter-22">Choosing What To Measure: Adam Tooze: Substack</a></p><p><a href="https://paydayreport.com/covid-19-strike-wave-interactive-map/">Absent In Media I: Payday Report</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/07/bureau-of-labor-statistics-non-reporting-tallies-8-strikes-in-2020-versus-payday-reports-1200.html">Absent In Media II: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/jessica-ashooh-reddit-national-security-state-plant/277639/">Containing Reddit: Alan MacLeod: Mintpress</a></p><p><a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-antitrust-revolution-has-found?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozNjIxNDUzLCJwb3N0X2lkIjozNzY0ODMyMSwiXyI6ImlFazZVIiwiaWF0IjoxNjI0MjMxOTUwLCJleHAiOjE2MjQyMzU1NTAsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xMTUyNCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.RcaZJNtGWRrylg2ewn770YDytshJmsTVKk3nDdeAqAY">Laws Can Be Enforced: Matt Stoller: Substack</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://thescrum.substack.com/p/something-happened-in-geneva">What's Up: Patrick Lawrence: Substack</a></p><p><a href="https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/ransomware.html">Smart Seizure: Stephen Diehl</a></p><p><a href="https://www.ianwelsh.net/siphon-the-system-thinking-doesnt-work-against-nature/">Poverty Is Policy: Ian Welsh</a></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-6768557405690350702021-05-27T11:25:00.002-04:002021-05-27T11:33:04.116-04:00Nothing Will Fundamentally Change Links<p><b> Nothing Will Fundamentally Change:</b></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/why-biden-is-not-a-transformational-president.html">https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/why-biden-is-not-a-transformational-president.html</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/michael-hudson-why-biden-wont-cancel-student-debt.html">https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/michael-hudson-why-biden-wont-cancel-student-debt.html</a></p><p><b>1619 Project:</b></p><p><a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619">https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619</a></p><p><a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html</a></p><p><a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html</a></p><p><b>Policy for Sale:</b></p><p><a href="https://www.dailyposter.com/debt-collectors-spending-big-to-block-a-crackdown/">https://www.dailyposter.com/debt-collectors-spending-big-to-block-a-crackdown/</a></p><p><b>Your Money or Your Life:</b></p><p><a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/">https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/</a></p><p><a href="https://www.ianwelsh.net/cdc-decides-to-just-not-count-all-covid-cases/">https://www.ianwelsh.net/cdc-decides-to-just-not-count-all-covid-cases/</a></p><p><a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/what-really-happened-with-that-weird-yankees-covid-outbreak.html">https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/what-really-happened-with-that-weird-yankees-covid-outbreak.html</a></p><p><a href="https://zeroanthropology.net/2021/05/24/the-world-health-organization-who-a-problem-of-trust/">https://zeroanthropology.net/2021/05/24/the-world-health-organization-who-a-problem-of-trust/</a></p><p><a href="https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-science-has-been-corrupted/">https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-science-has-been-corrupted/</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01246-x">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01246-x</a></p><p><b>Structural Propaganda:</b></p><p><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/19srByafx4z79bMRm4buo5u7Fm1bj5EShTkj1gdGUzTg/view">https://docs.google.com/document/d/19srByafx4z79bMRm4buo5u7Fm1bj5EShTkj1gdGUzTg/view</a></p><p><a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-beating">https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-beating</a></p><p><a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-cj-hopkins-critic">https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-cj-hopkins-critic</a></p><p><a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy-a32">https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy-a32</a></p><p><a href="https://ghionjournal.com/revisiting-russiagate-donald-trump-barack-obama-ndaa/">https://ghionjournal.com/revisiting-russiagate-donald-trump-barack-obama-ndaa/</a></p><p><a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/spies-journalists-and-info-ops-against-america/">https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/spies-journalists-and-info-ops-against-america/</a></p><p><b>Golden Age of Fraud:</b></p><p><a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/will-goldman-penis-envy-crash-the-da9">https://taibbi.substack.com/p/will-goldman-penis-envy-crash-the-da9</a></p><p><a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/con-of-the-week-greensill-capital-99c">https://taibbi.substack.com/p/con-of-the-week-greensill-capital-99c</a></p><p><a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/racket-of-the-week-the-2-billion-7a2">https://taibbi.substack.com/p/racket-of-the-week-the-2-billion-7a2</a></p><p><a href="https://www.americanbanker.com/news/warren-quarles-spar-over-fed-role-in-banks-archegos-losses">https://www.americanbanker.com/news/warren-quarles-spar-over-fed-role-in-banks-archegos-losses</a></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-48531211556185225182020-11-19T13:00:00.001-05:002020-11-19T13:00:13.765-05:00What's Left When You Don't Believe In It Links<p><a href="https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4953&context=lcp">Information Power: Kathirina Pistor: Duke.Edu</a></p><p><a href="https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-prophet-of-the-revolt">Powerlessness & Participation: Martin Gurra: ThePullRequest</a></p><p><a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/11/the-enemies-briefcase-secret-powers-of-the-presidency/">Alternate Power: Andrew Cockburn: Harpers</a></p><p><a href="https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/09/04/stocks-are-up-wages-are-down-what-does-it-mean/">Fictitious Capital?: Blair Fix: Economics Top Down </a></p><p><a href="http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/">Fictitious Power?: <span style="font-family: times;"><span class="person_name" style="background-color: white;">Nitzan, Jonathan</span><span style="background-color: white;"> and </span><span class="person_name" style="background-color: white;">Bichler, Shimshon: ORKU</span></span> </a></p><p><a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/glenn-greenwald-ran-cover-billionaire">Power People: Yasha Levine: SubStack</a></p><p><a href="https://africasacountry.com/2020/09/climate-imperialism-and-the-us-elections">Climate Imperialism: Keston Perry: Africa Is A Country</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/09/brazils-pantanal-wetland-is-on-fire-joining-other-places-where-wildfires-rage-or-have-recently-burned-out-of-control.html">Imperialism Burns: Jerri-Lynn Scofield: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p><a href="https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/21/guide-to-journalists-assange-trial-upset-by-media-blackout/">Truth Eclipse: Kevin Gosztola: Shadowproof</a></p><p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/20/gangster-capitalism-and-the-american-theft-of-chinese-innovation/">What Goes Around: Danny Chrichton: TechCrunch</a></p><p><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-myth-liberal-north-erases-long-history-white-violence-180975661/">Racism Institution: Clark-Pufara & Cox: Smithsonian</a></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-53656992492653221392020-09-22T11:47:00.008-04:002020-09-22T12:13:12.630-04:00Sausage Links<p style="text-align: left;">Google is trying to kill off old school bloggers by only allowing double spacing. Please accept our apologies for the vast wasted screen space and the excessive scrolling Google now insist on putting you through</p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/04/we-need-to-abolish-race/">Abolish Race: Inaya Iman: Spiked-Online</a> </p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/race-is-about-more-than-discrimination/amp/?__twitter_impression=true">The Edge Of Capitalism: Bill Fletcher: Monthly Review </a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=15/30.298/-97.776&city=austin-tx">It's Deadly False History: Mapping Inequality: dsl.richmond</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-21/calculating-reparations-look-what-s-been-taken-from-black-americans">And Stolen Past: William Darity Jr: Bloomberg</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.latimes.com/wildfires-map/">Burning The West: LA Times</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/economists-think-congress-could-create-an-economic-disaster-this-summer/">Intending Disaster: Thompson-Deveauz & Paine: FiveThirtyEight</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-left-case-against-open-borders/">Left Open: Peter Turchin: Cliodynamica</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/max-blumenthal-and-ben-norton-with-michael-hudson-how-the-us-makes-countries-pay-for-its-wars-economics-of-american-imperialism.html">Billing The Vicitims: Blumenthal & Hudson: Naked Capitalism</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-could-save-us-from-coronavirus/">Seeing It Coming: Adam Tooze: Foreign Policy</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/GunnelsWarren/status/1285409615908417537?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1285409615908417537%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2020%2F07%2F200pm-water-cooler-7-21-2020.html">And The Winners Are: Gunnels Warren: Twitter</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/">Stealing The New Way: Barry Linn: Harpers</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://scienceblog.com/517765/study-reveals-impact-of-powerful-ceos-and-money-laundering-on-bank-performance/">Stealing The Old Way: Science Blog</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/near-and-present-anarchy-zakin">Amongst The Ruins: Susan Zakin: Baffler</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/30/oh-what-a-webb-we-weave/">Globalization's Shadow: Greg Mabury: Consortium News</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/FirasElEchi10/status/1290678032978579456">And It's Explosion: Firas El Echi: Twitter</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://classunity.org/spiraling-anti-marxism-in-the-dsa/">Anti-Marxist Marxists: Editorial Committee: Class Unity</a>y</p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://morningconsult.com/2020/08/18/tracking-consumer-comfort-with-dining-out-and-other-leisure-activities/">Leading Horses To Water: Alyssa Meyers: Morning Consult</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2020/07/29/best-worst-countries-raise-family/#6d8f7fab7bec">Worst Place To Raise A Family: Laura Begley Bloom: Forbes </a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/the-very-important-and-of-course-blacklisted-bis-paper-about-the-crisis.html">Blacklisted Truths: Andrew Dittmer: Naked Capitalism</a></p><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/M_C_Yates/status/1293300812001742855">She Who Must Be Obeyed: M C Yates: Twitter</a></div><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2020/08/25/the-abyss-of-disinformation-gazes-into-its-creators/">Blank Stares: Patrick Armstrong: Russia Observer</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://awfulavalanche.wordpress.com/2020/09/18/how-america-plans-to-sink-russian-submarines-part-iv/">To Start A War For: Yalensis: Awful Avalanche </a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/dealing-with-america-in-decline/">Into Decline: Timofei Bordachev: Valdai Discussion Club</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/14/cold-war-china-misuse-of-history-united-states-soviet-union/">Past Compulsions: Zachary Carabell: Foreign Policy</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/coronavirus-pandemic-working-class">No Class Party: Michael Lind: Tablet</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://theweek.com/articles/932075/joe-biden-already-planning-failed-presidency">Baking In Failure: Ryan Cooper: The Week</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59">Destroying Surveillance Capitalism: Cory Doctorow: Medium</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/16/americas-eviction-epidemic/">Eviction Eruption: Gabriel Schivone: NYROB</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09/14/lets-be-real-president-biden-would-probably-be-more-hawkish-than-trump/">The Toad To War: Caitlin Johnstone</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/new-york-city-s-day-of-reckoning-is-at-hand/">Day Of Reckoning: O'Brien Kaissar: BloombergQuint</a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/14324641-7be1-4efa-b544-09395429c0e7">Innovating Starvation: Patti Waldmeir: Financial Times</a></p>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-20361168272619993522020-07-20T11:47:00.004-04:002020-07-20T12:29:58.394-04:00Corona Crash Links<a href="https://transitiontech.ca/pdf/Winner-Do-Artifacts-Have-Politics-1980.pdf">The Politics Of Things: Langdon Winner: MIT Press</a><br />
<a href="https://projects.propublica.org/protest-police-tactics/#979122">In Action: Buford, Waldron, Syed, Shaw: ProPublica</a><br />
<a href="https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=15/30.286/-97.759&city=austin-tx">In Maps: Mapping Inequality: dsl.richmond</a><br />
<a href="https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/20-127_6164cbfd-37a2-489e-8bd2-c252cc7abb87.pdf">In Space: Kniffin et al: HBS</a><br />
<a href="https://theweek.com/articles/921833/world-putting-america-quarantine">At The Border: Ryan Cooper: The Week</a><br />
<a href="https://valdaiclub.com/a/chairman-speech/coronavirus-should-it-be-vaccinated/">In Institutions: Andrey Bystritskiy: Valdai Discussion Club</a><br />
<a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/01/us-coronavirus-leading-world-america-first/">Of The Virus: Adam Tooz: Foreign Policy</a><br />
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<a href="https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hhrg-116-ba16-wstate-spriggsd-20200714.pdf">What Should Be Done: William Spriggs: House Financial Services</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/07/covid-19-economic-realities-sinking-in-as-denialism-wanes-desperation-rises.html">But Isn't: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism</a><br />
<a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets">Confused By Numbers: Micheal Pettis: China Financial Markets</a><br />
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-18/nyc-home-purchase-contracts-plummet-delaying-a-price-reckoning">& And Reaction Time: Oshrat Carmiel: Bloomberg</a><br />
<a href="https://paydayreport.com/covid-19-strike-wave-interactive-map/">Action On The Ground: Strike Map: Ppydayreport</a><br />
<a href="https://discourseblog.substack.com/p/the-blood-on-new-yorks-hands">Apportioning Responsibility: Jack Crosbie: Discourseblog</a><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/RoseAnnDeMoro/status/1278340640967819265?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1278340640967819265%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2020%2F07%2F200pm-water-cooler-7-1-2020.html">For This: Rose Ann De Moro: Twitter</a><br />
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<a href="https://nonsite.org/symposium/the-surprising-geography-of-police-killings-back-of-the-napkin-calculations-on-race-region-and-violence">Geography Of Police Killings: Christian Parenti: NonSite</a><br />
<a href="https://paydayreport.com/900-strikes-since-march-1st-rubber-bullet-workers-make-only-10-an-hour-new-strike-board-game-launched/">& The Industry Behind It: Mike Elk: Paydayreport</a><br />
<a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07/20/cancel-government-secrecy-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/">Built In Secret: Caitlin Johnstone</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/why-americas-institutions-are-failing/613078/">Eroding Institutions: Derek Thompson: The Atlantic</a><div><a href="https://sirota.substack.com/p/dems-sternly-worded-letter-wont-stop?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozNjIxNDUzLCJwb3N0X2lkIjo3Mzg4MDQsIl8iOiJvb3A5KyIsImlhdCI6MTU5NTI2MjQ4MywiZXhwIjoxNTk1MjY2MDgzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzc3NzgiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.k78bVvYUM-mhpIYBUFygjTTD6k2HdcDVj5XbIx0VM0c">With Bipartisanship: David Sirota</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-rally-that-could-have-been/">Class Conservativism: John Burtka IV: TAC</a><br />
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<a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/07/14/cancel-culture-martina-navratilova-documentary/">Canceling Collaboration: Glenn Greenwald: The Intercept</a><br />
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-14/coronavirus-conversations-with-one-of-america-s-richest-men">To Protect Idiots Like This: Max Abelson: Blooberg</a><br />
<a href="https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7557.html">Making Free Speech Moot: Steve Randy Waldman: Interfluidity</a><br />
<a href="https://americancompass.org/respect-the-rage/">Which Leaves Only Rage: Chris Arnade: AmericanCompass</a><br />
<a href="https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/what-s-wrong-with-america-the-despair-is-smoldering-in-society-a-7db32b9d-cea0-425e-b417-51eab17d7aff">& Despair: Case & Deaton: Der Spiegel</a><br />
