Ironies of Overdevelopment

A common explanation for the end of the Cold War was that the Soviet Union was forced into unsustainable competition with the U.S. through the arms race. According to this theory, the USSR’s demise occurred because a “flagging, state-owned economy simply couldn’t match the escalation in defense spending” initiated by Ronald Reagan, especially the hyper-expensive (for the time) Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, that was intended to militarize space.

This explanation is convenient for proponents of ever-greater spending of our national treasure on arms and weapons. After all, if we felled the Soviet adversary by building up a vast arsenal of fear-inducing armaments, what new candidate for seriously rivalry to America could possibly arise as long as we keep up the flow of cash to Raytheon and Northrup Grumman?

As a result, we have enthusiastic backing for fancy new weapons like the trillion-dollar F-35 fighter jet and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, recently given a Hollywood/TopGun-style unveiling [above]. These big-ticket projects are lucrative sources of contracts certain to warm the hearts of elected officials standing by to welcome the jobs and economic stimulus to their districts, along with the loot needed for their next campaign. Given our system of legalized bribery, this arrangement is the classic self-licking ice cream cone.

For example, the bat-winged B-21 Raider will cost $700 million each, and the plan is to build at least 100 of these babies at an estimated cost of $32 billion, including research and development, over the next 5 years. Earlier this month, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 sailed through Congress authorizing $857 billion in “defense” spending, $45 billion more than Biden had requested. The measure included the establishment of a “multiyear, no-bid contract system” for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and other weapons manufacturers to “expand their industrial base” and assure ongoing production of essential munitions.

That sure makes it sound as though the U.S. has the wherewithal to put machinery and equipment on the battlefield at almost a moment’s notice, reminiscent of the enormous U.S. industrial mobilization that took place in the run-up to World War 2. In fact, the U.S. has rushed $20-some billion worth of weapons to Ukraine in the last nine months.

So why is Ukraine running out of ammo? Ukrainian president Zelensky recently announced his wish list for replenishing his army’s supplies, including 300 new tanks, 600 to 700 new infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 new Howitzers, and, one assumes, the ammunition, spare parts, and technical assistance to make this ordnance usable.

That sounds like a lot of hardware. But when comparing those figures to the amount of weaponry already lost, we get a slightly different view. Ukraine started off the war with 2430 tanks, ranked 13th in the world. Ukraine also had 11,435 armored vehicles and 2040 artillery batteries. Where did it all go?

Without having a clue about military matters, I would hazard a wild guess that it’s mostly been blown up by the Russians, who must have even more, plus total dominance of the skies as the Ukrainian air force was destroyed in the first week of hostilities. Furthermore, despite regular announcements that the Russians are about to “run out” of this or that essential piece of weaponry, they miraculously seem to keep churning the stuff out.

By contrast, NATO has completely depleted its reserves of useful materièl according to multiple reports. What about the back-up supplier, the US of A? Well, turns out the industrial capacity of the American powerhouse, unequaled in history, second to none, etc., etc., can’t crank out the supplies until, in some cases, the middle of next year.

Don’t take my word for it: here are Bradley Bowman and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery (ret.) writing in Defense News this past October. Year after year, they write,

. . . budgets were proposed and approved that saw crucial munitions purchased at the lowest possible rate companies could sustain, hollowing out the industrial base. Now, Washington can no longer disregard a munitions production shortfall that endangers U.S. military readiness.

What we need to do now, they argue, is to fund “major production increases of key munitions, targeted measures to expand industrial capacity, and the provision of multiyear procurement authorities that incentivize private sector investment.”

In other words, the U.S. has shot itself in the foot through its lean-and-mean (“just-in-time”) industrial policy in which companies were encouraged/permitted to locate production offshore and pocket the nice difference between what American factory workers used to get and the poverty wages they paid to virtual slaves in Honduras, Pakistan, or Cambodia. Turns out that’s actually not too smart when applied to tanks, trucks, and ammo IF you turn out to actually need them in a hurry.

But the big bucks were always in the F-21s, nuclear weapons upgrades, and the like, so everyone in Washington could bask in the bright sunlight of the MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Counter-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex) and refill their poolside cocktails from the bountiful overflow of U.S. Treasury cash without worrying about actual preparedness. How ironic it will be if financialized late capitalism turns out to be incompetent at sustaining the military machine that made its global domination possible.

Russia, on the other hand, seems to have developed an industrial/military policy that enables it to produce everything it needs for war at a fraction of the cost, perhaps because financiers and rentier capitalists have not been permitted to take over the Russian economy—which incidentally is doing just fine.

Maybe the referee of the great Cold War World Cup has not yet blown his final whistle. Now that would be an own goal for the ages.

The political class reminds us of its [class] interests

The comfortably bipartisan display of disdain for the needs of a group of essential railroad workers—led by Lunch Bucket Joe of Scranton—is yet another reminder that the fibers that bind our multicolored rulers together are far more durable than the hues of their respective ribbons.

It was truly a Bastille Day moment to see the assembled millionaires and beneficiaries of generous federal benefits, exhorted by “Labor” Secretary Walsh and Mayo Peter the transport minister (fresh from his multi-month paternity leave), smash rail workers’ fight for adequate sick leave in the wake of a HEALTH epidemic that killed off a million of us.

Not that anyone is digging up cobblestones for an assault on the headquarters of Berkshire Hathaway where railway tycoon Warren Buffett can now add a few billions to his unspeakable fortune. We’re too busy hating on either the “libs” or the “fascists” to realize that the great 99% without control over our own lives have a lot in common: the fact that we’re being equally screwed by our insatiable neo-feudal elites powerless over their addiction to acquisition.

Before this week’s tragicomically crude display of ruling class greed, we were living in a curiously insouciant time after the popcorn fart of the midterms when the Republican blowout did not occur. For a few days, the two factions, the reds and the blues, stared hatefully at each other in roughly matched hemispheres. It was easy to think that nothing much was going to change.

Although the current temporary lull is unlikely to last, the treatment of the railroad workers was a bracing reminder of what a puppet show we’re getting from these folks. The barons of late financialized capitalism are accelerating their class war, and on that score they’re fully on board with each other and against us.

Our inflamed national discourse, full of denunciation and alarm on either side, obscures the superficial nature of the political differences at the top. Do the two bands truly disagree about the country’s future course? If so, in what ways? Do they truly represent distinct social forces? If so, what are they?

On the surface, public policy disagreements are expressed in increasingly hostile language, suggestive of profound and fundamental differences on all manner of issues, things like abortion access; crime control and policing; social benefits and their expansion (or reduction); lately, public health measures; perhaps the content of education and educational materials; the eternal blame for the cost of everyday necessities. But how much do the two teams really diverge in their proposed responses once we look past the rhetorical variants?

Who represents the working classes in the face of economic turmoil and suffering? Republicans classically carry hod for big business, but the world of big finance has tilted toward Democrats in recent years. Both insist that long-standing elements of the New Deal are or soon will be on the chopping block as amply demonstrated this week. Workers are expendable, and the bosses have no problem shoving that fact in our faces because the much vaunted “resistance” promptly collapses when they do. (Some “progressive” email lists and FB sites leapt to the defense of Biden so quickly I had to be careful not to drink coffee while reading. The DSA camp, mercifully, is having none of it.)

