Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:43 on 8 January 2017

It’s something I’ve been pondering ever since the results of the election last November. Not whether or not to be part of the resistance, of course: it’s a given that I will be part of it. But how (and more importantly how much, particularly initially) to be part of it is still an issue.

It’s a given that I shouldn’t simply cling to my class privilege and let that compromise my activism. In turn that means I must be willing to risk my home and my material possessions. When I decided to try giving being more settled one last try, it was always on the basis of giving it up and bailing if it didn’t work out. I never anticipated it not working out in this particular way, but the nature of the future is that you cannot always anticipate it. Unexpected turns of events happen.

But, as with many things, it’s not so simple. Let’s play with Establishment economics a bit; it’s still very relevant, considering we still have an Establishment economic system.

It’s possible Trump will start a trade war. Some talk as if its a certainty. I disagree; the capitalist class has a lot of influence in Washington, DC, and a trade war would be bad for business. But it’s definitely a possibility: the capitalist class has gambled — incorrectly — that it can control a fascist more than once, only to later regret its mistake.

If a trade war happens, stagflation is the likely result. That’s because free trade has been the modus operandi for three decades or so, with the result (as Trump keeps correctly pointing out) that US manufacturing jobs have been decimated. Most of those factories closed a decade or more ago. The machinery has been removed and shipped abroad and the buildings have fallen into ruins. It’s called the Rust Belt for a reason.

The result is that at present there simply is not enough domestic manufacturing capacity to supply anything near the domestic demand for manufactured items. If tariffs increase the cost of imported goods buy 25%, 33%, or more, it simply won’t be possible to dodge them by shifting to now-cheaper domestically-made goods. In fact, the few remaining domestic manufacturers will now earn super-profits, because the tariffs will raise the market value of their goods to the price of the tariffed imported ones.

Those super-profits will attract investment in expanding domestic manufacturing, of course, but such expansion cannot happen immediately. It takes time to plan and build a factory. Moreover, building a factory takes extensive amounts of manufactured goods to accomplish (and remember, the trade war has just increased the price of those).

So a trade war will cause a series of price shocks for manufactured goods to hit the economy, much like OPEC caused a series of price shocks for energy to hit the economy in the 1970’s. The result will be the same: stagflation.

That will cause many people to suffer, as prices increase and economic opportunity declines. Hanging on to my home will serve me as a hedge against inflation (and a very effective one, since it’s a leveraged purchase). That will leave me better equipped to financially back the resistance. Moreover, I have room to host a roommate, and can use that space to host a fellow member of the resistance at a below-market rent.

So the correct course to take is at this time unclear. Maybe there will be a trade war, maybe there won’t be. Even if there is, maybe the resistance will most need my help in ways other than financial and housing.

It’s also quite likely that Trump will be impeached and not serve out his full term. Many observers have already predicted this, including both Allan Lichtman and Michael Moore, both of whom correctly foresaw that a Trump win was either likely or possible. In that case, the struggle will be transformed into a far more mundane one of opposition to a more traditionally conservative administration.

All I can say is, at this stage, it is not the time to make any rash decisions with my life. I suspect the correct course to take will manifest itself within six to twelve months.

Published at 08:40 on 6 January 2017

I believe Glenn Greenwald errs on the side of dismissing Russian influence in American politics (more about that below), but he does have a point about the “Russia hacked our electric grid” story.

Basically, Russia didn’t “hack the grid.” The hacked computer was a laptop that played no role in controlling the electric grid. Hacking an electric utility is not the same thing as hacking the electric grid.

The reason I believe Russia is significantly involved is not simply that the US intelligence community asserts so, but that it makes larger sense in the context of many observable unclassified facts.

