Commenting On George W. Bush Saying "Iraq" Instead of "Ukraine"

When george dubya bush was president some people said that he was only pretending to be stupid.  They said an absolute moron could not have flown those difficult fighter jets used by the Texas Air National Guard.  (A reminder:  the TANG was the institution that bush II's family pulled strings to get him into so that he could avoid the danger of serving in the War On Vietnam which they supported.  It's also the institution from which he went AWOL from aside from stopping at a base between drunks to get free dental care.)  Assuming that dubya ever flew one of those planes would only establish that he had good reflexes (and he did, dodging those shoes thrown at him was evidence of that) and that he had a decent memory to remember how to use the plane's controls.

At no other time in his life did bush II display any particular intelligence or wisdom.  Not as young man who got a legacy appointment at Yale (where he was a C-student) and then (by hook or by crook) a Harvard MBA.  He wasn't showing intelligence or wisdom as a young man post-graduation, drinking and carousing and doing the rich white boys' drug of cocaine and going AWOL from the TANG.  He was made the figurehead of a consortium of wealthy business parasites who bought the Texas Rangers baseball team and who ripped-off the taxpayers for hundreds of millions to get a publicly financed stadium.  dubya then became governor of Texas and executed a lot of people.  At some point he sobered up and became just an asshole.  Then he stole the presidency and then 9-11 happened on his watch.  The entire time he was president he displayed a slow-wittedness and an inability to speak as anything other than a moron.

Some people said it was an act.  It wasn't, but even assuming it was for the sake of argument, it was a life-long act.  bush II was so stupid that Dick Cheney was able to pose as the brains behind their operation and Cheney himself wasn't very smart.  Cheney was a fuck-up academically and in business.  His entire career was his wife's creation.  

People are always saying that it's dangerous to underestimate these people.  I don't think that I am underestimating them.  I think that I'm giving them their due.  It's those who say that people like bush II, Cheney, Biden, stephen harper, etc., etc., are highly intelligent who are doing reality a disservice.  

I recently dallied with some internet weirdo who believes in conspiracies to the extent that he types online that COVID is actually a chemical poison spread through civilization by a globalist elite that is trying to ethnically cleanse the Ukraine to provide living space for International Jewry and that Vladimir Putin (actually a body-double since 2016 or some other year it doesn't matter because it's not true) was trained by MI-6 and various national leaders who did not allow the importation of vaccines to their countries (Haiti and some African countries I believe) were assassinated after which the vaccines came in.

Sheer insanity.  But a lot of these conspiracy theories are similar to the thinking that demands we believe that people like george dubya bush or stephen harper are intelligent.  It creates this shadowy world of genius string-pullers that allow the conspiracists to revel (simultaneously) in their ability to see the patterns and their inability to do anything about it.  These dark, sinister forces, (the Rothschilds, the Bilderbergers, the Globalists, etc., ) have pulled the wool over everyone's eyes except for these diligent, intrepid independent researchers who have their own little community where they trade their imaginary insights with each other and curse "the sheeple" for not seeing what they see.  Somehow or other the Globalists either don't know about these communities of truth-seekers and that is why they all haven't been killed, or they do know about them and ignore them because they're not a threat.  (Or, once in a while, one of these internet conspiracy researchers dies in a way that can be considered mysterious and that just shows how ruthless the Globalist Davos Soros crowd can really be.)

All of this is just my way of establishing my own view that bush II really is a moron.  That when he was speaking at the Southern Methodist University's George W Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, on the date of May 18th, 2022, and blathered stupidly and hypocritically about how the absence of democracy in Russia produced a great tragedy:

“The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”

And then he excused his stupidity on his being 75 years old and the audience laughed along with him because it was comprised of people who self-select for cretinism by wanting to go and listen to that brain-dead war criminal in the first place.

bush II's outburst was so bizarre it made me wonder (for a second) if he was actually an evil genius after all.  That he knew how counterproductive it would be to provide such a brazen example of the USA's murderous hypocrisy but that he knew the opposition against the system is so impotent that it wouldn't matter.  In the end, I had to remember that nothing was served by bush II's stupidity and that the whole power-elite of our times are idiots who only survive because the system that they've inherited was built by more capable people and it remains somewhat powerful despite the fact that the people holding the steering wheel for the past few decades are monkey-brained psychopathic incompetents.

And then it got even better. After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension in the empire-loyal crowd with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life.

