Big American Money, Not Russia Put Trump in the White House

Worth a look: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/30/big-american-money-not-russia-put-trump-in-the-white-house-reflections-on-a-recent-report/

...a Chomsky quote from the link:

“Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is a method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics…The urgency is for popular progressive groups to grow and become strong enough so that centers of power can’t ignore them. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its core include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, every day, not just once every four years…sensible [electoral] choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action.”

Warren Mosler explains Modern Money Theory, and the macro problem behind unemployment.

See 7:38 for unemployment info

The farm bill makes us sick, and climate worse

It's not an accident that a calorie of carrot is more expensive than a calorie of high-fructose corn syrup. Michael Pollan quotes one farmer as saying Federal ag subsidies are "just like laundering money for Cargill and ADM..." (two big agribusinesses).

Read the whoe article here. (bonus action opportunity, includes a letter requesting a better farm bill)

Uber not a panacea

This NY Times editorial is worth a look.

The Noamster Comments about Russian Meddling

Interviewer: Which brings us to the narrative of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election. I understand you’re not very impressed with this line.

Chomsky: Well it’s very hard to take seriously for a number of reasons. One reason is the work of Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues [“How Money Won Trump the White House”]. There really is manipulation of elections, but it’s not coming from the Russians. It’s coming from the people who buy the elections. Take his study of the 2016 election [“Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election”]. That’s how you interfere with elections. Or the pretty spectacular study that he and his colleagues did about a year ago on Congress “How Money Drives US Congressional Elections,” where you just get a straight line [correlation between money and major party votes in Congress]. You rarely see results like that in the social sciences. That’s massive manipulation. Compared with that, what the Russians might be doing is minuscule. Quite aside from the fact that the U.S. does it all the time in other countries.

Pete Peterson: The alternative obituary

Billionaire National Debt panic promoter Pete Peterson just died. His vocations included being CEO of Bell & Howell, Nixon’s Commerce Secretary, CEO of Lehman Brothers, and one of the founders of Blackstone, a vulture hedge fund.

His hobby was spreading panic about national debt. To that end he funded several think tanks and campaigns, including “Fix the Debt” speaking tours, budget workshops from his Concord Coalition (bipartisan!) think tank, and the ubiquitous Peterson Institute which supplied economists even to “lefty” radio NPR.

But national “debt” is nothing like he portrays it in his propaganda. It’s the money. The money is the debt.

How is money debt? Any bank account is the depositor’s asset, but the banks liability--that is the bank’s debt. When you write a check, you’re assigning a portion of the bank’s debt to the payee.

Currency works like that too. It’s like checks made out to “cash” in fixed amounts. The Federal Reserve, our country’s central bank, carries currency on its books as a liability too. In fact, all that “debt” is really the dollar financial assets circulating in the economy.

What happens when policy makers heed the Peterson’s prescription? It diminishes the population’s savings! And mortgage holders all say “OK, there’s less money in the economy now, so we’ll skip this month’s house payment!”

...NOT!

Mortgage holders universally say “Pay your mortgage payment or we’ll foreclose on your house!”

And sure enough, in the periods following major reductions in national “debt” the economy suffers waves of foreclosures and asset forfeitures as the population struggles to come up with the cash to pay their payments.

...And that’s just what a vulture fund wants: Lots of foreclosed assets to pick up on the cheap.

So...Pete Peterson is self-serving even in his “Fiscally Responsible™” concern. He even worried about whether the country would go bankrupt...but if the government makes fiat money, and owes its debts in that money it can never be involuntarily insolvent. NEVER! Bad on us for believing otherwise.

So let’s sum up: 

1. Money is debt is money. 
2. Money creators who owe their debt in the money they create are completely unlike households, and that fundamental difference means they can never be involuntarily insolvent. 
3. Government does not need to implement austerity to “conserve” money...it makes as much as it needs whenever it needs it. 
4. Peterson’s advocacy for austerity injected fragility into the economy, subjecting large numbers of people to debt peonage and suffering. 

