Europe is willing to defy the U.S. on Nordstream to the point of forcing the U.S. to openly and nakedly destroy its reputation
with European contractors and governments to stop one pipeline in a place where multiple gas pipelines will be needed for future
growth.
This is the diplomatic equivalent of the nuclear option. And the neocons in the Senate just pushed the button. Europe understands
what this is really about, the U.S. retaining its imperial position as the policy setter for all the world. If it can set energy
policy for Europe then it can set everything else.
And it's clear that the leadership in Europe is done with that status quo. The Trump administration from the beginning has used
NATO as an excuse to mask its real intentions towards Europe, which is continued domination of its policies. Trump complains that
the U.S. pays into NATO to protect Europe from Russia but then Europe buys its energy from Russia. That's unfair, Donald complains,
like a little bitch, frankly, even though he right on the surface. But if the recent NATO summit is any indication, Europe is no
longer interested in NATO performing that function. French President Emmanuel Macron wants NATO re-purposed to fight global terror,
a terrible idea. NATO should just be ended.
But you'll notice how Trump doesn't talk about that anymore. He wants more billions pumped into NATO while the U.S. still sets
its policies. This is not a boondoggle for the MIC as much as it's a Sword of Damocles to hold over Europe's head. The U.S.'s involvement
in should be ended immediately, the troops brought home and the billions of dollars spent here as opposed to occupying most of Europe
to point missiles at a Russia wholly uninterested in imperial ambitions no less harboring any of them.
And Trump also knows this but thinks stopping Nordstream 2 is the price Europe has to pay him for this privilege. It's insane.
The time has come for Europe to act independently from the U.S. As much as I despise the EU, to untangle it from the U.S. on energy
policy is the means by which for it to then deal with its problems internally. It can't do that while the U.S. is threatening it.
Circling the wagons against the immediate threat, as it were.
And that means protecting its companies and citizens from the economic depredations of power-mad neoconservatives in the U.S.
Senate like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.
Allseas, the Swiss company laying the pipe for Nordstream 2,
has halted construction for now
, awaiting instructions from the U.S. Gazprom will likely step in to finish the job and Germany will green light any of the necessary
permits to get the pipeline done. Those people will be put out of work just in time for Christmas, turning thousands of people against
the U.S. Commerce drives people together, politics drives them apart.
But, at the same time, the urgency to finish Nordstream 2 on time is wholly irrelevant now because Ukraine and Russia came to
terms on a new five-year gas transit contract. This ensures Gazprom can meet its contractual deliveries to Europe that no one thought
could be done on time. But when the Nazi threat to Zelensky meeting with Merkel, Macron and Putin in Paris failed to materialize,
a gas deal was on the horizon.
And, guess what? U.S. LNG will still not have the marginal lever over Europe's energy policy because of that. Putin and Zelensky
outmaneuvered Cruz, Graham and Trump on this. Because that's what this boils down to. By keeping Russian gas out of Europe, it was
supposed to constrain not only Russia's growth but also Europe's. Because then the U.S. government can control who and how much energy
can make it into European markets at critical junctures politically.
That was the Bolton Doctrine to National Security. And that doctrine brought nothing but misery to millions.
And if you look back over the past five years of U.S./EU relations you will see this gambit clearly for what it was, a way to
continue European vassalage at the hands of the U.S. by forcing market share of U.S. providers into European markets.
Again, it gets back to Trump's ideas about Emergy Dominance
and becoming the supplier of the marginal erg of energy to important economies around the world.
The smart play for the EU now that the gas transit deal is in place is to threaten counter-sanctions against the U.S. and bar
all LNG shipments into Europe. Gas prices are at historic lows, gas supplies are overflowing thanks to fears of a deal not being
in place.
So, a three to six month embargo of U.S. LNG into Europe to bleed off excess supply while Nordstream 2 is completed would be the
right play politically.
But, in reality, they won't need to, because the U.S. won't be able to import much into Europe under current prices and market
conditions. And once Nordstream 2 is complete, LNG sales to Europe should crater.
In the end, I guess it's too bad for Ted Cruz that economics and basic human ingenuity are more powerful than legislatures. Because
Nordstream 2 will be completed. Turkstream's other trains into Europe will be built. Venezuela will continue rebuilding its energy
sector with Russian and Chinese help.
There is no place for U.S. LNG in Europe outside of the Poles literally burning money virtue signaling their Russophobia. Nordstream 2 was a response to the revolt in Ukraine, to replace any potential losses in market share to Europe. Now Russia will
have what it had before passing through Ukraine along with Nordstream 2. By 2024 there will be at least two trains from Turkstream
coming into Europe.
Iran will keep expanding exports, settling its oil and gas trade through Russian banks. And the U.S. will continue to fulminate
and make itself even more irrelevant over time. What men like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump refuse to understand is that when you go nuclear you can't ever go back. If you threaten
the nuclear option, there's no fall back position.
And when those that you threaten with annihilation survive they are made all the stronger for passing through the eye of the needle. Looking at Gazprom's balance sheet right now, that's my take.
Turkey, since 2011, has been waging a pro-Sunni proxy war in Syria, in the hope of one day
establishing in Damascus a pro-Turkey, Islamist regime. This ambition has failed, costing
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey violent political turmoil on both sides of
Turkey's 911-km border with Syria and billions of dollars spent on more than 4 million Syrian
refugees scattered across the Turkish soil.
In Egypt, in 2011-2012, Erdoğan aggressively supported the failed Muslim Brotherhood
government and deeply antagonized the incumbent -- then-general but now president -- Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi. Since Erdoğan's efforts in Syria and Egypt failed, his Sunni Islamist
ambitions have found a new proxy-war theater: Libya.
On December 10,
Erdoğan said he could deploy troops in Libya if the UN-backed Government of National
Accord (GNA) in Tripoli (which Turkey supports) requested it. Erdoğan's talks with GNA's
head, Fayez al-Sarraj, who is fighting a war against the Libyan National Army (LNA) of General
Khalifa Haftar, produced two ostensibly strategic agreements: a memorandum of understanding on
providing the GNA with arms, military training and personnel; and a maritime agreement
delineating exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean waters.
Greece and Egypt protested immediately while the European Council unequivocally condemned
the controversial accords. Meanwhile, the deals apparently escalated a proxy competition
between Turkey's old (Greece) and new (Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) rivals.
With the al-Sarraj handshake, Erdoğan is apparently aiming to:
minimize Turkey's isolation in the Mediterranean, one which has gradually worsened since
2010, following one diplomatic crisis after another with Israel;
counter strategic cooperation between Cyprus, Greece, Egypt and Israel, including joint
diplomatic, energy and military initiatives;
cut into the emerging Cypriot-Greek-Egyptian-Israeli maritime bloc;
push back against Arab (Egyptian and UAE) pressure on al-Sarraj;
fill the European vacuum in Libya; and
emerge as a deal-breaker in the Mediterranean rather than a deal-maker.
All that ambition requires military hardware as well as diplomatic software. Since 2011, a
year after the Mavi Marmara incident ruptured relations with Israel, Turkey has been investing
billions of dollars in naval technologies, in an apparent effort to build up the hardware it
would one day require.
In the eight years since then, Turkey has built
four Ada-class corvettes; two Landing Ship Tank (LST) vessels; eight fast Landing Craft Tank
(LCT) vessels; 16 military patrol ships; two deep-sea rescue ships; one submarine rescue ship;
and four assault boats.
The jewel in the naval treasury box is a $1 billion Landing Platform Dock (LPD), now being
built under license from Spain's Navantia shipyards, to be operational in 2021. The TCG
Anadolu , Turkey's first amphibious assault ship, will carry a battalion-sized unit of
1,200 troops and personnel, eight utility helicopters and three unmanned aerial vehicles; it
also will transport 150 vehicles, including battle tanks. It also may be able to deploy short
takeoff and vertical landing STOVL F-35 fighter jets. Turkey will be the third operator in the
world of this ship type, after Spain and Australia.
Erdoğan's naval ambitions, however, are not limited just to an emerging fleet of
conventional vessels. In 2016, he said
that the LPD program would hopefully be the first step toward producing a "most elite" aircraft
carrier. He also said he "sees it as a major deficiency that we still do not have a nuclear
vessel."
On December 22, Turkey's first Type 214 class submarine, the TCG Piri Reis , hit the seas
with a ceremony attended by Erdoğan. "Today,"
he said , "we gathered here for the docking of Piri Reis . As of 2020, a submarine will go
into service each year. By 2027, all six of our submarines will be at our seas for
service."
Unsurprisingly the docking ceremony reminded Erdoğan of his Libyan gambit: "We will
evaluate every opportunity in land, sea and air. If needed, we will increase military support
in Libya."
Erdoğan seems to think that his best defense in the Mediterranean power game is an
offense. On December 15, Turkish Naval Forces
intercepted an Israeli research ship, the Bat Galim , in Cypriot waters and escorted it
away, as tension over natural resource exploration continued to rise in the region.
On December 16, Turkey dispatched a surveillance and reconnaissance drone to the
Turkish-controlled north of the divided island of Cyprus. A week before the drone deployment,
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Ankara could use its
military forces to halt gas drilling in waters off Cyprus that it claims as its own.
Libya is another risky proxy war theater for Turkey. Its deals with the al-Sarraj government
over troop deployment and maritime borders will become null and void if the Libyan civil war,
begun in 2014, ends with Gen. Haftar's victory. The chief of staff of the LNA, Farag
Al-Mahdawi,
announced that his forces would sink any Turkish ship approaching the Libyan coast. "I have
an order; as soon as the Turkish research vessels arrive, I will have a solution. I will sink
them myself," Al-Mahdawi warned, noting that the order was coming from Haftar. On December 21,
Haftar's forces seized
a Grenada-flagged ship with Turkish crew aboard, on the suspicion that it was carrying arms.
The ship was later released.
The European Union is another factor why Erdoğan, once again, is probably betting on
the wrong horse. Technically speaking, Turkey is a candidate for full EU membership, but it is
an open secret that accession talks have not moved an inch during the past several years, and
with no prospects of progress in sight. Making membership prospects even gloomier, EU foreign
ministers in November
agreed on economic sanctions for Ankara for violating Cyprus' maritime economic zone by
drilling off the island.
The Mediterranean chess game leaves Turkey in alliance with the breakaway Turkish Cypriot
statelet and one of the warring factions in Libya, versus a strategic grouping of Greece,
Cyprus, Egypt (and the UAE), Israel, and the other warring Libyan group.
One emerging power in Libya, however, is not a Western state actor. After controlling Syria
in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and establishing permanent military bases inside and off
the coast of the country, Russia has the potential to step into the Libyan theater with a
bigger proxy and direct force, to establish its second permanent Mediterranean military
presence. As in Syria, where divergent interests did not stop Turkey from becoming a
remote-controlled Russian player, Moscow can once again make use of the Turkish card to
undermine Western interests in Libya.
Also as in Syria, Turkey's Islamist agenda will probably fail in Libya, but by the time
Erdoğan understands that, it might be too late to get out of Moscow's orbit.
Instead of finding the real culprits - ISIS remnants, disgruntled locals, Kurds who want
to regain control over Kirkuk - the U.S. decided that Kata'ib Hizbullah was the group guilty
of the attack....
Yesterday's attacks guarantee that all U.S. troops will have to leave Iraq and will
thereby also lose their supply lines to Syria.
One wonders if that was the real intend of those strikes.
Just like with 9/11 and Iraq where the US government immediately pushed its pre-existing
agenda, so the US doesn't care who really launches attacks on US and US-client positions in
Iraq and Syria but automatically assigns them to Hezbollah and thus to Iran, in accord with
the pre-existing neocon wet dream of provoking a full-scale war with Iran.
If that's the US intent, to escalate against Iran, and if conversely the Iraq government
is serious about kicking out the US military, we'll have the confrontation discussed in the
open thread.
As for the idea that Trump was briar-patching here, wanting a good legalistic pretext to
withdraw troops from Iraq (which would then trigger the practical supply-based pretext to
withdraw them from Syria and not "take the oil" after all), well even if he had such confused
thoughts, we've already seen how spineless he is about trying to assert his will over that of
the neocon bureaucracies, civilian and military. Do we really expect them to agree to vacate
Iraq merely because the legally constituted supposedly sovereign government told them to? It
seems more likely they'll tell the government they're not going anywhere and demand that the
government help them suppress non-governmental resistance to their ongoing presence, or else.
(I don't know if there's yet been a formal order to leave from the Iraqi government, or just
rhetoric in an attempt to save face.)
"... "Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win." ..."
"... And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats (Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here in the United States and around the world." ..."
"... The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy." ..."
"... Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context, history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian" nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis. ..."
"... By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies allegedly don't fight wars against one another. ..."
"... George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad policy. ..."
"... Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake. ..."
"... "Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now." ..."
You can hear echoes of progressive realism in the statements of leading progressive
lawmakers such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna. They have put ending
America's support for the Saudi war on Yemen near the top of the progressive foreign policy
agenda. On the stump, Sanders now singles out the military-industrial complex and the runaway
defense budget for criticism. He promises, among other things, that "we will not continue to
spend $700 billion a year on the military." These are welcome developments. Yet since November
of 2016, something else has emerged alongside the antiwar component of progressive foreign
policy that is not so welcome. Let's call it neoprogressive internationalism, or
neoprogressivism for short.
Trump's administration brought with it the Russia scandal. To attack the president and his
administration, critics revived Cold War attitudes. This is now part of the neoprogressive
foreign policy critique. It places an "authoritarian axis" at its center. Now countries ruled
by authoritarians, nationalists, and kleptocrats can and must be checked by an American-led
crusade to make the world safe for progressive values. The problem with this neoprogressive
narrative of a world divided between an authoritarian axis and the liberal West is what it will
lead to: ever spiraling defense budgets, more foreign adventures, more Cold Wars -- and hot
ones too.
Unfortunately, Senators Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have adopted elements of the
neoprogressive program. At a much remarked upon address at Westminster College in Fulton,
Missouri, the site of Churchill's 1946 address, Sanders put forth a vision of a Manichean
world. Instead of a world divided by the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet Communism, Sanders sees a
world divided between right-wing authoritarians and the forces of progress embodied by American
and Western European progressive values.
"Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or
democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen
American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe,
including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to
win."
A year later, Sanders warned that the battle between the West and an "authoritarian axis"
which is "committed to tearing down a post-Second World War global order that they see as
limiting their access to power and wealth." Sanders calls this "a global struggle of enormous
consequence. Nothing less than the future of the -- economically, socially and environmentally
-- is at stake."
Sanders's focus on this authoritarian axis is one that is shared with his intraparty rivals
at the Center for American Progress (a think-tank long funded by some of the least progressive
regimes on the planet), which he has pointedly criticized for smearing progressive Democrats
like himself. CAP issued a report last September about "the threat presented by opportunist
authoritarian regimes" which "urgently requires a rapid response."
The preoccupation with the authoritarian menace is one Sanders and CAP share with prominent
progressive activists who warn about the creeping influence of what some have cynically hyped
as an "authoritarian Internationale."
Cold War Calling
Senator Warren spelled out her foreign policy vision in a speech at American University in
November 2018. Admirably, she criticized Saudi Arabia's savage war on Yemen, the defense
industry, and neoliberal free trade agreements that have beggared the American working and
middle classes.
"Foreign policy," Warren has said, "should not be run exclusively by the Pentagon." In the
second round of the Democratic primary debates, Warren also called for a nuclear "no first use"
policy.
And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be
one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats
(Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt
capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here
in the United States and around the world."
Warren also sees a rising tide of corrupt authoritarians "from Hungary to Turkey, from the
Philippines to Brazil," where "wealthy elites work together to grow the state's power while the
state works to grow the wealth of those who remain loyal to the leader."
The concern with the emerging authoritarian tide has become a central concern of progressive
writers and thinkers. "Today, around the world," write progressive foreign policy activists
Kate Kinzer and Stephen Miles, "growing authoritarianism and hate are fueled by oligarchies
preying on economic, gender, and racial inequality."
Daniel Nexon, a progressive scholar of international relations, believes that "progressives
must recognize that we are in a moment of fundamental crisis, featuring coordination among
right-wing movements throughout the West and with the Russian government as a sponsor and
supporter."
Likewise, The Nation 's Jeet Heer lays the blame for the rise of global
authoritarianism at the feet of Vladimir Putin, who "seems to be pushing for an international
alt-right, an informal alliance of right-wing parties held together by a shared
xenophobia."
Blithely waving away concerns over sparking a new and more dangerous Cold War between the
world's two nuclear superpowers, Heer advises that "the dovish left shouldn't let Cold War
nightmares prevent them [from] speaking out about it." He concludes: "Leftists have to be ready
to battle [Putinism] in all its forms, at home and abroad."
The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU
professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian
school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute
power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom
of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy."
Likewise, we are seeing the emergence of an "authoritarian school" which posits that the
internal political dynamics of regimes such as Putin's cause them, ineffably, to follow
revanchist, expansionist foreign policies.
Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global
movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context,
history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian"
nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis.
By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the
neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and
neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence
that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies
allegedly don't fight wars against one another.
Yet as Richard Sakwa, a British scholar of Russia and Eastern Europe, writes, "it is often
assumed that Russia is critical of the West because of its authoritarian character, but it
cannot be taken for granted that a change of regime would automatically make the country align
with the West."
George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession
with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So
too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith
and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad
policy.
True, some of the economic trends voters in Europe and South America are reacting to are
global, but a diagnosis that links together the rise of Putin and Xi, the elections of Trump in
the U.S., Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, and Kaczyński in Poland with the
right-wing insurgency movements of the Le Pens in France and Farage in the UK makes little
sense.
Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the
neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to
anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western
interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific
to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a
mistake.
Echoes of Neoconservatism
The progressive foreign policy organization Win Without War includes among its 10 foreign
policy goals "ending economic, racial and gender inequality around the world." The U.S.,
according to WWW, "must safeguard universal human rights to dignity, equality, migration and
refuge."
Is it a noble sentiment? Sure. But it's every bit as unrealistic as the crusade envisioned
by George W. Bush in his second inaugural address, in which he declared, "The survival of
liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best
hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."
We know full well where appeals to "universal values" have taken us in the past. Such
appeals are not reliable guides for progressives if they seek to reverse the tide of unchecked
American intervention abroad. But maybe we should consider whether it's a policy of realism and
restraint that they actually seek. Some progressive thinkers are at least honest enough
to admit as much that it is not. Nexon admits that "abandoning the infrastructure of American
international influence because of its many minuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for
decades to come." In other words, America's hegemonic ambitions aren't in and of themselves
objectionable or self-defeating, as long as we achieve our kind of hegemony. Progressive
values crusades bear more than a passing resemblance to the neoconservative crusades to remake
the world in the American self-image.
"Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these
days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which
we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max
Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war
record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist
authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now."
Neoprogressivism, like neoconservatism, risks catering to the U.S. establishment's worst
impulses by playing on a belief in American exceptionalism to embark upon yet another global
crusade. This raises some questions, including whether a neoprogressive approach to the crises
in Ukraine, Syria, or Libya would be substantively different from the liberal interventionist
approach of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Does a neoprogressive foreign policy
organized around the concept of an "authoritarian axis" adequately address the concerns of
voters in the American heartland who disproportionately suffer from the consequences of our
wars and neoliberal economic policies? It was these voters, after all, who won the election for
Trump.
Donald Trump's failure to keep his campaign promise to bring the forever wars to a close
while fashioning a new foreign policy oriented around core U.S. national security interests
provides Democrats with an opportunity. By repeatedly intervening in Syria, keeping troops in
Afghanistan, kowtowing to the Israelis and Saudis, ratcheting up tensions with Venezuela, Iran,
Russia, and China, Trump has ceded the anti-interventionist ground he occupied when he ran for
office. He can no longer claim the mantle of restraint, a position that found support among
six-in-ten Americans in 2016.
Yet with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, for the most part the Democratic field is offering
voters a foreign policy that amounts to "Trump minus belligerence." A truly progressive foreign
policy must put questions of war and peace front and center. Addressing America's post 9/11
failures, military overextension, grotesquely bloated defense budget, and the ingrained
militarism of our political-media establishment are the proper concerns of a progressive U.S.
foreign policy.
But it is one that would place the welfare of our own citizens above all. As such, what is
urgently required is the long-delayed realization of a peace dividend. The post-Cold War peace
dividend that was envisioned in the early 1990s never materialized. Clinton's secretary of
defense Les Aspin strangled the peace dividend in its crib by keeping the U.S. military on a
footing that would allow it to fight and win two regional wars simultaneously. Unipolar
fantasies of "full spectrum dominance" would come later in the decade.
One might have reasonably expected an effort by the Obama administration to realize a
post-bin Laden peace dividend, but the forever wars dragged on and on. In a New Yorker profile
from earlier this year, Sanders asked the right question: "Do we really need to spend more than
the next ten nations combined on the military, when our infrastructure is collapsing and kids
can't afford to go to college?"
The answer is obvious. And yet, how likely is it that progressives will be able realize
their vision of a more just, more equal American society if we have to mobilize to face a
global authoritarian axis led by Russia and China?
FDR's Good Neighbor Policy
The unipolar world of the first post-Cold War decade is well behind us now. As the world
becomes more and more multipolar, powers like China, Russia, Iran, India, and the U.S. will
find increasing occasion to clash. A peaceful multipolar world requires stability. And
stability requires balance.
In the absence of stability, none of the goods progressives see as desirable can take root.
This world order would put a premium on stability and security rather than any specific set of
values. An ethical, progressive foreign policy is one which understands that great powers have
security interests of their own. "Spheres of influence" are not 19th century anachronisms, but
essential to regional security: in Europe, the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.
It is a policy that would reject crusades to spread American values the world over. "The
greatest thing America can do for the rest of the world," George Kennan once observed, "is to
make a success of what it is doing here on this continent and to bring itself to a point where
its own internal life is one of harmony, stability and self-assurance."
Progressive realism doesn't call for global crusades that seek to conquer the hearts and
minds of others. It is not bound up in the hoary self-mythology of American Exceptionalism. It
is boring. It puts a premium on the value of human life. It foreswears doing harm so that good
may come. It is not a clarion call in the manner of John F. Kennedy who pledged to "to pay any
price, bear any burden." It does not lend itself to the cheap moralizing of celebrity
presidential speechwriters. In ordinary language, a summation of such a policy would go
something like: "we will bear a reasonable price as long as identifiable U.S. security
interests are at stake."
A policy that seeks to wind down the global war on terror, slash the defense budget, and
shrink our global footprint won't inspire. It will, however, save lives. Such a policy has its
roots in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address. "In the field of World policy,"
said Roosevelt, "I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor
who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others, the
neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a
World of neighbors."
What came to be known as the "Good Neighbor" policy was further explicated by FDR's
Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the Montevideo Conference in 1933, when he stated that "No
country has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another." Historian
David C. Hendrickson sees this as an example of FDR's principles of "liberal pluralism," which
included "respect for the integrity and importance of other states" and "non-intervention in
the domestic affairs of neighboring states."
These ought to serve as the foundations on which to build a truly progressive foreign
policy. They represent a return to the best traditions of the Democratic Party and would likely
resonate with those very same blocs of voters that made up the New Deal coalition that the
neoliberal iteration of the Democratic Party has largely shunned but will sorely need in order
to unseat Trump. And yet, proponents of a neoprogressive foreign policy seem intent on running
away from a popular policy of realism and restraint on which Trump has failed to deliver.
James W. Carden is contributing writer for foreign affairs at The Nation and a
member of the Board of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.
The other possible replacements include Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Deputy Secretary of
State Biegun, U.S. ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, Trump's Iran envoy Brian Hook, and two
hard-liners from the Senate, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton. Most of these names inspire some
mixture of loathing and dread, and of the seven men being considered Biegun is the only one
remotely qualified to take the job. Hook has
disqualified himself , and he shouldn't even be working at the State Department right now
much less running it. Grenell functions as little more than an international
troll , and he has done a terrible job representing the U.S. in Berlin, so promoting him
would be an equally terrible mistake.
Rubio and Cotton are fanatics with the most toxic foreign policy views, and they would also
likely be very poor managers of the department. In that respect, they are very much like
Pompeo. Mnuchin would likely have great difficulty getting confirmed, and replacing one
sanctions-happy Secretary with the Treasury Secretary who has been enforcing those sanctions is
no improvement at all. As for O'Brien, he was a
bad choice for National Security Advisor , he has done nothing since he took over from
Bolton to suggest otherwise, and so it makes absolutely no sense to promote him. Biegun clearly
has the confidence of the Senate following his overwhelming confirmation vote to be Deputy
Secretary, so having him take over the department for whatever time is left in Trump's term
seems the best available choice.
It is a measure of how chaotic and unsuccessful Trump's foreign policy is that we are
talking about the possible nomination of a third Secretary of State in less than three years.
Pompeo has outlasted many of his administration colleagues to become one of the longest-serving
Cabinet officials under this president, and his tenure is not even two years old. It is no
wonder that the list of likely replacements is so weak. Who would want to join a scandal-ridden
administration with a failed foreign policy?
Pompeo's departure will be good news for the State Department, and the sooner it comes the
better. There has rarely been a Secretary of State as dishonest and political as Pompeo, and
his brief time running the department has been one of the low points in its history.
Considering the damage that Pompeo has done along with the harm done by Tillerson, the next
Secretary of State will have a lot of work to do to rebuild and not much time to do it in.
Pompeo should clear the way for the next Secretary and resign as soon as possible.
Congress' constitutional duty is putting Israel first!
House Dems Unanimously Vote to Condemn Withdrawal From Syria - Oct 16, 2019
In a Wednesday vote, the House overwhelmingly backed a resolution expressing opposition to
the end of the US war in Syria, and calling on the US to protect the Syrian Kurds from
Turkey. The vote was 354-60, with the majority of Republicans supporting it, and unanimous
support from Democrats who cast votes .
Positions from Democrat leaders suggested an unconditional opposition to Trump ending
any war and withdrawing any troops under any circumstances. They also objected to the
notion that a president could end a war without their permission .
The other possible replacements include Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Deputy Secretary of
State Biegun, U.S. ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, Trump's Iran envoy Brian Hook, and two
hard-liners from the Senate, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton. Most of these names inspire some
mixture of loathing and dread, and of the seven men being considered Biegun is the only one
remotely qualified to take the job. Hook has
disqualified himself , and he shouldn't even be working at the State Department right now
much less running it. Grenell functions as little more than an international
troll , and he has done a terrible job representing the U.S. in Berlin, so promoting him
would be an equally terrible mistake.
Rubio and Cotton are fanatics with the most toxic foreign policy views, and they would also
likely be very poor managers of the department. In that respect, they are very much like
Pompeo. Mnuchin would likely have great difficulty getting confirmed, and replacing one
sanctions-happy Secretary with the Treasury Secretary who has been enforcing those sanctions is
no improvement at all. As for O'Brien, he was a
bad choice for National Security Advisor , he has done nothing since he took over from
Bolton to suggest otherwise, and so it makes absolutely no sense to promote him. Biegun clearly
has the confidence of the Senate following his overwhelming confirmation vote to be Deputy
Secretary, so having him take over the department for whatever time is left in Trump's term
seems the best available choice.
It is a measure of how chaotic and unsuccessful Trump's foreign policy is that we are
talking about the possible nomination of a third Secretary of State in less than three years.
Pompeo has outlasted many of his administration colleagues to become one of the longest-serving
Cabinet officials under this president, and his tenure is not even two years old. It is no
wonder that the list of likely replacements is so weak. Who would want to join a scandal-ridden
administration with a failed foreign policy?
Pompeo's departure will be good news for the State Department, and the sooner it comes the
better. There has rarely been a Secretary of State as dishonest and political as Pompeo, and
his brief time running the department has been one of the low points in its history.
Considering the damage that Pompeo has done along with the harm done by Tillerson, the next
Secretary of State will have a lot of work to do to rebuild and not much time to do it in.
Pompeo should clear the way for the next Secretary and resign as soon as possible.
Lyttennburgh, I can think of a couple of reasons for Erdogan's Libyan adventure. First, he'd
rather have those battle tested jihadis in Libya than on his border or in his country.
Second, he may have his eyes on Mediterranean oil. Lastly, he may see a friendly Libyan
government as an ally or province of his Ottoman Empire dream. No matter what the reason,
he's setting himself up for another confrontation with Russia.
Combating the scourge of US-supported terrorists in Syria at the behest of its government
aside, Russia's involvement elsewhere is diplomatic, including in Libya.
Obama regime-led aggression in 2011 transformed Africa's most developed nation into a
charnel house, a dystopian failed state, endless war raging with no resolution in prospect.
Wherever wars rage, chances are US dirty hands are involved, clearly the case in multiple
countries, including Libya.
Russia is not involved in the country militarily. Claims otherwise are fabricated. Russian
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov strongly denied them, saying:
"I categorically refute speculations of this kind. We are acting in the interest of the
Libyan settlement," adding:
"We are supporting the existing effort, including through the United Nations. We maintain a
dialogue with those who somehow influence the situation."
"We do not think that there is any grounds for such statements, such fiction, but this is
not the first time that US media spread different speculations, wicked rumors, falsehoods
targeting us."
"We have already gotten used to this, and we take it in stride. However, I have to
acknowledge that recurrent hoaxes of this kind exercise a negative influence on the sentiment
of the US domestic public, and the general atmosphere in the United States."
"Unfortunately it does not promote normalization of our ties, although we strive for
it."
A November NYT propaganda piece falsely accused Russia of involvement militarily in Libya --
instead of focusing on how the Obama regime raped and destroyed the country.
Trump hardliners support warlord Khalifa Haftar, a longtime CIA asset, a former US resident,
commander of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) -- waging war on the UN-backed
Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA).
Since US-led aggression toppled Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 and sodomized him to death,
the US continued to wage secret drone war on the country, conducting hundreds of strikes,
continuing since Trump took office.
The Times falsely claimed "Russian mercenaries (and) snipers" are involved in Libya -- no
evidence cited proving what's not so, adding:
Hundreds of "Russian fighters (are) part of a broad campaign by the Kremlin to reassert its
influence across the Middle East and Africa (sic)."
"It has introduced advanced Sukhoi jets, coordinated missile strikes, and precision-guided
artillery, as well as the snipers -- the same playbook that made Moscow a kingmaker in the
Syrian civil war (sic)."
There's nothing remotely "civil" about US aggression in Syria. No evidence suggests Russia
is involved militarily in Libya with heavy or other weapons.
The Kremlin didn't intervene in the country on behalf of anyone. Its involvement is
diplomatic to try resolving the mess US aggression created -- what the Times and other
establishment media cheerled.
Days earlier, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed false claims
about Kremlin involvement in Libya militarily, saying:
Moscow officials maintain diplomatic contact "with all current Libyan political forces,"
adding:
Congressional hardliners drafted the so-called Libya Stabilization Act -- imposing sanctions
on Russia for its "imaginary military presence in" the country.
The measure falsely accuses Moscow of "military intervention," blaming what doesn't exist on
destabilizing the country, ignoring how US-led NATO smashed Libya, massacring countless
thousands, displacing many more, destroying their livelihoods and well-being
"I wonder how US lawmakers describe the illegal US armed forces presence in Syria or the
reckless actions of the (Obama regime) in Libya to their voters," Zakharova stressed.
The Times propaganda piece barely acknowledged Trump regime support for Haftar, mentioning
it buried well into its article, ignoring its April 2019 piece, headlined:
Imbecilization is a normal historical process where intellectual declines follows the
economic decline of a given empire. There's growing evidence the West is going through the
same process.
A with any composite, complex historical process, imbecilization doesn't happen in a
uniform and linear way. Economics was the first science that descended into pseudo-science in
the capitalist world (after Marx dismantled Classic Economics). Philosophy followed. Erudite
art degenerated after the fall of Modernism somewhere in the 1950s. Human sciences in general
became fragmented and little more than a constelation of esoterism and pseudo-sciences - a
condition they still enjoy today (e.g. the dismembering of History into Sociology, Behavioral
Economics and others).
Meanwhile, the so-called STEM or "Hard Sciences" continued to prosper for some decades,
until they also hit a ceiling in the 1990s. The fall of the profitability of the capitalist
world led it to resort to "financialization" to keep the system going, which resulted in the
most brilliant capitalist mathematicians to be hosed to Wall Street instead to the likes of
NASA. Those MIT mathematicians and rocket scientists created the algorithms Wall Street still
uses today, but they did not stop the 2008 meltdown.
Nowadays, those brilliant STEM minds are nothing more than fraudsters who keep their
careers going by creating meaningless experiments (because they need the funding) only to
publish articles and keep their production quotas or self-censuring bootlickers for Wall
Street and Big Pharma. When they get to work for a big corporation, they are mere architects
of planned obsolescence or patent renewing. There's a new book I strongly recommend all of
you to read:
"... Imagine millions of government employees paid for by America's tax payer class, involved in covert operations undermining nation states for the benefit of war mongering shadow overlords counting on more never ending chaos feeding their hunger for power. ..."
"... This isn't Orwell's 1984, this Team America on opioids. ..."
"... Senior OPCW official had orders from US/ the Donald. Remember that the Donald bombed Syria based on this fake report , after a false flag done by Al Qaeda's artistic branch, the White Helmets. ..."
"... Pray, do tell where are the consequences for these literal demons that engaged in war crimes? It is quite clear: as long as you are a member of the establishment, you can do whatever the f*ck you want. ..."
"... Third rate script, third rate actors and crooked investigators. TPTB seem to have a plan worked out. Their problem now is that we, the hoi-polloi, have seen it all before, many times, and we can now recognise ******** when it's used to try to influence us. ..."
"... If this is not lamentable enough, the OPCW – whose final report came to more than a hundred pages and which even issued an easy-to-read precis version for journalists – now slams shut its steel doors in the hope of preventing even more information reaching the press. ..."
"... Instead of these pieces concentrating on the whistleblower how about putting a little heat on the 50 lying bastards who initiated the coverup? ..."
"... The destruction of the countries of the Middle East for the sake of a dwarf with giant ambitions is the most stupid thing the United States has done over the past 30 years in its foreign policy. And yes, all the wars in the Middle East were grounded in lies. And the Americans paid for it all from start to finish. When Americans realize that they need to defend their national interests, and not other people's national interests, maybe something in the Middle East will change for the better. True, I am afraid that with the hight level of stupidity and shortsightedness that is common among Americans, the United States is more likely to be destroyed faster. No offense. ..."
"... And I propose to remember the Syrian Christians who were destroyed by the Saudi Wahhabis, hired by the CIA with the money of American taxpayers and at the request of Israel. Until the Americans begin to investigate the activities of the CIA (and this activity causes the United States only harm), the responsibility for this genocide (you heard right) will be on the American nation. It turns out that in the Middle East you are primarily destroying Christians. How interesting, why such zeal. ..."
"... According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW officials raised alarm about the suppression of critical findings that undermine the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad's editors at Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. "If I don't find another position in journalism because of this, I'm perfectly happy to accept that consequence," Haddad says. "It's not desirable. But there is no way I could have continued in that job knowing that I couldn't report something like this." ..."
"... New leaks continue to expose a cover-up by the OPCW – the world's top chemical weapons watchdog – over a critical event in Syria. Documents, emails, and testimony from OPCW officials have raised major doubts about the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. The leaked OPCW information has been released in pieces by Wikileaks. The latest documents contain a number of significant revelations – including that that about 20 OPCW officials voiced concerns that their scientific findings and on-the-ground evidence was suppressed and excluded. ..."
Wikileaks has released their fourth set of leaks from the OPCW's Douma investigation,
revealing new details about the alleged deletion of important information regarding the
fact-finding mission.
RELEASE: OPCW-Douma Docs 4. Four leaked documents from the OPCW reveal that toxicologists
ruled out deaths from chlorine exposure and a senior official ordered the deletion of the
dissenting engineering report from OPCW's internal repository of documents. https://t.co/ndK4sRikNk
"One of the documents is an e-mail exchange dated 27 and 28 February between members of the
fact finding mission (FFM) deployed to Douma and the senior officials of the OPCW. It includes
an e-mail from Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW , where he instructs that an
engineering report from Ian Henderson should be removed from the secure registry of the
organisation," WikiLeaks writes. Included in the email is the following directive:
" Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive] And please remove all
traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.'"
According to Wikileaks, the main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma, was
that two of the cylinders were most likely manually placed at the site, rather than
dropped.
"The main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma and two cylinders that were
found on the site of the alleged attack, was that they were more likely manually placed there
than dropped from a plane or helicopter from considerable heights. His findings were omitted
from the official final OPCW report on the Douma incident," the Wikileaks report said.
It must be remembered that the U.S. launched an attack on Damascus, Syria on April 14, 2018
over alleged chemical weapons usage by pro-Assad forces at Douma.
Another document released Friday is minutes from a meeting on 6 June 2018 where four staff
members of the OPCW had discussions with "three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one
bioanalytical and toxicological chemist" (all specialists in chemical weapons, according to the
minutes).
Minutes from an OPCW meeting with toxicologists specialized in chemical weapons: "the
experts were conclusive in their statements that there was
no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure". https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/vgPaTtsdQN
The purpose of this meeting was two-fold. The first objective was "to solicit expert advice
on the value of exhuming suspected victims of the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April
2018". According to the minutes, the OPCW team was advised by the experts that there would be
little use in conducting exhumations. The second point was "To elicit expert opinions from the
forensic toxicologists regarding the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged
victims."
More specifically, " whether the symptoms observed in victims were consistent with exposure
to chlorine or other reactive chlorine gas."
According to the minutes leaked Friday: "With respect to the consistency of the observed and
reported symptoms of the alleged victims with possible exposure to chlorine gas or similar, the
experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and
chlorine exposure ."
The OPCW team members wrote that the key "take-away message" from the meeting was "that the
symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate
chemical causing the symptoms could be identified".
The isisrahell have such long hand to pull the plug any stories implicating their crime in
progress otherwise they can put out some bs spins as bombshell reporting about US lies in
Afghanistan war on their wapo for public for those who read it was nothing important revealed
except being a misdirected na
If you want to pay off that student loan you're going to print what they tell you to
print. You're going to inject kids with what they tell you to inject them with. You're going
to think what they tell you to think or you're going to spend your days in a Prole bar
drinking Blatz.
yes, an attack was launched, 50 missiles I believe, after loud warnings that it was
coming, and none of them actually hit anything significant ... this is the way the game is
played .... the good news is that the missiles cost $50 million, and now they will have to be
replaced, by the Pentagon, first borrowing the money through the US Treasury offerings, and
then paying for them from new money printed by the Federal Reserve. capische?
That`s the way it`s always been, it`s the eternal war of good against evil.
And when one evil enemy is defeated, it`s necessary to create a new evil enemy, how else
can the Establishment Elite make money from war, death and destruction.
It's really very awkward & telling how ***** these bunch of western nations are
looking tough on taking out poor defenceless country like Syria on ******** & at the
satried to ease real kickass Russian as you described when they launch the attacks
I kind wish the US & their Zionist clown launch such huge attacks on Iran based on
false flag
I really wanted these evil aggressive powers to taste what it is like to get bombed back
even one they used to throw on multiple weaker nations freely with nothing to fear as
retribution etc
This organisations are all set up in Europe and US run by the filthiest filth on earth who
still think they have God given right to imperial rule over the world.
Your military-industrial-intelligence complex at work, creating justification for more
funding, like always - and who cares if people die as a result? Like Soros said, if they
didn't do it, someone else would. (do I need /sarc?).
They don't like to be shown to be in charge, just to be in charge. And if you think this
is a function of the current admin, you've been slow in the head and deaf and blind for quite
some time.
I've watched since Eisenhower, and "it's always something". Doesn't matter what color the
clown in chief's tie is.
Imagine millions of government employees paid for by America's tax payer class, involved
in covert operations undermining nation states for the benefit of war mongering shadow
overlords counting on more never ending chaos feeding their hunger for power.
This isn't Orwell's 1984, this Team America on opioids.
Senior OPCW official had orders from US/ the Donald. Remember that the Donald bombed Syria based on this fake report , after a false flag done
by Al Qaeda's artistic branch, the White Helmets.
Pray, do tell where are the consequences for these literal demons that engaged in war
crimes? It is quite clear: as long as you are a member of the establishment, you can do
whatever the f*ck you want. Why do we even follow the law, then? Given the precedent that is
being set, we might as well not have any.
Well, they are looking forward to using all those Israeli weapons, er, uh, products, that
local law enforcement has purchased...so watch out for Co-Intel Pro elicitation going
forward....?
Everybody knows the Golem (USA) does Isn'treal's bidding in Syria and elsewhere in the
Near East. Hopefully they keep hammering in the fact that this "gas attack" was an obvious
set-up to use as a pretext (flimsy itself on the face of it) to brutalize Assad and Syria on
behalf of Isn'treal.
The whole thing is built on ******* lies. Worst part about it is, nothing will happen.
Only official news is to believed. You see it and it is a lie. they tell you to believe
it. A lot of people casually believe whatever is spoken on TV. They become teachers and are
taught in college what is right and wrong. We only have a few years before all the brain dead
are in charge and robotically following the message like zombies with no brain
Third rate script, third rate actors and crooked investigators. TPTB seem to have a plan worked out. Their problem now is that we, the hoi-polloi, have
seen it all before, many times, and we can now recognise ******** when it's used to try to
influence us.
It is difficult to underestimate the seriousness of this manipulative act by the OPCW.
In a response to the conservative author Peter Hitchens, who also writes for the Mail on
Sunday – he is of course the brother of the late Christopher Hitchens – the
OPCW admits that its so-called technical secretariat "is conducting an internal
investigation about the unauthorised [sic] release of the document".
Then it adds: "At this time, there is no further public information on this matter and
the OPCW is unable to accommodate [sic] requests for interviews". It's a tactic that until
now seems to have worked: not a single news media which reported the OPCW's official
conclusions has followed up the story of the report which the OPCW suppressed.
And you bet the OPCW is not going to "accommodate" interviews. For here is an
institution investigating a war crime in a conflict which has cost hundreds of thousands of
lives – yet its only response to an enquiry about the engineers' "secret" assessment
is to concentrate on its own witch-hunt for the source of the document it wished to keep
secret from the world.
If this is not lamentable enough, the OPCW – whose final report came to more than
a hundred pages and which even issued an easy-to-read precis version for journalists
– now slams shut its steel doors in the hope of preventing even more information
reaching the press.
The destruction of the countries of the Middle East for the sake of a dwarf with giant
ambitions is the most stupid thing the United States has done over the past 30 years in its
foreign policy. And yes, all the wars in the Middle East were grounded in lies. And the
Americans paid for it all from start to finish. When Americans realize that they need to
defend their national interests, and not other people's national interests, maybe something
in the Middle East will change for the better. True, I am afraid that with the hight level of
stupidity and shortsightedness that is common among Americans, the United States is more
likely to be destroyed faster. No offense.
And I propose to remember the Syrian Christians who were destroyed by the Saudi Wahhabis,
hired by the CIA with the money of American taxpayers and at the request of Israel. Until the
Americans begin to investigate the activities of the CIA (and this activity causes the United
States only harm), the responsibility for this genocide (you heard right) will be on the
American nation. It turns out that in the Middle East you are primarily destroying
Christians. How interesting, why such zeal.
According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW officials raised alarm
about the suppression of critical findings that undermine the allegation that the Syrian
government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad's
editors at Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. "If I don't find another
position in journalism because of this, I'm perfectly happy to accept that consequence,"
Haddad says. "It's not desirable. But there is no way I could have continued in that job
knowing that I couldn't report something like this."
New leaks continue to expose a cover-up by the OPCW – the world's top chemical
weapons watchdog – over a critical event in Syria. Documents, emails, and testimony
from OPCW officials have raised major doubts about the allegation that the Syrian government
committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. The leaked OPCW
information has been released in pieces by Wikileaks. The latest documents contain a number
of significant revelations – including that that about 20 OPCW officials
voiced concerns that their scientific findings and on-the-ground evidence was suppressed and
excluded.
This is, without a doubt, a major global scandal: the OPCW, under reported US pressure,
suppressing vital evidence about allegations of chemical weapons. But that very fact exposes
another global scandal: with the exception of small outlets like The Grayzone, the mass media
has widely ignored or whitewashed this story. And this widespread censorship of the OPCW
scandal has just led one journalist to resign. Up until recently, Tareq Haddad was a reporter
at Newsweek. But in early December, Tareq announced that he had quit his position after
Newsweek refused to publish his story about the OPCW cover up over Syria.
So Turkey goes against Uncle Sam and Egypt. Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed . ..."
"... In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict . ..."
"... Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to topple Assad? ..."
"... The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world. More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. ..."
Bloomberg has confirmed on Friday the prior rumors that Turkey will be sending mercenaries
to Libya -- where it is propping up the UN-backed government in Tripoli (the GNA) -- are true.
"Turkey is preparing to deploy troops and naval forces to support the
internationally-recognized Libyan government, joining a planned push by Ankara-backed Syrian
rebels to defeat strongman Khalifa Haftar,"
reports Bloomberg .
Though Ankara has yet to confirm or deny the new reports, Erdogan's Turkey has for years
overseen a Libya-to-Turkey-to-Syria arms
"rat line" which saw both heavy weaponry and jihadists fighters transported for the purpose
of toppling Assad. But now with Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa
Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed
.
This also as President Erdogan
in a speech on Thursday presented plans to send Turkish national troops bolster Tripoli as
well .
Possibly thousands from among the so-called Turkish Free Syrian Army (formerly the FSA),
with most of its fighters currently attacking Syrian Kurds in the ongoing 'Operation Peace
Spring', will now be sent into Libya.
There are reports suggesting Turkey is ready to pay $2,000 a month for each Syrian 'rebel'
willing to go to Libya .
TFSA source told me Turkey will be offering fighters from all TFSA factions $2,000/month
to go to Libya.
And akin to the current proxy war which has seen both the US, Kurds, and Sunni Islamists
backed by Turkey wrangle over Syria's oil rich eastern region, Libya is heating up to be the
latest 'oil and gas prize' -- but with immensely more at stake. As Bloomberg notes:
In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its
troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior
Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that
serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business
contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict .
As we
predicted earlier , Libya and the southern Mediterranean is on its way to becoming the next
big Middle East conflict of 2020 , also with Egypt and even Russia warning of further
involvement to block Turkey's increasing role on the ground.
And as the mainstream media finally stops ignoring the looming catastrophe for north Africa
and the region (still in denial as to the fruits of US-NATO "liberated" Libya after Gaddafi was
overthrown and killed), it
must be remembered that in another ironic plot twist, the CIA trained the very FSA 'rebel'
fighters now on their way to Libya .
Gee who would have ever predicted? It's the foreign fighter 'rat line' in reverse.
Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to
topple Assad? Via a 2015
military study :
The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world.
More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of
jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these
foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. Who are these North African fighters, and why are they
going to Syria? What do they hope to accomplish there, and do they want to return to their home countries?
Considering the tens of thousands of foreign fighters which poured into Syria starting in
2011 and 2012 in the first place, many of them from Libya, perhaps many are now simply headed
"home" -- ready to further the proxy war chaos at Erdogan's bidding.
NATO IS NOTHING more than an extension of George Soros' arm as it is also an extension
of the Rothschild arm! Most should have gleaned this by now, particularly recognizing the
radical Wahhabism that was included in this band of merry global thugs (Saudi Arabia) to do
the bidding of the globalist satanic cabal. Kind of sad hearing this kind of neive
responses from the gallery...sorry Mr. teolawki but you missed the forest for the
trees.
What is naive is not understanding that Turkey is the current NATO nations gateway for
all manner of illicit and illegitimat activity to foment and perpetuate the forever wars in
the ME. This has been going on since well before Benghazi and has only gotten worse under
Erdogan.
If you have a way to snap your fingers and solve every problem simultaneously, then
please do so. Otherwise it must be undertaken one step at a time. Closing that Turkish
gateway permanently is an excellent start.
"... Sorry to burst your bubble, but since the end of the Soviet System (with Western criminal thieving BILLIONAIRES who rushed in to plunder Russia (Yeltsin Years) ---- Russians now live longer than the degraded, and impoverished Americans with what the Junk Food Nation serves in the US of A. ..."
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4777 Washington's Unmasked Imperialism Towards
Europe And Russia by Tyler Durden Sat, 12/28/2019 - 07:00 0
SHARES
Washington must think the rest of the world is as stupid as many of its own politicians are.
Its passing into law – signed by President Trump this week – of sanctions to halt
the Nord Stream-2 and Turk Stream gas supply projects is a naked imperialist move to bludgeon
the European energy market for its own economic advantage.
US sanctions are planned to hit European companies involved with Russia's Gazprom in the
construction of the 1,225-kilometer pipeline under the Baltic Sea which will deliver natural
gas from Russia to Germany and elsewhere across the European Union. The €9.5 billion
($11bn) project is 80 per cent complete and is due to be finished early next year.
It is quite clear – because US politicians have openly acknowledged it – that
Washington's aim is to oust Russia as the main natural gas exporter to the giant EU market, and
to replace with more expensive American-produced gas.
What's hilarious is the way American politicians, diplomats and news media are portraying
this US assault on market principles and the sovereignty of nations as an act of chivalry.
Washington claims that the sanctions are "pro-European" because they are "saving Europe from
dependency on Russia for its energy". The American hypocrisy crescendoes with the further claim
that by stopping Russia earning lucrative export revenues, then Moscow will be constrained from
"interfering" in European nations. As if Washington's own actions are not interference on a
massive scale.
European politicians and businesses are not buying this American claptrap. The vast
overstepping by Washington into European affairs has prompted EU governments to question the
nature of the trans-Atlantic relation. About time too. Thus, Washington's hubris and bullying
are undermining its objective of dominating Europe for its own selfish interests.
Russia, Germany and others have defiantly
told Washington its weaponizing of economic sanctions will not halt the Nord Stream nor the
Turk Stream projects.
As German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas
said earlier this month, "it is unacceptable" for the US to brazenly interfere in European
and Russian energy trade. The American pretext of supposedly "protecting" the national security
of its purported European allies is frankly laughable.
The American agenda is a blatantly imperialistic reordering of the energy market to benefit
US economic interests. To pull off this audacious scam, Washington, by necessity, has to
demonize and isolate Russia, while also trampling roughshod over its European allies. Europe
has partly aided this American stitch-up of its own interests because it has foolishly indulged
in the US antagonism towards Russia with sanctions due to the Ukraine conflict, Crimea and
other anti-Russia smears.
The legislation being whistled through the American Congress by both Republicans and
Democrats (collectively dubbed the War Party) is recklessly fueling tensions between the US and
Russia. In trying to gain economic advantages over Europe's energy, Washington is wantonly
ramping up animus towards Moscow.
Apart from the sanctions against Russian and European companies partnering on Nord Stream,
the US Congress passed separate legislation which seeks to boost American oil and gas
production in the East Mediterranean.
A Radio Free Europe
report this week was headlined: 'Congress Passes More Legislation Aimed At Curbing Russia's
Energy Grip On Europe'.
The headline should more accurately have been worded: 'Congress Passes More Legislation
Aimed At Bolstering America's Energy Grip On Europe'.
The RFE report states: "The bipartisan Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership
Act, which was approved on December 19, is the latest piece of US legislation passed this year
that aims to diversify [sic] Europe's energy sources away from Kremlin-controlled
companies."
Again, the American double-think is jaw-dropping. Such is the arrogance of a flailing,
delusional empire when it can publicly justify with a straight face an energy-market-grab with
a veneer of virtue.
US oil and gas giants are moving into the East Mediterranean. Exxon Mobil
announced the discovery of a major natural gas field off Cyprus in February this year.
American firms are also
partnering with Israeli companies to begin gas production in the Leviathan Field located
off the coast at Haifa.
There is no doubt that the US sanctions targeting Nord Stream and Turk Stream are part of a
bigger concerted pincer movement by Washington to corner the EU energy market of 500 million
consumers (more than double the US population).
Colin Cavell, a US professor of political science, commented to Strategic Culture
Foundation: "What should be hammered down in this continuing debate over which country will be
able to deliver oil and natural gas to Europe is the fact that neither the United States nor,
and especially, the Republican Party, stand for so-called free trade."
Free-trade capitalism is supposed to be an ideological pillar of the US. In this ideology,
governments should not interfere with market supply and demand. But paradoxically as far as
US-imposed sanctions on Russian-European energy companies are concerned the American Congress
is "quintessentially anti-free market", notes Cavell.
In its shameless profiteering, Washington is acting aggressively towards Russia and Europe
while flouting its own supposed economic principles and relying on brute force to win its
arguments. America's imperialist agenda towards Europe and Russia is how world wars are
instigated.
"You will buy our more expensive, less efficient, non-market solution, you will pay for it
with King Dollars, and by gawd, YOU WILL LIKE IT, now shuddup, Vassals!" -- Uncle Scam and
the Reloonicans
I live in Denmark, a country Nord Stream 2 is going through. We are (used to be?) one of
the strongest allies to the US. But recent developments have alienated a lot of danes to the
US.
First Trump publicly announced he wanted to buy the isle of Greenland from Denmark.
Greenland is the largest isle in the world and of strategic importance. But you don't just
buy a part of another country, and this offer was firmly refused. As response to the refusal
Trump cancelled a previously planned official visit to Denmark. This was seen by most danes
as an insult.
Denmark was the last country holding out on permissions needed to build Nord Stream 2, but
after this incident we allowed the project to go forward. I believe the Greenland incident
caused the change making Denmark approve Nord Stream 2.
After this we have had other incidents. One is on the Faroe Islands (a part of Denmark),
where both US and Chinese ambassadors interfered in our internal affairs trying to influence
if Huawei could be used for 5G in this self-governing part of our country. Another is a
follow-up to the Greenland incident mentioned, where the US now wants to open a diplomatic
mission on the island, probably in an attempt to influence the local government to accept
that the US buys the island.
During the last year I have seen sentiment among my fellow citizens going from "the US is
great, let us support and follow them" to "we have to be careful of these guys, they
interfere in our internal affairs and try to break up our country".
I believe the US government is underestimating how much they are alienating the Europeans
with this line of foreing policy.
Its a guess but I think there are other hidden issues here nobody wants to talk about. Of
course, Trump idea of buying the island was stupid but I believe it arouse out of
frustration. You see, US wants to build huge military base there. Danes won't permit that.
The reason US wants to do it is because sea between Iceland and England/Norway is a
chokepoint aimed against Russian subs. This is the only place where they can be reasonably
stopped. It is nothing new, the same thing happened during WWII war at so called "war of
Atlantic" where the most of the fighting happened between German U-boats and alliance
marines.
You most certainly can buy land from other countries. Thomas Jefferson purchased the
entire center of N. America from the French and for pennies. We also purchased Alaska from
the Russians for next to nothing as well. Both land masses are much larger than all of
Europe.
You guys don't need Greenland so give it to us for pennies.
Russia has the largest proven reserves of easily recoverable oil and natural gas on Earth.
The US has about a decade to choke Russia to death. Economic sanctions, regime change, cyber
attacks...whatever it takes. If the US doesn't utterly break Russia soon, Russia will become
the next, (and last) empire on Earth. NeoConThink.
"The US has about a decade to choke Russia to death. "
Actually you are absolutely wrong on this. It is the other way around. Russia has to get
out of US chokefold NOW or it will likely disintegrate.
Why? In short, economy, geogaphy and even more importantly demographics.
Today there are about 110 million native Russians there. Next to them are about 40 million
muslims living there. Muslims have about twice as big reproduction rate as Russians do. It is
estimated that in 30 years if current trends stand it will be 50/50. Worse, in ten years
there will be only about 90 million Russians living there.
There are other issues as well. About 25 percent of Russian men die before the age of 55.
The reason? Alcoholism and drug abuse. Have you ever heard about cheap Rusian drug called
Krokodil?
It kills you slowly first then fast. Your body just ROTS AWAY and falls off. Literally!
Like you have bare bones instead of feet. No kidding. Just check on you tube.
Another problem is soldier materiel. It is estimated that only about 30 percent of males
between the age of 18-25 are healthy enough to join military. As of today it is barely
sufficient to fill the ranks. In 10 years Russian military will have to shrink by 20 percent.
From that perspective it is do or die for Russia right now. This is most likely the peak of
their military power, then it will slowly deteriorate. Putin knows that, hence he lashes out
at its neighbours, most notably Poland. Economy shrinks, military is on vane, hence he needs
an enemy to rally his people around. Or else!
Then there is China. Make your best bet what they will do in the far east when Russia lies
prostate.Remember, Russia took over a lot of Chinese territory in late XIX century there.
Yep, the area around Vladivostok and other nearby territories, the size close to that of
today's France..There are millions of Chinese already living there.In the Asian south Chinese already took controll of the former
Russian stans. They rule there, not Putin. You didn't know that?
"There are other issues as well. About 25 percent of Russian men die before the age of 55.
The reason? Alcoholism and drug abuse. Have you ever heard about cheap Rusian drug called
Krokodil?
It kills you slowly first then fast. Your body just ROTS AWAY and falls off. Literally!
Like you have bare bones instead of feet. No kidding. Just check on you tube."
Sorry to burst your bubble, but since the end of the Soviet System (with Western criminal
thieving BILLIONAIRES who rushed in to plunder Russia (Yeltsin Years) ---- Russians now live
longer than the degraded, and impoverished Americans with what the Junk Food Nation serves in
the US of A.
" Washington must think the rest of the world is as stupid as many of its own
politicians are"
No, washington thinks no such thing. It doesnt really understand how stupid its own
politicians are. Nor DOES IT CARE!.
Did anyone watch the impeachment proceedings? Now, THAT was stupid, stupid for the
whole world to watch. And then there is the chocoate cake diplomacy of Trump, the elegance
and sophistication of Pompeo, Bolton, and the digniity of Nikki Haley. Putting Raytheon to
run our Pentagon is a magical touch.
Comment from a friend of mine concerning the statement below. He has excellent security
credentials:
"Our President has made the world far more dangerous by withdrawing from treaties without
attempting to negotiate new ones. No country is well served by this. The situation is very
destabilizing."
The Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Sergey Shoigu:
- I hope that a full-scale war is not a question today. And all the risks and consequences
that such a full-scale war entails are obvious to everyone.
Regarding the third world war, there are a very large number of different statements. The
most accurate and adequate of them seems to me: "I do not know exactly what the third world
war will be. But I know for sure that she will be the last. "
However, if we talk about the number of threats to our country, then they do not become
less. The United States has already withdrawn from two important nuclear arms control
treaties. So far, the START-3 treaty remains, which is also under discussion in the USA: to
renew it or not to renew it?
As a result of this approach, the world is becoming more unpredictable and less secure. At
the current level of informatization and automation, there is a high probability of errors in
the weapons control system.
That is why recently issues of ensuring information security have come to the fore. When
you are aware of your vulnerability and are interested in maintaining balance and universal
equal security, it makes you turn on your head.
And when you think how the United States continues to believe by inertia that a balance of
power has developed in your favor, a variety of ideas may come to your head, including not
the most reasonable ones. It is in this situation that I see the main threat now, and not
only for Russia, "the minister replied.
It's good cop/bad cop nonsense. Europe is occupied territory, and American huffing and
puffing at Russia is just meant to get Europe "better deals" for their projects with Russia.
The only ones who don't get it are spooks and Neo-Libs/Cons
What is not expected is rational discussion on what I have described here. But since facts
contrary to my expose here are missing I doubt it will happen.
" But remember also that todays Russia is ruled by a Tsar named Putin"
Im amazed at how long this silly meme can be maintained.
Putin is NOT and autocrat, he has to struggle with a delicate balance. between the Atlantic integrationists and Eurasiaon soveriigntists. The oligarchy installed by the US is still strong in Russian. They have not won their
soveriignty yet.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Palmerston stated what he thought was obvious,
that "England has no eternal friends, England has no perpetual enemies, England has only
eternal and perpetual interests." Palmerston was saying that national interests should drive
the relationships with foreigners. A nation will have amicable relations most of the time with
some countries and difficult relations with some others, but the bottom line should always be
what is beneficial for one's own country and people.
If Palmerston were alive today and observing the relationship of the United States of
America with the rest of the world, he might well find Washington to be an exception to his
rule. The U.S., to be sure, has been adept at turning adversaries into enemies and
disappointing friends, and it is all done with a glib assurance that doing so will somehow
bring democracy and freedom to all. Indeed, either neoliberal democracy promotion or the
neoconservative version of the same have been seen as an overriding and compelling interest
during the past twenty years even though the policies themselves have been disastrous and have
only damaged the real interests of the American people.
The U.S. relationship with Israel is, for example, driven by a powerful and wealthy domestic
lobby rather than by any common interests at all yet it is regularly falsely touted as being
between two "close allies" and "best friends." It has cost Americans hundreds of billions of
dollars in subsidies for the Jewish state and Israeli influence over U.S. policy in the Middle
East region has led to catastrophic military interventions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq,
Syria, Mogadishu and Libya. Currently, Israel is agitating for U.S. action against the
nonexistent Iranian "threat" while also unleashing its lobby in the United States to make
illegal criticism of any of its war crimes, effectively curtailing freedom of speech and
association for all Americans.
Far more dangerous is the continued excoriation of the Kremlin over the largely mythical
Russiagate narrative. Congress has
recently approved a bill that would give to Ukraine $300 million in supplementary military
assistance to use against Russia. The money and authorization appear in the House of
Representatives version of the national defense authorization act (NDAA) that passed last
week.
The bill is a renewal of the controversial Ukraine
Security Assistance Initiative that Donald Trump allegedly manipulated to bring about an
investigation of Joe Biden's son Hunter. The new version expands on the former assistance
package to include coastal defense cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles as offensive weapons
that are acceptable for export to Kiev. It also authorizes an additional $50 million in
military assistance on top of the $250 million congress had granted in last year's bill, "of
which $100 million would be available only for lethal assistance."
Ukraine sought the money and arms to counter Russian naval dominance in the Black Sea
through its base at Sevastopol in the Crimea. One year ago the Russian navy
captured three Ukrainian warships and Kiev was unable to push back against Moscow because
it lacked weapons designed to attack ships. Now it will have them and presumably it will use
them. How Russia will react is unknowable.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration,
has been in Washington lobbying for the additional military assistance. He has had considerable
success, particularly as there is bipartisan support in Congress for aid to Kiev and also
because the Trump Departments of Defense and State as well as the National Security Council are
all on board in countering the "Russian threat" in the Black Sea. President Trump signed the
NDAA last week, which completed the process.
Far more ominously, Kuleba and his interlocutors in the administration and congress have
been revisiting a proposal first surfaced under Bill Clinton, that Ukraine and Georgia should
be admitted to the NATO alliance. Like the $300 million in military aid, there appears to be
considerable bipartisan support for such a move. NATO already has a major presence on the Black
Sea with Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey all members. Adding Ukraine and Georgia would completely
isolate the Russian presence and Moscow would undoubtedly see it as an existential threat.
The NDAA also provides seed money to initiate the so-called Space Force ,
which President Trump inaugurated by describing it as "the world's newest war-fighting domain.
Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital.
We're leading, but we're not leading by enough, but very shortly we'll be leading by a lot. The
Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground."
If that isn't bad enough, the new defense budget ominously also requires the Trump
administration to impose sanctions "with respect to provision of certain vessels for the
construction of certain Russian energy export pipelines." Last week the House of
Representatives and Senate
approved specific sanctions relating to the companies and governments that are
collaborating on the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will cross the Baltic Sea
from Vyborg to Greifswald to connect Germany with Russian natural gas. President Trump has
signed off on the legislation.
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The United States has opposed the project ever since it was first mooted, claiming that it
will make Europe "hostage" to Russian energy, will enrich the Russian government, and will also
empower Russian President Vladimir Putin to be more aggressive. Engineering companies that will
be providing services such as pipe-laying will be targeted by Washington as the Trump
administration tries to halt the completion of the $10.5 billion project.
Now that the NDAA has been signed, the Trump administration has 60 days to identify
companies, individuals and even foreign governments that have in some way provided services or
assistance to the pipeline project. Sanctions would block individuals from travel to the United
States and would freeze bank accounts and other tangible property that would be identified by
the U.S. Treasury. One company that will definitely be targeted for sanctions is the
Switzerland-based Allseas, which has been contracted with by Russia's Gazprom to build the
offshore section of pipeline. It has suspended work on the project while it examines the
implications of the sanctions.
Bear in mind that Nord Stream 2 is a peaceful commercial project between two countries that
have friendly relations, making the threats implicit in the U.S. reaction more than somewhat
inappropriate. Increased U.S. sanctions against Russia itself are also believed to be a
possibility and there has even been some suggestion that the German government and its energy
ministry might be sanctioned. This has predictably resulted in pushback from Germany, normally
a country that is inclined to go along with any and all American initiatives. Last week German
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas asked Congress not to meddle in European energy policy, saying "We
think this is unacceptable, because it is ultimately a move to influence autonomous decisions
that are made in Europe. European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S."
German Bundestag member Andreas Nick warned that "It's an issue of national sovereignty,
and it is potentially a liability for trans-Atlantic relations." That Trump is needlessly
alienating important countries like Germany that are genuine allies, unlike Israel and Saudi
Arabia, over an issue that is not an actual American interest is unfortunate. It makes one
think that the wheels have definitely come off the cart in Washington.
The point is that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and Mike Esper (admittedly too
many Mikes) wouldn't know a national interest if it hit them in the face. Their
politicization of policy to "win in 2020" promoting apocalyptic nonsense like war in space has
also reinforced an existing tunnel vision on what Russia under Vladimir Putin is all about that
is extremely dangerous. Admittedly, Team Trump throws out sanctions in all directions with
reckless abandon, mostly aimed at Russia, Iran, North Korea and, the current favorite,
Venezuela. No one is immune. But the escalation going from sanctions to arming the Kremlin's
enemies is both reckless and pointless. Russia will definitely strike back if it is attacked,
make no mistake about that, and war could easily escalate with tragic consequences for all of
us. That war is perhaps becoming thinkable is in itself deplorable, with Business
Insiderrunning a recent
piece on surviving a nuclear attack. New homes in target America will likely soon come
equipped with bomb shelters, just like in the 1950s. Tags Politics
O nce in a blue moon an indispensable book comes out making a clear case for sanity in what
is now a post-MAD world. That's the responsibility carried by " The (Real)
Revolution in Military Affairs ," by Andrei Martyanov (Clarity Press), arguably the most
important book of 2019.
Martyanov is the total package -- and he comes with extra special attributes as a top-flight
Russian military analyst, born in Baku in those Back in the U.S.S.R. days, living and working
in the U.S., and writing and blogging in English.
Right from the start, Martyanov wastes no time destroying not only Fukuyama's and
Huntington's ravings but especially Graham Allison's childish and meaningless Thucydides Trap
argument -- as if the power equation between the U.S. and China in the 21stcentury could be
easily interpreted in parallel to Athens and Sparta slouching towards the Peloponnesian War
over 2,400 years ago. What next? Xi Jinping as the new Genghis Khan?
(By the way, the best current essay on Thucydides is in Italian, by Luciano Canfora ("
Tucidide: La Menzogna, La Colpa, L'Esilio" ). No Trap. Martyanov visibly relishes defining the
Trap as a "figment of the imagination" of people who "have a very vague understanding of real
warfare in the 21st century." No wonder Xi explicitly said the Trap does not exist.)
Martyanov had already detailed in his splendid, previous book, "Losing Military Supremacy:
The Myopia of American Strategic Planning," how "American lack of historic experience with
continental warfare" ended up "planting the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the American
military mythology of the 20thand 21stcenturies which is foundational to the American decline,
due to hubris and detachment of reality." Throughout the book, he unceasingly provides solid
evidence about the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a possible, future war against
real armies (not the Taliban or Saddam Hussein's), air forces, air defenses and naval
power.
Do the Math
One of the key takeaways is the failure of U.S. mathematical models: and readers of the book
do need to digest quite a few mathematical equations. The key point is that this failure led
the U.S. "on a continuous downward spiral of diminishing military capabilities against the
nation [Russia] she thought she defeated in the Cold War."
In the U.S., Revolution in Military
Affairs (RMA) was introduced by the late Andrew Marshall, a.k.a. Yoda, the former head of
Net Assessment at the Pentagon and the de facto inventor of the "pivot to Asia" concept. Yet
Martyanov tells us that RMA actually started as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution),
introduced by Soviet military theoreticians back in the 1970s.
One of the staples of RMA concerns nations capable of producing land-attack cruise missiles,
a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only the U.S., Russia, China and France can do it. And there are
only two global systems providing satellite guidance to cruise missiles: the American GPS and
the Russian GLONASS. Neither China's BeiDou nor the European Galileo qualify – yet
– as global GPS systems.
Then there's Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). The term itself was coined by the late Admiral
Arthur Cebrowski in 1998 in an
article he co-wrote with John Garstka's titled, "Network-Centric Warfare – Its Origin and
Future."
Deploying his mathematical equations, Martyanov soon tells us that "the era of subsonic
anti-shipping missiles is over." NATO, that brain-dead organism (copyright Emmanuel Macron)
now has to face the supersonic Russian P-800 Onyx and the Kalibr-class M54 in a "highly hostile
Electronic Warfare environment." Every developed modern military today applies Net-Centric Warfare
(NCW), developed by the Pentagon in the 1990s.
Rendering of a future combat systems network. (soldiersmediacenter/Flickr, CC BY 2.0,
Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov
mentions in his new book something that I learned on my visit to Donbass in March 2015: how
NCW principles, "based on Russia's C4ISR capabilities made available by the Russian military to
numerically inferior armed forces of the Donbass Republics (LDNR), were used to devastating
effect both at the battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, when attacking the cumbersome Soviet-era
Ukrainian Armed Forces military."
No Escape From the Kinzhal
Martyanov provides ample information on Russia's latest missile – the hypersonic
Mach-10 aero-ballistic Kinzhal, recently tested in the Arctic.
Crucially, as he explains, "no existing anti-missile defense in the U.S. Navy is capable of
shooting [it] down even in the case of the detection of this missile." Kinzhal has a range of
2,000 km, which leaves its carriers, MiG-31K and TU-22M3M, "invulnerable to the only defense a
U.S. Carrier Battle Group, a main pillar of U.S. naval power, can mount – carrier fighter
aircraft." These fighters simply don't have the range.
The Kinzhal was one of the weapons announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin's
game-changing March
1, 2018 speech at the Federal Assembly. That's the day, Martyanov stresses, when the real
RMA arrived, and "changed completely the face of peer-peer warfare, competition and global
power balance dramatically."
Top Pentagon officials such as General
John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have admitted on the record there are "no
existing countermeasures" against, for instance, the hypersonic, Mach 27 glide vehicle Avangard
(which renders anti-ballistic missile systems useless), telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services
Committee the only way out would be "a nuclear deterrent." There are also no existing
counter-measures against anti-shipping missiles such as the Zircon and Kinzhal.
Any military analyst knows very well how the Kinzhal destroyed a land target the size of a
Toyota Corolla in Syria after being launched 1,000 km away in adverse weather conditions. The
corollary is the stuff of NATO nightmares: NATO's command and control installations in Europe
are de facto indefensible.
Martyanov gets straight to the point: "The introduction of hypersonic weapons surely pours
some serious cold water on the American obsession with securing the North American continent
from retaliatory strikes."
Kh-47M2 Kinzhal; 2018 Moscow Victory Day Parade. (Kremilin via Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov is thus unforgiving on U.S. policymakers who "lack the necessary tool-kit for
grasping the unfolding geostrategic reality in which the real revolution in military affairs
had dramatically downgraded the always inflated American military capabilities and continues to
redefine U.S. geopolitical status away from its self-declared hegemony."
And it gets worse: "Such weapons ensure a guaranteed retaliation [Martyanov's italics] on
the U.S. proper." Even the existing Russian nuclear deterrents – and to a lesser degree
Chinese, as paraded recently -- "are capable of overcoming the existing U.S. anti-ballistic
systems and destroying the United States," no matter what crude propaganda the Pentagon is
peddling.
In February 2019, Moscow announced the completion of tests of a nuclear-powered engine for
the Petrel cruise missile. This is a subsonic cruise missile with nuclear propulsion that can
remain in air for quite a long time, covering intercontinental distances, and able to attack
from the most unexpected directions. Martyanov mischievously characterizes the Petrel as "a
vengeance weapon in case some among American decision-makers who may help precipitate a new
world war might try to hide from the effects of what they have unleashed in the relative safety
of the Southern Hemisphere."
Hybrid War Gone Berserk
A section of the book expands on China's military progress, and the fruits of the
Russia-China strategic partnership, such as Beijing buying $3 billion-worth of S-400 Triumph
anti-aircraft missiles -- "ideally suited to deal with the exact type of strike assets the
United States would use in case of a conventional conflict with China."
Beijing parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic, October 2019.
(YouTube screenshot)
Because of the timing, the analysis does not even take into consideration the arsenal
presented in early October at the Beijing parade celebrating the 70thanniversary of the
People's Republic.
That includes, among other things, the "carrier-killer" DF-21D, designed to hit warships at
sea at a range of up to 1,500 km; the intermediate range "Guam Killer" DF-26; the DF-17
hypersonic missile; and the long-range submarine-launched and ship-launched YJ-18A anti-ship
cruise missiles. Not to mention the DF-41 ICBM – the backbone of China's nuclear
deterrent, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland carrying multiple warheads.
Martyanov could not escape addressing the RAND Corporation, whose reason to exist is to
relentlessly push for more money for the Pentagon – blaming Russia for "hybrid war" (an
American invention) even as it moans about the U.S.'s incapacity of defeating Russia in each
and every war game. RAND's war games pitting the U.S. and allies against Russia and China
invariably ended in a "catastrophe" for the "finest fighting force in the world."
Martyanov also addresses the S-500s, capable of reaching AWACS planes and possibly even
capable of intercepting hypersonic non-ballistic targets. The S-500 and its latest middle-range
state of the art air-defense system S-350 Vityaz will be operational in 2020.
His key takeway: "There is no parity between Russia and the United States in such fields as
air-defense, hypersonic weapons and, in general, missile development, to name just a few fields
– the United States lags behind in these fields, not just in years but in generations
[italics mine]."
All across the Global South, scores of nations are very much aware that the U.S. economic
"order" – rather disorder – is on the brink of collapse. In contrast, a
cooperative, connected, rule-based, foreign relations between sovereign nations model is being
advanced in Eurasia – symbolized by the merging of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the NDB (the BRICS bank).
The key guarantors of the new model are Russia and China. And Beijing and Moscow harbor no
illusion whatsoever about the toxic dynamics in Washington. My recent conversations with top
analysts in Kazakhstan last month and in Moscow last week once again stressed the futility of
negotiating with people described – with overlapping shades of sarcasm – as
exceptionalist fanatics. Russia, China and many corners of Eurasia have figured out there are
no possible, meaningful deals with a nation bent on breaking every deal.
Indispensable?
No: Vulnerable
Martyanov cannot but evoke Putin's speech to the Federal Assembly in February 2019, after
the unilateral Washington abandonment of the INF treaty, clearing the way for U.S. deployment
of intermediate and close range missiles stationed in Europe and pointed at Russia:
"Russia will be forced to create and deploy those types of weapons against those regions
from where we will face a direct threat, but also against those regions hosting the centers
where decisions are taken on using those missile systems threatening us."
Translation: American Invulnerability is over – for good.
In the short term, things can always get worse. At his traditional, year-end presser in
Moscow, lasting almost four and a half hours, Putin stated that Russia is more than ready to
"simply renew the existing New START agreement", which is bound to expire in early 2021: "They
[the U.S.] can send us the agreement tomorrow, or we can sign and send it to Washington." And
yet, "so far our proposals have been left unanswered. If the New START ceases to exist, nothing
in the world will hold back an arms race. I believe this is bad."
"Bad" is quite the euphemism. Martyanov prefers to stress how "most of the American elites,
at least for now, still reside in a state of Orwellian cognitive dissonance" even as the real
RMA "blew the myth of American conventional invincibility out of the water."
Martyanov is one of the very few analysts – always from different parts of Eurasia --
who have warned about the danger of the U.S. "accidentally stumbling" into a war against
Russia, China, or both which is impossible to be won conventionally, "let alone through the
nightmare of a global nuclear catastrophe."
Is that enough to instill at least a modicum of sense into those who lord over that massive
cash cow, the industrial-military-security complex? Don't count on it.
* * *
Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong
Kong-based Asia Times . His latest book is
"
2030 ." Follow him on Facebook .
If the British were the ones to organise an independence referendum in Crimea, they would
probably push as many people as possible into postal voting and reduce the number of polling
stations as part of this strategy.
"... My hunch is that a lot of Pentagon defence spending already props up communities throughout the US. Private defence companies set up factories in towns that would otherwise be ghost towns to manufacture armaments or parts for planes or ships in programs funded by the US Department of Defense, in states across the country ..."
"... Part of the reason is to lobby politicians representing the electorates where their factories are located for more Pentagon funding to finance more contracts. Politicians willingly support more defense funding because they know these companies provide jobs and keep unemployment down. ..."
My hunch is that a lot of Pentagon defence spending already props up communities
throughout the US. Private defence companies set up factories in towns that would otherwise
be ghost towns to manufacture armaments or parts for planes or ships in programs funded by
the US Department of Defense, in states across the country .
Part of the reason is to lobby politicians representing the electorates where their
factories are located for more Pentagon funding to finance more contracts. Politicians
willingly support more defense funding because they know these companies provide jobs and
keep unemployment down.
The issue then is how to keep those jobs and keep those factories but change what
engineers are designing and workers are making from machines of destruction into machines
that sustain life and communities.
Yes, the absolute truth. Defense spending is spread over as many states and regions as
possible to keep strong political support. It seems every month the state is sponsoring
seminars aimed at educating small/medium manufacturers on how to bid on defense contracts.
Even small mom-and-pop machine shops get their share of defense business. One small shop in
our region makes compressor blades for cruise missiles. Every time the US fires off a barrage
of missiles, they probably get an order; everybody is happy except those in the target area.
Many American communities also depend on the Military-Industrial Complex to educate their
children. I personally know several families who had children enlist in the military in order
to get a free college education; one that their families could otherwise not afford. The
parents put their kids in the army and navy, and then just cross their fingers and hope they
won't be deployed to a war zone.
The system is actually perfect. The odds of any one of these young people actually getting
killed in a war, is actually quite low. The vast majority get a good education with lots of
perks, all expenses paid including housing, they do their time, and never see a bullet. All
at the taxpayers expense.
"... Overwhelming Power was the stated war goal in 1942. When that failed because of the Soviets, the Red Victories, and the Red bomb, it become essential to create a false reality where "Everything the American Public believes is false (Casey/Honegger) ..."
Overwhelming Power was the stated war goal in 1942. When that failed because of the
Soviets, the Red Victories, and the Red bomb, it become essential to create a false reality
where "Everything the American Public believes is false (Casey/Honegger)
Stimson said in '42>
"We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle our flag will be
recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of
overwhelming power on the other." (Capra Why We Fight")
If Power is overwhelming, then Power defines freedom. Stimson's rhetoric presents a
false equality. A deception. Essentially a lie.
The "Reds" are onto this, however, see VVP's informal disquisition at
"Dan Crenshaw did not serve his country. Dan Crenshaw is not a hero. Dan Crenshaw
participated in a military occupation that after 18 years and counting has claimed tens of
thousands of lives for no benefit to any ordinary American at all. All he served during his
time in that country was the geostrategic imperialist agendas of unaccountable government
agencies and the profit margins of war plutocrats, yet upon returning home he's been able to
convert his stint as a glorified hired thug into social collateral which got him elected to
the US House of Representatives and secured him a punditry platform from which he can spout
war propaganda. All because people agree to play along with the completely nonsensical
narrative that US war veterans are heroes."
("glorified hired thug" LOL!!!)
"I'm not saying to be mean to veterans, and I'm not saying veterans are bad people, in
fact, one of the most heinous injustices about these corporate wars is that they turn many of
our finest and bravest young people toward the very most toxic and pernicious ends possible.
Many of them sincerely enlisted due to an impulse to help make the world a better place; it's
the same impulse which led Julian Assange to set up a leaking outlet to help expose
unaccountable power structures, the only difference is that Assange saw clearly through the
fog of propaganda and they did not. But the reverence and fairy tales have got to go.
There are no war heroes. There are only war victims. It's time to grow up and stop pretending
otherwise."
Damn!!!! Caitlin is Spot F'n On !!!
BTW Notice how these war 'heroes' seem to bear a striking family resemblance.
Who does that pix of Crenshaw bring to mind??? LOL!!! Weird huh!!!
So we go to THEIR homeland as if they had come here to our homeland-which they
haven't.
Maybe that's what Dan would have said if he were a straightforward truthful kinda guy
which of course he isn't.
Be careful. Playing upon her military service is a big part of Tulsi Gabbard's gravitas and
authenticity. It's quite true that she uses it to argue against regime-change wars, but a
position that military records only mean you served as a dupe for war profiteers and enabled
their plundering will not do her any good at all, and Caitlin has set it up so there is
little wiggle room for intentions.
I'd always argue the Romans were the most effective in ancient times. Even they struggled
to control Gaul it was still ahead of it's time technologically and administratively. The
British were exceptional at extracting resources in modern times but couldnt even control the
Irish and Scottish. Great philosophical discussion at the end of the day with no clear
winner. I'd say the Mongols were amateur at best compared to the afore mentioned
The British Empire never really fell. It simply mutated into Anglo-American empire. Teddy
Roosevelt and Edward VII should be credited for forging the coalition (With Redshield pulling
the strings from behind).
You can thank these three entities for total takeover of USA and for warming the seat for
Woodrow Wilson (the patsy who ushered in Income Tax, Federal Reserve and America's entry in
WW-1).
Yes. I don't know why the US Empire isn't counted. After all, what is an empire? It's a
central government that controls other countries. By that measure - and I think it's a fair
one - the US Empire includes most of the world that isn't controlled (one way or another) by
China and Russia. What does it not control? A few squabbling little places that
struggle for independence - but every empire has those. Remember that the US of A began as an
empire, in 1789. ( See link below for a brief summary I wrote a few years ago .) Just
because America's is not ordinarily referred to as an empire doesn't deny the reality. When
the USSR existed, we didn't deny its status as an empire; we didn't pretend that Poland and
Bulgaria weren't controlled from Moscow.
After this fraudulent news story received wide coverage, it was followed by "reports" from
the Washington-based Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. This group receives most of its
funds from U.S. government grants, primarily from the CIA-linked National Endowment for
Democracy, a major source of funding for U.S. "regime change" operations around the world.
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders shares the same Washington address as Human
Rights Watch. The HRW has been a major source of attacks on governments targeted by the U.S.,
such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria and China. The network has long called for sanctions
against China.
The CHRD's sources include Radio Free Asia, a news agency funded for decades by the U.S.
government. The World Uighur Congress, another source of sensationalized reports, is also
funded by NED. The same U.S. government funding is behind the International Uyghur Human Rights
and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association.
The authors of the Grayzone article cite years of detailed IRS filing forms to back up their
claim. They list millions of dollars in generous government funding -- to generate false
reports.
This whole network of supposedly impartial civil society groups, nongovernmental
organizations, think tanks and news sources operates under the cover of "human rights" to
promote sanctions and war.
CIA-funded terror
Central Asia has experienced the worst forms of U.S. military power.
Beginning in 1979, the CIA, operating with the ISI Pakistani Intelligence Service and
Saudi money, funded and equipped reactionary Mujahedeen forces in Afghanistan to bring down a
revolutionary government there. The U.S. cultivated and promoted extreme religious fanaticism,
based in Saudi Arabia, against progressive secular regimes in the region. This reactionary
force was also weaponized against the Soviet Union and an anti-imperialist Islamic current
represented by the Iranian Revolution.
For four decades, the CIA and secret Pakistan ISI forces (Pakistan Military, Inter
Services Intelligence) in Afghanistan sought to recruit and train Uyghur mercenaries, planning
to use them as a future terror force in China. Chechnyans from Russia's Caucasus region were
recruited for the same reason. Both groups were funneled into Syria in the U.S. regime-change
operation there. These fanatical religious forces, along with other small ethnic groups, formed
the backbone of the Islamic State group (IS) and Al-Qaida.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center bombing, the very forces that U.S. secret
operations had helped to create became the enemy.
Uyghurs from Xinjiang were among the Al-Qaida prisoners captured in Afghanistan and held in
the U.S. prison at Guantanamo for years without charges. Legal appeals exposed that the Uyghur
prisoners were being held there under some of the worst conditions in solitary confinement.
U.S. wars dislocate region
The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the massive U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 created
shockwaves of dislocation. Social progress, education, health care and infrastructure were
destroyed. Sectarian and ethnic division was encouraged to divide opposition to U.S.
occupations. Despite promises of great progress, the U.S. occupations sowed only
destruction.
In this long war, U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were notorious. The CIA
used "enhanced interrogation" techniques -- torture -- and secret rendition to Guantanamo,
Bagram and the Salt Pit in Afghanistan. These secret prisons have since been the source of many
legal suits.
According to U.N. investigations, by 2010 the U.S. held more than 27,000 prisoners in over
100 secret facilities around the world. Searing images and reports of systematic torture and
prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan surfaced.
Exposing coverup of war crimes
In July 2010 WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 classified U.S./NATO reports on the war in
Afghanistan.
In October of that year, a massive leak of 400,000 military videos, photos and documents
exposed, in harrowing detai,l torture, summary executions and other war crimes. Army
intelligence analyst former Private Chelsea Manning released this damning material to
WikiLeaks.
Based on the leaked documents, the U.N. chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, called
on U.S. President Barack Obama to order a full investigation of these crimes, including abuse,
torture, rape and murder committed against the Iraqi people following the U.S. invasion and
occupation.
The leaked reports provided documentary proof of 109,000 deaths -- including 66,000
civilians. This is seldom mentioned in the media, in contrast to the highly publicized and
unsourced charges now raised against China.
Prosecuting whistle blowers
The CIA's National Endowment for Democracy pays handsomely for unsourced documents making
claims of torture against China, while those who provided documentary proof of U.S. torture
have been treated as criminals.
John Kiriakou, who worked for the CIA between 1990 and 2004 and confirmed widespread use of
systematic torture, was prosecuted by the Obama administration for revealing classified
information and sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Chelsea Manning's release of tens of thousands of government documents confirming torture
and abuse, in addition to horrific photos of mass killings, have led to her continued
incarceration. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is imprisoned in Britain and faces deportation to
the U.S. for his role in disseminating these documents.
Rewriting history
How much of the coverage of Xinjiang is intended to deflect world attention from the
continuing crimes of U.S. wars -- from Afghanistan to Syria?
In 2014 a Senate CIA Torture Report confirmed that a torture program, called "Detention and
Interrogation Program," had been approved by top U.S. officials. Only a 525-page Executive
Summary of its 6,000 pages was released, but it was enough to confirm that the CIA program was
far more brutal and extensive than had previously been released.
Mercenaries flood into Syria
The U.S. regime-change effort to overturn the government of Syria funneled more than
100,000 foreign mercenaries and fanatical religious forces into the war. They were
well-equipped with advanced weapons, military gear, provisions and paychecks.
One-third of the Syrian population was uprooted in the war. Millions of refugees flooded
into Europe and neighboring countries.
Beginning in 2013, thousands of Uyghur fighters were smuggled into Syria to train with
the extremist Uyghur group known as the Turkistan Islamic Party. Fighting alongside Al-Qaida
and Al-Nusra terror units, these forces played key roles in several battles.
Reuters, Associated Press and Newsweek all reported that up to 5,000 Turkic-speaking Muslim
Uyghurs from Xinjiang were fighting in various "militant" groups in Syria.
According to Syrian media, a transplanted Uyghur colony transformed the city of al
Zanbaka (on the Turkish border) into an entrenched camp of 18,000 people. Many of the Uyghur
fighters were smuggled to the Turkish-Syrian border area with their families. Speaking Turkish,
rather than Chinese, they relied on the support of the Turkish secret services.
China follows a different path
China is determined to follow a different path in dealing with fanatical groups that are
weaponized by religious extremism. China's action comes after terror attacks and explosives
have killed hundreds of civilians in busy shopping areas and crowded train and bus stations
since the 1990s.
China has dealt with the problem of religious extremism by setting up large-scale vocational
education and training centers. Rather than creating worse underdevelopment through bombing
campaigns, it is seeking to engage the population in education, skill development and rapid
economic and infrastructure development.
Terrorist attacks in Xinjiang have stopped since the reeducation campaigns began in
2017.
Two worldviews of Xinjiang
In July of this year, 22 countries, most in Europe plus Canada, Japan, Australia and New
Zealand, sent a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council criticizing China for mass arbitrary
detentions and other violations against Muslims in China's Xinjiang region. The statement did
not include a single signature from a Muslim-majority state.
Days later, a far larger group of 34 countries -- now expanded to 54 from Asia, Africa and
Latin America -- submitted a letter in defense of China's policies. These countries expressed
their firm support of China's counterterrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang.
More than a dozen member countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at the U.N.
signed the statement.
A further statement on Oct. 31 to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly explained
that a number of diplomats, international organizations, officials and journalists had traveled
to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of
counterterrorism and deradicalization.
"What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the
[Western] media," said the statement.
The President of the USofA has no power to turn this ship around. The seat of power is no
longer residing in the hands of civilian/political actors prime ministers or presidents though
they may be.
Candidate Trump indicated very early on that he intended to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, he soon succumbed to his advisors and generals advice of increasing troop
strength in 2017 as part of a surge strategy. This makes him no better or worse than his two
predecessors who succumbed to the same kind of advice.
However Trump has recently restarted negotiations with the Taliban and has renewed his
pledged to remove several thousand troops. "We're going down to 8,600 [from the 12,000 and
13,000 US troops now there] and then we make a determination from there as to what happens,"
Trump told Fox last August. "We're bringing it down." Of course the drawdown will be seen by
the neocons as a unilateral concession to the Taliban. That shouldn't phase Trump. I think he
plans to reannounce this withdrawal next month. DoD officials have said that the smaller US
military presence will be largely focused on counterterrorism operations against groups like
al Qaeda and IS, and that the military's ability to train and advise local Afghan forces will
be reduced considerably. Sounds like they're still looking for a reason to stay.
Trump can break the cycle. He holds no ideological conviction for staying in Afghanistan.
If he could get over his BDS (Bezos derangement syndrome), he could seize this Washington
Post series, or at least the SIGAR lessons learned reports, and trumpet them through his
twitter feed and helicopter talks. I believe he alone can generate a public cry for getting
the hell out of Afghanistan and carry through with that action no matter how much his
generals scream about it. But without a loud public outcry, especially from his base, Trump
has no incentive to break the cycle. So all you deplorables better start hootin' and
hollerin'. Hopefully enough SJWs will join you to pump up the volume.
Excellent, right up to the last sentence. SJWs are mere tools of people like George Soros
and have zero anti-war agenda nor do they care about America's manufacturing base ect.. In
fact, many are chomping at the bit to join, what was once termed in the SST comments, the
LGBTQ-C4ISR sect. I refer you to mayor Pete's exchange with Tulsi on the matter; he even
invoked our sacred honor as a reason to stay the course in Afghanistan.
TTG,
It's a shrinking cohort. For some of these types, their TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) is
actually causing them to side with the CIA and military. Enemy of my enemy.....and since
there's no draft, they have no skin in that game.
For the past 2-3 years many generals and politicians have been using the threat of ISKP as
the new bogeyman for staying in Afghanistan. This threat is not wholly unfounded, a
disproportionately large number of US airstrikes since 2015-2016 have been against ISKP in
Nangarhar(remember the MOAB?) rather than against the Taliban. If my memory serves me
correctly ISKP was responsible for every single US casualty in 2016-2017. In the past two
months however ISKP has been collapsing in its erstwhile stronghold of Nangarhar,
surrendering to the ANA rather than fall into the hands of the Taliba,à la Jowzjan
in summer 2018. I was very surprised by the number of foreign fighters and their families
to come out of there. We have the Taliban to thank for these two collapses.
IMO American "exceptionalism" doomed our effort in Afghanistan Very few of us are set up
mentally to accept the notion that other peoples are legitimately different from us and
that they don't want to be like us and do things our way. I attribute this deformation on
our part to the puritan heritage that you much admire. In your case your recent immigrant
past seems to have immunized you from this deformation. As SF men we rightly fear and dread
the attitudes of The Big Army, but, truth be told, it is we who are the outlier freaks in
the context of American culture with its steamroller approach to just about everything.
Ah yes, all that shining city on the hill stuff biting us in the ass once again. Like the
Puritans, we seem to believe we alone are His chosen people and are utterly shocked that
all others don't see this. In truth, Jesus probably sees our self righteous selves and our
pilgrim forefathers much as he saw the Pharisees... a bunch of douche nozzles.
"... Some, such as General David Petraeus , seem to sincerely believe that the U.S. was on the right track and could have made progress if only those pesky civilians in the Beltway hadn't pulled the rug out from under them by announcing a premature withdrawal. ..."
When Will the Afghan War Architects Be Held Accountable?
Even after the release of the Afghanistan Papers, our elites are still determined to escape
without blame. CERNOBBIO, ITALY - SEPTEMBER 06: Chairman of the KKR Global Institute David
Howell Petraeus attends the Ambrosetti International Economic Forum 2019 "Lo scenario
dell'Economia e della Finanza" on September 6, 2019 in Cernobbio, Italy. (Photo by Pier Marco
Tacca/Getty Images)
Almost two weeks after the Washington Post 's Craig Whitlock published his six-part
series on the trials, tribulations, and blunders of Washington's 19-year-long social science
experiment in Afghanistan, those involved in the war effort are desperately pointing fingers as
to who is to blame. An alternative narrative has emerged among this crop of elite policymakers,
military officers, and advisers that while American policy in Afghanistan has been horrible,
the people responsible for it really did believe it would all work out in the end. Call it the
"we were stupid" defense.
There were no lies or myths propagated by senior U.S. officials, we are told, just honest
assessments that later proved to be wrong. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who
has advised U.S. commanders on Afghanistan war policy, wrote that "no, there has not been a
campaign of disinformation, intentional or subliminal." Former defense secretary Jim Mattis,
who led CENTCOM during part of the war effort, called the Post 's reporting "not really
news" and was mystified that the unpublished interviews from the U.S. special inspector general
were generating such shock. Others have faulted the Post for publishing the material to
begin with, claiming that public disclosure would scare future witnesses from cooperating and
threaten other fact-finding inquiries (the fact that the newspaper was legally permitted to
publish the transcripts after winning a court case against the government is apparently
irrelevant in the minds of those making this argument).
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
All of these claims and counter-claims should be seen for what they truly are: the flailings
of a policymaking class so arrogant and unaccountable that it can't see straight. That they're
blaming the outrage engendered by the Afghanistan Papers on anything other than themselves is
Exhibit A that our narcissistic policy elite is cocooned in their own reality.
Analysts have been pouring over the Afghanistan interview transcripts for over a week in
order to determine how the war went wrong. Some of the main lessons learned have long been
evident. The decision to impose a top-down democratic political order on a country that
operated on a system of patronage and tribal systems from the bottom-up was bound to be
problematic. Throwing tens of billions of dollars of reconstruction assistance into a nation
that had no experience managing that kind of money -- or spending it properly -- helped fuel
the very nationwide corruption Washington would come to regret. Paying off warlords to fight
the Taliban and keep order while pressuring those very same warlords into following the rules
was contradictory. The mistakes go on and on and on: as Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said,
"We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
One of the most salient findings about this ghastly two-decade-long misadventure surfaced
after the Afghanistan Papers were released: the commentariat will stop at nothing to absolve
themselves of the slightest responsibility for the disaster they supported. The outright
refusal of the pundit class to own up to its errors is as disturbing as it is infuriating. And
even when they do acknowledge that errors were committed, they tend to minimize their own role
in those mistakes, explaining them away as unfortunate consequences of fixed withdrawal
deadlines, inter-agency tussling, Afghanistan's poor foundational state, or the inability of
the Afghans to capitalize on the opportunities Washington provided them. Some,
such as General David Petraeus , seem to sincerely believe that the U.S. was on the right
track and could have made progress if only those pesky civilians in the Beltway hadn't pulled
the rug out from under them by announcing a premature withdrawal.
It's always somebody else's fault.
Whether out of arrogance, ego, or fear of not being taken seriously in Washington's foreign
policy discussions, the architects of the war refuse to admit even the most obvious mistakes.
Instead they duck and weave like a quarterback escaping a full-on defensive rush, attempting
yet again to fool the American public.
But the public has nothing to apologize for. It is those who are making excuses who have
exercised disastrous judgment on Afghanistan. And they owe the country an apology.
Daniel R. DePetris is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a contributor
to The American Conservative.
On September 27, 2018, Yale's Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and
the Poynter Fellowship for Journalism hosted Vladimir Pozner, the acclaimed Russian-American
journalist and broadcaster. Pozner spoke on the impact of US foreign policy towards Russia
after the Soviet Union has been disbanded, and shared his opinions on a range of issues raised
by the audience, from the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections,
to Skripal poisoning, to the state of independent media in Russia and the US.
It turns out that the US military hires more shills and clowns and runs more "news"
worldwide than all the real news agencies, combined.
For Soetoro to turn this $hit loose on us exposes his truly sinister intent. Here you all
are, thinking the bull$hit on TV is remotely relevant other than exposing the gangsters who
direct it and rob us to pay for it against our will.
All these High Crimes on Pelosi and Schumer's watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
was shut down in 2003 by Congress after dinosaur exposed mass surveillance abuses
establishing "Total Information Awareness" over all US citizens. The program was continued in
overt defiance of Congress through Trillions in black funding.
Or you could just point to the massive expansion of debt and reduction of freedoms signed
by Trump last night while the whole government was telling you "nothing up my sleeve!"
"... The problem with an unseen stimulus is that no one thinks it's helping them. Obama provided tax relief for nearly every working American, but instead of sending citizens a check, as George W. Bush had done, his economists decided to structure it as a payroll tax cut, subtly increasing the size of everyone's paycheck. The administration then intentionally did not advertise the fact that it had given nearly every working American a tax cut , in the hopes that people would be nudged into spending, rather than saving, that extra cash. Predictably, in 2010, one poll showed that only 12 percent of Americans believed they'd received a tax cut; 24 percent thought Obama had raised their taxes. ..."
"... A program that was supposed to help underwater homeowners turned down 70 percent of those applying for permanent loan modifications , even as over six million families lost their homes. The point of the program was never actually to help people stay in their homes, of course; it was to preserve the finance industry by spacing out foreclosures. In the end, it achieved its aim: The banks today are as profitable as ever, while more households are renting than in 50 years . ..."
"... The individual mandate, similarly designed to force the healthiest young invincibles to enter the market to bring down costs, is equally dead. And a decade into the ACA, it has become more apparent than ever that the best way to reduce America's absurd health care costs would simply be a single-payer program. ..."
"... The political scientist Suzanne Mettler coined the term "the submerged state" in 2010 to refer to the jungle of hidden government "programs" designed not to call attention to themselves, often perpetuated not because they are still helping the neediest, but because they are lucrative to the finance, insurance, and/or real estate industries. ..."
Welcome to The Decade From Hell , our look
back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair.
As 2009 ended, the editors of this magazine at the time
took their measure of the first year of Barack Obama's
presidency and declared it, with some reservations, a modest success. "All of this might not exactly place him in the pantheon next
to Franklin Roosevelt," they said of his major domestic achievements (the stimulus package, primarily, as the Affordable Care Act
had not yet been signed). "But it's not a bad start, given all the constraints of the political system (and global order) in which
he works."
That was the broad consensus of American liberals at the time, ranging from nearly the most progressive to nearly the most neoliberal.
Over the ensuing years, that consensus would crack and eventually shatter under the weight of one disappointment after another. The
story of American politics over the past decade is that of a political party on the cusp of enduring power and world-historical social
reform, and how these once imaginable outcomes were methodically squandered.
The bulk of that unsigned New Republic editorial in 2009 was dedicated to Obama's foreign policy, specifically the question
of whether he was waging enough war. The conclusion: He was. The editors praised "the escalation of the war in Afghanistan" as "the
most consequential action of the first year of his presidency," even though it
offended the base of his party and possibly injured his future political prospects. On strategic grounds, we believe he made
the right choice. But the thoroughness and logic of the process by which he arrived at this decision double our confidence in
that choice. The is exactly the type of pragmatism and non-ideological policymaking that sentient humans have craved after the
Bush years.
(Sure, escalate the endless wars -- but for God's sake, please do it non-ideologically .)
In December of this year, The Washington Post
obtained thousands of pages of documents from a government oversight project called "Lessons Learned," which included interviews
with more than 600 people involved in the war in Afghanistan at some point over its 18-year history. An interview with a National
Security Council official described, according to the Post , "constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to
produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary." Nearly every piece of
data used over the last decade to try to convince Americans that the war was going well, or even going according to any sort of coherent
logic or reason, was phony or meaningless.
"I don't want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years," Obama
reportedly said in 2009 , as he struggled
with the decision to escalate the war. The president and his closest advisers were determined to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam. Since
then, overwhelmed by billions
in U.S. "aid," the country has sunk into kleptocracy. Last year, according to the United Nations, was the single deadliest year
of the war for Afghan civilians. Today, around 13,000 American service members remain in Afghanistan. The Trump administration is
attempting to negotiate a peace with the Taliban that would leave it in charge of the country, just as it was prior to America's
invasion. The war in Afghanistan may finally end, but not before the close of this decade that began with that oh-so-carefully considered
decision to escalate it.
"We Are All Socialists Now," Newsweek declared on its cover in early 2009, when
it was still part of the prestige press (it is currently run by
a different sort of cult ).
Editor Jon Meacham, evincing the usual historical and political amnesia of airport bookstore historians, justified the claim by writing
that "for the foreseeable future Americans will be more engaged with questions about how to manage a mixed economy than about whether
we should have one." A mixed economy run according to Keynesian principles was, you may recall from reading slightly more rigorous
historians, the primary alternative to socialism on offer in the West throughout the twentieth century. The stimulus had been
large (if not large
enough ), but with $288 billion of it dedicated to tax credits and incentives for individuals and businesses, it scarcely resembled
socialism. Indeed, rather than giving Americans a greater hand in managing the economy, much of it was designed to be almost invisible.
This was intentional. In the May 6, 2009, issue of The New Republic , Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber
described Obama's "Nudge-ocracy," a belief, inspired
by behavioral economics, that the best way for the government to create good outcomes for the people was not through "heavy-handed
market interventions" but via technocratic attempts to change the behavior of individuals and the incentives of market actors.
The problem with an unseen stimulus is that no one thinks it's helping them. Obama provided tax relief for nearly every working
American, but instead of sending citizens a check, as George W. Bush had done, his economists decided to structure it as a payroll
tax cut, subtly increasing the size of everyone's paycheck. The administration then
intentionally did not advertise the fact that
it had given nearly every working American a tax cut , in the hopes that people would be nudged into spending, rather than saving,
that extra cash. Predictably, in 2010,
one poll showed
that only 12 percent of Americans believed they'd received a tax cut; 24 percent thought Obama had raised their taxes.
The flaw in this strategy was apparent to another author at this magazine. In late 2009, John B. Judis
foresaw a presidency in serious political trouble, because
Obama's fortunes were tied not just to the state of the economy, or even economic trends, but to people's perceptions of the
state of the economy. Noting how Roosevelt "dramatized the New Deal's contribution to the economy" by creating "colorful new agencies,"
thereby "ensuring that Roosevelt was given credit for the rise in employment," Judis called on Obama to "introduce programs that
provide jobs and capture the public's imagination." He also suggested the president
turn a deaf ear to those who are calling for fiscal responsibility. He should keep pouring money into jobs and into the pockets
of people who will spend until the unemployment rate begins going down and wages begin going up.... And, whatever he does to try
to mend the economy, Obama should never stop loudly trumpeting his efforts -- so that he is able to reap the credit when improvements
occur.
Roosevelt liked to wrestle his enemies in public, and Team Obama preferred to be above it all.
What Judis didn't consider, though, was that Obama didn't want to do any of those things. The president, along with economists
who worked for him such as Austan Goolsbee and Tim Geithner,
all pointedly rejected comparisons to
Roosevelt , based in part on a seemingly inaccurate understanding of the history of his first term but also seemingly based on
aesthetics: Roosevelt liked to wrestle his enemies in public, and Team Obama preferred to be above it all. It's hard to remember
now how wise everyone made it sound that the president and his team intentionally avoided doing things they worried would be too
popular, but there would not be another New Deal. Indeed, instead of ostentatious acts of helping people, the administration almost
preferred being seen standing athwart attempts to provide relief. A program that was supposed to help underwater homeowners
turned
down 70 percent of those applying for permanent loan modifications , even as over six million families lost their homes. The
point of the program was never actually to help people stay in their homes, of course; it was to
preserve the
finance industry by spacing out foreclosures. In the end, it achieved its aim: The banks today are as profitable as ever, while
more households are renting than in 50 years .
By far the most effective part of the Affordable Care Act, in terms of helping Americans get care, was simply expanding Medicaid.
But what many Democrats and liberals were most excited about was the bill's many experimental and technocratic attempts to "bend
the cost curve" -- reduce costs without price controls -- and "improve quality," mainly by encouraging insurers, with incentives,
to strive for outcomes that market forces alone weren't incentivizing them to aim for. The signature example of this may be the "Cadillac
tax," which was designed to nudge companies to force employees onto cheaper insurance plans with greater cost sharing -- a tax built
on the belief that one of the primary drivers of health care cost inflation was people taking advantage of their too-generous employers
and greedily consuming more health care than they needed. The tax never went into effect.
The individual mandate, similarly designed to force the healthiest
young invincibles to enter the market to bring down
costs, is equally dead. And a decade into the ACA, it has become more apparent than ever that the best way to reduce America's absurd
health care costs would simply be a single-payer program.
That is not to say that the ACA did not end up having the significant long-term political ramifications its drafters promised
it would. The primary non-Medicaid structure of the ACA, with its means-tested subsidies to purchase private insurance, had the predictable
effect of convincing some of its beneficiaries
that Obama and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with the government assistance they weren't sure they were getting. Then, as
costs rose and rose over the decade, that structure also
had the predictable effect of making people
who receive partially subsidized private care resentful of those poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.
Much of the decade we have just endured has shown how the Democratic addiction to dispensing benefits through the tax code in
complicated, indirect ways -- combined with the usual insufficiency of these benefits -- was nearly perfectly designed to foment
mass resentment of others, imagined or not, who might secretly be getting the Good Benefits.
The political scientist Suzanne Mettler coined the term "the submerged state" in 2010 to refer to the jungle of hidden government
"programs" designed not to call attention to themselves, often perpetuated not because they are still helping the neediest, but because
they are lucrative to the finance, insurance, and/or real estate industries.
One of her illustrations
of the effect of the submerged state is a graph showing how many people who used particular government programs admitted so only
after first telling researchers they'd received no assistance. That nearly 40 percent of people on Medicare claimed this is likely
attributable to ideology (and the fact that Medicare, like Social Security, was designed to make retirees feel like they had "paid
into it").
But when 60 percent of people who used tax-advantaged higher education savings accounts claim they received no government benefits,
as they did in Mettler's study, it's probably because tax-advantaged savings accounts are wholly inadequate to the problem of higher
education costs. Now combine this with a persistent belief (memorably
described by Ashley C. Ford a few years ago) that minorities -- black kids in particular -- get to go to college for free by
default, and stir in the rise of tuition costs and other expenses due to cutbacks in state investment in education. The result of
this cocktail of ignorant biases and inadequate solutions might look something like the year 2019.
The new US defense bill, agreed on by both parties, includes sanctions on executives of companies involved in the completion
of Nordstream 2. This is companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around
the arrival point.
This could include arrest of the executives of those companies, who might travel to the United States. One of the companies
is Royal Dutch Shell, who have 80,000 employees in the United States.
Some people believe 'the market' for crude oil is a fair and effective arbiter of the industry supply and demand.
But if we step back an inch or two, we all can see it has been a severely broken mechanism during this up phase in oil.
For example, there has been long lags between market signals of shortage or surplus.
Disruptive policies and mechanisms such as tariffs, embargo's, and sanctions, trade bloc quotas, military coups and popular revolutions,
socialist agendas, industry lobbying, multinational corporate McCarthyism, and massively obese debt financing, are all examples
of forces that have trumped an efficient and transparent oil market.
And yet, the problems with the oil market during this time of upslope will look placid in retrospect, as we enter the time beyond
peak.
I see no reason why it won't turn into a mad chaotic scramble.
We had a small hint of what this can look like in the last mid-century. The USA responded to military expansionism of Japan by
enacting an oil embargo against them. The response was Pearl Harbor. This is just one example of many.
How long before Iran lashes out in response to their restricted access to the market?
People generally don't respond very calmly to involuntary restriction on food, or energy, or access to the markets for these things.
In any case withdrawal from Syria was a surprising and bold move on the Part of the Trump. You can criticizes Trump for not doing
more but before that he bahvaves as a typical neocon, or a typical Republican presidents (which are the same things). And he started
on this path just two month after inauguration bombing Syria under false pretences. So this is something
I think the reason of change is that Trump intuitively realized the voters are abandoning him in droves and the sizable faction
of his voters who voted for him because of his promises to end foreign wars iether already defected or is ready to defect. So this is
a move designed to keep them.
Notable quotes:
"... "America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said. ..."
President Trump's big announcement to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan is now emerging less as a peace move, and more
a rationalization of American military power in the Middle East. In a surprise visit to US forces in Iraq this week, Trump
said he had no intention of withdrawing the troops in that country, who have been there for nearly 15 years since GW Bush invaded
back in 2003.
Hinting at private discussions with commanders in Iraq, Trump boasted that US forces would in the future launch attacks from there
into Syria if and when needed. Presumably that rapid force deployment would apply to other countries in the region, including Afghanistan.
In other words, in typical business-style transactional thinking, Trump sees the pullout from Syria and Afghanistan as a cost-cutting
exercise for US imperialism. Regarding Syria, he has bragged about Turkey being assigned, purportedly, to "finish off" terror
groups. That's Trump subcontracting out US interests.
Critics and supporters of Trump are confounded. After his Syria and Afghanistan pullout call, domestic critics and NATO allies
have accused him of walking from the alleged "fight against terrorism" and of ceding strategic ground to US adversaries Russia
and Iran.
Meanwhile, Trump's supporters have viewed his decision in more benign light, cheering the president for "sticking it to"
the deep state and military establishment, assuming he's delivering on electoral promises to end overseas wars.
However, neither view gets what is going on. Trump is not scaling back US military power; he is rationalizing it like a cost-benefit
analysis, as perhaps only a real-estate-wheeler-dealer-turned president would appreciate. Trump is not snubbing US militarism or
NATO allies, nor is he letting loose an inner peace spirit. He is as committed to projecting American military as ruthlessly and
as recklessly as any other past occupant of the White House. The difference is Trump wants to do it on the cheap.
Here's what he said to reporters on Air Force One before touching down in Iraq:
"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world. It's not fair when the burden is all on us, the United
States We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven't even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous."
He added: "We're no longer the suckers, folks."
Laughably, Trump's griping about US forces "spread all over the world" unwittingly demonstrates the insatiable, monstrous
nature of American militarism. But Trump paints this vice as a virtue, which, he complains, Washington gets no thanks for from the
150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in.
As US troops greeted him in Iraq, the president made explicit how the new American militarism would henceforth operate.
"America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want
us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said.
This reiterates a big bugbear for this president in which he views US allies and client regimes as "not pulling their weight"
in terms of military deployment. Trump has been browbeating European NATO members to cough up more on military budgets, and he has
berated the Saudis
and other Gulf Arab regimes to pay more for American interventions.
Notably, however, Trump has never questioned the largesse that US taxpayers fork out every year to Israel in the form of nearly
$4 billion in military aid. To be sure, that money is not a gift because much of it goes back to the Pentagon from sales of fighter
jets and missile systems.
The long-held notion that the US has served as the "world's policeman" is, of course, a travesty.
Since WWII, all presidents and the Washington establishment have constantly harped on, with self-righteousness, about America's
mythical role as guarantor of global security.
Dozens of illegal wars on almost every continent and millions of civilian deaths attest to the real, heinous conduct of American
militarism as a weapon to secure US corporate capitalism.
But with US economic power in historic decline amid a national debt now over $22 trillion, Washington can no longer afford its
imperialist conduct in the traditional mode of direct US military invasions and occupations.
Perhaps, it takes a cost-cutting, raw-toothed capitalist like Trump to best understand the historic predicament, even if only
superficially.
This gives away the real calculation behind his troop pullout from Syria and Afghanistan. Iraq is going to serve as a new regional
hub for force projection on a demand-and-supply basis. In addition, more of the dirty work can be contracted out to Washington's
clients like Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who will be buying even more US weaponry to prop the military-industrial complex.
This would explain why Trump made his hurried, unexpected visit to Iraq this week. Significantly, he
said
: "A lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking", regarding his decision on withdrawing forces from Syria
and Afghanistan.
Since his troop pullout plan announced on December 19, there has been serious pushback from senior Pentagon figures, hawkish Republicans
and Democrats, and the anti-Trump media. The atmosphere is almost seditious against the president. Trump flying off to Iraq on Christmas
night was
reportedly his first visit to troops in an overseas combat zone since becoming president two years ago.
What Trump seemed to be doing was reassuring the Pentagon and corporate America that he is not going all soft and dovish. Not
at all. He is letting them know that he is aiming for a leaner, meaner US military power, which can save money on the number of foreign
bases by using rapid reaction forces out of places like Iraq, as well as by subcontracting operations out to regional clients.
Thus, Trump is not coming clean out of any supposed principle when he cuts back US forces overseas. He is merely applying his
knack for screwing down costs and doing things on the cheap as a capitalist tycoon overseeing US militarism.
During past decades when American capitalism was relatively robust, US politicians and media could indulge in the fantasy of their
military forces going around the world in large-scale formations to selflessly "defend freedom and democracy."
Today, US capitalism is broke. It simply can't sustain its global military empire. Enter Donald Trump with his "business solutions."
But in doing so, this president, with his cheap utilitarianism and transactional exploitative mindset, lets the cat out of the
bag. As he says, the US cannot be the world's policeman. Countries are henceforth going to have to pay for "our protection."
Inadvertently, Trump is showing up US power for what it really is: a global thug running a protection racket.
It's always been the case. Except now it's in your face. Trump is no Smedley Butler, the former Marine general who in the 1930s
condemned US militarism as a Mafia operation. This president is stupidly revealing the racket, while still thinking it is something
virtuous.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages.
Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor
for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked
as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist
based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
dnm1136
Once again, Cunningham has hit the nail on the head. Trump mistakenly conflates fear with respect. In reality, around the world,
the US is feared but generally not respected.
My guess is that the same was true about Trump as a businessman, i.e., he was not respected, only feared due to his willingness
to pursue his "deals" by any means that "worked" for him, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, seemingly gracious or mean-spirited.
William Smith
Complaining how the US gets no thanks for its foreign intervention. Kind of like a rapist claiming he should be thanked for
"pleasuring" his victim. Precisely the same sentiment expressed by those who believe the American Indians should thank the Whites
for "civilising" them.
Phoebe S,
"Washington gets no thanks for from the 150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in."
That might mean they don't want you there. Just saying.
ProRussiaPole
None of these wars are working out for the US strategically. All they do is sow chaos. They seem to not be gaining anything,
and are just preventing others from gaining anything as well.
Ernie For -> ProRussiaPole
i am a huge Putin fan, so is big Don. Please change your source of info Jerome, Trump is one man against Billions of people
and dollars in corruption. He has achieved more in the USA in 2 years than all 5 previous parasites together.
Truthbetold69
It could be a change for a better direction. Time will tell. 'If you do what you've always been doing, you'll get what you've
always been getting.'
"... Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor and messianic in its language. ..."
"... At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem," yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways. ..."
"... Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory is built. ..."
"... Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet. ..."
"... I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department. ..."
"... I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization, which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely. Neither is guaranteed. ..."
"... "Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened. ..."
"... Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire, ..."
"... We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem, or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or .... ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'. ..."
"... "If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but a Global Empire only posing as your former country." ..."
Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are
part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from
the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but
can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and
he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and
integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy
of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor
and messianic in its language.
The foundation upon which Barnett builds his binary view of the world is heavily dependant upon the continued advancement of
globalization - almost exclusively so. However, advancing globalization is not pre-ordained. Barnett himself makes the case that
globalization is a fragile undertaking similar to an interconnected chain in which any broken link destroys the whole. Globalization
could indeed be like the biblical statue whose feet are made of clay. Globalization, and therefore the integration of the Gap,
may even stop or recede - just as the globalization of the early 20th century ended abruptly with the onset of WW I and a global
depression. Moreover, Barnett's contention that the United States has an exceptional duty and moral responsibility for "remaking
the world in America's image" might be seen by many as misguided and perhaps even dangerous.
The divide between the `Functioning Core' and the `Non-Integrating Gap' differs from the gulf between rich and poor in a subtle
yet direct way. State governments make a conscious decision to become connected vs. disconnected to advancing globalization. States
and their leaders can provide the infrastructure and the opening of large global markets to their citizens in ways that individuals
cannot. An example can serve to illustrate the point: You can be rich and disconnected in Nigeria or poor and disconnected in
North Korea. In each case the country you live in has decided to be disconnected. Citizens in this case have a limited likelihood
of staying rich and unlimited prospects of staying poor. But by becoming part of the functioning Core, the enlightened state allows
all citizens a running start at becoming part of a worldwide economic system and thus provide prospects for a better future because
global jobs and markets are opened up to them. A connected economy such as India's, for example, enables citizens who once had
no prospects for a better life to find well-paying jobs, such as computer-related employment. Prospects for a better Indian life
are directly the result of the Indian government's conscious decision to become connected to the world economy, a.k.a. embracing
globalization.
After placing his theory of the Core/Gap and preemptive war strategy firmly into the church of globalization, Barnett next
places his theory squarely upon the alter of rule sets. Few would argue that the world is an anarchic place and Barnett tells
us that rule sets are needed to define `good' and `evil' behavior of actors in this chaotic international system. An example of
such a rule set is the desire of the Core to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorist organizations. Other examples are the promulgation
of human rights and the need to stop genocide. Barnett also uses rule sets to define `system' rules that govern and shape the
actions, and even the psychology, of international actors. An example that Barnett gives of a system-wide rule set is the creation
of the `rule' defined by the United States during the Cold War called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Barnett claims that this
rule set effectively ended the possibility of war for all time amongst nuclear-capable great powers. Barnett states that the U.S.
now should export a brand new rule set called `preemptive war,' which aims to fight actors in the lawless Gap in order to end
international terrorism for all time. Barnett makes it clear that the Core's enemy is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (Middle
East), but a condition (disconnectedness).
Next, Barnett points out that system-wide competition has moved into the economic arena and that military conflict, when it
occurs, has moved away from the system-wide (Cold War), to inter-state war, ending up today with primarily state conflict vs.
individuals (Core vs. bin Laden, Core vs. Kim, etc.). In other words, "we are moving progressively away from warfare against states
or even blocs of states and toward a new era of warfare against individuals." Rephrased, we've moved from confrontations with
evil empires, to evil states, to evil leaders. An example of this phenomenon is the fact that China dropped off the radar of many
government hawks after 9/11 only to be replaced by terrorist groups and other dangerous NGOs "with global reach."
Barnett also points out that the idea of `connectivity' is central to the success of globalization. Without it, everything
else fails. Connectivity is the glue that holds states together and helps prevent war between states. For example, the US is not
likely to start a war with `connected' France, but America could more likely instigate a war with `disconnected' North Korea,
Syria or Iran.
Barnett then examines the dangers associated with his definition of `disconnectedness.' He cleverly describes globalization
as a condition defined by mutually assured dependence (MAD) and advises us that `Big Men', royal families, raw materials, theocracies
and just bad luck can conspire to impede connectedness in the world. This is one of few places in his book that Barnett briefly
discusses impediments to globalization - however, this short list looks at existing roadblocks to connectedness but not to future,
system-wide dangers to globalization.
At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore
never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited
some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by
claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard
wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem,"
yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion
that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways.
Barnett then takes us on a pilgrimage to the Ten Commandments of globalization. Tellingly, this list is set up to be more like
links in a chain than commandments. Each item in the list is connected to the next - meaning that each step is dependent upon
its predecessor. If any of the links are broken or incomplete, the whole is destroyed. For example, Barnett warns us that if there
is no security in the Gap, there can be no rules in the Gap. Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand
strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory
is built.
What else could kill globalization? Barnett himself tells us: "Labor, energy, money and security all need to flow as freely
as possible from those places in the world where they are plentiful to those regions where they are scarce." Here he is implying
that an interruption of any or all of these basic necessities can doom globalization. Barnett states clearly: "...(these are)
the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance." Simply put, any combination
of American isolationism or closing of borders to immigration, a global energy crisis, a global financial crisis or rampant global
insecurity could adversely affect "connectedness," a.k.a. globalization. These plausible future events, unnerving as they are,
leave the inexorable advancement of globalization in doubt and we haven't yet explored other problems with Barnett's reliance
on globalization to make the world peaceful, free and safe for democracy.
Barnett goes on to tell us that Operation Iraqi Freedom was an "overt attempt to create a "System Perturbation" centered in
the Persian Gulf to trigger a Big Bang." His definition of a Big Bang in the Middle East is the democratization of the many totalitarian
states in the region. He also claims that the Big Bang has targeted Iran's "sullen majority."
Barnett claims that our problem with shrinking the Gap is not our "motive or our means, but our inability to describe the enemies
worth killing, the battles worth winning, and the future worth creating." Managing the global campaign to democratize the world
is no easy task. Barnett admits that in a worst-case scenario we may be stuck in the "mother of all intifadas" in Iraq. Critics
claim this is something that we should have planned for - that the insurgency should not have been a surprise, and that it should
have been part of the "peacemaking" planning. Barnett blithely states that things will get better "...when America internationalizes
the occupation." Barnett should not engage in wishful thinking here, as he also does when he predicted that Iraqis would be put
in charge of their own country 18 months after the fall of Baghdad. It would be more accurate if he claimed this would happen
18 months after the cessation of hostilities. Some critics claim that Iraq is an example that we are an "empire in a hurry" (Michael
Ignatieff), which then results in: 1) allocating insufficient resources to non-military aspects of the project and 2) attempting
economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short time frame.
The final basic premise of Barnett's theory of the Core and the Gap is the concept of what he calls the "global transaction
strategy." Barnett explains it best: "America's essential transaction with the outside world is one of our exporting security
in return for the world's financing a lifestyle we could far more readily afford without all that defense spending." Barnett claims
that America pays the most for global stability because we enjoy it the most. But what about the other 80 countries in the Core?
Why is America, like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world's security and stabilization on its shoulders?
Barnett claims that historical analogies are useless today and point us in the wrong direction. I disagree. James Madison cautioned
us not to go abroad to seek monsters to destroy. We can learn from his simple and profound statement that there are simply too
many state (and individual) monsters in today's world for the U.S. to destroy unilaterally or preemptively. We must also avoid
overstretching our resources and power. Thucydides reminds us that the great democracy of Athens was brought to its knees by the
ill-advised Sicilian expedition - which resulted in the destruction of everything the Athenians held dear. Do not ignore history
as Barnett councils; heed it.
Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet.
Therefore, America needs to stay engaged in the affairs of the world, but Barnett has not offered conclusive evidence that the
U.S. needs to become the world's single Leviathan that must extinguish all global hot wars. Barnett also has not proved that America
needs to be, as he writes, "the one willing to rush in when everyone else is running away." People like Barnett in academia and
leaders in government may proclaim and ordain the U.S. to be a global Leviathan, but it is a conscious choice that should be thoroughly
debated by the American people. After all, it is upon the backs of the American people that such a global Leviathan must ride.
Where is the debate? The American people, upon reflection, may decide upon other courses of action.
I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend
it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the
military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department.
It seems to be well researched - having 35 pages of notes. Many of Barnett's citations come from the Washington Post and the
New York Times, which some may see as a liberal bias, but I see the sources as simply newspapers of record.
I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization,
which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely.
Neither is guaranteed.
I don't think poorly of Thomas Barnett himself. He's very bright and, I think, good hearted, BUT his well thought-out, well
argued pride and joy (and positive intellectual pursuit) is being badly distorted ---- which happens to all 'tools' that Empire
gets its hands on.
For those who like predictions, I would predict that Barnett will wind up going through an epiphany much like Francis Fukuyama
(but a decade later) and for much the same reason, that his life's work gets misused and abused so greatly that he works to reverse
and correct its misuse. Fukuyama, also brilliant, wrote "The End of History" in 1992 (which was misused by the neocons to engender
war), and now he's working just as hard to reverse a misuse that he may feel some guilt of his work supporting, and is writing
"The Future of History" as a force for good --- and I suspect (and hope) that Barnett will, in even less time, be counter-thinking
and developing the strategy and book to reverse the misuse of his 2004 book before the Global Empire pulls down the curtain.
"Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate
name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened.
Best luck and love to the fast expanding 'Occupy the Empire' educational and revolutionary movement against this deceitful,
guileful, disguised EMPIRE, which can't so easily be identified as wearing Red Coats, Red Stars, nor funny looking Nazi helmets
---- quite yet!
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding
wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem,
or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or ....
ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'.
"If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but
a Global Empire only posing as your former country."
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin
America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts
to threaten their global domination.
Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct
wars. They use today other, various methods like
brutal proxy
wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly
complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces
unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.
Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya
After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless
interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American
people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US
had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead
of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies
failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.
In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably
the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without
the presence of the US.
Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have
proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have
witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.
Evidence from
WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources.
The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't
care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources
for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that
the Western
hypocrites were using him according to their interests .
Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they
had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order
to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course,
his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.
Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone
It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which
belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe
at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster
in Middle East and Libya.
Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy.
The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also
the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the
Treuhand Operation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank
to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in
Ireland ,
Italy and
Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed
in an open financial coup against
Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF
and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside
and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.
Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF
economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the
second eurozone economy, France,
rushed to
impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under
the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.
Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power
with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical
with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between
the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.
The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the
NSA interceptions
scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a
transatlantic
economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies
its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree
of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.
Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres
of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.
A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally,
the constitutional
coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the
usual actions
of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the
global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away
from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.
Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team
of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff
was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known
situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.
The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen
the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an
alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic
that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant
impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in
order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.
The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since
Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality
of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.
The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth,
with a big overdose of exaggeration.
The establishment
parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the
Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about
the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation
with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina
could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal
monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina
is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's
happening right
now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.
'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine
The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the
new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with
other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.
The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership,
through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information
has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.
Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A
video , for
example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is
connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise
some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.
The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments
in Venezuela and other countries.
Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can
also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination
(like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans
to join Russia.
The war will become wilder
The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic
expansionism.
Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine
in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite
his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.
We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation
in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that
they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian
borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.
"... The American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the US government did against Iraq in 2003 and what Hitler's government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington? ..."
"... A friend of mine recently commented that honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television contracts and "teaching" positions at prestigious universities. ..."
"... If the marketplace is anything to go by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01. ..."
"... The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act, writing "It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story." ..."
"... "Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." ..."
"... senior government officials and politicians routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds ..."
"... One thing for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you're sorry. ..."
The United States already has by far the per capita largest prison population of any developed country but I am probably one of
the few Americans who on this Independence Day would like to see a lot more people in prison, mostly drawn from politicians and senior
bureaucrats who have long believed that their status makes them untouchable, giving them license to steal and even to kill. The sad
fact is that while whistleblowers have been imprisoned for revealing government criminality, no one in the federal bureaucracy has
ever actually been punished for the crimes of torture, kidnapping and assassination committed during the George W. Bush and Barack
H. Obama presidencies.
Why is accountability important? After the Second World War, the victorious allies believed it was important to establish responsibility
for the crimes that had been committed by officials of the Axis powers. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials called the initiation
of a war of aggression the ultimate war crime because it inevitably unleashed so many other evils. Ten leading Nazis were executed
at Nuremberg and ninety-three Japanese officials at similar trials staged in Asia, including several guilty of waterboarding. Those
who were not executed for being complicit in the actual launching of war were tried for torture of both military personnel and civilians
and crimes against humanity, including the mass killing of civilians as well as of soldiers who had surrendered or been captured.
No matter how one tries to avoid making comparisons between 1939 and 2015, the American invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression,
precisely the type of conflict that the framework of accountability provided by Nuremberg was supposed to prevent in the years after
1946. High level US government officials knew that Iraq represented no threat to the United States but they nevertheless described
an imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein in the most graphic terms, replete with weapons of mass destruction, armed drones flying
across the Atlantic, terrorists being unleashed against the homeland, and mushroom clouds on the horizon. The precedent of Iraq,
even though it was an abject failure, has led to further military action against Libya and Syria to bring about "regime change" as
well as a continuing conflict in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the US has been waging a largely secret "long war" against terrorists employing torture and secret prisons. The
American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being
spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the US government did against Iraq in 2003 and
what Hitler's government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the
Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington?
Many Americans would now consider the leading figures in the Bush Administration aided and abetted by many enablers in congress
from both political parties to be unindicted war criminals. Together they ignited a global conflict that is still running strong
fourteen years later with a tally of more than 7,000 dead Americans and a minimum of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, Afghans,
Libyans, Somalis and Syrians.
War breeds more war, due largely to the fact that guilty parties in Washington who piggyback on the prevailing narrative move
onward and upward, rewarded in this life even if not necessarily so in the hereafter. A friend of mine recently commented that
honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television
contracts and "teaching" positions at prestigious universities. Though not 100% accurate as I know at least a couple of honorable
former senior officials who wound up teaching, it would seem to be a generalization that has considerable validity. The implication
is that many senior government officials ascend to their positions based on being accommodating and "political" rather than being
honest and they continue to do the same when they switch over to corporate America or the equally corrupted world of academia.
I thought of my friend's comment when I turned on the television a week ago to be confronted by the serious, somewhat intense
gaze of Michael Morell,
warning about the danger that ISIS will strike the US over the Fourth of July weekend. Morell, a former senior CIA official,
is in the terror business. He had no evidence whatsoever that terrorists were planning an attack and should have realized that maneuvering
the United States into constantly going on alert based on empty threats is precisely what militant groups tend to do.
When not fronting as a handsomely paid national security consultant for the CBS television network Morell is employed by Beacon
Global Strategies as a Senior Counselor, presumably warning well-heeled clients to watch out for terrorists. His lifestyle and substantial
emoluments depend on people being afraid of terrorism so they will turn to an expert like him and ask serious questions that he will
answer in a serious way suggesting that Islamic militants could potentially bring about some kind of global apocalypse.
Morell, a torture apologist, also has a book out that he wants to sell, positing somewhat ridiculously that he and his former
employer had been fighting The Great War of Our Time against Islamic terrorists, something comparable to the World Wars of the past
century, hence the title. Morell needs to take some valium and relax. He would also benefit from a little introspection regarding
the bad guys versus good guys narrative that he is peddling. His credentials as a warrior are somewhat suspect in any event as he
never did any military service and his combat in the world of intelligence consisted largely of sitting behind a desk in Washington
and providing briefings to George W. Bush and Barack Obama in which he presumably told them what they wanted to hear.
Morell is one of a host of pundits who are successful in selling the military-industrial-lobbyist-congressional-intelligence community
line of BS on the war on terror. Throw in the neocons as the in-your-face agents provocateurs who provide instant intellectual and
media credibility for developments and you have large groups of engaged individuals with good access who are on the receiving end
of the seemingly unending cash pipeline that began with 9/11. Frances Townsend, who was the Bush Homeland Security adviser and who
is now a consultant with CNN, is another such creature as is Michael Chertoff, formerly Director of the Department of Homeland Security,
who has successfully marketed his
defective airport
scanners to his former employer.
But the guys and gals who are out feathering their own nests are at least comprehensible given our predatory capitalist system
of government. More to the point, the gang that ordered or carried out torture and assassination are the ones who should be doing
some hard time in the slammer but instead they too are riding the gravy train and cashing in. To name only a few of those who knew
about the torture and ordered it carried out I would cite George Tenet, James Pavitt, Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez from the intelligence
community. The assassination program meanwhile is accredited to John Brennan, currently CIA Director, during his tenure as Obama's
Deputy National Security Advisor. And then there are Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon together with John Yoo at Justice
and Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice at the White House, all of whom outright lied, dissimulated and conspired their way
to bring about a war of aggression against Iraq.
There are plenty of nameless others who were "only carrying out orders" and who should be included in any reckoning of America's
crimes over the past fifteen years, particularly if one also considers the illegal NSA spying program headed by Michael Hayden, who
defended the practice and has also
referred to those who oppose enhanced interrogation torture as "interrogation deniers." And then there are Presidents Bush and
Obama who certainly knew what was going on in the name of the American people as well as John Brennan, who was involved in both the
torture and renditions programs as well as the more recent assassinations by drone.
So where are they now? Living in obscurity ashamed of what they did? Hardly. Not only have they not been vilified or marginalized,
they have, in most cases, been rewarded. George W. Bush lives in Dallas near his Presidential Library and eponymous Think (sic) Tank.
Cheney lives in semi-retirement in McLean Virginia with a multi-million dollar waterfront weekend retreat in St. Michaels Maryland,
not too far from Donald Rumsfeld's similar digs.
George Tenet, the CIA Director notorious for his "slam-dunk" comment, a man who cooked the intelligence to make the Iraq war possible
to curry favor with the White House, has generously remunerated positions on the boards of Allen & Company merchant bank, QinetiQ,
and L-1 Identity Solutions. He sold his memoir At the Center of the Storm, which has been
described
as a "self-justifying apologia," in 2007 for a reported advance of $4 million. His book, ironically, admits that the US invaded
Iraq for no good reason.
James Pavitt, who was the point man responsible for the "enhanced interrogation" program as Tenet's Deputy Director for Operations,
is currently a principal with The Scowcroft Group and also serves on several boards. Cofer Black, who headed the Counter-Terrorism
Center, which actually carried out renditions and "enhanced interrogations," was vice chairman of Blackwater Worldwide (now called
Xe) and chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions, a Blackwater spin-off. He is now vice president of Blackbird Technologies, a defense
and intelligence contractor. Rodriguez, who succeeded Black and in 2005 illegally destroyed video tapes made of Agency interrogations
to avoid possible repercussions, is a senior vice president with Edge Consulting, a defense contractor currently owned by IBM that
is located in Virginia.
John Yoo is a Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley while Condoleezza Rice, who spoke of mushroom clouds and
is widely regarded as the worst National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in history, has returned to Stanford University.
She is a professor at the Graduate School
of Business and a director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. She
is occasionally spoken of as either a possible GOP presidential candidate or as a future Commissioner of the National Football League.
Her interaction with students is limited, but when challenged on her record she has responded that it was a difficult situation post
9/11, something that everyone understands, though few would have come to her conclusion that attacking Iraq might be a good way to
destroy al-Qaeda.
Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense, is seen by many as the "intellectual" driving force behind the invasion
of Iraq. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and advises Jeb Bush on foreign policy. A bid to
reward Wolfie for his zeal by giving him a huge golden parachute as President of the World Bank at a salary of $391,000 tax free
failed when, after 23 months in the position, he was ousted over promoting a subordinate with whom he was having an affair. His chief
deputy at the Pentagon Doug Feith left the Defense Department to take up a visiting professorship at the school of Foreign Service
at Georgetown University, which was subsequently not renewed. He is reported to be again practicing law and thinking deep thoughts
about his hero Edmund Burke, who no doubt would have been appalled to make Feith's acquaintance. Feith is a senior fellow at the
neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies. His memoir War and Decision did
not make the best seller list and is now available used on Amazon for $.01 plus shipping. If the marketplace is anything to go
by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01.
The over-rewarding of former officials who have in reality done great harm to the United States and its interests might well seem
inexplicable, but it is all part of a style of bureaucracy that cannot admit failure and truly believes that all its actions are
ipso facto legitimate because the executive and its minions can do no wrong. It is also a symptom of the classic American character
flaw that all things are of necessity measured by money. Does anyone remember the ancient Roman symbol of republican virtue Lucius
Quinctius Cincinnatus, who left his farm after being named Dictator in order to defeat Rome's enemies? He then handed power back
to the Senate before returning to his plowing after the job was done. The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act,
writing "It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great
honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story." George Washington was America's Cincinnatus and it is
not a coincidence that officers of the continental army founded the Cincinnati Society, the nation's oldest patriotic organization,
in 1783. It is also reported that Edward Snowden used the alias "Cincinnatus."
Lord Acton once observed that "Power tends
to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." More recently essayist Edward Abbey
put it in an American context, noting
"Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." That senior government officials and politicians
routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds is a
fault that is perhaps not unique to the United States but it is nevertheless unacceptable. Handing out a couple of exemplary prison
sentences for the caste that believes itself untouchable would be a good place to start. An opportunity was missed with David Petraeus,
who was fined and avoided jail time, and it will be interesting to see how the Dennis Hastert case develops. Hastert will no doubt
be slapped on the wrist for the crime of moving around his own money while the corruption that was the source of that money, both
as a legislator and lobbyist, will be ignored. As will his molestation of at least one and possibly several young boys. One thing
for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you're sorry.
"... oligarchic greed; a military dedicated to protecting the wealth of oligarchs; and, wars over resources. Granted Bill Clinton began the current charade about 'humanitarian wars' but it was Bush II and Obama who turned our focus into resource wars and the hegemons (Malignant Overlords) who decided it was time to take it all. ..."
Long ago (1968) after returning from Vietnam with a bullet hole in my leg (my 90 wonder, post-ROTC officer shot me when he
panicked) I wondered off to a down-at-the-heel cow college. There I took a class and C Wright Mills 'The Power Elite' was required
reading.
I had just finished 'War is a fraud' and read an article by Paul Ehrlich an then 'The Population Bomb' shortly thereafter.
The three books created an interesting fusion in my mind:
More or less after the year 2000 the world would be plagued by resource wars;
The primary role of the military is to enforce what capitalists want; and
Behind the alleged scenes of our form of government hovered oligarchs who would demand more and more.
I recently found a paper I had written long ago. It wasn't very well written, but even then the handwriting was on the wall:
oligarchic greed; a military dedicated to protecting the wealth of oligarchs; and, wars over resources. Granted Bill Clinton
began the current charade about 'humanitarian wars' but it was Bush II and Obama who turned our focus into resource wars and the
hegemons (Malignant Overlords) who decided it was time to take it all.
I guess the point of all of this is (except for the details) Ehrlich, Mills and Butler warned us. As did Huxley and Orwell
... we were just too damned dumb (or distracted) to see it.
Maybe with the Queen of Chaos, the above will result in either annihilation or in a severe reduction in the numbers of people
... (hopefully including all of the oligarchic class) and the chance to start over?
Nah ... we'll just fuck it up again ... as a species we refuse to learn. Sigh ...
On Thursday, police in Hong Kong announced the arrests of several individuals whom they
described as leaders of the Hong Kong protests movement. But these individuals (their
identities have not been released) were not simply collared out in the street.
Instead, police described the four as leaders of Spark Alliance, a mysterious organization
that has been one of the main financiers of the protest movement, including by bailing
protesters out of jail and helping to defray their legal fees.
Police seized HK$70 million ($9 million) in bank deposits and personal insurance products
from Spark, claiming that the group broke laws about money laundering.
In a response posted to its FB group, Spark blasted the police, accusing them of
deliberately trying to cut off one of the most important avenues of financing in the protest
movement.
On Thursday evening, police announced the arrests of four people connected with Spark
Alliance for suspected money laundering, the first cases brought over financing the
demonstrations after six months of protests against China's tightening grip over Hong Kong.
Authorities froze HK$70 million of bank deposits and personal insurance products linked to
the fund, while also seizing HK$130,000 in cash.
"The police attempted, through false statements, to distort the work of Spark Alliance as
money laundering for malicious uses," the group said in a statement on Facebook. " Spark
Alliance condemns this kind of defamatory action."
The arrests and seizures, as
Bloomberg explains, shed light on the innerworkings of the Hong Kong protest movement.
Millions of Americans who have read the news reports about the protests have probably been left
wondering how the protesters became so organized.
Well, this is how: Since the beginning of the movement, wealthy working HKers have observed
their duty to help those battling it out on the front lines in any way possible. Mostly, they
do it through donations to groups that purport to help bail out protesters after they've been
arrested, or groups that simply provide food and shelter for the demonstrators, many of whom
are teenagers, or in their early 20s.
This division of responsibilities is part of what's allowed the movement to continue on for
as long as it has.
But by cracking down on the money, HK police are essentially pulling the rug out from under
Hong Kongers facing criminal charges for protest-related activities.
Because Spark Alliance and another, more transparent, fund called the 612 Humanitarian Fund
are responsible for financing the protest movement: According to BBG, the two funds account for
70% of the money raised by the protest movement.
The impact of this crackdown is two-fold: not only will protesters counting on these funds
to pay their legal fees be left out in the cold, but the renewed police scrutiny could deter
some working Hong Kongers who have been supporting the movement with donations.
The crackdown deals a major blow to demonstrators as they face ever-mounting legal bills,
with more than 6,000 people arrested since June. Spark Alliance, one of the largest
crowd-funding campaigns supporting the protests, plays a crucial behind-the-scenes role -
often sending anonymous representatives to bail protesters out of jail in the middle of the
night.
The latest arrests risk deterring Hong Kong's professional class from giving more cash,
potentially curbing a substantial source of funds that have helped sustain the protests
longer than anyone had expected. They also show the limits of the leaderless movement's
ability to manage tens of millions of dollars with little oversight outside of a formal
financial system.
Funds bankrolling the protests have collectively raised at least HK$254 million ($33
million) since June, with 70% coming from just two groups, Spark Alliance and the 612
Humanitarian Fund, according to a tally based on disclosures from the groups and an analysis
of publicly available documents. That figure doesn't reflect all the money raised related to
the protests, only the funds Bloomberg News could verify.
Before the arrests, most Hong Kongers didn't know the identities of anyone behind Spark
Alliance. Its website and bank accounts (before they were shut down) all forwarded to a Pest
Control company.
But Spark proved its reliability early on by helping bail protesters out of jail. But the
group has been under scrutiny even before the police got involved. Last month, HSBC shut down
the group's account, saying they had detected activity that differed from the stated purpose of
the account.
"Spark is probably less transparent but people tend to believe them," said Jason, a
protester in his 30s who asked to be identified by his English name. He said he memorized the
group's phone number and called the group after he was arrested in August. Seven hours later,
two lawyers helped arrange HK$4,000 in bail money.
"Everyone knows the cost to fight for this movement and not everyone can afford lawyer
fees," he said. "We need protection."
Over the past few months he's raised half a million dollars for Spark Alliance and other
charities through the sale of Hong Kong-themed figurines, including a miniature Carrie Lam
and a masked protester. Asked on Thursday night if he would still give the money to Spark
Alliance, Jason said he wanted more information on the arrests.
The shadowy nature of some of these organizations has helped the Chinese government portray
the protests as having been financed by foreign powers like the US. Of course, these
accusations aren't entirely without merit. Beijing threatened sanctions this month against the
National Endowment for Democracy, a US-based group which donated $686,000 to various Hong Kong
nonprofits in 2019.
Meanwhile, the June 12 fund has already spent roughly a quarter of the money it has raised
since June, mostly on legal expenses and bail.
For many of the thousands of protesters who have been arrested, the criminal penalties that
they could face without adequate legal representation could land them in prison for years.
Without having the support of knowing their bail will be paid in the event of an arrest,
many demonstrators wouldn't be so eager to fight their way past police barricades and take
other risks like that.
But many members of the protest movement believe the 612 fund is too stodgy in how it
operates. Most see organizations like Spark Alliance as being closer to the true ideals of the
movement.
The 612 fund has been chided in online forums for deploying only 24% of the money it
raised while asking protesters to first apply for legal aid from the city. Other critics see
the 612 fund as part of an older political establishment in Hong Kong that has failed the
younger generation of democracy advocates, and they believe Spark Alliance is closer to
protesters in the trenches.
"The younger generation doesn't trust in any institutions, not even those that advocate
for democracy," said Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong. "It's
an irrational decision to trust in a group believed to be closer to the people on the ground
even if they don't know who is behind the fund."
Ng, a 612 fund trustee, said the group is supported by "members of the public that are
incensed by what is being done by police and government."
"The movement is ongoing and we are using the funds for the stated purpose of humanitarian
aid," she said. "We don't have any obligation to spend all the money immediately."
Now that police have set their sights on Spark, we imagine a new group will need to come
forward and take up the mantle of the protest movement, or risk allowing it to fizzle out.
I keep wondering why ZH seems to be supporting the HK protestors when that 'color
revolution' too seems to be supported by the same elements promoting promoting the overthrow
of Trump and the overthrow of the elected government in Bolivia.
"Now that police have set their sights on Spark, we imagine a new group will need to come
forward and take up the mantle of the protest movement, or risk allowing it to fizzle
out."
Aww too bad. Looks like the CIA got their funds seized. No worries Soros will just add
more funding
In the six months riots and terrorisms, Hong Kong police did not kill anyone but gathering
information and evidence to dismantle foreign meddling in the city. During 7 days of protests
against religious discrimination in India the police already killed more than 20 people. IQ
does matter.
Wonder how many Muslims died in the past one year as victims of ZioNazi and Evil Empire
terrorism and mass murder.
100,000s? Yes, it's true, nobody in the world is as violent, evil, malicious and
belligerent as the ZioNazis and Evil Empire. Nobody is remotely close. Certainly not
China.
Chim Choms are BRUTAL so far 21 CIA clowns have gone MISSING and never HEARD or SEEN.. At
least Russia keeps these SPYS and do SWAPS Your agent for mine. TRADE OFF.. Not with CHIM
CHOMS God only KNOWS where CIA spys go I can IMAGINE Naturally they are ORGAN donors. Chim
choms don't **** around
The arrests and seizures, as
Bloomberg explains, shed light on the innerworkings of the Hong Kong protest movement.
Millions of Americans who have read the news reports about the protests have probably been
left wondering how the protesters became so organized.
Well, this is how: Since the beginning of the movement, wealthy working HKers have
observed their duty to help those battling it out on the front lines in any way possible.
Mostly, they do it through donations to groups that purport to help bail out protesters
after they've been arrested, or groups that simply provide food and shelter for the
demonstrators, many of whom are teenagers, or in their early 20s.
Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g.,
political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it
originates from and is supported by grassroots participants.
merican money is made from nothing... this allows for use in other nations to do evil
works... best to ban merican dollars others than individuals holding small amounts of it...
do not take it for exchange
There will be NO DEAL. China is not going to surrender their financial sovereignty to
the zionist bankers again after the communist party kicked them and their puppet (the
Nationalist KMT currently settled in Taiwan, China) out in 1949 :)
Told ya :) Still don't get it? Good :)
China is just being nice to Trump and let him save face and give him a ladder to
climb down :)
China already started cleaning up operation in Hong Kong by freezing the Zionist terrorist
slush fund :P When the funding stop no mercenaries will work for free to destroy Hong Kong.
Operation Yellowbird 2 just begins and you'll see them roaming in USA and Taiwan, then appear
on CNN, Fox News and all Zionist media as eyewitness to Hong Kong police brutality and how
communist China violates human rights :)
A man who fired a live round at officers in Tai Po on Friday night was involved in another
case centred on the seizure of bombs and firearms linked to anti-government protests, a
police source has said, adding that more suspects could be at large.
The force also warned that an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle seized in a follow-up flat raid
was the same model used in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting which
killed 58 people, adding that the weapon could cause severe casualties as it had a range of
up to 800 metres.
(Bloomberg) -- Glancing at bags of cash stuffed to the brim earlier this month, Gary Fan
simply wanted someone to remove them from an office in Hong Kong used by his political
party.
The former pro-democracy lawmaker had collected HK$2.7 million ($345,000) during an
anti-government protest the day before, and was waiting for someone to pick it up from a
mysterious group known as Spark Alliance that helps bail protesters out of jail. The next day,
a person whom he knew and trusted came to collect the cash, even though Fan says he doesn't
know who exactly is behind the group or where the money ends up.
"We just work by an honor system now, trusting them with a good cause," Fan said in a Dec.
11 interview, adding that Spark Alliance has "earned credibility with real work" like getting
legal assistance for protesters. Still, he said, "I absolutely agree there should be more
disclosure, transparency and accountability when you take money from the public."
On Thursday evening, police announced the arrests of four people connected with Spark
Alliance for suspected money laundering, the first cases brought over financing the
demonstrations after six months of protests against China's tightening grip over Hong Kong.
Authorities froze HK$70 million of bank deposits and personal insurance products linked to the
fund, while also seizing HK$130,000 in cash.
"The police attempted, through false statements, to distort the work of Spark Alliance as
money laundering for malicious uses," the group said in a statement on Facebook. "Spark
Alliance condemns this kind of defamatory action."
The crackdown deals a major blow to demonstrators as they face ever-mounting legal
bills, with more than 6,000 people arrested since June. Spark Alliance, one of the largest
crowd-funding campaigns supporting the protests, plays a crucial behind-the-scenes role --
often sending anonymous representatives to bail protesters out of jail in the middle of the
night.
The latest arrests risk deterring Hong Kong's professional class from giving more cash,
potentially curbing a substantial source of funds that have helped sustain the protests longer
than anyone had expected. They also show the limits of the leaderless movement's ability to
manage tens of millions of dollars with little oversight outside of a formal financial
system.
Funds bankrolling the protests have collectively raised at least HK$254 million ($33
million) since June, with 70% coming from just two groups, Spark Alliance and the 612
Humanitarian Fund, according to a tally based on disclosures from the groups and an analysis of
publicly available documents. That figure doesn't reflect all the money raised related to the
protests, only the funds Bloomberg News could verify.
The $33 million alone amounts to a third of the money the city has spent in overtime pay to
11,000 police officers since June, and would be able to purchase some 300,000 gas masks. But
the largest costs faced by protesters are legal fees that may stretch out for years.
Nearly 1,000 people have been charged for offenses like rioting, which carries a jail
sentence of as much as a decade, according to police. The 612 Fund says it can cost up to
HK$1.8 million per person for a 60-day legal defense, and many trials last far longer. Some
proceedings related to Hong Kong's 2014 Occupy protests are still ongoing.
Among dozens of groups, Spark Alliance is one of the most secretive: Even some donors and
lawyers who assist the group say they don't know who runs it, while the bank account listed on
its website belongs to a firm that owns a pest control company. A person who picked up Spark
Alliance's hotline last week said the number was only for protester requests. The group didn't
respond to requests for comment via Facebook, Whatsapp or Telegram.
'We Need Protection'
"Spark is probably less transparent but people tend to believe them," said Jason, a
protester in his 30s who asked to be identified by his English name. He said he memorized the
group's phone number and called the group after he was arrested in August. Seven hours later,
two lawyers helped arrange HK$4,000 in bail money.
"Everyone knows the cost to fight for this movement and not everyone can afford lawyer
fees," he said. "We need protection."
"... Since 2001, America has increasingly turned global economic and financial networks into weapons that can be used against adversaries. As we showed in earlier research, financial networks such as the "dollar clearing system" and the SWIFT messaging service, which provide foundations for the global financial system, have been used by the United States to gather intelligence and to isolate entire economies, such as Iran, from the global financial system. ..."
"... As we discuss in a new article in Foreign Affairs , other countries are beginning to think about how they can best respond: by threatening retaliation, by creating their own networks, or by insulating themselves from U.S. pressure. ..."
"America weaponized the global financial system. Now other states are fighting back." [
WaPo ].
" Since 2001, America has increasingly turned global economic and financial networks
into weapons that can be used against adversaries. As we showed in earlier research, financial
networks such as the "dollar clearing system" and the SWIFT messaging service, which provide
foundations for the global financial system, have been used by the United States to gather
intelligence and to isolate entire economies, such as Iran, from the global financial
system.
Control of these networks allows the United States to issue "secondary sanctions" against
countries, businesses or individuals that it wants to target, obliging non-U.S. actors to
adhere to the sanctions or risk substantial penalties.
Now, these tools are leading to backlash and reaction. As we discuss in a new
article in Foreign Affairs , other countries are beginning to think about how they can best
respond: by threatening retaliation, by creating their own networks, or by insulating
themselves from U.S. pressure.
"... Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious. It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest of the wealthy. ..."
"... America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla. ..."
"... Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators; it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending your kids to die. Never. ..."
Idealistic Realist , Apr 27, 2019 1:24:45 PM |
link
Best analysis by a candidate for POTUS ever:
American foreign policy is not a failure. To comfort themselves, observers often say that our leaders -- presidents, advisors,
generals -- don't know what they're doing. They do know. Their agenda just isn't what we like to imagine it is.
To quote Michael Parenti: "US policy is not filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. It has performed brilliantly
and steadily in the service of those who own most of the world and who want to own all of it."
The vision of our leaders as bunglers, while more accurate than the image of them as valiant public servants, is less accurate
and more rose-tinted than the closest approximation of the truth, which is that they are servants of their class interest.
That is why we go to war.
Those who buy the elite class's foreign policy BS, about the Emmanuel Goldsteins they conjure up every three years, are
fools. Obviously Hussein and Milošević were bad; but "government bad" does not mean we must invade. Wars occur for economic,
not humanitarian, reasons.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of Equatorial Guinea, is a kleptocrat, murderer, and alleged cannibal. This is
him and his wife with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, was said to have boiled political prisoners to death, massacred hundreds
of prisoners, and made torture an institution. This is him with John Kerry.
Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, has been involved in the assassination of political opponents, perpetrated obvious
election fraud, and had his term extended until 2034. This is him with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious.
It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest
of the wealthy.
America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian
reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support
Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla.
Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators;
it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending
your kids to die. Never.
March 12, 2019 at 5:25
pm GMT • 200 Words @AnonFromTN
Superfluously impossible, AnonfromTN said: "It is simple, really. The US needs a law
prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold public office."
Hi AnonfromTN.
Hard to comprehend how you persist to deny how the "US law" is Zionized. (Zigh) Israeli
"dual citizenship and holding "Homeland" public office is an irretractable endowment lawlessly
given to US Jews by ruling international Jewry.
They barged into our Constitution like a cancer and feast upon The Bill of Rights.
What's worse now is how livin' the "American dream" has reversed, and at present, President
t-Rump demands huge increases in war funding.
No one gets informed that future wars converge with Israel's will.
Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type
of war crime-free & unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US
military Rules of Engagement modus operandi, which governed the serial killing activity of an
Apache attack chopper crew in the Baghdad sky. Look close at the posed threat!
Tell me AnonfromTN? As you likely know, Bradley Chelsea Manning is, and under "Homeland"
law, in-the-klink for exposing the war crimes to America. Is their one (1) US Congressman
raising objection to the imprisonment? Fyi, you can look at the brave writing of Kathy Kelly on
the Manning case, and which appears at Counterpunch.org.
@ChuckOrloski I
can only agree. The patient (the US political system) is too far gone to hope for recovery.
As comment #69 rightly points out, our political system is based on bribery. Lobbyism and
donations to political campaigns and PACs are perfectly legal in the US, while all of these
should be criminal offenses punished by jail time, like in most countries. Naturally,
desperate Empires losing their dominant position resort to any war crimes imaginable, and
severely punish those who expose these crimes.
I can add only one thing: you are right that greedy Jews are evil, but greedy people of
any nationality are just as evil as greedy Jews. Not all greedy globalists and MIC thieves
are Jews, but they are all scum. I watch with dismay the US Empire heading to its crash.
Lemmings running to the cliff are about as rational as our degenerate elites. Israel
influence is toxic, but that's not the only poison the Empire will die from.
Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness
on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.
The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside
have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making
the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that
serve them [the US operation].
Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons
of gold and tens of millions of dollars.
Allegedly, "US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens
of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders
from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located."
ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria's oil-producing
region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying
to overthrow Syria's secular Government
and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family) . This gold is
the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold.
Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria's property.
The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America's allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful
that approach turns out to be.
Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria's secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly
by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families
and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined
"Guide to the Syrian rebels" and opened "There are
believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters." Except in the Kurdish
areas in Syria's northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda's Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain's Center on
Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015,
"Ideology
and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion" and reported: "If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other
Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place." Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria's Al Qaeda (Nusra), which
was protected by
the US
In September 2016 a UK official
"FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK
FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL" asserted that, "Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield
to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have
also joined." Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria's
Government.
On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia's videos of Russia's bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US
military website
"Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers" , and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain's Daily Express headlined
"WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border" . This article, reporting around
twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: "The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry,
shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet." The US military
had nothing comparable to offer to its 'news'-media. Britain's Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015,
"Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists" . Only America's allies were
involved in this commerce with ISIS -- no nation that supported Syria's Government was participating in this black market of stolen
Syrian goods. So, it's now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria's enemy-nations' means of buying that oil
from ISIS. They'd purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria's Government, the actual owner.
An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit
for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish
city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city
and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq
and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man
in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto
other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.
The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by
a brutal coup in February 2014
: It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian
reported, on 7 March 2014 , that "At 2 a.m. this morning ... an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport"
near Kiev in the west, and that, "According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen
minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing." This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining
on 14 March,
"Ukraine's Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?" in which he noted that, when asked,
"A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, 'Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.'" The
load was said to be "more than 40 heavy boxes." Chossudovsky noted that, "The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine's
gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars." It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland (
Obama's detail-person
overseeing the coup ) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
cleaning out the nation's gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation's steep indebtedness for Russian gas would
never be repaid to Russia's oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland's having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia
was being squeezed by this fascist
Ukrainian-American ploy.
The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America's support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists.
As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017 :
"In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed
9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN)."
Furthermore, On
8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain's Telegraph reported that Croatia's Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that "3,000
tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via
Jordan since November. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey
and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime."
Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled
"Islamic State Weapons
in Iraq and Syria" , reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being "captured from Islamic State
forces" by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking
their lives to fight against those jihadists.
In December 2017, CAR headlined
"Weapons of the Islamic State"
and reported that "this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition
forces." The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.
That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining
"Russian TV
Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria" , and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was
working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq's ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria's Government
in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the 'rebels' that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria's
Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn't
the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort
against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action,
"'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" ?
So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs
the gold -- and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.
This is today's form of imperialism.
Grab what you can, and run. And call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption'. And the
imperial regime's allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That's the deal, and they call it 'fighting
for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world'. That's the way it works. International gangland.
That's the reality, while most of the public think it's instead really "fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against
corruption around the world." For example, as
RT reported on Sunday , March 3rd,
about John Bolton's effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: "I'd like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together
to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,' Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper." Trump's regime wants to bring clean and
democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush's did to the Iraqis, and Obama's did to the Libyans and to the Syrians
and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama's regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them.
Though he's slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors'
many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America's and allies' billionaires. They're all in on
the take.
The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries,
and still haven't learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive
Government and of its stenographic 'news'-media. When is enough finally enough ? Never? If not never, then when ? Or do most people
never learn? Or maybe they don't really care. Perhaps that's the problem.
Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime's top 'news'-media, the Washington Post, had headlined
"Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria" and reported that "the Islamic State is sitting
on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations." So, it's not as if there hadn't
been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America's defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn't
expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the
past. Unless the public wises-up (if that's even possible).
"... The US strategy is based on two core principles: (1) Maintain – extend hegemony over whole world. (Resources, military etc etc) (2) Act as Israel's Golom. ..."
"... Of course this (very abbreviated) view of US "strategy" is open to the criticisms that it's both dumb & evil. As if US establishment cares. Compared to cost of traditional "war" it's pretty cheap ..."
In truth, infinite war is a strategic abomination, an admission of professional military
bankruptcy. Erster General-Quartiermeister Ludendorff might have endorsed the term,
but Ludendorff was a military fanatic.
Check that. Infinite war is a strategic abomination except for arms merchants, so-called
defense contractors, and the " emergency
men " (and women) devoted to climbing the greasy pole of what we choose to call the
national security establishment. In other words, candor obliges us to acknowledge that, in some
quarters, infinite war is a pure positive, carrying with it a promise of yet more profits,
promotions, and opportunities to come. War keeps the gravy train rolling. And, of course,
that's part of the problem.
Who should we hold accountable for this abomination? Not the generals, in my view. If they
come across as a dutiful yet unimaginative lot, remember that a lifetime of military service
rarely nurtures imagination or creativity. And let us at least credit our generals with this:
in their efforts to liberate or democratize or pacify or dominate the Greater Middle East they
have tried every military tactic and technique imaginable. Short of nuclear annihilation,
they've played just about every card in the Pentagon's deck -- without coming up with a winning
hand. So they come and go at regular intervals, each new commander promising success and
departing after a couple years to
make way for someone else to give it a try.
... ... ...
Congressional midterm elections are just months away and another presidential election
already looms. Who will be the political leader with the courage and presence of mind to
declare: "Enough! Stop this madness!" Man or woman, straight or gay, black, brown, or white,
that person will deserve the nation's gratitude and the support of the electorate.
Until that occurs, however, the American penchant for war will stretch on toward infinity.
No doubt Saudi and Israeli leaders will cheer, Europeans who remember their Great War will
scratch their heads in wonder, and the Chinese will laugh themselves silly. Meanwhile, issues
of genuinely strategic importance -- climate change offers one obvious example -- will continue
to be treated like an afterthought. As for the gravy train, it will roll on.
1. WW1 had total casualties (civilian and military) of around 40M. WW2 had total
casualties of 60M. So yes WW2 was more deadly but "pales in comparison" is hardly justified,
especially relative to population.
2. Marshal Foch, 28 June, 1919: "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20
years."
WW1 inevitably led to WW2.
The only politician with a modest national stage to have said that (and meant it) in the
last 50 years was Ron Paul, who was booed and mocked as crazy. Trump made noises in that
direction, but almost as soon as the last words of his oath echoed off into the brisk January
afternoon, he seemed to change his tune. Whether he never meant it, or decided to avoid the
JFK treatment, who knows.
No, as I believe Will Rogers said, democracy is that form of government where the people
get what they want, good and hard.
I supported Ron Paul in 2012. But after his candidacy was crookedly subverted by the
Establishment (cf., Trump's) I vowed never to vote again for anyone that I believe unworthy
of the power wielded through the public office. I haven't voted since, and don't expect to
until the Empire collapses.
Kirk Douglas starred in a great film about fighting in World War I: "Paths of Glory." I
highly recommend the film for its accuracy, best described in Wiki by the reaction of
governments:
Controversy
On its release, the film's anti-military tone was subject to criticism and censorship.
In France, both active and retired personnel from the French military vehemently
criticized the film -- and its portrayal of the French Army -- after it was released in
Belgium. The French government placed enormous pressure on United Artists, (the European
distributor) to not release the film in France. The film was eventually shown in France in
1975 when social attitudes had changed.[17]
In Germany, the film was withdrawn from the Berlin Film Festival to avoid straining
relations with France;[18] it was not shown for two years until after its release.
In Spain, Spain's right-wing government of Francisco Franco objected to the film. It was
first shown in 1986, 11 years after Franco's death.
In Switzerland, the film was censored, at the request of the Swiss Army, until
1970.[18]
At American bases in Europe, the American military banned it from being shown.[18]
No, it's not the generals who have let us down, but the politicians to whom they
supposedly report and from whom they nominally take their orders.
I'd say both. The generals have greatly assisted in stringing along the trusting public,
always promising that victory is just around the corner, provided the public supports this or
that final effort. Petraeus in particular willingly played his part in misleading the public
about both Iraq and Afghanistan. His career would be a great case study for illuminating what
is wrong with the U.S. today.
As to the apparent failure of the Afghanistan war – one must be careful to separate
stated goals from real ones. What kind of "lasting success" can the U.S. possibly hope for
there? If they managed to defeat the Taliban, pacify the country, install a puppet regime to
govern it, and then leave, what would that achieve? The puppet regime would find itself
surrounded by powers antagonistic to the U.S., and the puppets would either cooperate with
them or be overthrown in no time. The U.S. are not interested in winning and leaving –
they want to continue disrupting the peaceful integration of East, West, and South Asia.
Afghanistan is ideally placed for this purpose, and so the U.S. are quite content with
dragging out that war, as a pretext for their continued presence in the region.
I would disagree on one point though: "Today, Washington need not even bother to
propagandize the public into supporting its war. By and large, members of the public are
indifferent to its very existence."
This is an error. A majority of the American public think that wasting trillions of
dollars on endless pointless foreign wars is a stupid idea, and they think that we would be
better off spending that money on ourselves. It's just that we don't live in a democracy, and
the corporate press constantly ignores the issue. But just because the press doesn't mention
something, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
So during the last presidential election Donald Trump echoed this view, why are we
throwing away all this money on stupid wars when we need that money at home? For this he was
attacked as a fascist and "literally Hitler" (really! It's jaw-dropping when you think about
it). Despite massive propaganda attacking Trump, and a personal style that could charitably
be called a jackass, Trump won the election in large part because indeed most American don't
like the status quo.
After the election, Trump started to deliver on his promises – and he was quickly
beaten down, his pragmatist nationalist advisors purged and replaced with defense-industry
chickenhawks, and now we are back to the old status quo. The public be damned.
No, the American people are not being propagandized into supporting these wars. They are
simply being ignored.
When are you going to stop insulting our intelligence with this Boy's State civics crap?
You're calling on political leaders to stop war, like they don't remember what CIA did to
JFK, RFK, Daschle, or Leahy. Or Paul Wellstone.
Your national command structure, CIA, has impunity for universal jurisdiction crime. They
can kill or torture anyone they want and get away with it. That is what put them in charge.
CIA kills anybody who gets in their way. You fail to comprehend Lenin's lesson: first destroy
the regime, then you can refrain from use of force. Until you're ready to take on CIA, your
bold phrases are silent and odorless farts of feckless self-absorption. Sack up and imprison
CIA SIS or GTFO.
Since Spain was smart enough to stay out of both World Wars (as was Switzerland, of
course), I wonder what Franco was thinking when he banned the film. Anyway, the final scene
may be the best final scene in the history of movies.
This writer, a retired military officer whose son died in service to the yankee imperium
seems to have as good a grasp as any if not a better grasp than any about the nature of the
yankee system of permanent war.
While I agree the slave-American is ignored, I think the elected, salaried members of the
elected government are also ignored.. The persons in charge are Pharaohs and massively
powerful global in scope corporations.
Abe Lincoln, McKinnley, Kennedy discovered that fact in their fate.
Organized Zionism was copted by the London bankers and their corporations 1897, since then
a string of events have emerged.. that like a Submarine, seeking a far off target, it must
divert to avoid being discovered, but soon, Red October returns to its intended path. here
the path is to take the oil from the Arabs.. and the people driving that submarine are
extremely wealthy Pharaohs and very well known major corporations.
I suggest to quit talking about the nation states and their leaders as if either could
beat their way out of a wet paper sack. instead starting talking about the corporations and
Pharaohs because they are global.
The yawning silence accompanying the centennial of the Great War is baffling to me. It was
the pivotal event of the 20th century. It was the beginning of the unmanning, the
demoralization of Western Civilization. It was the calamity that created the World we inhabit
today.
I've heard nary a peep about it in the U.S. over the last four years. It's as if it were
as remote in people's consciousness as the Punic Wars.
The World Wars (I and II) can be seen as an increasingly desperate attempt of a fading
British Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, with the material, human,
and moral cost of the wars actually accelerating the empire's demise.
Likewise, the current endless "War on Terra" can be seen as an increasingly desperate
attempt of a fading American Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, again
with the material, human, and moral cost of this war actually accelerating its demise.
But in the meantime, in both examples, the Bankers and the MIC just keep reaping their
profits, even at the expense of the empires they purportedly support and defend.
In a traditional sense the author is right. Strategy is the attainment of political goals,
within existing constraints. (diplomatic, political, resources etc)
"Goals" traditionally means "victories". (WWI is a great example of the sometimes dubious
idea of victory)
Has the US ceased to have a strategy ? No. (Their strategy is myopic & self destructive
– ie it's not a "good" strategy)
The US strategy is based on two core principles: (1) Maintain – extend hegemony
over whole world. (Resources, military etc etc) (2) Act as Israel's Golom. Afghanistan,
at (relatively) minimal cost, US controls key land mass (& with possible future access to
fantastic resources). Threaten, mess up Russian – Chinese ambitions in this area. Iraq:
Israeli enemy, strategic location, resource extraction. Syria: Israeli enemy, strategic
location, key location for resource transfer to markets (EU esp). Deny Russia an ally. Libya:
who cares ? Gaddafi was a pain in the arse. Iran: Israeli enemy, fantastic resources, hate
them regardless.
Of course this (very abbreviated) view of US "strategy" is open to the criticisms that
it's both dumb & evil. As if US establishment cares. Compared to cost of traditional
"war" it's pretty cheap ( which is funny, because it's such a yummy gravy train for the
1% sorry, actually, forgot the FIRST core principle of US strategy: enrich all the "right"
people)
'There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one–on the part of the
instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so
many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for
the war. The pulpit will– warily and cautiously–object–at first; the great,
big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be
a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is
no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side
will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing
and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently
the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long you will see this
curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of
furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as
earlier– but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation–pulpit and
all– will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who
ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen
will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man
will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and
refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that
the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of
grotesque self-deception'.
- Satan, in Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger" (1908)
European politicians, the war on terror, and the triumph of Bankers United: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/06/12/europe-brainwashed-normalize-relations-russia/
"Europe has not had an independent existence for 75 years. European countries do not know
what it means to be a sovereign state. Without Washington European politicians feel lost, so
they are likely to stick with Washington .
Russian hopes to unite with the West in a war against terrorism overlook that terrorism is
the West's weapon for destabilizing independent countries that do not accept a unipolar
world."
The world is ripe for barter exchange. Screw the money changers.
"... In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its "exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam. ..."
"... The cynical fabrication of "false flags" that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers ..."
"... Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as "nuclear targeting planning is increased". The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against "repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this." ..."
"... Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama's overthrow of Ukraine's elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia's western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941. ..."
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its
"exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its
lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was
burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in
Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to "the entire Bank of America family" which "has long supported
our country's veterans". Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed
perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More
than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have
taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right
from the start. The narrator says the war "was begun in good faith by decent people out of
fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings".
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of "false flags"
that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin "incident"
in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official
documents, notably the Pentagon Papers , which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be
for many Americans ! it is difficult to watch the film's jumble of "red peril" maps,
unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
... ... ...
The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987
Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)
that effectively ended the Cold War.
Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche
Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as "nuclear targeting planning is
increased". The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against "repeating the worst
mistakes of the Cold War All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev
and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training
ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this."
But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders' "revolution" in
last year's presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of
America's violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like
Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.
Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record,
including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama's overthrow of Ukraine's elected
government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia's
western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.
According to some commenters at MoA the US neocons can be viewed as a flavor of political psychopaths: "Linear thinking is precisely
how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population for subservience and eventual exploitation.
It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money, guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking
because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates
think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone
straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced
and banished from the Washington tribe."
and " the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath
manages to fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough
about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the troops
in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way of doing things
to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly, that "we create
our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to disaster every single
time. "
Notable quotes:
"... Provided the gross flaws of the intelligence, one has to wonder about the quality of the education in politics provided by Harvard and other expensive universities.. What they seem to learn very well there is lying. ..."
"... Barack CIA 0bama. ..."
"... It seems the, "Mission Possible" of the alphabet agencies is not intelligence, but chaos. ..."
"... Did the U.S. enter the First World War to save the world and democracy, or was it a game of waiting until the sides were exhausted enough that victory would be a walkover, the prize a seat at the center of power and the result that the U.S. could now take advantage of a superior position over the now exhausted former superpowers, having sat out the worst of the fighting and sold to both sides at a healthy profit? ..."
"... Invading Afghanistan and Iraq gives the U.S. a dominant role in the center of the Asian continent, the position coveted by Britain, Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire during the Great Power rivalry leading up to the Great War. It can be seen as partial success in a policy of encirclement of Russia and China. Redefining the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along these lines make them look more successful, not less, however odious we may thing these objectives might be from moral and international law perspectives. ..."
"... you mean non-conforming realities like the rule of law, and possible future contingencies like war crimes tribunals? ..."
"... it seems to me that trying to write some kind of rational analysis of a US foreign policy without mentioning the glaring fact that it's all absolutely illegal strikes me as an exercise in confusion. ..."
"... the author's focus on successful implementation of policy is misguided. That the Iraq War was based on a lie, the Libyan bombing Campaign was illegal, and the Syrian conflict was an illegal proxy war does not trouble him. And the strategic reasons for US long-term occupation of Afghanistan escapes him. ..."
"... Although he laments the failure to plan for contingencies, the words "accountable" and "accountability" never appear in this essay. Nor does the word "neocon" - despite their being the malignant driving force in US FP. ..."
"... There have been many lessons for the Russians since Afghanistan, two that Russia was directly involved with were the 90's break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90's (and the diplomatic invention of R2P) and the Chechen turmoil of the last decade. ..."
"... My only gripe with his work is that he always describes multiple aspects of psychopathy in his observations of U.S. foreign policy and the Washington ruling elite, but never goes as far as to conclude the root of all our problems are psychopathic individuals and institutions, or a culture of psychopathy infesting larger groups of the same, e.g., Washington elite, "The Borg", etc. ..."
"... Linear thinking is precisely how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population for subservience and eventual exploitation. It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money, guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced and banished from the Washington tribe. ..."
"... the military was told "Go to Iraq, overthrow Saddam, everything will work out once we get our contractors and corporations in after you." Paul Bremer's CPA and his "100 Orders" were supposed to fix everything. But the Iraqis objected strenuously to the oil privatization selloff (and the rest of it) and the insurgency was launched. Okay, the military was told, break the insurgency. In comes the CIA, Special Forces, mass surveillance - what comes out? Abu Ghraib torture photos. The insurgency gets even stronger. Iran ends up winning the strategic game, hands down, and has far more influence in Iraq than it could ever dream of during the Saddam era. The whole objective, turning Iraq into a client state of the U.S. neoliberal order, utterly failed. ..."
"... Here's the point I think you're missing: the Washington strategists behind all this are batshit crazy and divorced from reality. Their objectives have to be rewritten every few years, because they're hopeless pipe dreams. They live and work and breathe in these Washington military-industrial think tanks, neocons and neoliberals both, that are largely financed by arms manufacturers and associated private equity firms. As far as the defense contractors go, one war is as good as another, they can keep selling arms to all regardless. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria - cash cows is all they are. So, they finance the PR monkeys to keep pushing "strategic geopolitical initiatives" that are really nonsensical and have no hope of working in the long run - but who cares, the cash keeps flowing. ..."
"... It's all nonsense, there's no FSA just Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, plus the Kurdish proxy force is a long-term dead end - but it keeps the war going. A more rational approach - work with Russia to defeat ISIS, don't worry about economic cooperation between Syria and Iran, tell the Saudis and Israelis that Iran won't invade them (it won't), pull back militarily and focus instead on domestic problems in the USA - the think tanks, defense contractors, Saudi and Israeli lobbyists, they don't like that. ..."
"... Brenner is trying to mislead us with bombastic terminology like "The Linear Mindset". The root cause of America's problems is what Michael Scheuer calls Imperial Hubris: The idea that they are Masters of the Universe and so they have omnipotent power to turn every country into a vassal. But when this hubris meets reality, they get confused and don't know what to do. In such a case, they resort to three standard actions: sanctions, regime change or chaos. If these three don't work, they repeat them! ..."
"... Politicians are mere puppets. Their real owners are the 1% who use the Deep State to direct policy. Among this 1% there are zionists who have enormous influence on US Middle Eastern policy and they use the neocons as their attack dogs to direct such policy. This hubris has caused so much pain, destruction and death all over the world and it has also caused America so much economic damage. ..."
"... America is waning as a global power but instead of self-introspection and returning to realism, they are doubling down on neocon policy stupidity. Putin, China and Iran are trying to save them from their stupidity but they seem to be hell-bent on committing suicide. But I hope the policy sophistication of Russia, China and Iran, as well as their military capabilities that raise the stakes high for US military intervention will force the Masters of the Universe to see sense and reverse their road to destruction. ..."
"... the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath manages to fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the troops in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way of doing things to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly, that "we create our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to disaster every single time. ..."
"... The propaganda part is inventing, manufacturing and embellishing some embodiment of evil that must be defeated to liberate their victims and save humanity. That's the cover story, not the underlying purpose of U.S. aggression. ..."
"... Neocons do not believe that exclusively as a goal in itself - it merely dovetails rather nicely with their ultimate obsession with control, and it's and easy sell against any less-than-perfect targeted foreign leader or government. Irrational demonization is the embodiment of that propaganda. ..."
"... The methods of ultimately controlling the liberated people and their nation's resources are cloaked in the guise of 'bringing Western democracy'. Methods for corrupting the resulting government and usurping their laws and voting are hidden or ignored. The propaganda then turns to either praising the resulting utopia or identifying/creating a new evil that now must also be eliminated. The utopia thing hasn't worked out so well in Libya, Iraq or Ukraine, so they stuck with the 'defeat evil' story. ..."
"... Apart from psychopathy in US leadership, the US has no understanding, nor respect of, other cultures. This is not just in US leadership, but in the exceptional people in general. It shows up from time to time in comments at blogs like this, and is often quite noticeable in comments at SST. ..."
"... The essence of imperial hubris is the belief that one's country is omnipotent; that the country can shape and create reality. The country's main aspiration is to create clients, dependencies and as the Godfather Zbigniew Bzrezinski candidly put it, "vassals".Such a mindset does not just appreciate the reality of contingency; it also does not appreciate the nature of complex systems. The country's elites believe that both soft and hard power should be able to ensure the desired outcomes. But resistance to imperial designs and blowback from the imperial power's activities induce cognitive dissonance. Instead of such cognitive crises leading to a return to reality, they lead to denial amongst this elite. This elite lives in a bubble. Their discourse is intellectually incestuous and anybody that threatens this bubble is ostracized. Limits are set to what can be debated. That is why realists like John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Michael Scheuer and Stephen Cohen are ignored by this elite even though their ideas are very germane. If other countries don't bow down to their dictates, they have only a combination of the following responses: sanctions, regime change and chaos. The paradox is that the more they double down with their delusions the more the country's power continues to decline. My only hope is that this doubling down will not take the world down with it. ..."
"linear"?, I would say amateurish and often stupid! It seems that the USA cannot see far enough as it's submitted to regime changes
every 5 years and decisions are finally left to powerful lobbies that have a better continuity.
Provided the gross flaws
of the intelligence, one has to wonder about the quality of the education in politics provided by Harvard and other expensive
universities.. What they seem to learn very well there is lying.
"Linear" and all that is the mushy feel-good stuff on top of your arrogance. Kleptocracy only NOW putting down its roots? Come
on. Let's get back to the 90's where it started. Vengeance for 9/11? Cover?
It seems the, "Mission Possible" of the alphabet agencies is not intelligence, but chaos. All's well in the world with
them as long as the USSA is grinding away on some near helpless ME country. Drugs and other natural resources flow from and death
and destruction flow to the unsuspecting Muslim targets.
With America, you're our friend, (or at least we tolerate you) until you're not (or we don't), then God help you and your innocent
hoards.
The organized and well scripted chaos has been just one act in the larger play of destroying western civilization with throngs
of Muslims now flooding western Europe and to a lesser degree, USA. Of course, the Deep State had felt confident in allowing Latinos
to destroy America...Trump has put a large crimp in the pipeline--one of the reasons he is hated so badly by the destructive PTB.
Your analysis of linearity is interesting. However, you make what I believe is a critical error. You assume you know the objective
and the path to follow and base your critique accordingly.
It is entirely possible that the underlying objective of, for instance, invading Iraq was to win a war and bring democracy.
Subsequent behaviour in Iraq (and Afghanistan) indicates that there might be (likely is) a hidden but central other objective.
I do not want to state that I know what that is because I am not "in the know". However, much that you attribute to failure from
linear thinking just as easily can be explained by the complexity of realizing a "hidden agenda".
Perhaps we can learn from history. Did the U.S. enter the First World War to save the world and democracy, or was it a
game of waiting until the sides were exhausted enough that victory would be a walkover, the prize a seat at the center of power
and the result that the U.S. could now take advantage of a superior position over the now exhausted former superpowers, having
sat out the worst of the fighting and sold to both sides at a healthy profit?
Invading Afghanistan and Iraq gives the U.S. a dominant role in the center of the Asian continent, the position coveted
by Britain, Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire during the Great Power rivalry leading up to the Great War. It can be seen as
partial success in a policy of encirclement of Russia and China. Redefining the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along these lines make
them look more successful, not less, however odious we may thing these objectives might be from moral and international law perspectives.
Russia learnt a huge lesson from their experience in Afghanistan. There they retreated in the face of a violent Wahabist insurgency
and paid the price. The Soviet union collapsed and became vulnerable to western free-market gangsterism as well as suffering the
blowback of terrorism in Chechnya, where they decided to play it very differently. A bit more like how Assad senior dealt with
the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980's.
Russia knew that if ISIS and friends were allowed to destroy Syria like the Mujahadeen
had done in Afghanistan, then it would only be a matter of time before blowback would come again to Russia.
Russia's involvement is entirely rational and in their national interest. It should never have come as a surprise to the US,
and the US should shake off their cold war propaganda and be grateful that people are willing to put their lives on the line to
defeat Wahabist terrorism. Russia has played a focused line with integrity. Many Syrians love them for this, and many more in
the Middle East will likewise adopt a similar line.
In other words, the linear mindset blocks out all non-conforming realities in the present and those contingent elements
which might arise in the future
you mean non-conforming realities like the rule of law, and possible future contingencies like war crimes tribunals?
i kinda skimmed this piece, but it seems to me that trying to write some kind of rational analysis of a US foreign policy
without mentioning the glaring fact that it's all absolutely illegal strikes me as an exercise in confusion.
Brenner: Washington never really had a plan in Syria.
Really? Firstly, the author's focus on successful implementation of policy is misguided. That the Iraq War was based on
a lie, the Libyan bombing Campaign was illegal, and the Syrian conflict was an illegal proxy war does not trouble him. And the
strategic reasons for US long-term occupation of Afghanistan escapes him.
Although he laments the failure to plan for contingencies, the words "accountable" and "accountability" never appear in
this essay. Nor does the word "neocon" - despite their being the malignant driving force in US FP.
The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities
has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic
to Al Qaeda.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January [2007], Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said
that there is "a new strategic alignment in the Middle East," separating "reformers" and "extremists"; she pointed to the Sunni
states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were "on the other side of that divide."
Lastly, Brenner's complaint that Obama has been "scape-goated" as having created ISIS conveniently ignores Obama's allowing ISIS
to grow by down-playing the threat that it represented. Obama's called ISIS al Queda's "JV team" and senior intelligence analysts
dutifully distorted intelligence to down-play the threat (see below). This was one of many deceptions that Obama took part in
- if not orchestrated (others: "moderate rebels", Benghazi, the "Fiscal Cliff", bank bailouts).
After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States
Central Command's most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command's intelligence products to downplay the threat from
ISIS in Iraq" . . .
The Joint Task Force can find no justifiable reason why operational reporting was repeatedly used as a rationale to change
the analytic product, particularly when the changes only appeared to be made in a more optimistic direction . . .
There have been many lessons for the Russians since Afghanistan, two that Russia was directly involved with were the 90's
break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90's (and the diplomatic invention of R2P) and the Chechen turmoil of the last decade.
Russia has also benefited through the non-linear analysis of US diplomacy failures of the last two decades. Russia has created
a coalition backing up their military entry into the Middle East that allows achievement of tangible objectives at a sustainable
cost.
But b's article is about the US's dismal diplomacy that is exacerbating its rapid empire decline and it does very well to help
explain the rigid lack of thought that hastens the deterioration of US influence.
This article makes a lot of good points, but I didn't really grasp exactly what "linear" thinking is. OK. Venezuela very well
may be turning into a situation. What is the "linear" approach? What, instead, would be the "non-linear" approach? This article
cites many "linear" failures. It would be helpful also to learn of some non-linear successes. If not by the United States then
by somebody else.
Let me clarify my prior posting. This article seems to be asserting that the United States has attempted to pound the square peg
of its policy objectives into the round hole of the Middle East. I pretty much agree with that idea. But how is this "linear,"
as opposed to "bull-headed"? How does being "non-linear" help with the pounding? Would not adapting our policies to pound a round
peg instead be just as "linear" but more clever?
Thanks for posting these great observations by Michael Brenner, b.
The link to his bio on University of Pitsburg site is broken and the page is gone, but it still exists for now in Google's
cache from Aug. 1st
here . His bio can also be found under this ">https://www.theglobalist.com/united-states-common-man-forgotten-by-elites/">this
article from The Globalist
Everything I've read of Dr. Brenner that I've stumbled across is brilliant. My only gripe with his work is that he always
describes multiple aspects of psychopathy in his observations of U.S. foreign policy and the Washington ruling elite, but never
goes as far as to conclude the root of all our problems are psychopathic individuals and institutions, or a culture of psychopathy
infesting larger groups of the same, e.g., Washington elite, "The Borg", etc.
While he is quite accurate in describing the symptoms, one is left with the impression that they are the things to be
fixed. Linear thinking in a U.S. foreign policy of aggression? Absolutely, but it's pointless to 'fix' that without understanding
the cause.
Linear thinking is precisely how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population
for subservience and eventual exploitation. It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money,
guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear
thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters
will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels
that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced and banished from the Washington tribe.
Does anyone in Washington REALLY want to 'save' the Persians and 'rebuild' Iran as they imagine America did post WWII to German
and Japan? Or is the more overriding intent to punish and destroy a leadership that will not submit to the political and commercial
interests in the US? Of course the U.S. fails to deliver any benefits to the 'little people' after destroying their country and
government - they are incapable of understanding what the 'little people' want (same goes for domestic issues in the U.S.).
The U.S. government and leadership do not need lessons to modify their techniques or 'thinking' - they are incapable of doing
so. You can't 'talk a psychopath into having empathy' any more than you can talk them out of having smallpox. 'The law' and voting
were intentionally broken in the U.S. to make them all but useless to fix Washington, yet a zombified American public will continue
to use the religiously (or sit back and watch others use them religiously) with little result. Because we're a democracy and a
nation of laws - the government will fix anything broken with those tools.
In a certain sense, I'm glad Brennan does NOT go on about psychopathy in his articles. He would sound as tedious and nutty
as I do here and would never be allowed near Washington. I'll just be grateful for his thorough illustration of the symptoms for
now.
Your analysis of linearity is interesting. However, you make what I believe is a critical error. You assume you know the objective
and the path to follow and base your critique accordingly.
First, this is more an analysis of military failure to "do the job" that Washington "strategic thinkers" tell them to do, and
the reasons why it's such a futile game. In our system of government, the military does tactics, not strategy. And the above article,
which should be passed out to every politician in this country, isn't really about "the objective".
For example, the military was told "Go to Iraq, overthrow Saddam, everything will work out once we get our contractors
and corporations in after you." Paul Bremer's CPA and his "100 Orders" were supposed to fix everything. But the Iraqis objected
strenuously to the oil privatization selloff (and the rest of it) and the insurgency was launched. Okay, the military was told,
break the insurgency. In comes the CIA, Special Forces, mass surveillance - what comes out? Abu Ghraib torture photos. The insurgency
gets even stronger. Iran ends up winning the strategic game, hands down, and has far more influence in Iraq than it could ever
dream of during the Saddam era. The whole objective, turning Iraq into a client state of the U.S. neoliberal order, utterly failed.
Here's the point I think you're missing: the Washington strategists behind all this are batshit crazy and divorced from
reality. Their objectives have to be rewritten every few years, because they're hopeless pipe dreams. They live and work and
breathe in these Washington military-industrial think tanks, neocons and neoliberals both, that are largely financed by arms manufacturers
and associated private equity firms. As far as the defense contractors go, one war is as good as another, they can keep selling
arms to all regardless. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria - cash cows is all they are. So, they finance the PR monkeys to
keep pushing "strategic geopolitical initiatives" that are really nonsensical and have no hope of working in the long run - but
who cares, the cash keeps flowing.
And if you want to know why the Borg State got firmly behind Hillary Clinton, it's because they could see her supporting this
agenda wholeheartedly, especially after Libya. Here's a comment she wrote to Podesta on 2014-08-19, a long 'strategy piece' ending
with this note:
Note: It is important to keep in mind that as a result of this policy there probably will be concern in the Sunni regions of
Iraq and the Central Government regarding the possible expansion of KRG controlled territory. With advisors in the Peshmerga
command we can reassure the concerned parties that, in return for increase autonomy, the KRG will not exclude the Iraqi Government
from participation in the management of the oil fields around Kirkuk, and the Mosel Dam hydroelectric facility. At the same
time we will be able to work with the Peshmerga as they pursue ISIL into disputed areas of Eastern Syria, coordinating with
FSA troops who can move against ISIL from the North. This will make certain Basher al Assad does not gain an advantage from
these operations. Finally, as it now appears the U.S. is considering a plan to offer contractors as advisors to the Iraqi Ministry
of Defense, we will be in a position to coordinate more effectively between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army.
It's all nonsense, there's no FSA just Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, plus the Kurdish proxy force is a long-term dead end
- but it keeps the war going. A more rational approach - work with Russia to defeat ISIS, don't worry about economic cooperation
between Syria and Iran, tell the Saudis and Israelis that Iran won't invade them (it won't), pull back militarily and focus instead
on domestic problems in the USA - the think tanks, defense contractors, Saudi and Israeli lobbyists, they don't like that.
Regardless, it looks like end times for the American empire, very similar to how the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s, and
the last days of the French and British empires in the 1950s. And good riddance, it's become a dead weight dragging down the standard
of living for most American citizens who aren't on that gravy train.
Brenner is trying to mislead us with bombastic terminology like "The Linear Mindset". The root cause of America's problems
is what Michael Scheuer calls Imperial Hubris: The idea that they are Masters of the Universe and so they have omnipotent power
to turn every country into a vassal. But when this hubris meets reality, they get confused and don't know what to do. In such
a case, they resort to three standard actions: sanctions, regime change or chaos. If these three don't work, they repeat them!
Politicians are mere puppets. Their real owners are the 1% who use the Deep State to direct policy. Among this 1% there
are zionists who have enormous influence on US Middle Eastern policy and they use the neocons as their attack dogs to direct such
policy. This hubris has caused so much pain, destruction and death all over the world and it has also caused America so much economic
damage.
America is waning as a global power but instead of self-introspection and returning to realism, they are doubling down
on neocon policy stupidity. Putin, China and Iran are trying to save them from their stupidity but they seem to be hell-bent on
committing suicide. But I hope the policy sophistication of Russia, China and Iran, as well as their military capabilities that
raise the stakes high for US military intervention will force the Masters of the Universe to see sense and reverse their road
to destruction.
There's a lot in both this piece and the comments. In a sense, I wonder if the core issue behind the Neocon/Imperial mindset isn't
a complete inability to see the other side's point of view. Psychopathy, short-termism (a common fault in businesspeople), divorce
from reality and hubris are likely a good part of it, as somebody, Paveway IV, Makutwa and nonsense factory put it, but the
Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath manages to
fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough
about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the
troops in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way
of doing things to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly,
that "we create our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to
disaster every single time.
I would paraphrase critics of b that he (she?) has fallen into linearity trap: one point is the resources spent by USA on wars
of 21-st century (a lot), the second points are positive results (hardly any), and an intellectual charge proceeds from A to B.
However between A and B there can be diversity of problems. We can stock enough gasoline, run out of potable water. And indeed,
you can encounter pesky terrain. I recall a family vacation trip where we visited Natural Bridges National Monument and we proceeded
to Arizona on an extremely straight highway through pretty flat plateau. Then the pavement end, and the acrophobic designated
driver has to negotiate several 180* hairpins to get down on a cliff flanking Monument Valley. After second inspection, the map
had tiny letters "switchbacks" and a tiny fragment of the road not marked with the pavement. Still better than discovering "bridge
out" annotation on your map only when you gaze at the water flowing between two bridge heads. (If I recall, during late 20-th
century Balkan intervention, US military needed a lot of time to cross Danube river that unexpectedly had no functioning bridge
where they wanted to operate. Landscape changes during a war.)
That said, military usually has an appreciation for terrain. But there are also humans. On domestic side, the number of experts
on those distant societies is small, and qualified experts, minuscule. Because the qualified ones were disproportionally naysayers,
the mere whiff if expertise was treated as treason, and we had a purge of "Arabists". And it was of course worse in the lands
to charm and conquer. Effective rule requires local hands to follow our wishes, people who can be trusted. And, preferably, not
intensely hated by the locals they are supposed to administer. And like with gasoline, water, food, etc. on a vacation trip (who
forgot mosquito repellent!), the list of needed traits is surprisingly long. Like viewing collaboration with Israel supporting
infidels as a mortal sin that can be perpetrated to spare the family from starvation (you can recruit them, success!), but it
has to be atoned through backstabbing (local cadres are disappointing).
Great analysis! This is an excellent example for why I read MOA at least once a day and most of the comments! There's something
of a sad irony that Trump has made at least some kind of effort to thwart the neocons and their relentless rush toward armageddon,
seeing as how lacking in any real intellectual capcity they all seem and with Trump at the helm?
Mostly tptb, our political class, and the pundits for the masses, seem all to exhibit an astonishingly dull witted lack of
true concern or humanity for anybody anywhere, and in my years on earth so far, at least in America, they have inculcated in the
population very dubious ethical chioces, which you would think were tragic, and decisions, which you would believe were doomed,
from the wars being waged, to the lifestyles of the citizenry especially toward the top of the economic ladder, and I don't know
about others here but I for one have been confronting and dealing with these problems both in family and aquaintances for my entire
adult life! Like the battle at Kurushetra. At least they say they "have a plan," scoffingly.
Where is chipnik to weigh in on this with his poetic observations, or I think long ago it was "slthrop" who may have been bannned
for foul language as he or she raged on at the absurdities that keep heaping up exponentially? I do miss them!
Oh well, life is relatively short and we will all be gone at some point and our presense here will be one and all less than
an iota. An awareness of this one fact and its implications you would think would pierce the consciousness of every human being
well before drawing their final breath, but I guess every McCain fails to realize until too late that the jig is up?
Justin Glyn@20 "but the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda."
The propaganda part is inventing, manufacturing and embellishing some embodiment of evil that must be defeated to liberate
their victims and save humanity. That's the cover story, not the underlying purpose of U.S. aggression.
Neocons do not believe that exclusively as a goal in itself - it merely dovetails rather nicely with their ultimate obsession
with control, and it's and easy sell against any less-than-perfect targeted foreign leader or government. Irrational demonization
is the embodiment of that propaganda.
The methods of ultimately controlling the liberated people and their nation's resources are cloaked in the guise of 'bringing
Western democracy'. Methods for corrupting the resulting government and usurping their laws and voting are hidden or ignored.
The propaganda then turns to either praising the resulting utopia or identifying/creating a new evil that now must also be eliminated.
The utopia thing hasn't worked out so well in Libya, Iraq or Ukraine, so they stuck with the 'defeat evil' story.
Apart from psychopathy in US leadership, the US has no understanding, nor respect of, other cultures. This is not just in
US leadership, but in the exceptional people in general. It shows up from time to time in comments at blogs like this, and is
often quite noticeable in comments at SST.
That it why the US in its arrogance has failed in Syria, and Russia with its tiny force has been so successful.
The essence of imperial hubris is the belief that one's country is omnipotent; that the country can shape and create reality.
The country's main aspiration is to create clients, dependencies and as the Godfather Zbigniew Bzrezinski candidly put it, "vassals".Such
a mindset does not just appreciate the reality of contingency; it also does not appreciate the nature of complex systems. The
country's elites believe that both soft and hard power should be able to ensure the desired outcomes. But resistance to imperial
designs and blowback from the imperial power's activities induce cognitive dissonance. Instead of such cognitive crises leading
to a return to reality, they lead to denial amongst this elite. This elite lives in a bubble. Their discourse is intellectually
incestuous and anybody that threatens this bubble is ostracized. Limits are set to what can be debated. That is why realists like
John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Michael Scheuer and Stephen Cohen are ignored by this elite even though their ideas are very germane.
If other countries don't bow down to their dictates, they have only a combination of the following responses: sanctions, regime
change and chaos. The paradox is that the more they double down with their delusions the more the country's power continues to
decline. My only hope is that this doubling down will not take the world down with it.
"... A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating, if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature, is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it; of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it. ..."
"... My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us. ..."
"... Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again. ..."
Consider this article a work of speculation; a jumble of ideas thrown at a blank canvas.
A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating,
if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature,
is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to
teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it;
of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it.
For example, America's overseas wars today are both abstractions and distractions. They're also somewhat surreal to most Americans,
living as we do in comparative safety and material luxury (when compared to most other peoples of the world). Abstraction and surrealism:
two art styles that may say something vital about America's wars.
If some aspects of America's wars are surreal and others abstract, if reports of those wars are often impressionistic and often
blurred beyond recognition, this points to, I think, the highly stylized representations of war that are submitted for our consideration.
What we don't get very often is realism. Recall how the Bush/Cheney administration forbade photos of flag-draped coffins returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of all the war reporting you've seen on U.S. TV and Cable networks, and ask how many times you saw
severed American limbs and dead bodies on a battlefield. (On occasion, dead bodies of the enemy are shown, usually briefly and abstractly,
with no human backstory.)
Of course, there's no "real" way to showcase the brutal reality of war, short of bringing a person to the front and having them
face fire in combat -- a level of "participatory" art that sane people would likely seek to avoid. What we get, as spectators (which
is what we're told to remain in America), is an impression of combat. Here and there, a surreal report. An abstract news clip. Blown
up buildings become exercises in neo-Cubism; melted buildings and weapons become Daliesque displays. Severed limbs (of the enemy)
are exercises in the grotesque. For the vast majority of Americans, what's lacking is raw immediacy and gut-wrenching reality.
Again, we are spectators, not participants. And our responses are often as stylized and limited as the representations are. As
Rebecca Gordon put it from a different angle at
TomDispatch.com , when it comes to America's wars, are we participating in reality or merely watching reality TV? And why are
so many so prone to confuse or conflate the two?
Art, of course, isn't the only lens through which we can see and interpret America's wars. Advertising, especially hyperbole,
is also quite revealing. Thus the US military has been sold, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama, as "the world's finest military
in history" or WFMH, an acronym I just made up, and which should perhaps come with a copyright or trademark symbol after it. It's
classic advertising hyperbole. It's salesmanship in place of reality.
So, when other peoples beat our WFMH, we should do what Americans do best: sue them for copyright infringement. Our legions of
lawyers will most certainly beat their cadres of counsels. After all, under Bush/Cheney, our lawyers tortured logic and the law to
support torture itself. Talk about surrealism!
My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least
in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the
ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us.
As I said, this is me throwing ideas at the canvas of my computer screen. Do they make any sense to you? Feel free to pick up
your own brush and compose away in the comments section.
P.S. Danger, Will Robinson. I've never taken an art theory class or studied advertising closely.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools
and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at
[email protected] . Reprinted from Bracing
Views with the author's permission.
Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a
Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again.
"... It is understandable why so many are angry at the leaders of America's institutions, including businesses, schools and governments," Dimon, 61, summarized. "This can understandably lead to disenchantment with trade, globalization and even our free enterprise system, which for so many people seems not to have worked. ..."
"JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has two big pronouncements as the Trump administration starts reshaping
the government: "The United States of America is truly an exceptional country," and "it is clear that something is wrong."
Dimon, leader of world's most valuable bank and a counselor to the new president, used his 45-page annual letter to shareholders
on Tuesday to list ways America is stronger than ever -- before jumping into a much longer list of self-inflicted problems that
he said was "upsetting" to write.
Here's the start: Since the turn of the century, the U.S. has dumped trillions of dollars into wars, piled huge debt onto students,
forced legions of foreigners to leave after getting advanced degrees, driven millions of Americans out of the workplace with felonies
for sometimes minor offenses and hobbled the housing market with hastily crafted layers of rules.
Dimon, who sits on Donald Trump's business forum aimed at boosting job growth, is renowned for his optimism and has been voicing
support this year for parts of the president's business agenda. In February, Dimon predicted the U.S. would have a bright economic
future if the new administration carries out plans to overhaul taxes, rein in rules and boost infrastructure investment. In an
interview last month, he credited Trump with boosting consumer and business confidence in growth, and reawakening "animal spirits."
But on Tuesday, reasons for concern kept coming. Labor market participation is low, Dimon wrote. Inner-city schools are failing
poor kids. High schools and vocational schools aren't providing skills to get decent jobs. Infrastructure planning and spending
is so anemic that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in more than 20 years. Corporate taxes are so onerous it's driving capital
and brains overseas. Regulation is excessive.
" It is understandable why so many are angry at the leaders of America's institutions, including businesses, schools and
governments," Dimon, 61, summarized. "This can understandably lead to disenchantment with trade, globalization and even our free
enterprise system, which for so many people seems not to have worked. "...
"Inner-city schools are failing poor kids. High schools and vocational schools aren't providing skills to get decent jobs. Infrastructure
planning and spending is so anemic that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in more than 20 years. Corporate taxes are so onerous
it's driving capital and brains overseas. Regulation is excessive."
Let's unpack his list. The 4th (last) sentence is his hope that his bank can back to the unregulated regime that brought us
the Great Recession. His 3rd sentence is a call for more tax cuts for the rich.
We may like his first 2 sentences here but who is going to pay for this? Not Jamie Dimon. See sentence #3.
Why would you object to government creating more demand for labor? Over time, wages will rise and higher wages will fund more
demand for labor produced goods.
"... As the steward-in-chief of the American empire, Obama continued Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and extended his "War on Terror" into Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. He also became a terrorist himself and a serial killer, weaponized drones and special ops assassins being his weapons of choice. ..."
Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize -- for not being George W. Bush. This seemed unseemly at the time, but not outrageous.
Seven years later, it seems grotesque.
As the steward-in-chief of the American empire, Obama continued Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and extended his "War on Terror"
into Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. He also became a terrorist himself and a serial killer, weaponized drones and special ops assassins being his weapons of choice.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY
(Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS
(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is
In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the
Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy)
at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to
Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics
of Illusion (AK Press).
"... Although the bill has not said which specific Russians, the nature of the bill means that there will be inevitable sanctions against Russia as it is a top weapon exporter to Syria, which will unlikely change despite of the new sanctions. Those in the eventual sanction list will face an American blacklist, which means a ban on entry, freezing of assets in the United States, a ban on doing business with this person for American citizens or companies. At the same time, the bill allows that the US President can consider each case separately and refuse to impose sanctions. ..."
"... Washington is frustrated that European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S., which calls into question the cooperation between the U.S. and Europe. It is a very risky measure and Europe would need to have a blunt attitude of rejection of these measures imposed by the U.S., because its own economy is at risk. ..."
"... Effectively, the "Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act," which strangely targets Russia who had a greater role than the U.S. in defeating ISIS terrorists, is just another way for Washington to warn other countries not to buy the S-400 or Russian military equipment or engage in energy diplomacy with Moscow. It is unlikely that this will deter states from conducting arms and energy deals with Russia as Moscow has been pioneering anti-sanction measures to protect financial transactions without punishment, and rather it demonstrates a Washington that is becoming increasingly desperate in the Era of Multipolarity. ..."
Washington's Proposed New Sanctions Against Turkey also Aimed Against Russia
December 18, 2019 A Opinion Leave a commentWith the world fixated on Turkish actions
against Syria, Greece and Libya at the moment, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate
of the United States Congress approved a bill, "Promoting American National Security and
Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act," spearheaded and thoroughly promoted by staunch
anti-Syria/Venezuela/Iran/Russia Democratic Senator Robert Menendez who celebrated the bills
passing
on his Twitter . The Republican-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 18-4 to send
the bill for a vote in the full Senate.
The approval of the bill was widely reported in the mainstream media as an "anti-Turkey
bill." Senator Jim Risch, the panel's Republican chairman, a fellow endorser of the bill with
Menendez, said that the approval of this bill is because of the "drift by this country, Turkey,
to go in an entirely different direction than what they have in the past. They've thumbed their
nose at us, and they've thumbed their nose at their other NATO allies."
According to
the draft bill , the Turkish acquisition of the powerful S-400 missile defense system gives
grounds to impose sanctions against this country, under the Countering America's Adversaries
Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). In particular, the document restricts the sale of U.S. weapons
to Turkey and imposes sanctions on Turkish officials responsible for supplying weapons towards
their
illegal military operation in Syria.
Turkey signed in December 2017 the first contract with Russia for the purchase of the S-400
for a value of $2.5 billion, which caused tension in relations between Ankara and Washington.
The U.S. demanded that Ankara renounce that transaction and buy U.S. Patriot systems, and
threatened to delay or cancel the sale of the F-35 fighters to Turkey. Ankara refused to make
concessions and assured that its purpose of acquiring Russian systems remains firm.
What was missed, perhaps intentionally by the majority of the mainstream media is that this
bill has a heavy anti-Russian/Syrian component to it. Although not as detailed and expansive as
the Turkish section of the bill, it claims that "the Russian Federation and Iran continue to
exploit a security vacuum in Syria and continue to pose a threat to vital United States
national security interests," without explaining what these security interests are, exactly as
we have become accustomed to.
According to the bill, there will be a
"list of each Russian person that, on or after such date of enactment, knowingly exports,
transfers, or otherwise provides to Syria significant financial, material, or technological
support that contributes materially to the ability of the Government of Syria to acquire
defense articles, defense services, and related information."
Although the bill has not said which specific Russians, the nature of the bill means that
there will be inevitable sanctions against Russia as it is a top weapon exporter to Syria,
which will unlikely change despite of the new sanctions. Those in the eventual sanction list
will face an American blacklist, which means a ban on entry, freezing of assets in the United
States, a ban on doing business with this person for American citizens or companies. At the
same time, the bill allows that the US President can consider each case separately and refuse
to impose sanctions.
These proposed new sanctions that will have to pass the House of Representatives, which
passed its own anti-Turkish sanctions bill by an overwhelming 403-16 vote in October, is part
of a wider effort for the U.S. to keep pressurizing Russia's economy. On December 9, the
committees of both chambers of the U.S. Congress previously agreed on the military budget for
2020, which includes restrictions against the Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream pipelines to bring
Russian energy to Europe, infrastructures designed to raise Europe's energy security. The U.S.
bill that provides sanctions against companies participating in the laying of the Nord Stream 2
gas pipeline aims to obtain unilateral advantages in the gas area to the detriment of the
interests of the countries of Europe. This prompted the chairman of the Board of Directors of
the Russian-German Foreign Chamber of Commerce, Matthias Schepp, to explain that the new
measures against Nord Stream 2 affect not only Russia, but, above all, European companies and
Germany's energy interests.
Washington is frustrated that European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S.,
which calls into question the cooperation between the U.S. and Europe. It is a very risky
measure and Europe would need to have a blunt attitude of rejection of these measures imposed
by the U.S., because its own economy is at risk.
Effectively, the "Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS
Act," which strangely targets Russia who had a greater role than the U.S. in defeating ISIS
terrorists, is just another way for Washington to warn other countries not to buy the S-400 or
Russian military equipment or engage in energy diplomacy with Moscow. It is unlikely that this
will deter states from conducting arms and energy deals with Russia as Moscow has been
pioneering anti-sanction
measures to protect financial transactions without punishment, and rather it demonstrates a
Washington that is becoming increasingly desperate in the Era of Multipolarity.
"... One of the most revealing and absurd responses to rejections of forever war is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries: ..."
"... The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare. ..."
"... The routinization and normalization of endless, unauthorized war is one of the most harmful legacies of the Obama administration. ..."
"... When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something else. ..."
One of the most revealing and absurd responses to
rejections of forever war
is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries:
Just like @POTUS , who put a limited op of NE
#Syria under heading of "endless
war," this op-ed has "drone strikes & Special Ops raids" in indictment of US-at-war. In fact, those actions are antidote to war.
Their misguided critique is insult to real war. https://t.co/DCLS9IDKSw
War has become so normalized over the last twenty years that the constant use of military force gets discounted as something other
than "real war." We have seen this war denialism on display several times in the last year. As more presidential candidates and analysts
have started rejecting endless war, the war's
defenders have often
chosen to
pretend
that the U.S. isn't at war at all. The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is
a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and
Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare.
Because Obama is relatively less aggressive and reckless than his hawkish opponents (a very low bar to clear), he is frequently
given a pass on these issues, and we are treated to misleading stories about his supposed "realism" and "restraint." Insofar as
he has been a president who normalized and routinized open-ended and unnecessary foreign wars, he has shown that neither of those
terms should be used to describe his foreign policy. Even though I know all too well that the president that follows him will
be even worse, the next president will have a freer hand to conduct a more aggressive and dangerous foreign policy in part because
of illegal wars Obama has waged during his time in office.
The attempt to define war so that it never includes what the U.S. military happens to be doing when it uses force abroad has been
going on for quite a while. When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they
came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the
Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't
engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for
redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't
engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that
gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment
of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something
else.
It isn't just physical war that results in active service body bags but our aggression has alreay cost lives on the home front
and there is every reason to believe it will do so again.
We were not isolationists prior to 9/11/2001, Al Qaeda had already attacked but we were distracted bombing Serbia, expanding
NATO, and trying to connect Al Qaeda attacks to Iran. We were just attacked by a Saudi officer we were training on our soil to
use the Saudis against Iran.
It remains to be seen what our economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, and our continued use of Afghanistan
as a bombing platform will cost us. We think we are being clever by using our Treasury Dept and low intensity warfare to minimize
direct immediate casualties but how long can that last.
This article confirms what the last Real Commander-in-Chief, General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about when he retired
58 years ago.
His wise Council based on his Supreme Military-Political experience has been ignored.
The MSM, Propagandists for the Military-Industrial Complex, won't remind the American People.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could,
with time and as required, make swords as well.
But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments
industry of vast proportions.
Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on
military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total
influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.
We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the
very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
The psychological contortionism required to deny that we are at war amazes me. US military forces are killing people in other
countries – but it's not war? Because we can manufacture comforting euphemisms like "police action" or "preventive action" or
"drone strike," it's not war? Because it's smaller scale than a "real" war like WWII?
Cancer is cancer. A small cancer is still a cancer. Arguing that it's not cancer because it's not metastatic stage IV is, well,
the most polite term is sophistry. More accurate terms aren't printable.
> alliances like NATO, and ultimately the loss of our democracy
Changes might be coming, but Republicans and Clinton faction of Dems are now fully
prepared to resist those changes tooth and nail.
Neoliberal Dems just invented the template for deposing or, at least, paralyzing any
future antiwar president. Via vote of non-confidence mechanism, which essentially what
House impeachment "investigation" was about.
You can always find another Fiona Hill, or Alexander Vindman or a half-dozen State
Department neocon hawks (where in some cases it was unclear who is their real employee )
, or find another jingoistic and complexly detached from reality professor like Karlan,
to support this action. Neocons feed from threat inflation. And money from MIC doesn't
smell.
The problems with the current impeachment goes far deeper then Trump. It is a change
of the constitutional system converting it closer to the UK model.
One last item I'll copy/paste from Putin's presser is his answer to questions from China's
CCTV bearing in mind what has occurred since the UNGA Debate speeches in September.
Questions:
"The first question is about Chinese-Russian relations. This year marks 70 years since the
establishment of diplomatic relations between our countries. We can say that our bilateral
ties have entered a new era. And my question is this: which results of our partnership do you
see as the most significant, and what future cooperation potential do you see between our
countries?
"The other question is about international affairs. The global situation today is full of
uncertainty and instability. Obviously, some countries pursue a policy to maintain a unipolar
world and protectionism, undermining the foundations of international law and free trade,
while China and Russia are both supporters of a multipolar world. So what steps do you think
China and Russia could take to support the original principles of a multipolar system and
free trade, and how could they effectively respond to external challenges?"
Putin's answers:
"The most important thing that we have achieved in recent years, between Russia and the
People's Republic of China The most important thing is not even the figures I will cite in a
moment, or the industries in which we cooperate – the most important achievement is
the unprecedented level of trust that has developed between our countries . [My
Emphasis]
"This is what forms the basis for our accomplishments in the economy (our bilateral trade
has topped 100 billion, and we will certainly attain even 200 billion, we will reach that
mark), and for our successful high-tech projects – in space exploration, the aircraft
industry, and transport in general, and in many other areas.
"Russian-Chinese cooperation is undoubtedly a major factor of international stability,
including the strengthening of international law and the creation of a multipolar world.
"As a matter of fact, it has already been created; a unipolar world no longer exists.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an illusion that this system was possible
and that it would last for a long time, but it was only an illusion. I always said so. The
most recent events have indicated just that. When you say 'some countries,' you, first of
all, mean the United States. The world's multipolarity is a derivative of economic
relations.
"After World War II, the US share in world GDP was 50 percent. And now China's share is
higher than the US's share, I may be mistaken, but China is ahead of the United States in its
share of global GDP. And also in many other indicators. In terms of purchasing power parity,
the Chinese economy has become larger than the American one.
"This inevitably leads to changes in many other areas. And apart from that, the world
simply cannot have a unipolar structure, with a single centre that governs the entire
international community.
"The role of our interaction with China is very important here. We will continue to
strengthen our multilateral strategic ties. I am sure that this will benefit the people of
China and the Russian Federation alike."
Trust, one of the most difficult, fragile yet most important aspect of all relations. It
is something the Outlaw US Empire neither has nor seems to value whatsoever as we see no
attempts at trying to build trust with any nation. Everything is framed in
Zero-sum terms. Do please take a moment to compare that very well observed mindset with that
expressed in the US Declaration of Independence's opening paragraph:
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the
earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle
them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the
causes which impel them to the separation ." [My Emphasis]
The smallminded men and women holding power in the Outlaw US Empire are mental midgets in
comparison. They are holding their compatriots hostage in their allegiance to the corruption
in which they wallow and cause many deaths globally on a daily basis because they essentially
trust nothing, for to have trust in anything you must first care about that thing. There's no
Love, no Trust, no Kindness, not even Kindred Spirit--they are like an alien organism, a
cancer, requiring removal just like the financial parasites that are their only allies. Such
a vast, sad waste.
"The CIA was the central protagonist in Russiagate. The origins of the New Cold War are found
in Bill Clinton's first term, when administration neo-cons looted, plundered and moved NATO
against a prostrate Russia in
contradiction to explicit guarantees not to do so made by the George H.W. Bush
administration. Vladimir Putin's apparent crime was to oust the Clintonites from Russia and
restore Russian sovereignty." CounterPunch.org
"Russiagate was a declaration of war by the 'intelligence community' against a duly elected
President. As argued below, the CIA's motive is to move its own foreign policy agenda forward
without even the illusion of democratic consent." CounterPunch.org
Notable quotes:
"... Actions in the Washington cesspool never surprise -- by members of both right wing of the US war party. They represent the greatest threat to world peace and ordinary people everywhere at home and abroad. Pro-war, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, anti-progressive Speaker Pelosi is part of the problem, never part of the solution. ..."
Actions in the Washington cesspool never surprise -- by members of both right wing of the US
war party. They represent the greatest threat to world peace and ordinary people everywhere at home and
abroad. Pro-war, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, anti-progressive Speaker Pelosi is part of the
problem, never part of the solution.
Her long disturbing congressional record shows she exclusively serves wealth and power
interests at the expense of the vast majority of Americans she disdains, proving it time and
again.
Her deplorable voting record speaks for itself, backing:
the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Blily Act repeal of Glass-Steagall, permitting some of the most
egregious financial abuses in the modern era;
the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), permitting endless
wars of aggression in multiple theaters, raging endlessly;
annual National Defense Authorization Acts and US wars of aggression;
Obama's neoliberal harshness, continuing under Trump, along with tax cuts for the rich,
benefitting her and her husband enormously, without admitting it;
increasingly unaffordable marketplace medicine, ripping off consumers for profit, leaving
millions uninsured, most Americans way underinsured;
the USA Patriot Act, Anti-Terrorism Act and other police state law;
the 9/11 whitewash Commission Recommendation Act;
the FISA Amendments Act -- permitting warrantless spying post-9/11, Big Brother watching
everyone;
NAFTA and other anti-consumer/corporate coup d'etat trade bills;
the repressive US gulag prison system, the world's largest by far; incarcerating
millions by federal, state, and local authorities, it includes global torture prisons;
unapologetic support for Israeli apartheid viciousness;
fierce opposition to Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, and other
nonbelligerent sovereign states threatening no one;
the Russiagate witch hunt and Ukrainegate scams.
Calling exploitive/predatory "free market (capitalism) our greatest asset" shows her
contempt for equity and justice.
Her support for the military, industrial, security, media complex is all about backing
endless wars of aggression against invented enemies. No real ones exist.
Pelosi represents what belligerent, plutocratic, oligarchic, increasingly totalitarian rule
is all about, notably contemptuous of nations on the US target list for regime change --
Russia, China and Iran topping the list.
On Friday, she falsely accused Russia of involvement in Ukrainegate, a failed Russiagate
scam spinoff with no legitimacy, supported by undemocratic Dems and their echo-chamber
media.
Repeating the long ago debunked Russian US election meddling Big Lie that won't die, she
falsely accused Moscow of "ha(ving) a hand in this."
Referring to the Ukrainegate scam, she offered no evidence backing her accusation because
none exists.
During a Friday press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York,
Sergey Lavrov slammed Pelosi's Big Lie, saying:
"Russia's been accused of all the deadly sins, and then some. It's paranoia, and I think
it's obvious to everyone."
It's unacceptable anti-Russia hate-mongering, what goes on endlessly, Cold War 2.0
raging.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the following on her facebook
page:
"Speaker of the lower house of Congress Nancy Pelosi believes that Russia is involved in the
scandal over July telephone conversation between us and Ukraine Presidents Donald Trump and
Vladimir Zelensky."
"This (baseless) assumption was made on Friday Pelosi (not) explaining what it means, and
without providing evidence of her words."
"Considering that it was Nancy Pelosi who caused the 'Scandal around the telephone
conversation between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine,' then, according to the
speaker's logic, Russia attached the hand to her."
What's going on is continuation of the most shameful political chapter in US history,
ongoing since Trump took office, along with railroading Richard Nixon.
Both episodes represent McCarthyism on steroids – supported by establishment media,
furious about Trump's triumph over Hillary, targeting him largely for the wrong reasons,
ignoring plenty of right ones.
Mueller's probe ended with a whimper, not the bang Dems wanted, Ukrainegate their second
bite of the apple to try discrediting Trump for political advantage ahead of November 2020
elections.
That's what Russiagate and Ukrainegate are all about.
These actions by undemocratic Dems and their media press agents are further clear proof that
Washington's deeply corrupted political system to its rotten core is far too debauched to
fix.
Afghan war demonstrated that the USA got into the trap, the Catch 22 situation: it can't
stop following an expensive and self-destructive positive feedback loop of threat inflation
and larger and large expenditures on MIC, because there is no countervailing force for the
MIC since WWII ended. Financial oligarchy is aligned with MIC.
This is the same suicidal grip of MIC on the country that was one of the key factors
in the collapse of the USSR means that in this key area the USA does not have two party
system, It is a Uniparty: a singe War party with two superficially different factions.
Feeding and care MIC is No.1 task for both. Ordinary Americans wellbeing does matter much
for either party. New generation of Americans is punished with crushing debt and low paying
jobs. They do not care that people over 50 who lost their jobs are essentially thrown out
like a garbage.
"41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"–US Dept.
of Agriculture. FDR addressed the needs of this faction of the population when he delivered
his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded
on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship;
3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.
Items 3 and 4 are probably unachievable under neoliberalism. And fear is artificially
instilled to unite the nation against the external scapegoat much like in Orwell 1984.
Currently this is Russia, later probably will be China. With regular minutes of hate replaced
by Rachel Maddow show ;-)
Derailing Tulsi had shown that in the USA any politician, who try to challenge MIC, will
be instantly attacked by MIC lapdogs in MSM and neutered in no time.
One interesting tidbit from Fiona Hill testimony is that neocons who dominate the USA
foreign policy establishment make their living off threat inflation. They literally are
bought by MIC, which indirectly finance Brookings institution, Atlantic Council and similar
think tanks. And this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact. Rephrasing Samuel Johnson's
famous quote, we can say, "MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last
refuge of scoundrels."
The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era
corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign,
Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine
issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely
against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited
prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia
and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination
for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.
It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy
against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy
through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.
All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.
The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.
If anyone was watching The Horowitz hearing in the senate today it would be hard to conclude
that RussiaGate and Ukrainegate will not have serious consequences going forward.
The whole sordid, nasty conspiracy seems on the verge of being exposed, maybe as high as
Obama himself, although he is just a puppet himself, and indictments are sure to follow. I
don't see how anyone could think that this will not be catastrophic for the democratic
party.
"... The FFM was headed by Malik Ellahi , who served as head of the OPCW's government relations and political affairs branch. The appointment of someone lacking both technical and operational experience suggests that Ellahi's primary role was political. Under his leadership, the FFM established a close working relationship with the anti-Assad Syrian opposition, including the White Helmets and SAMS. ..."
"... Once the FFM wrapped up its investigation in Douma, however, it became apparent to Fairweather that it had a problem. There were serious questions about whether chlorine had, in fact, been used as a weapon. The solution, brokered by Fairweather, was to release an interim report that ruled out sarin altogether, but left the door open regarding chlorine. ..."
"... Braha did this by dispatching OPCW inspectors to Turkey in September 2018 to interview new witnesses identified by the White Helmets, and by commissioning new engineering studies that better explained the presence of the two chlorine cannisters found in Douma. By March, Braha had assembled enough information to enable the technical directorate to issue its final report. Almost immediately, dissent appeared in the ranks of the OPCW. An engineering report that contradicted the findings published by Braha was leaked , setting off a firestorm of controversy derived from its conclusion that the chlorine cannisters found in Douma had most likely been staged by the White Helmets. ..."
"... The OPCW, while eventually acknowledging that the leaked report was genuine, explained its exclusion from the final report on the grounds that it attributed blame, something the FFM was not mandated to do. According to the OPCW , the engineering report in question had been submitted to the investigation and identification team, a newly created body within the OPCW mandated to make such determinations. Moreover, Director General Arias stood by the report's conclusion that it had "reasonable grounds" to believe "that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon has taken place on 7 April 2018." ..."
"... The OPCW's credibility as an investigative body has been brought into question through these leaks, as has its independent character. If an organization like the OPCW can be used at will by the U.S., the United Kingdom and France to trigger military attacks intended to support regime-change activities in member states, then it no longer serves a useful purpose to the international community it ostensibly serves. ..."
A spate of leaks from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (
OPCW ), the international inspectorate
created for the purpose of implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention, has raised serious
questions about the institution's integrity, objectivity and credibility. The leaks address
issues pertaining to the OPCW investigation into allegations that the Syrian government used
chemical weapons to attack civilians in the Damascus suburb of Douma on April 7, 2018. These
allegations, which originated from such anti-Assad organizations as the Syrian Civil Defense
(the so-called White Helmets )
and the Syrian American Medical Society ( SAMS ), were immediately embraced as credible by the OPCW, and
were used by the United States, France and the United Kingdom
to justify punitive military strikes against facilities inside Syria assessed by these
nations as having been involved in chemical weapons-related activities before the OPCW
initiated any on-site investigation.
The Douma incident was initially described by the White Helmets, SAMS and the U.S., U.K. and
French governments as involving both sarin nerve agent and chlorine gas. However, this
narrative was altered when OPCW inspectors released, on July 6, 2018, interim
findings of their investigation that found no evidence of the use of sarin. The focus of
the investigation quickly shifted to a pair of chlorine cylinders claimed by the White Helmets
to have been dropped onto apartment buildings in Douma by the Syrian Air Force, resulting in
the release of a cloud of chlorine gas that killed dozens of Syrian civilians. In March, the
OPCW released its final report on
the Douma incident , noting that it had "reasonable grounds" to believe "that the use of a
toxic chemical as a weapon has taken place on 7 April 2018," that "this toxic chemical
contained reactive chlorine" and that "the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine."
Much has been written about the OPCW inspection process in Syria, and particularly the
methodology used by the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), an inspection body created by the OPCW in
2014 "to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly
chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic." The FFM was created under the
direction of Ahmet
Üzümcü , a career Turkish diplomat with extensive experience in
multinational organizations, including service as Turkey's ambassador to NATO.
Üzümcü was the OPCW's third director general, having been selected from a field
of seven candidates by its executive council to replace Argentine diplomat Rogelio Pfirter.
Pfirter had held the position since being nominated to replace the OPCW's first director
general, José Maurício Bustani. Bustani's tenure was marred by controversy that
saw the OPCW transition away from its intended role as an independent implementor of the
Chemical Weapons Convention to that of a tool of unilateral U.S. policy, a role that continues
to mar the OPCW's work in Syria today, especially when it comes to its investigation of the
alleged use by the Syrian government of chemical weapons against civilians in Douma in April
2018.
Bustani was removed from his position in 2002, following an
unprecedented campaign led by John Bolton, who at the time was serving as the
undersecretary of state for Arms Control and International Security Affairs in the U.S. State
Department. What was Bustani's crime? In 2001, he had dared to enter negotiations with the
government of Iraq to secure that nation's entry into the OPCW, thereby setting the stage for
OPCW inspectors to visit Iraq and bring its chemical weapons capability under OPCW control. As
director general, there was nothing untoward about Bustani's action. But Iraq circa 2001 was
not a typical recruitment target. In the aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991, the U.N. Security
Council had passed a resolution under Chapter VII requiring Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), including its chemical weapons capability, to be "removed, destroyed or rendered
harmless" under the supervision of inspectors working on behalf of the United Nations Special
Commission, or UNSCOM.
The pursuit of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction led to a series of confrontations with Iraq
that culminated in inspectors being ordered out of the country by the U.S. in 1998, prior to a
72-hour aerial attack -- Operation Desert Fox. Iraq refused to allow UNSCOM inspectors to
return, rightfully claiming that the U.S. had infiltrated the ranks of the inspectors and was
using the inspection process to spy on Iraqi leadership for the purposes of facilitating regime
change. The lack of inspectors in Iraq allowed the U.S. and others to engage in wild
speculation regarding Iraqi rearmament activities, including in the field of chemical weapons.
This speculation was used to fuel a call for military action against Iraq, citing the threat of
a reconstituted WMD capability as the justification. Bustani sought to defuse this situation by
bringing Iraq into the OPCW, an act that, if completed, would have derailed the U.S. case for
military intervention in Iraq. Bolton's intervention
included threats to Bustani and his family, as well as threats to withhold U.S. dues to the OPCW accounting
for some 22% of that organization's budget; had the latter threat been implemented, it would
have resulted in OPCW's disbandment.
Bustani's departure marked the end of the OPCW as an independent organization. Pfirter,
Bolton's hand-picked replacement, vowed to keep the OPCW out of Iraq. In an
interview with U.S. media shortly after his appointment, Pfirter noted that while all
nations should be encouraged to join the OPCW, "We should be very aware that there are United
Nations resolutions in effect" that precluded Iraqi membership "at the expense" of its
obligations to the Security Council. Under the threat of military action, Iraq allowed UNMOVIC
inspectors to return in 2002; by February 2003, no WMD had been found , a result that did
not meet with U.S. satisfaction. In March 2003, UNMOVIC inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq
under orders of the U.S., paving the way for the subsequent invasion and occupation of that
nation that same month (the CIA later concluded that
Iraq had been disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction by the summer of 1991).
Under Pfirter's leadership, the OPCW became a compliant tool of U.S. foreign policy
objectives. By completely subordinating OPCW operations through the constant threat of fiscal
ruin, the U.S. engaged in a continuous quid pro quo arrangement, trading the financial solvency
of an ostensible multilateral organization for complicity in operating as a de facto extension
of American unilateral policy. Bolton's actions in 2002 put the OPCW and its employees on
notice: Cross the U.S., and you will pay a terminal price.
When Üzümcü took over the OPCW's reins in 2010, the organization was very
much the model of multinational consensus, which, in the case of any multilateral organization
in which the U.S. plays a critical role, meant that nothing transpired without the express
approval of the U.S. and its European NATO allies, in particular the United Kingdom and France.
Shortly after he took office, Üzümcü was joined by Robert Fairweather , a
career British diplomat who served as Üzümcü's chief of Cabinet. (While
Üzümcü was the ostensible head of the OPCW, the daily task of managing the
functioning of the OPCW was that of the chief of Cabinet. In short, nothing transpired within
the OPCW without Fairweather's knowledge and concurrence.)
Üzümcü and Fairweather's tenure at the OPCW was dominated by Syria, where,
since 2011, the government of President Bashar Assad had been engaged in a full-scale conflict
with a foreign-funded and -equipped insurgency whose purpose was regime change. By 2013,
allegations emerged from both the Syrian government and rebel forces concerning the use of
chemical weapons by the other side. In August 2013, the OPCW dispatched an inspection team into
Syria as part of a U.N.-led effort, which included specialists from the World Health
Organization (WHO) and the U.N. itself, to investigate allegations that sarin had been used in
attack on civilians in the town of Ghouta. While the mission found conclusive evidence that sarin nerve agent had been
used , it did not assign blame for the attack.
Despite the lack of causality, the U.S. and its NATO allies quickly assigned blame for the
sarin attacks on the Syrian government. To forestall U.S. military action against Syria, the
Russian
government helped broker a deal whereby the U.S. agreed to refrain from undertaking
military action if the Syrian government joined the OPCW and subjected the totality of its
chemical weapons stockpile to elimination. In October 2013, the OPCW-U.N. Joint Mission , created
under the authority of U.N. Security Council resolution 2118 (2103), began the process of
identifying, cataloging, removing and destroying Syria's chemical weapons. This process was
completed in September 2014 (in December 2013, the OPCW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its
disarmament work in Syria).
If the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons was an example of the OPCW at its best, what
followed was a case study of just the opposite. In May 2014, the OPCW created the Fact-Finding Mission, or FFM ,
charged with establishing "facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals,
reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic." The FFM was headed
by Malik Ellahi ,
who served as head of the OPCW's government relations and political affairs branch. The
appointment of someone lacking both technical and operational experience suggests that Ellahi's
primary role was political. Under his leadership, the FFM established a close working
relationship with the anti-Assad Syrian opposition, including the White Helmets and
SAMS.
In 2015, responsibility for coordinating the work of the FFM with the anti-Assad opposition
was transferred to a British inspector named Len Phillips (another element of the FFM, led by a
different inspector, was responsible for coordinating with the Syrian government). Phillips
developed a close working relationship with the White Helmets and SAMS and played a key role in
OPCW's investigation of the April 2017 chemical incident in Khan Shaykhun. By April 2018, the
FFM had undergone a leadership transition, with Phillips
replaced by a Tunisian inspector named Sami Barrek . It was Barrek who led the FFM into
Syria in April 2018 to investigate allegations of chemical weapons use at Douma. Like Phillips,
Barrek maintained a close working relationship with the White Helmets and SAMS.
Once the FFM wrapped up its investigation in Douma, however, it became apparent to
Fairweather that it had a problem. There were serious questions about whether chlorine had, in
fact, been used as a weapon. The solution, brokered by Fairweather, was to release an interim
report that ruled out sarin altogether, but left the door open regarding chlorine. This
report was released on July 6, 2018. Later that month, both Üzümcü and
Fairweather were gone, replaced by a Spaniard named Fernando
Arias and a French diplomat named Sébastien
Braha . It would be up to them to clean up the Douma situation.
The situation Braha inherited from Fairweather was unenviable.
According to an unnamed OPCW official who spoke with the media after the fact, two days
prior to the publication of the interim report, on July 4, 2018, Fairweather had been paid a
visit by a trio of U.S. officials, who indicated to Fairweather and the members of the FFM
responsible for writing the report that it was the U.S. position that the chlorine cannisters
in question had been used to dispense chlorine gas at Douma, an assertion that could not be
backed up by the evidence. Despite this, the message that Fairweather left with the OPCW
personnel was that there had to be a "smoking gun." It was now Braha's job to manufacture
one.
Braha did this by dispatching OPCW inspectors to Turkey in September 2018 to interview
new witnesses identified by the White Helmets, and by commissioning new engineering studies
that better explained the presence of the two chlorine cannisters found in Douma. By March,
Braha had assembled enough information to enable the technical directorate to issue its final
report. Almost immediately, dissent appeared in the ranks of the OPCW. An engineering report
that contradicted the findings published by Braha
was leaked , setting off a firestorm of controversy derived from its conclusion that the
chlorine cannisters found in Douma had most likely been staged by the White Helmets.
The OPCW, while eventually acknowledging that the leaked report was genuine, explained
its exclusion from the final report on the grounds that it attributed blame, something the FFM
was not mandated to do.
According to the OPCW , the engineering report in question had been submitted to the
investigation and identification team, a newly created body within the OPCW mandated to make
such determinations. Moreover, Director General Arias stood by the report's conclusion that it
had "reasonable grounds" to believe "that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon has taken
place on 7 April 2018."
Arias' explanation came under attack in November, when WikiLeaks published an email sent
by a member of the FFM team that had participated in the Douma investigation. In this email,
which was sent on June 22, 2018, and addressed to Robert Fairweather, the author noted that,
when it came to the Douma incident, "[p]urposely singling out chlorine gas as one of the
possibilities is disingenuous." The author of the email, who had participated in drafting the
original interim report, noted that the original text had emphasized that there was
insufficient evidence to support this conclusion, and that the new text represented "a major
deviation from the original report." Moreover, the author took umbrage at the new report's
conclusions, which claimed to be "based on the high levels of various chlorinated organic
derivatives detected in environmental samples." According to email's author "They were, in most
cases, present only in parts per billion range, as low as 1-2 ppb, which is essentially trace
quantities." In short, the OPCW had cooked the books, manufacturing evidence from thin air that
it then used to draw conclusions that sustained the U.S. position that chlorine gas had been
used by the Syrian government at Douma.
Arias, while not addressing the specifics of the allegations set forth in the leaked email,
recently declared that it is "the nature of any thorough inquiry for individuals in a team
to express subjective views," noting that "I stand by the independent, professional conclusion"
presented by the OPCW about the Douma incident. This explanation, however, does not fly in the
face of the evidence.
The OPCW's credibility as an investigative body has been brought into question through
these leaks, as has its independent character. If an organization like the OPCW can be used at
will by the U.S., the United Kingdom and France to trigger military attacks intended to support
regime-change activities in member states, then it no longer serves a useful purpose to the
international community it ostensibly serves.
To survive as a credible entity, the OPCW must open itself to a full-scale audit of its
activities in Syria by an independent authority with inspector general-like investigatory
powers. Anything short of this leaves the OPCW, an organization that was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize for its contributions to world peace, permanently stained by the reality that it is
little more than a lap dog of the United States, used to promote the very conflicts it was
designed to prevent.
The
Washington Post , throughdocumentsreleased through the Freedom of Information Act, has published a long
investigation into Afghanistan. Journalists have collected over 400 testimonies from American
diplomats, NATO generals and other NATO personnel, that show that reports about Afghanistan
were falsified to deceive the public about the real situation on the ground.
After the tampering with and falsification of the report of the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW), we are witnessing another event that will certainly discomfit those
who have hitherto relied on the official reports of the Pentagon, the US State Department and
international organizations like the OPCW for the last word.
There are very deliberate reasons for such disinformation campaigns. In the case of the
OPCW, as I
wrote some time back, the aim was to paint the Syrian government as the fiend and the
al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked "moderate rebels" as the innocent souls, thereby likely justifying a
responsibility-to-protect armed intervention by the likes of the US, the UK and France. In such
circumstances, the standing and status of the reporting organization (like the OPCW) is
commandeered to validate Western propaganda that is duly disseminated through the
corporate-controlled mainstream media.
In this particular case, various Western capitals colluded with the OPCW to lay the
groundwork for the removal of Assad and his replacement with the al-Nusra Front as well as the
very same al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked armed opposition officially responsible for the 9/11
attacks.
As if the massaging of the OPCW reports were not enough in themselves to provoke
international outrage, this dossier serves to give aid and comfort to jihadi groups supported by the Pentagon
who are known to be responsible for the worst human-rights abuses, as seen in Syria and Iraq in
the last 6 years.
False or carefully manipulated reports paint a picture vastly different from the reality on
the ground. The United States has never really declared war on Islamic terrorism, its
proclamations of a "War on Terror" notwithstanding. In reality, it has simply used this
justification to occupy or destabilize strategically important areas of the world in the
interests of maintaining US hegemony, intending in so doing to hobble the energy policies and
national security of rival countries like China, Iran and the Russian Federation.
The Post investigation lays bare how the US strategy had failed since its inception,
the data doctored to represent a reality very different from that on the ground. The inability
of the United States to clean up Afghanistan is blamed by the Post on incorrect military
planning and incorrect political choices. While this could certainly be the case, the
Post's real purpose in its investigation is to harm Trump, even as it reveals the
Pentagon's efforts to continue its regional presence for grand geopolitical goals by hiding
inconvenient truths.
The real issue lies in the built-in mendacity of the bureaucratic and military apparatus of
the United States. No general has ever gone on TV to say that the US presence in Iraq is needed
to support any war against Iran; or that Afghanistan is a great point of entry for the
destabilization of Eurasia, because this very heart of the Heartland is crucial to the
Sino-Russian transcontinental integration projects like the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and
the Belt and Road Initiative. In the same vein, the overthrow of the Syrian government would
have ensured Israel a greater capacity to expand its interests in the Middle East, as well as
to weaken Iran's main regional ally.
The Post investigation lays bare the hypocrisy of the military-industrial complex as
well as the prevailing political establishments of Europe and the United States. These parties
are not interested in human rights, the wellbeing of civilians or justice in general. Their
only goal is to try and maintain their global hegemony indefinitely by preventing any other
powers from being able to realize their potential and thereby pose a threat to Atlanticist
preeminence.
The war in Iraq was launched to destabilize the Middle East, China's energy-supply basin
crucial to fueling her future growth. The war in Syria served the purpose of further
dismantling the Middle East to favor Saudi Arabia and Israel, the West's main strategic allies
in the Persian Gulf. The war in Afghanistan was to slow down the Eurasian integration of China
and Russia. And the war in Ukraine was for the purposes of generating chaos and destruction on
Russia's border, with the initial hope of wresting the very strategically area of Crimea from
Russia.
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and this has been on full display in
recent times. Almost all of Washington's recent strategic objectives have ended up producing
results worse than the status quo ante. In Iraq there is the type of strong cooperation between
Baghdad and Tehran reminiscent of the time prior to 1979. Through Hezbollah, Iran has
strengthened its position in Syria in defense of Damascus. Moscow has found itself playing the
role of crucial decider in the Middle East (and soon in North Africa), until only a few years
ago the sole prerogative of Washington. Turkey's problems with NATO, coupled with Tel Aviv's
open relation with Moscow are both a prime example of Washington's diminishing influence in the
region and Moscow's corresponding increase in influence.
The situation in Afghanistan is not very different, with a general recognition that peace is
the only option for the region being reflected in the talks between the Afghans, the Taliban,
the Russians, Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis. Beijing and Moscow have well known for over a
decade the real intent behind Washington's presence in the country, endeavoring to blunt its
impact.
The Post investigation only further increases the public's war weariness, the war in
Afghanistan now having lasted 18 years, the longest war in US history. Jeff Bezos, the owner of
the Post , is a bitter opponent of Trump and wants the president to come clean on the
Afghanistan debacle by admitting that the troops cannot be withdrawn. Needless to say,
admitting such would not help Trump's strategy for the 2020 election. Trump cannot afford to
humiliate the US military, given that it, along with the US dollar, is his main weapon of
"diplomacy". Were it to be revealed that some illiterate peasants holed up in caves and armed
with AK-47s some 40 years ago are responsible for successfully keeping the most powerful army
in history at bay, all of Washington's propaganda, disseminated by a compliant media, will
cease to be of any effect. Such a revelation would also humiliate military personnel, an
otherwise dependable demographic Trump cannot afford to alienate.
The Washington Post performed a service to the country by shedding light on the
disinformation used to sustain endless war. But the Post's intentions are also
political, seeking to undermine Trump's electoral chances by damaging Trump's military
credentials as well as his standing amongst military personnel. What Washington's elite and the
Post do not know, or perhaps prefer to ignore, is that such media investigations
directed against political opponents actually end up doing irreparable damage to the political
and military prestige of the United States.
In other words, when journalist do their job, the military industrial complex finds it
difficult to lie its way through wars and failures, but when a country relies on Hollywood to
sustain its make-believe world, as well as on journalists on the CIA payroll, on compliant
publishers and on censored news, then any such revelations of forbidden truths threaten to
bring the whole facade crashing down.
"Trump was simply asking new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky -- in a July phone
call -- to investigate crimes at the "highest levels" of both Kiev and Washington," Rudy
Giuliani, a personal attorney for President Trump, told Laura Ingraham on "The Ingraham
Angle."
"So, he is being impeached for doing the right thing as president of the United States,"
he said.
Giuliani told Laura Ingraham on "The Ingraham Angle" that he helped forced out Yovanovitch
because she was corrupt and obstructing the investigation into Ukraine and the Bidens.
Dem's impeachment for innocent conduct is intended to obstruct the below investigations of
Obama-era corruption:
- Billions of laundered $
- Billions, mostly US $, widely misused
- Extortion
- Bribery
- DNC collusion w/ Ukraine to destroy candidate Trump
He told Ingraham that he needed her out of the way because she was corrupt. Giuliani said he
was not the first person to go to the president with concerns about the diplomat.
In more tweets Tuesday, Giuliani elaborated:
Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to
Ukrainians who wanted to come to US and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine. She was
OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE and that's not the only thing she was doing. She at minimum enabled
Ukrainian collusion.
" Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to
Ukrainians who wanted to come to US and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine.
She was OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE and that's not the only thing she was doing. She at
minimum enabled Ukrainian collusion."
Marie Yovanovitch was dismissed in March after Trump's allies said she was blocking the
probe of Joe Biden and bad-mouthing the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Lutsenko said that she
gave him a "do not prosecute list", that included Ukraine MPs and the exact same Sorosfunded
NGO president.
Nov 19, 2019Several sources claim former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch,
instructed Ukraine officials to keep their hands off investigating the NGO in Ukraine founded
by George Soros. Why?"
Any questions? As Putin warned the US: "ask about the 5th floor of the State Department."
(where Soros held court!). No wonder the US Commies hate Putin.
What the Shiffhead Impeachment hearings demonstrated with the appearances of Ms.
