Tag Archives: Socialism

Austerity, War & Dictatorship… the Charade of Western Democracy Is Over. Can We Lose Those Chains?

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Western liberal democracy and its ubiquitous “austerity economics” is a euphemism for fascism. And the charade is finally coming to an end.

Western liberal democracy and its ubiquitous “austerity economics” is a euphemism for fascism. And the charade is finally coming to an end.

Austerity is not some recent policy under neoliberal capitalism. It was born out of the historic crisis in the Western system following the First World War and during the 1930s when fascism became a way to curtail any democratic challenge to the prevailing capitalist system.

That political instrument of repression is wielded today across all Western states. Quite amazingly, for a long time, few people recognized their captive, repressive state as fascism. We generally lived under the illusion that we were free citizens in “liberal democracies”.

In this interview, Clara E Mattei explains how the technocratic-sounding “austerity” is used to hide the brutal reality of dictatorship and repression against the vast majority of citizen workers in Western states.

Clara Mattei is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research, New York. She is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.

Her book investigates the origins of austerity as an economic policy after the crisis of World War One. Crucially, she argues that austerity is not merely about governments balancing financial budgets. Professor Mattei contends that austerity policy implemented by all Western governments is a political instrument of mass repression to prevent any challenge to the prevailing capitalist order.

Austerity forces the vast majority to accept unacceptable conditions that are otherwise shockingly anti-democratic. The precariousness and insecurity of employment, the widespread denial of social services, deprivation and poverty, and the relentless abuse of taxes and resources that are fueling insane militarism and war.

If we really did live in free, democratic societies why are such deformities enforced without any alternative? Austerity is used to crush the political imagination for any reasonable, more humane, more peaceful alternative.

However, as Clara Mattei points out in this interview, the extreme anti-democratic conditions in Western societies are inevitably forcing greater numbers of people to question the injustices and hideous anomalies of the prevailing capitalist order.

People are realizing that Western governments are in reality regimes of repression in service for the enrichment of a minority. That fundamental deformity is why Western societies are collapsing and why the United States and its Western lackeys are driven to increasing conflict against Russia and China.

The charade of “Western democracy” is coming to an end. The rulers and their pantomime political parties are losing the moral authority to hold power over the masses.

As people necessarily seek ways to reinvent societies that are fit for meeting their democratic needs, socialist solutions are beckoning. We have to throw off the mental shackles imposed by our dictators, and realize, as Karl Marx once eloquently said, that we have got nothing to lose except our chains.

Economic effect of coronavirus could be revolutionary

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: Intrepid Report

Coronavirus and globalism will teach us vital lessons. The question is whether we can learn vital lessons that do not serve the ruling interest groups and ideologies.

Coronavirus will teach us that a country without free national health care is severely handicapped. Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They cannot afford health care premiums, deductions, and copays. Millions have no insurance. This means millions of people infected with coronavirus who cannot get medical help. The morbidity from this is intolerable in any society.

Shutdowns associated with efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus will deny income to millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. What do they do for food, shelter, transportation?  You don’t have to think very long along these lines to see a very frightening scenario.

Globalism has taken down the ladders of upward mobility by exporting American middle class jobs to Asia. A population once able to save now lives on debt, the service of which is interrupted by recession/depression and by debt service absorbing all net disposable income.

Globalism has also reduced the survivability of our society by making it dependent  on externally produced goods, the supply of which can be cut off by disruptions in other societies, by policy disagreements leading to sanctions, and by an inability to export enough to pay for imports, which is what the offshored production of US firms is.

The United States has an unprotected population and an economy in trouble. For years, corporate executives have run the companies for the benefit of their bonuses, which are largely dependent on rises in their company’s share price. Consequently, profits and borrowings have been invested in buying back the companies’ shares and not in new investment in the businesses. Corporate indebtedness is extreme and will threaten many corporations and many jobs in a downturn. Boeing is a case in point.

Economist Michael Hudson has for many decades studied the use of debt-forgiveness to restart economies killed by debt burdens. Debt forgiveness for corporations has a different implication than debt forgiveness for individuals. For corporations, forgiving debts lets those who financialized and indebted the economy and the population off the hook. To avoid rewarding them for the catastrophe they produced and to prevent widespread public outcry and distrust, nationalization is implied for insolvent companies and banks.

Nationalization would be limited to insolvent companies and financial institutions and doesn’t mean that there would be no private companies or businesses. Additional nationalization could be used to prevent strategic companies from substituting their interests for national interests, which they do when they move American jobs and factories offshore. Pharmaceuticals could be nationalized along with health care. Energy which often sacrifices the environment to its profits could be considered for nationalization. A successful society has to have more driving it than private profit.

For most Americans nationalization is a dirty word, but it has many benefits. For example, a national health care system reduces costs tremendously by taking profits out of the system. Additionally, nationalized pharmaceutical companies could be made more focused on research and cures than on profit avenues. Everyone knows how Big Pharma influences medical schools and medical practice in line with Big Pharma’s approach. A more open-minded approach to medicine would be beneficial.

Socialist is another American dirty word, one that is being used against Bernie Sanders.  I have not turned into a socialist overnight. I am simply thinking outloud. How can the economy recover when the population and corporations are smothered by debt?  Debt forgiveness is the only way out of this debt suffocation. Can debts be forgiven without nationalization? Not without a huge giveaway to financial mangers and Wall Street. It is the members of the “one percent” who have received 95% of the increase in us income and wealth since 2008. Do we want to reward them for smothering the economy with debt by bailing them out without nationalizing them?

The combination of an economy covered in debt and an unprotected population is clearly revolutionary. Do we have leadership capable of breaking out of interest group politics and ruling ideologies in order to save our society and put it on a more sustainable basis?

Or will the economic hardships be blamed on the virus, the catalyst that ignited the debt timebomb?

Of Course Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist

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By HipCrime Vocab

There’s apparently a row over whether billionaires should exist. That is, whether or not billionaires should be a thing in our society.

What a stupid question. Of course billionaires shouldn’t exist! But the reason has nothing to do with Socialism.

Rather, under a properly-functioning free-market capitalist system, billionaires shouldn’t exist. And that would have also been the opinion of the “Classical Liberals” so favored by the Right these days: Adam Smith, David Ricardo. Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and so on.

Billionaires are a sign of market failure.

Let me say that again: billionaires are a form of market failure! You cannot simultaneously be both pro-Market and pro-billionaire.

I’m amazed at how few people get this!

In a truly competitive market, excess profits would be competed away. Someone would come along and undercut outsize profits. That’s exactly how the Classical Liberals assumed free markets would work. In this, they saw markets as instruments of greater equality, not inequality, and certainly not as a way to construct a new and improved aristocracy even more powerful than the old one.

The Classical Liberals wrote in opposition to the main power centers of their day: aristocratic government and chartered monopolies like the East India Company. They didn’t see the purpose of their writings as defending privilege and power. One can dispute the end results, but that was not their goal. Quite the contrary. The idea that a single, solitary individuals would possess more wealth than the kings and pharaohs of old under a functioning free market system would have been unthinkable to them.

In their time, much of the national wealth was monopolized by a landed aristocracy who gained their wealth through disproportionate ownership of the country’s productive land. The other major source of wealth came from large joint-stock companies that were granted royal monopolies due to their political connections. Yet another source of unearned wealth came from the holders of bonds (gilts)—essentially loaning money to the state and getting the government’s tax revenues funneled to them via interest payments.