The austerity continues today. I’m not the only one who thinks so, too. See Pete Peterson’s Fix the Debt CEOs Promote Austerity for the Masses, Expanding Wealth for the 1 Percent.

Political correctness note: Hard Working People vs. Lazy Bums

Ever notice that politicians universally characterize their constituents as “hard working”? Where are the representatives for the lazy?

And...of course they’re “hard working,” they have been sold out by both major parties, and must work hard to make ends meet!

Such canards comprise the cynical flattery the political class uses to lull the population into compliance. If Don Rickles could make a career out of calling people idiots, why hasn’t some politician at least tried to talk honestly to his voters?

'tis a mystery long and deep...

Here's Milan Kundera's take from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"The fact that until recently the word 'shit' appeared in print as s--- has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can't claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defection session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.

"It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called *kitsch*.

"'Kitsch' is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence....

"The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.

"Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see the children running on the grass!

"The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

"It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

"The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch." ...

"And no one knows this better than politician. Whenever a camera is in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.

"Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

"When I say 'totalitarian,' what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree 'Be fruitful and multiply.'

"In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse..."

"...As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter who we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition."

Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost: Supervisor and Racketeer

© by Mark Dempsey

A recent decision by the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) approved expanding Elk Grove’s borders by about 1100 acres. Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost was one of the deciding votes in this 4 - 3 decision. The irony of Supervisor Frost’s vote was that she portrays herself as the Fiscally Responsible™ Supervisor, fretting publicly about low budget reserves. But the outlying development she voted to approved increases the cost of all the infrastructure local government must provide. The region also has 20 years worth of unbuild infill, already served by existing infrastructure. Building infill is a much cheaper for government.

Why did she vote for outlying “greenfield” development? Because it’s enormously profitable for a tiny plutocracy of land speculators. These plutocrats can buy or option outlying agricultural land for a fraction of what it’s worth once local government permits development. The speculators paid roughly $2,000 an acre for North Natomas--that’s 20’ under water floodplain surrounded by weak levees--and sold it to builders for $200,000 an acre once development rights were granted. Speculators do not even pay income tax on this enormous, 10,000% gross profit if they swap their land for some more real estate--often apartments or shopping centers that provide them with income.

When I complained about this to a respected local environmentalist, he attempted to console me. “You have to understand,” he said, “Sacramento does not have much industry. At least this provides a boost for the local economy.”

But industry is something necessary, or productive. Sacramento’s Siemens plant assembles light rail cars, and nearby Intel makes computer chips. Even the State Capitol makes legislation. Does land speculation make any new land? Do we need any more development land? No, land speculation simply redistributes income. Classical economics called the profit from speculation “economic rent.” Rentiers are parasites who run what today we call a “racket.”

What does a productive economy do about economic rents? The Germans make developers sell their land to local governments at the agricultural land price, then re-purchase it at the development land price. The public gets the entire benefit of that "unearned increment" of profit.

The Germans have a good educational system and nice infrastructure, too--not infrastructure rated D+ by its engineers, as is the case in the U.S. In Germany, college tuition is free even for foreigners, and the arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the national endowment for the arts for the U.S. of A.

The rentier/plutocrats also support the complement to paying economic rent: austerity. The excuse for austerity is “We’re out of money,” and “There is no alternative!” (TINA) but to tax more and spend less. Austerity de-funds public services like infrastructure, education, health care, and retirement benefits. Strangely enough, the $16 - $29 trillion in financial sector bailout from the Federal Reserve in 2007-8, and that multi-trillion-dollar war in Iraq, received no "We're out of money" excuse.

After austerity cripples services for the general public, then the “solution” is to privatize and financialize. Consider higher education: Federal funding for it declined 55% since 1972. State funding has declined even more. Why do you suppose tuitions continue to rise and student loans make debt peons of graduates?

