Billy_T wrote:

WV, I know you’re not saying this, but some of the articles decrying the focus on Russia seem to be. That seems to be their main point…

=============
Well I’ve seen lots of articles that make Russia out to be Saints and Saviors,
and Hillary out to be a Demon, and Trump out to be a Savior. That stuff is out there. And of course there is a lot of stuff out there saying the USA is glorious and Russia is evil.

I dont see nearly enough stuff saying the US is a gangster state and so is Russia. Ah well.

w
v

zn wrote:

i have a
more broad idea in mind than just ‘domestic econ policy’.

Again, it’s economic policy.

Not domestic per se.

And, different foreign policies can be attached to neoliberal economics.

One does not dictate the other in any kind of necessary way. And you choosing to use the word a certain way is just you. But it is leading to a lot of analytic confusion.

If you want to look at the combination of foreign policy and neoliberal economics, it’s a case of one from menu A, then the only thing (neoliberal) on menu B.

So it could be A1 and B, or A2 and B, or A3 and B, and so on.

..

————–
And i would say ‘economic policy’ is a very stretchy concept, that necessarily implicates the CIA and the NSA and Drones and Weapons and all the rest.

Otherwise ‘economic policy’ is just academic writings in a book.

In the real world ‘economic policy’ ie, ‘neoliberalism’ includes a lot of the mechanisms of enforcement and power.

WE are now at the point of repeating ourselves over a ‘semantic’ issue. So you can have the last word if you want it.

w
v

zn wrote:

zn wrote:

You can be a non-fascist neo-liberal and a fascist neo-liberal. Fascist and neo-liberal are not opposable terms.

from the wiki

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism (neo-liberalism) refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic free market liberalization. These include extensive economic policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy. The implementation of neoliberal policies and the acceptance of neoliberal economic theories in the 1970s are seen by some academics as the root of the financial crisis of 2007–08. Currently, neoliberalism is most commonly used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers, and reducing state influence on the economy, especially through privatization and austerity.

The ONLY part of any of that Trump opposes, at least superficially, is the trade stuff. But then it’s doubtful that’s even true…he is not consistent or coherent when it comes to that. The rest? He’s another lockstep pro-corporate, pro-market, liberalization soldier. Far more so than any of his predecessors.

==========
And nothing in that definition restricts it to ‘domestic’ policies. Which means it can be GLOBAL econ policy. Which means it implicates the Pentagon/CIA/NSA, world-bank, IMF, ‘enforcement’ policies.

Which means Neoliberalism implicates a lot more than pure ‘econ’ policy.

w
v

Yes, agreed, Zooey. Sigh.

…and yet….there was the Bernie phenomenon. A small flickering light in the darkness, perhaps.

Its all we got.

w
v
“So live your life so the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their views, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and of service to your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a stranger if in a lonely place. Show respect to all people, but grovel to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life and strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies in yourself. Touch not the poisonous firewater that makes wise ones turn to fools and robs them of their visions. When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

Tecumseh

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Ok, true, but ‘neoliberal’ to me, also means to reach out around the globe and spread and grow and to use the military and cia to help that spread.

But that’s not what the word means.

The word refers only to economic policies.

And different neo-liberals can have different foreign policies and all still be neo-liberal.

That’s because foreign policy does not reduce to economic policy. With foreign policy you have to start accounting for fears and anxieties and perceived threats. Those can just run on a completely different track. So you can de-regulate the financial industry, destroy public education, and spend untold fortunes on the military because you’re pizzed off at what you perceive to be the muslim threat.

————-

Ok, well when “I” use the term I have a broader meaning in mind.

And to me, those neoliberal econ policies CANT be separated from the Pentagon/cia-enforcement methods.

w
v

zn wrote:

Where is this idea coming from that Trump’s policies are NOT neo-liberal?

Look at his appointments. Combined with a republican congress if anything he’s the most extreme version of that we have seen yet.

Anyone who exonerates Trump in any way at any level automatically loses my interest. It’s just a form of blindness and it’s irritating as such. It is invariably based on bad analysis.