We shouldn’t be surprised. For years unions have backed Democrats and got very little in return while rural voters and angry blue-collar workers cheered Trump and got even less. Whichever party is in power, the beleaguered masses face impossible housing costs, medical bankruptcy, educational debt peonage, and only by accident a bit of economic relief via an accidentally favorable job market.

Republicans beat the drums of crime and capitalize on people’s fears, steadily inflamed by tabloid-style coverage of the day’s horrors. For their part, Democrats go defensive and backtrack on any nuanced approaches to public safety and criminal justice—New York City is a prime example. They fall back on demagogy, call for more police, more jail time, and harsher conditions, so while the rhetoric shifts a tad this way or that, the end result is largely the same: violent crimes continue to plague us, and prisons bulge with ever more discarded lives.

Which is the party of peace? Which is the party for reining in the military industrial complex, for seeking savings in our bloated military budget? Republicans denounce the Democrats in power as too stingy with cash for the Pentagons and the arms industries; Democrats in power now outdo them in shoveling money to new initiatives and break all records with multi-billion-dollar packages for their failing adventure in Ukraine.

Which is the party defending our privacy from the intrusions of the security state and the snoops of Silicon Valley? Neither. Which is the party against regime change in foreign countries? Trump made noises against that idea, then hired a passel of neocons dedicated to keeping it up. Democrats openly claim America’s right as the shining guardian of virtue against foreign despots and criminals, conveniently defined to justify the next war, the next invasion, the next militarized hotspot.

Which party promises to preserve our civil liberties and the rule of law, the party that established dungeons in Guantánamo where detainees languish without criminal charges for 20 years or the party that promised to abolish them and never did?

Which is the party for fair terms of trade, for protecting American workers from foreign quasi-slave labor? Which party is prepared to face down the monopolies and cartels that are gobbling up the economy and turning us all into serfs?

Which is the party for preserving Medicare benefits, for protecting Social Security? The party that encouraged deep invasions by private insurance to extract juicy profits from government reimbursed programs? Oh, that would be both.

No doubt partisans of each camp will insist that they represent virtue, and the others, vice. They will point out areas where their side actively works in favor of one policy item or another that clearly distinguishes them from the others. Democrats could credibly argue that the antitrust awakening engineered by Biden appointees is a concrete break with decades of past practice. Republicans could claim they are the ones truly hostile to monopolies, especially those headed by Silicon Valley moguls who ban Trumpian speech on social media.

But which of the parties will resist the mountains of cash available at the commanding heights of the finance sector, ready to rain down on the favored to crush the rebellious? Which will defy Northrup Grumman and Raytheon and dare to propose a modus vivendi with Russia and China in a world slipping from decades of U.S. domination?

The cheers of World Cup fans at the entry of a spherical object into a net are comforting. The goals act as substitutes for the desire of our clannish biped race to plunge knives into hated foreigners, and as such I enjoy seeing their energies dissipate harmlessly. In the end, though, what do we celebrate when our team, in hockey, basketball, politics, or synchronized swimming, emerges with the gold or the trophy or the Senate seat? Those who live for “owning the libs” or crushing the Trumpian meatheads can expect only temporary relief from the gnawing doubt that our creaking, hyper-financialized, irrational economic system headed by experts in propaganda and not much else is capable of navigating the ship of state increasingly lost at sea.

Red New York Bucks the Trend

OK, I was wrong. Here’s why.

The GOP did not take over, and the national red wave did not occur.

But in New York State, it did.

Had New York’s trends translated to the entire nation, the Republicans would have swept both houses of Congress with a big majority.

As seen in the two maps above, Dem Senate candidate John Fetterman’s victory in Pennsylvania was reflected all over the state where he consistently outperformed Biden’s vote in 2020. His regular-guy persona, his active campaign in every county, and his unapologetically sharp policy stances bore fruit. He overcame what looked like a fatal health issue to send off Dr Oz by a surprisingly handy margin.

Fetterman, however, was an anomaly. He campaigned as a left-leaning populist against the Democratic machine, which universally backed his primary opponent, one of those bland, Bob Forehead types that the corporate party so loves. As Krystal Ball noted in her show, Fetterman was the most left-wing candidate in the entire national field and, contra mainstream opinion, didn’t suffer for it. He cut down on the GOP’s rural margins and won back some of the white working class, and his stroke-induced struggles may even have made him look even more real. “Fallible humanity trumps a silver tongue, celebrity, or fancy credentials” (Ball).

Fetterman refused to creep into the center in obeisance to the Beltway wisdom in his primary or the general. He slammed corporate gouging and painted Oz as an elitist dweeb. He also benefited from some re-shored jobs trickling back into the old Rust Belt, suggesting that people may sometimes actually vote their interests, despite the disdain of the punditocracy.

By stark contrast, New York Governor Kathy Hochul looks like, and is, a cookie-cutter centrist party operative who stayed mum about Andrew Cuomo’s failings during her years as his loyal lieutenant. She took over when he was forced out and ran on being a nice lady who isn’t against you getting an abortion.

Meanwhile, the city of New York is obsessed with crime and last year elected an ex-cop as mayor who echoes GOP talking points. Given that there is virtually no pushback on what to do about crime (get tougher, hire more cops, throw everyone in jail and keep them there), the Republicans dominate the discussion. Turnout was way down in the boroughs, and the usual Republican tilt upstate was overwhelming.

Hochul isn’t personally all that much to blame. She’s just a product of a sclerotic Democratic party that has as little as possible to do with small-d democracy. Its notorious Brooklyn gang does a great imitation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party, crushing any attempt to actually organize Brooklynites while pinning medals on its paid toadies and sycophants.

The national party’s bagman, sleazoid congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, is also from New York. Maloney invaded a progressive’s district after redistricting and elbowed him out because Maloney thought that seat was safer, then swanned around Europe raising cash while getting his ass handed to him in the actual voting. Bye, Sean!

Redistricting hurt the state Dems, for which they themselves are to blame (though not solely). The state tried to stop the blatant gerrymandering that benefits the party in power by assigning the task to an allegedly bipartisan commission, but that didn’t work because the state’s politicians have no interest in a fair fight. The districts got redrawn by a judge, which made them surprisingly, and unusually, competitive. Since Democrats were unmotivated, turnout tanked, and the Republicans cleaned up.

In short, New York State, despite a huge Democrat advantage in registration, almost single-handedly shepherded the Republicans into control of the House by allowing them to flip four seats. If anyone thinks accountability for this debacle will follow, they don’t understand New York.

Empty plate

 

The torrent of political ads flooding the airwaves in the last hours before Tuesday’s vote places in high relief the issues that our political class thinks should decide the outcome. Here in New York state, they boil down to very few:

 

·         Crime, which is the fault of squishy liberals who hate the police and love felons;

·         Abortion, which male predators want to outlaw so that women return to the kitchen barefoot and pregnant;

·         Gas, which is too damn high;

·         Trump, who is Evil and a dictator.

