The "Neoliberalism Frankenstein" - If You're Against It You Should Be Rooting for Greece and Russia!

Is it true as salon.com author Patrick L. Smith opines in a recent piece,

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/12/neoliberalism_is_our_frankenstein_greece_and_ukraine_are_the_hot_spots_of_a_new_war_for_supremacy/

 that we Americans have all become supine and surrendered to the mind -fucking U.S. media, and so are unable to discern truth from propaganda any more? Smith observes:

"Americans have by now surrendered to a blitz of propaganda wherein Russia and its leadership are cast as Siberian beasts, accepting as truth tales the National Enquirer would be embarrassed to run"

 It seems so, as polls disclose too many of us are siding with the Neoliberal media machine in two of the last arenas where Neoliberal world supremacy is at stake: Greece and the Ukraine. In the former a 'gun' is being held to the country's head to pay up all its owed debts despite the fact most level-headed people familiar with the structuring know it can't work. Putting the Greeks and their new PM in a hopeless, losing wicket position.   As Smith points out:

"At writing, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s imaginative new finance minister, has just made his first formal effort to present European counterparts with new ideas to get foreign debts of €240 billion ($271 billion) off the books and the Greek economy back in motion. These ideas can work. Even creditor institutions acknowledge that Greece cannot pay its debts as they are now structured. But at a session in Brussels Wednesday, the European Union’s arms remained folded."

Why the obstinacy? Because if Greece is allowed to restructure so will Spain and likely Portugal too. This the Neoliberal debt mongers cannot afford to allow. (And let's note that Barbados too is under the neolib gun, after the most recent credit downgrade, as the vultures of the IMF circle getting ready to pick the country's bones.  In Bim's case, of course, it was a profligate gov't that allowed the situation to get out of control.)

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine - the West's Neoliberals have handed PM Petro Poroshenko an "offer he can't refuse" - a la the Godfather when he had his hit men chop that thoroughbred's head off and place it in the bed of the movie mogul who refused to cooperate (giving the Godfather's godson a movie role.) The West, featuring the EU and its U.S. ally as well as NATO puppets, want that Ukraine gem in their Neoliberal constellation - backed up right against Russia's border.  They refuse to allow it to be a buffer state  - which is exactly what's needed now.  Smith again:

"Also at writing, the Poroshenko government in Ukraine appears to have recommitted to a cease-fire signed last September in Minsk and promptly broken. It is not surprising given Kiev’s very evident desperation on all fronts. But neither would it be if Poroshenko once again reneges. There is a sensible solution on the table now, but these are not people who have so far been given to one."

Again, why not accept the sensible solution? Because that is not what Neoliberal supremacy is all about. Like a Frankenstein monster created by economic dimwits who believe in the deus ex machina of markets with humans as its cogs, they are all about absolutism. Solutions must therefore be all or none, with the 'none' being no Russian input that can be respected. Ukraine is therefore dictated to be a satellite in the greater NATO conglomerate and subject to Neoliberal debt rules.

Smith in his essay rightly puts it thus:

"There is something tragically irrational driving both of these crises. The genesis of each, at least nominally, is the question of whether markets serve society or it is the other way around. Economic conflict, then, has been transformed into humanitarian disasters. This is what Greece and Ukraine have most fundamentally in common.
 

It is in search of a logical explanation of the illogic at work in these two crises that something else, something larger, emerges to bring them into a coherent whole. Washington has so many wars going now, none declared, one can hardly keep the list current. But the most sustained and havoc-wreaking of them is unreported. This is the war for neoliberal supremacy across the planet. Greece and Ukraine are best viewed as two hot fronts in this war, a sort of World War III none of us ever imagined."

And he nails it right there! "World War III" going on right now,  yet most of us are somnolent, or better, comatose under the haze of Neoliberal puppet media propaganda. The barrage on the nightly news has been so effective, the poorly informed are left with their mouths agape as those brutal Russians (backing the separatists)  emerge with pretty well the same "evil" aura as ISIS.  No surprise that like the brainwashed denizens of Oceania - in the scene where the uber villain Goldstein is depicted on the giant theater screen - they go nuts clamoring for blood and action.  DO they not know that action more fully ensnares them as complicit bait in their future slavery and destitution  in a perpetual war state? Frankly, they no longer care. Having lost the ability to critically and logically think, thanks to the bastardized vocabulary of Newspeak, their brains have now been colonized by "Big Brother" to his own ends.

The people of Oceania were no longer authentic beings in their own right but mere extensions of Big Brother and his will to power, to keep grinding their bodies and state resources up in a never-ending war to attain global domination. SO it is with the "Neoliberal Frankenstein" and how it now seeks to grind Greece and Ukraine into more fodder for its misbegotten global ends.