<a href="https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/the-man-who-drove-the-us-out-of-afghanistan/">& Incompetence: Fazelminallah Qazizai: AsiaTimes</a></div>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-66961377244401969672020-07-15T17:40:00.024-04:002020-07-23T13:17:43.717-04:00How Beliefs Kill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4qoZiFpEFmlovMZ0TaG5Pnk3JAC9Wejgmj-tL8sZNQnNxzG_Cb9_FHf5Cb1jNhfgnUcWdq3BXs52Ra4gH-0bfMR6ytFiu1vhStVT_vo2BgwrVvVUYIbQkThyphenhyphenWCnY8mtbYHOBp2VkCxFjI/s1600/UNADJUSTEDNONRAW_thumb_4387.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="1272" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4qoZiFpEFmlovMZ0TaG5Pnk3JAC9Wejgmj-tL8sZNQnNxzG_Cb9_FHf5Cb1jNhfgnUcWdq3BXs52Ra4gH-0bfMR6ytFiu1vhStVT_vo2BgwrVvVUYIbQkThyphenhyphenWCnY8mtbYHOBp2VkCxFjI/s400/UNADJUSTEDNONRAW_thumb_4387.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Markets can be mesmerizing and seemingly magical things. By making purchases according to their values and needs, individuals cause reality to be reconfigured, out of site, invisibly and often at a great distance, satisfying those desires and needs. The intricate tapestry of markets with which we now live, having stitched the world together, is a marvel to behold. But the minute rhythm of its weave can all to easily hypnotize us into misunderstanding what's really happening. Markets exist, like money, only in our minds, their warp is our belief and their weft our action on those beliefs. There are people and things that markets organize, but themselves, they are just ideas: agreements between people that function as institutions in the same way as all our social institutions, by shared consent, as ideological representations of how people and things can be arranged. For better or worse, <a href="https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-system-did-not-appear-ex-nihilo/">real resources are configured by these belief and agreements</a>.</span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">Demand, supply and money interact in logical relationships of ever expanding complexity through markets. For instance it can be shown mathematically that <a href="https://www.levyforecast.com/profits-perspective/">"profit" across an economic system is equal to successful "investment"</a> where investment is defined as money spent to reconfigure capital goods and/or re-organize labor into more efficient processes to exploit the reconfigured or existing capital goods. The resulting profit across the system equals the combined input of successful investments. Function by function, the subsystems that make up modern markets are conceived symbolically to allow their situation within the larger system to be understood in order to identify those points where real resources can be reconfigured or new processes introduced to create more profit. And the further one is from actual production, the more symbolically loaded the math becomes, it is in these abstractions, and mostly in their manipulations, that finance finds it's millions.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">This symbolic aspect of markets</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 18px;">, for the elite,</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"> is their most enchanting characteristic: that all the complexity of reality need not clutter the stimulus and response of<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_equation#Statement"> "price setting", the </a></span><i style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_equation#Statement">essential </a></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_equation#Statement">symbolic function</a> of the market equation around which all other terms are organized to distribute resources efficiently. But for markets to deliver on that potential, every symbol in the construct which contains assumptions about some real thing must have these assumptions continuously tweeked. To track reality they must constantly be tuned, modified or abandoned as the feedback of reality dictates. "By making purchases according to their values and needs," for instance, assumes people with money to spend, an inherently political question where </span><i style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"><a href="https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-system-did-not-appear-ex-nihilo/">policy, not the market</a>,</i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"> determines reality. The most important assumptions are all political in this way. As what we think of as capitalism was taking its shape, an important vein of its development opted to deliberately exclude </span><i style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">essential</i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"> populations from participating in markets, chose to prevent them from having money to spend to impact price signals, keeping them as slaves for the sake of money profits in markets elsewhere. This political decision made business very profitable.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">By the time of the American Civil War, slaves constituted almost 40% of the population of the American South and were a key traded asset on the <a href="https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/londons-slave-trade">London Stock Exchange</a> and the key to profitability in the plantation economy. For profit in markets, "people cause reality to be reconfigured, out of site, invisibly and often at a great distance, to satisfy those desires and necessities." For the end buyer of cotton, or the traders of slave mortgages in London, the mass early deaths and appalling treatment of American blacks was an invisible externality. Or for those who knew, which those profiting most certainly did, they were an acceptable cost of doing business. This is the essential problem of markets: every symbolic construct of the system has real referents that however distant or obscure can take on staggering moral weight. The Corona Virus is underlining and highlighting for all the world the moral failures of America's markets now which are currently <a href="http://cobblehillbilly.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2020-04-06T10:38:00-04:00&max-results=15">destroying, by conflating, both our politics and economics.</a></span><span style="color: black; font-family: times, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"> </span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Remember way back in <i>early</i> March when the combined Democratic field was <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/27/politics/what-matters-february-26/index.html">dogpiling on the Sanders campaign</a> for its "irresponsible" Medicare For All proposal? At the cost of (bites pinkie) ONE TRILLION DOLLARS (over ten years)! Then, ...remember a few weeks later in <i>late</i> March, when Congress handed $1.6T to the Fed? Who within that same week gave ALL OF IT to Wall Street. From the same Congressional Act there is another $4.6T similarly pre-authorized for the Fed to play with but no one can tell what's going on with it because Congress provided meaningless oversight provisions. Only licensed financial institutions have accounts with the Fed, so there is that inherent limit on <i>where</i> it can spend. The Fed is doing as it pleases within that limit. Mysteriously the financial markets are near an all-time high. So is the US Covid infection rate with the US already the world leader in Covid deaths. The United States of America, I submit to you, can pay for whatever it CHOOSES and these are the choices our elected representatives have made.</span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">In a previous post, I made the claim that in the political market US policy making has become, with policy for sale to the highest bidder, policy cannot be coordinated towards any public aim, public health for instance, that conflicts with some private profit flow: profit comes first, that's what the buyer paid for. This is what I'm talking about when I say that markets and money are nothing but social agreements and that our beliefs about them reconfigure real resources: one day the money </span><i style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">isn't</i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"> there, the next it </span><i style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">is</i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">, some people get rich, some people die. Because of these beliefs. Where did that money come from? Why can't the US contain the virus? The nations around the world with socialized medicine have, the US and other nations that don't, haven't. We can insure the profits of corporations but not ensure the health of citizens because of what we choose to believe.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">No taxes were raised, no extended debate determined who would get rich, nor who would die. This is what was legislated with the Orwellian named "Cares Act" and passed by voice vote. On what grounds can anyone claim that our elected representatives care about their voters? Donors got rich, voters died. Winners and losers had long since been selected by four decades of legislation that made it very difficult to help voters at all while astonishingly easy to help corporations, particularly financial ones. Corporations, operating within their new Citizens United rights as persons, had lobbyists available and prepared for a crisis with comprehensive wish lists to shield corporate leadership from consequences of mismanagement under the banner of Covid relief, and had pre-bribed Congress adequately through "campaign finance" to ensure results. Voters only had their votes which don't register in the market for policy where only money has purchase.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">Like the nineteenth century London traders in slave backed mortgages, our legislators have shown that their first priority is preservation of capital, followed by ROI. They have arranged the apparatus of governance to dependably produce on these priorities. In addition, to inforce this they're generous in funding the coercive power of the state, from a vast overseas military empire to increasingly militarized domestic police forces. They have arranged the apparatus of governance to ensure fossil fuels continue to make profits even as they destroy the ecology required for human existence: the particular humans benefiting, small in number as they are, are remote from the dry and carcinogenic environments their profits require elsewhere. Death and ultimate extinction will be far from them or after they're gone, what do they care? A politics cannot get more bankrupt than this.</span></div>
jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-63417734731190218022020-06-17T09:24:00.000-04:002020-06-17T09:24:04.376-04:00Overly Dynamic Links<a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/the-left-case-against-open-borders/">Control What You Can: Angela Nagle: American Affairs</a><br />
<a href="https://paydayreport.com/covid-19-strike-wave-interactive-map/">With The {Power You Have: Pay Day Report</a><br />
<a href="https://americancompass.org/good-policy-is-good-politics/">To Protect Socieyty: Chris Arnade: American Compass</a><br />
<a href="https://americancompass.org/what-about-the-rotten-culture-of-the-rich/">From The Rotten Rich: Chris Arnade: American Compass</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/homewreckers-housing-vultures/">Stealing Your Home: Francesca Mari: NYROB</a><br />
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-how-many-more-jobs-will-be-lost/">Stealing Your Job: Dmitrieva, Pickert, Tanzi & Sam: Bloomberg</a><br />
<a href="https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/27/touchscreen-voting-makes-everything-easy-including-hacking/">Stealing Your Vote: Jennifer Cohn: WhoWhatWhy</a><br />
<a href="http://multiplier-effect.org/the-political-economy-of-lockdown-in-india/">Crushing The Weak: Lekha Chakraborty: Multiplier Effect</a><br />
<a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/how-the-anti-populists-stopped-bernie-sanders/">Crushing Hope: Robert Frank: Harpers</a><br />
<a href="https://historicly.substack.com/p/the-economy-of-evil">For A Return To Facism: Esha: Historicly</a><br />
<a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/neoliberals-response-pandemic-crisis">For Profit: Philip Mirowski: Jacobin</a><br />
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<a href="https://nonsite.org/editorial/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-of-patterns-of-police-violence-2">Confused By Race: Adolph Reed: NonSite</a><br />
<a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/70665/researchers-on-atrocity-prevention-warn-us-on-path-to-widespread-political-violence/">Leading To Atrocities: Smith & Wilson: JustSecurity</a><br />
<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.amp?__twitter_impression=true">As Casual Practice: Matthew Dessem: Slate</a><br />
<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/paul-manning-lawsuit-1.5289424">Even For Their Own: Dana Taekema: CBC</a><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/mobinfiltrator/status/1271432151142223872">And Persistant: Paul Manning: Twitter</a><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/p_t_charles/status/1271476401796001792">Though Unnecessary: Peter Charles: Twitter</a><br />
<a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/06/10/police-protests-and-human-transformation-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/">Until We Change: Caitlin Johnstone</a><br />
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<a href="https://michael-hudson.com/books/super-imperialism-the-economic-strategy-of-american-empire/">Super Imperialism: Michael Hudson</a><br />
<a href="https://capitalandmain.com/inaction-cost-climate-change-0603">Destroying The World: Judith Mernit: Capital & Main</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/07/02/trump-corruption-ransacking-republic/">Ransacking The Republic: Walter Shaub: NYROB</a><br />
<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/11/speaking-looting-trump-admin-refuses-disclose-corporate-recipients-500-billion">Looting The Land: Jessica Corbett: Common Dreams</a><br />
<a href="https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/europe-russia-and-attitudes-towards-the-new-cold/">Bemusing The Enemies: Timofei Bordachev: ValdaiClub</a><br />
<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/74576c3a-6303-4ba0-bbe3-15b563ce6019">Baffling Friends: Hille, White, Riordan & Reed: FT</a><br />
<a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-make-secretary-pompeo-decertifying-hong-kong-autonomy">Picking Fights: Julian Ku: LawFare</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/03/viktor-orbans-masterplan-to-make-hungary-greater-again/">Post Empire Prototype: Kate Maltby: NYROB</a><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><span style="background-color: white; color: white; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">ATimofei Bordachev</span><br />
<a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/t8muy/">The Rich Are Different: Blair Fix: SocArxiv</a><br />
<a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/insurrection-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-allan">The Poor Revolting: Hawa Allan: The Baffler</a><br />
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-10/arizona-covid-debate-highlights-loss-of-trust-amid-pandemic-kb8trn3f">The Experts Confusing: John Authers: Bloomberg</a><br />
<a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-loving-founder-and-wikimedia-foundations-regime-change-operative-ceo/">When They're Not Lying: Norton & Blumenthal: Grayzone</a><br />
<a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/the-abrupt-radical-reversal-in-how-public-health-experts-now-speak-about-the-coronavirus-and-mass-gatherings/">Which They Usually Are: Glenn Greenwald: The Intercept</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/they-really-are-lying-to-you/">Really: Arthur Bloom: The American Conservative</a><br />
<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/killing-jeremy-corbyn">Visciously: Oborne & Hurst: Middle East Eye</a><br />
<a href="https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/14/interview-most-foul/">And For A Long Time: Edward Curtain: Off Guardian</a><br />
<a href="https://www.salon.com/2004/09/15/warren/">About The Most Important Things: David Talbot: Salon</a><br />
<a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2020/06/08/patrick-lawrence-the-failed-american-experiment/">Until It Falls Appart: Patrick Lawrence: Consortium News</a>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-66618075859585468032020-06-03T12:41:00.026-04:002020-06-29T16:37:37.340-04:00Virus Attacks Internal Organs of Empire<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKIdhEdtPrywBTU9jvCDOPYNOfQsLIuRZh1CVbLH7BeM0ssbeB03YscqhIdAH7IFFhS_Ki-0e7IaIRD_NX57rzcsZPEyuWZXX_MEWPjoZnze7vaq06TDOR9uvazJoQM5EbHsq_Iomhu0k9/s1600/POLITICS.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKIdhEdtPrywBTU9jvCDOPYNOfQsLIuRZh1CVbLH7BeM0ssbeB03YscqhIdAH7IFFhS_Ki-0e7IaIRD_NX57rzcsZPEyuWZXX_MEWPjoZnze7vaq06TDOR9uvazJoQM5EbHsq_Iomhu0k9/w400-h300/POLITICS.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><o:p><br /></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><br /></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<o:p>COVID-19</o:p></div>
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<o:p>The State of the Science </o:p></div>
