Friday, February 26, 2016

The West’s Wars, Domestic Storms: Fascists, Terrorists and “Multiculturalism”

The United States and Europe, along with many willing collaborators have waged a series of wars and proxy wars stretching across much of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

What the West was pursuing in reordering the post-Soviet world through conventional military means in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq beginning in 2003, it continued through somewhat less-conventional means – the so-called “Arab Spring” and the series of proxy wars that erupted afterward beginning in 2011.

Today, Western-fueled wars continue to consume Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, while violence and political instability plague other nations the West has either recently meddled in or is currently occupying or undermining.

France alone – in addition to conducting military operations in Libya in 2011, and currently carrying out military operations in Syria and Iraq – has troops stationed in African nations including the Central African Republic (2,000), Chad (950), Ivory Coast (450), Djibouti (2,470), Gabon (1,000), Mali (2,000), and Senegal (430).

Eritrea and Somalia during this 15 year period have been subjected to invasions from neighboring Ethiopia – who despite being plagued by widespread poverty – has been the benefactor of US military support and encouraged to carry out proxy war upon its neighbors not unlike Saudi Arabia is now doing in Yemen.

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Wednesday, February 24, 2016

For Brexit!

Nationalism in on the rise in every region of the earth. In the face of an increasingly globalized world, the banners of tribe, tradition, and particularism are being unfolded in unabashed defiance. From Paris to Peoria the battle-cry is heard: Preserve our sovereignty!

Nationalism has had a bad reputation ever since the 1930s, when it was associated with colored- shirt-wearing thugs, militarism, and war: raging across Europe, it ignited a horrific conflagration. The pan-European idea was created largely in reaction to this bloody history, and yet the result has been a counter-backlash of nationalism, a new sort that has little if anything to do with its historical antecedents.

In the West, this current wave of nationalism, for the most part, is relatively pacific: instead of promoting aggression across borders it is intent on making those borders impenetrable. The old Bismarckian nationalism was statist and super-centralist as well as expansionist; the new nationalism is often (though not always) libertarian, decentralist, and uninterested in foreign adventurism (i.e. “isolationist”).

The best example of this is the new nation of Catalonia, which is seeking to part peaceably with Spain. With their own language, a long tradition going back to medieval times, and a relatively healthy economy compared to the rest of the Iberian peninsula, the Catalonians long to break free. The Spanish central authorities have reacted with all-too-predictable hostility, threatening to send in the tanks – and the European Union (EU) has taken Madrid’s side, declaring that an independent Catalonia will be isolated both economically and diplomatically.

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Monday, February 22, 2016

Going to War against Iraq, for Oil and for Israel: The Lies, Fabrications and Forgeries of the Bush-Cheney Administration

We [the United States] spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. … Obviously, it was a mistake… George W. Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East…

—They [President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney] lied… They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Donald Trump (1946- ), during a CBS News GOP presidential debate, on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016.

[George W. Bush] wants to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

—But the intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy.

Richard Dearlove (1945- ) Head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), (in ‘Downing Street memo’, July 23, 2002).

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.

Dick Cheney (1941- ), comment made at the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002

Spinning the possible possession of WMDs as a threat to the United States in the way they did is, in my opinion, tantamount to intentionally deceiving the American people.

Gen. Hugh Shelton (1942- ), former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001, (in his memoirs ‘Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior’, 2010)

We [the USA] went to war [in Iraq] not just against the Iraqi forces and insurgent groups but also against a large part of the Arab world, scores and scores of millions…It is a strategic error of monumental proportions to view the war as confined to Iraq… [The Iraq war] is turning out to be the greatest strategic disaster in our history.

Gen. William E. Odom (1932-2008), in a testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 18, 2007

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Thursday, February 18, 2016

TRUMP IS AMERICA’S LAST HOPE

Trump is not a politician. The best way to understand him is first of all to see him as a sincere nationalist who sees that his nation has been undermined and taken over from within. Most Americans feel they have been screwed. They have. Trump can point out some of the real causes, but Americans have been so brainwashed that most of the truth is beyond them. Trump feeds their anger by taking the official lies at face value and playing up their contradictions. He is definitely flirting with fascism, determined that a globalist sleeper like Cruz who threatens to make the whole Middle East glow in the dark will not outdo him with the red meat.

