The American "progressive" as Neocon handmaiden

[Paul Rigby]

MONDAY, JANUARY 09, 2017

Dear Self-Proclaimed "Progressives": as Apologists for the Neocon-Neoliberal Empire, You Are as Evil as the Empire You've Enabled

CHARLES HUGH SMITH

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2...es-as.html

Sorry, pal, you're evil. Self-righteous indignation counts for nothing in the strict accounting of real progressivism.

Dear Self-Proclaimed "Progressive": I love you, man, but it has become necessary to intervene in your self-destruction. Your ideological blinders and apologies for the Establishment's Neocon-Neoliberal Empire are not just destroying your credibility, they're destroying the nation and everywhere the Empire intervenes.

While you squandered your political capital defending zero-cost causes like "safe spaces on college campuses," the Empire was busy killing, maiming and making refugees of women and children in Syria. President Obama and his Neocon crew (former Secretary Hillary Clinton included) aren't fools; they rely on drones and proxy armies to do their dirty work.

Neoliberalism is the Establishment's core ideology, and by supporting Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, you furthered, defended and rationalized the Empire's neoliberal expansion and exploitation. Neoliberalism's Big Lie is transforming everything into a market makes everyone richer.

The dirty little secret of Neoliberalism is that the markets it creates are rigged in favor of Elitist cronies. If you can set aside your "progressive" blinders for a moment (Bill and Barack could do no wrong for 16 long years of neoliberal exploitation), you might learn that the Presidents and party you supported ushered in the era of neoliberal pillage as public-private partnerships, Philanthro-Capitalism, and rigged markets that enriched the elitist Establishment you defend at the expense of the bottom 95% non-elites.

You defended "higher education," which was simply a code word for stripmining the bottom 95% via student loans to pay outrageous salaries for under-assistant deans of student affairs and fund lavish expansion projects.

You embraced the Corporate Media's absurd "fake news" witch-hunt, when the biggest purveyors of fake news/Imperial Propaganda are the "liberal" media you unhesitatingly believe with all your heart because it reinforces your sense of moral superiority. Never mind that the mainstream "liberal" media is owned by corporations that are in bed with the Establishment and the Empire.

You were silent when your "progressive" president engaged in a global Murder, Inc., and your former secretary of state bragged "we came, we saw, he died." Your sputtering excuses for Imperial over-reach, extra-judicial murder and the destruction and displacement of entire populations is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of real Progressivism.

Wake up, Self-Proclaimed "Progressives": you're apologists for an Evil Empire.Your devotion to the Democratic Establishment that has mastered the art of bleating politically correct speech acts while destroying entire nations renders you the classic useful idiots, on par with those who defended Stalinism and the Soviet Gulag because "it was the right thing to do."

While you devote your energy to "resisting" Trump in completely empty gestures, you did nothing to resist the imprisonment of tens of thousands of young men of all ethnicities in America's War on Drugs Gulag.

While you championed your fake-Progressive presidents and party, wealth and wage inequality soared. Did you not mind because you and your household benefited from neoliberal skimming and scamming?

How many of your self-proclaimed "progressive" peers are in the 5% who came to do good and stayed to do well?

You have the luxury of supporting ObamaCare because somebody else is paying the bills. It may be a corporation, the state, a government agency, a university, a foundation or the taxpayer, but your support of neoliberal skims and scams doesn't cost you anything.

You are a hypocrite because you only engage in causes that don't cost you anything. Prove to us that you've been questioned or arrested by the F.B.I. for political action against the Empire, and you will have earned credibility. If you don't have any skin in real resistance, then your support of politically correct speech actsis cost-free and therefore meaningless.

I am sorry to be the one to tell you, but your unquestioning support of a neoliberal- neocon president, party and candidate makes you as evil as the empire you support, via your silence, rationalizations and absurdly empty gestures in favor of cost-free political correctness.

You have surrendered principled action in favor of a self-righteous belief that indignation makes you better then everyone else. Sorry, pal, you're evil. Self-righteous indignation counts for nothing in the strict accounting of real progressivism.

Your claim to moral superiority based on indignation makes you the moral equivalent of the "conservative" married preacher who is sleeping with the church secretary and skimming church funds. His claim to moral superiority is based on indignation, too.

By supporting a corrupt, self-serving elitist Empire of privilege and power, you are an enemy, witting or unwitting, of truth, justice, self-determination and liberty.

If you want to become a real Progressive, it has to cost you. You will have to abandon the Establishment you belong to, the party you support and the cheap veneer of self-congratulatory fake-progressivism you project.

You will have to throw yourself on the gears of the stripmining, protecting-the-privileged autocratic war machine you have supported by your silence and your rationalizations. To quote Mario Savio's famous extemporaneous speech during Berkeley's Free Speech Movement:

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

Memo to Self-Proclaimed "Progressives": "safe places" on campus don't count.

The truth is, you are an embarrassment to real progressives. You should be ashamed of your empty claims to the high moral ground. If you are incapable of feeling ashamed for your self-congratulatory self-righteousness, then you are truly lost.

Look, I know you want to "do the right thing." You want to encourage and support truth, justice, self-determination and liberty. To follow your better instincts, you're going to have to admit that you've been conned, and that you've been a loyal passive puppet of an Evil Empire.

The "right thing to do" is to recognize the Neocon-Neoliberal Empire as the enemy of truth, justice, self-determination and liberty and withdraw your consent. If you still don't get it, maybe these essays will help:

Moral panic over fake news hides the real enemy the digital giants.

America was a 'stan' long before Trump Paul Krugman et al conveniently forget that corruption, cronyism and contempt for the rule of law long predated Trump.

Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Myth of Free Markets

We need to pull together, not self-divide into ever more fractious camps. The oldest and most successful Imperial strategy is divide and conquer. Don't fall for it.

[Paul Rigby]

The liberal mind crashes and burns

Sub-headline: Regardless of who Trump is or isn't...

By Jon Rappoport

January 10, 2017

https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/...and-burns/

For most dyed-in-the-wool liberals, the election was going to be business as usual.

