Poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Not to have been born at all

Was never on the menu,

Oedipus. As you may recall

A little patience, a little tenue

 

Maybe waiving the right of way

And you would have stubbed

Through your day

Just fine. But you flubbed

 

Your road rage, buddy.

Not Jocasta’s error.

The queen could have studied

Her newborn’s terror

 

screaming down the shadowed halls,

then landed a knife in her hubby’s neck –

but here you are without eyeballs

waiting for the check

 

with your greatest hits behind you.

No regrets. Even in my brief

untidy life, I too

may come to taste similar grief.

 

 

 

 

 

the ductus of the zeitgeist: we are all fucked here

 the ductus of the zeitgeist

Every social order depends on a social mystery. The conservative wants to preserve that mystery. The liberal wants to palpate it a bit, but will go on long detours never to get to the root of it. The Marxist wants to expose it.

The mystery in our current social order that we knock our heads against at every corner is this: although Western economies are getting wealthier and wealthier, in comparison to, say, the economies of the 1950s, we are constantly told that we are too poor to maintain even the social welfare programs that we once took for granted, much less add new ones. If for instance you tweet something like, we should have free higher public education, you are bound to get a responding tweet that reads, how are we going to pay for it. In vain one points out that actually, we used to have a practically free higher public education system. State universities and colleges in the postwar period were almost tuition free. At the same time, the taxes charged the middle class – the working blue collar and white collar class – were less. How could this be? But you will never find out who killed Colonel Mustard if the board game clue is being played by hired shills of the murderer. To put this in other words: according to the figures, our total wealth is immensely more than it was when the public universities were founded, but somehow we have become collectively poorer and poorer so that we can’t afford what our great grandparents had. Now, one doesn’t even have to be an ardent Marxist to question this story. Instead, one might ponder how we expect to maintain a social system in which the multiple of greater wealth taken home by upper management versus the average worker has zoomed from 12 times to about 200 times in Fortune 500 Corporations. The increase in collective poverty is, of course, relative, and it must be broken down by way of class. In the seventies, the top 1 percent took in 8- 9 percent of the nation’s income. They now take in 22 percent. https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/

The response to this effect of class warfare on the liberal-left spectrum is to call for higher taxes on the wealthy. This is a sensible suggestion, but it certainly doesn’t address what has been happening to the system since, for convenience sake, 1980. It doesn’t address, in other words, the deregulation, the attack on organized labor, the financialization of the economy, the enormous increase in IP law, or the particulars of globalization, which has fed into the fortunes of an astonishingly small class of global wealthy people – the Davos set.

Since this mystery has a readily understandable social cause, i.e. as inequality soars, the people on the lower end find themselves paying higher prices at relatively lower wages, while the people on the higher end invest and “save” more and more, giving them a much greater power over the layout of the socio-economic system - we should expect that the apologists of this particular social order will do their traditional work. Their traditional work is to blame the natural order, and to try to make the state seem illicit, as long as the state is not guarding their property, so called, but trying to sustain its social welfare commitments. The apologists present the money made by the wealthiest as something that they have “earned”, in defiance of classical economics, which would define their wealth as a derivative of non-productive labor. The apologists are always on the prowl to put up one or another plutocrat as a hero and to erect a cult around him or her. In this way, one can keep an exploitative system going until it … goes to the dogs. So, it turns out that demographics are the thing to blame for liquidating private and public pension plans, for zooming medical entitlement costs that are locked into a for profit medical and drug system, and so on.

Back in 2005, I wrote a series of columns about the private pension crisis – of now blessed memory. That was back when there were pensions. Imagine! During the Bush boom years, corporation after corporation decided that there was too much honey in that pot, and through the magic of bankruptcy laws stole it, brazenly breaking their contract with their workers and getting away with it in the courtroom, and being applauded for it in the press. One case attracted my attention in particular: Delphi Corporation, an auto parts maker that was spun off from GM. Delphi was run by a man named J.T. Battenberg III’ in the 1999-2002 period, and he luckily was able to afford any hits to his pension, because for those three years – years that in retrospect led to bankruptcy in 2005 – he made 13.4 million dollars. He had an upper management team that did well too: for instance, V.P. D. L. Runkle made 6.4 million dollars. The press was unimpressed when the shit came down, cause what they saw were assembly line workers taking home bagfuls of the ready, 50 thou per year here, 60 thou there. Shocking amounts for those mere plebes, as was noted at the time by such well known “resistance” heroes as George Will.

