Milton Friedman on Phil Donahue, circa 1979

Big Swede inserted a Milton Friedman link over at 4&20, and so I went for a longer version. The appearance in 1979 on the Phil Donahue show [which I think I saw at that time] was forty-five minutes, Swede’s link was about 90 seconds, and this one runs about ten minutes. Swede’s portion is part of the longer clip here.

I have my own views of Friedman, and some ability to hold them with integrity as I was swayed by him in the 1980’s with his book/TV series Free To Choose. His logic was so crystal clear that it seemed unassailable to me, and like Swede, I could not understand how anyone could argue with him. But so much of what he advocated turned out wrong. He was on the wrong side of a fascist dictatorship in Chile, and deregulation of the S&L industry and later electricity in California led to disasters. (Like the Great Depression, I assume Friedman hung those somehow on government failure too.)

But there was no way I could fathom in my mind a better way to organize an economy than around freedom of choice. I would not begin to break through the barriers of neoclassical economics until I removed the ideological underpinnings, removing “capitalism” and “free markets” and “free trade,” which are mere window dressing, and putting in their stead mere fascism. The essential feature of the market is market power. In a “free” market there are no restraints on power, and those who do not have it must suffer. The ultimate expression of this freedom they so cherish is slavery. After all, what force protects a man from being owned by another? The free market? Or government.

So I listened to him again so many years later and realized he was a charlatan, smooth and glib in his assertions. Most of them are just wrong. People like him (or Chomsky or Nader) should be presented to us on adversarial platforms, never to merely blandly assert to the tides, but to endure cross-examination and refutation until the subject has crystallized. Putting Friedman up against Donahue, an entertainer, was OK. At least there was some blowback, and Donahue did not pretend to understand economics well.

It is 1979, there is a Fairness Doctrine, so I imagine that Nader, who came under attack was allowed to respond. The format was cordial and the men were respectful of one another, each allowing time for full questions and answers. All of that went out the window with the Fairness Doctrine, so that TV interviews are torture these days, usually one-sided with mikes cut off, people talking over one another, audience unrestrained in their applause and jeers. It was a different era. Back then we were stupid, but polite. Today we are just stupid.

Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, is now in the Ukrainian natural gas business (cue music, Mary Tyler Moore throwing beanie in air)

Hunter Biden (Has Dad's disingenuous car salesman smile)
Hunter Biden (Has Dad’s disingenuous car salesman smile)

Note: Please be sure to read JC’s comments under this post, as he is all over this matter.

I learned from Huffington Post that Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, has an impressive résumé, as follows:

Hunter Biden currently serves as Chairman of the Board of World Food Program USA and as a Director on the not-for-profit boards of the Truman National Security Project, The Center for National Policy and the US Global Leadership Coalition. Mr. Biden serves as managing partner at Rosemont Seneca Partners, Chairman at Rosemont Seneca Advisors, is Counsel to Boies, Schiller, Flexner, LLP, a national law firm based in New York, and is a Director of CAYOVA a next generation social networking site.

Mr. Biden is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Masters Program in the school of foreign service. Mr. Biden is a member of the CSIS Executive Council on Development and the President’s Advisory Board for Catholic Charities in Washington D.C. From 2006-2009, Mr. Biden served on the Board of Directors of Amtrak, serving as Vice Chairman from 2007-2009. Mr. Biden was honored to serve as an Honorary Co-Chair of the 2009 Presidential Inaugural Committee and to have served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Previously, Mr. Biden was a founding member of the law firm, Oldaker, Biden and Belair, LLP, was appointed by President Clinton to serve as Executive Director of E-Commerce Policy Coordination under Secretary of Commerce William Daley and was Senior Vice President at MBNA America Bank. He is also a member of the bar in the State of Connecticut, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Mr. Biden received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Add to that his recent appointment to Burisma Holdings, the largest private natural gas producer in Ukraine.