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The state of the science for COVID 19 is embryonic and as a result most projections are little more than speculation. As yet, there is no consensus on what if any future immunity or temporary immunity those who have recovered from the virus will receive from what antibodies they might have. Timelines of 18 to 30 months for development of a vaccine assume some sustained immunity from the development to antibodies, but to date there is insufficient evidence to conclude whether COVID-19 has more in common with seasonal flues, for which vaccination works, or another coronavirus, the common cold for which there is no possibility of vaccination due to the inherent mutability of the virus.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This level of medical and scientific uncertainty combined with the demonstrated lethality of the virus argues strongly that “the precautionary principle” should be observed until such time as the narrow question of acquired immunity is reasonably answered. Taleb et al are worth quoting in full on this:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><i><span style="border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">General Precautionary Principle </span></i></b><i><span style="border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">: The general (non-naive) precautionary principle [3] delineates conditions where actions must be taken to reduce risk of ruin, and traditional cost-benefit analyses must not be used. These are ruin problems where, over time, <b>exposure to tail events leads to a certain eventual extinction</b>. While there is a very high probability for humanity surviving a single such event, over time, <b>there is eventually zero probability of surviving repeated exposures to such events</b>. While repeated risks can be taken by individuals with a limited life expectancy, ruin exposures must never be taken at the systemic and collective level. In technical terms, the precautionary principle applies when traditional statistical averages are invalid because risks are not ergodic.</span></i><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">Spreading rate </span></i></b><i><span style="border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">: Historically based estimates of spreading rates for pandemics in general, and for the current one in particular, <b>underestimate the rate of spread because of the rapid increases in transportation connectivity over recent years. </b>This means that expectations of the extent of harm are underestimates both because events are inherently fat tailed, and because the tail is becoming fatter as connectivity increases. Global connectivity is at an all-time high, with China one of the most globally connected societies. Fundamentally, viral contagion events depend on the interaction of agents in physical space, and with the forward-looking uncertainty that novel outbreaks necessarily carry, <b>reducing connectivity temporarily to slow flows of potentially contagious individuals is the only approach that is robust</b> against misestimations in the properties of a virus or other pathogen.</span></i><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="background: white; border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">Asymmetric Uncertainty </span></i></b><i><span style="background: white; border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">: Properties of the virus that are uncertain will have substantial impact on whether policies implemented are effective. For instance, whether contagious asymptomatic carriers exist. These uncertainties make it unclear whether measures such as temperature screening at major ports will have the desired impact. Practically all the uncertainty tends to make the problem potentially worse, not better, as these processes are convex to uncertainty.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b><i><span style="background: white; border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">Conclusion </span></i></b><i><span style="background: white; border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">: Standard individual-scale policy approaches such as isolation, <b>contact tracing and monitoring are rapidly (computationally) overwhelmed in the face of mass infection, and thus also cannot be relied upon to stop a pandemic.</b> Multiscale population approaches including drastically pruning contact networks using collective boundaries and social behavior change, and community self-monitoring, are essential. Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include <b>constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak</b>, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b><i><span style="border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail do so will eventually cost everything</span></i></b><i><span style="border: 1pt none; font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt; padding: 0in;">—if not from this event, then one in the future. Outbreaks are inevitable, but an appropriately precautionary response can mitigate systemic risk to the globe at large. But policy- and decision-makers must act swiftly and <b>avoid the fallacy that to have an appropriate respect for uncertainty in the face of possible irreversible catastrophe amounts to “paranoia,”</b> or the converse a belief that nothing can be done.</span></i><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 8pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Taleb et al rely on “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system#History">complex systems dynamic analysis</a>,” which was first systematized by the authors of “The Limits of Growth” around the work of Nobel Prize philosopher and economist Fredrich Hayek. Its importance is that it looks at complex systems as radically dynamic where tipping points, once crossed, confer logarithmic, non-linear change. When “The Limits of Growth” was published the non-linearity of its conclusions were immediately <a href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-10-24/why-economists-cant-understand-complex-systems-not-even-the-nobel-prize-william-nordhaus/">challenged by William Nordhaus</a>, another Nobel Prize economist, who’s arguments have been incorporated into the mainstream economics we now live with. Nordhaus’ linearity ignores the real, nonlinear risks of disruptive events in dynamic systems like the earths ecology in the case of “The Limits of Growth” or extinction risks in the case of recurring global pandemics. This discounting of what Taleb calls fat tail risk by mainstream economists and scientists is what drove him to write his best-selling 2007 book, “The Black Swan”, anticipating of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Where Nordhaus and most economists using linear models to describe non-linear systems failed to see the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression until after the fact. Taleb wrote and sold his book into the collapse after anticipating it and its catastrophic effects. <o:p></o:p></div>
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With the mortality seen to date and only somewhere between 5 and 50 million infected (world-wide as of this time of writing), the pandemic is clearly far from having worked its way through the population, which it will do. Even without a vaccination, medical science is likely to identify best practice treatments and ameliorative behaviors over the course of the coming several years. If/when evidence confirms or disproves the possibility of vaccination we will be able to narrow our planning horizons, until then we need to think in terms of real uncertainty rather that risk. Science is popping at the moment with best minds around the world fully engaged, so there is reason to hope that good news is immanent, but the present reality is that politics around the world are being driven more by flawed economic than real public health concerns.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It was the same William Nordhaus who pulled dynamic systems analysis out of the <a href="https://popularresistance.org/the-cost-of-climate-change-steve-keen-dismantles-william-nordhaus/">IPCC Reports</a> on which world governments are basing their inaction on Climate Change. Nordhaus linear models project modest sea level increase and warming this century because his model is linear and excludes the “tipping points” <a href="https://necsi.edu/about-necsi">complex systems analysis describes</a> and that have logarithmic rather than linear impacts: fat tail risk. It is particularly discouraging that almost all economic models of COVID-19 are of the Nordhaus rather than Taleb variety and are systematically disregarding risks of non-linear, logarithmic outcomes of a known logarithmic system: viral infection with R0 of greater than 1. While medical science is carrying its own weight in the crisis, it will take time. The science of risk management is not pulling its weight because ergodic models are being applied to a non-ergodic system: life in a Darwinian universe where nature is indifferent to human survival.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Crisis in Medicine:<o:p></o:p></div>
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The American for profit medical industry has demonstrated decisively in the last two month’s markets cannot deliver public health. Rather, profit is maximized at the expense or public health with individual deaths as one of the costs externalized to society. The consolidation of the medical industry has deliberately reduced the bed count in private hospitals while beds in public hospitals have been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/08/were-short-hospital-beds-because-washington-let-too-many-hospitals-merge/">cut by local government</a> as Federal and State support has subsided. The COVID-19 shut downs are adding pressure <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/nyregion/coronavirus-hospitals-medicaid-budget.html">causing even more reductions</a>. This has left Private Equity <a href=" https://www.propublica.org/article/overwhelmed-hospitals-face-a-new-crisis-staffing-firms-are-cutting-their-doctors-hours-and-pay">planning our COVID-19 response for profit</a>, cutting front line responders pay during the height of the pandemic.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is the result of 40 years of viewing “public goods” as a cost rather than investments. From <a href="https://www.thebalance.com/deinstitutionalization-3306067">defunding sanitariums for the mentally ill</a>, who now mostly live on the streets or in prison, to the privatization and public subsidy of hospital and other health care facilities, even before the current pandemic, the American for profit and most expensive “health care” system in the world produced <a href="http://cobblehillbilly.blogspot.com/p/charts.html">significantly worse health outcomes</a>. Combined with the deregulation of capital and the offshoring of production, the Business School ethos of “just in time” management brought to public health by privatization has eliminated all spare capacity and any stockpiles of medical supplies like PPE or ventilators, viewing them as stranded capital to be liquidated to <a href="https://khn.org/news/analysis-we-knew-the-coronavirus-was-coming-yet-we-failed-5-critical-tests/">bolster current profits</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Public health is a non-ergodic system, there is no reason to assume health is self-equilibrating (ergodic), the history of plagues and pandemics is well known. But the analytical models of mainstream economics on which our politics have come to rely make no room for the absolute uncertainty of non-ergodic systems (life, biology). This is directly resulting in elevated mortality rates in States like New York where economizing on public health is resulting in extreme shortages of hospital beds, ICUs, ventilators and PPE. This economic rationalization of a non-economic system, public health, has made the actual New York system unfit for purpose, demonstrably unable to provision for public health in a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/07/coronavirus-epidemic-prediction-policy-advice-121172">predictable and predicted crisis</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is more money to be made from shortages of PPE and pharmaceuticals than there is from stockpiling adequate supply. Our privatized “public health” system is effectively doing exactly that right now. Because the demand is highly irregular, there will be no incentive for private investment in the production of PPE or even vaccines without significant public subsidy. Even then, the business incentive will be to leave supplies somewhere short of projected demand as emergency production with incompetent government oversight <a href=" https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/the-federal-reserves-coronavirus-e97">will be more profitable</a>.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><br /></div>
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Oversight of public expenditures on public goods, whether health, finance or war spending, was one of the core functions for the US Government from the beginning of the WW2 mobilization until the Reagan era of deregulation began. “Deregulation” can usefully be thought of as de-criminalization of <a href=" https://therealnews.com/stories/de-regulation-de-supervision-and-de-criminalization-set-the-stage-for-the-2008-financial-crisis-pt-1-3">“profiteering”</a>, the making of unreasonable profits not justified by any risks taken, across the financial economy. The financialization of US medicine through the medical insurance industry has optimized for exactly this kind of profiteering, primarily through “<a href="https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-upcoding-2615214">upcoding</a>” and “<a href="https://www.insurance.wa.gov/what-consumers-need-know-about-surprise-or-balance-billing">surprise billing</a>”. Generally, wherever lack of government oversight allows exploitation of market power, the introduction of IT has resulted in the optimization of public expenditure for <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18724573">private profit rather than public health</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As demonstrated by the numerous countries who have managed to <a href="https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/how-china-new-zealand-australia-germany-and-south-korea-beat-covid19/news-story/4a10b5c0eae1dea3cefda8604712a61a">stop the pandemic</a>, the public health disaster in The United States is a man-made disaster. As recently as February, the world considered the US CDC as the go to source for pandemic planning and it is the past recommendations of this agency that have structured the major successes elsewhere in the world. That the United States has lost the competence to execute on policies it has itself developed and trained governments around the world to adopt represents a systemic decay. It was made plain in March that the US is incapable of correcting course. This demonstrates that the privately run medical system, paid for by profit making insurance companies, is not a health system but a system of profiteering from illness and death. This has nothing to do with medical professionals and everything to do with systems designed to exploit rather than heal that deliberately subvert the efforts of healers.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Crisis of Politics:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: optima; font-size: 11.5pt;">“The more laws and restrictions there are,</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: optima; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /><span style="background: white;">The poorer people become.</span><br /><span style="background: white;">The sharper men’s weapons,</span><br /><span style="background: white;">The more trouble in the land.</span><br /><span style="background: white;">The more ingenious and clever men are,</span><br /><span style="background: white;">The more strange things happen.</span><br /><span style="background: white;">The more rules and regulations,</span><br /><span style="background: white;">The more thieves and robbers.”</span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: optima; font-size: 11.5pt;">Gia-</span>Fu Feng and Jane English (Vintage Books, 1972)<o:p></o:p></div>
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If it weren’t so deadly, it’s so absurd it would be funny. With the exception of China, and its economic hinterlands, political responses to COVID-19 are being informed by economic models like that Nordhaus used in his critique of “The Limits of Growth”: linear and ergodic. Within the mineral and geophysical parameters of the earth, life might be thought of as a self-equilibrating, as ergodic, but as an isolated biome, part of a larger Darwinian process, human life certainly isn’t self-equilibrating: species go extinct all the time. Such wholly unfounded ergodic assumptions blinded economists as a profession to the <a href="http://keenomics.s3.amazonaws.com/debtdeflation_media/2007/03/SteveKeenDebtReportNovember2006.pdf ">systemically obvious</a> GCF in 2008. Ergodic DSGE and IS-LM economic models failed to account for debt dynamics which are actually carefully tracked and published by <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/">bank regulators</a>. Western politicians who are being systematically misinformed by their economic advisors are visibly making a difficult situation worse, as they have for the last decade, letting all the same risks that drove the 2008 crash flourish. This time, however, the virus burst the bubble rather than the usual “animal spirits”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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With biological and psychological factors as the main <a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.press/we-need-a-radically-different-model-to-tackle-the-covid-19-crisis-by-james-k-galbraith/ ">exogenous shocks</a> it’s reasonable to expect the worst from a political system structured to address economic problems as though the only variable was “the price of money”, thus solely through monetary stimulus. The virus doesn’t have an account with the Fed. I’ll return to this below in The Economic Crisis, but understanding the ubiquity of misinformation in contemporary economics is essential to understanding what the policy responses will be and why they will fail. The reliance of the West on ergodic economic forecasting models will be the first casualty of “the end of American Exceptionalism”. It will be important to follow policies and <a href="https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/why-east-beat-west-on-covid-19/ ">outcomes abroad</a> in order to understand in the next few years what actually works when it becomes obvious the American system is <a href="https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/why-east-beat-west-on-covid-19-part-2/ ">fundamentally broken</a>. As Gramsci said, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great number of morbid symptoms appear.” Politically and economically, what we are living through is epochal, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/de643ae8-9527-11ea-899a-f62a20d54625">an era is ending and another one beginning</a>. What follows is an outline of structural changes in US politics over the last half century leading to the current tipping point.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Domestically, in the 1976 Buckley vs Valeo ruling, the US Supreme Court decided that political bribery was Constitutionally protected free speech. Always and everywhere corruption has haunted the halls of politics, but the 1976 ruling set the foundation for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo ">an incipient political market-place</a>, an actual incorporation of corruption into formal politics. This judgement set terms under which it would hence forth be legal to bribe politicians. So long as it was open ended (without written quid pro quos) and confined to politics (nominally campaigning), specific amounts and forms and terms of payment were legally codified creating a highly regulated market-place. These rules have subsequently evolved and loosened as legislated by Congress and bracketed by subsequent rulings of the Court. The process culminated with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC">Citizens United</a> which determined that anyone with money, including recently re-created corporate persons, has a barely limited right to spend whatever they choose under loose and hardly enforced rules. You and I are free to bribe under these rules too, but corporate personhood clearly privileges concentrated wealth, so our miniscule sums will be wasted. In this market, US politicians have become quite adept at the solicitation of bribes and the provisioning of those who bribe them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As this market-place evolved, it became easier and easier for well-funded entities to encourage lawmakers to favor their interests in legislation. The Finance, Insurance & Real Estate (FIRE) industries were early to the opportunity, one uniquely available to those who could literally <a href="ttps://nathantankus.substack.com/p/why-are-banks-special-monetary-policy">create money</a>. Financial criminals were prosecuted in mass for last time under a Republican administration for the frauds leading up to the <a href="https://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-execs-went-to-prison-during-the-last-fraud-fueled-bank-crisis/ ">Savings & Loan collapse</a>. Hundreds of executives went to jail. Finance flipped allegiance in the subsequent election, hiring Democrats instead of Republicans. Just as Buckley vs Valeo, under a Democratic administration began the development of a political market-place defined through minor legislation and court rulings, the Republican administrations of the eighties began the deregulation that led to the S&L and subsequent busts. The following Democratic one completed de-criminalization by repealing Glass Steagall and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that prevented the Wall Street casino from gambling with the savings of retail bank customers, frauds that had led to the 1929 collapse. This led within several years to the dot.com bubble and within a decade to the 2008 GFC with massive public bailouts for which no one of importance was prosecuted despite rampant, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-25-fi-mortgagefraud25-story.html ">now legal, fraud</a>, nor were any of the bailed out bank managements even fired.<o:p></o:p></div>
