Americans are more poorly positioned than we have been in nearly fifty years. By almost every measure — inflation, wages, medical expenses, student debt, rent, transportation costs — we are struggling. We are paying more for necessities and experiencing deepening immiseration while corporate profits are higher than they’ve been in nearly a century.
...
Wage theft and opportunity hoarding are perennial concerns, but what we are seeing now is a gold rush on working people’s remaining savings, scant as they are. In this, Americans are being tested to see just how much we’re willing to endure. Capitalists, having been instrumental in creating a workforce too exhausted and disorganized to mount an effective defense against plummeting quality of life, are betting the answer is quite a lot. And while inspiring union votes are being held across the country, the overall lack of any significant and sustained anti-capitalist movement telegraphs that we will still put up with more.
We need to show that we won’t.
...
Broke and bullied, we’re discovering that capitalists are trying to squeeze consumers and workers for all we’re worth — even if that means putting us in positions where we are literally dying for the job.
Inflation has decimated the modest wage gains workers saw last year. An hourly earnings increase of 0.4 percent, reported back in October, was obliterated by nearly 1 percent inflation for the month. Over the course of the pandemic, net hourly wages have declined 1.2 percent, while prices have climbed 7.5 percent over the past year, both due to inflation and because of the padding of corporate profits. Food prices, in particular, are up over 10 percent from a year ago.
Rents have similarly exploded, with some cities seeing as much as a 40 percent increase over the past year.
...
Student debt also remains a significant burden on Americans. While Biden has forgiven $15 billion of the $1.7 trillion total, including most recently a $415 million package, these drips and drops fall far short of campaign promises. With student loan repayment set to begin shortly, tens of millions of Americans will once again be thrown into debilitating economic stress.
The effects of the current shakedown go beyond mere impoverishment, which is certainly dire enough. American life expectancy also infamously dropped in 2020, from a previous 78.8 years to 77.3. While in part attributable to COVID, Americans are statistically dying younger from other causes as well — homicide, diabetes, and what Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called “deaths of despair,” including liver cirrhosis and drug overdose.
It goes on and on. And while Mister Daniel mentions signs of worker pushback, the enormity of this suffering, the inequality gap, the capitalists' power to do as they please, ... the fact that "Americans are more poorly positioned than we have been in nearly fifty years" ... all of this certainly would seem to give the lie to any previous talk of left "victories" and the effectiveness of our "resistance" during my lifetime.
Particularly touching is Daniel's statement here:
And while inspiring union votes are being held across the country, the overall lack of any significant and sustained anti-capitalist movement telegraphs that we will still put up with more.
We need to show that we won’t.
What exactly does he mean by that? What is ANYONE planning on the left to show genuinely massive worker refusal to continue to take this abuse? What is happening to make the capitalists and their political hirelings fear the consequences of continuing to abuse us? MASSIVE one-day peaceful rallies? MASSIVE petitions? In the United States a MASSIVE "get-out-the-vote" campaign for the Democratic Party?
As with all things, many human beings within the community of the political left seem to be cut-off from understanding the meanings of the words that they utter. Just as so many people, within the context of the crisis of Putin's invasion of the Ukraine, blithely discuss the possibility of nuclear war as if they really don't understand that it means certain death for themselves and everyone that they love and the extinction of the entire human race, so too, do these people not understand that their "fighting back" and their "resistance" and their "struggle" and their "coalition building" and their "activism" have accomplished sweet fuck all and that the outcome for the future looks to be more of the same.
People! Whatever you've been doing, it's obviously not working!
Not everyone on the right-wing is a hopeless deplorable. (And, yes, nazis of any persuasion are deplorable.) Some of them are confused and/or ignorant. (And some are intelligent people who are leery of societal change.) Hard economic times makes people "conservative." It makes people retreat into smaller, like-minded (or whatever) groups to preserve resources for themselves and their in-group. It makes them distrustful of others, "outsiders," seeing them as rivals for those scarce resources. Some of these people we should try to reach. If, by any stretch of the imagination, we were winning practical benefits for people on our side we perhaps could have some of these entitled blowhards putting their self-interested activism on OUR side. (They might be distasteful allies but you don't always have the luxury of choice when you're outgunned and losing.) Alas, our society has degenerated to the point where a vile turd like Pierre Poilievre. This shit-head was an embarrassment to someone as loathsomely stupid as stephen harper. And yet, the second-biggest political party in Canada, the one that continues to receive the endorsement of the majority of the capitalist media's "journalism" products, has a good chance of having this imbecile as it's leader.
This career politician who disparages government while serving as a whore for corporations; this asshole who abused public resources for partisan propaganda; this racist scumbag who hates the First Nations even more than Justin Trudeau does, ... this tool represents a sizeable proportion of the Conservative Party of Canada! Yet more evidence of the incapacity of the human species.
It's for the best that the NDP and Libs have been able to come to terms on a supply and confidence agreement which should at least provide for substantial material gains for people who need them, and may go further in setting up core elements of a universal health care system which have long been lacking. And it's particularly gratifying to see at least some recognition of the leadership that requires.
But while it's well worth celebrating what looks like a turn for the better, it's also worth a reminder as to what - and who - has prevented that type of cooperation from happening in the past.
Remember that Jagmeet Singh's message after the 2019 election was one of willingness to work with the Liberals on shared priorities. And Justin Trudeau's response was...to reject any systematic cooperation with a single party, as he preferred piecemeal politics and perpetual Parliamentary chicken to acceding to any NDP priorities in exchange for ongoing confidence.
