A must listen. How the supposed “Resistance” obscures US-Saudi genocide in Yemen.
The Maps That Show That City vs. Country Is Not Our Political Fault Line 2
“Why the differences? I’ve long argued that United States politics resolves around the tension between advancing individual liberty and promoting the common good. The regional cultures we think of as “blue” today have traditions championing the building and maintenance of free communities, today’s “red” ones on maximizing individual freedom of action. Our presidential contests almost always present a clear choice between the two, and the regions act accordingly.
The 2016 election was an exception, largely because Mr. Trump did not campaign as a traditional laissez faire Republican. Rather, he promised government would rebuild infrastructure and the manufacturing sector, shield workers from imports and migrant workers, replace the Affordable Care Act with “something terrific” and protect Social Security and Medicare. This delivered critical dividends in rural parts of the communitarian-minded Midlands and Yankeedom, flipping scores of counties that had voted for Mr. Obama twice, most of them in the Upper Mississippi Valley, northern New England and upstate New York.”
11 Regions Underlying the 50 States
How rival colonizers spread across the continent and set patterns that influence modern politics and culture.
By Colin Woodward
New York Times
FREEPORT, Maine — Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most significant and abiding divide in American politics isn’t between city and countryside, but rather among regional cultures. Rural and urban places certainly have distinct interests and priorities, but in our awkward federation their differences have taken a back seat to the broader struggle between our constituent regions.
Sectionalism isn’t, and never has been, as simple as North versus South or an effete and domineering East against a rugged, freedom-minded West. Rather, our true regional fissures can be traced back to the contrasting ideals of the distinct European colonial cultures that first took root on the eastern and southern rims of what is now the United States, and then spread across much of the continent in mutually exclusive settlement bands, laying down the institutions, symbols and cultural norms later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into.
Understanding this is essential to comprehending our political reality or developing strategies to change it — especially as we approach a momentously consequential midterm election.
GOP Congressman Investigates Undisclosed Gold Market Intervention by China and the Exchange Stabilization Fund Reply
Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV) Calls Out Fed & Treasury for Dodging Questions on Gold Activities
Washington, DC (July 31, 2018) – A member of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee is calling out the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury for dodging questions about their activities involving America’s gold reserves.
In a letter dated July 27, Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) wrote to Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, after receiving perfunctory responses to his April 24th letter, noting “a few questions were either not addressed at all or not fully addressed.”
In particular, the Fed and Treasury would not articulate any U.S. policy toward gold and refused to comment on historical U.S. State Department documents pointing to a U.S. policy of “driving gold out of the world financial system in favor of the Federal Reserve Note or Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.”
In his follow-up letter, Rep. Mooney provided evidence of involvement by the Exchange Stabilization Fund in the gold market and called attention to “the recent correlation of the gold price with the price of the Chinese yuan and the valuation of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.”
“Do these correlations reflect surreptitious intervention in the U.S. currency markets by China and currency manipulation by China?” Mooney asked.
Mooney also provided a 2009 letter from then Fed Governor Kevin M. Warsh acknowledging the existence of Fed documents on gold swaps (while simultaneously refusing to provide them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee).
Mooney asked Chairman Powell to reconcile the Marsh acknowledgement with his July 12, 2018, letter, including Powell’s assertion that “The Fed does not engage, nor has it ever engaged, in gold swaps.”
Rep. Mooney noted the Treasury did not appropriately answer his question regarding prior audits of America’s gold reserves. In his July 11, 2018 response, Acting Assistant Treasury Secretary Brad Bailey merely discussed audits of gold compartment seals, and Mooney responded that a cursory examination of seals is “neither an inventory nor an audit of our nation’s gold.”
The US-backed Coalition in Yemen is Trying to Trigger Another Massive Cholera Epidemic Reply
By Randi Nord
Geopolitics Alert
Sana’a (GPA) – The U.S.-supported Saudi-led coalition in Yemen carried out multiple airstrike attacks across Yemen on Friday, Islam’s holy day. Although the raids were not absent of casualties, today’s airstrikes appeared to target vital civilian infrastructure rather than human life. The continual attacks on water wells and treatment facilities make it seem as though the U.S.-backed coalition is attempting to trigger another massive cholera epidemic.