Yankonitbitch, Bowtie George, and the other "Dindunuffin/Donnonuffin Clowns" is just how much
American Taxpayers' money is being wasted employing a bunch of sanctimonious drones who do
nothing but get in the way of progress. Successful Corporations remove dead wood like that
with downsizing and shakeups. But the Federal Government seems immune to efficiency because
our elected officials NEVER DO THEIR JOBS BY USING ZERO BASE BUDGETING TO JUSTIFY EVERY
******* DOLLAR. And so, we now hear of yet another Omnibus Budget being foisted onto American
Taxpayers and more wasteful spending that never, never, never, gets reduced. We need a
Taxpayer's Revolution in this Country to stop the corrupt theft.
And one more thing: What the Ukrainian Matter reveals is how Foreign Aid is dispensed,
handed out by the foreign recipient, and the funds are laundered and kicked back to the
corrupt politicians and Deep State Operatives like the Bidens. If $400 Million in palletized
untraceable cash can be delivered via a clandestine unmarked airplane at night to Iran
supposedly for ransom as the Socialist Media Complex would have us believe in a way that is
not consistent with long practiced methods for funds transfer, can we imagine all the
billions that have quietly been stolen from us to enrich scum like Barack Obola, Quid Pro
Joe, The Clintons, and so many others? IN THE MEANTIME, PRESIDENT TRUMP CAN'T GET A DIME TO
SPEND ON BUILDING A WALL TO STOP THE ILLEGAL ALIEN COCKROACH INVASION.
Yovanovitch pulled the "poor me federal" employee act. I worked for the Feds for 31 years
most as a manger and Yovanovitch victim act is what all federal employees pull when they get
in trouble. Blah Blah my 30 years of service, my awards, my appraisals blah blah. She said
that she had no concern about Hunter Biden while being hailed as a corruption fighter. Blah
blah.
It's a crime that State Department people and ambassadors can have the same ethnic origin
as the countries they serve in. It's a recipe for personal/family agendas, corruption and not
representing the best interests of the United States. Of course if you're a DemoRat, you're
always corrupt, as they have proven it is a given.
Rudy Giuliani: Yovanovitch Was Part Of The Cover-Up, She Had To Be Ousted.
"Ousted"? I thought the penalty for high treason was hanging. What are they waiting for?
Hang the lot and in a public square near Congress so that all the traitors who reside in
Congress and the highest levels of government and banking get a sense of what awaits
them.
"At the end of the month, almost all criminals arrested for state crimes in New York,
including sex crimes , will be released without posting bail. It is a suicidal policy,
but it is nonetheless the state’s prerogative to engage in such suicide. What is
not its prerogative is the New York law that took effect this week granting
driver’s licenses to illegal aliens and blocking ICE access to criminal enforcement
information. We have a national union with a federal government controlling immigration for a
reason, and it’s time for the Trump administration to show state officials who has the
final say over this issue.
Beginning this week, the NY state government
is inviting any and all illegal aliens , with or without criminal records, to apply for
driver’s licenses. As documentation
, they can offer consular ID cards, which are fraught with fraud, expired work permits, or
foreign birth certificates. They can even offer Border Crossing Cards, which are only valid
for 72 hours and for a stay in the country near the border area! The state law further
prohibits state and county officials from disclosing any information to ICE and bars ICE and
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from accessing N.Y. Department of Motor Vehicles (NYDMV)
records and information.
It’s truly hard to overstate the enormity of the public safety crisis this law,
dubbed “the green light law,” will spawn. There are
currently 3.3 million aliens in the ICE non-detained docket who remain at large in this
country. Just in one year, ICE put detainers on aliens criminally charged with 2,500
homicides. Given
that New York has the fourth largest illegal alien population in the country, it is
virtually certain that a large number of criminal aliens reside in the state and will now be
offered legal resident documents to shield them from removal.
Some might suggest that this is the problem of New York’s residents and that it is
their job and their responsibility alone to overturn these laws. But the difference between
this law and their general pro-criminal laws is that when it comes to immigration, they
simply lack the power to enact such a policy. Rather than the DHS and DOJ bemoaning these
laws, it’s time for the Trump administration to actually stop them in their tracks.
Otherwise the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution is nothing but ink on parchment.
A violation of federal law and the Constitution
8 U.S.C. § 1324 makes a felon of anyone who “knowing or in reckless disregard
of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation
of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or
shield from detection, such alien in any place.” That statute also makes a criminal of
anyone who “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United
States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence
is or will be in violation of law” or anyone who “engages in any conspiracy to
commit any of the preceding acts, or aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding
acts.” Some form of this law has been on the books since 1891.
NY’s new law not only harbors illegal aliens but actually calls on the DMV to notify
illegal aliens of any ICE interest in their files. There is only one purpose of this law: to
tip off criminal alien fugitives that ICE is looking for them, the most literal violation of
the law against shielding them from detection. Would we allow state officials to block
information to the FBI, ATF, or DEA?
Moreover, New York’s Green Light law violates the entire purpose of the infamous
1986 amnesty bill, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which was “to combat
the employment of illegal aliens.” The law specifically makes it “illegal for
employers to knowingly hire, recruit, refer, or continue to employ unauthorized
workers.” Yet the rationale for the Green Light Law, according to supporters , was
“getting to work” and “ensure that our industries have the labor they need
to keep our economy moving.” That directly conflicts with federal law.
Finally, 8 U.S.C. 1373 prohibits state and local government from “in any way
restrict[ing]
, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status,
lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” The entire purpose of this bill is to restrict
all New York government entities from sending information on citizenship status to ICE.
Whether one disagrees with immigration laws or not, nobody can argue that the federal
government lacks the power to enforce them. Immigration law is one of the core jobs of the
federal government. People are free to go to any state once they are in the country, which is
why the Founders transferred
immigration policy from the states under the Articles of Confederation to the federal
government under the Constitution.
This is why James Madison in Federalist #42 bemoaned that, under
the Articles of Confederation, there was a “very serious embarrassment” whereby
“an alien therefore legally incapacitated for certain rights in the [one state], may by
previous residence only in [another state], elude his incapacity; and thus the law of one
State, be preposterously rendered paramount to the law of another, within the jurisdiction of
the other.” He feared that without the Constitution’s new idea of giving the
federal Congress power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,”
“certain descriptions of aliens, who had rendered themselves obnoxious” would
choose states with weak immigration laws as entry points into the union and then move to any
other state as legal residents or citizens.
As for immigration without naturalization, because of the issue of the slave trade, the
first clause of Article I, Section 9 bars Congress from prohibiting “the Migration or
Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to
admit” until the year 1808. Well, Congress has long exercised that power to exclude
over the past 200 years. New York has lacked the ability to maintain its own separate
immigration scheme for quite some time.
When did the federal government become weak in the face of state rebellion?"
The diplomatic service made a big mistake when they abandoned the practice of preventing
people from serving in countries where they have an ethnic connection
jovanivic is part of a rabid Ukrainian diaspora, chased out of the country by the Red Army
for collaboration with the Nazis.
these people have a vicious, insatiable desire for revenge ...and the US does not need
these kind of biases mucking things up
Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"
The underlying critical
point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since
linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the
epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to
regain their credibility.
The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking
credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.
Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much
better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's
genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is
credibility.
While former
Weekly Standard writer Warren thought the news was Cheney going after Pence, the real news
is Cheney's neoconservative crowd -- much of the GOP foreign policy establishment, which can be
counted on to advocate for intervention overseas -- being mad that President Trump won't listen
to their terrible advice.
Cheney was one of the
chief architects of the Iraq War, now in its seventeenth year with no end in sight. Given
the neverending morass that war has become, and its utter failure to concretely benefit
Americans in exchange for lives lost and trillions
spent , it is preposterous that he would be lambasting the current vice president over
foreign policy. He should instead be issuing public mea culpas.
Neocons Believe in
America as Global Policeman
Cheney's accusation that Trump is conducting Obama's foreign policy is inaccurate, because
both Obama and neocons are internationalists, and Trump is not. Neocons generally think global
peace can be achieved through spreading of freedom and democracy, often by using military
force. They tend to think any region in which America is not actively involved risks being
filled with a menacing geopolitical force. They often view themselves as global citizens, and
see America's power as the perfect tool for peace and democracy spreading. America should act
in its own interest, say the neocons, but America's interest is the global interest, and
vice versa.
Among other things, this leads neoconservatives to currently advocate for regime change or
at least continued U.S. presence in Syria, continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan (even as that
war is nearly two decades-old), a very hardline approach to Russia (which is oddly deemed an
equal or even greater threat than China), and a U.S. military presence in
more than 20 African countries that you have never heard of, to fight Islamic
terrorists.
Internationalists might disagree about how much force should be used to spread liberalism.
President Obama took out Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and presided over a terribly ineffective and
dangerous effort to fund Syrian rebels in that country's civil war. Republican neocons like
Cheney just wish Obama had done even more, and put U.S. troops on the ground in Libya and Syria
as well.
The Problem with Defaulting to Intervention
Despite their certainty about launching the United States into myriad global conflicts,
neocons have lots of problems. First, they are incredibly naïve about fundamentalist Sunni
Islam. Take the Syria example. ISIS and al Qaeda are both forms of fundamentalist Sunni Islam,
which is incredibly popular across the Middle East and Northern Africa. Fighting the ideology
that creates ISIS and al Qaeda could literally take forever.
It could also be self-defeating. Bombing and occupying a foreign land might make young men
there more prone to outright terrorism, and infantilize the domestic forces that must take a
stand in order for true progress against radicalization to occur.
In other areas too, neocons often cheer endeavors that shoot our country in the foot. They
want us to stay in Syria to fight terrorism, but they were more than happy to fund and arm
rebels --
many of whom were radical Sunnis with ties to al Qaeda -- in order to try to take down the
regime of Bashar al-Assad. Ditto with the intervention in Shia-majority Iraq, which ultimately
emboldened and empowered the dominant Shia power, Iran.
Academically speaking, neocons have learned the lesson of World War II, but haven't the
lessons of World War I, Vietnam, or countless other conflicts where intervention and war had
unforeseen outcomes and consequences. Thus they have a stunning record of getting foreign
policy wrong. Leading neocon Bill Kristol was a huge
advocate for the Iraq War , for example, and famously predicted it would be over in two months .
Despite how poorly many U.S.-involved conflicts have gone, neocons have refused to question
their ideology. They will question someone's motives if -- for example -- he disagrees with
entering Syria's civil war. You can point out that neither side is good, that this is largely a
Shia-Sunni religious struggle that we should stay out of, and that taking out Bashar al-Assad
would create a power vacuum for jihadists, but
Kristol and Max Boot will respond by calling you a Russian stooge.
Trump Is Right to
Not Listen to Failed Advice
Even though he still has neocons advising him in the White House, President Trump is thus
smart to frequently ignore these people. In fact, pushing back against neocons is a big reason
Trump got elected.
The American people agree that we shouldn't be
subsidizing wealthy European countries' welfare states by fronting their defense. Germany's
military is literally falling apart, but the country is more than happy to give Russia billions
for natural gas. If Germany isn't concerned about Russia, is it our job to do all the work?
The American people also appreciate that Trump is trying to end the war in Afghanistan, and
get American troops out of Syria, among other conflicts. Pence's statement, that Trump wants us
to be thoughtful about where we place U.S. troops, jives with the thoughts of a vast bipartisan
majority of Americans.
The GOP Is a Conservative Party
Trump had an easy go of his GOP contenders in 2015-16 because the GOP is not a
neoconservative party, it is simply a conservative party. There is a big difference. For
neocons like Cheney to act as if Donald Trump stole the party is laughable. The neocons were an
aberration in conservatives' coalition.
The roots of the Grand Old Party are nationalism, foreign policy realism, and fiscal
(spending) restraint. In but one example, President Eisenhower wrote a friend that cutting
taxes was a reward for finding wasteful spending. President Nixon went to Communist China to
exploit the rift between Beijing and Moscow. Democrats got us in the Vietnam War, and Nixon and
Ford got us out.
There is a fundamental long-run contradiction between U.S. nation-building
overseas and limited government here at home.
Conservative voters care about localism, and tempered, non-utopian nationalism. It isn't
just nice to care about the people around us, and demand our politicians do what's best for
them, it is a high moral ideal
-- even commanded by
scripture .
Some neocons just aren't conservatives. Many are socially
liberal , and view the pro-life cause as a way to get the so-called hayseeds to turn out on
election day, not as a pressing moral issue. Because of this, some neocons may eventually find
a home in the establishment Democrat Party.
True, neocons say they are fiscal conservatives, and many have criticized President Trump
for not talking about entitlement reform (as has this writer), but in practice neocons are
fiscal fakers. Their priorities never lead to downsizing the federal government. Rather, they
bargain with Democrats to increase domestic welfare spending as long as the military budget
also increases. There is a fundamental long-run contradiction between U.S. nation-building
overseas and limited government here at home.
That's why neocons have already lost the GOP, and Trump's presidency is only just the
beginning of a necessary shift. The Republican Party is finding its roots, and eventually going
back to true fiscal conservatism (spending restraint that allows tax cuts, not just tax cuts
for their own sake) and foreign policy realism.
But because of the American political system, this shift will occur in bits and spurts. Just
this January, 47 Republican senators
(that's most of them) joined Democrats to vote for an amendment pushed by Senate Majority
leader Mitch McConnell that sought to keep the United States in Syria and Afghanistan
indefinitely. Try getting anything close to half of the American public to sign on to that.
That's the real story here. Willis L. Krumholz is a fellow at Defense Priorities. He holds a JD
and MBA degree from the University of St. Thomas, and works in the financial services industry.
The views expressed are those of the author only. You can follow Willis on Twitter @WillKrumholz .
USSR, Yugoslavia, US, EU, and the Indian Union are predicated on the ideas of the
Enlightenment Tradition. So far, USSR and FRY have disintegrated. If EU fails, could US and
EU be too far behind. In US, we have the political ascendancy of foolish Protestantism, in
India that of Hindu masses.
Can any states, predicated on secularism of the Enlightenment Tradition survive the rise
of religious politics?
"... A nation seeking peace-as-dominion will use force more freely. This has long been an Israeli predilection. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, however, it has become America's as well. As a consequence, U.S. national-security policy increasingly conforms to patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state. This "Israelification" of U.S. policy may prove beneficial for Israel. Based on the available evidence, it's not likely to be good for the United States. ..."
"... Here is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing what he calls his "vision of peace" in June 2009: "If we get a guarantee of demilitarization we are ready to agree to a real peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state." The inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, if armed and sufficiently angry, can certainly annoy Israel. But they cannot destroy it or do it serious harm. By any measure, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) wield vastly greater power than the Palestinians can possibly muster. Still, from Netanyahu's perspective, "real peace" becomes possible only if Palestinians guarantee that their putative state will forego even the most meager military capabilities. Your side disarms, our side stays armed to the teeth: that's Netanyahu's vision of peace in a nutshell. ..."
Peace means different things to different governments and different countries. To some it
suggests harmony based on tolerance and mutual respect. To others it serves as a euphemism for
dominance, peace defining the relationship between the strong and the supine.
In the absence of actually existing peace, a nation's reigning definition of peace
shapes its proclivity to use force. A nation committed to peace-as-harmony will tend to employ
force as a last resort. The United States once subscribed to this view. Or beyond the confines
of the Western Hemisphere, it at least pretended to do so.
A nation seeking peace-as-dominion will use force more freely. This has long been an Israeli
predilection. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, however, it has become
America's as well. As a consequence, U.S. national-security policy increasingly conforms to
patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state. This "Israelification" of U.S. policy may
prove beneficial for Israel. Based on the available evidence, it's not likely to be good for
the United States.
Here is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing what he calls his "vision of
peace" in June 2009: "If we get a guarantee of demilitarization we are ready to agree to a real
peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state." The
inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, if armed and sufficiently angry, can certainly annoy
Israel. But they cannot destroy it or do it serious harm. By any measure, the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) wield vastly greater power than the Palestinians can possibly muster. Still, from
Netanyahu's perspective, "real peace" becomes possible only if Palestinians guarantee that
their putative state will forego even the most meager military capabilities. Your side disarms,
our side stays armed to the teeth: that's Netanyahu's vision of peace in a nutshell.
Netanyahu asks a lot of Palestinians. Yet however baldly stated, his demands reflect
longstanding Israeli thinking. For Israel, peace derives from security, which must be absolute
and assured. Security thus defined requires not simply military advantage but military
supremacy .
From Israel's perspective, threats to supremacy require anticipatory action , the
earlier the better. The IDF attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 provides one
especially instructive example. Israel's destruction of a suspected Syrian nuclear facility in
2007 provides a second.
Yet alongside perceived threat, perceived opportunity can provide sufficient motive for
anticipatory action. In 1956 and again in 1967, Israel attacked Egypt not because the
blustering Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser possessed the capability (even if he proclaimed the
intention) of destroying the hated Zionists, but because preventive war seemingly promised a
big Israeli pay-off. In the first instance, the Israelis came away empty-handed. In the second,
they hit the jackpot operationally, albeit with problematic strategic consequences.
For decades, Israel relied on a powerful combination of tanks and fighter-bombers as its
preferred instrument of preemption. In more recent times, however, it has deemphasized its
swift sword in favor of the shiv between the ribs. Why deploy lumbering armored columns when a
missile launched from an Apache attack helicopter or a bomb fixed to an Iranian scientist's car
can do the job more cheaply and with less risk? Thus has targeted assassination eclipsed
conventional military methods as the hallmark of the Israeli way of war.
Whether using tanks to conquer or assassins to liquidate, adherence to this
knee-to-the-groin paradigm has won Israel few friends in the region and few admirers around the
world (Americans notably excepted). The likelihood of this approach eliminating or even
diminishing Arab or Iranian hostility toward Israel appears less than promising. That said, the
approach has thus far succeeded in preserving and even expanding the Jewish state: more than 60
years after its founding, Israel persists and even prospers. By this rough but not
inconsequential measure, the Israeli security concept has succeeded. Okay, it's nasty: but so
far at least, it's worked.
What's hard to figure out is why the United States would choose to follow Israel's path. Yet
over the course of the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama quarter-century, that's precisely what we've
done. The pursuit of global military dominance, a proclivity for preemption, a growing taste
for assassination -- all justified as essential to self-defense. That pretty much describes
ourpresent-day MO.
Israel is a small country with a small population and no shortage of hostile neighbors. Ours
is a huge country with an enormous population and no enemy, unless you count the
Cuban-Venezuelan Axis of Ailing Dictators, within several thousand miles. We have choices that
Israel does not. Yet in disregarding those choices the United States has stumbled willy-nilly
into an Israeli-like condition of perpetual war, with peace increasingly tied to unrealistic
expectations of adversaries and would-be adversaries acquiescing in Washington's will.
Israelification got its kick-start with George H.W. Bush's Operation Desert Storm, a
triumphal Hundred-Hour War likened at the time to Israel's triumphal Six-Day War. Victory over
the "fourth largest army in the world" fostered illusions of the United States exercising
perpetually and on a global scale military primacy akin to what Israel has exercised
regionally. Soon thereafter, the Pentagon announced that henceforth it would settle for nothing
less than "Full Spectrum Dominance."
Bill Clinton's contribution to the process was to normalize the use of force. During the
several decades of the Cold War, the U.S. had resorted to overt armed intervention only
occasionally. Although difficult today to recall, back then whole years might pass without U.S.
troops being sent into harm's way. Over the course of Clinton's two terms in office, however,
intervention became commonplace.
The average Israeli had long since become inured to reports of IDF incursions into southern
Lebanon or Gaza. Now the average American has become accustomed to reports of U.S. troops
battling Somali warlords, supervising regime change in Haiti, or occupying the Balkans. Yet the
real signature of the Clinton years came in the form of airstrikes. Blasting targets in
Afghanistan, Bosnia, Serbia, and Sudan, but above all in Iraq, became the functional equivalent
of Israel's reliance on airpower to punish "terrorists" from standoff ranges.
In the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush, a true believer in Full Spectrum Dominance, set out to
liberate or pacify (take your pick) the Islamic world. The United States followed Israel in
assigning itself the prerogative of waging preventive war. Although it depicted Saddam Hussein
as an existential threat, the Bush administration also viewed Iraq as an opportunity: here the
United States would signal to other recalcitrants the fate awaiting them should they mess with
Uncle Sam.
More subtly, in going after Saddam, Bush was tacitly embracing a longstanding Israeli
conception of deterrence. During the Cold War, deterrence had meant conveying a credible threat
to dissuade your opponent from hostile action. Israel had never subscribed to that view.
Influencing the behavior of potential adversaries required more than signaling what Israel
might do if sufficiently aggravated; influence was exerted by punitive action, ideally
delivered on a disproportionate scale. Hit the other guy first, if possible; failing that,
whack him several times harder than he hit you: not the biblical injunction of an eye for an
eye, but both eyes, an ear, and several teeth, with a kick in the nuts thrown in for good
measure. The aim was to send a message: screw with us and this will happen to you. This is the
message Bush intended to convey when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Unfortunately, Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched with all the confidence that had informed
Operation Peace for Galilee, Israel's equally ill-advised 1982 incursion into Lebanon, landed
the United States in an equivalent mess. Or perhaps a different comparison applies: the U.S.
occupation of Iraq triggered violent resistance akin to what the IDF faced as a consequence of
Israel occupying the West Bank. Two successive Intifadas had given the Israeli army fits. The
insurgency in Iraq (along with its Afghan sibling) gave the American army fits. Neither the
Israeli nor the American reputation for martial invincibility survived the encounter.
By the time Barack Obama succeeded Bush in 2009, most Americans -- like most Israelis -- had
lost their appetite for invading and occupying countries. Obama's response? Hew ever more
closely to the evolving Israeli way of doing things. "Obama wants to be known for winding down
long wars," writes Michael Gerson in the Washington Post. "But he has shown no hesitance
when it comes to shorter, Israel-style operations. He is a special ops hawk, a drone
militarist."
Just so: with his affinity for missile-firing drones, Obama has established targeted
assassination as the very centerpiece of U.S. national-security policy. With his affinity for
commandos, he has expanded the size and mandate of U.S. Special Operations Command, which now
maintains an active presence in more than 70 countries. In Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, and
the frontier regions of Pakistan -- and who knows how many other far-flung places -- Obama
seemingly shares Prime Minister Netanyahu's expectations: keep whacking and a positive outcome
will eventually ensue.
The government of Israel, along with ardently pro-Israel Americans like Michael Gerson, may
view the convergence of U.S. and Israeli national-security practices with some satisfaction.
The prevailing U.S. definition of self-defense -- a self-assigned mandate to target anyone
anywhere thought to endanger U.S. security -- is exceedingly elastic. As such, it provides a
certain cover for equivalent Israeli inclinations. And to the extent that our roster of enemies
overlaps with theirs -- did someone say Iran? -- military action ordered by Washington just
might shorten Jerusalem's "to do" list.
Yet where does this all lead? "We don't have enough drones," writes the columnist David
Ignatius, "to kill all the enemies we will make if we turn the world into a free-fire zone."
And if Delta Force, the Green Berets, army rangers, Navy SEALs, and the like constitute (in the
words of one SEAL) "the dark matter the force that orders the universe but can't be seen," we
probably don't have enough of them either. Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems
willing to test both propositions.
The process of aligning U.S. national-security practice with Israeli precedents is now
essentially complete. Their habits are ours. Reversing that process would require stores of
courage and imagination that may no longer exist in Washington. Given the reigning domestic
political climate, those holding or seeking positions of power find it easier -- and less risky
-- to stay the course, vainly nursing the hope that by killing enough "terrorists" peace on
terms of our choosing will result. Here too the United States has succumbed to Israeli
illusions.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a visiting professor at the University of Notre
Dame.
The interesting info here is that the article states Haftar's "eastern-based Libyan
National Army (LNA), backed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, France, Russia and
Turkey".
The NATO rift between Turkey and its other members has escalated with the Evil Outlaw US
Empire's Senate voting to recognize the Armenian Genocide and Greece to help the LNA (Bengazi
gov't) defend against Turkish shipments of militia/terrorists and weapons to the besieged GNA
in Tripoli. This
site is very helpful and up-to-date regarding what's occurring. And
this PDF Briefing Paper is very good and quite detailed.
All of the above's added to the tense situation around Cyprus, Turkey's threat to close
Incirlik, and Greek offers to house those NATO facilities. It increasingly looks like the
Turkish S-400s are aimed at Greece and NATO.
/div>
Viking guy at 40
"Today we are not members of the EU, but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The
EU is a non-democratic nightmare that must be demolished."
Absolutely. The EU is the 2nd biggest imperialist asshole on the block, benefitting from the
fact that 1st place is taken by the USA, which is far more blatant, in-your-face and
universally obnoxious when at it, and doing it even to the EU. The EU not being the ultimate
superpower, it can't bully the US or China and only does it when dealing with lesser powers.
That's why it's practically impossible for anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually
notice and be aware of the typical EU behaviour: to crush any lesser country and to force it to
abide by its very own rules, whether independent countries want it or not.
That the EU is that bad should have been clear and obvious to all during the Greek crisis, but
most Europhiles prefer to think this was just an accident, due to some bad apples, and that "If
only the Czar knew", this wouldn't happen. Well, UK is going to get hit badly with the future
deal, because an imperalist neo-liberal power like the EU - just like the US, but most of the
time without the military part of it - can only crush any opposition and make an example out of
it.
If the EU were a truly democratic endeavour, they would allow at least popular referendum at
EU-wide level, and possibly even initiatives, for starter. The way it works, the people have no
checks on it. Not a bit surprise though, most of its core members function this un-democratic
way.
Viking guy at 40
"Today we are not members of the EU, but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The
EU is a non-democratic nightmare that must be demolished."
Absolutely. The EU is the 2nd biggest imperialist asshole on the block, benefitting from the
fact that 1st place is taken by the USA, which is far more blatant, in-your-face and
universally obnoxious when at it, and doing it even to the EU. The EU not being the ultimate
superpower, it can't bully the US or China and only does it when dealing with lesser powers.
That's why it's practically impossible for anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually
notice and be aware of the typical EU behaviour: to crush any lesser country and to force it
to abide by its very own rules, whether independent countries want it or not.
That the EU is that bad should have been clear and obvious to all during the Greek crisis,
but most Europhiles prefer to think this was just an accident, due to some bad apples, and
that "If only the Czar knew", this wouldn't happen. Well, UK is going to get hit badly with
the future deal, because an imperalist neo-liberal power like the EU - just like the US, but
most of the time without the military part of it - can only crush any opposition and make an
example out of it.
If the EU were a truly democratic endeavour, they would allow at least popular referendum at
EU-wide level, and possibly even initiatives, for starter. The way it works, the people have
no checks on it. Not a bit surprise though, most of its core members function this
un-democratic way.
While all experts agree that the events in Venezuela are following the same model as those
in Syria, some writers have contested the article by Thierry Meyssan which highlights their
differences from the interpretation in the anti-imperialist camp. Here, our author responds.
This is not a quarrel between specialists, but an important debate about the historic change we
are experiencing since 11 September 2001, and which is influencing all our lives.
In the first part of this article, I pointed out the fact that currently, President Bachar
el-Assad is the only personality who has adapted to the new " grand US strategy " – all
the others continue to think as if the present conflicts were simply a continuation of those we
have been experiencing since the end of the Second World War. They persist in interpreting
these events as tentatives by the United States to hog natural resources for themselves by
organising the overthrow of the pertinent governments.
As I intend to demonstrate, I believe that they are wrong and that their error could hasten
humanity down the road to hell.
For the last 70 years, the obsession of US strategists has not been to defend their people,
but to maintain their military superiority over the rest of the world. During the decade
between the dissolution of the USSR and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they searched for ways
to intimidate those who resisted them.
Harlan K. Ullman developed the idea of terrorising populations by dealing them a horrifying
blow to the head ( Shock and awe ) [ 1 ]. This was the idea behind the use
of the atomic bomb against the Japanese and the bombing of Baghdad with a storm of cruise
missiles.
The Straussians (meaning the disciples of philosopher Leo Strauss) dreamed of waging and
winning several wars at once ( Full-spectrum dominance ). This led to the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, placed under a common command [ 2 ].
Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski suggested reorganising the armies in order to facilitate the
treatment and sharing of a wealth of data simultaneously. In this way, robots would one day be
able to indicate the best tactics instantaneously [ 3 ]. As we shall see, the major reforms
he initiated were soon to produce poisonous fruit.
US neo-imperialist thought
These ideas and fantasies, first of all, led President Bush and the Navy to organise the
world's most wide-ranging network for international kidnapping and torture, which created
80,000 victims. Then President Obama set up an assassination programme mainly using drones, but
also commandos, which operates in 80 countries, and enjoys an annual budget of 14 billion
dollars [ 4
].
As from 9/11, Admiral Cebrowski's assistant, Thomas P. M. Barnett, has given numerous
conferences at the Pentagon and in military academies in order to announce the shape of the new
map of the world according to the Pentagon [ 5 ]. This project was made possible by
the structural reforms of US armies – these reforms are the source of this new vision of
the world. At first, it seemed so crazy that foreign observers too quickly considered it as one
more piece of rhetoric aimed at striking fear into the people they wanted to dominate.
Barnett declared that in order to maintain their hegemony over the world, the United States
would have to " settle for less ", in other words, to divide the world in two. On one side, the
stable states (the members of the G8 and their allies), on the other, the rest of the world,
considered only as a simple reservoir of natural resources. Contrary to his predecessors,
Barnett no longer considered access to these resources as vital for Washington but claimed that
they would only be accessible to the stable states by transit via the services of the US army.
From now on, it was necessary to systematically destroy all state structures in the reservoir
of resources, so that one day, no-one would be able to oppose the will of Washington, nor deal
directly with the stable states.
During his State of the Union speech in January 1980, President Carter announced his
doctrine – Washington considered that the supply of its economy with oil from the Gulf
was a question of national security [ 6 ]. Following that, the Pentagon
created CentCom in order to control the region. But today, Washington takes less oil from Iraq
and Libya than it exploited before those wars – and it doesn't care!
Destroying the state structures is to operate a plunge into chaos, a concept borrowed from
Leo Strauss, but to which Barnett gives new meaning. For the Jewish philosopher, the Jewish
people can no longer trust democracies after the failure of the Weimar Republic and the Shoah.
The only way to protect itself from a new form of Nazism, is to establish its own world
dictatorship – in the name of Good, of course. It would, therefore, be necessary to
destroy certain resistant states, drag them into chaos and rebuild them according to different
laws [ 7 ].
This is what Condoleezza Rice said during the first days of the 2006 war against Lebanon when
Israël still seemed victorious – " I do not see the point of diplomacy if it's
purpose is to return to the status quo ante between Israël and Lebanon. I think that would
be a mistake. What we are seeing here, in a way, is the beginning, the contractions of the
birth of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be sure that we are pushing towards
the new Middle East and that we are not returning to the old ". On the contrary, for Barnett,
not only the few resistant people should be forced into chaos, but all those who have not
attained a certain standard of life – and once they are reduced to chaos, they must be
kept there.
In fact, the influence of the Straussians has diminished at the Pentagon since the death of
Andrew Marshall, who created the idea of the " pivot to Asia " [ 8 ].
One of the great differences between the thinking of Barnett and that of his predecessors is
that war should not be waged against specific states for a political reason, but against
regions of the world because they are not integrated into the global economic system. Of
course, we will start with one country or another, but we will favour contagion until
everything is destroyed, just as we are seeing in the Greater Middle East. Today, tank warfare
is raging in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt (Sinaï), Palestine, Lebanon (Ain al-Hilweh and Ras
Baalbeck), Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia (Qatif), Bahreïn, Yemen, Turkey (Diyarbakır),
and Afghanistan.
This is why Barnett's neo-imperialist strategy will necessarily be based on elements of the
rhetoric of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, the " war of civilisations " [ 9 ]. Since it is
impossible to justify our indifference to the fate of the people from the reservoir of natural
resources, we can always persuade ourselves that our civilisations are incompatible.
According to this map, taken from one of Thomas P. M. Barnett's power point slides,
presented at a conference held at the Pentagon in 2003, every state in the pink zone must be
destroyed. This project has nothing to with the struggle between classes at the national level
nor with exploiting natural resources. Once they are done with the expanded Middle East, the US
strategists are preparing to reduce the North West of Latin America to ruins.
The implementation of US neo-imperialism
This is precisely the policy which has been in operation since 9/11. None of the wars which
were started have yet come to an end. For 16 years, on a daily basis, the living conditions of
the Afghan people have become increasingly more terrible and more dangerous. The reconstruction
of their state, which was touted to be planned on the model of Germany and Japan after the
Second World War, has not yet begun. The presence of NATO troops has not improved the life of
the Afghan people, but on the contrary, has made it worse. We are obliged to note the fact that
it is today the cause of the problem. Despite the feel-good speeches on international aid,
these troops are there only to deepen and maintain the chaos.
Never once, when NATO troops intervened, have the official reasons for the war been shown to
be true – neither against Afghanistan (the responsibility of the Taliban in the attacks
of 9/11), nor Iraq (President Hussein's support for the 9/11 terrorists and the preparation of
weapons of mass destruction to attack the USA), nor Libya (the bombing of its own people by the
army), nor in Syria (the dictatorship of President Assad and the Alaouite cult). And never once
has the overthrow of a government ever put an end to these wars. They all continue without
interruption, no matter who is in power.
The " Arab Springs ", which were born of an idea from MI6 and directly inspired by the "
Arab Revolt of 1916 " and the exploits of Lawrence of Arabia, were included in the same US
strategy. Tunisia has become ungovernable. Luckily, Egypt was taken back by its army and is
today making efforts to heal. Libya has become a battlefield, not since the Security Council
resolution aimed at protecting the population, but since the assassination of Mouamar Kadhafi
and the victory of NATO. Syria is an exception because the state never fell into the hands of
the Muslim Brotherhood, which prevented them from dragging the country into chaos. But numerous
jihadist groups, born of the Brotherhood, have controlled – and still control –
parts of the territory, where they have indeed sown chaos. Neither the Daesh Caliphate, nor
Idleb under Al-Qaïda, are states where Islam may flourish, but zones of terror without
schools or hospitals.
It is probable that thanks to its people, its army and its Russian, Lebanese and Iranian
allies, Syria will manage to escape the destiny planned for it by Washington, but the Greater
Near East will continue to burn until the people there understand their enemies' plans for
them. We now see that the same process of destruction has begun in the North-West of Latin
America. The Western medias speak with disdain about the troubles in Venezuela, but the war
that is beginning there will not be limited to that country – it will spread throughout
the whole region, although the economic and political conditions of the states which compose it
are very different.
The limits of US neo-imperialism
The US strategists like to compare their power to that of the Roman Empire. But that empire
brought security and opulence to the peoples they conquered and integrated. It built monuments
and rationalised their societies. On the contrary, US neo-imperialism does not intend to offer
anything to the people of the stable states, nor to the people of the reservoirs of natural
resources. It plans to racket the former and to destroy the social connections which bind the
latter together. Above all, it does not want to exterminate the people of the reservoirs, but
needs for them to suffer so that the chaos in which they live will prevent the stable states
from going to them for natural resources without the protection of the US armies.
Until now, the imperialist project ran on the principle that " you can't make an omelette
without breaking eggs ". It admitted that it had committed collateral massacres in order to
extend its domination. From now on, it is planning generalised massacres in order to impose its
authority – definitively.
US neo-imperialism supposes that the other states of the G8 and their allies will agree to
allow their overseas interests to be " protected " by US armies. That should pose no problem
with the European Union, which has already been emasculated for a long time, but will have to
be negotiated with the United Kingdom, and will be impossible with Russia and China.
Recalling its " special relationship " with Washington, London has already asked to be
associated with the US project for governing the world. That was the point of Theresa May's
visit to the United States in January 2017, but she has so far received no answer [ 10 ].
Apart from that, it is inconceivable that the US armies will ensure the security of the "
Silk Roads " as they do today with their British opposite numbers for the sea and air routes.
Similarly, it is unthinkable for them to force Russia to genuflect, which has just been
excluded from the G8 because of its engagement in Syria and Crimea.
With the Hong Kong protests showing no sign of letting up, a new narrative has emerged; that
anti-government activists are "
sliding into terrorism with home-made bombs" designed to inflict mass casualties.
On Sunday, Hong Kong police reported that they foiled a second bomb plot in under a week -
arresting three men who were allegedly testing home-made devices and chemicals in a secluded
area, according to
SCMP .
"If this keeps up, China will be virtually forced to shut down the protests - all in the
name of fighting terrorism."
well, I had argued all along that the strategy of the incremental escalation of violence,
the destruction of public infrastructure, both well documented regime change strategies, were
designed to ignite a civil war and force Mainland intervention.
This could then be used as an excuse for the usual embargo tactics. The construction of a
remote detonated bomb is highly complex and as you will recall from Islamic terrorism, bomb
makers are highly skilled.
For this skill to suddenly materialise in HK suggests intelligence agents at work. Hong
Kong has real problems, all economic, but their 5 demands don't call for economic remedies,
indeed they call for things that will never happen.
The leaders of the protests, Josh Wong, Deniese Ho and others are trained by NED and other
agencies to sow discord in what was otherwise a peaceful community.
There was a BBC documentary on utube about HK activists being trained at the NED/Soros
Oslo Freedom forum 2014 but it seems to have been memoryholed in the last few days.
"If this keeps up, China will be virtually forced to shut down the protests..."
Total nonsense. At this point if people in HK started blowing themselves up, the only thing
to pop in Beijing will be some champagne bottles. If Hong Kong slowly destroys itself,
Beijing will just contentedly watch from the sidelines as all that banking business goes to
Shanghai, Macao or across the river to Shenzhen.
Clapper and Brennan will be shaking in their boots after watching Barr's interview: done in
"bad faith" = SEDITION !!!! Deep State operatives...ie, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Stork, Lisa,
McCabe, should be held accountable. Obama should probably be impeached.
The hard fact is, that the top of the FBI knew, in advance, that the "dossier" was just bs
invented by Russian liars, for money, to be used as political lies for kilary's campaign. It
Wasn't evidence and Comey knew far in advance of crossfire hurricane. I can't see less than 20
years in comey's future. That same includes barak, brennan and clapper, who were all informed,
willing accomplices in this crime.
10:30
Whoever in FBI that intentionally misled the court using the Steele dossier knowing that the
dossier was "total rubbish" as Barr states, needs to be inditing immediately. Why we are
continuing to investigate instead of inditimg while continuing to investigate. Until these people
are held accountable I don't think our country will begin to heal and media and others apologize
to the country for the damage they have done.
7:49 -
"Comey refused to sign back up for his security clearance, and therefore couldn't be questioned
about classified matters." Well now, isn't that interesting. Haven't heard that one before.
In an exclusive interview, Attorney General William Barr spoke to NBC News' Pete Williams
about the findings on the Justice Department Inspector General's report on the Russia
investigation and his criticisms of the FBI.
I'm So glade we have a competent attorney General pushing back on the massive
disinformation narrative that comes from Giant News outlets of which are used to being
unchallenged, unchecked by today's "journalistic standards"
so this guy really asked Bahr"why not open an investigation even with little evidence?"
because is a violation of civil liberties to invade the privacy of law abiding citizens. You
need compelling evidence for something so huge
Horowitz should be instructed to edit or update his Report to discuss The Question of Bias
and Evidence of Bias. He has clearly misguided Americans with his choice of words and has
omitted important facts underpinning bias.
AG Barr is an outstanding role model, a man of integrity and wisdom, calm in a raging
political storm. I have full confidence he will make those who fabricated evidence and hid
exculpatory evidence finally face justice. AG Barr for President 2024!
Barr is a straight shooter and I love it. It sounds like we will get to the real truth
eventually through Durhams investigation I just hope it doesnt take another year to get to
the prosecutions.
So, I watched the interview... The video is called, "Full Interview: Barr Criticizes
Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation." Not once did I hear him criticize the
I.G.'s report. In fact, A.G. Barr clarified that the I.G.'s report was limited in scope
because of the limitations put on the I.G. He said that the report was appropriate.
It's scary to see how powerful the corruption of the Democratic Party has grown. It
represents a serious threat to all our personal freedom. The Democratic Party has to be
stopped.
Ok after watching this interview its quite clear that Barr and Durham is going after these
criminals and people are going to jail. Maybe there is hope for US yet becuase this dane
consider US atm a banana republic. Spying on political candidates? Forging documents? You FBI
behaving like Stalins secret police. Lets see what happen.
Amazing for the AG to go in deep into enemy territory at the heart of the opposition media
to lay out a case for the criminal activities that undermined our country prior to and after
the 2016 election. The deep state is trembling at the prospect of being held accountable
after all the facts are laid out to the american people that these activities cannot be
brushed aside or swept under the carpet if we are to continue as a country.
The corrupt media is trying to act like they have not been involved in this treasonous
scam since the beginning working directly with the treasonous cabal. The media has been lying
and pushing fake news for 3 years calling Trump a Russia agent and called him treasonous. I
knew the whole time that they were lying there was evidence from day one that this was all
lies and if I can see that from the public then they can definitely see that from the inside
they are purposefully lying.
I dare anyone on here to research Barr's History back to his involvement in the
assignation of JFK, the cover up, defending Nixon, Epstein, and many other illegal and
immoral activities. After reviewing the evidence, I walked away believing that Barr is trying
to cover up his tracks so he does do jail time. No need to reply. Either take my dare or not.
God Bless America and ALL her people, Stephan
The public are sick of waiting . I find myself skipping through a half hour news show in 5
minutes flat looking for arrests ,whereas before I was rivited to every minute of the half
hour show but it goes on and on and at the there is Nothiing .The Democrats are the masters ,
it's obvious . If they break the law they get off scott free . If you are republican wave bye
bye , you will be in jail for years . America is not the free and fair country it is all
cracked up to be . It is corrupted by the democrats who have peoiple in high places that
thwart real justice.
Mifsud approached George! Who was Mifsud working for (western asset) and why did he
approach George? He’s the one who offered George dirt on Hill. Then invited him to meet
the fake “niece”, of Putin, in England! What about this information? Someone set
George up to make this happen outside the US, because of EO 12333. It had to happen outside
the US so they could go to the fisa court!
I dont trust Christopher Wrey. He keeps slow-walking all the FBI documents and
declassifications. He also fights judicial watch and judges that rule in their favor and
continue not giving over what is ordered! This last judge was ready to hold him in contempt
for refusing to cooperate with court ordered documents.
Why did the FBI continue to investigate Trump after January when the case collapsed? To
try and find a way to impeach Trump. Remember the Washington Post headlined article right
after the inauguration "The effort to impeach President Donald John Trump is already
underway." The FBI "insurance" policy was essential!
As Tony Kevin reported (watch-v=dJiS3nFzsWg) at one small fundraiser
Bill Clinton made an interesting remark. He said that the USA should always have enemies. That's absolutely true, this this
is a way to unite such a society as we have in the USA. probably the only way. And Russia simply fits the
bill. Very convenient bogeyman.
Notable quotes:
"... The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium. ..."
One aspect of this report in the NYT is very troubling but not a great surprise to those who
pay attention to Asian affairs.
The reports that US military leaders had no idea of what to
do in Afghanistan and constantly lied to the public should rouse citizens in America to take
a different view of military leaders. That view must be to trust nothing coming from the
Pentagon or from spokespersons for the military. Included must be any and all secretaries of defence, and all branches of the military.
It is totally unacceptable that 1-2 trillion dollars and several thousand lives were spent
by America for some nebulous cause. This does not include many thousands of civilians.
During the Vietnam disaster, it became obvious that American military was lying to the
public and taking many causalities in an unwinnable war. Nothing was learned about Asia or
Asian culture because America entered Afghanistan without a real plan and no understanding of
the country or it's history.
The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up
all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and
America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in
Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which
has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium.
"... Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, recently freed from prison after his trial and conviction were deemed by the Supreme Court to have been a right-wing ruse, is vowing to challenge neo-Nazi president Jair Bolsonaro in the next presidential election. ..."
Trump's reinvigoration of the 19 th century imperialist Monroe Doctrine, which
Washington uses as a political lever to prevent the Western Hemisphere from adopting its own
foreign and domestic policies, has, once again, cast the United States in the light of an
oppressive overlord over the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Trump regime has returned to a Cold War playbook of color-coding Western Hemisphere
nations with red or pink for "socialist" and "communist." Falling into the "red" category are
Venezuela, which is suffering from crippling US-led economic, diplomatic, and trade sanctions,
and Nicaragua and Cuba, which are also subject to sanctions. Color-coded "pink" are Mexico and
Argentina, led by progressive presidents and which have shifted from their heretofore pro-US
stances. Argentina elected progressive leftist Alberto Fernández as president and, as
vice president, former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The Peronista left ticket
defeated incumbent right-wing president Mauricio Macri, a one-time real estate business crony
of Trump and someone who had abused the nation's security services in a failed attempt to dig
up dirt to target former President Kirchner in a bogus corruption court case. The same
CIA-backed "lawfare" operation was used to impeach and remove from office Brazilian leftist
president Dilma Rousseff and imprison her predecessor, the wildly popular Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, recently freed from prison after his trial and conviction
were deemed by the Supreme Court to have been a right-wing ruse, is vowing to challenge
neo-Nazi president Jair Bolsonaro in the next presidential election.
Trump and his Central Intelligence Agency's aggressive stance toward progressive hemispheric
governments have seen more transitions from the "red/pink" bloc to the fascistic and pro-US
bloc than the other direction. Ecuador has moved from the red/pink bloc to the blue as a result
of the pro-US policies of President Lenin Moreno, who served as vice president under the
leftist president Rafael Correa from 2007 to 2013. Moreno's threats against his predecessor
forced Correa to flee to political exile in Belgium. The recent right-wing coup in Bolivia was
supported by fascist leaders of Brazil and Colombia. Bolivia's democratically-elected president
Evo Morales was forced to flee to Mexico, which granted him political asylum.
The revanchist imperialism of the Trump administration has witnessed Moreno and Morales
being forced to flee the fascist "thugocracy" policies of their respective nations, which rely
on abusing the legal system to stifle dissent and imprison opposition politicians. The
governments of Chile and Peru have also firmly lined up with Washington and have engaged in
anti-opposition policies that, in the case of Chile, has led to bloodshed in the streets as a
result of brutal police actions.
A recent addition to the blue bloc from the pink/red coalition is Uruguay. After fifteen
years of rule by the left-wing Broad Front, the right-wing National Party's presidential
candidate, Luis Lacalle Pou, declared a razor-thin victory over Broad Front candidate Daniel
Martinez. One of Lacalle Pou's first decisions was to recognize the opposition Venezuelan
regime of the CIA puppet, Juan Guaido. Lacalle Pou also decided to align Uruguay with the Lima
Group, a bloc of US lackey regimes dedicated to overthrowing the Maduro government of
Venezuela. Lacalle Pou has also signaled his willingness to develop closer ties with the
Bolsonaro regime in Brazil and distance Uruguay from the Fernandez- Kirchner government of
Argentina. It is not secret that Argentina's Alberto Fernández supported the Broad
Front's Daniel Martinez for president.
Of special concern to progressive Uruguayans is the role that Lacalle Pou's coalition
partner, the Cabildo Abierto party of far-right winger Guido Manini Ríos, will play in
his government. If the CIA's lawfare operations in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia are
any indication, the Cabildo Abierto elements in Lacalle Pou's government, all supporters of the
former military junta's war against leftists in the 1970s, may seek the arrest of former
leftist presidents Jose Mujica, a leader of the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas in the 1970s, and
Tabaré Vázquez. The Latin American fascist acolytes of Trump, from Bolsonaro and
Bolivian politician Luis Fernando Camacho – known as the "Bolivian Bolsonaro" – to
Manini Ríos and Colombian President Ivan Duque, all share in common a desire to imprison
and even torture and execute the leftist opposition of their respective nations.
If the fascistic foreign policy power levers of the Trump White House, CIA, and State
Department have their way, another leftist leader in South America will face prison or worse.
Suriname's leftist president Desi Bouterse was recently convicted by a military court of the
extrajudicial executions of 15 political opponents in 1982, while he served as the military
leader of the former Dutch colony.
The death of the 15 opposition leaders may have been the work of the CIA, which launched a
coup attempt against Bouterse in 1982. In December 1982, the CIA worked closely with Dutch
intelligence to establish contacts with Bouterse's opposition in Suriname, including
politicians, businessmen, and journalists. The Dutch provided assistance to former President
Henck Chin a Sen and his Amsterdam-based opposition forces. The CIA plan included landing
Surinamese rebels in Paramaribo, the Suriname capital, and seize power. There were also reports
that the CIA planned to assassinate Bouterse during the coup, a direct violation of a White
House executive order banning assassinations of foreign leaders. The CIA's chief in-country
liaison for the coup was US ambassador to Suriname Robert Duemling.
A CIA dispatch from Suriname, dated March 12, 1982, describes the CIA's hands-on involvement
in the coup against Bouterse: "Dissident military officers opposing the leftist trend of the
military leadership launched a coup yesterday, but forces loyal to the government are still
resisting. The group, calling itself the Army of National Liberation, is led by two officers
who have been associated with conservative elements of the Surinamese society . . . Although
the rebels have control of the Army's main barracks and ammunition depot in Paramaribo,
government strongman Army Commander Bouterse and troops loyal to him apparently have taken up a
defensive position in the capital's police camp some 6 kilometers away. Fighting subsided
somewhat last night, with both sides claiming to be in control and appealing for support from
military troops and citizenry. A large number of rank-and-file military, who had objected to
Bouterse's leftist policies several months ago, probably will join the dissidents if Bouterse's
position weakens further." If anyone is responsible for the deaths of the opposition figures in
1982, one does not need to look beyond CIA headquarters in Langley and its interlocutors with
the Ford Foundation in New York.
Suriname's third largest ethnic group is Javanese, people who originally were settled by the
Dutch colonizers from Indonesia. In 1982, Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who spoke
fluent Javanese, was already well-entrenched with CIA programs in Java through her employment
with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ford Foundation. Dunham, who
used her Indonesian last name, re-spelled Sutoro from Soetoro, was a valuable asset for the
CIA's program to destabilize Suriname through its business-oriented and very anti-Bouterse
Javanese minority. Curiously, Ann Sutoro's employment contract with the Ford Foundation ended
in December 1982, the same month that the CIA attempted to oust Bouterse. During her 1981-1982
contract with the Ford Foundation, Dunham Sutoro spent much of her time liaising with the Ford
Foundation's headquarters in New York, a city that was also a base for the CIA-backed
Surinamese opposition.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Bouterse was on a state visit to China when the court delivered
its guilty verdict, along with a 20-year prison sentence. Bouterse seized power in 1980 during
an era that saw leftist leaders like Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas, Panamanian President
Omar Torrijos, Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldos, Bolivian President Hernán Siles Zuazo,
Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, and Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop all buck
Washington's influence in the hemisphere. Bouterse became a destabilization target of the
Ronald Reagan-George H. W. Bush administration. After stepping down from power in 1987,
Bouterse and his National Democratic Party returned to power when Bouterse was elected
president in 2010 and re-elected in 2015. In 2012, the National Assembly passed a bill that
granted Bouterse immunity from prosecution. It was later overturned by a court in another
blatant display of Washington-orchestrated lawfare. In 1999, the Dutch weighed in against
Bouterse by being convicted by a Netherlands court of drug-trafficking. Bouterse denies all the
claims against him and remains popular among the primarily Afro-Surinamese population.
The legal action against Bouterse appears to be part of the Trump administration's program
to curb China's international "Belt and Road Initiative," particularly in Latin America. Trump
has countered with his own contrivance, called the "Growth in the Americas" program. Peru has
signaled that it will join Argentina, Chile, Jamaica, and Panama in supporting the American
anti-Chinese bloc. It is clear that if Washington is able to depose Bouterse from power in
Suriname, it can prevent China from establishing a foothold in the country.
The Trump regime is attempting to move its chess pieces around on the Western hemisphere's
political chessboard. Increasingly, it will be up to exiled progressives like Correa and
Morales, as well as the recently-liberated Lula, to counter the march to fascist rule from
Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande.
As Tony Kevin reported (watch-v=dJiS3nFzsWg) at one small fundraiser
Bill Clinton made an interesting remark. He said that the USA should always have enemies. That's absolutely true, this this
is a way to unite such a society as we have in the USA. probably the only way. And Russia simply fits the
bill. Very convenient bogeyman.
Notable quotes:
"... The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium. ..."
One aspect of this report in the NYT is very troubling but not a great surprise to those who
pay attention to Asian affairs.
The reports that US military leaders had no idea of what to
do in Afghanistan and constantly lied to the public should rouse citizens in America to take
a different view of military leaders. That view must be to trust nothing coming from the
Pentagon or from spokespersons for the military. Included must be any and all secretaries of defence, and all branches of the military.
It is totally unacceptable that 1-2 trillion dollars and several thousand lives were spent
by America for some nebulous cause. This does not include many thousands of civilians.
During the Vietnam disaster, it became obvious that American military was lying to the
public and taking many causalities in an unwinnable war. Nothing was learned about Asia or
Asian culture because America entered Afghanistan without a real plan and no understanding of
the country or it's history.
The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up
all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and
America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in
Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which
has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium.
Any particular American war has no purpose, but the USA waging it does. The main points of
what war does:
1. Transfers wealth from social services to the military industrial complex. Americans
don't have education, infrastructure, or healthcare, but they do have a generation of
soldiers with PTSD, national debt, worldwide hatred, and an ever increasing sense of
exceptionalism.
2. Traps Americans in a cycle of fear and persecution. Americans don't need a bogeyman,
but our corporate overlords do, its how they monetize the populace. Find some disparate
population of brown people who want self autonomy, send in the CIA to fuck them up, and when
they retaliate tell Americans that people who live in a 3rd world land locked country several
thousands of miles away are a threat to their very existence and way of life because they
don't like God and Walmart.
Sadly the US uses the MIC to keep a large chunk of its population under control, as well as
providing a convenient coverup of the actual numbers of people who are unemployable or would
be unemployed if it were'nt for the taxpayer funding humungous spending in the so-called
defence sector, which needs a a constant supply of conflict to keep going. The frankly
moronic 'thank you for your service' soundbite drives me insane but it shows how much the
American public has been brainwashed.
For years my home state of Washington had a New Deal Democrat Senator named Henry Jackson,
AKA the Senator from Boeing.
He did good things for the state & was hugely popular here. One reason being that because
he brought the Federal pork back home.
IMO the things Gen. Butler wrote about in the 1920s are still the modus operandi of US
foreign policy.
If the Afghanistan war ends, the USA will go to war with someone else. You cannot spend so
much on military & not be at war. America must have an enemy. And, don’t forget,
they always have “God on our side!”
The neocons in power during 2001 were hell bent on taking out Saddam Hussein. When 9/11
happened, they were looking for avenues to blame Iraq so that they could launch the war on
that nation. Since things could not be put together, and all evidence pointed to Afghanistan,
they took a detour in their war plan with a half hearted approach.
In fact Afghanistan was never the problem - It was Pakistan that held Afghanistan on the
string and managed all terror related activities. Everything related to 9/11 and beyond
pointed directly at Pakistan. Whatever threat Bush and his cronies projected about Iraq was
true in the case of Pakistan. The war was lost when they made Pakistan an ally on the war on
terror. It is like allying with Al Capone to crack down on the mafia.
Pakistan bilked the gullible American war planners, protected its assets and deflected all
the rage on to the barren lands of Afghanistan. They hid all key Al Qaeda operatives and
handed off the ones that did not align with their strategic interests to the US, while
getting reward for it. War in Iraq happened in a hurry because the Bush family had scores to
settle in Iraq. Pressure was lifted on Afghanistan. This is when the war reached a dead
end.
The Taliban knew time was on their hands and waited it out. Obama did understand the
situation and tried to put Af-Pak together and tightened the grip on Pakistan. He got the
troops out of Iraq. Pakistan is almost bankrupt now for its deep investment on terror
infrastructure. The US has drained billions of dollars and lives in Afghanistan due to
misdirected goals. I am surprised Bush and Cheney have not been sent to jail on lies to
launch the Iraq war and botching the real war on terror.
"... The Washington Examiner first reported Friday that lawyers for the Free Beacon -- a conservative outlet based in the nation's capital -- funded the project from fall 2015 to spring 2016, when it pulled its funding as Trump looked set to clinch the nomination. ..."
"... Washington Free Beacon ..."
"... After the Democrats took over funding of the operation in mid-2016, Fusion GPS would hire former British spy Christopher Steele and would lead to the production of the so-called "Trump dossier," filled with salacious but unconfirmed claims about how Trump was compromised by the Russians. ..."
"... The Free Beacon noted in its statement that it had "no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele." ..."
"... The Free Beacon is funded in large part by the New York hedge fund billionaire and major GOP donor Paul Singer. The New York Times reports that Singer initially supported Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for the Republican nomination, but later spearheaded a campaign to deny Trump the nomination even after Rubio dropped out of the race. ..."
"... While supporting Republican establishment favorites such as Rubio and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Singer was a major backer of Common Core and was the founder of a super-PAC that has the express purpose of turning the GOP pro-gay marriage. ..."
"... Kristol is also the founder of the Weekly Standard, which like the Free Beacon has a neoconservative foreign policy outlook. The Free Beacon was co-founded by two former Weekly Standard writers, chairman Michael Goldfarb and editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti. ..."
The Washington Free Beacon, funded by GOP mega-donor Paul Singer, was the original funder of
Fusion GPS' research project that attempted to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump -- a
project that would later be funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's
campaign.
The Washington Examiner first
reported Friday that lawyers for the Free Beacon -- a conservative outlet based in the
nation's capital -- funded the project from fall 2015 to spring 2016, when it pulled its
funding as Trump looked set to clinch the nomination.
Lawyers for the Free Beacon informed the House Intelligence Committee of its role in the
funding on Friday. The outlet issued a statement
standing by its decision to fund the project:
Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained
third party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us
and our readers. In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to
provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we
retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.
After the Democrats took over funding of the operation in mid-2016, Fusion GPS would
hire former British spy Christopher Steele and would lead to the production of the so-called
"Trump dossier," filled with salacious but unconfirmed claims about how Trump was compromised
by the Russians.
Fusion has come under scrutiny for its
alleged ties to Russia, including the fact that many of the claims
originate from Kremlin sources -- meaning that the information came from inside the Russian
government.
The Free Beacon noted in its statement that it had "no knowledge of or connection to the
Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or
provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele."
"The Washington Free Beacon has issued a statement asserting that it had no involvement with
Christopher Steele or the dossier he compiled from Russian sources," Jack Langer, spokesman for
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told Breitbart News. "The Beacon has
agreed to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee to help the Committee verify this
assertion."
Yet, the revelation is likely to fuel questions about the role the so-called "Never Trump"
movement played in an effort that would eventually inflict damage on President Trump, and that
was possibly part of a Russian misinformation scheme.
The Free Beacon is funded in large part by the New York hedge fund billionaire and major
GOP donor Paul Singer. The New York Times reports
that Singer initially supported Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for the Republican nomination, but
later spearheaded a campaign to deny Trump the nomination even after Rubio dropped out of the
race.
While supporting Republican establishment favorites such as Rubio and 2012 presidential
candidate Mitt Romney, Singer was a major
backer of Common Core and was the
founder of a super-PAC that has the express purpose of turning the GOP pro-gay
marriage.
The Examiner reports that the Free Beacon was originally part of the 501(c)(4)
tax-exempt organization -- the Center for American Freedom -- but in 2014 became a for-profit
organization. The Center's original board of directors includes William Kristol, a prominent
"Never Trump" activist.
Kristol is also the founder of the Weekly Standard, which like the Free Beacon has a
neoconservative foreign policy outlook. The Free Beacon was co-founded by two former Weekly
Standard writers, chairman Michael Goldfarb and editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti.
***Update***
"The Washington Free Beacon has issued a statement asserting that it had no involvement with
Christopher Steele or the dossier he compiled from Russian sources," Jack Langer, spokesman for
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told Breitbart News. "The Beacon has
agreed to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee to help the Committee verify this
assertion."
TrumpAlways •
2 years ago • edited I smell McCain. Anyone else smell McCain with a little bit of
Bush in there...
"... The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with. ..."
"... The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors. ..."
The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not
mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and
on everyone they communicated with.
The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had
talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later
'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were
no more than unconfirmed rumors.
By now Steele's credibility is zero. Time to revisit Steele's involvement with the debunked
"Russia bought the soccer World Champion games", the Litvinenko polonium poisening and the
Skripal novichok poisening. The timing of the Skripal matter deserves some scrutiny in
relation to Skripal possibly being Steele's source for the infamous Trump dossier. There
might be a motive hidden there.
As early as
August 2018 , there had been speculation that the Skripals were being held at USAF
Fairford airbase, based on audiovisual evidence in the background garden scene where the
interview took place. Helmer's sources (they requested anonymity) spotted a chicken coop in
the background which they say is a crow ladder trap. This is one indication that the garden
scene was located near a runway. Background noises included the roar of jet engines.
If Helmer's information is correct, then we can now understand why the British government
never gave Russian embassy staff access to the Skripals: London was in no position to do so,
the Skripals were on US territory.
One implication of this new information is that the Skripals may no longer be in Britain
and may now be living in North America somewhere with new identities. Should something happen
to them (or have happened to them already), they will not be missed by their new neighbours.
The Skripals will never be allowed to return to Russia and Sergei Skripal will never see or
be allowed to communicate with his elderly mother again.
It really does look as if Sergei Skripal may have had something to do with that Orbis
dossier after all, even if as a minor source or as a reference rather than the primary source
of disinformation about Donald Trump's past activities in Moscow. What other work has Skripal
done for his American masters?
It looks as if Sergei Skripal may not be the primary source of the disinformation in
Christopher Steele's dossier. Perhaps the person who is the primary source
is not a Russian at all.
JR | Dec 11 2019 19:41 utc | 20 brings up a revisiting of the Litvinenko polonium poisoning.
It is worth mentioning that a tiny but crucial and virtually never mentioned detail of the
official inquiry (considered the last word on the matter) is that those conducting the
official inquiry were never allowed access to the autopsy report -- which should have been
(which would have been, in any honest effort at inquiry) the bedrock starting point. The
report has right along been sequestered by Scotland Yard in the interests of... you guessed
it: national security. Go figure...
It strikes me that the best explanation of the attack on the Skripals is not that he was
responsible for the Steele Dossier in any way, but that he could easily prove that it was a
fantasy. And was planning to do so.
He knew better, though, than to say so in the UK which suggests that he was on his way
home with his daughter when MI6 caught up with him and poisoned them both.
Steele, Pablo Miller and Skripal were old partners in crime.
I'm wondering whether the mistake Sergei made was not to leave the house -- probably worth
lotsa rubles -- behind and just go. On the other hand he was almost certainly under constant
surveillance.
@50 The Official Report to which you refer was also very careful to enter extensive
caveats regarding its conclusions for which there was almost no real evidence.
It seems important to note that Mr. Lavrov refers to administrations in his
comments, not presidents per se. As there are many staff in presidential
administrations, it seems entirely possible that 1) the requests from the Russians never
reached Obama or Trump personally, and 2) either or both presidents were therefore not even
aware of the requests. In the case of Trump, that would be consistent with the fact that many
members of his administration have been revealed to have operated contrary to his wishes.
@Jen #42
The Skripals residing on US territory would definitely indicate that the US has been the
senior partner in the "Skripal operation". This seems to be part of a general pattern.
@Jackrabbit #48
For the Steele dossier to be intentional bullshit (meaning its creator(s) knew it was
false when they created it) doesn't seem all that surprising. Intelligence agencies promote
disinformation all the time. That in no way means that Trump is in on the game.
Both Putin and Lavrov have stated that they talked directly with Obama and Trump about the
issues involved with their relations, so there's no excuses or obfuscation possible is this
case.
The congress decline is now visible. Other institutions will follow.
Much depends on how long "plato oil" will hold and Seneca cliff arrives.
Notable quotes:
"... First the institutions will decline. Second, the State will decline. Third, the economy will decline and only after this "phase 3" that we'll be able to se the real desintegration of the USA. ..."
"... More probable would be the gradual secession of some States after the economy has degraded enough. I wouldn't consider the loss of one peripheral State as the formal end of the USA, but if it goes to the stage of it losing more or less the Southern States or the Midwest States, then I think some historians would use these as a useful event to mark the formal end of the USA. ..."
"... the USA will remain a very influent regional superpower for the foreseeable future. It would have to take the entire capitalist structure to fall for the USA to really enter its disintegration phase. I've talked with some Marxists, and the most optimistic of them believe the USA still has some 150-200 years of tranquil existence. Of course, we're not psychics, so they are all wild guesses. ..."
@ Posted by: Passer by | Dec 9 2019 16:39 utc | 102
Well, the only USA that matters to the rest of the world is the
USA-as-the-world's-sole-superpower. If that version of the USA disappears, then we would be
talking about a completely different geopolitical architecture ("multipolar").
The USA itself doesn't need to collapse or disintegrate for that to happen.
My opinion is that the USA is losing its "sole superpower" status, albeit at a very slow
pace. It couldn't be another way, since the USA is a nuclear superpower, so its competitors
must deactivate its hegemony slowly and gently.
I also believe the USA will disappear some day, but in a different way than the USSR.
Since the USA is a capitalist economy, it will desintegrate rather than collapse, and this
disintegration will happen more a la Roman Empire (Crisis of the Third Century and beyond)
rather than a la USSR. Capitalism has an anarchic way of producing and distributing its
wealth, resulting in a decentralized web of institutions. First the institutions will
decline. Second, the State will decline. Third, the economy will decline and only after this
"phase 3" that we'll be able to se the real desintegration of the USA.
I don't believe the USA will fall by conquest, mostly because it has MAD, second because
its geographic location favors a defensive war of its territory. More probable would be
the gradual secession of some States after the economy has degraded enough. I wouldn't
consider the loss of one peripheral State as the formal end of the USA, but if it goes to the
stage of it losing more or less the Southern States or the Midwest States, then I think some
historians would use these as a useful event to mark the formal end of the USA.
But before that, I believe the USA will remain a very influent regional superpower for
the foreseeable future. It would have to take the entire capitalist structure to fall for the
USA to really enter its disintegration phase. I've talked with some Marxists, and the most
optimistic of them believe the USA still has some 150-200 years of tranquil existence. Of
course, we're not psychics, so they are all wild guesses.
They poisoned with the USA with Russophobia for decades to come, and that really increases
the risk of nuclear confrontation, which would wipe out all this jerks, but also mass of innocent
people.
Notable quotes:
"... The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5. Not holding my breath I am afraid. ..."
"... Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better distractions). ..."
Sooner or later you'll have this, IMHO: Reaction time 7 minutes . You know,
decision-making time to say "launch" or not. The decision-maker in the White House, Downing
Street and Elysees Palace either a geriatric or one of this new multiracial breed. Just think
about those people
Add to that the level of overall expertise by the crews manning those systems, its
maintenance etc. Add increased automation of some parts of the launch process with
hardware/software as it's produced now (you know, quality control etc.).
It will take a miracle not to have that launch sooner or later. Not big, say .80 KT. What
happens after that is anybody's guess. Mine, taking the second point from the fourth
paragraph .a big bang.
The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of
their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5.
Not holding my breath I am afraid.
@peterAUS The rational actor false supposition has it that the biologics can't be used
because they don't recognize friend from foe.
Rational actors? Where? Anthrax via the US mail.
One rational actor point of view is that you have to be able to respond to anything.
Anything. In a measured or escalating response. Of course biologics are being actively
pursued to the hilt. Just like you point out about Marburg.
But, the view from above is that general panic in the population cannot be allowed, and so
all biologics have to be down played. "of course we would never do anything like that, it
would be insane to endanger all of humanity". Just like nukes. So professors pontificate
misdirection, and pundits punt.
So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis. "We only want the fear that results
in more appropriations. Not the fear that sinks programs." Don't generate new Church
commissions. Hence the fine line. some fear yes, other fears, no.
Well Washington D.C.
Hahahahaha sorry, couldn't resist.
So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis.
I don't.
But I also probably forgot more about nuclear war than most of readers here will ever
know. And chemical, when you think about it; had a kit with atropine on me all the time in
all exercises. We didn't practice much that "biologics" stuff, though. We knew why, then.
Same reason for today. Call it a "stoic option" to own inevitable demise.
Now, there is a big difference between the age of those protests I mentioned and today.
The Internet. The access to information people, then, simply didn't have.
Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real
world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better
distractions).
Well, they will care, I am sure. For about ..say in the USA ..several hours, on
average.
We here where I am typing from will care for "how to survive the aftermath" .. for two
months.Tops.
Days before Britain's historic election, the UK's military-intelligence apparatus is
turning to the corporate media and US government-funded NATO cut-outs to smear Labour leader Jeremy
Corbyn with evidence-free Russiagate allegations.
Ben NORTON, Max BLUMENTHAL
The popular socialist leader of Britain's Labour Party,
Jeremy
Corbyn
, could be on the verge of becoming prime minister of the
United
Kingdom
. And the mere possibility is terrifying British intelligence services and the US
government.
Since Corbyn was elected to the head of the Labour Party in 2015, in a landslide victory after
running on a staunch leftist and anti-war platform, the
corporate
media has waged a relentless campaign
to demonize and delegitimize him.
With just days remaining before UK's national election on December 12, British intelligence
agencies and US government-backed organizations have escalated their
attacks
on Corbyn
, borrowing tactics from America's
Russiagate
hysteria
and going to great efforts to portray him -- without any substantive evidence -- as a supposed puppet of
the dastardly Kremlin.
These government-sponsored attacks on Corbyn, a lifelong anti-imperialist and former chair of the
Stop
the War Coalition
, are far from new. In December, The Grayzone reported on the
Integrity
Initiative
, a
UK
government-funded secret network
of spies, journalists, and think tanks that rehabilitated Cold
War-era information warfare to demonize Corbyn and smear anti-war leftists as Vladimir Putin's
unwitting foot soldiers.
But as polls show more and more popular enthusiasm for Labour and its socialist program on the eve
of the vote, and as the prospects of a Corbyn-led government become increasingly plausible, Western
government spooks have rapidly laundered avalanches of disinformation through the press, desperately
trying to undermine the party's electoral efforts.
Dozens of misleading hit pieces are circulating in the press that treat PSYOP specialists and
regime-change lobby groups funded to the hilt by Washington, NATO, and the weapons industry as
trustworthy and impartial.
British journalist Matt Kennard has documented at least 34 major media stories that rely on
officials from the UK military and intelligence agencies in order to
depict
Corbyn as a threat to national security
.
A powerful trans-Atlantic disinformation network sponsored by NATO-related entities and dedicated
to spreading fear about Russian meddling has set its sights on the leftist Labour leader.
Western intelligence cut-outs blame Corbyn's exposure of NHS
scandal on Russia
On November 27, the Jeremy Corbyn campaign revealed a
451-page
dossier
containing details of secret negotiations between the UK's Conservative government and the
US to privatize Britain's National Health Service (NHS) as part of the Brexit deal. The explosive
revelation put the lie to Prime Minister Boris Johnson's promise that the NHS was not up for
negotiation.
Less than a week later, a peculiar story dropped in the British media. A December 2
headline
in
the pro-Tory Telegraph blared that the NHS dossier deployed by Corbyn "points to Russia." The liberal
Guardian published a
similar
report
asserting that the leaked papers had been "put online by posters using Russian methods."
And the story
gravitated
across the Atlantic
thanks to the neoconservative Daily Beast tabloid.
In every case, the media relied on a single source to link the NHS dossier – and Corbyn himself –
to Russian interference: a supposed data consulting firm called Graphika, and its director, supposed
"information expert" Ben Nimmo.
Assuring the public that the leak of the documents "closely resembles a known Russian operation,"
Nimmo simultaneously conceded that "we do not have all the data that allows us to make a final
determination in this case."
Ben Nimmo at the DFRLab's 2018 Digital Sherlocks conference in Berlin, Germany
Not one outlet covering story bothered to inform readers who Nimmo was, or offered any detail on
the powerful state forces behind Graphika.
In fact, Nimmo is not a data expert or a journalist, but a former NATO press officer who previously
consulted for the covert Integrity Initiative propaganda farm, which was funded by the UK Foreign
Office and dedicated to spawning conflict with Russia.
Nimmo put his lack of journalistic precision on display when he launched a bungled 2018 witch-hunt
against Twitter users whose postings diverged from the NATO line, branding several real live humans as
Russian bots.
His victims included
Mariam
Susli
, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert
pianist
Valentina
Lisitsa
, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.
This April, Nimmo was hired as Director of Investigations by Graphika. Humbly
describing
itself
as "the best in the world at analyzing how online social networks form, evolve, and are
manipulated," Graphika's
partners
include
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative, the Senate
Select Intelligence Committee, and the Syria Campaign – the billionaire-funded
public
relations arm of the Syrian White Helmets
.
Nimmo also
works
as a senior fellow
at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council, NATO's
unofficial think tank in Washington.
Its DFRLab was enlisted by Facebook to "identify, expose, and explain disinformation during
elections around the world," and subsequently received $1 million from Mark Zuckerberg's social media
empire to carry out its work.
Last October, with guidance from Nimmo and the Atlantic Council's DFRLab, Facebook and Twitter
deleted
the accounts of hundreds of users
, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American
citizens.
Among those targeted in the coordinated purge were popular alternative news sites that scrutinized
police brutality and militarism, along with the pages of professional
journalists
.
Now, in the UK, the Atlantic Council is injecting itself into a national election campaign,
exploiting an atmosphere of Russia hysteria that its self-styled "information experts" have helped to
stoke.
On December 6,
Reddit
announced
that its platform had been used by "suspected" Russian actors to publish the scandalous
NHS dossier that become a centerpiece of Corbyn's campaign against Johnson. As usual, the primary
source for Reddit's claim was the Atlantic Council, which it credited with "provid[ing] us with
important attribution."
Reddit's Director of Policy, Jessica Ashooh, is the Atlantic Council's former Middle East Strategy
Task Force Deputy Director, and an ex-official of the government of the United Arab Emirates. She was
hired by the social media giant in 2017, at around the same time that Senate Select Intelligence
Committee co-chair Sen. Mark Warner was
demanding
more government control
over Reddit on the grounds that it was a potential vehicle for Russian
influence.
In a 2016
column
for
Foreign Policy, Ashooh likened Donald Trump to self-proclaimed ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and
appeared to lament that "drone strikes on Trump Tower are probably not coming any time soon."
She complained that Trump was "giving voice to troubling narratives of marginalization and
disenchantment with the status quo," and chided the "elite class" for underestimating him.
Those same elite grievances have animated the campaign to destroy Corbyn, a left-wing populist
whose political views are alternately opposed to Trump's. And the same cynical tactics honed in the
paranoid passion play of Russiagate have been redeployed against the Labour leader.
In the most recent intelligence-backed assault on Corbyn, corporate media outlets have even relied
on Nazis and neo-fascist blogs as sources.
Using literal Nazi blog posts to smear Corbyn as a terrorist
sympathizer
One of the most shockingly dishonest smears of Jeremy Corbyn was published in the British tabloid
The Sun on December 7.
The story, hyperbolically titled "'
HIJACKED
LABOUR
' Ex-British intelligence officers say Jeremy Corbyn is at the centre of a hard-left
extremist network," claimed the "Labour leader's spider's web of extensive contacts stretch from
Marxist intellectuals to militant groups and illegal terror organisations."
The piece uncritically echoes the opinions of a right-wing lobby group called Hijacked Labour,
which was founded by former military intelligence officers with the express goal of ousting Corbyn and
purging the Labour Party's anti-imperialist faction.
In lieu of any actual evidence, the report relied on a graphical web created by these conservative
disgruntled ex-spies, which attempts to link Corbyn to terrorism through many degrees of separation --
and cites neo-Nazis to do so.
The conspiratorial web does not show any tangible ties between these figures, and impugns Corbyn
with vague far-right buzzwords like "global Marxism" and "postmodern neo-Marxism." The latter term is
a non-existent and paradoxical concoction of ultra-conservative pundit
Jordan
Peterson
, based on the fascist anti-Semitic myth of "
Cultural
Marxism
," which is itself rooted in Nazi Germany's propaganda on "
Cultural
Bolshevism
."
In fact, the Hijacked Labour website directly references the right-wing pundit, recommending a
Jordan Peterson lecture titled "
Postmodernism
and Cultural Marxism
." The Peterson screed was published by
The
Epoch Times
, a right-wing media outfit run by the
fascist
Chinese cult Falun Gong
, which maintains that science and race-mixing are demonic and insists
Donald Trump was sent by God to destroy the Communist Party of China.
The anti-Corbyn group of British spooks also implored readers to watch a video by Thomas DiLorenzo,
a right-wing neoliberal economist at the libertarian Mises Institute, which Hijacked Labour claims
"works against the deconstructive and destructive effects of Cultural Marxism."
Given the conspiratorial web's reliance on far-right terminology, it might not have been a surprise
that it also cited literal Nazis as a source.
Critics on Twitter quickly pointed out that the Hijacked Labour website used by the British media
to attack Corbyn cited a neo-Nazi website called Aryan Unity.
Together with this white supremacist page, the former British military intelligence officers cited
a critique of antifascists published by the far-right website The Millennium Report. This blog has run
blatantly anti-Semitic posts with titles like, "
Why
are the Jews so reviled worldwide
? Have they brought this judgment on themselves?", "
New
World Order Pledged To Jews
," and "
This
is how the 'Court Jews'
have been strategically placed into power families over millennia."
After facing backlash on social media, The Sun article was removed from the website.
And the
new
URL
for the post includes the term "legal-removal," suggesting that the publication
may have been threatened with legal action for publishing the absurd story.
But this was far from the only corporate media attack on Corbyn that relied on military
intelligence apparatus as a source.
British journalist Mark Curtis has expanded his colleague Matt Kennard's tally and shown that some
40 media stories have been published in major corporate media outlets smearing Jeremy Corbyn with the
unsubstantiated claims of British spies.
The UK's military intelligence apparatus has demonstrated a striking ability to influence
the mainstream media, stirring pseudo-scandals almost every week. Desperate to prevent the
election of the first authentically left-wing British prime minister, it is no longer
disguising its role in the assault on Corbyn.
But there is one weapon Corbyn boasts that this unelected, opaque element can only hope for: the
hearts and minds of masses of British people. And this December 12, the people get to decide.
thegrayzone.com
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture
Foundation.
Tags:
Jeremy Corbyn
Mass Media
United Kingdom
United States
Print this article
December 9, 2019 |
Editor's Сhoice
US and UK Military-Intelligence Apparatus Campaigns to Destroy Jeremy Corbyn
Days before Britain's historic election, the UK's military-intelligence apparatus is
turning to the corporate media and US government-funded NATO cut-outs to smear Labour leader
Jeremy Corbyn with evidence-free Russiagate allegations.
Ben NORTON, Max
BLUMENTHAL
The popular socialist leader of Britain's Labour Party,
Jeremy
Corbyn
, could be on the verge of becoming prime minister of the
United
Kingdom
. And the mere possibility is terrifying British intelligence services and the US
government.
Since Corbyn was elected to the head of the Labour Party in 2015, in a landslide victory
after running on a staunch leftist and anti-war platform, the
corporate
media has waged a relentless campaign
to demonize and delegitimize him.
With just days remaining before UK's national election on December 12, British intelligence
agencies and US government-backed organizations have escalated their
attacks
on Corbyn
, borrowing tactics from America's
Russiagate
hysteria
and going to great efforts to portray him -- without any substantive evidence -- as a supposed
puppet of the dastardly Kremlin.
These government-sponsored attacks on Corbyn, a lifelong anti-imperialist and former chair of
the
Stop the War Coalition
,
are far from new. In December, The Grayzone reported on the
Integrity
Initiative
, a
UK
government-funded secret network
of spies, journalists, and think tanks that rehabilitated
Cold War-era information warfare to demonize Corbyn and smear anti-war leftists as Vladimir
Putin's unwitting foot soldiers.
But as polls show more and more popular enthusiasm for Labour and its socialist program on
the eve of the vote, and as the prospects of a Corbyn-led government become increasingly
plausible, Western government spooks have rapidly laundered avalanches of disinformation through
the press, desperately trying to undermine the party's electoral efforts.
Dozens of misleading hit pieces are circulating in the press that treat PSYOP specialists and
regime-change lobby groups funded to the hilt by Washington, NATO, and the weapons industry as
trustworthy and impartial.
British journalist Matt Kennard has documented at least 34 major media stories that rely on
officials from the UK military and intelligence agencies in order to
depict
Corbyn as a threat to national security
.
A powerful trans-Atlantic disinformation network sponsored by NATO-related entities and
dedicated to spreading fear about Russian meddling has set its sights on the leftist Labour
leader.
Western intelligence cut-outs blame Corbyn's exposure of
NHS scandal on Russia
On November 27, the Jeremy Corbyn campaign revealed a
451-page
dossier
containing details of secret negotiations between the UK's Conservative government
and the US to privatize Britain's National Health Service (NHS) as part of the Brexit deal. The
explosive revelation put the lie to Prime Minister Boris Johnson's promise that the NHS was not
up for negotiation.
Less than a week later, a peculiar story dropped in the British media. A December 2
headline
in
the pro-Tory Telegraph blared that the NHS dossier deployed by Corbyn "points to Russia." The
liberal Guardian published a
similar
report
asserting that the leaked papers had been "put online by posters using Russian
methods." And the story
gravitated
across the Atlantic
thanks to the neoconservative Daily Beast tabloid.
In every case, the media relied on a single source to link the NHS dossier – and Corbyn
himself – to Russian interference: a supposed data consulting firm called Graphika, and its
director, supposed "information expert" Ben Nimmo.
Assuring the public that the leak of the documents "closely resembles a known Russian
operation," Nimmo simultaneously conceded that "we do not have all the data that allows us to
make a final determination in this case."
Ben Nimmo at the DFRLab's 2018 Digital Sherlocks conference in Berlin, Germany
Not one outlet covering story bothered to inform readers who Nimmo was, or offered any detail
on the powerful state forces behind Graphika.
In fact, Nimmo is not a data expert or a journalist, but a former NATO press officer who
previously consulted for the covert Integrity Initiative propaganda farm, which was funded by
the UK Foreign Office and dedicated to spawning conflict with Russia.
Nimmo put his lack of journalistic precision on display when he launched a bungled 2018
witch-hunt against Twitter users whose postings diverged from the NATO line, branding several
real live humans as Russian bots.
His victims included
Mariam
Susli
, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert
pianist
Valentina
Lisitsa
, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.
This April, Nimmo was hired as Director of Investigations by Graphika. Humbly
describing
itself
as "the best in the world at analyzing how online social networks form, evolve, and
are manipulated," Graphika's
partners
include
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative, the
Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and the Syria Campaign – the billionaire-funded
public
relations arm of the Syrian White Helmets
.
Nimmo also
works
as a senior fellow
at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council,
NATO's unofficial think tank in Washington.
Its DFRLab was enlisted by Facebook to "identify, expose, and explain disinformation during
elections around the world," and subsequently received $1 million from Mark Zuckerberg's social
media empire to carry out its work.
Last October, with guidance from Nimmo and the Atlantic Council's DFRLab, Facebook and
Twitter
deleted
the accounts of hundreds of users
, including many alternative media outlets maintained by
American citizens.
Among those targeted in the coordinated purge were popular alternative news sites that
scrutinized police brutality and militarism, along with the pages of professional
journalists
.
Now, in the UK, the Atlantic Council is injecting itself into a national election campaign,
exploiting an atmosphere of Russia hysteria that its self-styled "information experts" have
helped to stoke.
On December 6,
Reddit
announced
that its platform had been used by "suspected" Russian actors to publish the
scandalous NHS dossier that become a centerpiece of Corbyn's campaign against Johnson. As usual,
the primary source for Reddit's claim was the Atlantic Council, which it credited with
"provid[ing] us with important attribution."
Reddit's Director of Policy, Jessica Ashooh, is the Atlantic Council's former Middle East
Strategy Task Force Deputy Director, and an ex-official of the government of the United Arab
Emirates. She was hired by the social media giant in 2017, at around the same time that Senate
Select Intelligence Committee co-chair Sen. Mark Warner was
demanding
more government control
over Reddit on the grounds that it was a potential vehicle for
Russian influence.
In a 2016
column
for
Foreign Policy, Ashooh likened Donald Trump to self-proclaimed ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
and appeared to lament that "drone strikes on Trump Tower are probably not coming any time
soon."
She complained that Trump was "giving voice to troubling narratives of marginalization and
disenchantment with the status quo," and chided the "elite class" for underestimating him.
Those same elite grievances have animated the campaign to destroy Corbyn, a left-wing
populist whose political views are alternately opposed to Trump's. And the same cynical tactics
honed in the paranoid passion play of Russiagate have been redeployed against the Labour leader.
In the most recent intelligence-backed assault on Corbyn, corporate media outlets have even
relied on Nazis and neo-fascist blogs as sources.
Using literal Nazi blog posts to smear Corbyn as a
terrorist sympathizer
One of the most shockingly dishonest smears of Jeremy Corbyn was published in the British
tabloid The Sun on December 7.
The story, hyperbolically titled "'
HIJACKED
LABOUR
' Ex-British intelligence officers say Jeremy Corbyn is at the centre of a hard-left
extremist network," claimed the "Labour leader's spider's web of extensive contacts stretch from
Marxist intellectuals to militant groups and illegal terror organisations."
The piece uncritically echoes the opinions of a right-wing lobby group called Hijacked
Labour, which was founded by former military intelligence officers with the express goal of
ousting Corbyn and purging the Labour Party's anti-imperialist faction.
In lieu of any actual evidence, the report relied on a graphical web created by these
conservative disgruntled ex-spies, which attempts to link Corbyn to terrorism through many
degrees of separation -- and cites neo-Nazis to do so.
The conspiratorial web does not show any tangible ties between these figures, and impugns
Corbyn with vague far-right buzzwords like "global Marxism" and "postmodern neo-Marxism." The
latter term is a non-existent and paradoxical concoction of ultra-conservative pundit
Jordan
Peterson
, based on the fascist anti-Semitic myth of "
Cultural
Marxism
," which is itself rooted in Nazi Germany's propaganda on "
Cultural
Bolshevism
."
In fact, the Hijacked Labour website directly references the right-wing pundit, recommending
a Jordan Peterson lecture titled "
Postmodernism
and Cultural Marxism
." The Peterson screed was published by
The
Epoch Times
, a right-wing media outfit run by the
fascist
Chinese cult Falun Gong
, which maintains that science and race-mixing are demonic and
insists Donald Trump was sent by God to destroy the Communist Party of China.
The anti-Corbyn group of British spooks also implored readers to watch a video by Thomas
DiLorenzo, a right-wing neoliberal economist at the libertarian Mises Institute, which Hijacked
Labour claims "works against the deconstructive and destructive effects of Cultural Marxism."
Given the conspiratorial web's reliance on far-right terminology, it might not have been a
surprise that it also cited literal Nazis as a source.
Critics on Twitter quickly pointed out that the Hijacked Labour website used by the British
media to attack Corbyn cited a neo-Nazi website called Aryan Unity.
Together with this white supremacist page, the former British military intelligence officers
cited a critique of antifascists published by the far-right website The Millennium Report. This
blog has run blatantly anti-Semitic posts with titles like, "
Why
are the Jews so reviled worldwide
? Have they brought this judgment on themselves?", "
New
World Order Pledged To Jews
," and "
This
is how the 'Court Jews'
have been strategically placed into power families over millennia."
After facing backlash on social media, The Sun article was removed from the
website. And the
new
URL
for the post includes the term "legal-removal," suggesting that the
publication may have been threatened with legal action for publishing the absurd
story.
But this was far from the only corporate media attack on Corbyn that relied on
military intelligence apparatus as a source.
British journalist Mark Curtis has expanded his colleague Matt Kennard's tally and shown that
some 40 media stories have been published in major corporate media outlets smearing Jeremy
Corbyn with the unsubstantiated claims of British spies.
The UK's military intelligence apparatus has demonstrated a striking ability to
influence the mainstream media, stirring pseudo-scandals almost every week.
Desperate to prevent the election of the first authentically left-wing British prime
minister, it is no longer disguising its role in the assault on Corbyn.
But there is one weapon Corbyn boasts that this unelected, opaque element can only hope for:
the hearts and minds of masses of British people. And this December 12, the people get to
decide.
Trump is right about the NATO members inadequate military spending; the US expects NATO
members to spend 2% of their GDP on their own defence, the US however, does not require them
to purchase American made weapons, they can produce their own weapons, like French do, or buy
from each other like Germans -- they just have to make their military up and ready in case of
emergency, that's not an unreasonable expectation.
Among the NATO members however, Canada's case is unique; due to its closeness and joint
high command (NORAD) with the US -- and direct threat from Russian claim on the Canadian
Arctic, Canada needs and must increase its military spending significantly, Canada should
purchase modern Air force fleet, Advanced Surveillance equipment, Warships and Submarines for
the defence of the Arctic; F-35, F-22, AH-64 Apache, Nuclear powered Icebreaker and
Submarines etc. because all these equipment will we be partially built in Canada which bring
many high tech jobs and economic growth to the Canadian communities.
Trump is right, NATO and Canada should spend much more on their own defence, and buying
American advanced weapons is the best strategic choice for the Canadians forces, there
shouldn't be any doubt about that.
LOL to the first comment, Russia is *zero* threat to Canada ** . Russia is zero threat to the
US or Europe either. NATO has long outlived its purpose and needs to die.
** I suppose Russia could claim the north pole, and threaten to hold Santa hostage.
@Jmaie
Russian annexation of Crimea was a blatant assault on the International Law, yet it went off
without serious consequences to Russia -- it's not a secret that Russia has claims on
Canadian Arctic seabed, Russia has already planted its flag on the Arctic seabed; here is a
Link that you should want to see: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/02/russia.arctic
I'd really be interested to understand how on earth the reintegration, by overwhelming
majority in a plebiscite acknowledged by all sides as free and unconstrained, of Crimea, a
Russian province for 300+ years, and a majority-Russian area for quite a long time, is "a
blatant assault on the International Law".
The "International Law" you quote must be a newcomer.
"I'd really be interested to understand how on earth "
It is very easy to understand. As Upton Sinclair observed "It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Alistair repeats typical neocon viewpoint. Nothing original here. Neocons make their
living off threat inflation and this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact.
Fiona Hill is a shining recent example here -- this intellectual prostitute of MIC is a
member of Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council and other MIC lobbing organization that
promote Cold War 2 and neoliberal globalization.
The real question is "Why we should believe any of these chickenhawks?" They has been
proven liars so many times that they deserve the rotten tomatoes to be thrown at them on any
of their public appearances or, which is sadly impossible, at their Internet posts
But again money do not smell: unless neocons start facing very real and very personal
consequences, nothing will change. And like with any sect there is small number of
intellectually deficient people who still believe them.
3. Restrainers Want Realistic Foreign Policy Goal s. Instead of engaging in
costly and futile efforts to remake the world in our image, restrainers want U.S. foreign
policy to pursue more feasible objectives. The U.S. military must be strong enough to deter
attacks on the U.S. homeland, a task that is relatively easy to accomplish. When necessary,
the United States can also help other states uphold the balance of power and deter war in a
few key strategic areas outside the Western Hemisphere. America's economic clout will also
give Washington considerable influence over the institutions that manage trade, investment
and other beneficial forms of international cooperation, and it should use that influence
to ensure these institutions are working properly. But the United States has neither the
need, the capacity, nor the wisdom to conduct massive social engineering projects
("nation-building") in deeply divided and conflict prone societies, and it should cease
trying.
4. Restrainers Want Credible Foreign Commitments . The United States keeps taking
on new security obligations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but it rarely
debates their wisdom or value. Americans are now formally committed to defending more
countries around the world than at any time in U.S. history, even though some of these
states are hard to defend, have little strategic importance for the United States, and
sometimes act in ways that damage U.S. interests. Washington is also engaged in less
visible military activities in dozens of other countries, some of them shrouded in secrecy.
Yet anytime U.S. leaders contemplate trimming these obligations, alarmists warn that the
slightest reduction in America's global presence will undermine U.S. credibility, embolden
rivals, and lead to catastrophe. Having allowed itself to become overextended, the United
States ends up fighting endless wars in places with no strategic value in order to convince
allies and adversaries that it will still fight in places of greater importance.
The sooner the EU & Europe generally either discard NATO or create its own defence
force in parallel with NATO, the better.
Europe MUST take control of its own destiny. It can not have an external nation, the US,
with different, if not opposing interests, dictating European policy & action.
The “Russia” situation is a perfect example of this divergence of interests.
Europe’s future clearly lies with greater Eurasian integration. Energy, primary
products, & mercantile trade all lie to the East, through Russia to China, Vietnam etc.
Notably, some countries such as Italy are already pulling away from official EU policy &
turning East.
Unfortunately, The US has bribed & threatened (many) EU leaders, leaders who
couldn’t even imagine a change to the status quo. Thankfully, though, it seems that
many average Europeans are sick to their back-teeth with the status quo & Europe’s
“evermore” subservience to US imperialism.
German tax-payers, like most other Europeans, see no need to spend billions of
hard-earned euros against a non-existent threat from the East.
They don’t even want to spend their money turning back the actual threats spilling
across their borders, but climate change is way up there on the agenda. De-industrialised
Europe chock-full of third-world denizens is going to be heaven on earth.
"... Primacists use the security threats that are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't stop, or in fact increase, the use of force. ..."
"... These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example, veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all parties involved. ..."
"... September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and denying this space wouldn't have prevented it. ..."
"... For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the Pacific." ..."
"... The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and importance. ..."
"... This article originally appeared on LobeLog.com . ..."
The unrivaled and unchallenged exertion of American military power around the world, or
what's known as "primacy," has been the basis for U.S. Grand Strategy over the past 70 years
and has faced few intellectual and political challenges. The result has been stagnant ideas,
poor logic, and an ineffective foreign policy. As global security challenges have evolved, our
foreign policy debate has remained in favor of primacy, repeatedly relying on a select few,
poorly conceived ideas and arguments. Primacy's greatest hits arguments are played on repeat
throughout the policy and journalism worlds and its latest presentation is in a recent
article in
the Wall Street Journal, written by its chief foreign policy correspondent, titled,
"America Can't Escape the Middle East." The piece provides a case study in how stagnant these
ideas have become, and how different actors throughout the system present them without serious
thought or contemplation.
Hyping the threat of withdrawal
The WSJ piece trotted out one of the most well-worn cases for unending American military
deployments in the region. "The 2003 invasion of Iraq proved to be a debacle," it rightly
notes. However, there's always a "but":[B]ut subsequent attempts to pivot away from the region
or ignore it altogether have contributed to humanitarian catastrophes, terrorist outrages and
geopolitical setbacks, further eroding America's standing in the world."
Primacists often warn of the dire security threats that will result from leaving Middle East
conflict zones. The reality is that the threats they cite are actually caused by the
unnecessary use of force by the United States in the first place. For example, the U.S. sends
military assets to deter Iran, only to have Iran increase attacks or provocations in response.
The U.S. then beefs up its military presence
to protect the forces that are already there. Primacists use the security threats that
are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't
stop, or in fact increase, the use of force.
These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently
ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example,
veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at
unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even
draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't
induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the
Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and
don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all
parties involved.
Terrorism safe havens
And how many times have we heard that we must defend some undefined geographical space to
prevent extremists from plotting attacks? "In the past, jihadists used havens in Afghanistan,
Yemen, Syria and Iraq to plot more ambitious and deadly attacks, including 9/11," the WSJ piece
says. "Though Islamic State's self-styled 'caliphate' has been dismantled, the extremist
movement still hasn't been eliminated -- and can bounce back."
The myth of the terrorism safe havens enabling transnational attacks on the United States
has
persisted despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and significant scholarly research
that contradicts it. The myth persists because it provides a simple and comforting narrative
that's easy to understand. September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the
ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and
denying this space wouldn't have prevented it.
Terrorists don't need safe havens to operate, and only gain marginal increases in
capabilities by having access to them. Organizations engage in terrorism because they have such
weak capabilities in the first place. These movements are designed to operate underground with
the constant threat of arrest and execution. The Weatherman Underground in the United States
successfully carried out bombings while operating within the United States itself. The Earth
Liberation Front did the same by organizing into cells where no cell knew anything about the
other cells to prevent the identification of other members if members of one cell were
arrested. Organizations that engage in terrorism can operate with or without safe havens.
Although safe havens don't add significantly to a terrorist groups' capabilities, governing
your own territory is something completely different. ISIS is a commonly used, and misused,
example for why wars should be fought to deny safe havens. A safe haven is a country or region
in which a terrorist group is free from harassment or persecution. This is different from what
ISIS created in 2014. What ISIS had when it swept across Syria and Iraq in 2014 was a
proto-state. This gave them access to a tax base, oil revenues, and governing resources. Safe
havens don't provide any of this, at least not at substantial levels. The Islamic State's
construction of a proto-state in Syria and Iraq did give them operational capabilities they
wouldn't have had otherwise, but this isn't the same as the possible safe havens that would be
gained from a military withdrawal from Middle Eastern conflicts. The conditions of ISIS's rise
in 2014 don't exist today and the fears of an ISIS resurgence like their initial rise are
unfounded .
Credibility doesn't work how you think it works
For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always
be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America
withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea
and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the
Pacific."
Most commentators have made this claim without recognition of their own contradictions that
abandoning the Kurds in Syria would damage American credibility. They then list all the other
times we've abandoned the Kurds. Each of these betrayals didn't stop them from working with the
United States again, and this latest iteration will be the same. People don't work with the
United States because they trust or respect us, they do it because we have a common interest
and the United States has the capability to get things done. As we were abandoning the Kurds
this time to be attacked by the Turks, Kurdish officials were continuing to
share intelligence with U.S. officials to facilitate the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi because both the United States and the Kurds wanted Baghdadi eliminated and only
the United States had the capability to get it done.
Similarly, the idea that pulling out militarily in one region results in a direct chain of
events where our adversaries move into countries or areas in a completely different region is
quite a stretch of the imagination. Russia moved into Crimea because it's a strategic asset and
it was taking advantage of what it saw as an opportunity: instability and chaos in Kiev. Even
if we left troops in every conflict country we've ever been in, Russia would have correctly
assessed that Ukraine just wasn't important enough to spark a U.S. invasion. When the Soviets
withdrew from Afghanistan, did the United States invade Cuba? What alliance did the Soviets or
Chinese abandon before the United States entered the Korean War?
Assessments of credibility , especially in times of crisis (like that in Ukraine), are made
based on what leaders think the other country's interests are and the capabilities they have to
pursue those interests. There is no evidence to support -- in fact there is a lot of evidence
that contradicts -- the idea that withdrawing militarily from one region or ending an alliance
has any impact on assessments of a country's reliability or credibility.
Not all interests are created equal
Threat inflation isn't just common from those who promote a primacy-based foreign policy,
it's necessary. Indeed, as the WSJ piece claimed, "There is no avoiding the fact that the
Middle East still matters a great deal to U.S. interests."
The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need
to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists
couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve
all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and
importance. Vital interests are those that directly impact the survival of the United
States. The only thing that can threaten the survival of the United States is another powerful
state consolidating complete control of either Europe or East Asia. This would give them the
capabilities and freedom to strike directly at the territorial United States. This is why the
United States stayed in Europe after WWII, to prevent the consolidation of Europe by the
Soviets. Addressing the rise of China -- which will require some combination of cooperation and
competition -- is America's vital interest today and keeping troops in Afghanistan to prevent a
terrorism safe haven barely registers as a peripheral interest. There are U.S. interests in the
Middle East, but these interests are not important enough to sacrifice American soldiers for
and can't easily be secured through military force anyway.
Consequences
Most of these myths and arguments can be summarized by the claim that any disengagement of
any kind by the United States from the Middle East comes with consequences. This isn't entirely
wrong, but it isn't really relevant either unless compared with the consequences of continuing
engagement at current levels. We currently have 67,000 troops in the
Middle East and Afghanistan and those troops are targets of adversaries, contribute to
instability, empower hardliners in Iran, and provide continuing legitimacy to insurgent and
terrorist organizations fighting against a foreign occupation. One
article in The Atlantic argued that the problem with a progressive foreign policy
is that restraint comes with costs, almost ironically ignoring the fact that the U.S.'s current
foreign policy also comes with, arguably greater, costs. A military withdrawal, or even
drawdown, from the Middle East does come with consequences, but it's only believable that these
costs are higher than staying through the perpetuation of myths and misconceptions that inflate
such risks and costs. No wonder then that these myths have become the greatest hits of a
foreign policy that's stuck in the past.
"... When Bush and his allies used this rhetoric, they were trying to spin a war of aggression as an act of self-defense. Now it is part of an even more ludicrous effort to make supplying weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine seem as if it is vitally important to the U.S. Simply put, this is propaganda, and it isn't even very good propaganda at that. ..."
"... Obviously, we aren't going to be fighting the Russians "here" no matter what happens in this conflict. These are the sorts of irrational claims that we get after decades of irresponsible threat inflation and mistakenly assuming that every conflict in the world is somehow our business. ..."
Here is a congealing conventional wisdom around sending military assistance to Ukraine that
is as absurd as can be, and it cropped up again this morning:
"Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" was extremely stupid when
applied to terrorism. It is much more stupid when applied to Russia, and shows how
impoverished the FP thinking of even bright, engaged Americans is. My goodness.
It is discouraging to see that one of the dumbest talking points from the Bush era has
returned. "Fight them there" was always a silly justification for waging unnecessary wars in
other countries, and now it is being repurposed to justify the questionable policy of throwing
weapons at a conflict in Europe. When it was used in the context of Bush-era wars, it was an
attempt to make what were clearly wars of choice seem as though they were unavoidable. When a
government needs to defend a bad policy, it will usually claim that they have no choice but to
do what they are doing.
When Bush and his allies used this rhetoric, they were trying to spin a
war of aggression as an act of self-defense. Now it is part of an even more ludicrous effort to
make supplying weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine seem as if it is vitally
important to the U.S. Simply put, this is propaganda, and it isn't even very good propaganda at
that.
I have written many times why I think it is a mistake to arm Ukraine. It just encourages
escalation at worst and the prolongation of the conflict at best. Until recently, the arguments
in favor of doing this have not been very compelling, but at least they weren't quite so
mindless. Needless to say, Russia's conflict with Ukraine is a local one, and the U.S. doesn't
have much at stake in that conflict. Ukrainians aren't fighting Russia and its proxies on our
behalf or to prevent them from attacking someone else, but for the sake of their own country.
If Russia hawks insist on providing Ukraine with weapons and other assistance, they should at
least be able to acknowledge that this is a peripheral interest of the United States.
Exaggerating the importance of this policy to U.S. security just calls attention to how little
it matters to U.S. security.
Obviously, we aren't going to be fighting the Russians "here" no matter what happens in this
conflict. These are the sorts of irrational claims that we get after decades of irresponsible
threat inflation and mistakenly assuming that every conflict in the world is somehow our
business.
From page 12 of Martyanov's RRMA, " people such as Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, none of whom had spent a
day serving in cadre officer uniform "
Rumsfeld was in fact a Naval Aviator who flew ASW aircraft for a number of years and retired from the Navy Reserve as a full
Captain.
Rumsfeld was in fact a Naval Aviator who flew ASW aircraft for a number of years
A Tracker, in 1950s for a couple of years, while having a degree in Political Science. That sure qualifies him for making strategic
decisions, right? Especially in the 21st century. Well, we all saw results, didn't we?
@Jim Christian Jim, a lot of truth in what you say. But especially this:
As for the military? A reflection of our society. When I went into the Navy in 1975, it was Stars and Stripes and we served
in large part for Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet.
Here is a quote from one of Russian undercover intelligence assets which was outed when Anna Chapman was outed. Unlike her,
however, this guy was a real deal. Here is what he had to say recently about US:
What is THEIR weakness? As enemies these guys are mediocrities, second rate. They overate. Their previous generation was
stronger. They respected us, we respected them. We don't respect these ones,they didn't deserve it. They can bully, as for
the real fight–we'll see about that They are enraged that soon they will have to live within their means.They forgot how to
do so long time ago. That is why they want to solve a problem with us now, while others are still afraid of them.
I remember 70s and 80s clearly, being myself a Cold Warrior, these were different times. many different people. Today, as you
say, I see decay everywhere in everything, the country (the US) was literally robbed, people blinded and all for a reasons of
bottom line in "business" and for Israel's, Saudi and corporate interests. The America I encountered in 1990s is gone.
The threat to US official impunity panics the regime more than any number of Russian
Sarmats or nuclear ramjets. The ICC is one very new judicial forum, and its halting efforts
to get its institutional footing panicked the US into imposing illegal sanctions on
accredited diplomats. The real threat of the Rome Statute is the universal obligation to
prosecute or extradite war criminals and enemies of humanity.
An increasing number of the most influential US functionaries will be unable to travel
freely. This is, in effect, pariah-state status more abject than North Korea's. This has been
a mounting challenge for years – GW Bush fled Switzerland, scared off by a war crimes
accusation from a single legislator.
And international criminal law is one jaw of a pincer. It complements the doctrine of
state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts. State responsibility provides the
civil equivalent of international criminal law, with the potential to impose restitution,
reparation, satisfaction, and compensation with interest. Satisfaction articulates directly
with international criminal law by providing for prosecution of designated criminals. The
US faces insupportable liabilities for its internationally wrongful acts, and US
functionaries know that any one of them could be sacrificed to get the regime off the
hook.
Russian policy is to enforce this law at gunpoint. Iranian policy is to make its case in
independent international courts. China is vocal about upholding rule of law, and as its
deterrent improves, it will be increasingly active in applying it. The G-192 – 96% of
the world's population – pitches in by withholding the "waterfall" of G-5 privileges.
The UK recently got pushed off the ICJ bench for the first time ever for its lawless conduct.
The US is next.
The US is an underdeveloped country ineffectually waving second-rate weapons. The world is
leaving it behind.
For the past two centuries and, particularly the last three decades, direct foreign military
intervention in the affairs of ostensibly sovereign and independent states has been perhaps the
most consistent and destructive common denominator that shapes our region's worsening
condition. Direct warfare by foreign powers almost always paves the way for decades, if not
centuries, of continuing instability -- whether in the cases of Napoleon in 1798, the Soviet
Union and the United States in Afghanistan in the decades after 1979, the U.S. in Iraq in 2003,
or Russia, Iran, and seemingly half the world in Syria since 2015.
Direct foreign military attacks or other "security" activities inside Middle East lands
inevitably create traumatic local power imbalances that portend chronic local ideological
conflicts, and spark resentments and resistance to the foreign invader or to the invader's
local ruling ally. Foreign invaders also create local authority vacuums that open the door for
other states to intervene (see Iraq, Syria, and Libya), and also create the ideal spawning
ground for radical, militant, resistance, or terrorist movements of all stripes. Israel
repeatedly encountered this instinctive local resistance to its predatory militarism in Lebanon
and Gaza, as did the U.S. and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and the U.S. and its allies in
Iraq.
Almost nothing good emerges from direct foreign militarism in the Middle East, and even when
the fighting stops surreptitious foreign support to local warring parties also perpetuates
tensions and clashes, which only spur economic waste, corruption, collapse, and widespread
poverty and suffering among the citizenry.
It is clear now that foreign militarism plays a destructive and sustained role in the two
biggest problems that now tear apart much of the Arab region (and also touch on non-Arab
Mideast states like Iran, Turkey and Israel). The first is mass pauperization that now sees
over two-thirds of all Arab citizens living in poverty or vulnerability, in states that have
reached or approach bankruptcy and allow citizens no meaningful political rights. This will get
much worse because all prevailing economic trends that could counter it are flat or negative
(trade, tourism, direct investment, remittances, job creation).
The second problematic big regional trend -- very much states' reactions to their citizens'
helpless pauperization -- is the growing militarization and securitization of governance. This
is evident in bloated military and security budgets that are controlled by a handful of
unelected, unaccountable leaders, and expanded use of anti-terrorism laws since September 2011
to deter or imprison domestic political foes, or prevent any independent political expression
by the public (see Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain). Foreign militarism since the 1940s
has inevitably promoted local military rule within Arab states. The incompetence, autocracy,
and corruption of Arab military rulers since the 1970s have driven economies into the ground,
and sparked the nonstop street uprisings we witness today across the region.
The centuries of cumulative interventions by foreign powers inside Arab states reached a new
peak in the past eight years in Syria, where dozens of foreign and regional actors that joined
the fray inside the country charted new ground in the historical legacy that had mostly seen
big power, usually Western and colonial, interventions in the region's affairs.
Of course Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Persian, and other imperial dominance in
the region across time all played a role in defining the Middle East as a frontline battlefield
in the recurring waves of global imperial dominance and cultural influence. Starting in the
19th Century, however, as imperial powers started to come to terms with their imminent
historical demise, the British and the French mostly wrote the book on the ugly heritage of
battling for strategic supremacy in our region. The 20th Century saw foreign powers fight at
will in the Middle East, and also provide indirect political and "security" support to their
favorite local partners, allies, surrogates, and stooges, who kept fighting it out inside Arab
countries that proved to be only nominally sovereign and independent states.
The civil war in Syria that started in 2011 was the logical outcome of this legacy. It
mirrors other states where authority and legitimacy collapsed in the eyes of their own people,
and the sovereign control of their lands and resources succumbed to the many foreign actors
that came in to save the dying beast or bite off pieces of its carcass. Syria offers one of the
most important examples of this, given the wide variety of warring parties that joined its
several overlapping local, regional, and global wars.
The fighters in Syria included dozens of Arab states and non-state armed groups, local
militias and tribal forces, regional non-Arab powers like Iran, Turkey, Israel, and Hezbollah
and their clients, wannabe regional powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, leading global powers
like the U.S. and Russia, second-tier powers like the U.K. and France, and a few smaller
countries around the world that joined directly or provided mercenaries mostly to win credits
with bigger Arab or foreign powers.
The eight-year war in Syria is at once a consequence and a high-water mark of sustained
foreign military interventions in the Arab region, and a harbinger of how such foreign and
local militarism will operate there for years to come. We can already see in Libya, Lebanon,
Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and scattered other corners of our troubled region several noteworthy
legacies of today's foreign militarism in Syria and its antecedents since Napoleon.
Regional and foreign powers' rolling interventions in Syria have redefined how such powers
engage across the region, where two opposing loose alliances, loosely allied with Saudi Arabia
or Iran, now face off -- each comprises Arab states, regional Arab and non-Arab powers, global
powers, and local non-state actors. The sheer number and variety of foreign forces that
directly or indirectly fought in Syria portend badly for fragile states whose illusory
sovereignty can collapse at any moment in the face of dozens of armed actors that pounce like
wolves circling a dazed gazelle. The "international community" that actively joined and fueled
the fighting also responded weakly to the alleged and real war crimes on both sides This
suggests that the "international community" is something of a fiction, but also that, whatever
it represents, it can live with the Middle East's continuing authoritarian, lawlessness, and
violent political systems -- as long as the violence, refugees, terrorists, and turmoil remain
in the Middle East.
Indeed, global and regional powers actively engage in cross-border militarism and
neo-colonialism that we can see in several arenas: Washington's support for Israeli settlements
expansion and annexations of occupied Arab lands, and its lingering presence in Syria and Iraq;
Russian and American support for Turkish incursions into northern Syria; Saudi Arabian and
Emirati moves to control parts of the south of Yemen for their own strategic aims; British and
American direct involvement in the war on Yemen; and, French, Emirati, Russian, and Egyptian
support for the rebel forces of Khalifa Haftar in Libya, to mention only the most obvious.
These are only the most current but ongoing consequences of over two centuries of non-stop
foreign military and political interference that our region has experienced, with devastating
long-term impacts. Internal and regional wars, in a climate of very high Arab military
spending, continue to propel countries back into dilapidated or vulnerable conditions every few
decades. The Arab examples of this only increase, including Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, Egypt,
Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Jordan. Non-Arab Iran, Turkey, and Israel face their own
challenges, as they simultaneously suffer the damages of external militarism and also engage in
it themselves around the region.
It is time for all foreign and regional powers to start learning the hard lessons of these
historical trends and instead seek non-violent diplomatic solutions to challenges they now
mostly address with their guns blazing. A regional population of half a billion poor and
powerless people held in check by hundreds of billions of dollars of military spending linked
to foreign troops who enter our countries at will is probably a far greater real threat to
their wellbeing than anything they can imagine today.
This is the net result of Clinton policies and neocon dominance in the USA foreign policy.
And it is not a pretty picture. It might difficult to win Russia back as an ally after those
Russiagate nonsense. They feel really offended by it and might overreact as is evident from the
test below.
I'll just say again that imbecilization is a completely normal historical phenomenon in declining empires, Empires also tend to have a very
flexible conception of truth, that is, they believe they can
fabricate reality for the simple reason they are geopolitically dominant.
The fact that the MSM have become mouthpieces for the CIA/deep state has
played a huge role in the brainwashing of academia and the rise of neoliberalism. The false
narratives these "trusted sources" of information have been serving up create a very real
Matrix, a false reality that is ingrained into those who rely upon them for their daily
"news".
It feels like the world has gone crazy. They push someone's wallet in our pocket, and then
shout "catch the thief!". We try to debunt this false flag, show surveillance footage, which
clearly shows the setup. But the continue shout in chorus - " thief, thief, thief!".
Acquaintances turn away, hide their eyes. Those "Western partners" iare numerous and they
silence our weak attempts to protest. We were driven into a corner... They try to strangulate
us with sanctions.
Unfortunately, this is our new reality. For the next decade. The question is "Why?" Because
we are a force in international arena again. We're ruining their racketeering business. We are
a vivid example that it is possible to escape the system of the global racket of which they
feed, That there is an alternative.
So now there is a player who does not wan to pay the racketeers, And he is still alive. This
means that others may not pay either. They hate such a situation, because other players may
refuse to pay, and that also means that sooner or later they might be force to live within this
own meanss. It has been a long time since they live within their means, and they completely
lost the habit of doing so. So they want to "solve" the problem with us now ones and forever,
while others are still afraid of them.
Plus they have a new gang leader. Like all newbies, he wants to be the toughest. And raises
the stakes.
Let's face the truth. They won't let us go easily. It's pointless to explain. We will be
hunted, subjected to the array of false flags, persecuted and sanctioned to death. And if they
feel the slack – they will beta us to the death, much more thoroughly then they did in
1990th. The question of whether this can be avoided is no longer worth asking. Today we have
one question – how to survive the next two decades?
We need finally exhale and turn on the brain... The key to victory, as Sun Tzu wrote –
is in knowing the enemy and knowing yourself.
What is their strength?
First, there are many. And they have money. They can buy everything, including witnesses and
judges. We'll be blamed for for anything; they will attack and we will be framed as the
attacker.
Second, they scream loudly. In chorus. That control world mass communications. And their
propaganda works. It is useless to argue otherwise. All our arguments are useless. They will
fall of death ear and will be ignored. Nobody will question their validity -- they will be
simply swipe under the carpet. No matter how ridiculous is their "version of events" is
(Skripals, Russiagate, Ukrainegate) the label "the guilty party" is already put on us like a
yellow patch on the Jews in Nazi Germany. Before any investigation or God forbid judicial
process. And most people on the planet still take their word for it.
What is their weakness?
As opponents these guys, I mean their neoliberal elites are the second grade; they belong to
the "grey zone", the zone of mediocrity. Too greedy, too arrogant, and too lazy. Sometime
semi-senile. Their previous generation was much stronger. They respected us. And we them.
We do not respect this new neoliberal elite and they feel that. And we don't respect them
because such mediocrities do not deserve our respect, and are not trustworthily partner. They
generally can be classified as "Unable to adhere to any legal treaties" (Nedogovorosposobnie")
. And that scares us, almost to death, because you need to deal with completely unpredictable,
bizarre partner for whom treaties and agreements are not worth the paper they were printed on.
But they will avoid open fight, unless the success guaranteed. We need to ensure that such
situation never occur.
Their nervousness, their fidgeting, their second-rateness now is staring to be felt by other countries who would
prefer to hedge their bet and join only a sure winner. They see that the outcome of the USA quest for Full Spectrum Dominance is not yet
decided.
In addition, our opponents are now engaged in brutal showdown with each other. Western
Europe recovered and became competitor of the USA. They also are openly laughing over their new chief. Half of the major
Europium countries leadership probably hates him. For how long he can stay in
power is completely unclear. But this is a new and unexpected development. .
And those in the second row, the stooges, are generally ready to escape from this virtual
battlefield. It became too expensive to catch hot potatoes for Uncle Sam as the amount of loot
for partners shrunk dramatically. And problems with neoliberalism at home mounted. Neoliberal
chickens start coming to roost. They were promised money and a share of loot, not a beating in a real fight
with a strong determined opponent.
What is our strength?
First of all we no longer have any illusions about the the USA or West in general, illusions
that cost us so dearly in 1990th. They are predators who want to colonize, fleece and dismember
our nation. An having no illusions means that they can't repeat economic rape they committed in
1990th. Now we know what awaits us if we give up. They'll devour us completely. Those gangsters
will kick the lying opponent with feet until he is dead. They won't let us survive a second
time.
We also have a grenade as the last resort. They know it, and they're terrified we'll pull
the pin.
They don't understand how we can be defeated, so they try new ways to make us surrender
without a fight. Looking for a weak spot.
What is our weakness?
Our first problem is that we are alone. We are a big and clumsy country with a lot of
internal problems and convoluted history. Which refuse to became the USA vassal. We were a difficult neighbor in the past. Some
people are afraid of us because or our past.
Our second and main problem is the lack of money for economic reconstruction. We don't have enough money for the restoration of the
economy and the standard of living of our people after 1990th rape to the level we deserve as
the major European country. Say the level the Germany managed to achieve, despite being
defeated in WWII. And nobody is going to help us, at least on acceptable conditions. They will
try to slow down our economic development by all mean possible. that's why they already imposed
sanctions under bogus pretext. They will impose more to slow down the process. They will
manipulate oil prices and engage us in "gas wars." If we can solve this problem and restore the
economy and the standard of living of people after 1990 collapse other problems will be easier
to take on.
Also a nice thing about having money is that you instantly have a lot of fiends ;-) At
once.
Now some panoramic view on the situation like in oil painting.
First of all out willingness to fight back is a guarantee that they will not get into a real
fight. We need to hold out for the next ten-twenty years or so. I think this is what we can
expect for neoliberalism to last before the collapse.
But that doesn't solve all our problems. We need that they stop punching us with new
sanctions. Better forever but, at least for the next twenty years. Until their racket finally
falls apart.
So the second goal is to earn to earn money need to reconstruction of the economy and
creating first class infrastructure. Which will allow us to grow. and we need to do this while
there is time. That probably means that invest our money in growth and stop saving "for a rainy
day" in US treasures and Western banks. Otherwise, this rainy day may come in a very unexpected
fashion and way too soon: money will simply be confiscated as long as they can do it with
impunity.
Andrey Bezrukov is the associate Professor of the chair of applied analysis of
international problems, MGIMO
"... Today USA even is no more an entity. You can not negotiate a thing with "America" because there is no such institution any more, but a hellish swarm of infighting spiders, each delightfully breaking anything negotiated by a rival spider. ..."
US political "elites" are generally appallingly incompetent in matters of war and are
"educated" mostly through Hollywood and Clansiesque "literature". I am not even sure that
they comprehend what Congressional Research Service prepares for them as compressed
briefings. Neocon wing of US political elite is simply mentally inadequate.
Very true, especially the part about "Hollywood and Clansiesque 'literature.'" I used to
read Clancy's books and, while entertaining, in retrospect they appear ridiculous, even
childish. But they probably capture the popular notion of American military invincibility
better than any other.
Most of Hollywood's output is garbage anyway, and its grasp of real war and military
matters appears to be that of a not so precocious third grader.
Katyn, whoever did it, was much before Cold War and before even first relatively small
nuclear blast.
And if you want to go that far – why not remember crisis over West Berlin, where
tank armees were watching one another, but no one pulled trigger?
Afghanistan was attacking one's own ally. Same as Prague 1968 and Hungary 1956.
If you want to compare – that is like USA invading Panama to remove their no longer
reliable puppet Norriega.
Did American attack on their own Panama risk USSR going ballistic? Hardly so. There was no Soviet invasion into Pakistan nor there was Chinese/American invasion into
India.
And looking away from purely military events, there was no attempt to arrest the whole
embassy stuff them, neither in Moscow nor in DC. No killing Soviet ambassadors in NATO states
during official events.
Those dirty games had red lines, both sides maintained. Today? Today USA even is no more
an entity. You can not negotiate a thing with "America" because there is no such institution
any more, but a hellish swarm of infighting spiders, each delightfully breaking anything
negotiated by a rival spider.
> deploying conventional anti-ballistic missile defenses around their most important
cities.
No, by then effective treaty both USSR and USA had only ONE region they were allowed to
protect.
Those were some nuclear launchpads in USA i guess, and one single city (Moscow) in USSR. No
more.
> deterrence [did not] worked > See the last phrase in bullet 2.
You suppose USSR killed itself trying to keep deterrence working.
That does not show it did not work, already.
That shows it worked so well (at least from Soviet perspective) that they gambled all they
had on the futile effort of keeping that deterrence working into the future.
Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there
been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a
handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they
will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will
not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John
Turner, 1922
Still it is true that Morales clings to power for too long... Generally the problem of the successor is almost an
irresolvable problem for left wing LA governments.
Economists' and statisticians' sign-on letter regarding the Bolivian elections
We the undersigned call for Bolivia's democratic institutions and processes to be
respected.
The Trump administration has openly and strongly supported the military coup of November
10 that overthrew the government of President Evo Morales. Everyone agrees that Morales was
democratically elected in 2014, and that his term does not end until January 22; yet many
outside of the Trump administration seem to accept the Trump-supported military coup.
Many people who supported the coup have claimed that Morales stole the election. This
story of fraud was given a very big boost by a statement issued by the Organization of
American States the day after the October 20 election, which it subsequently repeated in
similar forms. The statement, from the OAS Electoral Observation Mission for Bolivia,
announced "deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend
of the preliminary results after the closing of the polls." No evidence in support of this
statement was included. However, it was widely interpreted as an allegation of fraud, and
such allegations became common in the largest media since the election.
In fact, it is easy to show with election data, which is publicly available, that the
change in Morales' lead was neither "drastic" nor "hard to explain." There was a pause in the
"quick count" of the vote results -- when 84 percent of the votes were counted -- and
Morales' lead was at 7.9 percentage points. At 95 percent, his margin had increased to just
over 10 percent, which allowed Morales to win in the first round, without a runoff. By the
end, the official count showed a lead of 10.6 percent.[1]
It is not uncommon for election results to be skewed by location, which means that results
can change depending on when different areas' votes get counted. No one argued that there was
fraud in Louisiana's November 16 gubernatorial election, when the Democratic candidate John
Bel Edwards, pulled out a 2.6 percentage point victory, after being behind all night, because
he won 90 percent of the vote in Orleans County, which came in at the end of the count.
And the change in Morales' lead was not "drastic" at all; it was part of a steady,
continuous increase in Morales' lead for hours before the interruption.
This graph shows that the lead held by President Evo Morales (light blue dots) and by his
party in parliamentary elections (dark blue dots) rose at a steady rate for most of the vote
counting. There was no sudden surge at the end to put him over the 10 percent threshold.
The explanation for the increase in Morales' margin was therefore quite simple: the
later-reporting areas were more pro-Morales than earlier-reporting areas.
In fact, the final result was quite predictable on the basis of the first 84 percent of
votes reported. This has been shown through statistical analysis and also by even simpler
analysis of the differences in political preferences between later and earlier-reporting
areas.
We call upon the OAS to retract its misleading statements about the election, which have
contributed to the political conflict and served as one of the most-used "justifications" for
the military coup. We ask the Congress of the United States to investigate this behavior of
the OAS, and to oppose the military coup, the Trump administration's continuing support for
it, and the continuing violence and human rights violations of the de facto government.
Media outlets and journalists also have a responsibility to seek independent experts who
are at least familiar with the election data and can offer an independent analysis of what
happened, rather than simply take the word of OAS officials who have now repeatedly shown to
be wrong about this election.
Many lives may depend on getting this story straight.
This list tells quite a story. It deserves a name such as "US History Written in Blood," but
more ironically and yet sufficient would be "An Inconvenient List." In any case, mass murder
for fun and profit has defined war throughout the entire history of humankind. That in the
modern era of late that the US has pioneered rentier capitalism as a means of extracting
profits from the industrial war machine is a matter of the natural evolution of state
sanctioned murder, far better at returning profits to investors than the mere slaughter of
stone age natives to steal their land.
OTOH, pacifism is indeed an aberration of political thought, not necessarily an unwarranted
aberration, yet one that should be subject to close inspection for its bona fides. My
Cherokee ancestors inform me to always be suspect of the good intentions of white men
claiming that they despise war.
Pacifism for me is individual. I was a cold warrior (pacifist not!) from '72 to '85 when I
went from supporting operating weapons to the "dark side" in weapons development, which a lot
was also nuclear related.
It's pretty obvious that Team Pelosi is more concerned with the affairs of the Empire,
even though she has no constitutional responsibility. than for the welfare of the American
people. The focus of the impeachment hearing on American policy in Ukraine is further
evidence.
Meanwhile, I have gotten no answer to my basic question: what are the top 5 pieces of
progressive legislation that Pelosi has passed--legislation that representations can brag
about to their constituents when running in 2020? It's pretty obvious that their have been
almost none.
Yet, I have been assured by others here at EV that our two party representative political
system is not merely engaging in so much Kabuki theatre in order to appear relevant. Who
knew?
Outside of the fact that this fellow is a liar of monumental proportion - for instance, this
post alone contains 3 different lies - it is fundamentally untrue that BOTH parties are just
engaged in theater. One actually passes legislation to help people and to reduce the
influence of $$$. The other - as former Republican party member Norm Orenstein has pointed
out - is anti-democracy, pro-despotism and a insurgent danger with a propaganda arm.
Huh... all team Pelosi/Schumer of is rant against the US constitution, demean the congress,
disdain the office of the President and make up things about the Donald.
See the continuing resolution good through 20 Dec because Pelosi who owns the House won't
face the responsibility to try and run the US government's purse.
More selective outrage from EMichael, the partisan hack.
Sure, it's horrendous that Trump pardoned a war criminal. But let's not forget that Obama
never even prosecuted torturers ... or closed Guantanamo as promised.
As usual for EMichael and his ilk, what's a horror when their party does something, it's
perfectly acceptable when his party does it.
All these years of being a almost pacifist and now I am seeing the error in my ways.
Sometimes - hopefully increasingly less often - good people must rise up and stomp out evil.
The pardons were not just condoning war crimes - it was telling the nazi ahs in the ranks
that they can do the same domestically. The right has an army within the US. Most of the
officers are okay - but that said, they are tolerating nazis, white supremacists, oathkeepers
and dominionists in their ranks. These exceptions are to let the other nazis know they can
mass murder if the want.
"Second, reports suggest that Trump's new demands are not based on any clear U.S. military
need. This leads us to the question of how Trump arrived at the new sum being sought from
South Korea."
"Polling shows that while Americans are increasingly skeptical of the U.S. intervention
into Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans do support the United States' current engagement in the
world and its commitments to allies."
"Polling" in the current militarized liberal media is questionable as is putting one's
finger on "clear U.S. military need".
It seems the source of "clear US military need" in Japan and Korea (Germany, France, EU
part of NATO, Libya, Somalia...) is media selling the meme that the US cannot "trust" them to
maintain the US" "rules based world order".
"Trust" an excuse to shoulder the "white man's burden".
Besides there are a lot of Lockheed coupons to be clipped.
In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The
White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling
urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations.
Published in the February, 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine, the poem coincided with the
beginning of the Philippine-American War and U.S. Senate ratification of the treaty that
placed Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines under American control. Theodore
Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, copied the poem and sent it to
his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was "rather poor poetry, but good
sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as
Roosevelt. The racialized notion of the "White Man's burden" became a euphemism for
imperialism, and many anti-imperialists couched their opposition in reaction to the
phrase.
Take up the White Man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man's burden
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain
Take up the White Man's burden --
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard --
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
"Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden-
Have done with childish days-
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Source: Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden: The United States & The Philippine
Islands, 1899." Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1929).
"... As Bolivian soldiers were firing tear gas at a funeral for slain protesters recently, the US State Department issued a statement saluting "Bolivia's political transition to democracy" and declaring that the military leaders who had just overthrown the elected government were "standing up for their constitution." It was the latest example of intensifying US support for violently oppressive regimes south of our border. We are paying attention to Latin America again. That's bad news for Latin America. ..."
As Bolivian soldiers were firing tear gas at a funeral for slain protesters recently, the
US State Department issued a statement saluting "Bolivia's political transition to democracy"
and declaring that the military leaders who had just overthrown the elected government were
"standing up for their constitution." It was the latest example of intensifying US support
for violently oppressive regimes south of our border. We are paying attention to Latin
America again. That's bad news for Latin America.
The US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago are sometimes described as
wars in which everyone lost. In an odd way, though, Latin America won those wars. For more
than a decade, the US government focused so obsessively on the Middle East that it forgot
about Latin America. Free of intervention from Washington, voters in several countries
elected progressive or leftist leaders whom the United States would never have tolerated in
an earlier era. That cycle is now ending. The United States is returning to its traditional
role in Latin America, embracing retrograde regimes just as we did during the dark days of
military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.
In Bolivia, the landlocked heart of South America, the military deposed President Evo
Morales on Nov. 10 after opponents charged that he had used fraud to secure his re-election
three weeks earlier. Morales was Bolivia's first indigenous president and an outspoken
socialist. He had nationalized the oil and gas industries. Some feared that he was preparing
to limit foreign exploitation of his country's rich lithium deposits. His indigenous identity
was a permanent affront to the white ruling class. The little-known politician who has
installed herself as provisional president, Jeanine Añez, once tweeted: "I dream of a
Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rituals."
Morales may have -- manipulated election laws to give himself an extra presidential term.
But in its first days, the new regime has shown little democratic impulse. Morales has been
forced to flee the country. Senior members of his party have been attacked or arrested. If
his masses of indigenous followers are pushed back into political isolation despite
constituting the country's majority, many will feel disenfranchised and angry.
Their cousins in Honduras would know the feeling. Late one night in 2009, the elected
Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, who like Morales had alienated both the United States and
his own ruling elite, was pulled out of bed and put on a plane out of the country while still
in his pajamas. In the decade since then, the new regime in Honduras has eagerly handed out
mining and hydroelectric contracts to foreign corporations. It has abolished term limits for
presidents -- the very sin for which we denounced President Morales in Bolivia. Mass protests
have been harshly suppressed. Environmental activists are killed with impunity.
Last month in a New York court, the brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez
was convicted on charges of large-scale drug trafficking. A witness testified that the drug
lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman had contributed $1 million to Hernandez's presidential
campaign. Yet just a couple of days after the trial ended, the senior American diplomat in
Honduras was photographed partying with President Hernandez. Hondurans who saw those pictures
could hardly miss the message: the United States happily supports a Latin American government
that holds power unconstitutionally, allows political killers to rampage freely, and is
widely reported to be infiltrated by drug traffickers -- as long as it is friendly to the
United States. How has Honduras showed that friendship? By keeping leftists out of power and
agreeing to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The other Latin American country in which the United States is most assiduously wrecking
prospects for democracy is Guatemala. Like neighboring Honduras, it has long been dominated
by a clique of lavishly corrupt oligarchs. But over the last decade, a force has emerged that
for the first time mounted a serious challenge to drug traffickers, larcenous politicians,
organized-crime kingpins, and death squad leaders. In 2006, the government invited a squad of
investigators and prosecutors assembled by the United Nations to come to Guatemala and build
cases against powerful criminals. Since then the squad, known by the Spanish acronym CICIG,
has secured more than 400 convictions and deeply shaken the political elite. Presidents
George W. Bush and Barack Obama recognized that this process might help stabilize Guatemala,
and provided moral support and funding for CICIG.
This year, at the request of senior Guatemalan officials who seemed likely to be indicted
for corruption, the State Department agreed to stop backing CICIG. That crippled the first
serious effort in generations to confront the violent corruption that throttles civic life in
Guatemala. What did President Trump ask in return? That Guatemala open an embassy in
Jerusalem and agree to serve as a "safe haven" for Honduran and Salvadoran immigrants the
United States doesn't want to accept -- a sick joke considering that Guatemala is plagued by
violence and has one of the world's highest murder rates.
Bashing leftists in Latin America and embracing their quasi-fascist enemies is one of
Washington's oldest habits. It feels good and pays electoral dividends in Florida. Bolivians,
Hondurans, and Guatemalans might be forgiven for wishing that United States would once again
plunge into all-consuming war somewhere far away. That might allow them to try shaping their
societies as they see fit.
In addition to L.A., others in California submitting briefs include Sacramento, San Diego,
Fresno, Riverside and Orange counties, as well as a slew of cities, including Sacramento,
Fullerton, Torrance and Newport Beach. Several states including Idaho, Texas and Alaska have
as well. Their reasons for doing so vary.
"We're saying that we agree with the central tenet of Boise that no one should be
susceptible to punishment for sleeping on a sidewalk at night if there's no alternative
shelter at that point," said Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer. "But the rationale sweeps too
broadly ... It makes the opinion unclear and, therefore, the opinion raises more issues than
are resolved. And so it leaves jurisdictions like us without the certainty that we need."
---
The ninth curt ruling specified that without enough shelters, public camping cannot be
banned.
LA is spewing horse manure, claiming they want a humane solution, but they are filing to
have the ruling overturned. LA wants to ban homeless camping and they make up a bunch of
irrational horse manure because they had already invited the homeless to California with
promises of shelter that does not exits. They re caught in a contradiction and end up talking
out of the side of their mouth.
And no, more national debt to promise apartments for everyone just make inequality worse
because we end up doing bad deals with the primary dealers. The evidence is in on that. Our
ten year experiment of the '50 little hoovers' crowd has been proven fraudulent.
"... Just war theory and military ethics crumble to dust on the battle field. We rarely fight because it is right, but rather because in some context it seemed necessary at the time. After 9/11 there was an imperative that the US military wage an extended war against any and every group of Muslims that defied US global hegemony in any way. ..."
The average demorat, aside from worshipping Ba'al and hating the constitution, is depraved,
been such since crooked Hillary forgot that the neocon, empire spreading, war mongering
liberals living on the coasts do not run the world.
"...the neocon, empire spreading, war mongering liberals living on the coasts do not run the
world."
[Who says that they do not? Certainly, it is close enough to that for government work.
Besides, in the end corporations and the interests of the donor class dictate the rules of
engagement for both illiberal and unconservative politicians. How the dogs of politics fight
over scraps thrown out for them should be of less interest to the wage class than who is
throwing out the scraps to them.]
Of course a former Air Force military hardware procurements officer likely knows no more
about present day life among the wage class than a banker. That would be like thinking that a
kid raised in poverty by the welfare state knew how to farm. Still, it is possible for either
one to be haunted by guilt late in life.
You are bound with your adversaries in ways known only to God, not a religious testimonial
but merely a proxy for the abstraction of omniscience. Some things can be seen as clear as
day and remain a complete mystery, to me at least.
At the very least Trump is guilty of being Trump. So, if you believe the charges against
Trump are Trumped up, then what else would you expect?
Just war theory and military ethics crumble to dust on the battle field. We rarely
fight because it is right, but rather because in some context it seemed necessary at the
time. After 9/11 there was an imperative that the US military wage an extended war against
any and every group of Muslims that defied US global hegemony in any way.
The US Constitution was written and then rewritten repeatedly in blood going all the way
back to Apr 19, 1775. That is what it means to be an American, son, my Cherokee ancestors
notwithstanding.
China suspends Hong Kong visits by U.S. military ships, aircraft, sanctions U.S. NGOs
BEIJING -- The Chinese government has decided to suspend reviewing applications to visit
Hong Kong by U.S. military ships and aircraft starting Monday, foreign ministry spokesperson
Hua Chunying said.
China will also take sanctions against some U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for
their role in the disturbances in Hong Kong, Hua said at a press conference.
The NGOs include the National Endowment for Democracy, National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs, International Republican Institute, Human Rights Watch and Freedom
House.
A lot of facts and evidence have shown that the aforementioned NGOs supported anti-China
rioters in Hong Kong in various ways, abetted their extreme and violent criminal behavior and
incited separatist activities for "Hong Kong independence", Hua said, adding that these
organizations bear major responsibilities for Hong Kong's chaotic situation and should be
sanctioned and pay their price.
The spokesperson said the United States has seriously violated the international law and
basic norms governing international relations, and interfered in China's internal affairs by
signing the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 into law despite
China's firm opposition.
"China urges the U.S. to correct its mistake and stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs or
interfering in China's other internal affairs by any word and act," Hua said.
China will take further necessary actions in accordance with the development of the
situation to firmly defend the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong and safeguard national
sovereignty, security and development interests, she said.
"... Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online. ..."
"... And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger ..."
"... The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq ..."
"... On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point). ..."
"... Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is. ..."
"... No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism. ..."
"... The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost. ..."
"... I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014). ..."
"... NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.). ..."
"... The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR. ..."
In the Year of Our Lord 2019, sixteen years after this nation launched the catastrophic Iraq War, the following words were spoken
on Capitol Hill this week:
We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is.
And one of the things we understand most profoundly is it's not a real democracy, it's not a mature democracy, if the party in
power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. And I think you heard testimony - the Intelligence Committee heard testimony
about how it isn't just our national interest in protecting our own elections. It's not just our national interest in making sure
that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front line so they fight the Russians there and we don't have to fight them here, but
it's also our national interest in promoting democracy worldwide.
This was not the second coming of the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Bolton brigade. This was Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and Democrat
called by her party to testify in this week's House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.
Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the
often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online.
And I'm old enough to remember these lines from President Bush's second inaugural address, in 2005:
There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants,
and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the
success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every
man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and
earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and
no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement
of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation
and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
That didn't work out too well for us, for Iraq, or for the Middle East.
And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was
there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play
his part as a warmonger.
The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq
On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S.
into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such
treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it
will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point).
There are, as Victoria Nuland put it, 5 billion reasons for backing the CIA-led coup that overthrew an elected government and
replaced it with leaders that the she and the rest of the Obama/Clinton State Department chose. It was the Democrats, since the
nineties under another Clinton, that decided to move the American military right up to Russia's borders, interfere in the 1996
election to keep the puppet Yeltsin in power, and with Wall Street leaders to pillage the Russian economy with the stated end
to break up Russia into smaller satrapies with governments appointed by the IMF.
Did Joe Biden brag about a quid proof not releasing funds to the Ukraine until it ended the probe into Burisma, which was paying
son Hunter millions, and dismiss the investigators altogether? Does it turn out Ukrainian power brokers favored under Obama then
sought to influence the American elections against Trump, viewed as wanting to make peace with Russia? Yes, and yes.
The US are not a democracy, since the people do not rule. Rather, it's an oligarchy, since a few influential groups do get
their way all the time. Pamela is just shilling for one of these groups, the war party.
It does not matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
Agreed, I hope the Republicans agree to impeach him immediately after Election Day if he does win (which I think he will due
to the opposition candidates). I'd much prefer Mike Pence to represent us than freaking Trump. I voted third party last time,
but even as bad as Trump is, he's not nearly as bad as every democratic front runner.
Why the Democratic Party doesn't back Tulsi Gabard is insane, she's the only candidate who everyone could be somewhat happy
with.
Taking a "Unity-Party" angle this election and nominating an anti-war military Veteran who's also a super patriotic minority
women would absolutely destroy Trump. She's also a religious conservative while simultaneously being a sane social liberal, she
satisfies some of the concerns of literally every part of the electorate. A Tulsi Gabard/ Joe Manchin ticket would be an 84 level
blowout. A Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris ticket is literally the best thing that has ever happened to Trump. Trump will never beat
an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably)
going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is.
An article from someone I trust on that evidence which is not hearsay would be useful, any chance you would write one? I ask
because impeachment is either political or legal. If it's political then it's just the normal noise from D.C., if it's legal then
I want legal standards of evidence. The times I've paid attention the "evidence" has been at the level of someone told me they
overhead a phone conversation or we all believed this, but Trump directly told me the opposite of what we all believed.
I'm looking for something like saying "I did not have sex with that woman" under oath as evidence of committing perjury.
...OTOH, Trump's move against Hunter Biden could possibly be a "high crime and misdemeanor" worthy of impeachment, but given
the existence of Acts of Congress against foreign corrupt practices and the New York Times investigation of Hunter Biden, it becomes
hard to untangle Trump's motives. It would seem to be difficult to prove that an impeachable "high crime and misdemeanor" occurred
if probable cause for a Hunter Biden investigation existed. If we prove (NOT assume, as the Dems currently are doing) that probable
cause did not exist then impeachment would be a slam dunk. If we don't prove that then Trump's impeachment will not be seen as
legitimate by large segments of the public. We really are teetering on the edge of something deep here.
You think that finding out what the son of a sitting vice President, a VP who was also 'point man' for Ukraine, was doing getting
millions from a corrupt Ukrainian entity is strictly 'personal gain'? You think that looking into Ukrainian influence into our
election is 'personal gain'?
Oh the spreading of democracy worldwide nonsense again! Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and
in blood! This sycophant also brought up Pres. Trumps son Baron into the proceedings for no good reason but to score points at
tea time back at Stanford. What a demagogue.
It's always such a lie too, because it's never really about spreading "democracy" -- that is, they don't at all like
the spread of true democracy when the people genuinely prefer and vote for Putin, Assad, Orban, etc., to say nothing of when democracy
demonstrates the true will of the people in cases such as Brexit.
No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist
neoliberalism.
Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood!
Yes please give us more democracy, so the uniparty can sell our jobs to global capital and our children's future to foreigners.
Nations have survived tyranny, despots, and brutal civil wars. It is not at all clear whether the nations of the West will survive
your beloved democracy.
...Of course, anyone with a brain knows it's not about Ukraine, a country having no bearing at all on the vital interests of
the United States. Rather, Ukraine is a handy pretext serving the interests of America's military-industrial complex and the enrichment
of our Ruling Class.
If Trump wanted to prove a really great president, he could forge a peace with Russia (which would entail getting a settlement
with Ukraine). It is insane, and only to the benefit of woke liberal capitalists to frame Russia as a permanent enemy. Carving
developed nations into 'us vs them', so the liberal elite can divide and rule us. They use this strategy on multiple fronts, to
ensure success:
US vs Russia
US/UK vs EU
'pseudo-Christian' west vs islam
1st world vs multicutural diversity migration
Pragmatically, we will need an alliance with Russia (and possibly with a post-communist China) to stave off the invading colonisers
looking to grift a free lunch in the 'rich' west (its only the 1% wealthy in the west who are really rich, not the >90% peasant
class), not to mention the ideologically/religiously motivated muslims planning to implement the global sharia subjugation of
the pseudo-Christian west demanded in the Koran.
Sadly, Trump does seem to be proving he lacks the organisational skills to drain the swamp - a virtually impossible task for
any one person. A 'friendship pact' with Russia (perhaps swapping trade access to US for human rights, democratic and media freedoms
in Russia) would be a big step forward to building a united free west. Perhaps bring Poland and Hungary in to to reassure Russia,
and strengthen the protections for Christians and traditional family life. But for this to happen Trump needs to have a Secretary
of State he trusts heavily.
... Signify... whatever, anything, but please not too much thinking. Same with Washington's foreign policy blob. What matters
is that the world's is forced to take America's opinions into account, no matter how bone-headed they are. If they put the world
on fire that's called collateral damage (Ledeen Doctrine).
What I find funniest about this whole "impeachment" shenanigan is how the Democrats honestly think anyone doesn't believe they're
guilty of exactly what they're accusing Trump of. All Trump has to do is reveal seven such cases to the American people after
this whole shenanigan is over and turn their own words against them and they are THROUGH! This might honestly be the biggest political
mistake in the history of our Republic.
The whole thing is nonsense. Democracy is particular to the West, and is frankly innately fragile and dying a proper death
-- slowly, mind you, but dying it is, and thankfully so.
The whole Russia situation is hilarious and a thousand percent ideological. I sat next to these same assholes in college in
the 1980s as they blithely handwaved "no true Scotsman" type arguments about the Soviet Union, and moral equivalency and so on,
and then of course without their precious hearts skipping one single beat, they switched immediately to "Russia is evil and must
be stopped at all costs" when Russia emerged with a nationalist/rightist government.
The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else).
To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the
East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped
at any cost.
My guess is that Russia has enough nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them at every major city in the US. Vladimir
is no drunkard like Boris Yeltsin was. We should not provoke the Russian bear into lashing out at the US. The old Soviet Union
lost some 20 million of its citizens in WWII and did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis. Hands up if you want to send your
19 year old son to fight the Russians in Sevastopol. Does the average American even know where Sevastopol is? More than likely,
a war with Russia would result in the nuclear bombing of New York, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston for
starters.
I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $)
for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the
coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary
President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in
2014).
NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for
no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.).
I'm halfway cheering for Russia in their conflict with Ukraine. That's Russia's sphere of influence, Ukraine has no business
in the EU or in NATO. Any sane American government would be courting Russia in the new Cold War that's obviously coming with The
Chinese Communist Party. Instead we pulled all of the former European countries in the USSR into our sphere of influence.
The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the
USSR.
Daniel
LarisonTAC contributor Gil Barndollar
calls attention to the damage that endless war is doing to the military:
The president has been rightly excoriated for these pardons, which dishonor the U.S.
military and may degrade good order and discipline. But amid this uproar, Americans should
note the bigger lesson: Endless wars, especially endless counterinsurgency or
counterterrorism wars, slowly chip away at both a military's ethics and its critical
war-fighting skills.
These wars are particularly corrosive because they cannot be conclusively won, and for every
enemy that is destroyed it seems as if two or three more appear to replace it. Futile,
open-ended wars contribute to breakdowns in discipline. Barndollar continues:
However, keeping their honor clean becomes harder and harder the longer these wars drag
on. Wars among the people, as all our endless wars now are, are inherently dirty. When even
senior members of the foreign policy establishment concede that we are not seeking victory in
Afghanistan, it becomes harder for soldiers to make hollow mission accomplishment a higher
priority than self-preservation. Treating U.S. soldiers like victims, as Trump implicitly
does, also becomes more common.
When a war cannot be won, the rational thing to do would be to stop fighting it, but instead
of doing that our political and military leaders treat endless war as a new normal that must
not be questioned. It is bad enough when a government sends its soldiers to fight and die for a
cause that it pretends can still be won when that isn't possible, but to keep sending them over
and over again into war zones to fight a war they admit is futile has to be discouraging and
frustrating. This also has to widen the division between the military and the civilian
population. While military personnel are called on to go on multiple tours in pointless
conflicts, most people back home mouth empty platitudes about supporting the troops and do
nothing to bring the wars to an end. The public's failure to hold our political and military
leaders accountable for these failed and unnecessary wars is bound to have corrosive effects as
well.
At the same time, these wars degrade the military's ability to fight other adversaries:
Even more serious for American national security is the fact that endless small wars
degrade a military's ability to fight and win big wars -- wars that have real consequences
for our security and way of life.
Our endless wars have been enormously costly. It is estimated that all of the wars of the
last twenty years will end up costing at least $6.4 trillion, and beyond that they have
consumed our government's attention and resources to the detriment of everything else. Our
political and military leaders perpetuate these wars, and the public has allowed them to do
this, because they are still laboring under the faulty assumption that the U.S. is being made
more secure in the process. The reality is that endless wars are undermining our security,
weakening the military, and creating more enemies. They should be ended responsibly, but they
must end. about the author Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in
the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics
Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The
American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in
history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .
"... Thanks again for making explicit what I have long known: To America, Ukraine is nothing but a weapon against Russia. The whole point of support for Ukraine is to make Russia bleed—doesn’t matter how many people die or suffer in the process or how much of Ukraine is destroyed. https://twitter.com/BBuchman_CNS/status/1202267180219478024 … ..."
"... So fomenting on a war on Russia's border is, it appears, self-evidently aids our national security. What's next? A war scare? Ramping up MH17? ..."
"'Our Democracy Is at Stake.' Pelosi Orders Democrats to Draft Articles of Impeachment
Against Trump" [ Time ]. With autoplay video.
""The President abused his power for his own personal political benefit at the expense of
our national security by withholding military aid and a crucial Oval Office meeting in
exchange for an announcement of an investigation into his political rival." • So now when
a President doesn't allow The Blob to dictate Ukraine policy it's an impeachable offense?
Really? Yasha Levine quotes Democrat impeachment witness Karlan (see below) but the point is
the same:
Yasha Levine ✔ @yashalevine
Thanks again for making explicit what I have long known: To America, Ukraine is nothing but a weapon
against Russia. The whole point of support for Ukraine is to make Russia bleed—doesn’t matter how many people die or
suffer in the process or how much of Ukraine is destroyed.
https://twitter.com/BBuchman_CNS/status/1202267180219478024 …
So fomenting on a war on Russia's border is, it appears, self-evidently aids our
national security. What's next? A war scare? Ramping up MH17?
"Read opening statements from witnesses at the House Judiciary hearing" [
Politico ]. "Democrats' impeachment witnesses at Wednesday's judiciary committee hearing
plan to say in their prepared remarks that President Donald Trump's actions toward Ukraine were
the worst examples of misconduct in presidential history." • So again, it's all about
Ukraine. I feel like I've entered an alternate dimension. Aaron Maté comments:
My very subjective impression: I've skimmed three, and read Turley. Karlan, in particular,
is simply not a serious effort. Turley may be wrong -- a ton of tribal dunking on Twitter --
but at least he's making a serious effort. I'm gonna have to wait to see if somebody, say at
Lawfare, does a serious effort on Turley. Everything I've read hitherto is and posturing and
preaching to the choir. (Sad that Larry Tribe has so completely discredited himself, but that's
where we are.)
Lambert, while Trump was unable to complete his attempt to extort the President of
Ukraine, as someone who practiced the criminal law for 34 years, let me be the first to clue
you in to the concept in the criminal law of the inchoate offense . This is
criminal law, not contract law.
An inchoate offense includes an attempt, a conspiracy, and the solicitation of a crime.
All focus on the state of mind of the perpetrator, and none require that the offense be
completed -- only that a person or persons having the required criminal intent took material
steps toward completing the crime. Such a person becomes a principal in the contemplated
crime, and in the eyes of the law is just as guilty as if he or she had completed the
attempted offense.
(The details of Trump's offense differ from what David in Santa Cruz said they would be.)
"Inchoate" appears only in Turley's piece, indicating, to me, that his was the only serious
effort.
Prominent Ukrainian neo-Nazi figures have been spotted in the Hong Kong protests just weeks
after hosting an "academy of street protest" in Kiev. Leaders of far-right Ukrainian groups
that rose to prominence in the 2014 coup d'etat they helped orchestrate, including the
Azov
Battalion and Right Sektor , have recently traveled
to Hong Kong to participate in the anti-Beijing protests there. It's unclear why the groups,
sporting the apparel of a far-right hooligan group called "Honor" or "Gonor," have gone to Hong
Kong, but the fact that both the 2014 Ukrainian coup and the present protests in Hong Kong have
enjoyed extensive support from the CIA-spawned National Endowment
for Democracy may give a clue.
"Hong Kong welcomed us as relatives," Serhii Filimonov wrote on Facebook Saturday, sharing a
video of himself and other Ukrainian far-right figures in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.
Filimonov once headed the Kiev branch of the Azov Civilian Corps, a support group for the
ultra-nationalist Azov Battalion that's thinly veiled as a civilian NGO.
https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fserhii.filimonov.98%2Fvideos%2F160773771798497%2F&show_text=1&width=560
photos posted the
following day include Ihor Maliar, an Azov Battalion veteran who sports a "victory or
Valhalla" tattoo across his neck, and Serhii Sternenko, who headed the Odessa section of Right
Sektor when it torched the Trade Unions House on May 2, 2014, killing 42 people and injuring
hundreds in the street violence before and after. Sternenko also helped found the "People's
Lustration" fascist gang, which harassed, beat up and humiliated former officials of the
Ukrainian government in the months following the 2014 Euromaidan coup. Sputnik Screenshot
Screenshot of a Facebook post by Serhii Filimonov showing "Gonor" members in Hong Kong
Several of the men wear paraphernalia of the far-right "Honor" or "Gonor" so-called youth
group founded by Filimonov in 2015, sporting a stylized version of the "trident," a symbol with
ancient meaning in Ukraine adopted by ultra-nationalists, as three daggers. Several also have
neo-Nazi tattoos, such as swastikas.
Actual swastika tattoos, just in case you were left in any doubt these are actual
neo-nazis. pic.twitter.com/z2HqMWNXuO
The men also posed in front of the
wrecked Hong Kong Polytechnic University , where an intense two-week showdown between
police and protesters saw more than 1,000 students detained and thousands of weapons seized,
including petrol bombs and explosives.
Sputnik Screenshot
Serhii Filimonov post showing Ukrainian far-right figures posing in front of Hong Kong
Polytechnic University
Early last month, Filimonov, Sternenko and Maliar spoke at an "academy of street protest" in
Kiev, the posters of which featured a molotov
cocktail emblazoned with the "Gonor" logo.
Sputnik Screenshot Poster
for an "academy of street protest" featuring lectures by several Ukrainian far-right figures
A Ukrainian Facebook page that came to the defense of the Gonor crew and their trip Monday
afternoon seems to bridge the gap between the two movements. Calling itself the "Free Hong Kong
Center," the page posts about the supposed strong links between the Hong Kong and 2014 Ukraine
protests, complete with the words "umbrella" and "dignity" on their banner, referencing what
demonstrators in Hong Kong called their 2014 protests, seen as a precursor to the present
unrest, and by far-right Ukrainians to the 2014 coup.
"They assured us they are really against nazism and another kind of alt-right ideology,"
they posted, dismissing the neo-Nazi imagery as traditional Ukrainian symbols.
Sputnik Screenshot Facebook post by "Free Hong Kong Center" defending "Gonor" members'
visit to Hong Kong
It's not clear exactly what these "simple activists" were doing in Hong Kong. However, it's
worth noting the extensive groundwork laid for both the 2014 uprising in Ukraine and the 2019
protests in Hong Kong via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
In the three years before the 2014 coup, the CIA-backed NED sunk $14 million into regime
change efforts in Ukraine, and the NED
has been
cultivating anti-Beijing attitudes in Hong Kong since the mid-1990s, before the territory
was returned to Chinese rule by the British Empire.
Whether Filimonov and associates are there at the NED's behest or as simply a bit of protest
tourism is anybody's guess.
Our leaders like to say we value human rights around the world, but what they really manifest
is greed. It all makes sense in a Gekko- or Machiavellian kind of way.
Highly recommended !
Notable quotes:
"... Think of this as the new American exceptionalism. In Washington, war is now the predictable (and even desirable) way of life, while peace is the unpredictable (and unwise) path to follow. In this context, the U.S. must continue to be the most powerful nation in the world by a country mile in all death-dealing realms and its wars must be fought, generation after generation, even when victory is never in sight. And if that isn't an "exceptional" belief system, what is? ..."
"... A partial list of war's many uses might go something like this: war is profitable , most notably for America's vast military-industrial complex ; war is sold as being necessary for America's safety, especially to prevent terrorist attacks; and for many Americans, war is seen as a measure of national fitness and worthiness, a reminder that "freedom isn't free." In our politics today, it's far better to be seen as strong and wrong than meek and right. ..."
"... If America's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen prove anything, it's that every war scars our planet -- and hardens our hearts. Every war makes us less human as well as less humane. Every war wastes resources when these are increasingly at a premium. Every war is a distraction from higher needs and a better life. ..."
"... I think that the main reason of the current level of militarism in the USA foreign policy is that after dissolution of the USSR neo-conservatives were allowed to capture the State Department and foreign policy establishment. This process actually started under Reagan. During Bush II administration those “crazies from the basement” fully controlled the US foreign policy and paradoxically they continued to dominate in Obama administration too. ..."
"... Which also means that the USA foreign policy is not controlled by the elected officials but by the “Deep State” (look at Vindman and Fiona Hill testimonies for the proof). So this is kind of Catch 22 in which the USA have found itself. We will be bankrupted by our neoconservative foreign establishment (which self-reproduce in each and every administration). And we can do nothing to avoid it. ..."
"... they are not only lobbyists for MIC, but they also serve as "ideological support", trying to manipulate public opinion in favor of militarism. ..."
"... Yes. Ideology is vital. During the Cold War it was all about containing/resisting/defeating the godless Communists. Once they were defeated, what then? We heard brief talk about a "peace dividend," but then the neocons came along, selling full-spectrum dominance and America as the sole superpower. ..."
"... The neocons were truly unleashed by the 9/11 attacks, which they exploited to put their vision in motion. The Complex was only too happy to oblige, fed as it was by massive resources. ..."
"... Leaving that specific incident aside, the bigger picture is that the brains behind the Deep State understand that global capitalism is running out of new resources (which includes human labor) to exploit. Why is the US so concerned with Africa right now, with spies and Special Forces operatives all over that continent? Africa is the final frontier for development/exploitation. (The US is also deeply concerned about China's setting down business roots there, and wants to counterbalance their activities.) ..."
"... The brains in the US Ruling Class know full well that natural resources will become ever more valuable moving forward, as weather disasters make it harder to access them. Thus, the Neo-Cons (you thought I'd never get around to them, right?) came to the fore because they advocate the unbridled use of brute military force to obtain what they want from the world. Or, to use their own terminology, the US "must have the capability to project force anywhere on the planet" at a moment's notice. President Obama was fully in agreement with that concept. Beware the wolf masquerading as a peaceable sheep! ..."
By William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor. His
personal blog is Bracing Views .
Originally published at TomDispatch
Ever since 2007, when I first started writing for TomDispatch , I've been arguing
against America's forever wars, whether in Afghanistan , Iraq , or elsewhere . Unfortunately, it's no surprise that,
despite my more than 60 articles, American blood is still being spilled in war after war across the Greater Middle
East and Africa, even as foreign peoples pay a far higher price in lives lost and cities
ruined . And I keep asking myself: Why, in this century, is the distinctive feature of
America's wars that they never end? Why do our leaders persist in such repetitive folly and the
seemingly eternal disasters that go with it?
Sadly, there isn't just one obvious reason for this generational debacle. If there were, we
could focus on it, tackle it, and perhaps even fix it. But no such luck.
So why do America's disastrous wars
persist ? I can think of many reasons , some obvious and easy to
understand, like the endless pursuit of profit through weapons sales for those very wars, and some more
subtle but no less significant, like a deep-seated conviction in Washington that a willingness
to wage war is a sign of national toughness and seriousness. Before I go on, though, here's
another distinctive aspect of our forever-war moment: Have you noticed that peace is no longer even a topic in America
today? The very word, once at least part of the rhetoric of Washington politicians, has
essentially dropped out of use entirely. Consider the current crop of Democratic candidates for
president. One, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, wants to end regime-change wars, but is otherwise
a self-professed hawk on the
subject of the war on terror. Another, Senator Bernie Sanders, vows to end " endless
wars " but is careful to express strong support for Israel and the ultra-expensive
F-35 fighter jet.
The other dozen or so tend to make vague sounds about cutting defense spending or gradually
withdrawing U.S. troops from various wars, but none of them even consider openly speaking
of peace . And the Republicans? While President Trump may talk of ending wars, since his
inauguration he's sent more
troops to Afghanistan and into the Middle East, while greatly expanding drone and other
air strikes ,
something about which he openly
boasts .
War, in other words, is our new normal, America's default position on global affairs, and
peace, some ancient, long-faded dream. And when your default position is war, whether against
the Taliban, ISIS, "terror" more generally, or possibly even Iran or Russia
or
China , is it any surprise that war is what you get? When you garrison the world with an
unprecedented 800 or so
military bases , when you configure your armed forces for what's called power projection,
when you divide the globe -- the total planet -- into areas of dominance (with acronyms
like CENTCOM, AFRICOM, and SOUTHCOM) commanded by four-star generals and admirals, when you
spend more on your military than the next
seven countries combined, when you insist on modernizing a
nuclear arsenal (to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion ) already
quite capable of ending all life on this and several other planets, what can you expect but a
reality of endless war?
Think of this as the new American exceptionalism. In Washington, war is now the
predictable (and even desirable) way of life, while peace is the unpredictable (and unwise)
path to follow. In this context, the U.S. must continue to be the most powerful nation in the
world by a country mile in all death-dealing realms and its wars must be fought, generation
after generation, even when victory is never in sight. And if that isn't an "exceptional"
belief system, what is?
If we're ever to put an end to our country's endless twenty-first-century wars, that mindset
will have to be changed. But to do that, we would first have to recognize and confront war's
many uses in American
life and culture.
War, Its Uses (and Abuses)
A partial list of war's many uses might go something like this: war is profitable , most notably for
America's vast
military-industrial complex ; war is sold as being necessary for America's safety,
especially to prevent terrorist attacks; and for many Americans, war is seen as a measure of
national fitness and worthiness, a reminder that "freedom isn't free." In our politics today,
it's far better to be seen as strong and wrong than meek and right.
As the title of a book by former war reporter Chris Hedges so aptly put it , war is
a force that gives us meaning. And let's face it, a significant part of America's meaning in
this century has involved pride in having the toughest military on the planet, even as
trillions of tax dollars went into a misguided attempt to maintain bragging rights to being
the world's sole superpower.
And keep in mind as well that, among other things, never-ending war
weakens democracy while strengthening authoritarian tendencies in politics and society. In
an age of
gaping inequality , using up the country's resources in such profligate and destructive
ways offers a striking exercise in consumption that profits the few at the expense of the
many.
In other words, for a select few, war pays dividends in ways that peace doesn't. In a
nutshell, or perhaps an artillery shell, war is anti-democratic, anti-progressive,
anti-intellectual, and anti-human. Yet, as we know, history makes heroes out of its
participants and celebrates mass murderers like Napoleon as "great captains."
What the United States needs today is a new strategy of containment -- not against communist
expansion, as in the Cold War, but against war itself. What's stopping us from containing war?
You might say that, in some sense, we've grown addicted to it , which is true enough, but here
are five additional reasons for war's enduring presence in American life:
The
delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore
winnable: No American leader wants to be labeled a "loser." Meanwhile, such dubious
conflicts -- see: the Afghan War, now in its 18th year, with
several more years, or even generations
, to go -- continue to be treated by the military as if they were indeed winnable, even though
they visibly aren't. No president, Republican or Democrat, not even Donald J. Trump, despite
his promises that American soldiers will be coming home from such fiascos, has successfully
resisted the Pentagon's siren call for patience (and for yet more trillions of dollars) in the
cause of ultimate victory, however poorly defined, farfetched, or far-off. American
society's almost completeisolationfrom war's deadly
effects: We're not being droned (yet). Our cities are not yet lying in ruins (though
they're certainly suffering from a lack of funding, as is our most essential infrastructure , thanks in part to the
cost of those overseas wars). It's nonetheless remarkable how little attention, either in the
media or elsewhere, this country's never-ending war-making gets here. Unnecessary and
sweeping secrecy: How can you resist what you essentially don't know about? Learning its
lesson from the Vietnam War, the Pentagon now
classifies (in plain speak: covers up) the worst aspects of its disastrous wars. This isn't
because the enemy could exploit such details -- the enemy already knows! -- but because the
American people might be roused to something like anger and action by it. Principled whistleblowers like
Chelsea Manning have been imprisoned or otherwise dismissed or, in the case of Edward Snowden,
pursued and indicted for sharing honest
details about the calamitous Iraq War and America's invasive and intrusive surveillance
state. In the process, a clear message of intimidation has been sent to other would-be
truth-tellers. An unrepresentative government: Long ago, of course, Congress
ceded to
the presidency most of its constitutional powers when it comes to making war. Still, despite
recent
attempts to end America's arms-dealing role in the genocidal Saudi war in Yemen (overridden
by Donald Trump's veto power), America's duly elected representatives generally don't represent
the people when it comes to this country's disastrous wars. They are, to put it bluntly,
largely captives of (and sometimes on leaving politics quite literally go
to work for) the military-industrial complex. As long as money is speech ( thank
you , Supreme Court!), the weapons makers are always likely to be able to shout louder in
Congress than you and I ever will. \America's persistent empathy gap.
Despite our size, we are a remarkably insular nation and suffer from a serious empathy gap when it comes to
understanding foreign cultures and peoples or what we're actually doing to them. Even our
globetrotting troops, when not fighting and killing foreigners in battle, often stay on vast
bases, referred to in the military as "Little Americas," complete with familiar stores, fast
food, you name it. Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big
trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But
what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives,
these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.
All this puts me sadly in mind of a song popular in my youth, a time when Cat Stevens sang
of a " peace train " that was
"soundin' louder" in America. Today, that peace train's been derailed and replaced by an armed
and armored one eternally prepared for perpetual war -- and that train is indeed soundin'
louder to the great peril of us all.
War on Spaceship Earth
Here's the rub, though: even the
Pentagon knows that our most serious enemy is
climate change , not China or Russia or terror, though in the age of Donald Trump and his
administration of arsonists
its officials can't express themselves on the subject as openly as they otherwise might.
Assuming we don't annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons first, that means our
real enemy is the endless war we're waging against Planet Earth.
The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant
driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system, only
wants to grow more so, but what's welfare for the military brass isn't wellness for the
planet.
There is, unfortunately, only one Planet Earth, or Spaceship Earth, if you prefer, since
we're all traveling through our galaxy on it. Thought about a certain way, we're its
crewmembers, yet instead of cooperating effectively as its stewards, we seem determined to
fight one another. If a house divided against itself cannot stand, as Abraham Lincoln pointed
out so long ago, surely a spaceship with a disputatious and self-destructive crew is not likely
to survive, no less thrive.
In other words, in waging endless war, Americans are also, in effect, mutinying against the
planet. In the process, we are spoiling the last, best hope of earth: a concerted and pacific
effort to meet the shared challenges of a rapidly warming and changing planet.
Spaceship Earth should not be allowed to remain Warship Earth as well, not when the
existence of
significant parts of humanity is already becoming ever more precarious. Think of us as
suffering from a coolant leak, causing cabin temperatures
to rise even as food and other resources dwindle .
Under the circumstances, what's the best strategy for survival: killing each other while
ignoring the leak or banding together to fix an increasingly compromised ship?
Unfortunately, for America's leaders, the real "fixes" remain global military and resource
domination, even as those resources continue to shrink on an ever-more fragile globe. And as
we've seen recently, the resource part of that fix breeds its own madness, as in President
Trump's recently stated desire to keep U.S. troops in Syria
to steal that country's oil resources, though its wells are largely wrecked (thanks in
significant part to American bombing) and even when repaired would produce only a miniscule
percentage of the world's petroleum.
If America's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen prove anything,
it's that every war scars our planet -- and hardens our hearts. Every war makes us less human
as well as less humane. Every war wastes resources when these are increasingly at a premium.
Every war is a distraction from higher needs and a better life.
Despite all of war's uses and abuses, its allures and temptations, it's time that we
Americans showed some self-mastery (as well as decency) by putting a stop to the mayhem. Few
enough of us experience "our" wars firsthand and that's precisely why some idealize their
purpose and idolize their practitioners. But war is a bloody, murderous mess and those
practitioners, when not killed or wounded, are marred for life because war functionally makes
everyone involved into a murderer.
We need to stop idealizing war and idolizing its so-called warriors. At stake is
nothing less than the future of humanity and the viability of life, as we know it, on Spaceship
Earth.
I think that the main reason of the current level of militarism in the USA foreign
policy is that after dissolution of the USSR neo-conservatives were allowed to capture the
State Department and foreign policy establishment. This process actually started under
Reagan. During Bush II administration those “crazies from the basement” fully
controlled the US foreign policy and paradoxically they continued to dominate in Obama
administration too.
They preach “Full Spectrum Dominance” (Wolfowitz doctrine) and are not shy to
unleash the wars to enhance the USA strategic position in particular region (color revolution
can be used instead of war, like they in 2014 did in Ukraine). Of course, being chichenhawks,
neither they nor members of their families fight in those wars.
For some reason despite his election platform Trump also populated his administration with
neoconservatives. So it might be that maintaining the USA centered global neoliberal empire
is the real reason and the leitmotiv of the USA foreign policy. that’s why it does not
change with the change of Administration: any government that does not play well with the
neoliberal empire gets in the hairlines.
Which also means that the USA foreign policy is not controlled by the elected
officials but by the “Deep State” (look at Vindman and Fiona Hill testimonies for
the proof). So this is kind of Catch 22 in which the USA have found itself. We will be
bankrupted by our neoconservative foreign establishment (which self-reproduce in each and
every administration). And we can do nothing to avoid it.
Good point. But why the rise of the neocons? Why did they prosper? I'd say because of the
military-industrial complex. Or you might say they feed each other, but the Complex came
first. And of course the Complex is a dominant part of the Deep State. How could it not be?
Add in 17 intelligence agencies, Homeland Security, the Energy Dept's nukes, and you have a
dominant DoD that swallows up more than half of federal discretionary spending each year.
I agree, but it is a little bit more complex. You need an ideology to promote the interests
of MIC. You can't just say -- let's spend more than a half of federal discretionary spending
each year..
That's where neo-conservatism comes into play. So they are not only lobbyists for MIC,
but they also serve as "ideological support", trying to manipulate public opinion in favor of
militarism.
wjastore December 2, 2019 at 12:25 PM
Yes. Ideology is vital. During the Cold War it was all about
containing/resisting/defeating the godless Communists. Once they were defeated, what then? We
heard brief talk about a "peace dividend," but then the neocons came along, selling
full-spectrum dominance and America as the sole superpower.
The neocons were truly unleashed by the 9/11 attacks, which they exploited to put
their vision in motion. The Complex was only too happy to oblige, fed as it was by massive
resources.
Think about how no one was punished for the colossal intelligence failure of 9/11.
Instead, all the intel agencies were rewarded with more money and authority via the PATRIOT
Act.
The Afghan war is an ongoing disaster, the Iraq war a huge misstep, Libya a total failure,
yet the Complex has even more Teflon than Ronald Reagan. All failures slide off of it.
greglaxer , December 2, 2019 at 4:12 PM
There is a still bigger picture to consider in all this. I don't want to open the door to
conspiracy theory–personally, I find the claim that explosives were placed inside the
World Trade Center prior to the strikes by aircraft on 9/11 risible–but it certainly
was convenient for the Regime Change Gang that the Saudi operatives were able to get away
with what they did on that day, and in preparations leading up to it.
Leaving that specific incident aside, the bigger picture is that the brains behind the
Deep State understand that global capitalism is running out of new resources (which includes
human labor) to exploit. Why is the US so concerned with Africa right now, with spies and
Special Forces operatives all over that continent? Africa is the final frontier for
development/exploitation. (The US is also deeply concerned about China's setting down
business roots there, and wants to counterbalance their activities.)
Once the great majority of folks in Africa have cellphones and subscriptions to Netflix
whither capitalism? Trump denies the severity of the climate crisis because that is part of
the ideology/theology of the GOP.
The brains in the US Ruling Class know full well that natural resources will become
ever more valuable moving forward, as weather disasters make it harder to access them. Thus,
the Neo-Cons (you thought I'd never get around to them, right?) came to the fore because they
advocate the unbridled use of brute military force to obtain what they want from the world.
Or, to use their own terminology, the US "must have the capability to project force anywhere
on the planet" at a moment's notice. President Obama was fully in agreement with that
concept. Beware the wolf masquerading as a peaceable sheep!
After presiding over a far-right coup in Bolivia, the US dubbed Nicaragua a "national
security threat" and announced new sanctions, while Trump designated drug cartels in Mexico as
"terrorists" and refused to rule out military intervention.
One successful coup against a democratically elected socialist president is not enough, it
seems.
Washington dubbed Nicaragua a threat to US national security, and announced that it will be
expanding its suffocating sanctions on the tiny Central American nation.
Trump is also turning up the heat on Mexico, baselessly linking the country to terrorism and
even hinting at potential military intervention. The moves come as the country's left-leaning
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador warns of right-wing attempts at a coup.
As Washington's rightist allies in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador are desperately
beating back massive grassroots uprisings against neoliberal austerity policies and yawning
inequality gaps, the United States is ramping up its aggression against the region's few
remaining progressive governments.
These moves have led left-wing forces in Latin America to warn of a 21st-century revival of
Operation Condor, the Cold War era campaign of violent subterfuge and US support for right-wing
dictatorships across the region.
Trump admin declares Nicaragua a 'national security
threat'
A day after the US-backed far-right coup in Bolivia, the White House released a statement
applauding the military putsch and making it clear that two countries were next on Washington's
target list: "These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in
Venezuela and Nicaragua ," Trump declared.
On November 25, the Trump White House then quietly issued a statement characterizing
Nicaragua as an "unusual and
extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
This prolonged for an additional year an executive order Trump had signed in 2018 declaring
a state of "national emergency" on the Central American country.
Trump's 2018 declaration came after a failed violent right-wing
coup attempt in Nicaragua . The US government has funded and supported many of
the opposition groups that sought to topple elected Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and
cheered them on as they sought to overthrow him.
The 2018 national security threat designation was quickly followed by economic warfare. In
December the US Congress approved
the NICA Act without any opposition. This legislation gave Trump the authority to impose
sanctions on Nicaragua, and prevents international financial institutions from doing business
with Managua.
Trump's new 2019 statement spewed outlandish propaganda against Nicaragua, referring to its
democratically elected government -- which for decades has been targeted for overthrow by
Washington -- as a supposedly violent and corrupt "regime."
This executive order is similar to one made by President Barack Obama in 2015, which
designated Venezuela as a threat to US national security.
Both orders were used to justify the unilateral imposition of suffocating economic
sanctions. And Trump's renewal of the order paves the way for an escalated economic attack on
Nicaragua.
The extension received negligible coverage in mainstream English-language corporate media,
but right-wing Spanish-language outlets in Latin America heavily amplified it.
And opposition activists are gleefully cheering on the intensification of Washington's
hybrid warfare against Managua.
More aggressive US sanctions against Nicaragua
Voice of America (VOA), the US government's main foreign broadcasting service, noted that
the extension of the executive order will be followed with more economic attacks.
Washington's ambassador to the Organization
of American States (OAS), Carlos Trujillo, told VOA, "The pressure against Nicaragua is
going to continue."
The OAS representative added that Trump will be announcing new sanctions against the
Nicaraguan government in the coming weeks.
VOA stated clearly that "Nicaragua, along with Cuba and Venezuela, is one of the Latin
American countries whose government Trump has made a priority to put diplomatic and economic
pressure on to bring about regime change."
This is not just rhetoric. The US Department of the Treasury updated the Nicaragua-related
sanctions section of its website as recently as November 8.
And in September, the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control announced a " more
comprehensive set of regulations ," strengthening the existing sanctions on Nicaragua.
Voice of America's report quoted several right-wing Nicaraguans who openly called for more
US pressure against their country.
Bianca Jagger, a celebrity opposition activist formerly married to Rolling Stones frontman
Mick Jagger, called on the US to impose sanctions on Nicaragua's military in particular.
"The Nicaraguan military has not been touched because they [US officials] are hoping that
the military will like act the military in Bolivia," Jagger said, referring to the military
officials who violently overthrew Bolivia's democratically elected president.
Many of these military leaders had been
trained at the US government's School of the Americas , a notorious base of subversion
dating back to Operation Condor. Latin American media has been filled in recent days with
reports that Bolivian soldiers were paid $50,000 and generals were paid up to $1 million to
carry out the putsch.
VOA added that "in the case of the Central American government [of Nicaragua], the effect
that sanctions can have can be greater because it is a more economically vulnerable
country."
VOA quoted Roberto Courtney, a prominent exiled right-wing activist and executive director
of the opposition group Ethics and Transparency, which monitors elections in Nicaragua and is
supported by the US
government's
regime-change arm , the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Courtney, who claims to be a human rights activist, salivated over the prospects of US
economic war on his country, telling VOA, "There is a bit of a difference [between Nicaragua
and Bolivia] the economic vulnerability makes it more likely that the sanctions will have an
effect."
Courtney, who was described by VOA as an "expert on the electoral process," added, "If there
is a stick, there must also be a carrot." He said the OAS could help apply diplomatic and
political pressure against Nicaragua's government.
These unilateral American sanctions are illegal under international law, and considered an
act of war. Iran's foreign minister,
Javad Zarif , has characterized US economic warfare "financial terrorism," explaining that
it disproportionately targets civilians in order to turn them against their government.
Top right-wing Nicaraguan opposition groups applauded Trump for extending the executive
order and for pledging new sanctions against their country.
The Nicaraguan Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, an opposition front group that
brings together numerous opposition groups , several of which are
also
funded by the US government's NED , welcomed the order.
Trump dubs drug cartels in
Mexico "terrorists," refuses to rule out drone strikes
While the US targeting of Nicaragua and Venezuela's governments is nothing new, Donald Trump
is setting his sights on a longtime US ally in Mexico.
In 2018, Mexican voters made history when they elected Andrés Manuel López
Obrador as president in a landslide. López Obrador, who is often referred to by his
initials AMLO, is Mexico's first left-wing president in more than five decades. He ran on a
progressive campaign pledging to boost social spending, cut poverty, combat corruption, and
even decriminalize drugs.
AMLO is wildly popular in Mexico. In February, he had a record-breaking
86 percent approval rating . And he has earned this widespread support by pledging to
combat neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy.
"The neoliberal economic model has
been a disaster, a calamity for the public life of the country," AMLO has declared. "The child
of neoliberalism is corruption."
When he unveiled his multibillion-dollar National Development Plan, López Obrador
announced the end to "the long night of neoliberalism."
AMLO's left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on
neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a
reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.
On November 27 -- a day after declaring Nicaragua a "national security threat" -- Trump
announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as "
terrorist organizations ."
Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.
Trump revealed this new policy in an interview with right-wing Fox News host Bill O'Reilly.
"Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them
with drones and things like that?" O'Reilly asked.
The US president refused to rule out drone strikes or other military action against drug
cartels in Mexico.
Trump's announcement seemed to surprise the Mexican government, which immediately called for
a meeting with the US State Department.
The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico
have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the
Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in
counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.
Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing
death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The
CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central
America.
These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed,
trained, and funded far-right Islamist
extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same
US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander
Omar al-Shishani
, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from
Washington when he was fighting against Russia.
The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunne r
and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to
cartels in Mexico.
Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration's designation
of cartels as terrorists, "They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their
national security ."
"Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in
Mexico?" Duarte asked.
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She noted that the US corporate media has embarked on an increasingly ferocious campaign to
demonize
AMLO , portraying the democratically elected president as a power-hungry aspiring dictator
who is supposedly wrecking Mexico's economy.
Duarte discussed the issue of US interference in Mexican politics in an interview with The
Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton, on their podcast Moderate
Rebels:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7OJyCHjxCEs
Now, a whisper campaign over fears that the right-wing opposition may try to overthrow
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is spreading across Mexico.
AMLO himself has publicly addressed the rumors, making it clear that he will not tolerate
any discussion of coups.
"How wrong the conservatives and their hawks are," López Obrador tweeted on November
2. Referencing the 1913 assassination of progressive President Francisco Madero, who had been a
leader of the Mexican Revolution, AMLO wrote, "Now is different."
"Another coup d'état will now be allowed," he declared.
In recent months, as fears of a coup intensify, López Obrador has swung even further
to the left, directly challenging the US government and asserting an independent foreign policy
that contrasts starkly to the subservience of his predecessors.
AMLO's government has rejected US efforts to delegitimize Venezuela's leftist government,
throwing a wrench in Washington's efforts to impose right-wing activist
Juan Guaidó as coup leader.
AMLO has welcomed Ecuador's ousted socialist leader Rafael Correa and hosted Argentina's
left-leaning Alberto Fernández for his first foreign trip after winning the
presidency.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/D4T0zbASfbA
In October, López Obrador even welcomed Cuban President Díaz-Canel to Mexico
for a historic visit.
Trump's Operation Condor 2.0
For Washington, an independent and left-wing Mexico is intolerable.
In a speech for right-wing, MAGA hat-wearing
Venezuelans in Miami , Florida in February, Trump ranted against socialism for nearly an
hour, threatened the remaining leftist countries in Latin America with regime change.
"The days of socialism and communism are numbered not only in Venezuela, but in Nicaragua
and in Cuba as well," he declared, adding that socialism would never be allowed to take root in
heart of capitalism in the United States.
While Trump has claimed he seeks to withdraw from wars in the Middle East (when he is not
occupying its oil fields
), he has ramped up aggressive US intervention in Latin America.
During the height of the Cold War, Operation Condor thousands of dissidents were murdered,
and hundreds of thousands more were disappeared, tortured, or imprisoned with the assistance of
the US intelligence apparatus.
Today, as Latin America is increasingly viewed through the lens of a new Cold War, Operation
Condor is being reignited with new mechanisms of sabotage and subversion in play. The mayhem
has only begun.
The poll graph without three day averaging is a great visual illustration of the margin of
error concept. It's even clear in the averaged version. I guarantee people are NOT changing
their minds that fast, and I'm sure all the issues Lambert highlighted are contributing to
the inaccuracies.
That said, a few trends are clear. Biden is trending steadily (but very slowly) downward.
Sanders and Buttigieg are trending up, Sanders slowly and Buttigieg somewhat faster, while
Warren is settling back to her long term average after a bump in October. Harris' decision to
withdraw looks like a good one. Undecided numbers are all over the place, and tend to spike
up when other lines spike down, so I'm guessing that's down to differing polling
methodologies and how hard people are pushed to make a call.
Are these pollsters reading all twenty names over the telephone? Or is the polled asked to
name a candidate? I can't get my head around how to manage a list of this many candidates by
voice without 'Name Recognition' being the first choice.
> Are these pollsters reading all twenty names over the telephone?
That's a very good question. Is the list of names so long -- I don't think we've ever had
one so long -- that it enables pollsters to game the polls in new ways? Could be such a
simple and obvious mode of rigging that we did not see it.
Morning Consult (B/C)
Nov 25 – Dec 1
Mon – Sun
15,773 Likely
National
16 candidate names, plus "Someone else" (not present in data source, derived in app)
Details here: https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary/
The differences are Joe Sestak and Steve Bullock in HarrisX but not MC, going to guess
that MC decided not to list them because they dropped, and if they asked the names during the
survey their report them in the conveniently names "Someone else" category.
Regarding ChrisPacific's point about Undecideds, yes, this is affected by methodology and
whose polls came out on a particular day.
And more generally, we should expect to see noise in this data. These are minuscule
samples compared to the actual voting universe of over 65 million. The "Margin of Error" /
"Confidence Interval" claims are based on the assumption that all polls are distributed as a
uniform bell curve. Arguably useful for getting the noise out of stats for physical
observations of mechanical models, but absurd for human polling. Pollsters (who work mostly
in marketing) use MoE/CI to convince clients spend money on small polls and then spin out
reassuring MoE or CI (which scale to each other, bigger MoE = narrower CI). (Tangentially, on
political campaigns, the tactical advantages to be found in population data come from looking
into what's happening in the noise, not from smoothing it out and then assessing the
distorted surface).
And as in most viscous media, quick changes tend to snap back to origin, slow ones push
though. Consider also that a) these candidates are introducing themselves, impressions
develop over time, and engagement is still low. Also, the context of US society may be
gradually changing, but it would take a sudden shock (like 9/11 at the time) to change the
background context and be reflected in a suddenly shift in Dem Primary polls.
I participated in the last Des Moines Register/CNN Iowa poll. The pollster was required to
read all of the names, even when I could name one immediately.
The call came on my cell phone from a restricted number. I asked for what company or
candidate the poll was being conducted; the interviewer said that she was not given that
information, but at the very end I was asked whether I would be willing to talk to a reporter
from CNN or the DMR (I declined). She did tell me the research firm for which she worked,
which I later saw was the name of the firm that had conducted the poll. When I saw the
original release, I wondered whether I was correct that this was the poll, since I remembered
a question about my preference for a health care system that wasn't in the original release.
That result was released at a later date.
The M4A option for that question was simply M4A, without additional information or
qualifiers. I, as is usual for me, couldn't simply answer a multiple choice question, but
explained that I supported improved M4A, and that current Medicare is still expensive. The
interviewer told me that she herself has trouble affording Medicare, and that she
particularly has trouble paying for her medication. (We got a little chatty.)
The research firm was also contacting Republicans. She said that I had been the first
Democrat that she had reached that day, and that Republicans got different questions. She did
not know whom she was calling and, at the end, asked my first name so that her company could
verify that she had reached the right individual.
I'll check back here in case there are any other questions about the poll that I might be
able to answer. If anyone is interested in the questions themselves, those are already
available online.
Why did I agree to participate? To have my support for Bernie counted, of course!
"... A more compelling explanation for the persistence of a large global U.S. military footprint, and the concomitant creep of oversees commitments, is to be found in domestic politics. Trump's rhetoric can diverge sharply from reality without consequence because few in his party have an incentive to hold him accountable. In this hyper-polarized political moment, most voters will stick with their party regardless of how many campaign pledges are broken or foreign policy initiatives end in failure. With an all-volunteer military, flattening taxes, and deficit financing, the vast majority of Americans are insulated from the costs of American foreign policy. So long as most Americans want to look tough and influential without paying for it, politicians won't be punished for living in the same fantasy world as voters. ..."
"... The main reason why America's military commitments remain unchanged under Trump may simply be that the president doesn't really want to reduce them. ..."
aul MacDonald and Joseph Parent
explain in detail that Trump hasn't reduced U.S. military commitments overseas:
But after nearly three years in office, Trump's promised retrenchment has yet to
materialize. The president hasn't meaningfully altered the U.S. global military footprint he
inherited from President Barack Obama. Nor has he shifted the costly burden of defending U.S.
allies. To the contrary, he loaded even greater military responsibilities on the United
States while either ramping up or maintaining U.S. involvement in the conflicts in
Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. On practically every other issue, Trump departed radically
from the path of his predecessor. But when it came to troop deployments and other overseas
defense commitments, he largely preserved the chessboard he inherited -- promises to the
contrary be damned.
MacDonald and Parent's article complements my earlier
post about U.S. "global commitments" very nicely. When we look at the specifics of Trump's
record, we see that he isn't ending U.S. military involvement anywhere. He isn't bringing
anyone home. On the contrary, he has been sending even more American troops to the Middle East
just this year alone. While he is being excoriated for withdrawals that never happen, he is
maintaining or steadily increasing the U.S. military presence in foreign countries. Many Trump
detractors and supporters are so invested in the narrative that Trump is presiding over
"withdrawal" that they are ignoring what the president has actually done. Trump's approach to
U.S. military involvement might be described as "loudly declaring withdrawal while maintaining
or increasing troop levels." Almost everyone pays attention only to his rhetoric about leaving
this or that country and treats it as if it is really happening. Meanwhile, the number of
military personnel deployed overseas never goes down.
The authors offer a possible explanation for why Trump has been able to get away with
this:
A more compelling explanation for the persistence of a large global U.S. military
footprint, and the concomitant creep of oversees commitments, is to be found in domestic
politics. Trump's rhetoric can diverge sharply from reality without consequence because few
in his party have an incentive to hold him accountable. In this hyper-polarized political
moment, most voters will stick with their party regardless of how many campaign pledges are
broken or foreign policy initiatives end in failure. With an all-volunteer military,
flattening taxes, and deficit financing, the vast majority of Americans are insulated from
the costs of American foreign policy. So long as most Americans want to look tough and
influential without paying for it, politicians won't be punished for living in the same
fantasy world as voters.
Trump is further insulated from scrutiny and criticism because he is frequently described as
presiding over a "retreat" from the world. Most news reports and commentary pieces reinforce
this false impression that Trump seeks to get the U.S. out of foreign entanglements. There are
relatively few people pointing out the truth that MacDonald and Parent spell out in their
article. The main reason why America's military commitments remain unchanged under Trump
may simply be that the president doesn't really want to reduce them.
"... Now consider the notion of "anti-Semitism." Google searches for that word and its close variants reveal over 24 million hits, and over the years I'm sure I've seen that term tens of thousands of times in my books and newspapers, and heard it endlessly reported in my electronic media and entertainment. But thinking it over, I'm not sure that I can ever recall a single real-life instance I've personally encountered, nor have I heard of almost any such cases from my friends or acquaintances. Indeed, the only persons I've ever come across making such claims were individuals who bore unmistakable signs of serious psychological imbalance. When the daily newspapers are brimming with lurid tales of hideous demons walking among us and attacking people on every street corner, but you yourself have never actually seen one, you may gradually grow suspicious. ..."
"... It has also become apparent that a considerable fraction of what passes for "anti-Semitism" these days seems to stretch that term beyond all recognition. A few weeks ago an unknown 28-year-old Democratic Socialist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a stunning upset primary victory over a top House Democrat in New York City, and naturally received a blizzard of media coverage as a result. However, when it came out that she had denounced the Israeli government for its recent massacre of over 140 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, cries of "anti-Semite" soon appeared, and according to Google there are now over 180,000 such hits combining her name and that harsh accusatory term. Similarly, just a few days ago the New York Times ran a major story reporting that all of Britain's Jewish newspapers had issued an "unprecedented" denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, describing it as an "existential threat" to the Jewish community for the anti-Semitism it was fostering; but this apparently amounted to nothing more than its willingness to sharply criticize the Israeli government for its long mistreatment of the Palestinians. ..."
I recently published a couple of long essays, and although they primarily focused on other
matters, the subject of anti-Semitism was a strong secondary theme. In that regard, I mentioned
my shock at discovering a dozen or more years ago that several of the most self-evidently
absurd elements of anti-Semitic lunacy, which I had always dismissed without consideration,
were probably correct. It does seem likely that a significant number of traditionally-religious
Jews did indeed occasionally commit the ritual murder of
Christian children in order to use their blood in certain religious ceremonies, and also
that powerful Jewish international bankers did play a large
role in financing the establishment of Bolshevik Russia .
When one discovers that matters of such enormous moment not only apparently occurred but
that they had been successfully excluded from nearly all of our histories and media coverage
for most of the last one hundred years, the implications take some time to properly digest. If
the most extreme "anti-Semitic canards" were probably true, then surely the whole notion of
anti-Semitism warrants a careful reexamination.
All of us obtain our knowledge of the world by two different channels. Some things we
discover from our own personal experiences and the direct evidence of our senses, but most
information comes to us via external sources such as books and the media, and a crisis may
develop when we discover that these two pathways are in sharp conflict. The official media of
the old USSR used to endlessly trumpet the tremendous achievements of its collectivized
agricultural system, but when citizens noticed that there was never any meat in their shops,
"Pravda" became a watchword for "Lies" rather than "Truth."
Now consider the notion of "anti-Semitism." Google searches for that word and its close
variants reveal over 24 million hits, and over the years I'm sure I've seen that term tens of
thousands of times in my books and newspapers, and heard it endlessly reported in my electronic
media and entertainment. But thinking it over, I'm not sure that I can ever recall a single
real-life instance I've personally encountered, nor have I heard of almost any such cases from
my friends or acquaintances. Indeed, the only persons I've ever come across making such claims
were individuals who bore unmistakable signs of serious psychological imbalance. When the daily
newspapers are brimming with lurid tales of hideous demons walking among us and attacking
people on every street corner, but you yourself have never actually seen one, you may gradually
grow suspicious.
Indeed, over the years some of my own research has uncovered a sharp contrast between image
and reality. As recently as the late 1990s, leading mainstream media outlets such as The
New York Times were still denouncing a top Ivy League
school such as Princeton for the supposed anti-Semitism of its college admissions policy,
but a few years ago when I carefully investigated that issue in quantitative terms for my
lengthy Meritocracy
analysis I was very surprised to reach a polar-opposite conclusion. According to the best
available evidence, white Gentiles were over 90% less likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the
other Ivies than were Jews of similar academic performance, a truly remarkable finding. If the
situation had been reversed and Jews were 90% less likely to be found at Harvard than seemed
warranted by their test scores, surely that fact would be endlessly cited as the absolute
smoking-gun proof of horrendous anti-Semitism in present-day America.
It has also become apparent that a considerable fraction of what passes for "anti-Semitism"
these days seems to stretch that term beyond all recognition. A few weeks ago an unknown
28-year-old Democratic Socialist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a stunning upset primary
victory over a top House Democrat in New York City, and naturally received a blizzard of media
coverage as a result. However, when it came out that she had denounced the Israeli government
for its recent massacre of over 140 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, cries of
"anti-Semite" soon appeared, and according to Google there are now over 180,000 such hits
combining her name and that harsh accusatory term. Similarly, just a few days ago the New
York Times ran a
major story reporting that all of Britain's Jewish newspapers had issued an "unprecedented"
denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, describing it as an "existential threat" to the
Jewish community for the anti-Semitism it was fostering; but this apparently amounted to
nothing more than its willingness to sharply criticize the Israeli government for its long
mistreatment of the Palestinians.
One plausible explanation of the strange contrast between media coverage and reality might
be that anti-Semitism once did loom very large in real life, but dissipated many decades ago,
while the organizations and activists focused on detecting and combating that pernicious
problem have remained in place, generating public attention based on smaller and smaller
issues, with the zealous Jewish activists of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) representing a
perfect example of this situation. As an even more striking illustration, the Second World War
ended over seventy years ago, but what historian Norman Finkelstein has so aptly labeled "the
Holocaust Industry" has grown ever larger and more entrenched in our academic and media worlds
so that scarcely a day passes without one or more articles relating to that topic appearing in
my major morning newspapers. Given this situation, a serious exploration of the true nature of
anti-Semitism should probably avoid the mere media phantoms of today and focus on the past,
when the condition might still have been widespread in daily life.
Many observers have pointed to the aftermath of the Second World War as marking a huge
watershed in the public acceptability of anti-Semitism both in America and Europe, so perhaps a
proper appraisal of that cultural phenomenon should focus on the years before that global
conflict. However, the overwhelming role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and other bloody
Communist seizures of power quite naturally made them objects of considerable fear and hatred
throughout the inter-war years, so the safest course might be to push that boundary back a
little further and confine our attention to the period prior to the outbreak of the First World
War. The pogroms in Czarist Russia, the Dreyfus Affair in France, and the lynching of Leo Frank
in the American South come to mind as some of the most famous examples from that period.
Lindemann's discussion of the often difficult relations between Russia's restive Jewish
minority and its huge Slavic majority is also quite interesting, and he provides numerous
instances in which major incidents, supposedly demonstrating the enormously strong appeal of
vicious anti-Semitism, were quite different than has been suggested by the legend. The famous
Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 was obviously the result of severe ethnic tension in that city, but
contrary to the regular accusations of later writers, there seems absolutely no evidence of
high-level government involvement, and the widespread claims of 700 dead that so horrified the
entire world were grossly exaggerated, with only 45 killed in the urban rioting. Chaim
Weizmann, the future president of Israel, later promoted the story that he himself and some
other brave Jewish souls had personally defended their people with revolvers in hand even as
they saw the mutilated bodies of 80 Jewish victims. This account was totally fictional since
Weizmann happened to have been be hundreds of miles away when the riots occurred.
Although a tendency to lie and exaggerate was hardly unique to the political partisans of
Russian Jewry, the existence of a powerful international network of Jewish journalists and
Jewish-influenced media outlets ensured that such concocted propaganda stories might receive
enormous worldwide distribution, while the truth followed far behind, if at all.
For related reasons, international outrage was often focused on the legal confinement of
most of Russia's Jews to the "Pale of Settlement," suggesting some sort of tight imprisonment;
but that area was the traditional home of the Jewish population and encompassed a landmass
almost as large as France and Spain combined. The growing impoverishment of Eastern European
Jews during that era was often assumed to be a consequence of hostile government policy, but
the obvious explanation was extraordinary Jewish fecundity, which far outstripped that of their
Slavic fellow countrymen, and quickly led them to outgrow the available spots in any of their
traditional "middleman" occupations, a situation worsened by their total disinclination to
engage in agriculture or other primary-producer activities. Jewish communities expressed horror
at the risk of losing their sons to the Czarist military draft, but this was simply the
flip-side of the full Russian citizenship they had been granted, and no different from what was
faced by their non-Jewish neighbors.
Certainly the Jews of Russia suffered greatly from widespread riots and mob attacks in the
generation prior to World War I, and these did sometimes have substantial government
encouragement, especially in the aftermath of the very heavy Jewish role in the 1905
Revolution. But we should keep in mind that a Jewish plotter had been implicated in the killing
of Czar Alexander II, and Jewish assassins had also struck down several top Russian ministers
and numerous other government officials. If the last decade or two had seen American Muslims
assassinate a sitting U.S. President, various leading Cabinet members, and a host of our other
elected and appointed officials, surely the position of Muslims in this country would have
become a very uncomfortable one.
As Lindemann candidly describes the tension between Russia's very rapidly growing Jewish
population and its governing authorities, he cannot avoid mentioning the notorious Jewish
reputation for bribery, corruption, and general dishonesty, with numerous figures of all
political backgrounds noting that the remarkable Jewish propensity to commit perjury in the
courtroom led to severe problems in the effective administration of justice. The eminent
American sociologist E.A. Ross, writing in 1913, characterized
the regular behavior of Eastern European Jews in very similar terms .
Lindemann also allocates a short chapter to discussing the 1911 Beilis Affair, in which a
Ukrainian Jew was accused of the ritual murder of a young Gentile boy, an incident that
generated a great deal of international attention and controversy. Based on the evidence
presented, the defendant seems likely to have been innocent, although the obvious lies he
repeatedly told police interrogators hardly helped foster that impression, and "the system
worked" in that he was ultimately found innocent by the jurors at his trial. However, a few
pages are also given to a much less well-known ritual murder case in late 19th century Hungary,
in which the evidence of Jewish guilt seemed far stronger, though the author hardly accepted
the possible reality of such an outlandish crime. Such reticence was quite understandable since
the publication of Ariel Toaff's remarkable volume
on the subject was still a dozen years in the future.
Lindemann subsequently expanded his examination of historical anti-Semitism into a much
broader treatment, Esau's Tears , which appeared in 1997. In this volume, he added
comparative studies of the social landscape in Germany, Britain, Italy, and several other
European countries, and demonstrated that the relationship between Jews and non-Jews varied
greatly across different locations and time periods. But although I found his analysis quite
useful and interesting, the extraordinarily harsh attacks his text provoked from some outraged
Jewish academics seemed even more intriguing.
For example, Judith Laikin Elkin opened her discussion in The American Historical
Review by describing the book as a "545-page polemic" a strange characterization of a book
so remarkably even-handed and factually-based in its scholarship. Writing in
Commentary , Robert Wistrich was even harsher, stating that merely reading the book
had been a painful experience for him, and his review seemed filled with spittle-flecked rage.
Unless these individuals had somehow gotten copies of a different book, I found their attitudes
simply astonishing.
I was not alone in such a reaction. Richard S. Levy of the University of Illinois, a noted
scholar of anti-Semitism, expressed amazement at Wistrich's seemingly irrational outburst,
while Paul Gottfried, writing in Chronicles , mildly suggested that Lindemann had
"touched raw nerves." Indeed, Gottfried's own evaluation quite reasonably criticized Lindemann
for perhaps being a little too even-handed, sometimes presenting numerous conflicting analyzes
without choosing between them. For those interested, a good discussion of the book by Alan
Steinweis, a younger scholar specializing in the same topic,
is conveniently available online .
The remarkable ferocity with which some Jewish writers attacked Lindemann's meticulous
attempt to provide an accurate history of anti-Semitism may carry more significance than merely
an exchange of angry words in low-circulation academic publications. If our mainstream media
shapes our reality, scholarly books and articles based upon them tend to set the contours of
that media coverage. And the ability of a relatively small number of agitated and energetic
Jews to police the acceptable boundaries of historical narratives may have enormous
consequences for our larger society, deterring scholars from objectively reporting historical
facts and preventing students from discovering them.
The undeniable truth is that for many centuries Jews usually constituted a wealthy and
privileged segment of the population in nearly all the European countries in which they
resided, and quite frequently they based their livelihood upon the heavy exploitation of a
downtrodden peasantry. Even without any differences in ethnicity, language, or religion, such
conditions almost invariably provoke hostility. The victory of Mao's Communist forces in China
was quickly followed by the brutal massacre of a million or more Han Chinese landlords by the
Han Chinese poor peasants who regarded them as cruel oppressors, with William Hinton's classic
Fanshen describing the unfortunate history that unfolded in one particular village.
When similar circumstances led to violent clashes in Eastern Europe between Slavs and Jews,
does it really make logical sense to employ a specialized term such as "anti-Semitism" to
describe that situation?
Furthermore, some of the material presented in Lindemann's rather innocuous text might also
lead to potentially threatening ideas. Consider, for example, the notorious Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion , almost certainly fictional, but hugely popular and
influential during the years following World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. The fall of so
many longstanding Gentile dynasties and their replacement by new regimes such as Soviet Russia
and Weimar Germany, which were heavily dominated by their tiny Jewish minorities, quite
naturally fed suspicions of a worldwide Jewish plot, as did the widely discussed role of Jewish
international bankers in producing those political outcomes.
Over the decades, there has been much speculation about the possible inspiration for the
Protocols , but although Lindemann makes absolutely no reference to that document, he
does provide a very intriguing possible candidate. Jewish-born British Prime Minister Benjamin
Disraeli certainly ranked as one of the most influential figures of the late 19th century, and
in his novel Coningsby , he has the character representing Lord Lionel Rothschild
boast about the existence of a vast and
secret network of powerful international Jews , who stand near the head of almost every
major nation, quietly controlling their governments from behind the scenes. If one of the
world's most politically well-connected Jews eagerly promoted such notions, was Henry Ford
really so unreasonable in doing the same?
Lindemann also notes Disraeli's focus on the extreme importance of race and racial origins,
a central aspect of traditional Jewish religious doctrine. He reasonably suggests that this
must surely have had a huge influence upon the rise of those political ideas, given that
Disraeli's public profile and stature were so much greater than the mere writers or activists
whom our history books usually place at center stage. In fact, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a
leading racial theorist, actually cited Disraeli as a key source for his ideas. Jewish
intellectuals such as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso are already widely recognized as leading
figures in the rise of the racial science of that era, but Disraeli's under-appreciated role
may have actually been far greater. The deep Jewish roots of European racialist movements are
hardly something that many present-day Jews would want widely known.
One of the harsh Jewish critics of Esau's Tears denounced Cambridge University
Press for even allowing the book to appear in print, and although that major work is easily
available in English, there are numerous other cases where an important but discordant version
of historical reality has been successfully blocked from publication. For decades most
Americans would have ranked Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn as among the world's greatest
literary figures, and his Gulag Archipelago alone sold over 10 million copies. But his
last work was a massive two-volume account of the tragic 200 years of shared history between
Russians and Jews, and despite its 2002 release in Russian and numerous other world languages,
there has yet to be an authorized English translation, though various partial editions have
circulated on the Internet in samizdat form.
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At one point, a full English version was briefly available for sale at Amazon.com and I
purchased it. Glancing through a few sections, the work seemed quite even-handed and innocuous
to me, but it seemed to provide a far more detailed and uncensored account than anything else
previously available, which obviously was the problem. The Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the
deaths of many tens of millions of people worldwide, and the overwhelming Jewish role in its
leadership would become more difficult to erase from historical memory if Solzhenitsyn's work
were easily available. Also, his candid discussion of the economic and political behavior of
Russian Jewry in pre-revolutionary times directly conflicted with the hagiography widely
promoted by Hollywood and the popular media. Historian Yuri Slezkine's award-winning 2004 book
The Jewish Century provided many similar facts, but his treatment was far more cursory
and his public stature not remotely the same.
Near the end of his life, Solzhenitsyn gave his political blessing to Russian President
Vladimir Putin, and Russia's leaders honored him upon his death, while his Gulag
volumes are now enshrined as mandatory reading in the standard high school curriculum of
today's overwhelmingly Christian Russia. But even as his star rose again in his own homeland,
it seems to have sharply fallen in our own country, and his trajectory may eventually relegate
him to nearly un-person status.
A couple of years after the release of Solzhenitsyn's controversial final book, an American
writer named Anne Applebaum published a thick history bearing the same title Gulag ,
and her work received enormously favorable media coverage and won her a Pulitzer Prize; I have
even heard claims that her book has been steadily replacing that earlier Gulag on many
college reading lists. But although Jews constituted a huge fraction of the top leadership of
the Soviet Gulag system during its early decades, as well as that of the dreaded NKVD which
supplied the inmates, nearly her entire focus on her own ethnic group during Soviet times is
that of victims rather than victimizers. And by a remarkable irony of fate, she shares a last
name with one of the top Bolshevik leaders, Hirsch Apfelbaum, who concealed his own ethnic
identity by calling himself Grigory Zinoviev.
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The striking decline in Solzhenitsyn's literary status in the West came just a decade or two
after an even more
precipitous collapse in the reputation of David Irving , and for much the same reason.
Irving probably ranked as the most internationally successful British historian of the last one
hundred years and a renowned scholar of World War II, but his extensive reliance on primary
source documentary evidence posed an obvious threat to the official narrative promoted by
Hollywood and wartime propaganda. When he published his magisterial Hitler's War ,
this conflict between myth and reality came into the open, and an enormous wave of attacks and
vilification was unleashed, gradually leading to his purge from respectability and eventually
even his imprisonment.
These important examples may help to explain the puzzling contrast between the behavior of
Jews in the aggregate and Jews as individuals. Observers have noticed that even fairly small
Jewish minorities may often have a major impact upon the far larger societies that host them.
But on the other hand, in my experience at least, a large majority of individual Jews do not
seem all that different in their personalities or behavior than their non-Jewish counterparts.
So how does a community whose individual mean is not so unusual generate what seems to be such
a striking difference in collective behavior? I think the answer may involve the existence of
information choke-points, and the ability of relatively small numbers of particularly zealous
and agitated Jews in influencing and controlling these.
We live our lives constantly immersed in media narratives, and these allow us to decide the
rights and wrongs of a situation. The vast majority of people, Jew and Gentile alike, are far
more likely to take strong action if they are convinced that their cause is a just one. This is
obviously the basis for war-time propaganda.
Now suppose that a relatively small number of zealous Jewish partisans are known to always
attack and denounce journalists or authors who accurately describe Jewish misbehavior. Over
time, this ongoing campaign of intimidation may cause many important facts to be left on the
cutting-room floor, or even gradually expel from mainstream respectability those writers who
refuse to conform to such pressures. Meanwhile, similar small numbers of Jewish partisans
frequently exaggerate the misdeeds committed against Jews, sometimes piling their exaggerations
upon past exaggerations already produced by a previous round of such zealots.
Eventually, these two combined trends may take a complex and possibly very mixed historical
record and transform it into a simple morality-play, with innocent Jews tremendously injured by
vicious Jew-haters. And as this morality-play becomes established it deepens the subsequent
intensity of other Jewish-activists, who redouble their demands that the media "stop vilifying
Jews" and covering up the supposed evils inflicted upon them. An unfortunate circle of
distortion following exaggeration following distortion can eventually produce a widely accepted
historical account that bears little resemblance to the reality of what actually happened.
So as a result, the vast majority of quite ordinary Jews, who would normally behave in quite
ordinary ways, are misled by this largely fictional history, and rather understandably become
greatly outraged at all the horrible things that had been done to their suffering people, some
of which are true and some of which are not, while remaining completely ignorant of the other
side of the ledger.
Furthermore, this situation is exacerbated by the common tendency of Jews to "cluster"
together, perhaps respresenting just one or two percent of the total population, but often
constituting 20% or 40% or 60% of their immediate peer-group, especially in certain
professions. Under such conditions, the ideas or emotional agitation of some Jews probably
permeates others around them, often provoking additional waves of indignation.
As a rough analogy, a small quantity of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and
entirely so if distributed within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of
weapons-grade uranium is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning
atoms will quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of that
critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion, even a highly agitated
Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection of such agitated Jews becomes too
numerous and clusters together too closely, they may work each other into a terrible frenzy,
perhaps with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is
especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of top-level
control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.
Whereas most living organizations exist solely in physical reality, human beings also occupy
an ideational space, with the interaction of human consciousness and perceived reality playing
a major role in shaping behavior. Just as the pheromones released by mammals or insects can
drastically affect the reactions of their family members or nest-mates, the ideas secreted by
individuals or the media-emitters of a society can have an enormous impact upon their
fellows.
A cohesive, organized group generally possesses huge advantages over a teeming mass of
atomized individuals, just as a Macedonian Phalanx could easily defeat a vastly larger body of
disorganized infantry. Many years ago, on some website somewhere I came across a very
insightful comment regarding the obvious connection between "anti-Semitism" and "racism," which
our mainstream media organs identify as two of the world's greatest evils. Under this analysis,
"anti-Semitism" represents the tendency to criticize or resist Jewish social cohesion, while
"racism" represents the attempt of white Gentiles to maintain a similar social cohesion of
their own. To the extent that the ideological emanations from our centralized media organs
serve to strengthen and protect Jewish cohesion while attacking and dissolving any similar
cohesion on the part of their Gentile counterparts, the former will obviously gain enormous
advantages in resource-competition against the latter.
Religion obviously constitutes an important unifying factor in human social groups and we
cannot ignore the role of Judaism in this regard. Traditional Jewish
religious doctrine seems to consider Jews as being in a state of permanent hostility with all
non-Jews , and the use of dishonest propaganda is an almost inevitable aspect of such
conflict. Furthermore, since Jews have invariably been a small political minority, maintaining
such controversial tenets required the employment of a massive framework of subterfuge and
dissimulation in order to conceal their nature from the larger society surrounding them. It has
often been said that truth is the first casualty in war, and surely the cultural influences of
over a thousand years of such intense religious hostility may continue to quietly influence the
thinking of many modern Jews, even those who have largely abandoned their religious
beliefs.
The notorious Jewish tendency to shamelessly lie or wildly exaggerate has sometimes had
horrifying human consequences. I very recently discovered a fascinating passage in Peter
Moreira's 2014 book The Jew Who Defeated Hitler: Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR, and How We Won the War ,
focused on the important political role of that powerful Secretary of the Treasury.
A turning point in Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s relationship with the Jewish community came in
November 1942, when Rabbi Stephen Wise came to the corner office to tell the secretary what
was happening in Europe. Morgenthau knew of the millions of deaths and the lampshades made
from victims' skin, and he asked Wise not to go into excessive details. But Wise went on to
tell of the barbarity of the Nazis, how they were making soap out of Jewish flesh.
Morgenthau, turning paler, implored him, "Please, Stephen, don't give me the gory details."
Wise went on with his list of horrors and Morgenthau repeated his plea over and over again.
Henrietta Klotz was afraid her boss would keel over. Morgenthau later said the meeting
changed his life.
"... "The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq." ..."
"... " 'I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,' Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. 'I am sullied.' " ..."
In my opinion the most under-reported event of the Iraq war was the suicide of military Ethicist Colonel Ted Westhusing. It was
reported at the end of a Frank Rich column that appeared in the NY Times of 10-21-2007:
"The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence
was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant,
when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in
Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq."
"Colonel Westhusing's death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower,
according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book "Blood Money."
Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil,
is as much an epitaph for America's engagement in Iraq as a suicide note."
" 'I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,' Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating
the word mission. 'I am sullied.' "
"The tiny pink candies at the bottom of the urinals are reserved for Field Grade and Above." --sign over the urinals in the "O"
Club at Tan Son Nhut Airbase, 1965.
Now that sentiment, is Officer-on-Officer. The same dynamic tension exists throughout all Branches and ranks.
My background includes a Combat Infantry Badge and a record of having made Spec Four , two times. If you don't know what that
means, stop reading here.
I feel that no one should be promoted E-5 or O-4, if they are to command men in battle, unless they have had that life experience
themselves. It becomes virgins instructing on sexual etiquette.
Within the ranks, there exists a disdain for officers, in general. Some officers overcome this by their actions, but the vast
majority cement that assessment the same way.
What makes the thing run is the few officers who are superior human beings, and the NCOs who are of that same tribe. And there
is a love there, from top to bottom and bottom to top, a brotherhood of warriors which the civilian population will forever try
to discern, parse and examine to their lasting frustration and ignorance.
It is the spirit of this nation [Liberty, e pluribus unum and In God We Trust ] that is the binding filament of it all. The
civilians responsible for the welfare of the armed services need to be more fully aware of that spirit and they need to bring
it into the air-conditioned offices they inhabit when they make decisions about men who know sacrifice.
"... No. My point was it's very misleading. Misleading to set the parameters of discussion on U.S. posture toward Russia in such a way as to assume that Putin's actions against a purported Russian "democracy" have anything at all to do with USian antagonism of Russia. I'm sure you'll note current U.S. military cooperation with that boisterous hotbed of democratic activity, Saudi Arabia, in Yemen. Our allies in the house of Saud require help in defending their democratic way of life against the totalitarianism of Yemeni tribes, you see. The U.S. opposes anti-democratic forces whenever and where ever it can, especially in the Middle East. I guess that explains USian antipathy to Russia. ..."
Yes, it was late and I was tired, or I wouldn't have said something so foolish. Still, the
point is that after centuries of constant war, Europe went 70 years without territorial conquest.
That strikes me as a significant achievement, and one whose breach should not be taken lightly.
phenomenal cat @64
So democratic structures have to be robust and transparent before we care about them? I'd give
a pretty high value to an independent press and contested elections. Those have been slowly crushed
in Russia. The results for transparency have not been great. Personally, I don't believe that
Ukraine is governed by fascists, or that Ukraine shot down that jetliner, but I'm sure a lot of
Russians do.
Russian leaders have always complained about "encirclement," but we don't have to believe them.
Do you really believe Russia's afraid of an attack from Estonia? Clearly what Putin wants is to
restore as much of the old Soviet empire as possible. Do you think the independence of the Baltic
states would be more secure or less secure if they weren't members of NATO? (Hint: compare to
Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova.)
"So
democratic structures have to be robust and transparent before we care about them?"
No. My point was it's very misleading. Misleading to set the parameters of discussion on
U.S. posture toward Russia in such a way as to assume that Putin's actions against a purported
Russian "democracy" have anything at all to do with USian antagonism of Russia. I'm sure you'll
note current U.S. military cooperation with that boisterous hotbed of democratic activity, Saudi
Arabia, in Yemen. Our allies in the house of Saud require help in defending their democratic way
of life against the totalitarianism of Yemeni tribes, you see. The U.S. opposes anti-democratic
forces whenever and where ever it can, especially in the Middle East. I guess that explains USian
antipathy to Russia.
"I'd give a pretty high value to an independent press and contested elections."
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see what the U.S. looked like with those dynamics in place.
"Those have been slowly crushed in Russia. The results for transparency have not been
great."
If you say so. For now I'll leave any decisions or actions taken on these outcomes to Russian
citizens. I would, however, kindly tell Victoria Nuland and her ilk to fuck off with their senile
Cold War fantasies, morally bankrupt, third-rate Great Game machinations, and total spectrum dominance
sociopathy.
"Personally, I don't believe that Ukraine is governed by fascists, or that Ukraine shot
down that jetliner, but I'm sure a lot of Russians do."
There's definitely some of 'em hanging about, but yeah it mostly seems to be a motley assortment
of oligarchs, gangsters, and grifters tied into international neoliberal capital and money flows.
No doubt Russian believe a lot things. I find Americans tend to believe a lot things as well.
"... Pretty consistent, I agree. IMHO Sanjait might belong to the category that some people call the "Vichy left" – essentially people who are ready to sacrifice all principles to ensure their 'own' prosperity and support the candidate who intends to protect it, everybody else be damned. ..."
"... Very neoliberal approach if you ask me. Ann Rand would probably be proud for this representative of "creative class". ..."
"... Essentially the behavior that we've had for the last 8 years with the king of "bait and switch". ..."
Some paranoid claptrap to go along with your usual anti intellectualism.
Interestingly, with your completely unrelated non sequitur, you've actually illustrated something that does relate to Krugmans
post. Namely that there are wingnuts among us. They've taken over the Republican Party, but the left has some too. Fortunately
though the Democratic Party hasn't been taken over by them yet, and is still mostly run by grown ups.
"I am confident that what you say here is consistent with your methods and motivations."
Pretty consistent, I agree. IMHO Sanjait might belong to the category that some people call the "Vichy left" – essentially
people who are ready to sacrifice all principles to ensure their 'own' prosperity and support the candidate who intends to protect
it, everybody else be damned.
Very neoliberal approach if you ask me. Ann Rand would probably be proud for this representative of "creative class".
Essentially the behavior that we've had for the last 8 years with the king of "bait and switch".
Ukrainegate has definite signs of Soros funded operation
Notable quotes:
"... America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers. ..."
"... Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team. ..."
"... There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic, and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions. ..."
"... Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit them to infest his administration. ..."
"... PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle. ..."
"... HE PROMISED he would appoint a special prosecutor, PROMISED... ..."
"... Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through 501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil. ..."
"... Tyler, please rerun this! How George Sorros destroys countries, profits from currency trading, convinces the countries to privatize its assets, buys them and then sells them for yet another profit: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-08/how-george-soros-singlehandedly... ..."
"... We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... ..."
"... JFK was gunned down in front of the whole world. ..."
"... If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him) ..."
"... Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen. ..."
"... AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge in her own country! ..."
"... Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money ..."
Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is not about to "go quietly into that good night". On the morning
after her surprising and unanticipated defeat at the hands of Republican Party upstart Donald Trump, Mrs. Clinton and her husband,
former President Bill Clinton, entered the ball room of the art-deco New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan and were both adorned
in purple attire. The press immediately noticed the color and asked what it represented. Clinton spokespeople claimed it was to represent
the coming together of Democratic "Blue America" and Republican "Red America" into a united purple blend. This statement was a complete
ruse as is known by citizens of countries targeted in the past by the vile political operations of international hedge fund tycoon
George Soros.
The Clintons, who both have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions and Clinton Foundation donations from Soros,
were, in fact, helping to launch Soros's "Purple Revolution" in America. The Purple Revolution will resist all efforts by the Trump
administration to push back against the globalist policies of the Clintons and soon-to-be ex-President Barack Obama. The Purple Revolution
will also seek to make the Trump administration a short one through Soros-style street protests and political disruption.
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation of
Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when the nation
faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on Hillary Clinton, the
Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide
Huma Abedin
. President Trump should not allow himself to be distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.
America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national
security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because
there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers.
Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being
mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary
of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team.
There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries
of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump
supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic,
and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions.
Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit
them to infest his administration. If Mrs. Clinton had won the presidency, an article on the incoming administration would have
read as follows:
"Based on the militarism and foreign adventurism of her term as Secretary of State and her husband Bill Clinton's two terms
as president, the world is in store for major American military aggression on multiple fronts around the world. President-elect
Hillary Clinton has made no secret of her desire to confront Russia militarily, diplomatically, and economically in the Middle
East, on Russia's very doorstep in eastern Europe, and even within the borders of the Russian Federation. Mrs. Clinton has dusted
off the long-discredited 'containment' policy ushered into effect by Professor George F. Kennan in the aftermath of World War.
Mrs. Clinton's administration will likely promote the most strident neo-Cold Warriors of the Barack Obama administration, including
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a personal favorite of Clinton".
President-elect Trump cannot afford to permit those who are in the same web as Nuland, Hadley, Bolton, and others to join his
administration where they would metastasize like an aggressive form of cancer. These individuals would not carry out Trump's policies
but seek to continue to damage America's relations with Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and other nations.
Not only must Trump have to deal with Republican neocons trying to worm their way into his administration, but he must deal with
the attempt by Soros to disrupt his presidency and the United States with a Purple Revolution
No sooner had Trump been declared the 45th president of the United States, Soros-funded political operations launched their activities
to disrupt Trump during Obama's lame-duck period and thereafter. The swiftness of the Purple Revolution is reminiscent of the speed
at which protesters hit the streets of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in two Orange Revolutions sponsored by Soros, one in 2004 and
the other, ten years later, in 2014.
As the Clintons were embracing purple in New York, street demonstrations, some violent, all coordinated by the Soros-funded Moveon.org
and "Black Lives Matter", broke out in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, Nashville, Cleveland, Washington, Austin, Seattle,
Philadelphia, Richmond, St. Paul, Kansas City, Omaha, San Francisco, and some 200 other cities across the United States.
The Soros-financed Russian singing group "Pussy Riot" released on YouTube an anti-Trump music video titled "Make America Great
Again". The video went "viral" on the Internet. The video, which is profane and filled with violent acts, portrays a dystopian Trump
presidency. Following the George Soros/Gene Sharp script to a tee, Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova called for anti-Trump Americans
to turn their anger into art, particularly music and visual art. The use of political graffiti is a popular Sharp tactic. The street
protests and anti-Trump music and art were the first phase of Soros's Purple Revolution in America.
President-elect Trump is facing a two-pronged attack by his opponents. One, led by entrenched neo-con bureaucrats, including former
Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff,
and Bush family loyalists are seeking to call the shots on who Trump appoints to senior national security, intelligence, foreign
policy, and defense positions in his administration. These neo-Cold Warriors are trying to convince Trump that he must maintain the
Obama aggressiveness and militancy toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries. The second front arrayed against
Trump is from Soros-funded political groups and media. This second line of attack is a propaganda war, utilizing hundreds of anti-Trump
newspapers, web sites, and broadcasters, that will seek to undermine public confidence in the Trump administration from its outset.
One of Trump's political advertisements, released just prior to Election Day, stated that George Soros, Federal Reserve chair
Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein, are all part of "a global power structure that is responsible
for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets
of a handful of large corporations and political entities". Soros and his minions immediately and ridiculously attacked the ad as
"anti-Semitic". President Trump should be on guard against those who his campaign called out in the ad and their colleagues. Soros's
son, Alexander Soros, called on Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, to publicly disavow Trump. Soros's tactics
not only seek to split apart nations but also families. Trump must be on guard against the current and future machinations of George
Soros, including his Purple Revolution.
"It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation
of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when
the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care."
None of those "pressing issues" involve the DOJ or the FBI.
Investigate, prosecute and jail Hillary Clinton and her crew.
Trump is going to need a hostage or two to deal with these fucks.
News for the Clintons, The R's and D's already united to vote against Hillary.
I do not understand why they think street protests will bring down a POTUS? And that would be acceptable in a major nation.
Why isn't the government cracking down the separatists in Oregon, California, and elsewhere? They are not accepting the legal
outcome of an election. They are calling for illegal secession. (Funny in 1861 this was a cause for the federal government to
attack the joint and seveal states of the union.) If a group of whites had protested Obama's election in 2008?
The people living in Kalispell are reviled and ridiculed for their separatist views. Randy Weaver and family for not accepting
politically correct views. And so on.
This is getting out of hand. There will be no walking this back.
"Yes. And who are the neocons really? Progressives. Neocon is a label successfully used by criminal progressives to shield their
brand."
Well let's go a little bit deeper in examing the 'who' thing:
"The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative") Republican right, is, in
reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary , a media arm of the American
Jewish Committee , which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward , the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote
in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: " If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can
lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.... "
The idea of arresting the Clinton Crime, Fraud and Crime Family would be welcomed. BUT, who is going to arrest them? Loretta Lynch,
James Comey, WHO? The problem here is that our so called "authorities" are all in the same bed. The tentacles of the Eastern Elite
Establishment are everywhere in high office, academia, the media, Big Business, etc. The swamp is thoroughly infested with this
elite scum of those in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, Club of Rome,
Committee of 300, Jason Society and numerous other private clubs of the rich, powerful and influential. The Illuminati has been
exposed, however they aren't going down lightly. They still have massive amounts of money, they own the media and the banking
houses. Some have described it as MIMAC, the Military Industrial Media Academic Complex. A few months ago here at Zero Hedge,
there was an article which showed a massive flow chart of the elites and their organization
They could IF and WHEN Trump gets to Washington after 20 Jan 2017, simply implode the economy and blame t it on Trump. Sort
of what happened to Herbert Hoover in the late 1920's. Unfortunately the situation in the US will continue to deteriorate. George
Soros, a major financial backer of Hillary will see to that. Soros is a Globalist and advocate of one world government. People
comment that Soros should be arrested. I agree, BUT who is going to do that?
Agree. I think Trump will yank all the "aid" to Israel as well as "aid" to the Islamic murderers of the Palitrashian human garbage
infesting the area. This "aid" money is simply a bribe to keep both from killing each other. F**k all of them. None of our business
what they do.
We got progressives ( lots and lots of Jews in that group) who are the enemy of mankind and then we got Islam who are also
the enemy of mankind. Why help either of them? Makes no sense.
Soros is hated in Israel and has never set foot there but his foundations have done such harm that a bill was recently passed
to ban foreign funding of non profit political organizations
The fact that we all have to worry about the CIA killing a President Elect simply because the man puts America first, really says
it all.
The Agency is Cancer. Why are we even waiting for them to kill another one of our people to act? There should be no question
about the CIA's future in the US.
Dissolved & dishonored. Its members locked away or punished for Treason. Their reputation is so bad and has been for so long,
that the fact that you joined them should be enough to justify arrest and Execution for Treason, Crimes Against Humanity & Crimes
Against The American People.
There are entirely way too many Intelligence Agencies. Plus the Contractors, some of who shouldn't have high level clearance to
begin with which the US sub contracts the Intel / work out to.
For Fucks sake, Government is so incompetent it can't even handle it own Intel.
Something along the lines of Eurpoe's Five Eyes would be highly effective.
Fuck those Pure Evil Psychopaths at the CIA They're nothing more than a bunch of Scum Fuck murdering, drug running, money laundering
Global Crime Syndicate.
The FBI is still investigating the Clinton Foundation, Trump needs to encourage that through backdoor channels. Soro's needs to
be investigated, he has been tied to a conspiracy to incite violence, this needs to be documented and dealt with. Trump can not
ignore this guy. If any of these investigations come back with a recommendation to indict then that process needs to be started.
Take the fight to them, they are vulnerable!
Make a National APB Warrent for the apprehension & arrest of George Sooros for inciting violence, endsrgerimg the public & calling
for the murder of our Nations Police through funding of the BLM Group.
Have every Law Informent Agency in the Nation on alert. Also, issue a Bounty in the Sum of $5,000,000 for his immediate apprehension.
Trump needs to replace FBI chickenshits & sellouts with loyal people then get the FBI counter-terrorism to investigate and shut
down Soros & the various agencies instigating the riots. It's really simple when you quit over-thinking a problem. It's domestic
terrorism. It's the FBI's job to stop it.
I read what Paul said this morning and thought, despite Paul's hostility to Trump during the primaries most likely due to his
son, Rand's loss, that Paul gave good advice to Trump.
Let's face it Donald Trump is a STOP GAP measure. And demographic change over the next 4 years makes his re-election very, very
UNLIKELY. If he keeps his campaign promises he will be a GREAT president. However as ZH reported earlier he appears to be balking
from repealing Obamacare, I stress the word APPEARS.
Let us give him a chance. This is all speculation. His enemies are DEADLY as they were once they got total control in Russia,
they killed according to Solzhenitsyn SIXTY-SIX MILLION Russian Christians. The descendants of those Bolsheviks are VERY powerful
in the USSA. They control the Fed, Hollyweird, Wall Street, the universities...
Much of the media and advertising exist by pushing buttons that trigger appropriate financially lucrative reflexes in their
audiences, from pornography to romantic movies to team sports. Media profits are driven by competition over how best to push
those buttons. But the effort to produce politically and racially cuckolded Whites adds a layer of complexity: What buttons
do you push to make Whites complicit in their own racial and cultural demise?
Actually, there are a whole lot of them, which shouldn't be surprising. This is a very sophisticated onslaught, enabled
by control over all the moral, intellectual, and political high ground by the left. With all that high ground, there are a
lot of buttons you can push.
Our enemies see this as a pathetic last gasp of a moribund civilization and it is quite true for our civilization is dying.
Identity Christians describe this phase as Jacob's Troubles and what the secular Guillaume Faye would, I think, describe as the
catastrophe required to get people motivated. The future has yet to be written, however I cannot help but think that God's people,
the White people, are stirring from their slumber.
"PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William
Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle.
JINSA, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. "explaining the link between U.S. national security and Israel's
security" Served on JINSA's Advisory Board: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Perle."
If Trump has probable cause on the Soros crimes, have his DoJ request a warrant for all of Soros's communications via the NSA,
empanel a grand jury, indict the bastard, and throw his raggedy ass in prison. It would be hard for him to run his retarded purple
revolution when he's getting ass-raped by his cell mate.
I agree. Thing is, I think as president he can simply order the NSA to cough up whatever they have, just like Obama could have
done at any point. The NSA is part of the Defense Department, right? What am I missing here?
But in respect to Soro's money and the Dalas shooting or other incited events, there should be a grand jury empanelled and
then charges brought against him. I think nothing short of him hiding in an embassy with all his money blocked by Swift is justice
for the violence that he funded.
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation
of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when
the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on
Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide Huma Abedin. President Trump should not allow himself to be
distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.
And so it begins; I really hope that this is just some misinformation/disinformation, because HE PROMISED he would appoint
a special prosecutor, PROMISED...
The likes of Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg get to catch up on their Torah for the forseeable future but the likes
of Lloyd Blankfein will probably get to entertain the court since they have probably crossed paths doing business in NYC. The
"real conservative" deeply introspective, examine-my-conscience crowd screwed themselves to the wall, god love them.
Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because
that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through
501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a
massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil.
We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an
advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... (just in case you confused him with Mother Theresa)..
But then again JFK took office with a set of initiatives that were far more bellicose and provocative (like putting huge Jupiter
missile launchers on the USSR border in Turkey)... once he saw he light and fired the pro Nazi Dulles Gang , JFK was gunned
down in front of the whole world.
If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will
unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him)
I'm guessing though that deep down Trump is quite comfortable with a neoCon cabinet... hell he already offered Jamie Diamon
the office of Treasry Secretary... no doubt a calculated gesture to signal compliance with the Deep State.
The Clintons do not do things by accident. Coordination of colors at the concession speech was meant for something. Perhaps the
purple revolution or maybe they want to be seen as royals. It doesn't really matter why they did it; the fact is they are up to
something. They will not agree to go away and even if they offered to just disappear with their wealth we know they are dishonest.
They will come back... that is what they do.
They must be stripped of power and wealth. This act must be performed publicly.
In order to succeed Mr. Trump I suggest you task a group to accomplish this result. Your efforts to make America great again
may disintegrate just like Obamacare if you allow the Clintons and Co. to languish in the background.
The protestors are groups of individuals who may seek association for any number of reasons. One major reason might be the loss
of hope for a meaningful and prosperous life. We should seek out and listen to the individuals within these groups. If they are
truly desirous of being heard they will communicate what they want without use of violence. Perhaps individuals join these protest
groups because they do not have a voice.
Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction
and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen.
The articles reporting that Mr. Trump has changed his response to the protestors is a good effort to discover the protestors'
complaints and channel their energy into beneficial political activity. Something must be done quickly though, before the protests
get out of hand, for if that happens the protestors will be criminals and no one will want to work with them.
In order to make America great again we need input from all of America. Mr. Trump you can harness the energy of these protestors
and let them know they are a part of your movement.
Classical economists are experts on today's capitalism, it is 18th and 19th Century capitalism, it's how it all started.
Adam Smith would think we are on the road to ruin.
"But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society.
On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going
fastest to ruin."
Exactly the opposite of today's thinking, what does he mean?
When rates of profit are high, capitalism is cannibalizing itself by:
1) Not engaging in long term investment for the future
2) Paying insufficient wages to maintain demand for its products and services.
Got that wrong as well.
Adam Smith wouldn't like today's lobbyists.
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great
precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous,
but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of
the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions,
both deceived and oppressed it."
First five minutes of Alex Jones' video today is clips of people saying "Donald Trump will never be president". Full Show - Soros-Funded Goons Deployed to Overthrow America - 11/11/2016
AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge
in her own country!
lakecity55 -> CoCosAB •Nov 12, 2016 7:53 AM
Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money. Trump will have to do some rough stuff,
but he needs to, it's what we hired him for.
"... Authored by Peter Hitchens via The Mail On Sunday blog, ..."
"... I stood outside the safe house, in a road I cannot name, in a major European city I cannot identify, not sure what I might find inside. I had no way of being sure. ..."
"... In decades of journalism I have received quite a few leaks ..."
"... But I've never seen one like this. It scared me. ..."
"... If bodies such as the OPCW cannot be trusted, then World War Three could one day be started by a falsehood. ..."
I stood outside the safe house, in a road I cannot name, in a major European city I cannot
identify, not sure what I might find inside. I had no way of being sure.
I had travelled a long distance by train to an address I had been given over an encrypted email.
I was nervous that the meeting might be some sort of trap.
Leaks from inside arms
verification organisations are very sensitive matters. Powerful people mind about them.
I wasn't sure whether to be afraid of being followed, or to be worried about who might be waiting behind
the anonymous door on a dark afternoon, far from home. I took all the amateurish precautions that I could
think of.
As it happened, it was not a trap. Now, on carefully selected neutral ground, I was to meet a person
who would confirm suspicions that had been growing in my mind over several years – that there is something
rotten in the way that chemical weapons inspections are being conducted and reported. And that the world
could be hurried into war on the basis of such inspections.
Inside the safe house, I was greeted by a serious, patient expert, a non-political scientist
whose priority had until now always been to do the hard, gritty work of verification
– travelling
to the scenes of alleged horrors, sifting and searching for hard evidence of what had really happened.
But this entirely honourable occupation had slowly turned sour.
The whiff of political interference had begun as a faint unpleasant smell in the air and grown
until it was an intolerable stench.
Formerly easy-going superiors had turned into tricky bureaucrats.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had become so important that it could
no longer be allowed to do its job properly.
Too many of the big powers that sponsor and finance it were breathing down its neck, wanting certain
results, whether the facts justified them or not.
My source calmly showed me various pieces of evidence that they were who they said they were,
and knew what they claimed to know, making it clear that they worked for the OPCW and knew its inner workings.
They then revealed a document to me.
This was the email of protest, sent to senior OPCW officials, saying that a report on the alleged Syrian
poison gas attack in Douma, in April 2018, had been savagely censored so as to alter its meaning.
In decades of journalism I have received quite a few leaks
:
leaks
over luxurious, expensive lunches with Cabinet Ministers, anonymous leaks that just turned up in envelopes,
leaks from union officials and employers, diplomats and academics.
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But I've never seen one like this. It scared me.
If it was true, then
something hugely dishonest and dangerous was going on, in a place where absolute integrity was vital.
If bodies such as the OPCW cannot be trusted, then World War Three could one day be
started by a falsehood.
Last week I reported on the first episode in this story. Within days the OPCW had confirmed that the
email I leaked was authentic.
Nobody followed me home or threatened me. A few silly people on social media told blatant lies about
me, insinuating that I was somehow a Russian patsy or a defender of the disgusting Syrian regime that
I have been attacking in print for nearly 20 years. That was what I had expected.
But there is much more to come.
And, as it grows harder for everyone to ignore this
enormous, dangerous story,
I suspect I shall be looking over my shoulder rather more than usual.
A con man of the first order. Fewer and fewer are seeing him as a decent man. Just another
neoliberal. When he was in his in first term and said to a bunch of reporters in a hamburger stand that
he was the same as a 1960's moderate Republican, I couldn't believe that people gave him a
pass.
It was so obvious. I never made the mistake of voting for him again. I'm glad it's finally
getting through to people what a phony, greedy person he is.
He and his neoliberal ilk are why this country is declining rapidly into economic and social
disaster and why South America and Europe are now on fire with right-wing coups and massive
demonstrations.
With the power structures combining to purposely decimate the world population, I see
nothing but historic calamity facing all of us. I just hope the 1% have to pay the piper as
well.
Take a mild-mannered Constitutional Law professor, wave a magic wand and utter "Abracadabra!"
and you get a full-blown apologist for US Imperialism! "We are the Indispensable Nation We
are the Indispensable Nation We are the Indispensable Nation " Stop the world, I want to get
off!
Who's for starting a pool to guess the month and week Barack Obama announces – with
reluctance – that for "the good of the Nation and Party" he would accept the
nomination, were it to be offered?
Barack vs Hillary, Round 2: Better than "The Thrilla in Manilla" or "The Rumble in the
Jungle."
Follow-up: Will the Democratic Party survive the campaign and convention?
" That anonymous author (a German intelligence analyst) documented the evilness of the overthrow of Evo Morales in Bolivia,
and the threat now clearly posed to the world by the US regime -- a spreading cancer of expansionist fascism, led from Washington.
But, even more than this, he indicated that unless the individuals who are responsible for the advancing fascism are executed,
there won't be any real hope for democracy anywhere in the world. Either this impunity will stop, or else the spread of the US
international dictatorship -- not only by CIA coups such as this, but by illegal international invasions such as of Iraq 2003,
Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, and Yemen 2015-, -- will continue and will engulf in misery ultimately the entire world . He makes
clear the complicity of US 'news'-media in the lies that 'justify' this coup (and 'justified' those invasions)." [My Emphasis]
IMO, that's a very broad interpretation of b's summation, but I cannot argue against the section I bolded--as some may have
noticed, my appellation for the USA has evolved to better reflect its nature: the Evil Outlaw US Empire. There are numerous reasons
that prompted me to do so, one I mentioned in my reply @14 to S--tact is no longer employed in diplomacy by the Evil Outlaw US
Empire, and that's a very bad sign, IMO. Zuesse continues on calling out the crimes of BigLie Media, echoing my accusation that
the writers and editors are all committing the crimes of Goebbels and ought to mimic his actions when his end was nigh.
Zueese ends his very authentic rant with the following prescription which was clearly needed prior to 911:
"Unfortunately, the only global solution would be a second American Revolution, but, this time, the news-media are far less
honest, and so almost no support exists amongst the US population for doing that. Consequently, the outlook for the future, worldwide,
is grim. If the warning (hidden by the media as it is), this time from Bolivia, is not heeded, how can this cancer ever be stopped
from engulfing the entire world?"
It's curious that an impending Civil War within the Evil Outlaw US Empire is posited but seldom a 2nd Revolution, although
the latter's been discussed at the bar by myself and others off and on over the past several years. I wrote the following in a
reply to psychohistorian on the previous open thread:
"I appears that the prerequisite to obtaining freedom and democracy is public ownership of the vast majority of financial levers.
Without public capture of that essential domain, only some form of penury is possible for the vast majority of commonfolk, leaving
only a select hierarchy free, democracy reserved only for their use. Pretty well sums up the current situation within the Evil
Outlaw US Empire I'd say."
The Civil Arm of the coup: one of the best-funded NGOs in Bolivia during 2017 and 2018 was the International Republican Institute
(IRI). http://bit.ly/37HYnit
The destabilization of Ukraine and Tunisia are the main achievements of this American organization.
US Empire's Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell gets irked that more nations are joining the INSTEX mechanism for commerce with Iran as
shown by his Tweet:
"cc: @TreasurySpox @USTreasury sounds to me like all these people and groups should be added
to the US Sanctions list. We should ensure that they don't get to work in the US market.
Iran or the US -- they decide. But not both ." [My Emphasis]
The nations saying we're not with you are Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway,
and Sweden--what might be termed the more enlightened Europeans.
And here we have Germany's CDU acting in a manner reflecting the Bush Doctrine as it debated
Germany's 5G
rollout :
"The moderates, represented by Merkel, believe that Germany should not rule out any company
over political issues, but focus more on objective factors such as whether its technological
security and standards meet German requirements. However, some hard-liners make it an
ideological issue and believe Huawei should be excluded. The reason they provided is ' no
Chinese company is an independent company,' adding that Huawei's involvement is principally "an
imminent question of national security .
"After decades of following the US, Germany has somewhat lost the ability to independently
decide its development and destiny. But in recent years, the US has been pursuing
unilateralism. The export-oriented German economy is affected by not only China-US trade
conflicts, but also US threat of imposing tariffs on German products. Thus, it is time for
Berlin to stop its fear of threats from Washington and make choices that are in line with its
own interests." [My Emphasis]
Every Evil Outlaw US Empire chartered corporation in the tech realm is not an "independent
company" since they work hand in glove with CIA, NSA, FBI, other government organizations, and
are also funded by the government. The same is likely true of every Western tech company. A
double standard excuse in service of continuing the Bush Doctrine.
To paraphrase Grenell, Now is most certainly the time to declare your independence and
reclaim your sovereignty and cease acting in the service of another nation.
American nationalism binds the whole-to-its-parts by using narrative to weaponize emotions
and broadcast the idea of American 'wholeness' as somehow exceptionally greater than the sum of
its parts.
There can be no doubt that zealotry became the dynamic forging the American character .
First and foremostly, enunciations spat out by bearded prophets were carried on the winds of
ontological time and eventually landing on the shores of the new world along with bible and
crucifix to stave off inequities and help shape a mind-set (and foreign policy) for those
taking possession of the Kingdom of God. A colonial policy that inevitably consigned the
population of the occupied territories into misery and poverty would in time come to be
regarded as regime change. The Protestant reformation was always about gilding the God
narrative with a work ethic equal to the sum of its mercantile whole.
To this very day, individual achievements take precedence over collective values as
missionary zeal is believed to have the potential to sublimate the libido and divert energy
into productive work activities. The nub of the narrative being the ineffable
Protestant-cum-existentialist credential underpinning the virtues of 19th century Anglophile
culture that found ways of appeasing the mind with dreamlike emoluments to convey the promise
of earthly rewards for the industrious of mind or simply put; mercantilism became
a-one-size-fits-all solution for man's irascible struggle with his existential hairshirt.
In time, European mercantile classes would invasively penetrate every corner of the globe
for the purpose of wealth extraction. Those who sought material gratification would eventually
come to define democracy as freedom to pursue individual desires. What emerged from this was
class-identified gentrification and fake sugar-coated democracy supporting a form of
fake-individuality that created a class system based on the exploitation on just about
everything.
As time passed the existential stature of the state grew, while the existential stature of
the individual remained the same. With the advent of mercantilism came a national economic
policy designed to maximize exports and minimize imports, with the state taking a more
adversarial role in all business arrangements. For the state to be greater than the sum of its
parts meant exporting a greater quantity of its manufactured products to its trading partners
while minimising the amount of goods they imported from them.
To do this it was necessary to devise policies that aimed to reduce a possible current
account deficit and achieve a current account surplus. Mercantilism introduced a national
economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves through a positive balance of trade,
especially in finished goods fine policies in theory, but when push came to shove in the
competitive arena, greed inevitably exposed these polices to the raw 'talents' of people like
Sheriff Trump and most of his contemporaries , who interpret business as dealership and
mawkishly set out to wage economic warfare on all and sundry.
The practice of sucking in wealth associated with the resources of Africa, India, the
Americas, India and other Asian destinations was so successful that Britain almost
inadvertently found itself in possession of an empire. It had reached a plateau where the sum
was greater than its parts and to sustain its 'sum-status' meant creating an alliance of
collusive narratives to justify its pre-eminence and the best way to do so and retain control
of the narrative was to resort to propaganda and trophy issues that would weaponize the
emotions of the population. Hence the modern state found a way to prioritize itself at the
expense of the individual. Over time, business cartels in tandem with the government would
create ever more contextual paradigms for the individual to deal with.
