John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“The Cultural Problem of Cheating & Lying”

“This is not just a lesson for parents, schools, the courts, and the marketplace. It is also a necessary lesson for our politics. But we have not managed to come up with a way to vet our leaders so as to assure their long-term honesty and integrity — a process we have been searching for since the time of Plato. Nonetheless, we should try harder…”

 

Yes, indeed, but I do find the piece weak and rather squishy, avoiding as it does the real source of the problem and putting things into philosophical terms of a search for ways to insure truth in American politics and in the wider society. It actually gets quite preachy, but preaching doesn’t change the real political economy of a huge state, and, indeed, I think it effectively offers a kind false hope to hide behind.

A little like the people in America who periodically stand in a crowd on a hillside with their arms outstretched in a kind of supplication, waiting for the Second Coming. They are sincere, to be sure, I have no doubt, but their efforts are utterly pointless since they ignore science and the realities of the human condition.

There are bricks-and-mortar causes for the ailments of American society, and if you refuse to deal with those, you are in a very real sense lying to yourself and just adding to the total volume of American lying.

Given America’s empire and the vast and costly military/security services supporting it, I don’t think there is any option but for leaders to lie, and doing so almost continuously. The emergence of American plutocracy, which is what the empire serves, and money-driven politics at home are at the heart of the problem.

Can America’s leaders in Washington openly admit that they are starving children and depriving the sick of medicine in Iran and Venezuela and were working to do the same in Bolivia and still other places?

Even the ugliest, most powerful government officials or the plutocrats they serve do not happily take public credit for such grim acts. So, lying and cheating just become built into the society at the highest level. Almost everyone, no matter how malevolent their intentions and actions, wants at least a veneer of respectability, credit for worthy motives. Only the genuine psychopaths, of which America has more than a few in powerful positions because they are useful, are likely to want such credit, much like credit for scalps on display.

So, destroying someone else’s elected government invariably is transformed into fighting for democratic values. Venezuela’s unelected Guaido, absurdly swearing himself in as President without ever running for election and financing his activities with American intelligence agency funds as well as American-appropriated Venezuelan national assets, becomes the hope for democracy over the party of twice-elected Maduro and his thrice-elected predecessor, Chavez.

Again, except for the scalphunters, who would want credit for shutting down Venezuela’s electricity grid several times so that millions of poor ordinary people likely lost the food in their fridges? And many life-sustaining machines stopped working?

Such are the realities of empire. And there are just so very many examples, the story of Ukraine being a prominent and tragic one in recent years.

According to the delightful Victoria Nuland, a high State Department official who was overheard at the time, America spent five billion dollars on the coup in Ukraine, doing absolutely nothing for Ukraine’s people, overthrowing an elected government, and indeed wrecking the country in many ways. All done just to threaten the security interests of Russia along a huge border. Needless violence and intimidation, with plenty of killing along the way.

Parts of Ukraine seceded under the unpleasant language and cultural policies of the coup-installed government, and I think it pretty unlikely they will ever return. Thousands died in an unnecessary civil war over the matter. Great numbers of people sought work in other parts of Europe as the Ukrainian economy literally collapsed under a corrupt and incompetent American-installed administration.

Versions of neo-Nazism now openly flourish in Ukraine because the groups’ capacity to intimidate the government is useful in preventing any turning back to rational policies. Such groups, some subsidized by the State Department or American security services, threaten the government into not making reasonable concessions for peace.

Incidentally, Joe Biden, in his then role as presidential proconsul to Ukraine, assisting the coup government in getting things right – “right” meaning the way America wants them – was photographed warmly shaking hands with the commander of one such group, the Azov Battalion, a group whose marches much resemble those of Hitler’s Brownshirts of the 1930s.

The post-coup Ukrainian military demonstrated gross incompetence. Despite its far greater numbers and resources, it had poor leadership and lack of motivation and managed only to kill thousands of civilians in breakaway Eastern Ukraine. Its efforts to draft soldiers in Western Ukraine to send to fight in Eastern Ukraine resulted in embarrassingly high levels of running from the draft.