...
Needless to say, that leaves reason for concern that the same factors will affect both the length of time the current agreement figures to hold up, and the expectations as to what will be achieved while it does. And while the points of agreement may make some major achievements seem like real possibilities, there's a lot of work to be done to keep pushing toward actually bringing them to life before the Libs decide to go it alone.
The NDP disappoints so often and is so uninspiring and hopeless that I have walked away from them on a few occasions. But this is something that reminds us that they still have their purpose.
As evidence of the moral imbecility of liberals I offer you the following: Sometimes during this recent crisis in the Ukraine I question the sincerity of Biden's concern for ordinary Ukrainians by pointing out his support for Saudi Arabia and the UAE's campaign of genocide in Yemen and for his evident plan to collectively punish the people of Afghanistan by starving them all to death.
The response of these liberals? Some of them say the [they think] magic word "whataboutism" in the hopes that it makes me disappear. Others misinterpret me that I'm trying to excuse Putin by bringing up US crimes. Either way, I'm a Putin-pupper repeating Kremlin propaganda who can be summarily dismissed while they courageously support Ukrainians and do their part to defeat Putin by putting a Ukranian flag on their avatars and calling for no-fly zones over the combat zone.
And then they do absolutely nothing about Yemen and Afghanistan. The sufferings of millions of people, TENS OF MILLIONS of people, directly at the hands of their own government (our Canadian government in the case of our weapons sales to the Saudi dictatorship) and instead they bray like the good brainwashed jackasses they are about the crimes of official enemies. Even after I've brought it to their attention they treat it like a distraction. They don't even write about it.
I find it just as maddening as the shit-heads wandering around wearing masks that don't cover their noses. Goddamned fucking adults who haven't yet mastered the concept of breathing. I find it just as maddening as the arrogant stupidity of those who are proudly unmasked. COVID is invisible and some people have no symptoms and because of the efforts of more responsible people some don't even get infected. So obviously it doesn't exist! Obviously they're "Free Men On The Land" and you can't enslave THEM with a cloth mask!
These stupid liberals with their embarrassing continued adherence to "Russiagate" and displaying their inner authoritarians with all their calls for censorship of social media (while the corporate media and the government can obviously continue to lie their asses off) and their so obvious gullibility for brazen and stupid corporate media narratives!!!
One more thing (This is only indirectly related but I've wanted to say it for a while): When I was listening to the Canadian citizen Abdullah Almalki, who had been tortured in Syria at the behest of CSIS (who provided the Syrian torturers with questions to ask him as they abused him) about his ordeal, he mentioned that through the walls of his cell he could sometimes hear the cries of children from somewhere else in the dungeon.
I thought: That fucking monster! Assad is a fucking monster! And I believe that is the natural response to such a situation. But when the USA and Saudi Arabia sent in Jihaadist maniacs to overthrow Assad I opposed it. Because being an adult in a world as shitty as ours I realized that the wholesale slaughter of a civil-war (or a mercenary invasion in the case of Syria) and the likely consequences of a Jihaadist Syria would be worse than the Assadist status-quo. This is how terrible the United States' government is: They managed to make Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, and the Taliban look preferable to what the USA brings.
Sometimes I think that many humans know what words mean on a superficial level but they don't grasp their true meaning. Idiot liberals pompously "weighing the option" of a nuclear war don't grasp that this means that they and everyone they love will be vapourized or doomed to a terrible death from thrist, or starvation and cancer. And when they hear the words "vapourized" or "terrible death" etc., ... they don't really absorb what those words mean either.
It's really getting hard to take. The hysteria, the hypocrisy, the ridiculous chest-thumping war-mongering. Now, don't get me wrong; I've always said that I find liberals to be intelligent people who I can tend to get along with up to a point. But right now we're past one of those points. And these people are losing their fucking minds.
Rule number one for a sane person with integrity: If you do not hate all the US presidents back to Reagan (at least) as much as you hate Vladimir Putin, then you are a brainwashed fuck-faced hypocrite. If Putin has blood on his hands then those presidents have blood up to their elbows, if not their shoulders.
This is just a fact.
God damn it.
One sign of liberal derangement is the continued admiration of the moron, racist, elitist, imperialist, untalented hack Thomas Friedman. Here's the idiot spewing drivel about Putin's invasion of the Ukraine:
Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. ... Yes, the Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries — before the democracy revolutions in America and France — when a European monarch or Russian czar could simply decide that he wanted more territory, that the time was ripe to grab it, and so he did. And everyone in the region knew he would devour as much as he could and there was no global community to stop him.
[ Now (because there are so many goddamned brainwashed fools out there) let me preface the rest of this post (and, what the hell, ANY OTHER POST that I write wherein I shall speak about Vladimir Putin using facts and arguments based on evidence and not delusion and bloodlust) by saying that I do not want to loving lick Vladimir Putin from his anus, up his taint, over his balls, and then begin lovingly sucking on his shaft and the head of his cock before going back down again and repeating this over and over with greater intensity until he ejaculates and then we lovingly cuddle and smoke cigarettes. He is an authoritarian social arch-conservative/reactionary, who does not run his own country very well, and who has abused and killed people. That having been said, in a choice between Putin, and any US government that has existed during his many years in power, ... or with the Israelis, or the Colombians, or the Egyptians, or any other dictatorship or semi-dictatorship, ... there is literally NOTHING to choose from. Certainly nothing to risk nuclear war over. ]
Back to Friedman ...
