https://srsroccoreport.com/next-oil-domino-to-fall-mexico-becomes-a-net-oil-importer/
NEXT OIL DOMINO TO FALL? Mexico Becomes A Net Oil Importer
While Mexico suffered the bloodiest year of violent deaths in 2018, even bigger trouble may be ahead for the embattled country. For the first time in more than 50 years, Mexico has become a net importer of oil. This is undoubtedly bad news for the Mexican Government as it has relied upon its oil revenues to fund a large percentage of its public spending.
And, the majority of these revenues came from just one prolific oil field. After the discovery of the huge Cantarell Oil Field in the Gulf of Mexico in 1976, Mexico’s oil production surged from 894,000 barrels per day to a peak of 3.8 million barrels per day (mbd) in 2004. That year, Mexico’s net oil exports exceeded 1.8 mbd.
Unfortunately, the downturn of Mexico’s oil production was also due to the peak and decline of the Cantarell Oil Field, which topped out at 2.1 mbd in 2004 and is now below 135,000 barrels per day:
With the rapid decline in Cantarell’s oil production, Mexico’s net oil exports also plummeted from 1.8 mbd in 2004 to only 314,000 barrels per day in 2017. However, the situation for Mexico’s net oil exports continued to deteriorate in 2018 as its domestic oil supply fell to a new low at the end of the year.
According to several sources, the BP 2018 Statistical Review, IEA’s OMR Reports, and the EIA’s data on World Oil Production, Mexico became a net oil importer in November 2018:
I find it strange that this has not yet been mentioned in the news as it is a very critical factor for the future of Mexico. Now, I would like to qualify that the data I am using is accurate. I found Mexico’s total petroleum production and consumption data from the EIA, the U.S. Energy Information Agency’s World Oil Production Browser, the IEA’s, the International Energy Agency OMR Reports, and BP’s 2018 Statistical Review.
In just a little more than a year, Mexico’s net oil exports fell from 314,000 barrels per day to net imports of 90,000 barrels per day in December 2018. This next chart shows Mexico’s total oil supply versus consumption for each month in 2018:
Of course, we don’t know if Mexico will be able to increase production, but if we consider the disaster that is taking place at PEMEX, the country’s national oil company, I highly doubt domestic oil production will recover. Why? Well, let’s just say, PEMEX is on the verge of bankruptcy as the company published two troubling signs in its Q4 2018 Financial Report:
Falling Oil Production
Rising Long-Term Debt
According to PEMEX’s Q4 2018 Report, oil production fell from 1.90 mbd Q4 2017 to 1.76 mbd in Q4 2018. These figures are for oil production only and do not include NGPL (natural gas plant liquids) and refining gains. Which is why it doesn’t add up to the 1.94 mbd for December 2018 shown in the chart above.
Regardless, oil production continues to decline at PEMEX while it’s long-term debt reached a new record high of $96 billion last year:
So, even with all the additional capital expenditures, (shown by the massive increase in long-term debt), PEMEX was not able to prevent the inevitable decline of its domestic oil production. What happens to PEMEX when oil production really starts to decline?
Sadly, as domestic oil supply continues to decline, the Mexican Government will have lower oil revenues to support its public spending. I believe Mexico is likely one of the next OIL DOMINOS to fall… and it won’t be pretty....
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Saturday, March 30, 2019
SC186-10
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51355.htm
Empire of Chaos in Hybrid War Overdrive
Is this the Age of Anxiety? The Age of Stupidity? The Age of Hybrid War? Or all of the above?
As right populism learns to use algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and media convergence, the Empire of Chaos, in parallel, is unleashing all-out hybrid and semiotic war.
Dick Cheney’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) is back, metastasized as a hybrid mongrel.
But GWOT would not be GWOT without a Wild West scarecrow. Enter Hamza bin Laden, son of Osama. On the same day the State Department announced a $1 million bounty on his head, the so- called “UN Security Council IS and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee” declared Hamza the next al-Qaeda leader.
Since January 2017, Hamza has been a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department – on par with his deceased Dad, back in the early 2000s. The Beltway intel community “believes” Hamza resides “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.”
Remember these are the same people who “believed” former Taliban leader Mullah Omar resided in Quetta, Baluchistan, when in fact he was safely ensconced only a few miles away from a massive U.S. military base in Zabul, Afghanistan.
Considering that Jabhat al-Nusra, or al-Qaeda in Syria, for all practical purposes, was defined as no more than “moderate rebels” by the Beltway intel community, it’s safe to infer that new scarecrow Hamza is also a “moderate”. And yet he’s more dangerous than vanished fake Caliph Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi. Talk about a masterful example of culture jamming.
Show Me The Big Picture
A hefty case can be made that the Empire of Chaos currently has no allies; it’s essentially surrounded by an assortment of vassals, puppets and comprador 5thcolumnist elites professing varied degrees of – sometimes reluctant – obedience.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy – as in the whole episode of designating State Department/CIA regime change, lab experiment Random Dude as President of Venezuela. Legendary cultural critic Walter Benjamin would have called it “the aestheticization of politics,” (turning politics into art), as he did about the Nazis, but this time it’s the Looney Tunes version.
To add to the conceptual confusion, despite countless “an offer you can’t refuse” antics unleashed by psychopaths of the John Bolton and Mike Pompeo variety, there’s this startling nugget. Former Iranian diplomat Amir Moussavi has revealed that Trump himself demanded to visit Tehran, and was duly rebuffed. “Two European states, two Arab countries and one Southeast Asian state” were mediating a series of messages relayed by Trump and his son-in-law Jared “of Arabia” Kushner, according to Moussavi.
Is there a method to this madness? An attempt at a Grand Narrative would go something like this: ISIS/Daesh may have been sidelined – for now; they are not useful anymore, so the U.S. must fight the larger “evil”: Tehran. GWOT has been revived, and though Hamza bin Laden has been designated the new Caliph, GWOT has shifted to Iran.
When we mix this with the recent India-Pakistan scuffle, a wider message emerges. There was absolutely no interest by Prime Minister Imran Kahn, the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani intelligence, ISI, to launch an attack on India in Kashmir. Pakistan was about to run out of money and about to be bolstered by the U.S., via Saudi Arabia with $20 billion and an IMF loan.
At the same time, there were two almost simultaneous terrorist attacks launched from Pakistan – against Iran and against India in mid-February. There’s no smoking gun yet, but these attacks may have been manipulated by a foreign intelligence agency. The Cui Bono riddle is which state would profit immensely from a war between Pakistan and Iran and/or a war between Pakistan and India.
The bottom line: hiding in the shadow of plausible deniability – according to which what we understand as reality is nothing but pure perception – the Empire of Chaos will resort to the chaos of no-holds-barred hybrid war to avoid “losing” the Eurasian heartland.
Show Me How Many Hybrid Plans You Got
What applies to the heartland of course also applies to the backyard.
The case of Venezuela shows that the “all options on the table” scenario has been de facto aborted by Russia, outlined in an astonishing briefing by Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, and then subsequently detailed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj at a crucial RIC (part of BRICS) summit in China,Lavrov said, “Russia keeps a close eye on brazen US attempts to create an artificial pretext for a military intervention in Venezuela… The actual implementation of these threats is pulling in military equipment and training [US] Special Forces.”
Lavrov explained how Washington was engaged in acquiring mortars and portable air defense systems “in an East European country, and mov(ing) them closer to Venezuela by an airline of a regime that is… rather absolutely obedient to Washington in the post-Soviet space.”
The U.S. attempt at regime change in Venezuela has been so far unsuccessful in several ways. Plan A – a classic color revolution -has miserably failed, in part because of a lack of decent local intelligence. Plan B was a soft version of humanitarian imperialism, with a resuscitation of the nefarious, Libya-tested responsibility to protect (R2P); it also failed, especially when the American tale that the Venezuelan government burnt humanitarian aid trucks at the border with Colombia was a lie, exposed by The New York Times, no less.
Plan C was a classic Hybrid War technique: a cyberattack, replete with a revival of Nitro Zeus, which shut down 80 percent of Venezuela’s electricity.
That plan had already been exposed by WikiLeaks, via a 2010 memo by a U.S.-funded, Belgrade-based color revolution scam that helped train self-proclaimed “President” Random Dude, when he was just known as Juan Guaidó. The leaked memo said that attacking the Venezuelan power grid would be a “watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”
But even that was not enough.
That leaves Plan D – which is essentially to try to starve the Venezuelan population to death via viciously lethal additional sanctions. Sanctioned Syria and sanctioned Iran didn’t collapse. Even boasting myriad comprador elites aggregated in the Lima group, exceptionalists may have to come to grips with the fact that deploying the Monroe doctrine essentially to contain China’s influence in the young 21stcentury is no “cakewalk.”
Plan E—for extreme—would be U.S. military action, which Bolton won’t take off the table.
Show Me the Way to the Next War Game
So where do all these myriad weaponizations of chaos theory leave us? Nowhere, if they don’t follow the money. Local comprador elites must be lavishly rewarded, otherwise you’re stuck in hybrid swamp territory. That was the case in Brazil – and that’s why the most sophisticated hybrid war case history so far has been a success.
In 2013, Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks revealed how the NSA was spying on Brazilian energy giant Petrobras and the Dilma Rousseff government beginning in 2010. Afterwards, a complex, rolling judicial-business-political-financial-media coup ended up reaching its two main objectives; in 2016, with the impeachment of Rousseff, and in 2018, with Lula thrown in jail.
Now comes arguably the juiciest piece of the puzzle. Petrobras was supposed to pay $853 million to the U.S. Department of Justice for not going to trial for crimes it was being accused of in America. But then a dodgy deal was struck according to which the fine will be transferred to a Brazilian fund as long as Petrobras commits to relay confidential information about its businesses to the United States government.
Hybrid war against BRICS member Brazil worked like a charm, but trying it against nuclear superpower Russia is a completely different ball game. U.S. analysts, in another case of culture jamming, even accuse Russia itself of deploying hybrid war – a concept actually invented in the U.S. within a counter-terrorism context; applied during the occupation of Iraq and later metastasized across the color revolution spectrum; and featuring, among others, in an article co-authored by former Pentagon head James “Mad Dog” Mattis in 2005 when he was a mere lieutenant general.
At a recent conference about Russia’s military strategy, Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov stressed that the Russian armed forces must increase both their “classic” and “asymmetrical” potential. In the U.S. this is interpreted as subversion/propaganda hybrid war techniques as applied in Ukraine and in the largely debunked Russia-gate. Instead, Russian strategists refer to these techniques as “complex approach” and “new generation war”.
Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation still sticks to good ol’ hot war scenarios. They have been holding “Red on Blue” war games simulations since 1952 – modeling how the proverbial “existential threats” could use asymmetric strategies. The latest Red on Blue was not exactly swell. RAND analyst David Ochmanek famously said that with Blue representing the current U.S. military potential and Red representing Russia-China in a conventional war, “Blue gets its ass handed to it.”
None of this will convince Empire of Chaos functionary Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recently told a Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon will continue to refuse a “no first use” nuclear strategy. Aspiring Dr. Strangeloves actually believe the U.S. can start a nuclear war and get away with it.
Talk about the Age of Hybrid Stupidity going out with a bang.
Empire of Chaos in Hybrid War Overdrive
Is this the Age of Anxiety? The Age of Stupidity? The Age of Hybrid War? Or all of the above?
As right populism learns to use algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and media convergence, the Empire of Chaos, in parallel, is unleashing all-out hybrid and semiotic war.
Dick Cheney’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) is back, metastasized as a hybrid mongrel.
But GWOT would not be GWOT without a Wild West scarecrow. Enter Hamza bin Laden, son of Osama. On the same day the State Department announced a $1 million bounty on his head, the so- called “UN Security Council IS and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee” declared Hamza the next al-Qaeda leader.
Since January 2017, Hamza has been a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department – on par with his deceased Dad, back in the early 2000s. The Beltway intel community “believes” Hamza resides “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.”
Remember these are the same people who “believed” former Taliban leader Mullah Omar resided in Quetta, Baluchistan, when in fact he was safely ensconced only a few miles away from a massive U.S. military base in Zabul, Afghanistan.
Considering that Jabhat al-Nusra, or al-Qaeda in Syria, for all practical purposes, was defined as no more than “moderate rebels” by the Beltway intel community, it’s safe to infer that new scarecrow Hamza is also a “moderate”. And yet he’s more dangerous than vanished fake Caliph Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi. Talk about a masterful example of culture jamming.
Show Me The Big Picture
A hefty case can be made that the Empire of Chaos currently has no allies; it’s essentially surrounded by an assortment of vassals, puppets and comprador 5thcolumnist elites professing varied degrees of – sometimes reluctant – obedience.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy – as in the whole episode of designating State Department/CIA regime change, lab experiment Random Dude as President of Venezuela. Legendary cultural critic Walter Benjamin would have called it “the aestheticization of politics,” (turning politics into art), as he did about the Nazis, but this time it’s the Looney Tunes version.
To add to the conceptual confusion, despite countless “an offer you can’t refuse” antics unleashed by psychopaths of the John Bolton and Mike Pompeo variety, there’s this startling nugget. Former Iranian diplomat Amir Moussavi has revealed that Trump himself demanded to visit Tehran, and was duly rebuffed. “Two European states, two Arab countries and one Southeast Asian state” were mediating a series of messages relayed by Trump and his son-in-law Jared “of Arabia” Kushner, according to Moussavi.
Is there a method to this madness? An attempt at a Grand Narrative would go something like this: ISIS/Daesh may have been sidelined – for now; they are not useful anymore, so the U.S. must fight the larger “evil”: Tehran. GWOT has been revived, and though Hamza bin Laden has been designated the new Caliph, GWOT has shifted to Iran.
When we mix this with the recent India-Pakistan scuffle, a wider message emerges. There was absolutely no interest by Prime Minister Imran Kahn, the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani intelligence, ISI, to launch an attack on India in Kashmir. Pakistan was about to run out of money and about to be bolstered by the U.S., via Saudi Arabia with $20 billion and an IMF loan.
At the same time, there were two almost simultaneous terrorist attacks launched from Pakistan – against Iran and against India in mid-February. There’s no smoking gun yet, but these attacks may have been manipulated by a foreign intelligence agency. The Cui Bono riddle is which state would profit immensely from a war between Pakistan and Iran and/or a war between Pakistan and India.
The bottom line: hiding in the shadow of plausible deniability – according to which what we understand as reality is nothing but pure perception – the Empire of Chaos will resort to the chaos of no-holds-barred hybrid war to avoid “losing” the Eurasian heartland.
