Essays

Our Legacy Systems: Dysfunctional, Unreformable

"Real reform would mean powerful constituencies would have to take real reductions in staffing, power, benefits and in their share of the national income. Rather than reveal this double-bind--reform is impossible but the Status Quo is unsustainable--the legacy system deploys its gargantuan resources to laying down a smoke-screen of bogus reforms and ginned-up statistics. America's legacy systems are like stars about to go super-nova. They have increased in size to the point where their stupendous mass guarantees that once their energy source (as measured in fossil fuels and money) falls below a certain threshold, the institution will collapse inward on itself." Continue reading →

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Mass State Surveillance Not About Privacy

"The way we’re encouraged to cope with this is to make it about privacy: to turn inwards, take stock of our personal inner domain, and decide just how much of our lives can be offered up to the state. Large scale, bureaucratic intrusion into our personal lives is a given, but we can fill out a customer response card if we have any comments about the degree of the intrusion. If this is about privacy, the onus is on us to define its limits, to guide our servant institutions to the right policies that will protect our newly cordoned-off personal space. And so they invent a clever distraction about what the limits of privacy should be." Continue reading →

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What’s the Better Role Model, France or Switzerland?

"The first slide, which is based on research from the Boston Consulting Group, looks at which jurisdictions have the most households with more than $1 million of wealth. Switzerland is the easy winner, and you probably won’t be surprised to see Hong Kong and Singapore also do very well. Gee, I wonder if the fact that Switzerland (#4), Hong Kong (#1), and Singapore (#2) score highly on the Economic Freedom of the World index has any connection with their comparative prosperity? The most impressive part of this data is the way Switzerland has maintained a much smaller burden of government spending [compared to the Eurozone]." Continue reading →

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What the NSA Revelations Tell Us about America’s Police State

"Ongoing revelations by The Guardian and The Washington Post of massive, illegal secret state surveillance of the American people along with advanced plans for waging offensive cyberwarfare on a global scale, including inside the US, underscores what Antifascist Calling has reported throughout the five years of our existence: that democracy and democratic institutions in the United States are dead letters. If what the Bush and now, Obama regimes are doing is not Orwellian blanket surveillance of the American people, then words fail." Continue reading →

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Snowden vs. the Soyuz

"Russian drones aren’t plying the skies above distant countries, raining death and terror on helpless neighborhoods. Putin the ex-KGB chief doesn’t have Tuesday meetings to authorize summary executions on the basis of a 'Kill List' compiled by anonymous and unaccountable functionaries. Moscow doesn’t provide arms, training, and support to terrorist groups in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere; that’s Washington’s gig. And since September 2001 it has Washington, not Moscow, that employs the services of KGB-trained secret police in countries like Uzbekistan and Syria." Continue reading →

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Why Centralization Leads to Collapse

"A system that suppresses dissent is fault-intolerant, ignorant and fragile. Any event that does not respond to centralized, rationalized policy creates unintended consequences that throws the centralized mechanism into disarray. Lacking dissent and redundancy, the system piles on one haphazard, politically expedient 'fix' after another, further destabilizing the system. The event that triggers crisis and collapse isn't important; the system, rendered unstable and fragile by centralization, is primed for crisis and collapse. The dry underbrush is piled high, and if the first lightning strike doesn't start the fire, the second one will." Continue reading →

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Why the Status Quo Is Doomed

"Every one of these implicit assumptions has been turned on its head: growth is barely above the rate of inflation; by some measures, it has already fallen below the real rate of inflation. Debt is increasing much faster than income or wealth. Virtually all of the recent expansion of wealth/income is flowing to the top 10%. This is why the status quo is doomed: there is no Plan B or even conceptual alternative to the 'more growth forever' agenda. The oft-touted fantasy is that 'we're going to grow our way out of this,' but it is abundantly clear that debt is rising far faster than growth or incomes." Continue reading →

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Homeland Security Is A Racket Twice Over

"Since the government has created the problem of terrorism while fraudulently denying that it has, and then in building up the DHS has fraudulently offered a non-solution to solve the problem of its own making, the DHS is a racket twice over. Actually, since the DHS's activities actively invade everyone's rights, it is a racket thrice over. None of us would have any expectation of systematic terrorism against Americans in America if there were not a U.S. empire that systematically intrudes in lands where it doesn't belong. Retaliations from these places take time, sometimes decades. The U.S. is breeding new terrorists all the time and in more and more places." Continue reading →

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How the Empire Works

"Former US intelligence asset John Perkins described how he and fellow 'Economic Hit Men' were used by Washington in a global loan-sharking scheme. The case of Yemen is instructive. In 1991, Yemen refused to vote in the UN in favor of the first Iraq War. Washington retaliated by cutting of all financial aid. Saudi Arabia expelled about a million Yemeni workers whose remittances were vital to the country’s economy. Yemen, which had barely become unified, descended into civil war and dictatorship. Today Yemen is ruled by a compliant puppet dictator who eagerly supports Washington’s drone warfare campaign against his subjects. Such are the ways of empire." Continue reading →

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How to Survive When Prices Double Every Day and a Half

"At a 2011 Casey Research Summit, I met and heard the firsthand accounts of three gentlemen from Zimbabwe, Argentina, and Yugoslavia, who had survived hyperinflation in their home countries. Although these may sound like exotic locales with foreign problems, their terrifying histories have a lesson to teach us. Hyperinflation is like fire. We all install smoke alarms, keep fire extinguishers handy, and buy insurance to protect our homes, but most of us will never fall victim to an unplanned fire. However, when a fire does ignite, it can be catastrophic – which is why prudent people simply plan ahead." Continue reading →

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