LBJ Not Seeking A Second Term Was THE Defining Moment In Contemporary American Politics

newstatesman |  The tendency to treat political struggles and disagreements as forms of conspiracy is not only a polarising feature of the current moment, but also, paradoxically, a stabilising one. American political development over the past several decades has not merely been divided into opposing camps, around, for example, questions of race and gender equality, reproductive rights, or gun ownership; it has also been locked into a dynamic of partisan competition that encourages threat inflation, yielding important contributions from both parties to expansively coercive institutions, in the name of collective security. From the early Cold War, US partisanship revolved around which party was better prepared to fight communism, leading to covert actions, proxy wars and full-scale military invasions, culminating in a disastrous, immoral war in Vietnam. By the 1970s, this morphed into a question of which party was tougher on crime – a policy orientation that delivered a regime of mass incarceration unprecedented in world history. The attacks of 9/11 raised the question of which party would keep the American “homeland” safe from foreign predators, leading to two more decades of fruitless war in the Middle East and west Asia, and a deportation delirium that has swept up millions. What if the banal revelation at the end of the US wars on communism, crime and terror is simply that Americans are their own worst enemies?

The spectre of civil war might be better understood as a metaphor for waning confidence in the (liberal) US empire. The breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as a regulative ideal is part of an attrition of what Raymond Geuss has called the “sheltered internal space of… Homo liberalis” fashioned during the post-1945 golden age of American pluralism, rising affluence, increasing tolerance and expanding civil rights. The “Great Society”, the name that was given to the effort to institute social democratic liberalism inside the US, and the civil rights revolution that made the country a formal multi-racial democracy for the first time in its history, was its high watermark. With the war in Vietnam raging, and the protests of impoverished black residents and rising crime roiling American cities, however, President Lyndon Johnson concluded that the US now faced a “war within our own boundaries”, before abdicating instead of pursuing a second full term. Americans have been talking about civil war ever since.

Why did the NGO borg pivot to niche identities? Because the cause of substantive black equality is so much harder than declaring the gender binary defunct through acts of bureaucratic stipulation and language change

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) July 15, 2022

In these same years, a conception of politics as civil war by other means captured the imagination of the modern US right on its ascent to power. The politician and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater laid down the gauntlet in the 1960s with a famous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”. Ronald Reagan was his successful heir, rising to the presidency while declaring himself a “state’s righter” against an overweening federal government. Shrinking the welfare state would go hand in hand with expanding the carceral state: “running up the battle flag”, as Reagan put it, against a feral, drug-abusing, black “underclass”. In 1994, forging the first GOP majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in four decades, Newt Gingrich made these inner war analogies explicit. Our politics is a “war [that] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars”, he argued. “While we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefield, nonetheless, it is a true civil war.” Trump’s “American carnage” was something of a belated echo.

The modern GOP has avidly fought Gingrich’s version of civil war at the ballot box and in the courts, leveraging counter-majoritarian institutions and using the individual states as laboratories for reactionary politics: advancing model legislation against public regulations; periodically mobbing local school boards; gerrymandering congressional districts; undermining public unions; funnelling federal spending on health, welfare and police via block grants to maximise state discretion; defending a right of foetal personhood that trumps a woman’s right to bodily autonomy; making it more difficult to register to vote and to cast a vote; stimulating white revanchism and moral outrage against expressions of public disorder and anti-normative behaviour at every opportunity.

In the process, they successfully captured the commanding heights of the judiciary, and have now successfully rolled back landmark, 50-year-old national civil rights gains: striking down federal voting-rights protections, ending a national right to abortion and overturning legal protections for criminal suspects in police custody. Winning two of the last five national presidential elections with a minority of the popular vote, and deploying the Senate filibuster during periods in the congressional minority, the GOP has pursued civil war by other means as a well-honed and effective strategy.

In the face of this challenge, it is difficult to judge the Democratic Party as anything more than a feckless, mildly recalcitrant partner. Over the past 40 years, it has alternatively sought to ratify, in gentler tones, GOP-driven projects and demands to lower corporate taxes, get tough on crime, end welfare as we know it, expand the ambit of deportation and sustain open-ended military authorisations. It has sought to placate vulnerable constituents with forms of symbolic recognition and modest regulatory action, often undergirded by weak executive authority and moral sentiment. It is the undeniably saner and more constructive of the two electoral options Americans are forced to choose between. But it also operates an effective pincer movement against alternatives further to the left that seek to transform skewed imbalances in the power of capital and labour, police authority and public safety. When constituents choose to fight, for example, against police abuse, or for labour rights, Democrats are missing in action, or else warning against unpopular opinions that will awaken the monster on the right. Forever counselling that we choose the lesser evil, they have instead grown habituated to living with the fox inside the chicken coop.

Nixon Is Remembered For Petty Scandal Not His Transformative Corporate Capture Of Government

nplusonemag |   Turning points in history require distance to understand their full complexity. For Watergate, the initial arrests of which mark their fiftieth anniversary this summer, there is yet no similar judgment on the magnitude of Woodward’s telling in The Origins of the New South. The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing country in the late 19th century could be brought together by open collusion of business interests, we give little attention today to how changing commercial opportunities during the Vietnam War might have torn apart the political accommodations that followed World War II.  Watergate’s place in this history today is but a hairline fracture to the New Deal Order; a symbol rather than a decisive moment. This is a serious misinterpretation that leaves unexamined the universal business consensus behind Richard Nixon in both 1968 and 1972.