Show Me How Many Hybrid Plans You Got
What applies to the heartland of course also applies to the backyard.
The case of Venezuela shows that the “all options on the table” scenario has been de facto aborted by Russia, outlined in an astonishing briefing by Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, and then subsequently detailed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj at a crucial RIC (part of BRICS) summit in China,Lavrov said, “Russia keeps a close eye on brazen US attempts to create an artificial pretext for a military intervention in Venezuela… The actual implementation of these threats is pulling in military equipment and training [US] Special Forces.”
Lavrov explained how Washington was engaged in acquiring mortars and portable air defense systems “in an East European country, and mov(ing) them closer to Venezuela by an airline of a regime that is… rather absolutely obedient to Washington in the post-Soviet space.”
The U.S. attempt at regime change in Venezuela has been so far unsuccessful in several ways. Plan A – a classic color revolution -has miserably failed, in part because of a lack of decent local intelligence. Plan B was a soft version of humanitarian imperialism, with a resuscitation of the nefarious, Libya-tested responsibility to protect (R2P); it also failed, especially when the American tale that the Venezuelan government burnt humanitarian aid trucks at the border with Colombia was a lie, exposed by The New York Times, no less.
Plan C was a classic Hybrid War technique: a cyberattack, replete with a revival of Nitro Zeus, which shut down 80 percent of Venezuela’s electricity.
That plan had already been exposed by WikiLeaks, via a 2010 memo by a U.S.-funded, Belgrade-based color revolution scam that helped train self-proclaimed “President” Random Dude, when he was just known as Juan Guaidó. The leaked memo said that attacking the Venezuelan power grid would be a “watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”
But even that was not enough.
That leaves Plan D – which is essentially to try to starve the Venezuelan population to death via viciously lethal additional sanctions. Sanctioned Syria and sanctioned Iran didn’t collapse. Even boasting myriad comprador elites aggregated in the Lima group, exceptionalists may have to come to grips with the fact that deploying the Monroe doctrine essentially to contain China’s influence in the young 21stcentury is no “cakewalk.”
Plan E—for extreme—would be U.S. military action, which Bolton won’t take off the table.
Show Me the Way to the Next War Game
So where do all these myriad weaponizations of chaos theory leave us? Nowhere, if they don’t follow the money. Local comprador elites must be lavishly rewarded, otherwise you’re stuck in hybrid swamp territory. That was the case in Brazil – and that’s why the most sophisticated hybrid war case history so far has been a success.
In 2013, Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks revealed how the NSA was spying on Brazilian energy giant Petrobras and the Dilma Rousseff government beginning in 2010. Afterwards, a complex, rolling judicial-business-political-financial-media coup ended up reaching its two main objectives; in 2016, with the impeachment of Rousseff, and in 2018, with Lula thrown in jail.
Now comes arguably the juiciest piece of the puzzle. Petrobras was supposed to pay $853 million to the U.S. Department of Justice for not going to trial for crimes it was being accused of in America. But then a dodgy deal was struck according to which the fine will be transferred to a Brazilian fund as long as Petrobras commits to relay confidential information about its businesses to the United States government.
Hybrid war against BRICS member Brazil worked like a charm, but trying it against nuclear superpower Russia is a completely different ball game. U.S. analysts, in another case of culture jamming, even accuse Russia itself of deploying hybrid war – a concept actually invented in the U.S. within a counter-terrorism context; applied during the occupation of Iraq and later metastasized across the color revolution spectrum; and featuring, among others, in an article co-authored by former Pentagon head James “Mad Dog” Mattis in 2005 when he was a mere lieutenant general.
At a recent conference about Russia’s military strategy, Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov stressed that the Russian armed forces must increase both their “classic” and “asymmetrical” potential. In the U.S. this is interpreted as subversion/propaganda hybrid war techniques as applied in Ukraine and in the largely debunked Russia-gate. Instead, Russian strategists refer to these techniques as “complex approach” and “new generation war”.
Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation still sticks to good ol’ hot war scenarios. They have been holding “Red on Blue” war games simulations since 1952 – modeling how the proverbial “existential threats” could use asymmetric strategies. The latest Red on Blue was not exactly swell. RAND analyst David Ochmanek famously said that with Blue representing the current U.S. military potential and Red representing Russia-China in a conventional war, “Blue gets its ass handed to it.”
None of this will convince Empire of Chaos functionary Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recently told a Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon will continue to refuse a “no first use” nuclear strategy. Aspiring Dr. Strangeloves actually believe the U.S. can start a nuclear war and get away with it.
Talk about the Age of Hybrid Stupidity going out with a bang.
Friday, March 29, 2019
SC186-9
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-making-of-a-monster-were-all-lab-rats-in-the-governments-secret-experiments/5672927
The Making of a Monster: We’re All Lab Rats in the Government’s Secret Experiments
“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.
This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.
This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.
Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle coming out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.
These horrors are being meted out against humans and animals alike.
It’s heartbreaking enough when you hear about police shooting family dogs that pose no threat—beloved pets that are “guilty” of little more than barking, or wagging a tag, or racing towards them in greeting—at an alarming rate somewhere in the vicinity of 500 dogs a day.
What I’m about to share goes beyond heartbreaking to horrifying.
For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.
It gets more gruesome.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killed during the course of these experiments.
It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.
“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.
While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.
At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.
In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.
In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.
In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their systems. In Ohio, over 100 inmates were injected with live cancer cells. Also in New York, prisoners at a reformatory prison were also split into two groups to determine how a deadly stomach virus was spread: the first group was made to swallow an unfiltered stool suspension, while the second group merely breathed in germs sprayed into the air. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.
As the Associated Press reports,
“The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”
Moreover,
“Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”
Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?
How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?
Is the U.S. Government Evil? You Tell Me
Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.
For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports,
“All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.”
And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports,
“before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”
Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed?
Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry?
Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?
Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?
Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?
Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”
In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gases and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.
The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is—said the government cheerleaders—that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)
Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.
In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipegusing generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.
In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.
And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.
The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.
It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.
The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”
The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.
The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.
Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.
As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that Herbert Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.
The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.
All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators—including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten national security.
Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.
As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.
It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?
When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.
This is not a government that values us.
Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.
Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”
“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.
“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is how the U.S. government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.
To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.
To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.
To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.
“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”
In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”
“The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”
How do you defeat a monster? You start by recognizing the monster for what it is.
The Making of a Monster: We’re All Lab Rats in the Government’s Secret Experiments
“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.
This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.
This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.
Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle coming out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.
These horrors are being meted out against humans and animals alike.
It’s heartbreaking enough when you hear about police shooting family dogs that pose no threat—beloved pets that are “guilty” of little more than barking, or wagging a tag, or racing towards them in greeting—at an alarming rate somewhere in the vicinity of 500 dogs a day.
What I’m about to share goes beyond heartbreaking to horrifying.
For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.
It gets more gruesome.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killed during the course of these experiments.
It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.
“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.
While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.
At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.
In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.
In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.
In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their systems. In Ohio, over 100 inmates were injected with live cancer cells. Also in New York, prisoners at a reformatory prison were also split into two groups to determine how a deadly stomach virus was spread: the first group was made to swallow an unfiltered stool suspension, while the second group merely breathed in germs sprayed into the air. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.
As the Associated Press reports,
“The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”
Moreover,
“Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”
Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?
How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?
Is the U.S. Government Evil? You Tell Me
Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.
For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports,
“All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.”
And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports,
“before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”
Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed?
Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry?
Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?
Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?
Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?
Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”
In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gases and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.
The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is—said the government cheerleaders—that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)
Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.
In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipegusing generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.
In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.
And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.
The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.
It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.
The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”
The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.
The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.
Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.
As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that Herbert Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.
The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.
All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators—including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten national security.
Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.
As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.
It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?
When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.
This is not a government that values us.
Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.
Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”
“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.
“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is how the U.S. government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.
To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.
To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.
To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.
“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”
In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”
“The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”
How do you defeat a monster? You start by recognizing the monster for what it is.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
SC186-8
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/03/28/your-plans-for-revolution-dont-work-nothing-weve-tried-works/
Your Plans For Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works.
All the old ideas for uprooting the status quo have failed. I point this out not to depress people, but to persuade them to stop twisting on locked doorknobs. The old ideas don’t work, so we need new ones.
The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed. I say this not because of any glaring flaws in any of those ideas (in theory any of them could potentially work in an alternate universe), but because we are hurtling towards extinction in the fairly near future, and none of them have saved us.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “My particular favorite ideology would have saved us long ago if only everyone had gotten on board with it!”
Okay. But they didn’t. And now we’re on the brink of armageddon. That means it has failed. It doesn’t work.
We are well on our way to extinction via climate collapse or nuclear holocaust, and even if we miss those by some miracle we are headed toward an artificial intelligence-led tech dystopia in which our consciousness is permanently enslaved by a propaganda network that is far too advanced for there to be any hope of escaping into truth.
We are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops.
Our ecosystem is very fragile and rapidly fading, and the difference between the ability to survive without it and our current scientific capability is the difference between flying and jumping. Which won’t matter if one of the many small, unpredictable moving parts in the steadily escalating new cold war with Russia results in a nuclear weapon being deployed as a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication and sparking off the annihilation of every organism on earth, as nearly happened during the last cold war on more than one occasion.
This is where the status quo has gotten us. All attempts to overthrow it have failed. The time is up, and the results are in.
The political process doesn’t work.
I say this not because the political process can’t work, due to some technical failure in the way it has been applied. I say this because it doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that we’re on the cusp of the apocalypse with no signs of steering clear of it. Attempts to uproot the status quo via political engagement and voting does not work.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “The only reason the political process doesn’t work is because it has been hijacked by corrupt powers with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo! If we can extract those corrupt powers, we can make the political process work!”
Okay. But you didn’t. You were unable to extract the corrupt powers, and now we’re on the brink of extinction. Your strategy has failed.
Capitalism doesn’t work.
I say this not because capitalism can’t work in theory, I say this because it doesn’t work in practice. How do I know it doesn’t work in practice? Because the planet is dying and we’ve all got doomsday weapons pointing at our heads that may go off at any moment. The results are in. Capitalism doesn’t work.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “What we’ve tried hasn’t been real capitalism! The free market hasn’t been given a chance to solve all our problems, because of the artificial interference and regulations of Big Government. If we can get rid of Big Government, we can solve all our problems!”
Okay. But that never happened. And now here we are at the end of the world, watching our planet ripped to shreds by status quo power structures. Capitalism failed. It doesn’t work.
Socialism doesn’t work.
I say this not because socialism can’t work in theory, I say it because it doesn’t work in real life, as evidenced by the fact that our world is on fire, our time is up, and we are all about to die. Socialism failed to save us. It doesn’t work.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “Socialism hasn’t worked because it’s never had a chance to work! If the capitalist imperialists would just stop sabotaging socialist experiments, it would thrive and replace the status quo! We’d all be saved!”
Okay. But we’re not. The worldwide populace has not answered the call of socialism in sufficient numbers to overthrow the interests which oppose it, and now we’re at the end of days. The plan was to unite the working class against the elite oppressors around the world and implement socialism, and it failed. It is a strategy which does not work.
Libertarianism doesn’t work.
We could do this all day, with any number of ideologies. Perhaps libertarianism could work under the right circumstances, but attempts to rally the public around it have utterly failed, and now we’re staring down the barrel of extinction. You can object and make excuses, or you can acknowledge that the strategies for implementing your preferred status quo-challenging ideology don’t work, and find new ones.
It’s easy to isolate yourself within a particular ideological echo chamber and create the illusion for yourself that your pet ideology is making progress. Oh look, Russiagate was disproven. Oh look, Jeremy Corbyn did well in those last elections. Oh look, the Democratic Socialists of America gained a few thousand members. But if you step out of that echo chamber and look at the big picture, you see a futile tug-of-war between feuding ideologies with no gains made anywhere near the scale that would be necessary to avert the massive threats on our horizon.
My point here is that we may have found an ideological standpoint that really resonates with us, and that ideology itself may be intrinsically worthy and vastly superior to the status quo. But the strategies for implementing that strategy have failed spectacularly. If you can’t implement your strategy, you’re just diddling cutesy ideas while the world burns. It’s just a nice identity for you to hold onto and make your feely bits feel nice.
“I’m a Marxist!”
“I’m an anarchist!”
No you’re not. You’re an ideological LARPer dressing up in an identity and pretending to change the world, while the world itself tumbles into the abyss.
Again, I say this not to create a sense of hopelessness, but to get people to stop wasting time and energy pushing on locked doors. Stop trying strategies that people have been trying for decades with essentially zero ground gained, and try something else instead. Stop hanging out in your little echo chambers and thinking that anything’s changing just because you are surrounded by people who agree with you. Sure, hold onto your beliefs about what kind of system would most benefit the world if you like, but be acutely aware that those beliefs in our current situation are completely meaningless.
The reality is that as long as powerful people control the dominant public narratives, no ground will be gained in steering our species away from the status quo trajectory that’s killing us, because you won’t be able to awaken mainstream consciousness to what’s going on. The only thing that has any hope of prying the oligarchic hands off the steering wheel is the mainstream public seeing what they’re doing and using the power of their numbers to force drastic change in a wildly different direction. If we can’t make that happen, we’re all just banging on locked doors while the curtain closes on humanity.
We all need to do better. I include myself in this. We need to try new things. Many, many new things. We need new ideas. What kind of new ideas? I don’t know, that’s why I’m telling you. I’m just one woman, and I put as many ideas out there as I can, but it’s not enough. Clearly it’s not enough, because here we are.
In my opinion the obvious way to open up a path for dissident ideas to replace the status quo is to kill the public trust in the stories they were told in school and continue to be told by the mass media about the kind of world and country they live in, but so far that hasn’t happened. My own ideas for advancing that agenda which I’ve been seeding into the world have been inadequate, and so have everyone else’s. So we need more new ideas. Lots and lots of new ideas.
What we’ve tried up until now hasn’t worked, so if there’s anything that might work it’s going to come from a wildly unanticipated direction, from way outside the failed mental processes which have accompanied us to this point. We need to open ourselves to that kind of idea.
That’s basically all I’ve got to offer today. A helpless but sincere plea for humanity to try something new, spat out onto the internet in the Hail Mary hope that it might plant some seeds and loosen the soil for something unprecedented to open up in human consciousness. Sometimes that’s all that we can do.
Your Plans For Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works.
All the old ideas for uprooting the status quo have failed. I point this out not to depress people, but to persuade them to stop twisting on locked doorknobs. The old ideas don’t work, so we need new ones.
