Things are getting rather bizarre at the US Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Its increasingly prominent commanding chief, one General Glen VanHerck, has abandoned any initial sense of frankness in discussing the destruction of an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4.
Since that disproportionately violent event, more public relations than sense, three other objects have also been destroyed. “We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” the general said cryptically in remarks made on February 12. The briefing came in the aftermath of the downing of an octagonal-shaped object over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border.
Cultures of paranoia and suspicion approach such statements the way crops take to manure. The line between extraterrestrial fantasies and human-made balloons can become grainy. Tinfoil hats become charged; fear finds a funnel to travel through. The suggestion from the general that “the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out” signalled an avalanche of speculation. This was given further impetus by VanHerck’s assertion that he “hadn’t ruled out anything” to a question on whether aliens featured in the mix. “At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threat unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.”
On February 13, the White House was left to deal with the excitement caused by the Pentagon’s speculations. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was given the bucket to dampen the enthusiasm. “I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no sign, again no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”
John Kirby, coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council in the White House, was also adamant in his briefing: “I don’t think the American people need to worry about aliens with respect to these crafts, period.” Hardly reassuring to those glued to such reports as that from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021, which refused to rule out the possibility that 144 unidentified aerial phenomena might have extraterrestrial provenance.
The bafflement over these objects has added some zest to the already exaggerated China threat. It is a throwback to the Cold War, which was characterised by ill-educated second guesses about performance, capability, and awareness about an inscrutable enemy. Foes, drunk with threat inflation, jousted in the dark and groped in the wilderness, finding a mirage of reality.
With the latest belligerent undertakings by the US government, an escalation is being encouraged by the hawks in Congress. Kirby, wishing to add a sting to the China effort, told the press that Biden, on coming to office, directed the US intelligence community to conduct a broad assessment of Chinese intelligence capabilities. “We know that these [Chinese] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners.”
This is hardly a unilateral game. Having accused Beijing of such airborne surveillance present and past, the Biden administration is now facing accusations of its own. According to the PRC, the US has conducted its own exercises in flying high-altitude balloons in its airspace – no fewer than 10 times last year. To that can be added hundreds of reconnaissance missions. “It’s very common that the US intrudes [into] others’ airspace,” remarked Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin, citing 657 sorties made by Washington in 2022 and 64 aircraft flights in January “over the South China Sea alone”.
Kirby was cocksure in denying such claims, even those alleged missions that might apply to Taiwan or the South China Sea. “There is [sic] no US surveillance aircraft over Chinese – in Chinese airspace.”
The Balloon Affair has also tickled the interest of Washington’s allies. Object fever is catching. The United Kingdom, that reliably unquestioning transatlantic appendage of US power, is hopping on the bandwagon. The country’s transport minister, Richard Holden, did not even care to cite any evidence of “Chinese spy balloons” making their way through British airspace. What mattered was that it was “possible” and “that there will be people from the Chinese government trying to act as a hostile state.”
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace further suggested, with forced graveness, that, “The UK and her allies will review what these aerospace intrusions mean for our security. This development is another sign of how the global threat picture is changing for the worse.” Blame it on those objects.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also reminded the good people of Britain that the country is ever vigilant to any incursions from hot air objects or anything similar to them. “We have something called the quick reaction alert force which involves Typhoon planes, which are kept on 24/7 readiness to police our airspace, which is incredibly important.”
Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chairman of the Commons defence select committee, swallowed the suggestion that those sneaky Orientals were “exploiting the West’s weakness” with their mysterious aerial instruments. At least there was no mention of aliens, but that is increasingly becoming a distinction without a difference.
The US is a far bigger threat to Canadian sovereignty and democracy than China but you’d never know it from following the dominant media.
In recent days a CIA-linked firm got the federal government to stop research with a Chinese university, a State Department funded group convinced parliament to criticize China and the Pentagon’s panic over a balloon prompted Global Affairs to summon China’s ambassador. But even media critic Canadaland prefers to focus on Chinese interference in Canada.
According to “Big Trouble with Meddling China”, a 45-minute Canadaland podcast released last week, “the Chinese state has infiltrated Canadian democracy at all levels, according to a bombshell report from investigative reporter Sam Cooper of Global News.” Three months ago, the author of Wilful Blindness: How a network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents Infiltrated the West reported on a “vast campaign of foreign interference”. In it, Cooper claimed that Canadian intelligence officials warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that at least 11 candidates running in the 2019 federal election were financed by a clandestine Chinese influence network. But Cooper’s report “is based on unsubstantiated claims and dubious allegations”, noted Brendan Devlin in a convincing Canadian Dimension response headlined “Is China a threat to Canadian democracy?”
Canadaland’s Jesse Brown is far more trusting of Cooper and his intelligence sources. He doesn’t question Cooper about CSIS’ interest, which is tied to its US counterparts, in hyping the China threat. Instead, the media critic claims Cooper’s reporting hasn’t received adequate attention despite it being at the centre of a major spat between Trudeau and Chinese president Xi Jinping at the G20 in November.
Brown doesn’t even challenge Cooper when he names China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, as well as “allied” countries, interfering in Canadian politics. What kind of journalist names only states that Ottawa considers “enemies”? A mouthpiece of the US Empire aligned intelligence apparatus?
The ‘China is undermining Canadian democracy story’ line is driven by another country’s far greater influence, which the media largely ignores. Atop its front-page last week, the Globe and Mail published “Canadian universities conducting joint research with Chinese military scientists” and then two days later “Ottawa vows to curb Canadian university research with Chinese military scientists”. The source for the Globe’s expose about scientists tied to China’s National University of Defence Technology was Strider Technologies. The Salt Lake City based firm is full of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials, including Assistant Director John Mullen. The Globe failed to mention this fact.
Last Thursday the House of Commons unanimously endorsed a resolution reiterating its claim that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang and calling for Canada to accept 10,000 Uyghur refugees. Liberal MP Sameer Zuberi, working closely with the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, drove the initiative. The group’s website stated the “Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project is funded by the Washington-based National Endowment Fund for Democracy for its Advocacywork in Canada.” The media ignores how the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project is funded by the US government’s NED and that it openly seeks to balkanize China, rejecting the legitimacy of the nationalist/communist revolution that united China after more than a century of foreign domination.
Last week the US military convinced Canadian officials to hype a large balloon that apparently passed through Canadian airspace at the end of January. Global Affairs summoned the Chinese ambassador in Ottawa and Melanie Joly said the federal government would “take all necessary measures to safeguard Canada’s sensitive information”. Subsequently, Ottawa has joined Washington in supporting shooting down three more unidentified objects that many are suggesting are Chinese.
Two months ago, the Liberals released an Indo-Pacific Strategy that labeled China “an increasingly disruptive global power” engaged in “foreign interference and increasingly coercive treatment of other countries.” US ambassador David Cohen pushed for the strategy and immediately applauded its release.
Anti-China hysteria is sweeping through US public life. Its air force recently scuttled a plan for a corn mill in North Dakota claiming the Chinese firm’s investment represented a “significant threat” while Texas and other states are looking at banning people from China from buying land, homes or other buildings. Many US states have banned TikTok from public Wi-Fi networks, including at universities, and there’s talk of shuttering the Chinese-owned social media platform out right.
Washington is waging an economic war on China. The US has launched an unprecedented international campaign to block China’s access to advanced semiconductor chips.
Last week four-star Air Force General Mike Minihan, head of US Air Mobility Command, told his troops that the economic war is likely to turn into a shooting conflict by 2025. Minihan wrote that they should prepare for war with China, which will likely centre on Taiwan. In the recently signed budget the US allocated $10 billion over five years in arms to Taiwan, which most of the world considers a province of China. Hundreds of US troops are also stationed on the island.
Last week the US signed an agreement with the Philippines to use more bases. In “US secures deal on Philippines bases to complete arc around China” the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reported, “the US has secured access to four additional military bases in the Philippines – a key bit of real estate which would offer a front seat to monitor the Chinese in the South China Sea and around Taiwan. With the deal, Washington has stitched the gap in the arc of US alliances stretching from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia in the south. The missing link had been the Philippines, which borders two of the biggest potential flashpoints — Taiwan and the South China Sea.”
For its part, CNN reported last week on “plans to deploy new US Marine units to Japanese islands. The US Marine Corps also opened a new base on Guam last week, a strategically important US island east of the Philippines.”
The US already has over 100,000 troops stationed around China. Washington spends $2,400 a year per citizen on its military whereas Beijing spends $200 for each Chinese citizen. The US also spends twice as a much on militarism as a percent of its GDP.
Recently US ally Japan announced a plan to spend $320 billion US on its military over the next five years. Japan plans to acquire missiles that can strike China and its new National Security Strategy labels that country its “greatest strategic challenge ever”.
The US Empire is taking an ever more aggressive posture towards China and Washington is demanding Canada’s support, which Ottawa is increasingly giving.
Complaining about alleged Chinese influence on Canadian democracy without mentioning the far greater US influence is like calling the police on a shoplifter while a bull rampages in your porcelain shop.
US war planes have shot down three unidentified objects in North American airspace over the last three days, which is entirely without precedent.
On Sunday an octagon-shaped object was reportedly shot down over Lake Huron near the Canadian border after first being detected some 1,300 miles away over Montana on Saturday night. On Saturday a cylindrical object was reportedly shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory by an American F-22, and on Friday an object “about the size of a small car” was reportedly shot down after being detected over Alaska.
Unlike the Chinese balloon that was shot down earlier this month which the US claims was an instrument of espionage, as of this writing there’s still no solid consensus as to what these last three objects were or where they came from. While all three were found at high altitude like the balloon, the Pentagon is refusing to classify them as such, with the head of US Northern Command General Glen VanHerck going as far as to say it hadn’t yet been determined how these objects are even staying aloft.
“I’m not going to categorize them as balloons. We’re calling them objects for a reason,” VanHerck told the press on Sunday. “I’m not able to categorize how they stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure or it could be some type of a propulsion system. But clearly, they’re — they’re able to stay aloft.”
VanHerck also made headlines for saying he couldn’t rule out extraterrestrial origin for the objects.
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Local maritime authorities in East China's Shandong Province announced on Sunday that they had spotted an unidentified flying object in waters near the coastal city of Rizhao in the province and were preparing to shoot it down, reminding fishermen to be safe via messages. pic.twitter.com/aQbUntwy4m
To further confuse things, China has detected a UFO of its own that it was preparing to shoot down according to a report on Sunday. Last month Russia reported that it had shot down a UFO as well. A report on Saturday said the air force of Uruguay is investigating strange lights over the sky in the western part of the country.
But of course it could still be balloons. Moon of Alabama made a pretty good argument the other day that the object shot down over Alaska was likely a failed US weather balloon. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he was told by the White House that all of these mystery objects are believed by US officials to have been Chinese spy balloons, though the White House swiftly disputed this claim, saying it’s too early to categorize them as such.
For myself, I remain comfortable not knowing what the hell is going on with any of this right now. I’ve written periodically about how there’s an abundance of reasons to be intensely skeptical of the new UFO narrative that entered the mainstream in 2017 under highly suspicious circumstances, but I’m also uninterested in pretending I know everything about this weird universe we’ve all tumbled into. I remain open to all possibilities, from mundane balloons, to a sudden increase in interest in aerial objects that have long been common, to US government psyop, to lightbulb-headed visitors from the great unknown.
So I don’t really know what these UFOs are. But I do know what they will be used for.
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China is flying high level ISR aircraft over our country.
SANCTIONS IMMEDIATELY!
This is a national security emergency and it comes after we had a total FAA blackout (effecting Canada as well) and power went down in DC last week. This looks like cyber warfare.
It is a very safe bet that whatever the US government determines these objects to be, the response to that determination will feature increased militarism and the advancement of pre-existing Pentagon agendas. We’re already seeing Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna using the UFO incidents to argue for sanctions on China and to accuse Beijing of “cyber warfare”, and Republicans are already claiming that the threat of Chinese spy balloons means there can be no cuts to military spending.
In an article titled “Chinese spy balloon has GOP saying no cuts to defense,” The Hill’s Alexander Bolton quotes numerous congressional Republicans arguing that military cuts should be taken off the table in their negotiation over a debt ceiling, and that ideally the spending should be increased.
“The entire civilized world should recognize that communist China is probably the greatest threat we’ve ever faced, more severe than Soviet Russia was because of its economic integration into the West,” says perpetually war-horny senator Tom Cotton. “We should take every step we can to try to reduce our dependency on China [and] try to build stronger military deterrence against them.”
“I do not think that we should be talking about cutting the defense budget at all right now. If anything, substantial defense increases,” Cotton adds.
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lmao ofc. literally any excuse to protect the military industrial complex oh whoops a trillion dollars a year isn’t enough to shoot down balloons sorry guys no healthcare money pic.twitter.com/hPhbvksEZR
For the imperial swamp the answer is always more militarism; it doesn’t matter what the question is. Whether they decide these UFOs are a foreign threat or something unknown or something else entirely, the solution funneled through the US empire’s groupthink apparatus will entail more military spending and more weapons of war.
And again I remain open to all possibilities, but I do find it very interesting that we’re seeing completely unprecedented aerial kinetic warfare in North American skies which is certain to lead to more US military expansionism at the exact same time the US prepares its “great power competition” against China and the governments aligned with it.
As we’ve discussed previously, the empire has been going to extraordinary lengths to make sure the public plays along with a long-term campaign to secure US unipolar planetary hegemony. However this UFO narrative ends up playing out, we may be certain that it will be used to facilitate this agenda.
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The terrible earthquake disaster in Turkey and Syria should make us ponder the meaning of community and nation as well as security and sovereignty, writes Stuart Rees.
• 4 new U.S. military bases in the Philippines
• Chinese weather balloon over the U.S.
• “Peace Ark”, the Navy’s hospital ship
• Chinese scientists cloned three “super cows”
When asked if he would support the return of the death penalty, Anderson answered “Yes”, stating:
Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. You know that, don’t you? 100% success rate.
Sunak was immediately forced to state “that’s not my view, that’s not the Government’s view” in response to Anderson’s comment, but Anderson was by no means alone. iNews reported that Brendan Clarke-Smith and two other anonymous MPs leapt to Anderson’s defence. Clarke-Smith went so far as to say “I am one of those people” who supports capital punishment. Whilst it may appear that calls for capital punishment are an extreme position to take, Anderson’s views have deep roots in the history of Britain.
National Front
Britain’s far right element have included that National Front, a fringe party formed in 1967 by the combination of the League of Empire Loyalists, the British National Party, and the Racial Preservation Society – followed later by the neo-Nazi Greater Britain Movement.
In 1970, the National Front put out one of its most infamous campaign posters. Along with the urging to “Put Britons First” and “Vote National Front”, it stated six policies. These were:
STOP immigration
REJECT common market
RESTORE capital punishment
MAKE Britain great again
SCRAP overseas aid
REBUILD our armed forces
Horrifyingly, each of these positions can be found in Tory policy or supported by individual Tory MPs right now.
Common market
Enter, Brexit. The Tories – and the National Front, for that matter – have already seen their win here. Former PM Boris Johnson backed a hardline Brexit trade deal which he called “a turning point in the life of our nation”. Britain crashed out of the EU’s single market with little planning or preparation.
Since then, we’ve seen life in Britain follow a steady decline. As our own Joe Glenton summarised:
Brexit has caused a food price hike of nearly £6bn in the last two years, according to new research. The study by the London School of Economics (LSE) states that the rise in prices is due to increased red tape. That’s somewhat of an irony given Brexit was often touted as a way to reduce bureaucracy and added costs.
Britain’s imperialism of recent decades has been masked in the language of humanitarian intervention, international trade and European cooperation. The Brexit era has created renewed purchase for the idea of the next British empire.
In October, Braverman proudly told Tory Party Conference attendees that it is her ‘dream‘ and ‘obsession’ to see a flight traffic asylum seekers to offshore detention sites in Rwanda. This scheme comes alongside the inhumane and discriminatory Nationality and Borders Bill, which seeks to criminalise vulnerable people seeking refuge in the UK.