The guy is juiced. He’s connected to the Vice President of the United States, and has been appointed to the board of a company in an area of immediate interest in US foreign policy, a place where there has been insurgencies, riots, a violent coup d’état, massacres, where NATO wants to expand, where Russia’s security interests are threatened and a potential confrontation between two very powerful countries is an ongoing backdrop. It is not unlike George W. Bush shilling for Enron when his Daddy was president. It is not kid-juice, but rather daddy-juice, that secures these appointments.

Newsworthy? Nah. I got hold of this tidbit via Olga75 on Twitter. Otherwise, [crickets] all the way up and down the Google.
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Update: One almost gets the feeling that, outside the United States and in the inner tubes exists a real news media. This is from a Buzzfeed story:

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told BuzzFeed that Russia saw no conflict of interest in Joe Biden working to wean Ukraine off Russian gas – which makes up about 60 percent of the country’s energy supply – while his son worked in the Ukrainian gas industry.
“Anyway, as everyone knows, there’s no gas in Ukraine,” he added. “The gas in Ukraine is Russian.”

Factor that into JC’s comments below in which Burisma appears to be nothing more than a shell – no gas fields, no real company, Cypriot ties and a connection to the former Polish president and the current US Vice President. Burisma and I have one thing in common: Both of us got our domain names from GoDaddy.

Twelve Years a Slave

Caricature: exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics.

imageWe are well into Twelve Years a Slave this evening, and are yet to meet a character who does not fit the above definition. I don’t know if I can sit through this much longer.

What trash! What nonsense! The quest for moral superiority is never-ending. I remind you that slavery was legal in much of the north as well as the south at that time. I remind you of Dr. King’s words, that he feared the quiet racism of the good people more than the open racism of the bad.

The Holocaust became the reason for World War II, after the fact. It appears to me that slavery became the reason for the Civil War in the same manner. Economics brings out the worst in people. There are still slaves on the planet in abundance, and sweatshop workers are not far removed. The free market demands it. There are people livening nearby you who cannot pay their bills or college loans or afford health care or have enough food based on our current system. People suffered then and now because those who control economics devalue people.

But people are the same, wherever you go. These evil southerners and noble slaves in the movie are literary devices, nothing more. The whole damned movie so far has been one long tortuous device.

Twelve Years a Slave: Rotten apples all the way through. Feel-good junk food.

Odessa witness: “Third force” terrorists in Odessa set House of Trade Unions fire

It has become apparent to me in reading about the Odessa Trade Union fire, seeing videos, watching foreign news reports and listening to interviews, that the following took place (gruesome descriptions follow, but no photos or videos):
Continue reading “Odessa witness: “Third force” terrorists in Odessa set House of Trade Unions fire”

Kiev government using American mercenaries to put down eastern rebellion

Nicholas Slatten charged with 2007 Iraq murders - is he hung out to dry?
Nicholas Slatten charged with 2007 Iraq murders – is he hung out to dry?
The Kiev government is unable to rely on its own military to suppress the counterinsurgency in the east, and so is now using foreign mercenaries for that task. This story, from Voice of Russia, points to a German report to Angela Merkel that 400 of them working for the American firm Academi.

Academi, by the way, is just another name for Blackwater. Ever since Jeremy Scahill wrote that book about the company, they have been regularly morphing from one thing to another. They have gone from the unpronounceable “Xi” to Greystone to Academi. As “Blackwater” they were notorious for murdering civilians in Iraq but were left unpunished by the US legal system. Just recently the charges have reappeared via a grand jury – one lone agent is charged. That’s about all the justice that exists in this country.

The Green Berets, Navy Seals and all of that were put together as military units outside the military command structure, essentially paramilitary units under CIA control. They traveled under the euphemism “advisers” in Vietnam, and our entertainment system has done everything in its power to glamorize them. Navy Seals are held in near godlike status these days after the fake Obama killing in 2011.

Blackwater/Xi/Greystone/Academi are generally populated with ex-Berets and Seals. The companies merely uses them as hired guns, terrorists for hire, essentially removing their beards, making honest men of them.
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Update: Moon of Alabama repeats the rumors and their source and offers insight here.

