Meditations on Class Solidarity and "War of the Worlds" and Such Like

I have a movie playing on the TeeVee, an Australian picture called "Occupation" that is a variation on the perpetual theme of Alien Invasion which of course is the premise of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" of 1897-1898.

British imperialism was the subtext, particularly how Britain acquired and ruled its empire. It wasn't very nice, was it? In fact, it was bloody and cruel. From the point of view of those subject to the Empire, especially during the initial phases of conquest, the Brits and their mercenary "allies" were no different from, and perhaps in some ways worse than, the Martians so focused on destruction as they made their way across Britain and the globe. 

The question arose: what made them do this? Why? The theory after the fact was that Mars was a dying planet suffering from resource depletion and climate catastrophe, and perhaps overpopulation. 

The Martians saw the Earth as the ideal place for conquest and resettlement as the natives were so technologically backward, divided and unable to resist effectively -- if at all.

And indeed, the Earthlings were clearly losing the "war of the worlds," and in a sense weren't even fighting in part because they were unable to do so in any way that would protect and preserve their autonomy. This was an allegory for the progress of the British Empire in its global conquest of peoples and territories through force of superior arms, technology and a determination to simply and thoroughly exterminate and destroy anything and anyone who got in their way. Any survivors would be subject to enslavement and pillage.

Earthlings of course fight among themselves as much as or more than they resist the aliens. That's how it normally goes with these things. Yet ultimately, in every one of these Invasion pictures, the remnant humanity is victorious over the seemingly invulnerable alien hordes, and life, such as remains of it, returns to normal.

Or something.

The Earthlings fight among themselves, but sometimes as they do, they become aware of their common interest, solidarity against the invading All-Powerful Aliens, and despite themselves, they learn to work together against the common enemy. This process typically takes a long time, and sometimes it never comes. If they cannot become one another's allies, then the game is lost. The Martians win. Ah, but not forever, as the tiny Earthling remnant is always sufficient -- well, usually -- to overcome the power of the invaders. This story is so common as to be a trope. 

Another common trope is that the remnant humanity becomes allied with the invaders, and that's what happens at the end of "Occupation." Mankind and the Martians learn to live together on the Earth, so no more War of the Worlds. 

Is that a hint of socialism? Perhaps. 

Learning to live together is one of the prime directives of most socialist movements. There's a utopianism underlying the ideals of a socialist future, but at the same time, the community, the kind that already exists, is the model of the socialist ideal. Only larger. The joining of former enemies in common cause. The understanding that common effort can produce magnificent results that serve the common interests of the People rather than a small coterie of super-rich whose interest is not that of the Masses. That coterie is more likely than not to ally with the Martian Invaders, particularly if doing so will ensure their lasting benefit and survival.

This was one of the ways that British Imperialists acquired and maintained their Empire -- ally with a faction of the native rich and powerful and destroy any competition. It worked so well that other imperialists adopted the same tactic.

It's always hard to resist and counter this determination to conquer. 

And in "War of the Worlds" it took an Act of God -- in the form of a disease bacteria against which the Martians had no resistance -- to slay the dragon. 

In actual fact of course, spreading disease and famine and so forth to vanquish the natives was another of the many tactics employed by the British to obtain and hold their Empire.

What ended it was two world wars that saw the collapse of the Upper Classes through attrition and their inability to raise sufficient funds in their customary ways to maintain their grip on overseas territories. Empires are costly, no matter the loot extracted from the conquered peoples. Once India became more of a financial burden than not, the game was up.

Cleverly, though, the imperial strings are still being pulled through the advent of the Commonwealth. Which finally itself is dying a slow and tortuous death.

My Irish ancestors might be amused. I don't know. Ireland is now said to be one of the richest nations on earth, fiercely proud and European -- and surprisingly diverse and welcoming and functioning -- while Britain is in the process of domestic governing and societal collapse. Haw haw. 

Are we witness to end stage imperialism, finally? Hardly. The US has become the inheritor of the Anglo-Imperial mantle, and the US Empire, while apparently struggling, is actually expanding as American "interests" force their way into more and more overseas territories and endless wars are conducted to ensure US power is strengthened.

The internet has long maintained an Imperial Collapse Watch on the erroneous premise that US imperial overreach will cause its immanent collapse. Um, been waiting many decades. The collapse just never seems to come, does it?

Many errors, yes. But collapse? No.

Physical power is matched or exceeded by immense US financial clout. Sanctions against Russia though seem to have no effect and in fact may be backfiring. Hard to say. At any rate, the conflict over Ukraine, "proxy WWIII" as a correspondent puts it, appears to have no objective beyond depopulation and destruction of this borderland between Russia and Nato. Both sides are cooperating in that objective. Interesting. 

Class solidarity? So far only among the plutocrats and overclass.

Will it ever be revived among the Lower Orders? That remains to be seen, and I'm afraid I won't see it before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

How Close Are We To Direct Military Rule?

Hard to say. I'm not really up on military thinking (to put it mildly), so I haven't a clue to what The Generals are up to in their own secret realms. I know that they, their troops, their allies and their mercenaries have been killing and destroying up a storm overseas, and they've been organizing disaster response domestically. That can easily -- too easily -- morph into occupation abroad and martial law at home, but domestically it hasn't quite yet (the situation in Puerto Rico may hold the key... they say that crime is running rampant on the streets of San Juan and "something has to be done." Right.)

When Gen. Dunford appeared before the media to clean up the mess of the Niger Operation, I thought, "Well, there's your Emperor-in-waiting."

I've said for a while now that we're one or two catastrophes away from the Apocalypse, and we've had one major catastrophe (the California wild fires) since.

We're very close to the edge.

We've seen over and over how close to nonfunctional Congress is, and when they can do something, it's detrimental to the public good. We've seen over and over how dysfunctional and chaotic the White House is, and when they do something, it is all but certain to bring harm to some segment of the public -- and probably save the favored faction of the gangster rich from harm -- to say the least.

The courts too often reinforce injustice and free the rich from the law.

The public is restive enough that some are taking matters into their own hands; white rightists are on the march, racially motivated murder and assault is on the rise, and nothing is being done about the long term problem of mass murder, except perhaps to encourage more of it.

The White House backs the "good people on both sides" -- whoever they may be -- involved in the mayhem.

This is not sustainable.

The military and intelligence community are already in effective control of foreign policy, international affairs -- and warmaking. Trump freed them from Obama's restraint almost the moment he assumed the throne. I doubt he fully understood what he was doing -- does he fully understand anything, after all? But by doing so, he set up the foundations for the military take over of the government (to the extent it isn't already overseen/directed by the military.) The emergency framework has been around since the 1950s. On occasion, parts have been implemented, starting, so far as I can tell, with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, or perhaps with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Or maybe earlier.

The point is that both the military and the permanent government in Washington, DC, have contingency plans which can be implemented in a heartbeat should the need arise.

Parts of those plans can be implemented without notice or a backward glance, and it's possible hardly anyone would notice.

Trump opened the door to the seizure of the whole government by the military when he countermanded the restraints on military action imposed by the Obama regime. It may seem like those restraints only involved who got killed and what was destroyed where and when -- overseas. The White House had to approve.

But the military also has a domestic presence and role, and if by chance the chaos of the Trump regime interferes... it can be (and in part already has been) neutralized.

Retired and currently serving generals are scattered throughout the Trump regime, and they head -- or have headed -- the key agencies that can impose rule on a restive population. Experiments and examples are implemented by such agencies as the Gestapo-like ICE which has been unleashed to terrorize brown people and communities.

This sort of thing is easily expanded, but I would suggest that in a military take over, this sort of thing would be reduced or even cease.

The military and their sponsors would want calm and certainty at home so they can more easily and effectively pursue their Imperial objectives abroad -- which apparently involve the wholesale destruction and annihilation of "rebels against the Empire" we've been seeing.

All to what end?

We're not privy to that.

At any rate, I'd say we're closer than ever to the end point of the Republic, and once it comes, a lot of Americans will breathe a sigh of relief.

Not Much Interested

Can't say I've been following the campaigns or the conventions with anything like the interest and involvement I once had. No, not at all.

It's not so much the sham and charade of it all as it is the fact that at some point you learn that the spectacle has a particular purpose: to keep the Rabble amused and distracted sufficiently -- divided and at one another's throats if need be and possible -- to enable the continued exploitation and looting by the privileged elites.

It's a basic principle of rule.

Whatever else goes on, the Rabble must never be allowed to express their own interests and govern their own lives. Ever.