 

Missing from this list:

 

·         The deaths of 800,000 people from Covid during the Biden presidency: One doesn’t have to think it’s his fault to wonder why this actual threat to our citizens’ wellbeing is a non-issue. Two murders on the subway apparently scare people far more than several tens of thousands of cadavers in ICUs.

·         The prospect of a shooting war with a nuclear power even as U.S. military personnel arrive in Ukraine to “monitor” arms deliveries, which have been going on for months.

 

Old dudes like me can remember the arrival of “advisors” to South Vietnam as a precursor to the dispatch of a half million troops. Gingerly suggesting that a door to negotiations be opened is so taboo that two dozen Democrats were beaten into backtracking when they dared to breathe the word. Once again, we are allowed to be afraid of a nutcase coming at us with a knife on the street but not of ICBMs turning New York City into a smoldering parking lot.

 

For whom does one vote to express opposition to debtors’ prison? For whom does one vote to endorse diplomacy over war? For whom does one vote to block the consolidation of oligarchic control of our economy and the rule of money in politics or the spreading of state-techno censorship? The “democracy” that our neocon cabal insists on exporting throughout the world does not offer such choices on the 2022 ballot. 

 

Prediction is a mug’s game, but let’s play anyway: a very solid GOP victory, sweeping them into power in both houses of Congress along with some unexpected prizes that no one would have expected a month ago (e.g., NY governorship). A delegation visiting Sleepy Joe at the White House to discuss a retirement package before year’s end—not meaning Social Security.

Chaotic British leadership shuffle reflects democratic disappearing act

 

The imminent defenestration of the hapless Liz Truss that will end her flash premiership after mere weeks will result in the year’s third U.K. prime minister who, unlike the previous two, will have not been elected by anyone. Truss, for all her manifold faults, at least won a legitimizing vote in her favor by the Tory party membership. Boris Johnson, preceding her, was the beneficiary of a general election in which the country resoundingly opted for his party’s continuation in power.

Truss was famously engraved in memory by being the last person to appear publicly with the late Queen Elizabeth. But while QE edges even closer to immortality than she did while alive, we will soon wonder if LT ever existed at all.

Meanwhile, on our side of the Atlantic, we trudge grimly toward an election whose results seem guaranteed to resolve nothing about who should captain the ship of state. Election night returns, that core element of democratic rule, will be challenged in courts throughout the land. Ostensible winners will be promptly denied and discredited before the ballot inks are dry. Some losers will say the vote totals were rigged; others that the computerized voting systems are hackable, perhaps by foreign geniuses; and still others that the voting arrangements were cynically calculated to deny hostile blocs access to the urns.

Even where numerical vote totals seem more or less accurately to reflect voter choice, we will remain shadowed by hoary traditions like the blatant gerrymander, the plague of the Electoral College, and the ongoing usurpation by a Supreme Court determined to re-legislate the last 50 years, wielding a majority installed by a minority-vote president.

While we are rallied to support overseas war-making as a defense of “democracy” versus some sort of oriental authoritarianism, citizens of the collective West enjoy less of it than ever. If the Republicans retake control of the Senate—which I anticipate—the filibuster (that Democrats insist on treating as hallowed tradition) will be quickly jettisoned into the dustbin of history, and a new GOP legislative-judicial dictatorship will show us how the Will to Power really works.

Why is democracy failing us so badly and broadly and not just us but Europeans, too? They face a hungry and frigid winter but will be treated only to bland phrases and non-solutions from the unelected EU pooh-bahs who regularly overrule their presidents and prime ministers, increasingly reduced to figureheads and placeholders.

I suggest that it is because the failures of late financialized capitalism are now impossible to ignore and that “the will of the people” cannot be satisfied under current conditions. Whatever voters may want and manage to articulate in their voting choices, the political classes of the collective West cannot provide it. There is no prosperity, no healthy growth, no essential services, no social cohesion, no infrastructural modernization, no cooperative mobilization (e.g., for climate change), and certainly no peace possible as long as we continue to tolerate the dictatorship of concentrated wealth that now marks our world. While we scrap over transgender bathrooms and mass imprisonment, who is tougher on crime and who knows how to raise children, bloated plutocrats steadily push us toward a neo-feudalism in which only the incalculably rich retain any agency over their own lives.

The bright side of this march cliff-ward is that our capacity for belief is rapidly shrinking, and that is a very good thing. Undoubtedly, this growing skepticism towards officialdom is accompanied by many “morbid symptoms” as Gramsci warned are characteristic of an imploding system. We enjoy marveling at the credulousness of the adversary but will gradually appreciate where we ourselves have bought the shiny object and will discover fraud.

This weekend, I attended a fundraiser for the New York Progressive Action Network, which grew out of the 2016 Bernie campaign. It continues to advocate for popular (and populist) policies in health, education, housing, labor, transportation, and the like. Unfortunately, the speeches were almost exclusively from or about elected officials, and while speakers occasionally warned that we would not “play along” with the establishment Democrats forever, the focus of the event was to keep doing exactly that. We need a more expansive vision.

As stated above, I fully expect next months’ midterms to result in the Democrat wipe-out that some Pollyannas continue to think can yet be avoided. A party with such a stellar record of failure cannot expect to avoid total discredit; but the other one’s will follow in due course, and we should lament neither. Those empty suits are mere hod-carriers to the real elites, and we needn’t take them seriously. Their role is to inflame emotions and distract us from the dysfunction at the core of our social arrangements. The sooner we see through them, the faster we will begin to formulate alternatives.

Pluto's Return

Among the ancient gods, Pluto was both necessary and unwelcome. Somebody had to rule the underworld, especially because of the precious metals buried there. But having Gloomy Gus Pluto remain out of sight was fine with everyone, including him. He took little interest in human affairs, could only snag a wife through kidnapping, and kept company with things humans preferred to suppress, all those distasteful, ugly, painful reminders that we humans are sometimes, often, not very nice.

Pluto was the god who ruled over death, transformation, and rebirth, and he is associated with the discovery (un-earthing) of unconscious, hidden elements—not the best portfolio for winning a popularity contest. Pluto stands by as things are dug up, exposed, viewed, and acknowledged as real, whether charming or repulsive. Today, Pluto would be the god of colonic irrigations.

This year, 2022, the U.S. of A. celebrates its Pluto Return because the dwarf planet takes 246 years to orbit the sun. It’s right back where it sat in our sky in 1776, so no wonder every he or she or theyx is thinking about the moment of our national creation and its associated myths. The Supreme Court’s Catholic majority has one version; the 1619 Project another; the neocons busily redrawing the map of Europe, theirs.

A Fourth of July random massacre, then, as occurred in Highland Park last week, is a fitting Pluto Return moment. Not only was the holiday not exempt from our nation’s relentless compulsion to engage in random shoot-ups, last week’s edition was a virtual sacralization of it—a mystical union between the political entity on its own birthday and the method by which it brought itself about.

