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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2020-whirling-and-swirlin/

Forecast 2020 — Whirlin’ and Swirlin’

....Economy and Its Accessories

The shale oil “miracle” was a financial stunt using debt to provide the illusion that the nation’s energy supply was safe and assured long-term. It’s been an impressive stunt, for sure, with production nearing 13 million barrels-a-day now, but it is foundering on its Ponzi business model — the producers just can’t make money at it, and they’ve spent ten years proving that it’s a foolish play for investors. The result will be dwindling investment in an endeavor that requires constant re-investment. Which means that 2020 is the year that shale oil de-miracle-izes and production falls. The bankruptcies have only just begun.

The economy is really just a function of energy inputs, and these must be inputs that make economic sense — that don’t cost more than whatever they return. All our banking and finance arrangements depend on that. If energy inputs decline, or the cost in energy exceeds the value of net energy you get, then debts of every kind can no longer be repaid and the whole system implodes. From there the question is whether collapse is slow or fast. My guess is that it may start slowly and then accelerate rapidly to critical — and the process has already begun.

As a result of this energy dynamic, we’re seeing a generalized contraction in economic activity and growth worldwide, expressed in standards of living that will fall going forward. The effects in America are already obvious and discouraging: the struggling middle-class, people living paycheck-to-paycheck, people unable to buy cars or pay to fix them. The hope was that America might reindustrialize (some version of MAGA) while the “emerging” economies kept producing stuff as the “engines” of the global economy: China, India, Korea, Brazil, Mexico and others. These places saw standards of living rise dramatically the past thirty years. Reversing that trend will be a trauma. These emerging economies are topping off and heading down because of the same basic energy dynamics which affect the whole world: running out of affordable energy, oil especially. The likely result will be political instability within China, and the rest — already manifest — and some of that disorder may be projected outward at economic rivals.

Europe has experienced plenty of blowback from its contracting standard-of-living as expressed in the Yellow Vest disruptions in France, the Brexit nervous breakdown, the gathering power of nationalist political movements in many nations, and the ongoing refugee crisis (largely economic refugees from failing third world places). The European banks, led by the sickest of them all, Deutsche Bank, suffer from a crushing burden of bad derivative obligations that are liable to sink them in 2020, and then there will be a scramble for survival in Euroland, with the recent refugees caught in the middle. I think we will see the first attempts to expel them as financial chaos spreads, violence erupts, and nationalism rises.

The “solution” to the quandary of contraction since 2008 has been for central banks to “create” mountains of fresh “money” to provide the illusion that debts can be repaid (and fresh loans generated) when reality clearly refutes that. All that money “printing” has only deformed banking relations and the behavior of markets — the most obvious symptoms being asset inflation (stocks, bonds, real estate), the quashing of price discovery (the chief function of markets), and zero interest rates (which makes the operations of banking insane).

The bankers will continue to do “whatever it takes” to try to keep the game going, but they’ve run out of actual mojo to get it done. Interest rates can barely go any lower. The amount of money “printing” needed to sustain the illusion of a functioning, rational system grows ever larger. In the six weeks just before-and-after Christmas, the Federal Reserve is expected to pump $500 billion into the banks to stabilize asset prices. How long can they keep doing that?

Eventually, either asset prices fall (perhaps crash), or the increasingly desperate measures needed to prop them up will degrade the value of money itself. The catch is, that might not happen everywhere at once. For instance, China’s banking system, like Europe’s, is ripe for a convulsion, which would send money fleeing for perceived safety (while it can) into America’s markets, temporarily pumping up the Dow, the S & P, and US Treasury bonds even while other big nations crash. But US banks have the same disease and those birds of disorder will eventually roost here, too.

Also, the method of distributing fresh central bank money-from-thin-air will likely change going forward. The public will surely revolt at another bankster bailout. Instead, the folks-in-charge will turn to “Peoples’ QE,” otherwise known as “helicopter money” (as in dropping cash from choppers), or Modern Monetary Theory (MMT — print money until the cows come home), featuring “Guaranteed Basic Income.” The tensions in the contraction trap we’re in are such that disequilibrium in the debt markets can only play out in a hard default or a softer attempt to inflate currencies. Inflation could keep stock markets afloat and allow continued debt repayment (“servicing”) in currencies of declining value — a process that is never really manageable in history, always gets out-of-hand, and leads quickly to political mayhem. Remember, there are two ways of going broke: having no money, and having plenty of money that is worthless.

The elements of this financial psychodrama will meld into the US election politics of 2020 as the Left turns to increasingly promises of “free” money and “free” services (medicine, education) to panicked voters who can no longer afford the American Dream standard-of-living. Tremors emanating from the seized-up Repo markets (Repo = repurchase of collateral for overnight loans) the past three months suggest that some major US banks and insurance companies have entered their own zones of criticality. I’m doubtful that any ploy can fend off major financial instability before the end of 2020, but if the US does become a refuge for money from elsewhere in the world, that could stave off the arrival of crisis until summer.

The idea that a roaring stock market signifies a “great” economy is especially fallacious with all the ongoing market interventions and manipulations of the past decade. All it really signifies is how swindles, frauds, and rackets have taken the place of the industrial production of yesteryear, and that’s not a very sound basis for an economy. I don’t think there are any real prospects of getting back to the industrial might of yore. We’ll surely have to make things in the times ahead, and produce our bread by some means, but it’ll be a very different model of production, at a much more modest scale. When standards-of-living fall, they’ll eventually land somewhere. We just don’t know where that landing place is yet.....

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/crumbling-america/5698097

The Crumbling of America

In June of 2013 an Interstate bridge on a main commercial corridor between Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, Canada, collapsed and fell into the river below after being hit by a truck. This was not a high-speed collision; the truck simply bumped one of the main support pillars at low speed, but the weakened and dilapidated pillar broke from the strain and, without that extra bit of support, the entire bridge immediately collapsed. In prior examinations, the heavily-travelled bridge had not only been rated as functionally obsolete but structurally deficient and requiring replacement.

This is only one of thousands; the great majority of the physical infrastructure of the US is in a similar condition, involving roads, dams, bridges and more. More than 160,000 bridges in the US are officially categorized as dangerous, at risk of collapse, with such collapses now regularly occurring. (1) (2) (3)

Most American infrastructure was built in the early to mid-20th century, the continent having been simultaneously wired for electricity and phone service while constructing large projects like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as the interstate highway system along with thousands of smaller bridges, tunnels and more. But the US has spent almost no money on maintenance and repairs on any of this infrastructure for almost 60 years now. The situation today is dire and in many instances critical, but money is no longer available. Roads and highways alone require more than $100 billion per year; bridges would require many hundreds of billions per year indefinitely. Most are reaching the end of their useful life and repairs alone will not suffice; replacement will become increasingly necessary.

The American society of Civil Engineers produced a comprehensive evaluation report on America’s entire infrastructure, which gave all but one item category a “D” grade, meaning unsatisfactory, inadequate, and in danger of failing. The list included drinking water, wastewater treatment and handling, the electric power grid, airports and aviation facilities, rail facilities and transportation, inland waterway transportation, roads and highways, bridges, dams, hazardous waste, schools and transit. Each category received a D. (4) (5) (6)

More than 4,000 dams in America were classified as unsafe and dangerous by the American Society of Civil Engineers, who noted that failures were increasing at a disturbing rate with about 40% of all US dam failures since 1875 having occurred in only the last ten years. In one year, 2004, in only one county in New Jersey, 30 different dams failed or were severely damaged due to heavy rainfall. In only one 5-year period ending in 2006, 130 major dams failed and the US experienced 1,000 of what the engineers called “dam incidents” which revealed deficiencies so serious as to threaten the integrity of the dam. In one major case, the US saved a dam only by opening the flood gates and releasing all the water. Engineers claim the number of unsafe dams is increasing much faster than those being repaired. (7) (8)

Before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, engineers wanted to rebuild the levees to prevent their collapse, but the $1 billion cost was unaffordable. After Katrina, the federal government had to spend $17 billion on a poor-quality repair, leaving many of the original problems unresolved.

The US has more than 300,000 Kms. of highways, most of which were built in the 1940s and 1950s and which have seldom received adequate maintenance. In Washington, the nation’s capital, 65% of all roads and highways today require either substantial and expensive overhaul or total replacement. Many US states today are tearing out their hard-surfaced highways, and reverting to gravel and dirt-surfaced roads that were common in the 1950s, since the highways, like the bridges, are nearing the end of their useful lives but no money is available for the expensive repairs.