And all the previous coup government leader, Poroshenko, could talk about was how the Russians were invading and how brave Ukrainian soldiers were preventing Europe from being invaded. Absolutely absurd stuff, but our press and politicians credited it as truth. Somehow, with all such claims, the hi-tech, unarguable evidence of America’s fleets of spy satellites and sophisticated radars just manages to disappear. America would in fact know in a heartbeat if Russia invaded Ukraine, and it would not sit silently watching it happen.

So, we not only have thick clots of lies, we have the government of the United States treating us all as though we were totally ignorant of the realities of around-the-clock surveillance.

Perhaps the most grotesque aspect of Ukraine’s post-coup military operations was the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, either in error or deliberately, an event which launched an industrial-sized cover-up with a shameless investigation which never even bothered to collect all the evidence, pieces of the plane and contents still being easily discovered in the region where it crashed. If you study the case, there are many powerful reasons for believing the Ukrainian military shot down the airliner with fighter planes, but imagine the risk to America’s five-billion-dollar coup investment if the truth had been broadcast right away? So, years of throwing dust in people’s eyes began, and now the matter is almost forgotten. And, again, no American satellite images or radar tracks were ever produced.

We have ugly stunt after ugly stunt – such as the infamous Skripal Affair of two years ago in Britain – done merely to hurt the interests of those America does not like. Truth is impossible, and the lying goes beyond all normal bounds to become a massive network of distortions, all dutifully attested to at the highest levels of government and by the corporate press which of course always serves the government which has so regulatory powers over it.

It was after all, Hitler himself in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, who propounded the concept of “the Big Lie.” It proved a highly successful idea, and tyrants and seekers-after-power have never stopped employing it since.

That is the very nature of empire, and there is no escaping it. It is impossible to behave the way America does and not lie about it, massively and continuously.

I’ve said it many times, but there’s no shame in repeating such an important truth: you can either have a decent country or you can have an empire, but you cannot have both.

The infrastructure of empire is built on threats, oppression, subversion, coups, dishonesty, and no shortage of violence.

And there is always an underlying assumption that a relatively small number of people in the United States are somehow entitled to tell the other more than 95% of humanity how they are to run their affairs. Are you not implicitly lying about your democratic and human-rights values when you do that? Of course, it isn’t America’s roughly 5% of the world’s people making the claim, it’s a tiny fraction of that, the highly privileged.

There’s no way the establishment politicians in Washington – including the best Congress money can buy – can one day just take a kind of Boy Scout Oath to reform things. Believing that goes beyond naïve to asinine.

Fundamental change is required – including basic matters like a tax structure which supports the creation of plutocracy and the grotesque role of money in politics – but I don’t think Americans are prepared to undertake it, and perhaps they are not even able to do so, given the establishment’s powerful tools of self-defense.

Right now, the Democratic Party is working to shut out Bernie Sanders, and it has already pretty much shut out Tulsi Gabbard, yet neither of those two admirable politicians is even advocating large-scale change. That’s a good measure of how risk-averse America’s establishment is.

The other half of America’s money-controlled political duopoly, the Republican Party, supports a foul-mouthed madman who brags about stealing. Why? Because he vigorously continues the good work of imposing America’s will on the planet, and he actively works to hurt those who are going to become important parts of a very different future, as China and Russia.

Well, I believe sadly that America is stuck right where it is until larger events overtake it and the now-emerging multi-polar world becomes the dominant reality.

MAGA will be seen as a museum relic, like some Shaman’s pathetic talisman, representing futile efforts by America to claw its way back to where it was seventy years ago, pretty much king of the world.

Either that, or it is not impossible at all for genuine widespread and destructive war to emerge from America’s present global hostilities almost everywhere.

After all, what do bullies do when their demands are ignored but start throwing punches or using a weapon?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY AURAL BRAUN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

More intellectual crap from Aural Braun.

Mr Braun is a full-time lobbyist for the interests of the Israeli-U.S. effort to re-shape the planet.

