Category Archives: State Crime

The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

America’s next president will inherit more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he or she assumes office. He will also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country.

To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.

The first shadow government, referred to as COG or continuity of government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.”

The second shadow government, referred to as the Deep State, is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.

The first shadow government, COG, is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.

Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it is the second shadow government, the Deep State, which poses the greater threat to our freedoms. This permanent, corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of the police state.

These two shadow governments, which make a mockery of representative government and the “reassurance ritual” of voting, have been a long time in the making. Yet they have been so shrouded in secrecy, well hidden from the eyes and ears of the American people, that they exist and function in contravention to the principles of democratic government.

As the following makes clear, these shadow governments, which operate beyond the reach of the Constitution and with no real accountability to the citizenry, are the reason why “we the people” have no control over our government.

The COG shadow government plan was devised during the Cold War as a means of ensuring that a nuclear strike didn’t paralyze the federal government.

COG initially called for three teams consisting of a cabinet member, an executive chief of staff and military and intelligence officials to practice evacuating and directing a counter nuclear strike against the Soviet Union from a variety of high-tech, mobile command vehicles. If the president and vice president were both killed, one of these teams would take control, with the ranking cabinet official serving as president.

This all changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when it became clear that there would be no warning against a terrorist attack. Instead of waiting until an attack occurred to mobilize part-time bureaucrats and activate evacuation schemes, George W. Bush opted to change COG and establish a full-time, permanent shadow government, stationed outside the capital, run by permanently appointed (not elected) executive officials.

COG has since taken on a power—and a budget—of its own.

Incredibly, under the Obama administration, the plans for the shadow government have expanded and grown far more elaborate and costly than many realize. It is what investigative journalist William M. Arkin refers to as “the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival.”

In much the same way that the nation was taken hostage after 9/11 by color-coded terror alerts and “See Something, Say Something” campaigns that transformed us into a fearful, watchful nation of suspects, the government’s efforts to prepare us for a so-called national disaster have, in turn, left us a constant state of near-emergency and acclimated us to the sight of militarized police, military drills on American soil, privatized prisons, the specter of internment camps, and the erosion of constitutional rights, especially as they pertain to so-called “extremists,” domestic or otherwise.

Study the COG plans carefully, however, and you’ll find that the concern isn’t so much about protecting our government as it is about protecting the nation’s governmental elite.

As Arkin reports: “Countless billions have been spent on this endeavor over the years, a secret orgy of preparedness going on behind the scenes, one that ensures Washington can defend itself, take care of its own, and survive no matter what.”

To this end, the government has invested heavily in the “architecture of fear”: massive underground bunkers—the size of small cities—which are sprinkled throughout the country for the government elite to escape to “in case of an imminent nuclear strike so that they can set up a kind of Administration-in-exile, directing every order of business from retaliation to recovery.”

These bunkers, strategically located around the nation’s capital and in key states, represent a who’s who on the shadow government’s payroll, with every department and agency represented, from the Department of Education and the Trademark Office to the Small Business Administration and the National Archives.

No sector has been overlooked: military, surveillance, counterintelligence, scientific, political, judicial, corporate contractors, as well as computer programmers, engineers, fire fighters, craftsmen, security guards, branch chiefs, financial managers, supply officers, secretaries and stenographers, all of whom have been entrusted with special ID cards allowing them clearance into the doomsday survival sites. They’ve even included individuals tasked with patent and trademark processing. They even have contingency plans to save priceless works of art.

The Federal Relocation Arc near Washington DC will reportedly serve as the emergency bunker for “every Cabinet department (and every government organization deemed essential).” Site R, a 700,000-foot facility inside Raven Rock Mountain near Camp David, will serve as a backup Pentagon. Peters Mountain near Charlottesville, Va., is the likely site for the nation’s domestic spies to hide out. Congress will retire to a subterranean facility near the posh Greenbrier resortin West Virginia, which served as an internment facility for Japanese, Italian and German diplomats during World War II. And a 600,000-square-foot complex inside Virginia’s Mount Weather is expected to be the primary relocation site for the White House, the Supreme Court and much of the executive branch.

Built into the side of a mountain, Mount Weather, near Bluemont, Va., is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This self-contained facility contains, among other things, a hospital, crematorium, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, an emergency power plant, a radio/television studio and a full-time police and fire department.

There is also an Office of the Presidency at Mount Weather, which regularly receives top-secret national security information from all the federal departments and agencies. This facility was largely unknown to everyone, including Congress, until it came to light in the mid-1970s. Military personnel connected to the bunker have refused to reveal any information about it, even before congressional committees. In fact, Congress has no oversight, budgetary or otherwise, on Mount Weather, and the specifics of the facility remain top-secret.

These facilities reinforce a troubling government mindset that treats the American people as relatively insignificant and expendable. Because you know who’s not on the list of key-individuals-to-be-saved-in-the-eventuality-of-a-disaster? You and me and every other American citizen who is viewed as a mere economic unit to be tallied, bought and sold by those in power.

Not to worry, however. The government hasn’t completely forgotten about us.

In the event of a “national emergency”—loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions”—the executive branch and its unelected appointees will be given unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power.

In such an event, the Constitution will effectively be suspended, thereby ushering in martial law.

However, writing for Radar magazine, Christopher Ketcham suggests that the government won’t have completely forgotten about the rest of us. In fact, Ketcham believes that the government also has plans to imprison hundreds of thousands of “potentially suspect” Americans in detention camps.

Ketcham describes a program created by the Department of Homeland Security that relies on a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Referred to by the code name Main Core, this database reportedly contains the names of millions of Americans who, “often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”

Sounds unnervingly like the objectives of the government’s new Domestic Terrorism Czar and the Strong Cities network, which will be working to identify and target potential extremists, doesn’t it?

Under Ketcham’s scenario, if a terrorist attack occurs, the president will declare a national emergency, activating COG procedures and throwing the country into martial law with the shadow government at the helm. The administration will then round up the “dangerous” Americans listed in Main Core and place them in one of the many internment camps or private prisons built for just such an eventuality.

For all intents and purposes, the nation is one national “emergency” away from having a full-fledged, unelected, authoritarian state emerge from the shadows. All it will take is the right event—another terrorist attack, perhaps, or a natural disaster—for such a regime to emerge from the shadows.

As unnerving as that prospect may be, however, it is the second shadow government, what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” that poses the greater threat right now.

Consider this: how is it that partisan gridlock has seemingly jammed up the gears (and funding sources) in Washington, yet the government has been unhindered in its ability to wage endless wars abroad, in the process turning America into a battlefield and its citizens into enemy combatants?

The credit for such relentless, entrenched, profit-driven governance, according to Lofgren, goes to “another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

This “state within a state” hides “mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day,” says Lofgren, and yet the “Deep State does not consist of the entire government.”

Rather, Lofgren continues:

It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.

All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted.

The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

In an expose titled “Top Secret America,” The Washington Post revealed the private side of this shadow government, made up of 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.”

Reporting on the Post’s findings, Lofgren points out:

These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings…

The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.

As Lofgren concludes:

[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change… If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda.

Remember this the next time you find yourselves mesmerized by the antics of the 2016 presidential candidates or drawn into a politicized debate over the machinations of Congress, the president or the judiciary: it’s all intended to distract you from the fact that you have no authority and no rights in the face of the shadow governments.

 

There is No Pipeline, Schools are Prisons

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By Ryan Calhoun

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

We are told there is a pipeline in the United States that travels from our school system to our criminal justice system. Correct as the data corroborating the pipeline’s existence may be, it is a flawed way of conceptualizing the issue. There is no pipeline out of schools and into prisons, because schools and prisons in this country are not conceptually separable.

Every child is mandated to receive an education with the threat of reprisal by the judicial system if they fail to. Children are thus coerced into attending a learning center, almost none of which adequately meet the educational needs of children. Some opt for public school “alternatives” like homeschooling or private schools, but the model of education is still generally the same and attendance is vigorously enforced. Through forced schooling, children are largely deprived of the ability to engage with the world and learn by means of play. They must cease the process of seeking fulfillment of genuine desires and begin one of alienation from their natural curiosity.

The consequences are shockingly apparent in a case out of Columbia, South Carolina where a police officer at a public high school physically manhandled a young black girl. The scene: A female student sits passively in her chair while the officer demands she stand. The lead-up to the incident is irrelevant. Insubordination to authority in schools is an inevitability for any child with a mind and drive of her own. For having such a mind and drive of her own (“resisting” in law enforcement-speak) the student was grabbed by the neck, slammed to the ground and dragged across the classroom, all while still partially connected to her desk.

Once again, this is not abnormal behavior. Disobedience is something youth do well and often. The response to disobedience, insubordination, and general independent-streaks at any school usually boils down to authoritative command and punishment. Physical assault on children is not legal in all schools, but it is in 19 states. Each year, over 800 children are assaulted legally and as a matter of policy at their schools. In South Carolina, it is legal to handcuff students for simply being loud.

In addition to the female assault victim in the South Carolina incident, the classmate who filmed the shocking video was also later arrested and held on bail. She was kidnapped for filming what was, by any reasonable standard, child abuse. Why was this allowed to happen? Her charge was “Disturbing school.” Please allow this to fully register. Non-violent, peaceful actions by children are construed as attacks on the supposed civility of school.

This officer’s assault is not an aberration; it is how schools treat students. They have no freedom to leave. Anyone who escapes is treated as a fugitive. They are permitted to go home, but this does not change the striking similarities between prisons and schools. It is now regular for schools to have guards — some are cops hired out and some are the schools’ own security staff. Students are filed along corridors and into rooms in such a way as to surveil and control their flow of activity.

