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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2022-156
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Ukraine war:
Labour:
Epstein didn't kill himself:
Crazy money:
Us as open (Not Ukraine) thread …
@ James C | Sep 25 2022 14:43 utc | 10
One has to analyze what really happened in all the color revolutions, as well as all the countries which already are under US domination and control without such revolutions. In all cases, there is an aspiring, traitorous comprador class who are ready to collaborate in the exploitation of their own people in exchange for better treatment for themselves. All exploitative — as opposed to settler — colonial ventures always looked for such people to help them out; without them, a colonial venture can never succeed or get off the ground, because a mere military occupation of a place will just be a profitless drain on the occupier. The compradors are usually people of the higher class locally, because they are the ones who aspire to rise in the world and hope to get into the ruling class itself.
These aspirations account for a good deal of the support the US system even inside the US itself and certainly are characteristic of wide swathes of people outside of it. Such people are described by Michael Hudson in his works as supporters of the exploitation system. In non-English speaking countries, people fall all over themselves trying to learn English to fit in with the dominant group, they deliberately disparage and trash their own mother tongue, and the historian Arnold Toynbee even observed as early as the 1930s, they believe it is the greatest honor to be mistaken for one of the colonizers. They also adopt the belief that the empire is the greatest blessing and hate oppositionist movements that dispute that belief. When you have a large, well-positioned local class that is so self-brainwashed, you naturally have opposition to any kind of independentism. I had plenty of opportunities to experience such people during my eleven years in Egypt, where I found them very difficult to persuade about the evil intentions of the US elite.
In the case of Iran, unfortunately, the effort to wed the religion of Islam with the modern state is a failure, because religion is about faith, sincerity, truth, honesty, etc., while the state is the ground of compromise, falsehood, lying, insincerity, skullduggery, oppression, exploitation, etc., and never the twain shall meet. See Wael Hallaq’s excellent The Impossible State on this point. Thus, the people have become vastly alienated from the religion there because of this attempt, this takeover, by part of the so-called Muslim “clergy,” who felt that imperialism had gotten to be such a huge threat (true) that they had to intervene and take power (big mistake). Because this was an unprecedented, invalid move with no basis in Muslim history, it was and remains opposed by the majority of the Shi`i Muslim religious scholars (a like step never occurred in the Sunni countries).
On the other hand, of course we can’t accept the reporting of the ever-lying western MSM about the issue, although there clearly is a kind of revolt. In particular, it is not likely that most of the Iranian people would want to give up the independence of their country to the tender mercies of the US, let alone Israel, and probably feel that the inveterate hatred those two countries feel toward them would prevent them from any easy path back into western favor no matter what they did, and they have the example of the failure of the moderate Khatami before them to prove this point. So it would seem it would remain more likely like Venezuela, with the traitorous movement led by Juan Guaido creating a problem but not having the critical mass to overthrow the independentist regime. Nevertheless, one can be sure that the US will bend all efforts to create discord and disorder in Central Asia.
Posted by: Cabe | Sep 25 2022 15:20 utc | 12
james | Sep 25 2022 22:25 utc | 50
re KHudson + RNader i’view…
I have written before on “Why words do not communicate”.
Eureka! Here is RNader raising that very subject with MHudson:
link, again https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/09/michael-hudson-discusses-debt-financial-surveillance-the-fed-and-more-with-ralph-nader.html
Read down to about 7th Nader/Hudson exchange where appears:
Ralph Nader: What isn’t understandable is what they mean by that…
and Hudson’s reply:
Michael Hudson: Well, I think you’ve caught me. I’m a hopeless academic…
Read the whole exchange part on how words fail!. I will give it here [if b allows]. It is crucial for all to know:
Begin quote
…”Ralph Nader: What isn’t understandable is what they mean by that, namely 1) lower taxes for the rich and the multinational corporations, not so much for the rest of us. 2) deregulating corporate crime, fraud, and abuse. 3) it’s not a free market; there’s no such thing as a free market in this country other than maybe a tween-run lemonade stand, because free markets can’t exist with monopolies, with small business franchise one-way agreements with corporate crime, with
corporate welfare subsidies, with deceptive and lying advertisements. Those destroy free markets and many more that I’ve put out in a paper called “Rebutting Free Market Fundamentalism”.
