kelsosnuts

MEANWHILE, IN EUROPE…

http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/​08/change-you-dont-have-to-bel​ieve-in.html

This is a very good article on Europe. He definitely gets it. It left me wanting more, though. There is the old IMF banking-cartel game hanging over everything, of course, and I suppose he identifies some of the right political villains if not the financial ones. He correctly positions Germany as the fulcrum here, and while I’m not a great fan of Merkel, I wouldn’t quite put her in the same class of awful as Berlusconi, Papandreou, Sarkozy or Rodríguez-Zapatero.

The German economy is the strong one and not only has not had to finance elite debt profligacy with the same degree of taxes and cutting of services to the people as the rest of Europe has, Merkel’s made it clear to Deutschebank that they are responsible for their own shit here. Politically, though, Germany offers the same choice of corporatism or corporatism that every other European country does (just like the USA and Israel), albeit with enough of a coalition threat from the Greens and Die Linke to keep Merkel’s CD slightly better than the rest. So, you see good stuff like the government’s attitude towards Deutsche, the ban on nuclear power, and their demurral on Libya.

Their Israel policy is bad but that’s an historical and cultural thing they are reflexive about. The problem, in a nutshell, is that since there are so few Jews there, there is no PAN-SEMITIC or anti-Zionist Jewish movement to set things straight. So, the post-WWII guilt thing holds as a matter of law and policy without regard to the Diaspora’s objection to Zionism. Plus, the Turkish-Germans are a mixed-bag and at this point consider themselves GERMAN, so even the Muslims are quiet on Palestine.

There are mixed opinions on Germany going forward. The author’s suggestion that the EU isn’t long for this world and countries better start printing and coining the old currencies are probably true. There isn’t a great deal of patience given the economic strength gap between Germany and the rest of Europe to continue to be the “Sheriff Of The EU” and a power Germany as either part of BRIC or as a 3rd force seems to be where things are headed.

The other power neo-liberal country which is wobbling away from the Anglo-EU-USA axis of evil is Chile. It is every bit as conservative poitically and culturally as Germany, but it is too big and economically strong to continue to be a stooge-state despite the racist Chileno-Francés elite. Sebastián Piñera is no angel but like Merkel he sees the realities which is why they wobble towards a Sub-Continental SUCRE asset-backed monetary zone rather than continue to trust a dying USD as a reserve currency. Their Peso does float, but so will their copper-backed SUCRE. The large population of Diasporal Arabs and Jews in Chile give them a more modern take on Palestine to the point of a real old-fashioned conservative like Piñera recognizng a free, independent, self-determined state of Palestine with pre 1967 borders, sovereignty over East Jerusalem and a contiguity-plus geographical solution.

Politically, Chile is a bit like Western Europe and mostly like Germany in the sense of offering two major parties with a choice of corporatism or corporatism, yet with a Bolivarian (JSM-”Juntos Somos Más”) and market-socialist (Frente Allendista) coalition threat strong enough to keep Piñera from being a total bastard. The institutional “Socialist Party” of Frei and Bachelet is just the same neo-liberal “Socialist” parties of Europe, most notably France, Greece and Spain.

South America and the Bolivarian solution of 1998 and forward — using the local fraud statutes to get out from under the IMF, banking-cartel, cronyism and stooge status and allying themselves with BRIC, brings us back to Europe and the very good question I wish the author had addressed of Iceland and their “Nordic Bolivarianism” of Grimsson and Siguraradottir. This seems to have triggered finally some resistance to the IMF in President Mary McAleese of Ireland although she’s a bit too late to the party. Iceland was late, too, but it may be TOO late for Ireland unless Germany lets it all go and the PEOPLE THEMSELVES REALLY TAKE OVER.

If that doesn’t happen, Spain will be the test case come January of the OVERT police-state in Europe, with their civil liberties laws being harmonized as much as possible with those of the USA.

THE INADAQUACY OF DENNIS KUCINICH, episode #67,875

This was a response to a response to Max Keiser’s SILVER LIBERATION ARMY post on David DeGraw’s FASCISTBOOK page.  I was pleased with it and feel it’s wasted on FASCISTBOOK and really fits better as a full blog post on THE REVOLT.

http://silverliberationarmy.com/

http://kucinich.house.gov/UploadedFiles/NEED_ACT.pdf

Jill Cohn: The answer is Kucinich’s HR6550-have you read it? Gives the right to print money back to the congress & abolishes fractional lending. See http://www.theamericandreamfilm. com

My answer:

I read the bill and while it has some good provisions in it, it is not even an answer I, a non-US national, find sufficient to control the problems the USA monetary system, banking system, and CFTC rules cause the rest of the world. That’s to me. To a US resident, it’s way less of an answer. All it really would to is to harmonize the USA monetary system with that of most nations of the world in that it would have a public central bank under “ministry of finance” control. Even that is in question given the passage that refers to the purchase of equity in the constituent member banks of the Federal Reserve. The issue of fractional lending (which I consider way too polite a term and prefer “LEVERAGE FRAUD”) is not well-confronted in the bill and, moreover, no matter what the bill says about there existing no right of individuals to create money, the CFTC OTC rules make enforcement impossible without a judicial challenge to those rules and a win at the Supreme Court level. Another problem is that all of the reforms (which are good and well-meant) in the bill would require an Executive Branch decree in order to return a privilege of agency granted to Congress in the Constitution. So, it’s all really whistling in the dark and depending on the clearance of some very high material hurdles. Despite the modest improvements that would come about should all those hurdles be cleared, NONE of the problems the SLA has cited are addressed at all.

But I’m not in the SLA, so here are more of my problems with the bill many of which dovetail with the SLA’s (1) The monetary-system would remain debt-based
(2) There is no provision for the liquidation of the present debt-load, let’s call it $20 TLN, to be conservative given the present debt-load and the debt which would accumulate during the process of passing this legislation. (3) There is no provision to unwind the derivative contracts of much greater notional principal which sits atop the debt load. Let’s call that figure $2 QUADRILLION.
(4) My numbers (2) and (3) are really not correct, strictly speaking, because there is a way to do it, but to do it would create an apocalypse — DEFAULT ON THE EXTANT DEBT, FORCING THE UNWINDING OF THE DERIVATIVE CONTRACTS.
(4x) Default really is the only unilateral action because to do anything else would violate the “takings clause” for US holders of US debt and would be acts of war against foreign governmental holders of US debt
(5) There is nothing that addresses the corruption inherent in the banking-cartel/US government/Federal Reserve relationship in which all three of these entities are really the same and thus not even highly-leveraged bank speculation bears any risk at all of loss (while the counter-party to those transactions do). The banks collect from the counter-parties should they win and are given some prize by the Fed (themselves in other words) and/or the Treasury if they lose!
(6) There is nothing in the bill that addresses the problem of inability of people and businesses outside that triumvirate to do voluntary business or trade and settle voluntarily because of the militarized law-enforcement powers over individual voluntary transactions granted by the triumvirate to itself via the US government’s Executive Branch: (a) the powers assumed by USA v Union Bank Of Switzerland (NA)/Banque Union de Switerland, S.A. (b) USA PATRIOT ACTS 1,2 & 3 (c) RICO (d) UIGEA (e) ·KYC” (f) F.A.T.C.A.T. (g) all of those powers unnamed but assumed under an umbrella we’ll call the “War On Terror” which include the US Executive Branch’s various signing statements, executive orders, emergency powers, it’s interpretations of the War Powers Act and the UCOMJ
(6) there is very pleasant language in the bill with regard to unemployment and the American middle-class and so forth, but without a separate act of Congress a right or even entitlement to full employment is neither constitutional nor in any way materially feasible.

Fortunately for me, but not for your or Dennis Kucinich, UNASUR-ALBA and most of MERCOSUR see these issues the same way the SLA does, including everything I´ve written up to this point, but primarily THE NEED FOR ASSET-BASED NOT DEBT-BASED MONEY as voluntarily agreed-to media of exchange and store of value. Some of the UNASUR-ALBA nations have gone so far as to ENCOURAGE private, voluntary transactions between people and/or businesses apart from their current USD-reserve debt-based monetary systems but rather with “Trueque” (Barter), with a tax holiday kicker. Yes, HUGO CHÁVEZ=RON PAUL.

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All posts are opinions meant to foster comment, reporting, teaching & study under the “fair use doctrine” in Sec. 107 of U.S. Code Title 17. No statement of fact is made or should be implied. Ads appearing on this blog are solely the product of the advertiser and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BuehlahMan’s Revolt or WordPress.com

On anomie, Ingmar Bergman, Oprah Winfrey, Harold Pinter, Tom Dwan, David DeGraw, Black Agenda Report and Zionism

This got absolutely no love or respect or even disagreement or response of any kind on FASCISTBOOK.

I guess that means its perfect fare for B’Man’s Revolt.

LANGUAGE AND THE RON PAUL LITMUS TEST

I have a basic problem which has nothing whatsoever to do with Ron Paul. It is a problem of language. I am quite simply not used to speaking or writing contemporary American English. I only speak it on the radio show and with you. I only write it on FB or blogs. My American friends other than you, Torrance, Jay and Oren, with whom I text or speak with on a daily basis are all professional gamblers and that is an English which is very different from normal American English. The vocabulary is peculiar to the discipline and even the sentence structure and verb tenses are different. Someday, when there’s time, I´ll do shirt-pocket linguist thing and set forth with examples of what I mean.

I have come to discover that contemporary American English when you don’t speak it often is an extraordinarily complex language. It is always layered and twisted with this connotation and that tangential reference and invariably produces mis-communication among practiced native speakers! When politics is the subject, it´s a fucking mess. This is not your problem or anyone else’s. It’s my problem. Andino/Criollo Spanish is a very direct language with words having the normal series of meanings one would find in the rankings of usage in any good dictionary.

Public figures do have certain connotations to each speaker of this dialect, but the layering and knotting and twisting is nowhere near what it is in American English. There is also less reflexivity and fewer knee-jerk responses to a name, such as to take the two which seem to drive Americans crazy instantly: Ron Paul and Hugo Chávez.

My view of Ron Paul is actually quite similar to yours and I know you are an exception to what I´ve written in that you always mean what you say and say what you mean. Your opinions are always well-considered. I find Ron Paul to be a very intelligent, serious, honest, and gentlemanly guy, whose views on imperial corporatism inclusive of such violations of common decency as Zionism I share. Like you, I don’t agree with his free-market utopianism. He has never properly explained the end-game of it. I know he doesn´t approve of the wealth concentration in the USA, but his utopianism would merely freeze it place.

I might differ from you on the issue of his view of regulations of corporations but only in one sense. He would apply the concept of civil and criminal fraud more broadly than it is done in the USA now. That would include such things as bankster and Federal Reserve leverage-fraud and polluters, for example, would be guilty of defrauding their community in his concept of it.

I agree it doesn´t go far enough and I certainly disagree with him on such things as the National Health as you know. I am a National Health absolutist. Furthermore, I don’t believe any human being should have to go without food, water, clothing, shelter, education, and a chance at meaningful employment and certainly a stake in society. I don´t believe a human being should have to be a slave to either THE BOSS or THE PARTY or THE COLLECTIVE in order to qualify for these basic necessities OR ELSE!

In that sense, there really is no ideology which has a planned end-game that isn´t a pure fantasy, just like Ron Paul’s free-market utopianism.

Where you and I have a disagreement here is only on the definition of the term “neo-liberal”. My sense is that Ron Paul is most definitely NOT a neo-liberal because he’s not a statist, he’s a libertarian. Neo-liberalism involves the state, quasi-governmental structures, and NGOs forcing a NON-VOLUNTARY UNFREE-MARKET CAPITALISM UPON PEOPLE IN ORDER TO SERVE THE GREED OF ELITES.