Classical English Liberals felt that competitive markets would do away with a good portion of the unearned and unproductive wealth common in Great Britain at the time. They believed that “free and open” markets would channel wealth and activity to more productive ends. That is, they would break up large pools of wealth and unproductive money. The kind of obscene fortunes that they saw in their day would no longer be possible thanks to competition, they assumed, and that British society would become more equal than it was under landed aristocracy, not less. We can dispute their logic (and I have issues with it), but I think we can safely say that this is what they believed, rightly or wrongly.

An inherent part of their conception of free markets is the possibility of failure. Unproductive or inefficient businesses would be competed away, they assumed, and the fortunes earned through such activities would disappear. But that is not the case today. Billionaires have so much money they can literally never lose it! That’s not capitalism, that’s aristocracy. I read recently that someone like Bill Gates literally cannot give away money to his pet causes fast enough to reduce his fortune even if he tried. In fact, he’s grown wealthier even while giving away billions.

The important point about [Adam] Smith’s system, on the other hand, is that it precluded steep inequalities not out of a normative concern with equality but by virtue of the design that aimed to maximize wealth. Once we put the building blocks of his system together, concentration of wealth simply cannot emerge.

In Smith, profits should be low and labor wages high, legislation in favor of the worker is “always just and equitable,” land should be distributed widely and evenly, inheritance laws should partition fortunes, taxation can be high if it is equitable, and the science of the legislator is necessary to thwart rentiers and manipulators.

Political theorists and economists have highlighted some of these points, but the counterfactual “what would the distribution of wealth be if all the building blocks were ever in place?” has not been posed. Doing so encourages us to question why steep inequality is accepted as a fact, instead of a pathology that the market economy was not supposed to generate in the first place.

Contrary to popular and academic belief, Adam Smith did not accept inequality as a necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy (LSE Blogs)

Yet today the people who call themselves the heirs to “Classical English Liberals” emphatically defend the existence of billionaires and extreme inequality at every turn. Such people are not pro-market or pro-capitalism as they like to portray themselves; they are simply pro-wealth, or—to use a less complementary term—bootlickers. They are not defending capitalism or Markets; what they really are defending is oligarchy, power, privilege, and hierarchy. As Corey Robin opined, “The priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power,” with all the soaring rhetoric about markets and freedom being just a smokescreen and a cover for defending hierarchies and power imbalances. Their defense of billionaires is proof positive of this. This is true of presidential candidates as well.

The existence of obscene fortunes and extreme inequality are not a sign of capitalism’s success; they are a sign of capitalism’s failure.

This is pointed out by Chris Dillow:

“I don’t think anyone in this country should be a billionaire” said Labour’s Lloyd Russell-Moyle yesterday, at which the BBC’s Emma Barnett took umbrage. The exchange is curious, because from one perspective it should be conservative supporters of a free market who don’t want there to be billionaires.

I say so because in a healthy market economy there should be almost no extremely wealthy people simply because profits should be bid away by competition. In the textbook case of perfect competition there are no super-normal profits, and in the more realistic case of Schumpeterian creative destruction, high profits should be competed away quickly.

From this perspective, every billionaire is a market failure – a sign that competition has failed. The Duke of Westminster is rich because there’s a monopoly of prime land in central London. Would Ineos’ Jim Ratcliffe be so rich if pollution were properly priced, or if his firm faced more competition?

The Right’s Mega-Rich Problem (Stumbling and Mumbling)

How is this rectified? How do they square their supposed love of fair competition and free and open markets with the presence of outsize fortunes?

They don’t.

And the sad thing is how many people buy into their nonsense. Everyone seems to think that a defense of billionaires is a defense of capitalism.

It’s not. It’s the opposite.

What is a billionaire?

Billionaires are only made possible through monopolies and tollbooths. Period. And such monopolies are more possible than ever before thanks to technology.

This is argued by Matt Stoller, an expert on monopolies, in a post entitled, What Is A Billionaire?:

Most people think a billionaire is someone with a lot of money, a sort of Scrooge McDuck who goes swimming in a pool of gold coins. And why wouldn’t we? The name billionaire has the word billion contained within it, so clearly it means having a net worth of at least ten figures. And in a sense, that is technically true. But if you look at the top ranks of the Bloomberg billionaire index, you’ll notice that nearly all of the leaders are people who own a corporation with substantial amounts of market power in one or more markets.

Billionaires use market power to extract revenue the way that a tollbooth operator does. If you want to drive on a road, you have to pay for the privilege. It costs the tollbooth operator nothing, he/she just has a strategic chokepoint for extraction. Billionaire Warren Buffett, for instance, has such a ‘tollbooth’ strategy for investing, though he uses the term ‘moat’ because it sounds charming and quirky rather than rapacious.

Put another way, the Bloomberg billionaire index isn’t a list of the most important Scrooge McDuck’s, it’s a list of the biggest tollbooth operators in the world.

What he’s saying is that one becomes a billionaire only by short-circuiting the competitive market economy. Then their profits cannot be competed away. Only by gaming the system can one “earn” over a billion dollars. No one person is that valuable.

Stoller goes on to elucidate the operational tactics used by both Bill Gates and by his predecessor John D. Rockefeller, and finds that even though the industries are radically different, the techniques of short-circuiting and circumventing market competition are the same. Whether it’s horizontal and vertical integration, or using market influence to price out rivals, or exclusive contracts, the techniques are the same regardless of industry or time period:

In 1976 and 1980, Congress allowed the copyrighting of software. IBM had been under aggressive antitrust investigation and litigation since 1967, so when it built a personal computer, it outsourced the operating system – MS-DOS – to Gates’s company and allowed Gates to license it to other equipment makers. (Gates’s upbringing didn’t hurt; the CEO of IBM at the the time knew his mother.) Such a relationship with a vendor was a shocking change for IBM, which had traditionally made everything in-house or tightly controlled its suppliers. But IBM treated Microsoft differently, transferring large amounts of programming knowledge to the small corporation. IBM also did this with the microprocessor company Intel, which IBM protected from Japanese competition.

And yet, in 1982, the Department of Justice dropped the antitrust suit against IBM, signaling a new pro-concentration framework. Bill Baxter, Reagan’s antitrust chief, did not want to bring monopolization suits, and did not. The new fast-growing technology space of personal computers would be a monopolized industry. But it would not be monopolized by IBM, which had kept control of the computing industry since the 1950s, because IBM’s corporate structure was now skittish about the raw use of power. And it would not be monopolized by AT&T, which was kept out of the computing industry by a 1956 consent decree that lasted until 1984. Gates, in many ways, had a greenfield, an environment friendly to monopoly but one in which all the old monopolists had been cleared out by antitrust actions.

In the case of Amazon, even though it theoretically has competition, through vertical and horizontal integration it can effectively control online e-commerce to a large degree. The result is a fortune greater than that of entire nation-states controlled by a single individual. One hardly imagines that Adam Smith would approve.

I read an interesting concept, and I forget where it came from. It was that networks are natural monopolies. This explains things like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. It’s entirely possible that the online world, due to features inherent in the technology, simply cannot be regulated by normal competition the way the market for goods and services can. Yet all our theories pretend that it can. It’s delusional.

Under these scenarios,’ profits’ are really a form of tribute (or perhaps plunder). In fact, we really shouldn’t even use the word ‘profits’ to describe them (just like we shouldn’t use ‘trade’ to describe global wage arbitrage).

And there are many more examples of competition being limited by deliberate legal policy. Much of Microsoft’s profits come from the fact that other people can’t copy their software—which they’ve arbitrarily labeled “piracy”—without facing legal repercussions enforced by the state and its legal system. In that sense, outsized fortunes are a consequence of laws, and not a feature inherent to technology:

…inequality is not in fact driven by technology, it is driven by our policy on technology, specifically patent and copyright monopolies. These forms of protection do not stem from the technology, they are policies created by a Congress which is disproportionately controlled by billionaires.