I have essentially no interest in either of the two major candidates for the presidency of the United States, for example. They may be a tremendous contrast to one another (or maybe not), but neither has shown a determination to enable the People's liberation.  Instead, they both show a strong tendency to want to order and command the Rabble to extract the most power from them. The idea of self-governance doesn't occur to either of them. It's more a matter of who can assert dominance over the masses "better."

Sheesh.

Of course the electoral process was irreparably damaged when the Supreme Court lawlessly intervened in the 2000 election, handing the presidency to George Bush the Lesser and his enforcer Mr. Cheney.

I'm old enough to remember some other lawless interference, including the assassination President Kennedy in 1963, and numerous subsequent assassinations, upheavals, bewildering government behaviors (such as wars and what have you) and constant economic exploitation and social and political repression.

But the election interference by the Supreme Court in 2000 was unprecedented, and it essentially put the lie to the whole idea of "elections." If they don't produce the "correct" result within a certain time frame, then they will be canceled and the Supreme Court will decide the outcome.

In the interim since then, we've seen, over and over again a plethora of electoral outcome shenanigans, from outright voter intimidation/suppression, to fungible machine counts, constantly off kilter polls (ha!), and media collusion for desirable outcomes. The Supreme Court hasn't had to interfere again, so that's good, I guess. But the mask came off, and I think more than a few people understand that if the outcome isn't satisfactory to the PTB, then the Court can and will intervene again. But it's almost impossible to imagine that the outcome cannot be remotely manipulated to produce the desired result so as to obviate direct intervention.

So. Don't think your vote really matters. It doesn't.

Besides, we've been given such dismal choices this time around. At least Obama had charm and grace. Neither of these two -- Clinton or Trump -- have either. Many have speculated that if Obama could run again, he'd be elected in a heartbeat over either of these two, and that's probably correct.

Can't say that Bernie has/had much charm or grace, either.

Of course, this has nothing to do with policy. It has everything to do with personality, and that's what our elections for president have been running on for practically ever. It's not about the policy. It's about the personalities on offer.

Those of us who try to keep things on a policy plane (heh) say that really, neither of the major candidates has anything to offer the Rabble besides more pain, suffering, and exploitation, and it appears from the signs and portents that one of them, Mrs. Clinton, is eager to get her war on, while the other, Mr. Trump, may wish to delay it for a bit, until the US itself is "cleansed." Yeek. Neither is really a palatable option in my view.

I will say that it was obvious to many of us during the 2000 election that Mr. Bush and his familiar Mr. Cheney were more than eager to gain the White House and get their war on. I remember online bets being taken over how long it would be before Bush-Cheney involved the US in a major armed conflict. I said "6 months," and of course lost because it actually took 9 months to get things started.
But that war started so long ago now, many young people who will be able to vote in the 2018 congressional elections (if they want to) can't remember a time when the US wasn't at war abroad and at home... It appears to be a permanent state of war -- which is what Bush-Cheney wanted apparently -- that the Rabble can do nothing about.

Trump wants to expand the imperial wars against Muslims, whereas Clinton seems to want to expand the Empire -- by any means necessary including nuclear confrontation -- to absorb/dismantle both Russia and China.

Whichever one succeeds in gaining the White House, they are both mad, and their warmongering policies are utter madness. But that's where our governing class is these days -- delusional, insane, dangerous, mad.

There is this notion that Clinton is somehow the consummate E-Ville of All Time, and Trump is not, but this is silly. They are both products of a corrupt and evil system, only one is slicker at it than the other, and one will be slightly sly-er at accomplishing the ends that system desires than the other. The system itself is evil, if you will, and it will only produce choices-candidates who fit the interests of the system. Don't fool yourself that one is uniquely evil and the other is not. They are parallel products of the same system. Both equally nasty.

So what do you do?

Clearly, the system is not self-correcting. If anything, it's getting worse. The option many have chosen is to withdraw and build a better -- but separate -- society that exists outside the parameters of government and rule.

That may be sufficient over the short term, but the long term looks pretty bleak. There is no escape from the vicissitudes of climate change, for example, and it looks from the evidence that the Empire will grind on like the Juggernaut it is, rolling over everything in its path in perpetuity. In other words, there's no permanent escape from the Juggernaut of Empire, either.

Stopping the Juggernaut will take some doing, and so far, nothing has proved effective against it. On the other hand, you never know what will be effective until you try it.

We are in such interesting times, no?

Summer Slaughter Season

Map of Europe, c. 1940. The Summer Slaughter Season was under way and wouldn't end for years to come...

[Note: I found the map above in my collection of maps and atlases a couple of weeks ago. The map is in a Rand-McNally Atlas that was published in 1936, but the interesting thing to me was that the owner of the Atlas had taken a pink colored pencil to it and shaded in the then-current conquests of Nazi Germany. They include Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway. Albania had been invaded and occupied by Italy in 1939, and it is included in the conquests. Also indicated as partially absorbed into the Fatherland are Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Finland... We know that the Axis wasn't by any means satisfied... Don't forget Spain and Portugal...]

The sharks are in the water. Have you noticed?

The Summer Slaughter Season is upon us, and the various conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere are in full swing. Bloodlust is catching.

Of course the slaughter in Gaza rivets the attention of many among us -- partly because it is so telegenic, what with the constant exploding shells, the running, screaming Arabs, holding the broken bodies that once were their children, and of course the breathless "terror" of the Israelis dashing to their shelters if by chance one of the Gazan "missiles" gets through the protective Iron Dome. (Actually, according to statistics I've seen, most get through. It's just that they land and explode -- or not -- where they have no effect.)

It's telegenic, too, because of the massive propaganda campaign Israelis undertake when they go to slaughter Arabs, a campaign that has only been matched recently by the coup-regime run by the Freaks in Kiev (h/t Saker) as they go to slaughter in the Donbass and along the Black Sea coast, committing atrocity after atrocity, but none as telegenic recently as the slaughter of Arabs in Gaza.

What became of this Ukrainian slaughter? It's still going on, with sieges under way, villages destroyed, hundreds then thousands of dead, millions made refugees. But the news is practically nil. The businesses that bring us the "news" are almost entirely focused on the slaughter in Gaza, for that's where the real action is.

Word has it that the ethnic cleansing an extermination campaign in Ukraine is perhaps going better than planned -- assuming it was planned, and I'm not sure it was -- partly because "Putin blinked" and refused in the end to send more than token assistance (if that) to his Russian/Russian speaking comrades in the Donbass and southeast. The rebels are on their own.

And so, recognizing that they cannot hold out indefinitely, and there's probably no profit in trying to do so, many residents, targets of the coup-regime run by the Freaks in Kiev, are leaving. By the tens of thousands.

Slaviansk fell to the Kiev coup-regime last week, and reports from there have practically ceased. We don't know how many executions there have been, in other words, but given previous indications, we can rest assured that the wet work is proceeding with all due diligence and speed. The armed rebel faction may have abandoned the city, but their collaborators are everywhere within it, no? And how does a bogus government like the Kiev coup-regime establish its authority over resistant areas and peoples? By killing rebels and their collaborators on a massive scale.

See the coup-regime in Cairo for a not-too-long past example.

The killing goes on in Syria unabated, and now the Syrian slaughter -- they say -- has spread to Iraq with the conquests of the ISIS Caliphate which has abolished the border between Syria and Iraq, and is -- they say -- intent on reestablishing the historic rule of the Caliph from Baghdad where once he held forth.

It's an interesting idea. No, really.

There was a time of relative peace and prosperity throughout Araby. It was much more recent than the Caliphate. It was during Ottoman times. Barely a century ago, within the historical memories of most of those in Arab lands today. Anglo-Euro-Americans have no memories of it, because in their histories, they created the Arab nations out of nothing at all; the Ottoman period barely registers.

The arrangements the Ottomans made among the various Arab peoples (and with the Jews too) seemed to work out fairly well all in all, limiting tribal conflict, resolving disputes, providing a reliable sense of security and safety throughout the region for peoples to do pretty much as they wished.

If that or something like it is what the ISIS Caliphate party is trying to re-establish, who am I to say "no?" Except, from reports, it's not. The Ottomans were progressives compared to the Caliphate. Or so we're told. The Caliphate would be going backwards a thousand years, and it would be terrible for the well-being of the people and the region. No, really.

 So we, or rather they, can't have that. Must be crushed. And so the anti-ISIS campaign is supposedly under way to re-take the various cities in Iraq that have fallen...

Deja-vu all over again.

We've done this before, haven't we? Wait, wait. We've been on this road so many times.