We came into being through force, including the strategic use of slaughter; we expanded through more of the same; and we have now come up against the limits of our force capacity just in time for a returning Pluto to expose the sordid underpinnings of how we possess this subcontinent and the reach of our supposed suzerainty over the entire world.

Viewed most superficially, Pluto returns as a war unfolds in Ukraine; layered atop it is another war, economic in nature; the two nestle in the swaddling clothes of competing ideologies that stage their own gladiatorial tournaments in the propaganda battles raging through cable channels, uploaded videos, reportage (such as it is), and windy think thank articles.

Struck dumb and blind, our chosen authorities insist on making all three wars worse: the longer the shooting war continues, the less there will be left of Ukraine. The neutron bomb of sanctions has boomeranged and landed explosively into the wobbling debt-o-sphere of our financialized western economies; and even the propaganda war, so deftly conducted by our division-strength phalanx of persuaders, will backfire when the depth of their duplicity becomes impossible to ignore.

And yet, there are other buried aspects to be uncovered about the moment of our national fertilization. At that instant when our American zygote sprang forth from the wiggling fishies of the founding dads implanted into the moist soils of the colonies, the populace dared to throw off the shackles of monarchy. A republic, imperfect and hypocritical, was born, with dubious possibilities for survival. And yet, it did.

So, despite the nasty parts of our Pluto story, other, less sanguinary impulses are also part of our founding DNA. We made a unique claim of citizen equality—within limits, of course, but still. While the enslavement and/or elimination of those not born into the privileged clans belied the foundational principle, nonetheless it emerged in 1776, right here on this soil. It resurfaced periodically as the polity absorbed, reluctantly and imperfectly, some of those it had brutally excluded.

Another foundational principle was quickly articulated by the earliest Americans—to confine our bloody business to the New World and not “go abroad to slay dragons [we] do not understand,” in the rarely remembered words of John Quincy Adams. The wisdom of that sentiment has long been buried, and no one is less interested in acknowledging it than the neocons ruling at Washington, London, and Brussels, determined to do the exact opposite. Yet, there it lies buried, ready to be exposed to the light of day.

It is often alleged that the neocon cabal that has seized control of our foreign policy establishment originated in a core group of individuals inspired more by the ideas of Trotsky than those of Madison or Franklin. Whether or not the Nulands and Sullivans and Kagans and Blinkens call their ideology “permanent revolution” or "spreading democracy," they carry on their crusades with the unshakeable faith of a self-appointed vanguard convinced that one more blow to the enemy will transform the world. For them, no sacrifice is too great to bring on the Millenium. The war in Ukraine not going so well? Start a new one over Taiwan. Encourage the Israelis to launch an attack on Iran. Double down, never admit error, never admit defeat, and escalate.

In their bubble world, failure can never result from their playbook. Unlike Trotsky or indeed any rational being, they have no concept of strategic retreat. In the current case, the U.S. populace, shielded from dissenting views, accepts that the war is going tolerably well and, at worst, will descend into a lengthy stalemate. But the rosy predictions of our propagandists are more faithful to their fanciful ideals than to stubborn factoids. 

Sooner rather than later, IMNSHO, Russia will dictate the terms of surrender in Ukraine, and the “rules-based international order” (i.e., “we make the rules, and you follow the orders”) will implode. Back at home, the Republican autocrats will blame it all on Biden and install themselves more or less permanently in power as they rip up the rulebooks of 1776 and 1865.

We are on the cusp of a major rearrangement of our world. Pluto’s Return promises to be full of revelations—and perhaps death and rebirth as well.

A Reckoning

 

The debacle the West has brought on itself over Ukraine is impossible to ignore any longer.  Of the three wars that began in February: the battlefield, the economic, and the propaganda—only the last, the “softest” and least tangible, can be called a victory of sorts though a Pyrrhic one at that.

The Russian invasion prompted the U.S. and its western allies to attempt to crush Russia’s economy in full confidence that the rickety old “gas station masquerading as a country” would quickly collapse and force Putin to beg for forgiveness. Bad Vlad would be overthrown or marginalized, and Russia reopened for business just like in the glory years of Yeltsin and the Harvard-boys, the neoliberal experts who auctioned off Russian resources to the oligarchs. 

Instead, the Russians turned out to be prepared for just such an eventuality. They now preside over a stable domestic scene, are selling all the oil and gas they wish, and are in the process of launching a radical reordering of a large chunk of world trade by hiving itself off from U.S. control. Russia has its own bank clearing system that smoothly took over after the Americans threw them out of SWIFT, uses its own currency with its trading partners, is finding alternatives for things it used to import from the EU, and has kept inflation at manageable levels. (No, Joe, the ruble is not "rubble.") Somehow, it will survive the loss of access to Louis Vuitton bags and Scotch whiskey, no doubt at great emotional cost.

On the other hand, the U.S. and Europe are frantically trying to rein in double-digit inflation at home while at a loss for what to do in case the recession-inducing interest rate hikes don’t work. Two EU/NATO governments already have cracked, and more will surely follow. Estonia’s 22% inflation rate knocked its coalition government, led by the free-market-liberal Reform Party, into a corner. Boris Johnson in the U.K. survived a no-confidence vote by such a slim margin that he’s now dead meat and currently standing by the door with his coat on. Face-saving commentators refuse to blame the Ukraine war for their losses and point instead to the economic messes directly caused by it. Okay, whatever. 

The Italian techno-government led by the eternal (though not, thankfully, immortal) Mario Draghi is tottering; Macron in France stands to lose his parliamentary majority; and the German Social Democrats, never strong since they took over just months ago, look set for an historic drubbing.  

And last and also least, our own dear Sleepy Joe has to be wondering where did this ass he’s holding in his hands come from. Food prices are shooting up, housing costs are galloping into the far distance (trailer parks are being seized by private equity, so that’s a disappearing option), and gas is so dear that Americans may suddenly discover that they have feet. According to Biden’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, everything is or soon will be just dandy, demonstrating that for our Democrat leaders, the only real problem is an inadequate public relations strategy and whiny citizens who don’t realize how great they’re doing.

Speaking of propaganda campaigns, casual observers deserve our sympathy for believing that the Ukraine war is going well and that triumph is near. Unfortunately, Mr Bernays had no real advertising suggestion for how to spin the destruction of one’s fighting forces by an enemy invader. Ukraine is tottering on the verge of total defeat, notwithstanding the cheery dispatches from the hotels of Kiev by a phalanx of loyal stenographers bottle-fed by western spook agencies.

The US/European dominance of the informational spaces has resulted, perversely, in a trap: given the relentless boosterism over every imagined Ukrainian battlefield advance—whether technically true, practically irrelevant, or completely made up—has left Biden, Johnson, and von der Leyen with nowhere to go once they realize that the Russians are eating their bountiful lunches.

With every passing day, Russia’s leadership has ever less reason to negotiate anything. What once could have been face-saving compromises (such as that outlined in the Minsk agreements that would have left the Donbass republics within Ukraine) are slowly disappearing from the realm of possibility. In a few more weeks, the hated Mr Putin will be dictating terms, and Russia will decide exactly how much of the former Ukraine it will absorb into its territory permanently.