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While FIRE led the way down the road of decriminalization, the Military Industrial Complex and <a href="https://psmag.com/environment/the-military-is-the-largest-single-user-of-fossil-fuels-elizabeth-warren-wants-to-change-that ">associated oil industry</a> were precocious students. By the time Eisenhower coined the term, the MIC was already distributed across all fifty states to ensure political access. With its ever-expanding budget, the Pentagon has developed a private political presence of contractors and their employees who bribe congressmen on its behalf to add to its public power. By the final years of the century, the MIC was as <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/">fully engaged in fraud as finance</a>, and with equal impunity. Learning from these role models, as the new century dawned, every powerful public agency or private business was lining up to bribe legislators at all levels of government to similarly re-legislate the legal environment in which it operated. The Patriot Act disburdened Federal Agencies like the <a href="https://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/04/how-would-patriot-act-release.html">FBI, CIA and NSA of most oversight</a> and a sympathetic Executive Branch essentially abdicated on oversight so long as these agencies supported its policies. The largest anti-war protest in world history, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War">over 36M people</a>, provided no brake on the US march to war on falsified information from the newly <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/09/usa.iraq2">deregulated intelligence agencies</a>. Multiple aimless wars and the crafted hysteria of terrorism covered politically for the liberation of the most destructive and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix">exploitative public</a> and <a href="https://boingboing.net/2008/02/21/commerce-dept-docs-c.html">private institutions</a> from electoral oversight and control. These agencies were empowered with surveillance and <a href="https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/assassinations/">extrajudicial punitive powers</a> clearly at odds with any honest reading of US constitutional law. Similarly private corporations generally were given an <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/03/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-nine-1990s-koch-funded-propaganda-program-ubers-true-origin-story.html">operational right to ignore whatever</a> <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/facebook-mark-zuckerbergs-fake-accounts-ponzi-scheme.html">laws</a> they <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/48-states-to-investigate-google-anti-trust-or-politicking.html">found inconvenient</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There are no individuals in the above account because the political crisis the United States faces is an institutional one. The current crisis is the result of the institutional changes outlined above, not a cause. The 2008 elections in which Americans dramatically repudiated everything to this point in my narrative resulted in a Democratic administration institutionalizing everything the electorate put it in office to end: no one was prosecuted for falsifying intelligence to coerce the public into supporting <a href=" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Report_on_Pre-war_Intelligence_on_Iraq">a series of wars</a> who’s only point is private profits; no one was prosecuted for <a href=" https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence-torture-archive/2018-04-26/gina-haspels-cia-torture-file">torturing prisoners</a>; no one was prosecuted for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list">extrajudicial executions</a>; no one was prosecuted for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_income,_no_asset">systemic financial frauds</a>. In fact, after bailing out <a href="http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/29000000000000-a-detailed-look-at-the-feds-bailout-by-funding-facility-and-recipient">Wall Street with $29T</a>, the government then <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/">“foamed the runway” with homeowners</a>, foreclosing on and bankrupting millions to buy time for private banks to pad their balance sheets with free money from the Fed via Quantitative Easing. All while the Wall Street gamblers who created the problem not only <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-washington-summit-geithner-pay-idUSTRE59J61F20091021">kept their jobs and got their bonuses</a> but went right back to business, scarcely changed.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Similarly this political narrative excludes all the headline political stories of the last several decades: abortion; immigration; illegal immigration; gun rights; church and state; mass shootings; Russia; North Korea; Me Too; etc. etc.. Instead it follows a chthonic narrative of bipartisan consensus about freeing business, more properly money, from political and legal constraints and shifting the locus of governmental support <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/10/bill-black-the-great-betrayal-and-the-cynicism-of-calling-it-a-grand-bargain.html">from the population</a> in general to private businesses and property, benefits limited to the extent possible to the “market makers” of politics: <a href="https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/How-Money-Drives-US-Congressional-Elections-More-Evidence.pdf">the bribers</a>. The 80s, 90s & early 00s established this new system, from the late 00s it has been playing itself out. The presentation of polarized politics to the public through corporate owned media has been a distraction from the auction block politics has become where legislators compete in the solicitation of bribes to serve <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/thomas-ferguson-on-how-money-drives-congressional-elections.html">the interest of the bribers</a> until they lose an election at which point they become lobbyists for the bribers they’ve already served, this their reward for <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/aoc-calls-for-ban-on-revolving-door-as-study-shows-2-3-of-recently-departed-lawmakers-now-lobbyists.html">betraying their electorate</a>. The dysfunction we are living is the result of disparate policies bought by disparate interests that cannot be coordinated in a crisis by design because any public good established through such coordination would cost some interest its profits.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For instance, half way though the previous Democratic administration, <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/aoc-calls-for-ban-on-revolving-door-as-study-shows-2-3-of-recently-departed-lawmakers-now-lobbyists.html">deregulation of pharmaceuticals</a> led to an <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/03/american-opioid-epidemic.html">opioid epidemic</a> causing a sustained US life expectancy decline for the first time <a href="http://climatechangefork.blog.brooklyn.edu/files/2019/04/Life-expectancy_Economist.png">in almost a century</a>. The legislative response has been non-existent. Further, this deregulation created a <a href="https://www.sheldrake.org/essays/the-replicability-crisis-in-science">replicability crisis</a> in science as primary research was privatized for profit. The result has been a growing <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2281-1">mistrust of science</a> that dovetails politically with the disinformation <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122017/big-oil-heartland-climate-science-misinformation-campaign-koch-api-trump-infographic">campaign against climate scientists</a> deployed for the last 40 years by the oil industry which hobbles the effectiveness of well-known epidemiological practice in the ongoing pandemic. The political right has used the real corruption of science to delegitimize policies directed towards public goods from climate change to pollution control to epidemiological responses, supporting a profitable status quo for themselves. Furthering the illegitimacy of expertise, the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-college-admissions-fraud-corruption-list-20190312-story.html">college admissions scandal</a> has made a narrative of generalized elite corruption easily believable and apparently real.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Democrats persistent <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/03/political-misfortune-anatomy-democratic-party-failure-clintons-campaign-2016-part-ii.html">denigration of working people</a>, efforts to define them as <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/03/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly.html">racists</a> or <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/noam-chomsky-why-its-a-big-danger-to-dismiss-the-anger-of-trump-voters.html">gun nuts</a>, and the lived experience of <a href="http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/11/liberals-didnt-listen-immense-cost-ignoring-tom-franks-warnings.html">betrayal in 2008</a> followed by abandonment has left voters deeply skeptical of the Democratic Party. This abandonment is so obvious to those who’ve experienced it that Democrat controlled corporate media are discovering their attacks on the Republican incumbent <a href="https://jonathanturley.org/2020/05/18/bobo-the-clowns-revenge-how-the-media-is-reelecting-donald-trump/">enhance his chances of reelection </a>even as he <a href="https://www.salon.com/2013/11/22/gop_is_literally_killing_it_base_partner/">defies sound</a> or even <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/trump-vows-to-open-up-our-country-even-as-deaths-from-coronavirus-rise">sane</a> practice in the pandemic. <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/05/21/the-cias-murderous-practices-disinformation-campaigns-and-interference-in-other-countries-still-shapes-the-world-order-and-u-s-politics/">Democratic association with the Intelligence Community</a> further erodes the legitimacy of the Party through the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/21/world/director-admits-cia-fell-short-in-predicting-the-soviet-collapse.html">obvious</a> <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/rip-russiagate/">lack of competence</a> over two generations of this fourth, clandestine and now wholly unaccountable branch of government. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Privatized medical institutions have proven they <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/overwhelmed-hospitals-face-a-new-crisis-staffing-firms-are-cutting-their-doctors-hours-and-pay">cannot provide for public health</a>. Congress has proven incapable of serving any but the most <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/04/12/stimulus-check-how-much-qualifies/#4711782169f1">modest public goods</a>, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/04/11/congress-coronavirus-stimulus-allows-federal-reserve-to-hold-secret-meetings-on-corporate-bailout_partner/">legislating bailout</a> <a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/21/coronavirus-senate-passes-new-small-business-bailout/">after bailout</a> for bribers while giving lip service to working people by calling them heroes in legislation that <a href="https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1260262113454546944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1260262113454546944%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailywire.com%2Fnews%2Fpelosis-bill-gives-massive-tax-break-to-the-rich-in-mostly-blue-states-taxpayer-money-to-illegal-aliens">essentially ignores them</a>. The executive <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-reportedly-has-financial-interest-in-hydroxychloroquine-manufacturer">promotes his investments</a> while <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/failure-of-the-worst-kind-republican-blasts-trump-for-forcing-states-to-compete-with-each-other-to-obtain-protective-gear/">fumbling his powers to coordinate</a> public policy for public good even as the daily <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/30/texas-reopening-coronavirus-cases-spike/">death rate grows into his “reopening the economy”</a>. The party of War and Oil wants to reopen the economy because shutdowns impede action, commerce, consumption and profit. The Party of the Finance and the Medical Industrial Complex wants to reopen the economy, but allow the PMC (who form their voting constituency, the Professional & Managerial Class) to work from home while requiring blue collar workers to shoulder all the health and financial risks for the same reasons. The galling hypocrisy of allowing those who can afford to work from home to do so while requiring those who can’t to face infection and unknowable risk isn’t lost on workers. We are half way through an election year and for their own parochial reasons both Parties would rather have more working people die than do anything meaningful to help them. <a href="https://paydayreport.com/covid-19-strike-wave-interactive-map/">Working people</a> and <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/18/disaster-capitalism-and-real-culprit-italian-covid-19-catastrophe">Disaster Capitalists</a> are both <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/84ee3b24-c7f0-44ba-aeba-5ac9c57f810a">taking note</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Abroad, as time has passed US foreign policy has been increasingly malignant. With the death of Roosevelt the vision of a popularly constrained capitalism where markets were focused on the overall needs of society was <a href="https://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/superimperialism.pdf">abandoned</a>. Instead, under the new global dollar standard set up at Bretton Woods, the US embarked on a “free trade” project <a href="https://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/superimperialism.pdf">modeled on the British Empire</a> now controlled by the US, which when combined with Monroe Doctrine trade relationships in the western hemisphere was more or less coterminous with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism#1941%E2%80%931945:_World_War_II">American sphere of influence</a>. As the war was winding down the State Department, Pentagon and OSS, soon to become the CIA, began a sustained campaign of expansion by regime change aimed at economic assimilation of both populations and material resources to expand the dollar empire. That campaign continues to this day. The goal has been to re-build and extend the laissez-faire capitalism that existed prior to the First World War where metropolitan capitalist centers benefited from minimally constrained exploitation of populations and resources remote from them, assigned fixed roles in a <a href="https://www.academia.edu/37065805/Neoliberals_Against_Europe">global “division of labor”</a> policed now by the US military and/or clandestine agencies.