People of color are far more likely to find themselves physically assaulted by staff in schools. They are more likely to receive punishment than their white counterparts for the same behavior, and as a result, they begin to recognize the system’s perception of them as marked criminals. Eventually, many are sent to even more coercive penal environments, where the violence and authoritarianism from the administration only escalates. Many students are lucky enough to avoid the transition from educational to criminal detention centers. But far too many either aren’t able to successfully navigate the educational-police state, or have the deck stacked against them from the outset. Their fate is a sad and unnecessary one.

There is no pipeline from school to prison. Some are just forced to stay in class.

Citations to this article:

Insurrection and Utopia, Part 1: “We are Eating From a Trashcan; This Trashcan is Ideology.”

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By Dr. Bones

Source: Gods and Radicals

It all started innocently enough. A friend asked me a question on facebook:

“How can you advocate anarchic revolution when your political vision is so far in the minority?”

The underlying premise was a good one: In a country of 300+ million, how can you call for the upheaval of society, the breaking of societal and political bonds, when so few would readily identify as Anarchists/Socialists/Communists/Leftists/Anti-Capitalists/What-have-you? It’s a question often thrown at the Left and unfortunately many haven’t fully wrapped their heads around it.

In a way it’s a watermark. For an ideology or political vision to go from outright dismissal and laughter to being asked to provide real world examples of what would be done if it came to pass is a sign of growth; it is a signal, an omen, that the winds are beginning to blow in our favor and many want to know what might lie ahead. It’s one thing to talk about “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” but it’s quite another to discuss how restaurants would be run democratically and without profit or what exactly people might “do” on a day to day level in a classless, stateless society.

Still, the question is not an easy one. We could argue that it is the one question that has always plagued and nagged the Left: “Well that’s all good and well, but how do you plan to achieve this? How does such a world become born?” Staunch Marxists rely on a religious belief in the inevitable procession of history, Syndicalists will rail about the need for increased unionization, firebrand Neo-Bolsheviks plot to simply take power and liquidate class enemies, while the newly minted faux-left “Democratic Socialists” will hem-and-haw about passing enough laws to magically change the balance of power.

All of these options present difficult problems. History has been shown to be anything but inevitable (every year since 1914 has been “Late Capitalism”), a worker-owned McDonalds is still a site of exploitation, nobody ever bothers to explain just where all these people ready to kill for the Revolution are to come from, and the ludicrous doctrine of the Sandernistas that the wealthy and powerful will simply submit to higher taxes and the rule of law is so preposterous it’s only response should be derisive laughter.

So, where are we? Where do we go from here? How are we to change the world?

I start first with a question: Whose world?

You Can’t Teach an Old Carrion-Eater New Tricks

Society, technology, language, and culture all bear the birth marks and forms of the ideological underpinnings of the system they emerged from. Marx notes:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

The Ruling Class, whether Capitalist or State Socialist, informs and projects its will and vision onto the rest of society by the sheer nature of being the dominant force in that society. Of course we can see this politically, but Marx notes this extends also into ideas, culture, anything that could be identified as a byproduct of human interaction and thinking.

The iron steel resolve and blatant disregard of human life so typical of the fearsome Bolshevik Commissar was not so much traits born as traits cultivated; ideals taken within the individual and digested. These cultivated traits came directly from the ideological call for early revolutionary Bolsheviks to identify themselves as “hards,” to be tough, to be ruthless and uncompromising in their goals; when they took state power it become propagated on a cultural level. This meme, this political trait, spiraled out and became a creature, a position, a symbolic figure to be adored/feared all onto its own. It transcended its existence as a mere “idea” or feeling about how party members should behave.

Uber, the trendy internet-based taxi service, could have just as easily manifested into the world as a collectively owned, worker-managed co-op. The internet platform itself is not that revolutionary, the people and tools to create the business were there all along and yet….it did not. Instead Uber emerged and was formed through an ideological lens that made sense to the Ruling Class and by a CEO who’s practically a poster boy for modern capitalism:

“Let’s consider how Kalanick treated his Uber taxi drivers in New York. When he was trying to convince them to break the law to boost Uber’s footprint in the city, Kalanick offered yellow cab drivers free iPhones and promised to “take care of” any legal problems they encountered with the TLC. A few short months later, when the service was forced to close, those same drivers received a message to come to Uber HQ. Reports the Verge ‘Multiple drivers said Uber called them into headquarters, claiming they needed to come by in order to get paid and would get a cash bonus for showing up. When the cabbies came in, Uber surprised them by asking for the device back, informing them that taxi service was no longer available in New York.’”

This is how Uber is evolving, this is how the entire concept other companies will build off is evolving: through actions committed under the dictate and logic of a particular ideology. Taken as gospel or rejected as too harsh new companies will only differ themselves in shades from this first “business plan” and mold their own social and economic arrangements within this ideological parameter. Even the technologies, once thought to be “pure” of politics develop along political lines.

“In an even stronger sense, many technologies can be said to possess inherent political qualities, whereby a given technical system by itself requires or at least strongly encourages specific patterns of human relationships. Winner (1985, 29–37) suggests that a nuclear weapon by its very existence demands the introduction of a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command to regulate who may come anywhere near it, under what conditions, and for what purposes. It would simply be insane to do otherwise. More mundanely, in the daily infrastructures of our large-scale economies — from railroads and oil refineries to cash crops and microchips — centralization and hierarchical management are vastly more efficient for operation, production, and maintenance. Thus the creation and maintenance of certain social conditions can happen in the technological system’s immediate operating environment as well as in society at large.”

What’s interesting is the feedback loop this creates: technology is warped and shaped by the society(and thus dominant ideology), while at the same time the society becomes molded by the technology.

“As technologies are being built and put into use, significant alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place … the construction of a technical system that involves human beings as operating parts brings a reconstruction of social roles and relationships. Often this is a result of the new system’s own operating requirements: it simply will not work unless human behavior changes to suit its form and process. Hence, the very act of using the kinds of machines, techniques and systems available to us generates patterns of activities and expectations that soon become “second nature.”…

Winner gives several examples of technologies employed with intention to dominate, including post-1848 Parisian thoroughfares built to disable urban guerrillas, pneumatic iron molders introduced to break skilled workers’ unions in Chicago, and a segregationist policy of low highway overpasses in 1950s Long Island, which deliberately made rich, white Jones Beach inaccessible by bus, effectively closing it off to the poor. In all these cases, although the design was politically intentional, we can see that the technical arrangements determine social results in a way that logically and temporally precedes their actual deployment. There are predictable social consequences to deploying a given technology or set of technologies.”

In effect we our trapped in a web: We exist in a world not only molded and shaped by a Hierarchical and Capitalist mentality, but the very tools we use including our social selves maintain and reinforce this artifice. The ideology molds the world which molds the people which molds the technology which molds the world which molds the people, etc, etc, etc. As Slajov Zizek points out even those who wish to rebel against the system seem doomed(as if by design?) to remain within it:

“If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who ‘really want to do something to help people’ get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing.”

Even if State power is seized, if the old masters are cast out, the very throne itself acts like a cursed object and corrupts those that sought to destroy it. People who fought for the worker’s emancipation end up crushing strikes, Greens end up debating just how much depleted uranium to bury underground and how much to fire out of tanks, anti-austerity Leftists end up dispatching riot police to break up protests, the list goes on and on throughout history. The simple truth is you can take the most noble pauper and make him a king, and he may be a great king, but he must still maintain certain conditions(however unjust) by simply being king. The more he becomes attached to this position the more “pragmatism” takes over, excusing acts once thought unthinkable in the name keeping the current conditions going if only to “continue to do good things.” Hugo Chavez and Castro can speak all day of “people’s liberation” but the fact is people aren’t liberated if simply holding a different opinion is so threatening to your revolution they have to be jailed. And thus the throne lives on. While the Kings may change shape or party color the throne of the State and Capital continue to exist, continue to propagate exploitative and domineering cultural memes, social conditions, and technological apparatus.

But there is hope, even on the hinterlands of the oh-so-popular activism of today, in that seemingly bizarre behavior the State displays when people, protests, and organizations are met with overwhelming force.  Why can millions march up and down streets freely “as long as they do not get close to a certain limit” of behavior? What is this Hedge, this boundary we must cross? What is this line so jealously guarded?

Push it to the Limit

Remember the Cuban Missile crises? Where the big bad Soviet Union brought us within an inch to war, ready to point nuclear warheads stationed in Cuba right at us? And how it was only through tough diplomacy and American bravado that we got them to turn around? No? Good, because it didn’t happen like that at all. The Soviets, arming an ally after a recent American-backed invasion, made the deal, not us: Remove the missiles stationed in Turkey(a country that shared a border with the USSR) pointed at Moscow and they would do the same. Kennedy liked the deal and took it. This brought horror to the Military-Industrial establishment; they saw it as backing down to the Soviets. Remember that ideology bit? They didn’t see it as two individuals avoiding nuclear war; their ideological lens would not permit them to. They instead saw it in a hierarchical, dominating dialectic: we had been submissive towards another power. But the Soviets didn’t see it that way, and neither did much of the world, and therein lay the true danger: a new way of thinking, a shift in vision had been displayed and put into practice. And this would not stand.

Others have covered just how against the grain Kennedy went, and how often those who went against him howled for war. I leave the fact that one of those two combatants is dead under your feet for you to play with and ponder. I could mention that right when Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King started talking about “economic justice” and planned on occupying DC until the Vietnam war was ended he too ended up dead. Interestingly enough his family won a wrongful death suit(full court transcripts available) alleging the government killed him. But I’ll instead stick with “accepted” facts like the long history of COINTELPRO, an FBI program specializing in infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. And this wasn’t a kids games either.

“Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.

Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists. They used bad-jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences.

Legal harassment: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, “investigative” interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.

Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations. The object was to frighten or eliminate dissidents and disrupt their movements….

The FBI also conspired with the police departments of many U.S. cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago) to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes—often with little or no evidence of violations of federal, state, or local laws—which resulted directly in the police killing many members of the Black Panther Party…In order to eliminate black militant leaders whom they considered dangerous, the FBI is believed to have worked with local police departments to target specific individuals, accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them.”

Anyone who thinks this has ended is sorely mistaken. Really, really mistaken.

“Participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.”

Let me translate that for you: “We are actively studying political movements, identifying people whom might actually change things and are using propaganda techniques to change the conversations they have as well as they views they hold to better suit the military’s domestic strategy.” Let that one sink in.

Truth be told we may never fully know how deep the rabbit hole goes. But there is a unifying factor here: the State clamps down hard whenever the ongoing narrative, the ideology itself is shown not to be the only one. They’re afraid of ideas, because these things are what sparks action. The greatest threat to the system isn’t just learning things aren’t what they appear to be, but beginning to imagine a world where things are different. If something is outside the “parameters of acceptance” for the dominant ideology it presupposes that there are limitations to the system; if there are limitations to the system it can become old, worn out, made useless, and ultimately replaced.

So the Ruling Class will violently defend it’s doctrines at all costs. Can we beat such an invincible enemy, an enemy whose literally shaped us all our lives?  How can we achieve that? Can we ever free ourselves and stop eating out of the trashcan of Capitalist Ideology?

Follow me down a rabbit hole of our own making, lets…article6

 

Dr. Bones is an 8 year practitioner of the Southern occult tradition known as Conjure, Rootwork, and Hoodoo. A skilled card reader and Spiritworker, Dr. Bones has undertaken all aspects of the work, both benevolent and malefic. Politically he holds the Anarchist line that “Individuality can only flourish where equality of access to the conditions of existence is the social reality. This equality of access is Communism.” He resides in the insane State of Florida with his loving wife, a herd of cats, and a house full of spirits.
He can be reached through facebook and at drbones@gmail.com

Peter Levenda Podcast Roundup

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Peter Levenda is best known as the author of the Sinister Forces series, a seminal trilogy on the occult history of the United States. He’s also the alleged author of the Simon Necronomicon. Like Robert Anton Wilson (with a more historical and sociological bent), Levenda is able to draw connections between a wide range of fascinating but seemingly disparate topics and consistently digs up mindblowing information that could leave readers questioning their understanding of reality. Throughout the year he’s been doing a larger than usual number of podcast interviews in part to promote his latest book The Hitler Legacy: The Nazi Cult in Diaspora, How it was Organized, How it was Funded, and Why it remains a Threat to Global Security in the Age of Terrorism. Fans of his writing will likely enjoy all the following podcasts which highlight different aspects of his work. Those new to Levenda might want to start with the Higherside Chats interview which provides an expansive yet concise overview of his research.

12/17/15: The Higherside Chats (Sinister Forces, Occult History and The Nine)

http://thehighersidechats.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/THC-Peter-Levenda-Free.mp3

12/10/15: Project Camelot (Nazi Roots of ISIS)

8/25/15 – 10/27/15: Dave Emory (10 Episodes on the Hitler Legacy)

https://wfmu.org/playlists/DX

8/7/15: Dreamland (w/ Joseph Farrell on the Dark Energies of the Modern World)

http://strieber.streamguys1.com/dreamland_08_07_15fr.mp3

4/18/15: Auticulture (on culture, religion, the occult, and geopolitics among other topics)

http://auticulture.com/podcasts/Levenda.mp3

The Other Dieoffs

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By Chad Hill

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

Last week I realized that there were a few subtleties left out of my (rather depressing) topic. I argued that America was doing more than just throwing its working class under the bus; it was actively trying to eliminate of them. Meanwhile, the media, especially that tailored to the richest twenty percent of news consumers, is consistently waxing ecstatic on how this is the “best, richest, most peaceful time, ever,” because Facebook, even though most of us Americans are living in communities that are in an advanced state of decay, if not outright collapse.

The point I wanted to make is that the dieoff is happening not only at the end of life as we saw last week, but also at the beginning. By this I mean that it’s simply too expensive to have kids anymore.  Lowered birthrates are a sort of “stealth dieoff” among the lower classes, and the upper ones too.

Now, lowered birthrates is certainly something I can get behind, but I would rather it have come from choice rather than economic necessity. I realize that not everyone is like me, and for some, the desire to breed is unstoppable. The rich are perennially complaining that the poor are having children they can’t afford, a very Anglo-Saxon complaint that goes back several hundred years. Of course, the poor will continue to breed no matter what because a child costs nothing to produce, and if their ancestors hadn’t behaved the same way after all, they wouldn’t be here. The idea that poverty will stop the poor and indigent from breeding has a poor track record, especially with the numbers of poor and indigent consistently rising. All it means is that more children will be born in poverty, and we now know that there are a host of behavioral and epigenetic consequences of that. Most certainly, the fallout from that will once again be placed on individual failure rather than social circumstance.

Scientists Find Alarming Deterioration In DNA Of The Urban Poor (HuffPo)

The number of kids in the US would be shrinking if it weren’t for immigrants. Americans are castigated for having children they can’t afford, with entire communities, especially rural ones, bereft of well-paying jobs. Meanwhile people in these communities see a massive influx immigrants with huge families working in all the blue collar occupations that they used to do. Is it any wonder that anti-immigrant demagoguery is a political winner in decaying Middle America? Corporate America felt they could keep a lid on this situation forever, even as they cynically stoked this reactionary fervor to delegitimize the very idea of the common good to gain tax benefits and hide the stealth takeover of government. Now they cannot control the demon they have unleashed. The nihilistic philosophy purveyed by the Right of every man for himself has reaped a whirlwind that even they can no longer control. It was only a matter of time before someone hijacked it and used it for their own personal ends.

This article is from the British newspaper The Guardian, but is just as relevant to the United States:

These hurdles to the world of adulthood continue to be a great source of sadness and anxiety, and I’m not alone. For swathes of people in their 20s and 30s, who largely thought they would be at least a bit sorted by now, achieving the adult lives they want seems a distant fantasy. Spiralling property prices coupled with the fetishisation of housing as an investment – expressed through buy-to-let properties and often poor rental conditions – means secure housing is off the table for many of us as we continue to subsidise our much richer landlords…The recession, unstable and unreliable unemployment, low pay compounded by a pensions shortfall and an ageing population, have all led to a situation in which many members of my generation feel not only short-changed, but helpless when it comes to building some semblance of a stable family life. While our generational predecessors, the baby boomers, reaped the rewards of free university education and affordable property prices, we have been disproportionately affected by austerity…

Jealousy towards baby boomers is an everyday occurrence. You’ll be sitting in a bar with friends and hear them lament the fact that their parents had bought a house by the time they were 27. .. Generation Y – or millennials, if you must – are still often portrayed as existing in a state of perpetual kidulthood; we’re Peter Pans who never want to grow up. Yet many of us are desperate to do so.

Unaffordable housing and living costs are often portrayed as a “London problem”. “Why not simply move?” detractors say, as though career opportunity, family ties or personal finances are not an issue. Yet I spoke to people in their 20s and 30s from all over the UK, and many felt the same way: that their chances of getting to the point where they are stable enough to settle down and have children are slim to none. Many of them feel great sadness about this, not only because they look to their parents’ generation and see opportunities they’ve never had, but because a gulf is opening within our own generation – between those who can start a family or whose parents can help them get on the property ladder, and those who can’t….

The more people I spoke to, the more apparent it became that this is not just about generational divides, but about class. Interviewees were forever mentioning friends or acquaintances who had been privileged enough to buy, while those from low-income backgrounds lost out.

‘Babies? An impossible dream’: the millennials priced out of parenthood (Guardian)

The decay of America’s working class is often chalked up sort of a moral turpitude, and this is depicted as something that emerged as a fallout of the permissive 1960’s, despite the fact that it more exactly coincides with the shuttering of factories all over the country than the flower children. The lower classes are consistently depicted by the media as stupid and lazy, and thus deserving of their plight. Meanwhile, the wealthy are depicted as increasingly hard-working and morally upstanding, constantly either studying for another certification or working to the point of exhaustion, and pushing their sheltered, overprivileged children to study hard and get into a good college so they can keep up with the Joneses. Yet at the same time, these poor, working class white Americans are held up as moral exemplars of the nation; the “Real Americans,” in contrast to the swarthy, godless, libertine city-dwellers living it up on welfare. Middle Americans get the mixed message that they are morally superior than the lazy, dark-skinned masses in the cities (where most of the economic activity takes place), at the same time as their communities are being overtaken by violence, family breakdown and chronic drug abuse. It’s a rather schizophrenic view, to say the least.

I recently read this comment on Disinfo :

Viewing this site without Adblocking software is quite the experience. Right now, I’ve got two professional wrestling ads and an ad for Kohls up top. Down at the bottom:

“The way Kim Kardashian lost her virginity is disgusting!”
“25 sexy girls who don’t hide that they’re bisexual!”
“14 selfies taken right before death!”
“20 unseemly moments caught on Walmart security cameras!”
“24 stars who forgot to wear underwear in public!”
Something about ultimate female fighter Ronda Rousey.

It’s like the server is emanating from “Idiocracy,” targeting the oh so coveted “13 Year Old Boy Who Jacks Off 23 Times a Day” demographic.