Votes being counted in eastern Ukraine – against Russian advice

“You son of a bitch, you moved the cemetery but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a bitch! You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!! YOU ONLY MOVED THE HEADSTONES!!! WHY?! WHY?!!!” (Craig T. Nelson as Steve in the 1982 movie Poltergeist)

That’s a movie quote. It came to mind this morning as I read about elections going on in the Donetsk and Lugansk region of Ukraine. They are voting on whether to be governed by the new regime installed by London/Washington in Kiev, or to be independent republics. The Russian government urged them not to do this, at least at this time. I imagine it has to do with regional security. The elections will inflame tempers in Kiev, and violence and bloodshed will follow.

What caught my eye, the reason for the movie quote was this, from a Voice of Russia article

More than 3.1 million ballots have been printed for the referendum in the Donetsk region.

In the United States we have elections, but generally we don’t have real choices since both (we are only allowed two) parties are bought with the same money. Our news media only reports on partisan differences so that when the candidates agree on the issues, as they generally do, there is nothing to report but the horse race. Our voters are so dumbed down that they are easily influenced by low-information, emotional TV advertising.

But when all else fails, if there is a threat that an election will bring about real change, we have electronic voting machines. They are easily hacked, and rarely audited in any meaningful way.

Here’s an example: David Prosser, a Scott Walker man, lost his reelection bid to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2011 to JoAnne Kloppenburg by 204 votes. So we thought, until a former Prosser worker, Kathy Nicholaus, discovered 14,000 uncounted ballots. Amazingly there were just enough votes for Prosser in that fortuitous find to not only win the election for him, but also to give him a large enough margin so that there could be no recount.

The election was stolen in broad daylight.

So anyway, I imagined an exchange between, say Zbigniew Brzezinski and his protegé, Barack Obama, that went something like this:

  • Obama: It’s not looking good, Zbig. There’s a lot of resistance to our people in Kiev. The vote won’t be to our liking.
  • Brzezinski: So change the vote.
  • Obama: I can’t.
  • Brzezinski What do you mean you can’t? You send your people in with program fixes, you switch enough votes to change the goddammed outcome. You find missing votes in laptops. What the hell is wrong with you? You know this stuff!
  • Obama: They use paper ballots. They count them by hand.
  • Brzezinski: You son of a bitch, you let them have elections and you forgot to give them voting machines, didn’t you? You son of a bitch! You left the elections and you let them use paper ballots!! YOU LET THEM USE PAPER BALLOTS!!! WHY?! WHY?!!!”

It’s ugly however, as fascists, as with Walker in Wisconsin, do not care about elections. If they cannot change them, they ignore them. Kiev has already said it will not recognize the outcome.

There will be blood.
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Update: Disruptions by the Kiev regime junta are underway as we speak.

A thrwarted false-flag attack at Donetz?

This from my own blog post a couple of days ago:

But will Russia be used as the perpetrator behind a new false flag attack? Are we looking at a Cold War franchise reboot?

From Diane Johnstone, Counterpunch (h/t Lizard):

It is not impossible that the pullback order [of Russian troops on the Eastern Ukrainian border] was linked to a Novosti RIA report dated May 6, which indicated that the Ukrainian secret service was planning an imminent false flag operation in order to accuse Russia of violating the border with Ukraine.

Novosti said it had learned from security circles in Kiev that the Ukrainian secret service SBU had secretly shipped about 200 Russian army uniforms and some 70 forged Russian officer ID into the Eastern Ukrainian protest stronghold of Donetz, to be used to stage a false attack on Ukrainian border patrols.

Continue reading “A thrwarted false-flag attack at Donetz?”

A disgusting ad from the John Walsh campaign

image

Democrat candidates need to appeal to the nurturing instincts of their party’s natural base when campaigning. The ad men are working the numbers, trying to help him appeal to various factions. This ad was designed to reach teachers and appears via Facebook.

John Walsh is yet to utter an original thought, typical of a military man. He’s not had to think for himself throughout his life, and won’t start in the Senate if, God forbid, he’s elected instead of, God forbid, Steve Daines.