They viewed Hillary Clinton as one of their own, a kind person with extensive political experience who would continue to guide the nation in the direction set by other kind and decent leaders---Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. It was all good. Hope, change, help, share and care, sympathy for the less fortunate, giving back, on the road to a better world. In other words, these liberals were deluded by their own vague ideals.

Nothing new there.

They believe everything big media tells them to believe. They trust in big government. They admire the notion of socialism, such as they understand it, but of course they would never come right out and admit to being socialists. That would be a bridge too far. That might commit them to a specific set of ideas, and you can count on liberals to avoid specificity like the plague. They prefer the warm fuzzy bubbly delusion of "progress" and "improvement."

Above all, they want to be seen as good.

Under no circumstances do they want to be seen as greedy or ambitious.

They have a tacit deal with their favored candidates: those leaders must never seem to be greedy, either.

The Clinton Foundation operation? A money-laundering machine set up to make the Clintons rich and powerful mountain-top mobsters manipulating US policy for cash? Impossible. Would never happen. Look the other way. Ignore it. Stay in the bubble.

Hillary Clinton playing a major role in the destruction of Libya by air attack, torn bodies lying in the streets, fiery chaos, government dissolved, vicious terrorists fighting it out to see who'll control the landscape, with the shell-shocked population caught in the crossfire? Never happened.

Sturdy, tough, dedicated family men across America robbed of their jobs by cold-blooded Bill Clinton, Obama, and Hillary Clinton Globalist maneuvers? No, never happened.

Then Trump won the election.

The liberals crashed and burned.

And now they're curling around the feet of the CIA and the Washington Post and demanding more stories about the Russians---those evil bastards they once adored from a distance---stealing the election and handing it to Trump.

They're shoving their fangs in wherever they can, desperately hoping to unseat Trump before he takes the Oath of Office.

And if somehow Trump restores some of those lost American jobs? If by chance he doesn't embark on more wars of Empire? If he destroys a swath or two of foul corruption inside the DC Beltway?

NO, NO, NO, THE LIBERALS SAY. OUR GIRL HILLARY WOULD HAVE DONE WHATEVER GOOD THERE WAS TO BE DONE. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN HER JOB. SHE WOULD HAVE DELIVERED.

Sure she would. She would have flown and floated over the White House like an angel made out of cotton candy and pointed her wand at Washington criminals and dismissed them straightaway.

These liberals will now primp and plump up the Obama presidency and, in hindsight, it will become the greatest eight years in the pantheon of human progress. Obama will eventually become Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ all rolled up into one.

But behind this, the liberal mind has crashed and burned. Its vague delusions of goodness are falling apart, flaming cinders in the wind. Liberals wander in psychotic grief throughout the land. The ideals to which they pledged their allegiance have been exposed as cover stories:

The ideal of open borders actually means: Let in so many immigrants they overwhelm public resources, while crimes escalate---all for the purpose of making chaos, whose only solution is the closing iron fist of the surveillance/police state.

The idea of one world united actually means: Under the rubric of international cooperation and friendship, keep sending companies and jobs overseas, decimating the economy and families---all for the purpose of making chaos, whose only solution is the closing iron fist of the surveillance/police state, and the government takeover of the economy.

The list of destructive intentions is much longer, and in every case the solution is the same.

But the presider over this end-game operation never made it into the White House.

And her addled liberal supporters are clueless on every level. They don't see the forest for the trees, and they don't even see the trees. They only know that their own narcissistic signaling devices, which broadcast how virtuously their precious hearts throb, are running out of juice. That's all they ever cared about, and now that, too, is going away.

Their garbling gibbering politically correct psychobabble long ago replaced their minds, so they can't begin to figure out what has happened and what is happening.

Their beloved symbols---Hollywood liberal celebrities---are saying, in sub-text, "Ignore my tears, I'm digging my fortified bunker deeper. Don't bother me."

People can call themselves liberals or progressives. But until they understand how their sentimental ideals have been used to launch destructive operations against the American people, they're at best a collection of obstructers who are preventing the dismantling of arch-Globalists.

Those Globalists intend to decimate the nation and drag it down into a bleak future---not a shred of independence or sovereignty left. Instead, America would be a mauled element of an abject planetary "utopia," which is grotesquely celebrated as "sustainable."

With justice for no one.

This is the liberal heritage.

This is what seeming-to-be-good has wrought.

This is what a vast pretense of virtue has brought to our door.

[Paul Rigby]

Uploaded on Apr 28, 2007

The Democratic Cantidate nobody knew about stole the show at the 1st Democratic Presidential Debate of the 2008 election.

[video=youtube_share;hWgYQANTQw4]http://youtu.be/hWgYQANTQw4[/video]

[Paul Rigby]

Infinite Jest: Liberals Laughing All the Way to Hell

by CHRIS FLOYD

JANUARY 18, 2017

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/18/i...y-to-hell/

Saturday Night Live had a really funny ha-ha joke the other night. Making fun of Trump's whiny tweet asking "Are we living in Nazi Germany?" the funny ha-ha SNL news guy said brightly: "Of course not! At least Nazi Germany had the guts to take on Russia!"

You see how really ha-ha funny that is? Sure, more than 25 million people died as a result of this display of "guts," and sure, the Holocaust was greatly accelerated by the invasion, which brought millions of more victims within its evil purview, and yeah, OK, it was an act of naked, insane aggression that had as its explicit aim the murder (directly and by starvation) of 40 to 50 million Jews and Slavs but Hitler sure gave it to those Russkies, right? Trump could learn from that example, right? See how ha-ha funny that is?

Especially from the funny ha-ha folks at SNL who paid Trump to be the host of their show while he was conducting the most racist, hateful political campaign in modern American history. They normalized his hatred, they gave him a national platform to show he was an all-right guy with a sense of humor, no big threat, no big deal. They normalized him, lionized him, helped him reach millions of people who pay little attention to the news. Now, of course, they're "leading the resistance" with "cutting-edge comedy" Alec Baldwin puckering his lips and fawning on a shirtless Putin and with really funny ha-ha stuff like saying Trump should totally be more like that gutsy Hitler guy and "take on Russia."