That might or might not be an outcome of the practical implementation of Paul’s free-market utopianism. It certainly leaves no person protected in the ways I’d prefer as a baseline, but at the same time would not involve these governmental structures, etc., with an a priori task of robbing the people to feed the greed of the elites. Quite the contrary, those types of stooges to the elites would be BANNED in a republic of Ron Paul’s conception. Call him a mis-guided utopian for sure, but he is not a neo-liberal because, quite plainly, he is absolutely oppposed to imperial corporatism.

I also agree with you that no American politician who is part of the 1-party system can fully be trusted not to shift from whatever core values the politician had to a position of active or passive participant in the advancement of American imperial corporatism. Dennis Kucinich is the example par excellence of that. Given that Paul’s excellent work in getting an agreement on very good core principles among all the 2008 off-party candidates, and his dumping of Kucinich in favor of Ralph Nader in the right-left alliance he always seeks, I would be more comfortable with him if he were to become an OFFICIAL member of the Libertarian Party and leave the Republicrats.

I have no familiarity with this Lincoln character at all who showed up on the thread with a point that wasn´t terrible exactly but was not germane to that discussion and to me was yet another example of an American knee-jerk liberal rule which states that ONE MUST IMMEDIATELY REGISTER ONE’S DISAPPROVAL OF RON PAUL IN TOTO.

My life has absolutely nothing to do with the socio-political norms of the American debate. My only interest is that American military and contractors get the fuck out of every other nation and allow other people liberty and self-determination. It gains me no points to have an a priori view of any public figure, anywhere in the world. I have those I like less and those I like more, but they have to prove themselves to me for me to have an opinion. Rafael Correa, for example, has proven himself very very good for any number of actions, starting with re-nationalizing the water supply which had been forcibly sold to Vivendi during the dictatorial Noboa regime under IMF diktak, booting out the US military, refusing to honor the fraudulent IMF “debt,” and most recently thwarting an American coup attempt non-violently. Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, and American stooge, has proven himself a monster — a master of genocide who will probably pass Stalin and Hitler combined in genocide before he meets his maker.

But I don´t say Correa´s “good” and Kagame’s “bad” as part of some point-scoring system of what ideology one has. I based those opinions on the two mens´deeds.

All posts are opinions meant to foster comment, reporting, teaching & study under the “fair use doctrine” in Sec. 107 of U.S. Code Title 17. No statement of fact is made or should be implied. Ads appearing on this blog are solely the product of the advertiser and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BuehlahMan’s Revolt or WordPress.com

MY RESPONSE TO AN AMERICAN LEFTIST’S AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

http://www.zcommunications.org/when-facts-don-t-matter-by-paul-street

THIS ATHEIST SUPPORTS B´MAN´S SABBATH WORDS

IOr, having drawn inspiration for this from the thread following B´Man´s “Jobs” piece, and stealing from Malcolm X,I could title this “The Vessel or The Shekel.”

I may be an atheist, but I also believe that it is impossible to be an atheist without having read religious text and understanding and respecting religion. Big time religion is another Imperial corporatist con-game. Benito Mussolini admitted himself openly. The Church was one of the pillars of his concept of “fascism,” the others being the largest corporations and banks, the government and bureaucracy, the military and media. Sound like someplace you know pretty well?

So, I have no business with big religion, but I have no problem with the concept that “God is Love.” I live with a devout Cathoic woman and her religion and my study have brought us to the same morality so I have to figure that while I´m not bothering with Deuteronomy or Leviticus, I like the idea of Jesus whether in metaphysical form, as historical reformist rabbi, or main composite symbol in a larger allegory.

Whether “Prince Of Peace” as in English or “El Dios De Amor” in Spanish, the words are powerful. As she explains her understanding of Jesus to me, he is the embodiment of love in its purest form. While I´m not religious, I take comfort in those words.  And unless self-defense is required, when revolutionary values are on the table, I´m for peace and love. No one has convinced me yet that political violence is the way to stop political violence.

I don’t know of too many violent revolutions that produced anything good no matter if they won or lost. I am the great great nephew of two Bolsheviks who fought on the winning side of the Russian Revolution and they soon discovered that the new boss was just as bad as the old boss, if not worse, and that despite all the Leninist and Stalinist lies, the problems they fought and killed to correct were worse in the USSR: bigotry, cronyism, totalitarianism, arbitrary justice, corruption, class systems, and all that. And they got out as fast as they could.

French Revolution? Right idea. Well-strategized. Well-executed. Horrible outcome. Jacobin Party was worse than the USSR Communist Party (almost as bad as Khmer Rouge) and without even any of the lies about a workers´paradise. And what followed that? Return to the exact monarchical system the revolution overturned only with worse imperial aims and they ended up getting routed by the Brits.

Orange Revolution: Failure led by a John Hagee-type with the authority and taste for torture and murder.

Vietnamese Revolution: Oppressive authoritarian French colonial and local stooge government replaced by putatively egalitarian communist government soon after victory turned into somewhat less oppressive capitalist government with some democratic features and ally of the same empire which fought it at great cost to both sides, with the knock-on effect of truly brutal and ultimately worthless, useless, “revolutions” in Cambodia and Laos. Because I know so many American veterans of that war, and because I know so many Vietnamese immigrants to the USA who escaped either conscription by the South or retribution by the North, I have a lot of trouble writing anything even slightly positive about the results 35 years on.

Chinese Revolution: Monarchical Dynasty replaced by a different perversion of Marxism, slightly less oppressive than the USSR, but with many of the same features. Any concept of egalitarianism scrapped almost immediately leaving a Maoist government and all its tender mercies like “The Cultural Revolution” and “The Great Leap Forward”.  Steady improvement after Mao´s death to what obtains now, an intelligent, well-run, plutocratic oligarchy, without the wanton governmental violence, and part of a loose configuration of economic powers which stand as the one of the true “policemen of the world” against the trouble caused by the worst banksters and gangsters in the EVIL EMPIRE, but by no means a free or fair society.

Mexican Revolution: A just cause, a fair fight, a mixed result at the end leaving a country with all the potential in the world but having devolved into a 1-party, corrupt, fake democracy but real client state status of the USA which with NAFTA and a weak president and government is a full-on stooge, having replaced Noriega´s Panamá as the world´s cocaine middleman. Still though, it boasts one of the world´s more sophisticated cultures in one of the world´s most important cities, a real but imperfect democratic-republican system with true governing and opposition partie, and a vibrant region of dissent which has had a strong effect on taming the most brutal elements of society and is the conscience of the opposition party. Not terrible and a less violent product than any of the others but maybe because while the part of the Revolution liberating it from Spain was successful the part liberating it from the USA was a failure.

American Revolution: Not a revolution, really. Merely, a series of tax protests turned into a war between the parent nation and a once-friendly colonial master.  Very good result because of the luck of having 500 of the greatest legal and philosophical minds in world history in the same place at the same time, a unified populace, and superior military strategy. Always had, though, its own imperialist sensibilities revealed best by the systemic genocide, oppression and theft of the fruit of the indigenous tribes´labor and the most brutal and longest lasting slavery system of any other colonial power.

In its creation as a new nation, the best of those legal minds and Englightenment philosphers (“The Anti-Federalists” Franklin, Henry, Jefferson, Madison and Williams) lost the back-room political battle to “The Federalists” like John Adams, Gwinnett, Hamilton, Monroe, and Washington. This loss, briefly corrected in part by John Quincy Adams and in full by Andrew Jackson until his assassination with no Jacksonian power of note to follow until the decent but ineffective Grover Cleveland, left the seeds of the EVIL EMPIRE of today in foreign and domestic policy.

Nicaraguan Revolution: One of the less bloody in the actual fighting part, but despite Daniel Ortega at his best trying his hardest, the USA was too powerful for the Sandinista concept to ever have a chance.  It´s not a terrible place now in Ortega´s democratically-elected government, but he is neither the thinker nor the leader he once was.  Nicaragua, while a legitmate part of the Latin wave, is its most subordinate member.

The complex, brainy, Ortega who used every tool at his disposal from “magic leadership” to showing up at an American Corporatist convention of the Young President´s Society (CEO´s under 40) and annoucing that the propaganda was wrong and Nicaragua was open to fair trade and for-profit American business investment. Clever move, but sharing the wealth with the host country as well as Europe, was not what the Reagan Administration had in mind, exactly. They were “anti-communists” for show,imperialists for dough.

Ortega may be an iconic figure to Nicaragua now and in that sense he´s has some value but the years have made him less wise not more and in fact one could say Ronald Reagan´s domestic social policy was slightly more “liberal” than Ortega´s is now. Fresh leadership, but in synch with modern Latin America, is necessary in Nicaragua as it begins its biggest infrastructure project yet, another isthmian canal and trade project. It is also necessary because of the overthow of Zelaya in Honduras, who was a very good center-left president, populist and pro-working class as well as encouragement of growth, development and capital investment. I don´t believe Honduras is even a country anymore, as it not recognized by more than half of the other countries on Earth.  It is merely a gangster state as far as Hondureños are concerned and yet another military staging complex as far as the EMPIRE is concerned. With Colom´s government of Guatemala overthrown in a silent coup and Guatemala now a smaller version of Northern Mexico for CIA drug-running, strong leadership is needed in Nicaragua to go along with the Mauricio Funes government in El Salvador if Central America is to stay a part of the Latin Wave as it becomes more and more important.

Cuban Revolution:  The fight was fair. The violence limited. And the reasoning was consistent if not to everybody´s taste. Your guess is as good as mine, but it´s hardly a template for a New America.  It has not lived up to much of the utopian communist or instrumental socialist promises of Fidel Castro that´s for sure.  It´s an oligarchy, albeit a fairer one than most. The relentless USA efforts at destroying Cuba are probably the reasons Cuba is something of a failed state.  At this point, having lost its symbolism of cold war USSR intrusion into the USA´s sphere of influence because the Miami exiles are split on independent Cuba, it´s something of a sad sack and nothing of a threat. Other than a old deal which allowed Guantanamo Bay to remain in US hands, Cuba, which has also begged for foreign investment with not much in the way of success, is a burden on everybody.

I don´t think he´d ever admit this in public but the facial expressions and body language give it away every time: Hugo Chávez feels compelled to always pay special tribute to Castro as if it were Cuba which was powerful and Venezuela the empty husk, and Chávez hates doing that. He´s a good president, maybe a great president, but his ego pretty big. On the other hand, he takes one for the team with these displays at UNASUR-ALBA meetings because neither Rafael Correa, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Pepe Mujica, Fernando Lugo, Mauricio Funes, and especially not Dilma Rousseff (who actually WAS a Marxist true-believer as a young woman) are in any hurry to go through these motions.  It´s a job best (maybe worst left to Ortega) if Chávez ever grows weary of it.  Maybe Evo Morales could do it. He´s extremely polite and very into symbolism but of course he´s not orator that Chávez is (few are).

Bolivarian Revolution I: Not terrible in that it wasn´t as violent as any of the others I´ve mentioned.  Good that it was grounded in the same Englightenment philosophy the American Revolution was, but following Bolivar,Venezuela could not really sustain independence and evolution. By the time the Bolivarian Revolution II came along with Hugo Chávez — via the ballot not the bullet — Venezuela had become a corrupt 1-party client state of the USA, not as bloody as Chile, Paraguay,El Salvador, Argentina and Colómbia have been but always a country riddled with economic and social problems.

REVOLUTION 2011

Both my analytical view and my moral values tell me that B’Man´s right and the chances for any good to come of violent revolution in the USA are 0%. The US government, which has at an ever increasing rate been removing basic rights and liberties from its citizens and residents to the point that it is a police state and the most militarized, most sadistically sophisticated of any yet, would love the opportunity to put it down quickly, violently, and symbolically to close the window on any thoughts of another attempt.

