Defaultgeddon: More good articles

The articles I post here pretty much show for certain that there wont be a default but still, for ease of lumping the topics together I've kept the same title

Yesterday I posted a short FAQ that was one of the best explanations of the debt ceiling farce so far. In a discussion on Buzz I was caused to ask if there are any longer form articles that give a description of a similar quality. Thanks to a mix of hanging out in a Something Awful thread and checking various sites I regularly do a day later I have an embarrassment of riches on the subject.

This fairly short article by Dean Baker explains how the debt ceiling arguments are just being used as a cover by both Republicans and Democrats, especially Obama, to force austerity measures on America and gut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security at the behest of their corporate overlords.

Given the stealth Bi-partisan support for this Americans really are screwed.

Michael Hudson has written a longer piece that focuses on the great amount of effort Obama has put in to destroying as much of FDR's legacy as he possibly can.

Speaking of FDR, Richard D Wolff has written an article examining the nature of the Keynesian softening of Capitalism that was required to save Capitalism. Essentially the Welfare State and the New Deal were part of a system to keep Capitalism going and protect the rich from popular anger when the system is experiencing one of its' major crisis. However in order to maintain this buffer and protect the rich governments incurred greater deficits because the rich and powerful didn't want to pay the tax necessary to maintain it. Now public debt has gotten so large the elite want deficit reduced. Thus the buffer that keeps people relatively safe and relatively quiet is being removed. Interesting times loon.

The IMF gets to play to the home crowd.

Over the years the IMF has gotten to fuck over a lot of countries and bring misery and death to countless poors but this is the big one, the IMF is going to do the biggest gig of all, the home crowd. We all knew it was coming but finally they're starting to hype it up for the fans.

And as they receive a ticker tape along the newly privatised streets the IMF's open topped limo will be blaring out a very special anthem:


Make your peace with your Gods non-millionaire Americans.

The far right is the majority's worst enemy.

I feel a little uncomfortable writing this, am I simply emulating the worst of the right wing commentators by bandwagoning on a tragedy. Nonetheless I feel that such a tragedy as the bombing and shooting spree in Norway need to be looked at in wider terms than the narrow context of a lone mad man doing a bad thing that can be quickly ignored.

The far right are useful to economic elite and thus the mainstream media are not going to be asking probing questions about the nature and ideology of this attack. Take this analysis from the BBC and reflect on how it ends:

Following the attacks in Oslo and on Utoeya, it will be interesting to see whether many in the country develop a more sophisticated view of where the greatest threats are coming from, amid a growing realisation that extremism is deadly regardless of nationality, ethnicity or religion.

Which marvellously combines an entreaty to support the status quo as much as possible with an equivocation that the Muslims are just as bad. No questioning of if the motives of a marginalised and victimised group in Europe's are any different from a comfortably off man who was a member of the accepted majority in one of the most pleasant places to live on Earth.

Fascists are useful to the elite for the simple reason of their not being Socialists. Socialists might tax them more heavily, ask questions about the distribution of wealth and so on. Fascists will target ethnic minorities and homosexuals which the majority of the elite aren't and those that are are rich enough to be well protected. Best of all Fascists will target Socialists and indeed all social and political movements the elite like least.

So we can expect plenty of condemnation of this particular act but there will be limited attempts to tie this into a wider context and at the same time this good looking white mass murderer gets his picture plastered everywhere, to encourage the others and you better bet the mainstream right will start to ask questions about whether our immigration and asylum policies are causing actual problems. I mean of course killing people is bad but maybe there is something to what he was talking about, we can't let the violence of his actions blind us to the real problems immigrants cause in society. etc etc.

We really do need to look into what kind of utterly corrosive ideology makes a comfortable and affluent man who faces no real threats kill nearly 100 people. We can over no grandiose excuses like Western Imperialism in the Middle East, nor the sociological and economic explanations of competition with immigrants for jobs driving working class whites towards the right wing. No this guy lived with his mum in an affluent part of Oslo, had enough money to set up an agricultural company, that admittedly may have been a front to buy fertilisers for bombs, and lived in Norway, one of the best damn places to live on Earth.

The malignancy of an ideology than even in the most comfortable circumstances can drive someone to commit such horrific crimes is something we in the West truly have to confront, in full force and quickly. However we simply cannot expect the political class to lead us in this regard. As I said before the elite have little to lose from supporting the far right. Indeed they are already doing so quite openly. Back in February of this year David Cameron just happened to give a speech attacking Multiculturalism hours before a big march by the EDL, the biggest Fascist group in the UK.