Smith asserts that "Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein" and also says "it is profoundly undemocratic, never mind that the English and American variants of democracy are the mulch from which it arises." He also adds:  "It is also unrelentingly absolutist because it is intimately related to the myth of America’s providential exception, neoliberalism can tolerate no alternative".  His definition (formal) starts out:

"Neoliberalism denotes the revival since the 1970s, plus or minus, of English liberalism as expounded by Locke in the 17th century and numerous others in the 18th—Adam Smith and his “invisible hand,” most famously. John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian, are notable among 19th century apostles."

But then goes into a lengthy discourse comparing early and 18th century forms of  liberalism to the neo-mutant. Let's just cut to the chase here and give Smith's core definition:

"Classical liberalism in its neo phase denotes not thought but belief, ideological conviction. It is the ideology of radical deregulation, radical corporatization, radical privatization—prisons? water? kindergartens? human health?—maximal profit without regard to consequences, and the radical devaluation of any serious consciousness of the communities in which all individuals are suspended."

I would add to this columnist Jay Bookman's insight from a 1998 Baltimore Sun piece ('The New World Disorder Evident Here, Abroad'):

“The global economy has been constructed on the premise that government guarantees of security and protection must be avoided at all costs, because they discourage personal initiative."

And there is Henry Giroux's insight on Neoliberalism:

"As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit-making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. "
 

Thus we see where the yen to cut social insurance arises, and why profit is amplified for the richest, and  also how  the wealthier nations  especially benefit by placing newcomer additions in regimes of adversely structured debt. This is exactly why the West's Neolibs are determined to make Ukraine part of the Neoliberal imperative and orbit. It follows from this that the true liberal must inveigh against this mission and that means siding with Russia. At least to the extent that the Ukraine outcome ends essentially in a draw - translated to mean neither in the West's orbit or Russia's but a separate buffer state. (This was advocated by Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson two years ago.)

But this may be difficult given as Smith writes:
 

"I was astonished many times as a correspondent to see how readily foreign leaders and their finance ministries drank the Anglo-American Kool-Aid. Here I single out Continental Europe as especially disappointing. A long social-democratic tradition notwithstanding, almost all European leaders—and every last technocrat in Brussels—went down like sticks of butter when neoliberals at State, Treasury and in the think tanks launched the post-Berlin Wall campaign."

Thus, the Europeans have now become puppets of the U.S. which let's face it, is the primary force bearer - the 'cop of the world' there to enforce Neolib standards. Hence, the threat to send lethal weapons to the Ukrainians - who will then get to actively fight for their own Neoliberal debt enslavement.

They may never have heard of FDR's famous words that "Necessitous men cannot be free men" but who knows, they may instead buy into the old Nazi saw "Arbeit Macht Frei" - the sign hanging over Auschwitz.

The same applies to the case of Greece, as Smith observes:
 

"It is preposterous. Greek debt can be efficiently restructured so that losses are minimized and properly shared. This is a European crisis in the final analysis, not Greece’s alone; behind every incautious borrower is an incautious lender. Yet there is no hint of open minds among Europe’s leaders, notably the Germans. What, we have to ask, is this all about?"

Again, what it's about is the Neoliberal imperative. The ability to structure debt in the most adverse way possible to convert nations into debt slavery states and their citizens into slaves for the Neoliberals.  How accomplished? Well, via the draconian conditions required by the EU and the IMF: the privatization of numerous state-held assets, including airports, rails and the entire port of Piraeus. Also,  divestment of the most profitable of these first.  Leaving the gov't impecunious and a beggar beholden to the Neoliberal empire.

If you consider yourself to have any skin at all in this ongoing war, you need to back Greece and Russia as bulwarks against Neoliberal advance. If not, then you are part of the problem not the solution and if the whole world turns into a slave state for the richest, you must share the blame.
 

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-zuesse/60991/gallup-americans-fear-of-russia-soars

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dean-baker/60995/greece-does-battle-with-creationist-economics-can-germany-be-brought-into-the-21st-century

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/60987/putin-heads-off-a-us-russia-war

and:

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/16/ukraine_is_the_new_iraq_why_history_is_repeating_itself_in_eastern_europe_partner/

How Capital Really Came to Control the Human Populace in the 21st Century- Part II

The evolution of central banking and currencies to the system of globalized Neoliberal capital is predicated on what came before in terms of eliminating multiple local currencies to induce scarcity (See Pt. I). The worth and fluctuation of the selected central currency could then be determined by assorted manipulations, e.g. such as in the present Federal Reserve era in the U.S. with the Fed’s quantitative easing program that has ‘juiced’ the stock market to unheard of highs – while depriving savers of income. In this way the Fed deliberately super-charged the financial landscape in favor of speculation over safe saving.

