Volatility

June 14, 2018

Yemen Genocide and US Desires for World War

Filed under: Afghanistan, Dance of Death, Disaster Capitalism, Global War On Terror, Mainstream Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Russ @ 8:52 am

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What “Feed the World” really means for Western system types, including of course all pro-GMO/pesticide activists.

 
 
The US proxy war in Yemen, launched by Obama and continued by Trump, is entering the forced famine stage. US clients, the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, will attempt to starve the Yemeni people into submission. The UN has warned that as many as 18 million people may die.
 
The US government, both halves of the Corporate One-Party (Republicans and Democrats) and their partisans, and the mainstream media led by the New York Times which speaks to and for the US political class as a whole, are all willing, gleeful perpetrators of this unfathomable crime. If this forced famine escalates, it will be the worst war crime in history. And the entire US political class will swim in this infinite blood. Which in turn is an added new surge amid the torrents of blood they already cause to flow.
 
 
US liberals are reveling in this imminent genocide. They can take it as consolation after their profuse laments about the (temporarily) diminishing prospect for WWIII breaking out in Korea. No one ever has been so eager for nuclear war as today’s Dembots. Their actions since they blew the 2016 election have proven this. Evidently they’re in such existential despair they’d rather see everyone on Earth dead.
 
(I hope they do give Trump the Nobel Prize. It would be no more perverse than arch war criminal Obama getting it, and watching the apoplexy of the Dembot scum will be very amusing.)
 
 
Meanwhile there might still be a few people out there who are sincerely confused about any of this, who might naively believe that North Korea or Iran or Russia or “terrorists” or (fill in the blank) represent some kind of threat to the American people. For them I’ll say, the solution is simple: Get Out. Go Home. Get your imperial presence out of Korea and Asia, out of the Mideast, out of Afghanistan, out of eastern Europe, out of Africa, out.
 
The US is the pure aggressor everywhere on Earth and has zero legitimate basis for a presence anywhere outside North America. Only imperial globalization ideology claims otherwise.
 
Get Out. Go Home. Dismantle the empire as fast as possible, even chaotically. Get out.
 
That’ll require also ridding ourselves domestically of neocons like anyone who sees North Korea as a “threat” simply because the North’s policy is based on self-defense. Same for Russia, Iran, Islamists, etc.
 
Most of all it means the Democrat Party and its partisans must cease to exist, as soon as possible. This is true for every crisis afflicting America and humanity, but Democrat/liberal war-mongering is one of the main reasons humanity and the Earth cannot co-exist with them.
 
At this moment this is proving true most of all for the starving people of Yemen, victims of US imperialism’s drive for world domination, their agony fully endorsed by the same who are condemning a Korean declaration which offers to lessen the odds of WWIII. Because US system types, and liberal Democrats most of all, want nuclear war. Their actions prove it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

January 3, 2018

The US Voter Says to Earth, Happy New Year

Filed under: Dance of Death, Globalization, Tower of Babel — Tags: , , , , , , — Russ @ 5:00 am

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Donald Trump says to North Korea, “my button is bigger than yours”. This is just the latest and most extreme example of how Trump is nothing more or less than the logical consummation of the last fifty years of US government policy and US electoralism. I’d call him the most typical US president of all. Starting where you wish, let’s say Jimmy Carter, name a single president for whom a US-provoked nuclear standoff, and likely nuclear war, wasn’t portended by the entire thrust of his foreign and especially economic policy (corporate globalization, i.e. flat-out aggressive war by economic means). The Clintons and Obama never once said anything other than my button, my bombs, my guns, my dollars, are bigger than yours.
 
As I wrote before, all US voters voted for Trump. And today there’s consensus among all Republicans and Democrats that they want nuclear war. The only difference is whether they want it with North Korea or Russia or both. But they all want nuclear war. They lust for it. They lust for the total death of all that’s human and earthly. That, to say again, is the logic implicit in the entire thrust of all they’ve sought for decades now with their votes and with every other political action. Today the entire thrust of the US electoral system, which votes unanimously every election for total global war, is reaching its logical consummation.
 
Humanity, if it survives this crisis, must never forget this and never forgive it.
 
If there are any fellow mammals out there, better find cover, preferably in groups, while the dinosaurs cheer on the asteroid they’ve long prayed for.
 
 
 
 
 

October 17, 2017

Two Favorite Quotes

Filed under: American Revolution, Civil Liberties, Climate Crisis, Disaster Capitalism, Freedom, Globalization, Mainstream Media, Scientism/Technocracy — Tags: , , , — Russ @ 9:18 am

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AKA, “No, you follow me.”

 
 
I measure “favorite” here by how often the quote comes to mind and I smile ruefully and say “that’s true.”

 
 
1.The all-time champion remains a line I read in some political column or essay many years ago. I can’t recall the writer, outlet, or what he was writing about, but this line has stayed with me, constantly coming to mind:
 
“America is not permissive, it’s just promiscuous.”
 
That sums up perfectly the average American and all US institutions: Grossly self-indulgent where it comes to their own whims and crimes (often including violence), indulgent toward the whims and crimes of others they approve of, puritanical and censorious toward anything they don’t like, and in principle dismissive of such values as tolerance, minding your own business, live and let live, living in peace, even as they scream like stuck pigs the moment anyone impinges upon their sense of entitlement to all these things.
 
2. The challenger is a line from Freud’s essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide”. In contradistinction to the often profound political and religious philosophizing of his fiction, when Dostoevsky moonlighted as a regular political columnist he regressed to run-of-the-mill right wing fulmination. In dismissing Dostoevsky’s political position Freud calls it “a position which lesser minds have reached with smaller effort” (p. 177 in this scan).
 
How often I recall this, when I see all the hyper-educated “experts” and “intellectuals”, all pompously proclaiming their participation in this or that millennial intellectual paradigm, whether it be scientism, technocracy, neoliberalism, establishment versions of environmentalism and other causes, and yet their social and political vision invariably boils down to the same flat-earth worship of the system of money, “jobs”, temporal power, including regurgitating the same lies any half-assed mainstream media columnist is paid to spew. I assume as an axiom that 99.9% of Mensa members have utterly mainstream, mediocre political opinions. (Opinions, not even thoughts, let alone values.) Almost without exception these persons submit to the exact same bounds of political partisanship which are dictated to them by the mainstream media. All their learning, all their alleged intellectual principles, do nothing to give them even a single new idea.
 
This applies to the great majority of self-alleged “radicals” as well. They too constantly renew their devotion to all the main ideas and institutions of productionism and consumerism, however much it pleases them to sneer at “bourgeois” ideology (but their own ideology is bourgeois to the core) and arbitrarily to separate productionism into the two flavors of “capitalism” and “socialism”.* Of course many of them, come time for the kangaroo election (they also have no ideas beyond electoralism), tell the people to vote Democrat. I think Freud would agree that it never required intensive study of Marx to reach the position of “Hope and Change…I’m With Her”. I personally know plenty of utterly uneducated people who reached the same position, or its “Make America Great Again” flip side, with zero effort.
 
