Day: August 24, 2015

by William Skink

We are on the precipice of a “correction” in the stock market. How’s that for semantics? After years of zero interest liquidity pouring into banks like booze down an alcoholic’s throat, it’s about to get real ugly again. When alcoholics who can’t quit are at the end-stage of their disease, going cold turkey can kill them. If Yellen holds to raising interest rates next month after 6 years of a liquidity bender, which no one of course expects the Fed to actually do, ugly could get catastrophic.

There’s another malady many Americans suffer from: American Exceptionalism. I hope The Polish Wolf keeps writing, because he’s such a great example of this debilitating mindset.

Case in point, a post up today, titled China Beats the US at Neoliberalism.

It’s a curious post that takes China to task for propping up it’s crashing stock market with state pensions:

In an effort to boost its flailing stock market, and apparently learning nothing from the US experience, China has authorized local pension authorities to put workers’ pensions into national stocks, bonds, and derivatives. This is in fact a much bigger deal than the same thing happening in the US (where local and state level pensions have been playing the stock market, and not always winning, for years), because not only does it strip away some of the last facades of socialism from China’s capitalist core, but this affects virtually every worker in China, because unlike in the US almost all Chinese pensions are run through local bodies. This is risky to say the least, and seems to vastly widen the potential fallout of another financial crisis.

Since we are quickly approaching another financial crisis, it might be more helpful to figure out why instead of bashing China for going into damage control mode. If figuring out why is something you’re into, Michael Whitney has a piece worth reading about why China’s market volatility might not be the underlying reason for last Friday’s plunge.

That said, I do appreciate PW’s effort to cast China’s pension gambit as somehow beating the US at Neoliberalism (like it’s some sort of game) because he produced this gem of exceptionalist thinking (“It” refers to China’s ploy to prop up its stock market):

It also has implications for foreign policy, especially for those on both the far right and far left who are rightly concerned about the power of global plutocrats. If we’re really concerned about the spread of a ‘neoliberal’ mindset, which sees the government as merely an apparatus to appease the markets (what Paul Krugman brilliantly describes as the ‘confidence fairy’ theory of laissez faire economics), China’s willingness to risk its people’s pensions to re-inflate the stock market should be solid evidence, nay, proof positive, that a ‘post-American world’ will not have any more humane or less capital-dominated goals than an American one. While in Western Europe and increasingly in the US there is real resistance to this shift, China (and Russia), far from being bastions of resitance to neoliberal inhumanity, are out at the forefront of it.

I’m very familiar with this kind of argument, not because I studied rhetoric in college, but because I have a 7 year old that likes to say “but so and so did it to” when he’s caught doing something he knows he shouldn’t be doing. The evidence that someone else is doing the wrong thing as well doesn’t get him out of trouble.

Worrying about a post-American world is just bizarre to me. I don’t get it. Personally, I’m worried about a post-collapse world. And so are the uber-wealthy:

Super rich hedge fund managers are buying ‘secret boltholes’ where they can hideout in the event of civil uprising against growing inequality, it has been claimed.

Nervous financiers from across the globe have begun purchasing landing strips, homes and land in areas such as New Zealand so they can flee should people rise up.

With growing inequality and riots such as those in London in 2011 and in Ferguson and other parts of the USA last year, many financial leaders fear they could become targets for public fury.

The vast majority of humanity—Americans, Russians, Chinese and everyone in between—will be the ones left behind to suffer if things get really bad. At that point it won’t matter who beat who at Neoliberalism. It will be all about survival.

by William Skink

As Don bids Montana adieu for an extended period of traveling, other intelligently discontented writers will pick up the slack at Intelligent Discontent. One of those writers, The Polish Wolf, is already penning such intelligent missives, like this post about how killing the Iran deal sets us up for a quagmire, nuclear Iran, or both.

