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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Financial collapse leads to war Scanning the headlines in the western mainstream press, and then peering behind the one-way mirror to compare that to the actual goings-on, one can't but get the impression that America's propagandists, and all those who follow in their wake, are struggling with all their might to concoct rationales for military action of one sort or another, be it supplying weapons to the largely defunct Ukrainian military, or staging parades of US military hardware and troops in the almost completely Russian town of Narva, in Estonia, a few hundred meters away from the Russian border, or putting US “advisers” in harm's way in parts of Iraq mostly controlled by Islamic militants. The strenuous efforts to whip up Cold War-like hysteria in the face of an otherwise preoccupied and essentially passive Russia seems out of all proportion to the actual military threat Russia poses. (Yes, volunteers and ammo do filter into Ukraine across the Russian border, but that's about it.) Further south, the efforts to topple the government of Syria by aiding and arming Islamist radicals seem to be backfiring nicely. But that's the pattern, isn't it? What US military involvement in recent memory hasn't resulted in a fiasco? Maybe failure is not just an option, but more of a requirement? Let's review. Afghanistan, after the longest military campaign in US history, is being handed back to the Taliban. Iraq no longer exists as a sovereign nation, but has fractured into three pieces, one of them controlled by radical Islamists. Egypt has been democratically reformed into a military dictatorship. Libya is a defunct state in the middle of a civil war. The Ukraine will soon be in a similar state; it has been reduced to pauper status in record time—less than a year. A recent government overthrow has caused Yemen to stop being US-friendly. Closer to home, things are going so well in the US-dominated Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that they have produced a flood of refugees, all trying to get into the US in the hopes of finding any sort of sanctuary. Looking at this broad landscape of failure, there are two ways to interpret it. One is that the US officialdom is the most incompetent one imaginable, and can't ever get anything right. But another is that they do not succeed for a distinctly different reason: they don't succeed because results don't matter. You see, if failure were a problem, then there would be some sort of pressure coming from somewhere or other within the establishment, and that pressure to succeed might sporadically give rise to improved performance, leading to at least a few instances of success. But if in fact failure is no problem at all, and if instead there was some sort of pressure to fail, then we would see exactly what we do see. In fact, a point can be made that it is the limited scope of failure that is the problem. This would explain the recent saber-rattling in the direction of Russia, accusing it of imperial ambitions (Russia is not interested in territorial gains), demonizing Vladimir Putin (who is effective and popular) and behaving provocatively along Russia's various borders (leaving Russia vaguely insulted but generally unconcerned). It can be argued that all the previous victims of US foreign policy—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, even the Ukraine—are too small to produce failure writ large enough to satisfy America's appetite for failure. Russia, on the other hand, especially when incentivized by thinking that it is standing up to some sort of new, American-style fascism, has the ability to deliver to the US a foreign policy failure that will dwarf all the previous ones. Analysts have proposed a variety of explanations for America's hyperactive, oversized militarism. Here are the top three: 1. The US government has been captured by the military-industrial complex, which demands to be financed lavishly. Rationales are created artificially to achieve that result. But there does seem to be some sort of pressure to actually make weapons and field armies, because wouldn't it be far more cost-effective to achieve full-spectrum failure simply by stealing all the money and skip building the weapons systems altogether? So something else must be going on. 2. The US military posture is designed to insure America's full spectrum dominance over the entire planet. But “full-spectrum dominance” sounds a little bit like “success,” whereas what we see is full-spectrum failure. Again, this story doesn't fit the facts. 3. The US acts militarily to defend the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. But the US dollar is slowly but surely losing its attractiveness as a reserve currency, as witnessed by China and Russia acting as swiftly as they can to unload their US dollar reserves, and to stockpile gold instead. Numerous other nations have entered into arrangements with each other to stop using the US dollar in international trade. The fact of the matter is, it doesn't take a huge military to flush one's national currency down the toilet, so, once again, something else must be going on. There are many other explanations on offer as well, but none of them explain the fact that the goal of all this militarism seems to be to achieve failure. Perhaps a simpler explanation would suffice? How about this one: The US has surrendered its sovereignty to a clique of financial oligarchs. Having nobody at all to answer to, this American (and to some extent international) oligarchy has been ruining the financial condition of the country, running up staggering levels of debt, destroying savings and retirements, debasing the currency and so on. The inevitable end-game is that the Federal Reserve (along with the central banks of other “developed economies”) will end up buying up all the sovereign debt issuance with money they print for that purpose, and in the end this inevitably leads to hyperinflation and national bankruptcy. A very special set of conditions has prevented these two events from taking place thus far, but that doesn't mean that they won't, because that's what always happens, sooner or later. Now, let's suppose a financial oligarchy has seized control of the country, and, since it can't control its own appetites, is running it into the ground. Then it would make sense for it to have some sort of back-up plan for when the whole financial house of cards falls apart. Ideally, this plan would effectively