America’s road tunnels are also in serious condition, including new ones which collapse with some regularity, as occurred in downtown Boston in 2006. As with many others, this collapse was not an “accident” as authorities initially claimed, but was proven to have been caused by inferior quality, substandard building materials and sloppy construction work, exacerbated by carelessness and incompetence – the same issues the US likes to claim are endemic to China. (9) (10)

Every year, America’s aging sewer systems spill by some estimates millions of cubic meters of untreated sewage, contaminating freshwater rivers and creating enormous health hazards. The US power grid is increasingly unable to carry its loads, regularly disrupting the nation and leaving entire cities without power.

Derailments and other accidents occur almost daily on America’s dilapidated and unsafe rail network which, like the highways, has received only urgent patching rather than proper maintenance and repair. The same is true for subways and elevated inner-city rail systems like that in New York City; rickety, dirty, dangerous, and looking for a reason to collapse. Many of America’s airports and railway stations compare unfavorably to those in third-world countries, and many of the nation’s schools are not measurably better. (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

As one measure, China spends 9% of its GDP on infrastructure, while US infrastructure expenditures peaked at 3% almost 60 years ago and have been falling ever since. Where China and other Western nations and developing countries have been increasing their investment in physical stock, the US has gone in the opposite direction, leaving a legacy of a crumbling nation already hopelessly in debt and without the means to change direction. (16) (17) (18)

It’s worthy of note that various portions of the US government, the World Bank, the IMF, ‘economics professors’ like Michael Pettis, and others, voice a unanimous and increasingly strident insistence that China immediately abandon its capital investment infrastructure programs as ‘unsustainable’, and develop its economy in true American fashion by encouraging Chinese to max out their credit cards, thereby “rebalancing” China’s economy in a “sustainable” fashion. And thus joining the West in its imminent historic collapse.

There are two causal explanations for this massive deterioration in the American physical stock that exists in no other nation in the world. The first is clearly that for the past 60 years the US government spent its cash and ten trillions in borrowed money on wars for the benefit of the top 1% who don’t take the subway and aren’t interested in your leaking sewers.

The second clear cause has been the privatisation of the nation’s infrastructure. The bankers and private equity companies took control of much of America’s physical stock solely to extract the value from those assets, a process not assisted by expenditures on maintenance, repair, or long-term investment. A toll highway for which private investors pay $2 billion may provide an extraction of perhaps $20 billion in profits, but repairs other than the most minimal and urgent cannot fit into this picture.

Based on the creed of profit maximisation, the most financially-sound plan is to calibrate maintenance and repairs to the precise extent that when the asset is returned at the end of the lease, its value will have depreciated to zero. In other words, the asset itself is slowly cannibalised over the term of the lease, to enhance the profits. But in a truly bizarre turn of events, US bankers and media supporters are now claiming that a solution to the US’ overwhelming infrastructure problems is to transfer yet another $500 billion in public assets to private owners.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52755.htm

US Making Outer Space the Next Battle Zone

In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, American Professor Karl Grossman warns that the Trump administration is recklessly pushing ahead with long-held US plans to militarize outer space. This is in spite of a UN treaty banning such a development.

Grossman says the weaponization of space is essential to US imperialist ambitions for “full spectrum dominance” over the entire planet. He also contends that the US enterprise will unleash a new arms race with Russia and China, thereby gravely undermining global security and greatly increasing the risk of a nuclear war.

Much of the US space weaponization program, he says, can be traced back to the post-Second World War years when former Nazi rocket scientists were employed by Washington to continue the Third Reich’s military programs.

Grossman debunks oft-repeated claims made by US politicians that Russia and China are advancing their own space weaponry. Indeed, he points out, both Moscow and Beijing are on the record over many years calling for the US to desist from violating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The Space Force plan being rolled out by the Trump administration is largely being done without the US public’s knowledge or consent.

Karl Grossman’s biography includes being a full Professor of Journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He is also a film-maker, author and renowned international expert on space weaponization, having addressed UN conferences and other forums on the subject. He is a founding director (in 1992) of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. Grossman is author of the ground-breaking book, ‘Weapons in Space’.

INTERVIEW

Question: The annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) currently going through the US Congress this month makes provision for the establishment of a Space Force as an entirely separate branch of the armed forces. Is the Trump administration moving ahead with plans to weaponize outer space in ways that far exceed similar plans seen under previous administrations, such as Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and his “Star Wars” initiative?

Karl Grossman: It is along the lines of US military space strategy that has been developing for decades. It is important, I believe, to note that much of this started with the arrival of former Nazi scientists – many of whom worked on the V2 rocket program, such as Werner von Braun – to the US after World War Two. At the Army arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, they produced a modified V2 renamed the Redstone, the first US missile capable of carrying a nuclear weapon.

Former General Walter Dornberger, who supervised work on the V2, was hired as a consultant to the US Air Force in 1947 and, notes the book ‘Arming the Heavens’ by State University of New York Professor Jack Manno, Dornberger “wrote a planning paper for his new employers. He projected a system of hundreds of nuclear-armed satellites all orbiting at different altitudes and angles, each capable of reentering the atmosphere on command from Earth to proceed to its target. The Air Force began early work on Dornberger’s idea under the acronym NABS (Nuclear Armed Bombardment Satellites).” Manno also writes: “Before a congressional hearing in 1958, Dornberger insisted that America’s top space priority ought to be to ‘conquer, occupy, keep and utilize space between the Earth and the moon.’”

The “Star Wars” scheme of President Ronald Reagan represented a full-blown plan by the US for the weaponization of space – despite, importantly, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which declares space a global commons to be used for peaceful purposes.

In my book, ‘Weapons in Space’, I quote from various US military documents, such as the US Space Command’s ‘Vision for 2020’, its multi-colored cover depicting a laser weapon shooting a laser beam down from space zapping a target below. This report, issued in 1996, proclaims the US Space Command’s mission of “dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into war-fighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict.”

So important, too, ‘Vision for 2020’ compares the US effort to control space and the Earth below to how centuries ago “nations built navies to protect their commercial interests,” how the great empires of Europe ruled the waves and thus the world.

As General Joseph Ashy, then commander in chief of the US Space Command, put it in 1996 in the trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology: “It’s politically sensitive, but it’s going to happen. Some people don’t want to hear this, and it sure isn’t in vogue, but – absolutely – we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space.”

As to Trump, the preposterous US president now, as National Public Radio reported this August, the Space Force notion “started as a joke.” Reported NPR correspondent Claudia Grisales in a report titled, ‘With Congressional Blessing, Space Force Is Closer to Launch’ – “Early last year President Trump riffed on an idea he called ‘Space Force’ before a crowd of Marines in San Diego. It drew laughs, but the moment was a breakthrough for a plan that had languished for nearly 20 years.”

She continued: “‘I said maybe we need a new force, we’ll call it the ‘Space Force,’ Trump said at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in March 2018. ‘And I [Trump] was not really serious. Then I said, ‘What a great idea, maybe we’ll have to do that.’”

The space program currently of Trump and the US military will ultimately, I’d project, resemble the “Star Wars” architecture – orbiting battle platforms with on-board nuclear reactors providing the power for hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons. (“Without reactors in orbit,” as former “Star Wars” commander General James Abrahamson, put it at a Symposium on Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion, there would need to be “a long, long light [extension] cord that goes down to the surface of the Earth” to power space weaponry.

Question: Presumably, the Space Force sought by President Trump is an irrevocable move. Once it is established, it will be a permanent

branch of the US armed services, which will not be disestablished by

future presidents?

Karl Grossman: Once established, it could theoretically be disestablished – but with government, as conservatives like to complain, correctly, once an office is set up, once a department is created, a vested interested is established. An entity is formed which seeks to perpetuate itself. Further, places where components of the Space Force would be based would lobby to retain them. Moreover, because of the partnership in the US of the military and powerful aerospace contractors, these corporations with their huge clout – and government contracts – would also lobby (and utilize campaign contributions to politicians) to keep a Space Force and its components permanent.

Question: The whole dynamic of weaponizing outer space by successive US governments appears to violate the 1967 UN-ratified Outer Space Treaty. From a legal point of view, is what the Trump administration and Congress doing – setting up a Space Force – blatantly illegal?

Karl Grossman: What is being done might not now be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty – but it certainly is a violation of the intent of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. As Craig Eisendrath, who had been a US State Department officer involved in the treaty’s creation, notes in my TV documentary ‘Star Wars Returns’, after the Soviet Union launched the first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, “we sought to de-weaponize space before it got weaponized…to keep war out of space.” Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966, it entered into force in 1967. Put together by the US, the then Soviet Union and Britain, it has been ratified or signed by 123 countries. It provides that nations “undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in space in any other manner.”