Of course most of these pseudo-educated elites are “lesser minds” themselves, mediocrities who had the grinder aspiration and the money to go to school. I’m applying Freud’s quote more to their grandiose ideological pronouncements more than to themselves. The point is that such grand intellectual projects, if they really possessed any of the integrity, profundity, and altruistic impulse their adherents claim for them, ought to better the minds and spirits of those who participate. But we see every day how there’s almost an inverse relationship between the grandiosity of the ideal and the gutter quality, intellectual and moral, of its practitioners and fanboys.
 
To come closer to Freud’s example of the steep drop-off in quality from Dostoevsky’s fiction to his everyday political opinionation, even where it comes to the few writers today capable of the true eagle’s eye perspective, those who speak profoundly about the soon-to-go-fully-kinetic crises of economics, energy, and ecology, they’re still prone to insist on self-indulging in “topical” political commentary where most of them immediately regress to the level of cranky right-wing bloggers. A decades-long spiritual training and intensive reading about the profundities of the relationship of ecology to the economy leads one to Archie Bunker-level political spewing about “the left”? Yes indeed, much lesser minds often reach that position with much less effort. (For real criticism of the left as offering no alternative to productionism and technocracy, one has to come to a site like mine.)
 
Perhaps the greatest irony of this culture is how the “Progress” ideologues are the most hidebound, intellectually stagnant, politically retarded epigones who are congenitally incapable of ever actually progressing to a new idea, a new vision. For them the laws of the world are never anything but the status quo forever. In many ways “progressives” are, objectively speaking, reactionaries in how they desperately cling to revanchist fantasies for things which long ago were disproved and/or destroyed forever, not to mention how meager their fantasies usually are. (To fixate on “bring back Glass-Steagal” manages the feat of being simultaneously nostalgic and lame.)
 
I think their parents who paid for all those university degrees should ask for their money back. All that investment of money, time, effort, all that “thinking”, and look at what the modern intellectual/political class comes up with: Straight parroting of all the most gutter “values”, lies, and ideological precepts of Mammon and the corporations, every last one of these a thousand times refuted. The modern intellectual is hidebound, stagnant, and stupid. The modern expert is a prostituted liar. I say we the people can do better.
 
 
In case anyone thinks I’m exalting novelty or radicalism for their own sakes, no. My total opposition to thoughtless reckless promiscuous technological deployment sufficiently refutes both. Nor is that the case with ideas. I call for propagating and enacting the new and necessary ideas. What’s wrong with productionism isn’t that it’s an old idea and institution, but that it’s proven destructive to humanity and the Earth. What’s wrong with “progress” isn’t that it’s antiquated, but that it’s long been disproven as at best a religious fantasy, more often an ideological lie. What’s wrong with liberalism and “vote Democrat” isn’t that it’s the same old thing, but that it’s long been proven ineffective and a malign scam. Those who still adhere to these disproven notions, claiming to be finding something new and possible in them, are liars and/or idiots.
 
The necessary new ideas, most of all the great need to abolish corporate industrial agriculture and globally transform to agroecology, are those needed to overcome and transcend these failed and destructive old notions and actions. That’s the one and only real kind of progress.
 
 
*This morning I read another piece exalting “science” from a “left” perspective. That means one denounces “Trump” and is indistinguishable from a partisan liberal. For this kind of scribbler, what’s wrong with de jure climate denial is that it’s an affront to the authority of “Science”, a kind of lese majestie. In reality, what’s wrong with any kind of climate denial isn’t that it’s intellectually “wrong”, let alone that it insults the majesty of Science. What’s wrong is that climate chaos already is profoundly destructive of humanity and the Earth and will become far worse. Denial of this and obstruction of real mitigation and adaptation measures comprise a crime against humanity and the Earth. That’s what’s wrong with it, not the liberal vs. conservative culture war part of it.
 
Such misdirection highlights how the de jure deniers are just one minority faction among the deniers. Far greater in number are the de facto deniers, who may “believe in” anthropogenic climate change and often claim to care about it, but whose actions prove they want no change in the status quo paradigms which drive climate change. They only tell various lies and propagate various scams in order to pretend they care and are doing something. These are the climate crocodiles, crying crocodile tears over climate change. They include the liberal hand-wringers, as well as the scientific establishment and its fanboys such as the author of the typical piece I linked above. All these persons and institutions systematically do their worst to drive climate change, even as they deplore it with empty words. This kind of denialism is far more pernicious than the de jure kind, since it reflects a much deeper Earth-destroying inertia.
 
For the climate crocodiles this hypocrisy driven by destructive inertia causes them to fixate on “Trump” even though ecologically destructive policy and ideology is the realm where, more than anywhere else, Trump is nothing but the continuation of the Clinton-Bush-Obama paradigm. And here is the best example of the pathology I mentioned above, where “leftists” decompose to become indistinguishable from liberals, often to the point of touting the Democrat Party, thus demonstrating their own indelible bourgeois character, to use one of their own favorite curse words.
 
All that education and ideological pomposity, and one still decries Trump’s affront to the Paris accord or the “corruption” of the previously public-spirited EPA. So-called lesser minds usually reach those positions with much less effort. It’s taken a bit more effort to work out the new and necessary ideas for a human future. We’ll see how much effort it takes to propagate and then realize them.
 
 
 
 

August 18, 2017

The EPA Stalls for Monsanto

Filed under: GMO Corporate State, GMO Health Hazards, GMO-Based Poison Infliction, Reformism Can't Work — Tags: , , , , , — Russ @ 9:48 am

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Stonewalling the people, building a wall against the future.

 
 
The EPA’s most common practice is to receive PR copy from corporations like Monsanto and launder Monsanto’s lies to the public with its own “regulatory” imprimatur. But sometimes the collaboration is more actively hands-on, as in this long-running delay of a toxicological review of glyphosate. The new review was promised for 2015. The delay leaves in place the EPA’s 2013 proclamation denying the fact that glyphosate causes cancer. This proclamation was a prime example of the stenography and rubber-stamping of the corporation’s own self-description I mentioned above. This new information about EPA/Monsanto collusion is the latest to come out of the many cancer lawsuits Monsanto is now fighting.
 
Note well, this is Obama’s EPA in action. The Obama administration was the most aggressively pro-pesticide and pro-GMO to date. Trump certainly will try to catch up and surpass Obama, but as with so many other crimes against humanity and the Earth, he has a long, long way to go.
 