Watergate was nothing less than the visible manifestation of a hypogeal realignment. A basic continuity in American trade and financial policy has persisted ever since the Nixon–Ford Administrations. In foreign policy, the historian Bruce Cummings faithfully describes the period after Watergate as “Nixonism without Nixon.” Most potently for a present reacquainted with the discomforts of inflation, planned recessions and stagnation remain the preferred tool among policy experts for regulating growth since our trust in price freezes and direct controls on wages and prices has never recovered from the Nixon scandal. The narrowing of our understanding of the import of the investigations that followed the 1972 campaign to the quirky personality and outrageous private pronouncements of Richard Nixon himself leaves these legacies unexplained.

The break-in’s fiftieth anniversary marks a new occasion for taking stock. Alongside a fiftieth anniversary edition of Bob Woodward (no relation) and Carl Bernstein’s canonical account of the investigation at the Washington Post, Washington journalists Garrett M. Graff and Jefferson Morley each published their own updated investigations into the presidential entanglements of the early 1970s this year. Yet to the disappointed eye of the trained historian there is no semblance of a synthesis on the horizon: the basic contours of interpretation remain those set during the spectacle itself, in the Senate hearings and their exclusions. If there is debate about the subject of these books, it will unfold on those vintage terms of 1973 and 1974—the pliability of patriotic fervor and its tendency towards fascism; the roles of fear and vanity in political leadership; the importance of the CIA and its exact role in the burglary and the cover-up. In its narrow focus on process—the motions by which the 37th President violated civil liberties, extorted donors, lied to Congress, and obstructed justice—Watergate’s prevailing interpretation also invites an easy analytic leap to Donald Trump. The neat portability of this historical analogy obscures not only the historical significance of the Nixon helmsmanship at a critical moment of capitalist transformation, but our own understanding of economic interests today and their relationship to modern party politics. Woodward and Bernstein give this reductive interpretation of the present their own authorial imprimatur: “Both Nixon and Trump have been willing prisoners of their compulsions, to dominate, and to gain and hold political power through virtually any means.”

Yet the burglaries were never the story. Control of the executive branch remained critical at a moment of global shift: détente, the end of the gold-dollar standard, the rise of government economic planning across the global south and its threat to corporate autonomy at home, and the challenge to the material basis of organized labor’s power in the old manufacturing industries of the US Northeast and Midwest. The money from Nixon’s election campaigns that paid for the Plumbers was, after all, donated by blue-chip corporations, intent on ensuring their man remained at the wheel to steer the nation through the moment’s economic dislocations and the ascendant social pressures to transform the American welfare state into something more capable of ensuring stability on popular terms. For all this, the Democrats’ media spectacle failed to alter the course of economic development or fundamentally challenge the emerging social order—a historic failure for which the ablutions of impeachment hearings have never quite absolved American democracy.

Finance Won The Darwinian Struggle On The Corporatist Evolutionary Threshing Floor

theatlantic |  Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.

Meanwhile, AMLO Being A Bro - Fitna Hook Us Up With Some Gas And Gasoline

whitehouse |   Yes, I fully coincide with what you have proposed, President Biden.  And I could summarize everything we’ve been saying in five basic items of cooperation.

Number one, since the energy crisis started, Mexico has used 72 percent of its crude and fuel oil exports to United States refineries — 800,000 barrels a day.

Therefore, we decided that while we’re waiting for prices of gasoline to go down in the United States — and I hope that Congress approves or passes your proposal, Mr. President —

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  It has gone down for 30 days in a row.  (Laughs.)

PRESIDENT LÓPEZ OBRADOR:  (As interpreted.)  — of lowering — lowering prices, yes.  That’s it.

In the meantime, while we’re waiting for prices to go down, we have decided that it was necessary for us to allow Americans who live close to the borderline so that they could go and get their gasoline on the Mexican side at lower prices.

And right now, a lot of the drivers — a lot of the Americans — are going to Mexico, to the Mexican border, to get their gasoline.

However, we could increase our inventories immediately.  We are committed to guaranteeing twice as much supply of fuel.  That would be considerable support. 

Right now, a gallon of regular costs $4.78 average on this side of the border.  And in our territory, $3.12. 

Let me clarify something, and I also want to take advantage of this opportunity to thank you, Mr. President.  Most of this gasoline, we are producing it in the Pemex refinery that you allowed us to buy in Deer Park, Texas.

Two, we are putting at the disposal — or sending at the disposal of your administration over 1,000 kilometers of gas pipelines throughout the southern border with Mexico to transport gas from Texas to New Mexico, Arizona, and California for a volume that can generate up to 750 megawatts of electric energy and supply about 3 million people.

Three, even though the USMCA has made progress for the elimination of tariffs, there are still some others that could be immediately suspended.  And we could do the same with some regulations, regulatory measures, and tedious procedures or red tape in terms of trade related to foodstuffs and other products so that we can lower prices for consumers in both our countries, always being very careful in the protection of health and the environment.

Four, starting a private-public investment plan between our two countries to produce all those goods that will be strengthening our markets so that we can avoid having importations from other regions or continents.

In our country, we shall continue producing oil throughout the energy transition.  With the U.S. investors, we are going to be establishing gas-liquefying plants, fertilizer plants, and we shall continue promoting the creation of solar energy parks in the state of Sonora and other border states as well.