 Conversely, the Fed has been able to create scarcity when it wants to – say by implementation of deflationary policies. Much of the Fed’s basis and purpose has been discussed at length by James Livingstone in his monograph 'Origins of the Federal Reserve System- Money, Class and Corporate Capitalism’, 1890-1913. As he observes on, p. 233:

 

"...the creation of the Federal Reserve is an episode in, or evidence for, the emergence of a modern ruling class.. "

 

How so? Because all money created - on average $30-40 billion a year- is *brokered* into the system. That is, made available by escalating debt. This is achieved by the Fed using the money created to purchase government bonds, thereby making this (debt-burdened) product available to private banks at greater cost, so they must charge much higher interest than the bonds to secure what they regard as a 'reasonable return'.   This is also why JFK's injection of "U.S. Notes" (created by the Treasury not the Federal Reserve) couldn't be tolerated, because it introduced a non-debt burdened currency that would gradually move the financial edifice away from scarcity and hoarding  - for more on this, see:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/07/yes-those-us-notes-were-real.html

 

And so while nascent Americans, in their revolutionary fervor, had thrown off the shackles of one monarchy, within 137 years they came under the boots of another. This one devoted to the business and banking classes, who demanded ever more favored treatment vis-a-vis 'ordinary' citizens.

 As Rushkoff points out (op. cit., p. 171):

“To this day, the bias of centralized currency is toward scarcity and hoarding. This slows down the rate at which money circulates, while concentrating wealth at the top.”

 

This is not difficult to figure out. If only a certain species of coinage or currency is accepted as ‘real’ then there will be a natural tendency to hoard it. If it is hoarded then there will be scarcity, so aggregate demand will seize up and de facto fiat money will have to be printed to compensate. In the case of the past six years or so this fiat money has been engendered by the Fed holding down interest rates to absurd levels while doing monthly bond buying to the tune of $85 billion. The hoarding is now all in terms of Wall Street and Banks (as well as billionaires) who are able to exploit the cheap money environment in assorted nefarious ways. These include: inside information, flash trading, hedge fund gaming, credit default swaps and enticing ordinary investors to unwisely buy into the raging market – then collecting the spoils when it collapses – as all Bull markets do.

 

The game, obviously, is rigged so that the rich can get richer and everyone else gets poorer.  In other words, contrary to Neolib propaganda it is zero sum: each extra dollar the wealthy rats get is one less for you. Worse, the Neoliberal imperative dictates that those on the lower rungs be disallowed any economic security, especially via government social insurance programs. In this way it feeds economic inequality while it rewards the speculator and banker class - namely those who benefit from the rigged Neolib capitalist system. It also helps to corrupt the political class via unregulated campaign contributions – which, instead of being equitably distributed to all contenders – is now hoarded by only a few top candidates. When the majority of candidates lose – as they must -  all the donations contributed are lost.

 

Five years after the New World Order dawned,  Jay Bookman aptly noted('The New World Disorder Evident Here, Abroad', in The Baltimore Sun, December 15, 1997):

"The global economy has been constructed on the premise that government guarantees of security and protection must be avoided at all costs, because they discourage personal initiative. In times of crisis, however, that premise cannot be sustained politically. In times of trouble it is human nature to seek security and protection and to be drawn toward those who promise to provide it. That is how men such as Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin came to power, with disastrous consequences."

 

This aspect also has to do with what economists call “Pareto optimality” – which is another reason the rich keep getting richer and well known even before Piketty’s book arrived. This is based on the Pareto distribution, which confers much greater value (in what are called ‘utils’) to the money of the rich, than the money of the non-rich.  See e,g,


Since this difference exists, Vilfredo Pareto argued more power must be given to those higher util dollars. Today this would mean dispensing with government subsidies like food stamps, unemployment insurance or welfare. It also would also mean cuts to Social Security since by Pareto Optimality it wasn’t right for old codgers to simply collect money for breathing every day – as opposed to investing or working for it.

 

One hidden, ugly side of the Neoliberal imperative is that when nations come under its yolk – as at least one part (western) of the Ukraine is likely to do – then all its government  economic and social supports must also be cut. The people are then tossed into the über market just like all others haplessly trapped in the Neolib matrix. This means the same thing that happened to the Russians in the 1990s must befall them: all pensions cut, no more government food or energy subsidies, and wage cuts of 40 to 50 percent (as recently happened with Greece). Oh, and rents increased by 50-70 percent too!

 

An even more ugly side, as noted by Rushkoff  (Ch. 7, ‘From Ecology to Economy’) is that all remaining wealth on the planet must be hoarded and rendered scarce. This means millions of hectares of forest must be removed each year to make palm oil for assorted commercial products, even as millions of acre-feet of water must be wasted and despoiled each year to reap fracking profits. Whether ordinary people have any trees, or clean water left is not an issue that concerns the Neoliberal, only ensuring that they are faced with water scarcity, as well as that of other resources (clean air).