They´ll do it anyway as the food and water riots begin with the increasing unemployment, hidden inflation, and hyperinflation awaiting the first sharp move downward for the USD in the world´s f/x markets. Goldilocks and the rest of the banksters have already bet 6 times the value of the Earth against the USD, anyway. And how can you blame them? They´re greedy bastards and they just like us can see what endless commitment to war alongside psychopathic monetary policy like “quantitative easing” portends.

Though we have certainly not been the first to say this, the only available kind of “revolution” creating a New America, I think B´Man and I see the narrow way through more clearly than those who advocate violence as a means for change.

I´d recommend reading: David DeGraw on modern American revolution, the Kevin Zeese-David Beito-Ralph Nader-David DeGraw book and blogs and listen to the interviews, Cindy Sheehan´s “Revolutionary Communities” idea, watching Michael Badnarik´s 43-part video (each segment 10-minutes) on the Constitution which closes with his thoughts on alternative peoples´currency, George Orwell´s “Homage To Catalonia,” as well as what has been happening in Barcelona in the news and maybe as far back as the Maragell era which ended when he was term-limited in 2007 or as far back as forever, the history of the Prague rebellion, the history of the Diggers, all about permaculture, and in fact anything about the history and news in alternative peoples´currency because B´Main nailed it.

My referring to the Diggers´rebellion in England reminded me of this song and while Billy Bragg has become an Obamamón, he sang this as an idealistic young man as opposed to the credulous or calculating middle-aged man he became.

The US EMPIRE AND POLICE STATE only have power if their dollar has power and their dollar only has power if people believe it has power or accept that it has power.  The Federal Reserve and Treasury themselves say that the dollar is “backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Of America.” Well, does anyone think that the USA has any real credit or is deserving of any faith at all?

I don´t know how many times I´ve written it but the whole rest of the world is lined up to be the 2nd country to kick America when it´s down. I can´t think of a better FIRST COUNTRY to start it off than the ACTUAL USA, NOT THE GOVERNMENT OR INSTITUTIONS BUT THE PATRIOTIC, PEACEFUL, FREEDOM-LOVING, CRITICALLY-THINKING, INFORMED AMERICAN PEOPLE.

The sheeple will have to shift for themselves. They are no more your responsibility than you are BRIC, Venezuela, Iran, Iceland, Turkey, Switzerland, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, or “Greater Andorra”´s responsibility.  They have their own problems with the EMPIRE and judging by Chávez´s telling the USA to fuck itself and foget any free CITGO home heating oil,during one of the coldest winters in recent memory, is a sign that while he´s a decent human being, he like every other head of state in conflict with the EMPIRE is way too busy with those tasks to bother with people who won´t help themselves. He already led a peaceful revolution of his own people.

And he´s just one example. It´s great knowing there´s an Armageddon stopper out there in BRIC but Americans have to do this for each other and in a way that´s unified, organized, and culturally appropriate for a pretty diverse populace.

Go and do likewise, friends.

THE CLIENT STATE PROBLEM IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01102011.html

This whole essay is outstanding.  Roberts covers the waterfront in a short post and doesn´t waste a word.  His final words were especially compelling to me because I have similar points of view in the Colombian and Israeli press and I agree with them and with Roberts.

“Puppet governments are caught between the empire’s power and the power of the local population. To the extent that Europeans have a moral conscience, they will find America’s foreign policy increasingly repugnant. To the extent that Muslim solidarity grows, the Muslim puppet governments that support America’s and Israel’s massacres of Muslims will find themselves threatened from within.

The American Empire is on the rocks, despite its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and its control over the foreign and domestic policies of its subservient puppet states in  Western and Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, parts of Africa, the Middle East, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Baltic states, Georgia, Kosovo, Mexico, Central America, Columbia, and, no doubt, others.

A country that is the font of war and oppression, whose dominance rests on the weak reed of puppet states, and whose economy is collapsing will not long remain dominant.”

Because of where I live and because of my orientation as a committed anti-Zionist Jew, I´ve focused on Colómbia and Israel in my reading, but I agree with Roberts especially with regard to Europe that the model of the future I´ve long forecasted will happen and the “Obama Deception” has accelerated its arrival.  This is hardly a new idea of mine.

One of the things I wrote at THE PITCHFORK that was key in my getting the boot (luckily, B´Man had already made the point that I was wasting my time writing there and that B´MAN´S REVOLT was a more appropriate spot for my views) was in September of 2009.  I wrote that George W. Bush as former HEAD OF SALES of the Empire had in that role a way of presenting himself that was very familiar in Colómbia and Israel to the government, people, violent stooges, and rebels alike.  It conformed to a model everyone was used to, but that Obama´s way of presenting himself as HEAD OF SALES of the Empire was so different that it would cause much more violence yet perhaps lead to changing those two of the very worst client states for the better down the line.  Those changes would not be because Obama was better than Bush.  They would be because Obama was much, much worse and everything about him would be so disorienting and produce so much more bloodshed that it would not be rebel victories that would cause the changes.  Nor should anyone hope for that even.  There is nothing great about the FARC/ELN in the slightest and precious little that is tolerable about Hamas, though they are the “least worst” of those two rebel forces.

A point or two of aside regarding the propaganda one hears about Venezuela and Iran which make them the wished-for sites of the next two USA imperial wars of natural resource conquest.  The biggest share of the propaganda involves Venezuela´s purported support of the FARC/ELN and Iran´s purported support of the violent extremist and Wahabbist elements in Hamas.  In a word: manure.  Do Americans realize what Venezuela and Iran are? They are economic powerhouses which sit on the first concentric circle around BRIC.  Trade with Venezuela is critical to Colómbia´s survival and Israel has nothing to fear from Iran because the last thing Iran needs is war with Israel.  That would destroy its economy and the better elements of the entire social fabric of the nation.  Iran needs its large Persian Jewish autonomous community badly for many reasons, the principal one being the role that community plays in applied and research medicine in Iran.  Although at this point relations between Persian Jews and Israel are so bad that I wonder sometimes if they don´t want a war with Israel much more than even the most extreme Muslims do! (Where else but on B´Man´s Revolt would you read something like that and know that you could trust its veracity?)  Mostly, though, BRIC and all its trade and diplomatic allies need peace and stability in Venezuela and Iran desperately.  There is too much money at stake for all concerned.  There is too much money at stake for all concerned for Venezuela or Iran to be involving itself in the internal affairs of Colómbia or “Israel.”  Everyone has heard Chávez and Ahmedinajad express points of view on the pathologies of their neighbors but both of them were even neutral on Colómbia´s and Israel´s elections, let alone getting involed in providing material support for rebel forces.  Think this through for a moment.  What material purpose would that serve?  Away from the corridors of power in this and germane to Roberts´s piece, the PEOPLE of both nations want peace for all the reasons any normal nation wants peace. The home-base of the empire is pathological, not normal.

Nobody with a conscience can fail to feel great sympathy for the victims of the decades´long civil wars in both Colómbia and “Israel,” but that´s neither Roberts´s point nor mine.  When I saw Obama after all the bullshit he said during the campaign cheerleading the ethnic-cleansing in Gaza in December of 2008 and January 2009 followed by that irresponsible speech in Cairo of all places in the spring of 2009, plus his disgusting speeches and comportment at the 209 Summit Of The Americas followed by the overthrow of the Zelaya government in Honduras and the implementation of his version of Plan Colombia which made Bush´s look Gandhi-esque, I knew something very strange was happening.  I was also reading at the time that at the Corporation-Client level, isntructions from Obama (designed of course by Brzezinski, Kissinger, Gates, and all the masters of war and the banking cartel profiting from such things) to the paramilitary forces in the clients, the AUC and IDF, respectively were to increase output of death.

So, I did a critical-thinking exercise and put myself, or tried to anyway, in the mind of a paramilitary.  Whether AUC or IDF, these people are trained, affectless, and experienced killers and that´s all they are.  That is all they know.  That is their reason to be.  There really isn´t much in the way of spoils of civil war for them.  They are good at that one task: genocide.  I tried to imagine if I were a paramilitary if I would enjoy the ultra-sadism.  I couldn´t see myself taking any extra pleasure in it beyond doing well at the only thing I do well.  I don´t have a cause I believe in.  I don´t REALLY hate those whom I kill and maim and torture and displace because I have no reason to hate them.  I feel nothing for them one way or the other but these are my orders, this is the way it is, and this is what I´m trained at, good at and the only thing I care about.

There are others among us who do have a `politicial view or two and I´ve heard them all from my associates and my bosses and my government, and especially from all of our colonial American overlords but they mean nothing to me.  They are words that sound like those coming out of Charlie Brown´s teacher´s mouth.  I am focused on my assignments and given what they are I don´t expect to have a career in government or the military or the police waiting for me.  I expect to be dead before I´m 30, anyway.

Then, something strange happens.  I am hearing public speeches by this new American president about “looking forward, not backward,” and “changing the tone” and “new beginnings” and when it´s  translated for me it sounds like while the civil war may go on there may not be enough money coming from the USA to pay all of us and I hear my mates discussing opportunities to be mercenaries in Africa and how much money there is in that but I know that those opportunities are very few.  I hope it´s the typical political bullshit and double-talk one always hears from the US government but that hasn´t changed anything for me yet, so I´ll expect to continue what I do.

But now something even stranger and really disorienting and upsetting is happening.  The new American president has taken a very keen interest in the specific thing I do even more than the last couple did or the ones before them did when my father was a para.  This new American president has become very close to our leaders and has complained that we are not doing our jobs effectively enough, that we need to kill more, maim more, torture more, and take more risks for the same money.  I believe we are already doing the best we can and have increased our throughput which the statistics show.

I´m worried again about how I´ll take care of my family if my unit is disbanded because this Amerian president, who has no experience with what I do at all, who was never even in the military or police, and I´ve heard when he was my age he was afraid to register for the draft when his country was at war with Lebanon.  And THIS PERSON has the ultimate say over me.  He doesn´t know how complicated and often difficult this work is.  3 generations now of men in my family have been paras and still the enemy exists and the tasks never end.

I don´t understand this but I know I don´t like the new American president.  He makes me think he sides with the enemy and he makes me think that I am not deserving of the only work I´ve ever had.  I come to think of HIM as the enemy.  I come to think of all Americans as the enemy.  They don´t speak Spanish(Hebrew).  They don´t have to face even what the fancy people here have to face when my targets are in the cities.  They are not like me.

I don´t like Piedad Córdoba(Jeffery Halper). I think she(he) is a traitor but she(he) is one of my people and has spoken to me.  She(he) has even arranged for some men who were taken by the enemy to be released and didn´t even demand that they not return to us.  This Obama fellow has done nothing for us other than criticize our manhood when he is not what I consider a man.  But this doesn´t stop with him.  The other soft American politicians I hated who used to be traitors to their country and who defied their president and ours and would be involved in trying to end my work are also now requiring I do more than I´m capable of doing.  The newspapers write about how good this is because these people are pinto(tunkele).  The pintos(tunkelim) in my unit are like me.  They don´t understand this either.  Maybe the enemy doesn´t understand either.  What can I do to show I´m worthy of this? I can´t think of anything other than killing myself or hoping I die. I´ve never been afraid before.  The enemy is lucky.  They are ruled by no one from the outside.  They can keep for themselves the land we fight over.  I don´t know what has happened in our government either.  President Santos (Prime Minister Netanyahu) does not value our work as the others used to.