From 2005 - sixteen years ago: The WSJ article about the looming default of Delphi’s pension plan is a sort of map to the way the chattering classes give cover to the investment class’s big lie: the lie of our increasing collective poverty. The beginning is classic bizspeak:

“Delphi Corp.'s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing represents more than just another Midwest metal-bender facing harsh reality. It marks a true reckoning for the traditional auto industry and the end of a 75-year-old way of life in America: that of the highly paid but unskilled worker. It was a noble concept, established largely by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s. But it cannot withstand a global economy that has ended the UAW's labor monopoly in the auto industry, and a consumer body that won't pay more to subsidize costly employee benefits that most consumers themselves don't have.”

You will notice that the squeeze here is in the traditional rhetorical pattern: the consumers won’t pay because they don’t have benefits themselves. In an odd turn, the cost of production becomes a subsidy. Interestingly, this idea has a cousinship to surplus labor value. But in the capitalist apologetic, “subsidy” has a limited substitution value. For instance, the idea that the workers at Delphi are subsidizing the management or the investors is strictly verboten. We don’t go down that dark alley at the WSJ.

For the past thirty years, our social order – or at least the economic dimension – has depended on reversing the ductus of the zeitgeist. Where we once read from right to left, from new deal to the social welfare state, we now read from left to right, from the social welfare state to gilded age levels of inequality. The current CEO of Delphi, R.S. "Steve" Miller, is getting huge amounts of love in the business press because he has made tons of money taking companies into bankruptcy and dumping their pension obligations. Every once in a while, the oracles speak, and they reveal the ugly little truth that capitalism is class warfare. Warfare, of course, doesn’t have to be total. In the Keynesian order that lasted until the eighties, the truce that obtained allowed the investment class to accrue an advantage, but a smaller advantage, in the economy. This truce has been destroyed piecemeal since, but the price of that destruction has been delayed. We are going to be seeing what it means at a narrower distance to our own flesh in the coming decade, since the devil’s deal of the Reagan era is essentially unworkable: you cannot make a system in which the top one percent of households own 38 percent of the wealth and expect to continue to provide services based on a time when that upper one percent owned around fifteen percent. Obviously, the upper class knows this, and so its heroes are the innovators who draw the logical conclusion: let the dead bury their own dead, or: we can dump the costs of pensions for the workers on the workers and get away with it, cause nobody is going to call for some kind of giveback of upper management’s compensation packages, circa 1970 – 2000. Miller is a hero among business journalists because he’s up front about his thievery. The job, now, is to translate that thievery into inevitability. That, after all, is why we have a business section in the newspaper.

Ainsi Sprach 2005. The news is: it just keeps getting worse.

Thumbsuckers: a collective distemper

 There's an excellent little book by Italian researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini , "Inevitable Illusions." P.P contends that our usual cognitive mechanism suffers from certain mental "tunnels," especially when it comes to probability, causal inference, and what I would call the narrative urge -- the drive to create, out of events, stories that are consonant with the pattern of stories we like. P.P's section on Predictability in Hindsight seems particularly apposite as tv gives acres of camera time to warhawks ranting about Afghanistan. Since the case goes something like: how could the Taliban be so strong? The Taliban isn't that strong. Thus, evil Biden musta done something. Or - the Afghanistans have themselves to blame! which is an easy position for the liberal hawks to attack, you simply have to identify the bribetakers in Afghanistan - the gov and its friends - with those forced to give bribes - Afghan peasants, soldiers and stuff - and you have your story. Like most stories, it needs unified characters, and damn the divisions that might actually fragment them.