If the importance of these government granted monopolies is not clear, ask yourself how rich Bill Gates would be if any start-up computer manufacturer could produce millions of computers with Windows and other Microsoft software and not send the company a penny. The same story holds true with most other types of technology. The billionaires get rich from it, not because of the technology but because the government will arrest people who use it without the patent or copyright holder’s permission.

This point is central to the debate on the value of billionaires. If we could get the same or better technological progress without making some people ridiculously rich, then we certainly don’t need billionaires. But in any discussion of the merits of billionaires, it is important to understand that they got their wealth because we wrote rules that allowed it. Their immense wealth was not a natural result of the development of technology.

Farhad Manjoo promotes billionaire ideology in proposal to get rid of billionaires (Dean Baker, Real World Economic Review)

Baker has also pointed out that outsized salaries in many fields are determined by limiting competition though things like wildly expensive education and licensing requirements, which are ultimately determined by the government. Doctors and lawyers do not have compete against the wage rates in India or China thanks to the legal system, for example. Everyone else, however, is required to compete against the entire world for jobs.

On a global level, most billionaires are not the result of “hard work” or doing things beneficial for their society:

The vast majority of the world’s billionaires have not become rich through anything approaching ‘productive’ investment. Oxfam has showed that, approximately one third of global billionaire wealth comes from inheritance, whilst another third comes from ‘crony connections to government and monopoly’.

Why on Earth Shouldn’t People Be Able to Be Billionaires? (Novara Media)

And the monopolies that allow billionaires to exist are not good for the economy as a whole. In fact, they are highly detrimental, as Chris Dillow further points out:

What’s more, monopoly pricing is a form of tax – a tax which often falls upon other, smaller businesses…In this sense, not only are billionaires a symptom of an absence of a healthy competitive economy, but they are also a cause of it: their taxes on other firms restrict growth and entrepreneurship…

Tories are wrong, therefore, to portray attacks on the mega-rich as the politics of envy. It’s not. The existence of billionaires is a sign and cause of a dysfunctional economy…

In fact, logically, it is rightists who should be most concerned by the concentration of wealth. We lefties can point to it as evidence that the system is rigged. But Tories should worry that it undermines the legitimacy of the existing order not only because people don’t like inequality, but because it slows down economic growth and so encourages demands for change.

Furthermore, their existence is detrimental politically:

Controlling society’s wealth effectively gives the wealthy the right to plan economic activity. Billionaires – and the people who manage their money – determine which governments can access borrowing, which companies deserve to grow, and which ideas should be researched. This gives them an immense amount of political, as well as economic, power – allowing billionaires to provide favours to those politicians who helped them get rich in the first place.

Ultimately, the monopolisation of society’s resources by a tiny, closed-off elite means that most of society’s resources are used for dirty, unsustainable and unproductive speculation.

Why on Earth Shouldn’t People Be Able to Be Billionaires? (Novara Media)

In fact, the proliferation of billionaires in the developed world has accompanied a period of slow growth and stagnation, not rapid growth. As has been pointed out ad nauseum, yet still fails to sink in, America’s fastest period of growth came when there were fewer billionaires and tax rates ranged from 50 to 90 percent. There is no evidence that the proliferation of billionaires has benefited society as whole. And now, billionaires are attempting to buy political offices outright, making a joke of democracy.

People defending billionaires are only defending raw power, not capitalism, not democracy, and certainly not free markets.

Stoller concludes:

[Billionaires] are not people with a bunch of dollar bills stacked to the moon, they are (largely) men with a strategic position of power protected by public laws and rules. They aren’t better or smarter than anyone else, they are simply politically adept and in the right place at the right time. There’s no reason we have to enable such people to run our culture. At the end of the day, tollbooths are nothing but bottlenecks on a road on which we would otherwise travel faster and more freely.

What is a Billionaire? (Matt Stoller)

So, should there be billionaires? The answer is no. And you should believe that if you consider yourself a libertarian free marketeer or a democratic socialist. Anyone asserting anything else is just a bootlicker or a toady.

Addendum:

Here’s a good piece explaining how billionaires are basically mad kings:

…one of civilization’s great challenges stems from millionaire rhyming with billionaire. In holding them in the same linguistic corner of our minds, we conflate them, yet they’re so mathematically distinct as to be unrelated. A millionaire can, with some dedicated carelessness, lose those millions. Billionaires can be as profligate and eccentric as they wish, can acquire, without making a dent, all the homes and jets and islands and causes and thoroughbreds and Van Goghs and submarines and weird Beatles memorabilia they please. Unless they’re engaging in fraud or making extremely large and risky investments, they’re simply no match for the mathematical and economic forces—the compounding of interest, the long-term imperatives of markets—that make money beget more money. They can do pretty much whatever they want in this life, and therein lies the distinction. A millionaire enjoys a profoundly lucky economic condition. A billionaire is an existential state.

This helps explain the cosmic reverence draped over so many billionaires, their most banal notions about innovation and vision repackaged as inspirational memes, their insights on markets and customers spun into best sellers. Their extravagances are so over the top as to inspire legend more often than revolution…

The Gospel of Wealth According to Marc Benioff (Wired)

One of the most potent demonstrations that the modern-day rich are mad kings, comes form the story of Adam Neumann of WeWork. This is the impression I got from the Behind the Bastards podcast on Neumann: The Idiot Who Made, and Destoryed, WeWork (Podtail)

Counting Jeff Bezos’s fortune using 1 grain of rice = $100,000
byu/GallowBoob innextfuckinglevel

Establishment media’s mass deception

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: Intrepid Report

On major geopolitical and other issues, mass deception overrides truth and full disclosure in establishment media print editions and daily broadcasts—wealth, power and privileged interests served over peace, equity and justice.

The NYT is Exhibit A. Its Friday edition featured Iran-bashing disinformation, saying the following: “Iran has used the continuing chaos in Iraq to build up a hidden arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles in Iraq [sic], part of a widening effort to try to intimidate the Middle East and assert its power [sic]”—citing unnamed US intelligence and Pentagon officials,” adding that the US built up “its military presence in the Middle East to counter emerging threats to American interests [sic], including attacks on oil tankers and facilities that intelligence officials have blamed on Iran [sic].”

Iranian missiles “pose a threat to American allies and partners in the region, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, and could endanger American troops…”

Fact: Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi debunk phony claims about IRGC missiles in Iraq, saying that the accusations are “false, meaningless and ludicrous. What has been raised and published by some infamous cells and certain media about the transfer of Iranian missiles to Iraq is a nonsensical statement and sheer lie.”

They’re all about maliciously vilifying Iran to create a nonexistent threat, wanting its Iranian relations with neighboring countries undermined.

Iranian military advisors are in Iraq and Syria at the behest of their governments, Tehran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani earlier explained—adding that they’re there to help combat US-supported terrorism.

The US and its key allies are “the main creators and sponsors of takfiri terrorists,” he earlier stressed.

Fact: Iran was falsely blamed earlier for attacks on regional oil tankers and facilities it had nothing to do with—no evidence suggesting otherwise. The incidents were false flags staged to wrongfully blame Iran for what happened.

Fact: Iran threatens no other countries. Claims otherwise are bald-faced Big Lies, part of establishment media supported US propaganda.

Fact: The US and its imperial allies threaten humanity. Needing enemies to unjustifiably justify its imperial agenda, they’re invented because no real ones exist—none since WW II ended.

Fact: Iran’s nuclear program has no military component, never did in a nation abhorring these weapons, wanting them eliminated everywhere.