Jesus-fucking-Christ! There's so much stupid shit in those few sentences. After the "democracy revolutions in America and France" the French went on to invade and annex several countries and establish puppet states in others. And the United States of America conquered and subjugated the peoples living in what is now their own western states. Then they took over Hawaii and the Philippines.
And the only big difference between US imperialism and old-style European imperialism is that the US-Americans have learned that it's far more efficient to allow a place to retain nominal independence and rule them through a comprador class who turn over their countries' resources in return for a cut of the swag that is far less costly than an actual military occupation.
But all of that is beside the point that Vladimir Putin does not want to annex the Ukraine. I say that with confidence for the same reason I always say that Putin's foreign policy is far more modest than his hysterical detractors present it as; this being that Putin knows he cannot afford extended military campaigns and occupations.
So let's dispense with the groundless assertion that Putin seriously wants to CONQUER the Ukraine and forcibly make it a part of Russia again. Friedman continues ...
In acting this way today, though, Putin is not only aiming to unilaterally rewrite the rules of the international system that have been in place since World War II — that no nation can just devour the nation next door — he is also out to alter that balance of power that he feels was imposed on Russia after the Cold War.
Friedman then begins babbling about "World War Wired." This apparently means that war info and coverage is now taking place in a world connected by high-speed internet where anyone with a cellphone can upload video footage of what's happening to everyone else with an internet connection. Big fucking deal. I pretty much stopped reading at Friedman's hypocritical nonsense of Putin "unilaterally rewrit[ing] the rules of the international system." Doesn't Friedman remember George Bush Sr.'s description of the "New World Order" with the fall of the Soviet Union and the US-led coalition against Iraq (for its invasion of Kuwait)? That new order was "What we say goes!"
The United States routinely violates international law. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal. Bush Sr.'s invasion of Panama was illegal. It's sanctions against Venezuela are illegal. And I'm pretty sure that arming and training Jihaadist mercenaries to topple the government of a sovereign state (such as Syria) is illegal. [I can't remember where, during the past couple of weeks, that I read someone who pointed out that the USA no longer says "international law" but instead substitutes that with saying "rules-based international order" because the USA has so frequently violated international law that even they're embarrassed by the term.]
As usual, with an arrogant buffoon like Thomas Friedman, it's difficult to know if he's deliberately, cynically lying, or if he stupidly believes the tripe that he's writing. It's possible that it's a combination. Friedman knows that the "Big Lie" is a useful tool of propaganda. But he lives in a bubble of elitist psychopaths who lie all the fucking time and in such an environment one could see how an individual's grasp on reality could become weak.
Next up on our cavalcade of braying jackasses calling for a nuclear holocaust is Canadian columnist Glen Pearson. Pearson argues that the constant news and images of dying Ukrainian children from Putin's criminal invasion will so pierce the hearts of the peoples of the Western democracies that eventually we will have to consider risking nuclear war to make it stop.
Women and children are increasingly falling victim to this conflict. Ukrainian men and even boys use whatever weapons they can find, and their casualty rate will grow as the weeks, months, and years ensue. In a war of attrition like this, a decision will have to be made: allow Putin to continue the civilian carnage or risk the nuclear option by protecting civilians caught in the mayhem.
...
Many kids will lose their fathers, grandfathers, and sometimes their mothers forever. Whenever this kind of conflict rears its ugly head, parents seek to get their children to someplace safe, just as the English did in World War Two. We aren’t even two weeks into the conflict, and Ukrainian children are now traumatized, surrounded by mortality, and increasingly facing a future without a father, a mother, or both.
As this conflict wears on and Russia inevitably gains the upper hand, images of the carnage will play much more on the western mind than they do at present. When enough children perish, pressure will mount for someone to do something, likely starting with creating open skies. Critics will continually point out that doing so risks the use of nuclear weapons, and they won’t be wrong.
I rather think that the Biden administration's preference is to continue to allow those children to die because their goal is to weaken and debilitate Putin's Russia in a long, drawn-out guerrilla conflict, and if the Ukraine is devastated the way Afghanistan was, ... well, so what. Of course, as I said last post, Biden and his SoS Blinken are both idiots, and things could spin out of control. But if it does, and we do have a nuclear war, it won't have much to do with the concerns of ordinary people, however conveniently brainwashed they are.
If you don't want ordinary people stirred-up by images of dying civilians, a time-tested way to avoid that problem is to not report on it. Suppress the traumatic news about people suffering and dying the same way the corporate press suppresses the suffering and dying in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Colombia, Honduras, etc., etc., ... and problem solved! (Yes I'm being cynical and sarcastic.) And, anyway, as I said, ordinary people's feelings don't matter. Unless their agreement with the official narrative serves some purpose for the ruling class, their emotions matter as little as their practical demands.
It certainly isn't the case that Biden (or anybody else at the top of the USA's political culture) gives a fuck about human suffering. Right now Biden is imposing collective punishment on the people of Afghanistan by starving them all to death. He cynically lied about ending support for Saudi Arabia's genocidal campaign against Yemen where millions have been suffering for years as food imports to the poorest nation in the Middle East have been reduced to a trickle by the bombing of ports and infrastructure. The USA has been preventing Syrian reconstruction after the defeat of their Jihaadist mercenary insurrection. It has done nothing to repair the devastation that NATO's air campaign did to Libya, or to restore order to the country which has fallen into chaos as the various Jihaadist nutbar factions that the US employed to bring down Qaddafi turned against each other. No. Biden doesn't care about the suffering in the Ukraine. The Ukraine is a pawn on a chessboard and the human beings within it count for nothing except as propaganda tools.