As I say, to be expected with a Space Force would be – as they were planned for Reagan’s “Star Wars” – the placement of hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons in space. Depending on at what they are aimed, these come close – if they are not exactly – to being “weapons of mass destruction.”

Then there is the space-based “Rods From God” weapons plan of the US Air Force. As this article is headlined: “These Air Force Rods From God Could Hit With The Force Of A Nuclear Weapon”.

So, yes, it can be anticipated that space-based “weapons of mass destruction” would be positioned in space – in outright violation of the Outer Space Treaty.

Question: American politicians who advocate for making “space an operational domain” for the US military claim that their nation is losing ground to advances in this domain allegedly made by Russia and China. Yet Russia and China have consistently called for the banning of space weaponization. Are American claims false or are Russia and China secretly developing space weapons in violation of the Outer Space Treaty?

Karl Grossman: The Trump administration and the US military have been claiming that a Space Force is necessary because of Russia and China moving into space militarily but, in fact, Russia and China – as well as Canada – have been leaders for decades in pushing for an expansion of the Outer Space Treaty. The treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in space and the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) treaty, which the three nations above have sought, would prohibit the placement of any weapons in space.

The US – under both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations – has opposed the PAROS treaty and effectively vetoed its enactment at the United Nations.

I’ve been at the UN and watched as the representative of my country, the United States, has cast this veto vote. It is an outrage.

Question: What kind of weapons is the US endeavoring to deploy in space?

Karl Grossman: That has not been specified yet but, as I say, they would most likely be hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons – and “Rods From God.”

Question: Do you think it is technologically feasible to create and deploy such weapons?

Karl Grossman: Yes, it is technologically feasible, unfortunately.

Question: What do you think are the motives behind the US plan to weaponize space? To assert its presumption of global power over Russia and China by way of Washington being able to intimidate these perceived geopolitical rivals?

Karl Grossman: Yes, exactly. The US, in numerous military documents, has through the years – and now – spoken of “full spectrum dominance” over the Earth, seizing the “ultimate high ground” and from space being able to control the Earth below.

As Trump has declared: “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space.”

American dominance in space! One country dominating space!

Question: Presumably, the Pentagon and US military-industrial complex view the venture into space militarism as a huge source of financial profits. Is the weaponization of space driven by corporate

profiteering?

Karl Grossman: It is a partnership of the military, aerospace contractors which are corporate giants – and Trump.

Question: Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that Russia will not be dragged into another arms race with the US as existed during the Cold War decades. But will Russia and China be forced to also match US developments in pursuit of space weapons, thereby unleashing a vicious cycle of arms race?

Karl Grossman: Yes, Russia and China – and other countries – will respond in kind to the US seeking to achieve “American dominance in space.”

And they don’t want to have to do this. I vividly recall sitting at a table with Chinese diplomats at the UN in Geneva a number of years ago – after I keynoted a conference on the threat of weaponization of space – and the Chinese diplomats speaking about how they want to feed, educate, house their nation of more than a billion people, not waste billions in an arms race in space. My presentation earlier was followed at that conference by the Chinese ambassador to the UN who emphasized how his nation sought to keep space for peace.

Incidentally, on my way walking to the UN on that visit, on the street I came upon the US ambassador to the UN who had been at my presentation – watching me with daggers in his eyes. A diplomat, however, he conversed cordially to me on the street and when I spoke about Russia and China following us in kind, he declared that Russia “doesn’t have” the money to compete with the US military in space and China was “30 years behind” in terms of space ability. I told him this was so wrong. I told him of having visited the Space Museum in Moscow – and seeing a “parallel” universe to the US documenting Russian space prowess, and said his judgement regarding China couldn’t be more incorrect.

Russia and China don’t want to do it, I am convinced, but if the US weaponizes space – they’ll be up there, too, with space weaponry. And the heavens will be turned into a war zone. And if war breaks out, with nuclear-powered battle platforms up there and exchanges between battle platforms, debris, much of it radioactive, will be raining down, vast swathes on Earth will be devastated, huge numbers of people would die – the overall outcome would be apocalyptic.

We must keep space for peace – as the Outer Space Treaty has sought to do, and prevent this looming arms race in space.

Question: Do you see the latest, more earnest phase of US space

weaponization as part of a wider context of Washington undoing arms

controls treaties, such as the ABM and INF treaties?

Karl Grossman: Yes, the breaking of one treaty after another by the GW Bush and Trump administrations goes along with Trump’s scheme of having American “dominance” of space.

Question: Is the US attempt to weaponize space a grave concern for global peace?

Karl Grossman: Yes, it is of grave concern. The turning of the heavens into an arena of conflict will have a gigantic impact on the vision of global peace.

Bringing the scourge of war from Earth up to the heavens will be a huge historical calamity.

Question: How might this US flouting of international law regarding the Outer Space Treaty be halted? The American public seem to be

indifferent or unaware of the dangers?

Karl Grossman: At the UN and before other international organizations, there must be strong – very strong – opposition to the US scheme to turn space into a war zone. Moreover, there needs to be strong – very strong – action at the grassroots. The international group in the lead challenging this US space military madness is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. I urge people to connect with this group. The address of its website is here. And folks should become active in it.

As to indifference and lack of awareness, it’s not just the American public but most US public officials. For example, the US House of Representatives a few days ago passed a military policy bill – providing for $738 billion in military spending and approving the Trump scheme for a Space Force.

The vote for what is titled the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2020 was 377 to 48. Some 189 Republicans and 188 Democrats voted for it. Six Republican House members voted against the bill along with 41 Democrats and one independent.

The large Democratic “yes” vote came as a result of a trade-off – for 12 weeks of paid parental leave for civilian federal employees. A New York Times’ article said Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, was pivotal. “It was Mr Kushner who helped broker a deal to create the Space Force, a chief priority of the president’s, in exchange for the paid parental leave, a measure championed by his wife, Ivanka Trump, also a senior advisor to the president,” said The Times.

This was a pivotal vote, as the US Senate will now consider the measure and pass it considering the Trump-controlled majority in the Senate, and Trump will sign it.

A trade-off of giving the OK for a US Space Force in return for paid parental leave for government employees – something common throughout the world. What a trade-off!

Moreover, if one asks Americans about the PAROS treaty and the push by Russia and China and our neighbor Canada for its expanding the Outer Space Treaty and banning of all weapons in space, if one in 10,000 American citizens are aware of this, that would surprise me. The ratio would be better among US public officials but still most would not be aware. Hence the baloney that the US must arm the heavens because of Russia and China is being believed.

Thus the US is pushing the world headlong toward unparalleled disaster.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52684.htm

Operation Condor 2.0 – “Expanded”

According to US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, the US will help “legitimate governments” in Latin America, in order to prevent protests from “morphing into riots”.

From what we are seeing this “legitimization” may be expanded to rest of the world. Because Washington instigated destabilizing unrest goes on throughout the world. We may as well call it “Operation Condor 2.0 – Expanded”. It promises to become devastating, oppressive and murderous on all Continents. A transformation from whatever ‘freedom’ may have existed to neoliberal dictatorships bending towards neofascism.

The original “Operation Condor” was a campaign by the United States to bring ‘order’ into her backyard, i.e. Latin America. In other words, it was a repressive move that started in 1968 and concluded around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are talking about more than 20 years of right-wing repression, especially but not exclusively directed on the Southern Cone of South America.

It included such military dictators like Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. He came to power in 1976 by a US supported military coup, deposing Isabel Martinez de Perón. Comandante Videla stayed in power during five years until 1981, period in which he brutally oppressed Argentinians, especially the opposition. It is reported that during this period more than 30,000 people ‘disappeared’ – never to return. They were tortured and killed. Some of the dissidents were dropped from helicopters into the Rio de Plata.

Another, better known dictator was Augusto Pinochet, who was directly helped by the CIA and then President Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger – to overturn the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a bloody coup on 11 September 1973. Pinochet introduced as a first in Latin America neoliberal economics through a group of economists from the Economic School of Chicago, the so-called “Chicago Boys”. The resulting austerity brought extreme poverty and famine to Chileans. The ensuing 17 years were a horror, with over 40,000 people ‘disappeared’ or outright murdered.

Other countries that went through one or several “Operation Condor” cleansings, included Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and possibly others. It was a despicable and deadly period for Latin America. In all, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people were killed and some 400,00 taken as political prisoners.