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Laissez-faire posited that the global division of labor would produce the <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979529">best global economic outcomes</a>, claiming the many would benefit from <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979529">the profits of the few</a>. An ideology that had grown up with capitalism, laissez-faire economics was a supposedly apolitical logic. In fact it was and is a rhetoric used to hide the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/95818/dodd-frank-lobbying-cftc">raw power of concentrated finance</a>. Power to bend small and distributed political institutions to the <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/alecs-influence-over-lawmaking-in-state-legislatures/">will of those who wield capital</a>. Under this ideological rhetoric, any sincere pursuit of freedom applies solely to freedoms of capital and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/11/democracy-defenders-economic-freedom-neoliberalism">freedoms of those individuals that command it</a>. Since the early 19<sup>th</sup> Century, laissez-faire capitalism has been disguising its aim of a centrally planned, privately owned, maximally exploitative economic system behind <a href="https://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-the-man-who-started-the-civil-war.htm">a popular rhetoric of freedom</a>, deliberately confusing human freedom rhetorically with that of capitalist institutions of control. Post war US foreign policy has been as pure <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2019/07/01/late-imperialism/">an expression of globalist</a>, laissez-faire goals as capital could afford and nominally <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/20/how-they-sold-the-iraq-war/">popular politics could sell</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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US clandestine agencies, and the State Department and Pentagon to varying degrees, have been involved in non-stop regime change efforts towards the global integration of populations and resources in this system of private, capitalist control. Mostly successful since WWII, these efforts began with Greece in 1948, followed by Syria in 49, Albania from 49-53, Iran in 53, 54 Guatemala, Syria again in 56, Haiti in 57, Indonesia 57, Laos 58-60, Cuba 59-present, 59 Cambodia, 60 Ecuador, 60 Congo, 61 Dominican Republic, 62-64 Brazil, 63 Iraq, 63 South Vietnam, 64 Bolivia and Brazil, 65 France, 65 Indonesia again, 66 Ghana, 67 Greece again, 70 Costa Rica, 71 Bolivia again, 73-75 Australia, 73 Chile, 74 Portugal, 75 Angola, 75 Zaire, 76 Argentina, 76 Jamaica, 79-89 Afghanistan, 79 Seychelles, 80-92 Angola again, 80-89 Libya, 81-87 Nicaragua, 82 Chad, 83 Grenada, 82-84 South Yemen, 82-84 Suriname, 87 Fiji, 89 Panama, 91 Albania again, 91 Iraq, 93 Somalia, 99-2000 Yugoslavia, 2000 Ecuador again, 01 Afghanistan again, 02 Venezuela, 03 Iraq again, 04 Haiti again, 07 to present Somalia again, 11 Libya again, 12 to present Syria for a third time, 14 Ukraine, Brazil again in 16 and Bolivia and Ecuador in 2018. Ongoing destabilization efforts are underway in Venezuela, Iran, Russia and China.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In addition to Cuba, the countries in the last sentence represent “the resistance” to assimilation in the dollar denominated global financial empire. The US has essentially <a href="thenation.com/article/archive/why-are-us-special-operations-forces-deployed-over-100-countries/">surrounded these countries with military bases</a>. The last two administrations have been structurally <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ab46ddd8-14e3-11ea-8d73-6303645ac406">hostile towards China</a> with the current one ramping up the “regime change” rhetoric both to <a href=" https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/01/30/the-pentagon-is-planning-for-war-with-china-and-russia-can-it-handle-both/">pursue ongoing policy</a> and to distract from systemic <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/20/coronavirus-trump-blames-china-distancing-himself-fallout/2876983001/">domestic failures in handling COVID-19</a>. Hostility toward Iran has been a sustained US trope since the 79 overthrow of the <a href="https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2013/nov/17/us-iran-timeline-1979">US puppet Shah</a> and Venezuela since <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/22/the-u-s-and-venezuela-a-long-history-of-hostility/">Hugo Chaves established a popular government</a> there in 1999. Russia was a brief success for the CIA when Yeltsin militarily suppressed the newly installed <a href=" https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-10-04/yeltsin-shelled-russian-parliament-25-years-ago-us-praised-superb-handling">popular government there in 1993</a> but Putin has become a stubborn spoiler, depriving the global division of labor the vast resources of the Russian east.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When States, territories and/or populations are assimilated into the US financial empire, they are integrated into the global division of labor where the private multinational capitalist actors who can most profitably utilize these choose for them. To the extent local populations or States object they become subject to <a href="https://spiremagazine.com/2017/09/04/the-school-of-the-americas-how-the-united-states-has-trained-latin-american-dictators-in-corruption-and-genocide/">police operations sponsored by US military</a> and <a href="https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/cia-releases-files-that-describe-ruthless-chilean-dicta-1787899872">secret agencies</a>. The major refugee/immigration crisis of the last two decades can be <a href="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2018/12/06/from-central-america-to-syria-the-conspiracy-against-refugees/">traced directly to these policies</a>. Transfer pricing by multinationals, where they internally transfer accounts across borders to avoid taxes, has resulted in a global “offshore banking” archipelago where profits from that global division of labor, policed on the US taxpayers account, are sequestered <a href="https://michael-hudson.com/2004/02/an-insider-spills-the-beans-on-offshore-banking-centers/">ahead of exposure to taxing authorities</a>. This is the clearest manifestation of the American Empire, where nominally independent nations around the world <a href="https://www.worldfinance.com/infrastructure-investment/the-politics-behind-the-imf">cannot pursue policies for the benefit of their majority populations</a> while wealth is stripped from them and hidden in financial havens within the US empire but outside of US taxing authority, and thus of no benefit to most Americans who see only the costs. These populations serve multinational capitalism as cheap, disposable labor that can be kept at subsistence living standards while producing robust <a href="https://www.worldfinance.com/infrastructure-investment/the-politics-behind-the-imf">profits for foreign investors</a> who additionally benefit from US military and police protection without having to pay for it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Begun with The Marshall Plan, this <a href="https://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/superimperialism.pdf">monetary imperialism</a>, a uniquely American approach to empire, has grown to dominate two thirds of the earths human population and most of its surface area, but mismanagement had it experiencing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/07/s-were-decade-imperial-overreach-trump-is-making-it-worse/">overreach even prior to the pandemic</a>. Geopolitical tensions between core US allies in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia and the imperial centers in New York and DC suggest a quickly shifting future. Germany is committing to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2018/08/21/despite-trumps-threats-nord-stream-2-is-very-much-still-on/#5156f7521c01">deeper integration with Russia</a> in the energy market as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines look at <a href="https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/korea/south-korean-cities-fear-us-bases-won-t-meet-deadline-to-vacate-1.197310">a future without their US protectorate status</a>, where not <a href="https://www.theweek.co.uk/98170/why-is-japan-rearming">actually remilitarizing</a>. The centrality of the US Federal Reserve is the only real force holding this monetary empire together even as <a href="https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russian-chinese-alternatives-swift-global-banking-network-coming-online.html/">competing economic and geopolitical interest</a> <a href="https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/beijing-sees-trumps-hand-and-wont-fold/">build structures to tear it apart</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Domestically US politics has been reduced to a policy auction where whoever bids the highest gets whatever they want without any coordination of public needs, or even internal coherency. <a href="https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/27/touchscreen-voting-makes-everything-easy-including-hacking/">Capital and IT began to buy up</a> the <a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/vendors-push-risky-new-voting-machines-over-safe-paper-ballots/">electoral process</a> following the <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n03/bruce-ackerman/anatomy-of-a-constitutional-coup">Judicial Coup in 2000</a>. This has led directly to the legitimacy issues of the last two Democratic Party Primaires, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/iowa-caucus-democratic-party-bernie-sanders-rigged-trump-vote.html">destroying the credibility of the Democrats </a>as a "popular party". The monetary empire seeks and has acquired a state that is small and weak with regard to individual political and economic rights, but as large and powerful as necessary to protect private property and other economic rights of those who control capital. What the collective of competing buyers have acquired is a communism for the rich, but one that is <a href="https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2020/05/31/deresponsibilization-and-the-politics-of-escape/">liquidating its own economic basis in real production</a>. This will be the subject of the next post.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Relying on economic models that exclude the realities of logarthmic systems, the forcast made for the policies implemented on the behalf of biribers do not account for predictable and predicted real world effects of both the virus and the human respones to it. While employment may bounce back, the financial hit of the lock down on the working population who were forced into credit card and landlord debt will be a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/867856602/millions-of-americans-skipping-payments-as-tidal-wave-of-defaults-and-evictions-">predictable cascading of defaults</a>. This is simple math, but because the ergodic economic models policy makers rely on exclude finance and "fat tail risk", the obvious oncoming wave of bankruptcys and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-how-many-more-jobs-will-be-lost/">other breaks on the chain of debt payments</a> is not being accounted for in any of the legislation being passed at the behest of the bribing class. At the same time, the panicked reopening of the economy is already increasing the spread and fatality of the virus. Economic models that address reality rather than the needs of the financialized economy have saved lives and economies in New Zealand, South Korea and Germany, just to name a few. Obliviousness to the real hardship these breaks in the chain of debt payment are causing across the population left the political class here stunned by the explosion of outrage at the police murder of and black man in custody.</div>
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Panicking politicaly with the same blindness caused by the economic disinformation policy makers are fed by a mercenary economics profession, the authoritarian form of the post war empire has been brought home. Beginning in the 70s, <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.amp?__twitter_impression=true">concluding now</a>, the forces that generated civil war and population displacement around the world for the last 70 years <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1267335112515112960/photo/1">are having the same effect in the US</a>. An unfit for purpose “health care industry” has needlessly killed a <a href="https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6">hundred thousand people in the last three months</a> while an unfit for purpose financial industry has again been given an essentially <a href="https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/the-big-unanswered-questions-about">open ended bailout</a>. These outrages while well over 40 million have lost their jobs, income and, unless they can pay out of pocket, their health care. All of the wounds of US foreign policy continue to fester even as political incompetence destabilizes <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/angela-merkel-rebuffs-donald-trump-invitation-to-g7-summit/">the central</a> <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/on-trumps-japan-visit-tensions-emerge-over-trade-and-north-korea">economic</a> <a href="https://www.voanews.com/europe/key-us-base-risk-turkish-us-tensions-escalate">dependencies</a> around which the US world financial empire is built. And this "<a href="https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/why-americas-revolution-wont-be-televised/">bringing the empire home</a>" has brought with it the <a href="https://apnews.com/b3817623ef861818803b5676d43741ea">police state normalized 70 years ago for the beneficiaries of “regime change”</a>. The level of freedom in a society is best expressed by how it treats its most hated political prisoners. Ours has shown it character with psychological warfare against <a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court/">Assange</a>, physical torture of <a href="https://edwardsnowden.com/asylum-in-russia/">Manning</a> and the expatriation of <a href="https://edwardsnowden.com/asylum-in-russia/">Snowden</a>, that character is now <a href="http://useofforceproject.org/#project">on public display</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266751520055459847">across the nation</a>. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">In the next post, we will look at the economic consequences of the pandemic on the uniquely financial imperialism of the US centered global economic system. This is a system that has used debt obligations as it's primary projection of power, with the US armed forces an increasingly ineffectual subsidiary. As the virus has attacked every imaginable link in the "chain of payments" that structure this empire, economics will become the driver of politics until the system collapses or re-introduces a robust conception of public goods.<span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos, the situation is excellent.” Mao Zedong</span></div>
jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-72996247984106700482020-04-15T15:20:00.001-04:002020-04-15T15:20:24.439-04:00Corona Crash Links<a href="https://daily.jstor.org/what-if-a-shrinking-economy-wasnt-a-disaster/">A Look At Real Change: Livia Gershon: JSTOR</a><br />
<a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/sometimes-the-most-powerful-act-of-resistance-is-to-do-nothing">First Step Towards It: Nigel Warburton: Aeon</a><br />
<a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2020/04/uss-week-strikes">And The Next: Emily Tamkin: New Statesman</a><br />
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/reality-has-endorsed-bernie-sanders">Reality Endorses Sanders: Keeanga-Yamahatta: New Yorker</a><br />
<a href="https://adamtooze.com/2020/04/05/crashed-to-corona-3-the-fed-beyond-swap-lines/">But Fed Bails Out Biden: Adam Tooze</a><br />
<a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/3/28/21195207/coronavirus-covid-19-financial-crisis-economy-depression-recession">Ezra Klein Wonders: Ezra Klein: Vox</a><br />
<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7eff769a-74dd-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca">As Does Martin Wolf: Martin Wolf: Financial Times</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/martin-wolf-and-wishful-thinking-on-ending-coronavirus-lockdowns.html">Both Missing Reality: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism</a><br />
<a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sec-rule-that-destroyed-the-universe">The Build Up: Matt Taibbi: Substack</a><br />
<a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/resetting-the-bomb">And The Bomb: Matt Taibbi: Substack</a><br />
<a href="https://eand.co/america-is-committing-economic-suicide-c7c1f7122169">With Which US Commits Suicide: Umair Haque: Eudaimonia</a><br />
<a href="https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/04/14/gaslighting-coronavirus-julio-vincent-gambuto">And Will Blame You: Julio Gambuto: Cognoscenti</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rich-and-healthy-vs-poor-and-dead-in-nyc/">While Rich Live, Poor Die: Peter Van Buren: TAC</a><br />
<a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/04/how-the-anti-populists-stopped-bernie-sanders/">PMC Stomps Left: Thomas Frank: Harpers</a><br />
<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/sanders-biden-obama-promise-future-past-lose-1497854">With Obama's Help: Moshik Temkin: News Week</a><br />
<a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/information-wars/">Systemic Deception: Craig Murray</a><br />
<a href="https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/this-absolute-bullshit-would-not-be-possible-without-propaganda-f60383880d71">Industrialized Bullshit: Caitlin Johnstone</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-covid-19-response-must-be-industrial-not-just-medical/">Instead of What Could Help: Atkinsonn & Auraback: TAC</a><br />
<a href="https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/us-china-decoupling-a-reality-check/">How Hard That Is: David Goldman: Asia Times</a><br />
<a href="https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/03/amateur-team-builds-ultra-efficient-electric-car-in-a-barn/">And If We Did: Kennedy & Bart: Yale Climate Connections</a><br />
<a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/day-29-hey-asshole-mayor?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMTQyMjAsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM3NjY2NSwiXyI6IkVmNjloIiwiaWF0IjoxNTg2OTMzOTEzLCJleHAiOjE1ODY5Mzc1MTMsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0zOTMwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.Ey678JwnVd8RFmRKvIRyD9OIvu4jJVx-cs4-h_re0Pg">What We Could Do: Yasha Levine: Substack</a>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-31124015637357652692020-04-06T10:38:00.003-04:002020-04-06T19:28:56.619-04:00The Economic Death Cult & Corona Virus<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The last several months have been a real astringent for world