Meanwhile, Trump and his minions and the Congressional extremists are already rolling back every law and regulation they can lay their hands on in a slavering frenzy to poison the earth, remove all restrictions on corporate rapine, strip millions of health care, roll back decades of hard-fought civil rights advances, double the military budget and build a Berlin Wall on the Mexican border. It's a full-bore Barbarossa on the wellbeing and common good of the American people (and the world) but who cares about that? According to the funny ha-ha guys at SNL and practically the entire Democratic Party and the so-called liberal media what Trump should really be doing is "taking on Russia." And if he does that what? Will none of the other things matter? Will that make him "legitimate" in John Lewis' eyes?

Of course, Trump's bashing of Lewis was ignorant and racist and sinister and wrong. But look at the reality. Trump won the presidency because of a years-long, systematic, all-out vote suppression crusade by Republicans, aimed directly at African-American voters. It is not even debatable that hundreds of thousands of African-Americans across the country were locked out of voting by the GOP-passed laws including in the crucial swing states. But that didn't make Trump illegitimate in Lewis's eyes. Trump's victory was also due to the convoluted, anti-democratic Electoral College system set up in the 18th century to mollify the demands of slave-owners. But that didn't make Trump illegitimate in Lewis's eyes. Trump's sickening racist campaign didn't make him illegitimate in Lewis's eyes. Trump's egregious corruption didn't make him illegitimate in Lewis's eyes.

No, the one thing that roused John Lewis to anger and caused him to declare that Trump is illegitimate is the fact that US intelligence services have released reports alleging that Russia may have been involved in hacking emails which, by revealing the truth about collusion and vote-rigging in the Democratic primary, made the Clinton campaign look bad. That's the only thing that makes Trump illegitimate in Lewis' eyes. These are, of course, the same intelligence services that hounded Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. for years; the same ones that supplied the lies for Bush to "take on Saddam" like Hitler did Russia with a war of aggression; the same agencies that were caught lying about hacking the United States Senate a couple of years ago trying to quash a report on CIA atrocities.

But now we must implicitly believe them. We must pick up the sword they have given us, and we must have the "guts" to "take on Russia" just like Nazi Germany did. We are told this in serious tones by serious people like Obama's CIA chief John Brennan the same John Brennan who played a key role in cooking intelligence about Saddam's non-existent WMD program. He was instrumental in a process that led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in a hellish spiral of death and chaos that is still going on today. But we must believe this man now this proven liar, this dishonest dealer, this warmongering spy. We must believe when he tells us that we have to "take on Russia."

But of course, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. So in addition to the very serious words of very serious serial liars like John Brennan, we also get the same message "Take on Russia! Take on Russia! Take on Russia!" in more easy-peasy palatable forms, through venues like the funny ha-ha crew at Saturday Night Live. Take on Russia just like the Nazis did! Ha ha! Hee hee! Sure, we helped normalize Trump by putting him our hip cool funny ha-ha TV show but look at us now, sticking it to the Man, leading the Revolution and, yes, above all, "taking on Russia"!

I don't like Putin. I didn't like Putin when George Bush was looking into his soul and embracing him as a partner. I didn't like Putin when a Kremlin-connected bank gave Bill Clinton $500,000 for a single speech after he helped Russia gain a huge share of the American uranium market. (This was direct payment of "Russian gold", straight into the pockets of a man whose wife was the head of U.S. foreign policy at the time. Is this not at least as questionable as Trump's unsuccessful feelers for Russian business deals? And does this direct Russian monetary influence make Clinton's former presidency "illegitimate" in Lewis's eyes? I'm guessing not.) I don't like Putin today. But I don't think I have ever seen such a full-scale, all-out demonization and "Othering" campaign like the one going on now, not just against Putin and his loathsome regime, but Russia and Russians in general. Not even the run-up to the Iraq War was so blatant and blunt and racist. At least in the public propaganda, the Iraqi people themselves weren't demonized, but depicted as victims of a tyrant. (Of course, we know what the Dick Cheney-led oil-grabbers REALLY thought of the filthy Arabs sitting on oil that God meant for fat white guys from Wyoming.) But more and more we see the stance, the assumption, that the worthless Russian people deserve whatever's coming to them for supporting Putin. (Oddly enough, one sees the same take in "liberal" circles about U.S. regions that voted for Trump: "those people" deserve whatever they get, they're scum, they deserve to die.)

Where is all this headed? Does it begin with funny ha-ha jokes about invading Russia like Hitler did and end with actually invading Russia like Hitler did? What is it that our newly converted CIA liberals and New McCarthyite progressives really want? War with Russia? On what grounds? Do they really think Russia is going to invade Poland? (It was the other guy who did that, remember the new hero of the funny ha-ha SNL guys.) Do they want nuclear war over Crimea while they happily do business with Tibet-gobbling China (whose regime is actually more repressive than Putin's)? Everything in this broad-ranging anti-Russian campaign sounds and feels like the run-up to the Iraq War (as Patrick Cockburn points out). So is that the ultimate aim war? Is this what our good liberals and progressives are signing up for? Will they be laughing all the way to the fall-out shelter? "At least we took on Russia, ha ha ha ha!"

Yes, let's have an investigation of alleged Russian meddling in the election. Let's throw in the alleged meddling by Ukraine too. We might also look at alleged meddling by Israel, South Korea, Turkey (that perennial back-door meddler and buyer of congressfolk), by Taiwan, Saudi Arabia (which gave millions of dollars to the family foundation of one of the candidates who wasn't named Trump) and any other nation whose covert operators might have been plying their trade to influence events in 2016 (as they do in every election). I would be very happy if nefarious Trump connections were found. I'd be happy to see him be the first president ousted for treasonous pre-election dealings especially after presidents like Nixon and Reagan (the treacherous "October Surprise" that the CIA chief turned VP candidate G.H.W. Bush negotiated for him with the Iranians) got away with their treason.