I cannot defect and betray the AUC (IDF).  Those like Córdoba (Halper) have no power to make this stop.  I am seasick. I want to kill everyone who made me this way.  I don´t care about the enemy.  The enemy will always be there.  I have to kill the enemy but the enemy understands why because they have to kill us and we understand why.  What has happened? Did we really fail?  Or were we failed?

So, having done this exercise, I have to wonder how much longer the paramiltary forces everywhere on Earth will continue to fight these civil wars against their own people for no cause nor private gain, but only because of the DURATION of them and the limited opportunities available to people who didn´t choose the life they have but who under different circumstances could go as far as their abilities would take them in a free, self-governing, self-determining nation, able to actually feel patriotism without seeing violence as its only expression.

If the EMPIRE is not stopped, millions of these people around the world, are going to put this all together and understand that their “enemies” are THEM but the American Empire and their stooges in local government are not THEM.  It´s absurd to think that the AUC and FARC/ELN or IDF and Hamas would UNITE.  They would still kill each other, but it would be about something tangible to each side.  They would not be Brzezinski´s chess pieces.  There´s nothing so great about that either.  Nobody liked a unified Yugoslavia under USSR rule, maybe least of all the Serbs because they felt betrayed having given so much of everything to the USSR.  The difference there is that with the fall of the USSR, the USA took 1 1-2 sides in the civil wars with the result being just more deaths and a new Muslim client state of far less “practical” use than Egypt, Libya or Syria.  The partitioning of Yugoslavia was merely practice for the long wars in Iraq and South Central Asia, with the lessons learned by the EMPIRE being: (1) this is a Peak Oil, post 9/11, world, make the goal of it worth a LOT (2) choosing a side is fine for public relations at the start but it´s better to have ALL sides even if it puts the EMPIRE´S military forces at much, much, much greater risk and carries the potential of unintended consequences like thermo-nuclear war.

Roberts has given a short list of the conflict zones.  And it’s not like there´s any fantasy in anything I´ve written because these violent power arrangements have existed throughout history, ancient and contemporary.  I´ve seen the signs of exactly that which I´ve described.  Colómbian president Juan Manuel Santos of the far-right PDLU has hardly been the monster everybody expected, him having been a death-squad leader and all.  He´s been so rational, his predecessor and soon to be Georgetown University political science professor, Alvaro Uribe, has called him a traitor and Obama and Santos have not gotten along at all.  Obama want a death-squad leader as president of Colómbia, so much so that James Carville was dispatched to run Santos´s campaign, but Santos doesn´t want to be impeached or ruin his economy by starting a war with Venezuela.  Even “Israel” is a little more wobbly than usual.  I think Obama, Biden and Hillary are far more Zionist and Israel-expansionist than Netanyahu is and that was just an impression until Norman Finkelstein more or less confirmed it saying while there has never been a “good” Israeli PM or government, and today´s political alignment is among the worst in its history, of the top 4, Barak, Avigdor Lieberman, Livni and Netanyahu, the latter is by far the least worst and maybe the least worst in “Israeli” “history” because of all of THEM, Netanyahu is much more of a talker than a killer.  Not that Professor Finkelstein LIKES Netty and not that he´s saying Netty isn´t a killer.  He´s merely saying that given all the opportunities for him to have the lowest body count says something.

I happen to believe that the finesses of Barack Obama which work so beautifully in creating a now UNFRIENDLY FASCISM in the USA and completely splintering the American people, has had something of the opposite effect elsewhere in the world that the EMPIRE is waging war, participating in client state proxy wars and civil wars, and in other areas (e.g. East Congo, Cote D’Ivoire) where the EMPIRE sees violence and assumes potential for their benefit so has thrown gasoline on a big fire.  Having Obama follow Bush (whom I believe was hardly the fool he seemed to be, just look at his self-presentation before and after his presidency and compare it to his self-presentation during his presidency…and how much of Bush as president did the world really see, anyway? It was always the same 6 clips in a loop) was clever in its way.  You have to give the elites credit for coming up with a way of gaining the loyalty of 90% of African-Americans who are now far more opposed to peace, freedom and social justice than even the Tea people are and would be fierce opponents of any non-partisan or alternative party-caucus peoples´mass movements of direct dissent and civil disobedience.  Evidence: watch any video of a “Black Is Back Coalition For Peace, Justice and Reparations” rally and half the delegates are White and I´ll bet a whole bunch of them are either libertarian or classical conservatives.

You have to give them credit as well for removing all shame from unconditional support of illegal wars across all identifiable demographic and psycho-graphic groups.  The master stroke was the narrative that the USA is fighting their main wars for feminist reasons to free Muslim women.

The truth: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175050

(nb: one never stops learning…Pepe Escobar in the AsiaTimes online piece here believes Kosovo is anything but useless as a USA client state)

They know how to sell Imperial Corporatism whether in its military adventurist form, banking-cartel form or police-state form.  I think despite the disaster the elites have brought upon the United States, Obama´s no worse than a coin-flip to hold the presidency, and if the economy is bad and a Republicrat is elected president, he or she will adopt much of the stylistic template of Obama.  They´ll also make sure not to force the Christianism on anyone in the campaign and make doubly sure not to let Wall Street get away from them again.  Nothing will change if a Republicrat is elected other than things getting worse. Nothing will change in a term-limited Obama presidency other than things getting worse because that is how it´s been with each administration.  Always a little worse each time.  Sometimes a lot worse (I´m thinking more of McKinley and Wilson than I am of Reagan, by the way).

But all human endeavor is subject to these iron-clad rules: resources are limited and nothing is ever perfect.  You´ve observed the cleverness of the Clinton, Bush, Obama triumvirate in the USA, but as great as Obama has been at oppressing and creating the machinery for self-oppression in the USA, he´s full of leaks maintainance of EMPIRE wise.  As I dramatized, the same personality which is so effective at the oppression, coercion, and theft of the fruits of the peoples´labor in the USA, doesn´t work at all outside the USA.  Every culture outside whether in a self-governing nation or an authoritarian one is far more traditional than the USA is and one could say possessed of certain moral values the Americans will readily allow to be peeled off. I don´t know why that is. All I know is that it exists and I don´t blame popular culture.

In the same vein, for all the planning that went into having this series of HEADS OF SALES for the empire in this order, the global conquest planning has been shit.  They´ve just been persistent.  The empire brings death and destruction but doesn´t bring about submission because the threats are no longer credible.  The multiple front strategy with very limited commitment of forces relatively speaking, spread thinly over the entire globe doesn´t work and everyone knows it.  The USA´s other tool of dominance, the reserve status of the USD, is all over but the shouting.  Venezuela devalues from 2.4VEB/$ to 4.8VEB/$.  Russia and China agree to settle in SDR as a temporary measure until the Renmimbi floats and they then can settle in CHR for RUR.  India and Iran agree to settle in physical gold.  Germany has begun to tire of having to hold the EU together will limited upside to them and is considering unwinding all the debt it can, letting the EU break apart, and returning to a floating Deutschmark.  This is all because the USA´s enormous debt, and commitment to war-based deficits give them no credibility and the only reason all this hasn´t happened yesterday is every other country, all of which are awash in USD and have lent vast piles of money to the EMPIRE cling to some hope that they will be able to collect and resolve some of their own economic problems as well.  I think Hugo Chávez was right on the mark when he priced the USD at 50c and that was when the world should have gotten together agreed that  50c was a good middle position to take, and walked away having taking a big hit but still on their feet.

You´ve watched the protests in Europe for over a year now over the same things that brought in the Latin Wave in 1998 and washed out the century of 1-party EMPIRE-backed dictatorial rule.  If one can observe a difference in Colómbia, “Israel,” and Germany, and one can be smashed in the face with direct civil disobedience not only in Northern Spain which has a long history of such behavior, but in such regressive places as England, France and Italy, not to mention a total rejection of the USA by South Korea and India, how much longer will the EMPIRE last?

It will last as long as its people let it and world conditions don´t stop it.  It´s people will let it go on as long as possible, the rest of the world will not be so nice.  If the EMPIRE is forced to become a self-contained republic for the first time, it can be a democratic-republic or a fascist/corporatist one.  It´s up to you to shown your fellow Americans the right way on this.  Jay Midnyte always gives me hope for the youth of America.  He is tireless in explaining these things to his friends and though it only gets through to a handful, he says that when they get it, when they realize everything they had thought to that point has been a lie, they don´t become embarrassed or ashamed.  They become excited because they have a feeling of seeing after having been blind and can´t think of anything else but this new way of making sense of the world without having to stop being who they are or to bow to any one leader or do anything other than stay informed and be active when they can.  I´ve convinced a number of Americans in my age group (same as B´Man’s) and have observed the same reaction.  You cross that Rubicon and nothing is the same but you become obsessed with the realignment you´ve made and critical-thinking becomes automatic.

So, I´ll close with some good old American pop culture (and sports) which I absolutely don´t think is the problem because that stuff is popular everywhere.

(I´l put up the automatic links to the articles in the comment thread…My usual retarded inablity to handle wordpress)

Surely, B´Man´s loyal readership can deal with it.

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NOTES ON A SCORECARD

this is sort of a compendium of comments I left on FB threads which a tiny handful of people thought were blog worthy and since this is my spot, here goes.  The first concerns a sarcastic rhetorical question about whether the US Dept Of Injustice would pursue terrorist charges against two SOA-WHINSEC goons for their acts of terror in Latin America (on the orders of the US government.

Posada Carriles? I highly doubt it considering that the Obama Administration contracted him and his terrorist organization to assassinate Hugo Chávez in May 2009 when Chávez was on his way to the inauguration of President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador.  The plot was discovered just after the plane had taken off, so they turned around and went back to Caracas, missing the inauguration unfortunately, but sparing 1000s of lives and who knows how much mayhem.  I´ll bet that little tidbit didn´t make it onto Fox, MSNBC, CNN or into the New York Times.

I´d sure like to see Posada and Bosch and Reich and Negroponte and Abrams and Gates and Powell and Brownfield and Kelly and — yes — Tom Hayden, and absolutely Eric Holder and every other oppressor in prison. I know that´s not going to happen but at least as far as Latin America is concerned, I´m optimistic that the wave of 1998 hasn´t even come close to cresting yet.  The most important event in the Western Hemisphere in 2010 happened without the American peoples´awareness or understanding but you can bet the American elites noticed and didn´t like it.

The Obama Administration with Hillary Clinton in the lead tried in vain to get a wedge in between Rafael Correa and Hugo Chávez with her “charm,” assuming that because Correa is US-educated with an MBA and PhD from the University of Illinois, he might be “different” from the other Bolivarians.  That sure didn´t work out.  Would you abandon your closest ally on Hillary Clinton´s say-so? Then the CIA did its usual number of trying to corrupt Correa´s Partido PAIS Alianza with the bribes and threats and Gutierrez´s strong-arm opposition tactics.  That didn´t work either.  So, they went for the coup but they failed to do their homework.  Ecuador is a small country maybe with the #35th largest GDP in the world but it´s not Honduras or Haiti. Those were easy targets. But Ecuador is not for a lot of reasons, the biggest being that there is about $1 TRILLION of Russian investment in oil and natural gas leases and a series of pipeline JVs with various Ecuadorean companies.

So, when the CIA, BlackwaterXe, and Gutierrez used a routine negotiation between the government and the police union as the lever to try to overthrow Correa, showing up at the President´s residence with all manner of guns and grenades and things of that nature, Correa opened the window and announced to his would-be killers “if you want to kill me, kill me right now and see what happens.”  Well, we know what would have happened, right? Aside from the material investment that Rosneft JSC et al stood to lose, there´s a little tripartite Ruso-Latino-Iran mutual defense pact signed sealed stamped and on file at The Hague.  What would have happened aside from a total Venezuelan embargo of jet fuel and heating oil, would be that the Russians would have shoved an ICBM with a nuclear warhead up the asses of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Gates.