There is no way that Trump does not know far more about 9/11 than what the rest of us can already gather from investigators such as Chris Bollyn, that it was a Jewish operation with shabbos goys. Trump doesn’t have to get into all that just now. It’s enough to show the obvious, that America was attacked on Bush’s watch.

It is nasty of Trump to dwell on the guilt of the Muslim couple accused of the San Bernardino massacre when he certainly knows they were innocent and were murdered in a false flag operation. But that is how the game is played.

So what is the game? You cannot restore America’s greatness without breaking the power of the Jews who control every aspect of it — politics, media, education, arms industry, and most of all finance. Trump challenges the Masters of Discourse by using their discourse at face value. So when Trump says that it is within the right of America to keep lists of Muslims and to spy on mosques that are a source of anti-American criminality, that is justified, given what he have been taught.

It takes just a slight adjustment from that — substitute “Jew” for “Muslim,” mutatis mutandis — to seeing the Neocons hanged.

Trump is threatening the whole globalist order.

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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

President Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy, were murdered by the military-security complex

Presstitute media, such as the UK Telegraph, spend a lot of energy debunking exposes of government conspiracies. For example, the thousands of high-rise architects, structural engineers, physicists, nano-chemists, demolition experts, first responders, military and civilian pilots, and former government officials who have provided vast evidence that the official story of 9/11 is a made-up fairy tale at odds with all evidence and the laws of physics are dismissed by presstitutes as “conspiracy theorists.”

Similarly, those, such as James W. Douglass, who have proven beyond all doubt that President John F. Kennedy was not assassinated by Oswald but by his own paranoid anti-communist military-security complex, are dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

The 9/11 Commission Report and the Warren Commission Report were cover-ups. VP Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives he sponsored needed a “new Pearl Harbor” in order to begin their military assaults on the Middle Eastern countries that had independent foreign policies instead of being US/Israeli vassals. 9/11 was their orchestrated “new Pearl Harbor,” and this fact had to be covered up when 9/11 families persisted in their demands for an investigation and could not be bought off for large sums of money.

Similarly, the Warren Commission had no choice but to cover up that a popular American president, John F. Kennedy, had been murdered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the Secret Service, because he was believed by paranoid anti-communists to be “soft on communism” and thereby a threat to the security of the United States. The cold war was on, and the Warren Commission could not hold those responsible accountable without destroying the public’s confidence in the American military and security services.

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Friday, February 12, 2016

How Republics Perish

If you believed America’s longest war, in Afghanistan, was coming to an end, be advised: It is not.

Departing U.S. commander Gen. John Campbell says there will need to be US boots on the ground "for years to come." Making good on President Obama’s commitment to remove all US forces by next January, said Campbell, "would put the whole mission at risk."

"Afghanistan has not achieved an enduring level of security and stability that justifies a reduction of our support. … 2016 could be no better and possibly worse than 2015."

Translation: A US withdrawal would risk a Taliban takeover with Kabul becoming the new Saigon and our Afghan friends massacred.

Fifteen years in, and we are stuck.

Nor is America about to end the next longest war in its history: Iraq. Defense Secretary Ash Carter plans to send units of the 101st Airborne back to Iraq to join the 4,000 Americans now fighting there,

"ISIS is a cancer," says Carter. After we cut out the "parent tumor" in Mosul and Raqqa, we will go after the smaller tumors across the Islamic world.

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Wednesday, February 10, 2016

New Hampshire: The Triumph of Populism

The results of the New Hampshire primary are in, and the big winner is the new populism: that mysterious pro-“outsider” phenomenon that has the political class in a panic, and which no one has adequately defined – including its current practitioners.

Donald Trump’s vote total of nearly 35 percent is impressive enough, but his two-to-one margin over the closest runner-up, John Kasich, underscores the triumph of his brand of Jacksonian populism over both the Romney-esque center right (Kasich-Bush) and “movement conservatism” (Cruz-Rubio). In spite of a concerted effort by the conservative punditariat and the mainstream media to marginalize Trump as toxic, he handily crushed them, and is now in a position to barrel into South Carolina and beyond, steamrollering the “Establishment lane” candidates who are as divided as ever.

Even more stunning is Bernie Sanders’ victory over Hillary Clinton: while the polls told us that the former was headed for a win, the numbers – as I write Hillary is barely holding on to 40 percent – augur trouble for Mrs. Clinton’s much anticipated coronation. While the Clintonian “firewall” in the south is supposed to be impregnable, one can easily imagine it turning into the electoral equivalent of the Maginot Line. It’s that kind of election year.