Fact: Iranian defense spending is solely for self-defense, its legal right under international law. It’s ruling authorities haven’t attacked another nation in centuries—what US-dominated NATO and Israel do repeatedly, their hostile actions supported by the Times and other establishment media.

Instead of reporting “all the news that’s fit to print,” Times’ editions feature managed news misinformation and disinformation.

Times and other establishment media columnists are what famed journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) called “prostitutes of the press.”

They’re propagandists, scam artists and charlatans—paid to lie, distort, misinform, and blame victims for US high crimes committed against them, while supporting monied interests over popular ones.

In his latest disinformation piece, Times columnist David Brooks “cheer[ed] (predatory) capitalism, now and forever,” adding, “I came to realize that capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out… It has a competitive profit-driven process to motivate you to learn and innovate, every single day.”

Fact: Diogenes called education “the foundation of every state.” Horace Mann said: “The common [public] school (socialized education) is the greatest discovery ever made by man”—calling it the “great equalizer” that was “common” to all.

In 1862, the Morrill Act established land-grant public colleges and universities on a tuition-free basis.

For the next century, many US state and other public colleges and universities charged no or nominal tuition and other fees to attend—socialized higher education, affordable to millions that worked as intended.

Attending today entraps millions of students into debt bondage because of exorbitantly higher education costs—at a time when career opportunities are a shadow of what they were post-WW II

Fact: New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society program helped millions of Americans avoid poverty—social programs that worked, eroding and disappearing today.

FDR’s Great Depression social programs built or renovated 700,000 miles of roads, 7,800 bridges, 45,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 1,000 airfields, and other infrastructure projects—including much of Chicago’s lakefront.

Fact: The post-WW II (GI Bill) Servicemen’s Readjustment Act provided college or vocational education for 7.8 million returning vets.

Fact: Another 2.4 million got VA-backed low-interest, no down payment home loans at a time when their average cost was under $5,000—letting millions of families afford them.

Studies later showed the GI Bill was one of America’s soundest investments. It paid for itself seven times over. It also helped millions readjust successfully to civilian life.

The State University of New York (SUNY) system, the nation’s largest, was tuition-free until 1963. The University of California system had free tuition until the 1980s.

Today, SUNY tuition, room, board and fees are around $14,000 annually. At UCLA, it’s around $34,000 annually for state residents, at UC Berkeley over $36,000, for non-state residents about $63,000 annually.

Facilitating free or low-cost higher education and home ownership in the US post-WW II with VA-backed low-interest loans helped created post-war prosperity.

In the 1940s and 50s, strong unions and well-paid factory jobs elevated millions of Americans to middle-class status, what’s fast eroding today.

The economy then grew annually at around 3.5%. By 1960, blue-collar workers were the biggest buyers of many luxury goods and services, including homes and autos.

Socialism works as intended when unobstructed by foreign interference. Under Hugo Chavez, Venezuela was Latin America’s fastest growing economy.

The country prospered until devastated by US economic terrorism, harming the nation and its people.

According to the Times’ resident neocon Bret Stephens, “NATO is full of freeloaders [sic],” falsely adding the alliance is “how we defend the free world. Europe without American protection is a continental disaster waiting to happen.”

Fact: US-dominated NATO threatens world peace and humanity’s survival. After Soviet Russia dissolved in December 1991, NATO became an alliance for aggression, not deterrence, its current US-controlled mission.

As long as NATO exists, endless US-led wars will continue, world peace and stability remaining unattainable—the ominous threat of nuclear war by accident or design possible.

Nuclear War: Just Another Day

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: OffGuardian

Catastrophic events that send the world into turmoil happen on ‘just another day’. The atom bomb that exploded over Hiroshima took place while thousands of ordinary folk were just going about their everyday business on ‘just another day’.

A missile attack on a neighbourhood in Gaza or a drone attack on unsuspecting civilians in Afghanistan: death and destruction come like a bolt from the blue as people shop at the local market or take their kids to school on ‘just another day’.

Will it be ‘just another day’ when the next nuclear bomb is exploded in anger, an ordinary day when people are just going about their daily business? By then it might be too late to do anything, too late to act to try to prevent an unfolding global catastrophe on a scale never before witnessed by humans.

Yet so many appear too apathetic and wrapped up in a world of gadgets, technology, shopping malls, millionaire sports players and big-time sports events to think that such a thing could be imminent.

Are they so preoccupied with the machinations of their own lives in cotton-wool cocooned societies to think that what is happening in Syria or Iraq is just too boring to follow or that it doesn’t really concern them or it is ‘not my problem’?

Do they think they are untouchable, that only death, war and violence happens in faraway places?

Could any of us even contemplate that on some not-too-distant day a series of European cities could be laid waste within a matter of minutes? It isn’t worth thinking about. Or is it.

The US (and the West’s) foreign policy is being driven on the basis of fake morality and duplicity. Millions lie dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya as a result of US-led imperialism, and nuclear-armed Russia is constantly demonised simply because it will not acquiesce to Washington and serve as a vassal state.

And now, as the US continues to stir up tensions with Iran and as China warns neighbouring countries about allowing US nuclear missiles aimed at it on their territories, much of the Western public and media remain oblivious to the dangers of conflict escalation and the biggest immediate threat to all life on Earth: nuclear war.

The threat of mass murder

Some fell to the ground and their stomachs already expanded full, burst and organs fell out. Others had skin falling off them and others still were carrying limbs. And one in particular was carrying their eyeballs in their hand.”

The above extract comes from an account by a Hiroshima survivor talking about the fate of her schoolmates. In 2016, it was read out in the British parliament by Scottish National Party MP Chris Law during a debate about Britain’s nuclear arsenal.

In response to a question from MP George Kereven, the then British PM Theresa May said without hesitation that, if necessary, she would authorise the use of a nuclear weapon that would kill hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. May also implied that those wishing to scrap Britain’s nuclear weapons are siding with the nation’s enemies.

Politicians like May read from a script devised by elite interests. This transnational capitalist class dictates global economic policies and decides on who lives and who dies and which wars are fought and inflicted on which people.

The mainstream narrative tends to depict individuals who belong to this class as ‘wealth creators’. In reality, however, these ‘high flyers’ have stolen ordinary people’s wealth, stashed it away in tax havens, bankrupted economies and have imposed a form of globalisation that results in devastating destruction and war for those who attempt to remain independent or structurally adjusted violence via privatisation and economic neo-liberalism for millions in countries that have acquiesced.

While ordinary folk across the world have been subjected to policies that have resulted in oppression, poverty and conflict, this is all passed off by politicians and the mainstream media as the way things must be.

The agritech sector poisons our food and agriculture. Madelaine Albright says it was worth it to have killed half a million kids in Iraq to secure energy resources for rich corporations and extend the wider geopolitical goals of ‘corporate America’. The welfare state is dismantled and austerity is imposed on millions. The rich increase their already enormous wealth.

Powerful corporations corrupt government machinery and colonise every aspect of life for profit. Environmental destruction and ecological devastation continue apace.

And nuclear weapons hang over humanity like the sword of Damocles.

The public is supposed to back this status quo in support of what? Austerity, powerlessness, imperialism, propping up the US dollar and a moribund system. For whom? Occidental Petroleum, Soros, Murdoch, Rothschild, BP, JP Morgan, Boeing and the rest of the elite and their corporations whose policies are devised in think tanks and handed to politicians to sell to a largely ignorant public: those who swallow the lie about some ‘war on terror’ or Washington as the world’s policeman, protecting life and liberty.

Rejecting hegemonic thought

Many believe nuclear weapons are a necessary evil and fall into line with hegemonic thinking about humanity being inherently conflictual, competitive and war-like.