Fascism/Nazi-ism back in the day was a means of coordinating/uniting fractious Europe's elites and common herd to oppose the Dreaded Communists of the Soviet Union. A rightist form of populism, if you will, intended to do physical battle with the Soviet Bear, which it did with not a lot to show for it.

The Soviet Union dissolved on its own decades after the disaster of the Fascist/Nazi expansion period (with a nudge or two, to be sure).

But now we're in a political/ideological situation where it seems Our Betters believe that the Fascists and Nazis were too advanced, too progressive. Too organized.

Disruption and chaos are now the operative principles of global elites. Disruption in the Middle East and South Asia has been going on for many years, the idea apparently being to prevent any sort of comprehensive -- or even localized -- organization among the Arabs and to disrupt/dismantle any organization among the non-Arabs (such as Persians, Afghanis, and so forth).

Chaos and disruption serve the interests of the High and Mighty, but they cannot do so permanently. At least not historically. At some point, a new status quo has to settle in, but for some reason that is not allowed to happen in the Middle East and adjacent lands.

The current slaughter in Gaza is part of Israel's ongoing attempts to maintain chaos and disruption in its almost-conquered dependencies of Gaza and the West Bank. To what object is the question. How are Israeli interests served by such tactics?

But we can ask the same questions about Iraq or Syria or Libya or Ukraine or pretty much anywhere chaos and disruption -- and slaughter -- are the current ruling principles. How is anyone's interest served more than temporarily, indeed more than momentarily?

There have been more than a few suggestions that the ISIS advance in Iraq is a false flag engineered by the United States in order to disrupt/overthrow the corrupt regime of al-Maliki who was previously installed by the US. That would be par for the course given the way the Great Game has been played from the bunkers of the West for some time now, but there's no telling whether it's true -- or even relevant if it were true -- at this point.

The indications are that the Ukraine Thing was engineered by the US and EU over a long period, indeed over decades, and came to fruition by "accident" when Yanukovych said "no" to EU/IMF demands that would have caused domestic chaos and disruption in order meet them. Chaos and disruption ensued anyway.

Much the same can be said for Syria, Libya, and anywhere else the neo-imperial project is being implemented.

There is no escape apparently; there is no way to avoid the impositions and social/political/economic destruction that ensues.

Much the same was the case in Europe and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in prelude to the American entry into WWII.

While Americans were content to sit back and watch things spiral out of control in 1940 and '41-- at least until the attack on Pearl Harbor -- today, it appears the US Government, or a faction of it, is leading a global campaign of disruption and chaos.

We have become the enemy we once fought against...

The New Model Imperial

[Apropos of nothing in particular, I'm reminded that my sister and her husband drove older Imperials in the Fifties and early Sixites; they had two of them as I recall, a 1951 and a 1954. To me, they were very stodgy cars, too proper by half. But my first car was a Packard convertible, followed by a Buick Roadmaster and which was followed by a Cadillac Sedan de Ville. So I should talk...]

We're living in an era in which the Imperial Idea is reasserting itself with a vengeance. I've often commented that the course of warfighting in the Great and Glorious (Neverending) War on (Some) Terror(ism) initiated following the attacks of 9/11/2001 has closely followed the British Empire's march, and the targets were, until recently, mostly the failed projects of the British -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, the Yemen, even Egypt. They may still be failed Imperial projects, but they have been ripped to pieces and strictly punished for their temerity. Let that be a lesson to them.

Recently, the Imperial Idea has expanded, though, to encompass theaters of operations outside the former British sphere, starting with Libya (which was an Italian colony at one time) and moving on to Syria (French)  both of which experienced a descent into civil war and chaos , the Syrian matter still unresolved, and now, interestingly, expanding into (the) Ukraine (Russian). There are other sites where the New Imperial Idea is being fostered (Venezuela, Thailand, Bosnia, among them) but for now (the) Ukraine is the hot spot. (Note: "The" Ukraine is a Soviet slur according to some; the proper name of the country is simply "Ukraine" with no preceding article...)

There was some hoo-hah the other day over Mark Ames' article at Pando Daily that exposed Pierre Omidyar's funding of the opposition in (the) Ukraine, and his daring to question the integrity of the First Look Media staff, especially regarding their ability to do "adversarial" journalism when their boss and the owner of First Look is an active "co-investor" with the US government and other NGOs in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government and the installation of a more compliant one.

Oh, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that ensued! Oh, the focus on personalities and not the issue! The Twitter Wars! The tits-for-tats!

Yes, well, that's how it goes with today's media. It's really is all about personality, hardly about issues at all.

In the midst of the all the angst and ennui over the Pando article, there appeared a blogpost that's having a bit of play because it dares to focus on the issues of New Model Imperialism, and how the various regime changes and overthrows under way, particularly the one in (the) Ukraine, fit into the New Model Imperial Idea, and how -- perhaps -- Ames wasn't even conscious of what he was doing when he wrote the article in question. (Note: I'll write another post dealing specifically with that one.)

According to the author, Patrick Higgins, Ames inadvertently showed just how the New Model Imperial Idea is organized and implemented through the collaborative activities of NGOs (they are legion and extremely well funded by the US government and private agencies), private funders like Pierre Omidyar through their foundations, pre-existing and newly created in-country opposition groups, together with American government agencies -- openly and prominently by the USAID, covertly the CIA and others unnamed and probably unknown. It's a formula for regime change that typically doesn't require military intervention. It may lead to civil war, but that's an internal matter (viz: Syria), not something that requires sending in Marines and occupation forces to enforce order and the rule of predation as in the dreadful cases of Iraq and Afghanistan. The situation in Ukraine is a bit dicier because it treads on Russia's historic interest in holding or at least controlling territories on its western and southern borders, and the overt attempt to detach Ukraine from the Russian sphere isn't going over well in the Kremlin. Not a bit.

Higgins gets into the fact that oligarchs like Pierre quite naturally play a prominent role in the New Model Imperial Idea, not (by any means) a marginal one. They are integral to the process of regime change that is such a feature of New Model Imperialism. It's actually hard to imagine the process of regime change without oligarchic participation. Especially so in the case of Ukraine.

RT ran a story the other day that touched on the role Oligarchs as a class play in the Ukrainian developments, focusing on the role Ukrainian Oligarchs are playing, not even mentioning Pierre. Understanding that RT is strongly funded and influenced by the Kremlin, if the story is true -- there's no reason to doubt it at this point -- then parts of the Imperial pageant we're seeing play out in (the) Ukraine is being undertaken by Ukraine's own Oligarchs who apparently are being installed or installing themselves as Eastern District rulers and warlords -- fascinating. They are playing roles that seem to be in line with Kiev's new rulers, who in turn pledge fealty to Frau Merkel and her bankers, but how is one to know? These men are billionaires. They will do what billionaires do. They will look out for themselves, not "their people" -- of which there are none. If it means the Ukrainians and Russians are pink misted, so be it.

The newly-appointed Dnepropetrovsk governor is Igor Kolomoysky, Ukraine’s third-wealthiest man, with an estimated fortune of $2.4 billion. He co-owns the informal commercial group Privat, which includes Ukraine’s largest bank Privatbank, which Kolomoysky heads, as well as assets in the oil, ferroalloys and food industries, agriculture and transport

A former ally of Yulia Tymoshenko, Kolomoysky reportedly had a falling out with her and refused to finance her election campaign in 2010, which the ex-prime minister subsequently lost to Yanukovich. Kolomoysky was reported to be a principal sponsor of the UDAR party, which is one of the three fueling the street campaign to oust Yanukovich. Kolomoysky has a dual Ukrainian-Israeli citizenship and controls his business empire from Switzerland.

The new governor of Donetsk Region is Sergey Taruta, who is estimated to worth around $2 billion, putting him among the top-10 wealthiest people in Ukraine. He heads ISD, one of the biggest mining and smelting companies in the world, and also own Donetsk-based Metallurg Football Club.

I've noticed that people refuse to accept news, even if it is perfectly factual, if it comes from the "wrong" source, and these days, RT (like Iran's Press TV) is considered by many on the "left" (so-called) as a "wrong" source. Unless the news reported above appears in the New York Times, say, many will simply dismiss it as propaganda.

Well, yesterday, the Times did report it. They couched the appointment of Oligarchs to rule the potentially restive East Ukraine as perfectly natural, of course, who wouldn't do this, but it's clearly recognized as something... odd if "natural" and provocative nonetheless.

Russia has its Oligarchs too, and so does the USA. Pierre Omidyar is one of them.

I still don't know much about him, largely because he has such a low public profile, and stories about him and his enterprises are fairly rare. His apologists at First Look and the Honolulu Civil Beat are fiercely defensive. And why shouldn't they be? He pays their freight. It's only natural to protect and defend one's patron.