The planned Rwanda flights faced repeated protests and legal challenges due to their “‘shopping list’ of potential illegality” and stark inhumanity. Braverman failed to see them carried through because of the collapse of the then-government under Liz Truss.
Less aid, more arms
The Tory Party’s rule has also seen dramatic reductions in overseas aid, just as the National Front demanded 50 years ago. A statement from the House of Lords last year explained that:
In 2021 (the latest figures available), the UK’s ODA spend was £11,423mn, a decrease of £3,054mn (21.1%) on 2020. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) explained that this decrease was “driven by the government’s decision to reduce ODA from 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) to 0.5% in 2021”.
‘ODA’ here refers to official development assistance. Its main objective is “the promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries”. Spending on ODA has taken a sharp downturn in recent years, both in terms of raw cash and gross national income (GNI):
Meanwhile, the opposite is true for Britain’s military budget. Last year’s defence spending received an “increase of £3.6 billion from the previous year, which when adjusted for inflation is an 8.9% increase”. This was mirrored in the Ministry of Defence’s rise in the rankings of government payouts, becoming the “fifth highest spending area of UK government during 2021/22, up from sixth position in 2020/21.”
It seems increasingly clear that Britain’s problem wasn’t with the policies of the National Front themselves. After all, we’ve repeatedly voted Tories into government who echo all of their main talking points from 50 years ago.
The public doesn’t like its fascism in jackboots or wearing a shaven head. Instead, the horrors should come from the mouths of Eton alums with expensive suits and clipped accents.
With Conservatives like these, who even needs fascists any more?
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/ David Woolfall, CC BY 3.0, resized to 770*403
Kawayan De Guia (Philippines), Nature of Currency, 2017.
On 2 February 2023, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines met with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at Malacañang Palace in Manila, where they agreed to expand the US military presence in the country. In a joint statement, the two governments agreed to ‘announce their plans to accelerate the full implementation of the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA)’ and ‘designate four new Agreed Locations in strategic areas of the country’. The EDCA, which was agreed upon in 2014, allows the US to use land in the Philippines for its military activities. It was formulated almost a quarter of a century after US troops vacated their bases in the Philippines – including a massive base at Subic Bay – during the collapse of the USSR.
At that time, the US operated on the assumption that it had triumphed and no longer required the vast structure of military bases it had built up during the Cold War. From the 1990s, the US assembled a new kind of global footprint by integrating the militaries of allied countries as subordinate forces to US military control and building smaller bases to create a much greater reach for its technologically superior airpower. In recent years, the US has been faced with the reality that that its apparent singular power is being challenged economically by several countries, such as China. To contest these challenges, the US began to rebuild its military force structure through its allies and more of these smaller, but no less lethal, base structures. It is likely that three of the four new bases in the Philippines will be on Luzon Island, at the north of the archipelago, which would place the US military within striking distance of Taiwan.
Su Xiaobai (China), Great Consummation-3, 2008.
For the past fifteen years, the US has pushed its allies – including those organised in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – to strengthen their military power while increasing its techno-military power and reach by establishing smaller bases across the world and producing new aircraft and ships with greater territorial reach. This military force was then used in a series of provocative actions against those it perceived as threats to its hegemony, with two key countries, China and Russia, facing the sharp edge of the US spear. At the two ends of Eurasia, the US began to provoke Russia through Ukraine and provoke China through Taiwan. The provocations over Ukraine have now resulted in a war that has been ongoing for a year, while the new US bases in the Philippines are part of an escalation against China, using Taiwan as a battleground.
To make sense of the situation in East Asia, the rest of this newsletter will feature briefing no. 6 from No Cold War, Taiwan Is a Red Line Issue, which is also available for download as a PDF.
In recent years, Taiwan has become a flashpoint for tensions between the United States and China. The seriousness of the situation was recently underscored on 21 December, when US and Chinese military aircraft came within three metres of each other over the South China Sea.
At the root of this simmering conflict are the countries’ diverging perspectives over Taiwan’s sovereignty. The Chinese position, known as the ‘One China’ principle, is firm: although the mainland and Taiwan have different political systems, they are part of the same country, with sovereignty residing in Beijing. Meanwhile, the US position on Taiwan is far less clear. Despite formally adopting the One China policy, the US maintains extensive ‘unofficial’ relations and military ties with Taiwan. In fact, under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, US law requires Washington to provide arms ‘of a defensive character’ to the island.
The US justifies its ongoing ties with Taiwan by claiming that they are necessary to uphold the island’s ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. But, how valid are these claims?
A Foothold for Influence
To understand the contemporary geopolitical significance of Taiwan, it is necessary to examine Cold War history. Prior to the Chinese Revolution of 1949, China was in the midst of a civil war between the communists and the nationalists, or Kuomintang (KMT) – the latter of which received billions of dollars in military and economic support from Washington. The revolution resulted in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland, while the defeated KMT forces fled to the island of Taiwan, which had returned to Chinese sovereignty four years earlier, in 1945, following fifty years of Japanese colonial rule. From Taipei, the KMT declared that they were the rightful government-in-exile of all of China under the name of the Republic of China (ROC) – originally founded in 1912 – thereby rejecting the legitimacy of the PRC.
The US military soon followed, establishing the United States Taiwan Defence Command in 1955, deploying nuclear weapons to the island, and occupying it with thousands of US troops until 1979. Far from protecting ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ in Taiwan, the US instead backed the KMT as it established a dictatorship, including a 38-year-long consecutive period of martial law from 1949–1987. During this time, known as the ‘White Terror’, Taiwanese authorities estimate that 140,000 to 200,000 people were imprisoned or tortured, and 3,000 to 4,000 were executed by the KMT. Washington accepted this brutal repression because Taiwan represented a useful foothold – located just 160 kilometres off the south-eastern coast of the Chinese mainland – that it used to pressure and isolate Beijing from the international community.
From 1949–1971, the US successfully manoeuvred to exclude the PRC from the United Nations by arguing that the ROC administration in Taiwan was the sole legitimate government of the entirety of China. It is important to note that, during this time, neither Taipei nor Washington contended that the island was separate from China, a narrative that is advanced today to allege Taiwan’s ‘independence’. However, these efforts were eventually defeated in 1971, when the UN General Assembly voted to oust the ROC and recognise the PRC as the only legitimate representative of China. Later that decade, in 1979, the US finally normalised relations with the PRC, adopted the One China policy, and ended its formal diplomatic relations with the ROC in Taiwan.
Chu Weibor (China), Sun in the Heart, 1969.
For Peace in Taiwan, US Interference Must End
Today, the international community has overwhelmingly adopted the One China policy, with only 13 of 193 UN member states recognising the ROC in Taiwan. However, due to the continued provocations of the US in alliance with separatist forces in Taiwan, the island remains a source of international tension and conflict.
The US maintains close military ties with Taiwan through arms sales, military training, advisors, and personnel on the island, as well as repeatedly sailing warships through the narrow Taiwan Strait that separates the island from the mainland. In 2022, Washington pledged $10 billion in military aid to Taiwan. Meanwhile, US congressional delegations regularly travel to Taipei, legitimising notions of separatism, such as a controversial visit by former US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in August 2022.
Would the US or any other Western country accept a situation where China provided military aid, stationed troops, and offered diplomatic support to separatist forces in part of its internationally recognised territory? The answer, of course, is no.
In November, at the G20 summit in Indonesia, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden held their first in-person meeting since Biden was elected president. At the meeting, Xi strongly reiterated China’s stance on Taiwan, telling Biden that: ‘the Taiwan question is at the very core of China’s core interests, the bedrock of the political foundation of China-US relations, and the first red line that must not be crossed’. Although Biden responded by stating that the US adheres to the One China policy and that he is ‘not looking for conflict’, just a few months prior, he affirmed in a televised interview that US troops would militarily intervene to ‘defend Taiwan’, if necessary.
It is clear from the US’s track record that Washington is intent on provoking China and disregarding its ‘red line’. In Eastern Europe, a similarly reckless approach, namely the continued expansion of NATO towards Russia’s border, led to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. As progressive forces in Taiwan have declared, ‘to maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait and avoid the scourge of war, it is necessary to stop US interference’.
Huang Yuxing (China), Trees of Maturity, 2016.
On 31 January, Pope Francis conducted a mass in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with a million people in attendance, where he declared that ‘Political exploitation gave way to an “economic colonialism” that was equally enslaving’. Africa, the Pope said, ‘is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered. Hands off Africa!’. Later that same week, the US and the Philippines – in complete disregard of the pope’s declaration – agreed to build new military bases, completing the encirclement of US-allied bases around China and intensifying US aggression towards the country.
The pope’s cry could very well be ‘Hands off the world’. This of course means no new Cold War, no more provocations.
Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.
These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.
Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.
Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up.Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.
The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.
Deepfakes, AI and virtual reality are blurring the line between reality and a computer-generated illusion. Powered by AI software, deepfake audio and video move us into an age where it is almost impossible to discern what is real, especially as it relates to truth and disinformation. At the same time, the technology sector continues to use virtual reality to develop a digital universe—the metaverse—that is envisioned as being the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.
Advances in technology are outstripping our ability to protect ourselves from its menacing side, both in times of rights, humanity and workforce. In the absence of constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, we desperately need an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.
The courts have aligned themselves with the police state. In one ruling after another, the courts have used the doctrine of qualified immunity to shield police officers from accountability for misconduct, tacitly giving them a green light to act as judge, jury and executioner on the populace. All the while, police violence, the result of training that emphasizes brute force over constitutional restraints, continues to endanger the public.
The nation’s dependence on foreign imports has fueled a $1 trillion trade deficit. While analysts have pointed to the burgeoning trade deficit as a sign that the U.S. economy is growing, it underscores the extent to which very little is actually made in America anymore.
World governments, including the U.S., continue to use national crises such as COVID-19 to expand their emergency powers. None are willing to relinquish these powers when the crisis passes. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the U.S. government still has 42 declared national emergencies in effect, allowing it to sidestep constitutional protocols that maintain a system of checks and balances. For instance, the emergency declared after the 9/11 has yet to be withdrawn.
The nation’s infrastructure is rapidly falling apart. Many of the country’s roads, bridges, airports, dams, levees and water systems are woefully outdated and in dire need of overhauling, and have fallen behind that of other developed countries in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that crumbling infrastructure costs every American household $3,300 in hidden costs a year due to lost time, increased fuel consumption while sitting in traffic jams, and extra car repairs due to poor road conditions.
The nation is about to hit a healthcare crisis. Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other high-income country, it has the worst health outcomes than its peer nations. Experts are also predicting a collapse in the U.S. health care system as the medical community deals with growing staff shortages and shuttered facilities.
These are just a small sampling of the many looming problems that threaten to overwhelm us in the near future.
Thus far, Americans seem inclined to just switch the channel, tune out what they don’t want to hear, and tune into their own personal echo chambers.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing.
— Michael Parenti
Sign the petition: Don’t let House Republicans undermine the IRS for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
Republicans are trying to cut $80 billion in recent investments designed to strengthen the IRS and its ability to crack down on millionaire, billionaire, and corporate tax cheats through the Inflation Reduction Act.1 In other words: As per usual, Republicans want to issue handouts to their wealthy donors and leave working families in the lurch.
In 2019 alone, the richest 1% of households evaded $163 billion of the total of unpaid or underpaid taxes that year. When we allow the ultrawealthy to evade paying their fair share, we place that responsibility on regular working people. Donald Trump’s recently released tax returns are a clear example of this corruption and greed. His returns expose overseas bank accounts and manipulative real estate evaluations that effectively allowed him to dodge taxes. This is exactly why Democrats included funding for the IRS, to ensure there were people within the agency that would hold the wealthiest people in this country accountable. We cannot allow the GOP to tank our efforts to lessen the tax burden on the working class.
Fun stuff, you know, since we are getting close to USA shooting nuclear weapons, utilizing the dirty tricks of CIA and false flags and dirty bombs. You know this country’s history, yet the Democrats, the MoveOne outfit, is going for the One Percent.
You know, since these companies are as honest as a nun (not). Imagine, the amount of US taxpayer money paying for fraud, crimes, endless and meaningless and worthless reports, hearings, white papers, investigations, stalling tactics, cover-ups, PR spin, all of it, including the dirty, polluting, community-breaking externalities of these corporations. And how many of these corporations have GOVERNMENT contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions?
How many dual-income earners in the Five percent — $208,000 x 2 – $416,000 yearly income — have trouble sending their kids to Yale and Harvard, uh?
The book, Dream Hoarders tells a picture of those Five and Ten Percenters and the Twenty Percenters x two incomes ($97,000) = $195,000. But here, the irony, at the most elite-sucking, exceptionalist outfit locally, Aspen Institute:
Now, now. I have a 77-year-old fellow with all sorts of medical operations under his belt driving a bus, me as his monitor. There are older people driving school buses where I live, one aged 81. You know, high winds, in a tsunami zone, earthquake zone, king tides, ice, fallen trees, fallen power lines, rain rain rain. You know, that precious cargo — children — and we get $19 an hour, with three cameras on board, a tablet that marks our stops and time, and, well, you can imagine the lack of trust this huge corporation has in us, the lowly guys and gals. Precious cargo my ass!
Truckers in the world, got .06 (cents) a mile in the 1960s. And when you are owner-operator, you pay pay pay for expenses, upkeep, maintenance and more. In the old days, the idea was to get to New York from Portland, Oregon, as quick as possible with that load of seafood. One fellow told me he took ZipLock baggies with him to urinate on that 72-hours, one-way from Oregon to NYC. And, the pills. The uppers. Keeping awake.
This is, alas, Capitalism with a capital “c” for corruption, collusion, chaos, criminality, contraband, crassness.
But alas, MoveOne is going after the One Percent, because of course, all those Five Percenters working for the One Percenters in high level jobs, all those 10 Percenters who are hoarders and vote to not have an extra percentage of tax put upon them, all the Eichmann’s and Faustians, all of them, love the idea of becoming rich and famous too, or just rich. They think being part of the 80 Percent is a crime against their egos and sensibility.
There is only so much of the good money to go around to the One Percent and up to the 19 Percent, right? Just talked to a 51 year old who gave me a ride back home since my ride was indisposed in Newport. I had to get to the bus driving gig. I stopped someone coming from the hospital, and he gave me a lift. He grew up in Toledo, Oregon, and had a year’s worth of wages saved up for Oregon State University, but he opted to work. As a lineman for the local central utility district. His brother went to college, and even called him a loser. Just a few years ago, the brother apologized to this man, who has worked 32 years for this company, and he said he’s making $150,000 a year as he is in management. The brother never got that income with his college degree.
Yes, there have to be options for young people. Yes, everyone needs to go to a cool college, for history, for the arts, for writing, for sociology. Yes, there should be contruction courses in college. Yes, there should be a way to get those who might have a proclivity for hands-on high IQ stuff to get that hands-on education, but all junior and senior high school students should be exposed to Oceanography, Orwell and Organic farming. In addition to, Reading and Writing, but also, learning what soil is and is not. What a forest is. What the jet stream is, and what weather is and is not. Hands down, the only way humanity is going to solve the crimes of capitalism and the savagery of capitalism and the barbaric acts of the One Percent and maybe another 5 percent, is to arm ourselves with thinking, caring, community-driven people.
Out here in Rural Oregon, we have those rugged (sic) individuals looking for acres and a place to put some chickens and cool motorcycles and jungle gyms on, and a place AWAY from humanity. Imagine that.
Some of those homes I pass by in the rural landscape are 6,000 square foot lodges that would look like they fit in Aspen or Jackson Hole.
Here it is, then, the shifting baseline disorder. Up is down, and somehow, Nazi History is Okay History. Ukraine is a country with a violent and racist history, and now, worse than ever. But these kids and these linemen, well, they do not want to know about THAT.