When I click on the banners, I’m brought to a site running so many simultaneous video ads that my computer freezes. “Gee, thanks! Say, could I perhaps buy something from you?”

This is in reply to a Matt Taibbi article, America is too dumb for TV news.

It’s our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that’s basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.

The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.

What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it’s just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.

And this coming not long after “Black Friday,” in which we are treated to scenes from all over the country of herds of people camping out outside in the freezing cold on one of our few holidays outside the blank, cinderblock boxes of suburban wasteland, so that they can trample themselves to death to secure a new big-screen TV, video game or juicer.

It does seem like Idiocracy, which was theoretically a parody movie, is increasingly an accurate depsiction of our society right now. We currently have a reality TV star running for president. What else is Donald Trump but our very own President Camacho?

Idiocracy is now. How much further can society plummet?

On this news website, chronicling just one area (upstate New York), every article was a depiction of the horror show that Middle America has become:

Mother hid dead body of 11-year-old daughter missing for over a year in freezer, police say

Rome police: Teen shot girlfriend’s baby after trying to stand with loaded gun

Man checks into Syracuse hospital with gunshot wound, but won’t say what happened

Armed Arizona man threatens Islamic community in Upstate NY

In Louisiana, a ‘picture-perfect’ family of 4 is dead in murder-suicide

Mississippi Man Guns Down Waffle House Waitress After She Asks Him Not to Smoke (Alternet)

Citing mass shootings, Upstate NY sheriff urges citizens to carry guns

This is not the sign of a healthy society. This is a society in the grip of madness. This is the other dieoff.

America is one giant tapestry of scam artistry. From pedophiles in Congress, to hedge-funders jacking the price of drugs, to shaking down taxpayers to fund sports stadiums for billionaires, to gutting finance laws, everywhere you turn there is a scam where someone is either trying to rip someone off, or is getting ripped off. And those who are getting ripped off are busily looking to get in on the hustle where they take advantage of someone else below them. It’s a society of predators and prey. And we think this is somehow normal. How much longer can a society like this last?

Isn’t it time we start acknowledging that this is what capitalism is. I mean inherently. It’s the law of the jungle. It’s every man for himself. It’s the “survival of the fittest.” It’s everyone jockeying for some sort of advantage, every minute of every day, morality be damned. It’s a society dedicated to nothing else besides getting every last dollar from the next guy by any means possible. It’s appealing to the lowest and basest instincts in humanity. Yet we’re told that “naked self interest” is natural and is the sole engine of prosperity, and that extreme inequality drives us to “achieve” by the pseudoscience of economics, and most of us appear to believe it.

This is the society we’ve made for ourselves. Are your proud of it? So is it any wonder there’s a backlash, whether from religious fundamentalists or radical political ideologies like Trumpism?

…on the free market it is legal and customary to instrumentalize our fellow human beings, violating their dignity because our goal is not to protect it. Our goal is to gain personal advantage, and in many cases this can be achieved more easily if we take advantage of others and violate their dignity…What is decisive is my attitude and my priority: am I interested in the greatest good and the preservation of the dignity of all, which is something which affects me automatically and which I benefit from as well, or am I primarily interested in my own welfare and my own advantage, which others might, but will not necessarily draw benefit from? If we pursue our own advantage as our supreme goal, the customary practice is to use others as means to achieve this goal and to take advantage of them accordingly.

If we must constantly fear that our fellow human beings will take advantage of us in the market as soon as they are in a position to do so, something else will be systematically destroyed: trust. Some economists say this doesn’t matter because the economy focuses completely on efficiency. But such a view must be disputed, for trust is the highest social and cultural good we know. Trust is what holds societies together from the inside – not efficiency!..The interim conclusion to be drawn is radical: so long as a market economy is based on pursuit of profit and competition and the mutual exploitation that results from it, it is reconcilable with neither human dignity nor liberty. It systematically destroys societal trust in the hope that the efficiency it yields will surpass that achieved by any other form of economy.

10 Moral Crises That Have Resulted From Unfettered, Free Market Capitalism (Alternet)

This comment to a Barbara Ehrenreich piece at Naked Capitalism describes one major reason the white working classes, especially who have bought into the “rugged individualism” ethos, are being skinned alive by this economic system.

I believe this analysis is missing a very important component. True, historically poor whites have experiences somewhat more privileged conditions than minorities (admittedly even today they still do), but that traditional privilege has simultaneously caused them to be somewhat more fragile, less resilient than other oppressed groups. Poor whites are more atomized, isolated people in America. They do not have, nor have access to, the same cohesive social structures that have tended to develop among minorities as a survival mechanism against white oppression in the past.

I don’t say that as a theory, but rather as experienced reality. In the trailer park my family still lives in minority groups tend be gregarious and social among themselves (and honestly among others as well if one were inclined to invite himself as I often was). From my experience they were mostly psychologically stable and had a good ability to roll with the punches. The poor whites on the other hand were near universally drug addicts and thieves, and even when they did (or do–they’re still there I mean) form (weak) social bonds they’d nevertheless steal from each other or rat each other out to the police regardless. This was something I never saw happen among minorities (though I’m sure it does happen; I just didn’t see it at all).

Anyway to continue on, I believe that our economic system is in decline across the board, and that everyone’s wealth and prosperity are taking a hit on average (and the poor are getting the worst of it, as is common in collapsing societies–as I believe I understood from Jared Diamond’s work as well as a Sciencedaily anthropology article I read a while back). This being the case, I put the two together and come up with the idea that poor whites simply do not have the social frameworks, that were previously forged by oppression among the minorities, required to survive a declining society–and thus are dying off.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/12/america-to-working-class-whites-drop-dead.html#comment-2520049

Which coincides with my observations.

Of course there are no social bonds in a society where it’s every man for himself trying to gain personal advantage. Humans were not meant to live like this. The endgame of such a society is Colin Turnbull’s description of the Ik in Uganda, also brought about by a rapid onset of scarcity and deracination. We’re doing the elite’s dirtywork ourselves. They don’t have to massacre us if they can get us to massacre each other.

Meanwhile, among the “meritocratic elite” winners, things are not looking so rosy either:

The rich middle- and high-school kids Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm. They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average. Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.

One of the two major causes of distress, Luthar found, was the “pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits.” …From their answers, Luthar constructed a profile of elite American adolescents whose self-worth is tied to their achievements and who see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don’t meet the highest standards of success. Because a certain kind of success seems well within reach, they feel they have to attain it at all costs—a phenomenon she refers to as “I can, therefore I must.” Middle-class kids, she told me, generally do not live with the expectation that they should go to Stanford or earn $200,000 a year. “If I’ve never been to the moon,” she said of middle-class families, “why would I expect my kids to go there?” The yardstick for the children of the meritocratic elite is different, and it can intimidate as much as it can empower.

The second major cause of distress that Luthar identified was perhaps more surprising: Affluent kids felt remarkably isolated from their parents….

Since Levine wrote The Price of Privilege, she’s watched the stress in the Bay Area and in affluent communities all over the country become more pervasive and more acute. What disturbs her most is that the teenagers she sees no longer rebel. A decade ago, she used to referee family fights in her office, she told me, where the teens would tell their parents, “This is bad for me! I’m not doing this.” Now, she reports, the teenagers have no sense of agency. They still complain bitterly about all the same things, but they feel they have no choice. Many have also fallen prey to what Levine calls a “mass delusion” that there is but one path to a successful life, and that it is very narrow. Adolescents no longer typically identify parents or peers as the greatest source of their stress, Levine says. They point to school. But that itself may suggest a submission of sorts—the unquestioned adoption of parental norms.

The Silicon Valley Suicides (The Atlantic)

One of the reason the children of the elites feel such a sense of anxiety is by design. We’ve made sure that anyone who doesn’t make it into the “cognitive elite” now lives a life of persistent humiliation, desperation and scarcity, constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the debt collectors and predatory law enforcement. And now they can’t even afford to have a family, as we saw above. Add to that the fact that the social safety net is being gutted every day because it is “unaffordable,” even as the pool of jobs is inexorably shrinking. Is it any wonder they’re being driven to neurosis, even to the point of taking their own lives?

It’s yet another dieoff.

So who exactly is thriving in a society like this? Because I can’t find anyone. Yet we’re constantly told by economists that this is just the “natural” evolution of society, as inevitable as the phases of the moon or the law of gravity. There is simply nothing to be done but stomp down on the pedal of more growth and innovation. Really?

Can there be any doubt after reading stories like those above, that something is seriously wrong? for those of us who don’t live in gated communities, or the rarefied communities in Manhattan, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles where all of our media originates, we can see this with our own two eyes. We see the dysfunction around us. Yet the media constantly denies it. It’s dedicated to stoking our fears and insecurities to push product. Can there be any surprise that people in this frightened and decaying nation are turning to someone like Trump who ignores the economists and promises to “make us great again?” It was only a matter of time before someone did it.

Now, you might accuse me of cherry-picking the sordid and sensationalist stories above. I collected them last week entirely by happenstance intending to write about them, but in the interim, something else happened that you may have heard about. As cynical as I am, even my breath is constantly getting taken away.

I once wrote that mass-shootings will become so common in America that the media won’t even bother to cover them anymore. One remarkable thing about the massacre in San Bernardino was that it managed to completely obscure the other gun massacre that took place on the very same day! And it pushed coverage off of the religious fundamentalist massacre at an abortion clinic less than a week before. In other words, there are so many gun massacres that the media cant even cover them all!

Of the 30,000-plus people killed by firearms each year in the United States, more than 11,000 of those are homicides. That means there are more than 30 gun-related murders daily.

