toni solo, June 6th 2014

As Planet Obama continues receding towards infinite absurdity along a trajectory of endless terrorist aggression, military provocation and corporate criminality, earthlings struggle to understand the incoherent signals beaming out of the White House and its European and Asian satellites. The latest propaganda message stream projected images of Western leaders commemorating the allied landings in Normandy in 1944. Glossed over is the fact that all those leaders are currently allied with Ukrainian oligarchs and their nazi protegés in what amounts to a genocidal military attack on Russian speakers in Novorossiya, made up of the newly declared Republics of Donestk and Lugansk.

On April 19th 1944, then aspiring Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace, wrote an article in the New York Times entitled "The Danger of American Fascism". Wallace wrote, “The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.” Wallace would certainly have been aware of the intimate collusion of US corporate interests with Nazi Germany, something carefuly written out of Western histories of World War 2.

The Ukrainian oligarch gangsters and their nazi terror squads are natural allies for Barack Obama whose regime combines  a coercive national security state with criminal corporate power in the classic tradition of European and Latin American fascism. Obama's stealthy, mendacious, toxic rhetoric embodies in an exemplary way what Henry Wallace warned against seventy years ago. The US and European corporate elites have now poisoned information media to the point where anything perceived as contrary to their interests is subject either to comprehensive vicious attack, or sometimes subtle, always malicious distortion or else simply gets shoved to the margins and ignored.

The fundamental toxic mainstream narrative is that Western government actions, while responsible and in their national interests, are nonetheless always benign and morally right. Even media outlets superficially critical of the mainstream narrative are more often than not intimidated by the sheer power and dominance of the Western mainstream governmental and corporate media consensus. This is true even when the dominant narrative on the domestic front is self-evidently false. That in its turn affects mass political action.

Neither the Occupy movement in the US nor the Indignados in Spain, for example, made the connection between corrupt government domestic policy and criminal genocidal terrorist foreign policy. And yet the two policy areas are completely intertwined. Overseas, North American and European government foreign policy seeks to sustain access to and control of natural resources and too of strategically important territories and maritime areas. Thus they ensure the extraction and supply of raw materials and also secure global trade in their own finished goods.

Iran, Venezuela, Novorossiya and North Korea, for example, are subject to Western aggression because their territories hold valuable natural resources. Africa is more and more subject to Western military occupation to counteract Chinese influence in relation to the continent's huge wealth of natural resources. The West's terrorist aggression against the people of Syria aims to get decisive control of a vital strategic region. Provocative US and allied government actions and declarations in the western Pacific aim at intimidating China in another strategically important area, also rich in resources, the South China Sea.

In all these cases, US and allied government terrorist aggression and military provocation aims at braking the relentless decline in the Western Bloc countries' ability to manage their overwhelming pressing domestic economic dilemma. That dilemma consists of either halting declining domestic living standards for their peoples or else sustaining corporate profits and inflated asset prices. It is virtually impossible for Western governments to do both. Only a brief window of opportunity, maybe four, five or six years, exists to work out that dilemma without either serious military conflict or widespread violent domestic dissent.

As that process works towards its various outcomes the incoherence of Western economic analysis becomes more and more striking. Right wing economic commentators insist on the need for ever more emphasis on free markets, deprecating both government intervention in economic affairs and the validity of organized labour. But their criteria for excluding those vital market actors are completely artificial and arbitrary and practically incoherent in terms of legitimate regulatory controls, as repeated financial crises have demonstrated..

A principle of non-intervention in markets necessarily means that all players be equally entitled to apply whatever power and resources they can so as to defend their interests. But free market advocates absurdly welcome government legislation intervening to weaken the power of labour unions. Likewise, they praise Western government initiatives to impose misnamed "free trade treaties" or "economic partnership agreements" which are little more than grotesquely inequitable charters facilitating uninhibited corporate licence and abuse against the sovereign interests of nations and peoples.

Against the extreme proponents of free markets, progressive and liberal market economists make cogent arguments for self-evident measures aimed at securing something approaching economic equity and equilibrium. They make the obvious case for higher wages, debt relief for unjustly indebted ordinary home owners, a more equitable tax system, stronger protections for organized labour, effective regulation of corporations and aggressive prosecution of fraud. Similarly, in relation to the trade deficit, they argue against an "overvalued dollar" or an "undervalued yen" but they still defer to the overall corporate dominated mainstream media consensus on the desirability of free markets.

It comes as no surprise that assorted right wing theoreticians are incapable of admitting that there is no such thing as a free market. The only markets that have ever existed are markets that one way or another are either well regulated or not well regulated, by the very power of the actors and agents that compose and make them. The refusal of progressive and liberal economists, for the sake of credibility with in any case demented mainstream media, to insist on the well-established absurdity of free market ideology debilitates their legitimate although hardly ambitious case.

That ideological weakness goes a long way towards explaining the inability of mass dissenting political movements in the West to connect effectively a defence of their own domestic living standards with a rejection of their governments' overseas aggression. The deficit argument in the US should have been won by liberals and progressives years ago. In 2008, the main components of the federal government deficit were the Bush tax cuts, war spending and the banking bailout. But US public life is now so demented that national politicians still seriously propose cutting social security and health care provision.

No wonder there has been no economic recovery in the United States. All that Barack Obama and his clique have done is demonstrate that even at low levels of inflation, domestic living standards will still be destroyed if wages stagnate far behind strong increases in productivity. The same lesson is clear in Europe. The argument for higher wages, clear for over 20 years, was smothered by "free market" calls for corporate friendly deregulation, complacent tolerance of "innovative" fraud and a relentless assault on organized labour.

That paradoxically oppressive liberalization process followed the break up of the Soviet Union. Far from being an unquestionably liberating event, the dissolution of the Soviet Union condemned the majority world to deeper and more extensive neocolonial Western corporate rapine. In the West it meant a consolidation of the political-moral Cold War inquisitorial culture excommunicating all talk of socialism.

Currently, Western governments and corporate and alternative propaganda media outlets attack to varying degrees the governments of Argentina, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Iran, North Korea, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. All those governments reject Western dominated corporate consumer capitalism, promote regional combination and integration against Western dominance and advocate nationalist development policy within those regional initiatives. Many of those countries explicitly espouse some variety of socialism.

The ideology ridden commemoration of the 1944 allied landings in northern France coincided with the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square events in 1990. Just as US corporate collaboration with the Nazis has been erased from history, so the 1990 Tiananmen protests are portrayed as a "massacre" of peaceful protestors when in fact they resembled more than anything the vicious street fighting of Kiev's Maidan. Those kinds of distortions and omissions are exactly what Henry Wallace was writing about back in April 1944.

Western media offensives against countries resisting US and allied governments' terrorist aggression and military provocation are a corollary to Western mainstream media's defence of hopelessly failed domestic European and North American corporate-friendly economic policy. That failure is camouflaged by Western governments and media alike as a temporary difficulty. As the hollowed out Planet Obama and its satellites drift out of control into ever more demented economic and foreign policy incoherence, there is no going back, no recovery of influence and prestige, only brute military power. 

The Western ancien regime Death Star is dead on its axis. Apart from its huge counterproductive military arsenal, it has an insane surplus of degenerate financial power that is essentially consuming itself while damaging global economic partners. Its substantial productive manufacturing power is in relative decline. It has a chronic deficit of natural resources and raw materials. Something has to give soon. Humanity's best hope lies in anti-imperialist resistance of the kind currently seen in Iran, Novorossiya, Syria and Venezuela, all countries supported by Russia and China.