Why There Won’t Be a Revolution

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 8 Comments

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Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Conspiracy Theorists, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Death of the Liberal Class, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Neoliberal Capitalism, Police State, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Social Unrest, The Boston Marathon Bombings, The Brothers Tsarnaev, The Elite 1%, The Southern Poverty Law Center, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, War on Terror

A good summation of Chris Hedges’ main points in ‘Death of the Liberal Class’ was found on the blog Law and Disorder. I have edited, corrected and changed the list a bit. As wealth has concentrated and taken over every institution of society, social injustice has sky-rocketed. The ruling elite who are benefitting from the current paradigm are blind to its toxic byproducts. As discussed in my previous post, I see such violent outbursts of antisocial behavior as a result of the current system.

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.

The following bullet points will explain this belief further:

The pillars of liberal establishment, liberal religious institutions, labor, public education, esp. public universities, culture, the press and finally the Democratic Party, which made incremental or piecemeal reform possible – which watched out for the interests and the grievances of those outside of the narrow power elite – no longer function.
The term neo-liberalism is a reconfiguring of what it means to be a liberal in a democratic society. Neoliberalism is actually an ideology that prizes market fundamentalism and seeks a return to laissez-faire economics, i.e. unfettered capitalism. Community is devalued in favor of unregulated capitalism.
We have figures like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Pelosi and others that continue to speak in the values of social liberalism but have betrayed every one of those values.
The subservience to Wall Street, the slavish catering to the permanent war economy, the failure to defend basic civil liberties, including habeas corpus – all of these have ultimately been embraced by the majority of the power elite so that a liberal is indistinguishable from a conservative on the core structural issues.
The liberal class and liberal institutions are traditionally allowed to function in a capitalist democracy because when there is a crisis within the society, they perform as a formal channel or mechanism within the power structure for injustices to be alleviated.
The New Deal: perfect example of how the liberal class functions.
The interests of the financial elite have usurped all of the pillars of the liberal establishment.
What kept the liberal class honest in the past were the populist movements which held fast to moral imperatives.
With the open-ended ‘War on Terror’, a culture of permanent war psychosis has been institutionalized by America’s ruling elite. Under such an atmosphere, social norms have degenerated, opening the door to demagogues.
With this gradual coup, which corporations have carried out in the United States beginning with Reagan and accelerated by Clinton and Bush, and certainly further by Obama, we’re left powerless; we have no mechanism to fight back.
The ruling elite understood that people were not moved to act primarily by fact or reason but could be manipulated through emotion. This is the result – we live in a society utterly saturated with lies.
The liberal class has been reduced to the status of courtiers to the financial elite. The term ‘limousine liberals’ comes from this situation.
The corporate state is rapidly reconfiguring society into a form of neo-feudalism, where you have these speculators on Wall Street earning 900 thousand dollars an hour while at the same time you have families of four barely able to feed and sustain themselves. The ever-looming threat of medical bills is another scythe hanging over their heads.
The elite institutions of education which charge astronomical sums essentially provide education for the elite, while public education is gutted for the masses.
People are trained to work as cogs in the corporate structure. Inner city schools are turned into boot camps for the corporate machine; that’s what charter schools are about, along with the ability to break teachers unions.
Everybody has their place and a caste system is solidified. There’s no hope for escape. We are fed endless stories of the few rare exceptions of people breaking into the top 1%, to somehow make us think that we’re responsible for our own predicament.
The dismantling and co-opting of the liberal class by the financial elite is one of the most vicious things that has been visited upon the working class.
The weakening and dismantling of a true liberal class explains how we can stand by passively as millions of people are forced from their homes through foreclosures by banks, the wealth gap widens to even more grotesque disparities, and the environment is destroyed for short-term economic growth and profit.
As these grievances mount, there is no mechanism within the structures of power or traditional institutions by which these injustices can be ameliorated.
Social grievances become expressed in these very frightening proto-fascist movements, such as the Tea Party or right-wing demagogues and extremist groups who give legitimacy to this anger, rage and sense of betrayal.
While being cleverly deflected away from Wall Street, the anger of the disenfranchised is directed at government and the present-day hollow mirage of a “liberal class”. The hypocrisy of the so-called “liberal class” is readily apparent from those on the low-end of the economic spectrum.

I’ve often wondered why there are so many conspiracy theorists and paranoid thinkers in today’s society:

The Southern Poverty Law Center released a new report on Tuesday finding that “the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012″ and that the number of hate groups has remained at “near record levels” of more than 1,000…. – source

If you have a mass media which is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the corporations and Empire, then the truth will be nearly impossible to discern. Such a society which cannot tell fact from propaganda or reality from fabricated illusions will be a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists and believers in the absurd. That’s exactly what we have today.

