Non-Annoying Radical Punditocracy

Arthur Silber suggests an idea
worthy of consideration.

Arthur Silber at Once Upon A Time blog had the idea, where, playing off widespread and deepening domestic fury, of doing a massive civil protest where people would descend upon Washington and other big cities on April 15, 2014, and in addition to bringing those places to a halt, the assembled millions would refuse to send their tax returns to the IRS en masse.

The idea is certainly worth fleshing out.

Before getting into it, though, I thought it would be worthwhile to make note of the distinction between someone like Silber and that nincompoop Patrick Cockburn whom we discussed in our previous post. The distinction is this: where Cockburn appears content to stay on the sidelines and pontificate, Silber takes the next -- and courageous -- step: he suggests doing something.

This particular idea isn't a new one for Silber; it's a reincarnation of an idea he put forward to protest the attack against Iraq -- one wherein, he notes in his present missive, he encouraged writers with a greater readership than his own to adopt and disseminate. He notes that no such such prominent writer took up the baton.

We should make a note about that. There's a very good reason that no writers or otherwise prominent people took up the challenge: they know that doing so would be very damaging -- if not fatal -- to their very prominence.

Age is teaching me that there are very few accidents when it comes to the bigger things in one's life, such as, if one chooses, to cultivate one's career. People don't get where they want to go without sacrifice and without making the compromises necessary to achieve their goals. (I'll add, parenthetically, that this is precisely the reason why I've adopted 'sitting quietly with my hands folded' as my personal career aspiration.) People don't get to the big time without making big time compromises.

The categorical imperative among those career-oriented compromises is never to rock the boat so much that it tips over.

Is it any accident that no Oscar-winning actress ever says, in giving her acceptance speech, that the whole Academy Award selection process is rotten and corrupt -- although everyone knows it anyway? Is it any accident that Glenn Greenwald, the intrepid left-wing vindicator of 'progressive' democratic values, lately castigated Obama and the DOJ for obtaining the phone records of the Associated Press while making no mention that the Associated Press has regularly served as a primary conduit for the most reprehensible government propaganda legitimizing similar invasions of others' privacy in the name of the government's Thousand Years' War Against Terrorism?

These are no surprises, and it's likewise no surprise that nobody of prominence took up on Silber's idea.

One technical point that should be made is that widespread refusal to file tax returns would be much more of a symbolic gesture than one of substance. Most people file tax returns to get a refund of a few dollars of the much larger sum the government already confiscated from them.

No doubt that the clowns in the government would take notice, and would probably regard it as something of a threat in that it would be an indication that there remain residual manifestations of a population able to think for itself. But it wouldn't substantially compromise the government's ability to conduct its nefarious business.

That notwithstanding, let's assume that Silber's idea did work, and "government leaders" found themselves in a position where making substantive compromises to a seething population was among the policy options needing to be considered.

My instinct is that the authoritarians among those "leaders" (most of them being authoritarians to begin with) would hold sway, and the policy option actually "implemented" would be a crackdown with martial law, although it would need to be called something different. More cynical observers might posit that the Boston "lockdown," to use the prison nomenclature, was a dry run for such political developments.

They'll need to find a better term than "lockdown," however, due to its negative connotations. I might suggest something along the lines of, for example, "Operation Preserve Democracy." Calling it something like "Operation Restore Democracy" would be be a less desirable option because it contains a tacit admission that democracy doesn't presently exist. "Preserving" democracy sends a far more legitimizing message.

If and when such a crackdown happens we can rest assured that there will be no shortage of prominent people encouraging the public to "remain calm" amid such a "challenging time for our 'Homeland.'"

Hey, it happened in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Poland, and a whole pile of other places. It'll happen here too, given the right circumstances. Those circumstances are, unfortunately, entirely foreseeable at present.

Does this mean that Silber had a bad idea? Hardly. His idea is a step in the right direction and one to be built upon.

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Annoying Radical Punditocracy

Commentatator Patrick Cockburn:
a shining moral beacon for our age.

Perhaps it's only my insecurities speaking, but often I feel annoyed by a certain condescension from the "radical" punditocracy, as though they speak from a podium on high, deigning occasionally to bestow their sage moral verities onto such lowly and yet-unenlightened heathen as yours truly.

Faithful readers of these pundits -- myself included, of course -- mustn't question their masters' teachings lest they be shunned as apostates -- or worse -- they might be forced to think for themselves for a change.