The EDL, an alliance of football hooligans and other extremely unpleasant groups in society was allegedly an inspiration for the Norwegian terrorist. The EDL has other friends beyond Norwegian Mass Murderers and the British Prime Minister though, The Daily Star, a less reputable tabloid than the Sun but with a decent circulation, also tested the waters for backing them earlier this year.

Also quite by chance while finding that story on the New Statesman website I stumbled on this article about how the architect of "Blue Labour" a plan to move New Labour even further to the right, which Ed Miliband was smiling upon, is at best a xenophobe and may well be a racist.

The political mainstream simply will not save us from Fascism. This atrocity in Norway must be a rallying cry for the majority to push against a growing Fascism in the western world, to defend values most people support and prevent the elite from having an army of remorseless thugs to keep them in power by attacking any positive political and social movements that may emerge from the current economic crisis. Make no mistake the elite will be doing everything they can to take advantage of this with fleet footed "well maybe he had a point" statements and articles.

"Anything but Socialism" has been the mantra of the Western elite for over a century and regardless of whether you are left wing or not it is imperative that we as a majority do not make supporting Fascism the path of least resistance for the elite.

Oh bugger, I meant to incorporate this article into the body of the text because it is very good and was the inspiration for this whole entry. I shall highlight it here instead, please read..

Also it had the best advert for a magazine I've ever seen:

Israel likely to attack Iran within months.

I was halfway through writing this when I realised the real reason for Israel doing this, blackmailing China and the EU into opposing the Palestinian State with the threat of massively increased oil prices. I didn't want to delete the other stuff because it is valid but I'm putting this TL:DR here because this is the main point I think. Scroll down to the next bolded bit for my thoughts on this.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer, the inspiration for George Clooney's character in Syriana, has stated there is an extremely strong possibility Israel will attack Iran, probably in September. Given he cites a former head of Mossad that only stepped down in late 2010 I think we can take his warning seriously.

I am also inclined to believe Israel, who are now totally out of control, will attack against American's wishes. Politically and Militarily there is no will for the third middle eastern war.

The probable outcomes for the US are such an attack are devastating. If they do the sensible thing and don't rush to Israel's aid then Obama loses in 2012 for certain. More to the point though we see another example of the American Empire not looking after its' colonies. Sure Russia and the EU took notice that America wouldn't defend Georgia in 2008 but Georgia was small potatoes. Failure to defend Israel, the jewel in the crown means it is open season on the US, China, Russia and others can follow a much more aggressive foreign policy knowing the US simply can't back up its' colonies and client states.

If then they do the publicly popular and necessary thing and defend Israel things are unlikely to go much better. Iran has had years to see how American forces work in Iraq and will have tailored their asymmetric capabilities in response. Also any US navy vessels hanging around Iranian waters probably wont do so well either. But on top of these handicaps the US faces other problems.

The Arab Spring means that guarantees of fly over rights, security of supply lines and so on is vastly weakened. Also the great unpopularity of Israel will likely be a regionally galvanising force, US aligned client rulers across the region could face even greater problems in the event of an Israel and America vs Iran conflict.

Plus you know the massive war fatigue, an economy on life support and likelihood of the need for more troops at home as social conditions deteriorate further at home.

TL:DR bit
Of course as I write this I realise none of that will happen. Because I remember reading at least one article before where Israel threatened China that if they didn't do some such thing then Israel would attack Iran. Now China has no love for Iran, not really but they do need oil and they're heavily dependent on the Middle East for it. The disruption a war between Israel and Iran would cause would create huge problems for China, economically and socially. So China did what Israel wanted.

Now the UN vote on Palestinian Statehood approaches and several big EU countries are looking favourably at the motion. The EU is similarly reliant on Middle Eastern oil so in order to get Israel to reconsider this mindless jingoism they'll have to do whatever Israel wants. I don't know China's position on the issue but if they were looking favourably at it this will likely make them reconsider.

It may be Israel wants other concessions or issues resolved in this extortion operation but regardless of the objective I think this is why their stupidly dangerous plan is suddenly being aired.

However one has to wonder if Israel's chickens will come home to roost at some point. America's power and economy is seemingly on the wane. Doing everything you can to piss off the EU and China seems... unwise. Still, what do I know?

A very British genocide.