Correa´s words:

People supporting him and rejecting the coup, as described by ECUATV reporter:

The upshot of all this is that Rafael Correa thwarted a coup using ony words with no one killed or injured and everything back to normal. If the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 to Barack Obama when the actual vote of the panel was for Piedad Córdoba hadn´t cheapened the thing beyond its worth even having, I´d say President Correa was the real 2010 winner.  But his intelligence, bravery and preparedness is not even the story here.  The big story is that it´s a new world out here and there is a bigger superpower than the USA it´s just very spread out geographically. It´s BRIC.  And BRIC is not going away, it´s only getting stronger And they´ve predicated the thing on a very simple concept: no wars with any other nations and economic growth from fair trade and fair business practices without bribes and coercion.

So, while I support with all my heart every American effort at peoples´organization for the purposes of dissent against the practices of the EVIL EMPIRE, I know that there is a stopper on the EVIL EMPIRE whether Americans care about their own enslavement or not. I´d like to see a diverse broad-based peaceful revolution in the USA which ends the corporatist empire.  Once the USA is a democratic-republic, everyone can argue about which ideology they prefer and those choices will be expressed by a wide-range of views, but none of them will be instiitutional and some voting systems that involves public finance of campaigns, more local power and an instant-runoff system for counting the votes and allocating the polic¡tical power.  I certainly don´t expect it because the world is getting along, though the economic messes, just fine and the USA is always a threat and never any sort of help.

That applies to the citizens as well as the government.  The fascist system is awful and the people who enable it passively are totally useless. And the world doesn´t care anymore. You see that.  You think President Chávez, with heating oil in his pockets and heating oil in his shoes and heating oil in a great big pile, is going to resume giving it away for free to people who hate him and want him dead and that goes for ALL Americans even those of limited means.  You think he has some special affinity for Black Americans because he has a dark complexion and Black Americans represent 1/3 of the American underclass despite being 1/8 of the population? Think again. He´s probably the most intelligent and best-read head of state in the world.  He knows that the fascist government for which Obama is head of sales is his worst enemy.  And he knows that the groups which have the strongest support for that system are the ultra-wealthy and Black Americans. Moreover, American racial attitudes are very different from those in Venezuela.  Afro-Venezolanos are not the underclass. Indigenios are.

And it applies to the communities of dissent as well. Look, I wouldn´t piss on Haley Barbour if he were on fire, but if “Black Is Back,” “Project Mark Twain” and Cindy Sheehan´s “Peace Of The Action” and “Revolutionary Communities Project” can´t work together, don´t bother pissing on Haley Barbour. Piss on the fire and call in the dogs because the hunt is over.  The only way to crack the fascist system is to organize broadly.  Once you´ve stormed the Federal Reserve, then you can go back to your purity tests and fiefdoms but in a positive way as diverse peoples´parties in a real, voluntary, self-governing system.

This one gets to the same conclusion but is focused on economics.

This is an extremely important status post and thread of comments and it ties in very nicely with the laugh Hoz Turner and I always have at The Miniature Schnauzer, Paul Krugman. Jodda has gotten at the essence of the problem of Stagflatio…n, Recessflation, Depressflation, whatever you want to call it. When you have a stagnant or contracting economy with extremely high unemployment and lots of people on fixed incomes and onto that you lay price inflation you have an economic HOLOCAUST FOR THE PEOPLE BUT NOT THE ELITES.

That´s going to be true in this type of economic state of nature whenever it happens, but now, the “solutions” are not only eacerbating the burden on the people, the “sollutions” are also giving away free TRILLIONS to the elites. That is why the USA has the world´s highest wealth and income concentration. Somebody complained about “capitalism”. That´s an error. Capitalism has many forms and is merely an economic system and one that will exist even if the official system is collectivist.

The problem in the USA that makes it different from a communist country like Cuba or a capitalist country like Germany or a country that mixes socialism with classically conservative economics like Venezuela, is that the USA IS AN IMPERIAL CORPORATIST state. Its style of growth and resource allocation is to theft from its own people, global conquest theft, and transfer of all wealth to the ultra elites.

It is critical for Americans to blame the right villains: THE LARGEST BANKS AND CORPORATIONS, THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, THE GOVERNMENT, K-STREET, AND THE FEDERAL RESERVE. Forget the politicians and the parties. They are all stooges of the elites. Forget the “opinon-makers” which support one of the fake “parties” or the other. The are stooges too who feed off the small dropping of the elites. Of course, Glenn Beck is absurd but he´s a circus clown, not the source of anyone´s problems. Forget Rachel Maddow, she´s a circus clown, not the solution to anyone´s problems. Especiallly forget the economists associated with one “party” or other. Alll of these people AGREE with and SUPPORT American Imperial Corporatism. It is, however, important to criticize Obama because while he makes no decisions, his role in your oppression is significant. He is THE HEAD OF SALES of the empire. He is worse than Bush, that´s true, but he´ll also seem better than whoever follows him. That´s because the policy of Imperial Corporatism never changes from administration to administration. It´s merely on a worsening trajectory. The only answer is a peaceful revoluton in which the American people just say “that´s enough, no more!” and stop contributing to their own destruction. I don´t mean taxes. It´s far beyond all that. I mean complete withdrawal from doing anything that contributes to the system and arragning ways in communities of supporting one another.

There are very few choices here. It´s the worsening status quo. It´s peaceful revolution. It´s total mayhem when the dollar cracks. Or it´s a vain attempt at violent revolution which the elites want most so they can formalize martial law. Or waiting to die and hoping for your childrens´sakes that when the empire dies under its own weight and BRIC is the world´s superpower, what remains of the USA will be arranged into something more egalitarian, but that is decades away.

Nothing I´ve written is original in the slightest. It has been said over and over again by way more intelligent people than me on the REAL RIGHT and the REAL LEFT and among REAL INDEPENDENTS. 99% of the American people, however, have all been too caught up in the spectacles of the moment to notice.

I close with an oldie but goodie. Mario Savio´s speech at Berkeley in 1964.

In the spirit of B´Man´s analysis of his blog stats, I, too, take some weird pride in being among the least popular bloggers and Facebook commenters around. I have to laugh at myself about this because if anyone has heard any of the Raw Dawg Buffalo Radio shows that Torrance Stephens and I do each Thursday night, they´ll know that I don´t like to call people idiots or ignorant or anything like that, whereas Torrance takes great delight in it. We have these arguments each week in which I wonder why the American people are getting shafted worse than the Europeans are, not that they´re complaining about anything trivial, but they get out in the streets in the millions whenever there´s a government/NGO action by the IMF to solve a banking-cartel debt problem with more debt still and cover than debt from the peoples´pockets. This is, of course, nothing less than wholesale theft of peoples´wealth as a gift to the ruling elites.

And everything they get shoved up their asses has some American equivalent which is way worse. Yet Americans not only don´t protest like Europeans do, and they certainly don´t have the balls to fight violent American terrorist stooges with only words and the belief in the people like Rafael Correa, nor do they politicians like Montilla and Maragell in Cataluña who hate the central government in Madrid so much they´ve signed enabling legislation for Catalán secession from the Kingdom Of Spain and the EU, nor do they have heads of state like Lars Grimsson and Johanna Sigguradottir of Iceland who, like Correa 8 years ago, told the IMF to screw themselves and “try collecting,” they have corrupt clowns for politicians, an affectless killer for a “President” (Head Of Sales, actually), and martial law for all intents and purposes, but…..THEY SEEM TO LIKE IT!

Torrance gives me a 1000 reasons why this is coupled with 1000 great quotes from the Founding Fathers and Abolitionists, and I always argue that intelligence is randomly distributed and there´s no statistical proof at all that Americans are less cognitively able than anyone else on Earth, so I keep refusing to agree that they´re stupid and I make fun of myself for being boring, being an asshole, being universally disliked in America for my views, and especially being a shit blogger and shit commenter.

This is an extremely long way of writing that I have a lot more of these short essays collected and if you want more of them, let me know, but I surely won´t be offended if you don´t!

JAY MIDNYTE DOES IT AGAIN!

I was having a Facebook chat with Jay a few nights ago. It was enjoyable because Jay´s such a bright kid that I not only can go into very deep discussions of the political economy with him, but I always come away from our conservations or reading his writing with information that teaches me something or knocks me over with ironic coincidence.

Two examples that come to mind are his discovery of a redacted document that showed the size and leverage terms of anti-US dollar derivative positions held by the 10 largest banks in the world and as far as I know, no one else has discovered the document or even commented on Jay´s blog post which has it other than myself and Dr Torrance Stephens. Jay, while particpating as a caller to T, Sista GP and my “Raw Dawg Buffalo Radio Show,” raised the only contrary position which posited no violence in the USA if the dollar does crack and hyperrecessflation creates widespread starvation, thirst and mayhem. Many people, accurately I believe, have posited that this epoch will see the imposition of extreme martial law and, naturally, the use of the FEMA camps to the fullest.

I don´t think Jay disagreed with that necessarily but he approached the issue from the point of view of the American people, not those enlisted into the social control goon squads. It was Jay´s opinion that while there would be martial law and use of FEMA camps as centers of imprisonment of dissenters, the displaced, and those just fighting hard to get food and water, the mayhem would likely be less widespread and less intense that most believe. It was a very profound opinion but one that was simple, understandable, and a lot of people missed even considering it: NO MATTER HOW BAD THE ECONOMIC DEVASTATION GETS, THE TVs WILL STILL BE BROADCASTING INTO THE SAME MILLIONS OF AMERICAN HOMES AND WHATEVER DOCILITY AND IGNORANCE THE TV HAS CREATED AND PROMOTED IN AMERICANS, WILL CONTINUE TO BE CREATED AND PROMOTED. This, Jay believes, will mitigate a great deal of relentless and necessary survival and self-sufficiency on the part of The Sheeple even when their children are dying of thirst.

It´s such an obvious bit of reasoning but for some reason it has escaped a lot of smart people who have paid attention to the socially-distortive potential of US fiscal and monetary oolicy. I could list 1000 people way smarter than me who understand economics, who, like me, assumed civil war rather than sporadic violence contained by TVs that will still be in homes and still in control.

If Jay has decided to take time off from writing, it´s our loss, but having done the same myself, there are times you feel like doing it and times you don´t or can´t. Because, he and I are still in regular contact though and because his mind has no stopped working, I´m happy to convey the mind-blowing stuff he uncovers in my spot here until he´s ready to reanimate “JayMidnyte” and/or “ThoughSwirl.”

I don´t know if anyone remembers Jay´s piece on the present day active and passive participation in the American system of Imperialist Corporatism. He posits that, though the USSR was hardly in great shape either, their psy-ops were a good deal stronger than those of the USA and their generational predictions and active psyop distortions against the USA are a explanatory variable not only of The Sheeple but of Obamabot/Democrat/”Progressive” wing of the present state of fascist play in the USA.

Jay illustrated this with a late 70s/early80s clip of an interview with KGB defector, Yuri Bezmezov, who explains both America´s corporatist imperialism of the time and future and how KGB psyops PROMOTED THAT with the use of demoralization following on psychological subversion of that generation and the baby-boomers. Bezmezov is not a perfect predictor but having done the work before defection he knows of what he speaks and his predictions from 27 years ago are pretty damned amazing.

I don´t remember exactly which clip Jay used but this one´s close enough.