P.P reports an interesting experiment, comparing two cases. In one case, a real result, and real prior data leading up to the result, was given to the subjects of the experiment, who were then asked if they could have predicted the result from the prior data. In a second case, they gave the same data, but an opposite result (in other words, they lied). In both cases, the subjects were confident, from the data, that they could have predicted the result. As long as we think we have a certain result, we immediately create a plausible backstory; and in the creation of that backstory we become confident of our power to correctly appraise each piece of evidence.

This is an experiment that should be practiced on thumbsuckers before they ever get a seat opinionating on any media venue.

But it won't be.

sloppy imperialism 2: what it means to be objectively anti-taliban

 When you criticize someone for using a shabby, cultish product to cure cancer, you are not being objectively pro-cancer. Similarly, if you criticize the shabby cultish foreign policy that got the U.S. into Afghanistan, you are not being objectively pro-Taliban.

I don’t speak Pashto and have never set foot in Kabul. But I have noticed a few things about the U.S. and imperialism in general. I’ve noticed how the American brand of sloppy imperialism is bad for peasants and good for strongmen. I’ve noticed that, in the years since the Cold War ended, the U.S. has tried to transform its sloppy imperialism into remote control imperialism. Bring out the drones, exert total control over the battlefield sphere, yadda yadda.

To this I say: give me a fucking break.

The moral and political rubicon was crossed when the U.S. refused the Taliban’s offer to either try Osama bin Laden or send him to a moslem country for trial. As American then did not notice, but the Middle East did, when Osama bin Laden escaped there was a less than adequate search for the man. In fact, it was so inadequate it made a mockery of the American moral position demanding Osama’s surrender. It is a bit like that La Fontaine fable, The Wolf and the Lamb, in which the wolf presents several inconsistent and false reasons for attacking the lamb, but does so anyway: "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure".

Once the threshold was crossed, though, what would I – I as a railer at sloppy imperialism – have advised?

To my mind, imperialism doesn’t come cheap. What was needed, given the size of Afghanistan, was a U.S. force of at least 500,000 soldiers. What was needed was a five year occupation at the least. What was needed was putting in infrastructure on the American ticket. Electrification, minimum health care, education. The occupying power might well encourage civil society, of a type, but it would not be in name or deed a democracy. Corruption would be dealt with ruthlessly. Those who were the most corrupt would either be executed or jailed, as on this matter hangs the entire imperial exercise.

There would be no more NGO photo ops. Schooling, in Afghanistan, under the Americans was a pathetic theater. The stats as to building schools and graduating teachers disguised other stats, such as those contained in a report by the World Bank that the Bank chose not to publish in 2008, showing that 98 percent of the girl students dropped out by third grade, and 90 percent of boys had dropped out by sixth. (Rosemary Skaine, 2008). In Afghanistan, women have a long experience of rape, and are not going to send their girls to classes taught by men. Yet there are fewer female teachers, and as we know from numerous reports, teachers have to pay big bribes, amounting to a considerable part of their first years salary, just to get a post.

The trouble with this vision of Afghanistan is not the Afghanis. It is the Americans. To actually occupy and improve this central Asian space would require manpower and material that would demand a draft. You could do imperialism without a draft in the 19th century – but that moment died in the trenches of northern France in 1914. Americans speak of sacrifice tearfully, but when they have to, well, sacrifice, it is not popular. Furthermore, the amount of money needed would be in the hundreds of billions every year.

This goes against the sloppy imperialism ethos. Americans are willing to spend a trillion per year, more or less, on the military and intelligence because that money comes back into the pockets of the CEOs and stockholders of Defense contractors and radiates out in the American labor force. But spending money on making a national healthcare and educational system for Afghanis would hit the American funnybone: there is nothing as unpopular in America as foreign aid. In 2001-2005, spending on Afghanistan could have taken the place that was filled by the borrowing for the housing boom. But this is, to say the least, an unpopular way of heating up the economy.