And we’re going to accomplish this with the support of thermal electric plants and also through transmission lines to produce energy in the domestic market, as well as for exports, to neighboring states in the American union, as for instance, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.  

It’s also important to mention that, two months ago, we took the sovereign decision of nationalizing lithium in Mexico.  This is a fundamental mineral, a fundamental input to advance in our purpose not to depend on fossil fuels.  And this will be available for the technological modernization of the automotive industry among our great countries — the countries of the USMCA. 

Five, orderly migration flow and allowing arrival in the United States of workers, technicians, and professionals of different disciplines.  I’m talking about Mexicans and Central Americans with temporary work visas to ensure not paralyzing the economy because of the lack of labor force. 

The purpose of this plan would be to support and to have the right labor force that will be demanded by the plan you proposed and that was passed by Congress of using $1 trillion for the construction of infrastructure works. 

And it’s also indispensable that I say this in a very sincere fashion in the most respectful manner: It is indispensable for us to regularize and give certainty to migrants that have for years lived and worked in a very honest manner, and who are also contributing to the development of this great nation. 

I know that your adversaries — the conservatives — are going to be screaming all over the place, even to Heaven.  They’re going to be yelling at Heaven.  But without a daring, a bold program of development and wellbeing, it will not be possible to solve problems.  It will not be possible to get the people’s support. 

In the face of this crisis, the way out is not through conservatism.  The way out is through transformation.  We have to be bold in our actions.  Transform not maintain the status quo. 

On our part, we’re acting in good faith, with all transparency, because there shouldn’t be selfishness between countries, peoples that are neighbors and friends.  On the other hand, integration does not signify hegemony or subjugation. 

And, President Biden, we trust you because you respect our sovereignty.  We are willing to continue working with you for the benefit of our peoples.  Count with our support — count on our support and solidarity always. 

Long live the United States.  Viva México lindo y querido.  Long live Mexico — dear Mexico, loved and beautiful Mexico.  Viva México.

NAFTA, Drought, And Sanctions Blowback - Bout To Crater The Mexican Corn Supply...,

mexiconewsdaily |   Back in the late 1980s and leading up to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the PYMES (small and medium size companies) did not understand the effects of the opening of the Mexican economy to foreign investment.

My two Mexican partners and I attended a conference where the speaker kept repeating, “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.” We followed the advice and survived, but many in the middle class did not and soon found themselves facing bankruptcy.

Today Mexico is facing the same problem and those most affected are the 47% (AMLO’s latest figures) of those living below the poverty line and are paying no attention. The key word is corn. To summarize: The four largest exporting countries of corn are the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine. The second largest importer of corn in the world is Mexico, where the product is the most important food staple for the making of tortillas.

They are also not aware that parts of the Midwest of the United States where corn is harvested have been suffering from drought, nor are they aware that President Biden insists that the growers of corn turn this into ethanol as a substitute in light of growing gasoline prices.

The poor may be aware that there is a war going on between Russia and Ukraine but have no idea that globally this has affected the supply of corn in the world.

Those Mexicans living below the poverty line, what the sociologist Oscar Lewis called “The Culture Of Poverty” based on two books titled The Children of Sanchez and Five Families, are totally unaware of these global realities that will inevitably have a serious effect on their well-being. The word partial famine comes to mind.

What does this have to do with the expat community? It behooves every one of us to talk to those Mexicans who work for us and explain these realities by advising them to save as much money as possible for the upcoming crisis. As an example, my gardener and handyman has many part-time jobs so he can invest in building a home for his wife and three-year-old daughter.

I told him, “Stop investing your money in a new home for the time being and concentrate on feeding your family. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”

I hope he listens, but I have my doubts. It’s the effort that counts.

Beldon Butterfield is a writer and former publisher and media representative. He is retired and lives in San Miguel de Allende.

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Resisting Mass Formation...,

amidwesterndoctor  |  One of the greatest challenges for individuals with advanced knowledge in a subject is the gradual realization of just how little they know (conversely, as shown by the Dunning–Kruger effect, the less individuals know, the more they overestimate their knowledge and competence). Being able to proceed forward despite not knowing if you were on the correct path requires a great deal of courage, especially when most of your peers oppose what you are doing. That said, virtually every person who has been highly successful and changed the world for the better had this type of courage.

In some cases, we are just born with it, but in the majority cases, it comes from living a life that cultivates courage. One of the most useful words of wisdom I heard at a young age was “comfort makes you weak” which is important because our technocratic society has tried to create the illusion that if we always comply with it, it can guarantee our safety and prevent all discomfort.

This is fundamentally impossible (and often creates many medical issues), but many traumatized and pampered members of society have become so ingrained with this mythology they now lack the courage to venture outside safe spaces created by the technocracy. Unfortunately, if you lack the courage to oppose something you know is wrong, as history repeatedly shows, that same evil will eventually show up at your doorstep, and by the time it does it will have gained enough momentum that you will no longer have the ability to oppose it.

The strength that produces courage ultimately arises from our connection to ourselves (particularly our physical body) and our connections to each other. Hence, like many things in medicine where you cannot reduce a problem to one single component, mass formation is also a complex process that weaves into so many other aspects of our society that it must also be dealt with holistically. Just remember: 

Postscript: I have noticed that many groups will develop a collective consciousness that often transcends the individual participants (often leading them to rapidly adopt terrible behaviors once they join the group holding that collective conscienceless) and can often persist for generations. The best term I ever came across for this, Egrigore, was something I came across on wikipedia. I cannot fully endorse the idea because of where it originates from, but over and over I have come across situations where it appears an egrigore has taken over a group (particularly in Allopathic medicine, which I believe carries fairly malignant Egrigores).

