Just a few economic notes this time; I think combined with earlier notes
there's enough to spur discussion on an upcoming News from Neptune. Have a
good show, guys.
Assange/WikiLeaks
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dt5C4orWoAAEcvU.jpg -- Assange infographic
worth viewing, reproducing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vASMcbEufHQ -- Assange rejects the "no
death penalty" claim for good reason.
Neoliberalism at home and abroad.
US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGBQI5g2DFo -- Millenials are in deeper
debt than ever even after going to college according to the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York: in the past 10 years young people's average debt has gone
up: $20,000 in 2005 to $34,000 in 2015. That's $1.3 trillion overall, which
is 175% increase from 2006.
UK: Prime Minister May's proposed deal looks like a loser and it looks like
she's on the way out -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oopo_OUV34g -- the
vote that was scheduled to happen on 2018-12-11 has been postponed, it's
believed, because May would have lost. Brussels has said the European
Council deal is not renegotiable.
This jibes with a poll which says 62% of those polled say PM May's deal is
"bad for Britain" (including 47% of conservatives) per
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgLOXjaCosE
France: The Yellow Vests are continuing their protests against
neoliberalism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oopo_OUV34g) and the
sentiment is spreading to Brussels
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysZ3Xn_OYrA)
Russiagate expands its mandate, now we're supposed to believe Russiagate is
causing the Yellow Vest protests too! Russiagate continues to be the
distraction designed to keep us from understanding how things are and why
we're seeing what we're seeing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/08/france-online-extremists-put-centrism-torch/
-- Max Boot of the Washington Post arguing that his detractors (who cite
his own words circa Macron's election) are possible "bots" because the
accounts are unpopular ("The irony is that some of the Twitter accounts
scoffing at my questions about bots had so few followers that they might be
bots themselves.").
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/world/europe/yellow-vests-france.html --
But fellow stenographers at the New York Times (you remember them, they
championed invading Iraq based on sourceless lies they published) say that
the Yellow Vest protests are "mostly organic" and are "about the inability
to pay the bills", not Russian meddling:
> [...] what makes France’s revolt different is that it has not followed
> the usual populist playbook. It is not tethered to a political party,
> let alone to a right-wing one. It is not focusing on race or migration,
> and those issues do not appear on the Yellow Vests’ list of complaints.
> It is not led by a single fire-breathing leader. Nationalism is not on
> the agenda.
>
> The uprising is instead mostly organic, spontaneous and
> self-determined. It is mostly about economic class. It is about the
> inability to pay the bills.
Far better discussion and insight comes from elsewhere, such as some pieces
that ran on RT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oopo_OUV34g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f512rmxgxNg -- shorter pieces on this topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysZ3Xn_OYrA -- a lengthier discussion on
"CrossTalk" of how this issue is part of a larger discussion in public
objection to neoliberalism including:
> Mark Sleboda (around 4m22s): The lack of functioning institutions and
> Macron's neoliberal globalist policies. Macron's approval rating has
> fallen from some 55% down to 18%. While polls also show that 68-72% of
> the French people support the protests that the media is trying to
> [describe] as 'violent' and 'mobs' and so on. We see clearly that it is
> unions, and firemen, and students out there protesting--
>
> Peter Lavelle: And it's not just in Paris but--
>
> Sleboda & Lavelle (together): all across the country.
>
> Sleboda: They're not just protesting the fuel taxes and Macron
> personally but they're also protesting very specific other things in his
> policy like his removal of the wealth tax. With one hand he hands an
> extra fuel tax to the working class and the poor, while the other hand
> he removes taxes from the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
A highly-recommended discussion about what's going on in France and
breaking out in other nearby countries. We haven't seen the end of what
drove Brexit, Trump's election, Yellow Vest protests, and more is to come.
For the most part, mainstream media (and, I'm afraid, Democracy Now as
well) has framed the issue as either Russian meddling (hence this is also
another Russiagate smear), or an opportunity to ignore the issue and bring
up Trump's impeachment instead. Either narrative is (they hope) is a useful
distraction away from the global critiques of neoliberalism. But there's no
evidence to support the meddling rationale (just like every other
Russiagate story falls apart or becomes too trivial). Foreign meddling and
domestic distractions won't explain what's going on.