 
 
 
 

April 21, 2017

Corporate Scientists “Mostly Say, Hooray for Our Side”

Filed under: Climate Crisis, Disaster Capitalism, Mainstream Media, Reformism Can't Work, Scientism/Technocracy — Tags: , , , , — Russ @ 2:20 am

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It’s a space-age church, all right.

 
 
Yet another gang of corporate conformists will be out shrieking about nothing, this time holding a so-called “March for Science”. Their premise is that this administration is “anti-science” in a way previous administrations* were not.
 
This of course is a lie. There is perfect consensus among the US political class and both divisions of the Corporate One-Party that science is supposed to serve corporate imperatives. There is no significant dissent from this dogma within the system. Therefore according to the measure of the Popperian scientific method, all US political and economic institutions are anti-science. But more accurately, today’s Kuhnian “normal science” is the corporate science paradigm, which can be summed up as, “Science is whatever the corporate marketing department says it is, nothing more and nothing less.” As always, the only difference among the pro-corporate factions is cosmetic: Trump’s “science” has some superficial differences in tone from Obama’s “science”, no significant differences. The main cosmetic difference is in their respective modes of climate denial. Trump is reviving old-style de jure denial which had fallen into relative disuse, while Obama represented the full development of the de facto denialism of crying crocodile tears but insisting that nothing has to change. While liberals, leftists, and mainstream environmental groups shrilly invoke the specter of climate change, by their actions, from their continued personal jet-setting to their fraudulent corporate-aggrandizing policy prescriptions, they prove every day that they don’t really believe there’s a climate crisis. At any rate it’s a proven fact that they don’t want to do anything about it.
 
The climate crisis is very real, but those among the system political class who claim to believe in it and care about it are liars and con artists. Indeed, this mass political abdication and embrace of such cynicism is part of the political and cultural manifestation of the greater crisis, of which physical climate chaos (a deliberate corporate campaign), is itself a part.
 
Meanwhile from Obama to Trump there’s not even a cosmetic change in the “science” propaganda and deployment of agricultural poisons. How could there be: Where it comes to poisonism the Obama administration was the most aggressively anti-science, pro-corporate administration yet.
 
We see that the March for Science is a typically stupid misdirection ploy. As with every other version of this lie, the goal is to keep the people imprisoned with the chains of the corporate system’s ideas and the limits of its “politics”. In particular, the lie’s two main parts are:
 
1. Never question the overall status quo, which is permanent and never will change or can be changed.
 
2. Refer all questions to the conflict of Republican vs. Democrat, which encompasses all conflict.
 
These are both extremely stupid lies designed to keep the people stupid and comatose. But in reality the status quo is impossible and will collapse of its own physical limitations and self-destruction. And in reality there’s no difference between Republican and Democrat and they do not conflict in any significant way. On the contrary, as I said above they have perfect consensus: On corporate rule, and on the fundamentalist religion of the goodness and permanency of the extreme energy consumption model of civilization.
 
Where it comes to this latter faith, they are true believers. And when they preach their Republican/Democrat lie they are preaching to fellow believers among the people, who are the real constituency for this propaganda. They’re also trying to smother in the cradle any nascent awakening to the truth.
 
All system propaganda institutions, from political parties to regulatory agencies to NGOs to academia and the media to the scientific establishment, are working on this same role of reinforcing cult faith in extreme energy consumption and suppressing any new idea. The March for Science is the latest such gambit of the corporate science establishment.
 
 
Meanwhile why doesn’t someone organize a march to liberate science from corporate control? For starters, only about two people would show up. (Indeed, even the critics of corporate control of science are still system grinders who prefer to party with the cool kids.)
 
 
*If you’re wondering whether our political science class thought George Bush was anti-science, I refer you to their valedictorian and head cheerleader Neil DeGrasse Tyson:
 

Q: President George W. Bush named you to a pair of aerospace commissions, but how do you feel about Bush’s relationship with science?

A: People can say and think what they want, but what matters is whether or not it becomes policy or legislation, and I don’t remember any legislation that restricted science. In fact, the budget for the National Science Foundation went up. What matters is money in Congress. What does Congress do? Allocate money. That’s really what they do. So the science budget of the country went up during the Bush administration, and the budget for NASA went up 3 percent—and it had actually dropped 25 percent in real spending dollars under the eight years of President Clinton. I don’t care what you say or think. I care about legislation, and policy.

Also, he appointed me! There may have been some science that he hadn’t learned yet or didn’t know fully, but he’s not creating legislation based on it. Speeches are politics, so you can’t fault a politician for saying something political.

 
So Bush was OK. I also appreciate Tyson’s refreshing honesty in openly acknowledging that he and other scientists are for sale and will espouse whatever “science” they’re paid to espouse, especially if presidents also heap honors upon them. And that the March for Science is nothing but speeches and politics, about nothing but speeches and politics and money. Yes, all this is what Popper was talking about.
 
 
Help propagate the necessary ideas.
 
 
 
 

March 12, 2010

Bush Rehab (Social Fascists, 1 of 2)

Filed under: Corporatism, Global War On Terror, Mainstream Media — Tags: , , , , — Russ @ 5:36 am

 

It’s long been known among those familiar with him that Obama is a neoliberal corporatist. That’s why, under Robert Rubin’s tutelage, he became the recipient of the bulk of Wall Street donations. Still, even the corporatists must be pleasantly surprised at the gleeful alacrity with which Obama has broken all his change promises and instead devoted his presidency to looting the country on their behalf even more brazenly than Bush did.
 
Meanwhile the Republicans, who had to expect the worst for themselves (since Obama could easily have served his masters while still hammering the Reps), must be amazed at how well Obama and the Democrats have fixed things up for them as well. If Obama’s actions prove that his first priority is to serve Wall Street and the big rackets, his second has been to rehabilitate George Bush and the Republicans.
 
It was only a little while ago that Bush policy and Bush disasters were almost universally repudiated as one long bad dream. Everyone agreed that Iraq was a debacle, that the MSM had behaved shamefully in shilling for it, serving as stenographer for administration lies, that Democrats had been wrong to support it. Since the financial crash everyone uttered a big sigh of relief that Social Security privatization had failed. Everyone said, Where would we be today if Bush and Wall Street’s plot had succeeded? Fighting back to defeat it was the Democrats’ one great moment in an otherwise dismal decade of cowardice and betrayal. Even Republicans didn’t want to associate themselves with the Bush years exemplified by the monumental failure and betrayal of Katrina. 
 
Katrina broke Bush’s spell over the people. Katrina opened up the space for the Dems to crawl back into power, as Bush’s real approval rating permanently plummeted below 30%. For the rest of history, any revived good feelings for Bush and his Republicans will only be the result of nostalgia as things get even worse. The truth about how the people really saw him will never change.
 
But Democrats are also eternally Democrats, and the same cowardice and betrayal which characterize them in opposition even more profoundly mark them in power. Look at how Obama and the Dem establishment have embarked upon the full-scale rehabilitation of all the defining Bush policies and actions.
 