The Polish Wolf exemplifies American ignorance when it comes to foreign policy. In the comments, Steve Kelley ponders a concept that is hard to fathom for many: that our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is producing the desired results:

Perpetual war is our mission. Please at lease consider that the “mission” was accomplished, and conditions are precisely as predicted. I’m not buying the “miscalculation” or “incompetence” argument. Plans to divide-and-conquer the ME have been written and followed faithfully since at least the 1982 Yinon Plan.

The Polish Wolf just can’t seem to wrap his brain around this notion:

While I agree that a prosperous and democratic Iraq (as advertised) was not the likely goal of the planners of the Iraq war, I find it hard to imagine that the present situation was the plan, either. If the main goal by the US had been simply to destabilize the Baathist regime in Iraq and thus split up the country, that could have been accompished easily and relatively cheaply from the air – indeed, it was nearly accomplished inadvertantly in 1998. I can’t see the geopolitical logic in intensifying (immensely) the influence of Iran in Iraq and ruining our relationship with Pakistan, especially because both moves increase the influence of our greatest actual rivals in the region, China and Russia.

I sympathize with the difficulty of understanding America’s foreign policy. But here is a good place to start: American foreign policy never concerns itself with human rights and democracy. There was no “humanitarian intervention” in Libya, nor a legitimate populist revolt in Ukraine, but don’t tell that to The Polish Wolf.

The only geopolitical logic is attaining domination and control, and where that isn’t possible, chaos is preferable to the stability of non-aligned nations.

If American foreign policy was truly concerned with human rights, we wouldn’t be providing Saudi Arabia cover to do what it’s doing to Yemen, where the war is now stalled and widespread famine is likely.

But it’s Ukraine where The Polish Wolf was most spectacularly wrong when he claimed in April of 2014 that The American Left has Failed on Ukraine. Here is a part of that alleged failure:

Perhaps the biggest failing of Leftist analysis, though, is the consistent belief that somehow this is related to NATO’s eastward expansion, or that a reasonable solution can include preventing Ukraine from ever joining NATO. If one knows the history, this is absolute hogwash. Note that Russian intervention in neighboring countries has been a constant fact since the Napoleonic wars – and NATO membership has shown to be the strongest preventive measure of that outcome. Georgia has been invaded; Turkey has not. Ukraine has been invaded; Estonia, almost incalculably weaker, has not.

The Polish Wolf hasn’t addressed the situation in Ukraine since that post, but that doesn’t mean the situation isn’t continuing to worsen. The coup government in Kiev has used the ceasefire to prepare for a full-scale offensive against Ukraine’s Eastern population:

At an August 22 military ceremony in Chuguev, near Donbass, illegitimate oligarch president Petro Poroshenko boasted about using Minsk II to rearm and increase Ukraine’s military ranks to much greater size than last year – despite a bankrupt economy near collapse, using borrowed funds desperately needed for vital services going begging. More on this below.

Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) military spokesman Eduard Basurin said Kiev’s armed forces in Southeastern Ukraine total 90,000. Their weapons include 450 tanks, 203 salvo artillery units, and five Tochka-U missile systems.

“A total of five separate mechanized brigades, two separate tanks brigades, and air mobile brigade, an artillery brigade, and a salvo system brigade have been deployed…to Mariupol,” he explained.

“All in all, this grouping has 22,500 men and officers, more than 130 tanks, more than 560 armored cars, fifty-five salvo artillery units, about 200 artillery guns and mortars, and about 720 antitank weapons.”

DPR’s Defense Ministry intelligence shows heavy troop and weapons concentrations deployed near Donetsk. More military force was sent to the Debatsevo sector and near Lugansk. Reserves back up front line strength.

Basurin said Kiev plans escalated war on Donbass. “Information has been received about the plan of forthcoming actions by the Ukrainian army from a source in the Ukrainian General Staff and, no matter how strange this may seem, there are still true officers there who do not want to fight against their own people,” he explained.

When will this madness end?