political economy. If we can stay clear headed and identify the various fulcrum
points the shifting disintegration of our political economy is uncovering,
there will be numerous opportunities to have disproportionate effects. These
effects may not turn out as we intend, but we should least try to change for
the good. Toward that aim, I'll begin by laying out the core values the
following analysis is based on, the "good" I see to aim for: that
anthropogenic climate change is real and manageable; that neoliberal capitalism
is converting invaluable global genetic, ecological, biological, organic and
chemical/mineral resources to money profits now by destroying those resources
for the future and that this can be changed; that western political systems
have been captured by neoliberal capitalists and that this can be changed; that
neoliberal capitalists, while they may be decent human beings individually,
lack the moral imagination to accept the responsibility for the wreckage and
carnage their "investments" reap, it remains possible that this too
can be changed. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">What has become surprisingly obvious in the last few weeks, so
obvious even our President's beginning to see it (but not so obvious<a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/"> that
economists</a>, the clerics of the neoliberal state, can see it), is that The
Efficient Markets Hypothesis has turned Western economics into a death
cult. Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson's so called
"Keynesian Synthesis" normalized The Efficient Markets Hypothesis
(EMH), deceptively relegating Keynes "animal spirits", his contention
that tempers and temperaments of fickle humans animate markets, to short-term epiphenomenon. Instead Samuelson elevated an empirically
untestable claim</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18px;"> to the status of unassailable truth:</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that market agents with perfect informtion settle market prices that are</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18px;">self-equilibrating</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Unassailable, that is,
between markets collapse like two weeks and twelve years ago. Between
such events, when the "Market" doctrine has held, the logic of EMH
has been used to rationalize the elimination of all "costs" that
would be necessary to maintain a societies ability to combat, for instance and
among other things, a global viral pandemic. It is the EMH logic that has had our
President insisting we'll all head back to work after Easter, it's sure as hell
not concern for our health.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">This <a href="https://twitter.com/StephanieKelton/status/1243674759201796098?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1243907696266526720&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2020%2F03%2Flinks-3-29-2020.html">astonishing
video</a> leads me to believe that our President has a better grasp of
what money is (a social/political relationship) than anyone in the Democratic
Party, and that to save his Presidency there is a better than even chance he'll
steal Sanders "Medicare for All", which the Democratic Party has
thrown everything it has into defeating (yielding a candidate with obvious
dementia to challenge Trump in the fall). At a fraction of the cost of the $6T
bailout Trump's discussing here, he can temporarily nationalize the medical
insurance industry and provide universal medical coverage at least for the
duration of the crisis. If he wants to get his face on Mount Rushmore, he'll
consolidate it into universal government backed insurance like Germany has and
go a long way towards making US labor costs globally competitive again. But I
expect rather that he will maintain a predatory rentier system once the virus
has passed to placate the oligarchy, a universal insurance system with poison
pills to ensure shareholders get their dividends from disease. Even this,
though, would be a profound re-alignment of US social relationships to the
benefit of workers. If the Democrats are lucky, he won't seize this opportunity
but the death cult of economic expertise makes their luck our misfortune.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Different from the Global Financial Crisis of twelve years ago,
the lethality of the present one is glaring. The previous episode erupted
around the social relationships we think of as "debt". As such, it
could be dealt with through the <a href="http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/29000000000000-a-detailed-look-at-the-feds-bailout-by-funding-facility-and-recipient">power
of fiat money</a> by a Federal Reserve desperate to prevent people
questioning the social nature of those underlying relations in order to
preserve the relations themselves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">In only this The Fed succeeded. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">In 2008 it
was predatory lending and regulatory failures of the global dollar banking
system that precipitated the crisis. A crisis of debt that only turned into a
social one when Western governments insisted on maintaining the underlying debt
structure by forcing societies to pay for the <a href="http://cobblehillbilly.blogspot.com/2012/07/bad-debt-is-result-of-prior-bad.html">mistakes</a> of
finance. The <a href="https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ceb1-modest-proposal-2-2-6th-april-20111.pdf">tragedy
of Greece </a>was the clearest EU manifestation, though Cypress, the
Baltic states, Ireland and Spain were all abused. The worst of it in the US was
the foreclosure epidemic of 2008-12 where poor and minority homeowners were
used to <a href="https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/">"foam
the runway"</a> for a slow-motion recapitalization of otherwise
insolvent US banks. The lethality of the GFC is visible only in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States">statistics of
suicide</a> and the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/156852/deaths-despair-rising">"deaths
of despair"</a> of the opioid epidemic, which the unaffected tend to
be unaware of. The current crisis is one of disease itself intruding on the
socially agreed fictions of money with very real fears for life and health,
animal spirits dislocating the structure of debt. The bodies are piling up in
the morgues even as the defaults pile up on bank balance sheets. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I'll return to the underlying structural forces at work in a latter post, but
explaining them will be much easier in light of the clarifying realities COVID
19 continues to force into the social relations of money, debt and power.
Probably the most immediate problem is the one who's name I'll borrow from
"Slate", <a href="https://slate.com/business/2020/03/coronavirus-rent-landlords-strike-unemployment.html">Red
April:</a> Mattress Firm, Subway and Cheesecake Factory, among other
corporate franchises are lawyering up to engage in a rent strike. The precedent
set here implicates about $40B a month in the residential rental market alone,
which disruption in the flow of funds could trigger cascading defaults across
the financial and real estate industries here and around the world. This
impending threat has neoliberal institutions like the Financial Times trotting
out "<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/223271e6-6cfa-11ea-89df-41bea055720b">Fear,
Uncertainty & Doubt</a>", the anti-marketing technique
perfected first by tobacco and now used primarily by fossil fuels companies to
confuse otherwise clear science to protect threatened profit flows.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">From the perspective of the social relations of money/debt, that
it is these corporate franchise chains lawyering up to prepare for a rent
strike says that we have arrived at the logical conclusion of the Citizens
United vs FEC ruling. Corporations are now fully enfranchised and acting as
citizens. Except to the extent they are as wealthy as corporations, actual
humans no longer matter and cannot get traction as citizens. The <a href="https://www.epi.org/blog/the-cares-acts-aid-to-state-and-local-governments-isnt-enough-to-shield-vital-public-services-from-the-coronavirus-shock-lessons-from-the-great-recession-tell-us-why/">CARES
Act</a> provides about two trillion dollars in <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90483112/here-are-the-most-infuriating-details-and-corporate-giveaways-in-the-covid-19-stimulus-bill">subsidies
for corporations and wealthy investors</a> plus another <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/coronavirus-stimulus-bill-explained-bailouts-unemployment-benefits.html">four
trillion for financiers</a> while only providing a window dressing of
unemployment relief and financial aid to distressed Americans. Conspicuously
absent in light of Sanders campaign for "Medicare for All" is any
effort to help Americans defray the costs of testing and treatment for the
virus itself, and whatever losses medical insurers take from those who's
insurance does actually cover them, insurers are confident they will recoup
next year by <a href="https://twitter.com/wendellpotter/status/1242969820762484736">raising
rates 40%</a> or more as the need may be. I'm afraid Trump has noticed
this too.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">As for the citizens abandoned by their government, the Federal
Reserve recently projected that 10-15% of Americans<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-400-emergency-expense-story-is-wrong?sref=C3P1bRLC"> cannot
muster $400</a> to handle an emergency. It is probably not that 10-15% who
showed up in the unprecedented 3,283,000 new unemployment claims
booked <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/us-weekly-jobless-claims-record-coronavirus-unemployment-insurance-labor-recession-2020-3">the
week ending March 20th</a>, before the systematic shutdowns began to roll
across America's cities: gig, part-time and contract workers don't qualify for
unemployment while living under the highest levels of financial stress, making
the real situation much worse than even the appalling headline number. Millions more have filed for unemployment in the time since then. While
the unemployment number is ten times the previous record for new claims, a
record set tellingly in 1982 as the "Markets" ideology was initially
deployed to begin to dismantle the New Deal social protections, it excludes
anyone who didn't previously have a full time job with benefits, which is to
say all of societies neediest. The $1,200 in payments to individuals included
in the CARE Act is an insult to the ongoing needs of a huge number of hard
working, underpaid and increasingly insolvent Americans. It can't even reach
the tens of millions of people who have no bank account and so don't exist to
the IRS.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Many of these people will have no choice but to join the Red April
rent strike: no money no rent. The S&P bounced after the CARE Act passed,
but within a day investors began to worry about the upcoming first of the
month and are watching nervously as the realities set in. Between the<a href="http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/29000000000000-a-detailed-look-at-the-feds-bailout-by-funding-facility-and-recipient"> $29T
financial bailout in 2008</a>, the ever expanding Fed Balance sheet resulting
from Quantitative Easing and <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/11/roiled-repo-markets-looking-for-answers-in-all-the-wrong-places.html">new
innovations</a> in <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm">pumping
money into the financial infrastructure</a> to keep it from blowing up,
not to mention the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on-middle-east-wars-since-2001-study.html">cost
of the permanent wars</a>, it's pretty clear the US can afford what it chooses
to afford. That the <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615418/why-the-us-cant-go-back-to-work-by-easter/">President</a>,
and numerous others, nominally <a href="https://observer.com/2020/03/ex-goldman-sachs-ceo-lloyd-blankfein-suggest-lift-coronavirus-lockdown/">liberal</a> and <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/dick-kovacevich-1494365">conservative</a>, were calling on workers to go back to work by Easter despite projections the
pandemic won't peak until mid-May tell you all you need to know about their
values: they value their balance sheets. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/17/new-zealand-launches-massive-spending-package-to-combat-covid-19">New
Zealand</a> and <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8095269/Italy-suspends-MORTGAGE-payments-wake-coronavirus-outbreak.html">Italy</a> have
both backed their populations in response to the crisis with direct financial
relief, thus far the US has told workers to <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dan-patrick-sacrifice-grandparents_n_5e796dd8c5b6f5b7c549df25">"go
die"</a>. It was only as the bodies piled up in New York that this Market first rhetoric abated just a little.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So, in the immediate term, for white collar workers as part of what
is essentially <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/business/economy/coronavirus-inequality.html#click=https://t.co/URFeYT219J">a
white collar quarantine</a> their work can advance remotely and their direct deposit continue. In New York and DC there is likely to be a plethora of new
opportunities headed their way as Cuomo jockeys to displace Biden from the head
of the Democratic ticket at what will certainly be a brokered convention this
summer and the bailouts spill out across Maryland and Virginia. Looking a little further afield, China offers some interesting
insights. The CCP deployed it's full authoritarian power, once it woke up to
the problem, to effectively contain the epidemic. Of course I remain <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/wuhan-front-line-coronavirus-outbreak-by-tracy-wen-liu-2020-04?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e6d934103a-op_newsletter_2020_04_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-e6d934103a-93464089&mc_cid=e6d934103a&mc_eid=3624552392">deeply
skeptical</a> of <a href="http://shanghaiist.com/2020/03/27/urns-in-wuhan-far-exceed-death-toll-raising-more-questions-about-chinas-tally/">China's
claims</a> about success with the virus, I expect leadership there is
subject to the same "save the economy, the people be damned" pressure
the business and conservative press is subjecting ours too. None the less, once
the quarantine was wound down, real fiscal stimulus <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-27/china-pledges-to-raise-fiscal-deficit-ratio-sell-special-debt">is
being implemented</a>. This will have to happen here too and will require additional
emergency legislation in the coming week. I expect governors and mayors across
the country to start making a lot of noise in the coming week.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">On top of the problems of the real economy and much like the PRC,
in this increasingly panicked legislation we will feel the effects of an
economic elite that acts with impunity in a political environment of scarce and
incompetent oversight. New digital monopolies like Facebook and Google,
distributional monopolies like Walmart and Amazon and innovative, high tech
grifts like Tesla, Uber and to a lesser extent the quickly deflating WeWork are
led by celebrity billionaires our post Citizens United Federal Judiciary and
Justice Department will not touch. Combined with the mercenary essence of our
two current parties, the GOP serving fossil fuels and resource extraction
corporations, for whom Trump has <a href="https://commons.commondreams.org/t/holy-crap-this-is-insane-citing-coronavirus-pandemic-epa-indefinitely-suspends-environmental-rules/75729">shut
down the EPA</a>, the Democrats hosting the twin MICs, Military and Medical, furiously resisting attempts to end wars or solve medical
problems, our domestic politics promise to continue the kind of disgusting
giveaways to the rich and powerful we saw with the CARES Act last week. While we have surveillance capabilities to match the PRC, ours are all tooled to rent extraction and can't even be repurposed for public good in the biggest crisis in a lifetime.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br />
And at the bottom, in a country that has more or less abandoned legal
unionization, wild cat strikes like the <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/04/oklahomas-revolution-didnt-end-teacher-strikes-going-much.html">Teachers
Strikes</a> last summer are proliferating. Nurses, truck drivers, bus
drivers and longshoremen have, in various places across the country and without
formal unions staged <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2020/04/uss-week-strikes">strikes
for safe working conditions</a> and material support. Prior to the Teacher
Strikes, which incidentally were in "red" states, this was
unprecedented in the last 30 years. Ennobled and appropriately emboldened as
"essential workers", laborers across the economy and its supply
chains are waking up to their power. While I expect the essential lawlessness
of the corporate and plutocratic actors in DC for the foreseeable future, I
expect more and more people will begin paying attention to the cognitive
dissonance between what corporate media tell them and sources closer to them,
at both the top and the bottom of society. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br />
Several generations of younger Americans have now grown up in a society in
which nothing really works for them. Education has <a href="https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-college-admissions-fraud-corruption-list-20190312-story.html">been
monetized</a> with the yield of profits more important than pedagogical
results. Medical care is behind increasingly tall pay walls that everyone below
the upper middle class is increasingly resigned to not relying on. Even science
has a <a href="https://www.sheldrake.org/essays/the-replicability-crisis-in-science">replicability
crisis</a> where monetary incentives have driven data selection and
presentation for so long that the scientific method itself is breaking down.