 

If you need some insight into what the Neoliberal global order will look like in the year 2050, check out the first five minutes of the scifi film ‘Elysium’.  Look carefully at the landscape of wasted, rotted out buildings, scruffy people in rags eking out an existence and then look around now – and see the emergence of a similar landscape if the global frackers get their way.

 

Again, Pareto optimality and its perverted economics dictate this: to amass and hoard ever more wealth (in money) so that natural wealth must be destroyed. If ordinary people die by the millions because of the effects of climate change or polluted water, e.g. from cholera or amoebic dysentery, it matters not because those people control less wealth anyway – so in terms of Pareto optimality – aren’t worth that much. This is also why the Neoliberal sees more sense in dispensing massive tons of toxic garbage to the less developed world: the inhabitants of those locales already are facing serious health issues so more toxic waste doesn’t matter in the scheme of things. For the time  being it’s more economically useful than letting it pile up here in the U.S., where it might generate ten times more cancers, and having millions consume Medicare funds to get them treated.

Of course, once the Neolibs can get rid of all “entitlements” that all might be changed.  These so-called entitlements are the main bulwark now standing between a barely surviving Middle Class in the U.S. (which has already been overtaken by Canada's Middle Class, not surprisingly) and one that goes under. In that future all seniors will only receive a "welfare" pittance, and will have to work in some manner if they want to live at a decent level.

 The bottom line is that the Neoliberal imperative as I’ve described it is what’s responsible for generating massive income inequality. While Thomas Piketty’s factors (i.e. inherited wealth)  do enter, they are not as historically cogent as the ones Douglas Rushkoff points out that preceded them – especially the original move to centralized currencies and banking.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/gaius-publius/54836/neoliberalism-just-deserts-and-the-post-climate-crisis-economy

 

Plutocrats Plus - Why Neoliberalism Is Bad For Us All

Author Thomas Frank in a recent essay ('Plutocracy Without End: Why the 1 Percent Always Defeats the Middle Class') wrote:

"The One Percent have already broken every record for wealth-hogging set by their ancestors, going back to the dawn of record-keeping in 1913. But what if it all just keeps going? How much fatter can the fat cats get before they hit some kind of natural limit? Before the invisible thumb of history presses down on the other side of the scale and restores balance?"

How much fatter can the fat cats get? Much fatter indeed! We've already seen the Gini coefficient, one of the best measures of inequality, rise to its highest level in decades - accelerating most since the Reagan era and the massive cut in the top income tax rates. People bitch and moan about paying taxes, but don't understand that they are what keeps our society afloat. No taxes, then no roads, no schools, no benefits......and no armies! The problem with the myopic Right is that they want all the taxes to go for armies and weapons and none for the domestic foundation. But this is a fool's thinking because without domestic security at its basic level, in terms of providing roads, bridges, water mains, sewer lines and means for people to not only subsist but thrive, you are looking at a banana republic.

The problem with the Neoliberal, pro -free market idiom is that it denies the most basic security for the majority of citizens. In this way it feeds economic inequality while it rewards the speculator and banker class. It also helps to corrupt the political class via unregulated campaign contributions.

Jay Bookman aptly noted('The New World Disorder Evident Here, Abroad', in The Baltimore Sun, December 15, 1997):

"The global economy has been constructed on the premise that government guarantees of security and protection must be avoided at all costs, because they discourage personal initiative. In times of crisis, however, that premise cannot be sustained politically. In times of trouble it is human nature to seek security and protection and to be drawn toward those who promise to provide it. That is how men such as Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin came to power, with disastrous consequences."

This description of the New World Neoliberal Order is exactly why the seeds of its own destruction are built into it, have been built into it.  Even as I read (in the New York Times) yesterday of the collapse of multi-employer Pension benefits funds, and how many union workers can no longer receive pensions, it occurred to me that if congress doesn't act, this is a situation that can rapidly destabilize.  There's only a small critical threshold between mass suffering and mass unrest- as we've seen all over, from the Arab Spring, to the Ukraine.

 But in the case of the Ukraine, the unrest was fomented by U.S. Neoliberals and their neocon sidekicks,  driving NATO expansion to the east. The cover story sold is that the people wanted "freedom" and being aligned with the EU and the West. The truth is that if they go that route they will become economic slaves to the Neoliberal  Economic Order. Indeed, once the IMF and EU funds go through one of the first offsets will be cutting public pensions and abolition of all rigid price controls, as well as painful cuts to public subsidies. Those Ukrainians pining for "freedom" would have been better served to have pondered FDR's famous words:

"Necessitous men cannot be free men."

And looked before they leaped into the Neoliberal Abyss (which they might have asked EU Sovereign debt victim Greece about).