The Intractable State of Things: Life in the Corporate State

20 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil

≈ 8 Comments

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British Filmmaker Temujin Doran, Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dzhokhar 'Jahar' Tsarnaev, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Police State, Security and Surveillance State, The Brothers Tsarnaev, The Elite 1%, The Film "Obey", War for Profit, War on Terror

For the last week or so I’ve been feeling a sort of emptiness, an exasperation of the state of things, a growing acceptance of the intractable way of things. And no matter the reality that a small percentage of us can clearly see, the titanic wheels of the ‘system’ will spin onwards like a runaway train heading over a cliff, taking us all with it. People are not entitled to their own version of reality, but that is the society we live in today where facts are interchangeable with self-serving opinion and corporate spin.

This morning I came across an excellent movie entitled ‘Obey’ based on Chris Hedges’ brilliant book ‘Death of the Liberal Class’. For those who want to hear an insightful and perceptive analysis of the real world in which we exist, please watch:

…Passivity permits societies to transfer their emotional allegiance to the absurd and ignore real problems. It exacerbates despair. It keeps us in a state of mass self-delusion. Once we are drawn into this form of magical thinking, the structure and goals of the corporate state are not questioned. This magical thinking coupled with the bizarre ideology of limitless progress holds the promise of an impossible, unachievable happiness. It has turned whole nations into self-consuming machines of DEATH…

…The giddy, money-drenched choreographed carnival, the petty spectacle of politics will divert our attention from the collapsing world around us. The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation will mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. We will convince ourselves that global warming never existed or we will concede that it exists, but insist that we can adapt. Both responses will satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our huge reckless pursuit for personal comfort. And all around us the natural world will change…

…The death of the planet is just another investment opportunity.

Many human monstrosities have burst forth from the bleak and soulless landscape of American suburbia, reaping their 15 minutes of infamy. The brothers Tsarnaev are simply the latest. American society, for the most part, does not exist; it’s been bought out, chopped up, and repackaged for the corporate state’s consumer culture. A society that has been broken up and atomized is ripe for control and plunder.

I was poking around the twitter account of Dzhokhar ‘Jahar’ Tsarnaev and found some ironic and disturbing reflections on life in America. With the morbid fascination our throwaway culture has with its own social atrocities, perhaps it’s not so odd that ‘Jahar’ now has nearly 85,000 followers.

Sifting through the evidence, people want to know why, but one thing that won’t be analyzed is the society from which such horrors spring.

American society always emerges squeaky-clean out of all the investigations, post-mortems, examinations, inquiries that follow. Its guiltlessness is asserted by implication that the motives for such slayings are incomprehensible, unfathomable…

…The script is now word-perfect. Whenever some violent event erupts in the US, the chronology is identical. The shock is followed by flowers at the site of the deed, which is transformed into a temporary shrine, the comforting of the bereaved and injured, the assertion of solidarity, the lessons to be learned. In the end, American society becomes the hero of the tragedy, with its perpetual penitence, its never-again reflex, its openness to the cleansing effects of trauma, its avowals of solidarity, its ritualistic counselling which is a form of cancelling, as people ‘come to terms with’ their grief.

What is never asked is, what kind of social pathology creates such disorders? ‘No Entry’ signs are posted on all avenues of exploration where some clue is most likely to be found… – source

(in chronological order)

A Note on the Recent Terrorist Bombings

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 22 Comments

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Afghanistan, Boston Marathon Bombings, Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Iraq, Military Industrial Complex, Religious Extremism, Resource Wars, Saudi Arabia, Security and Surveillance State, War for Profit, War on Terror

The horrific bombings which took place recently at the Boston Marathon are the most significant terrorist attack to have occurred on U.S. soil since 9-11. My condolences go out to the innocent victims. Ideologies of any sort can be twisted to justify abhorrent acts. This terrorist act opens up old wounds for an Empire which in the last decade has gone on the offensive, spending vast resources on foreign wars and a security and surveillance state. Even with such Herculean expenditures, the asymmetric nature of terrorism demonstrates there is no foolproof solution for preventing such acts. The perpetrators spent perhaps a few hundred bucks on their homemade bombs, and we spend incalculable multiples of treasure and blood in return. This was really the goal of Osama bin Laden – to draw the Empire into costly wars and expenditures of life and limb. As has been stated by others, the best that can be hoped for from a military standpoint is to keep terrorist groups in a constant degraded and disorganized state. As much as left-leaning individuals as myself like to point out the foreign policy “transgressions”(to put it mildly) of the American Empire, decades of capitalist imperialism will never be put back into the bottle. Such bombings are pretty much daily occurrences in war-ravaged Iraq and Afghanistan as well as other areas of the Middle East. Our incursions into those countries only seem to have fueled the fire.

A law enforcement official had some interesting info on the bombings:

…A preliminary analysis of the bombs, which went off near the race’s finish line on Boylston Street, suggests they are similar to the improvised explosive devices found in war-torn regions like Iraq and Afghanistan, the law enforcement official said.

“The shrapnel, the simplicity of it — it’s something right out of the Iraq War. A basic roadside bomb,” the official said.

That “basic bomb” can be seen in the design of the Boston bombs, the law enforcement official said: pressure cookers stuffed with nails, ball bearings and other projectiles, and hidden in black duffel bags left near the 26.2 mile mark in the race.

What appear to be fragments from a pressure cooker were recovered at the scene, along with BBs, nails and black-nylon fragments possibly from a bag used to house the device, the FBI said.