But let's also, for God's sake, look at the real reasons why Trump's presidency is illegitimate. Let's focus on the real damage he is actually doing and will do. Let's have genuinely open investigations of any foreign meddling while we also have a full-blown Church Committee-like probe into America's incessant and pervasive meddling and rigging of elections all over the world, year in, year out, decade after decade. (Including the mass-murdering "regime change" interventions which could be seen as somewhat worse than hacking the emails of political hacks.)

Of course, I'm falling into an old journalism trope here. I'm saying "Let's do this, let's do that" offering some positive alternatives after a negative analysis when I know that none of this will be done. The Democrats will continue to believe that they are as pure as the driven snow, and that their CIA-fed demonization campaign against Russia is nothing like Bush's bad old CIA-fed demonization campaign against Iraq. Their McCarthyism which sees Kremlin agents behind everything, including anti-fracking campaigns and the Occupy movement and skeptical analyses of CIA reports is nothing like the bad old McCarthyism that saw Kremlin agents behind everything. Like John Lewis, they will continue to be incensed by an alleged email hacking while sidelining actual, factual, real-life, in-your-face evils like voter suppression and the ravages awaiting from the Exxon-Goldman Sachs-Christian Nationalists Trump has loosed upon the nation.

They won't look at the evils done in their progressive name by the progressive president they now mourn. They won't look at Yemen, Libya, Honduras, or how their champion became the greatest arms dealer in the history of the world, or how he deported more than 2 million people (including thousands of children fleeing the coup regime he and Hillary Clinton backed in Honduras). They won't look at how he saved the gilded wreckers of the economy and let millions of ordinary people lose their homes. They won't remember the reports in the New York Times where Obama admitted that he allowed ISIS to grow in order to meddle in the electoral process in Iraq and get another government there more to his liking. They won't remember the NYT story outlining in hushed, reverent tones the death squad that Obama personally ran in the White House, meeting weekly with security chiefs to finalize death lists of people to be assassinated that week without trial, without defense, without warning. They won't recall Obama's approval of "signature strikes," allowing numerous operators "in the field" to kill unknown people not even named "terrorist suspects" if they are spotted, by drones, carrying out "suspicious behavior" … like putting shovels in a truck. They won't recall the brutal neoliberalism of his trade policies, his Stasi-like expansion of the surveillance system, his unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers, his cowardly protection of CIA torturers.

They won't look at any of this, they won't remember any of it, they won't learn a damn thing from it. They will spend the next four years railing about Russia (and, ha ha, trying to get Trump to "take on Russia" like Hitler did, ha ha hee hee) while fighting like hell to get back to the system that gave us all the horrors named above.

Trump's rise has proven once and for all that that that system is broken. Something different is going to take its place. It could be Trumpism it could be something even worse. Or it could be something better. It would be nice to think that our Democrats and liberals and progressives and enlightened media types would leap wholeheartedly into an effort to build this better system on the blasted, rotten ruins of the old one, instead of trying frantically to resurrect it in its worst aspects. But, laying aside old tropes, I don't think they will. There is much that could be done, but I don't think they'll do it.

I would be happy to be proved wrong, of course. I find few encouraging signs among the generations now in ascendance but I do see a fire and an openness to genuine change in some of the younger generations, including my children. If we can hold on until it's their time, if we can shore up enough fragments against the ruins until they can shape the world, there might be hope. We owe them that.

[Paul Rigby]

Three days in and Trump has already kept one pledge

Paul Craig Roberts

January 24, 2017

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/01/...ne-pledge/

On Trump's third day Trump is one up on the Establishment. Can this last?

I am not a Trump booster. I am a scorekeeper.

On the third day of his presidency Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacificic Partnership (TPP). Based on this we must assume he will also deep-six the Trans-Atlantic Partnership.

Trump and his advisors regard the Pacific and Atlantic partnerships as trade deals like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that sent American jobs to Mexico at the expense of Americans.

However, the most strategic part of these agreements is that they make global corporations immune from the laws of the countries in which they do business if those laws adversely impact the profits of the global corporations.

Who decides the question? Not the courts of the countries or a world court.
The question is decided by a corporate tribunal staffed only by corporations.

In other words, the sovereign laws of sovereign countries, such as France's laws against GMOs, are subject to damage suits decided by corporate tribunals, which means the end of the legal sovereignty of countries.

The so-called trade partnerships are weapons of American economic imperialism.

Whether Trump and his advisors are aware of this or not, Trump has on his third day dealt a lethal blow to a power lusted after by US global corporations.

How will this formidable force respond to this blow inflicted upon them by Trump?

That remains to be seen if the blows that Trump has promised against the interests of the elites continue.

Global corporations are Fifth Columns in the countries in which they are incorporated and also in the foreign countries in which they do business. They have no loyalty to any country, only to the profits that comprise their bottom line. Anything that increases those profits they regard as legitimate. Anything that diminishes those profits they regard as illegitimate.

Modern capitalism is a profit-driven world, in which capitalists are devoid of the loyalty to their native countries that Adam Smith and David Ricardo assumed them to have. US global corporations have demonstrated their disloyalty to the US by moving US jobs to Asia. Think Apple, Nike, Levi, and all the rest. Jobs offshoring separates consumers from the incomes associated with the production of the goods that they consume, which leads to penury.

The rewards for the offshoring global corporations have been large profits from reduced labor and regulatory costs, resulting in executive "performance bonuses" and capital gains to shareholders and to executives with stock options or some similar income booster.

The costs have been the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an "opportunity society." High productivity, high valued added manufacturing and professional skill jobs, such as software engineering jobs, have been moved offshore, and in the case of software jobs also given to foreign H1B work visa holders. The consequence is the collapse of the state, local, and federal tax base, and the consequent assault on Social Security, Medicare, and state and local pensions.

A county like the US that gives its GNP away to other countries is locked into a transformation from First World to Third World. This is what Trump has said he will reverse.

How can he do it? Is this something that he can deliver by cutting corporate tax rates and by imposing an import or border tax?