It’s probably not newsworthy that a politician like Ms. Frost is a hypocrite, but now, even environmentalists are running interference for speculators, calling what they do “industry” instead of what it really is: a racket.

The Rectification of Names

When asked what he would do if he ruled, Confucius replied he would first “rectify the names”--in other words, start calling things what they really were, calling a spade a spade. I’d suggest that’s one of the tasks environmentalists must take on: creating the language of sustainable, ecological development.

That’s why I was shocked to hear from a respected fellow Environmental Council of Sacramento (ECOS) colleague. As usual, I was complaining about the abuses of land speculation in our region, unhappy about how such outlying development lengthens commutes and impoverishes local jurisdictions with unsustainable infrastructure demands, and this colleague was trying to console me, telling me that Sacramento didn’t have much industry, so it needed outlying development like the recently approved 1,100 acre increase in Sacramento suburb Elk Grove’s outlying land to make the region economically healthy.

Setting aside the industries the region does have (the Capitol, Intel, Siemens, etc.) proposals for outlying development continue to appear, in spite of the 20-years-worth of infill land available to build. Why? Because current public policy allows land speculators to purchase (or option) that outlying land for a few thousand dollars an acre, then once local government grants development permission, sell it to builders for 50 - 100 times more than they paid for it. This public policy provides enormous economic incentives to corrupt local government, and to continue speculating, but calling it “industry” is really beyond the pale.

Classical economics defined industry as something that’s productive. Adam Smith’s example is carving a tree branch into an axe handle--but land speculation does nothing productive. It makes no new land, and does nothing to configure any existing land. It’s not an industry. Classical economists called such speculation the extraction of “economic rent.” I’d suggest the modern term is a “racket.” That's right, land speculation is not an industry; it’s a racket.

Economic rent is money paid for no productive purpose, owed simply because of the rentier’s political influence or social status. Classical economics also decried rent as what kept an economy from being truly productive. Keynes famously advised “euthanizing” the rentiers...basically taxing economic rents out of existence so people could have the most productive societies.

What does a truly productive economy do about economic rents? The Germans make the developers sell their land to local governments at the agricultural land price, then re-purchase it at the development land price once government grants the entitlement to develop. The public gets the entire benefit of that "unearned increment" of economic rent.
And Germans have a good educational system and nice infrastructure, too--not rated D+ by its engineers, as is U.S. infrastructure. In Germany, college tuition is free even for foreigners. The arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the national endowment for the arts for the U.S. of A. That’s what you get when economic rent inures to the benefit of society at large rather than the land speculators.

One other example of such an unproductive racket would be the monopoly rent professional sports get to charge. In the U.S., professional sports are exempt from antitrust prosecution, so they can (legally) be price-setting monopolies. Teams' threats to leave town can therefore extort stadiums and other economic concessions from their communities. This is true not just for the quarter-billion-dollar stadium subsidy recently given the Sacramento Kings, but for other teams too. The Davis family has extorted money and stadiums from Oakland, Anaheim and now Las Vegas for the Raiders. Three quarters of George W. Bush’s net worth comes from such a stadium deal in Arlington TX.

One other hallmark of the rentier's agenda is the complement to economic rent: while the aristocrats get huge subsidies, the rest of the public gets austerity. The cry is “We’re out of money,” and the line that “There is no alternative!” (TINA) but to tax more and spend less are the constant refrain of the narrative supporting the oligarchy.

Austerity de-funds public services in everything from infrastructure, to education, to health care, to retirement benefits. Meanwhile, the $16 - $29 trillion in financial sector bailout after Lehman's bankruptcy received nothing like the "We're out of money" cry, but we are led to believe Social Security's shortfall simply cannot be filled. (Bank bailout figures are from the Federal Reserve's audit mandated by congress after the Great Recession began.)