When we, the citizens of the western countries who brought this about, realize that we’ve been fed a pack of lies, the reaction will be something to behold. IMNSHO, the aftermath of this war will not be merely a humiliating Afghanistan 2.0 but rather a cataclysm with existential consequences.

NATO’s continued credibility as a defense/offense alliance will be in serious doubt, and the much-ballyhooed entry of Sweden and Finland looks likely to be vetoed by Turkey’s president, who is highly attuned to the direction of the winds.

Europe, in the person of its undemocratic EU bureaucracy, remains strangely committed to its own disintegration as it faithfully toes the failed American neocon non-strategy of telling everyone what to do despite no longer having the power to make them do it.

More immediately, the economic war launched by Washington, which the Nulands and Sullivans and Blinkens were sure would bring about a quick and glorious triumph, has turned into a giant boomerang headed right for the necks of the Democrats facing the voters in a few months. The boycotts and sanctions and thefts have caused oil and food prices to spike, and there is no sign of relief from any quarter.

Failing to stave off recession and impoverishment while losing a war is not an attractive record of accomplishments for the campaign trail. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see the maniac Republicans steamrolling to victory both now and in 2024, then finalizing its rigging of the system to remain in power permanently. We will be lucky to avoid electoral dictatorship with journalists imprisoned for sedition or ultra-right-wing biker gangs and gun clubs enforcing ideological purity. Those who sat by passively while Bush, Obama, and the courts destroyed habeas corpus may be shocked to see how precious that hoary old civil right actually is.

Unfortunately for the increasingly deranged figures arising from the Trumpian swamps, they also have no answers to the systemic weaknesses of our current social and economic arrangements and will find themselves equally discredited in the long run. What looked like a slow decline and gradual political crisis with neither party able to mount a coherent response is shifting into a much higher gear.

While the upheaval is not likely to be pretty, the possibilities for a rethinking of very basic assumptions—about our country, our habits, and in the end our very selves—increase proportionally. When the old ways no longer work, painful changes ensue.

All hat, no cattle

American police, equipped with untold quantities of military-grade hardware, trained constantly, cheered endlessly, and almost always protected from accountability when they commit abusive errors, are expected to do one job with minimum dedication and skill: protect the innocent from deranged attackers even when at risk of harm to themselves.

It must come as a shock to many of our fellow citizens to see how the Uvalde cops rolled up in an armored car, kitted out in all sorts of weaponry, but couldn't stop a bumbling teenager from murdering children because they came upon a locked door and didn’t have the key.

That’s nothing compared to the cognitive dissonance that will descend upon us shortly when we realize the same phenomenon is taking place in Ukraine where US and NATO tough guys stand around in a variety of ethnic cowboy hats, egging on other guys to keep getting chewed up by the Russian military machine.

The bipartisan Washington duopoly that pours $700 billion worth of our resources annually into military preparedness lectures everyone on earth about what they had better do—or else because standing behind the threats is a vast array of high-tech weaponry. Oddly enough, that team is getting its ass handed to it by “a gas station masquerading as a country.” Just as on the domestic stage, we’re being told that all is well because our cops are lumbering through the streets with hundreds of pounds of Robocop fetish gear.

The latest breathless narrative is that M777 howitzers or the new batch of totally cool Javelin missiles or some other mystical sounding piece of equipment will turn the tide, just like in the war-porn movies we gobble up.

We’re promised that those trillion-dollar piles of weapons will keep disobedient foreigners from getting ideas and threatening “democracy.” Turns out even pesky sub-humans who haven’t discovered “freedom” and the “rules-based international order” can acquire a bit of agency.

The Uvalde cops and assorted Texas elected officials tried to answer questions about the elementary school debacle by emitting endlessstreams of word salad about the “terrible tragedy” and the valiant efforts of “officers on the scene” who “brought things under control.” They desperately attempt to deflect attention away from the utter and ignominious failure of the heroic cops to actually take a risk and stop the slaughter of children.

Similarly, Sullivan, Blinken, foggy Joe, the laughable Ursula von der Leyen, Boris Johnson, Scholz, Stoltenberg, and their clapping seals in the entire western media universe assume heroic poses on the battlements of their respective capitals. They survey the landscape and decide never to retreat an inch in the Donbass where some 10 thousand Ukrainian troops are about to face the choice between annihilation or surrender.

Victory is just around the corner, though, and the Zelenskiy government will soon be pushing back against the paper Russian tiger, whose demoralized troops are short of food, running out of ammo, and about to desert for a nice job in Barcelona. (I actually heard David Frum predict this on a webinar.)

Meanwhile, the Uvalde cops will be storming the child-assassin—as soon as they get snipers, armor, back-up, and their Starbucks orders. Don’t try to interfere, or we’ll tase you.

 

Bankruptcy

 

Back at the time of the collapse of the USSR, some commentators claimed that the West had driven the Soviets into bankruptcy by escalating the arms race beyond their means while simultaneously making sure that the Afghan war continued to drain them. All that unsustainable spending, pundits insisted, had brought the rickety Soviet system crashing down into a heap.

It may be time to ask whether the tables have been turned upon us.

President Biden has asked Congress for additional monies for the DoD, the better to prepare ourselves for a stand-off with Russia in Europe. Congress, never particularly reticent when it comes to military pork for members’ districts, promptly insisted on giving him more than he asked for.

Biden’s proposed $813 billion Pentagon bill dwarfs all previous budgets for arms and warfare, and Republicans promptly attacked it as too little. While gummint programs often come in for the criticism that they simply throw money at a problem, there is a sudden 180 pivot when the same approach is used in this particular sphere.

I remember attending a Pentagon briefing in 1981 when the incoming Reagan Administration was boosting the budget numbers left behind by Carter. The briefing book literally had the Carter numbers crossed out and new percentage increases penciled in over each item, giving the strong impression that the only thought in anyone’s mind when they got the checkbook out was, “More!”

The never-never question of, “How are we to pay for all this?” remains off limits given that, by long-established custom, it is only asked of programs that improve people’s lives such as Social Security or transportation infrastructure. But under no circumstances must this query be put to those demanding new funds for weaponry.

However, it might be a relevant inquiry these days as we witness inflation reach double-digits and our trade deficit with China (tomorrow’s enemy!) explode.

Biden and his neocon war council seem confident that the United States can stage confrontations with large and small rival powers such as Russia, China, Iran (perhaps toss in India and Pakistan as well if need be), wage economic war upon them, and emerge unscathed.

Biden’s guys are happily ensconced in a virtual world dating to about 1992 (or perhaps 1946) in which the U.S. rules the four winds and the seven seas, dictates terms, and punishes renegades.

That world has come and gone, but if you believe that perceptions matter more than reality, the Golden Age can be summoned back with magical thinking and some good old Edward Bernays-style PR.

After all, Ronald Reagan made us “feel good about America” after the hardships of the 60s and 70s, and for four decades that has stood us in good stead. We recovered from the so-called Vietnam syndrome and returned to our rightful place as the beacon of freedom and democracy around the world, as witnessed by our efforts to promote both in Panama, El Salvador, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. As long as we feel good, everything will work out fine.