As we drain the tax coffers for Zelensky, for all those military industrial complex big boys and little ones.
This is fact — Russia-Soviet Union beat the Nazi’s then:
The Battle That Changed the Course of WWII: 80th Anniversary of the Soviet Victory at Stalingrad
On February 2, 1943, Nazi forces trapped in the ruined city of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) by the Soviet Red Army surrendered, marking the end of one of the bloodiest and most intense battles in history – the Battle of Stalingrad.
During the course of this battle, Soviet forces managed to trap a substantial force of Nazi soldiers inside the very city the latter wanted to capture. The Soviet’s also managed to repel all attempts by the rest of the Nazi war machine to relieve their trapped comrades, and to finally break the enemy’s will to resist.
This triumph allowed the USSR to seize the strategic initiative and effectively turn the tide of the entire World War II, paving the way for the eventual defeat of the Nazi Germany a little over two years later. (source)
A mass grave of Red Army soldiers, executed on orders from Franz Halder, at Stalag 307 near Dęblin, Poland.
Don’t let MoveOn fool you — Liz Warren maybe a super capitalist, but that means she is for great wealth misdistribution, great land exploitation, the Monroe Doctrine on steroids, and of course, money, missiles and mush for Ukraine.
Michael Parenti — Peeling back those Shifting Baselines!
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States. (source)
Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?
Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes—and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans—are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no propertied wealth; they live in debt.
Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt. In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick thru garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops. (source)
Sixty years ago, a crowd of us young people anxiously massed around a black-and-white TV in my college student union building. The US and the USSR were in an existential standoff. The US had deployed ballistic nuclear missiles in Turkey. When the Soviets responded by placing missiles in Cuba, the US demanded their removal or face dire consequences.
We all breathed an enormous collective sigh of relief when Nikita Khruschev publicly agreed to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba. John F. Kennedy secretly reciprocated by removing US missiles from Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. The whole world rejoiced. A close encounter with a war, which could have threatened civilization, had been avoided.
In the aftermath, a robust international peace movement demanded and achieved some successes including the Anti-Ballistic Missile and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. Those halcyon days are now over. The US is largely responsible for scrapping those disarmament treaties. The last remaining Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) expires in February 2026 and has faint prospects of being renewed.
Back in 1962, in the midst of the Cold War, it would have been unfathomable to think that we were living in hopeful times of relative security. But such was the case, compared to the current situation. The US and the USSR were both willing to step back from the brink of nuclear conflict in 1962. Both sides sought accommodation; neither sought victory. Now the US and its allies seek a mortal defeat of Russia.
No Exit Strategy
History has shown wars either end in a negotiated peace or in victory for one side.
The world was fortunate that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with both sides willing to seek accommodation rather than victory. In contrast, the currently raging and indeed escalating Ukraine War could be the prelude to World War III because neither side appears to have an exit strategy; one by choice, the other because its back is to the wall.
The US’s intent is victory by “overextending and unbalancing” Russia in the words of the 2019 position paper by the semi-governmental Rand Corporation. As analyst Rick Sterling pointed out, this was the playbook for the US to provoke Russia into the current conflict. Bombers have been repositioned within striking range of key Russian strategic targets, additional tactical nuclear weapons deployed, and US/NATO war exercises have been held on Russia’s borders.
German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel recently revealed that the western powers never intended to make peace with Russia. That admission explicitly articulated what had been long enshrined in US foreign policy. Sooner or later the mounting provocations by the US and its allies deliberately threatening its existence would have had to be addressed by Russia.
Expansion of NATO
NATO was founded in 1949 at the onset of the Cold War against the then Soviet Union and later against Russia. NATO was from the beginning not so much an “alliance” as it was a military extension of the US empire where all members had to be integrated with and under US military command.
From its initial 12 members, NATO had expanded east toward the USSR with the addition of Greece, Turkey, and West Germany, by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After that crisis and despite assurances to the Soviets and then the Russian Federation, NATO has expanded to the very borders of what is today Russia with a full membership of 28 hostile states.
Nuclear proliferation
The horrendous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 marked the dawn of the nuclear era with the US holding a monopoly of this ultimate weapon of mass destruction. The Soviet Union defensively developed its own capacity by 1949, followed by the UK in 1953. Since 1962, the nuclear club expanded to France, China, Israel, rivals India and Pakistan, and finally North Korea.
Currently, the US has 1644 deployed strategic nuclear warheads compared to 1588 by Russia. The only other powers with strategic warheads deployed on intercontinental missiles or bombers are France and the UK.
All of today’s nuclear powers, according to the Federation of American Scientists, “continue to modernize their remaining nuclear forces at a significant pace, several are adding new types and/or increasing the role they serve in national strategy and public statements, and all appear committed to retaining nuclear weapons for the indefinite future.” The danger of nuclear war is ever greater, exacerbated by potential unintentional or accidental triggers.
US hegemony threatened
Especially with the rise of China as a world economic power, US hegemony is being challenged. Washington has not adjusted to an emerging multilateral world graciously.
The one third of humanity that has failed to be sufficiently subservient to what President Biden calls his “rules-based order” have been placed under asphyxiating unilateral economic sanctions. Western Europe, a would-be natural trade partner with their neighbor to the east, has been pressured to sever their economic ties with Moscow. And if there is a hint of hesitancy, the US simply uses force as it did to end the export of Russian gas to Germany via the Nord Stream pipelines.
However, the US has found that it cannot always prevail. Pentagon Plan B, accordingly, is a plague of chaos as has been the fate for Afghanistan, Libya, Haiti, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, etc. For the hegemon, a failed state is better than an independent one. Given the alternative of chaos, one that would make the fire-sale Yeltsin period look like a picnic (and one in which Putin was complicit), Russia sees no alternative but to try to prevail at whatever cost.
Normalization of nuclear war
Adding to the present danger is the normalization of war. When I was in elementary school, the US government’s policy was to bring home the fear of nuclear war in order to justify the post-WWII expansion of the empire’s military. So, us children were terrorized with “duck-and-cover” drills. Families were to sequester in their own private bomb shelters.
Now the prevailing propaganda from Washington is that nuclear war can be “won.” Dr. Strangelove is no longer satire. This planning to fight a nuclear war as if it were not an existential threat is institutionalized insanity. Symptomatic is the Smithsonian Magazine’s reassurance: “Today we live in a vastly different world…the threat of global thermonuclear war has mostly faded.”
However, Robert Kagan, spouse of the US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, asks: “Can America learn to use its power?” The neo-con then argues in favor of a vigorous nuclear confrontation with Russia on the grounds that Putin will most likely back down.
As if in response, the inimitable Caitlin Johnstone retorts: “It’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.”
A pathway to a negotiated peace settlement is lacking
The Rand Corporation recently floated the perspective that: “The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the US.” Rand not only reflects, but also leads ruling class opinion. So, this analysis is significant because it backs off from advocating complete victory in Ukraine against Russia.
Unfortunately, not only does the Biden administration have no exist strategy to its wars without end, but it also faces little domestic opposition to this policy compared to former times.
While a handful of Republicans – mainly for narrow partisan reasons – have questioned the ever-expanding US war efforts, there is absolute war unanimity among Democrats. The Democrats have become the full-throated party of war. United with the neoconservatives, the “pimps of war” are charting the course of our future. Even some putative leftists in the US are beating the war drums to “support Ukraine’s victory against the Russian invasion.”
How I long for those days gone by when the choice of “better red than dead” was an option.
The Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) vehemently protests CELAC’s (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños / Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) apparent support for multinational military intervention into Haiti, and strongly opposes CELAC including unelected Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry in its recent summit in Buenos Aires. We deem such acts as betrayals of the Haitian people as well as the democratic and anti-colonial forces in the region.
Founded in 2011, CELAC is a bloc of 33 Caribbean and Latin American countries. It has stated its mission as promoting regional integration and providing an alternative to U.S. power in the region, especially as that power is channeled through the multi-state entity, Organization of American States (OAS).
At the conclusion of the summit, CELAC members released the Buenos Aires Declaration, a 28-page, 111-point document covering environmental cooperation, post-pandemic economic recovery, food and energy security. Included in that document was CELAC’s endorsement of the development of the region as a Zone of Peace, free of nuclear weapons and committed to non-militaristic solutions to intra-regional problems.
Yet, CELAC’s commitments to peace as well as to other principles, such as “democracy; the promotion, protection and respect of Human Rights, international cooperation, the Rule of Law, multilateralism, respect for territorial integrity, non-intervention in the internal affairs of States, and defense of sovereignty,” are all directly undermined by its stance on Haiti. By inviting Henry, CELAC has legitimized an unpopular, Core Group-installed, de facto prime minister in Haiti. Henry has not only refused to hold elections, but he has presided over the departure from office of every single elected official in the country. Meanwhile, against the wishes of the Haitian masses and majority, he has begged for foreign intervention to shore up his power.
The Haiti/Americas Team affirms the words of Ajamu Baraka, chairperson of BAP’s Coordinating Committee, who stated, “Solidarity has to be reciprocal. CELAC must commit itself to supporting the democratic struggles in Haiti against an illegitimate U.S. puppet [government]. Inviting the Haitian government to CELAC is like inviting Juan Guaidó to represent Venezuela.”
Points 101 and 102 of the Buenos Aires Declaration directly address the situation in Haiti. Point 102 endorses the September 8 letter from the UN Secretary General to the President of the Security Council encouraging the organization of a “specialized multinational force” to intervene in Haiti. Nowhere in the Declaration do they mention the role of the international community in creating the current crisis in Haiti. Nowhere do they mention that the crisis is a crisis of imperialism, brought on by the United Nations, the Core Group (an alliance of countries as well as multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank), the United States, Canada, and other so-called “friends” of Haiti in the international community.
If CELAC supports non-intervention in the internal affairs of independent states, how can they call for foreign intervention in Haiti? If CELAC promotes a Zone of Peace, how can they demand foreign military intervention? If CELAC is for regional sovereignty, how can they support an imperialist design, driven by the United States and others? If CELAC is an advocate for the people of the Caribbean and Latin America, how can they so brazenly ignore the wishes and demands of the people of Haiti?
BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team suggests CELAC government leaders listen to the voices of the Haitian people, and their supporters in the region, as well as CELAC Social. This new entity of more than 200 organizations issued its own declaration demanding, in part, that the “region give its own response to the Haitian question, respecting the principle of non-intervention and the right of the people of Haiti to define sovereignly their destiny.”
CELAC’s position on Haiti is ill-informed and dangerous, representing an all-too frequent, reactionary “Haiti exception” when it comes to the “progressive” governments of the Americas. Peace and solidarity in the region cannot be achieved at the expense of Haitian sovereignty. CELAC must avoid contributing to Haiti’s current crisis—the crisis of imperialism.
This latest instance of police brutality is not about racism in policing or black-on-black violence.
The entire institution is corrupt.
The old guard—made up of fine, decent, lawful police officers who took seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace—has given way to a new guard hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
Memphis’ now-disbanded Scorpion unit provides a glimpse into the looming crisis in policing that has gone beyond mere militarization.
Unfortunately, while much has been said about the dangers of police militarization, a warrior mindset that has police viewing the rest of the citizenry as enemy combatants, and law enforcement training that teaches cops to shoot first and ask questions later, little attention has been paid to the role that “roid rage,” triggered by anabolic steroid use and abuse by police, may contribute to the mounting numbers of cases involving police brutality.
A far cry from Mayberry’s benevolent, khaki-clad neighborhood cops, police today are stormtroopers on steroids, both literally and figuratively: raging bulls in blue.
“Steroid use,” as researcher Philip J. Sweitzer warns, “is the not-so-quiet little secret of state and city police departments.”
Illegal without a prescription and legitimized by a burgeoning industry of doctors known to law enforcement personnel who will prescribe steroids and other growth hormones based on bogus diagnoses, these testosterone-enhancing drugs have become hush-hush tools of the trade for police seeking to increase the size and strength of their muscles and their physical endurance, as well as gain an “edge” on criminals.
Broad-shouldered. Slim-waisted. Veiny. Tree-trunk necks. Rippling physiques. And as big as action heroes. That’s how Men’s Health describes these “juicers in blue”: cops using a cocktail of steroid drugs to transform themselves into “a flesh-and-blood Justice League.”
“Because juicing cops are a secretive subculture within a secretive subculture,” exact numbers are hard to come by, but if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed, it’s more widespread than ever, with 25% of police using these drugs to bulk up and supercharge their aggression.
Indeed, while steroids are physically transformative, building muscle mass, they are also psychologically affective, upping resistance to physical and emotional stress during periods of prolonged or heavy conflict, to the delight of the military, which was involved in their early development and experimentation.
As Philip Sweitzer documents, “Cops on steroids are simply the natural evolution of a conscious decision by the federal government to promote military authoritarianism in drug enforcement, and the implementation of military technologies.”
Roid rage is yet another example of blowback from a militaristic culture.
When that roid rage is combined with the trappings of a militarized cop armed to the teeth and empowered to shoot first and ask questions later, as well as to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, the danger of any encounter with a cop grows exponentially more deadly.
Given the growing numbers of excessive force incidents by police, especially against unarmed individuals, we cannot afford to ignore the role that doping by police plays in this escalating violence.
For instance, in one of the largest busts nationwide involving law enforcement, 248 New Jersey police officers and firefighters were found to have been getting fraudulent prescriptions of anabolic steroids, human growth hormones and other muscle-building drugs from a doctor. A subsequent investigation of those officers found that many had previously been sued for excessive force or civil rights violations, or had been arrested, fired or suspended for off-duty.
Not surprisingly, police have consistently managed to sidestep a steady volley of lawsuits alleging a correlation between police doping and excessive force, insulated by a thin blue wall of silence, solidarity and coverups, powerful police unions, and the misapplied doctrine of qualified immunity.
Qualified immunity is how the police state stays in power.
As Hoberman points out, “The police establishment has reacted to the steroid culture by equivocating: announcing zero-tolerance policies while doing the absolute minimum to detect and control steroid use.”
Thus, any serious discussion about police reform needs to address the use of steroids by police, along with a national call for mandatory testing.
For starters, as journalist David Meinert suggests, police should be subjected to random drug tests for use of steroids, testosterone and HCG (an artificial form of testosterone), and testing should be mandatory and immediate any time an officer is involved in a shooting or accused of unnecessary force.
This is no longer a debate over good cops and bad cops.
It’s a power struggle between police officers who rank their personal safety above everyone else’s and police officers who understand that their jobs are to serve and protect; between police trained to shoot to kill and police trained to resolve situations peacefully; most of all, it’s between police who believe the law is on their side and police who know that they will be held to account for their actions under the same law as everyone else.
Unfortunately, more and more police are being trained to view themselves as distinct from the citizenry, to view their authority as superior to the citizenry, and to view their lives as more precious than those of their citizen counterparts. Instead of being taught to see themselves as mediators and peacemakers whose lethal weapons are to be used as a last resort, they are being drilled into acting like gunmen with killer instincts who shoot to kill rather than merely incapacitate.
We’ve allowed the government to create an alternate reality in which freedom is secondary to security, and the rights and lives of the citizenry are less important than the authority and might of the government.
Stop Wapenhandel (Stop the Arms Trade) and The Transnational Institute (TNI) co-produced an important dossier in November that details the enormous funds the West is spending on a new arms race, reports Pip Hinman.
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Lt. Col. William Astore for his current thoughts. We focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of the U.S. in the tensions and its capacity to reduce them.
We are grateful to William Astore for sharing his valuable and thought-provoking views. The interview was arranged by John Rachel, Director of the Peace Dividend Project. The Peace Dividend strategy is not a meme or a bumper sticker. It is an end-to-end methodology for challenging the political establishment and removing from power those compromised individuals who work against the interests of the great majority of U.S. citizens. The only hope for our hyper-militarized nation is each and every one of us having a decisive voice in determining the future we want for ourselves and our children.