Last year, over one million people contracted cholera in Yemen and over two thousand died.
U.S.-backed warplanes belonging to the Saudi coalition launched at least five airstrikes on the Sana’a International Airport. The attacks took place immediately following the departure of UN envoy, Martin Griffith. Griffith had just met with the leader of the Yemeni Ansarullah revolution, Abdulmalik Al-Houthi to discuss the conflict and humanitarian disaster.
The coalition against Yemen has hit Sana’a’s airport over 160 times since the war began despite the fact that the Saudi-imposed blockade forced the airport to shut down. Additional airstrikes on Friday targeted a farm, communication tower, and plastic factory.
The Federal Government as Organized Crime Reply
Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Quick hypothetical: Lets say me and a few of the burliest trans-girls I know show up at your doorstep and ask, scratch that, demand that you pitch in a chunk of your salary to pay for our bottom surgeries, making a halfway descent argument that it serves the communities interest to make us physically whole. Lets say you say no and me and the girls physically subdue you, tie you up, and hold you prisoner in your basement for a few weeks while we max out your credit cards and then cut you loose with a stern warning not to cross us again.
Now lets say me and the girls are running this racket up and down the eastern seaboard. How would you classify such an operation? A federal prosecutor might quite accurately describe this as organized crime.
Now lets say we were a different kind of T-girl and we showed up at your door with a badge, demanding that you hand over your hard earned money to pay for far more ambiguous projects than the state of our genitalia. Projects that allegedly serve our fine nations greater interests. Naturally, you say fuck off and we dock your pay, slap on a pair of cuffs, and beat the fucking candy out of you if dare to defend yourself before sending you to a sex dungeon upstate. Now it’s not organized crime, it’s organized government! Aside from that little tin shield that affords one the mandate of the state in spite of never being elected to anything, you tell me the goddamn difference?
I’m far from the first person to make this observation. It’s one of the major bedrocks that form the foundation of anarchist thought. But lately, in this hyper-partisan age of unfettered mass hysteria, regular old do-nothing Republicrats and Dempublicans have taken up not-so-dissimilar positions against federal agencies that have crossed them. While Democrats are calling for the collective head of ICE in the face of their mass kidnappings on the border, Republicans are openly musing about giving the ax to the FBI for picking favorites in the 2016 election. Well, I say you don’t have to be an anarchist, Republican, or Democrat to support banning both.
The Latin Americanization of the United States 2
By Keith Preston
Everyone knows that one of the principal grievances of the right-wing involves the substantial amount of immigration from Latin America to the United States that has taken place in recent decades. The commonly voiced concern is that the traditional “white” (Northern European) majority will lose its majority status, and that persons of Latin American ancestry (combined with people of color generally) will become the demographic majority. Whether this is good or bad is an individual value judgment, but the criticisms often obscure other, perhaps more substantive ways in which the United States is coming to resemble Latin America.
The traditional class system of Latin America is one where the very rich plutocratic elites live in opulence and luxury, and rule over an impoverished working class, an extraordinarily large underclass of the extreme poor and permanently unemployed, and a small middle class of professionals and technocrats. This is precisely the same kind of class system that the United States is developing, particularly in California which is widely considered to be the bellwether of the nation.
In traditional Latin American societies, the elite rule for the sake of pursing their own class interests, without any pretense of interest in the needs of the masses. To the degree that elections are held at all, the candidates are merely functionaries of the plutocracy. US politics is rapidly coming to resemble this model.
The police and the army are the traditionally dominant force in Latin American societies, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the military industrial complex and police state have assumed a comparable role in the United States.
The one noticeable difference is that in many traditional Latin American societies, the Catholic Church hierarchy provided the ruling class with its self-legitimating ideology. In the United States, organized religion is becoming an increasingly marginal force with the new self-legitimating ideology of the state being the totalitarian humanist ideology of the new clerisy.
Interestingly, Latin America has experienced a great deal of liberalization and progress in the past few decades, while the United States has increasingly gone backward. Perhaps Americans need to start emigrating to Latin America.
The Latest Casualty of the Marines’ Surrender to Political Correctness Reply
When a Marine Corps commander is relieved of his position for using the word “faggot,” do we need any more evidence that PC has in fact completely permeated the general society and become the ideology of the state/ruling class/power elite?