Why drag self-described "alternative" news Democracy Now into this?
Goodman and company apparently had plenty of time on Monday (2018-12-10) to
let Marcy Wheeler (she of the thoroughly debunked Russiagate explanation,
courtesy of Aaron Mate and The Real News) speculate about how Trump's
alleged hush money payoffs to two adult media stars might be a part of
indictment and impeachment (see
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/10/marcy_wheeler_mueller_probe_could_lead).
But not only is this a weak topic (even if Trump did have extramarital sex
that doesn't affect the lives of the vast majority of Americans), there's
no discussion of how this would happen without Democratic Party control
over both houses of Congress, and no discussion of how a President Pence
would likely continue the policies we've seen so far across Obama and Trump
but benefit the Permanent Government/Deep State in making them less nervous
than candidate Trump made them (remember they shifted their endorsement to
the reliable belligerent Hillary Clinton).
Perhaps something else will materialize this week on DN. But so far DN's
pattern is clear: DN will let guests debunk Russiagate stories (I believe
because DN airs live so editing is impossible and cutting off the guest
looks desperately clumsy and bad), but DN's hosts won't debunk Russiagate
stories. So DN's audience gets repetition of Russiagate stories with no
clarifying/debunking analysis immediately following DN repeating the
Russiagate story. This is a radical departure from how DN handled the
run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Back then virtually every time they'd
repeat a NYT story about Iraqi WMDs, they would immediately quote what Hans
Blix's group said about their on-site investigations, or the history of
Iraq's WMDs. This had the effect of laying bare that NYT's stories were
lies. DN also seemed to take pride in talking to "unembedded" journalists
which further distanced DN from being just another source for pro-war
propaganda. I think this repeated debunking helped earn DN an audience. But
nowadays DN's hosts won't recognize that one's own economy is a far more
important concern than alleged Russian meddling. DN won't repeatedly or
critically dig into a recent poll which indicates that the public ranked
Russiagate concerns below 1% when listing significant issues of the day. RT
and others have reported on this.
So if DN isn't going to bring us different coverage than the baseless
speculation/distraction we could get from CNN or MSNBC, what's the point of DN?
RT is not of one mind on this. It's disappointing that some RT hosts don't
listen to what the public and other RT shows are saying, but:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvkCK3wHSsU -- This RT piece tries hard to
make it seem like single-payer medical care delivery and taxpayer-funded
education as the causes for the Yellow Vest protests by making it seem like
the French public wants these things but doesn't want to pay for them. But
as is typical with (the usually disappointing) Scottie Nell Hughes, she
doesn't bring in certain key points that might conflict with her views:
- the evidence of history (France has had a better medical care delivery
system longer than the US and most western countries do something closer to
what France does than the US HMO-based system),
- the state of affairs in the US (Americans can't afford HMO-based medical
care and Americans like Medicare for All),
- nor does Hughes discuss French willingness to pay for the costs that come
with the higher standard of living the Yellow Vests protests are all about.
The French are protesting neoliberalism and their lower standard of living.
They acknowledge what they want costs money. This is about how their money
is allocated. The money they have given government is plenty to cover the
costs of what the public wants but what the public wants conflicts with
what the elites put Macron in office to do. Macron is the banker put into
office to shepherd in increased privatization and make real austerity
policies (such as dropping the French wealth tax).
Domestically, one of the reasons the $21 trillion dollars the DoD and HUD
can't account for gets so little coverage is because that figure could
easily cover so much of what the American public wants. See
https://www.thenation.com/article/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/ for more on
this and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrAdBYbXHZ8 for Redacted Tonight's
latest coverage of this ongoing story. So long as most media won't talk
about this (even to criticize it) the elites are less likely to be pressed
on this and they'll be under less pressure to raise their distractionary
excuse (it's an 'accounting error' and not real money we've paid and seen
no real benefit from). Democracy Now joins the mainstream media in their
overwhelming silence about the story. Reload
https://www.democracynow.org/search?utf8=✓&query=trillion+defense and see
what comes up for you.
-J