Black explosive powder and a circuit board believed to have been used to detonate the bombs were also found, the federal official said.

Similar explosives have been used in third-world hot spots from South Asia to the Persian Gulf, and one of the devices used in the botched bombing of Times Square in May 2010 employed a pressure cooker.

The Pakistani Taliban, which claimed blame for the 2010 Times Square attempt, said it had no role in the Boston attack, according to The Associated Press.

A 2010 bulletin issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned pressure-cooker bombs are as easy to transport as they are to conceal.

“Terrorists can exploit the innocuous appearance of easily transportable items such as pressure cookers to conceal IED components,” the alert said. “Placed carefully, such devices provide little or no indication of an impending attack.”

That some victims lost limbs in the blast puts the device “into a powerful class,” said John Goodpaster, head of the forensic science program at Indiana University–Purdue University, and former chemist with the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Goodpaster said the blasts appeared to be from a “high explosive of some kind, military explosive, commercial explosive or improvised explosive.”
…

The sooner the world can get off MENA oil, thereby pulling the plug on the financial network of terrorist groups, the better off we’ll all be, not to mention our indispensable biosphere.

According to Wikipedia resources:

…Saudi Arabia is said to be the world’s largest source of funds for Salafi jihadist terrorist militant groups, such as al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba in South Asia, and donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide, according to Hillary Clinton.^[1] According to a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state, “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.”^[2]

The violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan is partly bankrolled by wealthy, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them.^[1] Three other Arab countries which are listed as sources of militant money are Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, all neighbors of Saudi Arabia…

In an encouraging sign, The small country of Portugal is now running its economy on 70% renewables, serving as a role model for the rest of the world.

…Actually 70 percent isn’t unheard of for Portugal. For a few hours in 2011, Portugal was entirely run on renewable power. Yet this was the first time so much was sustained for a quarter.

Portugal’s investment in modernizing its electricity grid in 2000 has come in handy. Like in many countries, power companies owned their own transmission lines. What the government did in 2000 was to buy all the lines, creating a publicly owned and traded company to operate them. This was used to create a smart grid that renewable energy producers could connect to (encouraged by government-organized auctions to build new wind and hydro plants)…

Of course planet Earth has an avalanche of environmental problems coming to a head in the near future (all caused by humans, mind you), but it’s good to see some accomplishments in at least one area of human impact – reduction of fossil fuels – even if it may be too little, too late.

The Sandy Hook Massacre and the Merchant$ of Death

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 3 Comments

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Andrew Feinstein, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Empire, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Global Arms Industry, Inverted Totalitarianism, J.W. Smith, Merchants of Death, Military Industrial Complex, NRA, Police State, Regulatory Capture, Sandy Hook Massacre, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, Transparency International, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, War on Terror, Wayne LaPierre

In my previous ‘arms industry’ posts (Guns, God, and Greenback$ as well as Guns ‘R U.S.), I alluded to the revolving door between the arms industry and the government and the corruption of politics by the money involved therein. In one of the most interesting interviews of 2012 aired today on DemocracyNow, arms industry analyst Andrew Feinstein, author of “The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade” and a former African National Congress member of Parliament in South Africa, sheds more light and insight on this very subject:

ANDREW FEINSTEIN: …The global arms trade is a $1.74 trillion-a-year business. That’s $250 for every person on the planet. And the profit motive behind the global arms trade is absolutely crucial. This is a business that is about big, big money. The trade contributes around 40 percent of all corruption in all global trade. So its impact on countries, on governments, on ordinary individuals in terms of the economic opportunity costs are absolutely massive.

Now, you will find that many spokespeople for the trade would try to distinguish between the legal or formal trade, on the one hand, and the illegal or illicit trade, on the other. I argue in the book that this distinction is a fallacy, that the boundaries are in fact extremely fuzzy and that the licit and the illicit are very closely intertwined, in addition to which the industry is largely protected because of its very close links to governments, to intelligence agencies, obviously to the military, and to lawmakers. So it is very seldom—even with the inadequate regulations that exist globally around the trade in weapons, it is very, very seldom that people who break those regulations are actually brought to book…

…Now, the situation that pertains at a global or international level has very many similarities with the domestic situation, particularly in the U.S., because let’s—let’s bear in mind while discussing this that the U.S. buys and sells almost as much weaponry as the rest of the world combined. So what happens in the U.S. is going to have enormous impact on the rest of the world. And what happens domestically, in terms of the ownership of weaponry within the U.S., really does, as I say, reflect the global trade in arms, in that we see it’s a $3.5 billion-a-year industry. And here we’re talking about smaller weaponry—about handguns, about assault rifles, semi-automatic weapons, the sorts that are used in the tragedy at Sandy Hook and all of the others that we’ve seen over the years throughout the U.S.