Reading Desmet’s work has led me to suspect crowd psychology and the mass formation concept provides another potential explanation for the “Egrigore” concept I keep on running across. Put differently, this means I believe in addition to Mass Formation applying to society as a whole, it can also manifest within specific subgroups which have some type of strong ritualistic link to each other especially when they also have to suffer through a collective hardship.

When Fraudulent AssClowns Battle - Only Pissants Get Hurt...,

forummag  |  “Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it,” James Carville, the political strategist often credited with Clinton’s 1992 victory (and, let’s be honest, not much else), whinged to Vox last year, 100 days into Joe Biden’s presidency. “It’s hard to talk to anybody today—and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party—who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.”

If someone makes up an identity grounded in nothing but subjective feeling and a state recognizes it as constituting a protected class, subjective reality becomes immune to challenge and the ultimate political contest becomes to control what feelings are recognized by the state

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) July 9, 2022

The statement is immediately self-contradictory, sure—it’s hard to talk to anyone who doesn’t say this, but not out loud? But it’s already setting the stage for a year of recriminations and preemptive blame-shifting for what is widely expected to be a midterm bloodbath for the ruling Democratic party. The political scientist Ruy Teixera—co-author of a best-selling Bush-era book on how demographic change would lead inexorably to permanent Democratic dominance—now peddles a newsletter where he moans about “the Democratic Left’s adamant refusal to base its political approach on the actually-existing opinions and values of actually-existing American voters,” as if “the Democratic Left” has been the determinant of what a government led by Joe Biden—again, that Joe Biden, the one who is president—has managed to accomplish, or not accomplish, over the last year.

In lengthy Twitter threads and ugly Substack newsletters, consultants and would-be consultants tell the gerontocratic and eternally triangulating leadership of the Democratic Party that the real problem is that the kids who work for them are too “woke.” Despite “everyone” knowing it’s a problem, “wokeness” is a poorly defined concept. “Woke” was once a Black slang term for being politically aware (specifically, being aware—sometimes in a comically exaggerated way—of the myriad methods the white establishment has of punishing politically active Black people). It now serves, in the popular political discourse, the exact same function as the term “PC” did for Marshall and From in 1993. “PC” stood for “political correctness,” which, after the fall of the Soviet Union and prior to 9/11, was, in the eyes of the white commentariat, the single greatest threat faced by the United States. (A few years ago Moira Weigel observed that the term “political correctness” hardly appeared in print at all prior to 1990. As she notes, in 1992, a database of U.S. magazine and newspaper articles turned up 2,800 references.) The point of each term, as deployed by these men, is to euphemize a euphemism: “special interests.”

“African Americans, women, white farmers, and, especially, organized labor,” is how Geismer describes the New Democrat conception of “special interests.” The big idea of the New Democrats was that denying all of these annoying groups any material gains would please the White Suburban Voter, who had emerged from all the social upheavals of 1960s and beyond as the Main Character of American Politics. What is remarkable, more than three decades later, is how little anyone has learned.

“WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ,” huffed a recent tantalizing subhead in Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” tipsheet. Was it some previously undisclosed intelligence operation? A newly declassified Kennedy assassination document? No. It was a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican Senator Mitt Romney calling on the White House to “ditch its woke advisers.”

“White House chief of staff RON KLAIN may have taken this a bit personally,” Playbook’s authors wrote. He “retweeted our own SAM STEIN, who quipped that White House deputy chief of staff BRUCE REED was the ‘embodiment of woke’ (Reed is objectively un-woke. In fact, the woke don’t like him).” I do not mean this as a cheap gotcha point, but all of the capitalized names in this dispatch are white men, and at no point do the keen analysts behind  Politico’s West Wing Playbook define what they think the term “woke” means.” At a certain point, though, you have to ask:. What does “wokeness” mean, to you, to Democratic centers of power and (last and probably least) to Politico?

Back in George W. Bush’s second term, Jonathan Schwarz articulated what he called the “Iron Law of Institutions.” It goes: “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to ‘succeed’ if that requires them to lose power within the institution.” Schwarz  meant to universalize it, but I think he nailed something very specific about how the Democratic Party works, and I think Al From and Will Marshall ought to agree.

The long-standing fight over who runs our nation’s left-of-center party has featured multiple linguistic evolutions but otherwise remained strikingly static. For my entire life, white moderates have been complaining about how difficult the people on the side of multiracial democracy are making it for them to win their idealized suburban voters.

Woke Imperium: Identity Politics Co-opted By Neoconservatism To Justify Empire

 

peacediplomacy | The advocates of American primacy within the United States foreign policy establishment historically rely on prevailing ideological trends of the time to justify interventionism abroad. The new ‘woke’ face of American hegemony and projects of empire is designed to project the U.S. as an international moral police rather than a conventional great power—and the result is neo-imperialism with a moral face.

• This is an iterative and systemic process with an internal logic, not one controlled by a global cabal: when the older rationalizations for primacy, hegemony, and interventionism appear antiquated or are no longer persuasive, a new rationale that better reflects the ruling class norms of the era is adopted as a substitute. This is because the new schema is useful for the maintenance of the existing system of power.

