The other night I listened to a prominent journalist I have followed and admired, being interviewed, and saying: "I'm distraught."
Apparently that journalist's belief that No. 47 had been sincere, if not very intelligible, in his intention to bring an end to the wars and make America, well, you know, has just been shattered by the Good murder.
And I thought, as I have lately with several otherwise competent sources currently being "community-noted", "deep-faked", relegated to "independent" media, and even de-banked:
Wait, you're figuring this out now?
I'm not a capital or lowercase journalist, I'm just an old guy who can't do the many different kinds of physical labor he used to do, and has turned to writing it all down. I turned to writing it down when I hit a certain age, around 2008.
Here's something I wrote early in 2020. In case you skip it here, you won't have missed much, because almost everything going on today is in it...
Fascism-- The Convergence of Government and Business
War has now become business-as-usual. The war market is organized around predictable expectations of profit and loss. Business used to thrive on competition in the marketplace. Now it seeks only to crush all competition and take over the marketplace.
As Commander-in-Chief, the 45th President of the United States announced the withdrawal of American forces from Syria at the end of 2018. He had not notified the military, or anyone else, of this sudden decision. The troops did not immediately depart Syria, lock, stock and barrel.
But the significance of the announcement was clear to those with reason to understand it. In explaining that America's allies were not paying enough for the American soldiers to be fighting their wars for them, the President was announcing that henceforth, the American military was for hire. The Volunteer Army became the Mercenary Army, in one brief moment of Presidential twittery.
Considering the number of private contractors protecting the troops in war zones, and their much higher pay scale, it was only a matter of time before the Army was reduced to training fighters for the highly-paid and much less accountable corporate armies.
Wait. Protecting the troops? Yes, that's what we were told those contractors are doing over there"
"Following Orders" was rejected as a Nazi defense at the Nuremburg Trials, and hangings followed. U.S. military personnel are required by law to refuse illegal orders, and they take an oath to protect the Constitution from threats "foreign and domestic".
What will be required of a contract military? Mercenaries are bound by law to whatever is in their contracts.
Ancient texts on strategy such as "The Art of War" and "The Book of Five Rings" have long been marketed as essential reading for business people. The requirements for successful business are seen as identical to the requirements for victory in war.
The language of modern business is the triumphal language of violent conquest. Competitors are enemies. Corporate mergers and acquisitions may determine the fate of millions of people as much as any war. Business is War, and War is Business. The only good competitor is a bankrupt competitor.
It's not that war is a big part of our economy. It's the "economy stupid". The stupid economy.
In a Democracy, government and business are separate and distinct, for good reason: there's no Profit in caring for the poor, maintaining roads and bridges and waterways and sanitation systems and national parklands. There's no Profit in regulating for safe foods and drugs and chemical industries. There no Profit in regulating honest business practices. If government didn't provide for the common good, business wouldn't cover it.
The word for a government that is "run like a business" is Fascism. Americans, British, Australians, Europeans, Russians, Africans and many other groups fought and died in World War II to defeat Fascism. Surviving families were left with trauma that haunts us to this day.
By 2019 the President had replaced the heads of all Federal agencies with individuals who were openly hostile to the functioning of those same agencies (some were replaced twice, when the first one proved too crooked or crazy to sustain even the pretense of leading a Federal agency). Former lobbyists were given responsibility to regulate their former employers. This put Business in charge of regulating Business.
Then the President refused to sign a funding bill unless it had funds for a wall on the Mexican border. This stopped the paychecks of almost a million government employees and all government contractors for over a month.
There was pandemonium at airports. The Coast Guard went without pay. The National Parks were staffed by local volunteers. Food programs ran out of food. The National Weather Service shut down, in the midst of a wave of extreme weather events.
In addition, the President had announced withdrawal from nuclear disarmament treaties, slapped tariffs on essential trade commodities like steel, and the auctioning of environmentally-sensitive, formerly-protected areas for unlimited oil and gas drilling.
Healthcare, social safety-nets, civil rights laws, education, across the board, the benefits of Citizenship are being withdrawn - or priced beyond the means of most. Taxes have been "reformed" in a massive transfer of wealth to the already-wealthy.
The pattern is consistent with a plan to "privatize" the entire Federal government. It is being disabled and put into the hands of corporations with no accountability to the people they are supposed to serve, and who pay for it, while it is openly sabotaged and then blamed for being unworkable.
This is a domestic version of the foreign policy applied to sovereign nations that happen to be sitting on large amounts of fossil fuels. They are subjected to trade embargoes and heavy financial sanctions, and demonized in the general media. When their economies collapse, elected leaders are blamed and labeled as dictators. According to this plan, "regime change" is sure to follow. Typically, the US military is sent in if the government doesn't collapse.
The Federal regulatory agencies of the US Government are controlled by the industries they are supposed to regulate; the government is being disabled in preparation to sell off even more of its operations to private corporations; the US Military is openly for hire as a mercenary force. The President is surrounded by lawsuits and investigations, but he personally is only needed as long as he's useful to those who are reaping astronomical profits under cover of all the chaos and terror.
It's as if an international cabal of powerful men have finally decided to just take everything for themselves, and lock the rest of humanity out.
As if.
When this was written, we were about to experience a violent insurrection-- if you think it was "a riot" it's fine, but there was an armed mob breaking down the doors of Congress, beating law enforcement officers to the ground with blunt objects, and chanting "Hang Mike Pence" while our elected officials evacuated in terror for their lives; just sayin'-- then we would have a sort of interim presidential term-on-hold while the "conservative" thinktanks got their act together and wrote the script that is now operational.
There is a difference I think significant. Back then there was no talk of genocide. There was lots of genocide going on, but in the public discourse it was inconspicuously absent, even while Israel was "mowing the grass".
Mike Rivage-Seul has written an insightful article in which he notes the clutching of pearls about the safety of Iranian protesters after more than two years of livestreaming horror from Gaza going nearly unremarked.
All this demands, especially of writers and journalists: are you on some new sleep medication? What is it that has you rolling over and sliding back into somnolence after each new mass atrocity? How come the clear announcement of impending war knocks you out? This is not normal, it's pathological. The canary isn't just a weak canary, it's a dead canary. A late canary. A canary that is no more (apologies to Cleese).