A recent example of such condescension can be seen in Patrick Cockburn's May 13, 2013, missive in Counterpunch entitled, "History Lessons the West Refuses to Learn."

Cockburn begins by pointing out that the Middle East is coming unglued from the spoils of the former Ottoman empire that were pasted together by the British and French at the close of World War I.

His first example is Syria:

"In Syria, the government no longer controls many crossing points into Turkey and Iraq. Syrian rebels advance and retreat without hindrance across their country's international borders, while Shia and Sunni fighters from Lebanon increasingly fight on opposing sides in Syria. The Israelis bomb Syria at will. Of course, the movements of guerilla bands in the midst of a civil war do not necessarily mean that the state is finally disintegrating. But the permeability of its borders suggests that whoever comes out as the winner of the Syrian civil war will rule a weak state scarcely capable of defending itself."

And then Iraq:

"The result of this ever-deeper rift between the Sunni and the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad is that Iraqi troops in Sunni-majority areas behave like an occupation army. At night, they abandon isolated outposts so they can concentrate forces in defensible positions. Iraqi government control in the northern half of the country is becoming ever more tenuous."

Cockburn underlines his concern about what the future may hold:

"But as the 20th century settlement of the Middle East collapses, the outcome is unlikely to be peace and prosperity. It is easy to see what is wrong with the governments in present-day Iraq and Syria, but not what would replace them."

He sums up with his moral teaching, showing his audience that at least he has thought through through the issue closely enough to have reached the proper practical and ethical conclusions:

"If President Bashar al-Assad did fall in Syria, who would replace him? Does anybody really think that peace would automatically follow? Is it not more likely that there would be continued and even intensified war, as happened in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003? The Syrian rebels and their supporters downplay the similarities between the crises in Iraq and Syria, but they have ominous similarities. Saddam may have been unpopular in Iraq, but those who supported him or worked for him could not be excluded from power and turned into second-class citizens without a fight.

"US, British and French recipes for Syria's future seem as fraught with potential for disaster as their plans in 1916 or 2003. In saying that Assad can play no role in a future Syrian government, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, speaks of the leader of a government that has still only lost one provincial capital to the rebels. Such terms can only be imposed on the defeated or those near defeat. This will only happen in Syria if Western powers intervene militarily on behalf of the insurgents, as they did in Libya, but the long-term results might be equally dismal."

We could encapsulate the moral thrust of Cockburn's lesson as follows: 'Don't those foreign policy establishment dileanti realize that the outcome of their collective meddling in the Middle East will function only to bring about more war and suffering?'

As with Cockburn, that is, as a concerned humanitarian who's too sophisticated to fall prey to the MSM "debate" about Western "involvement" in the Middle East -- my reaction to his observations should be that I had better adopt his point of view as my own because otherwise I'll be on the side of those who are, as Cockburn's guidance suggests, if not the bad guys, then at least the idiots.

But I choose not to subscribe to his thinking, not only because of its arrogance, but also because it misses the important point: Everyone already knows that the Western powers are a bunch of criminals; what matters is the question of 'what can be done about it?'

To paraphrase Cockburn, 'Does he really think that his dismay over Western powers' visiting war and suffering upon the people of the Middle East means a damned thing to those Western powers?'

Or to paraphrase him once again, 'Does Cockburn really think that reminding his already-convinced readers of the moral degradation, or at least of the stupidity, of the Western powers is going to have one iota of effect on the manner in which their respective foreign policies are going to be executed?'

Earth to Cockburn, and Earth to Cockburn's fans: These guys don't give a rat's ass about how much suffering and death they cause. What they care about is their power.

To prove it, all one needs to do is to take a look at how, for example,  the U.S. bombed the living shit out of the hundreds of thousands -- or indeed of the millions -- of innocent civilians in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the hundred-odd thousand civilians they slaughtered in Iraq at the turn of the present century, notwithstanding popular domestic disagreement with those policy choices.

Or perhaps to consider the 15 million people who died of starvation in India while under British "administration." Or maybe the 1.5 million people massacred by the French during their rule over Algeria.

But Cockburn, rather than devoting his effort to suggesting answers to the real question, i.e., 'what is to be done,' instead flatters himself and dis-serves his readers, taking the phony moral high ground of lodging rhetorical complaints about an imperial power structure -- rhetorical complaints that are destined to have absolutely no effect.

As I said, sometimes I get annoyed by these "radical" commentators. But then again, maybe it's only my insecurities speaking.