Iraq survived, mostly, America’s sloppy imperialism. After Iraq, we did it to Libya – the perfect remote control imperialist enterprise. Ten years afterwards, Libya has yet to emerge from the fragments, the warlords, the plunge in lifestyle. And, surprise, Khaddafi’s son looks like he might become the ruler of Libya in the next year or two. The repressed return, especially when the repression is affected by minimal commitment of troops, mucho droning, and bubble gum.

No, you can’t cure cancer with Milk of Magnesia. And those who urge the Milk of Magnesia are not objectively anti-cancer – they are deeply non-serious.

PS - none of my nostrums are guaranteed to work. In fact, it is rare for an occupying power to succeed in fundamentally changing the occupied state in the modern era. But at least it has a chance.

The end of sloppy imperialism? The Afghanistan experience

 For thirty some years, I have had my ears filled with Americans - mostly white guys who of course never fought there - saying that we were winning goddamit in Vietnam. That we lost must be due to some evil stab in the back. These peeps evidently think that the 388,000 tons of Napalm dropped on Vietnam was just not enough - another spoonful of sugar and we woulda won!

A similar crackbrained meme has sprung up, inevitably, about the 20 year Afghanistan war. Another thousand soldiers, brave Americans, put on the mountain passes and presto chango, the wonderful democratic government of Afghanistan, our ally (or ventriloquist dummy) who we respect so much, but did exclude from our negotiations with the Taliban, would have shown the world that it could eliminate illiteracy in another measly half a century, or maybe seventy five years.
I've grown old, I've grown old/I shall keep the cuffs of my trousers rolled, or something like that. And so it goes - nothing is more dangerous than educating an American in international relations at some Ivy League school and plunking him or her into a think tank. It poses a danger to peoples everywhere

As we watch the gnashing of teeth among the elite who, twenty years ago, cheered on the invasion and asked no questions.

Afghanistan and Iraq took different trajectories. In Iraq, the U.S., try as it might, could not take over the central governing powers. The Shi'ite militias withstood sustained efforts by the U.S. to wipe them out. In consequence, Iraq is a shaky but independent entity. Afghanistan is another story. The U.S. basically took over the funding and security functions of the government, while pouring in money that went to U.S. defense companies and into the pockets of various corrupt local officials and Kabul elites. The habit of freeriding and lack of governance can be found in the stats. All those hearts going out to the women of Afghanistan seem curiously blind to the fact that, as of 2018, according to Unesco, only 28 percent of women were literate. And only 55 percent of men were literate. So, by UNESCO's count, since 1979, when only 5 percent of women were literate, we've had a rise of less than 30 percent. According to Asian Development Bank, after the 20 years of governance by the U.S., 47.3 percent of the people live below the poverty line. Combine these incredibly depressing statistics with the state of play when the Afghanistan government was given back one power - the control over the military, including the duty to supply them with food and wages - and their utter failure to do so and you have pretty much the picture for the Taliban's enormous advance. In American heads, the Taliban is beating women and destroying schools for girls - unfortunately, they don't have to, as the schooling for girls was part of the puppet theater Americans played for themselves, unreflected in the stats that show an utterly different case. Why is it that the American public has such a different picture of Afghanistan? I'd say that it is the provinciality of the American elites, including the media, who never bother to learn the languages of the places they report on or the people they govern. Language illiteracy points towards an even deeper disjunction between the American sahib and the average Afghanistan man or woman. That disjunction, transferred to the United States, allows for absolutely abstract discussions of what is happening in Afghanistan, without any reference, even, to statistically represented realities.

Looking back, Afghanistan is the latest - and probably not the last - country to be subjected to that malignity of the 20th century, America's sloppy imperialism. Western interventionism obscures various very distinct features of American sloppy imperialism, which favors corrupt states and rule from the homeland - the people sent out to the propped up states are not colonists, like the French in Indochina or the British in Kenya, but state functionaries who take up temporary residence. WIthin the imperial realm of the French, British, and Dutch, there were serious attempts at, for instance, learning the languages of the ruled. The United States in the Cold War sponsored something similar - anthropologists in Laos and the like. But it seems to me that the Middle Eastern wars signal a decline in that activity. From the reportes to the "experts" in Afghanistan, my impression is that the overwhelming majority had no fluency in the languages - a basic requirement for governance - and depended on a subaltern group for communication without understanding that groups own interests.

