Not pictured: choice or change.

Isn't it clear Barack Obama is the most conservative president ever? Or at least for a long time?

Bush expanded the size, cost, scope, and of course the power of government more than any president for decades, more than any non-wartime president ever. He signed into law about two-thirds of the national-health package formerly known as HillaryCare. Regulations and government spending exploded. He ended his administration by floating a colossal spending-orgy bailout bill - which was dwarfed by the real bailout, the ten-plus billion dollars cranked out by the Fed to boost the economy.

And no president has ever worshiped the power of government to do good more fervently in word (leaving aside a few obligatory mumbles about "small government") or deed. Bush promised to remake the world in America's image by killing everybody who opposed democracy. Even by voting.

What's more liberal than that? Doesn't progressivism mean forcing people to think and speak they way you want them to, for their own good?

Obama promised more war on the campaign trail - and selected a Secretary of State who ran furthest to the right on foreign policy of any candidate, including shrill war-loving harpy Sarah Palin. And they've delivered the goods: the war in Iraq continues (just without anyone reporting on it anymore); the Afghan War has been extended to war on US ally Pakistan, and is now being expanded. The US has increased its military bridgehead in South America, and now, of course, is rolling out the same lies used to sell the aggression against Iraq to peddle Obama's promised war with Iran - all while expanding the US offense budget more than Bush proposed.

At home he's reduced transparency in government, absolved telcoms of illegally helping the US spy on Americans, continued the cover-up of torture, and is almost certain to extend the expiring provisions of the ironically-named PATRIOT Act. Which after all started life under Bill Clinton as HR 666 (and what's more conservative than perpetuating Democratic misdeeds?)  And finally he's shipped trillions of more dollars, mostly via the Fed, to the very rich.

What's more conservative than that? Isn't conservativism all about forcing people to think and speak they way you want them to, for their own good?

Isn't it really clear that there's no functional difference among candidates? That no one will ever be allowed into a position where it's possible for them to be elected unless they agree to further the agenda of the Almighty State (and serve the interests of those who run it for their own profit) ? That the US ruling class figured out a very long time ago that the best way to rig an election is to do it before it ever takes place?

Remember, folks - the power of government to do good stands on two legs, and two legs only: murder and inflation. What government does is milk the many to enrich the few. Murder and inflation are how they do it.

Feel free to guess how I'd fill in the blank above.

The most effective means of transferring wealth from the productive classes to the plutocrats is inflation. Government is now dealing with the inevitable consequences of long-term inflation. Of course, the only thing they can do about it is what the US is in fact doing: inflate more.

All the bad behavior by Wall Street, the banks, and the other usual suspects was subsidized, hence encouraged, by the US government, whose partners in crime they were. (The US is massively subsidizing such behavior again, under the guise of "stimulus," i.e. direct transfer payments to the rich.)

How much of this is "capitalism" is a matter of semantics. I'm inclined to agree with Kevin Carson's "free-market anti-capitalism" formulation myself.

The collapse certainly has nothing to do with the markets being "too free." They've been manipulated every step of the way. Meanwhile it was the hard money and real free market types (not the neocons and their conjoined equally-evil twins, the neoliberals, passing off their mercantilism-warmed-over as "free markets) who predicted the meltdown all along.

Mainstream economists, who cheer-led the inflationary bubble and predicted it would expand forever, now tout the Bush/Obama Rich-Only Recovery as "green shoots." One wonders how much of this is innocent stupidity, and how much is paid.

The above is a slightly-edited version of a comment I dropped on John Robb's excellent Global Guerrillas blog. Robb is a most insightful and incisive writer on the continuing collapse of centralization. He really is a good guy, convinced he's doing good work - although he seems sadly unable to recognize that what he's really doing is struggling desperately to preserve centralized power for the ruling class by somehow incorporating decentralization into top-down hierarchy.

Fortunately for us all, that's self-contradictory, and thus can't work for any length of time (indeed in the longer term it hastens the very thing it's intended to forestall.) Unfortunately, by adopting some of his suggestions our rulers could inflict substantial additional harm on us. So it's fortunate they won't listen to him.