Strengthening the military budget? We know what that’s all about. That’s the military industrial complex and the constant weapons sales on empire abroad that you’ve written about. Conservative judges? Not really. They’re corporate judges. That’s the main criteria, that they support corporate power over human individual rights as consumers, labor, environmental, health, etcetera. Now, I’ve read interviews of you, Michael Hudson. Let me tell you, I’m a patient reader. You believe in massive sequential reasoning lathered by facts. And the more sequential, the more you lose the audience and they can’t follow you. So I’m going to put a question to you that probably no one has put to you. Drop the use of the word neoliberalism, which progressives always use, including Chris Hedges. And I say, Chris, do you know anybody around the country who works with their hands or their computers, who know what neoliberalism means? In one of your interviews, you gave numerous definitions, which were hard to remember. What you really mean by neoliberalism is corporate domination of our political economy from A to Z. I know you can spell it out. How are you going to overcome the communication problem? Progressive economists don’t use simple statements as what they’re for. They don’t say, “We’re for taxing the rich and the corporations.” They say, “We’re for fair taxation.” They use the word providers for the drug companies and health insurance companies, as if they’re philanthropic organizations instead of sellers, not to mention gougers. They use the words white-collar crime instead of corporate crime. How do you overcome this? This is a tough question for you to ask. If you were to counteract the Republican agenda that I just mentioned and compress it the way they do and make it understandable and motivational for the workers, how would you do it?
Michael Hudson: Well, I think you’ve caught me. I’m a hopeless academic. And the fact that I talk largely to other academics or to people who are working in the field. So you’re right, it’s corporate. I’m not sure why you call this Republican. It’s bipartisan. It’s the Democrats. What you’ve described as the Republican program is everything President Biden believes in. If the Democratic…
Ralph Nader: But the Republicans hijack better than the Democrats. They hijacked free trade, went against corporate—they’ve hijacked patriotism. They’ve hijacked the Bible. They hijacked the flag. They hijack everything. And so they blur that distinction.
Michael Hudson: Well, blurring is part of why I use a jargon word. And jargon is used because it is technical. There’s one reason that I hesitate to use the word corporate, because there are two kinds of corporations, because there are two kinds of economies. If you say corporate, most people at least think of corporations that manufacture things. They may be monopolies, but they still manufacture. But the neoliberalism means the financial corporations. And I want to focus really on the fact that, where the financial line, which America has been following since the 1980s, the Reagan and Thatcher line, has been not an industrial corporate line. We deindustrialized. It is corporate, but it’s corporate financial that is shrinking the economy. At least the idea of industrial corporations was when they make a profit, they reinvest it in making even more companies and selling even more, and at least you get an expanding economy. I’m trying to explain why the American economy is shrinking and not expanding.
Ralph Nader: Because it’s making money from money from money? Is that what you call financialization? It doesn’t produce anything real?
Michael Hudson: Well, not only making money from money, it’s making money by loading the economy down with debt. All money is a form of debt on the other side of the balance sheet. And I know you’re going to say, once I say balance sheets, people’s eyes glaze over, because thinking in terms of balance sheets, one person’s saving is another person’s debt. And that means one person’s debt is another person’s saving. I’m trying to deal with how can the American economy cope with the fact that there’s so much money from debt, as you began this show by mentioning, the only way you can write down the debt is to write down somebody else’s savings, and those savings are the savings of the 10%. Maybe we can figure out a new vocabulary to use for this, because you’re right, the vocabulary shapes how people think about problems, and I haven’t invented new terms, but maybe we can figure out something to distinguish the really predatory financial sector from the equally predatory corporate sector, but they’re predatory in different ways.
Ralph Nader: There’s another wrinkle, too, Michael, to engaging in massive sequential thinking. You don’t get on the mass media because you’re talking in paragraphs. You’re talking long tracks of argument and analysis. So you never get on TV or radio. You’ve got to learn how to talk in short pitches. Now, I’ll give you an example. $7 trillion has been, in effect, blown away from any productive use in stock buybacks in the last 10 years. Stock buybacks used to be considered by the Securities Exchange Commission, as you know, as stock manipulation and prohibited, except on certain circumstances. But Reagan opened the floodgates in 1982. Now stock buybacks mean that all the surplus profits from consumer buying of these corporations, like Apple, Intel, and General Electric and so on, the management doesn’t have any productive use for it. They want to enrich themselves by buying back their stock, increasing the metrics for their executive compensation, and laughing all the way to the bank. They’re not putting this money into productive enterprise. They’re not putting it into bolstering the pension plans of their workers or increasing wages. They’re not putting in research and development. Apple is not putting in recycling this horrific contaminating waste from its discarded computers and iPhones. I don’t think Marx would ever have anticipated that the pile of cash would be so massive that the capitalists wouldn’t know what to do with it other than to buy back their stock. What is your take on this unbelievable stock buyback? I mean, in one year recently, Apple bought back $90 billion of their stock, which was more than the combined budgets of the Department of Labor, the FDA, the Auto Safety Agency, on and on, $90 billion with a B, just one company. That, by the way, would have more than paid for all the tuition of college students that year at public universities, and they would have had a lot leftover. And that decision was not made by the shareholders of Apple. That decision was made by Tim Cook, who is now paying himself with a rubber stamp board of directors $833 a minute. A minute, Michael, $833 a minute on a 40-hour week. What’s your analysis of stock buybacks, which are bleeding the economy? That’s the consumers’ dollar there.” …
End quote
Posted by: chu teh | Sep 25 2022 23:09 utc | 53
In the case of Iran, unfortunately, the effort to wed the religion of Islam with the modern state is a failure, because religion is about faith, sincerity, truth, honesty, etc., while the state is the ground of compromise, falsehood, lying, insincerity, skullduggery, oppression, exploitation, etc., and never the twain shall meet. See Wael Hallaq’s excellent The Impossible State on this point. Thus, the people have become vastly alienated from the religion there because of this attempt, this takeover, by part of the so-called Muslim “clergy,” who felt that imperialism had gotten to be such a huge threat (true) that they had to intervene and take power (big mistake). Because this was an unprecedented, invalid move with no basis in Muslim history, it was and remains opposed by the majority of the Shi`i Muslim religious scholars (a like step never occurred in the Sunni countries).