The stories I have seen about Pierre, though, suggest that he is both busy and quite slippery, engaging in more than a few large projects, both philanthropic and for profit, in which his participation barely breaks the surface of consciousness. He says he likes to slip in under the radar and slip away again. Even those who profess to know him probably don't. One of the things that comes out in the article linked, however, is that even if the public knows little about Pierre Omidyar, he is quite well known in Power circles, indeed is a major player therein. How many people know that Pierre was living in Honolulu at the same time as Snowden? How many people know of the Omidyar Network's connections with Booz Allen, Snowden's last NSA-contractor employer? Then there is the whole PayPal 14 Thing which has so angered many in the online civil disobedience community, and which prompted Alexa O'Brien to declare of Greenwald, "He fucking lied."

As principal shareholder and chairman of eBay, Omidyar controls eBay’s child company, PayPal. PayPal has recently made headlines for prosecuting the so-called “PayPal 14,” the hacktivists who staged a virtual ‘sit in’ in protest of PayPal’s decision to cut off Wikileaks’ funding by organizing a Denial of Service attack on PayPal’s website. PayPal was co-founded by Max Levchin, a dedicated NSA supporter.

More worrying still, Sal Gambianco, one of the principal investment partners with the Omidyar Network, actually sits on the board of advisors of Globant, a software company in which both the Omidyar Network and Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer, are major shareholders. Philip Odeen, one of the Booz Allen Hamilton board members, also sits on the Board of Directors of Globant. The Omidyar Network and Booz Allen Hamilton are also both major investors in Innocentive.

Omidyar Network, BTW, is the funder of the Ukrainian opposition organization -- which is actually an umbrella organization for more than 50 Ukrainian opposition groups -- which Ames discovered in his research prompted, he said, by Marcy Wheeler's tweets which cogitated over whether the regime change in Kiev constituted a "coup."  (The obfuscatory denials from Wheeler, Greenwald and Culligan that they were discussing something else notwithstanding.)

Paging through the list of member organizations of "New Citizen" (aka "Centre UA") is really kind of creepy, as many of the opposition organizations that cluster under the umbrella of "New Citizen" are National Endowment for Democracy (NED) clients as well, and a surprising number of them are essentially media propaganda outfits.

I think I mentioned how slickly produced the video feeds from the Maidan were. This was no amateur on the fly footage, it was highly professional and designed to inspire/inflame. Well, among the 58 "New Citizen" member organizations are 7 or 8 public relations/media organizations, actually there are more, but they are masked under a number of different labels, but among the ones easily identified are a couple of media professional trade unions.

The umbrella can actually provide any sort of "technical assistance" the members need or want. That's its function. ON mentions that "New Citizen" is an umbrella for "over 50" orgs, but that seems to have escaped most other notice. Each of these member orgs has funding of its own, of course, and one of them ("Center UA") is also the master org for "New Citizen." "New Citizen" you see is a "project" of "Center UA") Oh what a tangled web...

The fact that the Omidyar Network funded the umbrella organization for so many other organizations has been dismissed as unimportant, "minor funding" given the $5 billion or so that Victoria Nuland-Kagan boasted of spending over the last two decades in Ukraine.

In other words, the "investment" of $335,000 in "New Citizen" over two years by the Omidyar Network is barely a drop in the bucket [UPDATE: Omidyar Network issued a communiqué today which "clarified" its "investments" in "Center UA" -- not mentioning "New Citizen". According to the brief communiqué, ON has "invested" a total of $1.105 millon in "Center UA", $335,000 in 2011 and $770,000 in 2013, made to "amplify the voices of Ukrainian citizens" and "promote open and accountable government." The communiqué is somewhat at odds with other documents however.] compared to the $5 billion, Nuland claims the US has "invested in the development of democratic institutions and other goals" since Ukrainian independence over two decades ago. That works out to about $20million a year, not by any means a small sum, but what-- exactly -- it's been spent on, and how much has been spent during any given budget cycle remains to be investigated.

We don't know. These are not things our rulers think we should know, either.

Omidyar is by no means the most generous funder of the Ukrainian opposition, the United States government is, directly and through its myriad NGOs, but Omidyar's funding should be more than a little interesting to in light of events. Greenwald and Wheeler claim it is not, however, as the political activities of Mr. Omidyar -- who pays them -- are of no interest to them, nor is his involvement in overthrowing dictators abroad in concert with the interests of the US Government of any particular moment. Just business, I guess.

Such willful blindness is itself interesting for what it says about dedication to "adversarial journalism and transparency."


Of course, we are supposed to "wait" before we pass any judgement on these things. 6 months, say. OK?

No, the course has been set, and the destination is clear. We are being led into another round of an old Imperial contest that always -- ALWAYS -- harms ordinary people, and at some point, we the Rabble have to say, NO MORE.

We are being propagandized and manipulated to believe that (suddenly) Russia has been transformed into the Soviet Union and Putin has become the reincarnation of Stalin (or Hitler, depending.) Lies and fabrications are everywhere, and the risks to the Ukrainian people from all sides is horrendous.

I doubt what Pierre Omidyar has to do with it is any greater than what the native Ukrainian oligarchs have to do with it -- though I don't doubt his assistance is welcome. The people of Ukraine, however, are the losers. How badly they will lose remains to be seen, but they can gain nothing.

Stalin-Hitler!!!!®©@™

I'm just a bit too young to recall either Hitler or Stalin in the flesh -- Hilter, of course, didn't survive WWII ("they say"/s) and Stalin was dead before we got us a teevee at our house, so the only time I saw images of them was in the newsreels and the propaganda movies -- which were ubiquitous in those days.

I've written many times about American propaganda in the 1950s-- primarily anti-Communist/anti-Soviet -- but it's hard to imagine what it was like if you weren't there or don't recall living through it. People who have no memories of those days like to think we're living in the most oppressive and propagandized era of American history, and it's just not so. It's laughable, really. Practically every previous era in American history has been worse when it comes to matters of oppression, conformity and propaganda.

That's as may be, and it doesn't mean we are not living in a heavily propagandized, surveilled and controlled society. Of course we are. The point is that, as bad as it is, this isn't the worst of all possible worlds, and it isn't in part because we have so many informational tools -- and the freedom to use them -- which we didn't have in the 1950s and early 60s, and if we have any critical thinking skills at all (sometimes I wonder), we are far more likely to recognize propaganda as such now than we were able to then.

The question is whether we can think critically any more and whether we can ask the right questions when we question authority.

Since the advent of the horror show called The Great and Glorious War on Terror(ism), Americans have once again been immersed in propaganda which has involved some of the most egregious lies and deceptions we've been subjected to in generations, lies and deceptions leading directly to international catastrophe after catastrophe.

One of the recurring features of this propaganda campaign is the declaration that this or that dictator who must be removed is the modern equivalent of Hitler or Stalin, sometimes elided into a hybrid creature: "Hitler-Stalin" or "Stalin-Hitler" depending on whether the Evil One is more Nazi or more Communist.

Right now, the prime candidate to be the modern "Stalin-Hitler" is Vladimir Putin, "dictator" of Russia, aka the "Soviet Union." It's hilarious in some ways. I saw Ray McGovern defending Putin and Russia on DN! last night, but referring to the "Soviet Union" quite unconsciously as if it still existed. People of a certain age do this all the time. They cannot let go of what they were socialized and propagandized to believe in earlier times, and the notion that there is no Soviet Union any more doesn't compute. McGovern ran the Soviet Desk at the CIA under Bush the Old, and even though he didn't see the Soviets as enemies then and he doesn't see Putin as an enemy now, he's unable to let go of the "Soviet" images he was immersed in when time was.

Many anti-Putinists and anti-Russian commentators, especially on the so-called "left," seem more than eager to pretend that Putin is a reincarnation of Stalin who wants to re-constitute the Soviet Union entire or in stages, and his "invasion" of Ukraine is "only the first step." Well except for the others. Before this one. That is.

In fact, there was a fellow droning on and on about this very thing while McGovern was trying to figure out what's wrong with saying "Soviet Union." It was funny and sad at the same time.

As far as I'm concerned, Putin is not Stalin and he's certainly not Hitler. The comparisons and conflations are stupid. The Soviet Union no longer exists, it's gone, and there is no way I know of to reconstitute it, especially given the fact that a) Russia today is far more in sync with its Tsarist predecessor, and b) it is suffused with religious nonsense.