Meanwhile, Thomas Frank goes on to observe (ibid.):

"That we are very close to such a limit—that the contradictions inherent in the system will automatically be its undoing—is an idea much in the air of late. Not many still subscribe to Marx’s dialectical vision of history, in which inevitable worker immiseration would be followed, also inevitably, by a revolutionary explosion, but there are other inevitabilities that seem equally persuasive today. We hear much, for example, about how inequality contributed to the housing bubble and the financial crisis, how it has brought us an imbalanced economy that cannot survive."


Marx's dialectic theory of history is one thing, but a more germane or relevant destabilizer is that without adequate income, with only debt to purchase the capitalist goods manufactured - the whole edifice of the consumer economy (and our GDP) collapses.  The reason is simple, and one evident to anyone with basic math skills: it is consumption that supports 70 percent of our GDP. Take away that consumption, and kaput! The economy dives into depression, irrespective of what the Fed, Obama, congress or anyone does.

Thus, once the Neoliberal Order of Globalized capital was established, the seeds for its future destruction were sown. Recall that it was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ( 'Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism', 1916) who first sounded the warning that mobile finance capital was designed to continually leverage labor to the lowest common denominator. Lenin clearly showed in his treatise how the Political and Economic Elite, simply by the expedient of export capital, could indirectly exploit raw materials from poor nations, or use the latter as captive labor markets. Meanwhile, that same exported capital would ensure working conditions degraded at home. Under such a scheme, financiers would continually divert capital to foreign locales where it would generate the highest return and refrain from aiding industry in their own countries.

That working conditions have degraded at home is self evident to the most cursory reader who follows economic conditions. We still have more than 24 million people under-employed or unemployed and we have a Middle Class losing more ground every day, even as the Elites talk wildly of cutting their Social Security and Medicare benefits - the last barriers between them and penury ...

Then there are the millions trapped in minimum wage jobs with no chance of advancement. Nor is there any motivation in our congress to help them by increasing their wage to a living wage, despite the fact that such a move could actually extend the life of their market Neoliberalism - since it would permit workers to purchase the goods that prop up the GDP without going into debt.

Finally, there are the tens of thousands of recently graduated college students mired in debts accrued that they now must pay off, but with no decent job prospects by which to do so. Do the Neoliberals care at all about the plight of these students or their families? Not at all! Their message is basically, "Sink or swim!" 


Will the Neoliberals quit while they're (relatively ) ahead? Not on your life! They want to add the Ukraine to their potpourri of misery, saddle them with endless debt and poverty like they did the Russians post-1990,. They also want to double down on the global Neoliberal order itself - this time using TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership, another way to screw with us like the earlier GATT and NAFTA.

Are people paying attention? Maybe, maybe not. It is painful to watch as many of our citizens simply hunker down with their TVs, DVDs, notebooks, Twitter, Facebook or other entertainment and refuse to understand that the active citizen must come to the fore if the Neoliberals are not to send our nation into a plutocracy.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has released the draft text of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, currently being negotiated in secret by 12 Pacific Rim nations.   It would be well for every citizen who thinks of him (or her-)self as more that than consumer to read it, and do so carefully.

Your future, and especially that of your offspring, may well depend on it. You need to know of the massive collision coming - heading right toward you - before it happens.  If an informed citizenry is the basis for democracy, why are we being kept in the dark? Perhaps because we no longer have a democracy  but a corporatocracy!

But that is the other prop the Neoliberals depend upon: citizen inertia, stupidity or belief in impotence, i.e. that they only have "opinions" - which carry no weight.  Also, they don't want citizens pursuing truth - information outside the media they promote, which is more invested in propaganda.

If we each do our part, as opposed to retreating, we may yet wake the Neoliberal New World Order up to the fact that poverty stricken indigents (replacing well paid, economically secure citizens) is the last thing it needs.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/55716/msnbc-can-be-trusted-by-the-established-order-thats-a-problem

NO! The U.S. Does NOT Want a War With Russia!

A Russian Destroyer, the Moskva, leaves its base for the waters off Syria in July. Below: Obama clueless as to who the real "freedom fighters" are in Ukraine.

Q. What do you get when you cross a neocon with a Neoliberal?

A. The Shock Doctrine, 100, 000 dead ....then Wall Street stock or bond shares on the new oil or debt.

It was laughable last night seeing Bill Maher expose the Neocon asshole William Kristol for the braggart know-nothing he is, just like the rest of his ilk. In turn, Bill trotted out three of Kristol's predictions made before the invasion of Iraq including: 1) The U.S. will be vindicated when the weapons of mass destruction are discovered, 2) Very few wars in American history were better prepared for, and 3) It's 'pop psychology' to believe the Shi'ia can't get along with the Sunni.

All of which, along with the other trope - i.e. that the oil we find will pay for the war, were shown to be total nonsense and lies.