By William S. Lind
Marine Lt. Col. Marcus Mainz (left) on the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge in September 2017 during relief efforts after Hurricane Irma. Mainz was relieved of command in May. (Kaitlyn E. Eads/U.S. Navy)
Several weeks ago, the United States Marine Corps copied its old Japanese adversary and committed seppuku. It did so by relieving its best battalion commander and most promising future senior combat leader of his command, thus terminating his career. As another Marine lieutenant colonel said to me, “The last light shining in the darkness has been put out.”
The officer relieved of his command was Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Mainz. Some years ago Mainz, as a captain, was one of my students in a Fourth Generation War seminar at the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Warfare School. He was one of the best—bright, tremendous energy, a powerful personality, and an ability to get results. These are exactly the qualities the Marine Corps needs in its leaders if it is to implement its doctrine of maneuver warfare. Now that doctrine seems to be little more than words on paper.
Mainz, through the innovative training program he implemented in his battalion, had built a substantial and devoted following throughout the Marine Corps. Now many of his admirers are giving up and putting in their paperwork to resign or retire. Their hope is gone. A Marine major said to me, “The second- and third-order effects of his dismissal are massive.”
What led the Marine Corps to devour its young? The answer lies in the moral cowardice the senior Marine Corps leadership (and that of our other armed services) routinely displays in the face of “political correctness,” i.e., cultural Marxism.
Speaking to his Marines, as told to me, Mainz dismissed some of the administrivia that eats up much of their training time, saying something like, “We’re not going to do that faggot stuff.”
The Elite Fixation With Russiagate Reply
By Aaron Mate
The Nation
No single act of Donald Trump’s presidency has engendered more criticism than his performance at the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin. For declining to endorse US intelligence claims that the Kremlin meddled in our election and faulting both countries for the poor state of US-Russia relations, Trump was roundly accused of “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “treasonous” behavior that has sparked a full-blown “national security crisis.”
But does the American public at large share the prevailing elite assessment? Save for a White House vigil led by two longtime Hillary Clinton staffers and a few scattered rallies—and in stark contrast to mass protests over Trump’s misogyny, Muslim ban, and zero-tolerance immigration policy—Americans have not poured into the streets to confront the “crisis.” A poll by The Hill and the HarrisX polling company found 54 percent support for Trump’s now-scuttled plan for a follow-up summit with Putin at the White House. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump’s post-Helsinki approval rating slightly increased to 45 percent. While the uptick does not necessarily signal an embrace of Trump’s behavior, it is not difficult to see why his numbers did not plummet. In a recent Gallup poll on problems facing the country, the “Situation with Russia” was such a marginal concern that it did not even register. While an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 64 percent believe Trump has not been tough enough on Russia, it also saw a near-even split on whether Putin is a foe or an ally, and 59 percent support for better relations.
The gap between elite and public priorities highlights an endemic problem that long predates Trump. Since his election, however, the elite fixation on alleged Russian meddling and the president’s suspected collusion has exacerbated that divide.
“The New Seven Dirty Words” Reply
A writer from the New York Times describes how while the Right controls the foreign policy, economy and legal system of the United States, the Left controls the culture, with offenses to PC taking the place of traditional forms of obscenity.
This speaker’s perspective is interesting given that she seems to be a conventional urban professional class liberal with standard center-left Democratic Party politics, i.e. the primary constituency for PC. Increasingly, I am noticing that more people from the various PC constituencies are starting to have second thoughts about it all.
Anyone who wishes to be a critic of the existing society, and does not recognize the role that the totalitarian humanist ideology of what Joel Kotkin calls the “new clerisy” plays in legitimizing the system is already of the game before it starts.
Bari Weiss “The New Seven Dirty Words” Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater Speaking during Week Five 2018, “The Ethics of Dissent” July 26, 2018 Bari Weiss is a writer and editor for The New York Times opinion section, where she writes about culture and politics. Before joining the Times a year ago, Bari was an op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal and an associate book review editor there. For two years, she was a senior editor at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish news, politics, and culture, where she edited the site’s political and news coverage. Earlier this month, Bari won the Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which annually honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.” The judges cited “her brilliant, incisive journalism defends that cornerstone of individual liberty and civil society: freedom of speech.” Bari is a proud Pittsburgh native and a graduate of Columbia.