Next up, sadly, is a bizarre editorial from the usually sensible Michael Harris.
Ukraine’s pop-star president, the guy in the T-shirt, says if Ukraine goes down, it’s not just the end of one country. It is the end of the world. In other words, if Ukraine dies, ask not for whom the bell tolls. You know the rest.
It is true that war leaders deal in hyperbole, but Volodymyr Zelensky has a point. As he said, Ukraine is the border between the civilized world, and what used to be known as the evil empire; between democracy and brutal dictatorship.
Vladimir Putin, the villain of this piece and more than a few others, is proving to be a one-man geopolitical pandemic. Despite all the death and destruction Putin has already caused, French President Emmanuel Macron warns that the “worst” is yet to come in this unprovoked and savage war against a sovereign, democratic state.
"Stark reminder, that for the most part, the legislators and journalists and institutions that we jab and ridicule are not, in any way, the enemy. For however frustrated or outraged the back and forth can become, it's still back and forth, a conversation between those on, let's call it 'Team Civilization.'"
I'm sorry, but "for the most part" you mock people like george w. bush, dick cheney, donald rumsfeld, condoleeza rice, barack obama (sort of), john mccain, mitch mcconnell.
THAT is your "Team Civilization"? Thieving, torturing, mass-murdering scum-bags???
It's true, that "Team Civilization" doesn't go into newsrooms in Paris, London, New York City, and shoot people in cold blood. But let's be fair here. What makes it more tragic for 12 Western cartoonists to have been killed for their views, than for 12 Pashtun-speaking citizens of Pakistan to be killed by a predator drone while attending a funeral of another innocent person who was killed by another predator drone? Or 12 Afghan villagers, blasted to bits by a NATO air-strike against insurgents taking shelter among them? Or 12 Iraqis, shot by US marines on a rampage because one of their own was killed by an IED? Or 12 Syrians killed by being in the crossfire of the civil war between the Baathist dictatorship and the fundamentalist, fanatic rebels? Or 12 Palestinians, blasted to pieces from a bomb dropped by an Israeli war plane?
What reasons did those other people die for? Is it better to die for US imperialism? Or Israeli expansionism? Are those deaths less tragic, and more "civilized" because the final source of them was in Washington D.C. or Tel Aviv?
"Team Civilization" has a lot of blood on its hands, doesn't it?
It's the same with Harris's nitwit depiction of the West being the defender of righteousness and decency and democracy. This is beyond ridiculous. The USA subjects all of Latin America to corrupt, mafioso-type governments and funds and trains the DEATH SQUADS that are needed to keep the populations of these countries down whenever the poverty and misery of neo-liberal imperialism becomes too much to take. And any countries that manage to defeat these DEATH SQUAD governments, whether it's Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Venezuela, or Chile, or Bolivia, or Ecuador, gets subjected to terrorist insurgencies. And if these independent, leftist governments respond to these terrorists the way the US government would when faced with the same thing, the USA employs bullshit concerns for "human rights" to impose brutal, murderous sanctions on them. (They employ these bullshit concerns for "human rights" and "free elections" regardless.)
It's difficult to really appreciate the enormity of the stupidity in describing the US-led "international community" as the defenders of justice when the US continues to rampage across the Middle East, invading countries, employing torture, arming and funding terrorist insurgencies, and leaving entire nations in ruins.
And who gives a shit what Emmanual Macron says? The man is a servant of the banksters with a deplorable human rights record himself. He's just a servile poodle to the US-dominated Borg. Anyway, Harris continues:
So far, there is no sign that severe sanctions have done anything but make Putin double down on his outrageous invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces continue to inexorably close in on the country’s key cities, including Kyiv, in what has been called by U.S. intelligent analysts, the “slow annihilation” of Ukraine’s military assets. Despite Putin’s denials, civilian targets are also being ravaged by intense shelling.
So if the goal of the sanctions, the shaming, and the isolation of Putin and his band of thugs and oligarchs was to stop the invasion, it hasn’t worked, at least not yet.
So what do you suggest Michael? What, beyond sanctions, should "The West" do to defeat Evil and restore Justice?
And even if, over time, the sanctions work, what if the net result is an isolated Putin driven into the arms of China? What if China becomes the buyer of last resort for Russian wheat and energy? What if the two countries conspire to set up a course of their own, buying and selling securities and commodities in a non-dollar currency? If your neighbourhood is Asia, how tempting would it be to work with Peking rather than New York, even if the deals weren’t denominated in U.S. dollars?