But the NRA, the gun sellers, the gun users seem to be afforded an extraordinary level of protection by government, by law enforcement authorities, just as happens on the global level. And part of this is because of the revolving door of people between, for instance, the NRA and government. Recent figures suggest that 15 of 28 officials in the NRA came from—sorry, lobbyists in the NRA came from important positions within government dealing with some of these same issues, so that the sorts of decisions being made by government are being informed disproportionately by those who want guns to be unregulated, by those who are making massive profits out the suffering of the victims of gun crime…

…let me make another point that I think is absolutely crucial about this and to understand where the NRA is coming from and, unfortunately, where the global trade in arms comes from, as well. And that is the linkages between politics and the gun lobby, and particularly, in terms of those linkages, money. One of the reasons that I focus on the global trade in arms in my work is because I saw, both in the context of South Africa, but also at a global level, the way in which money has come to pollute our politics. And the relationship between defense contractors on an international level and political parties and individual politicians are deep and profound. At a domestic level, the relationships between the NRA and specific elected representatives, not only in terms of money contributed, but also in terms of support given, are, again, profound. And unless we are able to break these linkages between money and politics that so pollute the way we are governed around the world, we will not be able to deal with some of the most intractable problems that face us as human beings —problems of the weaponization of the world, problems of climate change…

…I have not seen anywhere else in the world a gun lobby that has the same level of influence on its own government as the NRA does in the United States. My own assessment of what happened in July with the arms trade treaty is that the NRA, through the words of Mr. LaPierre and others, made clear to the Obama administration that it would make the president’s re-election a lot more difficult if he supported an international arms trade treaty. And I think it’s in that way that the NRA had such direct influence on the U.S. decision to effectively scupper negotiations for what in my opinion wouldn’t have been a strong-enough arms trade treaty, but would have been far better than any form of regulation that we have at the moment. So, yes, I think this is something of a unique situation, where a gun lobby has the extent of influence that it has in the United States of America…

What I find most disturbing is that in an age of resource constraints and austerity measures aimed at the lower class, global sales from the arms industry are booming and that growth is coming primarily from the United States of America (aka ‘Guns ‘R U.S.’):

As was stated by Feinstein, the world-wide anti-corruption body, Transparency International, reports that the arms industry is one of the most corrupt business sectors, accounting for 40-50% of corruption in global trade.

Corruption plays a significant role in influencing arms procurement. But despite repeated scandals, this situation has been largely ignored by governments, NGOs and academics.”
~ Laurence Cockroft, Chairman of Transparency International’s UK chapter.

‘Commissions’ are the euphemism for bribes which are paid by manufacturers to governments and average at least 10% of contracts that run in the tens of $billions per year. Some reasons for the rampant corruption in the arms industry:

The merchants of death have only grown more powerful in recent times, and their horrific impacts to the well-being of humanity are as true today as they were after World War I when the League of Nations listed six primary criticisms of global arms dealers, as quoted by J.W. Smith:

Stung by the horrors of World War I, world leaders realized that arms merchants had a hand in creating both the climate of fear and the resulting disaster itself.

From a review of Feinstein’s book:

Americans need to understand that the NRA is very much a part of this global arms trade. If one follows the money, the reasons why the NRA is adamantly opposed to any sort of regulation on guns becomes painfully apparent. While the US domestic arms industry conveniently wraps itself and its profit motive behind the patriotic fervor of the Second Amendment and the colonial ghosts of Founding Fathers, the horrors of the Sandy Hook massacre are blamed on everything under the sun except for that which hides in plain sight — an unregulated, out-of-control global and domestic arms industry.

Guns, God, and Greenback$

17 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

America's Gun Culture, Barack Obama, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Global Small-Arms Sales, Government-Corporate-Lobbyist Complex, Gun Control, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Military Keynesianism, NRA, Police State, Right Wing Wingnuts, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Security and Surveillance State, Semi-Automatic Weapons, War for Profit, War on Terror

Obama’s history on gun control has been long on rhetoric and nonexistent on results. Politics was always the primary concern for him. Having studied Obama’s political behavior in Illinois, Ralph Nader said very discerningly in a recent speech that Obama is risk averse. He avoids confrontation with the powerful interests and caves in to their demands. From the too-big-to-fail banks to the for-profit healthcare insurance industry, Obama has shown himself to be a milktoast and socket-puppet of the corporate elite. Wow, what a surprise. Who knew you had to sell your soul to get into the White House? His tear-drenched words aside, Obama’s abysmal record speaks for itself:

…the president received a dismal review from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the most visible gun-control advocacy groups.

“President Obama’s first-year record on gun violence prevention has been an abject failure,” the group wrote in a 2010 report, adding, “his campaign promises have gone unfulfilled and a year’s worth of opportunities to bring sanity to the gun issue have been lost.”

Should he want to bring forward legislation now, Obama faces a major obstacle: Congress. Even the Democratic-controlled Senate has shown little appetite to touch the controversial issue.

Multiple gun control bills have been introduced in recent years, but not a single one has advanced to a floor vote…. – link

And the ‘MericanPeople don’t wan’t nobody touchin’ their guns. Even after particularly horrific massacres of children, any uptick in favor of gun control quickly dies in the lesion-riddled brain of the United States of Amnesia:

With an economy predicated on growth, we’ll take it anyway we can, i.e. war and military Keynesianism. And the belief that every ‘Merican needs a gun is a part of that militarized American culture. Guns are the norm just like cars and televisions.