Obama’s refusal to obey the law and bring Bush war criminals to justice is one part of a broader program to reglorify Bush’s war, including Iraq. Obama did say he’d continue the war in Afghanistan, while promising to get out of Iraq. But he never hinted at the sprawling escalation he’s actually embarked upon in the Afghan theater. Meanwhile, he’s indicating that the vaunted Iraq withdrawal also isn’t going to happen.
 
The Democratic rehabilitation of the Iraq war and the most vile tactics used to fight it has in turn encouraged the MSM to flip yet again on the war. After their sojourn of some years of apologetics and even some alleged self-searching, outfits like the WaPo and NYT coming back full circle to their original jingoism. (These days chickenhawk Bill Keller at the NYT seems to want to outdo the Times’ old bloodlust, even soliciting op-eds complaining that Americans aren’t killing enough civilians.) Afghanistan, just like Iraq before it, is the glorious project for a unified front of the same old warmongering flacks representing themselves as decent, responsible people. And now even Iraq is being restored to its old respectable position.
 
Surely it could never be possible that the worst fuck-up of an American government imaginable, the multiple SNAFUs which converged in the Katrina disaster, could ever be rehabilitated? For the first time in broad daylight, for all the world to see, America was revealed in its true banana republic nature. No one would ever want to revise this as a great time. And when Naomi Klein depicted in Shock Doctrine how American governments and business leaders were overjoyed at the disaster capitalist opportunities the havoc had opened up, this was surely a slanderous exaggeration on her part? Sure, there’s always a few rotten crooks and vultures in any disaster, but decent people would never so much as think, let alone act upon, such a notion as exploiting the great suffering of a disaster-beleaguered people to do things like destroying their homes and schools permanently?
 
Well, yes they could. And while Bush’s own people lied about their intent and actions, it was left to Obama himself to openly say, “Katrina was a good thing”. We now have smoking gun confirmation that Klein was always right not only about the actions but the systematic intentions and precalculation. Yet it’s not even unreconstructed Bush Republicans who are cheering on the Bush system’s crimes here. Here, as with Iraq, it’s the Obama administration which has dedicated itself to rehabilitating Bush’s worst crimes and failures. Obama’s goal is nothing less than to revise history so that Bush’s worst disasters are reformulated as triumphs.
 
Obama’s actions prove that he cherishes his position as steward of Bush’s assault on civil liberties. And, as the keystone of his overarching dream of out-Bushing Bush, Obama even wants to carry to completion Bush’s failed project to privatize social security. Never mind that there’s no reason to even think of this; that for this zombie system a dozen crises loom, any one of which is more pressing than this; how the system will be brought down of its own weight long before Social Security could ever come into crisis of its own accord; how even acknowledging the notion gives aid and comfort to Republican memes in general; how nobody who’s not a criminal wants to even discuss “entitlement reform” right now.
 
None of that matters. Obama, with the support of the deficit terrorists* in the MSM, has unilaterally decreed that privatization must be on the table. The only conceivable reason to do it is to further empower Wall Street, and that as always is Obama’s main motivation. But he also wants to step up the assault on the social safety net, on general principle. That’s part of his homage to his true hero, Reagan. And here above all we see the reason for his rehabilitation of Bush. If Obama can first redeem Bush, revive all of Bush’s ideas and projects, reaffirm them all as good, and then outdo Bush at their achievement, he’ll have proven himself even more Reaganesque than Bush. He’ll be the real Bush, and therefore the real consummator of the Reagan revolution, and therefore the consummator of neoliberalism and the imperial presidency in themselves. Here we see the true evil and derangement of Obama’s deepest fantasy.
 
That’s why some commentators, including myself, have compared gutting Social Security and Medicare to Nixon’s going to China. Just as it’s been supposed that only a Republican could go to China, so now they’re trying to make it look like only a Democrat can undertake the necessary (in the mind of the establishment) painful job of destroying these popular programs.
 
Does this sound like a fanciful interpretation? It’s borne out by the evidence. It’s hard to explain Obama’s actions otherwise. And Obama’s only the epitome of the true nature of Democratic party hacks and liberal cadres. He exemplifies what they really are, as I’ll discuss in the sequel to this post.
 
[*Just to be clear, the reason deficits don’t matter is because the system is already unsustainable because of the lack of sufficient physical energy to keep it “growing”, and because, as we’re already seeing, the debt tower is just one big ponzi scheme. Even if there were no such thing as Peak Oil, the system’s own contradictions render it impossible to prop it up. They’re liquidating the rest of the existing “consumers”, and they’re not going to be able to create new ones out of Chinese peasants.
 
So for these reasons the reserve currency’s already a dead dollar walking. The entitlement system is already doomed. All these now are just political fictions. So if the issue of a “reform commission” comes up, that’s just the same exercise in political theater as the legislative kabuki over bogus health “reform” or finance “reform”. The only question is who gets a political boost out of the way a play is performed.
 
So if Obama makes up out of thin air this alleged necessity to resurrect a Republican meme which was dead and buried, this can only help the Republican political brand as such. Indeed, it’s so obvious that it’s hard to believe even he’s stupid enough not to realize that. That’s why it’s such a prime piece of evidence that Obama actually wants to rehab the Republicans.
 
If we ask how he could think that sacrificing himself for the sake of the Republicans would gain him credit as having consummated the Reagan legacy, why he doesn’t know that they’ll still revile him as a “socialist” and spit on his memory, I guess we can chalk that up to his fundamental kumbaya character flaw. Deep down he’s not only desperate for the right-wing cool kids to like him, but is actually deluded that his own personal greatness and righteousness (as he’s deluded into seeing them) will overcome all their resistance, contempt, and hatred.] 

January 27, 2010

The Real State of the Onion

Filed under: Bailouts Only Propped Up Zombies, Global War On Terror — Tags: , , , , — Russ @ 6:27 am

 

State of the Union is an odd title unless this speech is going to sound a sincere alarm over the centrifugal forces of crime and antisociality spinning this “union” to pieces. We know we’re not going to hear any such alarm.
 
The state of the union according to Obama is a joke. We know with absolute clarity that Obama’s state is a nightmare of bailouts, war, secrecy, destruction of civil liberties, the imperial presidency, and the tyranny of corporatism.
 
We are clear that he and his party don’t care about jobs, health reform, farm reform, food reform, energy reform, or reform of any sort.
 
I don’t doubt Obama consciously fails to understand himself. His cognitive dissonance looks deeply engrained. Asked to grade his performance so far, he didn’t even demur to answer but leapt to give himself a “B+”. The only reason he didn’t give himself an A is because he thinks, however stellar his performance thus far, there’s always room for improvement.
 