What was required to sustain the status quo was a narrative to make the people feel proud of
the fact that they were part of a-top-dog-team in action. Once the authors of the narrative
realized that propaganda, when coupled with patriotism, could produce adherents imbued with
convictions that were inherent in the narrative, they realized that language itself could
cement a profitable relationship between buyer and seller and public relations became a force
unto itself.
If you were part of the bourgeoisie who came into existence in the 19th centuries as a
consequence of the wealth pouring into Europe and Britain from the colonial exploitation of
Africa or India, Ireland, Asia etc. and your conscience was troubled by virtue of being party
to a culture sliding grandiosely up its own existential arse, you could find balm within the
isolated confines of the psychiatrist's couch if your pockets were deep enough. If you were of
a humble disposition, there was the pastor or the priest who could deal with your existential
woes. If you made it to the 20th century you probably would have become so conditioned by
events as to be unaware of other people's suffering and if you made it to the 21 century perish
the thought!
It was in this phase of history that commerce cleverly entered the business of explaining
the meaning of existence per educational fiat for a price! Thereafter it would be secular
experts who explained the meaning of life to anybody who could afford to pay for enlightenment
while simultaneously repressing revolutionary instincts that could, in the first instance,
allow the light of reason to filter through.
With the crafting of the existential narrative, more and more people came to see themselves
as parts in a new whole. Personal history became the curveball of the 20th century, promoting a
vision of America as utopia on steroids, which in turn, produced a sky-is-the-limit kind of
optimism. America had long taken over from where Britain had left off after experiencing a fin
de siecle stampede through its pearly gates in the 19th century which eventually produced an
adrenaline rush to end all adrenaline rushes by the time it put a man on the moon. The net
result was that American industry became kingpin for a century which left it convinced of its
own invincibility.
When did America start to believe that it had to possess the biggest nuclear arsenal for it
to feel that 'whole' America had become greater than the sum of its rival's parts? Which raises
the question; given the way power is used by the modern democratic-capitalist state, is the
American constitution merely an example of baggage retained for baggage sake? Is there anything
beyond raw power that may define its essence? Does it have an essence, or is it merely guided
by some dark light that emanates from a single word 'democracy' that stands alone on the blank
piece of paper that was placed in a bottle and cast upon the ocean with information that might
help 'the people' fulfil their desires?
Do the people not see that they need to be free from illusions that enfold them before they
can revolutionize their system and move on?
The elites who control the narrative remain invisible, they are neither deep nor surface
stakeholders, they simply control the money flow. They are the sum-total of the faceless state,
protected by protocols, secret intelligence agencies and the reality of the military budget
that is put in place to maintain top-dog status for the elites and the illusions that comfort
the multifarious minions now quarantined in citizen- zones that continue to emasculate their
revolutionary spirit.
The current impeachment process in America best illustrates the sterility the population is
immiserated in. They should be impeaching themselves (instead of looking for a scapegoat) for
their inability to confront their own record. They seem unaware that they are party to a
bloodbath that has devastated much of the Middle East and many other societies across the
globe.
Once again, Americans are involved in the early stages of an election that leaves the
question of America's foreign policy in the too hard basket. A charade that would make
Machiavelli blush. But alas, when blush comes to shove, American might is a God given right and
collateral damage is not something that would soon alter the tone of its pugnaciously
thick-skinned approach to reality.
Then there is ever more evidence of the schism that is corporate existentialism as opposed
to individual existentialism. The former owning the right to squash the latter ever since
Corporate America took the civil out of civilisation by assiduously seeking to remove
voices/data/information/truth and honourable journalism from serving the public interest.
To observe how Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden (also Daniel Ellsberg,
Jeffrey Wigand, Thomas Andrew Drake and Frank Serpico) were treated for divulging the execrable
crimes of the American state are odious to say the least. That so many Americans, in condoning
"the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" mentality, and dismissive of the service their
whistle-blowers are providing, is appalling. A new class of people have come into existence and
they hate whistle-blowers because they speak truth to power pity the millions of Americans who
don't think that way!
And what does the MSM really think of all this? That the New York Times continues to readily
publish Bibi Netanyahu's blandishments concerning existential threats to Israel while ignoring
the fact that Palestine have had their country invaded and countless Palestinians now live
under appalling conditions where existential rights do not even apply to them. The hurt that is
inflicted on Palestinians is akin to the hurt that can be extended to say, Julian Assange,
because both insidiously demean the human spirit.
These are actions that highlight the schism that exists between governance and the governed
existence of the state in relation to the existence of the individual or any other agent in the
individual legal zone we recognise as being separate from the privileged existential zone of
governments that includes corporations who enjoy limited liability by virtue of their status in
law. Existentialism, at the individual level, is a concept born of leisure (think affluence),
but when dealing with fiscal reality, finds its sovereignty somewhat overshadowed by the
external trappings of an existential system designed to keep the checks and balances that
favour the imperial narrative.
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Six months ago when the US Government slammed Assange with 17 charges under The Espionage
Act for publishing the Chelsea Manning Leaks, indications were that these actions were taken to
stifle the existence of a precedent that challenged the rights of a government to suppress the
existence of truth itself; eventually it became their right to gag the message and the
messenger.
The American police state is a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle meant to keep the property
and the resources of the American people flowing into corrupt government agencies and their
corporate partners. In its present incarnation, it unmistakably exists as a pariah whose
insidious meddling in other people's systems knows no limitations. It unrelentingly spews out
lies at every opportunity which vaunt variations on a theme of America's self-righteous
greatness ad nauseam. Its porous foreign policy exists to suck-out the essence of vulnerable
states that are exposed to the gravitation pull of weaponised systems such as Wall Street and
The Pentagon.
The systems that have weaponized American culture have spawned a host of 'yes' men and women
the MSM is aglow with them. The emotional and intellectual life of main street America is
ominously self-righteous and defensive. To understand how reflexive American politics is, is to
discover by merely surfing channels that the American public has become the meat in a
political-duopoly sandwich.
To listen to Elizabeth Warren expostulating on Bolivia attests to a form of political incest
that bedevils America. The Massachusetts Senator wanted to air her foreign policy bona fides in
an interview with a former Barack Obama administration apparatchik on the podcast "Pod Save
America."
Warren praised Trump's strategy of appointing the deflated Venezuela coup leader Juan Guaido
as president and declared, "I support economic sanctions." She also described the country's
democratically elected president Nicolas Maduro as a "dictator." although the interview was
conducted back in February, video clips have recently resurfaced and gone viral on social
media.
Which brings me back to the observation that America's mawkish culture is viral in ways that
are mainly lethal for those it disapproves of. It behaves like a giant octopus forever
extending its tentacles into places that it wishes to exploit or annihilate. And behold The
American Posse has morphed into stealth forces that operate outside of international law, human
decency or basic accountability. It abhors the idea that leaders like Nicolas Maduro could curb
the extortionist practices of corporate America and set about eliminating poverty in his
beloved Bolivia. Worst of all is the fact that the American public condones regime change and
all the other rapacious practices it is known for.
Sadly, America has become like an illiterate robot in a mathematical minefield stomping and
headbutting everyone and everything it perceives as a competitor while waving its nuclear
missiles and pruning shears at spectres of the existential sub-particle kind that threaten to
lead humanity in a direction where it might discover that dancing the socialist fandangle might
be o.k. after all.
Looks like exceptions in US political jargon means "no rivals"... Trump is still dreaming about "Full Spectrum Dominance"
Otherwise he would not populate his administration with rabid neocons, leftover from Bush II administration. As well as
people who were responsible for Obama color revolutions and wars. Instead of gratitude from neocons viper nest in the State
Department he got Ukrainegate as a Thanksgiving present.
Notable quotes:
"... If the US cannot find some modus vivendi with China, then the outcome could be a catastrophic conflict worst than any previous world war, he admonished. ..."
"... A key remark made by Kissinger was the following: "So those countries that used to be exceptional and used to be unique, have to get used to the fact that they have a rival." ..."
"... In other words, he is negating the erroneous consensus held in Washington which asserts that the US is somehow "exceptional", a "uni-power" and the "indispensable nation". This consensus has grown since the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the US viewed itself as the sole super-power. That morphed into a more virulent ideology of "full-spectrum dominance". Thence, the past three decades of unrelenting US criminal wars and regime-change operations across the planet, throwing the whole world into chaos. ..."
"... While sharing a public stage with Kissinger, the Chinese leader added: "The two sides should proceed from the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the people of the world, respect each other, seek common ground while reserving differences, pursue win-win results in cooperation, and promote bilateral ties to develop in the right direction." ..."
"... Likewise, China and Russia have continually urged for a multipolar world order for cooperation and partnership in development. But the present and recent US governments refuse to contemplate any other order other than a presumed unipolar dominance. Hence the ongoing US trade strife with China and Washington's relentless demonization of Russia. ..."
"... This "exceptional" ideological mantra of the US is leading to more tensions, and ultimately is a path to the abyss. Henry Kissinger gets it. It's a pity America's present crop of politicians and thinkers are so impoverished in their intellect. ..."
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made prudent
remarks recently when he said the United States is no longer a uni-power and that it must
recognize the reality of China as an equal rival. The furor over a new law passed by the US this week regarding Hong Kong and undermining
Beijing's authority underlines Kissinger's warning.
If the US cannot find some modus vivendi with China, then the outcome could be a
catastrophic conflict worst than any previous world war, he admonished.
Speaking publicly in New York on November 14, the veteran diplomat urged the US and China
to resolve their ongoing economic tensions cooperatively and mutually, adding: "It is no longer
possible to think that one side can dominate the other."
A key remark made by Kissinger was the following: "So those countries that used to be
exceptional and used to be unique, have to get used to the fact that they have a
rival."
In other words, he is negating the erroneous consensus held in Washington which asserts
that the US is somehow "exceptional", a "uni-power" and the "indispensable nation". This
consensus has grown since the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the US
viewed itself as the sole super-power. That morphed into a more virulent ideology of
"full-spectrum dominance". Thence, the past three decades of unrelenting US criminal wars and
regime-change operations across the planet, throwing the whole world into chaos.
Kissinger's frank assessment is a breath of fresh air amid the stale and impossibly arrogant
self-regard held by too many American politicians who view their nation as an unparalleled
power which brooks no other.
The seasoned statesman, who is 96-years-old and retains an admirable acumen for
international politics, ended his remarks on an optimistic note by saying: "I am confident the
leaders on both sides [US and China] will realize the future of the world depends on the two
sides working out solutions and managing the inevitable difficulties."
Aptly, Kissinger's caution about danger of conflict was reiterated separately by veteran
journalist John Pilger, who
warned in an exclusive interview for Strategic Culture Foundation this week that, presumed
"American exceptionalism is driving the world to war."
Henry Kissinger is indeed a controversial figure. Many US scholars regard him as one of the
most outstanding Secretaries of State during the post-Second World War period. He served in the
Nixon and Ford administrations during the 1970s and went on to write tomes about geopolitics
and international relations. Against that, his reputation was badly tarnished by the US war in
Vietnam and the horrendous civilian death toll from relentless aerial bombing across Indochina,
believed to have been countenanced by Kissinger.
Kissinger has also been accused of supporting the military coup in Chile in 1973 against
elected President Allende, and for backing the dirty war by Argentina's fascist generals during
the 1970s against workers and leftists.
... ... ...
At times, President Donald Trump appears to subscribe to realpolitik pragmatism. At other
times, he swings to the hyper-ideological mentality as expressed by his Vice President Mike
Pence, as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mike Esper. The
latter has labeled
China as the US's "greatest long-term threat".
This week President Trump signed into law "The Human Rights and Democracy Bill", which will
impose sanctions on China over alleged repression in its Hong Kong territory. Beijing has
reacted furiously to the legislation, condemning
it as a violation of its sovereignty.
This is exactly the kind of baleful move that Kissinger warned against in order to avoid a
further poisoning in bilateral relations already tense from the past 16 months of US-China
trade war.
One discerns the difference between Kissinger and more recent US politicians: the former has
copious historical knowledge and appreciation of other cultures. His shrewd, wily, maybe even
Machiavellian streak, informs Kissinger to acknowledge and respect other powers in a complex
world. That is contrasted with the puritanical banality and ignorance manifest in Trump's
administration and in the Congress.
Greeting Kissinger last Friday, November 22, during a visit to Beijing, President Xi Jinping
thanked him for his historic contribution in normalizing US-China relations during 1970s.
"At present, Sino-US relations are at a critical juncture facing some difficulties and
challenges," said
Xi, calling on the two countries to deepen communication on strategic issues. It was an echo of
the realpolitik views Kissinger had enunciated the week before.
While sharing a public stage with Kissinger, the Chinese leader added: "The two sides
should proceed from the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the people of the world,
respect each other, seek common ground while reserving differences, pursue win-win results in
cooperation, and promote bilateral ties to develop in the right direction."
Likewise, China and Russia have continually urged for a multipolar world order for
cooperation and partnership in development. But the present and recent US governments refuse to
contemplate any other order other than a presumed unipolar dominance. Hence the ongoing US
trade strife with China and Washington's relentless demonization of Russia.
This "exceptional" ideological mantra of the US is leading to more tensions, and
ultimately is a path to the abyss. Henry Kissinger gets it. It's a pity America's present crop
of politicians and thinkers are so impoverished in their intellect.
"... However, Morris contends that Clinton believes that she has to "wait until Biden drops out because he's obviously next in line for it, and if he goes away, there's an opening for her." According to Morris' scenario, Clinton would become the moderate candidate opposed to the leading progressive, Elizabeth Warren. ..."
In November, Barack Obama, who had avoided commenting on the Democratic presidential
primary, came out forcefully in opposition to the extreme positions taken by some leading
progressive contenders, positions that could cause the Democrats to be beaten by Trump in the
2020 election. Obama was a very popular president among Democrats, and what he has to say
carries considerable weight with them. While this may not be his intent, Obama's position could
open the field for Hillary Clinton to enter the fray and quite possibly become the Democrats'
nominee, given the lackluster performance of leading "moderate" Joe Biden, whose weaknesses
have been brought out by the mainstream media, despite their animosity toward Trump.
Now many in the Democratic Party leadership, as well as wealthy Democratic donors, have been
concerned for some time about the radical nature of some of the economic policies advocated by
the leading progressive Democratic contenders. They fear that instead of the 2020 election
revolving around Trump with his low approval ratings, and very likely his impeachment, which
would seem to be a slam-dunk victory for Democrats, it would focus on those radical economic
proposals. Many voters are skeptical about how free college for all, free health care for all,
high-paying jobs in "green energy" -- after greatly reducing the use of fossil fuels, free
childcare for all, just to name some of the "free" things that have been promised, would really
work. Instead of raising taxes on the middle class, most of these free things would purportedly
be paid for by the super-wealthy, which would exclude mere millionaires such as Bernie Sanders
(estimated wealth $2 million) and Elizabeth Warren (estimated wealth $12 million) who are the
leading progressive contenders.
Obama began stressing his concern about the danger of radicalism in an October speech at the
Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago. And he did this not by dealing with presidential candidates
but with youth who think they can immediately change society. "This
idea of purity and you're never compromised, and you're always politically woke and all
that stuff, you should get over that quickly," Obama lectured. "The world is messy. There are
ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws."
It was at a gathering of Democratic donors in Washington, D.C., in November that Obama
cautioned Democratic candidates not to go too far to the left since that would antagonize many
voters who would otherwise support the Democratic candidate. "Even as we push the envelope and
we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in
reality ," Obama asserted. "The average American doesn't think we have to completely tear
down the system and remake it." Although Obama did not specify particular Democratic
candidates, his warning was widely interpreted as being directed at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie
Sanders.
Currently, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, according to national polls,
is Joe Biden, who is considered a moderate. But Biden has a number of problems. He continues to
make gaffes while speaking, and during his long career in the Senate took positions that are
antithetical to the Democratic Party of today. Moreover, he lacks the charisma to attract large
crowds to his events. Thus, it is questionable that he has the capability to attract large
numbers of Democratic voters to the polls in November 2020.
According to Politico Magazine , Obama was recently discussing election tactics with
an unnamed current candidate and "pointed out that during his own 2008 campaign, he had an
intimate bond with the electorate" and he is quoted as adding, "And you know who really
doesn't have it ? Joe Biden."
Biden's appeal already seems to be waning. For example, in November, a Marquette Law School
poll, which is considered the gold-standard survey in swing state Wisconsin, which the
Democrats need to win the 2020 election, shows
Trump leading Biden 47 percent to 44 percent. In October, Trump had trailed Biden by 6
points (44 percent to 50 percent), and in August, Trump trailed Biden by 9 points (42 percent
to 51 percent). In short, Biden is losing support. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by a slender
margin of 0.77 percent, with 47.22 percent of the total votes over the 46.45 percent for
Hillary Clinton.
Another problem Biden faces is the corrupt activities of his son Hunter and brother James,
who have taken advantage of their connection with him. The mainstream media has so far largely
kept this mostly under wraps, but this tactic won't be successful as the election approaches.
In fact, the progressive Democrats such as Bernie Sanders are likely to bring this up in a
desperate effort to be nominated. And already these issues are being mentioned by the
alternative media. For instance, there is an article in the non-partisan, anti-government
Intercept
titled, "Joe Biden's Family Has Been Cashing in on His Career for Decades. Democrats Need to
Acknowledge That," and comparable articles in the conservative Washington Examiner such
as, "Hunter Biden-linked company r
eceived $130M in special federal loans while Joe Biden was vice president," and "Hunter
Biden has
99 problems , and Burisma is only one."
David Axelrod, Democratic strategist and longtime aide to Barack Obama, said concerns about
Biden's electability clearly influenced multi-billionaire (estimated $53 billion) and
former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's entrance into the contest for the Democratic
nominee for president. "There's no question that Bloomberg's calculus was that Biden was
occupying a space, and the fact that he's getting in is a clear indication that he's not
convinced Biden has the wherewithal to carry that torch," Axelrod said. "So yeah, I don't think
this is a positive development for Joe Biden."
Similarly, Democratic strategist Brad Bannon contended that "centrist Democrats and wealthy
donors have
lost confidence in Biden's ability to stop Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders from winning
the nomination." Bannon added that with Bloomberg entering the Democratic presidential race,
"Biden's fundraising will get even shakier than it already is. There's only room for one
moderate in this race and Bloomberg threatens Biden's status as the centrist
standard-bearer."
Bloomberg's "stop and frisk"
policy as mayor , which largely targeted blacks and Hispanics, should make it virtually
impossible that he could be the Democratic nominee, despite his recent apology. Unless he has
become senile in his late 70s, Bloomberg should well understand this since he did not make his
billions by being stupid. It could be that he intends to serve as a stalking horse to draw
Hillary Clinton into the contest by showing the weakness of Biden. Then like Superwoman,
Hillary can enter the fray, appearing not to act for her own sake but to save the country from
a likely second term for President Trump.
Similarly, Mark Penn, who was chief strategist for Clinton's unsuccessful 2008 presidential
campaign, said Bloomberg's entrance
could cause Clinton to consider to run and decide there's "still a political logic there for
her."
As Biden's support slips away, Clinton's should rise. Clinton has been recently promoting a
book she co-wrote with her daughter, Chelsea, in Britain. In an interview with BBC Radio 5
Live , Clinton said "many, many, many people" are
pressuring her to jump into the 2020 presidential race and that she thinks about this "all
the time." Clinton told the host that she is under "enormous pressure" but said it is not in
her plans, though she cryptically added that she would "never say never."
Dick Morris, who was once a close confidant of the Clintons during Bill Clinton's time as
Arkansas governor and U.S. president recently said in a radio interview that Hillary Clinton
likely wants to run for the presidency in 2020. "My feeling is that
she wants to ," Morris said. "She feels entitled to do it. She feels compelled to do it.
She feels that God put her on the Earth to do it. But she's hesitant because she realizes the
timing is bad."
However, Morris contends that Clinton believes that she has to "wait until Biden drops out
because he's obviously next in line for it, and if he goes away, there's an opening for her."
According to Morris' scenario, Clinton would become the moderate candidate opposed to the
leading progressive, Elizabeth Warren.
Morris has not been in touch with the Clintons for many years, and has become strongly
critical of them, so his claim might be questionable. Nonetheless, his portrayal of Hillary's
current thinking seems quite reasonable.
A Fox News poll included Clinton along with the active Democratic candidates in a
hypothetical election with Trump, and Hillary came out ahead of him by two percentage
points. While some actual candidates did somewhat better than Hillary, she did quite well for
someone who is not currently running for office.
Furthermore, a Harris Harvard poll in late October asked the question, "Suppose Hillary
Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, and John Kerry decides [sic] to enter the race, who would you
support as a candidate for President?" Joe Biden received the support of 19 percent of Democrat
respondents while Clinton was a
close second with 18 percent. Elizabeth Warren came in third at 13 percent, John Kerry was
at 8 percent, and Bloomberg was at 6. Again, Clinton does quite well for someone who is not
actually running for president.
One might think that if references to family members' corruption damaged Biden, then Clinton
would be subject to worse damage in that area, since she and her husband Bill were connected
with far more corrupt activities -- Whitewater, Travelgate, the Lewinsky affair, the Paula
Jones affair, t the death of Vince Foster, the Clinton Foundation, her private server, and so
on. But these issues are already known and are presumably already taken into account by the
voters, whereas the Biden family's corrupt activities are so far largely unknown.
It should be pointed out that Clinton has a number of positives as a presidential candidate.
Although losing in the Electoral College in 2016, Clinton had garnered 3 million more votes
more than Trump. The election was decided by a total of 80,000 votes in three states. It is
highly unlikely that such a fluke could be duplicated.
Clinton's staff had been overconfident assuming victory, which was based on their polling of
various states, and as a result began to focus on competing in states well beyond those Clinton
needed for victory.
Moreover, one key event outside the control of Clinton's staff was FBI Director James
Comey's investigation of Clinton's use of a personal email server during her tenure as
secretary of state. Most crucial were his July 2016 public statement terminating the
investigation, with a lengthy comment about what Clinton did wrong, and his October 28
reopening the inquiry into newly discovered emails and then closing it two days before the
election, stating that the emails had not provided any new information. The October 28 letter,
however, probably played a key role in the outcome of the election. As statistician Nate Silver
maintains: "Hillary Clinton would probably be president
if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which
said the FBI had 'learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the
investigation into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended
the news cycle and soon halved Clinton's lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the
Electoral College.'"
[Silver's organization FiveThirtyEight had projected a much higher chance (29
percent) of Donald Trump winning the presidency than most other pollsters]
Clinton has also helped to convince many Democrats and members of the mainstream media that
the 2016 election was stolen from her by Russian agents If this were really true – which
is very doubtful – then Hillary should be the Democrats' candidate for 2020 since Russian
intervention should not be as successful as it allegedly was in 2016.
In endorsing Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, Obama stated. "I don't think that
there's ever been someone
so qualified to hold this office." He has yet to make such an endorsement for Biden and
privately, as mentioned earlier, said he is a poor choice for a nominee. He might ultimately
endorse Biden, but he certainly would not renege on what he said four years ago about Clinton
if she became the Democrats' standard-bearer.
Should Clinton opt to run, she would have no trouble raising money since she set a record in
2016 of $1.4 billion
and wealthy donors want a moderate to be the Democratic nominee. It would seem likely that she
would enter the contest if Biden has serious trouble. She would miss some state primaries since
it would be too late to register in them but given the crowded field of candidates, there is a
likelihood that there will be a brokered convention, that is, the convention will go past the
first ballot. Since the superdelegates would be allowed to vote in all rounds after the first,
they could determine the winner, which would probably mean the selection of a candidate who
would be seen to have the greatest chance of winning, and that would likely be Hillary Clinton,
if she has entered the fray.
I discussed the merits of Pete Buttigieg in a previous article in
Unz Review, and what I write here might seem to conflict with that. However, while Buttigieg is
doing quite well
in the polls, he still does not get much support
from blacks and Latinos, which is essential to become the Democrats nominee for president.
Buttigieg could, however, be nominated for vice president or, more likely, given an important
cabinet position since the vice-presidential slot would probably be reserved for a black or
Latino if a white person were picked as the presidential nominee, which currently seems
likely.
But because of Buttigieg's relatively hardline foreign policy
, which largely meshes with that of Clinton's, and his wide knowledge and language ability,
Buttigieg would fit well in the all-important position of secretary of state in a Clinton
administration. Moreover, Buttigieg, whose tenure as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will end in
January 2020, would almost certainly be willing to take such a position, which could serve as a
jumping-off point for the presidency in the future.
"... Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies. ..."
"... No informed American can afford to not know the names Oded Yinon, AIPAC, The Clean Break, The NEOCONS. Knowledge is indeed power. > ..."
"... Hersh hoped that future historians would document the fragility of American democracy by explaining how eight or nine neoconservatives were able to overcome easily the bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press. Stephen Sniegoski, in The Transparent Cabal, has provided a detailed history of how the neoconservative cult achieved the takeover. ..."
"... The neoconservatives do not represent the only case in American history of a small group attempting to take over America. The Plot to Seize the White House (Jules Archer) provided a detailed account of General Smedley Butler's testimony to Congress about a secret plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler, a Republican, authored War is a Racket. ..."
"... In a recently written best-seller two political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard (John Meirsheimer and Stephen J. Walt _The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_) broke a long-standing taboo in the United States and risked charges of anti-Semitism by exposing the role of the powerful Israeli Lobby (AIPAC) in the United States and its push for war against Iraq and with its future sights on Iran. This book echoes many of the claims made by Meirsheimer and Walt and further shows the agenda of the small circle of neoconservatives in directing American foreign policy. The author maintains that the neoconservatives are a "transparent cabal", in that they have operated as a tight-knit secret group but their actions remain transparent. ..."
"... That old canard "anti-semitic" is heard again in one of the reviews of this book. Nonsense!!! If one is anti-semitic simply because he is critical of certain policies followed by Likud, then many Jews living in Israel are also Jew haters. ..."
"... Israeli politicians are, undertandably, looking out for the intestests of their nation state. However, many American pols are beholden to the Israeli lobby (of simply feaful of it) and often place American interests second to that of the lobby. ..."
Although it is generally understood that American neoconservatives pushed hard for the war
in Iraq, this book forcefully argues that the neocons' goal was not the spread of democracy,
but the protection of Israel's interests in the Middle East. Showing that the neocon movement
has always identified closely with the interests of Israel's Likudnik right wing, the
discussion contends that neocon advice on Iraq was the exact opposite of conventional United
States foreign policy, which has always sought to maintain stability in the region to promote
the flow of oil. Various players in the rush to war are assessed according to their motives,
including President Bush, Ariel Sharon, members of the foreign-policy establishment, and the
American people, who are seen not as having been dragged into war against their will, but as
ready after 9/11 for retaliation
Every American should read this superb book about the intimate connection between the
state of Israel and the Americans who planned and promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003
(and who still influence U.S. policy in the Middle East). This very well-researched and
well-argued book will enlighten Americans who want to understand how the Jewish State of
Israel powerfully shapes U.S. Middle East policy.
Stephen Sniegowski provides a detailed look at the network of die-hard pro-Israel
Neoconservatives who have worked in the U.S. government, in think tanks, and in the news
media to shape American foreign policy to serve the needs of Israel at the expense of the
U.S. From media baron Rupert Murdoch, whose 175 newspapers around the world ALL editorialized
in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to
Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and later Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, to
Vice President Dick Cheney, to the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, the
neoconservatives successfully persuaded President George W. Bush to invade Iraq to promote
Israel's foreign policy interests.
Sniegowski describes how the Neocons promoted lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed Weapons
of Mass Destruction and his supposed ties to al-Qaeda terrorists from a network of think
tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Middle East Media Research Institute,
Hudson Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Center for Security Policy, and the
Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
He also traces the influence of Israeli Zionist Oded Yinon on the American
Neoconservatives. Yinon wrote an article in 1982 entitled "A Strategy for Israel in the
1980s" that called for Israel to bring about the dissolution of many of the Arab states and
their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. This is basically what
is happening to Iraq and Syria today. He also called for Israelis to accelerate the
emigration of Palestinians from Israel, whose border he believed should extend to the Jordan
River and beyond it.
Yinon's article influenced a paper written for the Israeli Likud government of Benjamin
Netanyahu in 1996 by American neoconservatives Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David
Wurmser entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". This paper stated
that Netanyahu should "make a clean break" with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel's
claim to the West Bank and Gaza. Like Yinon's article, it also called for the removal of
Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the weakening of Syria to promote Israel's interests. It was
written five years BEFORE the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. These same three
men - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser - who advised Netanyahu's Israeli
government on issues of national security would later advise President George W. Bush to
pursue virtually the same policies regarding the Middle East.
If you want to understand how and why powerful pro-Israel neoconservatives in the U.S.
misled Americans and convinced President George W. Bush to order the U.S. invasion of Iraq in
2003, and how they persuaded the U.S. Congress to give Bush the authority to order the
invasion, read this outstanding book.
Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper
entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think
tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to
foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies.
The policy was adopted by the Israeli pro-settler right wing and Jewish activists in and
around the Clinton and Bush administrations such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David
Wurmser (who all helped produce the original document). They identified as targets Iraq,
Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and were handed a golden opportunity after the 9/11 attack on
the World Trade Centre. Iraq was falsely presented as an Al Qaeda base and the media planted
with stories about an imminent attack on the United States using WMD. Despite the CIA knowing
all along that the WMD didn't exist, the US still invaded Iraq and the story was quietly and
unbelievably changed to "building democracy".
As Sniegoski points out, the war has exceeded the cost of Vietnam and the same activists,
now working through Hillary Clinton are looking for "incidents" in Iraq to trigger the next
phase of the plan which is a US attack on Iran.
UPDATE October 2014:
And it gets worse: The 911 story itself keeps morphing. Google "Building 7", YouTube "911
Missing Links" or check the article at http://911speakout.org/7TOCPJ.pdf. >
Important book for those trying understand the chaos that
is currently reigning in the Middle East. From the lies based NEOCON attack on Iraq trumpeted
by the mainstream USA media as a fight to save Western Civilization, to the rise of ISIL.
This books will make those connections clear. No informed American can afford to not know the
names Oded Yinon, AIPAC, The Clean Break, The NEOCONS. Knowledge is indeed power. >
On January 27, 2005, [...] posted the remarks of Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker
contributor) at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York that a neoconservative cult had
taken over the American government.
Hersh hoped that future historians would document the
fragility of American democracy by explaining how eight or nine neoconservatives were able to
overcome easily the bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press. Stephen Sniegoski, in The
Transparent Cabal, has provided a detailed history of how the neoconservative cult achieved
the takeover.
Other books have stressed how the neoconservative ideology is contrary to traditional
American values: Reclaiming the American Right (Justin Raimondo), America the Virtuous (Claes
Ryn), Where the Right Went Wrong (Patrick Buchanan).
"Memoirs of a Trotskyist" in Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Irving Kristol)
provided a neoconservative account of the origins of neo-conservatism. Sniegoski noted
correctly that the term neoconservative originated with leftists critical of their former
comrades for attempting to infiltrate the Democratic and Republican parties. Thanks to
leftists who call neoconservatives the ultra-right and to conservative dupes who think that
anyone using a conservative label is a conservative, the neoconservative cancer has spread
through the fragile American political body.
The neoconservatives do not represent the only case in American history of a small group
attempting to take over America. The Plot to Seize the White House (Jules Archer) provided a
detailed account of General Smedley Butler's testimony to Congress about a secret plot to
overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler, a Republican, authored War is a Racket.
Unlike earlier secret plots to take over the American government, Sniegoski explained how it
was possible for the neoconservatives to operate as a relatively transparent cabal. However,
he observed that the neoconservatives used a Trojan horse technique to take over the American
conservative movement. The goal of the neoconservatives is to promote endless wars regardless
of whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power.
The neoconservatives do not represent a popular mass movement in America. Instead, the
neoconservatives rely upon the co-operation of other groups. Sniegoski provided extensive
documentation of which groups enabled the neoconservatives. For example, the Christian
Zionists duped their followers into sacrificing money and soldiers. Zionism originated with
the writings of Moses Hess (who helped Karl Marx write The Communist Manifesto, was nicknamed
the Communist Rabbi, and who is buried in Israel). In 1862, Moses Hess published Rome and
Jerusalem. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (Shlomo Avineri) provided a detailed
explanation of the relationship between Communism and Zionism.
The reason for the fragility of American democracy is the failure of many Americans to
understand the most basic aspects of the American political system and of their
religions.
The Transparent Cabal is an important starting point for understanding how a neoconservative
cult opposed to traditional American political and religious values is able to destroy
America with endless wars.
_The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, And the
National Interest of Israel_, published in 2008 by Enigma Editions of IHS Press, by scholar
Stephen J. Sniegoski is a thorough examination of the role of the neoconservatives in pushing
for war in the Middle East (beginning with the war in Iraq and pushing onwards towards Iran)
in order to protect the national interests of Israel. Sniegoski makes the claim that the
neoconservatives have been the fundamental force behind the war efforts of the United States
and have played a particularly prominent role in the Bush administration. While these claims
have now become common knowledge, Sniegoski makes an important contribution by tracing the
history of the neoconservative movement and its links to prominent pro-Jewish and pro-Israel
groups. In particular, Sniegoski claims that neoconservativism is a tool of Zionism and the
Likudniks of Israel. Sniegoski traces out how following the attacks of September 11, the
neoconservative war hawks had a profound influence on the thinking of President Bush and
offered him a ready made solution to his foreign policy agenda. In this book, Sniegoski also
considers and refutes other theories as to the root causes behind America's intervention in
Iraq (such as the role of oil and war profiteering) but explains how these theories lack the
validity of that which lays the blame on the neoconservatives and their goals for Israeli
dominance in the Middle East.
In a recently written best-seller two political scientists at
the University of Chicago and Harvard (John Meirsheimer and Stephen J. Walt _The Israeli
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_) broke a long-standing taboo in the United States and risked
charges of anti-Semitism by exposing the role of the powerful Israeli Lobby (AIPAC) in the
United States and its push for war against Iraq and with its future sights on Iran. This book
echoes many of the claims made by Meirsheimer and Walt and further shows the agenda of the
small circle of neoconservatives in directing American foreign policy. The author maintains
that the neoconservatives are a "transparent cabal", in that they have operated as a
tight-knit secret group but their actions remain transparent.
This book begins with a Foreword by Congressman Paul Findley (famous author of _They Dare
to Speak Out_ and longtime opponent of the Israeli Lobby) in which he explains the importance
of Sniegoski's book and deflects the spurious charge of anti-Semitism. Following this,
appears an Introduction by noted paleoconservative Paul Gottfried who explains his admiration
for Sniegoski's book, offers some comparisons between Sniegoski's claims and those of other
individuals, and contrasts the old non-interventionist limited government form of
conservativism with that of the neoconservatives.
The first chapter of Sniegoski's book is entitled "The Transparent Cabal" and notes the
disastrous consequences that have followed upon the Iraq war spurred on by the
neoconservatives. The author explains what he means in calling the neoconservatives a
"transparent cabal" and notes the importance of their Middle East, pro-Israeli agenda. The
author explains how following the events of September 11, they came to take on a prominent
role in influencing the thinking of the president (who had previously shown little interest
in the Middle East).
The second chapter is entitled "The "Neocon-Israel" Claim: Bits and
Pieces" and exposes the role of Israel's Likudnik party behind the neoconservatives. The
author deflects claims of "anti-Semitism" which are frequently hurled at those who make these
charges by showing that even many prominent Jews agree with this. Following this appears a
chapter entitled "Who are the Neocons?" which shows how the neocons emigrated from their
original home in the Democratic party of the McGovernite left into the Republican party as
the New Left began to voice criticisms of Israel. The author shows that many of the neocons
are actually socialists and Trotskyites parading under the label of "conservative". Further,
the author shows the role of various intellectuals centering around New York City in creating
the neoconservative movement.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "The Israeli Origins of the
Middle East War Agenda" which shows how the goal of Middle East war to further the interests
of Israel has been supported extensively by hawkish groups in Israel. The author explains how
these groups came to have such a prominent role in influencing the policy of the United
States and in suppressing the native population of Palestinians in Israel. Following, appears
a chapter entitled "Stability and the Gulf War of 1991: Prefigurement and Prelude to the 2003
Iraq War" in which the author explains the importance of the first Gulf War of Bush I in
prefiguring the Iraq War of Bush II. After this, appears a chapter entitled "During the
Clinton Years" in which the author shows the continuing role of the neocons during the
Clinton years.
Following this, appears a chapter entitled "Serbian Interlude and the 2000
Elections" in which the author explains how the war in Yugoslavia paved the way for the
coming Iraq War of President Bush. This also explains the split that occurred among
conservatives between those traditional conservatives who opposed the war and the neocons who
firmly supported it. Following this appears a chapter entitled "George W. Bush
Administration: The Beginning" in which the author explains the role that the neocons came to
take in the Bush administration mentioning in particular the role of such figures as
Wolfowitz and Cheney and the role of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Following
this appears a chapter entitled "September 11", showing how the events of Sept. 11 allowed
the neocon agenda to gain prominence in the mind of President Bush.
Next, appears a chapter
entitled "Move to War" explaining how the neocons pushed for war against Sadaam Hussein
presenting their case to the American people by claiming that Hussein was in possession of
WMDs which could be used against America. Following this appears a chapter entitled "World
War IV" explaining how the conflict in the Middle East came to be dubbed World War IV by
certain intellectuals among the neocons.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "Democracy for the
Middle East" showing the role of the neocons in foisting "democracy" onto various nations and
their goal of global democratic revolution. The author also explains the role of the thinking
of political philosopher Leo Strauss behind many of the neocons and his profoundly
anti-democratic philosophy. Following this, appears a chapter entitled "Neocons'
Post-Invasion Difficulties" showing how the invasion of Iraq turned out to be more serious
and difficult than originally anticipated by the neocons. Next, appears a chapter entitled
"Beginning of the Second Administration" showing the continuing role of the neocons under the
second Bush administration.
Then, appears a chapter entitled "Israel, Lebanon, and the 2006
Election" showing the role of Lebanon and Syria in relationship to Israel and that of the
2006 election.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "2007: On to Iran" showing how the neocons
continued to press for further wars in particular against Iran by alleging among other things
that Ahmedinejad was a mad man with possible access to nuclear weapons. Following, appears a
chapter entitled "The Supporting Cast for War" noting the role of Christian Zionists (which
includes the beliefs of President Bush, although not his father), former Cold Warriors, and
even prominent establishment liberals in supporting the Iraq war. The author notes however
that the traditional foreign policy establishment elites and many in the intelligence
agencies did not support the war, but were disregarded to further the neocon agenda. The
author also contrasts the difference between the liberal elites who frequently were pro-war
and the popular anti-war movement which had very little power.
Following this, the author
turns to a chapter entitled "Oil and Other Arguments" in which the author considers the
claims that the war was fought to obtain access to oil or for the interests of war profiteers
and shows that while both groups certainly benefited they are not the real reason for the
war. The book ends with a "Conclusion" in which the author expounds upon the continuing role
of the neocons in influencing American foreign policy and a "Postscript" in which the author
notes that no matter who wins the 2008 election that the neocon agenda will likely continue
and is not likely to go away anytime soon.
This book offers a fascinating history and account of the role of the neoconservatives in
pushing the United States into war. The author makes clear the influence of the Israeli
Likudnik party behind the neocons and their goal of strengthening the position of Israel in
the Middle East. It is important to understand the fundamental nature of the foreign policy
elites who have been pushing us into war against Iraq and now with eyes towards Iran.
That old canard "anti-semitic" is heard again in one of the reviews of this book.
Nonsense!!! If one is anti-semitic simply because he is critical of certain policies followed
by Likud, then many Jews living in Israel are also Jew haters.
Let's put aside these negative and nasty characterizations and look at the facts.
Israeli politicians are, undertandably, looking out for the intestests of their nation state.
However, many American pols are beholden to the Israeli lobby (of simply feaful of it) and
often place American interests second to that of the lobby.
To suggest that there is such a
lobby and that it is powerful is hardly anti-semitic. Nor is the author. He is simply stating
verifible facts which any student of politics is free to do. He may be mistaken in his
conclusions but that hardly makes him anti-semitic. And he may not be mistaken at all. He is
not the first to suggest that our leaders are fearful of the Israeli lobby and do its bidding
and often to the detriment of American interests .
Stephen Sniegoski, a diplomatic historian, is uniquely qualified to write about the
neoconservatives' involvement in the prolonged Iraq War originating in 2003. He accurately
predicted their activities and allegiance in this entanglement in 1998, three years before
the acts of 9-11 and two additional years before a traumatized nation yielded to a nescient,
misdirected President, his Vice President/administration, and an ostensibly compliant
bi-partisan House and Senate.
The author presents a tight outline which he cogently expands in intelligible detail,
maintaining that the origins of the American war on Iraq revolve around the adoption of a war
agenda whose basic structure was conceived in Israel to advance Israel's interests. The
pro-Israel neoconservatives and a powerful Israel lobby in the United States fervently pushed
its agenda. Ironically, he extracts his most persuasive evidence from an extensive
neoconservative paper trail that's been clearly recognized by a discreet cadre of vigilant
Americans for years. Thus the title, "The Transparent Cabal."
Dr. Sniegoski asks the appropriate question: "Who are the neoconservatives?" He provides
insightful answers on their pertinent activities since 1972, those who shaped and mentored
them, their immediate family/interconnected family networks, their prominent periodical
publications, their past and present leadership, non-Jewish minority members, their
persistent rise to positions of political influence and authority, their embrace of Christian
Zionists, and their close ties to the extremely conservative Likud Party in Israel. He
reveals their tactical affiliations with key, heavily endowed influential think tanks, and a
vast number of powerful Israel-centric lobbying organizations that reactively finance and
nurture their continued success.
Many readers will recognize his references to writers of previous books, articles and
columns -- many of Jewish heritage -- who bravely fight against well financed, mainstream
media-dominant opponents and their psychological surrogates active on the Internet. These
opponents perniciously engage in personal attacks and retribution, indiscriminately applying
irrelevant anti-semitic labels. They persist at attempting to sway public discourse by
spreading misinformation, disinformation, and mostly NO RELEVANT INFORMATION to the
public.
In various places throughout the book, the author notes curious relationships with current
and former elected and appointed officials. He writes about the ongoing 2008 presidential
campaign in a postscript, citing past and existing direct influences on specific candidates
by the neoconservatives, the Israel Lobby and its supporters.
The book concludes with a summary of the paucity of benefits compared to the predictable
losses of the American people over recent years. These are the real consequences of the
Israel-inspired plan to "drain the swamp" (a euphemism for destabilizing perceived enemies
then establishing precarious nominal democracies) that began with our misadventure in Iraq
and was to proceed with subsequent U.S. military interventions in Iran and Syria. The few
meager benefits and the enormous losses to the United States are compared to the strategic
advantages that the State of Israel derives directly from our five-year induced military
involvement in Iraq and our concomitant departure from past, longstanding policies of
diplomacy and stability in the Middle East.
Sniegoski counsels, "it is hardly controversial to propose that elites, rather than the
people as a whole, determine government policies, even in democracies."
Yet this war has a supporting cast of middle Americans. Many of them were traumatized by
the events of 9-11 and reactively saw an act of patriotism in supporting retaliation against
a falsely perceived enemy in Iraq. It's time to reconsider false arguments preceding the Iraq
War that have only been cosmetically modified until the present day. It's time to dismiss
incongruous ideas formed in the cauldron of confusion after 9-11.
Given today's realities, it DOES take patriotism and courage to insist on formally
normalizing an entangled, unreciprocated military alliance with an Israeli government that
burdens the taxpayers of the United States, promotes angst among its people, and imperils its
military forces worldwide.
Know and embrace Thomas Jefferson's ideal of 'eternal vigilance' as citizens of the United
States.
.
.
Facts in this book are reinforced in adjacent paragraphs and referenced in nearly 50 pages of
notes. Readers are encouraged to read:
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global
Instability by Amy Chua -- "Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers and FBI Suspects
in the September 11 Attacks and Their Failure to Give Us Adequate Warning: The Need for a
Public Inquiry" **a 166 PAGE LEAKED REPORT** documenting foreign espionage activities
surrounding 9-11, available on the Internet (although rarely in COMPLETE UNEDITED FORM **WITH
5 EXHIBITS AND 4 MAPS**). .
Stephen J. Sniegoski has a doctorate from the University of Maryland and studied American
diplomatic history. My review here will refer to him as "S," for short.
This book is about the American neoconservative movement. S goes from its founding through
its influential role in getting the U.S. into the Iraq War, then he discusses the War's
aftermath. S's argument is that the neoconservative agenda regarding the Middle East is
designed to serve the interests of the state of Israel, as those interests are articulated by
the right-wing Likud party there. This agenda supports weakening Arab nations surrounding
Israel so that they cannot pose a threat to her. According to S, the neoconservatives
supported such an agenda since their beginning as a movement, but 9/11 created an opportunity
for this agenda to become the foreign policy of the United States during much of the
Presidency of George W. Bush.
Here are some thoughts:
A. Looking broadly at the book itself, it is a standard narration of the events
surrounding and including the Iraq War. Like a lot of people, I lived through that, so the
sweeping narrative of the book was not particularly new to me. The story is essentially that
the U.S. went into Iraq expecting to find weapons of mass destruction after 9/11, bombed the
country and found that were no WMDs, and traveled the difficult road of trying to rebuild the
country, amidst ethnic division, turmoil, and opposition from Iraqis.
B. That said, there were some things that I learned from this book. First, while
neoconservatism is said to believe in spreading democracy in the Middle East, it is not
necessarily committed to democracy, per se. Initially, it supported a new government of Iraq
that would be led by the traditional, pre-Saddam tribal authorities, who were not democratic.
Second, S seems to imply that even the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan was
unnecessary, since the Taliban initially appeared cooperative in offering to help the U.S. to
bring al-Qaeda to justice. Third, there are neoconservatives who have supported undermining
even America's allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia. The different groups in Saudi
Arabia was also interesting, for, as S notes, Shiites hold a significant amount of control
over Saudi oil, even though the political establishment is Sunni. Fourth, S argues rigorously
against the idea that the U.S. launched the Iraq War to get more oil. Saddam was offering
U.S. oil companies opportunities to drill in Iraq, plus oil companies did not want the oil
infrastructure of the country to be disrupted or shattered by war.
C. There were also things in the book that I was interested to learn more about, even
though I had a rudimentary understanding of them before. For one, S chronicles George W.
Bush's changing views on foreign policy, as he went from rejecting nation-building, while
retaining a tough stance, to embracing nation building. In the early days of the Bush II
Administration, long before the Iraq War, Condi Rice even explained on news shows why regime
change in Iraq would be a mistake at that point. Second, S discusses the coalition that
emerged to support the war in Iraq. The neocons wanted to protect Israel, but Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embraced the Iraq War as a way to showcase the effectiveness of a
lean military. Meanwhile, many Americans, frightened after 9/11, supported the Iraq War as a
way to keep the U.S. safe. And Christian conservatives embraced the good vs. evil, pro-Israel
stance of neoconservative policy. Third, S strategically evaluates moves that the U.S. made;
for S, for example, the surge did not actually work, but more stability emerged in Iraq as
different ethnic factions became separated from each other.
D. According to S, the Iraq War was a disaster. It stretched America's military, taking
away resources that could have been used to find Osama bin-Laden. Yet, Israel got something
that it wanted as a result: disarray among her Arab neighbors. An argument that S did not
really engage, as far as I can recall, is that the Iraq War placed Israel even more in peril,
since it increased the power of Iran by allowing Iraq to serve as a proxy for Iranian
interests.
E. For S, neoconservatism is concerned about the security of Israel. Even its staunch Cold
War policy is rooted in that concern, since the U.S.S.R. tended to support Arabs over the
Israelis. S acknowledges, though, that there is more to neoconservatism that that.
Neoconservatives supported a strong U.S. military intervention in the former Yugoslavia
during the Clinton Administration, and neoconservatism also maintains stances on domestic
issues, such as welfare.
F. S is sensitive to any charges of anti-Semitism that may be launched against his book.
He emphatically denies that he is saying there was a Jewish conspiracy to get the U.S. into
Iraq, for he observes that many Jews opposed the Iraq War. Moreover, S does not exactly
present the U.S. government as a Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), for the neoconservatives
were long on the margins prior to the Presidency of George W. Bush. Even under Bush II, the
traditional national security and intelligence apparatus was critical of the Iraq War,
preferring more multilateralism and a focus on stability in the Middle East. The Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR), long a bogeyman of right-wing conspiracy theorists, also had
reservations about the Iraq War.
G. S largely depicts the Likud party in Israel, and neoconservatives, as supporting
Israel's security as a nation, her protection, if you will. At the same time, S argues that
Israel in 2006 was acting aggressively rather than defensively in its invasion of Lebanon,
for Lebanon had coveted water-supplies.
H. Near the end of the Iraq War, S demonstrates, neoconservatives were calling on the U.S.
to take an aggressive stance against Iran, going so far as to bomb the country. That, of
course, is an issue that remains relevant today. S probably regards such a move as a mistake.
At the same time, he can understand why Israel would be apprehensive about a nuclear-armed
Iran. He thinks that Ahmadinejad has been incorrectly understood to say that Israel should be
wiped off the map, but S still acknowledges that a powerful Iran could provide more support
to the Palestinians, which would trouble Israel. Although S understands this, he seems to
scorn the idea that Israel should get everything she wants and have hegemony.
I. S is open to the possibility that neoconservatives believe that their support for
Israel is perfectly consistent with America's well-being. As S observes, the U.S. government
since its founding has had people who believe that partisanship towards a certain nation --
-Britain or France -- -is not only good for its own sake but serves the interests of the
United States. S disputes, however, that neoconservative policy is the only way to help the
U.S. Could not one argue, after all, that the U.S. would want to be on the Arabs' good side,
with all the oil the Arabs have? This analysis may be a little dated, since the U.S. now has
some alternative sources of energy (fracking), but S makes this point in evaluating the
historical stance of neoconservatism.
I was interested to see the reviews of this book. Usually if any book suggests that Israel
is less than perfect a group of Zionist fanatics surface with several reviews telling us that
there nothing wrong Israel or American support of it.
Remarkably there is only one negative review of this book which has to be seen to be
believed. This reviewer "yoda" from Israel charges in all seriousness that Sniegoski does not
provide evidence that the neoconservatives are "predominantly Jewish " and are " strongly
aligned with Israel". Asking the author to provide evidence for such
assertions is like asking him to give evidence that the sun will
rise in the east tomorrow .
This is I believe the real reason that that there are relatively few attacks on this book.The
author does not engage in shrill denunciations of Israel or of the neoconservatives . What he
does do is quote at length what neocoservstives say and provide careful documentation for any
factual claims. For the most part the reader is allowed to
draw his own conclusions. Should the US continue to finance
Israeli repression of Palestinians and perhaps go to war against Iran or anyone else who
might object to Israeli policie?
Instead of denouncing Sniegoski "Yoda" should consider
the sane Israelis in his own country . For example former
Mossad chief Meir Dagan who said that a war with Iran was
the "stupidest idea he had ever heard of." Also moviemaker
Emmanuel Dror who interviewed virtually all the former directors of the Shin Bett ( Israel's
internal security service )
who all called for disengaging from the occupied territories .
perhaps we all would be better off listening to these Isaelis rather than follow the
neoconservatives into another disastrous war on the other side of the world.
This is going to be a very strange review coming from me. You see, I wrote a novel called
"Other Nations" and well, people that liked it a lot, liked it, but then those that really
disliked it disliked it because my "aliens among humans" were nice people, likeable people,
even charismatic people, everyday suburban types even, living that kind of life. Among us.
Next door, in the next city over. They wanted instead to see the aliens among us portrayed as
well, pick your favorite genocidal maniac or mind-controlling dictator or creature so
dementedly alien that no sense can be made of it. Well!
There are many types of true horror. The kind that passes itself off as my aliens among us
are portrayed, well, I guess some people GET IT - and they liked it.
But I'm not here to push my book. I'm here to push THIS BOOK - because my god, this is
REAL, not fantasy, it's REAL, not science fiction. And yes, they are among us with well -
BUY THIS BOOK. If you are too broke to buy it, get it from the library - and by all means
- READ IT.
Just hope to whatever god you choose that neocons are removed from governmental influence
and that their Amen corner is ignored. Hope to god, because if they suceed in doing the
INSANITY they want to do - America will be FINISHED - if it's not finished already due to
what these Fifth Columnists have done during the 8 years of Twilight Zone (GWB Rule).
And for those Jewish critics on here that might want to compare these neocon FACTS and the
other FACTS openly available to all (which is WHY the book is called the TRANSPARENT cabal) -
compare it to the Protocols - they better think twice about that. Becauase, you see, what's
in here is real, real facts, provably real facts - and if Jews themselves compare this to the
Procols? Some folks might get the idea that maybe that is real too. Perhaps George Soros (who
is Jewish) needs to speak LOUDER against the neocons. They are, indeed, crazies, as Colin
Powell called them. Crazies.
If you want to have an eye opener then read and see who were those Jewish players working
and influencing everything in the Bush Admin.promoting war with Iraq, then this is your book
of truth. The cabal of Jewish players come out of the woodwork in Stephen Sniegoski's great
work. When step by step the plan was a clear war map laid out for the U.S. in detail and
after you realize just who was working for whom in this criminal cabal of the American
government.
When you have Jewish control of the main stream media and Jewish control in Washington, D.C.,
don't wonder why the facts were omitted to make all the right connections for the public to
see in this lead up to a war from lies.
Max is one of the greatest journalists of our time ! Thank You , but take care because
their are many that are threatened by truth and integrity ! RESPECT !
The msm is full of CIA swamp lobbyist liars. Max is just objectively reporting
substantiated data points that counter lies that are meant to sell taxpayers war.
Any left wing leader clinging to power long enough (for EVo Morales it was 12 years) creates
a real opportunities for a color revolution, which would decimate the whole movement. Looks like
at this point Evo Moralis was doomed and the coup was just a matter of time.
Any protests in governments that oppose Washing neoliberal empire are hijacked by Washington and turned into the anti-government
coupe d'état.
Notable quotes:
"... by 2019, Morales had been in office for 12 years, and his popularity had ebbed. As Christine Mathias writes in Dissent, even some on the left, including former indigenous supporters, had begun to question his leadership ..."
"... They raised concerns about Morales's desire to remain in office indefinitely, alleged corruption in his inner circle, his administration's response to recent fires in the Amazon, and especially its extractivist development model. Aymara leader Felipe Quispe presented some of the most damning critiques, describing [Morales' Movimiento al Socialismo] as "neoliberalism with an Indian face." ..."
"... Now, I've seen a lot of mockery directed at the Bolivian court for this decision, which said that barring Morales from running violated his "human rights." It is seen as a transparent power-grab by Morales, and a sign that his rule was undemocratic and illegitimate, because he simply had "cronies" rewrite the law. ..."
"... Article 23. Right to Participate in Government ..."
"... 1. Every citizen shall enjoy the following rights and opportunities: ..."
"... a. to take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives; ..."
"... b. to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters; and ..."
"... c. to have access, under general conditions of equality, to the public service of his country. ..."
"... 2. The law may regulate the exercise of the rights and opportunities referred to in the preceding paragraph only on the basis of age, nationality, residence, language, education, civil and mental capacity, or sentencing by a competent court in criminal proceedings. ..."
"... This is important, because now that Morales has been forced out of power by an illegitimate leader, every effort is being made to paint him as having been illegitimate himself. ..."
"... We know that, as protests escalated after the election, Morales lost the support of members of the Bolivian police and that the military "encouraged him" to resign. Morales fled to Mexico; ..."
"... "We want to be a democratic tool of inclusion and unity," said the 52-year-old religious conservative, sitting at a table bearing a huge open Bible and crucifix. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Several MAS officials have been detained, fled the country or have sought refuge in foreign embassies. Meanwhile, debate has brewed over whether the party, which still enjoys wide support, should even be allowed to exist due to the alleged electoral manipulation. ..."
"... The Journal quotes a Morales critic saying: "MAS is dead We have a saying here: When the dog dies, so do the fleas." ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... she was doing the power grab. ..."
"... But Morales was elected! ..."
"... Order Restored Amid Unrest, Government Says ..."
"... A Dozen Unarmed Protesters Murdered In Cold Blood. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... debate has brewed over whether the party, which still enjoys wide support, should even be allowed to exist due to the alleged electoral manipulation. ..."
In Bolivia, within the course of a month,
one of the most successful contemporary governments to call itself "socialist" has been
replaced by an
unelected right-wing leadership that has killed protesters, promised to restore the rule of
Christianity, and demanded the jailing of former president Evo Morales as a "
terrorist. " What went wrong?
Let us review the most uncontroversial facts of what happened in Bolivia. Evo Morales, the
country's first indigenous leader, had been praised for his sound management of the country's
economy,
which "experienced a spectacular run of economic growth and poverty reduction." Even
harshly critical media assessments mentioned "the
country's growing economy and shrinking inequality," and the New York Times
noted that "tiny, impoverished Bolivia, once a perennial economic basket case, has suddenly
become a different kind of exception -- this time in a good way," as the country became South
America's fastest-growing
economy . As with China, the heavily state-led economic program of Bolivia -- which
included successful
nationalization of certain parts of industry -- threatens free market orthodoxies about the
inevitable catastrophe of socialism and state "intervention in the economy." (According to the
Center for Economic and Policy Research, "the importance of the government's nationalization of
hydrocarbons to Bolivia's economic progress over the past 13 years cannot be
overemphasized.")
But by 2019, Morales had been in office for 12 years, and his popularity had ebbed. As
Christine Mathias writes in Dissent, even some on the left, including former indigenous
supporters, had begun to question
his leadership :
They raised concerns about Morales's desire to remain in office indefinitely, alleged
corruption in his inner circle, his administration's response to recent fires in the Amazon,
and especially its extractivist development model. Aymara leader Felipe Quispe presented some
of the most damning critiques, describing [Morales' Movimiento al Socialismo] as
"neoliberalism with an Indian face."
Morales ran for a fourth term this year. Previously, the new Bolivian constitution that
Morales had introduced imposed term limits. There was a referendum on whether to scrap term
limits in 2016, and Morales lost narrowly. Bolivia's Supreme Court then overturned the results
of the referendum, allowing Morales to run again.
Now, I've seen a lot of mockery directed at the Bolivian court for this decision, which
said that barring Morales from running violated his "human rights." It is seen as a transparent
power-grab by Morales, and a sign that his rule was undemocratic and illegitimate, because he
simply had "cronies" rewrite the law.
A few bits of context are important, though. First, the president actually has less direct
control over the makeup of the Bolivian court than the United States president has over the
composition of our Supreme Court. And second, the ruling was not actually as crazy as it is
being made to sound. The ruling was based on the American
Convention of Human Rights , which Bolivia is a signatory to. The relevant section reads as
follows:
Article 23. Right to Participate in Government
1. Every citizen shall enjoy the following rights and opportunities:
a. to take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen
representatives;
b. to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by
universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the
will of the voters; and
c. to have access, under general conditions of equality, to the public service of his
country.
2. The law may regulate the exercise of the rights and opportunities referred to in
the preceding paragraph only on the basis of age, nationality, residence, language,
education, civil and mental capacity, or sentencing by a competent court in criminal
proceedings.
As you can see, every citizen is guaranteed the right to be elected in periodic
elections, and that right can be regulated only on the basis of a number of very
particular grounds. "Having served in office previously" is not one of those grounds. Now, your
instinct here may be to say "Oh, but that's silly , of course term limits are
permitted, it would be ridiculous to say that term limits are a violation of human rights." The
entire argument made by legal textualists like Antonin Scalia, however, is that it doesn't
matter what you might have meant , it matters what the law says. If the
drafters of a law believe that you should be able to restrict people from running for office
based on their previous service in office, they need to put that in the rights convention,
otherwise that exception won't be valid.
I am not saying that I am anti-term limits, or that I share Scalia's theory of
jurisprudence, although it's worth remembering that term limits do prevent people from
choosing the candidate that they might want the most and are a restriction on democracy (after
all, Obama would probably still be president if we adopted the democratic principle that "the
candidate the most people would want to vote for should win the election"). I am saying that
it's not obvious that the Supreme Court was simply mindlessly throwing out the rule of law, and
that the reactions after the Court's decision (some called the decision itself a "coup") was
not justified.
This is important, because now that Morales has been forced out of power by an
illegitimate leader, every effort is being made to paint him as having been illegitimate
himself. (The New York Times , using the language preferred
by the right-wing government , calls him a "strongman.") And if these arguments are
correct, it undermines critics of the anti-Morales coup. After all, if he was an autocrat who
himself had no democratic mandate and disrespected institutions, it was less bad for his
successors to seize power, even if they did so without being elected. The present Bolivian
"leadership" has made a very strong effort to portray themselves as "restoring" a democracy
that Morales had "undermined" (with the new self-declared president saying that "the coup
d'état was by Evo Morales") even as they behave undemocratically themselves, so it's
important to actually scrutinize the facts and remember what happened.
I find Morales' decision to keep running indefinitely to be frustrating, and a sign that he
was relying more on his personality than a political movement, but I do not think that he
disrespected the law any more than Michael Bloomberg did when he had the New York City
Council get rid of term limits. I would not have called Bloomberg an "illegitimate" mayor or a
"dictator," nor would I say that he was not the "real" mayor of New York and could justly be
overthrown by the NYPD. So I think Morales was within his rights to run again, and since his
term has not expired, and he was forced out by threats of violence, he should still be
considered the president of Bolivia.
What of the election itself? American media has reported on the election as if it was
self-evident that Morales stole it or committed election fraud. The central allegations here,
however, do not appear to hold up. Read the analyses from
Kevin Cashman in Jacobin and
Mark Weisbrot in MarketWatch , who both provide careful explanations of how the
Bolivian election actually worked, as opposed to vague innuendos.
She vowed to be a
mere caretaker until new elections could be held, "[telling] reporters that her only aim was to
unite the country and restore it to the path to democracy," and
saying that her mission in office was "to call for clean and transparent elections with all
the qualified political actors as soon as possible." Of course, that word "qualified" should
have been the tip-off from the beginning that Añez would soon unilaterally declare
Morales ineligible to run .
But it was very evident that she was lying about her intentions, which were not to preside
over a "caretaker" government but to re-establish right-wing rule after a decade of successful
socialism. She acted like "
anything but a caretaker ," and has "been putting her own ideological stamp on South
America's poorest nation as she pursues the opposition's long-held dream of undoing nearly
14 years of socialist rule under former president Evo Morales." She "replaced Bolivia's top
military brass, cabinet ministers and the heads of major state-owned companies with appointees
of her own." She immediately moved to reshape the county's foreign policy, reinstall Catholic
rituals, and gave soldiers immunity from prosecutor for murdering protesters. Sure enough,
"within hours, a confrontation between soldiers and Morales supporters near Cochabamba left
nine dead." (It is ironic that Áñez had previously "denied that Morales had been
the victim of a coup," saying "a coup d'etat is when there are soldiers in the streets.")
Añez's government barely pretended to care about equality. She brought a giant Bible
to her swearing-in, and said "the Bible has returned to the government palace." As the press
noted, this was "a pointed attack on Morales, since the constitution he passed in 2009 placed
Christianity on equal footing with indigenous spiritual traditions." Añez's open
Christian supremacist ideology was evident even when she was making half-hearted gestures
toward inclusiveness:
"We want to be a democratic tool of inclusion and unity," said the 52-year-old
religious conservative, sitting at a table bearing a huge open Bible and crucifix.
Añez was not just repudiating Morales, socialism, and secular pluralism, but the
indigeneous population more broadly. She had
previously "published provocative posts on Twitter
mocking Indigenous people's culture, branding their
religious rites 'satanic' and calling Mr. Morales a
'poor Indian. '"
She "quickly set up a transition cabinet with almost no indigenous people, but full of
business elites who oppose Morales." At a public rally by a close Añez ally, a speaker
cried: "We have tied all the demons of the witchery and thrust them into the abyss. Satans, get
out of Bolivia now." As one analyst noted, her government seems to be " thinking
that what Bolivia needs right now is a purge. "
And the purge is underway. The interim interior minister threatened
"to arrest lawmakers loyal to ousted President Evo Morales for alleged acts of subversion and
sedition," even though Morales' MAS party still technically held a legislative majority. He "
announced the creation of a 'special apparatus of the Prosecutor's Office' that will crack
down on elected officials from Morales' Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party, which controls
about two-thirds of the legislature," and "said he would be publishing a 'list' of legislators
he claims are guilty of 'subversion' and that those individuals will be blocked from continuing
their duties as representatives and will be subject to arrest starting Monday." He "began by
promising to hunt down Mr. Morales's top former minister, Juan Ramón Quintana, who has
gone into hiding," saying "We're going to go hunting for Juan Ramón Quintana because he
is an animal that feeds on the blood of the people."
Several MAS officials have been detained, fled the country or have sought refuge in
foreign embassies. Meanwhile, debate has brewed over whether the party, which still enjoys
wide support, should even be allowed to exist due to the alleged electoral
manipulation.
The Journal quotes a Morales critic saying: "MAS is dead We have a saying here: When the
dog dies, so do the fleas."
* * * *
Surely, some things are clear here. The new right-wing government is not actually interested
in democracy, but in destroying socialism and indigenous power. They're literally threatening
to "hunt down" socialist legislators. They don't want fair elections. They want elections that
have socialists either excluded from running or intimidated by force. Why is Evo Morales in
Mexico? He's not there because he wants to be in Mexico. He's there because if he had stayed in
Bolivia he might have been jailed as a "terrorist" or killed. I do not know why there is "
debate "
over whether what happened in Bolivia was a "coup." The elected president fled the country at
the direction of the military and has been branded a criminal by an unelected leadership that
has murdered protesters and explicitly vowed to destroy socialism and restore Christian
rule.
Yet now we enter the topsy-turvy world of the U.S. media, whose response to the Bolivian
coup has been a case study in Chomsky and Herman's theory of "manufacturing consent."
The Wall Street Journal , unsurprisingly, has heralded the ousting of Morales as
a victory for
democracy . "No one should shed a tear" for Morales, its editorial board said. Bolivia's
"people have suffered enormously" under Morales, it said, citing no evidence. (Hard to know
what to cite when what the people have suffered from its record
growth and diminishing poverty .) The Journal said that "Bolivian law forbids a
candidate caught in fraud from running again," though it did not cite which Bolivian law allows
unconfirmed allegations to override court precedents. Another editorial, " Morales Made
Bolivia A Narco State ," essentially repeated the word "narco" over and over, emphasizing
that Morales started as the head of the coca grower's union, to convince readers to think of
him as nothing but a drug trafficking dictator. (The editorial had the audacity to center
criticism of Morales around his violations of indigenous people's rights, said the military
"suggested" he step down, and suggested that he simply ran illegally, failing to mention the
court decision that allowed him to participate and the justifications given by the court.)
One expects this stuff from a fascist-sympathizing
Murdoch paper, of course. But the New York Times has been just as bad, full of
sentences like: "Morales's grip on power unraveled after he tried bending electoral rules to
stay in power for a fourth term in October, flouting constitutional term limits he himself had
set." (Again, a Supreme Court decision allowed him to run under the terms of a treaty.) "
How an Unknown Female Senator Came to Replace the Bolivian Strongman Evo Morales " is an
incredible article. It does not quote any socialist legislators, but quotes plenty of figures
from the conservative opposition, including heavy quotation from a "cement magnate." It
discusses the "transition talks," and says that Añez was brought to the capital to
"pre-empt any power grab," without noting that she was doing the power grab. The
article treats the conservatives as pragmatic and patriotic restorers of order who were
concerned with preventing a slide into chaos and wanted to maintain the constitutional order.
"We knew that she was the only constitutional thread we had." Calling Morales a "strongman" is
bad enough. He is a democratically elected president, and the Times did the
opposition's work for it by printing a word that suggested Morales was an illegitimate tyrant.
(Even if you believe this year's elections were fraudulent, Morales' term does not expire until
January!) Perhaps because of public outcry about this use of a loaded, and arguably racist,
term, the Times later stealth-edited "strongman" out of
the headline and replaced it with "president," without offering a correction or
apology.
The Times editorial board published an incredible editorial blaming Morales for
what happened, saying that "the
country's growing economy and shrinking inequality propped him up for years. But its democracy
and its institutions suffered, and that's what brought him down." (The idea of being "propped
up" by a growing economy is funny.) "Predictably," the Times editors said, stodgy old
leftists were denouncing the "coup," but "what brought Mr. Morales down was not his ideology or
foreign meddling, as he claimed, but the arrogance of the
populist , evident in so many other parts of the world -- the claim to be the ultimate
arbiter of the will of the people, entitled to crush any institution that stands in his way."
The Times editorial is an interesting example of how institutions in other countries
are spoken of differently than they would be in our own. It says Morales had the country's
Supreme Court "by now stuffed with his loyalists, rule that limiting his time in office somehow
violated his human rights." Our Supreme Court, of course, is not "stuffed with
loyalists," even though it too is a nakedly
political institution . Of Añez, all it said was that she was "offering to lead the
country to new elections," and that Morales "would do well to call on his backers to clear the
way."
Witness, too, this Times op-ed
, written in sorrow and lament , about how Bolivia offers "lessons on how to
fix semi-democracies," saying that the coup was "a reminder that the process of stopping
semi-democratic leaders is likely to be semi-democratic as well." But Morales was
elected! The op-ed pretends there is no difference between Morales's democratic election
and Añez's seizure of power without an election. "Blaming the coup is to blame the
symptoms and ignore the overall shock on the system caused by the preceding democratic
backsliding . Fixing a semi-democracy will not always follow strict democratic playbooks The
best that can be hoped for is that the military sides with moderate civilians, democratic
norms, and constitutional rule."
Here, we would do well to remind ourselves that anything can be cloaked under euphemisms:
mass murder can be "restoring order," overthrowing an elected government can be "preserving
democratic rule." And the most dangerous political actors are going to have a very strong
incentive to use these kinds of euphemisms, which is why it's important for ordinary people to
be extremely skeptical, and why newspapers shouldn't quote powerful people's words as if they
are facts. ( Order Restored Amid Unrest, Government Says is a headline that could
easily mean A Dozen Unarmed Protesters Murdered In Cold Blood. )
When you are reading about Bolivia in the U.S. press, make sure to ask critical questions:
Whose voices are being quoted here, and whose voices don't I hear? What is taken as being
self-evident that should actually require some proof? How are words being shaded in ways that
could disguise what is actually going on? Is one action being described two different ways when
done by two different people? (When X does it, they're a "strongman" or "caudillo" and when Y
does it they are a "caretaker" or "interim leader.") Propaganda
often looks very reasonable, on the surface, especially to those of us who don't have access to
the facts on the ground. Every word needs to be read carefully to see how our perceptions of
reality are being manipulated.
One interesting thing about propaganda, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is that you can
often find the truth buried within it. U.S. newspapers often do report all the facts you need
to know in order to understand what is going on, but the analysis and framing buries those
facts. (I've previously
written about how the Holocaust, far from being unknown, was reported in the pages of the
New York Times as something trivial not worth caring about.) You need to notice the
small stuff. For example, when someone is quoted talking about how "when a dog dies, the fleas
do too," that sounds an awful lot like they're probably going to try to destroy the socialist
movement. Amid all the Wall Street Journal 's discussions about whether or not to call
the "transition" a "coup," you will find little sentences like: " debate has brewed over
whether the party, which still enjoys wide support, should even be allowed to exist due to the
alleged electoral manipulation. " Um, there is debate over whether a movement with wide
support should be allowed to exist? Who is "brewing" this debate?
When Añez announced that Morales couldn't run in a new election, Current
Affairspredicted that the next thing
that would happen was a new election which wouldn't be legitimate, but which would quickly be
declared legitimate. Sure enough, MAS legislators are being persecuted and threatened, and Evo
Morales is being told that if he comes back to the country he will be tried as a terrorist.
No election held under these conditions can be legitimate, and it will inevitably be
worse than the "fraud-marred" original election. But when the right wins, they will
declare democracy restored. In fact, fake elections are historically a powerful tool of the
right.
The 1933 German election was
not a real election, because the Nazis' opponents were systematically persecuted and
threatened. But they used it to claim they had a democratic mandate. This is also what happened
in Brazil: The most popular Workers Party candidate, Lula, was barred from running, and cleared
the way for the far-right Jair Bolsonaro to take power.
This is what the Bolivian right needs now: an "election" in which the most popular
opposition candidate is barred from standing, and the majority party is threatened and
intimidated. Then, when the right narrowly wins the election (as Bolsonaro and Hitler did) they
will demand recognition for the "people's will." If you do not notice what is happening, you
need to read some more history! This is a very old story and has been told many times.
The U.S.' counterinsurgency war against the communist and Black self-determinationist
movements of the 20th century ensured that the period of U.S. imperial decline beginning in the
1970s would embolden the rich to eviscerate any and all gains made by workers in the decades
prior. Neoliberal austerity, privatization, and monopolization drowned the United States in a
sea of counterrevolutionary political ideology. "Call out culture" commodified movement culture
and channeled activists into profitable modes of expression that promoted individual
recognition, academic prestige, and careerism rather than the plight of the poor, especially
the Black poor.
... ... ...
"Corporate political operatives like Obama seek to 'diversify' a violent empire."
As I wrote for Black
Agenda Report in 2016, Obama's legacy is in large part shaped by a mastery of
counterinsurgency warfare. His recent slandering of millennial activists fits snugly within
this legacy. While appearing to castigate the very political environment that elevated him
beyond criticism for eight years, Obama was really taking aim at the increasingly left posture
of millennials. The "Bernie or bust" movement is worrisome to a ruling class that has utilized
the counterinsurgency skills of Barack Obama to engineer massive profits from endless war and
austerity. "Wokeness" and "purity" must be shot down by Obama because it threatens the
legitimacy of political class actors like him who expect to be praised for their intelligent
leadership over the great race to the bottom.
Barack Obama takes great pride in his impurity. Obama was elected in 2008 to bring "hope"
and "change" to the masses, only to escalate and add to every single ill of end-stage U.S.
imperialism. Under his administration, whistleblowers were prosecuted
under the Espionage Act in record numbers,
Black wealth plummeted, bankers ran away with trillions worth
in bailout rescue funds, and the military industrial complex expanded its special
operations to
engulf 70 percent of the world's nations in a regime of endless chaos. In many ways,
Obama's presidency was the biggest lie in the history of an empire built on grand lies of
democracy, liberty, and freedom. As he successfully posed as the "lesser evil," Obama was hard
at work instituting a permanent private healthcare system ( the Affordable Care Act ),
murdering thousands of people
by way of drone strike , and militarizing the African continent
through AFRICOM to ensure the instability required for Western corporations to plunder the
continent of its vast wealth.
"'Wokeness' and 'purity' must be shot down by Obama because it threatens the legitimacy
of political class actors like him."
While Obama succeeded in ramming through the ruling class' agenda, he also helped engineer
the political crisis which paved the way for the rise of Bernie Sanders. Millennials have
mobilized in the millions to elect a president that will bring them Medicare for All, a Green
New Deal, and living wages. They are no longer interested in politicians like Obama who claim
to be a "lesser evil" choice to the Republicans only to implement a more effective Wall Street
agenda that renders
ninety percent of all new jobs low-wage or temporary. The "purity" of the Sandernista's
principles is a sign to Obama and his class that Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and
Pete Buttigieg are unlikely to garner any support from Sanders' large millennial base. It
should come as no surprise, then, that Obama feels compelled to condemn the political leanings
of young people as an affront to his sordid legacy.
Obama benefitted from the proliferation of call out culture so much that he has no shame in
telling its most loyal adherents to "shut up and dribble" into the embrace of the Democratic
Party. Neither Obama nor the rest of the corporate Democratic Party has anything to offer
except the so-called civility and respectability that characterizes their approach to imperial
rule. Obama is aware of who he works for and what will keep him well-paid now that his
presidential career has ended. Like Hillary Clinton, Obama has quickly become a pundit for Wall
Street and its paid killers in the war machine. His most recent comments offer further evidence
of the desperate need for a mass exit from the Democratic Party. Of course, no mass exodus from
the Democratic Party is possible prior to a popular repudiation of Obama's legacy and all the
imperial arrogance and destruction that comes with it.
Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He and Roberto
Sirvent are co-authors of the book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence:
A People's History of Fake News--From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror ( Skyhorse
Publishing). He can be reached at[email protected], on Twitter @spiritofho,
and on Youtube at The Left Lens with Danny Haiphong
"... The Empire has started something it cannot win. I have other thoughts on this but I just dropped by to post this and get back to my entertaining chores, me being the chef and all that. ..."
Just enough time to share this Global Times editorial
regarding the gross interference in China's affairs by the Evil Outlaw US Empire's
Congress--to cooperate with the Empire is to commit treason :
"In the meantime, the law also threatens to sanction Hongkongers who do not cooperate
with the US. This will suppress neutral space for people with different ideas and further
tear the city apart. The only way to maintain the solidarity of Hong Kong is to resist US
provocation and prevent more people from joining hands with the opposition for fear of US
sanctions. Efforts to fight the forces colluding with the US should be stepped up, and the
corresponding laws need to be improved. There is no way to allow traitors to prevail and
patriots to suffer .
"'One country, two systems' is China's independent constitutional arrangement and US
intervention damages its external environment. Hong Kong society should be vigilant. To
maintain "one country, two systems," the Chinese mainland and the HKSAR need to work
together. Anyone who colludes with external forces to undermine 'one country, two
systems' must pay a heavy price ."
"To sum up, Trump has signed another evil law that intervenes in China's domestic
affairs and violates the country's sovereignty by using Hong Kong as a stick. However,
in deciding how to use the stick and whether it will take the US where it wishes,
Washington has to think carefully because the move would probably backfire ." [All
Emphasis Mine]
The Empire has started something it cannot win. I have other thoughts on this but I just
dropped by to post this and get back to my entertaining chores, me being the chef and all
that.
Happy T-Day, and may Peace at some point finally prevail and come to Rule this and all
other days.
After initiation of Operation Condor 2.0, which debuted with massacres in Bolivia following fascist coup d´etat against majority
of pueblos originarios , as preparations in other countries of CARICOM are in the making, starting with Grenadine....
"... The aim of Washington – and I am sure it has people on the ground in Bolivia to 'advise' the coup government – will be to stabilize the situation and keep things quiet while Anez gets settled in and selects a cabinet and forms her organization. After that, it'll just be the new reality, and everyone will have to get used to it. ..."
"... Frankly, it's almost a pity there wasn't a mercenary army for hire by victims of western-sponsored coups such as Ukraine and Bolivia. The military has remained mostly loyal to Maduro in Venezuela, so I did not include it. ..."
Inside Bolivia's murderous post-coup regime – with Wyatt Reed
25 Nov 2019
Moderate Rebels
Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton speak with journalist Wyatt Reed, who is reporting on the
ground in Bolivia after a US-backed far-right military coup against democratically elected
leftist President Evo Morales. He describes the bloody repression of Indigenous protesters
and the state of resistance.
The aim of Washington – and I am sure it has people on the ground in Bolivia to
'advise' the coup government – will be to stabilize the situation and keep things quiet
while Anez gets settled in and selects a cabinet and forms her organization. After that,
it'll just be the new reality, and everyone will have to get used to it.
Frankly, it's almost a pity there wasn't a mercenary army for hire by victims of
western-sponsored coups such as Ukraine and Bolivia. The military has remained mostly loyal
to Maduro in Venezuela, so I did not include it.
This army could be used to fight the
disloyal police and military and restore order. But that'd be the wrong way to go, because it
would quickly escalate and you can be sure the hired peacekeepers would be referred to as
invaders rather than 'moderate rebels', so Washington would consider itself invited in
militarily to 'protect democracy'.
Once again, the United States is complicit in an illegal coup d'état in Latin America,
this time in Bolivia. On November 10, a right-wing, anti-Indigenous group seized power after
the Bolivian military's removal of President Evo Morales, who had declared victory in the
October 20 presidential election.
The United States' fingerprints are all over the coup. Advisers from the U.S. Southern
Command have been stationed on Bolivia's border with Argentina, Ivanka Trump made a
surprising visit to an Argentine province near the Bolivian border in September, the pro-U.S.
Organization of American States (OAS) cast unfounded doubt on Morales's election victory, and
the U.S.'s National Endowment for Democracy provided suspicious grants to Bolivia.
At least 32
people have been killed and hundreds injured since the coup began. Sacha Llorenti,
Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations,
toldDemocracy Now!, "We are going through not just a coup d'état, but a
violent one." Indeed, it has resulted in "the rise of a far-right regime of terror,"
professor Gabriel Hetland
wrote in TheWashington Post.
Morales -- Bolivia's first Indigenous leader in a country where 65 percent of the people
are Indigenous -- received 10 percent more votes than Carlos Mesa, the second-place candidate
who has close ties to the U.S. government. Mesa was in regular communication with U.S.
officials who were trying to destabilize Morales, U.S. government cables published by WikiLeaks
reveal.
The day after the election, the U.S.-funded OAS sought to delegitimize the election
results. "The OAS Mission expresses its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and
hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of
the polls,"
it stated .
But the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) published a
comprehensive statistical analysis on November 8 that found no evidence of fraud or
irregularities in the election and determined that the results reflected highly similar
patterns from past elections. Other research
conducted by CELAG (Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica)
confirmed CEPR's findings and identified insufficient evidence to support the assertions in
the OAS statement.
CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot
noted in an op-ed for Market Watch , "The OAS isn't all that independent at the
moment, with the Trump administration actively promoting this military coup, and Washington
having more right-wing allies in the OAS than they did just a few years ago."
U.S.
complicity in the coup in Bolivia is illegal under both U.S. and international law.
The OAS was
established during the Cold War to prevent the proliferation of leftist governments.
USAID considers OAS a critical tool in "promot[ing] US interests in the Western
hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-US countries" such as Bolivia.
The November 10 military coup led to the forced resignation of Morales, who received
asylum in Mexico. Right-wing politician Jeanine Añez declared herself interim
president, and Donald Trump immediately recognized her illegitimate claim to the presidency.
Añez then issued a decree
immunizing the military from criminal liability "for carrying out necessary actions in their
legitimate defense while performing their constitutional duties." Morales supporters accused
Añez of giving soldiers "carte blanche" to shoot demonstrators. Bolivia's human rights
ombudsman and reporters
have documented widespread injuries and fatalities from gunshots.
U.S. Involvement
in the Coup
During Morales's nearly 14 years in office, his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party
reduced
poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent. It cut unemployment by 50
percent and nearly
tripled the per-capita G.D.P. "It's indisputable that Bolivians are healthier, wealthier,
better educated, living longer and more equal than at any time in this South American
nation's history," Anthony Faiola
wrote in TheWashington Post .
There was
discontent about Morales seeking a fourth term among some sectors in Bolivia, who thought
there should be space for new leadership. But Morales had a
strong record of establishing policies to help the people of Bolivia, which angered the
U.S. government, Western corporations and the corporate media, "who function as ideological
shock troops against leftist governments in Latin America," Alan MacLeod wrote
at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
The U.S. and Argentine governments helped to engineer the Bolivian coup, Stella Calloni
reported in Resumen: Latinoamerico . She cited the presence of advisers from the
U.S. Southern Command on the Argentine border with Bolivia.
Calloni also documented "the surprising trip of Ivanka Trump" to the Argentine province of
Jujuy near the Bolivian border on September 4-5. Accompanied by 2,500 U.S. agents and
Undersecretary of State John Sullivan, Ivanka Trump was ostensibly there to "visit" a small
NGO dedicated to furthering women's rights, and she delivered an "aid" package of $400
million for "road works." Alicia Canqui Condori, national representative of MAS, said that,
"in Jujuy Donald Trump's daughter had met with Gov. Gerardo Morales to plan what happened in
Bolivia."
Moreover, according to Calloni, Bolivian Gen. Williams Kaliman, who "suggested" that
Morales resign after the election, traveled to the United States 72 hours after the coup
began and he
received $1 million from the U.S. embassy in Bolivia. Like many Latin American strongmen
over the years,
at least six of the top military leaders involved in the coup, including Kaliman, were
trained at the notorious U.S. Army School of the Americas (now
called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning,
Georgia.
Months before the coup, Bolivia concluded a
$2.3 billion deal with a Chinese consortium to mine lithium. Bolivia has 70
percent of the world's supply of lithium, which is used in car batteries, electronic
devices and weapons systems. "The idea that there might be a new social compact for the
lithium was unacceptable to the main transnational mining companies," Vijay Prashad
wrote . U.S. and Canadian companies sought to make a lithium agreement with Bolivia but
they could not meet Morales's conditions. "Morales himself was a direct impediment to the
takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms," according to Prashad.
"He had to go."
Sordid History of U.S. Meddling in Latin America
U.S. complicity in the Bolivian coup follows in a sordid tradition of meddling in the
political and economic affairs of Latin American countries. "For many years, the US
government has provided overt financial support to opposition political parties and civic
groups, including to many of the groups that have been engaged in violent insurrections and
coup plotting since at least 2008," Thomas Field wrote in
Jacobin.
This is the time to urge senators and Congress members to end all U.S.
support for the illegitimate regime.
One key vehicle that the U.S. government uses as a cover for its imperialist policies is
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). After disturbing revelations of covert CIA
operations in the second half of the 1970s, NED was established under Ronald Reagan. "The
idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for
decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities,"
William Blum
wrote in 2005. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein concurred,
stating in 1991, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
Although ostensibly a private, nonprofit organization, NED is largely funded by the United
States. "In effect," Blum noted, "the CIA has been laundering money through NED."
Peter Haberfeld, a retired lawyer and labor organizer who has studied the "Pink Tide"
governments in Latin America, documented NED grants in Bolivia. He told Truthout that
"between 2016 and 2019, NED gave grants to over 30 organizations for 'democracy promotion' in
Bolivia. The grants total $3,209,887."
Haberfeld said the grants were officially earmarked for "lofty objectives such as
expanding participation by women, youth, media and entrepreneurs in a vibrant political
process, particularly in connection with elections," but cautioned "it is wise to be
suspicious." Haberfeld cited author Neil A. Burron, who wrote in The New Democracy Wars:
The Politics of North American Democracy Promotion in the Americas, that "democracy
promotion is typically formulated to advance commercial, geopolitical and security objectives
that conflict with a genuine commitment to democracy development." Burron noted, "For the US,
the political manipulation of democracy promotion in support of a North American-led regional
order is a continuation of long-standing forms of intervention [that have been] used as a
license to meddle in the domestic affairs of others."
NED
was complicit in the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, manipulated the 1990 Nicaraguan
elections, heavily funded the 2002 failed coup attempt against socialist President Hugo
Chavez in Venezuela, and supported the opposition to progressive President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide in Haiti in the 1990s. Between 1990 and 1992, NED donated a quarter-million dollars
to the Cuban-American National Foundation, the violent anti-Castro group based in Miami.
In 2018, under the guise of "democracy," "human rights" and "entrepreneurship," NED
funneled
more than $23 million to opposition groups in Latin American countries, including
Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia.
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton called Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua the
"Troika of Tyranny" in November 2018. A few months later, in April 2019, the U.S. government
orchestrated
another unsuccessful
coup in Venezuela. Juan Guaidó, Washington's chosen puppet to seize power from
President Nicolás Maduro, was funded by NED.
Trump not only took aim at the progress Barack Obama had made toward normalization
of relations with Cuba, he has escalated the U.S. economic war on Cuba and unleashed
untold numbers of lawsuits that
threaten to destroy the fragile Cuban economy.
The Obama administration, led by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
supported the 2009 coup in Honduras. The fraudulent election following the coup was
financed by NED and the State Department, ushering in a repressive and militarized regime.
Conditions deteriorated, leading to the exodus of thousands of Honduran children fleeing
north.
U.S. Complicity in the Coup in Bolivia Is Illegal
U.S. complicity in the coup in Bolivia is illegal under both U.S. and international law.
The United Nations Charter prohibits the use of or threat to use force against the
territorial integrity or political independence of another nation. The International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights guarantees the right to self-determination.
The Charter of the Organization of American States, to which the U.S. is a party, forbids
any country from intervening in the internal or external affairs of another country. The OAS
charter declares
that, "Every State has the right to choose, without external interference, its political,
economic, and social system and to organize itself in the way best suited to it, and has the
duty to abstain from intervening in the affairs of another State."
The Foreign
Assistance Act forbids the United States from assisting a country "whose duly elected
head of government is deposed by military coup or decree."
There has been global condemnation of the coup. Sixty-four organizations of jurists,
lawyers, NGOs, social movements and trade unions from around the world, including the
International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the National
Lawyers Guild , sent a
letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, urging her to
strongly condemn the human rights violations resulting from the coup.
Fourteen members of the House of Representatives sent a
letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying they were "deeply concerned" about the
contribution of the Trump administration to the "escalating political and human rights
crisis" in Bolivia.
Over 800 scholars, activists and public figures published an open
letter demanding that the United States and the international community halt all support
to the right-wing, anti-Indigenous regime that took power after the military coup.
Veterans For Peace
condemned the racist coup in Bolivia and demanded an end to U.S. intervention in Latin
America:
Veterans For Peace stands in solidarity with the Indigenous majority in Bolivia who are
resisting the racist, right-wing takeover of their democracy. We demand that the coup be
stopped and democracy restored in Bolivia. As military veterans who have been used and
abused in too many unjust wars, we demand an end to 200 years of U.S. intervention in Latin
America.
The situation in Bolivia is volatile and there is danger it could devolve into civil war . This is
the time to urge senators and Congress members to end all U.S. support for the illegitimate
regime, demand free and fair elections with all political parties represented, and insist
that fundamental human rights of all Bolivians are protected.
@ jayc # 34 who wrote
"
The effective elements of the blunt stick the HKHRDA represents will inevitably weaken if not
destroy HK's position as a financial hub, a fact which the protest leaders seem not to have
gamed out. Or maybe they have.
"
Exactly! I think destroy is closer to the truth. China does not want profit forced in the
middle of their financial dealings with the outside world and there is little or no value
that HK can add to the equation.
As jared adds in comment #40 above
"
The financial industry is generally a con game built on managing perception and after all its
all about the money when we strip away the facade.
"
The lie that private finance masturbation for profit adds anything to the GDP of the world is
getting closer to being obvious to many. If anything it can be shown that profit subtracts
value that could/should be provided as a public utility by government.
So in due course the trade war was replaced by the full scale cold war.
Notable quotes:
"... Needless to say, no differences will be "settled amicably" and now China will have no choice but to retaliate, aggressively straining relations with the US, and further complicating Trump's effort to wind down his nearly two-year old trade war with Beijing. ..."
"... The legislation, S. 1838, which was passed virtually unanimously in both chambers, requires annual reviews of Hong Kong's special trade status under American law and will allow Washington to suspend said status in case the city does not retain a sufficient degree of autonomy under the "one country, two systems" framework. The bill also sanctions any officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses or undermining the city's autonomy. ..."
"... The House cleared the bill 417-1 on Nov. 20 after the Senate passed it without opposition, veto-proof majorities that left Trump with little choice but to acquiesce, or else suffer bruising fallout from his own party. the GOP. ..."
"... In accordance with the law, the Commerce Department will have 180 days to produce a report examining whether the Chinese government has tried use Hong Kong's special trading status to import advanced "dual use" technologies in violation of US export control laws. Dual use technologies are those that can have commercial and military applications. ..."
"... The new law directs the US secretary of state to "clearly inform the government of the People's Republic of China that the use of media outlets to spread disinformation or to intimidate and threaten its perceived enemies in Hong Kong or in other countries is unacceptable." ..."
"... The state department should take any such activity "into consideration when granting visas for travel and work in the United States to journalists from the People's Republic of China who are affiliated with any such media organizations", the law says. ..."
"... Yes I think getting the western financial institutions out of HK is the plan. I'm sure they appreciate the US doing this for them, but of course they could never admit that. ..."
Less than an hour after Trump once again paraded with yet another all-time high in the
S&P...
... and on day 510 of the trade war, it appears the president was confident enough that a
collapse in trade talks won't drag stocks too far lower, and moments after futures reopened at
6pm, the White House said that Trump had signed the Hong Kong bill backing pro-democracy
protesters, defying China and making sure that every trader's Thanksgiving holiday was just
ruined.
In a late Wednesday statement from the White House, Trump said that:
I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and the people of Hong Kong.
They are being enacted in the hope that Leaders and Representatives of China and Hong Kong
will be able to amicably settle their differences leading to long term peace and prosperity
for all.
Needless to say, no differences will be "settled amicably" and now China will have no
choice but to retaliate, aggressively straining relations with the US, and further complicating
Trump's effort to wind down his nearly two-year old trade war with Beijing.
Trump's signing of the bill comes during a period of unprecedented unrest in Hong Kong,
where anti-government protests sparked by a now-shelved extradition bill proposal have
ballooned into broader calls for democratic reform and police accountability.
"The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act reaffirms and amends the United States-Hong
Kong Policy Act of 1992, specifies United States policy towards Hong Kong and directs
assessment of the political developments in Hong Kong," the White House said in a statement.
"Certain provisions of the act would interfere with the exercise of the president's
constitutional authority to state the foreign policy of the United States."
The legislation, S. 1838, which was passed virtually unanimously in both chambers,
requires annual reviews of Hong Kong's special trade status under American law and will allow
Washington to suspend said status in case the city does not retain a sufficient degree of
autonomy under the "one country, two systems" framework. The bill also sanctions any officials
deemed responsible for human rights abuses or undermining the city's autonomy.
The House cleared the bill 417-1 on Nov. 20 after the Senate passed it without
opposition, veto-proof majorities that left Trump with little choice but to acquiesce, or else
suffer bruising fallout from his own party. the GOP.
Trump also signed into law the PROTECT Hong Kong act, which will prohibit the sale of
US-made munitions such as tear gas and rubber bullets to the city's authorities.
While many members of Congress in both parties have voiced strong support for protesters
demanding more autonomy for the city, Trump had stayed largely silent, even as the
demonstrations have been met by rising police violence.
Until now.
The bill's author, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, said that with the legislation's
enactment, the US now had "new and meaningful tools to deter further influence and interference
from Beijing into Hong Kong's internal affairs."
In accordance with the law, the Commerce Department will have 180 days to produce a
report examining whether the Chinese government has tried use Hong Kong's special trading
status to import advanced "dual use" technologies in violation of US export control laws. Dual
use technologies are those that can have commercial and military applications.
One other less discussed but notable provision of the Hong Kong Human Rights Act targets
media outlets affiliated with China's government. The new law directs the US secretary of
state to "clearly inform the government of the People's Republic of China that the use of media
outlets to spread disinformation or to intimidate and threaten its perceived enemies in Hong
Kong or in other countries is unacceptable."
The state department should take any such activity "into consideration when granting
visas for travel and work in the United States to journalists from the People's Republic of
China who are affiliated with any such media organizations", the law says.
* * *
In the days leading up to Trump's signature, China's foreign ministry had urged Trump to
prevent the legislation from becoming law, warning the Americans not to underestimate China's
determination to defend its "sovereignty, security and development interests."
"If the U.S. insists on going down this wrong path, China will take strong countermeasures,
" said China's foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang at a briefing Thursday in Beijing. On
Monday, China's Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang summoned the U.S. ambassador, Terry
Branstad to express "strong opposition" to what the country's government considers American
interference in the protests, including the legislation, according to statement. The new U.S.
law comes just as Washington and Beijing showed signs of working toward "phase-one" of deal to
ease the trade war. Trump would like the agreement finished in order to ease economic
uncertainty for his re-election campaign in 2020, and has floated the possibility of signing
the deal in a farm state as an acknowledgment of the constituency that's borne the brunt of
retaliatory Chinese tariffs.
Last week China's Vice Premier and chief trade negotiator Liu He said before a speech at the
Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing, that he was "cautiously optimistic" about reaching the
phase one accord. He will now have no choice but to amend his statement.
In anticipation of a stern Chinese rebuke, US equity futures tumbled, wiping out most of the
previous day's gains... Still, the generally modest pullback - the S&P was around 2,940
when Trump announced the Phase 1 deal on Oct 11 - suggests that despite Trump's signature,
markets expect a Chinese deal to still come through. That may be an aggressive and overly
"hopeful" assumption, especially now that China now longer has a carte blanche to do whatever
it wants in Hong Kong, especially in the aftermath of this weekend's
landslide victory for the pro-Democracy camp which won in 17 of the city's 18
districts.
"Following last weekend's historic elections in Hong Kong that included record turnout, this
new law could not be more timely in showing strong US support for Hongkongers' long-cherished
freedoms," said Rubio
This is another attempt by the US to stop BRICS. They care NOTHING about HK, only its
usefulness in the US war on Chinas growing importance in world trade.
but no no no... trading with communists brings jobs to sell cheap crap. oh what was I
thinking.... cheap crap, jobs, and the richest of the rich get richer... my bad.
it ain’t like the commies are going to use the money to build up their military..
Of course the obvious solution is to just let people choose whatever or whomever they want
to associate with and be respected and left alone for their choice.
But no. We all have to live and abide by the wishes of other people bcuz of "unity" and
****.
Eh guys, you still do not understand that all this (not only China and Hong Kong) is a
very big "elite" performance for ordinary people to keep you (the rest of the boobies) in
subjection. It's like in boxing - contractual fights. Do you think world "elites" benefit
from peace and order? You are mistaken - these guys have the world as death (the death of
their Power and their Control). An example from the history of Europe - in the 18-19 and
early 20th century, Europe only did what it fought. But the funny thing is that the monarchs
(the real owners of Europe) were relatives among themselves. The First World War was
popularly called “The War of Three Cousins” (English monarch, German Kaiser and
Russian emperor). But the Europeans paid for the dismantling of relatives. Now the "monarchs"
are bankers and your position has not changed, you changed only the owners after 1918.
Problem with Hong Kong is, it is dependent on China to survive. That is not only true for
the most basic neccessities, but also as a port for international trade. However, in the last
25 years, Shenzhen and Guangzhou have built up their own trade hubs, which has pulled trade
away from being concentrated in Hong Kong, and consequently more dependent on China. Our
ideas of Hong Kong remaining an independent island nation isn't going to work for three
reasons:
1. Without being a doorway to China, there is no other reason for its existence.
2. Hong Kong is indeed Chinese sovereign territory, that was taken away from it to be made
into a trade colony by the British in 1841, under the Treaty of Nanking. The British gave up
Hong Kong in 1997, under the 1984 signed Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which Britain
agreed to return not only the New Territories but also Kowloon and Hong Kong itself. China
promised to implement a "One Country, Two Systems" regime, under which for fifty years Hong
Kong citizens could continue to practice capitalism and political freedoms forbidden on the
mainland. So, when the year 2047 comes around, Hong Kong will be fully absorbed and
integrated in a One Country, One system Chinese regime. In otherwords, Hong Kong's fate was
already sealed in 1984, and there is nothing America can legally do about it.
3. Hong Kong still needs the basic neccessities from China to survive. Don't count on
either the British or the Americans to provide it.
Yes I think getting the western financial institutions out of HK is the plan. I'm sure
they appreciate the US doing this for them, but of course they could never admit
that.
The question is who will listed to Obama after his "change we can believe in" betrayal. Also
is not he a war criminal? Obama election was probably the most slick false flag operation even
conducted by intelligence agencies. Somebody created for him complexly fake but still plausible
legend.
That Obama desire to interfere in 2020 election also shows gain that that he a regular
completely corrupt Clinton neoliberal. The worst king of neoliberals, wolfs in sheep's
clothing.
And the fact that CIA democrats dominates the Democratic Party actually is another reason
from "Demexit" from the Democratic party of workers and lower middle class. The sad fact that the
USA Corporate Dems recently became the second pro-war militarist party, and learned to love
intelligence agencies; two things unimaginable in 60th and 70th.
As we noted earlier, a bombshell admission from Politico today exploring Obama's
substantial behind the scenes influence as Democratic kingmaker : included in the lengthy
profile on the day-to-day of the former president's personal office in the West End of
Washington D.C. and his meeting with the field of Democratic candidates, is
the following gem :
"Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would
speak up to stop him."
And crucially, when asked about that prior statement reported in Politico, an Obama
spokesperson did not deny that he said it.
The frank admission underscores what many independent analysts, not to
mention prior damning WikiLeaks DNC disclosures , have pointed out for years: that the
establishment controlling the Democratic party has continuously sought to rig the system
against Bernie.
"Since losing 2016, Dem elites have waged a prolonged effort to stop Bernie. Bernie is the
obvious answer to the neoliberal Clinton-Obama legacy voters rejected..." journalist Aaron
Maté observed of the
Politico quote.
Here's the stunning and deeply revealing section in full, which began by outlining Obama's
'advice-giving' throughout meetings with Democrat contenders including Joe Biden, Elizabeth
Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker,
and others :
Publicly, he has been clear that he won't intervene in the primary for or against a
candidate , unless he believed there was some egregious attack. "I can't even imagine with
this field how bad it would have to be for him to say something," said a close adviser.
Instead, he sees his role as providing guardrails to keep the process from getting too ugly
and to unite the party when the nominee is clear.
There is one potential exception: Back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he
does now, Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama
would speak up to stop him. (Asked about that, a spokesperson for Obama pointed out that
Obama recently said he would support and campaign for whoever the Democratic nominee is.)
And a further deeply revealing but more laughable quote comes later as follows: "Obama
designed his post-presidency in 2016, at a time when he believed Hillary Clinton would win and
Biden would be out of politics." So the reality is... far from the idea that the Dem elites
would back the actual nominee the party puts forward, clearly the die has already been cast
against Bernie just
like the last time around against Hillary in 2016.
Politico author Ryan Lizza later in the story quotes a "close family friend," who described
that Obama's "politics are not strong left of center."
"I mean it's left, but he's nowhere near where some of the candidates are currently sitting,
at least when he got himself elected," the source claimed.
This means in the mind of Obama and other top party influencers and kingmakers, Bernie and
other popular outliers like Tulsi Gabbard have already long been sidelined. Tulsi, it should
also be noted, is one of the couple of candidates who did not bother to stop by Obama's D.C.
office for a 'blessing' and advice.
According to the US Census there are 3031 counties in the US.
If we redirected the $3.8 billion plus the 500,000,000 for missile defense that we give
Israel to US counties budgets each county would receive about
$ 1.3 million.
If we included the $1.2 billion each we give to Egypt and Jordon for signing the Carter
peace treaty with Israel that figure increases to $2.3 million for each county.
While $2.3 million may be a small figure for counties with metro cities, it would be a
large amount for the majority of counties across the nation.
Since aid to Israel alone accounts for 50% of US foreign aid who would oppose this re
direct of taxpayers money...besides the politicians...and how would the politicians explain
their opposition to the districts they supposedly represent?
"... Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins. ..."
"... Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics ..."
"... "The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks. ..."
"... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision." ..."
"... Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. ..."
"... To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe. ..."
Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins.
Could it be my Russian paranoia. Nah, I am being unreasonable -- those people never had a bad feeling towards Trump's attempts to
boost Russian-American relations with Michael Flynn spearheading this effort.
Jokes aside, however, I can only imagine how SVR
and GRU are enjoying the spectacle. I can only imagine how many "free" promotions and awards can be attach to this thing as a
free ride.
Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't
remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics. I thought it
had been an American Admiral. I had no luck finding a reference so I googled it. Still no joy with the American admiral, but the
list thrown up had near the top of it this informative quote from Patrick Bahzad.
"The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration.
It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose
to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe"
to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth
called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant
but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy
agenda on questions that would require adult supervision."
Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the
respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the
crazy banner. Or, to put it more soberly, form part of the neocon wing of those administrations. Though I, as an outside
observer, might be prejudiced here because I happen not to get on very well with Brzezinski and his copious output.
Allowing for that prejudice, which I confess runs very deep, I still think that to an extent American foreign policy has been
hijacked by Eastern European emigres who themselves retain some of the prejudices and mindset of another age and place.
Looking at it from afar, the influence of some Eastern European emigres on American foreign policy has been uniformly deleterious.
And that from a long way back and no matter whether those emigres are in Washington or Tel Aviv.
It cannot but help be distorting, that influence. It's not merely that unexamined Russophobia is embedded in the DNA of many
Eastern Europeans. There's a narrow minded focus on aggressive Machtpolitik, bred from centuries of violent territorial disputes
with neighbors.
That, transferred to the world stage as it must be when it infects the foreign policy of the United States - because that is
a country that cannot but help be at the centre of the world stage - distorts US foreign policy. To a great degree American
foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions
inherited from Old Europe.
In the most famous of his speeches Churchill spoke of the time when, as he hoped, "the New World, with all its power and might,
steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
Let the historians dispute as they will, that is what happened. And continued to happen for half a century and more. But there
was a price few noticed. The New World might have stepped forward to rescue the old, but it carried back from that old world a
most destructive freight.
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding
of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's
loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He
dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do
many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding
Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I
argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
I wrote what follows before reading Andrei's response to EO, but do not see much reason to change what I had written.
When in 1988 I ended up working at BBC Radio 'Analysis' programme because it was impossible to interest any of my old television
colleagues in the idea that one might go to Moscow and talk to some of the people involved in the Gorbachev 'new thinking', my
editor, Caroline Anstey, was an erstwhile aide to Jim Callaghan, the former Labour Prime Minister.
As a result of his involvement with the Trilateral Commission, she had a fascinating anecdote about what one of his fellow
members, the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, said about another, Zbigniew Brzezinski: that he could never work out which
of his country's two traditional enemies his Polish colleague hated most.
Almost a generation after hearing her say this, in December 2013, I read an article Brzezinski published in the 'Financial
Times, headlined 'Russia, like Ukraine, will become a real democracy.'
Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, but it clearly expresses its author's fundamental belief that after all those
years of giving Russia the 'spinach' treatment -- to use Victoria Nuland's term -- it would finally 'knuckle under', and become
a quiescent satellite of the West.
An ironic sidelight on this is provided in a recent article by a lady called Anna Mahjar-Barducci on the 'MEMRI' site -- which
actually has some very useful material on matters to do with Russia for those of us with no knowledge of the language -- headlined
'Contemporary Russian Thinkers Series -- Part I -- Renowned Russian Academic Sergey Karaganov On Russia And Democracy.'
Its subject, who I remember well from the days when he was very much one of the 'new thinkers', linked to it on his own website,
clearly pleased at what he saw as an accurate and informed discussion of his ideas.
There is an obvious risk of succumbing to facetiousness, but sometimes what one thinks are essential features of an argument
can be best brought out at the risk of caricaturing it.
It seems to me that some of the central themes of Karaganov's writing over the past few years -- doubly interesting, because
his attacks on conventional Western orthodoxies are very far from silly, and because he is a kind of 'panjandrum' of a significant
section of the Russian foreign policy élite -- may be illuminated in this way.
So, attempting to link his Russian concerns to British and American ones, some central contentions of his writings might be
put as follows:
'"Government of the people, by the people, for the people' looked a lovely idea, back in 1989. But if in practice "by the people"
means a choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, how can it be "for the people?"
'Moreover, it turned out that our "deplorables" were always right, against us 'intellectuals', in grasping that, with "Russophobes"
running Western policy, a "real democracy" would simply guarantee that we remained as impotent and humiliated as people like Brzezinski
clearly always wanted us to be.
'Our past, and our future, both in terms of alliances and appropriate social and political systems, are actually "Eurasian":
a 'hybrid' state, whose potential greatest advantage actually should be seen as successfully synthesising different inheritances.
'As the need for this kind of synthesis is a normal condition, with which most peoples have to reckon, this gives us a very
real potential advantage over people in the West, who, like the communists against whom I rebelled, believe that there is one
path along which all of humanity must -- and can -- go.'
At the risk of over-interpreting, I might add the following conclusion:
'Of course, precisely what this analysis does not mean is that we are anti-European -- simply that we cannot simply come to
Europe, Europe come some way to meet us.
'Given time, Helmut Schmidt's fellow countrymen, as also de Gaulle's, may very well realise that their future does not lie
in an alliance with a coalition of people like Brzezinski and traditional "Russophobes" from the "Anglosphere".
'And likewise, it does not lie with the kind of messianic universalist "liberalism" -- and, in relation to some of the SJC
and LGBT obsessions, one might say "liberalism gone bonkers" -- which Putin criticized in his interview with the "Financial Times"
back in June.
An obvious possibility implicit in the argument is that, if indeed the continental Europeans see sense, then the coalition
of traditional 'Anglophobes' and the 'insulted and injured' or the 'borderlands' may find itself marginalized, and indeed, on
the 'dustbin of history' to which Trotsky once referred.
Of course, I have no claims to be a Russianist, and my reading of Karaganov may be quite wrong.
But I do strongly believe that very superficial readings of what was happening when I was working in the 'Analysis' office,
back in 1988-9, have done an immense disservice alike to Britain and the United States.
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding
of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's
loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He
dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do
many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding
Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I
argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
David, Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. But the events of two days ago with Putin and Lavrov being personally
present at the unveiling of the monument to Evgenii Primakov in a front of Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs speaks, in fact
screams, volumes. You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as I type this and it means that the West "lost"
(quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose) Russia and it can be "thankful" for that to a so called Russia
Studies field in the West which was primarily shaped and then turned into the wasteland, in large part thanks to influx of East
European "scholars" and some "Russian" dissidents which achieved their objectives by drawing a caricature. They succeeded and
Russia had it with the West.
DH, appreciate your comment. Haven't read the MEMRI paper yet. Scanned the first page though.
Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. ... You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as
I type this and it means that the West "lost" (quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose)
Well, two things sticked out for me during Tumps reelection campain.
1) on the surface he stated, he wanted closer relations to Russia. Looked at more closely, as should be expected, maybe. They
were ambigous. If I may paraphrase it colloguially: I meet them and, believe me, if I don't get that beautiful deal, i'll be out
of the door the next second.
2) he promised to be enigmatic, compared to earlier American administrations. In other words, hard to read or to predict. Guess
one better is as dealmaker. But in the larger intelligence field? Enigmatic may well be a commonplace. No?
Otherwise, Andrei, I would appreciate your further elaboration on Karaganov as opportunist.
Andrei: Strzok and Pientka come from Galicia -- the westernmost portion of what is now Ukraine -- that was acquired by Empress
Maria Theresa in the mid - 18th century.
I have been curious about precisely where both Srzok and Pientka came from, but have not had time to do any serious searches.
What is the actual evidence that they have Galician origins?
And, if they do, what are these?
I would of course automatically tend to assume that Polish names mean that their origins are Polish.
But then, if this is so, why are they enthusiastically collaborating with 'Banderista' Ukrainians?
It has long been a belief of mine that one of Stalin's great mistakes was to attempt to incorporate Galicia into the empire
he was creating.
Had he returned it to Poland, the architects of the Volhynia massacres of Poles -- as also of the massacres of Jews in Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg
-- could have gone back to their old habits of assassinating Polish policemen.
I first picked up the Galician connection in an article by Scott Humor: " North America is a land run by Galician zombies "
-- published by The Saker on July 4, 2018. It seems that Galicians, especially those that arrived after WWII, migrate into security
positions such as ICE / FBI / NSA etc. It may have to do with a family history of work in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Regrettably, I am not from Eastern Europe and cannot help you further about the Bortnicks, the Gathkes, Buchtas, and so on.
"... 38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another 31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night. Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to scale back U.S. involvement overall. ..."
"... The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more support for negotiations and non-intervention: ..."
"... With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons ..."
"... There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they want. It is long past time that Washington started listening. ..."
he Eurasia Group Foundation's new survey of public
opinion on U.S. foreign policy finds that support for greater restraint continues to rise:
Americans favor a less aggressive foreign policy. The findings are consistent across a
number of foreign policy issues, and across generations and party lines.
The 2019 survey results show that most Americans support a more restrained foreign policy,
and it also shows an increase in that support since last year. There is very little support for
continuing the war in Afghanistan indefinitely, there is virtually no appetite for war with
Iran, and there is a decline in support for a hawkish sort of American exceptionalism. There is
still very little support for unilateral U.S. intervention for ostensibly humanitarian reasons,
and support for non-intervention has increased slightly:
In 2018, 45 percent of Americans chose restraint as their first choice. In 2019, that has
increased to 47 percent. Only 19 percent opt for a U.S.-led military response and 34 percent
favor a multilateral, UN-led approach to stop humanitarian abuses overseas.
38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another
31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of
Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that
there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night.
Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to
scale back U.S. involvement overall.
The report's working definition of American exceptionalism is a useful one: "American
exceptionalism is the belief that the foreign policy of the United States should be
unconstrained by the parochial interests or international rules which govern other countries."
This is not the only definition one might use, but it gets at the heart of what a lot of hawks
really mean when they use this phrase. While most Americans still say they subscribe to
American exceptionalism either because of what the U.S. represents or what it has done, there
is less support for these views than before. Among the youngest respondents (age 18-29), there
is now a clear majority that rejects this idea.
The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with
its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran
has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been
nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to
elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this
year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more
support for negotiations and non-intervention:
A strong majority of both Republicans and Democrats continue to seek a diplomatic
resolution involving either sanctions or the resumption of nuclear negotiations. This year,
there was an increase in the number of respondents across party lines who would want
negotiations to resume even if Iran is a nuclear power in the short term, and a bipartisan
increase in those who believe outright that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons to
defend itself. So while Republicans might be more likely than Democrats to believe Iran
threatens peace in the Middle East, voters in neither party are eager to take a belligerent
stand against it.
With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against
Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons, and it
isn't doing that. It may be that the failure of the "maximum pressure" campaign has also
weakened support for sanctions. Support for the sanctions option dropped by almost 10 points
overall and plunged by more than 20 points among Republicans. In 2018, respondents were evenly
split between war and sanctions on one side or negotiations and non-intervention on the other.
This year, support for diplomacy and non-intervention in response to this imaginary nuclear
weapons program has grown to make up almost 60% of the total. If most Americans favor diplomacy
and non-intervention in this improbable scenario, it is safe to assume that there is even more
support for those options with the real Iranian government that isn't pursuing nuclear
weapons.
There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and
avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant
constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right
now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they
want. It is long past time that Washington started listening.
"... She warned Republicans that legitimizing an unsubstantiated theory that Kyiv undertook a concerted campaign to interfere in the election – a claim the president pushed repeatedly for Ukraine to investigate – played into Russia's hands. ..."
"... "In the course of this investigation," Dr. Hill testified before the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment hearings, "I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests." ..."
"... government investigators examining secret records have found Manafort's name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr. Manafort's main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych. ..."
"... Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych's pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine's newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau . Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials. ..."
"... In addition, criminal prosecutors are investigating a group of offshore shell companies .. Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin. ..."
"... Mr. Manafort's involvement with moneyed interests in Russia and Ukraine had previously come to light. But as American relationships there become a rising issue in the presidential campaign – from Mr. Trump's favorable statements about Mr. Putin and his annexation of Crimea to the suspected Russian hacking of Democrats' emails – an examination of Mr. Manafort's activities offers new details of how he mixed politics and business out of public view and benefited from powerful interests now under scrutiny by the new government in Kiev. ..."
"... Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country. ..."
"... Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. ..."
"... President Petro Poroshenko's administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race .. ..."
"... But Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another's elections. ..."
"... While it's not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of the more damaging Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign – and certainly for Manafort – can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government. ..."
"... Needless to say, Fiona Hill is among the worst of the neocon warmongers, and has made a specialty of demonizing Russia and propagating over and over flat out lies about what happened in Kiev during 2014 and after. Thus, in one recent attack she claimed, ..."
"... "In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation's embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin's desire to rebuild a Russian empire." ..."
"... On April 26, 1954. The decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet transferring the Crimea Oblast from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR ..Taking into account the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR . ..."
"... NATO, with just 16 members in 1990, now includes 29 European states, with all of the expansion countries lying east of Germany. As this was unfolding, Russian leaders issued stern warnings about the consequences if America and the West sought to include in NATO either Ukraine or Georgia. Both are considered as fundamental to Russian security. ..."
"... True, many in western Ukraine have pushed for greater ties to the West and wanted their elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to respond favorably to Western financial blandishments. But Yanukovych, tilting toward Russia, eschewed NATO membership for Ukraine, renewed a long-term lease for the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, and gave official status to the Russian language. These actions eased tensions between Ukraine and Russia, but they inflamed Ukraine's internal politics. And when Yanukovych abandoned negotiations aimed at an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union in favor of greater economic ties to Russia, pro-Western Ukrainians, including far-right provocateurs, staged street protests that ultimately brought down Yanukovych's government. Victoria Nuland gleefully egged on the protesters. The deposed president fled to Russia. ..."
"... Nuland then set about determining who would be Ukraine's next prime minister, namely Arseniy Yatsenyuk. "Yats is our guy," she declared to U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. When Pyatt warned that many EU countries were uncomfortable with a Ukrainian coup, she shot back, "Fuck the EU." She then got her man Yats into the prime minister position, demonstrating the influence that enables US meddling in foreign countries. ..."
"... That's when Putin rushed back to Moscow from the Winter Olympic Games at Sochi to protect the more Russian-oriented areas of Ukraine (the so-called Donbass in the country's east and Crimea in the south) from being swallowed up in this new drama. He orchestrated a plebiscite in Crimea, which revealed strong sentiment for reunification with Russia (hardly the "sham referendum" described by Taylor) and sent significant military support to Donbass Ukrainians who didn't want to be pulled westward. ..."
"... The West and America have always been, and must remain, wary of Russia. Its position in the center of Eurasia – the global "heartland," in the view of the famous British geographic scholar Halford Mackinder – renders it always a potential threat. Its vulnerability to invasion stirs in Russian leaders an inevitable hunger for protective lands. Its national temperament seems to include a natural tendency towards authoritarianism. Any sound American foreign policy must keep these things in mind. ..."
"... But in the increasingly tense relationship between the Atlantic Alliance and Russia, the Alliance has been the more aggressive player – aggressive when it pushed for NATO's eastward expansion despite promises to the contrary from the highest levels of the US government; aggressive when it turned that policy into an even more provocative plan for the encirclement of Russia; aggressive when it dangled the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia; aggressive when it sought to lure Ukraine out of the Russian orbit with economic incentives; aggressive when it helped foster the street coup against a duly elected Ukrainian government; and aggressive in its continued refusal to appreciate or acknowledge Russia's legitimate geopolitical interests in its own neighborhood. ..."
"... George Kent and William B. Taylor Jr., in their testimony last week, personified this aggressive outlook, designed to squeeze Russia into a geopolitical corner and trample upon its regional interests in the name of Western universalism. If that outlook continues and leads to ever greater tensions with Russia, it can't end well. ..."
"... David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He's the author of three books, ..."
"... . He also is founder of David Stockman's Contra Corner and David Stockman's Bubble Finance Trader . ..."
It's beginning to seem like an assault by the Zulu army of American politics – they
just never stop coming.
We are referring to the Russophobic neocon Deep Staters who have trooped before Adam's
Schiff Show to pillory POTUS for daring to look into the Ukrainian stench that engulfs the
Imperial City – a rank odor that is owing to their own arrogant meddling in the the
internal affairs of that woebegone country.
This time it was Dr. Fiona Hill who sanctimoniously advised the House committee that there
is nothing to see on the Ukraine front that involved any legitimate matter of state; it was
just the Donald and his tinfoil hat chums jeopardizing the serious business of protecting the
national security by injecting electioneering into relations with Ukraine.
She warned Republicans that legitimizing an unsubstantiated theory that Kyiv undertook
a concerted campaign to interfere in the election – a claim the president pushed
repeatedly for Ukraine to investigate – played into Russia's hands.
"In the course of this investigation," Dr. Hill testified before the House Intelligence
Committee's impeachment hearings, "I would ask that you please not promote politically
driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests."
Folks, we are getting just plain sick and tired of this drumbeat of lies, misdirection and
smug condescension by Washington payrollers like Fiona Hill. No Ukrainian interference in the
2016 US election?
Exactly what hay wagon does she think we fell off from?
Or better still, ask Paul Manafort who will spend his golden years in the Big House owing
to an August 2016 leak to the New York Times about an alleged "black book"
which recorded payments he had received from his work as an advisor to the Ukrainian
political party of former president Yanakovych. As we have seen, the latter had been removed
from office by a Washington instigated coup in February 2014.
By its own admission, this story came from the Ukrainian government and the purpose was
clear as a bell: Namely, to undermine the Trump presidential campaign and force Manafort out
of his months-old role as campaign chairman – a role that had finally brought some
professional management to the Donald's helter-skelter campaign for the nation's highest
office.
In the event, this well-timed bombshell worked, and in short order Manafort resigned,
leaving the disheveled Trump campaign in the lurch:
government investigators examining secret records have found Manafort's name, as well
as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was
used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr.
Manafort's main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr.
Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych's pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012,
according to Ukraine's newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau . Investigators
assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients
also included election officials.
In addition, criminal prosecutors are investigating a group of offshore shell companies
.. Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million
deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort
and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Manafort's involvement with moneyed interests in Russia and Ukraine had previously
come to light. But as American relationships there become a rising issue in the presidential
campaign – from Mr. Trump's favorable statements about Mr. Putin and his annexation
of Crimea to the suspected Russian hacking of Democrats' emails – an examination of
Mr. Manafort's activities offers new details of how he mixed politics and business out of
public view and benefited from powerful interests now under scrutiny by the new government in
Kiev.
The bolded lines in the NYT story above tell you exactly where this was coming
from. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau had been set up by an outfit called "AntAC", which
was jointly funded by George Soros and the Obama State Department. And there can be little
doubt that the Donald's accurate view at the time – that Crimea's reunification with
Mother Russia after a 60 year hiatus which had been ordered by the former Soviet Union's
Presidium – was unwelcome in Kiev and among the Washington puppeteers who had put it in
power.
For want of doubt that the Poroshenko government was in the tank for Hillary Clinton, the
liberal rag called Politico spilled the beans a few months later. In a January
11, 2017 story it revealed that the Ukrainian government had pulled out all the stops
attempting to help Clinton, whose protégés at the State Department had been the
masterminds of the coup which put them in office. Thus, Politico concluded,
Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by
officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by
publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a
top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to
back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information
on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
President Petro Poroshenko's administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in
Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race ..
But Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the
race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from
engaging in one another's elections.
While it's not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between
governments and reporters, one of the more damaging Russia-related stories for the Trump
campaign – and certainly for Manafort – can be traced more directly to the
Ukrainian government.
Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency – and publicized
by a parliamentarian – appeared to show $12.7 million in cash payments that were
earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president,
Yanukovych.
The New York Times , in the August story revealing the ledgers'
existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were "a focus" of an
investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the
FBI was pursuing an overlapping inquiry.
Yet Fiona Hill sat before a House committee and under oath insisted that all of the above
was a Trumpian conspiracy theory, thereby reminding us that the neocon Russophobes are so
unhinged that they are prepared to lie at the drop of a hat to keep their false narrative
about the Russian Threat and Putin's "invasion" of Ukraine alive.
Needless to say, Fiona Hill is among the worst of the neocon warmongers, and has made a
specialty of demonizing Russia and propagating over and over flat out lies about what
happened in Kiev during 2014 and after. Thus, in one recent attack she claimed,
Russia today poses a greater foreign policy and security challenge to the United States
and its Western allies than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Its annexation of
Crimea, war in Ukraine's Donbas region, and military intervention in Syria have upended
Western calculations from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Russia's intervention in Syria,
in particular, is a stark reminder that Russia is a multi-regional power ..
There is not a single true assertion in that quotation, of course, but we cite it for a
very particular reason. Shifty Schiff & his impeachment tribunal have brought in Hill
– and Lt. Colonel Vindman, Ambassador Taylor, George Kent and Tim Morrison previously
– in order to created an echo chamber.
That's right. The Dems are parroting the neocon lies – whether they believe them or
not – in order to propagate the impression that the Donald is undermining national
security in his effort to take a different posture on Russia and Ukraine, and is actually
bordering on treason.
Thus, Adam Schiff repeated the false neocon narrative virtually word for word at the opening
of the public hearings:
"In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation's
embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin's desire to rebuild a Russian
empire."
That's pure rubbish. It's based on the Big Lie that the overwhelming vote of the Russian
population of Crimea in March 2014 was done at the gun point of the Russian Army. And that
event, in turn, is the lynch-pin of the hoary canard that Putin is seeking to rebuild the
Soviet Empire.
So it is necessary to review the truth once again about how Russian Crimea had been
temporarily appended to the Ukrainian SSR during Soviet times.
The allegedly "occupied" territory of Crimea, in fact, was actually purchased from the
Ottomans by Catherine the Great in 1783, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of the
Russian Czars for a warm-water port. Over the ages Sevastopol then emerged as a great naval
base at the strategic tip of the Crimean peninsula, where it became home to the mighty Black
Sea Fleet of the Czars and then the Soviet Union, too.
For the next 171 years Crimea was an integral part of Russia (until 1954). That span
exceeds the 170 years that have elapsed since California was annexed by a similar thrust of
"Manifest Destiny" on this continent, thereby providing, incidentally, the United States Navy
with its own warm-water port in San Diego.
While no foreign forces subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most definitely
not Ukrainian and Polish rifles, artillery and blood which famously annihilated The Charge Of
The Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in 1854; they were Russians defending the
homeland from Turks, French and Brits.
And the portrait of the Russian "hero" hanging in Putin's office is that of Czar Nicholas
I – whose brutal 30-year reign brought the Russian Empire to its historical zenith. Yet
despite his cruelty, Nicholas I is revered in Russian hagiography as the defender of Crimea,
even as he lost the 1850s war to the Ottomans and Europeans.
At the end of the day, security of its historic port in Crimea is Russia's Red Line, not
Washington's. Unlike today's feather-headed Washington pols, even the enfeebled Franklin
Roosevelt at least knew that he was in Soviet Russia when he made port in the Crimean
city of Yalta in February 1945.
Maneuvering to cement his control of the Kremlin in the intrigue-ridden struggle for
succession after Stalin's death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev allegedly spent 15
minutes reviewing his "gift" of Crimea to his subalterns in Kiev.
As it happened, therefore, Crimea became part of the Ukraine only by writ of one of the
most vicious and reprehensible states in human history – the former Soviet Union:
On April 26, 1954. The decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet
transferring the Crimea Oblast from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian
SSR ..Taking into account the integral character of the economy, the territorial
proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the
Ukrainian SSR .
That's right. Washington's hypocritical and tendentious accusations against Russia's
re-absorption of Crimea imply that the dead-hand of the Soviet presidium must be defended at
all costs – as if the security of North Dakota depended upon it!
In fact, the brouhaha about "returning" Crimea is a naked case of the hegemonic arrogance
that has overtaken Imperial Washington since the 1991 Soviet demise.
After all, during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the
"captive nation" of Ukraine – with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in
1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990's when a financially desperate Ukraine
rented back Sevastopol and the strategic redoubts of the Crimea to an equally pauperized
Russia.
In short, in the era before we got our Pacific port in 1848, and even during the 170-year
interval since then, America's national security has depended not one whit on the status of
Russian-speaking Crimea. That the local population has now chosen fealty to the Grand Thief
in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble who have seized Kiev amounts to a giant: So what!
The truth is, when it comes to Ukraine there really isn't that much there, there. Its
boundaries have been morphing for centuries among the quarreling tribes, peoples, potentates,
Patriarchs and pretenders of a small region that is none of Washington's damn business..
Still, it was this final aggressive drive of Washington and NATO into the internal affairs
of Russia's historic neighbor and vassal, Ukraine, that largely accounts for the demonization
of Putin. Likewise, it is virtually the entire source of the false claim that Russia has
aggressive, expansionist designs on the former Warsaw Pact states in the Baltics, Poland and
beyond.
The latter is a nonsensical fabrication. In fact, it was the neocon meddlers from
Washington who crushed Ukraine's last semblance of civil governance when they enabled
ultra-nationalists and crypto-Nazis to gain government positions after the February 2014
putsch.
As we indicated above, in one fell swoop that inexcusable stupidity reopened Ukraine's
blood-soaked modern history. The latter incepted with Stalin's re-population of the eastern
Donbas region with "reliable" Russian workers after his genocidal liquidation of the kulaks
in the early 1930s.
It was subsequently exacerbated by the large-scale collaboration by Ukrainian nationalists
in the west with the Nazi Wehrmacht as it laid waste to Poles, Jews, gypsies and other
"undesirables" on its way to Stalingrad in 1942-43. Thereafter followed an equal and opposite
spree of barbaric revenge as the victorious Red Army marched back through Ukraine on its way
to Berlin.
So it may be fairly asked. What beltway lame brains did not chance to understand that
Washington's triggering of "regime change" in Kiev would reopen this entire bloody history of
sectarian and political strife?
Moreover, once they had opened Pandora's box, why was it so hard to see that an outright
partition of Ukraine with autonomy for the Donbas and Crimea, or even accession to the
Russian state from which these communities had originated, would have been a perfectly
reasonable resolution?
Certainly that would have been far preferable to dragging all of Europe into the lunacy of
the current anti-Putin sanctions and embroiling the Ukrainian factions in a suicidal civil
war. The alleged Russian threat to Europe, therefore, was manufactured in Imperial
Washington, not the Kremlin.
In fact, in 1989 and 1990, the George H. W. Bush administration assured Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev that if he accepted German unification, the West would not seek to exploit
the situation through any eastward expansion – not even by "one inch," as
then-secretary of state James Baker assured Gorbachev. But Bill Clinton reneged on that
commitment, moving to expand NATO on an eastward path that eventually led right up to the
Russian border.
So Robert Merry said it well in his excellent piece on the entire neocon Ukraine Scam that
is being paraded before the Schiff Show.
That is, what is being desperately defended on Capitol Hill is not the rule of law,
national security or fidelity to the Constitution of the United States., but a giant Neocon
Lie that is needed to keep the Empire in business, and the world moving ever closer to an
utterly unnecessary Cold War 2.0 between nation's each pointing enough nuclear warheads at
the other to destroy the planet.
NATO, with just 16 members in 1990, now includes 29 European states, with all of the
expansion countries lying east of Germany. As this was unfolding, Russian leaders issued
stern warnings about the consequences if America and the West sought to include in NATO
either Ukraine or Georgia. Both are considered as fundamental to Russian security.
True, many in western Ukraine have pushed for greater ties to the West and wanted their
elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to respond favorably to Western financial
blandishments. But Yanukovych, tilting toward Russia, eschewed NATO membership for Ukraine,
renewed a long-term lease for the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, and gave official
status to the Russian language. These actions eased tensions between Ukraine and Russia, but
they inflamed Ukraine's internal politics. And when Yanukovych abandoned negotiations aimed
at an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union in favor of greater
economic ties to Russia, pro-Western Ukrainians, including far-right provocateurs, staged
street protests that ultimately brought down Yanukovych's government. Victoria Nuland
gleefully egged on the protesters. The deposed president fled to Russia.
Nuland then set about determining who would be Ukraine's next prime minister, namely
Arseniy Yatsenyuk. "Yats is our guy," she declared to U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey
Pyatt. When Pyatt warned that many EU countries were uncomfortable with a Ukrainian coup, she
shot back, "Fuck the EU." She then got her man Yats into the prime minister position,
demonstrating the influence that enables US meddling in foreign countries.
That's when Putin rushed back to Moscow from the Winter Olympic Games at Sochi to
protect the more Russian-oriented areas of Ukraine (the so-called Donbass in the country's
east and Crimea in the south) from being swallowed up in this new drama. He orchestrated a
plebiscite in Crimea, which revealed strong sentiment for reunification with Russia (hardly
the "sham referendum" described by Taylor) and sent significant military support to Donbass
Ukrainians who didn't want to be pulled westward.
The West and America have always been, and must remain, wary of Russia. Its position in
the center of Eurasia – the global "heartland," in the view of the famous British
geographic scholar Halford Mackinder – renders it always a potential threat. Its
vulnerability to invasion stirs in Russian leaders an inevitable hunger for protective lands.
Its national temperament seems to include a natural tendency towards authoritarianism. Any
sound American foreign policy must keep these things in mind.
But in the increasingly tense relationship between the Atlantic Alliance and Russia,
the Alliance has been the more aggressive player – aggressive when it pushed for NATO's
eastward expansion despite promises to the contrary from the highest levels of the US
government; aggressive when it turned that policy into an even more provocative plan for the
encirclement of Russia; aggressive when it dangled the prospect of NATO membership for
Ukraine and Georgia; aggressive when it sought to lure Ukraine out of the Russian orbit with
economic incentives; aggressive when it helped foster the street coup against a duly elected
Ukrainian government; and aggressive in its continued refusal to appreciate or acknowledge
Russia's legitimate geopolitical interests in its own neighborhood.
George Kent and William B. Taylor Jr., in their testimony last week, personified this
aggressive outlook, designed to squeeze Russia into a geopolitical corner and trample upon
its regional interests in the name of Western universalism. If that outlook continues and
leads to ever greater tensions with Russia, it can't end well.
"... America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the 1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted. ..."
"... Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent, sensitive type would be concerned by it. ..."
"... America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over" as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened. ..."
"... Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington. ..."
"... Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even insist they do so. ..."
The motives for so many Western spies serving the Soviet Union – and in the 1940s and
1950s the Soviets had the best "humint" on earth – were rather idealistic. This was
largely true for the Cambridge Circle in Britain. They were concerned that America was going
to "lord it over" the Russians and everyone else.
America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the
1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted.
Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined
towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of
major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent,
sensitive type would be concerned by it.
You certainly did not have to be a communist to feel that way, but being one assisted with
access to important Soviet contacts. They sought you out.
America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable
position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over"
as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened.
It made little secret of its desire to keep such a monopoly, so brilliant people like
Oppenheimer would be well aware of something they might well regard as ominous.
Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the
Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there
were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington.
A hugely important general like MacArthur was unblinkingly ready in 1950 to use atomic
weapons in the Korean War to destroy North Korea's connections with China.
I read several major biographies of Oppenheimer, and there is little to nothing concerning
Soviet intelligence work. When I came across the Sudoplatov book with its straightforward
declaration of Oppenheimer's assistance, it was difficult to know how to weigh the claim.
Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even
insist they do so.
Judging by what is suggested here, if Oppenheimer did help, it was in subtle ways like
letting Klaus Fuchs, a fellow scientist and a rather distinguished one (but a Soviet spy),
look at certain papers. But the scientific community always has some considerable tendency to
share information, a tendency having nothing to do with spying.
In general, it should be understood, that Oppenheimer, despite all his brilliance, was a
rather disturbed man all his life. Quite early on, as just one example, he attempted to
poison someone he did not like. Only pure luck prevented the man's eating a lethally-laced
apple. There were other disturbing behaviors too.
Later they believed that equality of superpower status for the Soviet Union would
contribute to world peace.
How dumb were these "scientists". Everyone knows that once Soviet Union fell, peace and
freedom and democracy are flowering all over the world and United States are not waging any
wars anymore.
Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive
training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing
Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a
few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive
training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing
Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a
few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
"... "Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount of influence over both parties." ..."
"... She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so serious about what's at stake here." ..."
"... Democratic presidential primary debate, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, in Atlanta, via the AP. ..."
In a rare moment with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi
Gabbard explained why the leading figures in her party are war hawks. Far from days of the
Democrats feigning to have any semblance of an 'anti-war' platform (only convenient for Liberal
activism during the Bush years, but fizzling out under Obama), today's party attempts to
out-hawk Republicans at every turn.
"I'm looking at the Democratic establishment figures," Matthews introduced, "people I
normally like. John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton. You go down the list. They all supported
the war in Iraq. Why were they hawks? " (Though we might ask, what do you mean, "
were ?"). "Why so many Democrats with a party that's not hawkish, why are so many of
their leaders hawks?" Matthews reiterated.
In the segment, Matthews heaps rare praise on Tulsi for being "out there all alone tonight
fighting against the neocons."
"Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy
establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount
of influence over both parties."
She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors
have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have
people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical
decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so
serious about what's at stake here."
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The interview happened immediately after this week's fifth Democratic debate Wednesday night
in Atlanta, and after pundits have continued to complain that Gabbard is a 'single issue
candidate'.
However, is there any candidate in her party or in the GOP saying these things?
We find ourselves in a rare moment of agreement with MSNBC's Matthews: she is "out there all
alone tonight fighting against the neocons." Tags Politics
"... The "marginal violence" campaign of the "pro-democratic" students has failed to win more support for them. Regular Hongkongers are increasingly willing to take a stand against further provocations: ..."
"... Ten days ago the core of the black clad rioters began to paralyze Hong Kong's traffic during regular workdays. They ransacked nearly every metro stations and barricaded large thoroughfares and tunnels. Schools were closed, businesses and workers were severely harmed. ..."
"... One 70 year old street cleaner was killed when he was hit by a stone thrown by the rioters against civilians who tried to remove a barricade. A 57 year old man was drenched with gasoline and set alight after he verbally disagreed with the rioter's ransacking of a metro station. A policeman was shot with an arrow. ..."
"... Last Sunday the police surrounded the PolyU and let no one leave. Those who wanted out were either arrested or, when under 18, identified and handed to their parents. There were several violent battles when the rioters attempted to break through the police cordon but only a few escaped. ..."
"... Today there are still some 30 rioter holed up in a PolyU building. The police are waiting them out. They said that they had made more than a thousand arrests. The university is ransacked and there was significant battle damage . The rioters again left thousands of Molotov cocktails and other weapons behind. ..."
"... Had China moved troops to Hong Kong, or allowed more force to be used against the protesters, the U.S. would have used that to press its allies to put strong sanctions on China. The protesters' violence was designed to achieve that outcome. The plan was part of the larger U.S. strategy of decoupling from China . ..."
"... Here's a handy piece of advice for non-American nations around the world: Whenever some American starts running its mouth about crusading for Freedom, Democracy, Human Rights, or similar propaganda slogans, get ready to defend your nation. These slogans are merely the American version of the White Man's Burden and Western Civilizing Mission. ..."
"... The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion since they began in 2001. That total is $2 trillion more than all federal government spending during the recently completed fiscal year. The report, from Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, also finds that more than 801,000 people have died as a direct result of fighting. ..."
"... The Grayzone piece linked above misses the real man behind the lobbying. Andrew Duncan who is a main sponsor of Senator Marco Rubio who is the main promoter on the hill for "activist" and U.S. darling Joshua Wong. Duncan is also one of the producers (financiers) of a film about Wong. ..."
"... In Hong Kong, it looks like university students were enthused to join in. ..."
"... The cognitive dissonance has been overwhelming these past months. "Pro-democracy protesters" who use black bloc tactics of arson and vandalism ..."
"... . Add a dollop of uninformed virtue-signalling from the usual clueless western cheerleaders, and it has been a festival of delusion which somehow ends with the image of a petrol-bomb-wielding black bloc protester as the new face of "freedom" (as seen on twitter). ..."
"... Recall that early media reports said there were 1.7 million protesters "according to the organiser's estimates". Once you remember that, then every time you hear millions is a hint to look up the Police estimate (150k) and estimates of maximum numbers in space available - also 150k or thereabouts. ..."
"... People whose ultimate goal is a comfortable life in a the USA which best meets their needs without necessarily concerning themselves with the needs of everybody else, are incredibly vulnerable once arrested. ..."
"... Usually it takes a few years before a resistance movement becomes too infiltrated to fulfill its objectives (eg the IRA), if the PRC has managed to do this to a movement which initially had so much popular support, within the space of a couple of months, this a massive win. ..."
"... I can only try to imagine what the Chinese police do to the Filipino mercenaries who make up the core of the US sponsored "protesters" with Molotovs when they catch them. ..."
"... The Chinese are not really as smart as we thought, are they, or such riots would have never happened (where were the parents of all these kids used by the US organizers?). But credit goes to the smart Chinese leadership for sitting out all the violence of the US-sponsored "peaceful protests" and thus preventing the organizers from involving the rest of the West in the war on China. The organizers will not give up, will try another day another way. ..."
"... Many young Chinese rioters burned their own jobs with their Molotovs , the typical achievement of the professional ideologues - getting the young people to do damaging things to themselves. ..."
"... Considering the now ridiculously low, and increasingly lower, share of Hong Kong in China's economy, wrecking Hong Kong economy like it just happened was a Pyrrhic move from the protesters. Hurting HK's economy doesn't hurt China much, actually, it might just boost a little bit more mainland China and weaken the independent-minded HK a bit more. ..."
"... It's funny, in a silly kind of way, that the US Congress has decided to "own" the Hong Kong riots by recognising them as 'legitimate'. The protesters shot themselves in the foot when they rejected Carrie Lam's offer to convene a summit at which protest reps and HK Govt reps could negotiate their differences - without pre-conditions. ..."
"... hong kong is just a small piece of the puzzle, a tiny bit of the apple in the big strudel which is the US hurry hurry rush, particularly since obama and clinton, to 'pivot to Asia' and try to 'contain' once again a rising superpower, China. ..."
The U.S. sponsored riots in Hong Kong are mostly over. They were sustained much longer than
we had expected .
The "marginal violence" campaign of the "pro-democratic" students has
failed to win more support for them. Regular Hongkongers are increasingly willing to
take a stand against further provocations:
Demonstrators gathered at about 12.30pm on a bridge outside Exchange Square, which houses
Hong Kong's stock exchange in the city's financial heartland, in another round of lunchtime
protests that have been staged most days over the past two weeks.
Scuffles broke out after a pro-police group of about 50 people showed up about an hour
later, but police arrived soon after to clear the area.
During at least two altercations between some members of each group, an anti-government
contingent yelled "go back to China" at their adversaries, and one of their number kicked a
woman walking towards the smaller group.
Ten days ago the core of the black clad rioters began to paralyze Hong Kong's traffic during
regular workdays. They ransacked nearly every metro stations and barricaded large thoroughfares
and tunnels. Schools were closed, businesses and workers were severely harmed.
One 70 year old street cleaner was killed when he was hit by a stone thrown by the rioters
against civilians who tried to remove a barricade. A 57 year old man was drenched with gasoline
and set alight after he verbally disagreed with the rioter's ransacking of a metro station. A
policeman was shot with an arrow.
The rioters occupied the Chinese University and the Polytechnic University (PolyU) which are
next to large streets and the important Cross-Harbor-Tunnel. Using the universities as logistic
bases and fortifications they managed to keep many roads closed throughout day and night. After
some negotiations with the president of the Chinese University the rioters evacuated from there
while
leaving some 8,000 petrol bombs behind . They concentrated in the PolyU next to the
Cross-Harbor-Tunnel.
Last Sunday the police surrounded the PolyU and let no one leave. Those who wanted out were
either arrested or, when under 18, identified and handed to their parents. There were several
violent battles when the rioters attempted to break through the police cordon but only a few
escaped.
After a few days most of those inside PolyU surrendered to the police.
Today there are still
some 30 rioter holed up in a PolyU building. The police are waiting them out. They said
that they had made more than a thousand arrests. The university is ransacked and there was
significant
battle damage . The rioters again left thousands of Molotov cocktails and other weapons
behind.
The blockage of the city traffic and the increasing damage caused by rioter vandalism has
alienated even those who earlier supported them. As the police now have most of the core
rioters under arrest there is little chance that such violent protests will continue.
On Sunday there will be citywide district council elections in Hong Kong. China had pushed
for the elections to go forward under all circumstances. Riot police will guard all polling
stations.
Weeks ago the "pro-dem" candidates, who supported the rioters, were still poised to win more
seats than they had held before the protests. But they now fear that the general public will
punish them for the mayhem they have caused and will
choose establishment candidates :
Chinese University political scientist Ivan Choy Chi-keung said while the turnout could set
another record, the overall situation was more unpredictable than before.
"The pan-democrats could have won a landslide victory if the elections had been held in
the summer, when the protests erupted," Choy said. "But after the recent clashes at two
universities, undecided voters may be worried about public order and be discouraged from
voting.
He was referring to fiery battles protesters fought with police outside Chinese University
on November 12, followed by more confrontations outside Polytechnic University last week.
"It will be difficult for the camp to win more than half of the seats, as some originally
envisaged," Choy said.
The Hong Kong government has conceded none of the protesters' "five demands". The only thing
that the protesters have won is the passing of
legislation by the U.S. Congress :
The House of Representatives on Wednesday followed the lead of the Senate in overwhelmingly
approving two pieces of legislation: The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which
requires the president to annually review the favourable trading status that the US gives to
Hong Kong, threatening to revoke it and impose penalties against officials if freedoms are
determined to have been quashed; and the Protect Hong Kong Act, which will block the sale of
tear gas and other policing items.
The former, although largely symbolic, could alter Washington's relationship with Hong
Kong and Beijing.
US President Donald Trump has a straightforward choice on legislation passed on to him by
the United States Congress supporting the protests that have engulfed Hong Kong –
approve or veto. Coming amid tough bargaining on his trade war with China, he may be tempted
to make his decision part of the negotiations.
...
But Beijing sees such measures as striking at the heart of Chinese sovereignty. Radical
protesters could be spurred to greater violence. Unspecified countermeasures are promised
should Trump give his approval.
...
But the trade war, violence and legislation have damaged business sentiment in Hong Kong.
Approval or not, pessimism and uncertainty have already been deepened. There can be no
winners.
Trump wants the trade deal with China and will therefore likely
veto the bill :
Speaking on the "Fox & Friends" morning program, the president said that he was balancing
competing priorities in the U.S.-China relationship.
"We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I'm also standing with President Xi [Jinping], he's
a friend of mine. He's an incredible guy, but we have to stand I'd like to see them work it
out, okay?" the president said. "I stand with freedom, I stand with all of the things that I
want to do, but we are also in the process of making one of the largest trade deals in
history. And if we could do that, it would be great."
A veto would only have a temporary impact as the law has passed the House and Senate by veto
proof majorities.
The idea behind the protests and the rioters In Hong Kong was all along to provoke another
Tian An Men incident . This has been quite obvious since the start of the protest. It now
gets publicly acknowledged:
"Some of the protesters seem to have an objective to provoke a military confrontation with
China. They seem to want a Tiananmen Square outcome as success."
Fmr Foreign Sec @Jeremy_Hunt says he is "concerned with the tactics" with some of
#HongKong's protesters
Had China moved troops to Hong Kong, or allowed more force to be used against the
protesters, the U.S. would have used that to press its allies to put strong sanctions on China.
The protesters' violence was designed to achieve that outcome. The plan was part of the larger
U.S. strategy of
decoupling from China .
The plan failed because China was too smart to give the U.S. what it wanted. Now it is Trump
who is under pressure. He needs the trade deal with China because the current trade war is
doing harm to the U.S. economy and endangers his reelection.
Which is probably the real reason why the protests have died down.
Posted by b on November 22, 2019 at 19:02 UTC | Permalink
Here's a handy piece of advice for non-American nations around the world:
Whenever some American starts running its mouth about crusading for Freedom, Democracy,
Human Rights, or similar propaganda slogans, get ready to defend your nation. These slogans are merely the American version of the White Man's Burden and Western
Civilizing Mission.
They are a clear and present threat that the American predator is slouching towards
you.
Interesting that in The Atlantic magazine article B links to (at "That was a mistake"), the
writer Suzanne Sataline followed a rioter all the way through PolyU without saying why she
had to do so. Had she been found by police, she would surely have been arrested and charged
with assisting in terrorist-styled activities.
Next time The Atlantic sends her on an overseas assignment, perhaps somewhere in the
Middle East, Africa or Latin America, she might not be so lucky. Somehow the fate of Marie
Colvin in Syria or Lebanon comes to mind. I would not be surprised though if Sataline has
never heard of Colvin.
The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $6.4
trillion since they began in 2001.
That total is $2 trillion more than all federal government spending during the recently
completed fiscal year. The report, from Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University,
also finds that more than 801,000 people have died as a direct result of fighting.
"I think China needs to stop interfering in the internal affairs of the United States because
our treatment of Hong Kong is an internal matter," says @MarcoRubio.
While claiming to fight for "self-determination," Hong Kong opposition leaders are
collaborating with regime-change neoconservatives in Washington to "preserve the US's own
political and economic interests." A new DC lobbying front has become their base of
operations.
The Grayzone piece linked above misses the real man behind the lobbying. Andrew Duncan who
is a main sponsor of Senator Marco Rubio who is the main promoter on the hill for "activist"
and U.S. darling Joshua Wong. Duncan is also
one of the producers (financiers) of a film about Wong.
An election watchdog organization filed a complaint Friday with the Federal Election
Commission over a $500,000 donation to a super political action committee aiding Marco
Rubio from a mystery firm headed by a New York investor.
...
The complaint from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, seeks
an investigation into IGX LLC for masking the donation and to determine whether the
Conservative Solutions PAC was aware of the origins of the contribution. The actual donor,
Andrew Duncan, of Brooklyn, New York, acknowledged to the Associated Press earlier this
month that he had routed his contribution through IGX, a business entity registered last
year in Delaware.
If the violence in the demonstrations is being pushed by the US, as suggested by b (and I
agree), it doesn't matter very much how popular the demos are. Apart from the need not to
look absurdly out of tune.
This is not the first time that I've compared the Hong Kong demos to the Gilets Jaunes in
France. The model is identical. Groups separate from the popular demonstrations commit
violence; no-one knows who they are. Black-masked unknown individuals.
In Hong Kong, it looks like university students were enthused to join in.
In Paris we had it again last Saturday, but it won't last, as most of the Gilets Jaunes
are against the violence. We ran into a group that night; they didn't seem very violent, more
like copycats. Their more violent fellows had just destroyed a war monument.
The French always deny that it could be a foreign intervention, but it's so similar to
what has happened in Hong Kong.
The cognitive dissonance has been overwhelming these past months. "Pro-democracy protesters"
who use black bloc tactics of arson and vandalism.
"Students yearning for freedom" who
organize Molotov cocktail factories. Complaints of excessive "police brutality" when by
objective international standards the police were remarkably constrained. "Hong Kong is a
repressive police state" says Joshua Wong, and yet it is consistently near the top of the
list in the Cato Institute world freedom index.
The protesters are "fighting for democracy"
even though Hong Kong is democratic, and demand a "universal suffrage" that in practice very
few jurisdictions, least of all their beloved US/UK, enjoy. Add a dollop of uninformed
virtue-signalling from the usual clueless western cheerleaders, and it has been a festival of
delusion which somehow ends with the image of a petrol-bomb-wielding black bloc protester as
the new face of "freedom" (as seen on twitter).
I disagree. Gillets Jaunes protest are throughout the country. And GJ are not trying to maintain any
sort of special status like HK protesters. GJ have not been violent. Its those that are trying to discredit the GJ that are
violent.!!
The author (b) writes: "Had China moved troops to Hong Kong, or allowed more force to be used
against the protesters, the U.S. would have used that to press its allies to put strong
sanctions on China."
Ironically, China already moved its troops to the street of Hong Kong this week - to help
to clean the street and repair the damages done by the rioters! I know it is anti-climax, and a big let down for all the Chinese haters like Marco Rubio,
Nancy Pelosi, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon and many others.
The funny thing is that a little bit of effort and the whole thing becomes apparent even
through the traditional media reports. Recall that early media reports said there were 1.7
million protesters "according to the organiser's estimates". Once you remember that, then
every time you hear millions is a hint to look up the Police estimate (150k) and estimates of
maximum numbers in space available - also 150k or thereabouts.
More stories hint of high protester numbers but don't mention numbers -- so check the
accompanying pictures and videos - we a few thousand (ie well down on ever factual early
numbers) and more recently just a few hundred. Police violence - yet every picture or video
show large numbers of police acting very very peaceably (compare Paris). HK democracy - yet
all the pictures recently have been exclusively of masked blackshirts and if you dig deep
most of the violence has been blackshirt on passers by.
There must be picture editors who are stunned by the reports they run. And obviously the story they are all looking for is the China overreaction that was never
going to happen.
The whole thing runs in parallel with the obvious Ujghur 1 million in prison lie (it would
be equivalent to every male aged 16-29) where the only witnesses to speak to western
journalists have been fed to the press in Istanbul. We all know that Chinese muslims in
Istanbul are going to or already in ISIS. James Le Mesurier doing a little extra press
feeding in his spare time.
in 1997, the year Great Britain consumed her concession of Hong Kong, the colony, now
mainland proper, was counting for 40% of China´s GDP. today hardly 2%. a major factor
of the unrest.
"They seem to want a Tiananmen Square outcome as success."
The Tiananmen Square outcome was–media accounts to the contrary –- that the kids
all left the square safely by 7:20 am, just as all the HK demonstrators are unharmed.
There was a riot led by professional thugs elsewhere in Beijing, in Chang'An
Avenue, but that was a different matter entirely and one with an interesting sequel. The
leader of that riot was exfiltrated to the UK by MI6 and subsequently convicted of robbing
and murdering an elderly Londoner. Sweet.
The decision to crowd hundreds of members of the hard core into a siege situation at PolyU is
more than a mistake it will be catastrophic for a movement which is largely peopled by
members of the bourgeoisie. Although if it follows the form of many other similar resistance efforts it is likely that any
proletariat members participating found themselves on the front lines during confrontation
because they had the balls to be there once push came to a crack on the melon with a baton.
People whose ultimate goal is a comfortable life in a the USA which best meets their needs
without necessarily concerning themselves with the needs of everybody else, are incredibly
vulnerable once arrested.
The best outcome for PRC will be a situation where they have intelligence of what moves
resistance may be planning in the future, combined with some ability to control the
resistance.
Now that the most violent of the protesters have stuffed themselves into one spot in a way
that makes being arrested as they leave the scene they vandalised a reasonable act by police
in the eyes of Hongkong citizens and, for that matter, the world, we can be certain many of
the arrestees will be 'turned' by the police and intelligence services.
As for that essential ingredient of any resistance movement, solidarity, the atlantic
article b linked to denigrates many of those still stuck inside PolyU as "well-meaning,
unlucky naifs who didn't know the geography and didn't have the guile or foresight to
negotiate, bargain, lie, or sneak their way out." that elitist summation of the
courageous is likely to have been engendered in the writer by her sources (prolly introduced
by amerikan 'friends') who did escape.
Smart proletarian fighters abandoned inside PolyU and desperate bourgeois resisters now
facing the disappointment of their families caused by the realisation that their actions have
made their future prospects a lot grimmer will cause many to rationalise that they were
betrayed & led up the garden path by a selfish leadership. In those circs helping the
police is less a betrayal than a reasonable reaction to movement indifference towards them,
they will decide.
Perhaps this was a definite police strategy from the start, utilizing some of the vandals
already arrested at earlier riots. That would mean that some of the escapees were not solely
agents of usuk, some were permitted to escape by the police so they wouldn't have to explain
away yet another arrest to their comrades.
Usually it takes a few years before a resistance movement becomes too infiltrated to
fulfill its objectives (eg the IRA), if the PRC has managed to do this to a movement which
initially had so much popular support, within the space of a couple of months, this a massive
win.
I can only try to imagine what the Chinese police do to the Filipino mercenaries who make up
the core of the US sponsored "protesters" with Molotovs when they catch them. I can certainly
understand why they are desperately trying to escape through the sewer pipes of the
University etc. Even the dumbest Hong-Kongers have finally cottoned it that they are the big
losers of this "democratic revolution".
The Chinese are not really as smart as we thought, are they, or such riots would have
never happened (where were the parents of all these kids used by the US organizers?). But
credit goes to the smart Chinese leadership for sitting out all the violence of the
US-sponsored "peaceful protests" and thus preventing the organizers from involving the rest
of the West in the war on China. The organizers will not give up, will try another day
another way.
But the Chinese authorities must study the Russian experience with
prevention , to avoid the huge economic losses. This is a big but Pyrrhic Chinese victory
over US. The Return on Investment to the riot organizers was not too bad, for couple tens of
million dollars they set back the Hong Kong economy by billions and 5-10 years.
Many young
Chinese rioters burned their own jobs with their Molotovs , the typical achievement of
the professional ideologues - getting the young people to do damaging things to
themselves.
@ Kiza in #39 who wrote
"
This is a big but Pyrrhic Chinese victory over US. The Return on Investment to the riot
organizers was not too bad, for couple tens of million dollars they set back the Hong Kong
economy by billions and 5-10 years. Many young Chinese rioters burned their own jobs with
their Molotovs, the typical achievement of the professional ideologues - getting the young
people to do damaging things to themselves.
"
Thanks for your thoughts.
China has won in two ways, IMO
1. It will speed the reintegration of HK into the China political economy because it further
destroyed the HK of British rule.
2. It is a wake up call to Taiwan about their reliance on and fealty to the West....what
benefits are there and at what cost?
I agree with Psychohistorian. Considering the now ridiculously low, and increasingly lower,
share of Hong Kong in China's economy, wrecking Hong Kong economy like it just happened was a
Pyrrhic move from the protesters. Hurting HK's economy doesn't hurt China much, actually, it
might just boost a little bit more mainland China and weaken the independent-minded HK a bit
more.
As long as the situation ends up returning to normal and things stay quiet afterwards,
I would nearly wonder if some Chinese agents didn't help create that mess in Hong Kong,
because Beijing surely doesn't need a booming HK with special status anymore.
I think your reasoning is far too complex, and I here in Australia, (a Serial Email-er to the
National Broadcaster "The ABC") emailed some months ago my impression the Government in
Beijing would sit on its hands and watch the show across the moat from Shenzhen 35 Klms away,
which it sees as the replacement for Hong Kong?
I don't think the Chinese have forgotten the Opium Wars and the arrogance of the Poms which
occupied Hong Kong from 1841 to 1997 with a short intermission in which the Japs took
residence. So I believe they just watched Hong Kong destroy itself, and didn't care who was
behind it and as a result would be in a far more powerful position when they expose the
British and the US for their part in this exercise.
There never was going to be a Tienanmen event as I predicted several months ago about which
the idiots in the ABC salivated and all sorts of stuff was written about the impending
"Invasion" of the "Democratic" Island where these over indulged brats had their
Hissy-Fit.
Hong Kong never in its History has ever had "Democracy" as it was a servile "Stateless
Outpost" dictated by Buckingham Palace via the "Foreign Office" and the Resident
Governor!
<<<<<<<<<<<< So suck it up!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I feel these terms "pro-dem" and "pan-democratic" in HK politics should not be allowed to
stand uncontested. Sure, the government in mainland China is not democratic (refreshingly, at
least it doesn't pretend to be).
But the Beijing-friendly parties in Hong Kong contest the
local elections under exactly the same (flawed) rules as every other party; so it seems to me
they're all equally democratic. Rather, the pan-dem (pandemic?!) bloc in Hong Kong is
pro-American -- that's the real difference.
It's already long, long ago that I noticed the same sleight of hand in Serbia, where MSM
conflated "democratic" with "pro-EU".
It's funny, in a silly kind of way, that the US Congress has decided to "own" the Hong Kong
riots by recognising them as 'legitimate'. The protesters shot themselves in the foot when
they rejected Carrie Lam's offer to convene a summit at which protest reps and HK Govt reps
could negotiate their differences - without pre-conditions.
She subsequently sounded the plot's death knell the day she announced that her government
won't recognise ANY of the protesters' infantile supplementary demands and declared violent
masked protesters to be illegal and illegitimate.
...
A week or so ago ABC.net.au's reporter in Hong Kong said that the protests were confined to a
very small area representing Hong Kong's "financial heartland." He stated that two blocks
from the Media Circus/protests it's business-as-usual in the rest of Hong Kong.
I haven't heard this claim made by any other MSM 'news' source...
Earlier I thought China was too soft on the rioters but they have played it well. Like Russia
separated moderate rebels from jihadis in Syria, China separated the regime change rioters
from the genuine protestors in Hong Kong.
"Hong Kong is a repressive police state" says Joshua Wong, and yet it is consistently near
the top of the list in the Cato Institute world freedom index.
Posted by: jayc | Nov 22 2019 21:14 utc | 19
In the past, I thought that Hong Kong was dominated by a narrow rich oligarchy with rules
that kept the input from hoi-polloi to the minimum, which meant low taxes for business and
the rich etc. From the point of view of Cato Institute it is the definition of paradise, but
the life in paradise may have its discontent.
Compare with Chile that has exemplary record of
"property rights" since Pinochet era with a constitution that makes it very hard to change,
and yet, the locals are not happy and neither Russian nor Bolivarian agitators were identfied.
Or Colombia, another shiny bastion of democracy, allowing very wide spectrum of
relationship between bosses and workers (assassinations of uppity organizers included). I
would be curious if systematic and widespread murder in the defense of freedom merits
downgrading in Cato Institute world freedom index.
I agree completely with what many other commenters have written, the whole rigmarole was just
an US attempt to instigate a "Colour Revolution".
Modus Operandi fits perfectly with what has been done in many other places.
It is about time the US tastes its own soup....And we dont even have to supply them weapons, they have got plenty
As long as the situation ends up returning to normal and things stay quiet afterwards, I
would nearly wonder if some Chinese agents didn't help create that mess in Hong Kong,
because Beijing surely doesn't need a booming HK with special status anymore.
Yep, and I would think that the Chinese leadership took exactly that calculated risk to
neutralise the HK status and snuff out some fifth column saboteurs. Beats disappearing them
and all that untidy stuff.
As for any comparison with the Gillet Jaunes by other contributors, I do not see that at
all. I agree people are in the streets but the GJ are in solidarity with their fellow
citizens whereas the HK rioters are murderous thugs pissing on their fellows. The role of the
police forces are entirely opposite with the HK police exercising phenomenal constraint. The
HK rioters could learn something if they followed the Maoist history of struggle or even the
history of the west. Losers and creatures of the USUK private finance fascisti.
I wonder if this PolyU seige was meant to be some sort of Odessa style Tienanmen event. I
mean, what can you do with 8000 molotov cocktails without getting roasted in the process?
Common sense prevailed on both sides.
Rioters who left the scene and surrendered just
chickened out. They love a good riot but did not sign up to get themselves identified by
their dental records. It would not even surprise me if there were any snipers out there
waiting to shoot protesters running for their lives fleeing a burning building. MSM would
have a field day.
Peterau@ Posted by: Peter AU1 | Nov 23 2019 7:34 utc | 67
Fair enough chap; I rarely click on linked nyms because they tend to reveal blatant
agendas which are most often a disappointment.
Without getting into a serious debate about it, I have come to the conclusion that when Xi
runs the Zhou Enlai 'completely uninterested in intervention' line which he has been sticking
to since the kick-off off the latest attempt by usuk to take advantage of the people of
Hongkong (despite anyone who can think, asking themselves that if the englanders really cared
that much about their Honkers subjects, WTF didn't they give 'em all brit passports when they
were asked to), he seems least credible.
This is a bloke who runs a line much closer to the old school, 'rich do what rich do',
line that his parents promulgated, than he ever has to either Zhou's or Mao's unapologetic
socialism stance - (although it must be emphasized that there is a vast difference in both
means and goals between the act which wealthy Chinese merchants in China pulled and the
sociopathic, anti-humanist line that modern usury based capitalism spruiks) unfortunately
neither advocate for the humanist, everybody deserves a fair shake of the stick mantra, which
is the only line that can possibly lead to the continuing existence of human beings.
hong kong is just a small piece of the puzzle, a tiny bit of the apple in the big strudel
which is the US hurry hurry rush, particularly since obama and clinton, to 'pivot to Asia'
and try to 'contain' once again a rising superpower, China.
china is pretty clearly the new next up and coming world empire, (anyone really see any
other competition against the US? and don't count on europe to offer much resistance to much
of anything that the US wants/demands either, though there are notable exceptions, like Nord
Stream)
peter lee/chinahand tells me something I didn't yet know, about the china chicken hawks:
"....donnie came into office w/ aspirations as a china dealmaker/korea peacemaker. but his
political weakness forced him to pivot to milsec his best base of support. & the China
hawks took over literally every lever of policy. From Schriver at the Pentagon to Pottinger
at the NSC to the purge of Thornton at State. Now that China hawks run the policy apparatus,
China threat is entrenched as the Beltway consensus and the indispensable political accessory
for Dems & GOP alike, Donnie's outlived his usefulness...."
so while the US has wasted at least $6 trillion since 2001 on a futile and endless series
of north african/middle eastern wars of aggression (and blowing lots of things up, just like
in those hollywood movies), China and built and built and invested its trillions in
productivity. Hong kong is important in the chess game, but really just as a sideshow and
irritant
The problem for the US has been that unlike previous trade competitors, Japan, Korea and
Germany, there is no standing UIS army in China, so they don't have to do as they are told.
Now even though HK has shrunk from 25% of Chinese GDP at handover to less than 3% now, it
remains strategically important, especially as China builds out its capital markets.
As such,
threatening the separate economic status of HK is a pretty powerful stick which the Neo cons
have just given themselves. In my opinion it is no coincidence that what began as a peaceful
protest over the extradition treaty (whipped up by the tycoons and the triads who have most
to lose) turned into an antifa style textbook color revolution immediately after Rubio et al
had launched the bill in the summer. Given that prior to two weeks ago most members of the
House would have struggled to find Hong Kong on a map it was mightily helpful that the
protesters decided to 'spontaneously" switch to telegenic firebombs and tactics to ensure
24/7 news coverage on C(IA)NN in the days leading up to the vote.
The WP and NYT as well as
the FT and Economist all did their bit of course, as did all the breathless 'embedded
reporters'. Result, the US has just awarded itself the right to meddle in the political
affairs of Hong Kong including specifically setting a timetable for universal suffrage on the LegCo. This is technically not a big deal as the people of HK were supposed to get that in
2015, but, (and get this) the so called pro democracy purists refused to accept it unless
they also got the right to both nominate and select the chief executive as well, something
that was not being offered. Bottom line, tycoons have what they want, the State Department
has what it wants and while the Taiwanese would like to keep the pot boiling for their
elections in January, most of the vested interests are done now so the propaganda machine can
move on.
Here are some interesting takes on the origins of the HK protests:
This has an unfortunate title. It has nothing to do with Africans. It is referring to the
fact that there are always locals that benefit from being part of a colony.
http://www.unz.com/ishamir/house-niggers-mutiny/ These are focused on the very human response to a loss in status, as well as the problems
of living in a economic entity controlled by oligarchs.
The spirit of the "One country, two systems" deal is that HK should remain capitalist
until 2047. It is possible for a capitalist society to also be a dictatorship (Fascist Italy,
Third Reich, the military dictatorships of Latin America of the 1950s-1980s, Thailand etc.
etc.), so, even if Beijing deprives the people of HK (which is a city, not a country) of
directly choosing its leadership, the 1C2S social contract remains intact.
Capitalism doesn't equal democracy.
--//--
Posted by: Ts'yew T'aw-Loh | Nov 23 2019 14:01 utc | 80
Well, if that's the brilliant conclusion this "Zhōu Shùrén" came after
carefully analysing 3,000+ years of Chinese History, then he's wrong.
Lu Xun grew up (and died) during the "Century of Shame". That period was exceptional, not
the rule, in Chinese history. In that context, I understand his stance. But that's definitely
not what China is today.
Sure you could teach his works to the people of HK, but they could as easily interpret his
opus on the reverse: that the HK are the new "Chinese", and thus must liberate themselves
from the "other" -- Beijing. So, I don't know what lessons, beyond the specific historical
period the writer lived in, you could take in modern geopolitics.
If you want not only to understand the social world, but to change it in a scientific,
rational way, Marxism is the only way to go nowadays.
..As for any comparison with the Gillet Jaunes by other contributors, I do not see that at
all. I agree people are in the streets but the GJ are in solidarity with their fellow
citizens whereas the HK rioters are murderous thugs pissing on their fellows. The role of the
police forces are entirely opposite with the HK police exercising phenomenal constraint.
Uncle Tungsten @67
I agree there aren't many who view the GJ in that way, but one of them, a regular visitor
with good info from the Middle East, is so invested with Macron, and always has been, that he
refuses to see that the GJ are exactly what they seem to be- a genuine grassroots provincial
movement with conservative attitudes. By which I mean that they want to conserve the welfare
state features that have made France a relatively civilised society. Macron, on the other
hand, is a gung ho market reformer who can't wait to smash the unions, privatise the
railways, restore the profit motive to the healthcare system and generally make the rich
happy. Macron is a groupy of and an eager collaborator with the oligarchs. In fact he is, as
the behaviour of his police forces and the relentless force used against demonstrators
confirms, an authoritarian in the French tradition which gave rise to fascism and a conscious
inheritor of the mantle of Petain and those who collaborated with the Nazis to preserve
'order and hierarchy.' The last French election was a contest between two schools of fascist
and Macron won.
claims UAW
and Israel behind Iraq protests Humm Is there a central "start a protest, riot or
invasion task group somewhere .. Where are these fake or overtaken protest and coup-de-riot
plots planned? Where is the play book? Who funds them and why? Is it possible these RIPOFFs
are private interest planned, state funded and private contractor executed? Who writes the
reports about them..
Who studies them (what schools what people in those schools teaches this kind of stuff). How
can copies of reports about riots, protests and invasions that were planned by outsider third
parties be obtained.. ??
Studying reported results by those who planned the protest or the riot, invasion or
whatever would or could reveal the methods and give strong indicators about the true source
of each new riot, invasion, protest or false flag [RIPOFF]
Where do they start.. (seems like the young people mostly..) but I do not know
How long does it take to get a riot or protest organized ?
How much money does it take to get a riot or protest organized?
How many experts does it take to get the riot or protest organized?
did the same people that planned the riots in Hong Kong also plan the riots or protests in
Iraq and Lebanon/
More about China calling out the US for meddling from Reuters this morning
"
BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States is the world's biggest source of instability and its
politicians are going around the world baselessly smearing China, the Chinese government's
top diplomat said on Saturday in a stinging attack at a G20 meeting in Japan.
Meeting Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok on the sidelines of a G20 foreign ministers
meeting in the Japanese city of Nagoya, Chinese State Councillor Wang Yi did not hold back in
his criticism of the United States.
"The United States is broadly engaged in unilateralism and protectionism, and is damaging
multilateralism and the multilateral trading system. It has already become the world's
biggest destabilizing factor," China's Foreign Ministry cited Wang as saying.
The United States has, for political purposes, used the machine of state to suppress
legitimate Chinese businesses and has groundlessly laid charges against them, which is an act
of bullying, he added.
"Certain U.S. politicians have smeared China everywhere in the world, but have not
produced any evidence."
The United States has also used its domestic law to "crudely interfere" in China's
internal affairs, trying to damage "one country, two systems" and Hong Kong's stability and
prosperity, he added.
"It Was A Coup. Period": Tulsi Gabbard Slams US 'Interference' In Bolivia
Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has come out swinging on Bolivia, following an initial period of being silent
and reflection on the issue after leftist President Evo Morales was forced to step down on November 10 over growing anger at election
irregularities, whereupon he was given political asylum in Mexico.
"What happened in Bolivia is a coup. Period," Gabbard wrote on Twitter in the early hours of Friday while warning against any
US interference.
"The United States and other countries should not be interfering in the Bolivian people's pursuit of self-determination and right
to choose their own government, " she argued.
Washington had been quick to endorse and recognize opposition senator Jeanine Anez as 'interim president' after she controversially
declared herself such without a senatorial quorum or public vote, and as Morales' Movement for Socialism was said to be barred from
the senate building when it happened.
Gabbard's statement, which again sets her far apart from a large field of establishment and centrist candidates on foreign policy
issues , comes a few days after Bernie Sanders was the first to condemn the events which led to Evo's ouster as a military coup.
"When the military intervened and asked President Evo Morales to leave, in my view, that's called a coup," Sanders tweeted Monday,
while linking to a video showing Bolivian security forces dispersing an indigenous pro-Morales protest using a volley of tear gas
canisters.
Meanwhile, in a new interview with Russian media this week, Evo Morales said the right-leaning Organization of American States
(OAS), which had initially cited "clear manipulations" in the voting surrounding his controversial re-election to a fourth term,
played a prime role in deposing him, and that ultimately Bolivia's huge reserves of lithium were being eyed by the United States
and its right-wing Latin American allies .
"The OAS made a decision and its report is not based on a technical report, but on a political decision,"
Evo told RT in the interview from Mexico.
Addressing his country's most valued natural resource, he said, "In Bolivia we could define the price of lithium for the world...Now
I have realized that some industrialized countries do not want competition" -- while implying Washington had helped engineer his
downfall.
Most estimates put the impoverished country's Lithium supply at about 60% of the world's known reserves .
The White House in the days after Evo's ouster
had called it a "significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere"; however, the now exiled former president described
it as "the sneakiest, most nefarious coup in history."
* * *
Watch key moments of the translated RT interview below:
From the point of view of election promise of detente with Russia, Trump clearly betrayed them. He was a neocon puppet
from the beginning to the end, His policy was not that different from hypothetical policy of Hillary administration.
Notable quotes:
"... Caitlin Johnstone discredits a CNN listicle on Trump's "softness" towards Moscow. In fact, she writes, the U.S. president has actually been consistently reckless towards Moscow, with zero resistance from either party. ..."
"... It would be understandable if you were unaware that Trump has been escalating tensions with Moscow more than any other president since the fall of the Berlin Wall; it's a fact that neither of America's two mainstream political factions care about, so it tends to get lost in the shuffle. Trump's opposition is interested in painting him as a sycophantic Kremlin crony, and his supporters are interested in painting him as an antiwar hero of the people, but he is neither ..."
"... Anyone who has not read Orwell's 1984 should do so sooner rather than later. The official control of narrative in the novel is what we are presently drowning in. To watch it work so spectacularly is beyond depressing. ..."
"... The complete corruption of Western MSM is the reason many of us regularly read Caitlin and Consortium, all desperately trying to get some sort of a reality-check in an otherwise "Orwellian" media environment. ..."
"... The simple truth here is that in regard to the military (read 'military complex', which includes the deep state and shadow government [intelligence agencies] every president is a puppet. ..."
"... The coup in Ukraine was a major provocation to Russia, but was also a repeat of the Americans' rape and pillaging of Russia under Yeltsin, Clinton's puppet. The per capita median income of Ukrainians has dropped in half from 2013, despite pumping $billions in from the US. ..."
"... Failing impeachment, from the attempts by the Clinton Campaign, to the Congressional sanctions on Russia, to sabotage of Syria withdrawal to the Mueller hoax, to the State Dept hawks protests on Ukraine, the effort to prevent Trump from following through on his campaign promise has been the primary goal of the intelligence community. It is instructive to note that the phone call that has led to the current impeachment inquiry was made on July 26, the day following Robert Mueller's clownish testimony before Congress, effectively ending that line of impeachment. ..."
"... Also note that although the phone call was made in July, nothing was said about it until after John Bolton was fired in September, 2 months later. ..."
Caitlin Johnstone discredits a CNN listicle on Trump's "softness" towards Moscow. In fact,
she writes, the U.S. president has actually been consistently reckless towards Moscow, with
zero resistance from either party.
CNN has published a fascinatingly manipulative and falsehood-laden article titled "
25 times Trump
was soft on Russia ," in which a lot of strained effort is poured into building the case
that the U.S. president is suspiciously loyal to the nation against which he has spent his
administration escalating dangerous new cold war aggressions.
The items within the CNN article consist mostly of times in which Trump said some words or
failed to say other words; "Trump has repeatedly praised Putin," "Trump refused to say Putin is
a killer," "Trump denied that Russia interfered in 2016," "Trump made light of Russian
hacking," etc. It also includes the
completely false but oft-repeated narrative
that "Trump's team softened the GOP platform on Ukraine", as well as the utterly ridiculous and thoroughly
invalidated claim that "Since intervening in Syria in 2015, the Russian military has
focused its airstrikes on anti-government rebels, not ISIS."
CNN's 25 items are made up almost entirely of narrative and words; Trump said a nice thing
about Putin, Trump said offending things to NATO allies, Trump thought about visiting Putin in
Russia, etc. In contrast, the 25 items which I am about to list do not consist of narrative at
all, but rather the actual movement of actual concrete objects which can easily lead to an
altercation from which there may be no re-emerging. These items show that when you ignore the
words and narrative spin and look at what this administration has actually been doing ,
it's clear to anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty that, far from being "soft" on
Russia, Trump has actually been consistently reckless in the one area where a US president must
absolutely always maintain a steady hand. And he's been doing so with zero resistance from
either party.
It would be understandable if you were unaware that Trump has been escalating tensions with
Moscow more than any other president since the fall of the Berlin Wall; it's a fact that
neither of America's two mainstream political factions care about, so it tends to get lost in
the shuffle. Trump's opposition is interested in painting him as a sycophantic Kremlin crony,
and his supporters are interested in painting him as an antiwar hero of the people, but he is
neither. Observe:
1. Implementing a Nuclear Posture Review with a more aggressive stance
toward Russia
Last year Trump's Department of Defense rolled out a Nuclear Posture Review which
CNN itself called "its toughest line yet against Russia's resurgent nuclear forces."
"In its newly released Nuclear Posture Review, the Defense Department has focused much of
its multibillion nuclear effort on an updated nuclear deterrence focused on Russia," CNN
reported last year.
This revision of nuclear policy includes the new implementation of
"low-yield" nuclear weapons , which, because they are designed to be more "usable" than
conventional nuclear ordinances,
have been called "the most dangerous weapon ever" by critics of this insane policy. These
weapons, which can remove some of the inhibitions that mutually assured destruction would
normally give military commanders, have already been rolled off the assembly line.
2.
Arming Ukraine
Lost in the gibberish about Trump temporarily withholding military aide to supposedly
pressure a Ukrainian government who was never even aware of being
pressured is the fact that arming Ukraine against Russia is an entirely new policy that was
introduced by
the Trump administration in the first place. Even the Obama administration, which was
plenty hawkish toward Russia in its own right, refused to implement this extremely provocative escalation
against Moscow. It was not until Obama was replaced with the worst Putin puppet of all time
that this policy was put in place.
3. Bombing Syria
Another escalation Trump took against Russia which Obama wasn't hawkish enough to also do
was bombing the Syrian government, a longtime ally of Moscow. These airstrikes in April 2017 and
April 2018 were perpetrated in retaliation for chemical weapons use allegations that there
is
no legitimate reason to trust at this point.
4. Staging coup attempts in
Venezuela
Venezuela, another Russian ally, has been the subject of relentless coup attempts
from the Trump administration which persist unsuccessfully to this very day .
Trump's attempts to topple the Venezuelan government have been so violent and aggressive that
the starvation sanctions which he has implemented are believed to have
killed tens of thousands of Venezuelan civilians .
"Signals coming from certain capitals indicating the possibility of external military
interference look particularly disquieting," the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "We warn
against such reckless actions, which threaten catastrophic consequences."
5. Withdrawing
from the INF treaty
For a president who's "soft" on Russia, Trump has sure been eager to keep postures between
the two nations extremely aggressive in nature. This administration has withdrawn from the 1987
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, prompting UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to
declare that
"the world lost an invaluable brake on nuclear war." It appears entirely possible that Trump
will continue to adhere to the John Bolton school of nuclear weapons treaties until they all
lie in tatters, with the administration strongly criticizing the crucial New START
Treaty which expires in early 2021.
Some particularly demented Russiagaters try to argue that Trump withdrawing from these
treaties benefits Russia in some way. These people either (A) believe that treaties only go one
way, (B) believe that a nation with an economy the size of South
Korea can compete with the U.S. in an arms race, (C) believe that Russians are immune to
nuclear radiation, or (D) all of the above. Withdrawing from these treaties benefits no one but
the military-industrial complex.
6. Ending the Open Skies Treaty
"The Trump administration has taken steps toward leaving a nearly three-decade-old agreement
designed to reduce the risk of war between Russia and the West by allowing both sides to
conduct reconnaissance flights over one another's territories," The Wall Street Journalreported last month , adding that the
administration has alleged that "Russia has interfered with American monitoring flights while
using its missions to gather intelligence in the US."
Again, if you subscribe to the bizarre belief that withdrawing from this treaty benefits
Russia, please think harder. Or ask the Russians themselves how they feel about it:
"US plans to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty lower the threshold for the use of nuclear
weapons and multiply the risks for the whole world, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai
Patrushev said," Sputnik
reports .
"All this negatively affects the predictability of the military-strategic situation and
lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, which drastically increases the risks for
the whole humanity," Patrushev said.
"In general, it is becoming apparent that Washington intends to use its technological
leadership in order to maintain strategic dominance in the information space by actually
pursuing a policy of imposing its conditions on states that are lagging behind in digital
development," he added.
7. Selling Patriot missiles to Poland
"Poland signed the largest arms procurement deal in its history on Wednesday, agreeing with
the United States to buy Raytheon Co's Patriot missile defense system for $4.75 billion in a
major step to modernize its forces against a bolder Russia," Reuters
reported last year .
8. Occupying Syrian oil fields
The Trump administration has been open about
the fact that it is not only maintaining a military presence in Syria to control the
nation's oil, but that it is doing so in order to deprive the
nation's government of that financial resource. Syria's ally Russia strongly opposes this,
accusing the Trump administration of nothing short of "international state banditry".
"In a statement, Russia's defense ministry said Washington had no mandate under
international or US law to increase its military presence in Syria and said its plan was not
motivated by genuine security concerns in the region," Reutersreported last
month.
"Therefore Washington's current actions – capturing and maintaining military control
over oil fields in eastern Syria – is, simply put, international state banditry,"
Russia's defense ministry said.
9. Killing Russians in Syria
Reports have placed Russian casualties anywhere between a handful and
hundreds , but whatever the exact number the U.S. military is known to have killed Russian
citizens as part of the Trump administration's ongoing Syria occupation in an altercation last
year.
exact number the U.S. military is known to have killed Russian citizens as part of the Trump
administration's ongoing Syria occupation in an altercation last year.
10. Tanks in
Estonia
Within weeks of taking office,
Trump was already sending Abrams battle tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and other
military hardware right up to Russia's border as part of a NATO operation.
"Atlantic Resolve is a demonstration of continued US commitment to collective security
through a series of actions designed to reassure NATO allies and partners of America's
dedication to enduring peace and stability in the region in light of the Russian intervention
in Ukraine," the Defense Department said in a statement.
11. War ships in the Black
Sea
12. Sanctions
Trump approved new sanctions against Russia on August 2017. CNN reports the following:
"US President Donald Trump approved fresh sanctions on Russia Wednesday after Congress
showed overwhelming bipartisan support for the new measures," CNN reported at
the time . "Congress passed the bill last week in response to Russia's interference in the
2016 US election, as well as its human rights violations, annexation of Crimea and military
operations in eastern Ukraine. The bill's passage drew ire from Moscow -- which responded by
stripping 755 staff members and two properties from US missions in the country -- all but
crushing any hope for the reset in US-Russian relations that Trump and Russian President
Vladimir Putin had called for."
"A full-fledged trade war has been declared on Russia," said Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in
response.
13. More sanctions
"The United States imposed sanctions on five Russian individuals on Wednesday, including the
leader of the Republic of Chechnya, for alleged human rights abuses and involvement in criminal
conspiracies, a sign that the Trump administration is ratcheting up pressure on Russia," The
New York Timesreported in December
2017 .
14. Still more sanctions
"Trump just hit Russian oligarchs with the most aggressive sanctions yet," reads
a Vice headline from April of last year.
"The sanctions target seven oligarchs and 12 companies under their ownership or control, 17
senior Russian government officials, and a state-owned Russian weapons trading company and its
subsidiary, a Russian bank," Vice reports. "While the move is aimed, in part, at Russia's role
in the U.S. 2016 election, senior U.S. government officials also stressed that the new measures
seek to penalize Russia's recent bout of international troublemaking more broadly, including
its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad and military activity in eastern
Ukraine."
"The Trump administration on Thursday imposed new sanctions on a dozen individuals and
entities in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea," The Hill
reported in November of last year. "The group includes a company linked to Bank Rossiya and
Russian businessman Yuri Kovalchuk and others accused of operating in Crimea, which the U.S.
says Russia seized illegally in 2014."
17. Oh hey, more sanctions
"Today, the United States continues to take action in response to Russian attempts to
influence US democratic processes by imposing sanctions on four entities and seven individuals
associated with the Internet Research Agency and its financier, Yevgeniy Prigozhin. This action
increases pressure on Prigozhin by targeting his luxury assets, including three aircraft and a
vessel," reads
a statement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from September of this year.
18.
Secondary sanctions
Secondary
sanctions are economic sanctions in which a third party is punished for breaching the
primary sanctions of the sanctioning body. The U.S. has leveled sanctions against both
China and
Turkey for
purchasing Russian S-400 air defense missiles, and it is
threatening to do so to India as well.
19. Forcing Russian media to register as
foreign agents
Both RT and
Sputnik have been forced to register as "foreign agents" by the Trump administration. This
classification forced the outlets to post a disclaimer on content, to report their activities
and funding sources to the Department of Justice twice a year, and could arguably place an unrealistic
burden on all their social media activities as it submits to DOJ micromanagement.
20.
Throwing out Russian diplomats
The Trump administration joined some 20 other nations in casting out scores of
Russian diplomats as an immediate response to the Skripal poisoning incident in the
U.K.
21. Training Polish and Latvian fighters "to resist Russian aggression"
"US Army Special Forces soldiers completed the first irregular and unconventional warfare
training iteration for members of the Polish Territorial Defense Forces and Latvian
Zemmessardze as a part of the Ridge Runner program in West Virginia, according to service
officials," Army Times
reported this past July.
"U.S. special operations forces have been training more with allies from the Baltic states
and other Eastern European nations in the wake of the annexation of Crimea by the Russian
Federation in 2014," Army Times writes. "A low-level conflict continues to simmer in
eastern Ukraine's Donbas region between Russian-backed separatists and government forces to
this day. The conflict spurred the Baltics into action, as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia
embraced the concepts of total defense and unconventional warfare, combining active-duty,
national guard and reserve-styled forces to each take on different missions to resist Russian
aggression and even occupation."
22. Refusal to recognize Crimea as part of the Russian
Federation
Key point: Trump agreed to send more forces to Poland to defend it against Russia.
What Happened: U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to deploy approximately 1,000 additional
U.S. troops to Poland during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda on the sidelines of
the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, Reuters reported Sept. 23.
Why It Matters: The deal, which formalizes the United States' commitment to protecting
Poland from Russia, provides a diplomatic victory to Duda and his governing Law and Justice
ahead of November elections. The additional U.S. troops will likely prompt a reactive
military buildup from Moscow in places like neighboring Kaliningrad and, potentially,
Belarus.
24. Withdrawing from the Iran deal
Russia has been consistently opposed to Trump's destruction of the JCPOA. In a statement
after Trump killed the deal, the Russian Foreign Ministry said
it was "deeply disappointed by the decision of US President Donald Trump to unilaterally refuse
to carry out commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action", adding that this
administration's actions were "trampling on the norms of international law".
25.
Attacking Russian gas interests
Trump has been threatening Germany with sanctions and troop withdrawal if it continues to
support a gas pipeline from Russia called Nord Stream 2.
"Echoing previous threats about German support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Trump said
he's looking at sanctions to block the project he's warned would leave Berlin 'captive' to
Moscow," Bloomberg
reports . "The US also hopes to export its own liquefied natural gas to Germany."
"We're protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of
dollars in money from Germany" for its gas, Trump told the press.
I could have kept going, but that's my 25. The only reason anyone still believes Trump is
anything other than insanely hawkish toward Russia is because it doesn't benefit anyone's
partisanship or profit margins to call it like it really is. The facts are right here as plain
as can be, but there's a difference between facts and narrative. If they wanted to, the
political/media class could very easily use the facts I just laid out to weave the narrative
that this president is imperiling us all with dangerous new cold war provocations, but that's
how different narrative is from fact; there's almost no connection. Instead they use a light
sprinkling of fact to weave a narrative that has very little to do with reality. And meanwhile
the insane escalations continue.
In a cold war, it only takes one miscommunication or one defective piece of equipment to set
off a chain of events that can obliterate all life on earth. The more things escalate, the
greater the probability of that happening. We're rolling the dice on Armageddon every single
day, and with every escalation the number we need to beat gets a bit harder.
We should not be rolling the dice on this. This is very, very wrong, and the U.S. and Russia
should stop and establish detente immediately. The fact that outlets like CNN would rather
diddle made-up Russiagate narratives than point to this obvious fact with truthful reporting is
in and of itself sufficient to discredit them all forever.
Our historians here seem to be forgetting the brutal takeover of Ukraine by the USSR in
the 50's, in which millions of Ukrainians were shot, raped, beaten and starved out, while
"ethnic Russians" moved in and took over. Kruschev didn't "give" Crimea away, he simply
transferred the administration thereof to the Soviet Republic of "the" Ukraine (a term
Ukranians have always decried as a way to make it seem as if Ukraine had always been a part
of the USSR). The "ethnic Russians" wouldn't have been there at all if the Soviets hadn't put
them there. That argument is the same one Hitler used as his excuse to annex Poland, and Polk
used to annex Texas. It's true Russia's self-interest (and well-founded fears of foreign
betrayal) have been largely ignored, but it's also disingenuous to ignore their murderous
20th-century imperialism. Just because we're not the good guys doesn't mean they are
either.
anon4d2 , November 20, 2019 at 18:12
Perhaps you forgot that the USSR actions in eastern Europe after WWII were in direct
response to the murder of 20 million Russians in WWII by the Nazi forces, attacking through E
Europe just as Napoleon had done. All US casualties in all its wars are less than five
percent of that, and 95 percent of Nazi division-months were spent in the USSR. On that front
they had nearly all of the casualties and did nearly all of the fighting. No wonder they were
a bit uncomfortable afterward with leaving open the favorite attack route of the west. What
would the US have done if a hundred times its WWII casualties were caused by two invasions
through (for example) Mexico? Would we have left the door open? Such circumstances cannot be
ignored. Starting one's version of history after the world's greatest provocation cannot be
said to clarify the history.
Toby McCrossin , November 21, 2019 at 02:56
"Our historians here seem to be forgetting the brutal takeover of Ukraine by the USSR in
the 50's"
Nice alternative facts. Ukraine was one of the original constituent republics of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922!
" Kruschev didn't "give" Crimea away"
Huh? Crimea had been part of Russia since 1783. You know you can check this stuff yourself
using Google, right?
"The "ethnic Russians" wouldn't have been there at all if the Soviets hadn't put them
there."
Right, so the Soviets put the Russians in Crimea in 1783, 139 years before it was in
existence. I guess the Soviets mastered time travel.
I know reading's hard and all but you might wanna try it some time.
Jon Anderholm , November 20, 2019 at 02:22
An essential article by Caitlin .. Thanks so much .
Sam F , November 19, 2019 at 22:56
Another excellent article by Caitlin Johnstone.
Jeff G. , November 19, 2019 at 19:59
Given the laws of cause and effect, our nuclear missiles might as well be considered to be
pointed straight at ourselves. Like shooting at one's image in a mirror or joining in a
mutual suicide pact. Sheer insanity.
ranney , November 19, 2019 at 17:26
WONDERFUL article, Caitlin. You are so right! I agree with Alan Ross, you deserve an award
for this, and I hope this gets passed around for a wide readership.
Antonio Costa , November 19, 2019 at 15:14
When elected POTUS you are elected, no matter the campaign rhetoric, to take the reins of
the imperial empire.
Trump did that willingly, in fact to a fault given his "big mouth". He's no more nor less
dangerous than his predecessors. And like them, his is a mass of rhetorical contradictions.
Policy is all that should really matters. It is our only means of identifying some truth.
Trump knows what most here know regarding US invasions and assassinations. What he thinks
about any leader is anyone's guess (including his). For him it's all deal making as if it's
his private Trump Towers Enterprises. But in the end he's playing the chief gangsta role of
his like. (If you've ever listened to Sinatra at the Sands (the full concert), you'll hear
how Trump has mimicked the popular gangsta singer to the last "love ya baby ").
The media is not free. It is an arm of the national security state, with occasional
outages of truth telling, all the more to tell the big lies. It's purpose is to pacify and
repress any rebellions. Since the end of Vietnam it has succeeded. And here we are, never
knowing truth from lie. (I think of Obama as deceitful to the max, while Trump just tells
transparent lies so you don't know when he's actually telling a profound truth.)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to
believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people
from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the
mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the
State."
-- Joseph Goebbels (was a German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi
Germany from 1933 to 1945)
Mark Thomason , November 19, 2019 at 14:22
We can go one step further than to say that Trump was reckless toward Russia, "with zero
resistance from either party."
Both parties demanded it. They approved it as "Presidential" whenever he did it, and
attacked him for any effort to be less reckless. They'd done the same to Obama, but Trump
proved weaker and more malleable.
Jeff Harrison , November 19, 2019 at 14:14
Verra nice peroration. I have two objections. One, I doubt that the people of the Donbass
are Russian backed in the same sense that the "moderate" rebel scum in Syria is US backed
with weapons, intelligence, and training but the people of the Donbass are ethnic Russians.
With a steady stream of anti-Russian legislation coming out of Kiev, I imagine they're
looking for an out. Putin is trying to get it for them without starting a war with Ukraine.
The real question that Washington has yet to address is what are they going to do if the
people of Ukraine notice that since they signed on to the neo-liberal dictates of Washington
and Brussels they've become the poorest nation in Europe. I know that there are a number of
Ukrainians who think wistfully of the days when they were part of Mother Russia. But you
never know, the CIA is notorious for its subversion and the Ukrainians might prove to be
spectacularly stupid. After all, they weren't doing badly until they let the US and EU foment
a coup for them.
And, two, "We should not be rolling the dice on this. This is very, very wrong, and the
U.S. and Russia should stop and establish detente immediately." While I agree with the
sentiment, don't bring Russia into this. Everything that Russia has done has been a reaction
to what is usually an American violation of international law. Putin has been very clear that
he wants to back off this cold war but he has also been very clear that we started it and
we're going to have to be the ones to start backing off.
David Hamilton , November 20, 2019 at 02:11
I absolutely agree with your number two reaction to Caitlin's suggestion that Russia and
the U.S. should stop it and establish detente immediately. Everything Russia's leadership is
doing is a reaction to American imperial dares to defy their law violations. They exhibit
extreme and principled restraint to the Orwellian madness emanating from this place.
I think it is important that this be understood. Russians have been used and abused once
before by American largesse in the form of Clinton's puppet's assistance in the rape of the
former Soviet Union by the Harvard-sponsored project. That was the one during the nineties
that privatized national industries and created a dozen neoliberal oligarchs. The cost was a
huge increase in death rate that lowered life expectancy into the 50's from 70 years I think.
Cynical foreign policy, isn't it?
Lois Gagnon , November 19, 2019 at 13:16
Anyone who has not read Orwell's 1984 should do so sooner rather than later. The official
control of narrative in the novel is what we are presently drowning in. To watch it work so
spectacularly is beyond depressing.
Many thanks to Caitlin Johnstone, Consortium News and all the others pushing back against
this system of perception management. I keep repeating it because it rings true. It's like
waking up in the Twilight Zone.
John Neal Spangler , November 19, 2019 at 12:44
She is right. CNN. MSNBC, NYT, and Wapo totally irresponsible. Fox not much better. So
many anti-Russian bigots in US
Jimmy gates , November 19, 2019 at 12:37
Thank you Caitlin. The neoliberals and neocons both desperately want a greatly intensified
cold war with Russia, but want it started by Trump ( because he is personally an
outsider).
This gives the Democrat and Republican donors contracts for the war machine. Ever since
Clinton administration moved NATO to the Russian border, the process has worked for the
oligarchs who control all US policies, foreign and domestic.
The complete corruption of Western MSM is the reason many of us regularly read Caitlin and
Consortium, all desperately trying to get some sort of a reality-check in an otherwise
"Orwellian" media environment.
For anyone who has been waiting for the publication of reporter Udo Ulfkotte's best
selling book (in Germany), a book based on his experience as a well respected journalist
whose reporting was completely compromised by Western intelligence services and business
interests, it is finally available in an English language edition. The English language
edition has been quite obviously suppressed for the last several years and the book was
published in 9 languages BEFORE this English edition became available. It is a book that is
well worth reading to better understand why literally NOTHING written by MSM should be
believed at face value, ever:
See:
I would urge anyone interested in buying this book to get it directly from the publisher-
Progressive Press. Amazon and other mega monopolies are a big part of our problems. Take the
time to make a few extra clicks and boycott Jeff Bezos.
Noah Way , November 19, 2019 at 10:58
The simple truth here is that in regard to the military (read 'military complex', which
includes the deep state and shadow government [intelligence agencies] every president is a
puppet. Nobel Peace Prize winner oBOMBa bombed 7 countries, overthrew Ukraine's democratic
government, invaded Syria, armed terrorists as proxy armies, authorized drone assassinations,
and bombed a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
The last president to resist the military complex? JFK
Caitlin Johnstone's list points to growing tensions with Russia. Failure of the political
and media establishment to see this makes the task of avoiding world war three all the more
difficult. In the West the end of the Cold War was seen as the dawn of peace. But the Cold
War was the peace, a post-world war environment: we are now in a pre-world war
environment.
Jimmy gates , November 19, 2019 at 12:45
The Democratic Party members have not " missed" anything that Trump has done. They will
not impeach him on those grounds, because they too are guilty of complicity in those war
crimes.
As Pelosi said regarding impeaching GWB for the torture program or invasion of Iraq and
Afghanistan " it's off the table". Because she was complicit.
Lois Gagnon , November 19, 2019 at 13:23
Russia did not illegally annex Crimea. A referendum was held and 90% of the voters voted
to rejoin Russia. Most people in Crimea are ethnic Russians and speak Russian. They were
understandably scared to death of what their fate would be under the rule of the fascists the
US installed in Ukraine.
And frankly, Russia had every right to protect its only warm water port in Sevastopol that
would have been taken over by NATO if Crimea had remained part of Ukraine. Too many Americans
have been indoctrinated in the belief that Russia has no legitimate self interest to
defend.
michael , November 19, 2019 at 18:22
In addition to what Lois Gagnon points out, you have to realize that the re-patriation of
Crimea to Russia in March 2014 was the direct result of Obama, Biden, Nuland et al
overthrowing the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Yanukovych, in the Maidan coup
in February, 2014, and replacing him with a neoNAZI regime. Russian speech was outlawed,
which has been the language of the majority of Crimea since Catherine the Great.
The coup in Ukraine was a major provocation to Russia, but was also a repeat of the
Americans' rape and pillaging of Russia under Yeltsin, Clinton's puppet. The per capita
median income of Ukrainians has dropped in half from 2013, despite pumping $billions in from
the US.
Jeff G. , November 19, 2019 at 20:25
Crimeans have an absolute right of self-determination as a fundamental human right under
established international law, just as the Kosovars did when we were supporting the breakup
of Serbia when Clinton was president. Ethnic Russians voted in an overwhelming majority in a
free and fair plebiscite to rejoin Russia, which they had been part of for centuries, because
the neo-Nazi US coup government allied with Azov battalions in Kyiv terrified them and they
wanted nothing further to do with them. Crimea had every right to decide. Russia did nothing
to interfere, not a bullet was fired. Russia's troops were already stationed in Crimea by
treaty and did not invade. Russia warned NATO against the Kosovo precedent that it would come
back to bite them someday, and it was ignored. NATO is unhappy because it was denied an
illegitimate geostrategic advantage they thought they would gain. Crimea is happy, so what's
the problem?
DH Fabian , November 19, 2019 at 21:08
"We," who? Regardless, the issues you raise can't be understood outside of their
historical context, and Americans never try to understand the world within that historical
context.
anon , November 19, 2019 at 22:54
Crimea was part of Russia for roughly 200 years before the USSR premier (Kruschev?) gave
it to Ukraine, although its inhabitants were nearly all of Russian heritage and language,
like E Ukraine. So not surprising that they wanted to go back to being part of Russia.
dean 1000 , November 20, 2019 at 19:26
Couldn't agree more Lois Gagnon. Washington did an illegal coup. Russia did a legal
annexation.
btw – The Autonomous Republic of Sevastopol on SW Crimea is no longer the only
ice-free port of the Russian Navy. Kaliningrad (on the Baltic sea) has been part of Russia
since 1945. Its deep ice-free harbor is the home port of Russia's Baltic fleet according to
the 2012 world book DVD.
Good one Caitlin. Again
jdd , November 19, 2019 at 09:51
This article properly puts to rest the absurd notion that President Trump is a "tool of
Putin, " and correctly notes that it has created a potentially disastrous situation.
However,
let's put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the Anglo/American led forces arrayed
against Trump from the moment he announced his intention to run on a platform of "getting
along" with Russia and joining with Putin to defeat ISIS.
Failing impeachment, from the
attempts by the Clinton Campaign, to the Congressional sanctions on Russia, to sabotage of
Syria withdrawal to the Mueller hoax, to the State Dept hawks protests on Ukraine, the effort
to prevent Trump from following through on his campaign promise has been the primary goal of
the intelligence community. It is instructive to note that the phone call that has led to the
current impeachment inquiry was made on July 26, the day following Robert Mueller's clownish
testimony before Congress, effectively ending that line of impeachment.
Nick , November 19, 2019 at 16:50
Also note that although the phone call was made in July, nothing was said about it until
after John Bolton was fired in September, 2 months later.
Alan Ross , November 19, 2019 at 09:47
This article alone deserves an award for public service. And in a more sensibly run world
Caitlin Johnstone would have gotten at least fifty such awards for past articles.
This is another remnant for Bush neocon team, a protégé of Bolton. Trump probably voluntarily appointed this rabid neocon, a
chickenhawk who would shine in Hillary State Department.
Interestingly she came from working class background. So much about Marx theory of class struggle. Brown, David (March 4, 2017).
"Miner's daughter
tipped as Trump adviser on Russia" . The Times.
She also illustrate level pf corruption of academic science, because she got
PhD in history from Harvard in 1998 under Richard
Pipes, Akira Iriye, and
Roman Szporluk. But at least this was history, not
languages like in case of Ciaramella.
Such appointment by Trump is difficult to describe with normal words as he understood what he is buying. So he is himself to blame for his current troubles and his inability
to behave in a diplomatic way when there was important to him question about role of CrowdStrike in 2016 election and creation of Russiagate
witch hunt.
There is something in the USA that creates conditions for producing rabid female neocons, some elevator that brings ruthless female
careerists with sharp elbows them to the establishment. She sounds like a person to the right of Madeline Albright, which is an achievement
With such books It is unclear whether she is different from Max Boot. She buys official Skripal story like hook and sinker. The
list of her book looks like produced in UK by Luke Harding
Being miner daughter raised in poverty we can also talk about betrayal of her class and upbringing.
This also rises wisdom of appointing emigrants to the Administration and the extent they pursue policies beneficial for their
native countries.
She testified in public before the same body on November 21, 2019. [12] While being
questioned by Steve Castor , the counsel for the House Intelligence
Committee's Republican minority, Hill commented on Gordon
Sondland 's involvement in the Ukraine matter: "It struck me when (Wednesday), when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland's
emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right," she said.
"Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And
those two things had just diverged." [13] In response
to a question from that committee's chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff
, Hill stated: "The Russians' interests are frankly to delegitimize our entire presidency. The goal of the Russians [in 2016]
was really to put whoever became the president -- by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale -- under a cloud."
[
Never has the world seen so many simultaneous outbreaks of mass protests against various
governments and regimes.
Currently there is public unrest simmering in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Hong Kong, France,
Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.
But which ones are authentic grassroots movements , and which ones have been hijacked by
outside powers or are being co-opted by the United States Department of Regime Change?
The following segment explores some of the dynamics at play, and what signs to look out for
in various global uprisings...
Nice and focused and succinct...love the Mao quote...
The higher the monkey climbs, the harder he will fall...
That describes Scumbag Pompeo in a nutshell...worth hearing this brief history of the
lardass pathological climber...
I have said this before...Trump is still the best of what's on offer in the fake democracy
of empire...
His opponents are hoisting themselves on their own petard...the more pathologically
determined they get, the bigger the bomb exploding in their face...Wile E Coyote 101...
The simple fact as I see it is that Trump is basically alone, which is not surprising
because who among the Washington creatures is going to agree with any of his sensible
agenda...which most notably is to get out of Syria and Afghanistan...and 'get along' with
Russia...
Regardless of anything else bad that he thinks is good...which includes enabling Israeli
colonialism and other things...if he were able to actually pull off those agenda items it
would be a very good step forward...
Now he has been tied up quite effectively by the opposition ['resistance'] but he's still
managed to at least break open northeastern Syria for the government to return...a big
plus...
As far as hopes to somehow take him down...that is delusional...he's a tough cookie who's
dealt with much tougher customers than these half wits in Washington...
People forget that the POTUS has tremendous power, even all alone and stranded on an oval
office island...he is not going to be brought down like Nixon...that era is over...plus he's
not as dumb as poor Dickie...
At the same time, there will be no scumbags going to jail for the massive hoax of
Russiagate and what amounts to a domestic color revolution attempt that they perpetrated on
their own people...
The Trump plan is to simply remain in office, which almost certainly he will do, and then
we may see Prometheus Unbound...
"... Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references? Might have been a non-biased article, but many of us will never know... ..."
"... They certainly aren't National Socialists, and arguably not nationalists. Nationalists are open to what is best for "the nation" regardless of where it lies on the political spectrum. Since they don't consider the people in Donbas to be part of "the nation", that means, if anything, they are useful idiots of Zionism. ..."
In my July 25th article " Zelenskii's dilemma " I pointed
out the fundamental asymmetry of the Ukrainian power configuration following Zelenskii's crushing victory over Poroshenko: while
a vast majority of the Ukrainian people clearly voted to stop the war and restore some kind of peace to the Ukraine, the real levers
of power in the post-Maidan Banderastan are all held by all sorts of very powerful, if also small, minority groups including:
The various "oligarchs" (Kolomoiskii, Akhmetov, etc.) and/or mobsters Arsen Avakov's internal security forces including some "legalized"
Nazi death squads The various non-official Nazi deathsquads (Parubii) The various western intelligence agencies who run various groups
inside the Ukraine The various western financial/political sponsors who run various groups inside the Ukraine The so-called "Sorosites"
(соросята) i.e. Soros and Soros-like sponsored political figures The many folks who want to milk the Ukraine down to the last drop
of Ukrainian blood and then run
These various groups all acted in unison, at least originally, during and after the Euromaidan. This has now dramatically changed
and these groups are now all fighting each other. This is what always happens when things begin to turn south and the remaining loot
shrinks with every passing day,
Whether Zelenskii ever had a chance to use the strong mandate he received from the people to take the real power back from these
groups or not is now a moot point: It did not happen and the first weeks of Zelenskii's presidency clearly showed that Zelenskii
was, indeed, in " free fall ": instead of becoming
a "Ukrainian Putin" Zelenskii became a "Ukrainian Trump" – a weak and, frankly, clueless leader, completely outside his normal element,
whose only "policy" towards all the various extremist minorities was to try to appease them, then appease them some more, and then
even more than that. As a result, a lot of Ukrainians are already speaking about "Ze" being little more than a "Poroshenko 2.0".
More importantly, pretty much everybody is frustrated and even angry at Zelenskii whose popularity is steadily declining.
... ... ...
Another major problem for Zelenskii are two competing narratives: the Ukronazi one and, shall we say, the "Russian" one. I have
outlined the Ukronazi one just above and now I will mention the competing Russian one which goes something like this:
The Euromaidan was a completely illegal violent coup against the democratically elected President of the Ukraine, whose legitimacy
nobody contested, least of all the countries which served as mediators between Poroshenko and the rioters and who betrayed their
word in less than 24 hours (a kind of a record for western politicians and promises of support!).
... ... ...
Some of the threats made by these Ukronazis are dead serious and the only person who, as of now, kinda can keep the Ukrainian
version of the Rwandan " Interahamwe " under control would probably be Arsen Avakov, but since he himself is a hardcore
Nazi nutcase, his attitude is ambiguous and unpredictable. He probably has more firepower than anybody else, but he was a pure "
Porokhobot " (Poroshenko-robot) who, in many ways, controlled Poroshenko more than Poroshenko controlled him. The best move
for Zelenskii would be to arrest the whole lot of them overnight (Poroshenko himself, but also Avakov, Parubii, Iarosh, Farion, Liashko,
Tiagnibok, etc.) and place a man he totally trusts as Minister of the Interior. Next, Zelenskii should either travel to Donetsk or,
at least, meet with the leaders of the LDNR and work with them to implement the Minsk Agreements. That would alienate the Ukronazis
for sure, but it would give Zelenskii a lot of popular support.
Needless to say, that is not going to happen. While Zelenskii's puppet master Kolomoiskii would love to stick this entire gang
in jail and replace them with his own men, it is an open secret that powerful interest groups in the US have told Zelenskii "don't
you dare touch them". Which is fine, except that this also means "don't you dare change their political course either".
...are going through the famous Kübler-Ross stages of griefs: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance: currently,
most of them are zig-zagging between bargaining and depression; acceptance is still far beyond their – very near – horizon. Except
that Zelenskii has nothing left to bargain with.
Thank you for a rational article about Ukraine. The sad thing is that it might take years to reach the "acceptance" phase.
It would take someone like Hitler to clean out the stables. Arrest is not a viable option as they will bribe their way out.
These people need to be put down like rabid dogs. That is the only way to put an end to their mischief and it would be a deterrent
to their replacements.
Personally, I suspect that the Ukraine is being deliberately depopulated to make way for waves of "refugees" from Israel. Another
country that is still in the "denial" phase. Its military and political leaders know full-well that their strategic aims have
all failed. The boot is now firmly on the other foot.
I suspect that Crimea was their preferred destination and hence the massive non-stop propaganda against Russia on that score.
To give you an idea of how ridiculous it has all become, the UK no longer accepts medical degrees awarded by universities in Crimea.
Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references? Might have been a non-biased article, but
many of us will never know...
I suspect that the Ukraine is being deliberately depopulated to make way for waves of "refugees" from Israel.
You got that right – what it's all about is building a New Khazaria. But they're neither giving up on their Greater Israel
project between the two rivers, and hence more wars, conflict and chaos to drive out the native Arabs from the Middle East.
I suspect that Crimea was their preferred destination and hence the massive non-stop propaganda against Russia on that score.
@AWMThey certainly aren't National Socialists, and arguably not nationalists. Nationalists are open to what is best for
"the nation" regardless of where it lies on the political spectrum. Since they don't consider the people in Donbas to be part
of "the nation", that means, if anything, they are useful idiots of Zionism.
@bob sykes Kolomoiskii is the real hidden owner/controller of the company that bribed the Bidens. He has a finger in lots
of pies. His pretense to leaning towards Russia is his way to try to get the Americans to stop attempts to get at the many millions
that he stole from his own Ukrainians bank – fake loans to his companies.
Of course, the Russians understand all of that. This theater is aimed at the Americans – not at the Russians.
For the Ukrainian state to break up, there need to be some forces interested in a break-up. You won't find such forces inside
the Ukraine.
What is Ukrainian South-East? In pure political terms, "South-East" is a bunch of oligarchs, who are all integrated into Ukrainian
system, and have no reason to seek independence from Kiev, especially if it means getting slapped with Western sanctions.
Even the Kremlin doesn't show much interest in breaking up the Ukraine, so why the hell would it break up?
It's worth pointing out that the so-called "Novorossia movement" started out as Akhmetov's project to win concessions from
new Kiev regime. It was then quickly hijacked by Strelkov, a man who actually wanted to break up the Ukraine, and it is because
of Strelkov, that Donetsk and Lugansk are now de-facto independent. Without similar figures to lead secessionist movements elsewhere
in the Ukraine, this break-up that Saker keeps talking about will never happen.
His ratings must be sky-high, because otherwise I cannot imagine why Fox would allow him to continue to use their network as
a medium to broadcast common sense.
Of course the Dems are making it so easy.
Schiff, Kent, Taylor, Yanovitch -- what a pathetic, nauseating crew.
When they passed the "Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019" by unanimous
consent, the U.S. Senate essentially doused our relationship with China with kerosene and set
it on fire. The following comes from Zero Hedge
In a widely anticipated move, just after 6pm ET on Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed a
bipartisan bill, S.1838, showing support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong by
requiring an annual review of whether the city is sufficiently autonomous from Beijing to
justify its special trading status. In doing so, the Senate has delivered a warning to China
against a violent suppression of the demonstrations, a stark contrast to President Donald
Trump's near-silence on the issue, the result of a behind the scenes agreement whereby China
would allow the S&P to rise indefinitely as long as Trump kept his mouth shut.
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
=/ As Bloomberg notes, the House unanimously passed a similar bill last month, but slight
differences mean both chambers still have to pass the same version before sending it to the
president. /=
Sending it to the president, huh?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ //
[My own comment]
15 hours ago [near midnight last night] I said:
I think there is some possibility that the Chinese government will announce something
rather drastic in about seven hours. All cargo ships and planes will turn around 180 and head
back to China. Wal-Mart will close. Amazon will go dark.
It's possible.
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So... When the congressional fools send this unanimous bill(!) to Trump, will he sign it.
If he does, does the US economy collapse instantly? If he doesn't do they impeach him?
Or... Does he not sign it, then they immediately override, then the economy collapses
utterly while they are busy trying to impeach him?
Re the unanimous vote by US Senate - "Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of
2019".
As you noted this seems to put Trump into a real bind re ongoing trade agreement soap
opera with China. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
The American political establishment has made any trade deal with China more unlikely.
Which probably removes a trade deal with China from Trump's list of accomplishments in the
2020 elections.
Thus the "Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019" would seem to be directed against
Trump.
But how really desperate is Trump for a trade deal with China? In trying to
re-industrialize the United States, maybe not so much.
And now he can blame the political establishment for American economic problems related to
the lack of a China trade deal.
I don't think this would work as Trump would reject the trade. He would love to see the
Democrats' slime and corruption trotted out in public. Meanwhile he is basically immunized
from anything that may come out of a Senate trial as he has already been trashed to a
saturation point.
And, since after three years of this BS they still haven't come up with any real evidence
against Trump, he would have little to worry about.
The Democrats have far more to lose than Trump; his attitude towards a Senate trial would
likely be: "Bring it on. Make my day, assholes."
The idealization of Trump that pictures him as some kind of silver bullet that could
penetrate the heart of corruption is a bizaare fantasy. It stands at odds with the reality of
the man. A crook he is at the very least. But it is what the two Parties agree upon, the
criminality in which they find common cause, that is the most horrifying thing.
From truthdig :
House Democrats Hand Trump 'Authoritarian' Surveillance Powers . And RT reports that this
includes a couple of remarkable dems, the idealistic newcomers we hear so much about. It will
be a long time before we are rid of the succubus of blanket surveillance. The grotesque
empire is to be held together at all cost.
snake @95 argues "the deep state does not exist" with circular logic that is massively off
target.
The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters,
the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests. None of those
interests have the ability to make policy and implement regime changes without the deep
state. Yes, outside interests drive the actions of the deep state, but no, those outside
interests have no ability to accomplish anything without their deep state operatives.
If the US federal government bureaucracy was a) much less powerful, b) much more
transparent, and c) more responsive to elected leaders, then none of the bad things would
happen. A pipe dream? Yes - but it is erroneous to make a simple declaration "the deep state
doesn't exist" without any rational arguments to refute my points in @72.
Thank you for your post. You say that there is a deep state, but you then go on to tell us
it is not as deep as we imagine. So, I posit we should call it "the shallow state". It is the
foam on the edge of the sea as it begins to recede from a high tide of corrupt practices,
delicate and lacy at the edges and so mesmerizing and attractive to some. But it is receding.
And out there as it departs the Deep People are waiting. They are the depths of an ocean that
never disappears. At low tide they are still there, and they will feed the incoming tide. At
the turn.
And I also say, you may not care what the future brings, but I do. I have a little
granson, born on my birthday, gazing at me with twinkling eyes from his photograph across the
room. Family is also something we can call Deep and be truthful about that. It runs in both
directions, past and future. The Deep People have Deep Families.
And yes, I know, other grandsons have met untimely deaths this century and are counted as
'collateral damage' by the shallow state. Still they are with us as the past is always with
us; they deepen our persons in unaccountable but irreversible ways. They strengthen our
family commitments. They are always here, in our memories and in our strengths. They are not
collateral; they are the fabric of our determinations, our life blood.
The Deep People do care what happens. The twinkle in their grandsons' eyes burns in
their hearts. It is a fire, a consuming force. It never dies.
"deep state", "deep people", "the swamp" .. a rose by any other name would smell just as
rancid.
"deep people" implies a small, isolated group. IMO, it's more like an iceberg than
seashore foam. 90% of it is hidden from view.
My point was that snake's blame of the oligarchs misses the target. I look at them the way
I look at any other predator - if the opportunity exists, they will take it. The deep state
is THE necessary ingredient for the evil that the US government does.
I too have grandchildren. I am convinced that their lives will be less free, less
prosperous, with less opportunity than what the seven generations of Wills family before me
have experienced in the US for the last 275 years. So what can I do about it? Typing on my
keyboard certainly won't make one whit of difference...
Andrew Bacevich rightly
rejects
the
idea that there was ever a
Pax Americana
in the Middle East:
"It took many decades to build a
Pax Americana
in the Middle East," X writes. Not
true: it took only a handful of hours - the time he invested in writing his essay. The
Pax
Americana
is a figment of X's imagination.
Defenders of U.S. hegemony like to make what they think is a flattering comparison between the
U.S. and the Roman Empire, but
where the Romans made a desert and called it peace the U.S.
has gone to war in the desert again and again with no end in sight.
Not only has the U.S. not brought peace, but there is little reason to think that our
government is capable of doing so.
More to the point, the U.S. has no right to keep
meddling in the affairs of these nations. It would also be accurate to say that the more American
involvement there has been in the region, the less
pax
there has been there. There is
nowhere else in the world where our foreign policy is as intensely militarized, and it is no
accident that it is also where our foreign policy is most destructive.
If the U.S.
genuinely desired stability and the security of energy supplies, it would not be waging an economic
war on Iran, and it wouldn't be fueling a disgraceful war on Yemen.
The author of that
piece, William Wechsler, notably has nothing to say about either one of those policies.
Opponents of U.S. withdrawal
from the Middle East make two major claims: that withdrawal would
harm U.S. interests and that it would make the region worse off than it already is.
The second point is wrong but debatable, and the first one depends on an absurdly expansive
definition of what U.S. interests are. The
piece
that
Bacevich is answering asserts that "it would be a terrible mistake and deeply harmful to the United
States" to withdraw from the region, but the author does not show that current troop levels of more
than 50,000 people are necessary or even useful for securing U.S. interests.
The U.S.
didn't have and didn't need a large military presence in the Middle East for the entire Cold War,
and it doesn't need to have one now.
Having a military presence in the region has directly
contributed to increased threats to U.S. security through terrorism, and it made the Iraq war
debacle possible. The greatest harm to U.S. security has come from our ongoing extensive military
involvement in this part of the world.
Neither does the author demonstrate that U.S. foreign policy up until now has actually
been doing the job he thinks it has.
For instance, he mentions "supporting a delicate
balance of power that promotes regional stability and protects our allies," but looking back over
just the last twenty years of U.S. foreign policy in the region there is no evidence that the U.S.
has been supporting a balance of power or promoted regional stability.
On the contrary, to
the extent that there was a balance of power at the start of this century, the U.S. set about
destroying it by overthrowing the Iraqi government, and it has further contributed to the
destabilization of at least three other countries through direct or indirect involvement in
military interventions.
The clients that the U.S. has in the Middle East aren't allies and
we aren't obliged to protect them, but the U.S. hasn't done a terribly good job of protecting them,
either. The U.S. has managed to indulge its clients in reckless and atrocious behavior that has
also made them less secure and undermined our own security interests. Support for the war on Yemen
is a good example of that.
Enabling the Saudi coalition's war has bolstered Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), devastated and fractured Yemen, and exposed Saudi Arabia to reprisal
attacks that it had never suffered before.
The other major flaw with the Wechsler piece is that he is warning against something that isn't
happening:
As campaign promises tend to become governing realities for American foreign policy, the
prospect of a full U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East now stands before us.
If only that were true.
The U.S. has more troops in the region than it
did at the start of this year. There is no sign that those numbers will be reduced anytime soon.
Support for the war on Yemen continues, and the president has gone out of his way to keep arming
the Saudi coalition. Even in Syria, there will still be an illegal U.S. military presence for the
foreseeable future. Full withdrawal is nowhere in sight right now. The U.S. is heading in the
opposite direction. The author pretends that withdrawal is in the offing and then urges the next
president to "reverse this course," but there is nothing for the next president to reverse. So why
rail against something that hasn't happened and isn't likely to occur?
This is an old
tactic of making the option of withdrawing from the region seem so extreme and dangerous that it
has to be rejected out of hand, but these scare tactics are less and less effective as we see the
mounting costs of open-ended conflict and deep entanglement in the affairs of other countries.
The author wants the next administration "to reestablish American leadership in the Middle East,
restore deterrence with our adversaries, and begin renewing trust with our partners and allies,"
but he has not made a persuasive case that "American leadership" in the region is worth
"reestablishing" even if it were possible to get back to the way things were before the Iraq war.
Many of the "partners and allies" in question are themselves unreliable and have become
liabilities, and many of the adversaries do not really threaten the U.S.
Bacevich
concludes that there needs to be a radical overhaul of U.S. foreign policy in the region on account
of its colossal failures:
Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is
essentially zero.
There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East.
The imperative is to go forward, which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in
region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman
rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.
Once we acknowledge those errors, the next step is not to fall into the same patterns
out of a misguided desire for "leadership" and domination.
Instead of chasing after a
fantasy of imposing peace in some other part of the world, we need to stop our destabilizing and
destructive policies that perpetuate conflict and make new wars more likely.
Lets just be honest the USA is in the business of war,overthrowing
governments and creating vassal states with murder and mayhem all
the way,sponsoring fascists,dictators,drug lords and Christ knows
what else along the way and there is no high moral ground as its
average citizen is either watching football or Kim Kardashians ***
and couldn't give a ****,no amount of whinging is ever going to
change that the author is pissing in the wind.
Instead of replacing and upgrading infrastructure in the US, we
have burned that money up in the desert fighting wars so the
Chinese and Russian oil companies could waltz in and take all of
marbles.
US Middle East policy has been failing since Eisenhower
injected us into Iran an in the 1950s.
It seems to me those people are intent on killing each other at
all costs. No need to get in their way and suffer casualties.
Seems like a population reduction in that region might improve
the world
Your ignorance is amazing. Before the US interventions a
number of these countries were going down the path of having
secular governments. Many had mixed communities from a
religious and ethnic perspective. US bastardry has cost the
lives of tens of thousands of people.
Aside from the countless us blunders in the middle east.. The core
issues are rooted in the barbaric religious beliefs that have
plagued the region since Mohammed rose to power.
Let them figure it out. Why stick yoar hook nose into someone
else's problems? Ah there is something in it for the special
group, and the tab goes to the tax payers.
The politicians
should set the example by sending their kids to woar first.
Trillions wasted and what benefit has that been to the tax
payers? No money for healthcare or education, pensions,
infrastructure etc. Lotsa money available for killing people.
Agreed. The Jews were a relatively recent reintroduction to
the region. It was a **** hole long before this time. Try to
blame it all on them but it's a weak point of view. Unless
you are looking at the last 70 years. But that **** hole
status goes back far beyond this time frame
Perpetual war was always the plan since Reagan days to break up
OPEC or cause in-fighting and destablize region. Iran/Iraq war,
first Gulf war, Iraq war, ISIS, Syrian conflict, Yemen,
Sunni/Shitte division, feed the fire on unofficial decades old
plan still ongoing by CIA and State Dept lifers. Perpetual war in
Mid-East was always the plan.
That way you keep down the competition.
What do you think all the demonizing efforts are against China
and Russia now? They are countries murica can't conquer.
The author of the referenced article is a prototypical Atlantic
Council Zionist *** chickenhawk ******** artist who pisses
swampwater - William F. Wechsler.
His concern is Greater Israel, not what is best for Americans.
All humanity, including us, have the right to survive and defend
ourselves from obliteration. To do this we must hit when hit, and
harder to eliminate the attack. beyond that, we need not fight.
God will is in charge, not ours.
We are at risk of non-survival
when we fail to recognize the difference between what we feel
responsibly for, and what we can actually control. That is why we
need a border. Defnding it gives us a line behidn which we can
produce, and be productive. Once we cross that line, we begin to
fall into a morass.
How long did it take America to exit Vietnam? You would think
America had money and men to burn with these fruitless wars. Who
benefits other than the vampires of the military-industrial
complex, owners of cemetaries, and those who produce and market
the Intel community's distracting and criminally-produced films
and television offerings?
Vietnam War started back when dollar debt was redeemable in
gold. Back then debts had impact and the war spending was felt
almost immediately though its effect on the economy. War was
partially responsible for closing of the gold window by Nixon.
They couldn't fake sustainability otherwise.
Jimmy Carter: US 'Most Warlike Nation in History of the World'
-
April 19, 2019
Most countries surveyed in a 2013 WIN/Gallup poll identified
the United States as the greatest threat to world peace, and a
2017 Pew Research poll found that a record number of people in
30 surveyed nations viewed US power and influence as a "major
threat."
Benjamin
Disraeli: Father Of The World Wars
The British-Jewish Lion Plots
Austria-Hungary and Turkey were the winners at Disraeli's
Congress of Berlin. Serbia and Russia were the losers.
Disraeli: "Our great object was to break up and permanently
prevent the alliance of the three Empires and I maintain there
never was a general diplomatic result more completely
effected."
The Franco-Russian alliance encircles Germany and
Austria-Hungary. Britain joined the alliance in 1907.
The Great War was only triggered by the assassination. The real
engineer of the disaster was Rothschild agent, Benjamin
Disraeli, who died in 1881.
All Wars Are Bankers' Wars!
The IRS and The Federal Reserve
Bank work together to swindle USA citizens
The 16th Amendment and the Income Tax
1913 proved to be a transformative year for the nation's
economy, first with the passage of the 16th "income tax"
Amendment and the false claim that it had been ratified.
"I think if you were to go back and and try to find and
review the ratification of the 16th amendment, which was the
internal revenue, the income tax, I think if you went back
and examined that carefully, you would find that a
sufficient number of states never ratified that amendment."
- U.S. District Court Judge James C. Fox, Sullivan Vs.
United States, 2003.
Later that same year, and apparently unwilling to risk
another questionable amendment,
Congress passed the
Federal Reserve Act over Christmas holiday 1913, while
members of Congress opposed to the measure were at home.
This was a very underhanded deal, as the Constitution
explicitly vests Congress with the authority to issue the
public currency, does not authorize its delegation, and thus
should have required a new Amendment to transfer that
authority to a private bank. But pass it Congress did, and
President Woodrow Wilson signed it as he promised the
bankers he would in exchange for generous campaign
contributions.
Woodrow Wilson later regretted that decision.
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my
country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its
system of credit. We are no longer a government by free
opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote
of the majority, but a government by the opinion and du
I don't blame
them. Look at all the invasions and coups since WWII. Theft of
gold, resources, death and destruction and poverty follows. No
moar competition.
Washington? We know what our founding father said about the Jews.
He was right. Today, and even before the Federal Reserve "Black
Magic Act" of 1913:
Washington = Israel.
There is no
America any longer. It was 911'd inside and out by the Joker ***
cult. And after they 911'd you they did a Joker dance, didn't
they?
it was never paxamericana. it was always paxjudaica, in other
words war and chaos called peace the way jewlanders roll with
their zionazi cocksuckers in tow.
"They [the Jews] work more
effectively against us, than the enemy's armies. They are a
hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great
cause we are engaged in... It is much to be lamented that each
state, long ago, has not hunted them down as pest to society
and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America."
-- George
Washington
We in Ukraine?
Historically and even today, Russia has much in common with Ukraine -- the United States, almost nothing.
Stephen F. Cohen
November 14, 2019
500 Words
51 Comments
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For centuries and still today, Russia and
large parts of Ukraine have had much in common -- a long territorial border; a shared history; ethnic,
linguistic, and other cultural affinities; intimate personal relations; substantial economic trade; and
more. Even after the years of escalating conflict between Kiev and Moscow since 2014, many Russians and
Ukrainians still think of themselves in familial ways. The United States has almost none of these
commonalities with Ukraine.
Which is also to say that Ukraine is not
"a vital US national interest," as most leaders of both parties, Republican and Democrat alike, and much of
the US media now declare. On the other hand, Ukraine is a vital Russian interest by any geopolitical or
simply human reckoning.
Why, then, is Washington so deeply
involved in Ukraine? (The proposed nearly $400 million in US military aid to Kiev would mean, of course,
even more intrusive involvement.) And why is Ukraine so deeply involved in Washington, in a different way,
that it has become a pretext for attempts to impeach President Donald Trump?
The short but essential answer is
Washington's decision, taken by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, to expand NATO eastward from Germany
and eventually to Ukraine itself. Ever since, both Democrats and Republicans have insisted that Ukraine is a
"vital US national interest." Those of us who opposed that folly warned it would lead to dangerous conflicts
with Moscow, conceivably even war. Imagine Washington's reaction, we pointed out, if Russian military bases
began to appear on Canada's or Mexico's borders with America. We were not wrong: An estimated 13,000 souls
have already died in the Ukrainian-Russian war in the Donbass and some 2 million people have been displaced.
Things are likely to get worse.
Democrats are sharply criticizing Trump for withholding large-scale military aid to Kiev (even though
President Obama, despite strong pressure, wisely did so). Ukraine's recently elected President Volodymyr
Zelensky, having been drawn into the Washington scandal, is no longer as free to negotiate peace with
Russian leader Vladimir Putin as he hoped and promised during his campaign. And candidates for the 2020 US
Democratic presidential nomination, with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, are likely to compete for the role
of Kiev's biggest military booster. Here, as generally in US-Russian relations, Democrats are becoming a war
party.
Meanwhile, as I have reported before,
Russian leader Vladimir Putin continues to be accused by hard-liners in Moscow of passivity in the face of
"American aggression in Ukraine." Is it irony or tragedy that the often-maligned Trump and Putin may stand
between us and something much worse -- between a fragile Cold War peace and the war parties in their respective
countries?
The short but essential answer is Washington's decision, taken by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s,
to expand NATO eastward from Germany and eventually to Ukraine itself.
The problem, however, is with the fact that the United States has neither resources nor status anymore to
do either:
Kissinger: If we treat Russia seriously as a great power, we need at an early stage to determine
whether their concerns can be reconciled with our necessities. We should explore the possibilities of a
status of nonmilitary grouping on the territory between Russia and the existing frontiers of NATO.
That's the danger, remove last remaining military and intelligence professionals and you have ignorant,
grossly incompetent American political class which thinks that it is 1995.
The fact that both Trump and Putin have managed to keep the peace is laudable and somewhat surprising,
particularly on our side given the comparative pressure the Israel lobby can exert on Trump politically and
personally vs. Putin.
Thanks to Ron & the many anti-US-Russia-Ukraine war writers here at Unz over the years including Pat
Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul, Phil Giraldi, Caitlyn Johnstone, C.J. Hopkins and The Saker, among
others.
Russia is the only nation on Earth with the undisputable power to permanently cripple the United States
with nuclear weapons. A nuclear exchange between these nations would do serious damage to the world
ecosphere for decades if not centuries.
Short of defending against a full-scale invasion of United States territory the United States has no
justified interest in provoking or engaging in such an exchange.
The entire Ukraine is not worth the bones of one American infantryman.
The people in Washington and Tel Aviv who are playing these games with potentially millions of American &
Russian lives are psychopaths who in a sane world would be tried for war crimes for the acts they have
already committed, much less those they contemplate or risk setting in motion.
The problem, however, is with the fact that the United States has neither resources nor status anymore
to do either:
I would add that if Russia were broken up, then very likely China and not the United States would capture
the mineral wealth of Siberia. This would be a geopolitical blunder of biblical proportions, comparable to
Germany's decision to sponsor Lenin's sealed train voyage.
[Digression: Andrei, I read your blog and I agree about Russian Math and Physics cirriculum. I followed a
similar cirriculum in Poland and I got into MIT easily. Я согласен]
Guessing it's because that dastardly Putin wanted Russia's share of tax receipts from the looting oligarchs
and their western backers during the pillaging 90s. Bankers and financiers lives matter more then the common
good. So does the Clinton slush fund So Hillary got her vengeance on Vlad by doing an Ukrainian coup, and
sending her best like Brett Kimberlin, Victoria Nuland, and Jonathan Winer. Unfortunately the sneaky Putin
kept Crimea and its port on the Black Sea.
The gall of it all. With all the Hong Kong real estate woes, HSBC needs Russian money laundering moolah.
More are becoming aware of Bill Browder's Magnitsky Act con. Plus Hillary's appetite for payoffs is
insatiable. Basically no clue why we're in the Ukraine other than the Clintons. Trump really should have at
least one of them up. Instead he's facing a bogus impeachment. Good news is we might be geting rid of Joe
Biden, and the nuke weapon makers are getting richer. Wonder where that missing 1998 4.8 billion
dollarFederal Reserve/ IMF loan to Russia ever got too?
comparable to Germany's decision to sponsor Lenin's sealed train voyage.
While I disagree with this assessment–it was just an episode against the background of a complete
collapse of Russia, even none other than Solzhenitsyn admits that Bolsheviks merely picked the power up from
the street where it was laying because nobody realistically wanted it, I have to say that in terms of
consequences of Russia breaking up, you are absolutely spot on. In such a scenario the main beneficiary will
be China and it will be easy for it.
Andrei, I read your blog and I agree about Russian Math and Physics cirriculum. I followed a similar
cirriculum in Poland
In general what is known as Socialist Camp–STEM education was extremely good, I know Germans, Poles and
Czechs, among others, who also were the "products" of this education and yes, they had no problems
navigating US higher-ed.
Pitting the Christian (Protestant) U.S. against Christian
(Orthodox) Russia serves the needs of
Dhimmi
Globalism. Both sides are limited in their ability to
resist Muslim efforts at replacing Christians if they cannot unify against the IslamoGlobalist invaders.
The Biden family, Kerry family, and
Dhimmi
Soros family all have business investments in Ukraine
that will only make money if they are able to keep responsible Christians out of office. If Trump can clear
the
Dhimmi
Deep State hurdles, investigations and impeachment, hopefully this flow of money to
suppress Ukrainian Christians will be shut off.
Not really, just out of focus. NATO is Israel's bitch/attack dog. Israel is owned by the Rothschilds, The
Rothschilds got tossed from the USSR. They regained Russia through Yeltsin. Putin pushed back against the
Rothschild front oligarchs, and now they want it back.
Guys, guys what's going on?! You are, recently, slipping hard here. C'mon we aren't THAT dumb.
So far you've done sterling work in the real world; keeping "normies" in check on the Internet too.
But the crew here is ..slipping.
Two options:
1. You really take us here for dumb fucks. While there is some merit there, still I mean, Soros as
dhimmi?!?
2. The team here has kept the same handles but the real people behind them are different guys. Temps hired
for peanuts. So, if that, where have the real guys gone? And, more importantly, why?
If I can venture an opinion I guess on focusing the effort on normies in the runup to the election.
Anyway, please, tone that idiocy down. It's bad form, really.
It looks as if at least one Ukrainian "player" has taken a look at the smoking ruins of the Middle East and
concluded that "friendly ouvertures" by US are just the on-ramp to a scenario where there will be much
pissing on your robbed grave in a decade or so. A trial balloon to start a de-escalation vis-à-vis of Russia
may have been launched.
In general what is known as Socialist Camp–STEM education was extremely good, I know Germans, Poles
and Czechs, among others, who also were the "products" of this education and yes, they had no problems
navigating US higher-ed.
And then they all flee to the U.S. to design and build computers, airplanes, missiles, etc., while their
native lands try to remain barely 2nd world in STEM.
Another important piece of the puzzle is NATO's Strategic Concept, approved at the 1999 Washington Summit.
It included for the first time "possibility of conducting non-Article 5 crisis response operations." Since
Article 5 refers to a response to a military attack against a member country, this single phrase changed
NATO from a defensive alliance to an offensive one.
This created a loophole. First, sponsor a separatist
insurgency in a country you don't like. When the government responds, claim that civilians are suffering.
Mobilize the public opinion using photos of crying women (less than ten is enough, just show them
frequently.) Follow up with accusations of "humanitarian crisis." Claim that "genocide is unfolding" (this
quote and the bogus claim of 100,000 dead Albanians was used in 1999). Frequently use the phrase
"International Community". Invade.
This scenario was implemented against Yugoslavia and Libya. Had Al Gore won in 2000, Richard Holbroooke
would become Secretary of State and he would use Chechnya as a pretext for intervention in Russia. It almost
happened – Madeleine Albright asked Russia to permit presence of "observers" in Chechnya. Putin wisely
refused, perhaps because he knew that "observers" in Kosovo were used to provide a pretext for war against
Yugoslavia.
Albright's request happened soon after Nato permitted "non-Article 5 crisis response operations."
Few people realize how close we were to a repeat of Yugoslavia-style scenario being used to break up Russia.
@Curmudgeon
You believe it's "The Rothschilds".
I believe it's a
BIT
more complicated than that.
I suggest we skip
that
debate here.
At the moment the pressure is in three spots: Syria, Ukraine and Balkans.
Or, why are "we" in Syria and Balkans, for example? Dumb question, of course.
As why "we" are in Iraq, Afghanistan. Or Bulgaria. Or Japan. Or Italy. Or whatever.
Boring, in fact.
Changing that fact, somehow, could be an interesting conversation. Granted, wouldn't attract much traffic
around here. One day, perhaps.
The question should be : Is there any little speck of land on the entire planet that isn't of "strategic
importance" to the fools that control the USG??
@Exile
Exactly! The fact is that the Democratic establishment have lost any credibility with the Russia Scam so
they are now working on the Ukraine angle an angle that is fraught with danger for them if it all comes out
in the wash.
@peterAUS
The IslamoSoros is an ex-Jew, now totally dedicated to Islam and Jew extermination. That is why he is so
dedicated to the genocidal BDS movement: (1)
Israel released a list of 20 BDS-supporting organizations whose members will be banned from entering
Israel due to their BDS activism, prominently featuring six American groups. At least four of the six
BDS-promoting U.S. groups receive funding tied to Soros. Scores of other U.S. organizations that support
the BDS movement are financed by Soros.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is a central proponent of anti-Israel BDS activism on
college campuses and in churches
Globalism is against the Judeo-Christian God and his values. Which is why the IslamoSoros and Globalism
go together so well.
@Undocumented Shopper
"This would be a geopolitical blunder of biblical proportions, comparable to Germany's decision to sponsor
Lenin's sealed train voyage."
Exactly. The reason they did that was because they feared Russia would open
up a second front. A short sighted objective in the end because the Zionists managed to sucker America into
fighting on the side of the Allies for the promise of their "promised land" in Palestine.
Same with America embracing Ukraine since Putin isn't going to follow the conventional rules of
engagement since he doesn't have to thanks to the US abrogating the treaty on Medium range nukes. If NATO
makes its advance through Ukraine he'll launch a nuclear counterstrike using tactical nukes.
The people in Washington and Tel Aviv who are playing these games
Don't you mean to say Jaffa? Or Jerusalem? Then again it's actually neither, so may as well.
Russia is the only nation on Earth with the undisputable power to permanently cripple the United
States with nuclear weapons.
Say it ain't so. It's almost as if Israel is not the only one with a Samson(ov) Option? But I'm sure
you'll find a way to blame it on people in the wrong (((Capital))) Anyway.
Israel's nukes are a reason to take them away?
Russia's nukes are a reason to grab your ankles and hope for the best?
I am not in Ukraine. Imperial Washington is in Ukraine as part of it's project to rule the world by force of
arms. I am in Texas minding my own business.
@Gall
I see what you mean. But perhaps the Dems, or the powers behind them, are just concerned with getting rid of
Trump and don't mind if the scandal envelops Joe Biden too.
They'd just be getting rid of the old
"moderate" white guy and giving the nomination instead to a woman.
They would have Warren or whoever's baggage, and she's not young either -- but they wouldn't have to
suffer Creepy Joe's more advanced age and apparent mental decline, his open touching of young girls, and his
constant gaffes and lies/exaggerations.
@Exile
'The fact that both Trump and Putin have managed to keep the peace is laudable and somewhat surprising,
particularly on our side given the comparative pressure the Israel lobby can exert on Trump politically and
personally vs. Putin '
Get the feeling that maybe you're solving this puzzle?
What happens to the interest of US politicians in the Ukraine if Russia agrees to dump Syria?
Yes, but the long answer is that a majority of Jews (with exception to the author perhaps and some others)
now have a dog in this fight (or rather, many). It's hard to believe, but 80 years after playing the leading
role in having millions of Ukrainians murdered in the 1930's, after founding the Soviet Union, Jews now
dominate Ukraine, not just with oligarchs but with politicians elected to the highest office(s) in the land.
They now have their second Jewsh president in a row, the first being part Jewish. The top positions of the
gov't are dominated by Jews and I believe they control most of the media, just as they do in the US. By
contrast, Russia has an ethnic Russian that leads the country and by some counts is undergoing a big return
to Christanisty. Ths is like a horror movie to Jews who never stop indoctrinating Amercans with talk of the
"pogroms" from 120 years ago or longer.
I can sum up the differences based on a personal experience. In
2002 I visted Saint Petersburg and met a young woman there. Durng the time we spent together the subject of
the Jews came up and she said "Russians and Jews don't get along well". I don't recall the exact words of
her sentence, but that is precisely the sentiment she related. It was rather refreshing. She wasn't
criticnzing either side, just stating a fact. And she wasn't apologizing. She appeared to be a proud
Russian. By contrast, when I was in Lviv last year, what had been the heart of Ukrainian nationalism, I met
a young woman completely beholden to the Jews. She had visited Israel several times, she spoke of Jewish
briliance, she made a comment about the bad Palestinians, she called me an anti-semite for telling her Jews
dominated the USSR and were in charge when millions of Ukrainians were killed. She hated Germans, and hated
me. She told me how brilliant Einsten was and how awful Germans were. No doubt, she would be a very loyal
American.
That is what is at stake for the Jews. They now have one more country they dominate, and maybe this one
more than any other. And this is the same country they blasted for many decades as "anti-semitc", portraying
Ukrainians as evil "anti-semites" in movies and deporting Ukrainains from the USA so they could be tried on
trumped up charges in Israel (John Demjanjuk).
Anyone that doesn't think Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler and the Jewish dominated mainstream medis are not
acting in their own interest (Jewish interests) are just dumb.
@Andrei Martyanov
"The problem, however, is with the fact that the United States has neither resources nor status anymore to
do either:"
Yes -- but
The US would hope it can pull another Indonesia, Ukraine, Hondurous, & now Bolivia etc, etc,
etc on Russia. Another colour revolution, by those humanitarians in the NED.
@A123
"Globalism is against the Judeo-Christian God and his values. Which is why the IslamoSoros and Globalism go
together so well."
I can't believe your claims never mind your logic.
So called "globalists" give not a damn about any religion, any race, any culture, & (probably) any ideology.
They care about Power & Money -- that-is-it.
@A123
What religion does Soros profess? Is he a member of an established racial and/or religious group? Just
wondering. Ann Coulter says he's a "pompous American billionaire." But I felt that description was somehow
incomplete.