The US is a member of the World Trade Agreement, which prohibits tarrifs or "border taxes." If this is correct, Trump would first have to pull the US out of the WTO, something that might be difficult.

However, what Trump can do is to offset the labor cost advantage to corporate profits from offshoring their production for US markets by changing how corporations are taxed.

If US corporations add value to their product in the US, that is, if they produce the products that they market to Americans in the US with American labor, they would have a lower tax rate than if they produce the products abroad with foreign labor. The difference in the tax rate can be calculated to offset, or more than offset, the advantage of the lower labor and regulatory costs abroad. This is a matter of domestic taxation and not a matter of tarrifs on foreign-produced goods, and, therefore, it is not subject to WTO rules.

Because of the globalist propaganda, Americans have forgotten that the strength of their economy was domestically-based. The development of the US economy was never based on foreign trade. It rested firmly in the rise of consumer spending power from America labor receiving the bulk of the productivity gains.

What jobs offshoring did was to transfer the income gains from productivity to corporate profits by underpaying Asian labor.

It was easy to pay Asian labor less than labor's contribution to profit, because of the immense excess supply of Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, and other labor. When labor is plentiful and jobs are scarce, labor goes begging.

Even today the Chinese and Indian labor forces are under-employed. The only way American labor can compete is to accept a wage below the US standard of living.

Trump understands this, just as did Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan.

Ross Perot was a billionaire; yet he stood up for ordinary working Americans. Yet, the left says all billionaires are evil.

Pat Buchanan was royalty in the Republican Establishment; yet he deserted them and stood up for the ordinary working American. And the left says he is a "Nixon-Reagan fascist."

Clearly, the pathetic remnant of the American left has more hate for those who stand up for the working class than they have for those oppressing the working class and those fomenting war. Why did the women so quick to march against Trump not march against the Clinton, Bush/Cheney, and Obama regimes for killing, maiming, orphaning, widowing, and dislocating millions of peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria?

That we see the left aligned with the ruling elites against Trump is proof that the left has abandoned the working class.

Chris Hedges doesn't know how desperately revolution is needed in the US. If revolution occurs, it is more likely to be led by Donald Trump than by the left.

[Paul Rigby]

The Protected, Privileged Establishment vs. The Working Class

Charles Hugh Smith

January 24, 2017

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan17/elit...s1-17.html

Meanwhile, back in reality, household income for the bottom 95% has declined while the owners of capital and their privileged, protected servants in the Establishment have gorged themselves on private wealth.

As noted yesterday in The Collapse of the Left, the working class has finally awakened to the Left's betrayal and abandonment of labor in favor of the protected privileges of the elitist Establishment. I also described the Left's Great Con:

To mask the collapse of the Left's economic defense of labor, the Left has substituted social justice movements for economic opportunities and security. This has succeeded brilliantly, as tens of millions of self-described "progressives" now parrot the Great Con that "social justice" campaigns on behalf of marginalized social groups are now the defining feature of Progressive Social Democratic movements.

This diversionary sleight-of-hand embrace of economically neutered "social justice" campaigns masked the fact that social democratic parties everywhere have thrown labor into the churning propellers of globalization, open immigration and neoliberal financial policies--all of which benefit mobile capital, which has engorged itself on the abandonment of labor by the Left.

Meanwhile, the fat-cats of the Left have engorged themselves on capital's largesse in exchange for their treachery. Bill and Hillary Clinton's $200 million in "earnings" come to mind, as do countless other examples of personal aggrandizement by self-proclaimed "defenders" of labor.

But it isn't just the Left's fat-cats who have feathered their own nests while denigrating the Working Class with arrogantly contemptuous scorn: the entire protected, privileged "liberal" elitist Establishment has responded with a very illiberal outrage that their protected, privileged skims and scams might be endangered by an uprising of the loathed and ridiculed Working Class that they reckoned would remain safely cowed and conned.

As noted yesterday, the only moment in recent history in which the Wall Street-cartel-state strongholds of privilege, wealth and power (i.e. owners of capital) felt threatened by political insurrection by disenfranchised labor was The Great Depression of the 1930s.

With the first iteration of global debt-based capitalism in near-collapse (systemic bad debt was not written off, lest the big banks' insolvency be recognized), owners of capital and the political class reluctantly swallowed modest social-democratic reforms that gave labor enough of the pie to stave off revolt / revolution (as noted by Arshad A. on my Facebook thread).

Just as Marx had predicted, this crisis of global-debt-cartel-state capitalism was the result of internal contradictions built into all forms capitalism dominated by capital and the state that protects and serves capital.
Now we face another crisis of the current iteration of global-debt-cartel-state capitalism, also the result of internal contradictions--not just financial, but cultural, energy-based and political contradictions.

The privileged, protected elitist Establishment reckoned the social-welfare programs of the 1930s and the Left's Great Cons would keep the disenfranchised Working Class permanently cowed and conned. If welfare (now called "disability," "crazy money", etc.) and the distractions of "social justice" campaigns didn't keep the Working Class fragmented and powerless, then the ceaseless drumbeat of arrogant dismissal and disdain aimed at any Working Class resistance would do the trick.

Any Working Class individual who recognized that globalization, open immigration and neoliberal financial policies were the propellers dismembering the Working Class economically and disenfranchising the Working Class politically was immediately labeled with the worst that "liberal" privileged, protected elites could spew: you're racist, Luddite, backward, etc.--in other words, you're not a rootless Cosmopolitan who loves your servitude to capital and the state like us.

Since the Left has masked its abandonment and betrayal of the Working Class with "social justice" speech acts, the worst insults the Left can dish out are those that suggest opposition to the Left's social justice campaigns.

Self-identified "Progressives" are fine with the destruction and disenfranchisement of the Working Class, as long as the politically correct speech acts praising the Left's Great Con are being uttered.

The self-serving, privileged, protected "liberal" Establishment is enraged that the Working Class is no longer following the script, i.e. remaining cowed, conned and fragmented. Like every other disenfranchised group, the Working Class has essentially zero choice of representational leadership, as the machinery of governance, finance and the mainstream media are all controlled by the privileged, protected elites of the Establishment.