Mr Putin, as one of the true independent-minded statesmen of our time, is of course at odds many times to a dangerous vision of world affairs.
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“Please, Obama is a joke. He is a complete amateur, never worthy or prepared to be president.”

I wish it were true that Obama’s behavior could be explained by “amateur” status.

But it cannot be.

He came to office with dreams and enthusiasms and some sound thinking, but in the face of the forces which truly govern America, he quietly threw up his hands and has become effectively a hostage.

He undoubtedly feared assassination, but it is not just such a dark threat which likely influenced him.

Day to day, he works with a relatively small group of people – military and intelligence officials, members of the imperious Senate, big money political contributors, including the powerful Israel Lobby – and that group is not friendly to the language of an Obama before election.

Look at any other notable American politician and presidential aspirant, and you see the same thing at work.

Hillary Clinton, over the last 20 years or so, has gone from a rather idealistic person to an unpleasant, acerbic advocate of Imperial America. She has told bald-faced lies in public countless times and uttered words which might have been written by an old crypto-Nazi like Dick Cheney.

Her husband was once a man of some ideals, too, but his two terms in office were marked by not one achievement of any worth, and he became little more than a kind of giant vacuum cleaner for political donations, setting some ghastly precedents like selling nights in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House or pardoning a big-time criminal at the end of his term in exchange for many millions of political dollars.

This is the modern reality of imperial America: elections at the highest level simply do not matter. By the time a politician has managed to scrabble to become a contender, with all the endless secret begging for campaign funds, he or she has become part of the problem, not the solution.

In economics, we speak of barriers to the entry of markets. The American campaign finance system requiring truckloads of private money to run is effectively a barrier to entry in the political market, a barrier against the idealistic or those who would do anything to interfere with America’s entrenched governing establishment: the military-industrial-intelligence complex along with such powerful special interests as the Israel Lobby.

This barrier is reinforced by a duopoly of parties in that market, each being not very different than the other, except in some volatile social interests of no concern to the establishment.

And anyone who even chances to pass over those barriers faces everyday life with some dark and powerful people who will not watch their power diminished.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Hillary once commanded considerable sympathy for the grief her spouse subjected her to and admiration for her intelligence.

But her time as Secretary of State has in my mind obliterated all of that.

Her tenure has been marked by the most intensely ugly behavior towards the world and towards all interests outside of the narrow ones of the United States and its nasty sidekick Israel.

It has been almost painful to see and hear her as eager chief spokesperson for unnecessary wars, drone murders, torture, threats, and abuse of every description.

In that sense she’s all set to run for president now because American presidents for decades pretty much follow the line laid out by America’s military-intelligence establishment in its role of supporting powerful special interests.

It’s not a pretty picture in America. Its foreign policy consists of pushing people around who do not agree with America’s narrow interests, often killing great masses of them and destroying their economies.

America is not, in any real sense, a democracy. It never claimed to be one in the past, always terming itself a republic, that vaguest in meaning of all words for political organization. But now it is an outright plutocracy. Yes, elections are held, but they are based entirely on money as nowhere else in the world, and only candidates deemed worthy by the establishment have any chance of receiving their share of campaign funds.

As we know from economics, firms in less-than-competitive industries – industries organized under what is called imperfect competition – spend great sums on advertising and minor product differentiation. What they are doing with their efforts is building insurmountable barriers against the effective entry of new competitors to their industry. The same principles exactly apply to national politics.

Only candidates who can fit comfortably into this special-interest, money-drenched, undemocratic political system can possibly get one of the two nominations which exist in a carefully controlled political duopoly.

Hillary has demonstrated how well she qualifies.

And just as is the case of the current election – Obama or Romney, who cares? – it makes virtually no real difference who wins. Not one candidate has any leeway to be genuinely different or original.

America has become the world’s ugly bully, having killed several millions in the last few decades and having made tens of millions miserable and homeless, all while mouthing meaningless phrases about freedom and rights and democracy. And only proven bullies or sociopaths need apply for the job.