And Bush’s audience laughed. They thought it was great. A president who launched an illegal invasion that killed upwards of a million people (probably way upwards) openly confessing to doing what every news outlet in the western world has spent the last three months shrieking its lungs out about Putin doing was hilarious to them.

There are not enough shoes in the universe to respond to this correctly.

As comedian John Fugelsang put it, “George W. Bush didn’t do a Freudian slip. He did a Freudian Confession.”

One of the many, many interesting things about this occurrence is the likelihood that Bush’s words tumbled out in the way they did because he’s either heard a lot of criticisms of his invasion or has been thinking a lot about them; a familiar neural pathway would explain why his brain chose the exact worst word he could possibly swap out for “Ukraine” in that moment. This would be a small light in the darkness for we ordinary folk who oppose war and love peace, because it suggests that even the worst empire managers cannot fully insulate themselves from our criticisms.

george dubya bush really was a stupid man who stole the presidency and fabricated a "justification" for an illegal war of aggression that killed over a million people and traumatized tens of millions more and his stupid case for this illegal war was approved by Joseph R. Biden and Hillary R. Clinton and they both went on to destroy several other countries and now we're supposed to pretend that they're alarmed by Putin's "unprovoked" invasion of the Ukraine.  bush II is just a contemptible shit-head who should have been hanged by the neck until dead like the war criminals they condemned at Nuremberg.

"Wars Are Not Won By Evacuations"

 

Indeed.  That quote is from Winston Churchill's speech after the successful evacuation of much of the British Expeditionary Force (and over 100,000 French allied soldiers) from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940.  While the evacuation ["Operation Dynamo"] was rightly considered a wonderful achievement, Churchill cautioned:

"We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.  Wars are not won by evacuations."

I was moved to recall Churchill's words in response to the bizarre reporting on the end of the fighting at the Azovstal Steel Plant in the contested city of Mariupol in the Ukraine.  Every headline in the pro-NATO media refers to an "evacuation" and to "an end of combat operations" there.  But reading further it appears that the fascist (and the mainstream media was fine with referring to these nazis as nazis up until a little while ago) battalion surrendered to the Russians:

Hundreds of combatants were evacuated on Monday from the besieged Azovstal metallurgical plant in the southeastern port hub of Mariupol. Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Anna Malyar, said fifty-three wounded soldiers were taken to a hospital in Novoazovsk, a town controlled by the breakaway pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), and another 211 Ukrainian personnel were taken to the DPR-controlled village of Olenivka.

A little while ago I posted about how it's difficult to know what the real military situation in the Ukraine is.  The propaganda in the NATO countries says that Russia's military is floundering, it's soldiers dividing their time between murdering civilians and surrendering.  NATO's weapons are pouring in and being used to destroy tonnes of Russian military equipment.  Meanwhile, in Russia itself, the population is simmering with anger against the tyrant Putin (who apparently smells funny and is losing his mind).  The Ukrainians are defying imperialism and protecting democracy and are a light and an example for the world.

Meanwhile, the pro-Russian websites are saying that Russia's special military operation is progressing in an orderly fashion according to their own timetable.  Ukrainian nazis are murdering pro-Russian collaborators and shooting civilians trying to escape through corridors provided by the Russians.  Ukranians have filmed themselves torturing Russian prisoners.  Russia has systematically destroyed the Ukraine's airforce and transportation infrastructure.  NATO weaponry is obsolete, cannot be used without proper training and is being destroyed before it reaches the front in any case.  Meanwhile, in Russia itself, Putin has 80% popular support and there is no mention of how he smells or how his body and brain are crumbling.

Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle?  I don't know.  But I have to say, with this stupid drivel about "evacuating" the nazi Azov Battalion from Azovstal when in actuality they've surrendered and been taken prisoner, the pro-NATO propagandists aren't doing themselves any favours.  The word "evacuation" tends to mean getting your people out to safety (like the British did at Dunkirk) and not being captured.

[EDITED TO ADD: It's so insane the way that surrender was referred to as an "evacuation" that in writing the post I forgot that the main reason I used Churchill's "Wars are not won by evacuations" quote is because however much that is an obvious truism, it is even MORE obviously true that wars are not won by surrenders to the enemy.  Even if you call those surrenders "evacuations."]

In related news, Norman Finkelstein asks a question that I've been pondering myself: What exactly was Putin supposed to have done in the face of YEARS of USA/NATO provocations?