And we’ve seen ad nauseum how the Democrats think Massachusetts, O’s plummeting approval ratings, and other political boners are all because of inadequate messaging; none of them are about flawed substance.
 
Today administration flacks say that in tonight’s speech Obama will “take responsibility” but not the blame.
 
How do you do that? Would you let your ten year old get away with that? “OK, it’s my responsibility, I’m sorry, but it’s not my fault”?
 
I remember Rumsfeld saying something like, “I don’t know where people get the notion that just because you’re head of an organization that you’re responsible for what happens in it.” (I couldn’t find the quote, but I think it was at the same assembly where he said “you go to war with the army you have, not the one you want”.)  
 
(I’m often reminded of the “army you have” notion when I hear Democrat hacks saying “you govern with the Democratic party you have, not the one you want”. But then these hacks remind me of Bush hacks with every lying word they say.)
 
Again: Bailouts, yes we can. War, yes we can. Ever-bloating Pentagon budgets, yes we can. Insurance racketeering, yes we can. Torture, yes we can. Secrecy, yes we can. Disappearing people, yes we can. Anything which empowers tyrannical corporations, yes we can. Anything which empowers tyrannical government, yes we can.
 
Jobs, no we can’t. Reform, no we can’t. Anything which benefits the people, no we can’t. Morality, spirit, happiness, justice, freedom, no we can’t.
 
That’s how we can classify, for example, all the lying gambits emitting from his lying “populist” epiphany.
 
Size limits on banks! No, they’ll just be capped at their existing monopoly sizes. maybe. For now.
 
No more prop trading for government-backstopped banks! Except for all the loopholes. On second thought, any restriction will be the exception. And of course we won’t touch the structural pathology of prop trading as such, which shouldn’t exist at all; of financial speculation as such, which shouldn’t exist at all.
 
Help for the middle class! In the form of mere crumbs. Insulting, really, when you compare it to the looting on behalf of the banks, health insurance rackets, weapons contractors, and others.
 
And now cuts in non-defense spending. That wouldn’t put a dent in the debt, wouldn’t comfort the afflicted, wouldn’t afflict the comfortable, and would on the contrary afflict the afflicted on behalf of the comfortable. No one can even figure out who the political constituency for that is supposed to be. It looks absolutely idiotic from any point of view.
 
Through it all Obama continues to support “Heckuva job, Bennie” Bernanke.
 
Bennie is doing a heckuva job for the banksters, as since December the ceiling on the Fed’s MBS purchases on the taxpayers’ bill, the ONLY thing which is still propping up the insolvent zombie system, are now in principle infinite.
 
(Meanwhile Robert Gates has similarly assured weapons dealers that Pentagon budgets are to be expanded without limit, purely for the dealers’ sakes, as explicit corporatist administration policy.)
 
That’s what Obama really thinks of the budget and its deficit.
 
And that’s why he self-refutes all his newfound anti-bankster talk with his support for Bennie.
 
Meanwhile we’re actually starting to zero in on the first identifiable de jure crime, the Fed’s money laundering through AIG. Testimony is coming up today.
 
From here the next step is the assault on ALL Fed secrecy. This secrecy is intended to cover up crime, to cover up the magnitude of the Bailout, to cover up how insolvent all the banks are, how the entire premise of the Bailout is a lie.
 
It’s a refutation on principle of Obama’s claims to “transparency” and confirms his imperial pretensions; that Obama agrees with Cheney on the imperial presidency and executive secrecy as a principle, a privilege, a prerogative.
 
That they even went so far as to try to claim “national security” as justification for AIG secrecy provides a case study in the general national security lie; how we must assume it’s ALWAYS a lie.
 
Let’s hope these hearings go somewhere, though the pattern indicates it’ll be a whitewash.
 
And this can still only nibble at the fringes of the great crime, for which we must someday convene a new Nuremburg Tribunal.
 
In the meantime we can dispose of Obama’s stupid speech.   
 
“State of the Union” is an odd title for a speech describing the progress of the class war from above. It’s a document of America’s continuing descent into a gangland cesspool. But since it will be a package of lies, the Orwellian title is blandly appropriate.
 
This speech, like all the other lying words oozing from this criminal politician and every other politician of the criminal system, will only insult our intelligence and our deepest instinct for morality, our deepest demand for justice.

October 30, 2009

Bailout War

Filed under: Disaster Capitalism, Global War On Terror — Tags: , — Russ @ 11:01 am
As we enter year two of Bailout America and reach the end of year two of the official bank-created recession, and as we continue further and deeper into the decades-long quagmire of financialization and the devastation of the real economy, we should look to the state of what’s supposed to be our democracy as well, since it has been just as degraded as our wages, just as hollowed out as our manufacturing, just as fictitious as our “growth”.
Last fall the Bush administration tried to seize the ultimate disaster opportunity when it sought to steamroll Congress into passing a three-page authorization which would have made Henry Paulson a veritable dictator. They threatened a complete meltdown, that by Monday “there might not be an economy” unless Congress stampeded. The “leadership” was suitably terrified, which reinforced their normal corporatism and cowardice. They did all they could to deliver the “emergency” war powers Bush and Paulson sought. (That’s exactly how the inception of the bailouts should be seen, as an internal economic war authorization, and very similar to the Enabling Act demanded and obtained by Hitler in 1933.)
 
By some miracle the House at first listened to the fierce wisdom of the people who immediately saw this for the coup d’etat it was. But the miracle was ephemeral. The coup plotters added a few pages and toned down a few provisions. They added some limits and oversight authority. Meanwhile the corporate media kept up a drumbeat similar to the SA troopers outside the Reichstag shouting in unison, “We want the Enabling Act or there’ll be hell to pay!”, while an astroturf telephone and e-mail campaign laid seige to the holdouts. “We want the Bailout or there’ll be hell to pay!” It was a classic top-down/bottom-up vise.
 
Congress caved and Bailout America was officially established. The result wasn’t perfect from the looters’ point of view. They’d had to compromise on those limits, deadlines, oversight.
 
But one year in Obama and Geithner are trying to finish the job. They’ve proposed, as part of the general package of phony reforms being bandied about, that Treasury war authorization be made permanent, that there no longer be independent oversight, and that there be no limits on time frames or funds conveyed to the Too Big To Fail rackets. When Congressman Brad Sherman, wanting to avert this “TARP on steroids”, asked Geithner if he could accept a $1 trillion limit on his discretion, Geithner flatly said No. He’s demanding complete bailout dictator power.
 
(All this comes as another TBTF corpse, GMAC, staggers up to the trough for the third time. It’s been a year since the crisis hit and two bailouts already for GMAC, a dog so decrepit and diseased that its own daddy, Cerberus, won’t put money into it. Yet in all this time not only has the administration done nothing to unwind and dismantle it, or any other TBTF entity, but every policy has sought to make them bigger, more unsustainable, to further concentrate them, further entrench them.)
 