He pretty much calls everything perfectly with the exception of one guy he gets wrong — Daniel Ellsberg, who was always non-partisan, non-ideological, and a strong anti-fascist peace activist. Odd that of all the others like Jane Fonda (and if there was a Michael Moore phenonmenon then, he´d be perfect, too) Bezmezov gets exactly that once they realized that the “market” in the USA would no longer want what liberals were selling, the “liberals” made the easy switch to pro-USA Imperial Corporatism, as a confused and demoralized nation stared at the idiot box. There are a lot of Bezmezov videos around and you get the same perceptiveness from all of them, but for that one goofup on Ellsberg who is so much like America´s Bezmezov. He told the truth about the American system after having been trained by it and never stopped telling the truth.

Walter Mondale (CFR, Trilateral Commission, etc), Tom Hayden (Prison Industrial Complex Advocate and Obama/Hillary´s chess piece in advancing coup in Honduras as stifling desposed center-left pan-Latinist president Mel Zelaya), and Jane Fonda (went from pro-Stalinist, pro-Maoist, pro-Pol Pot “Hanoi Jane” communist extremist to uber-American corporatist whose love of money knows no ends) were bulls-eyes for Bezmezov´s predictions. Jay´s greater point with all this is that the demoralization that set in once ignorant reflexive pro-USSR American elitist group-think morphed into pro-USA American elitist imperial corporatism which seems to have reached its apotheosis with Obalism. I still think it´s going to get worse and just as what Obama sells is just that much worse than what Bush sold, the next head-of-sales in the USA will be selling an even WORSE product than Obama is.

I´m sort of recapping my recent conversation with Jay here in which we reviewed much of our previous conversations and written work. Then, apparently just using my saying that Bezmezov had been right that Jane Fonda would turn into a true fascist, Jay googled away and with those key words found another soothsayer, the classical conservative John Flynn who predicted pretty much exactly how America became more and more fascist from the FDR period to the present.  Ironically, Jay caught this interesting piece with the key words “Jane Fonda” and “fascist,” but it´s not Jane Fonda´s present-day fascist imperialism and greed that comes up in Flynn´s writing. Rather, it´s  his constitutional defense of her right in earlier times to be a Marxist-Leninist if that´s what she chose as a point in defense of classical conservatism as against neo-conservatism.

“The Coming US Fascism

In 1944 the Old Right journalist John T. Flynn wrote:

“The test of fascism is not one’s rage against the Italian and German war lords. The test is – how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas to American social and economic life? When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government – then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.

“But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we are dealing by this means with the problem of fascism. Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing millions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy.

“It should be equally clear that all this is in no sense communism…. [A] reason for the confusion is the character of the men who are authentic and honest New Dealers but who were not communists…. They began to flirt with the alluring pastime of reconstructing the capitalist system. They became the architects of a new capitalist system. And in the process of this new career they began to fashion doctrines that turned out to be the principles of fascism. Of course they do not call them fascism, although some of them frankly see the resemblance. But they are not disturbed, because they know that they will never burn books, they will never hound the Jews or the Negroes, they will never resort to assassination and suppression. What will turn up in their hands will be a very genteel and dainty and pleasant form of fascism which cannot be called fascism at all because it will be so virtuous and polite.” (As We Go Marching [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1944], pp. 252-255.)

In 1969, at the height of the so-called Sixties, a New Right essayist – alarmed, apparently, that Jane Fonda still enjoyed freedom of speech and that college administrators were too spineless to have the police clear student radicals out of their offices – called for “some variety of expediential fascism”:

“The very nature of the situation creates competing codes and doctrines extreme in content and alien to the balancing compromises of liberal polity. The stringent demands of such a rudimentary struggle of power and ideas invites political approaches that are totalitarian in nature: not quite in the original fascist sense that puts all aspects of life under the aegis of political authority, at least in the general sense that political theory can no longer restrict itself to general conditions and procedural rules, but must offer a comprehensive, authoritative resolution of a number of specific political and social questions.” (Donald Atwell Zoll, “Shall We Let America Die?”, National Review, December 16, 1969, pp. 12-62-1263, italics added.)

The phrase emphasized above (“political theory can no longer restrict itself to general conditions and procedural rules”) abolishes constitutions and expresses the long-standing wish of some “conservatives” for a Government of National Emergency. FDR and Truman taught them well. National Review lives in a mental state of siege. There may be no antidote for it, but the following quotations may be of some use:

“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

~ James Madison, 1798 (italics added)

“Is it not just possible that we may become corrupted at home by the reaction of arbitrary political maxims in the East upon our domestic politics, just as Greece and Rome were demoralised by their contact with Asia?”

~ Richard Cobden, 1850

“Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State.”

~ Randolph Bourne, 1919

Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com

Jay and I read this piece at the same time and we were so blown away by this fellow´s predictive powers that it kind of ended our conversation.  There have been a lot of unconventional forecasters like Bezmezov, Ellsberg, Flynn, and old-time Louisiana governor Huey Long who seem to have describe America on Christmas Day 2010 from decades in the past.  There are forecasters of present vintage like Gerald Celente, Max Keiser, David DeGraw, Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, Cynthia McKinney, BUELAHMAN, and a whole bunch more who´ve been uncannily correct in their foresight.  These people have all been basically disregarded and called “conspiracy theorists” for the trouble. 

So, if  there´s a lesson in all this that people who read BuelahMan´s Revolt can take away from my account of my conversation with Jay, it´s that one of the better ways to be patriot Americans (in the sense of pride in your country and belief  in a democratic-repulic of the USA, peaceful, free and just, TRUST YOUR OWN OPINIONS SO LONG AS THEY´RE YOURS. AND IF THEY FEEL LIKE “CONSPIRACY THEORIES,” THEY PROBABLY HAVE A LOT OF RETROSPECTIVE AND PREDICTIVE QUALITY!

I´m going to enjoy the last few hours of this Christmas Day with some of the great leftover pork roast and turkey from last night.

CORPORATISM WATCH: A LOOK BACK AT GM, A LOOK FORWARD ATFORECLOSURE FRAUD

“I have to teach this Obama something about capitalism” — Hugo Chávez.

This was in the wake of the government takeover of GM, chronicled very well right here by B´Man who used this piece by Greg Palast to make the same point Chávez made.

The latter, of course, is a bright man with a very needling yet accurate sense of humor. He knew that while he calls his government “socialist,” it is hardly that, and he knows his reputation in the American propaganda is as some kind of communist dictator, so he took an opportunity to make a very deeply finessed joke. The essential truth at the heart of the joke is while the “socialist” Republic of Venezuela is, like almost all countries, an economic mix of public and private ownership of productive capacity. They vary as to percentage, but all self-governing nations can be said to be “capitalist” in the main with greater or lesser degrees of “socialist features.”

The United States is not one of those countries because it is neither “capitalist” nor “socialist” nor the common blend of the two. It is a CORPORATIST EMPIRE. The wealth and productive capacity of the USA is largely controlled by a triad of the largest banks and corporations, all branches of government by mostly the executive and legislative, and a PRIVATE CENTRAL BANK the world knows as THE FEDERAL RESERVE.

Thus, the country which claims to be the example of capitalism in action, has no respect for the natural rules of capitalism and I don´t need to discuss the role of regulation and/or oversight either to prove it.

One of those natural, commonsense, laws of capitalism is THE LEVELS OF SENIORITY OF CORPORATE FINANCE. Without the existence of this ladder, capitalism could not function. There would be no incentive to lend money and there would be no incentive for any single person to commit themselves to any job at all. The only logical choice would be, as was in the case of the USSR, for everyone to steal everything that wasn´t bolted down at their place of employment.

Palast lays out the case of the government takeover of GM and concurrent theft of workers´and lenders´money and rights to benefit itself and the banking-cartel, at the expense of the natural order of seniority of corporate finance.

(An aside: Chávez and Argentina´s President Cristina Fernández De Kirchner have bragged about allowing the process of seniority of levels of corporate finance to work itself through failing companies and have created 1000s of millionaires out of normal unionized workforces who were able to use their top rung on the ladder of finance to take over failed companies and make successes of them. 1000 millionaires are better than one billionaire screwup, no?)

So, EXHIBIT A, in exactly how the USA is a corporatist empire, not a democratic republic with a mixed economy. H/T again to B´Man for his post from the Summer of 2009.

Grand Theft Auto: How Stevie the Rat bankrupted GM

It is not just the executive and legislative branches of government of the USA which violate another natural tenet of capitalism, THE ILLEGALITY OF FRAUD.

Another aside, this one with more American relevance!: while I have a great deal of respect for Ron Paul, I certainly don´t agree with his free-market absolutism because it does not appear that he has thought through the endgame of it. All that would happen is, while the government might be severed from the corporations, the result would be overt feudalism in the country with the world´s greatest wealth and income concentration. To be fair to Paul, however, he asserts that the laws against fraud properly enforced are better than a corporatist government whose regulation and oversight are themselves fraudulent. I agree with this part of his explanation, though I find it necessary, but hardly sufficient, because the laws pertaining to fraud are completely disregarded as the Palast piece and the following show.

So, EXHIBIT B in our ongoing case against corporatism.

The judicial branch of government at the behest of the banking cartel and executive branches is participating in a cruel fraud against the American homeowner by creating a quasi-governmental, quasi “private,” agency called MERS to rob homeowners of their rights and to speed up the foreclosure process as a gift to the banking-cartel.

Factbox: The role of MERS in foreclosure furor

Once you´ve read it, and understood why it´s a fraudulent entity, watch this video of Matt Taibbi explaining to Cenk Uyger why this is so.

Now, have a look at a chart which partially shows the slicing and dicing and repackaging and sales and trading of mixed mortgages.

My point here is to emphasize that the dispersion of millions of tiny pieces of millions of mortgages to entities far and wide and completely unaccounted for leave any fraudulent entity like MERS or any special courts meant to speed up the foreclosure of homes are not LEGAL. They violate federal laws against fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, restraint of trade, and are wholly unconstitutional because they violate due process and the so-called “takings clause.”

What Taibbi alludes to and I specify is that the “plaintiffs” in these “judicial foreclosures” are not necessarily entitled to pursue foreclosure because as it seems, THEY ARE NOT THE BENEFICIAL OWNERS OF THE HOME LOAN. Thus, they are not the “aggrieved parties” to any foreclosure court proceeding and have no business trying to force anyone out of their homes. Only if the actual beneficial holders of the loans are able to repackage them into the original loan itself (or some threshold percentage of it) can they bring a claim of foreclosure against a homeowner. A bank which briefly owned an MBS/CDO and no longer has any title to any tiny slice of any mortgage in it is plainly not an aggrieved party and ought by law, normal business practice, and the US Constitution, have no right to try to seize something they don´t own only to make yet more free money and oppress yet more people.

But if you look at these two examples, you see that in the Imperial Corporatist States Of America, THERE IS NO LAW, THERE IS NO NORMAL BUSINESS PRACTICE, AND OBVIOUSLY THERE IS NO CONSTITUTION.

There is only a corporatist empire, a police state and all the oppression, coercion, expropriation, and RULE OF FRAUD that accompanies an empire.

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EMPIRE WATCH: ECUADOR´S STRENGTH, AUSTRALIA´S WEAKNESS, AND IS THERE A STRONG AMERICAN ALTERNATIVE?

Ironically, there´s a kind of capitalist (NOT CORPORATIST) lesson the World Socialist Web Site´s piece on the ouster of Kevin Rudd as Australian PM

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/aust-d08.shtml

Good lesson indeed on how not to handle the American Empire as the leftish-leaning leader of some other country.

You get those deals done with BRIC or APEC as fast as possible upon taking office, whether it be open-auction leases of natural resource realization, or real estate, or hotel/casino/resorts, and/or hard and fast fair-trade agreements. You do not fart around trying to split the difference and attempt to deal with the evil empire at arm´s length, yet sort of kind of remain “Western” because you´re Anglo.