Clearly, increased gun availability has not protected America’s civil rights which have been whittled away in the age of the Security and Surveillance State. And it has not prevented the corporate takeover of the government either. I can, however, readily see that the profits of an active gun industry have been protected. This firearms industry then uses those profits to lobby state and federal legislatures for relaxation of restrictions on gun ownership and the de-criminalization of gun use – a familiar refrain in our government-corporate-lobbyist complex.

According to data from Sunlight:

The NRA has spent 73 times what the leading pro-gun control advocacy organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, has spent on lobbying in the 112th Congress ($4.4 million to $60,000, through the second quarter of 2012), and 4,143 times what the Brady Campaign spent on the 2012 election ($24.28 million to $5,816). (One caveat on the data is that the NRA itself does a very poor job of accurately reporting its spending, and we must rely on its self-reports.)

As I pointed out in my last two blog entries, guns are a big and growing business for America, just like the metastatic growth of the military industrial complex over the last half century. The NSSF (the trade association for the gun industry), located just across the highway from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut, touts this fact in its 2012 Firearms and Ammunition Industry Economic Impact Report:

…During difficult economic times and high unemployment rates nationally, our industry has grown and created over 26,325 new, well-paying jobs over the past two years. Our industry is proud to be one of the bright spots in this economy.Take a look for yourself and see the impact we have nationally and on your home state.

The Firearms Industry Creates Jobs in America

United States companies that manufacture, distribute and sell sporting firearms, ammunition and supplies are an important part of the country’s economy. Manufacturers of firearms, ammunition and supplies, along with the companies that sell and distribute these products, provide well paying jobs in America and pay significant amounts in tax to the state and Federal governments.

Economic Impact of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Industry in the U.S.

An Important Part of America’s Economy

Companies in the United States that manufacture, distribute and sell firearms, ammunition and hunting equipment employ as many as 98,752 people in the country and generate an additional 110,998 jobs in supplier and ancillary industries. These include jobs in companies supplying goods and services to manufacturers, distributors and retailers, as well as those that depend on sales to workers in the firearms and ammunition industry. [1]…

So the predictable outcome of a country awash in lethal guns would be more gun deaths. Oh that’s right, the NRA says “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Guns are just the handy instrument that is so effective for someone bent on maximum destruction. Is there political will to try to stop the toxic effects of this flourishing gun industry, a by-product of our war economy and militarized society? I doubt it. The sheer number of guns already in circulation will guarantee a continuum of grisly mass murders throughout the country far into the future. And as long as there’s money to be made from guns and weapons, nothing will ever really change:

Illustrating the sickness of this culture:

Guns ‘R U.S.

16 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

America's Gun Culture, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Global Small-Arms Sales, Gun Control, Inverted Totalitarianism, Killing Them Softly, Military Industrial Complex, NRA, Police State, Right Wing Wingnuts, Security and Surveillance State, Semi-Automatic Weapons, War for Profit, War on Terror

“America isn’t a country. It’s a business. Now pay me my fucking money.” ~ Killing Them Softly

In the previous post, aubreyenoch commented on the toxic effects of our current socio-economic system, i.e. industrial capitalism. These “off balance liabilities” are a reality which persists despite the standard business-world practice of ignoring them. The last topic was guns; so lets look at how firearms have become an integral part of our economy. Reading the article ‘In America, guns are a boom, regulation a bust‘, we learn that America is driving the production and spread of guns here and abroad as well as propelling the creation of foreign gun industries:

…the Small Arms Survey, or SAS, an independent research group in Geneva, valued global small-arms sales for 2011 at $8.5 billion, more than double its 2006 estimate of $4 billion.

Although the increase partly reflects improved information gathering, the gun trade has undoubtedly expanded in recent years. The report identifies two primary sources: large government purchases for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and increased spending by U.S. civilians.

Matt Schroeder, who heads the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists, says the U.S. “appetite for weapons” is one of the world’s largest and most diverse.

“There aren’t a lot of countries that are similar in terms of the quantities demanded and the types that are legally purchased here,” he said.

American small-arms purchases in 2009 accounted for 38 percent of the global total at $1.8 billion, more than 47 other leading importers combined, according to the SAS.

Private citizens provide the main source of demand for small arms around the globe. Of the 650 million firearms owned by civilians worldwide, more than 41 percent are in American hands.

It’s no surprise the United States has by far the highest proportion of guns per person, an estimated 89 civilian firearms per 100 residents…

And contrary to the popular fear by gun zealots that ‘Socialist’ Obama is going to take away their guns, he has not put forward any new gun laws and actually worked to relax regulations on the export of U.S. firearms abroad:

Despite decrying gun violence, however, Obama hasn’t pushed for gun control. His administration is also advocating new regulations that would make it easier to export weapons abroad.