Ultimately, Robb makes the same mistake as everyone who uses "we" when they mean the United States: he thinks that means all of us, but it really means those who operate the government for their own private interests. Which is everyone involved in running it.

Postscript: if he's bothered reading any of the several comments I've left on his blog, Mr. Robb probably thinks I'm a total lunatic and dangerous. As a nameless North Vietnamese colonel allegedly said to Colonel Harry Summers, "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant."

That's not the narrative we're taught, of course. Nor what most of us believe. Even "libertarians" and other believers in the real free market tend to accept that progressive taxation is meant to ensure more equal outcomes ... when the truth is the very opposite.

Why? Habit. Time to break it.

The simple singular fact of politics is that anything government does, it does for the primary purpose of increasing the wealth and power of its proprietors. Who, by the way, are never "the people" at large - the very fact democracy is designed to hide.

What "everything" means here is everything. If taxes are raised - and if taxes are lowered. If regulations are imposed - or abolished. All of these actions, apparently contradictory as they are, represent at the most the temporary ascendancy of one or another faction of the ruling class.

More usually, it's a shell game: mountains of paper designed to do nothing but hide business as usual. If it's not meant to cover another ruling class grab at power and wealth.

Here is the Big Truth, that I'll repeat over and over - a million times, if need to - until it actually enters your awareness:

The only purpose of government is to centralize benefit and socialize cost.

Anything else is a lie.

The new administration has already bettered its predecessor by expanding the illegal (and unwinnable) war in Afghanistan to an illegal, unwinnable war on Pakistan, a US ally.  Now, after a ritual display of phony reluctance to mollify world opinion, plus those four or five US leftists who haven't turned into Limbaugh-like werewolves thirsting for the blood of swarthy foreigners with the inauguration of a Democratic-brand president,  the US is caving into Israeli demands which include  "massive new sanctions against the Iranian government."

This is likely a major step toward the US attack on Iran that's been hanging fire for years, awaiting the proper pretext to launch.

Meanwhile the US is looking to increase its military presence in Colombia. Aside from embroiling the US in yet another civil war, which US interference will inevitably make worse - look how well US drug-war "assistance" to Mexico has panned out - look for the bigger Colombian footprint to provide a launch-point for indirect, and eventually direct, military action against Venezuela.

It's painfully well established that the freer the market is, the more wealth it produces. Thus, the more loot for the rulers. Thus Sweden is richer than North Korea (although, granted, heedless exploitation of abundant natural resources has a lot to do with  Sweden's "success" as well.)

But socialism provides a far more efficient means of extracting that wealth from the many for the benefit of the few - conducing to outright looting, all while actually convincing many if not most people that it's being done (why would it be?) for their own good.

One thing I've seen for years has been that the people who really rule us have long been caught in a manic-depressive frenzy:  swinging from wild-eyed optimism, that they'll soon exert total, unbreakable control over the populace and the planet; and utter, bleak despair that they're about to lose their power, privilege, and profits for good. Let's just say that for at least the last ten years I've seen nothing to contradict that.

Oddly, those opposite states promote the same behavior: our rulers getting all they can as quickly as they can.

Now the bipolar crisis has reached extreme frequency and amplitude. One sign of our rulers' rising madness is that they've now switched the dominant political rhetoric to socialist. Meaning they want to grab everything they can now. Because even the dimmest of them see the disaster they're steering us for.

It's not coincidental that "defense" spending, already bloated beyond reason, is actually increasing under the new sock-puppet administration: "social programs" and war (and what could be more socialist than war?) being the proven fastest conduits whereby wealth can be piped to the plutocrats.

That's also at the same time that, while generating plenty of smoke with "debate" over a penny-ante "bailout," the Federal Reserve has shipped trillions more dollars to the needy ultra-rich and powerful.

A personal observation: despite unprecedented highs in "defense" spending, none of my many friends in that industry seem to be benefiting from it. They're almost all facing cutbacks if not getting laid off themselves. Wherever all that loot's going, it isn't to them.