They hide Lenin's Tomb during parades in Red Square, as if the Communist era never happened. That seventy years has been largely erased from Russian history -- except when it is convenient to recall it, typically as something too horrible to believe. There is no going back to Stalin, let alone Lenin. The idea is absurd.

Instead, if anything is a revival in Russia, it is a semblance of the last phase of Tsarist rule, say from Alexander III through Nicolas II as if, somehow, WWI had never happened and the Revolutions that followed had not succeeded.

That's what I see in Russian culture and psychology today. It's imperial, yes, but not at all what our propaganda interests want us to believe it is. It's not Soviet, it's not Fascist. It's royal and imperial, something we haven't seen on the world stage since the collapse of the British Empire.

Why It Matters

Ultimately, this whole Snowden Thing may blow over like any other Summertime SharksInTheWater Story, but we don't know that yet.

This whole uproar seems to me to be a direct power play by one corporate faction to essentially seize the government on behalf of its own interests, and in the process ensure the willing submission of enough of the public to make it stick.

We've been living in a corporate state for quite a long time now, and the Obama administration has been, if anything, its more than willing servant. So much so, the outrage has been barely contained.

I have been aware that Greenwald is a factional corporate liberation player for almost as long as he's been active in the so-called Left Blogosphere. Not only has he vigorously defended corporate personhood and the Citizens United decision, he has been at constant pains to denigrate government power and authority while essentially never finding fault with corporate authority and power -- unless, that is, such corporate power and authority interferes with interests he supports.

While he was certainly a thorn in the side of the Bush Regime, he's pulled out all the stops in his vein popping hatred for Obama and his administration. But ultimately, no matter how much the issue gets personalized from time to time, the "enemy" is government, and the objective is to reduce it to complete submission to corporate interest and power. Or to destroy it.

When he's yelling loudest about "civil liberties" it's important to ask: "Liberty for whom to do what?" We might think we know, but I'd suggest we don't. The answer is important. And I doubt one would ever get a straightforward answer from Greenwald. I know I never did.

Corporate liberation means that corporate interests are liberated from onerous -- in many cases any -- government interference in their affairs at all. Corporations become free of any restraint or responsibility they don't choose for themselves. They cannot be compelled in any way -- apart from enforceable contracts they willingly enter into. To a Corporate Libertarian, corporations are intrinsically benign or even intrinsically good. They only do bad things when forced to do them by perfidious government.

To a Corporate Libertarian, government involvement or intrusion into corporate affairs is intolerable. To a Corporate Libertarian, the proper relationship between government and corporations is submission and service.

The People and the public interest don't factor into it at all though you may hear much cant and rhetoric about the People and the Public Good and whatnot from Corporate Libertarians. Most of it is marketing. It's mostly meaningless, for unless one is aligned with and subject to favored corporate interests .... fffft.

Some of the propaganda tactics being employed by Snowden/Greenwald partisans are strikingly Stalinist, though I doubt many people would recognize them. Their order that everyone exclusively focus on the NSA ignoring every other aspect of the story and domestic surveillance in general, the ridiculing and shouting down of any questioning of the story as received from Greenwald and the Guardian, constant denunciations of "government" and especially highly personal and often barely veiled racist denunciations of Obama, and preening/overweening righteousness are all factors which remind me of Stalinist propaganda tactics. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of it either. There has been an attempt -- that looks to have been partially successful -- to create a mindless mob to carry forward a hate campaign directed at "government" in general and Obama in particular.

Both Naomi Wolf and Sibel Edmonds (among others) have raised questions about aspects of the story and about those promoting it that trouble them, and they have both faced withering denunciations for daring to ask questions. Others who have expressed anything less than complete acceptance of the story as delivered by Greenwald and the Guardian have faced slurs, smears, and furious denunciations by Snowden/Greenwald partisans. It can't get much more Stalinist than that.

Meanwhile, domestic surveillance itself is basically been secured and solidified. The government has been somewhat more forthcoming about the surveillance, there has been some movement toward minor reforms of the legal foundations of the National Surveillance/Security State, and at least superficially, there appears to be no chance in holy hell that that domestic surveillance will be curtailed let alone ended...

Unless... actually there is a chance that surveillance will be modified if not completely suspended for some groups, such as favored corporate honchos, certain media interests, and some government agencies and interests.


That was the essence of the complaints and demands brought forward with the initial domestic surveillance "scandals" involving AP and FOX . Basically, they were demanding exemption from the surveillance everyone else was subject to because of the First Amendment. If the media is to be exempted (regardless of the Constitution) who else would be demanding their own exemptions? Shortly after the Snowden story broke, members of Congress demanded to be exempted (oh, and eventually were assured they were exempt!). No doubt the various corporate partners of the Surveillance State have defenses in place to prevent their information from being shared (though hackers are still able to defeat them) and I wouldn't be surprised if their contracts specify that the government cannot collect their data. How many others will demand and get exemptions? At what cost to the rest of us?

We've been devolving into an Empire in which your social class, who you are, who you know, and the alliances you have entered into become the most important aspects of your life and are the determinants of your future. It's an Empire in which you are a suspect until your status is established to the satisfaction of interested authorities. It is an Empire in which everyone who has not established their status to the satisfaction of parties they may not even be aware of are subject to invasive surveillance and continual exploitation throughout their lives, and there is literally nothing they can do about it.  It is an Empire endeavoring to ensure that no one subject to surveillance and exploitation wants to do anything about it.

We are very far down this path. Nothing Greenwald or Snowden has revealed has diverted our course.

I'm not sure at this point that anything will.

What then must we do?

Repost of "On Appeals to Orwell"

About three years ago, I did a series of posts under the title "On Appeals to Orwell," based in part on what I thought was a serious -- and likely deliberate -- misapprehension of Orwell's thoughts and politics among a cadre of Libertarians and their fellow travelers who had adopted him as One of Their Own. The triggering issue was what I saw as the misuse of the term "tribalism" to refer to "mindless loyalty" which was being justified by reference to Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" -- which never mentions tribalism, and in my view is not meant in any way to confuse tribalism with nationalism.

However, there is much more to Orwell and his perspectives as expressed in his writing, including his dismay at the march of totalitarian nationalism in his lifetime, including the many elements of it found in supposed western democracies. He was anti-imperial, anti-totalitarian, anti-surveillance, and anti-conformity. Yet he was, he said, politically a Democratic Socialist, far from the Libertarian Hero he's been made out to be.

He came to his highly negative views of totalitarianism and nationalism and their march throughout the western world, including Britain, from his grim personal experience in British Imperial Service in Burmah, and as a propagandist with the BBC during World War II, among many other experiences in his life.

I initially wrote this series of posts in response to what I saw as the misuse of his legacy as a means to promote ideas and an ideology that were quite contrary to his point of view. But looking over them again, I see they may have some utility again as we realize just how comprehensive the American -- and by extension, global -- surveillance state has become, something we might say Orwell was in on the ground floor of developing and implementing, and which he came to reject utterly.

So. Here are links to the series. Make of them what you will. I am quite fond of the early BBC kinescope of "1984" that is embedded in one of them!

On Appeals to Orwell, June 26, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore, June 28, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore II, June 28, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- UpSide Down, InSide Out, Round and Round, June 29, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- Attacking the Weak, Flattering the Strong and Evaluating Every Contact on the Basis of Advancement, June 30, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- The -Isms on the Home Stretch July 1, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- The Wrap Up and a New Day Dawning July 1, 2010

On Secession and Secessionists

This Modern Secession Movement might become intriguing as more and more entities decide to press for secession from one another.

I'm told that there are now secession movements in all fifty states. But within the states, particularly Texas -- which got the ball rolling, after all, with some of the more intemperate statements of its brain-addled governor quite some time ago -- there have arisen plenty of internal secession movements seeking to withdraw this or that city from the grip of the Other Secessionists. Well now. What have we here?

For some time, I've been writing that the Problem With America is that it is too big. It's a Domestic  Imperial State where one really ought not to be. It's an anachronism built from the detritus of the British Empire, which itself was a criminal enterprise leading to untold suffering and misery around the world. Basically, as brilliant as many of the Founding Fathers were, their underlying premise was that they could do this Continental Imperial Project better than the British, and they wanted the power and authority to engage in it without interference from London. They were prepared to take that power from London and did so.

Their Original Sins, of course, were slavery and genocide, both necessary for the Imperial Project to succeed. The political efforts to curb the excesses of these sins led to the Civil War and a temporary break up of the Union to discover whether the future of America would be corporate-Imperial or plantation/mercantile-imperial. The corporate side won.

And here we are.

Of course it's not that simple, not at all, but the outline is strong, and the problem continues to be the fact that the country is a domestic Empire that's just too damn big. The solution is to break it up.