The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed. I say this not because of any glaring flaws in any of those ideas (in theory any of them could potentially work in an alternate universe), but because we are hurtling towards extinction in the fairly near future, and none of them have saved us.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “My particular favorite ideology would have saved us long ago if only everyone had gotten on board with it!”
Okay. But they didn’t. And now we’re on the brink of armageddon. That means it has failed. It doesn’t work.
We are well on our way to extinction via climate collapse or nuclear holocaust, and even if we miss those by some miracle we are headed toward an artificial intelligence-led tech dystopia in which our consciousness is permanently enslaved by a propaganda network that is far too advanced for there to be any hope of escaping into truth.
We are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops.
Our ecosystem is very fragile and rapidly fading, and the difference between the ability to survive without it and our current scientific capability is the difference between flying and jumping. Which won’t matter if one of the many small, unpredictable moving parts in the steadily escalating new cold war with Russia results in a nuclear weapon being deployed as a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication and sparking off the annihilation of every organism on earth, as nearly happened during the last cold war on more than one occasion.
This is where the status quo has gotten us. All attempts to overthrow it have failed. The time is up, and the results are in.
The political process doesn’t work.
I say this not because the political process can’t work, due to some technical failure in the way it has been applied. I say this because it doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that we’re on the cusp of the apocalypse with no signs of steering clear of it. Attempts to uproot the status quo via political engagement and voting does not work.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “The only reason the political process doesn’t work is because it has been hijacked by corrupt powers with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo! If we can extract those corrupt powers, we can make the political process work!”
Okay. But you didn’t. You were unable to extract the corrupt powers, and now we’re on the brink of extinction. Your strategy has failed.
Capitalism doesn’t work.
I say this not because capitalism can’t work in theory, I say this because it doesn’t work in practice. How do I know it doesn’t work in practice? Because the planet is dying and we’ve all got doomsday weapons pointing at our heads that may go off at any moment. The results are in. Capitalism doesn’t work.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “What we’ve tried hasn’t been real capitalism! The free market hasn’t been given a chance to solve all our problems, because of the artificial interference and regulations of Big Government. If we can get rid of Big Government, we can solve all our problems!”
Okay. But that never happened. And now here we are at the end of the world, watching our planet ripped to shreds by status quo power structures. Capitalism failed. It doesn’t work.
Socialism doesn’t work.
I say this not because socialism can’t work in theory, I say it because it doesn’t work in real life, as evidenced by the fact that our world is on fire, our time is up, and we are all about to die. Socialism failed to save us. It doesn’t work.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “Socialism hasn’t worked because it’s never had a chance to work! If the capitalist imperialists would just stop sabotaging socialist experiments, it would thrive and replace the status quo! We’d all be saved!”
Okay. But we’re not. The worldwide populace has not answered the call of socialism in sufficient numbers to overthrow the interests which oppose it, and now we’re at the end of days. The plan was to unite the working class against the elite oppressors around the world and implement socialism, and it failed. It is a strategy which does not work.
Libertarianism doesn’t work.
We could do this all day, with any number of ideologies. Perhaps libertarianism could work under the right circumstances, but attempts to rally the public around it have utterly failed, and now we’re staring down the barrel of extinction. You can object and make excuses, or you can acknowledge that the strategies for implementing your preferred status quo-challenging ideology don’t work, and find new ones.
It’s easy to isolate yourself within a particular ideological echo chamber and create the illusion for yourself that your pet ideology is making progress. Oh look, Russiagate was disproven. Oh look, Jeremy Corbyn did well in those last elections. Oh look, the Democratic Socialists of America gained a few thousand members. But if you step out of that echo chamber and look at the big picture, you see a futile tug-of-war between feuding ideologies with no gains made anywhere near the scale that would be necessary to avert the massive threats on our horizon.
My point here is that we may have found an ideological standpoint that really resonates with us, and that ideology itself may be intrinsically worthy and vastly superior to the status quo. But the strategies for implementing that strategy have failed spectacularly. If you can’t implement your strategy, you’re just diddling cutesy ideas while the world burns. It’s just a nice identity for you to hold onto and make your feely bits feel nice.
“I’m a Marxist!”
“I’m an anarchist!”
No you’re not. You’re an ideological LARPer dressing up in an identity and pretending to change the world, while the world itself tumbles into the abyss.
Again, I say this not to create a sense of hopelessness, but to get people to stop wasting time and energy pushing on locked doors. Stop trying strategies that people have been trying for decades with essentially zero ground gained, and try something else instead. Stop hanging out in your little echo chambers and thinking that anything’s changing just because you are surrounded by people who agree with you. Sure, hold onto your beliefs about what kind of system would most benefit the world if you like, but be acutely aware that those beliefs in our current situation are completely meaningless.
The reality is that as long as powerful people control the dominant public narratives, no ground will be gained in steering our species away from the status quo trajectory that’s killing us, because you won’t be able to awaken mainstream consciousness to what’s going on. The only thing that has any hope of prying the oligarchic hands off the steering wheel is the mainstream public seeing what they’re doing and using the power of their numbers to force drastic change in a wildly different direction. If we can’t make that happen, we’re all just banging on locked doors while the curtain closes on humanity.
We all need to do better. I include myself in this. We need to try new things. Many, many new things. We need new ideas. What kind of new ideas? I don’t know, that’s why I’m telling you. I’m just one woman, and I put as many ideas out there as I can, but it’s not enough. Clearly it’s not enough, because here we are.
In my opinion the obvious way to open up a path for dissident ideas to replace the status quo is to kill the public trust in the stories they were told in school and continue to be told by the mass media about the kind of world and country they live in, but so far that hasn’t happened. My own ideas for advancing that agenda which I’ve been seeding into the world have been inadequate, and so have everyone else’s. So we need more new ideas. Lots and lots of new ideas.
What we’ve tried up until now hasn’t worked, so if there’s anything that might work it’s going to come from a wildly unanticipated direction, from way outside the failed mental processes which have accompanied us to this point. We need to open ourselves to that kind of idea.
That’s basically all I’ve got to offer today. A helpless but sincere plea for humanity to try something new, spat out onto the internet in the Hail Mary hope that it might plant some seeds and loosen the soil for something unprecedented to open up in human consciousness. Sometimes that’s all that we can do.
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
SC186-7
https://www.globalresearch.ca/weaponizing-world-bank-imf/5672431
Weaponizing the World Bank and the IMF
The U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”
PressTV: Are these so-called financial institutions guilty of that, and how do they do it? – If so, this would point to the fact that these organizations are NOT independent.
Peter Koenig: Let me start with the fact that indeed these organizations are not independent at all. The World Bank and IMF are fully controlled by the US. The US has a de factoveto power, since it possesses about 17% of the votes, and it takes 85% to overrule the veto – impossible.
OECD is an organization of some 34 so-called industrialized countries, also dominated by the US and her mostly vassal states of the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand — so of course, they are controlled by the US, or simply, the West.
You could add to these organizations also WTO – the World Trade Organization, also dominated by the US and Europe to the detriment of developing countries, especially since the latter are too weak in general to impose their trade conditions, or even simply get a fair deal.
And yes, these institutions, WB and IMF, can and have used in the past, financial means as “weapons” – for example, the World Bank’s use of structural type adjustment loans, or so-called “rescue packages” by the IMF – a glaring example is Greece, and lately Argentina. These loans come with strong austerity conditions attached, meaning privatization of public properties, of natural resources – all to the benefit of foreign corporations – and to the detriment of the countries and local populations concerned. At home, in Greece and Argentina – there are growing tariffs for all services, reduction of pensions, education and health services are being privatized and unemployment is rampant, leading to poverty.
In the case of Argentina, in 2015 in November, just a month before the neoliberal Macri was pushed in by Washington as Argentina’s new President – the Kirchner regimes were able to reduce poverty from close to 70% in 2001/2002, when Argentina’s economy collapsed, then also as a result of the IMF, they, the Kirchner Governments, managed to reduce it to about 14%. Today Argentina’s poverty rate is above 35% – and rising, especially with the largest ever IMF loan made in the history of the IMF, granted to Argentina late last year, of US$ 57 billion.
So yes, lending instruments of these organizations can and are being weaponized. Imagine, Argentinians cannot take it any longer and resort to a civil war —- I don’t even want to think about it.
PressTV: It is said the US is not only using this against Venezuela, but it has also exercised this on countries, like Ecuador and Argentina. Isn’t the sovereignty of these countries being violated, and aren’t the economic rights of its citizens also violated due to the actions of the government, like exercising austerity and budget cuts?
US Sanctions Against Iran Aimed at Regime Change
PK: Yes, very clearly the sovereignty of these nations is being violated. Not only that, interfering in another nations economic affair is an international crime. However, all international courts of justice in The Hague and elsewhere are bought by Washington. A recent statement by US Foreign secretary Pompeo, couldn’t have been blunter – he threatened any judge if the ICC with sanctions or harsh actions, if they would dare pursuing any US or Israeli citizens, adding that this would apply to other allies too.
The US has not used the IMF and the World Bank in Venezuela, simply because Venezuela under Chavez has exited both Institutions and they are not a member of OECD. However, they have used another – let’s say “money tool” to attempt bringing Venezuela to her knees – economic and financial sanctions. Sanctions can only be imposed to countries that are linked to the dollar-based western monetary system, that also includes the Euro and currencies in Canada, Australia NZ, Japan. But no longer Russia and China and much of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) countries.
Under this western system any monetary transaction has to go through a transfer scheme, called SWIFT, and it is automatically channeled through a US, usually Wall Street bank, in either New York or London. Therefore, every transaction is being subject to control and can be blocked and funds can even be confiscated. In the case of Venezuela, the US Government has practically confiscated US$ 35 billion in US banks, and through CITGO – the Venezuela gasoline corporation in the US, from whom profit and cash flows were blocked in US banks.
That’s how the US is punishing Venezuela for not giving it free reign to steal its natural resources, the largest known oil reserves in the world, and for being a socialist country.
On top of it, the US propaganda is such that the majority of the people around the world believe that Venezuela is mismanaged, is suffering from hunger and needs regime change. All of this is a flagrant lie. Fortunately, this is now changing, since about 60 nations, including China, Russia and India in the UN have expressed their disgust with this coercive US policy and stand firmly behind Venezuela – that means more than 50% of the world population supports the current, freely and fully democratically elected Venezuelan Government, headed by Nicolás Maduro.
But the US has used the IMF and the World Bank’s “Money Weapons” in Argentina and also to some extent on Ecuador. The case of Argentina I described earlier, and in an example of Ecuador, the government proposed a motion at the UN, preferring breast feeding over artificial milk, à la Nestlé. The US – followed by her European vassals – threatened Ecuador with trade sanctions, if they would not withdraw their motion – so, they did. And that’s only one example.
PressTV: Another point of interest is that these financial weapons are largely governed by the National Security Council (NSC), which is currently headed by the US national security advisor John Bolton. The document notes that the NSC “has primary responsibility for the integration of the economic and military instruments of national power abroad.” John Bolton is an avid advocate of regime change, like in Iran: why has he been given these broad powers?
PK: John Bolton has been known since the Bush Administration and even earlier as a ruthless character that finds hardly a match among the many ruthless politicians the US has in stock. So, they let him lose, because his pathological psychopathic behavior is intimidating to many countries.
First you bring down countries by intimidation, once that has been achieved, it is easier to put other coercive measures in place, like more sanctions, as in the case of Iran – and finally, if nothing works, they threaten and demonstrate US / NATO military intervention by putting the weapons at a country’s doorstep. Like in the case of Russia. However, I doubt very much that the US really intends to intervene militarily in Russia and Iran – or in Venezuela for that matter. There is too much at risk. Washington knows that the Russian modern missiles – that can fly at speeds in excess of 20 Mach – and the S-400 missile defense systems, are far superior to anything the US has in store.
In addition to a big-mouth, Bolton is a very good sable-rattler.
PressTV: It appears that countries who counter US policies can be economically pressured in order to have financial assistance, and if they don’t walk Washington’s line, then these financial instruments can be used against them to bring about regime change: Is this an accurate scenario? Are many countries forced to be financially weak to then be subservient to the US?
PK: Yes, this is a plausible scenario, especially in the case of a country that has natural resources, like oil, and especially, if the country does not have a corrupt leader that easily bends to the wishes of Washington. There are reasons invented to punish the country with “sanctions” – case in point is Iran – the negation of the Nuclear Deal for no good reason whatsoever, other than to weaken Iran’s economy – and once the country is weak enough, the IMF and WB come in and offer “help” in the form of bail-out loans, or structural adjustments as they were called in the 80’s and 90’s.
If the government falls for these loans – often the ministry of finance in such countries are infiltrated by “Fifth Columnists” or Atlantists – the IMF and World Bank come in with large loans, i.e. huge debt, that at the end leaves the country totally enslaved to the masters of Washington – ready for privatization of all public goods, natural resources. – Iran has a lot of oil and gas – and other resources.
If that doesn’t work, the Fifth Columnists create civil unrest in the hope of bringing about regime change– which then would allow Washington to put in a puppet regime and come in to steal what it wants to steal, and control a country’s strategic position – like in the case of IRAN. – So, Iran beware. – I think Iran is fully aware of the game – and the departure of Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mr. Javad Zarif, may just be the beginning.
Weaponizing the World Bank and the IMF
The U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”
PressTV: Are these so-called financial institutions guilty of that, and how do they do it? – If so, this would point to the fact that these organizations are NOT independent.
Peter Koenig: Let me start with the fact that indeed these organizations are not independent at all. The World Bank and IMF are fully controlled by the US. The US has a de factoveto power, since it possesses about 17% of the votes, and it takes 85% to overrule the veto – impossible.
OECD is an organization of some 34 so-called industrialized countries, also dominated by the US and her mostly vassal states of the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand — so of course, they are controlled by the US, or simply, the West.
You could add to these organizations also WTO – the World Trade Organization, also dominated by the US and Europe to the detriment of developing countries, especially since the latter are too weak in general to impose their trade conditions, or even simply get a fair deal.
And yes, these institutions, WB and IMF, can and have used in the past, financial means as “weapons” – for example, the World Bank’s use of structural type adjustment loans, or so-called “rescue packages” by the IMF – a glaring example is Greece, and lately Argentina. These loans come with strong austerity conditions attached, meaning privatization of public properties, of natural resources – all to the benefit of foreign corporations – and to the detriment of the countries and local populations concerned. At home, in Greece and Argentina – there are growing tariffs for all services, reduction of pensions, education and health services are being privatized and unemployment is rampant, leading to poverty.