Washington was chiefly responsible for the collapse of talks last summer on a UN arms trade treaty—a reflection of the vast political influence wielded by the U.S. gun lobby, which is spending tens of millions of dollars to ensure the highly lucrative industry keeps expanding…

Gun lobby groups have claimed credit for sinking United Nations negotiations over an international arms trade treaty last summer—when Amnesty International activists handed out bananas in New York’s Times Square, saying treaties regulate the global trade of fruit, but not guns and ammunition.

The talks concluded with no agreement on the draft text after the United States refused to sign, saying it needed more time to review the text.

Jeff Abramson, director of the Control Arms Secretariat, said the U.S. delegation’s actions were especially disappointing because the draft text satisfied all concerns Washington expressed during the negotiations.

“The best conclusion is that the Obama administration made a political decision to not deal with the treaty during an election cycle,” he said.

However, Abramson dismisses the NRA’s claim it “killed” the agreement, saying the strong American gun culture “makes it very difficult to have a rational conversation about regulations, even ones that do not impact U.S. law.”

Marsh agrees politics don’t fully explain the industry’s influence. Although gun owners who rushed out to buy more firearms after Obama’s first election may have contributed to the sales boom, the spending reflects a “much deeper, underlying trend” that dates back to 2001—and which he believes will continue for the foreseeable future.

Now let’s look at some of the “off balance liabilities“. The flintlock pistols and muskets of bygone frontier days are a far cry from the firepower of today’s semi-automatic weapons, something the founding fathers did not envision:

And if we look at deaths by firearms per country:

Firearm Death Rate per 100,000 People

(compared with 25 of the industrialized nations)

Is any of this sinking into your thick skull, Ivy Mike?

Guns ‘N X-Mas

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Military Industrial Complex

≈ 16 Comments

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Adam Lanza, America's Gun Culture, Arms Dealers, Christmas and Guns, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Connecticut Elementary School Shooting, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jacob Tyler Roberts, Mass Shooting, Militarization of Society, Neoliberal Capitalism, NRA, Obama, Oregon Mall Shooting, Police State, Poverty, Scottsdale Gun Club, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, War on Terror

I wasn’t paying attention to the news yesterday and completely missed the horrific headlines of the latest bloodletting in Connecticut which comes right on the heels of a mall shooting in Oregon. The reason I looked at the news was because I noticed an old posting I did was getting renewed viewing – The Joke’s on Us: Guns in a Sociopathic Society. I re-read the post and stand by everything in it. There are nearly three times as many licensed gun dealers in America than there are grocery stores. Gun dealers are about as common as gas stations in this country! And I’m reminded again of this society’s ingrained gun culture. Take for instance the Christmas event that was started recently in Arizona:

Scottsdale Gun Club offers photo opportunity with Santa | azfamily …

It’s actually pretty fun, you’ve got the guns with Santa and everything and you get to hold them, just a fun family event,” said Scott Daugherty after taking a family photo with Santa as well.

This is the third year the gun club has offered this “Santa and machine guns” photo opportunity.

While some people find the idea of posing with Santa and guns inappropriate, the line out the gun club’s door proves gun aficionados love it.

“We got here about an hour early to make sure because last year the line was really crazy and we decided not to stay, so we figured we better come early this year, we were about third or fourth in line and we’re off to breakfast and ready to ship these pictures off to our family,” said a woman by the name of Abby on her way out.

Such a yuletide family event by Pax Americana in its twilight years:

I had to go back and look up the definition(wikipedia) of Christmas after seeing those photos. I have to wonder if this gun culture is reinforced by a country whose economy revolves around war and the militarization of our society. Maybe a previous President had a point when he said:

“We cannot be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of the weapons of war.

Chart of Smith & Wesson revenues:

I’m sure this year will break records for gun sales. Oh, it already did:

And you think this species has a chance at long-term survival?

The World’s Most Destabilizing Force

13 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

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Arms Dealers, Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Joseph Biden, Luis J. Rodriguez, Military Industrial Complex, Mitt Romney, Obama, Paul Ryan, Resource Wars, War for Profit, War on Terror, William Blum

The U.S. military industrial complex is the single biggest leech upon society. Both parties unquestioningly support it. While many view a Romney in the White House would be like adding an accelerant to the flame of U.S. militarism, Obama has proven himself one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades. The military industrial complex sucks up more than half of every tax dollar and enriches weapons manufacturers at the expense of this country’s citizens. If you look back in history and read some of the essays of William Blum, you’ll have all the proof you need that the capitalists of America are not a stabilizing force in the world, but a destabilizing one. As others have noted, empires collapse from within. While they continue expanding outward and investing in their reach of hegemony, the needs of the citizens back at home are overlooked and neglected. We have an empire at the expense of democracy:

…In the first minutes of the debate, Biden gloated about how the economic blockade of Iran orchestrated by Washington had devastated the Iranian economy and caused widespread suffering among the people. He boasted of the US role in aiding the Syrian forces seeking to overthrow the Assad regime. And he repeatedly defended the administration by declaring that it had the full support of the Pentagon brass—accepting Ryan’s premise that the generals should have veto power over foreign policy.