Such tendencies do of course exist, but they do not exist in a vacuum. They are fuelled by capitalism and imperialism and played upon by politicians, the media and elite interests who seek to scare the population into accepting a ‘necessary’ status quo.

Co-operation and equality are as much a part of any arbitrary aspect of ‘human nature’ as any other defined characteristic. These values are, however, sidelined by a system of capitalism that is inherently conflict-ridden and expansionist.

Much of humanity has been convinced to accept the potential for instant nuclear Armageddon hanging over its collective head as a given, as a ‘deterrent’. However, the reality is that these weapons exist to protect elite, imperialist interests or to pressure others to cave into their demands.

If the 20th century has shown us anything, it is these interests are adept at gathering the masses under notions of flag, god and country to justify their slaughter.

To prevent us all shuddering with the fear of the threat of instant nuclear destruction on a daily basis, it’s a case of don’t worry, be happy, forget about it and watch TV.

It was the late academic Rick Roderick who highlighted that modern society trivialises issues that are of ultimate importance: they eventually become banal or ‘matter of fact’ to the population.

People are spun the notion that nuclear-backed militarism and neoliberalism and its structural violence are necessary for securing peace, defeating terror, creating prosperity or promoting ‘growth’. The ultimate banality is to accept this pack of lies and to believe there is no alternative, to acquiesce or just switch off to it all.

Instead of acquiescing and accepting it as ‘normal’, we should listen to writer and campaigner Robert J Burrowes:

Many people evade responsibility, of course, simply by believing and acting as if someone else, perhaps even ‘the government’, is ‘properly’ responsible. Undoubtedly, however, the most widespread ways of evading responsibility are to deny any responsibility for military violence while paying the taxes to finance it, denying any responsibility for adverse environmental and climate impacts while making no effort to reduce consumption, denying any responsibility for the exploitation of other people while buying the cheap products produced by their exploited (and sometimes slave) labour, denying any responsibility for the exploitation of animals despite eating and/or otherwise consuming a range of animal products, and denying any part in inflicting violence, especially on children, without understanding the many forms this violence can take.”

Burrowes concludes by saying that ultimately, we evade responsibility by ignoring the existence of a problem. The evasion of responsibility, acquiescence and acceptance are, of course, part of the conditioning process.

The ‘problem’ encompasses not only ongoing militarism, but the structural violence of neoliberal capitalism, aided and abetted by the World Bank, IMF and the WTO. It’s a type of violence that is steady, lingering and a daily fact of life under globalised capitalism.

Of course, oppression and conflict have been a feature throughout history and have taken place under various economic and political systems. Indeed, in his various articles, Burrowes goes deep into the psychology and causes of violence.

But there is potentially a different path for humanity.

In 1990, the late British MP Tony Benn gave a speech in parliament (above) that indicated the kind of values that such a route might look like.

Benn spoke about having been on a crowded train, where people had been tapping away on calculators and not interacting or making eye contact with one another. It represented what Britain had apparently become under Thatcherism: excessively individualistic, materialistic, narcissistic and atomised.

The train broke down. As time went by, people began to talk with one another, offer snacks and share stories. Benn said it wasn’t too long before that train had been turned into a socialist train of self-help, communality and comradeship.

Despite the damaging policies and ideology of Thatcherism, these features had survived her tenure, were deeply embedded and never too far from the surface.

For Tony Benn, what had been witnessed aboard that train was an aspect of ‘human nature’ that is too often suppressed, devalued and, when used as a basis for political change, regarded as a threat to ruling interests.

It is an aspect that draws on notions of unity, solidarity, common purpose, self-help and finds its ultimate expression in the vibrancy of community, the collective ownership of productive resources and co-operation.

The type of values far removed from the destructive, divisive ones of imperialism and capitalism which key politicians and the corporate media protect and promote.

 

Stick to the Plan

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Illustration by Mike Faille

Reclaiming central planning from the clutches of corporations

By Brendan James

Source: The Baffler

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

–CCA Chairman Arthur Jensen, Network

WHAT DO JEFF BEZOS AND JOSEPH STALIN have in common? A certain supervillain chic. Cold-blooded austerity. Iron discipline. A penchant for back-breaking output targets. A healthy appetite for terror.

Yet perhaps their most surprising overlap is that the General Secretary and the chairman of Amazon, Inc. built two of history’s largest centrally planned economies. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising: What embodies the trademark Bezos-ethos of “Get Big Fast” better than the Five-Year Plan? Thanks to its cutting-edge logistics and coordinated supply chains, Amazon last year clocked a GDP of $230 billion[*]. To Jared Kushner’s recent demand that “the government should be run like a great American company,” let all communists raise a fist of solidarity!

In fact, write Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in The People’s Republic of Walmart, Amazon is just one of thousands of firms, big and small, that centrally plan their inputs and outputs. Of the top hundred global economies, around sixty-nine of them are businesses, not countries; most, if not all, are internally planned. (Sears, which over the last decade broke its firm into an “internal market” of competing units thanks to CEO and Ayn Rand-devotee Eddie Lampert, is conspicuously absent from this list.) Despite the collapse of the USSR and the global gospel of markets that spread in its wake, it seems planning is still working all around us.

The problem is that planning is not working for most of us. Yes, automation and “Big Data” have conjured cheaper goods for consumers—unfortunately, most consumers are also laborers who remain ruthlessly exploited. As the promise of new technology expands each day, workers sleep while standing or collapse from heat exhaustion. Planning, once a revolutionary tool meant to reduce labor time and eliminate exploitation, has become just another vulgar mechanism for maximizing the profits of unelected, authoritarian, union-busting, planet-cooking, superrich vampires. The People’s Republic of Walmart makes the case that the left should reclaim the radical demand for a democratically planned economy and repurpose this corporate apparatus for the flourishing of all. Far from a dry pamphlet on logistics theory, the book raises crucial questions about justice, technology, and our capacity to build a new world in the face of economic and climate catastrophe.

The planned economy was supposed to have gone extinct three decades ago. The Soviet Union gasped its last breath, American capitalism sprayed a bottle of Cristal, European social democracy ordered another latte, and China pressed a big button labeled “Market Socialism.” But if you really put the time in, you could probably get a wonk from the Hoover Institution to grudgingly accept that government planning still beats the market in the realm of certain public services, such as health care or fire departments. The knives come out, though, when this approach is proposed for things like housing, pharmaceuticals, energy, or, heaven forbid, consumer goods in general.

What may surprise newcomers, however, is that many self-described Marxists are wary of planning, too. Despite being thanked in Phillips and Rozworski’s acknowledgements, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the left-wing magazine Jacobin, identifies as a market socialist. In a 2013 essay sketching an agenda for the left, Jacobin’s executive editor Seth Ackerman conceded that markets are necessary, so perhaps we’d best just find a way to socialize them. Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology and, along with Sunkara, one of several co-authors of The ABCs of Socialism, dismisses planning as a dead-end: “We can want planning to work, but we have no evidence that it can.” One of the left’s “worst legacies” has been to “identify socialism with central planning.” Market socialism, we’re told, is communism for grown-ups.

Everyone from the market socialist to the Austrian economist has taken one side of an incredibly sexy academic exchange known as the “socialist calculation debate.” The argument should be familiar: market transactions provide producers with essential information about what consumers and other producers need, and therefore how much to make. To try and calculate (that is, plan) this galaxy of interdependent inputs and outputs is impossible in a fluid economy. It’s a matter of information, you fool. And like it or not, market prices are the best way to collect the information we need to map out supply and demand.

