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Americans like to think of their country as different from those run by military regimes. They are only fooling themselves. Ever since the federal government was converted into a national-security state after World War II (without a constitutional amendment authorizing the conversion), it has been the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that have run the government, just like in countries governed by military dictatorships.

Oh sure, the façade is maintained — the façade that is ingrained in all of us in civics or government classes in high school and college: that the federal government is composed of three co-equal, independent branches that are in charge of the government.

But just a façade. It’s fake. It’s a lie.

It’s true that the federal government used to consist of three branches. But that quaint notion disintegrated when the federal government was converted to what is known as a “national-security state” after World War II. Even though it was done without a constitutional amendment, that conversion effectively added a fourth branch of government to the federal government — the national-security branch, which consists of the NSA, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

The addition of that fourth branch fundamentally altered the original three-branch concept, especially because the fourth branch quickly became the most powerful branch. The reason is because ultimately government is force, and the fourth branch is where the most force was concentrated within the new, altered governmental structure.

As law professor Michael Glennon has pointed out in his book National Security and Double Government, the result is a federal government in which the military, the CIA, and the NSA are in charge. They are the ones actually calling the shots. But they permit the other three branches to maintain the façade that they are in charge, including periodically going along with decisions in the other three branches to keep Americans thinking that everything is the same as it always has been.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beyond Cynicism: America Fumbles Towards Kafka’s Castle

December 27, 2017

Beyond Cynicism: America Fumbles Towards Kafka’s Castle

On America’s ‘long emergency’ of recession, globalization, and identity politics.

Credit: alisafarov/Shutterstock

Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic. — Tom McGuane

Can a people recover from an excursion into unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, which include the burdens of empire, onerous debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change.

A sense of gathering crisis, which I call the long emergency, persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our ability to carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is hard for the public to process. It manifested itself first in finance because that was the most abstract and fragile of all the major activities we depend on for daily life, and therefore the one most easily tampered with and shoved into criticality by a cadre of irresponsible opportunists on Wall Street. Indeed, a lot of households were permanently wrecked after the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008, despite official trumpet blasts heralding “recovery” and the dishonestly engineered pump-up of capital markets since then.

With the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in paralysis and dysfunction and the public’s trust in them is at epic lows.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Does Russia Produce ‘Fake News’? Or Does America? Or Both?

October 30, 2017

Does Russia Produce ‘Fake News’? Or Does America? Or Both?

The biggest difference between American and Russian news-reporting has been a simple factual issue between the two sides, on what incident started the ‘New Cold War’ between the U.S. and Russia. (The original Cold War was between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and had an ideological, capitalist-versus-communist, alleged basis, but this one doesn’t — so, it’s not really a ‘New Cold War’; it is quite different, but it might be even more deadly.)

The U.S. and its allies say that what started it was in March 2014 when “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” and “the invasion of Crimea” and Russia’s “conquest of land” by means of that “invasion,” sparked America’s sanctions against Russia and NATO’s military buildup along Russia’s borders; but Russia says that what started it was in February 2014 when Ukraine was victimized, as Russian Television reported it, on 13 March 2014, by:

an armed coup. The Maidan do not appoint these people; rather, it’s the US that does it. It’s enough to look at the newly appointed officials: Parubiy, Gvozd, Nalyvaichenko are all people who followed somebody else’s orders, the orders of the US, not even Europe. They are directly linked to the American intelligence.

In the American account, Ukrainian democracy started when the democratically elected President of Ukraine was overthrown in February 2014; in the Russian account, Ukrainian democracy ended when the democratically elected President of Ukraine was overthrown in February 2014, and only after (and in response to) that, did two regions (Crimea and Donbass, both of which had voted more than 75% for that man) break away from, and refuse to be governed by, the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which was now being imposed upon them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China’s rise, America’s fall

October 26, 2017

China’s rise, America’s fall

Will the rise of China mean the fall of America? In a word, yes. Although decline might be more accurate.

Why do I think this? Because China is about to launch the PetroYuan and when it does the demand for dollars and for dollar denominated debt will shrink. When it does, I question whether the world will be so sanguine about the level of debt that America carries. If that happens then the value of the dollar is in question.

