Title : If we can't call it "fascism," what word should we use?
link : If we can't call it "fascism," what word should we use?
If we can't call it "fascism," what word should we use?
When last we met, I proposed a radical theory: What if Donald Trump intentionally says and does things designed to create market volatility? What if he and his allies have figured out a way to profit from stratospheric highs and the sudden, precipitous plummets?Just a few hours ago, CNBC released a piece which buttresses my argument.
If President Donald Trump wants to keep his strong stock market gains, he may want to stay off Twitter.Again: If you seek to make millions through short selling, Trump's Twitter finger is the goose that lays the golden eggs -- as long as you get advance notice. Yes, the stock market has risen significantly overall. That fact does not invalidate my argument: Volatility (in either direction) makes it possible to make a quick killing.
Days when Trump tweets a lot are associated with negative stock market returns, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said Tuesday in a report.
A friend to this blog offered the following words, which deserve a wider readership:
I’ve been thinking about such possibilities since the early days of the administration. Trump would call out a company in an unprecedented fashion. Why? His reputation as king of snark was sufficient cover.Many will tell you that shorting the market is not a secure way to make profits in the long run, but I don't think that advice works any more, at least not for the people who operate on the "oligarch" level.
But remember that hedge fund guy Bob Mercer was aboard. No stranger to market instruments and strategies. Pretty sure a word in Trump’s ear, for a well earned cut of the action, would be well received.
The main point of options stratgies is that timing is critical, the option expires with zero value. But if it’s known when the price will move, then a lot of money can be made.
Short selling is very risky over a length of time (ask Bill Ackman about Herbalife) because if the price goes up, it’s expensive to maintain the short position, or to have to buy the stock back at the higher price. Again, timing is critical.
It is my opinion that new forms of market manipulation are being developed. Relying on the huge quantities of cash that flowed into the financial system following 2008, and available to the excessively wealthy, it now may be possible to, in theory, greatly delay unpredictable drops in market value. The “in theory” is key, for it may not work.
But such a plan would not need to work for ever.
Dare we use the F word? The theory outlined above -- and I admit: It's just a theory -- coalesces with the points made in this fine New York Review of Books article. It begins as a review of the film The Great Hack, a must-see expose of Cambridge Analytica. But Tamsin Shaw's NYRB piece explores territory well beyond the reach of that documentary.
Forgive me for quoting at length:
In both Britain and America, there exists a class of billionaires who seek to become oligarchs and a corresponding class of government officials who want to become billionaires. Since 2008, when the financial markets’ development of complex and ill-regulated derivatives led to a credit crisis and crash that erased huge sums from the fortunes of the global ultra-rich—with Western tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and Sheldon Adelson, and Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska among the biggest losers—the world’s billionaires have been moving away from a commitment to free markets. Learning from the banking bailouts and the socialization of moral hazard, they have instead embraced an ambition to build lasting monopolies that enjoy both official and unofficial forms of state support.One of the great ironies of the rise of the Alt Right -- if I may use that term -- is that it gained power by giving lip service to Libertarian ideology. Robert Mercer, monyeman behind Breitbart (home of the Alt Right), also funded the Heartland Institute, whose logo displays the faces of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Frederick Hayek. But the people who really run the show don't actually believe in free markets. Libertarianism requires universal submission to certain rules, and the uppermost one percent of the one percent just ain't into submission.
Russia has pioneered this new form of “state capitalism,” in which the state absorbs risk for the companies of certain loyal oligarchs, allowing them to reap enormous profits. In exchange, these billionaires advance strategic objectives, not just through energy deals but also by investing in foreign companies that own sensitive technology or valuable data, or which provide important forms of economic leverage abroad.
I'm not at all surprised that the Top of the Top have given up on the goal of keeping government as tiny as possible. They seek to make state and capital "as one." Big gummint is no longer the enemy.
Of course, anyone who honestly assessed libertarianism could have predicted this outcome.
The following example helps us to understand why Mitch is such a bitch:
One recent example is the huge investment Oleg Deripaska’s Rusal made in a Kentucky aluminum plant, funding the economic revival of the area. Shortly before the announcement of the investment, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell had backed the successful effort to lift sanctions on Deripaska and his businesses. The investment increases Russia’s political leverage in the US, since if sanctions were to be reimposed on Deripaska now under another administration they would directly harm the people of Kentucky. Putin is happy for his oligarchs to invest outside Russia so long as they are serving Russian strategic interests. None of the accumulated profit is distributed back to the Russian people: it is generally held off-shore.I hate to keep quoting and quoting, but what choice is there? Shaw's piece is just too good:
The United States has its own versions of the oligarchs, albeit ones who made their money legally rather than through the criminal enterprises for which many Russians have been indicted by American prosecutors or sanctioned by the federal government. As I’ve previously written, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley managed to establish their extraordinary monopolies—viewed by the state as a form of soft power as well as an essential national security asset in a world of cyber-conflict—only because that entire sector received huge injections of venture-capital funding from the military and intelligence agencies. In this case, too, the astronomical profits are largely untaxed and held off-shore. Other national security–related industries have sought a similar status under the Trump administration.Should we even use the term "private"? People keep forgetting that Cambridge Analytica did a ton of work for the American and British intelligence communities. Many CA employees were (are?) "former" MI6 staffers. I've always felt that calling CA "private" was really a polite fiction.