put down any chance of revolt of the downtrodden masses, and allow the oligarchy to maintain security and hold onto its wealth. Peacetime is fine for as long as it can placate the populace with bread and circuses, but when a financial calamity causes the economy to crater and bread and circuses turn scarce, a handy fallback is war. Any rationale for war will do, be it terrorists foreign and domestic, Big Bad Russia, or hallucinated space aliens. Military success is unimportant, because failure is even better than success for maintaining order because it makes it possible to force through various emergency security measures. Various training runs, such as the military occupation of Boston following the staged bombings at the Boston Marathon, have already taken place. The surveillance infrastructure and the partially privatized prison-industrial complex are already in place for locking up the undesirables. A really huge failure would provide the best rationale for putting the economy on a war footing, imposing martial law, suppressing dissent, outlawing “extremist” political activity and so on. And so perhaps that is what we should expect. Financial collapse is already baked in, and it's only a matter of time before it happens, and precipitates commercial collapse when global supply chains stop functioning. Political collapse will be resisted, and the way it will be resisted is by starting as many wars as possible, to produce a vast backdrop of failure to serve as a rationale for all sorts of “emergency measures,” all of which will have just one aim: to suppress rebellion and to keep the oligarchy in power. Outside the US, it will look like Americans blowing things up: countries, things, innocent bystanders, even themselves (because, you know, apparently that works too). From the outside looking into America's hall of one-way mirrors, it will look like a country gone mad; but then it already looks that way. And inside the hall of one-way mirrors it will look like valiant defenders of liberty battling implacable foes around the world. Most people will remain docile and just wave their little flags. But I would venture to guess that at some point failure will translate into meta-failure: America will fail even at failing. I hope that there is something we can do to help this meta-failure of failure happen sooner rather than later. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 4.
#3. To: X-15 (#0)
(Edited)
The recent US wars have been against enemies of Israel simply to gain brownie points from the Israeli lobby which along with Jew-controlled media is instrumental in electing Republican and Democrat members of Congress after they are vetted for unequivocal support of the thieving Israeli state. In a country with a well-trained labor force and extensive infrastructure economic collapse is of little consequence and may well be a good thing since it will purge the system of useless, initiative-stifling bureaucrats. Skimming the 39 blog comments found them of little relevance except: tom said... Perhaps Robert Conquest's Third Law of Politics applies? "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies". They don't come much more bureaucratic than the US federal government. michigan native said... The future certainly looks bleak. Just when you thought the neocons in the US couldn't get more vile or despicable, we read that Putin's opposition leader is shot dead. The media whores of course implicate Putin with their new obsession of demonizing Russia and creating other phantom boogey men. They are clearly getting desperate. Let's fund neo Nazis and death in the Ukraine while we cut food stamps, After all, those kids don't need to eat. Let's cut money for their school lunch programs. We have other priorities. That against the back drop of news that the government is taking initial steps to control the internet (we knew this was coming), another homeless man is attacked and killed in Los Angeles (shot in broad daylight), and other nasty realities that are swept under the carpet (the town of Ferguson where another black man was killed gets 20% of its revenues from issuing tickets/arresting people, disproportionately targeting Afro Americans, who are seeing themselves increasingly the victims of state sanctioned racism and genocide and has prompted charges that they have returned to debtor prisons) A huge spike in the radiation leaching into the ocean from Fukushima, video of masses of sea lions washing up on the west coast, dead or dying. Not a word in the mainstream media, but the videos are all over the internet. No wonder they want to control the free flow and exchange of information there. So look for the neocon bastards to create more enemies, use that as an excuse to silence dissent, either through martial law and generous applications of sanctified violence and/or controlling the exchange of information (one asshole supposedly tried to label RT as a "terrorist" organization), while they scale back services and do everything and anything they can to steal your money as your plunge into third world helldom. But not to worry, they will distract people by focusing on Bruce Jenner, Justin Bieber, Vladimir Putin (if they don't assassinate him first) or whatever fictitious enemy they can concoct and brainwash and distract people with the media they control. Maybe, just maybe, enough people will wake up and realize that they are the enemy and that we can't afford them anymore and we will not go along with their dastardly, deadly games anymore.
You know, it's easy to see why there's little hope and how this thing works. One side favors government spending (now debt) for wars, the other for equally destructive domestic things, both of which are equally "justifiable" in the eyes of a majority somewhere. The school lunch programs, or rather the entire public school system that they support, is an enormous part of the problem. First of all the teachers, and particularly the administrators at all levels, are grossly overpaid. Second of all, the public school system does the bidding of a tyrannical government, not of liberty. At a ballpark cost of having a child "educated," really indoctrinated and propagandized, is ~ $15k annually, even for 1st grade. Think about that, it costs nearly three times as much to send a child to 1st grade as it does to go to a community college. Parents could send their kids to private educational institutions for a fraction of that. But it's "free." Americans are fools, literally fools!
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