The questions offered by debate moderator Martha Raddatz—an ABC News foreign correspondent with close ties to the US military-intelligence apparatus—took as their point of departure the unchallengeable legitimacy of the operations of American imperialism abroad and the profit system at home.

Many of them touched on foreign and military policy, in every case tacitly assuming that the United States has the right to bomb, invade and conquer any country it chooses. The discussion between the candidates dealt with the expediency of such military actions, not whether they were legally or morally justifiable.

Similarly, the parts of the debate that touched on domestic policy—the economy, health care, taxes and social issues like abortion—took for granted the existing division of the wealth of society between the tiny minority that controls nearly all of it and the large majority who are struggling to survive.

In the entire 90 minutes, there was not a single question or answer about the conditions of life of the working class—about cuts in wages, pensions and other benefits; the growth of poverty, homelessness and hunger; the spreading plague of evictions and foreclosures; the deterioration of public services such as education; the collapse of the social infrastructure…

Do you see a problem with this picture of the U.S.?

Other threats loom larger than the boogeyman terrorist. While we create enemies to fight, real manmade dangers like global warming and climate change are growing, threatening to wipe all of humanity off the face of the Earth. Humans don’t have that much time left on this planet, so it would probably be a wise decision to ratchet back all the war mongering, move away from a war-based economy, and try another approach to how we interact with the rest of the world before it all ends in more and more resource wars and the plume of a mushroom cloud.

A moment of truth-telling by Luis J. Rodriguez:

Iran appears to be next on our bombing agenda. If we had not covertly overthrown their democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953 because he wanted to nationalize their oil resources, could we have averted this impending war?…

Reality TV Has Become the Real World for Americans

04 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 4 Comments

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Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Financial Elite, George Farah - Founder and Executive Director of Open Debates, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jeremy Scahill, Presidential Debates, Privatization, The Elite 1%, War on Terror

I was doing a little net surfing this morning and wondered what my buddy Jeremy Scahill has been up to. Shoot, it’s been 6 months since I’ve seen an article from him. A recent video of him reaffirms why I like him so much…

We live in this culture where we have this reality television which has become the real world, and what’s being done with our dollars, and with our soldiers, and in foreign countries in our name has become page seven.
~ Jeremy Scahill

He still has a sense of humor too.

Concerning those debates, which in this day and age are only another reality TV production brought to you by Wall Street, Democracy Now had a truly jaw-dropping show on the corporate takeover of the political debates over the last couple of decades. Secret agreements were formed between the two parties which framed the “debates” so that only predetermined, soft-ball questions would be asked and no third party candidates would be allowed to participate. When you watch a “presidential debate”, what you are seeing is pure fluff and staged answers. You might as well be hearing ventriloquist voices emanating from manikins. And to top it all off, one of the primary corporate sponsors of the debates is Anheuser-Busch. How fitting… Bud Light and cheesy made-for-TV “reality” shows constitute the method by which the American sheeple choose their ‘leaders’. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I urge you to watch this interview. It explains a lot about the development of the modern American Cororatocracy and the dumbing down of its population of “consumers”.

Here is George Farah’s Website (click the pic to go there):

Future Forecast: Rising Fascism, Expensive Food, and Social Unrest

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Wall Street Fraud

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Capitalism, Car Culture, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Happy Fascism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Oxfam - Extreme Weather - Extreme Prices, Police State, Security and Surveillance State, Walmart, War on Terror, Yaneer Bar-Yam

I found the following story pathetic, predictable, and a microcosm of America’s inverted totalitarianism. This is the corporate state flexing its fascist muscles with for-hire private armies, replete with the latest face-stomping boots and weaponry from Homeland Security. You can never have too much police intimidation in the land of the fearful and home of the paranoid.

Basic rights are what the workers were requesting, but the corporations are working hard to ensure American workers are on the same footing as laborers of Third World sweatshops.

…and don’t forget the sonic cannons to completely suppress the oppressed:

Criminalizing dissent extinguishes free speech. The threat of a nightstick cracking open your head is a good silencer. I fail to see much difference between America and China at this point. A lot has been written recently about the rise of America’s ‘Security and Surveillance State’. Let’s recap:

Why Don’t Americans Care About Democracy at Home?

…the financialization of the economy and culture has resulted in the poisonous growth of monopoly power, predatory lending, abusive credit card practices and misuses of CEO pay. The false but central neoliberal tenet that markets can solve all of society’s problems has no way of limiting the power of money and has given rise to “a politics in which policies that favor the rich … have allowed the financial sector to amass vast economic and political power.”[24] As Joseph Stiglitz points out, there is more at work in this form of governance than a pandering to the wealthy and powerful: There is also the specter of an authoritarian society “where people live in gated communities,” large segments of the population are impoverished or locked up in prison and Americans live in a state of constant fear as they face growing “economic insecurity, health care insecurity [and] a sense of physical insecurity.”[25] In other words, the authoritarian nature of neoliberal political governance and economic power is also visible in the rise of a national security state in which civil liberties are being drastically abridged and violated.