You put all this together and it’s clear that this administration, beyond even the normal standard of corrupt government, is nothing but the hired thug arm of the bank rackets. This is the one and only priority. Bush was always rightly pegged as a childish warmonger who wanted to let big corporations loot the country. Obama was rightly questioned for running a vacuous campaign based on nothing but charisma and vaporous rhetoric. What would be the basis of an Obama presidency, and how would it represent Change from Bush?
 
Now we see that Obama represents not change from but the refinement of Bush corporatism. The core of his policy is delivering the country to the Wall Street racketeers as a mine and a playground. The pretext is the crisis, the vehicle is the bailout. Every other policy flows from this.
 
So the overthrow of democracy and institutionalization of looting remains the same, but it’s more focused, better organized. It has more of a sense of permanency.
 
Just as the Global War on Terror is intended to now be permanent (Gates and others consistently refer to the “Long War” and “our wars”), so the Bailout War will now be permanent. The GWOT represents the institutionalization of military Keynesianism (that is, the state as dedicated corporatist buyer to the military-industrial complex), the security- and prison-industrial complexes, and rising authoritarianism, fostered by the power of these complexes as well as by MSM propaganda. The astroturf teabaggers will supplement with street terror from below, if necessary.
 
Similarly, the Bailout War institutionalizes the government as primarily a loot conveyor to the finance sector (and, using Wall St as conduit, to other sectors and to the GWOT), while here authoritarianism takes the form of releasing the government’s fiscal powers from any democratic accountability. This will dovetail with the Fed’s existing anti-democratic unaccountability in its monetary policy, to remove the government from all taxpayer oversight and accountability.
 
Put the bailouts and the Global War on Terror together, see them being used to pursue the policy of resource fascism, and you have a complete precis of what this power structure intends to do in the coming decades of Peak Oil energy descent. It’ll be serfdom for an increasing majority, the looting of our wealth, labor, and blood, and the creeping totalitarianism which won’t be creeping much longer.
 
We’ll have come full circle to the original taxation without representation. After over 230 years we’ve come back to ground zero. American history must end here or start anew.

October 9, 2009

No Good “Options” in Afghanistan

Filed under: Afghanistan, Global War On Terror — Tags: , , , — Russ @ 2:32 am
Earlier this week Obama met with a Congressional delegation to discuss the war in Afghanistan. In spite of rhetorical assurances that the White House team was discussing “all options”, the real point of this meeting with Congressional cadres was to assure them that none of the options being discussed involved devolving the troop presence or the war. (Indeed, the only persons invited to the meeting were varying species of hawk, but no one who is demanding an exit strategy.)
 
According to reports, the options on the table are the McCrystal plan for a large troop escalation and a broad shift in strategy from search-and-destroy (“terrorist-hunting”) to Vietnamization (counter-insurgency and “nation-building”); a fuzzy middle-of-the-road combination of some of McC’s recommendations with muddling through as we are now; or the Biden proposal to wind down troop activities and focus on the video game war of drone assassinations.
 
Obama still hasn’t made up his mind what he wants to do here; unlike his all-in policy for domestic corporatism, and unlike his earlier bland jingoism, he seems to be getting squeamish as he has to face this war up close. Clearly the proximate reason for this meeting was to assure the Congressional chickenhawks, and by extension the neocon establishment and MSM, that no matter what happens, even if he broadly accepts Biden’s proposal, there will not be any troop de-escalation. At the very least Obama is committing to “stay the course”.
 
(It is interesting, though, that he felt the need to do this. It seems to indicate that there was at least the perception that troop reductions were “on the table”, and it definitely means that Biden has gained on McC in the terrorist-hunting vs. COIN (counterinsurgency) sweepstakes.)
 
Obama declared that the choice between “doubling-down” or “leaving” was a “straw man”. Of course that doesn’t mean he won’t still double down as McC demands, he just won’t call it that.
 
Everybody’s still sifting through the debris of McC’s alleged power play. His public declarations, his leaking of the policy report, even the personal insult of wearing fatigues to a meeting with Obama on board Air Force One, all are taken to represent a pattern of at least pressuring Obama to enact the proposal, and probably of insubordination as well.
 
I suppose it is “insubordinate”, and everyone assumes Obama must be furious. There’s plenty of Truman-MacArthur comparisons going around. But we who don’t respect the prerogatives of the imperial presidency and who care about transparency and small-d democracy can be content with McC’s publicity campaign. There are certainly no military secrets involved here, only politics. If the only thing at stake is McC disrespecting Obama, that’s fine.
 
(And I doubt McC is in much danger of being fired. He’s Obama’s guy after all; O picked him to make exactly the kind of proposal he’s made. If O now is leery of that proposal, it means O changed, not McC. All the evidence indicates that even if he doesn’t really want to escalate any more he’ll cave in anyway. And there’s no evidence that he’d ever have the backbone to fire anyone other than lower-level public interest activists like Van Jones and ACORN.)
 
So how do we sum up all this? It’s all political nonsense firmly within the policy bounds of continuing the war. Ending it is off the table. But should we end it? What’s the point of it?
 
National Security Adviser James Jones himself says there are fewer than 100 Al Qaeda cadres in Afghanistan. Meanwhile according to the Pew Research Center Pakistanis support their own government’s efforts to expel Afghan and Arab militants, but do not support doing so in military conjunction with the US or to serve the imperialist purposes of the US. (They give the US a 16% favorable rating, and 76% oppose partnering with the US for drone attacks.)
 
When you couple this evidence with the administration’s own testimony that there’s only a vestigial Al-Qaeda still active in Afghanistan, it looks like the real war-on-terror aspect of the Global War on Terror has been won. We can wrap it up and go home. But to continue to seek corporatist, imperial goals, which is all the GWOT does by now, can only incite further resistance and militancy. If the real goal is anti-terrorism, by now the return on investment is becoming negative.
 
We can tolerate the Taliban if they’re unwilling and/or unable to reproduce the terrorist sanctuary they previously offered. Common sense says they’re likely to be unwilling, after what AQ has already put them through. In spite of sympathies, Jordan kicked out the PLO in 1970 when the heat got to be too much.
 
And now that we know what we’re dealing with and have this counterterrorist infrastructure in place, it should be possible to monitor and target any recidivism of the terrorists in Afghanistan. Contrary to neocon propaganda, it’s not clear why counterterror requires maintenance of current troop levels in Afghanistan. It seems we can garner sufficient intelligence regarding AQ in Pakistan without such troop levels there. Neocons would argue that the troop presence in Afghanistan somehow facilitates intelligence in Pakistan, but this is only asserted, not proved or even evidenced.
 
We don’t need to combat the broader social movement, which has been gradually and steadily losing support on the Muslim street, just the terrorists’ technical capabilities. The polling in Pakistan is just one piece of evidence that the Muslim people don’t support the jihadists, except where American imperialism drives them to. That’s just as true today as it has always been, right from the start.
 