The San Bernardino massacre marked the 353rd mass shooting in America this year alone, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker, which defines a mass shooting where at least four people are either injured or killed.

“You have 14 people dead in California, and that’s a horrible tragedy. But likely 88 other people died today from gun violence in the United States,” Everytown for Gun Safety’s Ted Alcorn told the New York Times.

In 2015 to date, according to the Gun Violence Archive, 12,223 people have died as a result of gun violence in America, while another 24,722 people have been injured.
“We’re having a mass shooting every day, it’s just happening under the radar,” Jon Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Gun Policy and Research, told news.com.au.

New York Daily News front cover divides America: ‘God Isn’t Fixing This’ (news.com.au)

Legislation that was unobjectionable to the George W. Bush administration—laws that would simply prevent people on the FBI’s consolidated terrorist watch list from buying guns or explosives—are voted down in Congress. A physician, running for president, say,  “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” And 185,345 background checks to buy guns were processed on Black Friday alone—a new record. According to the FBI, “The previous high for receipts were the 177,170 received on 12/21/2012—a week after Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.” Mass killings turn out to be extremely good news for the gun industry. 

Beyond the frequency and the brutality and the futility of effecting changes, maybe this is a statistic worth noting. As Joshua Holland writes: “Perhaps the most frightening thing we know about gun violence comes from a study conducted by researchers at Duke, Harvard, and Columbia that was published earlier this year in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law. It found that almost one in 10 Americans who have access to guns are also prone to impulsive outbursts of rage. Among this group are almost 4 million people who carry their guns around in public and say they ‘have tantrums or angry outbursts,’ ‘get so angry [that they] break or smash things’ and lose their temper and ‘get into physical fights.’ ” This is not about mental illness; it’s about anger, violence, and fear. And in no small part because of mass shootings, we become more angry, violent, and more fearful all the time. 

And while we read the same articles, and make the same phone calls, and buy more guns, and grow more frightened, one other thing does change. Our schools go into lockdown. More and more. Thursday in Denver (“reports … of an armed person at the school”). Thursday in Pleasant Grove, Utah (“after a student reported another student with a gun”). Thursday in Chicago. Thursday in Palm Beach, Florida. Thursday in Dallas. Thursday in Savannah, Georgia. Thursday (and two other days this week) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Friday in Philadelphia. Wait, what? Kids bring guns to schools? In what universe does this surprise us? For our children, a world of daily shootings and daily lockdowns is the way they will have been raised. For them, as a friend who lives near one of Thursday’s lockdowns puts it, “It’s not if. It’s when.”

Mass Shootings are Changing Us (Slate)

The irony is that, when it comes to real resources, America is one of the best placed societies in the world. We waste upwards of forty percent of our food and energy on a daily basis. While we do import oil, this is mainly due to our profligate ways rather than true scarcity or “need.” Our population density compared to land area is the envy of Europe, much less places like India, China and Nigeria. We have the resources to give people a much higher standard of living in an industrial decline situation than much of the world, it’s just that our frontier growth mentality and bootstrap ideals dictate that life must be a hard struggle, and that allowing the rich to accumulate massive fortunes is somehow not only morally, but also practically, ideal.

I feel somewhat fortunate that I understood from an early age that the American lifestyle is toxic just be observing the lives of people around me. I never bought into the bullshit, and it seems like the people who did are the ones who are struggling, particularly mentally. My circumstances are somewhat similar to this woman from the article cited above:

Some might argue that expectations are now simply too high. Thea, 26, certainly thinks so. “I come from a working-class background, so, while I have had some financial help from my parents when I’ve been desperate – I’m talking a couple of hundred quid a month – the onus has always been on me to achieve and get where I want to be in life. I’ve not had anything ‘handed’ to me, like a house or substantial amount of money that would help me settle down in future.”

But it doesn’t bother her too much. “My upbringing and background have helped me accept my current situation. Despite not having much money as a kid – we never went abroad, for example – I never felt I missed out on anything. I do think my expectations of what constitute necessities – foreign holidays, owning a house or car – are lower than those of some of my peers who had more middle-class upbringings.”

Thea has never wanted children and, as an only child, knows that she will inherit her parents’ house when they die. “I think the country, as far as wages, property, poverty and my generation actually being able to build secure finances, is in an absolute state and something undoubtedly needs to be done. But I also think part of the problem is that so many people go to uni now: it devalues a degree (I don’t have one) and doesn’t guarantee anyone a job. So you’re left with broke, unemployed twentysomethings in debt.”

In my office context, I saw countless examples of people pursuing the “American Dream” of going deep into debt for a fancy degree, clawing their way up the career ladder by working 80-hour weeks and hitting the links, marrying someone from a suitable class background, pumping out the babies immediately thereafter, and moving out of their cozy, walkable neighborhoods to a bloated starter mansion out in the distant exurban wastelands, with the requisite hour-plus commute to be in a good school district (and moving another ten miles out with every raise or promotion). This is the good life? Really? I had no intention (or even opportunity) to get into the competition of who has the bigger house, or whose kids have the best SAT scores, or any of that nonsense. Being born on the bottom with no family has its advantages. You don’t have to be a hermit to not buy into this society’s bullshit, you just have to think for yourself, something most people are conditioned never to do, because if they did the whole thing might fall apart.

But then, again it’s all falling apart anyway.

The Business of War is the Cause of War

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By Sergey Baranov & Ethan Indigo Smith

Source: Waking Times

If you objectively and consistently observe the mainstream media and its interpretation of global events, its omissive and deceptive character soon becomes abundantly clear. This could hardly be called incompetence. The coverage, which is popularly called “news,” is in fact nothing but a propaganda mechanism, designed to persistently shape public opinion in favor of war.

Who benefits from war?

Certainly not the people on the warring sides. People always suffer in war; their futures ruined and their lives destroyed. In fear, they look to their government to protect them, the very same government that is invested in war. War is a dirty business that profits off death and destruction while generating blood money for the profiteers. The people are told to look the other way, outside of their country – where the ‘enemy’ supposedly resides.

But what if the real enemy is inside the country, and wears expensive suits, not turbans? What if he speaks your language while living in luxury and sending his children to study at Princeton, Yale and Harvard? While your kids are sent off to fight in fraudulent wars for corporate interests masquerading as ‘patriotism’.

This is in fact jingoism – a nationalized fervor of aggression, based on the notion of supremacy, and usually founded in a lust for power and riches. This mindset, of course, isn’t new and is no different from Adolf Hitler’s extreme nationalism, or fascism.

Today we are living under the rule of oligarchical, trans-humanist, eugenicist elites that continuously consolidate power in order to control and confine humanity while methodically stripping us of the power to govern ourselves. One of the best ways to achieve this is to keep the people in constant fear of wars and threats of terrorism, that, in reality governments themselves typically create or sponsor. For example, we can look at the current threat of ISIS which is in fact a remodel of Al Qaeda, a group the CIA created in the 1970’s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.

Constant mainstream promotion of ISIS with newly released videos of beheadings and other types of inhuman cruelty is used to scare the American people into the further submission, and ever-greater losses of rights and personal freedoms. The growing surveillance and domestic police state, and the passage of laws including the recent renewal of the Patriot Act, wouldn’t be possible without always frightening the general public. This policy ensures the constant funding of the military industrial complex, which unfortunately has taken over the government, as Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States had foreseen and warned us about on Jan. 17th, 1961.

READ: Former Presidents Warn About the “Invisible Government” Running the United States

How can we stop the war machine?

Well, certainly not by fighting against it using its means. That’s what the machine is designed for, and an armed resistance will only be playing into its hands. After all, they’ve got the nukes and they will use them as they have already done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There must be another way to shut down this engine of death.

What is the way to a global peace? Certainly it isn’t paved with war… how absurd! Nor is it threats and rhetoric of war.

Furthermore, the nuclear threat means that the situation today is dire. The wars most of us have known in our lifetimes have not been nuclear which is why you need to wake up and get involved before it happens. There are no survivors under mushroom clouds – everybody dies.

There is no defense in the case of a nuclear war being unleashed – unless you were to commit yourself to living underground in a bunker for the rest of your life, without ever again seeing and feeling the sunshine. It is a death by a thousand cuts if you remain on the surface. There is no technology to clean up radiation and take it out of the air, water and land. The half-life of nuclear radiation is 4.5 billion years, equal to the age of our planet. That means that during this time, the radioactive particles will remain as deadly as they are today. This could be the end of all of us if nuclear war were to be released on a massive scale – a probability that is as high today as it has ever been, and growing proportionally with the insanity of politics.

The cold war between the Soviet Union and USA never ended, only slowly heated up. And even though the nuclear arms race developed through paranoia, the threat of nuclear war today, is in fact a very present and real one.

Realizing that war is an instrument to have us kill and be killed on behalf of corporate interests, we should be refusing the very notion of war, no matter how much we are lied to and instigated to do otherwise. War defeats individuals and empowers institutions. Wars do not happen naturally. They are orchestrated for political and economic advantage by corporate entities for which human life is only a means to a greater enrichment. The United States of America is not the only country in which the military industrial complex has taken over. The same can be seen in many modern nations.‘’War is good for the economy,’’ is a slogan often heard on the news in Israel.

But for which economy? For the economy of peace, or for the economy of war? Is it good for the people or is it good for those who are in the business of bullets and bombs?

Traveling the world and observing ordinary people, one will inevitably come to the conclusion that no one actually wants war. Regardless of the geographical location, nationality, skin color, social status etc., people want peace, and to see their children grow. Wars, although they may appear, are not fought between people. They are fought between military industrial factions and alliances warring for domination and control.