• The rise of a ‘woke’ activist-driven, social justice-oriented politics—particularly among the members of academia, media, and the professional managerial class—has provided the latest ideological justification for interventionism, and it has become readily adopted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. These groups now have an even greater level of symbiotic relationship with state actors.

• Professional selection and advancement under these conditions require elite signaling of loyalty to ‘progressive’ universalism as the trending state-sanctioned ideology, which further fuels the push towards interventionism. This combination of factors encourages a new institutional and elite consensus around trending shibboleths.

• The emerging hegemonic posture and its moral imperialism are at odds with a sober and realistic appraisal of U.S. interests on the world stage, as they create untenable, maximalist, and utopian goals that clash with the concrete realities on which U.S. grand strategy must be based.

• The liberal Atlanticist tendency to push moralism and social engineering globally has immense potential to create backlash in foreign, especially non-Western, societies that will come to identify the West as a whole with niche, late-modern progressive ideals—thus motivating new forms of anti-Westernism.

Read the full paper at the download link.

DOWNLOAD PDF

 

It Was A Sign Of Things To Come When Brandon Made Student Debt Undischargeable In Bankruptcy

nakedcapitalism |  The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria– love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak.

The Greek concept of hubrisinvolved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor.

That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving the gods.That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage. Chieftains, kings and temples were in charge of allocating credit and crop-land to enable smallholders to serve in the army and provide corvée labor. Rulers who behaved selfishly were liable to be unseated, or their subjects might run away, or support rebel leaders or foreign attackers promising to cancel debts and redistribute land more equitably.

The most basic function of Near Eastern kingship was to proclaim “economic order,” misharumand andurarumclean slate debt cancellations, echoed in Judaism’s Jubilee Year. There was no “democracy” in the sense of citizens electing their leaders and administrators, but “divine kingship” was obliged to achieve the implicit economic aim of democracy: “protecting the weak from the powerful.”

Royal power was backed by temples and ethical or religious systems. The major religions that emerged in the mid-first millennium BC, those of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Zoroaster, held that personal drives should be subordinate to the promotion of overall welfare and mutual aid.

What did notseem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord aristocracy would conquer the Western world. In creating what became the Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course, the political system. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and industry into debt.

This was done on a purely opportunistic basis. There was no attempt to defend this ideologically. There was no hint of an archaic Milton Friedman emerging to popularize a radical new moral order celebrating avarice by claiming that greed is what drives economies forward, not backward, convincing society to leave the distribution of land and money to “the market” controlled by private corporations and money-lenders instead of communalistic regulation by palace rulers and temples – or by extension, today’s socialism. Palaces, temples and civic governments were creditors. They were not forced to borrow to function, and so were not subjected to the policy demands of a private creditor class.

But running the population, industry and even governments into debt to an oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which is now trying to impose the modern variant of this debt-based economic regime – U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism – on the entire world. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about.

By the traditional morality of early societies, the West – starting in classical Greece and Italy around the 8^thcentury BC – was barbarian. The West was indeed on the periphery of the ancient world when Syrian and Phoenician traders brought the idea of interest-bearing debt from the Near East to societies that had no royal tradition of periodic debt cancellations. The absence of a strong palace power and temple administration enabled creditor oligarchies to emerge throughout the Mediterranean world.

Greece ended up being conquered first by oligarchic Sparta, then by Macedonia and finally by Rome. It is the latter’s avaricious pro-creditor legal system that has shaped subsequent Western civilization. Today, a financialized system of oligarchic control whose roots lead back to Rome is being supported and indeed imposed by U.S. New Cold War diplomacy, military force and economic sanctions on countries seeking to resist it.

All You Beaners Are Like Breakfast Tacos In A Bronx Bogida...,

dailymail |  As distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio - is your strength,' she said, mispronouncing the word 'bodega.'

'We are not tacos. Our heritage as Latinos is shaped by a variety of diasporas, cultures and food traditions, and should not be reduced to a stereotype,' the National Association of Hispanic Journalists said in response.

The gaffe came as President Biden's popularity among Latino voters continues to plummet. 

According to a recent Quinnipiac opinion poll found that Biden's approval rating among young Hispanic voters is around 26%. 

San Antonio is home to one of the largest Latino communities in the United States, with a population of nearly 1.5 million people that is 65 percent Hispanic or Latino, according to U.S. Census data.

In April 2021, Biden made a similar gaffe when she mispronounced the phrase: 'Si se puede' (Yes we can) to a group of farmworkers in Delano, California. 

During the same speech on Monday, Biden also made reference to a recent visit that she made to Uvalde, Texas in the wake of the May 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School.

She said: 'I stood in front of those 21 crosses and touched the pictures of the bright, beautiful faces that would never again laugh, or open birthday presents, or tell their parents that they love them. And I knew that a piece of Uvalde would always be a part of me.' 

The first lady also touted her husband's modest gun reform law saying that the president 'will do everything he can to call on Congress to act, including on measures to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines.'

Biden added: 'A ban on guns that only belong on the battlefield. The right to make our own decisions about our own bodies,' to rapturous applaus

 

It's Conspicuously Obvious To The Casual Observer That Biden Is A Senile Old Man

technofog |  The troubling thing is that most of the presidency is off-script.

How do you address inflation and families being priced-out of groceries when you struggle through a press conference?

How do you formulate a strategy about China or Russia when you rely on a cheat sheet for a 5-minute meeting?