Secretary Pompeo’s words could not be clearer. He added that protests in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador reflect the “character of legitimate democratic governments and democratic expression. We’ll work with legitimate governments to prevent protests from morphing into riots and violence that don’t reflect the democratic will of the people.”

Not to forget any invented villains, he added, the US will “continue to support countries trying to prevent Cuba and Venezuela from hijacking those protests.” He went on accused Russia of “malign” influence in Latin America and of “propping up” the democratically elected Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro.

Such remarks come after the US-led November 10 military coup in Bolivia. Amazing that nobody dares stand up and answer him. Are all afraid?

And this especially in the light of having in Bolivia now an opposition dictator, the self-declared interim President (much like Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó), Jeanine Añez, who acts with impunity following fascists and racist orders from Washington – indiscriminately killing her own country-women and men – who happen to be indigenous people. Although she promised new elections, Añez has not set a date, but rather is undoing almost everything Evo Morales has achieved for the people of Bolivia, by privatizing public assets and services, as well as abolishing social safety nets by decree.

Pompeo concluded by saying there remains an “awful lot of work to do” in the region, meaning Latin America as the US’s “back yard.” He also warned against “predatory Chinese activities” in the region, which he claimed can lead countries to make deals that “seem attractive” but are “bad” for citizens.

The new repression that we see in Latin America is not homogenous. In Chile at the surface it looks like the protests started over a metro-fare hike of the equivalent of 4 cents (US-dollar cents) – and then expanded violently to oppose political and economic injustice in Chile, directed against Chile’s neoliberal President, Sebastian Piñera. In Bolivia protests are against an US-induced military coup; in Ecuador they are directed against an austerity-inflicting IMF loan, in Colombia, they appeared suddenly against the corruption and injustice of the Iván Duque presidency; and in Brazil, against the neofascist austerity reforms by Jair Bolsonaro. Copy cats? What’s good for our neighbors, is good for us? – I don’t think so.

It looks much more like a concerted effort by the US to enhance and bolster protests from whatever side they come, to be able to install fully repressive governments, of course, with the help of the US and her secret services – funded by the usual NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and other NGOs that would help install within the respective governments strong 5th Columns, so as to detect early warning signals and crackdown in time on any opposition.

“Operation Condor 2.0 Expanded” – Expanded refers to similar violent protests going on in other parts of the world – practically simultaneously. Take Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, Afgnaistan, and now France – no matter from which side they come – repression and state of siege, if necessary, are of the order – total repression, that is. All with the help of the US – and, not to forget NATO. This is certainly a key justification to keep NATO alive – to avoid opposition to spread and to risk abolishing the faltering US hegemony.

We are, indeed, in the midst of a new “Operation Condor”; or “Operation Condor 2.0 – Expanded”. Full repression worldwide. In preparation of the next planned global recession, planned by the US-led western banking and financial sector. A recession that will likely outdo whatever we have known in the recent past, and make the 2008 /09 downfall look like a walk in the park. The repression now, it is hoped, will prevent people from going on the barricades when they suffer the next cut in salaries, pensions and other social services, already at an unlivable level. Authoritarianism and tyranny must be efficient and total with a para-military police, enhanced by the armed forces, if necessary. It’s going to be another transfer of assets and social capital from the bottom to the top.

This has been sensed perhaps intuitively by the French – who have been protesting in the form of Yellow Vests against Macron’s regime for more than a year – and now in the form of a CGT- syndicate organized open-ended general strike. Repression is massive – an estimated 1.5 million people in the streets of the major French cities, all public transportation disrupted. There have even been rumors that the police forces may also join the strike, because they realize they are part of the oppressed and abused by Macron’s neoliberal austerity policies. This is reflected by the four times higher suicide rates among police officers, as compared to the average French.

China and Russia beware. The rogue nation and bulldozer won’t stop necessarily in front of your borders. To the contrary, they may seek any entry they can get – as they are already doing in China with Hong Kong, not letting go despite the various concessions already made by HK’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, supported by Beijing; and also in the autonomous Region of Xinjiang, with the mostly Muslim Uyghur people, many of whom are being recruited by the CIA across the border from Afghanistan, trained and funded to cause destabilizing unrest.

In view of all of this, President Putin’s recent overture to Israel, especially to PM Netanyahu, is worrisome. Netanyahu is by all accounts part of the repressive wave engulfing our Mother Earth, and, in addition, with his cruel policies against Palestine, he may be considered a mass-murderer.

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https://www.peakprosperity.com/good-riddance-to-the-twenty-teens/

Good Riddance To The ‘Twenty-Teens’

A decade best shunned & forgotten

This is my last report from the good old “twenty-teens”.

In some respects, they didn’t turn out at all like I thought they would. But in many others, exactly as predicted.

I badly underestimated the system’s ability to perpetuate obvious frauds and swindles without causing a social rebellion. And worse, to watch so many otherwise intelligent people participate with glee.
Negative Interest Rates

Back in 2008 when The Crash Course first came out, you would have never convinced me that we’d be sitting here at the cusp of 2020 with $11 trillion of “negative yielding debt.”

I have to place that phrase in quotation marks, because, although I can write those words, I haven’t a clue what they actually mean in a world where money is supposed to be a store of value. How can money in the future be worth less than money today?

Perhaps Pablo Escobar could help us here, as he reputedly factored in a 10% loss on all his buried cash due to rats, water damage, mold, or forgetting where he placed it.

Thee twenty-teens saw the extinguishment of bond vigilantes leaving nobody to seriously push back on the abomination of negative rates. Only speculators are left these days, perfectly happy to place the bet that they’ll be able to sell their negative yielding bonds to a greater fool at a higher price.

There’s no such thing as a bond vigilante anymore, only speculators perfectly happy to pull on a slot machine lever in the hopes of selling their negative yielding bonds to some other punter later on at a higher price.

Paying any government to lend it money is a swindle. Buying Greek national debt with a lower rate of return than US Treasury debt is a swindle.

These and a thousand others completely obvious swindles, and yet here we are with the vast machinery of state and corporate journalism aligned to tell you how good and right they all are.
Shale Oil

I also underestimated the longevity of the recent shale oil “boom”.

I studied it intently early on, concluded it was a money-losing enterprise, and then patiently waited for investors to wake up to that reality.

This realization has been slow to dawn on them, but it’s finally becoming understood. Slowly, grudgingly. However, that’s after 10 years of massive losses for hapless investors in the shale oil space.

Shale company bond and equity holders have been slaughtered, though those vast losses are yet to be recognized.

The reason?

While the capital raised from bond sales and equity offerings has already been spent, so are the wells that were drilled with that money. They’re played out.

Raising new capital merely obscures that any money that has not already been returned to investors can’t be and won’t be because of this dynamic:

What does the above chart tell us? Only that the very best shale operator in the world operating in the very best shale play in the world sees an 82% decline rate in average well output in the first year.

Which means that if that well has not entirely paid itself back within that first year, it probably won’t generate *any* returns for bond or shareholders to enjoy. Ever.

It also means that all the debt and equity capital poured into the ground between 2008-2017 is now “invested” in wells that are, effectively, depleted.

Bluntly, if the returns have not already happened on those monies, they probably never will. How could they? The wells are mostly drained.

The table below shows the equity losses for a small sampling of afflicted companies. Hundreds of other shale companies have already gone completely bankrupt with similar staggering bond losses to “investors”:

It still doesn’t make sense to me that the obvious cash-destroying financial math of shale oil has proven so misunderstood that an entire decade has passed before the media and Wall Street have started to catch on. Live and learn.

Old Barnum – There’s a sucker born every minute.

New Barnum – Investors are the best suckers there are.

More amazingly, there has been such a rush to rip the shale oil out of the ground that the accompanying natural gas is simply burned off into the night sky. All that lost fossil energy will never be used constructively, other than signaling to the wider universe how moronically wasteful we’ve been with a precious resource.

As a Dec 24, 2019 Bloomberg article put it:

Producers in the Permian are already flaring record levels of natural gas. The Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the oil and gas industry in the state, has granted nearly 6,000 permits allowing explorers to flare or vent natural gas this year [2019]. That’s more than 40 times as many permits granted at the start of the supply boom a decade ago.

That was 6,000 opportunities to not be moronic. And we passed on every single one.

There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when people will look back, shake their heads, and pass harsh judgment on the generations involved with wasting so much precious energy.
“Unless…”

In Dr. Seuss’ book The Lorax, the hero warns of the self-destructive impacts of industrial and consumer exploitation of the natural world and its denizens.