READ: All Wars Are Well Planned Banker Wars, Including World War 3

Banks financing the governments of warring sides are even more heavily involved than the war materials industries. They fund the entire game by lending money to the governments, further sinking nations in debt, while they use this money to kill each other off. Federal spending surges as the military is mobilized. Outlays for troops, weapons and munitions increases as conflicts escalate. Thee fraudulent and never-ending war in Iraq has already cost over 3 trillion dollars and counting – a steady flow of income for all those who are employed and benefiting from war.

While the average person wants to be left alone to live his or her life in peace on either side of an orchestrated conflict, government, corporations and institutions drag us into conflict time and again. The world has become a place where corporate interests, backed by corrupt governments, all funded by evil banks, violate human rights, freedom and dignity beyond measure. This poses an existential threat to the survival of our species that will not abate as long as the military industrial complex maintains its grip on our society and our culture.

 

About the Authors

Sergey Baranov is the author of Path: Seeking Truth in a World of Lies. Follow him on Facebook here. Follow Sergey on Facebook here https://www.facebook.com/sergey.baranov.path

Activist, author and Tai Chi teacher, Ethan Indigo Smith was born on a farm in Maine and lived in Manhattan for a number of years before migrating west to Mendocino, California. Guided by a keen sense of integrity and humanity, Ethan’s work is both deeply connected and extremely insightful, blending philosophy, politics, activism, spirituality, meditation and a unique sense of humour. Follow Ethan on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ethan-Indigo-Smith/423549761069857?fref=ts

Emanuel running scared; White House, Hillary camps alarmed

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

President Obama and putative Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton held a previously unscheduled and unannounced 90-minute luncheon meeting at the White House on December 7. Although the White House termed the meeting “personal,” WMR learned that chief on their agenda was the political scandal in Chicago surrounding former Obama chief of staff and former Clinton administration White House aide Rahm Emanuel. Obama and Clinton fear that an indictment of Emanuel for covering up the shooting death by Chicago police of an unarmed black teen in order to skate to re-election as mayor could upset Chicago and Illinois politics and harm Clinton’s current lead in the polls.

Emanuel, who was re-elected mayor of Chicago last month after defeating his Hispanic challenger, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, in the April run-off primary, is mired in a major scandal arising from his covering up of the existence of a Chicago Police Department tape showing Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke pumping sixteen rounds into Laquan McDonald, a 17-year old African-American, in 2014.

On December 7, just as Obama and Clinton were secretly meeting at White House, the U.S. Justice Department announced it was conducting a criminal probe of the Chicago Police Department. At the same time, Emanuel, who has had a tortured relationship with the press, called a news conference to announce that he would support the federal probe of the police. Last week, after publicly supporting his police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, an import from the New York Police Department, Emanuel suddenly asked for his resignation.

At the news conference, Emanuel, who is normally brash and ill-tempered with the media and others, looked like a deer caught in the headlights. After having rejected a federal probe of his police department, Emanuel reversed himself and said he welcomed it. Mrs. Clinton publicly stated she had faith in Emanuel. Clinton said she was “confident that he’s [Emanuel] going to do everything he can to get to the bottom” of the emerging scandal.

Illinois Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, a longtime friend of Emanuel, like Mrs. Clinton, expressed “shock” after seeing the video of McDonald’s shooting but refrained from criticizing the mayor. However, Rauner, whose wife Diana Mendley Rauner, like Emanuel, is Jewish and a strong supporter of Zionist causes, did criticize Obama for not ordering a federal investigation of the Chicago police earlier. The Obama White House is said to have been livid over Rauner’s criticism and believes it would not have been made without a “wink and a nod” from Emanuel’s backers.

Rauner’s chief operating officer is former Republican Governor of Hawaii Linda Lingle, another supporter of Zionist causes who is helping to deflect criticism away from Emanuel. Emanuel also has a powerful ally in Obama’s Cabinet, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, the founder of PSP Capital Partners and Pritzker Realty Group and an heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a financial backer of Emanuel.

Emanuel has also appointed as a senior adviser to his Task Force for Police Accountability former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, an African-American and a close friend of Obama. Emanuel hopes to avoid any potential indictment for covering up the McDonald shooting by using Patrick, the head of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division under President Bill Clinton, to use his connections with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, also an African-American, and her senior staff to intercede on his behalf.

Emanuel and his political supporters have every reason to be worried. Emanuel stands accused of covering up the existence of the police dash cam video showing that Van Dyke shot McDonald without provocation from the teen. On April 15, 2015, the Chicago City Council, with Emanuel’s obvious blessing, offered to pay the McDonald family $5 million in a settlement. The offer came just a week after Emanuel defeated Garcia and a campaign in which Emanuel convinced the city’s African-American voters that he was a better choice than Garcia, a Cook County Commissioner.

On May 26, 2015, a freelance journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the police dash cam video showing the shooting of McDonald. The city denied the request citing an ongoing investigation of the incident. In November, a judge ordered the city to release the explosive tape that enraged the city’s African-American residents and prompted Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to charge Van Dyke with first degree murder.

However, it was known to Alvarez, McCarthy, and Emanuel what was on the 2014 video and Emanuel stands accused in the court of public opinion and by a number of newspapers of covering up the tape’s existence in order to glide on to re-election. It is certain that if the tape were made public earlier, Garcia would have garnered the support of a majority of Chicago’s African-Americans and defeated Emanuel in the April Democratic primary. Emanuel, the scion of a hard line Zionist family—his father, a former Irgun terrorist from Israel once stated that Arab women were only suited to be cleaning ladies in the White House—harbors his own presidential ambitions in 2020 or 2024. That is why Emanuel, former U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald, and U.S. Judge James Zagel arranged for former Democratic Governor and Emanuel’s predecessor in Illinois’s 5th Congressional District, Rod Blagojevich, to receive a 14-year federal prison sentence for corruption. Blagojevich, who insists he is innocent, is not slated for release until 2025.

Emanuel has called on all his Zionist friends to bail him out of his current political morass. With several quarters calling for his resignation, Emanuel is being hit with the age-old political scandal question arising from the Watergate affair: “What did he [Emanuel] know and when did he know it?”

Emanuel even has his own version of the Richard Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods’s infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in an Oval Office audio tape. The manager of a Burger King testified before a grand jury that Chicago police erased 86 minutes from his restaurant’s security video tape that showed the shooting of McDonald. The FBI confiscated the Burger King’s video recorder and then stated that there was no evidence that the videotape had been altered. When it comes to mishandling and tampering with evidence of a crime, from the Kennedy assassination in Dallas to the crash of TWA flight 800 off Long Island and 9/11, the FBI has no peers. And when it comes to whether to believe a Burger King manager and the FBI, the Burger King manager wins any veracity contest hands down.

In addition to McCarthy, Emanuel fired Scott Ando, the chief administrator of the so-called “Independent” Police Review Authority and replaced him with a former assistant attorney flunky for Fitzgerald in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Sharon Fairley. Fairley’s “independence” is dubious since she served as Emanuel’s general counsel and deputy inspector general during the cover-up of the McDonald shooting. Police confiscated the Burger King tape which was subsequently turned over to the FBI.

As for as the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, Zachary Fardon, Emanuel has little to be concerned with. Fardon replaced Fitzgerald in 2013 and formerly assisted him in prosecuting and convicting former GOP Governor George Ryan after the governor commuted the death sentences of Illinois’s death row inmates after citing police and prosecutorial misconduct in their trials. Fardon’s assistant U.S. Attorney is Gary Shapiro, another pal of Emanuel.

By going after corrupt law enforcement officers and prosecutors, Ryan painted a target on his back. Ryan went to prison because he went after Fitzgerald’s and Fardon’s corrupt cronies. Blagojevich followed Ryan into prison after threatening to expose Obama’s and Emanuel’s political and personal cronyism in Chicago.

Emanuel created a number of enemies on his way up the political ladder. His enemies include Chicago public school teachers, public employee unions, the African-American community, the Hispanic community, former Democratic Governor Pat Quinn—defeated by Emanuel’s pal Rauner—and the Assyrian Chaldean Christian community in the 5th district. During his campaign for Congress, Emanuel had the Assyrians convinced that he, like them, was of Assyrian Christian descent. Emanuel never mentioned that he was a Zionist Jew who served in the Israeli Army during Operation Desert Storm. Now that Emanuel’s political blood is in the water, his enemies are coalescing and are ready to pounce on the political circle of wagons Emanuel believes he has formed around himself in Chicago, Springfield, and Washington, DC. Emanuel, who has been a “divide and conqueror” for all of his political life—he once called progressive and liberal Democrats “fucking retarded”—now stands to be politically “drawn and quartered” by enemies who are uniting in the common goal of seeing Emanuel “perp walked” off to prison.

The Dying Americans

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By Chad Hill

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

I’ve often used the term “the final solution for the working class,” in reference to the current American policy towards its vast intercoastal peasantry who, for reasons of circumstance or inclination, do not subject themselves to the decade or so of wildly expensive education that qualifies them for the remaining jobs on offer. It may be a reflection of my readership that I haven’t received any pushback. As someone who is in that same working class, I can clearly see what is happening around me, and I’m not alone. David J. Blacker, in his book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, also broached the subject of eliminationism, going so far as to study the German holocaust literature of the 1930’s which calmly and rationally discussed how to deal with the problem of getting rid of the millions of excess people whom the elites determined were “undesirable” in the brave new world they were creating.

After last week, it’s hard to argue that this is hyperbole. The news that America’s white working class between the ages of 45-65 has dramatically falling life expectancy, alone against nearly the entire world, received a surprising (to me) bit of coverage. When I first read it, I assumed it would be just another footnote story that I would write about here, but would be ignored everywhere else. But it received a surprising amount of coverage: even Paul Krugman wrote about it. I suspect a large part of that was due to the fact that it was research by the most recent economics “Nobel” laureate Angus Deaton and his wife, so it was harder to ignore than if it had been from some unknown researcher.