So WHY in the hell should anyone with half a grain of sense or half a brain believe these idiots when they yap for confronting the Russians over Ukraine? And yet last night, what did we behold? Obama getting up on his lectern and "warning" the Russians about "interfering in Ukraine". Are you kidding me? The U.S. interfered long before the Russians via their Neocon NED as I described in the previous blog. Is ANYONE paying attention? Is the President?

And what is he going to do when the Russians laugh at these hollow warnings? Make no mistake that going up against the Russians will not be anything like the mock "wars" of the past 14 years, based mainly on invading and occupying two nations laden with impoverished, ragtag, robed radicals who can barely muster enough supplies to make home made bombs.  The Russians, by contrast, have actual fighter jets, battle ships and tanks, as well as a well equipped army that will give the U.S. everything it can handle and more. It won't be any 'shock and awe' cakewalk like in Iraq. So why is Obama falling for this bullshit, and why hasn't he cleaned house and gotten rid of the Neocons?

And why hasn't Obama sacked the Neocon advisors putting him up to this rubbish? Why does he have ANY Neocons still in his administration? As blogger Robert Parry put it two days ago:

"the U.S. government appears nearly as divided as the Ukrainian people. While neocon holdovers in the State Department, particularly Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, helped instigate the crisis, President Obama has seen his collaboration with Putin to tamp down crises in Syria and Iran put at risk"

This  sounds to me like Obama needs to do a major clean up at State. Get rid of these buggers once and for all! Send them packing! No Neocons!  Obama needs to grasp he is backing the WRONG side! And also, these "freedom fighting citizens" are mainly Neo-Nazi thugs!  See also:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/27/the-neo-nazis-of-ukraine/

Excerpt:

"The Washington-paid schemers are now reaping their just reward as they sit in craven silence while neo-nazi Muzychko wielding an Ak-47 challenges government officials to their face: “I dare you take my gun!” Only Obama, Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, Washington’s European puppets, and the Western prostitute media can describe the brutal reality of post-coup Ukraine as “the forward march of democracy.

If a democratically elected president and ruling party are so easily driven from power by armed neo-nazis, what chance do Washington’s paid stooges among the so-called “moderates” have of forming a government?"

Indeed, it is yet another display of supporting Neoliberal FASCISM! Neo -Nazis! Are you shitting me? WTF are we doing supporting Nazis? Has this country gone mad, or is the leadership now bamboozled again by the Neocons who clearly have them by the balls too?

 As I cited Mike Whitney's piece at the end of the post yesterday:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/mike-whitney/54509/the-coup-in-ukraine-obamas-dumbest-plan-yet

In order to topple Yanukovych, the US had to tacitly support fanatical groups of neo-Nazi thugs and anti-Semites. And, even though “Interim Ukrainian President Oleksander Tuchynov has pledged to do everything in his power to protect the country’s Jewish community”; reports on the ground are not so encouraging. Here’s an excerpt from a statement by Natalia Vitrenko, of The Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine that suggests the situation is much worse than what is being reported in the news:

“Across the country… People are being beaten and stoned, while undesirable members of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine are subject to mass intimidation and local officials see their families and children targeted by death threats if they do not support the installation of this new political power. The new Ukrainian authorities are massively burning the offices of political parties they do not like, and have publicly announced the threat of criminal prosecution and prohibition of political parties and public organizations that do not share the ideology and goals of the new regime.” (“USA and EU Are Erecting a Nazi Regime on Ukrainian Territory”, Natalia Vitrenko)

Ukraine is gradually succumbing to the loving embrace of the New World Order where it will serve as another profit-generating cog in Wall Street’s wheel. That’s the theory, at least. It hasn’t occurred to the boneheads at the New York Times or Washington Post that Ukraine is rapidly descending into Mad Max-type anarchy which could spill over its borders into neighboring countries triggering violent conflagrations, social upheaval, regional instability or–god-help-us– WW3"

It is high time to call a halt to this insanity now!

Mr. Obama, tell the Neocons burrowed within your administration to get the hell out! Tell any Neocon advisors to shut the fuck up! We do not need or want World War III - which believe me, these assholes are leading us into one fell step after another. Do not let them make you believe Russia does not have as much right to defend her doorstep as we do ours!  (And WHO can forget how Reagan dispatched several Marine regiments  and ships to the small island of Grenada in 1983 to wipe out a small (400-650) band of Cuban commie engineers - on the island to repair roads. Don't hand me any shit that WE also don't fight to protect what's near our doorstep - even if 2,000 miles away!)

Enough of this crap!

Be like JFK and act as a leader for once, and tell the warmongers and warmakers to take a long hike on a short pier.