Ah. I can already hear the screams of Imperialists: "Balkanization!" Yes, well.

The United States is really an uncomfortable amalgam of a number of culture and geographic areas into an unwieldy and nigh on ungovernable mish-mash of a nation served by an ever more remote and disconnected national government and a descending series of ever more impoverished state and local governments.

Given my druthers, the rest of the country should secede from the Old South rather than the other way around, since the South really runs this pop stand and isn't about to let go of it any time soon. So, drop kick them. I'd go farther, though, and abolish the states as well, since they are all artificial creations with no natural existence either culturally or geographically at all.

Instead, what's now the United States should be divided into affinity/geographic regions, perhaps ten of them outside the Old South. Each independent. For a time I thought that there was some merit in preserving the national existence, but now I'm not so sure.

The idea of domestic empire has become an anachronism in any case.

It's time to ponder something else again.

A real secession movement would be founded outside the South and would have as its objective freeing the People from the illiberality of the Old South. Real secessionists would want to see the chains of the Old Southern mindset broken, and our governments liberated from control by Old Southern politicians and their cruelties.

I like the idea of turning the Modern Secession Movement inside out this way.

Heh.

Is This The End of Empire?

I've said many, many times that the period we're in is not the End of Empire, it is the much closer to the beginning of a Neo-Imperialist Era. It was inevitable given the Neo-Con and Neo-Lib triumph over the Boogey-Man of "Socialism."

Now we're hearing lots and lots of chatter in the system about an accelerated withdrawal from the Afghanistan clusterfuck, thanks in large measure to the Latest Massacre, and there is an almost overwhelming inevitability factor to all the Pull Out Now! yakkity-yak. This is more propaganda, make no mistake. The Busheviks didn't pioneer the tactic, but they certainly made their own, and it worked for them through their whole dismal reign. The Obamanauts are no slouches when it comes to using "inevitability" tactics, either (they did it to Hillary masterfully, for example.)

There is considerable push back on the Pull Out Now! faction, however. Today's Propaganda installment from the WaPo seems to be saying what I suggested in a comment yesterday: since the Natives aren't too restless over this little "accident," it will all blow over, no harm, no foul. The Occupation and Plunder will continue unchanged. Killing and plundering the Natives is all in a day's Imperial Work. Burning of Holy Writ, however, is a capital offense according to Native standards, and in the future, our Warriors will want to watch that shit.

What we are probably witnessing is the outward appearance of an internal squabble between gung-ho Warriors in the Pentagon and Pragmatists in the White House. The Warriors never seem to want to leave the Battle Space (which has metastasized to include Everywhere Around the World) within which to kill and destroy at pleasure. The Warriors seem to have no other mentality at all. On the other hand, the Pragmatists say, 1) it's too costly to keep troops on the ground overseas in large numbers; 2) it's not necessary to do so in order to maintain hegemony; 3) the Warriors fuck up too much to ensure the efficient exploitation of colonial outposts.

On an elemental emotional level, it's likely that what drove this Massacre -- among so many massacres -- was vengeance, pure, stark, blood soaked revenge. The Natives took it upon their foolish selves to protest the "accidental" burning of the Korans; some of the more uppity of them took it upon themselves to kill a number of American troops and officers in (apparent) retaliation for this "accident." Several dozen of the riotous Afghans were shot during protests, but the troop and officer killings were not avenged -- the way any such action by colonial populations must be. It is the way Empires work and have worked from the first. Imperial Overlords cannot allow the Natives to recognize that they do have considerable power over their captors and exploiters. Any sign of Native threat to Imperial power must be put down swiftly and brutally, and any deadly act of Native resistance must be avenged, with blood and fire. This did not look like the act of a madman gone berserk. It had all the earmarks of a punitive raid.

Back in the day, Imperial forces were generally up front about what was going on, why they were punishing resistance, and the necessity of "Teaching those Wogs a Lesson." It didn't matter a whit if innocents were slaughtered in their beds. Better it should be so. That's how Empire is done. There are so many Natives and so few Imperial forces. The only way to keep the Wogs in their Place is to come down on them with immense cruelty and suffering every time they get out of line. It's the only way. Do it enough, and the Wogs learn their Place and stay in it.

I remember during the earlier years of the Iraq Occupation, horrible things were happening to innocent Iraqis all the time. There were numerous incidents of Iraqis being shot to pieces at checkpoints for not being sufficiently ...something. It was never really clear why all these hundreds of Iraqis were being shot at checkpoints -- except that the troops at the checkpoints were scared of them, and they could shoot them with impunity as long as they said they were "scared." The military justification was that the Wogs needed to learn to follow commands at these checkpoints, and if enough of them were killed for not doing so, they'd get the idea.

Something that happened all too often was that military convoys would charge through traffic jams (which were frequent because of all the checkpoints) by literally crashing into and driving over occupied vehicles caught in the jam, killing and injuring who knows how many people inside the vehicles. Iraqis were horrified at this consistent behavior of their occupiers -- the Turks and the British were never this cruel. Of course, the indifference of the Imperial American Occupiers was routine.

Sometimes when a convoy encountered traffic, they'd just start shooting. They've done it in Afghanistan as well. No doubt thousands of innocents have been killed through these actions.

But that's how Empires work. There is no interest in or concern for the well being of the subject peoples. At all.

In our latest forays, there is hardly any recognition that they are "people" -- they're barely considered to be objects.

Withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan is likely to occur sooner rather than later, simply because it's not worth the aggravation to keep them there. Killing and exploitation can be done by remote control and through surrogates these days.

It will not be a withdrawal like the one from Vietnam. Afghanistan will not be abandoned, any more than Iraq has been abandoned. No, it will be operated as a colonial outpost from the blast-wall-surrounded "diplomatic" facilities in Kabul, much as the British did after they "withdrew" from Afghanistan back in the day, and the killing and exploitation will continue with somewhat less annoyance from and by the Warriors.

Some of the push back on the Pull Out Now! meme is Pentagon Panic. The relevance of a massive Imperial military force is under siege.

We live in interesting times, but it is not the End of Empire.

History for Beginners

After the heady, arguably Revolutionary events of last January, this year's opening month and its absurdist and obsessive media spectacle of the Republican Campaign Clown Car, one cannot be blamed if one longs for... something better. Change the channel, mKay? This is boresome.

Well, I have not watched a single "debate" (they are not debates, they have not been debates for years, for generations, why are they calling them "debates" when they are nothing but sales pitches? I ask you.) in the Republican campaign, and I doubt I will even watch the Incumbent trade sound bites with the Challenger (whomever it may be -- even Romney who now has to overcome so many obstacles -- in the end). It's become a Gong Show with aspects of Survivor thrown in to make it seem up to date.

Entertainment for the masses and revenues (Oh, boy! Big Fucking Revenues!http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif) for the Entertainment conglomerates. Talk about revenue sharing and wealth transfers! Yeek!

I did watch Arcade Fire on Austin City Limitsthough. Anyone who was following the Wisconsin Uprising and Occupation last winter is aware of Arcade Fire because of the video below, even if, like me, they didn't know of them beforehand:

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Arcade Fire's "Revolution (Lies)" was hailed at the time as "the soundtrack of a Revolution."

Little did we know then that Wisconsin actually was the spark that would ignite revolutionary fervor throughout the land. Our friends in Egypt knew, though.

They knew that what they had done just days and weeks before and what their colleagues in Tunisia had done and what was igniting in Europe was unstoppable. Once the spark is lit... there you are. It's under way. Hold on, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

And so it has been. Thus the media focus on the Clown Car of the Perpetual Political Campaign is more than a little, erm, stupid. And maybe that's for the best. Our friends at dKos have been absolutely obsessed with Republicans and their maunderings and maneuverings to capture the Throne for months and months, so much so, there has been practically no acknowledgement that there even are "Democrats" in Washington DC and statehouses any more. Whether the honchos over there realize it or not, their almost exclusive focus on Republicans functions as one of those subliminal messages that we all used to understand the media was filling our little heads with: Republicans are the only politicians that matter, the only political party that matters, focus exclusively on the Republicans, no matter how clownish they may be, they are your Rulers and your Buddies... over and over again, repeated endlessly, a mantra, a trance-inducing formula. To my eye, intentional. Let us not forget, Markos, like many other luminaries in the internet's so-called "progressive" political field, is an ex-Republican who converted as it were.