And where does it mention that Jews compose 90% of the current government of Ukraine? And of the previous
governments ever since the Putsch?
And that in a country almost devoid of Jews.
Most of the oligarchs were created by the Americans using the World Bank and International Finance
Organization and a string of private banks. These oligarchs are again almost all Jewish.
Any article or video about Ukraine that leaves the role of International Jewery out is a work of fiction.
Why, then, is Washington so deeply involved in Ukraine?
Because once you secure the old border by making an ally of the country on it, their border becomes the
new insecure border and so you have to bring yet another country on the far side of the new ally within your
alliance. There is no end to it.
I think it is as simple as it looks. Ukraine is "vital to American interests" inasmuch as those interests
are:
1- Keeping a heel on Russia to serve whatever existing financial interests there are in that status
quo, or simply to remain dominant geopolitically, power being an end in itself
2- The venality of American politicians in using Ukraine as a financial playground, very much as
Ukrainian and Russian politicians have done.
There's no real mystery in a small "border" nation that exists as a conduit for a vital commodity being
the pawn of bigger powers, is there?
@Anonymous
I find it odd how Eastern Europeans boast that they're much more intelligent and capable than Westerners,
yet it seems to me that those of them with any intelligence and capability move to Western countries as soon
as possible.
If they're so wonderful shouldn't it be the other way round? Of course, they always blame it
on "Communism" but that seems to be rather like the "Colonialism" excuse for why India and Africa is third
world, how long is that excuse credible?
@Anonymous
"And then they all flee to the U.S. to design and build computers, airplanes, missiles, etc., while their
native lands try to remain barely 2nd world in STEM".
Computers like the fundamentally insecure Intel
processor chips? Besides, most "American" computers are manufactured in Asia. The American "executives" just
skim off the profits. Any time now the people who actually make the microprocessors, RAM, hard drives, SSDs,
network chips, etc. will realise that all they have to do is initiate a "buyout" and it will all be theirs.
Airplanes yeah, like the F-35? No honest comparison of the F-35 with any of the recent MiGs or Sukhois
could come to any conclusion but that the Russian planes are vastly superior. And, of course, vastly cheaper
– not only to buy, but to maintain and upgrade. Besides, the price of a Russian jet fighter includes the
engines (unlike some F-35 quotations I have seen).
Missiles you really have got to be joking even to bring missiles into it. Turkey, India and many other
nations are well aware that the Russian anti-aircraft missiles are far, far better than any US products. Not
only that – they are also much cheaper! If you are talking about offensive missiles, the picture becomes
even more one-sided.
To correct your wording, the people you speak of "flee to the US" not to design and build anything
useful, but mainly to scoop up all the gold with which the streets are lined, and drink all the milk and
honey that flows there.
They quickly find out that it's not gold that lines the sidewalks, but something much nastier and
smellier.
@RadicalCenter
"A map is useful for ascertaining which countries border Russia. Yes, there are many".
Whereas the USA has
borders with two (very weak) nations: Canada and Mexico. As Jules Jusserand, French Ambassador to the US,
remarked in 1910:
"The United States was blessed among nations. On the north, she had a weak neighbour; on the south,
another weak neighbour; on the east, fish; and on the west, fish".
Nothing has changed since then.
So the USA, with only two relatively weak and unthreatening neighbours, should need very minimal armed
forces and should spend very little on armaments; while Russia, with many neighbours (including some very
powerful ones) is justified in spending far more on its armed forces.
Precisely the opposite of what we see; in reality, the USA spends ten times as much on armaments as
Russia does.
Of course, the convenient Wikipedia article is heavily biased toward the neocon view that Ukraine is no
part of Russia and has always been independent.
Kievan Rus was roughly contemporary with King Alfred's Wessex – the nation that rapidly expanded to
become England. And Kiev was the capital of the very first Russian state, just as Winchester was the capital
of King Alfred's Wessex. (All of this happened over 800 years before the American Revolution).
If someone were to tell me today that Hampshire (the county in which Winchester is situated) is not part
of England, but belongs to some weird country called "Borderland" – the literal meaning of "Ukraine" – I
would laugh out loud. Russians would be quite as justified in claiming that Kiev has always been a Russian
city, and still is today.
However the Russians are peaceable, tolerant people and prefer to let their "erring sisters" go their own
way unhindered. (Unlike Abraham Lincoln's USA, which reacted to the perfectly justified secession of the
Confederate States by launching a war that killed nearly a million people).
" .I've often quoted Randolph Bourne as saying, "War is the
health of the state." He was quite correct. The larger the nation, the greater the need political leaders
have for warfare. ..Since the end of World War II, the US military-industrial complex has been
displeased with the fact that peacetime means diminished revenue for them. Increasingly, they've contributed
heavily to election campaigns for both major parties in every election.
The repayment for those contributions has always been the same – the political class must find excuses to
create a new conflict as soon as another one ends, ensuring the continued revenue of the complex.
This has resulted in the US becoming the first and only country that's in a consciously created state of
perpetual warfare. The cost of this, in 2018, was roughly $600 billion – 54% of all federal discretionary
spending ":
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting
[via central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal
scams which cannot be "reformed","improved", simply because of their innate, unchangeble criminal nature."
onebornfree
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to
differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a
professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
– Without the unequivocally Russian parts (to include Dniepropetrowsk and Odessa oblasts) Ukraine is a
landlocked sunflower field chemically pure of strategic value (thanks to Nord Stream 2).
It was a private venture of the Tribe to provide a safe space more conveniently located than London or
Cyprus.
– The Banderists are a wild card it took a special kind of idiocy to wake up that particular dog; they are
not forever going to believe it was the Big Bad Russians who massacred their brothers.
From the other side
of the grand chessboard (always assuming there still is such a thing as an independent US geostrategy) the
situation is simple – there are two Archimedean points, the loss either of which will mean the end of the
empire:
– Germany: NATO´s eastward expansion is not so much aimed at Mother Russia as on preempting
Tauroggen/Rapallo 3.0 . Brexit doesn´t help either.
– the Gulf: there is a reason it is called "Persian" and not "Lake Monroe"; contrary to popular belief
the US do not need the oil, but without the ability to deny it to others the $$$ would collapse, rendering
untenable the worldwide strategic posture (and prolly unleashing a groid uprising back home).
Classic empire in overstretch – the only question is how much damage they will do on the way down.
@Kolya Krassotkin
Yes.
The Neocon foreign policy has been swallowed up by most of the Dumbo-crats because of TDS (Trump Derangement
Syndrome). Thank God for Tulsi. The Republi-tards are even more rabidly Neocoonish than the Demokratz. Thank
The Lord for Rand Paul. So 'they', The Cabal, the Neocons, whatever you want to call them, basically run our
foreign policy.
Now 'they' have a special hatred for Putin because he reestablished Christian Orthodoxy into Mother Russia.
You have to admire Trump's intestinal fortitude to push back against Christian Zionists, Neocons, derranged
Democrats and stupid politicians in general and that's just in his own family!
@Anonymous
You probably live under some stone. If you were following Russia military developments you would clearly
understand that STEM so far at least math physics part is doing ok and considerably better than in USA.
@Andrei Martyanov
At least Germans once in a while did something good for Russia, while doing really long term disservice to
themselves as history shown.
Basically ukraine and belorussia is Russia safe few parts. The whole madness of this situation that
basically russian people were led to believe that they are not russians . Sooner or later this anomaly will
have to be addressed and I disagree with those who consider ukraine a lost cause. Everything in due time. In
this regard chinese are behaving rightfully not allowing no piece of china go. Once one start retreating in
this regard there is no knowing how much can be lost. For now I think russia is doing right thing. But
eventually both Ukraine and belorussia will have to be reintegrated. On their own they are not viable
anyway.
"... "In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to Ukraine. ..."
"... But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such? ..."
"... And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay. ..."
"... The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that. ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia. ..."
"... "They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for it." ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets. ..."
"... Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass. ..."
"... Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes. ..."
"... Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup: ..."
"... Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%. ..."
"... on Yovanovitch, She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States." ..."
"... She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. . .Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is injured in the knee ..."
NBC News
is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats' impeachment circus. But it fails to
note what the conflict is really about:
It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic.
In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George
Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on
Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but
also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.
"It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression," Taylor, the
acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why
Trump's decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of
Russian expansionism didn't align with U.S. policy.
But at a time when Democrats are simultaneously eager to influence public opinion in favor
of ousting the president and quietly apprehensive that their hearings could stall or
backfire, the first round felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than
the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.
"In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the
permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to
Ukraine.
But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?
President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine
despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama's decision against U.S. national interest?
Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?
Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. Who defines what is in the
"national interest" with regards to foreign policy? Here is a point where for once I agree with
the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes :
[O]n the critical matter of America's interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the
policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would
resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that
stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin's anti-American
dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist
ambitions.
But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.
And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the
bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National
Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their
assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a
constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay.
The U.S.
constitution "empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly
negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries."
The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the
administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col.
Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is
the duly elected president who does that.
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly
believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his
campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good
relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
...
[I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his
pleasure" are there to implement them.
There is another point that has to be made about the NBC's assertions. It is not in
the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber
baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup
had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in
his
recent NYT interview :
Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his
role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a
remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn
back toward Russia.
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's
power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And
you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for
it."
... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed
Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.
Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its
geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties
with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He
predicted that the trauma of war will pass.
...
Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to
divulge details because the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way."
Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to
pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received
nearly 73% of all votes.
Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess
it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They
are joined in this
with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup:
Zelenskiy's decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern
Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians
opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but
prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in
light of this domestic opposition.
...
The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary
factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in
western Ukraine. Crucially, however, they can also rely on right-wing paramilitary groups
composed of veterans from the hottest phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-5.
Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25%
of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won
5.8%.
By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore
the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That
undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.
Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate
peace with Russia. (He should also investigate
Biden's undue influence .) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient
step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.
It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.
Posted by b on November 14, 2019 at 18:23 UTC |
Permalink
next page " agree with mccarthy about who conducts foreign policy, disagree about who
the aggressor is; it's the USA, trying to weaken Russia, which is the aggressor.
thanks b... typo - immediate piece with Russia - 'peace' is the spelling here...
the comments from Kolomoisky in the recent nyt interview are very telling.. aside from
being a first rate kleptomaniac who will willingly play both sides if he can profit from it,
he is also speaking a moment of truth..for him Ukraine is available to the highest bidder...
he could give a rats ass about Ukraine or the people... but still, it is refreshing that the
NYT published his comments in this regard..
the quote "the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way." is very true... it was true
before kolomisky picked a side too.. this guy is very shrewd.. i wonder if his own country is
able to see thru him?
national interest.... yes, trump gets to decide and he won on the idea of having closer
relations with russia, but the cia-msm has been lambasting him and anyone else associated
with him since before the election over the clinton e mails... they have painted a scenario
that it is all russias fault and have been relentless in this portrayal... hoping trump is
going to turn this around is like hoping someone is going to turn the titanic around from
hitting a giant iceberg... the usa is too far gone and will be hitting the iceberg.. they are
in fact...
From NYT about Kolomo???? (spelling in English is highly variable)
George D. Kent, a senior State Department official, said he had told Mr. Zelensky that his
willingness to break with Mr. Kolomoisky -- "somebody who had such a bad reputation" -- would
be a litmus test for his independence. [If is good to be independent, i.e. to do what we
want.]
And William Taylor, the acting ambassador in Kiev, said he had warned Mr. Zelensky: "He,
Mr. Kolomoisky, is increasing his influence in your government, which could cause you to
fail." [La Paz is a fresh reminder for Kiev?]
Well the thing about Zelensky is he's still there, and he is making changes in Donbass.
Kolomoisky was interested in the fracked gas in Donbass, the completion of NordStream II
has made a mess of that idea. It is good that he has seen the light, as it means Zelensky
will have support in his attempts to adapt to reality. But Kolomoisky is still a crook no
doubt.
My immediate reaction was that Kolomoisky realises he has to act - the Ukrainian oligarchs
have got too close to America. I agree with James that he is a extremely clever man.
Ukraine's traditional business is playing both ends against the middle and sending the
proceeds to Switzerland (or the Caribbean in Porosyonok's case). Since 1990 a few of these
robber barons have made a very good business winding up the west against Russia, it could go
on ever - why spoil it by lifting the rock and seeing all the insects scurrying around in the
light?
Another rock that has been lifted is in Washington, where the khokhol diaspora are
desperately trying to get Uncle Sam to right the wrongs of a century ago.
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners oif the world and they run the world they
own.
... @ b -- "Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports."
The are not 'separatists', but rather Ukrainians who want to stay in a federated Ukraine
as 'provinces' with powers to pass their regional laws, similar to those in Canada.
The segment of empire in the US that are against Russia act so because it was Russia that
stymied them in Syria and continues to be in their way of expanding the control from that
part of empire...the US segment.
I still believe that the global private finance core segment of empire is behind Trump and
throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The cult of global
private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role in the new
multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyones heads to make it ongoing.
I don't believe that strategy will work but as long as they can be fronted by a MAD player
of some sort (Occupied Palestine comes to mind) they can be bully players in international
matters.
As the world economies grind to a "halt" there will be lots of pressure everywhere and
very little clarity about the key civilization war over public/private finance, IMO
For a military dictatorship, diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means. The US has
been at war with Russia since the right-wing coup at the Democratic convention of 1944. All
presidents have been servants of the military, which includes the police/intel/security
apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead role were "dealt with."
Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state bureaucrats are shocked
and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US foreign policy for 75
years!
Wow! The depth of delusion on display is as breathtaking as its complete projection of the
intentions and actions of the Evil Outlaw US Empire! Oh so many saying I'm displaying four
fingers instead of two. Too bad there isn't a padded cell big enough to contain all the
lunatics. I recall the pre- and post-coup discussions from 2014--that Russia was going to
make NATO own Ukraine until it was forced to concede it has no business being there; that
Russia would teach the would-be leaders of Ukraine a serious lesson in where their national
interests lay. NATO is ready to cede and the lesson's been learned.
IMO, two referendums must be held. The first within Russia: Will you accept portions of
Ukraine wanting to merge with Russia: Yes/No? Second to be given within Ukraine provided Yes
wins in #1: Do you wish to join Russia or remain in Ukraine? IMO, this is a very longstanding
unresolved issue of consequence for the people involved. The political leaders of Russia and
Ukraine might both be against such a vote, but IMO that merely kicks the can further down the
road and opens the door for more mischief making by the Evil Outlaw US Empire. Assuming a Yes
from Russia and some from Ukraine, a strategic threat to Russia and Europe would be
mitigated. Additional questions about those parts of Ukraine not wanting to join Russia could
be solved via additional referenda in the Ukraine and neighboring nations that might prove
willing to absorb the remnants and their people. Such action would of course negate the Minsk
Agreements.
Given the ideological passions of those living in Western and Northern Ukraine, I don't
see any hope for the continuation of the Ukrainian state as currently arranged, thus the
proposed referenda. However, if Russia says Nyet, then Minsk must be implemented.
"Democracy" is not about letting the people as a whole have a say in how the country is
governed. That would be fascist, and racist, and populist, and LITERALLY HITLER. Letting the
people decide on things like foreign policy, is literally anti-democratic.
No, "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing responsibility. The elites get
to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take responsibility when things go wrong.
Because you see, we are a "Democracy."
Breaking off long established economic and cultural ties with a large neighbouring country,
virtually overnight, is a rash act, and certain to create dislocation and hardship. The
craziness of the idea was only achievable through the traumatizing psy-op of the sniper
event, leading directly to the coup and the state of war. The EU and the US were clearly
malevolent in orchestrating the Association agreement with its ridiculous terms and the
corresponding Maidan pressures.
The fools in Hong Kong, after protester-sponsored screenings of the World On Fire
documentary, were actually quoted as presuming the Maidan protests had "won" and expressed
their hopes that they too could "win". Good luck to them.
Kolomoisky and Zelensky know what needs to be done, but they fear the blood that will flow
with Nazi-Banderist scum! Zelinski's balls are not that big, and has no options left after
compromising his position from day one. Who will make the first move, I fear not him? Russia
has time, and patience, which is sorely lacking in the west who feel they have to push the
envelope.
The Minsk II protocol was agreed to on 12 February 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia,
France, and Germany, It included provisions for a halt in the fighting, the withdrawal of
foreign forces, new constitution to allow special status for Donbass, and election in Donbass
for local self governance. Control of the present border of Ukraine would be restored to the
Ukraine government. Donbass would continue to be in Ukraine with some autonomy here (scroll down).
There are many such autonomous zones in the world, and in Europe, seen here .
The problem in Ukraine is that the neo-Nazi factions promoted by the US don't want to see a
resolution, and will fight it with US support.
Kolomoysky is obviously a master thief and general scumbag...but he is no fool...
I think the writing on the wall became obvious with the Nordstream 2 finalization, where,
it is noted, Denmark came in just under the wire in terms of not disrupting the
timetable...
Obviously the interests of German business have prevailed...and rightly so in this
case...
And what of the famous EU line about 'protecting' Ukraine as a gas transit
corridor...?
LOLOLOL...that is in the same category of nothingburger as the EU noises about 'alternate
payment' mechanisms for trade with Iran...
As soon as the Denmark story broke, Gazprom and Russian energy analysts talked openly
about the tiny volumes that Ukraine could expect to see transiting its territory...as part of
a new agreement to replace the one that has expired...
It works out to a small fraction of the several billion dollars in transit fees the
Ukraine was getting...
Also considering that the IMF appears to be finally shutting off the tap of loans to this
failed gangster state...and that the promises from the EU in 2013 were just so much fairy
tales...hard-nosed operators like Kolomoysky are recalculating...
The chaos and national ruin has really cost these gangster capitalists nothing [in fact
they have profited wildly]...so it is easy for them to reverse course and come begging back
to Russia...
Bryan MacDonald has a good piece about this today in RT...
So, here we are, almost six years since the first "EuroMaidan" protests in Kiev, and
Ukraine's most prominent oligarch has finally voiced the unmentionable: the project has
failed.
As for Kolomoysky...like Trump, there is something to like about dirtballs who speak their
minds openly...LOL
Quite a turnaround by Kolomoisky. Wasn't he once caught on a tapped phone call admitting
while chuckling about Ukrainian complicity in shooting down MH-17? i.e. NOT Donbas rebels and
NOT Russia.
@12 karlof1... a referendum... as if the usa would agree to that, lol.... look how they
processed the one in crimea...
@18 flankerbandit... last line is true, but it pales in relation to the ugliness these 2
exhibit 99% of the time, although the 1% when they don't it's refreshing! ukraine will
continue to be used as a tool by the west..
forget about any referendum.. that makes too much sense and won't be allowed..
Nordstream 2 will come online in less than 2 months and the Ukrainian gas exports at that
time will cease (I.e. no oil for the Oligarchs to steal), no matter what the US says they
can't replace the Russian oil exports in terms of money & support to Ukraine, so the
Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in order for the Russians to keep
even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets
It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot.
But now the Ukrainian thieves are beginning to realize that the Western thieves are going
to steal the very ground from under their feet, so there will be no more Ukraine to steal
from. That's not a very good business model. Plus they're no doubt seeing how the US treats
its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere, and realize they could easily find themselves
the next meal for the US beast. Pretty easy to see why the smarter ones are getting
nervous.
they need to make peace with Russia or they will be left out in the cold, literally. They
seemed to have previously bought into some insane lie that they'd be a part of the EU and
NATO if theyd do Washington's bidding. The Deep state vastly underestimated Putin's resolve
when it became clear to the Russians that Washington may try and turn Crimea into a NATO port
one day. The game is over. Ukraine needs to find a way forward now for itself or it will be a
failed state in the near future. It's clear Merkel and Europe want no part of this headache
I don't think Russians want to 'own' any part of Ukraine...at least that is the nearly
unanimous opinion of my own contacts and colleagues in Russia...so I don't think any
referenda will be on the table...
What I do think is possible is what Yanukovich and Russia agreed to in terms of a trade
and economic deal...which was a lot more practical [not to mention generous] than the EU
'either or' nonsense...
Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they are selling vast tracts of
agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally dispossessing themselves of
their own food security...
At the time of the Soviet dissolution, Ukraine had the highest living standards and some
of the world's prime industry and technology...including for instance the Yuzhnoye design
bureau [rocket engines and spacecraft] and many more such cutting edge aerospace
concerns...
For years these crucial enterprises were able to keep going due to the Russian
market...that all ended in 2014 [and in fact was tapering off even before due to the massive
corruption]...
Now the Chinese are looking to scoop up these gems at firesale prices...
It is really quite unbelievable that the nutcases in the Ukraine would be willing to cut
off their own arm just to bleed on Russia's shirt...
Why did the Ukraine never recover from the gangster capitalism like Russia did...because
no Putin ever came along to reign in the oligarchy...[It could be argued Putin hasn't done
nearly enough in this regard].
The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own future...as the
unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to extract maximal
wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on the verge of
toppling...
Kolomoisky is talking his book and helping USA to make the case that Nordstream is a NATO
security issue. To pretend that he's serious about a rapproachment with Russia just plays
into that effort.
And b ignores my comment on the prior thread that he references (about Trump being
Constitutionally charged with foreign policy). Repeating: the "Imperial Presidency" has flung
off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing the need to get Congressional
approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and
black budgets.
While for practical reasons the Executive Branch of USA government has the power to
negotiate treaties and manage foreign relations, Constitutionally he does so for the
sovereign (the American people) and his efforts are subject to review and approval of the
people's representatives via the power of the purse.
Ignoring how the "Imperial Presidency" has usurped power leads to faulty analysis that
supports that power grab.
Ukrainegate IS a farce, but for other reasons. Chief among them being the inherent fakery
of 'managed democracy' which manifests as kayfabe.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners of the world and they run the world they
own.
Nicely put:- that is the reality. Thanks b for your intrepid reports.
Paul Craig Roberts has a deeply aggrieved rant at zero hedge if barflies want a chuckle.
What a shitshow.
Crimea?
It has been part of Russia about as long as the USA has been a country.
9 out of 10 residents are of Russian origin, and Russian is the spoken language.
I guess it could be returned to the 10%-- but out of fairness, we must turn the USA over to
its original occupants.
If you live in the USA, get your ass ready to leave.
One of the problems that the anti-nazis face in Ukraine is that there are occupying armies in
the country. Armies which cannot be trusted to obey instructions which are not agreed upon by
NATO warmongers.
One such army is Canadian, commanded I believe by a descendant of the Ukrainian SS refugees
and reporting to the Foreign Minister in Ottawa, a Russophobe with a family background of
nazi collaboration.
The actual political situation is much more delicate than media reports suggest: what are
called elections feature, in the Washington approved fashion, the banning of socialist and
communist candidates. Bans which are enforced by a combination of fascist commanded police
forces and, even less responsible, private nazi militias. Opponents of the Maidan regime are
driven into exile, jailed or murdered.
Those who wonder as Jackrabbit, in a rare essay into rationality, does above, about the
nature of the US Constitution after decades of the erosion of checks and balances thanks to
the Imperial Presidency, will recognise that a dialectic is at work here. Washington's
support for fascism abroad has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the
installation of fascist regimes abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US
intervenes it leaves a fascist regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind
it.
And what this means is that, among other things, the ability of the population to effect
political change is cancelled: there is no way that the people of Ukraine can decide what
they want because the decisions have been taken for them, in weird cult like gatherings of SS
worshiping Bandera supporters in Toronto and Chicago. It is no accident that most of the
'Ukrainians' being wheeled out by the Democrats to testify against Trump are actually greedy
expatriates who have never really lived in Ukraine.
There was a moment, not long ago, when it looked as if the Minsk accords promised a path to
peace and reconciliation. Unfortunately the plain people of Ukraine, the poorest in Europe
though living in one of the richest countries, Washington, Ottawa and NATO didn't like the
sound of Minsk. Nor did the fascists in the Baltic states and Poland, for whom, for
centuries, Ukraine has been a cow to milk, its people slaves to be exploited and its rich
resources too tempting to ignore.
As Thomas Jefferson explained the President's role in foreign affairs in 1790, and the lack
of advisors' policy making decisions: ''as the President was the only channel of
communication between the United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that
foreign nations or their agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation';
that whatever he communicated as such, they had a right and were bound to consider 'as the
expression of the nation'; and that no foreign agent could be 'allowed to question it,' or
'to interpose between him and any other branch of government, under the pretext of either's
transgressing their functions.' Mr. Jefferson therefore declined to enter into any discussion
of the question as to whether it belonged to the President under the Constitution to admit or
exclude foreign agents. 'I inform you of the fact,' he said, 'by authority from the
President.'
Might also be worth yesterdays hero's asking if dear Mr Kolomoisky, joint Uki/Israeli
national, took a part in authorising the shoot down of MH17 as a news cover for Operation
Protective Edge. Heave ho zionist USA ....et al.
1.The decisions to with hold and release aid have nothing to do with the President making
foreign policy but with his campaign. Saying it was about foreign policy is a damned lie.
2.Trump as president is supposed to lead foreign policy, which means actually setting a
policy. Military aid to Ukraine, yes, except no, except yes, personal handling without asking
anybody with experience how to achieve the national goal desired, national agenda kept secret
from the people who have to carry it out, abuse of officials, demands for dubiously legal
actions without rationale...Saying it was about the president's executive role is a damned
lie.
3.Trump has not made even a tweet that questions US support for fascists. That not even a
issue for Trump. Saying this is about support for fascism is a damned lie.
4.Kolomoyskiy is a bankroller of fascists. It is not impossible even a billionaire might get
frightened by the genie he's let out of the bottle, even if he's Jewish and rich enough to
run away. But actually undoing the fascist regime means taming the paramilitaries and this is
not even on the horizon. Given the rivalry between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskiy it's not even
certain it's a real change of heart or just soothing words for the non-fascist people. Nor is
it even clear the Zelensky will follow even the Steinmeier formula. If he does, good, but
until something actually happens? Saying it's about the antifascist turn is a damned lie.
The only thing that isn't a lie is that Trump was not committing treasons, "merely" a
campaign violation. But then, Clinton never did either. The crybabies who dished it out but
can't take it deserve zero respect, and zero time.
Curious to know how Kolomoisky is working "feverishly" to end the war in the Donbass region.
Wonder if he is planning to come clean on what he knows of the Malaysia Airlines MH17
shootdown and crash in an area not far from Slavyansk and near where his Privat Group's
subsidiary company Burisma Holdings holds a licence to drill for oil and natural gas. What
does he know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17
to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000 metres above as the flight crew
had requested? He had been governor of Dnepropetrovsk region at the time.
Somewhere I read it alleged that the actual owner of Burisma was or is Kolomoiski.
Anything to this?
And via John Helmer (via Checkpointasia and dances with bears) comes the perspective that
it's not so much Kolomoiski floating trial balloons (though that may also be true) but that K
is being given space in the NYT to build his credentials as the new Borg villain, thereby
making it still harder for Zelensky to reconcile with Russia.
fb @ 25 said;"The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own
future...as the unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to
extract maximal wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on
the verge of toppling..."
Yup, aided and abetted by our current regime, while pretending not to...
@23
"It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot."
This is it in a nutshell. The Russians were fed up with Ukraine stealing gas. Hence, Nord
Stream 2. That was always the plan. Whether the Yanks truly grasped the rationale here
---Russia is cutting off gas to Ukraine, simple---has never been clear to me. Although it is
a fairly simple plot. The Russians had decades of shenanigans with the Ukes and said Basta.
By not overreacting to the Ukrainian-USA freakout and keeping their eyes on the prize (Nord
Stream and disengaging, gas-wise, from Uk), they have managed to reach their goal of getting
Nord Stream 2 online.
Kolomoiski is the bankroller and commander of the Azov Battalion. Has close arrangements with
other paramilitaries. And is the current principal of Burisma. And is Privatbank, the only
bank left in Ukraine. He gets a cut of all the action.
When Trump queries Zelensky, all that Zelensky is thinking is this guy does not know the
score. This guy does not know who's on first. He wants me to investigate the boss? Let him
talk to the boss. And who does Z talk to in D.C.? Pointless getting into detail with
Trump.
Trump has no team. No one in D.C. is on his side. He's unable to finish anything.
1) Say the fantasy happens and the US/Russia become BFFs like US/UK...
- Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
- Tough to answer, many unknowns- Russia may act different once its on top, actors may
derail schemes, Deep State temper tantrum, etc...
In general, governments are the order-providing solution for chaos and problems that only
first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over others.
Kolomoiski is a U.S. asset. His interview with the NYTimes proves it.
His threats are meant to mobilize NATO and Russia haters in general; because Trump and
most of his cadre care nothing for Ukraine.
Does anyone think Russia will give Kolomoiski 100 million dollars? Why was he given an
opportunity to threaten the USA? For no reason? Something else is afoot but Russia still
won't take the bait because they are winning.
Russia is quite happy with the status quo. The war in Ukraine keeps the war against Russia
on a level which is easy to manipulate and therefore geostrategically beneficial. Kolomoiski
will get nothing.
Thank you, b, for that snippet from NY Interview with Kolomoisky . I had glanced the headline
on RT but didn't read it because of RT's usual clumsy writing.
Kolomoiski is taunting the empire: investigate my crimes and
ukraine will seek reconciliation and alliance with russia.
Russia won't fall for it. They want kolomoiski's scalp even
more than the empire. From the statements putin has made, maybe
the only concession russia would accept is the dissolution of
ukraine as a sovereign entity and reintegration with russia, minus galicia.
Putin has remarked that they are not one people but one state. Ukraine
already knows that its domestic industry is only viable in competition
with the eu industrial powerhouses if it is integrated with russia.
What does [Kolomoysky] know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control
personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000
metres above as the flight crew had requested?
Okay..so an interesting can of worms here...
First is the fact that Kolomoysky was the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast at the
time...
Now as to the flight and Dnipro Radar [the regional air traffic control facility that
controls a very big chunk of airspace over eastern Ukraine]...
First the issue of the airplane cruising altitude...the crew had filed their flight plan
to climb from flight level 330 [33,000 ft] to FL350 after passing a certain waypoint in
eastern Ukraine...
Now the controllers did instruct the crew to go ahead and climb to their planned altitude,
but the crew declined the clearance and opted to stay at FL330...this was done very
likely because the atmospheric conditions at that height were better for fuel economy...
[To be even more specific...the Boeing manual gave an optimum flight altitude of 33,800
ft, but flying eastward you only have odd numbered flight levels to choose from, so the crew
figured they would be better off staying at 33 than climbing to 35...]
BUT...there are a couple of very curious things here...
First is the fact that Dnipro controllers deviated the airplane from its flight
plan just before it went down...ostensibly due to other traffic...
We can see this in the following map, which is what's called a high altitude en route
chart, which is used by pilots to plan and execute their flight...
You will note a couple of things here...the airplane is flying on the L980 airway
[basically a highway in the sky] when it is turned south by controllers to the RND waypoint,
which is in Russian territory...
This is NOT the route filed by the crew...which can be seen here...
They were supposed to continue flying on L980 right to the TAMAK waypoint, which is
visible on the previous chart and is right on the border with Russia...
They would have continued on the A87 airway to their next waypoint in Russia which is
TIKNA...
Now here is the thing...right after they were turned south, they got shot down...
According to the radio transcripts, the crew acknowledged the course change, but did not
object...however, usually these kinds of course changes aren't appreciated on the flight deck
because the crew is trying to minimize wasted time and wasted fuel on course
deviations...
Most times you will just not bother to complain to controllers...but for sure there will
always be chatter between the captain and copilot about being yanked around like that...
No mention is made in the Dutch Safety Board report about such chatter from the cockpit
voice recorder, which I find very odd...
Also odd is the fact that Dnipro ATC primary radar was down, and only the so-called
'secondary' was working which uses the transponder signals from the airplane...
This is very busy airspace because a lot of flights from western Europe to South Asia
traverse this territory...the plan is always to fly what's called a 'great circle route'
which is basically a straight line, if you flattened out the globe...
Plus considering that you have a war going on underneath...it's very unusual to have your
PRIMARY radar inoperable...
This is significant also because military aircraft will not be using transponders and so
will not be visible to the secondary surveillance...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch
have made some kind of excuse about that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not
usable...
So we see some very suspicious anomalies here...
The Ukrainian authorities did have a NOTAM [notice to airmen] in effect up to FL320
[32,000 ft] so commercial traffic could not fly under that height...but clearly they should
have closed the airspace over the hot conflict area...
They didn't do that...and Kolomoysky was in charge...
The Deep State's view on the members' God given right to make foreign policy decisions (it
must be the God who has give it to them, because the people certainly have not) just reminds
the of the general attitude of the Government's bureaucracy. Give any fartbag a position in
the government and he/she becomes "a prince/princes over the people", give him or her a
monopoly over violence and you got yourself a king/queen. All these police and military kings
& queens milling around and lording over us. "Deep State" is such a totally natural
consequence of the government bureaucracy corrupted by power that it appropriated.
Pillaging taxes from the sheeple (and taking young maidens like Sheriff of
Nottingham/Epstein) could have never ever been enough. Did you seriously think that the Deep
Staters would constrain themselves to only stealing your money, taking your children for
their pleasure and to die in their wars of conquest, and putting you into a totally unsafe
airplanes to die for their profit? Constrain themselves when there is a whole globe out there
to be lorded over, like Bidens over Ukraine? It is the poor people of Ukraine who just have
too much money, thus had to give it through the gas monopoly to the Biden gang, which
selflessly brought them "democracy" at $5B in US taxpayers' expense. Therefore, it is the
Deep State which has been chosen by God, or someone just like that, to make the decisions
about the imperialist/globalist foreign policy and have billions of dollars thrown by the
grateful natives into their own pockets, as consulting fees:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-bank-records-confirm-burisma-biden-payments-morgan-stanley-account
So far the only clear-cut globalization is that one of crime, which has become
global.
What is the US National Interest b asks? Who defines it as such?
Ome magazine that might know is none other than The National Interest. Hopefully I won't
get attacked for quoting from what seems like a fairly sane article to me....
"The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to. Ukraine is a debt-ridden state
and only five years beyond an extralegal revolution. Should the government collapse again,
then American weapons could end up in the possession of any number of dubious paramilitary
groups.
It wouldn't be the first time. In the 2000s, CIA operatives were forced to repurchase
Stinger missiles that had fallen into the hands of Afghani warlords -- at a markup.
Originally offered to the Mujahideen in the 1980s, the Stingers came to threaten American
forces in the region. Similarly, many weapons provided with US authorization to Libyan rebels
in 2011 ended up in the possession of jihadists."
It's difficult to find clean information on happenings within Ukraine and those involving
Russia. The Ministry of Foreign affairs has this page
dedicated to the "Situation Around Ukraine." Of the three most recent listings,
this one --"Comment by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the NATO
Council's visit to Ukraine"--from 1 November is quite important as it deals with the reality
on the ground versus the circus happening thousands of miles away, although it's clear the
delusions in Washington and Brussels are the same and "continue to be guided by the Cold War
logic of exaggerating the nonexistent 'threat from the East' rather than the interests of
pan-European security."
In the
second most recent listing --"Remarks by Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian
Federation to the OSCE Vladimir Zheglov at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on the
situation in Ukraine and the need to implement the Minsk Agreements, Vienna, October 31,
2019"--the following was noted:
"There's more to it. The odious site Myrotvorets continues to function using servers
located in the United States. The UN has repeatedly stated that this violates the presumption
of innocence and the right to privacy. Recently, Deputy Head of the UN Human Rights
Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Benjamin Moreau, reiterated the recommendation to shut down
this website. A similar demand was made by other representatives of the international
community, including the German government. The problem was brought to the attention of the
European Court of Human Rights. The other day, the representative of Ukraine at the ECHR was
made aware of the groundlessness of the Ukrainian government's excuses saying that it
allegedly 'has no influence' on the above website.
"In closing, recent opinion polls in Ukraine indicate that its residents are expecting the
government to do more to bring peace to Donbas. The path to a settlement is well known, that
is, the full implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures of February 12, 2015, that was
approved by the UN Security Council."
Clearly, Zelensky's government is much like Poroschenko's when it comes to listening to
those who empowered it, the above citation is one of several from the overall report.
The latest report deals with an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice at The
Hague that reveals some of the anti-Russian bias there. It has no bearing on this discussion,
although it does provide evidence of the contextual background against which the entire
affair, including the circus in Washington, operates.
MoA consensus is Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords they continue to oppose
to implement despite their promise to do so. Clearly an excellent example of not being
agreement capable that hasn't changed since 2015.
If the Republicans had any brains, they'd turn the Ukrainian aspect of the hearings into
an indictment against Obama/Biden for illegally overthrowing Kiev and trying to obtain their
piece-of-the-action, but then that would be the logical thing to do and thus isn't an option.
The prospect of each day providing similar spectacle is mind numbing as it airs the sordid,
unwashed underwear if the Evil Outlaw US Empire.
I normally do not reply to trolls, but I make an exception for you. Pedo-dollar? Do you have
any more such crap to dilute the valid points discussed here?
i liked what @ 32 tod said - "he's just doing the old Jewish threatening/begging
dance!
"And you are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it." Wink!
Wink!"
stating the obvious is one remedy for any possible confusion here..
@54 karlof1... i don't believe trump is allowed to shine any light on the usas illegal
actions as that would be sacrilege to all the americans who see their country in such a
great, exceptional-ist light... how would trumps MAGA concept swallow that? it wouldn't, so
it won't happen...
You are a bit off on that story. NS2 pipeline will increase the capacity not transitioning
via Ukraine and reduce the price banditry by the Ukrainian & US gangs, but it will not
make gas transit via Ukraine unnecessary. The planned switch off of the German nuclear and
coal power plants will gradually increase the German demand for gas, that is the Russian gas
by so much that NS1 and NS2 will not be enough. Primarily, NS2 is a signal to the Ukrainian
& US Democrat gangs that if they try excessive transit fees and stealing of gas again,
that they will be circumvented within a few years by NS 3,4,5 ...
BTW, the globalized pillaging of the population is clearly not an invention of the DNC
crime gang only. For example, the 737Max is a product of primarily Republican activity on
deregulating what should have never been deregulated and subjugation to the Wall Street (aka
financialization). The pillaging of the World is strictly bipartisan, just differently
packaged:
1) R - packaging the deregulation to steal & kill as "freedom" or
2) D - packaging the regime change as responsibility to protect R2P (such regime change and
stuffing of own pockets later).
karlof1 @54 - "Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords"
Yes. As you well know, and as we have well discussed, Minsk was in its very essence the
surrender terms dictated to the US by NAF and Russia in return for letting the NATO
contractors go free and secretly out of the Debaltsevo cauldron. Either actually or
poetically, this was the basis. The US lost against NAF. The only way to prevent Donbass
incursion into the rest of Ukraine was to freeze the situation. The US had no choice, and
surrendered.
Out of the heat and fog of warfare came a simple document made of words which, even so,
illustrated perfectly just how elegantly the Kremlin had the entire situation both war-gamed
and peace-gamed. Minsk from that day until forever has locked the Ukraine play into a lost
war of attrition for the US sponsors, with zero gain - except for thieves.
To attempt to parse Ukraine in terms of statecraft is to miss the point that Ukraine can
only be parsed in terms of thievery. This is not cynicism, simply truth.
Now they sell their land because this is all there is left to sell. Kolomoisky proposes
selling the entire country to Russia for $100 billion but not only will Russia not bite, the
country isn't worth even a fraction of that - because of Minsk, it can cause zero harm to
Russia. But this ploy raises the perceived value (Kolomoisky hopes) in the eyes of the west,
and starts the bidding.
In Russia the people see all this very clearly, including on their TV. Yakov Kedmi in this
Vesti News clip of
Vladimir Soloviev's hugely popular talk show, discusses the situation. He baits Soloviev by
saying that the Ukrainian thieves are only doing what the Russian thieves did in the 1990's -
and one must filter through this badinage to take out the nuggets he supplies. Here are
three:
1. Zelensky has no security apparatus that follows his command, therefore how can he be
considered the leader of the country?
2. There is no power in Ukraine, only forces that contend over the scraps of plunder.
3. These forces are creating the only law there is, which is the sacred nature of private
property for the rich - the only thing the US holds sacred.
Therefore sell the very soil.
~~
The Minsk agreement is a sheer wall of ice reaching to the sky. No force imaginable can
scale it or break it. Against that ultimate, immovable wall the US pounds futilely, with
Ukraine caught in the middle, while Russia waits for Ukraine to devolve into whatever it
can.
And the Russian people and government regard the people of the Ukraine as brothers and
sisters. But until the west has worn itself down, and either gone away or changed the
equation through a weakening of its own position in some significant way, nothing can be done
by Russia except to wait.
What Tod @32 described is spot-on, "the old Jewish threatening/begging dance". It is not that
the Russians do not know this about Kolomoyskyi. They will play along not expecting anything
from the Zelo-on-a-String and his master. The Russians like to let those scumbags (Erdo comes
to mind) huff & puff and embarrass themselves by flips. They know - it could always be
worse if those did something intelligent. Kolomoyskyi is vile but he ain't no genius, not any
more than Erdo.
Sure Cheeza...everybody's a 'bit off' except you...
Gazprom is talking about 10 bcm a year through Ukraine for the new 10 year deal, as
opposed to the 60 bcm [billion cubic meters] that Ukraine is hoping for...
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction/)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government. Babyl-on @ 8
? before I begin , how do you measure the political and economic power of money
as opposed to the political and economic power of the intentions and needs of the masses.
Does $1 control a 100 people? A million dollars control 100,000,000 people? How do we measure
the comparative values between money power and people power? I think the divisions of
economics and the binaries of politics established by the nation state system means that the
measurement function (political and economic values) varies as a function of the total wealth
vs the total population in each nation state. If true, become obvious how it is that: foreign
investments displaces the existing homeostatis in any particular nation state, the smaller
the poorer the nation state, the more impact foreign wealth can have; in other words outside
wealth can completely destroy the homeostatis of an existing nation state. I think it is this
fact which makes globalization so attractive to the ruling interest (RI) and so damning to
the poorest of the poor.
Change by amendment is impossible There is one and only one Western Empire but
there is also an Eastern Empire, a southern empire, and a Northern Empire and I believe the
ruling interest (faction) manipulate all nations through these empires. In fact, they can do
this in any nation they wish. The world has been divided into containers of humans and
propaganda and culture have highly polarized the humans in one container against the humans
in other containers. <=divide, polarize, then exploit: its like pry the window, and gain
access to the residence, then exploit. It is obvious that the strength of the resistance to
ruling class exploitation is a function of common cause among the masses. But money allows to
control both the division of power and the polarization of the masses. The persons who have
the powers described in Article II of the US Constitution since Lincoln was murdered can be
controlled (Epstein, MSM directed propaganda, impeachment, assassination, to accomplish the
objects of the ruling interest (faction). Article II of the USA constitution removes foreign
activity of the USA from domestic view of the governed at home Americans. Article II makes it
possible for the POTUS to use American assets and resources to assist his/her feudal lords in
exploiting foreign nations almost at will and there is no way governed Americans can control
who the ruling interest place in the Article II position.
A little History Immigration to NYC from Eastern (the poor) and Western (the
rich) Europe transitioned NYC and other cities from Irish majority to a Jewish majority; and
the wealthy interest used the Jewish majorities in key cities to take control over both
Article I and Article II constitutional powers by electing field effect controlled
politicians (political puppets are elected that can be reprogrammed while they are in office
to suit the ruling interest. The source code is called rule of law, and money buys the
programmers who write the code. So the ruling interest can reprogram in field effect fashion,
any POTUS they wish. Out of sight use of the resources of America in foreign lands is nothing
new, it was established when the constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787 and
ratified in 1788.
Propaganda targeted to the Jewish Immigrants allowed the wealthy interest to
control the outcome of the 1912 election. That election allowed to destroy Article I,
Section 9, paragraph 4 " No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid unless in
Proportion to the Census of enumeration herein before directed to be taken". and to enact a
law which privatized the USA monopoly on money into the hands of private bankers (the federal
reserve act of 1913)
What was the grand design Highly competitive, independent too strong economic
Germany was interfering with Western hegemony and the oil was in the lands controlled by the
Ottomans. It took two wars, but Germany was destroyed, and the Ottoman empire (basically the
entire Middle East) became the war gained property of the British (Palestine), the French
(Syria) and the USA (Israel). Since then, the ruling interest have used their (field effect
devices to align governments so the wealthy could pillage victim societies the world over.
Field effect programming allows wealth interest to use the leaders of governments to use such
governments to enable pillage in foreign places. The global rich and powerful, and their
corporations are the ruling interest.
psychohistorian says it well "..the global private finance core segment of empire is
behind Trump and throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The
cult of global private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role
in the new multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyone's heads to make it
ongoing..." by psychochistorian @ 10
NOBITs @ 11 says it also "All presidents have been servants of the military, which includes
the police/intel/security apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead
role were "dealt with." Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state
bureaucrats are shocked and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US
foreign policy for 75 years!" by: NOBTS @ 11
According to TG @ 13 "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing
responsibility. The elites get to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take
responsibility when things go wrong. Because you see, we are a "Democracy."by: TG @ 13 <=
absolutely not.. the constitution isolates governed Americans from the USA, because the USA
is a republic and republics are about privatizing power and socializing responsibility;
worse, there ain't nothing you can do about it.
Vonu @ 19 says "According to Kevin Shipp, the National Security Council really runs the
executive branch, not the president. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=XHbrOg092GA"
by: Vonu @ 19 <=but it is by the authority of Ariicle II that the NSC has the power to run
the executive branch?
KAdath @ 22 says "the Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in
order for the Russians to keep even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets by: Kadath @
22" <=exactly.. but really its not abandoning the USA, its abandoning the oligarchs local
to the pillaged nation..
J Swift @ 23 says "the US treats its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere,"
[poorly] but its not the USA per say, because only one person has the power to deal in
foreign places. Its that the POTUS, or those who control the Article II powers vested in the
POTUS, have or has been reprogrammed.. J. Switft @23>>
flankerbandit @ 25 says " Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they
are selling vast tracts of agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally
dispossessing themselves of their own food security..." flankerbandit @ 25 <=Not really
the wealthy (investor interest) have pushed the pillage at will button.. since there is no
resistance remaining, the wealthy will take it all for a song..
Jackrabbit @ 26 says "Trump [is].. Constitutionally charged with foreign policy. Repeating:
the "Imperial Presidency" has flung off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing
the need to get Congressional approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by
Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and black budgets.by Jackrabbit @ 26 <== Trumps orders
military to take 4 million day from Syria in oil?
your observation that the money has circumvented Article I of the COUS explains why the
democraps are so upset.. the wealthy democrap interest has been left to rot? Your comment
suggest s mafia is in charge?
Tod @ 32 says "As soon as some money goes his way, he'll discover democracy again.
Sorry to burst you bubbles." by: Tod @ 32" <==understatement of the day.. thanks.
Bevin @ 32 says "a dialectic is at work here. Washington's support for fascism abroad
has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the installation of fascist regimes
abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US intervenes it leaves a fascist
regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind it. this means.. the ability of
the population to effect political change is cancelled" by bevin @ 33 <= yes but there is
really no difference in a republic and its rule of law, and a fascist government and its
military police both rule without any influential input from the governed.
michael @ 34 reaffirms "The President was the only channel of communication between the
United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that foreign nations or their
agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation'" michael @ 34 well known to
barflies, the design of national constitutions is at the heart of the global problem. Until
constitutional powers are placed in control of the governed there will never be a change in
how the constitutional powers ( in case of the USA Article II powers) are used and
abused.
OutofThinAir @45 says "In general, governments are the order-providing solution for
chaos and problems that only first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over
others.by: OutOfThinAir @ 45" <+governments are the tools of wealth interest and the
governors their hired hands.
by: War is Peace @48 " Trump is a moron, groomed by Jewish parents ( Mother was Jewish,
Father buried at biggest Jewish cementary in NYC ) to be a non-Jew worked for the mob under
Cohen ( lawyer for 1950's McCarthy ); Became the 'Goyim Fool" real estate developer as a
cover for laundering mob money. So that it didn't appear that it was Jewish Mafia Money, so
they could work with the Italian Mafia. Trump went on for his greatest role ever to be the
"fool in Chief" of the USA for AIPAC. What better way to murder people, than send out a fool,
it causes people to drop their guard. by War is Peace @48 <= yes this is my take, What
does it mean. com suggest the global wealth interest may be planning to reprogram Trump to
better protect the interest of the global wealthy.
Kiza @ 51 the reason for globalization is explained see above=> response to Babyl-on @
8
dh @ 53 says ""The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to." by dh @53 <
the USA cannot consider anything, if its foreign the POTUS (Article II) makes all decisions
because Art II gives the POTUS a monopoly on talking to, and dealing with, foreign
governments.
Deagel @ 56 says "The American people don't care, they're all drugged out, and shitting
on the side-walks all over the USA, and sleeping in their own shit. This is the best time in
USA history for the Zionists to do anything they wish." by: Deagel @ 56 <= I think you
under estimate the value Americans place on democracy and human rights, until recently
governed Americans believed the third party privately produced MSM delivered propaganda that
nearly all overseas operations by the USA were to separate the people in those places from
their despotic leaders, and to help those displaced people install Democracy.. many Americans
have come to understand such is far from the case.. the situation in the Ukraine has been an
eye opener for many Americans. thoughts are sizzling, talk is happening, and people are
trying to shut google out of their lives. that is why i think Trump is about to be
reprogrammed from elected leader to .. God in charge
I watched that Soloviev segment with Kedmi the other day...always interesting to say the
least...
Btw...I'm not really up to speed on that whole Debaltsevo cauldron thing...I've heard
snippets here and there...[there is a guy, Auslander, who comments on the Saker blog that
seems to have excellent first hand info, but I've only caught snippets here and there]...
I hadn't heard this part of the story before about Nato contractors as bargaining
chips...if you care to shed a bit more light I will be grateful...
I suggest going to The Saker Blog and
enter Debaltsevo Cauldron into the site's search box and click Submit where you'll be greeted
with numerous results.
Grieved @62--
Thanks for your reply and excellent recap. As I recall, Putin wants Donbass to remain in
Ukraine and Ukraine to remain a whole state, although I haven't read his thoughts on the
matter for quite some months as everything has revolved around implementing Minsk. The items
at the Foreign Ministry I linked to are also concerned with Minsk.
The circus act in DC is trying to avoid any mention of Minsk, the coup or anything
material to the gross imperial meddling done there to enrich the criminal elite, which
includes Biden, Clinton, other DNC members--a whole suite of actors that omits Trump in this
case, although they're trying to pin something on him. The issue being studiously ignored is
Obama/Biden needed to be busted for their actions at the time, but in time-honored fashion
weren't. And the huge rotted sewer of corruption related to that action and ALL that came
before is the real problem at issue.
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person as evidenced by The New Yorker 737Max article
in the previous thread. This good article could only be measured by how much it agrees with
your own opinion that MCAS was put in to mimic the pilots' usual fly-stick feel. If anyone
does his home work, such as the journalist of this article, then he must agree with you,
right? With experts such as you out there, why would anyone dare apply common sense and say
that it would be an unimaginably stupid idea to put in ANY AUTOMATED SYSTEM which pushes
the plane's nose down during ascent (the most risky phase of a civilian flight, when almost
desperately trying to get up and up and up) for any DUMBLY POSSIBLE REASON !? What could
ever go wrong with such an absolutely dumbly initiated system relying on one sensor? Maybe it
was a similar idea to putting a cigarette lighter right next to the car's gas tank because it
lights up cigarettes better when there are gasoline vapors around. Or maybe an idea of
testing the self-driving lithium battery (exploding & flammable) cars near kindergartens
(of some other people's children)!?
An intelligent person would have said - whatever the reason was to put in MCAS it was a
terribly dumb idea, instead of congratulating himself on understanding the "true reason".
"If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly
associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly,
desirable) with Putin's anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia
family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions."
Really?
From what have gleaned from the alternative media available on the internet ,of which MOA is
an important part. Putin and Lavrov are the two most moral and diplomatic statesmen on the
world stage today Compared to Trump, Johnson, Macron, Merkel, Stoltenberg, Pompeo, Bolton and
whoever else blights the international scene these days these two are colossi.
To describe
them as like a Mafia family seems to me to be 180 degrees wrong. Maybe Putin overreacted, in
his early days in power, to the Chechen conflict but look at the situation today.
Look at how
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were played by the west. I appreciate you did not write the words
quoted above but you said you agree with them and I find that startling given I am usually
very admiring of your insight and knowledge of geopolitical events.
According to the Impeachniks, it is Schiff's staff who decides how Schiff votes and his
policies. It would be illegal for Schiff to make decisions. But Schiff's recommendation will
make or break the careers of his staff, so elected Schiff has some influence. That's not true
for elected Trump, because those in his service already have made careers and/or a host of
outsiders looking to place them.
Although, he didn't get impeached for it Obama did get criticized for not sending the aid to
Ukraine. He was also criticized when he did intervene, but not fast enough for the deep
state. Remember "leading from behind" in response to Libya. Obama was much more popular and
circumspect than Trump, which protected him from possible impeachment when he went off the
deep state's script.
Discussion of the USC and the responsibilities assigned therein is probably a foolish and
merely moot exercise, as law is, ultimately simply custom over time, and since '45 or so the
custom has become dissociated from the documents' provisions, particularly with regard to
war-making and the "licensed" import and sale of dangerous drugs, dope. The custom in place
is essentially ukase - rule by decree. Many decree are secret.
I do not object, simply pointing to the obvious.
This is a public secret anybody can know. Inter alia see The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (McCoy)
...........
Custom includes also permitted theft, blackmail, trafficking children and so forth.
...........
zerohedge put up some documents tying TGM Hunter B to the money from Ukraine...
................
I would not worry about the name of the person called president. The real sitrep is more
like watching rape and murder from the dirty windows of a runaway train.
Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was left with the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in
the world. In exchange for financial assistance in the costs of removing all the nukes, the
West guaranteed to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity.
In the meantime, Russia has annexed the Crimea and rebels have taken control of parts of
Eastern Ukraine. The West has not provided any direct military assistance to restore those
territorial infringements.
Since the West has reneged on its end of the deal, would it not only be fair to return
Ukraine's nukes so it can defend itself like the Big Boys do, namely with threat of nuclear
annihilation?
I hate this trope. The Russian Fed. is not launching offensive operations to capture
Kharkov or Kiev. Western Ukraine is shelling ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. What would
U.S. Congressman say if these were Jews? (I would condemn that as well).
The next time someone pontificates, 'Ukrainians are dying because Trump held up aid' ask
them how many. The number is ZERO. Javelins are not being used on the front line.
Mr. Kolomoisky is spot on, i.e. when he says that the Americans will only use Ukrainians as
their little bitches to fight and die for America's gain against Russia. Just like the
Americans fucked over the Kurds in Syria, using them as proxy fighters to do USA/Israel's
dirty work. Wherever the USA shows up and starts interfering, everything turns into shit:
Iraq...Afghanistan...Venezuela...Bolivia...Ukraine...Libya...Yemen...Nicaragua...Ecuador...the
list is quite long. It remains to be seen if Mr. Kolomoisky can bring about rapprochement
with Russia. He'd better watch his back.
"Wow. My opinion of Kolomoisky has just improved ... somewhat." --Seamus Padraig @73
Yes, Kolomoisky has moved up a notch in my estimation as well; from the low of
"monstrously inhuman spawn of satan" all the way up to "rabid dog" . That's
quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
I am very glad to see you back, Grieved, and your 'wall of ice' metaphor is indeed accurate.
To me, the promising signs in Ukraine were even as here in the US when voters fought back
against what b calls Deep State, which I am sure in my heart was even more of an overwhelming
surge than registered - the best the corrupters of the system could do was make it close
enough to be a barely legitimate win for their side, and they didn't succeed. Maybe somewhere
along their line of shenanigans a small cog in the wheel got religion and didn't do their
'job'. An unsung hero who will sing when it's safe.
I hope, dearly hope, it gets safe in Ukraine very soon. They are us only further down the
line than we are, but we will get there if we can't totally remove the cancer in our midst.
That's our job; I wish Ukraine all the best in removing theirs.
Jen...I should have made clear that the two aircraft picked up by Russian PRIMARY RADAR were
unidentified...
The two commercial flights you mention were in the area and were known to both Russian and
Ukrainian controllers by means of the SECONDARY SURVEILLANCE RADAR, which picks up the
aircraft transponder signals...
However, secondary WILL NOT pick up military craft that have their transponders
off...which is normal operating procedure for military craft...
So the airspace situation was this...you can see this from one of the illustrations I
provided from the DSB prelim report...
You had MH17...you had that other flight coming from the opposite direction [flying
west]...and you had that airplane that overtook the MH17 from behind [they were in a hurry
and were going faster, so when MH17 decided to stay at FL330, they were cleared to climb to
FL350 so they could safely overtake with the necessary vertical separation...]
Those three aircraft were all picked up on the Ukrainian SECONDARY [transponder]
surveillance...as well as the Russians...on both their PRIMARY AND SECONDARY...
But what the Russians picked up were two craft ONLY ON THEIR PRIMARY...those would have
been military aircraft flying with their transponders off [they're allowed to do that and do
that most of the time in fact]...
That's why those two DIDN'T SHOW UP ON THE SECONDARY DATA HANDED OVER TO THE INVESTIGATORS
BY THE UKRAINIANS...
Only primary radar would pick those up...and, very conveniently, the Dnipro primary was
inop at the time...[so the data handed to investigators by the Ukrainians would have no trace
of any military aircraft nearby]...
But with the Russian primary radar data, there is in fact evidence that there were
military aircraft in the air at the time...just that the Dutch investigators simply decided
to exclude the very vital Russian radar data on some stupid technicality...
[Really this is a very poorly done report, both prelim and final, and I've read many over
the years...]
The other thing I should have emphasized more clearly is about that course deviation that
controllers steered MH17 to, just seconds before it was hit...
The known traffic was those three commercial aircraft, as shown on the chart...here it is
again...
Those three commercial flights are clearly labeled...and the big question is... why was
MH17 DIVERTED SOUTH...OFF ITS PLANNED ROUTE...?
We can see the deviation track by the dotted red line...
Clearly there was no 'other traffic' that required MH17 to be vectored south by the
controllers...
In fact we see that there was a FOURTH commercial flight [another B777] that was flying
south exactly to that same waypoint that MH17 was diverted to...we see this airplane is
flying west on the M70 airway and is heading to the RND waypoint...
This does not make sense...why would you divert MH17 from going to TAMAK as flight
planned...in order to go south toward RND where another airplane is heading...
If nothing else this is very bad controller practice right there...yet again, the DSB
[Dutch Safety Board] does not even raise this question...
Like I said, leaving aside any guesswork, these are the simple facts and they raise
serious questions...both about the competence of the Dutch report, and the way the
controllers handled that flight...
Ukrainian think tank Ukrainian Institute of the Future and Ukrainian media outlet Zerkalo
Nedeli (both anti-Russian, but slightly more intellectual than typical Ukrainian outlets)
have contracted a Kharkov-based pollster to conduct a poll among DNR/LNR residents from
October 7 to October 31 (method: face-to-face interviews at the homes of the respondents,
sample size: 806 respondents in DNR and 800 respondents in LNR, margin of error: 3.2%) and
published its results in an article: Тест
на сумісність
[Compatibility Test] (in Ukrainian).
It's a long and rambling article, interspersed with
Ukrainian propagandistic clichés (perhaps to placate Ukrainian nationalists), but the
numbers look solid, so I've extracted the numbers I consider important and put them in a
table format. Here they are:
GENERAL INFORMATION
Gender 46.5% male 53.5% female
Age 8.3% <25 years old 91.7% ≥25 years old
Education 31.5% no vocational training or higher education 45.2% vocational training 23.3% higher education
Religion 57% marry and baptize their children in Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) 31% believe in God, but do not go to any church 12% other churches, other religions, atheists
Political activity 3% are members of parties 97% are not members of parties
Language 90% speak Russian at home 10% speak other languages at home
Nationality 55.4% consider themselves Ukrainians 44.6% do not consider themselves Ukrainians
ECONOMY
Opinion about the labor market 24.3% there are almost no jobs 39.3% high unemployment, but it's possible to find a job 15.7% there are jobs, even if temporary 17.1% key enterprises are working, those who want to work can find a job 2.9% there are not enough employees
Personal financial situation 4.9% are saving on food 36.4% enough money to buy food, but have to save money to buy clothing 43.6% enough money to buy food and clothing, but have to save money to buy a suit, a mobile
phone, or a vacuum cleaner 12% enough money to buy food, clothing, and other goods, but have to save money to buy
expensive goods (e.g. consumer electronics) 2.7% enough money to buy food, clothing, and expensive goods, but have to save money to buy a
car or an apartment 0.4% enough money to buy anything
Personal financial situation compared to the previous year 28.4% worsened 57.3% stayed the same 14.2% improved
Personal financial situation expectations for the next year 21% will worsen 58.6% will stay the same 18.7% will improve
Opinion on the Ukraine's (sans DNR/LNR) economic situation compared to the previous
year 50.3% worsened 41.4% stayed the same 6.3% improved
CITIZENSHIP
Consider themselves citizens of 57.8% the Ukraine 34.8% DNR/LNR 6.8% Russia
Russian citizenship 42.9% never thought about obtaining it 15.5% don't want to obtain it 34.2% would like to obtain it 7.4% already obtained it
Considered leaving DNR/LNR for 5.2% the Ukraine 11.1% Russia 2.9% other country 80.8% never considered leaving
Visits to the Ukraine over the past year 35.1% across the DNR/LNR–Ukraine border (overwhelming majority of them -- 32.2% of all
respondents -- are pensioners who visit the Ukraine to receive their pensions) 2.6% across the Russia–Ukraine border 62.3% have not visited the Ukraine
WAR
Is the war in Donbass an internal Ukrainian conflict? 35.6% completely agree 40.5% tend to agree 14.1% tend to disagree 9.3% completely disagree
Was the war started by Moscow and pro-Russian groups? 3.1% completely agree 6.4% tend to agree 45.1% tend to disagree 44.9% completely disagree
Who must pay to rebuild DNR/LNR? (multiple answers) 63.6% the Ukraine 29.3% Ukrainian oligarchs 18.5% DNR/LNR themselves 17% the U.S. 16.5% the EU 16% Russia 13% all of the above
ZELENSKIY
Opinion about Zelenskiy 1.9% very positive 17.2% positive 49.6% negative 29.3% very negative
Has your opinion about Zelenskiy changed over the past months? 2.7% significantly improved 7.9% somewhat improved 44.8% stayed the same 22.9% somewhat worsened 20.5% significantly worsened
Will Zelenskiy be able to improve the Ukraine's economy? 1.4% highly likely 13.3% likely 55.3% unlikely 30% highly unlikely
Will Zelenskiy be able to bring peace to the region? 1.7% highly likely 12.5% likely 59% unlikely 26.5% highly unlikely
MEDIA
Where do you get your information on politics? (multiple answers) 84.3% TV 60.6% social networks 50.9% relatives, friends 45.9% websites 17.4% co-workers 10% radio 7.4% newspapers and magazines
What social networks do you use? (multiple answers) 70.7% YouTube 61% VK 52.3% Odnoklassniki 49.8% Viber 27.1% Facebook 21.4% Instagram 12.4% Twitter 11.1% Telegram
FUTURE
Desired status of DNR/LNR 5.1% part of the Ukraine 13.4% part of the Ukraine with a special status 16.2% independent state 13.4% part of Russia with a special status 50.9% part of Russia
Desired status of entire Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts 8.4% part of the Ukraine 10.8% part of the Ukraine with a special status 14.4% independent state 13.3% part of Russia with a special status 49.6% part of Russia
Just listening to a bit of the testimony of the ex-ambassador to Ukraine.
It is all BS hearsay!
Also, this lady doesn't seem to grasp that as an employee of the State Department, she
answers to Trump. Trump is her boss.
The questioning is full of leading questions that contains allegations and unproved
premises built into them. I can't imagine that such questioning would be allowed in a normal
court of justice in the USA.
Sure, Trump is a boor. But he is still the boss and he gets to pull out ambassadors if he
wants to.
This is total grandstanding.
Also, a lot of emotional stuff like "I was devastated. I was shocked. Color drained from
my face as I read the telephone transcript . . . "
This is BS!
IIRC the Russian radar showed that the two mystery planes in questions were flying in
MH17's blindspot . That's way too close to be half an hour away. Also, the fact that
the two planes were flying over a war zone with their transponders turned off (which is why
they couldn't be conclusively identified) strongly suggests that they were military.
@ Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 15 2019 11:24 utc | 71
When the US launched a coup in Kiev, wasn't that a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty
too?
@ Posted by: Christian J Chuba | Nov 15 2019 12:36 utc | 72
You know the real reason why they have yet to deliver the javelins to Ukraine? It's
because they're afraid that they'll be sold on the black market and end up in the ME
somewhere targeting US tanks. That's why.
@ Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 15 2019 13:30 utc | 75
That's quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
on Yovanovitch,
She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to
safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States."
She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security
interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. .
.Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is
injured in the knee
Cheeza decides to launch a personal attack...also completely off topic...
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person [sic]...With experts such as you out there,
why would anyone dare apply common sense...an intelligent person would have said...blah
blah blah...
Look man...I'm not going to take up a lot of space on this thread because it's not about
the MAX...
BUT...I need to set the record straight because you are accusing me here of somehow
muddying the waters on the MAX issue...
That is a complete inversion of the truth...I have been very explicit in my [professional]
comments about the MAX...and it is the exact opposite of what you are trying to tar me with
here...
Yes, it is important to understand these things...which is why I have made the effort to
explain the issue more clearly for the layman audience...
Your pathetic attack here shows you have no shame, nor self-respect...
Let's rewind the tape here...I said that Gazprom is looking to cut supplies to Ukraine in
the new 10 year deal that comes up for negotiation in January...and that they are going to be
pumping much less gas through Ukraine because NS2 now allows to bypass Ukraine...
You took a run at this comment, calling it wrong, and putting up a bunch of your own
hypothesizing...
I responded by linking to the
Russian news report quoting officials saying exactly that...that gas to Ukraine will be
greatly reduced...
Instead of responding to that by admitting you were full of shit...you decide to attack me
on the MAX issue...everybody here knows my [professional] position on the MAX...and that I
have said repeatedly THAT IT CANNOT BE FIXED...[which is also why I have offered detailed
technical explanations...]
I'm not going to let you screw with my integrity here...everything you attributed to me
on the MAX is completely FALSE and in fact turning the truth on its head...
As Kiza #55 noted - Nordstream 1 and 2, combined, only equal half of Ukraine's transit
capacity.
The primary impact is that Ukraine can't hold far Western European customer gas hostage
anymore with its gas transit "negotiations" as Nordstream allows Russia to sell directly to
Germany.
There can still be Russian gas sold via Ukraine, but this will be mostly to near-Ukraine
neighbors: Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Czech as well as Ukraine itself.
Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania can transit from Turk Stream, but there are potential Turk (and
Bulgarian) issues.
Poland is already committing to LNG in order to not be dependent on Russian gas transiting
Ukraine - a double whammy.
The ultimate effect is to remove Ukraine's stranglehold position over Russian gas exports,
which in turn severely undercuts Ukraine's ability to both get really cheap Russian gas and
additional transit fees - a major blow to their economy.
Therefore, the continuation of gas transit via Ukraine in volumes greater than the 26 bcm/y
suggested above will depend on the European Commission and European gas importers, and
their insistence that gas transit via Ukraine continues.
Otherwise, gas transit via Ukraine will be reduced to delivering limited volumes for
European storage re-fills in the 'off-peak' summer months...
This prospect will undoubtedly complicate any negotiations between Gazprom and its
Ukrainian counterparty over a new contract to govern the transit of Russian gas via
Ukraine, once the existing contract expires at the end of December 2019.
...Gazprom may be willing to commit to only limited annual transit volumes...
European gas importers don't give a shit about Ukraine...and they have the final
word...they care only about getting the gas they need from Russia in a reliable way and at a
good price...
The news report I linked to makes it perfectly clear that the Europeans are demanding that
the Ukranians get their act together on the gas issue, or they will be dropped
altogether...
You know...FOOL...it really makes me wonder how fools like you decide to make statements
here with a very authoritative tone...when it is quite clear you are talking out your rear
end...
Nobody needs that kind of bullshit here...if you don't know a subject sufficiently well,
then maybe you should keep quiet...or when making a statement, phrase it as your own OPINION
and nothing more...
"... "In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to Ukraine. ..."
"... But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such? ..."
"... And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay. ..."
"... The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that. ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia. ..."
"... "They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for it." ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets. ..."
"... Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass. ..."
"... Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes. ..."
"... Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup: ..."
"... Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%. ..."
"... on Yovanovitch, She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States." ..."
"... She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. . .Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is injured in the knee ..."
NBC News
is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats' impeachment circus. But it fails to
note what the conflict is really about:
It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic.
In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George
Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on
Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but
also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.
"It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression," Taylor, the
acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why
Trump's decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of
Russian expansionism didn't align with U.S. policy.
But at a time when Democrats are simultaneously eager to influence public opinion in favor
of ousting the president and quietly apprehensive that their hearings could stall or
backfire, the first round felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than
the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.
"In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the
permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to
Ukraine.
But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?
President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine
despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama's decision against U.S. national interest?
Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?
Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. Who defines what is in the
"national interest" with regards to foreign policy? Here is a point where for once I agree with
the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes :
[O]n the critical matter of America's interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the
policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would
resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that
stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin's anti-American
dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist
ambitions.
But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.
And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the
bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National
Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their
assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a
constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay.
The U.S.
constitution "empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly
negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries."
The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the
administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col.
Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is
the duly elected president who does that.
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly
believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his
campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good
relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
...
[I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his
pleasure" are there to implement them.
There is another point that has to be made about the NBC's assertions. It is not in
the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber
baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup
had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in
his
recent NYT interview :
Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his
role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a
remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn
back toward Russia.
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's
power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And
you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for
it."
... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed
Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.
Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its
geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties
with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He
predicted that the trauma of war will pass.
...
Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to
divulge details because the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way."
Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to
pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received
nearly 73% of all votes.
Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess
it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They
are joined in this
with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup:
Zelenskiy's decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern
Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians
opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but
prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in
light of this domestic opposition.
...
The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary
factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in
western Ukraine. Crucially, however, they can also rely on right-wing paramilitary groups
composed of veterans from the hottest phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-5.
Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25%
of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won
5.8%.
By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore
the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That
undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.
Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate
peace with Russia. (He should also investigate
Biden's undue influence .) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient
step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.
It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.
Posted by b on November 14, 2019 at 18:23 UTC |
Permalink
next page " agree with mccarthy about who conducts foreign policy, disagree about who
the aggressor is; it's the USA, trying to weaken Russia, which is the aggressor.
thanks b... typo - immediate piece with Russia - 'peace' is the spelling here...
the comments from Kolomoisky in the recent nyt interview are very telling.. aside from
being a first rate kleptomaniac who will willingly play both sides if he can profit from it,
he is also speaking a moment of truth..for him Ukraine is available to the highest bidder...
he could give a rats ass about Ukraine or the people... but still, it is refreshing that the
NYT published his comments in this regard..
the quote "the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way." is very true... it was true
before kolomisky picked a side too.. this guy is very shrewd.. i wonder if his own country is
able to see thru him?
national interest.... yes, trump gets to decide and he won on the idea of having closer
relations with russia, but the cia-msm has been lambasting him and anyone else associated
with him since before the election over the clinton e mails... they have painted a scenario
that it is all russias fault and have been relentless in this portrayal... hoping trump is
going to turn this around is like hoping someone is going to turn the titanic around from
hitting a giant iceberg... the usa is too far gone and will be hitting the iceberg.. they are
in fact...
From NYT about Kolomo???? (spelling in English is highly variable)
George D. Kent, a senior State Department official, said he had told Mr. Zelensky that his
willingness to break with Mr. Kolomoisky -- "somebody who had such a bad reputation" -- would
be a litmus test for his independence. [If is good to be independent, i.e. to do what we
want.]
And William Taylor, the acting ambassador in Kiev, said he had warned Mr. Zelensky: "He,
Mr. Kolomoisky, is increasing his influence in your government, which could cause you to
fail." [La Paz is a fresh reminder for Kiev?]
Well the thing about Zelensky is he's still there, and he is making changes in Donbass.
Kolomoisky was interested in the fracked gas in Donbass, the completion of NordStream II
has made a mess of that idea. It is good that he has seen the light, as it means Zelensky
will have support in his attempts to adapt to reality. But Kolomoisky is still a crook no
doubt.
My immediate reaction was that Kolomoisky realises he has to act - the Ukrainian oligarchs
have got too close to America. I agree with James that he is a extremely clever man.
Ukraine's traditional business is playing both ends against the middle and sending the
proceeds to Switzerland (or the Caribbean in Porosyonok's case). Since 1990 a few of these
robber barons have made a very good business winding up the west against Russia, it could go
on ever - why spoil it by lifting the rock and seeing all the insects scurrying around in the
light?
Another rock that has been lifted is in Washington, where the khokhol diaspora are
desperately trying to get Uncle Sam to right the wrongs of a century ago.
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners oif the world and they run the world they
own.
... @ b -- "Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports."
The are not 'separatists', but rather Ukrainians who want to stay in a federated Ukraine
as 'provinces' with powers to pass their regional laws, similar to those in Canada.
The segment of empire in the US that are against Russia act so because it was Russia that
stymied them in Syria and continues to be in their way of expanding the control from that
part of empire...the US segment.
I still believe that the global private finance core segment of empire is behind Trump and
throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The cult of global
private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role in the new
multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyones heads to make it ongoing.
I don't believe that strategy will work but as long as they can be fronted by a MAD player
of some sort (Occupied Palestine comes to mind) they can be bully players in international
matters.
As the world economies grind to a "halt" there will be lots of pressure everywhere and
very little clarity about the key civilization war over public/private finance, IMO
For a military dictatorship, diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means. The US has
been at war with Russia since the right-wing coup at the Democratic convention of 1944. All
presidents have been servants of the military, which includes the police/intel/security
apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead role were "dealt with."
Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state bureaucrats are shocked
and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US foreign policy for 75
years!
Wow! The depth of delusion on display is as breathtaking as its complete projection of the
intentions and actions of the Evil Outlaw US Empire! Oh so many saying I'm displaying four
fingers instead of two. Too bad there isn't a padded cell big enough to contain all the
lunatics. I recall the pre- and post-coup discussions from 2014--that Russia was going to
make NATO own Ukraine until it was forced to concede it has no business being there; that
Russia would teach the would-be leaders of Ukraine a serious lesson in where their national
interests lay. NATO is ready to cede and the lesson's been learned.
IMO, two referendums must be held. The first within Russia: Will you accept portions of
Ukraine wanting to merge with Russia: Yes/No? Second to be given within Ukraine provided Yes
wins in #1: Do you wish to join Russia or remain in Ukraine? IMO, this is a very longstanding
unresolved issue of consequence for the people involved. The political leaders of Russia and
Ukraine might both be against such a vote, but IMO that merely kicks the can further down the
road and opens the door for more mischief making by the Evil Outlaw US Empire. Assuming a Yes
from Russia and some from Ukraine, a strategic threat to Russia and Europe would be
mitigated. Additional questions about those parts of Ukraine not wanting to join Russia could
be solved via additional referenda in the Ukraine and neighboring nations that might prove
willing to absorb the remnants and their people. Such action would of course negate the Minsk
Agreements.
Given the ideological passions of those living in Western and Northern Ukraine, I don't
see any hope for the continuation of the Ukrainian state as currently arranged, thus the
proposed referenda. However, if Russia says Nyet, then Minsk must be implemented.
"Democracy" is not about letting the people as a whole have a say in how the country is
governed. That would be fascist, and racist, and populist, and LITERALLY HITLER. Letting the
people decide on things like foreign policy, is literally anti-democratic.
No, "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing responsibility. The elites get
to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take responsibility when things go wrong.
Because you see, we are a "Democracy."
Breaking off long established economic and cultural ties with a large neighbouring country,
virtually overnight, is a rash act, and certain to create dislocation and hardship. The
craziness of the idea was only achievable through the traumatizing psy-op of the sniper
event, leading directly to the coup and the state of war. The EU and the US were clearly
malevolent in orchestrating the Association agreement with its ridiculous terms and the
corresponding Maidan pressures.
The fools in Hong Kong, after protester-sponsored screenings of the World On Fire
documentary, were actually quoted as presuming the Maidan protests had "won" and expressed
their hopes that they too could "win". Good luck to them.
Kolomoisky and Zelensky know what needs to be done, but they fear the blood that will flow
with Nazi-Banderist scum! Zelinski's balls are not that big, and has no options left after
compromising his position from day one. Who will make the first move, I fear not him? Russia
has time, and patience, which is sorely lacking in the west who feel they have to push the
envelope.
The Minsk II protocol was agreed to on 12 February 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia,
France, and Germany, It included provisions for a halt in the fighting, the withdrawal of
foreign forces, new constitution to allow special status for Donbass, and election in Donbass
for local self governance. Control of the present border of Ukraine would be restored to the
Ukraine government. Donbass would continue to be in Ukraine with some autonomy here (scroll down).
There are many such autonomous zones in the world, and in Europe, seen here .
The problem in Ukraine is that the neo-Nazi factions promoted by the US don't want to see a
resolution, and will fight it with US support.
Kolomoysky is obviously a master thief and general scumbag...but he is no fool...
I think the writing on the wall became obvious with the Nordstream 2 finalization, where,
it is noted, Denmark came in just under the wire in terms of not disrupting the
timetable...
Obviously the interests of German business have prevailed...and rightly so in this
case...
And what of the famous EU line about 'protecting' Ukraine as a gas transit
corridor...?
LOLOLOL...that is in the same category of nothingburger as the EU noises about 'alternate
payment' mechanisms for trade with Iran...
As soon as the Denmark story broke, Gazprom and Russian energy analysts talked openly
about the tiny volumes that Ukraine could expect to see transiting its territory...as part of
a new agreement to replace the one that has expired...
It works out to a small fraction of the several billion dollars in transit fees the
Ukraine was getting...
Also considering that the IMF appears to be finally shutting off the tap of loans to this
failed gangster state...and that the promises from the EU in 2013 were just so much fairy
tales...hard-nosed operators like Kolomoysky are recalculating...
The chaos and national ruin has really cost these gangster capitalists nothing [in fact
they have profited wildly]...so it is easy for them to reverse course and come begging back
to Russia...
Bryan MacDonald has a good piece about this today in RT...
So, here we are, almost six years since the first "EuroMaidan" protests in Kiev, and
Ukraine's most prominent oligarch has finally voiced the unmentionable: the project has
failed.
As for Kolomoysky...like Trump, there is something to like about dirtballs who speak their
minds openly...LOL
Quite a turnaround by Kolomoisky. Wasn't he once caught on a tapped phone call admitting
while chuckling about Ukrainian complicity in shooting down MH-17? i.e. NOT Donbas rebels and
NOT Russia.
@12 karlof1... a referendum... as if the usa would agree to that, lol.... look how they
processed the one in crimea...
@18 flankerbandit... last line is true, but it pales in relation to the ugliness these 2
exhibit 99% of the time, although the 1% when they don't it's refreshing! ukraine will
continue to be used as a tool by the west..
forget about any referendum.. that makes too much sense and won't be allowed..
Nordstream 2 will come online in less than 2 months and the Ukrainian gas exports at that
time will cease (I.e. no oil for the Oligarchs to steal), no matter what the US says they
can't replace the Russian oil exports in terms of money & support to Ukraine, so the
Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in order for the Russians to keep
even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets
It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot.
But now the Ukrainian thieves are beginning to realize that the Western thieves are going
to steal the very ground from under their feet, so there will be no more Ukraine to steal
from. That's not a very good business model. Plus they're no doubt seeing how the US treats
its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere, and realize they could easily find themselves
the next meal for the US beast. Pretty easy to see why the smarter ones are getting
nervous.
they need to make peace with Russia or they will be left out in the cold, literally. They
seemed to have previously bought into some insane lie that they'd be a part of the EU and
NATO if theyd do Washington's bidding. The Deep state vastly underestimated Putin's resolve
when it became clear to the Russians that Washington may try and turn Crimea into a NATO port
one day. The game is over. Ukraine needs to find a way forward now for itself or it will be a
failed state in the near future. It's clear Merkel and Europe want no part of this headache
I don't think Russians want to 'own' any part of Ukraine...at least that is the nearly
unanimous opinion of my own contacts and colleagues in Russia...so I don't think any
referenda will be on the table...
What I do think is possible is what Yanukovich and Russia agreed to in terms of a trade
and economic deal...which was a lot more practical [not to mention generous] than the EU
'either or' nonsense...
Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they are selling vast tracts of
agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally dispossessing themselves of
their own food security...
At the time of the Soviet dissolution, Ukraine had the highest living standards and some
of the world's prime industry and technology...including for instance the Yuzhnoye design
bureau [rocket engines and spacecraft] and many more such cutting edge aerospace
concerns...
For years these crucial enterprises were able to keep going due to the Russian
market...that all ended in 2014 [and in fact was tapering off even before due to the massive
corruption]...
Now the Chinese are looking to scoop up these gems at firesale prices...
It is really quite unbelievable that the nutcases in the Ukraine would be willing to cut
off their own arm just to bleed on Russia's shirt...
Why did the Ukraine never recover from the gangster capitalism like Russia did...because
no Putin ever came along to reign in the oligarchy...[It could be argued Putin hasn't done
nearly enough in this regard].
The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own future...as the
unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to extract maximal
wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on the verge of
toppling...
Kolomoisky is talking his book and helping USA to make the case that Nordstream is a NATO
security issue. To pretend that he's serious about a rapproachment with Russia just plays
into that effort.
And b ignores my comment on the prior thread that he references (about Trump being
Constitutionally charged with foreign policy). Repeating: the "Imperial Presidency" has flung
off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing the need to get Congressional
approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and
black budgets.
While for practical reasons the Executive Branch of USA government has the power to
negotiate treaties and manage foreign relations, Constitutionally he does so for the
sovereign (the American people) and his efforts are subject to review and approval of the
people's representatives via the power of the purse.
Ignoring how the "Imperial Presidency" has usurped power leads to faulty analysis that
supports that power grab.
Ukrainegate IS a farce, but for other reasons. Chief among them being the inherent fakery
of 'managed democracy' which manifests as kayfabe.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners of the world and they run the world they
own.
Nicely put:- that is the reality. Thanks b for your intrepid reports.
Paul Craig Roberts has a deeply aggrieved rant at zero hedge if barflies want a chuckle.
What a shitshow.
Crimea?
It has been part of Russia about as long as the USA has been a country.
9 out of 10 residents are of Russian origin, and Russian is the spoken language.
I guess it could be returned to the 10%-- but out of fairness, we must turn the USA over to
its original occupants.
If you live in the USA, get your ass ready to leave.
One of the problems that the anti-nazis face in Ukraine is that there are occupying armies in
the country. Armies which cannot be trusted to obey instructions which are not agreed upon by
NATO warmongers.
One such army is Canadian, commanded I believe by a descendant of the Ukrainian SS refugees
and reporting to the Foreign Minister in Ottawa, a Russophobe with a family background of
nazi collaboration.
The actual political situation is much more delicate than media reports suggest: what are
called elections feature, in the Washington approved fashion, the banning of socialist and
communist candidates. Bans which are enforced by a combination of fascist commanded police
forces and, even less responsible, private nazi militias. Opponents of the Maidan regime are
driven into exile, jailed or murdered.
Those who wonder as Jackrabbit, in a rare essay into rationality, does above, about the
nature of the US Constitution after decades of the erosion of checks and balances thanks to
the Imperial Presidency, will recognise that a dialectic is at work here. Washington's
support for fascism abroad has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the
installation of fascist regimes abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US
intervenes it leaves a fascist regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind
it.
And what this means is that, among other things, the ability of the population to effect
political change is cancelled: there is no way that the people of Ukraine can decide what
they want because the decisions have been taken for them, in weird cult like gatherings of SS
worshiping Bandera supporters in Toronto and Chicago. It is no accident that most of the
'Ukrainians' being wheeled out by the Democrats to testify against Trump are actually greedy
expatriates who have never really lived in Ukraine.
There was a moment, not long ago, when it looked as if the Minsk accords promised a path to
peace and reconciliation. Unfortunately the plain people of Ukraine, the poorest in Europe
though living in one of the richest countries, Washington, Ottawa and NATO didn't like the
sound of Minsk. Nor did the fascists in the Baltic states and Poland, for whom, for
centuries, Ukraine has been a cow to milk, its people slaves to be exploited and its rich
resources too tempting to ignore.
As Thomas Jefferson explained the President's role in foreign affairs in 1790, and the lack
of advisors' policy making decisions: ''as the President was the only channel of
communication between the United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that
foreign nations or their agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation';
that whatever he communicated as such, they had a right and were bound to consider 'as the
expression of the nation'; and that no foreign agent could be 'allowed to question it,' or
'to interpose between him and any other branch of government, under the pretext of either's
transgressing their functions.' Mr. Jefferson therefore declined to enter into any discussion
of the question as to whether it belonged to the President under the Constitution to admit or
exclude foreign agents. 'I inform you of the fact,' he said, 'by authority from the
President.'
Might also be worth yesterdays hero's asking if dear Mr Kolomoisky, joint Uki/Israeli
national, took a part in authorising the shoot down of MH17 as a news cover for Operation
Protective Edge. Heave ho zionist USA ....et al.
1.The decisions to with hold and release aid have nothing to do with the President making
foreign policy but with his campaign. Saying it was about foreign policy is a damned lie.
2.Trump as president is supposed to lead foreign policy, which means actually setting a
policy. Military aid to Ukraine, yes, except no, except yes, personal handling without asking
anybody with experience how to achieve the national goal desired, national agenda kept secret
from the people who have to carry it out, abuse of officials, demands for dubiously legal
actions without rationale...Saying it was about the president's executive role is a damned
lie.
3.Trump has not made even a tweet that questions US support for fascists. That not even a
issue for Trump. Saying this is about support for fascism is a damned lie.
4.Kolomoyskiy is a bankroller of fascists. It is not impossible even a billionaire might get
frightened by the genie he's let out of the bottle, even if he's Jewish and rich enough to
run away. But actually undoing the fascist regime means taming the paramilitaries and this is
not even on the horizon. Given the rivalry between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskiy it's not even
certain it's a real change of heart or just soothing words for the non-fascist people. Nor is
it even clear the Zelensky will follow even the Steinmeier formula. If he does, good, but
until something actually happens? Saying it's about the antifascist turn is a damned lie.
The only thing that isn't a lie is that Trump was not committing treasons, "merely" a
campaign violation. But then, Clinton never did either. The crybabies who dished it out but
can't take it deserve zero respect, and zero time.
Curious to know how Kolomoisky is working "feverishly" to end the war in the Donbass region.
Wonder if he is planning to come clean on what he knows of the Malaysia Airlines MH17
shootdown and crash in an area not far from Slavyansk and near where his Privat Group's
subsidiary company Burisma Holdings holds a licence to drill for oil and natural gas. What
does he know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17
to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000 metres above as the flight crew
had requested? He had been governor of Dnepropetrovsk region at the time.
Somewhere I read it alleged that the actual owner of Burisma was or is Kolomoiski.
Anything to this?
And via John Helmer (via Checkpointasia and dances with bears) comes the perspective that
it's not so much Kolomoiski floating trial balloons (though that may also be true) but that K
is being given space in the NYT to build his credentials as the new Borg villain, thereby
making it still harder for Zelensky to reconcile with Russia.
fb @ 25 said;"The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own
future...as the unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to
extract maximal wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on
the verge of toppling..."
Yup, aided and abetted by our current regime, while pretending not to...
@23
"It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot."
This is it in a nutshell. The Russians were fed up with Ukraine stealing gas. Hence, Nord
Stream 2. That was always the plan. Whether the Yanks truly grasped the rationale here
---Russia is cutting off gas to Ukraine, simple---has never been clear to me. Although it is
a fairly simple plot. The Russians had decades of shenanigans with the Ukes and said Basta.
By not overreacting to the Ukrainian-USA freakout and keeping their eyes on the prize (Nord
Stream and disengaging, gas-wise, from Uk), they have managed to reach their goal of getting
Nord Stream 2 online.
Kolomoiski is the bankroller and commander of the Azov Battalion. Has close arrangements with
other paramilitaries. And is the current principal of Burisma. And is Privatbank, the only
bank left in Ukraine. He gets a cut of all the action.
When Trump queries Zelensky, all that Zelensky is thinking is this guy does not know the
score. This guy does not know who's on first. He wants me to investigate the boss? Let him
talk to the boss. And who does Z talk to in D.C.? Pointless getting into detail with
Trump.
Trump has no team. No one in D.C. is on his side. He's unable to finish anything.
1) Say the fantasy happens and the US/Russia become BFFs like US/UK...
- Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
- Tough to answer, many unknowns- Russia may act different once its on top, actors may
derail schemes, Deep State temper tantrum, etc...
In general, governments are the order-providing solution for chaos and problems that only
first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over others.
Kolomoiski is a U.S. asset. His interview with the NYTimes proves it.
His threats are meant to mobilize NATO and Russia haters in general; because Trump and
most of his cadre care nothing for Ukraine.
Does anyone think Russia will give Kolomoiski 100 million dollars? Why was he given an
opportunity to threaten the USA? For no reason? Something else is afoot but Russia still
won't take the bait because they are winning.
Russia is quite happy with the status quo. The war in Ukraine keeps the war against Russia
on a level which is easy to manipulate and therefore geostrategically beneficial. Kolomoiski
will get nothing.
Thank you, b, for that snippet from NY Interview with Kolomoisky . I had glanced the headline
on RT but didn't read it because of RT's usual clumsy writing.
Kolomoiski is taunting the empire: investigate my crimes and
ukraine will seek reconciliation and alliance with russia.
Russia won't fall for it. They want kolomoiski's scalp even
more than the empire. From the statements putin has made, maybe
the only concession russia would accept is the dissolution of
ukraine as a sovereign entity and reintegration with russia, minus galicia.
Putin has remarked that they are not one people but one state. Ukraine
already knows that its domestic industry is only viable in competition
with the eu industrial powerhouses if it is integrated with russia.
What does [Kolomoysky] know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control
personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000
metres above as the flight crew had requested?
Okay..so an interesting can of worms here...
First is the fact that Kolomoysky was the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast at the
time...
Now as to the flight and Dnipro Radar [the regional air traffic control facility that
controls a very big chunk of airspace over eastern Ukraine]...
First the issue of the airplane cruising altitude...the crew had filed their flight plan
to climb from flight level 330 [33,000 ft] to FL350 after passing a certain waypoint in
eastern Ukraine...
Now the controllers did instruct the crew to go ahead and climb to their planned altitude,
but the crew declined the clearance and opted to stay at FL330...this was done very
likely because the atmospheric conditions at that height were better for fuel economy...
[To be even more specific...the Boeing manual gave an optimum flight altitude of 33,800
ft, but flying eastward you only have odd numbered flight levels to choose from, so the crew
figured they would be better off staying at 33 than climbing to 35...]
BUT...there are a couple of very curious things here...
First is the fact that Dnipro controllers deviated the airplane from its flight
plan just before it went down...ostensibly due to other traffic...
We can see this in the following map, which is what's called a high altitude en route
chart, which is used by pilots to plan and execute their flight...
You will note a couple of things here...the airplane is flying on the L980 airway
[basically a highway in the sky] when it is turned south by controllers to the RND waypoint,
which is in Russian territory...
This is NOT the route filed by the crew...which can be seen here...
They were supposed to continue flying on L980 right to the TAMAK waypoint, which is
visible on the previous chart and is right on the border with Russia...
They would have continued on the A87 airway to their next waypoint in Russia which is
TIKNA...
Now here is the thing...right after they were turned south, they got shot down...
According to the radio transcripts, the crew acknowledged the course change, but did not
object...however, usually these kinds of course changes aren't appreciated on the flight deck
because the crew is trying to minimize wasted time and wasted fuel on course
deviations...
Most times you will just not bother to complain to controllers...but for sure there will
always be chatter between the captain and copilot about being yanked around like that...
No mention is made in the Dutch Safety Board report about such chatter from the cockpit
voice recorder, which I find very odd...
Also odd is the fact that Dnipro ATC primary radar was down, and only the so-called
'secondary' was working which uses the transponder signals from the airplane...
This is very busy airspace because a lot of flights from western Europe to South Asia
traverse this territory...the plan is always to fly what's called a 'great circle route'
which is basically a straight line, if you flattened out the globe...
Plus considering that you have a war going on underneath...it's very unusual to have your
PRIMARY radar inoperable...
This is significant also because military aircraft will not be using transponders and so
will not be visible to the secondary surveillance...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch
have made some kind of excuse about that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not
usable...
So we see some very suspicious anomalies here...
The Ukrainian authorities did have a NOTAM [notice to airmen] in effect up to FL320
[32,000 ft] so commercial traffic could not fly under that height...but clearly they should
have closed the airspace over the hot conflict area...
They didn't do that...and Kolomoysky was in charge...
The Deep State's view on the members' God given right to make foreign policy decisions (it
must be the God who has give it to them, because the people certainly have not) just reminds
the of the general attitude of the Government's bureaucracy. Give any fartbag a position in
the government and he/she becomes "a prince/princes over the people", give him or her a
monopoly over violence and you got yourself a king/queen. All these police and military kings
& queens milling around and lording over us. "Deep State" is such a totally natural
consequence of the government bureaucracy corrupted by power that it appropriated.
Pillaging taxes from the sheeple (and taking young maidens like Sheriff of
Nottingham/Epstein) could have never ever been enough. Did you seriously think that the Deep
Staters would constrain themselves to only stealing your money, taking your children for
their pleasure and to die in their wars of conquest, and putting you into a totally unsafe
airplanes to die for their profit? Constrain themselves when there is a whole globe out there
to be lorded over, like Bidens over Ukraine? It is the poor people of Ukraine who just have
too much money, thus had to give it through the gas monopoly to the Biden gang, which
selflessly brought them "democracy" at $5B in US taxpayers' expense. Therefore, it is the
Deep State which has been chosen by God, or someone just like that, to make the decisions
about the imperialist/globalist foreign policy and have billions of dollars thrown by the
grateful natives into their own pockets, as consulting fees:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-bank-records-confirm-burisma-biden-payments-morgan-stanley-account
So far the only clear-cut globalization is that one of crime, which has become
global.
What is the US National Interest b asks? Who defines it as such?
Ome magazine that might know is none other than The National Interest. Hopefully I won't
get attacked for quoting from what seems like a fairly sane article to me....
"The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to. Ukraine is a debt-ridden state
and only five years beyond an extralegal revolution. Should the government collapse again,
then American weapons could end up in the possession of any number of dubious paramilitary
groups.
It wouldn't be the first time. In the 2000s, CIA operatives were forced to repurchase
Stinger missiles that had fallen into the hands of Afghani warlords -- at a markup.
Originally offered to the Mujahideen in the 1980s, the Stingers came to threaten American
forces in the region. Similarly, many weapons provided with US authorization to Libyan rebels
in 2011 ended up in the possession of jihadists."
It's difficult to find clean information on happenings within Ukraine and those involving
Russia. The Ministry of Foreign affairs has this page
dedicated to the "Situation Around Ukraine." Of the three most recent listings,
this one --"Comment by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the NATO
Council's visit to Ukraine"--from 1 November is quite important as it deals with the reality
on the ground versus the circus happening thousands of miles away, although it's clear the
delusions in Washington and Brussels are the same and "continue to be guided by the Cold War
logic of exaggerating the nonexistent 'threat from the East' rather than the interests of
pan-European security."
In the
second most recent listing --"Remarks by Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian
Federation to the OSCE Vladimir Zheglov at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on the
situation in Ukraine and the need to implement the Minsk Agreements, Vienna, October 31,
2019"--the following was noted:
"There's more to it. The odious site Myrotvorets continues to function using servers
located in the United States. The UN has repeatedly stated that this violates the presumption
of innocence and the right to privacy. Recently, Deputy Head of the UN Human Rights
Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Benjamin Moreau, reiterated the recommendation to shut down
this website. A similar demand was made by other representatives of the international
community, including the German government. The problem was brought to the attention of the
European Court of Human Rights. The other day, the representative of Ukraine at the ECHR was
made aware of the groundlessness of the Ukrainian government's excuses saying that it
allegedly 'has no influence' on the above website.
"In closing, recent opinion polls in Ukraine indicate that its residents are expecting the
government to do more to bring peace to Donbas. The path to a settlement is well known, that
is, the full implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures of February 12, 2015, that was
approved by the UN Security Council."
Clearly, Zelensky's government is much like Poroschenko's when it comes to listening to
those who empowered it, the above citation is one of several from the overall report.
The latest report deals with an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice at The
Hague that reveals some of the anti-Russian bias there. It has no bearing on this discussion,
although it does provide evidence of the contextual background against which the entire
affair, including the circus in Washington, operates.
MoA consensus is Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords they continue to oppose
to implement despite their promise to do so. Clearly an excellent example of not being
agreement capable that hasn't changed since 2015.
If the Republicans had any brains, they'd turn the Ukrainian aspect of the hearings into
an indictment against Obama/Biden for illegally overthrowing Kiev and trying to obtain their
piece-of-the-action, but then that would be the logical thing to do and thus isn't an option.
The prospect of each day providing similar spectacle is mind numbing as it airs the sordid,
unwashed underwear if the Evil Outlaw US Empire.
I normally do not reply to trolls, but I make an exception for you. Pedo-dollar? Do you have
any more such crap to dilute the valid points discussed here?
i liked what @ 32 tod said - "he's just doing the old Jewish threatening/begging
dance!
"And you are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it." Wink!
Wink!"
stating the obvious is one remedy for any possible confusion here..
@54 karlof1... i don't believe trump is allowed to shine any light on the usas illegal
actions as that would be sacrilege to all the americans who see their country in such a
great, exceptional-ist light... how would trumps MAGA concept swallow that? it wouldn't, so
it won't happen...
You are a bit off on that story. NS2 pipeline will increase the capacity not transitioning
via Ukraine and reduce the price banditry by the Ukrainian & US gangs, but it will not
make gas transit via Ukraine unnecessary. The planned switch off of the German nuclear and
coal power plants will gradually increase the German demand for gas, that is the Russian gas
by so much that NS1 and NS2 will not be enough. Primarily, NS2 is a signal to the Ukrainian
& US Democrat gangs that if they try excessive transit fees and stealing of gas again,
that they will be circumvented within a few years by NS 3,4,5 ...
BTW, the globalized pillaging of the population is clearly not an invention of the DNC
crime gang only. For example, the 737Max is a product of primarily Republican activity on
deregulating what should have never been deregulated and subjugation to the Wall Street (aka
financialization). The pillaging of the World is strictly bipartisan, just differently
packaged:
1) R - packaging the deregulation to steal & kill as "freedom" or
2) D - packaging the regime change as responsibility to protect R2P (such regime change and
stuffing of own pockets later).
karlof1 @54 - "Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords"
Yes. As you well know, and as we have well discussed, Minsk was in its very essence the
surrender terms dictated to the US by NAF and Russia in return for letting the NATO
contractors go free and secretly out of the Debaltsevo cauldron. Either actually or
poetically, this was the basis. The US lost against NAF. The only way to prevent Donbass
incursion into the rest of Ukraine was to freeze the situation. The US had no choice, and
surrendered.
Out of the heat and fog of warfare came a simple document made of words which, even so,
illustrated perfectly just how elegantly the Kremlin had the entire situation both war-gamed
and peace-gamed. Minsk from that day until forever has locked the Ukraine play into a lost
war of attrition for the US sponsors, with zero gain - except for thieves.
To attempt to parse Ukraine in terms of statecraft is to miss the point that Ukraine can
only be parsed in terms of thievery. This is not cynicism, simply truth.
Now they sell their land because this is all there is left to sell. Kolomoisky proposes
selling the entire country to Russia for $100 billion but not only will Russia not bite, the
country isn't worth even a fraction of that - because of Minsk, it can cause zero harm to
Russia. But this ploy raises the perceived value (Kolomoisky hopes) in the eyes of the west,
and starts the bidding.
In Russia the people see all this very clearly, including on their TV. Yakov Kedmi in this
Vesti News clip of
Vladimir Soloviev's hugely popular talk show, discusses the situation. He baits Soloviev by
saying that the Ukrainian thieves are only doing what the Russian thieves did in the 1990's -
and one must filter through this badinage to take out the nuggets he supplies. Here are
three:
1. Zelensky has no security apparatus that follows his command, therefore how can he be
considered the leader of the country?
2. There is no power in Ukraine, only forces that contend over the scraps of plunder.
3. These forces are creating the only law there is, which is the sacred nature of private
property for the rich - the only thing the US holds sacred.
Therefore sell the very soil.
~~
The Minsk agreement is a sheer wall of ice reaching to the sky. No force imaginable can
scale it or break it. Against that ultimate, immovable wall the US pounds futilely, with
Ukraine caught in the middle, while Russia waits for Ukraine to devolve into whatever it
can.
And the Russian people and government regard the people of the Ukraine as brothers and
sisters. But until the west has worn itself down, and either gone away or changed the
equation through a weakening of its own position in some significant way, nothing can be done
by Russia except to wait.
What Tod @32 described is spot-on, "the old Jewish threatening/begging dance". It is not that
the Russians do not know this about Kolomoyskyi. They will play along not expecting anything
from the Zelo-on-a-String and his master. The Russians like to let those scumbags (Erdo comes
to mind) huff & puff and embarrass themselves by flips. They know - it could always be
worse if those did something intelligent. Kolomoyskyi is vile but he ain't no genius, not any
more than Erdo.
Sure Cheeza...everybody's a 'bit off' except you...
Gazprom is talking about 10 bcm a year through Ukraine for the new 10 year deal, as
opposed to the 60 bcm [billion cubic meters] that Ukraine is hoping for...
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction/)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government. Babyl-on @ 8
? before I begin , how do you measure the political and economic power of money
as opposed to the political and economic power of the intentions and needs of the masses.
Does $1 control a 100 people? A million dollars control 100,000,000 people? How do we measure
the comparative values between money power and people power? I think the divisions of
economics and the binaries of politics established by the nation state system means that the
measurement function (political and economic values) varies as a function of the total wealth
vs the total population in each nation state. If true, become obvious how it is that: foreign
investments displaces the existing homeostatis in any particular nation state, the smaller
the poorer the nation state, the more impact foreign wealth can have; in other words outside
wealth can completely destroy the homeostatis of an existing nation state. I think it is this
fact which makes globalization so attractive to the ruling interest (RI) and so damning to
the poorest of the poor.
Change by amendment is impossible There is one and only one Western Empire but
there is also an Eastern Empire, a southern empire, and a Northern Empire and I believe the
ruling interest (faction) manipulate all nations through these empires. In fact, they can do
this in any nation they wish. The world has been divided into containers of humans and
propaganda and culture have highly polarized the humans in one container against the humans
in other containers. <=divide, polarize, then exploit: its like pry the window, and gain
access to the residence, then exploit. It is obvious that the strength of the resistance to
ruling class exploitation is a function of common cause among the masses. But money allows to
control both the division of power and the polarization of the masses. The persons who have
the powers described in Article II of the US Constitution since Lincoln was murdered can be
controlled (Epstein, MSM directed propaganda, impeachment, assassination, to accomplish the
objects of the ruling interest (faction). Article II of the USA constitution removes foreign
activity of the USA from domestic view of the governed at home Americans. Article II makes it
possible for the POTUS to use American assets and resources to assist his/her feudal lords in
exploiting foreign nations almost at will and there is no way governed Americans can control
who the ruling interest place in the Article II position.
A little History Immigration to NYC from Eastern (the poor) and Western (the
rich) Europe transitioned NYC and other cities from Irish majority to a Jewish majority; and
the wealthy interest used the Jewish majorities in key cities to take control over both
Article I and Article II constitutional powers by electing field effect controlled
politicians (political puppets are elected that can be reprogrammed while they are in office
to suit the ruling interest. The source code is called rule of law, and money buys the
programmers who write the code. So the ruling interest can reprogram in field effect fashion,
any POTUS they wish. Out of sight use of the resources of America in foreign lands is nothing
new, it was established when the constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787 and
ratified in 1788.
Propaganda targeted to the Jewish Immigrants allowed the wealthy interest to
control the outcome of the 1912 election. That election allowed to destroy Article I,
Section 9, paragraph 4 " No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid unless in
Proportion to the Census of enumeration herein before directed to be taken". and to enact a
law which privatized the USA monopoly on money into the hands of private bankers (the federal
reserve act of 1913)
What was the grand design Highly competitive, independent too strong economic
Germany was interfering with Western hegemony and the oil was in the lands controlled by the
Ottomans. It took two wars, but Germany was destroyed, and the Ottoman empire (basically the
entire Middle East) became the war gained property of the British (Palestine), the French
(Syria) and the USA (Israel). Since then, the ruling interest have used their (field effect
devices to align governments so the wealthy could pillage victim societies the world over.
Field effect programming allows wealth interest to use the leaders of governments to use such
governments to enable pillage in foreign places. The global rich and powerful, and their
corporations are the ruling interest.
psychohistorian says it well "..the global private finance core segment of empire is
behind Trump and throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The
cult of global private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role
in the new multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyone's heads to make it
ongoing..." by psychochistorian @ 10
NOBITs @ 11 says it also "All presidents have been servants of the military, which includes
the police/intel/security apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead
role were "dealt with." Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state
bureaucrats are shocked and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US
foreign policy for 75 years!" by: NOBTS @ 11
According to TG @ 13 "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing
responsibility. The elites get to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take
responsibility when things go wrong. Because you see, we are a "Democracy."by: TG @ 13 <=
absolutely not.. the constitution isolates governed Americans from the USA, because the USA
is a republic and republics are about privatizing power and socializing responsibility;
worse, there ain't nothing you can do about it.
Vonu @ 19 says "According to Kevin Shipp, the National Security Council really runs the
executive branch, not the president. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=XHbrOg092GA"
by: Vonu @ 19 <=but it is by the authority of Ariicle II that the NSC has the power to run
the executive branch?
KAdath @ 22 says "the Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in
order for the Russians to keep even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets by: Kadath @
22" <=exactly.. but really its not abandoning the USA, its abandoning the oligarchs local
to the pillaged nation..
J Swift @ 23 says "the US treats its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere,"
[poorly] but its not the USA per say, because only one person has the power to deal in
foreign places. Its that the POTUS, or those who control the Article II powers vested in the
POTUS, have or has been reprogrammed.. J. Switft @23>>
flankerbandit @ 25 says " Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they
are selling vast tracts of agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally
dispossessing themselves of their own food security..." flankerbandit @ 25 <=Not really
the wealthy (investor interest) have pushed the pillage at will button.. since there is no
resistance remaining, the wealthy will take it all for a song..
Jackrabbit @ 26 says "Trump [is].. Constitutionally charged with foreign policy. Repeating:
the "Imperial Presidency" has flung off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing
the need to get Congressional approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by
Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and black budgets.by Jackrabbit @ 26 <== Trumps orders
military to take 4 million day from Syria in oil?
your observation that the money has circumvented Article I of the COUS explains why the
democraps are so upset.. the wealthy democrap interest has been left to rot? Your comment
suggest s mafia is in charge?
Tod @ 32 says "As soon as some money goes his way, he'll discover democracy again.
Sorry to burst you bubbles." by: Tod @ 32" <==understatement of the day.. thanks.
Bevin @ 32 says "a dialectic is at work here. Washington's support for fascism abroad
has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the installation of fascist regimes
abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US intervenes it leaves a fascist
regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind it. this means.. the ability of
the population to effect political change is cancelled" by bevin @ 33 <= yes but there is
really no difference in a republic and its rule of law, and a fascist government and its
military police both rule without any influential input from the governed.
michael @ 34 reaffirms "The President was the only channel of communication between the
United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that foreign nations or their
agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation'" michael @ 34 well known to
barflies, the design of national constitutions is at the heart of the global problem. Until
constitutional powers are placed in control of the governed there will never be a change in
how the constitutional powers ( in case of the USA Article II powers) are used and
abused.
OutofThinAir @45 says "In general, governments are the order-providing solution for
chaos and problems that only first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over
others.by: OutOfThinAir @ 45" <+governments are the tools of wealth interest and the
governors their hired hands.
by: War is Peace @48 " Trump is a moron, groomed by Jewish parents ( Mother was Jewish,
Father buried at biggest Jewish cementary in NYC ) to be a non-Jew worked for the mob under
Cohen ( lawyer for 1950's McCarthy ); Became the 'Goyim Fool" real estate developer as a
cover for laundering mob money. So that it didn't appear that it was Jewish Mafia Money, so
they could work with the Italian Mafia. Trump went on for his greatest role ever to be the
"fool in Chief" of the USA for AIPAC. What better way to murder people, than send out a fool,
it causes people to drop their guard. by War is Peace @48 <= yes this is my take, What
does it mean. com suggest the global wealth interest may be planning to reprogram Trump to
better protect the interest of the global wealthy.
Kiza @ 51 the reason for globalization is explained see above=> response to Babyl-on @
8
dh @ 53 says ""The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to." by dh @53 <
the USA cannot consider anything, if its foreign the POTUS (Article II) makes all decisions
because Art II gives the POTUS a monopoly on talking to, and dealing with, foreign
governments.
Deagel @ 56 says "The American people don't care, they're all drugged out, and shitting
on the side-walks all over the USA, and sleeping in their own shit. This is the best time in
USA history for the Zionists to do anything they wish." by: Deagel @ 56 <= I think you
under estimate the value Americans place on democracy and human rights, until recently
governed Americans believed the third party privately produced MSM delivered propaganda that
nearly all overseas operations by the USA were to separate the people in those places from
their despotic leaders, and to help those displaced people install Democracy.. many Americans
have come to understand such is far from the case.. the situation in the Ukraine has been an
eye opener for many Americans. thoughts are sizzling, talk is happening, and people are
trying to shut google out of their lives. that is why i think Trump is about to be
reprogrammed from elected leader to .. God in charge
I watched that Soloviev segment with Kedmi the other day...always interesting to say the
least...
Btw...I'm not really up to speed on that whole Debaltsevo cauldron thing...I've heard
snippets here and there...[there is a guy, Auslander, who comments on the Saker blog that
seems to have excellent first hand info, but I've only caught snippets here and there]...
I hadn't heard this part of the story before about Nato contractors as bargaining
chips...if you care to shed a bit more light I will be grateful...
I suggest going to The Saker Blog and
enter Debaltsevo Cauldron into the site's search box and click Submit where you'll be greeted
with numerous results.
Grieved @62--
Thanks for your reply and excellent recap. As I recall, Putin wants Donbass to remain in
Ukraine and Ukraine to remain a whole state, although I haven't read his thoughts on the
matter for quite some months as everything has revolved around implementing Minsk. The items
at the Foreign Ministry I linked to are also concerned with Minsk.
The circus act in DC is trying to avoid any mention of Minsk, the coup or anything
material to the gross imperial meddling done there to enrich the criminal elite, which
includes Biden, Clinton, other DNC members--a whole suite of actors that omits Trump in this
case, although they're trying to pin something on him. The issue being studiously ignored is
Obama/Biden needed to be busted for their actions at the time, but in time-honored fashion
weren't. And the huge rotted sewer of corruption related to that action and ALL that came
before is the real problem at issue.
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person as evidenced by The New Yorker 737Max article
in the previous thread. This good article could only be measured by how much it agrees with
your own opinion that MCAS was put in to mimic the pilots' usual fly-stick feel. If anyone
does his home work, such as the journalist of this article, then he must agree with you,
right? With experts such as you out there, why would anyone dare apply common sense and say
that it would be an unimaginably stupid idea to put in ANY AUTOMATED SYSTEM which pushes
the plane's nose down during ascent (the most risky phase of a civilian flight, when almost
desperately trying to get up and up and up) for any DUMBLY POSSIBLE REASON !? What could
ever go wrong with such an absolutely dumbly initiated system relying on one sensor? Maybe it
was a similar idea to putting a cigarette lighter right next to the car's gas tank because it
lights up cigarettes better when there are gasoline vapors around. Or maybe an idea of
testing the self-driving lithium battery (exploding & flammable) cars near kindergartens
(of some other people's children)!?
An intelligent person would have said - whatever the reason was to put in MCAS it was a
terribly dumb idea, instead of congratulating himself on understanding the "true reason".
"If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly
associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly,
desirable) with Putin's anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia
family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions."
Really?
From what have gleaned from the alternative media available on the internet ,of which MOA is
an important part. Putin and Lavrov are the two most moral and diplomatic statesmen on the
world stage today Compared to Trump, Johnson, Macron, Merkel, Stoltenberg, Pompeo, Bolton and
whoever else blights the international scene these days these two are colossi.
To describe
them as like a Mafia family seems to me to be 180 degrees wrong. Maybe Putin overreacted, in
his early days in power, to the Chechen conflict but look at the situation today.
Look at how
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were played by the west. I appreciate you did not write the words
quoted above but you said you agree with them and I find that startling given I am usually
very admiring of your insight and knowledge of geopolitical events.
According to the Impeachniks, it is Schiff's staff who decides how Schiff votes and his
policies. It would be illegal for Schiff to make decisions. But Schiff's recommendation will
make or break the careers of his staff, so elected Schiff has some influence. That's not true
for elected Trump, because those in his service already have made careers and/or a host of
outsiders looking to place them.
Although, he didn't get impeached for it Obama did get criticized for not sending the aid to
Ukraine. He was also criticized when he did intervene, but not fast enough for the deep
state. Remember "leading from behind" in response to Libya. Obama was much more popular and
circumspect than Trump, which protected him from possible impeachment when he went off the
deep state's script.
Discussion of the USC and the responsibilities assigned therein is probably a foolish and
merely moot exercise, as law is, ultimately simply custom over time, and since '45 or so the
custom has become dissociated from the documents' provisions, particularly with regard to
war-making and the "licensed" import and sale of dangerous drugs, dope. The custom in place
is essentially ukase - rule by decree. Many decree are secret.
I do not object, simply pointing to the obvious.
This is a public secret anybody can know. Inter alia see The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (McCoy)
...........
Custom includes also permitted theft, blackmail, trafficking children and so forth.
...........
zerohedge put up some documents tying TGM Hunter B to the money from Ukraine...
................
I would not worry about the name of the person called president. The real sitrep is more
like watching rape and murder from the dirty windows of a runaway train.
Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was left with the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in
the world. In exchange for financial assistance in the costs of removing all the nukes, the
West guaranteed to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity.
In the meantime, Russia has annexed the Crimea and rebels have taken control of parts of
Eastern Ukraine. The West has not provided any direct military assistance to restore those
territorial infringements.
Since the West has reneged on its end of the deal, would it not only be fair to return
Ukraine's nukes so it can defend itself like the Big Boys do, namely with threat of nuclear
annihilation?
I hate this trope. The Russian Fed. is not launching offensive operations to capture
Kharkov or Kiev. Western Ukraine is shelling ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. What would
U.S. Congressman say if these were Jews? (I would condemn that as well).
The next time someone pontificates, 'Ukrainians are dying because Trump held up aid' ask
them how many. The number is ZERO. Javelins are not being used on the front line.
Mr. Kolomoisky is spot on, i.e. when he says that the Americans will only use Ukrainians as
their little bitches to fight and die for America's gain against Russia. Just like the
Americans fucked over the Kurds in Syria, using them as proxy fighters to do USA/Israel's
dirty work. Wherever the USA shows up and starts interfering, everything turns into shit:
Iraq...Afghanistan...Venezuela...Bolivia...Ukraine...Libya...Yemen...Nicaragua...Ecuador...the
list is quite long. It remains to be seen if Mr. Kolomoisky can bring about rapprochement
with Russia. He'd better watch his back.
"Wow. My opinion of Kolomoisky has just improved ... somewhat." --Seamus Padraig @73
Yes, Kolomoisky has moved up a notch in my estimation as well; from the low of
"monstrously inhuman spawn of satan" all the way up to "rabid dog" . That's
quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
I am very glad to see you back, Grieved, and your 'wall of ice' metaphor is indeed accurate.
To me, the promising signs in Ukraine were even as here in the US when voters fought back
against what b calls Deep State, which I am sure in my heart was even more of an overwhelming
surge than registered - the best the corrupters of the system could do was make it close
enough to be a barely legitimate win for their side, and they didn't succeed. Maybe somewhere
along their line of shenanigans a small cog in the wheel got religion and didn't do their
'job'. An unsung hero who will sing when it's safe.
I hope, dearly hope, it gets safe in Ukraine very soon. They are us only further down the
line than we are, but we will get there if we can't totally remove the cancer in our midst.
That's our job; I wish Ukraine all the best in removing theirs.
Jen...I should have made clear that the two aircraft picked up by Russian PRIMARY RADAR were
unidentified...
The two commercial flights you mention were in the area and were known to both Russian and
Ukrainian controllers by means of the SECONDARY SURVEILLANCE RADAR, which picks up the
aircraft transponder signals...
However, secondary WILL NOT pick up military craft that have their transponders
off...which is normal operating procedure for military craft...
So the airspace situation was this...you can see this from one of the illustrations I
provided from the DSB prelim report...
You had MH17...you had that other flight coming from the opposite direction [flying
west]...and you had that airplane that overtook the MH17 from behind [they were in a hurry
and were going faster, so when MH17 decided to stay at FL330, they were cleared to climb to
FL350 so they could safely overtake with the necessary vertical separation...]
Those three aircraft were all picked up on the Ukrainian SECONDARY [transponder]
surveillance...as well as the Russians...on both their PRIMARY AND SECONDARY...
But what the Russians picked up were two craft ONLY ON THEIR PRIMARY...those would have
been military aircraft flying with their transponders off [they're allowed to do that and do
that most of the time in fact]...
That's why those two DIDN'T SHOW UP ON THE SECONDARY DATA HANDED OVER TO THE INVESTIGATORS
BY THE UKRAINIANS...
Only primary radar would pick those up...and, very conveniently, the Dnipro primary was
inop at the time...[so the data handed to investigators by the Ukrainians would have no trace
of any military aircraft nearby]...
But with the Russian primary radar data, there is in fact evidence that there were
military aircraft in the air at the time...just that the Dutch investigators simply decided
to exclude the very vital Russian radar data on some stupid technicality...
[Really this is a very poorly done report, both prelim and final, and I've read many over
the years...]
The other thing I should have emphasized more clearly is about that course deviation that
controllers steered MH17 to, just seconds before it was hit...
The known traffic was those three commercial aircraft, as shown on the chart...here it is
again...
Those three commercial flights are clearly labeled...and the big question is... why was
MH17 DIVERTED SOUTH...OFF ITS PLANNED ROUTE...?
We can see the deviation track by the dotted red line...
Clearly there was no 'other traffic' that required MH17 to be vectored south by the
controllers...
In fact we see that there was a FOURTH commercial flight [another B777] that was flying
south exactly to that same waypoint that MH17 was diverted to...we see this airplane is
flying west on the M70 airway and is heading to the RND waypoint...
This does not make sense...why would you divert MH17 from going to TAMAK as flight
planned...in order to go south toward RND where another airplane is heading...
If nothing else this is very bad controller practice right there...yet again, the DSB
[Dutch Safety Board] does not even raise this question...
Like I said, leaving aside any guesswork, these are the simple facts and they raise
serious questions...both about the competence of the Dutch report, and the way the
controllers handled that flight...
Ukrainian think tank Ukrainian Institute of the Future and Ukrainian media outlet Zerkalo
Nedeli (both anti-Russian, but slightly more intellectual than typical Ukrainian outlets)
have contracted a Kharkov-based pollster to conduct a poll among DNR/LNR residents from
October 7 to October 31 (method: face-to-face interviews at the homes of the respondents,
sample size: 806 respondents in DNR and 800 respondents in LNR, margin of error: 3.2%) and
published its results in an article: Тест
на сумісність
[Compatibility Test] (in Ukrainian).
It's a long and rambling article, interspersed with
Ukrainian propagandistic clichés (perhaps to placate Ukrainian nationalists), but the
numbers look solid, so I've extracted the numbers I consider important and put them in a
table format. Here they are:
GENERAL INFORMATION
Gender 46.5% male 53.5% female
Age 8.3% <25 years old 91.7% ≥25 years old
Education 31.5% no vocational training or higher education 45.2% vocational training 23.3% higher education
Religion 57% marry and baptize their children in Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) 31% believe in God, but do not go to any church 12% other churches, other religions, atheists
Political activity 3% are members of parties 97% are not members of parties
Language 90% speak Russian at home 10% speak other languages at home
Nationality 55.4% consider themselves Ukrainians 44.6% do not consider themselves Ukrainians
ECONOMY
Opinion about the labor market 24.3% there are almost no jobs 39.3% high unemployment, but it's possible to find a job 15.7% there are jobs, even if temporary 17.1% key enterprises are working, those who want to work can find a job 2.9% there are not enough employees
Personal financial situation 4.9% are saving on food 36.4% enough money to buy food, but have to save money to buy clothing 43.6% enough money to buy food and clothing, but have to save money to buy a suit, a mobile
phone, or a vacuum cleaner 12% enough money to buy food, clothing, and other goods, but have to save money to buy
expensive goods (e.g. consumer electronics) 2.7% enough money to buy food, clothing, and expensive goods, but have to save money to buy a
car or an apartment 0.4% enough money to buy anything
Personal financial situation compared to the previous year 28.4% worsened 57.3% stayed the same 14.2% improved
Personal financial situation expectations for the next year 21% will worsen 58.6% will stay the same 18.7% will improve
Opinion on the Ukraine's (sans DNR/LNR) economic situation compared to the previous
year 50.3% worsened 41.4% stayed the same 6.3% improved
CITIZENSHIP
Consider themselves citizens of 57.8% the Ukraine 34.8% DNR/LNR 6.8% Russia
Russian citizenship 42.9% never thought about obtaining it 15.5% don't want to obtain it 34.2% would like to obtain it 7.4% already obtained it
Considered leaving DNR/LNR for 5.2% the Ukraine 11.1% Russia 2.9% other country 80.8% never considered leaving
Visits to the Ukraine over the past year 35.1% across the DNR/LNR–Ukraine border (overwhelming majority of them -- 32.2% of all
respondents -- are pensioners who visit the Ukraine to receive their pensions) 2.6% across the Russia–Ukraine border 62.3% have not visited the Ukraine
WAR
Is the war in Donbass an internal Ukrainian conflict? 35.6% completely agree 40.5% tend to agree 14.1% tend to disagree 9.3% completely disagree
Was the war started by Moscow and pro-Russian groups? 3.1% completely agree 6.4% tend to agree 45.1% tend to disagree 44.9% completely disagree
Who must pay to rebuild DNR/LNR? (multiple answers) 63.6% the Ukraine 29.3% Ukrainian oligarchs 18.5% DNR/LNR themselves 17% the U.S. 16.5% the EU 16% Russia 13% all of the above
ZELENSKIY
Opinion about Zelenskiy 1.9% very positive 17.2% positive 49.6% negative 29.3% very negative
Has your opinion about Zelenskiy changed over the past months? 2.7% significantly improved 7.9% somewhat improved 44.8% stayed the same 22.9% somewhat worsened 20.5% significantly worsened
Will Zelenskiy be able to improve the Ukraine's economy? 1.4% highly likely 13.3% likely 55.3% unlikely 30% highly unlikely
Will Zelenskiy be able to bring peace to the region? 1.7% highly likely 12.5% likely 59% unlikely 26.5% highly unlikely
MEDIA
Where do you get your information on politics? (multiple answers) 84.3% TV 60.6% social networks 50.9% relatives, friends 45.9% websites 17.4% co-workers 10% radio 7.4% newspapers and magazines
What social networks do you use? (multiple answers) 70.7% YouTube 61% VK 52.3% Odnoklassniki 49.8% Viber 27.1% Facebook 21.4% Instagram 12.4% Twitter 11.1% Telegram
FUTURE
Desired status of DNR/LNR 5.1% part of the Ukraine 13.4% part of the Ukraine with a special status 16.2% independent state 13.4% part of Russia with a special status 50.9% part of Russia
Desired status of entire Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts 8.4% part of the Ukraine 10.8% part of the Ukraine with a special status 14.4% independent state 13.3% part of Russia with a special status 49.6% part of Russia
Just listening to a bit of the testimony of the ex-ambassador to Ukraine.
It is all BS hearsay!
Also, this lady doesn't seem to grasp that as an employee of the State Department, she
answers to Trump. Trump is her boss.
The questioning is full of leading questions that contains allegations and unproved
premises built into them. I can't imagine that such questioning would be allowed in a normal
court of justice in the USA.
Sure, Trump is a boor. But he is still the boss and he gets to pull out ambassadors if he
wants to.
This is total grandstanding.
Also, a lot of emotional stuff like "I was devastated. I was shocked. Color drained from
my face as I read the telephone transcript . . . "
This is BS!
IIRC the Russian radar showed that the two mystery planes in questions were flying in
MH17's blindspot . That's way too close to be half an hour away. Also, the fact that
the two planes were flying over a war zone with their transponders turned off (which is why
they couldn't be conclusively identified) strongly suggests that they were military.
@ Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 15 2019 11:24 utc | 71
When the US launched a coup in Kiev, wasn't that a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty
too?
@ Posted by: Christian J Chuba | Nov 15 2019 12:36 utc | 72
You know the real reason why they have yet to deliver the javelins to Ukraine? It's
because they're afraid that they'll be sold on the black market and end up in the ME
somewhere targeting US tanks. That's why.
@ Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 15 2019 13:30 utc | 75
That's quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
on Yovanovitch,
She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to
safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States."
She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security
interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. .
.Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is
injured in the knee
Cheeza decides to launch a personal attack...also completely off topic...
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person [sic]...With experts such as you out there,
why would anyone dare apply common sense...an intelligent person would have said...blah
blah blah...
Look man...I'm not going to take up a lot of space on this thread because it's not about
the MAX...
BUT...I need to set the record straight because you are accusing me here of somehow
muddying the waters on the MAX issue...
That is a complete inversion of the truth...I have been very explicit in my [professional]
comments about the MAX...and it is the exact opposite of what you are trying to tar me with
here...
Yes, it is important to understand these things...which is why I have made the effort to
explain the issue more clearly for the layman audience...
Your pathetic attack here shows you have no shame, nor self-respect...
Let's rewind the tape here...I said that Gazprom is looking to cut supplies to Ukraine in
the new 10 year deal that comes up for negotiation in January...and that they are going to be
pumping much less gas through Ukraine because NS2 now allows to bypass Ukraine...
You took a run at this comment, calling it wrong, and putting up a bunch of your own
hypothesizing...
I responded by linking to the
Russian news report quoting officials saying exactly that...that gas to Ukraine will be
greatly reduced...
Instead of responding to that by admitting you were full of shit...you decide to attack me
on the MAX issue...everybody here knows my [professional] position on the MAX...and that I
have said repeatedly THAT IT CANNOT BE FIXED...[which is also why I have offered detailed
technical explanations...]
I'm not going to let you screw with my integrity here...everything you attributed to me
on the MAX is completely FALSE and in fact turning the truth on its head...
As Kiza #55 noted - Nordstream 1 and 2, combined, only equal half of Ukraine's transit
capacity.
The primary impact is that Ukraine can't hold far Western European customer gas hostage
anymore with its gas transit "negotiations" as Nordstream allows Russia to sell directly to
Germany.
There can still be Russian gas sold via Ukraine, but this will be mostly to near-Ukraine
neighbors: Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Czech as well as Ukraine itself.
Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania can transit from Turk Stream, but there are potential Turk (and
Bulgarian) issues.
Poland is already committing to LNG in order to not be dependent on Russian gas transiting
Ukraine - a double whammy.
The ultimate effect is to remove Ukraine's stranglehold position over Russian gas exports,
which in turn severely undercuts Ukraine's ability to both get really cheap Russian gas and
additional transit fees - a major blow to their economy.
Therefore, the continuation of gas transit via Ukraine in volumes greater than the 26 bcm/y
suggested above will depend on the European Commission and European gas importers, and
their insistence that gas transit via Ukraine continues.
Otherwise, gas transit via Ukraine will be reduced to delivering limited volumes for
European storage re-fills in the 'off-peak' summer months...
This prospect will undoubtedly complicate any negotiations between Gazprom and its
Ukrainian counterparty over a new contract to govern the transit of Russian gas via
Ukraine, once the existing contract expires at the end of December 2019.
...Gazprom may be willing to commit to only limited annual transit volumes...
European gas importers don't give a shit about Ukraine...and they have the final
word...they care only about getting the gas they need from Russia in a reliable way and at a
good price...
The news report I linked to makes it perfectly clear that the Europeans are demanding that
the Ukranians get their act together on the gas issue, or they will be dropped
altogether...
You know...FOOL...it really makes me wonder how fools like you decide to make statements
here with a very authoritative tone...when it is quite clear you are talking out your rear
end...
Nobody needs that kind of bullshit here...if you don't know a subject sufficiently well,
then maybe you should keep quiet...or when making a statement, phrase it as your own OPINION
and nothing more...
[... Opus Dei ...] Neo-cons at it again.
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Nov 14 2019 13:24 utc | 98
Opus Dei was created in 1928 is Spain, where Catholics were opposing emerging hordes of
godless Communists, Anarchists and Socialists. Since ca. 1960 Opus Dei is active in Bolivia
where they continue Work of God, with fruits that he have just witnessed. Sadly, in Bolivia
the error of Marxism is compounded by native superstition and paganism under flags of
Pachamama. Perhaps Opus Dei is neo-Saint Inquisition, but as conservatists, they have
decently long pedigree.
The problem with import substitution is that the factories that used to make these goods were
largely moved to China. China isn't going to give them back.
So in order to attempt to substitute US made for the China imports, the factories have to
be built first.
Secondly, China heavily subsidizes the early parts of the supply chains: raw materials and
what not. This wouldn't hold true to American factories.
So while the goal and the theory are good, the problem is the execution.
Russia is doing it because they're forced to: sanctions actually accelerates the process
because Russian internal investors know there will be a reasonably long term market for
Russian goods so long as the sanctions hold true, and the sanctions also lock in Russian
capital (that which was repatriated) to some extent.
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the
nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two
great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer
even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in
which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of
every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In
this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with
millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of
worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot
know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only
country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL
Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can
of worms and feeding it to the world.
Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep
State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.
Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the
Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.
A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for
Trump's re-election.
But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid
drinkers.
It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!
Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the
reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b
how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane...
at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet
when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number
of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy
as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process
is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...
but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides
with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the
usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around
the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily
duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..
Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very
well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the
establishment.
Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:
> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House
Speaker.
> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.
IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party
members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never
swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard
because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won
in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption
never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat
its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate
D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's
the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't
been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand
situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of
citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders
and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education,
health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire.
Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS
candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless
something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the
Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.
Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's
#1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1
cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were
as brainwashed then as now.
I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.
You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016
inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with
the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the
Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a
foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!
"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in
our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and
according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we
will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship
with Mr. Putin?"
Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than
Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?
More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only
begun!):
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase!
How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked
their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'?
I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of
America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect,
they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade
away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are
yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.
Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor
with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from
knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not
all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base
believes in Trump.
Often I expect these stories in the media to get important technical details wrong...but
here we see that this writer did his homework...
I have said this many times before, but the MCAS system is NOT an anti-stall system...it
is there solely for the purpose of providing the right kind of stick feel to the pilot...
"On most airplanes, as you approach stall you can feel it," a veteran pilot for a U.S.
commercial carrier told me.
Instead of the steadily increasing force on the control column that pilots were used
to feeling -- and that F.A.A. guidelines required -- the new engines caused a loosening
sensation.
This is exactly it...and this is why I have to wonder how exactly is MCAS going to be
cleared to fly again...since the original, much less authoritative version was found
inadequate in providing the stick force required...and the rejigged production version proved
to be a surefire killer if it kicked in at low altitudes such as takeoff...
We recall that Captain Sullenberger called the MAX a 'death trap'...
So clearly the system's authority has to be dialed back...in which case the airplane
handling qualities do not meet established requirements...
The story here tells of the struggle that the family of Ralph Nader's grand-niece, who
perished in the Ethiopian flight, is waging to 'axe the max'...
Hopefully they will succeed, but I doubt it..the MAX can never be a good airplane...full
stop...
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the
nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two
great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer
even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in
which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of
every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In
this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with
millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of
worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot
know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only
country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL
Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
@Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly
discontinued...
Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
Just found your query. Quick and dead-on response is a major EMP event, but that is not
what I had in mind.
Let me see if I can work up another, but necessarily lengthier response.
As I noted on the Bolivia thread, BRICS is having its Summit today & tomorrow in
Brasilia, and will likely be the most important of its brief life. So far, just this report :
"The heads of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will discuss issues related to
economic, financial and cultural cooperation as well as arms control and joint efforts to
counter terrorism.
"The leaders of the five member-states are to attend the BRICS Business Forum, and meet
with the BRICS Business Council and the heads of the New Development Bank.
"In addition, Vladimir Putin will hold a number of bilateral meetings with the heads of
state and government taking part in the summit."
No! But there will be a new "civil war" in the US around the mid of the next decade. Split
occuring not south to north, but west to east; chaos further increased by immigrants from the
middle & south Americas with their own agenda.
Forces (land & air), militia & DHS people of the eastern party may seek secure
backing near frontier to Canada (area of Great Lakes therefore save). Some of the 'big
capitalists' who feel more international than patriot will flee to outer South America
(Argentinia, Chile).
Eventually a dead president (for that and for the civil war please look into cycles of
US-history). Peace will come with the first female president. Keep watch on Tulsi Gabbard
(but may be also another lady - as I am in Europe I am not familiar with all probable coming
female candidates).
Why no permanent split of the States? There are internal benefits (common traffic, markets
etc.) but more it is the outside pressure: to be able to compete with China it is a necessity
for the States to remain united. Also the coming chaos in Europe and Russia demands
unification of the US.
Now a very strange remark: some elites in the US have already accepted, even promote the
tendency toward "civil war" to enable a 'reset' of the political, economical and social
structure of the country. Furthermore, a seemingly weak US with a split in the military may
lead Russia in temptation to make some mistake (towards Ukraine and Europe). And now a very,
very strange remark: while some forces in the homeland are caught in civil disorder some
other forces in the overseas may be involved in a foreign war. Extremely pointed out: the
coming civil war in a very specific manner is a fake (to deceive and trap Russia - of course
not Putin but his followers).
Today I had a look into George Friedman's book about the next hundred years. For the first
view there is a lot of nonsense (disintegration of China etc.). But I agree that the power of
the US will be restored during the century. And if not the same power as it was in the 1990s,
then in every case the internal stability of the USA is completely guaranteed.
With greetings from Germany and with thanks to Bernhard for his valuable work, Gerhard
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can
of worms and feeding it to the world.
Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep
State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.
Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the
Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.
A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for
Trump's re-election.
But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid
drinkers.
It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!
Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the
reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b
how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane...
at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet
when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number
of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy
as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process
is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...
but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides
with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the
usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around
the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily
duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..
Karlof1 @ 9 --
"I expect the atmosphere to be tense..."
I do, as well. Though I imagine certain leaders might feel a temptation to suspend
Brazil's membership, doing so would illustrate a structural weakness to be overcome by any
legitimate multipolar body. That is, if the Empire is able to turn just one member (in this
case Brazil), it may be used to weaken the organization as a whole.
Having just a limited exposure to Putin's approach to multipolarity, my understanding is
that it is to be accepted that sovereign countries evolve along their own trajectories (as
opposed to being subjected to "universal" "liberal" principles). If Brazil or Turkey decide
that this means playing both sides off each other, it will be interesting to see whether
there are any principled (as opposed to realpolitical or pragmatic) objections that Russia
might offer.
Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very
well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the
establishment.
Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:
> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House
Speaker.
> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.
The reason I ask is because I have heard a load of bull about Russia's plans to Russianize
the world and that Trump is his pawn since day -167 of his inauguration. I have heard this
from coworkers, from friends, from family, seen it on Reddit, read it on neolib outlets like
slate and the like. I'm wondering if you live in Trump country and just don't hear or see the
Russophobia being played out in the beltway and on the elitest coastlines.
Trust me when I say that the dems played the right card, albeit a desperate one, when they
started with the whole Russiagate nonsense. To you and I, b and others, Russiagate is
nonsense. But tell that to the average dem or moron yuppie in their towers along our shining
seas.
Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly
discontinued...
Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players
quaking
in their boots.
9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.
What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next willing to surrender?
**What are those limits?**
The Resistance, Democrats, no longer respects democratic rights -
no thought to the millions of voters that they would disenfranchise if
the nullification of Trump's election were successful via a coup (impeachment).
Five years ago would you have imagined that Democratic voters would be so cavalier
about democratic rights? So willing to accept the vacuous accusation that our
President is a Russian agent. Would resurrect the CIA - the torturing, kidnapping,
assassinating, war promoting, false flag creating, disinformation spewing CIA, - and
ravenously swallow endless streams of McCarthyist propaganda.
How fast,how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power too far down the
spiral
to imagine? Five years ago would you have imagined the current decent of Democrats we have
witnessed?
If the pretext, the myth, of the necessity of seizing power, were echoed by the mouthpiece
MSM
would Democrats go along? Americans have surrendered rights in our near lifetime.
Americans
worship militarism and their military heroes more than ever before. Americans have
swallowed
hook-line-and-sinker the new-McCathyism and "Putin is an evil man".
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players
quaking
in their boots. To answer your question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their criminal limit or capability.
Paul Damascene @13: I generally share your view, about Putin's view, but I don't think Putin
minds Erdogan playing both sides, Bolsonaro, yeah, but not Erdogan, he can play games with us
all he wants. Keeps us distracted, and Erdogan doesn't like us "taking the oil", and we can't
get in a shooting war with him, he's NATO. He's the military counter-balance to the Pentagon
in Syria that Russia cannot be. So I think he will be thrashing around in N. Syria with
Putin's consent until we leave (as long as he doesn't pick a fight with Assad.)
Bolsonaro he may see as something to wait for the end of.
It will be interesting and possibly informative to see what comes out of this meeting.
Thanks for your reply! Note that the main event is the Business Forum, which is an arena
where genuine national interests usually reign. As you're likely aware, BRICS was formulated
as an instrument to facilitate development via commerce and mutual investment and that its
first major joint accomplishment was the formulation of the BRICS Development Bank to bypass
the IMF, World Bank and the dollar dominated international trade regime. I found it curious
that Global Times had zero articles on its main page related to the Summit, while
Xinhuanet ran this
short commentary overview which amounts to a short recap and cheerleading. We'll need to
await the presser this evening to get a better feel.
You make an interesting point librul... It reminds me of the whole continuity of government
scheme. 'In case of _____, break glass an impose martial law or whatever the manufactured
disaster calls for. The fact that the north woods 911 bit worked is a testament to just how
far the ptb are willing to go. You know, in regard to the USA perspective I can tell you from
first hand experience that a steady diet of agitation propaganda as well loads of distraction
have rendered a majority of the population easily lead no matter what stripes they might be
wearing. Selling Russia as the bad bad guy was easy. Look if a large group of people buy the
Bin Laden hit then the sky is the limit.
The 5 mile asteroid would pose a serious problem to most mammals, but given the amount of
species self loathing being pedaled about.... My point about the executive branch and the
question of 'is he the last' hinges on the fact that the president does nothing which is not
somewhat scripted. We know what happens when they go "off the Rez"...
Below is a ZH quote about the meeting with Trump and Erdogan today
"
"It's a great honor to be with President Erdogan... the ceasefire is holding very well, we've
been speaking to the Kurds and they seem to be very satisfied, as you know we pulled back our
troops quite a while ago..."
"I want to thank the President for the job they've [Turkey] done in Syria," Trump said of
Erdogan.
And on that note, he already addressed the rationale for continued US troop presence in
Syria, saying with Erdogan sitting next to him: "We are keeping the oil. We have the oil. The
oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil."
"
To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the keep the oil fits in
with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?
'Deep State' is just a convenient way of labeling something we can also call 'the
illuminati', or 'the globalists', or 'the one percent', or 'Big Brother', etc.. We know that
there are hidden powers. Some call them reptilians. Who knows? We can tell that they are
there, though we cannot say exactly who they are and how they constitute their coherence, how
they organize themselves. We can see pieces of the deeper pattern, but we cannot see the
whole thing. So we use these vague and sometimes fanciful labels.
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle. Humanity is
maybe in its final throes, there and in so many other places. Or maybe its the birth pains of
who we were really meant to be. God help us.
IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party
members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never
swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard
because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won
in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption
never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat
its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate
D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's
the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't
been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand
situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of
citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders
and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education,
health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire.
Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS
candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless
something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the
Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.
Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's
#1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1
cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were
as brainwashed then as now.
The 'Orwellian Globalists' may have overstepped, hubristically, when they chose an
out-and-out racist, an outspoken racist, to be their puppet to head the new government in
Bolivia. This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of
Bolivia ...
Librul@16 responds to the statement by start, Chevrus @ 3. "Please
illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA
would be suddenly discontinued..." Chevrus @ 3, end
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots.
9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.
What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next
willing to surrender? **What are those limits?**
How fast, how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power
too far down the spiral to imagine? Five years ago would you have
imagined the current decent of Democrats we have witnessed?
Is media capable to determine who shall have the power? Can
media make Americans surrender their rights?
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots. To answer your
question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their
criminal limit or capability. by: librul @ 16
Snake says look at and carefully read the statements by Assad in Syria.. they
are very telling about circumstances here in the states. Assad distinguishes
top down ideology from bottom up cause a very interesting distinguishment.. ..
So to answer your question how far are Americans willing to allow the Oligarchs to
retract human rights in America: are their any limits to the willing surrender?
I think it is as Assad said in the above citation.. outside investors
instigated the unrest in Syria and used it as pretense to get their governments
to invade Syria so that the investors could privatize all of
Syria.. That is exactly what is happening in USA governed America.
karlof1 @4
Your scenario doesn't reach its logical conclusion:
1) Asteroid strike is automatically blamed on "those damn rooskies".
2) Nuclear war ensues.
3) Far West, South, TransMissisippi and New England all secede with each claiming to be the
rightful 'United State of America'.
4) Voila.
IIRC the Clintons rode into the Whitehouse on the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC).
The DLC has quietly morphed into the DNC (or stolen their ID). Proof might be found on
identifying the faction controlling the Democratic Party's finance committee under the
assumption whoever controls the finance also controls the party. Memory is a perfidious and
ephemeral thing and goes down Alice's rabbit hole in nothing flat.
@14 jackrabbit.. i am sorry, but it is too simplistic for me... your examples are fine, but
as i see it, they random and not some orchestrated plot from up above... that is where we
differ here... in fact, your overview is much too simplistic..you can make it simple for me,
but the whole concept of deep state orchestrating everything here is much too simplistic..
@ 16 librul... good overview that is kind of how i see the democratic party here, although
@ 24 karlof1 disagrees, it looks like that to this outsider / canuck.. here is the line from
karlof1 that gives it away for me - "Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they
won't run as 3rd Party POTUS candidates" which begs the question, why? my answer - they are
useful shills for this same agenda..
I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.
You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016
inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with
the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the
Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a
foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!
"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in
our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and
according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we
will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship
with Mr. Putin?"
Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than
Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?
More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only
begun!):
I see a civil war in the USA as highly unlikely. The upper class has too much common
interest and purpose. The lower classes are divided and powerless and in the near future only
seem to be becoming more so. When the third-worldization reaches a critical point, a staged
and managed revolution may be in the cards. Before a real revolution has any chance, the
elites will have flooded the USA with immigrants from the south, ensuring further division of
the lower classes and postponing any real challenge.
Overall, the societal foundation of the USA looks to have been crumbling for maybe five
decades already and for the next few decades an acceleration of that process is more likely
than a reversal. Don't be on the lookout for leaders or movements to change any of that. Only
when the american people clean up their act, ie. their addiction to numbing drugs, empty
consumerism and false jingoisms, will anything there ever change for good. Until that
happens, the place will be withering more and more.
Not until the American elites start to fail to safeguard their own priviliges at the cost
of the rest of the population will change happen.
I don't see the Russian aggression that you propose to be realistic or likely to happen.
Russia does not need to reach abroad for energy, resources or food. Their main challenge is
to manage the riches of the huge country with the people they have. Already the resurgence
after the post-1990 crash (and the preceding stagnation) is an accomplishment worthy of
admiration.
The Russian interest clearly is consolidation and defence, which is exactly what their
policies have been showing on the international stage. Suggestions of aggression are pure
projection by Atlanticists theselves. Instead of Washington trying to provoke Russian
mistakes, the real game is about Moscow trying to contain NATO's erratic trashing and
carefully preventing any catastrophic escalation.
To wit, what country did recently "update" its nuclear doctrine, suggesting the
possibility of 'limited' use of nuclear weapons? Was it Russia, or ehhm... perhaps the
USA?
The only uncertain factor between Russia and the USA is Europe. I expect a lot more
American craziness towards Europe, as its effective leverage crumbles. Europe has not yet
devolved as badly as the USA and the American implosion is a major risk factor for the
Europeans.
psychohistoiran @22 asks "To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the
keep the oil fits in with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?"
As someone who voted for Trump I can tell you I do not agree with this decision nor will I
defend it. I hold the same sentiment pre 2016 that I do now - bring these endless wars to an
end. Period. Am I disappointed in his walking back the decision to leave Syria entirely? You
betcha.
Weeks ago when barflies were discussing Trump's withdrawal, someone corrected my
understanding regarding the Kurds who took control of the oil fields, so to speak, and were
selling the oil to SAA. My understanding of this newest policy is the Kurds will continue to
manage and benefit from the sale of the oil. I could be wrong. Feel free to correct me if I
am. But if my understanding of the arrangement is correct, the Kurds maintaining their role,
then they are likely still selling the oil to the SAA. Then again, maybe not, but I wouldn't
be surprised if they were.
So, management or control of the oil fields has changed, but it looks like everything else
remains as it was before when the oil fields were managed/controlled by the Kurds.
What I do respect in the President's decision to leave NE Syria is removing troops from
theater. The CIA's proxy war appears to have been shutdown. This w/o question I applaud,
LOUDLY.
BTW, all this talk about asteroids and false flags makes me remind the brilliant nineties
movie "Starship Troopers", in which Paul Verhoeven not only sort of presages 911 and the
ensuing war on the bugs, but also smuggled into it the ephemeral phrase "Are you psychic?". I
sometimes wonder how many people got that...
This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of Bolivia ...
I doubt it, without massive quantities of weapons similar to those received by the Syrian
takfiris, the indigenous people don't stand a chance once the Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation (formerly SOA) trained Washington-supported death squads get to
work. It's going to be a massacre that'll be barely reported in MSM, because after the
"election" they'll be anti-democratic. Bolivia is not Syria.
The issue with the Americans is a hyper-partisan mindset has been instilled, akin to duelling
sports teams, so one cheers for their team facts or context be damned. This used to be a Fox
News-Republican phenomenon, but now has infected Dem supporters as well.
Break up of US would mean break up of Canada too. Look to the moves made by province of
Alberta in response to fed election - a sort of firewall is being proposed where Alberta will
take on fed gov responsibilities pension, health care, etc. Alberta is a Koch Bros oil
republic, and any N American melt-down will result in formation of private fiefdoms - i.e.
Alberta-Montana-Wyoming-South Dakota become Kochland.
Then you must be a shut-in or unemployed to not see the dual-benefit of the deep state in
that it stymies trump and resurrects Russia as a boogeyman. Nay! Thrice-benefit in that it
also allows for an excuse to be horrifically status quo and gamble on everything returning to
normal after the trump phenomenon runs its course and the duopoly reassert its grip.
I wonder how in the Earth can anyone have cultural cooperation and join efforts against
terrorism with a goon like Bolsonaro who has posted Twitters celebrating Bolivia´s coup
and is known misses Pinochet ´s "expeditive measures" against communists...How this, so
called group BRICS, can continue following its path, as if nothing had happened, especially
since the coup in Bolivia...
Just today read the statements by Kremlin spokeman, Peshkov, and what to say, seemed to me
quite soft his stance, throwing balons out...Sometimes I feel like to trust John Helmer on
his assesment on the existence of two blocks in the Russian Federation, the stavka ,
and these people of the Kremlin office...
To this you add the Russian ambassador to the US, today visiting Kissinger ( the builder
of the Condor Plan...) a man always like begging for better relations to this bully of a
country, and this is one of the times when I wonder if i would not be supporting all this
time just the people who wants to crush me...( meaning my now almost 6 years long support for
the RF and concretely this adminsitration...)
I found quite different the unambiguous and strong statements by the Russian FM and
Kremlin itself when Venezuela was about to suffer a coup, and now when the legitimate
government of Bolivia has been sent into exile and his indigenous population on the verge of
extermination by nazi thugs...
You can not be against nazis in the Ukraine and then support ( or be way too soft in your
lack of condemnation...) nazis in Brasil or Bolivia (... or the EU...) or you are for
international law and human rights, always, or not, but not only when business opportunities
are in prospect....
Yes, today is one of those days when my consideration of the RF and Putin´s
administration as a referent in keeping international order in the face of a lawless US just
wobbles...
No se puede estar en misa y repicando al mismo tiempo
Waiting for the final statement of the meeting for to possibly take a determination on
this issue...
@ 36 jayc... kenney is a divisive politician.. i always think of alberta like the 'texas
wannabe' of canada... they think highly of themselves and their oil, even when they can't get
it out to the coast due the fact the people on the coast view all this very differently.. and
now they are resorting to a type of quebec referendum option to use as leverage over the rest
of canada.. it didn't work with quebec, and it definitely won't work with alberta.. at least
quebec could legitimately claim itself a different type of culture... as for dividing up
canada and the usa - it makes more sense to go along north south lines - cascadia being a
good example of this.. koch republic would be a good name for that zone!!
You'd probably do well to study the history of China after the downfall of the Manchu Qing
dynasty up to the 1930s at least (when Japan began invading the country and bringing its own
forms of chaos, violence and enslavement) to get an idea of where the US might be heading if
and when the Federal government falls. From the 1910s onwards, China was governed by warlords
looking out for No 1, with their own armies.
Not so very different from the situation prevailing in Afghanistan and Libya. Talk about
the chickens coming home to roost.
The other alternative is if the 50 states decide to be self-governing statelets or form
their own federations among themselves or with neighbouring provinces and states in Canada
and Mexico, or even abroad. Alaska may petition Moscow to be accepted back into the Russian
Federation and Hawaii may seek another large patron to attach itself for security reasons.
Washington and Oregon
states may finally form a federation with British Columbia and call it Cascadia.
Yeah, like Formerly T-Bear intoned about memory. I concede, but still note Gabbard hasn't
faltered in her zeal. I finally finished my series of thoughts on the Bolivian thread
regarding the Big Picture. IMO, Evil's sly enough to get elected even if it campaigned
showing its attributes as in
this image . If I were 20 years younger, I'd emigrate to Russia or China, but I'm not and
doubt I've 20 years remaining on this orb. But I do think I've got the struggle properly
diagnosed, although no cure's readily available.
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle.
@Posted by: Paul | Nov 13 2019 20:06 utc | 23
Indeed ,the same way I see it, and it seems that, in this one, Russian will not be with
us...After all there is neither oil, nor weapons to sale in Bolivia, nor to the working poor
people.....
Just today I was hearing Trump stating that he would like very much assisting to the next
Vicotry Day parade in Moscow...Well, how to say ( wait for me while I go throwing up a
bit...) Just here again, a bit back in myself...
Thus, this thug, who just has unleashed those rabid nazi death squads over the poor
indigenous people of Bolivia is going to sit along the veterans who really fought the nazis
in WWII, the few who still are alive to remember the 25 millions of their own who died in the
battle fields, moreover taking into account that Trump´s father really was a nazi
himself and supported Nazi Germany as if there was no tomorrow...If you though that of
Netanyahu last year was way too much...to see how yo take this...
Seeing these things, no wonder that fascism advance without obstacles...Voting in the UN
or passing all day energically protestingthe demolition of monuments to Soviet heros of WWII
is not enough...It is neede to eergically protest when today´s nazis are salughterin
currently lving people...
As happened during WWII, I fear, it will be us the people who will have to organize
ourselves to fight this scourge...Putin, simply, will not be there....May be the Red Army
will...
Gerhard @10;
I agree the US will split up. As a poli sci initiate, i was forced to consider the role of
institutions acting in support of the polis. I wasn't impressed at the time. my disdain for
the rot of leadership in most if not all institutions in the west, it was mostly for the
greed....but i realize the cumulative effect is the fraying of those 'supports' of the nation
itself. Consider:
The 16 intelligence agencies each have their own agendas, the regulatory agencies are
revolving doors for industry placements, the FBI was crooked since the days of Hoover, the
governments agencies are rife with oligarchy quislings .....and in the end the greed of those
in power will be not be held back by any moral force. The police are militarized, murdering
and robbing their own citizens.
Meanwhile, the MSM are owned by the oligarch, so there is no national forum where the
corruption can be addressed on a national level. This leaves the blog sites such as MOA to
lead the fight against the PTB. The problem is in the nature of the internet, which has no
'locus' as in a national voice. The internet has no center. As example, i am not a US
citizen. When the polis finally hit the point where the Rentier economy has driven them to
extreme reaction, they will not be thinking of reclaiming the vast American experiment,
rather they will seek to at least control their little part of the world. I believe you will
see blocs of similar states rising up to control whet they think is in their own best
interests: The mid-west, the west coast and mountain states, the deep south, the eastern
states will find common issues to crytalize around.
That's my read.
As a Canadian, my thoughts are how Canada will negotiate with these remainder blocs of former
US states.
James @ 39
I general concur with your brief reading of Jayson Kenney and Alberta talk of separatism. But
on that score the comparison would not so much be to Texas as perhaps to Boris Johnson /
Nigel Farage, in their moves to break away from the EU. I don't know that either of them (or
Kenney) is all that passionate about separation itself, but the divisiveness -- and surfing
various waves of polarization -- are what this new nihilist political wave seems to be about.
I support the Cascadia concept. There's a wonderful work of speculative fiction called
Ecotopia that is set in a Cascadia - although it was written before the digital hi-tech era
and so could not predict that such an entity, short of a true revolution, would be run by
Microsoft - Google - Apple etc.
A high speed rail link from Vancouver to Portland has been proposed, which is a
forward-thinking policy initiative, but they are going to take a few years to think about it,
and then another fifteen to twenty years to build it, and that itself will only happen if the
"no new taxes" retrograde types don't stop it in its "tracks" (which they intend to do).
off topic: I've just realized how vexing the idea of a non-citizen army.
Imagine: The tax payer funds the majority of tax dollars to a bureau that funds its own
production of weapons, recruitment, training personnel, maintenance of 800 or so bases across
the world and, finally, deploying these recruits wherever it deems worthy, based on the
directions of it's head, potus. its just so sweet: hire mercenaries, and do whatever you want
across the planet....there are no draftees ....no one to criticize when the body bags return
stateside. Some otherwise brain-dead fuck in the pentagon is enjoying lieutenant generalship,
just for figuring out the army didn't need a draft...there were plenty of poor people, who
could be had with a few bucks......
I'm in Montana and working on a piece of fiction that anticipates the breakup of the
States in the not-so-distant future. I did a little research on Cascadia and found that
there's elements of white supremacism wanting to co-opt the idea of Cascadia for their own
ethno-state fever
dreams :
The far right is known to appropriate pop culture imagery, particularly for recruitment and
to mitigate their viewpoints. But Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State
University, explained that Cascadia, "a really important movement in the Pacific
Northwest," is targeted specifically for its link to bioregionalism. "It implies a
territorial imperative but doesn't necessarily involve anti-racism, according to the far
right, so fascists appropriate it," he told me of Cascadia.
The appropriation began at least as far back as 2004, when a flag suspiciously similar
to the Cascadian flag appeared on the cover of Harold Armstead Covington's book, A Distant
Thunder. In 2008, Covington founded the white nationalist group Northwest Front, which
calls for an "independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest." The group
later penned a disturbing rhyme on its website about this flag, the Tricolor flag, using
language similar to Baretich's:
The sky is blue, and the land is green. The white is for the people, in
between.
Cascadia appropriation has snowballed since then. In 2016, a man adopting the moniker
Herrenvolk, a German word for "master race" used by the Nazis, helped form Cascadia, the
"foremost" alt-right group in the Pacific Northwest. According to its website, its mission
is to "regain our sovereignty and prevent foreign influence on our people." That goal
correlates with the narrative of Cascadia as quintessential, and it echoes the groaning
around Portland about newcomers spoiling the city.
in the narrative I'm working on, New Cascadia does become a white supremacist
stronghold.
I was somewhat puzzled by your Good and Evil post in the last thread, karlof1. Were you just
being facetious or did I misread you to say that all would depend on the outcome of the 2020
election?.
I followed you on the course of 'the rest of the world' under leadership from Russia and
China into multipolarity rather than one hegemon; I'd tend to agree with you on that concept,
though maybe we'd have disagreements on the course of history up to that point. I have a
literary turn of mind myself, and to me "good" literature (with a small g) always comes out
on top - as with goodness in most other aspects of life learning as well.
All the same, it's hard for me to think the coming US election will really decide
anything. That is, I don't see any of the candidates preparing his or herself to join 'the
rest of the world'. That would be the good outcome for me and I just can't see it
happening.
I'll be literary and say that maybe for nations 'the way up is the way down.' And while
the disparity and struggle between wealthy and not in the US is starkly apparent, we are
nowhere near bottoming out here yet. And I think we have to be; I think we will be - but
when? I'll be literary again and say that for Tigger it was when he got all his bounce taken
out of him. All of it. Not 'make America great' but rather 'help America survive
yadayadayada...'
I'm kinda doubting I'll be around to see it. It's sort of that 'not with a bang but a
wimper' sort of scenario - and we're a long way from wimpering yet.
Still, I feel very positive. I think 'the rest of the world' is going to be kinder than we
deserve when it all boils down to the dregs. What a day that will be!
Nemesiscalling 15
Right you are. The Anti-Russia hype has been going on for a while but had a bit of a hiatus
during King (W) Shrub II. Both parties worked to destroy the Russian economy during the
80s/90s with the Chicago/Harvard boys gutting it completely while enriching themselves. It
accelerated under Obama while they presented us with the "Reset" switch. Apparently the
Russians didn't play along so they became the bogeyman that gets inflated as time goes on.
Trump tried but got dragged down in the process.
As to a US split, I live in the south. So I've wondered if California (for example) tried
to leave if a US President would pull a Lincoln and destroy the state ... in order to save
it.
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase!
How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked
their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'?
I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
Occupied Palestine continues killing people as documented in the report below from Reuters
"
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip killed six members of a
Palestinian family on Thursday, all of them civilians, medical officials and residents said,
bringing the death toll in the territory from a 48-hour surge in fighting to 32.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the pre-dawn incident in Deir al-Balah,
which came as cross-border shelling exchanges continued despite a ceasefire offer by the
Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.
Israel killed an Islamic Jihad field commander on Tuesday, sparking cross-border rocket
salvoes by the militant group and further Israeli strikes. Medics said 32 Palestinians have
been killed, at least a third of them civilians.
Those killed in Thursday's attack on a home in Deir al-Balah included a woman and a child,
medical officials said. Another 12 people were wounded, they said.
"
Sad to see this continue to go on and no resolution in sight, only escalation
I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of
America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect,
they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade
away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are
yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.
Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor
with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from
knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not
all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base
believes in Trump.
TASS and Sputnik have both published short reports on events from the BRICS Summit in
Brasilia. As I noted earlier, it revolved around the Business Forum, so most everything
focused on economics, global trade, and the hindrances in the normal conduct of commerce:
"'Undoubtedly, the global economy was affected by the fact that methods of unfair
competition, unilateral sanctions - including politically motivated ones are being used on a
wider scale in the global trade, [and] protectionism is flourishing. Under those
circumstances, BRICS nations have to take serious effort to ensure the development of their
economies, to prevent the deterioration of the social situation and the fall of living
standards, of our citizens' welfare,' Putin said at the closing ceremony of the BRICS
business forum."
Hopefully, there'll be a full transcript of Putin's remarks and further reporting to
digest tomorrow.
Re: trustworthy people, I meant that my eyes have seen first hand the effects of this
whole Russiagate brainwashing. As a result, I don't talk politics with my family, and it is
tenuous with my coworkers. Can you imagine a guy working in a west-coast city and actually
has something positive to say about DJT?
I still say that DJT deserves an ENORMOURS!...ENORMOUS! amount of credit for awakening
such terminology into the public lexicon as "Globalism," "nationalism," "fake news," and the
like. How he was able to do this was very simple but absolutely revolutionary for any
bonafide presidential candidate that I can remember or know. For myself, I view the issue as
globalism as paramount and far more world-shattering than US imperialism.
Here
is an interesting Frontline interview with Ann Coulter a week or so ago. It shines a light on
how a guy like Trump was able to capture the public imagination. Hint: it wasn't because the
Deep State was grooming him.
For any of you who use protonmail. They seem to be touting their links to clearly compromised
media sources such as Bellingcat quite strongly these days, and are pushing the empire's
message on MH17, Ukraine, Scripals, Russiagate etc etc. I was an early adopter but they now
seem compromised or simply deluded. Too bad, another one bites the dust.
Got it, Nemesiscalling, sorry to be obtuse. But I'm afraid I do disagree. This whole phobia
against Russia and anti-Trump scenario turned off huge numbers of their voters - some didn't
vote but some actually held their noses and voted for Trump. To me (and I sure could be
wrong) Dems just dug themselves a deeper hole with all of this. Save some sort of coup, I
can't see them winning a year from now. If anything more US voters have wised up than were
wised up before - you don't go back once eyes are opened.
I agree with your premise about this being kayfabe. From where I sit, there is no other
explanation for any political party to make these endless attacks based on absolutely nothing
over and over again. Attacks which can only maintain the charade from 2016 of Trump the
Victim. Does anyone think that somehow the Dems suddenly stopped being to calculating
psycho/sociopaths that they and the other side of the aisle are? Why would such shrewd
players not verify what people like Vindeman had to say before putting them on the stand?
They keep undermining their own case over and over again.
I find it impossible that they would continue to stick their hands in the fire after being
burned every single time before this, and with easily verifiable information. Especially when
the attacks are ALWAYS over stupid shit and never go after anything he actually could be
attacked for doing. What I keep seeing is like watching kindergarten kids try to kill a grown
man with foam rocks.
We keep seeing this complex, convoluted, evil shit come out of DC and yet we
simultaneously think these same players are morons? No freaking way. These attacks are the
only thing that keeps Trump's base on his side as he keeps betraying them and the opposition
keeps trying to outdo its last performance of stupid. I have seen a LOT of Trump supporters
throw in the towel on him for things he has done in the last 3 years, yet they come back to
his side after the newest stupid thing the left wing of the uni-party comes up with.
Shit, it isn't like Trump is even really shaking things up to cause such a ruckus!
"... And, of course, it wouldn't be good, old-fashioned Washington gunslinging if she didn't pin the blame on somebody else. In this case, it was former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff John Kelly -- portrayed by Haley as duplicitous snakes who sought to undermine the president behind his back. ..."
Her messaging confirms what many have long suspected: Nikki Haley is a human weathervane, trying to ingratiate herself to the
boss (she knows Trump will remain a popular figure within Republican politics for years to come) while at the same time distancing
herself from his most controversial actions.
And, of course, it wouldn't be good, old-fashioned Washington gunslinging if she didn't
pin the blame on somebody else. In this case, it was former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff
John Kelly --
portrayed by Haley as duplicitous snakes who sought to undermine the president behind his back.
She is a neocon and people arent going to vote for more war. She has no real accomplishments. I think she would make an interesting
candidate. A republican woman is generally not as loopy left wing as the democratic women running just because their women. Personally
Nikki does not represent my values and I wouldnt vote for her.
Well, what does that tell ya about the continuing corruption and ruining of America's elections systems in this evolving, shallower
society and the major 'news' media being 'neo-con' run or influenced as such?
It's ridiculous and I'm being kind, that people with no qualifications are seriously being given money and given media exposure
such as- Buttgieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and some others with low IQ's and only want the ego tripping and be one of the 'elites'
all their non-productive lives.
So, Nikki Haley is seriously one of those to lead America?
You now what, people who vote for these clowns, clowns that never worked in their lives, are just plain shallow too. But...the
big donors give these characters money so that they will continue the terrible neo-con foreign policy.
Now, may I ask, as a fella that was born in another nation:
how come I use my real name but Nikki Haley and others do not?
I laugh, as did others, over the years when I say-you would think, that a guy with my name, being a Palestinian/Arab/Moslem heritage,
would be the last one to do that!
Well, how 'bout that question in our great big country America? Dig?
Opportunism of this one is so sky high that it resembles a cartoonish psychopath. Even her name is not real. A pathological liar
who took up barking as a profession because that is what sells these days. Tragedy of America is that snakes move high and up.
"... Cliff Asness, another money manager, would fly into a rage at Warren adviser Gabriel Zucman for using the term "revenue maximizing" -- a standard piece of economic jargon -- describing it as "disgustingly immoral." ..."
"... Objectively, Obama treated Wall Street with kid gloves. In the aftermath of a devastating financial crisis, his administration bailed out collapsing institutions on favorable terms. He and Democrats in Congress did impose some new regulations, but they were very mild compared with the regulations put in place after the banking crisis of the 1930s. He did, however, refer on a few occasions to "fat cat" bankers and suggested that financial-industry excesses were responsible for the 2008 crisis because, well, they were. And the result, quite early in his administration, was that Wall Street became consumed with " Obama rage ," and the financial industry went all in for Mitt Romney in 2012. ..."
No, the really intense backlash against Warren and progressive Democrats in general is
coming from
Wall Street . And while that opposition partly reflects self-interest, Wall Street's Warren
hatred has a level of virulence, sometimes crossing into hysteria, that goes beyond normal
political calculation.
What's behind that virulence?
First, let's talk about the rational reasons Wall Street is worried about Warren. She is, of
course, calling for major tax increases on the very wealthy, those with wealth exceeding $50
million, and the financial industry is strongly represented in that elite club. And since
raising taxes on the wealthy is highly popular , it's an
idea a progressive president might actually be able to turn into real policy.
Warren is also a big believer in stricter financial regulation; the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau, which was highly effective until the Trump administration set about gutting
it, was her brainchild.
So if you are a Wall Street billionaire, rational self-interest might well induce you to
oppose Warren. Neoliberal_rationality/ does not, however, explain why a money manager like Leon Cooperman
-- who just two years ago
settled a suit over insider trading for $5 million, although without admitting wrongdoing
-- would circulate an embarrassing, self-pitying open letter
denouncing Warren for her failure to appreciate all the wonderful things billionaires like
him do for society.
Nor does it explain why Cliff Asness, another money manager, would fly into a rage at Warren
adviser Gabriel Zucman for using the term "revenue maximizing" -- a standard piece of
economic jargon -- describing it as "disgustingly immoral."
The real tell here, I think, is that much of the Wall Street vitriol now being directed at
Warren was previously directed at, of all people, President Barack Obama.
Objectively, Obama treated Wall Street with kid gloves. In the aftermath of a devastating
financial crisis, his administration bailed out collapsing institutions on favorable terms. He
and Democrats in Congress did impose some new regulations, but they were very mild compared
with the regulations put in place after the banking crisis of the 1930s. He did, however, refer on a few occasions to "fat cat" bankers and suggested that
financial-industry excesses were responsible for the 2008 crisis because, well, they were. And
the result, quite early in his administration, was that Wall Street became consumed with "
Obama
rage ," and the financial industry went all in for Mitt Romney in 2012.
I wonder, by the way, if this history helps explain an odd aspect of fund-raising in the
current primary campaign. It's not surprising that Warren is getting very little money from the
financial sector. It is, however, surprising that the top recipient isn't Joe Biden but
Pete
Buttigieg , who's running a fairly distant
fourth in the polls. Is Biden suffering from the lingering effects of that old-time Obama
rage?
In any case, the point is that Wall Street billionaires, even more than billionaires in
general, seem to be snowflakes, emotionally unable to handle criticism.
I'm not sure why that should be the case, but it may be that in their hearts they suspect
that the critics have a point.
What, after all, does modern finance actually do for the economy? Unlike the robber barons
of yore, today's Wall Street tycoons don't build anything tangible. They don't even direct
money to the people who actually are building the industries of the future. The vast expansion
of credit in America after around 1980 basically involved a surge in
consumer debt rather than new money for business investment.
Moreover, there is growing evidence that when the financial sector gets too big it actually
acts as a drag on the economy -- and America is well past that point .
Now, human nature being what it is, people who secretly wonder whether they really deserve
their wealth get especially angry when others express these doubts publicly. So it's not
surprising that people who couldn't handle Obama's mild, polite criticism are completely losing
it over Warren.
What this means is that you should beware of Wall Street claims that progressive policies
would have dire effects. Such claims don't reflect deep economic wisdom; to a large extent
they're coming from people with vast wealth but fragile egos, whose rants should be discounted
appropriately. The Times is committed to publishing
a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of
our articles. Here are some tips
. And here's our email: [email protected]
.
Are we starting to witness some state cinture in Spain?
After yesterday warning, is the socialist government of Sánchez turning, at least a
bit, if only in form, socialist?
( after the advance of the "devotes of Trump´s night worship" in yesterday elections
and probably progession of Spanish policy investigation on Barcelona riots, two events that
reinforced each other? )
Spain criticizes the role of the Bolivian Army and Police in the resignation of President
Evo Morales, after protests against his re-election.
Spain joins the avalanche of international comdenations before the proceeding of the
Bolivian Army and Police at the juncture that the Latin American country is going through,
since, according to a statement issued on Monday by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
in this regard, that proceeding reminds past times in Latin American history, even more
when President Evo Morales opted for a new call for elections.
"Spain condemns that the process opened yesterday towards a new electoral call has been
distorted by the intervention of the Armed Forces and the Police, suggesting to Evo Morales
to submit his resignation", the note said.
Likewise, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls "all actors to avoid resorting
to violence" and "to guarantee the security of all Bolivians (...) including former
President Morales himself, his relatives and members of his administration".
For his part, the general secretary of the Spanish Unidas Podemos party, Pablo
Iglesias, has written on his Twitter account that "Coup d'etat in Bolivia. Shameful that
there are media that say the army makes the president resign. In the last 14 years Bolivia
has improved all its social and economic indicators. All our support to the Bolivian people
and Evo Morales".
The style of scaring the people is a total imitation from post-Maidan Ukraine, where
communists and other opposed factions in Rada were beaten, covered in paint and thrown in
waste containers...until they left the country...
Then Myrotvorets was launched and the first killings on those who dared to quition
Euromaydan events... Recall Alex Buzina... Any compromised intellectual will suffer the same
fate in Bolivia...
Guess who is behind this coup at the letter of the book...
Don't get me wrong Sasha, I don't think Evo's team objective, 2 weeks after they've win them,
was to repeat elections so soon. This is likely their best approach right now, for the sake
of Bolivians and their supporters. Not mentioning possible reaction a la Caracas.
#InfoMV Evo Morales denounced that his security personnel were offered 50 thousand dollars
for him to be delivered to violent opposition groups. He held Fernando Camacho and Carlos
Mesa responsible for what would happen to him or García Linera.
@Posted by: Vasco da Gama | Nov 10 2019 23:43 utc | 53
You seem to be unaware of the developments of events to this time, Evo called for
elections BEFORE he was oblied to resign by police and military rebels, and made leave the
country...
Elections now with every Evo´s supporter under menace of death would only throw a fake
result favourable to the opposition who did not manage to win elections democratically...
This is the same scenario than in the Ukraine, where representatives of the working people
were never more able to concur to elections and had to leave the country, remaining to be
elected only those puppets of oligarchs or the US...
Pasquinades posted by coupist opposition before Efvo´s resignation what ccan illustrate
why the government has resigned so fast...
Pure fascism....
What I told you? Here you have the Bolivian Myrotvorets .....
Traitor Tracking The population is asked to register all the social network publications of
the "Cyber llunkus". Take screenshots and copy the links of the publications and profiles
of the "Cyber Llunkus".
The M.A.S. ( Evo´s party ) is a criminal organization.
Once Evo Morales falls, a rake will be made to identify the traitorous of the people "Cyber
Llunkus" and imprison them through the location of their mobile devices.
Fake profiles will not save them.
#Civil Resistance Bolivia
Now that the US tells us the tale of democratic elections in Bolivia now...
A people's Counter-revolution that sweeps the Reactionaries down the drain once and for
all.
Chavez was keen to the CIA's modus and thus reformed the military in numerous respects,
particularly by making it impervious to corruption--AND--instituting the uniquely structured
Bolivarian Constitution. Evo's problems stem from the lack of extensive public support as
proven by the election results that kept him from instituting the sort of reforms Chavez
accomplished; and the same goes for all other Latin American nations. In a nutshell, the
Bolivian people squabbled too much amongst themselves and never constructed the type of
Revolutionary constitution and social system required to be resilient to outside
manipulation. Yes, Venezuela was very much a Bottom->Up remaking of society to the point
where the Comprador upper 10% didn't matter, which is why Chavez then Maduro left them to
their own devices. But elsewhere, the popular masses never generated the required solidarity
to prevent losing their hard won freedoms. Sure, it's possible to regain power through the
ballot box, but it can be just as easily lost as is happening now in Bolivia if preventative
measures aren't taken beforehand.
Nations must have constitutions that don't allow for rich minorities to gain control or to
allow them to begin in control as in the USA's case. But to institute such an instrument, the
popular masses must act as one and cast their factionalisms aside until this primary aspect
of consolidating power in their hands becomes the law of their land. Plus, they must again
drop their in-fighting when confronted by any reactionary threat and remember what the main
task is at all times--Maintenance of Freedom.
We all see what seems to be the demise of empire but facts on the ground tell a different
story today in Bolivia. I am sorry for the pain and suffering for many caused by my country
under the control of the global private finance cult. I continue to try and spread the word
about the perfidy of Western empire and will keep trying but am limited in my abilities.
I hope to live to see the demise of private finance led empire all over the world.
Humanity deserves a better future.
We all see what seems to be the demise of empire but facts on the ground tell a different
story today in Bolivia. I am sorry for the pain and suffering for many caused by my country
under the control of the global private finance cult. I continue to try and spread the word
about the perfidy of Western empire and will keep trying but am limited in my abilities.
I hope to live to see the demise of private finance led empire all over the world.
Humanity deserves a better future.
What saved Venezuela was the huge investing in education started with Chavez, in that they
counted with the help and advice of people from the Spanish left ...
Bolivian people, of the poor class, are mostly poorly educated people...and so easy to buy
and fool...as this images show...
Look that this people ransacking Evo´s home, they are not white patricios ...but
those who they have payed to do the dirty work...indigenous people poorly
dressed...collaborating in ovrthrowing the legitimate democratically elected from their
own...
Yeah..this time is no different from others, they always go straight to the throat of the
weak and poor...Totally depsicable...
To their own, earning points in the view of the world...
@ Sasha who wrote
"
What saved Venezuela was the huge investing in education started with Chavez, in that they
counted with the help and advice of people from the Spanish left ...
Bolivian people, of the poor class, are mostly poorly educated people...and so easy to buy
and fool...as this images show...
"
I agree, thank you for your commenting and want to add my perspective to that.
If you read many who come and comment at MoA that supposedly are "educated" you will
notice that they continue to think and write in terms of the conflict being between socialism
and capitalism in spite of myself, karlof1 and others that continually point out that China
is 80% capitalistic as are other "socialistic" countries but what matters is what part of the
social economy is socialism versus capitalism. That is why I continue to beat my drum about
the evil of global private finance that is the core problem with the social contract of the
West. Look at how many in the West are brainwashed to not understand the difference between
public/private finance and its effects on the whole culture and aggressive nature of the
society under that meme.
That, IMO, is the core education that all those in the West and all striving to throw off
the chains/economic jackboot of the West must learn and take to heart.
Very disappointing to hear about Evo...but this is just one round in a very long fight...
In Argentina we have a new government for the people...in Mexico also...Lula is out of
jail now in Brazil so eventually that will turn also...
The empire is rotting but is very dangerous right now because they are lashing out
everywhere...we see in Lebanon and Iraq they are not succeeding...
This is desperation we see folks...they are losing control quickly and are trying
to forestall the inevitable collapse of their global fascist dictatorship...
I think the end will come much sooner than they expect...the house of cards is teetering
badly...
Maidán script all the way....They do not have enough with hi resigning, they need
to wipe out such honest leader form the face of Earth, at least while the "new fake
elections" to maskerade the take over by the opposition are developed...as happened with
Lula....
Here, US Lawyer sees all the signature of the US around the place...as happens to
me...
A significant factor is that the anti-Morales opposition is based mainly in Santa Cruz
department in eastern Bolivia. This is the largest department (in territory and population)
in Bolivia and has significant natural gas reserves. The indigenous people living in that
department have virtually nothing in common with the highland indigenous people (Aymara and
Quechua speakers) who formed Morales' base.
Morales did not have a military background as Chavez did and we can presume he was never
able to cultivate a network of militias among the urban and rural working class that could
support and defend his government. Significantly it was the armed forces who asked Morales to
resign.
@Posted by: psychohistorian | Nov 11 2019 1:34 utc | 72
Sorry...but the conflict is between socialism and capitalism...between the rich and the
working masses, especially those who work and still they remain poor....as has always
been....who says otherwise is only trying to fool the masses...
Of course, you people in this forum who live over the average peer, I do not try that you
understand...
You live in your world, looking your belly button, and the furthest you are willing to go is
complain here about the Outlaw US Empire...
Why do you not damn go tomorrow in the streets to protest this new coup by your fascist
administration?
Do not tell me, that would risk your privileged pensions...and all those expensive things
you do to your bodies...
Excuse me, but today, reading the same stupid things of always make me feel like throwing
up...
Fully support the findings of the @OAS_official report recommending new elections in
#Bolivia to ensure a truly democratic process representative of the people's will. The
credibility of the electoral system must be restored.
Will he still support new elections in the morning?
Meanwhile the protesters are calling MAS a criminal
organization so no doubt it'll be excluded from the new elections as happened to the
Party Of The Regions in Ukraine. The wonders of American "democracy".
Why was Evo Morales overthrown? He was nationalizing the highly profitable lithium
industry and planning to deal directly on the international market rather than exporting the
commodity at bargain prices to Western corporations"
"Bolivia has %43 of World's Lithium mines. Batteries from smartphones to Electric cars are
all made with Lithium. Evo Morales was investing in facilities to produce Lithium as a high
end export material rather than just exporting the mine itself."
Somewhere on his blog "Sic Semper Tyrannis", maybe earlier this year, Pat relates the tale
of how when working for the US Gov. in Bolivia he gave medical help to someone and was
rewarded with information which led to the capture of Che Guevara. This may be what Sasha is
referring to.
"The Hydrocarbons law (Law 3058, May 2005) and a subsequent Supreme Decree (May 2006)
require that companies sell all production to YPFB and that domestic market demand be met
before exporting hydrocarbons. Furthermore, these laws transfer the entire transport and
sales chain over to state control. After the law was enacted, hydrocarbon companies were
required to sign new contracts with YPFB, agreeing to pay 50 percent of gross production in
taxes and royalties."
"Prepared by our U.S. Embassies abroad. With its network of 108 offices across the United
States and in more than 75 countries, the U.S. Commercial Service of the U.S. Department of
Commerce utilizes its global presence and international marketing expertise to help U.S.
companies sell their products and services worldwide. Locate the U.S. Commercial Service
trade specialist in the U.S. nearest you by visiting http://export.gov/usoffices."
I usually try to read all the comments before making my first of the day, but I have yet to
do so, although I looked to see if anyone had linked to Escobar's
report on Lula and Brazil , which is an extremely important article for events within
Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and the rest of the world that's resisting the
Outlaw US Empire and its Neoliberal/Neofascist attack dogs.
The information Pepe provides is very important as it jibes with what Assad averred in
his RT
interview , for which I'm still looking for a transcript. Here's Pepe's warning about the
likely future course of events, which has CIA scrawled over every act:
"With the military betting on a strategy of chaos, augmented by Lula's immense social base
all over Brazil fuming about his return to prison and the financial bubble finally burst,
rendering the middle classes even poorer, the stage would be set for the ultimate toxic
cocktail: social 'commotion' allied with 'terrorism' associated with 'organized crime.'
"That's all the military needs to launch an extensive operation to restore "order" and
finally force Congress to approve the Brazilian version of the Patriot Act (five separate
bills are already making their way in Congress).
" This is no conspiracy theory. This is a measure of how incendiary Brazil is at the
moment, and Western mainstream media will make no effort whatsoever to explain the nasty,
convoluted plot for a global audience ." [My Emphasis]
Bolivia coup was orchestrated with direct assist of OAS analysis/report which identified
alleged voting fraud. OAS report focuses on a vote-counting system called TREP, which was
adopted by Bolivia and others in the region on direct advice of OAS. The TREP system is meant
to provide/ publicize initial results, but it is not "official". The official results come
from a slower and more thorough vote count process. The OAS claim of irregularities in the
TREP count is largely irrelevant, as it was never intended to be "official" or legally
reflect official results. There were no irregularities in the official count, won by Morales,
and the so-called "delay" was in fact the natural process of the slower moving count to
produce the official result.
While Trump denounced Morales, the US State Department stepped in to sanitize Washington's
position, with a senior official telling Reuters that the US has "no preference" among
opposition candidates. The spokesperson did say, however, that anyone who tried to
"distort" last month's vote should not be allowed to participate .
That's MAS banned from the election by the cunts in the fucking State Department. Imagine
if the Russian MFA announced that neither the Democratic nor Republican parties could field
presidential candidates in 2020. Trump is an idiot but the State Department, DoJ, and
Treasury are the real bastards. Forget the CIA, that's just a bunch of senile tossers who
have wet dreams about Cold War 2.0.
b mentioned lithium with reference to Bolivia in his 139 above
Nov 11, 2019 -- Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational
Firm's Lithium Deal
"Bolivia's lithium belongs to the Bolivian people. Not to multinational corporate
cabals."
The Morales move on Nov. 4 to cancel the December 2018 agreement with Germany's ACI Systems
Alemania (ACISA) came after weeks of protests from residents of the Potosí area. The
region has 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats.
Among other clients, ACISA provides batteries to Tesla; Tesla's stock rose Monday after the
weekend.
As Bloomberg News noted in 2018, that has set the country up to be incredibly important in
the next decade:
Demand for lithium is expected to more than double by 2025. The soft, light mineral is
mined mainly in Australia, Chile, and Argentina. Bolivia has plenty -- 9 million tons that
have never been mined commercially, the second-largest amount in the world -- but until now
there's been no practical way to mine and sell it. . .
here
But Teslas catch fire....from ZPower--
Actually, lithium may be in trouble for vehicle batteries.
Just as lithium-ion (Li-ion) replaced nickel metal hydride (NiMH) before it and nickel
cadmium (NiCd) before that, silver zinc (AgZn) batteries are on track to replace Li-ion too,
according to a McGraw-Hill forecast as far back as 2010. Since then silver zinc has been
perfected and are on the market for rechargeable hearing-aid "button" batteries by ZPower LL
(Camarillo, Calif.) They are nonflammable and could provide up to 40 percent more run time
than lithium-ion batteries. . . here
Credit where its due: both Corbyn and Sanders have issued statements against the coup in
Bolivia.
On the other hand the recently re-elected, appalling government of Canada has backed it to
the hilt. Was probably involved in financing it. See yves engler https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/11/canada-backs-coup-against-bolivias-president/
The State Department which rarely misses a chance to discredit the democracy that it so
hates, is accusing Morales of 'distorting' the election result. Nobody is suggesting that he
didn't win the election, at most it is being claimed that his margin of victory, more than
10%, was exaggerated.
A similar, equally spurious claim was used to justify the coup against Aristide. There it was
not disputed that Lavelan candidates had won their senatorial elections but that their
victories were merely pluralities not majorities.
For this offence Canada, the US and (let it be recalled) Brazil occupied the country,
kidnapped Aristide and banned his party from running in future elections.
On November 7, 2019, the National Court of Justice of Ecuador ratified the preventive
detention of former president Rafael Correa , along with a number of his former officials.
Immediately after the court rendered its decision for pretrial detention, Correa rejected
accusations of bribery, illicit association and contributions to his political campaign between
2012 and 2016, while he was the leader of Alianza Patria Altiva i Soberana (PAIS). Correa
founded Alianza PAIS in 2006, as a democratic socialist political party with an objective to
achieve economic and political sovereignty, and foment a social and economic revolution in the
nation, which came to be known as The Citizens' Revolution (La Revolución
Ciudadana).
During his presidency, which lasted from January 15, 2007 to May 24, 2017, Correa
introduced a brand of 21 st century socialism to Ecuador, with a focus on improving
the living standards of the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population. His
presidency was part of 'the revolutionary wave' in Latin America, referred to as 'Pink tide',
where a number of left-wing and socialist governments swept into power throughout the continent
during the 2000s, including Cristina Néstor Kirchner and Fernández de Kirchner in
Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Manuel Zelaya in
Honduras, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, and Hugo Chávez in
Venezuela. All of these governments were opposed to neo-liberal economic policies and American
imperialism.
While he was president, Correa raised taxes on the rich and cut down on tax evasion, and
increased public investment on infrastructure and public services, including publicly-funded
pensions, housing, free health care and education. His government ended up building many
schools in different parts of the nation, particularly the countryside, and provided students
with nearly all of the materials needed to further their studies. President Correa also more
than doubled the minimum wage, which contributed to significantly reducing socioeconomic
inequality. In 2018, a World Bank report explained that:
Ecuador has made notable improvements in reducing poverty over the last decade. Income
poverty decreased from 36.7 percent in 2007 to 21.5 percent in 2017. In addition, the share
of the population living in extreme poverty fell by more than half, from 16.5 percent in 2007
to 7.9 percent in 2017, representing an average annual drop of 0.9 percentage points. In
absolute numbers, these changes represent a total of 1.6 million individuals exiting poverty,
and about one million exiting extreme poverty over the last decade.[i]
Furthermore, the unemployment rate fell from an 'all time high of 11.86 percent in the first
quarter of 2004' to 'a record low of 4.54 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014'[ii]. The World
Bank also reported that Ecuador posted annual economic growth of '4.5 percent during 2001-2014,
well above the average for the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region of 3.3 percent.
During this period, real GDP doubled and real GDP per capita increased by 50 percent.'[iii]
On October 1, 2016, Correa announced the nomination of Lenín Boltaire Moreno
Garcés , who served as his vice president from 2007 to 2013, as his party's candidate
for the 2017 presidential election at the conference of Alianza PAIS. Moreno was elected
president, and it was expected that he would continue and build on Correa's left-wing economic
policies. However, within a few months of winning the election, president Moreno began to
dismantle many of the social, economic and political reforms enacted by Correa during his
decade as president. Contrary to Correa's government, many of the domestic policies pursued by
president Moreno included reducing public spending, weakening worker rights, and providing
significant tax cuts to the rich and large corporations. In other words, president Moreno has
gradually shifted Ecuador's left-wing policies to the political centre-right.
Moreno's presidency also shifted Ecuador's foreign policy stance, giving it a more
neo-liberal and pro-American orientation. When Correa's socialist government was in power,
Ecuador enjoyed close diplomatic and economic relations with Venezuela, and was more
independent of American hegemony. For example, president Correa closed a US military base in
Manta, Ecuador when Washington's lease expired in 2009. Prior to that, in 2007, Correa
stated:
We'll renew the [Manta air] base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami --
an Ecuadorean base if there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil, surely,
they'll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.[iv]
Subsequently, on September 18, 2009, he also said:
As long as I am president, I will not allow foreign bases in our homeland, I will not
allow interference in our affairs, I will not negotiate our sovereignty and I will not accept
guardians of our democracy.
Contrary to Correa, the US-Ecuador military relationship has expanded under the Moreno
government 'through training, assistance, and the reestablishment of an Office of Security
Cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Quito.'[v]Ecuador and the US have also signed deals for the
purchase of weapons and other military equipment, and agreed to cooperate more closely in the
areas of security, intelligence, and counter-narcotics.
In 2011, president Correa expelled US ambassador Heather Hodges from Quito. Subsequently, in
2014, his government expelled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
from the country, where it had been operating since 1961 as part of John F. Kennedy's Alliance
for Progress (AFP)[vi]. USAID regularly exercises 'soft power' in Latin American nations in
order to help the US establish itself as an 'international police power'[vii]. In May 2019,
Moreno's government announced that USAID would return to Ecuador.
President Correa also became renowned for providing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with
political asylum in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to prevent his arrest and possible
extradition to the US. However, shortly after his election, there were indications that Moreno
might be willing to hand him over to authorities in the UK. In addition to calling Assange an
'inherited problem,' a 'spoiled brat' and a 'miserable hacker', Moreno accused him of
repeatedly violating his asylum conditions and of trying to use the embassy as a 'centre for
spying'[viii]. Then, on April 11, Assange's political asylum was revoked, which allowed him to
be forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy by British police.In response, Correa called
Moreno 'the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history' for committing 'a crime
humanity will never forget'[ix].
President Correa's government supported the integration of South America countries into a
single economic and political bloc. However, since Moreno came to power, Ecuador has distanced
itself from the Venezuelan government, and withdrew from the Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas[x](ALBA) in August 2018, as well as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in
September 2019. UNASUR was established by 12 South American countries in 2008to address
important issues in the region without the presence of the United States. Currently, only five
members remain: Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. The other seven members,
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay, agreed to create the Forum for
the Progress of South America (PROSUR) in March 2019. The goal of this alternative organization
is to achieve the right-wing agenda in Latin America, as its members support neo-liberal
austerity measures and closer ties with Washington. It could be said that PROSUR aligns well
with the goals and objectives of the Monroe Doctrine.
Another major shift in president Moreno's political stance pertains to lawsuits brought
against Texaco/Chevron by the Correa government to obtain compensation for environmental
damages caused when the operations of Texaco (acquired by Chevron in 2001) dumped 16 billion
gallons of toxic wastewater in the Amazon region of Ecuador between 1964 and 1992, affecting
more than 30,000 Indigenous people and Campesinos in the area. 'Chevron left 880 pits full of
crude oil which are still there, the rivers are still full of hydrocarbon sediment and polluted
by the crude oil spills in Amazonia, which is one of the most biodiversity rich regions in the
world'[xi], and 'the damage has been left unrepaired for more than 40 years'[xii]. To raise
public awareness about this environmental disaster, president Correa's government established
an international campaign called the 'Dirty Hand of Chevron'. In 2011, the Ecuadorian
Constitutional Court ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in compensation for social and
environmental damages it caused.
In September 2018, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), an agency of the United Nations
based in the Hague, Netherlands, ruled that the Ecuadorian court decision against Chevron was
illegal, because it was an outcome of fraud, bribery, and corruption. The PCA 'also ruled that
Ecuador will have to pay economic compensation'[xiii]to Chevron. 'The amount has not been
established yet, but Chevron requested that Ecuador assume the US$9.5 billion' awarded to
affected communities by the Ecuadorean court.[xiv]Following the PCA decision, the government of
president Moreno announced that:
the state will sue former President Rafael Correa and his government officials if Ecuador
lost the international arbitration process.[xv]
In this matter, president Moreno also accused Correa of 'failing to defend the country's
interests correctly and spending money on "The Dirty Hand of Chevron" campaign, which according
to the government sought to "manipulate national and international public opinion."'[xvi] In
reality, president Moreno supports the PCA decision, thereby prioritizing the interest of
Texaco/Chevron over those of his own citizens . In fact, his government has been attempting
to nullify the Constitutional Court ruling against Chevron. In response, former president
Correa has accused the Moreno government of 'doing homework ordered by (the United States Vice
President Mike) Pence'. Even some of Moreno's own cabinet ministers condemned the PCA ruling
and expressed their support for Ecuador's Constitutional Court for defending of the country's
nationals interest and the rights of the people of the Amazon.
Correa exhibited a hostile attitude towards the Bretton Woods Institutions during his
presidency. He sought to renegotiate Ecuador's external debt of US$10.2 billion, which he
called 'illegitimate' because 'it was accrued during autocratic and corrupt regimes of the
past. Correa threatened to default on Ecuador's foreign debt, and ordered the expulsion of the
World Bank's country manager'[xvii], which was carried out on April 26, 2007. His government
also opposed the signing of any agreements that would permit the IMF to monitor Ecuador's
economic plan. As a result of such actions on the part of Correa's government, 'Ecuador was
able to renegotiate its debt with its creditors and redirect public funds towards social
investments.'[xviii]
To the contrary, Moreno has enthusiastically embraced the IMF during his short time as
president. On March 1, 2019, Ecuador's central bank manager, Verónica Artola
Jarrín, and economy and finance minister, Richard Martínez Alvarado,submitted a
letter of intent to the IMF requesting a three-year $4.2 billion Extended Fund Facility (EFF)
agreement. An EFF allows the IMF to assist countries that are facing 'serious medium-term
balance of payments problems.' More precisely, EFF is designed to:
to provide assistance to countries: (i) experiencing serious payments imbalances because
of structural impediments; or (ii) characterized by slow growth and an inherently weak
balance of payments position. The EFF provides assistance in support of comprehensive
programs that include policies of the scope and character required to correct structural
imbalances over an extended period.[xix]
The IMF agreement signed in March allowed Ecuador to borrow $4.2 billion. However, as is
always the case, the IMF agreement was not without conditionalities, as it required the
Ecuadorian government to implement a series of neo-liberal economic reforms. According to IMF
statements, these reforms aim to transform Ecuador's fiscal deficit into a surplus, reduce the
country's debt-to-GDP ratio, and increase foreign investment. On March 11, 2019, Christine
Lagarde, former Managing Director of the IMF, claimed that:
The Ecuadorian authorities are implementing a comprehensive reform program aimed at
modernizing the economy and paving the way for strong, sustained, and equitable
growth.[xx]
On March 11, 2019, Christine Lagarde also explained that:
Achieving a robust fiscal position is at the core of the authorities' program, which will
be supported by a three-year extended arrangement from the IMF. The aim is to reduce
debt-to-GDP ratio through a combination of a wage bill realignment, a careful and gradual
optimization of fuel subsidies, a reprioritization of capital and goods and services
spending, and a tax reform. The savings generated by these measures will allow for an
increase in social assistance spending over the course of the program. The authorities will
continue their efforts to strengthen the medium-term fiscal policy framework, and more
rigorous fiscal controls and better public financial management will help to enhance the
effectiveness of fiscal policy.[xxi]
Protecting the poor and most vulnerable segments in society is a key objective of the
authorities' program. In this context, the authorities plan to extend the coverage of, and
increase the nominal level of benefits under the existing social protection programs. Work is
also underway to improve the targeting of social programs.[xxii]
Ecuador's participation in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
represents another point of contention between Correa and the Moreno government. Ecuador was a
member of OPEC from 1973 and 1992. After a period of absence, it rejoined the organization in
2007 after Correa became president of the country. However, on October 1 st ,
president Moreno announced that Ecuador would once again end its membership in OPEC effective
January 1, 2020. Given Moreno's penchant for implementing neo-liberal economic policies, this
decision was likely based on the notion that freeing the country from the burden of having to
abide by quotas would bring fiscal sustainability to Ecuador. This is evidenced by the fact
that Ecuador contacted OPEC to request permission to produce above its quota in February 2019,
though it was never confirmed whether a response was received[xxiii]. While increasing
production in its Amazonian oil fields would likely bring more foreign investment to Ecuador
and open up new markets, it would also lead to serious conflicts between the Moreno government
and the indigenous people living in the area, who are strongly opposed to oil extraction.
In addition to announcing Ecuador's departure from OPEC, president Moreno also selected
October 1 st as the date to introduce Decree 883, a series of economic measures that
included ending longstanding subsidies for fuel, the removal of some import tariffs, and cuts
to the benefits and wages of public employees. In particular, the elimination of fuel
subsidies, which had been in place for 40 years, was instituted in order to meet IMF
requirements to keep the $4.2 billion programme on track, and to satisfy international
investors. The EFF agreement between the IMF and the Ecuadorean government also called for
thousands of public employees to be laid off, the privatization of public assets, the
separation of the central bank from the government, cutting public expenditures, and raising
taxes over the next three years. IMF representatives claim that these types of reforms bring
more foreign direct investment into the economy.
In fact, a close examination of the neo-liberal economic reforms recommended by the IMF in
many countries reveals that they are almost identical, meaning that they do not take the
diverse needs and realities of each country into account; rather, they are driven by the
interests of the countries and other stakeholders that provide the funds. Generally, the IMF's
recommendations[xxiv]consist of cutting deficits, liberalizing trade, privatizing state-owned
enterprises, reforming the banking and financial systems, increasing taxes, raising interest
rates, and reforming key sectors. However, countless studies have revealed that these types of
reforms, have raised the unemployment rate, created poverty, and have often preceded
recessions. On October 2, 2019, the IMF issued a press release on Ecuador stating that:
The reforms announced yesterday by President Lenin Moreno aim to improve the resilience
and sustainability of Ecuador's economy and foster strong, and inclusive growth. The
announcement included important measures to protect the poor and most vulnerable, as well as
to generate jobs in a more competitive economy.
The authorities are also working on important reforms aimed at supporting Ecuador's
dollarization, including the reform of the central bank and the organic code of budget and
planning.
IMF staff will continue to work closely with the authorities to improve the prospects for
all Ecuadorians. The second review is expected to be submitted to the Executive Board in the
coming weeks.[xxv]
President Moreno's decision to end the subsidies on fuel led to the prices of diesel and
petroleum increasing by 100% and 30%, respectively, overnight, which directly contributed to
significantly raising the costs of public transportation. In response, protests erupted against
Moreno's austerity measures on October 3 rd , featuring students, unions and
indigenous organizations. They declared an indefinite general strike until the government
reversed its neo-liberal adjustment package. Moreno's initial response was to reject the
ultimatum and state that he would 'not negotiate with criminals.'
The following day, on October 4, 2019, president Moreno declared a state of emergency under
the pretext of ensuring the security of citizens and to 'avoid chaos.' Nonetheless, the
protests continued and intensified to the point that the government was forced to relocate to
city of Guayaquil because Quito had been overrun by anti-government protestors. However, this
attempt to escape the protestors proved ineffective as taxi, bus and truck drivers blocked
roads and bridges in Guayaquil, as well as in Quito, which disrupted transportation
nationwide.
In the following days, thousands of demonstrators continued to demand the reversal of
austerity measures, as well as the resignation of the president. However, Moreno remained
defiant, refusing both demands under all circumstances. Subsequently, Ecuador's main oil
pipeline ceased operations after it was seized by indigenous protesters. Petro-Ecuador was
concerned that production losses could reach 165,000 barrels a day. Indigenous protesters also
occupied two water treatment plants in the city of Ambato. Meanwhile, violent clashes between
protesters and police resulted in seven deaths , about 2,000 injuries, and over 1,000
arrests. Eventually, Moreno's government was forced to back down and make concession with the
well -organised protesters.
On October 13, president Moreno agreed to withdraw Decree 883 and replace the IMF-backed
plan with a new proposal, involving negotiations with the Confederation of Indigenous
Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and other social groups. The following day, president Moreno
signed Decree 894, which reinstated the cancelled fuel subsidies. However, on October 23,
CONAIE released a statement informing the public that 'it paused talks with President Lenin
Moreno because of the government's "persecution" of the group's leaders [Jaime Vargas] since a
halt to violent anti-austerity protests.'[xxvi]
It is unlikely that president Moreno would be willing to give up on his austerity policies
or start the process of cancelling the IMF loan, given his apparent commitment to helping the
US realize the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine. Many of the reforms and policies that his
government has introduced will help keep Ecuador firmly entrenched in America's backyard for
years to come.
This is not a new development, as history has revealed that, for more than a century
, 'in Latin America there are more than enough of the kind of rulers who are ready to use
Yankee troops against their own people when they find themselves in crisis' (Fidel Castro,
Havana 1962). However, the eruption of protests in response to Moreno's neo-liberal reforms
suggests that he faces an uphill battle, as his fellow Ecuadorians do not appear to share his
enthusiasm for selling his country to external creditors and foreign influences. Although
Moreno has managed to successfully drive Rafael Correa out of Ecuador, the former president's
opposition to capitalism and imperialism remain strong among the population.
*
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Global Research contributor Dr. Birsen Filip holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the
University of Ottawa.
"... this impeachment isn't directed at Trump at all, it's about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades -- with issues like universal public health-care and equitable taxes. They've even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods. ..."
"... Political parties are nothing more than gangs. To me, the Dems are like the Gambinos and the Repoops are like the Genovese. And they hate it when someone from outside their domain comes and disrupt their racket, when things are going smooth. ..."
"... To me Trump is like the mobster Joe Gallo, killed at Umberto's clam house in NYC. Gallo was a big shot, talked loud and fast, and wanted to start his own racket. And the other crime families would not let him do that. So they whacked him. The same thing both Dems and Repoops are trying to do with Trump. And yes Repoops don't like Trump, as in the latest from Drudge, that the Repoops are split when it comes to impeachment. ..."
"... Apropòs the articles about the 'deep state' meddling in US domestic politics, here's an oldie but a goodie from the World Socialist Web Site: The CIA Democrats . ..."
"... "The Mueller investigation has thus ultimately ended up prosecuting people for telling the same pack of lies that Mueller himself was pushing. The Clinton media, including CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, are baffled by this. They follow the Stone trial assiduously from delight in seeing a long term Trump hanger-on brought down, and in the hope something will come out about Wikileaks or Russia. Their reporting, as that of the BBC, has been deliberately vague on why Stone is being charged, contriving to leave their audience with the impression that Stone's trial proves Trump connections to Wikileaks and Russia, when in fact it proves the precise opposite. A fact you will never learn from the mainstream media. Which is why I am doing this at 2am on a very cold Edinburgh night, for the small but vital audience which is interested in the truth." ..."
"... Of course, it stretches back to both parties, but that's what it is about - not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine - plus S, L, Y, and above all I & A!!! Gosh, we might get the entire alphabet included; ahoy all boats! ..."
"... Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament. Since the end of World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a "war on terrorism" meant to settle matters once and for all. ..."
"... To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero. ..."
"... The very fact Bloomberg had to enter the Democratic Party presidential race is the definite proof Biden's corruption and involvement on the destruction of Ukraine is so overwhelming and difficult to hide that it will eventually be impossible to cover it with the NYT and WaPo power alone should he be chosen as the nominee. ..."
I am amazed how the Impeachment Circus and the mainstream media continue to
ignore the facts of this story:
Joe Biden has been a favorite target for Trump-allied lawmakers. Many have adopted Trump's unsubstantiated assertion that Biden
pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because he was investigating Burisma.
The CIA is emerging as a domestic political party.
...
Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest. "The CIA is not involved in domestic politics," he said. "Period. That's on the
record."
This he asserted confidently, at an event where he had just spoken about about influence campaigns on swing voters and implied
that Hillary Clinton might be right in calling U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset. Even seasoned analysts, it
seems, have their blind spots.
What shifted [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] now? I'd say the answer is: this impeachment isn't directed at Trump at all, it's
about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party
agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades -- with issues like universal public health-care and
equitable taxes. They've even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods.
I agree with Mr. Salutin, the impeachment is not about impeachment, although if impeachment results, I'm sure they will take
it. And I agree it's about protecting the current Democratic Part "elites", both from scandal (Joe Biden, Clinton) and from the
challenge on the left. A risky and desperate move .
I tend to think it was Trump going after the Ukraine cesspit that precipitated the impeachment, but other motives seem relevant.
I have thought since Obama went all in with Russiagate that the current Dem leadership does not feel it can afford to relinquish
control.
Political parties are nothing more than gangs. To me, the Dems are like the Gambinos and the Repoops are like the Genovese. And
they hate it when someone from outside their domain comes and disrupt their racket, when things are going smooth.
To me Trump
is like the mobster Joe Gallo, killed at Umberto's clam house in NYC. Gallo was a big shot, talked loud and fast, and wanted to
start his own racket. And the other crime families would not let him do that. So they whacked him. The same thing both Dems and Repoops are trying to do with Trump. And yes Repoops don't like Trump, as in the latest from Drudge, that the Repoops are split
when it comes to impeachment.
Biden / Ukraine: Others begin to get it: 'Further scratches become visible on the picture of the Bidens in the Ukraine affair'
(original in German: 'Am Bild der Bidens in der Ukraine-Affäre werden weitere Kratzer sichtbar' nzz 9.11.19, nzz.ch/international/ukraine-affaere-rolle-der-biden-familie-undurchsichtig-ld.1520759)
Apropòs the articles about the 'deep state' meddling in US domestic politics, here's an oldie but a goodie from the World Socialist
Web Site: The CIA Democrats .
Craig Murray has an exclusive interview with
Randy Credico he prefaces with these remarks:
"The Mueller investigation has thus ultimately ended up prosecuting people for telling the same pack of lies that Mueller himself
was pushing. The Clinton media, including CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, are baffled by this. They follow the Stone
trial assiduously from delight in seeing a long term Trump hanger-on brought down, and in the hope something will come out about
Wikileaks or Russia. Their reporting, as that of the BBC, has been deliberately vague on why Stone is being charged, contriving
to leave their audience with the impression that Stone's trial proves Trump connections to Wikileaks and Russia, when in fact
it proves the precise opposite. A fact you will never learn from the mainstream media. Which is why I am doing this at 2am on
a very cold Edinburgh night, for the small but vital audience which is interested in the truth."
That would include MoA barflies since we crave Truth. Murray has a bit more to say prior to the excerpt I provide, which I
suggest be read, too.
What a feast of links! I've only just started, with b's Daniel Lazare piece at Stretegic Culture.org - well done!
" ...This is what impeachment is about, not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine – plus Syria, Libya,
Yemen, and other countries that the Obama administration succeeded in destroying – and why Trump should pay the supreme penalty
for suggesting that Democrats are in any way to blame..."
Of course, it stretches back to both parties, but that's what it is about - not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine - plus S, L, Y, and above all I & A!!! Gosh, we might get the entire alphabet included; ahoy all
boats!
Impeachment is about controlling where the attention is focused. When things get to close to home Pelosi says look over here at
the orange head, look over there at the border but whatever you do, do not look over
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1KfU5ifhqE ">here.
"Biden / Ukraine: Others begin to get it: 'Further scratches become visible on the picture of the Bidens in the Ukraine affair'
(original in German: 'Am Bild der Bidens in der Ukraine-Affäre werden weitere Kratzer sichtbar' nzz 9.11.19, nzz.ch/international/ukraine-affaere-rolle-der-biden-familie-undurchsichtig-ld.1520759)"
Andrew J. Bacevich weighs in on US foreign policy:
Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament. Since the end of
World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian
Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly
in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a
"war on terrorism" meant to settle matters once and for all.
To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the
ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that
failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero.
There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward,
which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with
King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.t
The very fact Bloomberg had to enter the Democratic Party presidential race is the definite proof Biden's corruption and involvement
on the destruction of Ukraine is so overwhelming and difficult to hide that it will eventually be impossible to cover it with
the NYT and WaPo power alone should he be chosen as the nominee.
@Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 11 2019 21:30 utc | 152
But, with that explanation, it is like you are whithewashing fascism as a merely opposing political view, which is precisley
the position and pretension of the Trumpers, when it is not. Fascism is incompatible with democracy and human rights...as the
recent ( just overnight the coup...) declarations by The Donald on the events in Bolivia come to confirm...
You forget a main characteristic of fascists, that is that they aspire ( and when the circumstances allow it, always try...)
to wipe out their political adversaries from the face of Earth, as the case in Bolivia is so flagrantry illustrating. Along with
their political adversaries, who are always those who position themselves in the side or as representives of the people, they
always try to wipe out also all those subgroups of human beings they consider utermenschen ...In this cathegory they will
include many, slavs, latinos, jews, gypsies, black people...
Then, once in power, they will use terror to keep the citizenry ( who otherwise will rebel once the real "program" of the nazis
unveiled ) in control...
That the US system is as a whole fascist falls plainly in the faces of all its deluded and anestesized citizens when you see today
that neither Pelosi, nor Schumaker, nor Clinton, nor Biden have said a word agsint what happened yesterday in Bolivia or against
the words of the POTUS who "allegedly" they try to overthrow...a representation described by Trump himself, in the heights of
stone face, as coup d´etat...
I stated that fascism has no ideology. It cannot be a "political view" .
The fascists in Rwanda are Black. The fascists in Israel are Jewish. The fascists in Ukraine are Slavs. The fascists in Colombia
are Latinos.
Fascism isn't about one ethnicity or another. Ethnic prejudice is just one (of many) handle that the capitalists elites use
to get some parts of society to attack other parts. The people who fall under that control by the capitalist elites are fascists.
Are we starting to witness some state cinture in Spain?
After yesterday warning, is the socialist government of Sánchez turning, at least a
bit, if only in form, socialist?
( after the advance of the "devotes of Trump´s night worship" in yesterday elections
and probably progession of Spanish policy investigation on Barcelona riots, two events that
reinforced each other? )
Spain criticizes the role of the Bolivian Army and Police in the resignation of President
Evo Morales, after protests against his re-election.
Spain joins the avalanche of international comdenations before the proceeding of the
Bolivian Army and Police at the juncture that the Latin American country is going through,
since, according to a statement issued on Monday by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
in this regard, that proceeding reminds past times in Latin American history, even more
when President Evo Morales opted for a new call for elections.
"Spain condemns that the process opened yesterday towards a new electoral call has been
distorted by the intervention of the Armed Forces and the Police, suggesting to Evo Morales
to submit his resignation", the note said.
Likewise, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls "all actors to avoid resorting
to violence" and "to guarantee the security of all Bolivians (...) including former
President Morales himself, his relatives and members of his administration".
For his part, the general secretary of the Spanish Unidas Podemos party, Pablo
Iglesias, has written on his Twitter account that "Coup d'etat in Bolivia. Shameful that
there are media that say the army makes the president resign. In the last 14 years Bolivia
has improved all its social and economic indicators. All our support to the Bolivian people
and Evo Morales".
The style of scaring the people is a total imitation from post-Maidan Ukraine, where
communists and other opposed factions in Rada were beaten, covered in paint and thrown in
waste containers...until they left the country...
Then Myrotvorets was launched and the first killings on those who dared to quition
Euromaydan events... Recall Alex Buzina... Any compromised intellectual will suffer the same
fate in Bolivia...
Guess who is behind this coup at the letter of the book...
Don't get me wrong Sasha, I don't think Evo's team objective, 2 weeks after they've win them,
was to repeat elections so soon. This is likely their best approach right now, for the sake
of Bolivians and their supporters. Not mentioning possible reaction a la Caracas.
#InfoMV Evo Morales denounced that his security personnel were offered 50 thousand dollars
for him to be delivered to violent opposition groups. He held Fernando Camacho and Carlos
Mesa responsible for what would happen to him or García Linera.
@Posted by: Vasco da Gama | Nov 10 2019 23:43 utc | 53
You seem to be unaware of the developments of events to this time, Evo called for
elections BEFORE he was oblied to resign by police and military rebels, and made leave the
country...
Elections now with every Evo´s supporter under menace of death would only throw a fake
result favourable to the opposition who did not manage to win elections democratically...
This is the same scenario than in the Ukraine, where representatives of the working people
were never more able to concur to elections and had to leave the country, remaining to be
elected only those puppets of oligarchs or the US...
Pasquinades posted by coupist opposition before Efvo´s resignation what ccan illustrate
why the government has resigned so fast...
Pure fascism....
What I told you? Here you have the Bolivian Myrotvorets .....
Traitor Tracking The population is asked to register all the social network publications of
the "Cyber llunkus". Take screenshots and copy the links of the publications and profiles
of the "Cyber Llunkus".
The M.A.S. ( Evo´s party ) is a criminal organization.
Once Evo Morales falls, a rake will be made to identify the traitorous of the people "Cyber
Llunkus" and imprison them through the location of their mobile devices.
Fake profiles will not save them.
#Civil Resistance Bolivia
Now that the US tells us the tale of democratic elections in Bolivia now...
A people's Counter-revolution that sweeps the Reactionaries down the drain once and for
all.
Chavez was keen to the CIA's modus and thus reformed the military in numerous respects,
particularly by making it impervious to corruption--AND--instituting the uniquely structured
Bolivarian Constitution. Evo's problems stem from the lack of extensive public support as
proven by the election results that kept him from instituting the sort of reforms Chavez
accomplished; and the same goes for all other Latin American nations. In a nutshell, the
Bolivian people squabbled too much amongst themselves and never constructed the type of
Revolutionary constitution and social system required to be resilient to outside
manipulation. Yes, Venezuela was very much a Bottom->Up remaking of society to the point
where the Comprador upper 10% didn't matter, which is why Chavez then Maduro left them to
their own devices. But elsewhere, the popular masses never generated the required solidarity
to prevent losing their hard won freedoms. Sure, it's possible to regain power through the
ballot box, but it can be just as easily lost as is happening now in Bolivia if preventative
measures aren't taken beforehand.
Nations must have constitutions that don't allow for rich minorities to gain control or to
allow them to begin in control as in the USA's case. But to institute such an instrument, the
popular masses must act as one and cast their factionalisms aside until this primary aspect
of consolidating power in their hands becomes the law of their land. Plus, they must again
drop their in-fighting when confronted by any reactionary threat and remember what the main
task is at all times--Maintenance of Freedom.
We all see what seems to be the demise of empire but facts on the ground tell a different
story today in Bolivia. I am sorry for the pain and suffering for many caused by my country
under the control of the global private finance cult. I continue to try and spread the word
about the perfidy of Western empire and will keep trying but am limited in my abilities.
I hope to live to see the demise of private finance led empire all over the world.
Humanity deserves a better future.
We all see what seems to be the demise of empire but facts on the ground tell a different
story today in Bolivia. I am sorry for the pain and suffering for many caused by my country
under the control of the global private finance cult. I continue to try and spread the word
about the perfidy of Western empire and will keep trying but am limited in my abilities.
I hope to live to see the demise of private finance led empire all over the world.
Humanity deserves a better future.
What saved Venezuela was the huge investing in education started with Chavez, in that they
counted with the help and advice of people from the Spanish left ...
Bolivian people, of the poor class, are mostly poorly educated people...and so easy to buy
and fool...as this images show...
Look that this people ransacking Evo´s home, they are not white patricios ...but
those who they have payed to do the dirty work...indigenous people poorly
dressed...collaborating in ovrthrowing the legitimate democratically elected from their
own...
Yeah..this time is no different from others, they always go straight to the throat of the
weak and poor...Totally depsicable...
To their own, earning points in the view of the world...
@ Sasha who wrote
"
What saved Venezuela was the huge investing in education started with Chavez, in that they
counted with the help and advice of people from the Spanish left ...
Bolivian people, of the poor class, are mostly poorly educated people...and so easy to buy
and fool...as this images show...
"
I agree, thank you for your commenting and want to add my perspective to that.
If you read many who come and comment at MoA that supposedly are "educated" you will
notice that they continue to think and write in terms of the conflict being between socialism
and capitalism in spite of myself, karlof1 and others that continually point out that China
is 80% capitalistic as are other "socialistic" countries but what matters is what part of the
social economy is socialism versus capitalism. That is why I continue to beat my drum about
the evil of global private finance that is the core problem with the social contract of the
West. Look at how many in the West are brainwashed to not understand the difference between
public/private finance and its effects on the whole culture and aggressive nature of the
society under that meme.
That, IMO, is the core education that all those in the West and all striving to throw off
the chains/economic jackboot of the West must learn and take to heart.
Very disappointing to hear about Evo...but this is just one round in a very long fight...
In Argentina we have a new government for the people...in Mexico also...Lula is out of
jail now in Brazil so eventually that will turn also...
The empire is rotting but is very dangerous right now because they are lashing out
everywhere...we see in Lebanon and Iraq they are not succeeding...
This is desperation we see folks...they are losing control quickly and are trying
to forestall the inevitable collapse of their global fascist dictatorship...
I think the end will come much sooner than they expect...the house of cards is teetering
badly...
Maidán script all the way....They do not have enough with hi resigning, they need
to wipe out such honest leader form the face of Earth, at least while the "new fake
elections" to maskerade the take over by the opposition are developed...as happened with
Lula....
Here, US Lawyer sees all the signature of the US around the place...as happens to
me...
A significant factor is that the anti-Morales opposition is based mainly in Santa Cruz
department in eastern Bolivia. This is the largest department (in territory and population)
in Bolivia and has significant natural gas reserves. The indigenous people living in that
department have virtually nothing in common with the highland indigenous people (Aymara and
Quechua speakers) who formed Morales' base.
Morales did not have a military background as Chavez did and we can presume he was never
able to cultivate a network of militias among the urban and rural working class that could
support and defend his government. Significantly it was the armed forces who asked Morales to
resign.
@Posted by: psychohistorian | Nov 11 2019 1:34 utc | 72
Sorry...but the conflict is between socialism and capitalism...between the rich and the
working masses, especially those who work and still they remain poor....as has always
been....who says otherwise is only trying to fool the masses...
Of course, you people in this forum who live over the average peer, I do not try that you
understand...
You live in your world, looking your belly button, and the furthest you are willing to go is
complain here about the Outlaw US Empire...
Why do you not damn go tomorrow in the streets to protest this new coup by your fascist
administration?
Do not tell me, that would risk your privileged pensions...and all those expensive things
you do to your bodies...
Excuse me, but today, reading the same stupid things of always make me feel like throwing
up...
Fully support the findings of the @OAS_official report recommending new elections in
#Bolivia to ensure a truly democratic process representative of the people's will. The
credibility of the electoral system must be restored.
Will he still support new elections in the morning?
Meanwhile the protesters are calling MAS a criminal
organization so no doubt it'll be excluded from the new elections as happened to the
Party Of The Regions in Ukraine. The wonders of American "democracy".
Why was Evo Morales overthrown? He was nationalizing the highly profitable lithium
industry and planning to deal directly on the international market rather than exporting the
commodity at bargain prices to Western corporations"
"Bolivia has %43 of World's Lithium mines. Batteries from smartphones to Electric cars are
all made with Lithium. Evo Morales was investing in facilities to produce Lithium as a high
end export material rather than just exporting the mine itself."
Somewhere on his blog "Sic Semper Tyrannis", maybe earlier this year, Pat relates the tale
of how when working for the US Gov. in Bolivia he gave medical help to someone and was
rewarded with information which led to the capture of Che Guevara. This may be what Sasha is
referring to.
"The Hydrocarbons law (Law 3058, May 2005) and a subsequent Supreme Decree (May 2006)
require that companies sell all production to YPFB and that domestic market demand be met
before exporting hydrocarbons. Furthermore, these laws transfer the entire transport and
sales chain over to state control. After the law was enacted, hydrocarbon companies were
required to sign new contracts with YPFB, agreeing to pay 50 percent of gross production in
taxes and royalties."
"Prepared by our U.S. Embassies abroad. With its network of 108 offices across the United
States and in more than 75 countries, the U.S. Commercial Service of the U.S. Department of
Commerce utilizes its global presence and international marketing expertise to help U.S.
companies sell their products and services worldwide. Locate the U.S. Commercial Service
trade specialist in the U.S. nearest you by visiting http://export.gov/usoffices."
I usually try to read all the comments before making my first of the day, but I have yet to
do so, although I looked to see if anyone had linked to Escobar's
report on Lula and Brazil , which is an extremely important article for events within
Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and the rest of the world that's resisting the
Outlaw US Empire and its Neoliberal/Neofascist attack dogs.
The information Pepe provides is very important as it jibes with what Assad averred in
his RT
interview , for which I'm still looking for a transcript. Here's Pepe's warning about the
likely future course of events, which has CIA scrawled over every act:
"With the military betting on a strategy of chaos, augmented by Lula's immense social base
all over Brazil fuming about his return to prison and the financial bubble finally burst,
rendering the middle classes even poorer, the stage would be set for the ultimate toxic
cocktail: social 'commotion' allied with 'terrorism' associated with 'organized crime.'
"That's all the military needs to launch an extensive operation to restore "order" and
finally force Congress to approve the Brazilian version of the Patriot Act (five separate
bills are already making their way in Congress).
" This is no conspiracy theory. This is a measure of how incendiary Brazil is at the
moment, and Western mainstream media will make no effort whatsoever to explain the nasty,
convoluted plot for a global audience ." [My Emphasis]
Bolivia coup was orchestrated with direct assist of OAS analysis/report which identified
alleged voting fraud. OAS report focuses on a vote-counting system called TREP, which was
adopted by Bolivia and others in the region on direct advice of OAS. The TREP system is meant
to provide/ publicize initial results, but it is not "official". The official results come
from a slower and more thorough vote count process. The OAS claim of irregularities in the
TREP count is largely irrelevant, as it was never intended to be "official" or legally
reflect official results. There were no irregularities in the official count, won by Morales,
and the so-called "delay" was in fact the natural process of the slower moving count to
produce the official result.
While Trump denounced Morales, the US State Department stepped in to sanitize Washington's
position, with a senior official telling Reuters that the US has "no preference" among
opposition candidates. The spokesperson did say, however, that anyone who tried to
"distort" last month's vote should not be allowed to participate .
That's MAS banned from the election by the cunts in the fucking State Department. Imagine
if the Russian MFA announced that neither the Democratic nor Republican parties could field
presidential candidates in 2020. Trump is an idiot but the State Department, DoJ, and
Treasury are the real bastards. Forget the CIA, that's just a bunch of senile tossers who
have wet dreams about Cold War 2.0.
b mentioned lithium with reference to Bolivia in his 139 above
Nov 11, 2019 -- Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational
Firm's Lithium Deal
"Bolivia's lithium belongs to the Bolivian people. Not to multinational corporate
cabals."
The Morales move on Nov. 4 to cancel the December 2018 agreement with Germany's ACI Systems
Alemania (ACISA) came after weeks of protests from residents of the Potosí area. The
region has 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats.
Among other clients, ACISA provides batteries to Tesla; Tesla's stock rose Monday after the
weekend.
As Bloomberg News noted in 2018, that has set the country up to be incredibly important in
the next decade:
Demand for lithium is expected to more than double by 2025. The soft, light mineral is
mined mainly in Australia, Chile, and Argentina. Bolivia has plenty -- 9 million tons that
have never been mined commercially, the second-largest amount in the world -- but until now
there's been no practical way to mine and sell it. . .
here
But Teslas catch fire....from ZPower--
Actually, lithium may be in trouble for vehicle batteries.
Just as lithium-ion (Li-ion) replaced nickel metal hydride (NiMH) before it and nickel
cadmium (NiCd) before that, silver zinc (AgZn) batteries are on track to replace Li-ion too,
according to a McGraw-Hill forecast as far back as 2010. Since then silver zinc has been
perfected and are on the market for rechargeable hearing-aid "button" batteries by ZPower LL
(Camarillo, Calif.) They are nonflammable and could provide up to 40 percent more run time
than lithium-ion batteries. . . here
A controversial whistleblower who allegedly reported second-hand on President
Donald Trump's
private conversation with the Ukrainian President
Volodymyr
Zelensky visited the Obama White House on numerous occasions, according to Obama era visitor logs obtained by Judicial Watch.
Last week
Real Clear Investigation's first reported the whistleblower's name. It is allegedly CIA officer Eric Ciaramella. His name, however,
has been floating around Washington D.C. since the leak of Trump's phone call. It was considered an 'open secret' until reporter
Paul Sperry published his article. Ciaramella has never openly stated that he is the whistleblower and most news outlets are not
reporting his name publicly.
He was detailed to the National Security Counsel during the Obama Administration in 2015 and was allegedly sent back to the CIA
in 2017, after a number of people within the Trump White House suspected him of leaking information to the press, according to several
sources that spoke with SaraACarter.com .
Further, the detailed visitor logs reveal that a Ukrainian expert
Alexandra Chalupa , a contractor that was hired by the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election, visited the White
House 27 times.
Chalupa allegedly coordinated with the Ukrainians to investigate then candidate Trump and his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Manafort was forced out of his short tenure as campaign manager for Trump when stories circulated regarding business dealings with
Ukrainian officials. Manafort was later investigated and convicted by a jury on much lesser charges then originally set forth by
Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation. He was given 47 months in prison for basically failing to pay appropriate taxes and
committing bank fraud.
Both Ciaramella and Chalupa are of interest to Republican's investigating the what some conservatives have described as the second
Trump 'witch-hunt.' And many have called for the whistleblower to testify to Congress.
They are absolutely correct and within the law. There is so much information and evidence that reveals that this was no ordinary
whistleblower complaint but one that may have been based on highly partisan actions targeting Trump.
Here's just one example : Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes said its impossible to have a fair impeachment
inquiry without the testimony of the alleged whistleblower because he is a 'fact foundational witness' who had met with Intelligence
Committee Chairman
Adam
Schiff, D-CA, previously. Schiff had originally denied that he had any contact with his committee and then had to walk back his
statements when it was revealed that the whistleblower had met with the Democrats prior to filing his complaint to the Intelligence
Inspector General about the President.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, said the visitor logs reveal that there is much lawmakers or the American public don't know
about what happened during the 2016 presidential elections and moreover it raises very significant questions about the apparent partisan
nature of the whistleblower.
"Judicial Watch's analysis of Obama White House visitor logs raises additional questions about the Obama administration, Ukraine
and the related impeachment scheme targeting President Trump," said Fitton, in a press release Friday.
"Both Mr. Ciaramella and Ms. Chalupa should be questioned about the meetings documented in these visitor logs."
Read Below From Judicial Watch
The White House visitor logs revealed the following individuals met with Eric Ciaramella while he was detailed to the Obama White
House:
Daria Kaleniuk: Co-founder and executive director of the Soros-funded Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC) in Ukraine. She
visited on December 9, 2015
The Hill
reported that in April 2016, during the U.S. presidential race, the U.S. Embassy under Obama in Kiev, "took the rare step of
trying to press the Ukrainian government to back off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and (AntAC)."
Gina Lentine: Now a senior program officer at Freedom House, she was formerly the Eurasia program coordinator at Soros funded
Open Society Foundations. She visited on March 16, 2016.
Rachel Goldbrenner: Now an NYU law professor, she was at that time an advisor to then-Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha
Power. She visited on both January 15, 2016 and August 8, 2016.
Orly Keiner: A foreign affairs officer at the State Department who is a Russia specialist. She is also the wife of State Department
Legal Advisor James P. Bair. She visited on both March 4, 2016 and June 20, 2015.
Nazar Kholodnitzky: The lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Ukraine. He visited on January 19, 2016.
On March 7, 2019, The Associated Press reported
that the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch called for him to be fired.
Michael Kimmage: Professor of History at Catholic University of America, at the time was with the State Department's policy
planning staff where specialized in Russia and Ukraine issues. He is a fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He was also one of
the signatories to the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group Statement of Principles. He visited on October 26, 2015.
James Melville: Then-recently confirmed as Obama's Ambassador to Estonia, visited on September 9, 2015.
On June 29, 2018, Foreign Policy
reported that Melville resigned in protest of Trump.
Victoria Nuland: who at the time was assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs met with Ciaramella on
June 17, 2016.
(Judicial Watch has previously uncovered
documents revealing Nuland had an extensive involvement with Clinton-funded
dossier . Judicial Watch also released
documents revealing that Nuland was involved in the Obama State Department's "urgent" gathering of classified Russia investigation
information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Trump taking office.)
Artem Sytnyk: the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Bureau director visited on January 19, 2016.
On October 7, 2019, the Daily Wire
reported leaked tapes show Sytnyk confirming that the Ukrainians helped the Clinton campaign.
The White House visitor logs revealed the following individuals met with Alexandra Chalupa, then a DNC contractor:
Charles Kupchan: From 2014 to 2017, Kupchan served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European
affairs on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) in the Barack Obama administration. That meeting was on November 9,
2015.
Alexandra Sopko: who at the time was a special assistant and policy advisor to the director of the Office of Intergovernmental
Affairs, which was run by Valerie Jarrett. Also listed for that meeting is Alexa Kissinger, a special assistant to Jarrett. That
meeting was on June 2, 2015.
Asher Mayerson: who at the time was a policy advisor to the Office of Public Engagement under Jarrett had five visits with
Chalupa including December 18, 2015, January 11, 2016, February 22, 2016, May 13, 2016, and June 14, 2016.
Mayerson was previously an intern at the Center for American Progress. After leaving the Obama administration, he went to work
for the City of Chicago Treasurer's office.
Mayerson met with Chalupa and Amanda Stone, who was the White House deputy director of technology, on January 11, 2016.
On May 4, 2016, Chalupa emailed DNC official Luis
Miranda to inform him that she had spoken to investigative journalists about Paul Manafort in Ukraine.
The EU sees US leadership failing while the Russian beast to its east are getting stronger. The lessons of Russia wielding power
over Ukraine by cutting off energy supplies have been noted: energy security is a long-term threat to the EU and Russia is on the
verge of controlling Middle Eastern supplies as well. Furthermore, the lessons of China's economic successes through non-democratic
government control will also have been noted as something for European statists to emulate.
The EU's response to the energy threat from Russia has been to adopt a radical green agenda without reservation. Despite about
98% of transport and logistics being delivered by diesel and gasoline, some member states in the EU are banning the sales of internal
combustion engines as motive power from as soon as 2030 . This accelerated path to zero emissions will require massive investment.
Clearly this is being viewed as economically stimulative at a time of declining optimism over the general economic outlook.
These views are articulated in UNCTAD's Trade and Development Report 2019, Financing a Global Green Deal [iii]. The authors argue
that internationally coordinated action between governments pursuing reflationary monetary and fiscal policies, while restricting
international capital flows, will generate the economic growth and capture the resources to finance the investment. The charts below
are indicative of their thinking, and are copied from Page 56 of the report.
Excellent laying out of the situation but little in the way of digestible solutions. Demonizing Russia as "the Beast" is both
unhelpful and shows a prejudice of the author shared by the genuinely evil powers of the world. Russia has a huge interest in
keeping Europe as an energy trading partner. The troubles with Ukraine were due to the US / Globalist efforts in that country
to destabilize a competitor (Russia) in their global hegemonic bid.
Russia is well led and debt free. The gold backed crypto is well underway in that country but was not mentioned in this otherwise
breathy article. Crypto is a bridge too far at the moment for general consumption. I am betting on a return to a fractional gold
tie down. The mis-leaders and the bankers will not enjoy having their print-fest party spoiled but it is the only practical solution
and carries the much desired mechanism of tying their dirty hands.
Debt is the noose which will hang the central banks and this hanging needs to be done in public whether 5% or 50% of the people
understand it. Some people will only understand how the system works when Starbucks declines their cattle card.
Again pathetic assholes making plans against Russia.
It is a terrible shame: only two countries at the UN opposed Russia's resolution on the fight against Nazism.
The third committee of the UN General Assembly on social and humanitarian issues by a majority vote adopted a draft Russian
resolution to combat the glorification of Nazism. Thanks to this initiative, radical groups can have big problems.
Representatives of 121 countries supported the idea of Russian diplomats. As expected, only two countries voted against -
the United States and Ukraine. Another 55 countries abstained from voting.
No wonder. Americans are behind any Nazism. Hitler's fascism in particular, they grew up in the hope of inciting Hitler to the
USSR. Well, Ukro-Nazis today are the favorite Nazi whores of Americans. Therefore, such results: the owner and his whore.
As Nikita Khrushchev said, we did not finish you off near Stalingrad, but we will finish you off!
America is fighting terrorism and the White House is hosting it
Walid Sharabi and Gamal Hishmat , Muslim Brotherhood leaders, wanted for justice for
participating in killing and inciting on terror attacks in Egypt, escaped from the country
and they are hosted by Qatar, Turkey and moving freely in Europe and the USA.
They are wanted for participating and inciting on burning vital buildings and public
properties, inciting for violence and killing, criminal court cases numbers 12838 year 2013 , and 10790/101 year 2013 .
Muslim Brotherhood leaders attended meetings with senior US officials and Congress in this
current month Jan 2015. Walid Sharabi declared on his Face book page, that Mohamed Morsi
being the legitimate president of Egypt, is not an open issue for discussion or arguments. He
added that this is not the first time and won't be the last time to held meetings with US
officials and also they are in contact and meetings with 27 other countries in the world to
discuss Egyptian affairs issues.
MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LEADERS IN THE US CONGRESS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LEADERS ESCAPED FROM
EGYPT AND WANTED FOR JUSTICE FOR PARTICIPATING AND INCITING ON TERROR ATTACKS
Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the above screenshot are the leaders of the
revolutionary council formed and established by Muslim brotherhood in Turkey after the
30/6/2013 revolution. The woman is Maha Azzam the chief of the council, Walid Sharabi and
Gamal Hishmat Shura council member of Muslim Brotherhood and Abd Elmawgoud Aldardiri the
official spokesman of Muslim Brotherhood and their dissolved political party, after being
declared a "terrorist organization" in Egypt.
Despite that the US refused to consider Muslim Brotherhood as "terrorist organization",
and that the US doesn't hide publicly their ties with Muslim Brotherhood, but we do have many
questions and exclamations here. What is the purpose of these meetings? Is it to hold the
stick from the middle?!
There is a blatant contradictory in the
White house policy , The White house claims their support for stability and fighting
terrorism in Egypt, and in the meantime time, they support and held meetings with the same
terrorists, Egypt is fighting!
There is no official declarations from the US officials or the Brotherhood about the
details of discussions of these meetings between MB and US officials. If Washington follows
the transparency policy as they always claim, why these meetings details were not published
to the public opinion!?
There is certainly a message there to Egypt from the US and their Muslim Brotherhood
allies, and If there is any honesty or transparency in the White house policy, Obama should
declare and admit publicly that they held deals with the devil and the terrorists, as long as
it serve their interests, and they have no shame in applying double standards policy. This is
happening already, so why not call spade a spade!
Does the White house think that playing with this idiotic card of Muslim Brotherhood, can
put any pressure on Egypt, when needed, or to go on with the same chaos middle East project,
that Egypt was saved from, after the 30/6 Egyptian revolution, to face the same destiny of
Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen, so the project will be accomplished and achieve its
targets!
Is it a coincidence or intentional to allow the first political party of a terrorist
organization like the Muslim Brotherhood in the USA, and held official meetings with them
what is the deal here?
On 26 Jan 2015, the inquisitr's
Website published that Muslim Brotherhood Starts A Political Party "UMMA" out of Chicago.
The founder of the party is Sabri Samirah a Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood member, was deemed a
US national security risk in 2003 and was banned from entering the US for almost 11
years.
SABRI SAMIRAH ALLOWED TO ENTER THE US BY OBAMA IN 2014 AFTER 11 YEARS OF BAN FOR NATIONAL
SECURITY THREAT
Sabri Samirah, was allowed into the U.S. by President Barack Obama back in 2014 following
an 11-year ban!!! He immediately gathered Muslims to form the party, which is now recognized
as the UMMA, an offset of the United Muslim Americans Association (UMAA means nation). The
first political party in the U.S. to be openly connected to the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist
organization .
So, not only the White House refused to consider Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist
organization, but they allowed them to form a political party in the US There are some
political analysis that are confirming the ties between MB and Washington, to keep the
channels open between the US and terrorist Organizations through the mediation of Muslim
Brotherhood, like Al-Qaeda and ISIS to ease the pressure on the US in their fight against
terrorism!
What is the deal Obama?!
This is not the first time and it won't be the last time either, the White House make
deals with all parties, including terrorists, this is no longer a secret and it is not
shocking anymore.
But why not call things by its own names? Obama always talks about his administration's
principles and values and standard policy and he is always lecturing us about the US
transparency in dealing whether with internal or external affairs. But he never calls things
by its right names!
The Muslim Brotherhood who deceived the entire world and many Egyptians, with their
moderate Islam and that they only seek to be political partners with other political
currents, are the same Muslim
Brotherhood who ruled Egypt with fascism and the same who live in about 80 countries in
the world, including the US, they are the same MB who consider
women as nothing but a pot of desires and lusts
This is their tactics, they are spreading through deception, and when the right moment
comes, they show their ugly faces and raise their swords against any one who doesn't belong
to their sick distorted ideology.
This is no longer a prediction or analysis, this is no longer a reading of the scene. We
repeat and we will never gave up confirming and warning the entire world that Muslim
Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, because this is what we have lived and experienced
when Egypt was under the rule of Muslim Brotherhood, and we are still fighting their terror
attacks.
Obama, you can't support the Egyptian people and support the terrorists at the same time,
unless of course, you are a MORON or a Schizophrenic!
Obama said that the US will always support the Egyptian people's will and the Egyptians
are the only ones to chose freely their own future and destiny
We did chose freely our destiny and future, like UNCLE OBAMA said, by our own free will on
30/6/2013.
We revolted against Muslim Brotherhood fascist regime and got back our identity and
country that has been hijacked by Muslim Brotherhood terrorists.
Obama can't claim that the US respect our human rights and free choices, the Obama's
administration violated one of our main human rights when they interfered in our internal
affairs from the very first beginning, and every time they are dictating and lecturing us
about what must be done to enjoy freedom and democracy.
Obama is against violence and armed demonstrations, this is what he claims He mentioned
several times that those who demonstrate can not express themselves with violence!? Not even
with bombs or machine guns! How come Obama is telling our gevernment to apply Restraint
policy , while they are facing Muslim Brotherhood armed demonstrations and terror
attacks?!
Yes, "He can" support us and support the terrorists at the same time.
Obama, you can't claim that you are with us and you are fighting terrorism, and at the
same time, you are hosting Terrorists in the heart of America!
All of these flags, logos and names vary, but The terrorism is one. they symbolize the
blood, racism and extremism, intolerance and discrimination, murder and slaughter and
bloodshed and torture.
How come Obama supports the symbol of Muslim Brotherhood which is a symbol of terrorism,
violence and blood, and he is fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda? They are all coming from the same
bloody womb! How come America declared HAMAS as terrorist group, and in the meantime, the
white house is supporting Muslim brothers terrorists and Hamas is the military wing of
MB!
Muslim Brotherhood raising their 4 fingers sign of terrorism and blood in the US congress
and US foreign affairs department, it is not a message of challenging the Egyptian State or
the Egyptian people, but Muslim Brotherhood are directly challenging the American people.
This is totally insane and beyond any logic for any brain to absorb or even to
understand.
who said
this today in an official gov't press release?
"Today, Russia – led by a former KGB officer stationed in Dresden ‒ invades
its neighbors and slays political opponents. It suppresses the independence of the Orthodox
Church in Ukraine. Russian authorities, even as we speak, use police raids and torture
against Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians who are working in opposition to Russian aggression. In
Chechnya, anyone considered "undesirable" by the authorities simply disappears.
In China – in China, the Chinese Communist Party is shaping a new vision of
authoritarianism, one that the world has not seen for an awfully long time. The Chinese
Communist Party uses tactics and methods to suppress its own people that would be
horrifyingly familiar to former East Germans. The People's Liberation Army encroaches on the
sovereignty of its Chinese neighbors, and the Chinese Communist Party denies travel
privileges to critics – even German lawmakers – who condemn its abysmal human
rights record. The CCP harasses the families of Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang, who simply
sought refuge abroad. We – all of us, everyone in this room – has a duty. We must
recognize that free nations are in a competition of values with those unfree nations."
"... This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia. ..."
"... Then good old Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and nail. ..."
"... Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from Kaliningrad could be accomplished. ..."
You are 100% correct that trust is the number one point in coming to any agreement and
currently there is very little trust on either side for varying reasons. One important fact
that is overlooked by most people is the leadership of President George H. W. Bush and PM
Margaret Thatcher during the transition from the Soviet Union/Warsaw pact to independent
sovereign nations. The Bush was a WW II pilot and Thatcher earned the name Iron Lady for her
decisive action in the Falklands War, both understood the world as it was in 1990. This
statement highlights the view that prevailed from Bush at the time: "Not once, but three
times, Baker tried out the "not one inch eastward" formula with Gorbachev in the February 9,
1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev's statement in response to the assurances that "NATO
expansion is unacceptable." Baker assured Gorbachev that "neither the President nor I intend
to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place," and that the
Americans understood that "not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as
well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in
Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction
will spread in an eastern direction." (See Document 6)"
These were complicated issues that involved a multitude of parties being negotiated by
just a few i.e. US, UK, France and West Germany a holdover from the WW II model. The Poles,
Czechs and others were not consulted and IMHO had they been the situation would have become
untenable. It must be remembered that Poland and Czechoslovakia suffered heavily due to
"large important nations" giving them away pre and post WW II. There was no written agreement
nor official treaty between the west and the Soviet Union soon to be Russian Federation and I
believe that was intentional for the reason I give above. George H. W. Bush was not reelected
in 1992 and Bill Clinton became POTUS and he pursued a foreign policy that was entirely
different. Some of his ideas used Thatchers earlier idea of a more political NATO with less
emphasis on the original military mission which brought in the Partnerships for Peace
program. That program was IMHO quite good as it stabilized countries that were wobbly in the
1990's after the breakup occurred. The Clinton White House had Madeline Albright an immigrant
from Czechoslovakia as secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski a former secretary of State
and an academic that influenced his policies which were pro eastern European anti Russian. It
was during this time that NATO expanded. The US is a country of immigrants and there is a
large Polish population as well as other eastern Europeans and political considerations are
always come into play.
This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly
defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia.
G.W. Bush basically continued the trend with regard to NATO but was preoccupied with 9/11
more than anything else. Bush thought that he understood Putin and even invited him to his
ranch in Crawford, Texas which Putin accepted and they did seem to get along.
However 2008
and the Georgia War began the slide in relations between the two countries. Then good old
Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign
policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current
POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and
nail.
Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by
sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that
need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and
Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from
Kaliningrad could be accomplished.
Many have tried, usually ended up in those infamous endless Russian fields, in long boxes.
See Pushkin, for the exact quote. But historical trivialities aside, there should be a way to
satisfy Imperial hubris without 'salting the grounds'. Hannibal's elephants did not carry
nukes in their trunks. Trying for the sixth time in the last 4 centuries to get Moscow
grounds salted might end badly for the entire planet.
Trust was not breached by Russia, military buildup, hostile threatening military, NATO
expansion and refusal to negotiate on these issues did not originate from Russia. Russia has
tried to negotiate, concede and de-escalate before. The West did not respond to those moves.
Even US sanctions placed on Soviet Union were not removed from Russia, despite there being no
reason for them to remain in place. This and other recent events (libya, iran deal etc) tells
Russia and other global players that de-escalating with the West doesn't work.
Even now, West seems to be interested to trade with Russia at least in some areas. And
Europe is increasingly frustrated with the United States. There is reportedly a number of EU
initiatives aimed at gradually limiting US economic levers created during the Cold War.