The book ends with a final warning; Unless.

“Unless” our destructive practices are halted and reversed, much of the natural world will disappear forever, never to return. Gone is gone, man.

The distressing trends in the environment warned of in The Lorax and in The Crash Course have sadly only become gotten predictably worse over this past decade. I hate being right about those.

Meanwhile, I see a lot of people fretting about if/how various carbon emission targets are going to be met. Let me alleviate the suspense; they’re not.

Every single economically-retrievable lump of coal and molecule of oil and gas is going to be extracted and burnt before we give up our addition to fossil fuel.

Why?

Because without energy ,nothing is possible. Especially our ridiculously comfortable lives of massive over-consumption. And fossil fuels remain unmatched in their net-energy returns compared to today’s alternatives.

Even Australia’s current shattering of all its heat records, with growing swaths of the continent literally aflame, hasn’t managed to trip any alarms in the skull of the Australian PM Scott Morrison, whose single major policy initiative on the matter was to enact harsh new penalties on any Australians who might protest against the coal industry.

No one cares until you threaten to dampen corporate profits. Or impede the unchecked march of break-neck resource extraction. If you do, then you’re branded a threat, a terrorist, or “indulgent and selfish” in the words of Mr. Morrison.

After all, what could be more ‘indulgent and selfish’ than advising we proceed with caution, so as to protect society’s future prospects?

In a post-peak world, we’re probably not going to be seeing too many bananas way up north (where I live) in January. And I’m pretty sure the current ones individually wrapped in plastic won’t be available any more:

There’s something so offensive about an individually-wrapped banana that it strikes like a closed fist. It’s a shining reminder that we’re accelerating down a slippery slope, while blithely spraying Astroglide ahead of us.

Maybe we should preserve one of these plastic-wrapped banana to place in a future Buzzfeed-sponsored Smithsonian display titled “You won’t believe these 10 stupid things your forebears did.”

Meanwhile, as you can plainly see below, innumerable science-based summits, conferences and accords held over the past decade have really done their work on mounting CO2 levels.

I’ve helpfully mapped the size of the possible solution set below that.

Marine life is in deep trouble, soils continue to erode, species are disappearing, and weather events are getting more and more chaotic.

Only a fool would build (or re-build as the case often is) in a 500-year flood plain. We can now count on those to be routinely swamped.

Yet as a completely non-sensical counter to all this, the central banks of the world, led by the Fed, have mounted a particularly spirited effort to make the wealthy insanely wealthier and by every measure they have not only succeeded, but are determined to top their former high scores.
Fed-Tastic

One thing I never, ever, not once, EVER foresaw was the markets being A-OK with the massive distortions the world central banking cartel has saddled the world with over the past decade.

$15 Trillion in new currency printed from thin-air. The cramming of interest rates to 5,000 year lows. Negative interest rates. The complete perversion of price discovery.

All in the service of making a very, very few wealthy people even wealthier.

All while absolutely screwing the (former) middle classes, slow-roasting pensions, and destroying the retirement dreams of millions living on a fixed income.

Despite the fact the 99.9% of all journalists are decidedly not in the camp of the “winners” here, they nonetheless take pains to never ask a single tricky question of the Fed, nor ask anything about its stated policy of robbing from the many to give to the few.

Here’s a still shot of the media over the past ten years engaging with the Fed.

After ten years of non-stop interventions, the central banks have created the worst asset price bubble in history and are now trapped.

To try to keep it from popping, they’re being forced to use increasingly desperate measures not seen since the hairy depths of the worst moments of the Great Financial Crisis:

Over the past decade, the markets morphed into “markets” which then metastasized into ““markets”” . They are now so perversified that they are well and truly “““markets””” ,signifying that they lack any resemblance to a place where honest participants set honest prices.

Collectively, the world’s central banks have undertaken more emergency ‘easing’ than at any point in time, since… ever.

Global central banks have cut interest rates roughly 90 times over the past year, the largest cumulative easing since the financial crisis, according to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce data.

While the Fed accounted for three of those, taking its policy rate down to a range of 1.5% to 1.75%, that’s still higher than much of the rest of the developed world, including Japan and Europe, where rates are near or even below zero.

“It’s very hard for the average foreign investor to survive — we’re still at a point now where it’s max desperation,”

How about that? Feeling better yet?

I certainly don’t. But don’t tell the stock “““markets,””” which are now wholly-owned subsidiaries of the central banks and the governments of the world that protect this cartel:

They perform a utility function — but instead of delivering electricity to your home, they siphon wealth from the many to give to the few. If Robin Hood’s evil twin operated a utility, he’d operate the US equity markets.

While the average household in the US slips farther and farther behind, going deeper and deeper into debt, the Fed congratulates its efforts, believing it’s doing “God’s work”.

Again, here’s the media on all this:

At this point you really ought to be asking yourself, “why exactly are the world’s central banks, led by the Fed, freaking out so badly right now?”

As we close out the ‘twenty-teens’, all I can say is, you’d better start working on providing the basics for yourself and your family, because when this credit cycle finally ends, it’s going to be horrible.

Which is precisely what the central bankers know, too.

While you and I may share in that knowledge, it remains unacceptable to talk about in public.

The Overton Window does not allow for such talk anywhere and certainly never in the mainstream media, which is on track to close out the twenty-teens having failed in its Fourth Estate duties more comprehensively than any other press cohort in history.
The End Of ‘Magnificent Folly’

There’s a great emergency happening right now, but society is not acknowledging it.

The social mood is darkening Fourth Turning-style and people are protesting and risking life, career, and limb to express their anxiety and frustration with the policies of Team Elite™. But don’t expect to hear about that on the nightly news or in the mainstream press.

The economy is doing so “great” that central banks are applying record-breaking amounts of funny-money stimulus to counter…something. Or, more accurately, to avoid something.

I hold the view that people are organisms and that we’re wired to know when our nest is getting fouled. Our instincts, honed over millions of years of evolution, are to migrate to a new, less polluted or played-out home.

That only makes sense. But the problem is that now there’s nowhere new to go. No next valleys. No unpolluted corner to wander off to and inhabit for a while.

So those of us who are ‘of an age’ and remember when a porch light left on for an August night would attract a Zootopia of strange and wonderful insects to our screen doors. How many of you are now deeply anxious, as I am, at the creepily barren screens we now wake up to?

It’s as if the Rapture happened only – surprise! – God took the insects. Because they didn’t have any clothes to leave behind, nobody noticed.

But we’ll soon notice the ramifications of knocking out them and other key pillars of the food chain on which we depend.

As I look forward, I sincerely hope we can do a lot better in the 2020’s. The bar is current set depressingly low.

But we probably won’t. That’s the reality.

What will the 2020’s hold?

More of the same likely, though also some very sharp differences because the effects of a lot of our current bad decisions will come home to roost very soon.

My simplified view of the 2020’s is this: you better be working on your garden’s soil, developing a tight and close trust network, and be emotionally prepared to adapt quickly to new situations and circumstances....

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-us-american-exceptionalism-fake-history-hides-shame-creates-stupidity-dangerous-imperialism/5698387

Fake U.S. History: How “American Exceptionalism” Hides Shame, Creates Stupidity and Dangerous Imperialism

Premise

The culture and nation state of the United States of America is founded on the egregious and forceful dispossession of others. You might even call it an earlier version of fascism – institutional dehumanization for private profit. A myth, or grand lie, was created that we are an exceptional people, effectively pre-empting openly experiencing the important feeling of social shame and, in turn, blocking any accountability or genuine inquiry into our genocidal origins built on stolen land and labor, that murdered millions with impunity.

Thus, we live by fantasy of our superiority, which functionally makes us stupid, as if in a stupor. Applying the legal exclusionary rule to the culture at large, the USA is the “fruit of the poisonous tree”, as with most “civilizations”, founded on forcefully stolen land and labor, thereby lacking any moral or legal validity.

Introduction

When I was a child in rural upstate New York in the 1940s and 1950s, I enjoyed small town life and the tranquility of a luscious surrounding nature. I had pictures of baseball stars plastered on all four of my bedroom walls. I recited a grateful prayer in my little sanctuary before going to sleep each night: “Thank you God for allowing me to have been born and raised in the United States, the greatest country in the history of the world, endowed by our Creator to bring prosperity to the impoverished, and Christianity to the heathen”. It was a wonderful story, greatly enhanced by our nation’s celebrated reputed victory over Fascism in Europe. Life was good, or so I thought.