America - if we pretend it is so, it must be so!

 America's idiocracy rolls on. This NYT sub is a great expression of the lack of reality that has seized this country, from the anti-vaxxer Trump won contingent to the Trump was Putin's puppet we must support our freedom lovin' pals, like Saudi Arabia contingent.

"After 20 years of diplomacy and support, American officials are now contemplating the harrowing question of whether — and how — they might engage with a Taliban government in Afghanistan."

Here, lets pick that header apart: after twenty years of supplying massive aid to the chief ally and host of the Taliban, Pakistan; after supervising the entry into the Afghanistan government the worst of the corrupt - and very anti-women - jihadis that the U.S. supported as freedom fighters in the 80s - after suppressing the poppy crop unsucessfully while providing nothing else - while watching successive U.S. puppets in Kabul do all they can to enrich themselves while earning zip loyalty from an armed force that only fought for money - and while knowing very well that the armed force was not being paid - the U.S. has to deal with a harrowing question - is it going to recognize reality or go on another fifty year binge of pretend, as it has done with Iran? Bets are on the binge!

The thumbsukcer war that is breaking out is firmly grounded in pretend, so a few remarks before it begins: a. if you set up a government as your "ally and supply it with billions that it couldn't collect in taxes or borrow; b. and you take over the task of governing, essentially making sure that said government won't, for instance, negotiate with the Taliban; so, c., said government and its infrastructure engages in massive peculation, siphoning off money from a citizenry whose role is confined to ritual voting; and d, you try to wean the government into the normal ways of governance, as for example, oh, paying the wages of its soldiers; and e., that doesn't happen, but a certain english speaking elite begins to enjoy a whole buncha western approved lifestyle choices - good home appliances, cultural goods, etc. then: f. your country will fall, and that small group that benefitted from the American lifestyle and exercized zero responsibility towards the rest of the country will quickly become the microsized cause du jour, no questions asked. Roll the film, this is the American way of sloppy imperialism. Every time.

Look back in Anger - Afganistan November 25, 2001 to August 15, 2020

 

Ah, how it all comes back!

Long before “fake news” was a cry to rally the yahoos at presidential candidate rallies, it was a quite m.o. of the media during the Bush golden years. My blog, limited inc, which goes back twenty years, contains a treasure of fools gold culled from the asinine, warmongering, fakin’ and lyin’ press – mostly in the realm of print. I am not and never have been a listener to news on the radio or a viewer of news on tv. Eccentrically, I consider tv one of the worst platforms for news, and radio is, to me, best when playing music, second best when doing drama or standup or some funky shit, and bottomlessly bad doing news. Of course, I’ve heard that in its time, Pacifica radio was primo, but that’s hearsay.

NPR, though, I did hear enough of in the Bush golden years to realize that it viewed its job as transforming hysterical America ueber alles-ism into dulcet toned America ueber alles-ism.

So much of news is in the non-reporting. What were the headlines on November 24, 2001? For the NYT, it was a curious headline: Pakistan again said to evacuate allies of Taliban.  The story, by Dexter Filkins, begins with a graf that tells us that Pakistani airplanes are evacuating Pakistani soldiers who fought with the Taliban. Not exactly a warshaking scenario, right? What Filkins didn’t say, and what was not headlined and burned into the American psyche, with all its peppy get up ‘n kill them Taliban, is that the evacuation was not just of Pakistani soldiers.