A rich tradition of heterodox economics, mathematics, and computer science has materialized to answer this problem of calculation. But it is modern processing power, dwarfing the bandwidth available in the twentieth century, that truly rebukes the argument above. Consider computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott who, in about two minutes, using only university equipment, claims to have run models that were able to optimize an economy “roughly the size of Sweden.” You get the feeling that the mammoth data centers at Amazon, Ford, or Foxconn might be capable of even more impressive calculations. And besides, to insist communist theory prove some perfect equation is either disingenuous or missing the point. The question is not whether planning is mathematically pristine, but whether it can allocate better than the market.

The answer, to return to the material world, is yes it can. It’s true that under capitalism firms plan internally but compete with each other, a dance that keeps companies innovating new ways to capture surplus and, sometimes, inadvertently benefit regular people. This dynamic would not occur naturally in a planned economy; one cannot just seize Amazon or Walmart, socialize it, and call it a day. Phillips and Rozworski apparently recognize this (there is an entire chapter in The People’s Republic of Walmart titled “Nationalization Is Not Enough”) and point to an interesting line of thought from economist J. W. Mason: Banks tend to operate as a privatized Gosplan, where the slush fund of finance capital flows to whichever firm a group of Brooks Brothers-clad planners decide deserves investment, regardless of profitability. Market competition, in other words, is hardly the divine engine of innovation if so many firms are, as Mason writes, “born new each day by the grace of those financing it.”

Even so, could planning replicate the market’s capacity to innovate? Ford’s former CEO Mark Fields certainly seemed to think so, declaring in 2016 that his company would soon “be able to use analytics to anticipate people’s needs, as opposed to people trying to tell us what they want.” And to the perennial taunt of the lizard-brained conservative—“I love seeing idiot millennials protest capitalism on their Apple-made IPHONES”—one may point out it was largely the market-immune Pentagon and Department of Energy, not Apple, that developed the batteries, algorithms, touch screens, and microprocessors our right-wing friend uses to tweet about the Muslim Caravan. Once again, none of this is to celebrate the actual decisions or practitioners of planning as it exists under capitalism, but to recognize its power and how else it might be put to use.

So much for feasibility. Still, the left has good reason to harbor deeper techno-skepticism. When most of us hear the phrase “data collection,” we think not so much of social justice but of Facebook selling our personal information, NSA surveillance, and racist models of “predictive” policing. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks catalogs state policies that placed welfare applications, housing allocation, and child welfare investigations under algorithmic control. The results have been catastrophic for the poor and working class, of every race and gender. Algorithms, after all, are written by humans, and prejudices operate just as easily in digital form as they do in twentieth century analog—perhaps even more so. Phillips and Rozworski acknowledge this reality and rightfully urge vigilance. If planning is to make use of such technology, we must make sure not to bake this poison into the cake.

But hope lies in the very recognition that technology is a political construct, rather than some transcendental, neutral force. If we can program the reinforcement of hierarchies, we can certainly work to program their destruction. (There’s already encouraging research as to how to account for problems such as “disparate impact.”) As Eubanks writes, “if there is to be an alternative, we must build it on purpose, brick by brick and byte by byte.”

Beyond algorithmic justice, the real specter haunting socialism is, naturally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose record in planning was less than exemplary. While capital-C Communism brought about modern industry, literacy, and social security, Phillips and Rozworski don’t deny the ultimate failure of the Soviet experiment. The October Revolution was contorted and compromised by a world war, a civil war, imperialist invasion, economic backwardness, another world war, and a half-century of military competition with the United States. For the sake of the revolution, democracy was indefinitely postponed. Even if Soviet and East German firms were just as or more efficient than their Western counterparts, this arrangement still resulted in workers resisting work and managers lying about output, i.e., bad information. (In a particularly cruel irony, Gosplan bureaucrats even took to sabotaging new computerized approaches to planning, lest they personally lose their political clout. Their unlikely co-conspirators were “reform” minded crypto-capitalists who worried the algorithms would actually succeed, leaving planning in place forever!)

For Phillips and Rozworski, it wasn’t communist planning that led to authoritarianism and disaster, but authoritarianism and disaster that led to bad planning. “Democracy,” they write, “is not some abstract ideal tacked on to all this, but essential to the process.”

A few years ago. Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty cast the very idea of Soviet planning as its hero, wherein it falls from grace, as all tragic heroes do. There’s no need to understate that tragedy, but it ispossible to overstate it. Let’s not forget what happened after the victorious arrival of the market in the former USSR: production of consumer goods, industrial output, and human life expectancy all cratered. A new class of homeless citizens emerged, frozen to death in streets, alleyways, and parks. We often discuss the millions of deaths in the Stalinist 1930s. We don’t discuss the millions of deaths in the post-Communist 1990s. Unsurprisingly, recent polling revealed that a majority of those surveyed in Russia still regret the collapse of the USSR and its planned economy. (In 1996 they nearly voted in Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov until—get this—right-wing hucksters colluded with a hostile foreign government to help install a widely unpopular and corrupt buffoon through a media campaign that peddled rank propaganda.) The Soviet experience was a lesson, all right, but not quite the one many smug market fetishists would have us believe.

And if all that can happen to a superpower, imagine what faced Chile, the would-be socialist alternative to Soviet technocracy: in 1970, buoyed by the support of the working class, Marxist president Salvador Allende was elected and set about building a nation-wide, participatory planning network. This novel approach was predictably stymied by a U.S. economic blockade and finally snuffed out by a CIA-backed military coup in 1973. Still, the pioneering spirit of this moment was poignantly captured by Eden Medina in her wonderful study Cybernetic Revolutionaries. What happened next is a depressing cliché: Chileans were placed under the rule of a distinctly not-left-wing dictatorship and enrolled as fresh test subjects in the mad laboratory of the market.

How will that same market treat the workers of tomorrow who fall victim to imminent waves of automation? Is the market really compatible long-term with progressive policy goals like universal basic income, or full employment? Will the market really permit the end of mass incarceration? Then there’s the C-word: last month we learned that potentially catastrophic climate change is now beyond prevention, and that even if we swore off carbon tomorrow, by 2099 the Arctic will still be 5°C hotter. The expression “glacial pace” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. In light of this, The Atlantic, official mouthpiece for the death god Nyarlathotep, predictably suggests that “any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs.” Not to be outdone, the New York Times last month published an op-ed titled—no shit—“Can Exxon Mobil Protect Mozambique From Climate Change?”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Converting industries to renewable energy, Phillips and Rozworski argue, is wholly within the power of America, India, and China. But, wouldn’t you know it, the principles of commerce just aren’t incentivizing them fast enough! Carbon-free agriculture is a trickier feat, but certainly less tricky as a state-sponsored venture freed from market meddling, à la Sputnik or the Manhattan Project. Climate reporter Kate Aronoff suggests: “If you create a successful drive to nationalize [the fossil fuel industry] or rapidly scale back their power that will create a real precedent for other industries . . . then you can nationalize Monsanto. Have that be the crux of a populist demand of a climate movement.” There are different schools on the left when it comes to ecology (Phillips, science writer by day, has been criticized for consumerist, growth-happy “ecomodernism”), but one hopes we can all agree that smashing the existing energy market is a necessary step.

More than any other crisis of capitalism, ecological calamity is the most self-evident reason to abandon the dumb, short-sighted, animal logic of the market for a rational and humane plan. It has been, to quote the superior critique of capital, Gremlins 2, “a complete failure of management.” And if the history of capitalist crises is any guide, the odds are that climate change will produce a bigger, bulkier, more controlling state no matter what. Before things really start to crack up, we may want to pick whether that state runs on egalitarian principles or the fascist death drive. Does anyone who doesn’t own a yacht called Fountainhead truly want to cede that decision to the invisible hand of the market?