At the moment no matter what level of debt America carries, other countries need dollars. Dollars to pay for oil, since oil is traded in dollars. Dollars for their financial system so their banks can settle contracts for goods and services traded in dollars.

But over the last few years China has been systematically putting in place everything it needs to launch the Yuan as not only a rival to the dollar in trading and settling oil contracts but as a rival to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. At the moment the only rival to the dollar is the Euro. I think it fair to say the relationship between the two currencies and their issuing powers, has been… ‘delicate’. The news that Sadam Hussein was going to start trading his oil in Euros came just a few months before America and its lap dog GB, decided Sadam was a threat to world peace and went to war with him. Something similar happened to Colonel Qaddafi.

Under Qaddafi Libya’s currency was backed by the country’s large holdings of gold and silver. This had allowed Qaddafi to finance, for example, the entire construction of the Great Man Made River without going to Western banks for a single loan. Libya was debt free and owned its own resources and infrastructure.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America: The Dictatress of the World

October 10, 2017

America: The Dictatress of the World

On July 21, 1821, John Quincy Adams, who would go on to become the sixth president of the United States, warned that if America were ever to abandon its founding principle of non-interventionism in foreign affairs, she might well become the dictatress of the world.

Adams issued his warning in a speech he delivered to Congress, a speech that has gone down in history with the title “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.”

Adams was referring to the fact that the United States was founded as a constitutional republic, one whose military forces did not go around the world helping people who were suffering the horrors of dictators, despots, civil wars, revolutions, famines, oppression, or anything else. That’s not to say that America didn’t sympathize with people struggling to experience lives of freedom, peace, and prosperity. It was simply that the US government would not go abroad to slay such monsters.

Here is how Adams expressed it:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

Adams was summing up the founding foreign policy of the United States, a policy of non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations, specifically Europe and Asia.

And that’s the way the American people wanted it. If Americans had been told after the Constitutional Convention that the US government would be intervening around the world, there is no way that they would have ever approved the Constitution.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Empire Destroying Wars Are Coming to America Under Trump – Part 1

October 10, 2017

Empire Destroying Wars Are Coming to America Under Trump – Part 1

There are a variety of reasons Trump supporters voted the way they did in November, but one clear message many found attractive was the idea his administration would be driven by an “America First” doctrine. America first meant a lot of things to a lot of different people, running the gamut from economic populism and immigration, to an avoidance of barbaric and costly overseas wars. The economic populism part was the biggest ruse from day one, a betrayal which (as we had seen under Obama) became undeniable as soon as he started appointing lifelong swamp-dwelling billionaires and Goldman Sachs partners to run his administration. Irrespective of who you elect, Wall Street runs the empire, as Trump proved once again.

The coming massive pivot when it comes to destructive wars abroad will take a little longer, but the writing’s been on the wall for months. I’ve published several posts on the topic, with the most popular one titled, Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire. Here’s an excerpt:

This is not the sort of thing you see in a confident, brave, and civilized nation, it’s the sort of stuff you’d expect to see toward the end. It’s the stuff of craven war-mongers, of dishonest cowards, of a totally deranged and very dangerous media. The signs are everywhere; imperial decline is set to accelerate rapidly in the coming years…

Expect more of all the above as the U.S. empire enters its most devastating phase of collapse. Think about what it might mean for you and your family and prepare accordingly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Tale of Two America’s…Urban Rise, Rural Demise, Rationale to Hyper-Monetize

October 9, 2017

The Tale of Two America’s…Urban Rise, Rural Demise, Rationale to Hyper-Monetize

(The following was written as an outline for a potential book. To this point no publisher has shown interest and time and funds have run out.)

America is in the midst of an ongoing and accelerating shift in demographics and population growth. These trends, long in place, are at a tipping point that are simultaneously driving urban economic growth (plus associated asset bubbles) and rural economic declines (plus associated asset collapses). The spin up and spin down are mutually interconnected, the result of movement in a zero sum game. But for select regions (and rural America in general), there is a surging quantity of sellers and a dwindling quantity and quality of buyers that will result in the primary asset of most Americans, their home, transitioning from an asset to an outright liability.