If that news wasn’t actually published anywhere, then all of the ‘news’-media fail their most-basic obligation to the public: to provide facts that are crucial in order for the public to understand — instead of to mislead the public to misinterpret and misunderstand — the most important news of the day: to misunderstand the events that are shaping our future history.
If, instead, that news was published somewhere but Google refused to produce a find of that extremely important news-report, then Google fails its most-basic obligation to the public, because it’s not letting the public understand the world; it is instead hiding crucial important facts so as to encourage misunderstanding.
So, I then did a Yandex search for that headline, “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022,” and it found only four finds, which were the Reuters direct news-report, plus three obscure appearances of that headline, one from Moldova, one from Vietnam, and one from Poland — nothing at all mainstream or even ‘alt-news’ anywhere. And, five hours later, it was the same four finds plus two more — one from Tanzania, and the other an obscure personal-finance site, neither of which two additional sites, when I clicked onto it, actually had that headline or news-report on it.
Yandex isn’t American but Russian. Its main person and founder is the Russian-Maltese-Israeli (all three citizenships) billionaire Arkady Volozh who resigned as the company’s CEO on 30 December 2022 because he had been sanctioned by the EU for being a Russian billionaire who had kept his Russian citizenship and residence after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
So far as I can tell from those two Web-searches, that Reuters news-report, which like all such had been sent out from that news-agency to thousands of news-media around the world, wasn’t published by any of them.
It’s remarkable but — otherwise than here — unremarked-upon. And, though investors in America’s suppliers to the military benefit from controlling their markets (the U.S Government and its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations), the actual performance of the U.S. military ever since the end of WW II (in places such as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and many others) has been poor. When profits instead of the nation’s actual defense are the main motivation for a nation’s military expenditures, enormous waste and a stunningly unsucessful military are the result. For example, Russia, where the Government controls the corporations that make its weapons, spends one-twentieth what the U.S. does on its military, but no one would say that its military is only one-twentieth as effective.
The 26 January JTA Daily Briefing arrived in my mailbox with the subject: “Major Israeli Raid in Jenin Kills 9 Palestinians.” I was sadly dumbfounded by the imparted insensitivity and inhumanity. Would any humanity-loving organization blare such news about the killing of the Other? Supposedly, the Oslo accords were a movement toward peace, but Zionist Israel has continued to wreak violence unabated, and Palestinians of every age and gender are the victims whether they be civilians or not. Yes, the violence is not only from one side, but the violence is overwhelmingly carried out by the Israeli side. And, when it comes to violence by Palestinians, one must realize that they have the right to resist oppression, occupation, siege, and violence.
Imagine what would have been the reaction in the West if a headline had appeared — “Major Palestinian Raid in Tel Aviv Kills 9 Palestinians”?
Such is the hypocrisy of the “West” that Israel can unleash lethal violence against Palestinians with scarcely a peep from the “West.” A Palestinian reprisal would undoubtedly be denounced in the strongest language as terrorism, and Palestinian officials would be called onto the carpet to unequivocally condemn the violence. Even the United Nations hardly comes across as a neutral party.
The US can steal oil in open daylight from Syria, and there is not a peep from US-allied countries. Palestinians know this all too well, as Israel has been expropriating Palestinian oil and gas for years. The US occupies Cuban territory, and there is hardly a peep from the US-alliance. Britain can steal the gold reserves of the Venezuelan people, and there is little complaint from governments in the West.
Western thievery has extended to Russia, as its bank assets were frozen by the US and by the European Union with the stated intention of using Russian assets to reconstruct Ukraine.
The peoples of Palestine, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela people, among other nationalities, suffer from US thievery and violence. As an accomplice or silent actor, this also points to the inhumanity of US-allied governments. These are the same governments that criticize Russia for its “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine.
A Telling Comparison
What happened when one out-of-uniform US marine officer, first lieutenant Robert Paz, was killed by Panamanian soldiers in December 1989? US president George HW Bush launched Operation Just Cause [sic]. A US invasion of Panama happened. About 600 Panamanians were killed (half civilians) and 23 US soldiers. Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, the drug-running CIA asset (and a person who should have been untouchable by having diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Article 29 reads, “The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable.”) was abducted and brought back to the US to face American justice.
Since 2014, following the US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, a war has been carried out by the Ukrainian state, including its neo-Nazi fighters, against the predominantly ethnic Russian peoples of Donbass. Over 13,000 people had been killed, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.1
Consider that the US invaded Panama after one US marine was killed, but the killing of thousands of ethnic Russians (who had been clamoring for secession to Russia) was muted by the US, the self-same country which created the circumstances that filliped Russia’s Special Military Operation to protect its security from further NATO encroachment.
That the US invaded a country (many countries in its history) does not mitigate a Russian invasion of a country. But the invasions are not the same. There was no credible threat to US security from Syria, Palestine, Iran, Libya, Viet Nam, Venezuela, etc, but the US invaded or abetted the attack on these countries nonetheless. Russia has made irrefutably clear the security concerns posed by NATO missiles appearing on the Ukraine-Russia border just minutes away from Moscow. Russia was faced with an existential threat, a threat that the US would never allow (witness the US reaction to the stationing of Soviet missiles in Cuba).
This essential background information will not appear in monopoly media.
“According to calculations of the total number of human losses related to the conflict in Ukraine (from April 14, 2014 to January 31, 2021) amounts to 42,000-44,000: 13,100-13,300 killed (no less than 3,375 civilians, about 4,150 Ukrainian servicemen and approximately 5,700 members of armed groups)… Tass.
News of January 26, 2023, from InfoDefenseEspañol channel:
Bundestag deputy Petr Bistron to Olaf Scholz about the transfer of tanks to Ukraine:
You have just said goodbye to the fundamental provisions of Germany’s post-war foreign policy, Germany’s special responsibility towards the world. The slogan ‘Never again’ meant the refusal to supply weapons to conflict zones. This has always been the core of German foreign policy. You will go down in history as the chancellor who trampled on this legacy.
It is exactly as Petr Bistron tells Olaf Scholz: he has thrown away the fundamental German international policy adopted after the horrible and shameful crimes of fascism. A decision that Scholz takes on purpose, forgetting or trivializing the millions of dead in World War II, between 50,000,000 and 60,000,000 of which a third, between 20,000,000 and 25,000,000 were Russians. The most horrific war ever fought on earth 80 years ago, is about to be surpassed by the one being waged between the United States and NATO against Russia, with the participation of a nominally democratic Germany, but really as Nazi as that under Hitler in the first half of the 20th century.
Once again, the imperialism of the 21st century illegally and illegitimately attacks the rest of the world, starting with Russia, the first obstacle to be eliminated in order to continue razing less powerful countries. Nazism began under disguise in Germany in the 1930s until the Nazis soon took off their masks and continued with sabotage, arson, attacks, arrests… war and occupation in Europe and the Jewish holocaust. Today Germany, one of the richest countries, with a high standard of living, including education, is run on a whim by the most Nazi country of all: the United States. This ‘democracy’ has become the highest form of Nazism, it is a crude deception for conquest: ‘By deception and intrigue, so shall you make war’.
In the name of the Western democracy, the United States and NATO have killed, wounded and driven millions of people from their homes since the Second World War with the UN as an abulic and consenting witness. Only the immoral or the foolish do not know this; the rest of the world knows it and will suffer to their regret, albeit too late. Their passivity will not help them. It is not neutral. They will pay for it and will not be able to accuse Russia because they did not even want to ask their own governments: why did you help the Ukrainian Nazis in their government and their battalions in the genocide of the Donbas populations? Why did not you protect the victims as Russia did? Why didn’t you ask your governments NOT to send weapons for the benefit of the most deadly killing machine in the world, the United States?
We are not just dealing with one more war, this may be the end of Humanity or huge parts of it. It could end in one more extinction on earth, just one more species, with the difference that ours is caused by our own actions.
You didn’t need to hear it from me that the USA is subjected to some of the most insane and inhumane policies tied to the criminal injustice system; tied to mass public K12 education; and corporate overlording; or anti-union activities; also to taxation; or finance; and health care; tied to infrastructure care; or tied to retirement protection. I’ve written about social work and social services many times, and the terrible outcomes of those I have served: just released from prison; pregnant teenagers; foster youth, 16 to 21 years old; veterans and their families deemed homeless and medically fragile; folks with substance abuse issues as well as living homeless; gang-influenced youth; inmates in a federal correctional institution; community college students; active duty military; lifelong learning senior citizens; adults with intellectual, developmental and psychological disabilities.1
Enough, already. Plenty more where those stories came from!
Moving on: Here, the latest mainstream media-press account, again, a day late, a few hundred million dollars short: Oregon is facing a drastic shortage of mental health care workers. The state needs as many as 35,000 new workers by some estimates to fill the mental health care needs in the state. But people interested and willing to go into the field are facing high barriers to doing the work. What can be done to change the system, and open up the pipeline of behavioral health care workers?
It’s way beyond the crappy pay, the student loans, the overloads, the lack of respect, poor management, lack of trauma informed managers, and so much more. The value in this society is big time sports, big time corporate jobs, big time doctors and CEOs and administrators and, well, you get the picture: if I am paid $17 an hour to be a case manager, and then a toilet and bedroom cleaner with an Air B & B gets $21 an hour, and if a bus driver for schools gets $19 an hour, and if some of us volunteer and get diddly squat from tax write offs for all that work, and, you get the idea: money for nothing, and the Value of Nothing.
Until we have 250 elementary students to one counselor, when we have rotating visiting nurses, when we have K12 teachers swamped with the stupidity of curriculum and the stupidity of the local community hobbling teaching; when we have the hands on stuff cut — auto mechanics, construction, floral arranging, orthotics, pet techs, even beauty classes, all of that, including leather working, ceramics, graphic arts, film making, radio broadcasting, gardening, husbandry, basket weaving, well, we are in this mess of digital gulags and the deadening of the Homo sapiens into Homo erectus algorith consumo retailopethicus.
I’ve seen the blasphemy daily, as foster and group homes are going by the wayside for troubled youth and youth and adults living with DD-ID-PD. We have care homes going by the wayside, and we have retirement and terminal medical care facilities costing someone $6,000 a month for one room and pretty basic food. More and more people are paid this $15 an hour shit wage for a vital job, and additionally, they have to drive drive drive to work, and then, put in incredible stressful hours up to sometimes 10 or 12 hour work days. With some of the most despicable bosses around. Pressure pressure pressure. Forget about the fact that non-profits are for-profits, and those retirement-care facilities are monopolized by a few dozen across the land. Speaking of bullshit jobs:
We are at that crossroads of wondering just how far the human brain and spirit can take now, 2023, with the cascading of big-time issues penetrating the souls of people, stripping us bare, stripping our immune systems, and culling our brains. Good people. Vulnerable people. We are trapped in a world of complexities and counter-intuitive thinking and rationalizations, but those complexities are nothing compared to C-PTSD: complex post traumatic stress disorder. More than just a label. The foisting of so much media madness, too, on top of our personal hells, and then add to that, the reality of capitalism as a “search and destroy the competition/ mom and pop/ bricks and mortar/ people-centered businesses” sort of law of the “jungle,” Lord of the Flies style.
We have trauma deeply repressed, unprocessed, hidden, sort of hanging there, in the psyche, and alas, a trigger will pull the anxiety into the bloodstream until a whole lot of mental and shaking comes along.
It is not just a dog eat dog adventure into chaos, and more than bizarre allusion of the law of the jungle crap. Capitalism is scorched earth devaluation of humans policies. The economies of scale is for the shareholders and top brass, not for some nirvana of great benefit to the rank and file. There is so much ugliness and cut-throat shit that the world today serves up, on top of atomized families, communities, friendships; on top of the sink or swim nature of things in AmeriKa. Imagine, facing all of that PLUS the traumatic disorders.
Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear. Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.
— Gabor Mate, Oct 14, 2019
Inside, hidden, pushed down, recriminated, hated, laughed at, and as the Anglo Saxon credo says, “Keepa stiff upper lip, bloke.” It’s bad enough that the systems — education, politics, local governance, media, Press, family, government business, bureaucracies — are against the 80 Percent: those that do not have political, real estate, employment, financial, familial, networking clout. But the so-called representatives we “vote” in and who are picked by those we vote in are working for THEM, the point zero-zero-zero One Percent; the One Percent; the Five Percent and possibly the rest of the 15 percent. Representation and clout and power for the 20 percent, more or less. Of course, there is the Faustian Bargain for the 15 Percenters. There is the Eichmann Syndrome. There is the lock-step belief in the hope that providing support for the elite and their legions of manipulators will get you away from decay: neighborhood, school system, environmental, familial, fraternal, transactional decay.
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
— Michael Parenti)
A decaying society pays off (benefits handsomely) for the 19 or 20 Percent. And the cognitive dissonance and the collective Stockholm Syndrome mixed witht he GAD — general anxiety disorder — weathers the shit out of us, the 80 Percent. Until we have a shortage of mental health/social services heroes (oh, shortages left and right, and everywhere one cares to look). We need navigators for almost everything in this legalistic, contractualized, atomized, disassociative society, since everything in the pipeline we need to survive, i.e. safety nets, is almost impossible to interpret and understand. People need help with bills, debts, loans, health care, insurance, housing, medical needs, and mental health. The house we live in may have some fancy furniture and amazing kitchen and bathroom redos, but if the roof leaks (and it’s leaking like a sieve), then the entire half a million dollar home is a goner, sooner than later. Flooded, soaked, warped, moldy and a tear down soon.
Think of the mental health of a child as the roof for that child’s psychic and humanistic house, world, well being. Think of the totality of those in and around that child suffering from the leaky roof. Think of the collective community in and around the youth with the leaky mental health roof gushing water onto them. No amount of Advance Placement classes and super duper athletic training will help build a child into a teen and then into an adult with some normalcy and balance and internal strength without the leaky roof being fixed, maybe R & R-ed, but absolutely not full of holes.
Lifeblood and gut-brain connections are connected to the holism of grand positive mental and spiritual health. The gut-brain-hormone-immune system is all predicated on sound mental health, and learning what trauma is, then stopping it, preventing it, and, of course, patching it up, i.e. treating it. Therapies are the construction processes for that leaky psychic roof.
And so, depression, general anxiety disorder, the new ailments of social media and Facebook shaming, and the disassociative links to all that time on tablets and surfing the internet, and hooking into a Zoom Doom room for every class, every human (sic) interaction. Think of the shame of people in the USA for being so, well, collectively stupid, impotent, flagging, when it comes to the reality that celebrities, the rich, the famous, the leadership, the administrations, the governors’ offices, the entire shit show is worthy of complete deconstruction and dismantling or imploding, yet, we are still in this continuum of never pushing the edge of the envelope and standing down those systems of exploitation, abuse, scamming and general anxiety setting progroms.
This is normal, but today, a diatribe like this would get you Tazed, hog-tied, thrown in jail, and put into a mental ward:
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’
So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’
I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell –
‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’
Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis.
But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
It’s normal, that reaction, no, and we should embrace the roots of any sort of explosion of emotion that fits this “Anger moment.” But beware: I have been a social services practitioner, and the people in it and at the managerial level are not the right folk for the job in so many cases. And, while I always connect these diatribes to my own journey, AKA struggle, this is more than about the stupidity of people in my neck of the woods — Lincoln County — who have passed me over on more than a dozen or so attempts to get employed here in this rural county as a social services practitioner. That is the way of the middling, the milquetoast, and I have to say the attitude of ignorant and destructive human beings in social services. There is no way in hell it seems that any of these middle brow folk can see me as a co-worker at the county, state or city or nonprofit level to be a case manager or social services navigator.
Here we are, then, stuck in the dead pan of AmeriKa, where conformity is the way of the sheeple, the lemming. Following the crowd or buying into the good old broken system, this is the way of the Yanqui. Oh, they say over and over — “You can’t fight City Hall. I’m just one person. They are too powerful and we are too weak.” AmeriKans have caved!