Like Napoleon, we—or least Messrs. Blinken and Sullivan—believe in the historical mission of advancing democracy and free-market capitalism on the point of our nuclear-tipped lances. The neocons, true to their original Trotskyist roots, have led an ideological battle inspired by their revolutionary beliefs and backed up with the vast coercive resources of the world’s costliest military machine.

Whether it’s the best prepared or most competent remains to be seen as the neocon zealots push us ever closer to open battle with Russia on the European front. War ideas that were once far-fetched edge ever closer to reality as the Biden leadership shows no signs of discovering a reverse gear despite the evidence that Plan A hasn’t gone so well. We now face the prospect of a direct face-off.

But notwithstanding their crushing triumph in the information war, the U.S. and its western allies haven’t found a winning formula to reverse Russian advances in the field. Meanwhile, the economic war launched with vast confidence that the Russian economy (“a gas station masquerading as a country”—John McCain) would promptly collapse and force Putin to his septuagenarian knees has generated a boomerang effect that has only just begun to be felt here at home.

Americans are currently enthusiastic about the nobility of the Ukrainian cause and happy to display blue and yellow face-paint and donate to the widows-and-orphans charities springing up.

Of course, a couple of years back people were clapping out their windows for the heroic nurses tending to Covid patients, the same nurses who are now the object of hostile comments at the grocery store for their role in the “fake” epidemic and its inconvenient restrictions.

How long will Ukraine solidarity survive in the face of seven-dollar-a-gallon gas? Or apples suddenly costing $3 a pound instead of $1.75?

No doubt all we’ll need is tighter restrictions on “pro-Russian” propaganda on Twitter and YouTube to revive that fighting spirit of sacrifice. After all, the defense of Ukrainian agency and the preservation of its options for NATO membership are certainly worth canceling that family vacation or moving into a two-room flat.

Given that the US of A is the greatest country on earth with an awesome fighting force and the best of everything, we’ll be up to the challenges facing us once they’re explained by credible leaders like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump. 

The American economy dwarfs most others and certainly will respond with resilience even though its captains of industry long ago packed up the nation’s factories and shipped them to Mexico, Bangladesh, and China. But we have Facebook, Google, and many iProducts and dozens of billionaires each worth ten times the net worth of ancient Mesopotamia. We are indestructible.

Nothing can go wrong, and all will be well.

Three Wars

 

Three simultaneous wars are underway in Ukraine.

The current score is: 1-1-1: one win, one loss, one stalemate.

The information war

The U.S. is winning the war for the narrative hands down. The entire western hemisphere sees Russia as an unprovoked aggressor invading a weak, sovereign neighbor and concurs that it is an outrageous act that jeopardizes world peace. The crushing repudiation of the Russians at the United Nations this week is an apt expression of that consensus.

It is no accident that the country that essentially invented advertising and public relations (the U.S.) should excel at shaping the terms of public debate and public emotion. The Russians are rank amateurs and have paid almost no attention to the art of convincing others of their case, probably assuming that it was a lost cause. They must therefore fall back upon facts on the ground.

The ground war

Which is exactly where everything is unfolding as Russia anticipated with some minor surprises of the sort that are inevitable in war. Tales of Ukrainian resistance and valor will be short-lived. The much-discussed delays in the Russian advance are likely more to do with their decision to destroy as little as possible of Ukraine so that the parts not to be absorbed into the Russian sphere can recover rapidly. The optimistic tales emanating from the informational apparatus [see above] are mostly wishful thinking. The Americans predicted that the war would occur and announced that NATO would not be able to stop it. They were right.

The economic war

This one is a stalemate, and we should not start filling in our scorecards for at least six months to a year. Russia is not Iran, which could be (and was) kicked around and driven into penury by economic warfare, boycotts, and direct and third-party sanctions. In this case, however, many tools are available to Russia for retaliation. The extraordinary move to sanction the Russian central bank and freeze (or seize) its assets will have consequences. As long as there is a chance of ratcheting down the hostilities and limiting the damage, Russia may hold off. On the other hand, if de-escalation is not on the horizon, that war—unlike the bombs and mortar shells—may hit us directly.  

Calming Our Fears

 

Given our frailties as bipeds, we seek protection from harm. We go to considerable lengths to be reassured that we are secure in our persons, our streets, our homes. But as women generally know much better than men, the safety that we feel is based on a pretty big illusion, one that sets us up for psychological manipulation. Here’s what I mean:

I got mugged some years ago and sustained a rather harrowing injury. Once the initial shock had passed, my medical needs attended to, and the concerned friends sent away, I experienced a period of trauma that manifested as agoraphobia although no one called it that at the time. I could not leave home alone and was uncomfortable walking the half-block to my bus stop in the middle of the day. I could not stop thinking that around the next corner, there could be someone ready to come at me with a club.

I was right—there could. Yes, of course, there was no such person. I say “of course” because that’s the psychic contract we sign up to as participants in society during normal times—the comforting assumption that no one is out to get us. But it was precisely the “of course” that I could not grasp. I had seen through the veil of our consensual reality and understood that there is, in fact, nothing stopping our fellows from battering us to death and making off with our stuff. Nothing, that is, except the general agreement that we won’t. Cops exist to discourage aggression, but they arrive only after it has occurred in almost all cases and thus play a merely retributive and punitive role.

What really keeps us safe is the deep, unconscious commitment to play nice with others that most of us mostly observe most of the time.

As women know, this agreement only goes so far, and they live with the permanent threat that the contract doesn’t fully cover them in the minds of too many large, aggressive bipeds. But I digress.

Notorious, alarming crimes undermine our sense that this protective social fabric remains intact. In our case here in New York City, nothing violates our confidence in the safety of our dense, urban environment like the sudden platform shove that puts someone in the path of a speeding subway train (as occurred January 18). We circulate constantly amidst thousands of fellow riders and pedestrians and shudder when standing near those terrifying engines to think that we are only inches away from its death-dealing irons. We’re right—we are.

The publicity attached to a rash of subway-related crimes, along with an uptick in deadly shootings, resulted in the installation of an ex-cop as our new mayor. Although a dissident during his time in uniform—especially over the topic of racism in the force—Mayor Adams so far has the very selective support of the NYPD as manifested in his role at the week-long memorials and funerals of the two officers killed on Jan. 21 when responding to a domestic violence call.

I have come to know a number of DV officers who have a difficult job and, clearly, a dangerous one. In the best of cases, they defuse potentially violent situations and mobilize resources to alleviate their underlying causes. One of the deceased, Jason Rivera, 22, joined the force after witnessing what he considered inappropriate police behavior applied to Hispanic youth like himself and thought he could do better, which makes his demise even more lamentable.

That said, it is an irony and indeed a disrespect to his memory that many now use his death politically to clamor for an end to all criticism of the way policing is done in our city and country. Alvin Bragg, the new Manhattan borough district attorney, campaigned and got elected on the idea that the current bail system is overly punitive and locks people up because they’re poor. After the dual NYPD deaths, Bragg’s plans were immediately attacked by all and sundry, including the new governor, who waved the bloody shirt of the dead officers. The D.A., said one commentator, has to “march in lockstep” with the NYPD, a blatant call to eliminate what little civilian control now exists over our $6 billion-a-year police force.