Many will point to record stock market valuations as an indicator of positive economic and/or business activity to refute my claims. Instead, I argue it is the Federal Reserve and federal government policies, in place as a quasi “life support” for the negatively affected regions and rural America at large, that are driving the asset valuation explosions of equities (chart below, representing all stocks publicly traded in the US) and urban housing. I will outline why the situation in the affected regions will only get worse and thus the Fed believes its hands are tied. Why any amount of normalization will only induce localized collapses across much of the nation. The total market capitalization ($ value) of the Wilshire has nearly doubled the acknowledged “bubbles” of 2000 and 2008 and is likely to continue rising further, precisely due to the worsening issues I detail below.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s Hypocrisy on Democracy

October 5, 2017

America’s Hypocrisy on Democracy

U.S. politicians often lecture other nations about their flawed governance as if American democracy is the gold standard, but anti-democratic measures like gerrymandering belie that self-image, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

An old fear about Islamist political parties entering government is that once in power, even if they had gained their position through democratic means, they would subvert democracy for the sake of maintaining power.

A 1812 political cartoon drawn in reaction to a new state senate election district in Massachusetts, created to favor the Democratic-Republican Party candidates of Governor Elbridge Gerry, whose name became attached to the concept of gerrymandering.

The U.S. government explicitly mentioned the specter of “one man, one vote, one time” in condoning in 1992 the Algerian military’s cancellation of the second round of a legislative election that the Islamic Salvation Front, which had won a plurality in the first round, was poised to win. The military’s intervention touched off a vicious civil war in which hundreds of thousands of Algerians died.

History has indeed offered examples of rulers coming to power through democratic means and then clinging to power through undemocratic means. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany only after his Nazi Party had won pluralities in two successive free elections in 1932. But there is no reason to associate such scenarios with Islamists more so than with parties of other ideological persuasions.

A relevant modern data point is Tunisia, the one Arab country in which democracy took hold as a result of the Arab Spring. The Islamist Ennahdha Party won a free election in 2011 and formed a government but willingly stepped down in 2014 after it lost much of its public support, very much in the mold of how governments in parliamentary democracies in the West vacate office after losing the public’s confidence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s Weapons: “The Dollar and the Drone”

September 15, 2017

America’s Weapons: “The Dollar and the Drone”

It was said that “the guinea and the gallows” were the true instruments of British imperial power.

The guinea represented the coined wealth of Great Britain.

The gallows represented its… constabulary zeal in policing restless natives.

This is the 21st century of course… a time of enlightenment.

Today’s instruments of imperial power are no longer the guinea and the gallows.

No. Today’s instruments of imperial power are “the dollar and the drone.”

The dollar and the drone are America’s weapons.

Like the 19th-century pound (which replaced the guinea), today’s dollar is the world’s reserve currency.

Like the 19th-century pound, the dollar finances some two-thirds of global trade.

And the gallows?

Britain hanged its foreign trouble. America explodes its own in drone attacks.

Here is civilization; here is progress.

The sun eventually sank on the British Empire… the gallows came down… and the pound lost its global reserve status.

The U.S. will have its drones. But is its other weapon, the dollar, close to losing global reserve status?

Recent developments may tell…

The global oil trade has centered on the dollar since 1974, when Saudi Arabia agreed to enthrone the dollar as currency of the oil market.

If it was oil you wanted… it was dollars you needed.

But now China — world’s top oil importer — is preparing to create an oil market that bypasses the dollar entirely.

The plan would let China buy oil from Russia and Iran with its own currency, the yuan.

But the yuan is not a major reserve currency like the dollar.

Under this plan, Russia and Iran would be able to swap yuan for an asset far more desirable than Chinese scraps of paper — gold itself.

Perhaps that explains why China’s been hoarding so much gold in recent years?

Jim Rickards says this system marks the beginning of the end for the petrodollar:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s Fragile Future

September 14, 2017

America’s Fragile Future

The U.S. mainstream’s flailing about over alleged Russian “meddling” in American politics reflects a nation that is rapidly losing its global dominance and fearful of even the slightest challenge, as Gilbert Doctorow explains.

Does the United States have a future as a great power?

President Donald J. Trump and President Emmanuel Macron on July 13, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Twenty years ago posing this question would have seemed absurd. The United States was fully self- confident about its position as the sole surviving superpower in the world. It faced virtually no obstacles or objections to its performance on behalf of the “public good,” a process that supposedly brought order to the world either through the liberal international institutions that it helped to create after World War Two and dominated, or through unilateral action when necessary via “coalitions of the willing” aimed at bringing down one or another disruptive malefactor on a regional stage.