So it boiled down to: choose more disenfranchisement and cowed servitude to "liberal" Elites, or vote for Trump. There was no other choice, so the Working Class voted for Trump as their only option other than surrender and servitude.

This rejection of their "betters" script has enraged their "betters," who now demand the destruction of their proxy voice (Trump) and their rebellion. The Establishment's war on Trump is beneath the surface also a war against a Working Class that has finally had enough of its arrogant, hubris-soaked, self-serving, privileged, elitist "betters" of the Establishment.

If the Establishment had deigned to offer a radical-Left leader who correctly called out the American carnage that is the Working Class experience of the globalized, open-immigration neoliberalism that has so enriched the owners of capital and their "liberal" apparatchiks, then the Working Class may well have voted for the radical-Left truth-teller.

Alas, the Left ground down any opposition to "we 'earned' $200 million" Hillary Clinton and her corrupt coterie of self-serving elites. Having beaten down, stripmined, insulted, denigrated, scorned and exploited the Working Class (whose "proper role" is to provide cannon fodder for the Elites' neocon Permanent War), the privileged, protected Establishment (like every other elite that suddenly finds its entitled dominance challenged) is in a full-blown fury: how dare the Working Class not accept our self-serving rule! We are entitled to rule! How dare they!

Meanwhile, back in reality, household income for the bottom 95% has declined while the owners of capital and their privileged, protected servants in the Establishment have gorged themselves on private wealth.

http://www.oftwominds.com/photos2016/GDP...e5-16a.png

Here's what's happened as the Left and its armies of privileged fake-Progressives threw the Working Class overboard in favor of serving capital on the First Class deck:

http://www.oftwominds.com/photos2016/cor...ts9-16.png

What will it take to shift the balance of power decisively in favor of labor? My guess is the downward mobility of another 10 or 20 million people who currently reckon themselves "middle class" into the unprotected, disenfranchised ranks of the Working Class will do it.

[Paul Rigby]

Double Standards: Where Were the Liberal Protestors During Obama's Wars?

MIKE WHITNEY JANUARY 26, 2017

http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/double-stand...amas-wars/

The election of Donald Trump has sent millions of people pouring out onto the streets to protest a man they think is a racist, misogynist, xenophobic bully who will destroy US democracy in his quest to establish himself as supreme fascist ruler of the country.

Maybe they're right. Maybe Trump is a fascist who will destroy America. But where were these people when Obama was bombing wedding parties in Kandahar, or training jihadist militants to fight in Syria, or abetting NATO's destructive onslaught on Libya, or plunging Ukraine into fratricidal warfare, or collecting the phone records of innocent Americans, or deporting hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers, or force-feeding prisoners at Gitmo, or providing bombs and aircraft to the Saudis to continue their genocidal war against Yemen?

Where were they?

They were asleep, weren't they? Because liberals always sleep when their man is in office, particularly if their man is a smooth-talking cosmopolitan snake-charmer like Obama who croons about personal freedom and democracy while unleashing the most unspeakable violence on civilians across the Middle East and Central Asia.

The United States has been at war for eight straight years under Obama, and during that time, there hasn't been one sizable antiwar march, demonstration or protest. Nothing. No one seems to care when an articulate bi-racial mandarin kills mostly people of color, but when a brash and outspoken real estate magnate takes over the reigns of power, then watch out' because here come the protestors, all three million of them!

Can we agree that there is at least the appearance of hypocrisy here?

Indeed. Analyst Jon Reynolds summed it up perfectly over at the Black Agenda Report. He said:

"If Hillary had won, the drone strikes would have continued. The wars would have continued. The spying would continue. Whistleblowers would continue being prosecuted and hunted down. And minorities would continue bearing the brunt of these policies, both in the US and across the world. The difference is that in such a scenario, Democrats, if the last eight years are any indication, would remain silent as they did under Obama offering bare minimum concern and vilifying anyone attacking their beloved president as some sort of hater. Cities across the US would remain free of protests, and for another 4-8 years, Democrats would continue doing absolutely nothing to end the same horrifying policies now promoted by a Republican." ("Delusions Shattered", Jon Reynolds, The Black Agenda Report)

He's right, isn't he? How many of the 800,000 protesters who marched on Sunday would have flown to Washington to express their contempt for would-be President Hillary Clinton?

Zero, I'd wager, and yet it's Hillary who wanted to implement the no-fly zones in Syria that would have put Washington in direct confrontation with Moscow, just like it was Hillary who wanted to teach Putin a-thing-or-two in Ukraine. But is that what the people want? Would people prefer to be led into World War 3 by a bonefide champion of liberal values than concede the post to a brassy billionaire who wants to find common ground on fighting ISIS with his Russian counterpart?

It seems like a no-brainer to me. And it's not like we don't know who is responsible for the killing in Syria either. We do.

Barack Obama and his coterie of bloodthirsty friends in the political establishment are entirely responsible. These are the people who funded, armed and trained the Salafist maniacs that have decimated the country and created millions of refugees that are now tearing apart the EU. That's right, the spillover from America's not-so-covert operation is ripping the EU to shreds. It's just another unfortunate side-effect of Obama's bloody Syrian debacle. As journalist Margaret Kimberly says in a recent post at The Black Agenda Report: "All of the casualties, the sieges, the hunger and the frantic search for refuge can be placed at America's feet."