The War Nerd on exiled.com has been doing a daily update for 25 days straight and if you haven't been reading them you are officially failing at life. Today's update covers the Mau Mau event, yeah the one involving Obama's Grandpa (not that its stopped the big O from doing just the same to other nations as President). Pretty standard for British colonialism, every evil you can imagine from mass murder on an industrial scale to horrific abuse of prisoners and all taking place years after the Holocaust and all the hand wringing and claims to moralism that entailed.

To anyone who cares to look the British Empire was probably second only to the Mongol Empire in terms of most evil organisation ever to exist. But the more worrying implication of today's update is the convincing argument it makes about British academic complicity. Now in hindsight its not really that surprising this is the case but it had simply never occurred to me, but yeah the entire British system is set up in a way to deny the utterly horrific crimes the Empire committed that we still feel the benefits from today. Still, as someone who self identifies as a historian its not nice to think the organisation I believe myself a part of is so complicit in evil.

Monstrous turtles all the way down I suppose.

It would certainly seem plausible there is a similar propaganda model for academia.

Weekend Watch 07/01/11

The excuse this time is me getting into twitter but thats irrelevant, excuses aren't good enough.

So anyway, here is part 3 of the power of nightmares:

The leaked US cables.

Probably the best place for up to date information about this stuff is The Guardian's sub-website devoted specifically to the leaks.

Man theres a lot of fun stuff up there already, Arab puppets of the US want Iran nuked, The state department (CIA) spying on the leadership of the UN and sundry other unpleasant things.

Tories endorse Police Racism.

A couple of months ago it was revealed that black and brown people in the uk are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched. So now the Tories are in power they've decided that the best thing to do is fully back this behaviour and amend stop and search powers so that a person's race can be a legitimate reason to accost them! Along with this the plans also remove the need for the police to record each time they stop and search a person, giving them even greater carte blanche to be racist.

Why is this happening? Well apart from the general fact rightists are pretty much evil to their core and this is just another example it is likely an attempt to appease police officers over the slash and burn cuts the Tories are imposing, especially given the news yesterday Manchester Police are facing 25% spending cuts cuts. This does not reflect well on the police that this would appease them and it doesn't reflect well on the Tories that they would attempt appeasement in this way.

This however should dispell the myth of the Tories being in any way tolerant or decent.

Bankers always win but this time they've won even more:

Found here.

So yeah America's Plutocratic Aristocracy is incomprehensibly rich and able to spend as much as it wants on elections. Things are going to get a lot worse for everyone on earth bar that tiny elite.

The Skynet of stealing.

This is finance so I can't really speak to the content but I get the feeling it is important. Essentially the big banks are using computer programs to manipulate and control the market. Happily the US Govt is merrily looking the other way about this because it worked out so well last time.

Jonny linked by a different article about this a long time ago but I forgot to link it so thanks to him for at least making me aware this is an important issue.

Israel ever more openly fascist.

Will try and do a proper post on this soon but the Israeli cabinet has approved legislation to force all Israeli citizens to recite a loyalty oath to the country as a Jewish Democratic State. Or to put it another people who live in Israel who aren't Jewish or refuse to regard it as a solely Jewish state, which would affect dissenting Israelis of European origin as well as the Arab minority, will no longer be Israelis and can be expelled. Yay

It cannot be over emphasised how similar late capitalism and feudalism are.

You hear people talking about a new aristocracy or how certain behaviour is "medieval" and you understand it as hyperbole. After all this is an age of progress ever moving forward and regression is a bogey man to be rolled out to demonise a policy things aren't really getting worse. But of course that isn't the case, things are getting worse and anyway the past is always with us.

Nonetheless the feudal nature of the actions of the elite slip by unnoticed because it is very unpleasant to realise just how undemocratic and deeply unfair their attitudes and wielded power are. Mark Ames has profiled one of the Koch brothers' evangelical propagandists and I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between the patronage system he operates within and a medieval clergyman retained by a local lord to keep the peasants in line.

Australia is racist as all hell.

I know I know, it is pretty shocking a country that had a whites only immigration policy until 1973 and still has one that is considered racist, that keeps the remnants of the Aboriginal peoples the British didn't kill in squalid camps in the wasteland no one else wants and then blames Aboriginal people for the outcomes of such treatment and then following a "remedy" to those problems by further punishing Aboriginal people and treating them as untermensch, all of which was imposed by the Australian military is Racist but there you go. I aim to shock.