By contrast, the claims of the Bush regime about Iraq being a threat were not believable in the context of observable unclassified facts:

• The intelligence community actually disagreed with many of the things Bush was saying publicly. Whistleblowers such as Joseph Wilson, and scandals like the regime’s retaliation against his wife resulted.
• UN weapons inspectors such as Scott Ritter and Hans Blix disagreed that Iraq was stockpiling WMD.
• Saddam Hussein was a secular nationalist and Islamists such as Al Qaeda were his ideological enemies. There was no reason to believe Iraq had any connection whatsoever with the 9/11 attacks.

Yes, sometimes the intelligence community lies at the behest of the White House. But sometimes it tells the truth. Sometimes it lies but the lie is minor and doesn’t discredit a larger truth. We do not live in a simplistic melodrama world where institutions are either lying evildoers or truthful protagonists. This applies to the Russian government as much as it does to the US intelligence community.

In this case, the thesis that the intelligence community is generally being accurate and truthful is the one that is more consistent with observable reality. Moreover, the thesis that Russia did not hack the grid agrees with observable reality far more than the claim that it did.

Published at 08:19 on 1 January 2017

Suppose I had the ear of Donald Trump. Suppose I wanted to destroy (or at least badly damage) Israel.

What I’d do is get Trump to be as fawning to the Israeli right as possible. I’d have no problems with settlement construction in the West Bank. I’d appoint an ambassador who wants to move the US embassy there to Jerusalem.

I’d move the embassy, preferably to occupied East Jerusalem. I’d back Israel 100% in settlement building (and in oppressive police measures, and anything else ethically questionable Israel does to the Palestinians). Then I’d let the inevitable blowback hit — and dump Israel.

Trump need not even be aware of the overall plan. His right-wing Christian backers almost certainly aren’t. They’ll support the initial stages as being pro-Israel, as the Israeli government will. But after the war heats up, the anti-semites (together with the unwitting support of the antiwar left and many middle Americans who both would be rightly afraid of a dangerous entanglement) will get Trump’s ear and convince him that his bread is now buttered on the side of isolationism and letting Israel fend for itself.

Not saying that’s actually what’s going on, of course. But given the ties of the Trump regime to the far right, it just might be. Moreover, they’ve already done the things detailed in the second paragraph of this post. Finally, the Israeli right is ideologically vulnerable to being played like a fiddle into doing its utmost to provoke a conflict with the Arabs.

Published at 22:00 on 29 December 2016

This. (It’s not the best-designed web site. Click on the three dot-dash symbols at upper left if it seems to end mid-work without showing the whole thing.)

Yes, Derrick Jensen is something of an asshole (check out some of his rants about anarchists and transgendered people if you don’t believe me). No, I don’t buy his claim that the only viable alternative to civilization is stone-age tribalism.

But, that said, the guy (and his co-authors) does have some valid promises about this civilization being so destructive that it must be ended, the sooner the better, in part because the official mechanisms of power are pretty much useless for the purpose of arresting and reversing the destruction.

Update: Note that this endorsement of the book with the title Deep Green Resistance is not an endorsement of the organization by the same name. The latter appears to be dominated by a cult of personality around Derrick Jensen as much as the Revolutionary Communist Party is by a cult of personality around Bob Avakian.

Published at 09:10 on 26 December 2016

On first glance, Mattis seems to be an atypically good pick, given the general hideous nature of Trump’s cabinet picks.

Then you get to what I called at the time the Rape of Fallujah, a deliberate attempt on my part to draw parallels between what Japanese fascists did in Nanking during World War II. I wasn’t exaggerating when I coined that phrase; at the time well in excess of 90% of the casualties were civilians. According to Wikipedia, when the dust settled the civilian casualty rate was between 71.5% and 77% of the total casualties.

Guess what? James Mattis was in charge of that operation.

Update: Democracy Now has a piece on the Rape of Fallujah here.

Published at 08:21 on 21 December 2016

What we need is realism. Sometimes that means accepting an unpleasant fact, but sometimes that means refusing to fall into false despair.