And my question which I’ve constantly been putting in correspondence is a very simple one: if you agree that for 20 years—more than 20 years, more than two decades—, Russia has tried to engage in diplomacy; if you agree that the Russian demand to neutralize Ukraine —not occupy it, not determine its government, its form of economy, just neutralize it like Austria after World War II—, if you agree that was a legitimate demand; if you agree that the West was expanding and expanding NATO; if you agree that Ukraine de facto had become a member of NATO, weapons pouring in, engaging in military exercises in NATO; and if you agree… You know, Russia lost 30 million people during World War II because of the Nazi invasion, so there’s a legitimate concern by Russia with all of these —if you excuse my language— Nazis floating around in the Ukraine, then the simple question is: What was Russia to do?

I’m not saying I agree with the invasion, I’m not saying it went right, but I think one thing: the invasion showed… you know what the one thing the invasion showed, Briahna, was that Russia is kind of weak militarily, which is why all the more they may have been fearful of a NATO-backed Ukraine filled with Nazis, and probably at some point positioning nuclear missiles on its border. And I think 30 million, 30 million people… Listen to this: I think 30 million people is 30 million arguments in favor of Russia. Now I’m not going to say, because I’m not a general and I’m not a diplomat, so I’m not going… I’m not a military strategist so I’m not going to say it was the wisest thing to do. I’m not going to say it was the most prudent thing to do. But I will say —and I’m not afraid to say it because it would dishonor the memory of my parents if i didn’t say it—, I will say that they had the right to do it. And I’m not taking that back. They had the right to do it. They had if I can call it the historic right to do it. 30 million people (killed during WW2), and now you’re starting again, you’re starting again. No, no, you know I can’t go for it, I can’t go for those who acknowledge the legitimacy of the arguments made by Putin but then call the invasion criminal. I don’t see that.

Now you could say the way they executed it may have had criminal elements. However I don’t know… Well, you went to Harvard Law School, I don’t know if you studied the laws of war, but the laws of war make a very big distinction between ‘jus ad bellum’ and ‘jus in bello’, namely whether the launching of the war was legitimate or whether it was an act of aggression versus the way you conduct the war, ‘jus in bello’. Maybe the conduct, targeting of civilians and so forth, that probably violates the laws of war, but that’s a separate issue under law from “did they have the right to attack”. I think they did. I’m not going to back off from that.

Now, I think there's too much veneration of what the Soviet Union did in WWII and no acknowledgement of why Ukrainians might hate Russians because of Stalin's terror-famine in the 1930's.  (Though I don't think most Ukrainians hate Russians.  Seventy-three percent of the Ukrainian electorate voted for Zelensky as a peace candidate.  It's really only the degenerate extremists propped-up by the United States that have a visceral hatred for the Russians.)  Still and all, I think Finkelstein's stance is more respectable than those "idealists" blathering about their uninvestigated abstract principles (when they're not yammering insanely about how nuclear war might be an option to end Putin's aggression).

Also, the Democratic Party cult-site "Daily Kos" had a headline about how "Tankies" refuse to blame Russia for this war.  At this point in my life I just don't feel like engaging with something so irredeemably stupid and shit-headed.  I'm not going to argue with it.  I'm not even going to bother linking to it.  It is so fucking goddamned stupid to think that Russia wasn't provoked.  If you believe that ... fuck it.  

Here's something I will link to: An account of the European Union's economic suicide, within which are links to Michael Hudson's reflections, including news about psycopath Victoria Nuland's amoral scheming:

The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.

That's my blog post for tonight!

Anti-Inflation as Class Warfare

 

There were two reasons that I got political.  One summer in the early-1990's I read two books.  One of them was Necessary Illusions: Thought Control In Democratic Societies based on Noam Chomsky's 1988 Massey Lectures. That one told me that the world we live in was far more monstrous that I could have ever possibly imagined.  The second was John Raulston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. That one told me (among other things) that the Canadian government's debt and deficit situation had not been caused by lazy people mooching off the welfare system (which was the general consensus) but by the ruinous, asinine anti-inflation policies of the Bank of Canada (which was itself following the monetarist consensus established by Paul Volcker and Milton Friedman in 1979). 

