Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, says the escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Iran today is a continuation of two decades of U.S. policy disasters in the Middle East, starting with the 2003 run-up to war with Iraq under the Bush administration. “America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It’s part of who we are. It’s part of what the American Empire is,” says Wilkerson. “We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That’s the truth of it. And that’s the agony of it.”Endless war is a key feature of the national economic model, the goose that lays the golden egg.
(Video only, transcript forthcoming.)
Democracy Now!
"America Exists Today to Make War": Lawrence Wilkerson on Endless War & American Empire
7 comments:
Better explain this to Trump. There are signs he doesn't quite get it.
Jawbs, jawbs, jawbs... Americans need jawbs for income and war supplies them. So when are we going to have a society where wage-slavery is largely a thing of the past?
Never according to MMT proposals which would merely supplement wage-slavery to the private sector with wage slavery to government. Even if robots could do 100% of needed work, MMT advocates have no other answer to the need for income (except for the rich robot owners) but wage slavery.
Dumb, dumb, dumb ... And morally vacuous given that government privileges for private credit creation have allowed the richest to steal from everyone else.
Shrugging off culture isn't easy, Andrew.
Thinking logically is even harder. And the culture that AA wants to shrug off is called "logical thinking" and "justice".
Andrew Anderson's robot future would be a morally vacuous hell, because the ordinary person has no control. Only the Leader- call him Andrew Anderson- who knows better than everyone else makes production and distribution decisions, determines what is the needed work, what is needed income. Since AA speaks of income, the society has money, so to not be insanely unjust it has to guarantee a way to get money. Which the AA-dictated dole is not, cannot be.
Jesus made such arguments. But AA does not want to listen to the logic of Jesus and many others through the ages. Trivialities about private credit creation are specks in the banksters eyes compared to the log in his own.
One way to resolve unemployment is to exempt people from working. Cultural norms stand in the way of this. A job guarantee is an ode to our past.
One way to resolve unemployment is to exempt people from working. Cultural norms stand in the way of this. A job guarantee is an ode to our past.
One way to resolve unemployment is to exempt people from working.
Sure, and killing them is one way to exempt them from working. But we have a cultural norm about that. Maybe we need odes to our past about that?
People will want to work. They always have, everywhere.
Demanding something of people without giving them a way to satisfy the demand is criminally insane, tyrannical. Can we agree on that?
That's what AA is proposing. But since he doesn't understand what he is saying - and apparently you don't either, he doesn't see that. Many thinkers through the ages, from Jesus to Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Necker, Fichte, Lincoln many more have pointed it out the purely logical flaw in his dystopia. For if you think such a demand as above is insane, you are supporting a job guarantee.
Opponents of the Job Guarantee flatter themselves that they are Advanced Thinkers - not bound by the antiquated "cultural norms" that bind lesser folk. And think that if only these lesser people would abandon these cultural norms, they could be as Advanced.
But this cultural norm is not some moralistic work ethic, but "logic and consistency". It is a human universal and universal beyond humanity. There is no culture, no living thing which can abandon it and survive, no human culture which has done so. Advising people to abandon it is like advising them to abandon a belief in gravity. Doesn't matter what you believe. The Advanced Thinker who dupes himself and the Lesser Person who listens will still die if they jump off tall buildings.
In Canada, the disabled are not required to work.
Able-bodied individuals who are financially secure, are also not required to work.
Demanding something of people without giving them a way to satisfy the demand is criminally insane, tyrannical. Can we agree on that?
It's uncivilized.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely we will see a job guarantee.
Human beings are seemingly incapable of moving beyond the confines of survival of the fittest. They're unable to leave the state of mind that they were in, before the advent of civilization. The result has been needless suffering in an age of plenty.
The necessity of having everyone 'pitch in to bring in the harvest' is over. Only a fraction of the population works in agriculture, or clothing manufacturing, or in all the endeavors that are necessary for survival. If we were to curtail consumerism, for the sake of preserving the biosphere, fewer people would be engaged in work, or more specifically, paid work.
JG is a form of triage, until our species can come to terms with the idea that reciprocity is not as important as it once was. The mechanism by which the necessities of life are distributed to everyone, is not as important as developing a culture capable of accepting its distribution. We are nowhere near to accomplishing that. We have yet to break free of our scarcity mentality.
What we do with our free time may resemble work, and we may choose to call it that, but it is divorced from the need for physical survival. That is one of the benefits of civilization and culture; to be able to nourish more than just your body.
The 'work ethic' has become moralistic. It is imposed by society onto the individual, with a few exceptions as outlined above. That is what policymakers have to contend with, and that is why I support a JG. I don't support it because I believe it is virtuous.
The way things are going, civilization will collapse and all of these options will be moot. The good news is that no one will be unemployed.
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