To their credit, Phillips and Rozworksi return throughout the book to the necessity of mass mobilization. Planning is not One Weird Trick to Achieve Socialism. Unless we simply want state-capitalist profit optimization, the real thing will require continuous and brutal class struggle. It will require experimentation, failure and, as Marv Alpert once said, tenacious defense. Any hope of success lies in a rejuvenated, robust and, yes, global people’s movement to shatter the political, legal and physical barricades put up by governments and capital. But planning must be part of the agenda.

Here the cybernetic concept of feedback is useful: the very idea of a plan, of giving everyone control of their own lives, is just the kind of revolutionary notion that can energize, inspire, and keep such a movement alive. The final line of Spufford’s Red Plenty need not be read as the end of a dream, but the real beginning of history: “Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?”

Hope for the best, of course. And plan for the worst.

8 VENEZUELA LIES THE US GOVERNMENT & MAINSTREAM MEDIA WANT YOU TO BELIEVE

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By Makia Freeman

Source: Waking Times

Venezuela lies abound. Both the USG (United States Government) and its lapdog MSM (Mainstream Media) have been going into overdrive, exaggerating or just plain lying about the state of affairs in Venezuela. Truth is always a casualty of war, and it’s also a casualty of pre-war, as the NWO prepares the ground for military intervention by demonization and propaganda. Here are 8 lies about Venezuela which are being used to justify yet another coup in a long, long history of US coups in foreign lands.

Venezuela Lies #1: The Venezuelan People Have No Food and the Shelves Are Bare

In these videos (here and here) on the ground in Caracas, Max Blumenthal exposed one of the lies about Venezuela that is constantly repeated, i.e. that the people have no food and the supermarket shelves are bare.

Venezuela Lies #2: The US Only Wants to Send Aid

If by “aid” you mean “weapons and barbed wire for radical opposition forces,” then yes, the US only wants to send aid. However, if by “aid” you mean actual medicine, then no. This VenezuelaAnalysis report quotes a NYT reporter and USAID itself. They either don’t have medicine as part of the inventory or state outright that there was no medicine:

“According to New York Times reporter Anatoly Kurmanaev, the trucks that the opposition tried to force across the border contained “no medicine” at all, with reports that a “small” amount of medicine was being stockpiled in Cucuta not confirmed by USAID. Initial inventories from USAID made no mention of medicine, listing only basic food and personal hygiene products amongst the “aid”.”

The Venezuelan Government is accepting aid from Russia and other countries it can trust, just not the US, since US “aid” may just “accidentally” happen to contain weapons for anti-Maduro agitators (or, as the Spanish say, compradores). Hmm, wonder how those arms got in the food truck?

As I covered in the article NGOs: Choice Tool of Subversion for the New World Order, NGOs have become a weaponized tool of soft power through which the NWO expands its empire – meddling, destabilizing, toppling and installing, all the while using the NGO as a humanitarian pretext. USAID is just another in a long-line of NGOs loyal to the US Government and NWO, willing to put a nice PR happy face on their agenda of subversion.

Venezuela Lies #3: Juan Guaido Has Legitimacy in Declaring Himself President

As I covered in my previous article Is This the Most Blatant US Coup Ever?, Juan Guaido is a US-CIA stooge through and through. He’s an agent-provocateur “opposition leader” who has been carefully groomed to play his role in the coup. His claim to be interim president of Venezuela under Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution is, legally, utter nonsense, since Maduro has not abandoned the presidency and Maduro held free, open and fair elections as adjudged by outside independent parties.

Venezuela Lies #4: Many Countries Support Guaido

The US claims many nations and groups support its efforts to topple Maduro and install Guaido. In reality, these countries are basically vassal states or other nations controlled by the US that don’t want to upset the apple cart. Notice the strategy of the US: try to co-opt the United Nations HRC (Human Right Council) into following US coup efforts, and try to strong-arm groups like the OAS (Organization of American States) and the Lima Group into betraying their brother nation Venezuela.

The US tried this same trick with the Syrian War by creating and controlling a group called “Friends of Syria.” Here is what Venezuela’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador Jorge Valero said:

“the self-proclaimed “Lima Group” is a cartel made up of satellite governments of the imperial government to break Latin American and Caribbean unity, and, due to the failure of using the Ministry of the Colonies, which is the OAS to isolate Venezuela in this organization. The empire and its minions couldn’t approve Article 20 of Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Permanent Council of the OAS and resort to the United Nations Security Council, where they also failed. The creation of puppet governments by the US is not new.”

Venezuela Lies #5: The US Cares about the Venezuelan People (Just Like It Cares about the Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Iranian People)

The NWO uses the US to bring all nations into its fold, but it like to do so with the veneer of democracy so as to gain more public support and engender less resistance. Subversion, NGO soft power and covert operations are more palatable than overt control and boot-in-the-face oppression. In this vein, the USG likes to pretend it truly cares and has deep compassion for the people of nations like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and any other place it plans to subvert, invade or bomb … even though it has never professed such care in the past and will probably never again profess it in the future once its new puppet leader is installed.

Just look at the kind of lies, hypocrisy and nonsense Pence and a “deeply concerned” Pompeo tweeted about Iran when the USG set it sights on igniting a coup there in 2018:

Venezuela Lies #6: Venezuela is Only in the Condition It is Because of Chavez, Maduro and Socialism (They’re the Bad Guys)

Nothing is black and white. It is possible to look at the unfolding Venezuelan crisis and acknowledge that Maduro has mismanaged things while at the same time seeing the gross foreign interference he and his government have been subjected to. As I covered in other articles such as Venezuelan Economic Crisis: The Real Cause is Not Socialism, US-NWO foreign meddling is by far the biggest factor here. For instance, did you know that Bank of England has effectively stolen USD$1.2 billion from Venezuela by toeing the NWO line and blocking Venezuela from accessing it? Did you know that the US has effectively stolen USD$11 billion from Venezuela by freezing its US accounts? How is a small nation supposed to function as normal when such massive amounts are stolen from it?

Venezuela Lies #7: Yes, the US Has Toppled Governments Worldwide, But “This Time It’s Different”

Once you study enough history, you begin to see the lies of tyrants and empires. The lie remains the same. The US wants Venezuela’s gold and mineral reserves. It’s only 5 days from the US, whereas the Middle East is around 20 days from the US and in a very volatile part of the world. There is also the strategic acquisition of the mineral coltan. They also want to teach the successive government to Hugo Chavez a lesson after he thumbed his nose at the US-NWO Empire. This isn’t any different from other subversions and invasions. It fits the pattern exactly.

Venezuela Lies #8: It’s a “Grassroots Uprising” against a “Brutal Dictator”

This entire coup has been planned, orchestrated and executed from Washington. Period. There is no “grassroots uprising.” Ever wondered why Assad and Maduro are “brutal dictators” but bin Salman, El Sisi and other US-CIA stooges are not? It’s all about branding the enemy, marketing foreign interference and controlling perception. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa. Al-Qaeda is bad and now Al-Qaeda is good. Were we fighting Eastasia or was it Eurasia?

Who is the brutal dictator? Who is imposing economic warfare and deprivation, starvation and misery by sanction? Who is fomenting regime change on innocent nations? Who is funding and supporting terrorists to topple any government they don’t like?