That is how Ecuador with a $110BLN GDP is stronger and more independent than Australia with an $850BLN GDP. Once the Bolivarian movement President Rafael Correa won the election handily, he bought out the sub-market RoyalDutch/Shell lease which had been arranged as an “austerity” diktak by the IMF in exchange for a debt-bailout to the dictatorial Noboa government and got an above-market price from Rosneft. That allowed him to boot out the US Military and tell the Bush Administration that if he still wanted a US Army base in Ecuador, Bush had better be willing to let him have an Ecuadorean Army base on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. The Russians are sure happy with the lease even though they paid premium at the time.

So, that allowed Correa to buy back the water supply from Vivendi which had been privatized under IMF “austerity” fiat during the Noboa period. And then tell the IMF to go f**k itself and try collecting on its “bailout loan” because it may have been legal under dictatorial rule but not in a self-governing Bolivarian republic. Then the Ruso-Latino Defense Pact was signed in 2007.

Hillary Clinton paid a call on Correa to try to get him to bend on various “free” trade agreements and maybe to get in between Correa and Chávez, but he said no thanks, any trade would be at fair market value and neither the empire nor IMF would ever have any special leverage. Nor did it have any business lying to him about his closest ally.

This frustrated Hillary, Obama and the IMF, so unable to get rid of Correa by corrupting the inside of the PPA (Partido PAIS Alianza), they made a half-assed coup attempt by having the usual suspects turn a routine negotiation between the government and police union into an attempt to overthrow Correa. With the Rosneft deal on the lease and the pipeline JV, plus the Ruso-Latino Pact signed, sealed and delivered in Belgium, Correa told them all “go ahead and kill me now and see what happens.” Well, we know what would happen — WW3. Coup thwarted.

Kevin Rudd´s mistake was not getting the deals done with China and Japan fast enough, leaving him unprotected when Hillary came calling. Rudd, while certainly different from the neo-con Howard and the neo-lib Beazley, just dawdled basking in his massive approval ratings which at the time were close to if not higher than Obama´s AND Bachelet´s. He kind of fancied himself something of an Anglo Obama/Bachelet cross even.

You have to give Hillary some sick credit here for smelling weakness and ego and not giving Rudd a chance to get anything going with BRIC or APEC. Without the protection of these deals making Rudd not Beazley China´s contact (and perhaps Brazil´s, India´s and Russia´s as well), he surely couldn´t tell Clinton to go fuck herself or “just kill him and see what happens”! So, he was the easiest kind of prey for the US. And what else do they have now in Australia in addition to a compliant neo-liberal like Beazley in charge? Well, look at the WSWS piece. They have more US military bases and none in exchange for an Australian base hard by the Delano Hotel.

I understand that the handful of self-proclaimed American state-socialists dislike the Bolivarian movement because it´s a unique socialist-capitalist-Englightenment “conservative” blend without a “dictatorship of the proletariat” or any intention of getting rid of capitalism at all. They use the tools of Adam Smith and Irving Fisher and the basic natural rules of corporate finance to get to a very egalitarian result with a budget surplus. Well, do American state-socialists like neo-liberal toadies like Berlusconi, Blair, Brown, Merkel, and Rodriguez Zapatero better?

I´m not saying that Bolivarianism is perfect in any way. No system nor government is ever really more than 60% good. Chávez, himself, says so far it works about 15% as well as he had hoped, and he is not a modest guy! But it was a new idea that has worked for 13 years now. And unless a country´s government is willing to be a client-state of the American corporatist empire and international banking-cartel, they are out there on their own. They better be ready with a new idea that is even just partly a peoples´movement. They have to be fearless and they must be ready to do capitalist business according to the natural rules with the strong nations outside the Empire´s Axis. Sure, it means BRIC and APEC and Iran and Turkey and Kazakhstan, etc. While with determination, creativity and a good idea, peoples´movements via an orderly, fair, electoral process with many differing parties represented, can work outside of America and its client states, e.g., Israel, the UK, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada, Costa Rica, the Gulf Emirates, Colómbia, Perú, Rwanda, and the EU to greater and lesser extents. Right now the Bolivarian nations of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and the Bolivarian-influenced Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and El Salvador seem to be the only nations which have successfully tried this new concept in varying culturally appropriate ways and seem to be solid and both independent and interdependent.

Brazil has been the most successful of the major powers in adapting its own way of being a strong, wealthy republic with the unique task of being a bridge between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. Of course, they were lucky enough to have as their first non-dictatorial president, Lula da
Silva, an extraordinarily bright and capable man. The world should hope that his successor Dilma Rousseff continues Lula´s policies and reach. I think she can, but time will tell as it will for the newest nations to emerge from dictatorship, Paraguay and El Salvador.

Honduras, sadly, did fall to the best efforts of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, despite the center-left Zelaya government attracting some Eastern investment in Tegucigalpa and having economic growth in every year of his presidency. The Zelaya government was just not prepared for a military coup with maximum CIA and “contractor” help. At least, the USA´s puppet president, Pablo Lobo, has not been recognized as the rightful president of the “republic” except by the USA, Israel, Canada, and the rest of the usual suspects.

So, what is to be done inside the home base of the Corporatist Empire since there is obviously no galvinzing force like a Chávez, Correa, or Morales to lead a peoples´movement which would set things to rights. In American terms, that would mean becoming for the first time really a democratic republic, not a corporatist empire? Can it be done BEFORE the dollar cracks and hyper-recessflation brings about starvation, thirst, chaos, martial law, and ,yes, finally the use of those FEMA “camps” which are anything but a conspiracy theory?

I believe that first of all it has to be — in the same way Bolivarianism V 2.0 suited Latin America — a new, non-institutionally political system-based concept that is culturally right for America. I believe a first step happened in 2008 but everyone was too caught up in the moment to notice. I am not speaking about Obama´s ersatz “history-making election.” I am talking about Ron Paul´s “Third Party Conference” in September of that year in which he moderated a panel of the off party presidential candidates McKinney (Green), Nader (Independent), Baldwin (Constitutionalist), and the absent Barr (Libertarian). They each represented different philosophies, but they all agreed on a handful of core principles based upon anti-imperial corporatism. I include the video which is long but interesting and has a few really surprising moments.

There is also something new which formalizes a lot of what came out of Paul´s conference and is even less institutionally political than that was. It has gone through a number of name changes, but I kind of like “Project Mark Twain” best of all because that captures the same historical spirit that Chávez, Correa & Company used when they came up with Bolivarianism. (Simón Bolivar was the Latin leader who liberated Latin America from Spain and was acquainted with Thomas Jefferson). The idea is the brainchild of a leftist named Kevin Zeese who ran for Senate in Maryland from the Green Party and a classical conservative professor at Alabama named Dr David Beito. I understand Ralph Nader has joined them and they have written a book about their idea. Mark Twain´s portrait´s on the cover. They adopt some of the basic principles of peace, personal liberty, economic sanity, and an end to the EMPIRE. This is a good interview with Zeese and Beito conducted by Scott Horton of Antiwar.com Radio.

http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/02/27/kevin-zeese-and-david-t-beito/

Gerald Celente the forecaster who is Director of the Trends Research Institute believes some non-partisan or multi-partisan popular movement rebellion is very likely in America. He doesn´t give the Tea Party much chance of viability, but its existence is a piece of evidence that despite Americans´seeming apathy and ignorance there is a great hunger for a real movement that can give the 1-party Demopublican/Republicrat system a strong challenge if electoral political success is a necessary first step. Personally, I´d like to see something like Project Mark Twain gain tremendous popular support and overturn the Corporatist empire, Federal Reserve, MIC, police state, drug war and bankster cartel, and then splinter off into varying shades of non-institutional peoples´ parties which are very different yet share the core principles. If something like instant-runoff voting comes along with this, a “tyranny of the majority” can be avoided at more or less every level of self-governance with the minority parties having 1/(Number Of Different Parties) worth of power and voice plus the ability to caucus together.

John Pilger, in his famous “Obama As A Public Relations Creation” concludes that while all chances for a democratic republic of the USA seem remote, he has found in his career as a journalist that the MSM always get it wrong and miss the peoples´movements when they bloom. He cites the Prague rebellion of 1968, the fall of the USSR, and the Latin Wave all as examples that nobody in the media had a clue about until the deed was done.

I apologize for running on long and covering a lot of ground, but this is my first post here in nearly a year and I have only just gotten back the desire to write again. I also apologize for boring anybody. I always do that, but I write what I know about that I think might be new for some readers, and let the chips fall where they may.

A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WITH REAL CANDIDATES

<I´m referring to the Colombian presidential election first round on May 30. At first glance, Rednecks might not think this is relevant to them. They would be wrong. Obama is itching for a war in South America with Colombia as a staging area. It will be Redneck kids doing the fighting and dying for Ameriican Imperial Corporatist interests here so Rednecks and every other American should pay attention.

Here are you candidates. I include their party and political orientation along with some color about each, although Wikipedia will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about each of them

Uribe´s Defense Minister, Juan Manuel Santos (Party Of The U), Far Right. This man is a butcher so bad he makes Uribe look like Russ Feingold. War with Venezuela, Ecuador and/or Bolivia is a likelihood with Santos. An even more violent drug-war, US-backed police state and anti-trade unionist state is a certainty

Former Mayor of Bogota, Anantas Mockus (Green Party), Center-Left. He was probably the most successful mayor Bogota had in a long time. He has degrees in math and philosophy and is more of a pragmatist than an idealist, although he´s anti-war and for a peace process. He´s flirted with market-based solutions to civil issues found they didn´t work, and was quick to abandon them. He´s known for a big personality and over the top sense of humor. He once mooned a political rival and rode an elephant into his wedding ceremony. He´s declared a Women´s Day in which men were excused from work to do all cooking, cleaning and childcare. His running-mate is another popular ex-mayor, Sergio Fajardo of Medellín. Mockus could also peel off a good number of moderate conservative voters who are pro-peace, drug legalization, etc.

Uribe´s Ambassador (UK) Sra Noemi Sanín (Conservative), Right Wing. She´s got a thin resume but has been around the Colombian political and business scene for years and did her time studying at Harvard when she lost a primary to Andres Pastrana in the late 1990s. She´s basically a global elitist and would not get in the way of any US imperial plans for the region.

Senator Gustavo Petro (Alternative Democratic Pole), Bolvarian Left. As a young man he was an M-19 guerrilla who fought the government. When M-19 briefly became a political party, Petro got a degree in economics, a master´s, a second master´s in Belgium in Human Rights Economics, and a PhD in business administration from the University of Salamanca in Spain, one of the world´s finest schools. He is regarded as both the most intelligent candidate and the most left-wing. He won a seat as a Representative in the lower house and quickly earned a reputation as a fighter of government violence and corruption, something he´s carried over to the Senate, where he led an investigation into drug-trafficking by the president´s brother. He is opposed to US bases and wants a peace process.

Senator Rafael Pardo (Liberal), center-left. He´s the choice of the party bosses, having been party chair Cesar Gavíria´s Mininster of National Security. His low standing in the polls suggests that today´s Liberal Party is Piedad Córdoba´s (She was the actual winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on the votes, but they ignored their own votes and picked Barack Obama), not Cesar Gavíria´s. Pardo isn´t bad. For example, he was tough on the Auto-Defensores, the far right paramilitary terrorist group. He´s just a party time-server and careerist.

Senator Germán Vargas Lleras, (Radical Change), neo-liberal. He was a number of right-wing Liberals who jumped ship to support Uribe in 2006. He has, along with Santos and Sanín, remained a Uribe-supporter. He approves of both Obama´s Plan Colombia and a U.S. FTA.