He, like so many others who want to sit at the Big Table and be a Playah in the Palace, has never been much of a liberal/leftist/progressive in any recognizable political sense of those terms. I've said that he, like many others on the lefter side of the internet political dial, is essentially a libertarian entrepreneur. That's not quite the same thing as the "hard left partisan" that he and others have been accused of being.

But then, libertarians have long been angling to capture the leftish mantle. And who's to blame them? The Dems gave it up a long time ago. In fact, I would argue that the Dems have never been a leftist party at all, they are a conservative political party. They are the oldest political party in the country, and they take that status very seriously. They see themselves as the Responsible Party conserving what is best in American culture, society, and politics, in opposition to various radical reactionary parties (like the Republicans) who have arisen from time to time, while simultaneously standing in opposition to the "mob", the vox populi, We the People, whose ravenings and outcries must be kept suppressed at all times and by any means necessary.

Sometimes that means throwing bones to the masses, but for some time now, neither major political party has been the least bit inclined to throw bones (sometimes not even rhetorical ones) to their bases.

Hm. How did that happen? This is not normal American politics.

From what little I can figure out from my experience on the inside of the Federal government "what happened" was Waco and then Oklahoma City. And then the Clinton impeachment, the Bush seizure of the White House and the collapse of Congressional authority, followed in quick succession by the 9/11 attack and the wars of revenge and imperial aggression that followed upon that singular event. Thence the rigorous institutionalization of the National Security State and the New Model Mercenary Militarist that bids to rule the world -- on behalf, it would seem, of a rather small but very powerful cohort of global corporatists. The "People"? Pshaw. What of them?

What I witnessed was the government barricading itself against the People.

From the inside, these events were all of a piece, almost seamless; they altered government's relationship with the People, and they fundamentally altered politics in ways that I don't think more than a few people have fully come to recognize.

Politics has always been a spectacle and a show, that's it's nature. But now it is one that is completely meaningless at the federal level. Once in office, elected representatives do not serve you and me, they can't or they wouldn't be there, not for long anyway. They serve a ruling class, one that is rather more shadowy than we may think. This is not to go all CT, but the people who are actually pulling the strings in the DC Palaces, and more and more in the provinces as well, are people we've probably never heard of; at the top there is no separation between these people and their interests and the government. It's all the same.

We the People are simply irrelevant at that level. We exist to the extent we can be manipulated when need be to follow the commands and desires of a ruling elite. But as we've seen, there are "too many" of us, by many millions. Way too many. Must cull the herd one way or another. It seems that the preferred method is relatively simple: dismissal from society and neglect.

Though I have long railed about it, there is still very little general recognition of what has happened and is happening to tens of millions of Americans who have been jettisoned, not just from the so-called middle class but from any class at all. They've become essentially non-people, by the tens of millions. They have no jobs and they cannot get jobs because there aren't any openings and there won't ever be again. They have no homes because their homes have been seized and will be given to others at pennies on the dollar. There are few and diminishing social services available to them -- or anyone for that matter -- and so American poverty rates are skyrocketing, hunger stalks the land, people are suffering quite openly, and some are dying. Very little is done by our policy-makers to alleviate this suffering, because it's standard policy not to. And in America, it has always been standard policy to blame the victim.

But things are different this time. The cruelty that policy-makers are exhibiting is remarkable, for one thing. Nothing quite like this has been seen and known in this country for decades, not since the Hoover era, and even then, policy-makers were more circumspect about their contempt for the common herd. The current social/political/economic situation is being used by policy-makers as an opportunity -- yet another in a long string of them -- to take away customary rights, benefits, and privileges that Americans thought were guaranteed by contract or the Constitution.

Benefits are being cut, or they are not available at all. Access to basic services like health care and education is being denied. Rights that workers earned long ago are being withdrawn. Pension obligations are being refused. Contracts are abrogated. Homes are seized and sold to others for a tiny percentage of what had been demanded from the debtor. On and on.

This American model of cruelty is like something out of a 19th Century novel -- a nightmare of despair that we thought we overcame... but it turns out our policy makers never got the message.

I trace it back to Waco, one of the cruelest -- and most spectacular -- domestic policing actions our federal government has ever engaged in. Once under way, it seemed impossible to stop. Why that should be is still a matter of controversy, but the upshot was almost too horrible to contemplate, not just the miserable deaths of scores of innocents in the holocaust of Branch Davidian compound, but in the armed rebellion that commenced soon thereafter.

In fact, according to reports, the action at the Branch Davidian compound was intended to thwart armed rebellion by certain shadowy crypto-religious forces that were arming and aligning with one another in preparation for the coming Apocalypse (or something of the sort). The Davidians were among the many armed Apocalyptic Believers who were being tracked at the time, and the action itself was planned -- if you want to call what the incompetents in charge were doing "planning" -- during the latter days of the Bush (Senior) administration, apparently without the knowledge of headquarters. The action itself was put in motion under the authority of the Clinton Justice Department. The point of it was to neutralize this particular armed camp and to intimidate anyone else who might be contemplating armed insurrection in preparation for the Return of the Lord.

It didn't go well.

This all happened at a time when the domestic security state apparatus was relatively primitive though quite extensive, built as it was on a Drug War platform. That's a whole other topic in itself.

Waco was a catastrophic failure. And I cannot imagine we would be in such a horrible mess now if it weren't for that catastrophe. There are plenty of people who would disagree with my assessment, who would see the origins of our current pickle elsewhere. There is no single source, of course. But Waco was the catalyst for what was to come.

After the shock wore off, the response to the slaughter at Waco was an intensification not a diminution of the armed insurrectionist movements around the country, exactly the opposite of the intent of action itself.

This culminated in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. While directly related to Waco, that reaction seemed to come from an even deeper animosity against The Government due to what McVeigh witnessed and participated in during the First Gulf War. As awful as the slaughter in Waco was, it had eerie echoes of Iraq where hundreds of mostly women and children were burnt alive in a shelter in Baghdad, where surrendered prisoners were machine gunned down in the field because they were inconvenient, and where McVeigh himself was ordered to bury hundreds of Iraqi soldiers alive. On their retreat from Kuwait, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops -- conscripts almost all -- were ruthlessly slaughtered from above in an action that had no modern precedent.

The First Gulf War has been largely forgotten thanks to subsequent events in the region but at the time it was seen as one of the most barbaric campaigns the United States had ever conducted, of such surpassing brutality and cruelty that it was practically unimaginable.

The sight of Schwartzkopf, Cheney, Powell, et al, lying on teevee and celebrating this disgusting slaughter still turns my stomach, and I know people who were involved in it who were emotionally shattered by what they did or what they witnessed, and who were physically sickened as well and still suffer from complications.

Hundreds of thousands of American troops paid a heavy price for the momentary glory of the warrior-policy-makers who just kept right on strutting and puffing out their chests while the rest of us languished.

Here we are, two decades on, and the cruelty on display overseas that thence was made manifest domestically has borne extraordinarily foul fruit given the global economic collapse and further overseas war-making that has made it so gosh-darn hard to fund even the basic domestic social services Americans have already paid for like Social Security and Medicare and so forth.

The question, as always, is what do we do about it?

We see that the political/electoral system does not work on behalf of the People, and under the current circumstances, it cannot. The government itself is absent, barricaded away from you and me, and We the People do not have access to it. We are subjects -- when we are considered at all which is ever less often. The rituals of politics and elections still continue, of course, as they did in Rome for hundreds of years after the Republic was extinguished. Roman elections were part of panem et circenses that kept the lower orders entertained while their betters got on with the important matters of state and empire that simply didn't involve the plebeians -- except to the extent they could be a revenue source and be manipulated.

When there were too many, the herd was culled. When they rebelled...

The situation now, however, is far more complex -- and yet in some ways, simpler -- than historical parallels. We are facing a global onslaught against the People and the Earth by what is really a tiny fragment of hyper-wealthy and powerful individuals who are competing against one another to be King of the World. We largely don't know who these people are; even if we know some of their names, we have little or no idea what their political/social/moral points of view are, and those few we do know something of are so surpassingly benighted and cruel it's almost unimaginable.

The People rising up against this fragment of quasi-humanity should have overwhelmed them long ago, but it hasn't happened, not even close. Oh no, the struggle has barely begun.

Wither?