And please, no more empty, provocative threats - unless you're also prepared to threaten the Nazis wreaking mayhem in Ukraine!  See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/daniel-patrick-welch/54546/worst-man-for-the-job-what-the-hell-is-obama-thinking

See the nationalist filth that the West, the neocons and Obama are backing here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBo0akeDMY

The Shredding of the Social Contract (1)

"We should cease making speech after speech accepting that our fate and the fate of the world, will inevitably be decided by impersonal, market controlled forces and the sooner we accept this the better off we will be. Instead we should be denying most strongly, in every forum available to us, that such a fate is inevitable... That instead the world deserves a better future than the one on offer from the ruthless money men and sleaze-ridden free trade marketeers, who are making this terrible bid to dominate the world."

Ian MacDonald, in The Barbados NATION, Aug. 14, 1998, p.8.

As this is being written a global cancer is spreading across the planet- engulfing whole populations in its wake, and destroying the cohesion of societies and the integrity of the natural environment. This cancer is inured to suffering and distress, whether of people or the planetary home and natural environment they inhabit. All it cares about is its own aggrandisement and accumulation of monetary wealth, capital at the expense of environmental sanity and labor fairness.

Students who've been highly educated and hold college degrees, facing massive loan payoffs? This global capitalist cancer could care less! The reason is that its essence and malignancy is dictated by debt, and the greater the debt and the more varied it is, the better -from student loans, to mortgages, to credit cards.

The enormous forces currently at work, fueled by manic speculation and debt, seek to re-shape geopolitical boundaries along dictatorial market-imperialist lines. Lines from which multinational corporations and capital govern and rule, rather than governments. The violent episodes of public reaction in Greece are merely at the surface of what lies in store for the planet, if we allow these maniacs to leverage control of our lives.

All these, in toto, bespeak an encroaching economic fascism that has now arrived under the face of the 'market' and multi national corporate hegemony, economic oligarchy- deploying financiers, investment bankers and creditors rather than stormtroopers. And dollar (or euro) signs instead of swastikas. One in which no borders, of any country, are impervious to the reshaping - whether in terms of mergers, downsizings, or progressive indentured servitude of the workforce, or sacrifice of hard-won environmental laws to stealth investment legislation sponsored by transnationals. A 'New World Order'.

In this blog and the next two in this series, I wlll examine in detail the core of the problems we are facing as a nation (or perhaps more accurately, segment of a nation) that still values social justice, upward mobility and equitable access to resources. I will also show what sort of beast the Occupy Wall Street protestors are confronting, and how this beast became what it is today - also why stopping it cannot be a localized strategy - but must be accomplished on a global level.

It was sometime during his presidency that former CIA Deputy chief George Herbert Walker Bush sounded the words "New World Order". He didn't have to amplify it or explain it, because those elitist enclaves that would wield its power knew already what it meant: citizen subservience to corporate "persons" rule, and economic fascism disguised as "free market" Neoliberalism. The aim? To deliver to this Neoliberal pseudo-free market artifact a world of serfs, some willing, some not so willing.

But Bush and others of his ilk knew the only way to achieve this was via a cancerous process called "globalization". This would become the great equalizer and enable impersonal market forces to remove freedoms and all hopes for economic mobility and security. Understanding this is crucial to understanding what the Occupy Wall Street protestors are up against, because in this sense "Wall Street" is just the visible tip of one small iceberg and agent for American ruin, but not the whole! The whole extends to the entire network of unaccountable central banks throughout the world, traced back to the Bank for International Settlements.

Most naive people, when they hear or see the words "New World Order", smirk and smile then think of some looney conspiracy theorist alone in his mom's basement churning out tracts on "black helicopters" and UN prison camps. But this is in fact the hyperbolic lunacy that the real New Worlders wish people to pillory: a deliberate exaggeration to conceal their own ambitions. In fact, this World Order doesn't require black helicopters or UN invaders at all, merely mobile capital that can wend its way across any borders and upend any social contracts at will by allowing capital to outbid the indigenous populace and its rights. The New Worlders know full well that in any competitive bidding war between capital inflows, it will be the one ensuring the fastest race to the bottom that prevails. And no one will be any the wiser.....because it's money via electronic trades and transfers.

Thereby, the workings of the global bond markets, for example, can reduce or remove from the world's social markets much of the freedom their own governments exercised in the past to pursue counter-cyclical economic policies. Thus, in the present era of low aggregate demand, the U.S. would have been able to pursue Keynesian stimulus policies - since we are in a balance sheet recession- and this could have pumped hundreds of billions in for public works to create new jobs. But.....the bond pirates have decreed austerity measures instead, so nothing is done to prime that pump that specifically can engender more jobs and we remain steeped in unemployment.

In effect, the bond marketeers, their rating agency allies and other more nefarious central banking interests, have forced governments worldwide to retreat into a pre-Keynesian world of minimal economic efficacy, even as their populations grow increasingly restive and furious. Governments like Greece (and the U.S.) are thereby left to wait out disruptive downturns in economic activity whatever their social and economic costs. And meanwhile, the one percent - including many bond traders, investment bankers and investors in hedge funds - conceive of ways to use credit default swaps to bet on government failures as their populations erupt.