In the case of Argentina, in 2015 in November, just a month before the neoliberal Macri was pushed in by Washington as Argentina’s new President – the Kirchner regimes were able to reduce poverty from close to 70% in 2001/2002, when Argentina’s economy collapsed, then also as a result of the IMF, they, the Kirchner Governments, managed to reduce it to about 14%. Today Argentina’s poverty rate is above 35% – and rising, especially with the largest ever IMF loan made in the history of the IMF, granted to Argentina late last year, of US$ 57 billion.
So yes, lending instruments of these organizations can and are being weaponized. Imagine, Argentinians cannot take it any longer and resort to a civil war —- I don’t even want to think about it.
PressTV: It is said the US is not only using this against Venezuela, but it has also exercised this on countries, like Ecuador and Argentina. Isn’t the sovereignty of these countries being violated, and aren’t the economic rights of its citizens also violated due to the actions of the government, like exercising austerity and budget cuts?
US Sanctions Against Iran Aimed at Regime Change
PK: Yes, very clearly the sovereignty of these nations is being violated. Not only that, interfering in another nations economic affair is an international crime. However, all international courts of justice in The Hague and elsewhere are bought by Washington. A recent statement by US Foreign secretary Pompeo, couldn’t have been blunter – he threatened any judge if the ICC with sanctions or harsh actions, if they would dare pursuing any US or Israeli citizens, adding that this would apply to other allies too.
The US has not used the IMF and the World Bank in Venezuela, simply because Venezuela under Chavez has exited both Institutions and they are not a member of OECD. However, they have used another – let’s say “money tool” to attempt bringing Venezuela to her knees – economic and financial sanctions. Sanctions can only be imposed to countries that are linked to the dollar-based western monetary system, that also includes the Euro and currencies in Canada, Australia NZ, Japan. But no longer Russia and China and much of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) countries.
Under this western system any monetary transaction has to go through a transfer scheme, called SWIFT, and it is automatically channeled through a US, usually Wall Street bank, in either New York or London. Therefore, every transaction is being subject to control and can be blocked and funds can even be confiscated. In the case of Venezuela, the US Government has practically confiscated US$ 35 billion in US banks, and through CITGO – the Venezuela gasoline corporation in the US, from whom profit and cash flows were blocked in US banks.
That’s how the US is punishing Venezuela for not giving it free reign to steal its natural resources, the largest known oil reserves in the world, and for being a socialist country.
On top of it, the US propaganda is such that the majority of the people around the world believe that Venezuela is mismanaged, is suffering from hunger and needs regime change. All of this is a flagrant lie. Fortunately, this is now changing, since about 60 nations, including China, Russia and India in the UN have expressed their disgust with this coercive US policy and stand firmly behind Venezuela – that means more than 50% of the world population supports the current, freely and fully democratically elected Venezuelan Government, headed by Nicolás Maduro.
But the US has used the IMF and the World Bank’s “Money Weapons” in Argentina and also to some extent on Ecuador. The case of Argentina I described earlier, and in an example of Ecuador, the government proposed a motion at the UN, preferring breast feeding over artificial milk, à la Nestlé. The US – followed by her European vassals – threatened Ecuador with trade sanctions, if they would not withdraw their motion – so, they did. And that’s only one example.
PressTV: Another point of interest is that these financial weapons are largely governed by the National Security Council (NSC), which is currently headed by the US national security advisor John Bolton. The document notes that the NSC “has primary responsibility for the integration of the economic and military instruments of national power abroad.” John Bolton is an avid advocate of regime change, like in Iran: why has he been given these broad powers?
PK: John Bolton has been known since the Bush Administration and even earlier as a ruthless character that finds hardly a match among the many ruthless politicians the US has in stock. So, they let him lose, because his pathological psychopathic behavior is intimidating to many countries.
First you bring down countries by intimidation, once that has been achieved, it is easier to put other coercive measures in place, like more sanctions, as in the case of Iran – and finally, if nothing works, they threaten and demonstrate US / NATO military intervention by putting the weapons at a country’s doorstep. Like in the case of Russia. However, I doubt very much that the US really intends to intervene militarily in Russia and Iran – or in Venezuela for that matter. There is too much at risk. Washington knows that the Russian modern missiles – that can fly at speeds in excess of 20 Mach – and the S-400 missile defense systems, are far superior to anything the US has in store.
In addition to a big-mouth, Bolton is a very good sable-rattler.
PressTV: It appears that countries who counter US policies can be economically pressured in order to have financial assistance, and if they don’t walk Washington’s line, then these financial instruments can be used against them to bring about regime change: Is this an accurate scenario? Are many countries forced to be financially weak to then be subservient to the US?
PK: Yes, this is a plausible scenario, especially in the case of a country that has natural resources, like oil, and especially, if the country does not have a corrupt leader that easily bends to the wishes of Washington. There are reasons invented to punish the country with “sanctions” – case in point is Iran – the negation of the Nuclear Deal for no good reason whatsoever, other than to weaken Iran’s economy – and once the country is weak enough, the IMF and WB come in and offer “help” in the form of bail-out loans, or structural adjustments as they were called in the 80’s and 90’s.
If the government falls for these loans – often the ministry of finance in such countries are infiltrated by “Fifth Columnists” or Atlantists – the IMF and World Bank come in with large loans, i.e. huge debt, that at the end leaves the country totally enslaved to the masters of Washington – ready for privatization of all public goods, natural resources. – Iran has a lot of oil and gas – and other resources.
If that doesn’t work, the Fifth Columnists create civil unrest in the hope of bringing about regime change– which then would allow Washington to put in a puppet regime and come in to steal what it wants to steal, and control a country’s strategic position – like in the case of IRAN. – So, Iran beware. – I think Iran is fully aware of the game – and the departure of Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mr. Javad Zarif, may just be the beginning.
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
SC186-6
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar19/FB-GOOG-censorship3-19.html
When Are We Going to Tackle the For-Profit Monopolies Which Censored RussiaGate Skeptics?
The RussiaGate Narrative has been revealed as a Big Con (a.k.a. Nothing-Burger), but what's dangerously real is the censorship that's being carried out by the for-profit monopolies Facebook and Google on behalf of the status quo's Big Con.
This site got a taste of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship back in 2016 when a shadowy fake-news site called PropOrNot aggregated every major alt-media site that had published anything remotely skeptical of the coronation of Hillary Clinton as president and labeled us all shills for Russian propaganda.
Without any investigation of the perps running the site or their fake-news methodology, The Washington Post (Jeff Bezos' plaything) saw fit to promote the fake-news on Page One as if it were journalistically legitimate. Why would a newspaper that supposedly values the integrity of its content run with such shameless fake-news propaganda? Because it fit the Post's own political agenda and biases.
This is the essence of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship: sacrifice accepted journalistic practice, free speech and transparency to promote an absurdly obvious political and social agenda.
If there was any real justice in America, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai should be wearing prison jumpsuits for what Facebook and Google have done to American democracy. Both of these monopolies have manipulated news feeds, search results and what individuals are shown in complete secret, with zero public oversight or transparency.
The damage to democracy wrought by Facebook and Google is severe: free speech no longer exists except in name, and what individuals see in search and social media feeds is designed to manipulate them without their consent or knowledge--and for a fat profit. Whether Facebook and Google are manipulating users for profit or to buy off Status Quo pressures to start regulating these monopolistic totalitarian regimes or to align what users see with their own virtue-signaling, doesn't matter.
What matters is that no one can possibly know how Facebook and Google have rigged their algorithms and to what purpose. The typical corporation can buy political influence, but Facebook and Google are manipulating the machinery of democracy itself in three ways:
1. They are secretly censoring alternative media and skeptics of the status quo narratives.
2. They are selling data and ads to anyone interested in manipulating voters and public opinion.
3. They are providing data to the National Security organs of the state which can then use this data to compile dossiers on "enemies of the people," i.e. skeptics and dissenters who question the "approved" context and narrative.
That's a much more dangerous type of power than buying political influence or manipulating public opinion by openly publishing biased "commentary."
We all understand how America's traditional Corporate Media undermines democracy: recall how every time Bernie Sanders won a Democratic primary in 2016, The New York Times and The Washington Post "reported" the news in small typeface in a sidebar, while every Hillary Clinton primary win was trumpeted in large headlines at the top of page one.
But this sort of manipulation is visible; what Google and Facebook do is invisible. What their algorithms do is invisible, and the shadow banning and other forms of invisible censorship cannot be easily traced.
A few of us can trace shadow banning because we have access to our site's server data. Please consider the data of Google searches and direct links from Facebook to oftwominds.com from November 2016 and November 2018:
Nov. 2016: Google Searches: 36,779
Nov. 2016: links from Facebook: 9,888
Nov. 2018: Google Searches: 12,671
Nov. 2018: links from Facebook: 859
Oftwominds.com has been around since 2005 and consistently draws around 250,000 page views monthly (via oftwominds.com and my mirror site on blogspot, which is owned/operated by Google. Interestingly, traffic to that site has been less affected by shadow banning; Coincidence? You decide....).
Given the consistency of my visitor traffic over the years, it's "interesting" how drastically the site's traffic with Google and Facebook has declined in a mere two years. How is this shadow banning not Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship? It's akin to China's Orwellian Social Credit system but for private profit.
It wouldn't surprise me to find my photo airbrushed out of group photos on Facebook and Google just as the Soviet propaganda organs did when someone fell out of favor in the 1930s.
Fortunately, oftwominds.com isn't dependent on Facebook or Google for its traffic; other content creators who were skeptical of RussiaGate are not so fortunate. One of the implicit goals of shadow banning and filters is to destroy the income of dissenting sites without the content creators knowing why their income plummeted.
Strip dissenters of their income and you strip them of the ability to dissent. Yea for "free speech" controlled by for-profit monopolies!
Where's the "level playing field" of free speech? As long as Facebook and Google are free to censor and filter in secret, there is no free speech in America. All we have is a simulacrum of free speech in which parroting "approved" narratives is promoted and dissent is censored/banned--but without anyone noticing or even being able to tell what's been filtered, censored or banned.
So when are we going to tackle privately held monopolies which are selling user data to the highest bidder, obliterating free speech in secret and manipulating news feeds and search to promote hidden agendas? I've argued (see links below) that the solution is very simple:
1. Regulate Facebook and Google as public utilities. Ban them from collecting and selling user data to anyone, including federal agencies.
2. Allow a modest profit to each firm via display adverts that are shown equally to every user.
3. Require any and all search/content filters and algorithms be made public, i.e. published daily.
4. Any executive or employee of these corporations who violates these statutes will face criminal felony charges and be exposed to civil liability lawsuits from users or content providers who were shadow-banned or their right to free speech was proscribed or limited by filters or algorithms.
There is no intrinsic right for privately held corporations to establish monopolies that can manipulate and filter free speech in secret to maximize profits and secret influence. We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy....
When Are We Going to Tackle the For-Profit Monopolies Which Censored RussiaGate Skeptics?
The RussiaGate Narrative has been revealed as a Big Con (a.k.a. Nothing-Burger), but what's dangerously real is the censorship that's being carried out by the for-profit monopolies Facebook and Google on behalf of the status quo's Big Con.
This site got a taste of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship back in 2016 when a shadowy fake-news site called PropOrNot aggregated every major alt-media site that had published anything remotely skeptical of the coronation of Hillary Clinton as president and labeled us all shills for Russian propaganda.
Without any investigation of the perps running the site or their fake-news methodology, The Washington Post (Jeff Bezos' plaything) saw fit to promote the fake-news on Page One as if it were journalistically legitimate. Why would a newspaper that supposedly values the integrity of its content run with such shameless fake-news propaganda? Because it fit the Post's own political agenda and biases.
This is the essence of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship: sacrifice accepted journalistic practice, free speech and transparency to promote an absurdly obvious political and social agenda.
If there was any real justice in America, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai should be wearing prison jumpsuits for what Facebook and Google have done to American democracy. Both of these monopolies have manipulated news feeds, search results and what individuals are shown in complete secret, with zero public oversight or transparency.
The damage to democracy wrought by Facebook and Google is severe: free speech no longer exists except in name, and what individuals see in search and social media feeds is designed to manipulate them without their consent or knowledge--and for a fat profit. Whether Facebook and Google are manipulating users for profit or to buy off Status Quo pressures to start regulating these monopolistic totalitarian regimes or to align what users see with their own virtue-signaling, doesn't matter.
What matters is that no one can possibly know how Facebook and Google have rigged their algorithms and to what purpose. The typical corporation can buy political influence, but Facebook and Google are manipulating the machinery of democracy itself in three ways:
1. They are secretly censoring alternative media and skeptics of the status quo narratives.
2. They are selling data and ads to anyone interested in manipulating voters and public opinion.
3. They are providing data to the National Security organs of the state which can then use this data to compile dossiers on "enemies of the people," i.e. skeptics and dissenters who question the "approved" context and narrative.
That's a much more dangerous type of power than buying political influence or manipulating public opinion by openly publishing biased "commentary."
We all understand how America's traditional Corporate Media undermines democracy: recall how every time Bernie Sanders won a Democratic primary in 2016, The New York Times and The Washington Post "reported" the news in small typeface in a sidebar, while every Hillary Clinton primary win was trumpeted in large headlines at the top of page one.
But this sort of manipulation is visible; what Google and Facebook do is invisible. What their algorithms do is invisible, and the shadow banning and other forms of invisible censorship cannot be easily traced.
A few of us can trace shadow banning because we have access to our site's server data. Please consider the data of Google searches and direct links from Facebook to oftwominds.com from November 2016 and November 2018:
Nov. 2016: Google Searches: 36,779
Nov. 2016: links from Facebook: 9,888
Nov. 2018: Google Searches: 12,671
Nov. 2018: links from Facebook: 859
Oftwominds.com has been around since 2005 and consistently draws around 250,000 page views monthly (via oftwominds.com and my mirror site on blogspot, which is owned/operated by Google. Interestingly, traffic to that site has been less affected by shadow banning; Coincidence? You decide....).
Given the consistency of my visitor traffic over the years, it's "interesting" how drastically the site's traffic with Google and Facebook has declined in a mere two years. How is this shadow banning not Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship? It's akin to China's Orwellian Social Credit system but for private profit.
It wouldn't surprise me to find my photo airbrushed out of group photos on Facebook and Google just as the Soviet propaganda organs did when someone fell out of favor in the 1930s.