As for the costs, we can’t afford them. This war is being fought on credit. Just like every other rathole down which we’re throwing trillions of dollars, this one only accelerates doomsday for the dollar. We could be using what wealth we still have, including what remaining credibility the dollar has as reserve currency, to prepare for the hard times ahead, to help make them somewhat less hard.
 
But even as Obama draws lines in the sand on health care reform having to be “deficit neutral”, he perpetuates the Bush crime of off-budget debt financing for the war. Meanwhile normal Pentagon and weapons expenses never have to meet any deficit standards at all. All the same Republican and right-wing Democrat scum who are such budget hawks wherever money could be spent to help people don’t care about throwing infinite wealth into this bloody pit.
 
It’s very simple: You can’t be serious about the debt and still support the war. If you support the war, you forfeit all right to complain about the debt.
 
From today forward the American imperative must be to roll back every stupid bloated expense – bailouts, war, the existence of the health insurance racket, and everything else which distills to corporatist looting.
 
Meanwhile the insurgents are getting an excellent return on investment from cheap Kalashnikovs and RPGs. 

September 28, 2009

Which Way in Afghanistan?

Filed under: Afghanistan, Global War On Terror — Tags: , , , — Russ @ 4:27 am
In 2001 America had the opportunity and the justification to launch a big raid to capture and destroy Al Queda and, as punishment, knock the Taliban out of power. If the Bush administration had been acting in good faith to avenge 9/11 and apprehend or kill the AQ leadership, this would probably have been accomplished.
 
But Bush was really using 9/11 as a pretext of power, and the real target was Iraq. As always with the Bush crew, where they didn’t really care about what they were doing, they totally botched it. So it was in Afghanistan. (I’ve wondered whether the idea actually was that Osama bin Laden was more useful alive and at large, as a political bogeyman, than dead, and that they let him get away at Tora Bora. It’s possible, but we hardly need such explanations. Bush incompetence and half-assedness always lay at the root of everything he did.)
 
For the next seven years the Bush war was ad hoc, without strategy, without consistent funding or staffing, without sufficient forces. When the Taliban regrouped and reasserted their control of much of the country, Bush and his Pentagon simply lied about it.
 
As a result, Afghanistan is today a quagmire, and the question of the day is whether to extract the mired leg or plunge in with the other. It’s now that the long-feared Vietnam parallels begin to get triggered.
 
Obama is frequently being compared to Lyndon Johnson. The situation looks the same. A proclaimed domestic reformer comes into office saddled immediately with an existing war. Johnson thought his Great Society agenda depended upon a quid pro quo with Congressional hawks, that he give them their war in exchange for their votes. He also thought he was politically vulnerable if he wasn’t a warrior president. (This was rendered nonsensical when he ran in 1964 as the peace candidate; that he still had political fears after that was idiotic.)
 
So it seems nominally with Obama. He says he really wants to reform health care and the financial system, but also has to deal with this inherited war. But that’s really an illusion, since Obama definitely never needed any Republican votes to achieve anything, was never going to get them anyway, and seems to really like the Global War on Terror in principle. So if he ever really believed any of this LBJ parallel stuff, that’s just his personal demon. It’s not reality-based.
 
(I should also mention that LBJ sincerely wanted, ferociously fought for, often against odds, sometimes losing, his Great Society program. Meanwhile all the evidence is that Obama never really wanted finance reform or health care reform. So far he has certainly been unwilling to lift a finger to get either. So as rightfully tarnished as LBJ’s legacy is thanks to his Vietnam derangement, it would still be unjust to regard he and Obama as the same.)
 
If Obama really is having second thoughts about an Afghan escalation, he should remember that he’s had no problem breaking all his other campaign promises. So he shouldn’t worry about this promise, to escalate in Afghanistan. This is the one promise he should break.
 
Obama has compared American war policy to a large ship at sea. It takes time to make a ponderous turn toward a new course. That’s true; government policy has considerable inertia. But:
 
1. The point is nevertheless to turn as quickly as possible.
 
2. With an intrepid mindset, you can do it much faster. For example, although they don’t like to talk about it this way, one of the reasons they can’t withdraw troops more quickly from places like Iraq is because they’re protecting not American interests but the private interests of war profiteers. Another piece of dead weight is existing privateer contracts in these war zones.
 
Well, I think a good way of trimming down this tanker to a sleeker vessel would be to jettison these invalid concerns and illegitimate “interests”. If it’s true that there’s no right to strike against the public interest, it’s equally true that no one in government has a right to sign contracts against the public interest.
 
It’s all academic for the moment; tanker or speedboat, so far Obama is full steam ahead.
 
So where are we chronologically, compared to Vietnam? In one sense Obama is Nixon, taking on an existing war and making it his own. As Nixon and his new commander Creighton Abrahms came in with the “new” strategy of withdrawing troops, Vietnamization, and extending the war beyond Vietnam’s borders into Cambodia and Laos, so Obama has indicated that he cherishes a new emphasis on Pakistan, while his guy McChrystal wants to refocus the military effort in Afghanistan from search-and-destroy to pacification and Vietnamization. Richard Holbrooke, a pacification cadre in Vietnam himself, is gung ho about this program.
 
At the same time, the parallel is also to 1965 and LBJ. Here the newly elected president inherits an ongoing but still relatively small scale war and chooses to greatly escalate the troop levels and the scope of action. Thus Obama has already deployed 21000 more troops toward a total of 68000 by December (plus 75000 contractors, plus the fact that they’ve been rotating out support troops, whose positions are taken by contractors, while they rotate in more “trigger-pullers”; in this way they are escalating the combat troop level without additionally escalating the aggregate troop level), and McC is expected any day now to request anywhere from 10-45000 more, with the expectation being that Obama would end up authorizing the middle case of twenty-something thousand, what they’ve been calling the Goldilocks figure.
 
Or, that was the expectation, until Obama reportedly began to hesitate. In spite of denials, the brass has apparently been putting on the pressure. Last week they leaked McC’s classified report predicting failure without a large troop escalation. JCS Chairman Mike Mullen has been beating the drums for more troops to retrieve a “deteriorating” situation. Mullen, Centcom commander Petraeus, and McC had a powwow in Germany a few days ago. The bloodmongers in the media and Congress (republican and democrat) have been shrieking. It’s hard for me to believe Obama’s going to stand up to this kind of confrontation, even if he did end up changing his mind about the policy. We might end up with Obama himself becoming the McNamara here, in his mind no longer believing, but too weak to say No.
 