Amen, to that. All the violence can be traced back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, home of Barack Hussein Obama, Nobel peace prize winner. What a joke. Here's how analyst Solomon Comissiong sums it up in another article at the BAR:

"Supporters of Barack Obama, and liberals in general, are disingenuous frauds. They had no issues protesting the likes of the amoral warmongering George W. Bush or the racist xenophobe, Donald J. Trump, however when it comes to Barack Obama they can find no reason to protest his mass murdering escapades. Obama supporters were recently nostalgic and teary eyed after he gave his last major speech as president of the United States, yet can find little reason to shed tears over the masses of civilians who were destroyed directly as a result of Obama's policies. Where were the emotions and tears when men, women and children were getting blown to bits by USA drone attacks, indiscriminate air strikes and bombs?…Those who protested the racist and xenophobic Trump, but not Obama or Clinton, are nothing more that disingenuous frauds and amoral cowards." ("As Obama Exits the White House, Never Forget His Destructive Imperialist Legacy", Solomon Comissiong, Black Agenda Report)

Let's be honest, Obama got a pass from his supporters strictly because of appearances; because he looked and sounded like a thoroughly reasonable bloke who only acted on the loftiest of principles. Obama was hailed as a moral giant, a political rock star, a leader among leaders. But it was all fake, all make-up and glitz behind which operated the vicious national security state extending its tentacles around the world, toppling regimes wherever it went, and leaving anarchy and destruction in its wake. Isn't this Obama's real legacy when you strip away the sweeping hand gestures and pompous rhetoric?

Of course it is. But Trump won't have that advantage, will he? Trump is not a public relations invention upon which heartsick liberals pin their highest hopes. Trump is Trump warts and all, the proverbial bull in the china shop. That's not to say Trump won't be a lousy president. Judging by the Wall Street cutthroats and hard-edged military men he's surrounded himself with, he probably will be. But the American people are no longer asleep, so there's going to be limits to what he can hope to achieve.

So the question is: How should one approach the Trump presidency? Should we denounce him as a fascist before he ever sets foot in the Oval Office? Should we deny his "legitimacy" even though he was elected via a process we have honored for over 200 years? Should we launch impeachment proceedings before he's done anything that would warrant his removal from office?

Veteran journalist Robert Parry answers this question in a recent piece at Consortium News. Here's what he said:

"The current danger for Democrats and progressives is that by bashing everything that Trump says and does they will further alienate the white working-class voters who became his base and will push away anti-war activists.

There is a risk that the Left will trade places with the Right on the question of war and peace, with Democrats and progressives associating themselves with Hillary Clinton's support for "endless war" in the Middle East, the political machinations of the CIA, and a New Cold War with Russia, essentially moving into an alliance with the Military (and Intelligence) Industrial Complex.

Many populists already view the national Democrats as elitists disdainful of the working class, promoters of harmful "free trade" deals, and internationalists represented by the billionaires at the glitzy annual confab in Davos, Switzerland.

If in a rush to demonize and impeach President Trump Democrats and progressives solidify support for wars of choice in the Middle East, a New Cold War with Russia and a Davos-style elitism, they could further alienate many people who might otherwise be their allies.

In other words, selectivity in opposing and criticizing Trump where he rightly deserves it rather than opportunism in rejecting everything that Trump says might make more sense. A movement built entirely on destroying Trump could drop Democrats and progressives into some politically destructive traps." ("Selectivity in Trashing Trump", Robert Parry, Consortium News)

Right on, Bob. A very reasonable approach to a very thorny situation.

Bravo!

[Paul Rigby]

The Demise of the Left

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS JANUARY 25, 2017

http://www.unz.com/proberts/the-demise-of-the-left/

On several occasions I have asked in my columns the rhetorical question: What became of the left? Today I answer my question.

The answer is that the European and American left, which traditionally stood for the working class and peace (bread and peace) no longer exists. The cause championed by those who pretend to be the "left" of today is identity politics. The "left" no longer champions the working class, which the "left" dismisses as "Trump deplorables," consisting of "racist, misogynist, homophobic, gun nuts." Instead,the "left" champions alleged victimized and marginalized groupsblacks, homosexuals, women and the transgendered. Tranny bathrooms, a cause unlikely to mobilize many Americans, are more important to the "left" than the working class

All white-skinned peoples except leftists, including apparently victimized women, are racist by definition. Racism and victimization are the explanations of everything, all of history, all institutions, even the US Constitution. This program of the left cuts the left off from the working class, who have been abandoned by both political parties, and has terminated the left's connection to the people.

The collapse of the left as an effective and real political force followed the Soviet collapse. The underclass had resisted their exploitation before the publication of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in 1867. But Marx raised the exploitation of labor to a fighting cause on whose side was History. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia seemed to validate Marx with its overthrow of the existing order and proclamation of Soviet Communism.

Soviet practices deflated left-wing hopes and expectations, but nevertheless an alternative system which continued to speak against capitalist exploitation existed. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, neoconservatives and neoliberals declared that History had chosen capitalism over the working class, and Marx's prediction of the triumph of the working class had been proven wrong.

The Soviet collapse caused communist China and socialist India to change their economic policy and to open their economies to foreign capital. With no rival, capitalism no longer had to restrain itself and allow widespread access to the growth of income and wealth. Capitalists began collecting it all for themselves. Many studies have concluded that the productivity gains which formerly went mainly to the work force are now monopolized by the mega-rich.

One avenue to the concentration of income and wealth is the financialization of the economy (emphasized by Michael Hudson and by Marx in the third volume of Capital). The financial sector has been able to divert the discretionary income of the working class into interest and fees to banks (mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loans).

The other avenue is the offshoring of American jobs to which Donald Trump is strongly opposed. Here is what happened:

Wall Street told US manufacturers to move their production to China in order to increase profits from lower labor and regulatory costs, or Wall Street would finance takeovers of the companies, and the new owners would raise the firms' profitability by moving production offshore. Large retailers, such as Walmart, ordered suppliers "to meet the Chinese price."

When the jobs were in the US, most of the gains in productivity went to labor. Therefore, real median family incomes rose through time, and the consumer purchasing power this income growth provided drove the US economy to success for ever more people.

When the jobs were moved to Asia, the growth in real median US family incomes stopped and declined. The large excess supplies of labor and lower cost of living in Asia meant that Asian workers did not have to be paid in wages the value of their contribution to output. The difference between the US wage and Asian wage was large and went into corporate profits, thus driving up executives' "performance bonuses" and capital gains (rising stock prices from higher profits) for shareholders. In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism published in 2013, I was able to calculate that based on current information at that time, every 1,000 manufacturing jobs moved to China resulted in a labor cost saving for the US company of $32,000 per hour. These hourly savings did not translate into lower prices for US consumers of the offshored production. The labor cost savings translated directly into the incomes of the executives and shareholders.