Political Naïveté (or what are we to do about Maoism) 4
By Aragorn
Anarchist Library
One of the reasons that anarchism has become a popular political perspective is because in many contexts (for instance mass mobilizations or broad direct action campaigns) we seem open, friendly, and nonsectarian. This is in great contrast to visible (and visibly) Marxist or Leftist organizations, which either seem like newspaper-selling robots or ancient thorny creatures entirely out of touch with the ambivalence of the modern political atmosphere. Anarchists seem to get that ambivalence and contest it with hope and enthusiasm rather than finger-wagging.
The public face of anarchism tends towards approachability and youth: kids being pepper-sprayed, the general assemblies of the occupy movement, and drum circles. These are the images of the past five years that stand in contrast to the image of anarchists as athletic black clad window breakers. Both are true (or as true as an image can be) and both demonstrate why a criticism of anarchists continues to be that (even at our best) we are politically naïve.
Of course very few window breakers believe that breaking windows means much beyond the scope of an insurance form or a janitorial task, but that is beside the point. What matters is that the politics of no demands makes the impossible task of intelligent political discourse in America even more complicated (by assuming that discourse is a Pyhrric act). To put the issue differently, the dialectical binary of both engaging in the social, dialogic, compromising act of public politics while asserting that there is no request of those-in-power worth stating or compromising on isn’t possible. It is cake-and-eat-it thinking that is exactly why Anarchists must do what Anarchist must do[1].
This rejection of how the game is played while participating in it hasn’t shown itself to be a long term strategy– impossible never is. For lessons on playing the game we have to turn to the winners of politics and revolution: neoliberalists, sure, but also statist Marxists, reactionaries (from racist populists to nationalist Know Nothings or their descendants in the Tea Party), and what remnants exist of the old and new Left. Just to make the point crystal clear I’ll restate it. On the one hand you have the ridiculous non- or even anti-strategy of anarchist political theater that cannot achieve the impossible goal of everything for everybody forever. On the other hand you have realpolitik: the pragmatic application of power in the political sphere. This simplistic dualism is why most intelligent people abandon politics altogether and retreat to NIMBYism (at best) or the quiet solitude of screaming at a television screen as the only expression of engagement with the outside world.
In this light, a discussion about maoism might seem outrageous and it is! Maoism isn’t a relevant political tendency or movement in America. It isn’t leading guerrilla forces in the hills, it has no leaders-in-waiting just outside the border (unless you count Avakian which you should in no way do), but it isn’t further from the mainstream of American political thought than Anarchism is (anarchist big tent populists to the contrary) and is arguably much closer (in an often cited example, the mayor of Oakland, Jean Quan, is a former Maoist). More pointedly, Maoism and Anarchism have been cross-pollinating for decades. Our task here is to shine a light on that history and challenge what benefits anarchists have garnered from this little-discussed pollination.
The Saint Max Option: Why Libertarian Activism Fails 1
A Facebook friend sums up why “the libertarian moment” passed with a succinct critique of conventional libertarianism (and I would include virtually the entire anarchist and anti-state milieu in this as well).
“The Libertarian Party is utterly useless. It may have once had some utility as a ‘forum’, but for a long time it’s been a scam to get donors to support the wonkery and time-wasting of party bureaucrats. The Tom Woods show has accomplished more than the LP ever has. The similar (though Republican-branded) Ron Paul Presidential runs are about the same thing. Millions of dollars blown to accomplish ‘outreach’? Most of the people it reached have apparently become SJWs, Bernouts or Trumpkins, anyway. Which just goes to show you that the problem isn’t ignorance, oppression, or government schools. The problem is that normal people are dumb, herdish, gullible, and just not libertarian. This is largely genetic, and also a product of enormous social inertias that are not subject to rational disputation. I generally think most ‘activism’ is a waste of time, especially if it’s activism for anything that makes sense: people have deep-seated, sub-rational reasons for rejecting this stuff.