Make no mistake, Biden’s senility is one of the biggest stories in the world. The media’s silence on this matter is telling. Never before has the press tried to so hard to ignore so big a story (I venture this is bigger than Hunter’s laptop), as they’re afraid of what a correct assessment of Biden’s facilities might reveal. Ask whether Dementia-in-Chief is a threat to national security or economic recovery.

Also revealing is the media’s attempts to explain-away or otherwise repackage Biden’s mental and physical deficiencies. Peter Baker, writing for The New York Times, says Biden’s “age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party.” Of course, Biden’s age isn’t the issue per se - it’s Biden’s mind. “Age” is just The New York Times’ way of being polite, of serving the Biden Administration.

To make matters worse, there was the unbelievable “uniform” reporting of Biden’s competence by those interviewed by Baker:

In interviews, some sanctioned by the White House and some not, more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers uniformly reported that Mr. Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart questions at meetings, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them late at night, picking out that weak point on Page 14 of a memo and rewriting speeches like his abortion remarks on Friday right up until the last minute.

Those comments by Biden’s closest advisors and Democrat officials are certainly contrasted by how they treat Biden, and Baker unfortunately makes no effort to push-back on that point. As Baker concedes: “He stays out of public view at night and has taken part in fewer than half as many news conferences or interviews as recent predecessors.”

“Out of public view at night.” Could it be because Biden struggles with sundowning, which causes confusion, aggression, anxiety, and depression? Baker doesn’t ask.

But - if you have any concerns about Biden’s health or acuity - don’t worry. The New York Times has found experts that “put Mr. Biden in a category of ‘super-agers’ who remain unusually fit as they advance in years.”

Sadly, Baker doesn’t challenge that conclusion either. And what an easy challenge it would have been.

There’s the old cliché that journalists must speak truth to power. As Chomsky once observed, speaking truth to power is pointless because the powerful already know the truth. Better to speak truth to the powerless. As to Biden’s age-related failures - dare I say dementia - the press has chosen to avoid speaking the truth to the power and the powerless.

How much it matters is another story. This is likely a one-term president and the public is seeing Biden’s real-time deterioration for themselves.

But - if the press is willing to cover-up Biden’s dementia - then what other stories are they euthanizing?

CNN Called Brandon Rudderless, Aimless, And Hopeless....,

CNN  |  Debra Messing was fed up. The former "Will & Grace" star was among dozens of celebrity Democratic supporters and activists who joined a call with White House aides last Monday to discuss the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

The mood was fatalistic, according to three people on the call, which was also co-organized by the advocacy group Build Back Better Together. 

 

Messing said she'd gotten Joe Biden elected and wanted to know why she was being asked to do anything at all, yelling that there didn't even seem a point to voting. Others wondered why the call was happening.

That afternoon, participants received a follow-up email with a list of basic talking points and suggestions of Biden speech clips to share on TikTok.

 

The call, three days after the decision eliminating federal abortion rights, encapsulates the overwhelming sense of frustration among Democrats with Biden. It offers a new window into what many in the President's party describe as a mismanagement permeating the White House.

 

Top Democrats complain the President isn't acting with -- or perhaps is even capable of -- the urgency the moment demands.

 

"Rudderless, aimless and hopeless" is how one member of Congress described the White House.

Two dozen leading Democratic politicians and operatives, as well as several within the West Wing, tell CNN they feel this goes deeper than questions of ideology and posture. Instead, they say, it gets to questions of basic management.

 

More than a week after the abortion decision, top Biden aides are still wrangling over releasing new actions in response, despite the draft decision leaking six weeks earlier.

 

White House counsel Dana Remus had assured senior aides the Supreme Court wouldn't rule on abortion that day. A White House press aide assigned to the issue was walking to get coffee when the alert hit. Several Democratic leaders privately mocked how the President stood in the foyer of the White House, squinting through his remarks from a teleprompter as demonstrators poured into the streets, making only vague promises of action because he and aides hadn't decided on more.

 

Then, Biden's July 1 meeting with governors to talk about their efforts to protect abortion rights was planned so last minute that none of those who attended came in person, and several of those invited declined to rearrange their schedules to appear virtually.

 

Multiple Democratic politicians who have reached out to work with Biden -- whether it's on specific bills, brainstorming or outreach -- often don't hear anything back at all. Potential appointees have languished for months waiting to hear if they'll get jobs, or when they'll be done with vetting. Invitations to events are scarce, thank you calls barely happen. Even some aides within the White House wonder why Biden didn't fire anyone, from the West Wing or at the Food and Drug Administration, to demonstrate some accountability or at least anger over the baby formula debacle. 

 

Inside the White House, aides are exhausted from feeling forever on red alert, batting at a swarm of crises that keeps growing -- enough for White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to make an offhand joke about the constant "eleventh hour" decision-making in the building when under fire at a recent daily briefing.

 

NYTimes Would Have You Believe That Biden Is An Unusually Fit "Super-Ager"

NYTimes |  “I do feel it’s inappropriate to seek that office after you’re 80 or in your 80s,” said David Gergen, a top adviser to four presidents. “I have just turned 80 and I have found over the last two or three years I think it would have been unwise for me to try to run any organization. You’re not quite as sharp as you once were.”

Everyone ages differently, of course, and some experts put Mr. Biden in a category of “super-agers” who remain unusually fit as they advance in years.