By penalizing any government which attempts to employ a reasonable and rational Keynesian stimulus - such as has been proposed by Obama in his $447b jobs bill- the market forces (including their regressive political allies like the GOP and billionaire-funded "Tea Party") ensure that those same governments are forced to respond using only the disastrous and deflationary measure of expenditure cuts, including cuts to social benefits. Thereby the global bond pirates profit while populations become more destitute and insecure.

The global capital markets do even more than this: they effectively make any form of social democracy moribund. This social democracy embodies a hearty progressive taxation or deficit -funded full employment (i.e. at least at the 4% level) and healthy, consistent benefit levels - including for welfare recipients. But thanks to the global capitalist pirates, all of these are being unravelled at once! Taxes are now their lowest level for the wealthiest in more than a generation and more tax breaks are to come (if the Bush tax cuts are renewed), and deficit funding is anathema, while Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are on the chopping block for an unelected, un-Constitutional super committee.

The problem is the existence of social democratic principles, and by extension social justice, cannot survive an open-global economy. Indeed, only within a closed economy can we see first hand if principles of social justice espoused in that country can work and persist. In fact, it is only within a closed economy that any kind of egalitarian spirit can even be remotely enforced. Meanwhile, in every case those "open economies" (the wet dream of the Neolilberal) undermine egalitarianism (including quality jobs for all) by virtue of the freedom of capital to march in and conduct impersonal bidding wars without popular consent. Worse, with no transaction taxes on this bidding, there is no accountability whatsoever! Because no costs are applied, not even ¼ a penny tax per trade, the bond pirates or multinational corporations can infuse as much capital as they want - or can bet on (via trading derivatives in credit default swaps) to bring a country to its knees. Meanwhile, if a nation does attempt to defend its citizens' labor rights vs. inflowing capital, the World Trade Organization or WTO can be appealed to on the basis of the impertinent nation enabling "trade impediments".

If then money or human capital can be allowed to migrate or move to wherever it wants on the planet, it will most often choose those places where labor and health costs are lowest, or the regulations that support them are minimalist. In this way it will maximize its profits and hence maximize its capital for further bidding wars elsewhere. This is a prime reason why millions of college educated Americans are out of luck on the jobs scene even when this recessionary period ends. With 2 billion competing, lower cost workers in China, India and Russia, there's no need to tap any but the cheapest labor - even for high grade skills!

The reason is that the Neoliberal lords of the "New World Order" and its mobile capital have declared their (students') labor comes at too dear a price, including the rights attached to their labor. Far preferable to move it to India, China or Mexico where capital impingements are not so great. The students, meanwhile, end up in a deeply leveraged quasi-proletariat which can easily be exploited for temporary labor when the need arises.

Finally, let us bear in mind that NO "free market" exists! It is a construct of the PR establishment and used to spread false consciousness, so that those caught up with no jobs and no prospects will tend to blame themselves as opposed to the rigged economic system. The fundamental attribution error.

How to know if a market is free or coerced? Charles Reich provided the test ('Opposing the System’, 1995, p. 22):

"A free market produces results that favor the health of society as a whole, because an essential balance is maintained. But in a coercive market, the balance is destroyed, the earning power of work and the standard of living of workers declines, and society as a whole is devastated while those with economic power gain an ever more unbalanced share of the nation's economic wealth"

This is exactly what we have with the top 1% controlling 57% of the nation's wealth, and 400 billionaires with the same monetary resources as 150 million fellow citizens!

Now, magnify this coercive market to the global scale and you have a global cancer! Ian McDonald again, writing in The Barbados NATION (Aug.14 1998):

"Do we really believe for one moment that those who preach free trade and the inevitable triumph of market forces have anything other than their own increased wealth and aggrandizement in mind? Do we honestly believe they think the system they espouse is fundamentally a good one for all concerned? Are we so naïve as to think if, by any chance, the system were to operate against their interests, that they would not make sure it was changed or abridged to suit them? Are we so innocent and trusting that we cannot recognize bullying and crude self-interest when our noses are being rubbed in it constantly?"

Author Willaim Grieder's take is equally pungent (One World Ready Or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, p. 401):

"It does not require great political imagination to see that the world system is heading toward a further dispersion of governing power so the closet dictator of the marketplace can command things more efficiently, from everywhere and nowhere. The historic paradox is breathtaking: At the very moment when Western democracies and capitalism have triumphed over the communist alternative, their own systems of self-government are being gradually unraveled by the market system. "


And further (ibid.)

"Like feudal lords, the stateless corporations will make alliances with one another or launch raids against one another's stake. They will play weakening national governments off against each other..... In that event, vast throngs of citizens are reduced to a political position resembling that of the serfs.... "


Next: How the Global Corporatocracy is already making serfs of us all - via permanent unemployment