Until, well, sorry to say, the 80 Percent are begging for life support. Begging for basics. In this upside down world of an earth moving closer and closer to nuclear hell, all because of a few elites, a few money changers in Jesus Christ’s story, people are hobbled and strangled by the oppressiveness of elites running the show and ruling the roost. Money changers a la War Mongers, a la Big Pharma, a la Larry Fink and Blackrock, so many tens of thousands of top dog criminals. Can you imagine those Pseudos buying that old time religion story, Matthew 21:12!?
The crowds replied, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.” Then Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves. And He declared to them, “It is written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer.’ But you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’
Imagine that sanity, daily: distrupting the disruptors? Well, try this out for size: This is 2022 IRS 1040 filing time, but maybe also a time for 100 million USA households to declare Zelensky and his sidekick wife as OUR dependents, our WRITE-OFFS, our DEDUCTIONS. That’s $2,000 each, at $4,000 total, and with 100,000,000 filing that way, as the dirty Ukrainian couple as our “children,” hell, we’ll get back some of the drug-gun-offshore money of the Ukrainian Nazis the USA Criminal Enterprise has stolen from our taxpayer coffers to throw at Zelensky’s war — count that $400,000,000,000 total for 100 million 1040s filed with the ugly couple as our dual deduction of $4,000. That’s four hundred billion $$.
In our pockets. And then, hmm, how about massive rolling strikes. IN concert with Mutal Aid. Can you imagine all the people suffering mental illness, all the hardships of children in today’s day and age, and especially now, when there are still putrid sorts yelling at the youth that they have it easy. “Try growing up in the Great Depression. Or during World War Two.” We have to take things back or all hell will break loose. Mental Hell, that is.
Here’s one version of trauma —
And, another version:
‘Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice’ by Raj Patel and Rupa Marya takes the reader on a medical tour of the human body and reveals the relationship between our biology and the injustices of our political and economic system such as racism, poverty and colonialism. Patel and Marya ultimately offer a cure of “deep medicine” to heal our bodies and the world by reconnecting to the earth and each other.
We come down to this, uh? Canada, USA, Africa, South America, Mexico, anywhere we find the clergy! I have a friend in Australia, part of the victim class of native Australians who were despoiled and abused by clergy, in this case the robed and frocked monsters of the Catholic Church. This is one trauma piled onto another, until a victim is powerful but still at age 60, say, waylaid by the news of yet another blasphemy of humanity getting prime time news coverage recently: Do these people have no dignity, no access to a bottle of barbituates and fifth of vodka? More lies, convicted but found not-guilty? Blasphemy. There are Nine Circles of Hell. Welcome to one of them, Cardinal, where there will undoubtedly be a few hundreds of millions of others awaiting you there.
Cardinal George Pell, 81, died in Rome on Jan. 10, the Vatican has confirmed. A leading Australian Catholic and close advisor to Pope Francis, the cardinal had participated in the funeral of his friend, Pope Benedict XVI, just last week.
Pell, the former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, became the third-highest ranked official in the Vatican after Pope Francis tapped him in 2014 to reform the Vatican’s notoriously opaque finances as the Holy See’s first-ever finance czar. He spent three years as prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy, where he tried to impose international budgeting, accounting and transparency standards.
He has been living in Rome since his release from an Australian maximum security prison in 2020 after spending 404 days in solitary confinement after being wrongfully convicted in December 2018 on charges of the abuse of two altar boys in Melbourne in 1996.
His conviction was upheld by an appeals court in March 2019, but he always protested his innocence and was the first cardinal to be imprisoned on such charges. The full bench of Australia’s High Court unanimously squashed his conviction in 2020, and he decided to return to Rome, where he had previously served in various positions under Pope Francis. (Source)
There are thousands of priests who have never been excommunicated or jailed for their rape crimes. I recall when I was in El Paso, and there were some priests from Spokane Diocese in El Paso. I never inquired there, but until later. Then, just by chance, I ended up in Spokane years later, and ahh, there was the answer to El Paso and Spokane priest connection: the ones charged up in Washington, in Spokane, got sent to the border, where the “little brown ones and the brown people would just be happy to have some wise, white priest from the sophisticated Northwest tending the flock.” That’s what one Jesuit said to me, quoting one of his bosses. Send away the rapists to the other outposts, in this case, La Frontera, the border.
There are so many multiple trauma’s just in the ether, such as the head Federal Reserve Mafiosa — how does his continence settle with you?
Ahh, the fed chief, or this cabal? Vice President Joe Biden, flanked by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, sits with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on February 7, 2015, before a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany.
Yep, that’s $17 or $20 an hour with clients suffering under a massive overload of trauma, both physical and mental. Those leaky roofs, the spiritual and psychological shelters and protective covers that need attending to before almost anything else, they are gaping, and yet ‘this country tis of thee’ throws trillions away, burns it up, memory holes it, until we have all of us on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Again, I am a communist, so these two blokes below are not my normal everyday peeps I’d be hanging with, but I am certainly around so many people who are bought, sold and delivered in this exceptionalist wasteland, that I learn how to converse and have open dialogue and debates. But listen to Scott Ritter here. Have you ever seen this guy on Amy Soros Goodman’s Democracidocy Now? On any of the mainstream media? But listen to him, man. This is serious stuff, and he tells it like it is that Blinken should be immediately sacked, and that there is no one sane person in the Biden Administration, and that there are no nuclear arms control panels.
And we wonder why so so many people are on the verge of a complete melt down:
The trail of tears throughout the old colonies and the neo-colonies is epigenic trauma of the generations. The collateral damage. The Madeleine Albright murders by 1,000 economic sanctions cuts, it never just ends with her or that generation or time frame. Over 500,000 dead was-is-will forever be worth it in her psychopath’s mind. How many generations are lost and affected?
Fight until the last Ukrainian. Worth it! Yeah, death by 10,000 cuts.
•U.S. EPA fish testing in 2013–2015 had a median PFAS concentration of 11,800 ng/kg.
•Even infrequent freshwater fish consumption can increase serum PFOS levels.
•One fish serving can be equivalent to drinking water for a month at 48 ppt PFOS.
•Fish consumption advice regarding PFAS is inconsistent or absent in the U.S. states.
This is just one insult to humanity, one multiple aspects of how rotten the world is, and so, how are those children supposed to process this? Forever chemicals, all those hormone-disrupting, diabetes-creating, immune system-depleting, cancer-causing, brain fog-inducing shit chemicals/poisons/toxins that the great CEOs and the “follow the science Über Alles” or else bullshit people have put upon humanity and ecosystems?
And how do we get powerful, self-actualized, community-driven, socialist-minded, anti-authority youth activated when they have mental health disturbances via a thousand injustices?
Remember it seems so long ago, 1988? That other criminal, Ronald Reagan, and the 1988 campaign for POTUS, surely a position only megalomaniacs, narcissists and sociopaths can find themselves happy in their own element?
Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis knows about the damage that disability can cause–even its mere mention. In this keynote address given to the symposium on Presidential Disability and Succession held at Northeastern University in Boston last spring (2014), Dukakis reflected on his famous 1988 presidential campaign that, largely at his expense, redefined negativity in presidential politics, in particular the fictitious allegation that he had a history of mental illness. A distinguished professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University, Dukakis also spends each winter quarter at UCLA as a visiting professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs. He remains active in both politics and public policy, canvassing for Democratic candidates such as Elizabeth Warren during her 2012 Senate campaign and promoting policy initiatives through the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, which he affectionately calls a “think and do tank.” The three-term governor (1975-1979 and 1983-1991) was voted Most Effective Governor by the National Governor’s Association in 1986. After his first term in the late 1970s he lost a nasty primary election to Ed King, whom he would later defeat to reclaim office. Though it wasn’t apparent at the time, for Dukakis, that 1978 campaign would serve as a precursor for the attack politics that were unloosed during the 1988 presidential campaign. In the remarks that follow, he offers a candid assessment of how not going negative may have cost him the presidency, and how an offhand remark by President Reagan (quickly retracted) caused the press to obsess over Dukakis’ health record for the better part of a week–enough to slow his momentum during a crucial stage of campaigning. (Campaigns and disability: When an incumbent president questions his potential successor’s mental health status during the campaign)
Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which will be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.
Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.
China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi’s visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi’s trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it’s an almost-daily occurrence.
Beijing views the US House speaker visiting Taiwan as an affront to the one-China policy and the understanding the US and China reached in 1979, when Washington severed formal relations with Taipei.
US-led provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the US itself and from its imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the western political/media class, the urgent threat of our day is “Chinese aggression”.
After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China — a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the US government to ramp up the new cold war — the committee’s chairman Mike Gallagher put out a statement saying that it is “time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in bipartisan fashion.”
Gallagher is a particularly noxious warmonger who says urgent efforts must be made to stop China from “destroying the capitalist system led by the United States in order to make way for the triumph of world socialism with Chinese characteristics.” He advocates the “selective decoupling” from specific sectors of the Chinese economy and says the US is in “the early stages of a new cold war” against China. He advocates pouring weapons into Taiwan in much the same way the US did in the lead-up to its proxy war in Ukraine, and asserts that the US needs to be preparing for a direct hot war with China in the near future.
Gallagher’s hawkishness on China is quickly becoming the mainstream consensus position in the western political/media class as the US-centralized empire ramps up aggressions while continually complaining about Chinese aggression.
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The Select Committee on the CCP will expose the CCP's strategy to undermine American leadership and work on a bipartisan basis to identify common sense approaches to counter CCP aggression.
None of this would be tolerated by the United States if China were openly moving its war machinery into adjacent areas with the stated goal of “countering the US”. If China were doing this, it would be a near-unanimous consensus throughout the western world that China was engaged in hostile provocations and was clearly the aggressor. Nobody would listen to China if it claimed it was militarily encircling the US for defensive purposes.
But that’s exactly what happens with US aggressions against China. It’s just taken as matter of fact when the US says it’s moving more and more war machinery into the waters around China as a defensive precaution to deter Chinese aggression. Because the narrative is coming from the most effective propaganda machine ever devised, we hear “No bro, the US is militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival on the other side of the planet defensively. Because like what if China tries to do something aggressive?”
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Assembling an Asian anti-China containment coalition, kneecapping China’s economy, engaging in an arms race, aligning local regimes to encircle Beijing & demanding countries choose between China & US lead to regional fracture & war, not stability. https://t.co/UTHl9YRVYG
In a surprisingly decent Foreign Affairs article titled “The Problem With Primacy,” Van Jackson argues that the US is behaving in such a transparently aggressive manner toward China that it can’t possibly claim to be acting in the interests of preserving peace and stability in the region.
“This is not the rationale of a country that is simply balancing Chinese power or trying to stop Beijing from creating a sphere of influence,” writes Jackson of the recent US semiconductor export ban against China. “It is not the strategy of a state trying to decouple from the Chinese economy. It is containment in all but name.”
“The Pentagon has promised that 2023 will be ‘the most transformative year in US force posture in the region in a generation,’ a line likely meant to be reassuring but that comes off as ominous,” Jackson writes. “The Department of Defense is making good on this promise by modernizing its large traditional presence in Northeast Asia while increasing its footprint in the Pacific Islands and Australia—areas that the Chinese military cannot seriously contest.”
Jackson argues that Washington’s efforts to halt China’s rise will likely achieve nothing besides provoking China into militarizing against it, saying, “There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal or selling submarines to Australia will cause China to do anything but continue arming itself as quickly as possible.”
This aligns with the warnings of an anonymous US official cited in a November article by Bloomberg, who said that “the hawkish tone in DC has contributed to a cycle where the US makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further.”
It’s the US making the first move every time.
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Why does China keep aggressively surrounding itself with US military bases? https://t.co/LntfZXg8Vv
Taiwan is an odd case because empire apologists will openly tell you that Beijing must never control the island as it’s a geostrategically crucial location with essential semiconductor manufacturing, and then turn around and still try to tell you that Washington’s interest in Taiwan is because it wants to protect freedom and democracy. It’s even more transparent than when they were pretending to yearn for the liberation of nations that just so happened to sit on a lot of oil.
I don’t know if Beijing will ever launch an attack on Taiwan or some other future flashpoint, but if it does it seems a safe bet that it will be because the US empire kept ramping up aggressions and provocations until it got to the point that China felt it was losing more from inaction than it would from action. And then empire apologists will spend all day shrieking at anyone who tries to talk about those provocations.
Because that’s the rule now, if you weren’t aware. As of February 2022 we’re all meant to pretend that the concept of provocation is not a commonplace idea that everyone understands and learns about as children, but that “provocation” is rather a nonsensical propaganda word that was invented by Vladimir Putin last year. It is now no longer permissible for you to talk about the aggressions that led up to a nation going to war; we must all pretend that history began the day their troops crossed the border.
History is being re-written with Ukraine, and if war erupts over Taiwan it will probably be re-written there as well. But note to the future: the road to war was paved by mountains of US aggression.
________________
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Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country’s security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on claims — later found to be baseless — that its leader, Saddam Hussein…
Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.
– George Orwell, 1984
As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam. I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.
Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from the New York Times‘ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.” It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for the N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.
The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.
On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue. When you support a U.S. war, as has always been the Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have existed since they are not mentioned.
But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”
Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission. The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times.(Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)
All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”
Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Romania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc. In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.
This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.
The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident. The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:
Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
“Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”
This is expert opinion for dummies. A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address. The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.
It is a fight they will lose in the days to come. Russia was, is, and will triumph.
Everything in the editorial is disingenuous. Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys. Putin another Hitler. The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t). History is repeating itself.
Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1972 was appropriate. As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world. It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial. It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that the New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth. It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
The Global Firepower ranking was published on January 6. The annual report classifies the world’s strongest militaries based on over 60 factors, including size, spending and technological advancements.
The report, which placed the United States military on top, followed by Russia, China, India and the UK, raised more questions than answers, with some accusing GFP, the organization that compiled the report, of being biased, sloppy and highly politicized.
For example, while Russia maintained its former position as the second strongest military in the world, Ukraine jumped by seven spots, to occupy the 15th position. This raises questions: how did GFP possibly estimate the current capabilities of the Ukrainian military nearly a year after a devastating war that destroyed much of Kyiv’s original military hardware, especially when the Pentagon itself is still unable to track the massive shipments of weapons delivered to Ukraine since the start of the war?
A more pertinent set of questions must be asked: is this truly the time for chest-thumping about military strength and frivolous spending on hardware, an act that is ultimately aimed at generating profits, instilling fear and killing people?
Following the Paris Agreement on the environment of 2015, many governments appeared to have finally risen to the occasion, by collectively agreeing that climate change is, indeed, the greatest danger facing humankind. That promising moment did not last for long, however, as the US Administration of Donald Trump reneged on Washington’s earlier commitment, thus weakening the resolve of others to lower greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, shifting the world’s attention increasingly away from what suddenly seemed to be a less urgent climate crisis. For some, the new focus was mere survival; for others, the devastating economic consequences of the pandemic; for the poorest countries, it was both.
“The world’s poorest countries have been hardest hit, with women and children bearing a disproportionate burden,” according to a report published by Oxfam in March 2022. This is to be expected.
Even before the world managed to heal from its global ailment and its equally deadly variants, the Russia-Ukraine war began early last year. For Russia, it was, in part, a bold attempt at confronting the decade-long violence in the Donbas; for the West, it was a last stand to defend an unsustainable unipolar world order.
The resultant global competition is unprecedented since World War II, which killed up to 60 million people, shattered many economies, led to mass migrations, devastated the environment and redrew the map of many nations and, by extension, the world’s geopolitics.
And, just like that, we are back to the harsh realities of the ‘great games’ of yesteryears – and with it, the unbearable price tag of death toll, economic dissolution and the gradual, but at times, irreversible damage to the environment.