Fortunately, oftwominds.com isn't dependent on Facebook or Google for its traffic; other content creators who were skeptical of RussiaGate are not so fortunate. One of the implicit goals of shadow banning and filters is to destroy the income of dissenting sites without the content creators knowing why their income plummeted.
Strip dissenters of their income and you strip them of the ability to dissent. Yea for "free speech" controlled by for-profit monopolies!
Where's the "level playing field" of free speech? As long as Facebook and Google are free to censor and filter in secret, there is no free speech in America. All we have is a simulacrum of free speech in which parroting "approved" narratives is promoted and dissent is censored/banned--but without anyone noticing or even being able to tell what's been filtered, censored or banned.
So when are we going to tackle privately held monopolies which are selling user data to the highest bidder, obliterating free speech in secret and manipulating news feeds and search to promote hidden agendas? I've argued (see links below) that the solution is very simple:
1. Regulate Facebook and Google as public utilities. Ban them from collecting and selling user data to anyone, including federal agencies.
2. Allow a modest profit to each firm via display adverts that are shown equally to every user.
3. Require any and all search/content filters and algorithms be made public, i.e. published daily.
4. Any executive or employee of these corporations who violates these statutes will face criminal felony charges and be exposed to civil liability lawsuits from users or content providers who were shadow-banned or their right to free speech was proscribed or limited by filters or algorithms.
There is no intrinsic right for privately held corporations to establish monopolies that can manipulate and filter free speech in secret to maximize profits and secret influence. We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy....
Monday, March 25, 2019
SC186-5
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/mueller-report-ends-a-shameful-period-for-the-press/
Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press
The Mueller report’s categorical statement that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia ends one of the most shameful periods in modern American journalism, one that rivals the mindless cheerleading for the Iraq War by most of the press. It further erodes and may prove fatal to the credibility of a press that has steadfastly rendered most of the country invisible and functions as little more than an array of gossiping courtiers to the elites.
“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” U.S. Attorney General William Barr wrote in an official letter summarizing the findings of the inquiry by Robert Mueller.
The charge that Russia stole the election, that Vladimir Putin has secret “pee tapes” of Trump cavorting in a Moscow hotel with prostitutes or that Trump has been a longtime “Kremlin agent,” repeated by reporters whose work I admired in the past, is demagoguery as pernicious as the vile taunts and racist tropes that come out of the White House. The press endlessly repeated such allegations while ignoring the expanding social inequality and suffering of a country where half the population lives in poverty, as well as the collapse of our democratic institutions. These facts, not Russian manipulation, saw enraged American voters elect a demagogue who at least belittles the elites, including those in the press, who sold them out. The charge that Trump was a tool of Russia is entertaining. It attracts billions in advertising dollars. It allows the press to posture as a moral crusader. But over the past three years this obsession blotted out most of the real crimes committed by this administration and the reality most Americans endure.
The mainstream press, owned by the corporations that have extinguished the democratic state and are fleecing the public, as well as destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life, does not hold its employers to account. The empty chatter about Russia, including in The New York Times, exposes the bankruptcy of the U.S. media. MSNBC and CNN, which long ago abandoned journalism for entertainment, have breathlessly clogged the airwaves with ridiculous conspiracy theories and fantasies and used them to justify a faux crusade.
Don’t expect any of this to change. Rachael Maddow, like Jack Tapper or any other fatuous news celebrity, will not be held to account for slogging through this fiction night after night. Maddow will still collect her $10-million-a-year salary. And the handful of reporters who exhibited journalistic integrity—Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal and Katrina vanden Heuvel—will continue to remain on the margins of the media landscape. The press is an arm of the corporate-funded burlesque that has replaced the country’s political life and turned civic debate into a vast reality show.
The more the big news outlets try to spin this report, arguing that they need to see the full report rather than the attorney general’s summary, or that Jared Kushner sought to use the communications systems of Russian diplomats, the more credibility they will lose. And they do not have much credibility left. The lurid details of the president’s alleged sexual relations with a porn star and a Playboy bunny, and of “Russiagate,” have replaced journalism. These stories have nothing to do with the lives of most Americans. This descent into the inane and the tawdry gives immunity to Trump. In attacking the press he attacks an institution most Americans loath. And with good reason. The press, unwittingly, enhances a president it seeks to destroy. And its decline, accelerated by its collaboration with liberal Democratic elites who scapegoat Russia to avoid confronting their responsibility for trashing the country in the service of corporate oligarchs, will get worse. Little the press says about Trump will now be believed.
There was, of course, massive interference in our election by a foreign power—Israel. But try saying this naked truth out loud and you will suffer the character assassination, chanted by the unified chorus in the press and the political hierarchy of both parties, that was unleashed on Rep. Ilhan Omar. The engine driving our animosity toward Russia comes from the arms industry, which with the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border—despite assurances given upon the unification of Germany that this would not happen—is making billions of dollars selling weapons to countries in Eastern Europe. The situation is also exacerbating tensions between two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. But this is just one more suppressed truth.
The Trump administration has carried out policies that, rather than serve Russian interests, have further antagonized our relationship with Moscow. It has imposed sanctions. It is openly attempting to overthrow the government of a country that Russia supports, Venezuela. It is attempting to block the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe. It has sold weapons to Ukraine, a foe of the Kremlin. It has armed insurgents in Syria and carried out airstrikes, even as Russian troops seek to prop up the Syrian regime. But facts matter little to Russian-conspiracy theorists.
It is not only Trump who has obliterated the line between fact and fiction. It is the press. It hyped and reported allegations it never investigated or confirmed. And by doing this, repeating failures of the kind that appeared in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq, it has committed suicide. A nation that lacks a functioning press becomes a tyranny. This is not Trump’s fault, but our own.
Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press
The Mueller report’s categorical statement that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia ends one of the most shameful periods in modern American journalism, one that rivals the mindless cheerleading for the Iraq War by most of the press. It further erodes and may prove fatal to the credibility of a press that has steadfastly rendered most of the country invisible and functions as little more than an array of gossiping courtiers to the elites.
“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” U.S. Attorney General William Barr wrote in an official letter summarizing the findings of the inquiry by Robert Mueller.
The charge that Russia stole the election, that Vladimir Putin has secret “pee tapes” of Trump cavorting in a Moscow hotel with prostitutes or that Trump has been a longtime “Kremlin agent,” repeated by reporters whose work I admired in the past, is demagoguery as pernicious as the vile taunts and racist tropes that come out of the White House. The press endlessly repeated such allegations while ignoring the expanding social inequality and suffering of a country where half the population lives in poverty, as well as the collapse of our democratic institutions. These facts, not Russian manipulation, saw enraged American voters elect a demagogue who at least belittles the elites, including those in the press, who sold them out. The charge that Trump was a tool of Russia is entertaining. It attracts billions in advertising dollars. It allows the press to posture as a moral crusader. But over the past three years this obsession blotted out most of the real crimes committed by this administration and the reality most Americans endure.
The mainstream press, owned by the corporations that have extinguished the democratic state and are fleecing the public, as well as destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life, does not hold its employers to account. The empty chatter about Russia, including in The New York Times, exposes the bankruptcy of the U.S. media. MSNBC and CNN, which long ago abandoned journalism for entertainment, have breathlessly clogged the airwaves with ridiculous conspiracy theories and fantasies and used them to justify a faux crusade.
Don’t expect any of this to change. Rachael Maddow, like Jack Tapper or any other fatuous news celebrity, will not be held to account for slogging through this fiction night after night. Maddow will still collect her $10-million-a-year salary. And the handful of reporters who exhibited journalistic integrity—Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal and Katrina vanden Heuvel—will continue to remain on the margins of the media landscape. The press is an arm of the corporate-funded burlesque that has replaced the country’s political life and turned civic debate into a vast reality show.
The more the big news outlets try to spin this report, arguing that they need to see the full report rather than the attorney general’s summary, or that Jared Kushner sought to use the communications systems of Russian diplomats, the more credibility they will lose. And they do not have much credibility left. The lurid details of the president’s alleged sexual relations with a porn star and a Playboy bunny, and of “Russiagate,” have replaced journalism. These stories have nothing to do with the lives of most Americans. This descent into the inane and the tawdry gives immunity to Trump. In attacking the press he attacks an institution most Americans loath. And with good reason. The press, unwittingly, enhances a president it seeks to destroy. And its decline, accelerated by its collaboration with liberal Democratic elites who scapegoat Russia to avoid confronting their responsibility for trashing the country in the service of corporate oligarchs, will get worse. Little the press says about Trump will now be believed.
There was, of course, massive interference in our election by a foreign power—Israel. But try saying this naked truth out loud and you will suffer the character assassination, chanted by the unified chorus in the press and the political hierarchy of both parties, that was unleashed on Rep. Ilhan Omar. The engine driving our animosity toward Russia comes from the arms industry, which with the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border—despite assurances given upon the unification of Germany that this would not happen—is making billions of dollars selling weapons to countries in Eastern Europe. The situation is also exacerbating tensions between two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. But this is just one more suppressed truth.
The Trump administration has carried out policies that, rather than serve Russian interests, have further antagonized our relationship with Moscow. It has imposed sanctions. It is openly attempting to overthrow the government of a country that Russia supports, Venezuela. It is attempting to block the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe. It has sold weapons to Ukraine, a foe of the Kremlin. It has armed insurgents in Syria and carried out airstrikes, even as Russian troops seek to prop up the Syrian regime. But facts matter little to Russian-conspiracy theorists.
It is not only Trump who has obliterated the line between fact and fiction. It is the press. It hyped and reported allegations it never investigated or confirmed. And by doing this, repeating failures of the kind that appeared in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq, it has committed suicide. A nation that lacks a functioning press becomes a tyranny. This is not Trump’s fault, but our own.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/03/25/trump-is-going-to-repeat-this-until-november-2020-thanks-msnbc/
Trump Is Going To Repeat This Until November 2020. Thanks, MSNBC.
After news broke that Robert Mueller had turned in his final report without recommending any further indictments, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow began frantically retweeting blue-checkmarked Twitter pundits who claimed that since nobody knows the contents of the report yet, the news that the number of Americans indicted for conspiring with the Russian government is set at zero doesn’t matter.
Well guess what, Rachel? We know what the report contains now.
US Attorney General William Barr has sent a letter to congressional officials which you can read here. It contains the following unequivocal quote:
The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
A footnote on the document clarifies that the Mueller investigation defined coordination with the Russian government very broadly, to include not just overt coordination but any “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.” No such agreement, tacit or otherwise, was found to have taken place.
So that’s it then. The central and foundational claim of the Russiagate conspiracy theory has been found to have been completely baseless. The report asserts that Russia hacked and distributed Democratic Party emails (a claim that the public has still yet to see any hard evidence for), and “did not draw a conclusion – one way or the other” whether Trump committed obstruction of justice in the investigation of baseless collusion allegations, but the central and foundational Russiagate claim that Trump and the Kremlin conspired to steal the 2016 election has been killed. Finito. Case closed. Debate over.
And Trump is loving every second of it.
“No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!” tweeted America’s reality TV star president exactly as you would expect him to, taking some creative license with the actual contents of Barr’s letter.
This is your life for the next 594 days, America. You can expect to hear over and over and over again, from today until November 2020, that the president was victimized for over two years by a “WITCH HUNT” which was “COMPLETE and TOTAL FAKE NEWS!” All Trump will have to do to get re-elected is keep his economy narrative going and repeat the claim that he’s been unjustly persecuted by the establishment “swamp”.
And it will work, because that claim will not be unfounded. As much of a corrupt establishment crony as Trump has proven himself to be, he does indeed have all the facts he needs to successfully sell the narrative that the political/media class has spent over two years pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and he can indeed claim persecution and victimization in the process. He can easily leverage this into sympathy and support in his reelection campaign, and can use it to reinforce his tarnished image as an enemy of the beltway swamp. Those who’ve been selling the Russiagate narrative handed him this weapon.
So thanks, Rachel Maddow. Thanks Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and Eric Swalwell. Thanks CNN and MSNBC, Washington Post and New York Times. Thanks supposed progressives like Bernie Sanders and The Young Turks. Thank you to everyone who spent the first half of Trump’s term helping to push the Russiagate narrative, thereby helping to ensure another four years of this asshole advancing longstanding establishment agendas of war, nuclear brinkmanship and ecocide. Thank you so much for helping to inflict that upon our planet with no regard for the inevitable consequences of your actions.
So are any of the aforementioned offenders admitting any fault on this? Actually, it’s a surprisingly mixed bag.
Sure, you’ve got more Russiagaters than I can count moving the goalposts to possible financial crimes and frantically grasping at the straws of Mueller’s words in Barr’s letter regarding potential obstruction of justice, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” You’ve got MSNBC analyst and “Saint Mueller Preserve Us” t-shirt salesman Malcolm Nance starting up a whole new conspiracy theory that Barr has committed the “greatest scandal in history to coverup the greatest scandal in history,” I guess implying that Barr is lying about the contents of a report that will with absolute certainty be viewed and verified by other people. You’ve got some trying to pretend that Russiagaters never cared about Russiagate at all anyway.
But you’ve also got CNN’s Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter sharing Matt Taibbi’s excellent article titled “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD“, which describes the mass media’s spectacular failures to ask the questions that needed to be asked and demand the evidence that needed to be demanded for the claims advanced in the Russiagate narrative. You’ve got NBC’s Ken Dilanian, an actual CIA asset who has been eagerly advancing the establishment Russia narrative, said that “this is a total legal exoneration of the president. Congress will want to know more, of course. But the topline: No conspiracy, no obstruction.” This is highly unusual behavior from such stalwart empire loyalists, and it may be taken as a turning point of sorts on this particular aspect of this particular subject, due solely to the total destruction of any basis for their previous narrative.
But, of course, the damage is already done. Trump has been handed a powerful political weapon which may have ensured his reelection to the White House, and, far, far worse, a new cold war with Russia is now underway which threatens the life of every organism on this earth, facilitated by a political/media class who convinced the public that they could hurt the president by demanding that he take a more hawkish posture toward Russia. That Pandora’s box won’t be un-opened by these new revelations.
This should be the end of the mass media. In anything resembling a sane world, Rachel Maddow would be unloading her desk into a cardboard box today, and Aaron Maté would become the most respected and highest-paid journalist in America.
This should be the end of the Democratic party. This dismal state of affairs is their fault, from the content of the leaked emails to their handling of it. They have had choices on the way to clean up their act but, they have blankly refused at every juncture. Not one thing has changed since the emails revealed that the DNC rigs its primaries, and yet here we are in the middle of another fake primary with everyone going along with it like it’s a real thing. It’s weird. In a healthy democratic republic the party would be dead already, and a new one would’ve taken its place fueled by fresh energy and enthusiasm but the donor-class corruption is so deeply entrenched that that possibility has seemed like a fantasy.