“But I used to be a Nazi-Communist until I saw the Ron Paul campaign!” someone will say. Anecdotal stuff like this does not move me. Most people who call themselves ‘libertarians’ are useless, and still cowardly middle-classers who don’t dare actually break the law or approve of violence against the police. The Crips do more to actually subvert the law than most ‘libertarians’, because they’re not fat sissies. It’s not just that they’re afraid to declare Jihad on Washington and start selling meth out of their pickup truck, it’s that they’re afraid to even say that this is okay and maybe, just maybe, American soldiers who invade foreign countries deserve to die. This bourgoisie fetish for not offending people and being ‘respectable’ is a disease of the entire culture. This is one reason I’m not as big a fan of the middle class as the PaleoLib, types. They’re the people who gave us the nation-state and the state churches. You may think it is impractical to take on the FBI with your semi-automatic AR15. Fair enough. But the instinctive, herd-like fear of even acknowledging that the FBI would have it coming, tactical efficacy aside, is why American libertarians are weak sauce. I have much more respect for the Sovereign Citizens. I have more respect for the Shining Path and the Mafia than I do for the LP. They might be Commie lunatics and gangsters, but at least they’re not fat pussies begging their slave master for better food.
Global Warfare. Preparing for World War III? Targeting Iran 4
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
President Donald Trump confirmed back in May that the U.S. will be pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal as well as reimposing a sanctions regime on Tehran.
This far-reaching decision by the White House was taken following Netanyahu’s staged presentation on Iran’s nuclear capabilities based on so-called “sound intelligence”. The accession of Mike Pompeo to the the State Department was also an important factor. His predecessor Rex Tillerson was known to be largely supportive of the US “remaining on board with the Iran JCPOA nuclear deal – along with other P5+1 countries Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia”. According to Stephen Lendman:
Replacing Tillerson with militantly anti-Iran hardliner Pompeo smooths things for Trump to pursue greater hostility toward the Islamic Republic with a key administration official on board with his reckless agenda.
Under the guidance of secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his new national security advisor John Bolton, Trump’s decision points in the direction of military escalation.
Already in December 2017, reports pointed to a so-called “secret plan” to destroy and destabilize Iran, the first step of which would be a color revolution. In this regard, Trump said he would relaunch the economic sanctions regime in mid-May “unless the European powers join Washington in unilaterally rewriting the civil nuclear agreement between Tehran and the world’s great powers.”
This not so secret plan to wage war on Iran has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon since the mid-nineties as outlined in my 2010 article below, written eight months prior to the onslaught of the US-NATO led proxy war directed against Syria in March 2011.
It should be noted that there are significant divisions within the US-NATO-Israel coalition largely as a result of Turkey’s rapprochement with Russia and Iran. In turn Turkey is fighting US proxy forces in Northern Syria. Moreover, France has significant interests in Iran’s oil industry.
While the present structure of military alliances (with Turkey sleeping with enemy) does not at this juncture favor the waging of a major military operation against Iran, there are unconfirmed reports that President Trump is currently envisaging a so-called preemptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities as early as next month.
US Defense Secretary James Mattis has casually dismissed the reports that the U.S. is contemplating military action against Iran.
Michel Chossudovsky, July 29, 2018
Global Warfare. Preparing for World War III? Targeting Iran
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
August 1, 2010
Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. War preparations to attack Iran are in “an advanced state of readiness”. Hi tech weapons systems including nuclear warheads are fully deployed.
This military adventure has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board since the mid-1990s. First Iraq, then Iran according to a declassified 1995 US Central Command document.
Escalation is part of the military agenda. While Iran [in 2010], is the next target together with Syria and Lebanon, this strategic military deployment also threatens North Korea, China and Russia.
Since 2005, the US and its allies, including America’s NATO partners and Israel, have been involved in the extensive deployment and stockpiling of advanced weapons systems. The air defense systems of the US, NATO member countries and Israel are fully integrated.
In a divided U.S., therapists treating anxiety are hearing the same name over and over: Donald Trump 1
I am generally not one that buys into the usual “our culture is plagued by an excess of decadence” theme that is a favorite of many on the Right. But if I were to make a case that we are indeed in a Kali Yuga moment, this might be Exhibit A in favor of such an argument.
Seriously, I would say that someone that needs a shrink because their preferred candidate lost an election is someone that “has issues,” as they say. Maybe folks like that really do need a shrink, but because of their complete lack of emotional maturity, sense of balance and proportion, obsessive-compulsive fixation, neurosis, or whatever else is wrong them.