After austerity cripples and defunds services for the general public, then the population at large "spontaneously" says the solution is to privatize these services. Consider the example of higher education: Federal funding for it declined 55% since 1972. State funding has declined even more. Why do you suppose tuitions continue to rise, and public schools continue to accommodate privately endowed professorships, even if they are filled with crackpot advocates for the TINA line, or climate change skeptics?

Do the oligarchs fund propaganda to support these "solutions"? One example: the Kochs spent $889 million in the 2016 election cycle. "Lefty" (capitalist, currency speculator) George Soros is supposed to balance the Kochs right-leaning spending but Soros spent only $17 million in the 2016 election cycle, so not exactly an even balance coming from even such a doubtful lefty.

Corporate America outspent unions 2-to-1, says the Washington Post. You'll hear Hillary spent twice what Trump spent, but that does not account for the "Citizens United" spending by PACs.

Implicit subsidies for land speculation, and explicit subsidies for stadiums and privatization are all in service of the rentiers. They are rackets, and all the protestations of support for sustainable development and economic justice are futile as long as economic rent and austerity dominate the public policy landscape.

This dynamic hardly applies only to Sacramento. The British austerians are lobbying to reduce funding for their popular National Health Service (NHS). The austerian agenda is to make NHS bad enough that the population will submit to its partial or wholesale privatization.

Margaret Thatcher began this process in the U.K. by, among other things, privatizing the U.K.'s publicly-owned rail system, which promptly raised fares while cutting back service. Poverty skyrocketed during Thatcher's term, too, tripling for U.K. children.

Demonstrating that social justice and sustainable environmental policies go hand in hand, austerians excuse any environmental degradation as simply an economic necessity. Along those lines: when the topic of affordable housing came up, another respected environmentalist and ECOS member suggested we needed to deregulate builders to solve that problem. That's right: To him, regulation was the source of high housing costs. Funny, the Kochs have been saying exactly that, too, and now environmentalists are lobbying on their behalf!

Naturally, austerity has had an enormous impact on affordability as public housing programs have been gutted, while subsidies for upper-income housing remain intact. Reagan's '86 tax law retroactively disallowed tax breaks that encouraged apartment building too, making limited partnerships that built apartments fail. While Reagan halved the top marginal income tax rate, between Reagan and his successor, payroll taxes on working America increased eightfold.

Actually, besides austerity, low real estate taxes make speculation and skyrocketing home prices possible because landowners can keep their land off the market at a minimal cost--you know, like that 20 years worth of infill in the Sacramento region. Take a look at the RealEstate4Ransom.com website for the full story here. Prop 13 makes real estate more expensive, getting government out of the housing business does not make it cheaper, either.

Meanwhile, it's starting to look like the environmentalists are doing the Koch’s lobbying for them, urging us to support simpler “streamlined” regulation...maybe setting aside CEQA while we develop that affordable housing as the legislature did for the Kings’ stadium.

The real agenda behind “streamlining” of regulations or “simplification” of taxes means our oligarchs, with their armies of consultants, accountants and attorneys, can game existing regulations and tax law. What these campaigns to "simplify" really urge is a system that’s easily bypassed when economic rent is to be had.

So...sadly, the expectation I had was that environmentalists would see these things, and resist them. That's clearly not been realistic as expectations go.

As for the condition of the environment now, it's not an exaggeration to say the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. But the real heroes here won't draw their light sabers, they'll change their minds and change their ways.

If you have had the patience to read this far, to take a look at this from J.D. Alt, who exposes one of the most deceptive practices in the current narrative and provides genuine and hopeful solutions for our most severe environmental and social justice problems. Not bad! (Unfortunately, now it’s in the "great idea," stage, and not widely shared….)

But hey! I’m typing as fast as I can!

Questionable Blockchain Climate Solution wins MIT prize

MIT's Climate CoLab has issued prizes for climate solutions, and the top of their prizewinning solutions list is uses Blockchain.