For now. The next couple of days are going to be very important. As the clamoring din of Russiagate falls into the memory hole, a large empty space will open up. As the pundits scramble to find the Next Big Thing to blare through the screens, the people will be left to their own devices for a few precious moments. They won’t know what to think. They may even have some of their own thoughts for once. The media landscape will resemble a demolition site. So why not use this space to push forward some new exciting ideas. Space means possibilities. Space means something new can be built. After the crushing disappointment of finally finding out that the whole thing was a bust, two years have been lost to the bumbling ineptitude of Pelosi and Schumer, and now impeachment is off the table, what has anyone got to lose? Let’s try something new.
Trump Is Going To Repeat This Until November 2020. Thanks, MSNBC.
After news broke that Robert Mueller had turned in his final report without recommending any further indictments, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow began frantically retweeting blue-checkmarked Twitter pundits who claimed that since nobody knows the contents of the report yet, the news that the number of Americans indicted for conspiring with the Russian government is set at zero doesn’t matter.
Well guess what, Rachel? We know what the report contains now.
US Attorney General William Barr has sent a letter to congressional officials which you can read here. It contains the following unequivocal quote:
The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
A footnote on the document clarifies that the Mueller investigation defined coordination with the Russian government very broadly, to include not just overt coordination but any “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.” No such agreement, tacit or otherwise, was found to have taken place.
So that’s it then. The central and foundational claim of the Russiagate conspiracy theory has been found to have been completely baseless. The report asserts that Russia hacked and distributed Democratic Party emails (a claim that the public has still yet to see any hard evidence for), and “did not draw a conclusion – one way or the other” whether Trump committed obstruction of justice in the investigation of baseless collusion allegations, but the central and foundational Russiagate claim that Trump and the Kremlin conspired to steal the 2016 election has been killed. Finito. Case closed. Debate over.
And Trump is loving every second of it.
“No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!” tweeted America’s reality TV star president exactly as you would expect him to, taking some creative license with the actual contents of Barr’s letter.
This is your life for the next 594 days, America. You can expect to hear over and over and over again, from today until November 2020, that the president was victimized for over two years by a “WITCH HUNT” which was “COMPLETE and TOTAL FAKE NEWS!” All Trump will have to do to get re-elected is keep his economy narrative going and repeat the claim that he’s been unjustly persecuted by the establishment “swamp”.
And it will work, because that claim will not be unfounded. As much of a corrupt establishment crony as Trump has proven himself to be, he does indeed have all the facts he needs to successfully sell the narrative that the political/media class has spent over two years pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and he can indeed claim persecution and victimization in the process. He can easily leverage this into sympathy and support in his reelection campaign, and can use it to reinforce his tarnished image as an enemy of the beltway swamp. Those who’ve been selling the Russiagate narrative handed him this weapon.
So thanks, Rachel Maddow. Thanks Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and Eric Swalwell. Thanks CNN and MSNBC, Washington Post and New York Times. Thanks supposed progressives like Bernie Sanders and The Young Turks. Thank you to everyone who spent the first half of Trump’s term helping to push the Russiagate narrative, thereby helping to ensure another four years of this asshole advancing longstanding establishment agendas of war, nuclear brinkmanship and ecocide. Thank you so much for helping to inflict that upon our planet with no regard for the inevitable consequences of your actions.
So are any of the aforementioned offenders admitting any fault on this? Actually, it’s a surprisingly mixed bag.
Sure, you’ve got more Russiagaters than I can count moving the goalposts to possible financial crimes and frantically grasping at the straws of Mueller’s words in Barr’s letter regarding potential obstruction of justice, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” You’ve got MSNBC analyst and “Saint Mueller Preserve Us” t-shirt salesman Malcolm Nance starting up a whole new conspiracy theory that Barr has committed the “greatest scandal in history to coverup the greatest scandal in history,” I guess implying that Barr is lying about the contents of a report that will with absolute certainty be viewed and verified by other people. You’ve got some trying to pretend that Russiagaters never cared about Russiagate at all anyway.
But you’ve also got CNN’s Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter sharing Matt Taibbi’s excellent article titled “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD“, which describes the mass media’s spectacular failures to ask the questions that needed to be asked and demand the evidence that needed to be demanded for the claims advanced in the Russiagate narrative. You’ve got NBC’s Ken Dilanian, an actual CIA asset who has been eagerly advancing the establishment Russia narrative, said that “this is a total legal exoneration of the president. Congress will want to know more, of course. But the topline: No conspiracy, no obstruction.” This is highly unusual behavior from such stalwart empire loyalists, and it may be taken as a turning point of sorts on this particular aspect of this particular subject, due solely to the total destruction of any basis for their previous narrative.
But, of course, the damage is already done. Trump has been handed a powerful political weapon which may have ensured his reelection to the White House, and, far, far worse, a new cold war with Russia is now underway which threatens the life of every organism on this earth, facilitated by a political/media class who convinced the public that they could hurt the president by demanding that he take a more hawkish posture toward Russia. That Pandora’s box won’t be un-opened by these new revelations.
This should be the end of the mass media. In anything resembling a sane world, Rachel Maddow would be unloading her desk into a cardboard box today, and Aaron Maté would become the most respected and highest-paid journalist in America.
This should be the end of the Democratic party. This dismal state of affairs is their fault, from the content of the leaked emails to their handling of it. They have had choices on the way to clean up their act but, they have blankly refused at every juncture. Not one thing has changed since the emails revealed that the DNC rigs its primaries, and yet here we are in the middle of another fake primary with everyone going along with it like it’s a real thing. It’s weird. In a healthy democratic republic the party would be dead already, and a new one would’ve taken its place fueled by fresh energy and enthusiasm but the donor-class corruption is so deeply entrenched that that possibility has seemed like a fantasy.
For now. The next couple of days are going to be very important. As the clamoring din of Russiagate falls into the memory hole, a large empty space will open up. As the pundits scramble to find the Next Big Thing to blare through the screens, the people will be left to their own devices for a few precious moments. They won’t know what to think. They may even have some of their own thoughts for once. The media landscape will resemble a demolition site. So why not use this space to push forward some new exciting ideas. Space means possibilities. Space means something new can be built. After the crushing disappointment of finally finding out that the whole thing was a bust, two years have been lost to the bumbling ineptitude of Pelosi and Schumer, and now impeachment is off the table, what has anyone got to lose? Let’s try something new.
SC186-3
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/buyers-remorse/
Buyer’s Remorse
The Narrative is dead! Long live The Narrative!
That’s what played on CNN, NBC, and The New York Times yesterday as they struggled to digest the parting meal Robert Mueller served to the RussiaGate lynch mob: a nothingburger with a side of crow-flavored fries. Mr. Mueller was careful, though, to leave a nice red poison cherry on top with his statement that “…while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Mr. Mueller, who ought to know better, could not be more in error on that too-fine-a-point. The official finding that no crime was committed is, ipso facto, an exoneration, and to impute otherwise is a serious breach of his role in this legal melodrama. Prosecutors are expressly forbidden to traffic in defamation, aspersion, and innuendo in the absence of formal charges. So, it will be interesting to hear what Mr. Mueller has to say when Jerrold Nadler reels him into the House Judiciary Committee, as inevitably he will, to do to some ‘splainin.’
What actually happened with RussiaGate? A cabal of government officials colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 election and, failing to achieve their desired outcome, engineered a two-years-plus formal inquisition to deflect attention from their own misconduct and attempt to overthrow the election result.
The Cable News characters, quite a few of them lawyers, were litigating the living shit out of the story on Sunday night in their usual spirit of obdurate rank dishonesty. For instance, Jeffrey Toobin, who plays Attorney General on CNN, went off on the infamous 2016 Trump Tower Meeting in which the president’s son, Donald, Jr., met with Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya. Toobin omitted to mention that Ms. Veselnitskaya was, at that very time, on the payroll of Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton’s “oppo” research contractor. In other words, Trump Junior was set up.
That was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between the Hillary campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK’s MI6 intel agency, and the Obama White House, striving to prevent the election of a TV reality show star, and to disable him afterwards — also of the news media’s role in the whole interminable scam of RussiaGate. Their fury and despair were as vivid the night of March 24, 2019, as on November 8, 2016. And now they will attempt to spark off a sequel.
Rachel Maddow, for instance, struggling to maintain her dignity after two years playing Madame DeFarge on MSNBC, tried to console her fans with the prospect of Mr. Trump getting raked over the coals by the DOJ’s Southern District of NY prosecutors for crimes as yet unpredicted — really, whatever they might find if they turn over enough rocks in Manhattan. Perhaps she doesn’t know how the justice system actually works in this country: we prosecute crimes not persons. In places like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, you first choose a person to eliminate and then fit them to a crime. If no crime can be found, one is easily manufactured. In the USA, a predicate crime is required before you can launch a prosecution. Perhaps the actual Attorney General, Mr. Barr, will advise the avid staff of the Southern District of NY how this works.
There remains also, the rather sweeping panorama of misconduct and probable crime among the government (and former government) players in the agencies mentioned above. Does the full Mueller Report mention, for instance, that the animating document claiming that Trump colluded with Russia was manufactured by Mrs. Clinton’s employees? And that this document was used time and again improperly and illegally to prolong the inquisition? How could Mr. Mueller not acknowledge that? And if not, what sort of investigation was this?
You are forced to ask: did Mr. Mueller play an honorable role in this epic, multilayered scandal? And is Mr. Mueller himself an honorable character, or something less than that? I believe we’ll find out. The other team is coming to bat now — and just in time for MLB’s opening day, too. The Mueller report has been a shocking disappointment to the so-called “resistance,” but what about the as-yet-unreleased DOJ Inspector General’s report on these very matters? Or the parallel investigation of federal prosecutor John Huber, who is charged specifically with looking into the malfeasance of the RussiaGate investigators? Or whatever action the Attorney General himself launches in the wake of all this? Or whether Mr. Trump finally declassifies the mountains of documents behind the simple failure to find him guilty of any crime?
My favorite college professor and mentor, David Hamilton, once put a curious question to us when we were vexing him for some reason now forgotten: “Why,” he asked, “Did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?”
We twiddled our cigarettes and pulled our chins.
“Because he was just that pissed,” he said.
Buyer’s Remorse
The Narrative is dead! Long live The Narrative!
That’s what played on CNN, NBC, and The New York Times yesterday as they struggled to digest the parting meal Robert Mueller served to the RussiaGate lynch mob: a nothingburger with a side of crow-flavored fries. Mr. Mueller was careful, though, to leave a nice red poison cherry on top with his statement that “…while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Mr. Mueller, who ought to know better, could not be more in error on that too-fine-a-point. The official finding that no crime was committed is, ipso facto, an exoneration, and to impute otherwise is a serious breach of his role in this legal melodrama. Prosecutors are expressly forbidden to traffic in defamation, aspersion, and innuendo in the absence of formal charges. So, it will be interesting to hear what Mr. Mueller has to say when Jerrold Nadler reels him into the House Judiciary Committee, as inevitably he will, to do to some ‘splainin.’
What actually happened with RussiaGate? A cabal of government officials colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 election and, failing to achieve their desired outcome, engineered a two-years-plus formal inquisition to deflect attention from their own misconduct and attempt to overthrow the election result.
The Cable News characters, quite a few of them lawyers, were litigating the living shit out of the story on Sunday night in their usual spirit of obdurate rank dishonesty. For instance, Jeffrey Toobin, who plays Attorney General on CNN, went off on the infamous 2016 Trump Tower Meeting in which the president’s son, Donald, Jr., met with Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya. Toobin omitted to mention that Ms. Veselnitskaya was, at that very time, on the payroll of Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton’s “oppo” research contractor. In other words, Trump Junior was set up.
That was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between the Hillary campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK’s MI6 intel agency, and the Obama White House, striving to prevent the election of a TV reality show star, and to disable him afterwards — also of the news media’s role in the whole interminable scam of RussiaGate. Their fury and despair were as vivid the night of March 24, 2019, as on November 8, 2016. And now they will attempt to spark off a sequel.
Rachel Maddow, for instance, struggling to maintain her dignity after two years playing Madame DeFarge on MSNBC, tried to console her fans with the prospect of Mr. Trump getting raked over the coals by the DOJ’s Southern District of NY prosecutors for crimes as yet unpredicted — really, whatever they might find if they turn over enough rocks in Manhattan. Perhaps she doesn’t know how the justice system actually works in this country: we prosecute crimes not persons. In places like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, you first choose a person to eliminate and then fit them to a crime. If no crime can be found, one is easily manufactured. In the USA, a predicate crime is required before you can launch a prosecution. Perhaps the actual Attorney General, Mr. Barr, will advise the avid staff of the Southern District of NY how this works.
There remains also, the rather sweeping panorama of misconduct and probable crime among the government (and former government) players in the agencies mentioned above. Does the full Mueller Report mention, for instance, that the animating document claiming that Trump colluded with Russia was manufactured by Mrs. Clinton’s employees? And that this document was used time and again improperly and illegally to prolong the inquisition? How could Mr. Mueller not acknowledge that? And if not, what sort of investigation was this?
You are forced to ask: did Mr. Mueller play an honorable role in this epic, multilayered scandal? And is Mr. Mueller himself an honorable character, or something less than that? I believe we’ll find out. The other team is coming to bat now — and just in time for MLB’s opening day, too. The Mueller report has been a shocking disappointment to the so-called “resistance,” but what about the as-yet-unreleased DOJ Inspector General’s report on these very matters? Or the parallel investigation of federal prosecutor John Huber, who is charged specifically with looking into the malfeasance of the RussiaGate investigators? Or whatever action the Attorney General himself launches in the wake of all this? Or whether Mr. Trump finally declassifies the mountains of documents behind the simple failure to find him guilty of any crime?
My favorite college professor and mentor, David Hamilton, once put a curious question to us when we were vexing him for some reason now forgotten: “Why,” he asked, “Did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?”
We twiddled our cigarettes and pulled our chins.
“Because he was just that pissed,” he said.
Sunday, March 24, 2019
SC186-2
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51313.htm
Countdown to “Full Spectrum Dominance”
The US is formally committed to dominating the world by the year 2020. With President Trump’s new Space Directive-4, the production of laser-armed fighter jets as possible precursors to space weapons, and the possibility of nuclear warheads being put into orbit, the clock is ticking…
Back in 1997, the now-re-established US Space Command announced its commitment to “full spectrum dominance.” The Vision for 2020 explains that “full spectrum dominance” means military control over land, sea, air, and space (the so-called fourth dimension of warfare) “to protect US interests and investment.” “Protect” means guarantee operational freedom. “US interest and investment” means corporate profits.