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Pied Cow Motorcycle Club: First 2013 Rally a Big Success

Pied Cow Motorcycle Club members perform
a druid exorcism at New Hampshire's fabled
economic hamlet, Bretton Woods.

BRETTON WOODS, N.H., May 11 (TASS) - In what observers described as Pied Cow Motorcycle Club's (PCMC's) most successful charity run to date, PCMC roared into the rural hamlet of Bretton Woods, N.H. and rallied nearby the storied Mount Washington Hotel.

Local residents greeted the deafening roar of PCMC's motorcycles with enthusiasm, with Carroll, N.H., Select Board member Tammy Dubois handing PCMC a ceremonial "key to the town" at a brief ceremony to begin the rally.

"We'd like to extend a warm welcome to the Pied Cow Motorcycle Club for its first rally of 2013," said Dubois, adding, "we're very honored to act as the Club's hosts. As a token of our welcoming the Club to the town of Carroll and the village of Bretton Woods, I'm proud to present the Club with the key to the town. This key is rather unique in that if you look at it closely, you can see that it's also a handy bottle-opener to be used while enjoying your favorite beverages responsibly."

The good-natured crowd gave Dubois an extended round of applause to express its gratitude, particularly since many rally attendees had arrived carrying higher-quality beer in their saddlebags -- types that didn't commonly have twist-off tops.

ebola addressed the biker multitude after accepting Dubois' practical gift on the Club's behalf.

"As many of you are aware, today's event has been a huge success. We've raised an impressive $433,000 to be donated to the Student Debt Mutual Aid Society to help them keep the momentum going for their planned student debt boycott, tentatively scheduled to begin in 2015."

"We're all aware that the situation faced by graduating students is unacceptable in nearly every respect. It would be one thing if there were any jobs for these students to look forward to. But there aren't, and that's because they all got shipped overseas in that big corporate heist otherwise known as globalization. Global capital, with its present configuration having its beginnings in this very hamlet in 1944, and with its two primary outposts now in Washington and Manhattan, has found the newest victims of its wage slavery program in the Far East, while at the same time it has transformed what had been its North American wage slavery program into one of North American debt slavery."

"So much the better, we say, because it only makes their scheme easier to see and feel," she said.

ebola went on to preview the day's rally events, which would include seminars on writing computer viruses, a cookout, a pageant performed by special guest artists Bread and Puppet Theatre, and concluding with a druid exorcism of any evil spirits that may have bedevilled the area subsequent to the convening of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, which institutionalized the dominion of the U.S. financial elite over the world economy ever since.

A senior law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity said there were no disturbances at the rally and no arrests.

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Making the Right Eugenic Choice

Making the personal choice to use Pro-Genera.

My good friend High Arka wrote an intriguing post in which she wondered about what happens when women start having abortions based on the projected characteristics of their offspring, such choices resulting in a population that's increasingly skewed toward handsome, heterosexual males who show great immunity to disease.

I thought it was an idea worth developing in our own Petri dish.

As I see it, what happens when the technology "advances" sufficiently to allow for maternal choice based on eugenic considerations depends on what the social elite determines to be in its own best interest.

I don't think it's likely that abortions will set the tone for the eugenics program that we can reasonably expect to see, for the simple reason that abortions don't make a lot of money for the elite. Abortions are provided via a generally decentralized system, where healthcare workers and administrators handle their responsibilities locally. Health insurers don't make gobs of money from abortions.

I'd say it's more likely that the eugenics program will be spearheaded by the pharmaceutical industry, providing DNA-modifying drugs for the childbearing public that will have appreciable effects on the population as a whole, ultimately manifesting itself as a race of male super-warriors and female amazons.

One can imagine the TV ad campaign already:

[Video background: Attractive upper-middle-class woman of childbearing years leaning forward in her chair while conversing with a seated salt-and-pepper-haired man wearing a lab coat.]
[Musical background: String orchestra playing an uplifting but tastefully slow tune.]

[Female narrator:] "If you're thinking of taking the important step to have a baby, when consulting with your doctor you may choose Pro-Genera -- the pharmaceutical regimen that's been shown not only to reduce the possibility of birth abnormalities, but that's also been shown to bring out the very best in your new baby."

[Video jump-cuts to an animated and androgynous human silhouette with colorful DNA helixes spinning slowly in the silhouette's abdominal region.]