I disagree with Trump on quite a few things. I disagreed with Obama on quite a few things. I disagreed with every one of their predecessors on quite a few things. I’ve previously criticized the policies of the US government, and other governments, in about half a dozen books, and countless articles, essays, blog posts, lectures, interviews, podcasts, television and radio appearances, or social media posts. Few people have put more energy into criticizing the political establishment than I have. But someone that needs a therapist simply because Trump is president is simply a weenie, a loser, a drip, a dolt, a dullard, and a dumbfuck. No other way to put it. To folks like that my only advice would be “Get a fucking life, for God’s sake.”
In fact, that so many people seem to seriously believe that Trump is a “fascist” shows how liberal society has become in recent decades. Trump’s foreign policy is Nixonian. His economics are a hybrid Reaganite supply side and Mondale/Gephardt protectionism. He’s indifferent to gay marriage and marijuana. To the degree that he poses as a social conservative at all, it’s obviously just a ruse to hook in the Republican “base.” Immigration is probably the issue that he is most conservative on, which puts him square in line with Ross Perot, and to the left of Eisenhower. The idea that all of this would require “therapy” merely demonstrates that mental health is indeed a serious problem in our society, but not because of Trump.
The majority of my politics trend far, far to the left, though there are a handful of issues where I swing back to the center or right. I tend to think groups like DSA or the Greens are milquetoast weenie suburban liberals and college students, not dangerous left-wing extremists. But the idea that having a de facto Blue Dog Democrat or Rockefeller Republican like Trump as president would require mental health counseling for anyone indicates they really do have mental health issues, but not because Trump is the president.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s name comes up an awful lot when Americans discuss their politics-related anxiety with their therapists. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
By Matt Kwong
CBC News
“Is he gonna blow us all up?”
So inquired one of Elisabeth LaMotte’s patients recently, fretting out loud about the volatility of U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions during a therapy session at her Washington practice.
It was a rhetorical question — one that predated Trump’s threats of a showdown with Iran this week. But if the question wasn’t meant in earnest, the politically induced anxiety LaMotte is hearing about from her clients certainly is, says the founder of the D.C. Counselling and Psychotherapy Center.
She refers to it as a “collective anxiety” among patients who feel on edge about how potentially dire the president’s decisions could be.
“There is a fear of the world ending,” she said. “It’s very disorienting and constantly unsettling.”
No Doubt About It: The Deep State Is Real and Trump Is Its Latest Tool Reply
These are the things our anarchist and libertarian friends ought to focused on.
By John Whitehead
Rutherford Institute
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
There are those who would have you believe that President Trump is an unwitting victim of the Deep State.
And then there are those who insist that the Deep State is a figment of a conspiratorial mind.
Don’t believe it.
The Deep State—a.k.a. the police state, a.k.a. the military industrial complex, a.k.a. the surveillance state complex—does indeed exist and Trump, far from being its sworn enemy, is its latest tool.
When in doubt, follow the money trail.
It always points the way.
Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought—lock, stock and barrel—and made to dance to the tune of the Deep State.
Even Dwight D. Eisenhower, the retired five-star Army general-turned-president who warned against the disastrous rise of misplaced power by the military industrial complex was complicit in contributing to the build-up of the military’s role in dictating national and international policy.
Enter Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC.
Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump has paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the rest of the Deep State (also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”) to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.
In One Year, MSNBC Covered Stormy Daniels 455 Times, War in Yemen 0 2
This is pathetic. The US media is a joke.
By Adam Johnson
The Antimedia
Why is the No. 1 outlet of alleged anti-Trump #resistance completely ignoring his most devastating war?
(FAIR) As FAIR has noted before (1/8/18, 3/20/18), to MSNBC, the carnage and destruction the US and its Gulf Monarchy allies are leveling against the poorest country in the Arab world is simply a non-issue.
On July 2, a year had passed since the cable network’s last segment mentioning US participation in the war on Yemen, which has killed in excess of 15,000 people and resulted in over a million cases of cholera. The US is backing a Saudi-led bombing campaign with intelligence, refueling, political cover, military hardware and, as of March, ground troops. None of this matters at all to what Adweek (4/3/18) calls “the network of the Resistance,” which has since its last mention of the US’s role in the destruction of Yemen found time to run over a dozen segments highlighting war crimes committed by the Syrian and Russian governments in Syria.