Here, Harris is actually on to something. The USA's ruling class's delusional attempt to hold onto sole superpower status despite their own determination to disembowel themselves. THEY are the ones who shifted manufacturing to China. THEY are the ones impoverishing the majority of their fellow citizens by taking away their jobs, their social programs, their public infrastructure. THEY are the ones short-sightedly pursuing the financialization of the economy and engaging in reckless, illegal fraud requiring one public bail-out after another. Other countries, wealthy people from other countries, are coming to the conclusion that not only is the US dollar artificially propped-up, but that the US and the UK are thieves. Saudi Arabia prices its oil in US dollars and this is vital to the ability of the dollar to remain the world's reserve currency. But Saudi Arabia's Clown Prince Bone-Saw is now talking about accepting the Chinese Yuan. (He is petulant because of Biden's [insincere] criticisms of his genocide in Yemen as well as Biden's carrying out the Trump-initiated withdrawl from Afghanistan.) Again, it's entirely possible, given their limited mental abilities, their delusion and hubris, that Biden, Blinken, et.al., really haven't thought this through. Despite what you would read in the corporate press, it is not only Russia that is going to be hurt by these sanctions. And, despite what you read in that corporate press, it's entirely possible that Russia and China (with all their resources) could successfully build a Eurasian (mostly Asian) separate trading bloc against the US-led trading bloc. It is possible (but given Russia's corruption and lack of democracy it is a slim possibility) that Russia (after a period of intense pain) could emerge from this stronger, rather than weaker.
But with all that having been said, ... I just gotta say that I never would have believed it if I hadn't experienced it all in recent weeks, ... how so many people, ... even those who follow the news and the analyses and therefore consider themselves informed, ... have bought the US-Amerian propaganda narrative hook, line and sinker. How even after the abominations of the invasion of Afghanistan and its failed occupation, and the illegal invasion of Iraq and its destruction into a balkanized, sectarian nightmare, and the cynical "humanitarian" intervention by NATO that destroyed Libya, and the support for friendly dictators to the extent of slaughtering their own people in the "Arab Spring," and the proxy-war against Syria's Assad [dictatorship] by US and Saudi financed JIHAADIST maniacs; that these people, these "liberals" would so line-up behind the Biden administration's narrative with such stupid enthusiasm.
Once again, the offical enemy is a "MAD-MAN" with whom negotiation is pointless. Negotiation is, once again, "Appeasement" and "Munich 1938." War is the only possible response to the crimes of the "MAD-MAN," the new Hitler, the reincarnation of Stalin. And, once again, the USA is the "indispensiable nation" in the fight against "EVIL" and in defense of the "rules-based international order."
Case-in-point is Owen Gray at "Northern Reflections." All of those idiotic quotes from those idiotic writers I've been talking about I only know about from reading Owen Gray's blog. I don't read garbage from Thomas Friedman. I'd never even heard of the mediocrity Glen Pearson. Owen does. For some reason Thomas Friedman's decades-spanning career of imperialist lies and failed predictions hasn't discredited him in Owen's eyes. Probably because he writes for the establishment New York Times. And the NYT's consistent support for every imperialist venture, it's brazen willingness to debase its credibility again and again, doesn't detract from it's authority. Because some people are like children who need authority figures to believe in. They have to believe in the system.
So, with such a childish mindset, immersed in such dreck, one inevitably comes to believe that Putin is a "mad-man," just like Saddam Hussein was a "mad-man" and Osama bin Laden was a "mad-man," and Qaddafi was a "mad-man," and Hugo Chavez was a "mad-man." All of these men did what they did not for any identifiable reasons but because they're the new Stalin/Tsar out to recreate the Soviet/Russian Empire, or the new Hitler seeking to conquer the entire Middle East, or (most stupidly) because they "Hate FREEDOM":
Just because Putin said, year after year, to stop pushing the anti-Russian military alliance of NATO towards his borders, and then insisted that Ukraine was the red line they could not cross; just because non-Russian scholars on foreign affairs said that no Russian government would consent to NATO bases in the Ukraine; just because the USA put a Missile defense system in Eastern Europe on the ridiculous premise that it was to defend against an Iranian missile attack; ... none of these are any reason to take Putin seriously. No, no, no. What you have to do is listen to shameless liars and hopeless idiots like Thomas Friedman and Antony Blinken or whatever fuckhead you choose, and believe them when they babble about Putin being a "mad-man" who wants to take over Europe.
And the USA invaded Iraq on the basis of non-existent "Weapons of Mass Destruction" rather than allow UN inspectors to continue their work of PROVING Iraq's adherence to its obligations.
I cannot find the words to adequately express the contempt that I feel for shit-libs who continue to spout off about how the latest official enemy of the USA is the anti-Christ and that the USA continues to be the Shining City on a Hill. The childishness. The hypocrisy. The moral blindness.
Even after I point out to Owen Gray the FACT that the USA's GBWT has killed about SIX MILLION PEOPLE and has created 38 MILLION REFUGEES he refuses to admit the titanic stupidity of his beliefs. Of COURSE we have to pour small-arms weapons in to the Ukraine to defend "freedom"! And all the while, maniacs are shouting about starting World War Three!!!
Here's Caitlin Johnstone vainly crying out for sanity in a world of insane shit-heads with no idea about the meanings of the words they use:
But I think another major part of it is the much more basic fact that if people truly understood how dangerous nuclear war is for everyone on this planet, nobody would consent to the kinds of cold war games that the drivers of empire have been intending to play with these weapons.
If people truly understood that their life and the lives of everyone they love are being gambled like poker chips in nuclear brinkmanship maneuvers geared toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony for an undeclared empire loosely centralized around the United States, those few empire architects would soon find themselves on the losing end of a tooth-and-claw fight against the entire human species. The ability to win cold war power struggles is dependent on the mainstream public not thinking too hard about what nuclear war is and why it is being risked.
...
So I think we’re seeing a broad lack of awareness among the general public of just how close to the precipice we are for the same reason nuclear winter theory has been suppressed: because if everyone deeply understood how dangerous these unipolarist grand chessboard power plays are, and how they deliver no real benefit to ordinary people, they wouldn’t permit them to happen.