Thus, jobs offshoring permitted the productivity gains to be monopolized by corporate owners and executives.

Instead of responding to Trump's support of the working class and his actions in their behalf during the first week of his presidencyTrump's termination of TPP and his demand to auto manufacturers to bring manufacturing back to Americathe "left" has rallied around a victim groupillegal immigrants. The "left" even elevates non-US citizens above the US working class.

Trump was elected by the working class. If the left is defined historically as the champion of the working class, then Donald Trump is their champion and the "left" is their enemy.

Throughout the contest for the Republican presidential nomination and the contest for the presidency, the "left" was allied with the ruling establishment of mega-rich capitalist oligarchs and the warmonger military/security complex against Trump. As Trump's presidency begins, it is the "left" that wants Trump impeached and delegitimized, precisely the goals of the war- mongers and the mega-rich and their presstitutes.

Even environmental groups, such as NRDC of which I am a member, has joined the identity politics against Trump. Rhea Suh, NRDC's president, has just sent me an email in which she declares NRDC, supposedly a champion of wildlife and the environment, to be standing with women in the Women's March on Washington against Trump "in defense of our most basic rights as women." "Women matter," Rhea declares, and proceeds to blame Trump for Flint Michigan's polluted water.

I am convinced that it is a mistake for Trump to emphasize jobs at the expense of the environment. Whether or not global warming is a hoax, environmental destruction is not. It is real, and the working class, as in Flint, are suffering from it as well as from the offshoring of their jobs.

The Democratic Party died during the Clinton regime when Clinton allied with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) founded in 1985 by Al From. I have often wondered who funded the DLC. It could just as well have been the Koch brothers as the DLC turned the Democratic Party into a second Republican Party.

The DLC convinced Democrats that the defeat of the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Walter Mondale proved that economic populism is not politically viable. Democrats had to turn away from the left and embrace "mainstream values" and "market-based solutions." The DLC was a big supporter of NAFTA. Reportedly, the DLC's Will Marshall regarded pacifists and Iraq war protesters as anti-American and advised Democrats to keep their distance.

In short, the message was: compete with the Republicans for the big corporate and financial sector money. It certainly worked for the Clintons, but not for the Democratic Party.

As "market-based solutions" offshored US manufacturing jobs, the Democratic Party's finances declined with union membership and power. Today Democrats and Republicans are dependent on the same interest groups for campaign funds. Thus ended the Democratic Party's connection with the working class.

The question is: Can Trump stand for the working class when both political parties and the presstitute media, the think tanks, universities, environmental organizations, military/security complex, Wall Street, and courts stand against the working class?

Who is going to help Trump help the working class?

[Paul Rigby]

How the Left Killed the Anti War Movement

Published on 6 Feb 2017

Once the home of the anti-war movement, under Barack Obama the Left advocated a continuation of war and mass murder by using the political expediency of humanitarian interventionism. In this episode of The Geopolitical report, we unpack how establishment Democrats have continued the wars begun by President George W. Bush and expanded them into Syria and Yemen through illegal proxy wars and an ongoing and intensified drone campaign across the Middle East. Now that Donald Trump is president and the wars continue, the antiwar movement will emerge from the shadows and reveal its hypocritical political coloration:

[video=youtube_share;R3gsAdAkdOY]http://youtu.be/R3gsAdAkdOY[/video]

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[Paul Rigby]

The Leftwing Has Placed Itself In The Trash Can Of History

Paul Craig Roberts

February 3, 2017

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/02/...g-roberts/

At a time when the Western world desperately needs alternative voices to the neoliberals, the neoconservatives, the presstitutes and the Trump de-regulationists, there are none. The Western leftwing has gone insane.

The voices being raised against Trump, who does need voices raised against him, are so hypocritical as to reflect less on Trump than on those with raised voices.

Sharon Kelly McBride, speaking for Human Rights First, sent me an email saying that Trump stands on the wrong side of "America's ideals" by his prohibition of Muslim immigrants into the US.

My question to McBride is: Where were you and Human Rights First when the Bush/Cheney/Obama regime was murdering, maiming, orphaning, widowing, and displacing millions of Muslims in seven countries over the course of 4 presidential terms?

Why is it OK to slaughter millions of peoples, destroy their homes and villages, wreck their cities as long as it is not Donald Trump who is doing it?

Where does Human Rights First get off. Just another fake website, or is McBride seizing the opportunity to prostitute Human Rights First in hopes of donations from the DNC, the Soros' NGOs, the Isreal Lobby, and the ruling One Percent?

Money speaks, and alternative voices need money in order to speak. As so many Americans are indifferent to the quality of information that they get, many alternative voices are thrown back to relying on whatever money is available. Generally, it is the money of disinformation, of information that controls the explanations in ways that favor and enhance the ruling oligarchy.

Is this the position in which McBride has placed Human Rights First?

Turn now to Truthout. This website says that Trump is demonizing Muslims by denying them immigration into the US. Where has Truthout been for the past 16 years? Did Truthout not notice that the George W. Bush regime said "We have to kill them (Muslims) over there before they (Muslims) come over here."

Did Truthout not notice that Obama continued the policy of "killing them (Muslims) over there"?

How insane, how corrupt, does Truthout have to be to say that it is Trump who is demonizing Muslims?

Trump has not said that he wants to "kill them over there." He has said that if the masses of peoples we have dislocated and whose families we have murdered want to come here, they might wish to exact revenge. Having made Muslims our enemies, it makes no sense to admit vast numbers of them.

According to Bush and Obama, we are supposed "to kill them over there," not bring them "over here" where they can kill us as a payback for the murder machine we have run against them.

This is common sense. Yet, the deranged left says it is "racism."

What happens to a country when the alternative voice is even more stupid and corrupt than the government's voice?