Bloomberg, August 12
At the dawn of steel city scribblings in late 2015, when I still worried about alienating my liberal peers, I rationed my use of the term, ruling class. I knew it put people off. As a workaround I came up with the term – you can still see it on my about page – criminally insane. These days I worry less about what liberals think of me or this site, but my nomenclatural fix of expedience has proved more durable and useful than I’d anticipated.
Now read on.
The sociopaths who rule the USA now seem set, with every war gamed scenario indicating defeat in a full on war against the Islamic Republic, on sitting it out on the assumption that naval blockade in the Gulf of Oman combined with sanctions will in time force the latter to cave. That assumption was put under the microscope in yesterday’s instantiation of Yves Smith’s now near daily reports of the conflict on Naked Capitalism.
Aside from the aforementioned sociopathy – Or is it psychopathy? Every time I look up the distinction it goes in one ear and out the other – of wrecking the global economy on the premise the US will be least damaged, the calculation seems shaky even on its own evil terms:
So the current clever US plan, as Administration sources told the Wall Street Journal [and Bloomberg] is that the US will keep up the economic war until Iran breaks … The US short-term, by virtue of its domestic oil output, looks better situated than many countries … Iran will have to shoot through much of the Global South to economically harm the US. But that assumes it is the energy/commodities strangulation and flagging global economy that drives the US into some sort of crisis. These factors may instead accelerate and intensify other train wrecks that seem likely to happen, such as bond market upheaval resulting from a currency crisis in Japan (recall oil shortages are increasing the harm done to Japan by a super cheap yen) or a private debt meltdown, or related implosions of AI equity and debt bubbles.
In her report of July 21, Yves interrogated the non-systemic assumptions of linear change still driving Washington thinking and that of the credulous Mr Market. Back then the talk was still of a US invasion. But while that seems off the agenda unless Team Trump is operating a feint, the linear thinking …
Ansar Allah’s closure of the Bab el Mandeb strait, Trump’s commitment to more kinetic escalation this week as Iran selectively damages critical petrostate energy and economic infrastructure, reports of fracture in Saudi Arabia and Israel and the continued slow bleeding out of the global economy all point to pressures continuing to build on connected economic, military, and political fronts. Yet as we will point out, too many forecasters are making linear forecasts, as if things will continue more or less as they are now, such at Robert Pape suggesting that Trump can continue the conflict on something like the current footing for six months. They are ignoring that pressures in any of these systems, or across systems, can and likely will generate sudden, large dislocations.
… continues to inform Washington strategy.
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Meanwhile and also yesterday, Caitlin of Melbourne reminded us that …
If We Could See Everything, It Would Radicalize Us All Instantly
It’s hard to wrap your mind around the abusiveness of the imperial status quo, partly because it’s all we’ve ever known, and partly because it’s too big to perceive all at once.
The statistics don’t show you the true human impact. The personal anecdotes just show you small snapshots of individuals suffering in their own lives. A working single mother crying in her car in a TikTok video because the endless toil necessary for survival is all-consuming and overwhelming. A news report about child labor in DRC cobalt mines. An Instagram reel about a father in Gaza carrying plastic bags he’s been told contain the remains of his daughter.
Individually, such stories are heartbreaking and enraging. But they are not merely personal anecdotes from separate individuals. These stories are unfolding all around the world, every moment of every day, affecting the lives of billions of human beings in different ways and to varying degrees.
If we could see it all, it would radicalize everyone against the empire instantaneously.
But we cannot see it all. We simply can’t take in all the suffering that is happening in all the ways it is being inflicted upon innocent people all around the world.
The most powerful weapon our rulers have is the fact that homo sapiens are incapable of perceiving everything all at once. If everybody could perceive all the consequences of the decisions being made by powerful people on a deep experiential level, most of humanity would rise up to overthrow the established order, and there’d be hardly anyone willing to defend it.
The only thing keeping the heads of the oligarchs and empire managers attached to their necks is the limitations of human perception.
Which of course is why they work so hard to maintain the present limitations of human perception. All the propaganda, internet censorship, AI shenanigans, algorithm manipulation and government secrecy we see from the capitalist empire is there to keep us from seeing too much, because unadulterated truth tends to have a radicalizing effect on the mind.
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