Rising economies will gradually offer more opportunities outside of the Western world.
Multipolar wolrd was a slogan in the 00s, in the 2040es it might be a reality.
We know NATO will not maintain ABM and CFE, and it is apparently not interested in INF and
Open Skies, and even START is in question now. NATO will withdraw troops if only Russia does
something? Please, you don't really believe that. With INF gone, Iskander is outdated, it was
a treaty-limited weapon. Moving it a few hundred klicks will not make NATO concede anything
now.
A huge trust maker would be for all NATO members to publically admit on their web page
that pledges to Russia were broken and at least some NATO officials feel responsibility for
that. They've spent 27 years denying any verbal assurances, now that those assurances are
declassified, they build other narratives about how those pledges did not matter. For there
to be trust, there needs to be an admission that trust was there, and was broken, and not by
Russia. No troop movements necessary even.
Biden isn't going to win the next election Trump will be reelected in 2020. The current
strain in relations with Russia has been inherited by Trump and even before he was elected
the DNC and Hillary Clinton cooked up the "Russia colusion" story which after $46 million and
2 1/2 years no Russia collision. Of course now we have the Dems trying to impeach Trump which
will not go anywhere in the Senate more waste of time and money. However there is the Justice
Department I.G. report soon to be released and many of the people who brought you the Russia
colusion hoax will be named. The Justice Department has an ongoing criminal investigation
into the key players and will undoubtedly result in indictments and prosecutions.
The real reason all of this is going on is because the establishment both Dem's & Repub's
along with the deep state look at Trump as an outsider who is tipping over their apple cart
i.e. he is changing the foreign policy direction and they don't like it one bit so they
create fake issues to try and stop him.
After his reelection I predict that more normal relations with Russia will resume.
Nowadays the actual attacks are manifested as 'hybrid warfare'. Of course Russia took the
US intervention and financing of Chechen rebels as an attack back in the 2000 ties. She took
fermenting and financing of the Georgian rose revolution as a hybrid attack, same as promises
made to pres. Saakashvili to support him militarily and politically after his attack on
Tskhinvali were taken as a hybrid attack. Same goes for both of the first color revolution in
Ukraine, and then the Revolution of dignity of 2014 that pushed ultra-right government to
power in Ukraine. In fact the NATO promise to both Georgia and Ukraine to take them in as
members in 2008 right after Putin's warning in 2007 was the first move in the 'hybrid war'.
The West had been warned, yet it decided to bulldoze its way across Eurasia and triggered the
confrontation. The placings of Aegises ashore in Poland and Romania was the cherry on top.
There can be be no meaningful compromise until the West backs off on the NATO enlargement.
That 2008 conference was what had reanimated the image of the collective West as adversary
for Russia.
What both sides should strive for though is at the very least to diminish the degree of
danger to the planet. Russia would not back off because she finds it easy enough to corner
individual EU states into minimal economic cooperation - Germany is already in recession and
there is no way they are going to continue damaging their economy for the sake of US
politics. And then there is China. When the Russians cannot buy goods from Germans they go
for made in China, which in turn gets China secure oil and gas from Russia. Which make the
repeat of pre-WW II situation with blockade on Japan pretty much impossible. Get realistic,
the West is loosing this one and should count her chickens already.
Well, then the sanctions will continue, as will the policy of keeping Russian in check in
the EU gas market.
What's interesting is that NATO never attacked Russia or threatened to attack Russia. Seems
to me that Putin is simply using the expansion as a pretext for military aggression against
the neighboring states. It's what the USSR did in 1939 against Finland. According the Soviet
side, the war started after Finland attacked the Soviet Union...
Russia *needs* the sanctions for at least another 5 years. Her milk and beef production is
still lagging compared to the deceased USSR and the only way her greedy oligarchs will
heavily invest in cow herd rearing is to continue to block the Eastern European milk products
to enter Russia. Chicken, eggs, pork and veggies are already up to speed, wheat production is
exploding, the salmon breeding programme have started so the Norway is not getting her market
back, bu the cow herds take longer to rear.
The Power of Siberia pipeline is being certified and filled right now - China would receive
her first delivery of piped Russian gas in 2020, so it is good that EU is prepping or the
squeeze - they are not going to continue getting unlimited cheap Russian gas, because Power
of Siberia II is in the works.
Every individual NATO member had attacked Russia in the past 4 centuries ( including small
but meaningful US contingent in the 1918), and some non-member allies had stomped those
fields as well. So the Russians are not taking any chances with the buffer zone. All of
Russia expansions to the West have always started with West invading first - then being
rolled back league by league. But seriously - ? Russians can live with Europe staying where
she is - if in turn Europe can learn to respect her civilization borders. The move on Ukraine
and Georgia was not a wise one.
"... "Manufacturing Consent," Taibbi writes, "explains that the debate you're watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it" (p. 11). ..."
"... Americans were held captive by the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic. ..."
"... The massive political revolution was, going all the way back to 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet Union itself -- and thus of the usefulness of anti-communism as a kind of coercive secular religion (pp. 14-15). ..."
"... our corporate media have devised -- at least for the time being -- highly-profitable marketing processes that manufacture fake dissent in order to smother real dissent (p. 21). ..."
"... And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid. ..."
"... For Maddow, he notes, is "a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity . The two characters do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the same" (pp. 259-260). ..."
Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc . is the most insightful and revelatory book about American
politics to appear since the publication of Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal almost four
full years ago, near the beginning of the last presidential election cycle.
While Frank's topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and
Taibbi's is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the
prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite social
circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our
intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class.
In fact, I would strongly recommend that the reader spend some time with Frank's What's the
Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal! (2016) as he or she takes up
Taibbi's book.
And to really do the book the justice it deserves, I would even more vehemently recommend
that the reader immerse him- or herself in Taibbi's favorite book and vade-mecum ,
Manufacturing Consent (which I found to be a grueling experience: a relentless
cataloging of the official lies that hide the brutality of American foreign policy) and, in
order to properly appreciate the brilliance of Taibbi's chapter 7, "How the Media Stole from
Pro Wrestling," visit some locale in Flyover Country and see some pro wrestling in person
(which I found to be unexpectedly uplifting -- more on this soon enough).
Taibbi tells us that he had originally intended for Hate, Inc . to be an updating of
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988), which he first read
thirty years ago, when he was nineteen. "It blew my mind," Taibbi writes. "[It] taught me that
some level of deception was baked into almost everything I'd ever been taught about modern
American life .
Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model [italics
mine], they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz saw" (p. 10). For what
seemed to be vigorous democratic debate, Taibbi realized, was instead a soul-crushing
simulation of debate. The choices voters were given were distinctions without valid
differences, and just as hyped, just as trivial, as the choices between a Whopper and a Big
Mac, between Froot Loops and Frosted Mini-Wheats, between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, between
Marlboro Lites and Camel Filters. It was all profit-making poisonous junk.
"Manufacturing Consent," Taibbi writes, "explains that the debate you're watching is
choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear
it" (p. 11). And there's an indisputable logic at work here, because the reality of
hideous American war crimes is and always has been, from the point of view of the big media
corporations, a "narrative-ruining" buzz-kill. "The uglier truth [brought to light in
Manufacturing Consent ], that we committed genocide of a fairly massive scale across
Indochina -- ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries
-- is pre-excluded from the history of the period" (p. 13).
So what has changed in the last thirty years? A lot! As a starting point let's consider the
very useful metaphor found in the title of another great media book of 1988: Mark Crispin
Miller's Boxed In: The Culture of TV . To say that Americans were held captive by
the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility
of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their
having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on
the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings
of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of
our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic.
Taibbi summarizes the history of these three decades in terms of three "massive revolutions"
in the media plus one actual massive political revolution, all of which, we should note, he
discussed with his hero Chomsky (who is now ninety! -- Edward Herman passed away in 2017) even
as he wrote his book. And so: the media revolutions which Taibbi describes were, first, the
coming of FoxNews along with Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio; second, the coming of CNN, i.e.,
the Cable News Network, along with twenty-four hour infinite-loop news cycles; third, the
coming of the Internet along with the mighty social media giants Facebook and Twitter.
The massive political revolution was, going all the way back to 1989, the collapse of
the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet Union itself -- and thus of the usefulness of
anti-communism as a kind of coercive secular religion (pp. 14-15).
For all that, however, the most salient difference between the news media of 1989 and the
news media of 2019 is the disappearance of the single type of calm and decorous and slightly
boring cis-het white anchorman (who somehow successfully appealed to a nationwide audience) and
his replacement by a seemingly wide variety of demographically-engineered news personæ
who all rage and scream combatively in each other's direction. "In the old days," Taibbi
writes, "the news was a mix of this toothless trivia and cheery dispatches from the frontlines
of Pax Americana . The news [was] once designed to be consumed by the whole house . But once we
started to be organized into demographic silos [italics mine], the networks found
another way to seduce these audiences: they sold intramural conflict" (p. 18).
And in this new media environment of constant conflict, how, Taibbi wondered, could public
consent , which would seem to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from conflict,
still be manufactured ?? "That wasn't easy for me to see in my first decades in the
business," Taibbi writes. "For a long time, I thought it was a flaw in the Chomsky/Herman
model" (p. 19).
But what Taibbi was at length able to understand, and what he is now able to describe for us
with both wit and controlled outrage, is that our corporate media have devised -- at least
for the time being -- highly-profitable marketing processes that manufacture fake dissent in
order to smother real dissent (p. 21).
And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam
job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid.
Or pretty much so. Taibbi is more historically precise. Because of the tweaking of the
Herman/Chomsky propaganda model necessitated by the disappearance of the USSR in 1991 ("The
Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, / As Russians do ," Jackson Browne presciently
prophesied on MTV way back in 1983), one might now want to speak of a Propaganda Model 2.0.
For, as Taibbi notes, " the biggest change to Chomsky's model is the discovery of a far
superior 'common enemy' in modern media: each other. So long as we remain a bitterly-divided
two-party state, we'll never want for TV villains" (pp. 207-208).
To rub his great insight right into our uncomprehending faces, Taibbi has almost
sadistically chosen to have dark, shadowy images of a yelling Sean Hannity (in lurid FoxNews
Red!) and a screaming Rachel Maddow (in glaring MSNBC Blue!) juxtaposed on the cover of his
book. For Maddow, he notes, is "a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity . The two characters
do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And
though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the
same" (pp. 259-260).
And that effect is hate. Impotent hate. For while Rachel's fan demographic is all wrapped up
in hating Far-Right Fascists Like Sean, and while Sean's is all wrapped up in despising Libtard
Lunatics Like Rachel, the bipartisan consensus in Washington for ever-increasing military
budgets, for everlasting wars, for ever-expanding surveillance, for ever-growing bailouts of
and tax breaks for and and handouts to the most powerful corporations goes forever
unchallenged.
Oh my. And it only gets worse and worse, because the media, in order to make sure that their
various siloed demographics stay superglued to their Internet devices, must keep
ratcheting up levels of hate: the Fascists Like Sean and the Libtards Like Rachel must be
continually presented as more and more deranged, and ultimately as demonic. "There is us and
them," Taibbi writes, "and they are Hitler" (p. 64). A vile reductio ad absurdum has
come into play: "If all Trump supporters are Hitler, and all liberals are also Hitler," Taibbi
writes, " [t]he America vs. America show is now Hitler vs. Hitler! Think of the
ratings! " The reader begins to grasp Taibbi's argument that our mainstream corporate media are
as bad as -- are worse than -- pro wrestling. It's an ineluctable downward spiral.
Taibbi continues: "The problem is, there's no natural floor to this behavior. Just as cable
TV will eventually become seven hundred separate twenty-four-hour porn channels, news and
commentary will eventually escalate to boxing-style, expletive-laden, pre-fight tirades, and
the open incitement to violence [italics mine]. If the other side is literally Hitler,
[w]hat began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor ,
and the show does not work if those contestants are not eventually offended to the point of
wanting to kill one another" (pp. 65-69).
As I read this book, I often wondered about how difficult it was emotionally for
Taibbi to write it. I'm just really glad to see that the guy didn't commit suicide along the
way. He does describe the "self-loathing" he experienced as he realized his own complicity in
the marketing processes which he exposes (p. 2). He also apologizes to the reader for his not
being able to follow through on his original aim of writing a continuation of Herman and
Chomsky's classic: "[W]hen I sat down to write what I'd hoped would be something with the
intellectual gravitas of Manufacturing Consent ," Taibbi confesses, "I found decades of
more mundane frustrations pouring out onto the page, obliterating a clinical examination" (p.
2).
I, however, am profoundly grateful to Taibbi for all of his brilliantly observed anecdotes.
The subject matter is nauseating enough even in Taibbi's sparkling and darkly tragicomic prose.
A more academic treatment of the subject would likely be too depressing to read. So let me
conclude with an anecdote of my own -- and an oddly uplifting one at that -- about reading
Taibbi's chapter 7, "How the News Media Stole from Pro Wrestling."
On the same day I read this chapter I saw that, on the bulletin board in my gym, a poster
had appeared, as if by magic, promoting an upcoming Primal Conflict (!) professional
wrestling event. I studied the photos of the wrestlers on the poster carefully, and, as an
astute reader of Taibbi, I prided myself on being able to identify which of them seemed be
playing the roles of heels , and which of them the roles of babyfaces .
For Taibbi explains that one of the fundamental dynamics of wrestling involves the invention
of crowd-pleasing narratives out of the many permutations and combinations of pitting
heels against faces . Donald Trump, a natural heel , brings the goofy
dynamics of pro wrestling to American politics with real-life professional expertise. (Taibbi
points out that in 2007 Trump actually performed before a huge cheering crowd in a
Wrestlemania event billed as the "battle of the billionaires." Watch it on YouTube!
https://youtu.be/5NsrwH9I9vE --
unbelievable!!)
The mainstream corporate media, on the other hand, their eyes fixed on ever bigger and
bigger profits, have drifted into the metaphorical pro wrestling ring in ignorance, and so,
when they face off against Trump, they often end up in the role of inept prudish
pearl-clutching faces .
Taibbi condemns the mainstream media's failure to understand such a massively popular form
of American entertainment as "malpractice" (p. 125), so I felt more than obligated to buy a
ticket and see the advertised event in person. To properly educate myself, that is.
I have stopped watching broadcast "news" other than occasional sessions of NPR in the car.
I get most of my news from sources such as this and from overseas sources (The Guardian,
Reuters, etc.). I used to subscribe to newspapers but have given them up in disgust, even
though I was looking forward to leisurely enjoying a morning paper after I retired.
I was brought up in the positive 1950's and, boy, did this turn out poorly.
Matt Taibbi is an American treasure, and I love his writing very much, but we also need to
ask, Why hasn't another Chomsky (or another Hudson), an analyst with a truly deep and
wide-ranging, synthetic mind, appeared on the left to take apart our contemporary media and
show us its inner workings? Have all the truly great minds gone to work for Wall Street? I
don't have an answer, but to me the pro wrestling metaphor, while intriguing, misses
something about the Fourth Estate in America, if it indeed still exists. And that is, except
for radio, there is a distinct imbalance between the two sides of the MSM lineup. On the
corporate liberal side of the national MSM team you have five wrestlers, but on the
conservative/reactionary side you have only the Fox entry. Because of this imbalance, the
corruption, laziness, self-indulgence, and generally declining interest in journalistic
standards seems greater among the corporate liberal media team, including the NYT and WaPo,
than the Fox team.
I'm not a fan of either Maddow (in her current incarnation) or Hannity, but Hannity,
perhaps because he thinks he's like David, often hustles to refute the discourse of the
corporate liberal Goliath team. Hannity obviously does more research on some topics than
Maddow, and, perhaps because he began in radio, he puts more emphasis on semi-rationally
structured rants than Maddow, who depends more on primal emotion, body language, and
Hollywood-esque fear-inducing atmospherics.
I'd wager that in a single five-minute segment there will often be twice as many rational
distinctions made in a Hannity rant than in a Maddow performance. In addition, for the last
three years Hannity has simply been demonstrably right about the fake Russiagate propaganda
blitz while Maddow has been as demonstrably wrong from the very beginning as propaganda
industry trend-setter Adam Schiff. So for at least these last three years, the Maddow-Hannity
primal match has been a somewhat misleading metaphor. The Blob and the security state have
been decisively supporting (and directing?) the corporate liberal global interventionist
media, at least regarding Russia and the permanent war establishment, and because the
imbalance between the interventionist and the non-interventionist MSM, Russia and Ukraine are
being used as a wedge to steadily break down the firewalls between the Dem party, the intel
community, and the interventionist MSM. If we had real public debates with both sides at
approximately equal strength as we did during the Vietnam War, then even pro wrestling-type
matches would be superior to what we have now, which is truthy truth and thoughtsy thought
coming to us from the military industrial complex and monopolistic holding companies. If
fascism is defined as the fusion of the state and corporations, then the greatest threat of
fascism in America may well be coming from the apparent gradual fusion of the corporate
liberal MSM, the Dem party elite, and the intel community. Instead of an MSM wrestling match,
we may soon be faced with a Japanese-style 'hitori-zumo' match in which a sumo wrestler
wrestles with only himself. Once these sumo wrestlers were believed to be wrestling with
invisible spirits, but those days are gone . http://kikuko-nagoya.com/html/hitori-zumo.htm
Today's Noam Chomksy? Chomsky was part of the machine who broke ranks with it. His MIT
research was generously funded by the Military Industrial Complex. Thankfully, enough of his
latent humanity and Trotskyite upbringing shone through so he exposed what he was part of. So
I guess today that's Chris Hedges, though he's a preacher at heart and not a semiotician.
> In addition, for the last three years Hannity has simply been demonstrably right
about the fake Russiagate propaganda blitz while Maddow has been as demonstrably wrong
Eh. Read whats-his-name's (Frankfurter?) book On Bullshit . You are giving
Hannity credit for something he doesn't really care about.
I don't believe the media environment as a whole leans corporate Dem/neoliberal.
T.V. maybe, but radio is much more right wing than left (yes there is NPR and Pacifica,
the latter with probably only a scattering of listerners but ) and it's still out there and a
big influence, radio hasn't gone away. So doesn't the right wing tilt of radio kind of
balance out television? (not necessarily in a good way but). And then there is the internet
and I have no idea what the overall lean of that is (I mean I prefer left wing sites, but
that's purely my own bubble and actually there are much fewer left analysis out there than
I'd like)
The whole review is good, but this extract should be quoted extensively:
While Frank's topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and
Taibbi's is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the
prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite
social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our
intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class.
In short, stagnation and self-dealing at the top. What could possibly go wrong?
Are you serious? Maddow called Trump a traitor and accused him of betrayal in Russiagate,
and was caught out when that fell apart. This was pointed out all over the MSM .
Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and
portable tablets
and then goes on to spend most of the article talking about television. I'd say television
is still the main propaganda instrument even if many webheads like yours truly ignore it
(I've never seen Hannity's show or Maddow's–just hear the rumors). Arguably even
newspapers like the NYT have been dumbed down because the reporters long to be on TV and join
the shouting. And it's surely no coincidence that our president himself is a TV (and WWE)
star. Mass media have always been feeders of hysteria but television gave them faces and
voices. Watching TV is also a far more passive experience than surfing the web. They are
selling us "narratives," bedtime stories, and we like sleepy children merely listen.
This rave review has inspired me to add this to my to-read non-fiction queue. Currently
reading William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, on the rise of the East India Company. Next up: Matt
Stoller's Goliath. And then I'll get to Taibbi. Probably worth digging up my original copy of
Manufacturing Consent as well, which I read many moons ago; time for a re-read.
May I suggest Stephen Cohen's "War with Russia?" if it's not already on your list? In
focusing on the danger emerging from the new cold war, seeded by the Democrats, propagated by
corporate media (which he thinks is more dangerous than the first), Cohen clarifies the
importance of diplomacy especially with one's nuclear rivals.
Us rubes knew decades ago about pro wrestling. There was a regional circuit and the hero
in one town would become the villain in another town. The ones to be surprised were like John
Stossel, who got a perforated eardrum from a slap upside the head for his efforts at
in-your-face journalism with a wrestler who just wouldn't play along with his grandstanding.
Somewhere, kids cheered and life went on.
Ah, Ancient Athens, here we come – running back to repeat your mistakes! Our MSM
media has decided that when we are not at our neighbor's throats, we should be at each
other's throats!
I was watching old clips of the 'Fred Friendly Seminars' on YouTube. IMHO any channel that
produced a format such as this would be a ratings bonanza. Imagine a round table with various
media figures (corporate) left, (corporate) right, and independent being refereed by a
host-moderator discussing topics in 'Hate, Inc.'. In wrestling it's called a Battle Royale.
The Fourth Estate in a cage match!
And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam
job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid.
This is important, if people don't want to be naive about what democracy buys. Democracy
in the end is a ritual system to determine which members of an elite would win a war without
actually having to hold the war. Like how court functions to replace personal revenge by
determining (often) who would win in a fight if there were one, and the feudal system
replaced the genocidal wars of the axial age with the gentler warfare of the middle ages
which were often ritual wars of the elite that avoided the full risk of the earlier wars.
That, I think, is important -- under a democracy, the winner should be normally the winner
of the avoided violent conflict to be sustainable. Thus, it's enough to get most people to
consent to the solution, using the traditional meaning of consent being "won't put up a fight
to avoid it". If the choices on the table are reduced enough, you can get by with most people
simply dropping out of the questions.
Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit
It shouldn't be a surprise that we've moved to "faking dissent" -- it's the natural
evolution of a system where a lot of the effective power is in the hands of tech, and not
just as in the early 20th century, how many workers you have and how many soldiers you can
raise.
If you don't like it, change the technology we use to fight one another. We went from
tribes to lords when we switch from sticks to advanced forged weapons, and we went from
feudalism to democracy when we had factories dropping guns that any 15 year old could use
(oversimplifying a bit). Now that the stuff requires expertise, you'd expect a corresponding
shift in how we ritualize our conflict avoidance, and thus the organization of how we control
communication and how we organize our rituals of power.
Aka, it's the scientists and the engineers who end up determining how everything is
organized, and people never seem to bother with that argument, which is especially surprising
that even hard-core Marxists waste their time on short-term politics rather than the tech
we're building.
I'd be curious whether Taibbi thought about the issue of the nature of the technology and
whether there are technological options on the horizon which drive the conflict in other
directions. If we had only kept the laws on copyright and patent weaker, so that the
implementation of communicative infrastructure would have stayed decentralized
Tabby's "manufacturing fake consent" was really the whole punchline – the joke's on
us. Hunter S. Thompson, another of Taibbi's heroes, is, along with Chomsky, speaking to us
through MT. Our media is distracting us from social coherence. Another thing it is doing
(just my opinion) is it is overwhelming us to the point of disgust. Nobody likes it. And we
protect ourselves by tuning it out. Turning it off. Once the screaming lunatics marginalize
themselves by making the whole narrative hysterical, we just act like it's another family
fight and we're gonna go do something else. When everyone is screaming, no one is
screaming.
I have tried to read Hate Inc. and Taibbi's Griftopia but one of my main issues with
Taibbi's writing is his lack of notes, references, or bibliography, etc. in his books. In
skimming Hate Inc. it seems like a book I would enjoy reading, however my personal value
system is that any book without footnotes, endnotes, citations, or at minimum a bibliography
is just an opinion or a story. At least Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal has a section for End
Notes/References at the end of the book. Again just my personal values.
I am from Greater Boston, far, far from flyover country (which I imagine begins in Yonkers
NY), but I sure grew up with pro wrestling as part of the schoolyard discourse. I certainly
knew it was as much of a family affair as Disney on Ice and have trouble believing he thought
otherwise though I will not impugn his honesty. I am very grateful to the author for taking
the time to write this, but is it possible for a male who grew up in the US to be as deeply
embedded in the MSNBC demo as he claims to be?
Seriously, how is it possible for a male raised in the US to not at least have some
working familiarity with pro wrestling? My family along with my community was very close to
the national median income–do higher income boys really not learn about WWF and
WWE?
Seriously, rich kids, what was childhood like? I know you had music lessons and sports
camps, what else? Was it really that different?
Sorry, my blue collar, lifetime union member brother says your view is horseshit. All the
knows about WWE and WWF is that they are big-budget fakery and that's why they are of no
interest.
aye. in my blue to white collar( and back to blue to no collar) upbringing, wrestling was
never a thing. it was for the morons who couldn't read. seen as patently absurd by just about
everyone i knew. and this in klanridden east texas exurbia
wife's mexican extended familia oth luche libre is a big thing that all and sundry talked
about at thanksgiving. less so these days possibly due to the hyperindiviualisation of media
intake mentioned
(and,btw, in my little world , horseshit is a good thing)
Even allowing for my lefty-liberal bias, I do not see how it is possible to equate Fox
Noise and MSNBC, or Hannity and Maddow, as "both-sides" extremists. Fox violates basic
professional canons of fairness and equity on a daily basis. MSNBC occasionally does, but is
quick to correct errors of fact. Hannity is a thuggish outer-borough New York schmuck without
much education or knowledge of the world. Maddow is an Oxford Ph.D. and Rhodes Scholar. It is
one of the evil successes of the right-wing news cauldron to have successfully equated these
two figures and organizations.
Huh? MSNBC regularly makes errors of omission and commission with respect to Sanders. They
are still pushing the Russiagate narrative. That's a massive, two-year, virtually all the
time error they have refused to recant.
The blind spots of people on the soi-disant left are truly astonishing.
'Hannity is a thuggish outer-borough New York schmuck without much education or knowledge
of the world. Maddow is an Oxford Ph.D. and Rhodes Scholar '
oh, well, then – end of conversation! i mean, god knows, it'd be a cold day in hell
before a rhodes scholar, or even someone married to one, would ever lead us astray down the
rosy neoliberal path to hell, while, at the same time, under the spell of trump derangement
syndrome, actually attempt to revive the mccarthy era, eh?
Actual drugs are being used to hinder debate as well as emotional drugs like hate.
They can't trust agency to be removed by words and images alone – the stakes are too
high.
Now all of you go take a feel good pill and stop complaining!
I've been impressed with Taibbi's work, what I've read of it, but ironically this very
article contains a quote from him which exemplifies the problem: his casual assertion that
the US committed "genocide" in Indochina. Even the most fervent critics of US policy didn't
say this at the time, for the very good reason that there was no evidence that the US tried
to destroy a racial, religious, ethnic or nationalist group (the full definition is a lot
more complex and demanding than that). He clearly means that the US was responsible for lots
of deaths, which is incontestable. But the process of endless escalation of rhetoric, which
this book seems to be partly about, means that everything now has to be described in the most
extreme, absurd or apocalyptic tones, and at the top of your voice, otherwise nobody takes
any notice. So any self-respecting war now has to be qualified as "genocide" or nobody will
take any notice.
"... I wish the punditry class would stop characterizing these metastatic wars for hegemony and resources, as 'mistakes and blunders' when their purpose are first, and foremost, to have the "enemy" participate in the destruction of his own land ..."
Our democracy is not in peril -- we do not live in a democracy. The image of our democracy is in peril. The deep state
-- the generals, bankers, corporatists, lobbyists, intelligence chiefs, government bureaucrats and technocrats -- is intent on salvaging
the brand. It is hard to trumpet yourself as the world's guardian of freedom and liberty with Donald Trump blathering on incoherently
about himself, inciting racist violence, insulting our traditional allies along with the courts, the press and Congress, tweeting
misspelled inanities and impulsively denouncing or sabotaging bipartisan domestic and foreign policy. But Trump's most unforgivable
sin in the eyes of the deep state is his criticism of the empire's endless wars, even though he lacks the intellectual and organizational
skills to oversee a disengagement.
The deep state committed the greatest strategic blunder in American history when it invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.
Such fatal military fiascoes, a feature of all late empires, are called acts of "micro-militarism." Dying empires historically squander
the last capital they have, economic, political and military, on futile, intractable and unwinnable conflicts until they collapse.
They seek in these acts of micro-militarism to recapture a former dominance and lost stature. Disaster piles on disaster. The architects
of our imperial death spiral, however, are untouchable. The clueless generals and politicians who propel the empire into expanding
chaos and fiscal collapse are successful at one thing -- perpetuating themselves. No one is held accountable. A servile press treats
these mandarins with near-religious veneration. Generals and politicians, many of whom should have been cashiered or put on trial,
are upon retirement given lucrative seats on the boards of the weapons manufacturers, for whom these wars are immensely profitable.
They are called upon by a fawning press to provide analysis to the public of the mess they created. They are held up as exemplars
of integrity, selfless service and patriotism.
After nearly two decades, every purported objective used to justify our wars in the Middle East has been upended. The
invasion of Afghanistan
was supposed to wipe out al-Qaida. Instead, al-Qaida migrated to fill the power vacuums the deep state created in the wars in Iraq,
Syria, Libya and Yemen. The war in Afghanistan morphed into a war with the Taliban, which now controls most of the country and is
threatening the corrupt regime we prop up in Kabul. The deep state orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with
the attacks of 9/11. It confidently predicted it could build a Western-style democracy and weaken Iran's power in the region. Instead,
it destroyed Iraq as a unified country, setting warring ethnic and religious factions against each other. Iran, which is closely
tied to the dominant Shiite government in Baghdad, emerged even stronger. The deep state armed "moderate" rebels in Syria in an effort
to topple President Bashar Assad, but when it realized it could not control the jihadists -- to whom it had provide some $500 million
in weapons and assistance -- the deep state began to bomb them and arm Kurdish rebels to fight them. These Kurds would later be betrayed
by Trump. The "war on terror" spread like a plague from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya to Yemen, which after five years of war
is suffering one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters. The financial cost for this misery and death is between $5 trillion
and $8 trillion. The human cost runs into hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, shattered cities, towns and infrastructure and
millions of refugees.
Trump committed political heresy when he dared to point out the folly of unchecked militarism. He will pay for it. The deep state
intends to replace him with someone -- perhaps Mike Pence, as morally and intellectually vacuous as Trump -- who will do what he
or she is told. This is the role of America's executive: Personify and humanize the empire. Do so with pomp and dignity. Barack Obama
-- who speciously reinterpreted the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to give the executive the right to assassinate anyone
abroad, even a U.S. citizen, deemed to be a terrorist -- excelled at the game.
The removal of Trump from office would not threaten corporate power. It would not restore civil liberties, including our right
to privacy and due process. It would not demilitarize the police or champion the rights of the working class. It would not impede
the profits of the fossil fuel and banking industries. It would not address the climate emergency. It would not disrupt the warrantless
surveillance of the public. It would not end extraordinary renditions, the kidnapping of those around the globe considered to be
enemies of the state. It would not halt the assassinations by militarized drones. It would not halt the separation of children from
their parents and the warehousing of these children in filthy, overcrowded conditions. It would not remedy the consolidation of wealth
and power by the oligarchs and the further impoverishment of the citizenry. The expansion of our prison system and of black sites
throughout the world, sites where we torture, would continue, as would the gunning down of poor, unarmed citizens in urban wastelands.
Most importantly, the catastrophic foreign wars that have resulted in a series of failed states and wasted trillions of taxpayer
dollars, would remain sacrosanct, enthusiastically embraced by the leaders of the two ruling parties, puppets of the deep state.
The impeachment of Trump, despite the enthusiasm of the liberal elite, is mostly cosmetic. The entire political and governmental
system is corrupt. Hunter Biden was reportedly paid $50,000 a month to sit on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings,
although he has no training or experience in the gas industry. He had previously worked for the credit card corporation MBNA, which
was one of Joe Biden's largest campaign contributors when he was a senator from Delaware. Hunter Biden was hired by Burisma Holdings
for the same reason he was hired by MBNA. His father, long a tool of corporate power and the military-industrial complex, in short
the deep state, was a senator and later the vice president. Joe Biden, the Clintons and the Democratic Party leaders personify the
legalized bribery that defines their rivals in the Republican Party. Corporate candidates in the two ruling parties are preselected,
funded and anointed. If they do not abide by the demands of the deep state, which protects corporate interests and the management
of empire, they are removed. There is even a word for it --
primarying . Corporate lobbyists write the laws.
The courts enforce them. There is no way in the American political system to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup,
AT&T, Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, Alphabet, Facebook, Apple, Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin, UnitedHealth Group or Northrop Grumman.
We, the American public, are spectators. An audience. Who will be seated when the game of musical chairs stops? Will Trump be
able to hold on to power? Will Pence be the new president? Or will the deep state elevate a political hack like Biden or a neoliberal
apologist such as Pete Butiggieg, Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris to the White House? Will it draft Michael Bloomberg, John Kerry,
Sherrod Brown or, God forbid, Hillary Clinton? And what if the deep state fails? What if the rot in the Republican Party, or what
Glen Ford calls Trump's "white man's party," is so profound
it won't sign on for the political extinction of the most incompetent president in American history? The power struggle, which includes
blocking Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren from obtaining the Democratic Party nomination, will make for months of great television
and generate billions in advertising revenue.
The war between the deep state and Trump began the moment he was elected. Former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper -- both now paid news cable commentators -- along with former FBI head James Comey soon would
accuse Trump of being a tool of Moscow. Intelligence agencies leaked salacious stories about "
pee tapes " and blackmail, plus reports of
"repeated contacts" with Russian intelligence. Brennan, Clapper and Comey were quickly joined by other former intelligence officials,
including Michael Hayden, Michael Morell and
Andrew McCabe. Their attacks were then amplified by former senior military leaders including
William McRaven , James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly,
James
Stavridis and Barry McCaffrey.
The Russia conspiracy, after the release of the Mueller report, proved to be a dud. The deep state actors, however, were re-energized
by Trump's decision to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate Biden. Trump, this time, seems to have given his deep state
enemies enough rope to hang him.
The impeachment of Trump marks a new and frightening chapter in American politics. The deep state has shown its face. It has made
a public declaration that it will not tolerate dissent, although Trump's dissent is rhetorical, mercurial and ineffectual. The effort
to impeach Trump sends an ominous message to the American left. The deep state not only intends to prevent, as it did in 2016, Bernie
Sanders or any other progressive Democrat from achieving power, but has signaled that it will destroy any politician who attempts
to question the maintenance and expansion of empire. Its animus toward the left is far more pronounced than its animus toward Trump.
And its resources to destroy those on the left are nearly inexhaustible.
The political philosopher
Sheldon Wolin saw it
all in his 2008 book "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism." He wrote:
The political role of corporate power, the corruption of the political and representative processes by the lobbying industry,
the expansion of executive power at the expense of constitutional limitations, and the degradation of political dialogue promoted
by the media are the basics of the system, not excrescences upon it. The system would remain in place even if the Democratic
Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as is foreshadowed
in the timidity of current Democratic proposals for reform. In the last analysis the much-lauded stability and conservatism of
the American system owe nothing to lofty ideals, and everything to the irrefutable fact that it is shot through with corruption
and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors. When a minimum of a million dollars is required of House
candidates and elected judges, and when patriotism is for the draft-free to extol and for the ordinary citizen to serve, in such
times it is a simple act of bad faith to claim that politics-as-we-now-know-it can miraculously cure the evils which are essential
to its existence.
There are no internal or external checks on the deep state. The democratic institutions, including the press, that once gave citizens
a voice and a say in the exercise of power have been neutered. The deep state will further the corporate consolidation of wealth
and power, expand the social inequality that has thrust half of Americans into poverty or near poverty, strip us of our remaining
civil liberties and feed the rapacious appetites of the military and the war industry. The resources of the state will be squandered
as the federal deficit balloons. The frustration and feelings of stagnation among a disempowered and neglected citizenry, which contributed
to the election of Trump, will mount.
There will come a moment of reckoning, as there has during the last few days in
Lebanon and
Chile . Social unrest is inevitable. Any population can be pushed only so far. The deep state, incapable of reform and determined
to retain its grip on power, will morph under the threat of popular unrest into a corporatized fascism. It has at its disposal the
legal and physical tools to instantly turn the United States into a police state. This is the real danger behind the deep state's
drive to impeach Trump. It is a stark message to obey or be silenced. Trump, in the end, is not the problem. We are. And if the deep
state fails to rid itself of Trump it will, however reluctantly, use him to carry out its dirty work. Trump, if he manages to survive
in power, will get his military parades. We will get, with or without Trump, tyranny.
I sure wish Chris would accept and promote the truth about the government's physically impossible and intelligence insulting
9-11 grand conspiracy myth. It was a false flag operation that served as the "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl
Harbor" desired by PNAC. It's also the most powerful tool We The People have (or probably ever will have) to help bring about
the dramatic regime change we so desperately need here in the U.S..
Play
Hide
I wish the punditry class would stop characterizing these metastatic wars for hegemony and resources, as 'mistakes and
blunders' when their purpose are first, and foremost, to have the "enemy" participate in the destruction of his own land.
So even when we don't get all the spoils we desire death, destruction, and chaos, are in themselves a great accomplishment. This
was clearly explained by John Perkins in Zietgeist Addendum
Divide and Conquer @ MM 30:27, Causality & The Art of War @ MM 34:25
Speaking of 9/11, Huffpost has gone full blown conspiracy theory on us. Referring to Tulsi Gabbard the author, Akbar Shahid
Ahmed, is accusing the US congress of entertaining "poisonous theories" by allowing Americans to sue the Saudis.
Huffpost has always been a part of the 9/11 criminal cover up. It is why I hate them and why I check on them every single day.
They are guilty of treason. Here is what they say. Notice how 9/11 truth is being referred to as "Islamist terror."
Now she's trying to make Islamist terror a focus of the Democratic primary ― reminding voters, in case they had forgotten,
that there was something there to be afraid of.
Hundreds of other members of Congress, many of them far more senior and more mainstream than Gabbard, were wrong to bolster
poisonous theories about 9/11 when they blessed the 2016 bill that implied there are still questions about Saudi ties to the attacks.
Gabbard is wrong to do it now.
President Obama vetoed that bill but it was overwhelmingly passed by congress over his veto. That makes me think that congress
is not as interested in maintaining the 9/11 criminal cover up as the people are at the very top. I often wonder how many people
in congress have figured out that 9/11 was an inside job. I'm sure some of them have and just keep their mouth shut about it in
order to avoid the flack.
Ha, I'll check in on Huffpost once in a while to see what propaganda is being fed to corporate liberals. I hate them as well.
Same goes for Zerohedge, except I check in on them to see what propaganda is being fed to fascists and "Libertarians." I have
no love for them either. But reading both anthropologically does help to keep the mind limber.
Cheers
You still read huffpost? I never read more than the headlines - so I could get a compacted assemblage of the day's mainstream
"news." But when they did a hit piece on Nicaragua and the Ortega government, I stopped even the cursory perusal. The only place
for garbage is the dumpster.
So what do you think of this story? MSM execs part of 'network of people' that covered for Epstein – Project Veritas founder
to RT
https://www.rt.com/news/472...
Abolish the CIA, NSA, the Patriot Act et Al,.and have as a primary goal disengagement from foreign military entanglements,
and foreign economic entanglements.
There is a short list of things to do. The people in DC know this already.
Hillary just doesn't know when to shut up. What do you think of this story? VIDEO: Leaked ABC News Insider Recording EXPOSES
#EpsteinCoverup "We had Clinton, We had Everything"
Where's the outcry in the MSP over Max Blumenthal's arrest?!! There is none because the MSP does not threaten the establishment
with telling the truth.
Same with Assange, Manning, Snowden, Kiriakou...
1. The media is working with the deep state and even hires former CIA liar and criminals like Brennan and clapper and Haden..the
very people behind the coup against Trump.Whether you support Trump or not this is sedition and a greater danger to the country
than Trump.Its all coming out.
Portly, Well-Paid Spy Who Infiltrated Trump Campaign Source Of WaPo Disinformation On Flynn: Report
Stefan Halper, who was paid over $1 million by the Obama administration - was enlisted by the FBI to befriend and spy on three
members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election.
And according to a recent court filing by Flynn's attorney, Sidney Powell, Halper, the CIA, the FBI, and a Defense official
used Russian-born academic Svetlana Lokhova to smear Flynn by feeding Ignatius information suggesting she was a Russian honeypot.
2. The media is covering up the murder and biggest child trafficking and blackmail operation in US history....and has for YEARS.
ABC Issues 'Cover Your Azz, Lawyer-Speak' Response To Bombshell Epstein Coverup Claims
Amy Robach, 'Good Morning America' Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC, explains
how a witness came forward years ago with information pertaining to
Epstein, but Disney-owned ABC News refused to air the material for years.
Robach vents her anger in a "hot mic" moment with an off-camera
producer, explaining that ABC quashed the story in it's early stages.
"I've had this interview with Virginia Roberts (Now Virginia Guiffre)
[alleged Epstein victim]. We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told "Who's Jeffrey Epstein. No one knows
who that is. This is a stupid story."
She continues, "The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different
ways."
Epstein is one of the most important cases in recent history. MSM can't seem to forget it fast enough. The line from Meyer
Lansky to JE Hoover to Roy Cohn and finally to Epstein exposes the cabal of government, media, corporate interests, judiciary,
military contractors, the security state etc. to organized crime.
The fact that I'm an American citizen is completely irrelevant since "Russian bots" like myself are only identified
by anonymous DNC funded trolls on the internet. They labeled me as one, so I must be one. That is how it works in full fantasy
politics.
Karl Rove explained it to us many years ago. They make up stuff and while we are trying to figure it out, they make up more
stuff. It is a political strategy to get away with all kinds of criminality by keeping the public constantly dazed and confused.
" Trump committed political heresy when he dared to point out the folly of unchecked militarism. He will pay for it. The deep
state intends to replace him with someone -- perhaps Mike Pence, as morally and intellectually vacuous as Trump -- who will do
what he or she is told. "
Rather than falsely paint President Donald Trump as the " American Hitler " the generic Left and those rather obtuse sectarian
Marxist parties should at least describe Trump- presently- as THE LESSER EVIL.
I see Anti-Fa and the New Democrats as promoting the HATE TRUMP , IMPEACH TRUMP , HATE RUSSIA New McCarthyism. What horrors
of robot like GROUP THINK , of lock step political conformity - even on the right TWO MINUTES HATE person of the week .
To what a horrible degree has the generic Left abandoned the FREE SPEECH , FREE THOUGHT tradition of Western Civilization ?
How many brainless HATERS on the Left ? THEY lead the way to a STALINIST future of dictatorship OVER the proletariat . Now SCIENCE
says that 2+2 = 5 ?
The real left has pushed against this insanity.......real journalists on the left .even thought they cant stand Trump knows
how dangerous this is.....these people pushing Russiagate and Impeachment are NOT LEFT......they are pro WAR corporate tools.
I agree but perhaps not enough yet. The left is going to have vanquish these "woke" useful idiots before I become a card carrying
member again. And I say that as someone who is anti-empire, pro massive wilderness areas, pro alternative energy, and pro access
to tools (means of production) for working people, though I would prefer Credit Unions loaning to individual owner operators and
small worker collectives to top down state socialism.
The real left is people like Bernie Sanders. The Democratic Party needs to shed its authoritarian fake left members. They are
powerful but they are also very vulnerable. The movements to reform incarceration and expose sexual predators are going to expose
them.
Yes we do. We know it because of what Hillary and her team had to do in order to stop him. They cheated, they lied, they stole,
then they went to court and the judges agreed that it was all OK for them to do that since they get to make up the rules!
It was really obvious to anyone paying close attention to Bernie's campaign that he would have won if it was not for the corrupt
DNC putting such a heavy thumb on the scale. You can assert that we don't know it, but in fact we do. We know it because we were
closely watching the whole thing.
It also pisses us off to think how much better things would be now if he had. Team Hillary is 100% responsible for giving us
President Trump.
Lol. You think the Clintons, Obama's, and Bidens of the world care even one bit more about working people than Trump? Hint
it was Bill Clinton who ended "welfare as we know it," who ended Glass Stegall, and vastly increased the clear cutting of National
Forests. If anything things may be slightly better for working people with a Republican in charge for at least Dim party partisans
like you will call out bad behavior by the government rather than sweeping it under the carpet and saying the Russians did. At
least assholes like you will match against wars started by Republicans.
BP and the government actually being the royal family. The British royals attacked the poor people in the US gulf by deliberately
blowing up the oil well. [At least one of them is on record as believing that world population needs to be reduced by 95%. The
oil well was deliberately blown.]
Our president sided with the rich people in England, a tight group but he is in it, over the poor and brown people in the US
and our poisoned ocean, air and food supply.
It was an act of war, much like 9/11 and possibly Fukushima. All covered up and blamed on something else. Obama was treasonous
in the way he catered to BP and the Queen over the American citizens. Just disgraceful.
"There is no way in the American political system to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, AT&T, Amazon,
Microsoft, Walmart, Alphabet, Facebook, Apple, Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin, UnitedHealth Group or Northrop Grumman."
The citizens of this country have allowed this to happen by unquestionably doing business these companies. The beast can be
(or could have been) starved. Don't buy their products, above all don't work for them, and always seek alternatives. Now that
these totalitarian systems have reached monopoly or near monopoly status the only way to fight them is not to do business with
them. Is that really impossible? I see so many seemingly forward thinking people ordering 2/3 of everything they buy from Amazon,
plunking away at their Windows and Mac computers, shopping at Whole (Amazon) Foods, banking at Bank of America, etc. How do they
overlook their direct contribution to the problem of corporate dominance when they actively support it every day?
........."The deep state will further the corporate consolidation of wealth and power, expand the social inequality that has
thrust half of Americans into poverty or near poverty, strip us of our remaining civil liberties and feed the rapacious appetites
of the military and the war industry"..........it's all well under way. You can thank the "DC Club" for that Too. And this time
next year, will be quite telling.
"... Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other main rival in the region, Damascus. ..."
Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern
Syria to western Iraq, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria.
After the drawdown of US
troops at Erdogan's insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria,
the US has still deployed 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and
at al-Tanf military base.
Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria,
Iraq and Jordan, and it straddles on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which
serves as a lifeline for Damascus.
Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around
al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained several Syrian militant groups there.
It's worth noting that rather than fighting the Islamic State, the purpose of continued presence
of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel's concerns regarding the expansion of
Iran's influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Regarding the oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate, it's worth pointing out
that Syria used to produce modest quantities of oil for domestic needs before the war – roughly 400,000
barrels per day, which isn't much compared to tens of millions barrels daily oil production in the
Gulf states.
Although Donald Trump crowed in a characteristic blunt manner in a tweet after the withdrawal of
1,000 American troops from northern Syria that Washington had deployed forces in eastern Syria where
there was oil,
the purpose of exercising control over Syria's oil is neither to smuggle oil
out of Syria nor to deny the valuable source of revenue to the Islamic State.
There is no denying the fact that the remnants of the Islamic State militants are still found in
Syria and Iraq but its emirate has been completely dismantled in the region and its leadership is on
the run. So much so that the fugitive caliph of the terrorist organization was killed in the bastion
of a rival jihadist outfit, al-Nusra Front in Idlib, hundreds of kilometers away from the Islamic State
strongholds in eastern Syria.
Much like the "scorched earth" battle strategy of medieval warlords – as in the case of the Islamic
State which early in the year burned crops of local farmers while retreating from its former strongholds
in eastern Syria –
Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and
natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other
main rival in the region, Damascus.
After the devastation caused by eight years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need
of tens of billions dollars international assistance to rebuild the country. Not only is Washington
hampering efforts to provide international aid to the hapless country, it is in fact squatting over
Syria's own resources with the help of its only ally in the region, the Kurds.
Although Donald Trump claimed credit for expropriating Syria's oil wealth, it bears mentioning
that "scorched earth" policy is not a business strategy, it is the institutional logic of the deep
state.
President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist
ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been
misled by the Pentagon and Washington's national security establishment.
Regarding Washington's interest in propping up the Gulf's autocrats and fighting their wars in regional
conflicts, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister
threatened
that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other
assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the
United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually
passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable; even though 15 out of 19 9/11 hijackers were
Saudi nationals.
Moreover, $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment
in Western Europe and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total
would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf's investments in North America and Western Europe.
Furthermore, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf's oil in the energy-starved
industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data:
Saudi Arabia has the world's
largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production exceeds 10 million
barrels; Iran and Iraq, each, has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million
barrels per day, each; while UAE and Kuwait, each, has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3
million barrels per day, each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788
billion barrels, more than half of world's 1477 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.
No wonder then, 36,000 United States troops have currently been deployed in their numerous military
bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of
1980, which states: "Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain
control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United
States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military
force."
Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry's sales of arms to the Gulf Arab
States,
a report
authored
by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration
had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during
its eight-year tenure.
Similarly, the top items in Trump's agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were:
firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led "Arab NATO" to counter Iran's influence
in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia. The package
included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales.
Therefore, keeping the economic dependence of the Western countries on the Gulf Arab States in mind,
during the times of global recession when most of manufacturing has been outsourced to China, it is
not surprising that when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided to provide training and arms
to the Islamic jihadists in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan against the government of Bashar
al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration was left with no other choice but to toe the destructive
policy of its regional Middle Eastern allies, despite the sectarian nature of the proxy war and its
attendant consequences of breeding a new generation of Islamic jihadists who would become a long-term
security risk not only to the Middle East but to the Western countries, as well.
Similarly, when King Abdullah's successor King Salman decided, on the whim of the Crown Prince Mohammad
bin Salman, to invade Yemen in March 2015, once again the Obama administration had to yield to the
dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not
only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars'
worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf Arab States during the conflict.
In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab
states by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf's petro-sheikhs contribute substantial
investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.
Regarding the Pax Americana which is the reality of the contemporary neocolonial order,
according to a January 2017
infographic
by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were stationed all over the world,
including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.
Although Donald Trump keeps complaining that NATO must share the cost of deployment of US troops,
particularly in Europe where 47,000 American troops are stationed in Germany since the end of the Second
World War, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom, fact of the matter is that the cost is
already shared between Washington and host countries.
Roughly, European countries pay one-third of the cost for maintaining US military bases in Europe
whereas Washington chips in the remaining two-third. In the Far Eastern countries, 75% of the cost
for the deployment of American troops is shared by Japan and the remaining 25% by Washington, and in
South Korea, 40% cost is shared by the host country and the US contributes the remaining 60%.
Whereas the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar – pay
two-third of the cost for maintaining 36,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf where more than half of
world's proven oil reserves are located and Washington contributes the remaining one-third.
* * *
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the
politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.
I am always amazed (and amused) at
how much smarter "journalists" are
than POTUS. If ONLY Mr. Trump would
read more and listen to those who
OBVIOUSLY are sooo much smarter!!!!
Maybe then he wouldn't be cowed and
bullied by Erdogan, Xi, Jung-on,
Trudeau (OK so maybe that one was
too far fetched) to name a few.
Please note the sarcasm. Do I really
need to go in to the success after
success Mr. Trump's foreign policy
has enjoyed? Come on Man.
What a load of BOLOCKS...The ONLY, I
mean The Real and True Reason for
American Armored presence is one
thing,,,,,,,Ready for IT ? ? ? To
Steal as much OIL as Possible, AND
convert the Booty into Currency,
Diamonds or some other intrinsically
valuable commodity, Millions of
Dollars at a Time......17 Years of
Shadows and Ghost Trucks and Tankers
Loading and Off-Loading the Black
Gold...this is what its all
about......M-O-N-E-Y....... Say It
With Me.... Mon-nee, Money Money
Mo_on_ne_e_ey, ......
From the sale of US oil in Syria
receive 30 million. dollars per
month. Image losses are immeasurably
greater. The United States put the
United States as a robbery bandit.
This is American democracy. The
longer the troops are in Syria, the
more countries will switch to
settlements in national currencies.
"Our interests", "strategic
interests" is always about money,
just a euphemism so it doesn't
look as greedy as it is. Another
euphemism is "security' ,meaning
war preparations.
...The military power of the USA
put directly in the service of "the
original TM" PIRATE STATE.
U are
the man Norm! But wait... now things
get a little hazy... in the
classic... 'alt0media fake
storyline' fashion!
"President Trump is known to be a
businessman and at least ostensibly
follows a non-interventionist
ideology; being a novice in the
craft of international diplomacy,
however, he has time and again been
misled by the Pentagon and
Washington's national security
establishment."
Awww! Poor "DUmb as Rocks
Donnie" done been fooled agin!
...In the USA... the military men
are stirring at last... having been
made all too aware that their
putative 'boss' has been operating
on behalf of foreign powers ever
since being [s]elected, that the
State Dept of the once Great
Republic has been in active cahoots
with the jihadis ...
and that those who were sent over
there to fight against the
headchoppers discovered that the
only straight shooters in the whole
mess turned out to be the Kurds who
AGENT FRIMpf THREW UNDER THE BUS
ON INSTRUCTIONS FROM JIHADI HQ!
"... At a first approximation, democracy is the alliance of the city dwellers for the power of the city, ignoring tribes and rural aristocrats, carefully contained so the landowners keep their land, and the slaves are kept under control. Or, to update it, the class collaboration of the wealthy (nowadays some sort of capitalist,) the middling strata and the common people for the power of the nation, carefully arranged so the people with great property make the decisions about the economy. ..."
"... As an example, it's only in the last few years I've wakened up to the extraordinary tendency to people to ignore either the progressive content of bourgeois revolutions, such as in pretending that destroying a national secular state in Iraq or Syria and replacing it with a cantonal confederation is a step backward. Or in surreptitiously pretending that democracy has nothing to do with the democratic state needing fighters against other states. Like most people on the internet, i do tend to get a little trendy, and repetitive. But apparently I'm too socially backward to get the memo on the correct trendy, and repetitive. ..."
"... The classic model of course was the Roman Republic. By coincidence I was reading Livy's first five books and the relationship between rights for the plebs and the need for them in war, stands out. Macchiavelli's Discourses on Livy makes this even plainer. In the US much of this was conveyed to the Americans via Algernon Sidney's Discourses on Government as refracted through Cato's Letters. (I hope to live long enough to read Discourses on Davila by John Adams, solely because of the title.) ..."
"... It would seem to me that the answer to the question "what is democracy" is best answered by another question: who gets (and doesn't get) the franchise? ..."
I went to see occasional Timberite Astra Taylor's remarkable film What is
Democracy? last night. It takes us from Siena, Italy to Florida to Athens and from Ancient
Athenian democracy through the renaissance and the beginning of capitalism to the Greek debt
crisis, occupy and the limbo life of people who have fled Syria and now find themselves stuck.
It combines the voices of Plato and Rousseau with those of ordinary voters from left and right,
Greek nationalists and cosmopolitans, ex-prisoners, with trauma surgeons in Miami, Guatemalan
migrants in the US, with lawmakers and academics, and with refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.
All the while it poses the questions of whether democracy is compatible with inequality and
global financial systems and the boundaries of inclusion.
steven t johnson 10.23.19 at 3:05 pm (no link)
At a first approximation, democracy is the alliance of the city dwellers for the power of the
city, ignoring tribes and rural aristocrats, carefully contained so the landowners keep their
land, and the slaves are kept under control. Or, to update it, the class collaboration of the
wealthy (nowadays some sort of capitalist,) the middling strata and the common people for the
power of the nation, carefully arranged so the people with great property make the decisions
about the economy.
It doesn't sound like this is very informative or useful, so I will wait until I have a
cheaper way to see it.
In my opinion, democracy as an actually existing property of a society is only imperfectly
described in terms of institutional arrangements, philosophical constructs, political system
or (as steven t johnson would have it) power relations between social groups. In addition to
all that, but probably prior to all that, democracy relies on principles which are
anthropological in nature, that pertains to the particular way human beings relate to
each other on a given territory.
This means that I absolutely believe in the necessity of a "we" to underlie democracy but
I doubt that this "we" needs to be (or indeed is ever) constitutive, it exists primarily if
not exclusively as a matter of human relations not as a constitutive abstraction. This also
means that I'm not surprised by the general absence of convergence in democratic forms around
the world (much to the bemusement of English-speaking political philosophers, or in the last
20 years, German and Flemish politicians) and that I believe that global citizenship is under
present circumstances a meaningless concept with respect to democracy. Some people understand
this to be arguing for a national, ethnic or cultural definition of democracy, in which only
people with a specific national identity, or a particular ethnicity, or specific cultural
practices or (in the contemporary American libertarian version) specific personality traits
may participate, as a matter of normative or positive judgment, depending on various
proponents of this theory. This seems to me to be a rather ironic analytical error: if indeed
a core property of democracy is rooted in the characteristic ways people relate to each
other, it is highly implausible that this could change under the influence of even a
substantial minority (in one direction or the other).
Incidentally, the idea that democracy is originally native to North-America is somewhat
classical (Voltaire championed it, but as usual with him, it is hard to vouch for his
seriousness). Since then it has resurfaced periodically for instance in William James Sidis
(disturbed) book The Tribes and the States or in the works of Bruce Johansen. Serious
discussions of this question lead, I believe, to the seemingly paradoxical observation that
English and Dutch settlers came to adopt the democratic principles of the Haudenosaunee
because they were themselves rather primitive (temporally speaking), and hence
democratic, in their anthropological values. Suc discussion would also lead to the far more
pessimistic conclusion that beyond their political models, native people in North-America
facilitated the establishment of a political democracy by providing a large neighboring group
to exclude out of humanity.
LFC@10 uses a reason for waiting as an excuse for a rhetorical question meant as a taunt. The
reason I might see it, if it's cheap enough, is because new facts and the (rare) new
perspective, if any, would seep into my thinking. The idea that my thinking doesn't change is
unfounded. It changes, it just doesn't change by conversion experience. The cogent arguments
of the wise on the internet are like Jesus on the road to Damascus, not quite able to be
described consistently, but still irrefutable.
But, try as I may, continual reworking of old ideas by new -- to me -- information
inevitably leads to the change. The process usually goes A Is that really true? B My old
ideas get a parenthesis added. C The parenthesis gets worked into the rest of the paragraph
so that I'm more consisten. D I've always believed that. The step where I abjectly plead for
forgiveness for being a moron is never there, any more than actually being consistent.
As an example, it's only in the last few years I've wakened up to the extraordinary
tendency to people to ignore either the progressive content of bourgeois revolutions, such as
in pretending that destroying a national secular state in Iraq or Syria and replacing it with
a cantonal confederation is a step backward. Or in surreptitiously pretending that democracy
has nothing to do with the democratic state needing fighters against other states. Like most
people on the internet, i do tend to get a little trendy, and repetitive. But apparently I'm
too socially backward to get the memo on the correct trendy, and repetitive.
For a less contentious example, as part of the process I've realized that ancient Sparta
was on the democratic spectrum, not least because of two kings which is definitely not twice
the monarchy. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it is still true, despite authority. But a
true expert who actually cared could revise the elementary insight into a much more
sophisticated, much superior way that might not even seem controversial. It might even seem
just like the answer to the questions: Why did Sparta ever ally with Athens in the first
place? Why did both Athens and Sparta ally (at different times) with Persia?
I will admit to a general prejudice against every historical discovery that a particular
place etc. was the birth of virtue.
steven t johnson 10.24.19 at 3:20 pm (no link)
Re the Haudenosaunee as exemplars of democracy, this is as I recall long known to be true of
Benjamin Franklin, one of the disreputable founders, nearly as disgraced as Tom Paine.
(Indeed, the notion that the revolutionaries weren't the founders, but Philadelphia lawyers'
convention was, is remarkable, though unremarked on.) But, what did Franklin admire about the
Iroquois League? I think it was the power through unity of different "tribes." The league
essentially genocided the Hurons to control the fur trade; launched long distance military
expeditions to drive away many other peoples from large areas in the Ohio valley to free up
hunting grounds; when it was convenient, they sold their rights, lands, there to the US. (The
treaty of Fort Stanwix) was later repudiated, verbally at least, by other.
The classic model of course was the Roman Republic. By coincidence I was reading Livy's
first five books and the relationship between rights for the plebs and the need for them in
war, stands out. Macchiavelli's Discourses on Livy makes this even plainer. In the US much of
this was conveyed to the Americans via Algernon Sidney's Discourses on Government as
refracted through Cato's Letters. (I hope to live long enough to read Discourses on Davila by
John Adams, solely because of the title.)
It would seem to me that the answer to the question "what is democracy" is best answered by
another question: who gets (and doesn't get) the franchise?
http://www.unz.com/mhudson/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson/
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Introduction: I recently spoke to a
relative of mine who, due to her constant and voluntary exposure to the legacy AngloZionist media, sincerely
believed that the three Baltic states and Poland had undergone some kind of wonderful and quasi-miraculous
economic and cultural renaissance thanks to their resolute break with the putatively horrible Soviet past
and their total submission to the Empire since. Listening to her, I figured that this kind of delusion was
probably common amongst those who still pay attention and even believe the official propaganda. So I asked
Michael Hudson, whom I consider to be the best US economists and who studied the Baltics in great detail, to
reply to a few very basic questions, which he very kindly did in spite of being very pressed on time. Once
again, I want to sincerely thank him for his kind time, support and expertise.
* * *
The Saker:
The US
propaganda often claims that the three Baltic states are a true success, just like Poland is also supposed
to be. Does this notion have a factual basis? Initially it did appear that these states were experiencing
growth, but was that not mostly/entirely due to EU/IMF/US subsidies? Looking specifically at the three
Baltic states, and especially Latvia, these were the "showcase" Soviet republics, with a high standard of
living (at least compared to the other Soviet republics) and a lot of high-tech industries (including
defense contracts). Could you please outline for us what truly happened to these economies following
independence? How did they "reform" their economies going from an ex-Soviet one to the modern "liberal" one?
Michael Hudson:
This is
a trick question, because it all depends on what you mean by "success."
The post-Soviet neoliberalism has been a
great success for kleptocrats at the top. They gave themselves the public domain, from key industries to
prime real estate. But the Balts largely let their Soviet industries collapse, making no effort to salvage
or reorganize them.
Much of the problem, of course, was that all the linkages to Soviet-era
industry were torn apart as the Soviet Union was disbanded. With their supplier and final markets closed
down from Russia to Central Asia, the Baltic economies had to start afresh – with a very right-wing tax
policy and no government help whatsoever, as the government itself had become privatized in the hands of
former officials and grabitizers.
Lithuania was marginally better in having some industrial policy. EU and
NATO accession in 2004, along with easy credit, kicked off property bubbles in the Baltics, largely inflated
by Swedish banks that made a bonanza off these countries that lacked their own banks or public credit
creation. The resulting 2008 crashes were the largest in the world as a percent of GDP, with Latvia
suffering the world's biggest contraction.
The neoliberal western advisors who took
control of these economies – as if this was the only alternative to Soviet bureaucracy – imposed crushing
austerity programs to restore macroeconomic "stability" meaning security of their land and infrastructure
grabs. This was applauded by Europe's bankers, who thought the Balts had discovered a workable recipe
allowing austerity governments to retain power in a seeming democracy. These policies would have collapsed
governments anywhere else, but the ability to emigrate, plus ethnic divisions against Russian speakers,
allowed these governments to survive.
It's a historically specific situation,
but Europe's bankers promote it as a generalized model. George Soros's INET and his associated front
institutions have been leaders in subsidizing this financialization-cum-grabitization. The result has been a
massive exodus of prime working age people from Lithuania and Latvia. (Estonians simply commute to Finland.)
Meanwhile, their economies are buoyed by foreign bank lending, which sends profits back to home countries
and can be reversed at any time.
Politically, the neoliberal revolution also has been a success for U.S.
Cold Warriors, who sent over native Balts from Georgetown and other universities to impose "free market"
doctrine – that is, a market "free" of domestic regulation against theft of the public domain, against
monopolies, against land taxes and other income taxes. The Baltic states, like most of the rest of the
former Soviet Union, became the Wild East.
What was left to the Baltic countries
was land and real estate. Their forests are being cut down to sell wood abroad. I describe all this in my
book
Killing the Host
.
The Saker:
After
independence, the Baltic states had tried to cut as many ties with Russia as possible. This included
building (rather silly looking) fences, to forcing the Russians to develop their ports on the Baltic, to
shutting down large (or selling to foreign interests which then shut them down) and profitable factories
(including a large nuclear plant I believe), etc. What has been the impact of this policy of "economic
de-Sovietization" on the local economies?
Michael Hudson:
Dissolution of the Soviet Union meant
that Baltic countries lost their traditional markets, and had to shift their focus to Western Europe and, to
some extent, Asia.
Latvia and Estonia had been assigned computer and information technology,
and they have found this to be much in demand. When I was in Japan, for instance, CEOs told me that they
were looking to Latvia above all to outsource computer work.
Banking also was a surviving sector.
Gregory Lautchansky, former vice-rector at the University of Riga had been a major player already in the
1980s for moving out Russian oil and KGB money. (His company, Nordex, was sold to Mark Rich.) Many banks
continued to shepherd Russian flight capital via offshore banking centers into the United States, Britain
and other countries. Cyprus of course was another big player in this.
The Saker:
Russians are still considered "non-citizens"
in the Baltic republics; what has been the economic impact of this policy, if any, of anti-Russian
discrimination in the Baltic states?
ORDER IT NOW
Michael Hudson:
Russian-speakers, who do not acquire citizenship (which requires passing local language and history tests),
are blocked from political office and administrative work. While most Russian speakers below retirement age
have now acquired that citizenship, the means by which citizenship must be acquired has caused divisions.
Early on in independence, many Russians
were blocked from government, and they went into business, which was avoided by many native Balts during the
Soviet era because it was not as remunerative as going into government and profiting from corruption. For
instance, real estate was a burden to administer. Russian-speakers, especially Jewish ones, have wisely
focused on real estate.
The largest political party is Harmony
Center, whose members and leadership are mainly Russian-speaking. But the various neoliberal and nationalist
parties have jointed to block its ability to influence law in Parliament.
Since Russian speakers are only able to
"vote with their feet," many have joined in the vast outflow of emigration, either back to Russia or to
other EU countries. Moreover, the poor quality of social benefits has led to few children being born.
The Saker:
I often hear that a huge number of locals
(including non-Russians) have emigrated from the Baltic states. What has caused this and what has been the
impact of this emigration for the Baltic states?
Michael Hudson:
The Baltic states, especially Latvia,
have lost about 30 percent of their population since the 1990s, especially those of working age. In Latvia,
about 10 percent of the loss were Russians who exited shortly after independence. The other 20 percent have
subsequently emigrated.
The European Commission forecasts that Latvia's working-age population
will decline by 1.6% annually for the next 20 years, while the birth rate remains as stagnant as it was in
the late 1980s. The retired population (over age 65) will rise to half a million people by 2030, more than a
quarter of today's population, and perhaps about a third of what remains. This is not a domestic market that
will attract foreign or local investment.
And in any case, the European Union has
viewed the post-Soviet economies simply as markets for their own industrial and agricultural exports, not as
economies to be built up by public subsidy as the European countries themselves, the U.S. and Chinee
economies have done. The European motto is, "Give a man a fish, and he will be fed all day with your surplus
fish and consumer goods – but give him a fishing rod and we will lose a customer."
Readers who are interested might want to
look at the following books and articles. I think the leading work has been done by Jeffrey Sommers and
Charles Woolfson.
The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Baltic Model
(London:
Routledge Press, 2014). Editors, J. Sommers & C. Woolfson. Foreword, J. Galbraith. ISBN:
978-0-415-82003-5.
Jeffrey Sommers, "No People, Big Problem': Democracy And Its Discontents In Latvia's National
Elections,"
Social Europe,
October 17, 2018.
Jeffrey Sommers, "Decline of the Demos: Latvia, the Face of New Europe and Austerity's Return," in F.
Jaitner, T. Olteanu and T. Spöri, eds.,
Crises in the Post-Soviet Space: From the dissolution of the
Soviet Union to the conflict in Ukraine
(Routledge Press, 2018) pp. 195-209. ISBN 9780815377245.
Jeffrey Sommers,
"
Austerity as a global prescription and lessons from the neoliberal
Baltic experiment."
Economic & Labour Relations Review.
Keynote article, 25:3 (fall 2014) pp.
1-20. DOI 10.1177/1035304614544091. Co-authored with C. Woolfson and A. Juskaa.
The Saker:
Finally,
what do you believe is the most likely future for these states? Will the succeed in becoming a "tiny
anti-Russia" on Russia's doorstep? The Russians appear to have been very successful in their
import-substitution program, at least when trying to replace the Baltic states: does that mean that the
economic ties between Russia and these states is now gone forever? Is it now too late, or are there still
measures these countries could take to reverse the current trends?
Michael Hudson:
Trump's
trade sanctions against Russia hurt the Baltic countries especially. One of their strong sectors was
agriculture. Lithuania, for instance, was known for its cheese, even in Latvia. The sanctions led Russian
dairy farming to develop their own cheese-making, and agriculture has become one of Russia's strongest
performing sectors.
This is a market that looks like it will
be permanently lost to the Baltic states. In effect, Trump is helping Russia follow precisely the policy
that made American agriculture rich: agricultural isolation has forced domestic replacement for hitherto
foreign food. I expect that this will lead to consumer goods and other products as well.
I am in Tallinn, Estonia right now. Just how good an economy is performing is often hard to determine by
talking to people, because like economists, many people have different perceptions. I was just talking to a
Russian-Estonian who was telling me how much better Lithuanians and Latvians are then Estonians at doing
things and how much cheaper things are there. It is true that things are much cheaper in the other Baltic
countries because Estonia (a tiny country of just over 1 million people) has taken off. Since the 2008
econmic collapse housing prices have shot up and in Tallinn there is building going on all over the city.
But, my acquaintance is wrong about other things. Estonians do things very well and Tallinn is a very nice
city, with beautiful cafes, clean and well kept streets and crime is very low. It is a very good city,
except it is now very expensive, especially considering how much people make here. The weather is not nice,
except for in the summer and there are friendly Estonians but they don't have a reputation for being
particularly friendly, even among themselves. I have not been back to Latvia yet, but when I was in Riga
years ago, it was a gorgeous city, bigger than Tallinn too. I think they do things very well there too. The
Russians I speak to here are often friendly and based on what I have been told, relations between Russians
and Estonians are much better than when I was here in the early 2000's.
No offense is intended to
Russians, but the Baltic countries had large German populations that played a key role in the development of
the cultures and peoples of these countries. There were also many Jews here prior to WW II. By the time WW
II had begun the German populations were much smaller than they had been and at the end of the war the
Jewish populations were much smaller. Jews were targeted in Latvia and Lithuania and many Latvians,
Lithuanians and Estonians were shipped off to far off places in the USSR during the war. I believe the Jews
were largely pro communist and welcomed the Soviet takeover of these countries in 1940, while the Latvian
and Estonian peoples were pro German, thus explaining the hard feelings between Balts and Jews.. They wanted
independence and formed legions to fight alongside the German army during WW II.
These countries were very advanced before WW II, having engineering industries and the Russian Empire's
first auto company was formed in Riga before WW I. While engineering may have been restarted after WW II,
these countries populations were decimated and they never returned to their former heights. Perhaps they
still can.
I'm assuming that these 3 East European countries are being bombarded with the same propaganda as the Ukies
are, so Russian speakers and those intelligent enough to see the game being played will be belittled and
isolated. But the Russian folks living in Russia have a birds eye view of what is going on in the west and
their puppet countries. Russia TV and debate programs, just have to show the delinquencies that are daily
happenings in the States, and Europe, in order to make the Ru people say – No Thanks to that way of life. As
far as the new Russian cheeses that are now in the markets -lol – they make a lightly smoked gouda that is
really good and is about 120-140 roubles a kilo. And, they are making more cheddar that is a white medium
taste as well. No scarcity of good natural food in Russia and No POlice state. Spacibo Unz Rev.
The trade volume between Russia and the Baltic states has actually risen, despite the sanctions. The Baltics
send food products and booze to Russia (and another 150 countries, food exports to Russia actually grew in
2016-2018). As well as chemical products and pharmaceuticals. Meldonium, btw, is made in Latvia and is still
being sent to Russia (as well as 20 other countries), not for athletes, but for regular folks. Work is being
carried out on a new generation Meldonium pill (the biggest market will be Russia).
Growth in the Baltic states has been 3-4% in the last few years. GDP per capita, as well as HDI, is
higher than in Russia. Foreign investment, including from Russia, has been growing (Russia was the second
largest investor in Latvia in 2018). Savings rates are growing, too. After a relative quiet period after
2010, the number of Russian (and other tourists) has grown again.
Estonia's population stopped shrinking in 2016 and is now growing in fact. They've seen immigration from
Finland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, as well as returning Estonians.
Emigration is a problem, of course, but this is partly because the Baltic states are the only former USSR
republics whose citizens were even given work permits in the West, imagine what would happen if these
permits were given to Russians from the regions.
Neo-liberal policies are of course bad and certain types of investment should be controlled, but to say
that there are no social services in the Baltic states is complete nonsense. Due to generous parental
payments, birthrates have risen significantly since the 1990s – in fact, birthrates in the Baltics are now
slightly higher than the EU average. Life expectancy is also growing. Latvia covers IVF treatments in full.
There are free school lunches.
Yes, it is true that some of the Soviet era factories should've been salvaged but the problem was they
were not competitive globally at that time (and there was no capital to remodel them). The Soviet market was
a closed one. However, some businesses were salvaged. There is local manufacturing (electronics,
pharmaceuticals, etc).
Not everything is ideal, but it is also not the kind of gloom and doom as you paint.
Saker says:
"Initially it did appear that these states were experiencing growth, but was that not
mostly/entirely due to EU/IMF/US subsidies?"
"Foreign Aid Makes Corrupt Countries More Corrupt":
"Any time a government hands out money, not just foreign aid, it breeds corruption And there are few
better examples than Ukraine – just don't tell the House impeachment hearings. Counting on foreign aid to
reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure alcoholism .If U.S. aid was effective, Ukraine would
have become a rule of law paradise long ago . The surest way to reduce foreign corruption is to end
foreign aid."
@onebornfree
The EU gives every year about 2,500 million euros to the 3 Baltic countries ( 6 million people the three of
them ) , and 9000 million euros to Poland ( 38 million people ) , plus more billions to other eastern
members .
Older members of the EU , specially the UK which is going out , Greece witch was tortured ( again )
economically by Germany , and south Europe in general are not very happy about admitting so many ex-soviets
countries en the EU and subsidizing them .
Recovery and self-sufficiency since Yeltsin show the brilliance of the Russian people
It's not so much brilliance as sheer necessity to survive under sanctions. But some results were better
than anyone expected. Say, food before sanctions used to be so-so in the provinces and downright bad in
Moscow because of abundance of imported crap. Now the food is exclusively domestic, fresh and tasty. Russia
never had traditions of making fancy cheeses. Now, to bypass sanctions, quite a few Italian and French
cheese-makers started production in Russia, so in the last 2-3 years domestically made excellent fancy
cheeses appeared in supermarkets. Arguably, Russian agriculture benefited by sanctions more than any other
sector, but there are success stories virtually in every industry. Sanctions and Ukrainian stupidity served
as a timely wake up call for Russian elites, who earlier wanted to sell oil and natural gas and buy
everything else. Replacing imports after the sanctions were imposed had a significant cost in the short run,
but in the long run it made Russia much stronger, economically and militarily. Speak of unintended
consequences.
My mom is from Lithuania and I've been there several times. We have second cousins our age.
Her father was
a surveyor for the Republic in the 20s and 30s, charged with breaking up the manors and estates and the
state distributing the land to the peasantry. It was near-feudalism. There was very little
industrialization; that which existed were in a few urban centers. One interesting comment from her was that
the "Jews were communists". From what I've read they were the urban working class, but perhaps part of the
socialist/Jewish Bund?
There is no doubt that the Soviet period unleashed considerable industrialization and modernization.
Lithuania had some of the best infrastructure in the USSR. Its traditional culture was really celebrated.
When I first visited, not long after the fall of the USSR, there were enormous, vacant industrial plants.
The collective farms were in the process of being sold off the western European agribusiness firms. One
relative through marriage was from the Ukraine, with a PhD in Physics and had been employed in the military
industries -- she was cleaning houses thereafter.
Any usable industrial enterprises were quickly sold off. The utilities are all foreign owned. Part of EU
mandates are "open" electricity "markets", which resulting in DC interconnections costing hundreds of
millions with the west to import very high priced electricity. The EU has paid for "Via Baltica", a highway
running from Poland to Estonia; it is choked with trucks carrying imports and there are huge distribution
and fulfillment centers along the highway. Such progress, huh?
There had been good public transport in the earlier years of independence, but that has been replaced
with personal automobiles -- usually western European used cars that pollute a lot. Trakai is a commuter town
to Vilnius with a medieval castle (restored in Soviet times). First time I went it was very pleasant. Second
time in 2018 the place was choked with cars and not very nice at all.
The impact of emigration cannot be over-stated. College educated young people leave by the hundreds
of thousands. Those that remain are paid very low wages (e.g., 1000 euros for a veterinarian or dentist),
but pay west European prices for many essentials. Housing is cheaper than the west.
Last time in Kazlu Ruda there were huge NATO exercises in progress and even bigger ones planned for 2020.
German units were billeted at an airbase nearby, rumored to have been a CIA black site. How fitting, as the
Germans with the Lithuanian Riflemens Union exterminated a quarter of a million Jews in a matter of months
(see Jager Report on Wikipedia). There is a Red Army graveyard in the town that has the remains of perhaps
350 soldiers killed in the area driving out the Nazis. I was frankly surprised it was still there.
Lithuania hasn't been independent since the days of the Pagans and Vytautas. It surely isn't independent
today.
Anecdotal -- yes. But based on personal observation.
"... The main difference is that the right of the president to have his own attorneys attend and participate at sessions of the Judiciary Committee is conditional on Trump dropping his order that executive branch officials refuse to testify before the various House probes or supply documents to them. ..."
"... Already, on Thursday, the Intelligence Committee took hours of testimony from Bolton's top deputy for Russia and Eastern Europe, Timothy Morrison. Morrison was brought on the National Security Council by Bolton with main responsibility for White House policy on weapons of mass destruction. He spearheaded the drive by the Trump administration to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which both he and Bolton vehemently opposed, in order to give the US military the green light to develop nuclear missiles that could target China from US bases like Guam, other US-controlled islands, and ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. ..."
"... There are other indications that Bolton is playing a key role behind the scenes in the gathering storm over impeachment. Two Democratic senators have sent a letter to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer seeking details on the Trump administration's decision not to restore Ukrainian access to the "generalized system of preferences" (GSP), a program that benefits developing countries. The letter follows a Washington Post report October 24 that Bolton had warned Lighthizer not to seek restoration of benefits to Ukraine because Trump would not approve it, as part of his effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens. Given the content of the article, the most likely source for the leak is Bolton or one of his top aides. ..."
"... General Joseph F. Dunford, who retired only a month ago as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a statement to CNN Wednesday defending Colonel Vindman against attacks from Fox News and other ultra-right media, calling him "a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer" who "has made an extraordinary contribution to the security of our nation in both peacetime and combat." ..."
"... Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan defended the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and agreed that she was the victim of a smear campaign by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped engineer her recall from her post in Kiev because she was an obstacle to the effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Boot focuses on two decisions that have most provoked the CIA-Pentagon-State Department axis of evil: holding up aid to Ukraine, thus undermining military operations against pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, and Trump's partial pullout of US forces in Syria. ..."
"... Boot is, of course, a fervent supporter of impeachment, because he sees that as a step towards reversing course on foreign policy and adopting a more aggressive and militaristic US role in the Middle East. His ranting only underscores the reality of the political conflict in Washington. ..."
By a near party-line vote of 232-196, the US House of Representatives voted Thursday for a
resolution laying out the procedures for the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump
that was begun September 24. The resolution sets the stage for the holding of public, televised
hearings and the likely drawing up of articles of impeachment in the course of the next
month.
Only two Democrats out of 233 in the House voted against the resolution, Jeff Van Drew of
New Jersey and Colin Peterson of Minnesota. Only one member elected as a Republican, Justin
Amash of Michigan, voted for the resolution. He left the Republican Party in July because of
his support for impeachment, and he now sits as an independent.
The sharp divisions over the resolution were reflected in the hour-long debate, in which
Republican defenders of Trump denounced the impeachment inquiry with hysterical anticommunist
rhetoric, calling it "Soviet-style" and a "show trial." Democrats wrapped themselves in the
American flag -- or displayed it on a large placard as they spoke, in the case of Speaker Nancy
Pelosi -- and denounced Trump for endangering US "national security."
The procedure laid down in the eight-page resolution, drafted Wednesday by the House Rules
Committee, gives an outsized role to the House Intelligence Committee, which is to begin public
hearings sometime in November at which many of the witnesses who have testified behind closed
doors will be asked to do so again in front of television cameras.
The Intelligence Committee, along with four other committees conducting investigations into
various aspects of President Trump's personal, business and official conduct, will report its
findings to the Judiciary Committee, which would actually draw up any articles of impeachment,
vote on them, and send them to the full House for final action.
The overall procedures, including provisions for extended questioning of witnesses by
representatives of both the majority and minority parties, conform generally to similar
measures adopted during the impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon in 1974 and
President Bill Clinton in 1998.
The main difference is that the right of the president to have his own attorneys attend
and participate at sessions of the Judiciary Committee is conditional on Trump dropping his
order that executive branch officials refuse to testify before the various House probes or
supply documents to them.
In the event of continued presidential stonewalling of the House committees, the resolution
provides that the chair of the Judiciary Committee "shall have the discretion to impose
appropriate remedies, including by denying specific requests by the president or his counsel
under these procedures to call or question witnesses."
In other words, if Trump continues to block testimony and evidence, his attorneys will not
be allowed to cross-examine those witnesses who do appear despite the full-throated opposition
of the White House. Given that many officials and former officials of the Trump administration
have agreed to testify under subpoena, this could become a significant issue.
The special role of the House Intelligence Committee underscores the reactionary nature of
the Democrats' impeachment drive. Trump is being targeted, not for his real crimes as
president, attacking immigrants, undermining democratic rights, and asserting quasi-dictatorial
powers, but for his foreign policy actions that are opposed by a substantial section of the US
military-intelligence apparatus.
The witnesses testifying before the closed-door sessions of the Intelligence Committee are
not immigrant mothers, cruelly and in some cases permanently separated from their children, or
the victims of Trump-inspired fascist gunmen like the El Paso mass shooter. Instead, they are
an array of State Department and military officials at odds with Trump's efforts to browbeat
the government of Ukraine into supplying him with political dirt against former vice president
Joe Biden, viewed by Trump as a likely opponent in the 2020 election.
Particularly significant in that context is the announcement that the Intelligence Committee
has set a November 7 date for the testimony of John Bolton, Trump's former national security
advisor. It is not clear whether Bolton will testify, but the potential alignment of the
Democrats and one of the most notorious war criminals in the American government is a clear
demonstration of the reactionary motives of the Democrats, who are acting as front men for
rabid warmongers in the national-security state.
Already, on Thursday, the Intelligence Committee took hours of testimony from Bolton's
top deputy for Russia and Eastern Europe, Timothy Morrison. Morrison was brought on the
National Security Council by Bolton with main responsibility for White House policy on weapons
of mass destruction. He spearheaded the drive by the Trump administration to withdraw from the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which both he and Bolton vehemently opposed, in order
to give the US military the green light to develop nuclear missiles that could target China
from US bases like Guam, other US-controlled islands, and ships in the Pacific and Indian
Oceans.
Morrison is the highest-ranking Trump aide to provide evidence to the Intelligence
Committee, and he announced his impending departure from the White House on Wednesday night,
hours before he was sworn in as a witness. According to leaks to the press from the closed-door
hearing, Morrison largely confirmed the testimony of other witnesses, particularly Lt. Col.
Alexander Vindman, that there was a direct quid pro quo involved in US policy towards Ukraine:
Trump demanded a public investigation into the Democratic Party and the Bidens, in return for
military aid and a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House.
There are other indications that Bolton is playing a key role behind the scenes in the
gathering storm over impeachment. Two Democratic senators have sent a letter to US Trade
Representative Robert Lighthizer seeking details on the Trump administration's decision not to
restore Ukrainian access to the "generalized system of preferences" (GSP), a program that
benefits developing countries. The letter follows a Washington Post report October 24 that
Bolton had warned Lighthizer not to seek restoration of benefits to Ukraine because Trump would
not approve it, as part of his effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the
Bidens. Given the content of the article, the most likely source for the leak is Bolton or one
of his top aides.
There were further indications of support for the impeachment drive -- or at least for the
national-security officials who have come forward to testify against Trump -- from the top
levels of the military and diplomatic establishment. General Joseph F. Dunford, who retired
only a month ago as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a statement to CNN Wednesday
defending Colonel Vindman against attacks from Fox News and other ultra-right media, calling
him "a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer" who "has made an extraordinary
contribution to the security of our nation in both peacetime and combat."
And in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is expected
to confirm his nomination to be US Ambassador to Russia, Deputy Secretary of State John
Sullivan defended the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and agreed that she was
the victim of a smear campaign by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped engineer
her recall from her post in Kiev because she was an obstacle to the effort to dig up dirt on
the Bidens.
Asked whether it was "ever appropriate for the president to use his office to solicit
investigations into his domestic political opponents," Sullivan replied, "I don't think that
would be in accord with our values." Given Trump's frequent declarations that his telephone
conversation with Zelensky, in which he made just such a request, was "perfect," Sullivan's
statement is extraordinary. It suggests an unprecedented degree of open revolt against Trump
within the national-security establishment.
The real motives of the impeachment drive were spelled out with particular frenzy in a
column by neoconservative Max Boot, who, like Bolton, has been an all-out supporter of US
military aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and throughout the world. Writing in the
Washington Post , under the headline, "More Trump gifts to Russia," he declares,
"Trump is bringing the United States to its knees and making Russia great again."
Boot focuses on two decisions that have most provoked the CIA-Pentagon-State Department
axis of evil: holding up aid to Ukraine, thus undermining military operations against
pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, and Trump's partial pullout of US forces in
Syria.
He writes: "Russian soldiers are entering U.S. bases and taking up the joint patrolling
duties with the Turkish army that U.S. troops had been performing until recently. The fate of
Syria was settled not in Washington but in Sochi -- Putin's favorite Black Sea resort. Trump
has given Russia what it has sought for decades: a leading role in the Middle East. This is the
biggest geopolitical shift in the region since 1972 when Egypt's Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet
advisers and aligned with Washington."
Boot is, of course, a fervent supporter of impeachment, because he sees that as a step
towards reversing course on foreign policy and adopting a more aggressive and militaristic US
role in the Middle East. His ranting only underscores the reality of the political conflict in
Washington.
by John Quiggin on October 13, 2019 On Facebook, my frined
Timothy Scriven pointed to an opinion piece by classics professor Ian Morris headlined
In the long run, wars make us safer and richer It's pushing a book with the clickbaity
title War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to
Robots .". Timothy correctly guessed that I wouldn't like it.
Based on the headline, I was expecting a claim along the lines "wars stimulate technological
progress" which I refuted (to my own satisfaction at any rate) in Economics in Two
Lessons" . But the argument is much stranger than this. The claim is that war, despite its
brutality created big states, like the Roman empire, which then delivered peace and
prosperity.
For the classical world at 100 CE or so, the era on which Morris is an expert, that argument
seemed pretty convincing. As the famous Life of Brian sketch suggests, Roman rule delivered a
lot of benefits to its conquered provinces.
The next 1900 years or so present a bit of a problem, though. There have been countless wars
in that time, and no trend towards bigger states. On the contrary two or three dozen states
(depending on how you count them) now occupy the territory of the former Roman Empire.
You could cut the number down a bit by treating the European Union as a new empire, but then
you have an even bigger problem. The EU was not formed through war, but through a determination
to avoid it. Whatever you think about the EU in other respects, this goal has been
achieved.
Morris avoids the problem by a "no true Scotsman" argument. He admits in passing that the
1000 years of war following the high point of Rome had the effect of breaking down larger,
safer societies into smaller, more dangerous ones, but returns with relief to the era of true
wars, in which big states always win. That story works, roughly, until 1914, when the empires
he admires destroyed themselves, killing millions in the process.
After that, the argument descends into Pinker-style nonsense. While repeating the usual
stats about the decline in violent deaths, Morris mentions in passing that a nuclear war could
cause billions of deaths. He doesn't consider the obvious anthropic fallacy problem – if
such a war had happened, there would not be any op-eds in the Washington Post discussing the
implications for life expectancy.
I haven't read the book, and don't intend to. If someone can't present a 700 word summary of
their argument without looking silly, they shouldn't write opinion pieces. But, for what its
worth, FB friends who have read it agree that it's not very good.
William Meyer 10.13.19 at 12:31 pm (no link)
I have not read the book in question, so I don't know if the author made this point: "Since
violence or implicit violence is how we overcome essentially all collective action problems
as humans, war probably does belong in the human toolkit." Obviously it would be better if we
could find more and better alternatives to war, and remove the obvious glitches in the
alternatives (e.g., representative democracy, single-party states, etc.) we have tried in the
past. So I find it odd as I get old that so little energy/research/academic effort is devoted
by the human race to finding better means of collective decision making. Clearly our current
abilities in this field are completely inadequate. I ponder if this is because we are
incapable of doing better by some inherent flaw in our makeup or if it is because, as in some
many areas of life, the wicked work tirelessly to maintain the systems that enrich and
empower them. I suspect I'll never find out.
Omega Centauri 10.13.19 at 4:33 pm (no link)
There might be a case to be made for empire building conquest advancing human society. I
think it was primarily by forcing the mixing of cultures which otherwise would have been
relatively isolated from each other. Also empires tended to create safe internal trade
routes, the Silk Road was made possible by the Mongol empire.
At least the authors of books about such empires like to state that over a timespan of
centuries that empire creation was a net positive.
Orange Watch 10.13.19 at 7:07 pm (no link)
Tim Worstall and Dipper's suggestion that the EU is borne of war is mostly just a failure to
take Morris's claim on its unsophisticated face and instead assume it contains subtle
complexity that is obviously missing if you read the article itself:
This happened because about 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating
the losers into larger societies. The victors found that the only way to make these larger
societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these
governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their
subjects.
For the EU to have been a result of war in the sense that Morris means, it would have to
have been forcibly formed in 1945 by the US/UK/Russia forcibly incorporating Europe into it.
When Morris states "wars make us stronger and richer" he very simply means wars of conquest
are long-term net positives. He doesn't mean something subtle about nations banding together
to forestall further war; he bluntly means conquerors gluing together their conquests into
empires and then liberally applying boot leather to necks.
Mark Brady 10.13.19 at 7:56 pm (no link)
John Quiggin is, of course, well aware of this quotation, but some of you may not.
"Though some of them would disdain to say that there are net benefits in small acts of
destruction, they see almost endless benefits in enormous acts of destruction. They tell us
how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace. They see "miracles of
production" which it requires a war to achieve. And they see a postwar world made certainly
prosperous by an enormous "accumulated" or "backed up" demand. In Europe they joyously count
the houses, the whole cities that have been leveled to the ground and that "will have to be
replaced." In America they count the houses that could not be built during the war, the nylon
stockings that could not be supplied, the worn-out automobiles and tires, the obsolescent
radios and refrigerators. They bring together formidable totals.
"It is merely our old friend, the broken-window fallacy, in new clothing, and grown fat
beyond recognition. This time it is supported by a whole bundle of related fallacies. It
confuses need with demand."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 3, "The Blessings of Destruction."
Alex SL 10.13.19 at 8:37 pm (no link)
On one side, AFAIK the last few centuries of war in Europe have indeed seen a reduction of
the number of states. Yes, the trend was partly reversed since 1914, but never to the degree
of splintering that existed in the middle ages.
On the other side, even the widely accepted cases of supposedly 'beneficial' empires such
as the Romans bringing the Pax Romana and the Mongols allowing far-reaching trade and travel
need to be seen against the devastation they caused to make their victories possible. The
Romans, for example, committed genocide in Gaul and Carthage, and they enslaved millions.
Best case argument in my eyes is that a very successful war is beneficial because it stops
continuous smaller wars, which is still not exactly the same as a general "war is
beneficial". Why not just create institutional arrangements that avoid wars between small
nations in the first place?
fran6 10.13.19 at 9:26 pm (no link)
Here's another personality who's also unfazed by the evils of war (although, she does wish
more folks were "kind" to each other):
Stephen @11 Say what? Are you suggesting that the Soviet bloc was part of the EU? As both
your comment and Tim Worstall's unwittingly illustrate, the fact that the EU has been
entirely peaceful since its creation (by contrast with non-EU Europe) is not because
Europeans suddenly became pacifists.
Sorry if I have a hard time getting Morris' argument, but: towards the end, be seems to be
saying the world requires a "Globocop" like the US to ensure its prosperity. But how does
that relate to his wider point about the benefits of war? Does Morris believe the hegemon
owes it to itself, and to the rest of the world, to wage permanent war?
Morris sold out. This was evident in his book comparing the progress of China and Europe,
though that book made excellent points in between the fluff and is well worth reading. But he
is well versed enough in Chinese history to be aware of the ultimate example of armies
conquering and bringing peace to a large area, which happens repeatedly in Chinese history.
Actually, Chinese history itself shows that the opposite argument has more support, that
instead of war being valuable because one powerful country will conquer a large area and
bring peace to it, its valuable because competition between states who are worried about
other states getting a jump on them turns out to be valuable to progress. Large continental
empires, including the Roman one as well, tended to stagnate in terms of culture and
technology and become correct.
MFB 10.15.19 at 7:18 am (no link)
Well, the opinion-piece was published on Jeff Bezos' blog. Oligarchs are naturally in favour
of centralised power and therefore of empires (so long as they are at the apex thereof, which
they usually are). The best way to build an empire is through war.
Of course, the author has to say "despite Hitler, Stalin and Mao", for ideological
reasons. Actually, Hitler built his empire largely through the threat of war rather than
through war itself; once he had actually started the war, he antagonised three more powerful
empires than his own and his empire was then crushed. As for Stalin, he actually did various
double-back-somersaults to avoid getting into wars, and the "empire" which he built in
Eastern Europe as a result of winning a war he didn't want did not sustain itself. And of
course Mao didn't start any wars at all -- his name just had to be thrown in for reactionary
reasons.
It is true that the Spanish, Portuguese, French and British empires were built upon war.
But where are they now? The United States fought a lot of wars against its indigenous people,
but frankly it would still have been a global superpower if it had simply sidestepped most of
them, at least from about 1865 onward.
An interesting question: can it be that a professor of Classics doesn't actually have to
understand the concept of evidence-based argument in any case, because everything has already
been said on the subject and all you have to do is cherry-pick other people's statements?
Because that seems to be how that silly article reads.
And yes, the whole thing reeks of the better angels propaganda. Let's not forget, by the
way, that various members of the EU -- Britain, France, Italy et al -- have launched brutally
murderous wars elsewhere, and the fact that they don't fight among themselves doesn't make
them peaceful or moral entities.
@TheSophist #25: that was mentioned as a joke rather than self-publicity, but if you're
really interested: The Roman Empire: roots of imperialism (Pluto Press, 2020). Obviously
books about the Roman Empire are ten a penny; my main claim for this one, besides its being
less apologetic and/or gung-ho than most, is that I try to integrate the historical reality
with its reception, i.e. how people have subsequently deployed Rome as an example or model.
Maybe the Roman Empire delivered on peace, but prosperity is a bit more complicated. Some
years ago David Hays wrote a book on the history of technology. One of the things he did was
make a back-of-the-envelope estimate of material welfare at different levels of development.
He concluded that, while civilization has always been a good deal for the elite, it's been
rather iffy for peasants and workers. It's only during the Industrial Evolution that the
standard of living at the lower end of society rose above that of hunter-gatherers. So, the
prosperity delivered by the Roman Empire went mostly to the elite, not the peasantry.
Peter Erwin@43 wanted the Nazis to roll right up to the eastern border of Poland, etc. etc.
So did Hitler. And although I'm quite reluctant to read minds, especially dead one, I will
nevertheless guarantee the move into the Baltics was seen as a blow to his plans, even if
accepted for temporary advantage. You must always see who hates Stalin for beating Hitler,
and those rare few who object to his real crimes.
And, Erwin thinks Chinese troops being in Korea with permission is an aggression, while US
troops closing on Chinese borders is not. The US still isn't out of Korea, but China is, but
he can't figure out who the aggressor is.
Really, Peter Erwin really says it all. The maddest ant-Communist propaganda is now
official.
MFB 10.17.19 at 9:02 am (no link)
I don't want to unnecessarily dump on Peter Erwin, because I don't believe in kicking
disadvantaged children, but if he reads the original post he will notice that it was talking
about international wars, not civil wars. I'll admit the invasion of Finland (and of the
Baltic states and Poland) but those were fairly obviously ways of strengthening the USSR's
position in order to discourage a German invasion, and all took place within the boundaries
of the former Russian Empire which Stalin undoubtedly saw as the default position.
As to Mao, he didn't start the Korean war (as Erwin unwillingly admits) and all the other
wars except for the invasion of Vietnam were civil wars since they entailed moving into
Chinese-controlled territory which had broken away during the main civil war. I'll admit that
Vietnam was a problem, but then, since Mao had been dead for some time by then, it's would be
hard for Erwin to blame him except for the fact that Erwin clearly lives on Planet
Bizarro.
@John Quiggin The claim is that war, despite its brutality created big states, like the
Roman empire, which then delivered peace and prosperity
I don't think this is an intellectually generous summary of the arguments, as presented in
the article.
The author himself summarizes it as "war made states, and states made peace", and if it is
indeed true that the author often speaks of "larger, more organized societies" there is a
strong implication that for a society to be "large" in the sense discussed in the article, it
is not really necessary that it be territorially very wide (the most clear cut indication of
that is that the author refers to the European states of the 1600s as "big, settled states"
while they all were geographically tiny at the time). So the point of the author, if
interpreted with intellectual honesty, seems to me to be twofold: 1) that war has been a
crucial factor in the formation of complex, organized states and societies and 2) that these
complex, organized states and societies brought with them so many positive things that the
wars required to form them were worth it.
The second point is pure Pinker. I consider it logically meaningless, myself (it
ultimately relies on the concept that History proceeds like an individual who is choosing a
pair of shoes) and morally repugnant (it is not hard to see who will be pleased to have a
rhetorical tool that can justify any atrocity by the long term gains it will provide humanity
– indeed, it is instructive in that respect to read SS internal papers on when and why
children should be executed with their parents, and how to select people for that task:
contrary to what could be guessed, the manual recommends the soldiers who appear to have a
strong sense of empathy and morality, with the idea that they will those who will most
strongly endorse the "by doing this abominable act, we are sacrificing ourselves on behalf of
future generations" thesis).
The first point, however, appears to me to be broadly correct descriptively. Extracting an
interesting thesis out of it requires much more work than is indicated by the article,
however (I consider Ertman's Birth of the Levianthan an example of that kind of extra
work done successfully).
@John Quiggin Lots of people predicted, along the lines of your post, that with the
external threat of the USSR gone, and the US pulling back, the old warlike Europe would
reassert itself.
I think what we may call the "wide military context thesis" runs rather like this: because
of the experience of WWII and the Cold War, modern industrial states have amassed enormous
military power while at the same time knowing that they can experience total destruction if
they enter into a military conflict with a state of comparable military might. As a
consequence, peace dominates between them. So France is not at war with the United Kingdom or
Germany, certainly in part because they are all (for now) members of the EU but also in part
for the same reason Japan is not at war with South Korea and Russia not at war with
China.
Personally, I think it would be absurd to claim that the EU has played no role in the
pacification of Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, but I think it
would be equally absurd to deny the role of other factors that plainly play a major role in
the equally remarkable pacification of other regional areas in the absence of an economical
and political unification process (rise in prosperity, rise in education, aging populations,
increased military power ).
@7, Omega
Not really wanting to get into the "do empires benefit civilization by promoting trade"
argument, but having just read Lost Enlightenment, nothing in that lengthy tome suggests the
Silk Road city states gain any special advantage from the Mongol invasion. In fact, quite the
opposite. After the Mongols (in part for reasons preceeding the conquest), Central Asia never
regained its pre-eminence (it had actually not just been a facilitator of trade but also a
center of manufacture, culture, scientific progress). Maybe the trade routes hobbled along as
trade routes but the civilization that was both built by and facilitated trade did not
rebound. Most empires seem to get that there is wealth to be had from involvement in trade,
they don't always know how to keep the gold goose alive.
LFC 10.20.19 at 9:10 pm (no link)
"War made states and states made peace" is a riff on Charles Tilly's line "war made the state
and the state made war."
"... Obama's life and actions are a texbook explanation of how humans develop on the sociopathic spectrum. Not all sociopaths are evil-looking monsters. Obama, Biden, Buttigieg, Kamala, W... but their actions always expose them. We, as fellow humans and sentient beings, must develop filters that trigger deeper probes into their actions over time and their sociopathic-- even psychopatic actions will emerge. ..."
For the hysterical Trump Derangement Syndrome jello-brained fools saying Trump is
killing people in secret or something ridiculous like that, check out the list of drone
murders in Pakistan as a rather typical illustration. The trend is the same for Yemen and
Afghanistan.
Here are the crucial totals for Pakistan:
Strikes under the Bush Administration: 51
Strikes under the Obama Administration: 373
Strikes under the Trump Administration: 5
84 of the 2,379 dead have been identified as members of al-Qaeda
"O-bomber" is an apt sobriquet for the previous Nobel Peace Prize winning
PotUS.
Karlof1,petri, lysias and others,(@40s) thank you for your details and focus on the U.S.
government's crimes and actions in Ukraine, especially pointing to Obama. His name is left
out of most blogs and discussions and I think is key to a critical need for us to redirect
our future conversations and actions: we need to identify the neoliberal/neocon trojan
horses early and often. I voted for Obama in 08 and was shocked as he immediately began
filling his cabinet with neoliberal/neocons-- Geitner, Hillary, Gates, Summers, etc.
Obama's life and actions are a texbook explanation of how humans develop on the
sociopathic spectrum. Not all sociopaths are evil-looking monsters. Obama, Biden,
Buttigieg, Kamala, W... but their actions always expose them. We, as fellow humans and
sentient beings, must develop filters that trigger deeper probes into their actions over
time and their sociopathic-- even psychopatic actions will emerge.
lysias 98 US when it comes to international law has been lawless since 1986.
"The Republic of Nicaragua v. The United States of America (1986) ICJ 1 is a public
international law case decided by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ ruled in
favor of Nicaragua and against the United States and awarded reparations to Nicaragua. The
ICJ held that the U.S. had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their
rebellion against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. The United
States refused to participate in the proceedings after the Court rejected its argument that
the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. The U.S. also blocked enforcement of the
judgment by the United Nations Security Council and thereby prevented Nicaragua from
obtaining any compensation.[2]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States
In the last decades, US has used things like R2P and coalitions and so forth, but under
Trump, US is dropping most pretenses. Pompeo at times is as honest as Trump when it comes to
US and what it is.
I linked a video in an earlier comment to Pompeo, but then I realised there was a bit more to
"We lied, we cheated, we stole." The piece that was cut off in the earlier video I linked "
It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment"
We can all wish that things were different, but they are what they are. So we have to
recognize what exists and look out for ourselves. And a little shot of Edward Abbey is pain
relief sometimes. Some quips from an anarchist:
> I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And I know and love my own
people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man!
> A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
> Democracy--rule by the people--sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in
America.
>> No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next --
if not a damn sight better.
The Bushes were a CIA family. William Barr's first jobs after college were with the CIA, and
his father was OSS. This has been the CIA's attitude towards law from the start. They've
largely been running the country since the JFK assassination, and now they're out in the open
trying to topple an elected president.
Arguably some of the most significant events since the eight-year long war's start have played out in Syria with rapid pace over
just the last month alone, including Turkey's military incursion in the north, the US pullback from the border and into Syria's oil
fields, the Kurdish-led SDF&# deal making with Damascus, and the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. All of this is why a
televised interview with Presiden39;st Bashar Assad was highly anticipated at the end of this week.
Assad's commentary on the latest White House policy to "secure the oil" in Syria, for which US troops have already been redeployed
to some of the largest oil fields in the Deir Ezzor region, was the biggest pressing question. The Syrian president's response was
unexpected and is now driving headlines, given what he said directly about Trump, calling him the "best American president" ever
– because he's the "most transparent."
"When it comes to Trump you may ask me a question and I'll give you an answer which might seem strange. I tell you he's the best
American president," Assad said, according to a
translation provided by NBC.
"Why? Not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president," Assad continued.
"All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the 'unique'
and 'brilliant' American or Western principles. But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the
American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil and others," he added.
"Trump speaks with the transparency to say 'We want the oil'." Assad's unique approach to an 'enemy' head of state which has just
ordered the seizure of Syrian national resources also comes after in prior years the US president called Assad "our enemy" and an
"animal."
Trump tweeted in April 2018 after
a new chemical attack allegation had surfaced: "If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster
would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!"
A number of mainstream outlets commenting on Assad's interview falsely presented it as "praise" of Trump or that Assad thinks
"highly" of him; however,
it appears the Syrian leader was merely presenting Trump's policy statements from a 'realist' perspective , contrasting them from
the misleading 'humanitarian' motives typical of Washington's rhetoric about itself.
That is, Damascus sees US actions in the Middle East as motivated fundamentally by naked imperial ambition, a constant prior theme
of Assad's speeches , across administrations, whether US leadership dresses it up as 'democracy promotion' or in humanitarian terms
characteristic of liberal interventionism. As Assad described, Trump seems to skip dressing up his rhetoric in moralistic idealism
altogether, content to just unapologetically admit the ugly reality of US foreign policy.
I see Americans keep calling Assad and Putin a ''dictator'' Hey, jackasses, they were ELECTED in elections far less corrupt than what you have in the USSA
Assad is a very eloquent speaker. Witty, sharp and always calm when speaking with decadent press. Of course the MSM understood
what he DID mean, but they cannot help themselves, but parse anything to try hurting Trump.
If true. It means the Vatican (the oldest most important money there is) like Saudi Arabia and the UAE sure do seem to care
about stuff like purchasing power in their "portfolios" and a "store of value"?...
I see lots of EU participants taking their money to Moscow as well with that Arctic bonanza that says "come hither" if you
want your money to be worth something!!!
It's always been about oil. Spreading Freedumb, Dumbocracy and Western values, is PR spiel. The reality is, the West are scammers,
plunderers and outright thieves. Forget the billions Shell Oil, is holding for the Biafran people/region in Nigeria, which it
won't give to either the Bianfran states in the east, nor the Nigerian government, dating back to the secessionist state of Biafra/Nigerian civil war 1967-70. The west are nothing more than gang-bangers, but on the world stage.
Yet the department for trade and industry is scratching its head, wondering why their are so few takers for a post-Brexit trade
deal with the UK, where the honest UK courts have the final say? lol
Too bad it is political suicide for an American president to try to establish communication with Assad. He seems like a pretty
practical guy and who knows, it might be possible to work out a peaceful settlement with him.
economic warfare on the syrian civlian population through illegal confiscation of vital civilian economic assets, and as conducted
in venezeula, is called ________________
Assad is saying where before the UKK was a masked thief, with Trompas and his egotism alias exceptionalism, has not bothered
withthe mask. He is still a murderer and thief.
Now Assad has some idea why Trump is so popular with his base, they love him for not being politically correct, for "telling
it like it is". He's like the wolf looking at the sheep and telling them he's going to eat them and the sheep cheering because
he's not being a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Unfortunately in the case of Trump's sheeple, they don't even have a clue they're going to be eaten, the Trumptards all think
he's going to eat someone else like the "deep state" or the "dumbocrats". Meanwhile he's chewing away at their health care, their
export markets, piling up record deficits, handing the tax gold to the rich and corporations while they get the shaft, taking
away program after program that aided students, the poor, and the elderly, appointing lobbyists to dismantle or corrupt departments
they used to lobby against, and in general destroying the international good will that it's taken decades to build.
"... Of course, when the die was cast and Rumsfeld's famous Shock and Awe campaign began, the three major news talk channels, CNN, MSNBC and FOX, were all over us with cheerleading. ..."
"... Swinton's use of the phrase 'Intellectual prostitutes' rang true then. ..."
"... As the war criminal Mr. Obama stated, when in 2008 many of his own party wanted to have hearings on the pre-emptive attack and occupation of Iraq, that it was time to 'Move forward'. Forward he did by increasing the number of drone murderous assaults by Tenfold! ..."
"... Now that he is out of office, Barack, the 'Hope and Change' king, just purchased a home for $8.1 million. Tell that to the suckers who fell for his rhetoric in the Afro American communities. ..."
There is no such thing at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press There is not ONE of you who
dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print!
I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with The business of journalists is to destroy
the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his
daily bread We are the tools of rich men behind the scenes.
We are jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property
of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes!"
We only need go back a few short years to see the utter magnitude of what Swinton was talking about. Remember the illegal and
immoral USA invasion and occupation of Iraq? Most of the 'levers of empire' were pushed to accommodate that bit of lying, disinformation
and half truths.
This writer remembers when Phil Donahue had his nightly news/talk show on MSNBC. By February of 2003 or thereabouts, Jeff Cohen,
Phil's producer, recalls how he was told to have TWO pro invasion guests on for every anti invasion guest. Remember, at that time
General Electric Corp. owned MSNBC. Yet, that was not enough to satisfy the empire. On February 23 the Donahue show was cancelled,
although the ratings were pretty good.
You see, by that time, late February, the machine was all ready for the attack. It just needed a few more morsels of propaganda
to sink into both the Congress and of course the consumers Sorry, I mean the citizenry.
This writer was extremely agitated by the high level of Pro invasion info coming over the embedded mainstream print and electronic
media. One slight consolation was when C-Span actually 'did the correct thing' and showed a Canadian news channel's coverage of the
impending doom.
Of course, when the die was cast and Rumsfeld's famous Shock and Awe campaign began, the three major news talk channels, CNN,
MSNBC and FOX, were all over us with cheerleading.
FOX was so off the radar that no critique is needed. However, CNN and MSNBC, trying to look like 'Neutral Journalism 101', could
not contain their peanut gallery mindsets, the one that John Swinton referred to in his famous speech.
You had Aaron Brown, Lester Holt and little Katie Couric (of flagship station NBC, owned by GE), along with Brian Williams (later
to be outed, for but awhile, for his phony news stories in Iraq) all right there celebrating the 'Liberators of Iraq'.
They all wore their flag buttons on their lapels, and little Katie was filmed strolling through the halls of NBC shouting 'Marines
Rock!' Of course, Lester Holt did the 'right (wing) thing' and now is a respected anchor so much so that good ole Lester moderates
presidential debates.
Swinton's use of the phrase 'Intellectual prostitutes' rang true then.
Now we come to a recent bit of disgrace. Ellen Degeneres, the highly celebrated and successful daytime talk show hostess and proud
gay woman, was seen sitting with Junior Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game, in the exclusive owner's box area.
She has had Junior on her show to talk about his painting, has visited him at his ranch, and considers him a 'Nice guy'. Junior
has, on record as president, never did squat to help with the AIDs pandemic, and allowed his far right evangelical beliefs to keep
him from ever speaking favorably about gay rights etc.
Yet, this openly gay woman, who must have felt alarmed by our illegal invasion (OR DID SHE?), must have had friends who were enraged
by that invasion at the time.
All the many alternative news blips must have gotten to her eyes and ears, telling her that the Bush/Cheney gang were WAR CRIMINALS!
Yet Ms. DeGeneres continues to satisfy the lie which tells us to take a pass on the dastardly things done by the war criminals in
the White House.
As the war criminal Mr. Obama stated, when in 2008 many of his own party wanted to have hearings on the pre-emptive attack
and occupation of Iraq, that it was time to 'Move forward'. Forward he did by increasing the number of drone murderous assaults by
Tenfold!
Now that he is out of office, Barack, the 'Hope and Change' king, just purchased a home for $8.1 million. Tell that to the
suckers who fell for his rhetoric in the Afro American communities.
Anyone but the foolish people who still support Mr. Trump realize that he is as much of a populist as the man he emulates with
his body gestures: Il Duce!
Nothing ever changes when the majority of working stiffs suck in the foul air that comes from the mouths of the empire's minions,
whether they be presidents, congress people or (so called) journalists and talk show hosts. It is time for those of good conscience
to boycott the lot of them!
Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson
of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his works posted on sites like Global
Research, Greanville Post, OffGuardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News,
Dissident Voice, , Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on
World News Trust , whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut
military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has an internet interview show, 'It's the Empire...
Stupid' with producer Chuck Gregory.
Pretty good article. Pity you had to spoil it with the Trump populist Mussolini comparison at the end. Don't get me wrong I am
no Trump fan but are you saying that much of the stuff written about him is not propaganda? So when it comes to Trump the media
are ..even handed? honest? ..unbiased? (LOL). P.S. How many wars did Bush try and stop? How many wars did Obama stop? Is stopping
wars now "populism"? Even I can see that the highest levels of the US government have been compromised by the intelligence agencies
and corrupt partisan actors. Need I remind you that it was a "populist" who called out the FAKE NEWS?
Doctortrinate
The News Today, as slipshod as you like – but how far is it different from those diligent yesterdays. Broadcasts, built upon a
complex Fabrication, to deceive it's willing dependants into accepting falsifications as an authentic constant of everyday reality.
So, until the demoi discard the pleasure of blissful ignorance, for the painful truth whatever the spin, however its dressed,
the story will continue, trapped in it's own invention, lost in a pernicious labyrinth where every redundant turn forgets the
last.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Corporatism is Fascism, and Fascists that tow the party line are always utilized for purposes of impression management much like
props on a TV program are. Dubya is a corporatist whore just as daytime talk show hosts are too. Assuming that corporatist whores
should have integrity is naïve in the extreme.
If you watch television you are an automaton without enough reason to be able to turn the television off given that you have
been programmed to mindlessly adhere to whatever the television coughs up daily.
If you watch mindless Fascists entertaining mass murderers like George W. Bush at ballgames that host the Military Industrial
Complex for halftime shows you are _Functionally Retarded_ and likely skimmed over this article whilst locked in a trance state
of ignorance & a lack of education.
FUCK America & American television.
It's a bankrupt Corporation that is $22 trillion in debt that it will never pay back, suckers!
MOU
wardropper
" Mr. Obama stated, when in 2008 many of his own party wanted to have hearings on the pre-emptive attack and occupation of
Iraq, that it was time to 'Move forward' "
And I will never, ever, forget Nancy Pelosi's dismissive shrug when many of that same party were calling for Bush's impeachment
on account of that illegal invasion:
"Impeachment is off the table." Decent Americans no longer have a representative in the US government. As Swinton clearly
implies, those who hire today's journalists bear practically all the responsibility for this.
hollyPlastic
A glaring example of how much the West loves freedom is shown in this UN briefing on Torture, this week.
This serves a good demonstration of how stupid Hong Kong protesters are in believing that there is a 'West/UK/US' supporting
their quest for 'Democracy' and 'Freedom'.
milosevic
you mean Hollywood movies aren't an accurate source of information about world politics and history???
hollyPlastic
Look and you'll see that according to the Controlled Corporate Mass Media, there are, in this period of history, three pillars
that are supporting Western civilisation:
Pillar One: Peroxide. Look how very blonde people are getting on mainstream media. You can't miss it. Good investment to
buy shares in Peroxide factories.
Piller Two: White Skin. Whether it's using Photoshop or Skin Whitening Products, people are looking very white in their
photos, these days.
Pillar three: Piercing Blue Eyes. That must be using photoshop, because there aren't eyes that are so blue in real life
like you see nowadays in the photos.
And
The Blonde is getting blonder. Even, black is now turning blonde. The White is getting whiter. The Blue is getting bluer.
Other pillars of Western Civilisation are somewhat behind the scene and include the proliferation/sales of weapons of mass
destruction, breaking international laws, as well as, the withdrawal from treaties which restrict the deployment of nuclear missiles.
mark
Ah, but everybody knows Bombing Brown People and Torturing Brown People is good for them. We only do it for their benefit. And
this in no way contradicts Our Values and Our Rules Based Order. All these benighted natives and lesser breeds are jolly grateful
for all our lofty sermons and pious lectures about human rights.
I find it very interesting, how people need to worship something!It seems to me that they aren't able to admit, that there are
things that are not clear to them!For instance, we know very little about the universe, so we declare God made it!
hollyPlastic
There is a poignant remark made on these pages which goes something like this:
When surviving depends on believing, the mind works wonders
I think the implications of 'believing' in order to survive are profound. People need to believe in order to fit in,
in order to get a job, in order to get a promotion, in order to get married, in order to get enough food to feed their offspring,
and in order to 'look' free.
Not to forget, by believing in Jesus, you give your proxy support to plunder every inch of the Earth, and kill as many brown-skin
people as possible.
hollyPlastic
I describe this situation we face as mind control warfare
It is indeed. Thanks for the valuable thoughts!
Tim Jenkins
Mammon avoids questioning & analysing incredible endless lies by 'Schiff for brains'. When actually, just like Norman Bates in
Psycho, Adam Schiff is actually the "whistleblower", with bent whistle all he needs is a wig and a rocking chair 🙂
Jayzus . Adam fecken Schiff. Complete wackjob extraordinaire, tho in Washington DC he has s(ch)tiff competition. Someone the Liberal
bourgie professional types here in Aussie regard with dewy eyed fondness and admiration for leading the . Resistance. Gag. Can
things get anymore surreal? Do you sometimes feel like you've dropped acid by mistake such is the bizarre happenings, um, happening.
Do you think the Mad Hatter would be perplexed at the state of our World? I know I bloody am
bob
Hey man, there's nothing wrong with the way the British regime treats its sick people .
Bob, nothing wrong at all -- if you worship St.Margaret of Muck, patron saint of the AZC.
"There's no such thing as a social conscience".
Pyewacket
Eugenics mate, it's been back in fashion here for the past decade. But instead of dying in a death camp, you die on the street,
or your own home, if you have one.
vexarb
AOO, you mean Trump's Time to Bring Them Back might be genuine? I give him credit because I understand his problem: he has to
face his Jewish daughter and her Likudnik husband.
"It is easier to rule an Empire than to manage a family" -- Montaigne
vexarb
ps Not only face but live with. Trump's sincerity is in the same awkward family position as Cher in "Moonstruck" when she and
her boyfriend meet her father and his girlfriend at the Opera, and she says to her father:
"I'm not sure whether I saw you".
mark
The only 2 reputable journalists who tried to cover Iraq honestly were Donahue and Chris Hedges. Needless to say, both were immediately
sacked. Needless to say, all the cheerleading whores with blood on their hands prospered greatly and are still in situ peddling
new lies.
Graft
Unfortunately Donahue is not on the working mans side he just didn't want a war and Chris Hedges is controlled opposition that's
why he has his own tv show and lost a tonne of support for his outright lies about Lenin
mark
I don't agree with either of them on different issues but I wouldn't question their integrity.
Ramdan
"But the more fundamental problem is that Americans are too nice. That may seem like a paradox, since we are a country that blithely
bombs the world and then weeps with self-pity and affronted dignity when the little people we just stomped on fail to forgive
us for tearing out their fingernails. In fact, our niceness is itself a symptom of the moral obliviousness that permits us to
enact atrocities in the first place. Niceness is not friendliness, not hospitality, not charity and not goodness. Niceness is
the blank grin on the face of the psychopath: it is the public enactment of all the forms of love and kindness without the troublesome
burden of loving anyone or treating people with kindness.
This is what an Ellen DeGeneres is really getting at when she brags about being friends with those who have "different beliefs."
It is not a matter of actual emotional attachment to any system of values, and it's certainly not a matter of transcending minor
political squabbles to form some approximation of a community. [ ]
Rather, she is saying that it is more personally and professionally convenient just to be nice to whatever person happens to be
in the same grandstand for the same spectacle of large men grievously injuring each other. It is not that there are disparate
values to be bridged in order to form a diverse and tolerant society. Instead, it is hankering after the ease of a society in
which there is no necessity to form a core of values beyond the practical calculation of personal and social advantage."
Dubya rehabilitated himself by slagging off the Orange Man. So he's now a jolly decent chap and all round good egg. Certainly
outweighs a little thing like a couple of million dead sand niggers.
Graft
As jimmy Bore said on his show liberals love Bush nowadays but they still fucking hate Ralph Nader, because he gave us ..Bush!
Mind officially blown
Ramdan
This is an interesting (as for debate) assessment of the motives and the way we (mis)construct reality .
"in the interests of survival" but "survival" of what?
"survival" of a mind construct as in "I don't like this but I NEED to do it to survive, to STAY ALIVE, to keep eating, to not
to die"?
"Survival" as in the indegenous kids eating from dumpsters? (
here and
here ) .
OR "survival" of our INTERNALIZED adoration of Mammon as the provider for pleasurable moments and the utter avoidance of the
non-pleasurable.
survival of a vehement desire for what is mentally, socially and culturally construed as 'satisfactory', 'laudable', 'praiseworthy',
'deserving' .which basically is the adoration of wealth, and 'upper' social status, of celebrity and of all other things that
represent the ACTUAL internal adoration of Mammon.
Is in this- seemingly 'innocuous' – way that reality is subverted and we (unconsciously) construct the uber-materialistic worldview
that continues to discard the honest, deep human, spiritual values that can save us from this madness.
I would rather remember again, and old, "crazy" guy .
"A philosopher named Aristippus, who had quite willingly sucked up to Dionysus and won himself a spot at his court, saw
Diogenes cooking lentils for a meal. "If you would only learn to compliment Dionysus, you wouldn't have to live on lentils."
Diogenes replied, "But if you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn't have to flatter Dionysus."
― Diogenes of Sinope
"... In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted. ..."
"... Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor. ..."
"... I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil - they didn't. ..."
"... I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique. ..."
"... And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot. ..."
"... How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement. ..."
Recently Ukraine has been thrown into the spotlight as Democrats gear up to impeach President Donald Trump. More important, though,
is its role in damaging America's relations with Russia, which has resulted in a mini-Cold War that the U.S. needs to end.
Ukraine is in a bad neighborhood. During the 17th century, the country was divided between Poland and Russia, and eventually ended
up as part of the Russian Empire. Kiev then enjoyed only the briefest of liberations after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before being
reabsorbed by the Soviet Union. It later suffered from a devastating famine as Moscow confiscated food and collectivized agriculture.
Ukraine was ravaged during Germany's World War II invasion, and guerrilla resistance to renewed Soviet control continued for years
afterwards.
In 1991, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. gave Ukraine another, more enduring chance for independence. However, the new nation's development
was fraught: GDP dropped by 60 percent and corruption burgeoned. Ukraine suffered under a succession of corrupt, self-serving, and
ineffective leaders, as the U.S., Europe, and Russia battled for influence.
In 2014, Washington and European governments backed a street putsch against the elected, though highly corrupt, pro-Russian president,
Viktor Yanukovych. The Putin government responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine's Donbass region.
Washington and Brussels imposed economic sanctions on Russia and provided military aid to Kiev.
The West versus Russia quickly became a "frozen" conflict. Moscow reincorporated Crimea into Russia, from which it had been detached
in 1954 as part of internal Soviet politics. In the Donbass, more than a score of ceasefires came and went. Both Ukraine and Russia
failed to fulfill the 2016 Minsk agreements, which sought to end the conflict.
In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from
their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political
division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged
Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists
have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted.
The most important geopolitical impact has been to poison Russia's relations with the West. Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine
cannot be justified, but the U.S. and Europe did much to create the underlying suspicion and hostility. Recently declassified documents
reveal the degree to which Western officials misled Moscow about their intention to expand NATO. Allied support for adding Georgia
and Ukraine, which would have greatly expanded Russian vulnerability, generated a particularly strong reaction in Moscow. The dismemberment
of Serbia with no consideration of Russia's interests was another irritant, along with Western support for "color revolutions" elsewhere,
including in Tbilisi. The ouster of Yanukovych finally triggered Putin's brutal response.
Washington and Brussels apparently did not view their policies as threatening to Russia. However, had Moscow ousted an elected
Mexican president friendly to America, while inviting the new government to join the Warsaw Pact, and worked with a coalition of
Central American states to divert Mexican trade from the U.S., officials in Washington would not have been pleased. They certainly
wouldn't have been overly concerned about juridical niceties in responding.
This explains (though does not justify) Russia's hostile response. Subsequent allied policies then turned the breach in relations
into a gulf. The U.S. and European Union imposed a series of economic sanctions. Moreover, Washington edged closer to military confrontation
with its provision of security assistance to Kiev. Moscow responded by challenging America from Syria to Venezuela.
It also began moving towards China. The two nations' differences are many and their relationship is unstable. However, as long
as their antagonism towards Washington exceeds their discomfort with each other, they will cooperate to block what they see as America's
pursuit of global hegemony.
Why is the U.S. entangled in the Ukrainian imbroglio? During the Cold War, Ukraine was one of the fabled "captive nations," backed
by vigorous advocacy from Ukrainian Americans. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they joined other groups lobbying on behalf of ethnic
brethren to speed NATO's expansion eastward. Security policy turned into a matter of ethnic solidarity, to be pursued irrespective
of cost and risk.
To more traditional hawks who are always seeking an enemy, the issue is less pro-Ukraine than anti-Russia. Mitt Romney, the Republican
Party's 2012 presidential nominee, improbably attacked Russia as America's most dangerous adversary. Hence the GOP's counterproductive
determination to bring Kiev into NATO. Originally Washington saw the transatlantic alliance as a means to confront the Soviet menace;
now it views the pact as a form of charity.
After the Soviet collapse, the U.S. pushed NATO eastward into nations that neither mattered strategically nor could be easily
protected, most notably in the Balkans and Baltics. Even worse were Georgia and Ukraine, security black holes that would bring with
them ongoing conflicts with Russia, possibly triggering a larger war between NATO and Moscow.
Ukraine never had been a matter of U.S. security. For most of America's history, the territory was controlled by either the Russian
Empire or the Soviet Union. Washington's Cold War sympathies represented fraternal concerns, not security essentials. Today, without
Kiev's aid, the U.S. and Europe would still have overwhelming conventional forces to be brought into any conflict with Moscow. However,
adding Ukraine to NATO would increase the risk of a confrontation with a nuclear armed power. Russia's limitations when it comes
to its conventional military would make a resort to nuclear weapons more likely in any conflict.
Nevertheless, George W. Bush's aggressively neoconservative administration won backing for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in
NATO and considered intervening militarily in the Russo-Georgian war. However, European nations that feared conflict with Moscow
blocked plans for NATO expansion, which went into cold storage. Although alliance officials still officially backed membership for
Ukraine, it remains unattainable so long as conflict burns hot with Russia.
In the meantime, Washington has treated Ukraine as a de facto military ally, offering economic and security assistance. The U.S.
has provided $1.5 billion for Ukrainian training and weapons, including anti-tank Javelin missiles. Explained Obama administration
defense secretary Ashton Carter: "Ukraine would never be where it is without that support from the United States."
Equally important, the perception of U.S. backing made the Kiev government, headed by President Petro Poroshenko, less willing
to pursue a diplomatic settlement with Russia. Thus did Ukraine, no less than Russia, almost immediately violate the internationally
backed Minsk accord.
Kiev's role as a political football highlights the need for Washington to pursue an enduring political settlement with Russia.
European governments are growing restless; France has taken the lead in seeking better relations with Moscow. Germany is unhappy
with U.S. attempts to block the planned Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has campaigned
to end the conflict.
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the
agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage
of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists,
passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should
formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances,
Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while
Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation,
since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of Crimea
while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would
double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would
certainly be better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author
of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.
I credit Mr. Bandow for his largely fair and accurate description of the events in Ukraine of five years ago, and for his ultimate
policy proposal for the US to extricate itself from its close involvement in the area. However, I'm a little confused by what
exactly the author means by "Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine" and "Putin's brutal response" (aside from the treatment of
dissidents and journalists as he specifically mentioned) to the Maidan Revolution.
Was it aggressive and brutal for Russia to support separatists in the Donbass who were facing the prospect of legal discrimination
and violence by a criminal, neo-fascist government in Kiev, not to mention de-industrialization, the gutting of the agriculture
sector and the forced economic migration of an enormous number of its young workers (assuming that Ukraine's economic deal with
the EU followed the script of every other Easter European's country's deal with the EU)? If Yanukovych had fled to the Donbass
and proclaimed himself still the freely elected (though certainly corrupt) President of the nation, Russia's support for the region
would have even had a shiny brass legal fig leaf, wouldn't it?
As for the supposed "conquest" of Crimea, that's a rather strong word to use considering that all of two members of the Ukrainian
military were killed, and 60-80 of them detained, while 15,000 defected to Russia. Compared to the violence in Kiev and Odessa,
what happened in Crimea almost qualifies as a bloodless coup. But then Mr. Bandow shies away from using the word "hegemony" to
describe the foreign policy of the United States, figuratively putting the word in the mouths of those bad men (which they are)
in Moscow and Beijing. It's a pity that Mr. Bandow felt the need to make linguistic concessions to the foreign policy establishment
in what was otherwise a useful and balanced piece.
Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings
in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to
escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor.
I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition
of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously
had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil
- they didn't.
I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history
of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique.
And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are
conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot.
How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement.
It is a deeply held belief that democracy is a system that by definition a generally acceptable path forward. That belief is
false as democracy is still comprised of human beings. And democracy in their hands is no "cure all". It can be a turbulent and
jerky bureaucratic maze process that pleases no one and works over time.
The US didn't accomplish it without violence until after more than 130 years, when the native populations were finally subdued.
And as for a system that embodied equal treatment to similar circumstance -- we are still at it. But a violent revolution every
ten years certainly isn't the most effective road to take.
-----------------
Why we insistent on restarting the cold war is unclear to me save that it served to create a kind of strategic global clarity
Though what that means would troublesome because Russia's ole would now be as a developing democratic state as opposed to a communist
monolith. And that means unfettered from her satellites and empowered by more capital markets her role as adversary would be more
adroit. As time after time, Ores Putin has appeared the premier diplomat for peace and stability in situations in which the US
was engaged or encouraging violence.(the Ukraine). I certainly don't think that our relations with Russia or China are a to be
kumbaya love fests, there is still global competition and there's no reason to pretend it would be without tensions. But seriously,
as a democratic/capital market player -- there really was no way to contain Russia.
----------------------
Given what we experienced during 2007 --- corruption comes in a mryiad of guises.
The Ukraine situation is complex to be certain, but ending military aid and letting Russia clean up seems like a bad idea.
This week we saw Russian forces occupy US bases abandoned when Trump ordered our troops to withdraw from the Turkish border.
And now the author is arguing we should do something similar in the Ukraine.
When did Russian appeasement become so important to conservative foreign policy?
Mate, Russians were in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. US troops are there illegally (no Congress mandate, no
international mandate, no invitation). US is an occupying, destabilizing, terrorist protecting force in Syria and Americans should
look beyond their self esteem before commenting on this "shameful" retreat. US does not have the right to put its troops wherever
it fancies.
This win or loose mentality will be the death of you. Who do you think is threatening the US, when it has the biggest moats
protecting its shores? The only thing that is happening is that the hegemonic role, that of controlling everyone's economy for
its own elites benefit is being denied.
This is what you are complaining mate, the the rich Americans cannot get richer? Do you think they will share with you, or
that, like the good English boys of the past, you will not be able to land a job with East India Co. and despoil the natives for
a while?
If the US were smart then they would lead some sort of negotiation where eastern Europe and Ukraine and Russia were allowed only
mutually agreed defensive weapons systems. A demilitarization of say 200 miles on each side of the Russia border. The strategy
should be to encourage trade between Eastern Europe and Russia where Russia has influence but is not threatening. It may be slow
to build that trust but the real question is whether the US and Europe and NATO want peace with Russia or whether they are using
fear of Russia to keep eastern Europe united with the US and Europe. This may be the case but the future will have China as a
greater threat than Russia (China will even be a threat to Russia). Any shift in Russian relations will take decades of building
trust on both sides.
Good article and excellent history of facts. If I recall during the last Bush administration W hosted a Putin and his then spouse,
at a visit at his ranch. Putin informed W," the Ukraine belongs to Russia. end of sentence.
The author forgot the critical role of Sevastopol in the Crimea. It is Russia's only warm water port and there was no way that
it was going to allow this area to become a NATO naval base. Secretary of State Clinton and her sidekick for Ukraine, Victoria
Nuland should have known this before they started supporting the overthrow of the pro-Russia government in Kiev.
If you look at a historical atlas, you won't find an independent country called Ukraine before 1991. When my parents were born,
near what is now called Lviv, the area was called Galicia and Lemberg was its provincial capital. A gold medal issued in 1916
in honor of Franz Josef's 85th birthday noted that he was the Kaiser of Austria, Hungary, Galicia and Lodomeria.
When the old Soviet Union agreed to allow East and West Germany to reunify, it was with the understanding that NATO would not
extend membership to former Soviet block countries and that there would be no NATO bases in these areas either. NATO and the US
broke their oral commitment to Russia a few years later.
The US should get out of the business of trying to spread democracy in third world countries and interfering in the affairs
of foreign governments. We can't afford to be the policeman of the world. We don't even have the ability to make many of our own
central cities safe for Americans. Think Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Detroit, all four of which appear on Wikipedia's
list of the 50 murder capitals of the world (per thousand population).
"This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all
that stuff, you should get over that quickly," Obama said, to some laughs from the crowd.
"The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws." he
continued.
Obama cited college campuses and social media as a breeding ground for wokeness.
"One danger I see among young people particularly on college campuses," he said, "I do get
a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media,
there is this sense sometimes the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible
about other people and that's enough."
Obama then directly poked fun at 'woke' keyboard warriors:
"Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb
or then, I can sit back and feel good about myself: 'You see how woke I was? I called you
out.'" he mocked.
In a nutshell, Obama is saying we all need a little more aloha spirit -- being
respectful & caring for one another. Not being so quick to judge. Not seeing everything
as black/white. I hope you'll join me in bringing the spirit of aloha to the White House.
https://t.co/tYADx6Dzqs
Obama made some pretty campaign finance promises in the 2008 primary, and then did an
about-face during the general, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from the usual
suspects. Then he declined to prosecute the bankers. Let's not do that again.
Bernie Sanders on Elizabeth Warren's work for big corporations such as advising Dow
Chemical:
"I'll let the American people make that judgment. I've never worked for a corporation.
I've never carried their baggage in the U.S. Senate." pic.twitter.com/yV9TRw7jPB
People are defending Warbama's helping DOW screw women who had breast cancer out of their
settlement. It's absolutely sickening to see people defending the indefensible. "She needed
the experience." WTAF does that even mean?
Obama made some pretty campaign finance promises in the 2008 primary, and then did
an about-face during the general, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from the
usual suspects. Then he declined to prosecute the bankers. Let's not do that again.
Bernie Sanders on Elizabeth Warren's work for big corporations such as advising Dow
Chemical:
"I'll let the American people make that judgment. I've never worked for a
corporation. I've never carried their baggage in the U.S. Senate." pic.twitter.com/yV9TRw7jPB
of identity politics is bullshit. He's offended enough by irrationality that he's willing
to comment on that in public--now that he's out of the Presidency and doesn't have to win any
more elections.
However, none of that would stop him (or did stop him) using that kind of identity
politics to the hilt for his own political advantage.
#2 Go
on ahead and mock all you want. Those of us who see you for what you are will never stop
seeing it and calling you out on it. Boohoo mofo.
"... Note this key excerpt from the letter of transmittal: ..."
"... " Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. " ..."
"... The Treaty was reported favourable by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September 27, 2000, consented to ratification by the Senate on October 18, 2000 and ratified by the President of the United States on January 5, 2001. The Treaty was entered into force on February 27, 2001. Here are the title page of the Treaty and the signature page: ..."
"... With this background and while I don't want to appear to be pro- or anti-Trump, it is very, very clear that the current POTUS was within the law under the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters between the United States and Ukraine when it comes to asking Ukraine to investigate a potential criminal matter. ..."
With the Trump impeachment procedures ongoing and the connection to his conversation about the
Biden family with Ukraine President Zelenskyy, there has been very little coverage of an
important aspect of the relationship between Washington and Kiev. While none of us can speak to
the actual intent of Donald Trump's remarks be it for personal gain or for other reasons, there
is background information that may help illuminate the context of the discussion between the
two world leaders.
In case you haven't read the pertinent section of the transcript of the conversation, here it
is:
" President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that
you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any
future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the
United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States
and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard
on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him
having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate
even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just
recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we
will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody
but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most
experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you
Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also
plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as
the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I
can assure you.
President Trump: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good
and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way
they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr.
Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I
would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy
very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that
would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the
people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that.
The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution
and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney
General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you
can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.
President Zelenskyy: I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all,
I understand and I'm knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute
majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate,
who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or
she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue.
The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the
honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top
of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to
us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in
our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall
her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad
ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she
admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new
President well enough.
President Trump: Well, she's going to go through some things. I will have Mr.
Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get
to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very
badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to
get better and better I predict. You have a lot of assets. It's a great country. I have many
Ukrainian friends, their incredible people." (my bolds)
Now, let's look back in time to 1998. On July 22, 1998, a treaty was signed between Ukraine and
Washington.
The Treaty on Mutual Legal
Assistance in Criminal Matters was signed in Kiev on the aforementioned date. Here is an
excerpt from the The original letter of submittal from the Department of State to the
President's office dated October 19, 1999 which states the following:
"I have the honor to submit to you the Treaty between the United States of America and
Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters with Annex (``the Treaty''), signed at
Kiev on July 22, 1998. I recommend that the Treaty be transmitted to the Senate for its advice
and consent to ratification. Also enclosed, for the information of the Senate, is an exchange of notes under which the
Treaty is being provisionally applied to the extent possible under our respective domestic
laws, in order to provide a basis for immediate mutual assistance in criminal matters.
Provisional application would cease upon entry into force of the Treaty.
The Treaty covers mutual legal assistance in criminal matters. In recent years, similar
bilateral treaties have entered into force with a number of other countries. The Treaty with
Ukraine contains all essential provisions sought by the United States. It will enhance our
ability to investigate and prosecute a range of offenses.The Treaty is designed to
be self-executing and will not require new legislation." (my bold)
The Treaty was then transmitted by the President of the United States (Bill Clinton) to the
Senate on November 10, 1999 (Treaty Document 106-16 -106th Congress - First Session) as shown
on this letter of
transmittal from Bill Clinton's office:
Note this key excerpt from the letter of transmittal:
" Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or
statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving
documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or
other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related
to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any
other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. "
The Treaty was reported favourable by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September
27, 2000, consented to ratification by the Senate on October 18, 2000 and ratified by the
President of the United States on January 5, 2001. The Treaty was entered into force on
February 27, 2001. Here are the title page of the Treaty and the signature page:
Here are the first two pages of the Treaty which outline the scope of assistance that is to
be offered by both nations as well as the limitations on assistance:
... ... ...
If you wish to read the Treaty in its entirety, please click
here .
With this background and while I don't want to appear to be pro- or anti-Trump, it is very,
very clear that the current POTUS was within the law under the Treaty on Mutual Legal
Assistance in Criminal Matters between the United States and Ukraine when it comes to asking
Ukraine to investigate a potential criminal matter.
Eric Ciaramella is connected to Victoria Nuland. IIf this information is true, the entire Impeachment thing is a another phase
of Russiagate. It's the Democrats attempt at a coup d'etat
Ciaramella, who was a Susan Rice protégé and was brought into the White House by H. R. McMaster. Looks like McMaster was a
neocon zealot.
In Chile, a country of around 17 million people, more than 1 million people r out in the
streets of capital Santiago protesting neoliberalism and the US-friendly govt's repression of
protest. The Western media are curiously silent about the scale of the uprising. #
ChileDesperto
... ... ...
Once again, protests in 22 countries is rather a lot (and these, as it were,
the wildfires, not small flare-ups here and there). But note that none of the sources
(including me, "L.S.") have a consistent list; it's extraordinary that Bloomberg, which is an
actual new gathering organization, omits Haiti, and that Human Rights Watch (HRW) omits France
(since the
state violence deployed against the gilet jaunes has been significant, far me so
than Hong Kong).
So how are we to make sense of these protests? The Dean, we might call her, of studies in
non-violent protest (and hence of the violence that accompanies or suppresses it) is Erica
Chenoweth, so we will begin with her (I would classify her as an academic rather than an
advocate, like Gene Sharp.) From there, we will broaden out to look at how the data that any
academic -- and, one would think, news-gathering organizations -- would use. Finally, we'll
look at what the previous two academic approaches do not really consider: The social basis of
protests as a predictor of success.
She speculates that the cause of the this decline is due to Authoritarian Adaptation:
the ability of authoritarian governments to adopt more politically savvy repressive tools
may be part of
the reason for the decline in success rates in the past six years. 21 .
Authoritarian leaders have begun to
develop and systematize sophisticated techniques to undermine and thwart nonviolent
activists.
Chenoweth provides this table, categorizing these techniques:
table l Methods of authoritarian adaptation against nonviolent resistance 2
*
Strategies to Reinforce Elite Loyalty
• Pay off the inner entourage
•Co-optoppositionists
• Use public brutality against accused defectors to deter further defections
Strategies to Suppress or Undermine the Movement
• Use direct violence against dissidents or their associates
• Counter-mobilize one's own supporters
• Plant plain-clothes police and agents provocateurs
• Solicit the help of paramilitary groups and pro-state armed militias
• Infiltrate the movement and engage in surveillance
• Pass pseudo-legitimate laws and practices that criminalize erstwhile legal
behaviors
• Add administrative and financial burdens to civil society groups
Strategies to Reinforce Support among the Public and Other Observers
• Blame foreigners and outsiders
• Mischaracterize domestic oppositionists as terrorists, traitors, coup plotters,
or
communists
• Conceal information through censorship and spin
• Remove foreign journalists from the country
21. There may be several other reasons for this decline in effectiveness. First, because
non-violent resistance has become such a popular and widespread practice, it is possible that
those wielding it do not yet have the requisite skill sets to ensure victory. For example,
Kurt Weyland has shown that radicals in various European capitals mobilized against their
dynastic sovereigns with a sense of false optimism , having witnessed a successful
revolution in France in February of 1848 (Kurt Weyland, 'The Diffusion of Revolution: "1848"
in Europe and Latin America,' International Organization 63/3:391–423 (2009)). They
essentially drew what Weyland calls "rash conclusions" about their own prospects for success
and attempted to import the French revolutionary model into their own contexts, failing
miserably. Second, a higher proportion of nonviolent uprisings since 2010 possess
"violent flanks" -- segments or groups within the campaign that destroy property,
engage in street fighting, or use lethal violence alongside a predominantly nonviolent
movement -- than in previous decades. Violent flanks tend to undermine participation rates in
nonviolent movements while discouraging security force defections (see Erica Chenoweth and
Kurt Schock, 'Do Contemporaneous Armed Challenges Affect the Out-comes of Mass Nonviolent
Campaigns?' Mobilization: An International Quarterly 20/4: 427–451 (2015)). Whereas the
most successful decades of nonviolent resistance featured highly disciplined campaigns of
nonviolent action, today almost 50% of primarily nonviolent campaigns possess some degree of
violent activity from within .
Chenoweth's strictures on "violent flanks" may apply to Hong Kong (though it is also true
that the Hong Kong protesters have achieved their first goal, the withdrawal of the of the
extradition bill). However, we should also remember the protester's spray-painted slogan: "
It was you who taught me that peaceful marches are useless ." We have yet to see. Perhaps
practice has outrun the academics. Perhaps not. We will look at this issue more tomorrow;
obviously, it applies to Chile.
Data Gathering (Fisher, et al.)
Chenoweth's dataset of "major episodes of contention, 1/1/1900–5/1/2016" includes 237
non-violent and 235 violent cases. But if we seek to record and classify protests in near real
time, there will be orders of magnitude more cases than that. Two projects to do just that are
described by Dana R. Fisher, Kenneth T. Andrews, Neal Caren, Erica Chenoweth, Michael T.
Heaney, Tommy Leung, L. Nathan Perkins, and Jeremy Pressman in " The science of contemporary street
protest: New efforts in the United States " (Science Advances, October 23, 2019). This is a
fascinating article, which I encourage all big data fans to read in full. From the
abstract:
This article reviews the two most central methods for studying street protest on a large
scale: building comprehensive event databases and conducting field surveys of participants at
demonstrations.
Of event databases, they write:
Tracking protest events in real time is fundamentally a discovery and coding problem. It
resembles the data collection components of past efforts to study protest by aggregating data
from third-party sources (51, 54). Unique to today's environment is the sheer number of
sources and the time-limited nature of the discovery-and-review period: Given the transience
of information on the internet compared to print media, thousands of sources produce reports
of variable reliability on a daily basis. Researchers must archive and extract information
such as where, when, and why a protest took place, as well as how many people attended,
before that content is moved behind a paywall, deleted, or otherwise made unavailable.
(Encouragingly, the event database is a citizen science effort.) However:
these event-counting methods also have several reliability, coding, and discovery
limitations and challenges, including (i) resolving discrepancies in reported data, such as
crowd size, for the same event reported by multiple sources; (ii) evaluating the reliability
and bias of each source; (iii) requiring manual review of what can be hundreds of potential
protest reports every day; (iv) accurately and consistently coding events in near real time;
and (v) having an incomplete list of sources and an incomplete list of reports from known
sources.
Of field surveys, Fisher et al. write:
The complex environment of a protest leads researchers to focus their attention on several
considerations that are not common in many other types of surveys. First, it is impossible to
establish a sampling frame based on the population, as the investigator does not have a list
of all people participating in an event; who participates in a protest is not known until the
day of the event; and no census of participants exists. Working without this information, the
investigator must find a way to elicit a random sample in the field during the event. Second,
crowd conditions may affect the ability of the investigator to draw a sample. The ease or
difficulty of sampling depends on whether the crowd is stationary or moving, whether it is
sparse or dense, and the level of confrontation by participants. Stationary, sparse crowds
that are peaceful and not engaged in confrontational tactics (such as civil disobedience, or
more violent tactics, like throwing items at the police) tend to be more conducive to
research. In general, the presence of police, counter-protesters, or violence by
demonstrators are all likely to make it more difficult to collect a sample. Third and last,
weather is an important factor. Weather conditions, such as rain, snow, or high temperatures,
may interfere with the data collection process and the crowd's willingness to participate in
a survey.
The Women's March after Trump was elected was one subject of surveys:
In her book American Resistance , Fisher examined seven of the largest protests
in Washington, DC, associated with opposition to President Trump: the 2017 Women's March, the
March for Science, the People's Climate March, the March for Racial Justice, the 2018 Women's
March, the March for Our Lives, and Families Belong Together (81). Her results show that the
Resistance was disproportionately female (at least 54%), highly educated (with more than 70%
holding a bachelor's degree), majority white (more than 62%), and had an average adult age of
38 to 49 years. Further, she found that the Resistance is almost entirely left-leaning in its
political ideology (more than 85%). Resistance participants were motivated to march by a wide
range of issues, with women's rights, environmental protection, racial justice, immigration,
and police brutality being among the more common motivations (83). She also found that
participants did not limit their activism to marching in the streets, as more than half of
the respondents had previously contacted an elected official and more than 40% had attended a
town hall meeting
I think Thomas Frank would recognize "the Resistance," although Fisher seems to have an odd
concept of what "the left" might mean. For example, there's no mention of strengthening unions,
the minimum wage, or the power of billionaries, so I wonder what her coding practices were.
The authors conclude -- as a good academic should do! -- with a call for further
research:
Moving forward, best practices will require forming teams of scholars that are
geographically dispersed in a way that corresponds with the distribution of the events under
investigation. While previous studies have concentrated on conducting surveys in different
regions and in major cities, the datasets would be more representative if data were collected
in multiple locations simultaneously in a way that represents smaller cities, suburbs, and
rural areas.
Consider an event projected to take place in 300 cities simultaneously in the United
States or Europe. Suppose that the target areas were stratified into 12 regions or countries.
If a survey was conducted in three types of locations -- one city, one suburb, and one rural
site or one capital, one college town, and one urban area with neither a capital nor a
university -- in each region, that would require the survey to go into the field in 36
locations (or roughly 12% of events). Such a task would likely require a minimum of 12 to 36
scholars working together, each coordinating research teams to collect survey data at events
in their region. Even more resources and institutionalization would be required to conduct
crowd surveys at a genuine random sample of events.
Beyond collaboration among multiple scholars, scaling up the administration of surveys
would also require standardization of the instrument, sampling, and practices in entering and
coding the survey data.
Ironically, the scale of the effort to survey and record such an event -- say, each scholar
would have a team of 10, for a total of 360, would be within an order of magnitude or so of
that required to organize it! (There were 24,000 Bolsheviks in 1917). What this
article does show, however, is how blind the public and the press are flying (though doubtless
the various organs of state security have better information.)
We further develop the argument that opposition movements dominated by industrial workers
or the urban middle classes have both the requisite motivation and capacity to bring
about
democratization . We clarify how and why the social composition of opposition movements
affects democratization. We expect that both the urban middle classes and, especially,
industrial workers have the requisite motivation and capacity to engender democratization, at
least in fairly urban and industrialized societies.
Other social groups -- even after mobilizing in opposition to the regime -- often lack the
capacity to sustain large-scale collective action or the motivation to pursue democracy. We
collect data on the social composition of opposition movements to test these expectations,
measuring degree of participation of six major social groups in about 200 antiregime
campaigns globally from 1900 to 2006. Movements dominated by industrial workers or middle
classes are more likely to yield democratization, particularly in fairly urbanized societies.
Movements dominated by other groups, such as peasants or military personnel, are not
conducive to democratization, even compared to situations without any opposition
mobilization. When separating the groups, results are more robust for industrial worker
campaigns
The capacities of protestors are found in their leverage and in their abilities to
coordinate and maintain large-scale collective action. Leverage comes from the power
resources that a group can draw on to inflict various costs on the autocratic regime and thus
use to extract concessions, including political liberalization. Leverage can come from the
ability to impose economic costs on the regime, through measures such as moving capital
assets abroad or carrying out strikes in vital sectors. Other sources of leverage include
access to weapons, manpower with relevant training, and militant ideologies that motivate
recruits. Urban middle classes score high on leverage in many societies. Many urban
professionals occupy inflection points in the economy, such as finance. Industrial workers
can also hold a strategic stranglehold over the economy, being able to organize nationwide or
localized strikes targeting key sources of revenue for the regime. In addition, workers often
have fairly high military potential, due to military experience (e.g., under mass
conscription) and, historically, often being related to revolutionary, sometimes
violence-condoning, ideologies (Hobsbawm 1974).
Riots and uprisings are often fleeting, and opposition movements are therefore more
frequent than regime changes. Hence, in addition to leverage, protestors must be able to
organize and maintain large-scale collective action over time, also after an initial
uprising, in order to challenge the regime. In this regard, groups with permanent,
streamlined organizations can effectively transmit information, monitor participants, and
disperse side payments. Organizations also help with recruiting new individuals, networking
with foreign actors, and experimenting with and learning effective tactics. The urban middle
classes have some potent assets in this regard, as they include members with high human
capital, which might enhance organizational skills. Various civil society, student, and
professional organizations can help mobilize at least parts of the middle classes. Industrial
workers typically score very high on organizational capacity (see Collier 1999; Rueschemeyer
et al. 1992). They are often organized in long-standing and comprehensive unions and labor
parties and have extensive networks, including international labor organizations and the
Socialist International. In sum, we expect opposition movements dominated by the middle
classes or industrial workers to be related to subsequent democratization. Yet, we anticipate
a clearer relationship for industrial worker campaigns, due to their multiple sources of
leverage and especially strong organizational capacity allowing for effective and sustained
challenges to the regime.
Lots to ponder here, including the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of a quintessentially
"urban middle class" protest, the Women's March, potential differences between Hong Kong and
(say) Chile, and much much more -- including the operational capacities of our own working
class, and the effects of deindustrialization and gutting unions. I wonder of the condition of
teeth, as a class marker, is included in any survey coding?
Conclusion
I hope this survey of the literature has been stimulating. I will have more to say about
invididual protests tomorrow.
NOTES
[1] I'm super-uncomfortable with the "responsibility to protect" framing (which is why so
much of the focus of the article is on state violence, presumably as a justification for the
U.S. to intervene). That suggests to me that Chenoweth runs with the wrong crowd, at least part
of the time.
Back in 2004 I had a few friends working in a film shot during the RNC convention
protests. It made headlines because actress Rosario Dawson was arrested (police thought she
was an anarchist protestor). The film shoot had footage of an undercover police officer
posing as a protestor starting scuffles and trying to rile up other protestors.
It was written up in The NY Times but people still act as if this is crazed conspiracy
talk.
Of interest is the underlying assumption in the Conclusion of your post; that pre-existing
exposure to sub-national group organizing is positive towards successful outcomes. In most
situations, a Union is organized against strong countervailing pressures from the Owner
class. A winnowing out process that concentrates and toughens successful organizers has
already occurred. As it were, protests that draw on extant Union personnel have an automatic
advantage. An entire step in the organization formation process has been rendered irrelevant.
Access to "off the shelf" organizers will jump start a movement.
As a corollary to the above, I note the absence of an even semi-professional class of
agitators in the United States. Not so do I note an absence of outright professional Organs
of the State: Oppressors.
A century ago, the world had several international organizations seriously dedicated to the
subversion and overthrow of "Free Market" Capitalism. Today?
A century ago, the world had several international organizations seriously dedicated to
the subversion and overthrow of "Free Market" Capitalism.
True, and that complicates the studies Lambert cites in at least two ways.
1. In what Lambert reports, and I think he's got the drift of their arguments, the
distinction between violent and nonviolent movements ignores the way in which nonviolent
movements have deployed the threat of violence precisely by offering themselves as a
nonviolent alternative. Within the Civil Rights movement in this country "if you don't
listent to us, you'll get them" was part of King's message to white elites, with "them"
referring to everyone from Malcolm X to the revolutionary elements of international Marxism.
Others with a better understanding of India's independence movement could find a
parallel.
2. Running in the opposite direction, international movements, particularly on the left,
have often been a brake on local initiative. The Trotskyist critique of Stalinist practice,
wherein the Stalinist international imposed, often murderously, controls on national
communist parties to avoid (overly) antagonizing the bourgeois international, is at least
historically accurate, however much one might dispute its strategic validity. This isn't so
immediately relevant to the violent/nonviolent question, but it does help foreground the
international context that the summarized articles appear to lose track of.
Especially due to (1) the data behind the graph needs a good review for 'interactive
effects' of this sort.
3 weeks ago I witnessed a large protest on the streets of Seoul, I'd think at least 50,000
people. But it was mostly elderly folk and very right wing, essentially protesting at what
they see as Government policies that are too pro Chinese and pro North Korean. The protests
were clearly well financed and organized – the banners were mass produced and
'non-official' ones were almost all pushed to the fringes. Locals were contemptuous, saying
they'd all been paid to turn up and bussed in from the provinces. There were smaller protests
on other days. All were peaceful.
I also saw the aftermath of a very big protest in Hong Kong A few days before. There was a
lot less damage than you'd think from the international reporting, a few shops burnt out. But
I was left with little doubt that there was a lot of 'silent' support among regular HKers and
even ethnic Chinese (mainlanders) for the protests.
The winners write history. Surviving losers also rewrite history ('Gone with the Wind").
Or, past lives are never written about at all. The problem is that western government has
swirled down the drain into incompetent delusion. Corporations rule. Plutocrats are in combat
over the spoils. Protests won't work until police and mercenaries realized that they aren't
being paid enough to die or to subjugate their own families.
Right now, the problem is two million Californians forced out of their homes or waiting
with no electricity for evacuation orders. The American government is simply incapable
rebuilding Puerto Rico or Northern California. Or handling global plagues such as African
Swine Fever that has already killed a quarter of the global pig population. Simply put,
climate change, overpopulation, and rising inequality assure that revolutions cannot be
orderly.
The 10% Technocrats like Elizabeth Warren will try to keep things running until they can't
anymore.
I don't see how the protests in Spain by Catalan nationalists are a case of political
freedom.
If you believe that the right of self determination means that countries like Spain are
divisible, then why not also allow Catalonia to also be divisible? And let people in every
city, town, street, and house be able to decide which country they want to split off or
join?
I would have complete sympathy if Catalans were protesting against any legitimate
oppression regarding their language or culture, or any other related discrimination. Why
don't more Catalans simple work with others in Spain and the EU to make it more equal, fair,
and just, than give in to racist nationalism?
The modern world simply cannot afford to allow nationists to split up the world into
smaller pieces, which often leads to wars, ethnic cleansing, and additional oppression of any
remaining "non-pure" people.
This is a good question for which the stupidity of brainless nationalism has no answer
(nationalism musn't be brainless but too often it is). In reality this is more an struggle
for political power rather than fight for rights. And of course, although less noisy, there
are many catalans that don't give a damn on independence. Only, or as many as, 42%
of catalans ask for a referendum on independence but a larger majority prefers
negotiations on autonomy.
One would think that brexit is a good example of what could go wrong on badly thougth
procedures of independence but blind nationalism, always believes in its exceptionality. You
can compare the Torras and Puigdemont of the moment as illuminated as Jonhson or Blair in
their own moments: feeling incapable of wrong doing and above procedure rules. A recipe for
disaster if they ever prevail.
As an example we have Mr. Utility Friendly Torras, current president of the Generalitat,
going his way on energy policy and giving still validity in Catalonia to an anachronic decree
approved in Spain by his co-religionary Rajoy (but hated because, you know, spanish) in 2009
–and now derogued– that was a stop signal for the development of renewables. This
occurs even when the Parliament od Catalonia has already repealed the decree. Shows the kind
of respect this great leader has for procedures when anything does not align with his
ideas.
If Gazans wanted political freedom, they'd be rioting against Hamas, which has refused to
hold general elections for eight years and kills its political opponents and civilians who
object to their policies. What they really want is dead Jews.
The Gazans are in a tough spot. The surrounding states view the Gazan situation as a spur
in the flank of Israel. The constant threat of the descendants of those Arabs 'ethnically
cleansed' out of the whole of Palestine in 1947 being sent into Israel to reclaim their
ancestral lands is a constant in the Arab state's permanent conflict with the State of
Israel.
The alternative offered to the Gazans is to become permanent second class citizens in a
Greater Israel. Actually, make that third class citizens. At present, Israel has First Class,
comprised of the Orthodox religious Jews, Second Class, comprising the Secular Jews, and
Third Class, all others.
As for self rule, with a dollop of actual democracy, well, easier said than done.
" Violent flanks tend to undermine participation rates in nonviolent movements while
discouraging security force defections"
Ecuador and Chile pose a challenge to that theory. The events there are significant in
themselves, because traditionally, capturing the capital constitutes victory, whether a
revolution or an invasion. In Ecuador, that was clearcut: the demonstrators – not very
non-violent – controlled the capital and drove the government out of it, then continued
a rampage against government buildings. The president, from Guayaquil, ordered the military
to remove them – which didn't happen, probably for ethnic reasons. As before, this was
essentially an Indian uprising. Moreno caved, which means he can't meet his agreement with
the IMF. This was the IMF riot to end all. And we were just talking about retiring in
Ecuador.
In Chile, more than a million people in the street have essentially captured the capital,
as the videos make clear. Nothing is going to move, short of extreme violence. Again, the
president capitulated and undertook to meet the demonstrators' demands. That one wasn't
really non-violent, either, though the culminating demonstration was.
In both cases, victory is somewhat qualified because the right-wing president remains; the
real result remains to be seen – but notice has been served. If that process continued
much further, he could be lynched in the street. (I do wonder why Chile re-elected a
right-winger, only a year ago. They now have to reverse an election.)
And looking at the map: the US isn't there. A hyper-violent police force alienated from
the public might be a factor.
> Ecuador and Chile pose a challenge to that theory
I think Chenoweth's perspective could be a bit US-centric, or academic-centric. I have to
admit that one reason I agreed with her is that the black bloc's role in Occupy was so
pernicious (with "diversity of tactics" being on a par with "innovation" and "sharing" for
seamy tendentiousness). I think in the United States we are not ready, as it were,
for "violent flanks."
So when I started following Hong Kong, I viewed matters at first through the Occupy Frame
(and the black-clad protesters didn't help me avoid that). However, it's clear that a
substantial portion of the population really does see then as "front-liners," as in America
we would not. Further, property violence seems carefully calibrated, as in the United States
it is not. So I was wrong.
Thanks, Lambert; I get that Here; in the U.S. it is *divide and conquer* , or conquering
by division as long as we fight with each other over *hot button* topics; we can't get
together to deal with the big; underlying issues.
There's another kind of protest entierely; the entiely fabricated protest as means of
pro-establishment propaganda. Here in Portland, OR, we've been treated to some breathlessly
sensationalized street battles between ostensibly far right and far left 'protesters'.
Eyewitness accounts speak of supposed ultra-conservative activists popping out of the back of
police vans to instigate dustups. And anyone who's not wholly ignorant of the infiltration of
left activists in the 60s knows just how easy this is. A Punch and Judy show managed from FBI
headquarters which is then reported by hyperventilating media. Fox News shows us raggedy
Bolsheviks with bandito massks beating up clean cut journo Andy Ngo (who then goes on the
pro-Israel circuit after recovering from massive brain trauma!) Then switching to Amy
Goodman, you get bald thuggish looking white guys with tattoos variously of Christian and
Viking themes (how exactly these really mesh in anyone's mind, I don't quite get-but that's
supposing it's real) forming a phalanx and waving confederate flags.
The entire thing seems fabricated to push fretting liberal homeowners and Responsible People
to support the 'radical center' of neoliberal Clintonism.
Since you live in Rose City, feel free to go on down and meet the "raggedy Bolsheviks" for
your own self. Or talk to the nazis, most are friendly enough to 'non-combatants'.
No doubt there are false flaggers and cops in both groups, but I assure you the conflict
itself is not staged.
Thanks for starting to wade into this topic. I appreciate the academic sideboards as a way
to discover the common elements. Which will help us with the revolution against neoliberalism
here in the US.
let me add my thanks for this round up. I look forward to continuing coverage on this
topic and especially beg those living outside the US, most especially those speaking the
local languages to give us the benefit of your observations.
Marcie Smith has done amazing research into the "guru of nonviolent revolution," Gene
Sharp, who turns out to be a CIA tool responsible for the "nonviolent" color revolutions
which were just an easier assertion of soft power than those annoying invasions and
coups.
So amazing that you can't be bothered to supply readers with the link?
Here is it is . I think Smith
oversimplifies ; I also think misuse of Smith's work leads to a quasi-religious tendency
("faith is the evidence of things not seen") to imagine CIA agents behind every protest sign,
and to imagine Sharp as a Saruman-like figure controlling the action from a distance, all of
which is both untrue and demoralizing/disempowering. You also seem to think that Sharp's
techniques substitute for invasions and coups; but in Serbia they clearly did not,
since we had both Otpor and bombing; and in Tahrir Square, to the extent that Sharp inspired
that protest -- the hashtag #GeneSharpTaughtMe was widely used at the time, in mockery -- an
invasion wasn't even an option. It's also not clear that the outcome of Tahrir Square was an
outcome we even desired; clearly the protesters had no idea what to do with power if they
won, which one would think their case officers would have handled as a matter of course.
The reflexiv sequence protest -> color revolution -> Gene
Sharp -> CIA seems deeply attractive to some soi disant leftists;
it's so mechanical and pointless and self-defeating it makes head hurt and my back teeth
itch. (Even at the best, it's like arguing that because the Germans sent Lenin over the
Russian border in a sealed train in 1917, that the Bolsheviks were all a plot by Kaiser
Wilhelm II.)
I'm also curious why you even bring up Gene Sharp. The post doesn't mention him. Is it
your thesis that the CIA is behind all the global protests?
This is a good point.
Not all opposition is controlled, but that does not mean the forces of the ancien regime
don't try. The upheavals in Egypt caught the neoliberal paladins by surprise and caused much
dismay. That the Army brought the mild islamist party leader down in a counter-doup is not a
symptom that the entirety of the Tahrir Square enterprise was a CIA orchestrated hoax of some
kind. Just that the US was happy to let Morsi hang once the Generals got their act together.
There certainly are many pro neoliberal coups that dress themselves up in liberatory
clothing. (Maidan and Georgia are the claerest examples.)
Gene Sharp, from everything I've seen on him and his career, showed him to be a true
believer in neoliberalism and the empire that propped it up. I suggest people look into his
views on the "free market," and its relation to democracy, to see what he was really
about.
What was the name of the institute he headed over at Harvard for so many years? Why, it
was the "Center for International Affairs"! Now why did they decide to rename that, after
waves of student protests against it? The acronym just a little too "on the nose?" He seemed
like a willfully ignorant dupe working alongside a long list of cold war psychopaths. Whether
or not he "believed" this or that, about his own work, is irrelevant.
Not to mention the underemployed -- the ongoing commitment of western regimes to inflation
prevention at the expense of labor wastage and the consequent immiseration of the citizenry
is scandalous.
Kenneth Pomeranz's "The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern
World Economy," basically proves your point very effectively. Pretty much beats down any
crypto-racist theories on the superiority of "western civilization," etc. China didn't have
coal, simple as that.
I would say that one has to categorize "protests" in order to uncover how they relate to
social relations of power. Violent vs non-violent framing is useful if you want to argue that
violence is not just immoral but actually impractical. If you want to try to prove the
eternal moral basis of the liberal order, it's great. If you really want to uncover how
conflict and power work, you need more vectors.
Complicate Chenoweth's liberal framing by adding more categories. What's the goal of the
movement? Is it revolutionary of reformist? Is the movement organized or diffuse? If the
violence is diffused is it lumpen rioting and random terror? If the violence is organized is
it terror cells, military columns, foreign invasion or something else? If the movement is
organized non-violent, does it exist at the same time as an organized violent movement with
similar goals? If the movement is organized non-violent, are the people in it armed but not
using the arms? If the movement is diffused non-violent is it actively opposed to violence?
Every combination matters in context, and the reform vs revolutionary labels absolutely
matter. There is a big difference between demanding the end of a fuel tax and demanding the
end of capitalism. There is a big difference between the treatment of armed people and
unarmed people by security forces, depending on the context.
In general IMO, reforms under liberalism can be captured through non-violent protest, and
diffused violence can harm their chances because they give security forces an excuse for a
crackdown. The organized threat of violence can help organized non-violent reform protests
because it scares the ruling class (BPP in the USA is a great example), but organized
violence itself can harm non-violent reform protests unless it's successfully revolutionary.
Revolution (not just a change in government!) can never be achieved through non-violent
protest, because the ruling class will use violence to save themselves.
"... But militarism is more than thuggish dictators, predatory weaponry, and steely-eyed troops. There are softer forms of it that are no less significant than the "hard" ones. In fact, in a self-avowed democracy like the United States, such softer forms are often more effective because they seem so much less insidious, so much less dangerous. ..."
"... But who can object to celebrating " hometown heroes " in uniform, as happens regularly at sports events of every sort in twenty-first-century America? Or polite and smiling military recruiters in schools ? Or gung-ho war movies like the latest version of Midway , timed for Veterans Day weekend 2019 and marking America's 1942 naval victory over Japan, when we were not only the good guys but the underdogs? ..."
"... Roughly two-thirds of the federal government's discretionary budget for 2020 will, unbelievably enough, be devoted to the Pentagon and related military functions, with each year's "defense" budget coming ever closer to a trillion dollars ..."
"... The U.S. military remains the most trusted institution in our society, so say 74% of Americans surveyed in a Gallup poll. ..."
"... A state of permanent war is considered America's new normal. ..."
"... America's generals continue to be treated, without the slightest irony, as "the adults in the room." ..."
"... The media routinely embraces retired U.S. military officers and uses them as talking heads to explain and promote military action to the American people. ..."
"... America's foreign aid is increasingly military aid. ..."
"... In that context, consider the militarization of the weaponry in those very hands, from .50 caliber sniper rifles to various military-style assault rifles. ..."
"... Paradoxically, even as Americans slaughter each other and themselves in large numbers via mass shootings and suicides (nearly 40,000 gun deaths in 2017 alone), they largely ignore Washington's overseas wars and the continued bombing of numerous countries. ..."
"... 9. Even as Americans "support our troops" and celebrate them as "heroes," the military itself has taken on a new " warrior ethos " that would once -- in the age of a draft army -- have been contrary to this country's citizen-soldier tradition , especially as articulated and exhibited by the "greatest generation" during World War II. ..."
"... Democracy shouldn't be about celebrating overlords in uniform. A now-widely accepted belief is that America is more divided, more partisan than ever, approaching perhaps a new civil war , as echoed in the rhetoric of our current president. Small wonder that inflammatory rhetoric is thriving and the list of this country's enemies lengthening when Americans themselves have so softly yet fervently embraced militarism. ..."
Killing Me Softly with Militarism - The Decay of Democracy in America
When Americans think of
militarism
,
they may imagine jackbooted soldiers goose-stepping through the streets as flag-waving crowds exult
;
or, like
our
president
, they may think of enormous parades featuring troops and missiles and tanks, with
warplanes soaring overhead. Or nationalist dictators wearing military uniforms
encrusted
with
medals, ribbons, and badges like so many barnacles on a sinking ship of state. (Was Donald
Trump
only
joking
recently when he said he'd like to award himself a Medal of Honor?)
And what
they may also think is: that's not us. That's not America. After all, Lady Liberty used to welcome
newcomers with a torch, not an
AR-15
.
We don't
wall
ourselves
in while
bombing others
in
distant parts of the world, right?
But militarism is more than thuggish dictators, predatory weaponry, and steely-eyed
troops. There are softer forms of it that are no less significant than the "hard" ones.
In
fact, in a self-avowed democracy like the United States, such softer forms are often more effective
because they seem so much less insidious, so much less dangerous. Even in the heartland of Trump's
famed base, most Americans
continue
to reject
nakedly bellicose displays like phalanxes of tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.
But who can object to celebrating "
hometown
heroes
" in uniform, as happens regularly at sports events of every sort in twenty-first-century
America? Or polite and smiling military recruiters
in
schools
? Or gung-ho war movies like the latest version of
Midway
, timed for Veterans
Day weekend 2019 and marking America's 1942 naval victory over Japan, when we were not only the
good guys but the underdogs?
What do I mean by softer forms of militarism?
I'm a football fan, so one recent
Sunday afternoon found me watching an NFL game on CBS. People deplore violence in such games, and
rightly so, given the number of injuries among the players, notably concussions that debilitate
lives. But what about
violent
commercials
during the game? In that one afternoon, I noted repetitive commercials for
SEAL
Team
,
SWAT
, and
FBI
,
all CBS shows from this quietly militarized American moment of ours. In other words, I was exposed
to lots of guns, explosions, fisticuffs, and the like, but more than anything I was given glimpses
of hard men (and a woman or two) in uniform who have the very answers we need and, like the
Pentagon-supplied
police
in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, are armed to the teeth. ("Models with guns," my wife
calls them.)
Got a situation in Nowhere-stan? Send in the Navy SEALs. Got a murderer on the loose? Send in
the SWAT team. With their superior weaponry and can-do spirit, Special Forces of every sort are
sure to win the day (except, of course, when they don't, as in America's current series of
never-ending
wars
in distant lands).
And it hardly ends with those three shows.
Consider, for example, this
century's update of
Magnum P.I.
, a CBS
show featuring a kickass private investigator. In the original
Magnum
P.I.
that I watched as a teenager, Tom Selleck played the character with an easy charm.
Magnum's military background in Vietnam was acknowledged but not hyped. Unsurprisingly, today's
Magnum is proudly billed as an ex-Navy SEAL.
Cop and military
shows are nothing new on American TV, but never have I seen so many of them,
new and old, and so well-armed.
On CBS alone you can add to the mix
Hawaii
Five-O
(yet more models with guns updated and up-armed from my youthful years), the three
NCIS
(Naval
Criminal Investigative Service) shows, and
Blue
Bloods
(ironically starring a more grizzled and less charming Tom Selleck) -- and who
knows what I haven't noticed? While today's cop/military shows feature far more diversity with
respect to gender, ethnicity, and race compared to hoary classics like
Dragnet
,
they also feature far more gunplay and other forms of bloody violence.
Look, as a veteran, I have nothing against realistic shows on the military. Coming from a family
of first responders -- I count four firefighters and two police officers in my immediate family --
I loved shows like
Adam-12
and
Emergency!
in
my youth. What I'm against is the strange militarization of everything, including, for instance,
the idea, distinctly of our moment, that first responders need their very own version of the
American flag to mark their service. Perhaps you've seen those
thin
blue line
flags, sometimes augmented with a red line for firefighters. As a military veteran,
my gut tells me that there should only be one American flag and it should be good enough for all
Americans. Think of the proliferation of flags as another soft type of up-armoring (this time of
patriotism).
Speaking of which, whatever happened to
Dragnet
's Sergeant Joe Friday, on the
beat, serving his fellow citizens, and pursuing law enforcement as a calling?
He didn't
need a thin blue line battle flag. And in the rare times when he wielded a gun, it was .38 Special.
Today's version of Joe looks a lot more like G.I. Joe, decked out in body armor and carrying an
assault rifle as he exits a tank-like vehicle, maybe even a
surplus
MRAP
from America's
failed
imperial
wars.
Militarism in the USA
Besides TV shows, movies, and commercials, there are many signs of the increasing embrace of
militarized values and attitudes in this country. The result: the acceptance of a military in
places where it
shouldn't be
, one that's
over-celebrated,
over-hyped
,
and given
far too much
money and cultural
authority, while becoming
virtually immune
to
serious criticism.
Let me offer just nine signs of this that would have been so much less conceivable when
I was a young boy watching reruns of
Dragnet
:
1. Roughly
two-thirds
of
the federal government's discretionary budget for 2020 will, unbelievably enough, be devoted to
the Pentagon and related military functions, with each year's "defense" budget coming ever
closer to a
trillion
dollars
. Such colossal sums are rarely debated in Congress; indeed, they enjoy wide
bipartisan support.
2. The U.S. military remains the
most
trusted
institution in our society, so say 74% of Americans surveyed in a Gallup poll. No
other institution even comes close, certainly not the presidency (37%) or Congress (which
recently rose to a monumental
25%
on
an impeachment high). Yet that same military has produced disasters or quagmires in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. Various "surges" have repeatedly failed. The
Pentagon itself can't even pass
an
audit
. Why so much trust?
3. A state of permanent war is considered America's new normal. Wars are now automatically
treated as multi-generational with little concern for how
permawar
might
degrade our democracy. Anti-war protesters are rare enough to be
lone
voices
crying in the wilderness.
4. America's generals continue to be treated, without the slightest irony, as "the adults in
the room." Sages like former Secretary of Defense
James
Mattis
(
cited
glowingly
in the recent debate among 12 Democratic presidential hopefuls) will
save
America
from unskilled and tempestuous politicians like one Donald J. Trump. In the 2016
presidential race, it seemed that neither candidate could run without being endorsed by a
screaming general (
Michael
Flynn
for Trump;
John
Allen
for Clinton).
5. The media routinely embraces retired U.S. military officers and uses them as
talking
heads
to explain and promote military action to the American people. Simultaneously, when
the military goes to war, civilian journalists are "embedded" within those forces and so are
dependent on them in every way. The result tends to be a cheerleading media that supports the
military in the name of patriotism -- as well as higher ratings and corporate profits.
6. America's foreign aid is increasingly military aid. Consider, for instance, the current
controversy over the aid to Ukraine that President Trump blocked before his infamous phone call,
which was, of course,
partially
about weaponry
. This should serve to remind us that the United States has become the
world's
foremost
merchant of death, selling far more weapons globally than any other country. Again,
there is no real debate here about the morality of profiting from such massive sales, whether
abroad
($55.4
billion in arms sales for this fiscal year alone, says the Defense Security Cooperation Agency)
or
at home
(a
staggering 150 million new guns produced in the USA since 1986, the vast majority remaining in
American hands).
7. In that context, consider the militarization of the weaponry in those very hands, from .50
caliber
sniper rifles
to
various military-style assault rifles. Roughly
15
million
AR-15s are currently owned by ordinary Americans. We're talking about a gun designed
for battlefield-style rapid shooting and maximum damage against humans. In the 1970s, when I was
a teenager, the hunters in my family had bolt-action rifles for deer hunting, shotguns for
birds, and pistols for home defense and plinking. No one had a military-style assault rifle
because no one needed one or even wanted one. Now, worried suburbanites buy them, thinking
they're getting their "
man
card
" back by toting such a weapon of mass destruction.
8. Paradoxically, even as Americans slaughter each other and themselves in large numbers via
mass shootings and suicides (nearly 40,000
gun
deaths
in 2017 alone), they largely ignore Washington's overseas wars and the
continued
bombing
of numerous countries. But ignorance is not bliss. By tacitly giving the military a
blank check, issued in the name of securing the homeland, Americans embrace that military,
however loosely, and its misuse of violence across significant parts of the planet. Should it be
any surprise that a country that kills so wantonly overseas over such a prolonged period would
also experience mass shootings and other forms of violence at home?
9. Even as Americans "support our troops" and celebrate them as "heroes," the military itself
has taken on a new "
warrior
ethos
" that would once -- in the age of a draft army -- have been contrary to this
country's
citizen-soldier tradition
,
especially as articulated and exhibited by the "greatest generation" during World War II.
What these nine items add up to is a paradigm shift as well as a change in the
zeitgeist. The U.S. military is no longer a tool that a democracy funds and uses reluctantly. It's
become an alleged force for good, a virtuous entity, a band of brothers (and sisters), America's
foremost missionaries overseas and most lovable and admired heroes at home.
This embrace
of the military is precisely what I would call soft militarism. Jackbooted troops may not be
marching in our streets, but they increasingly seem to be marching unopposed through -- and
occupying
--
our minds.
The Decay of Democracy
As Americans embrace the military, less violent policy options are downplayed or
disregarded.
Consider the State Department, America's diplomatic corps, now a
tiny
,
increasingly
defunded
branch
of the Pentagon led by Mike Pompeo (celebrated by Donald Trump as a tremendous leader because he
did
well
at West Point). Consider President Trump as well, who's been labeled an isolationist, and
his
stunning
inability
to truly withdraw troops or end wars. In Syria, U.S. troops were recently redeployed,
not withdrawn, not from the region anyway, even as
more
troops
are being sent to Saudi Arabia. In Afghanistan, Trump sent a few thousand more troops in
2017, his own modest version of a mini-surge and they're still there, even as peace negotiations
with the Taliban have been abandoned. That decision, in turn, led to a new surge (a "
near
record high
") in U.S. bombing in that country in September, naturally in the name of advancing
peace.
The result: yet higher levels of
civilian
deaths
.
How did the U.S. increasingly come to reject diplomacy and democracy for militarism and
proto-autocracy?
Partly, I think, because of the absence of a military draft. Precisely
because military service is voluntary, it can be valorized. It can be elevated as a calling that's
uniquely heroic and sacrificial. Even though most troops are drawn from the working class and
volunteer for diverse reasons, their motivations and their imperfections can be ignored as
politicians praise them to the rooftops. Related to this is the Rambo-like cult of the warrior and
warrior
ethos
, now celebrated as something desirable in America. Such an ethos fits seamlessly with
America's generational wars. Unlike conflicted draftees, warriors exist solely to wage war. They
are less likely to have the questioning attitude of the citizen-soldier.
Don't get me wrong: reviving the draft isn't the solution; reviving democracy is.
We need the active involvement of informed citizens, especially resistance to
endless
wars
and
budget-busting
spending
on American weapons of mass destruction. The true cost of our previously soft (now
possibly hardening) militarism isn't seen only in this country's quickening march toward a
militarized authoritarianism. It can also be measured in the dead and wounded from our wars,
including the
dead, wounded
, and
displaced
in
distant lands. It can be seen as well in the rise of increasingly well-armed, self-avowed
nationalists domestically who promise solutions via walls and weapons and "good guys" with guns.
("Shoot them in the legs," Trump is
alleged
to
have said about immigrants crossing America's southern border illegally.)
Democracy shouldn't be about celebrating overlords in uniform.
A now-widely
accepted belief is that America is more divided, more partisan than ever, approaching perhaps a
new
civil
war
, as echoed in the rhetoric of our current president. Small wonder that inflammatory
rhetoric is thriving and the list of this country's enemies lengthening when
Americans
themselves have so softly yet fervently embraced militarism.
With apologies to the great
Roberta Flack
,
America is killing itself softly with war songs.
"Police who deployed explosives and armored vehicles to flush
out a man –who'd stolen two belts and a shirt from a Greenwood
Village Walmart– from the house of Leo and Alfonsia Lech, are
not required to compensate the couple for destroying their
home, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled
on
Tuesday."
Those police destroyed a house worth well over 200K since
it's in metro Denver...and all to apprehend a punk that
shoplifted less than $100 of merchandise...something
terribly wrong, all the govt units, local on up are high on
the arrogance of power with impunity.
The author seems to be writing an interesting fiction, reminds one of a Hollywood movie
about a Russian oligarch at the behest of a senior Russian government official, attempting
to engineer wall street crash.
Taking out a newspaper advertisement with proper representation to state one's case can't
be compared with the US funded National Endowment for Democracy's funding of Hong Kong's
increasingly violent rioting.
This is like apple and orange, not comparable. China did not interfere in
NBA's affairs, just reacting to her citizens uproar against the infamous now
deleted tweet. Thus many Chinese Chinese sponsors pulled out. This is no
different to sponsors pulling out of US athletes endorsements from time to
time when there are scandals.
Whereas NED is US intelligence cover for interference in targeted countries
like Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran and many Islamic countries around the world, to
advance US political agenda.
And in breaking news. 39 Britons have been found dead in a container
trying to be smuggled fromt eh failed UK state to the successful state
run by the CCP.
Did I get that the right-way round ?
This is a paper or news site about asia. It is written in English? What does this tell
you? The audience ostensibly consists of westerners (or educated people from asia or
elsewhere) who want to read an alternative to the drivel and rubbish that's propagated in
copious quantities by the scat factories of the west and their zionist-oligarch dominated
news conglomerates...
Who is interfering in elections? Does china name some loser guaido as president of
venezuela or support terrorists in syria? Is china sanctioning (with financial warfare)the
whole world including their own allies? You must have no modicum of shame to come up with
this absolute smorgasbord of rancid festering bollocks that you think is befitting of
"reporting." You are bettet off taking a sabbatical and never coming back... i would tell
you all of this to your face with the utmost respect that i could muster before i
vomited...
Presidents come and go... the empire, deep state bureaucrats, and their slavish
dual-state minions such as yourself will march on no matter what until your rotten seed
perpetuate the corruption and degeneracy passed down through your genes. That xyz is
president makes zero difference in deterring the momentum of evil that lurks within the
diseased sociopaths such as yourself.
You are an unmitigated disgrace to true journalism and do a grave disservice to this
site's reputation.
CIA uses fake identities for the propaganda articles. If a nation is building close
ties with China, automatically an author with a name from that nation appears. They
also have groups posting propaganda under a single fake name. There are only a few
genuine Asian CIA hacks making a living off the CIA.
USA is heading for multiple
recessions possibly a depression unless they change their current anti China
policies.
In fact, in military, fake identities for information warfare are assigned to
one person, so that it multiplies the effect. To keep track of these
"personas" per each real person, and their postings -- a "persona" data bases
are needed to keep track of their activities. And unfortunately , there are
always some technicians who are more then happy to talk about it.
It would not surprise me if he worked for the CIA... this organization is, by
its mission, embedded into all public spheres...
What is worrisome is that
the cia has no accountability to anyone. It is one great example of deep state
operator. Also, cia is heavily infiltrated by mossad. In other words, cia is a
parallel drug traffickers organization that dabbles in news, democracy
promotion, torture, coups, blackmail, assasibation, rendition...
It is accountable to no one ... their actions are conducted in secrecy and
cannot be scrutinized... the president can't control them... these
organizations are a manifest example of why this article is a huge fallacy
dressed up in cured excrement.
These people are outrageously shameless in their assertion that they can openly interfere
in the internal affairs of other countries, like the recent bills passed by the US House
of Representatives in support of the Blackshirts of HK, but they would not brook any
interference from China in their election, not that it's true at all.
This is a good example of how the US apply its Orwellian ideology of "American
Exceptionalism" - "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" -
George Orwell's "Animal Farm."
Another guy cashing in on the evil China fad, pathetic. It is the US who conducts
financial warfare by imposing illegal sanctions and restrictions on other countries using
the dominance of the dollar in international trade.
If it is so easy to have a country's financial system snd stock markets manipulated -- how
do know that our own financial sharks are not already manipulating market to enrich them
selves , while making it appear that everything is fine? Or that they are not crashing
markets in order to profit?
There is something not right about a country with financial and market systems living off
the fumes of news cycle?
Look at how many times West attacked Russian financial systems
and markets, blocking whole companies and financial institutions -- yet nothing crashed.
Currency lost some value helping exports, while those earning in dollars simply had more
money to spend domestically. And by placing sanctions kn European food products -- they
shot up to the first place globally in wheat production.
I am wondering if the difference is Russia's large currency and gold reserves. As
opposed US economy that sits atop a large debt bubble? Than anything can spook it.
Bill Gertz is running out of stuff to bad mouth China. He is eager to make some money now
that he's been fired by Washington Free Beacon for having some shady deals with the
Chinese billionaire fugitive Guo who is the subject covered in his reporting.
Maybe Gertz can tell us who China wants to be elected by staging these financial influence
campaign? Gertz is sounding utterly ridiculous now.
american are losers, foreign influence here and there, well thanks to your own foreign
policies bombing here and there and regime change everywhere, you sow what you get. if you
don't want foreign influence. just build a great wall and extend it to these. not only no
5G, ditch all comunications including mail
This is a nonsense article. Lots of hypotheticals with no proof presented of China's
intention or cases of actually trying to influence any American election.
This is more
how Western countries behave with their Machivellian modus operandi overthrowing
governments in Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc. This author and American officials are
merely voicing what the USA is already capable of doing rather than what China has in
place.
In fact there is a debate among Chinese officials and think tanks that they might want
Trump to have a second term because as the USA p@sses off many countries including those
allied with the USA that might help China down the line.
Wait a minute -- Russia wants Trump to be reelected, and China wants him to lose?
With US creating legislation for the whole world -- our sanctions whose enforcement is
imposed in others -- means that other people must have the right to elect the president?
How can the world accept such financial burden on others with no right to vote.
Remember
America next time you vote for sanctions, tariffs etc. -- no taxation without
representation.
Global presidents must be elected globally!
There's no need for the Chinese to rely on 'covert' operation to influence the election's
outcome. For instance, if China just cancels the buying of the agricultural goods from the
US that it has dealt with Trump in what is being called the partial deal from the trade
war, it would be already enough to influence in the election. Lol!
MOSCOW, October 26, 2019 – RIA Novosti – The Russian Ministry of Defense has
published satellite intelligence images , showing American oil smuggling from Syria.
Image 1: Situation in the Syrian Arab Republic as of October 26, 2019.
According to the ministry, the photos confirm that "Syrian oil, both before and after the
routing defeat of the Islamic State terrorists in land beyond the Euphrates river , under the
reliable protection by US military servicemen, oil was actively being extracted and then the
fuel trucks were massively being sent for processing outside of Syria."
Image 2: Daman oil gathering station, Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 42 km east of Deir
ez-Zor, August 23, 2019.
Here, in a picture of the Daman oil gathering station (42 kilometers east of the Deir-ez-Zor
province), taken on August 23, a large amount of trucks were spotted. "There were 90 automotive
vehicles, including 23 fuel trucks," the caption to the image said.
In addition, on September 5, there were 25 vehicles in the Al-Hasakah province, including 22
fuel trucks. Three days later, on September 8, in the vicinity of Der Ez-Zor, 36 more vehicles
were recorded (32 of them were fuel trucks). On the same day, 41 vehicles, including 34 fuel
trucks, were in the Mayadin onshore area.
Image 3: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Al-Hasakah province, 8 km west of Al-Shaddadi,
September 5, 2019.
As the official representative of the Defense Ministry Igor Konashenkov noted, the Americans
are extracting oil in Syria with the help of equipment, bypassing their own sanctions.
Igor Konashenkov:
"Under the protection of American military servicemen and employees of American PMCs, fuel
trucks from the oil fields of Eastern Syria are smuggling to other states. In the event of
any attack on such a caravan, special operations forces and US military aircraft are
immediately called in to protect it," he said.
According to Konashenkov, the US-controlled company Sadcab , established under the so-called
Autonomous Administration of Eastern Syria , is engaged in the export of oil, and the income of
smuggling goes to the personal accounts of US PMCs and special forces.
The Major General added that as of right now, a barrel of smuggled Syrian oil is valued at
$38, therefore the monthly revenue of US governmental agencies exceeds $30 million.
Image 4: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 10 km east of Mayadin,
September 8, 2019.
"For such a continuous financial flow, free from control and taxes of the American
government, the leadership of the Pentagon and Langley will be ready to guard and defend oil
fields in Syria from the mythical 'hidden IS cells' endlessly," he said.
According to Konashenkov, Washington, by holding oil fields in eastern Syria, is engaged in
international state banditry.
Image 5: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 14 km east of Mayadin,
September 8, 2019.
The reason for this activity, he believes, "lies far from the ideals of freedom proclaimed
by Washington and their slogans on the fight against terrorism."
Igor Konashenkov:
"Neither in international law, nor in American legislation itself – there is not and
cannot be a single legal task for the American troops to protect and defend the hydrocarbon
deposits of Syria from Syria itself and its own people, " the representative of the Defense
Ministry concluded.
A day earlier, the Pentagon's head, Mark Esper declared that the United States is studying
the situation in the Deir ez-Zor region and intends to strengthen its positions there in the
near future "to ensure the safety of oil fields."
The Ruskies are mad - Trump is stopping them from taking the oil, it belongs to the Kurds
for their revenue and if US wants to help them have it so what....US is staying to secure
those oilfields against ISIS taking it again!
If everyone listened to the President when he talks there wouldn't be any spin that anyone
could get away with.
The oil is on Kurdish land. This part of Syria is just a small sector of Kurdish territory
that has been stolen from them by dividing it between four "countries", each of which has
oil. This is why the territory was stolen and why the Kurds have become the world's best
fighters.
Putin brokered a deal to stop Turkey wiping the Kurds by having their fighting force
assimilate with the Syrian military and required Russian observers access to ensure the Turks
keep their word and not invade to wipe all the Kurd civilians in order to also take their
Syrian oil.
So the corrupt US generals get caught in the act. Their senators and reps on the payroll
are going to need some more of that fairy tale PR for POTUS to read to us at bedtime.
If we are to believe that this is to protect the oil fields then the oil revenue should be
going to Syria, even though the Kurds are on the land. Follow the money to find the truth
because there is no one you can trust on this stage.
MSM are simply not covering this story. Or the other story about the supposed gas attack
at Douma where evidence was adulterated and/or ignored completely under US pressure.
Expect the same from MH17.
WTF is going on with our leaders and corporate MSM....can no one in a leadership position
distinguish between lies and the truth? Or fantasy and reality? Where are the 'journalists'
who will stand up and tell the truth in MSM? They no longer exist.
18 wheel fuel trucks around here hold 10K gal. 50 truck loads 500K of un processed oil if
it's true? I though they just got there. but no telling who might steal under those
conditions.
That was August. this is now. The Russians must have really wanted that oil to finance
their occupation. Trump is preventing ISIS from using the oil as their piggy bank.
Wasn't Erdogan doing the same not too long ago? Shortly after Erdogan became close friends
with Putin. Does this mean Trump and Putin will become close friends as well? Or is this
simply a common practice between two people who undeservingly place relatives in government
positions? First Turkey hands over Al Baghdadi (he received medical treatment in Southern
Turkey in a private clinic owned by Erdogan's daughter guarded by MIT agents) so that they
can continue to commit genocide against Kurds in Turkey and Syria... and now the US is
stealing Syrian oil like how the Turks initially were doing. What a mess and a
disappointment. Hopefully Erdogan visits DC and unleashes his security guards beating any
person freely walking the streets while Trump smiles and describes him as a great leader.
Watch in coming weeks as the tanker convoys are proven to be rogue operations from an out
of control CIA / Cabal network. Trump removed the troops, and now Russia is shining a light
on it.
No coincidence another article on ZH brung attention to the Ukrainian wareehouse arsos..12
in 2 yrs..2017-2018 where stored munition were carted away...not to fight rebels n Donbass
but sold to Islamic groups in Syria..it was one of Bidens pals..one keeps the wars going
while the others steal siphon of resources..whatever isn't nailed down..I've never seen
anything like this..Democrats are truly CRIME INC
w/o that oil..Syria can never reconstruct itself..Usually in a War or ,after that is, the
victors help rebuild..what we see is pillaging and salting the earth and walk away.. as the
Romans did to enemies like Carthage..it will resemble Libya ...a shambles
So the smuggling is protected by air cover and special forces? Light up the fields using
some scud missiles. I'm sure Iran or Iraq have a few they could lend Syria. Can't sell it if
its burning.
Brits and Americans have pillaged, as any other empire, wherever they conquered.
After WW1 the 'Allies' robbed Germany of all foreign currency and its entire gold. This
triggering hyperinflation and mega crisis.
During WW2 central bank gold was pillaged from countries that were 'liberated' across
Europe.
In more recent history, the gold of Iraq, Ukraine and Libya was flown to Fort Knox.
All well documented.
This is common practice by empires. Just please stop pretending you were the good
guys , spreading freedom and democracy, because that's really a mockery and the
disgusting part of your invasions.
During WW2 central bank gold was pillaged from countries that were 'liberated'.
Exactly, that's where the US got its 8,000 tons of gold. Before WWII, the US had 2000 tons
of gold, after WWII it had 8,000 tons. Even today the US always steals the gold of the
countries it "liberates"
Help me understand why the USA would want to smuggle oil from Syria. When the USA has more
oil than all of the middleast.
Now I can see why Russia would blame the USA if smuggling Oil from Syria. Russia needs
that oil really bad. So to get the USA away from the Syrian oil fields they would of course
create a reason for the rest of the world that the USA is Dishonerable and must not be
trusted with Syrian oil. It is just too obvious to me, what Russia is trying to
accomplish.
Huh? The US is stealing the oil to deprive the Syrian people energy they need to rebuild
the country we destroyed. This is collective punishment of Syrians because they won't
overthrow Assad.
Collective punishment is a crime against humanity according to international law. There's
your impeachable offense. But don't worry, that kind of crime is ok with Shifty Schiff and
the rest of the Israel ***-kissers in Congress.
The US is NOT stealing the oil - the American Military have become PIRATES - no different
than Somali Red Sea Pirates or looters in Newark stealing diapers and TV's
This is nothing new. We've been stealing oil from dozens of countries for the past 75
years since WWII. The only difference is that Trump is being blatant about it which in a way
is weirdly refreshing.
Regardless of what do you think about Donald Trump, what intelligence community did was a plain vanilla coup d'état approved by Obama
and coordinated by run by Brennan faction in CIA. With active participation of factions of FBI (Counterintelligence department),
Department of Justice (several highly placed officials) and State Department (which is a real neocon vipers nest so the majority of high level officials,
especially connected with the Ukrainian color revolution participated) eagerly participated in the coup.
They left too many fingerprints in this and now Barr hopefully will brings some individuals to justice for this coup.
Notable quotes:
"... I was fortunate to participate in a forum in August sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute. Here is my presentation on the attempted coup by US Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community. ..."
I was fortunate to participate in
a forum in August sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute. Here is my presentation on the attempted
coup by US Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community.
"... The below analysis is provided by " Ehsani " -- a Middle East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst who visits the region frequently and writes for the influential geopolitical analysis blog, Syria Comment . ..."
"... An M1 Abrams tank at the Udairi Range Complex in Kuwait, via Army National Guard/Military Times. ..."
Here's
Why Trump's "Secure Syria's Oil" Plan Will Prove Practically Impossible
by
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/26/2019 - 23:30
0
SHARES
The below analysis is provided by "
Ehsani
" -- a Middle
East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst who visits the region frequently and writes
for the influential geopolitical analysis blog,
Syria Comment
.
Much has been debated since President Trump tweeted that
"The U.S has secured the oil"
in Syria. Is this feasible? Does it make any sense? The below will
explain how and why
the answer is a resounding
NO
.
Al-Omar and Conoco fields are already secured by Kurdish-led SDF and U.S forces. Some of the oil
from these fields was being sold through third parties to Syria's government by giving it in crude
form and taking back half the quantity as refined product
(the government owns the
refineries).
Syria's government now has access to oil fields inside the 32km zone
(established
by the Turkish military incursion and subsequent withdrawal of Kurdish forces). Such fields can produce
up to 100K barrels a day and will already go a long way in terms of meeting the country's immediate
demand.
So the importance of accessing oil in SDF/U.S hands is not as pressing any longer.
SDF/U.S forces can of course decide to sell the oil to Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)
but Syria's government now has control over the border area connecting Syria to KRG territory through
both Yaaroubia and Al-Mallkiya.
The Syrian government also now has control over supply of electricity. This was made possible by
taking control of the Tishreen and Furat dams.
Operating those fields needs electric power
supply and the state is now the provider.
Securing and operating these fields also entails paying salaries to those operating the fields.
International companies would be very reluctant to get involved without legal backing to operate
the fields.
"Securing the oil" therefore
can only mean preventing the Syrian state from accessing al-Omar/Conoco
only (not oil in the north)
. It's unlikely anything can be sold or transported.
And let's not forget "securing" this oil would need
ready air cover, and all for what?
SDF composition included Arab fighters and tribes who accepted Kurds in leadership since they had
American support and key cities in north. Many of those Arabs are already switching and joining the
Syrian Army.
"Securing" oil for benefit of the Kurds is likely to antagonize the Arab fighters
and tribes in the region.
Preventing rise of ISIS is likely to entail securing support of the region's Arabs and tribes more
than that of the Kurds. This Kurd/Arab issue is yet another reason why President Trump's idea of
"securing" the oil for the benefit of the Kurds just doesn't make sense nearly on every level
.
The psychopaths destroyed the last secular country in the ME. Same
with Lybia. Now all we get are extremists on all sides. Mossad doing
what it knows best, bringing chaos for the psychopaths.
By withdrawing from Northern Kurdistan and by making an exception
for the oil fields, Genius President Trump just told the world a number
of things:
To trust the U.S.A. as an ally is sheer stupidity
The "alternative media" theory that it is all about oil (and
possible gas) has been proven true
The U.S.A. is being ruled by a hobbyist who has no strategic
plans, replacing them with a "random walk" concept
Of course, the European allies (except Turkey) are still refusing
to learn from this experience. "Duck and cover until November 2020"
is their current tactics. Not sure if this is a good idea.
Turkey has learned to go their own ways, but I don't think it is
a good idea to create ever more enemies at one's borders. Greece,
Armenia, the Kurdish regions, Syria, Cyprus, not sure how their stance
is towards Iran. Reminds me of Germany before both World Wars. Won't
end well.
"America/The US", a label, is
actually just a location on a map and is not a reference to the actual
identities of those who start wars for profit.
Also it is hilarious to use that label as if an area of the planet
is or has attacked another area. Land can not attack itself, ever,
just as guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Trump is not claiming posession of oil in syria by leaving some
troops behind. Just as he did not declare war, nor start any EVER.
Every conflct on earth has it's roots with very specific individuals,
none of whom are even related to Trump.
Syria was a conflicting mess before he took office and he is dutifully
attempting to pull US soldiers out of a powder keg of nonsense he
wants no part of. Nor does any sane American want more conflict in
battles we can't afford, in countries we'll never even visit.
Like I said before, Trump can't just abruptly yank all our troops.
It's simply not that simple. And for those pretending he is doing
syria a disservice, I dare any one of you to go there yourselves and
see if you bunch of complete dipshits can do better. Who knows, maybe
you'll find the love of your life, ******* idiots.
First, the US invades Syria in violation of the Geneva Convention
on War making it an international criminal. Then it funds and equips
the most vile terrorists on the planet which leads to the killing
of thousands of innocent Syrians. And now it has decided to stay and
steal oil from Syria. The US is now the Evil American Empire owned
and run by crooks, gangsters and mass murderers. The Republic is dead
along with morality, justice and freedom.
Let's limit the culprits to: The Obama regime... and
not all the US. This is why these devils need to be brought
to trial and their wealth clawed out of their hiding places to
pay reparations to some of the victims.
The US has been an Evil American Empire for a long time, since
at least the Wilson administration, and Republican or Democrat...it
make little difference. World wars, the Fed, IRS, New Deal,
Korea, Vietnam, War OF Terror, assassinations, coups, sanctions,
Big Pharma, Seeds of Death and Big Agri...and the list goes
on and on. Please understand that America is not great and one
day all Americans will have to account for what their country
did in their name. If you believe in the Divine, then know that
their will be a reckoning.
The Obama regime was merely a continuation of the Chimpy Bush
regime, which was merely a continuation of the Clinton regime,
which was merely a continuation of the Pappy Bush regime, which
was merely a continuation... etc.
More chinks in the petrodollar armor will be the outcome of this. The credibility of murica is withering
away as every day passes. Iraqi pressure upon foreign troops there
to leave and/or drawdown further will also make this venture even
more difficult to manage.
The Kurds
may not be the smartest with regards to picking allies, but even they
may by now have learned that sticking to murica any longer will destroy
any semblance of hope for any autonomy status whatsoever once the
occupants have left. Likewise, the Sunni tribes around this area don't
want to become another Pariah group once things revert to normal.
Assad will eventually retake all his territory and
this is speeding up the process of eventual reconciliation in Syria.
They've spent far more on these wars than they've made back by stealing
other countries' resources. Trillions wasted in exchange for mere
billions in profit, to say nothing of the massive loss of life and
destruction incurred.
'The below analysis is provided by "
Ehsani
"
-- a Middle East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst
who visits the region frequently and writes for the influential geopolitical
analysis blog,
Syria Comment
.'
this quote was my first red flag.
so POTUS outsmarts Erdongan, takes out ISIS leader BAGHDADI along
with Erdongan MIT agents meeting with him. sorry, Ehsani, i think
your full of sh*t.
CIA & MOSSAD LLC
friends ISIS is just the excuse the american
an israeli terrorists used and use in order to keep trying to remove
Assad from the Government.
They just can't accept defeat and absolute failure. What's worse
than an american/israeli terrorist destroyed ego?!
All info needs verification. US sources are not trustworthy including
anyone where money originates from the usual fake info instigators/
players.
POTUS is so misled by the deep state MIC /CIA/ FBI et al and their
willing fake media cohorts that he agreed to give the White Helmets
more public money for more fake movies, as has been properly proven
and widely reported.
Either they have taken control of his mind with a chip insert or
they have got his balls to the knife.
The false flags have been discredited systematically and only a
very brainwashed or a very frightened person would believe anything
from the same source until after a thorough scourge is proven successfully
undertaken.
It is evident that even the last hope department has been got at
by the money-power.
If they can do 9/11 and get away with it, as they have, then they
will stop at nothing to remain entrenched.
90% of oil is traded in U.S. dollars if that stops living standards
will drop in the U.S.. We dropped from 97% look how bad its now
with 7% imagine going down to 50% life would be unlivable
here.
...meanwhile, both according to
russia today
as well as the
(otherwise lying rag of a newspaper)
guardian
, the russian
government seems to take a different position to the views expressed
here by "a middle east expert".
russian state media is reporting that US troops are in the process
of taking control of syrian oil fields in the deir el-zour region
and have described such actions as "banditry". the crux of the matter
is this: if the US were not actually illegally taking control of Syrian
oil, then Russia would not be reporting this. Contrary to western
mainstream media, Russian sources have repeatedly shown themselves
to be factual.
Shame the "withdrawl" from Syria is tainted with "securing the oil".
US doesnt need that oil at all. So Orwellian! Unless the Kurds somehow
get rights to it.
Preventing rise of ISIS is likely to entail securing support of the region's Arabs and tribes more than that of the Kurds. This Kurd/Arab issue is yet another reason why President Trump's idea of
"securing" the oil for the benefit of the Kurds just doesn't make sense nearly on every level
.
Trump
is
securing
the
oil
not
for
the
Kurds
or
anything
in
the
middle
east-
his
doing
it
as
a response
to
the
media
backlash
he
received
when
he
announced
he's
abandoning
the
Kurds.
this is nonsense. thinking of the kurds and their interests is the absolutely last thing on trump`s mind: what counts for trump is how he is viewed by his voter base, no more, no less.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas
drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about
Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge
Trump at first threw down the gauntlet to the spies and proclaimed his autocratic
prerogative when God held off the rain for his inauguration (!) but now he would gladly get
on his knees between Gina Haspel's legs if the CIA would only help him stay in power.
What distinguishes Obama from other presidents is the degree to which he was manufactured.
He made it to the WH without much of a political base. Control of the political context,
media and process, launched Obama to the top. It was fulfillment of the liberal American
dream. It was a great coup. Talk about the "deep state"! It's staring us all in the face.
"... "What they did was treasonous, OK? It was treasonous," he told author Doug Wead for his upcoming book, " Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency." ..."
President Trump has ratcheted up his claim that the Obama White House spied on his 2016 campaign, charging in a new book that
it was a "treasonous" act by the former Democratic president.
"The interesting thing out of all of this is that we caught them spying on the election. They were spying on my campaign. So you
know? What is that all about?" said Trump.
"I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying," said Trump who then added, "Obama."
In 2017, Trump tweeted that he felt the Obama White House "had my wires tapped" in Trump Tower. He later said he didn't mean it
literally but that he felt his campaign was being spied on.
Attorney General William Barr earlier this year said he was looking into whether "improper surveillance" may have occurred in
2016.
He has tasked a prosecutor to look into Obama officials and other officials who sparked the Russia collusion investigation into
Trump after a report showed no collusion. New reports on that investigation described it as "criminal" in nature.
"It turned out I was right. By the way," Trump told Wead in excerpts provided to Secrets.
"In fact, what I said was peanuts compared to what they did. They were spying on my campaign. They got caught and they said,
'Oh we were not spying. It was actually an investigation.' Can you imagine an administration investigating its political opponents?"
said the president.
In the book, Trump said that the Russia investigation undercut his presidency.
" Anybody else would be unable to function under the kind of pressure and distraction I had. They couldn't get anything done.
No other president should ever have to go through this. But understand, there was no collusion. They would have had to make something
up," he said.
Technically, it was sedition, unless Trump can show that Obama was acting for a foreign power. There definitely were foreign
powers involved, the question is who was in charge?
The attempt to circumvent democracy and ensure Hillary's victory in the elections with falsified Russian collusion allegations
along with a constant communist media bombardment to discredit Trump, absolutely constitutes treason. What you need to understand
is that socialist progressives serve a different god - lucifer - and a different nation - Israel; that they do not have your best
interests at heart is a given.
Everything they do is to undermine traditional morality and the moral fabric that holds civilization together. Ordo Ab Cao.
Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch have published formerly classified
documents from the U.S. Department of Defence which reveals the agencies earlier views on
ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they
should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Levantreport.com reports:
Astoundingly, the newly declassified report states that for "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND
TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A
DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS
IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN
REGIME ".
The DIA report, formerly classified "SECRET//NOFORN" and dated August 12, 2012, was
circulated widely among various government agencies, including CENTCOM, the CIA, FBI, DHS,
NGA, State Dept., and many others.
The document shows that as early as 2012, U.S. intelligence predicted the rise of the
Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the
group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a U.S. strategic asset.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch published more than 100 pages of formerly classified
documents from the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department.
The documents obtained through a federal lawsuit, revealed the agencies earlier views on
ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they
should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
The U.S. intelligence documents not only confirms suspicions that the United States and
some of its coalition allies had actually facilitated the rise of the ISIS in Syria –
as a counterweight to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad- but also that ISIS
members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency
at facilities in Jordan in 2012.
The USA is a real leader in technology and arm production. This is the country that created
PC, Internet and smartphones, which changed the world. So technical supremacy paves the way to
imperial behaviour.
CIA is one of the most powerful tools of the empire, the force that is instrumental in
peeking the USA on globalist path now (looks at Russiagate) .
The path of U.S.-Israeli arrogance and domination, with its various dimensions, and with
its direct and indirect extensions and alliances, which is witnessing military defeats and
political failures, reflected successive defeats for the American strategies and plans, one
after the other. All this has led [the U.S.] to a state of indecision, retreat, and inability
to control the progress of events in our Arab and Islamic world. There is a broader
international context for this – a context that, in its turn, helps to expose the
American crisis, and the decline of the [U.S.] unipolar hegemony, in the face of pluralism,
the characteristics of which are yet to be stabilized.
"The crisis of the arrogant world order is deepened by the collapse of U.S. and
international stock markets, and by the confusion and powerlessness of the American economy.
This reflects the height of the structural crisis of the model of capitalist arrogance.
Therefore, it can be said that we are in the midst of historic transformations that foretell
the retreat of the USA as a hegemonic power, the disintegration of the unipolar hegemonic
order, and the beginning of the accelerated historic decline of the Zionist entity.
After World War II, the U.S. has adopted the leading, central hegemonic project. At its
hands, this project has witnessed great development of the means of control and unprecedented
subjugation. It has benefited from an accumulation of multi-faceted accomplishments in
science, culture, technology, knowledge, economy, and the military, which was supported by an
economic political plan that views the world as nothing but open markets subject to the laws
of [the U.S.].
"The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic
of hegemony in particular, is their basic belief that they own the world, and have the right
to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields. Thus, the Western, and especially
American, expansionist strategy, when coupled with the enterprise of capitalist economy, has
become a strategy of a global nature, whose covetous desires and appetite know no bounds.
The barbaric capitalism has turned globalism into a means to spread disintegration, to sow
discord, to destroy identities, and to impose the most dangerous form of cultural, economic,
and social plunder. Globalization reached its most dangerous phase, when it was transformed
into military globalization by the owners of the Western hegemony enterprise, the greatest
manifestation of which was evident in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to
Palestine, and to Lebanon.
There is no doubt that American terrorism is the source of all terrorism in the world. The
Bush administration has turned the U.S. into a danger threatening the whole world, on all
levels. If a global opinion poll were held today, the United States would emerge as the most
hated country in the world.
The most important goal of American arrogance is to take control of the peoples
politically, economically, and culturally, and to plunder their resources.
Rachel Maddow's trademark pouty-face got a workout as she strained to imagine " what the
thing is that Durham might be looking into." Yes, that's a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside
an enigma, all right with a sputtering fuse sticking out of it.
... ... ...
Over in the locked ward of CNN, Andy Cooper and Jeff Toobin attempted to digest the criminal
investigation news as if someone had ordered in a platter of shit sandwiches for the green room
just before air-time. Toobin pretended to not know exactly who the mysterious Joseph Misfud
was, and struggled to even pronounce his name
... ... ...
As for impeachment, ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff is surely steaming straight into his own
historic Joe McCarthy moment when somebody of incontestable standing denounces him as a fraud
and a scoundrel and the mysterious workings of nonlinear behavior tips the political mob past a
criticality threshold, shifting the weight of consensus out of darkness and madness. It has
happened before in history.
"... Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. ..."
"... No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care. ..."
"... The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services. ..."
"... After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered. ..."
"... The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria. ..."
"... This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria. ..."
"... We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements. ..."
"... Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton. ..."
"... The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.). ..."
"... Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless. ..."
"... Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing. ..."
"... Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11. ..."
"... I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests ..."
"... It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East. ..."
"... Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ..."
"... They've re-started the Cold War. Keeps all the warmongers in business. Surely they're not stupid enough to want a hot one are they? ..."
"... It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold. ..."
"... "Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them." ..."
There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump's decision
to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to defend Trump's actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure
of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger
picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the
paper writes
that "it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East".
Hang on a minute! Let's pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the
last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the
Middle East. And I'm not even referring to the mountains
of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington,
in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to
the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance
at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State
– and they didn't care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don't have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don't even have to
be concerned that these so-called "humanitarian" wars violated each state's integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined
in international law as "the supreme war crime".
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states
with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
, these haven't so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied
in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called "Washington consensus" since 9/11.
The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school's Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein's book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction,
the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable
population that would be ripe for a US-controlled "colour revolution".
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as
new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about
building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of
dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted
– from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning
from past errors. As Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the "reality-based
community": "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality."
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these
societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they
were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest
public health services.
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to
prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture
I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create
a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be
found and that served as the pretext for Bush's campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing,
flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in
the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even
more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always
abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis
saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned
state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before
their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building
their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that
in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the
moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through
Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of
thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became
instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly
only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East,
one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they
are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was
inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with
money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival
of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists' state-building project
is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its
Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in
northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds
too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army,
which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds' predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad's protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best
hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army's return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those
deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly
became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western
military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi's purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump's Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is
really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama
spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against
the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership's bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to
silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party's only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political
realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues
to bestow on them.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
The problem largely traces back to simple mistakes by prior Saudi administrations.
The Wahhabi were a threat to the royal family. So, the royal family funded them to go elsewhere. Given the craziness of Wahhabism
that made sense at the time. Crazy usually dies out. However, in this case the Crazy came with enough money in hand to establish
credibility. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a direct result of these exported extremism.
ISIS is the result of a schism inside the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. A "direct action" group wanted an even more extreme
and immediate solution and broke away.
-- Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability. Violent, ultra-extreme
ISIS fanatics would not follow the commands of infidel heretics. The Saudi royal family by this point realized that the Muslim
Brotherhood was a threat to them just like the original Wahhabi, but they had no good way to undo their prior mistake.
-- Did Turkey attempt to use ISIS to weaken Syria and Iraq? This is far more probable. Turkey's AK party is also a schismatic
offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, there is a great deal of opportunity for the two troops to find common cause. The New
Ottoman Empire needs to absorb Syrian and Iraqi land, so undermining those governments would be step #1.
One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the
problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving
the Craziness. There is no "plug to pull".
The wild savage dogs of ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of Islamic fundamentalism and their rise and violence should be attributed to
the liberal interventionism that has proven to be a disaster not only for the region but those who carried out the intervention.
"One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution.
If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside
forces driving the Craziness. There is no 'plug to pull'".
Absolute nonsense. And what do you mean by "outside forces." The US and Israel count as outside forces but Turkey does not?
Forces outside of what?
ISIS emerged out of ISI, Zarqawi's Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate, for a while, of AQ. The US invasion of Iraq created
the political and military space in Iraq for transnational terror groups.
Meanwhile, the US, at Israel's instigation, had been working to weaken Assad in Syria. After the rebellion against him in 2011,
the US, along with Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, Israel and others, began to support various jihadi groups inside Syria with the goal
of eliminating the Assad government, each for his own reasons. Syria began lost control of its border with Iraq and much of eastern
Syria and the Euphrates valley as well. This process allowed ISIS to emerge from an ISI under stress during the so-called "surge"
in 2007-10 and establish itself in Syria. In 2014, ISIS, now a powerful well-armed group went back into Iraq to defeat the incompetent
and unmotivated Iraq Security Forces that the US had established.
While the US moved against ISIS in Iraq after 2014, it left ISIS in Syria alone since it was depriving Assad of control over
most of Syria's oil and much of its arable land.
And yes, of course the US, instigated by Israel, didn't "deploy" ISIS in the sense of directing its operations. But they left
ISIS largely unimpeded to play a role in the overthrow of Assad which was always the primary goal. ISIS, it was thought, could
be dealt with later after Assad was gone.
That plan would probably have worked eventually, but the Russians entered the picture in the second half of 2015 and changed
the situation.
The US had been nominally supporting the usual "freedom fighters" but in effect supplying the more competent and vicious jihadis
who could take the TOW missiles and other weapons the US was providing to the approved sad-sacks and make more effective use of
them. Finally, with Russia and Iran facilitating the roll-back of all the jihadis, and the US threatened with being relegated
to the sidelines, Obama jumped on the SDF (Kurdish) bandwagon and actually started doing what the US had not done previously:
Taking serious action against ISIS so that a Russian/Iranian-backed Syrian reconquest of eastern Syria could be pre-empted.
And of course, the biggest supporter of the Kurds has consistently been Israel, who sees the possibility of creating pro-Israel
statelets or at least enclaves in the midst of a Turkish, Iranian and Arab region that detests the Judenreich.
So in order to eliminate another of Israel's enemies, reduce a unified Syrian state to a handful of even more impotent emirates
and ensure that Bibi would not be pestered with legal questions over the seizure and retention of the Golan, Syria was laid waste
under the guise of "promoting democracy" and then further devastated under the guise of combatting ISIS.
We have done more than enough damage at the behest of Israel and its fifth column in the US. ISIS might well have emerged regardless
of US actions, but it was the Jew-induced insanity of US regime-change/COIN policies that created the geographical, political
and military space in Iraq and Syria for the jihadists and the ensuing physical destruction of so much of those countries.
The best solution would be to facilitate the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty over all of Syria. But instead of doing
that, Trump has instead facilitated the entry of Turkish forces and allied jihadis in an attempt to mend fences with a thoroughly
alienated Erdogan. We'll see if Putin can mitigate the brutal incompetence of Israel-infected US policy.
@A123 For fuck's sake. Is there any way to stop Hasbara agents from effectively using software to get consistent first posts
on this site?
Their mere presence is annoying. Whatever they have to say, on any topic and no matter what it is, no one here wants to read
it because they are not beginning with any credibility whatsoever. As they are are religiously-avowed enemies of the West (who
they hold to be the continuation of Rome) and the demonstrated fervent enemies of non-Jewish Whites.
Given the craziness of Wahhabism
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
A very real but completely unadvertised reality of these regime changes was that the publicly owned central bank of the country
– Iraq and Libya – was eliminated and changed to a private central bank. Iraq and Libya both succumbed and Ron Paul related that
the smoke had barely cleared in Libya before the private central bank charter was drafted and implemented. Syria and Iran are
the last two countries that do not have a private central banks. Hence the drive by the neo-cons to destroy those countries and
fully implement the New World (banking) Order.
Not widely discussed but (I think) vitally important to understanding foreign policy.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring
they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
I love the second para. Getting slapped with a red herring with hope that the salt water blinds us .
My only gripe with Jonathan Cook is that this and all mid-eastern conflicts are engineered by the dual citizens and Israel
isn't called out by him as the chief instigator. The saudis are slave of the west and amount to nothing.
@A123 " Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability"
Perhaps. Except that it did happen in plain daylight, before our eyes, but we should, of course, trust your "reasonability" --
instead of our own lying eyes.
@A123 US President Donald Trump said Monday that a small number of US troops remain in Syria at the request of Israel and
Jordan, with some positioned near the borders with Jordan and Israel and others deployed to secure oil fields.
"The other region where we've been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section
of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel," Trump said when asked whether he would leave soldiers in Syria. "So we have a small
group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there's no reason for it, in our opinion."
Times of Israel
and J Post 21st oct
It 's all about Israel and for its "royal patsy when not for royal patsy it's for the cannon fodder/ foot solder of Israel.
This mayhem from 2003 hasn't seen the full effects of the blow-back yet .Just starting . Tulsi Gabbard and Trump have knowingly
and sometime unknowingly have told the master that the king never had any clothes even when the king was talking about the decency
of having clothes on .
"The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region."-
This sums up everything one want to know about certain human clones and the impact of the clones on the humanity.
Who will ever blame the victims for creating a future Hitler among them ?
We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain
and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements.
Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with
Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally
better than Hitlery Clinton.
Lock them all up, regardless of party affiliation.
Many interesting points here, and I agree with a lot of them. But:
[MORE]
"Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate
change led to repeated crop failures?"
Syria did run out of water, and it's hard not to see that as a major driver of the chaos that unfolded. But Syria didn't run
out of water because of "climate change," that's false.
The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made
the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See "Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba'thist Syria (Demographic
Developments and Socioeconomics)", by Onn Winkler).
The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which
point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical
care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.).
Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year
there were record rainfalls. If Syria's population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored
in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there
is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart.
Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically
as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell
as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.
simple and straightforward journalism that cuts through the "corporate veil." Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination,
but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and
later senators who become lobbyists are doing.
I also feel for our veterans who are indoctrinated to protect freedom, but in the end, when they come home injured and disabled,
or even dead, it was all for naught.
I find some of the rhetoric in this piece irritating and repetitive -- but the analysis is essentially correct.
We created a power vacuum that was almost certain to give rise to something like ISIS.
Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist
attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to
happen to Israel since 9/11.
"The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". "
That's a poorly written statement. It reads as though Trump was the one having a meltdown. How about: "House Speaker Pelosi's
meltdown during a meeting with Trump." ?
@MarathonMan That is a fact that should be kept foremost in the discussions of "why regime change is necessary". It is the
most basic and obvious reason for all this war in the ME.
"First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like
it – was inevitably going to fill."
Not quite accurate. The US Government "sowed the seeds of" ISIS by giving them material support before the vacuum was created.
IS is mainly a creature of empire, including the US and older remnants of empire in the UK and Europe which survives mainly in
the existence of (international) banks.
@Christian truth Project "Tulsi is/was a member of the CFR". Aren't all Congressmen members? Doesn't that come with signing
the AIPAC form, getting the secret decoder ring from Adam Schiff, and the free trip to Israel? (maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib
"don't measure up?")
I believe CFR was the organization Biden was regaling with his story of holding up $one billion in Ukrainian
aid unless the Ukrainians fired the investigator of his son Hunter "who did nothing wrong". Can you imagine if Biden had been
President rather than VP? This would have been a scandal!
@A123 One does not need outside actors, but then there would be a lot of 'dark matter' in the history of the ME over the last
100 years. Personally it's plain state terrorism to me, and the Brits have a good definition!
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/part/I
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about
Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power
Correction: They only care about the maintenance and expansion of Israeli power.
I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis.
Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests, and when it once did so by accident, it apologized to Israel. The destruction
of Syria is part of Israel's notorious Oded Yinon plan, according to which all states in Israel's neighborhood need to be fragmentized.
In Iraq and Libya that was a success, in Syria, thanks to Iran, Hizbollah and Russia, it failed. The US is simply a puppet for
Israel's foreign policy, but nobody in the US, not even Tulsi Gabbard, dares to say so.
@A123 Sorry Bibi, but your beloved Israel played a BIG part in establishing ISIS, then supporting it with shekels, medical
care for their wounded, training and weapons.
WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006
Cables reveal that before the beginning of the Syrian revolt and civil war, the United States hoped to overthrow Assad and
create strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Let's not forget that when the term ISIS first came out, the Tel Aviv war mongers realized it stood for Israeli Secret Intelligence
Services and changed that to ISIL, which their adoring MSM gladly obliged by parroting that change.
From the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag to the destruction of Syria, there's one common factor, Israel and her American
Jew sayanim who keep pushing America into forever wars so Israel can finish off the Palestinians and steal more land.
Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in
Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about
chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor
a preordained conclusion.
We have learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts
to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments
-- a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring
the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports.
Fixed "report" of OPCW was necessary to maintain anti-Assad narrative which is now unchallenged even by Gabbard (not to mention
the weak sheep-dog Sanders).
The US does not have to directly support the jihadists. It just has to manage the chaos, for whatever be
the action on the ground and whoever is killed or not killed, as long as there is chaos within their chosen sandbox, the chaos
masters in Israel wins and that is all that counts with all too many Americans. It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans
or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and
evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East.
But fortunately the Russians have turned things around.
Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ME is also about "fragmenting"
neighboring countries so Israel can expand. Yinon Plan.
Oct 18, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard responds to Hillary Clinton: Clinton "knows she can't control me"
Hillary Clinton implied Russians are "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to disrupt the election, a
charge which Gabbard denies. In a live interview with CBSN, Gabbard responds to Clinton's claims and says she will not run as
a third-party candidate.
@TG Excellent post. You bring up 2 very important but rarely discussed issues.
Demographics: Population is one of the most easily predictable developments within a country, and you'd think it might be one
of the most publically-discussed, and therefore, best-managed. Au contraire. Assad wasn't the only one who stood on the tracks
watching the headlights approach:
1. The EU is having problems with an aging native population because it earlier encouraged low birth rates, and is now promoting
mass immigration of rapidly-breeding immigrants who threaten to at least overwhelm if not overrun European society. Yet, as Douglas
Murray points out in his book The Strange Death of Europe, openly talking about this problem has been, and still is, verboten.
2. China is now wondering to do with its preponderance of young men, caused very predictably by the Communist Party's one-child
policy.
Climate:
If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back
a few years, at most.
The Syrian case you cite shows how even relatively minor climate changes can carry events past a tipping point. I do agree
with you that effects of APGW on climactic conditions are greatly exaggerated, yet changes in climate, for good or ill, have often
triggered much larger historical events. The cooling that caused a famine and that preceded the Justinian Plague weakened European
and Sassanian civilizations. These misfortunes paved the way for the Islamic takeover that followed. Contrariwise, Norse exploration
and the Renaissance, to give 2 examples of increasing activity, both occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.
It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing
their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold.
"Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and
influence it continues to bestow on them."
FTFY
Just as the GOP is precisely and thoroughly corrupt in exactly the same way, focused exclusively on their own craven self-interest,
the country be damned.
@Anonymous Jimmah was the last honest man in American politics. But since he told Americans that gas was going to cost more,
that perhaps they needed to drive a wee bit less, the Americans hated him. They didn't like the "malaise" of having to pay for
their lifestyle.
As for the Israelis, what did Jimmah not to do for them : Got Egypt out of the Arab alliance, arranged the annual tribute to
Israel, started the ball rolling on the Holocaust religion, paid off Egypt and Jordan to stay away from any alliance against the
Israelis. But what did he get in return; branded as anti-Semite merely for mentioning that the Palestinians had rights, were human
beings too. With the Zionist Jews, one is always on probation. No point playing their silly games.
Rachel Maddow's trademark pouty-face got a workout as she strained to imagine " what the
thing is that Durham might be looking into." Yes, that's a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside
an enigma, all right with a sputtering fuse sticking out of it.
... ... ...
Over in the locked ward of CNN, Andy Cooper and Jeff Toobin attempted to digest the criminal
investigation news as if someone had ordered in a platter of shit sandwiches for the green room
just before air-time. Toobin pretended to not know exactly who the mysterious Joseph Misfud
was, and struggled to even pronounce his name
... ... ...
As for impeachment, ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff is surely steaming straight into his own
historic Joe McCarthy moment when somebody of incontestable standing denounces him as a fraud
and a scoundrel and the mysterious workings of nonlinear behavior tips the political mob past a
criticality threshold, shifting the weight of consensus out of darkness and madness. It has
happened before in history.
"... Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. ..."
"... No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care. ..."
"... The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services. ..."
"... After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered. ..."
"... The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria. ..."
"... This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria. ..."
"... We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements. ..."
"... Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton. ..."
"... The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.). ..."
"... Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless. ..."
"... Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing. ..."
"... Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11. ..."
"... I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests ..."
There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump's decision
to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to defend Trump's actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure
of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger
picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the
paper writes
that "it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East".
Hang on a minute! Let's pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the
last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the
Middle East. And I'm not even referring to the mountains
of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington,
in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to
the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance
at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State
– and they didn't care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don't have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don't even have to
be concerned that these so-called "humanitarian" wars violated each state's integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined
in international law as "the supreme war crime".
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states
with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
, these haven't so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied
in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called "Washington consensus" since 9/11.
The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school's Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein's book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction,
the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable
population that would be ripe for a US-controlled "colour revolution".
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as
new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about
building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of
dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted
– from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning
from past errors. As Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the "reality-based
community": "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality."
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these
societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they
were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest
public health services.
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to
prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture
I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create
a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be
found and that served as the pretext for Bush's campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing,
flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in
the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even
more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always
abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis
saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned
state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before
their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building
their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that
in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the
moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through
Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of
thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became
instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly
only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East,
one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they
are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was
inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with
money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival
of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists' state-building project
is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its
Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in
northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds
too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army,
which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds' predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad's protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best
hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army's return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those
deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly
became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western
military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi's purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump's Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is
really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama
spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against
the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership's bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to
silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party's only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political
realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues
to bestow on them.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
The problem largely traces back to simple mistakes by prior Saudi administrations.
The Wahhabi were a threat to the royal family. So, the royal family funded them to go elsewhere. Given the craziness of Wahhabism
that made sense at the time. Crazy usually dies out. However, in this case the Crazy came with enough money in hand to establish
credibility. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a direct result of these exported extremism.
ISIS is the result of a schism inside the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. A "direct action" group wanted an even more extreme
and immediate solution and broke away.
-- Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability. Violent, ultra-extreme
ISIS fanatics would not follow the commands of infidel heretics. The Saudi royal family by this point realized that the Muslim
Brotherhood was a threat to them just like the original Wahhabi, but they had no good way to undo their prior mistake.
-- Did Turkey attempt to use ISIS to weaken Syria and Iraq? This is far more probable. Turkey's AK party is also a schismatic
offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, there is a great deal of opportunity for the two troops to find common cause. The New
Ottoman Empire needs to absorb Syrian and Iraqi land, so undermining those governments would be step #1.
One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the
problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving
the Craziness. There is no "plug to pull".
The wild savage dogs of ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of Islamic fundamentalism and their rise and violence should be attributed to
the liberal interventionism that has proven to be a disaster not only for the region but those who carried out the intervention.
"One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution.
If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside
forces driving the Craziness. There is no 'plug to pull'".
Absolute nonsense. And what do you mean by "outside forces." The US and Israel count as outside forces but Turkey does not?
Forces outside of what?
ISIS emerged out of ISI, Zarqawi's Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate, for a while, of AQ. The US invasion of Iraq created
the political and military space in Iraq for transnational terror groups.
Meanwhile, the US, at Israel's instigation, had been working to weaken Assad in Syria. After the rebellion against him in 2011,
the US, along with Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, Israel and others, began to support various jihadi groups inside Syria with the goal
of eliminating the Assad government, each for his own reasons. Syria began lost control of its border with Iraq and much of eastern
Syria and the Euphrates valley as well. This process allowed ISIS to emerge from an ISI under stress during the so-called "surge"
in 2007-10 and establish itself in Syria. In 2014, ISIS, now a powerful well-armed group went back into Iraq to defeat the incompetent
and unmotivated Iraq Security Forces that the US had established.
While the US moved against ISIS in Iraq after 2014, it left ISIS in Syria alone since it was depriving Assad of control over
most of Syria's oil and much of its arable land.
And yes, of course the US, instigated by Israel, didn't "deploy" ISIS in the sense of directing its operations. But they left
ISIS largely unimpeded to play a role in the overthrow of Assad which was always the primary goal. ISIS, it was thought, could
be dealt with later after Assad was gone.
That plan would probably have worked eventually, but the Russians entered the picture in the second half of 2015 and changed
the situation.
The US had been nominally supporting the usual "freedom fighters" but in effect supplying the more competent and vicious jihadis
who could take the TOW missiles and other weapons the US was providing to the approved sad-sacks and make more effective use of
them. Finally, with Russia and Iran facilitating the roll-back of all the jihadis, and the US threatened with being relegated
to the sidelines, Obama jumped on the SDF (Kurdish) bandwagon and actually started doing what the US had not done previously:
Taking serious action against ISIS so that a Russian/Iranian-backed Syrian reconquest of eastern Syria could be pre-empted.
And of course, the biggest supporter of the Kurds has consistently been Israel, who sees the possibility of creating pro-Israel
statelets or at least enclaves in the midst of a Turkish, Iranian and Arab region that detests the Judenreich.
So in order to eliminate another of Israel's enemies, reduce a unified Syrian state to a handful of even more impotent emirates
and ensure that Bibi would not be pestered with legal questions over the seizure and retention of the Golan, Syria was laid waste
under the guise of "promoting democracy" and then further devastated under the guise of combatting ISIS.
We have done more than enough damage at the behest of Israel and its fifth column in the US. ISIS might well have emerged regardless
of US actions, but it was the Jew-induced insanity of US regime-change/COIN policies that created the geographical, political
and military space in Iraq and Syria for the jihadists and the ensuing physical destruction of so much of those countries.
The best solution would be to facilitate the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty over all of Syria. But instead of doing
that, Trump has instead facilitated the entry of Turkish forces and allied jihadis in an attempt to mend fences with a thoroughly
alienated Erdogan. We'll see if Putin can mitigate the brutal incompetence of Israel-infected US policy.
@A123 For fuck's sake. Is there any way to stop Hasbara agents from effectively using software to get consistent first posts
on this site?
Their mere presence is annoying. Whatever they have to say, on any topic and no matter what it is, no one here wants to read
it because they are not beginning with any credibility whatsoever. As they are are religiously-avowed enemies of the West (who
they hold to be the continuation of Rome) and the demonstrated fervent enemies of non-Jewish Whites.
Given the craziness of Wahhabism
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
A very real but completely unadvertised reality of these regime changes was that the publicly owned central bank of the country
– Iraq and Libya – was eliminated and changed to a private central bank. Iraq and Libya both succumbed and Ron Paul related that
the smoke had barely cleared in Libya before the private central bank charter was drafted and implemented. Syria and Iran are
the last two countries that do not have a private central banks. Hence the drive by the neo-cons to destroy those countries and
fully implement the New World (banking) Order.
Not widely discussed but (I think) vitally important to understanding foreign policy.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring
they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
I love the second para. Getting slapped with a red herring with hope that the salt water blinds us .
My only gripe with Jonathan Cook is that this and all mid-eastern conflicts are engineered by the dual citizens and Israel
isn't called out by him as the chief instigator. The saudis are slave of the west and amount to nothing.
@A123 " Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability"
Perhaps. Except that it did happen in plain daylight, before our eyes, but we should, of course, trust your "reasonability" --
instead of our own lying eyes.
@A123 US President Donald Trump said Monday that a small number of US troops remain in Syria at the request of Israel and
Jordan, with some positioned near the borders with Jordan and Israel and others deployed to secure oil fields.
"The other region where we've been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section
of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel," Trump said when asked whether he would leave soldiers in Syria. "So we have a small
group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there's no reason for it, in our opinion."
Times of Israel
and J Post 21st oct
It 's all about Israel and for its "royal patsy when not for royal patsy it's for the cannon fodder/ foot solder of Israel.
This mayhem from 2003 hasn't seen the full effects of the blow-back yet .Just starting . Tulsi Gabbard and Trump have knowingly
and sometime unknowingly have told the master that the king never had any clothes even when the king was talking about the decency
of having clothes on .
"The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region."-
This sums up everything one want to know about certain human clones and the impact of the clones on the humanity.
Who will ever blame the victims for creating a future Hitler among them ?
We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain
and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements.
Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with
Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally
better than Hitlery Clinton.
Lock them all up, regardless of party affiliation.
Many interesting points here, and I agree with a lot of them. But:
[MORE]
"Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate
change led to repeated crop failures?"
Syria did run out of water, and it's hard not to see that as a major driver of the chaos that unfolded. But Syria didn't run
out of water because of "climate change," that's false.
The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made
the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See "Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba'thist Syria (Demographic
Developments and Socioeconomics)", by Onn Winkler).
The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which
point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical
care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.).
Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year
there were record rainfalls. If Syria's population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored
in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there
is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart.
Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically
as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell
as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.
simple and straightforward journalism that cuts through the "corporate veil." Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination,
but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and
later senators who become lobbyists are doing.
I also feel for our veterans who are indoctrinated to protect freedom, but in the end, when they come home injured and disabled,
or even dead, it was all for naught.
I find some of the rhetoric in this piece irritating and repetitive -- but the analysis is essentially correct.
We created a power vacuum that was almost certain to give rise to something like ISIS.
Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist
attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to
happen to Israel since 9/11.
"The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". "
That's a poorly written statement. It reads as though Trump was the one having a meltdown. How about: "House Speaker Pelosi's
meltdown during a meeting with Trump." ?
@MarathonMan That is a fact that should be kept foremost in the discussions of "why regime change is necessary". It is the
most basic and obvious reason for all this war in the ME.
"First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like
it – was inevitably going to fill."
Not quite accurate. The US Government "sowed the seeds of" ISIS by giving them material support before the vacuum was created.
IS is mainly a creature of empire, including the US and older remnants of empire in the UK and Europe which survives mainly in
the existence of (international) banks.
@Christian truth Project "Tulsi is/was a member of the CFR". Aren't all Congressmen members? Doesn't that come with signing
the AIPAC form, getting the secret decoder ring from Adam Schiff, and the free trip to Israel? (maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib
"don't measure up?")
I believe CFR was the organization Biden was regaling with his story of holding up $one billion in Ukrainian
aid unless the Ukrainians fired the investigator of his son Hunter "who did nothing wrong". Can you imagine if Biden had been
President rather than VP? This would have been a scandal!
@A123 One does not need outside actors, but then there would be a lot of 'dark matter' in the history of the ME over the last
100 years. Personally it's plain state terrorism to me, and the Brits have a good definition!
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/part/I
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about
Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power
Correction: They only care about the maintenance and expansion of Israeli power.
I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis.
Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests, and when it once did so by accident, it apologized to Israel. The destruction
of Syria is part of Israel's notorious Oded Yinon plan, according to which all states in Israel's neighborhood need to be fragmentized.
In Iraq and Libya that was a success, in Syria, thanks to Iran, Hizbollah and Russia, it failed. The US is simply a puppet for
Israel's foreign policy, but nobody in the US, not even Tulsi Gabbard, dares to say so.
@A123 Sorry Bibi, but your beloved Israel played a BIG part in establishing ISIS, then supporting it with shekels, medical
care for their wounded, training and weapons.
WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006
Cables reveal that before the beginning of the Syrian revolt and civil war, the United States hoped to overthrow Assad and
create strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Let's not forget that when the term ISIS first came out, the Tel Aviv war mongers realized it stood for Israeli Secret Intelligence
Services and changed that to ISIL, which their adoring MSM gladly obliged by parroting that change.
From the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag to the destruction of Syria, there's one common factor, Israel and her American
Jew sayanim who keep pushing America into forever wars so Israel can finish off the Palestinians and steal more land.
@Digital Samizdat Absolutely. Gabbard is the "Democrat" Trump. A Jew puppet presented as an outsider. They're exactly the
same. Even Obama was presented that way to an extent.
Yet the dumb goyim will fall for it for the third time in a row.
Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in
Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about
chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor
a preordained conclusion.
We have learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts
to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments
-- a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring
the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports.
Fixed "report" of OPCW was necessary to maintain anti-Assad narrative which is now unchallenged even by Gabbard (not to mention
the weak sheep-dog Sanders).
@Ilyana_Rozumova The US does not have to directly support the jihadists. It just has to manage the chaos, for whatever be
the action on the ground and whoever is killed or not killed, as long as there is chaos within their chosen sandbox, the chaos
masters in Israel wins and that is all that counts with all too many Americans. It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans
or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and
evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East.
But fortunately the Russians have turned things around.
@MarathonMan Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ME is also about "fragmenting"
neighboring countries so Israel can expand. Yinon Plan.
Oct 18, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard responds to Hillary Clinton: Clinton "knows she can't control me"
Hillary Clinton implied Russians are "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to disrupt the election, a
charge which Gabbard denies. In a live interview with CBSN, Gabbard responds to Clinton's claims and says she will not run as
a third-party candidate.
And now, according to the latest news, Trump will send tanks into Syria to help the Kurds secure the oil for Israel. It's hard
to understand why the Elders of the Deep State want to impeach Trump. He has done everything they wanted, moved the embassy, gave
Syria's Golan Heights to Israel, never criticizes the illegal settlements in Palestine. What else do they want from him?
What do you mean Pelosi has no credibility? Have you checked her bank balance lately? Nancy, had she not waded into politics,
would have been a pole dancer she had the goods for it.
@TG Excellent post. You bring up 2 very important but rarely discussed issues.
Demographics: Population is one of the most easily predictable developments within a country, and you'd think it might be one
of the most publically-discussed, and therefore, best-managed. Au contraire. Assad wasn't the only one who stood on the tracks
watching the headlights approach:
1. The EU is having problems with an aging native population because it earlier encouraged low birth rates, and is now promoting
mass immigration of rapidly-breeding immigrants who threaten to at least overwhelm if not overrun European society. Yet, as Douglas
Murray points out in his book The Strange Death of Europe, openly talking about this problem has been, and still is, verboten.
2. China is now wondering to do with its preponderance of young men, caused very predictably by the Communist Party's one-child
policy.
Climate:
If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back
a few years, at most.
The Syrian case you cite shows how even relatively minor climate changes can carry events past a tipping point. I do agree
with you that effects of APGW on climactic conditions are greatly exaggerated, yet changes in climate, for good or ill, have often
triggered much larger historical events. The cooling that caused a famine and that preceded the Justinian Plague weakened European
and Sassanian civilizations. These misfortunes paved the way for the Islamic takeover that followed. Contrariwise, Norse exploration
and the Renaissance, to give 2 examples of increasing activity, both occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.
When it comes to senior American politihoes, no one is ever right. Pelosi may be cultivating the ISIS, but Gabbard is busy blowing
assorted dictators and more closer to the heart, the hindoo nationalist queers, as impotent (I mean that in a literal sexual context,
as their elites don't marry) as they might be.
Tulsi needs to conduct herself with gravitas, because of her age. However, she is helped by the fact that the leader of the progressive
wing is a former bartender, and the leader of the environmental resistance is a high-school sophomore.
@MarathonMan It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing
their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold.
"Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and
influence it continues to bestow on them."
FTFY
Just as the GOP is precisely and thoroughly corrupt in exactly the same way, focused exclusively on their own craven self-interest,
the country be damned.
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
Lol! Deceitful lies from some godless/pagan whitrash.
If you are referring to some self-perceived notions of barbarity/deception/etc., within Islam, then you are a deceitful !@#
who is trying to cover up the sheer savagery/psychopathy/deception/hypocrisy/etc., of the Christoo whitrash race.
Again, as far as the roots of Islam being in Judaism, that is laughable. It is Christooism which is clearly having roots in
Judaism (there have been so many here who have quoted from your pagan scriptures about the haloed position of the Jooscum)
and Hindooism .
In-his-image mangods/womangods, Trinity/Trimurthi, the human body is the temple of god the list is long where you all share
your pagan theologies.
Islam utterly rejects all such pagan abominations. The following verses of the Holy Quran amply proves the simplest and purest
form of monotheism, that is Islam;
Say, "He is Allah, [who is] One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born , Nor is there to Him
any equivalent ."
@A123 "Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability."
Wrong.
The Oded Yinon Plan employs exactly this strategy, and along with the Neocon dominated State Dept with its Regime Change program
(Oded Yinon plan in stealth mode) is the predicate. Meanwhile, once it emerged, Obama & Kerry sought to preserve ISIS as a means
to pressure Assad. Neocon Zionist fifth column in the US, & Israel-behind-the-scenes are the dual agency-behind-the-curtain of
US regime-change wars ***EVERYWHERE*** (because they hate Russia, too.).
@DESERT FOX And rule, finally, over a smoldering wreck of a planet? They already rule most of it, they're at the Endgame of
their long match with the world. Not that they eschew violence and mass murder. Indeed, they got their start thousands years ago
by worshiping a god who told them to genocide all their neighbors and steal all their goods.