The glossy brochure explains that, in the past, the Army evolved to protect US settlers who stole land from Native Americans in the genocidal birth of the nation. Like the Vision for 2020, a report by the National Defense University acknowledges that by the 19th century, the Navy had evolved to protect the US’s newly-formulated “grand strategy.” In addition to supposedly protecting citizens and the constitution, “The overriding principle was, and remains, the protection of American territory … and our economic well-being.” By the 20th century, the Air Force had been established, in the words of the Air Force Study Strategy Guide, to protect “vital interests,” including: “commerce; secure energy supplies; [and] freedom of action.” In the 21stcentury, these pillars of power are bolstered by the Cyber Command and the coming Space Force.
The use of the Army, Navy, and Air Force—the three dimensions of power—means that the US is already close to achieving “full spectrum dominance.” Brown University’s Cost of War project documents current US military involvement in 80 countries—or 40% of the world’s nations. This includes 65 so-called counterterrorism training operations and 40 military bases (though others think the number of bases is much higher). By this measure, “full spectrum dominance” is nearly half way complete. But the map leaves out US and NATO bases, training programs, and operations in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine.
As the US expands its space operations—the fourth dimension of warfare—the race towards “full spectrum dominance” quickens. Space has long been militarized in the sense that the US uses satellites to guide missiles and aircraft. But the new doctrine seeks to weaponize space by, for instance, blurring the boundaries between high-altitude military aircraft and space itself. Today’s space power will be harnessed by the US to ensure dominance over the satellite infrastructure that allows for the modern world of internet, e-commerce, GPS, telecommunications, surveillance, and war-fighting.
Since the 1950s, the United Nations has introduced various treaties to prohibit the militarization and weaponization of space—the most famous being the Outer Space Treaty (1967). These treaties aim to preserve space as a commons for all humanity. The creation of the US Space Force is a blatant violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of those treaties. In more recent decades, successive US governments have unilaterally rejected treaties to reinforce and expand the existing space-for-peace agreements. In 2002, the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), allowing it to expand its long-range missile systems. In 2008, China and Russia submitted to the UN Conference on Disarmament the proposed Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects. This would have preserved the space-as-a-commons principle and answered US claims that “enemies” would use space as a battleground against US satellites.
But peace is not the goal. The goal is “full spectrum dominance,” so the US rejected the offer. China and Russia introduced the proposed the treaty again in 2014—and again the US rejected it. Earlier this year, the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Last month, President Trump sent an unclassified memo on the new Space Directive-4 to the Vice President, Joint Chiefs of Staff, NASA, and the Secretaries of Defense and State.
The document makes for chilling and vital reading. It recommends legislating for the training of US forces “to ensure unfettered access to, and freedom to operate in, space, and to provide vital capabilities to joint and coalition forces.” Crucially, this doctrine includes “peacetime and across the spectrum of conflict.” As well as integrating space forces with the intelligence community, the memo recommends establishing a Chief of Staff of the Space Force, who will to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The memo also says that US space operations will abide by “international law.” But given that the US has rejected anti-space weapons treaties, it is barely constrained by international law.
In late-2017, Space.com reported on a $26.3m Department of Defense contract with Lockheed Martin to build lasers for fighter jets under the Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments program. The report says that the lasers will be ready by 2021. The article links to Doug Graham, the Vice President of Missile Systems and Advanced Programs at Lockheed Martin Space Systems. In the original link Graham reveals that the Air Force laser “is an example of how Lockheed Martin is using a variety of innovative technologies to transform laser devices into integrated weapon systems.”
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) states in a projection out to the year 2050: “Economies are becoming increasingly dependent upon space-based systems … By 2050, space-based weapon systems may also be deployed, which could include nuclear weapons.” But this is extremely reckless. Discussing technologies, including the artificial intelligence on which weapons systems are increasingly based, another MoD projection warns of “the potential for disastrous outcomes, planned and unplanned … Various doomsday scenarios arising in relation to these and other areas of development present the possibility of catastrophic impacts, ultimately including the end of the world, or at least of humanity.”
“Full spectrum dominance” is not only a danger to the world, it is a danger to US citizens who would also suffer the consequences, if and when something goes wrong with their leaders’ complicated space weapons.
Countdown to “Full Spectrum Dominance”
The US is formally committed to dominating the world by the year 2020. With President Trump’s new Space Directive-4, the production of laser-armed fighter jets as possible precursors to space weapons, and the possibility of nuclear warheads being put into orbit, the clock is ticking…
Back in 1997, the now-re-established US Space Command announced its commitment to “full spectrum dominance.” The Vision for 2020 explains that “full spectrum dominance” means military control over land, sea, air, and space (the so-called fourth dimension of warfare) “to protect US interests and investment.” “Protect” means guarantee operational freedom. “US interest and investment” means corporate profits.
The glossy brochure explains that, in the past, the Army evolved to protect US settlers who stole land from Native Americans in the genocidal birth of the nation. Like the Vision for 2020, a report by the National Defense University acknowledges that by the 19th century, the Navy had evolved to protect the US’s newly-formulated “grand strategy.” In addition to supposedly protecting citizens and the constitution, “The overriding principle was, and remains, the protection of American territory … and our economic well-being.” By the 20th century, the Air Force had been established, in the words of the Air Force Study Strategy Guide, to protect “vital interests,” including: “commerce; secure energy supplies; [and] freedom of action.” In the 21stcentury, these pillars of power are bolstered by the Cyber Command and the coming Space Force.
The use of the Army, Navy, and Air Force—the three dimensions of power—means that the US is already close to achieving “full spectrum dominance.” Brown University’s Cost of War project documents current US military involvement in 80 countries—or 40% of the world’s nations. This includes 65 so-called counterterrorism training operations and 40 military bases (though others think the number of bases is much higher). By this measure, “full spectrum dominance” is nearly half way complete. But the map leaves out US and NATO bases, training programs, and operations in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine.
As the US expands its space operations—the fourth dimension of warfare—the race towards “full spectrum dominance” quickens. Space has long been militarized in the sense that the US uses satellites to guide missiles and aircraft. But the new doctrine seeks to weaponize space by, for instance, blurring the boundaries between high-altitude military aircraft and space itself. Today’s space power will be harnessed by the US to ensure dominance over the satellite infrastructure that allows for the modern world of internet, e-commerce, GPS, telecommunications, surveillance, and war-fighting.
Since the 1950s, the United Nations has introduced various treaties to prohibit the militarization and weaponization of space—the most famous being the Outer Space Treaty (1967). These treaties aim to preserve space as a commons for all humanity. The creation of the US Space Force is a blatant violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of those treaties. In more recent decades, successive US governments have unilaterally rejected treaties to reinforce and expand the existing space-for-peace agreements. In 2002, the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), allowing it to expand its long-range missile systems. In 2008, China and Russia submitted to the UN Conference on Disarmament the proposed Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects. This would have preserved the space-as-a-commons principle and answered US claims that “enemies” would use space as a battleground against US satellites.
But peace is not the goal. The goal is “full spectrum dominance,” so the US rejected the offer. China and Russia introduced the proposed the treaty again in 2014—and again the US rejected it. Earlier this year, the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Last month, President Trump sent an unclassified memo on the new Space Directive-4 to the Vice President, Joint Chiefs of Staff, NASA, and the Secretaries of Defense and State.
The document makes for chilling and vital reading. It recommends legislating for the training of US forces “to ensure unfettered access to, and freedom to operate in, space, and to provide vital capabilities to joint and coalition forces.” Crucially, this doctrine includes “peacetime and across the spectrum of conflict.” As well as integrating space forces with the intelligence community, the memo recommends establishing a Chief of Staff of the Space Force, who will to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The memo also says that US space operations will abide by “international law.” But given that the US has rejected anti-space weapons treaties, it is barely constrained by international law.
In late-2017, Space.com reported on a $26.3m Department of Defense contract with Lockheed Martin to build lasers for fighter jets under the Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments program. The report says that the lasers will be ready by 2021. The article links to Doug Graham, the Vice President of Missile Systems and Advanced Programs at Lockheed Martin Space Systems. In the original link Graham reveals that the Air Force laser “is an example of how Lockheed Martin is using a variety of innovative technologies to transform laser devices into integrated weapon systems.”
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) states in a projection out to the year 2050: “Economies are becoming increasingly dependent upon space-based systems … By 2050, space-based weapon systems may also be deployed, which could include nuclear weapons.” But this is extremely reckless. Discussing technologies, including the artificial intelligence on which weapons systems are increasingly based, another MoD projection warns of “the potential for disastrous outcomes, planned and unplanned … Various doomsday scenarios arising in relation to these and other areas of development present the possibility of catastrophic impacts, ultimately including the end of the world, or at least of humanity.”
“Full spectrum dominance” is not only a danger to the world, it is a danger to US citizens who would also suffer the consequences, if and when something goes wrong with their leaders’ complicated space weapons.
Saturday, March 23, 2019
SC186-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51310.htm
US-Germany Rift Set To Blow
This is going to get very ugly. Germany is openly defying US President Trump's demands to spend more on its NATO budget. Already the American ambassador to the country is crying foul, prompting German calls for his expulsion.
Of all the countries in the European Union, it is Germany that's been mostly on the receiving end of Trump's wrath since he entered the White House. In two years, the bilateral relation between Washington and Berlin has plummeted under the weight of Trump's withering verbal attacks.
The American president has assailed Germany for unfair trading practices over its lucrative auto exports; and he has virtually accused Berlin of treason in its dealings with Russia for natural gas supply, threatening to slap economic sanctions on German firms over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project under the Baltic Sea.
Germany has vehemently rejected Trump's accusations, saying its auto industry is a big investor in creating American jobs, and that its energy policies are a sovereign matter based on objective market principles.
But above all his complaints, Trump has continually rebuked Germany for not spending enough on NATO commitments, sniping that the country is freeloading on American military protection. At a NATO summit last year, Trump hectored German Chancellor Angela Merkel to raise her country's annual military budget to the designated NATO target of 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
For many years, especially after the end of the Cold War, German military spending has lagged at around 1 per cent of GDP. Trump contends that, as Europe's largest national economy, Berlin should at least double its defence budget.
Latest figures, however, show that German military spending is nowhere near reaching the 2 per cent target that Trump has been fulminating about. Indeed, the trend appears to be one of declining expenditure by Berlin on military, not increasing.
That caused earlier this week US ambassador Richard Grenell to decry Germany's "failure" to live up to its NATO commitments.
Grenell is something of a Trump cypher. It is not the first time the envoy has harangued Germany in terms that his boss in the White House could have almost written for him. Grenell has been slamming Berlin over the Nord Stream 2 gas project with Russia and in its dealings with Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.
His condemnations this week regarding Germany's military budget have again sparked furore among the country's politicians and media, eliciting further public calls for the envoy to be expelled owing to his alleged gross interference in Berlin's internal affairs. "An ambassador is not supposed to act like the spokesman of an occupying power," said Wolfgang Kubicki, the deputy leader of the Free Democrat Party.
The New York Times this week reported "the timing couldn't be worse" for US-German relations. Next month marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NATO alliance. A major celebration is due to take place in Washington DC for the occasion. The atmosphere will be severely chilled by Germany's truculent defiance of Trump to boost its commitment to NATO.
Out of some 30 members in the US-led NATO bloc, only seven countries have managed to raise their military budgets to the 2 per cent of GDP target that Trump has clamoured for. That target figure predates Trump's presidency. But since the end of the Cold War, many European members of NATO have reduced military spending. Trump has made it an obsessive issue and has even threatened to pull the US out of NATO if European members don't pull their financial weight.
Germany and others should call Trump's bluff and say, "go ahead!" — pull your troops, missiles and warplanes out of Europe. US forces in Europe have never been about "protection" and have always been about "projection" of American hegemonic power over European vassals, in particular, to prevent a normal and natural relationship with Russia progressing.
The American obsession with military spending needs to be vigorously challenged. What is this pathological addiction for? It is of course about milking the civilian economy to fatten the profits of giant military companies. It's a racket that requires the poisoning of international relations with Russia and China, among others, in order to sustain the charade of syphoning off public money.
The greatest security threat to Western societies is the massive growth of poverty, deprivation and inequality, according to a new OECD report. The whole scaremongering about Russia and other "foreign enemies" is a risible ruse for the obscene misuse of public money by a military-industrial complex that is a colossal parasite on society. A laughable contradiction is that Trump is supposed to be a "Russian puppet", according to his domestic political enemies, and yet he is pushing the anti-Russia pretext on behalf of the military-industrial complex more than any president.
Germany and most NATO members are just right to ignore Trump's dictate about dubious defence spending. The money would be much better invested in productive and genuinely beneficial social development.
One senses a showdown looming between Washington and Berlin. Germany has for too long been allowing itself to be kicked around by an American "occupying power". Under Trump, the insulting humiliation has only become more acute. How long can Berlin tolerate this abusive taskmaster? Especially when there is growing opposition in the German and wider European public despising the American overlord and its dictates.
US-Germany Rift Set To Blow
This is going to get very ugly. Germany is openly defying US President Trump's demands to spend more on its NATO budget. Already the American ambassador to the country is crying foul, prompting German calls for his expulsion.
Of all the countries in the European Union, it is Germany that's been mostly on the receiving end of Trump's wrath since he entered the White House. In two years, the bilateral relation between Washington and Berlin has plummeted under the weight of Trump's withering verbal attacks.
The American president has assailed Germany for unfair trading practices over its lucrative auto exports; and he has virtually accused Berlin of treason in its dealings with Russia for natural gas supply, threatening to slap economic sanctions on German firms over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project under the Baltic Sea.
Germany has vehemently rejected Trump's accusations, saying its auto industry is a big investor in creating American jobs, and that its energy policies are a sovereign matter based on objective market principles.
But above all his complaints, Trump has continually rebuked Germany for not spending enough on NATO commitments, sniping that the country is freeloading on American military protection. At a NATO summit last year, Trump hectored German Chancellor Angela Merkel to raise her country's annual military budget to the designated NATO target of 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
For many years, especially after the end of the Cold War, German military spending has lagged at around 1 per cent of GDP. Trump contends that, as Europe's largest national economy, Berlin should at least double its defence budget.