Final Thoughts: The US vs. Russia/China Proxy War Continues

Both Russia and China have invested a lot in Venezuela, including actual investments in their oil, military assistance and financial loans. They are not about to let the US get away with this – even if Venezuela is in the USA’s backyard, geographically speaking. The Monroe Doctrine, which started out in the 1800s as a policy by which the US would protect fellow American nations from European invasion, has now been turned on its head. Raving warmonger John Bolton recently mentioned the term as yet another excuse for the US to dominate whomever it wants on the 2 American continents. However, despite all the Venezuela lies emanating from Washington DC and the MSM, Venezuela is going to be a tough nut to crack, and many American and Westerners are already aware of the propaganda being used to foment war.

What Lies Beyond Capitalism and Socialism?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The status quo, in all its various forms, is dominated by incentives that strengthen the centralization of wealth and power.

As longtime readers know, my work aims to 1) explain why the status quo — the socio-economic-political system we inhabit — is unsustainable, divisive, and doomed to collapse under its own weight and 2) sketch out an alternative Mode of Production/way of living that is sustainable, consumes far less resources while providing for the needs of the human populace — not just for our material daily bread but for positive social roles, purpose, hope, meaning and opportunity, needs that are by and large ignored or marginalized in the current system.

One cognitive/emotional roadblock I encounter is the nearly universal assumption that there are only two systems: the State (government) or the Market (free trade/ free enterprise). This divide plays out politically as the Right (capitalism, favoring markets) and the Left (socialism, favoring the state). Everything from Communism to Libertarianism can be placed on this spectrum.

But what if the State and the Market are the sources of our unsustainability? What if they are intrinsically incapable of fixing what’s broken?

The roadblock here is adherents to one camp or the other are emotionally attached to their ideological choice, to the point that these ideological attachments have a quasi-religious character.

Believers in the market as the solution to virtually any problem refuse to accept any limits on the market’s efficacy, and believers in greater state power/control refuse to accept any limits on the state’s efficacy.

I often feel like I’ve been transported back to the 30 Years War between Catholics and Protestants in the 1600s.

I’ve written numerous books that (in part) cover the inherent limits of markets and the state, so I’ll keep this brief. Markets are based on two premises: 1) profits are the key motivator of human activity and 2) whatever is scarce can be replaced by something that is abundant (for example, when we’ve wiped out all the wild Bluefin tuna, we can substitute farmed catfish.)

But what about work that creates value but isn’t profitable? This simply doesn’t compute in the market mentality. Neither does the fact that wiping out the wild fisheries disrupts an ecosystem that is essentially impossible to value in terms that markets understand: in a market, the supply and the demand in this moment set the price and thus the value of everything.

But ecosystems simply cannot be valued by the price set in the moment by current supply and demand.

As for the state, its ontological imperative is to concentrate power, and since wealth is power, this means concentrating political and financial power. Once bureaucracies have concentrated power, insiders focus on securing budgets and benefits, and limiting transparency and accountability, as these endanger the insiders’ power, security and perquisites.

Both of these systems share a single quasi-religious ideology: a belief that endless economic growth is an intrinsic good, for it is the ultimate foundation of all human prosperity. In other words, we can only prosper and become more secure if we’re consuming more of everything: resources, credit, energy, and so on.

The second shared ideological faith is that centralizing wealth and power are not just inevitable but good. In other words, Left and Right share a single quasi-religious belief that centralization is not just inevitable but positive; the only difference is in who should hold the concentrated wealth/power, private owners or the state.

This ideology assumes a winner take most structure of winners and losers, with the winnings being concentrated in the hands of a few at the top of the Winners. Thus rising inequality and divisiveness are assumed to be the natural state of any economy.

This ideology underpins the entire status quo spectrum. The “growth at any cost is good” part of the single ideology underpinning the status quo is captured by the 1960 Soviet-era film Letter Never Sent; in its haunting, surreal final scene, a character envisions a grand wilderness untouched by human hands transformed into an industrial wasteland of belching chimneys and sprawling factories. This was not a nightmare–this was the Soviet dream, and indeed, the dream of the “growth at any cost is good” West.

Simply put, the status quo of markets and states is incapable of DeGrowth, i.e. consuming less of everything, including credit, “money”, profits, taxes—everything that fuels both the state and the market. As I have taken pains to explain, it doesn’t matter if a factory is owned by private owners or the state: the mandate of capital is to grow. If capital doesn’t grow, the resulting losses will sink the enterprise—including the state itself.

What lies beyond “growth at any cost” capitalism and socialism? My answer is the self-funded community economy, a system that is self-funded (i.e. no need for a central bank or Treasury) with a digital currency that is created and distributed for the sole purpose of funding work that addresses scarcities in local communities.

I outline this system in my book A Radiocally Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.

Rather than concentrate power in the hands of state insiders, this system distributes power to communities are participants. Rather than concentrate the power to create currency for the benefit of banks and the state, this system distributes the power to create currency for the sole benefit of those working on behalf of the community, on projects prioritized by the community.

This community economy recognizes that some work is valuable but not profitable. The profit-driven market will never do this work, and the central state is (to use Peter Drucker’s term) the wrong unit size to ascertain each community’s needs and scarcities.

Clearly, we need a socio-economic-political system that has the structure to not just grasp the necessity of DeGrowth and positive social roles (work benefiting the greater community) but to embrace these goals as its raison d’etre (reason to exist).

Human activity is largely guided by incentives, both chemical incentives in our brains and incentives presented by the society/economy we inhabit. In the current system, concentrating power and wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many and wasting resources / destroying ecosystems are incentivized if the activity is profitable to some enterprise or deemed necessary by the state.

In the current system, the state incentivizes protecting its wealth and power and the security/benefits of its insiders, and markets incentivize maximizing profits by any means available.

As I have explained many times in the blog and my books, we inhabit a state-cartel economy: the most profitable form of enterprise is the quasi-monopoly or cartel that limits supply and competition in order to extract the maximum profit from its customers.

Monopolies (or quasi-monopolies such as Google, which holds a majority share of global search revenues, excluding China) and cartels quickly amass profits which they then use to secure protection of their cartel from the state via lobbying, campaign contributions, etc. The elites controlling the state benefit from this arrangement, and so the system inevitably becomes a state-cartel system dominated by the state and private sector cartels and incentives that benefit the wealth and power of these institutions.

Once we understand the inevitability of this marriage of state and cartel, we understand socialism and capitalism–the State and Markets–are the yin and yang of one system. Reformers may recognize some of the inherent limits of the state and the market, but they believe these problems can be solved by tweaking policies–in systems-speak, modifying the parameters of the existing subsystems of lawmaking, the judiciary, regulatory agencies, and so on.

But as Donella Meadows explained in her classic paper, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System tweaking the parameters doesn’t actually change the system. For that, we must add a new feedback loop.

The status quo, in all its various forms, is dominated by incentives that strengthen the centralization of wealth and power, increase inequality and divisiveness and the permanent expansion of consumption and credit. That this path leads to implosion / collapse does not compute because the status quo is constructed on the fundamental assumption that permanent growth/expansion of consumption, credit, wealth and state power is not just possible but necessary.

As many of us have labored to show, the financial system has been pushed to unprecedented extremes to maintain the illusion that rapid growth of consumption and credit can be maintained essentially forever.

We need an alternative system that’s built on sustainable incentives and feedback loops so we have a new blueprint to follow as the current arrangement unravels in the next decade or two.

Security and prosperity are worthy goals, but the means to achieve them, as well as the definition of security / prosperity, must be reworked from the ground up. We need to include positive social roles and meaningful work as essential components of security/prosperity.

My conception of a Third / Community Economy does not replace either the state or the free-enterprise market; rather, it does what neither of the existing structures can do. It adds opportunity, purpose, positive social roles and earned income for those left out of the state/cartel/market economy.