Blockchain was originally devised as, in effect, an accounting system for digital cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. I've written about the cryptocurrency Bitcoin before. One pundit calls it "litigation futures." I'm certainly not a fan.

Cryptocurrencies are climate-counterproductive because they are a commodity-based currency. Instead of a lump of gold, the currency embodies the energy to make the encryption. Bitcoin "miners" are contributing CO2 to the atmosphere as we speak. (In fairness some such currencies pledge to use only renewables.)

The Blockchain promoters call it "incorruptable" because it's a database with distributed data--any hacker would have to bring down many more than one computer to corrupt it. The decentralized  presence of blockchain nodes (i.e. computers with the database) theoretically could be powered by renewables, but we're certainly not there yet.

The open source blockchain ("Ethereum") is "in its early stages." The internet article I found promoting Blockchain (with endorsements from the likes of Larry Summers!) also says "With companies like Uber and AirBnB flourishing, the sharing economy is already a proven success."

...Already you can spot the B.S. Uber has never made money, much less "flourished"... It's a dot com enterprise trying to improve on the model of the taxi, with decidedly mixed results.

However, it's difficult to fault a distributed accounting system itself as the stalking horse for fraud, but the stock market is already taking some of the early Blockchain offerings down.

In any case, it's worth remembering that techno-optimism does not guarantee attempts to reinflate the dot com bubble come from straight shooters. And yes, scientists are not above being fooled, even if they go to MIT.

What really should occupy our attention in climate solutions? That's covered in the previous article.

Modern Money Meets Modern Problems

The following is from Modern Money Theorist J.D. Alt, whose reading of the implications of the "Copernican Revolution" in economics proposed by Post-Keynesian Modern Money Theory is both surprising and profound.

For those unfamiliar with Modern Money Theory (MMT), here are a few links that explain it, followed by Alt's article. If you read the article first, and remain puzzled, return to the links:

• Short (me)
• A little longer (not me)
• Medium (me)
• Long (Warren Mosler’s “Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy”)

In contrast to a lot of laments about non-working economics and public policy, MMT proposes genuine, workable solutions. Unfortunately, this means most people have to abandon the narrative that sovereign, fiat money creators are just like households, so there's a bit of cognitive dissonance. It's literally hard to hear, in the same sense the illustration is hard to see:

The Big Three

Posted on March 15, 2018 by J.D. Alt
By J.D. ALT

This essay was first published at www.realprogressivesusa.com

There is a lot more riding on our understanding of modern fiat money than we typically consider or discuss. Human society is now confronted with three epoch-defining challenges and, in each case, the understanding and strategic use of modern fiat money holds out the ONLY real possibility for constructively engaging the them.

The challenges are:

• Climate change & ecological collapse
• Assault on Democracy
• Mass migration

In each case, the challenges are, first, aggravated, amplified, and intertwined by our ignorant, unimaginative clinging to the old rules and norms of “commodity” money [a type of money terminated by Richard Nixon in 1971 when he "closed the gold window"]. These old rules and norms tell us, basically, that money is (a) a finite resource that people must compete to have a share of; and (b) that a sovereign democracy must collect some portion of its citizens’ “finite” money-share (as taxes) for democracy to have money to spend for its collective goals and needs.

It is precisely because sovereign democracies cannot collect enough taxes that it appears climate change and ecological collapse cannot be addressed—the “cost” is simply too high for tax-dollars to cover. Worse, we are in a Catch-22 which demands that to increase tax-dollars collected, it is necessary to expand the business development that is the root cause of the climate change and ecological collapse we seek to correct.

It is precisely because progressive democracy continuously threatens to collect MORE taxes than the citizens are willing to pay (in order, for example, to ameliorate climate change and restore ecological habitats)—it is because of this that democracy, itself, must be challenged, threatened, held in check, to protect the pocketbooks of a wealthy class that loathes and fears, above all else, the taxation of their wealth.