“Right now, there’s no evidence that the age of Biden should matter one ounce,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studied the candidates’ ages in 2020. “If people don’t like his policies, they don’t like what he says, that’s fine, they can vote for someone else. But it’s got nothing to do with how old he is.”

Still, Professor Olshansky said it was legitimate to wonder if that would remain so at 86. “That’s the right question to be asking,” he said. “You can’t sugarcoat aging. Things go wrong as we get older and the risks rise the older we get.”

The White House rejected the idea that Mr. Biden was anything other than a seven-day commander in chief. “President Biden works every day and because chief executives can perform their duties from anywhere in the world, it has long been common for them to spend weekends away from the White House,” Andrew Bates, a deputy press secretary, said after this article was published online.

The president’s medical report in November indicated he had atrial fibrillation but that it was stable and asymptomatic. Mr. Biden’s “ambulatory gait is perceptibly stiffer and less fluid than it was a year or so ago,” the report said, and gastroesophageal reflux causes him to cough and clear his throat, symptoms that “certainly seem to be more frequent and more pronounced.”

But overall, Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, the president’s physician, pronounced him “a healthy, vigorous 78-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”

Questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness have nonetheless taken a toll on his public standing. In a June survey by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll, 64 percent of voters believed he was showing that he is too old to be president, including 60 percent of respondents 65 or older.

Mr. Biden’s public appearances have fueled that perception. His speeches can be flat and listless. He sometimes loses his train of thought, has trouble summoning names or appears momentarily confused. More than once, he has promoted Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “President Harris.” Mr. Biden, who overcame a childhood stutter, stumbles over words like “kleptocracy.” He has said Iranian when he meant Ukrainian and several times called Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, “John,” confusing him with the late Republican senator of that name from Virginia.

Republicans and conservative media gleefully highlight such moments, posting viral videos, sometimes exaggerated or distorted to make Mr. Biden look even worse. But the White House has had to walk back some of his ad-libbed comments, such as when he vowed a military response if China attacks Taiwan or declared that President Vladimir V. Putin “cannot remain in power” in Russia.

Mr. Biden was famously prone to gaffes even as a younger man, and aides point to his marathon meetings with families of mass shooting victims or his working the rope line during a trip to Cleveland this past week as evidence of stamina.

Hunger Makes You Peasants Productive

Globalresearch  |  Hunger must be sustained to exploit manual labor, contends George Kent, a professor at the University of Hawaii’s political science department. who authored the November 2021 UN the document.

“We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people,” Kent notes. “Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is need for manual labour.”

Without “the threat of hunger,” essential low-paying jobs would become vacant, a labor shortage would emerge and the global economy would cease to exist, Kent continues.

“We in developed countries sometimes see poor people by the roadside holding up signs saying ‘Will Work For Food.” Actually, most people work for food. It is mainly because people need food to survive that they work so hard either in producing food for themselves in subsistence-level production, or by selling their services to others in exchange for money. How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?

“More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger? When we sell ourselves cheaply, we enrich others, those who own factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of wealth.”

According to the U.N., assumptions attributing poverty and low-paying jobs to hunger are “nonsense” because people deprived of nourishment have stronger incentive to work.

“Who would have established massive biofuel production operations in Brazil if they did not know there were thousands of hungry people desperate enough to take the awful jobs they would offer?” Kent asserts. “Who would build any sort of factory if they did not know that many people would be available to take the jobs at low-pay rates?

“Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.”

“Slaves to hunger” are “assets” to “people at the high end,” Kent concludes:

The non-governmental organization Free the Slaves defines slaves as people who are not allowed to walk away from their jobs. It estimates that there are about 27 million slaves in the world, including those who are literally locked into workrooms and held as bonded labourers in South Asia. However, they do not include people who might be described as slaves to hunger, that is, those who are free to walk away from their jobs but have nothing better to go to. Maybe most people who work are slaves to hunger?

For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.

The decades-oldop-ed was removed from the United Nation’s website on Wednesday hours it went viral.

The United Nation’s Chronicle subsequently issued a statement claiming the article is “satire.”

A 2020 report published by The Rockefeller Foundation that outlines a globalist plan to transform the food system is underway began circulating across the internet on Monday.

The Rockefeller Foundation document titled, “Reset The Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System” argues the U.S. food system must be seized and transformed to advance “social justice” and “environmental protection.”

The report also calls for “numerous changes to policies, practices and norms” to modify the U.S. food supply, including data collection and online surveillance to track people’s the dietary habits.

Sri Lankans Show Bitch-Made Americans And Canadians How REAL PROTEST Is Done....,

michaelshellenberger |  Sri Lanka has fallen. Protesters breached the official residences of Sri Lanka's Prime Minister and President, who have fled to undisclosed locations out of fear of death. The proximate reason is that the nation is bankrupt, suffering its worst financial crisis in decades. Millions are struggling to purchase food, medicine and fuel. Energy shortages and inflation were major factors behind the crisis. Inflation in June in Sri Lanka was over 50%. Food prices rose by 80%. And a half-million people fell into poverty over the last year.

But the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture and “ESG,” which refers to investments made following supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. Sri Lanka has a near-perfect ESG score (98) which is higher than Sweden (96) or the United States (51), notes a commentator.

To be sure, there were other factors behind Sri Lanka’s fall. COVID-19 lockdowns and a 2019 bombing hurt tourism, a $3 billion to 5 billion-per-year industry. Sri Lanka’s leaders insisted on paying China back for various “Belt and Road” infrastructure projects when other nations refused to do so. And higher oil prices meant transportation prices rose 128% since May.

