The recent incident, gone viral, of former Obama Administration official Stuart Seldowitz harrassing and brow-beating ordinary workers inside a food truck has struck a nerve. It not only put on full display the bankruptcy of US policy when it comes to Israel and the Middle East, but also the consistency of this policy across administrations. Republican and Democrat alike. For African-Americans it yet further confirmation that Obama, rather than being the second incarnation of JFK era Camelot,  was instead Bush Jr. lite. That Obama could take counsel from such a man as Seldowitz is beyond disturbing but astounding and perplexing if one buys into the narrative on Obama pushed by the political establishment. AS it turns out, Obama was no less faithful servant of Empire and the Oligarchy as all the Presidents that preceded him and those that followed. Who Knew? People in the know like me did. But I digress. This is about Seldowitz.

Many commentators are writing Seldowitz off as a simply a hateful, lunatic bigot. But, the fact the Police never showed when called, shows there is something more sinister under-foot. However hateful he is, why would he suddenly, at random, just start harassing people. It seems to me, he is clearly an agent provocateur on a definite mission to sow division and hatred. This is why the cops likely never showed. They know who he is and what the mission is. In a comment originally posted underneath a dialogue between Brian Berlectic and Danny Haiphong, I noted:

“I would be cautious about selling short the people that on the surface run the Empire. These people are sock puppets. Behind them stands a rapacious Oligarchy who have seen their carefully constructed socio-economic edifice gradually erode. Whatever their personality  traits, this in itself is more a magnification, in the form of the worst forms of reaction and backwardness arising in individuals such as Seldowitz, of the crisis that has been afflicting Capitalism since the mid 60s marked by the assassination of Kennedy and further on the abandonment of the Bretton-Woods system. The exposed ugly face of imperialism is the end point of a long arc of decline for world Capitalism. This is one reason I do not completely buy into so-called multi-polarism which in reality is simply the division of the world into opposed warring camps.

Chinese and Russian Capitalism will no more be immune from the crisis of Capitalism than its Western counterpart. It is just a matter where on the arc of crisis they find themselves at any one point. The reason Western Capitalism has resorted to war are the same reasons Marx, Trotsky and Lenin described in various works that can be boiled down to that a profit centered system, whatever its pretensions, cannot escape the tendency of the rate to profit to fall, the ever greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands with the concomitant tendency toward monopolization and the disastrous cascading effects that ensue. War and hegemony is the natural answer to the endemic crisis of Capitalism. In this sense, the Western elite understand Capitalism better than their Chinese and Russian rivals. Like the Highlander, they understand there can only be One.”