Often times you hear about a “dieoff” due to our situation. I think this study confirms beyond a doubt that the dieoff is already happening. Yet, consider that, before this study became popularized, you would have never heard about it in the mainstream press. Still doubt the collapse is real?

It’s not people dying in the streets, though, unlike some of the more feverish TEOTWAKI peak oil predictions. From the research, elevated levels of suicide and drug abuse are the prime culprits. It’s the million little deaths that go unnoticed in the obituary columns of decaying communities all across this formerly prosperous nation. Someone overdosed in a back alley. Or a meth lab exploded. Or maybe they were killed in a car accident, or decapitated while driving their motorcycle too fast. Or they were shot by police. Or they are dying of liver failure by age 40. Or, increasingly, they are ground down slowly by the many chronic diseases such as diabetes that are symptomatic of the chronic stress and horrid (yet highly profitable) junk food diet of most Americans. It’s a dieoff all right, but it’s never framed as such. You can see it all around you: the overcrowded jails filled with unemployed people, the overcrowded hospitals filled with sick, obese people, the folks standing on the medians and freeway offramps with cardboard signs and living their cars, all while the media just goes on reporting about spectator sports and celebrity gossip as though nothing bad is happening. Ignorance really is bliss.

The obvious analogy here is Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, as many people writing about the study have pointed out: The Dying Russians (New York Review of Books). But there was no “collapse” of the United States. Or was there? Instead, we’re told by the media and politicians that everything in every way is getting better and better for everyone. Just look at the latest iPhone! Television screens are huge! Even the very poor have indoor plumbing! And you can Google anything you like, so what are you complaining about, loser?

Everything is famed as personal failure, thus the dieoff is just a million stories of individual failure with no overall pattern. Nothing to see here, more along. Study and “work hard” (whatever that means), and you’ll be okay. Certainly that fear is behind the epidemic of overwork, presenteeism and grinding hours of unpaid overtime Americans are putting in at work in the hope of not being next. It’s like being the model prisoner in a concentration camp, though. Ask the turkeys this month if being a good turkey had any effect on their ultimate fate. The Parable of the Happy Turkey (Global Guerrillas)

Up until now, Americans have been happy turkeys. Thus, they cannot comprehend what is happening to them. In America it is taken for granted that the ultimate locus of control is on the individual, and that there is no such thing as society. That belief has been heavily promoted over the past thirty years, along with the “create your own reality” and other assorted positive thinking nonsense (thanks Oprah!), and I think we can see why.

And since we see this always as personal failure and are not allowed to see it as systemic failure, the poor and formerly middle classes take it out on themselves instead of the system. After all, America is the land of opportunity; if you don’t “make it’ (whatever that means), you have no one to blame but yourself! Of course it is not true; the musical chairs job market and winner-take-all economy means that only a tiny number of people even have a shot at the middle class anymore, and a lot of that is due to geography, pre-existing social connections and luck.

They don’t have to kill you if they can get you to kill yourself.

And although framed as a tragedy, I wonder if to some extent this behavior on the part of working class males is a logical response to living in the kind of society that the United States has become. In a society that has no use for them anymore and where they have no sense of purpose and no hope for the future, it seems like suicide is a rational response. After a certain age, you realize that you have been sorted to the “losers” pile. If you live in the vast suburban flatland of Middle America, you likely live in a decrepit house somewhere in the anonymous miasma of strip-mall suburbia, buy disposable plastic crap made in China from baleful fluorescent-lit Dollar Stores, drive an older model pickup truck or SUV with a bad muffler and bad brakes over potholed streets and under rusty bridges, while all the jobs around you aside from the hospital and the university (which are mainly female-staffed) are minimum wage, dead-end jobs where you have to smile and wear a uniform. You realize you’re never going to meet the girl of your dreams since hypergamy is still baked into female mating choice, despite what some feminists claim. You realize you will never get that that great job that will allow you to be upwardly mobile and live in relative ease and comfort, and life is a bitter, hard struggle relieved only by the occasional joint and video games. Or you’re divorced and paying child support to your former wife who’s managed to keep herself presentable enough to hook up with one of the few remaining alpha-males, and half your income goes to support the kids you never see. Or your deadbeat loser children have been working multiple McJobs and living in the basement for years with no hope of even affording a one-bedroom apartment, and between them and the wife you never speak to anymore, you can’t even get into your own damn bathroom. You realize that, like most Americans, you will never afford to retire and will have to work your boring, dead-end job under your asshole supervisor until you literally drop dead. So why wait?

I mean, who wouldn’t kill themselves or anesthetize themselves with drugs and booze in an environment like this?

I once read an online commenter say that the rich are the beta testers for the lifestyles we will all be living in the future (and thus no restraints must be put on their wealth accumulation if we are to experience that future). But that commenter had it wrong. Rather, it is the poor–those living on less than a few dollars a day; those who live in ghettos marred by gangs and drug abuse; those with their heat, water, and streetlights turned off, who are the beta testers for the lifestyles that most of us will be “enjoying” in the near future. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed.

Given the above, I can’t help but think of the “Rat Park” experiment. Rats in a cage, when given  a choice between water and drugs, would overdose themselves to death on the drugs, neglecting even basic self-maintenance. But a cage is a boring, repetitive, stressful environment for a rat, so you might expect the animals to anesthetize themselves with whatever was on offer. But rats living in an environment specifically designed to be pleasant and give the rats what they needed to thrive did not overdose themselves to death; they preferred healthier behaviors instead. It’s worth noting that most of the drugs we use today have been known for hundreds or even thousands of years, but were not abused by the native peoples who discovered them. That is reserved for modern, “advanced” societies. The Rat Park experiment (io9)

I once wrote that if you wanted to intentionally design a social environment to drive a primate insane, you would develop something pretty much identical to modern-day America (advertising, chronic stress, inequality, separation from nature and each other, boring, repetitive work, constant surveillance, and on and on…). It’s pretty obvious how Rat Park parallels life in twenty-first century America with its ubiquitous television, concentration-camp schools complete with metal detectors, freeways and cul-de-sacs and landscapes of Applebees™ and Walmarts; along with a steady diet of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. It’s hardly an environment designed for human flourishing, is it? Rather, it is designed to maximize “economic growth” at all costs. The results of that experiment are as plain to see as they are predictable.

Most people who are still relatively comfortable are content to write off the people who are living in deprived circumstances among them right now, especially in the United States where so many of those poor are African-American. But more and more, whites are experiencing what they had previously dismissed as “black problems” due to their racist attitudes: the hopelessness and despair, the unemployment, the sociological pathologies; the drug abuse, divorces, domestic violence, youth gangs and so on. It’s not race, it’s environment, as Rat Park showed. Given a certain environment, an animal–any animal–will behave a certain way. Its totally predictable. We know this, but why do we pretend it is not true? Instead we reliably chalk it all up to “the Cult of Personal Failure.”

But this leads to an even larger question, one that gets to the heart of our modern predicament. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of society are we creating where so many people see death as preferable to living in such a society? In what kind of a society do people see life as so miserable that they prefer to kill themsleves, either slowly or immediately?  That is, why is this the end result of hundreds of years of supposed “progress?”

Fundamentally, how do you feel about this society? Do you feel good about this society? Do you feel good about the school-to-prison pipeline? Do you feel good that there are more prisoners than small yeoman farmers? Do you feel good that it is a felony to show us how our food is produced? Do you feel good about students mortgaging their future for jobs that won’t exist by the time the bill comes due? Do you feel good about hospitals treating chronic diseases taking the place of farming and making things as basis of the America’s rural economies? Do you feel good about police armed with body armor and and tear gas? Do you feel good about wall-to-wall advertising preying on our weakness and insecurities? Do you feel good about the atmosphere of incessant adversarial competition against everyone else for the shrinking pool of jobs on offer which pay enough to afford rent?

If so, why?

This puts a crimp on the Panglossian “everything in every way is getting better for everyone,” rhetoric that you hear so often in the media. What I find amusing is that this rhetoric used to come from the Left–that the welfare state would eliminate poverty, racism, that everything was under control and circles of cooperation would get larger and larger, and so on. But now, I mostly hear the Panglossian rhetoric coming primarily from the Right, whose preferred God is the unregulated “free” market. It’s in the Right-wing propaganda now that I constantly hear how wonderful everything is, and that those who are complaining are either delusional misfits or just jealous. Here is a prime example from the Right-wing National Review:

Good news abroad, and good news at home: In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New York City. That number has fallen by 85 percent. Murders are down, often dramatically, in cities across the country. The overall rate of violent crime has fallen by about half in recent decades. U.S. manufacturing output per worker trebled from 1975 to 2005, and our total manufacturing output continues to climb. Despite the no-knowthings [sic] who go around complaining that “we don’t make things here anymore,” the United States continues to make the very best of almost everything and, thanks to our relatively free-trading ways, to consume the best of everything, too. General-price inflation, the bane of the U.S. economy for some decades, is hardly to be seen. Flexible and effective institutions helped ensure that we weathered one of the worst financial crises of modern times with surprisingly little disruption in the wider economy. Despite politicians who would usurp our rights, our courts keep reliably saying that the First Amendment and the Second Amendment pretty much mean what they say. I just filled up my car for $1.78 a gallon.

 The world isn’t ending.