————
I dont think Hedges is saying Trumps policies are ‘not-neoliberal’ — i think he is saying they are ‘neoliberal mixed with fascism’ which is different than just ‘neoliberal’.

Though there is this odd anti-nafta strain in Trumps rhetoric. Its not neoliberal rhetoric on that one subject, but we dont know if trump is serious about that or what he might do about that, etc. I agree with Hedges that Trump is not an intellectual with principled-ideas about policies. He’s more malleable than that.

Plus trump has this thread of pat buchanon isolationism at times. Thats not neoliberal. Then again Trump says things that are the opposite of isolationism sometimes. So we dunno. But he is not
your garden variety neoliberal.

w
v

Well, my own view — once again —

1) is that Yes, Russia hacked. I never once said they didnt.
But we dont know the details. We DONT KNOW whether they gave the info to WIKILEAKS. They may have given the info to a third party who THEN gave something to Wikileaks. That would be the smart way for Russia to do it – thereby giving Assange plausible deniability, etc. Assange says he didnt get the true-and-accurate information from Russia. I tend to believe him. No-one knows though. There is zero evidence being presented. Zero. Are we simply supposed to ‘trust’ the fucking CIA and ‘intelligence communities’ ? I wouldnt trust a damn thing they or their puppets in the MSM said. Lets see proof. Where’s the evidence that Russia gave Assange the true-and-accurate information on Hillary and the NeoLibs ? And again — its TRUE and ACCURATE info people are complaining about here. Much like Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers.

2) context matters. Selectivity matters. The context of this hacking story is that the MSM is acting like this is new or unusual or strange, or good guys vs bad guys — the truth is the CIA has hacked and hacked and hacked all over the world. And the MSM has kept quiet about it. I assume the Russians have hacked and hacked and hacked all over the world. Mega-Corporations have hacked and hacked all over the world. Etc. So thats the context. Where is that context in the MSM?

3) I am not ‘defending’ the fascist billionaire Donald Trump when i say the CIA is trying to take him to the woodshed and teach him a lesson. And that is what this is all about to me. THe CIA/MSM is trying to assert some control of the loose cannon fascist. Listen to the Chris Hedges vid i just posted. He gets it. Looks to me like there is a bit of a ‘deep-state civil war’ between the fascists and the neoliberals.

w
v

link:http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/13/why-ridiculous-official-propaganda-still-works/
Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works

by CJ Hopkins

For students of official propaganda, manipulation of public opinion, psychological conditioning, and emotional coercion, it doesn’t get much better than this. As Trump and his army of Goldman Sachs guys, corporate CEOs, and Christian zealots slouch toward inauguration day, we are being treated to a master class in coordinated media manipulation that is making Goebbels look like an amateur. This may not be immediately apparent, given the seemingly risible nature of most of the garbage we are being barraged with, but once one understands the actual purpose of such official propaganda, everything starts to make more sense.

Chief among the common misconceptions about the way official propaganda works is the notion that its goal is to deceive the public into believing things that are not “the truth” (that Trump is a Russian agent, for example, or that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, et cetera). However, while official propagandists are definitely pleased if anyone actually believes whatever lies they are selling, deception is not their primary aim.

The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.

Imagine this Maginot line as a circular wall surrounded by inhospitable territory. Inside the wall is “normal” society, gainful employment, career advancement, and all the other considerable benefits of cooperating with the ruling classes. Outside the wall is poverty, anxiety, social and professional stigmatization, and various other forms of suffering. Which side of the wall do you want to be on? Every day, in countless ways, each of us are asked and have to answer this question. Conform, and there’s a place for you inside. Refuse, and … well, good luck out there.

In openly despotic societies, the stakes involved in making this choice (to conform or dissent) are often life and death. In our relatively liberal Western societies (for those of us who are not militant guerillas), the consequences of not conforming to the official narrative are usually subtler. Despite that, the pressure is still intense. Conforming to the consensus “reality” generated by these official narratives is price of admission to the inner sanctum, where the jobs, money, professional prestige, and the other rewards of Capitalism are. Conforming does not require belief. It requires allegiance and rote obedience. What one actually believes is completely irrelevant, as long as one parrots the official narrative.