The other big story of this election is the implosion of Marco Rubio, the fair-haired boy of the neoconservatives. His third place finish in Iowa was touted so loudly by his fanboys in the conservative media that one would have thought he taken first prize. Yet his cringe-worthy performance in the debate – it looked like his neoconservative handlers programmed him with the wrong software – and now his relegation to a humiliating fifth place in New Hampshire has almost certainly sunk his campaign. He will probably continue into Super Tuesday and perhaps beyond, but that’s only because he doesn’t seem to have an “off” button, or maybe it’s just stuck: in any case, it’s far too late to send him back to the factory for repair.

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Monday, February 8, 2016

A New Global Financial Cold War

A nightmare scenario of U.S. geopolitical strategists is coming true: foreign independence from U.S.-centered financial and diplomatic control. China and Russia are investing in neighboring economies on terms that cement Eurasian integration on the basis of financing in their own currencies and favoring their own exports. They also have created the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an alternative military alliance to NATO.[1] And the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) threatens to replace the IMF and World Bank tandem in which the United States holds unique veto power.

More than just a disparity of voting rights in the IMF and World Bank is at stake. At issue is a philosophy of development. U.S. and other foreign investment in infrastructure (or buyouts and takeovers on credit) adds interest rates and other financial charges to the cost structure, while charging prices as high as the market can bear (think of Carlos Slim’s telephone monopoly in Mexico, or the high costs of America’s health care system), and making their profits and monopoly rents tax-exempt by paying them out as interest.

By contrast, government-owned infrastructure provides basic services at low cost, on a subsidized basis, or freely. That is what has made the United States, Germany and other industrial lead nations so competitive over the past few centuries. But this positive role of government is no longer possible under World Bank/IMF policy. The U.S. promotion of neoliberalism and austerity is a major reason propelling China, Russia and other nations out of the U.S. diplomatic and banking orbit.

On December 3, 2015, Prime Minister Putin proposed that Russia “and other Eurasian Economic Union countries should kick-off consultations with members of the SCO and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on a possible economic partnership.”[2] Russia also is seeking to build pipelines to Europe through friendly secular countries instead of Sunni jihadist U.S.-backed countries locked into America’s increasingly confrontational orbit.

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Thursday, February 4, 2016

In New Hampshire, TV Station Partners With Interest Groups That Push Candidates on War and Austerity

A New Hampshire television news network owned by a former Republican candidate for Senate is working closely with conservative interest groups that are pressuring presidential candidates to take more aggressive positions on use of military force, entitlement reform, and tax cuts.

One group, Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, was formed last year on behalf of military contractors to hold events in early primary states with the explicit goal of pushing the candidates to support military engagement abroad.

And while local television stations regularly work with non-partisan, non-ideological groups to host and broadcast events such as candidate debates, the NH1 News network, owned by Bill Binnie, has gone a step further, providing its on-air talent to press the candidates on issues championed by its interest group partners.

Binnie’s NH1 News network, which operates WBIN-TV and includes over a dozen radio stations, also hosts a special interview series called “Fiscal Fridays” on behalf of Fix the Debt and the Concord Coalition, two groups bankrolled by billionaire Pete Peterson. Both groups encourage candidates to adopt the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission — which in practice translates into pushing for corporate tax cuts and reductions in Social Security and Medicare.

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Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Want Endless War? Love the U.S. Empire? Well, Hillary Clinton Is Your Choice

Like Obama, Clinton touts American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is better than any other country. In his State of the Union addresses, Obama has proclaimed America “exceptional” and said the U.S. must “lead the world.” Clinton wrote in her book “Hard Choices” that “America remains the ‘indispensable nation.’ ”

It is this view that animates U.S. invasions, interventions, bombings and occupations of other countries. Under the pretense of protecting our national interest, the United States maintains some 800 military bases in other countries, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars annually. Often referred to as “enduring bases,” they enable us to mount attacks whenever and wherever our leaders see fit, whether with drones or manned aircraft.

Obama, who continues to prosecute the war in Afghanistan 15 years after it began, is poised to send ground troops back to Iraq and begin bombing Libya. His aggressive pursuit of regime change in Syria was met with pushback by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to Seymour Hersh.

The president has bombed some seven countries with drones. But besides moving toward normalization of relations with Cuba, his signature foreign policy achievement is brokering the agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

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Monday, February 1, 2016