@really no shit I'm in the same age cohort as most of these shameless grifters, so I know the end of this run on earth is
drawing near. I know that no one can take whatever they accumulate in this life with them into oblivion or whatever their imagined
version of paradise might be. The loot stays here in this vale of tears.
ALL of these players busy ruining and ending lives, like Pelosi, the Clintons and the Bush family, are multi-millionaires at
the least–and all on the taxpayers' dime. Why do they desperately seek to add ever more cash to their bank accounts by bringing
yet more misery into the world? It won't be very long and either the collection of psychopaths known as the government of the
United States and its ruthless war machine will end up with the proceeds or they will pass down to further generations of these
congenital parasites and deadbeats.
Does Joe ask himself whether it was worthy to spend his wretched life accumulating ill-gotten wealth to pass on to Hunter and
his ilk? Or for Hillary to set up Chelsea and the next generation of Rodham Clinton lampreys? Jimmy Carter seems to have been
the only American president who didn't constantly grasp for money once out of office and the world never heard a peep about Amy
ever again.
[MORE]
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publication, this story has been corrected to clarify that the fighters trained in Jordan became members
of the ISIS after their training.]
JERUSALEM – Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S.
instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting
the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future
campaign in Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria were first vetted for any links to
extremist groups like al-Qaida.
In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in
the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country's northern desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it was not clear whether the Americans
worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan
reportedly focused on use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three months amid U.S. plans to train a total
of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps in the south and the east of Jordan.
Britain's Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British
and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on the German magazine's report. The
French foreign ministry and Britain's foreign and defense ministries also would not comment to Reuters.
Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch have published formerly classified documents from the U.S. Department of Defence
which reveals the agencies earlier views on ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that
they should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Levantreport.com reports:
Astoundingly, the newly declassified report states that for "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION
THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR),
AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME ".
The DIA report, formerly classified "SECRET//NOFORN" and dated August 12, 2012, was circulated widely among various government
agencies, including CENTCOM, the CIA, FBI, DHS, NGA, State Dept., and many others.
The document shows that as early as 2012, U.S. intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a U.S. strategic
asset.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch published more than 100 pages of formerly classified documents from the U.S. Department
of Defense and the State Department.
The documents obtained through a federal lawsuit, revealed the agencies earlier views on ISIS, namely that they were a desirable
presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
The U.S. intelligence documents not only confirms suspicions that the United States and some of its coalition allies had actually
facilitated the rise of the ISIS in Syria – as a counterweight to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad- but also
that ISIS members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency at facilities in Jordan
in 2012.
@Anonymous Jimmah was the last honest man in American politics. But since he told Americans that gas was going to cost more,
that perhaps they needed to drive a wee bit less, the Americans hated him. They didn't like the "malaise" of having to pay for
their lifestyle.
As for the Israelis, what did Jimmah not to do for them : Got Egypt out of the Arab alliance, arranged the annual tribute to
Israel, started the ball rolling on the Holocaust religion, paid off Egypt and Jordan to stay away from any alliance against the
Israelis. But what did he get in return; branded as anti-Semite merely for mentioning that the Palestinians had rights, were human
beings too. With the Zionist Jews, one is always on probation. No point playing their silly games.
The path of U.S.-Israeli arrogance and domination, with its various dimensions, and with its direct and indirect extensions
and alliances, which is witnessing military defeats and political failures, reflected successive defeats for the American strategies
and plans, one after the other. All this has led [the U.S.] to a state of indecision, retreat, and inability to control the progress
of events in our Arab and Islamic world. There is a broader international context for this – a context that, in its turn, helps
to expose the American crisis, and the decline of the [U.S.] unipolar hegemony, in the face of pluralism, the characteristics
of which are yet to be stabilized.
"The crisis of the arrogant world order is deepened by the collapse of U.S. and international stock markets, and by the confusion
and powerlessness of the American economy. This reflects the height of the structural crisis of the model of capitalist arrogance.
Therefore, it can be said that we are in the midst of historic transformations that foretell the retreat of the USA as a hegemonic
power, the disintegration of the unipolar hegemonic order, and the beginning of the accelerated historic decline of the Zionist
entity.
After World War II, the U.S. has adopted the leading, central hegemonic project. At its hands, this project has witnessed great
development of the means of control and unprecedented subjugation. It has benefited from an accumulation of multi-faceted accomplishments
in science, culture, technology, knowledge, economy, and the military, which was supported by an economic political plan that
views the world as nothing but open markets subject to the laws of [the U.S.].
"The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic of hegemony in particular, is their
basic belief that they own the world, and have the right to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields. Thus, the Western,
and especially American, expansionist strategy, when coupled with the enterprise of capitalist economy, has become a strategy
of a global nature, whose covetous desires and appetite know no bounds.
The barbaric capitalism has turned globalism into a means to spread disintegration, to sow discord, to destroy identities,
and to impose the most dangerous form of cultural, economic, and social plunder. Globalization reached its most dangerous phase,
when it was transformed into military globalization by the owners of the Western hegemony enterprise, the greatest manifestation
of which was evident in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to Palestine, and to Lebanon.
There is no doubt that American terrorism is the source of all terrorism in the world. The Bush administration has turned the
U.S. into a danger threatening the whole world, on all levels. If a global opinion poll were held today, the United States would
emerge as the most hated country in the world.
The most important goal of American arrogance is to take control of the peoples politically, economically, and culturally,
and to plunder their resources.
– Hassan Nasrallah December 8, 2009
and Trump IS NOT "pulling out" Will Tulsi? One way to find out. Doesn't look good though, unless shes willing to splinter the
C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, as they say..
Where's the proof that she is CFR member, I see sock puppets parrot this line all the time but offer no proof. Her serving
on the armed & financial services committees and doing a speech for them doesn't make her a member. I'd take her over Trump any
day.
a US-made color revolution seems to be afoot in Bolivia
wendy davis on Thu, 10/24/2019 - 11:50am The pink tide needs to be stemmed for good,
as with VZ, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, and so on; nor can the sole Indigenous President (and a
peasant to boot!) on the planet be allowed to win this election. Note: this a$$hat's threats
came on Oct. 21 , with only a portion of the votes announced! Yeah, we know what the US and its
client states will do; it's all part of the CIA handbook, isn't it? Criminalize the pinko's
'regime', sanction/sanction/sanction and eventually back the West's preferred leader.
The United States threatens "serious consequences" for Bolivia's government before vote
counting has even completed, offering a deceptive and inaccurate version of events
surrounding the Bolivian election.
The " Civic Committee " of Santa Cruz issues an ultimatum to the Election Commission to open
a second round of voting, otherwise they'll " proclaim " their own president. Also order Evo
Morales and his VP to vacate the presidential palace
@ MarkWeisbrot 'The OAS
should either provide evidence in support of its statements questioning the election results,
or publicly retract these statements.'
@ AndeanInfoNet
'President Evo Morales affirms that there should be an audit of the election results to address
fraud accusations in # Bolivia 's national elections. He
asked the opposition to provide evidence of these claims.'
Presidential elections were held on Sunday, Oct. 20. Telesur english described the two
front-runner candidates on
Oct. 17, 2019 :
"A look at Bolivia's opposition candidates provide insight into that question, so too does
examining the current fates of countries like Ecuador and Argentina that threw out progressive
governments to elect neoliberals, which is what Bolivia's right-wing is offering today.
Carlos Mesa , a former head of state himself who presided during the country's neoliberal
past, invited in the United States military to establish bases in Bolivia during his term.
Carlos Mesa's previous term (2003-2005) gives some idea of what lies in store for Bolivians if
he wins. During his watch, poverty and extreme poverty was twice as high as the current rates
-- over two thirds of the population were impoverished. His presidency, which he didn't
complete, came to represent one of the moments at which the country most beholden to the U.S.
government and its institutions.
During his time in power he attempted to push through
a bill that would grant legal immunity to U.S. officials operating in Bolivia , most of
whom were overseeing coca eradication and quelling Campesino protests against the practice.
Mesa's two-year tenure saw not only 'security' affairs outsourced to the U.S., but economic
policies. International institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) directed
economic affairs, exemplified by having their
office inside the building where Bolivia's Central Bank is also housed.
In his infamous resignation speech Mesa railed against
Morales saying his proposal to nationalize natural gas was 'unviable' because the U.S. and the
World Bank "have told us so." [long snip]
"The stakes are incredibly high in this election. One only has to look to Argentina and
Ecuador to see the speed at which progressive social pacts can disintegrate. After opting for
President Mauricio Macri, Argentina is now beholden to the tune of billions of dollars in IMF
loans and all the austerity conditions attached to it. Macri and his IMF pact have produced
runaway inflation, unemployment and poverty, as well as police excessive use of force against
demonstrators who are constantly protesting the effects of the IMF measures. Ecuador, too, is
just now emerging from 12 days of massive police violence and military curfews imposed on
protesters who were forced to the streets to stand against IMF-imposed austerity after
President Lenin Moreno invited the fund back to the Andean nation after a nearly 20-year
absence. Both Macri and Moreno have used remarkably similar rhetoric being employed by the
Bolivian opposition . Both railed against the leftist governments that preceded them,
characterizing them as 'populist' and calling for a reorientation of foreign policy towards the
U.S. and it's institutions and allies.
Ecuador in particular has accelerated attacks on the progressive regional integration
championed by former Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez. Barely completing half a term in power,
Moreno has already triggered the disintegration of UNASUR, the most important Latin American
forum that didn't include the U.S. Add to that the handing over of Julian Assange to British
authorities last April and establishing a U.S. military base in the Galapagos Islands, current
president Moreno, whose approval rating has sunk to 17 percent, seems determined to do away
with the progressive policies of the previous administrations, opting for austerity and U.S.
approval.
Bolivia's extraordinary achievements in lifting the regions poorest country out of
underdevelopment have been achieved only after rejecting neoliberalism and taking back control
of the country's natural resources. One study
illustrates how Bolivia would have lost US $74 billion in revenue were it not for Morales'
widespread nationalization initiatives.
"A coup is underway, carried out by the right-wing with foreign support what are the methods
of this coup attempt?"
Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales gave a press conference early Wednesday morning in
which he warned that a right-wing coup attempt is being carried out so as to stop the full
counting of votes , and annul the result of Sunday's elections if it gives Morales a
first-round victory.
"A coup is underway, carried out by the right-wing with foreign support what are the methods
of this coup attempt? They're not recognizing or waiting for election results, they're burning
down electoral courts , they want to proclaim the second-place candidate as the winner",
Morales told journalists assembled.
Morales pointed to the fact he is in the first place and reiterated his victory. However, he
also stated that "we are just
waiting for the electoral court to report the results, I'm nearly certain that with the vote of
the rural areas that we will win in the first round, even though the preliminary results show
that we've won, but we are respectful and will wait for the official results from the electoral
court. I say to the international press, our triumphs have always been with the rural
vote."
"Anti-government right-wing protests turned violent Monday with numerous violent attacks
took place across the country as preliminary results indicated that leftist President Evo
Morales is on course for a first-round victory. Attacks included the burning down of vote
counting centers and assaulting Indigenous supporters of Morales.
The first such action was in the city of Sucre, an opposition stronghold, where rioters set
fire to the regional electoral authority . Elsewhere in the country, government buildings were
attacked in Tarija, Oruro, the campaign headquarters of Morales' party were vandalized.
In Cochabamba, where Morales is leading the vote, protesters attempted to seize control
of the Campo Ferial, which is the hall in which the votes were being counted .
The president stressed that a key tactic of the right-wing who are plotting a coup is to not
recognize the Indigenous vote, which largely favors Morales." [snip]
To defeat the coup, Morales echoed the call from social movements of the
CONALCAM who yesterday declared a state of emergency and peaceful mobilization to defend
democracy from right-wing violence."
The Guardian's spin on the protests on
Oct. 21, 2019 : Bolivia braces for fresh protests as officials say Evo Morales close to
victory; Protesters set fire to electoral offices in three cities across the country late on
Monday amid fury over allegations of vote-rigging
Supporters of the Bolivian opposition candidate Carlos Mesa of Comunidad Ciudadana party
prepare to burn ballots during a protest in La Paz, Bolivia, on Monday.
"... All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world. ..."
"... That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners," and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security." ..."
"... The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans. That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap. ..."
"... There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism. A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy to our land. ..."
The chaos arising from U.S. interventionism in Syria provides an excellent opportunity to explore the interventionist mind.
Consider the terminology being employed by interventionists: President Trump's actions in Syria have left a "power vacuum," one
that Russia and Iran are now filling. The United States will no longer have "influence" in the region. "Allies" will no longer be
able to trust the U.S. to come to their assistance. Trump's actions have threatened "national security." It is now possible that
ISIS will reformulate and threaten to take over lands and even regimes in the Middle East.
This verbiage is classic empire-speak. It is the language of the interventionist and the imperialist.
Amidst all the interventionist chaos in the Middle East, it is important to keep in mind one critically important fact: None of
it will mean a violent takeover of the U.S. government or an invasion and conquest of the United States. The federal government will
go on. American life will go on. There will be no army of Muslims, terrorists, Syrians, ISISians, Russians, Chinese, drug dealers,
or illegal immigrants coming to get us and take over the reins of the IRS.
Why is that an important point? Because it shows that no matter what happens in Syria or the rest of the Middle East, life will
continue here in the United States. Even if Russia gets to continue controlling Syria, that's not going to result in a conquest of
the United States. The same holds true if ISIS, say, takes over Iraq. Or if Turkey ends up killing lots of Kurds. Or if Syria ends
up protecting the Kurds. Or if Iran continues to be controlled by a theocratic state. Or if the Russians retake control over Ukraine.
It was no different than when North Vietnam ended up winning the Vietnamese civil war. The dominoes did not fall onto the United
States and make America Red. It also makes no difference if Egypt continues to be controlled by a brutal military dictatorship. Or
that Cuba, North Korea, and China are controlled by communist regimes. Or that Russia is controlled by an authoritarian regime. Or
that Myanmar (Burma) is controlled by a totalitarian military regime. America and the federal government will continue standing.
America was founded as a limited government republic, one that did not send its military forces around the world to slay monsters.
That's not to say that bad things didn't happen around the world. Bad things have always happened around the world. Dictatorships.
Famines. Wars. Civil wars. Revolutions. Empires. Torture. Extra-judicial executions. Tyranny. Oppression. The policy of the United
States was that it would not go abroad to fix or clear up those types of things.
All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire,
pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world.
That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners,"
and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security."
That's when U.S. forces began invading and occupying other countries, waging wars of aggression against them, intervening in foreign
wars, revolutions, and civil wars, initiating coups, destroying democratic regimes, establishing an empire of domestic and foreign
military bases, and bombing, shooting, killing, assassinating, spying on, maiming, torturing, kidnapping, injuring, and destroying
people in countries all over the world.
The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans.
That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and
dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck
to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap.
The shift toward empire and interventionism has brought about the destruction of American liberty and privacy here at home. That's
what the assassinations, secret surveillance, torture, and indefinite detentions of American citizens are all about -- to supposedly
protect us from the dangers produced by U.S. imperialism and interventionism abroad. One might call it waging perpetual war for freedom
and peace, both here and abroad.
There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial
complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism.
A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist
foreign policy to our land.
"... The argument the Bolivian right-wing is using is exactly the same the Brazilian one used after the 2014 results: election fraud. The vice-president of the Bolivian Supreme Electoral Court has already renounced in protest after the institution caved in to the pressure and suspended the publication of the results: ..."
"... Evo Morales is much more fragile than Nicolás Maduro -- even though Bolivia's economy has been much better. The key here is that, in Latin America, every period of economic growth is destined to be followed by a period of economic crisis because it's impelled to follow the neoliberal model of development by the USA. The left-wing presidents are then forced to overcome this through straight up government spending in order to at least alleviate extreme poverty that ravages the subcontinent. ..."
"... But the hardest challenge for the socialists in Latin America are its armed forces: after the 1950s, they were turned into American subsidiaries, each one with a military doctrine that focuses on fighting the "internal enemy" (i.e. the socialists). No Latin American military is able to fight a single conventional war, they are essentially glorified militarized police forces. Maduro has the FANB; Morales doesn't have the Bolivian Armed Forces on his side. ..."
"... Meanwhile, neoliberalism rots. Bolsonaro already know his fate: ..."
"... It must be hard to realize, after years of hallucination and messianic complex, that you were just a disposable puppet of the Americans. ..."
"... A Brazilian prefers to suffer in silence than having to risk his life for a greater cause and, since the 1960s, has an inexplicable fascination with the USA and everything American (Bolsonaro ran his campaign openly as the "Brazilian Trump"). ..."
The argument the Bolivian right-wing is using is exactly the same the Brazilian one used after the 2014 results: election
fraud. The vice-president of the Bolivian Supreme Electoral Court has already renounced in protest after the institution caved
in to the pressure and suspended the publication of the results:
Evo Morales is much more fragile than Nicolás Maduro -- even though Bolivia's economy has been much better. The key here
is that, in Latin America, every period of economic growth is destined to be followed by a period of economic crisis because it's
impelled to follow the neoliberal model of development by the USA. The left-wing presidents are then forced to overcome this through
straight up government spending in order to at least alleviate extreme poverty that ravages the subcontinent.
But the hardest challenge for the socialists in Latin America are its armed forces: after the 1950s, they were turned into
American subsidiaries, each one with a military doctrine that focuses on fighting the "internal enemy" (i.e. the socialists).
No Latin American military is able to fight a single conventional war, they are essentially glorified militarized police forces.
Maduro has the FANB; Morales doesn't have the Bolivian Armed Forces on his side.
Let's wait and see how it evolves.
--//--
Meanwhile, neoliberalism rots. Bolsonaro already know his fate:
It must be hard to realize, after years of hallucination and messianic complex, that you were just a disposable puppet
of the Americans.
However, things are not so simple in Brazil: the majority of the Left is reactionary and pacifist; the Brazilian people has
a high tolerance for misery, is very docile and doesn't have a curriculum of violent uprisings or revolutions.
A Brazilian prefers to suffer in silence than having to risk his life for a greater cause and, since the 1960s, has an
inexplicable fascination with the USA and everything American (Bolsonaro ran his campaign openly as the "Brazilian Trump").
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are
just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to
speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important
article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group,
Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported
way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.
This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium,
but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need
to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about
when discussing the Democratic party.
When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be,
"Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."
It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard
as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly
calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever
existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions
with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a
world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.
This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan
member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:
... ... ...
Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately
reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and
pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm
a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These
people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't
even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape
and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of
political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.
This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment;
there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species
within a hair's
breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest,
and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the
life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.
... ... ...
I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My
article about Senator John
McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received
an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from
CNN to
USA Today to the
Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar
talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie
Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted
my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.
This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate
nonsense , showing
where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician,
some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.
This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has
engaged in, and some that
it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look
at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the
first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I
still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.
Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns
at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless
hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are
traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any
kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are
whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around
what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.
-- -- --
I'm a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking
me on Facebook , following me on
Twitter , or throwing some money into my hat on
Patreon .
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his
conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.
Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers
patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of
Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools,
National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Some of the "virtual facts:" ..."
"... The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist and an inevitable and indeed indispensable enemy of the US. Anyone who challenges that certitude is an obvious agent of the Russian government. ..."
"... Iran is the "greatest supporter of terrorism" in the world." ..."
"... The Syrian Arab Government is an abomination on the scale of Nazi Germany and must be destroyed and replaced by God knows what . ..."
"... Saudi Arabia is a deeply friendly state and ally of the US. ..."
"... It is beyond scary to see just how entrenched and powerful Deep State is and how it involves/controls both political parties ..."
"... I doubt there is any magic bullet website or other source of information that would turn people over night. A good start would be encouraging them to read transcripts of various Putin and Lavrov speeches and pressers, also Valdai Club, economic forum ect. ..."
"... The colonel's complaint implicitly assumes that things were not always thus. My adult experience since I saw a war up close has been that the "facts" of our public discourse are always simplified and usually grossly distorted. ..."
"... Not only are the MSM married to a narrative but they feel compelled to attack the few who ever challenge the orthodoxy. For example, 'Tulsi Gabbard met with the war criminal Assad'. ..."
"... It is certainly true that Russia is being demonized in all the MSM I have sampled. A frequent criticism is that Putin, like Assad, and earlier Saddam and Quadaffi, is essentially an illegitimate ruler of his country, ruling through brute force and without the consent of his countrymen. (Thus the WaPo editorials routinely call Putin a "thug", just as they call Assad a "butcher".) ..."
"... Not to defend Trump and his balance sheet mindset with respect to the Saudis, the reality is that both parties and presidents from George H.W to Bill Clinton to W and Obama have treated the Saudi monarchy as our "friend", even when they sponsored the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11. ..."
"... Tony Blair became a wealthy man after his prime ministership on the back of money thrown his way by the Arab sheikhs ..."
Mika B remarked a couple of years ago on the show that she and her sex slave stage in the
early morning that the social media were out of control because it is the job of the MSM to
tell people what to think. The Hillary stated recently that life was better when there were
only three TeeVee news outlets because it was easier to keep things under control. Now? My God!
Any damned fool can propagate unauthorized "facts." What? Who?
Well, pilgrims, the US government (along with our British and Israeli helpmates and masters)
are the preeminent creators and purveyors of the manufactured virtual facts on which we base
our policy. These "facts" are "ginned up" in the well moneyed hidden staff groups of "hidden"
candidates that are devoted to the seizure of power made possible by a deluded electorate.
These "facts" are then propagated and reinforced through relentless IO campaigns run by
executive "bots" in the MSM and in such remarkable and imaginative efforts as the "White
Helmets" film company manned by jihadis and managed by clubby Brits left over from the Days of
The Raj (sob). These "facts" are now so entrenched in the general mind that they can be used to
denounce people like Rep. (major ) Gabbard as traitors because they challenge them.
Some of the "virtual facts:"
The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist and an inevitable and indeed
indispensable enemy of the US. Anyone who challenges that certitude is an obvious agent of
the Russian government.
Iran is the "greatest supporter of terrorism" in the world." Iran is so designated by the
State Department on the annual list of terrorism supporting states which asserts this to be
true on the basis of Iranian support of Lebanese Hizbullah and Palestinian Hamas, calling
them "terrorist" groups rather than anti -Israeli nationalist resistance organizations. This
Zionist inspired propaganda is spread far and wide by neocon "useful idiots" like Maria
Bartiromo and Jesse Watters.
The Syrian Arab Government is an abomination on the scale of Nazi Germany and must be
destroyed and replaced by God knows what ... "They gassed their own people!" Bullshit! There
is no objective evidence for that. There are nothing but propaganda statements by the FUKUS
governments unsupported by any real evidence. The MI-6 funded (with USAID money) Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights (located in a basement in England) as well as the White Helmets
murder/propaganda operation states that the SAG is guilty as charged but independent
investigation says that assertions of SAG guilt are untrue.
Saudi Arabia is a deeply friendly state and ally of the US. How mad an idea is this! This
theocratic, absolute monarchy is a friend of the US? How insane an idea! Trump has a balance
sheet where a soul should be and that is the basis for the belief that MBS and/or his
"country" are our friends. pl
Yes I fully concur. We have gone from fact-based news to faith-based fake news led by the
MSM. I recall at the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, the line was out that British PM
Tony Blair was George W. Bush's "poodle," forgetting entirely that it was the first of the
British "dodgy dossiers" that made the totally discredited claim that Saddam had gotten tons
of yellow cake from Niger. So the British have no military resources but they continue to
maintain the idea that they can manipulate the U.S. and make up for the demise of the old
British empire.
The Steele dossier was the second British "dodgy dossier" that got the ball rolling on
Trump the Russian mole and Putin's "poodle."
So much fraud. But now social media must be patrolled and anyone daring to challenge the
voice of the MSM must be purged by Google, Facebook, Twitter et al.
My question is: When will the machinations of the Big Lie MSM Wurlitzer cross the line and
trigger the backlash that they secretly fear so much? MSM has to destroy Trump by 2020 or
else his "fake news" polemic will stick... because there is no much truth to it. The
messenger may be crude, but he has the bully pulpit to have a real impact.
I await the release, as Larry Johnson pointed out, of the Horowitz IG report on the
origins of the fake Trump-Russia collusion line. Also the pending Barr-Durham larger report
which is zeroing in on John Brennan.
"MSM has to destroy Trump by 2020 or else..."
The MSM are joined by all those folks who were wined, dined, and degraded by Jeffrey Epstein
and Hollywood hero Harvey Weinstein. Nobody seems to care about who Jeffrey abused, or who
enjoyed his island paradise. Harvey, he's about to buy a free ride out of jail. Meanwhile we
jail idiots who "bribe" there kids way into that "elite" institution - UCLA.
an ideal study would no doubt want to look into the Italy-GB-US angle already concerning
the "first dossier", or whatevers. Didn*t that have mediawise an intermediate French
angle?
This is what happens when the deciders believe their own propaganda. The media now says
that a residual force of American troops and contractors will stay behind at the Deir ez-Zor
oil fields and Al-Tanf base near the Jordon border. The media moguls dare not mention that
the real intention is to prevent the Syrian Arab Army from retaking its own territory or that
Turkey is seizing thousands of square miles of Syria. Syrians with Russia, Chinese and
Iranian aid won't quit until Syria is whole again and rebuilt. This means that America
continues its uninvited unwinnable war in the middle of nowhere with no allies for no reason
at all except to do Israel's bidding and to make money for military contractors. The swamp's
regime change campaign failed. The Houthis' Aramco attack shows that the gulf oil supply is
at risk and can be shut down at will. Continuing these endless wars that are clearly against
the best interests of the American people is insane.
It strikes me, as a matter of observable fact, that the Houthi attack had almost no long run
affect on oil production. Everything was back to normal within 10 days. I think that the
attack was allowed to occur for exactly one reason and that was to start a shooting war
between the USA as KSA's great defender and Iran as the horrible nation that has a mild
dislike for Israel.
It failed. So far.
To believe that the 24/7/52 AWACS, Ground radar, Israeli radar, and the overlapping close in
radar coverage of the Saudi oil fields all failed to detect the drones and cruise missiles is
to believe in more miracles than I can handle on a good day. It also means that assets in
other parts of this world covered by these same type of radars are just as vulnerable to
local disaffected groups.
The FUKUS thinks we are all a bunch of brainless sheep to be led by a ring in our noses. The
'Muktar' is clueless regarding our Saudi brethren, he's supposed to administer how the
overlords say he's to administer, nothing more. The CIA administration still has a hard-on
because they blew it regarding Iran and they're still embarrassed about it.
In two days, counting closer to a day and a half will be the sad anniversary (October 23)
where the Israeli government willfully with forethought let our Marines and other service
personnel bunked with them at the barracks in Beirut die needlessly, because Nahum Admoni
wanted U.S. to get our noses bloodied.
Never mind that the Russians lost close to 30 million to the brotherhood of the Operation
Paper Clip, and the Bormann Group that today controls from behind the scenes most of the
World's money thanks to Martin creating over 750 corporations initially to start with, that
has expanded like a Hydra. Any time that truth (Russia is no longer Communist) rears its ugly
head, the Bormann group goes into overdrive to ensure that the big lie perpetuates.
The FUKUS think we're all a bunch of sheep to be led off a cliff, and the propaganda mills
have created the trail right up to the edge of the precipice that the sheep are trotting.
Amen. The landslide of disinformation and bullshit disseminated on a daily basis by a pliant
media is happily lapped up by ignorant, uninformed Americans. I've had quite an exchange with
a liberal friend of mine who was shrieking MSNBC talking points on Syria and the Kurds. Mind
you, this fellow never served a day in the military. Never held a clearance in his life.
Didn't know a thing about JOPES and how Special Ops forces use a series of written orders
signed off on by the CJCS. Yet, he was qualified to criticize Trump. At the same time not one
of his kids or grandkids are signed up to fight on that frontline. I told him politely to
STFU and get educated before trying to comment on something he knows nothing about.
Thanks Colonel.
I am British and did consider the military in my youth but if I were that age now I would
not. Having seen what my political master, and yours, have asked the military to do the
danger of being sent on some counter product regime change mission or to prop-up someone I
would rather fight is just too great. I would only end up refusing to follow orders which I
understand the military takes a rather dim view of.
... regime change mission or to prop-up someone I would rather fight is just too
great.
once upon a time, and strictly I had opted not to believe either side before that, but
yes, at one point I wondered fully aware they may be legitimate complaints, how would the
UCK, or the Kosovo Liberation Army become the "Western" partner in war.
In hindsight I was made aware of this one grandiose British officer ... once upon a
time.
"if I were that age now..." That is the same line used by the American left since the
'60s.
"I would only end up refusing to follow orders..."
Samantha Power at the UN and James Comey at the FBI both had a "higher loyalty" than to the
elected government or the Constitution on which it is based. That's why they are busy trying
to subvert it.
There's a lot of truth there, Colonel. Life would be better with just three TV new outlets,
huh. Which three? Can you imagine being limited to three cable new outlets? Actually most
people probably limit themselves to three news outlets or less. They find an echo chamber and
stick with it. I thank God I don't have cable or satellite TV and I have too many interests
to engage with talk radio.
I couldn't agree more with your characterization of "virtual facts" about Iran, Syria and
Saudi Arabia. I also agree that those who continue to view Russia as an implacable enemy bent
on our destruction and world domination are liars and/or fools. The Soviet Union was just a
phase, a phase now past. Russia never ended. Conversely, those who insist that Russia is a
newly minted nation of glitter farting unicorns incapable of nefarious behavior are also
fools and/or liars. Russia is a formidable competitor, fully capable and willing to take
prudent actions in pursuit of her interests. We should respect her and seek cooperation where
we can and tolerance where we must.
How the never-Trumpers treat Tulsi Gabbard is shameful. What Clinton recently said is mild
compared to what others have been saying for quite some time. Calling Tulsi a Russian asset
is foolishly wrong. That Russia may prefer Tulsi over other potential Presidential candidates
should be seen as a positive thing. A policy of mutual respect, cooperation and tolerance
between our two countries would benefit the entire world.
America needed to restore the Kuwait monarchy for freedom and democracy. Remember defense
Secretary Dick Cheney sending captured Iraq arms to the Taliban.
Same play book was used to run Libyan arms through Bengazi to Wahhabism freedom fighter
"ISIS" and the al Lindsey McCain head choppers.
The nonsense will end since not even the United States can endure these costs. Did you hear
Trump? 8 trillion yankee dollars and nothing to show for it.
What is highly alarming, almost terrifying, is that really well educated people who have
achieved great things in their careers and are pillars of society believe this crap.
I had dinner guests last week; a former Chairman of a bank and his wife who is a highly
acclaimed Professor of public Health and Epidemiology who told me how awful Trump and Putin
are neither of these friends are what you could remotely classify as Social Justice
leftists.
My problem is that I don't know where to start to try and put them right without them
thinking I'm a tinfoil hatted conspiracy nut. I wish there was a website dedicated solely to
purveying basic truthful information that is not perhaps as esoteric as SST. Should I try and
start one or are there already good examples to point to?
I'm thinking this is so far and so deep there is nothing that can or will be done. Trump's
election and presidency has lifted the curtain on the puppet show. This recent Syria troop
removal is Trump's second attempt at openly declaring troops will be pulled out of Syria only
to have the military has said, "Um, no, we will stay and simply relocate."
Trump openly
called for FISA warrants to be declassified only to have the DOJ and FBI either ignore and
defy him. Groups like Judicial Watch and others go into court to get the requested
information through FOIA and DOJ and FBI lawyers and the courts block them.
It is beyond
scary to see just how entrenched and powerful Deep State is and how it involves/controls both
political parties. Trump has faced hurricane winds of opposition from day one and has been
constantly subverted by his own party and his own people. I don't know how he can get up
every day and continue to fight the obvious and concerted Deep State coup against him. I pray
for him. I pray the rosary for him.
There are members within Trump's own party who have agreed that there should be an
investigation into the impeachment of Trump for running a yellow light (at most). Again,
members of his own party. Renowned Constitutional lawyers John Yoo and Alan Dershowitz, from
Cal-Berkeley and Harvard laws schools respectively, have said that not only has Trump done
nothing, even remotely, which could trigger an impeachment inquiry but if Congress were to do
so it would be unconstitutional and illegal. But alas, who would enforce this? Deep State
snakes like John Roberts at the Supreme Court? Robert has already signed off on the coup (
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/john-roberts-mitch-mcconnell-trump-impeachment-trial.amp).
The only thing that separates America from falling into the abyss is Trump, a handful of
people in Washington, a few conservative talk show hosts, and about 40% of America. Many
people have talked a good game at points but I think in the end are just double agents of the
dark side/Deep State (Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, ... IG Horowitz, etc.). And some, such
as Chris Wray, are unabashed dark side/Deep State agents in good standing.
As St. Thomas More said, "The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them."
I have faith in Barr. I have faith in Durham. Two men whose Catholic faith is integral to
every aspect of their lives and work. But with as pervasive, entrenched, and powerful as the
Deep State is I'm skeptical they have the power to do anything. Btw, here's U.S. Attorney
John Durham's lecture before the Thomistic Institute at Yale (hosted by the Dominican Order):
https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/perspective-of-a-catholic-prosecutor-honorable-john-durham
One thing that really amuses me is that the marionettes of Deep State in the media and
politics actually believe that once Trump is gone their puppet show theatre can resume like
nothing happened. Sorry, but there is no coming back from this. They will be lucky if the
worst thing that happens is a sizable part of of the American populace protests by throwing
sand in the gears. I'm afraid it will end much worse.
I doubt there is any magic bullet website or other source of information that would turn
people over night. A good start would be encouraging them to read transcripts of various
Putin and Lavrov speeches and pressers, also Valdai Club, economic forum ect.
Most only get to see the odd sentence or paragragh in western MSM with an entirely
fictional story built around it, so perhaps and MSM piece like that and the transcript of the
relevant presser or speech alongside it.
I suspect the fine detail in Putin and Lavrov's replies to press questions
rather than cliches would surprise many people.
Walrus--100% my experience as well. Many dinners with "liberal" even "progressive" friends,
mostly of the retired kind require great psychic energy. Their Overton Window is 1"-square,
making exchanges very difficult to squeeze even minimal bits of political reality.
My daily
blog tour, like MW's above, takes me through: Moon of Alabama, Naked Capitalism, SST, Caitlin
Johnstone, Grayzone and a few others. I'm intel gathering -- but I need to figure out how to
convey broader perspectives even to my 40-45 year-old children and their friends. Inside the
Beltway assumptions are hard to de-program.
While I agree with the essence of the post I disagree with the characterization of SOHR. It
tends to get its stuff right. I have listed several significant events where SOHR disagreed
with the official narrative: On Sources And Information - The Syrian
Observatory For Human Rights . Those are exactly the moments where SOHR is disregarded by
the pressitude.
It is the selective quoting of such sources that paint them as partisan even as they try
to stay somewhat neutral.
---
@Pat - Any comment to the Gen. McRaven op-ed in the NYT? Our Republic
Is Under Attack From the President If President Trump doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time
for a new person in the Oval Office.
Isn't it a call to mutiny? It seems to me to be far beyond the allowed political comment
from a retired General.
Those that look up the pole, all they see is assholes. Those that look down all they see is
assholes, but those that look straight ahead, they see which path to take.
The colonel's complaint implicitly assumes that things were not always thus. My adult
experience since I saw a war up close has been that the "facts" of our public discourse are
always simplified and usually grossly distorted.
Is the Iranian regime terrible? Well, yes,
but it is also a regime that holds real elections and often loses them. Not in the same
league of awful with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
Similarly with the other examples. The
"facts" have in each case a basis in truth but do not by themselves give a true picture. Is
our discourse more unfair to Russia than it was to Nasser's Egypt? Is our promotion of Saudi
Arabia any worse than our adulation of Chiang Kai-shek?
Not only are the MSM married to a narrative but they feel compelled to attack the few who
ever challenge the orthodoxy. For example, 'Tulsi Gabbard met with the war criminal Assad'.
It would do our vaunted free press wonders if they traveled to Damascus instead of
repeating the same tired talking points about Syria. I'll never forget the look on Gabbard's
face when she talked about the Syrians came up to her and said, 'why are you attacking us,
what did we do to you'. Meeting real people can undo a lifetime of blather and must be
stopped at all cost.
b Perhaps memory fails me but I think SOHR propagated the SAG gas attacks mythology. I have
stated that McRaven should be recalled to active duty and court-martialed. I could find
several punitice articles in UCMJ under which he could be charged.
When McCain returned from the Hanoi Hilton he could have been prosecuted for treason he was
not because "peace with honour" overrode UCMJ and honour. McRaven is being offered up as a
distraction. Call him back to active duty yes, and assign him somewhere dreary, unimportant
and far from CONUS. Ignore the stuff he is blathering while he is retired, if he repeats
blather while on active duty then the navy might be able to recover some honour.
No...your memory does not fail you, Colonel, the SOHR was the main source cited at MSM level
on the alleged protests which gave place to the destruction of Syria and the legitimation and
labelling of alleged "moderate rebels" which then resulted being but terrorist jihadi groups
brought mainly from abroad under financing and mtrainning of non Syrian actors...
The source on the alleged atrocities commited by Assad was SOHR at the first years of the
war on Syria, along with Doctors Without Borders and "special envoys" by British and French
main papers reporting from the former, and first, "Baba Amr" caliphate in Homs....I am
meaning the times of Sunday Times´ Marie Colvin and the other woman from Le
Figaro , who then resulted or KIA or caught amongst the jihadists ranks along with other
foreign "special envoys" who then were released in a truce with Assad through a safe
corridor, especially made for that end, to Lebanon.
I fear SOHR was the source of the super-trolling consisting on inundating the MSM comments
sections, like that of El País , with dozens of vertical doctored photographs
every time any of us aware entered commenting to debunk their fake news.
I remember this since that was the starting point of Elora as net activist...( till then,
just a baby, peacefully growing up...unaware....but had no election, felt it was a duty,
since, as you comment here, so few people aware...Having known Syria few years before she
could not believe what they were telling about Assad, who, eventhough not being perfect, as
it has been long ago proved any other leader in the world is, had managed to show the
visitant a flourishing Syria where misery present at other ME countries was almost
absent...
It is only lately, when the Syrian war was obviously lost for the US coalition, that the
SOHR started contradicting some fake claims by the White Helmets, especially last two alleged
chemical attacks, if Elora´s not wrong.
Why this, why now, why in this form? Probably those powers behind SOHR trying to secure a
part in the cake of reconstruction and future of Syria...since, it got obvious, love for
Syria is not amongst one of their mottos...
Trump approves $4.5 million in aid for Syria's White Helmets
WASHINGTON -- US President Donald Trump has authorized $4.5 million in aid for Syria's
White Helmets group, famed for rescuing wounded civilians from the frontlines in the civil
war, the White House says today...
Thank you for this refuge from the noise. How long before the strangling of information makes
its way here, and to Craig Murray, Naked Capitalism, and others who look on with clear eyes?
Humans are copy/paste artists and generally not very good at creative thinking. When shown a
series of steps to achieve a reward people will repeat all the steps including clearly
unnecessary ones. Monkeys will drop unnecessary steps and frequently show more creativity by
using a different method to achieve the reward instead of copying.
The old story goes how a woman always cut the ends off a roast before putting it in a pan.
When her daughter asks why she doesn't know, asks her mother who doesn't know and asks the
great grandmother who laughs and says her pan was too small.
I suspect it is a functional tradeoff that lets us transfer great amounts of cultural
information and maintain a civilization of sorts. It creates a tough environment for
innovators and allows for easy manipulation of the majority.
Nature of course always has a sprinkling of minority traits in the gene pool to allow for
sudden changes in the environment. Most likely those of us that are more critical thinkers
and like in depth, multi-dimensional viewpoints and historical knowledge are always going to
be standing by watching the crowd do their copy/paste thing.
The rise of the internet giving easy access to more "sources" means more fragmentation in
worldviews than ever before depending on where people copy/paste from.
Re: only three TV channels and they all said the same thing!
Once Upon a Time, not so long ago, publishing news was hard. For one thing, you needed a
printing press, which was big, expensive and required housing and specialized technicians to
operate it. Not only that, but a printing press cost money for every sheet of paper printed,
and you had to spend more money to distribute what he printed.
They say that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" but there's more! Unless
you were already rich and planned to publish as an expensive and time-consuming hobby, you
needed an income stream. You would get some money from subscriptions, but subscriptions are
really a means to sell advertising. Dependence on advertising meant that there were some
people the publisher had to keep happy, and others he could not afford to annoy.
Anyone who knows anything about local news knows this. At best, it's a tightrope walk
between giving subscribers the news they want to know, and not infuriating your advertisers.
The result was a sort of natural censorship. Publishers had to think long and hard before
they published anything that would tork the bigwigs off. The fact that a publisher was tied
to a physical location and physical assets also made libel suits much easier.
The same thing applied to broadcast TV, only more so. It took orders of magnitude more
money, and you were restricted to a limited amount of bandwidth.
The internet changed all that. Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop ($299 cheap at
WallyWorld) and WiFi (free at many businesses) can go into the news publishing business by
nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and an advertising revenue stream, to boot.
Marginal cost of readership is zero.
Needless to say, this development has The People That Matter very concerned, and they are
working hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
For what it's worth, I found the late Udo Ulfkotte's personal-experience book "Bought
Jounalism" to be quite interesting on this topic, as it details the kind of nuts-and-bolts of
print-media prostitution. But I would really like to see an org-chart sometime of the
overlapping, possibly competing, mission control centers (if that's the right phrase) that
control the various "Wurlitzer" messaging and who, ultimately, is on charge of these. It has
been intriguing to watch, since Kerry uttered his "the Internet makes it very hard to govern"
line years ago, the blurry outline of a vast operation to shut down any non-approved media
messages, now including all social media. To give credit where credit is due, "they" sure
have done a bang-up job in feeding bullshit across all platforms down the throats of a
Western people, like a goose being fattened up for foie gras.
"...the US government (along with our British and Israeli helpmates and masters) are the
preeminent creators and purveyors of the manufactured virtual facts on which we base our
policy."
Sir
I've been perplexed for some time what the objectives are of these virtual fact creators?
When one digs into who the movers & shakers are in the virtual fact creation apparatus
then it seems very much analogous to the Jeffrey Epstein orbit. Folks bound together through
the carrot of extraordinary personal gain and the stick of personal destruction. Your
Drinking the Koolaid, is a seminal work in exploring how these virtual facts are created and
how those who challenge the creation are marginalized and even destroyed personally.
IMO, policy making on the basis of virtual facts extends beyond foreign policy to economic
and financial policy as well as healthcare policy in the US. The symptoms are seen in growing
wealth inequality and increased market concentration globally and financial policy completely
unmoored from common sense and sophistry an important element in virtual fact creation.
We're seeing signs of the early breakdown in social cohesion with social unrest in France,
Spain, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador. Brexit and the election of Trump despite the
intensity and vitriolic nature of how the media was used against them. The impeachment of
Trump another tool in the desperate attempt to retain and consolidate power. Maybe we're in
the Fourth Turning as Howe & Strauss label it.
"The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist ..."
In the interest of specificity and accountability, where/who in the MSM are asserting
that?
You (PL) are making a serious charge.
Just who is guilty of perpetrating such a blatant falsehood?
well it seems to me that the groundwork is being laid for an authoritarian state - and it
already has sophisticated tools that are unprecedented in their scope and depth and ability
to store data. And the whole enterprise is based on three rules:
1) secrecy - data is restricted to "insiders";
2) deception - the "outsiders" (you know, the citizens) are regarded as a herd of cattle to
be managed - with lies and disinformation so we don't get any ideas;
3) ruthless enforcement to dehumanize and destroy dissent. Just consider the torture and
destruction of Journalist Julian Assange: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
Not sure what the appropriate response is but I spend a lot of time at my camp working in
the woods. Thanks, Colonel Lang, for maintaining this site.
Keith Harbaugh
This is my opinion. I am uninterested in proving anything to you. If you listen to what is
said on the MSM (including Fox) it is evident that in the "minds" of the media squirrels
Russia is just the USSR in disguise. Try listening to what they are saying as sub-text.
The request was not just for my benefit, but with the thought that it would be useful to
document the occurrences of such clearly false statements in the media.
It is certainly true that Russia is being demonized in all the MSM I have sampled.
A frequent criticism is that Putin, like Assad, and earlier Saddam and Quadaffi,
is essentially an illegitimate ruler of his country,
ruling through brute force and without the consent of his countrymen.
(Thus the WaPo editorials routinely call Putin a "thug",
just as they call Assad a "butcher".)
I am certainly not endorsing that view, just reporting what I hear and read.
When I hear that, I harken back to my graduate school days,
when the same sort of charges were leveled against America, which was usually spelled
"Amerika", or sometimes "AmeriKKKa", and described as a racist, imperialist, fascist country
whose establishment must be "Smashed".
I believe the core group of people who so wanted a revolution in America in 1970
(which they essentially got, as we have seen over the last 50 years)
are much the same as those now demonizing Russia.
Here is some specificity on their complaints against Russia back then:
They were not opposed to the USSR, or communism.
Many of them were in effect communists.
The cry among many was : "Marx, Mao, and Marcuse" (Herbert Marcuse was a former Brandeis professor who extolled cultural Marxism).
What they did have, in spades, was a feeling that their ancestors had been victimized by the
Czarist regime in Russia,
which, among other supposed sins, had not done enough to prevent pogroms against them.
They seemed to have a deep fear of the Russian people,
based on their long experience with them.
My suspicion (actually, belief) is that the opposition to Putin is based on the fact that
he is sometimes viewed as a throwback to the the Czars,
and that is definitely not something looked upon favorably by many Jews.
"Trump has a balance sheet where a soul should be and that is the basis for the belief
that MBS and/or his "country" are our friends."
Not to defend Trump and his balance sheet mindset with respect to the Saudis, the reality
is that both parties and presidents from George H.W to Bill Clinton to W and Obama have
treated the Saudi monarchy as our "friend", even when they sponsored the terrorists that
attacked us on 9/11.
Tony Blair became a wealthy man after his prime ministership on the back of money thrown
his way by the Arab sheikhs.
MIC needs money and that requires foreign wars and hostility with Russia and China. Neoliberalism like Bolshevism if hegemonic social
doctrine which tried to spread itself all over the world. As one commenter suggested Trump made alot of "deals with the devil" in order
to survive and that shows.
In any case he, may be accidentally served, as a "great disruptor" mainly due to his own badly conceived ideas how to reform the
USA foreign policy on the the base of "might make right" principle. That's why he prefer bilateral treaties to multilateral, as it is
easier to bully the other side into submission this way.
Outside his 2016 campaign rhetoric's, he never question the idea of empire, as such. The differences with neocons were not about
goals, but means to achieve them. Since April 2017 he was essentially yet another neocon. He populated his administration with rabid
neocons like Bolton and Pompeo (and before them Haley and "generals")
And he proved to be pretty much the same warmonger as Hillary.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Trump's policies look chaotic. But one big reason for that is that some of his staff, like the 'U.S. official' above, are trying to subvert them. They have tried and still try to cage him in on nearly every issue. ..."
"... I don't believe in the 4D chess theory, this seems more like sheer incompetence to me. Yes, it's preferable to Hillary, but hardly the best of times. ..."
"... The Obama/war party got the US got into a stupid mess, and we have to admire Trump for getting them out, without betraying the monsters in the State department under Obama and the CIA or their Saudi/Israel allies. Indeed if Obama hadn't lead a coup against Erdogan this might not be possible. ..."
"... CNN reported on Trump's Viktor Orban's heresy informing us that Trump was deviating from U.S. foreign policy and you should have seen the smirk plasted on all of their faces. Do they realize that they have been groomed by the CIA like trained seals begging for fish? ..."
"... Even before Trump took office they began to stack his appointments with the same treasonable and corrupt bunch from prior administration. One man cant do everything ..."
"... But more to the point is listening to Trump policy. Libya "We should have taken the oil", Iraq "We should have taken the oil, who knows we may get anther chance", Syria "We should take the oil". ..."
"... Taking the oil is as much Trump policy as ending endless wars. It must be noted that Trump is very specific about which type of wars he does not like. Expensive wars and endless wars are not to his liking. ..."
"... We sadly live in a political era of not 'good guy vs bad guy', but of 'shittier vs shittiest'. Clinton was, and is shit. But so is Trump! The author here naively projects too much of his own hopes or fantasies onto Trump ..."
"... Totally swept aside is the complete asshole domestic policies of Trump: sell off national parks to oil and gas, privatize public schools, drill for oil in Arctic Nat Refuge, gut the EPA, build Israel-like walls along Mexico border, etc not to mention utterly fucking over the Palestinians and giving Israel everything.. ..."
"... In the good old days when the hand did not implement the policies of the regent, the head would usually fall soon after.. ..."
"... Its a shame that these days these criminals the world over get away with it because its 'policy' of the government.. What ever it is.. Thats it.. They usually are moved and promoted into higher posts.. Never are the government employees fired for their malign deeds.. ..."
"... The one who appointed Bolton is obviously not in his right mind and his purpose is immediate war with Iran and further destruction of the entire Middle East. He's called Sheldon Adelson, not Trump. ..."
"... When wondering why Trump chose poorly for his staff you need to forget the nonsense that Trump was the establishment's chosen winner of the elections in 2016. ..."
"... I'm not sure it's all incompetence, though I agree there is plenty of that to go around, which may not always be a bad thing if incompetence allows the Empire do less damage was it keels over. I'm not a fan of Trump, but I think he had to make a whole lot of deals with a whole lot of devils in order to survive, in the political and the literal sense. ..."
Since Donald Trump became president many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies. Instead of implementing Trump's
idea and preferences they have tried to implement their own. Some Have done so because they believed that it is the "right thing
to do" while others have ignored Trump's wishes to play their own game.
A recent example can be found in a Washington Post Ukrainegate
story:
Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly
corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials
said.
...
The efforts to poison Trump’s views toward Zelensky were anticipated by national security officials at the White House, officials
said. But the voices of Putin and Orban took on added significance this year because of the departure or declining influence of
those who had sought to blunt the influence of Putin and other authoritarian leaders over Trump.
... American policy has for years been “built around containing malign Russian influence” in Eastern Europe, a U.S.
official said. Trump’s apparent susceptibility to the arguments he hears from Putin and Orban is “an example of the president
himself under malign influence — being steered by it.”
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly believes that he was elected to change it.
He had stated his opinion on Russia during his campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to
have good relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized the voters.
Trump's policies look chaotic. But one big reason for that is that some of his staff, like the 'U.S. official' above, are trying
to subvert them. They have tried and still try to cage him in on nearly every issue.
When Trump then wields his Twitter
sword and cuts through the subversion by publicly restating his original policies the look from the outside is indeed chaotic. But
it is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his pleasure" are there to implement them.
Instead they have tried (and try) to make their own ones:
White House and State Department officials had sought to block an Orban visit since the start of Trump’s presidency, concerned
that it would legitimize a leader often ostracized in Europe. They also worried about Orban’s influence on the U.S. president.
“Basically, everyone agreed — no Orban meeting,” said a former White House official involved in internal discussions. “We were
against it because [we] knew there was a good chance that Trump and Orban would bond and get along.”
The effort to keep distance between Trump and Orban began to fray earlier this year with the departures of senior officials
and the emergence of new voices around the president. Among the most important was Mulvaney, who became acting chief of staff
in January and was seen as sympathetic to Orban’s hard-right views and skepticism of European institutions.
One "senior official" who tried to sabotage the Orban visit was
Fionna Hill who until recently
served as the Russia analyst at the National Security Council.
One wonders if Mrs. Hill ever read her job description. The people in the NSC do net get hired to implement their own policy preferences.
The task of the National Security Council is to "advise and assist" the president and to "coordinate" his policies within the administration.
That's it.
The same rules apply to the Pentagon and other agencies.
Aaron Stein points out that those aides who disregarding the declared policy of the president
are responsible
for the current chaotic retreat from Syria:
Trump has been clear about his intentions in Syria. As he
told the world in April 2018, after years of fighting foreign wars, in his view it was time for the United States to withdraw
from Syria, passing responsibility for the mission to hold territory taken from the Islamic State to regional states. I was listening,
and wrote in War on
the Rocks that the longer the president’s own staff continued to treat the world’s most powerful man like an infant,
the more likely it became that he would simply order a hasty withdrawal. This chaotic U.S. exit from Syria was obviously
coming, for anyone paying attention to the opinion of the man who matters most in the United States: the president.
...
For over a year, it was obvious Trump wanted to leave Syria and, as I wrote in April 2018, Trump “has made his preferences for
U.S. policy in the Middle East clear” and it was time “for his national security staff to listen to him and to devise a sequential
drawdown policy that fits with the spirit of the president’s demands, but takes deliberate and uncomfortable steps to protect
U.S. interests.” This did not happen.
Rather than plan and begin to implement a coordinated withdrawal, the president’s appointed envoy for Syria and the Department
of Defense worked to ensure Washington could stay, and ignored the reality that Trump would eventually order
an American withdrawal. Such delusions have not served the United States and its friends well.
The lack of planning for the option the commander in chief had already decided on led to the current mess. The Pentagon practically
sabotaged trump's announced policies by continuing to build up bases in Syria and by falsely telling the Kurds that the U.S. would
stay. It should instead have planned and prepared for the announced retreat from the country.
One can clearly see that this current withdrawal was not prepared for, neither politically nor militarily, in any orderly way.
Yesterday the Pentagon said it would pull the troops out of Syria but station them nearby in west Iraq. But no one had asked the
Iraqi government what it though of that idea. The inevitable outcome is that Iraq now
rejects it:
U.S. forces that crossed into Iraq as part of a pull-out from Syria do not have permission to stay and can only be there in transit,
the Iraqi military said on Tuesday.
...
The Iraqi military statement contradicted the Pentagon’s announcement that all of the nearly 1,000 troops withdrawing from northern
Syria are expected to move to western Iraq to continue the campaign against Islamic State militants and “to help defend Iraq”.
“All U.S. forces that withdrew from Syria received approval to enter the Kurdistan Region so that they may be transported outside
Iraq. There is no permission granted for these forces to stay inside Iraq,” the Iraqi military said.
There was also the idea that some 200 soldiers would be left behind in Syria to deny the Syrian government access to its own oil
fields in east Syria. Not only would this be obviously illegal but nobody seems to have given a thought on how the logistics for
such remote unit could be sustained. The oil fields are geographically large and the company strength unit would have to be dispersed
into tiny outposts within a hostile country and resupplied over unsecured roads. To defend them from surprise attacks the U.S. would
need to put combat air patrols above them for every hour of each day.
One hopes that the Pentagon and State Department recognize that the high political and financial costs of such a deployment is
not justified for making a minor political point that will not change the inevitable outcome of the war.
Trump ordered that all U.S. troops leave Syria. An illegal occupation of Syria's oil fields would keep the U.S. in Syria but in
an clearly indefensible position. Whoever came up with or supported that idea needs to be fired.
Here is a sign that the Pentagon has finally recognized that its utter lack of planning for the implementation of Trump's decision
to leave Syria resulted in a bad outcome. It is now
trying to avoid to be (again) be caught with its pants down with regards to Afghanistan:
The Pentagon recently began drawing up plans for an abrupt withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in case President Donald
Trump surprises military leaders by ordering an immediate drawdown as he did in Syria, three current and former defense officials
said.
...
Ending wars like the one in Afghanistan was one of Trump's chief campaign promises in 2016, and administration officials have
privately expressed concern that as the 2020 election approaches, he'll be more likely to follow through with threats of troop
withdrawal, as he did last week in Syria.
Trump has made clear to his advisers that he wants to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the 2020 election, NBC News
reported in August.
Trump made his decision in August but the Pentagon only now reacts to it. That is too slow.
Trump should have been and should be more rigorous with his staff. Those who sabotage his policies need to be fired early and
often. It would make his polices look much less chaotic than they currently seem to be.
Perhaps if Trump had not been so clueless/careless in his appointments then he would not be ignored and subverted so routinely.
As Paul Craig Roberts recently stated, who in their right mind would appoint a warmonger like John Bolton if his purpose was to
stop regime change wars and improve relations with Russia?
I don't believe in the 4D chess theory, this seems more like sheer incompetence to me. Yes, it's preferable to Hillary,
but hardly the best of times.
Even more remarkable than the way the US is exiting Syria is the way it got in. The us backed Turkey/Saudi/Israel in the creation
of Jihadi forces to bring down such a well entrenched and popular leader, Assad, and then maintained a presence based on the bizarre
claim that it was fighting terrorists and leading a mighty coalition that made the Syria/Russia/Iran/Hezbollah coalition laughable.
No wonder no one (not reading MofA or similar) understands quite what the US was doing there. No wonder people found the Assad
is deeply evil story credible, it did at least make more sense to an ordinary newspaper reader than the rest of the story (though
untrue).
The Obama/war party got the US got into a stupid mess, and we have to admire Trump for getting them out, without betraying
the monsters in the State department under Obama and the CIA or their Saudi/Israel allies. Indeed if Obama hadn't lead a coup
against Erdogan this might not be possible.
CNN reported on Trump's Viktor Orban's heresy informing us that Trump was deviating from U.S. foreign policy and you should
have seen the smirk plasted on all of their faces. Do they realize that they have been groomed by the CIA like trained seals begging
for fish?
It's as if U.S. foreign policy is cast in stone. Now we know that there is a list of foreigners you can talk to, Netanyahu
and whatever clown is governing Britain, and a list of pariah states we have to forever be at odds with. This precludes ever understaning
Iran's issues.
I hate the deep state but I hate their MSM enablers even more.
Even before Trump took office they began to stack his appointments with the same treasonable and corrupt bunch from prior
administration. One man cant do everything
Holding the Deir Ezzor oilfields would only require an operation the size of the Tanf operation. Anything wandering into that
area gets hit by US airstrikes or artillery strikes. Paved plus unpaved roads from Iraq into eastern Deir Ezzor...
But more to the point is listening to Trump policy. Libya "We should have taken the oil", Iraq "We should have taken the
oil, who knows we may get anther chance", Syria "We should take the oil".
Taking the oil is as much Trump policy as ending endless wars. It must be noted that Trump is very specific about which
type of wars he does not like. Expensive wars and endless wars are not to his liking.
We sadly live in a political era of not 'good guy vs bad guy', but of 'shittier vs shittiest'. Clinton was, and is shit. But
so is Trump! The author here naively projects too much of his own hopes or fantasies onto Trump.
Totally swept aside is the complete asshole domestic policies of Trump: sell off national parks to oil and gas, privatize
public schools, drill for oil in Arctic Nat Refuge, gut the EPA, build Israel-like walls along Mexico border, etc not to mention
utterly fucking over the Palestinians and giving Israel everything....not to mention the Khashoggi disaster. Zero ethics,
blah blah blah this guy fucking sucks.
In the good old days when the hand did not implement the policies of the regent, the head would usually fall soon after..
Its a shame that these days these criminals the world over get away with it because its 'policy' of the government.. What
ever it is.. Thats it.. They usually are moved and promoted into higher posts.. Never are the government employees fired for their
malign deeds..
... many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies.
Wait ... what?
Those 'subordinates' work for Trump. Trump could easily prevent the subverting of his policies - if he chose to.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Wasn't it Trump that tweeted that he was "locked and loaded" for war with Iran?
Wasn't it Trump that ordered TWO missile strikes on Syria based on false pretenses?
Wasn't it Trump that fully supported the Venezuela coup? And approved of illegally seizing Venezuelan assets?
Wasn't it Trump that violated UN Resolutions by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Golan Heights as Israeli
territory? All while drastically curtailing aid to the Palestinians?
Wasn't it Trump that militarized Space? (He seems rather proud of doing so.)
Furthermore, I don't hear Trump complaining about things like USA not following thru on commitments made for peace in Korea
or USA's terminating the INF Treaty.
Thank you for this post, b. The last president to have had obstruction within government that he had to adjust to, as well as
press adversity, was Jimmy Carter. It is really a huge problem when so much of the government is carry over, and in the case of
Trump it has been so obvious that he needed to have his own people and a better atmosphere in press coverage. For a volitile leader
this situation has been charged from the getgo. So much so that it is very difficult for the public to assess his actual leadership
abilities. We either over- or underestimate him, to our own peril. And that is true of other countries as well. They see the pull
and tug and the histrionics that ensue on both sides - how can they help assessing the chaotic situation as chaotic?
It was the people's will, in accordance with the Constitution, that Trump be declared president. I didn't vote for him, but
he is supposed to be our leader. What this country then did in the international arena should have been according to his decisions.
I do not believe, if that had been the case, that we would now be in the sad state we are in with our international reputation
in tatters.
Trump would have seen his policies followed, and we would have had more consistency in government than we now have. Some of
those policies would have been less than perfect and could then have been argued against in order to give us better government
in future. With the obstinate warpath he has been forced to adhere to, and that footdragging by those under him so clearly obstructing
an orderly situation that had been hoped for in Syria, we have to conclude that it is only the obstructionists who are to blame.
Them we see, what Trump might have accomplished or not accomplished we do not see.
Please, Circe, pull in your horns. There is no way to accurately tell what is Trump and what is his opposition when it comes
to US policy - even when he seems to say something in contradiction to what he has said previously, we cannot know but can reasonably
suppose forces in disagreement with him have the upper hand when it comes to actual implementation.
That upper hand is a high crime in Constitutional terms.
The only reason Trumpty is trying to APPEAR to get out of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan is because it is the only policy space where
his campaign promises differed in any great degree to the rest of the 2016 and 2020 POTUS competitors (Gabbard excepted).
And the DNC is trying to bury Gabbard on behalf of themselves and the rest of the warmongers in the Republican race.
Iraq refusing to take delivery on Syria-exiting US troops, let alone their Kurdish/ISIS terrorist hangers-on shows how little
influence the US now really carries outside Israel and Saudi Arabia. Non-terrorist Kurds were giving the US troops the send-off
they deserve... rocks and rotten veggies.
Trump was better at governing his TV show than running his government. Certainly, his irresponsible choices for his chief aides
carry much blame, but so does his inability/unwillingness/false promise to drain the swamp of all the saboteurs--just look at
the Justice Department for a graphic example. But Trump's mismanagement was exacerbated by his totally different conception of
the Outlaw US Empire and how it would go about its business--views that were diametrically opposite of those indoctrinated into
the career bureaucrats that would be charged with carrying out policy--when you've been told it's fine and dandy to ignore and
break as many laws and treaties as needed to implement policy, it becomes second nature to ignore and work against policy directives
that go against your indoctrination. One major point Trump was correct about was the a priori need to Drain the Swamp of the creatures
that brought about all the ill-fated policies he now wanted to unwind and abandon--the most important singular point he hasn't
really tried to accomplish. Instead, one of the first places he visited after his inauguration was CIA headquarters--Downtown
Swampland HQ.
I included and linked to
this article earlier today, "Trump's Foreign Policy Strategy Is All About the 2020 Elections." Lets assume that assumption
is 100% correct; what does that leave post-election when there's no further election to attempt to win? If all troops are removed
from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, what else will occur? Continued withdrawal from the Persian Gulf as Iran's HOPE project swings
into action? Withdrawal from Korea? Closing Gitmo? I haven't heard Trump say anything about potential domestic or foreign second
term policy. The D-Party's candidates have proposed lots of domestic policy changes, some greatly needed and desired by the public;
but aside from Gabbard, little's been said about foreign policy.
so all his handpicked bootlickers and his handpicked 'acting' this n that are not doing what the man wants them to do?
oh dear, you mean they are not loyal to the shitface? they have their own agenda? oh really? is that like the turtle not letting
go anything up for a vote if he (shitface) is not gonna sign it? Or is that the turtle not letting anything go up for a vote if
he (turtle) don't like it.
I have said since the beginning that the shitface is dumb, dumber and dumbest, simply by making enemies left right n centre,
using people until they are bled dry and then never eve working with anyone. Cause frankly, that is what he does.
So why are people astonished and surprised that those that he surrounds himself are a carbon copy of himself?
and does anyone here care? I mean stealing children is not as sexy and exiting as discussion the never ending war that will
never end cause ending it will benefit neither the shitface in the us nor the shitface in russia nor the shitfaces in the middle
east.
We should all hope the pentagon is never caught with its pants down because they always go commando.. being exceptionally manley
and all that... That sight would forever give PTSD to anyone watching.. The Roman generals on the other hand was at the front
giving orders.. These commandos hide in bunkers thousands of miles away and gives insane orders..
"who in their right mind would appoint a warmonger like John Bolton if his purpose was to stop regime change wars..."
The one who appointed Bolton is obviously not in his right mind and his purpose is immediate war with Iran and further
destruction of the entire Middle East. He's called Sheldon Adelson, not Trump.
I don't know, but I can guess: Bolton is a known entity to the departments and people in question. If Bolton sucked
up in his interviews, he may have left Trump with the impression that he would actually follow orders.
We all know that is nonsense, but Trump wouldn't necessarily.
When wondering why Trump chose poorly for his staff you need to forget the nonsense that Trump was the establishment's chosen
winner of the elections in 2016.
Was the 2016 election staged? Yes, and Trump was certainly aware of it. This is why Trump had not bothered to have a transition
team set up on election night, and why he had not bothered to even start vetting anyone for any of his cabinet positions until
after the election results were announced on November 10th.
Trump wasn't supposed to win the 2016 elections (ignore the jack bunny's silly nonsense about Kissinger anointing Trump in
2014 because the paywalled link it always provides as evidence doesn't mention Trump at all). Trump himself wasn't expecting
to win. Trump basically chose his staff by writing down names he recognized on slips of paper and pulling them out of a hat.
"Hmm... since I am pretending to be a Republican, who do I know that would make a stereotypical Republican Secretary of Defense?
I know, 'Mad Dog' Mattis! OK, so how about the Secretary of State? Well, the CIA already runs the State Department, so why not
appoint Pompeo? He knows the job already. Let's see, Secretary of Education... Hey, Betsy, are you busy?" and so on.
These choices were made on the spur of the moment in the chaos of an entirely unexpected victory with Trump trying to think
of the kinds of choices a blowhard Republican like he was typecast as would make. Do not assign them overly much significance.
@Perimetr. I'm not sure it's all incompetence, though I agree there is plenty of that to go around, which may not always be
a bad thing if incompetence allows the Empire do less damage was it keels over. I'm not a fan of Trump, but I think he had to
make a whole lot of deals with a whole lot of devils in order to survive, in the political and the literal sense. The deals
came with many demons attached, some of whom have been shown the door recently, and maybe more will go. Interesting to me there
seems to be some daylight showing between T and Bibi that wasn't there before. Not quite sure how T is pulling that off, but I
suspect it is a risky independence. Might Barr and Co. have something ready to drop that will stick? Unlikely, I know, but something
seems to be giving Trump more room to maneuver.
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his
conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.
Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers
patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of
Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools,
National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
"... How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion.. NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area. ..."
"... Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. ..."
"... Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind. ..."
"... A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion? ..."
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
"... Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint . ..."
"... The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and who has expertise in Ukraine, the Washington Examiner has reported . ..."
"... later emerged that a member of his staff had spoken to the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The Washington Post concluded that Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false. ..."
"... Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence. ..."
"... Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an illegal spying operation on the president. ..."
"... It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on intelligence ..."
"... Image credit: Caricature by Donkey Hotey via Flickr , CC BY-SA 2.0 . ..."
"... Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence. ..."
Seems every day brings a new revelation about Democratic efforts to rig an impeachment of
the president. The false claims and astonishing conflicts of interest being thrown out there
are piling up fast.
The latest, from the San Francisco Examiner, exposes House Intelligence Committee chairman
Adam Schiff's choice of staffers, who it turns out were
two disgruntled Deep-Staters from the White House
who had actually worked with the
so-called "whistleblower":
Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018,
was hired in February,
while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's
committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted
his
complaint
.
The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and
who has expertise in Ukraine,
the Washington Examiner has reported
.
A career CIA analyst with Ukraine expertise, the whistleblower aired his concerns about a
phone conversation
between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to
a House Intelligence Committee aide on Schiff's staff. He had previously informed the CIA's
legal counsel's office.
Schiff
initially denied
he knew anything about the complaint before it was filed, stating on
Sep. 17: "We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to."
But it
later emerged that a member of his staff
had spoken to
the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The
Washington Post
concluded that
Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false.
"
Grace, 36,
was hired
to help Schiff's committee investigate the Trump White House. That month, Trump
accused Schiff
of
"stealing people who work at White House." Grace
worked at the NSC
from 2016 to 2018 in
U.S.-China relations and
then briefly
at the Center for a New American
Security think tank, which
was founded by
two former senior Obama administration officials.
So these people were all buddies beforehand, and this would explain why the so-called
whistleblower had been sneaking around with Schiff's staff before he made his whistleblower
complaint.
And that came only after someone with influence was able to get the inspector general of the
Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand
knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put
into place, the whistleblower got going.
More and more, this sounds like a pre-planned setup. One Trump operative has a very good
summary of what seems to have been really going on as these anything but exculpatory stories
mount:
Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting
his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so
they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic
efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own
business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence.
Experienced intelligence operatives, and apparently this Trump operative has this sort of
background, like to say there are no coincidences.
As facts continue to roll out, it's getting more and more obvious that Schiff's operation
was to orchestrate this impeachment scenario all along, going into high gear with the flame-out
of the Mueller investigation.
Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation
orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an
illegal spying operation on the president.
It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on
intelligence
, not on being one of those creepy secret police characters in The Lives of
Others . It's also an outrageous misuse of taxpayer dollars. In light of this Schiff spy
operation, and if Democrats don't want some backatcha next time there's a Dem in office with a
Republican House, it really ought to be every last one of them signed up to that Biggs
list.
Image credit:
Caricature by Donkey Hotey via
Flickr
,
CC BY-SA
2.0
.
Seems every day brings a new revelation about Democratic efforts to rig an
impeachment of the president. The false claims and astonishing conflicts of interest being
thrown out there are piling up fast.
The latest, from the San Francisco Examiner, exposes House Intelligence Committee chairman
Adam Schiff's choice of staffers, who it turns out were
two disgruntled Deep-Staters from the White House
who had actually worked with the
so-called "whistleblower":
Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018,
was hired in February,
while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's
committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted
his
complaint
.
The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and
who has expertise in Ukraine,
the Washington Examiner has reported
.
A career CIA analyst with Ukraine expertise, the whistleblower aired his concerns about a
phone conversation
between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to
a House Intelligence Committee aide on Schiff's staff. He had previously informed the CIA's
legal counsel's office.
Schiff
initially denied
he knew anything about the complaint before it was filed, stating on
Sep. 17: "We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to."
But it later emerged that a member of his staff
had spoken to
the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The
Washington Post
concluded that
Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false."
Grace, 36,
was hired
to help Schiff's committee investigate the Trump White House. That month, Trump
accused Schiff
of
"stealing people who work at White House." Grace
worked at the NSC
from 2016 to 2018 in
U.S.-China relations and
then briefly
at the Center for a New American
Security think tank, which
was founded by
two former senior Obama administration officials.
So these people were all buddies beforehand, and this would explain why the so-called
whistleblower had been sneaking around with Schiff's staff before he made his whistleblower
complaint.
And that came only after someone with influence was able to get the inspector general of the
Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand
knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put
into place, the whistleblower got going.
More and more, this sounds like a pre-planned setup. One Trump operative has a very good
summary of what seems to have been really going on as these anything but exculpatory stories
mount:
Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House,
recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing
the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the
lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding
their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a
coincidence.
Experienced intelligence operatives, and apparently this Trump operative has this sort of
background, like to say there are no coincidences.
As facts continue to roll out, it's getting more and more obvious that Schiff's operation
was to orchestrate this impeachment scenario all along, going into high gear with the flame-out
of the Mueller investigation.
Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation
orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an
illegal spying operation on the president.
And that's a far more concrete crime than anything Trump is accused of committing. Right
now, Schiff has 109 congressional representatives
signed on to GOP rep. Andy
Biggs of Arizona's
call to condemn and censure Schiff for this sick little illegal
freelance operation to spy on Trump.
It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on
intelligence, not on being one of those creepy secret police characters in
The Lives of
Others
. It's also an outrageous misuse of taxpayer dollars. In light of this Schiff spy
operation, and if Democrats don't want some backatcha next time there's a Dem in office with a
Republican House, it really ought to be every last one of them signed up to that Biggs
list.
"... inspector general of the Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand
knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put
into place, the whistleblower got going." Doesn't that beg the question IF Atkinson had any past
relationships with any of these people in his former position? I believe I read somewhere that
Atkinson somehow was involved in the Steele Dossier from his former job.
Our government has always operated this way. Nothing new here. It only seems "run worse" because the results are out in the
open for all to see. Whereas, the same thing could be done in secret and you'd never know
about it (the changes in the rules).
Which do you prefer? The sloppy American way, or the secretive Chinese way?
I'm sorry to say we have only these two choices. The sloppy American way is preferable to
me because it's the better part of our openly democratic republic and our Constitution.
The current problems and distractions we are dealing with are the result of Biden,
Schiff, and the Democrat's attempts to be secretive about what they're doing. So, we have to
wonder why these people don't want their actions to be known.
We should delight in seeing such illegitimate secrets exposed.
"...The sloppy American way, or the secretive Chinese way?"
What difference does it make if the criminals
are never indicted? The fact that I know of don't know makes no difference. We know
politicians are dirty scum, anyway..
But I think it's not good enough to just accept rampant corruption, surely things
could be better than this?
Also, it's not so much the Dems in question but the entire system.
And I see little evidence that the system is changing.
Though as you point out, one big shift is that more of us have become aware of how
bad it is.
And as you point out, it's always been that way, going back at least to 1913... but
more like forever and with all systems.
And if it is forever and all systems, then maybe it's better we DON'T get to see
all the dirty laundry all the time, including that nothing is done about it. Maybe
better not to know! Maybe that's the only way to make the country 'great' again!?
International Man
: In a broad sense,
how would you describe the
foreign policy of the US?
David Stockman
: Well,
in two words: Empire First.
I contrast
that with what Donald Trump thought he wanted to seek as a candidate, America First.
Now these are obviously simplifications and slogans, but there is an underlying substance that's
really important.
I think the basic idea behind "America First" is reaching way back to Robert Taft in the
1950s.
He said that we cannot have a permanent warfare state in America, because our
foreign policy doesn't require it and our fiscal capacities can't afford it.
What Taft basically said is the US sits between these two great ocean moats in a nuclear age,
where the number-one threat is a nuclear threat, not an invasion of conventional forces. The way
you deal with that is to have overwhelming retaliatory capacity, to keep the other side at bay.
As a matter of fact, he was totally right. It worked for 40 years.
The Soviet
Union finally crumbled under its own weight in 1991, and therefore the case was proved. There was
no industrial society, high-tech conventional military threat left in the world. The opportunity
arose in the early 1990s to go really full out America First.
Why did we keep all of these aircraft carriers, battleships, all this forward power projection
capability, air refueling capabilities, 100 bases or more all over the world? None of that was
needed throughout the entire Cold War, but most especially after 1991. That's the direction we
should have gone.
Where we ended up was in the opposite direction of what I call "America First." Instead
of dismantling NATO, we expanded it from 15 to 29 countries.
Instead of keeping faith with the promise that was made to Gorbachev by Secretary of State Jim
Baker and George Bush the elder -- that NATO would not expand a single inch to the east -- instead, we
basically encircled the entire rump state of Russia that was left after the Soviet Union fell
apart. That has then led to the case for a military budget this year of $750 billion, when the
truth is a homeland defense would cost less than $250 billion.
International Man
: What are your thoughts on the amount of money the US spends
on foreign aid, wars, the so-called intelligence community, the State Department, and other aspects
of foreign policy?
David Stockman
: The excess over what we need for homeland defense is more than
a half trillion dollars per year -- money we are wasting that we don't have, that we're borrowing and
passing on to future generations.
We're really at a point where there is a stark contrast between what homeland security
and the safety of people in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Spokane, Washington, require -- and what they
continually produce in the imperial city in Washington, DC, with this massive warfare-state budget.
Now, unfortunately the lesson that we've learned in the first three years of the Trump
administration is that good intentions, even vague ones -- and Trump surely had no articulated or
well-developed content to his notion of America First -- they don't stand a chance against this
massive machine that is self-perpetuating.
In other words, Empire First dominates our foreign policy, because there's so much money
flowing into the Pentagon, the 17 intelligence agencies, and the rest.
That money is also going to the tens of thousands of people who are getting paid big salaries to
work as contractors for the NSA and other agencies. They form a built-in lobbying force of
tremendous effectiveness to keep the funds flowing.
When you add to that all of the think tanks that get money from the State Department, the
National Endowment for Democracy, and various pockets and crevices in the Pentagon that no one can
even keep up with, essentially you have what I call the equivalent of a self-licking ice cream
cone.
The thing just keeps going because it's so big it feeds itself -- the $750 billion defense
budget is just the beginning.
That's the Department of Defense budget per se, but if you
add in another $25 billion for nuclear energy programs at the Department of Energy, $50 billion for
security assistance and foreign aid, international relations, another $60–70 billion for Homeland
Security, and then the veterans' budget, which is $200 billion, it's just massive. It represents
the deferred cost of all these stupid wars that we've had and didn't need.
Altogether we're talking about a $1.1 trillion budgetary monster that creates these enormous
flows of dollars that want to perpetuate themselves. Therefore, the kind of America First
rationality that the world situation clearly would permit and support is completely lost.
I don't know what these people think they're fighting. Do they think that China is going to get
up and bomb 4,000 Walmart stores in America? That's not going to happen. Their economy would
collapse in six months if they began serious military activities or threats against the United
States or Western Europe.
Russia has a GDP of $1.6 trillion, which is less than the GDP of the New York
metropolitan area. It's a little rump state that has a lot of hydrocarbons, some wheat fields, and
a workforce that is shrinking because of a fondness for vodka.
These are obvious facts and the fundamentals. Let's call it the structure of the global national
security environment. It's so obvious that this massive warfare state machine that we have is not
needed. We could go the route of America First -- homeland defense, the Taftian posture -- and yet
there's not a snowball's chance in the hot place that it gets any kind of airtime, exposure, or
debate in Washington, DC.
Donald Trump even tried to get the last 2,000 or 3,000 troops out of Syria, where we have no
reason to be whatsoever. None, zero, zip. He can't do that because he is undermined by his own
advisors and the embedded Deep State that has never seen a war that it wanted to end and never an
occupation that it didn't want to perpetuate.
International Man
: It seems the
one thing Democrats and Republicans
agree on is a more aggressive foreign policy.
Why does US foreign policy never seem to
change, regardless of who is in power?
David Stockman
: That's really a good question, and I think
there are
two dimensions to it.
One, just in terms of the structure, when you have $1.1 trillion dollars pouring into
the system every year, it creates an overwhelming lobbying force for self-perpetuation.
To
perpetuate this massive budget, it needs to have threats, dangers, enemies, and all the rest. The
whole system is in the business of threat inflation -- even threat manufacture.
It's not just the defense contractors, as I said before. It's all the chattering classes that
inhabit these NGOs, think tanks, and all the rest of it.
Ukraine would be a great example of this now, or why we are stumbling around in Syria. Why did
we walk away from the Iranian nuclear deal and impose this vicious economic blockage and sanction
war? That's inviting some kind of hostile response at some point.
The second thing is this whole Russia-gate issue from 2016. It has essentially neutered
the Democratic Party as a rational voice in foreign affairs and the restraint that it historically
had on the warfare state.
I started back in the '60s, protesting the Vietnam War. I went to all the marches on the
Pentagon and all the rest of it.
The reason I bring this up is, at that point in time, the Democratic Party was loaded with doves
and antiwar people and people who were skeptical of anything you would hear from the CIA. We knew
what the CIA was.
The Democratic Party produced a lot of statesmen in the 1970s: McGovern, Fullbright, the Church
Committee, and all these guys who investigated the abuses of the warfare state and the CIA -- the lies
that got us into the quagmire of Vietnam, which ended up being a stain on America's history. It
really was a genocide perpetuated against a defenseless people who weren't a threat to us at all.
That's what it was.
We came out of the 1970s with a pretty healthy debate -- and a lot of checks and balances
politically against this warfare-state machine.
Now what happened to the Democratic Party?
They're basically AWOL on the issue
of war and peace -- and on the need for a restrained foreign policy. They've got it into their heads
that they lost the election not because their policies were failing and not because they had the
worst candidate the Democrats had fielded in decades, but because allegedly the Russkies
infiltrated our political system in the Trump campaign and stole the election.
Now, we can make fun of that, but what it's done is basically put the Democrats in a posture
where every night if you watch the war channel, CNN, they have half a dozen of them saying Trump is
jeopardizing national security. He's not listening to his intelligence community. He's leaving the
Ukrainians high and dry -- and Putin's going to be occupying Kiev within hours.
This is all complete nonsense. They've lost their minds. There's a couple antiwar
Democrats left, and that's it. That changes the equation fundamentally.
Here's why.
One way or another, the Republican Party was hijacked by the neocons back in
the 1980s and 1990s, and it's just gone from bad to worse.
So, you can't expect the Republican Party to be any kind of vehicle for common sense and a
peaceful foreign policy.
The Democratic Party was supposed to be the check, and it is now
AWOL. So, now there is no debate. It's a pretty dangerous thing, because we're doing stupid stuff
all over the world.
The latest example, which is red hot of course, is Ukraine-gate.
Let's just roll back the picture a couple years. Why is this thing even happening?
The answer is because, in 2014, Washington supported, financed, and encouraged a coup on the
streets of Kiev that threw out a legitimately elected government. It put in a lot of right wing
neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists that scared the hell out of the Russians living in the eastern part
of Ukraine and in Crimea -- where there are few Ukrainians by the way; only 15% of the population of
Crimea is Ukrainian. The rest is basically Russian and Tatars.
That's where the whole damn thing started. We never should have been there. That's right on
Russia's doorstep. It's not our business to sort out the history there. Crimea was a Russian
territory for 200 years anyway.
Once we got into the middle of that, that's why we had to send our vice president, Joe Biden, to
Ukraine to be the policy coordinator. Now let's think about it.
There are 190 countries or so in the world, and Ukraine has a GDP of $130 billion.
Ukraine is an absolute nothing, irrelevant piece of global real estate.
We didn't need to
send the vice president of the United States to coordinate policy. In a good policy environment,
you wouldn't need to send the vice president there to coordinate anything.
What did that lead to?
Well, once the vice president was there, all of a sudden
everything changed, including this Burisma energy company. It was basically run by a guy -- which
never comes out on CNN -- but he was allied with the president who was overthrown. And what did they
do? They called Washington. They looked for the sleaziest lobbyist they could find. What they came
up with was Hunter Biden and his buddy, Devon Archer, who was equally a sleaze bag, his roommate in
college apparently or something like that. He was a campaign finance bundler for John Kerry all the
time he was in the Senate.
This is how the whole damn thing got started.
The debate today focuses on what
Trump was doing during a very brief phone call in July 2019 and not about the history -- how we got
there and why the thing is off base to begin with. They pretend history only started with a phone
call on July 25, 2019.
That's the way the empire rolls. It demands that anybody who is paying attention should have
amnesia and that the only thing that you're supposed to focus on is what happened yesterday, as
it's spun by the machinery of the warfare state.
That's why we have the irony of the Democratic majority in the House. I don't think that
they're necessarily conscious tools of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. They're just
stupid. They're uninformed, and they're caught up in this imperial city groupthink.
Now they're out to impeach a president who casually wanted to look into what was clearly a
blatant case of influence peddling on the part of the prior vice president and his son.
Biden says he didn't know what Hunter was doing. Who believes that? But the point is, why in the
world would this big energy company based in Ukraine be hiring a guy, a lobbyist from Washington,
DC, unless his name was Biden? Biden knew nothing about natural gas, energy, Eastern Europe, or
Ukraine.
Once the empire gets as massive as it is, it behooves everybody around the world to have
all of the influence operations that they can afford or can mobilize in Washington to weigh into
the policy debate.
It really is like an imperial city. There are tens of millions -- hundreds of millions -- and billions
of dollars every year being paid by foreign countries to Washington, because they think they have
to defend their self-interest in the day-to-day operation of the US warfare state.
Again, it's another example of how Empire First perpetuates itself. Not only do you have all of
the domestic lobbies, the defense contractors, intelligence contractors, and think tanks that get
all their money from government agencies, but then you have all of the foreign outposts. The two
are actually pretty melded together.
The Atlantic Council is one of the most odious of these so-called think tanks
that dominates the debate.
They confuse these wet-behind-the-ears young people
who get elected to Congress. I can appreciate that. I was elected when I was pretty wet behind the
ears.
They send people to Washington to influence in a very subtle way, because the money goes through
the back door. Much of the money for the Atlantic Council comes from Ukrainian oligarchs who are
anti-Russian for whatever reason, and a lot more comes from Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the rest
of the oil states.
It's all on behalf of a big, slick lobbying operation that's created this pro-empire
mentality. It got us in the middle of all of these conflicts in the Middle East, but also Ukraine.
It is really bad. The Atlantic Council's role in pushing the Russia-gate hoax and getting us
involved in Ukraine -- essentially threatening Russia on its very border -- is pretty nasty stuff.
Don't forget that Russia bought Crimea in 1783 with good gold money from the Turks, who were
perennially short on cash. It was populated by Russian speakers all that time. It became the base
for the home port of the great Black Sea Fleet, which is what Russia has seen as its defense under
czars and commissars alike. For 170 years, it was an integral part of the Old Russian Empire and
then the Soviet Union.
Crimea got added to Ukraine when there were few Ukrainians living there, only because Khrushchev
won the violent struggle for succession after Stalin died. Khrushchev was Ukrainian, and so in a
drunken celebration one night, he basically said, I hereby will Crimea to my buddies in Ukraine for
all the good work that they did in helping kill off my two rivals to power.
Then a couple days later, the Presidium officially passed a law that added Crimea to the
Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.
So, what these Washington idiots are doing -- led by think tanks like the Atlantic Council and all
the rest of those who got us into this conflict in Ukraine -- is basically trying to enforce the dead
hand of the Soviet Presidium from 65 years ago.
Crimea wasn't the site of a Russian occupation. After the Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis
took control of the Ukraine government in the coup, the people in the Russian-speaking regions were
scared to death.
There's a whole bloody history behind this.
Hitler marched
through on the way to Stalingrad, and the Nationalist Ukrainians were with him. Then the Red Army
marched back through after Stalingrad and liquidated all their Ukrainian enemies. Yet decades and
decades later, Washington gets itself into the middle of this, trying to enforce the dead hand of
the Soviet Union.
Crimea got partitioned. There was a vote. No one can say that 90% of the people didn't vote to
rejoin Mother Russia, because they did. So what is the big deal?
And yet the warfare state
found it convenient to bulk up the Russian threat as one reason for continuing to have all the
defense money and the imperial footprint around the world. The next thing you know, it becomes
policy, because the Democrats really embrace it -- after they decided that Putin cost them the
election.
* * *
The amount of money the US government spends on foreign aid, wars, the so-called
intelligence community, and other aspects of foreign policy is enormous and ever-growing. It's an
established trend in motion that is accelerating, and now approaching a breaking point. It could
cause the most significant disaster since the 1930s. Most people won't be prepared for what's
coming. That's precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent
video with all the details.
Click
here to watch it now.
Russia today is simply a foil, a cover story for Hillary's
weakness and corruption....a cover for the runaway war machine
that enriches a few and protects Israel
"Russia has a GDP of $1.6 trillion, which is less than the GDP
of the New York metropolitan area. It's a little rump state that
has a lot of hydrocarbons, some wheat fields, and a workforce that
is shrinking because of a fondness for vodka."
If they only
had the world's reserve currency, non-stop printing press, and
blatant disregard for nation-states, they would occupy a more
untenable and precarious financial condition.
This is another fraud run by Uncle Scam. Voting at the IMF and
World Bank is weighted by GDP. The US and European allies
report in their native currencies, but countries like Russia
must convert to $USD.
Recall that Italy's GDP was "adjusted"
to allow for estimates for hookers and blow, to allow them to
keep their number of votes. This gives the US and Allies block
the votes they need.
But Russia, after sanctions, had to devalue their currency,
hence their GDP in USD went down. Their standard of living did
not decrease all that much.
On a purchasing power parity basis, China's economy is
already bigger than the US, it has been for almost a decade.
It is the "Exorbitant Privilege" of world reserve currency
that gives the US its power. Sanctions only work for a time,
eventually you will either have to abandon that privilege or
fight a major war to defend it.
The term exorbitant privilege refers to the alleged
benefit the United States has due to its own currency being
the international reserve currency. Accordingly, the US
would not face a balance of payments crisis, because it
purchased imports in its own currency. Exorbitant privilege
as a concept cannot refer to currencies that have a regional
reserve currency role, only global reserve currencies.
OK, I'm going to air a very unpopular opinion. We are entering a
period of period decline. There are too many people on the planet,
and resources are finite. Your life and mine are considerably
easier and more luxurious than they have any right to be, and they
will continue to be so while much of the rest of the world goes
without. Know why?
Because we live at the center of empire.
In
the modern high-tech world, it's inevitable there's going to be a
horrible, evil monolithic hegemon calling the shots and stealing
all the resources. Just be ******* grateful that you're living
there. Long live the empire.
When you are an
empire subject
, you are smack bang right
in the middle of all the dumb propaganda, like a fish
surrounded by the water. Empire subjects are de-sensitized to
imperial high crimes. Empire subjects thus tend to lack any
empathy towards regime change recipients.
It takes a strong
mind to de-programme from all the brainwashing and become aware
of the water.
If it wasn't for the empire, your life and mine would likely
be significantly more difficult. Out fabulously opulent
western lifestyles are entirely the result of the west
taking more than it's share of the resources. With the
present population... and in my very strong opinion a
concerted international effort to curb population growth
should have started AT LEAST half a century ago, but we are
where we are... it's either this or everyone on the planet
lives like peasants. Take your choice.
In other words,
Empire First
dominates our foreign
policy, because there's so much money flowing into the Pentagon,
the 17 intelligence agencies, and the rest.
Actually, it's
not Empire First, it's
PURSUIT of PROFIT
first.
This right here is the problem with the human species.
Many people know very little about Russia or the Russian people.
Most of what they have been told has been filtered through a
national security apparatus so entrenched in a cold war mindset
they appear paranoid.
It is clear the warmongering faction
residing within Washington has declared Russia a major threat and
sparked massive media coverage to convince us it is true. The myth
of Russia's strength amplified by journalists. More in the
following article;
Poppy Bush was corrupt from his first job out of skull and
bones. Zapata Off Shore Oil was 'his company' and Operation
Zapata was the CIA operation to over throw Castro in Cuba as
early as 1959. George Bush was the named
CIA operative
that Hoover named in a FBI memo in 1963 questioned whether Anti
Castro Cubans were involved in JFK assassination. Bush lied
about his CIA employment for more than thirty years many times
under oath.
Bush is truly the focal point after JFK
assassination (a coup) that changed much of the key personnel
in DC.
I place nearly the blame on on the very first miserable P.O.S.
George H.W Bush. He was forced onto Reagan as a V.P. because he
was a well k own establishment deep state ******. Reagan believed
in a string military but his primary philosophy was peace through
strength.
Well when Bush 1 became El Jefe he very quickly
changed the rules and instead of peace through strength he decided
that the large military Reagan had built up had to be used so
peace through strength became basically demonstration of serious
firepower for the world to witness and he set the nation on the
road of empire.
Since then the continuation and support of empire became the
norm and anything less is now isolationism. Peace and conflict
avoidance is considered isolationism.
Bankers run the United States of War. The Empire is a slave to
its debt, a slave to maintaining a illusion of solvency,
bankers that few politicians have the courage to unplug the
bankers IV drip from.
"... I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against 'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans. ..."
"... This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a good description ..."
"... The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely two branches of the Business Party. ..."
"... Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points across at the same time. ..."
"... Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment. ..."
"... Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local. ..."
Hillary Clinton appeared to suggest that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is the "favorite of the Russians" to win the 2020 presidential
election and is being groomed by Moscow to run as a third-party candidate against the eventual Democratic nominee.
...
The Russians already have their "eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party
candidate," she said, in an apparent reference to Gabbard.
"She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far," Clinton
told David Plouffe, the podcast's host and the campaign manager for former President Obama's 2008 campaign.
"And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton added, referring
to the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate.
The responses were appropriate:
Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard - 22:20 UTC
· Oct 18, 2019
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that
has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy,
there has been a ...
... concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through
your proxies and ...
... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
The Streisand effect of Clinton's shoddy remark will help Tulsi Gabbard with regards to name recognition. It will increase her
poll results. With Joe Biden faltering and Elizabeth Warren increasingly exposed as a phony Clinton copy, Bernie Sanders could become
the Democrats leading candidate. Then the “favorite of the Russians” smear will be applied to him.
Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party for damaging it's chances to regain the White House. But the Democratic
establishment would rather sabotage the election than to let one of the more progressive candidates take the lead.
Voters do not like such internal squabble and shenanigans. The phony Ukrainegate 'impeachment inquiry' is already
a gift for Trump. Messing with the candidate field on top
of that will inevitably end with another Trump presidency.
and Suspend her from what? a lamp post? That's a little bit harsh.
Hillary is actually doing something constructive for the first time in her career - by giving a boost to Tulsi Gabbard who
is the only candidate who challenges the military industrial complex, which has probably caused more death and destruction than
anyone else in history.
I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against
'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans.
But none of the other Democratic candidates stand a chance of beating Trump either. The two front-runners are medically unfit
for any important challenging job - Biden (senility) and Sanders (recent heart attack/stroke?).
Tulsi is urging Hillary to "enter the race" !! Hillary is foaming at the mouth with desire to enter the 2020 race. Is Tulsi
working for Hillary?
Behind the scenes it was decided to make HunterBidenGate the pretext for a Trump impeachment. This, it
was thought, would damage Trump AND Biden and make way for the resurrection of Hillary Clinton. There were so many other pretexts
available but they chose this one.
"Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party"
This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual
structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a
good description. Even a quick review of the Wikipedia entry reveals little.
As best I can tell, a person is a party member by checking the box on the voter registration form. The few times I have registered,
I did not check a box for any party. It is none of the state's business who I associate with or vote for.
It is also not the state's business to supervise and fund the selection of party candidates. But that is what happens in the
US. The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely
two branches of the Business Party.
"It didn't come much clearer nor more explicit than when Gabbard fired up the Democratic TV debate this week. It was billed
as the biggest televised presidential debate ever, and the Hawaii Representative told some prime-time home-truths to the nation:
"Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have
supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011 along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing
and cheer-leading this regime-change war."
The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists for its objective of overthrowing
the government in Damascus."
Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points
across at the same time. The way she tries to finesse her stances on Iran, India and Israel is disturbing though.
Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary
of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement.
When she's forthright, punches hard and says the things that many people are thinking but few dare say - as she did in her
statement on Syria, but didn't in her statement on Iran - she comes off as the first real candidate for President that I've seen
in my lifetime (I don't count the likes of Dennis Kucinich, who never seemed to actually want to win).
If Tulsi is serious about doing the world good, this is the path she needs to take. Speak the truths no one else is willing
to say; punch hard; stick with it. Yeah and be willing to die for it. If they can't stop you, which I don't think they can, they'll
come gunning for you...
Finally, at last, foreign affairs (i.e wars) has made it into a presidential campaign, and by a veteran, with veterans currently
being sanctified in the U.S. The women (Tulsi, Jill and Hillary) are getting down and dirty, too, which is always a good thing
and a feature of politics in time past, as in the Truman era. President Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of
the kitchen. If you cannot handle the pressure, you should not remain in a position where you have to deal with it."
Let's hope that they get into the details of Hillary's failures, including Libya, Somalia, and especially Syria. Let's get
it on! In the last election she never was forced to answer for her specific failures. Now's the time.
Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way
from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate
media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment.
What Trump has successfully done from the right that Sanders/Gabbard (like Corbyn in the UK) are struggling to do from the
left is to attack the establishment that's in a permanent state of warfare abroad and at home against its "enemies" and unfettered
capitalism at home For a brief moment it was hoped by progressives that Obama - who defeated the faces of the establishment, Clinton
and McCain in 2008 - would really fight the establishment but he ended up becoming more of a celebrity politician like Trudeau
who talked a good game but was unable to effect real change on the ground which of course led to a large number or African Americans
not voting in 2016 and a lot of white blue collar Obama 2008 voters going for Trump.
The corporate media which has been totally corrupted and infiltrated by intelligence agencies - quote openly versus covertly
as in the past - is going to make every effort to shut down not just Gabbard but Sanders and ensure that Warren - a wannabe feel-gooder
like Obama - be completely neutered to effect real change.
Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed
through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local.
"... For those who don't speak fluent neoconservative, "isolationist" here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and "We are becoming isolationist" here means "We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world." ..."
"... a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his "isolationism" ..."
"... Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of "war" is no longer "peace", but "isolationism". By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things. ..."
Humanity was treated to an important lecture on peace at a recent event for the NIR School of the Heart by none other than Ellen
Degeneres BFF and world-renowned peace expert George W Bush.
"I don't think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest," said the former president according
to The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin, whose
brief Twitter thread on the subject appears
to be the only record of Bush's speech anywhere online.
"An isolationist United States is destabilizing around the world," Bush said during the speech in what according to Rogin was
a shot at the sitting president.
"We are becoming isolationist and that's dangerous for the sake of peace."
For those who don't speak fluent neoconservative, "isolationist" here means taking even one small step in any direction other
than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and "We are becoming isolationist" here means "We have
hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and
we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world."
It is unclear why Bush is choosing to present himself as a more peaceful president than Trump given that by this point in his
first term Bush had launched not one but two full-scale ground invasion wars whose effects continue to ravage the Middle East to
this very day, especially given the way both presidents appear to be in furious agreement on foreign policy matters like Iran. But
here we are.
From a certain point of view it's hard to say which is stranger:
(A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is
endangering peace with his "isolationism", or
(B) the claim that Trump is "isolationist" at all.
But these bogus warnings about a dangerous, nonexistent threat of isolationism are nothing new for Dubya. In
his farewell address to the nation , Bush said the following:
"In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism
and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity
at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led."
As we discussed
recently , use of the pro-war buzzword "isolationism" has been re-emerging from its post-Bush hibernation as a popular one-word
debunk of any opposition to continued US military expansionism in all directions, and it is deceitful in at least three distinct
ways. Firstly, the way it is used consistently conflates isolationism with non-interventionism, which
are two wildly
different things . Secondly, none of the mainstream political figures who are consistently tarred with the "isolationist" pejorative
are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists; they all support many interventionist positions
which actual non-interventionists object to. Thirdly, calling someone who opposes endless warmongering an "isolationist" makes as
much sense as calling someone who opposes rape a man-hating prude; opposing an intrinsically evil act is not the same as withdrawing
from the world.
Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real
purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness
that the opposite of "war" is no longer "peace", but "isolationism". By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the
political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt
to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is
of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things.
It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal.
Failing that, at the very least people should stop looking at him as a cuddly wuddly teddy bear with whom it's fun to
share a sporting arena suite or a
piece of hard candy or to
hang award medals on for his treatment of veterans. This mass murdering monster has been
growing more and more popular with
Democrats lately just because he offers mild criticisms of Trump sometimes, as have war pigs like
Bill Kristol and Max Boot and even John
Bolton for the same reason, and it needs to stop. And in the name of a million dead Iraqis, please don't start consulting this
man on matters of peace.
Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to make the transcript public . .
. .
It's tempting to view Trump's presidency as sui generis. With norms and seemingly
well-settled historical precedents broken, with the liability casually laid at his feet by
most observers, even if not wholly out to destroy him.
Knowing its intent was remove him from office, Trump nevertheless ordered unprecedented
cooperation with the Mueller investigation. A brilliant move in hindsight. I don't recall
very much handwringing about the bad precedent this set for presidential power.
Trump's insight, and in no small part it explains his continued survival, is his refusal
to accept the appearance of his fully possessing his Article II powers. Most especially in
the context of the National Security State.
Utz has written how even Eisenhower was foiled from negotiating to reduce tensions with
the Soviet Union/Krushchev. If they could derail the POTUS then doing so with those that
followed him should have been easy by comparison and, I think, was. The trend since, as the
USG's global power grew, was for president's to ever quickly give way upon after office to
the role of what I call Figurehead/Pitchman. It's a Safe Space, as was palpably obvious
through Obama's two terms.
While Figurehead/Pitchman versus Real POTUS is, of course, a spectrum not a dichotomy,
Trump for reasons I don't need to belabor has effectively constituted a sharp break.
So, decisions of his like the following, facially a diminution of his authority, which
passed without a great deal of notice, struck me as him protecting himself from his
authorizing military actions designed to end his presidency:
The longer Trump survives the further these highest order threats of nuclear war and to
our Constitutional Republic recede. Even if it doesn't seem that way at moments like
this.
It's childish nonsense the idea that any foreign state, including Russia, thought Trump
would win, much less wanted him to do so. It's equally juvenile, especially close to three
years hence, to not understand that foreign adversaries and allies alike awaited a resolution
of this factional war internally within the US, avoiding catastrophe in the meantime.
Thankfully, at least so far, since Trump took the oath, the foreign powers for which a
Hillary presidency would have been a geopolitical gift of historic proportions (e.g. China;
Iran), have largely made their peace with that lost opportunity.
Bolton Opposed Ukraine Investigations; Called Giuliani "A Hand Grenade" by
Tyler Durden Tue, 10/15/2019 - 12:25 0 SHARES
Former national security adviser John Bolton was 'so alarmed' by efforts to encourage Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and 2016
election meddling that he told an aide, Fiona Hill, to alert White House lawyers, according to the
New York Times
.
When Hill confronted Sondland, he told her that he was 'in charge' of Ukraine, "a moment she compared to Secretary of State Alexander
M. Haig Jr.'s declaration that he was in charge after the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt, according to those who heard the testimony,"
according to the Times.
Hill says she asked Sondland on whose authority he was in charge of Ukraine, to which he replied 'the president.' She would later
leave her post shortly before a July 25 phone call with Ukraine's president which is currently at the heart of an impeachment inquiry.
Meanwhile, the Times also notes that "House Democrats widened their net in the fast-paced inquiry by summoning Michael McKinley,
a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who abruptly resigned last week, to testify Wednesday."
Career diplomats have expressed outrage at the unceremonious
removal of Ambassador Marie L. Yovanovitch from Ukraine after she came under attack by Mr. Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr. and
two associates who have since been arrested on charges of campaign violations.
Three other Trump admin officials are scheduled to speak with House investigators this week, including Sondland - who is now set
to appear on Thursday. On Tuesday, deputy assistant secretary of state George Kent will testify, while on Friday, Laura K. Cooper
- a a deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia policy, will speak with lawmakers as well.
Looks like we have our whistleblower. My only question is, how does one whistle with such a bristly moustache draping their
hairlip?
So now we have Mr. Neocon and Mr. Liddle Kidz conjugating as the strangest of bedfellows? How will this play to their respective
bases? Are we to assume these people think this nations top law enforcement agent (POTUS) is to abdicate his duties therewith
just because the criminal is (at least according to our two tiered justice system) supposed to be beyond reproach?
Mr. Bolton, bright and determined as he is, has hitched his wagon to mad mare galloping full tilt over a precipice.
Looking for a return of uranium one to the headlines soon. In due time we will stich this Russia/Ukraine narrative back together
from a patchwork of facts. You traitors are fucked...royally fucked...and you know it.
So, Mr bolton, explain to us in simple terms how you appraise America's security and her related interests. Your camp is in
eclipse.
John Bolton:
"I was appauled...just flabbergasted...that the president was concerned that our intelligence apparatus was politicized to
the extent that its highest echelons were arrayed in an attempt to subvert a lawful and legitimate election. Never mind that six
other nations were tasked with abetting this treasonous plot...this is an outrage!!! The whole point of intelligence agencies
is to skirt the law with impunity, and once we (the unelected permanent breacracy) tell one of our minions like Biden or Hillary
that they're permanently immune from prosecution, we can't have some earnest pact of Patriots running around demanding law and
order."
What a sorry bunch of cretians.
We were so close...so close...to losing it all. But since the enemy is making clear we're playing zero sum, we're going to
end up with everything.
Brace yourself, California. If I were you, I'd study the legal framework of Reconstruction. Your plight will be of a kind.
Your state has been engaged in a systematic attempt to overthrow the government. Your leaders will be appointed for a generation
after this all comes out. Don't look to Beijing to save you...they kinda have their hands full.
So, I guess Bolton is no longer collecting free money like Hunter Biden was. I get it now how all these politicians have kids
overseas and open foreign corporations which our tax money goes in to by way of cutting deals overseas public officials to line
their pockets with our money. This how they get into government poor and become very rich! Giuliani is pointing this fact out
to the public with Trump and the swamp HATES IT!
The public now knows how these corrupt PUBLIC OFFICIALS in America have been fleecing the tax payers. This is a major hit on
the swamp.
Trump & Giuliani we're behind you thank you for showing us how the swamp has been ******* us for all these years.
Understand that the reason Schitt head won't allow public hearings is because the former Ambassador to Ukraine--Volker, shot
this whole **** fest down when he testified. There is no "there" there.
Bolton and the others are crying because of Trump's pull out. The left jumped on the war bandwagon under Billary a long time
ago. Necons work both parties.
If Bolton dislikes Guiliani that's the best endorsement of Rudy I can imagine. Bolton is a complete warmongering traitor who,
like McShitstain, desires a nice case of brain cancer.
Go Rudy, expose the corrupt Demonrats! We deplorables love human hand grenades. That's why we elected the Donald, and you apparently
are the perfect lawyer for our great God emperor.
"Schiff simply does not have the gravitas that a weighty procedure such as impeachment requires," Biggs wrote in an opinion
piece for Fox News. "He has repeatedly shown incredibly poor judgment. He has persistently and consistently demonstrated that
he has such a tremendous bias and animus against Trump that he will say anything and accept any proffer of even bogus evidence
to try to remove the president from office."
"... Hitler's Third Reich was obliterated by massive military force in 1945. It lasted just 12 years. Stalin's Soviet Union bore the brunt of beating Hitler, but later succumbed to economic sclerosis. It fell apart in 1991, after 68 years. The mystery of the People's Republic of China is that it is still with us. ..."
The 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China was not a birthday I felt like
celebrating. As Dutch historian Frank Dikötter has shown in his searing three-volume
history of the Mao Zedong era, the Communist regime claimed the lives of tens of millions of
people: 2 million in the revolution between 1949 and 1951, another 3 million by the end of
the 1950s, up to 45 million in the man-made famine known as the "Great Leap Forward," and yet
more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's campaign against the intelligentsia,
which escalated into a civil war.
Hitler's Third Reich was obliterated by massive military force in 1945. It lasted just
12 years. Stalin's Soviet Union bore the brunt of beating Hitler, but later succumbed to
economic sclerosis. It fell apart in 1991, after 68 years. The mystery of the People's
Republic of China is that it is still with us.
Now, I could give you a rather boring explanation of why I think China's bid to "catch up
and surpass" (ganchao) the United States will fail. But maybe a more interesting answer can
be found in Liu Cixin's astonishing 2008 novel, "The Three-Body Problem," which I read for
the first time last week.
The problem of the title is introduced to the reader -- and to the nanotechnology
scientist Wang Miao, one of the central characters -- as a virtual reality game, set in a
strange, distant world with three suns rather than the familiar one. The mutually perturbing
gravitational attractions of the three suns prevent this planet from ever settling into a
predictable orbit with regular days, nights, and seasons. It has occasional "stable eras,"
during which civilization can advance, but with minimal warning, these give way to "chaotic
eras" of intense heat or cold that render the planet uninhabitable The central conceit of
Liu's novel is that China's history has the same pattern as the three-body problem: periods
of stability always end with periods of chaos -- what the Chinese call dong luan. The other
key character in the book is Ye Wenjie, who sees her father, a professor at Tsinghua
University, beaten to death by a gang of teenage Red Guards during the Cultural
Revolution.
Banished from Beijing to a labor camp in benighted rural backwater, Ye is rescued when she
is given a lowly job in a mysterious observatory known as Red Coast. But nothing can undo the
emotional damage of witnessing her father's murder. Nor can she escape the chaos of
Communism. She watches in horror as the entire area around the observatory is deforested.
Everything -- even astrophysics -- is subordinated to Mao's warped ideology.
Disillusioned completely by the madness of mankind -- a sentiment reinforced by a chance
meeting with an American environmentalist -- Ye stumbles on a way of beaming a message from
Earth deep into space by bouncing it off the sun. When, after years of empty noise, a clear
message is received in reply, she does not hesitate. Even though the message is a warning not
to communicate with Trisolaris -- the name of a real planet with three suns -- Ye sends
another message, ensuring that the Trisolarians can locate Earth, and initiate their
long-planned relocation.
Rehabilitated in the political thaw that follows Mao's death, Ye Wenjie returns to
Beijing, following in her father's footsteps as a physics professor. But she leads a double
life, for she also becomes the Commander of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement, a radically
misanthropic organization dedicated to helping the Trisolarians conquer earth. Acute readers
will notice that this group's ideology is a subtle parody of Maoism.
"Start a global rebellion!" they shout. "Long live the spirit of Trisolaris! We shall
persevere like the stubborn grass that resprouts after every wildfire! ... Eliminate human
tyranny!"
Little do they know that the Trisolarians are even worse than humans. As one of the aliens
points out to their leader, because of their world's utter unpredictability, "Everything is
devoted to survival. To permit the survival of the civilization as a whole, there is almost
no respect for the individual. Someone who can no longer work is put to death. Trisolarian
society exists under a state of extreme authoritarianism." Life for the individual consists
of "monotony and desiccation." That sounds a lot like Mao's China.
There is one scene in "The Three-Body Problem" that sticks in the mind. An adult and a
child stand looking at the grave of a Red Guard killed during the factional battles that
raged during the Cultural Revolution. "Are they heroes?" asks the child. The adult says no.
"Are they enemies?" The adult again says no. "Then who are they?" The adult replies:
"History."
True, the hero of the story is the foul-mouthed, chain-smoking Beijing cop Shi Qiang.
Chinese readers doubtless relish the scene when he lectures a pompous American general about
how best to save the world.
But the deeper meaning of the book is surely that Trisolaris is China. The three bodies in
contention are not suns but classes: rulers, intellectuals, masses. Right now, China is in
one of its stable phases. But, as the contending forces shift, chaos will sooner or later
return. Perhaps it already has, in Hong Kong.
If it spreads, I -- and history -- will win that bet.
The Three-Body Problem is a hard science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is
the first novel of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, but Chinese readers generally
refer to the whole series by the title of this first novel. The second and third novels in
the trilogy are titled The Dark Forest and Death's End. The title of the first novel refers
to the three-body problem in orbital mechanics. ...
The English translation by Ken Liu was published by Tor Books in 2014. It was the first
Asian novel ever to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel, in 2015 and was nominated for the 2014
Nebula Award for Best Novel.
(An amazing trilogy. Inspired by Arthur Clarke (*). Looks like Niall has read the first
book.)
* 'The Songs of Distant Earth' is a 1986 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C.
Clarke, based upon his 1958 short story of the same title. He stated that it was his
favourite of all his novels. ... The novel tells of a utopian human colony in the far future
that is visited by travellers from a doomed Earth, as the Sun has gone nova. The Songs of
Distant Earth explores apocalyptic, atheistic, and utopian ideas, as well as the effects of
long-term interstellar travel and extra-terrestrial life. (Wikipedia)
('Songs' is optimistic; 'Remembrance of
Earth's Past is not.)
At its core, exceptionalism places America outside of normal history into a category of its
own. Our initial "escape" from history followed two interrelated tracks: one was the religious
radicalism of the Puritans, the other was the frontier experience. Both paths were the
warpath.
The early settlers believed that they were "chosen" -- blessed by a special relationship to
their God. They viewed their " errand in the wilderness " as
a holy mission destined to bring a new and better way of life to the world. God's judgment on
their progress was revealed in the bounty of a harvest or the outcome of a war.
Exceptionalism was not a free-floating idea but was forged into a lasting culture by the
frontier wars aimed at the elimination or assimilation of native people and the conquest of
land. America's frontier history produced a lasting mythology that popularized empire and white
settler culture while cloaking their many contradictions.
I know it is hard to believe that the Puritans are still camped out in our minds. The old
religious radicalism has taken modern form in the liberal-sounding belief that the US military
is a "force for good (read God) in the world." The double-edged sword of exceptionalism traps
us into repeating history: our high moral standards and special role in the world gives us
license for wars and aggressions. It is the liberal elements of exceptionalism that are most
seductive, most difficult to wrap our heads around, and the most effective at winning our
consent to war.
Exceptionalism Wins Our Consent to War With A One-Two Punch
On the one hand, we have the "hard" exceptionalism like that of the Cold War (New and Old)
and the War on Terrorism. These war stories revolve around a rigid binary of good and evil.
After 9/11, in scores of speeches, George W. Bush repeated the mantra that there were "no gray
areas" in the struggle between good and evil.
On the other hand, "soft" exceptionalism takes a slightly different tack by appealing to the
liberal in us. Stories of rescue, protection, democracy and humanitarian efforts assure us of
our goodness. Obama mastered this narrative by claiming the US had a "duty to protect" the weak
and vulnerable in places like Libya.
These two strains of war stories are the narrative one-two punch, winning our consent to war
and empire.
Here is how war propaganda works: if authority figures in government and media denounce
foreign leaders or countries or immigrants as an evil threat and repeat it thousands of times,
they do not even have to say, "We are the chosen people destined to bring light to the world."
They know that millions of Americans will unconsciously refer to the exceptionalist code by
default because it's so deeply embedded in our culture. Once made brave by our exceptional
character and sense of superiority, the next moves are war, violence and white
supremacy.
Myth Meets the American War in Vietnam
The Vietnam War, and the resistance to it, profoundly challenged all existing war stories.
At the heart of this disruption was the soldier's revolt. Thousands of
US soldiers and veterans came to oppose the very war they fought in . An anti-war movement
inside the military was totally unprecedented in US history. The war-makers have been
scrambling to repair the damage ever since.
Following the defeat of US forces in Vietnam, the elites shifted gears. The idea that the US
could create a new democratic nation -- South Vietnam -- was an utter illusion that no amount
of fire-power could overcome. In truth, the US selected a series of petty tyrants to rule that
could never win the allegiance of the Vietnamese people because they were the transparent
puppets of American interests. The ruling class learned a lesson that forced them to abandon
the liberal veneer of "nation-building."
The Next Generation of War Stories: From "Noble
Cause" to "Humanitarian War."
Ronald Regan tried to repair the damaged narratives by recasting the Vietnam War as a "Noble
Cause." The Noble Cause appealed to people hurt and confused by the US defeat, as well as the
unrepentant war-makers, because it attempted to restore the old good vs. evil narrative of
exceptionalism. For Regan, America needed to rediscover its original mission as a
"city on a hill" -- a shining example to the world. Every single President since has
repeated that faith.
The Noble Cause narrative was reproduced in numerous bad movies and dubious academic studies
that tried to refight the war (and win this time!). Its primary function was to restore
exceptionalism in the minds of the American people. While Regan succeeded to a considerable
degree -- as we can see in the pro-war policy of both corporate parties -- "nation-building"
never recovered its power as a military strategy or war story.
The next facade was Clinton's "humanitarian war." Humanitarian war attempted to relight the
liberal beacon by replacing the problems of nation-building with the paternalistic do-gooding
of a superior culture and country. In effect, the imperialists recycled the 19th Century war
story of "Manifest Destiny" or "White Man's Burden." That "burden" was the supposed duty of
white people to lift lesser people up to the standards of western civilization -- even if that
required a lot of killing.
This kind of racist thinking legitimized the US overseas empire at its birth. Maybe it would
work again in empires' old age?
From the "War on Terrorism" to the "Responsibility to
Protect."
After the shock of 9/11 the narrative shifted again. Bush's "global war on terrorism"
reactivated the good vs. evil framing of the Cold War. The "war on terror" was an incoherent
military or political strategy except for its promise of forever wars.
Just as the Cold War was a "long twilight struggle" against an elusive but ruthless
communist enemy, terrorists might be anywhere and everywhere and do anything. And, like the
fight against communism, the war on terrorism would require the US to wage aggressive wars,
launch preemptive strikes, use covert activities and dodge both international law and the US
Constitution.
9/11 also tapped into deeply-rooted nationalistic and patriotic desires among everyday
people to protect and serve their country. The first attack on US soil in modern memory
powerfully restored the old binary: when faced with unspeakable evil, the US military became a
"force for good in the world." It's easy to forget just how potent the combination is and how
it led us into the War in Iraq. According to
The Washington Post :
Nearing the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, seven in 10
Americans continue to believe that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks, even
though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of
this.
The mythology is so deep that at first the people, soldiers especially, just had to believe
there was a good reason to attack Iraq. So we fell back on exceptionalism despite the total
absence of evidence. Of course Bush made no attempt to correct this misinformation. The myth
served him too well -- as did the official propaganda campaign claiming Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction.
But in due course, some of the faithful became doubters. A peace movement of global
proportions took shape. But in the US far too much of what appeared as resistance was driven by
narrow partisan
opposition to Republicans rather than principled opposition to war and empire.
But fear not war-makers -- Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton came to the rescue! As they
continued Bush's wars in the Middle East and expanded the war zone to include Libya, Syria and
then all of Africa, they sweetened "humanitarian war" with a heaping dose of cool-coated
"Responsibility to Protect." Once again, American goodness and innocence made the medicine go
down and our wars raged on.
Obama restored legitimacy to the empire so effectively that it took years for the illegal,
immoral, racist and "unwinnable" wars to reveal themselves to the public. I was told by one of
the leaders of About Face: Veterans
Against War that they almost had to close shop after Obama was elected because their donor
base dried up. Obama's hope was our dope. Just as the daze was finally lifting, Trump started
to take the mask off.
Is The Mask Off?
Today's we face an empire with the mask half off. Trump's doctrine -- "We are not
nation-building again, we are killing terrorists." -- is a revealing take on military trends
that began with the first US – Afghan War (1978-1992). US leaders gave up nation-building
and opted for failed states and political chaos instead of the strong states that
nation-building, or its illusion, required. The US military began to rely on
mercenaries and terrorists to replace the American
citizen-soldier. The
soldier revolt of the Vietnam Era already proved that everyday Americans were an unreliable
force to achieve imperial ambitions.
Nothing rips the mask off of the humanitarian justifications better than the actual
experience of combat in a war for oil and power -- so the war managers tried to reduce combat
exposure to a few. And they succeeded. The number of official US troops abroad
reached a 60-year low by 2017 . Even still
a new resistance movement of veterans is gathering steam .
Can
the "Green New Military" Put The Mask Back On?
The recycled imperial justifications of the past are losing their power: Manifest Destiny,
White Mans' Burden, leader of the free world, nation-building, humanitarian war, war against
terrorism, responsibility to protect -- what's next? If only the military could be seen as
saviors once again.
So far the New Cold War against Russia and China has recycled the anti-communist conspiracy
of the old Cold War into the xenophobic conspiracy theory of Russia-gate. Even a trusted tool
like Mueller could not make it work as a coherent narrative but no matter -- the US did not
skip a beat in building up
military bases on Russia's borders .
The media and political attacks on Russia or China or immigrants, or Iran or Syria are
likely to continue because propagandists cannot activate the exceptionalist code without an
evil enemy. Still, it takes more than evil. An effective war story for the US ruling class must
project the liberal ideas of helping, protection, saving and the spread of democracy in order
to engineer mass consent to war. Hence the need for "Humanitarian War," "Duty to Protect" or
maybe the"Green New Military."
Let anyone propose a retreat from any battlefield and the "humanitarian" war cry will rally
the empire's pawns and savior-types. If we practice our exceptionalism religiously -- and
religion it is -- then the US empire will never ever pull back from any war at any time. There
is always someone for the empire to "protect and save:" from the "Noble Savages" and innocent
white settlers of the frontier, to the Vietnamese Catholics, to the women of Afghanistan, to
the Kurds of Syria.
We so want to see our wars as a morality play, just as the Puritans did, but the empire is
all about power and profit.
"War is the Continuation of Politics by Other Means." -- Carl
von Clausewitz
All the Big Brass study Clausewitz because he is the founder of western military science --
but they are so blinded by the dilemmas of empire that they make a mess of his central
teaching: War is politics.
None of the war narratives and none of the wars can solve the most important question of
politics: governance . Who will govern the colonies? The overwhelming verdict of history is
this: colonies cannot be democratically or humanely governed as long as they are colonies.
Until the empire retreats its heavy hand will rule in places like Afghanistan.
The empire is reaching the limits of exceptionalism as both war narrative and national
mythology. This is why our rulers are forced to desperate measures: perpetual war, occupation,
intense propaganda campaigns like Russia-gate, the reliance on mercenaries and terrorists, and
the abuse and betrayal of their own soldiers.
Just as damning to the war machine is the collapse of conventional ideas about victory and
defeat. The US military can no longer "win." The question of victory is important on a deep
cultural level. According to the original mythology, the outcome of wars waged by "the chosen
people" are an indication of God's favor or disfavor. In modern terms, defeat delegitimizes the
state. Endless war is no substitute for "victory."
But it's not military victory we want. Our victory will be in ending war, dismantling the
empire, abolishing the vast militarized penal system and stopping irreparable climate chaos.
Our resistance will create a new narrative but it can only be written when millions of people
become the authors of their own history.
The empire is slipping into decline and chaos – one way or another. Will we be actors
deciding the fate of the American Empire or will it's collapse dictate our fate? But these wars
will, sooner or later, become the graveyard of empire -- or else America is truly exceptional
and we really are God's chosen people.
"... George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game: ..."
"... This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days. ..."
"... DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power." ..."
"... There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect. ..."
"Comedian Ellen DeGeneres loves to tell everyone to be kind. It's a loose word, kindness; on her show, DeGeneres customarily
uses it to mean a generic sort of niceness. Don't bully. Befriend people! It's a charming thought, though it has its limits
as a moral ethic. There are people in the world, after all, whom it is better not to befriend. Consider, for example, the person
of George W. Bush. Tens of thousands of people are dead because his administration lied to the American public about the presence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then, based on that lie, launched a war that's now in its 16th year. After Hurricane
Katrina struck and hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans, Bush twiddled his thumbs for days. Rather than fire the officials
responsible for the government's life-threateningly lackluster response to the crisis, he praised them, before flying over
the scene in Air Force One. He opposed basic human rights for LGBT people, and reproductive rights for women, and did more
to empower the American Christian right than any president since Reagan.
George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether
he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only
moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game:
And here is Ellen DeGeneres explaining why it's good and normal to share laughs, small talk, and nachos with a man who has
many deaths on his conscience:
Here's the money quote from her apologia:
"We're all different. And I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different," she told her studio
audience. "When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean be kind to the people who think the same way you do. I mean be
kind to everyone."
This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it
should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still
have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end
of his days.
Nevertheless, many celebrities and politicians have hailed DeGeneres for her radical civility:
There's almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong,
and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion,
I'll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres's friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues
the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn't a simple playground bully, he's the president. Americans grant our commanders-in-chief
extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency
to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes
from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump's critics want to make sure that
his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency
has to die.
DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity.
From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems
very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power."
...I am all in favor of Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war stance, but this comment shows me she is too childish to hold any power.
Tulsi Gabbard
Verified account @TulsiGabbard
22h22 hours ago
.@TheEllenShow msg of being kind to ALL is so needed right now. Enough with the divisiveness. We can't let politics tear
us apart. There are things we will disagree on strongly, and things we agree on -- let's treat each other with respect, aloha,
& work together for the people.
There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect.
"... "The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement," the company said in a statement. ..."
The maker of the iPhone has removed an app that allowed rioters in Hong Kong track where police are located after reports that
it was used to ambush officers and vandalize communities where law enforcement was not present. Following the suit of other companies
taking sides in ongoing tensions in China's autonomous city, Apple allowed HKmap.live to appear in its app store. The 'noble' goal
of helping rioters praised in the media has brought the opposite result.
"The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that
the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas
where they know there is no law enforcement," the company said in a statement.
"... "Is Apple guiding Hong Kong thugs?" the Chinese People's Daily newspaper wondered in an op-ed published on Wednesday. Beijing tore into the trillion-dollar company for offering HKmap.live, a map app that allows users to report and track police activity, warning the app "facilitates illegal behavior" and that Apple is hurting its reputation among Chinese consumers by "mixing business with politics and commercial activity with illegal activities." " ..."
"... This recklessness will cause much trouble for Apple ," the People's Daily declared, advising the tech firm to " think deeply ." ..."
"... Hong Kong's cheerleaders are rapidly finding out they may have bitten off more than they can chew. It's rarely a good idea, as a global business, to alienate 1.4 billion people living in the world's second-largest economy. ..."
"... More importantly, most Americans don't want a side of politics when they buy a smartphone or go to a basketball game. ..."
Beijing is angry at Apple for allowing a police-tracking map used by Hong Kong protesters in its App Store. Pressure grows on
US companies doing business in China to take a side, as virtue-signaling clashes with serving customers. "Is Apple guiding Hong
Kong thugs?" the Chinese People's Daily newspaper wondered in an op-ed published on Wednesday. Beijing tore into the trillion-dollar
company for offering HKmap.live, a map app that allows users to report and track police activity, warning the app "facilitates
illegal behavior" and that Apple is hurting its reputation among Chinese consumers by "mixing business with politics and commercial
activity with illegal activities." "
This recklessness will cause much trouble for Apple ," the People's Daily declared,
advising the tech firm to " think deeply ."
The majority of Apple's products are manufactured in China, and those that aren't are assembled in Texas from Chinese parts. China
is the second-largest market for Apple products, and CEO Tim Cook expects it will soon overtake the US as number one.
According to HKmap.live's developers, Apple initially rejected the app during a reviewing process, but reconsidered following
an appeal. It allows users to report not only the locations and movement of police, but also the use of tear gas and other protester-specific
features. The protests, which began in May over a now-shelved extradition bill, have grown quite violent, with some rioters turning
on ordinary citizens who merely express solidarity with the mainland.
It's not as if Apple has a track record of defying China's wishes – the company does not include the Taiwan flag emoji on its
Chinese devices, and this week has gone further by hiding the flag from users in Hong Kong and Macau. China does not recognize Taiwan
as a separate country.
Nor do people look to Apple as their moral guiding light. The Foxconn factories used by the company in China have become infamous
after a wave of worker suicides, so much that Apple had "suicide nets" installed to stop the employees from jumping to their
deaths.
So where did this sudden urge to stand up for rioters that have become the darlings of the West come from? Apple joins a lengthening
list of American corporate entities – including the makers of adult cartoon 'South Park', the manager of NBA team the Houston Rockets,
and Vans shoes – who've piled on China following the outbreak of the protests during the summer.
Virtue-signaling is almost expected of American companies in the Trump era. Celebrities who don't speak out against the president
are assumed to be secretly harboring pro-Trump sympathies, for example. China probably seems like an easier target than the president
– Beijing is halfway around the world and currently embroiled in a trade war with the US.
Hong Kong's cheerleaders are rapidly
finding out they may have bitten off more than they can chew. It's rarely a good idea, as a global business, to alienate 1.4 billion
people living in the world's second-largest economy. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who initially spoke up for Rockets manager Daryl
Morey's "freedom of expression" after he tweeted in support of the protests, has modified his statement to include understanding
that there are "consequences" to such freedoms and is scrambling to reach an understanding with China after the nation's largest
state-run TV station dropped NBA games in retaliation.
Look for Apple to do something similar if the government controlling its manufacturing and its second-largest market decides to
punish its insolence.
More importantly, most Americans don't want a side of politics when they buy a smartphone or go to a basketball game. The vast
majority of consumers – those who aren't on Twitter shrieking over the latest revelation that a CEO attended a Trump fundraiser –
are not interested in a company's ability to virtue signal. They want a product that works, not one that tells them what to think.
China’s embassy in France has slammed the country’s reaction to protests in Hong Kong, calling it hypocritical and arguing France
should show empathy as China did when Paris was trying to cope with Yellow Vests.
The diplomatic mission was commenting on a statement issued by the European Union, and swiftly repeated by the French Foreign
Ministry last week, after Hong Kong police used live ammunition against a protester in self-defense for the first time in four months
of demonstrations.
"... "Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars -- emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even begin to talk about kindness," the actor of Incredible Hulk fame tweeted. ..."
"... While some online were appreciative of the anti-Bush sentiment, many wondered aloud why similar treatment was rarely afforded to Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who is largely given a pass despite pursuing – in some cases escalating – many of the same policies for which Bush is condemned today. ..."
"... From a massive escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, ramping up drone bombings on Pakistan, establishing a secret presidential "kill list" that included American citizens, leading a NATO operation that left Libya in ruin, or arming violent Islamist militants in Syria – Obama still has much to answer for, but is rarely asked to do so. Despite bragging that he'd already bombed seven countries by 2015, liberal celebrities like Ruffalo have had few harsh words for the Nobel Peace Prize winner. ..."
"... *Nobel Peace Drones™ ..."
"... "Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible for the displacement and death of millions," ..."
Actor Mark Ruffalo was shredded for double standards after he posted a "callout" tweet
assailing George Bush for the sins of the Iraq War, with many netizens noting his aversion to
slamming Barack Obama's military adventures. Weighing into a controversy kicked off by TV
personality Ellen Degeneres, who came under fire for schmoozing it up with former President
George W. Bush at a football game last weekend, Ruffalo insisted no quarter or kindness should
be offered to perpetrators of heinous war crimes until they face consequences, including
Bush.
"Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War,
(including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars --
emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even
begin to talk about kindness," the actor of Incredible Hulk fame tweeted.
Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War,
(including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars --
emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even
begin to talk about kindness. https://t.co/dpMwfck6su
While some online were appreciative of the anti-Bush sentiment, many wondered aloud why
similar treatment was rarely afforded to Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who is largely given a
pass despite pursuing – in some cases escalating – many of the same policies for
which Bush is condemned today.
Claiming Bush is some monster while worshipping Obama even though they did the same things
abroad🤔
From a massive escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, ramping up drone bombings on Pakistan,
establishing a secret presidential "kill list" that included American citizens, leading
a NATO operation that left Libya in ruin, or arming violent Islamist militants in Syria –
Obama still has much to answer for, but is rarely asked to do so. Despite bragging that he'd
already bombed seven countries by 2015, liberal celebrities like Ruffalo have had few harsh
words for the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
"Woke Twitter, [including] Mark Ruffalo, are selective about call outs," one user
observed, noting the several occasions former first lady Michelle Obama posed affectionately
with Bush without facing a similar wave of outrage from figures like Ruffalo.
People ripping Jameela Jamil and the celebs in these screenshots but it was tumbleweed 101
when Michelle Obama was getting regular sweeties fixes from George W. Bush & going above
and beyond duty in friendly optics. Woke Twitter, incl Mark Ruffalo, are selective about call
outs. pic.twitter.com/snNYZEbAWM
It's funny how Mark Ruffalo can criticize Ellen, who was an actual person affected by
Bush's ignorance, but not a peep about Michelle Obama who admits to having a special
FRIENDSHIP with GW. https://t.co/9UM1BP8GpY
Another commenter seconded Ruffalo's views on Bush, but encouraged the actor to take his
criticism further, applying the same humanitarian standard evenly, regardless of the party in
power.
"Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible
for the displacement and death of millions," the user said.
The same is true for Obama. He started 5 wars and displaced even more people than Bush.
However, Obama is a media darling who Mark gushes over.
Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible for
the displacement and death of millions
The same is true for Obama. He started 5 wars and displaced even more people than Bush
However, Obama is a media darling who Mark gushes over
100% on Bush. You forgot to add Obama & Clinton though. No reason to root for justice
against one war criminal, while giving a free pass to others. It makes it partisan, rather
than ethical.
I did not vote for Trump, or for Hillary, but I firmly agree with analysis of Bacevich here:
> Honest people may differ on whether to attribute the Iraq War to outright lies or monumental hubris. When it comes to tallying
up the consequences, however, the intentions of those who sold the war don't particularly matter. The results include thousands
of Americans killed; tens of thousands wounded, many grievously, or left to struggle with the effects of PTSD; hundreds of thousands
of non-Americans killed or injured; millions displaced; trillions of dollars expended; radical groups like ISIS empowered (and
in its case even formed inside a US prison in Iraq); and the Persian Gulf region plunged into turmoil from which it has yet to
recover. How do Trump's crimes stack up against these?
> The Great Recession stemmed directly from economic policies implemented during the administration of President Bill Clinton
and continued by his successor. Deregulating the banking sector was projected to produce a bonanza in which all would share. Yet,
as a direct result of the ensuing chicanery, nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs, while overall unemployment shot up to
10 percent. Roughly 4 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. The stock market cratered and millions saw their life
savings evaporate. Again, the question must be asked: How do these results compare to Trump's dubious dealings with Ukraine?
Hong Kong police have seized weapons, armor and materials used to create Molotov cocktails,
which they said belonged to radical groups among the protesters labeled 'pro-democracy' by
western media. According to the police, on Monday and Tuesday they targeted 48 locations
throughout the city that they suspected were connected with violent protesters, who have been
waging street battles against the police force for several months.
The police arrested 51 people, including seven women, who were aged between 15 and 44, and
charged them with various crimes related to the rioting.
... ... ...
The authorities published
photos of the items they discovered during the raid, which include several suits of body armor,
various melee weapons as well as chemicals and glass bottles used in the manufacturing of
petrol bombs – a weapon routinely deployed by the protesters to cause chaos in Hong
Kong.
... ... ...
Mass anti-government protests first gripped the Chinese city in March, when thousands took
to the streets to protest an extradition bill that they deemed an attack on Hong Kong's
autonomy under the so-called "one country, two systems" arrangement. The bill has since been
revoked, but the protest movement's demands have continued to grow and it has become more
violent in its approach.
... ... ...
Peaceful protest demonstrations in Hong Kong, which have been the prime focus for Western
media coverage, take place against the backdrop of vandalism, harassment of businesses deemed
loyal to the central government and outright rioting.
"... "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ." ..."
"... I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never excuse war. ..."
"... Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world order to add to its Degeneracy. ..."
"... They conflate PNAC strategy with US security and anyone not in to military intervention for the PNAC is a traitor. ..."
This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media
with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who
lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.
To [Samantha Power] applies Scott Fitzgerald's often cited comment. Once Biden is back in
power, all these people will come back from the cold & rain the bombs on the globally
deplorables.
Lily Lynch @lilyslynch
This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media
with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who
lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ."
"liberal internationalism in Obama's cabinet. That made her [Powers] a target for his
critics. Her openness to military intervention – she was against [W Bush?] it in Iraq
but for it in Libya – drew flak from the left."
How can a supposed liberal [Obama was not a liberal in a traditional sense, maybe post
modern?] favor military intervention?
Does it involve ignoring "state run industrial age mass murder"?
Does it see a rationalized outcome to justify state mass murder?
I think post modern morality goes more towards the means don't matter much less the end---
see Libya!
I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never
excuse war.
Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world
order to add to its Degeneracy.
Looks like Us politicians adopted the stance: if you can't win against Israel lobby,
join... And yea we should talk about Zionists as a flavor of far right nationalism, nit about Jews, per se. The latter smells with
anti-Semitism as it accuses the ethnic group as a whole. Which is not only false, but also self-defeating stance:
Russophobia is "politically correct" anti-Semitism in the USA.
Notable quotes:
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
"... I would suggest to Phil Giraldi to talk about Zionists instead of Jews doing Israel's bidding. These Zionists adhere to the most racist and Apartheid ideology under the sun; Zionism. Not every Jew is a Zionist. Therefore it's an insult to those Jews who do not adhere to this wicked ideology and resist it. The notion of the right-wing Zionist regime in Israel to speak in the name of world Jewry should be rejected not only by the Jewish citizens of each country but by the public in general. It's amount to the hijacking of Jews in the name of a vile racist and occupation regime. Such a claim puts the local Jewish population in a precarious position, which could reproach in "dual loyalty." As Giraldi has pointed out numerous times, the majority of Americans have lost control of their Middle Eastern policy. A group of people whose loyalty to the US can cautiously describe as vague are in charge. ..."
"... I read in a sidebar on Antiwar.com that Sigal Mandelker was one of the attorneys representing Jeffrey Epstein in 2008. ..."
"... Mandelker was one of the DOJ officials who signed off on Epstein's sweetheart nonprosecution agreement. One suspects she was the superior of Alexander Acosta who told him that Epstein belonged to intelligence and was above Acosta's pay grade. ..."
Given Israel's clearly demonstrated ability to manipulate and manage American government at
all levels, there is inevitably considerable speculation about the presence of actual Israeli
citizens in the federal and state bureaucracies. Very often, lists that appear on the internet
focus on Jewish legislators, but in reality, few of them are likely to have Israeli citizenship
even if they regularly exhibit what amounts to "dual loyalty" sympathy for the Jewish state.
Nevertheless, Jews who are Zionists are
vastly overrepresented in all government agencies that have anything at all to do with the
Middle East.
There are, of course, some Jews who flaunt their identification with Israel, to include
current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who describes himself as "protector" of Israel and
former Senator Frank Lautenberg, frequently referred to as "Israel's Senator." One might also
include Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff and mayor of Chicago, who reportedly
served as a
volunteer in the Israeli Army, and Doug Feith, who caused so much mischief from his perch
at the Pentagon in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Feith had a law office in Jerusalem, suggesting
that he might have obtained Israeli citizenship.
To be sure there are many non-Jews in the American government who have hitched their star to
the Israeli wagon because they know it to be career enhancing. One only has to observe in
action Senator Lindsay Graham, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and perhaps the most
revolting of all, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who ran for office proclaiming that he would
be the most pro-Israel governor in the United States. After being elected he traveled to
Jerusalem with a large entourage of Zionist supporters to hold the first meeting of the Florida
state government cabinet. According to some authorities in Florida, the meeting was supposed to
be held in the state capitol Tallahassee and was therefore illegal, but DeSantis was undaunted
and made clear to observers where his loyalty lies.
Part of the problem is that Israeli citizenship is obtained virtually automatically upon
application by any Jew and once obtained it is permanent, only revocable by petitioning the
Israeli government. Nor is there anything equating to a list of citizens, so it is possible to
be an Israeli citizen while also holding American citizenship and no one would be the wiser. As
the United States permits American citizens to have multiple passports and therefore
nationalities there is, in fact, nothing in U.S. law that prohibits being both Israeli and
American.
Having dual nationality only a real issue when the policies of one citizenship conflict with
the other, and that is precisely where the problem comes in with Israeli dual nationals in the
United States, particularly if they wind up in the government. Frank Lautenberg, for example,
was responsible for the "Lautenberg amendment" of 1990 which brought many thousands of Russian
Jews into the United States as refugees, even though they were not in any danger and were
therefore ineligible for that status. As refugees, they received significant taxpayer provided
housing, subsistence and educational benefits.
Some other current officials in the government who may or may not have dual nationality and
are in policy making positions might include U.S. (sic) Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and
the recently resigned international negotiator Jason Greenblatt. Both have long histories of
pro-Israel advocacy to include supporting illegal settlements on the West Bank. And there is
also someone named Jared Kushner, whose ties to Israel are so close that Benjamin Netanyahu
once slept in his father and mother's apartment. If the metric to judge the actions – and
loyalty – of these individuals is their willingness to place American interests ahead of
those of Israel, they all would fail the test.
That said, there was one individual dual national who truly stood out when it came to
serving Israeli interests from inside the United States government. She might be worthy of the
nickname "Queen of Sanctions" because she was the Department of the Treasury's Under Secretary
for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI), who handed the punishment out and had her hand
on the throttle to crank the pain up. She is our own, unfortunately, and also Israel's own
Sigal Pearl Mandelker, and is its wonderful to be able to say that she
finally resigned last week!
OFTI's
website proclaims that it is responsible for "safeguarding the financial system against
illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats," but
it has from its founding been really all about safeguarding Israel's perceived interests.
Grant Smith notes how "the secretive office has a special blind spot for major terrorism
generators, such as tax-exempt money laundering from the United States into illegal Israeli
settlements and proliferation financing and weapons technology smuggling into Israel's
clandestine nuclear weapons complex."
To be sure, sanctions have been the key weapon in the ongoing unending war against perceived
"enemies" like Russia and Venezuela, but they have been laid on most promiscuously in the case
of Iran, Israel's number one enemy du jour, which has also been demonized by Washington even
though it is no threat to the United States. And it should be recognized that sanctions are not
a bloodless exercise used to pressure a recalcitrant government. They disproportionately affect
the poor and powerless, who starve and are denied access to medicines, but they rarely have any
impact on those who run the government. Five-hundred thousand Iraqi children died from
sanctions imposed by President Bill Clinton and his vulturine Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright. Currently, Iranians and Venezuelans are dying, by some estimates in their tens of
thousands.
Once on a sanctions list administered by the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control
(OFAC) , there is no actual appeal process and no getting off the hook unless Mandelker
said so. And anyone who has any contact with the sanctioned entity can be in for trouble,
including American citizens who will find themselves no longer having rights to free speech and
association. The terms for violation of sanctions used by OFAC are "transaction" and "dealing
in transactions," broadly construed to include not only monetary dealings or exchanges, but
also "providing any sort of service" and "non-monetary service," including giving a
presentation at a conference or speaking or writing in support of a sanctioned group or
individual.
OFAC has a broad mandate to punish anyone who has anything to do with any Iranian group or
even any individual as Iran is considered a country that is "comprehensively sanctioned." To
cite just one example of how indiscriminately the sanctions regime works, Max Blumenthal
has
described how the FBI recently, acting under Mandelker's orders, warned a number of
Americans who had planned on speaking at an Iranian organized conference in Beirut that they
might be arrested upon their return.
Mandelker was born in Israel and largely educated in the United States. She is predictably a
lawyer. She has never stated how many citizenships she holds while repeated inquiries as to
whether she retains her Israeli citizenship have been ignored by the Treasury Department. It is
not clear how she managed to obtain a security clearance given her evident affinity to a
foreign country. The position that she held until last Wednesday was created in 2004 by George
W. Bush and is something of a "no Gentiles need apply" fiefdom. Its officials travel regularly
on the taxpayer's dime to Israel for consultations and also collaborate with pro-Israel
organizations like AIPAC, WINEP and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).
Mandelker's predecessor was Adam Szubin and he was preceded by David Cohen and, before that, by
the office's founder Stuart Levey, who is currently Group Legal Manager and Group Managing
Director for global bank HSBC. Since its creation, OFTI has not surprisingly focused on what
might be described as Israel's enemies, most notably among them being Iran.
Mandelker was clear about her role, citing her personal and business relationship with "our
great partner, Israel." Referring to sanctions on Iran, she has said that "Bad actors need
money to do bad things. That is why we have this massive sanctions regime Every time we apply
that pressure, that crunch on them, we deny them the ability to get that kind of revenue, we
make the world a safer place." In support of the pain she is inflicting to no real purpose
other than to force complete Iranian capitulation, she cites alleged Iranian misdeeds, foremost
of which is its alleged threatening of Israel. She also condemns Iran's support for Syria's
Bashar al-Assad, who she claims has killed his own people with chemical weapons, an assertion
that has proven to be untrue.
Mandelker touted her personal history as a claimed child of the seemingly ubiquitous
"holocaust survivors." In a speech at the Holocaust Museum in April she claimed that her
parents went underground in Eastern Europe: "They were hiding underground, in forests, in
ditches and under haystacks. I grew up hearing their stories, including about moments of great
courage, some of which resulted in survival and others that ended in death."
To be sure, Mandelker and her predecessors have been going after Iran's money since the 1979
Islamic Revolution, constantly devising new restrictions and rules to make it hard for Tehran
to do business with any other country. In 2006 Levey's office began to focus on cutting off
Iran from the global financial system. Currently the Trump administration is applying what it
describes as "maximum pressure" in seeking to sink Iran's economy by blocking all oil exports.
Since May, any country buying Iranian oil has been vulnerable to secondary sanctions by
Washington, all set up and choreographed by Mandelker.
That Mandelker and company have been engaging in economic warfare with a country with which
the United States is not at war seems to have escaped the notice of the media and Washington's
chattering class, not surprisingly as Israel is a beneficiary of the policy. And the fact that
the way sanctions are being enforced against American citizens is clearly unconstitutional has
also slipped by the usual watchdogs. Sigal Mandelker was a prime example of why anyone who is
either an actual dual national or plausibly possesses dual loyalty should not hold high office
in the United States government and is a blessing that she is gone, though one imagines she
will be replaced by another Zionist fanatic. If anyone wonders why Israel gets away with what
it does the simple answer would be that there are just too many people at the federal level who
think that serving Israel is the same as serving the United States. That is just not so and it
is past time that the American public should wake up to that fact.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that
seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected] .
As refugees, they received significant taxpayer provided housing, subsistence and
educational benefits.
Including free Social Security, even though they never paid any money into that fund.
And it's not merely thousands, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands, all living off the
generosity of the American taxpayer. But Shhh, don't say anything, why that would be
anti-Semitic!
Talk about welfare Queens.
Those covered by the Lautenberg Amendment are eligible for Special Cash Assistance and
for Federal Public Assistance Programs including, but not limited to, Social Security,
Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
CRS statistics indicate that over 370,000 refugees were admitted from the Former
Soviet Union in the first ten years of the Lautenberg Amendment. In October 2002 the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that "The Lautenberg Amendment allowed some 350,000 to
400,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union to gain entry into the United States without
having to prove they were individually persecuted." In 2010 the Hebrew Immigrant Aid
Society cited Eric Rubin, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow stating
that the amendment had resulted in almost 440,000 refugees from the former Soviet Union
and other regions of the world.
*Eric Alterman made extended remarks in 2009 at the 92d Y, celebrating his dual loyalty:
"You know, one of the touchiest words you can say when you're discussing Jews and Israel
is the word dual loyalty. It's sort of one of those words that American Jewish officialdom
has ruled out of the discourse. If you say dual loyalty, you're playing into the hands of
anti-semites, because it's been a consistent trope among anti-Semites that you can't trust
Jews. etc. etc. And I find this very confusing because I was raised dually loyal my whole
life. When I went to Hebrew school, the content of my Hebrew school was all about supporting
Israel. When my parents who I think are here tonight sent me to Israel when I was 14, on a
ZOA [Zionist Organization of America]-sponsored trip it was drummed into me that I should do
what's best for Israel.
I was at the Center for Jewish History not long ago where I heard Ruth Wisse, the Yiddishist
professor at Harvard instruct a group of young Jewish journalists that they should think of
themselves as members of the Israeli army.
I am a dual loyal Jew and sometimes I'm going to actually go with Israel, because the United
States can take an awful lot of hits and come up standing. Whereas if Israel takes one
serious bad hit it could disappear. So there's going to be some cases where when Israel and
the United States conflict I'm going to support what's best for Israel rather than what I
think is best for the United States.
Then-editor of the Forward Jane Eisner: Can you imagine a time where you would feel that dual
loyalty and go with Israel?
Alterman: I just said, there are many occasions.
Eisner: Can you give us an example?
Alterman: I think that bin Laden and 9/11 were to some degree inspired by U.S. support of
Israel. I think a great deal of the terrorist attacks and the sort of pool of potential
terrorists who want to attack the United States are inspired by the United States support for
Israel. I'm not saying we shouldn't support Israel for that reason. I'm saying, Dammit if
that's the price we have to pay, then I'm willing to pay it. I'm just saying Let's be honest
about it.".>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Just think that what Alterman said is not condemned ..he suffers nothing for admitting
that he is basically a traitor who would sacrifice Americans for the Jewish state.
Unbelievable ..staggers the mind how this kind of Jew treason is so accepted in America
..just staggering.
How did this kind of treason come to be O.K. for the Jews?
It came from this kind of treason .. Nancy Pelosi Addressing AIPAC in December of last
year:
"I have said to people when they ask me, if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the
one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don't even call it our aid,
our cooperation with Israel. That's fundamental to who we are.""
If there was a terrorist out there worth a damn he would be bombing congress instead of
Wal-Mart's.
"'You can assume that these terrorists are fighting for Israel. If they aren't part of the
regular Israeli army, they're fighting for Israel. Israel has common goals with Turkey, the
United States, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other countries,' Assad was quoted by
Ynet" – https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4946010,00.html
Dammit if that's the price we have to pay, then I'm willing to pay it
Altermann is being slippery here, saying HE would be willing to pay the price of some
neoCONs or Zionists dragging the USA into another war for Israel.
What he should of said is that as a member of the Jewish dominated MSM, they are more than
willing to trick, deceive, bamboozle and pull us by our Star of David shaped nose ring into
endless wars for the glory of Apartheid Israel and if you disagree, why you're just a mouth
breathing, knuckle-dragging anti-Semite.
They need to live for 3 months in Israel (after attaining the correct visa) to attain the
citizenship, or a year of living in Israel for the passport (unless they changed this
recently or accelerated it).
What you are confused with is obtaining the repatriation visa and the temporary card. The
visa they can issue before people arrive in Israel, and the temporary identity card at the
airport. But those are only useful if you will live for the following months in Israel.
I would suggest to Phil Giraldi to talk about Zionists instead of Jews doing Israel's
bidding. These Zionists adhere to the most racist and Apartheid ideology under the sun;
Zionism. Not every Jew is a Zionist. Therefore it's an insult to those Jews who do not adhere
to this wicked ideology and resist it. The notion of the right-wing Zionist regime in Israel
to speak in the name of world Jewry should be rejected not only by the Jewish citizens of
each country but by the public in general. It's amount to the hijacking of Jews in the name
of a vile racist and occupation regime. Such a claim puts the local Jewish population in a
precarious position, which could reproach in "dual loyalty." As Giraldi has pointed out
numerous times, the majority of Americans have lost control of their Middle Eastern policy. A
group of people whose loyalty to the US can cautiously describe as vague are in charge.
"As the United States permits American citizens to have multiple passports and therefore
nationalities there is, in fact, nothing in U.S. law that prohibits being both Israeli and
American".
Although I have not checked recently, I am fairly sure that is not the whole story by any
means.
It is quite true that ordinary citizens can go a lifetime with dual nationality and feel
no pain. I am one such, as my parents were British by birth but I was born in Argentina. Like
the USA, Argentina grants nationality to everyone born there (or, perhaps more accurately,
claims such people as its citizens).
However I think you will find that US law forbids anyone with dual US-anything nationality
to serve as an officer (or perhaps in any rank) in the other nation's armed forces, or to
accept political office in the other nation's government. There may well be other
restrictions.
The exceptions I have pointed out are very relevant indeed to the dual US-Israeli citizens
mentioned in the article, as many of them have served in the Israeli armed forces. Indeed is
that not compulsory for any Israeli citizen resident in Israel)? Some of them have also held
political office, had civil service jobs, etc.
For such people to remain anonymous is a scandal and, frankly, a serious national security
risk for the USA.
"Israeli citizenship is obtained virtually automatically upon application by any Jew and once
obtained it is permanent, only revocable by petitioning the Israeli government".
Neat and effective. "It's a kopeck to get in, but a ruble to get out".
'OFTI's website proclaims that it is responsible for "safeguarding the financial system
against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security
threats" '
Doesn't the US government mind this office setting itself up against the power of
Washington?
Illicit use of funds – check.
Rogue nation – check.
Terrorist facilitators – check in CAPITAL LETTERS. (Also actual terrorists).
WMD – check. (No other nation's government still maintains nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons).
Money launderers – Hell, Washington is the world's biggest counterfeiter.
Drug kingpins – check, although that is mostly delegated to the CIA.
Other national security threats – check, Washington is a national security threat to
every other nation in the world except Israel.
To be sure there are many non-Jews in the American government who have hitched their
star to the Israeli wagon because they know it to be career enhancing.
It can only be career enhancing if whites allow it.
One only has to observe in action Senator Lindsay Graham, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki
Haley and perhaps the most revolting of all, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who ran for
office proclaiming that he would be the most pro-Israel governor in the United States.
With the exception of Nikki Haley, who was appointed by an elected official, the other two
were elected by the majority white electorate. Jews have inordinate power in our country
because whites allow it.
To be clear any problems caused by Jews are the result of white insouciance.
I read in a sidebar on Antiwar.com that Sigal Mandelker was one of the attorneys
representing Jeffrey Epstein in 2008.
If it is true, then she,like Alexander Acosta, is guilty of breaking the law by entering
into judgement a plea deal without first notifying the plaintiffs of what that deal was, and
whether or not it met to their satisfaction.
The fact that it was MORE important to Mandelker to reward a child rapist/ pedophile with
a super sweet, totally cush deal , than to seek justice for his numerous victims , indicates
, with extreme clarity , she has no business working in our treasury department, let alone
our OFAC.
Individuals, who breach our laws and rules of ethics to ensure pedophiles and child
rapists are free to roam our streets, have no business working in the United States
Government, in any capacity.
The fact that both Mendaker AND Acosta were given prominent positions of power , with the
full awareness of their actions by those who appointed them, is very, very troubling.
It is simply NOT acceptable to the American People that there may be pedophiles and/or
child rapists serving within, and/ or influencing , our representative bodies.
The fact there has been no investigation into any of this, as well as Mandelkers
connection, is an absolute disgrace.
It seems to me, that until all the facts are clear, President Trump should order a "clean
sweep protocol" As soon as possible.
Child rapists , and their enablers , belong in only one place .and that is Federal Prison.
.
It is not just a matter of ethics it is a matter of National Security.
Zionists have thoroughly infiltrated and compromised the US Treasury. This is news. Watch
it be ignored.
Crypto-Israelis have captured (and partly converted) a US Federal agency for the purpose
of crippling the economies of any state that interferes with the far-flung agenda of global
Zionism. Their duplicitous mission borders on treason.
Using American resources to target Israel's far-away foes has nothing to do with advancing
the interests of the American people. To the contrary. It damages us economically and
strategically. It also undermines us domestically since these actions allow a foreign-based
faction to seize and exploit US power for its own nefarious ends.
Crypto-Zionist penetration of Washington is a backdoor assault on US sovereignty. We are
being parasitized.
Incredibly, Israeli influence over Washington has become so embedded that's it's now taken
for granted by Jews and acquiescing gentiles alike. Success in Washington now requires one to
A) fully understand (and respect) Jewish privilege, while B) never transgressing upon the
taboos that protect this indomitable group.
Indeed, just examining the range and depth of Jewish power in America is a forbidden topic
(except by Jewish scholars for a Jewish audience).
But for the rest of us, just noticing Jewish power is a risky enterprise. (So say
nothing.)
Officially, there's no such thing. Only Jewish victims.
Hapless Americans are confused. For Diaspora Jews however these artful deceptions
constitute a familiar gameplan. Organized Jewish subversion dates back to ancient Persia.
Jews celebrate it. (See: Purim)
Today, Israeli operatives are all over Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood and beyond. And
they're not the least bit ashamed about it. No siree. It's what they do.
Activist Jews are deeply committed to weaving Israel's economic and political needs into
the very fabric of American life. They are succeeding.
When Zio-America's corrupt, bloodthirsty, and over-extended empire finally collapses,
Diaspora Jews can simply cash in their chips and migrate to Israel. America's demise will
mark a new chapter in their glorious, wandering, drama-filled history.
Unfortunately, we goyim are expected to go down with the American ship.
To see just how 'entitled' the Jewish State thinks it is read these two articles. They
are aflame over Trump decision not to interfere in the Turkey Kurd dispute on the Turkey
Syrian border.
Speaking of aflame, I would recommend a third. It's an article by Yossi Alpher, who is a
former Mossad official and former director of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for
Strategic Studies.
Concluding paragraphs from, What Trump's Withdrawal From Syria Means For The Kurds
– And For Israel :
At the end of the day, there are two basic lessons here for Israel and its supporters.
For anyone who has entertained doubts about the need for a state for the Jewish people, the
Kurds represent a tragic reminder. They are consistently being abandoned to an ugly fate
because they don't have a country.
The second lesson is that Israel cannot and must not depend on Trump. The cries of alarm
in Israel in recent days about a looming security threat do not only reflect lessons drawn
from Iran's (or one of its proxy's) spectacular attack on Saudi Arabia's energy
infrastructure. The alarms also reflect concern over the precedent set by Trump's refusal
to get involved militarily after Washington's Saudi ally was the victim of naked aggression
from Iran.
From that standpoint, America abandoning the Syrian Kurds is just icing on the cake of
Trump's Middle East non-strategy.
@alexanderMandelker was one of the DOJ officials who signed off on Epstein's sweetheart
nonprosecution agreement. One suspects she was the superior of Alexander Acosta who told him
that Epstein belonged to intelligence and was above Acosta's pay grade.
For China, the three principle points of potential military friction with the U.S. are
Taiwan, South Korea-Japan, and the South China Sea. Apart from South Korea and Japan, where the
U.S. has significant ground and air forces already forward deployed, the main threat to China
is maritime power projected by American aircraft carrier battlegroups and amphibious assault
ships. The Chinese response was to develop a range of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD)
capabilities designed to target American naval forces before they arrived in any potential
contested waters.
Traditionally, the U.S. Navy has relied on a combination of surface warships armed with
sophisticated air defense systems, submarines, and the aircraft carrier's considerable
contingent of combat aircraft to defend against hostile threats in time of war. China's
response came in the form of the DF-21D medium-range missile , dubbed the
"carrier killer." With a range of between 1,450 and 1,550 kilometers, the DF-21D employs a
maneuverable warhead that can deliver a conventional high-explosive warhead with a circular
error of probability (CEP) of 10 meters -- more than enough to strike a carrier-sized
target.
To compliment the DF-21D, China has also deployed the DF-26 intermediate-range missile , which
it has dubbed the "Guam killer," named after the American territory home to major U.S. military
installations. Like the DF-21, the DF-26 has a conventionally armed variant, which is intended
to be used against ships. Both missiles were featured in the 2015 military parade commemorating
the founding of the PRC.
As capable as they were, however, the DF-21D and DF-26 were not the shashoujian
weapons envisioned by Chinese military planners, representing as they did reciprocal
capability, as opposed to a game-changing technology. The unveiling of the true
shashoujian was reserved for last week's parade, and it came in the form of the DF-100
and DF-17 missiles.
The DF-100 is a vehicle-mounted supersonic cruise missile "characterized by a long range,
high precision and quick responsiveness," according to
the Chinese press . When combined with the DF-21/DF-26 threat, the DF-100 is intended to
overwhelm any existing U.S. missile defense capability, turning the Navy into a virtual sitting
duck. As impressive as the DF-100 is, however, it was overshadowed by the
DF-17 , a long-range cruise missile equipped with a hypersonic glide warhead, which
maneuvers at over seven times the speed of sound -- faster than any of the missiles the U.S.
possesses to intercept it. Nothing in the current U.S. arsenal can defeat the DF-17 -- not the
upgraded anti-missile ships, THAAD, or even the Ground Based Interceptors (GBI) currently
based in Alaska.
In short, in the event of a naval clash between China and the U.S., the likelihood of
America's fleet being sent to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is very high.
The potential loss of the Pacific Fleet cannot be taken lightly: it could serve as a trigger
for the release of nuclear weapons in response. The threat of an American nuclear attack has
always been the ace in the hole for the U.S. regarding China, given that nation's weak
strategic nuclear capability.
Since the 1980s, China has possessed a small number of obsolete liquid-fuel intercontinental
ballistic missiles as their strategic deterrent. These missiles have a slow response time and
could easily be destroyed by any concerted pre-emptive attack. China sought to upgrade its ICBM
force in the late 1990s with a new road-mobile solid fuel missile, the DF-31 . Over the course of the next
two decades, China has upgraded the DF-31, improving its accuracy and mobility while increasing
the number of warheads it carries from one to three. But even with the improved DF-31, China
remained at a distinct disadvantage with the U.S. when it came to overall strategic nuclear
capability.
While the likelihood that a few DF-31 missiles could be launched and their warheads reach
their targets in the U.S., the DF-31 was not a "nation killing" system. In short, any strategic
nuclear exchange between China and the U.S. would end with America intact and China
annihilated. As such, any escalation of military force by China that could have potentially
ended in an all-out nuclear war was suicidal, in effect nullifying any advantage China had
gained by deploying the DF-100 and DF-17 missiles.
Enter the
DF-41 , China's ultimate shashoujian weapon. A three-stage, road-mobile ICBM
equipped with between six and 10 multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV)
warheads, the DF-41 provides China with a nuclear deterrent capable of surviving an American
nuclear first strike and delivering a nation-killing blow to the United States in retaliation.
The DF-41 is a strategic game changer, allowing China to embrace the mutual assured destruction
(MAD) nuclear deterrence posture previously the sole purview of the United States and
Russia.
In doing so, China has gained the strategic advantage over the U.S. when it comes to
competing power projection in the Pacific. Possessing a virtually unstoppable A2/AD capability,
Beijing is well positioned to push back aggressively against U.S. maritime power projection in
the
South China Sea and the
Taiwan Straits .
Most who watched the Chinese military parade on October 1 saw what looked to be some
interesting missiles. For the informed observer, however, they were witnessing the end of an
era. Previously, the United States could count on its strategic nuclear deterrence to serve as
a restraint against any decisive Chinese reaction to aggressive American military maneuvers in
the Pacific. Thanks to the DF-41, this capability no longer exists. Now the U.S. will be
compelled to calculate how much risk it is willing to take when it comes to enforcing its
sacrosanct "freedom of navigation."
While the U.S. commitment to Taiwan's independence remains steadfast, its willingness to go
to war with China over the South China Sea may not be as firm. The bottom line is that China,
with a defense budget of some $250 billion, has successfully combined "Western technology with
Eastern wisdom," for which the U.S. has no response.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author ofseveral books,
most recently,Deal of the Century: How
Iran Blocked the West's Road to War (2018).
"When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record holders for 'second
chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives.", Stephen Walt
Actually, many of them should have been considered candidates for war criminals. "Waging the
war of agression" was part of the Nuremberg trials. This was the media called euphemistically
"the war of choice"!
"When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record
holders for 'second chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives. Beginning in
the mid-1990s, this influential network of hard-line pundits, journalists, think tank analysts,
and government officials developed, purveyed, and promoted an expansive vision of American
power as a positive force in world affairs.
They conceived and sold the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein and insisted
that this bold move would enable the United States to transform much of the Middle East into a
sea of pro-American democracies.
What has become of the brilliant strategists who led the nation into such a disastrous
debacle? None of their rosy visions have come to pass, and if holding people to account were a
guiding principle inside the foreign policy community, these individuals would now be marginal
figures commanding roughly the same influence that Charles Lindbergh enjoyed after making naive
and somewhat sympathetic statements about Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.",
Walt, S. (2018). The Hell of good intentions: America's foreign policy elite and the decline
of US primacy. Straus and Giroux, p. 190.
You would have thought that these cheerleaders of invasion of Iraq and violation of the UN
charter would have run far, far away so that we never hear from them again--but no, they are
back explaining the world for us and making money doing that.
[ Milanovic was referring to a new column in Project Syndicate that I was confused by
before I noticed this reference to the column. Among the points of Milanovic, we find the
same self-defeating foreign policy being pushed by the same elite opinion-makers who hurt us
so much by taking us to war in Iraq and beyond.
"... Combat crews of S-400, in Astrakhan Region, held combat exercises against hypersonic target-missiles "Favorit PM" and destroyed all targets. The statement of the press-service of Western Military District announced. The crews of S-400 Triumphs were from the units of air-defense of Leningrad Army of Air Force and Air Defense of Western Military District. ..."
The Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke yesterday at the yearly Valdai
Discussion Club meeting in Sochi. A video with English translations and excerpts of the
transcript are here .
With regards to the global system Putin made an interesting historic comparison:
in the 19th century they used to refer to a "Concert of Powers." The time has come to talk in
terms of a global "concert" of development models, interests, cultures and traditions where
the sound of each instrument is crucial, inextricable and valuable, and for the music to be
played harmoniously rather than performed with discordant notes, a cacophony. It is crucial
to consider the opinions and interests of all the participants in international life. Let me
reiterate: truly mutually respectful, pragmatic and consequently solid relations can only
built between independent and sovereign states .
Russia is sincerely committed to this approach and pursues a positive agenda.
The Concert of
Europe was the balance of power system between 1815 to 1848 and from 1871 to 1914:
A first phase of the Concert of Europe, known as the Congress System or the Vienna System
after the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), was dominated by five Great Powers of Europe:
Prussia, Russia, Britain, France and Austria. [...] With the Revolutions of 1848 the Vienna
system collapsed and, although the republican rebellions were checked, an age of nationalism
began and culminated in the unifications of Italy (by Sardinia) and Germany (by Prussia) in
1871. The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck re-created the Concert of Europe to avoid
future conflicts escalating into new wars. The revitalized concert included France, Britain,
Austria, Russia, and Italy with Germany as the main continental power economically and
militarily.
Bismark's concert kept peace in a usually warring Europe for 43 years. If Putin wants to be
the new Bismarck I am all for it.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow is helping China build a system to warn
of ballistic missile launches.
Since the cold war, only the United States and Russia have had such systems, which involve
an array of ground-based radars and space satellites. The systems allow for early spotting of
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Speaking at an international affairs conference in Moscow on Thursday, Putin said Russia
had been helping China develop such a system. He added that "this is a very serious thing
that will radically enhance China's defence capability".
His statement signalled a new degree of defence cooperation between the two former
Communist rivals that have developed increasingly close political and military ties while
Beijing and Washington have sunk into a trade war.
That is as good for China as it is for Russia. China has an immediate need for such a system
because the U.S. is taking a significantly more bellicose posture against it.
The U.S. left the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia to build a nuclear
missiles force in South Asia
that will aim at China. It is now looking for Asian countries in which it could station
such weapons. China is
using its economic might to prevent that but the U.S. is likely to succeed.
While China
has capable weapons and can defend itself against a smaller attack the U.S. has about 20
times more nuclear warheads than China. It could use those in an overwhelming first strike to
decapitate and destroy the Chinese state. An early warning system will give China enough time
to detect such an attack and to launch its own nuclear deterrent against the U.S. The warning
systems will thus checkmate the U.S. first strike capability.
Over the last two years Russia and China both unveiled hypersonic weapons. Currently the
U.S. has neither such weapons nor any defensive system that can protect against these.
Russia was smart enough to develop both - the super fast offensive weapon and a defense
against it. Via Andrei Martyanov we learn of a recent Russian press
notice:
Translation: Combat crews of S-400, in Astrakhan Region, held combat exercises against
hypersonic target-missiles "Favorit PM" and destroyed all targets. The statement of the
press-service of Western Military District announced. The crews of S-400 Triumphs were from
the units of air-defense of Leningrad Army of Air Force and Air Defense of Western Military
District.
And what this "Favorit PM" missile-target complex is? Very simple, it is deeply modernized
good ol' S-300 P series which allows to use missiles of types 5V55 which have their
explosives removed and are capable of atmospheric maneuverable flight with the velocities of
Mach=6 (in excess of 7,000 kilometers per hour). These are genuine hyper-sonic
missile-targets and, evidently, and I don't have any reasons to doubt it, S-400 had very
little problems shooting them down.
On top of the missile warning system China will also want to have that most capable air and
missile defense system. Russia will make it a decent offer.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's talked a day earlier than Putin. His speech and the Q &
A with him are here
. The talk was mostly about the Middle East and Lavrov's tone was rather angry while he passed
through a long list of U.S. sins in the region and beyond. There were also some interesting
remarks about Turkey, Syria and the Ukraine. The most interesting passage was his response to a
question about U.S. sanction against Russia to which some senators want to add even more.
Lavrov said:
I have heard that Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin are two famous anti-Russia-minded members of the
US Congress. I don't think that this implies that they have any foresight. Those with a more
or less politically mature opinion of the situation should have realised long ago that the
sanctions don't work in the direction they wanted them to work. I believe that they will
never work. We have a territory and its riches that were bestowed on us by God and our
ancestors, we have a feeling of personal dignity, and we also have the armed forces. This
combination makes us very confident. I hope that economic development and all the investment
that has been made and continues to be made will also pay off in the near future.
The U.S. loves to dish out sanctions left and right and the Trump administration has
increased their use. But sanctions, especially unilateral ones, do not work. The U.S. has not
recognized that because it has never assessed whether those sanctions fulfill their aims. A
recent Government Accountability Office report found :
The Departments of the Treasury (Treasury), State (State), and Commerce (Commerce) each
undertake efforts to assess the impacts of specific sanctions on the targets of those
sanctions. [...] However, agency officials cited several difficulties in assessing sanctions'
effectiveness in meeting broader U.S. policy goals , including challenges in isolating the
effect of sanctions from other factors as well as evolving foreign policy goals. According to
Treasury, State, and Commerce officials, their agencies have not conducted such assessments
on their own.
The U.S. sanctions and sanctions and sanctions but never checked if sanctions work to the
intended purpose. The efforts to sanction Russia have surely led to some unintended
consequences. They are the reason why the alliance between China and Russia deepens every day.
The U.S. has the exorbitant privilege of having its own
currency being used as the international reserve. The sanctioning of U.S. dollar transactions
is the reason why the U.S. is now losing it :
Russia's Rosneft has set the euro as the default currency for all its new export contracts
including for crude oil, oil products, petrochemicals and liquefied petroleum gas, tender
documents showed.
The switch from U.S. dollars, which happened in September according to the tender
documents published on Rosneft's website, is set to reduce the state-controlled firm's
vulnerability to potential fresh U.S. sanctions.
Washington has threatened to impose sanctions on Rosneft over its operations in Venezuela,
a move which Rosneft says would be illegal.
Iran has taken comparable steps. It now sells oil to China and India in either local
currencies. Other countries will surely learn from this and will also start to use other
currencies for their energy purchases. As the transactions in dollars decrease they will also
start to use other currencies for their reserves.
But the U.S. is not losing its financial or sole superpower status because of what China or
Russia or Iran have done or do. It is losing it because its has made too many mistakes.
Those states who, like Russia, have done their homework will profit from it.
Posted by b on October 4, 2019 at 18:03 UTC |
Permalink
next page " b: [Iran] now sells oil to China and India
Not to India, but India has said that that will change. India has to be deliberate because it
is angling for a permanent seat in the UNSC.
Russia is building a network of missile defense, early warning, electronic weapons systems
that will ring Greater Eurasia, not just the Russian Federation.
Russia may not produce smart phones and have their own Amazon or Alibaba scale e-commerce
platform, but they have the world class defenses and leading edge counter-strike weapons that
overwhelm anything the US has or will have for a decade to come.
Putin and Lavrov have laid out the diplomatic talking points for a safer, saner world.
And as the saying goes, if you don't talk to Lavrov, then you can talk with Shoigu
(MOD).
The Russians have warned the West. Maybe the West is hard of hearing.
But what is clear, the rest of the world has heard it and they are gravitating toward Russia
and China.
It is losing it because its has made too many mistakes.
A statement that deserves to be unpacked. I think at the core of the "mistakes" is a
certain exceptionalist attitude which carries with it a combination of greed and
hubris that promotes moral turpitude.
When the re-alignment of Russia and China started, I compared them to two soldiers, standing
back-to-back, defensively pointing their guns forward. This is becoming an integrated
continental defense now. Do you think that the two missile warning system will remain
separate? It is sad that it had to come to this, but the AngloZionist mindset of domination
and exploitation is what it is. Russia and China are not benevolent, but a big majority of
countries prefers their economic approach to the Western military - bombed and killed if you
do not comply with master's wishes. Simply, the West is a one-trick-pony in decline,
As the U.S.A.slowly petrifies into an ever more fragile state of existence will the blow that
finally causes it to fracture into a state of catastrophic impotence,( in it's eyes ) mean
that it will die with a whimper or a bang?
Will the politik of the U.S.A.wake up before it's demise and re-orientate it's ethos so as to
integrate with the new order instigated from the east or, like an enraged, immature being try
to bring the rest of the world down with it?
I hope wiser minds than those in the Senate prevail. However I'm not really that optimistic
that they are capable of serious self reflection.
Here is an article that looks at a WikiLeaks document that explains how the United States
Army is preparing to help Washington achieve its national strategic objectives:
This Army manual gives us a very clear view of how Washington uses manipulation through
its influence on the World Bank, IMF, OECD and other "global" groups to wage unconventional
warfare on any nation that doesn't share its view of how the world should function and that
threatens America's control of the globe, including nations like Venezuela, Iran, Russia and
North Korea.
While China has capable weapons and can defend itself against a smaller attack the U.S. has
about 20 times more nuclear warheads than China. It could use those in an overwhelming
first strike to decapitate and destroy the Chinese state.
b, in a nuclear exchange, all it takes is a tiny fraction of the US/China/Russia's nuclear
arsenals to finish off human civilisation, so numbers are irrelevant. Radiation knows no
borders.
Such contributors and Don Bacon, Grieved and Karlof1 might help me (dis)confirm this, but my
impression is that Russia is or could make a case for selling only or primarily defensive
weapons, to pretty much anyone ... with the effect and, say, the intent, to make wars of
aggression, particularly pre-emptive strikes, much less tempting.
By shifting the field advantage towards defense, can it be plausibly proposed that Russia
is working to make the world, overall, a safer place (even if their primary intent might be
to make it safer from attacks initiated by the Unipolar Axis)?
b: The U.S. sanctions and sanctions and sanctions . . .
It even sanctions itself, with tariffs. Free trade is dead!
Don, there's NEVER been free trade, ever, no matter how far back you look in history. Free
trade is imperial speak for the dominant economies dictating to the weaker.
Posted by: Paul Damascene | Oct 4 2019 18:46 utc | 9
my impression is that Russia is or could make a case for selling only or primarily
defensive weapons, to pretty much anyone ...
Isn't this exactly what they're doing. Martynov's writings reveal this proces in detail.
It's a process that has its origins in WWII, a process that also has economic implications
for Russia.
I agree with Barovsky in comment # 8 about the MAD nature of any nuclear war
I also want to posit that until China has its own air and missile defense system that
Russia will use its to insure that any nuclear attack on China will result in global MAD
@ b who wrote
"
But the U.S. is not losing its financial or sole superpower status because of what China or
Russia or Iran have done or do. It is losing it because its has made too many mistakes.
"
it is not the US necessarily that has the sole financial superpower status but the cult of
global private finance ownership that is international and not just the US. And now that
financial superpower status is not just being challenged from outside the Western nations of
empire but from within as I continue to write about in the latest Open Thread. The US state
of California has instantiated public finance for the state...it was signed into law this
past Wednesday and the Western MSM has yet to report or comment on this game changing
initiative.....speaks volumes to the threat it creates to global private finance because
California has the 5th largest GDP in the world.
I had been leaning toward the scenario where the Empire would, eventually, have to be put
down in a violent confrontation, with a CBG sunk, but I am really feeling now, given the
Singapore deal in the EAEU with India and Iran in the wings and the missile-shield over PRC
and Rosneft selling product in Euros and Syria and Iran and Venezuela not being wiped out,
that maybe, just maybe, the Empire will be left in the dust, with no climactic confrontation
required. Maybe I am being naive, but there seems to be evidence to support that idea.
I wish since a while for an US American Gorbachov. This kind of person only is able to bring
down the still running war economy. You would expect some hero like spiritual leader is
necessary. The only thing what was special about the russian version for that job, he was
young. Able to imagine a world without that permanent pressure, that everybody can feel in
every cell of society. Of course, I hoped that trump maybe will do this, but he is twisted in
his own challenges, already old, no real love for the people around him in general. The
actual task is to lead down US from the sole position of power to become the most important
country in the world. I hope US Americans can fell save one day without spending half of
world's expanses on war, which equals that US budget is more than half for this reason. Who
will be able to explain to voters, this isn't a sound deal?
I'm loathe to posit this but if the US follows the demise of previous empires, then only
war will accomplish this but perhaps, just perhaps the mold (or is that mould?) has been
broken? After all, WWI and WWII came about because of competition between dominant economies
and ultimately a redivision of the world into new blocs. But then again, the emergence of the
USSR changed everything, the most momentous event of the 20th century. So perhaps we need a
new USSR but this time a transnational USSR?
My country is in a sorry state of affairs indeed, and listening to those around me, a common
theme occurs, a wish that that slow-coming line in the sand which will truly mark the end of
our illusion of exceptionalism would just get here and be done, so we, or those of us who are
left afterward, can work through those damnable five stages of grieving, and begin the
process of reconstruction and healing what remains.
Judging by comments made here, I've withdrawn hope of either party having anything to
present the citizenry as a way out of our demise, so coast toward that necessary line we do.
Is that too negative?
Slightly off topic, but is not the Western use of children for nefarious purposes increasing?
From the first Hong King rioter who got shot for attacking a policeman, at all of his 14
years of age, through Epstein's sexual use of young girls for blackmail, to Greta and the
climate change screaming kids. If you are younger than 18, and without or with weak parental
oversight due to challenging economic conditions (struggle to survive), you are a fair game
for the Western "elite". Earn some pocket money by burning down Hong Kong.
This will only increase, because it runs parallel to the tactics of turning adults against
each other to miss to notice the "elite's" hand in all of their pockets. Fight each other
people and send your children into the front lines. That is how they channel anger toward's
"elite's" alternative-model enemies (China) and away from the real perpetrators and the real
issues. This is why the images of Hong Kong riots overlap with the two minute hate from the
movie 1984.
Finally, the Communist elite used children too, to do the dying in revolutions, to report
their own parents the communist authorities and to severely punish ideological opponents. The
use of children is nothing new, but it shows total moral depravity.
@ Sally Snyder 7
Thank you for that! And I thought Special Forces was only interested in assassinations.
As you indicate, it's surprising that they put such self-damaging information in print.
They think they're invincible, so we need more Lavrovs to set them straight.
re Paul Damascene #9, I see mutually assured defense as a highly desirable strategy emerging
from Russia and China. If that new 'mad' is expanded to friendlies in the middle east then a
very large sector of the planets continents can be enclosed in a single defensive frame.
I see this as a mighty good potential to arrest the lunatic tendency to war constantly
being chanted by the five eyes and their vassal toadies.
Certainly the elimination of nuclear weapons entirely should be the global objective.
Failing that, the prevention of ground blasts with the consequent dust and threat of nuclear
winter is desirable in my view. High altitude interception may prevent premature detonation
of attacking warheads but it will most likely lead to highly contaminated hot spots on
ground.
There is an evil in warmongering that is utterly beneath contempt.
I see on AMN, the Syrian News site, an article speaking about a new KFC in terrorist-held
Idlib ...
If this isn't a statement about who is collaborating in these wars I don't know what is !!
It is partially about the globalists wanting to increase the extent of their reach (apart
from all the religious and cultural issues too)
...
...but my impression is that Russia is or could make a case for selling only or primarily
defensive weapons, to pretty much anyone ... with the effect and, say, the intent, to make
wars of aggression, particularly pre-emptive strikes, much less tempting.
By shifting the field advantage towards defense, can it be plausibly proposed that
Russia is working to make the world, overall, a safer place (even if their primary intent
might be to make it safer from attacks initiated by the Unipolar Axis)?
Posted by: Paul Damascene | Oct 4 2019 18:46 utc | 9
Imo that's a perfectly sane assessment. It's just an unfortunate prerequisite, and a sign
of the times, that M.A.D. had to be looming in the background before the wisdom could be
recognised and de-escalation could commence.
@ PD 9 shifting the field advantage towards defense
>Actually all nations are supposed to concentrate on defense. The US changed its War
Dept to Defense Dept. --( to throw us off? ) There are few nations that have an overwhelming
offensive capability. Its expensive and requires a lot of people, including mostly
draftees.
> The F-35 jet fighter now goes for about $150 million per copy, in large part because it
is stealthy and can get through enemy defenses. At least that's the plan. But after eighteen
years (and counting) of development, the F-35 still has not been approved for full
production. That's an offensive weapon.
> Another expensive piece of gear is the aircraft carrier, now going for $13 billion per
copy, and several of the newfangled complex features on the new carrier design don't work.
High maintenance, too. Of eleven carriers only two are deplorable currently, none on the east
coast. Carriers have been mostly used to facilitate bombing runs over defenseless third-world
countries. They need a cheap defense.
> Regarding soldiers, few countries have a draft, or a large draft, any longer. No more
major land armies, required for offense. People are expensive, and 70% of US youth don't
qualify for service.
> The US Marine Corps is now going through a change with a new commandant. The main US
enemy now is China, and there's no thought of any war on China itself, only on allied islands
they might grab. So the Marines want to back out of their land warfare stance and concentrate
on Iwo-Jima type operations like the good old days. New USMC Commandant Berger: "We are too
heavy, too cumbersome. We're built for another Desert Storm. We have to go on a diet. .
.we're not going to go head-to-head, tank-on-tank," he said
> The recent Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia was a wake-up call. Drones and missiles,
inexpensive unstoppable and effective.
> So there's a lot of work to do, but yes one can say there is a trend from offense to
defense, and little by little the world might be safer against offensive actions.
I see mutually assured defense as a highly desirable strategy emerging from Russia and
China. If that new 'mad' is expanded to friendlies in the middle east then a very large
sector of the planets continents can be enclosed in a single defensive frame.
Excellent observation Uncle! It's the Empire (and its vassals) versus the planet.
There will never be an American Gorbachev because the American system is completely
different from the Soviet system.
In the USSR, the Communist Party was everything and commanded all the sociometabolical
aspects of society through a centralized State. When the Gorbachev killed the Party, he
killed the USSR. That's why it simply collapsed overnight and in a relatively peaceful
way.
The USA is a pure-blood capitalist society. It functions through a confederation of
capitalists, who command and owns different parts of the means of production. The State,
albeit powerful, is just one instutition among many others in this free market anarchy. The
USA, therefore, is a relatively decentralized society (for its size, it is incredibly
decentralized). In this sense, the USA is more akin to the old Roman Empire than any other
recent liberal or late-feudal empire.
My guess is the USA will degenerate slowly and very violently and chaotically, with a
succession of weak POTUS over a course of at least many decades. It can or cannot lose
territory in this process (I don't think it ever will, unless you're talking about Puerto
Rico and other possessions in the Southwestern Pacific). It almost certainly will provoke
many more wars against foreign nations in the process. It will be a very dangerous period of
Humanity's History, if not mark its end (if a total nuclear war happens).
--//--
I don't think Putin wants to be "the next Bismarck". Bismarck's new Concert was a failure:
it didn't relieve pressure between the imperialist powers in Europe and only gathered
pressure overtime in order to create an even bigger meatgrinder (WWI), which generated an
even bigger revolution (1917). By all intents and purposes, Bismarck's foreign polices were
an abject failure. His domestic record, on the other side, is stellar, since he turned
Germany into a world superpower which, by 1900, had already surpassed the UK in industrial
terms to reach second place overall (behind only the much bigger USA).
..."But the U.S. is not losing its financial or sole superpower status because of what China
or Russia or Iran have done or do. It is losing it because its has made too many
mistakes."...
The cadaver that is the USA, a ruptured spleen of financial criminality, is in it's end
stage of sucking the life of the world, it's host. Russia, China, and like minded sovereign
states are backstopping the US buck into oblivion with their gold purchases. Gold continues
to show the absurdities of the financial status of the US dollar. Gold is inoculating these
states that are being sanctioned and financially harassed. The USA, is a drunken bum in the
gutter looking for his next drink. Time is running short as the world economies are now
contracting into a spiral down the toilet drain taking the great financial criminal with
it.
If any politicians on the global chessboard can rival the statesmanship and intellect in
strategy, it sure is Putin.
Before him maybe de Gaulle, Helmut Schmidt or Churchill. But now? No where in the western
states.
To the growing ties with China and Russia: Irony is, Putin warned the western world, that
if his and Russia's preference of joining the western states would be denied, Russia would be
forced into China's arms, even though they are culturally and religiously much more tied to
Europe and the western world.
US and NATO policy brought the Russians to see the former "yellow menace" as their only
hope; Equally China was forced into the arms of its Russian neighbor, despite the Chinese
tradition of seeing the Russians equally as a not much loved neighbor.
So the "social Imperialists" and "Barbarians" of Russia and the "Yellow Menace" were forced
to overcome their old prejudices.
De Gaulle once said: "One day the Russians will realize again that they are white."
Meaning, when the Soviet system would come crashing down, the Russians would realize, that
they and their culture are European, and not Asian.
When this prophecy actually came true, and Yeltsin and Putin tried to rebuild the bridges
back to their cultural fellow European states, the Neocons destroyed that historic chance of
healing decades and century old wounds.
Putin and Russia actually tried for over a decade to avert this. Only most recently the
fight in the Russian bureaucracy is leading into going into the partnership with China more
broadly. It still is a partnership not of love or true desire, but of simple survival. And
that won't likely ever change.
I am currently reading a great book of the legendary German-French journalists and author
Peter Scholl-Latour about the new cold war against Russia. he published it IIRC over 12 years
ago, with research since the 90s for it, and including previous reports from his visits in
Russia since 1958.
He saw what he discusses here 20 years ago. And the strategic consequences of this idiotic
rejection of Russia's wish to come back into the fold of European nations by the US will
haunt us for generations to come, if it is not fixed.
Only way to that would be if we would have politicians in the EU and Europeans states like
Putin; more concrete: With the backbone, strategic insight, and a strong stand on national
sovereignty.
But with the current politicians in the EU and its states? Certainly no one on the left,
as "sovereignty" is now seen as "Nazi", and left politicians at least here in Germany being
"educated" by NATO think tanks, supporting military "interventions". The only ones who
realize how important sovereignty is for any country, are the new right like Salvini, Le Pen,
and the Nigel Farage. Which maybe a big part of why they are so hysterically attacked by the
MSM and establishment.
But sovereignty is important for the left too, and historically e.g. the older generations
social democrats here knew that. People like Helmut Schmidt realized that no people can be
free, and exercise its self-determination as a nation, without true sovereignty.
But the time of politicians of this class and caliber in the west is long gone. Maybe
another reason, why our politicians hate Putin so much. ;)
It should be obvious to anyone that we're going to see some kind of a joint Sino-Russian
military organization like NORAD. I was wondering about this after Russia sold their S-400 to
China. However, I'm not sure if the Chinese, or Russia, would be open to a Warsaw Pact
version 2. IMO, the inevitable collapse would be like the Soviet Union as WMDs will prevent a
war fought directly between the larger powers. In the meantime, expect more proxy wars fought
globally.
Kiza | Oct 4 2019 19:49 utc | 20:
It's always been like this as that is the most impressionable stage of one's life. I don't
know if this is an increase or not, but I see these useful idiots as activation of sleeper
cells cultivated in educational institutions.
The "Concert of Powers" was marked by numerous wars. Great power conflict in Europe was
avoided in favor of colonial wars. England against Indians, Africans and Asians, but Russia
against Turks too. So much for "truly mutually respectful..." relations. Putin speaks
gibberish. Today, "sovereign" means claiming the right to wage war at will. This is not a
premise for solid relationships, but shifting alliances against the current enemy.
It is incidentally highly unlikely that a basket of currencies could possibly substitute
for a single reserve. If people couldn't make bimetallism work, making bi-, tri-, poly-fiat
currency work isn't happening either. The fluctuations in relative value will destabilize the
financial systems of smaller powers.
Don
I don't see possibility of India getting a UNSC permanent seat any time coming soon, it's a
permanent wishful thinking on India's part. India will need to resolve her problems with
Kashmir and Pakistan before even she be considered. Indian realist analyst know this well. As
matter of fact I don't see any hope that anytime soon we can see a structural change in UN.
It's more possible UN be dissolved like the League was before it be reformed. US and India
only can be short term tactical allies against China, and not even strategic allies since
they both have different postures toward the subcontinent's, Indian Ocean states.
Exactly, which is why I am both confused and frustrated by people taking a side in the
Ukraine-gate farce. Does it matter which flavor of evil is currently provably less corrupt?
They all have almost the same goals: peanuts and platitudes to placate the peasants at home
and Full Spectrum Imperial Dominance abroad. I get trying to figure out the Gordian Knot, but
the Make Believe of Good Cop/Bad Cop is annoying.
- Wars like WW 1 & WW 2 are not going to happen anymore because such wars have simply too
expensive. But instead we'll see a series of smaller wars or proxy wars.
I should think that one reason for the failure of the Second Concert of Europe was that
Britain was determined to eliminate Germany as an economic and political rival and as an
example of what centralised government economic and social planning could do to improve
people's lives and the conditions in which they lived and worked. The reforms that Bismarck
brought to Germany, if only to keep 1848-style revolutions at bay, challenged the prevailing
laissez-faire economic policies (precursor to neoliberalism in our day) in Britain that
favoured the landowning and military elites.
The period 1871 - 1914 was one in which British aristocracy "revitalised" itself (for want
of a better term) by taking brides from American families that made their wealth from
investing in railway development across the US and in new American industries. (Perhaps
"vampirising" American money is the better term.) The classic examples of such marriages are
those of Consuelo Vanderbilt, of the wealthy Vanderbilt family, marrying into the
Spencer-Churchill family; and of Winston Churchill's mother marrying his father. Acquiring
American wealth in this way was one way in which British elites could maintain enough power
to keep a grip on British politics and British colonial politics.
The same period was also one in which European powers competed to chop up Africa and Asia
into colonies or "spheres of influence". So in a sense, the Europeans were already at war
with each other (and the Second Concert was a facade, just as the Cold War of the late 20th
century was a facade): they conducted this war away from their own publics, in areas distant
and remote enough, that most incidents of mass violence or outright land theft could be
covered up. The major exception was Belgian King Leopold's treatment of the area that is now
the Democratic Republic of Congo / Congo (Kinshasa) as he ruled it in the manner of a
mediaeval feudal lord and the atrocities committed there by his government were on a scale
too huge to ignore.
@Paul Damascene #9
Not strictly true.
Two nations, one with sword and shield but the other with only a shield. The first nation can
attack with little fear of reprisal.
Russia is still not going to sell defensive weapons to anyone unless there is a clear overall
strategic benefit.
Ironic that the Great War had to wait until 1914, when Britain's Liberal government was
adopting many of Bismarck's social welfare measures.
I suspect that America's increasing hostility to China reflects a fear of contagion from
the more successful and fairer Chinese system. Just like Britain and Germany in 1914.
Two are listed as being good for target velocity up to 6,415 mph which is well into
hypersonic range.
Another two, target velocities up to 11,185mph - mach 14.7 according mph to mach
converter.
Helmut Schmidt's books on China are impressive, but it's striking that in the first one,
"Nachbar China," of 2006, he totally failed to anticipate the economic collapse of 2008.
Actually, that's not true. When the UK went to war in 1914, they discovered that their
soldiers were so undernourished and unfit to fight for the Empire, that a series of 'social
reforms' were enacted to improve the lot of the working class (or cannon fodder).
"While China has capable weapons and can defend itself against a smaller attack the U.S. has
about 20 times more nuclear warheads than China. It could use those in an overwhelming first
strike to decapitate and destroy the Chinese state."
B, I read your analysis of the China weapons parade and came away with the impression that
US air & sea superiority was over. I thought China already had the S-400 too. I had no
idea that the US was in possession of more nukes than China. I hope that China gets that
system set up quickly, as well as the S-400.
The US is a psychopathic control freak, whose mask has slipped, yet the only one who
doesn't know that is Washington, but when it realizes it, that's when it will become far more
dangerous and may think that their time for a US first nuke strike is running out. Let's hope
they are not that stupid.
Anybody that believes China have only 290 nukes are naive.
Look at all those DF-41 and JL-2/3 missiles they've made. Some of those missiles have MIRV
capability.
What point does lying that way about a deterrence weapon serve? China only has nukes to
deter America from attacking them. The nukes are not intended to ever actually be used, so
why would they lie and pretend to have less than they really have? That makes no sense. If
anything they would lie and pretend to have more than they really do to enhance their
deterrence.
Secret weapons do not make an effective deterrence.
On the other hand, like Japan China probably has big stockpiles of fissile materials
sufficiently enriched that they could make many hundreds of additional nukes in a matter of a
couple weeks, or maybe even just days, if they needed to.
Just to clarify, a 100kg solid chunk of iron traveling at hypersonic speeds and with
decent accuracy would ruin the day for an American aircraft carrier. No nuke is needed.
Furthermore, if China has only 290 nukes, but 5,000 launch vehicles, which ones out of
that 5,000 are armed and have to be destroyed if America does a first strike and wants to
avoid several dozen of its biggest cities being turned into glowing craters in response?
Hint: All 5,000.
So you see, China doesn't really need much more than 290 nukes to prevent America from
attacking, assuming Americans are not stupid. Unfortunately that could very well be a losing
bet.
Washington is not a nation. It is only a city. If the rest of the world wants an honest
glimpse of what this city intends, all it has to do is look at what it has done, and is still
doing, to America's population. Take an honest look, disregarding all testimony. When you
completely disregard the narrative of dc and the media, the picture becomes quite stark quite
quickly.
The reason for the constitutional crisis in Britain in 1910, which resulted in the House of
Lords losing most of its power, was that the Lords refused to approve Lloyd George's People's
Budget, which, according to Wikipedia, "introduced unprecedented taxes on the lands and
incomes of Britain's wealthy to fund new social welfare programs." The upshot of the crisis
was that the budget became law.
. . . picked this up on the web:
In his seminal work On War, Carl von Clausewitz famously declared that, in comparison to the
offense, "the defensive form of warfare is intrinsically stronger than the offensive."
The defender being in his homeland contributes to defensive strength. It's certainly
contributed to US offensive failures in the last fifty years. It took the mighty US Army four
years and over a thousand deaths to pacify Baghdad. So what to do, the US has reverted to
high-level aerial bombing and long-range artillery to kill foreigners. This increases US
opposition, creating more enemies. No shortage of them.
Gotta give you a big Shout-Out for providing that ultra important fact as that marked the
beginning of the reaction to Classical Economists in the UK which was already happening
within the Outlaw US Empire, thus the seed of UK's Neoliberalism was planted and watered. It
also brought the UK and US elite together mind-set-wise.
Josh @51--
Your observation is 100% on the mark! The utterly gross neglect of the USA's human
capital's been ongoing for decades, and was given a great boost by the adoption of
Neoliberalism as basic policy during Carter's presidency, which was subsequently turbocharged
by Reagan/Bush. Profit before people had always been present; but after the "Saving the
bond-holders" deliberately deep recession caused by Volker from 1979-1982, there would be no
more policies aimed at improving social welfare. Instead, they were targeted for destruction
as the Full Employment Act of 1946 was 100% ignored by both Rs & Ds as jobs went offshore
and the Rust Belt oxidized.
--//--
Today, the hollowed-out Outlaw US Empire is a mere Paper Tiger reduced to using terrorists
and terrorism as its policy tools. Slowly, the nations of the world are enacting a de facto
form of containment that will eventually result in the diminishment of The Empire's abilities
and force it to become a normal nation for the first time in its history--hopefully without a
nuclear conflagration.
Putin is a voice of reason in a very sick and twisted world, one that is dominated by an evil
empire whose only purpose seems to be global corporate hegemony.
@2 Red Ryder - Russia is building a network of missile defense, early warning, electronic
weapons systems that will ring Greater Eurasia, not just the Russian Federation.
Always good to see your sweeping strategic view from the commanding heights. I quoted your
opening sentence because it makes such total sense, and also sounds so good. Mackinder has no
need to turn in his grave - the heartland has upended the world to save him the trouble
;)
There will be the invulnerable Eurasia, and the outside.
~~
I'm enjoying all the comments jumping onto the notion of Mutual Assured Defense. It seems
a concept that many here can readily relate to - and sign me up for sure. Thanks to Paul
Damascene for the concept, and uncle tungsten for coining the phrase.
Sharmine Narwani in her recent interview with Ross Ashcroft cited a Twitter comment
somebody made, to the effect that the S-400 was Russia's foreign policy. She was struck by
how perfectly this actually works as a policy. In a world where everybody has an S-400, no
war. Mutually assured defense.
I have long theorized, without a grain of collateral to prove it, that there is only one
security strategy for Russia. If I had a border as extensive as Russia's, I would see that
the only security possible for me would rest in an entire world at peace.
Therefore Russia works towards peace. It's how she conquers the world. As we saw in
Chechnya and in Syria, Russia builds and not destroys. Syria in particular over a long period
showed us precisely how Russia fights - not to "win", not to destroy an enemy, but purely to
lock down the peace and make everything safe. Only those restless souls who would not become
still were killed.
China too shares this same understanding of the Tao - not surprisingly of course. The game
is not to crush the opponent but to render the fight unnecessary. If China conquers the world
it will mean the Mandate Of Heaven has come to rule everywhere. The fight will become
unnecessary.
~~
Federico Pieraccini in his latest
article had this to say about China's strategy:
Beijing's strategy seems to be designed to progress in phases, modulating according to the
reaction of the US, whether aggressive or mild; a kind of capoeira dance where one never
actually hits one's opponent even when one can.
I had to look it up, Brazil's amazing contribution to world peace, the capoeira. I had
never heard of it and now I will never forget it. A brilliant comment from Pieraccini.
Peace is coming to the world faster than war is being left room to break out. And this is
because peacemaking is as dynamic an activity as warmaking . But by its very
nature of not breaking things, it is far less visible.
. . .from Putin
Truly mutually respectful, pragmatic and consequently solid relations can only built between
independent and sovereign states.
. . .from the UN Charter
The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
Putin is pointing backwards not forwards when you think it through.
No "souvereign" state can be independent in the age of global supply chains and markets,
refugees and global warming. The world is interdependent and always has been since the
evolution of the human species in Africa.
"Souvereignty" and statehood has always been achieved (and lost) by military power. It is
a recipe for war.
This is for the theory. Now for the practice. Of course, Russia has been intervening in
the affairs of other "souvereign" states. Of course Iran has been striving for dominance in
the Middle East. And of course Eastern European states feel squeezed between Russia, the US
and Germany. And of course China pressures Vietnam for the resources of the South China
Sea.
Putin is talking about being polite.
Europe will have neither economic nor political or military power dealing with Russia, the
US or China as individual "sovereign" states. And this is what this populist dance is
about.
The US has not lost influence because of the sanctions, they have lost influence because
they have no longer the technological edge and "souvereign states" have the alternative of
allying with Russia and China. That is a binary choice, not souvereinty.
ciue @ 41:
An intelligent observation, thanks. Though I find myself wondering if the world in which
everyone has a shield, and only one, a sword, is not, perhaps, a world quite changed.
In reading Don Bacon @ 58 and Grieved @ 57, something slid into place for me. As a child
of the Enlightenment, pained as I have been--for all its failings--to see it slip under the
waves, it has been especially painful to see the West despoiling its legacies of democracy
and universal human rights. Nothing has done these more damage than our corrupt, cynical
exploitation of them. When I look to the emergent multipolar model with not inconsiderable
relief, I see it as one in which democracy will not necessarily be a central value or form of
polity.
But if this multipolar principle of the sovereign equality among all of its members is
considered from a certain vantage point, the principle's equivalent in a democratic system of
individuals would be an acceptance of its various citizens as of fundamentally equal worth
regardless of their ideologies or beliefs.
Perhaps if that feature of our own systems were not so close to being lost, a glimpse of
this quality of an international comity wouldn't come to me now as a revelation.
I guess it is a Rorschach test. I don't see how anything in Syria has been resolved
peacefully, I just don't. I am not blaming Russia for it. Putin virtually waited until it
became clear that the US (Obama) would not intervene.
Russians had the worst WWI and WWII experience, plus Chechnya and Afghanistan. No Russian
leader would be able to motivate them for anything else but defense. It took the Moscow
apartment bombings to motivate them for the Chechen war.
weaponized economics USA says it has ability to affect the economic environment, says it can
influence international financial institutions .. says it can use such abilities and
influence to cement multinational coalitions for unconventional warfare campaigns or dissuade
adversary nation-state governments from supporting competitors"
financial blackmail .[nations either join/suffer], the stores of value can be exploited..
the economic space is a war zone the tax, interest rates, legal and bureaucratic measures
used locally, by target states, can be [manipulated] to persuade adversaries, allies, and
surrogates to modify their behavior.. Entire agencies specialize in identifying.
opportunities where financial weapon(s) can be used to provide leverage [to achieve goals]?
Thank you Sally Snyder @ 7 for that link and great explanation. I want to add that I see
evidence the USA uses that same strategy domestically against the leaders of its states, its
cities, its counties, its political parties and privately against the leaders and activist
the world over. Americans rarely have the opportunity you afforded @7 to understand why
things are happening in the USA the way they are.
new subject:
The Great War had to wait until 1914, when Britain's Liberal government was adopting many of
Bismarck's social welfare measures.to Lysias @ 43 <==I certainly do agree with your
reason.. Consider the following
The great war was on hold since 1897, waiting on the British and French bankers to
create a means to finance the war. That financing required the warriors in Europe to
invade and overthrow the US Constitutional prohibition (Article I, Section 9, paragraph 4)
which prohibited Capitation or other direct taxes, not based in proportion to the population.
Amendment 16 ratifed on February 3, 1913 reads, the Congress shall have power to lay and
collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the
several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Within minutes after the US. Supreme court took up taking non proportional taxes from the
pockets of working Americans the privately owned Federal reserve bank was created, and made
by congress the central bank of the world (1913). So to recap, British adoption of Bismarck's
measures had little to do with the war in Europe, instead it was the the money to be taken by
taxation from the pockets of every American that satisfied the bankers requirement of
suitable and ample capital (Federal Reserve Act of 1913); USA taxes on Americans would
collateral the FR lending, and the USA would guarantee the taxes would be collected and
rendered as required. Once constitutional intent was thwarted, the federal Reserve could lend
to the global warriors who wanted to destroy Germany and take the oil rich land (entire
Middle East) from the Ottoman. It took two world wars and trillions of tax dollars, not to
mention millions of lives, for the pubic nations states to enable the private theft of the
oil rich Middle East lands owned by the Ottomans.
additionally .. Barovsky responded also to lysias @ 43 with "Actually, that's not true.
When the UK went to war in 1914, they discovered that their soldiers were so undernourished
and unfit to fight for the Empire, that a series of 'social reforms' were enacted to improve
the lot of the working class (or cannon fodder).by: Barovsky @ 46
@ somebody 61 I don't see how anything in Syria has been resolved peacefully, I just don't.
Russia's strategy of giving foes a choice of fighting or being bused elsewhere, a choice they
took, was a truly unique peaceful resolution. Never been done before, to my knowledge.
Revolutionary. Wonderful. Peaceful. I liked it.
If I may: A big part of national strategy is to have the populace focusing on "foreign
threats" which takes citizens' minds of their domestic problems. Part of "sovereign equality"
is (at the national level) to mind our own business, not somebody else's.
George Washington dedicates a large part of his farewell address to discussing foreign
relations and the dangers of permanent alliances between the United States and foreign
nations, which he views as foreign entanglements.
Later, we have "War is the Health of the State"
by Randolph Bourne (1918) . . here
". . .The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions.
What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through
since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the
sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men. With the shock of war,
however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people,
without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling,
the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other
Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. . ."
I think we are seeing more like russia/china using a strategy similar to Muhammad Ali's rope
a dope against the u.s. They are both spending their money wisely on building effective
military forces, both defensive and offensive, but they are not wasting their treasure on
imperialist adventures. At the same time, everywhere U.S. has tried to corner a market or
extend itself, they have been getting cut off at the knees by either Russia or China. Russia
put a monkey wrench in U.S. goals in Ukraine, Syria and Venezuela. U.S. went after Iran and
China stepped in with a huge oil purchase and development project. Now I'm reading that
Russia is getting ready to assist Cuba in a major way.
Was it napoleon who said, "when you see your enemy making mistakes, let him"? (paraphrase)
I think they are going to continue trying to avoid a fight while they wait for the U.S. to
either come to its senses, collapse or come to blows, but they won't be the instigator.
U.S. is capitalist and this kind of society is more likely to destruct through a financial
collapse or a civil war than declaring war on either China or Russia. Not that war with China
or Russia can be ruled out, but if it occurred I think it would probably start as a result of
U.S. accidental blowing something up with one of our smart missiles....
This (entertaining) article was written by some street fellow in ukraine around the time
Yanukovich was ousted, but the similarities between Ukraine and US shares a common
perspective of a lot of USA common folk. In usa,you don't ever get to own much (its all
leased or financed) and even if you do, its not hard for them to find a way to liberate it
from you.
I recall US journalist George Seldes remarking his observations as he met the UK
conscripts coming to the WW1 front. His on-the-scene notes of malnourishment and inability to
handle repetitive lifting of ammunition to feed mortars/small cannon, relative to German
conscripts, were telling. Explains the postwar emphasis on sports and diet just to prep for
the next war. Lessons perhaps also applied to American emphasis on spoprts may just be the
overt signs of underlying gov covert funding/subsidies and legislation enabling "league"
monopolies.
Why the understatement? It's the same reason why militaries don't showcase their latest
greatest hardware to the public. Secrecy provides maneuvering room and is only revealed when
appropriate. It's also about managing fear and public opinion in hopes of exerting some
influence over your adversary.
AFAIK, China have not officially stated their holdings. The 290 figure is really an
estimate given by various NGOs.
Time is on the side of the new eastern powers, that is, with each passing month the US
military (& economic) superiority shrinks.
I think that is why China has been able to exercise such restraint with HK, they can put up
with the tantrums till 2047.
The big danger is if those who own the USA try to use their advantage before they lose
it.
They already assume
that an apocalypse is inevitable;
When the elite retreat to bunkers and private islands in Hawaii, New Zealand, Tasmania or
Patagonia
, their main concern is how to keep the deplorable's grubby hands off their stuff when the
shit finally hits the fan.
...re China's invention of gun powder. IIRC Marco Polo brought it back to Europe in 1400s at
a time when China had already advanced it to hand-held-cannon status.
Note well that Europe itself was already in an advanced state of acquisitive madness, as
much as could be enabled by formations of swords and horses occasionally being an
overwhelming weapon .
With gunpowder, force-of-arms were now an overwhelming weapon in far more areas of the
continent.
Then, and only then, could a Columbus et al have set out on voyages of discovery with
confident ability to claim any "new" lands for some king who would fund the mission.
I submit, there is no way a Columbus could set-sail unless he had on-board such
overwhelming weapons.
Else, landing anywhere without such would only permit some sly smiling and trading and
scouting. Any overtly aggressive landing party would be slaughtered by the sheer numbers of
home-team locals.
Re "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely", gunpowder was the 1st
overwhelming weapon that enabled conquest.
The 2nd overwhelming weapon was the atom-bomb. But IMO, some heroic figures understood
the ramifications its overwhelming-nature; thus they felt motivated to force its sharing, bec
a monopoly guaranteed its use to permit limitless conquering.
Then at that point, science was funded by .govs to invent the next overwhelming weapon
and use it before any delicious target could duplicate it. We are here.
Lavrov: "Those with a more or less politically mature opinion of the situation should have
realised long ago that the sanctions don't work in the direction they wanted them to
work."
Oswald Spengler is good here. What he called Western 'money-thinking' is moving at the moment
in contrary, self-extinguishing, directions. Full spectrum dominance, bankrolled by reserve
currency status, seeks the whole enchilada and potentially once had the wherewithal to
achieve it --if not for the punitive subtractions necessitated by sanctions regimes.
Compounding matters, the exiled nations, having escaped the comforts of the lab, develop
fearsome powers of self-reliance (what North Korea proudly calls juche). Banded together,
these hardened exiles will some day go on to decimate the King's Army:
"Spengler, more poet than historian, offers the penetrating eye of the stranger. His
prescience for the Russian destiny is paraphrased by Kerry Bolton here:
The Russian soul is not the same as the Western Faustian, as Spengler called it, the
'Magian' of the Arabian civilization, or the Classical of the Hellenes and Romans. The
Western Culture that was imposed on Russia by Peter the Great, what Spengler called
Petrinism, is a veneer The Russian soul expresses its own type of infinity, albeit not that
of the Westerner's Faustian soul, which becomes enslaved by its own technics at the end of
its life-cycle."
Many of those 'technics' fall under what Spengler called "money-thinking". At the
twilight of its life-cycle the West threatens to withhold its toxicity from all those who
don't 'play fair', plying its financial sanctions like an overused tool-set: fractional
reserve banking, impudent debt-money that arrives ex nihilo seeking its keep from
God-knows-where, leverage that belabors ever-narrowing denominators of intrinsic
value."
The Western debt pyramid can ill-afford meting out the punishment of exile. On the
contrary it needs everything on Earth plus the minerals of passing meteors and Martian water.
However its petulance and hubris can't resist banishing nations that displease it. When its
petulance exceeds its own diminishing critical mass, the seesaw tips against it.
Re ""power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely", gunpowder was the 1st overwhelming
weapon that enabled conquest."
The history of empires is as long as the history of agriculture and herding, nearly ending
with the advent of nuclear weapons and MAD.
Only one country left trying that needs some sense knocking into it.
I don't think the bussing to Idlib was Russian strategy. The Syrian civil proxy war was a
lot about demographics, Hezbollah tried to save Shiites from mixed areas, dito the Syrian
state with their supporters. It was a local solution that was necessary as Jihadi fighters
come with huge families. Turkey might have had a part as their interest was to have the
Jihadis at the border to fight against the Kurdish groups. You may have noticed that the
Syrian government with support of Russia now attacks the Jihadi fighters in Idlib.
Russia's strategy was to force Turkey on its side without alienating Iran or Syrians. Iran
at one stage seemed ready to support a religious power share the type of Lebanon. The Russian
intervention stopped that idea.
Russia saved the Syrian state and the Syrian state insisted on being secular and getting
rid of all internal ennemies. That is a kind of peace but the peace of the graveyard.
Actually it is quite funny that Putin has started to go back to the 19th century, to
"development models, interests, cultures and traditions " and the "concert of power".
After the Congress of Vienna there was the Russio-Persian war, the Russio-Turkish war, the
battle of Warsaw against Poland, the Crimean war against the Ottoman empire, Britain and
France, advancement in Central Asia and one of the tsars banned Ukrainian language in print.
Never mind the tsars successfully fighting the rebellions of the Russian middle classes.
Though in 1861 Russian serfs were finally freed as they were needed in newly developing
industries. The century ended in 1900 with the Russification of Finland, making Russian the
official language.
@ Peter AU 1 who wrote about the history of empires
"
Only one country left trying that needs some sense knocking into it.
"
That is occurring as we write our textual white noise about the details but the approach is
not a Western knocking some sense into it but an Eastern Art of War approach.
It came to me today that instead of WWIII we need to think of what the world is going
through as a Civilization war or evolution, assuming we make it out the other side of the
conflict. The current empire is trying everything in its quiver of arrows short of MAD to
retain control over the form of social organization with private finance at its core.
But the social organization of the East does not think like that and wants to spread the
wealth and ownership broadly. The East has been taken advantage of and maligned by the West
for centuries and they are not going to continue to let that happen. So they have organized
themselves to beat the West at its own game but are doing so according to the Art of War meme
instead of trying to knock some sense into the West. Since the East is good at playing the
long game in relation to the West they are incrementally wearing down and constraining the
West until it collapses of its inability to bully and Might-Makes-Right itself forward.
As we are watching the end game of those efforts, IMO. I don't see the West holding its
control on empire for much longer because the East is giving example of a better and more
equitable way that will be and is winning over country after country that have been client
states of empire held in place by the jackboot of global private finance.
We are witnessing a Civilization war of our species and it is quite the spectacle, eh?
Another example of the ever sanctioning superpower is losing its status. "Whistleblower
accuses largest US military shipbuilder of putting 'American lives at risk' by falsifying
tests on submarine stealth coating" Another day, another example of failure of the MIC to
deliver.
Huntington Ingalls Industries, which spun-off from Northrop Grumman in 2011, "knowingly
and/or recklessly" filed falsified records with the Navy claiming it had correctly applied a
coating, called a Special Hull Treatment, to Virginia-class attack submarines which would
allow the vessels to elude enemy sonar, the Sept. 26 complaint alleges.
Instead, the complaint said, Huntington Ingalls' Newport News Shipbuilding facility in
Virginia took shortcuts that allegedly "plagued" the class of submarines with problems, and
then retaliated against the employee who spoke up about the issues. At this rate most of the
US navy will be tied up at their home port waiting for repairs.
According to the complaint, Lawrence, a senior engineer at Huntington Ingalls who has
worked there since 2001, has provided evidence of the alleged issues at the company's Newport
News Shipbuilding facility in Virginia. Stay safe Lawrence.
My thoughts also. And we do live in very interesting times for sure.
When I say knocking some sense into, that includes something along the lines of a soviet
style collapse which is the preferable option.
~By The Western debt pyramid can ill-afford meting out the punishment of exile.~
71 FSD
Yeah, it is curious. You would think, with an understanding of its own system - infinite
growth backed by debt - that empire would wisely choose to employ its tentacles, not deny
them. Especially with most states outside of North Korea being open for business in some
shape or form. At this rate the US Treasury will need to authorize the advance sale of
mortgages to the burgeoning colonies on the moon.
To navigate to the summit for the best part of a century. And to squander those gains
within the space of half a young lifetime.
Putin's concept of strong defense is sound. You don't attack if the other side can defend
itself. You negotiate. In Thailand, we rarely see street fights (except between drunk
foreigners).
Why? The national sport is lethal Muay Thai (kick boxing), so you never start a fight, since
the other side can fight, too. You talk it over, negotiate.
Lot of nonsense in this thread. From "gunpowder was the 1st overwhelming weapon that
enabled conquest." When it is trivially simple to argue that the trained, uniformed and
properly regimented Roman Army which came 1500 years earlier was both a better example and
likely not the first.
Equally facile is the claim that "It's the quest for power that corrupts" Whilst its
probably true that some have been corrupted reaching for power it is equally true that many
who for various reasons were not corrupted in the quest, either because they acquired it
through serendipity by way of hereditary or accident, came into power as naive or
ideologically principled upstarts yet as with every leader, they were corrupted by power as
they were convinced no one else could do it (be the bossfella) as well as they.
Emperor Claudius comes to mind as an earlyish big time boss destroyed by power, but callow
youths thrust into power as clan leader when dad and/or older bros were killed in battle and
went on to become bigger arseholes than Dad, are examples which go back to when us mob first
walked upright.
Barovsky
I quoted a sentence by chu teh and was replying to the piece about gunpowder.
As for the power corrupts part, take a look at the US prior to the fall of the Soviet
Union and then what it has become during the time it held virtually absolute power..
Yesterday night The Godfather was broadcasted in a foreign private channel....
I saw a comrade telling about that and arguing that this movie contains the world...and it
is that indeed it encompasses the history of the USA...
"I have "worked" all my life for the welfare of my family, and I have always refused to be
a puppet moved by the threads of the powerful. With you I had other projects Michael. I
thought that one day you could move those threads. Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, or
more".
Even in the meeting of all the mafia families in New York for to reach a "pact of no
agression" someone states:
As for the power corrupts part, take a look at the US prior to the fall of the Soviet
Union and then what it has become during the time it held virtually absolute power
In the decades since the 1972 Watergate scandal, more charges of corruption have been
leveled against members of presidential administrations than in the preceding two
centuries. Perhaps the most lasting achievement of Ronald Reagan's presidency was the
astonishingly successful campaign to delegitimate government itself, at least in the eyes
of many citizens, and to enshrine individual economic self-interest, manifested in
unregulated "private enterprise," as the paramount value of American life. That
transformation, like the rise of so-called rational choice and utility maximization as the
governing paradigms in the social sciences, has encouraged citizens to seek wealth -- and
to avoid paying taxes or participating in civil society -- as the only sensible strategy.
As a result, the homely virtues of self-discipline, moderation, and reciprocity preached by
Enlightenment thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Abigail Adams now strike
many Americans as outmoded advice for suckers. If "greed is good," as the Wall Street
character Gordon Gekko asserted, then Donald J. Trump's career of swindling, debt dodging,
and tax evasion might serve as a model to emulate rather than an object lesson in the
mainstreaming of corrupt business practices.1
No one familiar with Alexander Hamilton, Roger "open the purses of the people" Morris or the
roots of the Shay's Rebellion, Whiskey Rebellion, North Carolina Regulator movement and other
people's movements and actions, or the 1787-88 counter-revolutionary coup carried out by the
Constitutional Convention for the purpose of centralizing economic and military power toward
social control and building a continental empire (anyone in any doubt about that should read
the proceedings and the Federalist Papers; Hamilton was especially forthcoming about the
imperial motivation), would have any illusions about how deeply corruption is inherent in the
US system.
Same for imperialism. And all subsequent US history starting and continuing with the
genocide of the First Nations bears this out.
With respect to sanctions, the EU central power ( i.e. Germany ) impossed harsh sanctions
that ended being implemented in full only by southern countries like Spain, who are those who
have seen their commercial excahnges with Russia diminished to the least with the conseuqent
loses for national business, while, in fact, German business continue their exchnage with
Russia as if nothing had happened...
Now that Trump impose import tariffs to Europe, the most affected are, again, those who
fulfilled the US sanctions plan towayds Russia at the letter, i.e. Spain and southern
countries...
If these Southern European Countries would have a sovereign government with any respect
for the people who vote them, they will extract the consequent lesson from all of this...and
would apply the recipe for all this with respect to Russia, Iran, and so on...
The lesson would translate like "the more you comply with US mandate on sanctions against
any other country you have nothing against, even at the price of harming badly your own
economy, the more sanctions/import tariffs will be impossed on yourself at the first
necessity...", which is the old lesson from primary school, "the more weak you would show in
front of a bully...more beating will come..., oor already in grown mafiosi, "more "special
tax" for "protection" to pay"...
Then it is Spain who hosts most of US nuclear deterrence and AFRICOM central command...If
Spain would have a sovereign government with a hint of respect for the people who vote it, an
ultimatum will be possed in front of the yankees, "eliminate import tariffs, stop meddling
with national economy, or pack your things and go home"
The Federal Reserve of the United States has injected about 278,000 million dollars in the
money market in four days. After injecting 53,000 million dollars earlier this week, the
Federal Reserve renewed these operations three times for astronomical amounts representing
75,000 million per day, and has already announced that it will continue to do so daily
until October 10.
The newspaper Le Figaro (1) describes as "astronomical" that jet of fiat money that,
however, does not seem to worry the New York Stock Exchange, with a Dow Jones index that
remained above 27,000 points throughout week. It is normal because, as the Efe agency says,
"Wall Street feeds on the flexibility of the Fed" (2), that is, the massive emissions of
paper money.
It has no different menu to nourish itself and, as specialists say, "the reasons that
lead to lower interest rates are usually not good."
The resistance of Wall Street is explained because these operations only affect the
interbank market, which is short of liquidity "temporarily". Banks that are financed on a
daily basis in this market would suffer a shortage of liquidity as a result of large debt
issues by the Treasury and a strong demand for liquidity from companies facing fiscal
maturities.
But there are more than enough reasons for speculators to worry. "The reasons may be not
only technical," says the newspaper. Some financial institutions have refused to make their
funds available to the market, indicating the possible vulnerability of a participant (bank
or companies) who may not be able to repay the amounts borrowed on a day-to-day basis. If
this situation is confirmed, which is synonymous with the loss of mutual trust in the
interbank market, it could be a more serious crisis than in 2008.
The President of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, who took office in February last
year, has no different alternative. He has been a member of the board of governors of the
Federal Reserve since 2012 and knows nothing more than routine: since the late 1970s he is
the first president of the Federal Reserve that does not even have a bachelor's degree in
economics. Does he need it?
The question is whether the gigantic mass of fiat money that it has put into circulation
will be sufficient to avoid a collapse like that of 2007, or another even greater collapse
will occur.
Russ @ 86.. can you tell me more about the continental congress. where can the biographies
and histories be had which might shed some real light on John Hanson first president(1781-1783) of the
United States in Congress Assembled(1776-1789) .. and Samuel Huntington (Conn), and Thomas
McKeen (Delaware) and the others who were elected and served as Presidents of the
[Continental Congress<= the government that defeated the British and that existed between
1776 and 1789}, before the lobbyist imposed ratification to install the US Constitution {a
document that cut off (terminated) the right of self determination and denied bottom up
democracy to the people of the several nations that were in America at the time]. Before the
constitution, the people could and did impose democracy on those who were in charge of the
local, state and central governments (The Articles of Confederation, central government from
1776 to 1789] after the Constitution, [the governed were never heard from again. ]. ..
somebody @59 sez: ""Souvereignty" and statehood ... is a recipe for war."
This is the mindset of the hegemon (or the servant of hegemony, whatever). They cannot
even imagine "Truly mutually respectful, pragmatic and consequently solid relations"
between nations any more than they can imagine others seeking that. They assume that everyone
else is motivated to dominate as they are. They project their own damage from having been
born into an intensely competitive, egotistical, identity -obsessed culture onto the
rest of humanity out of sheer ignorance that things could possible be any different
elsewhere.
Western culture, with the purest expression being in the United States, exalts in the
individual. That sounds like a noble and wonderful thing on the surface, but the practical
effect is to atomize society into isolated and competing hermetic entities. Community is
displaced to accommodate the self. This environment favors the sociopath and the psychopath,
which is why in the West sociopaths and psychopaths most easily accumulate power and rise to
the tops of all of those societies' institutions. It is not surprising that those born into
such an environment imagine it to be the natural order and human nature because that is all
they know and experience.
But of course that is not human nature. The species would have died out far more than a
hundred thousand years ago if it were. Human nature is to build community, and given the
opportunity that is precisely what they do. Community, though, is a threat to the power of
the psychopaths who ascend to the top of capitalist society, so in all institutions in which
those psychopaths gain power they discourage and fight and dismantle community and replace it
with social order built around themselves.
This psycho-driven culture grew to dominate in the West because, like slave-based
societies before, it was economically progressive. Due to the immaturity of communication
technology, individual psychos could assemble and coordinate larger social organizations
directed at production than the population could naturally assemble on its own. But
technology progresses and naturally formed human communities grow in scale and scope over
time. This made slave-based economies obsolete, and is now in the process of obsoleting
psycho-centric economies. It should come as no surprise that this replacement is occurring
most rapidly in cultures where the psycho-centrism had not fully established itself.
Considering the above, my bet is that as we see China's BRI project mature in Africa, that
continent will experience a Renaissance of epic proportions, perhaps even dwarfing China's
accomplishments of the last half century. This is because African cultures are similar to the
Chinese and other Asian cultures in that they have not yet been fully assimilated into the
western worship of "individualism" , so their natural human tendencies towards
community-building are not yet corrupted and subverted.
If China's transition to the dominant progressive power on the planet doesn't shatter the
dangerous American myth of exceptionality, then big portions of Africa moving into first
world status surely will. That's still some decades away, but we should be able to see
undeniable signs of movement in that direction by about 2030 to 2040 (growth in industrial
output and movement up the value added chain, dramatic development of infrastructure, rapid
increases in academic attainment, significant declines in poverty, etc).
Naturally, that is something that few westerners, particularly Americans, can wrap their
heads around because they have a flawed (Hobbesian) understanding of human nature. As they do
with China now, westerners will deny the evidence from their own eyes with regards to Africa
for as long as they can.
wikipedia makes no mention of it but for a long time Thomas McKeen was famous as the villain
in William Cobbett's The Democratic Judge or The Equal Liberty of the Press.
McKeen was a very nasty piece of work-his origins in Delaware are coincidental
"...that is not human nature. The species would have died out far more than a hundred
thousand years ago if it were. Human nature is to build community, and given the opportunity
that is precisely what they do. Community, though, is a threat to the power of the
psychopaths who ascend to the top of capitalist society, so in all institutions in which
those psychopaths gain power they discourage and fight and dismantle community and replace it
with social order built around themselves..."
How true, if a little unfair to psychopaths.
Very interesting.
I don't think it's the use of fiat money itself that's so important but what it's used for.
The money you describe as being used to support Wall Street is a great example of the wrong
use. Supporting a derivative led financial speculation benefitting the 1% vs the belt and
road which is oriented to real economic development which would be a wise productive use of
fiat.
-------------
In a famous critical remark directed at China's heavy reliance on western-style, debt-led
growth – an anonymous author (thought to be Xi or close colleague), noted
(sarcastically) the notion that big trees could be grown 'in the air'. Which is to say: that
trees need to have roots, and to grow in the ground. Instead of the 'virtual', financialised
'activity' of the West, real economic activity stems from the real economy, with roots
planted in the earth. The 'Belt and Road' is just this: intended as a major catalyst to real
economics.When the music stops and the derivative structure starts unraveling showing
multiple claims on ownership who will prevail. I think that there's a new sheriff in town
with the power to back up the 'roots in the ground' team.Posted by: financial matters | Jan
22, 2019 8:46:28 AM | 100
The 1776 Constitution was on a vector. By contrast, the 1788 Constitution was designed to
foreclose any further democratic movement. On the contrary, its main vector was to
concentrate power and wealth up the hierarchy, and to help build an empire for this new
ruling class.] the empire class ...needed a constitution which would centralize government,
strongly concentrate it, turn it into a versatile and brutal weapon on behalf of finance
assaults, military aggression, and police repression. There's only one path forward: We must
resume the American Revolution. by Russ @ 90..
very interesting.. 2012 .. discussion.. your paper .thanks . but still no background on the
people who brought about the 1776 government. and who operated it between its inception 1776
and the Bankers coup that regime changed the 1776 government into the 1788 Constitution of
the United States of America.
As you said in your article, everyone should know about Article 6 in the constitution of the
United States of America (the 1788 government) it saved British and French Aristocracy
<=and kept in power the very people the Americans had sought to remove=> from the
Americans who fought the war. It says All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into,
shall be as valid against the US under this Constitution, as under the confederation (but no
where do I see court cases that say under the 1776 government, that claims to lands, granted
by foreign kings and Queens (land grant estates) were valid? In fact, what I see is that the
Articles of Confederation government was planning to deny title to, and confiscate the lands
which traced to the land grants (G. Washington owned half of West Virginia and all of
Virginia) and the AoC plan was to distribute the land grant lands so confiscated among the
people who lived in America equally?
@WG 91 . . . as we see China's BRI project mature in Africa, that continent will experience a
Renaissance of epic proportions
Yes, and they've got a head start:
African countries with GDP growth rates above 5% in 2018
Libya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, The Gambia, Senegal, Uganda, Burkina Faso.
Kenya, Guinea, Ghana, Egypt, Niger.
Also: China 6.5, US 2.8, France 1.5, Germany 1.4, UK 1.3 . . here
Lot of nonsense in this thread. From "gunpowder was the 1st overwhelming weapon that
enabled conquest."
Posted by: A User | Oct 5 2019 8:38 utc | 81
...re China's invention of gun powder. IIRC Marco Polo brought it back to Europe in
1400s at a time when China had already advanced it to hand-held-cannon status.
Posted by: chu teh | Oct 5 2019 4:51 utc | 69
Agree with the lot of nonsense bit, although there is also a lot of interest. It is true
that China discovered gunpowder, but not sure about the "hand-held-canon status". My version
of reality had it that due to differences of perspective between East and West, China
discovered gunpowder and used it for firecrackers, and (allegedly) never thought of using it
for weapons. Similarly knowledge of the configuration of the stars in relation to location
was discovered by the arabs, long before this knowledge was exploited by Europeans for
navigation. The claim being, that the practical Europeans put scientific discovery to use for
practical benefits while the East - which discovered important segments of that scientific
discovery long before - had "merely" put it to spiritual, cultural and other transcendent
uses.
I absorbed the above factoids (gunpowder and the stars) over half a century ago before I
would have looked at such claims sufficiently critically; to what extent such factoids might
be really true I am not quite sure, although I remain somewhat sceptical about the
"hand-held-canon" claim. The broader claim though about the application of scientific
discovery needs to be reexamined more impartially.
Ian2 @67: "Secrecy ... is only revealed when appropriate."
And the appropriate moment to reveal a strategic doomsday arsenal that only exists to
prevent attack is when that arsenal is fielded. This point is so obvious that it was raised
with humorous intent in the 1964 Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove .
You only keep weapons systems secret that you intend to use in attacks in order to
surprise your victims. Since America is violently aggressive and regularly attacks other
countries, the US maintains this sort of policy. America is exceptional in this
regard, though. America's focus is on offensive weaponry to attack other countries
with, so keeping those weapons secret helps limit America's victims' abilities to prepare and
defend themselves. Military secrecy is therefore the tool of the aggressor intended to
facilitate sucker-punching its victims. Weapons intended to discourage such attacks
must be advertised loud and clear for their intended deterrence to succeed. This is
why Russia openly announces their new weapons and why China shows theirs off in parades.
China does not intend to use their nukes. They are not like America which is building
tactical nukes to make atomic weapons more palatable to use in practice. There are no
countries in the world that China has shown any interest in attacking anyway, unlike America
which maintains a list of target countries that it is working itself up to attacking.
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..according to two Chinese scholars who have connections to regime insiders and who
requested anonymity to discuss the thinking of policymakers in Beijing, China's response has
been rooted not in anxiety but in confidence.
Beijing is convinced that Hong Kong's elites and a substantial part of the public do not
support the demonstrators and that what truly ails the territory are economic problems rather
than political ones -- in particular, a combination of stagnant incomes and rising rents.
Beijing also believes that, despite the appearance of disorder, its grip on Hong Kong society
remains firm. The Chinese Communist Party has long cultivated the territory's business elites
(the so-called tycoons) by offering them favorable economic access to the mainland. The party
also maintains a long-standing loyal cadre of underground members in the territory. And China
has forged ties with the Hong Kong labor movement and some sections of its criminal
underground. Finally, Beijing believes that many ordinary citizens are fearful of change and
tired of the disruption caused by the demonstrations.
Beijing therefore thinks that its local allies will stand firm and that the demonstrations
will gradually lose public support and eventually die out. As the demonstrations shrink, some
frustrated activists will engage in further violence, and that in turn will accelerate the
movement's decline. Meanwhile, Beijing is turning its attention to economic development
projects that it believes will address some of the underlying grievances that led many people
to take to the streets in the first place.
This view of the situation is held by those at the very top of the regime in Beijing, as
evidenced by recent remarks made by Chinese President Xi Jinping, some of which have not been
previously reported. In a speech Xi delivered in early September to a new class of rising
political stars at the Central Party School in Beijing, he rejected the suggestion of some
officials that China should declare a state of emergency in Hong Kong and send in the
People's Liberation Army. "That would be going down a political road of no return," Xi said.
"The central government will exercise the most patience and restraint and allow the [regional
government] and the local police force to resolve the crisis." In separate remarks that Xi
made around the same time, he spelled out what he sees as the proper way to proceed:
"Economic development is the only golden key to resolving all sorts of problems facing Hong
Kong today."
ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS, MANY QUESTIONS
Chinese decision-makers are hardly surprised that Hong Kong is chafing under their rule.
Beijing believes it has treated Hong Kong with a light hand and has supported the territory's
economy in many ways, especially by granting it special access to the mainland's stocks and
currency markets, exempting it from the taxes and fees that other Chinese provinces and
municipalities pay the central government, and guaranteeing a reliable supply of water,
electricity, gas, and food. Even so, Beijing considers disaffection among Hong Kong's
residents a natural outgrowth of the territory's colonial British past and also a result of
the continuing influence of Western values. Indeed, during the 1984 negotiations between
China and the United Kingdom over Hong Kong's future, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping
suggested following the approach of "one country, two systems" for 50 years precisely to give
people in Hong Kong plenty of time to get used to the Chinese political system.
But "one country, two systems" was never intended to result in Hong Kong spinning out of
China's control. Under the Basic Law that China crafted as Hong Kong's "mini-constitution,"
Beijing retained the right to prevent any challenge to what it considered its core security
interests. The law empowered Beijing to determine if and when Hong Kongers could directly
elect the territory's leadership, allowed Beijing to veto laws passed by the Hong Kong
Legislative Council, and granted China the right to make final interpretations of the Basic
Law. And there would be no question about who had a monopoly of force. During the
negotiations with the United Kingdom, Deng publicly rebuked a top Chinese defense official --
General Geng Biao, who at the time was a patron of a rising young official named Xi Jinping
-- for suggesting that there might not be any need to put troops in Hong Kong. Deng insisted
that a Chinese garrison was necessary to symbolize Chinese sovereignty.
Statements made by U.S. politicians in support of the recent demonstrations only confirm
Beijing's belief that Washington seeks to inflame radical sentiments in Hong Kong.
At first, Hong Kongers seemed to accept their new role as citizens of a rising China. In
1997, in a tracking poll of Hong Kong residents regularly conducted by researchers at the
University of Hong Kong, 47 percent of respondents identified themselves as "proud" citizens
of China. But things went downhill from there. In 2012, the Hong Kong government tried to
introduce "patriotic education" in elementary and middle schools, but the proposed curriculum
ran into a storm of local opposition and had to be withdrawn. In 2014, the 79-day Umbrella
Movement brought hundreds of thousands of citizens into the streets to protest Beijing's
refusal to allow direct elections for the chief executive. And as authoritarianism has
intensified under Xi's rule, events such as the 2015 kidnapping of five Hong Kong–based
publishers to stand trial in the mainland further soured Hong Kong opinion. By this past
June, only 27 percent of respondents to the tracking poll described themselves as "proud" to
be citizens of China. This year's demonstrations started as a protest against a proposed law
that would have allowed Hong Kongers suspected of criminal wrongdoing to be extradited to the
mainland but then developed into a broad-based expression of discontent over the lack of
democratic accountability, police brutality, and, most fundamentally, what was perceived as a
mainland assault on Hong Kong's unique identity.
Still, Chinese leaders do not blame themselves for these shifts in public opinion. Rather,
they believe that Western powers, especially the United States, have sought to drive a wedge
between Hong Kong and the mainland. Statements made by U.S. politicians in support of the
recent demonstrations only confirm Beijing's belief that Washington seeks to inflame radical
sentiments in Hong Kong. As Xi explained in his speech in September:
---
The Communist party conveniently discovered truth when Xi cam to power.
I doubt it, I think a thousand year history of this stuff is playing out and it has
nothing to do with East vs West. I think Xi faces this stuff in many provinces, though not as
bad. Xi is deliberately playing the 'This time is different', and old Commie trick.
"... If Biden is innocent of corruption, why does it look like he's not? What does that say about the nature of corruption itself in the entire DC establishment? ..."
"... One scenario that Neuburger hasn't considered: perhaps the Democrats are trying impeachment now because they are out of ammo and getting scared about 2020. Rather than lose the election, they are attempting a pre-emptive strike. ..."
"... Or is it a pre-emptive defensive strike by the CIA/Blob? With Trump seeming to ask Ukraine about Crowdstrike, and Barr asking for help from Australia on the Mueller investigation origins (as well as investigating the way the dossier was used), Trump and Barr might be trying to turn TrumpRussia into a counterattack on their establishment enemies, just in time for the election. Buckle up, indeed. ..."
"... The CIA credentials of the "whistleblower" are somehow too convenient, too familiar. The Dems are already more or less in bed with the CIA/Blob, so it is as if they are acting more to aid a "messenger" ..."
"... The intelligence community is rife with dissension and conflict; not over their need to service the multi-national firms and their congressional sycophants they really represent, but rather the speed at which they need to react to challenges coming from our limited free flow of information that contradicts their "stories" and propaganda. ..."
"... Yup, but this is still mislabeled "whistleblowing", which would be such if he/she were ratting on the CIA. ..."
"... I assumed that the much delayed Mueller report finally came out when it did and with the conclusion it did because the CIA was finally convinced that it had Trump sufficiently cowed. The July 27 phone call made it clear to them that it didn't. ..."
"... And Pelosi, when asked by the CIA to jump, immediately responded, "How high?" ..."
"... There are several plausible explanations. If you consider Pelosi's motivations, you have to look no further than her constituency, the donor class. ..."
"... Indeed, we might as well argue that Obama should have been impeached for turning the Espionage Act against reporters. I see that as more damaging to the US than most of Trump's harmful acts to date. ..."
"... Obama successfully convinced people that he WANTED to do the right things but was prevented from doing them by the evil Republicans. Despite the insurance/drug company friendly implementation of ObamaCare, assertion of the most transparent administration, ever, brutally coming down on government whistleblowers, killing overseas citizens via drone, not prosecuting financial misdeeds, and destroying Libya, Obama is seen as righteous. ..."
"... In my view, a truly great con man remains unacknowledged/undetected. ..."
"... Once is the intra-elite competition between the intelligence community and Trump. ..."
"... Trump is more acceptable to Wall Street than the left agenda. These attacks serve to consolidate Trumps base; I've seen more Trump 2020 bumper stickers in my very-blue town than any other candidates. ..."
"... I'm not sure that the Democrats yelling "impeachment!" will register loud enough to overcome the substance of the election campaign. Not enough people care about it. ..."
"... The public discourse is presently in the hands of partisan hacks, of mainly one ideology; Rentier Capitalism. One main American political faction will characterize the obscurantist process as "White Noise. The other main faction will characterize it as "Rainbow Noise." Both will be correct about the "Noise" part. ..."
"... The current equation of Warren and Sanders is the point problem of that coherence. Sanders is weak on foreign policy particulars (Middle East, Venezuela, Ukraine are waffled responses, more afraid to alienate rather than state), Warren is totally absent because she has supported those policies in the past. ..."
"... Both committed to regulation, Warren wanting existing govt. style while Sanders wants the beginning of a bottom-up approach. Details are left on the "debate-stage floor", as what we have had so far is a Sideshow Bob presentation of policy, a Q&A for the media, which leads us nowhere unless you are fanatically political, which most of the nation has been educated/innoculated against. ..."
"... And not a word about Clinton approving arms sales while Secretary of State and accepting gifts to their foundation? ..."
"... What you are seeing is called "hypocrisy", writ large. The Democrats are finally discovering that they actually need the voters that they've been dissing for decades, and they really don't want to admit how badly they've screwed the pooch. ..."
"... That she has shoved the bankeresque Schiff to the fore in place of the more irascible and prosecutorial Nadler suggests she does not want to give the public a clear narrative, so much as to keep them calm, as if the Trump administration were in charge instead of being in office. ..."
"... Yes, Pelosi put the Intelligence Committee (Schiff) in charge, as opposed to the Judiciary Committee (Nadler). Odd. ..."
"... Don't forget too that Pelosi is related by marriage to Governor Gavin Newsom (his aunt was married to Ron Pelosi, brother-in-law to Nancy). It's one big happy Resistance family! Corruption is okay as long as they do it. Their hypocrisy has no limits. ..."
"... Just imagine if corrupt California elites could rule the United States! ..."
"... Nor was it in 2006, when, after recapturing the House, Pelosi took impeachment "off the table," even though the Bush Administration committed multiple felonies in its warrantless surveillance program, in addition to completely destroying the Fourth Amendment. (Obama later normalized and rationalized all this, of course.) ..."
"... In a very real sense, it is a partisan war where there are penalties for losing. ..."
"... Pelosi has clearly seen the dangers of democrat complicity and corruption before; what's changed? If she was acutely (off the table) aware of the dirty utterly filthy linen danger before, then why not now when it's, if anything, more obvious than ever? ..."
"... It's the ill conceived nature of this, the mess the democrats are creating for themselves, that suggests to me that shifting the focus away from popular programs such as medicare for all is unintended even if successful. It's like stabbing yourself in the arm to divert attention from robbing the church collection. Not a good analogy but anyway ..."
"... a world in which it's perfectly acceptable for the children of elites to trail around after their parents and help smooth the wider asset-grabbing through personal enrichment. ..."
"... Pelosi wants the scope very narrow. That's quite telling. Even more telling, and offensive, when you think about it, is her decision to have this inquiry be led by the House Intelligence Committee. This pretty much guarantees that at least some of the proceedings will happen behind closed doors. ..."
"... Revenge, like any addiction, doesn't brook common sense. The author of the article is spot on when he points out that it's just too late to impeach on the high road even if the democrat party did have something, anything, to distinguish them ethically from the republicans or Trump (other than bombast). ..."
"... Team Blue elites need #resistance happy because it's their base. ..."
"... As far as the primary is concerned, it reaffirms support for Biden by party leadership. His campaign requires "electability in the general", so not clear how that's helping the cause. ..."
"... Perhaps they figured Biden was gonna get hit anyway for making Poroshenko fire the guy running the office prosecuting Biden's son (whereupon the investigation was, by coincidence, halted). Thus get everything together hit back in the month or so before the details emerged in US media? ..."
"... I think it's a colossal mistake, and now Pelosi is all-in (together with a bunch of Representatives in deep purple congressional districts roped into going on record supporting the impeachment investigation), so all this ain't going nowhere. ..."
"... Maybe I missed it, and so I (as a veteran) must make sure it is said: if the Congress will not list, as the first Article of Impeachment, the slaughter of innocent people in wars not declared by Congress, then I don't see how any other possible Article would matter ..."
"... Here, Trump has aided and abetted the slaughter and unending misery for hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, in a country against which the U.S. never declared war, by keeping the House of Saud armed. And this reasoning would include the killing of innocent people outside any consideration of war and peace, a crime which can be incontrovertibly attributed to decisions emanating from the Oval Office regarding people who come to our borders to seek economic or political refuge. ..."
"... The problem, of course, is that the war in Yemen started under O'Bomber. One of those rare achievements of the Trump administration, in fact, is that he hasn't actually started any brand-spanking new wars at all–just continued the old ones started by Bushbama. ..."
"... Well, bush got congress to approve Iraq, so impeaching him would have been on account of the lies. Libya is on Obama Hillary. It wasn't 'we came, we saw, he died', cackle, it was 'a peaceful, prosperous country died', one with equal Ed for women, a rarity in ME. ..."
"... I have been hoping and praying that disgraced former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe has gone "John Dean" (of Watergate infamy) and the National Security State knows it. If that dream is a reality then maybe, just maybe, I'll have to buy a television set to watch that theater live on a 60 inch screen. ..."
"We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden," said Biden's
brother James according to
this Politico story about how the Biden family cashes in on their well-placed relative.
... ... ...
If Biden is innocent of corruption, why does it look like he's not? What does that
say about the nature of corruption itself in the entire DC establishment?
Two traps for a party that much of the nation depends on to rid them of the man the last
election elevated to power. Two reasons for independent voters -- those not Party loyalists,
not blue-no-matter-who, not Never-Trumpers, voters who never turn out for elections or rarely
do -- to not turn out for this one, when their voice and vote is needed most in this greatest
of watershed years
.
What's decided now, in this year and the next, will set the course of the nation and the
world for a dozen years to come -- or a dozen millennia if the chaos predicted by the most
pessimistic among us takes root and grows. After all, social and political chaos is a breeding
ground for authoritarian "solutions." We don't need any of those, and this may be the last
electoral chance to avoid them.
To reiterate a comment in the recent Water Cooler (this article is a better forum):
One scenario that Neuburger hasn't considered: perhaps the Democrats are trying
impeachment now because they are out of ammo and getting scared about 2020. Rather than lose
the election, they are attempting a pre-emptive strike.