While I lack real evidence I suspect that might soon be seen across the board:  the money's bypassing the middlemen ("employees," "the poor") and going straight to its intended destination:  the pockets of the truly powerful.

Meanwhile, the greatest ripoff by the elite of everybody else - hyperinflation - is probably launching.

What can we do? Dig in. Stock up on non-perishable necessities: food, meds, water. Buy silver and ammo. And start figuring out what you'll do when government quits even pretending it provides services to the governed.

If you get nothing else from this screed, please absorb this:  the sole purpose of all government, everywhere and ever, is to centralize benefit and socialize cost.

This is your idea of "anti-government?"

What is Fascism - and its brain-damaged butt-baby Nazism - about if not complete and total worship of the State?

I see how the "left" and the "right" in this country are engaging in a slap-fight because certain "right-wing" commentators have pointed out that fascism is a form of socialism. Guess what? It is. As is Nazism - no, "National Socialism" is not some kind of false front. It was what the Nazis were all about. It still is.

The concept that "socialism" and "fascism" are somehow opposites is just World War II propaganda bullshit.

You want to read anti-capitalist screeds? Try The Turner Diaries. Or the writings of Francisco Franco. Or, hey, Joe Goebbels.

So the "right-wing" sock-monkeys are right, for once. Then again, it's becoming so piteously obvious that the whole Left/Right thing is a scam I'm starting to read about it daily online. The "Right" is anti-government? Then where were they while George W. Bush was expanding everything about government - spending, scope, and power - at a nearly unprecedented rate?

Oh, that's right: with their noses firmly clamped between his asscheeks. Where the Left is with Obama now that he's doing the same thing and telling different lies about it.

Here's what it looks like.

It has so many faces.

It has some figures, too. Like the upwards of a quarter billion people it killed in the 20th Century. And that doesn't even count wars - in many ways the ultimate expression of government doing good.

It is the slogan, the motive, and the means for history's greatest murderers: Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot (socialists all.) And for the last US president, and the current one, and their admirers and apologists.

It's what those who rule us intend to come to your block soon.

So ... what part of government is evil were you having trouble understanding?

Hat tip to Radley Balko for commemorating the 20th anniversary of the above iconic image.

Good one.

Given that what DeLong and Paul Krugman and their fascist troll ilk are peddling - economic "stimulus" and the nonsensical notion that we can spend ourselves rich - is nothing more than a slathering of whore's makeup over history’s greatest known transfer of wealth to the very wealthy. Which wealth, by the way, is going to be ripped off our bodies like skin, through the miracle of hyperinflation.

To be sure, the Republicans clamoring in opposition to the bailout are ethics free hacks. Leaving aside the fact that's a truism - nobody gets elected to national office without being one - let's recognize their stance for the cheap ploy it is. The Republicans know the American people are largely wise to the fact this is all egregious socialism for the rich (a tautology anyway); they're just pandering. Of course they favor the bailout: they're employed by the same people the Democrats are, and that isn't the voters.

And after all, the bailout was one of the final pet projects of George W. Bush.

This is a trick the Democrats have proven adept at: vocally opposing Bush's war against American liberties at home and todo lo mundo abroad - and then voting for every stinking scrap of it, from funding the war waged against Iraq in total opposition to US strategic interests, to the confirmation of whatever torture monkey the Busheviks threw up to be Attorney General. Few were more assiduous at that than the new puppetoon President - whose definition of change, you should be realizing now, means "more of the same, only bigger and harder."

It's possible the Republicans in Congress will make a show of voting against the transfer of wealth to their masters - in full knowledge it'll pass pretty much no matter what they do.

Certainly the Krugmans and DeLongs and all the rest of their choir are fascists - the polite term being Keynesians. The question is, are they idiotic enough to believe what they're saying? One almost hopes they're simply bought.

And that they had the sense to demand to be paid in the traditional silver.

Ethics-free hacks, indeed.