I like Petro best. I could live with Mockus or Pardo. Sanín and Vargas Lleras are trouble. Santos is a nightmare of war and violence and re-colonialization.

Right now, Mockus holds a small lead over Santos. My guy, Petro, is far back on 6-7% leading only Pardo and Vargas Lleras.

You get one guess as to whom the Obama administration supports. Here´s a hint: it isn´t Gustavo Petro or Antanas Mockus.

$2,000,000,000,000,000 MEN

does that number have any special significance for you? It´s 2 QUADRILLION DOLLARS or 2 THOUSAND TRILLIONS. It is the total USA government, corporate, personal and other institutional exposure financially. 333 years worth of America´s GDP is at risk in obligations of hard assets, paper assets, and derivative paper assets.

Only the FEDERAL RESERVE can put more precision on it and say with more precision where the exposure is concentrated but we do know that it´s concentrated against the US DOLLAR in the main Wall Street banks and in almost every central bank and/or finance ministry and/or private savings everywhere else in the world as are the chances for GAIN in the event of a dollar crash.

In that scenario the concentration lies mostly with the large banks.

When crashes, defaults and devaluations happen, typically the losers pay and the winners don´t get paid for a long while or at all. That doesn´t mean they have no recourse. Remember my boring post about SENIORITY OF CORPORATE STRUCTURE? Remember B´Man´s posts about CORPORATE PERSONHOOD? Debt carries an implicit call option on the assets of the debtor by the borrower. That is IF YOU DON´T GET PAID, YOU CAN TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE. Goldman Sachs is the world´s largest bettor against the USD but it is the biggest voice at the FED and at the US D OF T. When they are ready to let the air out of the dollar, Goldman will be the “deciders” on that. They will decide when it´s best for them to do so.

They cannot be paid all they´d be owed because it would be over $100 Trillion, so, it could insist of being paid in kind not cash and for THE CU DECISION TO BE INVOKED AND FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO FORMALLY BECOME THE UNITED STATES OF GOLDMAN SACHS. ILLINOIS WOULD BE THE STATE OF BANK OF AMERICA AND SO ON….

…I still say that Hugo Chávez offered a pretty fair number — 50c on the dollar — to start unwinding this menace collectively with every creditor having say. It doesn´t have to end up at 1/2 deval. It could be 3/4 or 1/4 or any number that can get everybody (especially the world´s productive classes and poor) a number they can live with.

It was a FAIR STARTING AND IMHO ENDING POINT just to take Goldman out of the government business

[knly]

DENNIS KUCINICH, SIBEL EDMONDS, GREG PALAST, HUGO CHÁVEZ, THE AMERICAN PEACE AND FREEDOM MOVEMENT, BUELAHMAN´S REDSTATE REVOLT

What do all these names have in common? They along with some others familiar and unfamiliar — Cindy Sheehan & PEACE OF THE ACTION, Ron Paul and CAMPAIGN FOR LIBERTY, Cynthia McKinney, Scott Horton & Antiwar.com, the IAEA, David Swanson & AfterDowningStreet, Bruce Dixon, Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, the “ENLIGHTENED CYNIC”, and all the find folks at BLACK AGENDA REPORT, even Pat Buchanan & THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE magazine, Terri DiMatteo of DUMP THE DEMOCRATS, and money manager Dr Marc Faber — have all been trying to do something very, very, very hard.

We are trying to stop a runaway train run by most of the largest corporations in the world, an empire with a 75% share of the global arms market and a PRIVATE central bank called the FEDERAL RESERVE, always greedy and malicious to the point that since its creation following WWI, it has robbed the USA and its people of 96% of their wealth.

It is now the GLOBAL FINANCE SUPERCOP, as terrifying in its way as the military which services that 75% market share in arms trade by creating global wars wherever there´s money to be made, financed by borrowed, printed money from the FED.

Essential listening:

Scott Horton Interviews Allison Kilkenny

Don´t like violence? Make the EMPIRE a REPUBLIC. Or find some way to get together to slow this down at least. How do you do it? I wish I knew. The idea everyone has settled on is to unite 5 constituencies: the traditional American socialist/anarchist left, the Enlightenment conservative Constitutionalist right, the libertarians left and right, and a world community that is sick of violence. IRAN MIGHT JUST BE ONE OF THE AVERAGE AMERICAN´S BEST FRIENDS. IT IS CERTAINLY ONE OF THE AVERAGE AMERICAN JEW´S BEST FRIENDS. TOO BAD THEY THINK THE OPPOSITE.

This may help. When you watch the news “liberal” means “globalist NEW WORLD ORDER WALL STREET neo-liberal”, “conservative” means “globalist NEW WORLD ORDER MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX neo-con.” Barack Obama. George W. Bush.

The task has been fascinating and worthy but it is no fun. We’ve all lost lots of friends we´ll never have again. If the 2-3 million Americans who are into this union of seemingly opposite ideas and cultures can grow to 40 million, no one is going to call me or B´Man or Lynda up and say “you were right from the start, sorry.” Not even if they join at some point! American Exceptionalist Vanity infects the whole culture save a tiny sliver.

The interviews and the charts B´Man has provided in earlier posts show the USA dominance over the rest of the world combined in military might. Here´s the economic power it wields even in bankruptcy.

List of Countries by GDP

If we can´t unite enough people peacefully to stop it, LET´S SLOW IT DOWN, at least.

I got that phrase from a very dark movie called “Dirty Work” about corruption in Chicago.

IF YOU CAN SEPARATE THE “SOCIALIST” FROM THE “MARKET” YOU KNOW MORE THAN I DO

“Socialism?” or “Free Markets?” “Left or Right?” “Public Ownership or Libertarianism?” “Anarcho-Capitalist or Anarcho-Syndicalist?” “Left Libertarian or Right Libertarian?”

It was our compatriot Lynda who once wrote in these pages, “we´d have had the perfect candidate in 2008 in we could have mixed Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul up in a blender.” I agree, and might add Cynthia McKinney to the milkshake.

To me, the whole thing is a big mess and creates more fights that it resolves. That, of course, is the intention of labels, of nailing one´s colors to the mast.  You look for either safety in numbers or extreme individualism, so the whole pathology plays out in psychology as well as ideology and I´m fucking sick of it.

The purpose of BuelahMan´s Redstate Revolt was to get past the labels to where we can agree, so we can stop the theft and destruction of our countries and our world, to get “Rednecks” and everyone else into the conversation as full respected participants.  Because, sisters and brothers, every way I play this out it ends badly.  The amount of debt load the USA is carrying cannot be repaid in full.  Not in currency that has any value at all, anyway.  That does not change one immutable rule of finance (despite what happened at GM, that was pure Wall Street/US Government piracy): The Creditors — successful litigants, labor, debtholders — Have First Call On The Assets Of A Bankrupt Company. Or Country. That is called “capital structure,” in gear-head terminology, and merely means if you put up the cash as cash first, you get paid back first.  Here is a nice explanation in very plain language in bullet points.  It´s something everyone should know.

POWERPOINT

http://finprzed.wzr.pl/pliki/196.Capital%20structure%20Intro%20lecture%201.ppt.

HTML: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:abkFrVbmMdgJ:finprzed.wzr.pl/pliki/196.Capital%2520structure%2520Intro%2520lecture%25201.ppt+seniority+of+debt&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&lr=lang_en

Play out the global “chessgame” to all the conclusions you can think of.  A million of them are very, very bad, the worst being global thermo-nuclear war for US DOLLAR PARITY. There is only one path through that has a chance of success: peace followed by a series of meetings of the new arrangement of sovereign regions and independent nations: NAFTA (inclusive of Israel and Iraq), UK-EUROPEAN UNION, BRIIC, APEC, UNASUR-ALBA, the Gulf Oil Monarchies, Norway, Switzerland, Pakistan, South Central Asia, etc.  At these meetings, which would have nothing to do with any NEW WORLD ORDER (which is taken to mean sovereign dominance by one world government ruled by NAFTA or a combination of NAFTA-UK-EU),

The meeting would merely have the purpose of agreeing that the USA is carrying too much debt and has committed to too much budget deficit going forward and will never be able to repay all of it in full.  Instead, of acting unilaterally and invoking each´s “corporate structure rights,” putting the USA into default and seizing what is rightfully theirs, each sovereign region and independent creditor nation and the USA with it´s not to be trifled with threat of global destruction, come up with a discounted figure that the USA could pay back and but would not destroy the value of all the US Treasury debt or the dollar overhang held outside the USA.  The loans would have to be unwound slowly and the dollars traded slowly into world markets very slowly so as not to create a run.

A few weeks ago, the man many or most in America including the President, Mr Obama,  consider a “communist,” “terrorist,” and “greatest threat to the security of the United States Of America,” Hugo Chávez Frías, President of the Republic of Venezuela and his Mininister Of Finance Dr Ali Rodríguez announced what they thought that “number” should be.  It was very favorable to the US and I´m damned sure China and Saudi Arabia would be thinking much higher. By devaluing the US Dollar-fixed Bolivar by 1/2, Chávez effectively said he was comfortable with only taking 50c-on-the-dollars-owed-him.

You know who agrees with these ideas. Most economists and responsible market traders and investors arund the world. From Michael Hudson on the “left” to Paul Craig Roberts on the “right.” Who disagrees? Paul Krugman on the “American Propaganda Fantasy Left” to Ben Bernanke of the “American Propaganda Fantasy Right.” Marc Faber worries that no such negotiation will ever take place because of American bad faith.

This was hardly a terrorist act by Venezuela.  It was an invitation to the USA and the world to get the discusssions going.  But, yes, I agree, on the continuum of world nations more “socialist” or more “free market,” Venezuela is at the “socialist” end, though by no means the most.

This is an article by Greg Palast, which I first saw re-posted here at B´Man´s. It describes how GM/Wall Street/USA Executive Branch of government violated the law of corporate structure.

http://www.gregpalast.com/grand-theft-auto-how-stevie-the-rat-bankrupted-gm/

Read all of these articles, listen to Dr Faber and you´ll start to get a sense of where and these ideas of “capitalism” and “socialism,” “free-markets and regulation,” MUST co-exist in a civil, democratic-republican, directly democratic, parliamentary, constutional, self-governing nation.

This is something else that´s important to know.  “Nationalization” of industry happens for all sorts of reasons, good and bad, well-reasoned or impetuous.  The re-nationalization of the Ecuadorean potable water supply from Vivendi Corporation was a good one, well-reasoned and humane.  The expropriation of GM was a terrible one, ill-reasoned, and as close to piracy as the seizure of farmland in Zimbabwe.

As bad as it was, the partial “nationalization” of General Motors did not happen the way people fear nationalization happens elsewhere, with left-wing guerrillas or right-wing para-militaries carrying machine guns and invading the corporate headquarters.  It did not happen that way in Ecuador when the water supply was re-nationalized either. The “Bolivarian socialist” government of Rafael Correa (PhD, Economics, University Of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) made a series of bids to the board of directors of Vivendi Corporation until they got one they accepted, approved by the shareholders and the deal was done. There´s your “socialist nationalization” and how it works.  Not any different than any other sort of legitimate, legal buyout, in any of what are considered “capitalist” or “free-market countries”.

So, leaving aside autocratic, failed communist states like, North Korea and Cuba, what we have everywhere in the self-governing and non-self governinng nations, is always a blend of free-market capitalism for efficiency of allocation of resources and collective-ownership for fairness.

And now….a link to a table of G-20 nations ranked by “collective ownership” of productive capatcity. I got it from that COMMUNIST SOURCE, The CIA World Factbook.

http://openleft.com/diary/12706/just-how-socialist-a-survey-of-major-countries