In short, official propaganda is not designed to deceive the public (no more than the speeches in an actor’s script are intended to deceive the actor who speaks them). It is designed to be absorbed and repeated, no matter how implausible or preposterous it might be. Actually, it is often most effective when those who are forced to robotically repeat it know that it is utter nonsense, as the humiliation of having to do so cements their allegiance to the ruling classes (this phenomenon being a standard feature of the classic Stockholm Syndrome model, and authoritarian conditioning generally).

The current “Russian hacking” hysteria is a perfect example of how this works. No one aside from total morons actually believes this official narrative (the substance of which is beyond ridiculous), not even the stooges selling it to us. This, however, is not a problem, because it isn’t intended to be believed … it is intended to be accepted and repeated, more or less like religious dogma. (It doesn’t matter what actually happened, i.e., whether the “hack” was a hack or a leak, or who the hackers or leakers were, or who they may have been working for, or what whoever’s motives may have been. What matters is that the ruling classes have issued a new official narrative and are demanding that every “normal” American stand up and swear allegiance to it.)

The ruling classes are not exactly making it easy for their followers this time. Their new official narrative (let’s go ahead and call it “The Putinist Putsch to Destroy Democracy”) is so completely fatuous that it’s beyond embarrassing. The plot is more or less what you’d expect from a mediocre young adult novel or a Game of Thrones-type fantasy series. And if that wasn’t already humiliating enough for the liberals being asked to pretend to believe it, the PR folks in charge couldn’t even be bothered to assemble a new collection of liars to market their childish fairy tale for them. Not only are they insisting that liberals take the word of the “Intelligence Community” and the mainstream media that sold the world the “Saddam Has Secret WMDs” hoax, they actually dispatched James R. Clapper to sit there, in more or less the same spot he sat in the last time he lied to Congress, and do his dog and pony show again.

Meanwhile, the ruling classes’ papers of record, which cosmopolitan liberals rely on to provide a simulation of “serious journalism,” highbrow “arts and culture,” and so on, have descended to the level of the National Enquirer. Among the recent highlights was The Washington Post‘s “Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid” story, which it turned out involved neither Russians nor hackers, nor the Vermont power grid’s actual computers, and was basically just another made-up story, like the one about Putin’s Fake News Army. The New York Times, which has also been dutifully rolling out the new official narrative, has taken the leash off Charles M. Blow (aka “The Withering Gaze”), who is accusing Trump of being Russia’s appointment” and proclaiming his election “an act of war.” And now, as I was writing this piece, they hit us with the “Golden Showers” story, in which Trump paid a bunch of Russian hookers to pee on the bed where Obama slept. Any day now we are going to be told that Elvis is secretly working with Putin to deploy a Zhirinovskian gravitational weapon in a UFO disguised as Jesus that Assange and Snowden will personally pilot across the Atlantic to sink America. It’s like some kind of loyalty test in which the ruling classes are trying to determine just how far they can go with this crap before liberals refuse to salute any more of it.

The point of all this propaganda is to delegitimize Donald Trump, and to prophylactically reassert the neoliberal ruling classes’ monopoly on power, “reality,” and “truth.” In case this wasn’t already abundantly clear, the neoliberal ruling classes have no intention of giving up control of the global capitalist pseudo-empire they’ve been working to establish these last sixty years. They’re going to delegitimize and stigmatize Trump (and any other symbol of nationalist backlash or resistance to transnational Capitalism), bide their time for the next four years, and then install another of their loyal servants … after which life will go back to “normal,” and liberals will do their best to forget this unfortunate period where they pretended to believe this insipid neo-McCarthyite nonsense.

If I wasn’t worried that Trump is going to launch an all-out War on Islam, or that one of “our boys” in the tanks Obama has theatrically ordered to the Russian border was going to go bonkers and try to “git some” for Clinton, I’d be looking forward to seeing just how batshit crazy it’s going to get.
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C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (US). He can reached at his website, cjhopkins.com, or at consentfactory.org.