As the war on terror becomes a normalized state of existence, the most basic rights available to American citizens are being shredded. The spirit of revenge, militarization and fear now permeates the discourse of national security. For instance, under Presidents Bush and Obama, the idea of habeas corpus with its guarantee that prisoners have minimal rights has given way to policies of indefinite detention, abductions, targeted assassinations, drone killings and an expanding state surveillance apparatus. The Obama administration has designated 46 inmates for indefinite detention at Guantanamo because, according to the government, they can be neither tried nor safely released. Moreover, another “167 men now confined at Guantanamo … have been cleared for release yet remain at the facility.”[26]

With the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act in 2012, the rule of legal illegalities has been extended to threaten the lives and rights of US citizens. The law authorizes military detention of individuals who are suspected of belonging not only to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda but to “associated forces.” As Glenn Greenwald points out, this “grants the president the power to indefinitely detain in military custody not only accused terrorists, but also their supporters, all without charges or trial.”[27] The vagueness of the law allows the possibility of subjecting US citizens who are considered in violation of the law to indefinite detention. Of course, that might include journalists, writers, intellectuals and anyone else who might be accused because of their dealings with alleged terrorists. Fortunately, US District Judge Katherine Forrest of New York agreed with Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and other writers who have challenged the legality of the law. Judge Forrest recently acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the law and ruled in favor of a preliminary barring of the enforcement of the National Defense Authorization Act.[28]

The anti-democratic practices at work in the Obama administration also include the US government’s use of state secrecy to provide a cover or prevent being embarrassed by practices that range from the illegal use of torture to the abduction of innocent foreign nationals. Under the rubric of national security, a shadow state has emerged that eschews transparency and commits unlawful acts. Given the power of the government to engage in a range of illegalities and to make them disappear through an appeal to state secrecy, it should come as no surprise that warrantless wiretapping, justified in the name of national security, is on the rise at both the federal and state levels. For instance, the New York City Police Department “implemented surveillance programs that violate the civil liberties of that city’s Muslim-American citizens [by infiltrating] mosques and universities [and] collecting information on individuals suspected of no crimes.”[29] And the American public barely acknowledged this shocking abuse of power. Such anti-democratic policies and practices have become the new norm in American society and reveal a frightening and dangerous move toward a 21st century version of authoritarianism.

This police state the über wealthy are building better live up to all the hype that’s been advertised about it. There are too many horsemen (Climate Change, Peak Oil, Neoliberal Economic Policies, 6th Mass Extinction, Water Scarcity, Ocean Acidification) bearing down on humanity to even entertain the idea that the starving masses will go die quietly in some dark corner.

If There Are Riots In New York, You Can Blame Ethanol And Index Funds…

…Yaneer Bar-Yam, a physicist, complex systems theorist and general man-about-town with a pleasing CV that includes writing a book called “Making Things Work” and telling Slate that “the shortcomings of the U.N. humanitarian-response system in Haiti have a lot to do with a 50-year-old mathematical theorem known as Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.”

He and some friends wrote a paper, released yesterday, arguing that increases in food prices over the last few years can be explained almost entirely by two factors: financial market speculation and the growing use of corn for ethanol production rather than food.

Now these arguments have been made before, and also disputed or minimized. The new paper rejects a lot of those criticisms; more interestingly, it constructs a fairly simple four-parameter model that can pretty closely match the actual trends in food prices over the last few years:

So, neat. Also disturbing. And more disturbing is this:

That’s from their companion, non-mathy paper that proposes “that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption.” The main graph is food prices, the red dotted lines are incidents of rioting. Charmingly the numbers in parentheses are death tolls. They predict global doom in 2012-2013.

We apparently value feeding our cars over alleviating worldwide hunger and misery as well as preventing global unrest. A little unrest is always good for the bottom line of the Military Industrial Complex.

“Food prices (blue) and food price model (red) including projected increases in coming months. The social unrest threshold, corrected for inflation (purple dashed line) is a level of food prices that is likely to cause food riots of impoverished populations and social disruption. Parameters as in July update, modified to include larger recent reported FAO food price index increase of 6%.” – link

And a new report buy Oxfam, Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices, looks into the grim future of food production in a world of extreme climate change:

Even under a conservative scenario, another US drought in 2030 could raise the price of maize by as much as 140 per cent over and above the average price of food in 2030, which is already likely to be double today’s prices.

Drought and flooding in southern Africa could increase the consumer price of maize and other coarse grains by as much as 120 per cent. Price spikes of this magnitude today would mean the cost of a 25kg bag of corn meal – a staple which feeds poor families across Africa for about two weeks – would rocket from around $18 to $40.

A nationwide drought in India and extensive flooding across South East Asia could see the world market price of rice increase by 25 per cent. This could see domestic spikes of up to 43 per cent on top of longer term price rises in rice importing countries of such as Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

My prediction is that we will continue to sacrifice land and human lives at the altar of American, and now Chinese, car culture. Walmart, the enduring symbol of happy fascism in America, will enjoy a growing pool of cheap labor amid cut-throat competition to ensure stellar profit margins. And a new reality TV series featuring climate change survivors will air on America’s propaganda box. Why not? We’ve already got a reality TV series to promote our perpetual war economy.