In times like this, the number of dead becomes, for some of us, daily statistics, devoid of emotions or meaning. Thus, tens of thousands of dead and many more wounded cease to become individuals with feelings, hopes and aspirations. They are mere fodder in a war that must be won at any price so that an old world order can be sustained a bit longer, or a new one is allowed to be born.
The millions of war refugees also become detached from their real value as people with rooted identities, a deep sense of belonging, and histories that span many generations. Their usefulness barely extends beyond the need to serve as one of the numerous facets of a propaganda war, where one side, and one side alone, deserves all the blame.
Rarely do we also reflect on the unintended – and sometimes intended – consequences of the war. While, ironically, Europe continues to pray for a warm winter to survive its ongoing energy crisis, others are too deep in their own crises resulting from the war.
Is all of this worth the price of blood and gore that is being paid on a daily basis? Warmongers often think so, and not because of some pathological urge for violence, but because of the astronomical profits often associated with long-term conflicts.
Global conflicts often lead to sharp increases in arms sales, worldwide, as every government wants to ensure, in the post-war world order, it will be able to command greater influence and respect. Those who have climbed in the GFP ranks, naturally, want to maintain their hard-earned status; those who fell in rank would do anything to rise again. The outcome is predictable: more weapons, more conflicts and more profits.
And, in the midst of it all, poverty, homelessness, social inequality, climate disasters, global responses to pandemics are all relegated to the bottom of our collective list of priorities, as if the once critical matters are of no particular urgency.
But what is the point of having a strong army, and a weak, unequal, unfree, impoverished, and pandemic-ravished society? This is certainly not a question for Global Firepower to answer, because change does not start through the ranking of strong or weak militaries but is spawned within society itself.
I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don’t even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
You don’t need a thousand hours studying what trauma is, what forms it might take, delving into wars and conflicts, from the great war, when the psychologists in Europe attempted to study (sic; sick) shell shocked veterans, and, of course, how many civilians are there in that process of witnessing the most horrific treatment of humans and animals at the hands of, well, the soldiers, sure, and the definition of soldier is:
1. a person who serves in an army; a person engaged in military service.
2. an enlisted person, as distinguished from a commissioned officer: the soldiers’ mess and the officers’ mess.
a person of military skill or experience: George Washington was a great soldier.
verb (used without object): to act or serve as a soldier.
Informal. to loaf while pretending to work; malinger:
3. a wingless caste of ant or termite with a large specially modified head and jaws, involved chiefly in defense.
Soldiers? Mindless individuals? Bizarrely propagandized patriotic fools? Blood lust wannabes? Mercenaries in the employ of dirty, grotesque nations? Those who would rather wrap themselves in flags, swastikas, Ukrainian blue and yellow ribbons, and then, shoot to kill, shoot anything that moves, Murder All Military Aged Men? But they are being pushed around territories and lands by the War is a Racket Money Kings and Queens (do you want to see if your school, business, your own measely money investments are into one of these Top 100 War Profiteers? How about My Lai?
Hit men, one and all, whether from one of the Military Academies, or just from the dungeons of mercenary hell; hired on, persuaded by incompetents — generals and chiefs of staff and politicians and heads of the war profiteers and the civil servants in the revolving door scam. Teary eyed songs on Veterans Day/Armistice Day. Pathetic selling war, more war, and ZERO negotiations — many of them do not care about civilians, fighters, museums, churches, land, et al. Truly ruthless, in that they dehumanize their own babies, daughters, wheelchair-bound grandfathers, their own pets, all of it, it is open season. Sure, not THEIRS directly, but those children, babies, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, old and young, moms and pops on the OTHER side. Oh, that’s right, only kill those deemed the enemy? Nakba anyone?
Barbaric, brutal, and, if they went into uniformed, armed “service” with any humanity in their bones, any guts that states war is evil, well, well, well, they come out natural-born killers, warped, broken, disassociated from people, angry, psychotic, psychologically wounded, and, then, that shell shock we talked about early in the days of nascent psychology. Do not judge too harshly those youth that get caught up in gangs, who have nothing of a family unit, who have nothing to live for but guns, macho, abuse, drug running, following a leader, and murder. Which Faustian Gamble is the Best Faustian Bargain?
Beware, though, as you watch Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro in Sicario I, II, or III, because that macho shit — and it includes brutality, murdering, execution, rape, pedophilia, torturing, soldiering on, i.e., looking up to a male or male-like leader — might make the viewer forget the ones in suits and with briefcases and Harvard MBA’s and JD’s and political positions that they are the killers. Desensitized? Habituated? Normalized? Shows with action and no discussion board? Yeah, that’s Entertainment. I’ve met Perkins, and he too is not anything more than a hit man in mea culpa profit-making land mode. Can you really fix the sins of your own life, and the sins of your father? This fellow, again, gets on Democracy Now and into Green Festivals, vaunted as some hero (NOT).
You know, so many of us did not sign up to be murderers, never joined the economic draft, never bought into fraternities and macho Friday Night Football horror; or lusted after CIA, Criminal Injustice Outfits. Many of us never sought to work for any of those alphabet agencies of despair/disgust/ disasters/death: DoD, FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, HHS, and on and on, including DOJ. The Faustian Bargain has been signed, sealed and delivered daily by the tens of thousands for those people who want to gain, abuse, get one over on “them,” and who want to be part of the disaster capitalism shock troops of whichever form of abuse and trauma deliver one might find herself or himself in.
Oh Faustus!
Sure, Chuck Bowden was amazing, died semi-young (in his sixty-ninth year) and was a true hero of the journalistic kind.
I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one’s head, from dreaming in the fort of one’s home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over.
I’ve been to a couple of Bowden’s talks, and spoke with him in El Paso a very long time ago, it seems, when I was a journalist and teacher and, well, we will not get into THAT other thing. He’s not my guru, but he held some gravitas for me in the world of writing and journalism and speaking out against the crimes of the many set upon us all by the criminals in high office, the lobbies, the corporate boards, even the local and state agencies populated by big and small Eichmann’s, you know, little Eichmann’s. The drug gangs, lords, thugs, and politicians in Mexico are facilitated by, well, you guessed it, Military!
Let’s look at maltreatment of our children. Here and everywhere. Yes, the dirty dealings we set out for our own children and the collective children.
So, the pop-psychology headline, “Childhood Maltreatment Linked With Multiple Mental Health Problems” Jan. 10, 2023 just illustrates how slow witted, how dum downed and how flippant the entire show is, and when I mean show, I mean mainstream and internet feeds/news/games/ propaganda/marketing/ PR/advertising/yellow journalism.
The findings suggest that preventing eight cases of child maltreatment would prevent one person from developing mental health problems.
Corresponding author, Dr Jessie Baldwin (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences), said:
“It is well known that child maltreatment is associated with mental health problems, but it was unclear whether this relationship is causal, or is better explained by other risk factors.
“This study provides rigorous evidence to suggest that childhood maltreatment has small causal effects on mental health problems. Although small, these effects of maltreatment could have far-reaching consequences, given that mental health problems predict a range of poor outcomes, such as unemployment, physical health problems and early mortality.
“Interventions that prevent maltreatment are therefore not only essential for child welfare, but could also prevent long-term suffering and financial costs due to mental illness.”
Think hard Americanos, pro-Capitalists, pro-war drumming fools the absolute trauma of any conflict, that is, armed including those of the suited economic hit men as well as those tatooed hitmen children of the Pablo Escobar-El Chapo variety. Think of the Holly-Dirt images and storylines that show those folk, and it is Mario Puzo on steroids, because there is true admiration of the Mafia and the Sin City Juarez sicarios. Really, when it comes to Holly-Dirt. What about guys like Cormac McCarthy and his “No Country for Old Men” novel-turned-into-hit-movie?
What is trauma, then, those childhood maltreatments? Researchers define childhood maltreatment as any physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect before the age of 18. Imagine the life and times of a Palestinian, or a Yemeni? Imagine the life and times of those children in Donbass after the Chosen People’s Maiden coup under the auspices of the religious zealots of the Zionist variety — Nuland, Kagan, Blinken, et al?
Imagine what maltreatment is when in that Juarez neighborhood where familes are broke by booze, bounty, poverty, machoism, the unholy trinity of materialism, war, and greed? Think about how difficult it is to be a hero in your own family, neighborhood, school, job, state, country.
Thnks of all that trauma the USA inflicts on children before age 18. School lunches are not being cut, and school districts across the land are holding the proverbial hundreds of millions of dollars owed bag. Think hard how a Republican cuts the school lunches, and how dysfunctional schools are with a counselor for every 250 or more elementary students. Think of your community and try and find one qualified child psychologist with real work under her belt.
Student meal debt is rising rapidly in many school districts across the country.
The reason: now that federal funding that made school meals free for all students during the pandemic has ended, families are either struggling to pay for school meals or aren’t even aware that the program ended and they are now obligated to pay.
The end of universal free school meals comes as inflation and rising labor costs are driving up food prices for both schools and families.
No anger yet, over this messed up reality while the multimillionaire Nazified War Thug Zelenskyy gets billions and billions from U$A?
Maltreatment! Think of all the news, all the parents’ fears coming home to the child. Think of yelling, cursing, whipping, swatting, all of that, including how little attention and interaction adults have with those developing spirits-bodies-brains. So many adults are checked out, infantilized, Disneyfied and vapid and vacant. Fear and anger, the ugly mix with greed, that pretty much do it.
Think think think how corrupted adults are, and how foolish even people who want to do good are when they spend time worrying or reading about body shaming at the Golden Globes when their own communities lack childcare, day care, domestic abuse care, health care, mental care, activities care.
Who are the monsters? The kiddos surviving the hell on the streets? Dodging the violent adults? Hiding from the murdering cops? Are they kings of their own world?
Kings of the World? How does this film about teenagers in Columbia questing for the land one lad’s grandmother once owned but who had the land taken away? Of course, at the end of the flick, they make it to the land, and find gold miners polluting it, and, then, bam, all the kids get murdered. That is not a spoiler alert, my fine socialist readers, I hope!
Before “The Kings of the World,” the latest feature from Colombian writer-director Laura Mora, inserts us in the bustling streets of Medellín, where teenagers wield machetes to protect themselves, a shot of a fairy-tale-appropriate white horse introduces the dreamlike atmosphere of this ferocious fable about five adolescent street boys denied basic humanity.
Homeless and with no blood family to guard them, the young souls at the forefront of this electrifying social drama fend for themselves in a gritty urban environment. Their only comfort comes from the brotherly affection they display for one another. That state, caught between tenderness and violence as they navigate an inhospitable reality, defines the visceral energy of “The Kings of the World,” Colombia’s most recent Oscar entry.
The leader of the group, 19-year-old Rá (Carlos Andrés Castañeda), has just learned that the land his grandmother was forcefully evicted from many years in the past has finally been returned to him, the sole heir, as part of the government’s land restitution policies. As Rá, Castañeda exudes an air of innocence wrapped in determination. Heroically not bitter despite the harshness he’s faced, his large, expressive eyes illuminate a path forward.
The reality is that these boys are abused, man, and they drink and smoke, and get their asses kicked and beat up and knifed. The reality is they are the street urchins of Dickens or Bowden, the victims of maltreatment after maltreatment. The movie might have that Lord of the Flies undertone, but the reality is we the view should be steaming under the collar looking at how messed up Latin American countries are with the rich and oligarchs and the Americanos messing with the majority of the good people . . . . Until, generations of young men end up anchorless, stuck in the cycle of guns, drugs, knives, duking it out, dog-eat-dog, ugliness of one and then another and then a thousand maltreatments foisted upon them by parents, family, town, state, country, the world.
Think hard now how deeply that shell shocking does, and how wide it is cast, with the elites, the ones in suits and with suites, determining the extent of history and the future. This is this horror machine, this murderer in a suit, telling the world, telling unborn generations, or young generations, what shall be: No more Russia, no more diplomacy. Imagine that maltreatment having an even deeper affect on each new cycle of Harvard bound sad sake, taught by the Georgetown University Chosen People that history is determined by money, murder, war and elites gaming the systems, full stop.
If you do not wake up angry every day, then your are living in your organic (sic) granola world of inhuman existence. I’m not saying to go around with that anger as your operating position, but it should be there, somewhere, when intercoursing with the humanity and systems around you. This picture is worth a thousand words, and I can’t keep barraging the reader with more and more words, since I am not hearing the readers deploying those words to describe these felons for who they are — murderers, perversions of humanity, the maltreatment engines of today’s generation and generations to come (Stoltenberg and Biden):
Yeah, yeah, you gotta be laughing, for sure, at these Anglo Saxons of the highest degenerate order. But you ain’t pissed yet? Come on. See the memorial for children murdered in Donbass from 2014 to 2021?
No? Ahh, shucks, another Slav Chosen Person, Madeline, uh? Remember those cold eyes, those cold hands, wrapped on the money bags, as people, children, THOSE kiddos, are destroyed by more economic hit men and West Point brass?
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.
—60 Minutes (5/12/96)
Or, this absurdity?
“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.”
Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history.
“It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview.
The lack of curiosity in the monopoly media is far from a lack of thinking: It is a full-fledged attack on people, on history, on truth, on the Fourth Estate’s ability (once) to affect change, to get people motivated to throw the buggers out.
A Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources since September 11 turns up only one reference to the Albright quote–in an op-ed in the Orange Country Register (9/16/01). This omission is striking, given the major role that Iraq sanctions play in the ideology of archenemy Osama bin Laden; his recruitment video features pictures of Iraqi babies wasting away from malnutrition and lack of medicine (New York Daily News, 9/28/01). The inference that Albright and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale–a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one’s political ends–does not seem to be one that can be made in U.S. mass media. (Source)
Ahh, read an old piece on how massively corrupt the media are then, when USA military and planners attacked water treatment plants and restricted chlorine for keeping water safe. Read about the effects of sanctions, the very price was worth it on those children. Do you not believe that Albright, like an ocean liner’s worth of others just like her, is not a criminal of the very worst Dante’s Circles of Hell kind?
Yes, maltreatment, in early childhood?
Thomas Nagy of Georgetown University unearthed a Defense Intelligence Agency document entitled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” which was circulated to all major allied commands one day after the Gulf War started. It analyzed the weaknesses of the Iraqi water treatment system, the effects of sanctions on a damaged system and the health effects of untreated water on the Iraqi populace. Mentioning that chlorine is embargoed under the sanctions, it speculates that “Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons,” something that the United States disallowed for many years.
Combined with the fact that nearly every large water treatment plant in the country was attacked during the Gulf War, and seven out of eight dams destroyed, this suggests a deliberate targeting of the Iraqi water supply for “postwar leverage,” a concept U.S. government officials admitted was part of military planning in the Gulf War (Washington Post, 6/23/91).
A Dow Jones search for 2000 finds only one mention of this evidence in an American paper–and that in a letter to the editor (Austin American-Statesman, 10/01/00). Subsequent documents unearthed by Nagy (The Progressive, 8/10/01) suggest that the plan to destroy water treatment, then to restrict chlorine and other necessary water treatment supplies, was done with full knowledge of the explosion of water-borne disease that would result. “There are no operational water and sewage treatment plants and the reported incidence of diarrhea is four times above normal levels,” one post-war assessment reported; “further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation,” another predicted.
Combine this with harsh and arbitrary restrictions on medicines, the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities, and the fact that, until this summer, vaccines for common infectious diseases were on the so-called “1051 list” of substances in practice banned from entering Iraq. Deliberately creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment is little different morally from deliberately introducing a disease-causing organism like anthrax, but no major U.S. paper seems to have editorialized against the U.S. engaging in biological warfare–or even run a news article reporting Nagy’s evidence that it had done so. (The Madison Capitol Times–8/14/01–and the Idaho Statesman–10/2/01–ran op-eds that cited Nagy’s work.)
— Source, Nov.1, 2001, “We Think the Price Is Worth It — Media uncurious about Iraq policy’s effects–there or here” by Rahul Mahajan.