On the other hand, of course we can’t accept the reporting of the ever-lying western MSM about the issue, although there clearly is a kind of revolt. In particular, it is not likely that most of the Iranian people would want to give up the independence of their country to the tender mercies of the US, let alone Israel, and probably feel that the inveterate hatred those two countries feel toward them would prevent them from any easy path back into western favor no matter what they did, and they have the example of the failure of the moderate Khatami before them to prove this point. So it would seem it would remain more likely like Venezuela, with the traitorous movement led by Juan Guaido creating a problem but not having the critical mass to overthrow the independentist regime. Nevertheless, one can be sure that the US will bend all efforts to create discord and disorder in Central Asia.
Posted by: Cabe | Sep 25 2022 15:20 utc | 13
Salam, Cabe.
First of all, we’re in full agreement regarding the ‘impossible state’. This is precisely why the Shia Imams, Salam be upon them all, strictly followed a quietist approach to their god given mission: to guide the Muslim Umma. Hassan let go of the office to demonstrate non-attachment (Faqr) to power. Hussein went to expected slaughter to demonstrate Faith (Imaan). The rest devoted themselves to learning, teaching, clarifying. And knowing full well that unless a people are of one mindset, any government over them will involve Oppression (Zolm).
But that so called Ayatollah — these clerics are exceptionally generous with each other with titles, that one means Sign of God, good for a laugh — Khomeini, a man of Arrogant Ambition (Kabr) who self-designated himself “Vali” — only John the Baptist (Yahya, SBUH) is called Vali in Quran, that is the measure of the arrogant ambition of these clerics — which means ‘Guardian’. In Islam, guardians are for those who can not make decisions for themselves. An entire Muslim Umma is deemed to be without the Wits (AQL) and Knowledge (Irfaan) and needs to be under the guardianship of these Mullahs.
Jesus Christ Son of Mary (Salam be upon the both!) spoke clearly and eloquently about clerics. He warned us. Do we listen?
Read Luke 11:43-54. Salam be upon on that pure Sign of Allah (an actual Ayatollah), Jesus Son of Mary. Read and see how describes them to a “T”.
So yeah, Islamists are trying to “Hijack” Islam just like Zionist hijacked the religion of children of Israel (Bani Israel).
Is it a wonder then that some scene from Iran look like GAZA?
Is it a wonder then after 44 year of effective OCCUPATION by a small group of Ideologues in league with Motekabber — means Arrogent, Self-Aggrandizing – a big no no as far as God is concerned. Pharoah was called Motekabber — Akhounds, 44 years of completely fleecing the national resources of Iranian Nation (Mellat) to fund various ‘projects’ of the Cabal — including easing the “growth” of Globalist projects like China and India (take our free oil, please!) and other “movements”, 44 years of suffocating Iranian Culture (Farhang), 44 years of unbelievably blood thirsty and cold hearted treatment of political opponents (“enemies of God”), that the Iranians finally say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?
This is organic. The West in fact was very quiet about this. WSJ the other day said “they are against the Raisi government” (no, they want Jim Aleph (Jomhoorieh Islami to go the way of ZAHAAK.
No one should live in the fear of their own government simply because they have a different take on religion! This is not Islam!
Islam is supposed to give you Security! Sanctity! The Prophet (Salam be upon him) said “I’ve been sent to teach Good Disposition”!
So all you “revolutionaries” sitting here all puffed about the Empire, what is the goal of Revolution? That people live in fear? That they can be snatched from the streets by plainclothes security people and disappear in a hole to then be returned to their dear families DEAD with Bullet Holes and a piece of paper for you to sign saying “our beloved child died of an heart attack”?
That is Islam?
So HOSHDAR (Warning) to agents of Zahak in MoA: Tick Tock.
Posted by: Irooni | Sep 26 2022 16:50 utc | 99
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