A responsible news media would be educating the public about things like nuclear winter, and how easy it would be for a nuclear war to be triggered by a malfunction, miscommunication, misunderstanding, or miscalculation in the chaos and confusion of soaring cold war escalations as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. A “news” media whose job is not to report the news but to manufacture consent for imperial agendas will do everything it can to prevent people from paying attention to those things.
This is why, if you really understand nuclear war and what it means and how close we are to its emergence, it feels so surreal and dissonant looking around at the things people are talking about today. How ungrounded in reality it all is, how unseriously people are taking this thing, how willing they are to consent to things like no-fly zones and other direct military action against Russia. It’s because people are prevented from seeing and understanding this reality. You can’t have the riff raff interfering in the mechanics of the imperial machine. Unipolar hegemony is too important to be left to democratic processes. Keep the local fauna confused and distracted while you roll the dice on nuclear armageddon with the hope of ruling the world.
These people are like mobsters, knowing they’ll probably die a violent death but willing to risk it all for a chance at living the high life. There’s not the slightest iota of wisdom guiding their actions. Just the primitive impulse to dominate and control. They’re living their lives and making their decisions essentially on autopilot, guided by unconscious impulses they themselves don’t understand.
Indeed. You have to pull your heads out of your asses. You have to get over your infantile need for a good God or a benevolent United States. You have to admit that US presidents are mostly monsters. They are monsters with more blood on their hands than Putin has. You are a stupid hypocrite if you hate Putin more than any recent US president. They are not good people. They are bad people. They are insane people. And they are playing a very dangerous game for no good purpose and they are setting off chains of events that could get you and everyone you love killed.
I will no longer be commenting at Owen Gray's site. His moral imbecility is contemptible and there's no reason to communicate with such a stooge. I find most liberals as contemptible, believing in shit equally as stupid as that of any right-wing anti-vaxxer. Fuck those deluded simpletons.
Do an image search for "starvation yemen."
Even after they hear the FACTS about the number of people Biden and his ilk have tortured and murdered they cling to their stupid childish beliefs. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.
As I watch the world descend into COMPLETE insanity and disaster, I've started to think that the times we're living through are going to be world-transforming in a very bad way. We have the self-created threat of global warming, with all the feedback-loops in place and our governments and oligarchs are still pursuing a policy of denial and profit-taking. We have a worldwide pandemic that most of the OECD nations have decided to treat as a minor annoyance to be dealt with in a half-assed (at best) way. We have placed the profits of the pharmaceutical industries ahead of human lives by upholding patent protections for vaccines over the mass vaccination campaign that is so clearly required. The same percentage of the population that would vote for stupid grifters like stephen harper, Donald Trump, Jason Kenney, Rob Ford, etc., are, meanwhile, still convinced that the virus is a hoax, that wearing a cloth mask equals submission to totalitarianism and that vaccines are evil. By our own choice (collectively) we have decided to let the virus roam at will, infecting people and mutating itself, while we deny the risk that any of these mutations might become something beyond our control.
And then, ...
And then there's the completely deliberate orchestration of a world war between the NATO countries (plus maybe Japan, South Korea and Australia) against Russia and China.
[Take a look at this map of the world showing the countries that have imposed sanctions upon Russia and those that have not:]
Contrary to the breathless propaganda of a humanity united against the unprecedented evil of Valdimir Putin's Russia, almost the entire Southern Hemisphere has opted out. You could argue that my source for this map is a pro-Russian propaganda website but that doesn't change the level of accuracy of the map. My quick search of news sites confirmed that the list of countries matches the information provided by the map. India has been resisting US pressure to sanction Russia.
Also, contrary to the corporate news' propaganda, these sanctions on Russia aren't just going to hurt Russia. All you are hearing is that Russia's economy has fallen into a death-spiral under the hammer blows of the sanctions imposed by the human rights defenders of the West, led by the exceptional, essential nation, the United States of America. But make no mistake: This economic warfare is going to impose massive inflation on the entire world and European countries that depend on Russia fossil fuels are going to suffer. As a level of just how desperate the USA is to find other sources of fossil-fuel sources, the USA has gone to Venezuela's President Maduro [Wait! Why aren't they talking to Juan Guano??] to see about access to his country's oil. Also, they're moving quickly to welcome Iran's oil back into the international community.
What you have to understand is that Joe Biden is an idiot. He's always been an idiot. His career has been pandering to racists about school integration; serving the sleazebags who used his state of Delaware to escape taxation and engage in money laundering. He passed a bankruptcy bill that immiserated millions of US-American and a crime bill that produced a massive increase in the US prison population. He genuinely [and therefore stupidly] believed that US Social Security was unsustainable and spent years trying to cut into it. He voted for the invasion of Iraq.
That two such arrogant, hypocritical fantasists could have started an economic war without having fully throught through the ramifications seems to me entirely possible.
Well, that's all I feel like writing about this morning.
At the back of their minds both Biden and Putin have been agonizing over just how Thwap is going to react to this world crisis. Well White House or Kremlin bureaucrat being paid to monitor my blog in order to instantly alert your boss that Thwap has deigned to speak; TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY!!!!
Ahem! I think this is mostly Biden's fault but I am angry that Putin has attacked the Ukraine itself. I had no problem with Putin recognizing the Donbas provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.