By way of contrast, as MSNBC was marking a year without mentioning the US role in Yemen, the PBS NewsHour was running a three-part series on the war, with the second part (7/3/18) headlined, “American-Made Bombs in Yemen Are Killing Civilians, Destroying Infrastructure and Fueling Anger at the US.” The NewsHour’s Jane Ferguson reported:
Keith Preston: US has killed over 20 million people since World War ll 2
Press TV interview. Listen here.
The United States has been the biggest violator of human rights since World War ll, directly leading to the death of over 20 million people in the past 70 years, says an American political analyst in Virginia.
A study conducted several years ago by American historian James Lucas reveals that US military forces were directly responsible for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts in 37 nations, said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.
In terms of domestic policy, the US government has promoted or at least ignored widespread human rights abuses in the country, including regarding the issues poverty, crime, racism and gun violence, Preston told Press TV on Wednesday.
Former US President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that America has lost its position as the so-called global leader for human rights under President Donald Trump.
“We should be the champion of human rights. We’re a superpower, not based solely on military power; part of that definition should be a commitment to human rights,” Carter said at an event at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
Trump’s Iran Regime Change Fantasies 1
The most dangerous aspect of the current political situation in the United States is the belligerent attitude of the Trump administration toward Iran, followed by the liberal-left’s belligerence toward Russia.
By Doug Bandow
The American Conservative
Candidate Donald Trump campaigned against Washington’s foolish Middle East wars. President Donald Trump is threatening Tehran with the equivalent of fire and fury. After decades of American attacks on Iran, what Trump should be doing is changing course.
The president erupted against Iran on Twitter earlier this week in an outburst that was even more hysterical than his tirade against North Korea last year. “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE,” he tweeted. “WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”
The president sounded like a high school dropout who had just downed a six-pack and was now itching for a brawl. It’s he who should be cautious before enthusiastically threatening to visit death upon another nation and people. After all, as he once acknowledged, the results of U.S. warmongering have been ugly.
Anarcho-Coalitionism? 1
The meme below was recently posted on Facebook with the following comments by a proponent of “anarcho-coalitionism”:
#AnarchoCoalitionism is militant panarchy. It’s the only way forward. The elites LIKE the masses fighting amongst each other, and that doesn’t change, no matter how “woke” you are. You are not an island, and neither am I. Wanna win? Be #AnarchoCoalitionist.
Shake some hands. Find some agreements. You don’t have to compromise to move forward. But working with many you called “enemies” is going to be a first step.
And to anyone who sees this, feel free to use the banner pic.
They call it a banner for a reason, and the more people flying it, the more obvious it will be that we are coming, we are many, and we are not going away.
I responded with the following comments:
I’ve been thinking and writing about these kinds of ideas for years. I think the first problem is that there are too few anarchists at present for anarchism to exercise any real impact on the wider society, so anarchists tend to spend a lot of time in their own ideological enclaves fighting with each other. A second problem is that many anarchists of the hyphenated varieties are essentially the hyphens first and anarchists second. So the first goal probably needs to be to grow the number of anarchists of whatever kind, period.
The US Army wants to create biodegradable bullets that plant flowers where they fall 2
Totalitarian humanism’s eco-friendly imperialism.
By Robert Andrews
Inside Business
As you well know, bullets are designed to kill people. So far, so bad, but the metallic compounds in them also tend to leach into the environment and kill off plants and wildlife too.
At training facilities the world over, the US Army uses live ammunition to gear up their soldiers for combat. These bullets just remain in the wild, and do their damage. Deciding that enough is enough, officials are now asking for proposals to design biodegradable bullets that shall harm the environment no more.
Not only that, but they are hoping that the bullets will contain seeds, specialized for each local environment, so that they will ultimately “grow environmentally beneficial plants that eliminate ammunition debris and contaminants.”
That’s right – not only will new plants sprout from these seed bullets, but they will help suck out dangerous chemicals from their surrounding environment. It’s certainly an ambitious concept, but not one outside of the realms of possibility. According to the official request, this type of bullet “shell” has already been tested.