Or is it a pre-emptive defensive strike by the CIA/Blob? With Trump seeming to ask Ukraine
about Crowdstrike, and Barr asking for help from Australia on the Mueller investigation
origins (as well as investigating the way the dossier was used), Trump and Barr might be
trying to turn TrumpRussia into a counterattack on their establishment enemies, just in time
for the election. Buckle up, indeed.
Yes, I've been wondering this also. The CIA credentials of the "whistleblower" are somehow
too convenient, too familiar. The Dems are already more or less in bed with the CIA/Blob, so
it is as if they are acting more to aid a "messenger", as @InquiringMind
put it during the latest Water Cooler.
A recent decision was made by the intelligence organs to allow reporting of second-hand
information and be titled a whistleblower for your efforts. it is acceptable to spy (which
this is an example of, since it is not whistleblowing) and listen to conversations saying
they heard this or that was happening, report that through legal channels, and have it
accepted BECAUSE IT APPEALS POLITICALLY to the agency or the particular representative.
The intelligence community is rife with dissension and conflict; not over their need to
service the multi-national firms and their congressional sycophants they really represent,
but rather the speed at which they need to react to challenges coming from our limited free
flow of information that contradicts their "stories" and propaganda. We're getting wise
– not completely, not with any assuredness that our info is complete, but enough to
cause tremendous doubt and distrust of the messaging coming from government and media
propagandists.
To me, the danger of this period is exactly the lack of organized opposition, politically
at home and among the nations of the globe, to this onslaught and flooding of the ears with
lies that become real due to that repetition. We are not united, and the convenient and quick
answers are flawed. The Communist Party was deeply flawed, and the International a craven
defender of Stalin, but we could certainly use some organization similar to fight this neocon
cancer now, before it metastisizes into worse, if that is possible. That being said,
impatience drives tribal thinking, already invading academia and the few public intellectuals
existing. I await the working classes hitting their limit. Buckle up, indeed
Hey, I'm not posing an answer, and see fear of one everywhere, so don't thank me. There is
a inchoate and diffuse anger brewing "out there", but it does not reflect our measured,
rather moderate knowledge of crime and abuse of power we observe daily. It will, given the
money and influence of the right wing, push over to such violent reaction it will make the
1930s seem like a birthday party. The left, or what is loosely left of it, badly needs
discipline and structure, but its traditional organs have been rent asunder and are not
trustworthy.
A thinktank? New party? Dunno it has to have room to grow, and our secret-sauce parties
and intel outfits have "six ways from Sunday" to mess with any of it. Clarity of political
thought seems to come from crisis and being cornered, but that clarity is not guaranteed to
be "healthy", babies going with the bath water-wise. Bernie is a short-term stopgap to the
bleeding IF he can wrap his mind around the movement and an understanding of the immediate
threats to its existence- i.e., the DNC.
Regarding the first sentence of your comment: The requirements of the law never changed,
the whistleblower used an old form anyway, and the recently changed form has been
replaced.
In any case, the IG's process for handling whistleblower allegations is determined not
by a form but by the law and related policy documents. The key document, ICD 120, has been
virtually unchanged since 2014. Contrary to the speculation, the whistleblower used the
2018 form, not the new online form. The IG then investigated and found that his allegations
were credible and that Congress should be notified.
Yup, but this is still mislabeled "whistleblowing", which would be such if he/she were
ratting on the CIA. This hearsay would be laughed out of a court of law absent other proof.
Further, I think we can dismiss the IG investigation as being anything not pressured by
establishment types threatened by Trump's vendetta against Obama and his wing of the neo-lib
global corporation, as it promises to open the can of worms that both parties are united in
foreign policy and who we deal with, and that unity spills over into McCarthy-like reaction
to any unpredictability and unreliability such as Trump's. We can't "get him" on his real
crimes, as that would leave all "them guys" exposed.
I assumed that the much delayed Mueller report finally came out when it did and with the
conclusion it did because the CIA was finally convinced that it had Trump sufficiently cowed.
The July 27 phone call made it clear to them that it didn't.
And Pelosi, when asked by the
CIA to jump, immediately responded, "How high?" It will be extremely interesting to see how
much influence the CIA has over Republican Senators who will be casting decisive votes.
Thirty-three Republicans Senators will be excused and given cover. Is there a thirty-fourth
with the cojones to vote against removal and against the CIA's efforts to impose a color
revolution on American soil?
If this is really about 2020 then Democrats are even more stupid than I'm inclined to
believe. Krystal Ball said this morning that only 35% of the public supports impeachment. All
this effort will do is rile up Trump supporters. I recall what happened in the 1998 midterms
after the Clinton impeachment. There's every reason to believe this will turn around and bite
the Democrats in 2020.
Pelosi and Schumer are fine with that. If Democrats were to actually win, they'd have to
govern, and they can't do that.
There are several plausible explanations. If you consider Pelosi's motivations, you have
to look no further than her constituency, the donor class.
From their perspective there has been too many uncomfortable policy debates, including
climate change, occurring on the campaign trail. As with Russiagate all of these discussions
will vanish from the corporate media.
Also, some of the donors have stated they will not donate to the Dems, and may in fact
donate to Trump, if Warren gets nominated.
Finally, purely for display of party unity, protecting Joe Biden, even if it brings him
down will have value. Also, this specific charge will not bring up any of other former "suits" illegal
actions.
Inasmuch as polling showing the combined popularity of Sanders and Warren exceed 30% while
Biden is down to 19%, if you can end with a inconclusive first round of voting at the
Democratic Convention, you can bring in the Supers and name the person of your choice.
As to the question of 'why now?', my guess is because the 'resistance' types see the
writing on the wall that they are going to lose with anybody but Sanders as the candidate,
and they aren't about to allow Sanders to win. RussiaRussiaRussia, porn stars, and everything
else they tried didn't work and they've got nothing else that would give the public at large
something to vote for .
As to that writing on the wall, I will offer some very anecdotal evidence, but I found it
telling. A few days ago I went to a rural county fair. Now granted these fairs likely attract
a more conservative crowd, however this particular fair was in the most liberal county in the
state. Took a look at the exhibition hall at the fair, full of quilts, 4th grade artwork,
canned tomatoes, etc. as well as booths for both the Republican and Democrat parties.
At the Democrat party booth, they had put out poster boards with a list of issues and you
were supposed to put a little round sticker next to the issue you felt was most important.
Boring policy wonk stuff. I don't even remember if anyone was manning the booth when we
stopped by, but if they were they made no attempt whatsoever to speak with us. My wife put
one sticker on a poster and walked away and we were the only people there at the time. In
fairness, clearly there had been people there earlier since there were a lot of stickers
stuck to posters.
At the Republican booth, there were a number of people in line engaging with those manning
the booth. And rather than just pining little stickers on a poster, the Republicans were
handing out Trump 2020 swag and letting people get photos with a big Trump cutout. IDoing fun
stuff. Walking around the fair later I saw one of the few Hispanics in attendance (this is a
very white county in an extremely white state) sporting a Trump 2020 tote bag as he and his
wife walked through the fair.
If I were to base a prediction on the evidence alone, I would say Trump and the Elephants
are going to hand the Asses their asses in 2020 and they can feel it coming.
I really don't see how this doesn't blow up in their faces, but they've got nothing
else.
This is my feeling on it. It's the Democrats' Benghazi, a string of congressional hearings
designed to produce dirt on Trump to sink him in the election. Actual impeachment and removal
is nahgunnahappen, as that requires 67 senators, which would require all Democrats in the
Senate, both independents, and 20 Republicans . It would be a minor miracle if five
Republicans signed onto impeachment.
However, with dirt slinging as the only useful outcome possible, it shows how incompetent
Pelosi is by limiting the inquiry to just the Ukraine business. The damning dirt could come
in any form out of any corner of Trump's ongoings, so why would you limit the dirt digging to
something that, on the face of it, doesn't scream it went any deeper than Trump's
implication. Especially as it didn't happen that long ago.
God, this is so stupid. Look, perhaps it is because I live in a different continent or I
have a twisted turn of mind but I am seeing something completely different at work here. Is
Trump Corrupt? Of course he is but in a completely ham-fisted way that makes it blatantly
obvious. With Trump you always have low expectations. But Thomas Neuburger talks about ICE
deaths, Puerto Rico, the Muslim ban but so what? Obama was guilty of far worse but no
Democrats will criticize him for any of it. An example? If you cover up an international war
crime such as torture, that is an international crime too and Obama definitely covered up for
the CIA tortures and "looked forward". And one ramification for that was the US now having a
ex-torturer as head of the CIA.
So here is my take. The past few months Americans were finally having subjects like
healthcare and college debt forgiveness getting some air time and some serious traction. The
Democrat candidates were being forced to give answers on their positions on such ideas. But
now? The Democrats have introduced impeachment which has all the success prospects of
Russiagate. Expect copious amounts of verbal diarrhea in the next few months which will allow
for no time for discussion of subjects like healthcare anymore. The DNC will shout down
anyone trying to do so by shouting "Impeachment!". And when the elections rock around in a
year's time and there is finally some minor space to start talking about such subjects, the
DNC will tell progressives "You know, you should have really brought this up in 2019 while
there was time to talk about it. Your bad."
Indeed, we might as well argue that Obama should have been impeached for turning the
Espionage Act against reporters. I see that as more damaging to the US than most of Trump's
harmful acts to date.
I tell people that Trump is a minor league con man because so many people assert that he
is a con man
Obama successfully convinced people that he WANTED to do the right things but was
prevented from doing them by the evil Republicans. Despite the insurance/drug company
friendly implementation of ObamaCare, assertion of the most transparent administration, ever,
brutally coming down on government whistleblowers, killing overseas citizens via drone, not
prosecuting financial misdeeds, and destroying Libya, Obama is seen as righteous.
In my view, a truly great con man remains unacknowledged/undetected.
Obama is in a con man league of his own, as he benefits from the left's form of Obama
Derangement Syndrome.
Interesting that attacking trump on this is attacking Biden did dem elites give up on him?
don't see how he can survive, which seems to open the field for Warren sanders if so, not
what donors want, pelosi musta been forced by blue dogs cia.
Maybe good for sanders he needs rest, the stents will require recovery msm can't focus away
from impeach to celebrate his health problems
How long? Say one month?
Hopefully the dems great white hope Biden will be down and out by primaries Bernie might find
help in the south this time where it was a wall last time
Ca dem elites don't want Bernie, but electorate doesn't want Kamala
And Tulsi back on stage with her useful to focus on wars.
I think this vectors the right direction, Rev Kev. White noise to drown out clearly
articulated messages. If any of this were about actual evidence, Binney would've been called
to undercut the Crowdstrike assertions.
There are a couple of things that seem real. Once is the intra-elite competition between
the intelligence community and Trump. Epstein cracked a door and some light got through.
Trump seems to have taken the standard operating procedures personally.
Despite this, Trump is more acceptable to Wall Street than the left agenda. These attacks
serve to consolidate Trumps base; I've seen more Trump 2020 bumper stickers in my very-blue
town than any other candidates.
The endgame comes with the primaries. Sander's campaign income has a verisimilitude with
greater weight than the polls. Even polls which aren't specifically rigged can't cope with
modern communications. The problem is, with electronic vote-flipping on top of old-school
methods, unless the paper ballots get in (which is against status quo interests), how can it
be made clear the vote is being rigged? Could public gatherings outside the polling places be
enough to offer an alternative count?
Plus, Sanders has set himself up as TINA. He has not spread his wealth of four decades of
credibility to anyone else. No Hindu is getting the Oval, so Gabbard is a gadfly, not an
option. Trump and the top three Democratic candidates could all actually die of old age.
The only thing I'd actually put a bet on in all this is that Trump will not be removed
from office via impeachment.
I'm not sure that the Democrats yelling "impeachment!" will register loud enough to
overcome the substance of the election campaign. Not enough people care about it.
The real determinate is which people 'care' about it. The public discourse is presently in the hands of partisan hacks,
of mainly one ideology; Rentier Capitalism.
One main American political faction will characterize the obscurantist process as "White
Noise. The other main faction will characterize it as "Rainbow Noise." Both will be correct
about the "Noise" part.
According to Ball in the "Rising" video, the percentage of people who support impeachment
is 35%. That pretty much covers all the "partisan hacks" you refer to.
To the average voter? This is just noise and nonsense. Regardless of how impeachment ends
(and one doesn't have to be a genius to figure out that it will go nowhere), the concerns and
the anger of average voters are not going away.
Ditto, Ambrit- a rational response bestride the not caring noise.
The current equation of Warren and Sanders is the point problem of that coherence. Sanders
is weak on foreign policy particulars (Middle East, Venezuela, Ukraine are waffled responses,
more afraid to alienate rather than state), Warren is totally absent because she has
supported those policies in the past.
Both committed to regulation, Warren wanting existing
govt. style while Sanders wants the beginning of a bottom-up approach. Details are left on
the "debate-stage floor", as what we have had so far is a Sideshow Bob presentation of
policy, a Q&A for the media, which leads us nowhere unless you are fanatically political,
which most of the nation has been educated/innoculated against.
Right now, probably true. However, we've been victim to propaganda many times before
– WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, etc.etc. We have an apparatus that has honed its abilities
to reach millions immediately through TV, press, video, websites, that puts former agit-prop
to shame. We have been swarmed with the same message, basically allowing those caught in lies
previously to suddenly be believed today, "because"
The truth of any proposition comes down to its provenance and our ability to get tired of
the repetition and cacophony surrounding us, thus surrendering the ground. If enough believe
the initial message, if enough see their bread buttered by it, then the rest of us are prone
to that surrender unless an outside agency we CAN rely on exists.
It is sad to say that "not caring" becomes a positive. 50% of the voting public does not
vote, and most who vote do not care if their vote is even counted properly. Do not care
equals no democracy at all.
What you are seeing is called "hypocrisy", writ large. The Democrats are finally
discovering that they actually need the voters that they've been dissing for decades, and
they really don't want to admit how badly they've screwed the pooch.
Perhaps Ms. Pelosi's caucus finally made her do what she despises doing. That it should
benefit her party leadership's choice to replace Donald Trump is, of course,
coincidental.
There's still the nit that there's been no congressional vote authorizing her impeachment
inquiry, which will keep the process in the courts and delay proceedings longer than
necessary.
Ms. Pelosi's actions bring to mind the contradictory naval order, proceed with all
deliberate speed. It is a sign that the admirals acknowledge the necessity of doing
something, but tell their commanders it's on them if it goes South.
That she has shoved the bankeresque Schiff to the fore in place of the more irascible and
prosecutorial Nadler suggests she does not want to give the public a clear narrative, so much
as to keep them calm, as if the Trump administration were in charge instead of being in
office.
California is the vanguard of the "Resistance" to Trump. Pelosi is from California, as is
Schiff. Two of the Intelligence Committee members are also from California (Jackie Speier and
Eric Swalwell) as the LA Times pointed out a few days ago ("
California to play an outsize role in impeachment inquiry of Trump "). This is probably
why the whole impeachment inquiry is centered in the Intelligence committee and not the
Judiciary.
Various Obama officials live or work in California. For example, Eric Holder was hired by
the California Legislature to fight Trump. David Plouffe, who works with the Chan Zuckerberg
Initiative among other Silicon Valley groups, is helping a liberal group called ACRONYM with
anti-Trump digital messaging.
Don't forget too that Pelosi is related by marriage to Governor Gavin Newsom (his aunt was
married to Ron Pelosi, brother-in-law to Nancy). It's one big happy Resistance family!
Corruption is okay as long as they do it. Their hypocrisy has no limits.
Just imagine if corrupt California elites could rule the United States! The Wash Post even
had a fantasy piece about "President Pelosi" just a few days ago.
Thanks for that, saved me a bit of rushed commenting because I was going to quickly
comment on it before I noticed you had already.
California has 6 of the 24 members of the House Intelligence Committee: 4 of those 6
members hold 100% of Democratic (Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff) and Republican (Kevin McCarthy
and Devin Nunes) leadership roles; there are 4 out of 14 in the total Democratic membership,
and 2 out of 10 in the Republican membership.
Also, Californian members make up 100% of the House membership of the Gang of Eight, , 2
Democratic and 2 Republican: respectively, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff; and Kevin McCarthy
and Devin Nunes.
And lastly, both California Senators Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris (despite her
newbiness), are on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the only State to have both Senators as
members.
As a decades long California resident, what sickens me the most about this is California
legislators (overwhelmingly Democratic Party, but may as well be Republican given the
stunning inequality/austerity imposed in California) preside over the highest numbers of
unsheltered homeless in the country. A full third of California residents have been forced
onto Medi-Cal (where millions can't find a treating doctor for the life of them), or don't
qualify (despite not being able to afford their rents), yet can't afford any insurance.
Concurrently, State Legislators and that duplicitous, slimy creep Newsom just signed off on
an Obama inspired California
Healthcare Mandate Penalty , although there were crickets at California's Franchise Tax
Board when it came to following the IRS in going after Facebook's stunning and blatant 2010
Ireland Asset transfers Tax evasion (to the tune of billions now, and next to impossible to
determine what the current status of it is), they would much rather go after their
increasingly impoverished populace who can't afford a CPA, let alone an attorney.
> In other words, the rightness of impeachment was never a consideration for Democratic
Party leaders.
Nor was it in 2006, when, after recapturing the House, Pelosi took impeachment "off the
table," even though the Bush Administration committed multiple felonies in its warrantless
surveillance program, in addition to completely destroying the Fourth Amendment. (Obama later
normalized and rationalized all this, of course.)
So one would not have expected principle or the "rule of law" or any of those other
shibboleths to enter into the liberal Democrat decision-making process. It never does.
This person starts out with an establishing remark that convicts Trump, and goes on from
there. Unlike a true impeachment process, no 'real' groundwork is laid down. Furthermore, by
half-heartedly mentioning "issues" with the Pelosi formulation, in effect, that Biden is just
as bad as Trump, the author lays the groundwork for the 'impeachment' of both Party's "main"
candidates. The piece reminds me of the logic of the Alice in Wonderland trial: "Sentence
first – verdict afterwards." All this, my cynical sensibility reminds me, sotto voice,
for an insane Queen.
Impeachment has always been a political process. After all, it is a function of the Congress,
the prototype of politics. To take the authors buttressing point, that the 'essence' of
impeachment should be the pure logic of the deeds in question casts the entire process of
impeachment in the light of virtue signalling. How else would a disinterested observer
characterize a process where the process itself is not initiated with the anticipation of a
useful outcome? In a very real sense, it is a partisan war where there are penalties for
losing.
This piece, if any, shows plainly the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the American
political process today. The two "leading" candidates of the "rival" Partys are both
delineated to be frauds, figuratively and literally. Turning the mentioning of the earlier
English Parliamentary 'version' of impeachment on, as it were, it's head, one is lead to
consider that only something as all encompassing and determinative as an actual bloodletting
will be of any use to the Nation.
Be very careful what you ask for. You might get it.
"Impeachment is the Constitution's version of the English Civil War, minus the war."
It could be argued that getting rid of a Prime Minister via a vote of no confidence is
orders of magnitude simpler than impeachment. In fact, it seems to happen about every ten or
twenty years on average in the UK. And no civil war required either.
The best analogue of today with then is that the English Civil War did not just remove the
Royalist leadership of the time, but an entire generation of Royalists. Does America really
want a twenty year interregnum?
We are already in the Interregnum. Trump was 'none of the above'. People talked about a
'clown car' and then Trump showed that a clown could actually accede to power, insofar as a
clown can manage the role. The Democrats responded with a clown show of their own. It's a
circus, although the clowns are pretty malign. Maybe people like that. Meanwhile, serious
people with serious political proposals, like Sanders, are on the outside looking in.
Someone's going to have to break a window.
Pelosi has clearly seen the dangers of democrat complicity and corruption before; what's
changed? If she was acutely (off the table) aware of the dirty utterly
filthy linen danger before, then why not now when it's, if anything, more obvious than
ever?
All I can think of is that the Clinton derangement syndrome – the bitterness and
perceived injustice that the anointed one didn't get anointed – still has an iron grip
on the psyche of the DC Daristocrats. They're stone drunk on hatred, spite, and lust for
revenge and are hallucinating in broad daylight that they've got the hook to sell it.
I like the idea that this is all a clever ruse to keep the focus away from sanity in
health care etc., but it just doesn't look like they have that much sense. From the UK to the
the US, everyone's going nuts.
I bet it's good for fund raising, those I know who are most embarrassed by trump have a
fair amount of money and currently they are very excited. Whatever it is, it's not bernie (or
should I say &@cking bernie), it's not M4A, and it's not student loans, as commented on
above this line
It's the ill conceived nature of this, the mess the democrats are creating for themselves,
that suggests to me that shifting the focus away from popular programs such as medicare for
all is unintended even if successful. It's like stabbing yourself in the arm to divert
attention from robbing the church collection. Not a good analogy but anyway
There is a huge amount of pressure from the public to get rid of Trump any way possible
and a lot of that, ironically, has been manufactured by the democrats themselves. That, I
suspect, combined with Hillary syndrome, is more what's behind this than the criminal, but
lucid, plan to obscure the popularity of programs benefiting the public.
Perhaps you should go back and re-read the last 5 years of commentary then -- there's been
plenty of substance offered by those who are just as powerless as you.
Imagine Trump were to overthrow Maduro in a coup. He installs his puppet Guido who
immediately gives Ivanka a seat on the board of a Venezuelan oil company at 50K a month, or
more. Would the Democrats be screaming 'nothing to see here' in that scenario?
It's not clear the Democrats would notice any impropriety. What would be tearing them
apart is that they didn't get a seat at the trough (on the board) as well.
I would say 'Joe Biden's son's integrity' and 'the dubious right-wing Democratic Party
CIA-led arms sales-drive policy in the Ukraine.'
I don't think that Biden himself is particularly corrupt; the guy really is a terrible
hack. And I don't think legal corruption is necessarily what's at issue, but a world in which
it's perfectly acceptable for the children of elites to trail around after their parents and
help smooth the wider asset-grabbing through personal enrichment.
The wider context–villifying Russia, cleaning up Ukraine enough to justify
consorting with fascists and the far-right to keep all the balls in the air, needs to be
exposed.
There is a right way to do impeachment, and this ain't it. They could investigate the
Trump administrator for its rampant corruption – it's a very target-rich environment.
Instead, Pelosi wants the scope very narrow. That's quite telling. Even more telling, and
offensive, when you think about it, is her decision to have this inquiry be led by the House
Intelligence Committee. This pretty much guarantees that at least some of the proceedings
will happen behind closed doors.
So, they think that they're going to remove the duly elected
President behind closed doors, and they think the population will be okay with this? Do they
really live in such a bubble that they think people trust their judgment enough to do this?
It boggles the mind.
Revenge, like any addiction, doesn't brook common sense. The author of the article is spot
on when he points out that it's just too late to impeach on the high road even if the
democrat party did have something, anything, to distinguish them ethically from the
republicans or Trump (other than bombast).
Also, just a thought, having this discussion behind closed doors makes sense if Pelosi is
hoping they will come to their senses.
As to the right or wrong way to do impeachment, I think the democrats like the republicans
are simply beyond that or any notion of it other than the residue of dim memory that ends up
entirely as the decorative part in public speeches. I suspect they are quite simply oblivious
to such niceties as anything being wrong with using impeachment as a weapon rather than as a
means for justice.
I'm pretty sure Pelosi doesn't want it and wanted to repeat her 2007 play, but she doesn't
have 2008 certainty to offer (keep the powder dry I know but this was what that was about).
Team Blue elites need #resistance happy because it's their base. The people who missed brunch
aren't exactly rationale or going to have this explained to them behind closed doors. Pelosi
has been slowly losing with the caucus, but most of the members are terrible and vulnerable
to an AOC-esque challenge especially in safe seats which most of the seats are. Again without
theven #resistance, safe seat Team Blue types are very vulnerable.
Adding that, imo, the rank and file voters did the work of electing Democrats to a House
majority, motivated partly by Clinton revenge, but also by policy issues. There's been
noticeable dismay in the corners of twitter where I wander at Pelosi's taking so long to act,
the inept performances of the few hearings so far, and now the proposed narrow focus.
my take is they're never actually going to pass articles of impeachment, which would hand
the process over to McConnell in the Senate. It will stay in the House and they will attempt
to nab Trump or perhaps one of his sidekicks like Giuliani on obstruction of the House
investigation. This is by now a fairly transparent strategy, and we will find out what the
elusive PA swing voter thinks of it soon enough.
As far as the primary is concerned, it reaffirms support for Biden by party leadership.
His campaign requires "electability in the general", so not clear how that's helping the
cause.
Perhaps they figured Biden was gonna get hit anyway for making Poroshenko fire the guy
running the office prosecuting Biden's son (whereupon the investigation was, by coincidence,
halted). Thus get everything together hit back in the month or so before the details emerged
in US media?
I think it's a colossal mistake, and now Pelosi is all-in (together with a bunch of
Representatives in deep purple congressional districts roped into going on record supporting
the impeachment investigation), so all this ain't going nowhere.
Maybe I missed it, and so I (as a veteran) must make sure it is said: if the Congress will
not list, as the first Article of Impeachment, the slaughter of innocent people in wars not
declared by Congress, then I don't see how any other possible Article would matter.
Here,
Trump has aided and abetted the slaughter and unending misery for hundreds of thousands of
Yemenis, in a country against which the U.S. never declared war, by keeping the House of Saud
armed. And this reasoning would include the killing of innocent people outside any
consideration of war and peace, a crime which can be incontrovertibly attributed to decisions
emanating from the Oval Office regarding people who come to our borders to seek economic or
political refuge.
Wasn't the power to go to war exclusively reserved for Congress, to try to make sure that
the country wouldn't go to war on a lark? And wasn't the Bill of Rights enshrined to make
sure that the U.S. Government could not put people to death, at least without due
process?
I realize that this might mean that Congress would have had to impeach presidents left and
right. So be it; enlisted women and men can be severely punished for killing innocent people
(and for far less, such as disobeying orders). Why should presidents and vice-presidents
escape responsibility for high crimes of unjustifiable homicide (and, I must add,
countenancing torture)?
The problem, of course, is that the war in Yemen started under O'Bomber. One of those rare
achievements of the Trump administration, in fact, is that he hasn't actually started any
brand-spanking new wars at all–just continued the old ones started by Bushbama.
Well, bush got congress to approve Iraq, so impeaching him would have been on account of
the lies.
Libya is on Obama Hillary. It wasn't 'we came, we saw, he died', cackle, it was 'a peaceful,
prosperous country died', one with equal Ed for women, a rarity in ME.
Is this the last desperation Hail Mary by the Democratic Party and the National Security
State to save themselves?
Has it already happened?
I have been hoping and praying that disgraced former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew
McCabe
has gone "John Dean" (of Watergate infamy) and the National Security State knows it. If that dream is a reality then maybe, just maybe, I'll have to buy a television set to
watch that theater live
on a 60 inch screen.
"... After the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism, where one would expect a reduction if not elimination of such a global secret warfare organization, the CIA only ramped up its operations overseas. Today the CIA is merely one arm in a multi-faceted US "regime change" apparatus that includes the US State Department, USAID, and, very importantly, US government-funded "non-governmental" organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and its sub-grantees. This "regime change apparatus" uses CIA methods developed during the Cold War (by "experts" like Gene Sharp and others) such as mobilization, training, subterfuge, agitation, and propaganda. We saw this apparatus at work in events like the "Arab Spring" and before it in the overthrow of the Milosevic government in Yugoslavia. We saw it in the Ukraine coup of 2014 and we see it in Venezuela and in Hong Kong today. ..."
"... There is plenty of evidence of US government involvement in the Hong Kong protests. That does not mean that every single body out in the street is in the pay of the CIA. That is the red herring argument of those who are determined that we never see the US government hand in unrest overseas. Or to ridicule as "conspiracy theorists" those who point out obvious US government involvement. ..."
"... It is undeniable that the US government has been involved in grooming, training, and funding the anti-Beijing movement in Hong Kong for years. ..."
"... Imagine a movement dedicated to overthrowing the US political order that was funded by the Chinese, whose activists regularly went to Beijing for training in organization and mobilization, and whose leaders met with leading members of the Chinese Communist Party. How would such a movement in the United States be viewed by the US government? How would it be portrayed by the US mainstream media? ..."
"... The US has ceased being a republic and has become a national security state. The US national security state enriches its elites – be they in the military-industrial complex, the think tanks, or the media – at the expense of middle class and working-class America. It does this by promoting an "enemy scenario" whereby the American people are made to believe that if they ever challenge the US military budget – larger than the next seven military budgets combined – they are not only putting themselves and their families at risk, but they are deeply unpatriotic and anti-American. The US national security state fought an 18-year "war on terror" which only seemed to generate more terrorists! Intervention in Iraq and Libya and Syria to "fight terrorism" resulted in more, not less, al-Qaeda and ISIS. It was not until Russia and Iran stood up in 2015 and began fighting these US-backed groups that there was a reduction in their power. ..."
"... The Trump Presidency thus far has been an enormous disappointment. The president had the opportunity to name a top-notch foreign policy and national security team that would reflect and carry out his stated policies as a candidate – getting along with Russia, NATO skepticism, opposition to endless war, etc – but once in power he has again and again drawn from that same neoconservative cesspool that no matter who is elected always find its way to positions of power and influence. ..."
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your Twitter account has just been closed. Why?
Daniel McAdams: In August I was watching a segment of the Sean Hannity program while at a friend's house and noticed that despite
an hour of Hannity ranting against the "deep state" in the US, he was wearing a lapel pin bearing the seal of the US Central Intelligence
agency, which most would agree is either the center or at least an important hub of the US "deep state" itself. I tweeted about
this strange anomaly and as a comment to my own Tweet on it I happened to say that Hannity is "retarded." Twitter informed me
that I had committed "hateful conduct" for "promoting violence against or directly attacking or threatening other people on the
basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability,
or disease." It is clear on its face that I did none of these. I used a non-politically correct term to ridicule Hannity for attacking
the "deep state" while wearing the symbols of the deep state on his very lapel.
It is clear that Twitter is deeply biased against any voices outside the mainstream, pro-empire perspective. As a leading Tweeter
in opposition to interventionist US foreign policy, I had long been targeted by those who enable and enforce Twitter's political
biases. Look at who Twitter partners with and you will understand why I was banned for a transparently false reason: the US government-funded
Atlantic Council and other similar organizations are working with Twitter to eliminate any voices challenging US global military
empire.
In your opinion, what exactly is the role of the CIA in the regime changes of some countries around the world?
From its creation by the National Security Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency carried the dual role of analyzing
intelligence for its customers in the Executive Branch of the US government and conducting covert actions and operations in pursuit
of (claimed) US foreign policy goals. The history of CIA action in post-war Europe is extensive and includes founding front organizations
to prop up socialist and far-left publications and institutions as a challenge to Soviet communism as well as backing far-right
groups and political parties and even violent terror organizations to directly confront communism and overturn elections where
communists made gains.
After the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism, where one would expect a reduction if not elimination of such a
global secret warfare organization, the CIA only ramped up its operations overseas. Today the CIA is merely one arm in a multi-faceted
US "regime change" apparatus that includes the US State Department, USAID, and, very importantly, US government-funded "non-governmental"
organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and its sub-grantees. This "regime change apparatus" uses CIA methods
developed during the Cold War (by "experts" like Gene Sharp and others) such as mobilization, training, subterfuge, agitation,
and propaganda. We saw this apparatus at work in events like the "Arab Spring" and before it in the overthrow of the Milosevic
government in Yugoslavia. We saw it in the Ukraine coup of 2014 and we see it in Venezuela and in Hong Kong today.
The practical value to the United States of such operations is less than zero, the costs to the American taxpayer are enormous,
and the immorality of manipulating the globe toward an outcome preferred by Washington's elites is self-evident.
When we see the generalized NSA surveillance, do you think we live in a democracy or a tenebrous fascist regime?
Americans have been manipulated by the elites in government and its allies in state propaganda (otherwise known as the "mainstream
media") to accept, particularly post-9/11, the deeply anti-American proposition that we must yield our privacy and Constitutionally-guaranteed
civil liberties to a government that promises it will not abuse its increased power over us but will only use it to keep us safe.
These promises have been over and over again proven to be lies. Government is not targeting terrorism or terrorists: they are
targeting average American citizens.
Americans were told that only terrorists' phone calls would be intercepted, but then Edward Snowden revealed that all of our
phone calls are intercepted. Americans were mad for a few weeks but then Washington promised "reform" of the PATRIOT Act in the
form of the FREEDOM Act and everybody calmed down. Even though the FREEDOM Act is actually worse than the PATRIOT Act because
it legalized all of the illegal activities that were taking place under the PATRIOT Act. "Reform" in Washington means obfuscation
and perception manipulation.
Likewise, Americans seeking to travel within their own country have been forced to allow strangers to invade and touch the
most private areas of their bodies – and their children's bodies! American sheep just bow to the authorities and keep watching
their freedoms stolen from them, murmuring to themselves as they are raped by the authorities, "well I have nothing to hide "
You mentioned one time Operation Mockingbird, where the CIA manipulated journalists in the 1950s. In your opinion, does the CIA
continue to use these same practices today?
I have no doubt that the CIA continues to maintain a close relationship with both mainstream and independent journalists. This
is critical to establishing and controlling the narrative in each foreign "crisis." It is no accident that each mainstream media
outlet – regardless whether left-wing or right-wing or any wing - has the exact same perspective on events like the Ukraine coup
or the Venezuela attempted coup, or Hong Kong protests. Part of this is the US "deep state" or "national security state" and part
of it is the increasing integration of US corporate entities into the US government. Major media outlets are owned by US corporations
that also own weapons manufacturing companies and cannot be trusted to report on events objectively. Similarly, virtually every
US mainstream media outlet employs "former" members of the US intelligence community to "explain" foreign events to their viewers.
When is the last time a credible non-interventionist or pro-peace analyst has been featured in any mainstream media outlet?
As in Soviet times, any view at odds with Washington's "party line" is simply disappeared. When independent media outlets begin
gaining traction and challenging the narrative, they are "de-platformed" on social media and even from their Internet service
providers under the recommendations of US government-funded NGOs like the Atlantic Council or the German Marshal Fund.
Is not what is currently happening in Hong Kong a CIA manipulation targeting China in the context of the Trump administration's
economic war?
There is plenty of evidence of US government involvement in the Hong Kong protests. That does not mean that every single
body out in the street is in the pay of the CIA. That is the red herring argument of those who are determined that we never see
the US government hand in unrest overseas. Or to ridicule as "conspiracy theorists" those who point out obvious US government
involvement.
It is undeniable that the US government has been involved in grooming, training, and funding the anti-Beijing movement
in Hong Kong for years. They don't even hide it: you can easily find on USAID and National Endowment for Democracy website
the level of funding the US government provides these organizations and political parties. And when these party leaders come to
Washington, they are received by the US Vice President, Secretary of State, Speaker of the House, and other high-ranking US government
officials. Which foreign opposition movements that Washington does not support are given such treatment?
Imagine a movement dedicated to overthrowing the US political order that was funded by the Chinese, whose activists regularly
went to Beijing for training in organization and mobilization, and whose leaders met with leading members of the Chinese Communist
Party. How would such a movement in the United States be viewed by the US government? How would it be portrayed by the US mainstream
media?
You mentioned a US-supported coup when you talked about Venezuela. In your opinion, does the US administration continue the same
interventionist policy to destabilize Latin American countries?
Any Latin American government not in Washington's constellation has been and is targeted for destabilization and overthrow.
We saw this with the 2009 coup in Honduras, whose architect was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We see it in Cuba. We
see it in Venezuela. We saw it with Ecuador, where a government wary of US persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was
"changed" in favor of a regime that handed Assange over to the authorities in exchange for a few billion dollars from the IMF.
Do what Washington says and get paid; oppose Washington and get overthrown. That is the foreign policy of the US empire. And like
the Soviet empire that preceded it, it is a policy doomed to failure.
Why in your opinion does the United States always need an enemy? Is not there a danger of world war when we see the multitude
of US imperialist interventions around the world?
The US has ceased being a republic and has become a national security state. The US national security state enriches its
elites – be they in the military-industrial complex, the think tanks, or the media – at the expense of middle class and working-class
America. It does this by promoting an "enemy scenario" whereby the American people are made to believe that if they ever challenge
the US military budget – larger than the next seven military budgets combined – they are not only putting themselves and their
families at risk, but they are deeply unpatriotic and anti-American. The US national security state fought an 18-year "war on
terror" which only seemed to generate more terrorists! Intervention in Iraq and Libya and Syria to "fight terrorism" resulted
in more, not less, al-Qaeda and ISIS. It was not until Russia and Iran stood up in 2015 and began fighting these US-backed groups
that there was a reduction in their power.
After the Russian and Iranian success in beating back the jihadist threat in Syria, the 2017 US national security strategy
did an Orwellian about-face and abandoned the "war on terror" in favor of a declaration that our new enemies were again our old
enemies: China and Russia. It is literally Orwell's 1984: "we are at war with Eastasia. We had always been at war with Eastasia."
What do you think about the North Korean and Iranian case, where the Trump administration lacks a clear vision and where some
neoconservatives are pushing for a war?
There are few consistencies in President Trump's foreign policy. One emerging consistency, however, is that he seems genuinely
reluctant to take the country into a bona fide war. He's happy with sending a few dozen Tomahawk missiles into the Syrian countryside,
but when faced with an actual robust response to any US strike, he to this point has chosen de-escalation. This may be a function
of his keen eye for politics rather than any philosophical or moral concerns, but it to this point seems thematic. The problem
is that by surrounding himself with neoconservatives – and make no mistake his replacement for Bolton is at least as much a neocon
as the Mustached One himself – the president is isolating himself from any inputs advising military constraint when facing crises
overseas. That is why many of us were so much hoping that Bolton would be replaced with a Realist like Col. Douglas Macgregor.
There is a big danger that the president will be cornered by a lack of non-war options to the next crisis simply because he gives
no quarter to non-war voices in his administration.
When we consider the plight of activists and whistleblowers, such as Assange, Snowden, etc. can we still talk about freedom of
speech and human rights? Shouldn't we mobilize more to support these activists and others around the world?
The plight of Snowden and Assange and all of the persecuted whistleblowers and truth-tellers is the plight of what is life
of our liberty, freedom, and even Western civilization. When all dissent is quashed, imprisoned, tortured, we are left with only
the Total State. The Total State, as we know from history, brooks no dissent because it can only maintain power by continuing
the illusion that it alone is the source of truth. Thus any voice challenging the Total State, as the embodiment of truth, must
on its face be a lie. Why would truth allow lies to undermine it? Why would any sane person oppose "the people" as represented
in their Soviet government? Surely such a person would be insane and need of treatment rather than a citizen raising a legitimate
question or differing opinion.
This is what we are facing in the US today. A Total State, where opposing views are de-platformed and disappeared. Where truth-tellers
are jailed and tortured – pour servir d'avertissement aux autres (to serve as a warning to others).
What is your assessment of the Trump Presidency and what do you think of its foreign policy?
The Trump Presidency thus far has been an enormous disappointment. The president had the opportunity to name a top-notch
foreign policy and national security team that would reflect and carry out his stated policies as a candidate – getting along
with Russia, NATO skepticism, opposition to endless war, etc – but once in power he has again and again drawn from that same neoconservative
cesspool that no matter who is elected always find its way to positions of power and influence. He did not chart a wise course
in building a solid administration of professionals who agree with him – and there are plenty to choose from – and instead he
actually hired an entire team of people who not only disagree with his stated positions, but they actually publicly ridicule them
and work against them. It is unprecedented in my memory to see those who serve the president publicly undermining his stated positions,
yet Bolton and Pompeo never hesitated or hesitate to do just that. This is an enormous missed opportunity for President Trump
and for the United States.
You have been an advisor to Congressman Ron Paul and you are doing an excellent job as Director of the Ron Paul Institute for
Peace and Prosperity. Can you explain to our readers what the missions of this institute are?
Our mission as a non-profit educational institution is to make the case for a non-interventionist foreign policy and the restoration
of our civil liberties at home. We are the continuation of the Ron Paul liberty movement. To that end, we publish thousands of
articles making the case for non-interventionism on our website, we broadcast a daily Ron Paul Liberty Report, and we hold conferences
throughout the country bringing together a broad coalition of Americans – and non-Americans – to learn and promote peace and prosperity!
* * *
Daniel McAdams is executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-host of the "Ron Paul Liberty
Report," a daily live broadcast. He served for 12 years on Capitol Hill as foreign affairs and national security advisor to former
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former
communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.
"... Of course, I understand your motives for Impeachment are not wholly altruistic. With corporate donations drying up and growing pressure from Progressive primary challengers making Establishment incumbents increasingly nervous, you need some way to excite your old school base for the important election season to come. ..."
Thank you so much for inviting me to your Impeachment Party. It's really great to hear
you've finally found something to nail Trump with. Good for you! You've been looking so hard
these past three years. So nice to see all that effort finally pay off!
(Of course, some might say you should have spent that time looking for solutions to all the
problems the country is facing, but hey, let's not get crazy! Right?) And your amazing valor
doesn't stop at Biden. Oh no. You are even willing to let Republicans dredge up Hillary's email
scandal long after people had all but forgotten about Crowdstrike. The Romans who stood in
front of the charging elephants at Cannae would be proud.
... ... ...
Of course, I understand your motives for Impeachment are not wholly altruistic. With
corporate donations drying up and growing pressure from Progressive primary challengers making
Establishment incumbents increasingly nervous, you need some way to excite your old school base
for the important election season to come.
That's why it's even more testament to your pluck that you would choose such a transparently
hypocritical and overtly political hill on which to take your final stand, especially after
2016 showed so clearly that going after Trump personally only makes him more popular.
So I
say onward Impeachment soldier!
By the time the primaries roll around, your brave Establishment beserkers will have divided
the party and discredited the leadership to such an extent that rank and file Dems will be
begging for a Progressive intervention.
Foreign new coverage in modern western societies is controlled by intelligence agencies. There are no exceptions.
Notable quotes:
"... At this stage, any one who still believes in the western propaganda about China is simply too brain-washed and not too smart for any cure. Excuse me, I should say "too dumb for any cure". ..."
"... For example, Nathan Rich's recent video shows how media biased reporting of Hong Kong compare with Ukraine riots. The contrast can't be anymore stark: ..."
"... All these so-called anti communist slant against countries, I suspect, have its origins in the Vatican. People seem to forget that they should bear false witness https://www.youtube.com/embed/yUGPIeE9kMc?feature=oembed ..."
@d
dan " ..media biased Hong Kong reporting ."
How would American cops react to punks tossing Molotov Cocktails at them? Arson is a felony
but there would be no need for a trial just a coroner.
@Godfree Roberts "The
weird result of this enormous, expensive effort is that, while we were busy lying to
ourselves about China "
At this stage, any one who still believes in the western propaganda about China is
simply too brain-washed and not too smart for any cure. Excuse me, I should say "too dumb for
any cure".
For example, Nathan Rich's recent video shows how media biased reporting of Hong Kong
compare with Ukraine riots. The contrast can't be anymore stark:
@Godfree Roberts Here
is a good analysis of how the main stream media (MSM) gang up to give propaganda, and how I
wish they have objective comments about China or any country they do not like.
All these so-called anti communist slant against countries, I suspect, have its origins in
the Vatican. People seem to forget that they should bear false witness
"... Citing a "political and humanitarian crisis" committed by Caracas, the White House Office of the Press Secretary issued a "suspension of entry as immigrants and nonimmigrants of persons who threaten Venezuela's democratic institutions." ..."
"... The move comes as the latest effort from the Trump administration to oust Venezuela's president. ' ..."
'US President Donald Trump has moved to suspend Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's
senior officials, relatives, and others who receive financial benefits from entering into
the US in Wednesday press release from the White House.
Citing a "political and humanitarian crisis" committed by Caracas, the White House
Office of the Press Secretary issued a "suspension of entry as immigrants and nonimmigrants
of persons who threaten Venezuela's democratic institutions."
The move comes as the latest effort from the Trump administration to oust Venezuela's
president. '
Netanyahu's coalition was given the nod because they have 55 seats to the other side's
54.
There's still some question about whether Netanyahu can form a governing coalition.
But
Netanyahu now has 42 days to convince his former Defense Minister(!) Lieberman
(who heads the Yisrael Beiteinu Party) to join the coalition led by Likud.
"... One of the reasons that I doubt Biden's version of the story stems from my experience in Venezuela. After Chavez took power, Venezuelans told me that he had found that a critical subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA was basically a CIA shop. The names of CIA on the Board of Directors were not just ordinary CIA, but were recognizable figures at the very top. ..."
"... To me this is entirely plausible. Control of oil is critical to US global hegemony. And what better way to control foreign oil than to have trusted American asset sit on the BOD? ..."
One of the reasons that I doubt Biden's version of the story stems from my experience in
Venezuela. After Chavez took power, Venezuelans told me that he had found that a critical
subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA was basically a CIA shop. The names of CIA on
the Board of Directors were not just ordinary CIA, but were recognizable figures at the very
top.
To me this is entirely plausible. Control of oil is critical to US global hegemony. And
what better way to control foreign oil than to have trusted American asset sit on the BOD?
This brings us to Hunter Biden's appointment to Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. After the
coup in 2014, why wouldn't Biden want a trusted asset on the board of the biggest natural gas
producer in Ukraine? IOW it was unpublicized standard operating procedure.
This is a standard play in any color revolution. Possibility of emigrate is hanging like a
carrot to make protest more numerous and more violent. Kind of the reward for foot solves (who
are often students and have illusions as for their ability to move up the food chain after the
emigration) for their participation in the in color revolution.
The role of Taiwanese security agencies in riots still needs to be investigated... Hong Cong
protest changes the result of presidential elections in Taiwan and that probably was their main
role, as attempt to undermine sovereignty of China over Hong Cong in the long run are doomed to
be a failure. Taiwan now has renewed geopolitical importance for the USA and efforts to distance
it from China will multiply. So the main price might be the result of Taiwan presidential
elections.
In this case protesters were just pawns in a larger game.
Notable quotes:
"... the United States is waging a campaign to force China into a corner and inflict major geopolitical defeats. ..."
"... The United States already is entangled in the dispute over Taiwan’s political status. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, Washington made a commitment to provide Taipei with “defensive” weaponry and to regard any coercive moves by Beijing as a threat to the peace of East Asia. Under the Trump administration, U.S. policy has become even more supportive of Taiwan’s de facto independence. American officials complained about the decision of the Solomon Islands to recognize Beijing instead of Taipei and threatened to reconsider aid to that country. ..."
"... Even more significant, for the first time since Washington severed formal diplomatic ties with Taipei and switched them to Beijing in 1979, high-level U.S. security officials, including former national security adviser John Bolton, have met with their Taiwanese counterparts . The Trump administration has also approved an $8 billion arms sale that includes F-16 fighters . Beijing protests all U.S. weapons sales to Taipei, but the reaction this time seems especially angry. ..."
"... o doubt that swaying the upcoming Taiwan election was one of the goals of the "protest" apparatus and its backers. Tsai was looking weak until the "protests." ... ..."
"... sub-title: and especially avoid any manifestations of meddling. Not sure how that can be accomplished, my understanding is that NED et al are up to their eyeballs in meddling, taxpayer funded, and Chinese govt is well aware of that. ..."
"... "Chinese leaders also suspect that the United States is fomenting much of the trouble in Hong Kong. It is tempting to dismiss such accusations as nothing more than typical propaganda and scapegoating on the part of a beleaguered communist regime." ..."
"... Well, thank goodness one of the articles Mr. Carpenter linked to mentioned the U.S. government's National Endowment for Democracy, which distributed over $400,000 to three groups in Hong Kong last year. ..."
“We hope that before Communist China’s
National Day on Oct. 1, our friends in Taiwan can express their support for Hong Kong through
street protests,” Wong
said at a news conference on September 3. "A lot of people in the past have said 'today
Hong Kong and tomorrow Taiwan.' But I think the most ideal thing we'd say is 'Taiwan today,
tomorrow Hong Kong.' Hong Kong can be like Taiwan, a place for freedom and democracy."
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Such sentiments by themselves are enough to enrage Beijing. But Wong also urged Taiwan's
government to let Hong Kong protesters seek political asylum. Worse from Beijing's standpoint,
he made those statements not in Hong Kong or some neutral location, but in Taipei following
meetings with Taiwan's governing, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Communist Chinese leaders are likely to interpret such a venue as further evidence of a Hong
Kong-Taiwanese political alliance against the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Beijing’s persistent attempts to undermine Hong Kong’s political autonomy under
its “one county, two systems” arrangement has caused Taiwanese attitudes to turn
emphatically against such a formula for their island. Most Taiwanese were never enthusiastic
about that proposal, but the proposed Hong Kong extradition law (just now withdrawn) that would
have enabled Chinese authorities to try Hong Kong-based political dissidents in mainland courts
has soured Taiwanese public opinion even more. A poll that Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs
Council published in late July
found that 88.7 percent of respondents rejected one country, two systems, up from 75.4 per
cent in a January survey.
The Hong Kong democracy campaign is strengthening hardline, anti-PRC factions in Taiwan.
Incumbent President Tsai appeared to be in deep political trouble earlier this year.
Taiwan’s continuing
economic malaise had undermined her presidency, and the DPP suffered huge losses in
November 2018 local elections. Indeed, the losses were so severe that Tsai had to
quit her post as party chair. She also faced a strong primary challenge for the DPP’s
presidential nomination from her onetime prime minister, James Lai.
But Tsai has shrewdly exploited public anger at Beijing’s crude attempts to undermine
Hong Kong’s autonomy to rebuild her domestic political support. “As long as I am
here, I will stand firm to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty,”
Tsai pledged in July. “As long as I am here, you would not have to fear, because we
will not become another Hong Kong.” That message resonated with voters, and not only did
she defeat Lai, but her fortunes against the opposition Kuomintang Party in the upcoming
general election appear far more favorable than they did a few months ago.
The Hong Kong developments have created a political nightmare for the Kuomintang. The
party’s nominee, Han Kuo-yu, the maverick populist mayor of Kaohsiung, had long advocated
closer relations with the mainland. To that end, he sought to resume the policy that the last
Kuomintang president, Ma Jing-jeou, pursued from 2008 to 2016. Earlier this year, Han visited
China and had cordial meetings with Communist Party officials. He has always seemed highly
favorable to the PRC’s one country, two systems arrangement for Taiwan as well as Hong
Kong. Both the Chinese government and pro-Beijing media outlets in Taiwan (the so-called red
media) were decidedly enthusiastic about
Han’s candidacy against more moderate opponents in the Kuomintang Party’s
primary election this summer.
But the popularity of the Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrations among Taiwanese voters has
thrown Han on the defensive, and he is beating a very fast retreat from his previous position.
In a desperate attempt to rebut allegations that he would embrace an appeasement policy toward
Beijing, Han even
asserted that, if he is elected president, Taiwan would only accept China’s one
country, two systems proposal “over my dead body.” It is not clear how credible his
eleventh-hour political transformation is with Taiwanese voters.
Chinese leaders also suspect
that the United States is fomenting
much of the trouble in Hong Kong.
... ... ...
As much as Americans are understandably pleased with the democratic factions in Hong Kong
and Taiwan, Washington must temper its enthusiasm—and especially avoid any manifestations
of meddling. We must not give PRC leaders reason to believe that the United States is
waging a campaign to force China into a corner and inflict major geopolitical defeats.
Caution in both capitals is imperative. The next few months, perhaps even the next few weeks,
may determine whether East Asia remains at peace.
The United States already is entangled in the dispute over Taiwan’s political
status. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, Washington made a commitment to provide Taipei
with “defensive” weaponry and to regard any coercive moves by Beijing as a threat
to the peace of East Asia. Under the Trump administration, U.S. policy has become even more
supportive of Taiwan’s de facto independence. American officials complained about the
decision of the Solomon Islands to recognize Beijing instead of Taipei and
threatened to reconsider aid to that country.
Even more significant, for the first time since Washington severed formal diplomatic
ties with Taipei and switched them to Beijing in 1979, high-level U.S. security officials,
including former national security adviser John Bolton, have met with their Taiwanese counterparts . The Trump
administration has also approved an $8 billion arms sale that includes
F-16 fighters . Beijing protests all U.S. weapons sales to Taipei, but the reaction this
time seems especially angry.
US foreign policy has never been our strong suit. We change government every 4 years or 8,
meaning the State Department has a lot of turnover and is politically influenced to the
political doctrine in vogue, for any elected party. My personal best current day example is
North Korea. NK fears if they sign on with the US, their leaders fate will follow that of
Saddam and Gaddafi. Friends one day , next we turn on them. Even invade.
Reality is we have zero influence with Beijing, or Moscow. China has their hands full for
sure consuming Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Wow---so Ted Galen Carpenter is going full propagandist now. N o doubt that swaying the
upcoming Taiwan election was one of the goals of the "protest" apparatus and its backers.
Tsai was looking weak until the "protests." ...
sub-title: and especially avoid any manifestations of meddling. Not sure how that can be
accomplished, my understanding is that NED et al are up to their eyeballs in meddling,
taxpayer funded, and Chinese govt is well aware of that.
The mainland Chinese government expects acquiescence to its one China policy. Too bad Hong
Kong's Chinese people and the Taiwanese already have their own identities. Not.
"Chinese leaders also suspect that the United States is fomenting much of the trouble in
Hong Kong. It is tempting to dismiss such accusations as nothing more than typical propaganda
and scapegoating on the part of a beleaguered communist regime."
Well, thank goodness one of the articles Mr. Carpenter linked to mentioned the U.S.
government's National Endowment for Democracy, which distributed over $400,000 to three
groups in Hong Kong last year. Said agency was the subject of an article here at TAC
only a year or so ago, which can be found at
https://www.theamericancons... .
Readers of this report might find it of worth, and might consider the other countries in
which the NED "promotes" "democracy."
"... CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country, mainly because they wanted it ran their way and no other. Don't take my word for it though, read Arthur B. Darling's "THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, AN INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT TO 1950 copy right 1990 Penn State Press. (This work was classified for quite a long while.) ..."
"... So the first thing that works in CIA et al's favor is politicians who have been in DC long enough to be worn down and thoroughly compromised by blackmail of one sort or another and there fore vulnerable. ..."
It has been my contention that Biden's powerful backers from the
military-industrial-intelligence-media complex are fully aware of his mental state, and that
is precisely why they want him to be president. Why? He would only be a figure-head
president. He would be given a suggested running mate as well as a list of candidates for
cabinet and other appointed positions (as Obama was given) and Biden would follow that in
making appointments. Policies of his administration would be consistent with the interests of
the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex.
robert e williamson jr , September 20, 2019 at 15:19
Kids this is exactly what the intelligence community wants, someone who they can claim
needs to be told what to do or be kept discreetly out of the loop, so currently Joe maybe the
chosen one just as Bill Barr is reported to have told Slick Willy.
We end up where we are at the moment because our security state apparatus is ran by the
intelligence community who do not really want a strong intelligent, clear minded president
who can actually think for himself. Ask Barrack Obama!
For years I've used this analogy, crude as it maybe, that when the newly elected president
is called on for his national security briefing it is always a tense encounter because this
"Newby" is about to have a come to Jesus meeting with this most abusive of all government
entities. The intelligence community. He is "shown the way"he will act because if he doesn't
this community who has relieved him of one his go -- -s will come and relieve him of the
other.
This started as a joke on my part, I'm now convinced it reflects reality.
At some point many here will understand that since around the time of the murder of JFK ,
CIA has framed things in this manner.
CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country,
mainly because they wanted it ran their way and no other. Don't take my word for it though,
read Arthur B. Darling's "THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, AN INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT TO
1950 copy right 1990 Penn State Press. (This work was classified for quite a long
while.)
Doing so will help make your mind more flexible , jeesh what a slog to get through it.
So the first thing that works in CIA et al's favor is politicians who have been in DC
long enough to be worn down and thoroughly compromised by blackmail of one sort or another
and there fore vulnerable.
I figured if Caitlin could say "dog balls " which I think was a great analogy I could say
gonads.
Time to sit down Joe.
Thanks again to Consortium News for their great efforts at informing the masses.
Columnist Max Boot in The Washington Post put into writing what we have all known for
some time: real journalism, Jefferson's informed citizenry and all that, is dead. The job has
shifted to aspirational writing, using manipulated droplets of facts and just plain made-up
stuff to drive events.
Boot writes to drive Trump from office and overturn the 2016 election. Max : "Much of my
journalism for the past four years has been devoted to critiquing President Trump and opposing
the spread of Trumpism. But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in
office . I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference."
Boot has spent the last several years creating and circle-supporting others who create false
narratives. They manufacture reasons for Trump to resign, press Democrats to impeach, and try
to persuade voters they otherwise hold in contempt that they don't know what's good enough for
them. We kind of figured this out after senior staff at the New York Times had to
remind
reporters that they were "not part of the f*cking resistance," but it is helpful to see it in
daylight. After all, democracy dies in darkness.
The uber-false narrative Max and others Frankensteined into existence was Russiagate. Trump
wasn't the
Manchurian Candidate and there was no quid pro quo for Russian election help. Yet the media
literally accused the president of treason by
melding together otherwise unrelated truthlets -- Trump wanted a hotel in Moscow, some ads were
run on Facebook -- that could be spun into a narrative to bring him down. Correlation was made
into causation in a purposeful freshman Logic 101 fail. What was true was of little
consequence; what mattered was whether the media could collectively create a story that the
rubes would believe and then pile on.
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The critical flaw in Russiagate (other than that it didn't happen) was that the media
created an end-point they could not control. Robert Mueller was magic-wanded into the Last
Honest Man, the Savior of Democracy, as the narrative first unfolded and then fell apart like a
cardboard box in the rain. After his dismal
testimony, there was nowhere for the story to go.
Was it only a week ago Law and Order: Scotland SVU was the locus of the Next Big Thing
following Greenland? Because even as we race to catch up (debunking takes longer than making up
accusations,) a whole new Big Thing popped up over the Ukraine. Details are vague, based all on
leaks and persons familiar with some of it, but are as dire as they are lacking.
But as with every other outrage, leaks in the new phone call-gate instantly became
certainties, certainties became foreign influence in our elections, and demands to impeach were
recycled until Twitter voted for the death penalty. And all before a single piece of hard data
is public. See the pattern yet?
If the latest "gate" doesn't pan out, Democrats have already jumpstarted an old favorite,
upgraded for the 2020 election: Trump is now manipulating domestic and foreign policy for
personal gain via hotel fees.
At first glance, it seems like a non-starter. Trump's hotels are as much a part of him as
the extra pounds he carries. He campaigned as a CEO and announced early on that he was not
going to divest
. But with the first cold slap of his election victory, a narrative was being shaped: he could
not become president because of his business conflicts of interest; it was danged unconstitutional
.
Early proponents of this dreck dug around in the Constitution's closet and found the
Emoluments Clause , a handful of lines intended to bar officeholders from accepting gifts
from foreign sovereigns, kings, and princes to prevent influence buying. Pre-Trump, the last
time the issue was in actual contention was with President Martin Van Buren (no relation) over
gifts from the Imam of Muscat.
The media ran with it. They imagined out of whole cloth that any foreign government official
getting a room at any Trump hotel had been given a "gift." Then they imagined that any tiny
percentage of that room profit that actually went to Trump himself represented a bribe. Then
they imagined that despite the vast complexity of U.S. relations, Trump would alter course
because some guy rented a room. It was Joker -like in its diabolicalness, the presidency
itself merely a prank to hide an international crime spree. Pow!
It was ridiculous on its face, but they made it happen. The now-defunct leftist site
Think Progress ran what might be Story Zero before Trump even took office. An anonymous
source claimed that, under pressure, the Kuwaiti ambassador had canceled a major event at one
hotel to switch to Trump's own D.C. hotel. It turned out to be untrue. "Do you think a
reception of two hours in the Trump hotel is going to curry favors with the administration when
we host thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait? When we have in the past and still do support
American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?" the Kuwait ambassador asked when someone
got around to his side of the story. But no matter: the narrative was set.
Then it grew. Though the Emoluments Clause is quite specific, the media decided that every
timeanyone stayed at a Trump property, it was corruption. Even when Trump visited
one of his own homes, it was corruption, because the Secret Service paid Trump for the
privilege. Of course, the Secret Service has always paid for the facilities used in
their work because the government cannot commandeer private property or accept free rooms
(which, ironically, could be seen as a bribe), not from Marriott and not from the Trump
Organization. Even Joe Biden still has to charge the Secret Service
rent on a cottage he owns so they can protect him when he's home in Delaware.
More?
T-Mobile booked nine rooms at a Trump hotel, in media hive minds ostensibly to influence
federal approval of a $26 billion merger. Those rooms were worth about $2,700. Of course, the
president, who can influence the Dow with a tweet, prefers to make his illegal money off jacked
up hotel bills. Think small has always been a Trump trademark.
Reuters headlined how foreigners were buying condos from
third-party owners (i.e., not Trump or his company), but they were in a Trump-managed
building and maybe the monthly maintenance fees would qualify as mini-emoluments? Trump was
accused of "
hiding " foreign government income at his hotels when servers at the bar failed to ask cash
customers if they were potentates or princes (the
headline : "Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments
Clause").
And of course, there was the
Air Force crew staying at a Trump place in Scotland. No matter that the hotel had forged
its relationship with a nearby airport long before Trump became president, or that the Air
Force had
used the airport and hotel
hundreds of times before Trump became president (going back to World War II), or that a
decision by the Pentagon to have flights stop more frequently there was made under the
Obama administration. None of that stopped the media from proclaiming corruption. One piece
speculated that the $166 per night the Air Force pays for rooms was always part of Trump's
cornerstone financial
plan for the floundering multi-million golf course.
But to see how much the corruption narrative really is a media creation, you have only to
compare it to how the mainstream media covered what might have been a similar question in the
past. Imagine if journalists had treated every appearance by Obama as a book promotion. What if
his every speech had been slandered across the channels as corruption, Obama just out there
pimping his books? Should he have been impeached for commercializing the office of
president?
Follow the money, as Rachel Maddow likes to say. The Trump Organization pays to the Treasury
all profits from foreign governments. In 2018, that was
$191,000 . The year before, the amount was $151,470. So Trump's in-pocket profit is
zero.
Meanwhile, Obama's profit as an author during his time in office was
$15.6 million (he's made multiples more since, including a
$65 million book advance). In the two weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama reworked his
book deals to take advantage of his new status. He agreed not to publish another non-fiction
book during his time in office to keep anticipation high, while signing a $500,000 advance for
a young adult version of Dreams From My
Father .
Obama's books were huge sellers
in China, where publishing is largely government controlled, meaning he likely received Chicom
money in the Oval Office. His own State Department bought $79,000
worth of his books to distribute as gifts.
As with Trump, nothing Obama did was illegal. There are no laws per se against a president
making money. Yet no one bothered to raise ethical questions. No one claimed he sought the
presidency as a bully ATM machine. No one claimed his frequent messaging about his father was
designed to move books. No one held TV hearings on his profits or how taxpayer funds were used
to buy his books. It's not "everybody does it" or "whataboutism"; it's why does the media treat
two very similar situations so very differently?
Max Boot confessed why. The media has created a pitch-and-toss game with Democrats, running
false, exaggerated, and shallowly reported stories to generate
calls for
hearings , which in turn breathe life into the corruption stories they live off. We will
soon see how far last week's breathless drama -- unnamed "whistleblower" leaks supposedly
charging Trump with pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate his rival Joe Biden --
will go.
Boot and his ilk are doing a new job. Journalism to them is for resistance, condemnation,
arousal, and regime change. And that's one way democracy does die.
"Thirteen drones moved according to common combat battle deployment, operated by a single
crew. During all this time the American Poseidon-8 reconnaissance plane patrolled the
Mediterranean Sea area for eight hours," he noted. Read also Three layers of Russian air defense at Hmeymim air base in
Syria When the drones met with the electronic countermeasures of the Russian systems, they
switched to a manual guidance mode, he said. "Manual guidance is carried out not by some
villagers, but by the Poseidon-8, which has modern equipment. It undertook manual control," the
deputy defense minister noted.
"When these 13 drones faced our electronic warfare screen, they moved away to some distance,
received the corresponding orders and began to be operated out of space and receiving help in
finding the so-called holes through which they started penetrating. Then they were destroyed,"
Fomin reported.
"This should be stopped as well: in order to avoid fighting with the high-technology weapons
of terrorists and highly-equipped terrorists it is necessary to stop supplying them with
equipment," the deputy defense minister concluded.
The Russian Defense Ministry earlier said that on January 6 militants in Syria first
massively used drones in the attack on the Russian Hmeymim airbase and the Russian naval base
in Tartus. The attack was successfully repelled: seven drones were downed, and control over six
drones was gained through electronic warfare systems. The Russian Defense Ministry stressed
that the solutions used by the militants could be received only from a technologically advanced
country and warned about the danger of repeating such attacks in any country of the
world.
The forum
The eighth Beijing Xiangshan Forum on security will run until October 26 in Beijing. It was
organized by the Chinese Ministry of Defense, China Association for Military Science (CAMS) and
China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS). Representatives for defense
ministries, armed forces and international organizations, as well as former military officials,
politicians and scientists from 79 countries are taking part in the forum.
The defense minister also stressed that the number of threats to Russia is not declining
MOSCOW, September 22. /TASS/. The United States' belief in its own superiority could lead to
various unreasonable ideas, posing a major threat to Russia and other states, Russian Defense
Minister Sergei Shoigu said in his
interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets published on Sunday.
"When you think - as the United States continues to believe so by inertia - that the
balance of power has developed in your favor, various ideas may come to your head, including
unreasonable ones. I consider this situation now as the main threat, and not only for Russia,"
Shoigu said.
Meanwhile, the recognition of your vulnerability and a wish to maintain balance and
universal equal security "makes you turn your head on," the defense minister said, also
stressing that the number of threats to Russia is not declining.
At the same time, Shoigu voiced hope that a full-scale war is not on the horizon.
The priority task now is to ensure information security, he stressed, noting that "at the
current level of informatization and automation, there is a high probability of errors in the
weapons control system.".
"... Under international law, a state is accountable for the unlawful actions of a proxy only if an organ of the state ordered the proxy to commit the act. It is not sufficient simply to have provided material support or even encouraged the unlawful act. For example, in the 1980s, the International Court of Justice found the United States not liable for Contra violations of international humanitarian law, even after concluding that the United States had "financed, organized, trained, supplied, equipped and armed" the Contras, even to the point of providing training materials that discussed "shoot civilians attempting to leave a town, neutralize local judges and officials, hire professional criminals to carry out 'jobs,' and provoke violence at mass demonstrations to create 'martyrs'." ..."
It's become standard procedure for the US and its MSM to consider that Iran is totally
responsible for all anti-US events in the Middle East because of actions by Iran's "proxy
forces" in other countries. While these events usually have more diverse objectives, it's
often Iran did this and Iran did that. But there's no legal basis for that.
Here's some words on proxy relationships from DefenseOne: (excerpts)
Iran's proxy relationships have given it an extraordinary ability to impose costs on its
adversaries while obscuring its role. Doing so allows it to manage its risks while
politically constraining its adversaries' response. It might seem intuitive to simply
declare Iran responsible, and satisfying to retaliate against it directly. But
international law sets a high bar for holding a proxy's benefactor responsible for the
actions of its proxy, making it difficult to build the kind of international consensus
necessary to the legitimacy for any retaliation.
Under international law, a state is accountable for the unlawful actions of a proxy
only if an organ of the state ordered the proxy to commit the act. It is not sufficient
simply to have provided material support or even encouraged the unlawful act. For example,
in the 1980s, the International Court of Justice found the United States not liable for
Contra violations of international humanitarian law, even after concluding that the United
States had "financed, organized, trained, supplied, equipped and armed" the Contras, even
to the point of providing training materials that discussed "shoot civilians attempting to
leave a town, neutralize local judges and officials, hire professional criminals to carry
out 'jobs,' and provoke violence at mass demonstrations to create 'martyrs'."
Setting the bar so high establishes perverse incentives. A state that employs proxies is
discouraged from moderating their behavior, since any attempt at moderation could imply
effective control, and even from acknowledging the proxy relationships. So without proof
that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which typically manages Iran's proxy
relationships, ordered or participated in the attacks, there is little for which Saudi
Arabia or the United States can hold Iran legally accountable.. .
here
In 2001, drones were just a distant dream. It also involves a chain of once in a lifetime
of human errors by at least three governmental institutions (CIA, FBI and Pentagon).
What the Houthi did in 2019 is not that far fetched. Drones are a much more developed and
cheap technology, and Saudi Arabia is a basket case of a country. Surprise is how much soft
power they did enjoy in the West, since many commenters here still insist Saudi Arabia is
some kind of fascist utopia that couldn't be tricked by a bunch of stone age cave dwellers
(which the Houthi aren't any way). Looks like the USA's aura of invincibility is
contagious.
Jackrabbit #16. Perhaps increased tensions are enough to get Nuttyahoo elected (which I think
fits with the supposition that this attack is false flag). However My guess is that the
Houthis will prosecute this war to the very doorsteps of the holy mosques in KSA and exact
immense retribution if they can. They are responding to 5 years of geocidal assault and
cannot but fight to the death.
Trump and his immaculate surrounds of holy zionists and pentecostal towel boys are in
thrall. Mesmerised by their inspired service to the holy writ. No doubt they consult daily
with their personal rabbi who talks through his fedora as O would have it. But they are
beholden to something evil and beneath the dignity of humankind.
Perhaps war will be avoided by dithering and too elaborate plotting but I still consider
that justice might manifest in a meteor strike on their heads.
"... American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. ..."
"... A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some ..."
"... U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is: ..."
"... Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be. ..."
"... Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts. ..."
"... The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. ..."
"... Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership, resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense. ..."
"... any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it. ..."
"... Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan. ..."
"... Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only from reward and punishment. ..."
"... I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power. ..."
"... Empires have a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion. ..."
"... What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure. ..."
"... We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt. ..."
"... I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/ hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets. ..."
"... The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged. ..."
"... It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The money and power is too corrupting. ..."
"... I'm not sure that most of the citizens in those European countries we occupy actually support our permanent military presence in their countries. ..."
"... The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking. ..."
Stephen Wertheim explains
what is required to bring an end to unnecessary and open-ended U.S. wars overseas:
American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe.
Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do
what they most resist: end America's commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.
Any government that presumes to be the world's hegemon will be fighting somewhere almost all of the time, because its political
leaders will see everything around the world as their business and it will see every manageable threat as a challenge to their "leadership."
A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire
itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some.
U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at
the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to
use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is:
Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military
force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be.
Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and
intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts.
Our government's frenetic interventionism and meddling for the last thirty years hasn't made our country the slightest bit more secure,
but it has sown chaos and instability across at least two continents. Wertheim continues:
Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate
deployment of force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy ones.
The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the
idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous
goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. Constant warfare achieves nothing except to provide an excuse
for more of the same. The longer that a war drags on, one would think that it should become easier to bring it to an end, but we
have seen that it becomes harder for both political and military leaders to give up on an unwinnable conflict when it has become
an almost permanent part of our foreign policy. For many policymakers and pundits, what matters is that the U.S. not be perceived
as losing, and so our military keeps fighting without an end in sight for the sake of this "not losing."
Wertheim adds:
Despite Mr. Trump's rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that "our military dominance must be unquestioned"
-- even though no one believes he has a strategy to use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in
itself.
Seeking to maintain this dominance is ultimately unsustainable, and as it becomes more expensive and less popular it will also
become increasingly dangerous as we find ourselves confronted with even more capable adversaries. For the last thirty years, the
U.S. has been fortunate to be secure and prosperous enough that it could indulge in decades of fruitless militarism, but that luck
won't hold forever. It is far better if the U.S. give up on hegemony and the militarism that goes with it on our terms.
Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership,
resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense.
Truth be told, as your article states, any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is
considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it.
It makes us less safe. Isolationism did not cause 9/11. In the 90's when we were being attacked by Al Qaeda we were too distracted
dancing on Russia's bones to pay any attention to them. While Al Qaeda was attacking our troops and blowing up our buildings we
were bombing Serbia, expanding NATO and reelecting Yeltsin and sticking it to Iran.
It goes beyond that. Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan.
We later abandoned them when the job was done: a pack hound we trained, pushed to fight, then left in the forest abandoned and
starved. Then we wonder why it came back growling.
Isolationism may not be the most effective solution to things, but I'll admit a LOT of pain, on ourselves and others, would've
never happened if we took that policy.
Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only
from reward and punishment.
So far, they only have been rewarded for their crimes.
While I think the economic basis of the Soviet Union was faulty, and it had lost the popular support it might have had in early
days, the USSR's military aggression, particularly in Afghanistan, was a major precipitating factor in its downfall. It would
have eventually crumbled, I believe, anyway, but had they taken a less aggressive stance I think they would have lasted several
decades longer.
Is it really in our hands to actually disengage though? Is this politically feasible?
How does this work? The US gets up one day and says "We're pulling all of our troops out of Saudi and SK. No more funding for
Israel! No bolstering the pencil-thin government of Afghanistan. All naval bases abroad will be shut down. Longstanding alliances
and interests be damned!"
I sympathize very strongly with the notion that we must use military force wisely and with restraint, and perhaps even that
the post-WW2 expansion abroad was a mistake, but I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without
destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power.
This is the world we live in, whether we like it or not, and barring some military or economic disaster that forces a strategic
realignment or retreat (like WW2 did for the old European powers) I don't know how you practically pull back. Empires have
a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion.
What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our
debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure.
We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending
and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt.
Sure. That doesn't mean American withdrawal would create less instability in toto. Maybe it would. Who knows? We mortals can only
take counterfactuals so far.
I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/
hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets.
The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled
congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged.
It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The
money and power is too corrupting.
Maybe, just maybe, however, as we are at $22 trillion in debt and counting (just saw a total tab for F-35 of $1.5 trillion)
that the money will run out, and zero interest rate financing is not all that awesome, this unsustainable mindlessness will be
curtailed or even better, changed.
It's not really hegemony. Old-fashioned empires took over territory in order to gain resources and labor. We haven't done that
since 1920. Especially since 1990 we've been making war purely to destroy and obliterate. When our war is done there's nothing
left to dominate or own.
Domestically we've been using politics and media and controlled culture to do the same thing. Create "terrorists" and "extremists"
on "two" "sides", set them loose, enjoy the resulting chaos. Chaos is the declared goal, and it's been working beautifully for
70 years.
China is expanding empire in Africa and Asia the old-fashioned way, improving farms and factories in order to have exclusive
purchase of their output.
Could not have said it better. "On our terms" would mean that Europe is forced to take matters of military security in it's own
hands, I hope. But chanches are slim, history shows empires must fall hard and break a leg or so first before anything changes.
Iran, Saudi-arabia, the greater ME, China, the trade wars and the world economy are coming together for a perfect storm it seems.
The problem with US hegemony is Israel. Look around the world. Neither Japan nor South Korea nor Vietnam nor Philippines nor India
nor Indonesia nor Australia (the same can be said for South and Central America, Mexico, Canada and Europe) require a significant
US presence.
None of them are asking for a greater presence in their country (except Poland) while being perfectly happy with
our alliance, joint defense, trade, intelligence and technology sharing.
It is only Israel and Saudi Arabia which are constantly pushing the US into middle eastern wars and quagmires that we have
no national interest. Trump sees the plain truth that the US is in jeopardy of losing its manufacturing and its technological
lead to China. If we (US) dont start to rebuild our infrastructure, our defense, our cities, our communities, our manufacturing,
our educational system then our nation is going to follow California into a 3rd world totalitarian state dominated by democratic
voting immigrants whose only affiliation to our country and our constitutional republic is a welfare check, free govt programs
and incestuous govt contracts which funnel govt dollars into the re-election PACs of democratic / liberal elected officials.
The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking.
Defeat is now when war's income streams end. The only wars that are lost, are those that end, defeating the winning of war profits.
War, as a financial success story, has become an end in itself, and an empire that looks for more to wage means some mighty big
wages with more profit opportunities. Victory is to be avoided - red ink being spilled through peace detestable - and blood spilled
profitably to be encouraged.
"... The United States also cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials seemingly can't even decide which faction it wants to back. Washington's official policy continues to support the GNA, which the United Nations recognizes as the country's legitimate government -- even though its writ extends to little territory beyond the Tripoli metropolitan area. President Donald Trump, however, had an extremely cordial, lengthy telephone conversation in April with Haftar and appeared impressed with Haftar's professed determination to combat terrorist groups and bring order and unity to Libya. Neither Libyan faction now seems certain about Washington's stance. ..."
"... One poster child for such continuing arrogance is Samantha Power, an influential national security council staffer in 2011 and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In her new book, The Education of an Idealist , Power takes no responsibility whatever for the Libya debacle. Indeed, flippant might be too generous a term for her treatment of the episode. "We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own," she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison correctly excoriates her argument as "a pathetic attempt by Power to deny responsibility for the effects of a war she backed by shrugging her shoulders and pleading ignorance. If Libyan culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand, they should never have taken sides in an internal conflict there. If the 'culture was not our own' and they couldn't anticipate what was going to happen because of that, then how arrogant must the policymakers who argued in favor of intervention have been?" ..."
"... Obama and company not only destroyed Libya, they also helped to unleash a wave of jihadis who are terrorizing vast swaths of west Africa, especially Mali and Burkina Faso. Their stupidity and lack of foresight is mind-boggling! ..."
"... I understand the role which the Obama administration played in getting the Libyan intervention started. However the major destruction of Libya's fragile structure of governance under Qaddafi was done by the French, Brits, and Italians. ..."
The United States cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials can't seem to
decide which faction they want to back.
The Western-created disaster in Libya continues to grow worse. Fighting between Field
Marshal Khalifa Haftar's so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) and the even more misnamed
Government of National Accord (GNA) has intensified in and around Tripoli. The LNA boasted on
September 11 that its forces had routed troops of the Sarraj militia, a GNA ally, killing
about two hundred of them. That total may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the
situation has become increasingly violent and
chaotic in Tripoli and other portions of Libya, with innocent civilians bearing the brunt
of the suffering.
An article in Bloomberg News provides a
succinct account of the poisonous fruits of the U.S.-led "humanitarian" military
intervention in 2011. "Libya is enduring its worst violence since the 2011 NATO-backed ouster
of Muammar el-Qaddafi, which ushered in years of instability that allowed Islamist radicals to
thrive and turned the country into a hub for migrants destined to Europe. Haftar had launched
the war as the United Nations was laying the ground for a political conference to unite the
country. It is now more divided than ever." The country has become the plaything not only of
rival domestic factions but major
Middle East powers , including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab
Emirates. Those regimes are waging a ruthless geopolitical competition, providing arms and in
some cases even launching airstrikes on behalf of their preferred clients.
The United States also cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials seemingly
can't even decide which faction it wants to back. Washington's official policy continues to
support the GNA, which the United Nations recognizes as the country's legitimate government
-- even though its writ extends to little territory beyond the Tripoli metropolitan area.
President Donald Trump, however, had an extremely cordial, lengthy telephone conversation in
April with Haftar and
appeared impressed with Haftar's professed determination to combat terrorist groups and
bring order and unity to Libya. Neither Libyan faction now seems certain about Washington's
stance.
Given the appalling aftermath of the original U.S.-led intervention, one might hope that
advocates of an activist policy would be chastened and back away from further meddling in that
unfortunate country. Yet, that is not the case. Neither the Trump administration nor the
humanitarian crusaders in Barack Obama's administration who caused the calamity in the first
place seem inclined to advocate a more cautious, restrained U.S. policy.
One poster child for such continuing arrogance is Samantha Power, an influential
national security council staffer in 2011 and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In
her new book, The Education of an
Idealist , Power takes no responsibility whatever for the Libya debacle. Indeed,
flippant might be too generous a term for her treatment of the episode. "We could hardly expect
to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the
culture was not our own," she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison
correctly
excoriates her argument as "a pathetic attempt by Power to deny responsibility for the
effects of a war she backed by shrugging her shoulders and pleading ignorance. If Libyan
culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand, they should never
have taken sides in an internal conflict there. If the 'culture was not our own' and they
couldn't anticipate what was going to happen because of that, then how arrogant must the
policymakers who argued in favor of intervention have been?"
The answer to Larison's rhetorical question is "extraordinarily arrogant." It is not as
though prudent foreign-policy experts didn't warn Power and her colleagues about the probable
consequences of intervening in a volatile, fragile country like Libya. Indeed, as Robert Gates,
Obama's secretary of defense, confirms in his memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War , the Obama
administration itself was deeply divided about the advisability of intervention. The Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Vice President Joe Biden, and Gates were opposed. Among the most outspoken
proponents of action were Power and her mentor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gates notes
further that Obama was deeply torn, later telling his secretary of defense that the decision
was a "51 to 49" call.
The existence of a sharp internal division is sufficient evidence by itself that Power's
attempt to absolve herself and other humanitarian crusaders of responsibility for the
subsequent tragedy is without merit. Indeed, it has even less credibility than Pontius Pilate's
infamous effort to evade guilt. They were warned of the probable outcome, yet they chose to
disregard those warnings.
Power, Clinton, Obama and other proponents of ousting Qaddafi turned Libya into a chaotic
Somalia on the Mediterranean, and the blood of innocents shed since 2011 is on their hands.
Given the stark split within the president's national security team, the Libya intervention was
especially reckless and unjustified. The default option in such a case should have been against
intervention, not plunging ahead.
The Trump administration should learn from the blunders of its predecessor and resist any
temptation to meddle further. America does not have a dog in the ongoing fight between Haftar
and the GNA, and we should simply accept whatever outcome emerges. Washington's arrogant
interference has caused enough suffering in Libya already.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a
contributing editor at the National Interest , is the author of thirteen books and more than
eight hundred articles on international affairs. His latest book is NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur .
The outcome in Libya is what the intent was - chaos, per the Yinon plan. The side effect
of mass immigration to Europe was warned by Gaddafi! All was known, yet the destabilization
war continued.
Obama and company not only destroyed Libya, they also helped to unleash a wave of jihadis
who are terrorizing vast swaths of west Africa, especially Mali and Burkina Faso. Their
stupidity and lack of foresight is mind-boggling!
Libya was and still is the case of a civil war into which foreign powers have intervened.
The major parties of that war have always been the Tripolitanian West and the Cyrenaican
East. Whoever is on top considers the others to be the rebels. That is how the demise of
Qaddafi began. For him Benghazi was the rebel's nest which needed some cleaning. Nothing has
changed. Haftar is the new Qaddafi.
I understand the role which the Obama administration played in getting the Libyan
intervention started. However the major destruction of Libya's fragile structure of
governance under Qaddafi was done by the French, Brits, and Italians.
You can always make things worse. It is one thing that Trump and friends are good at.
They don't consider that a criticism either, since they want what the rest of us consider
worse -- more war, more enemies, more inequality in outcomes at home, more desperation at
home giving more power to the haves over the have-nots.
Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" is a timeless classic that still applies to articles
produced for electronic consumption. One of Adler's primary admonitions was to consider the
author's expertise, credibility, and potential biases. With regard to this article, scrolling
down to the end reveals the author's association with the Koch Brother financed Cato
Institute. The Koch Brothers and their money have done more to destroy American democracy
than any foreign tyrant or Presidential folly.
And oh, by the way, what did the Neocons and the Vulcans of the W Administration do to the
entire Middle East other than create a contiguous geographic belt of Iranian Shiite influence
from Tehran to Beirut?
There was a moment in Viet Nam when I questioned whether everything I had been taught
about "America" was one big fabricated lie – a huge pretend. It was April 1969, and I had
just experienced witnessing the aftermath of a series of bombings of supposed military targets.
They were in fact inhabited, undefended villages where virtually everyone in those villages
perished from low flying bombings, that included napalming. The majority of dead –
murdered – were young burned children. On several occasions I observed those bodies up
close, sickened by the sight, now burdened by the criminal nature of the US war. The policy of
accumulating massive numbers of body counts was an inkling of the Grand Lie. Reading the
entrance sign to my squadron in-country headquarters, "Welcome to Indian Country," was a first
clue.
My duty station was the "home" of the fighter-bombers and pilots who followed orders to
destroy those "enemy targets", i.e., villages. I was the USAF night security commander
following orders to protect those soldiers and planes from mortar and sapper attacks.
A few days later I was reading an article in Stars and Stripes , an official,
independent newspaper for soldiers, reporting on a recent Supreme Court decision (
Street v . New York , 1969) that upheld the right of desecrating our "sacred"
symbol – the US flag. During a period of increased burnings of the US American flag in
protests of the US wars against African-Americans at home, and Asians abroad, an
African-American veteran recipient of a Bronze Star, Sidney Street , publicly burned his
personal flag on a New York City street corner for which he was arrested and convicted.
Depressed, I pondered how it is that one could be arrested for burning a piece of cloth
– even a national symbol – that represented an official policy of criminally
burning innocent human beings, including large numbers of young children, while the
pilot-perpetrators were commended, and whom, in my duties I was protecting? Initially suicidal,
I had difficulty wrapping my head around this dystopian nightmare. I was in psychic shock from
extreme cognitive dissonance.
Our behavior against the Vietnamese, a nation of peasants with one-sixth the population of
the USA, one-thirtieth its size, certainly must rank as one of the worst of a number of
barbarisms in the 20 th Century. The US left 26 million bomb craters, sprayed
21 million gallons of DNA-altering chemical warfare on the landscape and people,
murdered some 6 million Southeast Asians, destroyed by bombing over 13,000 of Viet Nam's
21,000 villages, 950 churches and pagodas, 350 clearly marked hospitals, 3,000 high schools and
universities, 15,000 bridges, etc.
Why all this overwhelming firepower and destruction? Incredulously, to prevent the
Vietnamese from enjoying their self-determination, absurdly touted as necessary to stop
"communism." Does there in fact exist a kind of psychopathy in our cultural DNA? Though I
hadn't fired a bullet myself, or dropped a bomb, I had been a compliant participant in a
mindless murder machine. Viet Nam was not an aberration, but consistent with a long history of
arrogant interventions revealing something very dark about who we are. Was I part of a savage
culture of unthinking sadists, I wondered?
Learning Real People's Versus Fake, Kool Aid US History
I have spent countless hours studying a more comprehensive people's version of world and US
history. Study of US history of course is part of the Eurocentric globalization/colonization
over the past 500 years. The 20 percent Eurocentric "developed-world" is a product of
self-proclaimed "superiors" violently and deceitfully stealing resources and labor from the
other 80 percent, all cloaked in the conceited rhetoric of spreading "civilization." This
patriarchal policy is totally unsustainable from a social, political, ecological,
psychological, and moral perspective.
It is instructive to learn that the "Founding Fathers" chose, not democracy, but
oligarchy/plutocracy "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." Jefferson's
"empire of liberty" was a vision to expand private property for large landowners. Our
Constitution is more a document to preserve freedom of "property" and commercial transactions,
than it is to preserve human liberty, of which free speech is the most fundamental. Historian
Staughton Lynd summarized it thus: inherited land replaced inherited government. Recently the
highest court of the land ruled the legal fiction that property (money) is a person with free
speech rights, as preposterous as the earlier legal fiction that a person (slave) is
property.
A fear-laden gun culture originating in violent settler-colonialism and white
nationalism-supremacy serve as a basis for the founding ideology and military strategy of the
United States. Slave patrols and Indian fighters were our first "special operations,"
establishing the essential White character of our militarized culture. As the systematic
dispossession project continued, the US government signed over 400 treaties with Indigenous
nations, violating every one of them, establishing deceit and outright lying as part of
our cultural DNA.
The politics of violence based on classism and racism has been incessant throughout our
history. Examining the US criminal injustice system housing a quarter of all the world's
prisoners reveals brutal truth when comparing extreme disparities in punishments by race, and
class. Justice?
I studied the history of the city of my birth – Geneva, New York, which in the 1700s
was Kanadesaga, capitol of the Seneca nation. On September 8, 1779, Major General John Sullivan
and his forty-five hundred soldiers eradicated these "merciless Indian Savages" in the largest
Revolutionary War battle of 1779 – a terrorist, scorched-earth campaign massacring
civilians while destroying all forty of the well-established Seneca towns, including
Kanadesaga. By 1788, the European settlers renamed it Geneva, as if nothing had happened, a
deserved reward for superiors.
All those arrowheads I enjoyed collecting as a child possessed a profound dark secret about
the nature and character of my ancestors. However, I would only discover their secret after
deep reflections from my Viet Nam awakening.
Official US military interventionism began with the US Marine invasion of the Dominican
Republic in 1798 during the undeclared naval war with France. However, hundreds of settler
paramilitary units had been killing Indians since the 1620s. But imperialism has been
explicit policy since the late 1890s to assure domestic prosperity. In 1907,
Woodrow Wilson while president of Princeton University (six years before being elected US
president) lectured:
"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world
as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are
closed against him must be battered down. .Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order
that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused."
President McKinley, and various Senators continued to advocate "a foreign market for our
surplus products." US meddling, both "soft," and hard, has never stopped.
Traveling to a number of nations in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East have exposed me
to details of hundreds of US overt interventions, and thousands of covert
destabilization actions. These policies have caused the murders of millions, 20 to 30
million alone since WWII during the so-called "Cold War". Only five of these nearly 600
military interventions have been declared wars as required by the Constitution, clearly
indicating our sacred document is not taken seriously. This also tells us the system has no
interest in being accountable to its own Constitution, or international law. Speaking with
peasants in these victim-countries invariably reveals the horrendous cruelty of US interveners
and their surrogates. Does the US possess any intentions to be law-abiding? Does the US possess
any feelings for others, or only selfish imperial ambitions? And does anyone care?
Violence against even White citizens has matched violence we have carried out in foreign
policy. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1917-18 were enacted to suppress anti-war dissent
against US entrance into World War I. Thousands of US Americans were deported and
imprisoned following World War I for "radical" anti-war expressions, including labor leaders
and socialists. Some were tortured in US prisons. Ironically, free speech dissent is most
critical when a government decides to go to war. The original Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798
stifled free speech of US citizens, including elected officials, who objected to the undeclared
war against France. Free speech? Huh?
While the US was locking up and deporting citizens for opposing World War I, the FBI was
ignoring extremely violent KKK supremacist groups whose six million members –
nearly 25 percent of the white male population at the time – were lynching with impunity
an average of six African-Americans a month. Equal protection?
The first known use of air power against civilians was committed by US Marines in Haiti in
1919. But, the second known use of US air power against civilians occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
May 31-June 1, 1921, when hundreds of economically successful Black residents living in a
36-square block community were murdered, including from low flying white-piloted planes
dropping incendiaries, destroying nearly 1,300 buildings. How many US Americans know about this
abomination?
Walter White, a longtime leader in the National Association for Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), concluded that southerners fear of Negro progress offends the
intangible feeling of racial superiority, explaining the intensity of White savagery. The sense
of established White superiority (or anyone possessing those feelings) often leads to an
insecure character from lack of practicing accountability with others in a world of varied,
challenging relationships. Those feelings easily morph into paranoia of others, and delusions
of self grandeur – one of the most difficult psychological orders to treat, as the
persistent pathology of racism (and classism) so attests.
The third known use of US bombing civilians occurred at Blair Mountain, West Virginia,
August-September 1921. As many as 15,000 striking coal miners attempting to unionize were
attacked by 2,000 armed sheriff's deputies, coal company paramilitaries, US troops, and US Army
Martin MB-1 bombers, killing as many as 100 miners, with many more wounded. Before the battles
had ended, more than a million ammunition rounds had been fired. Nearly 1,000 miners were
ironically indicted for murder of the nearly 30 deaths among the miner's attackers. Over 700
union organizers have been murdered in our history. Is this known by many?
We continue to be obsessed with personal and government guns (police and military) as a
guarantor of our security. Those who question easy access to guns, even assault weapons, or the
ridiculously wasteful military spending, are thought of as nearly traitorous. US citizens
personally own nearly 400 million firearms, or 40 percent of all private guns in the world. On
average, three US citizens are killed every day by police, disproportionately
African-Americans. So far in 2019, the US has experienced more than one mass shooting (4 or
more shot) every day. Our gun death rate is ten times above that of other high income
countries. Using violence as a default position historically ends in disaster, as it has been
proven over and over that violence spirals out of control into more violence, while distracting
from serious discourse. Why the incredible record of violence? Insecurity?
Under its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance, the US government routinely dispatches
military ships to every sea space, military planes to every airspace, hundreds of satellites
into outer space, while ordering Special Forces units to operate clandestinely in nearly
three-fourths of the world's countries. Additionally, of the 1.4 million US soldiers in the
world, nearly 200,000 are positioned in as many as 150 countries, most stationed at 800 major
military bases in 80 nations. The US also possesses a large percentage of the world's weapons
of mass destruction, and recently has dispensed with any genuine effort at containing the
spread of nuclear weapons. The annual military budget, including hidden costs, amounts to an
exorbitant $1.25 trillion a year, more money than the next seven countries combined spend on
their militaries. If you want to be guaranteed health care and a modest house, join the Army.
Otherwise these human rights are "unaffordable." If you want gun control, start at the top.
How to explain the extent and breadth of our violent militarism and global imperialism?
Paranoia? It seems that our sense of superiority justifies hurtful dispossession from others to
acquire and preserve undeserved privilege.
After exiting the military in 1970, my opinions about the US war against the Vietnamese were
affirmed with the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers revealing the more than 20 years of
criminal intentions, and deceit, to thwart Vietnamese aspirations for self-determination.
Earlier in 1971, January 31-February 2, Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted the "Winter
Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes" when nearly 120 veterans testified
about the war crimes and atrocities they committed or witnessed in Viet Nam. I was aghast when
learning about Nixon's intended Huston plan to criminally interrupt antiwar activities, the
FBI's sixteen-year COINTELPRO of more than 2,000 illegal actions against innocent US citizens,
the CIA's Operation CHAOS keeping tabs on 300,000 citizens opposed to the Viet Nam war, and the
National Security Agency's Operation SHAMROCK watch lists of those communicating with people
overseas. Respect for the law? Huh? Further research revealed that as early as 1934 President
Roosevelt instituted a long-standing joint FBI-military program to conduct domestic
intelligence with broad investigative scope. The "American" Kool Aid indeed has sedated us.
Today our freedoms are further curtailed, for example, as the National Security Agency (NSA)
spies on every US American, the Authorization of Military Force Act (AUFA) allows
warrantless electronic surveillance of anyone suspected of aiding terrorism, and the National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) enables indefinite detention of US citizens, even arrest by
the military. Where is the Constitution when we need it? Or was it ever really there for
us?
One of the most revealing chapters in our history is the incredible sympathy the US
possessed for authoritarian Nazi Germany. Even though the Soviet military was most critical in
defeating the Nazis in World War II, deep fear of the Bolsheviks (the emergence of an
alternative social-economic system to capitalism) motivated US America's wealthy class, with
complicity of the US government, to support the rise of Nazi Germany from the mid-1930s
into the war years themselves. The US capitalists supported the Nazi capitalists to defeat the
"threat" of socialism. Elite power brokers included leaders of Wall Street and wealthy "barons"
such as the Rockefellers and Andrew Mellon, and businesses such as Ford Motor, IBM (tabulating
daily location of Jews in the Holocaust), General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil,
Texaco, ITT, International Harvester, Chase Manhattan Bank, the House of Morgan banking
dynasty, DuPont, United Aircraft, etc., who enjoyed huge profits from the war. And following
the war, the US's "Operation Gladio" systematically defeated popular anti -Nazi groups
throughout Europe, while "Operation Paperclip" secretly brought Nazi scientists and other
professionals to the US. Our affinity for fascism has been established.
Psychologically, it is important to note that our national identity has consistently
been markedly defined by demonizing others – "merciless savages", "uppity ni**ers",
"anarchists", "radicals", "communists", "Russians", "alien filth", "narco-traffickers",
"terrorists", "shithole countries", "vermin", etc., echoing psychologist Carl Jung's principle
of "shadow projection." Jung described a cowardly trick we play on ourselves: avoid looking in
the mirror so as not to take responsibility for seeing our own demons. We "see" the evil in
others, perpetuating a nation addicted to war against them, obscenely profiting as we
self-righteously deny our own severe pathologies. If we had looked in the mirror we would have
learned what Pogo told us, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Eco-psychologist Chellis Glendinning suggests that modern humans suffer from deep insecurity
that emerged from collective traumas hundreds of generations ago. A serious disconnect from
intimacy with the earth occurred when our ancient ancestors began controlling nature through
agriculture and animal domestication. Evolutionary philosopher Gregory Bateson concludes that
addictive behavior is consistent with the Western approach to life that pits mind against body,
while behaving as if the natural world is a commodity. We seek various distractions to numb our
pain from this feeling of aloofness. Technology, not Nature, has become our God.
Recognizing the Lie
Could it be that virtually everything I was taught by my parents, community, school, church,
and political leaders in terms of factual history, morality, ethics, and rational thinking
about "America" was the opposite of what had been represented? How could that be?
Yes, I have been conditioned by an incredibly comfortable fairy tale, a massive cultural
system denying or distorting historic realities, founded on shameful genocides. I had been
betrayed. We are told we are the greatest, even as we (s)elect imperial Presidents and
Congresspeople in an orgy of fantastic fiction about "democracy." The US Senate is a
millionaire's club, with many members of the US House also in that class. Indian author
Arundhati Roy describes "democracy" and "pro-democracy" as the "Free World's whores", hollow
words satisfying a whole range of tastes, available to be used and abused at will where facts
don't matter.
US America loves its myth of being committed to justice for all, but in fact it is a society
ruled and funded by a wealthy elite. This is not a government of, by and for the people!
It is a ruthless oligarchy sanctioned by a majority of the people believing their vote
counts. Money has always mattered, severely rigging the game in many ways toward an
upper class (obscenely bribing candidates, corporate personhood power, gerrymandering,
proprietary election software, hacking capacity to effect results, Jim Crow laws, voter
suppression, etc.). The oligarchy approves "acceptable" candidates, while contrived rhetoric,
propaganda, and our education system keep us faithful to our political system comprised of one
party with two right wings, the winner ruling by tyranny of its majority. But the bottom line
is that (s)elected representatives obey their large donors who thrive on war-making against
vulnerable others.
Nonetheless, these facts do not preclude existence of individual conscientious politicians.
However, the political economic system itself is fixed, it is not broken, a dilemma every
honest politician must face. This delicious Kool Aid has in fact concealed a delusional
madness, a Kafkaesque, Orwellian nightmare. Our political leaders have consistently and
collectively acted outside the Constitution, while selectively applying laws that
preserve the cabal in power. It has always been this way, though the social revolution of the
1960s threatened to overturn the oligopoly. This revolution was unfortunately unsuccessful but
the fearful system's repressive reaction is now in its fifth decade. In the end, we are in fact
a nation of men, not laws.
So, in effect, our mythological story made me functionally stupid, a "good kid" who became
complicit in mindless, mass murder. And I am suggesting that it has created a society comprised
of millions of functionally stupid people. This is different from intelligence. This is not
idiocy. This is serious non -thinking of intellectually capable people who, in effect,
have suspended their autonomous critical thinking, basking in an intoxicated spell of our sense
of national invincibility. It has enhanced the Friedman era of neoliberal privatization,
worshipping greed, while millions are without health care and homeless. This is mass
psychopathy, a dangerous cultural mental illness.
German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer , while a prisoner in one of Hitler's jails,
wrote about the role of stupidity in the German people that substantially contributed to the
rise of Nazism and worship of savior Hitler. He argued that it is very separate from
intellectual capacity but occurs when a cult-like belief system dangerously suspends critical
thinking, bringing collective relief to an emotionally anxious population. It is a form of
voluntary servitude more dangerous than malice, an entrenched belief system that makes genuine
dialogue and education almost impossible. (Bonhoeffer was hung in April 1945).
As US Americans we possess no visceral memory of the two unspeakable genocides
our ancestors shamefully committed, forcefully dispossessing Indigenous Africans of their
labor, and genuine Americans of their land, murdering millions with impunity. Even though we
are superficially taught about slavery and conquering the Indigenous, their egregious suffering
has been outsourced outside our feeling fields for 25 generations . Thus, was
established our cultural "DNA" of achieving expansion benefitting a few (mostly White males and
those who think like them) through any means while escaping any accountability
whatsoever. Now nearly 600 overt, and thousands of covert interventions later, US Americans
still know little or nothing about our unspeakable imperialism. Why not? Isn't it critically
important that we seriously grapple with our diabolical history?
In 2019, the President, US military, CIA, and other "regime change" entities like the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and their funders in Congress, continue to intervene
almost everywhere, destabilizing with crippling sanctions, sadistically causing suffering,
causing chaos, creating kill lists, murdering, bombing, etc. Does any of this criminal insanity
even happen? Has it ever? Does it matter to most people? I believe there is a deep shame
that burdens us. It is understandable to avoid looking at shame, but the cost is perpetual war
for perpetual peace until we are all dead. The era of privilege is over, as we enter the
terrifying era of consequences, bringing fear, insecurity and anxiety to many heretofore
privileged folks. Denial becomes a lethal seduction.
Our amnesia has precluded emotional intelligence, a depth of character, so necessary
for mature development, with little understanding of historical context. We are effectively
emotionally retarded, blocking the universal embedded human feeling of empathy, and the
collective solidarity that emerges therefrom. Thus, "America" is very insecure having been
conveniently wrapped in a fake, pretend narrative, convincing us of our "exceptional" nature,
ignoring both our systemic pattern of domestic violence, and global imperialism. The corporate
media, and corporate-owned social media platforms, serve as stenographers for our oligarchic
policies and values. They create an agenda-driven narrative that inoculates our minds with
constant group think untruths of neo-liberal capitalism.
We now live in a post-truth world, where narcissistic life is experienced as virtual, not
real. Do we feel the pain of the Afghani, Yemeni, the Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Libyan, Somali,
the Russian, the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Palestinian in Gaza, or
our neighbor down the street whose cancer left her homeless due to foreclosure? How much do we
care? Answering these questions can tell us a lot about our own survival, including yours and
mine.
Serious discussion and debate of a broad range and depth of ideas is virtually
nonexistent. Mention of "socialism" is considered traitorous to the religion of neoliberal
corporatism. In reality, we promote individualism over community, competition over cooperation,
and acquisitiveness over inquisitiveness. These capitalist characteristics condition human
development in a way that is diametrically opposed to our inherent, genetic nature as a social
species requiring for survival cooperation in all our relations.
The economy and political system is now virtually dependent upon what Eisenhower proclaimed
as the military/security industrial complex, and that complex thrives on creation of endless
"enemies" which produce obscene war profits for a very few. Community and family units have
disintegrated, and citizenship is less engaged as life is increasingly defined in terms of
commodities. Everything and everybody is for sale to the highest bidder. This leads to anomie,
violence and madness. And yet, we continue to enjoy shopping as the government conducts its
daily bombing. How can this be? How can we pay taxes and go about our business as usual when so
many people in the world are being impoverished or eliminated by US policies facilitating the
wealthy getting richer?
The Deep Divide – 1959 – 2019
Having graduated from a rural upstate New York high school in 1959 at the height of
post-WWII Cold War euphoria, in the midst of the short historic blip of aspiring consumerism,
the "American" Kool Aid I and my 28 fellow graduates drank at that time was delicious. I was
raised in a lower middle class home by conservative, religious parents, not dissimilar to the
upbringings of many of my classmates. Life seemed great, and simple. However, my Viet Nam
experience rudely exposed the poisonous nature of this delicious drink and its true
ingredients.
Discovering information about my former classmates finds several still living in the same
area we grew up, possessing similar views to that which we believed in 1959 – religiously
and politically conservative, but now supporters of MAGA, Trump and Israel. One classmate who
had been a basketball cheerleader, still married to her high school sweetheart after 60 years,
read my Facebook postings from Nicaragua, then declared me "a fool" admonishing me to "stay
there." This same cheerleader chanted for each starter before games, such as "Brian, Brian,
he's our man, if he can't do it, nobody can."
Being raised in and conditioned by US America instills a desire to preserve a fantasy of
post-WWII euphoria for many, at least until President Reagan. But experiential reality
painfully destroys make-believe. I argue that the USA has never been great, but suspect many of
my 1959 classmates would vehemently disagree.
Trump Exposes the Pretend Society
The phenomenon of the Presidency of Donald John Trump disturbingly "offers" our culture, and
the world, an overdue undisguised photo of our real culture and its politics. Some say
Trump brings out the worst in people – hatred, self-centeredness, cruelty, insensitivity,
crassness, racism, insulting language, poisonous divisiveness, adolescent delinquency, etc. But
is it possible that his language and demeanor are validating expressions of historically
suppressed feelings and values which have never been sufficiently addressed or openly
acknowledged in our Eurocentric, capitalist, money-oriented, nature-defying, often
mean-spirited culture? These censored feelings once unleashed, no matter how adolescent they
seem, are capable of manifesting in a vicious authoritarian and neo-fascist state, as they did
in Germany nearly 100 years ago. It seems we are at that point again.
The "developed" world, now led by the United States of America, has historically been built
on egregious exploitation and violence hidden under fanciful rhetoric. Inevitably, the chickens
will come home to roost. As Eurocentrics we have been lying to ourselves and the world with our
highly touted economic system and "democracy," fooling ourselves by myths and lies we have long
believed about our "superiority" built on the suffering of others. As stated above, we have
(s)elected leaders who are to varying degrees corrupted by money who use politically "correct"
language and a finessed demeanor to gain approval. In fact, they have consistently been
imperial and oligarchic, selfishly stealing to assure an insatiably consumptive lifestyle for
under 5 percent of the world's population (but only benefitting a minority of its own people),
while gobbling up anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the globe's resources (depending on the
resource and era examined). We ad nauseum excuse our interventions using "national
security" or "humanitarian justice." We have followed in the footsteps of our imperial teachers
in the United Kingdom. Fair? Sustainable? Ever thought about the structural unfairness and
gross arrogance that has enabled 500 years of colonization? Trump's Presidency reveals a lot
about us that we have not wanted to recognize. Scary? Our historical chronic complicity in this
horror story cannot be ignored.
Trump serves as an avatar, or caricature, of a collective, creepy, violent, disgusting,
mean-spirited, immature culture, at least as experienced by large numbers of people both in the
US and the world. Trump's appeal can largely be attributed to the fact that he has taken the
clothes off of Pretend . His childish nature of lying, tweeting and exaggerating,
ironically reveals an ugly "truth" about our modern selves that has been drowned under
incredible "public relations" – education, the media, Hollywood, sports, the State
Department, etc. His extreme personal narcissism matches well our extreme collective
exceptionalism. Is it clearer now just how big the LIE has been, protected by our comfortable
500-year myths? Welcome to dystopia, Kafka, and Orwell.
Conclusion
The 400-year history of Western dualistic Cartesian thinking (named after French philosopher
Rene Descartes' view of reductionist mind-body dualism) divorcing human beings from study of
observable nature, has produced a terribly flawed epistemology. The opposite basis for
knowledge is holism, a framework that enables comprehension of multiple interconnections and
historical context. Dispensing with any serious concern for consequences, the insatiably
consumer-driven materialistic Western Way of Life has ironically and blissfully been destroying
life itself by its addiction to burning finite fossil fuels. The harsh truth is that a
capitalist system is on a direct collision course with sustainable societies that require
conserving healthy interconnected relationships with each other and the earth's eco-system. We
have become accustomed to wishful thinking that resources are infinite, and that they belong to
us. This theft can only happen, of course, by force or its threat, and deceit, while living in
the toxic illusion we are better than others. Does this suggest a kind of arrogant
collective stupidity?
Nature bats last, something our cortex apparently chose to fatally ignore. We now face the
greatest existential crisis as Nature bats last humbling modern humans into extinction, or near
so. We somehow forgot the most critical truth of all – that we all part of the One. If we
can now recognize our various levels of "stupidity", we have an adrenaline opportunity to leap
out of our heretofore seductive comfortable fantasy, choosing instead to access our buried
human characteristic of interconnection with everything and everybody, i.e., mutual respect and
accountability. This leap now must be of a revolutionary nature, rocketing us out of our
historic arrogant pleasureableness. Our survival foundation: embracing the evolutionary feeling
of empathy. Saving ourselves is pretty damn important, and that means saving life for all.
Let's do it! We are not worth more; they are not worth less.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Brian Willson, Viet Nam veteran and trained lawyer, has been a lifelong critic of US
domestic and foreign policy. His essays and biography are found at his website:
brianwillson.com. His recent book, "Don't Thank Me for My Service: My Viet Nam Awakening to the
Long History of US Lies" is published by Clarity Press (2018). His psycho-historical memoir,
"Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson" was published by PM Press (2011).
A documentary, "Paying the Price for Peace: The Story of S. Brian Willson" was produced in 2016
by Bo Boudart Productions.
Bacevich is wrong: it is all about the control of oil producing nations in the Middle East and the preservation "oil for
dollars only" regime (with the help of Israel as the forward base of the US imperialism in the Middle East)
Notable quotes:
"... In this piece, I want to draw attention to the systemic problem of "Iran expertise" in Washington, which is neither new nor limited to the hawkish political factions now running this country's foreign policy. ..."
"... I assert that the US foreign policy establishment[i] has collectively created a culture of expert impunity when it comes to Iran, which has contributed in no small part to the unstable and dangerous policy conditions we see under Trump today. ..."
"... Supporting Iraq in its foolhardy war with Iran in the 1980s proved to be strategically shortsighted in the extreme. It yielded vastly more problems than it solved. It set in train a series of costly wars that have produced negligible benefits. Supporting Saudi Arabia today in its misbegotten war in Yemen is no less shortsighted. ..."
"... Power confers choice, and the United States should exercise it. We can begin to do so by recognizing that Saudi Arabia's folly need not be our problem." ..."
"... Iran has a much longer history of managing pawns and vassal states than the USA. So too has Russia. Now replace 'Iran' with 'Israel' and you can recognise the belligerent initiator/opponent of the conflict. Trouble is that Trump is captive of the Israelis (and his petty ego) while being tormented and impoverished by all those countries that the USA invaded at the Israeli's behest. ..."
"... The dumb oafish response of the USA giant with its five eyes as it stomps about the planet enthralled by prospect of egomaniacle rapture is what endagers humanity. Leave the middle east and everyone else to their own conflict resolution I say. ..."
In this piece, I want to draw attention to the systemic problem of "Iran expertise" in
Washington, which is neither new nor limited to the hawkish political factions now running
this country's foreign policy.
I assert that the US foreign policy establishment[i] has
collectively created a culture of expert impunity when it comes to Iran, which has
contributed in no small part to the unstable and dangerous policy conditions we see under
Trump today.
"I am not suggesting that Washington is supporting the wrong side in Yemen. I am
suggesting, however, that neither side deserves support. Iran may well qualify as America's
"enemy." But Saudi Arabia is not a "friend," regardless of how many billions Riyadh spends
purchasing American-manufactured weaponry and how much effort Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman invests in courting President Trump and members of his family.
The conviction, apparently widespread in American policy circles, that in the Persian Gulf
(and elsewhere) the United States is compelled to take sides, has been a source of recurring
mischief. No doubt the escalating rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran poses a danger of
further destabilizing the gulf. But the United States is under no obligation to underwrite
the folly of one side or the other.
Supporting Iraq in its foolhardy war with Iran in the 1980s proved to be strategically
shortsighted in the extreme. It yielded vastly more problems than it solved. It set in train
a series of costly wars that have produced negligible benefits. Supporting Saudi Arabia today
in its misbegotten war in Yemen is no less shortsighted.
Power confers choice, and the United States should exercise it. We can begin to do so
by recognizing that Saudi Arabia's folly need not be our problem."
Iran has a much longer history of managing
pawns and vassal states than the USA. So too has Russia. Now replace 'Iran' with 'Israel' and
you can recognise the belligerent initiator/opponent of the conflict. Trouble is that Trump is
captive of the Israelis (and his petty ego) while being tormented and impoverished by all
those countries that the USA invaded at the Israeli's behest.
The dumb oafish response of the USA giant with its five eyes as it stomps about the planet
enthralled by prospect of egomaniacle rapture is what endagers humanity. Leave the middle
east and everyone else to their own conflict resolution I say.
Yeah, I'm reminded--again--of Milo Mindbender's racket in Catch-22 , which was 100%
greed driven. But we mustn't forget the vaunted Vietnam Syndrome assorted POTUS have set out
to quell. Trump just played on that theme today in a portion of his speech I cited. As
psychohistorian reported on the open thread, the next round of QE has commenced in an effort
to bolster Trump's electability--lots of that money just went to shorting oil. Tomorrow will
surely bring forth new revelations, accusations, and denials.
For any barflies in the vicinity, Iran opens "an exhibition of
hunted/captured drones in #Tehran from September 22 to October 7" that will draw more than
the curious. I'm sure pics will get tweeted.
https://english.almasirah.net/details.php?es_id=8810&cat_id=1
"Air Force of the Yemeni Army and Popular Committees, Saturday morning carried out a
large-scale operation with 10 drones, targeting Abqaiq and Khurais refineries east of Saudi
Arabia. The operation is called the 2nd Operation of Balanced Deterrence."
"... Someone should tell Mike that our credibility as a nation is further damaged with claims that are in need of supporting evidence. ..."
"... Did Fat Mike rub the head camel jockey's glowing orb? ..."
"... America is a bomb-happy empire - we kill illiterate peasants and destroy mud-walled villages. We are really good at it. ..."
"... Mike, it may be an "act of war" for Saudi Arabia but it's not an act of war for the United States. We weren't attacked, they were. Let them unfuck the situation. ..."
"... No more wars Mr. Trump, no more wars. Plus, we need to prepare to defend our Constitution on our own shores. ..."
Mike, it may be an "act of war" for Saudi Arabia but it's not an act of war for the United
States. We weren't attacked, they were. Let them unfuck the situation.
I am pro military and I have many friends who have served or currently serve. And I have
kids. I'm not sending my kids to kill Iranians for the Saudi's, for Israel or for any other
fucked-up nation in the Middle East. And I don't want 18-year-old American kids getting
killed or wounded for those ungrateful ***** either.
No more wars Mr. Trump, no more wars. Plus, we need to prepare to defend our Constitution
on our own shores.
Sep 16, 2019 Welcome
to the world where things don't add up. For instance, some people did some things to
the Saudi Arabian oil refinery at Abqaiq over the weekend. Like, sent over a salvo of cruise
missiles and armed drone aircraft to blow it up. They did a pretty good job of disabling the
works. It is Saudi Arabia's largest oil processing facility, and for now, perhaps months, a
fair amount of the world's oil supply will be cut off. President Trump said "[we] are waiting
to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what
terms we would proceed!" Exclamation mark his.
How many times the past few years has our government declared that "we have the finest
intelligence services in the world." Very well, then, why are we waiting for the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia to tell us who fired all that stuff into Abqaiq? Whoever did it, it was
unquestionably an act of war. And, of course, what are we going to do about it? (And what will
some people do about it?)
Let's face it: the USA has had a hard-on for Iran for forty years, ever since they overthrew
their shah, invaded the US embassy in Tehran, and took fifty-two American diplomats and staff
hostage for 444 days. On the other hand, the Arabians and Iranians have had a mutual hard-on
for centuries, long before the Saud family was in charge of things, and back when Iran was
known as Persia, a land of genies, fragrant spices, and a glorious antiquity (while Arabia was
a wasteland of sand populated by nomads and their camels). The beef was formerly just about
which brand of Islam would prevail, Sunni or Shia. Lately (the past fifty years) it has been
more about the politics of oil and hegemony over the Middle East. Since the US invaded Iraq and
busted up the joint, the threat has existed that Iran would take over Iraq, with its majority
Shia population, especially the oil-rich Basra region at the head of the Persian Gulf. The
presence of Israel greatly complicates things, since Iran has a hard-on for that nation, too,
and for Jews especially, often expressed in the most belligerent and opprobrious terms, such as
"wiping Israel off the map." No ambiguity there. The catch being that Israel has the capability
of turning Iran into an ashtray.
The world has been waiting for a major war in the Middle east for decades, and it might have
one by close of business today. Or perhaps some people will do nothing . The
Iran-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen supposedly claimed responsibility for the attack. That's
rich. As if that rag-tag outfit has a whole bunch of million-dollar missiles and the knowledge
and capacity to launch them successfully, not to mention the satellite guidance mojo. A
correspondent suggests that the missiles were fired from a pro-Iranian military base in Iraq,
with the Houthis brought in on flying carpets to push the launch buttons.
President Trump is trumpeting America's "energy independence," meaning whatever happens over
there won't affect us. Well, none of that is true. We still import millions of barrels of oil a
day, though much less from Saudi Arabia than before 2008. The shale oil "miracle" is hitting
the skids these days. Shale oil production has gone flat, the rig-count is down, companies are
going bankrupt, and financing for the debt-dependent operations is dwindling since the
producers have demonstrated that they can't make a profit at it. They're trapped in the
quandary of diminishing returns, frontloading production, while failing to overcome steep
decline curves in wells that only produce for a couple of years.
It's also the case that shale oil is ultra-light crude, containing little heavier
distillates such as diesel and aviation fuel (basically kerosene). Alas, American refineries
were all built before shale oil came along. They were designed to crack heavier oil and can't
handle the lighter shale. The "majors" don't want to invest their remaining capital in new
refineries, and the many smaller companies don't have the ability. So, this makes necessary a
high volume of oil swapping around the world. Without diesel and aviation fuel, US trucking and
commercial aviation has a big problem, meaning the US economy has a big problem.
With the new crisis in the Middle East, benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is up from
around $55-a-barrel to just over $60 at the market open (European Brent crude is just above
$70). That's a pop, but not a spectacular one, considering that a whole lot more damage might
ensue in the days ahead. China, Korea, and Japan stand to lose bigly if the players in the
Middle East really go at it and bust up each other's assets. If that happens, the world will
never be the same. You can kiss the global economy goodbye for good. Let's hope some people
don't do something.
Not just the Saudi's. The Houthis support Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
They also control the Straits of Mandeb where most of Israel's oil transits to Asia.
Hence the war in Yemen an the problems in the Sudan. So its no wonder its not just
the Saudi's who are fighting the Houthis. The Houthis are fighting against the U.K.,
Germany, the U.S., Israel and the UAE, who are all supporting the Saudi's. Yemen, one
of the worlds oldest civilizations
Iran never said "wiping Israel off the map."It was Ahmadinejad that said "..wipe
the Zionist entity off the map".
This author should know better than to repeat Zionist lies.
Kunstler has some huge holes in his game. He seems to take many of the US MSM
talking points as good coin. Like, exhibit A, the "wipe Israel off the map" quote
which has long since been shown to be a mis-translation. Often his bigotry also slips
like when he dismisses Houthi capabilities and gets wrong what actually hit the
refineries. These were DRONES not missiles. That is why they were able to evade the
Saudi air defenses. But Houthis are to uncouth to pull of such an operation and
moreover how dare they defend themselves or accept assistance from Iran even if it
were true they are supplying the Houthis with weapons and intelligence. Of course, he
also fails to explain, following like a dog on a leash the US media, why Iran would
launch such an attack considering it may provoke the Israelis or the US. Sure they
may hate the Saudis but they certainly do not want a war where, though they would not
technically lose, would see their society destroyed. Again Cui Bono.
Kunstlers's roots are definitely showing here. His usual barbed wit has simply
disappeared and he seems to have bitten off and swallowed whole the officialbullshit , very unwise at this stage.
"A correspondent suggests" just doesn't cut it. Correspondents have suggested all
sorts of things and he should learn to ignore these voices and rely on facts
instead.
He forgets the fact that Saudi Arabia has been waging war on Yemen since 2015 and
that the damage inflicted upon the Saudi oil installations is only a tiny fraction of
the retribution that the Saudis deserve.
Kunstler predictably forgets the fact that Israel has been illegally attacking
Iranian interests in Syria for several years and that as a result many Iranians have
been killed by Israel in recent times. The fact is that these illegal forays are also
acts of war, which of course Kunstler forgets to tell us.
One other fact pertains to his boasting that Israel could wipe Iran off the map,
which is not just bad taste, but ignores the fact that Iran has enough conventional
power to do the same to its postage stamp sized and bellicose neighbour.
We now know that when the chips are down, Kunstler will simply revert to type and
tow the crooked official zio line. We don't need Kunstler for that, we all ready have
a zionist media, a craven Congress and Trump's government of crazies, very important
facts.
If the Yemenis are being assisted by Iran I say that's a good thing. The Saudi
beasts are being assisted by our jew rulers. If I was a Yemeni blowing up that oil
infrastructure would have been on top of my list. And Israel is the country that
would be turned into an ashtray. The US is gone, over run invaded, already lost.
"Let's face it:" says Kunstler. Iran started it forty years ago, "ever since they
overthrew their shah ..." Bad Iranians attacking the USA.
But if we go back a few decades further, we find USUKisrael smashing the elected
government of Iran and installing The Shah! So Kunstler is lying when he says "their
shah"; he should say OUR shah. I think he probably knows this. He's not accidentally
mixing things up.
Catastrophic or not the neocons are itching for a big confrontation and Iran fits
the bill.
Keep in mind that most collateral damage will be suffered by the Saudis.
The US is now the biggest producer of oil, just imagine the boost that the US shale
investors will get in an industry that was about to have its bubble burst.
No longer will it struggle to break even, no it will make a good profit, more
importantly the bubble will not hit the financial sector hard.
Now KSA will suffer a blow, but that will only serve the US - new loans and new
contracts will reverse the money stream and tie the Saudi regime even more to
Washington.
As a bonus it will please the Israelis when finally Iran will be taken out and
Hezbollah isolated.
Wild cards - how hard can Iran retaliate beyond KSA, is it able and willing to
strike against Israel? How hard can it strike US targets in the region? And finally
will they go full on against the Arabian energy infrastructure. If a couple of Houthi
cruise missiles in a single strike can drop total oil production by 5% and raise
prices by 20%, imagine what kind of havoc a real Iranian campaign can cause (again
ignoring the oil bonanza the US oil industry will score).
I really believe there is now a 50/50% that Washington will gamble a full blown
war against Iran, its perceived benefits outweighing the dangers.
If anything Israel will be the deciding factor, if Tel Aviv does not fear Iranian
retribution and gives the go ahead, we'll have a war on our hands,
The US is certainly stretched thin defending the national and security interest
across the globe - aka defending and expanding the empire.
However there is enough fire power to defeat the Iranian military as an organized
force and Teheran as a government, it all depends on the US rules of engagement and
how far they are willing to push this war.
But afterwards it will be no better than Iraq or Afghanistan.
That may actually be the excuse to do what some strategists have been itching to
do since the Korean war, that is to use a couple of tactical nukes - the ultimate
terror weapon of state.
The current NPR is a strong sign in favor of nuclear weapons in conflict as it
greatly reduces the threshold. Iran's perceived threat to global oil production could
be used to set an example.
In what condition will Saudi Arabia be in, after Iran has been subdued? Also the
plethora of US bases in the area will also be fat juicy targets for Iranian
missiles.
Did the condition of South East Asia other than the ubiquitous Domino Theory,
worry many when they went to war in Viet Nam, what about Iraq?
Oil and Israel are key.
Oil prices and Israel's safety.
They want to take out Iran, but this small attack shows how vulnerable the
regional energy infrastructure really is. That can be a temporary advantage, in
boosting US oil income, but that can be easily off set by the impact of rising oil
prices on all other sectors and the public.
That's why I think it is 50/50 at best, and slowly leaning to less likely we'll
see a major escalation.
Otoh, if I were the Houthis, I'd launch a couple of additional strikes to press
the message.
Saudi Arabia supplies oil to China, so to believe Iran was behind the drone attack
on Saudi oil is a bit of a stretch. The question is was it the U.S. and Israel
coordinating that attack? Israel's influence on the U.S. in the middle east is what
is getting America running in circles
The dangerous disease that inflict the USA neoliberal elite can be called "supremacism
delirium"
As for quality of arms produced, when profit is the main motivation, the quality of design
suffer. Still despite recent setbacks the USA remain the leader in new arm technologies.
B's posting is further proof that the US of A (and it's flunky allies) are indeed led by the
stupid, corrupt, and ignorant.
While Russia and Iran are taking rational routes to protect themselves, the US and it's
allies are pouring billions, if not trillions, of dollars (and thousands of lives) into a
foreign policy that can only be described as the foreign policy of God, for it passes all
human understanding.
Thanks b! One way looking radar is so Pre-Second World War! The Patriot's MPQ-53 radar has a
search sector of 90° and track capability of 120°--an amazingly inferior capability I
wasn't aware of, nor is the vast majority of the public, which is why that twitter gif I
linked to on the previous thread is humorous. In that comment, it was said that the radar's
were reoriented to aim at Houthiland which is the given excuse as to why the Iranian attack
wasn't detected. I don't buy that for an instant.
Houthi media's gone silent for now as it awaits a response from Saudis before launching
there next attack in under 48 hours--yes, they did place an actual time, but were very
general about the types of targets, although the top threat remains hydrocarbon
infrastructure. RT reports :
"Saudi Arabia's energy minister said that its oil supplies had resumed and that its oil
market would be 'fully back online' by the end of September following attacks which
Washington blames on Iran while Riyadh is still probing.
"Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told the media that oil production in October would
reach 9.89 million barrels per day and 12 million bpd by the end of November."
We shall see if the output equals the boast, particularly if Houthis continue their
attacks. No questions about providing better defenses reminds me of the Death Star
Commandeer's famous last words about his weapon's invincibility.
Meanwhile, Nuttyahoo's coalition's narrowly losing the election.
I love how the warmongers on FOX / CNN make Iran / Russia sound nefarious that they call
their strategy A2D2 or asymmetric warfare (aka actual defense of their country instead of
power projection). How is using short / medium range missiles or a green water navy
'asymmetric'?
If we do go to war w/Iran the only way we win is by committing war crimes by bombing
population centers until they surrender, we can't beat them in a straight up fight. I'm not a
military wonk but I can see the relative competence levels. We can't even get a decent photo
of a boat with a bomb on it after it's been sitting in broad daylight for 10hrs.
( Tony
Cartalucci - NEO ) - The US continues to deny any involvement in ongoing unrest in China's special administrative region of Hong
Kong.
However, even a casual look at US headlines or comments made by US politicians makes it clear the unrest not only suits US interests,
but is spurred on almost exclusively by them.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said it is "ludicrous" for China to claim the United States is behind the escalating
protests in Hong Kong.
Pompeo rebuked Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, who had claimed violent clashes in the city prompted by opposition
to the Hong Kong government's controversial extradition bill were "the work of the US".
However, even US policymakers have all but admitted that the US is funnelling millions of dollars into Hong Kong specifically
to support "programs" there. The Hudson Institute in an article titled, "
China Tries to Blame
US for Hong Kong Protests ," would admit:
A Chinese state-run newspaper's claim that the United States is helping pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong is only partially
inaccurate, a top foreign policy expert said Monday.
Michael Pillsbury, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland the U.S.
holds some influence over political matters in the region.
The article would then quote Pillsbury as saying:
We have a large consulate there that's in charge of taking care of the Hong Kong Policy Act passed by Congress to insure democracy
in Hong Kong, and we have also funded millions of dollars of programs through the National Endowment for Democracy [NED] so in
that sense the Chinese accusation is not totally false.
A visit to the NED's website reveals an entire section
of declared funding for Hong Kong specifically.
The wording for program titles and their descriptions is intentionally ambiguous to give those like US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
plausible deniability.
However, deeper research reveals NED recipients are literally leading the protests.
Johnson Yeung Ching-yin, from the Civil Human Rights Front, was among 49 people arrested during Sunday's protest – deemed illegal
as it had not received police approval – in Central and Western district on Hong Kong Island.
As S
Brian Wilson put it: "There was a moment in Viet Nam when I questioned whether everything I
had been taught about "America" was one big fabricated lie – a huge pretend. "
Well, I still think the failure to anticipate a Houthi attack is suspicious.
Another "failure of imagination" like 9-11 that conveniently allowed the attack to
happen.
Even if the radar only points one way, they could've set up radars that pointed in other
directions. After all, the Houthi had already demonstrated their ability to strike targets
far from Yemen.
And the damage done is also suspicious. 17 targets hit by 10 long-range drones/cruise
missiles? And the high precision? USA+Saudis are saying the ONLY explanation is that Iran
participated in the attack. But there's another explanation: sabotage (or photoshop) that
increased the damage so that oil prices would go higher and fears of war with Iran would
distract everyone from the possibility that its really all about oil prices and Netanyahu's
election.
Self-inflicted damage after a major attack? That too was something we saw in 9-11 when
WTC7 was brought down.
PS Like many, my initial reaction was that this attack would be the justification for
war with Iran. But increased TENSIONS are probably enough for TPTB to achieve some very
desireable ojectives:
1. Election of Netanyahu
TINA!
2. Funding Trump's "Deal of the Century" for Palestinians Saudis will pay them to leave with the increased revenue from higher oil
prices
3. USA financial bailout Financial firms have tens of billions invested in fracking which is not profitable at
low oil prices
Iran Rejects US Accusation It Is Behind
Saudi Attacks https://nyti.ms/30iNte7
NYT - Michael Wolgelenter - September 15
Iran on Sunday forcefully rejected charges by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that it was
responsible for drone attacks that caused serious damage to two crucial Saudi Arabian oil
installations, with the foreign minister dismissing the remarks as "max deceit."
The attacks on Saturday, which hold the potential to disrupt global oil supplies, were
claimed by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Mr. Pompeo said that Iran had launched "an unprecedented
attack on the world's oil supply," although he did not offer any evidence and stopped short
of saying that Iran had carried out the missile strikes.
The Houthis are part of a complex regional dynamic in the Middle East, receiving support
from Iran while the Saudis, Tehran's chief rival for supremacy in the region and the leader
of a coalition that is fighting the Houthis in Yemen, are aligned with the United States.
Seyed Abbas Mousavi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, castigated the Saudis
for their role in the war in Yemen, where the Saudis have directed airstrikes that have
caused heavy civilian casualties and exacerbated a humanitarian crisis. He also ridiculed Mr.
Pompeo's comments.
The semiofficial Fars news agency reported on its English-language website that Mr.
Mousavi described Mr. Pompeo's allegations as "blind and fruitless remarks" that were
"meaningless" in a diplomatic context.
Saudi Arabia has yet to publicly accuse Iran of involvement in the attack. On Sunday, its
Foreign Ministry urged international action to preserve the world oil supply in response to
the attack, but it said nothing about assigning blame or striking back.
The developments come at a moment of rising tensions between Iran and the United States,
which have mounted since President Trump pulled out of the 2015 accord in which Iran agreed
with the West to restrict its nuclear program. Since the American withdrawal, Iran has
gradually pulled away from its some obligations under the agreement. ...
... "US & its clients are stuck in Yemen because of illusion that weapon superiority will
lead to military victory," Mr. Zarif wrote on Twitter. "Blaming Iran won't end disaster.
Accepting our April '15 proposal to end war & begin talks may.
The attack on Saturday, which the Houthis said involved 10 drones, represented the rebels'
most serious strike since Saudi Arabia inserted itself into the conflict in Yemen four years
ago. That the rebels could cause such extensive damage to such a crucial part of the global
economy astonished some observers. ...
It's Monday September 16th, 2019 and the weeks starts off like this:
GM's UAW Strike
Yemeni Houti Rebels Drones wipe out 50% of Saudi Arabia's oil production
Trump tweets in response is "locked and loaded" implying a new US war in the ME
One of Trump's White House flunky's declared "it is better if Trump does not study an
issue" before making decisions (oh yea,"Stupid is what Stupid does")
Biden and S. Warren tied in the DEM race for 2020
Piketty's new Economics tome is out
PM Netanyahu is losing his re-election bid in Israel, to be determined by tomorrow's
Election
We live in interesting times...
...the question I pose for the times is 'Are the People are better lead by businessmen,
politicians, academics, or intellectuals?
"... Then the question arose whether drones had been used at all, or whether the attack might in fact have been a missile strike ..."
"... But regardless, the game has escalated up one more rung up the ladder. How many more will it take for the world to put its interests ahead of Israel's? ..."
"... Next escalation rung: a loading dock for supertankers: either the port of Yanbu or Ra's Tanura. Followed by desalination facilities, if Western politicians still pretend to turn a blind eye and prefer to follow the dictates of their Israeli masters. Nuff Sed. ..."
"... In asking the question, qui bono, you do have to include Netanyahu, who is up for reelection tomorrow. There's nothing like striking fear into the heart of the electorate on the eve of an election for firming up support for a proven incumbent. And if the US attacks Iran before tomorrow, so much the better for Netanyahu. ..."
"... That said, I don't think that Netanyahu's buddies in Riyadh would be amused if this were proven. However, poking a friend in the eye never seemed to stop Israel before think USS Liberty. ..."
"... Israel has the means, plus the motive (Bib's reelection), and might have taken the opportunity to attribute the attack to Iran and force Trump's hand. ..."
"... I am assuming, myself, personally, this action was taken to prevent a meeting in NYC between Trump and the President of Iran. That is my guess. ..."
"... There was never going to be a meeting between Rouhani and Trump. I expect to be dead of old age before there would be any substantive meetings between Iran and the United States. ..."
"... Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei has said there will be no meeting until the U.S.ends sanctions. ..."
"... I do not for a moment believe Bolton would have stood for it, and even though he's gone, neither will Pompeo or Pence. Both appear to be fanatically devoted to Israel. There may be meetings between low level functionaries, and Trump seems to want one very much, but Rouhani has said there is no way to trust America, so no point to talking. The situation may change if Netanyahu loses the election, although I have no reason to believe Avigdor will be any better. ..."
"... However, if Trump DOES cut a deal, he will not try and fluff it off as an "Executive Agreement"....if Trump cuts a deal he knows he will have to bring it to Congress. Thee Lobby may kill it there...or not. We'll see. ..."
"... It's not just Yemen. People forget there is an oppressed Shiite minority near the Aramco HQ (dispossessed of the oil fields, located in their ancestral area & treated like sub-sub-citizens); they get periodically beheaded" ..."
"... The Al Saud gang, under the Clown Prince Muhammad Bone Saw, can not count on those Shiite inhabitants of the oil rich region, not necessarily because of the latter's sympathy for Iran but because they were brutalized for almost a century. ..."
"... One to benefit from it that I see so far is Saudi's Aramco IPO which is critical to Saudi . According to WSJ they were considering delaying it because of low oil prices, they needed oil to reach $80 barrel to make it viable. The attack sent prices up but now market is talking about risk if there are 'on going attacks'. What could we deduce if there are no on going attacks and the IPO proceeds? ..."
"... We know Yemen has the Quds-1 and has surprised us before with their technical capability. Combine that with the video of Yahya Sari claiming full responsibility for the attack and I'm not sure there is any reason to speculate about conspiracies involving other actors. ..."
"... In addition, the specificity of the targets hit suggests good intel. I would suspect that Houthi's have linked with disaffected groups in SA (lots!) and improved their Humint. It seems highly unlikely that Iran would do something like this AND leave their fingerprints behind - at least based on recent events. ..."
"... Never underestimate the feckless laziness of the Saudis. In my experience they turn off all ATC and air defense systems that require manning or watch keeping when they find them inconvenient as on the weekend. IMO if Ansarallah did this they will do something similar soon to prove they are responsible. ..."
"... israel gets a lot of press and speculation on this board as well as everywhere else for all their conspiracies and supposed omnipotent power and control but in this writers opinion THEY have been punching way above their actual weight for years and current reality has exposed how feckless and puny they really are in the scheme of things. ..."
"... ''i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if israel were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations israel is viewed as responsible for.'' A Cult is a Cult regardless of it members makeup. And Israel is looking more like a Jim Jones farm every day. ..."
"... And Iran has demonstrated that they can cause months worth of damage on the KSA, the UAE, and Kuwait. I can't believe the number of Congressman who simultaneously believe that Iran was able to glide over U.S. made air defenses without detection and also believe that we can simply carpet bomb their refineries without any repercussion. How can one believe both things at the same time? That Iran is responsible for a sophisticated ghost attack and that they are incapable of retaliating in a target rich environment. ..."
"... Not only did Graham say this but the loon from Maryland repeated it. These people are insane but MSM hosts encourage it, just saw Cavuto snear at Ron Paul because he actually made sense. We are so messed up. ..."
"... Everyone keeps misunderestimating the Yemenis. The Houthis are fighting as part of a coalition that includes a large part of the Yemeni military and intelligence services. This coalition is carrying out a war under guerrilla conditions, but that war is led by professional military men. ..."
"... It is the benefit of being a perfumed prince or fop or neo-con that history has no meaning because history ended sometime in the 90's. Somehow I hear the voice of a Rove lecturing: ..."
"... "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." ..."
"... Yes indeed. Dave deserves hearty congratulations though we might add a caveat. The said "valves" could have been blown out in advance via software or person throwing a switch (humint or cyber component to one attack vector). ..."
"... It cries out "sure, it's bad, but it is reversible." ..."
"... Houthis have every reason to utilize their advanced weapons systems against Saudi targets to bring the war to an end. As for Iran, seems they have been on a semi-successful diplomatic campaign to counter US maximum pressure with their own maximum pressure on Europeans, Russia and China to deliver on the economic benefits that are as important in JCPOA as the curtailing of Iran's nuclear program. ..."
"... Trump talking about meeting Rouhani in New York, Zarif in China getting at least $50-100 billion in pledged economic support, Russia suggesting $10 billion investment in the Iranian energy sector: Why would Iran at this moment make a direct move to turn the world fully against them? Perhaps a rogue faction of IRGC out to stop any diplomatic action, but even that would have to come with OK from Khamenei--or there would be strong action against the rogues. ..."
"... Pressure on Trump to maintain the hardline against Iran following Bolton ouster? Pompeo has been leading the diplomatic back channels and repeating Trump's goal of forcing Iran to the table. Even the Saudis are for the moment hesitant to blame Iran, actually calling for a UN investigation into the source of the attacks. ..."
"... "The Iran did it" narrative as an attempt to keep on undermining the pro-Syrian government coalition. ..."
What made this attack different from other recorded Houthi drone attacks was not only the
unprecedented amount of material damage caused but also lingering doubt about the nature and
the attribution of the attack. First,
a video allegedly showing flying objects entering Kuwaiti airspace led to speculation that
like a
previous "Houthi" drone attack this strike might actually have originated in Iraq or even
Iran. While the video remains unverified, the fact that the Kuwaiti government
launched a probe into the issue lends some credence to the idea that something might have
happened over Kuwait that day. Speculation about the origins of the attack was further fueled
by a tweet
by Mike Pompeo in which he claimed that there was no evidence the attacks came from
Yemen.
Then the question arose whether drones had been used at all, or whether the attack might in
fact have been a missile strike. Previous Houthi drone strikes against oil facilities tended to
result in quite limited damage which could be an indication that a different weapons system was
used this time. Indeed, Aramco
came to the conclusion that its facilities were attacked by missiles. Even more curious,
several pictures began to emerge on social media purportedly showing the wreckage of a missile
in the Saudi desert. While the images appear real, neither the date the photos were taken nor
their location can be verified.
Social media users quickly claimed the images showed a crashed
Iranian-made Soumar cruise missile. The Soumar and its updated version, the Hoveyzeh, are
Iran's attempts at reverse-engineering the Soviet-designed KH-55 cruise missile, several of
which the country
illegally imported from Ukraine in the early 2000s . Others claimed it was the Quds 1, a
recently unveiled Houthi cruise missile often claimed to be a rebranded Soumar."
armscontrolwonl
---------------
TTG raised the issue of whether or not this wave of strikes was done by UAVs or cruise
missiles. IMO this cruise missile could be built in Yemen with Iranian assistance. I am very
interested in the question of what the actual vector of the attacks was in this case. pl
The accuracy of the strikes in the spherical pressurized gas storage containers all being in
the same place relative to each target is the place to start for those who, unlike me, are
capable of analyzing these things.
But regardless, the game has escalated up one more rung up the ladder. How many more will
it take for the world to put its interests ahead of Israel's?
Next escalation rung: a loading dock for supertankers: either the port of Yanbu or Ra's
Tanura. Followed by desalination facilities, if Western politicians still pretend to turn a
blind eye and prefer to follow the dictates of their Israeli masters. Nuff Sed.
In asking the question, qui bono, you do have to include Netanyahu, who is up for reelection
tomorrow. There's nothing like striking fear into the heart of the electorate on the eve of
an election for firming up support for a proven incumbent. And if the US attacks Iran before
tomorrow, so much the better for Netanyahu.
That said, I don't think that Netanyahu's buddies in Riyadh would be amused if this were
proven. However, poking a friend in the eye never seemed to stop Israel before think USS
Liberty.
"The Israeli military is armed with the latest fast jets and precision weaponry, yet it has
turned to its fleet of drones to hit targets in Iraq. Deniability has played a big factor
– the ability of drones to elude radar and therefore keep targets guessing about who
actually bombed them is playing well for Israeli leaders who are trying to prevent an
increasingly lethal shadow war with Iran from developing into an open conflict."
The Samad 3 is laden with explosives that allow it to detonate a shaped charge which
explodes downwards towards its target. Footage provided to MintPress by Yemen's Operations
Command Center shows the Samad landing on an asphalt runway, confirming that the drone is
now capable of conducting operations and then returning to base.
There is a huge sea water desalination plant not far away that provides all the treated water
via pipeline for injection into the oil reservoirs to improve recovery of oil. Target that
and not only have you already impacted the processing of the oil produced but would then
impact the total volume of oil available for processing.
I can see no happy ending short of
negotiation between interested parties. MBZ looks to have already reached that conclusion in
respect of the UAE. what will be the self preservation response for the House of Saud
Could the Committee speculate on possible 'steps of retaliation' operating, for theoretical
purposes, at the moment, on the assumption that regardless of where the 'bullets' were fired
from, or from what 'gun' they were fired, Iran paid for deed. What steps are open for action?
I am assuming, myself, personally, this action was taken to prevent a meeting in NYC between
Trump and the President of Iran. That is my guess.
There was never going to be a meeting between Rouhani and Trump. I expect to be dead of old age before there would be any substantive meetings between Iran
and the United States.
Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei has said there will be no meeting until the U.S.ends sanctions.
I
do not for a moment believe Bolton would have stood for it, and even though he's gone,
neither will Pompeo or Pence. Both appear to be fanatically devoted to Israel. There may be
meetings between low level functionaries, and Trump seems to want one very much, but Rouhani
has said there is no way to trust America, so no point to talking. The situation may change
if Netanyahu loses the election, although I have no reason to believe Avigdor will be any
better.
With all due respect, I think one of us fails to grasp the true nature of Trump. If he puts
his mind to it, and thinks it will benefit him, nobody, not Bolton, not Pompeo, not the whole
Neocon cabal, Israeli govt, the present one or the next one, will stop him if he is President
and alive. He will do what is best for Trump.
And trust has nothing to do with this. Why in the hell should I trust Iran? Hell, why
should I trust the UK? I trust that people and nations have interests. That's all I trust.
But that does mean I could not reach a deal with them. Now, as to whether that deals
holds...that is another question. However, if Trump DOES cut a deal, he will not try and
fluff it off as an "Executive Agreement"....if Trump cuts a deal he knows he will have to
bring it to Congress. Thee Lobby may kill it there...or not. We'll see.
Babak, I value your input here. However, I hope you are wrong and that a meeting or meetings
(substantive or not) will start as soon as the dealbreaker is out of office, and the
sanctions are called off. But I would never wish you an early death. May you live a hundred years.
Thank you very kindly.
I would like to ask the following questions:
Will the United States restore sovereign immunity to Iran?
Will the United States Congress rescind all the laws against Iran that form the basis of
economic war against Iran?
Will the United States rescind the sanctions against Ayatollah Khamenei, Dr. Zarif,
General Soleimani, etc., etc. etc.?
Will the Protestant Christians in the United States ever tire of their unrequited love for
all things Old Testament?
In my opinion, the answer to all of these are "no". Unfortunately, even if a man with the caliber of an FDR or a Nixon is elected to the US
Presidency, he will not be able to accomplish much because of the difficulty, nay the
impossibility, of untangling the rules and regulations that US has woven against Iran.
In my opinion, all of that was predicated on the strategic defeat of Iran and her
surrender.
If I WERE ANSWERING. I got some demands of my own..but we can put them aside for the moment.
In general, I would be inclined to respond: Yes, to the "sovereign immunity" question.
Certainly. Regarding "economic warfare", you would have to give me your legal definition of
such a broad phrase, but in principle, yes. Whole heartedly yes. Sanctions against Iran, and
it individuals officers? Yes, absolutely. Sick of sanctions, in general. It is not in my
power to answer the "unrequited love" issue, but I do solemnly state that I would agree to
stop laughing--in public, anyway, at the question. Wanna meet?
Nassim Nicolaas Taleb, author of "Black Swan":
"SAUDI FIELDS It's not just Yemen. People forget there is an oppressed Shiite minority near the Aramco HQ
(dispossessed of the oil fields, located in their ancestral area & treated like
sub-sub-citizens); they get periodically beheaded"
The Al Saud gang, under the Clown Prince Muhammad Bone Saw, can not count on those Shiite
inhabitants of the oil rich region, not necessarily because of the latter's sympathy for Iran
but because they were brutalized for almost a century.
Why would Iran have done it? Just to show they can or to provoke a attack on Iran?
One to benefit from it that I see so far is Saudi's Aramco IPO which is critical to Saudi
. According to WSJ they were considering delaying it because of low oil prices, they needed
oil to reach $80 barrel to make it viable. The attack sent prices up but now market is
talking about risk if there are 'on going attacks'. What could we deduce if there are no on
going attacks and the IPO proceeds?
Only other beneficiary would be Israel if the attack actually does and likely has killed
any Trump-Iran meeting.
Yemenis claimed credit for it, Iran and Iraq said they didn't do it. First word out of US
mouth is Iran did it. The mouth I am least likely to believe is the US. I remember Iraq has
WMDs propaganda....and those it came from.
Oh well, if Iran says they did not do it.......the US govt lies. The Iranian govt lies, the
Saudis surely lie. This is not about innocents. That search is for children and mighty young
ones at that.
The Quds-1 cruise missile is a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). The remotely piloted aerial
vehicles, which are more commonly referred to as drones are also UAVs. The difference is in
the degree of autonomy in flight control. On board autonomous flight control negates the need
for LOS radio or satellite communications with the cruise missile. Cruise missiles, with
their autonomous control, were always characterized by their high degree of accuracy.
I've
started looking a little closer at the Arduino/RasberryPi and model aircraft hobbyist groups.
With the availability of affordable microcontrollers and sensors, along with the massive
library of open source software, I am convinced a hobbyist could put together a guidance
system in his garage workshop capable of doing what the Quds-1 just did in SA. I also agree
with Colonel Lang that an airframe like the Quds-1 could easily be built in war-torn Yemen. A
cave would make an outstanding workshop.
Even if Iran exported dual use components or even blue prints; it should be counted as part
of the unfortunate world weapons market & wouldn't be illegal.
Your point TTG was nicely illustrated in b's video of the Russian guy building in his
workshopa turbofan engine that flew . Providing there is a set of plans it can be constructed
and it only has to have a one time reliability.
Evidence for what delivered the strike will be found within the complex and there will be a
lot of skills on the ground looking for those answers. The projectiles that struck the
spheres looked to have had penetrating qualities rather than high explosive, putting a hole
in a pressure vessel is sufficient to destroy its usefulness. I would be interested to know
if the projectiles that struck the train were explosive to maximise damage there. Do we need
to be considering what could deliver multiple targeted projectiles or were there simply
multiple independent units or some combination as there were more strikes logged over two
target complexes than the ten delivery platforms mentioned in the Al Ansar press release. Was
there a flight controller and if so where were they located also comes to mind.
There is also the TJ200 built bij Polaris from Brazil with the following description::
"Turbine TJ200:
TJ200 was specially designed to be used in either small cruise missiles or small high
performance UAVs. The most important advantage of TJ200 engine is small diameter and a
relatively low SFC (Specific Fuel Consumption) when compared to other engines of the same
thrust, what makes TJ200 perfect to be used in long range small missiles."
http://www.polaristec.com.br/products.html
That's a pretty specific description. So there are a number of COTS engines out there.
I'd have more confidence in the reporting if I could match it up better with what I can see
in Google Maps/Earth.
The only two satellite pictures I've seen of "burning oil plants" disticntly show a large
plume of black smoke centered a little ways away from the actual refinery area, in some kind
of rectangular area outside the actual "plant". Are those wellheads burning? or adjacent
underground storage? or what?
And the pictured of a burning plant labeled "Haradh Gas Plant" is actually (according to
Google Maps & my eyeballs) the Hawiyah Gas Plant, about 60 miles NNE of Haradh.
In Google Maps/Earth, the Abqaiq facility is on the East side of the city/town of Buquaiq,
and the details match the recent pix. The plume lines up with an empty square patch of desert
at the end of a pipeline running SSE out of the plant.
I've looked all around Khurais, and haven't found anything which could possibly be the
"Oil/Gas Infrastructure at Khurais", as the pictures of the damaged facility there are
labeled.
Elkern, I was referring to the pictures of the cruise missile parts in the sand. Seems to me
they are old from previous attacks.
As far as I can tell the pics of damage at Buqaiq and Khurais are valid. With the
exception of the eleven spherical tanks, which I believe were NOT hit. But I've been wrong
before and am no expert on imagery analysis.
We know Yemen has the Quds-1 and has surprised us before with their technical capability.
Combine that with the video of Yahya Sari claiming full responsibility for the attack and I'm
not sure there is any reason to speculate about conspiracies involving other actors.
The Houthis are not an Iranian "proxy" and I highly doubt they would accept responsibility
for something they didn't do.
Moon of Alabama links some photos and has discussion that suggests very high precision
5-10 m. That is not easily achievable with commercial GPS absent a lot of additional
correction hardware. On the other hand, drones can easily do so. Further, it would be
negligent for SA not to have GPS jamming around such facilities.
In addition, the specificity of the targets hit suggests good intel. I would suspect that
Houthi's have linked with disaffected groups in SA (lots!) and improved their Humint. It
seems highly unlikely that Iran would do something like this AND leave their fingerprints
behind - at least based on recent events.
Never underestimate the feckless laziness of the Saudis. In my experience they turn off
all ATC and air defense systems that require manning or watch keeping when they find them
inconvenient as on the weekend. IMO if Ansarallah did this they will do something similar
soon to prove they are responsible.
imo, the saudi's and washington are going to have to take one for the team. the team being
the global oil based world economy and all the notional value FOR THE present ONLY oil
derivatives and interest rate derivatives burdening the western banking system.... think the
insolvent deutsche bank et al.
a war on iran will do every bit as much damage or MORE to the west as it does to iran
which both russia and china can not.. will not allow to die.
israel gets a lot of press and speculation on this board as well as everywhere else for
all their conspiracies and supposed omnipotent power and control but in this writers opinion
THEY have been punching way above their actual weight for years and current reality has
exposed how feckless and puny they really are in the scheme of things.
i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if
israel were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations
israel is viewed as responsible for.
''i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if israel
were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations israel is
viewed as responsible for.'' A Cult is a Cult regardless of it members makeup.
And Israel is looking more like a Jim Jones farm every day.
Only one tank appears to have minor sooting or scorching. As though they were emptied after
an initial strike then targeted in a second strike, but no reports of a second strike.
In the sat pic showing targets in red boxes, top square, the target appears to be smaller
spheres which do look darkened.
Several correspondents here, including Adrestia and b, seem to lack faith in an autonomous
navigation and terminal guidance system for these cruise missiles. They do not need a radio
or cell phone communication link. This could have been even without a GPS signal. Given that
the strikes appear to come from the west, the smartest route would be to fly north to the
pipelines and then east to the targets. Once the missiles are close to the target either a
visual terminal guidance system could take over or the targets are marked and the missiles'
terminal guidance systems just home in on the marked targets. The marks could be laser
illumination, small IR strobes or offset targeting devices. These offset targeting devices
are emplaced with the exact azimuth and distance to the desired target programmed into the
missiles' terminal guidance system. As I said before, we did this in the early 80s. In the
90s, I used the IR strobes. These were tiny lights snapped to the top of a 9V battery. You
could carry a dozen in your pocket. I personally like the idea of emplacing small IR strobes
on target or a set distance and azimuth from the target. The missiles could home on a spot
say due east and 100 meters from the strobe. I'm sure there are other methods I haven't
thought of yet. My educated guess is that this strike was well thought out with both
intelligence and operational support on and near the target site. Anyone who thinks the
Houthi and their Yemeni allies are incapable of planning and executing this is magnificently
ignorant.
GPS is not accurate enough for the last 10-30 feet. Another possiblity that doesn't need
any human terminal guidance could be a creative use of sensors.
Using CARVER select suitable targets. Pick something that is hot, big or fumes gas.
Then use a combination of gas-sensing, parking-sensors, heat-sensing sensors for the last
few feet.
I'm reading the manual for an FY41AP autopilot right now. About $250, made in china.
As for optical guidance, the attacks happened about 0400 - night or dawn?
This autopilot has a video link as well as autonomous and ground based control modes I think.
If the Yemenis had a guy with a transceiver near abqaiq, then maybe they could send these
things over from yemen using gps and a guy with transceiver provided terminal guidance. If
that were to happen the drones would need to be launched at set intervals.
Your last sentence is true enough as far as it goes, but also, if Israel were all
Zoroastrians (or any other group) the world would have dealt with their paranoid and
psychopathic behavior decades ago. The only reason they get away with everything is because
they are Jewish.
Bacevich in NYT op ed. Behind a paywall, here is a copy. Please do not post if it is too long or off topic
Iran Might Be America's Enemy, but Saudi Arabia Is No Friend
After last week's refinery attack, Trump should be careful about throwing America's weight
behind an unreliable "ally."
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Mr. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Sept. 16, 2019
Image The American frigate Stark, which was hit by two missiles fired from an Iraqi fighter
plane during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. The American frigate Stark, which was hit by two missiles fired from an Iraqi fighter
plane during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987.
In 1987, an Iraqi warplane attacked an American Navy frigate, the Stark, on patrol in the
Persian Gulf. Accepting Saddam Hussein's explanation that the attack, which killed 37
sailors, had been an accident, American officials promptly used the incident, which came at
the height of the Iran-Iraq war, to ratchet up pressure on Tehran. The incident provided the
impetus for what became a brief, and all but forgotten, maritime war between the United
States and Iran.
Last week, someone -- precisely who remains to be determined -- attacked two oil
refineries in Saudi Arabia. American authorities have been quick to blame Iran, and the
possibility of a violent confrontation between the two countries is once again growing.
Before making a decision on whether to pull the trigger, President Trump would do well to
reflect on that 1987 episode and its legacy.
Back then, the United States had become involved in the very bloody and seemingly
interminable Iran-Iraq war, which Hussein had instigated in 1980 by invading Iran. As that
war turned into a brutal stalemate, President Ronald Reagan and his advisers persuaded
themselves that it was in America's interests to come to Iraq's aid. Iran was the "enemy" so
Iraq became America's "friend."
After the Stark episode, American and Iranian naval forces in the Gulf began jousting, an
uneven contest that culminated in April 1988 with the virtual destruction of the Iranian
Navy.
Yet the United States gained little from this tidy victory. The principal beneficiary was
Hussein, who wasted no time in repaying Washington by invading and annexing Kuwait soon after
his war with Iran ground to a halt. Thus did America's "friend" become America's "enemy."
The encounter with Iran became a precedent-setting event and a font of illusions. Since
then, a series of administrations have indulged the fantasy that the direct or indirect
application of military power can somehow restore stability to the Gulf.
In fact, just the reverse has occurred. Instability has become chronic, with the
relationship between military policy and actual American interests in the region becoming
ever more difficult to discern.
In 2019, this now well-established penchant for armed intervention finds the United States
once more involved in a proxy conflict, this time a civil war that has ravaged Yemen since
2015. Saudi Arabia supports one side in this bloody and interminable conflict, and Iran the
other.
Under President Barack Obama and now President Trump, the United States has thrown in its
lot with Saudi Arabia, providing support comparable to what the Reagan administration gave
Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s. But American-assisted Saudi forces have exhibited no more
competence today than did American-assisted Iraqi forces back then. So the war in Yemen drags
on.
ImageSmoke billowing from one of the oil facilities hit by drone attacks on two Saudi Aramco
oil facilities in Abqaiq, in Saudi Arabia's eastern province, on Saturday.
Smoke billowing from one of the oil facilities hit by drone attacks on two Saudi Aramco oil
facilities in Abqaiq, in Saudi Arabia's eastern province, on Saturday.CreditAgence
France-Presse -- Getty Images
Concrete American interests in this conflict, which has already claimed an estimated
70,000 lives while confronting as many as 18 million with the prospect of starvation, are
negligible. Once more, as in the 1980s, the demonization of Iran has contributed to a policy
that is ill advised and arguably immoral.
I am not suggesting that Washington is supporting the wrong side in Yemen. I am
suggesting, however, that neither side deserves support. Iran may well qualify as America's
"enemy." But Saudi Arabia is not a "friend," regardless of how many billions Riyadh spends
purchasing American-manufactured weaponry and how much effort Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman invests in courting President Trump and members of his family.
The conviction, apparently widespread in American policy circles, that in the Persian Gulf
(and elsewhere) the United States is compelled to take sides, has been a source of recurring
mischief. No doubt the escalating rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran poses a danger of
further destabilizing the Gulf. But the United States is under no obligation to underwrite
the folly of one side or the other.
Supporting Iraq in its foolhardy war with Iran in the 1980s proved to be strategically
shortsighted in the extreme. It yielded vastly more problems than it solved. It set in train
a series of costly wars that have produced negligible benefits. Supporting Saudi Arabia today
in its misbegotten war in Yemen is no less shortsighted.
Power confers choice, and the United States should exercise it. We can begin to do so by
recognizing that Saudi Arabia's folly need not be our problem.
Andrew J. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the
author of the forthcoming "The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War
Victory."
"a war on iran will do every bit as much damage or MORE to the west as it does to iran"
And Iran has demonstrated that they can cause months worth of damage on the KSA, the UAE,
and Kuwait. I can't believe the number of Congressman who simultaneously believe that Iran
was able to glide over U.S. made air defenses without detection and also believe that we can
simply carpet bomb their refineries without any repercussion. How can one believe both things
at the same time? That Iran is responsible for a sophisticated ghost attack and that they are
incapable of retaliating in a target rich environment.
Not only did Graham say this but the loon from Maryland repeated it. These people are
insane but MSM hosts encourage it, just saw Cavuto snear at Ron Paul because he actually made
sense. We are so messed up.
use the pic released by USG of the damage to get an idea of the orientation of the incoming
projectiles, I used that rectangularish pond behind as an aid,
Everyone keeps misunderestimating the Yemenis. The Houthis are fighting as part of a coalition that includes a large part of the Yemeni
military and intelligence services. This coalition is carrying out a war under guerrilla
conditions, but that war is led by professional military men. Yemen had a serious air force
consisting mostly of missile systems before the war. Much of it was destroyed by the bombing
campaign carried out for Saudi Arabia, but the military organization survived. They have now
reconstituted the Yemeni air forces under fire and in the midst of famine, blockade and
invasion.
Stock up on popcorn, the show has only just begun.
Using my CAD and graphic tools and Google Earth along with the photo showing the four
perforated pressure tanks, I have estimated the four vectors as:
E1 280W. E2 279W, E3 281W and E4 273W. I have numbered the tanks from the most eastwards (the
furthermost away in the photo). Angles from true north (0/360 deg). This averages as 278N
with a STDEV of 3 degrees. Its almost due west. Must be very difficult for autopilots (or
real pilots) could perform more than one group-turning maneuver and still maintain final-run
accuracy to what was achieved.
p.s. I'm not specialist in this field apart from terrestrial navigation and drafting
experience.
RobW
The Czech company which produces the TJ100 does have strong links with Iran.
"2005 TPP Iranshahr Iran, the largest project in the company's history, a turnkey project
- four power plant units." But then again. Creating a crash site in the desert with some COTS components in it is
also easy to do. I would be surprised if Iran is launching missiles now. That would be pretty
stupid to do.
I know. I was attempting a comparison between the way most Americans perceive the desert
peoples and the way most Americans fail to extrapolate from their beliefs of one groups
capabilities and motivations and another group closer to home. The perfumed fops in Ryadh and
the Perfumed Princes in DC are very similar under the perfume.
I remember in the mid sixties how the "benighted" Vietnamese and VC were on their last legs,
unable to do anything militarily significant, that the war would be over in 67. This was that
generations perfumed princes attitude towards a people who had been fighting against invaders
since the 1850s. I remember 68 and the most unexpectedly successful operational and strategic
level victory by the NVA and the VC that was TET.
From an infotainment/Cronkite perspective
the important thing was that the Saigon embassy was broached. From and operational
perspective a "defeated" enemy launched several hundred simultaneous attacks all over South
Vietnam while holding down as a diversion the Dien Bien Phu look alike that was Khe San. 51
years 2 and 1/2 generations and today we make the exact same mistakes in evaluating the
current situation.
It is the benefit of being a perfumed prince or fop or neo-con that history has no meaning
because history ended sometime in the 90's. Somehow I hear the voice of a Rove lecturing:
"That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we do."
I have seen articles over the last month or so (sorry, no links) saying that because they are
not able to send large amounts of material aid through the Saudi and U.S. Navy blockade of
Yemen, the Iranians sent blueprints and a few engineers and the Ansar Allah have been
building them in Yemen.
What looks like missile hits at identical positions on those spherical tanks are not.
They are the locations of pressure relief valvaes that blew when the towers hit, venting gas
up out and away.
I am in full agreement with your assessment Dave. I don't see any penetrations on those 11
spherical tanks. Look at the complete devastation on the three smaller spherical pressure
tanks.
Unless we get higher resolution pics that definitely show those tanks were pierced there
is no way I am going to believe those tiny scorch marks are UAV or missile hits. Much too
symmetrical! No amount of geometrical explaining of drone tracks will account for that
symmetry.
Yes indeed. Dave deserves hearty congratulations though we might add a caveat. The said
"valves" could have been blown out in advance via software or person throwing a switch
(humint or cyber component to one attack vector). Yes, tremors or shakes triggering sensor
which blows valve is possible, I suppose. But the thing that had me up at night was the
nagging sense that this was a prearranged message of sorts.
It cries out "sure, it's bad, but
it is reversible." So I had been wondering about invitation for pow-wows given UN upcoming
meeting in NY. I'm tending to lean toward an advance blowout rather than blowout in reaction
to stress. Why damage such delicate, custom equipment as those beautiful tanks? As you say,
it has to be something intrinsic/internal to the construction of the tanks. So - before or
after remains to be discussed. Assuming the pics are legitimate. But that's why I thought
especially there was a subtle message sent. If they are legit - see above. If not legit -
then it is howling reversibility or caution at the very least.
The processor trains are a linear series of stabilizer columns that help separate the sour
hydrogen sulfide gas from the crude oil. They are at the heart of the process and probably
the highest value target. They are to the left of the 11 pressure tanks in the pictures
shown, or perhaps just NNW of those tanks.
I buy the idea of HUMINT assets having collected target informatoin but the idea of
mini-strobes, etc. seems to me to be too difficult to do given the separation of the missile
force and the HUMINT assets. Very hard to coordinate.
Houthis have every reason to utilize their advanced weapons systems against Saudi targets to
bring the war to an end. As for Iran, seems they have been on a semi-successful diplomatic
campaign to counter US maximum pressure with their own maximum pressure on Europeans, Russia
and China to deliver on the economic benefits that are as important in JCPOA as the
curtailing of Iran's nuclear program.
Trump talking about meeting Rouhani in New York, Zarif
in China getting at least $50-100 billion in pledged economic support, Russia suggesting $10
billion investment in the Iranian energy sector: Why would Iran at this moment make a direct
move to turn the world fully against them? Perhaps a rogue faction of IRGC out to stop any
diplomatic action, but even that would have to come with OK from Khamenei--or there would be
strong action against the rogues.
Pressure on Trump to maintain the hardline against Iran following Bolton ouster? Pompeo
has been leading the diplomatic back channels and repeating Trump's goal of forcing Iran to
the table. Even the Saudis are for the moment hesitant to blame Iran, actually calling for a
UN investigation into the source of the attacks.
2) a general redirection of attention is achieved from 2 points:
- from Syria
In the issue of National Geographic Bulgaria of 04.2019, April 2019 number 4 (162),on p.29
there is a map of the migratory route of a bird - Ethiopia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq,
Turkey, Bulgaria. BUT the name of Syria is missing, just an empty space within its current
borders.
Maybe, I sincerely hope not, it was just a part of a campaign of mass indoctrination - the
"former Syria" to be divided between neighbors with a US military base here and there or to
turn onto a No Man's land of lawlessness right there, flanking the EU, Russia's Muslim areas,
China's silk road etc
"The Iran did it" narrative as an attempt to keep on undermining the pro-Syrian government
coalition.
- from the temptation to mix with West's "rivals" internal issues
A strange coincidence that there was such a recent burst of "opposition" activity first in
Russia, then in China. The velvet revolution recipe of the Arabian spring, Ukraine, etc (if
it was such) didn't quite work however.
And the "empires strike back" - subtly and not so subtly. China offers for the London
stock exchange (let's not forget that the Chinese take-over of the London metal exchange went
without a fuss). Saudi Arabia next.
Maybe the message is "Just stay out of your ex-colonies"
Richard Gill, managing director of the UK company Drone Defence:
"But [drone defence is] military-grade technology and it's massively expensive. To install a
defensive system is extremely complex and the threat is evolving at such a rate that it's
very hard to keep up to date, because the adversaries change the type of technology they use
in a way that almost renders the defence moot."
"Iran has launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply,"
declared Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Putting America's credibility on the line, Pompeo accused Iran of carrying out the devastating
attack on Saudi oil facilities that halted half of the kingdom's oil production, 5.7 million
barrels a day.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump did not identify Iran as the attacking nation, but did appear,
in a tweet, to back up the secretary of state:
"There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on
verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom (of Saudi Arabia) as to who they believe
was the cause of this attack and under what terms we would proceed!"
Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have been fighting Saudi Arabia for four years and have used drones
to strike Saudi airport and oil facilities, claim they fired 10 drones from 500 kilometers away to
carry out the strikes in retaliation for Saudi air and missile attacks.
Pompeo dismissed their claim,
"There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen."
But while the Houthis claim credit,
Iran denies all responsibility.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif says of Pompeo's charge, that
the U.S. has simply
replaced a policy of "maximum pressure" with a policy of "maximum deceit." Tehran is calling us
liars.
And, indeed, a direct assault on Saudi Arabia by Iran, a Pearl Harbor-type surprise attack on
the Saudis' crucial oil production facility, would be an act of war requiring Saudi retaliation,
leading to a Persian Gulf war in which the United States could be forced to participate.
Tehran being behind Saturday's strike would contradict Iranian policy since the U.S. pulled out
of the nuclear deal. That policy has been to avoid a military clash with the United States and
pursue a measured response to tightening American sanctions.
U.S. and Saudi officials are investigating the sites of the attacks, the oil production facility
at Abqaiq and the Khurais oil field.
According to U.S. sources, 17 missiles or drones were fired, not the 10 the Houthis
claim, and cruise missiles may have been used. Some targets were hit on the west-northwest facing
sides, which suggests they were fired from the north, from Iran or Iraq.
But according to The New York Times, some targets were hit on the west side, pointing away from
Iraq or Iraq as the source. But as some projectiles did not explode and fragments of those that did
explode are identifiable, establishing the likely source of the attacks should be only a matter of
time. It is here that the rubber meets the road.
Given Pompeo's public accusation that Iran was behind the attack, a Trump meeting with Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani at the U.N. General Assembly's annual gathering next week may be a dead
letter.
The real question now is what do the Americans do when the source of the attack is known and the
call for a commensurate response is put directly to our "locked-and-loaded" president.
If the perpetrators were the Houthis, how would Trump respond?
For the Houthis, who are native to Yemen and whose country has been attacked by the Saudis for
four years, would, under the rules of war, seem to be entitled to launch attacks on the country
attacking them.
Indeed, Congress has repeatedly sought to have Trump terminate U.S. support of the Saudi
war in Yemen.
If the attack on the Saudi oil field and oil facility at Abqaiq proves to be the work of Shiite
militia from inside Iraq, would the United States attack that militia whose numbers in Iraq have
been estimated as high as 150,000 fighters, as compared with our 5,000 troops in-country?
What about Iran itself?
If a dozen drones or missiles can do the kind of damage to the world economy as did those fired
on Saturday -- shutting down about 6% of world oil production -- imagine what a U.S.-Iran-Saudi war
would do to the world economy.
In recent decades, the U.S. has sold the Saudis hundreds of billions of dollars of military
equipment. Did our weapons sales carry a guarantee that we will also come and fight alongside the
kingdom if it gets into a war with its neighbors?
Before Trump orders any strike on Iran, would he go to Congress for authorization for his act of
war?
Sen. Lindsey Graham is already urging an attack on Iran's oil refineries to "break the
regime's back,"
while Sen. Rand Paul contends that "there's no reason the superpower of
the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran."
Divided again:
The War Party is giddy with excitement over the prospect of war
with Iran, while the nation does not want another war.
How we avoid it, however, is becoming difficult to see.
John Bolton may be gone from the West Wing, but his soul is marching on.
"... USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions... ..."
"... Strategically what this means is that after wantonly bombing and attacking woefully poor Yemen for years, rich Saudi Arabia is not capable of protecting almost the entire source of its wealth. ..."
It's Monday September 16th, 2019 and the weeks starts off like this:
GM's UAW Strike
Yemeni Houti Rebels Drones wipe out 50% of Saudi Arabia's oil production
Trump tweets in response is "locked and loaded" implying a new US war in the ME
One of Trump's White House flunky's declared "it is better if Trump does not study an
issue" before making decisions (oh yea,"Stupid is what Stupid does")
Biden and S. Warren tied in the DEM race for 2020
Piketty's new Economics tome is out
PM Netanyahu is losing his re-election bid in Israel, to be determined by tomorrow's
Election
We live in interesting times...
...the question I pose for the times is 'Are the People are better lead by businessmen,
politicians, academics, or intellectuals?
Personally, I choose to be lead by people that do the right thing long term for the People,
not the most politically expedient or the one that makes the most money in the short run or
the smartest, etc.
USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can
sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions about USA
capability. Have not yet seen any press questions in that direction.
USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can
sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions...
Strategically what this means is that after wantonly bombing and attacking woefully poor
Yemen for years, rich Saudi Arabia is not capable of protecting almost the entire source of
its wealth.
"American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military
dominance across the globe. Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To
get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do what they most resist: end
America's commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace."
Carter suggested that instead of war, China has been investing in its own infrastructure,
mentioning that China has 18,000 miles of high-speed railroad.
"How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?"
Zero, the congregation answered.
"We have wasted I think $3 trillion," Carter said of American military spending. " It's
more than you can imagine. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that's why they're
ahead of us. In almost every way."
SCMP Hong Kong @SCMPHongKong - 13:47 UTC · Sep 15,
2019
A video going viral online shows a middle-aged man being beaten up by protesters this
afternoon. He was later found lying injured at Gloucester Road. Paramedics treated him; he
was conscious vid
There were several such incidents today. These
rightwing 'protesters' are extremely aggressive. The true utility of the HK protests was
articulated by former US envoy to HK and Taiwan Stephen Young in the Asia TImes this week,
declaring that the "one country, two systems" framework was now "dead" since "Beijing has
reneged on its pledges to introduce local autonomy and democracy to Hong Kong." He claims it
is already too late for HK - "But the lesson for Taiwan's 23 million citizens is different.
Build your defences, solidify your relations with your essential security partner, America,
and make it clear you will fight for your freedom."
This is an incorrect and self-serving analysis. China has not reneged on any pledges or
undermined the Basic Law, despite claims to the contrary. Much like "Russian aggression"
became a key narrative thread in Ukraine despite little actual evidence of such aggression,
the alleged "brutal authoritarian" activity on behalf of the Chinese government will continue
as "the" story in Hong Kong even if it hasn't actually happened.
A big provocation has been promised by the protesters to spoil the October 1 celebration
of 70 years of PRC. Then focus will switch to Taiwan and its election in January. The
Americans hope the nationalist anti-PRC forces win, helped by the hysteria generated over HK,
and then the program of militarizing the island to serve as a fount of tension in the region
will begin in earnest with an explicit rejection of Taiwan's status as a part of China.
IMO the Honk Kong thing is backfiring a bit on the empire.
These very loud calls for Trump and England to come to their aid and liberate them is not
what the evil empire had in mind.
The Americans have gotten themselves in a real bind with their maximum pressure campaign on Iran. This latest attack on Saudi
Arabia's oil production looks like an escalation of the previous attacks on shipping and the spy drone. It is not evident how
the Americans can respond to this latest attack.
As I see it their options are:
1. To let KSA respond to the Houthi attack and continue with their campaign to shut down Iranian oil production, without any
direct U.S. response to the attack. However this will achieve nothing, as next month Iran will up pressure again with another
attack on Middle-East oil assets, and we'll be back to the same place.
2. To bomb Iran's oil industry, as Pompeo and Graham suggest. However this risks blowing up the whole Middle East, as well
as the World's oil market and their own (Western) economies.
3. Forget about Iran and move the fight to maintain U.S. global hegemony to another front: back to Venezuela? Serbia? Hong
Kong? Taiwan? However the end result of such a move would more than likely be another humuliating defeat for the U.S.
4. Do as Stephen Wertheim / New York Times suggest and sue for peace. This will end the dream of U.S. World dominance, Globalization
and the current western based financial system. The U.S. will become no more than a heavily indebted regional power in a 'Multi-polar
World Order' led by China and Russia.
As I see it, the U.S. is out of options to continue their war for global dominance. #4 is the only viable option. But, as one
author argued in a recent paper (I don't have the reference), wars continue long after the victor is clear, because the loser
can't admit defeat (at heavy additional costs to the loser). I think that this is the position that the U.S. finds itself in now.
What the attack on Saudi oil infrastructure shows us, is that now Iran has united her proxys into one united front.
While they were cautious to not leave evidence of their involvment with the Houtis before, they now are putting their support
more and more into the open.
The attack seemed to have involved not only Houti drones (already build with help from Iran), but also Iranian backed forces
in Iraq, AND pro Iranian forces in Saudi Arabia itself. And maybe even other actors.
This is a major new development. Not only for the war on Yemen, but also in the context of Iran providing a credile detterence
against US+Saudi aggression.
They excalated with increasing levels, and one wonders, what could top this last attack off.
And i am pretty sure, we will find out sooner rather than later.
@ 27
WaPo: Abqaiq . .damaged on the west-northwest sides
That's it! It was Hezbollah for sure. (not)
Actually there were two targets, the Buqaiq (Abqaiq) oil processing plant and the Khurais oil field, both in the Eastern Province.
These attacks are not the first -- from longwarjournal:
Last month, the Houthis claimed another drone operation against Saudi's Shaybah oil field near the United Arab Emirates. At
more than 1,000 miles away from it's Yemen territory, that strike marked one of the Houthis farthest claimed attacks.
The Houthis also claimed a drone strike on the Abu Dhabi airport last year, but that has been denied by Emirati officials.
Additionally, a drone strike on Saudi's East-West oil pipeline near Riyadh earlier this year, which the Houthis claimed responsibility,
was allegedly conducted by Iranian-backed Iraqi militants. If accurate, that means the Houthi claim of responsibility acted
as a type of diplomatic cover for the Iraqi militants.
Since beginning its drone program last year, the Houthis have launched at least 103 drone strikes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia
according to data compiled by FDD's Long War Journal. . .
here . . .and more
here .
Really appreciated the write up on the Houthis attack.
Sounds like the attack left substantial damage. Another bigger issue underlying all of this, aside from Saudi inability to get
what it wants now from it's IPO, is the fact that the US Patriots did not detect this attack.
The Saudis spent billions last year on this defense system. Sounds like the clown Prince better give Russians a call about their
S-400.
But the US wouldn't appreciate that much, would they?
Does he mean the treat of de-dollarization? The USA military is just an the enforcement arm
of Wall Street banks.
Notable quotes:
"... "It is increasingly clear that Russia and China want to disrupt the international order by gaining a veto over other nations' economic, diplomatic, and security decisions," ..."
"It is increasingly clear that Russia and China want to disrupt the international order
by gaining a veto over other nations' economic, diplomatic, and security decisions," Esper
said, seemingly unaware of the absurd hypocrisy of his words.
An Iranian parliamentary faction has come up with the idea of establishing a club of
sanctioned countries for concerted action against the US economic terrorism.
The chairman of the Parliament's faction on countering sanctions, Poormokhtar, gave a report
on the formation of the faction and its activities, as well as the ongoing efforts to establish
the club of sanctioned countries. Iran's FM, Zaraf, said this would be enhancing the already
existing alliance of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela against US economic
terrorism.
PressTV: Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela are among the nations that have
come out against the United States' use of sanctions to enforce its foreign policy around the
world. In what ways can they fight these US sanctions as a group?
Peter Koenig: Brilliant idea! Solidarity makes stronger and eventually will attract other
countries who are sick and tired of the US sanction regime, and since they have the backing of
Russia and China, that's a very strong alliance, especially an economic alliance. The sanction
regime can only be broken through economics, meaning decoupling from the western monetary
system. I said this before and say it again, at the risk of repeating myself.
After all, China is the world's largest and strongest economy in Purchasing Power GDP
measures which is the only comparison that really counts. I believe this solidarity alliance
against US sanctions is certainly worth a trial.
And personally, I think it will be a successful trial, as more countries will join, possibly
even non-sanctioned ones, out of solidarity against a common tyrant.
The countries in solidarity against sanctions, in addition to ignoring them -- and the more
they ignore them, the more other countries will follow-suit -- that's logical as fear
disappears and solidarity grows.
For example, Iran and Venezuela, oil exporting countries, could accompany their tankers by
war ships. Yes, it's an extra cost, but think of it as temporary and as a long-term gain. Would
"Grace I" have been accompanied by an Iranian war ship the Brits would not have dared
confiscating it. That's for sure.
PressTV: Many of the US sanctions have led to death of civilians in those particular
countries. At the same time, sanctions have also led to the improvement of these countries to
the point where domestic production in various fields advanced. Don't sanctions become
country-productive to US aims?'
PK: Of course, the sanctions are counter-productive. They have helped Russia to become
food-self-sufficient, for example. That was not Washington's intention and less so the
intention of the EU, who followed Washington's dictate like puppets.
Sanctions are like a last effort before the fall of the empire, to cause as much human
damage as possible, to pull other nations down with the dying beast. It has always been like
that starting with the Romans through the Ottoman's. They realize their time has come but can't
see a world living in peace. So they must plant as much unrest and misery as possible before
they disappear
That's precisely what's happening with the US.
Intimidation, building more and more military bases, all with fake money, as we know the
dollar is worth nothing – FIAT money – that the world still accepts but less
and less so, therefore military bases, deadly sanctions, and trade wars. Trump knows that a
trade war against China is a lost cause. Still, he can intimidate other countries by insisting
on a trade war with China or that's what he thinks.
PressTV: The more countries US sanctions, illegally, more people turn against the US:
doesn't that defeat the US so-called fight against terrorism and violence?
PK: Well, US sanction and the entire scheme of US aggression has nothing to do with fighting
terrorism, as you know. It's nothing but expanding US hegemony over the world, and if needed,
and more often than not, the US finances terrorism to fight proxy wars against their so-called
enemies, meaning anybody not conforming to their wishes and not wanting to submit to their
orders and not letting them exploit – or rather steal – their natural
resources.
Syria is a case in point. ISIL is funded and armed by the Pentagon, who buys Serbian
produced weapon to channel them through the Mid-East allies to Syrian terrorists, the ISIL or
similar kinds with different names -- just to confuse.
Venezuela too – the opposition consist basically of US trained, financed and armed
opposition "leaders" – who do not want to participate in totally democratic elections
– order of the US – boycott them. But as we have seen as of this day, the various
coup attempts by the US against their legitimate and democratically elected President,
Nicolás Maduro, have failed bitterly, and this despite the most severe sanctions regime
South American has known, except for Cuba, against whom the US crime has been perpetuated for
60 years.
So, nobody should have the illusion that Washington's wars are against terrorism. Washington
is THE terrorist regime that fights for world hegemony.
The collapse of neoliberalism naturally lead to the collapse of the US influence over the globe. and to the treats to the dollar
as the world reserve currency. That's why the US foreign policy became so aggressive and violent. Neocons want to fight for the
world hegemony to the last American.
Notable quotes:
"... US foreign policy is ever more unstable and confrontational ..."
"... Bolton's brutal defenestration has raised hopes that Trump, who worries that voters may view him as a warmonger, may begin to moderate some of his more confrontational international policies. As the 2020 election looms, he is desperate for a big foreign policy peace-making success. And, in Trump world, winning matters more than ideology, principles or personnel. ..."
"... Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has not merely broken with diplomatic and geopolitical convention. He has taken a wrecking ball to venerated alliances, multilateral cooperation and the postwar international rules-based order. ..."
"... The resulting new world disorder – to adapt George HW Bush's famous 1991 phrase – will be hard to put right. Like its creator, Trump world is unstable, unpredictable and threatening. Trump has been called America's first rogue president. Whether or not he wins a second term, this Trumpian era of epic disruption, the very worst form of American exceptionalism, is already deeply entrenched. ..."
"... driven by a chronic desire for re-election, Trump's behaviour could become more, not less, confrontational during his remaining time in office, suggested Eliot Cohen, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins university. ..."
"... "The president has proved himself to be what many critics have long accused him of being: belligerent, bullying, impatient, irresponsible, intellectually lazy, short-tempered and self-obsessed," Cohen wrote in Foreign Affairs journal . "Remarkably, however, those shortcomings have not yet translated into obvious disaster. But [that] should not distract from a building crisis of US foreign policy." ..."
"... This pending crisis stems from Trump's crudely Manichaean division of the world into two camps: adversaries/competitors and supporters/customers. A man with few close confidants, Trump has real trouble distinguishing between allies and enemies, friends and foes, and often confuses the two. In Trump world, old rules don't apply. Alliances are optional. Loyalty is weakness. And trust is fungible. ..."
"... The crunch came last weekend when a bizarre, secret summit with Taliban chiefs at Camp David was cancelled . It was classic Trump. He wanted quick 'n' easy, primetime credit for a dramatic peace deal, pushed ahead blindly, then changed his mind at the last minute. Furious over a debacle of his own making, he turned his wrath on others, notably Bolton – who, ironically, had opposed the summit all along. ..."
"... With Trump's blessing, Israel is enmeshed in escalating, multi-fronted armed confrontation with Iran and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Add to this recent violence in the Gulf, the disastrous Trump-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen, mayhem in Syria's Idlib province, border friction with Turkey, and Islamic State resurgence in northern Iraq, and a region-wide explosion looks ever more likely. ..."
"... "the bipartisan consensus forged in the 1990s – in which the US towered over the world and, at low cost, sought to remake it in America's image – has failed and cannot be revived", ..."
With John Bolton dismissed, Taliban peace talks a fiasco and
a trade war with China, US foreign policy is ever more unstable and confrontational
It was by all accounts, a furious row.
Donald Trump was talking about relaxing sanctions on
Iran and holding a summit with its president, Hassan Rouhani, at this month's UN general assembly in New York. John Bolton, his hawkish
national security adviser, was dead against it and forcefully rejected Trump's ideas during a tense meeting in the Oval Office on
Monday.
...Bolton's brutal defenestration has raised hopes that Trump, who worries that voters may view him as a warmonger, may begin
to moderate some of his more confrontational international policies. As the 2020 election looms, he is desperate for a big foreign
policy peace-making success. And, in Trump world, winning matters more than ideology, principles or personnel.
The US president is now saying he is also open to a repeat meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, to reboot stalled nuclear
disarmament talks. On another front, he has offered an olive branch to China, delaying a planned tariff increase on $250bn of Chinese
goods pending renewed trade negotiations next month. Meanwhile, he says, new tariffs on European car imports could be dropped, too.
Is a genuine dove-ish shift under way? It seems improbable. Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has not merely broken with
diplomatic and geopolitical convention. He has taken a wrecking ball to venerated alliances, multilateral cooperation and the postwar
international rules-based order. He has cosied up to autocrats, attacked old friends and blundered into sensitive conflicts he does
not fully comprehend.
The resulting new world disorder – to adapt George HW Bush's famous 1991 phrase – will be hard to put right. Like its creator,
Trump world is unstable, unpredictable and threatening. Trump has been called America's first rogue president. Whether or not he
wins a second term, this Trumpian era of epic disruption, the very worst form of American exceptionalism, is already deeply entrenched.
The suggestion that Trump will make nice and back off as election time nears thus elicits considerable scepticism. US analysts
and commentators say the president's erratic, impulsive and egotistic personality means any shift towards conciliation may be short-lived
and could quickly be reversed, Bolton or no Bolton.
Trump wanted quick 'n' easy, primetime credit for a dramatic peace deal in Afghanistan with the Taliban, pushed ahead blindly,
then changed his mind at the last minute
Trump is notorious for blowing hot and cold, performing policy zigzags and suddenly changing his mind. "Regardless of who has
advised Mr Trump on foreign affairs all have proved powerless before [his] zest for chaos," the
New York Times noted last week
.
Lacking experienced diplomatic and military advisers (he has sacked most of the good ones), surrounded by an inner circle of cynical
sycophants such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and driven by a chronic desire for re-election, Trump's behaviour could become
more, not less, confrontational during his remaining time in office, suggested Eliot Cohen, professor of strategic studies at Johns
Hopkins university.
"The president has proved himself to be what many critics have long accused him of being: belligerent, bullying, impatient, irresponsible,
intellectually lazy, short-tempered and self-obsessed," Cohen wrote
in Foreign
Affairs journal . "Remarkably, however, those shortcomings have not yet translated into obvious disaster. But [that] should
not distract from a building crisis of US foreign policy."
This pending crisis stems from Trump's crudely Manichaean division of the world into two camps: adversaries/competitors and supporters/customers.
A man with few close confidants, Trump has real trouble distinguishing between allies and enemies, friends and foes, and often confuses
the two. In Trump world, old rules don't apply. Alliances are optional. Loyalty is weakness. And trust is fungible.
As a result, the US today finds itself at odds with much of the world to an unprecedented and dangerous degree. America, the postwar
global saviour, has been widely recast as villain. Nor is this a passing phase. Trump seems to have permanently changed the way the
US views the world and vice versa. Whatever follows, it will never be quite the same again.
Clues as to what he does next may be found in what he has done so far. His is a truly calamitous record, as exemplified by Afghanistan.
Having vowed in 2016 to end America's longest war, he began with a troop surge, lost interest and sued for peace. A withdrawal deal
proved elusive. Meanwhile, US-led forces
inflicted record civilian casualties .
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest The US and Israeli flags are projected on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City in May, marking the anniversary of
the US embassy transfer from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/Getty
The crunch came last weekend when a bizarre, secret
summit with Taliban chiefs at Camp David was cancelled . It was classic Trump. He wanted quick 'n' easy, primetime credit for
a dramatic peace deal, pushed ahead blindly, then changed his mind at the last minute. Furious over a debacle of his own making,
he turned his wrath on others, notably Bolton – who, ironically, had opposed the summit all along.
All sides are now vowing to step up the violence, with the insurgents aiming to disrupt this month's presidential election in
Afghanistan. In short, Trump's self-glorifying Afghan reality show, of which he was the Nobel-winning star, has made matters worse.
Much the same is true of his North Korea summitry, where expectations were raised, then dashed when he got
cold feet
in Hanoi , provoking a backlash from Pyongyang.
The current crisis over Iran's nuclear programme is almost entirely of Trump's making, sparked by his decision last year to renege
on the 2015 UN-endorsed deal with Tehran. His subsequent "maximum pressure" campaign of punitive sanctions has
failed to cow
Iranians while alienating European allies. And it has led Iran to resume banned nuclear activities – a seriously counterproductive,
entirely predictable outcome.
Trump's unconditional, unthinking support for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's aggressively rightwing prime minister – including tacit
US backing for his proposed annexation of swathes of the occupied territories – is pushing the Palestinians back to the brink, energising
Hamas and Hezbollah, and
raising tensions across the region .
With Trump's blessing, Israel is enmeshed in escalating, multi-fronted armed confrontation with Iran and its allies in Iraq,
Lebanon and Syria. Add to this recent violence in the Gulf, the disastrous Trump-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen, mayhem in Syria's
Idlib province, border friction with Turkey, and Islamic State resurgence in northern Iraq, and a region-wide explosion looks ever
more likely.
The bipartisan consensus forged in the 1990s – in which the US towered over the world and, at low cost, sought to remake it
in America's image – has failed and cannot be revived
Stephen Wertheim, historian
Yet Trump, oblivious to the point of recklessness, remains determined to unveil his absurdly unbalanced Israel-Palestine "deal
of the century" after Tuesday's Israeli elections. He and his gormless son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may be the only people who don't
realise their plan has a shorter life expectancy than a snowball on a hot day in Gaza.
... ... ...
...he is consistently out of line, out on his own – and out of control. This, broadly, is Trump world as it has come to exist
since January 2017. And this, in a nutshell, is the intensifying foreign policy crisis of which Professor Cohen warned. The days
when responsible, trustworthy, principled US international leadership could be taken for granted are gone. No vague change of tone
on North Korea or Iran will by itself halt the Trump-led slide into expanding global conflict and division.
Historians such as Stephen Wertheim say change had to come. US politicians of left and right mostly agreed that "the bipartisan
consensus forged in the 1990s – in which the US towered over the world and, at low cost, sought to remake it in America's image –
has failed and cannot be revived",Wertheim wrote earlier this year
. "But agreement ends there " he continued: "One camp holds that the US erred by coddling China and Russia, and urges a new competition
against these great power rivals. The other camp, which says the US has been too belligerent and ambitious around the world, counsels
restraint, not another crusade against grand enemies."
This debate among grownups over America's future place in the world will form part of next year's election contest. But before
any fundamental change of direction can occur, the international community – and the US itself – must first survive another 16 months
of Trump world and the wayward child-president's poll-fixated, ego-driven destructive tendencies.
Survival is not guaranteed. The immediate choice facing US friends and foes alike is stark and urgent: ignore, bypass and marginalise
Trump – or actively, openly, resist him.
Here are some of the key flashpoints around the globe
United Nations
Trump is deeply hostile to the UN. It embodies the multilateralist, globalist policy approaches he most abhors – because they
supposedly infringe America's sovereignty and inhibit its freedom of action. Under him, self-interested US behaviour has undermined
the authority of the UN security council's authority. The US has rejected a series of international treaties and agreements, including
the Paris climate change accord and the Iran nuclear deal. The UN-backed international criminal court is beyond the pale. Trump's
attitude fits with his "America First" isolationism, which questions traditional ideas about America's essential global leadership
role.
Germany
Trump rarely misses a chance to bash Germany, perhaps because it is Europe's most successful economy and represents the EU, which
he detests. He is obsessed by German car imports, on which protectionist US tariffs will be levied this autumn. He accuses Berlin
– and Europe– of piggy-backing on America by failing to pay its fair share of Nato defence costs. Special venom is reserved for Germany's
chancellor, Angela Merkel, most likely because she is
a woman who stands up to him . Trump recently insulted another female European leader, Denmark's
Mette Frederiksen, after she refused to sell him Greenland .
Israel
Trump has made a great show of unconditional friendship towards Israel and its rightwing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who
has skilfully maximised his White House influence. But by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, officially condoning Israel's annexation
of the Golan Heights, and withdrawing funding and other support from the Palestinians, the president has abandoned the long-standing
US policy of playing honest broker in the peace process. Trump has also tried to exploit antisemitism for political advantage, accusing
US Democrat Jews who oppose Netanyahu's policies of "disloyalty" to Israel.
Clinton attempts to bankrupt and subdue Russia as well as his criminal (in a sense of no permission form the UN) attack on Yugoslavia
backfired. Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is
only due to the USA dominance at this stage of history. And he probably will manage to die before such opportunity might materialize.
The True Toll of the Trade War
Behind the escalating global conflict over trade and technology is a larger breakdown of the postwar rules-based order, which
was based on a belief that any country's growth benefits all. Now that China is threatening to compete directly with the United
States, support for the system that made that possible has disappeared.
By RAGHURAM G. RAJAN
CHICAGO – Another day, another attack on trade. Why is it that every dispute – whether over intellectual property (IP), immigration,
environmental damage, or war reparations – now produces new threats to trade?
For much of the last century, the United States managed and protected the rules-based trading system it created at the end
of World War II. That system required a fundamental break from the pre-war environment of mutual suspicion between competing powers.
The US urged everyone to see that growth and development for one country could benefit all countries through increased trade and
investment.
Under the new dispensation, rules were enacted to constrain selfish behavior and coercive threats by the economically powerful.
The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith. Meanwhile,
the system's multilateral institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund, helped countries in dire need of funds, provided
they followed the rules....
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith"
USA foreign policy since 70th was controlled by neocons who as a typical Trotskyites (neoliberalism is actually Trotskyism
for the rich) were/are hell-bent of world domination and practice gangster capitalism in foreign policy.
Bolton attitude to UN is very symptomatic for the neocons as a whole.
Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal
(in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he
and his coterie were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at this stage of history.
The truth is that after the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became completely unhinged. And inside the country
the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no external threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR.
The USA stated to behave like a typical Imperial state (New Rome, or, more correctly, London) accepting no rules/laws that
are not written by themselves (and when it is convenient to obey them) with the only difference from the classic imperial states
that the hegemony it not based on the military presence/occupation ( like was the case with British empire)
Although this is not completely true as there are 761 US Military Bases across the planet and only 46 Countries with no US
military presence. Of them, seven countries with 13 New Military Bases were added since 09/11/2001.In 2001 the US had a quarter
million troops posted abroad.
Still as an imperial state and the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more on financial instruments and neoliberal
comprador elite inside the country.
With the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 the USA centered neoliberal empire experiences first cracks. Brexit and election
of Trump widened the cracks in a sense of further legitimizing the ruling neoliberal elite (big middle finger for Hillary was
addressed to the elite as whole)
If oil price exceed $100 per barrel there will yet another crack or even repetition of the 2008 Great Recession on a new level
(although we may argue that the Great Recession never ended and just entered in Summers terms "permanent stagnation: phase)
Although currently with a bully at the helm the USA empire still going strong in forcing vassals and competitors to reconsider
their desire to challenge the USA that situation will not last. Trump currently is trying to neutralize the treat from China by
rejecting classic neoliberal globalization mechanism as well as signed treaties like WTO. He might be successful in the short
run but in the "long run" that undermines the USA centered neoliberal empire and speed up its demise. .
In the long run the future does not look too bright as crimes committed by the USA during triumphal period of neoliberalism
hangs like albatross around the USA neck.
EU now definitely wants to play its own game as Macron recently stated and which Merkel tacitly supports. If EU allies with
Russia it will became No.1 force in the world with the USA No. 2. With severe consequences for the USA.
If Russia allied with China the USA Np.1 position will hinge of keeping EU vassals in check and NATO in place. Without them
it will became No.2 with fatal consequences for the dollar as world reserve currency and sudden change of the USA financial position
due to the level of external debt and requires devaluation of the dollar.
Looks like 75 year after WWII the world started to self-organize a countervailing force trying to tame the USA with some interest
expressed by such players as EU, Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia. As well as ( in the past;
and possibly in the future as neoliberal counterrevolutions in both countries probably will end badly) by Brazil and Argentina.
Only Canada, Australia and probably UK can be counted as the reliable parts of the USA empire. That's not much.
One of the key questions in the escalating US trade disputes with China and other
countries is how much the economy of other countries depends on trade. The answer helps to
determine how much leverage the US has in trade disputes. Thus, it's interesting to note that
starting about a decade ago, both India and China started reducing their dependence on
exports as a source of growth, while doing more to build internal supply chains and relying
more on domestic products.
A group of authors from McKinsey Global Institute published "Asia's future is now" * in
July 2019, including Oliver Tonby, Jonathan Woetzel, Wonsik Choi, Jeongmin Seong and Patti
Wang. Here's a figure showing how the reliance of China and India on exports has been
falling.
[Graph]
The authors also note:
"As consumption rises, more of what gets made in these countries is now sold locally
instead of being exported to the West. Over the decade from 2007 to 2017, China almost
tripled its production of labor-intensive goods, from US$3.1 trillion to US$8.8 trillion. At
the same time, the share of gross output China exports has dramatically decreased, from 15.5
percent to 8.3 percent. India has similarly been exporting a smaller share of its output over
time. This implies that more goods are being consumed domestically rather than exported.
Furthermore, as the region's emerging economies develop new industrial capabilities and begin
making more sophisticated products, they are becoming less reliant on foreign imports of both
intermediate inputs and final goods. The previous era of globalization was marked by Western
companies building supply chains that stretched halfway around the world as they sought out
the lowest possible labor costs -- and often their supply chains ran through Asia. Now labor
arbitrage is on the wane. Only 18 percent of today's goods trade now involves exports from
low-wage countries to high-wage countries -- a far smaller share than most people assume and
one that is declining in many industries. ....
"Asian consumers have long had a strong preference for foreign luxury goods and brands.
But things are changing. The post-90's generation is starting to lose this bias against
domestic brands; in fact, they are starting to choose them over foreign brands more often.
..."
Wages in China have risen substantially in the last couple of decades. As a result, the
rising manufacturing hubs in Asia are now in places like Vietnam and Indonesia. In addition,
many of the international economic ties are within Asian countries, rather than being between
China and the United States.
"Historically China was known as the 'factory to the world.' But while low-cost labor was
its original competitive advantage, the wage gap between China and the rest of Asia is
closing. In 1996, wages in Japan were 46 times higher than in China; by 2016, they were only
four times higher. China is moving up the value chain, and as it transitions, other locations
around Asia are stepping into some of its former niches. Vietnam, in particular, has become a
hub of labor-intensive manufacturing for export. The country has attracted a flood of
greenfield investment into cities such as Hai Phong. In addition to Hai Phong (Vietnam), Ho
Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Bekasi (Indonesia), and Xi'an (China) are rising makers of
electronics. As new places assume new roles in industry value chains, a new set of cities
begins to benefit from the influx of capital. Investment in factories leads to new roads, new
jobs, and urbanization. Much of the capital flowing into Vietnam comes from South Korea and
Japan. These new manufacturing hubs speak not only to the rise of emerging Asian countries
but also to a region that is more connected and co-invested."
This helps to explain why, when the US puts economic pressure on trade with China, it
affects US trade with China, but not necessarily China's trade with other countries of Asia
or patterns of US trade with the Asian region as a whole.
The Only Way to End 'Endless War'
First, America has to give up its pursuit of global dominance.
By Stephen Wertheim
"We have got to put an end to endless war," declared Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend,
Ind., during the Democratic presidential primary debate on Thursday. It was a surefire applause
line: Many people consider "endless war" to be the central problem for American foreign
policy.
Even President Trump, the target of Mr. Buttigieg's attack, seems to agree. "Great nations
do not fight endless wars," he announced in his latest State of the Union.
But vowing to end America's interminable military adventures doesn't make it so. Four years
ago, President Barack Obama denounced "the idea of endless war" even as he announced that
ground troops would remain in Afghanistan. In his last year in office, the United States
dropped an estimated 26,172 bombs on seven countries.
President Trump, despite criticizing Middle East wars, has intensified existing
interventions and threatened to start new ones. He has abetted the Saudi-led war in Yemen, in
defiance of Congress. He has put America perpetually on the brink with Iran. And he has
lavished billions extra on a Pentagon that already outspends the world's seven next largest
militaries combined.
What would it mean to actually bring endless war to a close?
Like the demand to tame the 1 percent, or the insistence that black lives matter, ending
endless war sounds commonsensical but its implications are transformational. It requires more
than bringing ground troops home from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. American war-making will
persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe.
Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping
endless war, American leaders must do what they most resist: end America's commitment to armed
supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.
________________________________
In theory, armed supremacy could foster peace. Facing overwhelming force, who would dare to
defy American wishes?
________________________________
In May, Vice President Mike Pence told graduating cadets at West Point: "It is a virtual
certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will
lead soldiers in combat. It will happen." Mr. Pence enumerated the potential fronts: the
greater Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Western Hemisphere. He had a point. So long
as the United States seeks military domination everywhere, it will fight somewhere.
In theory, armed supremacy could foster peace. Facing overwhelming force, who would dare to
defy American wishes? That was the hope of Pentagon planners in 1992; they reacted to the
collapse of America's Cold War adversary not by pulling back but by pursuing even greater
military pre-eminence. But the quarter-century that followed showed the opposite to prevail in
practice. Freed from one big enemy, the United States found many smaller enemies: It has
launched far more military interventions since the Cold War than during the "twilight struggle"
itself. Of all its interventions since 1946, roughly 80 percent have taken place after
1991.
Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's
infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim,
limiting debate to what that aim should be. Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the
United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate deployment of
force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy
ones.
In the Middle East, endless war began when the United States first stationed troops
permanently in the region after winning the Persian Gulf war in 1991. A circular logic took
hold. The United States created its own dependence on allies that hosted and assisted American
forces. It provoked states, terrorists and militias that opposed its presence. Among the
results: The United States has bombed Iraq almost every year since 1991 and spent an estimated
$6 trillion on post-9/11 wars.
An even deadlier phase may be dawning. Because the United States pursues armed dominance as
a self-evident good, the establishment feels threatened by a rising China and an assertive
Russia. "Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific," Mr.
Pence told the cadets, noting that "an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence
in the region." But China's rise invalidates primacy's rationale of deterrence, and shows that
other powers have ambitions of their own. Addressing the rise of China responsibly will require
abandoning nostalgia for the pre-eminence that America enjoyed during the 1990s.
Despite Mr. Trump's rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that "our
military dominance must be unquestioned" -- even though no one believes he has a strategy to
use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in itself. Which means
Americans face a choice: Either they should openly espouse endless war, or they should chart a
new course.
As an American and an internationalist, I choose the latter. Rather than chase an illusory
dominance, the United States should pursue the safety and welfare of its people while
respecting the rights and dignity of all. In the 21st century, finally rid of colonial empires
and Cold War antagonism, America has the opportunity to practice responsible statecraft,
directed toward the promotion of peace. Responsible statecraft will oppose the war-making of
others, but it will make sure, first and foremost, that America is not fueling violence.
________________________________
Shrinking the military's footprint will deprive presidents of the temptation to answer every
problem with a military solution.
________________________________
On its own initiative, the United States can proudly bring home many of its soldiers
currently serving in 800 bases ringing the globe, leaving small forces to protect commercial
sea lanes. It can reorient its military, prioritizing deterrence and defense over power
projection. It can stop the obscenity that America sends more weapons into the world than does
any other country. It can reserve armed intervention, and warlike sanctions, for purposes that
are essential, legal and rare.
Shrinking the military's footprint will deprive presidents of the temptation to answer every
problem with a violent solution. It will enable genuine engagement in the world, making
diplomacy more effective, not less. As the United States stops being a party to every conflict,
it can start being a party to resolving conflicts. President Obama's nuclear agreement with
Iran and, to a lesser extent, President Trump's opening with North Korea suggest that
historical enmities can be overcome. Still, these steps have not gone far enough to normalize
relations and allow us to get on with living together in a world whose chief dangers -- climate
change, disease, deprivation -- cross borders and require cooperation.
Hawks will retort that lowering America's military profile will plunge the world into a
hostile power's arms. They are projecting, assuming that one rival will covet and attain the
kind of armed domination that has served America poorly. Russia, with an economy the size of
Italy's, cannot rule Europe, whatever it desires. China bears watching but has so far focused
its military on denying access to its coasts and mainland. It is a long way from undertaking a
costly bid for primacy in East Asia, let alone the world.
In any case, local states are likely to step up if the American military pulls back. The
world conjured by the Washington establishment is an empty space, a "power vacuum," waiting
passively to be led. The real world is full of people ready to safeguard their freedom. Today a
world with less American militarism is likely to have less militarism in general.
Hawks also warn that restraint will produce chaos, dooming the "rules-based," "liberal
international order." Ambassador James F. Jeffrey, President Trump's envoy for Syria, recently
told a version of this tale when he pounded the table in anger at Americans' objections to
"endless war." "Literally scores and scores of American military operations," he said,
"undergird this global security regime and thus undergird the American and Western and U.N.
values system."
But there's a reason no one can connect the dots from unceasing interventions to a system of
law and order. After decades of unilateral actions, crowned by the aggressive invasion of Iraq,
it is U.S. military power that threatens international law and order. Rules should strengthen
through cooperation, not wither through imposition.
In truth, the largest obstacle to ending endless war is self-imposed. Long told that the
United States is the world's "indispensable nation," the American people have been denied a
choice and have almost stopped demanding one. A global superpower -- waging endless war -- is
just "who we are."
But it is for the people to decide who we are, guided by the best of what we have been.
America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," Secretary of State John Quincy
Adams said in 1821. "She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the
ruler of her own spirit."
Two centuries later, in the age of Trump, endless war has come home. Cease this folly, and
America can begin to take responsibility in the world and reclaim its civic peace. Reply
Saturday, September 14, 2019 at 04:09 PM
The key question is why Trump hired Bolton in the first place, not why he was sucked...
This guy is a reckless imperialist, staunch neocon and a war criminal. No person who promoted
or voted in the Congress for Iraq war can held government or elected position. They are
compromised for the rest of their miserable lifes.
I'm no fan of Trump, but I would like to see a comparison of the total "US instigated
foreign fatalities" for his last 2 & 1/2 years compared with Obama's last 2 & 1/2
years, and what we guess the number would have been under Hillary. I'm sorry, but I think
Trump's number would be the lowest. In coming up with an explanation, I like to use the
"Reality Show Entertainment Value" theory which many have described. In this case, people
like to watch Trump bullshitting and freaking out the establishment, but they really don't
like watching dead bodies burn up or be carried away in body bags. That reality is not
attractive entertainment, despite the fantasy of it being bankable entertainment when
Tarantino flame throws a teenager at the end of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
Obama and Hillary are not "reality TV fans." They are more immersed in their megalomaniac
view of themselves as world actors, and will willfully kill a few hundred thousand if they
think it advances their misguided objectives.
"... Trade wars and sanctions are economic weapons against rival regimes, and like actual military warfare, often lead to unanticipated and sometimes devastating blowback from the targeted regimes. ..."
"... At the same time, western companies were forced to withdraw from Russian mega-deals because of sanctions. The best-known example was Exxon, forced by sanctions to walk away from an Arctic joint venture with Russia's state-owned oil giant, Rosneft, where it had invested $3.2 billion. In their very first effort, the partners successfully drilled oil wells containing 750 million barrels. ..."
"... The trade war with China that has led to tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese exports to the US, and as a result, Russia and China have moved even closer. It remains an absolute mystery why no one in the west had foreseen the blowback from economic warfare leading to an alliance between two of its most powerful adversaries. ..."
"... The US acts as if it has been blind-sided by the Russian/China moves, even though years before it undertook economic warfare against them, China, the world's largest energy importer, agreed to finance oil and gas multi-billion-dollar pipelines in neighboring Russia. Now Russia has become China's largest energy supplier, equaling or perhaps even surpassing its energy supplies to Europe. ..."
"... As stated by Global Village Space (GBS) , China and Russia rushed to aid Iran, with China replacing Total, in a 25-year deal estimated to be worth some $400 billions. With that, China inherits a bonanza, providing much needed finance and technology to a country that was and could again become one of the world's leading energy producers. China is looking to finance $280 billion to develop Iran's gas, oil and petrochemicals industries, along with $120 billion to improve transport and manufacturing, making it a key partner in China's Road and Belt program. ..."
"... The deal also gives China the right to buy any or all Iranian oil, gas, and petrochemicals products at a minimum guaranteed 12% discount to global benchmarks, plus an additional discount of 6-8% for risk adjusted compensation. Financing will proceed using local currencies, avoiding the costs of converting to a hard currency like the US dollar or the Euro, giving the Beijing yet another 10% cost advantage. ..."
"... In direct defiance of US sanctions against Iran, China has stepped into the breach, increasing its oil purchases from Iran while becoming Iran's major energy trade and finance partner. Like Russia, it seems that Iran is moving towards a military alliance with China. If the west worries about China's expansive moves in the South China Sea, along China's own borders, what to make then of China moving in on Hormuz, where some 30% of world oil is transited each day? ..."
"... It is well known that the US has been in secret meetings with Iran representatives, much to the dismay of the Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Bloomberg reports, after the G7 meeting, Trump publicly and repeatedly stated he was ready to meet with Iran's President, Hassan Rouhani. Bloomberg also reported that in a meeting with his Cabinet, Trump announced that he was ready to ease sanctions as a possible way to open negotiations between the two countries. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin agreed with the President, while National Security Advisor Bolton voiced strong opposition, that only one day later, led to his firing. Secretary of State Pompeo stated that Trump may meet on the sidelines of the upcoming UN meeting with Iran's President. ..."
"... The EU defence industry initiative, the ECB's money transfer service, the EU army (or defence collaboration :) are all longer term policies aimed at reducing the EU's reliance on systems that are controlled by the USA. ..."
"... Sanctions are the modern equivalent of siege warfare, only the target is a nation, not a city. ..."
"... John Bolton is clueless. He's a throwback to ruthless American competition and cowboy capitalism. And he appears to be an idiot. ..."
"... Consumer spending is going to struggle the rest of the year as it rebalances and manufacturing is heading to a full blown recession by December as auto companies try and get their balance sheets under control. ..."
Yves here. Even though most
readers know the general point very well, that US trade and financial sanctions haven't brought
targets to their knees, and had instead pushed them to find allies, but it's useful to have
detail to flesh out the story. There are some bits one can quibble with, like the "annexation
of Crimea" bit, and the US objectives for its sanctions against Russia. At least under the
Obama Administration, the belief was that they would damage the economy severely and force a
regime change.
By Robert Berke, an energy financial analyst with experience as a government consultant
to the State of Alaska. Originally published at
OilPrice
Trade wars and sanctions are economic weapons against rival regimes, and like actual
military warfare, often lead to unanticipated and sometimes devastating blowback from the
targeted regimes.
A prime example was President Obama sanctioning Russia over its annexation of Crimea. The
sanctions were designed to block Russia from any access to western financing, aimed at causing
a dire financial and economic crisis in Russia that would force it to relinquish Crimea and end
support for Ukraine's breakaway territories.
In fact, the sanctions did cause Russia to enter a short-lived recession. But it also had
other, much more drastic results for the West. It forced Russia to move closer to China, and
Moscow saw Beijing as a great alternative to western financing for Russian industries.
At the same time, western companies were forced to withdraw from Russian mega-deals because
of sanctions. The best-known example was Exxon, forced by sanctions to walk away from an Arctic
joint venture with Russia's state-owned oil giant, Rosneft, where it had invested $3.2 billion.
In their very first effort, the partners successfully drilled oil wells containing 750 million
barrels.
As noted by Reuters, the withdrawal was costly:
Exxon will post an after-tax loss of $200 million as a result of pulling out of the
Rosneft deal, but the true costs for the company run much deeper. Exploring and developing
giant offshore fields in Russia was supposed to provide long-term growth for the company,
and, in recent years, has seen falling reserves.
But the opportunity losses are likely to be far higher for Exxon, the company that famously
missed the US shale revolution. The long-term deal with Rosneft, expected to continue for
decades, included exploration for oil in the Black Sea, enormous shale resources in Western
Siberia, and the development of three large blocks in the Arctic (Kara Sea).
The trade war with China that has led to tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese exports
to the US, and as a result, Russia and China have moved even closer. It remains an absolute
mystery why no one in the west had foreseen the blowback from economic warfare leading to an
alliance between two of its most powerful adversaries.
China's major state-owned oil companies and its Silk Road fund each became 10% partners in
Russia's first major Arctic LNG (liquified natural gas), project in the Yamal Peninsula,
undertaken with Novatek, Russia's largest independent gas producer. The project offers great
prospects for enormous expansion.
The US acts as if it has been blind-sided by the Russian/China moves, even though years
before it undertook economic warfare against them, China, the world's largest energy importer,
agreed to finance oil and gas multi-billion-dollar pipelines in neighboring Russia. Now Russia
has become China's largest energy supplier, equaling or perhaps even surpassing its energy
supplies to Europe.
A similar scenario is taking place in the Persian Gulf where the US has withdrawn from the
Iran nuclear deal, while imposing economic sanctions on Iranian oil exports. The French energy
giant, Total, that in recent years has been a leading international oil company in that
country, was forced to withdraw because of sanctions, just like Exxon in Russia's Arctic, it
left billions of dollars on the table.
This may also answer the question as to why French Prime Minister Macron was so intent on
inviting the Iranian Foreign Secretary to the recent G7 meeting in France. It's also no secret
that French carmakers Peugeot and Renault are the main suppliers to Iran's auto assembly
plants.
As stated by
Global Village Space (GBS) , China and Russia rushed to aid Iran, with China replacing
Total, in a 25-year deal estimated to be worth some $400 billions. With that, China inherits a
bonanza, providing much needed finance and technology to a country that was and could again
become one of the world's leading energy producers. China is looking to finance $280 billion to
develop Iran's gas, oil and petrochemicals industries, along with $120 billion to improve
transport and manufacturing, making it a key partner in China's Road and Belt program.
The deal also gives China the right to buy any or all Iranian oil, gas, and
petrochemicals products at a minimum guaranteed 12% discount to global benchmarks, plus
an additional discount of 6-8% for risk adjusted compensation. Financing will proceed using
local currencies, avoiding the costs of converting to a hard currency like the US dollar or the
Euro, giving the Beijing yet another 10% cost advantage.
GBS further reports that the security for these projects will include up to 5,000 Chinese
security personnel on the ground in Iran to protects Chinese projects and to safeguard the
transit of energy products from Iran to China, including security for the very strategic Hormuz
Straits.
In direct defiance of US sanctions against Iran, China has stepped into the breach,
increasing its oil purchases from Iran while becoming Iran's major energy trade and finance
partner. Like Russia, it seems that Iran is moving towards a military alliance with China. If
the west worries about China's expansive moves in the South China Sea, along China's own
borders, what to make then of China moving in on Hormuz, where some 30% of world oil is
transited each day?
If these are considered winning policies for the West, one has to ask what failure looks
like.
The West is already slowly becoming aware of the blowback this disastrous policy has caused.
Evidence for this can be found in Macron's efforts to persuade Trump towards a peaceful
resolution with Iran.
It is well known that the US has been in secret meetings with Iran representatives, much to
the dismay of the Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Bloomberg reports, after the G7 meeting, Trump
publicly and
repeatedly stated he was ready to meet with Iran's President, Hassan Rouhani. Bloomberg
also reported that in a meeting with his Cabinet, Trump announced that he was ready to ease
sanctions as a possible way to open negotiations between the two countries. Treasury Secretary
Mnuchin agreed with the President, while National Security Advisor Bolton voiced strong
opposition, that only one day later, led to his firing. Secretary of State Pompeo stated that
Trump may meet on the sidelines of the upcoming UN meeting with Iran's President.
The firing of Bolton was
immediately followed by a fall in the price of oil and gold. Allowing Iran to continue to
increase supplies into already well supplied oil markets will add downward pressure on oil
prices. For the Trump administration, this is not necessarily a bad thing unhappy consumers at
the gas pump make for unhappy voters.
Similarly, the Trump Administration badly needs to move towards ending the trade war with
China in order to calm global markets. The recent announcement of the resumption of trade talks
between the US and China in October may provide an opportunity for a similar easing of tariffs
and a path towards further resolution.
Although these actions could help to quell global tensions, it may be too late to reverse
some of the serious damage caused by US-led economic warfare. Once China positions itself in
Iran, it will not likely be interested in withdrawing from its new strategic position in the
Middle East, that it gained as a result of US near sighted foreign policy.
Prior to the election, we may see a breakthroughs in the trade war, and the alleviation of
sanctions with Russia, Iran, China, and perhaps even North Korea, but the US will almost
certainly see the negative consequences from adversaries it helped to expand and
strengthen.
Can't speak much about the effects of the Chinese sanctions but I know a little bit about
the Russian ones. These Russian sanctions are biting hard but not the way they were intended
and it is not only the big oil companies that are losing big. Since they kicked in Russia has
lost about $50 billion in trade with the European Union which kinda stings. But in the same
time frame, the European Union has lost about $240 billion.
Considering that fact that these
sanctions were never for their benefit but for solidarity with the US, that is a very
expensive price tag. The US lost only about $17 billion but I remember reading that after the
sanctions kicked in, trade between the U and Russia actually increased. Europe is a big loser
here, particularly with agriculture. When the EU sanctioned Russian products to the EU, the
Russians did the same to them a few weeks later which came as a shock. Since then Russia has
made huge investments into growing their own food crops and those markets will never come
back again for the EU. As an example, Russia is once more a world leader in the production of
wheat second only to the US and has learned the value of autarky.
You see these results in all sorts of areas as the country started phasing out imports and
replacing them with domestically made products. They even started making marine engines out
of necessity as they were denied purchase of foreign ones. People might remember how Russia
was going to buy two specially built ships from France but France reneged under pressure from
Washington.
France not only had to give back all the money the Russians paid but also had to
compensate Russia for all related costs that the Russians made. In the end France paid Russia
over a billion dollars which was triple what the Russians initially paid. And now the
Russians are constructing their own ships of this class in the Crimea using the knowledge
acquired from France. Perhaps it is things like this that has cause Macron to open up
contacts with Russia once more in spite of what Washington demands.
Add in the purchase of gold stocks, developing financial systems in case the US cuts
Russia off from the SWIFT clearance systems, the development of weaponry that makes the
deployment of nuclear missile systems in Europe futile, you realise that Washington has
massively underestimated the response of counties like Russia, China and Iran and depended on
unicorn wishes instead.
But in the same time frame, the European Union has lost about $240 billion. Considering
that fact that these sanctions were never for their benefit but for solidarity with the US,
that is a very expensive price tag.
Well, Looks like Donald Trump let "The Swamp(tm)" run loose and they went and over-torqued
the screws!
Some decision makers in within the EU have begun to see the US sanctions against
everything and everyone as having the true goals of ablating EU's influence on the world
while hampering EU-based businesses. There are initiatives and polices that hints at "cutting
the cord" are quietly being introduced.
The EU defence industry initiative, the ECB's money transfer service, the EU army (or
defence collaboration :) are all longer term policies aimed at reducing the EU's reliance on
systems that are controlled by the USA.
The 'North Stream' pipeline and keeping the Iran deal kinda alive are more immediate and
direct challenges, as was the total unwillingness to join in any of the planned military
adventures involving Syria and Iran.
France is being rather open about about it. Possibly to test out on behalf of the EU what
the USA is actually willing to do to exact revenge and enforce compliance, possibly also
because opposing the USA in France remains a reliable way to win votes.
It's not just Trump. Our Congress is totally at the beck of special pleaders such as LNG
exporters and arms companies. All seek to use the US economic weapon to further their own
interests.
Plus, Russia is determinedly GMO free. The more the US goes down the GMO route, the less
likely the food trade with the EU – the European dogs wont eat GMO dogfood.
Post Brexit perhaps, Britain will accept US foods, all the more reason to insist on a proper
border if NI remains part of the 'UK'.
It's not just GMO, but the level and quality of technocratic oversight. US government
agencies are incapable of regulating anything in the private sector. While the EU is still
greatly influenced by private money, it has not completely sold out.
What is ignored by media is the harm sanctions inflict on the people living in these
countries. I think it should be considered a crime against humanity and our leaders should be
prosecuted. Sanctions are a weapon that is just as harmful as weapons to kill. We only seem
to look at the economic effects and ignore the social effects.
Sanctions are the modern equivalent of siege warfare, only the target is a nation, not a
city.
I've known in a vague intuitive way that US sanctions would alienate nations and isolate
the US, it's useful seeing how exactly these sanctions are backfiring with more nuance!
What is the next step after you have sanctioned everything and everyone and the reaction
is a shrug and a work around? Sanctions do have their bite, but they are, or are becoming, a
more effective tool for global economic and political realignment than a means to accomplish
their stated purpose.
Good question. I am wondering the same thing. There is a vague pattern here with Russia,
the most resource-rich oil producer. We don't want Russia to take off too fast. What can be
left in the ground should be left in the ground. And maybe that was the existential threat
posed by Exxon – a private, profit seeking US corporation geared to do everything fast
in order to make their profits.
Just thinking about slamming the breaks on manufacturing and
consumption and how this can make a mess of the oil industry if it is going for profits
– race to the bottom (currently). Rather, anyone thinking straight would want to
conserve oil, control it's production and marketing. John Bolton is clueless. He's a
throwback to ruthless American competition and cowboy capitalism. And he appears to be an
idiot.
There was a discussion of China's role in manufacturing drugs for Big Pharma on the news
last night, truly frightening.
They've already been found to be selling us contaminated drugs, what happens when they
refuse to deliver anything other than fentanyl?
I find it hard to understand how we're going to recover from the damage done by the
short-sighted, wholesale outsourcing of our manufacturing to China.
Given the centrality of drugs to American life, we should categorize them as sensitive
items of national security and declare a war on foreign drugs. That would brilliantly combine
the failed policies of the past with the failed policies of the present. We could make
exceptions for most-favored nations like Colombia or Afghanistan.
As in military conflicts, the fog of geoeconomic war together with partisan lens and poor
leadership can prevent adversaries from developing an accurate assessment of reality. The
writer has raised some examples that support his view pertaining to pushback, and he could be
right as The Rev Kev so eloquently pointed out here WRT Russia. However, whether his article
provides an accurate overview of the current state of play remains an open question IMO.
Setting aside deeply troubling questions about our national values and whether sanctions
should ever be employed due to their very damaging effects on domestic populations, together
with their evident past failure to realize policy goals, there are credible accounts that
China is now confronting a U.S. dollar shortage; that China has significant issues in its
financial system and economy; and that the people of China are seeing sharply rising food
prices as a result of decreased supplies of pork and soybeans. These issues are being
perceived as sufficient to cause China's leaders to be receptive to negotiating resolution of
the current tariffs, trade, intellectual property, and investment impasse on terms favorable
to the U.S. Whether this will be so remains to be seen, of course.
A multi-polar world became a uni-polar world with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis
Fukuyama said it was the end of history. It was all going so well, until the neoliberals got to work. The US created an open, globalised world with the Washington Consensus. China went from almost nothing to become a global super power.
That wasn't supposed to happen, let's get the rocket scientists onto it. Maximising profit is all about reducing costs. China had coal fired power stations to provide cheap energy.
China had lax regulations reducing environmental and health and safety costs.
China had a low cost of living so employers could pay low wages.
China had low taxes and a minimal welfare state.
China had all the advantages in an open globalised world. "The Washington Consensus was always going to work better for China than the US"
the rocket scientists.
If the US left this running it would be China first and America second. PANIC!
It seems since about the Vietnam war era, US FP has been run by hubristic idiots with
delusions of grandeur. Its foreign policy 101 that you never, never, set policy to drive your
2 largest rivals to alliance.
Yet these morons did exactly that. Since Trump, there have been many retirements form the
State Dept.
And maybe that's not such a bad thing. They show no evidence of competence.
Russia is leasing out old collective farm lands that was abandoned in the eastern part of
the country to Asian countries to farm and grow the export food products needed. It seems the
collective farms were abandoned and now the Russian government is re-purposing the vast
amounts of land available.
"Russia is now considering requests from Asian firms to farm another 1 million hectares
(2.5 million acres) -- an area roughly the size of Jamaica, according to the head of a
government agency."
It may be said that Trump's tariffs are the best things that could have happened to China
and Russia.
Frankly, I think it has pushed up consumer spending and that is about it. In other words,
this economy has overcapacity problems in the auto sector and its relation to junk corporate
debt, is not good.
Consumer spending is going to struggle the rest of the year as it rebalances and
manufacturing is heading to a full blown recession by December as auto companies try and get
their balance sheets under control.
"... Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down. ..."
"... Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as whatever was most useful politically. ..."
"Carlson concluded by warning about the many other Boltons in the federal bureaucracy,
saying that "war may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons,
it's always good business."
He went on to slam Trump's special representative for Iran and contender to replace Bolton,
Brian Hook, as an "unapologetic neocon" who "has undisguised contempt for President Trump, and
he particularly dislikes the president's nationalist foreign policy." Iranian Foreign Minister
Mohammad Javad Zarif echoed Carlson hours later in a tweet, arguing that "Thirst for war
– maximum pressure – should go with the warmonger-in-chief." Reuters and
Haaretz
-------------
Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar
of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite
German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them
allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not
accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down.
Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they
developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like
Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic
campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as
whatever was most useful politically.
They are not conservative at all, not one bit. Carlson was absolutely right about that.
They despise nationalism. They despise the idea of countries. In that regard they are like
all groups who aspire to globalist dominion for their particular ideas.
As for the gory details of CIA involvement in the Chilean coup d'état of 1973,
Costa-Gavras' film "Missing" (Universal Pictures, 1982) staring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek
exposes the surreptitious U.S. involvement via CIA operatives, supportive of Pinochet's
cold-bloodied massacre of students and other innocent bystanders. Not surprisingly, the film
was removed from the U.S. market following a lawsuit against the director and Universal
Pictures by former ambassador Nathaniel Davis for defamation of character. When Davis lost his
lawsuit, the film was re-released by Universal in 2006.
The face of neoliberalism in Chile today is disheartened, reflecting deep losses for the
wealthy class as the people of the country reject Milton Friedman's neoliberal policies,
including clever tax evasion techniques by the business class. Could this be the start of a
worldwide movement against neoliberalism?
After all, Chile is the country that neoliberal advocates crowned their "newborn" in the
battle against big government, "get government off our backs," according to Milton Friedman
(and, Reagan picked up on the adage.) But, au contraire, according to the film "Missing,"
fascism took control over Chile. Is it possible that Friedman and Kissinger secretly cherished
a fascist empire, where control would be complete, disguised as "the land of individual
economic freedom?" Whatever their motives, that's what they got, and they never hesitated to
revere Chile's remarkable economic achievements, fascism and all, which is powerfully expressed
in the film "Missing," from end to end the heavy hand of fascism is ever-present.
Today is a new day as the people of Chile abandon decades of rotting neoliberal policies.
They've had enough of Milton Freidman. The people have decided that the "state" is a beneficial
partner for achievement of life's dreams. The "state" is not the menacing force of evil
preached by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The people of Chile are embracing an anti-neoliberalistic nation/state for the first time in
over four decades. Will the world follow in their footsteps similar to the world adopting the
principles of the "Miracle of Chile" these past four decades?
As for the new way forward, it's all about student debt. Yes, student debt was the catalyst
behind Chile's repudiation of neoliberalism. In 2011 students in Chile made headlines by
launching nationwide strikes over high tuition costs that drove their families into debt (sound
familiar?) The strike lasted for eight months.
Over time, the student marches gained recognition by other like-minded organizations like
trade unions and protests of environmental degradation. According to Tasha Fairfield, an
assistant professor for the London School of Economics' Department of International
Development, the strikes were pivotal: "The student movement played a critical role in creating
political space," according to Fairfield, it "dramatically changed the political context in
Chile and helped to place the issues of Chile's extreme inequalities centrally on the national
agenda," Sebastian Rosemont, Chilean Activists Change the Rules of the Game, Foreign Policy In
Focus, Dec. 2, 2014.
Subsequently, the national election of 2013 swept the left wing into power with a huge wave
of public support, gaining strong majorities in both houses of the National Congress as well as
electing Michelle Bachelet president. The big leftward sweep came as over two thirds of the
population grew to support student demands for free university tuition.
Ever since the 2013 election, neoliberal policies have crumbled like a decrepit equestrian
statue of Pinochet, who carried the stigma of brutal criminality to, and beyond, the grave.
In stark contrast to 40 years ago, today, when students, armed with only stones clashed with
police equipped with full regalia of riot gear, tear gas, and armored vehicles, the harsh
police activity drew heavy international criticism. That, combined with more than two-thirds of
the population in support of the student movement, led to a new politics, Nueva Mayoria (New
Majority), a center-left coalition made up of Bachelet's Socialist Party, the Christian
Democratic Party, and the Party for Democracy.
Whereupon, Nueva Mayoria, turning up its nose to neoliberalism, raised corporate taxes from
20 percent to 25 percent and closed tax loopholes for companies and wealthy business owners.
Those changes added $8.3 billion annually to government coffers, thus, serving as a source of
funds to provide free education to all Chileans by 2020, as well as improved health care, and
including a roll back of the for-profit schools that emerged under Pinochet's dictatorship,
which is another neoliberal fascination, witness the U.S. for-profit schools listed on the New
York Stock Exchange honestly, what's with that? In order to achieve success, the new Chilean
politics astutely employed a key tactical move by applying the corporate tax hikes to only the
largest corporations. As a result, nearly 95% of businesses are not be affected by higher
taxation. This, in fact, served to secure a broad base of support for the new politics by
having those who can afford to pay Pay.
Along those same lines, the new government removed a tax dodge employed by large business
owners that allowed them to mostly escape taxes on $270 billion of profits (similar to the U.S.
15% "carried interest" for private equity entities, e.g., Mitt Romney's 15% tax rate).
Thus, it's little wonder that public backlash is challenging neoliberalism, especially
considering the conditions throughout the Pinochet regime, as described in the meticulously
structured documentary film, "The Pinochet Case," (Icarus Films, 2002), which opens with scenes
of ordinary Chileans scouring the desert for the remains of family members who were tortured
and killed decades previous.
Chile, "The Babe of Neoliberalism," came to life as an experiment for the "Chicago School"
of economic thought. It worked. Today neoliberal theory rules the world, laissez-faire
capitalism as practiced from China to the United States, privatization, open markets, slash
government, and deregulation, in short, "whatever works best for profits works best for
society." But, does it?
Forty years of neoliberal thought and practice has changed the world's socio-economic
landscape, but it only really, truly works for the same class of people today as it did 800
years ago for the nobility of the Middle Ages.
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at [email protected] .
It seems since about the Vietnam war era, US FP has been run by hubristic idiots with
delusions of grandeur. Its foreign policy 101 that you never, never, set policy to drive your
2 largest rivals to alliance.
Yet these morons did exactly that. Since Trump, there have been many retirements from
the State Dept. And maybe that's not such a bad thing. They show no evidence of
competence.
Ukraine is mainly the result of attempt of the USA to encircle Russia well as EU design for economic
Drang nach Osten -- attempt to displace Russia in xUSSR
republics.
So they pushed Ukraine into the pat that Baltic republic were already known for.
Notable quotes:
"... Ukraine's newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a "first step" in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000 civilians. ..."
"... In a subsequent referendum, 89% in Donetsk and 96% in Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine voted for independence, which the new government of Petro Poroshenko government did not accept. ..."
"... She told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in a telephone conversation that was tapped and later leaked that Arseniy Yatsenyuk, neoliberal head of the "Fatherland" Party, should be Prime Minister as he was thought to have the "economic" and "governing experience." ..."
"... Nuland further revealed that the U.S. had invested over $5 billion in "democracy promotion" in Ukraine since 1991 through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was carrying on the kind of work previously undertaken by the CIA during the Cold War. ..."
"... NED president Carl Gershman called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step towards toppling [Russian President Vladimir] Putin who "may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." ..."
"... To help achieve this end, the Obama administration pledged $1 billion in loan guarantees to the post-coup government in Ukraine, which Putin considered as the "ideological heirs of [Stephen] Bandera, Hitler's accomplice in World War II." ..."
"... Swayed by a slick lobbying campaign backed by supporters of the Afghan mujahidin in the 1980s looking for a new cause and by the Senate's Ukraine Caucus, the Obama administration further provided nearly $600 million in security assistance to the Ukrainian military. ..."
"... American military advisers embedded in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry provided rocket propelled grenades, carried out training exercises and planned military operations including with members of the fascist Azov battalion, which had Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel patches emblazoned on their sleeves. ..."
On Saturday September 7, Russia and Ukraine agreed to a prisoner swap which has brought
hope of improved relations between the two countries and an end to the 5-year long conflict in
Eastern Ukraine.
A peace accord is being planned for later this month in Normandy involving Ukraine, Russia,
France and Germany.
Ukraine's newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a
"first step" in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000
civilians.
The Ukraine War remains largely unknown to the American public even though the United States
has had a great stake in it.
The war started after a coup d'états in Ukraine in February 2014, which overthrew the
democratically elected pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovuch.
In a subsequent referendum, 89% in Donetsk and 96% in Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine voted for
independence, which the new government of Petro Poroshenko government did not accept.
The United States was a heavy backer of the coup and dirty war that unfolded in the
East.
Victoria Nuland, the head of the State Department's European desk, traveled to Ukraine three
times during the protests that triggered the coup, handing out cookies to demonstrators.
She told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in a telephone conversation that was tapped and
later leaked that Arseniy Yatsenyuk, neoliberal head of the "Fatherland" Party, should be Prime
Minister as he was thought to have the "economic" and "governing experience."
Nuland further revealed that the U.S. had invested over $5 billion in "democracy promotion"
in Ukraine since 1991 through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was carrying on
the kind of work previously undertaken by the CIA during the Cold War.
Ukraine has long been considered an important bridge between Eastern and Western Europe and
holds lucrative oil and gas deposits.
NED president Carl Gershman called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step
towards toppling [Russian President Vladimir] Putin who "may find himself on the losing end not
just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
To help achieve this end, the Obama administration pledged $1 billion in loan guarantees to
the post-coup government in Ukraine, which Putin considered as the "ideological heirs of
[Stephen] Bandera, Hitler's accomplice in World War II."
Swayed by a slick lobbying campaign backed by supporters of the Afghan mujahidin in the
1980s looking for a new cause and by the Senate's Ukraine Caucus, the Obama administration
further provided nearly $600 million in security assistance to the Ukrainian military.
It was supplied with counter-artillery radars, anti-tank systems, armored vehicles and
drones in a policy expanded upon by Trump.
Before and after the Ukrainian military's campaign began, Secretary of State John Kerry, CIA
Director John Brennan, and Vice President Joe Biden visited Kiev, followed by a flow of senior
Pentagon officials.
A back-door arms pipeline was set up through the United Arab Emirates and Blackwater
mercenaries were allegedly deployed.
American military advisers embedded in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry provided rocket
propelled grenades, carried out training exercises and planned military operations including
with members of the fascist Azov battalion, which had Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel patches
emblazoned on their sleeves.
Obama's National Security adviser, Samantha Power, claimed that the [Ukrainian] governments
"response [to alleged provocations by eastern rebels] [was] reasonable, it is proportional, and
frankly it is what any of our countries would have done."
The Ukrainian military and allied warlord and neo-Nazi militias were not acting reasonably
or proportionally, however, when they carried out artillery and air attacks on cities and
struck residential buildings, shopping malls, parks, schools, hospitals and orphanages in
Eastern Ukraine, and tortured and executed POWs in what amounted to clear war crimes.
NYU Professor Stephen Cohen notes that even TheNew York Times , which mainly
deleted atrocities from its coverage, described survivors in Slovyansk living "as if in the
Middle Ages."
That the American public knows nothing of these events is a sad reflection of the
superficiality of our media and decline in the quality of international news coverage.
It is also a testament to the failing of the political left, which has embraced the cause of
immigrant and Palestinian rights and fighting climate change, legitimately, but neglected the
plight of the Eastern Ukrainian people. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jeremy Kuzmarov
"... After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism. ..."
"... In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation. In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." ..."
"... Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high "the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system." ..."
"... The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another. ..."
This is as good a time as any to point to an alternative vision of foreign policy. One based on the principle of non-interference,
respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and, above all, international law. One based on peaceful coexistence and mutual
cooperation. A vision of the world at peace and undivided by arbitrary distinctions. Such a world is possible and even though
there are currently players around the world who are striving in that direction we need look no further than our own history for
inspiration. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you one Henry A. Wallace, for your consideration.
(The following excerpts from an article by Dr. Dennis Etler. Link to the full article provided below.) --
The highest profile figure who articulated an alternative vision for American foreign policy was the politician Henry Wallace,
who served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1940-1944 and ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the
Progressive Party.
After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's
role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with
partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism.
Wallace gave a speech in 1942 that declared a "Century of the Common Man." He described a post-war world that offered "freedom
from want," a new order in which ordinary citizens, rather than the rich and powerful, would play a decisive role in politics.
That speech made direct analogy between the Second World War and the Civil War, suggesting that the Second World War was being
fought to end economic slavery and to create a more equal society. Wallace demanded that the imperialist powers like Britain and
France give up their colonies at the end of the war.
In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation.
In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in
war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and
by such means as we see fit."
Wallace responded to Luce with a demand to create a world in which "no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other
nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there
must be neither military nor economic imperialism." Wallace took the New Deal global. His foreign policy was to be based on non-interference
in the internal affairs of other countries and mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Sadly, since then, despite occasional efforts to head in a new direction, the core constituency for US foreign policy has been
corporations, rather than the "common man" either in the United States, or the other nations of the world, and United States foreign
relations have been dominated by interference in the political affairs of other nations. As a result the military was transformed
from an "arsenal for democracy" during the Second World War into a defender of privilege at home and abroad afterwards.
-- - Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without
political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high
"the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key
policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance
of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system."
--
Wallace's legacy suggests that it is possible to put forth a vision of an honest internationalism in US foreign policy that
is in essence American. His approach was proactive not reactive. It would go far beyond anything Democrats propose today, who
can only suggest that the United States should not start an unprovoked war with Iran or North Korea, but who embrace sanctions
and propagandist reports that demonize those countries.
Rather than ridiculing Trump's overtures to North Korea, they should go further to reduce tensions between the North and the
South by pushing for the eventual withdrawal of troops from South Korea and Japan (a position fully in line with Wallace and many
other politicians of that age).
Rather than demonizing and isolating Russia (as a means to score political points against Trump), progressives should call for
a real détente, that recognizes Russia's core interests, proposes that NATO withdraw troops from Russia's borders, ends sanctions
and reintegrates Russia into the greater European economy. They could even call for an end to NATO and the perpetuation of the
dangerous global rift between East and West that it perpetuates.
Rather than attempt to thwart China's rise, and attack Trump for not punishing it enough, progressives should seek to create new
synergies between China and the US economically, politically and socioculturally.
-- -
In contrast to the US policy of perpetual war and "destroying nations in order to save them," China's BRI proposes an open plan
for development that is not grounded in the models of French and British imperialism. It has proposed global infrastructure and
science projects that include participants from nations in Africa, Asia, South and Central America previously ignored by American
and European elites -- much as Wallace proposed an equal engagement with Latin America. When offering developmental aid and investment
China does not demand that free market principles be adopted or that the public sector be privatized and opened up for global
investment banks to ravish.
-- The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing
its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying
on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with
nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another.
Usually a forum for anodyne statements about international cooperation and proper
environmental stewardship, the lid was blown off the latest Arctic Council meeting in May when
Pompeo delivered an unabashedly martial and provocative speech that deserves far more attention
than it got at the time. So let's take a little tour of what may prove a historic proclamation
(in the grimmest sense possible) of a new Washington doctrine for the Far North.
"In its first two decades, the Arctic Council has had the luxury of focusing almost
exclusively on scientific collaboration, on cultural matters, on environmental research," the
secretary of state began mildly. These
were, he said, "all important themes, very important, and we should continue to do those. But
no longer do we have that luxury. We're entering a new age of strategic engagement in the
Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate, and to all of our
interests in that region."
In what turned out to be an ultra-hardline address, Pompeo claimed that we were now in a new
era in the Arctic. Because climate change -- a phrase Pompeo, of course, never actually uttered
-- is now making it ever more possible to exploit the region's vast resource riches, a scramble
to gain control of them is now officially underway. That competition for resources has
instantly become enmeshed in a growing geopolitical confrontation between the U.S., Russia, and
China, generating new risks of conflict.
On the matter of resource exploitation, Pompeo could hardly contain his enthusiasm.
Referring to the derision that greeted William Seward's purchase of Alaska in 1857, he
declared:
"Far from the barren backcountry that many thought it to be in Seward's time, the
Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses 13% of the world's
undiscovered oil, 30% of its undiscovered gas, and an abundance of uranium, rare earth
minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources."
Of equal attraction, he noted, was the possibility of vastly increasing maritime commerce
through newly de-iced trans-Arctic trade routes that will link the Euro-Atlantic region with
Asia. "Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for
trade," he enthused. "This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and
the West by as much as 20 days Arctic sea lanes could come [to be] the 21st century's Suez and
Panama Canals." That such "steady reductions in sea ice" are the sole consequence of climate
change went unmentioned, but so did another reality of our warming world. If the Arctic one day
truly becomes the northern equivalent of a tropical passageway like the Suez or Panama canals,
that will likely mean that parts of those southerly areas will have become the equivalents of
uninhabitable deserts.
As such new trade and drilling opportunities arise, Pompeo affirmed, the United States
intends to be out front in capitalizing on them. He then began bragging about what the Trump
administration had already accomplished, including promoting expanded oil and gas drilling in
offshore waters and also freeing up "energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ," a pristine stretch
of northern Alaska
prized by environmentalists as a sanctuary for migrating caribou and other at-risk species.
Additional efforts to exploit the region's vital resources, he promised, are scheduled for the
years ahead.
A New Arena for Competition (and Worse)
Ideally, Pompeo noted placidly, competition for the Arctic's resources will be conducted in
an orderly, peaceful manner. The United States, he assured his listeners, believes in "free and
fair competition, open, by the rule of law." But other countries, he added ominously,
especially China and Russia, won't play by that rulebook much of the time and so must be
subject to careful oversight and, if need be, punitive action.
China, he pointed out, is already developing trade
routes in the Arctic, and establishing economic ties with key nations there. Unlike the United
States (which already has multiple military bases in the Arctic, including one at Thule in
Greenland, and so has a well-established presence there), Pompeo claimed that Beijing is
surreptitiously using such supposedly economic activities for military purposes, including,
heinously enough, spying on U.S. ballistic missile submarines operating in the region, while
intimidating its local partners into acquiescence.
He then cited events in the distant South China Sea, where the Chinese have indeed
militarized a
number of tiny uninhabited islands (outfitting them with airstrips, missile batteries, and the
like) and the U.S. has responded by
sending its warships into adjacent waters. He did so to warn of similar future military
stand-offs and potential clashes in the Arctic. "Let's just ask ourselves, do we want the
Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing
territorial claims?" The answer, he assured his listeners, is "pretty clear." (And I'm sure you
can guess what it is.)
The secretary of state then wielded even stronger language in describing "aggressive Russian
behavior in the Arctic." In recent years, he claimed, the Russians have built hundreds of new
bases in the region, along with new ports and air-defense capabilities. "Russia is already
leaving snow prints in the form of army boots" there, a threat that cannot be ignored. "Just
because the Arctic is a place of wilderness does not mean it should become a place of
lawlessness. It need not be the case. And we stand ready to ensure that it does not become
so."