This international billionaire class is also establishing and using private intelligence and influence agencies like Cambridge Analytica to help them manipulate national and international politics.
Things are even worse than Shaw presumes. Let's face it: A huge sector of the American and British intelligence community has always favored Trump.
What if the guy was put into office not by the FSB but by CIA and MI6? What if "our" spooks stopped working for us a long time ago? Never forget: Michael Flynn was the head of the Dee-freakin'-Eye-Ayy.
To illustrate what I mean, here's a last quote from Shaw's piece.
Despite this account in the Mueller Report, we still don’t know many details of what was discussed ahead of the Trump–Putin phone call. But we do know the details of one joint Russian and American plan intended to supply power plants to Middle Eastern countries, to be funded by Saudi Arabia on the understanding that the venture would ultimately lead to the Saudis’ acquiring nuclear technology as a safeguard against a nuclear Iran. In his brief tenure as national security adviser, Lt. General Michael Flynn was the point man inside the Trump administration, aiming to negotiate an end to Russian sanctions so the Saudi project could proceed, but many other senior military and intelligence figures were on the masthead of the group, known as IP3/Ironbridge, that was pitching to the Saudis. A recent congressional report found that the plan, still alive though without the Russian partners, “virtually obliterated the lines normally separating government policymaking from corporate and foreign interests.”
Dmitriev’s own negotiations were with one of the most ambitious of America’s would-be oligarchs, Erik Prince. He is a private military contractor, formerly of Blackwater; his present company, the Frontier Services Group, has backing from the Chinese government and a Hong Kong billionaire named Johnson Ko, the company’s executive director. Prince’s meetings on behalf of the Trump team were arranged by a former Blackwater colleague who is now an adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, George Nader. Nader, who is currently in federal custody in Virginia as an accused child sex trafficker, claims that Prince was sent as an emissary for Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to the notorious Seychelles meeting with Dmitriev and Bin Zayed. The accounts given by Bannon and Prince, to Mueller’s team and in congressional hearings, have conflicted, but we know that Prince met with Bannon frequently during the transition period, and Bannon acted as Prince’s advocate in the White House when Prince was lobbying for his Frontier Services Group to take over military operations in Afghanistan (a scheme Prince was still promoting in a New York Times op-ed months later).
The special counsel’s investigation acknowledged the existence of these back-channel negotiations but failed to shed light on them, in part because vital elements of the testimony Mueller’s investigators heard were false, and various encrypted communications had been erased. But Mueller also interpreted his remit in the narrowest possible way: his principal areas of investigation were the Russian social media campaign during the election, and the DNC hackings and release of materials. There had been some expectation that a further area of inquiry would take on financial entanglements, and even potential RICO crimes. Some hoped that if Mueller’s investigation implicated Trump and Russian entities in racketeering, possibly even providing evidence that Trump was compromised by Russia, then the cooption of government by private actors, foreign and domestic, would be exposed.I've quoted way more than I should have; my apologies to both the readers and to Shaw.
In the event, Mueller’s main finding, a “sweeping and systematic” campaign of interference by Russia in the 2016 election, has simply reinforced the idea that the United States and Russia are combatants in a fairly traditional form of political warfare. Mueller’s report and testimony had no impact in exposing the multilateral business deals—here involving American, Russian, Saudi, Israeli, Qatari, and Emirati actors—that bypass national interests, official foreign policy, international regulations, electoral laws, and even ordinary market pressures.
We need to ask important questions. We seem to be lumbering toward a new economic system -- an international system -- and it sure as hell ain't capitalism. Pretty soon, the people who insist on calling it "capitalism" won't be able to say the word with a straight face.
So which word should we use?
I don't mind calling this new system "fascism," but many object to this term on the grounds that fascism is so notoriously difficult to define. But if we can't use the F-word, which word does the job?
A final question: How do we return our national security apparat to sanity? How do we make sure that every single person within the American military and intelligence community actually works for America, rather than for the international oligarch class?
Thus Article If we can't call it "fascism," what word should we use?
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