It is the complex interaction of failing democracies, collapsing ecosystems, and the corrupt, profiteering, manipulation of the old “commodity” money-rules and norms, that drives failed states and mass migration—which, in turn, are rapidly giving rise to national bigotries and the marginalization of hundreds of millions of men, women, and children forced to flee from unlivable conditions while being provided no place to go.

In the case of each of these challenges, a constructive confrontation can only begin with a sweeping acknowledgement that the old “commodity” money-rules and norms are no longer applicable to our modern social economy—nor have they been for over half a century. Modern fiat money, we now understand, moves in a direction opposite the old mercantilist “commodity” money: instead of moving from the citizens to the democratic state—in the form of taxes—it moves from the democratic state to the citizens (and subsequently to the “mercantiles”) in the form of sovereign spending. And it is precisely this democratic sovereign spending, well considered and strategically directed, that can indeed:
Begin to address climate change and ecological collapse—by paying citizens to design and build new zero-carbon infrastructures, technologies and habitat restorations;
Quell the assault on Democracy, by eliminating the perception that democracy’s spending is to be paid for with citizen’s tax-dollars—and transforming the strategic understanding of what taxes, therefore, can and should be made to accomplish;
Ameliorate mass-migration on two fronts: (a) by repairing the failed states and rescuing the collapsing local economies that are producing the migrations; (2) integrating what necessary migrants there are into the local social economies of their adopted locales—by paying them living wages to provide useful services to their local and regional communities, wherever they may be.

We can make excuses that it is simply the greed of profit-making global corporations which holds back efforts to address global warming–(largely true!); that it is profit-making business interest and the wealthy who want Democracy in their back pockets so they can control what it taxes and spends—(definitely true!); that it is authoritarian populism (whatever that might be) which creates failed states and mass-migration (sadly, a true statement as well). But the real, underlying reason these threats are now growing large and unmanageable is because we find ourselves unwilling, or afraid, to openly discuss—in the mainstream political conversation—the simple topic of what modern fiat money is, how it works, and what it can accomplish. So long as progressive leaders are allowed to back-pedal on this topic—to try, somehow, to go forward based on the old economics of “commodity” money—little progress can ever be made to address the Big Three challenges that are growing more formidable every day.

Today's Bee Letter: Health care baloney

3/13/18 RE: Raise taxes or ration health care? Why single-payer won't work in California. Yet by Angela Hart

The Bee’s scary headlines say, in effect, “Sure, single payer is cheaper than what you’re already paying, but we can’t afford it.” The story under the headline says the state would need a payroll tax of $600 a month to pay for single-payer healthcare, and then quotes the subject of its story as saying "I'm already paying 700 bucks a month..."

The headline says this $100 monthly savings is a cost!? Has the Bee been smoking legal marijuana?

Typical of most right-wing attacks on single-payer, the Bee also expresses concern that it will drive business out of the state. No mention of Toyota locating a plant in Toronto rather than Detroit because they were concerned about adding health care costs to the price of their cars.

When will the Bee stop pretending to be liberal or unbiased?

Exiting the Vampire Castle

Before you can exit this approach to politics, you have to recognize it:
From Mark Fischer:

“The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd….[R]ather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group…. [and] the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class….The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. ... This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is …

“The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour.

“The second law of the Vampires’ Castle is: make thought and action appear very, very difficult. There must be no lightness, and certainly no humour.

“The third law of the Vampires’ Castle is: propagate as much guilt as you can. The more guilt the better. People must feel bad: it is a sign that they understand the gravity of things.

“The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. While fluidity of identity, pluarity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized.

“The fifth law of the Vampires’ Castle: think like a liberal (because you are one). The VC’s work of constantly stoking up reactive outrage consists of endlessly pointing out the screamingly obvious: capital behaves like capital (it’s not very nice!), repressive state apparatuses are repressive. We must protest!

"….The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. ‘How dare you talk – it’s we who speak for those who suffer!’”