There is nothing to choose between the competing mafia dons in Washington or Moscow. FWIW I think Putin is far more intelligent than Biden. But that doesn't take a lot of doing. Biden has always been an idiot and now his aged brain is incapable of sustained focus and clarity. I have always said (in the face of the moronic, fanatical Putin hatred embraced by brainwashed liberals) that comparing the foreign policy behaviour of Russia and the USA honestly, one finds that Russia has been far more patient and circumspect and that the USA has been belligerent and provocative. And that the reasons for this are not Putin's love of peace and respect for the rule of law, but are, rather, due to Russia's relative poverty and weakness. Russia's GDP is smaller than Canada's. It's population is over 100 million people larger than Canada's. Which makes Russians much poorer than Canadians. Wars are expensive. Occupations are even more expensive. Putin (while being as debased and insane as any other garden-variety national politician) is not a delusional idiot. He can't bully the world the way the USA can, starting wars of choice and meddling in any country on the planet he has designs on. Because he can't afford to.
Ian Welsh Says Putin Will Win
Before I get going too far I want to take the opportunity to mention that initially I thought that Putin had miscalculated by attacking the Ukraine itself rather than merely recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk and occupying them with Russian troops. Perhaps his anger and resentment over years of the USA's bullying and boorishness had actually pushed him over the edge. Perhaps he now felt compelled to strut and preen and just show everybody that Russia was actually powerful (when it isn't really). Until I read Ian Welsh on the subject. (I've been reading and admiring his work for years. Only recently I posted about how much I agreed with him on a the "Freedom Convoy.") Essentially Welsh is arguing that Biden's sanctions aren't going to hit Putin that hard. Sanction against Russian energy for instance, would raise energy costs world-wide, contributing to the inflationary pressures that are destroying Biden's presidency.
Welsh also quotes a statement from China's foreign ministry blaming the USA for pushing Russia to the wall and excoriating America for its brazen hypocrisy. China knows that it too is being targeted by the USA for having become too powerful for the USA to control. Russia and China together dominate most of Asia and all of it's people and resources. They need each other to resist domination by the US-led cartel.
Putin isn't going to try to conquer the Ukraine and make it a part of Russia. (As far too many people are insisting without any evidence.) He has offered the current government a cease-fire if they promise to never join NATO. This offer has been refused.
2022-02-28
Apparently Zelensky has accepted sending a delegation to negotiate with Russia without preconditions. At least that's what I'd read a few hours ago. Since I wrote that line I had a bath, ate dinner, did some sit-ups, some dishes, put my clean laundry away, ... you know, stuff. And now, a National Post headline on my browser homepage says the Ukraine has walked away from the talks. But that's the National Pest. I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere else.
"Whataboutism" Isn't a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card For Hypocrisy.
In the few posts I've made about this crisis before the Russian invasion, I always asked why the fuck anybody believes that Joe Biden cares about the people of the Ukraine given his absolute nonchalance about the millions of people suffering and dying under the hammer-blows of US imperialism. Generally, the liberals who I'm trying to communicate with accuse me of "Whataboutism." I don't remember when I first heard this term. It might have been Hillary-bots deflecting criticism of their goddess. Or it might have been liberal imperialists shrieking about Assad and Putin and denying the relevance of US and Israeli behaviour to the debate. It is now used to bludgeon any efforts to
Apparently the term itself was first used in 1974 in a letter-to-the-editor by an Irish history teacher, Sean O'Conaill. He said that the "Whatabouts" were the people defending the IRA by pointing to the crimes of the English. I assume O'Conaill was a Catholic because a Protestant criticizing the IRA and saying that the crimes of the English are irrelevant sounds to shameless to bother thinking about. So, I'm assuming that O'Conaill was a Catholic and that he did oppose the English but he was also an opponent of violence in general. The violence had to stop from both sides. (Again, I'm assuming this about O'Conaill. I've tried to look him up but haven't found anything.) The important thing is that if that was the case, then O'Conaill had some moral and intellectual integrity and consistency.
This cannot be said for those liberal fools, those brainwashed idiots, screaming blue murder about Putin and marching lockstep to the ever-shifting melody of the USA's foreign policy establishment. I'm not justifying Putin's actions when I ask the simple question about WHY we're supposed to believe a mass-murderer like Biden cares about Ukranians. Once we understand that Biden, who has played key roles destroying Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Honduras, etc., doesn't give a shit about the people of the Ukraine but is, rather, cynically using their sufferings to sell his own cynical, insane policies towards Russia, then we start to think more clearly about the topic.
IF O'Conaill was saying that his own people were guilty and that both sides had an equal moral obligation to stop the violence that is an entirely different thing from wishing to ignore the guilt on your own side and justifying your side's campaign against its enemy.
One of the best things you can do in a situation like this, for your own sanity and for the people who listen to you on the Internet, is to find your anchor to reality. Who are the reliable sources who post English-speaking coverage? Who can you follow and amplify to spread good information?
"Belling Cat" is a fraud. He's a paid propagandist for US and UK "intelligence." That a hack like him is being offered to us as someone to help learn truth from fiction on the Ukraine crisis is evidence of the weakness and deceitful nature of the Washington consensus.
We're treated to daily doses about how Ukranian President Zelensky provided the voice of the Ukranian translation of Paddington Bear, and how brave the Ukranians are, and how democratic they all are. And pro-Russian sources are instantly discredited by virtue of being pro-Russian. Because, you know, the truth is entirely on one side. So, to protect us from lies, viewpoints from the Russian side are being systematically throttled and even shut-down. Obviously the mass censorship of alternative voices will continue because the US oligarchy has little confidence in its propaganda withstanding the truth.