One such instance of despair is assuming there’s nothing that can be done about Trump; because given how Republican-dominated the government will be, there will be little we can do about it. This ignores the reality that Trump has at least one huge easily-observable vulnerability: his sociopathy.

He’s exceedingly self-centered, small-minded, selfish, and irritable. This is war, and in war your job is to determine and exploit your enemy’s vulnerabilities.

In war, you should also in general simply know your enemy, period. Our enemy is not just Trump, it is the larger Republican Party which is deciding to ally with him. That party is overwhelmingly conservative, and conservatives tend to place great importance on nationalism and patriotism. The latter is also a vulnerability we can exploit.

When an incoming president has the foreign entanglements that Trump has, to the point that he tweets disparagingly about protesters, news reporters, parents of deceased veterans, Broadway actors, and so on — yet refuses to say anything at all about Russia, this pushes some hot buttons for your typical conservative. We can use this to our advantage to split the Republicans in Congress and turn some of Trump’s own party against him and ally instead with us.

It may sound strange for a radical leftist to advocate making common cause with conservatives, but recall that this is war and war often requires making common cause to forge alliances with people you have many disagreements with. Churchill and Stalin had disagreements that paled in comparison to those I have with traditional American conservatives, yet managed to forge an effective alliance which defeated the Nazis.

If successful, it wouldn’t be a lasting alliance (the one with the Soviets promptly collapsed after World War II ended), but that’s not the point. The point is to neutralize a common enemy; both the Left and traditional conservatism are better off if they are slugging it out in an open society rather than being brutally repressed in a fascist state.

Published at 10:14 on 19 December 2016

The frustration is the general lack of activity in regards to the threat Trump poses. Attitudes tend to range from fatalism to denial (the latter typically accompanied by attempts at normalization of the situation). I am not alone; those I have met who agree the situation is urgent are also frustrated at this same thing.

Part of it, particularly amongst liberals, may be the desire to avoid facing painful and unpleasant realizations about one’s own worldview. Realizations such as:

• Liberals have been wrong about the right to keep and bear arms. Arming oneself is wise in the present situation, and it is dangerous that those on the Left have generally eschewed doing so, resulting in a situation where those who most need to be able to defend themselves now tend to have the least ability to do so.
• “Urban liberal elitism” is not just a meaningless buzz-phrase lobbed by conservatives. It is very much a real thing which has caused very real problems. There is a lot of despair outside of liberal urban bubbles which privileged urban liberals haven’t been good at all at acknowledging. This has motivated the despairing to back a fascist demagogue.
• Liberal politics has been insufficiently class conscious, because identity politics has substituted for class politics. (Note that identity politics is a good thing, but it’s no substitute for class politics. Both are needed.) This problem is most acute at the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, but many Democrats in the base have accepted it in the name or realpolitik, setting aside their own personal beliefs. Again, this has created despair which Trump has exploited.

The first two in particular tend to be painful and inconvenient for many liberals to face. But facing them must be done.

Facing ones’ own faults may be hard, but in that difficulty lies a silver lining: because the faults are one’s own, one doesn’t need to get any other side’s buy in to fix them, therefore they are relatively easy and simple to correct. If, that is, one is honest and faces them.

Published at 07:30 on 16 December 2016

• That the DHS and DNI would, in violation of the Hatch Act, issue a phony security statement about Russia being involved in hacking designed to compromise the presidential election, and
• That Russia’s cable channel Russia Today just happens by random chance to back Trump, and
• Internet trolls and fake news paid by the Russian government just by random chance backed Trump, and
• Trump himself just by random chance happens to have business ties to the Kremlin, and
• Just by random chance, multiple advisors and cabinet members Trump has chosen have close ties to Russia, and
• Just by random chance Trump praises Putin.

Or is it more likely that the Intelligence Community is not lying and the other stuff on the list above is not just random coincidence?

You don’t have to have a Top Secret clearance to realize Trump is most likely a toxic mixture of Neville Chamberlain and Vidkun Quisling. It’s pretty obvious just based on publicly-available information.