Montana teachers: Walsh’s people are making a run at you, but you won’t even get a cuppa joe with this guy if he wins. That’s now it works – they want you to show up, vote for him, and then go away and let him work for his money backers. That is his real constituency.

There is a candidate for Senate in Montana, Dirk Adams, who is talking progressive talk. I dunno … I fell for Jon Tester’s pwoggie talk in 2006. Tester played us and won and then quickly turned on us. Dirk Adams could be Lucy holding the football for the Charlie Brown progressives again, but if there is any real choice in the senate field in Montana in 2014, Adams appears to be the guy worthy of support from the left, such as it is.

What fresh hell awaits?

This is troubling: In a speech targeted at our elite planners Defense Chuck Hagel is warning people that cutting war spending is not a good course of action for the United States. But according to the linked Business Insider article, about 47 percent of the public wants the US to cut back.

The three major conflicts of the postwar were Korea and Indochina (1946-1975), and the Middle East (1967 to present). Perhaps encirclement of China was the objective of the first two, and encirclement of oil fields for the latter. But the human toll in these wars was staggering – millions of non-combatants killed. Carpet bombing, as a military strategy, came out of World War II, the US and Britain the major players. Dead civilians and destroyed buildings was the objective. As a war strategy it is not terribly effective. As a means of expending resources, it is.

The Orwellian side of the coin is as follows:

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

The United States has not been threatened by any other power on earth in the postwar era, but that does not matter. We are constantly attacking other countries. The “Cold War” was a mere cover story to justify the attacks, and when the Soviet Union receded, our leaders in short order staged an ineffective “War on Drugs.” It did not have enough propaganda bite to be a really effective motivating tool. They then staged 9/11, and that put us back on permanent war footing. Our propaganda was revamped to make “terrorism” the new “communism.” Then came business as usual … here a war, there a war, everywhere a war war.

“Killing” Osama bin Laden in 2011 perhaps signified a rift among state planners, or perhaps from a marketing standpoint, merely cleared the way for an introduction of new products. The Boston Bombing, which evidence easily shows to be another false flag event, featured Chechnyan patsies, a far cry from the usual Middle East ones.

The media currently wants us to focus our attention on Ukraine, but the MIC is not about to go to war against a powerful country like Russia, so other objectives are in play
here. I am not on the Twitter feed that sends out the explanations. I do not know the future, but there will not be a major confrontation with Russia. That is a given – we do not attack countries that can defend themselves and inflict comparable damage on us. But will Russia be used as the perpetrator behind a new false flag attack? Are we looking at a Cold War franchise reboot?*

In the larger framework, Hagels’s remarks, though deeply embedded in euphemism, are clear in meaning: Our military-industrial complex is worried that the American public does not have the stomach for more wars.

What fresh hell lay in store for us?
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*Seen in this light, the great efforts being expended to demonize Vladamir Putin make perfect sense. He would serve as the new Osama.

The world seen through the American news lens: ass backwards

This video came to mind this morning for two reasons: One, listening to RT news I was reminded of the courage of the Russian people in defeating fascism. Here is JFK speaking at American University, June of 1963:

No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland – a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.

I do not think I was supposed to learn about World War Two this way, not as an American. The European War started on D-Day. That’s when fearlessness struck at the heart of evil.

The Russians know their own history. They know about fascism. People on the streets of Odessa interviewed by RT speak freely on the neo-Nazis and fascists that have taken control of their country. RT is a Russian propaganda outlet, of course. These days it has more viewers than the American propaganda outlet, CNN.

I also listened to the American propaganda outlet NPR. There I learned that Americans are worried that Russia will try to disrupt the election to be held later this month in Ukraine. That is so typical of American treachery – to disrupt a country, instigate a violent coup d’état, support a reign of terror, and also call for an election. If they like the election outcome, fair or not, it will be a fair election. If they dislike the election outcome, fair or not, it will be ignored.

Which is why this video came to mind of that stupid, stupid movie. As John Wayne and the young boy head down the beach, it is sunset. The only problem is that the Vietnam coastline faces east, so that there is no sunset from that direction. It is ass backwards.

The American world view is ass backwards too, just like that movie.