But the biggest and main problem causing Sri Lanka’s fall was its ban on chemical fertilizers in April 2021. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers and, after the ban, 85% experienced crop losses. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold. Tea, the nation’s main export, also suffered, thereby undermining the nation’s foreign currency and ability to purchase products from abroad.

While there are 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 70% of the nation’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming. “We are furious!” said one rice farmer in May. “Angry! Not just me - but all the farmers who cultivated here are angry.”

More Shady Connections Than Hunter Biden And Jeffrey Epstein Combined...,

Click on the image below to watch the video on Bitchute.

Meet Nathan Wolfe (5 mins)

expose-news  |   Dr. Nathan Wolfe was a founding citizen of Ghislaine Maxwell’s TerraMar Project; a member of the Edge Foundation; a self-proclaimed “virus hunter” whose area of research is zoonotic diseases with a special focus on bats; with links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance; who previously bungled epidemic responses while selling pandemic insurance; whose company Metabiota which is funded by Rosemont Seneca, Google, The Skoll Foundation, among others, was awarded a sub-contract with the US Military’s DTRA program for work in Ukrainian biolabs.

A few days before the end of March Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marija Zakharova published a timeline of US-Ukraine bioresearch headed “BioBiden.”  Of the 23 timeline points she listed, Nathan Wolfe or organisations associated with him – Metabiota and Global Viral – were explicitly mentioned in 8 of them:

• 2007 – US DoD employee Nathan Wolfe founded Global Viral Forecasting Institute (subsequently – Global Viral), a biomedical company. The mission stated in the charter is non-commercial study of transborder infections, including in China.
• 2014 – Metabiota, a private commercial organisation specialising in the study of pandemic risks is detached from Global Viral. Neil Callahan and John DeLoche, employees of Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Partners are appointed to the board of Metabiota. Global Viral and Metabiota begin to get funding from the US Department of Defence.
• 2014 – Metabiota shows interest in Ukraine and invites Hunter Biden to “assert Ukraine’s cultural & economic independence from Russia”.
• 2014 – Metabiota and Burisma Holdings begin cooperation on an unnamed “science project in Ukraine”.
• 2014 – Metabiota, Global Viral and Black & Veatch Special Projects begin full-fledged cooperation within the US DoD programmes.
• 2014-2016 – Implementation of Metabiota and US DoD contracts, including a $300,000 project in Ukraine.
• 2016 – former US Assistant Secretary for Defence Andrew Weber is appointed head of Metabiota’s global partnerships department.
• 2016 – EcoHealth Alliance, a Global Viral founder Nathan Wolfe’s structure, is engaged in the study of bat-transmitted coronaviruses at the research centre in a Wuhan laboratory, China.

Considering the accusation is US political elites’ involvement in the military biological activity in Ukraine, it perhaps indicates Moscow has identified Nathan Wolfe as a person of interest in what Zakharova termed “this truly diabolical plan.”

Read more: Russian Foreign Ministry Releases Alleged “BioBiden” Timeline of US Bioresearch in Ukraine, The Gateway Pundit, 29 March 2022

Meet Nathan Wolfe

“If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet –microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.”

Nathan Wolfe, Business Continuity and The Pandemic Threat Robert A Clark (2016)

From 1999 to 2006 Wolfe conducted research as a postdoctoral student and then as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University.  There he worked with American epidemiologist Donald Burke, who suspected that the practice of hunting bushmeat in Africa had exposed a source of HIV. Based in Cameroon, Wolfe studied the local hunters and their hunting practices.  In 2004 he and his colleagues found that 1% of bushmeat hunters were infected with the simian foamy virus – a virus that is closely related to HIV and carried by nonhuman primates.

In 2006 he joined the department of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began pursuing ways to monitor, predict, and prevent animal-to-human transfer of viruses and conducted projects in Africa and Southeast Asia. In China, he collaborated with scientists to investigate wet markets (food markets that sell live animals) as a source of zoonoses (diseases from wild animals).

Read more: Nathan Wolfe, Britannica

Eat Bugs Muhphukkas!!! (Best B'lee All Kinds Of Bugs Fitna Eat You!!!)

U.N. |  We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world's economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour.

We in developed countries sometimes see poor people by the roadside holding up signs saying "Will Work for Food". Actually, most people work for food. It is mainly because people need food to survive that they work so hard either in producing food for themselves in subsistence-level production, or by selling their services to others in exchange for money. How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?
More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger? When we sell our services cheaply, we enrich others, those who own the factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.

The conventional thinking is that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs. For example, an article reports on "Brazil's ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom".¹ While it is true that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs, we need to understand that hunger at the same time causes low-paying jobs to be created. Who would have established massive biofuel production operations in Brazil if they did not know there were thousands of hungry people desperate enough to take the awful jobs they would offer? Who would build any sort of factory if they did not know that many people would be available to take the jobs at low-pay rates?

Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.

The non-governmental organization Free the Slaves defines slaves as people who are not allowed to walk away from their jobs. It estimates that there are about 27 million slaves in the world,² including those who are literally locked into workrooms and held as bonded labourers in South Asia. However, they do not include people who might be described as slaves to hunger, that is, those who are free to walk away from their jobs but have nothing better to go to. Maybe most people who work are slaves to hunger?

For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.