In this fun and happy read one learns about the conditions of Aboriginal people, the indifference of white Australians to institutionalised racism and how a town was happy at the lenient punishment for a group of young white men who killed an Aboriginal man who stood up them driving their 4x4 at and otherwise harassing Aboriginal people. To be honest it makes me violently angry but thats not the way, the racists are always better armed and far far better at inhuman violence, a more community based solution is required. Though first white Australians need to acknowledge there is a problem to start with.

The legacy of the British Empire is quite a thing.

Scientology still awful.

John Sweeney has performed another investigation into scientology three years after his first expose that was accompanied by an extensive campaign of harassment that culminated in a public outburst Scientology spread far and wide in an effort to discredit him. I don't think it succeeded particularly, it brought more attention to Scientology, something they don't want. Regardless his first investigation was interesting and got some of the unpleasant stuff Scientology does into the open.

Maybe he is a glutton for punishment but it is interesting the man who was in charge of harassing him the first time around, Mike Rinder, is now talking to Sweeney about the negatives of the cult. He was disgraced within the organisation for failing to undermine the first documentary and chose to leave rather than accept the severe punishment he was given for this. So his criticisms could be rooted in bitterness, nonetheless they are corroborated by more credible and long term critics such as Xenu.net.

Certainly Sweeney deserves credit for his perseverance.

A final thing I'd like to point out is a detail from this part of the BBC article.

That is why I was somewhat grateful to Scientology's UK lawyers at Carter-Ruck when they sent the BBC photographs of me hugging Amy Scobee at the end of a long and at times harrowing series of interviews about her experiences.
[...]
This was, oddly enough, welcome proof that the people who had been following and filming us in the States were indeed working for the Church of Scientology.

Scientology's favoured law firm in the UK is Carter Ruck, known to the excellent Private Eye as Carter Fuck. They are embody the awful culture of libel tourism to the nth term and love to help powerful entities cover up the truth. Perhaps the most famous suppression of free speech they were involved with was attempting to gag reports of the Trafigura toxic waste dumping in Côte_d'Ivoire. Truly delightful people.

Upbeat article of the day: "Matecrime" against those with learning disabilities

Its not just the Conservatives who want to abuse those with special needs it is apparently a loathsome pursuit that transcends class boundries.

There appears to be a growing trend of people taking advantage of people with learning disabilities to make money off them, from stealing to forcing them into prostitution, or to simply bully them for fun, sometimes to the point of murder, all the while they think those abusing them are their friends because they're lonely or naive. Hence "matecrime".

Why are these vulnerable people being put in such a dangerous situation? Well Thatcher's government realised it was cheaper to have social services look after people in the community than to maintain expensive institutions and care programs. Thus care in the community was born. Of course Thatcher and subsequent governments didn't bother to adequately fund this new scheme and large government cuts looming it is likely even more vulnerable people will be turfed out on to the streets. Yay.

Mark Ames on the Anti-I.M.F Protests In Washington D.C. April 20th 2000

Its depressing as fuck but its still interesting to see how the elite stiffle dissent in the US. The IMF and World Bank are evil as all hell and yet they're still getting to impose their wholesale destruction of the poor, just look how they got their tentacles further into Pakistan last week.

Obama loves torture just as much as Bush.

Whitehouse spokesperson Gibbs will have to refer most of the ACLU for drug testing thanks to a report that shows Obama is just as bad as Bush. To be honest it would seem the Tea Partier assertions Obama is like Hitler are true, albeit for policies the astroturfed dupes likely approve of, operating concentration camps, the widespread use of torture and gaming the judicial system to suppress opposition. But yeah, that Mosque in New York thing is totally what Americans should be publicly and angrily debating.

Documents detailing British complicity in torture of its' citizens.

A series of documents have been released detailing clearly the Labour government's willing complicity in the torture and abuse of its' citizens. You can look at the bits of the documents that aren't "redacted" with annotations here.

As you know I am no fan of the concept of nationalism or the idea of countries but the sickening thing about this is that it is clear that one of the few positive elements of nationalism, that the nation state will protect all of its' citizens and ensure their equal rights to fair treatment and safety is a lie. Just as whites can't be terrorists it seems that brown and black people aren't citizens.

The heir apparent to the leadership of the labour party David Miliband is a former foreign secretary and has yet to change his position that no torture occurred with Britain's acquiescence.

Cross your fingers as hard as you can.

Dick Cheney admitted to hospital feeling ill. Let us all hope that this is his sixth and final heart attack.