Right-thinking liberals who find Trump appalling mostly concur with that line of thinking, the same way they forgot about the rule of law once the Twin Towers came tumbling down. When it comes to the plea to “keep us safe,” there is little daylight between the red and blue teams. Demagogues everywhere know this and rise to popularity with pledges to toss out the rulebook (Bolsonaro, Duterte). If their crime-fighting tactics include dropping bodies from helicopters, most of us, if frightened enough, won’t object.

However, the get-tough approach doesn’t include everyone either, and that is another aspect of our inner totalitarian that gets ignored. Consider the case of Lauren Smith-Fields, 23, found dead in her Bridgeport, Connecticut, apartment on Dec. 12. She had been with a man met online who reported her dead; the autopsy reported fentanyl, alcohol, and other substances as the cause of death. But no one phoned or visited the next of kin to inform them that the young lady was deceased. They found out by calling her building superintendent after she failed to respond to messages.

Even stranger, the Bridgeport police did not interview the man who was with her when she died, nor did they collect forensic evidence from the site. Family members who later arrived found a used condom, a pill, and other evidence that no detective had bothered to retrieve.

Would it surprise us to know that Ms. Smith-Fields was African-American and that her date was white? Would it surprise us to know that the white man was a friend of the detective assigned to the case? Would it surprise us that another African-American female was also found dead in Bridgeport on the same day and that her family was also not notified?

Would police have proceeded in the same way if Ms. Smith-Fields were a 23-year-old white woman, like, says, Gaby Petito, and if her online date had been a black dude 15 years her senior?

The get-tough-on-crime meme doesn’t really have an answer to these questions because leaving enforcement entirely to those in uniform inevitably empowers all the prejudices that they bring to the job or develop over time. But even while recognizing injustices and the historical roots of the over-policing/ under-policing of minority communities that persist to this day, most New Yorkers will cheer Mayor Adams’ tired menu of get-tough policies, which are almost guaranteed not to work—if indeed the goal is to reduce violent crime. They will work, however, to reassure people psychologically that they will be kept safe and that real tough guys are in charge.

For example, Adams has proposed to add the category of “dangerousness” to the criteria for granting or refusing bail to detained suspects. That sounds reasonable until we examine the research evidence that judges routinely think black defendants are dangerous and white ones are not even when their records and pending charges are comparable.

Sometimes, an accused offender out on bail will commit a horrific crime, and the Murdoch yellow press immediately trumpets the tragedy as cause to lock up everyone within 5 miles just for good measure. Meanwhile, the contribution of our punitive prison system to maintaining the levels of violence in our society never gets a second look.

Adams also wants to remove Fifth Amendment protections from 16- and 17-year-olds arrested on gun charges to coerce them to rat out whoever provided them with the weapon. Aside from the irony that our gun-worshipping culture refuses to recognize the very real dangers that minority youth experience and punishes them severely for doing what white Texans brag about openly, Adams’s plan opens the door for new abuses like the case of the Central Park 5 in which innocent kids were browbeaten into false confessions and sent away for over a decade. But New Yorkers then wanted a resolution of the fear-inducing rape case, and not much has changed today.

M. A. Kaishian writes in Slate:

Adams’ focus on illegal guns comes as New York State—and New York City particularly—makes legal gun ownership nearly impossible. There are many reasons why people, including minors, choose to carry guns. In 2018 and 2019, the Center for Court Innovation interviewed 330 young people in New York City about guns, violence, and proposed solutions to violence. Eighty-eight percent had a family member or friend who had been shot and 81% had been shot or shot at.

We can send these young people off to long stints in upstate prisons, but violence and particularly gun violence will not be affected. But people will feel safer, which is what we want. Subway riders interviewed in the media repeatedly insist that we need more patrol officers on the trains. But six officers were assigned to the station where the fatal shoving incident occurred.

Our public discourse around crime is emotionally charged and cannon fodder for politicians to swagger. But once fear get a grip on us, we are incapable of acting rationally or, as some would say, applying The Science™.

While we succumb with depressing regularity to appeals to our anxiety about personal safety at home, the neocon establishment in Washington is eagerly drumming up the international version. Despite no real changes on the ground, we are suddenly assured (and not permitted to doubt) that the Russians are on the verge of staging an invasion of Ukraine and that they have massed the famous “100,000 troops on the border” in preparation for doing so. While one could question whether troop movements thousands of miles away from our national borders truly place us in danger, the assumptions of our Cold War upbringing kick in smoothly and convince us that, yes, intra-European disputes are our business.

Though our ideological enemies are long departed, Russia remains, in the collective brain, the land of dangerous autocrats. Therefore, NATO must march relentlessly eastward, and Poland, Romania, and Hungary must bristle with the latest weapons systems pointing at scary Moscow. Otherwise, Russians are likely to disembark into Sarah Palin’s back yard or, alternatively, take over Vermont’s power supply with Donald Trump’s collusion.

The surreal madness at work in this latest round of propaganda would be amusing if it were not promptly swallowed by the thought leaders of the blue team and the bulk of the managerial-professional class who constitute the Democrat base. They continue to insist that Trump was a Kremlin stooge in the face of no evidence. (These are the same people eager to censor unofficial Covid statements from Spotify and elsewhere.)

Our fears have taken over; our emotions rule. We seek new scapegoats, depending on our colors, Trumpian meatheads for some, woke snowflakes for others. All join hands to “support our troops” and their commanding generals who now flail about in confusion trying to figure out what to do next.

It would take a social historian much cleverer than I to tease out what on earth is happening in our disturbed polity. But it is clear enough that we have real grounds for fears that go far beyond someone surprising us on the street with a bat. While we hate on Joe Rogan or books about the Holocaust or Vladimir Putin or the Chinese who may shellac American athletes in the Olympics, we pose no threat to those making our future dangerous as hell.

(If you wish to receive alerts of future posts here, write me at <tfrasca@yahoo.com>.)

U.S. heading for its “Suez” moment

— Both parties collude to drive the country into war(s) it cannot win. —

As we have learned nothing from the mass bamboozlement that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, everyone and her brothers are obediently mouthing the security state’s declarations that Russia wants to invade Ukraine. This faith in the mouthpieces of our armament industries’ monetary interests is touching; plus, the believers in this Revealed Truth from our masters can go to bed mocking the conspiracists and nutters of the [choose one] blue/red team, which no doubt is very calming.

Our president and his national security team say that Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine. What happens in a few weeks if no such invasion occurs? Will Biden et al. claim that they faced down the weak-kneed Russkies successfully by a vigorous combination of finger-wagging, solemn assurances, and threats to cut off Vladimir Putin’s allowance? Perhaps an emergency measure to send another $50 billion over to the Pentagon will get hustled through a suddenly unified Congress.

Meanwhile, the Russians’ demand to revamp the security architecture in Europe, including a NATO retreat from its borders, goes unanswered. Perhaps that is the idea—distract with a non-existent threat and escape the pressure to get serious about negotiations.