Who makes money off of all the pain, the disease, all the epigenetic harm, all the chronic illnesses, all the psychotic breaks, all the PTSD a la Shell Shock? Who makes money or hay from meth or coke addiction? Crime pays, right, for the criminal justice systems of oppression, suppression, plea agreements, revolving door private prison complex.
Read all about it, that Sophisticated, High Brow, Articulate, Shakespeare-Producing Anglo Saxon Murder Incorporated, with the King and Queen and Lords looking over them. Makes those street kids I used to talk with in El Paso and Juarez, you know, spooks or huffers, using glue and even gasoline to get high:
Caroline Elkins’ accounts of British soldiers ramming broken bottles into the vaginas of female Kenyan prisoners during the Kikuyus’ Mau Mau revolt is not, by any stretch, the worst example of Albion’s imperial violence she recounts. Because this 870 page book is awash with similar instances of systematic war crimes by the British administration in Kenya, in Nigeria, Jamaica, South Africa, Malaya, Palestine, Cyprus, Nyasaland, India and countless other outposts of empire, justifiable comparisons between the British and the Nazis arise time and again.
And, although many Nazis were brought to book for their crimes, no British were, even though General Sir Frank Kitson, one of the most notorious of these Grade A war criminals, who hopscotched about from one colonial killing field to the next, is still alive and, no doubt, still plotting the murder of others. The book makes it plain that the British had a bunch of such military and civil service troubleshooters, psychopathic thugs like Kitson and Bomber Harris they were prepared to send, almost at a moment’s notice, to any part of their rotten empire where the “natives” had to be duffed up, a euphemism for barbaric tortures derived from Douglas Duff, one of their Satanic number.
Many of these savages, such as Percival and Montgomery, served alongside the Black and Tan terrorist group in Ireland, before moving on to Palestine, India and Malaya where they honed their torture techniques, which resembled those devils use in medieval paintings.
Or do these fellows really scare the shit out of you?
Ahh, there are so many houses of horrors, in the millions, man, that would scare the pants off of any sicario:
Sacred Yet? And I am big on NOT letting a teachable moment pass, a bit of Jewish Zeaotry tied to the origins of the word, “sicario,” which Jewish Holly-Dirt writers and producers and directors might never let the Netflix public see. (Curious, no, why you see no movies, dramas or otherwise, on the Top platforms or from movie studies on the murdering of families and youth and pets by the Jewish Occupiers? )
The Sicarii (Modern Hebrew: סיקריים siqariyim) were a splinter group of the JewishZealots who, in the decades preceding Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 CE, strongly opposed the Roman occupation of Judea and attempted to expel them and their sympathizers from the area. The Sicarii carried sicae, or small daggers, concealed in their cloaks. At public gatherings, they pulled out these daggers to attack Romans and alleged Roman sympathizers alike, blending into the crowd after the deed to escape detection.
It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 31 March 1968 . . . . Born in 1929, King’s actual birthday is January 15 (which in 1929 fell on a Tuesday).
Despite international sanctions Myanmar’s military junta is not short of business partners. Indeed, business, notably in the arms market, continues unabated, writes Binoy Kampmark.
International relations remains the sum game of vast hypocrisies, a patchwork of compromises and the compromised. Every moral condemnation of a regime’s conduct is bound to be shown up as an exercise in double standards, often implicating the accusers. In the case of the military regime in Myanmar, double standards are not only modish but expected.
A number of international declarations and measures have targeted Myanmar’s regime for its blood-soaked brutality, its genocidal practices against the Rohingya, and its general contempt for the human rights of its citizenry. In a statement last November, US Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken took note of the military’s “brutal campaign of violence against the people of Burma, carrying out lethal air strikes against the political opposition and the broader civilian population.”
In response, the US Department of Treasury designated Sky Aviator Company Limited and its owner and director, Kyaw Min Oo “for operating in the defense sector of the Burmese economy.” The company in question had “received multiple arm shipments from sanctioned entities”, while Kyaw had been responsible for facilitating “foreign military officers’ visits to Burma as well as the import of arms and other military equipment and provided assault helicopter upgrades.”
Despite such seemingly bold responses, Myanmar’s military junta is not short of business partners. Indeed, business, notably in the arms market, continues unabated and with some energy. Such conduct has also done much to make a mockery of the suite of sanctions and injunctions being imposed by the EU, United States and other states upon the country’s entities and its military personnel, notably since the February 2021 coup.
Last year, for instance, the Indian company Sandeep Metalcraft supplied 3000 fuses to Creative Exploration Ltd, Myanmar’s arms broker formerly known as MySpace International). This is despite India being a signatory to the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies, which obliges it to apply export controls on ammunition and associated products. This becomes particularly important where the supply of such material might be used in violation of the Geneva Conventions, or to aid and abet the commission of crimes and atrocities.
In August that same year, Justice for Myanmar also noted that as many as 116 Myanmar and Singapore companies with 255 directors and shareholders brokered deals involving the furnishing of weapons and other equipment to the regime, including the period since the February 1, 2021 coup.
In a report from three former United Nations experts as part of the Special Advisory Council on Myanmar (SAC-M), the verdict about companies in the United States, Europe and Asia is distinctly negative. Such entities are officially domiciled in thirteen states, including France, Germany, China, India, Russia, Singapore and the United States. Using source materials comprising leaked budget documents from the Ministry of Defence, interviews with contacts with the Myanmar military, and statements from witnesses of human rights violations showing security forces armed with various weapons, a dark picture emerges.
The authors note that Myanmar’s military has progressively moved towards becoming more self-sufficient in weapons manufacturing in a number of areas. The state, however, is not entirely weaned off foreign assistance. The Directorate of Defence Industries (DDI) remains “reliant on international supplies, including for a variety of raw materials, parts and components and end-items, as well as machinery and technology, for the sustained production – both licensed and un-licensed – of the weapons in its arsenal.”
The DDI has also, whether through production taking place under license or not, “obtained the technology and know-how to produce a variety of its weapons through various types of transfer of technology (ToT) deals.” Such deals have involved the receipt of whole weapon production plants, also known as turn-key projects, accompanied by engineer support for those supplying the technology. These include State-owned companies from Italy to Ukraine.
The report identifies the role played by automated machines, including Computer Numerical Control machines, manufactured by companies with domiciles in Austria, Germany, Taiwan and the United States. These are currently being used by the Myanmar military at factories responsible for its weapons production. To accompany this are software programs made by companies which have their legal domicile in France, Israel and Germany.
The authors are keen to point out the role played by Singapore, which “functions as a strategic transit point for potentially significant volumes of items – including certain raw materials – that feed Myanmar military’s weapon production.” Companies legally domiciled in Singapore have played significant roles in brokering deals and exporting military related items to the DDI or relevant civilian front companies for the Myanmar military.
Not to be outdone, Taiwan also fulfills an important role as transit point for the DDI’s purchase of high precision CNC machines, including those from European manufacturers, that aid KaPaSa arms manufacturing, a country-wide complex which involves some 25 entities.
The authors are direct and unequivocal about their grisly findings. “In short, weapons produced by the Myanmar military in-country at its KaPaSa factories have been used in the military’s widespread and systematic attacks against civilian targets, prior to, during and after the 2021 attempted military coup, and continue to do so.”
A statement from the SAC-M’s Yanghee Lee, a former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, recapitulated the point: “Foreign companies are enabling the Myanmar military – one of the world’s worst human rights abusers – to produce many of the weapons to commit daily atrocities against the Myanmar people.”
Lee went on to make the obvious point that such companies and their home states had “moral and legal responsibilities to ensure their products are not facilitating human rights violations against civilians in Myanmar.” Not doing so made the parties “complicit in the Myanmar military’s barbaric crimes.” It is a complicity that continues to be lightly worn in capitals from Washington to Brussels.
The purchase of High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) batteries from the United States is another irresponsible drain on the public purse and shows the military-industrial complex is thriving. Binoy Kampmark reports.
Probably no corporation possesses a bigger share of control over America’s Government than does the one that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other: Lockheed Martin. Actually, its top owners, or the group of stockholders who dominate the firm and cooperatively together control its policies and determine whom the corporation’s top executives are, are, together with one-another, the individual persons who cooperatively produce the decisions that constitute this “bigger share of control over America’s Government” than any other corporation does (and vastly more than the American public does). Some of these top owners are, themselves, in one way or another, employees or other official agents of Lockheed Martin, but others are not: one needn’t be officially a “part of” the firm in order for the firm to be one’s agent. This is instead the power of money and of ownership — not of any official status. Usually, stockholding is the main means by which it’s exercized. Corporations were planned and designed in this way, in the years 1600 and 1602, in England and in Holland, partly because the then-rising public opposition against the official, titled, nobility or aristocrats, was beginning to raise questions among the aristocracy, as to whether, some day, official titles might become more of a personal burden to be borne than of a personal asset to continue to flaunt publicly (such as by such titles as “Duke” “Lord” “Baron” or etc.). That was one of the main motives for the creation of the corporate form.
From its very outset, empire was to have its own army and armed forces, in order to be able to coerce the local aristocracy in a seized vassal-nation to cooperate with the imperial power, so as for those two national aristocracies jointly to exploit and extract wealth from the vassal nation and from its population. This was the start of capitalism. The armaments-makers and mercenaries have always been crucial to its foundation, and the result is popularly called “imperialism” or (in the United States, “neoconservatism,” though there is nothing really “neo” about it, except, as Mussolini called the two synonyms, “corporationism” and “fascism,” marking the historical transition away from agrarian-based feudalism, into its replacement by the international-corporate version of aristocracy — which is based on ownership of stock instead of land).
So: as the world’s largest armaments-maker, Lockheed Martin is quite naturally itself foundational to the U.S. empire. A few instances of how it functions that way will here be described:
And Biden did then follow Schwartz’s advice, and has remained loyal to him. This was an example of Lockheed’s impact upon a Democratic Party public official who serves the military-industrial complex (MIC) instead of the public.
Here is what I wrote on 26 March 2019, under the heading “Mueller’s Record of Framing Innocent People to Protect the Guilty, an excerpt concerning a Republican Party official, James Comey, who likewise serves Lockheed and the rest of the MIC instead of the public:
*****
The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of U.S.-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as-of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.
Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.
After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel] and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in U.S. military spending. … Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.
Lockheed Martin is by far the largest U.S. ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all U.S. Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.
Other than sales to the U.S. Government, the largest customer of Lockheed Martin is the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia and own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, and who hate Shia Muslims and especially hate Iran, which has the most Shia.
He left Bridgewater and became senior research scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security at Columbia Law School in February 2013, and also joined the board of London-based HSBC Holdings. As the Center has reported, Comey maxed out his contributions to Mitt Romney in 2012 in an effort to unseat his new boss, and also gave to Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
This is a team that’s pro-Saud and pro U.S. billionaires, and pro Israeli billionaires, but rabidly anti Iran and Russia and China, and looking for a fight — war and increased ‘defense’-spending — against any nation (such as Syria) that’s favorable toward those ‘enemies of America’.
*****
The MIC has far more key agencies than are generally known. One is In-Q-Tel, whose pernicious character is so obvious that practically nothing can be said about that corporation without revealing its inconsistency with any democratic republic.
Originally named Peleus and known as In-Q-It, In-Q-Tel was founded by Norm Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, and by Gilman Louie, who was In-Q-Tel’s first CEO.[4][5][7] In-Q-Tel’s mission is to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve United States national security interests. According to the Washington post, In-Q-Tel started as the idea of then CIA director George Tenet [the man who told G.W. Bush that fooling the American people to believe that Saddam had WMD would be “a slam dunk”]. Congress approved funding for In-Q-Tel, which was increased in later years.[6] Origins of the corporation can also be traced to Ruth A. David, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1990s and promoted the importance of rapidly advancing information technology for the CIA.[5] In-Q-Tel now engages with entrepreneurs, growth companies, researchers, and venture capitalists to deliver technologies that provide superior capabilities for the CIA, DIA, NGA, and the wider intelligence community.[8] In-Q-Tel concentrates on three broad commercial technology areas: software, infrastructure and materials sciences.
“We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered … In-Q-Tel. … While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology … This … collaboration … enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM–DIA operation Able Danger], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.[9]“
In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over US$2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth.[11]
However, at the lower levels — the hirees of the mega-corporations that are doing this, instead of at the top levels that more-directly represent the controlling stockholders — there is far more confusion, and even outright stupidity, as those front-line workers who carry out the censorship are struggling to do their jobs in the face of the multiple self-contradictory hypocritical instructions they get from corporate management, gobblydegook such as this, which is a link from Matt Taibbi’s 2 December 2022 “1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES”: his report about how the heavily Democratic-Party suckers who had been hired by the heavily Democratic-Party billionaires who control that corporation (Twitter) managed to hide from most Americans (until AFTER the 2022 mid-term elections) the reality of the scandal about what was contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop. Only at the topmost level — the board members and the top executives — is the actual motive (U.S. imperialism. a.k.a., “neoconservatism”) actually known and understood. Blaming the suckers down below can’t even possibly endanger, but instead protects, the real culprits (the beneficiaries — in BOTH Parties — of this imperialism). Censorship itself poisons and kills democracies: all of it is inconsistent with democracy and advances ONLY aristocracy, theocracy or any other form of dictatorship. Whereas the employees of firms such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, Guardian, NewsGuard, etc., might not know this, the top-level people there do, and they are the ones who have selected and hired those lower-level workers, to carry out their dirty-work, for the billionaires, and especially for their ‘defense’ contractors, who control the Government. It’s the controlling mega-corporate investors, basically, who are the beneficiaries of what this Government does, and this is the reality of neoconservatism (U.S. imperialism).
China offers a threatening alternative model of development that is non-capitalist, non-Western, and non-colonial. As such, it undermines the West’s neocolonial domination of the Third World and its debt-trap-based forced underdevelopment of subverience and exploitation.
— K.T. Noh1
If the United States were to posit that it could eliminate the economic challenge from China by launching an atomic war, there is no evidence that the U.S. would not do so.
— John Ross2
A Sino-American war is no longer unthinkable. As we approach a very dangerous period, possibly including WWIII and nuclear catastrophe, I fully expect a rise in frenzied sinophobia, threat inflation, vile lies about China, and further efforts to limit advanced technology to Beijing.
Here, I’m fantasizing that if blessed with the talent to write a dystopian, geopolitical, political thriller (with an edge-of-your seat movie to follow) I’d pitch a prospectus along the following lines:
In the not too distant future, the fears of the U.S. bourgeoisie are borne out when a multipolar, poly-centric international political system takes shape. China has become a global economic player, its Belt & Road Initiative won massive appeal throughout the global South and Beijing’s call for respecting the rights of all people to choose their own economic and political system has won many friends. A formidable Front of the South is clearly on the horizon. China has also taken the lead in fighting climate change and despite the U.S. best efforts, its computer chips are among the best in the world. In short, “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” will has proven its superiority to neoliberal capitalism.
As K.T. Noh writes, “China has demonstrated that it has developed an alternative, non-Western, capitalist, model of development without wars, invasion, colonization, slavery, regime change, primitive accumulation — that the world can emulate and follow.”1 Clearly, the U.S. ruling class cannot allow this 21st century threat of a good example to come to fruition and will use any means available to prevent it.
A win-win world future is inconceivable to the ruling class. They are unwilling for the United States to become just another normal country even though that would be inestimably better for ordinary citizens. As background, a two-pronged strategy emerged: first with Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 and then, in 2014, the U.S. manipulated coup d’etat and Minsk agreement in Ukraine which overthrew a democratically elected president and installed a puppet regime. Washington then baited and provoked Russia into military intervention in Ukraine in 2022.3
U.S. military planners pursued their medium term objective of weakening and even dismembering Russia in order to deny China its key geopolitical ally and force it to face the US on its own. The proxy war that the U.S. launched against Russia in Ukraine and fought to the last Ukrainian and mercenary, showed the world that Washington was willing to engage a Great Power — but the conflict ended in a stalemate. As the Pentagon anticipated, Russia was weakened but regime change was not achieved and Putin remains in power. China, even with its extended Covid pandemic, pledged a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination” with Moscow.