Having been born on July 4, 1941, I was a patriotic baby of the World War II generation. My family was lower middle class, devout Baptists and, like my parents, I believed that the FBI under the “leadership” of J. Edgar Hoover protected our democratic Christian freedoms from the Russians. The Cold War propaganda was nothing short of spectacular, virtually all unchallenged by anyone I knew.

Brian Willson (right)

But there was another factor operating. Coinciding with the celebrated post-World War II victory, the nation experienced a unique 35-year blip in its history – an age of a large middle class imbibing in insatiable consumerism and optimism. My family replaced their icebox with a new electric refrigerator after the war, bought their first automobile, and by 1958 had purchased an 11-inch B&W television set. It was proof that we are an exceptionalpeople, and God’s chosen people to boot. However, this optimism was tempered by fear of the Soviet Union that severely prevented genuine liberal dialogue and critical thinking education.

1950s: “Positive Thinking/Prosperity Gospel” – Norman Vincent Peale and US Exceptionalism

Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), a Dutch Reformed minister, wrote The Power of Positive Thinkingin 1952, a bestseller for 186 consecutive weeks, a book prominently in our home library, as it was in the Trump family home in Queens, New York. Peale also wrote a monthly magazine, Guideposts,which my parents read regularly.Peale served as a guru for the post-depression, post-World War II generation with his cult-like, self-help “bible” for achieving material success with divine blessings. Peale described himself as a “missionary to American business”, opposing unions and the New Deal. Thus, he was exceedingly popular with ambitious US Americans, especially White folks, both the rich, and those seeking riches.

Donald L. Trump, as a 6-year-old child began to regularly attended Peale’s New York City church with his parents. Peale officiated at Trump’s first marriage with Ivana Zelnickova, and both Trump’s sisters were married at Peale’s church. To this day, Trump lauds Peale for his success, unrestrained self-confidence, and from whom he learned modern branding. In Trump’s 2015 book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again[1], he proclaimed that “I am a Christian…I love God, and I love having a relationship with Him…[and] the Bible is the most important book ever written”.

Many theologians considered Peale as “God’s salesman”, critiquing him as a dangerous con man and fraud since he convinced people to believe that all basic problems were personal, unrelated to social, political, or economic contexts. Personal failures, Peale, said, were a sign of spiritual weakness, preaching that everyone has the power to make oneself happy and rich. It fits perfectly with US American exceptionalism and Trump’s narcissism[2].

Viet Nam – Great Awakening of the Grand Lie

I was in Viet Nam in 1969 where I turned 28 years, having been drafted in 1966 during my fourth semester of law school. It was there that my Disney bliss rapidly evaporated. The entrance sign to my squadron’s in-country headquarters said, “Welcome to Indian Country”. This reminded me of the slogan, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”, hinting the same plight for the Vietnamese. Incidentally, Trump, five years my junior, enjoyed five deferments enabling him to avoid Viet Nam.

While performing auxiliary duty as a USAF Combat Security officer, I documented the immediate aftermath of atrocities committed from the air that annihilated inhabited, undefended villages. I was sickened from the sight of hundreds of villagers lying dead and suffering horribly in their villages. I wondered who the fuck am I, a 6’ 3” White man, 9,000 miles from my rural farming village in New York State? These Vietnamese were in their homevillages. Village life was the essence of Vietnamese culture and we were systematically destroying it. I felt depressingly unauthentic, like a dumb ideological robot, and began to realize that being a privileged White man was in fact an emotional and intellectual disability. White male supremacy was a powerful force, as it enabled a kind of mindless “sliding” through life, pre-empting the need to ask serious questions. However, my discovery of empathy began to radicalize me. I wondered whether we had become sadistic criminal psychopaths? Or have we always been? Hmm?!

Accumulating high body counts, from babies to grandparents, and every age in between, was politically comforting to US politicians and to a large number of their their taxpaying constituents. We simply created a fiction that we were killing the “enemy” to satisfy the emotional, and political momentum of stopping the bogeyman – Communism – when in fact we were murdering innocent Vietnamese peasants. Mass murder was normalized. When the US war ended in 1975, 13,000 of 21,000 Vietnamese villages had been deliberately wiped out. Huge B-52 bombers left 26 million bomb craters, while targeting and destroying almost 950 churches and pagodas, 350 clearly marked hospitals, nearly 3,000 educational institutions, over 15,000 bridges, 18 power plants, 40 factories, 10 million cubic meters of dikes, and 25 million acres of farmland. The US also chemically poisoned food supplies and forests. Our cultural corruption is so extreme we proudly ordered B-52 death machines flying five miles high blessed by God-fearing chaplains to bomb unarmed, mostly Buddhist peasants living nine thousand miles across the Pacific. What?!

Several million peasants were gruesomely, senselessly murdered, with countless additional millions permanently maimed. It was barbaric. It was genocidal. I felt personal shame for my participation, and intense anger of betrayal. At times I felt suicidal. My White male conditioning had made me “disabled”, i.e., a kind of stupidity whose mind hadn’t even thought to seriously ask whyI was putting my life on the line in a small country across the seas I knew nothing about? I had been part of a massive conspiracy to violate international law and destroy a sovereign people. Huh?! But I had been conditioned to think that “America” was nonetheless, exceptional.

Criminal Cruelty to Prevent Vietnamese Autonomy

US premeditated policy intended to destroy Vietnamese self-determination. As historian William Blum has succinctly concluded: “the thread common to the diverse targets of [US] American intervention…in virtually every case involving the Third World… has been, in one form or another, a policy of ‘self-determination’: the desire …to pursue a path of development independent of US foreign policy objectives”[3].

The US war (as with virtually all wars), was based on a Grand lie, in this case that the majority Vietnamese were being invaded by other Vietnamese who the US called “Communists”. And it was maintained by grotesque lies – every day – such as identifying all dead Vietnamese as a victory (body counts), all carried out by heinous war crimes. Official reports abounded about our making progress in the war – lies. The fictional “democratic” South Vietnamese government created by the US and CIA was so unpopular the US military was forced to invade and occupy South Viet Nam for 10 years with nearly 550,000 troops supported by countless daily bombing missions and unprecedented use of chemical warfare. We murdered millions and it still didn’t work. How demonic can you get?

Fake history about Viet Nam was confirmed in the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers. Despite this, the highly publicized Burns-Novick 2017, The Vietnam War TV documentary, claimed the war was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings”. Lies die hard.

Dishonest Intelligence

Ralph McGehee, former starter on three Notre Dame national championship football teams in the late 1940s, a cum laude graduate, became one of the 700 CIA officers in Viet Nam. He was shocked when discovering the daily intelligence he was gathering was totally bastardized in official reports. Depressed about the dishonest intelligence system, he became suicidal. McGehee reported that the repressive, oligarchic government of US puppet Nguyen Van Thieu was so unpopular and corrupt that most Vietnamese were organized, committed, and dedicated to his defeat, and a Vietnamese Communist victory[4].

Cold War Redux

Now 78, fifty years out of Viet Nam, I am aghast that we are living through an even more virulent, Cold War. Cold War I propaganda cast an overwhelming toxic spell on the minds of three generations, including many intelligent people. Relentless rhetoric accomplished a near total indoctrination of our entire US culture. Virtually all systems colluded and cooperated to preserve unquestioning belief in the unique nobility of the US American system while instilling rabid, paranoid fear of “enemies” — in our midst as well as “out there”. We rationalized pathologically inexplicable behavior around the world, as well as at home. Indoctrination is so pervasive it generates a universally compelling mythology that conceals its own contradictions.

Today, the corporate and social media narrative managers so tightly control propaganda that once again our minds are saturated with rages against the evil “adversary”, Russia. The neoliberal religion of privatization makes everyone and everything for sale as a commodity, dictating both domestic and foreign policy. It is enforced at home by an overreaching national security state of surveillance (our Fourth Estate), and abroad with the most brutal “wholesale” terrorist machinery in history. The US government, and its compliant military, enables obscene profits for its Military-Congressional-Intelligence-Banking-Wall Street-Drug Complex. The US population de facto consents to destroying Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syrian and others, i.e, with diabolical imperialism.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us –US author Stephen King.

Orwell

In George Orwell’s novel, 1984[5], the Ministry of Truth rearranges facts and rewrites history. On the face of the building in which it is housed are engraved the slogans: “War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength”. Language is one of the most important tools of the totalitarian state. If all citizens accept the lies that the ruling party imposes – if all records tell the same tale – then the lie passes into history and becomes truth. All that is needed is an unending series of victories over our own memory. This is called Reality control. In Orwell’s Newspeak, doublethink is the official state language. Everything becomes pretend, the lies told over and over in many different forms throughout time.[6] Meanwhile, wars easily continue[7], facilitated by deceit and lies[8], elaborate propaganda mind-control systems[9] that permeate our education institutions[10] and Hollywood[11] and are promoted by the concentrated monopoly of corporate mass media[12]. Our collective minds are systematically colonized to accept the unacceptable.