Danger of Nuclear War
I was debating all of this with some liberals at a liberal blog and they all found it self-evidently hilarious that I (and other people on twitter apparently) were worried about nuclear war. At that point in the discussion I'd already gotten tired of beating my head against a brick wall and I didn't bother asking for clarification as to why fearing a nuclear holocaust is funny.
Less than a week into this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media's most beloved members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that the two countries with by far the planet's largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.
All of this has made nuclear war in the near term a whole lot more likely than it was just a few days ago… which is a really strange thing to type.
As I’m always saying, the primary risk of nuclear war is not that anyone will choose to start one, it’s that one could be triggered by any combination of miscommunication, miscalculation, misunderstanding or technical malfunction amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions. This nearly happened, repeatedly, in the last cold war. The more tense things get, the greater the likelihood of an unthinkable chain of events from which there is no coming back.
Cold war brinkmanship has far too many small, unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that they can ramp up aggressions without triggering a nuclear exchange. Anyone who feels safe with these games of nuclear chicken simply does not understand them.
[Very quickly: There's a deliberate choice to pretend that this isn't about the theat of the Ukraine in NATO, but, instead, Putin's aggression is due only to his psychological imbalances and his insane lust for conquest. Caitlin Johnstone again:
Chris Hedges introduces his latest article for Scheer Post, titled “Chronicle of a War Foretold“, with the following:
“After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.”
Imperial narrative managers have been falling all over themselves working to dismiss and discredit the abundantly evidenced idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was due largely to Moscow’s fear of NATO expansion and the refusal of Washington and Kyiv to solidify a policy that Ukraine would not be added to the alliance.
...
It makes sense that they would have to do this. After all, if westerners were to get it into their heads that this whole terrible war could have been avoided by simply solidifying a policy of neutrality for Ukraine and issuing a guarantee that it would never be added to NATO, they would begin asking why this did not happen. NATO powers had no interest in adding Ukraine to the alliance anyway, so it doesn’t really make sense to refuse to make such low-cost concessions if the only alternative is mass military slaughter. I mean, unless your goal was to provoke mass military slaughter to advance your own geostrategic objectives.
So they work hard to present the narrative that the invasion has nothing to do with NATO at all, and occurred solely because Putin is an evil madman who hates freedom and wants to destroy democracy.
Faced with such an enemy (a "madman") diplomacy is pointless. Of course, defining Putin as unhinged makes deliberately provoking him (and his nuclear weapons) seem a little bizarre.]
Conclusion
It was Vladimir Putin who chose to launch this invasion and to inflict the inevitable traumas and deaths on innocent people. That guilt will never wash away. BUT ... (and you're free to disagree with me on this) ... I think his crime is less than the crimes of bush II who started a war of choice against a country (Iraq) that was not and which would never be a threat to the United States. More, bush II "justified" his war with a pack of lies about "weapons of mass destruction" that never existed. Putin's Russia was being surrounded by an enemy alliance (NATO) that has a demonstrated track record of chipping away at its opponents until they are weak enough to attack. This desire to subjugate Russia was Biden's (and his predecessors') conscious decision. It is a cynical, evil, reckless, and insane, useless policy.
It is clear that the Biden administration's policy is going to be to continue to arm and train Ukranian insurgents to get Russia bogged-down in a debilitating permanent campaign. Just like the USA did to the USSR in Afghanistan. And, just like Afghanistan, constant fighting will make the Ukraine a hell-hole for years, perhaps decades to come.
What would happen in a world without official US enemies Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea, China? What would a world completely subjugated by the United States be like? For one thing, the USA needs enemies to distract its people from their own subjugation. So they'd invent something. Maybe "internal enemies." Of which there'd be plenty because the USA's ruling elite are amoral, selfish, anti-human, anti-democratic psychopaths who live to steal and poison and torture and exploit and kill.
I started this post a long time ago. But I knew that I had a lot to say and that none of it would matter. The powerful actors at the centre of all of this don't even know that I exist and most of them are too deluded or evil to listen to me anyway. And I know that my liberal acquaintances (who still believe in the "Russiagate" conspiracy) are immune to rational argument when it comes to narratives like this. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to make the time to pushback against this insanity in whatever little way that I can. Here's another article that I agree with.
Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine is undoubtedly illegal and immoral. From the point of view of Russian interests, it is also likely to prove a costly mistake. The primary question now, however, is what to do about this, and the answers presented thus far by those outraged by the invasion are dangerously counterproductive.
“Putin must be punished,” the Americans and Europeans insist. But the forms of punishment now being implemented – severe economic sanctions and military aid to Ukraine – are designed to prolong the military struggle and to cripple the Russian economy, apparently on the theory that Russia’s discontented masses and oligarchs will then replace Putin with a leader more to the West’s liking. Pardon me, but this makes little sense. Prolonging the conflict will kill more Ukrainians and Russians, inspire their compatriots and loved ones to seek revenge. It may also bring the world close to nuclear war.
I used to hang around on rabble.ca's "babble" until May, 2006, and, since then, I've been found at www.enmasse.ca and www.breadnroses.ca. Even more lately, I've been at EnMasse, but also numerous blogs from the progressive side.
I'm sometimes rude to people and I've been accused of "schoolyard taunts," so, here's my schoolyard.