And here we get to the heart of Pompeo's message: the United States will, of course,
"respond" by enhancing its own military presence in the Arctic to better protect U.S.
interests, while countering Chinese and Russian inroads in the region:
"Under President Trump, we are fortifying America's security and diplomatic presence in the
area. On the security side, partly in response to Russia's destabilizing activities, we are
hosting military exercises, strengthening our force presence, rebuilding our icebreaker fleet,
expanding Coast Guard funding, and creating a new senior military post for Arctic Affairs
inside of our own military."
To emphasize the administration's sincerity, Pompeo touted the largest NATO and U.S. Arctic
military maneuvers since the Cold War era, the recently completed " Trident Juncture " exercise (which he
incorrectly referred to as "Trident Structure"), involving some 50,000 troops. Although the
official scenario
for Trident Juncture spoke of an unidentified "aggressor" force, few observers had any doubt
that the allied team was assembled to repel a hypothetical Russian invasion of Norway, where
the simulated combat took place.
Implementing the Doctrine
And so you have the broad outlines of the new Pompeo Doctrine, centered on the Trump
administration's truly forbidden topic: the climate crisis. In the most pugnacious manner
imaginable, that doctrine posits a future of endless competition and conflict in the Arctic,
growing ever more intense as the planet warms and the ice cap melts. The notion of the U.S.
going nose-to-nose with the Russians and Chinese in the Far North, while exploiting the
region's natural resources, has clearly been circulating in Washington. By August, it had
obviously already become enough of a commonplace in the White House (not to speak of the
National Security Council and the Pentagon), for the president to offer to buy Greenland.
And when it comes to resources and future military conflicts, it wasn't such a zany idea.
After all, Greenland does have abundant natural resources and also houses that U.S. base in
Thule. A relic of the Cold War, the Thule facility, mainly a radar base, is already being
modernized , at a cost of some $300 million, to better track Russian missile launches.
Clearly, key officials in Washington view Greenland as a valuable piece of real estate in the
emerging geopolitical struggle Pompeo laid out, an assessment that clearly wormed its way into
President Trump's consciousness as well.
Iceland and Norway also play key roles in Pompeo's and the Pentagon's new strategic
calculus. Another former Cold War facility, a base at Keflavik in Iceland has been reoccupied
by the Navy and is now being used in antisubmarine warfare missions. Meanwhile, the Marine
Corps has
stationed several hundred combat troops at bases near Trondheim, Norway, the first
permanent deployment of foreign soldiers on Norwegian soil since World War II. In 2018, the
Pentagon even
reactivated the Navy's defunct Second Fleet, investing it with responsibility for
protecting the North Atlantic as well as the Arctic's maritime approaches, including those
abutting Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. Consider these signs of heating-up times.
And all of this is clearly just the beginning of a major buildup in and regular testing of
the ability of the U.S. military to operate in the Far North. As part of Exercise Trident
Juncture, for example, the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman and its flotilla of
support ships were sent into the Norwegian Sea, the first time a U.S. carrier battle group had
sailed above the Arctic Circle since the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. Similarly,
Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer recently announced
plans to send surface warships on trans-Arctic missions, another new military move. (U.S.
nuclear submarines make such journeys regularly, sailing beneath the sea ice.) This article first appeared on TomDispatch. More articles by:Michael T. Klare
Iran sanction and the threat of war has nothing to do with its nuclear program. It is about
the USA and by extension Israel dominance in the region. and defencing interesting of MIC, against the interest of general public.
Which is the main task of neocons, as lobbyists for MIC (please understand that MIC includes intelligence agencies and large
part of Wall Street) .
That's why Israel lobby ( and Bloomberg is a part of it ) supports strangulation Iran economy, Iran war and pushes Trump administration into it.
the demand " Rather than push for an extended sunset, Trump should hold out for a complete termination of Iran's nuclear
activities and an end to its other threatening behavior -- such as its ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist
groups across the Middle East -- in exchange for readmission into the world economy" is as close to Netanyahu position as we can
get.
Notable quotes:
"... The Bloomberg editors urge Trump not to give up on brain-dead maximalism with Iran ..."
"... As always, hard-liners ignore the agency and interests of the other government, and they assume that it is simply a matter of willpower to force them to yield. ..."
"... They have not left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, they have agreed to abide by the Additional Protocol that has even stricter standards. They are not enriching uranium to levels needed to make nuclear weapons. They certainly haven't built or tested any weapons. ..."
"... Iran has jumped through numerous hoops to demonstrate that their nuclear program is and will continue to be peaceful, and their compliance has been verified more than a dozen times, but fanatics here and in Israel refuse to take yes for an answer. That is because hard-liners aren't really concerned about proliferation risk, but seek to use the nuclear issue as fodder to justify punitive measures against Iran without end ..."
The
Bloomberg editors
urge Trump not to give up on brain-dead maximalism with Iran:
Rather than push for an extended sunset, Trump should hold out for a complete termination
of Iran's nuclear activities and an end to its other threatening behavior -- such as its
ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist groups across the Middle East -- in
exchange for readmission into the world economy.
This chance may never come again.
Bloomberg's latest advice to Trump on Iran is terrible as usual, but it is a useful window
into how anti-Iran hard-liners see things. They see the next year as their best chance to push
for their maximalist demands, and they fear the possibility that Trump might settle for
something short of their absurd wish list. If Trump does what they want and "holds out" until
Iran capitulates, he will be waiting a long time. He has nothing to show for his policy except
increased tensions and impoverished and dying Iranians, and this would guarantee more of the
same. The funny thing is that the "extended sunset" they deride is already an unrealistic goal,
and they insist that the president pursue a much more ambitious set of goals that have
absolutely no chance of being reached. As always, hard-liners ignore the agency and interests
of the other government, and they assume that it is simply a matter of willpower to force them
to yield.
The Bloomberg editorial is ridiculous in many ways, but just one more example will suffice.
At one point it says, "Nor is there any doubt that Iran wants nuclear weapons." Perhaps
ideologues and fanatics have no doubt about this, but it isn't true. If Iran wanted nuclear
weapons, they could have pursued and acquired them by now. They gave up that pursuit and agreed
to the most stringent nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated to prove that they wouldn't
seek these weapons, but the Trump administration chose to punish them for their cooperation.
Iran has not done any of the things that actual rogue nuclear weapons states have done. They
have not left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, they have agreed to abide by the
Additional Protocol that has even stricter standards. They are not enriching uranium to levels
needed to make nuclear weapons. They certainly haven't built or tested any weapons.
Iran has jumped through numerous hoops to demonstrate that their nuclear program is and will
continue to be peaceful, and their compliance has been verified more than a dozen times, but
fanatics here and in Israel refuse to take yes for an answer. That is because hard-liners
aren't really concerned about proliferation risk, but seek to use the nuclear issue as fodder
to justify punitive measures against Iran without end.
They don't want to resolve the crisis
with Iran, but rather hope to make it permanent by setting goals that can't possibly be reached
and insisting that sanctions remain in place forever.
"It will be well worth while": the state Duma has praised the willingness of the American
Ambassador to come and have a talk following his interview "Komsomolskaya Pravda"
Okhotny Ryad [address of State Duma -- ME] is now waiting for the Ambassador of
the USA to Russia, following his interview with "Komsomolskaya Pravda". We shall remind you,
that Jon huntsman, who, following his resignation, is leaving in October, has stressed that
he is ready to discuss allegations of interference (here he was talking about the publication
on Twitter by his Embassy of the announcement of the rally and a map of its route, together
with a request that these places be avoided these), but there has yet been no invitation made
that he do so.
I would be very happy to discuss this with anyone, but nobody has invited me and I
think I have not been invited because people know the truth, and it consists of the fact that
on the eve of the demonstrations, the Embassy should publish a consular alert and warn its
citizens to stay away from the places where they are to take place. My first responsibility
is to ensure the safety of American citizens.
And if I do not tell people, I would thereby have demonstrated neglect of my duty,
and my official duties. So I did what I did in all other cases – what I was doing in
China and what to do in Singapore when I was Ambassador there: we took documents already in
the public domain, and warned U.S. citizens that they should stay away from specific
locations, and published a map of where these places were marked.
That is what all this is really about, and I am very surprised that the standard
function of the Embassy has been presented as something unusual", said the
Ambassador."
(above) 02.20 2011, Beijing: Huntsman staying away from a specific place that the US
Embassy to China considered as being potentially dangerous to US citizens.
"... A kreakl is a Russian liberal, often the child or grandchild of Soviet-era intellectuals who believed they knew better than anyone else how the country should be run. ..."
"... "Continuing street protests in Hong Kong and Moscow have no doubt spooked the authoritarian duo of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Moscow protests, the largest in many years, must be keeping Mr. Putin up at night, or they wouldn't be dispersed with such unabated brutality." ..."
"... "This loss of nuclear competence is being cited by nuclear and national security experts in both the U.S. and in Europe's nuclear weapons states as a threat to their military nuclear programs. The White House cited this nuclear nexus in a May memo instructing Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, to force utilities to buy power from unprofitable nuclear and coal plants. The memo states that the "entire US nuclear enterprise" including nuclear weapons and naval propulsion, "depends on a robust civilian nuclear industry." ..."
Nina Khrushcheva is a kreakl. We use that word here a lot, and perhaps not all the readers
know what it means. It is a portmanteau of "Creative Class", but makes use of the letter 'k',
because the letter 'c' in Russian has a soft 's' sound, so we use the hard 'k'. The Creative
Class, or so they styled themselves, were the intelligentsia of Soviet times; the free-thinking
liberals who were convinced Russia's best course lay in accommodating the west no matter its
demands, in hope that it would then bless Russia with its secrets for prosperity and all the
fruits of the American Dream.
A kreakl is a Russian liberal, often the child or grandchild of Soviet-era intellectuals
who believed they knew better than anyone else how the country should be run. They express
their disapproval of the current government in the most contemptuous way, interpret its defense
of family values as homophobia, and consider its leadership – uniformly described by the
west as 'authoritarian' – to be stifling their freedom. My position is that their often
privileged upbringing insulates them from appreciating the value of hard work, and lets them
sneer at patriotism, as they often consider themselves global citizens with a worldly grasp of
foreign affairs far greater that of their groveling, sweaty countrymen. Their university
educations allow them to rub shoulders with other pampered scions of post-Soviet affluence, and
even worse are those who are sent abroad to attend western universities, where they internalize
the notion that everyone in America and the UK lives like Skip and Buffy and their other
college friends.
Not everyone who attends university or college turns out a snobbish brat, of course, and in
Russia, at least, not everyone who gets the benefit of a superior education comes from wealth.
A significant number are on scholarships, as both my nieces were. Some western students are in
university or college on scholarships as well, and there are a good many in both places who are
higher-education students because it was their parents dream that they would be, and they saved
all their lives to make it happen.
But many of the Russian loudmouths are those who learned at their daddy's knee that he
coulda been a contendah, if only the money-grubbing, soulless monsters in the government hadn't
kept him down – could have been wealthy if it were not for the money pit of communism,
could have taken a leadership role which would have moved the country forward had the leader
who usurped power not filled all the seats with his cronies and sycophants.
Khrushcheva is somewhat an exception to the rule there, because her grandpa actually was the
leader of the Soviet Union – First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Nikita Khrushchev. It was he who oversaw the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954,
the same year the Soviet Union
applied to join NATO . Some references consider Khrushchev her grandfather, and some her
great-grandfather; it's complicated. Julia – Khrushcheva's mother – was the
daughter of Leonid, who was a fighter pilot in World War II and the son of Khrushchev. When he
was shot down in the war and did not return, Khrushchev adopted Julia. Nina Khrushcheva is
therefore his biological great-granddaughter, but his adoptive granddaughter.
Now, she's Professor of International Affairs at The New School, New York, USA, and a Senior
Fellow of the World Policy Institute, New York. As you might imagine, The New School is a
hotbed of liberal intellectualism; as its Wiki entry announces, " dedicated to academic freedom
and intellectual inquiry and a home for progressive thinkers". So let's see what a liberal and
progressive thinker thinks about the current state of affairs vis-a-vis Russia and China, and
their western opponents.
You sort of get an early feel for it from the title: "
Putin and Xi are Gambling with their Countries' Futures ". I sort of suspected, even before
I read it, that it was not going to be a story about what a great job Putin and Xi are doing as
leaders of their respective countries.
Just before we get into that a little deeper – what is the purpose of an 'Opinion'
section in a newspaper? If it was 'Facts', then it would be news, because the reporter could
substantiate it. As I best understand it, people read newspapers to learn about news –
things that happened, to who, and where, when and why, documented by someone who either saw
them happen, interviewed someone who did, or otherwise has researched the issue. 'Opinion'
sections, then, allow partisans for various philosophies to present their conclusions as if
they were facts, or to introduce disputed incidents from a standpoint which implies they are
resolved and that the author's view represents fact.
Well, hey; here's an example, in the first paragraph – "Continuing street protests
in Hong Kong and Moscow have no doubt spooked the authoritarian duo of Chinese President Xi
Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Moscow protests, the largest in many years,
must be keeping Mr. Putin up at night, or they wouldn't be dispersed with such unabated
brutality."
I suppose they have their fingers on the world's pulse at The New School, but I haven't seen
any indication at all, anywhere, that either Mr. Putin or Mr. Xi are 'spooked' about anything.
The protests in Hong Kong appear to be instigated at the urging of the USA – as usual
– with reports that the protesters are
receiving western funding , and photographs showing protest leaders apparently
meeting with the US Consul-General . Nonetheless, despite the aggressive violence displayed
by the protesters, who are certainly not peaceful, the issue seems to be mostly confined to
Hong Kong, and there have been no indications I have seen that Beijing is 'spooked' about it at
all. In fact, the position of the Chinese government seems fairly reasonable – it does
not want to see Chinese criminals escape justice by fleeing to Hong Kong.
As to whether either protests are representative of a large number of people, it is
difficult to say: organizers of the Hong Kong protests claim almost 2 million, while the police
– responsible for crowd control – say there were no more than a tenth of that
number. And if the Moscow protests really were the largest in years, those hoping to see Putin
overthrown might want to keep quiet about that; organizers claim about 50,000 people, and
organizers usually overestimate the crowd for their own reasons. Moscow is a city of over 13
million just within the city limits. So the massive crowd represents less than half of one
percent of the city's population. Polling of the protest crowd suggested more than half of them
were from outside Moscow, where who is on the city council is no concern of theirs, since they
cannot vote. And in an echo of the iconic Tahrir Square protests, an element of the 'Arab
Spring' – probably the first mass demonstrations managed by social media – the
Moscow protests appear to be
managed and directed via social media links, where it is possible to exercise
disproportionate influence on a targeted crowd of restless youth who have little or no personal
investment in the country, and just want to be part of what's cool.
Let's move on. According to Khrushcheva, the protests are 'being dispersed with unabated
brutality'. That so? Show me. Bear in mind that all these protests are unauthorized, and those
participating in them are breaking the law and in breach of the public peace. Flash violence is
an objective of the demonstrations, because otherwise their numbers are insignificant, and if
they play it by the book nobody pays them any mind. I've seen loads of pictures of the
protesters in Moscow being hauled away to the paddywagons, and nobody is bloody or has their
clothing ripped. Here are some examples (thanks, Moscow Exile).
None of those adolescents looks old enough to vote. A video clip of a Chinese policeman
using his beanbag gun to disperse protesters has been edited to omit the part where he was
swarmed by protesters who were punching him. No citizens who are in high dudgeon at what they
are being told is 'unabated brutality' would tolerate unauthorized protests by young hooligans
in their own towns for a second, and would scorn any suggestion that they are pursuing noble
goals such as freedom and democracy. Fellow demonstrators in these photos seem far more
interested in capturing every bit of the action on their phones than in assisting their
captured co-demonstrators.
By way of contrast, check out this clip of US police officers in New Jersey arresting a young woman on the
beach because there was alcohol – apparently unopened – on the same beach
blanket, which she claimed belonged to her aunt. A pretty small-potatoes issue, you would
think, compared with the fearless defense of freedom and democracy. Yet the police officers,
viewed here on their own body cameras, throw her to the ground and punch her in front of her
child although she is obviously not drunk and their breathalyzer test does not register any
alcohol on her breath. Bystanders gratuitously and repeatedly advise her, "Stop resisting".
People who complain about the way the girl is being handled are told, "Back off, or you'll be
locked up, too". For what? Which of these looks like a police state, to you? Nina Lvovna? I'm
talking to you.
The demonstrations, we are told, are a poignant sign of Putin's declining popularity. Yes,
poor old chap. In fact, Putin's approval
rating in 2019 was 64%; it was 70% in 2000, nearly 20 years ago. Just for info, Donald
Trump, the Leader Of The Free World, had an approval rating with his own voters of 44% in 2018,
and Macron was even worse at 26%. I guess a little Macron goes a long way – his
current approval rating is only 28%. His fortunes have not improved much, you might say.
Boris Johnson has not yet even properly taken the reins in the UK, but his people do not appear
optimistic; about 35% speculate
he is or will be a capable leader , while only 23% rate him more honest than most
politicians. Enjoy those, BoJo; they represent a zenith born of unreasonable hope –
The Economist describes these ratings as 'surprisingly high'. In 2018, the
Netherlands' Mark Rutte
had only 10% approval – and that was the highest of the ministers – while 34%
disapproved. Apparently about half just didn't care.
Look; Khrushcheva is talking out her ass. There just is no way to sugar-coat it. In 2015,
Vladimir Putin was
the most popular leader in the world with national voters. I daresay he is now, as well;
with the state of the world, I find it hard to imagine any other leader has an approval rating
higher than 64%. But feel free to look. Polling agencies carefully parse their questions so as
to push the results in the direction they'd like to see, but when the question is reduced to a
basic "Do you trust Putin? Yes or No?", his approval rating goes higher than it is right now.
Please note, that's the reference supplied by Khrushcheva to substantiate her statement that
fewer and fewer Russians now conflate their nation with its leader.
I don't personally recall Putin ever saying he hoped Trump would improve relations with
Russia, although it would not be an unreasonable wish had he said it. I think he was probably
glad Hillary Clinton did not win, considering her shrill Russophobic rhetoric and fondness for
military solutions to all problems, but Khrushcheva makes him sound like a doddering old fool
who barely knows what century he is living in. I think Russia always hoped for better relations
with America, because when any country's relations with America are very bad, that country
would be wise to prepare for war. Because that's how America solves its problems with other
countries. Washington already had a go at strangling Russia economically, and it failed
spectacularly, and we're getting down to the bottom of the toolbox.
Next, Khrushcheva informs us that Russia is in as weak a position to defeat the USA in a
nuclear war as it was when it was the USSR. That's true, in a roundabout way. For one, there
would be no victors or defeated in a nuclear war. It would quickly escalate to a full-on
exchange, and much of the planet would become uninhabitable. For another, Russia was always in
a pretty good position to wax America's ass in a nuclear exchange and it still is. Russia
still has about
6,800 nuclear weapons to the USA's 6,500 , and has continued to modernize and update its
nuclear arsenal through the years. A Russian strike would be concentrated on a country about a
third its size. If I were a betting man, I wouldn't like those odds. Mind you, if I were a
free-thinking liberal professor who did not have a clue what I was talking about, I would laugh
at the odds – ignorance seasoned with a superiority complex tends to make you act that
way. Just as well that betting men mostly run the world, and not jackhole liberal
professors.
The recent explosion at what was believed to be development of a new nuclear weapon in
Russia is assessed by Khrushcheva to be a clear sign of incompetence, which is quite a
diagnosis considering no investigation has even started yet. Somehow she missed the dramatic explosion of
Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, together with its multi-million-dollar satellite payload,
back in 2016. Oh, never mind – Musk quickly explained that it was 'an anomaly'. Well,
that clears it all up. Must have; the US government has continued to throw money at Musk as if
he were embarrassingly naked or something, and nobody seems prepared to suggest it was
incompetent. While we're on that subject, the whole reason SpaceX even exists is because the
USA continues to use Russian RD-180 rockets developed in the 1960s to launch its satellites and
space packages into orbit, because it doesn't have anything better. I'd be careful where I
tossed that 'incompetent' word around. Cheer up, though the news isn't all bad: just a bit more
than a year ago, the most advanced commercial reactor designs from Europe and the United States
just delivered their first megawatt-hours of electricity within one day of each other. Oh,
wait. It is bad news. Because
that took place in China . You know, that place where Xi in his unabated brutality is
trampling upon the fair face of democracy. In fact, according to nuclear energy consultant
Mycle Schneider, principal author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report, "The
Chinese have a very large workforce that they move from one project to another, so their skills
are actually getting better, whereas European and North American companies haven't completed
reactors in decades".
Is that bad? Gee; it might be. "This loss of nuclear competence is being cited by
nuclear and national security experts in both the U.S. and in Europe's nuclear weapons states
as a threat to their military nuclear programs. The White House cited this nuclear nexus in a
May memo instructing Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, to force utilities to buy power from
unprofitable nuclear and coal plants. The memo states that the "entire US nuclear enterprise"
including nuclear weapons and naval propulsion, "depends on a robust civilian nuclear
industry." You see, Ninushka, competence in nuclear weapons is directly related to
competence in nuclear engineering as a whole.
I hope she knows more about Russia than she does about China – in a single paragraph
she has the Chinese government threatening to send in the army to crush protests, and standing
aside while thugs beat up protesters – and both are bad. And of course, this threatened
action/inaction had to have been sanctioned by Xi's government. Why? Well, because everyone in
Hong Kong knows it. Much of the rest of her reasoning – free thinking, I guess I should
call it – on China is what Xi 'might be contemplating' or 'could be considering'.
Supported by nothing, apparently, except the liberal free-thinker's gift of clairvoyance.
Hong Kong was always Chinese. The Qing dynasty ceded it to the British Empire in the Treaty
of Nanjing, and it became a British Crown Colony. Britain was back for Kowloon in 1860, and
leased what came to be known as The New Territories for 99 years, ending in 1997. Time's up.
The people of Hong Kong are Chinese; it's not like they are some different and precious race
that China aims to extinguish. I was there a decade after it returned to Chinese control, and
it was largely independent; it had its own flag, the British street names were retained, and
you can probably still stop on Gloucester Road and buy a Jaguar, if you have that kind of
money. To a very large degree, China left it alone and minded its own business, but like I
said; it's Chinese. These ridiculous western attempts to split it off and make an independent
nation of it are only making trouble for the people of Hong Kong and, as usual, appeal mostly
to students who have never run anything much bigger than a bake sale, and 'free-thinking
liberals'.
China is not 'isolated diplomatically'. Beijing is host city to 167
foreign embassies . There are only 10 more in Washington, which considers itself the Center
of the Universe. Lately China has been spreading itself a little,
muscling into Latin America , right in Uncle Sam's backyard. Foreign Direct Investment into
China increased3.6 percent
year-on-year to $78.8 billion USD in January-July 2019, and has increased steadily since
that time, when it fell dramatically owing to Trump's trade war. That has proved far more
disastrous to the USA than to China, which is rapidly sourcing its imports from other suppliers
and establishing new trading relationships which exclude the United States, probably for the
long term. "China is isolated diplomatically" is precisely the sort of inane bibble-babble
liberal free-thinkers tell each other because they want to believe it is true. It is not.
Similarly – and, I would have thought, obviously – China is also not 'increasingly
regarded as an international pariah'. That's another place she's thinking
of.
There is nothing Russia or China could do to please the United States and its increasingly
lunatic governing administration, short of plucking out its eye and offering it for a bauble,
like Benton Wolf in The Age of Miracles. The type of 'reforms' demanded by the US State
Department suggest its current state is delusion, since they are patently designed to weaken
the government and empower dissident groups – is that the essence of democracy? It sure
as fuck is not. You can kind of tell by the way Washington pounces on its own dissident groups
like Mike Pompeo on a jelly roll; the FBI investigated
the Occupy Wall Street movement as a terrorist threat. Russia got a prescient preview of
the kind of treatment it could expect from the west when it applied to join NATO, as I
mentioned at the beginning of this post. The acceptance of the Soviet Union "would be
incompatible with its democratic and defensive aims."
So as most ordinary thinkers could have told you would happen, America's
hold-my-beer-and-watch-this hillbilly moves to split Russia and China apart have succeeded in
driving them closer together; the world's manufacturing and commercial giant and a major energy
producer – a great mix, unless you are the enemy. The rest of the world is kind of
watching America with its pants around its ankles, wondering what it will do next. It failed to
wreck the Russian economy, failed to depose and replace Bashar al-Assad in Syria, failed to
depose and replace Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and it will fail to prevent a Sino-Russian axis
which will reshape global trade to its own advantage at the expense of America. Because
whenever it has an opportunity to seize upon a lucid moment, to turn away from its destructive
course, it chooses instead to bullshit itself some more. To whisper what it wishes were true
into its own ear.
HK article gets at the nascent conflicting conflagrations wrt objectives .what is to be cast
into the fire and what is to be taken as a new HK socioeconomic script.
The comments are **well worth** reading ,some of which mirror comments on HK by Stooges. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/09/pers-s09.html
If Carrie Lam had half a brain, she could always threaten to bring back the extradition bill
with a new provision that people who damage essential infrastructure like railway lines and
roads, and who target police with rocks, laser beams and grenades shot from portable grenade
launchers will be extradited to Beijing to stand trial for their misdeeds, if the protesters
keep changing and ramping up their demands.
Carrie Lam chose to play it like Yanukovych, and to give the protesters what they asked for.
That resulted in Yanukovych running for his life, and Lam might well find herself in the same
situation if the police don't get a handle on the hoodlums that are smashing the place up and
hurling stones and Molotov cocktails. Appeasing protesters only makes them feel empowered,
and that empowerment causes them to wonder why they should be satisfied with only what they
originally demanded. That's a natural effect, and this is not a natural protest, but a
destabilization effort instigated and nurtured by foreign interests. So the protesters'
demands are just going to grow and grow, because the goal is either a violent clash with the
police or complete government capitulation. China is not going to let the latter happen.
Lam has said already that there will be no negotiation with groups that destroy public
property, but protesters have vowed not to give an inch. The ball is in Lam's court, and if
she does not harden up and present a credible defense, she will be removed either by China or
by the protesters. Hong Kong is not going to become a democratic independent country –
China is not going to let it be snatched away under their noses. Firm action right now might
be able to get the situation under control with a minimum of violence, but if it goes on much
longer, people are going to be killed And there is zero the west could do to stop it, as it
is a domestic Chinese matter, so their continued egging on of the protesters shows how little
it cares for their lives.
WSWS,org's reporting on the Hong Kong protests has been dismal and ideologically biased. To
my knowledge, the protesters' demands have never covered working conditions, housing
conditions and the tremendous social inequalities (said to be the highest in the world). They
have never covered the state of a tax haven economy used and abused by billionaires in
mainland China to minimise their tax obligations to Beijing or to send money to other
overseas tax havens through registering their offspring or other people as Hong Kong
residents, resulting in money being poured into property speculation which itself has led to
sky-high property prices and the inability of ordinary people to afford to buy or rent homes
of a suitable space at reasonable prices.
The protesters' initial demands were to withdraw the extradition bill, to force Carrie Lam
to resign as Chief Executive and to force her government to investigate what they claimed was
police violence – in spite of the fact that most of the violence and sabotage (which
has now extended to fighting with commuters and throwing things at them, vandalising MTR
stations and throwing rocks and objects onto train lines) has been committed by protesters
themselves – and (as if as a last thought) demanding universal suffrage.
Full 10-minute video of middle-aged and elderly commuters fighting with protesters, the
incident that led to the Prince Edward MTR station staff calling in police over the August /
September weekend to subdue and arrest protesters, some of whom attempted to evade arrest by
changing clothes:
Yes You are correct in that wsws appears to be not on its game in its analysis of the HK
situation,as was noted in some of the comments to the article. Addressing fundamental
economic disparities in HK does not seem to feature in the agenda of the protesters.
Can't wait to see the Chinese headline: "Safe in Hong Kong, Chinese Accused Murderer Wei Tu
Lukky says, 'Thanks for the Democracy, Students!" Of course you'll never see it, because no
western paper would ever print it. As far as the west is concerned, it really is all about
freedom and democracy. Like no such things as extradition treaties exist between democracies.
Canada and the United States have an extradition treaty – aren't they democracies?
Aren't they free?
What it boils down to is that westerners like Bill Browder do not want to be snatched when
they are passing through Hong Kong International Airport, and extradited to China. Westerners
do not particularly care otherwise about the rule of law in China, but the usual
troublemakers sense an opportunity to destabilize and create a problem for China. If China
soft-pedals it, as they have done, it quickly gets out of hand to the point where they are
dealing with rioters rather than protesters, smashing and destroying in an orgy of violence.
Had they cracked down hard in the beginning and kicked out all western journalists reporting
on the issue, the 'protests' would have been strangled in the cradle, and while the west
would have gotten a little mileage out of the brutal Chinese authoritarianism, it would have
been nowhere near as bad as it is now.
The 'student leaders' of the 'protests', Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, are 22. I suppose
there might be a place somewhere in which 22-year-olds don't feel like they know everything,
but I've never heard of it. With political unit chief of the US Consulate Julie Eadeh
stroking them and telling them she's never seen anyone so brave, they can barely keep the
grins off their faces and fancy they really are somebody important. Lam did indeed flip on
the extradition issue, but it's too late for that now. She is going to learn the Yanukovych
lesson all over again – appeasing protesters, especially when it is part of a
destabilization program, only leads to more demands and more protests.
The Chinese government perhaps thought to go slow and not give the western media any money
shots to make a big issue of. That might have worked, if this was a genuine one-issue
protest. But it isn't – as i just pointed out, extradition treaties have nothing to do
with democracy and freedom, and if a bunch of students think they are going to have their own
country to play Independence Doctor in, they have a big surprise coming. Remember when
Poroshenko was justified in doing whatever he wanted, including taking students right out of
the university parking lot and putting them on a bus to Army training, because he was
'protecting his country'? Well, the Chinese government sees itself as having the same rights
where a small group of students is causing a major problem, and is blatantly violating public
order in an attempt to win western approbation; it is plainly not legal to throw stones and
gas bombs at the police and smash up public infrastructure.
You can't give people whatever they want when they are acting like hooligans – it
only makes them think of more things they want. And that's just what is happening here. If
they are not very careful, the entire Lam government is going to be replaced overnight with
hardliners, and then heads will roll.
Withdrawing the extradition bill is an easy move because Lam can always reintroduce it later
(perhaps in a changed form) though perhaps when that happens, the guy who killed his pregnant
girlfriend in Taiwan on St Valentine's Day in 2018, and used all her bank cards to clear his
own debts will have already gone free and for all we know have left Hong Kong.
Also by withdrawing the bill, Lam takes some of the wind out of the sails of the protest
movement. If the protesters are not happy over the withdrawal and ratchet up their demands
that Lam and her entire government resign, then Beijing knows this is a Color Revolution
protest movement and might start to press Hong Kong to expel British and American consular
staff stationed in the territory and shut down British and American NGOs and think-tanks
using whatever the laws of Hong Kong permit Lam to use against them. Lam may not be able to
stop the protests from escalating but she can slow them down by cutting off their funding,
advice and support.
Yes, it's curious that western governments are justified in using whatever force they feel is
necessary to put down anti-government protests, or just to keep order in general –
reports abound of ordinary people not doing anything wrong meeting up with a mean cop who
decides to slam them around a little in the process of establishing their identity, and the
aversion of the American police to bystanders filming them is well-known. But in certain
countries – and sometimes just certain governments in those countries – dispersal
of protesters or those posing as peaceful protesters is always 'brutal'. So it is in Hong
Kong, where 'pro-democracy protesters' – which is a label used to justify pretty much
any behavior – throw stones and gas bombs at police and destroy public property
(rioting by another, more palatable name). Nothing Saakashvili did to put down protests was
ever described by western media as 'brutal' in my recollection.
One reaction Americans are unaccustomed to is pity. When I meet them on the boats, traveling,
I am always extra nice to them, because I feel sorry for them. They have to go back. They're
nice people, mostly, they've never done anything to me personally. But sooner or later, they
have to go back to where those license plates were issued. They can't stay here. And I'm
sorry for them. But I would imagine most of them feel they are envied, and their citizenship
is coveted by the less-fortunate. That might be true in some third-world hellholes where
people would go anywhere to get out, but it certainly isn't so here.
The stars-and-stripes-wavers you meet in comment forums are usually blissfully ignorant,
happy in their fool's paradise where everyone wants to be an American, and resistance to
Uncle Sam's ruthless bullying is inspired by jealousy and inadequacy. For them, simply
acknowledging that Washington sometimes makes mistakes – which it's allowed to do,
because it's exceptional – is the essence of responsibility and fairness. There, I said
we aren't always right – what could be more fair? But when America invades a country
that did nothing to provoke it except refuse when it was ordered to do this or that,
sometimes things it couldn't do, like abandon the nuclear weapons program it didn't have
well, that was a mistake, but it was an honest mistake because no end of smart people the
world over agreed they did indeed have a nuclear weapons program. I mean, if you don't do
something quick, the consequences could be a mushroom cloud, ya know. And when it orders the
democratically-elected president of a country to stand down and make way for a hand-picked
replacement, it's not being arrogant. No; it's taking necessary on behalf of that leader's
benighted people, who suffer awful oppression at his hands, and America only wants them to be
free to make good choices.
A lot of those comments go unanswered; some because many of those forums now insist you
sign in with Facebook so they can go behind the scenes and see who and where you are and gain
all sorts of personal information about you, because dimwits love to blabber their entire
personal lives on Facebook. But some go unanswered simply because there is no real use in
trying to change such made-up minds. You will never dent the my-country-right-or-wrong
blathering of ignorant people who know nothing beyond what they see on CNN.
David Warner Mathisen definitely know what he is talking about due to his long military career... Freefall speed
is documented and is an embarrassment to the official story, because freefall is impossible for a naturally
collapsing building.
Now we need to dig into the role of Larry Silverstein in the
Building 7 collapse.
Notable quotes:
"... Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001. ..."
"... The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative" promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004. ..."
"... Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7 ..."
"... This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001. ..."
"... its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview. ..."
"... the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building ..."
"... Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states). ..."
"... Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day. ..."
"... In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled " Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative? " which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019. ..."
"... on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. ..."
"... Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here . ..."
"... The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare: ..."
"... David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University. ..."
Below is a video showing several film sequences
taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen
years ago on September 11, 2001.
The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative"
promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004.
Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska
published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by any airplane
on September 11, 2001, and concluded that fires could not possibly have caused the collapse of that 47-story steel-frame building
-- rather, the collapse seen could have only been caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every support column (43 in number).
This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue
to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001.
Various individuals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to argue that the collapse of Building
7 was slower than freefall speed, but its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed,
as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an
interview
here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview.
Although the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all
the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to
prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building prior to the flight of the aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center (Buildings One and Two), as well as the power to cover up the evidence of this criminal activity and to deflect questioning
by government agencies and suppress the story in the mainstream news, the collapse of Building 7 is by no means the only evidence
which points to the same conclusion.
Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly
during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting
the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states).
However, eighteen years later there is simply no excuse anymore -- except for the fact that the ramifications of the admission
that the official story is a flagrant fraud and a lie are so distressing that many people cannot actually bring themselves to consciously
admit what they in fact already know subconsciously.
For additional evidence, I strongly recommend the work of the indefatigable Kevin Robert Ryan , whose blog at Dig Within should be required reading for every man and woman in the united
states -- as well as those in the rest of the world, since the ramifications of the murders of innocent men, women and children on
September 11, 2001 have led to the murders of literally millions of other innocent men, women and children around the world since
that day, and the consequences of the failure to absorb the truth of what actually took place, and the consequences of the
failure to address the lies that are built upon the fraudulent explanation of what took place on September 11, continue to
negatively impact men and women everywhere on our planet.
Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan
but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters
to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a
jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless
the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day.
I would also strongly recommend listening very carefully to the series of five interviews with Kevin Ryan on Guns and Butter with Bonnie Faulkner, which can be found in the
Guns and Butterpodcast archive here . These interviews,
from 2013, are numbered 287, 288, 289, 290, and 291 in the archive.
I would in fact recommend listening to nearly every interview in that archive of Bonnie Faulkner's show, even though I do not
of course agree with every single guest nor with every single view expressed in every single interview. Indeed, if you carefully
read Kevin Ryan's blog which was linked above, you will find a
blog post by Kevin Ryan dated June 24, 2018 in which he
explicitly names James Fetzer along with Judy Woods as likely disinformation agents working to discredit and divert the efforts of
9/11 researchers. James Fetzer appears on Guns and Butter several times in the archived interview page linked above.
That article contains a number of stunning quotations about the ongoing failure to address the now-obvious lies we are being told
about the attacks of September 11. One of these quotations, by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996), is particularly noteworthy --
even though I certainly do not agree with everything Carl Sagan ever said or wrote. Regarding our propensity to refuse to acknowledge
what we already know deep down to be true, Carl Sagan said:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even
to ourselves, that we've been taken.
This quotation is from Sagan's 1995 text, The Demon-Haunted World (with which I have points of disagreement, but which
is extremely valuable for that quotation alone, and which I might suggest turning around on some of the points that Sagan was arguing
as well, as a cautionary warning to those who have accepted too wholeheartedly some of Sagan's teachings and opinions).
This quotation shows that on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept
what we already know. This internal division is actually addressed in the world's ancient myths, which consistently illustrate that
our egoic mind often refuses to acknowledge the higher wisdom we have available to us through the reality of our authentic self,
sometimes called our Higher Self. Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character
of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see
here for example,
and also here .
The important author Peter Kingsley has noted that in ancient myth, the role of the prophet was to bring awareness and acknowledgement
of that which the egoic mind refuses to see -- which is consistent with the observation that it is through our authentic self (which
already knows) that we have access to the realm of the gods. In the Iliad, for example, Dr. Kingsley notes that Apollo sends disaster
upon the Achaean forces until the prophet Calchas reveals the source of the god's anger: Agamemnon's refusal to free the young woman
Chryseis, whom Agamemnon has seized in the course of the fighting during the Trojan War, and who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo.
Until Agamemnon atones for this insult to the god, Apollo will continue to visit destruction upon those following Agamemnon.
Until we acknowledge and correct what our Higher Self already knows to be the problem, we ourselves will be out of step with the
divine realm.
If we look the other way at the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001, and deliberately
refuse to see the truth that we already know deep down in our subconscious, then we will face the displeasure of the Invisible Realm.
Just as we are shown in the ancient myths, the truth must be acknowledged and admitted, and then the wrong that has been done must
be corrected.
In the case of the mass murder perpetrated on September 11, eighteen years ago, that admission requires us to face the fact that
the "terrorists" who were blamed for that attack were not the actual terrorists that we need to be focusing on.
Please note that I am very careful not to say that "the government" is the source of the problem: I would argue that the government
is the lawful expression of the will of the people and that the government, rightly understood, is exactly what these criminal perpetrators
actually fear the most, if the people ever become aware of what is going on. The government, which is established by the Constitution,
forbids the perpetration of murder upon innocent men, women and children in order to initiate wars of aggression against countries
that never invaded or attacked us (under the false pretense that they did so). Those who do so are actually opposed to our government
under the Constitution and can be dealt with within the framework of the law as established by the Constitution, which establishes
a very clear penalty for treason.
When the people acknowledge and admit the complete bankruptcy of the lie we have been told about the attacks of September 11,
the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate repeal and dismantling of the so-called "USA PATRIOT Act" which was
enacted in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001 and which clearly violates the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Additionally, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate cessation of the military operations which were
initiated based upon the fraudulent narrative of the attacks of that day, and which have led to invasion and overthrow of the nations
that were falsely blamed as being the perpetrators of those attacks and the seizure of their natural resources.
The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent
pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media
for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing
the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That human right has been grievously trampled upon under the false description of what actually took place during the September
11 attacks. Numerous technology companies have been allowed and even encouraged (and paid, with public moneys) to create technologies
which flagrantly and shamelessly violate "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" and
which track their every move and even enable secret eavesdropping upon their conversation and the secret capture of video within
their homes and private settings, without any probable cause whatsoever.
When we admit and acknowledge that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, which has been falsely used as a supposed
justification for the violation of these human rights (with complete disregard for the supreme law of the land as established in
the Constitution), then we will also demand the immediate cessation of any such intrusion upon the right of the people to "be secure
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" -- including the cessation of any business models which involve spying on men and
women.
Companies which cannot find a business model that does not violate the Bill of Rights should lose their corporate charter and
the privilege of limited liability, which are extended to them by the people (through the government of the people, by the people
and for the people) only upon the condition that their behavior as corporations do not violate the inherent rights of men and women
as acknowledged in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
It is well beyond the time when we must acknowledge and admit that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, 2001
-- and that we continue to be lied to about the events of that awful day. September 11, 2001 is in fact only one such event in a
long history which stretches back prior to 2001, to other events which should have awakened the people to the presence of a very
powerful and very dangerous criminal cabal acting in direct contravention to the Constitution long before we ever got to 2001 --
but the events of September 11 are so blatant, so violent, and so full of evidence which contradicts the fraudulent narrative that
they actually cannot be believed by anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time looking at that evidence.
Indeed, we already know deep down that we have been bamboozled by the lie of the so-called "official narrative" of September 11.
But until we admit to ourselves and acknowledge to others that we've ignored the truth that we already know, then the bamboozle
still has us .
*
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David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne
Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster
Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature
and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.
David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne
Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster
Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature
and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.
This is a bit like rearranging the chairs on the deck of Titanic.
The problem is we do not know who pressed Trump to appoint Bolton., Rumors were that it was Abelson. In this case nothing
changed.
The other problem with making Bolton firing a significant move is the presence in White House other neocon warmongers. So one
less doe not change the picture. For example Pompeo remains and he is no less warmongering neocon, MIC stooge, and no less
subservant to Israel then Bolton.
Notable quotes:
"... Firing National Security Advisor John Bolton gives US President Donald Trump a chance to move foreign policy in a more peaceful direction – as long as he's not replaced with another hawk, former congressman Ron Paul told RT ..."
"... Bolton has "been a monkey-wrench in Donald Trump's policies of trying to back away from some of these conflicts around the world," Paul observed on Tuesday ..."
"... "Every time I think Trump is making progress, Bolton butts in and ruins it," Paul added. Negotiations with Afghanistan and talks with North Korea and Iran have reportedly been scuttled by his aggressive tendencies, with Pyongyang declaring him a "defective human product." ..."
"... "A lot of people here didn't even want his appointment, because he was only able to take a position that did not require Senate approval," Paul said, suggesting that perhaps the "Deep State" pressure had forced the president to keep Bolton around long past his sell-by date. ..."
"... As for whether Bolton's departure would change the White House's policy line significantly, though, Paul was less certain. "I don't think it will change a whole lot," he said, pointing out that "we have no idea" who will replace Bolton. Trump said he would make an announcement next week. ..."
Firing National Security Advisor John Bolton gives US President Donald Trump a chance to
move foreign policy in a more peaceful direction – as long as he's not replaced with
another hawk, former congressman Ron Paul told RT.
Bolton has "been a monkey-wrench in Donald Trump's policies of trying to back away from some
of these conflicts around the world," Paul observed on Tuesday, after news of Bolton's
dismissal from the White House.
Also on rt.com Bolton out: Trump ditches hawkish adviser he kept for 18 months despite
'disagreements'
"Every time I think Trump is making progress, Bolton butts in and ruins it," Paul added.
Negotiations with Afghanistan and talks with North Korea and Iran have reportedly been scuttled
by his aggressive tendencies, with Pyongyang declaring him a "defective human product."
Foreign leaders weren't the only ones who had a problem with Trump's notoriously belligerent
advisor, either.
"A lot of people here didn't even want his appointment, because he was only able to take a
position that did not require Senate approval," Paul said, suggesting that perhaps the "Deep
State" pressure had forced the president to keep Bolton around long past his sell-by date.
While the uber-hawk's firing came "later than it should be," Paul hoped it would clear the
way for Trump to follow through on the America First, end-the-wars promises that won him so
much support in 2016. "Those of us who would like less intervention, we're very happy with
it."
Also on rt.com War and whiskers: Freshly-resigned John Bolton gets meme-roasting
As for whether Bolton's departure would change the White House's policy line
significantly, though, Paul was less certain. "I don't think it will change a whole lot," he
said, pointing out that "we have no idea" who will replace Bolton. Trump said he would make an
announcement next week.
"... However satisfying it may be to see him leave, whoever is picked to succeed him may not be much of an improvement. No one should cheer the chaotic and dysfunctional nature of this administration. Its boss revels in divisions and factionalism among his staff, which allows him to continue governing by his whims, kneejerk reactions and vanity. ..."
"... It is more likely that he was fired because he dented his boss's ego than because his advice was so bad: Mr Trump liked Mr Bolton's bellicose style when he saw it on Fox News, not when it clashed with his own intentions. ..."
"... The national security adviser may have been the most ferocious of the voices urging Mr Trump to turn up the pressure on Iran, but he was certainly not alone . Mr Bolton's presence in the White House was frightening. But its continued occupation by the man who hired him is much more so. ..."
"... As far as Pompeo's "moderation" goes, don't expect anything moderate. But general mailiciousness and opportunism aside, as an evangelical he'll certainly get along perfectly with Pence. ..."
The Guardian view on John Bolton: good riddance, but the problem is his
boss
Many will rightly celebrate the departure of the US national security adviser. But
however welcome the news, it reflects the deeper problems with this administration
...
However satisfying it may be to see him leave, whoever is picked to succeed him may not be
much of an improvement. No one should cheer the chaotic and dysfunctional nature of this
administration. Its boss revels in divisions and factionalism among his staff, which allows
him to continue governing by his whims, kneejerk reactions and vanity.
It is neither normal nor desirable for the national security adviser to be excluded
from meetings about Afghanistan – even if it is a relief, when the individual concerned
is (or was) Mr Bolton. It is more likely that he was fired because he dented his boss's ego
than because his advice was so bad: Mr Trump liked Mr Bolton's bellicose style when he saw it
on Fox News, not when it clashed with his own intentions.
The national security adviser may have been the most ferocious of the voices urging
Mr Trump to turn up the pressure on Iran, but he was certainly not alone . Mr Bolton's
presence in the White House was frightening. But its continued occupation by the man who
hired him is much more so.
I read that the main drivers of getting him kicked or retire himself were Mnuchin and
Pompeo, both afflicted by that nasty goofy smile disease. I am always happy when I see
Mnuchin's hands on the table, eliminating one explanation for the smile.
There is that reported sentence about Bolton - that there is no problem for which war was
not his solution. I read about similar sentence about Pompeo - that he has an IR seeker for
Donald's ass.
That written, good riddance indeed. Likely, if Bolton had his way, the US would likely be
at war with North Korea and Iran.
When I studied I was at the UNFCCC for a time during Bush Jr. presidency and talked about
what Bolton did at the UN with my superior, a 20 year UN veteran.
A 'malicious saboteur arsonist' is a polite summary of what he did there directly and
indirectly, and with given his flirt with MEK and regime change in Iran he has likely not
changed at all.
As far as Pompeo's "moderation" goes, don't expect anything moderate. But general
mailiciousness and opportunism aside, as an evangelical he'll certainly get along perfectly
with Pence.
I don't usually find much value at the Atlantic but this article (written before Trump even
fired Bolton) about Trump's FP timeline (and flip flops) and Bolton who was acting like he
was President is very, very good.
It will allow Trump loyalist to more easily support Trump and give everyone else a tad bit of
hope that Trump really won't go bonkers and start any wars.
Since President Trump appears to talk about things and stuff with Tucker Carlson, perhaps he
should ask Tucker Carlson to spend a week thinking . . . and then offer the President some
names and the reasoning for offering those names.
If the President asks the same Establishment who gave him Bolton, he will just be handed
another Bolton. "Establishment" include Pence, who certainly supported Bolton's outlook on
things and would certainly recommend another "Bolton" figure if asked. Let us hope Pence is
not consulted on Bolton's successor.
different clue,
re "Let us hope Pence is not consulted on Bolton's successor."
Understandable point of view but then, Trump still is Trump. He can just by himself and
beyond advice easily find suboptimal solutions of his own.
Today I read that Richard Grenell was mentioned as a potential sucessor.
As far as that goes, go for it. Many people here will be happy when he "who always only
sais what the Whitehouse sais" is finally gone.
And with Trump's biggest military budget in the world he can just continue the arms sale
pitches that are and were such a substantial part of his job as a US ambassador in
Germany.
That said, they were that after blathering a lot about that we should increase our
military budget by 2%, 4%, 6% or 10%, buy US arms, now, and of course the blathering about
Northstream 1 & 2 and "slavedom to russian oil & gas" and rather buy US frack gas of
course.
He could then also take a side job for the fracking industry in that context. And buy
frack gas and arms company stocks. Opportunities, opportunities ...
If you think that Russia or China or Iran takes this clown show seriously or trusts in
word one Washington will follow through on what they say i have a bridge to sell you.
even during Obama's second term it was clear Putin and his staff did not trust the Obama
administration to tell the truth about the weather let alone anything important.
to get anything done now with Russia or China or Iran i suspect its become impossible. all
that's left between Washington, Moscow and Beijing is to avoid a nuclear ww3.
we have an impasse which is impossible to bridge. Russia and China are creating a new
world order for those that become a part that's philosophically, morally and economically
incompatible with the one Washington and its European vassals are trying to sustain.
only one winner will emerge from the struggle and i do not mean war although that is not
impossible once one side reaches denouement point of economic degradation.
Its said a reputation arrives on foot and departs on horseback and with ours all you
can see now is the tail wafting the air.
September
11, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. Note that for all
of Trump's considerable faults, including hiring John Bolton in the first place and taking too
long to get rid of him, Bolton's opposition to finding a way for the US to extricate itself
from the war in Afghanistan was reportedly the last straw.
When the conflict that the Vietnamese refer to as the American War ended in April 1975, I
was a U.S. Army captain attending a course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In those days, the student
body at any of our Army's myriad schools typically included officers from the Army of the
Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).
Since ARVN's founding two decades earlier, the United States had assigned itself the task of
professionalizing that fledgling military establishment. Based on a conviction that the
standards, methods, and ethos of our armed forces were universally applicable and readily
exportable, the attendance of ARVN personnel at such Army schools was believed to contribute to
the professionalizing of the South Vietnamese military.
Evidence that the U.S. military's own professional standards had recently taken a hit --
memories of the
My Lai massacre were then still fresh -- elicited no second thoughts on our part.
Association with American officers like me was sure to rub off on our South Vietnamese
counterparts in ways that would make them better soldiers. So we professed to believe, even
while subjecting that claim to no more scrutiny than we did the question of why most of us had
spent a year or more of our lives participating in an obviously misbegotten and misguided war
in Indochina.
For serving officers at that time one question in particular remained off-limits (though it
had been posed incessantly for years by antiwar protestors in the streets of America): Why
Vietnam? Prizing compliance as a precondition for upward mobility, military service rarely
encourages critical thinking.
On the day that Saigon, the capital of the Republic of Vietnam, fell and that country ceased
to exist, I approached one of my ARVN classmates, also a captain, wanting at least to
acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster that had occurred. "I'm sorry about what happened to
your country," I told him.
I did not know that officer well and no longer recall his name. Let's call him Captain
Nguyen. In my dim recollection, he didn't even bother to reply. He simply looked at me with an
expression both distressed and mournful. Our encounter lasted no more than a handful of
seconds. I then went on with my life and Captain Nguyen presumably with his. Although I have no
inkling of his fate, I like to think that he is now retired in Southern California after a
successful career in real estate. But who knows?
All I do know is that today I recall our exchange with a profound sense of embarrassment and
even shame. My pathetic effort to console Captain Nguyen had been both presumptuous and
inadequate. Far worse was my failure -- inability? refusal? -- to acknowledge the context
within which that catastrophe was occurring: the United States and its armed forces had, over
years, inflicted horrendous harm on the people of South Vietnam.
In reality, their defeat was our defeat. Yet while we had decided that we were done paying,
they were going to pay and pay for a long time to come.
Rather than offering a fatuous expression of regret for the collapse of his country, I ought
to have apologized for having played even a miniscule role in what was, by any measure, a
catastrophe of epic proportions. It's a wonder Captain Nguyen didn't spit in my eye.
I genuinely empathized with Captain Nguyen. Yet the truth is that, along with most other
Americans, soldiers and civilians alike, I was only too happy to be done with South Vietnam and
all its troubles. Dating back to the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the United States and
its armed forces had made a gargantuan effort to impart legitimacy to the Republic of Vietnam
and to coerce the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to its north into giving up its determination
to exercise sovereignty over the entirety of the country. In that, we had failed spectacularly
and at a staggering cost.
"Our" war in Indochina -- the conflict we chose to call the Vietnam War -- officially ended
in January 1973 with the signing in Paris of an "Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace
in Vietnam." Under the terms of that fraudulent pact, American prisoners of war were freed from
captivity in North Vietnam and the last U.S. combat troops in the south left for home,
completing a withdrawal begun several years earlier. Primary responsibility for securing the
Republic of Vietnam thereby fell to ARVN, long deemed by U.S. commanders incapable of
accomplishing that mission.
Meanwhile, despite a nominal cessation of hostilities, approximately 150,000 North
Vietnamese regulars still occupied a large swathe of South Vietnamese territory -- more or less
the equivalent to agreeing to end World War II when there were still several German panzer tank
divisions lurking in Belgium's Ardennes Forest. In effect, our message to our enemy and
our ally was this: We're outta here; you guys sort this out . In a bit more than two
years, that sorting-out process would extinguish the Republic of Vietnam.
Been There, Done That
The course Captain Nguyen and I were attending in the spring of 1975 paid little attention
to fighting wars like the one that, for years, had occupied the attention of my army and his.
Our Army, in fact, was already moving on. Having had their fill of triple-canopy jungles in
Indochina, America's officer corps now turned to defending the Fulda Gap, the region in West
Germany deemed most hospitable to a future Soviet invasion. As if by fiat, gearing up to fight
those Soviet forces and their Warsaw Pact allies, should they (however improbably) decide to
take on NATO and lunge toward the English Channel, suddenly emerged as priority number one. At
Fort Knox and throughout the Army's ranks, we were suddenly focused on "high-intensity combined
arms operations" -- essentially, a replay of World War II-style combat with fancier weaponry.
In short, the armed forces of the United States had reverted to "real soldiering."
And so it is again today. At the end of the 17th year of what Americans commonly call the
Afghanistan War -- one wonders what name Afghans will eventually assign it -- U.S. military
forces are moving on. Pentagon planners are
shifting their attention back to Russia and China. Great power competition has become the
name of the game. However we might define Washington's evolving purposes in its Afghanistan War
-- "nation building," "democratization," "pacification" -- the likelihood of mission
accomplishment is nil. As in the early 1970s, so in 2019, rather than admitting failure, the
Pentagon has chosen to change the subject and is once again turning its attention to "real
soldiering."
Remember the infatuation with counterinsurgency (commonly known by its acronym COIN) that
gripped the national security establishment around 2007 when the Iraq "surge" overseen by
General David Petraeus briefly ranked alongside Gettysburg as a historic victory? Well, these
days promoting COIN as the new American way of war has become, to put it mildly, a tough sell.
Given that few in Washington will openly acknowledge the magnitude of the military failure in
Afghanistan, the incentive for identifying new enemies in settings deemed more congenial
becomes all but irresistible.
Only one thing is required to validate this reshuffling of military priorities. Washington
needs to create the appearance, as in 1973, that it's exiting Afghanistan on its own terms.
What's needed, in short, is an updated equivalent of that "Agreement Ending the War and
Restoring Peace in Vietnam."
Until last weekend, the signing of such an agreement seemed imminent. Donald Trump and his
envoy,
former ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, appeared poised to repeat the trick that
President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger pulled off in 1973 in
Paris: pause the war and call it peace. Should fighting subsequently resume after a "decent
interval," it would no longer be America's problem. Now, however, to judge by the president's
twitter
account -- currently the authoritative record of U.S. diplomacy -- the proposed deal has
been postponed, or perhaps shelved, or even abandoned altogether. If National Security Advisor
John Bolton
has his way , U.S. forces might just withdraw in any case, without an agreement of any sort
being signed.
Based on what we can divine from press reports, the
terms of that prospective Afghan deal would mirror those of the 1973 Paris Accords in one
important respect. It would, in effect, serve as a ticket home for the remaining U.S. and NATO
troops still in that country (though for the present
only the first 5,000 of them would immediately depart). Beyond that, the Taliban was to
promise not to provide sanctuary to anti-American terrorist groups, even though the Afghan
branch of ISIS is already
firmly lodged there. Still, this proviso would allow the Trump administration to claim that
it had averted any possible recurrence of the 9/11 terror attacks that were, of course, planned
by Osama bin Laden while residing in Afghanistan in 2001 as a guest of the Taliban-controlled
government.
Mission accomplished , as it were.
Back in 1973, North Vietnamese forces occupying parts of South Vietnam neither disarmed nor
withdrew. Should this new agreement be finalized, Taliban forces currently controlling or
influencing significant
swaths of Afghan territory will neither disarm nor withdraw. Indeed, their
declared intention is to continue fighting.
In 1973, policymakers in Washington were counting on ARVN to hold off Communist forces. In
2019, almost no one expects Afghan security forces to hold off a threat consisting of both the
Taliban and ISIS. In a final insult, just as the Saigon government was excluded from U.S.
negotiations with the North Vietnamese, so, too, has the Western-installed government in Kabul
been excluded from U.S. negotiations with its sworn enemy, the Taliban.
A host of uncertainties remain. As with the olive branches that President Trump has
ostentatiously offered to Russia, China, and North Koea, this particular peace initiative may
come to naught -- or, given the approach of the 2020 elections, he may decide that Afghanistan
offers his last best hope of claiming at least one foreign policy success. One way or another,
in all likelihood, the deathwatch for the U.S.-backed Afghan government has now begun. One
thing only is for sure. Having had their fill of Afghanistan, when the Americans finally leave,
they won't look back. In that sense, it will be Vietnam all over again.
What Price Peace?
However great my distaste for President Trump, I support his administration's efforts to
extricate the United States from Afghanistan. I do so for the same reason I supported the Paris
Peace Accords of 1973. Prolonging this folly any longer does not serve U.S. interests. Rule
number one of statecraft ought to be: when you're doing something really stupid, stop. To my
mind, this rule seems especially applicable when the lives of American soldiers are at
stake.
In Vietnam, Washington wasted 58,000 of those lives for nothing. In Afghanistan, we have
lost more than 2,300
troops , with another 20,000 wounded, again for next to nothing. Last month, two American
Special Forces soldiers were killed in a
firefight in Faryab Province. For what?
That said, I'm painfully aware of the fact that, on the long-ago day when I offered Captain
Nguyen my feeble condolences, I lacked the imagination to conceive of the trials about to
befall his countrymen. In the aftermath of the American War, something on the order of
800,000
Vietnamese took to open and unseaworthy boats to flee their country. According to estimates
by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000 boat people
died at sea. Most of those who survived were destined to spend years in squalid refugee camps
scattered throughout Southeast Asia. Back in Vietnam itself, some 300,000 former ARVN officers
and South Vietnamese officials were imprisoned in so-called reeducation camps for up to 18
years. Reconciliation did not rank high on the postwar agenda of the unified country's new
leaders.
Meanwhile, for the Vietnamese, north and south, the American War has in certain ways only
continued. Mines and unexploded ordnance left from that war have inflicted more than 100,000
casualties since the last American troops departed. Even today, the toll caused by Agent
Orange and other herbicides that the U.S. Air Force sprayed with abandon over vast stretches of
territory continues to mount. The Red Cross calculates that more than one million Vietnamese have suffered
health problems, including serious birth defects and cancers as a direct consequence of the
promiscuous use of those poisons as weapons of war.
For anyone caring to calculate the moral responsibility of the United States for its actions
in Vietnam, all of those would have to find a place on the final balance sheet. The 1.3 million
Vietnamese admitted to the United States as immigrants since the American War formally
concluded can hardly be said to make up for the immense damage suffered by the people of
Vietnam as a direct or indirect result of U.S. policy.
As to what will follow if Washington does succeed in cutting a deal with the Taliban, well,
don't count on President Trump (or his successor for that matter) welcoming anything like 1.3
million Afghan refugees to the United States once a "decent interval" has passed. Yet again,
our position will be: we're outta here; you guys sort this out.
Near the end of his famed novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described two
of his privileged characters, Tom and Daisy, as "careless people" who "smashed up things and
creatures" and then "retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness" to "let other
people clean up the mess they had made." That description applies to the United States as a
whole, especially when Americans tire of a misguided war. We are a careless people. In Vietnam,
we smashed up things and human beings with abandon, only to retreat into our money, leaving
others to clean up the mess in a distinctly bloody fashion.
Count on us, probably sooner rather than later, doing precisely the same thing in
Afghanistan.
Bacevich is right. Vietnam was a tragedy. Here we are at Ground Hog Day in
Afghanistan.
I was touched by the author's recollection of Capt Nguyen. I well know that awful moment
when , reflecting on some past event, I have recognised my own actions as insensitive, crass
and unfeeling. How do we get so wrapped-up in ourselves that the feelings of others hardly
impinge on our sensitivities? What happened to society? Is that where the West has gone
wrong?
Btw, quote "to judge by the president's twitter account -- currently the authoritative
record of U.S. diplomacy" unquote. I hope those owning the Twitter Nest note the future use
of their archive.
Andrew Bacevich is right. However, there is an amazing human disinclination to face facts
but live with delusions which risk extinction for immediate gratification. The lessons from
Vietnam were never learned. The Bush/Cheney fateful decision to occupy Afghanistan at the
same time as invading Iraq ultimately led to the current predatory corporate military rule
that will never voluntarily withdraw from overseas. The intent of the media/intelligence coup
against the President is to prevent peace from breaking out. Executives and wealthy
shareholders would lose their taxpayer gravy train. The troops and contractors now in Eastern
Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are expendable. They will not have two years to get out. No
planning, deep-sixing science, and profits over safety all assure that sooner or later there
will be another black swan event. Be it Brexit, closure of Strait of Hormuz, subprime auto
loans, WWIII, or climate change, assuredly something will give the final push and the
American Empire will collapse.
"Après moi, le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every
capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer,
unless under compulsion from society."
Prof. Bacevich is very perceptive and he writes well; his essays are always worth reading.
Nevertheless, he is a retired US Army officer after all and there is that thing about
leopards and spots. There is a tell in this article, when he speaks of the day that Saigon
'fell'. I too remember well that day in April of '75. I was studying in Madison, on the GI
Bill. My friends and I all rejoiced on that day, as Saigon had finally been 'liberated'.
Why rejoice? The point should be that the US had no business in Vietnam, not that one
group finally succeeded in uniting the country under the rule of one dictatorial party. Not
all Vietnamese welcomed the "liberation" and many died fleeing the country.
I am sure this will be misunderstood, so I'll add that I think that the US role was one
massive war crime and we never should have been there at all, that Ho Chi Minh probably would
have won a fair election in the 1950's etc
Being antiwar has nothing necessarily to do with favoring the side our government opposes.
It simply means that there is no moral justification for the US invading Vietnam or Iraq,
supporting jihadists in Syria, helping the Saudis and the Israelis bomb civilians, and so
on.
Prof. Bacevich has an personal stake in what he writes about. His son, Lt. Andrew John
Bacevich, was killed in action by an IED during the occupation back in 2007. He was already a
severe critic of the war at the time but I am guessing that this underlined the futility of
it tall.
Although it is true that the willing of Trump to put an end to the Afghan occupation must
be seen as a positive, his policy of ever increasing military budgets make this affirmation
from Bacevich "the incentive for identifying new enemies in settings deemed more congenial
becomes all but irresistible" truer that ever. These expenditures must be justified in
practical terms and It worries me what the new enemies in Trump's brain are.
Ha, ha hah!
Yes, Hollywood has made a big effort to explain us, the common people, that US's military
expenses will protect us from Centaurians, Klingons, meteorites and some other rogue
invaders. I cannot imagine any other reason.
> Prizing compliance as a precondition for upward mobility, military service rarely
encourages critical thinking.
John Boyd: "And you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to
go." He raised his hand and pointed. "If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have
to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a
member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments." Then Boyd
raised his other hand and pointed another direction. "Or you can go that way and you can do
something -- something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you
decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good
assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to
compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might
make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call.
That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?" [Robert
Coram]
Which is worse? Living in a cave in Afghanistan or living in a prison in Europe/US?
If the invasion of Afghanistan was about capturing some people and then imprisoning them then
that question might possibly be relevant.
If the invasion was about prestige then sometimes the best revenge and biggest insult is to
treat that someone as irrelevant and insignificant. If the opportunity presents itself to do
something then by all means do something, do what prestige demands but if that does not
happen then what?
Sometimes the measure of someone is had by the measure of his/her enemies. Giving someone the
significance of being the enemy might provide that someone with a better life. There are
people with money who'd be willing to fund the enemy of their enemy. But how do those
financiers know if they are funding some chancers/charlatans or the real thing? Spread some
uncertainty about who are charlatans/chancers and see what happens to the funding . Maybe the
guilty ones might feel it necessary to publicly provide the necessary proof of their guilt,
doubtful but & if the location of them is found then threaten closure of the diplomatic
missions of the nation where they are unless they are handed over. The diplomatic missions
are cushy positions and closing them will only hurt the 'elite', the general population is
left unharmed.
Afghanistan is unlikely to change anytime soon. As with all predictions of the future that
one might be very wrong. However, the ones predicting that Afghanistan can and will change
due to military occupation are in my opinion the ones who need to somehow provide support for
their prediction.
A few predictions here. After the US and the rest of the Coalition leaves Afghanistan, not
much happens for awhile. But then the government starts to lose ground. Slowly at first, and
then quickly. Eventually Kabul falls. Long before then the US and other countries would have
had evacuated their embassies so that there is no repeat of the frantic helicopter
evacuations like happened in Saigon. There is a swell of refugees, particularly those who
worked with the Coalition but Trump refuses all entry of them into the US saying that there
are "very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers" in
Afghanistan.
Five years after the last troops are out of Afghanistan the war is all but forgotten in the
same way that the vets of the Korean War were forgotten. Not for nothing did they call Korea
the "Forgotten War.' By then the US is immersed in another campaign – probably in
Africa – and news about what is happening in Afghanistan is relegated to the back
pages. The vets will remember, but the nation will ignore them in the same way that Vietnam
vets were forgotten after that war ended until the striking Vietnam Veterans Memorial was
built in Washington by the vets themselves. In West Point text books, the war is relegated to
the back pages as the cadets will instead study peer warfare with Russia and China.
One very important question remains.
By 2001 the Taliban had reduced opium production to virtually zero. Every year since the
US/NATO invasion, opium production has increased.
What will the Afghans do when the US and British are no longer around to facilitate the
heroin trade? Perhaps that's why negotiations are proving so difficult.
The Taliban banned the cultivation of opium in 2001, shortly before being ousted by the
US-led NATO coalition. However, after 2005, the Taliban began to regroup, and encouraged
opium production to finance its insurgency by forcing locals to grow opium and punishing
those who refused. Besides, major opium traffickers annually pay vast amounts to the
Taliban in exchange for safe transport routes secured by the group.
The Taliban uses the money it collects from the opium trade to pay fighters' salaries,
buy fuel, food, weapons and explosives. Based on some reports, around 40% of the Taliban's
funding comes from opium production, while the rest of its expenditure is borne by foreign
patrons and tax collections. The group's annual income from the opium trade was estimated
to be $400 million in 2011, but it is believed to have significantly increased in recent
years.
The Taliban collect two types of taxes from opium businesses: a transportation tax from
drug trafficking and a 10% tax from opium cultivation. In exchange, the group provides
security for the drug convoys and carries out attacks on government institutions like
checkpoints in order to allow drug convoys to pass. The group has also launched attacks on
government forces to safeguard drug labs and factories.
The Taliban don't need US/UK to facilitate things. In fact, getting the US out of the
country might eliminate one of their major Heroin-related business rivals, the CIA.
Bacevich states, "Rule number one of statecraft ought to be: when you're doing something
really stupid, stop. To my mind, this rule seems especially applicable when the lives of
American soldiers are at stake. In Vietnam, Washington wasted 58,000 of those lives for
nothing."
Why does he find his rule especially applicable to the paltry number of US dead, given that
at least fifty times as many Indochinese died?
This attitude is surely one reason for the loathing felt by much of the world toward the USA.
People are justifiably sick of hearing how US lives are inherently more valuable than their
own.
" That said, I'm painfully aware of the fact that, on the long-ago day when I offered
Captain Nguyen my feeble condolences, I lacked the imagination to conceive of the trials
about to befall his countrymen. In the aftermath of the American War, something on the order
of 800,000 Vietnamese took to open and unseaworthy boats to flee their country. According to
estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000
boat people died at sea. Most of those who survived were destined to spend years in squalid
refugee camps scattered throughout Southeast Asia. Back in Vietnam itself, some 300,000
former ARVN officers and South Vietnamese officials were imprisoned in so-called reeducation
camps for up to 18 years. Reconciliation did not rank high on the postwar agenda of the
unified country's new leaders.
Meanwhile, for the Vietnamese, north and south, the American War has in certain ways only
continued. Mines and unexploded ordnance left from that war have inflicted more than 100,000
casualties since the last American troops departed. Even today, the toll caused by Agent
Orange and other herbicides that the U.S. Air Force sprayed with abandon over vast stretches
of territory continues to mount. The Red Cross calculates that more than one million
Vietnamese have suffered health problems, including serious birth defects and cancers as a
direct consequence of the promiscuous use of those poisons as weapons of war.
For anyone caring to calculate the moral responsibility of the United States for its
actions in Vietnam, all of those would have to find a place on the final balance sheet. The
1.3 million Vietnamese admitted to the United States as immigrants since the American War
formally concluded can hardly be said to make up for the immense damage suffered by the
people of Vietnam as a direct or indirect result of U.S. policy ."
Note in particular the phrase "the people of Vietnam" in the last sentence. I find your
criticism to be unwarranted.
I neither missed nor ignored Bacevich's caveat.
I was focusing on his 'rule number one', which seems to make the lives of a few US soldiers
more sacred than those of the many people – civilians as well as soldiers – they
kill.
I am not trying to say that Bacevich is as evil and abhorrent as say Bolton. I don't think he
is, though I suspect he's on the same side when it comes down to it.
I am suggesting that the USA will fail to win the hearts and minds of the world's people
while killing them and belittling their deaths.
(and you might note the phrase "can hardly be said to make up for" in the last
sentence!)
As I remember the movie Dr. Strangelove, as the USA nuclear weapon was launched toward
Russia, Russia was given an option to destroy some USA cities as a way of the USA doing fair
and suitable penance.
I don't imagine the USA's military is viewed in the world as other than operating in the
USA elites' interests, despite any media (Cable, internet, print,Hollywood films) verbiage
about "bringing democracy" or "bringing freedom" to other nations.
I believe the Peace Corps was established as a way to make the world a better place with
USA's expertise and as a way to win "hearts and minds of the world's people".
If you fund, arm, and train an army for a decade and it still can't defend itself against
insurgents, then you have to wonder whose side is right? If it actually had the backing of
the people on the ground and dedicated troops and government, then it should be able to hold
its ground well.
The US has had exactly the same outcomes in Vietnam and Afghanistan with training the
respective armies.
In Iraq, it is largely coherent tribal entities of Kurds and Shiites that have been
providing the backbone of relatively successful military organizations (not the same one
despite being in the same country). Both groups have their own independent goals. The US
forefeited its abiltiy to create a true national army in Iraq when they disbanded the former
Iraqi Army shortly after invading. That resulted in a well-trained insurgency.
"The US has had exactly the same outcomes in Vietnam and Afghanistan with training the
respective armies."
Hardly. From 1979 the US funded, armed and trained the Mujaheddin, who won. I'm not aware of
them funding, arming or training the Viet Cong or Viet Minh.
They didn't win when they backed the losing sides, that's true. But it isn't saying much
beyond the obvious.
I like Bacevich but he really demurred from making his underlying point. He asked "Why
Vietnam" and then he proceeded to fluff through that question. But the analogy to Afghanistan
remains at a much deeper level. That level (imo) is this: Why Vietnam? Because, at that
hysterical cold war turning point, Vietnam was the gateway to Southern China (Gore Vidal).
Our main objective was to position ourselves to invade Southern China and protect the old
imperialist interests of the UK and France (aka Nato). But we dithered and hesitated. Thank
god. It could have been a much worse debacle. So here it is: We invaded Afghanistan and sent
a zillion dollars worth of materiel to Iraq in order to take over the Middle East. And that
meant invading Iran. But just like China, Iran was a dangerous plan. Too many things could go
wrong, so everyone knew they would go wrong. Duh. And so we dithered and hesitated. And made
up for it by blatant propaganda for 15 years. We're "outta there" because we should never
have been in there. And one of the tragedies is our abandonment of the Kurds. Just like the
South Vietnamese. Bacevich didn't mention the Kurds. He implied our abandonment would upset
the poor Afghans. But, they won't care at all. They'll be flipping all of our departing
helicopters the bird. Still there was a point to be made about our fecklessness. Interesting
aside here that Bacevich, a well thought-out moral person, is the new President of the Quincy
Institute. It will probably become famous for deep, murky contradictions. And pompous
rationalizations without ever really making the point. Just to the taste of Soros and the
Kochs.
I suspect, re Afghanistan, there is an upside that will never be made into a finer point.
That is, we have worn out the appetite for a wider war for all concerned and managed to come
to agreement with all parties of interest in Middle East oil. Including Russia. And Israel.
And nobody will make much fuss about it, but we will still leave a very high-tech military
contingent in Afghanistan because Eurasia is a vast opportunity.
Vietnam War strictly motivated by the "Domino Theory" and "monolithic Asian communism",
per Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, et al. Kennedy was said to be having "second thoughts" about
expanded US presence at the time of his assassination; however, LBJ went all-in, urged on by
McNamara and the generals 11 years later it all went tits-up, Nixon ended the draft, all
relatively quiet on the war front, then Carter and Brzezinski funded Islamic militants in
Afghanistan to harry the Russkies and ca. 20yrs later, Cheney-Bush repeat the Russian
quagmire plus ça change etc" .
The author is too limited in his appraisals of USA wars, and the commentariat here too
polite to expand on the list of the criminal wars waged by the USA since Vietnam.
Iraq and Afghanistan were mentioned, yes, but there were also open wars of aggression
against Yugoslavia, then Serbia, Grenada and Libya as well as clandestine wars against a good
chunk of the globe, Israel/Palestine, Russian backyard countries, China, Venezuela, a swathe
of Central American countries, and so on ad infinitum.
USA's holy grail of subjugating all oil producing countries in the world, except for those
that can fight back, and purported payment to those unable to fight back, with readily
printable papers of questionable value, is not a long term strategy. Not long term as in 10
or 20 more years. Then what? John Bolton or his clone on a cocktail of steroids and
amphetamine, lobbing nuclear weapons indiscriminately all over the place?
"... Footage from the city also documented flagrant acts of vandalism targeting the infrastructure and public transportation. In one video, a staircase was spray-painted with an inspiring message, "fight for freedom," accompanied by a swastika. ..."
"... The protesters – many of them masked and armed with metal rods and clubs – also erected street barricades, which were then set ablaze. Police used tear gas to disperse the unruly crowds. ..."
"... Videos – not always publicized by the mainstream media – also show aftermath of vandalism as anti-government unrest enters its 14th week. ..."
"... Beijing has repeatedly accused Washington of fueling the political turmoil, a claim that became more difficult to refute after a senior American diplomat was seen meeting with protest leaders. ..."
"... With their direct appeal to Trump, it appears that many of the protesters are not interested in negotiating directly with the government. Hong Kong had already officially withdrawn the controversial extradition bill with China that sparked the unrest. ..."
Hong Kong protesters rallied in their thousands and clashed with police in fresh unrest.
They even called on Washington to "liberate" them from Chinese rule, suggesting some may now
view the US as their patron. Thousands of demonstrators marched to the US Consulate in Hong
Kong on Sunday, in what they said was an appeal to President Donald Trump to intervene in the
weeks-long political turmoil. Videos of the rally show protesters waving American flags as they
sing the US national anthem and play 'The Star Spangled Banner' through the speakers on their
phones.
People also carried banners, urging Trump to "liberate" Hong Kong. American lawmakers
are currently mulling the so-called 'Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act'. The legislation
would require Washington to annually assess Hong Kong's level of autonomy from Beijing and
react with economic countermeasures if self-rule is compromised.
Some signs of protest used to drum up support for the cause have raised questions about the
factual accuracy of the messaging. According to the Global Times, a banner attached to an
overpass erroneously claimed that "China owes America $1 trillion."
#HK radical protesters
fail to get the facts right on a banner which states that "China owes US$1 trillion." Here is
a free lesson: As of May, the US owes China about $1.11 trillion, not the other way round.
#香港pic.twitter.com/hky6WCDJqA
Footage from the city also documented flagrant acts of vandalism targeting the
infrastructure and public transportation. In one video, a staircase was spray-painted with an
inspiring message, "fight for freedom," accompanied by a swastika.
The protesters – many of them masked and armed with metal rods and clubs – also
erected street barricades, which were then set ablaze. Police used tear gas to disperse the
unruly crowds.
Beijing has repeatedly accused Washington of fueling the political turmoil, a claim that
became more difficult to refute after a senior American diplomat was seen meeting with protest
leaders.
With their direct appeal to Trump, it appears that many of the protesters are not interested
in negotiating directly with the government. Hong Kong had already officially withdrawn the
controversial extradition bill with China that sparked the unrest.
Hong Kong protest figurehead Joshua Wong, who has been rocking up to 'pro-democracy'
meetings with various Western officials in recent weeks, has been spotted hanging out with the
chairman of the White Helmets in Berlin. Wong attended the 'Bild 100' summer party in Berlin
this week, where he seems to have bumped into White Helmets boss Raed Al Saleh. That's a tad
awkward, since the Syrian first-responders group operates solely in areas controlled by
anti-government fighters and has been heavily suspected of
links to Al Qaeda and US-sponsored jihadist militias – a fact that did not go
unnoticed on Twitter.
There was another familiar face in the snaps, too: Mayor of Kiev Vitaly Klitschko, who was,
for a time, himself a Western favorite when Ukraine was in Washington's regime-change
crosshairs.
But Wong has had some questionable high-level meetings, too. He also met German Foreign
Minister Heiko Maas at the event – with that tete-a-tete quickly slammed by Beijing.
These meetings come on the heels of photos showing Wong speaking to
Julie Eadeh, an official from the US consulate general in Hong Kong, which raised more
suspicions that Washington had a hand in the recent violent anti-China protests
"... Watch for persons disguised as Red Chinese troops attacking the local Hong Kong radio station. ..."
"... A lot of countries are getting involved. Last Sunday there were many protesters who didn't even speak Cantonese! They were Mandarin speakers from Taiwan and when the crowd shouted to "Run away" (from the approaching police) they just stood and looked confused. Obviously the western MSM hasn't bothered to mention the point. They want you to think it is still HK students. BS!! ..."
"... German government is actually working for US and CIA. Nevermind the fact that German elites are supporting EU breaking away from USA and detest Trump. ..."
"... Your dislike of China blinds you to simple facts like Germany is a vassal of usa that is still under ww2 military occupation . Small domestic differences are allowed in all politics to give the illusion of choice. But tyranny gets a vote everytime. Democracy is a buzzword that died a long time ago in all countries. ..."
"... German government is actually working for US and CIA ..."
A lot of countries are getting involved. Last Sunday there were many protesters who didn't
even speak Cantonese! They were Mandarin speakers from Taiwan and when the crowd shouted to
"Run away" (from the approaching police) they just stood and looked confused. Obviously the
western MSM hasn't bothered to mention the point. They want you to think it is still HK
students. BS!!
All one needs to do is look at the fake protesters, the signs, the violent behaviors, the
top leaders' contacts in the US consulate, the White Hats, and elsewhere, and it is clear and
obvious who leads, funds and directs the destructive rioting scum bags.
The PRC needs to close the US and all EU consulates, terminate the HK-SAR, bring in a
hundred thousand tough well-disciplined PLA soldiers who will in an hour put a stop to this
US-directed garbage.
China insisted that Hong Kong be removed from the UN's list of territories that needed to
be decolonised prior to hand-over by the UK. Now China along with Russia, Cuba, Syria and
Iran are members of the UN decolonisation committee that is meant to assist territories to
decolonise. How strange democracy is.
The militant, unconstitutional and ineffective committee.
So according to the irrational narrative of the China Media now, German government is
actually working for US and CIA. Nevermind the fact that German elites are supporting EU
breaking away from USA and detest Trump.
The Chinese Journalists must have received detailed fake news training from CNN and
NBC
Your dislike of China blinds you to simple facts like Germany is a vassal of usa that is
still under ww2 military occupation . Small domestic differences are allowed in all politics
to give the illusion of choice. But tyranny gets a vote everytime. Democracy is a buzzword
that died a long time ago in all countries.
Your love of China blinds you to the facts that EU and US are bastions of freedom, and not
every single incident is a ******* conspiracy of the US and EU.
Also, I think you need to look up the word 'vassal'. Wrong time period & context.
"... But Bolton coupled the Fox and AEI sinecures with gnarlier associations -- for one, the Gatestone Institute, a, let's say Islam-hostile outfit, associated with the secretive, influential Mercer billionaires. ..."
"... Bolton appeared the leading light of a neoconservative revival, of sorts, until he didn't. ..."
"... It doesn't matter whether Bolton's "time is up" or not, because his departure wouldn't change anything. If he goes, Trump will replace him with some equally slimy neocon interventionist. ..."
"... It won't end until we muck out the White House next year. Dumping Trump is Job One. ..."
"... Oh. Yes. You want to get rid of Trump's partially neocon administration, so that you could replace it with your own, entirely neocon one. Wake me up when the DNC starts allowing people like Tulsi Gabbard to get nominated. But they won't. So your party will just repeat its merry salsa on the same set of rakes as in 2016. ..."
No major politician, not even Barack Obama, excoriated the Iraq war more fiercely than did
Trump during the primaries. He did this in front of a scion of the house of Bush and in the
deep red state of South Carolina. He nevertheless went on to win that primary, the Republican
nomination and the presidency on that antiwar message.
And so, to see Bolton ascend to the commanding heights of the Trump White House shocked many
from the time it was first rumored. "I shudder to think what would happen if we had a failed
presidency," Scott McConnell, TAC' s founding editor, said in late 2016 at our foreign
policy conference, held, opportunely, during the presidential transition. "I mean, John
Bolton?"
At the time, Bolton was a candidate for secretary of state, a consideration scuttled in no
small part because of the opposition of Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. As McConnell
wrote in November of that year: "Most of the upper-middle-level officials who plotted the Iraq
War have retreated quietly into private life, but Bolton has kept their flame alive." Bolton
had already been passed over for NSA, losing out early to the doomed Michael Flynn. Rex
Tillerson beat him for secretary of state. Bolton was then passed over for the role of
Tillerson's deputy. When Flynn flamed out of the White House the following February, Trump
chose a general he didn't know at all, H.R. McMaster, to replace him.
Bolton had been trying to make a comeback since late 2006, after failing to hold his job as
U.N. ambassador (he had only been a recess appointment). His landing spots including a Fox News
contributorship and a post at the vaunted American Enterprise Institute. Even in the early days
of the Trump administration, Bolton was around, and accessible. I remember seeing him multiple
times in Washington's Connecticut Avenue corridor, decked out in the seersucker he notoriously
favors during the summer months. Paired with the familiar mustache, the man is the Mark Twain
of regime change.
But Bolton coupled the Fox and AEI sinecures with gnarlier associations -- for one, the
Gatestone Institute, a, let's say Islam-hostile outfit, associated with the secretive,
influential Mercer billionaires. He also struck a ferocious alliance with the Center for
Security Policy, helmed by the infamous Frank Gaffney, and gave paid remarks to the National
Council for the Resistance of Iran, the lynchpin organization of the People's Mujahideen of
Iran, or MEK. The latter two associations have imbued the spirit of this White House, with
Gaffney now one of the most underrated power players in Washington, and the MEK's "peaceful"
regime change mantra all but the official line of the administration.
More than any of these gigs, Bolton benefited from two associations that greased the wheels
for his joining the Trump administration.
The first was Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist. If you want to
understand the administration's Iran policy under Bolton to date, look no further than a piece
by the then-retired diplomat in conservative mainstay National Review in August 2017,
days after Bannon's departure from the White House: "How to Get Out of the Iran Deal." Bolton
wrote the piece at Bannon's urging. Even out of the administration, the former Breitbart
honcho was an influential figure.
"We must explain the grave threat to the U.S. and our allies, particularly Israel," said
Bolton. "The [Iran Deal's] vague and ambiguous wording; its manifest imbalance in Iran's
direction; Iran's significant violations; and its continued, indeed, increasingly, unacceptable
conduct at the strategic level internationally demonstrate convincingly that [the Iran deal] is
not in the national-security interests of the United States."
Then Bolton, as I
documented , embarked on a campaign of a media saturation to make a TV-happy president
proud. By May Day the next year, he would have a job, a big one, and one that Senator Paul
couldn't deny him: national security advisor. That wasn't the whole story, of course. Bolton's
ace in the hole was Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has helped drive
Trump's Israel policy. If Trump finally moves against Bolton, it will likely be because Adelson
failed to strenuously object.
So will Trump finally do it? Other than White House chief of staff, a position Mick Mulvaney
has filled in an acting capacity for the entire calendar year, national security advisor is the
easiest, most senior role to change horses.
A bombshell Washington Post story lays out the dire truth: Bolton is so distrusted on
the president's central prerogatives, for instance Afghanistan, that he's not even allowed to
see sensitive plans unsupervised.
Bolton has also come into conflict with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to three
senior State Department officials. Pompeo is the consummate politician. Though an inveterate
hawk, the putative Trump successor does not want to be the Paul Wolfowitz of the Iran war.
Bolton is a bureaucratic arsonist, agnostic on the necessity of two of the institutions he
served in -- Foggy Bottom and the United Nations. Pompeo, say those around him, is keen to be
beloved, or at least tolerated, by career officials in his department, in contrast with Bolton
and even Tillerson.
The real danger Bolton poses is to the twin gambit Trump hopes to pull off ahead of, perhaps
just ahead of, next November -- a detente deal with China to calm the markets and ending
the war in Afghanistan. Over the weekend, the president announced a scuttled meeting with the
Taliban at Camp David, which would have been an historic, stunning summit. Bolton was
reportedly instrumental in quashing the meet. Still, there is a lot of time between now and
next autumn, and the cancellation is likely the latest iteration of the president's showman
diplomacy.
Ending America's longest war would be a welcome rebuttal to Democrats who will, day in and
day out, charge that Trump is a fraud. But to do so, he will likely need a national security
advisor more in sync with the vision. Among them: Tucker Carlson favorite Douglas Macgregor,
Stephen Biegun, the runner-up previously, or the hawkish, but relatively pragmatic retired
General Jack Keane.
Bolton seems to be following the well-worn trajectory of dumped Trump deputies. Jeff
Sessions, a proto-Trump and the first senator to endorse the mogul, became attorney general and
ideological incubator of the new Right's agenda only to become persona non grata in the
administration. The formal execution came later. Bannon followed a less dramatic, but no less
explosive ebb and flow. James Mattis walked on water until he didn't.
And Bolton appeared the leading light of a neoconservative revival, of sorts, until he didn't.
You confuse "politician" and "liar" here, whereas he is "consummate" at neither politics
nor lying. His politicking has been as botched as his diplomacy; his lying has been
prodigious but transparent.
Bolton has been on the way out now for how many months? I will believe this welcome news
when I see his sorry ___ out the door.
I think much of America and the world will feel the same way.
It doesn't matter whether Bolton's "time is up" or not, because his departure wouldn't
change anything. If he goes, Trump will replace him with some equally slimy neocon
interventionist.
It won't end until we muck out the White House next year. Dumping Trump is Job One.
Oh. Yes. You want to get rid of Trump's partially neocon administration, so that you could
replace it with your own, entirely neocon one. Wake me up when the DNC starts allowing
people like Tulsi Gabbard to get nominated. But they won't. So your party will just repeat
its merry salsa on the same set of rakes as in 2016.
Trump whole administration is just a bunch of rabid neocons who will be perfectly at home (and some were) in Bush II
administration. So firing of Bolton while a step in the right direction is too little, too late.
Notable quotes:
"... Whatever the reason for Bolton's departure, this means one less warmongering neocon is left in the DC swamp, and is a prudent and long overdue move by Trump, one which even Trump's liberals enemies will have no choice but to applaud. ..."
"... Ending America's longest war would be a welcome rebuttal to Democrats who will, day in and day out, charge that Trump is a fraud. But to do so, he will likely need a national security advisor more in sync with the vision. Among them: Tucker Carlson favorite Douglas Macgregor, Stephen Biegun, the runner-up previously, or the hawkish, but relatively pragmatic retired General Jack Keane. ..."
While there was some feverish speculation as to what an impromptu presser at 1:30pm with US
Secretary of State Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and National Security Adviser Bolton
would deliver, that was quickly swept aside moments later when Trump unexpectedly announced
that he had effectively fired Bolton as National Security Advisor, tweeting that he informed
John Bolton "last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House" after "
disagreeing strongly with many of his suggestions. "
... ... ...
Whatever the reason for Bolton's departure, this means one less warmongering
neocon is left in the DC swamp, and is a prudent and long overdue move by Trump, one which even
Trump's liberals enemies will have no choice but to applaud.
While we await more details on this strike by Trump against the military-industrial
complex-enabling Deep State, here is a fitting closer from Curt Mills via the American
Conservative:
Ending America's longest war would be a welcome rebuttal to Democrats who will, day in and
day out, charge that Trump is a fraud. But to do so, he will likely need a national security
advisor more in sync with the vision. Among them: Tucker Carlson favorite Douglas Macgregor,
Stephen Biegun, the runner-up previously, or the hawkish, but relatively pragmatic retired
General Jack Keane.
Bolton seems to be following the well-worn trajectory of dumped Trump deputies. Jeff
Sessions, a proto-Trump and the first senator to endorse the mogul, became attorney general
and ideological incubator of the new Right's agenda only to become persona non grata in the
administration. The formal execution came later. Bannon followed a less dramatic, but no less
explosive ebb and flow. James Mattis walked on water until he didn't.
And Bolton appeared the leading light of a neoconservative revival, of sorts, until he
didn't.
"... Yeah, consistency may be nice, but what about the actual substance of what Bolton believes and does? ..."
"... Personally, I'm not interested in trying to starve Iran into submission or attack it on behalf of Israel. And I would be interested in actually pursuing a meaningful attempt to resolve the Korea issue. Bolton is not only on the wrong side of these issues, he is in general the principal malign force pushing foreign policy insanity in this administration (as opposed to Adelson et all pushing policy insanity from outside the administration.) ..."
"... Heinrich Himmler also was consistent and sincere. By your logic, that must mean that Himmler was a credit to the Nazi regime. ..."
"... You can't serve a president well if you're constantly at odds with him. The Commander-in-Chief has to have his or her own mind about things, advisors are there to advise. If you want to do one thing but you're being counseled to do otherwise, what purpose does such a relationship serve? ..."
"... It was clearly Adelson and his ilk who got Bolton hired in the first place when Trump had initially been unimpressed. In "Fire and Fury," Steve Bannon allegedly says that Trump didn't think Bolton looked the part of NSA. And it's even more significant that Adelson and others of a similar cast--e.g., Safra Catz, the dual-national CEO of Oracle-- engineered a whispering campaign against McMaster that paved the way for what was effectively his firing. ..."
"... Bolton's ace in the hole was Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has helped drive Trump's Israel policy ..."
"... Besides, it's not like Bolton was a military man, he openly acknowledges that he didn't want to go and 'die on some rice paddy' in Vietnam. But, he's willing to send other people's kids to fight and die in some pointless show of geopolitical power, If he goes, good riddance. ..."
"... Israel and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia drive Trump's Iran policy, and Pompeo is their messenger. ..."
"I have to think that NSA Bolton actually believes what he advocates."
There are and have been lots of people who believe what they advocate--Lenin, Trotsky,
Mao, Robespierre, and the Neoconservatives in general among them.
Yeah, consistency may be nice, but what about the actual substance of what Bolton
believes and does?
Personally, I'm not interested in trying to starve Iran into submission or attack it on
behalf of Israel. And I would be interested in actually pursuing a meaningful attempt to
resolve the Korea issue. Bolton is not only on the wrong side of these issues, he is in
general the principal malign force pushing foreign policy insanity in this administration
(as opposed to Adelson et all pushing policy insanity from outside the administration.)
Sorry, but Bolton's "service" sure ain't appreciated by me!
Hyperbole much I see.
If you want to honestly assess someone, you might want to avoid that tact. To my knowledge NSA Bolton is not building concentration camps to send undesirables to
an early grave.
I would be curious what you know about what his agenda is or why.
You can't serve a president well if you're constantly at odds with him. The
Commander-in-Chief has to have his or her own mind about things, advisors are there to
advise. If you want to do one thing but you're being counseled to do otherwise, what
purpose does such a relationship serve?
Nah, they (Bolton and all the neocons) are celebrating the death of another American
soldier killed in a suicide attack just prior to a planned peace summit with the Taliban.
The Taliban and the neocons are two sides that deserve each other, but at the cost of many
innocents.
Its easy to depose any third world government with our military, but one cannot
eradicate an ideology with today's humanitarian standards. So we should just leave and tell
the Taliban they can even take power in Afghanistan again, but if they harbor any groups
that want to attack our country, we'll be back. It only takes a month or so to depose a
third world government. Then we leave again. We can do this over and over again and it'll
be way cheaper than leaving troops there and many fewer casualties.
I don't think Bolton will be in there for the rest of Trump's presidency. Presidential
appointments rarely ever last through the whole administration. Now I'm not when he goes
cause anyone's guess is as good as mine. And will policy actually change for the better or
remain the same?
" If only the Tsar knew how wicked his advisers are! "
We've been hearing of Bolton's imminent demise since the time Trump appointed the
unindicted criminal, and to a position that isn't subject to Congressional advice and
consent.
Bolton is still in office, still making policy, still stovepiping "intelligence" to
Trump, still plotting away like Grima Wormtongue.
If Trump wasn't so close to Bolton, why was he in regular contact with the man before
appointing him, and why does he allow Bolton to control what information Trump gets?
And if you read the latest news, it seems that the occupation of Afghanistan isn't going
anywhere either. Bolton wins again, but some writers at TAC keep holding out hope for
Trump.
"If Trump finally moves against Bolton, it will likely be because Adelson failed to
strenuously object."
Well, isn't that nice? Trump's decision on whether to keep or fire his national security
advisor depends on the whim of the hideous, Israel-uber-alles ideologue Adelson. That sure
makes me feel good. (And by the way, Curt Mills, this is called burying the lede.)
Of course it's only logical. It was clearly Adelson and his ilk who got Bolton hired in
the first place when Trump had initially been unimpressed. In "Fire and Fury," Steve Bannon
allegedly says that Trump didn't think Bolton looked the part of NSA. And it's even more
significant that Adelson and others of a similar cast--e.g., Safra Catz, the dual-national
CEO of Oracle-- engineered a whispering campaign against McMaster that paved the way for
what was effectively his firing.
This piece misses what's important about the Trump administration's foreign/security
policy saga and reduces it to a mere matter of personalities and petty politics. File this
under the heading of discretion being the better part of valor.
"Bolton's ace in the hole was Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has
helped drive Trump's Israel policy. If Trump finally moves against Bolton, it will likely
be because Adelson failed to strenuously object."
So -- Ilhan Omar was right??? I thought she was a vile anti-Semite echoing an ancient
slur!!
If Bolton does leave, I won't be sorry to see him go. Bolton's Hawkish opinions are
dangerous to the US' economic health.
Want to go into a deep Recession? Start another long-term foreign war that goes on for
decades - and do it on credit, AGAIN.
Besides, it's not like Bolton was a military man, he openly acknowledges that he didn't
want to go and 'die on some rice paddy' in Vietnam. But, he's willing to send other people's kids to fight and die in some pointless show of
geopolitical power, If he goes, good riddance.
The photo accompanying the article sums it up. Pompeo flanked by an American flag, and both
of them dwarfed by a huge projection of the flag of Israel.
Israel and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia drive Trump's Iran policy, and Pompeo is
their messenger.
This is a Marxist critique of neoliberalism. Not necessary right but they his some relevant
points.
Notable quotes:
"... The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. ..."
"... The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world output. ..."
"... While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy? The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in the latter and meet global demand. ..."
"... The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5 ..."
"... This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state, the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse , causing a financial crisis. ..."
"... The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument, as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6 ..."
"... If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment. ..."
"... The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their home market ..."
"... In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people ..."
"... In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism. ..."
"... The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their support. ..."
"... The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions, imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of neoliberalism. ..."
"... And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more. ..."
"... Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11 Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against it. ..."
The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth.
But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this
ideological prop.
Harry Magdoff's The Age of
Imperialism is a classic work that shows how postwar political decolonization does not
negate the phenomenon of imperialism. The book has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, it
follows in V. I. Lenin's footsteps in providing a comprehensive account of how capitalism at
the time operated globally. On the other hand, it raises a question that is less frequently
discussed in Marxist literature -- namely, the need for imperialism. Here, Magdoff not only
highlighted the crucial importance, among other things, of the third world's raw materials for
metropolitan capital, but also refuted the argument that the declining share of raw-material
value in gross manufacturing output somehow reduced this importance, making the simple point
that there can be no manufacturing at all without raw materials. 1
Magdoff's focus was on a period when imperialism was severely resisting economic
decolonization in the third world, with newly independent third world countries taking control
over their own resources. He highlighted the entire armory of weapons used by imperialism. But
he was writing in a period that predated the onset of neoliberalism. Today, we not only have
decades of neoliberalism behind us, but the neoliberal regime itself has reached a dead end.
Contemporary imperialism has to be discussed within this setting.
Globalization and
Economic Crisis
There are two reasons why the regime of neoliberal globalization has run into a dead end.
The first is an ex ante tendency toward global overproduction; the second is that the
only possible counter to this tendency within the regime is the formation of asset-price
bubbles, which cannot be conjured up at will and whose collapse, if they do appear, plunges the
economy back into crisis. In short, to use the words of British economic historian Samuel
Berrick Saul, there are no "markets on tap" for contemporary metropolitan capitalism, such as
had been provided by colonialism prior to the First World War and by state expenditure in the
post-Second World War period of dirigisme . 2
The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages
across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector
of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world
output. As Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capital , following the lead of
Michał Kalecki and Josef Steindl, such a rise in the share of economic surplus, or a shift
from wages to surplus, has the effect of reducing aggregate demand since the ratio of
consumption to income is higher on average for wage earners than for those living off the
surplus. 3
Therefore, assuming a given level of investment associated with any period, such a shift would
tend to reduce consumption demand and hence aggregate demand, output, and capacity utilization.
In turn, reduced capacity utilization would lower investment over time, further aggravating the
demand-reducing effect arising from the consumption side.
While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous
phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an
explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy?
The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the
first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the
metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in
the latter and meet global demand.
Historically, while labor has not been, and is still not, free to migrate from the third
world to the metropolis, capital, though juridically free to move from the latter to the
former, did not actually do so , except to sectors like mines and plantations, which
only strengthened, rather than broke, the colonial pattern of the international division of
labor. 4
This segmentation of the world economy meant that wages in the metropolis increased with labor
productivity, unrestrained by the vast labor reserves of the third world, which themselves had
been caused by the displacement of manufactures through the twin processes of
deindustrialization (competition from metropolitan goods) and the drain of surplus (the
siphoning off of a large part of the economic surplus, through taxes on peasants that are no
longer spent on local artisan products but finance gratis primary commodity exports to
the metropolis instead).
The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to
the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and
take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of
the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the
third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the
real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was
marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5
At the same time, such relocation of activities, despite causing impressive growth rates of
gross domestic product (GDP) in many third world countries, does not lead to the exhaustion of
the third world's labor reserves. This is because of another feature of contemporary
globalization: the unleashing of a process of primitive accumulation of capital against petty
producers, including peasant agriculturists in the third world, who had earlier been protected,
to an extent, from the encroachment of big capital (both domestic and foreign) by the
postcolonial dirigiste regimes in these countries. Under neoliberalism, such protection
is withdrawn, causing an income squeeze on these producers and often their outright
dispossession from their land, which is then used by big capital for its various so-called
development projects. The increase in employment, even in countries with impressive GDP growth
rates in the third world, falls way short of the natural growth of the workforce, let alone
absorbing the additional job seekers coming from the ranks of displaced petty producers. The
labor reserves therefore never get used up. Indeed, on the contrary, they are augmented
further, because real wages continue to remain tied to a subsistence level, even as
metropolitan wages too are restrained. The vector of real wages in the world economy as a whole
therefore remains restrained.
Although contemporary globalization thus gives rise to an ex ante tendency toward
overproduction, state expenditure that could provide a counter to this (and had provided a
counter through military spending in the United States, according to Baran and Sweezy) can no
longer do so under the current regime. Finance is usually opposed to direct state intervention
through larger spending as a way of increasing employment. This opposition expresses itself
through an opposition not just to larger taxes on capitalists, but also to a larger fiscal
deficit for financing such spending. Obviously, if larger state spending is financed by taxes
on workers, then it hardly adds to aggregate demand, for workers spend the bulk of their
incomes anyway, so the state taking this income and spending it instead does not add any extra
demand. Hence, larger state spending can increase employment only if it is financed either
through a fiscal deficit or through taxes on capitalists who keep a part of their income
unspent or saved. But these are precisely the two modes of financing state expenditure that
finance capital opposes.
Its opposing larger taxes on capitalists is understandable, but why is it so opposed to a
larger fiscal deficit? Even within a capitalist economy, there are no sound economic
theoretical reasons that should preclude a fiscal deficit under all circumstances. The root of
the opposition therefore lies in deeper social considerations: if the capitalist economic
system becomes dependent on the state to promote employment directly , then this fact
undermines the social legitimacy of capitalism. The need for the state to boost the animal
spirits of the capitalists disappears and a perspective on the system that is epistemically
exterior to it is provided to the people, making it possible for them to ask: If the state can
do the job of providing employment, then why do we need the capitalists at all? It is an
instinctive appreciation of this potential danger that underlies the opposition of capital,
especially of finance, to any direct effort by the state to generate employment.
This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as
finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state,
the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second
World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is
globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a
nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large
fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse ,
causing a financial crisis.
The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews
direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since
that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their
social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument,
as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the
pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6
It may be thought that this compulsion on the part of the state to accede to the demand of
finance to eschew fiscal intervention for enlarging employment should not hold for the United
States. Its currency being considered by the world's wealth holders to be "as good as gold"
should make it immune to capital flight. But there is an additional factor operating in the
case of the United States: that the demand generated by a bigger U.S. fiscal deficit would
substantially leak abroad in a neoliberal setting, which would increase its external debt
(since, unlike Britain in its heyday, it does not have access to any unrequited colonial
transfers) for the sake of generating employment elsewhere. This fact deters any fiscal effort
even in the United States to boost demand within a neoliberal setting. 7
Therefore, it follows that state spending cannot provide a counter to the ex ante
tendency toward global overproduction within a regime of neoliberal globalization, which makes
the world economy precariously dependent on occasional asset-price bubbles, primarily in the
U.S. economy, for obtaining, at best, some temporary relief from the crisis. It is this fact
that underlies the dead end that neoliberal capitalism has reached. Indeed, Donald Trump's
resort to protectionism in the United States to alleviate unemployment is a clear recognition
of the system having reached this cul-de-sac. The fact that the mightiest capitalist
economy in the world has to move away from the rules of the neoliberal game in an attempt to
alleviate its crisis of unemployment/underemployment -- while compensating capitalists
adversely affected by this move through tax cuts, as well as carefully ensuring that no
restraints are imposed on free cross-border financial flows -- shows that these rules
are no longer viable in their pristine form.
Some Implications of This Dead End
There are at least four important implications of this dead end of neoliberalism. The first
is that the world economy will now be afflicted by much higher levels of unemployment than it
was in the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, when
the dot-com and the housing bubbles in the United States had, sequentially, a pronounced
impact. It is true that the U.S. unemployment rate today appears to be at a historic low, but
this is misleading: the labor-force participation rate in the United States today is lower than
it was in 2008, which reflects the discouraged-worker effect . Adjusting for this lower
participation, the U.S. unemployment rate is considerable -- around 8 percent. Indeed, Trump
would not be imposing protection in the United States if unemployment was actually as low as 4
percent, which is the official figure. Elsewhere in the world, of course, unemployment
post-2008 continues to be evidently higher than before. Indeed, the severity of the current
problem of below-full-employment production in the U.S. economy is best illustrated by capacity
utilization figures in manufacturing. The weakness of the U.S. recovery from the Great
Recession is indicated by the fact that the current extended recovery represents the first
decade in the entire post-Second World War period in which capacity utilization in
manufacturing has never risen as high as 80 percent in a single quarter, with the resulting
stagnation of investment. 8
If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a
beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the
United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen
the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the
United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already
appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be
because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping
unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we
look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment.
There has been some discussion on how global value chains would be affected by Trump's
protectionism. But the fact that global macroeconomics in the early twenty-first century will
look altogether different compared to earlier has not been much discussed.
In light of the preceding discussion, one could say that if, instead of individual
nation-states whose writ cannot possibly run against globalized finance capital, there was a
global state or a set of major nation-states acting in unison to override the objections of
globalized finance and provide a coordinated fiscal stimulus to the world economy, then perhaps
there could be recovery. Such a coordinated fiscal stimulus was suggested by a group of German
trade unionists, as well as by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
9
While it was turned down then, in the present context it has not even been discussed.
The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large
over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with
protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even
spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world
market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the
ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their
home market.
Such a transition will not be easy; it will require promoting domestic peasant agriculture,
defending petty production, moving toward cooperative forms of production, and ensuring greater
equality in income distribution, all of which need major structural shifts. For smaller
economies, it would also require their coming together with other economies to provide a
minimum size to the domestic market. In short, the dead end of neoliberalism also means the
need for a shift away from the so-called neoliberal development strategy that has held sway
until now.
The third implication is the imminent engulfing of a whole range of third world economies in
serious balance-of-payments difficulties. This is because, while their exports will be sluggish
in the new situation, this very fact will also discourage financial inflows into their
economies, whose easy availability had enabled them to maintain current account deficits on
their balance of payments earlier. In such a situation, within the existing neoliberal
paradigm, they would be forced to adopt austerity measures that would impose income deflation
on their people, make the conditions of their people significantly worse, lead to a further
handing over of their national assets and resources to international capital, and prevent
precisely any possible transition to an alternative strategy of home market-based growth.
In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over
third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits
in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or
that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even
domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people.
The fourth implication is the worldwide upsurge of fascism. Neoliberal capitalism even
before it reached a dead end, even in the period when it achieved reasonable growth and
employment rates, had pushed the world into greater hunger and poverty. For instance, the world
per-capita cereal output was 355 kilograms for 1980 (triennium average for 1979–81
divided by mid–triennium population) and fell to 343 in 2000, leveling at 344.9 in 2016
-- and a substantial amount of this last figure went into ethanol production. Clearly, in a
period of growth of the world economy, per-capita cereal absorption should be expanding,
especially since we are talking here not just of direct absorption but of direct and indirect
absorption, the latter through processed foods and feed grains in animal products. The fact
that there was an absolute decline in per-capita output, which no doubt caused a decline in
per-capita absorption, suggests an absolute worsening in the nutritional level of a substantial
segment of the world's population.
But this growing hunger and nutritional poverty did not immediately arouse any significant
resistance, both because such resistance itself becomes more difficult under neoliberalism
(since the very globalization of capital makes it an elusive target) and also because higher
GDP growth rates provided a hope that distress might be overcome in the course of time.
Peasants in distress, for instance, entertained the hope that their children would live better
in the years to come if given a modicum of education and accepted their fate.
In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with
neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological
prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop
and finds fascism. This changes the discourse away from the material conditions of people's
lives to the so-called threat to the nation, placing the blame for people's distress not on the
failure of the system, but on ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups, the
other that is portrayed as an enemy. It projects a so-called messiah whose sheer
muscularity can somehow magically overcome all problems; it promotes a culture of unreason so
that both the vilification of the other and the magical powers of the supposed leader
can be placed beyond any intellectual questioning; it uses a combination of state repression
and street-level vigilantism by fascist thugs to terrorize opponents; and it forges a close
relationship with big business, or, in Kalecki's words, "a partnership of big business and
fascist upstarts." 10
Fascist groups of one kind or another exist in all modern societies. They move center stage
and even into power only on certain occasions when they get the backing of big business. And
these occasions arise when three conditions are satisfied: when there is an economic crisis so
the system cannot simply go on as before; when the usual liberal establishment is manifestly
incapable of resolving the crisis; and when the left is not strong enough to provide an
alternative to the people in order to move out of the conjuncture.
This last point may appear odd at first, since many see the big bourgeoisie's recourse to
fascism as a counter to the growth of the left's strength in the context of a capitalist
crisis. But when the left poses a serious threat, the response of the big bourgeoisie typically
is to attempt to split it by offering concessions. It uses fascism to prop itself up only when
the left is weakened. Walter Benjamin's remark that "behind every fascism there is a failed
revolution" points in this direction.
Fascism Then and Now
Contemporary fascism, however, differs in crucial respects from its 1930s counterpart, which
is why many are reluctant to call the current phenomenon a fascist upsurge. But historical
parallels, if carefully drawn, can be useful. While in some aforementioned respects
contemporary fascism does resemble the phenomenon of the 1930s, there are serious differences
between the two that must also be noted.
First, we must note that while the current fascist upsurge has put fascist elements in power
in many countries, there are no fascist states of the 1930s kind as of yet. Even if the fascist
elements in power try to push the country toward a fascist state, it is not clear that they
will succeed. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that fascists in power
today cannot overcome the crisis of neoliberalism, since they accept the regime of
globalization of finance. This includes Trump, despite his protectionism. In the 1930s,
however, this was not the case. The horrors associated with the institution of a fascist state
in the 1930s had been camouflaged to an extent by the ability of the fascists in power to
overcome mass unemployment and end the Depression through larger military spending, financed by
government borrowing. Contemporary fascism, by contrast, lacks the ability to overcome the
opposition of international finance capital to fiscal activism on the part of the government to
generate larger demand, output, and employment, even via military spending.
Such activism, as discussed earlier, required larger government spending financed either
through taxes on capitalists or through a fiscal deficit. Finance capital was opposed to both
of these measures and it being globalized made this opposition decisive . The
decisiveness of this opposition remains even if the government happens to be one composed of
fascist elements. Hence, contemporary fascism, straitjacketed by "fiscal rectitude," cannot
possibly alleviate even temporarily the economic crises facing people and cannot provide any
cover for a transition to a fascist state akin to the ones of the 1930s, which makes such a
transition that much more unlikely.
Another difference is also related to the phenomenon of the globalization of finance. The
1930s were marked by what Lenin had earlier called "interimperialist rivalry." The military
expenditures incurred by fascist governments, even though they pulled countries out of the
Depression and unemployment, inevitably led to wars for "repartitioning an already partitioned
world." Fascism was the progenitor of war and burned itself out through war at, needless to
say, great cost to humankind.
Contemporary fascism, however, operates in a world where interimperialist rivalry is far
more muted. Some have seen in this muting a vindication of Karl Kautsky's vision of an
"ultraimperialism" as against Lenin's emphasis on the permanence of interimperialist rivalry,
but this is wrong. Both Kautsky and Lenin were talking about a world where finance capital and
the financial oligarchy were essentially national -- that is, German, French, or British. And
while Kautsky talked about the possibility of truces among the rival oligarchies, Lenin saw
such truces only as transient phenomena punctuating the ubiquity of rivalry.
In contrast, what we have today is not nation-based finance capitals, but
international finance capital into whose corpus the finance capitals drawn from
particular countries are integrated. This globalized finance capital does not want the world
to be partitioned into economic territories of rival powers ; on the contrary, it wants the
entire globe to be open to its own unrestricted movement. The muting of rivalry between major
powers, therefore, is not because they prefer truce to war, or peaceful partitioning of the
world to forcible repartitioning, but because the material conditions themselves have changed
so that it is no longer a matter of such choices. The world has gone beyond both Lenin and
Kautsky, as well as their debates.
Not only are we not going to have wars between major powers in this era of fascist upsurge
(of course, as will be discussed, we shall have other wars), but, by the same token, this
fascist upsurge will not burn out through any cataclysmic war. What we are likely to see is a
lingering fascism of less murderous intensity , which, when in power, does not
necessarily do away with all the forms of bourgeois democracy, does not necessarily physically
annihilate the opposition, and may even allow itself to get voted out of power occasionally.
But since its successor government, as long as it remains within the confines of the neoliberal
strategy, will also be incapable of alleviating the crisis, the fascist elements are likely to
return to power as well. And whether the fascist elements are in or out of power, they will
remain a potent force working toward the fascification of the society and the polity, even
while promoting corporate interests within a regime of globalization of finance, and hence
permanently maintaining the "partnership between big business and fascist upstarts."
Put differently, since the contemporary fascist upsurge is not likely to burn itself out as
the earlier one did, it has to be overcome by transcending the very conjuncture that produced
it: neoliberal capitalism at a dead end. A class mobilization of working people around an
alternative set of transitional demands that do not necessarily directly target neoliberal
capitalism, but which are immanently unrealizable within the regime of neoliberal capitalism,
can provide an initial way out of this conjuncture and lead to its eventual transcendence.
Such a class mobilization in the third world context would not mean making no truces with
liberal bourgeois elements against the fascists. On the contrary, since the liberal bourgeois
elements too are getting marginalized through a discourse of jingoistic nationalism typically
manufactured by the fascists, they too would like to shift the discourse toward the material
conditions of people's lives, no doubt claiming that an improvement in these conditions is
possible within the neoliberal economic regime itself. Such a shift in discourse is in
itself a major antifascist act . Experience will teach that the agenda advanced as part of
this changed discourse is unrealizable under neoliberalism, providing the scope for dialectical
intervention by the left to transcend neoliberal capitalism.
Imperialist
Interventions
Even though fascism will have a lingering presence in this conjuncture of "neoliberalism at
a dead end," with the backing of domestic corporate-financial interests that are themselves
integrated into the corpus of international finance capital, the working people in the third
world will increasingly demand better material conditions of life and thereby rupture the
fascist discourse of jingoistic nationalism (that ironically in a third world context is not
anti-imperialist).
In fact, neoliberalism reaching a dead end and having to rely on fascist elements revives
meaningful political activity, which the heyday of neoliberalism had precluded, because most
political formations then had been trapped within an identical neoliberal agenda that appeared
promising. (Latin America had a somewhat different history because neoliberalism arrived in
that continent through military dictatorships, not through its more or less tacit acceptance by
most political formations.)
Such revived political activity will necessarily throw up challenges to neoliberal
capitalism in particular countries. Imperialism, by which we mean the entire economic and
political arrangement sustaining the hegemony of international finance capital, will deal with
these challenges in at least four different ways.
The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation
that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even
before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby
denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only
increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may
well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from
a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers
and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their
support.
Even if capital controls are put in place, where there are current account deficits,
financing such deficits would pose a problem, necessitating some trade controls. But this is
where the second instrument of imperialism comes into play: the imposition of trade sanctions
by the metropolitan states, which then cajole other countries to stop buying from the
sanctioned country that is trying to break away from thralldom to globalized finance capital.
Even if the latter would have otherwise succeeded in stabilizing its economy despite its
attempt to break away, the imposition of sanctions becomes an additional blow.
The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the
sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the
local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of
civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection
generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions,
imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political
elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of
neoliberalism.
And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic
warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military
warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third
world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when
revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more.
Two aspects of such intervention are striking. One is the virtual unanimity among the
metropolitan states, which only underscores the muting of interimperialist rivalry in the era
of hegemony of global finance capital. The other is the extent of support that such
intervention commands within metropolitan countries, from the right to even the liberal
segments.
Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing
for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First
World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state
intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only
occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11
Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize
itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist
intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against
it.
Samuel Berrick Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960).
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1966).
One of the first authors to recognize this fact and its significance was Paul Baran in
The Political Economy of
Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957).
For the role of such colonial transfers in sustaining the British balance of payments and the
long Victorian and Edwardian boom, see Utsa Patnaik, "Revisiting the 'Drain,' or Transfers
from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism," in Agrarian
and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri , ed. Shubhra Chakrabarti and
Utsa Patnaik (Delhi: Tulika, 2017), 277-317.
Federal Reserve Board of Saint Louis Economic Research, FRED, "Capacity Utilization:
Manufacturing," February 2019 (updated March 27, 2019), http://fred.stlouisfed.org .
This issue is discussed by Charles P. Kindleberger in The World in Depression,
1929–1939 , 40th anniversary ed. (Oakland: University of California Press,
2013).
Joseph Schumpeter had seen Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace as
essentially advocating such state intervention in the new situation. See his essay, "John
Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)," in Ten Great Economists (London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1952).
Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her books include Peasant Class Differentiation (1987),
The Long Transition (1999), and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (2007). Prabhat Patnaik
is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997),
The Value of Money(2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism(2011).
What democracy they are talking about? Democracy for whom? This Harvard political prostitutes are talking about democracy for oligarchs
which was the nest result of EuroMaydan and the ability of Western companies to buy assets for pennies on the dollar without the control
of national government like happen in xUSSR space after dissolution of the USSR, which in retrospect can be classified as a color revolution
too, supported by financial injection, logistical support and propaganda campaign in major Western MSM.
What Harvard honchos probably does not understand or does not wish to understand is that neoliberalism as a social system lost its
attraction and is in irreversible decline. The ideology of neoliberalism collapsed much like Bolsheviks' ideology. As Politician like
Joe Boden which still preach neoliberalism are widely viewed as corrupt or senile (or both) hypocrites.
The "Collective West" still demonstrates formidable intelligence agencies skills (especially the USA and GB), but the key question
is: "What they are fighting for?"
They are fighting for neoliberalism which is a lost case. Which looks like KGB successes after WWIII. They won many battles and
lost the Cold war.
Not that Bolsheviks in the USSR was healthy or vibrant. Economics was a deep stagnation, alcoholism among working class was rampant,
the standard of living of the majority of population slides each year, much like is the case with neoliberalism after, say, 1991. Hidden
unemployment in the USSR was high -- at least in high teens if not higher. Like in the USA now good jobs were almost impossible to obtain
without "extra help". Medical services while free were dismal, especially dental -- which were horrible. Hospitals were poor as church
rats as most money went to MIC. Actually, like in the USA now, MIC helped to strangulate the economy and contributed to the collapse.
It was co a corrupt and decaying , led by completely degenerated leadership. To put the person of the level of Gorbachov level of political
talent lead such a huge and complex country was an obvious suicide.
But the facts speak for themselves: what people usually get as the result of any color revolution is the typical for any county
which lost the war: dramatic drop of the standard of living due to economic rape of the country.
While far form being perfect the Chinese regime at least managed to lift the standard of living of the majority of the population
and provide employment. After regime change China will experience the same economic rape as the USSR under Yeltsin regime. So in no
way Hong Cong revolution can be viewed a progressive phenomenon despite all the warts of neoliberalism with Chenese characteristics
in mainland China (actually this is a variant of NEP that Gorbachov tried to implement in the USSR, but was to politically incompetent
to succeed)
CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that's
sustained.
The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other
elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide
how violent the confrontation with -- and reaction to -- the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other
security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo,
and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that's a decisive factor.
The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation
in the methods they use.
The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed -- which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes
-- they don't either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw
the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they're essentially co-signing
what the regime wants -- for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they're probably going to get totally crushed.
Wai Sing-Rin @waisingrin • Aug 27
Replying to @ChrisFraser_HKU @edennnnnn_ and 2 others
Anyone who watched the lone frontliner (w translator) sees the frontliners are headed for disaster. They're fighting just
to fight with no plans nor objectives.
They see themselves as heroes protecting the HK they love. No doubt their sincerity, but there are 300 of them left.
If bombing is/was punishment for use chemical weapons , US would have to keep bombing itself
to this day , as punishments for what they did to Vietnam ..And elsewhere.
"I have to think that NSA Bolton actually believes what he advocates."
There are and have been lots of people who believe what they advocate--Lenin, Trotsky,
Mao, Robespierre, and the Neoconservatives in general among them.
Yeah, consistency may be nice, but what about the actual substance of what Bolton
believes and does?
"... The old adage that the 'sea is always the sea' holds true for US foreign policy. And Iran repeating the same old routines, whilst expecting different outcomes is, of course, one definition of madness. A new US Administration will inherit the same genes as the last. ..."
"... And in any case, the US is institutionally incapable of making a substantive deal with Iran. A US President – any President – cannot lift Congressional sanctions on Iran. The American multitudinous sanctions on Iran have become a decades' long knot of interpenetrating legislation: a vast rhizome of tangled, root-legislation that not even Alexander the Great might disentangle: that is why the JCPOA was constructed around a core of US Presidential 'waivers' needing to be renewed each six months. Whatever might be agreed in the future, the sanctions – 'waived' or not – are, as it were, 'forever'. ..."
"... "[So] decoupling is already in motion. Like the shift of tectonic plates, the move towards a new tech alignment with China increases the potential for sudden, destabilizing convulsions in the global economy and supply chains. To defend America's technology leadership, policymakers must upgrade their toolkit to ensure that US technology leadership can withstand the aftershocks. ..."
"... "The key driver of this shift has not been the President's tariffs, but a changing consensus among rank-and-file policymakers about what constitutes national security. This expansive new conception of national security is sensitive to a broad array of potential threats, including to the economic livelihood of the United States, the integrity of its citizens personal data, and the country's technological advantage". ..."
"... A Quinnipiac University survey last week found for the first time in Trump's presidency, more voters now say the economy is getting worse rather than better, by a 37-31 percent margin – and by 41-37 percent, voters say the president's policies are hurting the economy. ..."
"... This is hugely significant. If Trump is experiencing a crisis of public confidence in respect to his assertive policies towards China, the last thing that he needs in the run-up to an election is an oil crisis, on top of a tariff/tech war crisis with China. A wrong move with Iran, and global oil supplies easily can go awry. Markets would not be happy. (So Trump's China 'bind' can also be Iran's opportunity ). ..."
There is consensus amongst the Washington foreign policy élite that all factions in
Iran understand that – ultimately – a deal with Washington on the nuclear issue
must ensue. It somehow is inevitable. They view Iran simply as 'playing out the clock', until
the advent of a new Administration makes a 'deal' possible again. And then Iran surely will be
back at the table, they affirm.
Maybe. But maybe that is entirely wrong. Maybe the Iranian leadership no longer believes in
'deals' with Washington. Maybe they simply have had enough of western regime change antics
(from the 1953 coup to the Iraq war waged on Iran at the western behest, to the present attempt
at Iran's economic strangulation). They are
quitting that failed paradigm for something new, something different.
The pages to that chapter have been shut. This does not imply some rabid anti-Americanism,
but simply the experience that that path is pointless. If there is a 'clock being played out',
it is that of the tic-toc of western political and economic hegemony in the Middle East is
running down, and not the 'clock' of US domestic politics. The old adage that the 'sea is
always the sea' holds true for US foreign policy. And Iran repeating the same old routines,
whilst expecting different outcomes is, of course, one definition of madness. A new US
Administration will inherit the same genes as the last.
And in any case, the US is institutionally incapable of making a substantive deal with
Iran. A US President – any President – cannot lift Congressional sanctions on Iran.
The American multitudinous sanctions on Iran have become a decades' long knot of
interpenetrating legislation: a vast rhizome of tangled, root-legislation that not even
Alexander the Great might disentangle: that is why the JCPOA was constructed around a core of
US Presidential 'waivers' needing to be renewed each six months. Whatever might be agreed in
the future, the sanctions – 'waived' or not – are, as it were, 'forever'.
If recent history has taught the Iranians anything, it is that such flimsy 'process' in the
hands of a mercurial US President can simply be blown away like old dead leaves. Yes, the US
has a systemic problem: US sanctions are a one-way valve: so easy to flow out, but once poured
forth, there is no return inlet (beyond uncertain waivers issued at the pleasure of an
incumbent President).
But more than just a long chapter reaching its inevitable end, Iran is seeing another path
opening out. Trump is in a 'China bind': a trade deal with China now looks "tough to
improbable", according to White House officials, in the context of the fast deteriorating
environment of security tensions between Washington and Beijing. Defense One spells it out:
"It came without a breaking news alert or presidential tweet, but the technological
competition with China entered a new phase last month. Several developments quietly heralded
this shift: Cross-border investments between the United States and China plunged to their
lowest levels since 2014, with the tech sector suffering the most precipitous drop. US chip
giants Intel and AMD abruptly ended
or declined to extend important partnerships with Chinese entities. The Department of Commerce
halved the number of
licenses that let US companies assign Chinese nationals to sensitive technology and engineering
projects.
"[So] decoupling is already in motion. Like the shift of tectonic plates, the move
towards a new tech alignment with China increases the potential for sudden, destabilizing
convulsions in the global economy and supply chains. To defend America's technology leadership,
policymakers must upgrade their toolkit to ensure that US technology leadership can withstand
the aftershocks.
"The key driver of this shift has not been the President's tariffs, but a changing
consensus among rank-and-file policymakers about what constitutes national security. This
expansive new conception of national security is sensitive to a broad array of potential
threats, including to the economic livelihood of the United States, the integrity of its
citizens personal data, and the country's technological advantage".
Trump's China 'bind' is this: A trade deal with China has long been viewed by the White
House as a major tool for 'goosing' the US stock market upwards, during the crucial
pre-election period. But as that is now said to be "tough to improbable" – and as US
national security consensus metamorphoses, the consequent de-coupling, combined with tariffs,
is beginning to bite. The effects are eating away at President Trump's prime political asset:
the public confidence in his handling of the economy: A Quinnipiac University
survey last week
found for the first time in Trump's presidency, more voters now say the economy is getting
worse rather than better, by a 37-31 percent margin – and by 41-37 percent, voters say
the president's policies are hurting the economy.
This is hugely significant. If Trump is experiencing a crisis of public confidence in
respect to his assertive policies towards China, the last thing that he needs in the run-up to
an election is an oil crisis, on top of a tariff/tech war crisis with China. A wrong move with
Iran, and global oil supplies easily can go awry. Markets would not be happy. (So Trump's China
'bind' can also be Iran's opportunity ).
No wonder Pompeo acted with such alacrity to put a tourniquet on the brewing 'war' in the
Middle East, sparked by Israel's simultaneous air attacks last month in Iraq, inside Beirut,
and in Syria (killing two Hizbullah soldiers). It is pretty clear that Washington did not want
this 'war', at least not now. America, as Defense One
noted , is becoming acutely sensitive to any risks to the global financial system from
"sudden, destabilizing convulsions in the global economy".
The recent Israeli military operations coincided with Iranian FM Zarif's sudden summons to
Biarritz (during the G7), exacerbating fears
within the Israeli Security Cabinet that Trump might meet with President Rouhani in NY at
the UN General Assembly – thus threatening Netanyahu's anti-Iran,
political 'identity' . The fear was that Trump could begin a 'bromance' with the Iranian
President (on the Kim Jong Un lines). And hence the Israeli provocations intended to stir some
Iranian (over)-reaction (which never came). Subsequently it became clear to Israel that Iran's
leadership had absolutely no intention to meet with Trump – and the whole episode
subsided.
Trump's Iran 'bind' therefore is somehow similar to his China 'bind': With China, he
initially wanted an easy trade achievement, but it has proved to be 'anything but'. With Iran,
Trump wanted a razzmatazz meeting with Rohani – even if that did not lead to a new 'deal'
(much as the Trump – Kim Jung Un TV spectaculars that caught the American imagination so
vividly, he may have hoped for a similar response to a Rohani handshake, or he may have even
aspired to an Oval Office spectacular).
Trump simply cannot understand why the Iranians won't do this, and he is peeved by the snub.
Iran is unfathomable to Team Trump.
Well, maybe the Iranians just don't want to do it. Firstly, they don't need to: the Iranian
Rial has been recovering steadily over the last four months and manufacturing output has
steadied. China's General Administration of Customs (GAC) detailing the country's oil imports
data shows that China has not cut its Iranian supply after the US waiver program ended on 2
May, but rather, it has
steadily increased Iranian crude imports since the official end of the waiver extension, up
from May and June levels. The new GAC data shows China imported over 900,000 barrels per day
(bpd) of crude oil from Iran in July, which is up 4.7% from the month before.
And a new path is opening in front of Iran. After Biarritz, Zarif flew directly to Beijing
where he discussed a huge, multi-hundred
billion (according to
one report ), twenty-five-year oil and gas investment, (and a separate) 'Road and Belt'
transport plan. Though the details are not disclosed, it is plain that China – unlike
America – sees Iran as a key future strategic partner, and China seems perfectly able to
fathom out the Iranians, too.
But here is the really substantive US shift taking place. It is that which is termed
"a new normal" now
taking a hold in Washington:
"To defend America's technology leadership, policymakers [are] upgrading their toolkit to
ensure that US technology leadership can withstand the aftershocks Unlike the President's trade
war, support for this new, expansive definition of national security and technology is largely
bipartisan, and likely here to stay.
with many of the president's top advisers viewing China first and foremost as a national
security threat, rather than as an economic partner – it's poised to affect huge parts of
American life, from the cost of many consumer goods to the nature of this country's
relationship with the government of Taiwan.
"Trump himself still views China primarily through an economic prism. But the angrier he
gets with Beijing, the more receptive he is to his advisers' hawkish stances toward China that
go well beyond trade."
"The angrier he gets with Beijing" Well, here is the key point: Washington seems to have
lost the ability to summon the resources to try to fathom either China, or the Iranian 'closed
book', let alone a 'Byzantine' Russia. It is a colossal attenuation of consciousness in
Washington; a loss of conscious 'vitality' to the grip of some 'irrefutable logic' that allows
no empathy, no outreach, to 'otherness'. Washington (and some European élites) have
retreated into their 'niche' consciousness, their mental enclave, gated and protected, from
having to understand – or engage – with wider human experience.
To compensate for these lacunae, Washington looks rather, to an engineering and
technological solution: If we cannot summon empathy, or understand Xi or the Iranian Supreme
Leader, we can muster artificial intelligence to substitute – a 'toolkit' in which the US
intends to be global leader.
This type of solution – from the US perspective – maybe works for China, but not
so much for Iran; and Trump is not keen on a full war with Iran in the lead up to elections. Is
this why Trump seems to be losing interest in the Middle East? He doesn't understand it; he
hasn't the interest or the means to fathom it; and he doesn't want to bomb it. And the China
'bind' is going to be all absorbing for him, for the meantime.
"... The reaction to what's going on in Hong Kong that I've seen, amongst the educated Taiwanese classes, is that most are horrified by it, perceiving it as a spasm of nihilist, ignorant Hong Kong youth manipulated by cynical outside forces. ..."
"... If the US intelligence agencies believe that Taiwan will throw in support for Hong Kong following a protest like this, it should think again. People in Taiwan have become far more skeptical of the US-Taiwan relationship, since the Sunflower Movement. ..."
"... In Hong Kong the U.S. is making the usual mistake of betting on the extreme rightwing, libertarians and fascists. ..."
"... The rioting students have already lost much of the wider support they had at the beginning of this operations. They will soon be seen as the nihilist idiots who only care about themselves that they truly are. The people of Hong Kong who care about Hong Kong will fight them down. ..."
"... I disagree with your characterization of the rioting students as nihilist idiots. Many probably believe (with justification) that the liberties they currently enjoy are at stake if HK's system of self-governance is eroded away to nothing. However, you raise a good point about the Chinese leadership being provoked into another Tiananmen. The PNAC crowd must be frustrated with the widespread public perception of China as *just* a manipulative trade competitor/pseudo adversary. A very public bloodbath in HK is just what they need to promote China to Axis of Evil status. ..."
"... Most Chinese, I expect, just want to get on with their lives rather than agitate about the CCP. ..."
The reaction to what's going on in Hong Kong that I've seen, amongst the educated Taiwanese
classes, is that most are horrified by it, perceiving it as a spasm of nihilist, ignorant
Hong Kong youth manipulated by cynical outside forces.
Remember that support for Tsai Yingwen & her coalition remains somewhere in the 20 to
30% range--that is, very much near the same range that Chen Shuibian was afflicted with,
before he was prosecuted and sent off to prison for corruption.
If the US intelligence agencies believe that Taiwan will throw in support for Hong Kong
following a protest like this, it should think again. People in Taiwan have become far more
skeptical of the US-Taiwan relationship, since the Sunflower Movement.
Yes--there will be a period of chaos, as the majority slowly explains to the unruly
outliers that no, their ideas are not useful. Yes, as in Hong Kong, that period may last a
period that US/uk authorities may find untenable.
But no: none of this will result in a China-NATO war. None of this will result in a hard,
black line running between the Koreas, Taiwan, and Japan. None of this will stop the
Philippines from continuing their gravitation westward ("Eastward", for you Euroyanks.)
Taiwan, I predict, will be the second-to-last stalwart holdout against US hegemony in East
Asia--with Japan being the last.
I get a different perspective from Taiwanese business people who I speak with regularly. They
are uniform in their disgust and fear of CCP. What they seem most concerned about is that the
US will abandon them when push comes to shove.
They are watching what's happening in HK with
much interest and are privately very sympathetic to the aims of the people of HK to be
independent of CCP rule.
I will guess that you are living in Taiwan, otherwise how would you be able to see the
reaction among the educated Taiwanese classes?
I would have to read up on the names of the people and movements you have given us before
I could know anything about them.
I had not heard, way back here in Great Lakestan, that US intelligence agencies were
thinking about whether Taiwan would "support" Hong Kong or not, though I suppose the US
intelligence agencies try to think about every possible thing. It seems more likely to me
that the agencies would be thinking about how Taiwan does or does not plan to welcome the
ChiCom regime when it looks their way and says " okay, you're next".
So, the "majority" will explain to the unruly outliers how useless their ideas are? In
what sense is a pack of ChiCom Regime-Lords a "majority"? A "majority" of what or whom?
I hope you are correct that there will be no China-NATO war. American hegemony is fading
and I hope the slow fade-out leaves America intact as a free country. I hope America can
break free from the International Forcey-Free-TradeRape system.
Yes, as one hegemony fades away . . . another rises. Since Taiwan is largely Han-majority,
I believe, I suppose Taiwan will fare better under Great Han Lebensraumist ChiCom rule than
Tibet or Sinjiang or Inner Mongolia or or or . . .
And maybe Taiwan will find Chinese hegemony more enjoyable than the American kind. And aren't
you the lucky lad? You may get to find out within your own lifetime.
As Angel-Eyes said to the Colonel with gangrene: " I wish you luck."
You predicted the immediate introduction of Chinese troops in Hong Kong how many month
back? Where are they?
China does not care about Hong Kong. It will not be provoked into another NED/CIA arranged
Tianamen.
In Hong Kong the U.S. is making the usual mistake of betting on the extreme rightwing,
libertarians and fascists.
The rioting students have already lost much of the wider support they had at the beginning
of this operations. They will soon be seen as the nihilist idiots who only care about
themselves that they truly are. The people of Hong Kong who care about Hong Kong will fight
them down.
There is alas a consistency in our ruling elite's modus operandi: just look at DC's support
for Taliban, liver-eating Al Nusra (Al Qaeda) in Syria, slave-trader Jihadists in Libya &
above all, genocidal Salafists in Yemen, Boston-marathon-bombing Chechens & above all
Saudi terror-financing Clown Prince ⚙️Mohammad Bone Saw⚙️: it is
telling that you are more concerned about a dead ideology as opposed to an expanding current
dangerous movement.
I disagree with your characterization of the rioting students as nihilist idiots. Many
probably believe (with justification) that the liberties they currently enjoy are at stake if
HK's system of self-governance is eroded away to nothing. However, you raise a good point
about the Chinese leadership being provoked into another Tiananmen. The PNAC crowd must be
frustrated with the widespread public perception of China as *just* a manipulative trade
competitor/pseudo adversary. A very public bloodbath in HK is just what they need to promote
China to Axis of Evil status.
Mr Wong and his comrades would be well advised to treat support from an American
administration still full of neocons with a great deal of suspicion. I don't doubt that
people like Bolton would willingly goad them into escalating the confrontation until the PLA
is forced to crush them. They may do so anyway. But if the risk of contagion is low an
example can be made of HK without violence. If major disruption continues businesses will be
forced to relocate. HK could simply be allowed to rot as this happens, pour encourager les
autres.
I did not. Chinese troops were massing on the HK border in August. There was a general
strike and that was a possible flash point. I predicted that China would inevitably crush the
rebellion in Hong Kong. I stand by that. Your anti-Americanism is showing again,
Obviously they do care. As the quoted article noted, they are the ones who provoked this
situation. Students (and others) did not just rush out into the streets on a whim. They have
not endured police state violence and arrests in pursuit of being "nihilist idiots".
Their chances seem slim. The question that I don't see asked or answered is "Why hasn't
this been put down already?" That seems the only plausible end to it. The Chinese government
certainly has the capability.
Holding back is not an effect of any strictness about rules or
morals. Not having done it can only mean that they see costs or dangers that they are not
(yet) willing to face.
Personally I think that the (the government) and powerful people with
China derive a LOT of money and power from the perception of Hong Kong as a rule-of-law
environment. But I have seen very little discussion of the motives for holding off. The costs
of holding off are obvious. The reasons for doing so must be massive.
There are indications elsewhere on the web that China will try and quarantine HK and let it
slowly die. Provided this can be achieved there is no need for military action. As for
overseas chinese attitudes, I didn't see any support for HK when I was in Singapore last
month and demonstrations by Chinese students in Australia seem to be neatly divided into pro
and anti HK camps. Most Chinese, I expect, just want to get on with their lives rather than
agitate about the CCP.
The American military is advanced over both Russia and China in one sense - they have access
to endless taxpayers' dollars to fund their programs, many of which are complete failures.
Putin can offer Trump hyper-sonic missiles knowing he cannot accept. To accept
these would display the USA's technical military inferiority for all to see. The msm ,
Hollywood, etc. all sing from the same song-sheet. "USA is great", ignore all the wars they
have lost, ignore the astronomical military financial expenditure (declared and hidden).
Just
like Reagan's star-wars program public perception is everything
If bombing is/was punishment for use chemical weapons , US would have to keep bombing itself
to this day , as punishments for what they did to Vietnam ..And elsewhere.
As newly appointed US Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, was reported to have claimed about
wanting for Russia to ''behave like a normal country'', Sergey Lavrov urged for him to
clarify what he means by ''normality'' during a press conference in the Russian capital; if
Russia was to behave like the US, it would have had to bomb Iraq, Libya, supporting an armed,
anti-constitutional coup in Kiev, and allocating millions in the interference in the affairs
of other countries, as in the ''promotion of democracy'' in Russia.
Sergey Shoygu did not have much to add, but what he did add could not be clearer: Russia
will probably have to remain being ''not normal''.
"... For the detached observer the juvenile behavior of groups of Americans is plain to see, both in this comment section and in the world at large. ..."
"... This is somewhat curious as this "normal nation" seems to have hit the neocon talking points as SecDef Esper used similiar phrase as applied to Russia. Russian MinFin responded: "he called upon us to act as a normal country [as such] and not like the United States," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a press briefing in the Russian capital: Otherwise, we should have been acting like the US, bombing Iraq and Libya in blatant violation of international law " ..."
"... If there is any country in the world that is less "normal" in the scope and ambitions of its foreign policy than ours, I can't think of which one it would be ..."
"... I can think of one in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. As a matter of fact, USA's foreign policy is their foreign policy. ..."
"... This is somewhat curious as this "normal nation" seems to have hit the neocon talking points as SecDef Esper used similar phrase as applied to Russia. ..."
"... Russian MinFin responded: "he called upon us to act as a normal country [as such] and not like the United States," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a press briefing in the Russian capital: Otherwise, we should have been acting like the US, bombing Iraq and Libya in blatant violation of international law " ..."
"... Similar to his rhetoric about other countries not following the "rules-based order". The US, which abandons and ignores treaties, or doesn't enter them in the first place but lectures others who have that they need to follow them. Who refuses to be judged by the ICC, UN and others yet wants them to hold others to account. And who call for regime-change of others based on rigged or suspect elections, yet refuses to fix its own crappy system and corruption. ..."
This can never happen. All Americans are inherently childish. They are all a product of the same environment, the same educational
system and the same all pervasive 'cultural' influences. This transcends ethnic boundaries for those born in the US or those who
arrived at an early age.
For the detached observer the juvenile behavior of groups of Americans is plain to see, both in this comment section and in
the world at large.
A recurring theme in international relations and diplomacy is that dealing with 'the Americans' is like dealing with children.
Of course when the American is trying to kill you, as they a often want to do, the actions of the petulant child take on new meaning.
This is somewhat curious as this "normal nation" seems to have hit the neocon talking points as SecDef Esper used similiar phrase
as applied to Russia.
Russian MinFin responded: "he called upon us to act as a normal country [as such] and not like the United States," Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov told a press briefing in the Russian capital: Otherwise, we should have been acting like the US, bombing Iraq and
Libya in blatant violation of international law "
" If there is any country in the world that is less "normal" in the scope and ambitions of its foreign policy than ours, I can't
think of which one it would be."
I can think of one in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. As a matter of fact, USA's foreign policy is their foreign policy.
This is somewhat curious as this "normal nation" seems to have hit the neocon talking points as SecDef Esper used
similar phrase
as applied to Russia.
Russian MinFin responded: "he called upon us to act as a normal country [as such] and not like the United States," Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov told a press briefing in the Russian capital: Otherwise, we should have been acting like the US, bombing Iraq and
Libya in blatant violation of international law "
" If there is any country in the world that is less "normal" in the scope and ambitions of its foreign policy than ours, I can't
think of which one it would be."
I can think of one in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. As a matter of fact, USA's foreign policy is their foreign policy.
Similar to his rhetoric about other countries not following the "rules-based order". The US, which abandons and ignores treaties,
or doesn't enter them in the first place but lectures others who have that they need to follow them. Who refuses to be judged
by the ICC, UN and others yet wants them to hold others to account. And who call for regime-change of others based on rigged or
suspect elections, yet refuses to fix its own crappy system and corruption.
This is also a thing about leftists with Trump Derangement Syndrome, who are oh-so-upset about Trump, either ignorant or lying
that he's at all an aberration. The US has consistently flouted international law, waged illegal wars and staged violent coups
and assassinations, and killed tens of thousands of innocents, under nearly all Presidents, including Obama.
"... I personally suspect that Trump has a negative net worth, and hopes that if he marches to Adelson's orders, he might get a nice pay-off at the end. It's the only thing that explains all this. ..."
I think it is highly unlikely Trump can pull off detente with the Chinese or anyone else before the next election. He has, unfortunately,
shown himself to be completely untrustworthy on the international stage. Under what circumstance are the Chinese going to sign
some agreement with him, when he might just throw out new tariffs a week later?
What are the Taliban going to agree to when the US wants to leave thousands of troops in Afghanistan?
I personally suspect that Trump has a negative net worth, and hopes that if he marches to Adelson's orders, he might get
a nice pay-off at the end. It's the only thing that explains all this.
"... Rickards had previously worked for the CIA (possibly still does – who knows?) but now seems to be a free-wheeling business executive, writer and strategic analyst. He tends to circulate outside of the usual middle-ranking semi-elite circles preferring to consort with the less observable, higher-ranking coteries of the inner-party. Moreover, he has nothing but disdain for the run-of-the-mill talking heads to be found (in abundance) in the media and academia – the outer-party. ..."
"... History is the first casualty of media micro-second attention span. An army of pseudo-savants saturate the airways to explain that tariffs are bad, trade wars hurt growth and mercantilism are a throwback to the 17th century. These sentiments come from mainstream liberals and conservatives and tag-along journalists trained in the orthodoxy of so-called free-trade and the false if comforting belief that trade deficits are the flipside of capital surpluses. So, what is the problem? The problem is that perpetual trade deficits have put the United States on a path to a crisis of the US$."[ 1 ] ..."
"... Obama, both Bushes, and Bill Clinton were globalists, defined as those willing to trade-off or compromise US interests for the sake of a stronger global community even conservative hawks like Reagan and JFK were firmly in the globalist camp, as they relied on NATO, the UN and the IMF to pursue their cold war goals. ..."
"... LBJ's administration contrived to conduct the Vietnam War as well as an expensive social programme, simultaneously. A guns plus butter economy. (The original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany. The then Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels stated: "We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms." ) ..."
"... Globally, the leading manufacturer of auto-vehicles is Volkswagen followed by Toyota. GM are 4th and Ford are 8th of ten. Hardly market leaders anymore, but Rickards apportions the blame to 'unfair practices' by foreign manufacturers and argues instead for tariffs. The same goes for other trade partners. Fact that the United States has to a large extent been deindustrialised was a political choice of its own making. ..."
"... There were a number of advantages which accrued to the dollar contingent on the ending of gold convertibility which Eichengreen listed these in his book. But the principle one was making the surplus nations of the world pay for America's wars with an unconvertible currency. Instead of being paid for in gold, or at least a gold-backed currency the world produced goods and services for a piece of green paper backed by nothing. ..."
"... This was to be expected quite simply because at bottom Rickards is a sophist much in the tradition of Protagoras, Gorgias and Thrasymachus "I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger" [ 12 ] ..."
"... A view which Rickards would certainly endorse. Beneath the Upper Manhattan, polished chic, there resides a ruthless Cold Warrior. The further one digs into the book, the more this becomes apparent. ..."
"... Many of us are aware of the problems of the USD but few are able to so succinctly explain why and connect the dots to expose the true picture. The bottom line is that the lifespan of the USD as king is almost over ..."
"... The US has been exposed, and so well said, as a predator nation .There must be a reason why China and Russia are buying up as much gold as their economy will permit .The exchange medium used for trade since time immemorial . ..."
"... The Wall Street ethos has always been 'kill or be killed' where bears eat, and bulls eat, but pigs get slaughtered! The problem with today's market & stock valuations is that they are as hyperinflated as Real Estate Commercial & Residential sectors are which leaves no wiggle room for price discovery until there is a system wide crash that mean reverts the valuations back to a realistic price. ..."
"... All that is happening now is that Trump is trying to solve his country's intractable economic and financial problems by looting the rest of the planet. This is not a new development, but Trump is at least refreshingly honest in his public pronouncements. ..."
"... The Nazi Empire imposed tribute on its conquests in identical fashion. Send us your industrial output, agricultural produce and raw materials. In return we'll give you a big credit balance at the Reichsbank. ..."
"... The current (real) military budget is $1,134 billion, around 60% higher than the fictitious figure that is normally touted. ..."
"... Gold could form some kind of basis for exchange in a collapse setting. Other desirable barter items would be alcohol, cigarettes, basic drugs like aspirin and paracetamol, electrical batteries, fuel and similar goods. Maybe ammunition as well. Goods were priced in cigarettes in postwar Germany. ..."
"... Bismarck is normally credited with the choice between Guns and Butter. Goebbels was suggesting that Guns will bring Butter. ..."
"... The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- ultimately a wholly artificial concept -- we're wasting immense amounts of resources and human potential, spreading misery and despoliation all over the planet and generally behaving like really awful global citizens. We can and must do better. ..."
"... American exceptionalism, for example, takes it for granted that we in the West are good, and therefore the East must become more like us. But we are logically, and morally, obliged to look at this from the opposite perspective too: What if the Chinese take it for granted that they are good, and therefore the West must become more like them? ..."
"... American parasitism writ large over the last half century has amply signified to the entire world that 'manifest destiny' was merely a ruse to foist American hegemony onto all sovereign nations at the behest of an out-of-control American Oligopoly that was power-tripping post WW2 & drunk on the souls of the poor sots all over the entire world with their power hungry warmongering Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... Its not "American". We just happen to be the chosen host for this part of history. Before us it was the British Empire that was top dog. ..."
"... You have made the common mistake of asserting that it is America, instead of those who govern (the USA and its pundits) that have engineered the problems you point out. ..."
"... To condense this lengthy essay: This ship is sinking. ..."
"Aftermath" is the latest addition to three previous publications by Rickards, Currency Wars (2011), The Death of Money (2014),
The Road to Ruin (2016). Together, with the present offering (Aftermath, 2019), the author uses the analogy of the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse to illustrate the themes of his four books. The latest book is thematic in its approach to the events which have
taken place in the world in general and the United States in particular during this period.
HIGH SOCIETY
Rickards had previously worked for the CIA (possibly still does – who knows?) but now seems to be a free-wheeling business executive,
writer and strategic analyst. He tends to circulate outside of the usual middle-ranking semi-elite circles preferring to consort
with the less observable, higher-ranking coteries of the inner-party. Moreover, he has nothing but disdain for the run-of-the-mill
talking heads to be found (in abundance) in the media and academia – the outer-party.
His observations of this social stratum are unapologetic and caustic:
History is the first casualty of media micro-second attention span. An army of pseudo-savants saturate the airways to explain
that tariffs are bad, trade wars hurt growth and mercantilism are a throwback to the 17th century. These sentiments come from
mainstream liberals and conservatives and tag-along journalists trained in the orthodoxy of so-called free-trade and the false
if comforting belief that trade deficits are the flipside of capital surpluses. So, what is the problem? The problem is that perpetual
trade deficits have put the United States on a path to a crisis of the US$."[
1 ]
As is apparent, his contempt is palpable.
It should be said that much of his writing and theorising is at times occasioned by a high level of sophistication, alas sadly
lacking in most of his contemporaries. But for all his refinement and eloquence that doesn't stop him being, from Off Guardian's
perspective (and mine), on the other side – the side of the Anglo-Zionist empire.
THE GREAT BETRAYAL
Throughout this book and previous books there runs a familiar leitmotif; a sense of betrayal by the present dominant section of
the US elite. This is not by any means an unusual political phenomenon and bears comparison with the stab-in-the-back myth – a notion
doing the rounds in Germany circa 1918.
It held that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but it was 'traitors' on the home front, especially the
traitorous republicans who overthrew the Hohenzollern monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–19.
This precedent loosely corresponds to Rickards' belief in the perfidy of the current leadership of the US and his vitriol is directed
against this globalist faction who are firmly ensconced in both Democrat and Republican parties and whom, he argues, have sold the
pass in terms of America's strategic interests. He writes:
Obama, both Bushes, and Bill Clinton were globalists, defined as those willing to trade-off or compromise US interests for
the sake of a stronger global community even conservative hawks like Reagan and JFK were firmly in the globalist camp, as they
relied on NATO, the UN and the IMF to pursue their cold war goals.
However, all was not lost. As a result of
the Presidential election of 2016 when Donald Trump was sworn in on 17 January 2017 as the strongest nationalist since Theodore
Roosevelt. For the first time in 100 years a committed nationalist was sitting in the Oval Office." [
2 ]
The event was obviously political grist to Rickards' mill.
However, precisely how this liberation of the US from the domestic globalists' stranglehold was to be brought about wasn't made
clear, and in fact is barely touched upon by Rickards.
Trump, for all his bombast and promises to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and pursue a radical foreign policy of withdrawal
from globalist wars of choice and military adventurism, has been conspicuous by its absence.
Moreover, from the outset he has been beset by the ancien regime of neo-conservatives and neo-liberals – Bolton, Pompeo and Pence
– entrenched in key US institutions, as well as various think-tanks and media who are still doggedly set upon the realization of
neo-con foreign policy goals.
It seems odd that Rickards doesn't see fit to comment on this important development given that Trumps' campaign promises have
disappeared almost without trace since he entered the Oval Office.
IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID
Rickards is on firmer ground, however, when dissecting the 8th wonder of the world – US economic policy. The US sovereign debt
(i.e., the debt of the Federal Government) to GDP is now at a record, this is unprecedented for a peacetime administration.
In addition, it is also worth noting the magnitude of US private debt and unfunded future liabilities, pensions, Medicaid, social
security and so forth.
This would include household debt, student debt, financial debt, corporate debt, and municipal debt. Add this to sovereign debt
and you get a figure roughly 5 times US sovereign debt, and even this is regarded as being a conservative figure according to many
– see David Stockman, John Mauldin et al).
According to Rickards, the present situation has been largely the result of excess spending by both Democratic and Republican
administrations. The spending has either been on 'Defence' – a Republican favourite – or social like L.B. Johnson's 'Great Society'
programme – a Democratic favourite.
LBJ's administration contrived to conduct the Vietnam War as well as an expensive social programme, simultaneously. A guns plus
butter economy. (The original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany.
The then Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels stated: "We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without
arms." )
LBJ's guns-and-butter policies were enacted in the late sixties at the height of the Vietnam war and the Tet Offensive. The utopian
attempt to have the best of both worlds brought LBJ's administration to an end; more importantly, perhaps it was also the beginning
of the process which brought down the curtain on the post WW2 economic world order established at the Bretton Woods conference in
1944.
Because the costs of the Vietnam war were superimposed on the economy not far effectively from full employment, the US domestic
sector was severely destabilised.
Instead of taxing the nation to pay for the war, the government engaged in the more acceptable practice of deficit financing
Vietnam showed that neither the United States nor any other democratic nation can ever again afford the foreign exchange costs
of conventional warfare, although the periphery was still kept in line by American military initiatives most recently in Yugoslavia
and Afghanistan.
The lesson in the long term is that peace will be maintained only by governments refusing to finance the military and other
excesses of the increasingly indebted imperial power." [
3 ]
The figure for the US sovereign debt – began to rise relentlessly from the 1980s onwards approaching wartime levels by the time
of the 2008 blowout.
It has been estimated by some economic theorists that any sovereign Debt-to-GDP figure greater than 60% represents a tripwire
whereby governments should act to rein in government expenditures.
The EU Maastricht criteria, for example, stipulated that EU Debt-to-GDP should not go over 60% except in certain circumstances
and an annual budgetary deficit should not be more than 3%.
That is a pretty tight monetary and fiscal policy EU style, but not to be outdone the spendthrift US was to go on a wild binge
in both fiscal and monetary terms the result of which is a now an unpayable mountain of debt. This gives an indication of how far
US economic policymaking has drifted away from any viable economic strategy.
Rickards fulminates:
To see how America came to this pretty pass we, one needs to review almost 40 years of fiscal policy under Presidents Reagan,
Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama and Trump from the period 1981-2019." [
4 ]
Under Reagan in 1981 US Debt-to-GDP ratio was 32.5%. The President was gung-ho for tax cuts and big spending increases, particularly
'defence' spending. This trend was continued under the tutelage of the Bushes and Clinton, and Debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 56.4% when
Bush Jr, took office and had risen to 82% by the time he left.
The Obama years saw the Debt-to-GDP rise to 100%. The diagram below 2009 debt-to-GDP was 82.3% This figure has risen inexorably
to over 100% in 2018. Yep, here we have the dreaded law of Diminishing returns. Every new dollar of input gives you 90 cents of output.
The above diagram illustrates the growth of debt vis-à-vis National Income (GDP) since the 2008 blowout. Debt has been growing
progressively faster than National Income.
The US economy, like the US shale oil industry, has become a Ponzi scheme in all but name. The Fed's issuance of new debt to pay
off existing debt signals the key moment of the Minsky crisis.[
5 ]
There doesn't appear to be any viable way out this predicament short of a straight default. But Rickards argues that 'the United
States will never default on its debt because the Fed can simply print the money and to pay it off.' This will involve an engineered
inflation to wipe out the debt. But in fact, inflation is the default, a default by the back door. Getting paid in worthless currency
is in essence no different than not getting paid at all.
NO EXIT
As for solutions to a crisis which has seemingly reached the point of no return, all that Rickards can offer is a Japanese scenario
of low or zero growth punctuated by recession for the United States and by implication for the rest of the world. The United States
had its first long decade from 2007 to 2017 and is now into its second decade.
This growth pattern will persist absent of inflationary breakout which the Fed seems powerless to ignite in the short run;
a war; or severe depression perhaps caused by a new financial crisis.[
6 ]
Not much of a prospect for the average family then. But Rickards does give some useful advice to his more opulent readers on how
they should diversify their assets.
There are apparently "luxury bombproof bunkers built in former missile silos and expansive estates in New Zealand loaded with
rations and good wines."
Really? At this point one wonders if Mr Rickards is being serious or just smug.
SOCIAL IMMOBILITY AND THE RISE OF OLIGARCHY
The social and economic impact on levels of inequality in both the US and globally have been extremely deleterious and seem set
to continue. Inequality in income and wealth – a phenomenon identified and outlined by Thomas Piketty – is resulting in societies
which more and more resemble feudal economic and social structures rather than textbook capitalism. Social class is hardening into
social caste and rates of social mobility are decelerating at an alarming rate.
The liberal notion that the individual is the author of his/her own destiny has become a very dubious proposition when the drawbridges
of advantage, birth and preferment are drawn up. Moreover, high levels of income/wealth are not conducive to growth since the new
aristocracy owns most of the wealth/income which is hoarded rather than spent on investment and/or consumption. Stagnation, idled
capital and rent extraction becomes the economic norm.
Inequality is common in college admissions where the wealthy and connected continue to send their sons and daughters to elite schools
while the middle-class are restrained by sky-high tuitions and the burden of student loans.
It's true in the housing market where the rich picked up mansions on the cheap in foreclosure sales whilst the middle-class were
frozen in mortgage negative equity.
It's true in health care, where the rich could afford all the insurance they needed while the middle class were handicapped by
unemployment and the loss of job-related benefits. These disparities also affected the adult children of the middle-class. There
are no gold-plated benefits packages in the gig society
Research shows that fewer than 50% of all children aged 30 today earn more than their parents did at the same age. This 50% figure
compares with 60% who earned more in 1971, and 80% who earned more in 1950.
The American dream of each generation earning more than the prior generation is collapsing before our eyes The middle class is
getting poorer on a relative basis and lagging further behind the rich whose incomes absorb an increasing share of total GDP The
manner in which the rich become rich is variable.
It could be due to a number of unrelated factors Problems arise in the way that the rich stay rich become richer and pass on wealth
to their children and grandchildren." [
7 ]
It is a matter of common knowledge that the traditional techniques of preserving and creating wealth have been long established
in law, customs, education and socialization; these traditional methods being practised over decades, if not centuries, have produced
a system of elite self-recruitment, one moreover which endures through time.
Many of the richest US citizens – e.g., Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg – pay minimal tax demands. Much of the wealth of the richest
Americans is never taxed because they hold onto real estate and stocks and pass them onto their beneficiaries tax-free. This is one
of a perfectly legal method of avoiding tax; there are many more too numerous to cite which include various other examples of tax
avoidance/evasion.
Levels of income and wealth inequality within states are usually measured by what is called the Gini Co-efficient. This measure
is a commonly used measure of income inequality that condenses the entire income distribution for a country into a single number
between 0 and 1 or 0% to 100%: the higher the number, the greater the degree of inequality. A rough estimate of inequality is a figure
above 40%.
The United States and China are in the low forties, surrounded by underdeveloped and developing states such as The Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Burundi and El Salvador. At the other end of the spectrum are Sweden, Norway and Iceland.
In this connection the by now well-known study carried out by two American academics at Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens
and North western University Prof Benjamin Page argue that the US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent
influence."
In plain English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.
The two professors came to this conclusion after reviewing answers to 1,779 survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on public
policy issues. They broke the responses down by income level, and then determined how often certain income levels and organised interest
groups saw their policy preferences enacted.
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association
and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations
and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to be a democratic society are seriously threatened."
In summation, both gentlemen concluded that in essence the US was an oligarchy not a properly functioning democracy. All very
true but somewhat self-evident.
Rickards regards the present situation as being irreversible. He does not present any alternative to this trend other than some
vague hopes that the 'nationalist' President in the Oval Office will turn things around – MAGA in fact.
The golden age of post WW2 capitalism ended when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in August 1971, which was in effect
a default by the US. Holders of surplus dollars in Europe who were no longer able to swap these dollars for gold but were merely
presented with other US$s with which they had to purchase US Treasurys (Bonds) debts which were never going to be repaid. In the
age of fiat currencies Europe and various other holders of US Treasuries were in fact subsidizing the United States.
POOR LITTLE AMERICA
At this point the book becomes one long whinge about how hard done-by America has been and how the rest of the world has taken
advantage of this benign gentle giant. This rather bizarre belief calls for further analysis. The US pays some of the bill for NATO
whilst European nations pay insufficient amounts for the 'defence' of their countries.
It should be pointed out, however, that in terms of military hardware the NATO alliance is standardized to American specifications.
This means large-scale purchasing of US war materiel which is a gift bonus to the US armaments industry.
Then Germany has the nerve to buy Russian gas transported to Europe via Nordstream 2 which is cheaper and more reliable than US
Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), when in fact they should be buying more expensive and less reliable US LNG. Apparently, Germany ought
really to be subsidising the US shale oil Ponzi racket. Bad, ungrateful Germany.
Then comes the incessant carping regarding trade policy and trade deals. The US in its speed to become a cool, post-modern, financialised
economy apparently forgot about the importance of production. In the automobile industry the once dominant US triad of General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler are no longer in the vanguard and Japan, with South Korea catching up, is now the leading country in the export
of auto vehicles, a position which the US once held. It was the Japanese auto industry which pioneered production methods including
just-in-time deliveries and lean production (Toyota). Was anyone stopping the Americans from innovating?
In rank order. Figures quoted in Global Shift – Peter Dicken.
Globally, the leading manufacturer of auto-vehicles is Volkswagen followed by Toyota. GM are 4th and Ford are 8th of ten.
Hardly market leaders anymore, but Rickards apportions the blame to 'unfair practices' by foreign manufacturers and argues instead
for tariffs. The same goes for other trade partners. Fact that the United States has to a large extent been deindustrialised was
a political choice of its own making.
If the US has lost ground in the competition for trade on world markets that is because of its own insular provincialism and hubris,
not foreign competitive malpractice. Moreover, much of its productive industry which remains has been outsourced to low cost venues
such as China. The US more than anyone should know that its competitors are simply using the same policies that it itself used during
the 19th century to break British trade hegemony.
It has been the same story with agriculture. Trade liberalization (this must rank as the greatest misnomer of trade theory) and
trade treaties have been an example of the blatant unfairness of such agreements. During the Uruguay round of 'talks' (1982-2000):
the United States pushed other countries to open up their markets to areas of 'our' (i.e. the US's) strength, but resisted, successfully
so, to efforts to make us reciprocate.
Construction and maritime services, the areas of advantage of many developing countries were not included in the new agreement.
Worse still, financial services liberalization was arguably even harmful to some developing countries: as large international (read
American) banks squelched local competitors denying them the funds they garnered would be channelled to the international firms with
which they felt comfortable, not the small and medium-sized local firms
As foreign banks took over the banking systems of like Argentina and Mexico worries about small and medium sized firms within
these countries being starved of funds have been repeatedly voiced.
Whether these concerns are valid or not, whether they are exaggerated or not, is not the issue: the issue is that countries should
have the right to make these decisions themselves, as the United States did in its own country during its formative years; but under
the new international rules that America had pushed, countries were being deprived of that right.
Suffice it to say that agriculture has always been a flagrant example of the double standards inherent in the US trade liberalization
agenda. Although we insisted that other countries reduce their barriers to our products and eliminate the subsidies for which those
products competed against ours, the United States kept barriers for the goods produced by the developing countries, and the US continued
massive subsidies to its own produce. [
8 ] EXORBITANT PRIVILEGE
Oh, I almost forgot: the imperial tribute that the world pays to the hegemon; aka the reserve status of the dollar. The role of
the US dollar in the world's political economy gives it advantages which the rest of the dollar surplus-states are dragooned into
accepting. In the late sixties early seventies, the US was on the verge of technical bankruptcy due to its spending profligacy at
home and military adventurism in Indochina. It had three choices of how to deal with this acute problem.
[The] 3 courses open to the US government on the collapse of the Gold Pool in London in 1968 were: immediately pull out of
the war in South-East Asia and cut back overseas and domestic military expenditure to allow the dollar to firm again on world
markets; to continue the war paying for its foreign exchange costs with further outflows of Fort Knox gold; or to induce the Europeans
and other payments surplus areas to continue to accumulate surplus dollars and dollar equivalents (US Treasuries) not convertible
into gold." [ 9 ]
Of course, it was option three that appealed and Nixon in his television broadcast was to announce a 'temporary' suspension of
gold sales by the US to its overseas 'partners'.
The date in question, 15 August 1971, marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. The temporary suspension soon
morphed into a permanent one and a global fiat currency regime based on the dollar came into being. This represented a culmination
of a situation in which the US manipulation of the dollar was termed the 'Exorbitant Privilege' by the senior French politician Valery
Giscard d'Estaing. And privilege it was.
The central political fact is that the dollar standard places the direction of the world monetary policy in the hands of a
single country which thereby acquires great influence over the economic destiny of others. It is one thing to sacrifice sovereignty
in the interests of interdependence; it is quite another when the relationship is one-way.
The difference is that between the EEC(EU) and a colonial empire. The brute fact is that the acceptance of a dollar standard
necessarily implies a degree of asymmetry in power which, although it actually existed in the early post-war years, had vanished
by the time that the world sliding into a reluctant dollar standard." [
10 ]
There were a number of advantages which accrued to the dollar contingent on the ending of gold convertibility which Eichengreen
listed these in his book. But the principle one was making the surplus nations of the world pay for America's wars with an unconvertible
currency. Instead of being paid for in gold, or at least a gold-backed currency the world produced goods and services for a piece
of green paper backed by nothing.
Quite a clever little racket when you think about it.
Better still is the way that the two biggest surplus nations, Japan and China, have been the US's main creditors, bankrolling
the US by buying its Treasuries. This had another intended, or perhaps unintended effect: long term interest rates on US bonds came
down (since bond prices and bond interest rates move in opposite directions) and enabled the property bubble to expand until the
inevitable blow-out in 2008.
In mafia terms the US dollar has been a 'made' currency enjoying a set of privileges and protection which it did not earn but
foisted upon others. This is a unique dispensation which is enjoyed by the US to which the rest of the world is excluded.
However, it is in the nature of things that privileges will ultimately get abused. In pushing its luck to the point of abuse the
US should be aware that initial signs are that the world is sloughing off the US dollar. As it proceeds in that direction, the US
currency will lose its position as the global reserve asset. Holders of trillions of dollar-denominated assets will become sellers
eventuating in a collapse of the currency.
The US economy lives like a parasite off its partners in the global system, with virtually no savings of its own. The World
produces whilst North America consumes. The advantage of the US is that of a predator whose advantage is covered, by what others
agree, or are forced, to contribute.
Washington uses various means to make up for its deficiencies: for example, repeated violations of the principles of liberalism,
arms exports, and the hunting-down of oil super-profits (which involves the periodic felling of producers; one of the real motives
behind the wars in Iraq and Central Asia).
But the fact is that the bulk of the American deficit is covered by capital inputs from Europe and Japan, China and the South,
rich oil-producing countries and comprador classes from all regions, including the poorest, in the third world, to which should
be added the debt-service levy that is imposed on nearly every country in the periphery of the global system. The US superpower
depends from day to day on the flow of capital which sustains its economy and society. The vulnerability of the United States
represents a serious danger to Washington's project." [
11 ]
In light of the above we may conclude that – in spite of the irritating name-dropping – Rickards' books are interesting well written
and well-argued; per contra they are very light on facts which have been left deliberately unexamined as well as counter-narratives
which have also been ignored.
This was to be expected quite simply because at bottom Rickards is a sophist much in the tradition of Protagoras, Gorgias
and Thrasymachus "I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger" [
12 ]
A view which Rickards would certainly endorse. Beneath the Upper Manhattan, polished chic, there resides a ruthless Cold Warrior.
The further one digs into the book, the more this becomes apparent.
NOTES:-
[1] Rickards – Aftermath – page.21
[2] Ibid., – page.65
[3] Michael Hudson – Super Imperialism – pp.298/99, 32.
[4] Rickards – Ibid. – page.66
[5] Hyman Minsky's theories about debt accumulation received revived attention in the media during the subprime mortgage crisis
of the late 2000s. The New Yorker has labelled it "the Minsky Moment". Minsky argued that a key mechanism that pushes an economy
towards a crisis is the accumulation of debt by the non-government sector. He identified three types of borrowers that contribute
to the accumulation of insolvent debt: hedge borrowers, speculative borrowers, and Ponzi borrowers.
The "hedge borrower" can make debt payments (covering interest and principal) from current cash flows from investments. For
the "speculative borrower", the cash flow from investments can service the debt, i.e., cover the interest due, but the borrower
must regularly roll over, or re-borrow, the principal. The "Ponzi borrower" (named for Charles Ponzi, see also Ponzi scheme) borrows
based on the belief that the appreciation of the value of the asset will be sufficient to refinance the debt but could not make
sufficient payments on interest or principal with the cash flow from investments; only the appreciating asset value can keep the
Ponzi borrower afloat.
[6] Rickards – Ibid., page.85
[7] Rickards – Ibid., page.239
[8] Joseph Stiglitz – The Roaring 90s – pp.206/207
[9] Gold Pool 1968. The price of one troy ounce of gold was pegged to US$35. The larger the gap, known as the gold window,
between free market gold price and the foreign exchange rate, the more tempting it was for nations to deal with internal economic
crises by buying gold at the Bretton Woods price and selling it in the gold markets. It couldn't last and it didn't.
[10] Michael Hudson – Ibid. – p.309
[11] Barry Eichengreen – Exorbitant Privilege – passim.
Frank Lee left school at age 15 without any qualifications,
but gained degrees from both New College Oxford and the London School of Economics (it's a long story). He spent many years as a
lecturer in politics and economics, and in the Civil Service, before retirement. He lives in Sutton with his wife and little dog.
Guy
Excellent article by Frank Lee. Many of us are aware of the problems of the USD but few are able to so succinctly explain
why and connect the dots to expose the true picture. The bottom line is that the lifespan of the USD as king is almost over
.There will not be any rabbit pulled out of the hat to make America great again.That is a feel good cliché used to further
induce the population to go back to sleep.
The US has been exposed, and so well said, as a predator nation .There must be a reason why China and Russia are buying
up as much gold as their economy will permit .The exchange medium used for trade since time immemorial .
FoodBowl
Measuring 'National Debt as a Portion of the US Economy' is for economics classes and for newspapers to publish. The Criminal
Elites look at things differently. They measure the National Debt as a Portion of the 'FEROCIOUS BOMBING POWER the US Possess'.
Also, 'Spreading Chaos Capabilities' is added to the Bombing Power.
From this point of view, they see enormous assets, and the debts becomes less worrying as they see less urgency to deal with
this ever growing liabilities.
Fair dinkum
No analysis required because it's always been the same. The few exploit the many. This has fed the cancers of psychopathy, messiah
complexes and endless wars.
We are rushing towards the midnight sun.
MASTER OF UNIVE
The Wall Street ethos has always been 'kill or be killed' where bears eat, and bulls eat, but pigs get slaughtered! The problem
with today's market & stock valuations is that they are as hyperinflated as Real Estate Commercial & Residential sectors are which
leaves no wiggle room for price discovery until there is a system wide crash that mean reverts the valuations back to a realistic
price.
Warren Buffett is currently sitting on $55 billion in cash so that he does not get destroyed on the upcoming systemic wide
crash. Buffett has never pulled this kind of bread from the table in his lifetime whilst waiting for a systemic crash & the inevitable
fat tail blowout that is poised to rip the face off of the USA & EU as their eyeballs get ripped out too.
Ripping a face off & ripping eyeballs out is day trader speak for kicking counterparties in the groin for the deal. The French
Revolution was all about teaching the financial elite predator class of monetary control freaks who the boss really is when the
gravy train slows during Financial Winter.
And if they can't take the heat they should get out of the kitchen!
RW
mark
All that is happening now is that Trump is trying to solve his country's intractable economic and financial problems by looting
the rest of the planet. This is not a new development, but Trump is at least refreshingly honest in his public pronouncements.
It has always been thus.
The Roman Empire imposed tribute on its subjects. You have to send us so much grain, cattle, so many slaves, so much timber
for shipbuilding, so much precious metal and base metal, so many wild beasts for our circuses. In return we won't kill you.
The Nazi Empire imposed tribute on its conquests in identical fashion. Send us your industrial output, agricultural
produce and raw materials. In return we'll give you a big credit balance at the Reichsbank.
Uncle Sugar says send me your BMWs, fine wines, electronic gadgets, oil and minerals. In return I'll give you some worthless
little pieces of green paper you can exchange for worthless IOUs called Treasury Bills.
The current (real) military budget is $1,134 billion, around 60% higher than the fictitious figure that is normally touted.
The trade deficit is $900 billion. The budget deficit $1,175 billion, over 20% of the overall budget.
America is borrowing around $4 billion a day from the rest of the world. Uncle Sam is the biggest scrounger, parasite, leech,
bludger, and panhandler in the history of the planet.
The official national debt of $22.5 trillion understates the true position by a factor of over ten. Every US man, woman, child,
and babe in arms is in hock to the tune of over $700,000.
The global economy is about to crash, yet again (because it's never really recovered from the 2008 crash)'. Answers on a postcard,
please (and one that doesn't involve giving the banksters eye-watering amounts of money).
Frank Lodge
Without reading the book in question, this seems like an thoroughly sound and incisive review. Just one thing, "cometh" takes
a singular subject.
BigB
Rickards attitude is famously: "Buy gold" to which he creates a fear porn scenario around the coming recession. His solution:
"Buy gold". Not, lets look at the conditions that are causing the underlying boom and bust business cycles and find a solution
that works for humanity. His solution: "Buy gold" which the likes of he and the others who are driving the business cyclical waves
of mutilation have already done to hedge their portfolios. Fuck Ricards. I have no time for those who wish to profit from the
overfinancial immiseration of humanity. And you know where you can stick your gold.
Good luck to anyone who produces gold in an actual collapse scenario. So you need to buy guns and bodyguards for self-protection
if you buy gold...
mark
Gold could form some kind of basis for exchange in a collapse setting. Other desirable barter items would be alcohol, cigarettes,
basic drugs like aspirin and paracetamol, electrical batteries, fuel and similar goods. Maybe ammunition as well. Goods were priced
in cigarettes in postwar Germany.
Gold would probably be of use. Gemstones, jewellery, would not. 99.9% of people are unable to distinguish a real diamond from
a piece of glass.
bevin
"he original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany." Not for the
first time Wikipedia is wrong here. Bismarck is normally credited with the choice between Guns and Butter. Goebbels was suggesting
that Guns will bring Butter.
Martin Usher
Its nice to see this in a book but its really common knowledge. The only thing I'd dispute is this notion of an 'elite', there
is no such thing, its just greed holding the reins -- its like a mass FOMO, nobody's willing to take the long view because it
might mean they'll miss out on what they can grab right now.
The danger we face from this is that if a large enough economic bloc runs by more rational rules then its going to eventually
cream us economically. This forces us to destroy it. This is what's at the bottom of our problems with China. The USSR wasn't
strong or well organized enough to pose a real threat to us so it could be taken down primarily by economic means. The Chinese
learned their lesson from the Russian experience and 'played nice' which they built their country up -- we all heard the commentariat
from a few years ago about them 'not really being communists any more'. Now they're in a position to look us in the eye so we've
got to confront them, to take them down. (You'll notice that one of the conditions that will end the trade war is the 'liberalizing
of capital markets' -- that is, we need to take over their banking system and currency.) If -- when -- this fails then the only
recourse would be actual war.
The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- ultimately a wholly artificial concept -- we're wasting immense amounts
of resources and human potential, spreading misery and despoliation all over the planet and generally behaving like really awful
global citizens. We can and must do better.
wardropper
And we certainly must stop talking about "taking down" the Chinese, and instead actually try to understand where they come from,
with their roots in a far more ancient civilized society than ours.
American exceptionalism, for example, takes it for granted that we in the West are good, and therefore the East must become
more like us. But we are logically, and morally, obliged to look at this from the opposite perspective too: What if the Chinese
take it for granted that they are good, and therefore the West must become more like them?
I have been to China, and found the people there to consist of the same mixtures of honest, good, nondescript, sinister and
deplorable as we have here at home.
They also share exactly the same fundamental problem as we do: Their politicians and their people, like ours, are two entirely
separate things. Of course the origins of Chinese, or Russian, society are different from ours, but that is no reason to despise
them. Our origins are often pretty despicable too.
Antonym
The Chinese people are as materialistic or spiritual as any; it is the local deep state (CPC) totalitarian culture that needs
to change.
Robbobbobin
"The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- [w]e can and must do better."
Three thousand years?
He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.
–Ecclesiastes 5:10
Two thousand years?
For the love of money is the root of all evil –1 Timothy 6:10
Surely the Anti Deceased Equine Distress Society has lobbied some sort of statute of limitations onto the books by now?
MASTER OF UNIVE
American parasitism writ large over the last half century has amply signified to the entire world that 'manifest destiny'
was merely a ruse to foist American hegemony onto all sovereign nations at the behest of an out-of-control American Oligopoly
that was power-tripping post WW2 & drunk on the souls of the poor sots all over the entire world with their power hungry warmongering
Military Industrial Complex.
Proof of their combined ignorance with respect to Cybernetics & Systems Theory was their willingness to follow the likes of
the Vietnam War architects that assumed incorrectly that they could impose a closed-looped cybernetic control system over world
finance & mercantilism throughout the entire world at the behest of academic failures like Macnamera who would not know a 'closed-looped
cybernetic' from an open-looped cybernetic if his life & legacy depended on it.
Simply put, American printing presses at the privately owned Federal Reserve cannot even remotely help or assist in anymore
financial profligacy for the Neoconservative or Neoliberal camps of the cerebrally sclerotic & Early Onset Dementia riddled, &
uneducated, financial buffoons that emanated out of the now defunct Chicago School headed up by Strauss et al. in the 60s & 70s.
All the macroeconomic indicators over the last two decades have clearly indicated that the Greenspan era of asset inflation
was nothing more than the undoing of Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker's hard won success during his tenure pre-Greenspan 'Maestro'
halcyon days of animal spirits run amok.
In brief, the United States of America can eat my shorts as it is solely responsible for manufacturing a finance control system
& requisite money pump fraud that is nothing more than a worldwide Ponzi scheme to defraud the entire world of disposable income
& discretionary income gain so that all gains accrue to the rentier class of speculative investors like Warren Buffett & Bob Paulson.
Bottom line is that Warren Buffett will have to purchase all the new automobiles, trucks, houses, mansions, cottages, farms,
cites, towns, railroads, roads, & precious metals as the emerging markets & first world markets all decouple just as Professor
Emeritus Benoit Mandelbrot hypothesized they would just before he died.
Go ahead, America, print the fake fiat greenbacks to infinity in vain hope of extricating yourselves from the intractable financial
muck & mire you are most assuredly going to find yourselves in this approaching October 2019.
Go ahead, Punk, make my day!
Are you feeling lucky, Punk?
RW
Martin Usher
Its not "American". We just happen to be the chosen host for this part of history. Before us it was the British Empire that
was top dog.
Money has no particular loyalty to a country. In pre-WW1 Europe the bourgeois were all intermarried, connected primarily by
wealth and power regardless of their nominal nationality, our present equivalent are similarly connected. Just like WW1 when the
chips are down we -- the ordinary people -- will be sacrificed on the alter of patriotism while they'll survive and prosper.
MASTER OF UNIVE
March 10th 2008 around 11:00am Bear Stearns time New York shitty was the virtual end of American hegemony worldwide forever more
into the obvious future of Macroeconomics & Macroprudential Policy as an ongoing concern. Debt-to-GDP of all sovereign Western
imperialist nations is intractably North of any semblance of sustainability vis-a-vis Finance worldwide or within Emerging Economies
or First World Developed Economies.
Intractable debt limits were broached when Nixon declared the bankruptcy of the Bretton Woods infrastructure of gold backed
USA Reserve Currency Status and then opted in ignorance for the petro-dollar bait & switch fiat USD Finance capture worldwide
which has now come home to roost across the rust belt of the heartland USA, and in places that were once bastions of manufacturing
for the middle class USA blue collar worker such as Detroit or Chicago. Today the business model of the USA is transnationalist
whereby places across the USA are not even remotely financed into that transnationalist Wall Street model of Finance that is wholly
parasitic to the point of crashing mainstreet USA across all sectors of the Service Sector Industries that were supposed to be
replacing the long lost USA Manufacturing Base that was offshored to the Third World sovereigns that would temporarly increase
profit margins for the transnationalist class of corporate parasites run amok to collectively destroy all life on Planet Earth
for centuries to come if we are lucky.
RW
martin
You have made the common mistake of asserting that it is America, instead of those who govern (the USA and its pundits)
that have engineered the problems you point out.
Why would the two parties in congress (Article II followers) and the two fellows with the Article II power, continue to [expand
the debt in fake, made up and useless expenses], unless they were controlled by external forces?
Maybe bankers and their high powered corporations are finding they can no longer easily dupe Americans into delivering their
resources into the pockets of the wealthy. Maybe the American people have drawn the line, no more, will they produce for the IMF,
world bank?
Maybe Americans have decided to refuse the tax burdens imposed to retire the fed debt? Maybe foreign nations have denied the
banks and their corporations access to their resources as a means to pay the USA debt? Maybe script has been recognized as a false
capital in-capable of ruling the world? Maybe organized criminals have taken up positions in the western governments and used
those positions to force on the governed many things? Maybe burdening the USA with debt is part of the plan to bankrupt America?
<==but why should the banks bankrupt America, why has access to education been limited, why has the USA spied on Americans? Why
have the governed Americans been denied access to the USA? Has the USA retired Americans from productive jobs, in order to accelerate
the demise of America? The USA has made Americans into debtors obligated to pay bankers in the form of taxes to be collected by
the USA and remitted to the bankers. <= just as is now occurring in Britain, Greece, France, and other places. Privatization,
monopolization and conversion from public to private franchising and ownership have served as the transforming agents that have
made the elite so wealthy.
Economic Zionism. as opposed to government regulated capitalism, condones no competition, allows no prisoners and either
takes or destroys all likely competitive elements (persons, corporations, or nations) Economic Zionism demands the government
that governs (as in USA governance over Americans) assist in rendering Americans broke. Is it because until Americans are broke,
the EZ bandits are hampered? Is scooping resources into private, monopoly powered, already wealthy hands, the goodies to be had
the goal? Maybe the USA is a privatizing agent instead of a benefactor serving Americans?
In USA governed America, there is much very-productive farm land, millions of tons of minerals, many productive seaports, and
tons and tons of money making monopolies (patents, copyrights, royalties, government franchised goodies, lucrative government
contracts, and plenty of government services and resources) to be privatized for profit. The goodies are located in thousands
of acres of rich farmland, the major ports and services attached thereto, and embedded within little domestic American companies
which the USA debt will eventually burden into bankruptcy. After all "scalping a bankruptcy" is historically a speciality of economic
zionism.
MASTER OF UNIVE
In 1994 JPMorgan management & traders went on a little holiday in Miami to concoct the Global Ponzi of debt & risk associated
with loans into what is known today as the Financialization Process whereby bank risk would be shuffled off of investment bank
balance sheets and onto those speculators that wanted to purchase all that risk involved in the bank portfolios en masse because
they knew how to offload that risk to unsuspecting greater fools that were always certain to come knocking in a climate of upward
growth and yield curve convexity. But the chink in their financial alchemy was obviously debt limits and the ability to track
the risk to the system as a whole given that all transactions in the derivatives world are dark & unregulated due to the helmsmen
like the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who previous to being nominated as Treasury Secretary was in fact the top man at Goldman
Sachs where he raked in approximately a smooth billion before traversing the revolving door between the Whore House & Goldman
Sachs New York shitty offices.
Casino Banking morphed into Late Stage Ponzi Capitalism when Bob Paulson wanted more Residential Mortgage Backed Security issuance
and pressured Goldman Sachs into providing more issuance via NINJA loans & Liar Loans after 05 when the Wall Street speculators
had to go bottom feeding for loan issuance in order to meet investor demand & apatite for their unhinged Gordon Gecko greed.
'Maestro' Greenspan emphasized his 'flaw' in his macroeconomic model of the world when the investor greed broached fat tails
on the order of a 10% crash of the power laws of distributions of loan issuance. Greenspan never assumed that the Financialization
Process would exceed a default scenario greater than 5-7% of no-performing loans in the subprime issuance tranche.
American exceptionalism via Henry Paulson USA Treasury Secretary 08 is what rendered American Late Stage Ponzi Capitalism wholly
defunct going forward into 2020 & beyond with a permanent lower bound CB Interest Rate Regime & specter of WW3 hot conflagration.
My money is on the pinko Commie bastards this time round the sovereign insolvency loop of domestic misery USA.
WELCOME to the New World Disorder!
RW
nottheonly1
To condense this lengthy essay: This ship is sinking.
This would include household debt, student debt, financial debt, corporate debt, and municipal debt. Add this to sovereign
debt and you get a figure roughly 5 times US sovereign debt, and even this is regarded as being a conservative figure according
to many
One – at least on this side of the screen – cannot but think that all this is by design. The cart is driven intentionally off
the cliff. To start off with a clean slate? Where the wealthy still have their wealth, but the suckers are depending on hand-outs?
An old proverb alledges that: To borrow brings sorrow.
To which only those who make loads of money from lending will disagree. Where are the solutions? No solutions, just listicles
as to how bad it all is? Sure, the West is reminiscent of the HMS Titanic – with the slight difference of the hole made by the
iceberg (debt) extending over the whole length of the ship. It is listing beyond dancing.
Well, I am willing to tell a secret (that isn't one anymore for quite some time):
Outlaw/prohibit Interest .
Prohibit capital gains . Or tax them with 99%.
Prevent under all circumstances a continuation of Performanceless Profits .
Make them punishable with prison time of no less than half of the age at which they were perpetrated. You're 30? You're going
in for 15. You're 65? Easy math.
Fact is, that there are solutions galore to save our souls. Problem is, those whose lives are depending on them, don't demand
them to be implemented. And why would the wealthy tax non-payers like Bezos et al want to change their 'winning team'? That is
a well known no-no. The only solution the masses of the little people can hope for is 'Force Majeur' that works to their benefit.
Shall we wait for that to happen?
I think the Car Wash conspiracy against Lula is a bombshell, and Pepe Escobar's prison
interviews with Lula provide insight to the larger global Borgist conspiracy. Check out what
Lula had to say about the JCPOA. Be sure to read partsI I and II as well.
And we certainly must stop talking about "taking down" the Chinese, and instead actually try to understand where they come from,
with their roots in a far more ancient civilized society than ours.
. But we are logically, and morally, obliged to look at this from the opposite perspective too: What if the Chinese
take it for granted that they are good, and therefore the West must become more like them?
I have been to China, and found the people there to consist of the same mixtures of honest, good, nondescript, sinister and deplorable
as we have here at home.
They also share exactly the same fundamental problem as we do: Their politicians and their people, like ours, are two entirely
separate things.
Of course the origins of Chinese, or Russian, society are different from ours, but that is no reason to despise them.
Our origins are often pretty despicable too.
"... Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong rearrested based on bail violations, which supporters claim represents political persecution. After being released on bail last week, Wong published an op-ed in the New York Times declaring the protests as the "front line" in a hybrid war vs the PRC, and travelled to Taiwan where he urged the government there to join forces with HK activists in open conflict against Beijing. In both forums, Wong hinted a major provocation was in the works to disrupt the October 1st celebration of the PRC's 70th anniversary. ..."
"... That is, just as the Maidan protesters, knowingly or not, demanded that the IMF impose an austerity program on them, the Hong Kong protesters demand sanctions and the withdrawal of preferential trading deals. The Maidan protests have been deliberately seeded as a correlating event to the HK protests, with numerous public screenings in HK of the contentious "Winter On Fire" documentary. This comparison first appeared in online journals such as Quartz many weeks ago, and appears to be one of the originating "memes" promoted by the PR people working behind the scenes. ..."
"... Wow those hongkong protesters are not even shy about their call for regime change by Trump against China/Hongkong ..."
The sooner the 50 states secede from that cesspool in Maryland and try something different, the better.
I agree, b; the panic amongst US military planners is indeed setting in; all the resources wasted in developing dubious-quality
weapons systems has been made plain for all the world to see with the rapid (and highly cost-effective) counter-measures both
Russia and China (and now Iran) have been able to put into serial production
(pretty
sure this ain't an RC video)
Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong rearrested based on bail violations, which supporters claim represents political persecution.
After being released on bail last week, Wong published an op-ed in the New York Times declaring the protests as the "front line"
in a hybrid war vs the PRC, and travelled to Taiwan where he urged the government there to join forces with HK activists in open
conflict against Beijing. In both forums, Wong hinted a major provocation was in the works to disrupt the October 1st celebration
of the PRC's 70th anniversary.
Meanwhile, "thousands of people converged at a park in central Hong Kong, chanting 'Resist Beijing, Liberate Hong Kong.' Many
of them, clad in black shirts and wearing masks, waved American flags and carried posters that read 'President Trump, please liberate
Hong Kong Protesters urged Washington to pass a bill, known as the Hong Kong Democratic and Human Rights Act, to support their
cause. The bill proposes sanctions against Hong Kong and Chinese officials found to suppress democracy and human rights in the
city, and could also affect Hong Kong's preferential trade status with the U.S." https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hong-kong-protests-us-embassy-1.5275142
That is, just as the Maidan protesters, knowingly or not, demanded that the IMF impose an austerity program on them, the Hong
Kong protesters demand sanctions and the withdrawal of preferential trading deals. The Maidan protests have been deliberately
seeded as a correlating event to the HK protests, with numerous public screenings in HK of the contentious "Winter On Fire" documentary.
This comparison first appeared in online journals such as Quartz many weeks ago, and appears to be one of the originating "memes"
promoted by the PR people working behind the scenes.
AuGold , Sep 8 2019 21:01 utc |
46Zanon , Sep 8 2019 21:04 utc |
47
Wow those hongkong protesters are not even shy about their call for regime change by Trump against China/Hongkong:
"... Twice in the same sentence we get told what that assumption is: "America's technology leadership" which so clearly no longer exists in weaponry, electronics, nuclear engineering, rocketry, high speed rail and mass transportation, low energy building techniques, and a host of other realms. This same sort of thinking pervades every defense doctrine paper produced during Trump's administration--the planners have eaten and all too well digested their own propaganda about the backwardness of Russia, China and Iran. ..."
"... This does not imply some rabid anti-Americanism, but simply the experience that that path is pointless. If there is a 'clock being played out', it is that of the tic-toc of western political and economic hegemony in the Middle East is running down ..."
"... [with] Iran repeating the same old routines, whilst expecting different outcomes is, of course, one definition of madness. A new US Administration will inherit the same genes as the last. ..."
"... "And in any case, the US is institutionally incapable of making a substantive deal with Iran. A US President – any President – cannot lift Congressional sanctions on Iran. The American multitudinous sanctions on Iran have become a decades' long knot of interpenetrating legislation: a vast rhizome of tangled, root-legislation that not even Alexander the Great might disentangle: that is why the JCPOA was constructed around a core of US Presidential 'waivers' needing to be renewed each six months. Whatever might be agreed in the future, the sanctions – 'waived' or not – are, as it were, 'forever'. ..."
"... "If recent history has taught the Iranians anything, it is that such flimsy 'process' in the hands of a mercurial US President can simply be blown away like old dead leaves. Yes, the US has a systemic problem: US sanctions are a one-way valve: so easy to flow out, but once poured forth, there is no return inlet (beyond uncertain waivers issued at the pleasure of an incumbent President)." ..."
Speculation's abounded about the political loyalty of the head of Russia's central bank
Elvira Nabullina. Luongo simply explains:
"Nabullina has always been a controversial figure because she is western trained and because
the banking system in Russia is still staffed by those who operate along IMF prescriptions on
how to deal with crises.
"But those IMF rules are there to protect the IMF making the loans to the troubled nation,
not to assist the troubled nation actually recover....
"The fundamental problem is a miseducation about what interest rates are, and how they
interact with inflation and capital flow. Because of this, the medicine for saving an economy
in trouble is, more often than not, worse than the disease itself.
"If Argentina's fourth default in twenty years doesn't prove that to you, nothing will."
It sounds like he's been reading Hudson's J is for Junk Economics !
The real rescue is Putin's aggressive de-dollarization policy that's finally rid Russia of
"dollar-dependency":
"She [Nabullina] keeps jumping at the shadows of a dollar-induced crisis. But the Russian
economy of 2019 is not the Russian economy of 2015. Dollar lending has all but evaporated and
the major source of demand for dollars domestically are legacy corporate loans not converted to
rubles or euros."
The key for me is to weave the content emphasis of Putin's Eastern Economic Conference speech with
his increasing pressure on Nabullina for the bank to support this very important development
policy direction and show China and other nations that Russia's extremely serious about the
direction being taken. Just Putin's language about mortgage rate reductions as an attracter
ought to be a huge message for Nabullina to respond properly. And a further kick in the pants
was provided by the massive deal announced between China and Iran. Luongo briefly alludes to
foreign policy in his article, its regional economic aspects, while omitting aspects hidden by
the US-China Trade War, specifically Russia's now very clear technological supremacy to the
Outlaw US Empire.
This brings us to Crooke's article in which he inadvertently tells us the #1 false
assumption in Trump's Trade War policy with China:
"To defend America's technology leadership , policymakers must upgrade their toolkit
to ensure that US technology leadership can withstand the aftershocks." [My
Emphasis]
Twice in the same sentence we get told what that assumption is: "America's technology
leadership" which so clearly no longer exists in weaponry, electronics, nuclear engineering,
rocketry, high speed rail and mass transportation, low energy building techniques, and a host
of other realms. This same sort of thinking pervades every defense doctrine paper produced
during Trump's administration--the planners have eaten and all too well digested their own
propaganda about the backwardness of Russia, China and Iran.
I could write further about the supposed handcuffing of POTUS by the unconstitutional and
illegal sanction regime "imposed" by the US Congress. Crooke mentions as a significant
hindrance--but if it was indeed a hindrance, any POTUS could break it by suing to prove its
unconstitutional, illegal standing, yet no effort is put into that, begging the question Why?
Crooke spends lots of space about this but fails to see the above solution:
"The pages to that chapter have been shut. This does not imply some rabid
anti-Americanism, but simply the experience that that path is pointless. If there is a 'clock
being played out', it is that of the tic-toc of western political and economic hegemony in the
Middle East is running down , and not the 'clock' of US domestic politics. The old adage
that the 'sea is always the sea' holds true for US foreign policy.
And [with] Iran repeating the same old routines, whilst expecting different outcomes is,
of course, one definition of madness. A new US Administration will inherit the same genes as
the last.
"And in any case, the US is institutionally incapable of making a substantive deal with
Iran. A US President – any President – cannot lift Congressional sanctions on Iran.
The American multitudinous sanctions on Iran have become a decades' long knot of
interpenetrating legislation: a vast rhizome of tangled, root-legislation that not even
Alexander the Great might disentangle: that is why the JCPOA was constructed around a core of
US Presidential 'waivers' needing to be renewed each six months. Whatever might be agreed in
the future, the sanctions – 'waived' or not – are, as it were, 'forever'.
"If recent history has taught the Iranians anything, it is that such flimsy 'process' in
the hands of a mercurial US President can simply be blown away like old dead leaves. Yes, the
US has a systemic problem: US sanctions are a one-way valve: so easy to flow out, but once
poured forth, there is no return inlet (beyond uncertain waivers issued at the pleasure of an
incumbent President)."
Being British, we should excuse Crooke for not knowing about the crucial Supremacy Clause
within the US Constitution, but that doesn't absolve any POTUS if that person is really intent
on talking with Iran--or any other sanctioned nation. IMO, the Iranians know what I know and
have finally decided the Outlaw US Empire's marriage to Occupied Palestine won't suffer a
divorce anytime soon. The result is the recent very active change in policy direction aimed at
solidifying the Arc of Resistance and establishing a Persian Gulf Collective Security Pact that
will end in check mating the Empire's King thus causing further economic problems for the
Empire.
Crooke does a good job of summarizing my comment and many more made over the year regarding
the reasons for the utter failure of Outlaw US Empire policy:
"Well, here is the key point: Washington seems to have lost the ability to summon the
resources to try to fathom either China, or the Iranian 'closed book', let alone a 'Byzantine'
Russia. It is a colossal attenuation of consciousness in Washington; a loss of conscious
'vitality' to the grip of some 'irrefutable logic' that allows no empathy, no outreach, to
'otherness'. Washington (and some European élites) have retreated into their 'niche'
consciousness, their mental enclave, gated and protected, from having to understand – or
engage – with wider human experience."
The only real way for the Outlaw US Empire to regain its competitive "niche" with the rest
of the world is to mount a massive program of internal reform verging on a revolution in its
outcome. It's patently obvious that more of the same will yield more of the same--FAILURE--and
the chorus of inane caterwauling by BigLie Media over where to place the blame.
"... " Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America's Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Do Better) " is a scalding indictment not only of the 45th U.S. president, but also of a morally bankrupt national security establishment whose addiction to empire has embroiled the nation in misbegotten military misadventures. ..."
"... Glaser, Preble and Thrall see Trump -- the "least informed, least experienced, and least intellectually prepared U.S. president in modern memory" -- as more bark than bite. True, he has altered specific U.S. positions on trade (more protectionism), immigration (greater closure) and human rights (deafening silence). But, on balance, they perceive a depressing continuity between Trump's foreign policy and what preceded it. Abetted by an invertebrate Congress and emboldened by the military-industrial complex, Trump has doubled down on the imperial presidency, on inflated threat perceptions, on defense spending and on the pursuit of global domination. In so doing, they claim, Trump is setting a course for continued interventionism that is at odds with U.S. ideals and dangerous to American liberty. ... ..."
In a provocative new book, three scholars from the
libertarian Cato Institute -- John Glaser, Christopher A. Preble and A. Trevor Thrall --
counsel the United States to abandon the pursuit of global primacy for a policy of prudence and
restraint. " Fuel to the Fire: How
Trump Made America's Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Do Better) " is a scalding
indictment not only of the 45th U.S. president, but also of a morally bankrupt national
security establishment whose addiction to empire has embroiled the nation in misbegotten
military misadventures. American foreign policy professionals may cast the United States as
a benevolent hegemon, defending the liberal or "rules-based" international order. But this
self-serving argument is hard to take seriously, they write, given the hubris, hypocrisy and
coerciveness of the American imperium.
The most surprising argument in "Fuel to the Fire" is that this misguided orientation has
persisted under Donald Trump. This seems counterintuitive. Washington's mandarins have recoiled
in bipartisan horror as the president dismantles their handiwork and pursues his "America
First" agenda. Glaser, Preble and Thrall see Trump -- the "least informed, least
experienced, and least intellectually prepared U.S. president in modern memory" -- as more bark
than bite. True, he has altered specific U.S. positions on trade (more protectionism),
immigration (greater closure) and human rights (deafening silence). But, on balance, they
perceive a depressing continuity between Trump's foreign policy and what preceded it. Abetted
by an invertebrate Congress and emboldened by the military-industrial complex, Trump has
doubled down on the imperial presidency, on inflated threat perceptions, on defense spending
and on the pursuit of global domination. In so doing, they claim, Trump is setting a course for
continued interventionism that is at odds with U.S. ideals and dangerous to American liberty.
...
Behind Hong Kong's chaos lie deep-seated social problems
"Seclusion brings no development opportunity for Hong Kong," said economist Lau Pui-King.
"Some youngsters don't understand that Hong Kong would be even worse if it is secluded from
the Chinese mainland."
"To come out of the current economic difficulty, Hong Kong needs to be linked with the
Chinese mainland much closer and more effectively," she said.
HONG KONG -- Kwong loves the pure adrenaline rush he gets when he takes his motorcycle out
on the weekends to light up his lackluster life.
The 35-year-old lives with his parents in an old and cramped apartment in the New
Territories of Hong Kong. He has a girlfriend but is hesitant to get married and start a
family.
"The rent is so high, and there is no way I can afford an apartment," said Kwong, who
earns 15,000 HK dollars (1,950 U.S. dollars) a month. Renting a 30-square meter one-bedroom
apartment would cost him about two-thirds of his salary.
"Future? I don't think much about it, just passing each day as it is," he said.
Kwong's words reflect the grievances among many people in Hong Kong, particularly the
young. Many vented their discontent in prolonged streets protests that have rocked Hong Kong
since June.
The demonstrations, which started over two planned amendments to Hong Kong's ordinances
concerning fugitive offenders, widened and turned violent over the past months.
"After more than two months of social unrest, it is obvious to many that discontentment
extends far beyond the bill," said Carrie Lam, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region (HKSAR), referring to the now-withdrawn amendments.
To Lam, the discontent covers political, economic and social issues, including the
often-mentioned problems relating to housing and land supply, income distribution, social
justice and mobility and opportunities, for the public to be fully engaged in the HKSAR
government's decision-making.
"We can discuss all these issues in our new dialogue platform," she said.
UNAFFORDABLE HOUSES
For nine straight years, housing in Hong Kong has been ranked as the least affordable in
the world. Homes in the city got further out of reach for most residents, according to
Demographia, an urban planning policy consultancy. The city's median property price climbed
to 7.16 million HK dollars in 2019, or 20.9 times the median household income in 2018, up
from 19.4 times from a year earlier.
In the latest case of house transaction, an apartment of 353 square feet (about 33 square
meters) at Mong Kok in central Kowloon was sold at 5.2 million HK dollars in September,
according to the registered data from Centaline Property Agency Limited.
For those fortunate enough to have bought an apartment, many have to spend a large part of
their monthly income on a mortgage. For those who have not bought any property yet, it is
common to spend more than 10,000 HK dollars in rent, while saving every penny up for a
multi-million HK dollar down payment.
From 2004 to 2018, the property price increased by 4.4 fold, while income stagnated,
statistics show. From 2008 to 2017, average real wage growth in Hong Kong was merely 0.1
percent, according to a global wage report by the International Labor Organization.
Homeownership dropped from 53 percent to 48.9 percent from 2003 to 2018.
Efforts of the HKSAR government to increase land supply to stem home prices from soaring
also went futile amid endless quarrels. Of Hong Kong's total 1,100 square kilometers of land
area, only 24.3 percent has been developed, with land for residential use accounting for a
mere 6.9 percent, according to data from the HKSAR government.
Social worker Jack Wong, 29, lives in an apartment bought by his parents. "I'm lucky. Most
of my friends still have to share apartments with their parents. My cousin has been married
for seven years, but he is still saving for his down payment, so he has to live at his
parents' house," he said.
"The older generation changed from having nothing to having something. We, the younger
generation, thought we had something, but it turns out we have nothing," he said.
MIDDLE CLASS' ANXIETY
While young people complain about having few opportunities for upward mobility, Hong
Kong's middle class, which should have long been stalwarts of the society, are under great
economic pressure and in fear of falling behind.
It is not easy to be middle class in Hong Kong, one of the world's most expensive cities.
To join the rank, a household needs to earn at least 55,000 HK dollars, or 7,000 U.S.
dollars, a month, according to Paul Yip Siu-fai, a senior lecturer at the University of Hong
Kong. About 10 percent of the households in the city are up to the rank.
Earning that much can be counted as rich in many parts of the world. But in Hong Kong, the
money is still tight if you have a child to raise and elderly to support.
Housing is the biggest burden for the average middle-class resident. The cost of having a
child is another headache in Hong Kong, where pricey extra-curricular activities and private
tutoring are considered necessary to win in the fierce competition.
Fears of descending to the low-income group are real for the middle class. Many think they
belong to the middle class only in education and cultural identity, but their living
conditions are not much better than the impoverished, said Anthony Cheung Bing-leung, former
secretary for transport and housing of the HKSAR government.
Civil servants and teachers, who earn much more than the average income, are traditionally
considered middle class. But Cheung found out in a survey that many of them could not afford
to have their own apartment, with some even living in the narrow rooms of partitioned
apartments.
"We don't belong to the low-income group, but we could just rent an apartment now," said
Lee, a teacher at a secondary school in Hong Kong.
Lee and her husband earned nearly 1.3 million HK dollars a year, but a 50-square meter
apartment is the best they could rent now for a five-member family. She preferred not to give
her full name as she feels her situation is embarrassing.
"We want to save more money to buy a house near prestigious elementary schools for our
kids," Lee said. "If our kids can't go to a good school, it'll be very tough in the
future."
CHANGING ECONOMIC STRUCTURE
In the 1970s, nearly half of Hong Kong's labor force were industrial workers when
manufacturing thrived in Hong Kong. During the 1980s, Hong Kong's finance, shipping, trade
and logistics and service industries started to boom.
Since then, the economic landscape began to change amid subsequent industrial
upgrading.
Due to the hollowing out of the manufacturing industry, the wealth gap in Hong Kong
widened and the class division worsened. Despite the prosperity of finance, trade and tourism
in recent years, more than 1.37 million people are living below the poverty line in Hong
Kong, home to more than 7 million.
Working career options are now limited, leaving little hope for the youngsters to move up
the social ranks.
As a result, Hong Kong's social class has largely been solidified in the 21st century,
with the richest people dominated by property developers and their families.
The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality of income distribution, reached a
new high of 0.539 in 2016, far above the warning level of 0.4, according to data by the HKSAR
government's Census and Statistics Department. The greater the number toward one, the more
unequal in income distribution.
Though the HKSAR government tried to narrow the wealth gap, many people in Hong Kong said
they are not sharing the fruits of economic prosperity, the young and those low-income groups
in particular.
STAGNATING POLITICAL BARRIERS
What makes the deep-seated problems in Hong Kong such a hard nut to crack? The reason is
complicated, according to observers, partly due to the containment in the current political
structure that leads to governance difficulty, partly due to a doctrinaire implementation of
the principle of "small government, big market," or laissez faire, and most importantly due
to the opposition's "say no for none's sake" that stirs political confrontation and sends
Hong Kong into a dilemma of discussions without decisions, or making decisions without
execution.
Over the past 22 years, the successive HKSAR governments have tried many times to tackle
these problems by rolling out affordable housing programs and narrowing the rich-poor
gap.
For example, to make houses more affordable, Tung Chee-hwa, the first HKSAR chief
executive, proposed in 1997 to build at least 85,000 flats every year in the public and
private sectors, raise the homeownership rate to 70 percent in 10 years and reduce the
average waiting time for public rental housing to three years.
Such plans, however, went aborted as home prices plunged in Hong Kong amid the Asian
financial crisis in 1998.
"Since Hong Kong's return, many economic and livelihood issues would not be as politicized
as they are now, should the HKSAR government have introduced more policies and better social
security arrangements to address those problems," said Tian Feilong, a law expert of the "one
country, two systems" center with the Beijing-based Beihang University.
To carry out major policies or push forward major bills, the HKSAR government needs to
garner the support of two-thirds majority at the Legislative Council (LegCo).
The HKSAR government's previous motions, be it economic policies or fiscal appropriations,
were impeded by the opposition time and again at the LegCo, regardless of the interests of
the majority of Hong Kong residents and the long-term development of the society.
The HKSAR government sought in 2012 to establish the Innovation and Technology Bureau to
ride the global wave of innovative startups, diversify its economic structure and bring more
opportunities for young people. Such efforts, however, were obstructed by the opposition at
the LegCo in defiance of repeated calls by the public. After three years, the proposal to
create the bureau was finally passed by the LegCo.
In another case, a Hong Kong resident, incited by the opposition, appealed in 2010 for a
judicial review of the construction plan of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge. Though the
HKSAR government won the lawsuit after more than a year of court proceedings, 6.5 billion HK
dollars of taxpayers' money had been wasted in the increased construction costs of the
bridge's Hong Kong section due to the delay.
As time passed, problems remained unsolved, so did public discontent.
Repeated political bickering stalled Hong Kong's social progress amid the sparring, and
the opposition created a false target and blamed the Chinese mainland for those deep-seated
problems.
Lau Pui-King, an economist in Hong Kong, snubbed the opposition's resistance of or even
antagonism to the Chinese mainland, saying such thinking of secluding Hong Kong from the
entire country could end nowhere but push the city down an abyss.
"Seclusion brings no development opportunity for Hong Kong," Lau said. "Some youngsters
don't understand that Hong Kong would be even worse if it is secluded from the Chinese
mainland."
"To come out of the current economic difficulty, Hong Kong needs to be linked with the
Chinese mainland much closer and more effectively," she said.
"... First, Fu Guohao , a reporter for the Chinese mainland newspaper, Global Times , was attacked, bound and beaten by protesters during their takeover of the Hong Kong International Airport. When police and rescuers tried to free him, the protesters blocked them and also attempted to block the ambulance that eventually bore him off to the hospital. The photos and videos of this ugly sequence were seen by netizens across the globe even though given scant attention in Western media. Where were the stalwart defenders of the press in the US as this happened? As one example, DemocracyNow! (DN!) was completely silent as was the rest of the U.S. mainstream media. ..."
"... And that photo with the protest leaders is just a snap shot of the ample evidence of the hand of the U.S. government and its subsidiaries in the Hong Kong events. Perhaps the best documentation of the U.S. "black hand" is to be found in Dan Cohen's superb article of August 17 in The Greyzone entitled, "Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob violence." ..."
"... On both sides anti-interventionism takes an especially hard hit when it comes to major competitors of the US, powers that could actually stand in the way of US global hegemony, like Russia or China. In fact on its August 12 program, DN! managed a story taking a swipe at Russia right next to the one on Hong Kong – and DN! was in the forefront of advancing the now debunked and disgraced Russiagate Conspiracy Theory. ..."
Through the summer the world has watched as protests shook Hong Kong. As early as April they began as peaceful demonstrations
which peaked in early June, with hundreds of thousands, in protest of an extradition bill. That bill would have allowed Hong Kong,
a Special Administrative Region of China, to return criminals to Taiwan, mainland China or Macau for crimes committed there – after
approval by multiple layers of the Hong Kong judiciary. In the wake of those enormous nonviolent demonstrations, Carrie Lam, CEO
of Hong Kong, "suspended" consideration of the extradition bill, a face-saving ploy. To make sure she was understood, she declared
it "dead." The large rallies, an undeniable expression of the peaceful will of a large segment of the Hong Kong population had won
an impressive victory. The unpopular extradition bill was slain.
But that was not the end of the story. A smaller segment continued the protests. (The Hong Kong police at one point estimated
4,000 hard core protesters.) They pressed on with other demands, beginning with a demand that the bill be "withdrawn," not simply
"suspended." To this writer death by "suspension" is every bit as terminal as death by "withdrawal." As this piece is sent to press,
news comes that Corrie Lam has now
formally withdrawn the bill .
As the summer passed, two iconic photos presented us with two human faces that captured two crucial features of the ongoing protests;
they were not shown widely in the West.
First,
Fu Guohao , a reporter for the Chinese mainland newspaper, Global Times , was attacked, bound and beaten by protesters
during their takeover of the Hong Kong International Airport. When police and rescuers tried to free him, the protesters blocked
them and also attempted to block the ambulance that eventually bore him off to the hospital. The photos and videos of this ugly sequence
were seen by netizens across the globe even though given scant attention in Western media. Where were the stalwart defenders of the
press in the US as this happened? As one example, DemocracyNow! (DN!) was completely silent as was the rest of the U.S. mainstream
media.
Fu's beating came after many weeks when the protesters threw up barriers to stop traffic; blocked closure of subway doors, in
defiance of commuters and police, to shut down mass transit; sacked and vandalized the HK legislature building; assaulted bystanders
who disagreed with them; attacked the police with Molotov cocktails; and stormed and defaced police stations. Fu's ordeal and all
these actions shown in
photos on Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, a paper leaning to the side of protesters, gave the lie to the image of these
"democracy activists" as young Ghandis of East Asia. (The South China Morning Post is based in Hong Kong and its readership is concentrated
there so it has to have some reasonable fidelity in reporting events; otherwise it loses credibility – and circulation. Similarly,
much as the New York Times abhorred Occupy Wall Street, it could not fail to report on it.)
Which brings us to the second photo, much more important to U.S. citizens, that of a "Political Counselor" at the U.S. Consulate
General in Hong Kong who in August was pictured meeting with, Joshua Long and Nathan Law, at a hotel there. The official was formerly
a State Dept functionary in the Middle East – in Jerusalem, Riyadh, Beirut, Baghdad and Doha, certainly not an area lacking in imperial
intrigues and regime change ops. That photo graphically contradicted the contention that there is no US "black hand," as China calls
it, in the Hong Kong riots. In fact, here the "black hand" was caught red-handed, leading Chen Weihua, a very perceptive China Daily
columnist, to tweet the picture with the comment: "This is very very embarrassing. a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting
HK protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if a Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street,
Black Lives Matter or Never Trump protesters."
And that photo with the protest leaders is just a snap shot of the ample evidence of the hand of the U.S. government and its
subsidiaries in the Hong Kong events. Perhaps the best documentation of the U.S. "black hand" is to be found in Dan Cohen's
superb article
of August 17 in The Greyzone entitled, "Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob
violence." The article by Cohen deserves careful reading; it leaves little doubt that there is a very deep involvement of the
US in the Hong Kong riots. Of special interest is the detailed
role and funding , amounting
to over $1.3 million, in Hong Kong alone in recent years, of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED), ever on the prowl for
new regime change opportunities.
Perhaps most important, the leaders of the "leaderless" protests have met with major US political figures such as John Bolton,
Vice President Pence, Secretary Pompeo, Senator Marco Rubio, Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel, Nancy Pelosi and others, all of whom have
heartily endorsed their efforts. This is not to deny that the protests were home grown at the outset in response to what was widely
perceived as a legitimate grievance. But it would be equally absurd to deny that the U.S. is fishing in troubled Hong Kong waters
to advance its anti-China crusade and regime change ambitions.
That said, where is the U.S. peace movement on the question of Hong Kong?
Let us be clear. One can sympathize with the demand of many citizens of Hong Kong to end the extradition bill or even the other
four demands: an inquiry into police handling of their protests; the retraction of a government characterization of the demonstrations
as riots; an amnesty for arrested protesters; and universal suffrage. (The first three all grow out of violence of the protests,
be it noted.) But that is the business of the citizens of Hong Kong and all the rest of China. It is not the business of the U.S.
government. Peace activists in the US should be hard at work documenting and denouncing the US government's meddling in Hong Kong,
which could set us on the road to war with China, potentially a nuclear war. And that is a mission for which we in the U.S. are uniquely
suited since, at least in theory, we have some control over our government.
So, we should expect to hear the cry, "US Government, Hands Off Hong Kong"? Sadly, with a few principled exceptions it is nowhere
to be heard on either the left or right.
Let's take DemocracyNow! (DN!) as one example, a prominent one on the "progressive" end of the spectrum. From April through August
28, there have been 25 brief accounts ("headlines" as DN! calls them, each amounting to a few paragraphs) of the events in Hong Kong
and 4 features, longer supposedly analytic pieces, on the same topic. Transcripts of the four features are
here ,
here ,
here and
here . There is not a single
mention of possible US involvement or the meetings of the various leaders of the protest movement with Pompeo, Bolton, Pence, or
the "Political Counselor" of the US Hong Kong consulate.
And this silence on US meddling is true not only of most progressive commentators but also most conservatives.
On the Left when someone cries "Democracy," many forget all their pro-peace sentiment. And similarly on the Right when someone
cries "Communism," anti-interventionism too often goes down the tubes. Forgotten is John Quincy Adams's 1823 dictum, endlessly quoted
but little honored, "We do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Where does this lapse on the part of activists come from?
Is it a deep-seated loyalty to Empire, the result of endless indoctrination? Is it U.S. Exceptionalism, ingrained to the point of
unconsciousness? Or is it at bottom a question of who the paymasters are?
On both sides anti-interventionism takes an especially hard hit when it comes to major competitors of the US, powers that
could actually stand in the way of US global hegemony, like Russia or China. In fact on its August 12 program, DN! managed a story
taking a swipe at Russia right
next to the one on Hong Kong – and DN! was in the forefront of advancing the now debunked and disgraced Russiagate Conspiracy Theory.
In contrast, the anti-interventionist movement is front and center when it comes to weaker nations, for example Venezuela – and quite
properly so. But when one puts this advocacy for weaker nations together with the New Cold War stance on China and Russia, one must
ask what is going on here. Does it betoken a sort of imperial paternalism on the part of DN and like-minded outlets? It certainly
gains DN!, and others like it, considerable credibility among anti-interventionists which can help win them to a position in favor
of DN!'s New Cold War stance. And the masters of Empire certainly understand how valuable such credibility can be at crucial moments
when support for their adventures is needed from every quarter.
Fortunately, there are a handful of exceptions to this New Cold War attitude. For example, on the left
Popular Resistance has provided a
view
of the events in Hong Kong and a superb
interview with
K.J. Noh that go beyond the line of the State Department, the mainstream media and DN! And on the libertarian Right there is
the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and the
work of its Executive Director Dan McAdams.
We would all do well to follow the example of these organizations in rejecting a New Cold War mentality which is extremely dangerous,
perhaps fatally so. A good beginning for us in the U.S. is to demand of our government, "Hands Off Hong Kong."
This Is How a War With China Could Begin
First, the lights in Taiwan go out.
By Nicholas Kristof
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- If the United States gets embroiled in a war with China, it may begin
with the lights going out here in Taipei.
Tensions are rising across the Taiwan Strait, and there's a growing concern among some
security experts that Chinese President Xi Jinping might act recklessly toward Taiwan in the
next few years, drawing the United States into a conflict....
[ Nuttier and nuttier but there we are, and as Les Gelb explained, the foreign policy
community at such times have become incapable of independent thought. ]
Mission Unaccomplished: Meet the press -- and see why it failed at several crucial points
during the Iraq War
By Leslie H. Gelb with Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati - Council on Foreign Relations
My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the
foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain
political and professional credibility. We "experts" have a lot to fix about ourselves, even
as we "perfect" the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and
embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common -- often wrong --
wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.
This Is How a War With China Could Begin
First, the lights in Taiwan go out.
By Nicholas Kristof
[ Though this essay is nutty, the implications are really frightening to me. We have
reached a point where New York Times columnists are imagining the bombing of China. This, to
my imagination, was precisely what was imagined during the height of the supposedly won Cold
War. ]
The atomic scientists should move their clock half the distance to mid night.
A side benefit of the US finding an excuse to terminate Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
(INF) Treaty of 1987 is to ring China with INF banned weapon systems!
The new, made up, cold war has two major fronts, Europe and the Pac Rim, whereas the
Soviet based [my] cold war only had Russia ringed from Germany Belgium UK and Spain.....
"... Hong Kong while having a high per capita income level is highly inequitable in income with economic tensions accentuated by a British-country-style property system. ..."
"... The parallels in Hong Kong property prices, with those of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are striking. Singapore has a completely different and relatively equitable property system, so too does neighboring Shenzhen. ..."
"... "The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality of income distribution, reached a new high of 0.539 in 2016, far above the warning level of 0.4" Pot meet kettle. ..."
"... "China's Gini Coefficient data was reported at 0.467 NA in Dec 2017. This records an increase from the previous number of 0.465 NA for Dec 2016. China's Gini Coefficient data is updated yearly, averaging 0.477 NA from Dec 2003 to 2017, with 15 observations." ..."
"... With a GINI co-efficient of about 0.4, the US has nothing to cheer about. But why not demonize China instead of addressing our own problems first? ..."
Hong Kong is essentially self-governing, administered in much the same way as during the
later period of British colonial control. Hong Kong is part of China but completely unlike a
Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen in terms of governance. Hong Kong while having a high per
capita income level is highly inequitable in income with economic tensions accentuated by a
British-country-style property system.
The parallels in Hong Kong property prices, with those of Britain, Canada, Australia and
New Zealand are striking. Singapore has a completely different and relatively equitable
property system, so too does neighboring Shenzhen.
Chinese Communist Party propaganda from the usual source. Yep, Hong Kong has its problems.
Control by the CCP will not help them one bit.
"The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality of income distribution, reached a new
high of 0.539 in 2016, far above the warning level of 0.4" Pot meet kettle.
"China's Gini Coefficient data was reported at 0.467 NA in Dec 2017. This records an
increase from the previous number of 0.465 NA for Dec 2016. China's Gini Coefficient data is
updated yearly, averaging 0.477 NA from Dec 2003 to 2017, with 15 observations."
Here are just some of the twists and turns in the case, which has gone on for more than
three years.
Flynn's trip to Russia in 2015, where it was claimed Flynn went without the knowledge or
approval of the DIA or anyone in Washington,
was proven not to be true .
Flynn was suspected of being compromised by a supposed Russian agent, Cambridge academic
Svetlana Lokhova, based on allegations from Western intelligence asset Stefan Halper.
This was also proven to be not true.
The very strange post-dated FD-302 form on the FBI's January 2017 interview of Flynn that
wasn't filled out until August 2017, almost seven months afterward, is
revealed in a court filing by Flynn's defense team .
FBI agent Pientka became the
"DOJ's Invisible Man," despite the fact that Congress has repeatedly called for him to
testify. Pientka has remained out of sight and out of mind more than a year and a half since
his name first surfaced in connection with the Flynn case.
Now, it's not that far-fetched of an idea that the Mueller special counsel prosecutors would
hide exculpatory evidence from the Flynn defense team, since they've just admitted to having
done exactly that in another case their
office has been prosecuting .
The defense team for Internet Research Agency/Concord, more popularly known as "the Russian
troll farm case," hasn't been smooth going for the Mueller prosecutors.
Then, in a
filing submitted to the court on Aug. 30, the IRA/Concord defense team alerted Judge
Friedrich that the prosecutors just got around to handing them key evidence the prosecutors had
for the past 18 months. The prosecution gave no explanation whatsoever as to why they hid this
key evidence for more than a year.
It's hard to see at this point how the entire IRA/Concord case isn't tossed out.
What would it mean for Flynn's prosecutors to have been caught hiding exculpatory evidence
from him and his lawyers, even after the presiding judge explicitly ordered them in February to
hand over everything they had?
It would mean that the Flynn case is tossed out, since the prosecution team was caught
engaging in gross misconduct.
Now you can see why Flynn refused to withdraw his guilty plea when Judge Sullivan gave him
the opportunity to do so in late December 2018.
A withdrawal of the guilty plea or a pardon would let the Mueller prosecution team off the
hook.
And they're not getting off the hook.
Flynn hired the best lawyer he possibly could have when it comes to exposing prosecutorial
misconduct. Nobody knows the crafty, corrupt, and dishonest tricks federal prosecutors use
better than Powell, who actually wrote a compelling book about such matters, entitled "
License to Lie: Exposing
Corruption in the Department of Justice ."
Everything this Mueller prosecution team did in withholding exculpatory evidence from
Flynn's defense team -- and continued to withhold even after Judge Sullivan specifically issued
an order about it -- is going to be fully exposed.
Defying a federal judge's Brady order is a one-way ticket to not only getting fired, it's a
serious enough offense to warrant disbarment and prosecution.
If it turns out Mueller special counsel prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence -- not
only in the IRA/Concord case, but also in the cases against Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael
Cohen, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, and others -- that will have a huge impact.
If they are willing to withhold exculpatory evidence in one case, why wouldn't they do the
same thing in other cases they were prosecuting? Haven't they have already demonstrated they
are willing to break the rules? Tags
We have become a third-world country. Even throwing Mueller and his entire prosecutors'
team in jail would not be enough to restore confidence in our legal system. But it would be a
start.
On or about December 28, 2016, the Russian Ambassador contacted FLYNN.
c. On or about December 29, 2016, FLYNN called a senior official of the Presidential
Transition Team ("PTT official"), who was with other senior ·members of the
Presidential Transition Team at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss
what, if anything, to communicate to the Russian Ambassador about the U.S. Sanctions. On that
call, FLYNN and 2 Case 1:17-cr-00232-RC Document 4 Filed 12/01/17 Page 2 of 6 the PTT
official discussed the U.S. Sanctions, including the potential impact of those sanctions on
the incoming administration's foreign policy goals. The PIT official and FLYNN also discussed
that the members of the Presidential Transition Team at Mar-a-Lago did not want Russia to
escalate the situation. d. Immediately after his phone call with the PTT official, FLYNN
called the Russian Ambassador and requested that Russia not escalate the situation and only
respond to the U.S. Sanctions in a reciprocal manner. e. Shortly after his phone call with
the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with the PTT official to report on the substance of his
call with the Russian Ambassador, including their discussion of the U.S. Sanctions. f. On or
about December 30, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin released a statement indicating
that Russia would not take retaliatory measures in response to the U.S. Sanctions at that
time. g. On or about December 31, 2016, the Russian Ambassador called FLYNN and informed him
that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to FL YNN's request. h. After his phone
call with the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with senior members of the Presidential
Transition Team about FL YNN's conversations with the Russian Ambassador regarding the U.S.
Sanctions and Russia's decision not to escalate the situation.
The coup plot between the international intelligence community (which includes our
FBI-CIA-etc) and their unregistered foreign agents in the multinational corporate media is
slowly being revealed.
Here’s another possibility... elites in the US Gov set on running a soft coup
against a duly elected president and his team made up a whole pile of **** and passed it off
as truth.
The Manafort thing has me totally riled since HRC's "Password" guy and his brother were
PARTNERS with manafort, did the same damn things, and were NOT investigated.
Donald Trump is many things to many people, but is not his social personna to be patient.
He is being VERY patient to let this unfold, to "give a man enough rope" or political party
and its owner, as it may be....
Donna Brazile's book is under-rated: it holds they keys as to who ran the DNC and why
after Obie bailed.
Our local community rag (Vermont) had an opinion piece last week about "The slide towards
Facism", where the author breathlessly stated that she had learned from a MSNBC expose by
Rachel Maddow that the administration was firing researchers at NASA and EPA as well as
cutting back funding for LGBTQ support groups. Oh the horror. The author conveniently forgot
that the same dyke had lied for 2 years about Russia,Russia,Russia but it's still OK to
believe any **** that drops out of her mouth.
This is the level of insanity happening around here. Of course it is Bernie's turf.
People who are so stupid and gullible deserve everything they are gonna get.
Poor Flynn. Rail-roaded by ZOG and Obama and Hillary and Co. I hope beyond hope that the
truth is revealed and that he can sue the **** out of the seditionists/(((seditionists))) who
put him into this mess such that his great-great-grandchildren will never have to work.
I also blame Trump for throwing Flynn under the bus.
If they are willing to withhold exculpatory evidence in one case, why wouldn’t they
do the same thing in other cases they were prosecuting? Haven’t they have already
demonstrated they are willing to break the rules?
Duh! Because it's easy and the media never covers it and AG Barr and FBI director Wray
will cover it all up. America no longer operates under rule of law, and now we all know it.
Never cooperate with them!
flynn didn't rape children, to buzy trying to fight liberators of iraq and afganistan from
invasion... that's his major crime.
I guess, kelly, mattis, mcmaster neither are on the child rape trend. but what can they
do? when the entire cia and doj and fbi are full on controlled and run by the pedos? it's
like when all the cardinals and the pope are pedos, what a bishop to do...
Why would CIA Rothschild'd up puppet Trump pick only the best William Barr?
Who told Acosta to cut no prosecution deal with Epstein? George Bush? Robert Mukasey? or
Bob Mueller?
Trump, Barr, Bush, Mueller all on the same no rule of law national no government
pys op , for Epstein & 9/11 clean op team Poppa Bush, Clinton, &
Mossad.
Barr: CIA operative
It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone
out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.
Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael
Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno
(1993-2001), **** Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.
Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting
in 1971. Barr’s youth career goal was to head the CIA.
CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA
operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of
Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy
(Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.
When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA’s
“legal office” and Bush’s inner circle, and worked alongside Bush’s
longtime CIA enforcers Theodore “Ted” Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines,
and others, several of whom were likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy
assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden
Triangle narco-trafficking.
Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA
abuses.
Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean
opposition leader Orlando Letelier.
Barr joined George H.W. Bush’s legal/intelligence team during Bush’s vice
presidency (under President Ronald Reagan) Rose from assistant attorney general to Chief
Legal Counsel to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.
Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of
the apparatus, simultaneously managing the operation while also “fixing” the
legal end, ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure
or arrest.
In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to “attack criminal
organizations”, drug smugglers and money launderers. It was all hot air: as AG, Barr
would preserve, protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use
Justice Department power to escape punishment.
Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes,
including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all
crimes of state committed by Bush
Barr provided legal cover for Bush’s illegal foreign policy and war crimes
Barr left Washington, and went through the “rotating door” to the corporate
world, where he took on numerous directorships and counsel positions for major companies.
In 2007 and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international law
firm Kirkland
& Ellis . Among its other notable attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John
Bolton, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration attorneys.
K&E’s clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt
Romney’s Bain Capital.
A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the
Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.
there is a war on america, and the DoD and men like flynn are too arrogant, dumb, and
proud to admit they have been fucked and conned deeply by men way smarter than them...
we don't need ******* brains, but killers to wage this revolution against the american
pedostate.
and that, what they master, they don't want to do.
if they want money, they should have learned to trade and not kill...
Let's say it's
January 2021
, and President Bernie Sanders has just assumed office. On his second day as
commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in world history, Bernie and his foreign policy
team are ushered into the White House Situation Room. After being seated at a long wooden table, a
group of diplomats and military officers informs Bernie that armed militants in the Central African
Republic have placed artillery around a town and are threatening to bombard its 10,000 inhabitants.
The townspeople have requested that the United States destroy the weapons and save their lives.
What should Bernie do?
For
Samantha Power
, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during Barack Obama's
second term, this really is no question at all: You eliminate the weapons. Power has dedicated her
life to promoting humanitarian intervention -- the idea that the United States, as the world's
"indispensable nation," has the moral duty to use its awesome military capabilities to prevent or
halt atrocities. First as a war reporter covering the Balkans in the 1990s, then as the Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of "
A
Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
, and finally as a government official
herself, Power has insisted that the "responsibility to protect" innocents from slaughter is
sacrosanct, even if it means U.S. military adventurism or violating foreign nations' sovereignty.
When civilians are threatened, Power believes we must save them.
THE
EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST: A MEMOIR by Samantha Power
Dey Street Books,
592 pp., $29.99
For this position, she has been both praised and
lambasted. Power's supporters see her as a
moral beacon
in a world focused on power politics at the expense of human rights. In the last
two decades, she has shaped the way a generation of liberal analysts and policymakers understand
international relations and their role within it: Barack Obama has
called her
"one of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy," while Ben Rhodes has said she was
"who I wanted to become when I moved down to Washington." Meanwhile, critics like the law professor
Aziz Rana
understand her as an unreconstructed "war hawk," who employs the discourse of human
rights to mask American imperialism. For them, Power embodies the contradictions of liberal
geopolitics, in which lofty rhetoric is used to justify military action in regions where the United
States has at best tangential interests.
Power's memoir arrives at a time when she and her approach have fallen from favor -- both with the
current administration, which has adopted a nakedly transactional approach to foreign affairs, and
with left-wing foreign policy thinkers, who want to dismantle U.S. military dominance. Against
these tides, Power's new book seems intended to rehabilitate both her agenda and her own
reputation, as she narrates in vivid and engaging prose her rapid rise to some of the most
influential positions in U.S. foreign policy-making. It's the story of a sympathetic protagonist
just trying to save innocent lives -- yet one that inadvertently demonstrates the lethality of good
intentions. The most startling thing about a book titled
The Education of an Idealist
is that Power appears not to have learned very much.
Power's early years exemplified the peripatetic privilege of the global bourgeoisie. She was
born in Ireland in 1970, the daughter of a doctor mother and a dentist father. In 1979, after her
father's alcoholism destroyed her parents' marriage, Power's mother moved with Samantha and her
brother to the United States. Power quickly acclimated to American life; she lost her Irish accent,
began a lifelong love affair with baseball, and started on her high school's basketball team. She
also studied hard for the SAT, and in 1988 was accepted to Yale University.
During Power's sophomore year, the
Berlin Wall
came
down, the Cold War ended, and she became a political junkie who quizzed herself on the news of the
day. In the summer of 1990, she took a trip to Europe that would transform her life. Power began
her journey with a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking through the bleak Secret
Annex drove home to Power "the horror of Hitler's crimes," and after her visit she started to keep
a list of books she wanted to read on "what U.S. officials knew about the Holocaust and what they
could have done to save more Jews." Soon after, she traveled to Dachau, where she "wondered aloud
what the modern world would look like if President Roosevelt had not finally entered the war."
(Ignoring, naturally, the Soviet Union's role in ending World War II, and that it was the Red Army
that liberated Auschwitz.)
Power's trip persuaded her that U.S. military force could legitimately be used to save innocent
lives. The Holocaust became for her the moral justification for American empire in an era in which
the United States no longer faced any perceived existential threats. Power concluded that if the
United States didn't rule the world, genocide was inevitable, and for the remainder of her career
she would view atrocities in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East through the prism of the
Holocaust: After all, if the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the 1940s, why
couldn't it do the same in the
1990s
,
2000s
, and
2010s
?
If the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the
1940s, why couldn't it do the same in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s?
The timing of Power's
trip was also crucial for her intellectual development. Before the disintegration of the Soviet
Union in the early 1990s, it was difficult to argue that the U.S. military could serve as a neutral
arbiter of human rights. Not only was the nation engaged in an avowedly political struggle with an
existential communist enemy, but the Vietnam War and several other failed interventions underlined
the dangers of using military force for ideological ends. Communism's collapse made it possible for
Power to imagine the U.S. military as a nonideological guarantor of broadly accepted human rights.
The empire could act for humanity, not politics. For Power -- and for many in her generation -- the U.S.
military was the base upon which the liberal international order of free markets, democracy, and
human rights would be constructed.
By her senior year at Yale, Power had determined that she "wanted to end up in a position to 'do
something'" about humanitarian crises. After graduating, she interned at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, where Mort Abramowitz, the endowment's president and a former ambassador to
Turkey, was turning his attention to the incipient Bosnian War. The more Power learned about the
conflict and its atrocities, "the more unnerved" she became. The war, she writes, provided her with
"a focus -- a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized." To publicize
their suffering, she decided to become a
war reporter
, and in late 1993 she moved to the Balkans, armed with little more than a laptop.
Power was in Zagreb, Croatia, when on February 5, 1994, Bosnian Serbs mortared the
Markale
market
in Sarajevo, killing 68 civilians. As she watched news footage of "market vendors
carrying away the bloodied remains of their mutilated friends," she found herself "rooting for the
first time in [her] life for the United States to use military force." She spent the next year and
a half writing pieces on
civilian
suffering
that she hoped would engender a domestic outcry and convince President Bill Clinton
to forcibly end the siege of Sarajevo.
As time went on and Clinton refused to intervene (the U.S.-led NATO Operation Deliberate Force
would not commence until August 1995), Power began to consider a new track that was "less about
describing events and more about directly trying to shape them." The decisive moment came in July
1995, when she learned that the Bosnian Serb army
murdered
more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. The sheer brutality of the genocide
compelled Power to take up a place at Harvard Law School (she had applied and been accepted earlier
that year), with the intention of becoming a prosecutor "who could bring murderers to justice."
At Harvard, Power returned to the question that had haunted her at the Anne Frank House and
Dachau: Don't Americans, as citizens of the world's greatest power, have a personal responsibility
to save lives if we have the capacity to do so? She enrolled in a class on the ethics of using
force and, most important for her future career, she wrote a paper that examined "what U.S.
policymakers
themselves
were thinking" when they failed to respond to twentieth-century
genocides. This paper was her first step toward her 2002 book
"A Problem From Hell,"
which
codified a decade of liberal thinking about humanitarian intervention, and which transformed Power
into an
internationally renowned expert
on human rights and genocide prevention.
"A Problem From Hell"
had two main arguments. First, it claimed that throughout the
twentieth century "the United States has consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress
genocide" and, by not acting, had failed the people of Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, among other
places. Second, the book maintained that in the future, U.S. decision-makers should take steps to
prevent or halt atrocities along "a continuum of intervention" that would range "from condemning
the perpetrators or cutting off U.S. aid to bombing or rallying a multinational invasion force."
Power did not, as many critics later avowed, unthinkingly advocate military intervention; rather,
she considered intervention as the final in a series of graduated steps intended to avert or stop
genocide. But as Power herself would soon learn, when Americans were presented with the hammer of
military force, many atrocities began to look like nails.
Power's book was perfectly primed for the post-9/11 moment, during which the question on many
Americans' minds was not whether the United States should remake the world, but how.
"A Problem
From Hell"
quickly became a cudgel in the
debate
over invading Iraq; as Power notes, several pundits clamoring for war invoked her book, arguing
that the 1980s Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds gave the United States a casus belli.
Even though Power herself opposed the invasion, the writers who referenced
"A Problem From
Hell"
were not exactly misreading the book: Power
had placed
U.S. military intervention on the menu of options available to policymakers who said
they wanted to protect human rights.
In a moment defined by paranoia, revenge fantasies, and a sense of moral crusade, it is not
particularly surprising that
"A Problem From Hell"
was employed to rationalize war. The
book's relevance at the time, in fact, helps explain why it won the Pulitzer Prize for general
nonfiction in April 2003, one month after the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq.
Samantha
Power in 2013 at an International Civil Society event with Secretary of State John Kerry and National
Security Adviser Susan Rice
Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty
With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Power got the chance to use her ideas to shape U.S.
policy more directly. Obama and Power first met in the spring of 2005, when Obama was an ambitious
junior senator from Illinois. They worked together for a year (Power volunteered to serve in his
office), and when Obama won the Democratic primary in 2008, he hired her as a foreign policy
adviser, later appointing her to the National Security Council as senior director for multilateral
affairs and senior director for human rights.
In government, Power swiftly learned that few officials cared about human rights; many, in fact,
deemed them a distraction from more important issues of power politics. Nevertheless, while at the
NSC, Power helped expand by $50 million U.S. aid to Iraqi refugees, increased the number of Iraqis
allowed to resettle in the United States, and doubled the government's refugee stipend. She also
advocated for the United States to run for a seat on the
U.N.
Human Rights Council
, which it won in 2009. From this perch, U.S. officials spurred a number of
resolutions focused on revealing human rights abuses in various nations, including Iran, Syria,
Sudan, and North Korea. Moreover, Power proudly emphasizes, the United States "succeeded in getting
the Human Rights Council to reduce by half the share of country-specific resolutions on Israel."
As this last comment indicates, for Power, protecting human rights means disciplining nations of
the Global South that are not U.S. allies. Throughout
The Education of an Idealist
, she
barely mentions Israel or Saudi Arabia -- she says nothing about Israel's occupation of the West Bank
or the Saudi war on women and LGBTQI+ people. These silences are deafening, because the type of
world Power wants to build will never be realized if only certain countries -- namely, those that
stand outside America's imperial sphere -- are held to account. Her approach does not make much sense
from a pragmatic perspective either: U.S. officials have the highest likelihood of ending human
rights abuses in countries that depend on us; there is little point in spending political capital
in a mostly quixotic attempt to transform antagonists like North Korea.
Meanwhile, Power completely ignores the human rights violations that took place in her own
country under Obama's watch; like many liberal interventionists, she is far more vexed by suffering
abroad. Nowhere does she address
police violence
against African Americans,
mass surveillance
,
refugee
detention
, or
mass
incarceration
. Nor does she give much thought to the colonial violence that defines American
history: In
The Education of an Idealist
, she recalls inviting a Serbian official to meet
with her in the so-called Indian Treaty Room, where she lectured him on the importance of
apprehending the war criminal Ratko Mladić. Somehow, Power overlooks the irony of championing
justice in a room named for repeatedly broken treaties that the U.S. government made with the
native population against which it committed genocide.
Power's most consequential decision during Obama's first term displayed a shortsightedness that
has often accompanied her faith in U.S. military power. With the outbreak of civil war in Libya,
Power began to advocate vociferously in favor of intervention to stop a potential massacre at
Benghazi. In particular, during a March 15, 2011, meeting, Power endorsed U.N. Ambassador Susan
Rice's proposal to establish a
no-fly zone
over Libya and attack Muammar Qaddafi's forces. Obama approved Rice's plan, and on
March 19, a U.S.-led NATO coalition began
bombing Libya
,
initiating a process that concluded with Qaddafi's death. Despite the war's expansion and the chaos
that ensued, Power remains proud of her contribution. For her, "once the revolution spread, the
real question became how to use the tools at our disposal to bring about the best possible -- or the
least bad -- outcome."
But was that the real question? Here are some other questions that are equally important and
that she should have taken more seriously before Obama commenced Operation Odyssey Dawn: Is the war
likely to expand? If the war expands and Qaddafi is deposed, who will govern Libya? Is the United
States -- especially the American public -- willing to commit itself to reconstruction efforts? What
precedent does the intervention potentially set? Power never really asked these questions, because
ultimately, as the historian Stephen Wertheim has argued, she considers humanitarian intervention a
categorical imperative (as long as it doesn't involve U.S. allies, of course). For this reason,
throughout her time in office Power regularly encouraged war.
In Obama's second term, Power left the NSC to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In
this position, she won many admirable victories: She aided in establishing a U.N. post
dedicated
to monitoring global LGBT rights;
brought countries together
to end the deadly Ebola outbreak of 2014; and promoted a resolution
that demanded the United Nations
deport
any peacekeeping units from countries in which U.N. soldiers were reported to have
committed sexual assault.
Yet it was also during Obama's second term that Power found herself less able to convince the
president of the moral necessity of intervention. In her memoir, she relates that when she first
learned that Bashar al-Assad's government had employed chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war,
she hoped "Obama would respond forcefully" and was disappointed when he didn't. Nevertheless, in
August 2013, Power was heartened to discover that Obama intended to answer the Syrian government's
murder of 1,400 people in a
chemical weapons attack
with airstrikes of military targets.
Power's expectations, however, were dashed when she was informed that Obama had decided to seek
congressional authorization for the airstrikes. "What happens if Congress doesn't support you?" she
asked the president. "Does that mean Assad could just keep using chemical weapons?" In the end,
Obama determined that Congress would rebuff his plan and
chose not
to go ahead with a vote; against Power's wishes, he also refused to intervene.
Instead, the president accepted Russia's offer to work together to disable Assad's chemical weapons
program. For her part, Power "shuddered at the inadequacy of the effort" to decrease Assad's
stockpile, despite the fact that U.S.-Russian collaboration provided an opportunity to build the
trust necessary to reach a political resolution
December 10, 2019 © Photo: Wikipedia Donald John Trump has turned back the clock in the Western Hemisphere to an era that saw coups and political unrest as the order of the day. Trump and his administration of far-right anti-socialists and pro-fascists have already overthrown the democratically-elected government of President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Trump has announced a policy of turning up the heat on President Nicolas Maduro's government in Venezuela by ratcheting up the economic blockade of Cuba, a Venezuelan ally.
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December 9, 2019 | Editor's Сhoice US and UK Military-Intelligence Apparatus Campaigns to Destroy Jeremy Corbyn Days before Britain's historic election, the UK's military-intelligence apparatus is turning to the corporate media and US government-funded NATO cut-outs to smear Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with evidence-free Russiagate allegations.
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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .
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