Hillary has all that down pat, the required qualities fitting her like a custom-made glove, so I’m sure she’ll run.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“A Congress without compromise serves no one”

Yes, indeed.

But Mr. Simpson is spitting against the wind.

Extreme and divisive attitudes absolutely characterize United States’ politics, the same kind of politics Harper works diligently towards establishing in Canada.

But the principle in Mr. Simpson’s quote is only in part true.

The Congress can serve no genuine purpose for the community at large, but it perfectly serves special interests.

The battle between the individual (or regional) interest and the community (or national) interest is an old one for any legislative body, but once you allow the special-interest payment for government though campaign contributions – which is exactly what the U.S. has and what Harper works towards – then the community interest will virtually always loose.

It is almost an unwritten rule of representative government.
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“The political stalemate in the U.S. should give pause to those who clamour for an elected upper chamber in Canada.”

A good point.

And with Harper working towards special-interest financing of elections, the situation would only be more pathetic.
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“The problem in the USA is and always has been that it is not a multi-party democracy, but a two-party power sharing agreement that gives special interest groups enormous power to sway political decisions by promising to deliver blocks of voters over single issues. It does not matter who is in power.”

Also a good point.

It is a duopoly in politics, and everything true of duopolies in economics is true in politics.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TELEGRAPH

American television debates are not, nor have they ever been allowed to be, debates in any sense – they are joint press conferences.

They are scripted and tightly controlled. Times for responses are highly limited. The moderator is jointly agreed upon, and thereby is rather a marshmallow-like newsman, And the questions generally do not touch true controversies.

Past presidential debates are only memorable for the odd mistake, but candidates have always made mistakes, and I think they are often more powerful in print than on the evanescent television image.

There’s also silliness that enters the television debate, a good example being the impression Nixon made with five-o’clock shadow and sweating, and that is no way to judge a leader.

In effect the American debates are the perfect symbols of what national politics have become there: a rather vacuous contest between the duopoly political parties and having much the flavor and sense of the kind of advertising we see for burger chains or the two big soda pop companies. All rather dreary and definitely uninformative.

And, contrary to what was claimed the other day on this topic by Toby Harnden, always ready to exaggerate, the American debates have changed almost nothing real: you don’t get change from an exchange of fluff.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The American Supreme Court has always, except for a brief few decades during the 20th century, been an institution for freezing progress.

This view of corporate spending as free speech is, in many ways, comparable to the Dred Scott Decision before the Civil War.

Runaway slaves were still someone’s property and needed to be returned.

So far as this decision goes, it’s back to the political jungle, although, in truth, American politics never quite left it behind since even the spending reform was not that awesome.

Money in America simply overrides democratic process on average.

When America was founded, a privileged local aristocracy ruled. About 1% of people in Virginia could vote (only white males of a certain wealth). The Senate was appointed (till 1913). The President was elected by the Electoral College, an elite of those with money. The “popular” vote – the 1% – did not even matter, the College elites did (they still do, but at least their votes are apportioned).

Well, some of that has changed, but along the way, American politics also has adapted to maintain a political reality not far from that of 1789 in many ways: the way that is done is with money for marketing and advertising and “exposure.” Tons of it.

In economics, with imperfect competition, we know barriers to entry of a market are vital, and barriers include tons of advertising, paying stores “shelf money” to pack the shelves with your line of products, and slightly differentiating your product from someone else’s – all making it near impossible for upstarts.

American national politics, effectively a duopoly between two parties through many rigged local regulations, exploits all of these practices.

Of course, the money also buys “face time” after elections. In any large American state, it is literally impossible to meet a Senator, much less have some time, unless you are a large money-supplier.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Sorry, this article is delusional.

Remodeling America is an imaginary concept.

Despite changes over the last two centuries such as universal franchise, America manages a great deal to be what it was two centuries ago.

An aristocracy of wealth and influence, where only a small number of people’s views genuinely count and one bent on imperial expansion.