It is to the second issue (monetarist anti-inflation policies as class warfare) that I wrote my two recent posts about the current price inflation and the establishment's preferred way of dealing with it.  (In the second post I neglected to continue my response to a quote about how 1970's price controls ... specifically over the price of oil ... led to difficulties at the pumps):

Price controls on gasoline exacerbated shortages, by not allowing rising prices to curb demand. The controls allowed refiners to raise gasoline prices each month based on the previous month’s crude oil price. In an environment of rising prices, the price controls incentivized refiners to withhold gasoline and sell it later at higher prices, rather than selling it today. Further aggravating the shortages, the federal government had an allocation system that did not allow gasoline distribution to adjust to demand conditions around the country. Some states also established a policy that only allowed drivers to buy $5 of gasoline at a time, meaning that they had to buy more frequently, virtually assuring longer lines.

Crude oil markets were regulated as well. Different prices for “old” and “new” oil were a relic of the earlier oil shock in 1973-74 that established perverse incentives, reducing domestic production and increasing imports. Additionally, in April 1979, the Department of Energy ordered large refiners to sell crude oil to smaller refineries that could not obtain affordable supply on the market. However, these smaller refineries were generally less complex, able to produce less gasoline from a given crude oil than their larger counterparts, deepening the supply shortage.

The situation drove a groundswell of anger against U.S. oil companies and public support for President Jimmy Carter dropped substantially. The crisis highlighted the inefficiencies inherent in government control of fuel markets, although the public wanted the government to do something about high prices and long lines.

 

I also pointed out how one economist recalled the absolutely horrible struggles between employers and workers over "Cost Of Living Allowances/Adjustments" during wage negotiations in a time of inflation.

"When I was a graduate student, all the professors would say, 'Oh, we'll never see this era again of letting the inflation genie out of the bottle,'" economist Constance Smith, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, said wryly.

Like others who lived through that time, she remembers it as being "unpleasant" — a term echoed exactly by Powell from his own memories, as repeated attempts by central banks to quash inflation failed to convince people that prices would stop rising.

Smith remembers constant battles over wage demands eventually leading to cost-of-living adjustments, or "COLA clauses," being written into employee contracts, to assure that workers' incomes would not constantly shrink due to unpredictable inflation.

Knowing as we do that the the mainstream economics' response to all inflation is to vastly increase the price of money (the rate of interest at which it is to be repaid) which thereby causes a massive recession, which thereby causes massive unemployment, which thereby causes massive government deficits (which must be financed by borrowing at a high rate of interest), which thereby causes austerity, which thereby causes the elimination of federal support for affordable housing, and also causes cuts to the public health care system, and also means that tuition costs skyrocket, all of which meant the destruction of worker's unions and bargaining power and the resultant increases in inequality, household debt, job precarity, and on and on, ... I'm pretty sure that those people stuck in long line-ups at the gas stations would have elected to suffer that temporary inconvenience over the insanity that their overlords had in store for them.  And they'd obviously prefer to still be able to fight for COLA's in the face of a rising price level.

Today, Ian Welsh posts about the class warfare being practiced by the USA's Federal Reserve as "inflation fighting":

Since 1979 the only type of inflation pressure either the Federal Reserve or legislatures have been willing to recognize is wage-push inflation.  (See HERE for a long explanation of how the Federal reserve crushed wages with wage push inflation measures.)

This is why, for going on 43 years now, workers wages have not kept up with GDP, most people can’t afford to buy a house, rent is thru the roof, and people die due to medical care costs.

But the way to deal with companies increasing prices faster than their costs isn’t to stop employers from hiring, it’s to institute an excess-profits tax, where companies that are making a lot more than they did before the pandemic simply have it taxed away. Granted, that would take legislative action, but the Fed isn’t even calling for it, and the Fed has a powerful bully pulpit.

You could also aggressively act on anti-trust concerns and break companies up so that they have competition: they can raise prices in large part because they are unregulated oligopolies who raise prices in lockstep.

Those are legislative actions, but the Fed is the main regulator of banks and brokerages and could stop loans from being given to firms buying up the housing and rental supply and jacking up prices. It could encourage the government entities which guarantee housing loans to put conditions which disallow rent increases beyond a few percentage points, and not allow large numbers of homes to be owned by corporations.

There are certainly other steps which could be taken, but the point is that the Fed isn’t pushing anything but “don’t hire and don’t give raises”.

In tight labor markets wages should rise. That’s good. If every time there is a tight labor market you squeal about inflation then hammer the economy into the ground to kill wages, of course people’s wages will fall behind, and if that’s substantially the only thing  you ever do to deal with inflation for over 40 years, of course wages will be hammered.

If, at the same time you run policies which cause massive inflation in housing, rent, and medical care (and now food), well then, ordinary people will be screwed because those are things they must have, no matter the cost, so if they can pay they have to.