If so, it won’t do much but postpone the inevitable, which is straight for a “Suez moment.”

The destruction unleashed by World War 2 ended European colonialism and the long primacy of Britain and France in world affairs. Their postwar decline became painfully clear to both the old bwana powers when Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956.

Britain, France, and Israel thought they could march in and reverse Nasser’s decision to claim control over a piece of Egyptian territory. But Eisenhower, for a variety of reasons, told the invaders to go home and backed up his suggestion with threats of economic sanctions that none of the three could afford. They obeyed. It was a sign of who had emerged stronger from the war and which countries were barely intact.

Suez, as became clear later, was “the last fling of the imperial dice,” at least as far as Britain and France were concerned. (Israel, meanwhile, continues the tradition in a new form.) Britain’s prime minister Anthony Eden was forced out two months later as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. relegated the rest of the world to the role of chorus.

Our current bosses are hurtling toward a similar rude awakening despite the array of shiny armaments at the disposal of our top-heavy military establishment. Aside from successful invasions of tiny Caribbean islands (Grenada) or devastating bombing runs over defenseless troops with no air cover (Iraq), it’s hard to identify any significant U.S. military success in decades with the possible exception of the smashing of the ISIS franchise in Iraq with the help of the hated Iranians and their local allies.

No one doubts that Americans can destroy cities and reduce whole countries to rubble, but direct combat of the sort being contemplated is another animal entirely. The parade of failed generals now hibernating comfortably on defense-contractor corporate boards might attest to that.

Whether in Ukraine on the Taiwan Straits, U.S. policymakers are in the grips of delusion.

Does anyone doubt that Russian troops fighting on their own frontiers would have a massive psychological motivation that might be lacking among NATO’s untested soldiers? Does anyone really mean to find out?

Should we doubt the nationalistic fervor that would drive however many millions of soldiers the Chinese might set to work on reclaiming Taiwan? Is it worth accumulating heroic war stories to learn the answer?

We have lived for many years under the assumption that neither of those countries would dare to confront the United States given the arsenals of nukes that stand ready to rain down upon them. If one listens to the statements coming out of Beijing and Moscow, however, one gets quite a different impression: that the two powers feel directly threatened NOW and are willing to call the Americans’ bluff.

Does Washington’s policy elite really want to get into a nuclear showdown over an island 10,000 miles away or a failed state in the middle of Europe?

(Incidentally, watch any mainstream news about Ukraine and ask yourself how often the Russians are quoted offering their views on what is happening, should happen, or how to defuse the situation. Of course, all U.S. news is fair and balanced—between Republican Americans and Democrat Americans.)

According to some of those, escalation up to and including World War III is just what we need. Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker said in early December the U.S. should consider “first-use nuclear action” staged from the Black Sea. 

In case we think such nutters are only found in the GOP, Wicker was joined by Evelyn N. Farkas, a Pentagon official during the Obama administration, who advocates “readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare for war.” Minor issues like attempts to undermine the outcome of a presidential election fade into irrelevancy when the two sides link arms, cast their gaze toward foreign enemies, and rattle nuclear sabers.

This is a dangerous game, and yet the assorted neocons that populate the U.S. foreign policy apparatus march in lockstep, confident that U.S. domination of the world over the last 75 years—and especially the last 30—is destined to continue indefinitely. They seem not to notice that our country is profoundly weakened by internal divisions, stripped of its industrial base, run by Sovietesque gerontocrats who rule a populace who believe in very little of what they say and even less of what they do.

Underlying the strategic myopia of what renegade CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Counter-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank Complex), sometimes called “The Blob,” is a philosophical view of geopolitics and indeed of humanity itself that rejects any possibility of cooperative coexistence among the peoples of the world. The concept that China and Russia might be allowed to pursue their interests in relative peace and that a modus vivendi might be reached among all the heavily armed world powers to tackle other urgent global problems makes no appearance in the encyclopedic textbooks of their incestuous think tanks.  

No doubt such zero-sum thinking has been the norm for millenia of human history, the motivation for its endless destructive wars and periodic bouts of pitiless slaughter. Therefore, with such encouraging outcomes, we should keep doing the same thing?

We, or at least they, seem to think that nothing has changed since ancient times when the Romans cast about constantly to see where the natives might be getting restless and sent out punitive patrols to rein them in, kill a few thousand, and restart the flow of tribute. They feared allowing their subjects any real independence or permitting encroachments into the empire’s far-flung territories by rivals. That’s how Washington thinks. They speak as if failure to dominate means being dominated as if the world were a vast international S&M dungeon with no room for “vanilla” behavior of any kind.

While rival blue and red camps brawl in Congress and soon will do so on the streets as well, a curious unanimity prevails between them when facing the prospect of disobedient foreign actors flexing their local muscles. Democrats and Republicans alike hasten to undermine presidents who fail to maintain a properly belligerent attitude toward our official enemies; this applies to both Trump and Biden and especially to the permanent foreign policy/ security apparatus that surrounds them.

The only danger to our blobiferous MICIMATT parallel state is the frightening idea that peace may break out and obviate the need for more trillions deposited at the Pentagon for distribution among friendly industries and lobbyists.

The incapacity of our leadership to contemplate any approach other than intimidation and demands for obedience is not merely a function of narrowness of vision or Beltway groupthink, though these are real enough. It is also the expression on the world stage of our 40-year surrender to the neoliberal article of faith that markets, and markets alone, must determine our course of action in all spheres of life.

Such ideological enslavement gave cover to the titans of financial power and their friends in elite circles such that when they acted to make themselves immensely rich at the expense of most everyone else, they could convince themselves they were being smart. Did the greed come first or the ideas justifying it? Does it matter?

Did Bill Clinton really believe his own rhetoric that inviting China into the World Trade Organisation and enabling the Chinese Communist Party to set millions of wage slaves in competition with the American industrial heartland would convert China into a democratic capitalist imitation of ourselves? Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. The industrialists and financiers drooling over the profit opportunities offered by crushing U.S. workers were all too happy to pretend to believe it whether they did or not. No one paused to consider the long-term consequences because the quarterly profit statements were rosy, and that is enough because Markets.

Do members of Congress really think the U.S. needs to escalate war fever against Russia and China, or do their role as recipients of legal bribes from the MICIMATT dictate their shared worldview? Northrup Grumman doesn’t care.

We have gone so far down this road that the system is incapable of righting itself. Biden, the product of a lifetime of toadying to these corporate cowboys and parroting their justifications, is the perfect expression of our decadent and paralyzed state.

It is my belief that the U.S. will continue down the confrontational precipice with its two rivals and, in one form or another, sooner or later, lose, either little by little or all at once. I expect this process will take no more than five to seven years and that we will wake up by the end of the decade as no longer the world’s preeminent power.

The shock of taking our new place as the chastised victims of our leaders’ hubristic overreach will be something to behold and to experience. Once accomplished, a stimulating discussion about where we want to go next will be possible for the first time in living memory.

[Let me know if you would like email alerts of new posts.] <tfrasca@yahoo.com>