The people who have grown up with this dysfunction are significantly more open
to non-Market solutions, a condition not seen since the 1960s, and Socialism, an openness not seen since Eugene Debs resigned from the Wilson Administration at
the start of the First World War. To these citizens, the New York Times and
Washington Post begin to look like Fox News looked to the once great papers
audiences a generation ago: backward looking institutions trying to hold onto a
no longer viable system while waiting for their audience to die.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br />
In conservative media as well there is a split between what I'll call
"values" conservativism, as embodied by journalists like Larison and
Dherer at The American Conservative, and "power" conservatives like
the editors at the Wall Street Journal. As with the left / liberal split
amongst Democrats, this value / power split in the GOP opens real space for new
political alliances and the potential of both parties to splinter.
Interestingly, the Financial Times ran an <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7eff769a-74dd-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca">editorial</a> calling
for redistribution, worker and environmental protections and significant
government involvement in the economy. The editors finish by calling for a
renewal of the "social contract" in Great Brittan. In the US, I would
say at this point it would be to introduce a social contract at all: what's
left of the one that used to exist here has been completely monetized in the
name of efficiency by the Neoliberal Death Cult. </span></div>
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jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-11525920778601429112020-03-22T17:09:00.001-04:002020-03-22T17:09:21.789-04:00Over Dynamic Situation Links<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/156901/dismantled-state-takes-pandemic">Drowining In A Bathtub: Alex Pareene: New Republic</a><br />
<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-america-could-collapse/">A Fragile Giant: Matt Stoller: The Nation</a><br />
<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/economy-mobilization-coronavirus-market/">Can Be Saved: James Galbraith: The Nation</a><br />
<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/348e05e4-6778-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3">With Tools At Hand: Martin Wolf: Financial Times</a><br />
<a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-to-structure-the-coronavirus?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozNjIxNDUzLCJwb3N0X2lkIjozMTUwMzIsIl8iOiJvb3A5KyIsImlhdCI6MTU4NDkxMDMyMSwiZXhwIjoxNTg0OTEzOTIxLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTE1MjQiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.641n9mibfQITCUDCI-XPO1-0I408dUMWGmwJfZFfufc">Used Wisely: Matt Stoller: MattStoller</a><br />
<a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/we-tracked-the-last-time-the-government-bailed-out-the-economy-heres-what-to-know-about-the-1-trillion-coronavirus-plan">And Carefully Monitored: Michael Grabel & Paul Kiel: ProPublica</a><br />
<a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/stop-the-coronavirus-corporate-coup?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyMDEwNDcsInBvc3RfaWQiOjMyNDM1MSwiXyI6IkRPNzUxIiwiaWF0IjoxNTg0ODMwMTEwLCJleHAiOjE1ODQ4MzM3MTAsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xMTUyNCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.Yd4rCOWgwnKYcfFm3FyhbtgtS6jejJ6PGUSQgz5I9S4">Unless The Looters Win: Matt Stoller: MattStoller</a><br />
<a href="https://centreforaviation.com/analysis/reports/covid-19-by-the-end-of-may-most-world-airlines-will-be-bankrupt-517512">Change Is Baked In: CAPA</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://historicly.substack.com/p/cause-and-effect-with-max-blumenthal">History Rolls On: Max Blumenthal: Historical Substack</a><br />
<a href="https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/sacred-ignorance-covid-19-reveals-iran-split/">Sacred Ignorance: Kourosh Zaibari: Asia Times</a><br />
<a href="https://ejmagnier.com/2020/03/18/iraqi-politics-in-a-storm-heading-towards-instability-and-chaos/">And Viscious Politics: E J Magnier</a><br />
<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-trump-iran-iraq-troop-withdrawal-afghanistan-a9412216.html#comments">Not Saying Retreat: Robert Fisk: The Independent</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2020/03/01/hyman-minsky-at-100-was-minsky-a-communist/">Commienomics: Ricardo Bellofiore: Monthly Review</a>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-39163647441619671002020-03-12T11:40:00.000-04:002020-03-16T17:10:44.529-04:00Neoliberal Collapse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"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.<br />
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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 <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-coronavirus-speech-reaction/">Oligarch
in Chief went on television </a>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.<br />
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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: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/us/politics/hillary-clinton-elizabeth-warren-medicare.html">everyone
knows that Medicare for All cannot be made law</a>. 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."<br />
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Public health? Privatized.<br />
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A particularly awkward time for the
Democrats to have to address this issue <a href="https://tdmsresearch.com/2020/02/17/new-hampshire-2020-democratic-party-primary-exit-poll-versus-reported-vote-count/">as</a> <a href="https://tdmsresearch.com/2020/03/02/south-carolina-2020-democratic-party-primary/">they</a> <a href="https://tdmsresearch.com/2020/03/04/massachusetts-2020-democratic-party-primary/">have</a> <a href="https://tdmsresearch.com/2020/03/07/texas-2020-democratic-party-primary/">just</a> <a href="https://tdmsresearch.com/2020/03/08/vermont-2020-democratic-party-primary/">rigged</a> <a href="https://tdmsresearch.com/2020/03/09/california-2020-democratic-party-primary/">every</a> <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/dont-let-corporate-media-or-dnc-fool-you-sanders-scored-a-big-win-in-iowa/">caucus</a>
and <a href="http://tdmsresearch.com/2020/03/09/california-2020-democratic-party-primary/">primary</a> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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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.<br />
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Political representation? Privatized.<o:p></o:p></div>
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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.<br />
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Sovereignty? Privatized.<o:p></o:p></div>
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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.<o:p></o:p></div>
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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.<br />
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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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-1587918409971866262020-02-16T17:39:00.000-05:002020-02-16T17:40:11.739-05:00Fluid Now Links<a href="http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/viral-alarm-when-fury-overcomes-fear">Fury Over Fear: Xu Xhangrun: ChinaFile</a><br />
<a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-coronavirus-xi-hold-on-power-by-yuen-yuen-ang-2020-02">Power Illusion: Yuen Yuen Ang: Project Syndicate</a><br />
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-15/u-s-says-it-has-thwarted-6-billion-russia-germany-gas-pipeline">Power Delusion: Pat Donahue & Matt Miller: Bloomberg</a><br />
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-security/the-west-is-winning-us-tells-china-france-wary-idUSKBN20908M">Wishing Making It So: Robin Emmott & Josh Irish: Reuters</a><br />
<a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/10/world-war-iiis-newest-battlefield/">Winter Is Coming: Michael Klare: Consortium News</a><br />
<a href="file:///Users/station19/Downloads/Institutionalizing%20Delay%20-%20Climatic%20Change%20(1).pdf">Before The Heat: Robert Brulle: Springer Science + Business</a><br />
<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-the-money-behind-the-climate-denial-movement-180948204/">Meet The Money: Colin Schultz: Smithsonian</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/02/china-brazil-amazon-environment-pork/606601/">And The Appetite: Melissa Chan & Heriberto Araujo: The Atlantic</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.carlbeijer.com/2020/01/why-they-hate-bernies-supporters.html">Hating Positive Change: Carl Beijer</a><br />
<a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/fulltext">And The Health It Brings: A P Galvani, A S Parpia, E M Foster-Burton & M C Fitzpatrick: The Lancet</a><br />
<a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/money-is-an-iron-hamrah">Money Is An Iron: A S Hamrah: The Baffler</a><br />
<a href="https://theotherhudsonvalley.com/2019/03/14/new-jersey-to-queens-barrier/">From River To Sea: R H Gilson: TOHV</a><br />
<a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/17/french-popular-uprising-revolution-or-frozen-conflict/">Frozen Conflict: Diana Johnstone: Consortium News</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/02/27/can-journalism-be-saved/">Saving Journalism: Nicholas Lemann: NYRB</a><br />
<a href="https://palladiummag.com/2020/02/12/how-state-capacity-drives-industrialization/">Libertarian State: B Landau-Taylor & O Dixon-Luinenberg: Palladium</a>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-39948156336560874312019-12-07T11:31:00.000-05:002019-12-28T10:47:05.379-05:00Kayfabe: Has Trump Done Any Real Good?<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">“Kayfabe” from WWF “professional wrestling”, from Wikipedia: “</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">In </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_wrestling" target="_blank" title="Professional wrestling"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-decoration-line: none;">professional wrestling</span></a></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">, <b>kayfabe</b> <span class="ipa"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English" target="_blank" title="Help:IPA/English"><span style="color: #0b0080;">/ˈke</span><span style="color: #0b0080;">ɪ</span><span style="color: #0b0080;">fe</span><span style="color: #0b0080;">ɪ</span><span style="color: #0b0080;">b/</span></a></span> (also called <b>work</b> or <b>worked</b>) 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 <i>kayfabe</i> has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.” </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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 </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">regional</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Trump, however awful, <a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/blackmail-jeffrey-epstein-trump-mentor-reagan-era/260760/">and awful he is</a>, <i>is</i> our <a href="https://canchewread.tumblr.com/post/189453111655/quickshot-quotations-alt-america"><i>elected</i> President</a>: 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 <a href="https://journalistsresource.org/studies/politics/finance-lobbying/the-influence-of-elites-interest-groups-and-average-voters-on-american-politics/">for at least 20 years</a>. 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: <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/trump-guts-endangered-species-act-in-gift-to-big-business/">environmental</a> and labor laws have been and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/29/18197346/trump-labor-electronic-injury-reporting-rule">continue to be gutted</a>; Wall Street continues to be <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/12/in-the-midst-of-the-biggest-wall-street-bailout-since-the-financial-crisis-the-fed-presents-alice-in-wonderland-testimony-for-todays-house-hearing/">bailed out</a>; tech monopolies go un-prosecuted for clear <a href="https://qz.com/1733210/matt-stoller-on-big-tech-and-monopoly-power/">anti-trust violations</a>; and ever expanding defense, border security and intelligence budgets <a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/02/11/a-pentagon-budget-like-none-before-700-billion/">continue to be passed</a>; corporatist, conservative judges continue to be <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/11/senate-democrats-judges-895168">approved by the Senate</a>; <a href="http://www.issuesmagazine.com.au/article/issue-december-2014/five-eyes-surveillance.html">universal surveillance continues</a>. These are all policies on which both parties to the Oligarchy agree completely.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXA--dj2-CY)">Joe Biden bragged about</a> there in 2016. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">So, to the question I'm frequently asked, “what, if anything, has Trump done that is actually good for this country?” My reply:</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> </span>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 <a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/07/isikoff-who-first-peddled-the-fake-steele-dossier-invents-new-russian-influence-story.html">Russiagate hysteria</a> 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 <a href="https://johnsolomonreports.com/the-10-most-important-revelations-to-expect-from-the-russia-probe-fisa-report/">starting to think</a> about <a href="https://saraacarter.com/fisa-alterations-could-pose-significant-trouble-for-fbi-fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree/">coming home to roost</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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 <a href="https://thesaker.is/putins-stunning-revelations-about-new-russian-weapons-systems/">US cannot defend against</a>. This is a direct result of Bush Jr unilaterally withdrawing the US from the <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002-01/us-withdrawal-abm-treaty-president-bush%E2%80%99s-remarks-us-diplomatic-notes">Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty</a> 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 <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/newly-declassified-documents-gorbachev-told-nato-wouldnt-23629">would not do so</a>. 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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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 <a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/01/how-the-us-enabled-isis-to-take-deir-ezzor.html">“regime change” Syria</a>. 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 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/02/11/ilhan-omar-israel-lobby-documentary/">innovator in congressional bribery</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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, <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/13/the-mess-that-nuland-made/">US installed puppet government</a>. Russia has controlled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Empire">Crimea since 1783</a>, 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 <a href="https://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02jan-feb/jan-feb02interviewklebniko.html">internationalize that looting</a>. Failing all of this, the Plan B was the status quo: continue to use Russia hysteria as a funding tool for the MIC.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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 <a href="https://fair.org/home/as-lula-emerges-from-prison-us-media-ignore-how-washington-helped-put-him-there/">Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia</a> 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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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 <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/22/bolsonaros-disastrous-policies-amazon-led-fires-say-observers">deforesting the Amazon basin</a> 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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">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 <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2019/11/25/medicare-for-all-lobbying-072110">Medical Industrial Complex</a> and the Shadow Government are running primarily to <a href="https://twitter.com/AllOnMedicare/status/1201248664343236608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1201248664343236608&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2019%2F12%2F200pm-water-cooler-12-2-2019.html">defeat Medicare for All</a>, a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2019/11/25/medicare-for-all-lobbying-072110">more important goal for them</a> 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.</span></div>