[Female narrator:] "Pro-Genera's advanced pharmaceutical technology actually works with your body's DNA to ensure that your baby's future is safe, secure, and above all promising. During your pregnancy while under the Pro-Genera therapeutic regimen and under your doctor's supervision, you'll have opportunities to select for your baby's gender, strength, hair color, intelligence -- and even [with the slightest hint of a feminine giggle in the narrator's voice] whether your little girl -- if you choose to have a little girl -- will have freckles and dainty curls."

[Video fades to the prospective mom's close-up face, where she smiles with dreamy warmth, tilting her head slightly while looking upward and to the right, as though considering something she hadn't thought of before. Video then fades to a meadow scene, where the woman and a handsome 30-something man walk hand-in-hand into the sunshine. The musical accompaniment swells to a gentle crescendo.]

[Female narrator:] "Pro-Genera is not for everyone. But if you feel that Pro-Genera might be the right choice for you, talk with your doctor. It's up to you, after all.  It's you. It's your baby. It's Pro-Genera."

[Off-camera male narrator, speaking at a quick pace:] Pro-Genera has been shown in a minority of cases to cause unwanted side effects. Such side effects can include insomnia, depression, headache, joint pain, neuralgia, vertigo, and in some very rare cases, seizures. If you experience any of these symptoms while on a Pro-Genera regimen, discontinue use and contact your doctor immediately."

[Music fades and the Pro-Genera logo superimposes itself on the screen.]

That's how I think it's going to go. I tend to doubt that there will be a growing disporportion between the genetically-engineered sexes --at least in the U.S. -- because a disproportionate ratio of men to women would have adverse effects on the sales of products geared particularly toward women, such as cosmetics, women's fashion, minivans, "chick flicks," etc.

Should birth data begin to show a growing bias toward either gender, we could expect to see specific ad campaigns gently suggesting to mothers the virtues of having babies of the minority gender. In more extreme situations we could expect to see government-sponsored public service announcement ads as well as the issue being addressed by "opinion leaders" appearing on the PBS News Hour.

But that we'll see a eugenics program put into practice in the comparatively near future is more than likely. There's too much money to be made to avoid it.

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The Dollar and U.S. Behavior, Part IV: A Slight Diversion

Econometric model used by Pied Cow in
calculating the data used in this post.

As readers may recall from our last post devoted to this topic, we left off by posing a question about whether significant calamitous events occurring at the turn of the present century had to do with a response to the introduction of the euro as a potential threat to U.S. dominion over the world economy.

The events we pointed to were: (1) the 9/11 disaster, (2) the Iraq War, and (3) the financial meltdown beginning in the U.S. in 2007 but which migrated to Europe in the form of the sovereign debt crisis beginning in 2010 and that remains unresolved.

Before we get into the question of whether these events were initiated by the U.S. political and financial elite as elements of a concerted effort to undermine the euro, however, we should start with an important threshold assertion: whether those events were related prior to their occurrences doesn't matter nearly as much as what happened subsequent to the occurrence of those events.

In other words, it doesn't matter if these events were elements of some big plot or were merely random and unrelated.

What matters is the outcome, which is that the net result of these calamities was that the U.S. dollar reasserted its dominion over the world economy, and it did so at the expense of the euro currency. More important, it did so at the expense of the potentially growing political power of elite Europeans supporting the euro's propagation.

Having said that, let's devote the remainder this post - and some of our next - to our conspiracy theory, which, at least in terms of entertainment value, is superior to an explanation of the euro's woes based on mere random events. We'll make mention of that alternative explanation in our next installment.

* * * * *

There are three basic reasons to suspect that 9/11, the Iraq War, and the financial meltdown were pre-scripted events: (1) historical precedent; (2) the importance of the issue being fought over; and (3) inferences to be drawn from the basic question in all investigations, cui bono, or 'who benefits?'

Historical Precedent. This section presents the question of whether the U.S. political and financial elite would make use of a pretext to launch wars or economic catastrophes to advance their objectives.

 War by Pretext. The political and economic events that we've seen since the introduction of the euro are hardly new on the world stage. That socially-dominant groups have been willing to use pretexts to achieve their ends is a theme as least as old as the Peloponnesian War.

A subset of going to war by pretext is the so-called "false flag" event, occurrences that are defined as political/military operations designed to deceive the public into believing that the operations were carried out by others than those who actually planned them. In modern times, the 1933 Reichstag fire in Berlin and the 1939 faked Gleiwitz attack that served as the pretext for the outbreak of hostilities in World War II are two archetypal examples.