Latest figures, however, show that German military spending is nowhere near reaching the 2 per cent target that Trump has been fulminating about. Indeed, the trend appears to be one of declining expenditure by Berlin on military, not increasing.
That caused earlier this week US ambassador Richard Grenell to decry Germany's "failure" to live up to its NATO commitments.
Grenell is something of a Trump cypher. It is not the first time the envoy has harangued Germany in terms that his boss in the White House could have almost written for him. Grenell has been slamming Berlin over the Nord Stream 2 gas project with Russia and in its dealings with Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.
His condemnations this week regarding Germany's military budget have again sparked furore among the country's politicians and media, eliciting further public calls for the envoy to be expelled owing to his alleged gross interference in Berlin's internal affairs. "An ambassador is not supposed to act like the spokesman of an occupying power," said Wolfgang Kubicki, the deputy leader of the Free Democrat Party.
The New York Times this week reported "the timing couldn't be worse" for US-German relations. Next month marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NATO alliance. A major celebration is due to take place in Washington DC for the occasion. The atmosphere will be severely chilled by Germany's truculent defiance of Trump to boost its commitment to NATO.
Out of some 30 members in the US-led NATO bloc, only seven countries have managed to raise their military budgets to the 2 per cent of GDP target that Trump has clamoured for. That target figure predates Trump's presidency. But since the end of the Cold War, many European members of NATO have reduced military spending. Trump has made it an obsessive issue and has even threatened to pull the US out of NATO if European members don't pull their financial weight.
Germany and others should call Trump's bluff and say, "go ahead!" — pull your troops, missiles and warplanes out of Europe. US forces in Europe have never been about "protection" and have always been about "projection" of American hegemonic power over European vassals, in particular, to prevent a normal and natural relationship with Russia progressing.
The American obsession with military spending needs to be vigorously challenged. What is this pathological addiction for? It is of course about milking the civilian economy to fatten the profits of giant military companies. It's a racket that requires the poisoning of international relations with Russia and China, among others, in order to sustain the charade of syphoning off public money.
The greatest security threat to Western societies is the massive growth of poverty, deprivation and inequality, according to a new OECD report. The whole scaremongering about Russia and other "foreign enemies" is a risible ruse for the obscene misuse of public money by a military-industrial complex that is a colossal parasite on society. A laughable contradiction is that Trump is supposed to be a "Russian puppet", according to his domestic political enemies, and yet he is pushing the anti-Russia pretext on behalf of the military-industrial complex more than any president.
Germany and most NATO members are just right to ignore Trump's dictate about dubious defence spending. The money would be much better invested in productive and genuinely beneficial social development.
One senses a showdown looming between Washington and Berlin. Germany has for too long been allowing itself to be kicked around by an American "occupying power". Under Trump, the insulting humiliation has only become more acute. How long can Berlin tolerate this abusive taskmaster? Especially when there is growing opposition in the German and wider European public despising the American overlord and its dictates.
Friday, March 22, 2019
SC185-15
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/03/22/us-completely-invalidates-all-of-its-own-arguments-about-crimea/
US Completely Invalidates All Of Its Own Arguments About Crimea
Well the worst Putin Puppet of all time is at it again, this time tweeting that the US must recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel despite the fact that the Israeli occupation of that Syrian land is illegal under international law.
“After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!”, Trump’s tweet reads.
Russian parliament member Oleg Morozov made a statement in response to Trump’s proclamation, saying that “Russia will never agree to recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan. Trump is damaging the international community and the Arab world”.
Trump’s tweet follows a report last week that his administration has deliberately softened the US government’s language concerning the Golan Heights in a way that is favorable to Israel, referring to the region as “Israeli-controlled” instead of “Israeli-occupied” as it had always previously been. This is just one more of the many, many ways in which the facts demonstrate a virulently anti-Russia posture by the Trump administration in the face of a funhouse mirror mass media narrative which claims the exact opposite, another of those facts being the administration’s sanctions and hawkish posturing over the Russian Federation’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“More red meat for Trump’s Evangelical base,” tweeted journalist Mark Ames in response to Trump’s tweet. “Doubt anyone will care about US hypocrisy since hypocrisy is what defines us—rewarding Israel’s armed seizure/colonization/annexation of Golan; yet punishing Russia’s Crimea annexation, which at least had local majority-Russian support.”
“How do the delusional @Maddow #Russiagate peddlers explain that ‘Putin puppet’ @realDonaldTrump still refuses to recognize Russian annexation of Crimea, but just did Netanyahu’s bidding and recognized illegal Israeli annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights?” asked Electric Intifada‘s Ali Abunimah.
“Putin will use this as a pretext to justify Russia’s annexation of Crimea,” former US ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk told the New York Times. “The Israeli right will use it as a pretext for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. It is a truly gratuitous move by Trump.”
“Twaddle,” tweeted the Global Policy Institute’s George Szamuely in response to Indyk’s NYT statement. “Putin doesn’t need any ‘pretext to justify’ anything. The return of Crimea to Russia took place 5 years ago, via a referendum in accordance with the constitution of Crimea. Putin won’t bring up the Golan because the two situations are so different.”
In an excellent article for Strategic Culture titled “US Duplicity over Golan Demolishes Posturing on Crimea” written prior to Trump’s statement, journalist Finian Cunningham breaks down the differences and similarities between Washington’s position on Crimea versus the Golan Heights, and explains how its current push to validate Israel’s annexation completely invalidates its own arguments about Crimea. I highly recommend checking out Cunningham’s article in its entirety for anyone who’s interested in this, as its arguments are largely unassailable, but here are some excerpts:
Israel has occupied the western part of the Golan since 1967 as a spoil from that war. In 1981, Tel Aviv formally annexed the Syrian territory. However, the UN Security Council in 1981, including the US, unanimously condemned the annexation as illegal. The resolution mandates Israel to return the land to Syria which has historical claim to the entire Golan. The area of 1,800 square kilometers is a strategic elevation overlooking the northern Jordan Valley.
If Washington confirms its recent indications of recognizing the Golan as officially part of Israel, the development would mark an egregious flouting of international law.
Claims by Washington and the European Union of “illegal annexation” of Crimea by Russia are the central basis for five years of economic sanctions imposed on Moscow. Those sanctions have contributed to ever-worsening tensions with Russia and the build-up of NATO forces along Russia’s borders.
Those claims are, however, highly contestable. The people of Crimea voted in a legally constituted referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and to join the Russian Federation. That referendum followed an illegal coup in Kiev in February 2014 backed by the US and Europe against a legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Historically, Crimea has centuries of shared cultural heritage with Russia. Its erstwhile position within the state of Ukraine was arguably an anomaly of the Cold War and subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union.
In any case, there is scant comparison between the Golan Heights and Crimea, save, that is, for the latest hypocrisy in Washington. While Crimea and its people are arguably historically part of Russia, the Golan Heights are indisputably a sovereign part of Syria which was forcibly annexed by Israeli military occupation.
The discrepancy between the White House’s positions on Crimea and the Golan Heights can easily be explained by the nature of America’s overarching imperialist agenda. The US-centralized empire, of which Israel is an inseparable part, operates much like the creature in the 1958 movie The Blob: its goal is to absorb as many geostrategic territories into itself as possible, growing larger and stronger with every absorption. The Golan Heights is a resource rich region dominated by plutocratic interests and provides Israel with a third of its water supply, as well as a strategically valuable location for attacking and undermining the unabsorbed nation of Syria and its unabsorbed Iranian and Hezbollah allies.
Crimea, meanwhile, is another highly strategically important location, but its control shifted outside the blob of empire when its people chose Moscow over Kiev. The blob of empire is strengthened and enlarged with the addition of the Golan Heights, but weakened and shrunk with the loss of Crimea.
We see this dynamic playing out all over the globe. Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil was a huge victory for the blob, strengthening its ability to attack and absorb other unabsorbed nations like Venezuela. This is why John Bolton recently tweeted that “We’re proud to make Brazil a Major Non-NATO Ally, and look forward to working with them on Venezuela, Iran, and China. A great meeting with a strong new strategic partner!”, and why Bolsonaro refused to deny the possibility of Brazil aiding the US in military action against Venezuela during his press conference with the president the other day.
The tight network of US allies which functions as an empire on foreign policy is constantly attempting to expand roughly eastward and southward, and to undermine the interests of any government which presents an obstacle to that expansion. Many people have grown very rich by the exploitative and frequently violent nature of this expansion, in precisely the way colonialists and conquistadors grew very rich with the exploitative and frequently violent expansion of European power into the rest of the world hundreds of years ago. The alliance of secretive government agencies and thieving plutocrats has been ensuring a concurrent metastasizing of corporate and government power along the waves of that expansion, and it won’t stop until either the empire is overthrown, the world is completely absorbed, or these bastards get us all killed in a nuclear holocaust with their reckless imperialist aggression.
US Completely Invalidates All Of Its Own Arguments About Crimea
Well the worst Putin Puppet of all time is at it again, this time tweeting that the US must recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel despite the fact that the Israeli occupation of that Syrian land is illegal under international law.
“After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!”, Trump’s tweet reads.
Russian parliament member Oleg Morozov made a statement in response to Trump’s proclamation, saying that “Russia will never agree to recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan. Trump is damaging the international community and the Arab world”.
Trump’s tweet follows a report last week that his administration has deliberately softened the US government’s language concerning the Golan Heights in a way that is favorable to Israel, referring to the region as “Israeli-controlled” instead of “Israeli-occupied” as it had always previously been. This is just one more of the many, many ways in which the facts demonstrate a virulently anti-Russia posture by the Trump administration in the face of a funhouse mirror mass media narrative which claims the exact opposite, another of those facts being the administration’s sanctions and hawkish posturing over the Russian Federation’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“More red meat for Trump’s Evangelical base,” tweeted journalist Mark Ames in response to Trump’s tweet. “Doubt anyone will care about US hypocrisy since hypocrisy is what defines us—rewarding Israel’s armed seizure/colonization/annexation of Golan; yet punishing Russia’s Crimea annexation, which at least had local majority-Russian support.”
“How do the delusional @Maddow #Russiagate peddlers explain that ‘Putin puppet’ @realDonaldTrump still refuses to recognize Russian annexation of Crimea, but just did Netanyahu’s bidding and recognized illegal Israeli annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights?” asked Electric Intifada‘s Ali Abunimah.
“Putin will use this as a pretext to justify Russia’s annexation of Crimea,” former US ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk told the New York Times. “The Israeli right will use it as a pretext for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. It is a truly gratuitous move by Trump.”
“Twaddle,” tweeted the Global Policy Institute’s George Szamuely in response to Indyk’s NYT statement. “Putin doesn’t need any ‘pretext to justify’ anything. The return of Crimea to Russia took place 5 years ago, via a referendum in accordance with the constitution of Crimea. Putin won’t bring up the Golan because the two situations are so different.”
In an excellent article for Strategic Culture titled “US Duplicity over Golan Demolishes Posturing on Crimea” written prior to Trump’s statement, journalist Finian Cunningham breaks down the differences and similarities between Washington’s position on Crimea versus the Golan Heights, and explains how its current push to validate Israel’s annexation completely invalidates its own arguments about Crimea. I highly recommend checking out Cunningham’s article in its entirety for anyone who’s interested in this, as its arguments are largely unassailable, but here are some excerpts:
Israel has occupied the western part of the Golan since 1967 as a spoil from that war. In 1981, Tel Aviv formally annexed the Syrian territory. However, the UN Security Council in 1981, including the US, unanimously condemned the annexation as illegal. The resolution mandates Israel to return the land to Syria which has historical claim to the entire Golan. The area of 1,800 square kilometers is a strategic elevation overlooking the northern Jordan Valley.
If Washington confirms its recent indications of recognizing the Golan as officially part of Israel, the development would mark an egregious flouting of international law.
Claims by Washington and the European Union of “illegal annexation” of Crimea by Russia are the central basis for five years of economic sanctions imposed on Moscow. Those sanctions have contributed to ever-worsening tensions with Russia and the build-up of NATO forces along Russia’s borders.
Those claims are, however, highly contestable. The people of Crimea voted in a legally constituted referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and to join the Russian Federation. That referendum followed an illegal coup in Kiev in February 2014 backed by the US and Europe against a legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Historically, Crimea has centuries of shared cultural heritage with Russia. Its erstwhile position within the state of Ukraine was arguably an anomaly of the Cold War and subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union.
In any case, there is scant comparison between the Golan Heights and Crimea, save, that is, for the latest hypocrisy in Washington. While Crimea and its people are arguably historically part of Russia, the Golan Heights are indisputably a sovereign part of Syria which was forcibly annexed by Israeli military occupation.
The discrepancy between the White House’s positions on Crimea and the Golan Heights can easily be explained by the nature of America’s overarching imperialist agenda. The US-centralized empire, of which Israel is an inseparable part, operates much like the creature in the 1958 movie The Blob: its goal is to absorb as many geostrategic territories into itself as possible, growing larger and stronger with every absorption. The Golan Heights is a resource rich region dominated by plutocratic interests and provides Israel with a third of its water supply, as well as a strategically valuable location for attacking and undermining the unabsorbed nation of Syria and its unabsorbed Iranian and Hezbollah allies.
Crimea, meanwhile, is another highly strategically important location, but its control shifted outside the blob of empire when its people chose Moscow over Kiev. The blob of empire is strengthened and enlarged with the addition of the Golan Heights, but weakened and shrunk with the loss of Crimea.
We see this dynamic playing out all over the globe. Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil was a huge victory for the blob, strengthening its ability to attack and absorb other unabsorbed nations like Venezuela. This is why John Bolton recently tweeted that “We’re proud to make Brazil a Major Non-NATO Ally, and look forward to working with them on Venezuela, Iran, and China. A great meeting with a strong new strategic partner!”, and why Bolsonaro refused to deny the possibility of Brazil aiding the US in military action against Venezuela during his press conference with the president the other day.
The tight network of US allies which functions as an empire on foreign policy is constantly attempting to expand roughly eastward and southward, and to undermine the interests of any government which presents an obstacle to that expansion. Many people have grown very rich by the exploitative and frequently violent nature of this expansion, in precisely the way colonialists and conquistadors grew very rich with the exploitative and frequently violent expansion of European power into the rest of the world hundreds of years ago. The alliance of secretive government agencies and thieving plutocrats has been ensuring a concurrent metastasizing of corporate and government power along the waves of that expansion, and it won’t stop until either the empire is overthrown, the world is completely absorbed, or these bastards get us all killed in a nuclear holocaust with their reckless imperialist aggression.
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