We can take this moment to point out another parallel. Just as Westmoreland could never give a coherent explanation of why the Vietnam war should be fought, but took it for granted and kept demanding ever more troops, so these admirals and generals today also offer no cogent rationale for the GWOT or for any of its theaters, beyond parroting neocon boilerplate. We’re of course not talking about something like WWII, where the point of the war was obvious to almost everyone, and it had to be fought to the bitter end regardless because it was total war. One would think that mercenary wars of choice, being fought for no obvious reason, and certainly no existential reason, call for explanations. But instead calling for escalation is simply what officer cadres in a professional military fighting mercenary wars do. It’s ingrained; it’s careerist; it’s inertial.
 
So when we turn to those neocons and their MSM megaphone, what reasons do we hear? Pretty much the same reheated Vietnam leftovers. Just as aggressive global Communism had to be fought everywhere or it would triumph everywhere, so now Islamofascism is the hydra who will keep sprouting heads if you don’t chop off the existing ones. It’s the Domino theory redux. Just as victory in Vietnam would set off a chain reaction sending communism on a triumphal progress through Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and so on until we’d have to “fight them in San Francisco”, as LBJ put it in a report to Kennedy while still VP, so if a fundamentalist regime can triumph in Afghanistan, down will go Pakistan, Yemen, and from there the rest of the Mideast and Central Asia, until we ended up fighting them in San Fran and other American cities.
 
Since this already looks dubious, since we already, through American-brokered elections, brought fundamentalist or quasi-fundamentalist regimes to power in Gaza and Iraq, not to mention the pre-existing Iranian regime, it looks like if dominoes are going to fall they’re going to fall anyway. And so far American arms have shocked and awed only in their fecklessness and inability to achieve what American leaders say they want to achieve.
 
So the jingoists have already trotted out the most malicious Vietnam tropes, “credibility” and even “honor”. These are of course moonshine, as Sherman would have called them. Needless to say America’s Vietnam disaster brought to the government only discredit and dishonor, abroad and for many at home.
 
What “credit” could Obama possibly seek today in Afghanistan? Credibility with terrorists? The concept makes no sense. If they are physically able to attack, they will attack. They’re not gauging America’s “moral fiber” the way it might have been done in Cold War brinksmanship. They care nothing for their perception of American resolve.
 
More important, it’s just as true today as it was during Vietnam that the best way to salvage credibility is to recognize when you’ve taken on a misguided project, horrendously expensive in money and blood, which you can never finish in any satisfactory way (where you cannot attain “peace with honor” in the stupid phraseology of 1969, “honor” being some nebulous substitute term for “victory”, but as a concept just as vague, empty, and bombastic), and make the decision that it’s not worth continuing. To keep going at that point is madness.
 
Meanwhile, just as the North Vietnamese were not stooges of the Soviet Union or China, so the Taliban is not controlled by Al Queda (and AQ itself is no longer the tight global network it once was; today terrorism is decentralized and generally far less professional, with “Al Queda” more a name than anything else, its professional cadre having been decimated – the war on terror has succeeded, to the extent it was meant to be just a reality-based war on terror).
 
But there is an incontrovertible stooge here, the mayor of part of Kabul, I mean Afghan President Diem, I mean Karzai. Karzai is an illegitimate kleptocrat presiding over a regime where corruption and impotence vie for supremacy. His latest theft has been any semblance of legitimacy for the election in which Obama vested such hopes (and for whose protection and integrity he dispatched those extra 21000 troops). This client will almost certainly never be any more legitimate, self-supporting, or morally worthy of support than any of the plutocratic and kleptocratic South Vietnamese regimes. If you want to build a nation, and a nation means a government, then there’s no nation to build. You can only temporarily clear, you can’t hold for long, and you certainly can’t build.
 
(Some are already playing the “blame Diem” card. If we could only get a good guy in there…It’s not that the very concept of “South Vietnam” is flawed. No – we just have some bad personnel.)
 
There’s other echoes. The frequent, reiterated fact-finding tours and “assessments” (redolent of the Peter Principle), as if you think asking the same question of the same facts over and over will eventually return a better answer. The gradually growing resistance in Congress (today we have Jim McGovern in the House and Feingold in the Senate taking the lead in calling for a timeline for withdrawal). The increasingly frequent atrocities.
 
There are some real contrasts. The most obvious and important is that today there’s no draft, nor is it politically conceivable that there could be a draft. This places a cap on how far the troop escalation can go (Mullen has been complaining about how overstretched the army already is, and yet he still wants to escalate in Afghanistan).
 
On the other hand, we’re no longer on the gold standard. This placed a cap on how far LBJ could economically escalate, as following Tet in 1968 a delegation of Europeans lectured him on how he needed to rein in the cost of the war, or else they’d have to think about demanding gold for their dollar holdings. It was probably that more than anything which signalled “peak war” to LBJ. He psychologically gave up after that.
 
Obama in theory faces no such limits. His administration has already shown a willingness to borrow obscene amounts to throw down a rathole – the bailouts. So presumably cost and debt would be no object for something equally stupid and useless like this war (only worthwhile things that could actually help people, like health care reform or a carbon cap, are to be subject to cost controls).
 
And perhaps the gathering depression will throw enough people out of work, render the masses desperate enough, that they wouldn’t need a draft to build a mass army. If the reserve army of capitalism gets big enough, and permanent war is the only job opportunity left…
 
But it won’t be possible to print that much cash without triggering hyperinflation. Gold standard or not, there’s a limit to how much borrowing you can do. Eventually they’ll have crammed so much cash down the world’s throat that it’ll have to be vomited back out, and that’ll be the end of the dollar. It’s difficult to see how they could keep waging high-input, high-tech, high-maintenance imperial war after that.
 
And then there’s Peak Oil…..
 
Also, “victory” in Vietnam, although unachievable, could at least be defined: the continued existence of the South Vietnamese regime, under its own strength, for a long enough time after American withdrawal that America’s honor and credibility could remain plausible.
 
But what constitutes victory in the Afghan theater, let alone the Global War on Terror? They have no idea. “We’ll know it when we see it” is the glib response of administration war hawk Holbrooke. This reply, a combination of know-nothing arrogance and desperation, can be taken as exemplary of the administration’s entire mindset.
 
So now Obama gets to be the decider. Almost no one, including Obama, questions the GWOT or its Afghan theater in principle. In spite of the efforts of McGovern and Feingold, it’s highly unlikely Congress would resist any level of escalation in the foreseeable future. (Although if the health care Progressive Block could hold together, that might embolden them to make another stand. As for the Republicans, don’t be surprised if they cheerfully vote against war measures. As extraordinarily hypocritical as that would be even for them, we know they care nothing for anything but money and political advantage. I imagine they’d be confident they could “vote against the troops” and then go back home and successfully blame it on the Democrats. Their voters would fall for it.) The military, the rightist thugs, and the corporate media are pressing him.
 
This doesn’t look like a situation where Obama fails to take the path of least resistance. But we’ll see.
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