Other noteworthy examples of false flag operations leading to war can be seen in the Franco-Prussian War and the Russo-Swedish War. Link. That the Spanish-American War was based on a false flag sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor remains a subject of debate. Link.

To resolve any doubt about whether our noble leaders in the U.S. would employ false flag tactics to achieve their objectives we need look no farther than the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident , an incident that precipitated a war that killed, at a minimum, approximately 375,000 Vietnamese civilians and where approximately 500,000 Vietnamese children were born with birth defects resulting from their parents' having been exposed to U.S. chemical weapons being dropped on them. Link.

That the elite would be willing to spill the blood of their own countrymen in the "conflict" is more than amply displayed by the 58,000-odd names etched into the the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.

Having learned the "hard lessons of Vietnam," then, would national leaders ever do it again, particularly when the primary targets of the operation would be their own citizens and valuable New York City real estate developments?

Evidence that the 9/11 disaster was carried out with at least significant government and financial community foreknowledge (if not their active participation) is so overwhelming and so widely acknowledged that it's no longer necessary to review the evidence tending to debunk the official conspiracy story that's been sold to the public in the 9/11 Report. Indeed, with the abundance reputable research discrediting the official conspiracy theory, link, it appears now that the burden of proof over who was responsible has shifted away from the skeptics and has gone back to the government, whose silence on the issue, by the way, is deafening.

Creating Economic Hardship to Advance Elite Objectives. That the financial elite wouldn't hesitate to throw the country into an economic depression to advance its interests can be seen in the example of the Panic of 1893, where in the context of an economic deflation caused by a sharp decline in silver prices (the dollar at the time was based on both silver and gold) as well as on an overproduction of railroad and industrial goods, powerful banking interests led by J.P. Morgan sold the vast amount of U.S. Treasury securities they held and demanded payment in gold, which nearly depleted the Treasury's gold reserve.

[Editor's note: A depleted gold reserve was bad because it implied a requirement for the government to pay significantly higher interest rates, which could cause a government default due to an inability to pay its bills. Further, trade imbalances were cleared by transferring gold from the deficit country's vault to that of the country running a surplus. A depleted gold reserve, therefore, implied an inability to clear a trade imbalance, which implied a need for currency devaluation as well as a danger of default, a.k.a. bankruptcy.]

Because of the Treasury's dwindling gold reserves, gold became the subject of hoarding, which led to a severe contraction of credit, which led futher to widespread bankruptcies particularly among railroads. There had been no worse economic depression up until that time in U.S. history. Seizing the opportunity, Morgan interests began buying up bankrupt railroads at fire sale prices, thereby bringing large segments of the railroad industry under banking control.

During the Panic, the magnanimous Morgan offered President Grover Cleveland a deal whereby he and London's Rothschild bank representative in the U.S. would replenish the Treasury's gold reserve from their own reserves in exchange for an exclusive sale of bonds at discounted rates that their banks would be free to re-sell to the public at significantly higher rates -- thereby enriching themselves even further from the crisis they helped to create.

So if they'd do it then, would they do it again in 2007?

What we have at this point is the following circumstantial evidence: (a) the Federal Reserve running below-market interest rates prior to the meltdown, interest rates which resulted in the "housing bubble" and the "subprime mortgage crisis," which began in 2006, (b) ridiculously leveraged derivative securities based mostly on home mortgages and issued primarily by the big financial institutions, with (c) the strongest among those institutions becoming the beneficiaries of the largest financial bailouts in history, and (d) none of the principals of those institutions being called to account in any way whatsoever.

So even though we're missing a "smoking gun," showing an explicit intent to crash the financial markets, it should be recalled that circumstantial evidence is more than sufficient to obtain a criminal conviction. Link. Since we're dealing here merely with likelihoods (that is, not with obtaining criminal convictions by proof beyond a reasonable doubt) at least for my part I'm satisfied that we've established a presumption, if not of their intent to crash the markets, then at least of their intent to profit handily upon the misfortunes of others. Thus now it's the responsibility of the financial institutions to rebut that presumption.

In any event, we can safely conclude that there's ample historical precedent to assert that U.S. political and financial leaders possess the singularity of purpose to cause calamitous events to suit their purposes.

In our next offering we'll explore the other two issues to suspect that our trifecta of disasters was were pre-ordained exercises directed at undermining the euro insofar as it presented a threat to U.S. political and financial power.

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