This McCarthy-like new Cold War dangerously speeds the world toward nuclear holocaust. I raise the question: Are we stupid? Can we not see that our behavior is leading to our ecocide/suicide – climate catastrophe and nuclear war?

US Exceptionalism Has Been Fatal – Creates Stupid, Shameful Monsters

The origins of the Grand Lie of Viet Nam, and the horrific cruelties committed there, are discoverable in the very origins of US America. The psychological and cultural conditioning growing up in US America, especially for a Eurocentric White male like myself, is emotionally and intellectually comfortable. But the noble “exceptional” history we have been taught about ourselves proves to be fantastic fakery which continues to serve as a comfortable escape from experiencing and feeling the horrible truth of the collective shame of our unspeakable criminal genocidal origins. Capitalism itself would not have existed without centuries of egregious colonial plunder of millions of Indigenous Americans, or millions of enslaved Africans. So, not only does the lie of “exceptionalism” enable us to avoid extremely unpleasant thoughts and feelings, but it also discourages asking enlightening, delving questions, about who we really are as a people. This makes us dangerously stupid. Why mess with the apparent successful myth of being exceptional? But thoughtlessness – a suspension of critical thinking – today leads to a dangerous, nuclear, arrogant war-making society. Not unintelligent, but stupid. And the power brokers, and many in the population, have a vested interest in remaining stupid to protect the comfortable original lie, that requires countless subsequent lies, in turn, to preserve that original lie. We have told ourselves a nice story. But it is a lie and as long as we continue to believe in our superiority we deepen our stupidity.

Thus, throughout our history we have lived by a slick Grand “American” lie, granting us comfort and security in our “superior” cultural identity. Spellbound and flattered we live by our favorite mythological maxims: “Founding Fathers”, “democracy”, “Constitution”, “Rule of Law”, and “greatest country ever”. Our political-religion of US American predatory corporate capitalism (privatization) blocks experiencing the most critical of all social emotions – empathy– that ties all humanity together, something I so painfully, but thankfully learned in Viet Nam. The Grand lie is so huge and pervasive we do not generally recognize it.

Cultural analysts such as Lewis Mumford have described how unchecked “power punctuates the entire history of mankind with outbursts of collective paranoia and tribal delusions of grandeur mingled with malevolent suspicions, murderous hatreds, and atrociously inhumane acts”.[13] So, in effect, much of human civilization history is based on institutionalized dehumanization, a form of Fascism. Mumford again: “A personal over-concentration of power as an end in itself is suspect to the psychologist as an attempt to conceal inferiority, impotence, and anxiety. When this inferiority is combined with defensive inordinate ambitions, uncontrolled hostility and suspicion, and a loss of any sense of the subject’s own limitation, ‘delusions of grandeur’ result, which is the typical syndrome of paranoia, one of the most difficult psychological states to exorcise”[14].

The US nation, as a criminal enterprise, is a perfect example of what Mumford described as a civilization maintained by “collective paranoia” without a sense of “limitation”, the result being “delusions of grandeur”, the typical syndrome of paranoia, one of the most difficult psychological states to exorcise”. Built on forceful dispossession, deceit, and fantasy, the USA lives with a DNA of selfishness, arrogance and violence that began long ago, and we seem content to leave it be, increasing our dangerousness to ourselves and the world.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52757.htm

An End to the World as We Know It?

Congress and the White House compete in year-end stupidity sweepstakes

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.

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 Insider running 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.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec19/manipulated-market12-19.html

All I Want for Christmas Is an Unmanipulated Market

All I want for Christmas is an unmanipulated market, because manipulated markets always crash big and crash hard. Virtually every market in America is heavily manipulated by the Federal Reserve, which creates currency out of thin air to either buy assets (outright market manipulation) or distribute to financiers, banks and corporations, which then manipulate the markets with their own profiteering (stock buybacks, leveraged buyouts, derivatives, etc.).

The Fed decided long ago that the housing and stock markets were too critical as signals that all is well to remain real markets, because real markets fluctuate and on occasion crash, especially if participants are playing fast and loose with debt, leverage and speculative bets placed with zero collateral (or fake collateral, which is the same thing).

To make sure no decline could ever collapse the happy-happy euphoria of ever-rising markets, the Fed turned markets into simulations of real markets, controlled "markets" masquerading as real markets in which price and value are set by participants, not central banks and proxies of central banks.

The key characteristics of markets are price discovery and the free flow of information about prices, supply, demand, quality, cost of credit, creditworthiness of buyers, etc.

Without a free flow of information and transparent-to-all-participants bids and asks (the price being offered by buyers and sellers), the market can't discover the price (value) of credit, goods, services, collateral, assets, etc.

Once markets have been stripped of the ability to discover price, nobody can trust the values being presented as "real" are actually based on reality. In the current simulacrum of a real market, the "price" is set by the Fed or its proxies, and there is a purposeful / profitable information asymmetry between high frequency traders and other insiders and everyone outside the inner circles who are kept in the dark while insiders skim billions in no-risk profits from the victims of this information asymmetry.

Right now market participants are euphorically confident that value no longer matters; the only thing that matters is the Fed wants stocks and housing to move higher, and they can move markets at will with their firehouse of trillions of dollars.

In other words, participants are confident the Fed is the market, but it's no longer a market at all. This mirage market has worked splendidly for the Fed, since it continues to signal all is well by rising year after year.

But manipulated markets are a mile wide and an inch deep. Everyone thinks selling won't happen or can't happen because the Fed is essentially guaranteeing that "buy the dips" will reward buyers. This was precisely what happened in 2008: The Fed reckoned the system had plenty enough liquidity to absorb any selling, but the liquidity was only an inch deep; once real selling hit the "market," it collapsed, as buyers dried up and blew away.

Manipulating markets into "signaling" mechanisms insures the eventual crash will not be stopped by applying the same manipulations that destroyed price discovery and trust. Everyone knows the price has lost connection with reality, and so every punter and algo is one second away from hitting "sell" and locking in the gains from a manipulated bubble.

The irony, of course, is that only those punters who sold on the way up will escape the devastation of the collapse into a bidless "market."

As the Fed will discover, providing "liquidity" isn't the same as conning buyers to get wiped out when the selling tsunami hits.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52751.htm

Behind the U.S. anti-China campaign: The facts about Xinjiang

In order to evaluate the claims of massive human rights violations of the Uyghurs, an ethnic and religious minority in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, it is important to know a few facts.

Xinjiang Province in the far western region of China is an arid, mountainous and still largely underdeveloped region. Xinjiang has significant oil and mineral reserves and is currently China’s largest natural-gas-producing region.

It is home to a number of diverse ethnic groups, including Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tajiks, Hui and Han peoples.

Xinjiang borders five Central Asian countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, where more than 1 million U.S. troops and even more mercenaries, contractors and secret agents have operated over four decades in an endless U.S. war.

What is happening in Xinjiang today must be seen in the context of what has been happening throughout Central Asia.

Xinjiang is a major logistics center for China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. Xinjiang is the gateway to Central and West Asia, as well as to European markets.

The Southern Xinjiang Railway runs to the city of Kashgar in China’s far west where it is now connected to Pakistan’s rail network under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project of the BRI.

The U.S. government is deeply hostile to this vast economic development project and is doing all it can to sabotage China’s plans.

This campaign is part of the U.S. military’s “Pivot to Asia,” along with naval threats in the South China Sea and support for separatist movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet.

Map features Central Asia and China, including Xinjiang.

No U.N. report on Xinjiang

The U.S. and its corporate media charge that the Chinese government has rounded up 1 million people, mainly Uyghurs, into concentration camps. News reports cite the United Nations as their source.

This was disputed in a detailed investigative report by Ben Norton and Ajit Singh titled, “No, the UN did not report China has ‘massive internment camps’ for Uighur Muslims.” (The Grayzone.com, Aug. 23, 2018) They expose how this widely publicized claim is based entirely on unsourced allegations by a single U.S. member, Gay McDougall, on an “independent committee” with an official sounding name: U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed that no U.N. body or official has made such a charge against China.

CIA/NED-funded ‘human rights’

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 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.