“The US Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) has demonstrated bioengineered seeds that can be embedded into the biodegradable composites and that will not germinate until they have been in the ground for several months,” it states.
Now they just need to be made into bullets that can be fired from a real weapon.
A Review of Tribes: The National-Anarchist Magazine 3
Issue #1 July 2018. Now available. Order here.
By Juleigh Howard-Hobson
With an unaffected sense of balance and variance, Tribes is more than a mere issue of a magazine. It is a thoughtful compendium of many facets of National-Anarchism. None steal center stage. None erase or confute. Even while each article is quite firmly individual, this is a cohesive publication that both explores and presents ideas about and of National-Anarchy.
Centrist Dems begin arguing against far-left agenda as 2020 play 1
It’s interesting how the neconservative/neoliberal political establishment is being challenged by the neo-Nixonian Trumpians from the right, and by the neo-Roosevetlians like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez from the left. If these insurgencies continue, the power elite will mostly certainly move to coopt them, which they have already done in the case of the Trumpians. It is likely that many within the power elite have come to understand that the neoconservative approach to foreign policy has created too much international instability, and seek to move toward a more realist perspective via Trumpism. It is also possible that many elites are recognizing that neoliberal economics have created too much domestic instability, and are seeking to move toward a more conventional New Deal-era liberalism in response. If so, politicians like Sanders and Ocasia-Cortez would be an effective means of advancing such a perspective.
If the neo-Nixonians were to eventually displace the neocons on the right, and the neo-Rooseveltians were to displace the neoliberals on the left, the US would largely return to the paradigm that existed during the 1970s before the ascendancy of Reaganism and Clintonism, both of which involved sharp turns to the right on a wide range of issues. Essentially, it would be a return to an American politics dominated by Rockefeller Republicans and New Deal Democrats.
By Alex Roarty
McClatchydc.Com
Columbus, Ohio
Leading moderate Democrats forcefully argued this week that the party can embrace a robust agenda of change while still praising capitalism and downplaying income inequality.
In other words, everything the empowered liberal base has spent a year and a half mobilizing against.
Democrats gathered here in Ohio’s capital city on Thursday and Friday in what was an opening salvo of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, part of a conference organized by the center-left think tank Third Way.
The longtime Washington-based group was unveiling the findings of a year-long assessment launched after the 2016 election, hoping to convince potential presidential contenders that they don’t have to adopt the hard-left agenda and style of a Bernie Sanders progressive.
Understanding the Trumpian Foreign Policy Reply
Pete Escobar published an article in the Hong Kong press when Trump took office that is a must read for anyone that wants to understand his administration’s approach to foreign policy, particularly US-Russia relations. Read the article here. Virtually everything Trump has done with regard to foreign policy fits with the paradigm described in this article.
The source of the Trump administration’s foreign policy ideas appears to be the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Trump’s foreign policy approach seems to be a move away from the neocon paradigm that has dominated Republican foreign policy approaches since the Reagan period, and a return to the Nixon/Kissinger approach of the Rockefeller Republicans. This is consistent with Trump’s New York background. His administration is moving back toward the Nixon/Kissinger approach and away from the neocon Republican or liberal internationalist (neocon lite) Democratic approaches. He’s been more of a neocon on domestic policy than on international relations, though in a very pragmatic way.
Trump’s economics seem to be the standard right-wing Keynesian approach that has dominated the Republicans since the Reagan period, although on trade he has departed from that a bit (although Reagan did so as well on a selective basis).
My guess is that a lot of folks among the power elite now regard having let the neocons run foreign policy as a mistake, and as having created too many liabilities and are now pushing them to the side. Notice even the neocon mouthpieces at FOX, who have been reluctant Trumpians, are getting upset about the Putin summit. The only exceptions have been Tucker Carlson, the token paleocon on FOX, and Hannity, who only cares about his ratings, and the fact that most of his fans are diehard Trumpians.
Thus far, Trump seems to be pursuing Nixonian detente with Russia for the purpose of reducing the potential for nuclear conflict, expanding the petroleum trade with Russia, containing jihadi terrorism in Central Asia, and wooing Russia away from an alliance with China.