Published at 07:16 on 16 December 2016

As I just wrote, the world is a messy and complex place. As loathsome as Trump and what he stands for is, there are some things he is correct about. One of them is the funding of NATO.

It is true that other NATO countries do not spend as much per capita on their militaries as the United States does. Therefore it is also true that those countries are to some degree getting a free ride at our expense. That this is happening is a legitimate topic for public debate, one that has generally been absent from the national rhetoric.

Therefore some questioning of this state of affairs is in fact completely appropriate. What is not appropriate is to do so, as Trump is doing, in the name of facilitating an appeasement of Russia.

Published at 06:59 on 16 December 2016

Stephen Cohen is a Russian historian of some note who is presently pooh-poohing all the evidence in favor of the Trump Regime being a Russian-manipulated threat to our freedom. His dissenting views have caused him to be the target of no small amount of hate for some time.

He’s wrong, of course. Putin is indeed a threat. However, it’s interesting to examine history a bit and determine just why he persists so stubbornly in his wrongness when (being an intelligent and educated person) he should know better.

There’s a huge truth that underlies his beliefs, the truth of Russophobia. The latter is a very real thing, and played no small part in the West dismissing any commitment to freedom and democracy and backing strongman politics in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed.

There was this bias, shaped by decades of Cold War rhetoric, that saw Russians (and Slavs generally, and Eastern Europeans more generally) as something slightly less than the full human beings Western Europeans are. Being an ignorant and insufficiently-cultured people, they weren’t really responsible enough to handle full democracy. Like children need parents, they needed a nice big dose of authoritarian control. So creating an imperial presidency for Yeltsin was seen as a reasonable thing to do.

It almost happened to Poland in the 1990s. A few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Poles, frustrated with economic “shock therapy” that was making the masses suffer, elected a socialist government. There was much hand-wringing about how the stupid Poles were too dumb not to vote ex-communists back into power. (Poland had been a one-party state. That the politicians of all parties, not just the socialist one, were ex-communists was of course conveniently ignored.) Thankfully, not much came of it. The “ex-communist” bogeyman was shown to be the phantom threat it actually was when the socialists eventually lost an election and promptly proceeded to hand over power to the victors, just like any political party should do in a democracy.

But I digress. The rise of Putin soon enough proved that in supporting the creation of a strongman presidency in Russia, the West had created a Frankenstein’s monster.

This was actually convenient for the American Right, who had run into a problem: pure capitalism is an unstable economic system which has difficulty producing much economic growth, because it lurches destructively from boom to bust. Interventionist economic policy is needed to stabilize it, but such policy is ideologically inconvenient: once you’re doing it, you’ve ceded the ability to cling morally to the principle of laissez-faire and you’ve opened the door to social democracy or modern liberalism. The Cold War had provided an out for the Right: military Keynesianism; spend on Cold War military programs instead of social ones to stabilize the economy.

So the response to the failure of Russophobia was not a questioning of how anti-Russian bias had fostered unwise support for a strongman, but an embrace of even more Russophobia. Previous promises made about not expanding NATO eastward were reneged on multiple times. The new NATO countries were required to modernize their militaries (which gave the US military-industrial complex new markets). Plus the fear could be used to rationalize more militarism at home, too.

It is this which Cohen has been fighting all these years. Unfortunately, the real world is a messy and complex place. As I wrote earlier, a Frankenstein’s monster had been created. It’s now clear just how much a threat that monster is.

Is it a monster created by Western hubris and Russophobia? Yes. Is it a monster that a less bigoted and Machiavellian foreign policy decades ago could have avoided? Probably, yes. But, it is also a present danger that now must be faced. The genie is now fully out of the bottle.

I find the return to a new Cold War loathsome, too. However, at this point in time, it’s probably the least loathsome of several bad options available. The West made its bed and must now lie in it.