The world is healthier, wealthier, and less hungry mainly because of the efforts of millions of unknown investors, entrepreneurs, farmers, workers, bankers, etc., all working without any central coordinating authority….There is much left to do: We have unsustainable fiscal situations in the Western welfare states, irreconcilable Islamist fanatics originating in points east but spread around the world, environmental challenges, and that tenth of the human race that still needs lifting out of hardcore poverty. But we have achieved a remarkable thing in that unless we mess things up really badly, in 50 years we’ll be having to explain to our grandchildren what a famine was, how it came to be that millions of people died every year for want of clean water — and they will look at us incredulously, wondering what it must have been like to live in the caveman times of the early 21st century.

Liberal Democracy and Free Markets, Take a Bow (National Review) Or better yet, strap on flight suit and hang up a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Yes, for the folks on the Right, it truly is a Golden Age. There are a few flaws in the ointment like those pesky welfare states and all that but, hey, gas is cheap! Can’t you just feel the bright, shiny future ahead? Here’s a another sampling from The Wall Street Journal:

The trajectory of the world doesn’t justify this pessimism. People are living longer on every continent. They’re doing less arduous, backbreaking work. Natural disasters are killing fewer people. Fewer crops are failing. Some 100,000 people are being lifted out of poverty every day, according to World Bank data.

Life is also getting better in the U.S., on multiple measures, but the survey found that 55% of Americans think the “rich get richer” and the “poor get poorer” under capitalism. Sixty-five percent agree that most big businesses have “dodged taxes, damaged the environment or bought special favors from politicians,” and 58% want restrictions on the import of manufactured goods.

Has the World Lost Faith in Capitalism? (WSJ) Silly people, how dare they “lose faith!” Once we stamp out every last vestige of “socialism” we can restore that faith.

So what’s going on here? Listening to the Right, one gets the appearance that things have never been better, and that people are just totally irrational and determined to complain no matter how good they have it, despite voluminous scientific literature portraying optimism bias as the default cognitive condition for most people.

I think it stems from two areas – the Neoliberal experiment has clearly been an unmitigated disaster, so the literature constantly has to portray a rosy picture for those still living in the elite ideological bubble by cherry-picking data: Cheer – Inequality is Falling Globally!! (and similar nonsense) (Pieria). It’s much like the “happy peasant” literature that prevailed on the eve of the French Revolution and during early Industrialism to convince upper-class readers that their efforts were actually for the good of all, not just themselves; it’s just that the feckless peasants were too short-sighted to realize it. The elites, for some reason, have a need to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the free-market fundamentalism they subscribe to is making everyone–not just them–better off. Perhaps it is a remedy for cognitive dissonance and a guilty conscience.

The second agenda might be to cover up the agenda of eliminationism referred to above.
Going back to the original topic, it’s fairly clear that getting rid of the lower classes is, as The Joker put it in The Dark Knight, “all part of the plan.”

Now that might seem a bit paranoid, but consider this – the governors of many states are withdrawing basic social protections for their poorest citizens, and actually paying for the priviliege! Here’ Kevin Drum:

…the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are denying health care to the needy and paying about $2 billion for the privilege. Try to comprehend the kind of people who do this. 

The residents of every state pay taxes to fund Obamacare, whether they like it or not. Residents of the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are paying about $50 billion in Obamacare taxes each year, and about $20 billion of that is for Medicaid expansion. Instead of flowing back into their states, this money is going straight to Washington DC, never to be seen again. So they’re willing to let $20 billion go down a black hole and pay $2 billion extra in order to prevent Obamacare from helping the needy. It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?

Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to Screw the Poor (Mother Jones)

Last week, McClatchy documented the unnecessary pain being inflicted on red state residents by their elected Republican representatives…Roughly 260 million Americans (roughly 85 percent) already have health insurance provided by their employers, the government or through individual policies they purchased. In places like Oregon, Colorado, New York, California and other, mostly Democratic states, governors and state legislators accepted the expansion of Medicaid to provide free health insurance for those earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty (FPL). For those earning between 138 and 400 percent of the FPL, the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies will help them purchase insurance in the private market. But in the states where Republicans said “no” to the expansion of Medicaid, the picture is much different. As the AP explained the coverage gap:

Nearly 2 in 3 uninsured people who would qualify for health coverage under an expansion of Medicaid live in states which won’t broaden the program or have not yet decided on expansion.

The resulting Republican body count is staggering. Thanks to the GOP’s rejection of Medicaid expansion, 1.3 million people in Texas, 1 million in Florida, 534,000 in Georgia and 267,000 in Missouri will be ensnared in the coverage gap.

Health Insurance “Coverage Gap” Coming To A Red State Near You (Crooks and Liars)

That’s right, Republican governors are blowing a hole in their budget just to remove social protections for the poor. Often times, “unaffordability” is cited as a justification, but clearly this is not at work here. It’s pure ideology. But what is that ideology? Here’s more detail:

American conservatives for the past several decades have shown a remarkable hostility to poor people in our country. The recent effort to slash the SNAP food stamp program in the House; the astounding refusal of 26 Republican governors to expand Medicaid coverage in their states — depriving millions of poor people from access to Medicaid health coverage; and the general legislative indifference to a rising poverty rate in the United States — all this suggests something beyond ideology or neglect.

The indifference to low-income and uninsured people in their states of conservative governors and legislators in Texas, Florida, and other states is almost incomprehensible. Here is a piece in Bustle that reviews some of the facts about expanding Medicaid coverage:

In total, 26 states have rejected the expansion, including the state of Mississippi, which has the highest rate of uninsured poor people in the country. Sixty-eight percent of uninsured single mothers live in the states that rejected the expansion, as do 60 percent of the nation’s uninsured working poor.

These attitudes and legislative efforts didn’t begin yesterday. They extend back at least to the Reagan administration in the early 1980s…

Most shameful, many would feel, is the attempt to reduce food assistance in a time of rising poverty and deprivation. It’s hard to see how a government or party could justify taking food assistance away from hungry adults and children, especially in a time of rising poverty. And yet this is precisely the effort we have witnessed in the past several months in revisions to the farm bill in the House of Representatives. In a recent post Dave Johnson debunks the myths and falsehoods underlying conservative attacks on the food stamp program in the House revision of the farm bill.

This tenor of our politics indicates an overt hostility and animus towards poor people. How is it possible to explain this part of contemporary politics on the right? What can account for this persistent and unblinking hostility towards poor people?

Why a war on poor people? (Understanding Society)

Let’s restate this to be clear to make sure the point is not lost: these states are willing to lose money in order to make sure their poor die quicker. Clear enough? And we’re not even talking about things like the outright cold-blooded murder of the homeless by police, the breaking up of homeless encampments, the mass incarceration, and return of debtors’ prisons, and so on. It’s expensive to be poor in  America. We do everything by the Matthew Effect from jobs to education, and wonder why class mobility is nonexistent. Yet we’re still told that everyone wants to be an American, that it’s the land of opportunity, and that things have literally never been better.

Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry (Guardian)

Much of the well-funded efforts of plutocrats and their allies has been to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which was designed by Right-wing think tanks), not to reform it or replace it with something more effective, but to return to the predatory status quo ante. Now, businessmen may be greedy, short-sighted and sociopathic, but they are not stupid. They surely know that the American System is wildly more expensive than any other place on earth, but they are willing to lose billions of dollars in profit just to make sure people don’t get health care! Think about that. A European friend said to me once that he didn’t understand why American businesses seemed to want sick, insecure employees who either don’t have access to health care, or are worried about going broke trying to pay for it. It seemed totally irrational to him. But it’s only irrational if you don’t understand the underlying ideology of eliminationism. Some societies actually want to kill off their own people, as Nazi Germany and other tragic examples have shown.

And it’s of a piece with the withdrawal of mass education that Blacker documents in his book. The elites are disinvesting from society in every way because they just don’t need us anymore. And their propaganda mills are dedicated to making sure the blame is squarely placed on individuals so that we will internalize learned helplessness which has prevented any effective resistance. Or their mills are insisting that it’s just not happening, and everybody is really better off, as we saw above, except for a few churlish losers who have no one to blame but themselves (and are probably looking for a handout).

Who turned my blue state red? (NYT). A great explanation of America’s crab mentality.

I’ve featured the analogy of horses that some economists use before. Human beings may have found other jobs (which is debatable), but the population of horses just went down in line with the work that was available for them to do. I think it’s obvious that this is a good analogy for what’s happening.

…Similarly, one could just as easily have said, a century ago, that: “Fundamental economic principles will continue to operate. Scarcities will still be with us…. Most horses will still have useful tasks to perform, even in an economy where the capacities of power sources and automation have increased considerably…”

Yet demand for the labor of horses today is vastly less than it was a century ago, even though horses are extremely strong, fast, capable and intelligent animals. “Peak horse” in the U.S. came in the 1910s, I believe. After that there was no economic incentive to keep the horse population of America from declining sharply, as at the margin the horse was not worth its feed and care. And in a marginal-cost pricing world, in which humans are no longer the only plausible source of Turing-level cybernetic control mechanisms, what will happen to those who do not own property should the same come to be true, at the margin, of the human? What would “peak human” look like? Or–a related but somewhat different possibility–even “peak male”?

Technological Progress Anxiety: Thinking About “Peak Horse” and the Possibility of “Peak Human” (Brad DeLong)

Off to the glue factory with the middle class, then. As long as it’s kept diffuse enough, it will never be picked up on; “Work Makes You Free” hangs in the air over our heads instead of over the entry gates. Perhaps we should just inscribe it on the Gateway Arch.

So, all told, the self-destructive habits of the middle-aged white poor are hardly irrational. Rather, it seems to be to be the most rational response to the type of world we’ve created. The only question is, why do so many of us apparently want to stay on this path?