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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-moral-hypocrisy-of-impeachment/

The Impeachment's Moral Hypocrisy

The impeachment process was a nauseating display of moral hypocrisy. The sound bites by Republicans and Democrats swiftly became predictable. The Democrats, despite applauding the announcement of the voting results before being quickly silenced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sought to cloak themselves in gravitas and solemnity. Pelosi’s calculated decision to open the impeachment proceedings with the 1954 “under God” version of the Pledge of Allegiance was an appropriate signal given the party’s New McCarthyism. The Democrats posited themselves as saviors, the last line of defense between a constitutional democracy and tyranny. The Republicans, as cloyingly sanctimonious as the Democrats, offered up ludicrous analogies to attack what they condemned as a show trial, including Rep. Barry Loudermilk’s statement that “Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats have afforded to this president.” The Republicans shamelessly prostrated themselves throughout the 10-hour process at the feet of their cult leader Donald Trump, offering abject and eternal fealty. They angrily accused the Democrats of seeking to overturn the 2016 election in a legislative coup.

It was a mind-numbing spectacle, devoid of morality and ethics, the kind of political theater that characterizes despotic regimes. No one in the House chamber was protecting the Constitution. No one was seeking to hold accountable those who had violated it. No one was fighting to restore the rule of law. The two parties, which have shredded constitutional protections and rights and sold the political process to the highest bidders, have engaged in egregious constitutional violations for years and ignored them when they were made public. Moral stances have a cost, but almost no one in Congress seems willing to pay. Trying to tar Trump as a Russian agent failed. Now the Democrats hope to discredit him with charges of abuse of power and contempt of Congress.

The politicization of the impeachment process has only exacerbated the antagonisms and polarization in the country. It has, ironically, increased support for Trump, who in this toxic environment may well be reelected. His approval rating has jumped to 45 percent, up from 39 percent when the impeachment inquiry was launched, according to the latest Gallup survey, conducted from Dec. 2 to Dec. 15. This is the third consecutive increase in Trump’s approval rating. Among Republicans, Trump has a job approval rating of 89%, almost nine in 10 in the GOP. Fifty-one percent of Americans oppose impeachment and removal, up five percentage points since the House inquiry began, Gallup reports.

Yes, Trump’s contempt of Congress and attempt to get Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to open an investigation of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in exchange for almost $400 million in U.S. military aid and allowing Zelensky to visit the White House are impeachable offenses, but trivial and minor ones compared with the constitutional violations that the two parties have institutionalized and, I fear, made permanent. These sustained, bipartisan constitutional violations—not Trump—resulted in the failure of our democracy. Trump is the pus coming out of the wound.

If the Democrats and the Republicans were committed to defending the Constitution why didn’t they impeach George W. Bush when he launched two illegal wars that were never declared by Congress as demanded by the Constitution? Why didn’t they impeach Bush when he authorized placing the entire U.S. public under government surveillance in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment? Why didn’t they impeach Bush when he authorized torture along with kidnapping terrorist suspects around the world and holding them for years in our black sites and offshore penal colonies? Why didn’t they impeach Barack Obama when he expanded these illegal wars to 11, if we count Yemen? Why didn’t they impeach Obama when Edward Snowden revealed that our intelligence agencies are monitoring and spying on almost every citizen and downloading our data and metrics into government computers where they will be stored for perpetuity? Why didn’t they impeach Obama when he misused the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force to erase due process and give the executive branch of government the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son? Why didn’t they impeach Obama when he signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, in effect overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force?

There are other bipartisan constitutional violations, including violating treaty clauses that are supposed to be ratified by the Senate, violating the Constitution by making appointments without seeking Senate confirmation, and the routine abusive use of executive orders. But the two major political parties, salivating at the thought of wielding the king-like power that now comes with the presidency, have no desire to curb these far more dangerous violations.

The selective use of the two violations to impeach Trump is a weaponization of the impeachment process. Should the Democrats take control of the White House and the Republicans control of the Congress, impeachment, with or without merit, will become another form of political pressure exerted within our dysfunctional and divided political system. The rule of law will be a pretense, as in the current process of impeachment and Senate trial.

The impeachment circus, which will culminate in a preordained, choreographed and televised show in the Senate, coincided with The Washington Post’s release of what is being called the Afghanistan Papers. The Post, through a three-year legal battle, obtained more than 2,000 pages of internal government documents about the war. The papers detail bipartisan lies, fraud, deceit, corruption, waste and gross mismanagement during the 18-year conflict, the longest in U.S. history. It is a blistering indictment of the ruling class, which, as the papers note, since 2001 has seen the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development spend or win appropriation of between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. “These figures,” the Post adds, “do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.” [See Chris Hedges discuss the Afghanistan Papers with Spenser Rapone, a West Point graduate who served as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan.]

This window into the inner workings of our bankrupt ruling elite, responsible for widespread destruction and the loss of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of lives in Afghanistan, was largely ignored by the media during the impeachment proceedings. Neither political party, and none of their courtiers on the cable news shows, is interested in exposing the bipartisan failure, lying and grotesque incompetence on the part of the United States in the years it has occupied Afghanistan. Afghan and U.S. officials concede that the Taliban is stronger now than at any other time since the 2001 invasion.

In a functioning democracy, the publication of the Afghanistan Papers would see generals and politicians who knowingly deceived the public hauled before congressional committees. The Fulbright hearings, during the Vietnam War, although they did not lead to prosecutions, at least aggressively held U.S. officials to account and made public their duplicity and failure. But in the wake of the new disclosures, no one in either political party or the military will be held accountable for the debacle in Afghanistan, a conflict that saw a vast waste of resources, including nearly a trillion dollars that could have been used to address our pronounced social inequality, rebuild our decaying infrastructure and help end our reliance on fossil fuels.

The Afghanistan Papers lay bare a truth the hyperventilating Republican and Democratic mandarins in Congress prefer to mask. On all the major structural issues—war, the economy, the use of militarized police and the world’s largest prison system for social control, the infusion of corporate money to deform the electoral and legislative processes, slashing taxes for the wealthy and corporations, exploitative trade deals, austerity, the climate emergency and the rapidly accelerating government debt—there is little or no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.

The political clashes are not substantive, despite what we heard in the impeachment hearings. They are rhetorical and largely inconsequential. The Republicans and the Democrats recently passed a $738 billion defense bill for fiscal year 2020, a $21 billion increase over what was enacted for fiscal year 2019. The vote was a lopsided 377 to 48. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. Also, a day after the impeachment of President Trump, the Republicans and Democrats in the House passed a thinly veiled rewrite of the Clinton administration’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the 25-year-old free trade agreement that hollowed out our manufacturing centers and sent U.S. jobs and production to Mexico. Again, the vote was lopsided, 385 to 41. When the wealthy and our corporate masters want something done, it gets done. Our elected officials serve them, not us. We are to be controlled.

The Republican and Democratic politicians, like the generals, government bureaucrats and intelligence chiefs, once they leave their government posts will be generously rewarded by being given jobs as lobbyists and consultants or being appointed to corporate boards. These politicians are the mutant products of our system of legalized bribery, shameless kleptocrats. The only interests they serve are their own. This truth binds half the country to Trump, who although a con artist and himself flagrantly corrupt, at least belittles and mocks the ruling elites who have betrayed us.

Trump and his supporters are not wrong in condemning the deep state—the generals, bankers, corporatists, lobbyists, intelligence chiefs, government bureaucrats and technocrats who oversee domestic and international policy no matter who is in power. The Afghanistan Papers, while detailing the quagmire in Afghanistan—where more than 775,000 Americans were deployed over the 18 years, more than 2,300 soldiers and Marines killed and more than 20,000 wounded—also illustrate how seamlessly the two ruling parties and the deep state work together.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, is quoted as saying by The Washington Post. “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

The Post writes, “The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul—and at the White House—to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.”

“As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing,” the Post notes. “They would avoid falling into the trap of ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan. On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan—more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.”

There is no difference, the Afghanistan Papers make clear, in the mendacity and incompetence of the policymaking apparatus no matter who controls Congress or the White House. No party or elected official dares defy the military-industrial complex or other titans of the deep state. The Democrats through impeachment have no intention of restoring constitutional rights that would curb the power of the deep state and protect democracy. The deep state funds them. It sustains them in office. The Democrats are seeking to replace the inept and vulgar face of empire that is Trump with the benign and decorous face of empire that is Joe Biden. What the Democrats, and the deep state that has allied itself with the Democratic Party, object to is the mask, not what is behind it. If you doubt me, read the six-part series on Afghanistan in the Post.