What the Fed is doing, in other words, is class warfare, the same as everything of significance it has done since 1979. People will die because of this and become homeless.

I agree with pretty much everything he says there.  This isn't "objective economic [pseudo-]science."  This is class warfare.

Apparently The Ukraine (NATO's Proxy) Is Winning

 

According to the astonishingly brainwashed liberal blogs I look at, "We" or "The West" or "NATO and its proxy/ally the Ukraine" or, really, "The USA military-industrial-complex oligarchy" is "winning" in the battle with Russia.

It might be true for all that I know.  The corporate media's coverage has been abysmal.  One-sided, hypocritical, sanctimonious.  But they talk about Ukrainian victories, low Russian morale, Russian incompetence and losses of territory and equipment.  And, most of all, Russian atrocities. (So I hear from snippets on nearby television news channels, radio five-minute news reports, and what I force myself to read from the liberal blogs.)

To get a different viewpoint I find myself reading websites I'd never bothered with before.  Some of them are bizarre communities of mostly male, pro-Russian weirdos who espouse some Dostoyevskian notion of the superior culture of Holy Mother Russia against the decadent West.  They speak of Putin's limited strategic goals, his restraint against unleashing a US-style "Shock & Awe" campagin devastating the Ukraine's cities, poor Ukrainian morale (middle-aged Ukranian "national guard" -type forces being pushed to the front to be obliterated by Russian artillery), and Russian destruction of roads and bridges in eastern Ukraine to slow the delivery of obsolete NATO weaponry that is itself destroyed long before it gets to the untrained hands at the front.

I don't find either side entirely credible.  Of course, the delusion of the pro-NATO narrative liberals is so fucking obvious that it weakens their position.  To say this military operation was "unprovoked" is just so blindingly stupid.  To do all this shrieking about human rights violations when so many of these bloggers are US-Americans whose governments have done at least the same thing, but these bloggers don't seem too upset that they have war criminals in their own country wandering around free.  These idiots and assholes sagely pondering whether NUCLEAR WAR (and, therefore the death of most of humanity and civilization) might be necessary to ensure the Ukraine's abstract right to join NATO are contemptible.  Their denial of the undeniable FACT that genuine, bona-fide NAZIs dominate the Ukraine's government also undermines their credibility.

But yesterday I was watching the TV news at work and the coverage of the fighting reminded me about how the media in the 1960's talked constantly about "the progress" in Vietnam when the US leadership knew all along things were different. As revealed in the leaked "Pentagon Papers." And then, in my lifetime, we were told about the constant progress in Iraq was always just around the next Friedman unit.  And how Afghanistan, ... well, we were always "winning" in Afghanistan.  And when Trump got the US out of Afghanistan, well, Biden babbled about how powerful the Afghan military was and how it was going to hold the line and then it evaporated in a manner of weeks.  (The Washington Post detailed the constant lying ... which was all printed in order to embarrass Trump ... in a series they called "The Afghanistan Papers.")

Who wants to bet there won't be anything later revealed in something that could be titled "The Ukrainian Papers"?

The Need For Price Controls: Part II

 

Yesterday's post ended up being much longer than I'd intended and I didn't even get to commenting on the original CBC News article about the new "stagflation."  This morning I found a relevant article from Jacobin: "Interest Rate Hikes Are Class War Against Workers," that I want to incorporate, and, also, the transcript of Bank of Canada Governor (2001-2008) David Dodge's remarks to Canadian Society of New York: "Canada's Experience With Inflation Targets and a Flexible Exchange Rate: Lessons Learned" that is actually a fine example of the nit-wittedness of conventional economic "wisdom" that I hope to discuss.

The Need For Price Controls

 

This CBC News article (plus, I'll admit, its comments section full of the usual right-wing ignoramuses) is what's grinding my gears this morning:

Like a boogeyman to scare children, stagflation is rolled out every now and again by economic prognosticators to warn of how awful things can get if we're bad. Perhaps that's why many economists don't seem to be taking the threat seriously.

International Cynicism (The Ukraine)

 

Apparently (according to the Wall Street Journal), on February 19th of this year, Germany's Olaf Scholz offered Ukrainian President Zelensky a deal whereby in return for renouncing the Ukraine's aspirations for NATO membership, a peace deal, signed by both Biden and Putin would guarantee Ukrainian sovereignty.  Zelensky rejected this offer, saying that Putin could not be trusted.