Here's a long quote from an intelligent assessment of what happened in Kunduz:

“The request was made by Musharraf [Pakistan’s president] to Bush, but Cheney took charg- a token of who was handling Mussharraf at the time. The approval was not shared with anyone at State… until well after the event. Musharraf said Pakistan need to save its dignity and its valued people. Two planes were involved, which made several sorties a night over several nights. They took off from air bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s northern areas, and landed in Kunduz, where the evacuees were waiting on the tartmac. Certainly hundreds and perhaps as many as one thousand people escaped. Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commandos and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU (Islamic movement of Uzbeckistan) and Al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes. What was sold as a minor extraction turned into a major air bridge.” - from 102 Days of War by Yaniv Barzilai

Well, the selling went down all right, signed by Dexter Filkins and the NYT. The voices that told us that Afghanistan’s Taliban was not down for the count, as its central commanders were saved, weren’t just mocked – the news didn’t give enough information to make mocking possible. Still, some got it. Ted Rall, writing in the Village Voice in December, 1981, under the headline “How we lost Afghanistan” already got it right by doing basic research. But the mainstream press had its story. And, as America is always just,naturally it attracts the best and brightest as its allies. Thus, when Musharraf retired as Pakistan’s president in 2008, he was given a tongue washing by the NYT:

“A commando at heart, and a man of often impetuous decisions, Pervez Musharraf ended Pakistan’s support of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan after 9/11 and pledged to help the United States, becoming one of Washington’s most crucial allies in the campaign against terrorism.”

This is fake news with a bullet, my friends. Even the NYT knows it, so in one of those “walks with a schizo” that tells you that the editors at the paper are nervous about leaving reality for neverneverland entirely, they quote journalist Ahmed Rashid, whose words are modified to the format. Best not shock the Americans entirely:

“Musharraf continued to provide cover to the Taliban, but still managed to convince the Americans for many years that it was not a double game,” said Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani expert on the Taliban and the author of “Descent into Chaos,” a book that details the relationship between Mr. Musharraf and Washington. “It was a remarkable feat of balancing on the tightrope.”

Definitely that. And a remarkable feat of ensuring that the leadership of the Taliban escape unharmed and have the territory and supplies to go back. But that the U.S. is that pig ignorant, that Bush was a disaster on every level, that the slimy administration lied and lied with the help of the shiny centrist press – well, that is not a story anybody wants to headline, surely.

Ah, the memories! Rarely do you catch the NYT and the pseudo-liberal media in real lies, since they hedge the falsification. Thus, fake news instead of lying liars news. But sometimes they have to admit to lies in the interest of empire. From my blog, I reach back to the interesting case of Robert Levinson, which occurred at the end of the Golden Bush years. Levinson “disappeared” in Iran in 2007. The NYT was on the case, and for seven years kept up the heat: Iran had captured an innocent American businessman! And like all evil Islamicists, they put him in a dungeon. A businessman who made a border crossing mistake!

Well, after seven years the AP reported that Levinson was no businessman, but was a CIA agent. It was rather obvious that he was one: his family was in fact suing the CIA in court. So the public editor of the NYT, which was back when they had one, went into the case and found that the NYT had not had the wool pulled over their eyes. In fact, they’d always known the man they labelled an innocent American businessman was a CIA agent. But they held back the info not because they are in the service of the American establishment’s foreign policy – no, the answer will bring tears to your eyes, its so romantic and sweet.  As explained by the editor at the time, Jill Abramson:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/public-editor/a-missing-spy-and-the-right-to-know.html?ref=thepubliceditor&_r=0,

Holding a story entirely is “a very rare thing,” she said. “The more usual situation is to withhold a level of detail, and those decisions are excruciating.”

“In this case, Ms. Abramson said, the reason for holding back the story was not because of a government request about national security, but in deference to Mr. Levinson’s family. “What caused us to hold the story was their profound worry that he would be killed.”

Of course, that profound worry didn’t prevent them from outing dear old dad themselves. At the same time, Levinson’s disappearance, as Abramson might have known, was being used as yet another reason to attack Iran. But come hell or high water, the NYT, which would never ever ever ever ever hold back information because the government told them to – after all, the whole point is to inculcate a set of responses so the government doesn’t have to do that – but only for sweet reasons of family love.

Ah, the memories. And the forgetting – the long forgetting I’ve tried to do of America in the 2000-2010 period. Alas, what you forget can kill you – or others. In droves.