Given its military supremacy and with a vast array of bases and well over 100,000 military personnel encircling China, Washington is sorely tempted to use its military to compensate for its inexorable economic decline and to halt China’s development — before it’s too late. An ominous unknown is what Russia will do if a war with China should “go nuclear.”
American officials publicly accuse China of repeatedly violating the “ruled-based international order” but behind the scenes these same officials are heard to say, “We are an empire, albeit a benign one, and this is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve us as a global hegemon.” She added that the rules protect US interests as its power wanes relative to China.” Besides, as another official candidly explains, “This is not about nations following rules but the one indispensable nation is making and imposing certain rules on behalf of safeguarding the free world.”4
The mass media begins amping up its China bashing and accuses the Chinese president of being evil incarnate, another Hitler. Slowly by slowly this drumbeat of propaganda succeeds in manufacturing consent for a war on China.
The likely flashpoint for military confrontation is the South China Sea and a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident is concocted by the CIA and the Pentagon. This is followed by U.S. B21’s and anti-ship missiles destroying a substantial portion of China’s maritime shipping assets. Because the U.S. is overextended in terms of military supply lines, its efforts to block Chinese trade routes and disrupt oil imports are only partially successful but U.S. submarines do manage to sink several ships attempting to sneak in and out of Chinese ports. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) retaliates by attacking American warships and bases in Guam, South Korea and Okinawa, causing tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel to perish.
A protracted military conflict ensues and in the fog of World War III, a “red line” is crossed when the Washington initiates the use of battlefield tactical nukes. The national security establishment counts on Beijing not having a survivable nuclear deterrent after absorbing a U.S. first strike. Thus, Washington’s credible nuclear threat (6,500 warheads) will prevent further escalation and compel China’s subjugation to U.S. global supremacy. However, due to hubris and miscalculation, a thermonuclear exchange results in which cities in both China and the United States are vaporized. Firestorms cause radioactive fallout unfurling in a massive plume extending some 60 miles from the blast sites. Both sides lose this geopolitical conflagration and in Washington, the long knives are out and recriminations begin.
India, which steadfastly refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, turned to Moscow as its largest oil supplier and rejected a Western world order, ascends to global leadership.
Bearing the above in mind, we know my book proposal will remain stillborn. However, that was not the fate of a speculative fiction novel appearing last year with the intriguing title, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis (New York: Penguin Press, 2021). It quickly rose to New York Times Bestseller list and received generally positive reviews across the mainstream political spectrum. Efraim Habers, former head of Israel’s Mossad, praised the book and described China as a “Great Threat” to the United States. And both former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General James “Mad Dog” Mattis call the book a “realistic cautionary tale for our times.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the Netflix film is already in the casting stage.
As you’ve undoubtedly surmised, here the wily, arrogant Chinese Communist Party instigates war with the United States. Beijing uses its vastly superior cyber warfare dominance to lure an American battleship into an ambush. China then sinks a flotilla of 37 US warships in order to gain a goal “generations in the making,” — unfettered control of the South China Sea. Meanwhile, Iran seizes an F-35 out of the sky — again, using superior technology — and the pilot is taken hostage. China then sets about annexing Taiwan.
As long as Beijing refrains from engaging with ICBMs, the U.S. president orders a “limited,” multi-pronged attack on the Chinese mainland including striking the Chinese port of Zhanijing with a 150 kiloton “tactical” nuclear weapon. A “red line” is crossed. China responds by creating radioactive wastelands of San Diego and Galveston and the US president (a female) retaliates by vaporizing Shanghai in a mass murder (not other term suffices) of 30 million people. The authors write that the devastation in Shanghai “exceeded capacity for comprehension.” The book ends with India intervening as the peacemaker with the New Delhi Peace Accords. The price of the war had been staggering to both countries and in its wake, India becomes the world’s ascendant political and economic juggernaut and Iran also emerges in a highly advantageous position.
Dr. Sandeep “Sandy” Chowdhury, the US deputy national security adviser, despairs that Reagan and Kennedy’s vision of a “city on a hill” might now perish but reassures himself with the thought that “America was an idea and ideas very seldom vanish…” American was a nation of “freemen” and he fervently hopes that this spirit of America has “yet to abandon the place.”
The authors blame defeat of the storied “city on a hill” on enormous deficiencies America’s technological war fighting readiness which must be shored up before its too late. The fact that the U.S. does not prevail is meant to rattle readers (and officials) out of their complacent stupor. And related, the question hangs in the air whether the U.S. can vanquish the China threat without resort to nuclear weapons? The authors also muse whether the U.S. public will waver in its support for war after hostilities begin?
It would never occur to the authors, publishers, reviewers or indeed, the American people, that the US would be the aggressive party and initiate military conflict with China. As one of book’s characters muses, “American didn’t use to start wars. It used to finish them.” And in a recent interview, the book’s authors reveal their American exceptionalism bias when they assert that “The history of America is us striving to create a more perfect union — to hit that ideal… the essence of America is that enduring ideal, and worth investing in and it has brought us much more good than harm to this world.”5
In the novel, China is portrayed as seeking to replace the U.S. as the globe‘s most powerful country. In testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March of 2021, Admiral Phil Davidson echoed this message when he said that China might attempt a military takeover over Taiwan in the next six years and this is “just one step along the way to supplanting the United States and its leadership in a rules-based international order.” Taiwan only bookends a larger war. Davidson added that China will militarily “attempt unilaterally changing the status quo.”6 And the Pentagon’s 2022 China Military Report to Congress, meant to convince that body to grant the largest defense budget ever, warns that China may challenge the U.S. in the global arena.
In lieu of a final conclusion, I think of a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein that “The world is dangerous not because some people do evil but because some people see it and do nothing” and bookend it with Howard Zinn’s that our problem is too much civil obedience.
However, I’m not sanguine about enough disobedient forces rising up in the United States in time to take up the gauntlet of Einstein’s “something.” And I must confess that, at times, I find myself on the edge of despondency as I sense the morbid symptoms in our midst that foreshadow WWIII, even before the climate Apocalypse.
Along with others on the left, I’ve often cited Gramsci’s injunction about “pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will” as the only answer for those committed to struggle for justice in the world.
That is, I’m convinced that we must look at the United States as it actually exists, with no illusions about the future. Noam Chomsky terms this RECD or “really existing capitalist democracy — which in its basic nature is a death sentence.” In the face of this reality, Chomsky has consistently reminded us that a moral person has only two choices: To do nothing to stop evil in the form of our belligerent warmongers who are bent on initiating war with China. This choice guarantees the worst will occur. Or we must do whatever we can to stop the Merchants of death “which is not much of choice, so we should be able to easily make it.” This course may not prove cathartic but it will put us more in touch with our humanity and that’s no small thing.
John Ross, “What is Propelling the United States into Increasing International Military Aggression,” Monthly Review, April 24, 2022. And see, Wi Yu, “What the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Know About China,” Common Dreams, Dec 20, 2022; Deborah Veneziale, “Who Is Leading the United States to War?”
Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022).
Ethan Rocke, “‘2034’ Authors talk about World War III, Nuclear Conflict and America’s Future,” Coffee or Die, April 14, 2022. 2034: A Novel of the Next War. The authors are Elliot Ackerman, author of several novels, spent eight years in the Marine Corps and was with elite covert CIA units in the Middle East and southwest Asia, including Afghanistan and Iraq. Retired Admiral James Stavridis former supreme commander of NATO and former Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
For those wondering what to expect from the government in 2023, it looks like we’re going to be in for more of the same in terms of the government’s brand of madness, mayhem, corruption and brutality.
Digital prisons. Unceasingly, the government and its corporate partners are pushing for a national digital ID system. Local police agencies have already been given access to facial recognition software and databases containing 20 billion images, the precursor to a digital ID. Eventually, a digital ID will be required to gain access to all aspects of life: government, work, travel, healthcare, financial services, shopping, etc. Before long, biometrics (iris scans, face print, voice, DNA, etc.), will become the de facto digital ID.
Precrime. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies are being used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating is being done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. AI predictive tools are being deployed in almost every area of life.
Mandatory quarantines. Building on precedents established during the COVID-19 pandemic, government agents may be empowered to indefinitely detain anyone they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.
Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel. As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.
Tracking chips for citizens. Momentum is building for corporations and the government alike to be able to track the populace, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card, microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin, or tags in retail products.
Military involvement domestically. The future, according to a Pentagon training video, will be militaristic, dystopian and far from friendly to freedom. Indeed, all signs point to the battlefield of the future being the American home front. Anticipating this, the government plans to have the military work in conjunction with local police to quell civil unrest domestically.
Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation. In the government’s ongoing assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Threat assessments. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
War on cash. The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal.
Expansive surveillance. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
Militarized police. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are moving into the next phase of the transformation, turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.
Police shootings of unarmed citizens. Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Police brutality and the use of excessive force continues unabated.
False flags and terrorist attacks. Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party is in power: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.
Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed. The military and security industrial complexes that have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire abroad and here at home.
Erosions of private property. Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.
Overcriminalization. The government has increasingly adopted the authoritarian notion that it knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives. Overregulation and overcriminalization have been pushed to such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair.
Strip searches and the denigration of bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Individuals—men and women alike—continue to be subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.
Censorship. First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”
Taxation Without Any Real Representation. As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts—the governors—have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.
Year after year, the government remains the greatest threat to our freedoms, and yet year after year, “we the people” allow ourselves to be suckered into believing that politics will fix what’s wrong with the country.
For seventeen days, Azerbaijani special forces and military personnel—masquerading as “environmentalists”—have blocked the only road connecting Artsakh to Armenia. They have effectively severed the only lifeline the Artsakh Armenians have to the outside world—a lifeline guaranteed by the Trilateral Statement of November 10, 2020. With 120,000 Artsakh Armenians now completely encircled and isolated, Azerbaijan is poised to rid itself of the entire Armenian population this holiday season, and it will try to do so while Europe sips hot chocolate and watches.
Frankly, it is rare to have the opportunity to witness mass atrocity as it unfolds, but social media and Azerbaijan’s impunity have given the West an opportunity to watch the ongoing travesty on their iPhones. Azerbaijani sources excitedly publish their atrocities against Armenians online. In fact, Azerbaijan has proudly telegraphed its intentions to ethnically cleanse Artsakh of Armenians—and the lead-up has been quite entertaining, at least for the sadists.
The movie trailers promise a rather captivating show. An Armenian woman in Azerbaijani captivity, her eyes gouged out, her finger severed and shoved into her mouth, her empty eye sockets plugged with stones, hate speech carved into her bare, exposed chest. A video showing an elderly Armenian man in Artsakh, squirming on his back in the grass and weeds as an Azerbaijani soldier mercilessly continues to saw off his head with a dagger. Armenian POWs brought to their knees, tied and bound like animals. Azeri soldiers, in sickening euphoria, unloading bullet after bullet after bullet into the heads and backs of young Armenian boys. Yet, Azerbaijan assures the West that it is looking for peace and “coexistence”.
Independent observers, however, tell quite a different story. The International Association of Genocide Scholars has proclaimed that “[s]ignificant genocide risk factors exist in the Nagorno-Karabakh situation concerning the Armenian population.” Genocide Watch has raised the genocide threat level facing Artsakh Armenians beyond the “dehumanization” stage and even the “preparation” stage into the “persecution” and “denial” stages. Indeed, the former Armenian Human Rights Defender, Arman Tatoyan, along with the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention have warned that Azerbaijan’s “actions are part of a larger genocidal pattern, demonstrating Azerbaijan’s Armenophobia and genocidal intent [aimed at] the eradication of Armenia, Artsakh, and the Armenians.”
Azerbaijan demands that Artsakh Armenians be subjected to Azerbaijani authority—against their will. This is quite the cocktail: dictatorship, subjugation and genocide. But the West need remember that, after the Holocaust, it rewrote the book on watching dictators round up and deliver humans to their slaughter. Let’s be clear: “coexistence” under Azerbaijani authority is not only an utterly ridiculous proposition; it is patently inhumane, intellectually vapid—and, frankly, impermissible. We would never imagine subjecting a population of 120,000 Jews today to the authority of a rabid Nazi regime—or any Nazi regime, for that matter.
But, for the Armenians, let’s go with “coexistence”. After all, Azerbaijan is doing a rather bang-up job laundering sanctioned Russian gas through Baku to help Europe evade sanctions and stay warm for the winter. Only the French President has stated that he is not willing to trade winter warmth for the lives of the Armenian people. The rest of Europe seems to be just fine trading some dead Armenians for thick wool socks, a gas fireplace and some hygge.
And make no mistake: the Azerbaijani peace agenda has no credible basis—Azerbaijan has violated every single ceasefire since 2020, and its hereditary dictator (who, incidentally, sports a mustache curiously similar to Hitler’s) has openly admitted that he launched the 2020 war to bring an end to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through force. Peace agendas usually involve negotiations—not summary executions, medieval beheadings, and open promises by a dictator to drive Armenians out “like dogs”. But then again, as long as the Europeans are toasty and warm, Azerbaijan appears free to starve and then ethnically cleanse the Artsakh Armenians.
There is a history of this too—and I am not even speaking of the Armenian Genocide (in which the Azerbaijanis, again with the help of their Turkish brothers, gladly participated). Azerbaijan’s march toward ethnic cleansing and genocide is blindingly clear in our own lifetimes. In response to peaceful demonstrations in Artsakh for unification with Armenia, Azerbaijan launched pogroms and massacres of Armenians in Sumgait, Kirovabad, and other cities in the late 1980s. Since then, Azerbaijan has only further institutionalized its Armenophobia, breeding and curating hatred toward Armenians at every turn.
More recently, Azerbaijan has offered its viewers a slew of genocide party favors: a stamp issued by Azerbaijan displays an exterminator in a Hazmat suit “exterminating” Artsakh; a military trophy park showcasing the helmets of fallen soldiers, gruesome mannequins of Armenians for children to mock and degrade; President Erdogan of Turkey praising Nuri Pasha, of Armenian Genocide era fame, at a military parade in Baku. Frankly, it is unclear what else Baku has to do to telegraph to the world its intention to eliminate the Artsakh Armenians.
The smell of genocide wafts unmistakably in the air. Just a year ago, the International Court of Justice itself indicated provisional measures ordering Azerbaijan to “[t]ake all necessary measures to prevent the incitement and promotion of racial hatred and discrimination, including by its officials and public institutions, targeted at persons of Armenian national or ethnic origin.” The case against Azerbaijan was brought under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination—a treaty in place as a stop-gap measure to prevent (you guessed it) genocide. Of course, it has not stopped Azerbaijan from targeting the Artsakh Armenians or, for that matter, even claiming the capital of Armenia as its own. You really can’t make this up.
But back to the blockade. No consignments of food or medicine can now reach Artsakh, and patients cannot be transferred to Armenia for life-saving treatment. Azerbaijan, at one point, even deliberately cut off the gas supply to Artsakh, subjecting the isolated population to subzero winter temperatures. As a result of this cruelty, schools, kindergartens, and hospitals were unable to be heated. Two weeks on, the food shelves are empty, the medicine cabinets are bare, and families are separated.
More than 270 children were left stranded on a road, meters from where civilian-clad Azerbaijani special forces kill peace pigeons and flash hand signs pledging allegiance to the “Grey Wolves”—an ultra-fascist hate organization banned in several countries.
There is no question a genocide is looming in Artsakh. The West, cozy with Russian gas laundered through Azerbaijan, can’t find that voice to condemn Azerbaijan or even call for humanitarian intervention. Europe has secured itself a front-row seat for this human catastrophe; now, let’s see if it has the stomach to watch it unfold.
This article was originally contributed to ZARTONK Media by Karnig Kerkonian and is republished with permission.