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jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-80853218527707357262019-11-10T16:01:00.000-05:002019-11-10T16:03:09.227-05:00Links<a href="https://doist.com/blog/asynchronous-communication/" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Digital Freedom: Amir Salihefendic: Doist</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-jeff-bezos-wants/598363/">Digital Slavery: Franklin Foer: The Atlantic</a><br />
<a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/1/20887003/tech-technology-evolution-natural-inevitable-ethics">Digital Ethics: Rose Eveleth: Vox</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.cjr.org/analysis/podcasting-business-revenue-independent.php">Choking The Internet: Cyrena Touros: CJR</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/27/slavery-reparations-holocaust-restitution-negotiations-229881">Divide & Conquer: Stuart Eizenstat: Politico</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.socialisteconomist.com/2019/10/how-europes-greedy-lending-to-africa-is.html">Out Of Africa: Vijay Prashad: Socialist Economist</a></div>
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<a href="http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=43495">Money Is Not A Real Resource 1: Bill Mitchell: MMT</a><br />
<a href="http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=43512">Money Is Not A Real Resource 2: Bill Mitchell: MMT</a></div>
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<a href="https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/kyoto-gion-photo-ban-intl-hnk/index.html">Real Resource Exploitation: Lilit Marcus: CNN</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article236719068.html">New, Posh, Sacrifice Zone: Sabalow, Kasler, Bizjak, Stanton & Wiley: Sacremento Bee</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/09/polluters-climate-crisis-fossil-fuel">And It's Your Fault: George Monboit: The Guardian</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-oxygen-on-which-the-fire-of-global-warming-burns">Arsonist Capitalism: Bill McKibben: New Yorker</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.brasilwire.com/part-four-how-wall-street-recolonized-brazil/">Burning Our Lungs: Staff: Brazil Wire</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/10/global-protests-round-up-authoritarian-adaptation-data-gathering-role-class.html">Leading To Revolt: Lambert Strether: Naked Capitalism</a><br />
<a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-capitalists-are-afraid/">And Appropriate Fears: Chris Hedges: Truthdig</a><br />
<a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/10/new-york-feds-repo-loans-are-foaming-the-hedge-fund-runways/">Capitalist Arson: Pam & Russ Martens: Wall Street On Parade</a></div>
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<a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/10/fed-ups-its-wall-street-bailout-to-690-billion-a-week-as-media-snoozes/">Burning Money: Pam & Russ Martens: Wall Street On Parade</a><br />
<a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/11/as-the-fed-throws-hundreds-of-billions-a-week-at-wall-street-banks-for-liquidity-jpmorgans-iif-can-afford-to-buy-el-paso-electric/">To Keep The Planet Burning: Pam & Russ Martens: Wall Street On Parade</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z">And Sea Level Rising: Kulp & Strauss: Nature</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/edward-snowden-alan-rusbridger-whitleblowing/">Absolute Power: Alan Rusbridger: TLS</a><br />
<a href="https://off-guardian.org/2019/11/08/assange-lawyers-links-to-us-govt-bill-browder-raises-questions/">And It's Abuses: Luch Komisar: Off Guardian</a><br />
<a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/views/analysis/will-you-come-and-help-father-of-julian-assange-on-campaign-to-free-his-son-962776.html">The Struggle: Michael Clifford: Irish Examiner</a><br />
<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/christopher-steele-britain-insanity-909539/">In The Face Of All Stupidity: Matt Taibbi: Rolling Stone</a></div>
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<a href="http://timshorrock.com/2019/10/25/the-assassination-of-park-chung-hee/">Assassination Park: Timshorrok.com</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/10/johnsons-brexit-is-inspired-by-blair-eden-and-chamberlain-not-churchill.html">Brexit Anschluss: Gerry Hassan: Naked Capitalism</a></div>
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<a href="https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal">De-Growth vs Green New Deal: Robert Pollin: New Left Review</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/catholicism-antichristic-church/">Antichristic Church: Rod Dreher: The American Conservative</a><br />
<a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/">Against The Grain: Scott Alexander: Slate Star Codex</a><br />
<a href="https://theweek.com/articles/876227/broken-medicareforall-financing-debate">Money Mouth: Ryan Cooper: The Week</a><br />
<a href="https://onezero.medium.com/the-death-of-the-computer-file-doc-43cb028c0506">Memory Loss: Simon Pitt: OneZero</a></div>
jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-21788600511443706502019-10-20T12:30:00.000-04:002019-10-20T12:30:01.428-04:00Links<a href="http://www.brasilwire.com/convivial-war-how-wall-street-recolonized-brazil-part-one/">Global Capital: Staff: Brazil Wire</a><br />
<a href="http://www.brasilwire.com/smiling-assassins-convivial-war-part-two/">Burns & Destroyys: Staff: Brazil Wire</a><br />
<a href="http://www.brasilwire.com/gold-against-the-soul-convivial-war-part-three/">Global Ecosystems: Staff: Brazil Wire</a><br />
<a href="https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/10/fbidoj-going-to-throw-the-cia-and-clapper-under-the-bus-by-larry-c-johnson.html">CIA Burns Itself: Larry Johnson: Sic Semper Tyrannis</a><br />
<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/ukrainegate-biden-trump/">& DNC With Them: Aaron Mate: The Nation</a><br />
<a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/new-york-times-fakes-the-record-of-arming-the-syrian-rebels.html">& Corporate Press Credibility: b: Moon Of Alabama</a><br />
<a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/media-and-pundits-misread-the-everyone-wins-plan-for-syria.html">Confusing The Pundits: b: Moon Of Alabama</a><br />
<a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/18/pepe-escobar-the-road-to-damascus-how-the-syria-war-was-won/">Transforming Balance Of Power: Pepe Escobar: Consortium News</a><br />
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-13/trump-s-syria-mistake-has-a-silver-lining">Appalling Peace Mongering: Hal Brands: Bloomberg</a><br />
<a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/new-york-times-fakes-the-record-of-arming-the-syrian-rebels.html">Revising The Record: b: Moon Of Alabama</a><br />
<a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/explosive-text-messages-reveal-boeing-knew-of-mcas-aggression-in-2016-and-misled-faa/">Doesn't Work Well In Business: Gates & Miletich: Seattle Times</a><br />
<a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/us-procurement-won-the-civil-war">Nor Does It Work In War: Matt Stoller: BIG</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/edward-snowden-labyrinth/">Nor In Politics: Jonathon Lethem: NYRB</a><br />
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<a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/extinction-rebellion-and-the-birth-of-a-new-climate-politics.html">Broken Ecology: David Wallace-Wells: New York Magazine</a> (Note: <a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/banks-deeply-involved-in-fbi-coordinated-suppression-of-terrorist-occupy-wall-street.html">Occupy Wall Street didn't fade, it was taken down in a multicity, coordinated,</a> <a href="https://sojo.net/articles/paramilitary-attack-occupy-wall-street-eye-witness-account">paramilitary raid)</a><br />
<a href="https://tyler.io/broken/">Broken Machines: Tyler io</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/scrubbed-reports-reveal-new-secrets-of-the-prince-andrew-jeffrey-epstein-relationship/262330/">Royal Epstein: Whitney Webb: Mint Press</a><br />
<a href="https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/19-30.htm">Matthew</a> <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/catholicism-antichristic-church/">19-30 Panic: Rod Dreher: TAC</a>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-40777022003822368822019-10-10T11:04:00.001-04:002019-10-10T15:58:02.855-04:00Links<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/brexit-a-repeat-of-the-turmoil-of-1914-1922.html">Disuniting Kingdom: Richard Murphyyy: Naked Capitalism</a><br />
<a href="http://thesaker.is/why-frances-20-and-30-somethings-hate-the-yellow-vests/">Disuniting Republic: Ramin Mazaheri: The Saker</a><br />
<a href="https://mspainthelp.com/who-will-survive-in-america/">Surviving In America: Jake Goldstein: M S Paint Help</a><br />
<a href="https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/11/middle-working-class-neo-estates-liberal/">Despite Our Betters: Joel Kotkin: Daily Caller</a><br />
<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/155190/fetishization-employer-provided-health-care">Selling You Your Own Death: Libby Watson: New Republic</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/wolf-richter-how-employees-employers-get-bled-by-health-insurance.html">And Making Your Job Suck: Wolf Richter: Naked Capitalism</a><br />
<a href="https://promarket.org/how-powerful-ideas-can-shape-society-aaron-director-and-the-triumph-of-nihilism/">For A Nihilistic Market Ideal: Matt Stoller: ProMarket</a><br />
<a href="https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/13284/americas-gaping-short-range-air-defense-gap-and-why-it-has-to-be-closed-immediately">Which Can't Make Weapons That Work: Tyler Rogoway: The Drive</a><br />
<a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/russia-shows-off-new-weapons-tells-us-to-come-down-to-earth.html">Against Real Competition: b: Moon Of Alabama</a><br />
<a href="https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/saudi-oil-disruption-could-hit-china-hardest/">In Defense Of What?: Tim Diass: Asia Times</a><br />
<a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/">Opposed To What: Craig Murray</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-europe-eyeing-a-reset-with-russia/">Alienating Europe: Scott Ritter: The American Conservative</a><br />
<a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/14/the-spy-who-walked-away/">With A Clown Show: Scott Ritter: Consortium News</a><br />
<a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-problem-with-impeachment/">That Changes Nothing: Chris Hedges: Truthdig</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/ukraine-gate-will-endanger-biden-not-trump/">Backfiring: Pat Buchanan: The American Conservative</a><br />
<a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-joe-biden-empowered-chinas-censorship">For China?: Matt Stoller: BIG</a><br />
<a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/15/the-last-time-a-jewish-state-annexed-its-neighbors-it-disappeared-for-2000-%20%20years-netanyahu-west-bank-palestinians/">Multi-millennial Mess: Ian Lustick: Foreign Policy</a><br />
<a href="https://chasfreeman.net/ready-fire-aim-u-s-interests-in-afghanistan-iraq-and-syria/">And Strategy To Support It: Chas Freeman</a><br />
<a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-capitalists-are-afraid/">Scaring Our Betters: Chris Hedges: Truthdig</a><br />
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-oxygen-on-which-the-fire-of-global-warming-burns">Throwing Fuel On The Fire: Bill McKibben: The New Yorker</a><br />
<a href="http://www.brasilwire.com/lula-interview-pts-mistakes-and-us-role-in-coup/">Obama Set: Pepe Escobar: BrasilWire</a><br />
<a href="http://www.brasilwire.com/rondonization-world-bank-dictatorship-and-the-amazon/">In The Amazon: Brian Mier: BrazsilWire</a><br />
<a href="http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/09/heres-how-we-are-silenced-by-big-tech.html">While We Are Silenced: Charles Hugh Smith</a><br />
<a href="https://digitstodollars.com/2019/09/26/the-heat-death-of-5g/">And Cooked: Jonathan Goldberg: Digits To Dollars</a><br />
<a href="https://ritholtz.com/2019/09/tracking-global-corporate-tax-avoidance/">To Avoid Taxes: Barry Ritholtz</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.excavating.ai/">Oh Yeah, AI Makes It All Worse: Crawford & Paglin</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/ari-ben-menashe-jeffrey-epstein-ghislaine-maxwell-israel-intelligence/262162/">And Epstein Was (Is?) Mossad: Whitney Webb: Mint Press</a>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-25497599281232388202019-08-11T16:59:00.000-04:002019-08-11T16:59:41.230-04:00Over Dynamic Situation Links<a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epstein-blackmail-roy-cohn/260621/">The Reagan Revolution: Whitney Webb: Mint Press</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/blackmail-jeffrey-epstein-trump-mentor-reagan-era/260760/">Was A Mob Takeover: Whitney Webb: Mint Press</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/mega-group-maxwells-mossad-spy-story-jeffrey-epstein-scandal/261172/">Of The United States: Whitney Webb: Mint Press</a><br />
<a href="https://promarket.org/how-the-supreme-court-is-rebranding-corruption/">Defining Away Corruption: Ciara Spelliscy-Torres: ProMarket</a><br />
<a href="https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/08/07/an-open-invitation-to-tyranny/">Invites Tyranny: Paul Craig Roberts</a><br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/07/monsanto-fusion-center-journalists-roundup-neil-young">The Cover Of Silence: Sam Levin: The Guardian</a><br />
<a href="https://www.ianwelsh.net/a-broken-media-is-a-broken-society/">Blinding Society: Ian Welsh</a><br />
<a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/08/the-descent-into-cruelty">To Creeping Authoritarianism: Nathan Robinson: Current Affairs</a><br />
<a href="https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/how-eton-college-perpetuates-problems-in-the-uk-a-1280694-2.html">A Venal Elite: Jorg Schindler: Spiegel</a><br />
<a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/08/india-will-come-to-regret-todays-annexation-of-jammu-and-kashmir.html">Nuclear Standoff 1: b: Moon Of Alabama</a><br />
<a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/08/north-korea-dislikes-that-us-plans-to-occupy-it.html">Nuclear Standoff 2: b: Moon Of Alabama</a><br />
<a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/08/china-conciders-to-protect-its-ships-from-us-piracy.html#more">Existential</a> <a href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/07/iran-keeps-calm-while-us-and-britain-continue-their-provocations-.html#more">Threat 1: b: Moon Of Alabama</a><br />
<a href="https://indianpunchline.com/china-reacts-to-jk-india-demands-reciprocity/">Existential Threat 2: M K Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline</a><br />
<a href="https://indianpunchline.com/what-if-north-korea-and-iran-move-in-tandem/">Existential Threat 3: M K Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline</a>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4579243609767994446.post-43881389882904875002019-07-21T17:54:00.002-04:002019-07-21T17:54:21.019-04:00Links<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/michael-hudson-u-s-economic-warfare-and-likely-foreign-defenses.html#comment-3183383">Imperial Overreach: Michael Hudson: Naked Capitalism</a><br />
<a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n14/adam-tooze/which-is-worse">Sulking Satrap: Adam Tooze: LRB</a><br />
<a href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14593">Cultural Abortion: Alba Corosio: Venezuelanalysis</a><br />
<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/the-cost-of-climate-change.html">Ecocide: Steve Keen: Naked Capitalism</a><br />
<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/trump-adolf-hitler-fake-news-common-similar-traits-semantics-a8998581.html">Linguistic Fascism: Robert Fisk: The Independent</a><br />
<a href="http://www.georgistjournal.org/2014/01/31/thoughts-on-the-tree-of-knowledge/">The Tree of Life: Dan Sullivan: Georgist Journal</a><br />
<a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/07/17/humanity-is-not-sleeping-its-in-an-induced-coma/">Drug Induced Sleep: Caitlin Johnstone</a><br />
<a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/12/skull-of-death-mass-media-inauthentic-opposition-and-eco-existential-reality-in-a-pre-fascist-age-of-appeasement-2/">Skull of Death: Paul Street: Counterpunch</a><br />
<a href="https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Green_New_Deal_-_Resolution.pdf">Plea For Life: AOC: Greenpolicy360</a>jsnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18326058179873660321noreply@blogger.com0