From many voices abroad it heard “amen” to its claims of exceptionalism and farther-seeing vision that came from its standing taller, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it. The “indispensable nation.”

Fourteen years ago, when America prepared for its ill-conceived invasion of Iraq and encountered loud resistance from France and Germany, backed up by Russia, it became possible to wonder whether U.S. global hegemony could last. The disaster that the Iraqi adventure quickly became within a year of George W. Bush declaring “mission accomplished” rolled on and progressively diminished the enthusiasm of allies and others hitherto on the U.S. bandwagon for each new project to re-engineer troublesome nations, to overthrow autocrats and usher in an age of “liberal democracy” across the globe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Freedom and the Fear of Self-Responsibility

August 11, 2017

FREEDOM AND THE FEAR OF SELF-RESPONSIBILITY

Liberty is under a renewed challenge and attack in the contemporary world. From “political correctness” and its accompanying growing totalitarian closed-mindedness at institutions of higher learning in both America and Europe, to the rebirth of economic nationalism with its rejection of freedom of trade, investment and people in places like the United States, along with the continuing stranglehold of the interventionist-welfare state seemingly everywhere, we are facing possible reductions in the degrees of individual liberty still remaining in our lives.

The question is, why? Various attempted answers have been offered by those deeply fearful of this direction, especially in “the West,” where the idea, ideal and practice of personal and economic freedom first emerged and took significant hold over the last three hundred years.

This trend has seemed most peculiar in the face of the dramatic, and “miraculous” transformation of the human condition in the last two hundred years, during which life for the ordinary person has gone from abject economic poverty and political oppression to a world of amazing affluence and material comfort for the vast, vast majority, with the institutionalization (if not always the practice) of respect for and protection of wide array of civil liberties.

The Trend Away From Freedom, Back to Paternalism

This trend, alas, has been going on for some time. For instance, in 1936, the noted Swiss economist and political scientist, William E. Rappard (1883-1958) delivered a lecture in Philadelphia on, “The Relation of the Individual to the State.” Looking back at the trend of political and economic events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Rappard explained:

The revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century . . . were essentially revolts of the individual against the traditional state – expressions of his desire to emancipate himself from the ties and inhibitions which the traditional state had imposed on him . . . which one may define as the emancipation of the individual from the state, to the will of the individual.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The American dystopia didn’t begin with Trump

May 17, 2017

The American dystopia didn’t begin with Trump

Media narrative includes myths fostered by Obama

The dystopian classic, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is streaming on Hulu, sparking lots of false comparisons between the misogynistic dictatorship in the miniseries and the presidency of Donald Trump.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Dystopia is here. It’s not just the “imagined place” of the dictionary definition or a future state of dystopian novels. It is very real and right now, at least for those of us trying to follow national politics.

And it’s not just Donald Trump. It’s Barack Obama, it’s Ted Cruz, it’s the New York Times, it’s Breitbart News. It is an alternate universe detached from the world we live in but intruding into it in painful and dangerous ways.

It is a media narrative of political conspirators colluding with a dictatorial archenemy, of an intemperate and delusional leader overturning the institutions of democracy, of a “deep-state” resistance to constitutional authority.

It is a dystopia of rampant hypocrisy, where obstructing legislation, supporting a law-enforcement official who strays beyond the limits of his authority, or boycotting a president’s appointments is evil and undemocratic until it’s your party that wants to do it.

Two dystopian classics have shot back to the top of best-seller lists because the media suggest the authoritarian surveillance societies they portray have arrived. The 1948 novel “1984” and the 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” are touted as descriptions of where we are headed under Trump.

While the author of “Handmaid,” Margaret Atwood, and the cast of the Hulu miniseries based on it see a Trump administration as the realization of the misogyny depicted in the novel, it’s obvious the U.S. is not about to become a Puritanical theocracy like that in the book.