The entire political system is stacked against serious change.

Congress is the best money can buy, and that goes for both parties.

The two parties are an opportunistic duopoly representing almost no principles at all.

The Washington establishment of the Pentagon/CIA/NIA/FBI actually form an unelected continuing government behind the elected government.

The last president who tried challenging that unelected government died in Dallas November 22, 1963.

Obama is personally an enlightened man of considerable depths, but he is ambitious to be and remain president. That wish is virtually incompatible with “remolding America.”

American exceptionalism is now everywhere and always the rule, whether it is making a war crime/ invasion into legitimate foreign policy or the Secretary of State putting pressure on Italy over a woman, one from a well-off family, fairly convicted of murder.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Clive Crook is absolutely correct, but he seems to imply that things have been different with American national politics, and that strikes me as rather naive.

American national politics have always been about personality, since the days when George Washington plied voters (then only the elite voters of the Electoral College mattered) with liquor, and they have only steadily gone downhill since.

It is now completely marketing and advertising and manipulated perceptions.

Marketing, America’s one authentic intellectual contribution to the world, dominates thinking there completely.

In products, services, politics and even religion, you will find not just its influence but its dominance as a way of thinking and operating.

The duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats behaves exactly the way we see Coke and Pepsi or McDonald’s and Burger King behaving.

Neither party stands for anything consistently other than the desire to maximize its election success.

The Republicans, for example, rather than a true conservative party have been a party of big spending and lowering taxes (for some), thus becoming the party of massive economic irresponsibility and huge debts.

The Republicans also, rather than the true conservative ideal of non-interference in private lives, have been the party of Christian hucksters trying to tell everyone what to do, the party of the paranoid ready to spy on everyone in every possible way, and the party of unethical business practices.

The dominance of marketing and advertising is why we have the dominance of money in American politics, something with which in the past McCain himself displayed considerable concern. America on the national level is today a de facto plutocracy. Big contributors get access and influence. Ordinary people are only marketing data points and the occasional subject of photo-ops.

Also, there is a consensus amongst America’s powerful on what I might call the really big issues. For example, we really do not see the Democrats – half a century ago portrayed as the party of the working man and woman – standing up against deficits which put a huge future burden on ordinary Americans. We do not see them standing up as a party against ugly colonial wars like Iraq to which overwhelmingly the sons and daughters of ordinary Americans are sent. We do not see them standing up against torture and abuse in the (false) name of security. And we do not see them standing up against laws which twist and distort every aspect of the Constitution protecting ordinary people against the abuse of the privileged.

So the combination and inter-workings of manipulative politics, money to pay for the manipulation, and the interests of the powerful who supply money for the manipulation make American democracy and national politics a fairly hollow set of institutions.

Added to this is the corporate structure of the country. Most people having good jobs have them with large corporations. Have you ever seen a democratic corporation? Corporations, with minor variations, operate much the way military organizations do.

Effectively, the main economic structure of America is an anti-democratic institution, one both with leverage over employees (and foreign readers cannot appreciate the full impact of this which includes a family’s health care insurance, corporate and government employed Americans being pretty much the only ones with decent insurance) and with the access and resources to largely have its way.

In the end, at least at this time, it perhaps doesn’t really matter that the political body politic is so warped, because the consensus of powerful people in America will keep the nation headed on the same course it has been on for decades. The America voter is faced not so much with a meaningful choice of policy directions as a choice of the person who will represent them collectively as both head of state and head of government.

And the truth is that even where there are domestic issues with some choice possible, so few politicians keep their promises or are able to keep their promises, that voting for an issue in America is a pretty hollow exercise. The best the voters really get is to choose between two individuals for personal characteristics which seem more agreeable.

Final note to one poster, the Pentagon and the defense industry plus the intelligence monstrosity make the greatest socialist entity in the world, one utterly without civilian and human-rights values, one with no competition, no democratic values, and a dangerous one. But American conservatives always think that is just fine. It’s the schools and social programs that are evil ands inefficient. Childish nonsense.