Yesterday, I posted a few movies, one of which was Frank Lopez's "END:CIV," which I think I've posted before. It's one of those "earth is dying/we are dying" manifesto movies you see from time to time. Typically, I don't much care for doomer-gloomer stuff, and I stay away from it on principle, but this is Frank Lopez, AKA, "The Stimulator" on Submedia.tv, who I became interested in when Global Revolution would run his "End of the World (As We Know It) and I feel fine" anarchist shit during the frequent outages of the Occupy Wall Street live feeds. I'm becoming more and more fond of him and his ideas and his work. "The Stimulator" is linked at right. Below is a link to a Q and A in Troy, NY, last April after a screening of "END:CIV". It gets pretty intense as some of the audience takes him to task over his views of non-violence, Gandhi, King, et al, and I think it is worth listening to the exchanges. As he says, we don't have a lot of time, and unless we have an honest and open discussion about tactics, we aren't going to get anywhere...

Q&A with activist media maker Frank Lopez

We may still be at the Beginning of the Beginning, but there is a lot of history behind it.

Lot of history....

Redemption and The Obama Problem

A big part of the initial enthusiasm for the candidacy of Barack Obama was due to the potential for Redemption that he represented. After 8 years of the monstrousness of Bush and Cheney and all their minions and lackeys in the White House and 8 years before that of sunny but compromised... erm... "vulgarity" of the Clinton White House (blow jobs on the job being so vulgar, dontchaknow), the need for the Redemption of the American government, indeed, the Redemption of America, was clear to anyone with eyes to see and brain to think.

And here was such a nice, well-spoken black man standing for the Presidency who wasn't out there blaming everybody and casting aspersions for his suffering and all. He merely pointed out that there was a Better Way Forward, that the Nation could heal and come together after a period of great difficulty. And he was the one to make it so.

There could hardly BE a more redemptive character given our history. And look at that smile and those big, floppy ears. Who could resist? Certainly, he was better and in better mental health than that crabby old grandpa and his harpie-like pseudo-sidekick. Boy howdy.

Besides, the economy had just gone into a tailspin, and the Busheviks in office, and the R side of the aisle in general, seemed indifferent to anything but the well-being of the top of the economic pyramid.

And so Obama was elected with enormous enthusiasm and Hope. Finally, our (real) long national nightmare would be over. Hurrah!

Well. It didn't work out so well.

The Redemption took place, to be sure, but it had nothing at all to do with America or the People; it had and has to do with the Highest of the Mighty who are doing better now than ever, and who are now more insulated and protected against the roaring of the mob than they have ever been. In Obama, whose election they funded with massive donations, they got someone who could not only do their bidding with bells on, they got someone who was almost magically able to manage the masses to go along with it. Though we were all told at the time his was a people-funded campaign, small-fry donations from the millions upon millions, it turns out that the banks and Wall Street were actually Obama's major donors, and soon enough, the People realized their small-fry contributions didn't mean a thing...

As I've pointed out many times, Candidate Obama was being auditioned for the role over a period of two years or more, his primary task being keeping the Rabble in line, and he passed with flying colors, something Gramps and Herself never came close to doing; they couldn't have pacified a mob if they tried. Obama did it with ease and a certain sort of grace that is still astonishing. He can spout perfect nonsense and the People will still respond as if they had been spoken to by God.

Throughout his tenancy in the White House, Mr. Obama has primarily served the interests of finance, the banks, and the rich. If the social service programs put forth in the (FD) Roosevelt and Johnson administrations had not existed, he would not have proposed them. From the outset, the Obama economic policy has been as close to Hooverism as it is possible for an American President to get at this time. Hoover's Redemption isn't complete, but it is getting closer thanks to Obama's adoption of his economic policies.

To this day, no matter how bad the unemployment situation is, Obama has not proposed a real jobs program for Americans; he won't even consider it. Nixon was on top of that problem when it came up during his administration. Not Obama. Nope. All he can come up with is the ditch metaphor, that it took a long time to get into this ditch and it will take a long time to get out of it.

Regardless of the falseness of the metaphor -- the crash was pretty damn fast to those who suffered, and the rich were rescued right away -- the fact is, the Rs have been making headway with the electorate by "talking about" jobs and job programs (of course they have no more intention of doing anything about it than Obama does). The fact that the Obama Administration has been stunningly indifferent to the plight of the unemployed should be the most serious mark against it, far and away more important to most people than the esoterica of "civil liberties," and even warmongering, but the Rs have proposed absolutely nothing of their own to do anything about it, so it's a wash.

In other words, nobody running for office intends to do a damn thing about the absence of employment for a large swath of the population. Not a damned thing.

The Rs will merely talk about it and do nothing; the Ds and Obama will wring their hands and do nothing.

Poverty is being imposed on millions upon millions more Americans year over year, and the Powers That Be like it like that. So that's the way it will be.

As of early this year, half of Americans were impoverished or officially "low income." This is why the R charge that "half of Americans don't pay income taxes!!" is so absurd. Yes? And? They're too fucking poor to pay income taxes, and they are getting poorer. "Lucky-duckies" indeed.

The impoverishment of the American People is not a matter of accidental Fate, it is a matter of policy from Washington. That policy is carried out by Obama with slightly less denunciation and demonization of those impoverished than it would be under an R administration. Optics!

The wars are winding down under the Obama reign, but they would have under Gramps as well. We can't "afford" them, you see, and there is no longer any value for the money spent, so... liquidate them.

Initially, the wars were a means of transferring boatloads of cash to favored friends of the Bush Regime, and for exterminating varied foe in dramatic fashion. The wars were spectacle for the masses, Big Money for friends. But then they got ugly.

And titanically expensive all around financed by borrowing from China, oops. Well, China's leaders are nobody's fools, and keeping the Americans Occupied as it were, occupying foreign lands, was a convenience for the Chinese and others who were able under the circumstances to foster their own societies and economic growth without the interference of Americans and their high-handed ways. They were busy elsewhere. The cost of keeping them at bay was worth it. But China is now balking at further payments along these lines.

As the funding for wars dries up, the wars themselves must be jettisoned, but many of the trappings of the wars have now been codified and institutionalized, trappings like the murder squads ("special forces"), the mercenaries, the drones, the camps for terror suspects, the torture policies, the ever greater limitations on civil liberties, the ever-expanding national security state and so on.

All of these trappings and more are now, it seems, permanent features of American law, lore, and practice. They were largely institutionalized under Obama.

Oh, well, Ron Paul has been talking about how bad they are, so that's good.

The fact is, there is no movement to upend most of what has been put in place as a consequence of the wars. Think back: much the same situation obtained after WWI and WWII as well. Many of the policies put in place as a consequence of those wars have stuck with us. They are useful to government and they perpetuate themselves because they are so useful.

I'll go so far as to suggest that it is the bloated military and the metastasized National Security State that are now the primary domestic economic engines. The war economy continued without let up -- it kept growing -- after WWII, the reason being that the war economy was seen as the primary means of staying out of another Depression. It worked after a fashion.

But here we are in another Depression anyway. In some sectors, that's blamed on the "Peace Dividend" in consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union; without a major foe, there was no rationale for the continued bloated military budget, thus... well, it's complicated.

This time, though, the bloated military and security budgets don't seem to be having any positive effect on the economic situation of most Americans. In fact, things have been getting worse. More ominously, practically every politician, including Obama, is endlessly yabbering about cutting budgets for such things as Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and any other kind of human assistance they can think of.

In other words, reducing further what little social services and income support most Americans have already paid for in order, it seems, to keep the wealthy as secure and comfortable as possible, and to keep the war machine and security state in tune forever.

Nothing else seems to matter to Our Rulers, nothing else at all.

And so the People rise, somewhat chaotically and ineffectively for the moment, but rise they do.

Redemption under Obama having failed, the Rs seek to put up a Gazillionaire with Issues as their nominee for the Throne. That will solve the problem! Right. Great plan. He could pull it off, of course, but at this point he is so close to implosion, it's hard to imagine just how he'd do it. It's early yet.

The pundits keep speculating that Romney's religion will keep him from being elected (Mormonism to me is more like a business with social service and secret society aspects rather than a religion), but this is pretty much the same narrative as was used by pundits to discuss the difficulty of electing JFK or Obama himself; some social "flaw" in other words, be it Catholicism or Mormonism or Colored-ism, interferes with the path to glory, and overcoming it is the test the candidate must pass.

What will hamstring Romney is his general snottiness. There would be no Redemption through him in any case. Back when Romney was endowed at the Temple, he took a vow to revenge the martyrdom of Prophet Joseph Smith in 1844. This is not quite the same as Redemption...

Obama, under the circumstances, has a much easier road than he otherwise would. He may be closer to re-confirmation on the Throne than anyone now realizes.

That means, if so, that Redemption, which this nation still so badly needs, is delayed yet again.

Psalm 94

3How long, O LORD?
How long will the wicked be allowed to gloat?
4Hear their arrogance!
How these evildoers boast!
5They oppress your people, LORD,
hurting those you love.