Critics on both the left and the right dispute the media meme that “Handmaid” is a depiction of the Trump era.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

In Praise of the Reprehensible

June 25, 2016

In Praise of the Reprehensible

Last month’s post here on cultural senility and its antidotes discussed the way that modern education erases the past in order to defend today’s ideologies against the lessons of history. While that post focused on the leftward end of the political spectrum—the end that currently dominates what we still jokingly call “higher education” in today’s America—the erasure of the past is just as common on the other end of things. Between the political correctness of the left and the patriotic correctness of the right, it’s hardly surprising that so many Americans stumble blindly toward the future in a fog of manufactured ignorance, sedulously shielded from the historical insights that could give them a clue about the troubled landscape about them or the looming disasters ahead.

This week I’d like to discuss another aspect of that erasure of the past. I’ll be concentrating again on the way it’s done on the leftward end of things, because that’s the side that’s doing the most to deform American education just at the moment, but I’d encourage my readers to keep in mind that the issue I have in mind is a blade that has two edges and cuts both ways. That issue? The censoring of literature from the past in order to make it conform to the moral notions of the present.

It so happens, for example, that quite a few works of American literature talk about people of color in terms that many people today find extremely offensive. Now of course just as many works of American literature discuss women, sexual minorities, and just about any other group of people you care to name, other than well-to-do, college-educated, white male heterosexual Anglo-Saxon Protestants, in highly insulting terms, but let’s focus on racism for the moment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

DANGER: Obama Ignores Russia’s Valid National Security Worries

June 18, 2016

DANGER: Obama Ignores Russia’s Valid National Security Worries

When the democratically elected President of Ukraine was violently overthrown in February 2014 and replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian regime, not only the residents in the areas of Ukraine that had voted heavily for him (Crimea having voted 75% for him, and Donbass having voted 90% for him) were terrified by what they viewed to be a bloodthirsty new regime, but Russians were, too, because the dictators who were installed made clear their hatred of Russians and even of speakers of the Russian language — one of their first legislative initiatives was to outlaw the Russian language, but the blatant hatred there made the proposal die in Ukraine’s parliament because this new regime needed outside support, and outlawing a language spoken by around half of the nation’s population would have sparked international condemnation.

Shortly after Crimeans voted overwhelmingly on 16 March 2014 to separate from Ukraine and to rejoin Russia, of which Crimea had been a part until the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, the top military commander at NATO, U.S. General Philip Breedlove, said that because Russia had protected Crimeans from invasion by the newly installed Ukrainian regime, which was threatening Crimeans if they were to hold a referendum to separate from Ukraine, “now it is very clear that Russia is acting much more like an adversary than a partner”, and he speculated sarcastically about the “next place where Russian-speaking people may need to be incorporated” into Russia — as if the people of Crimea didn’t have good reason to fear the new regime, and as if speakers of the Russian language in all countries were in the same situation and needed the same protection; and as if NATO itself had any right to comment about this matter at all, since Ukraine isn’t even a member-nation of NATO anyway.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America Excels in Business of Death

June 4, 2016

America Excels in Business of Death

America may lag behind the developed world in many categories, but it is No. 1 in the “merchant of death” business, experiencing a boom in the commerce of boom, especially in areas destabilized by U.S. invasions, notes JP Sottile.

Who says nothing is made in the USA anymore? Certainly not the well-heeled denizens of the State Department’s diplomatic corps. And they should know. That’s because they’re stationed on the frontlines of the ongoing battle to preserve Uncle Sam’s dominant market share of the global weapons trade.

Luckily for the Military-Industrial Complex, it turns out that “Made in the USA” inspires a lot of brand loyalty, even if actual loyalty is often a harder sell (paging Saudi Arabia). To wit, not only was America the world’s leading arms dealer in 2014 with $36.2 billion in sales, but it topped that 35 percent surge in sales over 2013 with yet another profitable spike to $46.6 billion in 2015.

President Barack Obama uncomfortably accepting the Nobel Peace Prize from Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009. (White House photo)

As Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) determined in its recent report on the global arms trade, the United States maintains a commanding “33% share of total arms exports” and is the world’s top seller for five years running. And its customer base includes “at least” 96 countries, which is nearly half of the world’s nations.

A robust 40 percent of those exports end up in the Middle East. Perhaps that’s why the State Department is so darn bullish on the prospects of Uncle Sam’s booming business of selling things that go “boom!”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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